by Simon Raven
‘I knew him in the old days,’ said the Provost. ‘Luffham of Whereham, I mean. Peter Morrison, we called him then. He asked if he could put this in my Garden.’
The Provost slept. Len came through the roses.
‘He is hankering,’ said Milo, ‘to see Sarum.’
‘He does sometimes. This is the first time for some months. It won’t last, this hankering.’
‘Good. He can never see Sarum. Not now.’
‘I suppose not,’ said Len easily.
‘In India there are not only Untouchables, there are Unseeables,’ Milo said. ‘Sarum is Unseeable.’
‘If you say so.’
‘I do.’
‘Then I shall make sure,’ said Len, ‘that the Provost does not see him. In any case, he is not fit to travel.’
But he could become so again, thought Milo; and he could insist on going down to Wiltshire whatever Len might say: after all, he is Provost of Lancaster still. So my task is now clear. I must soothe away this hankering, that the Provost may stay happy in his Garden.
I should talk to Theodosia, thought Marius. He put down Page’s edition of the Georgics and looked from Auntie Flo’s verandah out over the sea. She is bearing my child; she may be required to do so again; I should see her, so that we may talk to one another in our own voices.
But I am contented and well occupied here. Tessa… Teresa… is taking care of my lady.
I should see Thea. Human eye to human eye.
I have work for my exams in December (if they take place). Tessa is taking care of Theodosia. Any question of my getting another child on her must be delayed for months. After all, Raisley Conyngham says I am to sit here and wait and do nothing; Raisley says that when I am wanted I shall know it.
Jeremy Morrison sat caged behind the wire netting that covered the long first-floor verandah of the infirmary in the Kelly Jail near Adelaide.
The civil authorities, wanting no present embarrassment nor future recrimination over the delicate matter of dealing with the internationally famous son of a distinguished and much respected English Peer of the Realm, had reached a compromise. They had overruled a self-righteous minority among them that wished to stage the ‘Pom-Humiliation’ of the century and made a bargain with Jeremy and his lawyers. The evidence against Jeremy, the authorities said, was ruinous and overwhelming, and could be neither refuted nor suppressed: but let Jeremy plead guilty and claim in mitigation that he was unbalanced and badly tired after his demanding progress through the Orient, and the trial would be reduced to a formal minimum, while Jeremy himself would be let off with a light sentence of which he would serve only half, and that half (on grounds of chronic ill health) in a private ward of a prison infirmary, where he would be allowed to read and write as and when he chose, to conduct his private correspondence and his public affairs (such as these still were), and would also be privileged in the matter of food and drink.
So now, here he was, in the fourth week after sentence had been passed upon him, with some two months still before him in which to contemplate his future.
He had once told Fielding Gray that if ever he were disgraced he would simply retire to his Manor at Luffham and there lead the good life that Horace had led on his Sabine farm – rural, scholarly, unambitious and self-indulgent. But he knew now, as indeed he had known when producing this idyll to Fielding, that his life and tastes had become too various and too hectic for him to be satisfied with the pursuit of literature in bucolic peace. He needed public action; he was also a figure of crimson scandal. Thus the action, for a time, must perhaps be private, but action he must have – and here, delivered to him by a vast androgynous warder (‘Maily-waily, Jeremy tweetie’) not fifteen minutes before, was a very sensible letter from Carmilla Salinger turning precisely on the problem of how and where he should launch himself on leaving quod.
‘Fielding says you’ve turned yourself into an insatiable pathic,’ wrote Carmilla.
You’d better chuck that, Jeremy. American friends tell me there’s a nasty shock coming to buggers very soon, which could mean ‘matters against you for your life’ if you go on getting yourself screwed. So just stop it. Quite apart from anything else, it’s damned undignified.
So how are you to occupy yourself when they let you out? A suggestion. My horrible ex-lover, Richard Harbinger, has been employed by a firm called Alchemicals PLC to explore some vile little African country on condition he tries to push some medical muck they want to sell there. This gave me an idea: our printing-cum-publishing firm (mine and Thea’s, Canteloupe’s and the Sterns’) is now to sponsor a journey of exploration, a journey by you, if you will, in some region of your choice that must be obscure, perilous, uncivilized and remote, on the following conditions: that you are prepared to receive maximum publicity – you in conjunction with our firm – both before you go and after you return; that you (being as rich as you are) contribute one quarter of the cost; and that any book you later write about your expedition is to be offered, in the first place, to us.
We are in this for advertisement, Jeremy: we are turning patrons of exploration as other firms turn patrons of steeplechasing or yachting. As a matter of fact, I first conceived the notion as a way of getting Richard Harbinger off my back, but Alchemicals caught him in the nick of time, and now the job’s on offer to you. The good thing is, you see, that this rumpus in Australia is just the kind of thing we need to lend colour to the publicity: in most cases a conviction for soliciting to sodomy would be the last thing your employers would want; but in this case you can be puffed as the Byronic Sinner seeking God (or the Devil) in his Wanderings, or even as Roland crossing Wilderness and Desolation to the Valley of the Dark Tower, which may contain anything from the Grail to the Witch of Endor. All this, as you may imagine, suits us down to the quick.
Think it over, cheri. I don’t want you to end up in some lousy hole as a diseased and jelly-bottomed catamite. You were – in a way you still are – My Man (the best of the bunch, Jeremy, and I mean that) and I would wish (as would Theodosia) to be made proud of you.
Best love
from Carmilla.
PS Do you remember that time we made each other come in Ely Cathedral? What a scream – quite literally for my part.
xoxox C
PPS This thing I’m proposing would enable you to get out of the ‘Mother Earth’ circus before you’re rumbled as a fake (as well as a woofter) and without further explanation.
Carm.
Well, thought Jeremy, as the huge warder brought in his luncheon on a tray (‘Din-dins, duckie pie’), there are many worse roles than Childe Harold or Lord Jim.
Some days after Sozzler Jack Lamprey’s visit, Marius began to grow restless. It was all very well being told to sit and wait; even though a fellow was well occupied with Virgil while waiting, and well entertained in the intervals of study, a time came when he started to feel nervous. He needed, at the least, somebody to confide in (up to a point) and somebody to boast to. Auntie Flo was handy for both purposes.
‘You know that chap that called the other day?’ Marius said to Auntie Flo as they sat and watched Botham of Somerset showing off against the mediocre and charmless bowling of Dilley of Kent.
‘Jack Lamprey? I’ve known him for aeons. Crooked little brute but a fine trainer – if he can keep sober.’
‘He mostly does, these days. If Raisley Conyngham gets rid of him, there’s nowhere left for him to go. They both know this perfectly well, so Mr Conyngham takes advantage and often uses Captain Jack as a kind of running fag…like the Monitors and Bloods at our School use the bubs.’
‘I thought you didn’t have fagging any more.’
‘Not officially,’ said Marius. ‘But most of us are prepared to fag for someone we admire – given a decent tip, of course.’
‘You don’t need tips.’
‘Others do, and I must do as they do… Mr Conyngham was fagging Captain Jack the other day – sending him here to deliver messages.’
‘
Indeed,’ said Auntie Flo, feigning indifference.
‘Messages about Theodosia. She’s pregnant, you know.’
‘I do know.’
‘I think she’s unhappy about something. I think I’d better go to see her.’
‘What business is Lady Canteloupe of yours?’ said Auntie Flo, divining the answer.
‘She’s a sort of partner in our publishing firm – Salinger, Stern and Detterling. My father and Detterling started it years ago, and then the Salingers came in with their money. So you see, Theodosia is more or less my partner.’
‘By Detterling you mean Canteloupe. He’s a partner too,’ said Auntie Flo, who had done a bit of homework about the personae, that is to say the public masks, of those whom she might encounter in her role of Marius’ custodian. ‘He is also Lady Canteloupe’s husband. If I were you, Marius, I should leave her to Canteloupe. Strictly his business.’
‘Canteloupe is not the father of her child.’
‘So she told me.’
‘Then someone else…someone other than Canteloupe… should go to her now.’
‘She expressed no desire to be visited. Are you happy, Marius, at Sandy Lodge?’
‘I’ve never been happier,’ said Marius truthfully. ‘Thank you, Auntie Flo.’
‘If you want to thank me, just stay there with me.’
‘I’d like to. But I’m jittery.’
‘Why?’
‘Something has to happen sooner or later.’
‘Yes. You will have to go back to School. Be content until then. Don’t spoil this good time by hankering.’
‘Something will spoil it. Something always does.’
‘Then let it not be you.’
‘You are right. Thank you again, Auntie Flo.’ He leaned across and kissed her on the cheek. She remained motionless save for a quick flicker of pleasure under one eye. ‘I promise I will not hanker any more,’ Marius said. ‘Zowie, did you see that? Botham has the devil’s own luck.’
‘He also has great strength and very swift reactions. In a few years he will have neither. He will need to improve his method. He looks to me too conceited to acknowledge the necessity.’
Sharp old bird, thought Marius. And just think of all those winning tips she’s given me at the races – at long odds, some of ’em. One should always listen to Auntie Flo. So of course I shall obey her and not hanker after seeing Theodosia. I’ll stay put in Sandy Lodge and like it, as she recommends. After all, Raisley Conyngham’s instructions are the same, and he would be very angry if I tried to diverge from them. Sit still, says he; sit still, says Auntie Flo. And sit still, therefore, I shall, since they both say the same. The only thing is…that Raisley Conyngham does not mean quite the same as Auntie Flo.
Fielding Gray read through his first (manuscript) draught of Chapter II of The Master Baker, the companion volume to The Grand Grinder. He found the work passable, altered the final sentence so that it now ended in a heavy and conclusive monosyllable, and looked across the ninth fairway of the Broughton Staithe golf links towards the sand dunes. There, on a deckchair in the shade of the rear wall of a ruined military latrine, sat Maisie. She had a small blue volume on her lap, almost certainly the World’s Classics edition of Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, which was one of Tessa’s set books for her postponed ‘O’ Levels. Under her rump and out of the sun was a string bag which contained (as Fielding reckoned from Maisie’s conversation at breakfast) G M Trevelyan’s English Social History, an early novel of A S Byatt, the latest number of Private Eye, which had come from London in the post that morning, and a volume of essays by George Orwell.
Maisie had taken post on the dunes at half past ten o’ clock. There she would sit reading the heaviest of the works she had with her until two p.m., when she would get up and make a round of inspection of the ruined gun emplacements. She would then reseat herself for a brief doze, after which she would probably, Fielding thought, turn to the relative trivialities of Orwell, then take a quick glance at the Eye, and at last finish off her day’s study with a stiff dose of Byatt, so that she would have something fresh in her mind to complain of when she returned to the house in time for a shrimp tea. ‘Why is that lady so obsessed with pregnant women, dear?’ she would say as she went through the sitting room to turn on the kettle, or, ‘She writes exactly the same as that sister of hers, the Drabble girl, only with all the fun left out.’
For the first few days after they had come to Broughton, Maisie had rung up Buttock’s Hotel twice a day; then once a day; then only three times a week; and now she did not ring up at all, or hadn’t for the last ten days; she had simply given Mr Huxtable a standing instruction to telephone if anything important were wanted of her. It was beginning to look, thought Fielding, as if she were going to stay in Broughton for ever. He watched Maisie rise and stomp away for her daily round of the gun sites; then rang up the L’Estrange Arms (just in case of their having a lot of August holiday trash in the place) and told the reception girl that Mrs Malcolm and he would like their usual table by the window at half past eight. ‘For our usual filthy dinner,’ he said softly as he put down the receiver, and thought wrily of the informed and malignant comments that Maisie (as she did every evening) was bound to make on it. Once, indeed, he had suggested that they should take a taxi to the Jolly Vulture, a justly famous restaurant a few miles down the coast; but Maisie wouldn’t hear of it: ‘When we’ve got the good old L’Estrange only ten minutes’ walk away?’ she said. ‘I never heard of such silliness and extravagance in all my life.’
Sir Thomas Llewyllyn, Provost of Lancaster College, rang up from his Lodging to speak to Carmilla Salinger in her set of rooms in Sitwell’s Building.
‘I want to go to Wiltshire to see my grandson, Sarum,’ he said petulantly. ‘Len and Milo won’t let me.’
I should think, thought Carmilla, that the Provost is the very last thing they need in Wiltshire just now; but all the same he has a right to see his grandchild if he wants to.
‘Why won’t they let you?’ she said.
‘They say I’m not fit to travel.’
‘What does the doctor say?’
‘He says I’ll be quite all right to go there, in a large slow car, in three days’ time – provided I don’t have another attack.’
‘Very well,’ said Carmilla. ‘If you go on getting better for the next three days, I’ll ring up Theodosia to tell her to expect us, and hire a large slow car, and take you there myself. I don’t at all mind Len, if he wants to come with us, but I draw the line at that slimy little reptile, Milo Hedley.’
‘But I must have Milo. He’s so kind and amusing.’
‘Christ,’ said Carmilla. ‘Well, all right, Provost. But if you insist on Milo Hedley, I shall make you pay half towards the car. And the whole plan is strictly subject to the doctor’s confirming his permission before we go.’
Bugger, she thought as she rang off: just as my work on the Great Pox was going so smoothly; but I won’t have that old man bullied by Len, still less by that venomous Milo. If the Provost wants to see Sarum, he must be allowed to, and if the shock kills him it might be no bad thing. To have him decaying like this, in public and on the premises, is boring and embarrassing. Of course it’s always possible that Thea or Canteloupe (God knows what he’s up to just now) will forbid the visit; and very likely that Tom’s doctor will when it comes to the point, in either of which cases I can just get on with my work. But other things being equal, he must go if he wants; one must really just let God decide.
‘Puffing Dick, the Beggar King,’ she wrote on the pad in front of her, ‘reputed to have been infected with the Pox just by sniffing the air through the door of a brothel; worth a paragraph as a comic curiosity.’ Though come to think of it, she thought, it can’t have been at all comic for Puffing Dick, when he was covered with sundry lesions and half his nose fell off. But apparently the Pox (the one Columbus brought back) killed very much quicker in those early days, so perhaps there wasn’t time for it to break
his nose down first. ‘The Chronicle tells us,’ she wrote, ‘that “in seven brief months there was an end of Puffing Dick.” I wonder, she thought, if a Pox, got in his wild youth, could account for Tom’s bad health now. If it had been cursorily and incompletely cured…like Lord Randolph Churchill’s or Oscar Wilde’s…it might be making a creeping comeback. God let him die, she thought, before it all gets too ghastly: but even if God would let him, the medical profession would no doubt strive to prevent it, however horrible his case. Perhaps they could call in that man of whom Canteloupe and his friends were often speaking – Dr La Soeur. He sounded the sort to see Sir Tom off quick enough. But hadn’t she heard from someone (from Thea?) that La Soeur had retired? Or had lost his taste for the risks involved in flouting the ethics of his profession? Perhaps Len could find someone else? Or perhaps Milo Hedley, whose schoolmaster chum Raisley Conyngham was reputed to be a great greaser of nuts and bolts, would know where to find someone to do the trick? I had better, she thought, be more polite and pleasant to Milo, after all: one never knows when one may need him.
Milo had overheard the Provost’s telephone conversation with Carmilla, and rang up Raisley Conyngham in Somerset.
‘Three days?’ said Raisley. ‘Sir Thomas will try to visit the Canteloupes, in order to see Sarum, in three days?’
‘That’s right, sir.’
‘Then let him. Things are about to move, boy. In three days’ time it’ll be too late for him to be a nuisance. In fact, now I come to think of it we shall have a definite use for the Provost. You may recall that Canteloupe is keen that the whole thing should be altogether comme il faut…and that he favours the idea of a comely monument.’
‘I see,’ said Milo. ‘What better place for that than Lancaster College Chapel?’
Raisley Conyngham telephoned to Canteloupe.
‘Now let it work,’ Raisley Conyngham said.
Canteloupe telephoned Auntie Flo at Sandy Lodge.
‘Emergency, old girl,’ said Canteloupe, who had known her on and off for many years. ‘At this season, as you may probably know, I always get up an XI against the Somerset County Colts. One of my side’s ill. I thought Marius Stern might come in for him.’
