by Simon Raven
Miss Jesty Hyphen was a tiny little woman wrapped in a tartan rug and rolled into a ball and set on an invalid chair out of which, one felt, she might inadvertently bounce at any moment. With Carmilla and Piero on either side of her, she was parked on the veranda, full in the fierce sea breeze, of Aesculapius House, a discreet home for old women on the Promenade at Hythe. (‘Welcome to Aesculapius House,’ she had greeted Carmilla and Piero when they arrived: ‘it’s not here for health but for death; yet not such a bad place to die in.’) And now, sitting on the open veranda (‘So much the better if I get pneumonia and cease being a bloody nuisance in the world’), she was talking of Brydales and Raisley Conyngham’s adolescence there.
‘A thin, pretty, delicate little thing,’ said Miss Jesty. ‘Voice didn’t break till very late, I remember. I once saw his pego; tiny little thing like a snail, very neatly circumcised, not a hair in sight, though he was already over fifteen. And just in case you think I ramped round peering at little boys’ pegoes, I should explain that this was when we went on a holiday together one summer and were compelled, much against our wills, to share a bedroom for a couple of nights.’
‘A holiday together?’ said Carmilla.
‘In 1951. As I say, he was the only child in the place who showed any taste for the classics at all. The rest thought they were so superior and talented (for had not their parents and most of the staff perpetually told them they were?) that they wouldn’t trouble to learn any grammar. Or anything else for that matter. They just went through the days saying, “I wanna do this”, or, “I wanna do that”, and always “wanning” to change to something else at the first sign of minor difficulty. But Raisley stuck his nose in his book and kept it there. He turned off splendid copies of prose and verse, and, far better, actually understood the substance of what he was reading. At fourteen and a half he was saying, “But look here, Hyphen” – that’s what the children called me – “look here, Hyphen,” he was saying in his squeaky voice, “if we wish to appreciate ancient poetry, there’s no room at all for the Christian God.”’
‘“Amen,” I said: “you’ve got it in one. No place for the Christian God and no place for the Christian morality. Christianity and Christian doctrine are cod’s wallop,” I said – though Brydales was officially a Christian school – “unproven, unprovable, absurd, joyless and obscene…a word which comes, mark you, from the Latin ‘ob’ and the Latin ‘scaenus’, ‘obscaenus’, i.e. cluttering up the stage, in the way, a bloody pain.” He took the point and throve from then on.’
‘Throve so much,’ said Piero, ‘that you took him on a holiday?’
‘His father paid. He wanted Raisley out of the way that summer because he was planning a very special house party at Ullacote, the family seat. Raisley’s mother was already dead – no one knew who she was or who she had been, and certainly nobody cared (not even Raisley, who for a time regarded me as his mother), and Raisley’s father was giving this house party, and there was no place in it for Raisley.
‘“I expect they’ll be having orgies,” said little Raisley as we drove from Bordeaux towards Pau; “I once watched them at it when they thought I was safe in bed. You never saw anything less attractive, Hyphen.”
‘“I don’t suppose so,” I said.
‘“Blowsy women with sagging bottoms, stringy men with toenails like talons and hairs all over their backs. I love my father, he was a marvellous teacher before you came into my life, but I really do wish that he wouldn’t get up to that kind of a thing.”
‘“Don’t be such a little prig,” I said; “if that’s what they enjoy, just leave ’em to it.”
‘“I am making no moral judgement, Hyphen. I merely said that they – and my father – look unattractive when so engaged. I think Father got the idea from some murals in a villa he excavated in Thessaly. A coven of witches and warlocks in communal flagrance. He once explained to me that Thessaly was a great place for witches.” “Still is,” I told him; “but he wouldn’t need to go that far to pick up the idea of orgies. It’s quite common nearer home.”
‘Raisley and I were off to look at Roman remains in Provence, and of course there were plenty of orgies in some of the monuments round there, so I thought I’d better prepare him, to protect his aesthetic sensibilities from sudden shock. But in the end,’ said Miss Jesty Hyphen, ‘we never got round to the Roman bits. After two nights of sharing a room at Pau, and having to widdle in potties, as the lav was a furlong down the corridor, we cancelled the next night in our hotel and motored on towards Tarbes.
‘“For God’s sake, Hyphen,” said little Raisley, “let’s have proper rooms with our own baths and loos. The sight of you straddling a potty is more than I can stand.” “You shouldn’t have been looking.” “No; and nor should you. Don’t think I didn’t spot you.” “So now we both know what the other looks like,” I said; “and no harm done.” “If you say not, Hyphen; but from now on we’ll have separate rooms, with our own private arrangements en suite, if you please.”
‘“We can’t afford them,” I said: “you know how small the currency allowance is.” “I just happened to find four hundred pounds in my inside pocket;” said Raisley, “We can change that.”
‘“Naughty, naughty,” I said. “That’s the only nice thing about still looking like a dear little ten year old,” Raisley said; “one can get away with some handy smuggling.” “I shouldn’t play that trick too often, if I were you,” I said: “a lot of excise men have nasty minds – and then watch out.” “It’s come off all right this time, Hyphen. So no more servants’ bedrooms and tinkling chamber pots.” “Righty. But where did you get the money in the first place?” “Daddy. Blackmail. ‘I won’t go,’ I said to him – though of course I would have done, Hyphen, to be with you – ‘I won’t go and leave the coast clear unless you give me five hundred pounds.’ ‘Settle for four, boy?’ ‘Done.’ ‘A word of advice,’ he said, handing over the cash: ‘on your way from Bordeaux to the east, pop in at St-Bertrand-de-Comminges.’ What about it, Hyphen?”
‘“Why not?” I said. “There is nothing much in Tarbes. And there’s a three star hotel with a rosette for its food only a couple of miles from St-Bertrand, at Barbazan.” So we booked in there, and the next morning we walked up the hill to the cathedral in St-Bertrand. We sat in the Cloister.
‘“What’s that?” he said; “on the lid of that sarcophagus?” (There were several of them strewn about.) “Latin,” I said: “read it for yourself.” “H…U…B…Hubertus Breaze. Perfectus. Perfectus, Hyphen?” “Old Cathar term,” I told him: “a perfectus is a man who has forsworn the pleasures of the world and the flesh, and is therefore saved. But most Cathars postponed taking the oath till they were all but dead; they became ‘perfect’ just in time to escape hell-fire after a life of pleasure.”
‘This fascinated him. And he was still more fascinated when I told him that the Cathars postulated a Demiurge, or Creator, who was evil and had made the material world in order to tempt mankind away from the Good God. That was why one became “perfect”, I told him: one renounced the world and the flesh in order to cleanse oneself of evil, which was the creation of the Demiurge or Devil. But of course that wasn’t the end of it. As time went on, the Cathars conceived that the Devil or Demiurge wasn’t just a fallen angel made and then damned by God, he was Satan, another and alternative God, a co-eternal and co-equal rival to the Good God, in perpetual conflict with him and (who knew?) perhaps destined to conquer him.
‘“The pagan poets must have been on the side of the Demiurge,” Raisley said, “though of course they couldn’t have known that he’d later be called the Devil or Satan.” “It’s odd,” I told him, “that this sarcophagus was a Cathar’s. St-Bertrand wasn’t really a centre of Catharism – though there are plenty of Cathar towns not far off.” “We’ll go round them, Hyphen,” he said: “we’ll buy books and read about the Cathars and all their beliefs, from beginning to end. I love them, Hyphen. I want to see all their churches and all the places
they lived in.” Well, I thought, and why not? On the four hundred he’d lifted from Daddy we could live very comfortably (in those days) at the hotel in Barbazon, and every day we could go chugging off in my little Morris to see Cathar towns like Foix and Ax-les-Thermes and Tarascon (not the one near Arles but the one under the Pyrenees), charming places all of them, and then we might move east and set up headquarters in Narbonne… Roman remains in Provence are impressive but often stuffy, I thought, whereas the Cathar towns are rare and heady stuff, and if that’s what interests him, lead him to it. After all, it was his daddy who’d started it all off by directing him to St-Bertrand.
‘I loved that summer with Raisley Conyngham among the dead Cathars. True to his word, he read all the books, though some of them were long and in difficult French, and we discussed the whole history of the Albigensian Heresy from its inception in the mists of Gnosticism to the last Cathar survivors, a century and more after the Crusade of de Montfort which had been meant to wipe the sect out forever. It was the later Cathars whom he really loved, because they were the ones that set up the full-blown dualism between God and the Demiurge, between God and Satan.
‘“Either of ’em might win the match in the end, Hyphen,” he said. “Right back at the beginning of the heresy all Cathars just sinned, and then repented, in order to become Perfects and be saved at the last moment. But later, much later, after de Montfort’s Crusade, they decided they couldn’t know which was the real God, the God or the Satan-cum-Demiurge-God; and so then they had to make a wager. Should they become Perfects as death came nearer, hoping that the Old God of Heaven was still the superior God and would be victorious, or should they go on enjoying the world and its delights, hoping to be saved by Satan when he conquered and crushed his enemies at the end of time? Or could they assume that this battle between God and Satan would go on forever, so that being ‘saved’ was a mere matter of preference – for either you settled for Eternity in Heaven, or Eternity with the Devil/Demiurge among the flesh pots, in either case being cherished for; since neither of the Great Adversaries would ever overcome his enemy and destroy that enemy’s followers, there could be no damnation either way, and Satan would care as kindly for his servants (albeit in a different fashion) as did God. Which would you have chosen, Hyphen?”’
The old woman went silent.
‘Were there no more such summers?’ said Piero.
‘No,’ said Jesty Hyphen sadly. ‘In 1952 I was engaged to go on a tour of the Peloponnese, guiding and lecturing a large party. Raisley came too, but of course I was very preoccupied, and it was not the same. And then in 1953 he was ill. Some kind of infection of the chest which they thought might kill him. That was before we had antibiotics, you should remember, to keep the old and the feeble officiously alive. A simpler, saner, less crowded world.’
‘In any case – antibiotics or no antibiotics – Raisley survived,’ said Carmilla. ‘A good thing, should you think? For Raisley himself? For the world at large?’
Miss Hyphen shrugged beneath her tartan rug.
‘Your question is too large,’ she said. ‘All I know is that I had loved Raisley, in a sort, as we pottered about the foothills of the Pyrenees, raising ghosts and laying them. So I was anxious when he was ill, and gave thanks to whatever gods there be when he recovered and was strong enough to go on to Marcian College. I hoped there might be more holidays. Yet once he was at Marcian it seemed inappropriate that I should…intrude on him…with propositions for holidays. So I made none; and much to my sadness, neither did he.’
Fielding and Jeremy sought out Major Giles Glastonbury in his club.
‘You do all the talking,’ Jeremy said: ‘you were in the Army with him.’
‘A very long time ago.’
Giles Glastonbury stalked out of the Backgammon Room and took them upstairs to the Library.
‘Glad to see you,’ he said. ‘Young Blockley was trying to cheat. Glad of an excuse to get clear before there was an embarrassing scene.’
‘I thought,’ said Jeremy, ‘that no one cheated in places like this.’
‘They used not to. Now they’re brought up to think it’s clever. Just as boys at Eton sometimes think it clever to talk in ugly townee accents. By emulating criminal or lower-class behaviour, they think they are keeping their options open, and proving that they are not what they themselves call “square”. If only they knew how pathetic they look. They’re too idle even to learn how to cheat properly – let alone to put in a bit of practice. They’d be merely laughable if they weren’t such a nuisance. What can I do for you both?’
‘Tell us about Raisley Conyngham and the Blue Mowbrays.’
There was a pause while Giles took this in. Fielding expected that he would at least ask why they were interested. However, after a few seconds Giles nodded to them as if he fully appreciated both the motive and the necessity for their curiosity, and began to pronounce on the topic:
‘About the Blue Mowbrays there’s nothing to tell. They were the rottenest regiment in the world, and now they’re defunct.’
‘How did they get their intriguing title?’ Jeremy said.
‘They started as a regiment privately raised in the late eighteenth century by a descendant of the great Mowbray. But the title was the only good thing they ever had, and that had been unofficially altered to the “Yellow Mowbrays” by the end of the Boer War. Horrible shower they were. And that’s why Raisley Conyngham went to them. They were the only regiment that would have him.’
‘There’s some story,’ said Fielding, ‘that Raisley Conyngham was nearly found unfit to be commissioned anyway.’
‘He was found unfit to be commissioned. He cracked up completely on some exercise in Dartmoor. He would have been chucked out of OCTU – and serve him right – if I hadn’t managed to interfere from the War Box.’
‘Why did you bother?’
‘Because my cousin Prideau always said that Raisley would be a handy man to know some day. So I wanted him on my ledger…and here was a good way of putting him in the debtor column. Mind you, he’d tried to grease out of National Service altogether. He’d opted to go up to Cambridge first, hoping National Service would be done with by the time he finished. But it wasn’t. So he pointed out to the Medical Board, quite truthfully, that he’d been very ill with his chest when he was seventeen. The Medical Board said he was now completely over that. Then he tried to get Doctor La Soeur to write him a certificate to exempt him. La Soeur would usually oblige for a hundred or two in that line, but he hated Raisley so much that he wouldn’t oblige him at any price. So then Raisley came to me and asked me if I could fix it. No, I said, I couldn’t; but what I could do was to make it comfy for him: since he was a graduate, I could get him a National Service Commission inside four or five weeks (normally it would take as many months) from the day he joined – this by having him sent on some special short course for “senior recruits”.
‘This course was really intended to show the ropes to young scientists and the like whom the Army was in a hurry to commission; but Raisley had an excellent academic record and should therefore be qualified for commissioning in the same manner – at least if there was someone like me to give him a bit of a shove.
‘Senior Officer Cadet Raisley Conyngham, provisionally accepted for one of the Carbineer regiments, started a one-month course on 1 June, 1956, with a view to an immediate commission at the end of it – provided that the result of his finals (still to be published) was satisfactory and that he completed his course in “the approved standard”. In fact Raisley got a First (promulgated on 6 June), so that was very much all right, while “the approved standard” bit was, it was thought, a mere formality. But when Raisley started gibbering on an ordinary Night Exercise on Dartmoor (rather a soft one, to suit the nature of the course) this was obviously rather too bad… too bad even for a more or less fake course and even for the Carbineers. But luckily the Officer i/c the course was on my ledger to the extent of owing me a small favour, and he agreed
to carry Raisley to the end of it if I could find a regiment to take him. So I did a deal with the Colonel Commandant of the Blue Mowbrays: if he would take Raisley as a Second Lieutenant, I would wangle the postponement of a pending enquiry into the illicit sale of the Blue Mowbrays’ mess silver until they’d had time to rig the list a little and get in a few imitations.’
‘And how,’ said Fielding, ‘did Raisley Conyngham’s career in the Blue Mowbrays proceed?’
‘Very commodiously. In return for an agreeable douceur, the constable of Brougham Castle Commanding the Regimental Donjon of the Blue Mowbrays (fancy name for the OC of the Regimental Depot in Cumberland) let Raisley off on unofficial leave for months at a time, and every now and again sent in a highly favourable personal report on him. Round the middle of 1958 Raisley was demobilized in the ordinary way. And that was it.’
‘What did Conyngham do with all that leave?’ Jeremy enquired.
‘The gallant Constable of Brougham Castle neither knew nor cared – provided that Raisley kept himself well out of the way. He had to be warned, for example, that he was not to appear too prominently or too often on racecourses: after all, if an officer spends six days a week for three months on the course, even though he would never conceivably appear in uniform, some nosy parker may discover who he is and decide to send a nasty note to the War House. But I remember the Constable’s telling me what an easy and intelligent fellow Raisley was to deal with in matters like that. “Just goes off into France, leaving a Poste Restante address, some place called St-Girons or something of the sort, in case we have to call him back for anything,” the Constable said: “not that we should call him back if we could possibly help it, but if there was a war or some rubbish he might be expected to take a bit of an interest… for whatever good it could do anyone.” It occurred to me that I could now make a very stiff entry in Raisley’s debit column: not only had I found him the cushiest way to a commission and rescued the silly sod when he fucked it up, I’d also found him a totally sympathetic regiment which would let him do exactly what suited him, for all the world like a young grandee in the piping days of Fitzroy Somerset.’
