by Simon Raven
‘You’ve missed the five forty-three from Sandwich,’ he explained, ‘but we’ll easily catch it up before it gets to Dover.’
On the way they drove through the forest at Green Oxley Laris. Gregory wondered whether the lady in the cape was still watching the chapel.
‘Don’t think I’m not grateful,’ Glinter was saying. ‘We need that indoor range, and it’ll give a lot of pleasure and instruction. But frankly I think we’d better not mention your name in connection with it – not for a while yet.’
‘Because of Marius, you mean? Because people will say I bribed you to take him back?’
‘Partly – though I think all that is well on the way to being forgotten. The real this is, Stern, that your name is beginning to be associated with a series of extremely tough and offensive anti-Semitic articles…in the Scrutator and elsewhere. A good many of my parents are Jews.’
‘So am I,’ Gregory said.
‘And the rumour is that there will soon come a whole book of the same…so violent in tone that even your own firm won’t touch it.’
‘I’ve found a printer that will. Salinger & Holbrook.’
‘I dare say.’ Glinter changed down into second gear and proceeded at a very prudent speed downhill past Dover Castle. ‘Look here, Stern. I don’t know you well – only as a parent. But I’ve known some of your friends and authors – I was at school with Fielding Gray, though rather junior to him, and for some years after the war I played a bit of cricket with Canteloupe. So I think I am just entitled to say that I do not consider what you are doing to be decent. You understand the word as well as any man in the Kingdom. I do not say that this stuff of yours is Fascist or immoral or racialist or racist – none of the catchwords. I just say it isn’t decent.’
‘That’s what Canteloupe said.’
‘Well then, old chap: don’t you think you’d better stop? Anyway, until you do, I shan’t be putting up your name on the wall in the indoor rifle range.’
‘Just as well you’ve already cashed the cheque,’ said Gregory.
Glinter, who liked a blackish joke, laughed pleasantly.
‘That blazer you’re wearing,’ Glinter said, ‘Household Cavalry. Not a very fussy crowd, when it comes to what they say about Jews. But I don’t see any of ’em putting his name to one of your articles.’
‘They wouldn’t know how to write them,’ said Gregory complacently.
‘Nor they don’t need to. I’m just pointing out,’ said Glinter Parkes as he turned into the forecourt of Dover Priory Station, ‘that those chaps you’ve ridden with – you were on mounted duties?–’
‘Oh yes’
‘–Well, those chaps you rode with, all those years ago, from Knightsbridge up the Mall to the Horse Guards, they don’t think very much of what you’re doing.’
‘How can you know this?’
Glinter stopped the car under a ragged advertisement for Son et Lumière at Dover Castle the previous summer.
‘We have a Riding Master in Birchington,’ said Glinter, ‘to whom we send boys, yours among them, twice a week. An ex-Corporal of Horse. He was one of those who rode with you, Stern. His wife reads the Scrutator, sometimes aloud. He doesn’t care for all he hears. He tells me Marius has the same gentle hands with the reins that you once had. This used to give him great pleasure. Now, he says, it makes him sad.’
‘Who is this man?’
‘He is called Gordon Prince.’
‘British Army Pentathlon Champion…soon after the war.’
‘That’s right. Remind me, Stern: the Pentathlon consists of running, pistol shooting, swimming, riding – and what’s the other event?’
‘The sabre.’
‘Ah yes: the sabre. A distinct tang of The Prisoner of Zenda about the whole affair. Faintly absurd, but in the end coming down to one thing – honour. A good man, Gordon Prince, a good man to ride with from Knightsbridge up the Mall to the Horse Guards.’
‘I remember.’
‘So does he. “By God, sir,” he said to me the other day, “I wouldn’t ride with him now”.’
Fielding Gray, not wanting to drive in the dark, took a train to Cambridge. Len, on Tom’s behalf, had been definite: whatever it was, and he wasn’t saying on the telephone, wouldn’t wait. He promised Fielding a four-course dinner in the Provost’s Lodging. Maisie had been very upset when Fielding said he would have to leave her alone with the steak and kidney pudding, which she had already ordered specially from the kitchens.
‘Cambridge,’ she said. ‘I hope you’re not going to see that bloody young Morrison. Is it him that’s in trouble then?’
‘I don’t know anything about it at all,’ said Fielding.
‘Last time they rang you up from there it was about that boy from Venice, you said.’
‘This time nobody’s saying anything.’
‘A message from God, you said just now when you rang off.’
‘Yes. Exigent and mysterious. A divine summons.’
‘Nothing divine about Tom Llewyllyn.’
‘He’s not so very far from it. As Provost of Lancaster, he speaks for the Blessed Henry the Sixth, the Founder. Or so it was held until within living memory. If the Blessed Henry the Sixth summons you to his own College, Maisie, you go.’
‘What stuff they fill your heads with in those colleges.’
‘Not mine, Maisie. I never went. They turned me down for Lancaster because I’d been a naughty boy.’
‘And I suppose that explains,’ said Maisie, ‘why they’ve only got to whistle and you come running like a little dog now.’
‘I wonder,’ said Rosie at dinner, ‘why Sir Thomas Llewyllyn is so keen to see Mummy?’
‘So do I,’ said Gregory. The first course was Oeufs Benedict. Gregory, about to complain that he’d already had poached eggs for tea, reflected that, after all, the cook (a new man, at that) could not possibly have known this. ‘All I can tell you, my Rose,’ he said, ‘is that Tom apparently asked for your mother as his “sister-in-law”.’
‘Which implies,’ said Tessa, who was intimate in the household, ‘that whatever has happened concerns her side of the family, or his and hers, but not just his.’
‘Tom has nobody who is “just his”, said Gregory, ‘or not that we know of. Speaking in terms of family, that is.’
‘Which only supports my deduction,’ said Tessa, who, like Gregory, inclined to a literal and pedantic mode of thought, ‘that what has happened cannot concern just his side of the family, as this does not exist.’
‘If you ask for your sister-in-law,’ said Rosie, who was more imaginative than either of her companions but also given to spelling things out, ‘it implies that the crisis is common to both sides of the family…which narrows the field pretty drastically. Auntie Patricia?’ she suggested, naming her mother’s sister and Tom’s wife, who was retired from the world (almost certainly for ever) in St Bede’s asylum.
‘Please not, in all the names of Jahveh,’ Gregory said.
‘How many are there?’ asked Tessa.
‘Sixty-six or ninety-nine,’ said Gregory, glumly guessing.
‘I’m afraid you’re going to be liverish, Daddy, with all these eggs. When I heard from you on the telephone that you’d had poached eggs at tea, I did ask the new cook to change the menu, thinking you might get costive, but he said, “What nonsense, duckie, she’s much too big a girl to be bothered by four little eggies”.’
Gregory looked puzzled.
‘It’s called “she-talk”,’ Tessa explained kindly, ‘all the waiters at Aunt Maisie’s hotel use it all the time. Aunt Maisie is “he”, because she’s a lady, and Major Gray is “she” or “the drum majorette”.’
‘Ah,’ said Rosie, ‘we should have told Daddy that the drum majorette has been summoned to Cambridge too.’
‘By the Provost of Lancaster?’ asked Gregory.
‘We’re not sure,’ said Tessa. ‘Auntie Maisie rang up to say that Major Gray had had to leave at a second’s notice
to go to Lancaster College. Lancaster College, she said: nothing about the Provost, and I didn’t like to start asking questions because Aunt Maisie was very upset. She said that she’d have to eat a whole steak and kidney pudding which the Head Chef, who is called Stella, had made specially. Since Stella is so temperamental none of it must be left or he’d start crying. She also said that now Major Gray would not be able to come here and collect me, and would I ask you if I could spend the night?’
Gregory spread his arms in assent.
‘She is sending my things over in a taxi,’ said Tessa. ‘What is rather puzzling, though, is why Aunt Maisie can’t come in the taxi to collect me instead of just sending my things. I mean, even if she has got to eat a whole steak and kidney pudding–’
‘She’s being kind,’ said Rosie, smoothing her long black hair. ‘She knows you’ll love sleeping here, and I shall love having you, and that we shall be able to walk to school together tomorrow morning.’
‘I’ll walk with you and Teresa,’ said Gregory, ‘if I may.’ Gregory was one of the few people who habitually used Tessa’s real name. ‘It will be our last chance,’ he said, ‘for all of us to have a walk together, before I go abroad. I always like walking with you,’ he said to Tessa, ‘because you are so straight, so straight and neat…while my Rosie,’ he said, ‘skims like a little bird. You know,’ he said, looking rather vague and worried, as if uncertain whether the association of what he was about to say with what he had just said was not too loose for courtesy, ‘you know, I heard a funny thing today, about Marius. His Riding Master remembers me from the days when we were soldiers in the same Regiment. He says that when Marius is on a horse he has the same touch, the same gentle hands as I once had.’
‘Oh,’ cried Rosie, clapping her hands, ‘what a lovely thing to be told.’
‘You must be very proud,’ Tessa said.
‘Yes, Teresa. It has made me…quite suddenly…very proud.’
In the event, Fielding beat Isobel to the Provost’s Lodging in Lancaster by a short head. The door was opened to him by Len.
‘Servants’ night off,’ Len said, ‘we don’t want anyone listening in on us this evening.’
‘I hope that doesn’t mean cold food for dinner.’
‘No, duckie. Uncle Len will improvise with his portable electric oven and the char’s gas ring. The only cold thing is the caviar. Any complaints?’
‘As far as that goes, no. But why all this drama? And when do the explanations start?’
‘As soon as Mistress Isobel Stern arrives.’
This Mistress Isobel Stern now did, whirling her Lagonda under the Annan Arch and into the Provost’s Court, executing a skid turn round the Rylands Fountain, and stopping neatly in line with the Lucas Columns which framed the Provost’s door while Len and Fielding were still standing on the doorstep.
‘Madame Sauce,’ Len said.
‘Pissing time,’ announced Isobel, and galloped past them, through the open door, and down the hall towards the loo, nearly flattening Sir Thomas Llewyllyn as he emerged from it.
A few minutes later, just as Isobel finished her pissing, the party was joined by Messrs Ptolemaeos Tunne and Piero Caspar (his new surname), who had driven from the Fens in Ptolemaeos’ Mini.
‘Jo-Jo is looking after Baby,’ Ptolemaeos began ominously, ‘not that Baby will be much of a problem – for the time being, that is. Mrs Statch’s Fenland Slumber Brew (made from Papaver Paludis) will have knocked her out for a good twelve hours. The question must be…what will happen when she wakes up?’
‘First things first,’ Isobel said. ‘The question must be, as far as Fielding and myself are concerned, what happened before she went to sleep?’
‘Nobody knows…for certain. Except perhaps one person, who disappeared too quickly to be asked any questions. Jeremy Morrison. It might be helpful,’ Ptolemaeos said to Len, ‘if you could send for him…if he’s anywhere in the College. In Hall perhaps?’
‘Dinner in Hall is over,’ said Len. ‘Not that Jeremy often condescended to dine there. I’ll ask Wilfred on the Gate to send someone to look for him – and give him a message if he sees him coming in.’
‘I do not think,’ said Piero Caspar, ‘that Girolamo – Jeremy Morrison – will be coming back here to the Lancaster College tonight.’
‘And why not?’
Piero looked at Ptolemaeos.
‘You begin,’ Ptolemaeos said.
‘Dinner?’ said Fielding, looking very firmly at Len.
‘Yes, dinner,’ said Isobel, ‘we’ll never get anywhere on empty stomachs. I imagine you’ve got me down here to play the loving Auntie when Baby wakes up…as her loving Daddy’ – she glared at Tom–’ is still hanging around here, a safe fifteen miles and more from his daughter’s sickbed – or whatever it is – and the location, I presume, of the accident – or whatever it was. I also notice that no one appears to have sent for Canteloupe. So I deduce that both Baby’s father and her husband, and possibly the male sex in general, are considered to be, for whatever reason, unsuitable for the task that is to hand. Auntie to the rescue, it has clearly been decided, and I respect your wisdom and shall do my best. But we still have a few hours’ grace while Papaver paludis does its stuff, so can we please hear whatever there is to hear at our leisure and over dinner…for which I hunger like a lion, or should I say lioness?’
‘Baby is not the only problem,’ said Ptolemaeos, who was standing in the doorway and showed no interest in moving. ‘Young Morrison, now. I agree with Piero. I do not think that he will return here tonight, if at all. All that, of course, will be Fielding Gray’s department.’
‘Why?’ said Fielding.
‘Because you’ve just spent a month alone with him in Greece and Italy, and presumably you will have excellent insights into his behaviour, past and future.’
‘I shall exercise no insights into anything until I have been fed.’ And then, when Ptolemaeos still showed no sign of moving, ‘Why this reluctance to let us out to dine, Ptolemaeos? You are usually the first at the trough.’
‘There is something about what has happened – such little of it as we actually know – that has put even me off my assiette,’ Ptolemaeos said. ‘However, I must allow that it would be discourteous in me to frustrate the rest of you, so by all means let us go and dine. And as we do, let Piero discourse…’
In Wiltshire, Canteloupe and Leonard Percival dined tête-à-tête in the Lancelot Room (named after a Derby winner owned by the third Lord Canteloupe). The dishes were kept warm on a hotplate, from which they served themselves.
‘The question is,’ Canteloupe said to Percival, ‘was the stolen Asolano sent here in its frame? Or had it been taken out? It’s a very different thing storing a framed picture from storing a canvas. So what’s the betting about that?’
‘Impossible to say. Or is it? You see, it is much easier to take a framed picture off a wall – even a very big picture – and put another in its place, than it is for anyone other than an expert to cut a picture out of its frame and fit another into it. Remember that the chap who did this job – Lord Whatever-the-Eldest-Son-Was-Called-in-Those-Days–’
‘–He was travelling under an assumed name, Mr fitzAvon with a small “f”–’
‘–Remember, then, that Mr fitzAvon with a small “f”, always assuming it was him who organised the theft, was an amateur who would have found it much easier to hire porters to carry a large wrapped or crated rectangle than to perform the delicate task of detaching the painting from the frame. But on the other hand he may have found someone else to do this at some stage – any stage – after the theft.’
‘Let us, Leonard, consider the first possibility. The picture is stolen in its frame and sent home, still in its frame, under diplomatic seal, on the strength of fitzAvon’s diplomatic status. It then arrives down here. What does fitzAvon’s father do about it?’
‘Opens up the package and has a look.’
‘He was man of some taste. He would have r
ealised that the painting was not only curious but valuable: he would very much have doubted whether fitzAvon could have had the money to pay for it…though this might not have been altogether out of the question, as very good bargains are to be had in times of disruption. So what does he do now?’
‘Packs it up again and decides to postpone any action until he has heard fitzAvon’s account of the matter.’
‘But all he hears of fitzAvon, then or ever, is that he is dead. The accepted version,’ said Canteloupe, ‘was that he had been killed by “enemies”, possibly French agents who suspected that he was using his diplomatic privileges as cover for spying or running messages.’
‘Would they have known about the Asolano?’
‘The circumstances and reports of fitzAvon’s death are vague in the extreme. If you remember, Leonard,’ said Canteloupe, looking Percival straight in the eye, ‘there are excellent reasons why they should remain so.’
‘I remember, Detterling,’ said Percival, returning Canteloupe’s look, ‘or rather, I remember to forget.’
‘Good. The only thing any of us know for certain about fitzAvon’s death is where he is buried.’
‘So,’ said Leonard Percival, ‘the Peer has received the parcel – and then the news, possibly not unwelcome, that his renegade son is dead…’
‘…He marries a second wife, a few years later, and gets another and more satisfactory heir…’
‘…But meanwhile, Detterling, what has he done with the parcelled painting? He will also have received and inspected the watercolours. Disreputable stuff, however acquired. He will have looked at the large painting in its frame…and realised it has a connection with the watercolour sequence. But the watercolours are signed “Canzoni”, whereas the oil painting, which is a much larger version of the first watercolour, is signed “Asolano”. Asolano pinxit. What does our noble lord, this man of taste, deduce?’
‘That the whole thing is jolly fishy. He decides to hide the lot and make discreet enquiries, the Canzonis go into a locked cupboard in the library, inside a leather cover, secured with bronze clasp and padlock, which bears the title “The Little Flowers of St Francis de Sales”. This was where I found them, inside a wrapping which bore fitzAvon’s name and some sort of official insignia (no doubt an order for privileged carriage from the Chancery in Venice) when I was going over the place with Balbo Blakeney after my cousin’s death. So much for the watercolours. Now for the framed canvas: where did he hide that?’
