‘Just so,’ I said. I bade him good night, donned my gown and set sail for the SCR.
Dryden was profuse in his apologies for not having met me at the station.
‘I do hope Margate found you without difficulty?’
‘Margate? No, it was a rum chap called Francis.’
‘Yes, that’s right, Francis Margate. A very nice boy. Brightest Viscount I’ve taught for years.’
‘I hope your, ah, squitters are better, John? Your pupil seemed to be concerned about you.’
‘Oh, goodness, they don’t trouble me, I’ve had them for years, it’s the port here, d’you see, worst port in Oxford, don’t know why I stay. I’ve had splendid offers from all sorts of places, Sussex, Lancaster, Uganda – all sorts of places.’
‘They all sound much the same to me. What, in fact, did prevent you from meeting me?’
‘Oh, I had luncheon at one of those women’s colleges, can’t recall the name, they get you frightfully drunk, you probably know, shocking lot, boozers every one. So I felt a little tired after luncheon and Francis hadn’t his essay ready so I offered to let him meet you instead.’
‘Just so,’ I said. (I find that I say ‘just so’ often in Oxford, I wonder why that is?)
He then gave me a filthy glass of sherry without a word of apology and led me up to the Warden so that I might pay my respects. I paid them.
‘How nice,’ the Warden said with apparent civility, ‘to see an old member.’
To this day I cannot be sure whether it was a gibe or simply an unfortunate turn of phrase.
I strayed around the Common Room until I found a hideous pot-plant which seemed to deserve my sherry. A moment later, we formed the usual sort of procession and shuffled off to Hall, High Table and dinner. High Table was much as it has always been, except for the cut of the dinner-jackets and the absurd youthfulness of the dons, but a glance over my shoulder into the bear-pit of Hall made me shudder. Two hundred shaggy Tom-a-Bedlams with their molls and doxies were scrambling and squabbling around a row of stainless-steel soup-kitchen counters, snapping and snarling like Welsh Nationalists in committee, or Italian press-photographers in pursuit of an adulterous Royal. Every few moments one of them would break out of the mêlée, guarding a plate heaped with nameless things and chips, which he would savage at the table, cursing and belching the while. The long oak tables bore none of the ancient silver of my youth – they have to keep it locked up nowadays – but there were long, proud lines of bottles of Daddie’s Favourite Sauce – and jolly nice it is too, I dare say. But I turned away with a shudder and dipped a reluctant spoon into the Mock Turtle before me. (You can tell how even the memory of it all upsets me if you note that I started the last sentence with a conjunction, a thing I never do.)
You must not think that I am carping when I say that dinner was five courses of poisonous ordure: I expected it and would have been disturbed if it had been good. High Table dinner in Oxford, as perhaps you know, is always in inverse ratio to the brains-content of the College which offers it. Scone is a very brainy College indeed. If you want a good tuck-in in Oxford you have to go to places like Pembroke, Trinity or St Edmund Hall, where they play rugger and hockey and things like that and, if you’re spotted reading a book, someone takes you aside and has a chat with you.
No, what really spoiled my evening was that Scone had gone in for the ultimate gimmick and acquired a she-don. She resembled nothing so much as a badly-tied bundle of old bits of string; her smile was the bitter, clenched rictus of a woman pretending to enjoy natural childbirth and we disliked each other on sight to our mutual satisfaction. She was not wearing a bust-bodice or ‘bra’, that was clear; her blouse was gallantly taking the strain at about the level of her navel.
I couldn’t say anything, could I – as a mere Old Member I was only a guest and she was listening intently – but I met the Warden’s eye and gave him a long, level look. He smiled sheepishly, a sort of qualified apology.
After dinner, in the Common Room, Dryden mischievously introduced us.
‘Gwladys,’ he said with relish. ‘Charlie Mortdecai has been dying to meet you.’
‘Bronwen,’ she said curtly. Clearly, Dryden had used that gambit before.
‘ Enchanted,’ I exclaimed in the gallant voice which I hoped would most enrage her, ‘it’s high time this stuffy old place had a few pretty faces to brighten it up.’
She turned on me that particularly nasty look which your breakfast kipper gives you when you have a hang-over.
‘And what’s your field?’ I asked.
‘Sexual Sociometrics.’
‘I might have guessed,’ I replied archly. She turned away. Never let a day go by without making an enemy, is what I say, even if it’s only a woman.
‘You have made a conquest,’ murmured Dryden in my ear.
‘Have you any whisky in your rooms?’
‘Only Chivas Regal.’
‘Then let us go there.’
His room are the best set in Scone: there are boiseries and a pair of bookcases only rivalled by those in the Pepysian Library in Cambridge and a certain house in Sussex, whose name escapes me. Moreover, he has a bathroom of his own, an unheard-of luxury in Scone, where the corpus sanum – or vile – runs a very bad second to the mens sana. (The story goes that, long ago, when it was first proposed in the College concilium that bathrooms should be provided for undergraduates, an ancient life-fellow protested in piping tones that the lads couldn’t possibly need such things: ‘Why, they’re only here for eight weeks at a time!’ But then came the strange late-Victorian epoch, shot through with obscure guilts, when the English – whom Erasmus had named as the grubbiest race in Europe – found that nothing would do but that they must scrub themselves from head to foot whenever they could spare a moment from smartening up Fuzzy-Wuzzy and other Breeds Without The Law. There are three times as many undergraduates in Scone now, and the bathrooms are just as few, but now no one seems to mind any more.)
‘Well now,’ said Dryden, when the beaded bubbles of Chivas Regal were winking at the brim, ‘I gather that you have taken up the worship of Wicca and find that it compels you to range around the countryside stealing ducks.’
‘No, no, no, John, you must have mis-heard me on the telephone: duck was not the word I used and it’s not me at all, it’s some other chap.’
That’s what they all say,’ kindly, sadly, ‘but tell me all about your, ah, friend.’
He was, of course, teasing me, and he knew very well that I knew that he knew that I knew he was, if I make myself clear. I started from the beginning, for I am not skilled in narrative, and went on to the end. It electrified him; he sat up straight and poured profligate drinks for both of us.
‘Well, I do call that splendid,’ he chortled, rubbing his big, pink hands together. (Can you chortle, by the way? I can giggle and snigger but chortling and chuckling are quite out of my range. It’s a dying art, some modern Cecil Sharp should go around recording the last few practitioners.)
‘How do you mean, splendid?’ I asked when the chortling was over. ‘My friends and their wives don’t think it’s a bit splendid, I can tell you.’
‘Of course, of course. Forgive me. My heart goes out to them. What I meant was that in the midst of all this bogus satanist revival that’s going on it’s rather gratifying to a scholar that a serious recrudescence of the real tradition is taking place in just the sort of base and backward community where one had hoped the last embers of the Old Religion might, indeed, still be glowing.’ (What lovely sentences he constructs. I wish I could write one half so well as he talks.)
‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘it’s all there: the desecration of Easter for a start. It probably starts at Easter every year, you know, but few victims of ravishment ever complain to the police for reasons which doubtless spring to your mind; the counter-accusations and cross-examinations at the trial can be most shaming in cases of this kind. Moreover, the sturdy native Jersey women would, for the most part, apprecia
te that they had been singled out for what amounts to a religious rite – it is just as if an Englishwoman were told by the Vicar that it was her turn to do the flowers in Church for Easter: a nuisance but an honour. Do you follow me?’
‘So far I’m abreast of you.’
‘Then there’s the inverted cross –’
‘What inverted cross?’ I interrupted.
‘Why the one on the witchmaster’s belly, to be sure; hadn’t you twigged? The ladies would naturally have thought it to be a sword and it may well have been pointed at the top to represent the woven crosses they give out in churches on Palm Sunday, this combining an insult to Christianity and an ancient sex-symbol. Do you happen to know what colour it was?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Try and find out, there’s a dear boy. And find out whether it left any paint marks: it would be quite splendid – that is to say, very interesting – if it proved not to be painted at all but pyschosomatically produced. The body can do wonderful things, as I’m sure you know, under hypnosis or auto-induced hysteria. The stigmata, of course, springs to mind, and levitation: there’s far too much evidence to dismiss.’
I shot him a furtive look. He was displaying just a little too much zeal for his hobby-horse; committedness is next to pottiness, especially in elderly dons.
‘You are thinking that I am riding my hobby-horse a little hard,’ he said – beaming at my guilty start – ‘and I confess to finding the subject almost unwholesomely engaging.’
I mumbled a few disclaimers which he waved aside.
‘The words “hobby-horse” and “levitation”,’ he resumed, ‘bring us to the next point, the riding-jollop.’
‘How’s that again?’
‘Riding-jollop. There are many names for it but the formulae are all very similar. It is the pungent mixture a witch smears on his or her body before going to the Sabbat. The greasy base stops up the pores and thus subtly alters the body’s chemistry, another ingredient reddens and excites the skin, while the bizarre stench – added to the guilty knowledge of what the jollop is made of – heightens the witch’s impure excitement to the point where he knows that he can fly. In the case of she-witches, a canter round the kitchen with the broom-stick between her legs adds a little extra elation, no doubt.’
‘No doubt,’ I agreed.
‘Whether any of them succeeds in flying is an open question: it is their certain conviction that they can that is important. Do you care to know the ingredients of the jollop?’
‘No thanks. My dinner sits a little queasily on my stomach as it is.’
‘You are probably wise. By the bye, did you happen to notice in your local paper that any new-born babies had been missing shortly before Easter?’
‘Whatever has that –?’ I said. ‘Oh, yes, I see; how very nasty. Do they really? No, I wouldn’t have noticed that sort of thing. People shouldn’t have babies if they’re not prepared to look after them is what my old nanny used to say.’
‘You might just check, dear boy. It would have been in the dark of the moon before Easter. But of course it might have been the sort of baby which doesn’t get recorded. You know, “ditch-delivered of a drab”.’
‘Just so. “Eye of newt and blood of bat”.’
‘Precisely. But try. Now we come to the toads. I’ve always felt that Jersey’s particular fondness for toads might indicate that it was perhaps the last outpost of the Old Religion, for the toad was easily the most popular Familiar for witches. The warts on its skin, you see, remind one of the extra nipples which every she-witch was supposed to have and that goes back (am I boring you, dear boy? How is your glass?) that goes back to the polymastia or superfluity of breasts of the ancients. I need not remind you of Diana of the Ephesians, who must have looked like a fir-cone, as dear Jim Cabell pointed out.’
‘But I thought that the cat was the favourite familiar? I mean, Grimalkin and all that?’
‘A wide-spread and pardonable error, Mortdecai. First, you see, by the time of the great witch hunts of the seventeenth century – best-known because they were politically inspired you see, for there was a sort of suggestion of confrontation between the High Church and Papist Cavaliers, who, oddly, were supposed to more or less tolerate the Old Religion (perhaps they knew how to use it?) and the Puritans, who chose to see witchcraft as an extension of Rome; by this time, I say, the serious witches had gone very thoroughly underground and the only ones left on the surface were a few old crones practising a little Goëtic magic to help their friendly neighbours and to smarten up their petty persecutors.
‘Now, the rules of witch-finding were that a witch always had a devil’s nipple, by which she could give suck to her Familiar. They used to tie the poor old biddies up and watch them, certain that when the Familiar became hungry it would come around for its rations. Most old ladies, to this day, own a pussy-cat – and most old ladies tend to have a wart or a mole or two, this is common knowledge. You see? Moreover, there is an ancient confusion here, for the word “cat” used also to mean a stick, such as witches might ride on. (Perhaps you played “tip-cat” as a child? No?) In short, you may be sure that the toad, not the cat, is the most popular and effective familiar. “Was” perhaps I should say. Or rather “was deemed to be”,’ he ended lamely. The warmth of his defence of the toad led me to suspect uneasily that a close search of his quarters would pretty certainly reveal a comfortable vivarium somewhere, bursting with the little batrachians.
‘Well, John,’ I said heavily, ‘that’s all quite riveting and I’m more than grateful for the insight you have supplied into the way this awful chap’s mind works and so forth, but now I feel we should be thinking about remedies and things, don’t you? I mean, to you it’s an entrancing piece of living folk-lore, no doubt, but over there in Jersey two of my good friends’ wives have been horribly assaulted and one of them, if I’m not mistaken, is in jeopardy of grave mental illness. I mean, conversation of old customs and so on I’m all for, and I’d be the first to join a society for preserving the Piddle-Hinton Cruddy Dance etc., but you wouldn’t actually subscribe to a fund for the preservation of the practice of thuggee, would you? To my mind, this Johnny should be stopped. Or am I being old-fashioned?’
‘Oh Mortdecai, Mortdecai,’ he said – how funny it sounded, sort of hyphenated – ‘you were always impatient with things of the spirit. I remember you were rusticated in your second year, were you not, for –’
‘Yes.’
‘And again in your last year for –’
‘Yes, John, but is this to the point?’
‘Yes, of course, no, you’re quite right. Remedies are what you must have, I see that, I really do. Now, let me think. We shall assume that the violator is (and I have not a scrap of doubt that he is), properly versed in all the side-knowledge of his dread religion. Therefore, he can be daunted in several ways. First and easiest, common salt (rock-salt is better) sprinkled liberally on all entrances into the room; door-sills, window-sills, hearth-stones and even transoms and ventilation-louvres. Second, garlands of wild garlic festooned around those same apertures are reckoned sovereign, but you would be hard put to find wild garlic in Jersey, or anywhere, at this time of the year and its smell is really quite beastly.’
‘I know. I have tried to eat wild duck which have been feeding off it. The very dustbin rejects them.’
‘Just so. Third, and this has not been known to fail, the person fearful of visitations from a witch or warlock should go to bed clutching a crucifix made either of wood, or, much better, of either or both of the two noble metals – gold and silver: the very best of all is a cross made of one of the hardest woods such as ebony or lignum vitae and inlaid with silver and gold. He or she should memorize a simple cantrip to recite to the emissary of the Desired – chrm – that is to say, the Evil One, which I shall now dictate to you.’
‘Look John, forgive me, but I don’t think we are approaching this on the right lines. For one thing, I’ve no intention of distributing cantr
ips and costly crucifixes to every rapable woman in the Parish of St Magloire. For another, we don’t want just to keep the beggar out of our bedrooms, we want to catch him if possible – kill him if that becomes necessary – but at all costs to stop him for good.’
‘Oh dear, that is a very different matter indeed. You really mustn’t kill him if you can help it, you know; he may very well be the last living receptacle of some extremely ancient knowledge, we have no way of guessing whether he has yet initiated a successor to the Black Goatskin. No, no, you must try not to kill him. You might, in any case, find it a little difficult, heh, heh.’
‘I know; I’m thinking of ordering a box of silver bullets.’
‘My word, Mortdecai,’ he cried, clapping his hands merrily, ‘you always were a resourceful fellow, even the Dean said as much when you almost won the Newdigate with a thousand lines lifted from Shelley’s Cenci. Did you get rusticated that time?’
‘No, I played the “youthful prank” gambit. The Proctors hit me for fifty pounds. My father paid. I threatened to marry a barmaid if he didn’t.’
‘There you are again, you see. Resourceful. But no, try to avoid killing him. As to capturing him, I really cannot offer any suggestions. He will be endued with Fiendish cunning, you understand, and will have all sorts of other resources which we cannot gauge, it really depends on whether he’s been to Chorazin or not.’ He seemed to be addressing himself.
‘Chorazin?’
‘Ah, yes, well, just a scholarly aside, not to the point really. It’s a place mentioned in the Bible, just a few mounds today – or so they tell me – and one goes there, or rather chaps like your witchmaster go there, to complete their education, so to speak.’
‘A sort of Sabbatical?’ I prompted.
‘Just so, ha ha. Very good. Yes, they went there to, as it were, pay their respects to Someone; it was called the Peregrinatio Nigra, the Black Pilgrimage, you know.’
The Mortdecai Trilogy Page 45
