by Simon Raven
‘Don’t be so nosy, Canteloupe,’ said Theodosia, half sister, half Nanny.
‘Not nosy at all. Perfectly logical question. Fielding here says he wants to stay with us till Twelfth Night, while Jeremy Morrison’s father – Luffham of Whereham, or whatever ridiculous name he now gives himself – says that Jeremy and Fielding are off on a tour within a week of Christmas. That was what Luffham said – within a–’
‘Granted,’ said Fielding; ‘and among old friends I shall return a true explanation. My expedition with Jeremy Morrison is now uncertain. He is dragging his feet. He is tired of me. He is getting ready to cry off. So when he does, I wish to be in a position to say, “Very well, I have another excellent engagement, in Wiltshire.” The only thing is,’ said Fielding, ‘that I’m such a fool about him that if he were still on for the trip I’d be out of here the moment he beckoned.’
‘Not very flattering to us,’ Theodosia said, ‘but Jeremy does have that effect on people. It is something to do with that huge round face. It compels one towards it, as if it had gravitational powers. I am, you see, by way of being an expert, at least a former expert, on Jeremy. Don’t bother with him any more, Fielding. Oh, he’s fine and great fun with it – just so long as he’s getting what he wants out of you and still sees more blood worth the tapping. But once he’s had all the blood there is to have – or rather, all of it that he wants, for he is very discriminating and does not drink the dregs – he just glides away. To judge from what you’ve been saying, he is gliding away from you now. Let him go, Fielding; and get yourself a crucifix and a wreath of garlic in case he should come back.’
‘Goodbye, Giles,’ said Fielding.
‘Goodbye, Glastonbury,’ said Leonard Percival.
‘Goodbye, Fielding. Goodbye, Percival. Let me know, one of you, if anything…worthy of notice…should occur on the precincts.’
Major Glastonbury stooped almost to the ground, inserted himself into his Porsche, and rolled with vigour and éclat down the straight mile of the drive.
‘I bet he wouldn’t have driven so fast if Canteloupe had been here,’ said Fielding. ‘Where is he, by the way?’
‘He decided to pay a few neighbourly calls with her ladyship. Customary at this season, and a good opportunity since the frost has fucked up the racing. Detterling,’ said Percival, ‘likes a bit of old-fashioned etiquette. He still keeps cards, you know, and leaves them on people when the London season begins and ends. Pour prendre congé. That sort of a thing.’
‘He was always broadly conventional in outlook but totally opportunist in his own particular motives and actions. “Detterlings,” he once said to me, à propos of the Army, “Detterlings do not serve: it might be our family motto. Graceful and ingenious shirking is what we Detterlings are bred to.” So he’s out doing the right thing now – but only because he’s got nothing better on. Why, Leonard, does a man who sees through pretence and humbug so clearly take all this trouble to produce heirs to his title – when he knows that the title belongs elsewhere and that any scion of his house will be spurious? Why does he bother with it? I can see that he likes the money and the estate, and wants to hang on to them for his lifetime; but beyond that…why does he want to perpetuate a falsely inherited peerage through further doubly false inheritors who are not even the heirs of his body?’
‘I think,’ said Leonard, ‘that he enjoys deceiving the public and the establishment – as a way of gratifying his contempt for both – but also feels that he has some kind of duty to them, because they are, after all, his world and all that is therein. So he wants to keep the show going, for their benefit and his pleasure.’
‘Does face…or sentiment…play any part in all this?’
‘Not a great deal. It’s a matter of approval, Fielding. You said just now that Detterling was “broadly conventional in outlook”. So of course he broadly approves of a properly managed and assigned marquessate, if only because it is more seemly that an improperly managed one. He approves of continuity in such matters.’
‘But the whole point is that there is no genuine continuity or propriety in any of this. The marquessate belongs to someone else – and has done for the last hundred and eighty odd years – and its present official heir apparent is the product of collusive cuckoldry.’
‘You also said just now,’ said Leonard, ‘that he is an opportunist in his motives and actions. “Detterlings do not serve,” you quoted him as saying. Then what could be more appropriate in such a man, or more enjoyable to him, than passing off a House of Sand, the shifting chambers of which are crammed with lies and squalors and illusions, as a Castle of Rock from whose battlements the banners and blazons of honour fly boldly to delight his friends, dismay his foes and defy all challengers? He approves convention, Fielding, he derives much comfort and benefit from it; but he also sees through it, is rather contemptuous of it, and eludes it if it thwarts his pleasure or purpose. What could be more natural than that he should combine all these feelings into one supreme act of public celebration and private mockery?’
During a long and thoughtful silence, they walked across the Great Court to the Fives Court.
‘So…if little Tullius proved useless in his role of Sarum,’ said Fielding, ‘you think that Canteloupe would dispose of him?’
‘In the most tasteful and conventional manner. He would send him to Doctor La Soeur’s nursing home rather, so to speak, than the Tower.’
‘And he would expect Theodosia to get herself pregnant?’
‘He already does. Any man – any gentleman – of her choice, he says.’
‘And if she refuses?’
‘She will be replaced,’ said Leonard; ‘with taste and tact, of course. What Doctor La Soeur will do for Tullius, “young” John Groves of Groves & Groves, Solicitors, will do for Theodosia.’
‘She adores Canteloupe. It would kill her.’
‘In that case,’ said Leonard, ‘she had better – much better, don’t you think? – do what she is told.’
‘Marius is restless,’ said Tessa Malcolm at lunch on Boxing Day in Buttock’s Hotel.
‘Yes,’ agreed Marius’ younger sister, Rosie Stern: ‘but he has no reasonable excuse for being so, and even if he had, he should not have left us on Christmas afternoon.’
‘He stayed with you for Christmas dinner,’ said Jakki Blessington, and furtively looked down at her tiny new breasts, something she did when she felt truculent.
‘But he should have stayed on until today,’ said Jakki’s sister, Caroline, glancing down in the same manner as Jakki, though having as yet no new breasts for inspection, ‘if only because he knew that old friends – you and me, Jakki – were coming to luncheon.’
‘It’s my belief,’ said Tessa’s Auntie Maisie Malcolm (as the girls all knew her), ‘that he wouldn’t even have stayed for Christmas dinner if we hadn’t had it at lunch time.’ She glowered down the table at all the four girls over whom she presided, as if it were they, and not Marius, whom she was arraigning. ‘He was that fierce to go with that Jeremy Morrison,’ she rumbled, ‘that he’s have gone as soon as whistled for, Christmas dinner or no.’
‘I can’t say I blame him,’ said Jakki. ‘I’ve always fancied Jeremy Morrison myself.’
‘That’s enough of that, Missie.’
‘Of course,’ said Caroline Blessington, ‘Jeremy’s father is a lord now. Which means Jeremy is The Hon.’
‘The Honourable,’ said Rosie: ‘it is vulgar to abbreviate. To be fair to my brother, I don’t think that makes any difference to him. After all, Jeremy’s father is only a life peer, which is not very impressive when you think of some of the others…like Hugh Thomas or Ted Willis. No; I don’t think Marius went because of Jeremy’s new blue blood: I think he went for the esprit.’
‘Which is a polite way of saying,’ said Jakki, ‘that he got fed up with being surrounded by bloody women.’
‘Mind your tongue, Missie,’ said Maisie, the dutiful martinet. (My God, she thought, if some of my old
clients could see me now, wouldn’t they just laugh their balls off…and wouldn’t their cocks go stiff as staves for Tessa, like I know Fielding’s does, dirty pig.)
‘That wasn’t very kind,’ said Tessa, ‘to me and Rosie and Auntie Maisie.’
‘Auntie Maisie, Rosie and me,’ clacked Maisie.
‘Even if life peerages aren’t very impressive,’ said Caroline, ‘it’s quite flattering to Marius that the son of Lord Morrison–’
‘–Lord Luffham of Whereham is what he calls himself,’ said Rosie.
‘–That the son of Lord Luffham of Whereham should be prepared to spend half of Christmas day driving from Luffham to London and back, just to fetch him. Marius, I mean.’
‘Jeremy Morrison has always favoured Marius,’ said Rosie Stern, rather primly.
‘It started the other way round,’ said Jakki: ‘Marius had a hero worship thing about Jeremy. That’s why he agreed to come to our school instead of Eton. Jeremy had been at our school, and his father before him, so Marius wanted to go there too.’
‘He shouldn’t have. Marius’ father was at Eton,’ said Maisie with peculiar tenderness, looking long on Tessa: ‘Tessa would have gone to Eton and not your school, only Eton don’t take girls.’
‘That it does,’ said Jakki.
‘Not under a certain age, it doesn’t. But at your school they’ve started taking ’em from thirteen, which is why you and Tessa go there–’
‘–And why Caroline and I will be coming next autumn,’ announced Rosie. ‘I long for it. It’s very lonely here when Tessa’s away.’
‘She’s only a weekly boarder, ducks. You have her for weekends.’
‘I’m somehow not sure,’ said Rosie, in a measured tone, ‘that I have her properly, even at weekends.’
An ample silence fell over the table.
‘Don’t be ungrateful,’ huffed Maisie, trying to draw a red herring. ‘You know you asked to stay here at Buttock’s for as long as your mother went on living in France.’
‘I do know that, Mrs Malcolm, and I love being here with you, and I’m very comfortable, and I’m not ungrateful at all,’ said Rosie, rising and going to kiss Maisie’s cherubic mandibles. ‘All I’m saying, is that I miss Tessa when she’s away during the week, and I don’t think that quite all of her comes back for the weekend when she does. Which is a disappointing thing to happen when you love somebody and have been looking forward – oh, for such a long time, it seems – to being with her again.’
‘Milo Hedley,’ said Jakki darkly.
‘Who’s Milo Hedley?’ her sister asked.
‘Nobody,’ said Tessa, who had gone very shiny in the face. ‘Nobody at all,’ she said, her husky little voice crackling with insistence: ‘just a friend of Marius’. He’s in the school fencing team, and Marius wants to learn the sabre, so once I went to watch them.’
‘Beau Sabreur,’ said Rosie sadly, as she slipped back into her place between Jakki and Caroline.
‘Darling Rosie,’ said Tessa: ‘it’s only that after five days at school, it takes time to get used to everything here again, more than just the weekend.’ She leaned across Caroline, lifted Rosie’s black wavy hair with both her hands, and kissed her on her left ear. ‘That’s why I may have seemed different.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Rosie. ‘You’ve had plenty of time to get used to me again during these holidays, yet you’re still different, some of you is still not here.’
‘All of me will be soon. I promise.’
‘And by then,’ said Rosie, ‘Marius and I will have to go to France to pay our visit to Mummy. It’ll be too late.’
‘Well, I’m a weekly boarder like Tessa,’ said Jakki, seeking in her turn to draw a red herring, ‘and all I can say is that I hate coming home at weekends.’
‘Jakki, how horrid of you,’ said Caroline.
‘Marius says,’ persisted Jakki, who knew that her sister was only being ironical but that Rosie was bitterly wounded and must at any cost be distracted from further discussion of Tessa’s seeming failure in love, ‘Marius says that all the most exciting things happen at weekends, all the intrigue and the in-fighting and the assignations–’
‘–Fine goings on,’ said Maisie. ‘I’m glad my Tessa comes home when she does. I won’t have her mixed up in that sort of a circus. But I dare say it’s all fancy. With respect to you, Missie,’ she said to Rosie, ‘that handsome brother of yours always was a champion liar. So we’ll have no more of this silly chatter, you girls, and we’ll all take a good stump round Hyde Park. Nothing like fresh air to blow away notions.’
‘Bugger,’ said Marius, as his golf ball hopped twenty paces and into waist-high marsh reed. He banged the heel of his driver on the bank of the tee.
‘Careful,’ said Jeremy Morrison; ‘with the ground as hard as this, you’ll break it.’
Marius broke it. He looked down on the severed head of the club, then reached down for it and chucked it into the reeds.
‘I can do very well without a fucking driver,’ he said, and propelled the shaft after the head in the manner of a javelin.
‘Pity to do that to a hickory club,’ said Jeremy; ‘there aren’t so many left.’
‘Aren’t there? Steel shafts are miles better anyway.’
‘I dare say. But that driver was my mother’s. It was her set I lent you.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry, Jeremy. Would you like me to fetch the bits back?’
‘No. There’s no one left nowadays who could mend it.’
‘What a shame. I am sorry I lost my temper, Jeremy. It ought to be easy to hit a stationary ball and I get furious when I can’t.’
‘So do I. Perhaps we should stick to cricket. My turn to try.’
Jeremy’s drive ballooned away to the right and landed in a stream.
‘I think,’ Jeremy said, ‘that this hole is ill-starred for both of us. Let’s go to the next tee and make a fresh start.’
‘Why don’t we just stop?’
‘We’ve driven all the way over from Luffham,’ Jeremy said. ‘We must persist.’
‘We’ve persisted for eight holes. I’ve lost four balls and you’ve lost three. Don’t tell me you’re enjoying it any more than I am.’
‘I can’t think what made me suggest it. A vague notion that you were good at ball games, I suppose. Bloody nuisance they cancelled the Boxing Day meeting at Huntingdon. Lover Pie was running.’
‘That horse we backed at Newmarket? In some very long flat race, I remember.’
‘That was over two years ago. Lover Pie don’t run on the flat any more. But he’ll keep on over fences forever. That’s Fielding Gray’s house – over there to the right.’
‘Oh. Yes. Of course he sometimes lives here in Broughton Staithe, doesn’t he? It must be very lonely, out here at the end of the golf course.’
‘He doesn’t mind that when he’s working. He goes walking in the sand dunes. The first time that I came here, he took me for a walk in the sand dunes.’
‘What a common little house,’ Marius said.
‘It belonged to Major Gray’s parents,’ said Jeremy, in a voice which implied that that was all that needed saying.
‘Did you know them?’
‘Certainly not. I’m not yet a hundred and ten, you know. But my father did. He rather liked Fielding’s mother. We’ll leave our clubs in their garden,’ Jeremy continued, ‘what’s left of our clubs, that is, and I’ll show you where Fielding took me.’
He led Marius over some frosty rough to a gate in a wire fence. Beyond the fence was a garden of weeds and marine grasses, up the centre of which a narrow path conducted them to the foot of the steps that led up to the wooden veranda of Fielding’s common little house.
‘Under the steps,’ said Jeremy.
They deposited their clubs.
‘You’ll be seeing Major Gray before you leave for France with Rosie?’ said Jeremy.
‘No. Mrs Malcolm won’t have him in the house when Tessa’s there. She thinks they fancy eac
h other.’
‘Dear God… I want a message delivered to Fielding.’ They went out through the gate at the bottom of the garden. ‘I want you,’ said Jeremy, ‘to find ways and means of delivering it.’
‘Why me?’
‘Because I think you will make a very suitable messenger.’
They struck across a fairway, then up a slope of rough grass towards the dunes. Beyond the dunes was the low sound of the Wash as it beat sullenly at the distant mud.
‘We know each other well,’ said Jeremy. ‘I come to you at school and you come to me at Luffham. When you were discontented at Buttock’s on Christmas Eve, you applied to me to rescue you, because you understood me well enough to know that your request would not be refused by me. I repeat: you understand me; so if I give you a message for Fielding Gray, you will understand exactly what is meant by it, and you will therefore deliver it in a manner to convince him.’
‘I shan’t be seeing him. Mrs Malcolm won’t let him come near Buttock’s until Tessa and I have gone back to school.’
‘Telephone him. Arrange a meeting before you go to France.’
‘If you will tell me the message,’ said Marius, ‘I shall see what is to be done.’
Green eyes, fair hair, down on cheek and upper lip, slightly overgrown for his age, loose but not shambling: delectable and most surely desirable, but not, thought Jeremy, for me; never, thank God, for me. As they came towards the first of the rotting brick and concrete ammunition bays left over from the war, Jeremy began to explain:
There were a lot of things, he said, that Marius had to understand before he would be able to grasp the nature of Jeremy’s message for Fielding well enough to have any hope of delivering it correctly and tactfully. What Jeremy was now about to tell Marius was an essential preliminary to his being entrusted with the message.
‘If I consent to be,’ Marius said.
To begin with, Marius should know that Jeremy had decided to stay up at Lancaster College, Cambridge, for a fourth year, beginning last October. This was largely in order to have a firm base from which to insinuate himself into the world of polite letters and reputable allies (literary dons) who would assist him with introductions. Sir Thomas Llewyllyn, Provost of Lancaster, though not the man he was, might be very useful on that front, to say nothing of Ivan (‘the Greco’) Barraclough, the Hellenist; Sir Jacquiz Helmutt, the Archaeologist and Essayist; and other ‘odds and sods’, in which category Jeremy included Fielding Gray. Fielding was not a Lancastrian, or indeed a Cambridge man at all, but he made frequent visits to his friends in the College, and somehow the atmosphere and ambiance brought out the best elements in him – by which Jeremy meant, as he candidly admitted, those elements which best prompted him to urgent effort in the interest of Jeremy Morrison. Jeremy at Lancaster was the kind of privileged and graceful fantasy-Edwardian ephebe whom Fielding delighted to assist. Jeremy removed to London, say, or to Paris, would have had far less appeal: no doubt Fielding would still have done something for him (if only for the sake of his beaux yeux, so to speak) but far less than if he (Jeremy) were still loitering in a kind of perpetual Lancastrian autumn on the willowed banks of Father Cam.
