by Simon Raven
‘Oh, good. At last I’ve shocked you. Despite that carefully patronising tone of yours, I know I’ve shocked you. Am I going to let Alexandre fuck me? Well, I might. If he’s attractive and shows that he’d like to…in a nice kind of way. They say that all boys should be taught to do it by an older woman, at about that age, so why not by their mothers? Who could be better qualified? Common sense, darling; plain common sense. I can’t see what all the fuss is about.’
Gregory Stern, his son, Marius, and Lord Canteloupe stood together by Canteloupe’s magenta Mercedes in the drive of Oudenarde House Preparatory School in Sandwich. Glinter Parkes, the Headmaster, had told them to stand there for at least forty minutes in order that parents coming to deliver their sons for the Michaelmas Term that autumn afternoon should see that Marius Stern, who had been under a huge cloud and might have had to leave the school for ever, even now enjoyed the company and glad countenance of Captain the Most Honourable Marquess Canteloupe of the Aestuary of the Severn, and was therefore fit to be received back into any society whatever, no matter how he might have erred heretofore.
‘I think that’s a bit much, Glinter,’ Canteloupe had complained, ‘sticking us on a dreary piquet.’ And then, taking Glinter on one side, ‘That boy’s been keeping an absolutely straight bat since they had him circumcised. You’ve nothing to worry about now.’
‘That’s all very well,’ said Glinter, ‘but the parents don’t know that.’
‘You agreed that Marius could come back for his last year here if Gregory paid for your new indoor rifle range. That ought to be enough. You can’t go imposing extra conditions now.’
‘Indulge me, Canteloupe,’ Glinter had said, ‘just hang about with Marius and his father for forty minutes or so in this very agreeable sun. After all, Marius did nearly kill young Palairet last term, and the parents and the boys need reassuring. They don’t know about his operation, nor, if they did, would they understand what difference it can have made. I’m not sure I do myself. But everything will be as right as the Royal Enclosure if they see you standing there with your arm round his neck.’
And of course Glinter, who was not in the prepper game for winkles, was absolutely right. One rather common mother got so over-excited that she curtsied. Walter (Wally) St George, an assistant master at Oudenarde, nearly bust his gut with pride when Canteloupe (having met him before, at the time of Marius’ deepest disgrace) shook hands with him and called him ‘St George’ without prefixing the middle class ‘Mister’. A number of old cricketing acquaintances, who had come with their grandsons, rumbled with pleasure when Canteloupe waved to them and wheeled Marius up for a word.
‘This is Marius Stern,’ Canteloupe would say, ‘my old friend Gregory’s boy.’ And to Marius, ‘This is “Gin-Sling” Carhart-Harris, who downed ten Tom Collins in five minutes and then hit the ball clean over the Pavilion at Bangalore – and won a bet for a monkey.’
‘How do you do, sir,’ Marius would say, giving a smile at once manly and flirtatious. ‘Where did you keep the monkey afterwards?’
‘Haw, haw, young ’un. A monkey means five hundred quid.’
And Marius, who knew this perfectly well as his mother used that kind of slang, would be led on to ‘Whiffy’ Cave-Browne, while ‘Gin-Sling’ Carhart-Harris said to his daughter, his son in-law and his three grandsons, ‘By Jove, what a fine little chap’; and the son-in-law said, ‘But isn’t his father a Jew?’; and Gin-Sling riposted, ‘Eton and the Brigade. Poor chap can’t help the other thing. Anyway if Canteloupe likes the boy, the boy’s all right. I remember when Canteloupe – “Detterling” we called him then – used to cut the ball later than any man in England.’ And the daughter might say, greatly daring, ‘But didn’t that little boy hit another little boy very nastily last summer?’ Whereupon all the males present, from Gin-Sling down to the tiniest grandson, said, ‘Of course there’s going to be some scraps at a proper school with proper fellows in it’, and laughed at the poor silly bitch until she retired to the car in tears, and from that day to this has never presumed to open her mouth at a school function.
All ways round, then, Canteloupe’s tour of duty in the drive was a huge success. Indeed, by the end of it almost everyone present had agreed that Palairet was privileged ever to have been struck by such a one as Marius, nor would Palairet himself have dissented.
‘Stern,’ he called across the drive as soon as he was out of his parents’ car, ‘Marius Stern’, and ran across and stood with him, side by side. ‘I’m glad you came back,’ he said, moving his head just enough to see Marius’ face. ‘I’ll say goodbye to my people and then we can have a game of pingers.’
So Palairet said goodbye to his people and Marius to his – Canteloupe having tipped him a gold sovereign (which Leonard Percival had dug up) largesse which was lordly without being offensive, as the equivalent in paper money would have been – and the two boys went off to play pingers.
‘Cut,’ said Glinter, coming up to Gregory and Canteloupe, who climbed into the magenta Mercedes and were driven away within seconds.
‘So,’ said Fielding Gray at Liverpool Street Station, ‘I’ll come and see you at Lancaster next term.’
Their journey together was over and Fielding was seeing Jeremy off home.
‘Early next term, Fielding.’
‘If you like. Good. More trips, like we’ve just had, later on…do you think?’
‘I do think.’
‘Right. So now…go well, Jeremy Morrison, go well to Luffham.’
‘Stay well, Fielding Gray; and stay with God.’
When they were tired of playing ping-pong, Marius and Palairet went for a walk round the cricket ground in the last of the autumn evening.
‘No cricket for eight months now. Pity,’ said Palairet, a slight frown on his plain, amiable, rather crumpled face. ‘Soccer’s a rotten game. I wish we played Rugger this term as well as next.’
‘There’ll be Fives and Squash. I wish we had a Racquets Court,’ Marius said. ‘Someone took me to watch Racquets last hols. At the Queen’s Club. Super game. Fast.’
‘Who took you?’ said Palairet, suddenly jealous that he himself had not been of the party, though he had spent an entirely happy holiday in Somerset and Biarritz.
‘My father’s friend, Major Gray. As a treat after my operation.’
‘Your…oh, I see,’ said Palairet, who did see quite a lot, in a very general way, and also, being a boy of rare courtesy, realised that the fact of Marius’ operation, though not its nature (whatever that might have been), required recognition. ‘A bit of a celebration,’ Palairet said, ‘because they’d let you out okay.’
‘That’s it.’
‘Major Gray. Fielding Gray. My mother says his books are “pure filth”, but I know my father reads them. He has them in a drawer in his desk. What’s he like to go out with – Major Gray?’
‘Quite interesting. On the way to Queen’s he told me all about a journey he was going to go on – in Italy and Greece. I thought he would probably be fun to go with, except that he does…well…look you up and down a bit.’
‘Lots of them do that when they get old. They don’t often mean any harm. They just…like looking…that’s all. You see that seat up there, Stern?’
Palairet pointed to a wooden bench at the top of the bank which surrounded most of the cricket ground.
‘It’s funny about that,’ Palairet went on. ‘It only came last term, just before – just before you went away. Things like that usually come in the holidays, not in the middle of term.’
‘Well, let’s go and look at it.’
The bench was facing away from the cricket ground and over a canal which was on the other side of the bank.
‘I say,’ said Marius, ‘look who gave it. Jeremy Morrison, it says.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘Old Boy of Oudenarde. A…a friend of mine. During the hols.’
‘Last hols?’ said Palairet, jealous, once more, at his own exclusion.
&
nbsp; Marius nodded ‘We had great fun,’ he said, ‘games of cricket in the garden and a marvellous afternoon at Newmarket Races. I won nearly ten pounds.’ He grinned, then shook his head. ‘But I don’t care about him so much now,’ he said, ‘not now that I’m back here.’
‘You mustn’t just drop him, you know,’ said Palairet anxiously, jealousy assuaged and decency aroused, ‘even if the hols are over now.’
‘Oh, I know that. But I don’t suppose,’ said Marius, ‘that I shall be seeing him much any more.’
‘What I want to know,’ said Canteloupe as the Mercedes cruised towards London up the M2, ‘both as your friend and your partner, Gregory, is how long you are going to keep up your anti-Jewish campaign…how long you are going to go on writing those inflammatory anti-Jew articles which only a Jew could get away with?’
‘I am anti-Israel, not anti-Jewish,’ said Gregory, fingering the buttons all down the front of his Guards’ Blazer and then along the sleeves.
‘Forgive me, my dear Gregory, but it would take something of an expert to tell the difference.’
‘So what is this to you, Canteloupe?’
‘There is beginning to be what Lady Bracknell called “comment on the platform”. One such article as you have written for the Scrutator might proceed from whim or irritation, and a second might have been mere carelessness – an almost unconscious repetition of the first – but a third and a fourth, Gregory, require explanation.’
‘Very well. You remember that Isobel and I went astray on our travels last summer?’
‘I remember vividly, as I was landed with the problem of your son.’
‘And very sensibly you handled it,’ said Gregory reluctantly. ‘But the point is…that Isobel and I were detained by certain people, somewhere in what used to be called the Levant, until I gave my promise that I would write such essays as I am writing now – and then follow them up with a whole book on the subject. If I break my word, something similar will happen again – something similar to, but much nastier than, what happened last June. Even as it is, I must submit, later this autumn, to meeting these people and being taken somewhere secret while they examine my notes and hear about my preparations for the book.’
‘Which will be saying…what?’
‘That the Jews have no moral or historical right to Israel; and that their behaviour, both before and since they reoccupied the country, has been greedy, treacherous and cruel – to say the very least of it.’
‘Will your heart be in this book?’
‘It must be. The safety of my wife and children may depend on it.’
‘But can you contemplate your thesis with pleasure?’
‘If not with pleasure, then with less distaste than you might think. The Jews’ claim to Israel has always been questionable: unfortunately, at the very time when it should have been most closely questioned, the whole world was blinded by pity and guilt because of the way the Jews had suffered in the thirties and forties.’
‘And the other accusations – greed and treachery and the rest?’
‘My dear Canteloupe, the human race, taken as a whole, is ignorant, arrogant and envious; overseeing and vengeful in victory, snivelling, deceitful and whorish in defeat. The Jews are part of the human race, therefore the Jews share these characteristics. A simple syllogism.’
‘I can see that you can make a convincing case, and very possibly a best-selling case, in general terms. But what happens when you come, as come you must being a just and intelligent man, to the individual exceptions to this rule? They are, after all, many and honourable, be they gentile or Jew.’
‘The people with whom I have to deal, Canteloupe, do not think in such terms. To them, their side is noble and righteous, while the Jews are in every way vile and hideous – with no exceptions. They will hear of no just men in Sodom. Their intention is to procure from a Jew – from me – a one hundred per cent excoriation of Jewry.’
‘Silly of them. They would have a much better case if only they would not be extreme. As it is, Gregory, if you write this book to their exact specification as you have just described it, then it will not be, cannot be, the sort of book that a respectable firm, like our own Stern & Detterling, could even begin to consider publishing. Is that not so, my dear?’
Gregory’s head sank between his shoulders.
‘Not if the author himself paid for publication?’
‘Not even then. It is a question, as you well know, Gregory, of decency. Such a book would not be decent.’
‘I, as senior partner, must determine that.’
‘You know as well as I do that it is improper for a publisher to publish himself.’
‘You know as well as I do that it has been done,’ said Gregory, ‘And by a senior partner.’
‘You would not, I think, wish to find yourself the only partner?’
Silently and without moving a muscle of his face, Gregory began to weep. Tears welled from unblinking eyes, rolled down fleshy cheeks, and plunged, from his still elegant chin, on to the collar and lapels of his Guards’ Blazer.
At last, ‘Help me, Detterling,’ he said.
‘I cannot. But I know someone who might be able to. For some years I have had a personal Secretary – and a friend – called Leonard Percival.’
‘I have met him with you.’
‘He is formerly of Jermyn Street, or just “of Jermyn Street”, as he prefers to put it. Is the phrase familiar to you?’
Gregory shook his head. Canteloupe began to explain.
When Fielding Gray had driven himself from Liverpool Street to his London quarters in Buttock’s Hotel, he examined the mail which had come in during his month of absence. Although some letters might have gone to his seaside house in Broughton Straithe on the Norfolk coast, almost all interesting or urgent items would have come to Buttock’s.
An envelope from his agent, of the kind used when advising that he had received money on Fielding’s behalf and passed it on to his bank (less ten per cent), looked quite promising. It contained the news that the VAT due on his earnings, for the quarter June/August, 1978, had been duly paid into his account: all £17.83 of it.
A letter from his accountant looked as disagreeable as such letters always did, the address having been typed in Stygian black and the envelope having the texture of burnt, soggy toast. However, he told himself, he must grasp the nettle – and for all the determination with which he did so, he was staggered by the sting. His accountant informed him that the Inland Revenue, having called for figures from his agent and his publisher (both being Stern & Detterling, though in different departments, as the firm both published and represented him), had calculated that during the last three years he had under-declared his gross earned income in the sums (respectively) of £8,146.32, £13,045.10, and £517.24. His comment was invited.
A knock on the door. Maisie Malcolm came in.
‘They said you was back when I came in, dear. Glad to be home? Tessa and I have got up a special little welcome home dinner.’
‘Home’, he thought, that word twice in the same speech: of course she’ll never agree to sell the place.
‘How kind,’ he said, and meant it.
‘You don’t look very well, dear. I said you should never have gone off with that Jeremy Morrison.’
‘It’s the Tax people, Maisie. They’ve suddenly said that I’ve been short-changing them for the last three years, that I’ve been concealing thousands of pounds of my income.’
‘Don’t worry about them, dear, just take nine months to answer, then pretend you’ve gone to Tibet. I had a client once who used to send all Government envelopes back where they came from with “MISSING, BELIEVED DEAD” written by his name.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘He set fire to himself smoking in bed. He was only twenty-six.’
‘There you are, you see. God is not mocked, Maisie, neither is the Tax Man. Besides, if I tried anything on like that my accountant would refuse to act for me.’
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nbsp; ‘Sod him, lovie.’
‘It’d be sod me. The Inland Revenue always do you down in the end, unless you have an accountant, and often even then.’
‘So tell this dozy bugger of yours to pull his knickers up and start earning his living. And for God’s sake take that dismal look off your face. Tessa’s friend Rosie is coming to the welcome-home dinner, and I don’t want my girls sitting down to table with a gargoyle.’
‘I thought it was just you and me and Tessa. Family. Why’s Rosie coming?’
‘Rosie Stern’s pretty well family too, these days. All that business about Rosie’s brother, Marius – it’s just made Tessa and Rosie closer than ever… Besides, duck, it’s not just a welcome- home dinner, it’s an end of holidays dinner. The girls go back on Monday.’
‘But since they are both day girls, I can’t think that it makes much difference.’
‘Oh, it’s not so much that they’re going back to school. How shall I say it? It’s all to do with something I read in one of Tessa’s poetry books – how did it go? – “Goodbye, summer; summer, goodbye…”’
‘Farewell, summer, Maisie, if I’m not mistaken. Either way, I now recognise the nature of the occasion and shall try to honour it.’
‘That’s my good boy.’
The telephone rang on the table by Fielding’s bed. He crossed from his desk to answer it.
‘Fielding?’ said Tom Llewyllyn’s voice.
‘Yes, Tom?’
‘I’ve got a Franciscan here with a club foot. He says he’s Piero – you remember, Venice in seventy-three…’
‘I remember.’
‘He says he’s hitch-hiked the whole way from that island he went to – how does one hitch-hike from an island?’
‘By boat, I presume – the first stage anyhow.’
‘He says that Daniel is at peace but he isn’t, and he wants to be with Daniel’s friends. What shall I do?’
‘Cherish him.’
‘What?’
‘Be kind to him, Tom. He’s come a very long way. I’ll come down tomorrow, and we’ll discuss it all with him.’ So much, he thought, for his policy of ignoring “penniless foreigners”. ‘Did he say that he’d met Jeremy Morrison and me on Torcello?’
