The Face of the Waters (First Born of Egypt Series)

by Simon Raven

  ‘Yes. It went wrong so often that she began to think of herself as permanently barren. She still used to talk as if she was childless years after Marius and Rosie was born – she couldn’t really believe she’d had them.’

  ‘Well…one of the times it went wrong she actually got as far as having the child. Did you know that?’

  ‘Yes. It was in 1964.’

  ‘While she was in hospital, her husband… Gregory came to see me.’

  ‘Gregory Stern came to see you? In your professional capacity?’

  ‘Yes. He’d heard of me from you. Once, when you were drunk, you’d told him…that I’d been kind to you.’

  ‘You had.’

  ‘So, being drunk, you pressed my address and telephone number on him. And since he wanted to humour you he’d taken them down in his book. Months later, years later, Isobel went to hospital to have this baby. Now, although he’d never had eyes for a girl in the world but Isobel, he began to be tempted – after weeks of not doing it because she was pregnant – when his secretary made advances in the office. A sheer animal thing. But he knew he mustn’t come on his own doorstep, so to speak; he’d better off-load temptation somewhere – almost anywhere – else. So he looked in his book, remembering that time you’d been drunk, and came to confidential, ever-so-understanding me. You’d told him so much about me, he said, that he regarded me as a friend already. Then he put an envelope under the pillow. Then he told me he was so happy, his wife had had their first baby that afternoon, he’d always heard that made a man feel sexy, but anyway he must do it with someone, otherwise he was afraid he’d make an ass of himself over his prick-tease of a secretary and then there’d be a row and his wife Isobel would be so hurt and unhappy for him, and he loved her so much that he couldn’t bear that. I used to hear a lot of nonsense in that line, but somehow I believed Gregory; I liked him, I liked him a lot, Fielding, and so when he asked, could he just ring up the hospital, he should have done an hour ago but he’d been stuck in a traffic jam and forgotten, so could he use my phone and of course he’d pay, I told him to help himself and have it on the house.

  ‘So he rang up and they said his baby had died. They didn’t know why. It was big and strong and doing well. It had just died.

  ‘I saw from his face. And I thought…what did I think?… I was so sad, it seemed so unfair, and he just kept saying, “Oh dear, poor Isobel, she’s tried so hard, Maisie, so often, it’ll break her heart.” And yours too, I thought. God giveth and God taketh away, and perhaps tonight God will give back what he has taken away, give back to me what he has taken away from you and Isobel, it won’t do you any good but it may settle some account somewhere, so come to me, Gregory, I said, come to me, what a funny little lump on your shoulder, nice, though, nice, that’s it, my darling, you be happy while you can, you’re making me so happy too…yes, darling, come if you want to, oh warm, warm, I can feel it, come, Gregory, come, you come warm in Maisie’s womb.

  ‘Just that once,’ Maisie said to Fielding, ‘the only time ever, I didn’t take any precautions and I didn’t make him either. I left it to God, to see if he would settle the account, to see if he would give as well as taking away. And God gave me Tessa.’

  ‘But why…darling Maisie…why do you pretend to be her aunt?’

  ‘Just in case Gregory ever guessed, and it upset or embarrassed him. I think, if he’d never had children of his own, I might one day have gone to him and said, “Here’s your daughter”, I might have said, “complete down to that little lump on her back, here’s your daughter, love her if you will.” But as it is, he has his own by the wife he loves. So let Tessa be just mine, my orphan niece, and the world none the wiser.’

  ‘He may have guessed. He must know about Tessa’s little hump. And he must realise that you are the same Maisie.’

  ‘Oh, he realises that all right. And very kind to me he is when we meet. Rather as if…I had been his nanny when he was a little boy. He never refers to that time with me, of course, but I know he remembers, and that’s why it’s so important that I insist on Tessa being my niece, so that he need feel no worry, no responsibility. Luckily she doesn’t seem to favour him in the least, except for that little lump, there’s no hiding that.’

  ‘So…she really is Rosie’s sister. How happy they would both be if they knew.’

  ‘Much happier just imagining it,’ Maisie said. ‘A fantasy that turns out to be real loses its charm.’

  ‘Shall you tell Teresa? Oughn’t she to know?’

  ‘I nearly told her when I thought she might start fancying Marius. “No games of doctors with your brother,” I nearly said. And then I thought, would it really matter? And then it turned out, anyway, that she only loved him like a brother, even if she may once have got a bit carried away, and there seemed no point in complicating things. As things are, Fielding, and as they may well be for some considerable time to come, it will be better, believe me, for Tessa to remain my niece. Do you remember, last Spring, when suddenly nobody came to the hotel for weeks and weeks, and we couldn’t think why?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘That was God, I think now, warning me not to tell Tessa, saying that it would be a wicked thing to tell her how she came to be born and what sort of woman I’d been – for she would have had to be told that if told anything at all. God, who gave me Tessa, was warning me to keep quiet, showing me that my punishment for snatching her from Him, almost by stealth as I had done, was that I could never let her know I was her mother. As soon as I began to think that I had better tell Tessa who she really was, now Marius and she were growing up, just in case – as soon as I began to think that, the guests ceased to come here, and they only come again when I had at last given up all idea of speaking out.’

  ‘Maisie…it can’t have been that.’

  ‘What else?’

  Fielding went to his one window and beckoned her over.

  ‘What do you see, Maisie?’

  ‘A very pretty Garden of Rest, love, with a quaint Victorian Church on one side of it and the Underground cutting on the other.’

  ‘Precisely. A Garden of Rest which was an ordinary graveyard until February, when they widened the Underground cutting. Half the graveyard had to go, so they decided to take the stones out of the rest as well, and put all of them along the wall…work which took until June. Of course nobody was going to come here, Maisie, when the word began to go round that dead bodies were being dug up under the bedroom windows – and that even in that half of the cemetery which wasn’t actually being destroyed the stones were being moved…the graves, in a sense, desecrated. Our lack of guests was caused in part by superstition, Maisie, and in part by distaste for charnel engineering.’

  ‘Why didn’t we realise at the time that that was the explanation?’

  ‘Because once the work had been going on a very few days we simply ceased to notice it.’

  ‘No guests and a gaping graveyard,’ said Maisie, ‘a message from God, whichever way you look at it.’

  The telephone rang. Fielding lifted the receiver, listened, muttered, rang off, and began to sweat.

  ‘Another message from God,’ he said, slowly closing his one eye as if to rest it.

  Tessa Malcolm and Rosie Stern were having tea in Rosie’s house in Chelsea. Tessa was to stay on to dine as a special treat for Rosie, to make up for her parents having gone down to Sandwich to see Marius.

  ‘Though quite why I deserve a special treat because of that, I don’t know,’ Rosie said to Tessa.

  ‘They’re worried,’ said Tessa, ‘because Thursday is the wrong sort of day to be going to see anyone at a boarding school. They’ll only interrupt things. So to make up for upsetting Marius they’re being extra kind to you.’

  ‘But they’ve got a very good reason for going to see him. Daddy has got to go to Trieste soon, and so he’ll miss Marius’ first exeat and wants to see him before he leaves instead. Today is the only free day he’s got before then, even counting the weekend, so that
’s why they’ve gone to Sandwich.’

  ‘Marius’ first exeat,’ said Tessa scornfully, ‘it’s quite ridiculous, all the exeats and half-terms and days off they have at schools these days. No sooner has anyone learnt anything than they come home for a week and forget it.’

  ‘Well, this I will say,’ said Rosie, ‘in Marius’ case he certainly seems to be learning a lot to forget. He wrote me a very interesting letter about doing Greek for his scholarship exam next summer. He says he’s playing a lot of Eton Fives, whatever they may be, and sends you his love. So it looks as if everything is turning out all right…which is rather surprising, really, when you remember how horrid it all was only a few months ago.’

  Marius would certainly have agreed with Tessa’s strictures on the ease and frequency with which pupils were let out of schools, even schools as well disciplined and conservative as Oudenarde House. In Marius’ view term was term and hols were hols, and while it was term he did not in the least want to go home or see his parents or be taken out on Sunday – which was one of the best days of the week for playing Squash or Fives. Although he could just endure official breaks in the term, because they affected everyone, he really did draw the line at unofficial visits, on a normal school day, such as his father and mother were paying him now. He knew just why they had come – because his father would be abroad during the first exeat – and very absurd he considered it: as if his father and he couldn’t go without seeing each other from mid-September to half-term, which came only three weeks after the exeat. Not only was it absurd, it was downright annoying, as he was going to miss an important 1st XI pracker game and his favourite period with Wally St George – Latin Verse, which even these days could carry high marks, at the particular school for which he was entered, in his Scholarship Examination in June. And quite apart from that, what could be more pleasing than to be employed in an occupation which only .001 per cent of the population (so Wally had calculated) could begin to understand, let alone to emulate? What could be more superior, more absolutely and superly elite (the favourite word at Oudenarde that term) than writing poetry in a foreign language and a dead one at that?

  So it was a deprived and unhappy Marius that walked the streets of Sandwich with his parents, killing the time before tea – until suddenly his mother saved the afternoon by saying, ‘How silly of us to forget. Green Oxley Laris – it’s only a few miles away.’

  ‘What’s there?’ said Marius.

  ‘You’ll see,’ said his mother, and propelled him into the windy back seat of her Lagonda, while Gregory, delighted as always at the prospect of motion, scampered round the bonnet (all six foot of him) and into the nearside front.

  ‘Isn’t there some story about Green Oxley Laris?’ Gregory said. ‘Something to do with someone we know?’

  ‘There’s a legend,’ said Isobel, ‘but since it dates from the twelfth century it can hardly concern our friends or relations.’

  Isobel drove south, bypassed Deal, and continued south along the Dover Road. After about two miles they came to a steep dip; they passed some kennels in a meadow on their left; they entered a forest at the bottom of the dip; Isobel stopped the car under a bank by the mouth of a rough drive which led up into the forest; all of them disembarked.

  ‘Through here,’ Isobel said.

  They scrambled over the bank above the drive, through some fifty yards of trees and malevolent undergrowth, and down into a bowl where a little chapel sagged and rotted and dripped.

  ‘Now,’ said Isobel. ‘Notice those vouzoirs over the West Door, both of you: three orders of them. I don’t think much of the tympanum – a pretty crummy Christ. It used to be the private chapel of the manor house up on the hill.’

  How elite, thought Marius, to have a private chapel with a tympanum (however crummy the Christ) and three orders of vouzoirs. He accompanied his mother through the doorway (the door itself had vanished) and into the half-roofed chapel. ‘Lancet windows,’ said Isobel. (Goodness, how elite.) ‘Thirteenth-century sedilia over there, to the south of the sanctuary. An aumbry to one side of them.’

  ‘An aumbry, Mummy?’

  ‘Where the priest kept things. Bread and wine. Do you see the point of this place, my darling?’

  ‘I think so. It is beautiful. And it is sad.’

  ‘And it is wicked. An abbess used to meet the Lord of the Manor here…to make love with him.’

  ‘Inside this chapel, Mummy?’

  ‘I dare say…if it were cold or wet. He repented and went on a crusade.’

  ‘What did the abbess do?’

  ‘Waited for him to come back, I suppose.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘I don’t know, darling.’

  ‘Perhaps he died fighting in the Holy Land, under the Cross and she put up that tablet in his memory… How silly of me,’ said Marius, ashamed of his gushing, ‘she wouldn’t have been allowed to. An abbess. Anyway, it’s quite modern, the tablet. It’s for someone who died less than twenty years ago.’

  ‘I believe the family were still in the house on the hill for some years after the war. Come on: this place has given me an appetite. Do you know somewhere that will give us poached eggs for tea…crumpets…anchovy toast?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marius as they came out under the tympanum, ‘I know just the place.’

  ‘Good. There aren’t many left these days. Not enough money in teas. They all want to sell you a filthy dinner with corked wine.’ Thirty yards away, above the rim of the bowl, a shadow moved into the trees. ‘Daddy,’ called Marius.

  ‘I expect he’s back in the car. He doesn’t like the cold.’

  ‘But it’s beastly cold in that car of yours, Mummy. I thought I saw him by those trees over there.’

  ‘Why are you so nasty about my beautiful Lagonda?’

  ‘Oh, it’s very elite. But it is cold, Mummy…Daddy, why didn’t you come in with us? It was lovely…superly weird. Sedilia and aumbries. Mummy knew all about them.’

  ‘I know a little too, my dear. I know that the people who sat in those sedilia eight hundred years ago spent much of their time murdering and torturing our ancestors, yours and mine.’

  ‘Who richly deserved it,’ said Isobel, ‘as they lent out their money at eighty per cent.’

  Gregory chortled.

  ‘There was someone else hanging about without going in,’ he said. Isobel started the Lagonda. ‘Woman in a sort of cape,’ Gregory said. ‘I passed her on my way back. She looked upset about something…as if she resented our being there. That must be her car.’

  A Rover 2000 was now parked at the side of the drive, beyond the Lagonda. Isobel executed a neat three-point turn, missing it by inches…which was just as well, as a surly man in gaiters and breeches had come down the drive and was watching her.

  ‘More resentment,’ said Gregory, as Isobel inched forward again and the man in breeches climbed into the Rover.

  ‘Anchovy toast and crumpets,’ said Isobel, ‘which way?’

  ‘Mr Brown’s in Deal is best,’ said Marius. Isobel turned right and accelerated. ‘That man with the Rover hasn’t waited for the lady,’ Marius said.

  ‘She looked so disagreeable,’ said Gregory, ‘that I am not at all surprised.’

  When Isobel and Gregory arrived at Oudenarde House to deposit Marius, Glinter Parkes in person, wearing the gown of a Master of Arts, met them in the drive.

  ‘Your brother-in-law,’ he said to Isobel, ‘Sir Thomas Llewyllyn. He telephoned from Cambridge.’

  ‘How did he know I was here?’

  ‘He tried your London number about half an hour ago, and got your daughter, Rosie. She told him.’

  ‘What on earth does he want?’

  Palairet ran across the drive and stood with Marius. ‘Off you go, you two,’ said Glinter, anxious to clear the ground.

  ‘Goodbye, Mummy; goodbye, Daddy.’

  ‘Not so much as a kiss,’ said Isobel as the two boys faded into the shadows.

  ‘Better that way,’
said Glinter. ‘Quick.’

  ‘What did Tom want?’

  ‘You, Mrs Stern. To go at once to Cambridge.’

  ‘What nonsense is this of Tom’s, sending for people in the middle of the night?’

  ‘It is only five forty-five,’ said the literal-minded Gregory. ‘Tom does not play jokes. We must go.’

  ‘You must get back to dine with the girls in London,’ said Isobel. ‘I must go to Cambridge. You are right,’ she said, as she moved towards the Lagonda, ‘Tom does not play jokes.’

  She drove away before there could be any argument.

  ‘Better that way. Quick,’ said Gregory, wrily quoting Glinter. ‘I’d better telephone Rose and say I may be a little late.’

  ‘We’ll put you on a train as soon as possible, Stern. But by all means come in and use the telephone first.’

  ‘That was Daddy,’ said Rosie to Tessa in Chelsea. ‘He may be just a little late for dinner. Too many telephone calls.’

  ‘What else did your father say?’

  ‘Mummy has to go to Cambridge – something to do with that call we had just after tea, the one from the Provost of Lancaster. Daddy is coming from Sandwich by train because Mummy has taken the car. Marius is very well. They went to see an old chapel this afternoon which Mummy and Marius liked and Daddy didn’t. They all had poached eggs and hot buttered crumpets for tea, and Mummy was cross because she couldn’t have anchovy toast as well. The café was so famous for it that it had all run out, which made Mummy even crosser than if there hadn’t been any in the first place. She hates things to run out.’

  Tessa bowed her head slightly and crossed her wrists in front of her, touching both her little breasts, left breast with right hand, right with left.

  ‘I wonder what Sir Thomas Llewyllyn wants her for in such a hurry,’ Tessa said.

  ‘A very pertinent question,’ said Rosie, whose father had recently adopted the expression.

  Glinter Parkes, MA, having first removed his gown, took Gregory to Dover Station in his car.