by Simon Raven
Ex-Corporal of Horse Gordon Prince remembered Jeremy as a passable if heavy rider and a cheerful pupil. He was flattered that this personable young man (whose father, he recalled, had at one time been in the Government) should have come to look up his old Riding Master on his way home from visiting his old school, particularly as Birchington was not really on the way anywhere. So when Jeremy asked after ‘my friend, Mrs Stern’s son Marius,’ the Corporal of Horse said, ‘Come this way, sir,’ and led him off to the stable yard, opining to Jeremy as they went that Marius had the hands of a blooming little angel, sir.
In the stable yard, Marius was grooming his horse alongside Palairet, whom Jeremy did not know. Prince called Marius over to Jeremy (‘Here’s a friend of your ma’s and an old friend of mine’) and himself went to correct Palairet, who was doing something wrong.
‘Hullo,’ said Jeremy.
‘Hullo,’ said Marius, and shuffled.
‘Long time since we met.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You called me “Jeremy” then.’
‘Yes,’ said Marius, ‘Jeremy.’
‘I have to say something important, Marius. Listen. I must go away. Later, you may hear nasty things about me. They are not true. Do you understand clearly? Any nasty thing you hear about me is not true. I thought I must tell you before I went, because…because of the way we liked each other last summer.’
‘Yes, Jeremy,’ said Marius, looking at the ground.
‘Do you remember that afternoon at Newmarket?’ Marius merely nodded.
Palairet came and stood beside Marius. ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ he said objectively to Jeremy; and to Marius, ‘The Corporal of Horse says it’s time for the coach, Stern.’
Jeremy was being seen off, and knew it.
He shook hands with Marius, who smiled radiantly with relief, nodded to Palairet, crossed the yard, refused the Corporal of Horse’s offer of ‘Chai’, badly hurt the man’s feelings (though he had declined with the best grace he could muster), and found, as he drove back towards the main road, that his engine had developed a ‘nasty knock’ which certainly needed a garage.
It had been decided, some time ago, that Leonard Percival should ‘be on hand’ in Trieste in case Gregory wished to consult him at any stage during his meeting with Shamshuddin & Co., the people who had been responsible for kidnapping him and Isobel the previous summer and were now leaning on him in the matter of what Leonard called ‘The Bumper Anti-Schonk Omnibus’ and by other titles even more tasteless.
The original form had been that Gregory’s talks with Shamshuddin would last three days, after which Gregory, having satisfied him that his preparations for the production of the Omnibus were up to the mark, would return to London and set the presses of Salinger & Holbrook to roll off his polemic. The programme was now changed, in that Gregory intended to ‘make a little tour of Hellas’ before he returned to London, having represented to Shamshuddin that his book would need some revision as a result of their conference, a task best undertaken in surroundings that would remind Gregory with every breath he took of the sane and echt un-Hebrew customs and procedures of the classical Hellenes.
Leonard Percival was not at all sure that he approved the change in arrangements. True, these would entail his tracking and watching Gregory (at Gregory’s request and by Canteloupe’s assent) all through Yugoslavia and over much of Greece, at a time when the weather should be ideal for the excursion and most summer tourists would have vanished, leaving the scene to the discerning. True, also, that Leonard had often longed to look at the castles of the Southern Peloponnese, whither Gregory purported to be bound. He did not, he could not, mislike the prospect: he simply and roundly mistrusted it.
The whole thing, he told himself now, as he drove the car which he had hired in the Piazzale Roma at Venice through the autumn evening towards Trieste, the whole blessed bunderbust, seemed to him – what was that French phrase? – pas honnête. His professional nostrils smelt lies and evasions: worse, they smelt silliness. Gregory was getting some trick ready; he was having recourse to atavistic cunning; he was plotting, somehow or other, to ‘Jew’ his enemies. And then God help us all, Leonard Percival thought.
On Tuesday morning, Jo-Jo Guiscard remembered that Isobel was coming to the Fens that day. If she found her, she would take her. If not, not. I wonder, Jo-Jo thought. I could drive into Ely and just forget the whole thing. Do I want to forget the whole thing? What is that woman planning? Do I even want to know?
In the end, she decided to leave the matter to God (so to speak). She went to sit by the pool, taking Oenone and a volume of Browning (The Confessional – that’ll teach her, Jo-Jo thought), but on the way she concealed the beginning of the narrow path (just behind the summerhouse) by blocking it with bracken, small bushes and briars which she dragged off an unlit bonfire and arranged (as she thought) to look like undergrowth.
Then, not really caring whether Isobel found them or not, she started to read The Confessional to Oenone.
Rosie and Tessa had their mid-morning bun together.
‘I’ve got all my things ready to come back with you tonight,’ said Rosie. ‘How odd of God to be so kind.’
‘Has your mother left?’
‘Early this morning. I only hope she stays away as long as she thinks – about three weeks. She says Daddy won’t be back before then and she needs a change of life. What can she mean?’
‘It’s a thing ladies have at a certain age,’ said Tessa, ‘Auntie Maisie told me.’
‘And Mummy told me, ages ago. But I don’t think that’s what she meant this time…though that’s what she said. Not a change of air or food or place, but a change of life.’
‘I think,’ said Tessa, ‘that your father too is looking for a change of life. You know when he said goodbye to me, after he walked with us to school last Friday?’
‘He kissed you on your lips. He has never done that before. Only to Mummy and me. I was almost jealous. Then I wasn’t. I was glad.’
‘It wasn’t only the kiss,’ said Tessa, ‘he gave me something. A little parcel. He told me to open it later. When I did, I found something wrapped in a note–’
‘–A bank note?–’
‘–A letter. Wrapped in the letter was a little metal tube with a tiny roll of India paper inside it. Your father’s letter said the tube was called a mezuzah, a thing Jews put outside their front doors to bless their house. He said that the scroll inside had all the Names of God written on it – he’d only been joking, he said, the night before at dinner, when he’d told me there were sixty-six or ninety-nine. Now I could count them for myself and find out…and please would I always carry the mezuzah with me, to remind me of him.’
‘How sweet of him,’ said Rosie. ‘But I still don’t understand what you are saying…about his looking for a change of life.’
‘One reason for giving people presents to remember you by is because you think that you may soon in some way become different. When people leave school they give their friends photographs – to remind them what they used to look like when they were all young together. I think…your father wishes me always to remember him as he was on that morning. So fine and tall and kind and funny.’
‘He has given me nothing to remember him by,’ Rosie said.
‘You need nothing, you have known him so well for so long. Anyway, he has,’ said Tessa. ‘When I opened the little scroll to read the Names of God, there was only one: EROS, the God of Love.’
Tessa took a piece of tissue paper from her pocket, unwrapped a little metal tube, took the tiny scroll of rice paper from it, and opened it for her friend:
EROS
Underneath the name, stuck to the paper, was a deep red stone, uncut.
‘Rubies for happiness, Aunt Maisie once told me,’ Tessa said, ‘for happiness and for love. And so for the God of Love, for Eros…the letters of which also make Rose. So take this gift… my Rose…from the hand that took it from your father’s.’
T
he boring thing, Isobel Stern thought (as Mrs Statch let her in and said, no, she’d no idea where that Madame Guiscard had got to), was that if she didn’t find Jo-Jo, which meant that Jo-Jo wouldn’t come, then she’d have to disappear all by herself for the next three weeks, since Rosie would kill her if she turned up again this evening and carted her back from Buttock’s Hotel to Chelsea. And yet she could hardly turn up again in London without doing this. Therefore she must not turn up again in London, therefore she must stay away, therefore she must have a clear and interesting purpose in staying away, therefore she must find Jo-Jo, which all ways round she very much wanted to do.
Mr Ptolemaeos, Mrs Statch had said, was still in bed. ‘That Mr Caspar’ was with him in his bedroom, taking dictation or some such. Fielding Gray, as Isobel well knew, had left to look for Jeremy on the morning after the rumpus. She, Isobel, was on her own.
She let herself out of the drawing room into the garden and walked down the lawn to the summerhouse. ‘I shall find you,’ she had told Jo-Jo. ‘If you are sitting by your pool, I shall find you, and take you.’ Suppose she found Jo-Jo but she was not sitting by the pool? Presumably this too would mean assent. But the pool was important, Jo-Jo knew it was important, and if she was in the place at all she would certainly be sitting by the pool, the finding of which was to be Isobel’s test.
What on earth is the matter with Baby? thought Isobel, parenthetically, as she paused by the summerhouse. She’s regressing. As a little girl she was a horror, as a bigger girl she was worse, but then suddenly, when Patricia was taken away, she bloomed. For some years she went on, in every sense, blooming. And now – this. Keep your mind on your job, Isobel, she admonished herself, which just now is Jo-Jo. A pool among fir trees. These fir trees, crowding up the lawn all the way between the house and the summerhouse. But they are so close, interwoven, entwined, mingled together, like the bristles of a shaving brush, little enough space between them at the roots and none a little higher. A wall of woven branches, an impregnable phalanx behind it. Even if I knew where to go, I could not possibly get through. There must be a path. Where does it begin?
And then a voice came back to her from the summer: Marius’ voice. ‘There was a special place in that garden,’ Marius had said. ‘Not even Jeremy knew about it. I found it once by accident, when I was desperate to be by myself, the only time in all the time I was with Jeremy, but that time I had to, I found a hidden path behind the summerhouse, and went along it, and came to a secret place.’
‘No place which has a path leading to it is secret, darling.’
‘The path was secret. Even its beginning was hidden by the summerhouse, Mummy, and curtained off by thick branches. Only if you were lucky enough to pull at the right branch could you see where the path started.’
‘And exactly where did it go to, this path?’
She had touched the lobe of his ear.
‘To a little pool. So just that once I was by myself. Not again.’
Isobel went behind the summerhouse. Jo-Jo’s crude imitation of wilderness had drawn attention to the beginning of the path rather than concealed it…once one was in the know. Isobel scratched herself quite badly on the briars, but she did not mind that, because she knew that Jo-Jo (if only she was there) would honour her spoken word and come with her, when found, bringing the child. As she moved along the path, which would hardly allow her passage, so narrow it was, Isobel began to hear Jo-Jo’s voice:
‘“…You think Priests just and holy men!
Before they put me in this den
I was a human creature too,
With flesh and blood like one of you,
A girl that laughed in beauty’s pride
Like lilies in your world outside.”’
Canteloupe had thought of several possible presents for Baby from the proceeds of the Canzoni sale. Recently and as a result of his tuition she had been showing some interest in racing, particularly National Hunt, so why not a high class steeplechaser? He had also thought of a house or flat in the South of France, an emerald parure (Baby loved green stones), or, just possibly, a Rolls-Royce.
But Baby, after her return from the Fens, showed neither excitement nor even common gratitude at any of these suggestions. She merely sulked. When asked if anything was the matter, she sulked even worse. After some days of this, Canteloupe made two decisions: first, that he would drop the topic of Baby’s present altogether, at least for the time being; and secondly, that if he should ever raise it again, the gifts on offer would be of a very much humbler kind, in order to teach Baby a lesson in manners.
After a little while longer, Canteloupe came to a third decision. When Balbo had discovered the Asolano in the First Night Nursery, Canteloupe had at first told himself that since this might later prove a substantial cash asset (he remembered the interest in the fate of the real Asolano, this one as it must surely be, that had been shown in Los Angeles) he could spend even more of the Canzoni money on his present to Baby than he had originally planned to. But now that Baby had come home in this horrible fit of the sullens, now that she apparently neither desired nor deserved a present and was not going to get one (or only one much smaller and much later), there would be a lot of loose money lying about. Well, thought Canteloupe, one could never have too much liquid cash and he was determined not to fritter away this lot (a mistake he had sometimes made in similar circumstances in the past); but he could, he thought, afford a gesture, particularly since the one he had in mind would not involve actual disbursement. He would do the big thing: as justice, honour, liberality and the good name of his house required of him, he would hand back the stolen Asolano to the Church of San Martino.
Not being quite sure how to go about this, he rang up Balbo (who had by now returned to Lancaster) and asked to be put in touch with Sir Jacquiz Helmutt, the Cambridge art mogul, who agreed to send experts to examine the painting in the First Night Nursery and, if it was indeed the missing Asolano (as to which Balbo’s account had left Sir Jacquiz in little doubt), to undertake negotiations, with all the Civil, Excise and Ecclesiastical authorities that must necessarily be consulted, to expedite the picture’s return. What kind of ceremony, Sir Jacquiz asked, would Lord Canteloupe wish for its reception back in Burano? The very simplest, relied Canteloupe, and preferably one which did not require his own presence. If one was to make such a gesture, Sir Jacquiz rejoindered, one must do the thing en prince; this should be no shifty little hole in the corner operation: if it were, everyone would say that Canteloupe had given the painting back out of sheer guilt. There must be an air of munificence and even of magnificence about Canteloupe’s act, as if to say, ‘We English command and bestow at our pleasure: both as acquisitors and as benefactors we come on the grandest scale.’ Court Dress, prescribed Sir Jacquiz, his imagination soaring, or even a Marquess’ robes; coronets, he allowed, would be overdoing it and were probably forbidden in Italy, but Lady Canteloupe could appear in the finest family tiara to pull the chord to unveil the picture (yes, by all means let the tapestry remain with it – the combination made a characteristic Venetian joke). Let there come a Cardinal Archbishop to bless it and the first choir in Europe to sing it back to rest in its rightful place (what a pity one could no longer find a few castrati); and let a flagship of the Italian Navy (if such a thing there still was) fire a twenty-four gun salute in the lagoon.
Canteloupe, while deposing that he still felt that a certain modesty would befit the occasion, conceded that it would look well if he and his lady were present, though he had a private doubt, unexpressed to Sir Jacquiz, whether Baby, in her present mood, would attend such a function or grace it if she did.
So there it was, Fielding thought: whatever I am now to do about Jeremy’s disappearance (and this is not at all clear to me) at least I have set my house temporarily in order, as far as I can: so much, and so much only, can I spend (and very little it seems) until the next injection of earned money; if I exceed that amount, I shall have to start cashing in (which Heaven forfend
) the last of my reserves of stock.
As to the accusations of under-declaring his income, which had been made by the Inland Revenue, he had heard nothing further. When he had last telephoned his accountant, he had been brusquely recommended to cultivate patience, as if a possible liability of well into five figures, to say nothing of a prospect of prison, were matters indefinitely amenable to phlegm. The accountant had, however, so far relented as to say that he might ring back later that day – and here he was, it seemed, doing so.
But in fact the caller was the so-called Chamberlain of the Household at Luffham by Whereham. When this venerable person had been soldier-servant to Canteloupe (Detterling) he had of course been, as had Detterling, of the 49th Earl Hamilton’s Light Dragoons, which was Fielding’s Regiment also. Although Fielding and the Chamberlain had never met as serving soldiers, they had known each other after Detterling’s retirement, into which his servant, then known as ‘Corporal’, had followed him; and the man had been well aware, in his lucid days that they had both belonged to the same Corps – a fact which, Fielding thought, he has presumably remembered now, because, ‘Res Unius, Res Omnium, Major Gray, sir,’ the Chamberlain’s voice boomed at him down the telephone.
The old motto of the old mob.
‘“The affairs of one are the affairs of his comrades,”’ the Chamberlain translated, inaccurately and unnecessarily. ‘You are looking for Master Jeremy, sir. When you came the other day, I told you the lie which he instructed me – indeed made me swear – to tell to all who enquired: I told you he had not been here. I now think my loyalty was misplaced, and it is time for both of us, as Light Dragoons, to assist each other. I can tell you that Master Jeremy came here in his motor to collect clothes; so clearly he did not wish to avail himself of those at his College – id est, sir, he did not wish, for whatever reason, to show himself there. He took two full suitcases: enough gear for a fortnight, if he is unvaleted, and for several months, even years, if proper service is available to him. He said he must go away and that I was to believe no ill of him; otherwise he was imprecise, and named neither destination nor day of return.’
