In The Image of God

by Simon Raven

  ‘It was obviously,’ said Carmilla, ‘an adolescent infatuation which faded – and then returned, as adolescent infatuations sometimes do, many years later, only to die out once more without benefit of recorded research.’

  ‘Not yet recorded,’ Jeremy said; ‘perhaps suppressed for good reason. Nor do we know for certain that the infatuation is dead. If we went to the Languedoc, to all Raisley’s places –’

  ‘We don’t know which they are,’ Carmilla put in.

  ‘We know the names of those told to you and Piero by Jesty Hyphen. If we started examining these places, and if Raisley heard of it, then, knowing or strongly suspecting that we are his enemies and mean him no good, he might feel that he should revisit his old territory to guard or to conceal.’

  ‘He might,’ Carmilla said. ‘He couldn’t go there until the end of the school Quarter in March.’

  ‘He could always take sabbatical leave again if he thought it was really urgent. Despite the desolation of his stables, he is still, as old Flo remarked, a rich man. Now then: if he didn’t take a sabbatical and follow us, we should have a clear run in a clear country, casting about for whatever might help us. If he did come, we could concentrate on observing him (while he was observing us), and the results might be very informative. Either way the thing could be intriguing.’

  ‘A vote,’ said Carmilla. ‘Those in favour of going to France now, without further investigation.’

  Three hands rose.

  ‘Those against,’ said Carmilla, and raised her own.

  ‘Yet you were the first to suggest the Languedoc as a likely hunting ground,’ said Fielding, ‘at that opening conference in the fens.’

  ‘As I say, I have had doubts since then,’ Carmilla said. ‘But of course I shall come too. The fascination of the hunt, you see. Always absorbing, even if one is on a false scent. I know we shouldn’t start just yet, I know we should try to gather more evidence first, I know that you are just being silly and wishful, but I simply can’t resist it. I think, too, that we should remember the plea for greater urgency which Auntie Flo made the other day. Her talk of a “curse” may not be easily credible – certainly not to me – but it does not do to be blasé when old women utter as fiercely as she did. I am sure,’ Carmilla said to Piero, ‘that all Sicilians would agree with me there.’

  ‘But what about that book of yours?’ said Piero. ‘A History of Medieval Diseases. There will now ensue a sad delay. The learned world will be disappointed, your reputation as a diligent scholar will be eroded –’

  ‘– The learned world will be patient a little longer, I fancy. As for my reputation,’ said Carmilla, ‘I can afford a little set-back and delay. Like Raisley Conyngham, I am rich.’

  ‘You are all rich except me,’ said Fielding. ‘I only hope you will raise a purse for my expenses.’

  Gat-toothed Jenny, knocking a ball about in Canteloupe’s Fives court (of course she had permission), sent it from the back with her left hand high on to the front wall. It would bounce up on the step. As she mounted the step to continue her solitary rally, she tripped and was flung sideways against the corner of the buttress, which (so fast was she falling) sliced right into her scalp like an axe. When Leonard Percival, Canteloupe’s decrepit but perpetually prying Private Secretary, spotted her and her blood under the buttress fifteen minutes later and limped away like Lazarus to raise the alarm, she was not yet dead but might just as well have been.

  Old Mortality tolled from the Campanile, one bell only, cracked. The coffin, borne shoulder-high by six of Canteloupe’s yeoman tenants, floated steadily across the Great Court, past the Fives court, and towards the Grave Ground, which was in a far corner of the Rose Garden.

  ‘She was a good girl, Jenny,’ said Canteloupe to Giles Glastonbury, as they walked behind the coffin: ‘why not bury her with the family, I thought? She’s no people of her own. Come to that, what are you doing here?’

  ‘I knew her a bit when she was still with Raisley Conyngham,’ Glastonbury said: ‘a good girl, as you say. She was kind to Jack Lamprey.’

  ‘Particularly just at the end,’ Canteloupe said. ‘She was kind to Marius too.’

  ‘Does he know she’s dead?’

  ‘Yes. Not much interested, to judge from the note he sent. Tessa, on the other hand – she wanted to come to the funeral. I had to tell her,’ said Canteloupe, ‘that the custom here is to ban women from funerals. Burying is men’s work.’

  ‘Poor Jenny,’ said Giles Glastonbury as they stood by the hole, the coffin poised over it.

  ‘Well out of it, I’d say: there wasn’t going to be much in anything for her.’

  ‘She loved her horses,’ said Giles, ‘those she took care of for other people. What are you going to do with yours?’

  ‘Send ’em to your cousin Prideau, like Raisley did with his. Sell ’em later. The accountants have been stroppy.’

  ‘Funds sinking?’

  ‘Cant-Fun isn’t doing what it ought to.’

  ‘Cant-Fun?’

  ‘Trade name,’ said Canteloupe. ‘Trade name for, among other more cultural public entertainments, the Cock, Cunt and Cola Circus which I run for the sweaty nightcaps.’ He gestured across the hole and towards the hedge. ‘Other side of those yews, but you can’t hear or smell it because Balbo Blakeney designed the thing so that the house and garden should be prole-proof. It used to make a packet, Cant-Fun did, but it’s been going downhill. No reason why – Henry Bath at Longleat is doing better than ever. But something about this place seems to be putting people off.’

  ‘Perhaps that cracked bell bothers them. Can’t you do something about it?’

  ‘Never get another bell like that. Old Mortality. Never get it mended – no craftsmen these days. Never mind. Its message is all the clearer for the crack.’

  ‘It’s not a message people want to hear.’

  Gat-toothed Jenny, at least, wouldn’t hear it any more, under the earth that rattled on to her box.

  ‘I have something to consult you about,’ said Giles to Canteloupe as they walked back across the Rose Garden: ‘Raisley Conyngham.’

  ‘What about the brute?’

  ‘Your sister-in-law, Carmilla Salinger,’ said Giles, ‘is out to finish him. I had Fielding Gray and Jeremy Morrison infesting my club the other day and asking about Raisley’s time in the Blue Mowbrays, clearly with uncharitable intent.’

  ‘Why should that have anything to do with Carmilla?’ Canteloupe said.

  ‘She sent them. Fielding took notes of what I told them. He put ’em in an envelope and addressed it to Carmilla at Lancaster.’

  ‘You saw this address?’

  ‘Later, when he’d gone. He left the envelope behind.’

  ‘He what?’ said Canteloupe.

  ‘He didn’t put it properly into his pocket. It must have got stuck halfway in – probably in the ticket pocket at the side.’

  ‘Fielding wants to take a grip of himself.’

  ‘We all do at our age. Anyway, there it was on the sofa after he’d gone. I noticed Carmilla’s address, then opened it. It confirmed some meeting in Cambridge for a day or two later, then gave a precis of what I’d told him and Jeremy.’

  ‘And what had you told them?’

  ‘The truth,’ said Giles; ‘why not? Those two buggers are clever and persistent, and if I hadn’t told them, sooner or later somebody else would. So I told ’em how Raisley spent most of his military service on leave, and gave some address in the Foix region in case he was wanted to have tea in the Depot with the Queen. If, as I think, they’re enquiring seriously –’

  ‘They certainly will be if Carmilla’s behind it –’

  ‘Then they’ll know he went off to the same area in 1975 and ’76, about twenty years later. They will conclude that Raisley Conyngham is interested in the terrain just north of the Pyrenees. They may even go there.’

  ‘Bad for Raisley?’ said Canteloupe.

  ‘Not at all. They’ll be on Raisley’s ground. He
knows it, they don’t. So he can play will-o’-the-wisp, and entice them into the marshes to sink without trace…unless they get really clever and win against the odds, and Raisley ends up in the bog. Good result either way,’ opined Giles Glastonbury.

  ‘Spell it out to me,’ said Canteloupe. ‘I never trust these we-win-either-way situations.’

  ‘Well, as far as you’re concerned,’ said Giles Glastonbury, ‘indeed as far as we’re both concerned, the trouble with Raisley Conyngham is that he knows just too much. He knows, for example, that Marius Stern is Nausikaa’s father – and that Marius may go again to Thea if you want a son.’

  ‘That’s out,’ said Canteloupe; ‘I’m settling for Nausikaa. She’s lovely, you know. Lady Nausikaa Sarum, to be Baroness Sarum of Old Sarum when I die. I want no more of Marius in my lady’s chamber. Let her and little Tessa have it to themselves in peace. That way Thea will be happy.’

  ‘Good decision. The fact remains that Marius is the real father of Nausikaa. Therefore we want Raisley silent. Therefore we want him either to win in any contest with Carmilla, so that he’s in a generous temper and not about to spill any of your personal beans for spite; or we want him dead, having been, as I say, decoyed by Carmilla & Co into one of his own pet bogs in the Comté de Foix or thereabouts.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ said Canteloupe, ‘that even if he is decoyed into one of his own pet bogs he won’t necessarily vanish forever in a vortex of bubbles. He may work his way out again, covered in slime and stink and feeling mean enough to spill all the beans in the tin – including the reprehensible truth about poor little Tully’s demise.’4

  ‘Not,’ said Giles, ‘if we make it plain to him from the start that we’re on his side, and give him all the help we can. Now then: it is clear that Carmilla wants him disgraced and out of the way because she’s jealous of his influence over Marius. But she won’t want him dead – because Carmilla don’t approve of killing people. Raisley disgraced but still alive could be very dangerous to us, as I’ve just been saying. But if we help him with a few timely tips now, and hang about with a mobile bath unit, so to speak, to cleanse and comfort him if he ends up in the shit, then Raisley will be happy to keep in with us and will not, therefore, promulgate nasty tales about the genesis of Nausikaa or the decease of Tully Sarum.’

  ‘You could be right,’ Canteloupe said.

  ‘So I shall now go to Raisley,’ said Giles as they passed the Fives court, in one wall of which, he noticed, a tablet had now been affixed to record the death of Gat-toothed Jenny, ‘sturdy, loyal and amiable, who played in this Court and fell one day, entering Black Hades. May Persephone ease the passage of this lady through the realm of Dis and bring her where her friends abide.’

  ‘I shall now go to Raisley,’ said Giles when he had read Jenny’s epitaph (as good as any, he supposed), ‘and tell him what is in the troubled air. I think that we have more to gain with him than against him – as long as he still breathes.’

  Giles Glastonbury and Raisley Conyngham had agreed to meet in the paddock of the racecourse at Regis Priory, a few days after Giles’ conversation with Canteloupe at Gat-toothed Jenny’s funeral.

  ‘A long way from your school,’ said Giles. ‘I was rather surprised you found the arrangement suitable.’

  ‘I’m at Ullacote for a few days. Not too far from here. The school is having its Valentine’s Exit.’

  ‘How are things at Ullacote?’

  ‘Bad,’ said Raisley Conyngham complacently. ‘As you probably know, all the horses have been sent to your cousin Prideau. The stalls are rotting. The house will last a while, but I shan’t be going there much myself, still less inviting anybody.’

  ‘But only a few months ago…last spring…everything was so pleasant there. Stables spick and span and run as tight as a mano’-war; healthy horses; smiling, rosy servants.’

  ‘That,’ said Raisley Conyngham, ‘was when Marius Stern and Teresa Malcolm were there. And Jack Lamprey, and Jenny the Stable Lass. Now they are all gone, Giles; two of ’em to Tartarus.’

  ‘I should have thought that Jack and Jenny had deserved better than Tartarus. The Elysian Fields for them, I should have thought.’

  ‘Would you?’ said Conyngham. ‘There are one or two things which you don’t know. Nor am I going to tell you, Giles; not yet. But I will just tell you that nothing in any of this is quite what it seems.’

  ‘No? Thank you for the tip,’ said Giles.

  A bell rang and the jockeys started to mount.

  ‘I see there’s a horse of Prideau’s running,’ Raisley Conyngham said. ‘Where’s Prideau this afternoon?’

  ‘Sulking, I expect. He’s never been the same since his son died. I think he blames you. There’s some story that you deliberately infected the boy.’

  ‘Nothing in any of this is quite what it seems,’ Raisley repeated.

  A thin, malignant sleet began to fall. Raisley and Giles moved under the trees. The horses and their jockeys filed patiently out on to the course.

  ‘Carmilla Salinger’s after you,’ said Giles. ‘She wants you arraigned and exiled – exiled for life.’

  ‘I suspected as much. She and that interfering old woman from Burnham-on-Sea called at Ullacote a while ago. Prying.’

  ‘Fielding Gray and Jeremy Morrison have been asking questions. They came to my club.’

  ‘None of this surprises me in the least.’

  ‘So you know the lot already,’ said Giles. ‘No need for this meeting. I apologize for suggesting it.’

  ‘Not at all. This is a favourite course of mine. That jockey up on Prideau’s horse, Mercury,’ said Raisley Conyngham: ‘Danny Chead. I don’t like the look of him.’

  ‘Nobody does. Oddly enough, his father was Corporal Major in the 10th Sabre Squadron when I commanded. He hates Danny. He prays every night, he once told me, that the boy will fall and break his neck.’

  The two men started to walk through the sleet to the Stand. Giles led the way through a gate marked ‘Stewards Only’.

  ‘You’re not a Steward today, surely?’ Raisley Conyngham said.

  ‘No. But you’ll find none of them will object to us. I want a word with Dorchester about those rails. They should have been taken away several years ago – as he promised me they would be.’

  ‘Nasty spikes. Almost as bad as Folkestone. But they’ve got some of those plastic rails some yards out on the course itself.’

  ‘The spiked rails should have gone years ago,’ said Glastonbury, ‘and everybody knows it.’

  ‘Another thing about Carmilla Salinger and her crowd,’ said Raisley. ‘I had a letter from my old classics mistress Jesty Hyphen. They’ve been down to the south coast to question her.’

  ‘What does she know?’ said Giles.

  Raisley noticed that all the Stewards drew away from Giles and himself, though none objected orally to their presence. The starter sent off the seventeen-horse field towards the first of the nine hurdles.

  ‘Jesty Hyphen,’ said Raisley, ‘took me to the Pyrenees one summer. It was with her I first got interested in the area: Cathar country. Danny Chead is pulling Mercury fit to take his head off. Hyphen couldn’t have told them much, except that we had a very agreeable and scholarly excursion.’

  ‘But suppose they know that you’ve been going there for long periods since?’

  ‘They’ll discover nothing to their purpose, even if they go there themselves and look under every blade of grass with a microscope…unless I give ’em a few clues.’ He shook his head, as if to dispute Carmilla’s competence when it came to peering under blades of grass, then suddenly looked slightly sad, an expression Giles had never seen on his face before. ‘Poor old Hyphen,’ said Raisley Conyngham, and shook his head again. ‘A shrewd, kind woman. But she fancied just a drop too much in the evenings. They had to make her retire from Brydales early – not because of the tipple but because of a fuss got up by blacks. There weren’t any nogs worth talking of at Brydales until about 1960, and if there
were they didn’t read classics. But later on, when all those black Ambassadors started coming to London, a lot of them sent their spawn to Brydales – including a fellow called Cham Koreoti from Nigeria, who’d read classics at Cambridge (very unusual) at about my time and Prideau’s. He wanted his son to do the same. He’d heard great things of Jesty Hyphen – who rose to the occasion, overcame her mild distaste for Africans, and taught the Koreoti boy (Sitrep) for all she was worth…and got him an Exhibition at his father’s old college, Corpus Christi.’

  ‘Good going,’ said Giles, who had never met Jesty Hyphen and was not very interested in this story.

  ‘So one would have thought. But Cham Koreoti said his mtoto should have got a Foundation Scholarship. He blamed Jesty for not giving him enough attention, and altogether got up such a rumpus (although the boy, Sitrep, stood up for Jesty and said she’d given him hours of extra tuition) that the wet and worthy Governors of Brydales backed down and sacked her, in their unctuous deference to negritude – at the same time passing clandestine money under her skirt and into her knickers (so to speak) to stop her making a case of it and to keep her in comfort for the rest of her life. I’ll tell you what, Giles: there’s something the matter with Danny Chead. His face is like a skull – and that horse Mercury doesn’t mean to be held back any longer.’

  ‘What will you do,’ said Giles Glastonbury, ‘now you know that Carmilla’s after you?’

  ‘Wait and see what she does. No one’s got anything against me at the school or anywhere else. But if she does turn ugly I rather think…that one bad turn deserves another.’

  ‘You mean, if she tries anything you’ll hit back. What with?’

  ‘Ah. You’re afraid I may tell tales about her sister, Theodosia,’ said Raisley. ‘Certainly not. That might damage Canteloupe – and possibly Marius. Theodosia and her husband are safe from any delation on my part, Giles. If I go for Carmilla, it will be just for her and her gang. I don’t suppose you mind much what happens to them?’