by Simon Raven
For this kind of reason, then, Jeremy had returned from Luffham to Lancaster last October. After shameless wheedling of the Provost and his Private Secretary, Len, this backed by the promise of a colossal contribution to the fund for replacing the deceased College elms (Marius should remember that Jeremy was now very rich), he had been allowed back in his old rooms by the river; and here he sat doing a course of dainty reading and giving frequent dainty entertainments, waiting for Fielding’s and Sir Tom’s literary acquaintance to gather him into their fold and arrange his agreeable employment.
‘What,’ enquired Marius at this stage, ‘did you hope to write? Novels? Poetry? Plays?’
‘Anything,’ said Jeremy, ‘which would bring my name before the public.’
‘Weren’t you perhaps…putting the cart before the horse?’
‘Don’t be a little prig.’
‘Let me remind you,’ said Marius, ‘that it is you who are asking a favour of me, and that I must therefore be allowed the right of comment.’
‘If I erred, I was certainly punished, as you shall now hear…’
The Literary Editor of Sackcloth, the first to whom Jeremy was introduced by Fielding, took him to a cinema near Victoria Station and started caressing his privata. Jeremy, aware that occasional concessions had to be made by literary or theatrical aspirants, permitted the hideous old gentleman’s endeavour and indeed achieved a creditable (in all the circumstances) erection…
‘By thinking of somebody else, I expect. Who?’
‘Never you mind.’
‘Me?’
‘Absolutely not. One of the under-matrons at Oudenarde, if you must know, who used to play with me in my bath when I was a little boy.’
‘Very erotic.’
‘Very…’
But even so Jeremy could not manage ejaculation into the horny old hands, and after a while the Literary Editor excused himself (‘for a pee’) and reappeared neither in the cinema nor in Jeremy’s career.
A publisher recommended by the Provost was prepared to ‘commission’ an account of a bicycle journey from Alexandria to the Cape. ‘Splendid opportunity for a fit young man. Get you away from that frowsty College of yours.’ But the ‘commission’ apparently carried no advance, not even the price of a second-hand bicycle, and on learning from Private Eye that the firm offering it was already three months late in payment of the last half-year’s royalties, Jeremy withdrew.
‘Why,’ said Marius, ‘didn’t you try my father’s old firm? Stern & Detterling? Fielding Gray has a lot of pull there.’
‘Stern & Detterling,’ said Jeremy, ‘turned out to have amalgamated with a firm of printers called Salinger & Holbrook. Canteloupe arranged it after your father Gregory died. Now, the two chief shareholders of Salinger & Holbrook were the Salinger twins, Carmilla and Theodosia.’
‘I know. Grand girls.’
‘Grand girls…who wouldn’t be at all gratified to see my name on the list of publications.’
‘Oh come, Jeremy. Whatever you did to either of ’em, they’re too big to bear a grudge.’
‘It’s I that bear the grudge. They’ve helped me so often…and been cheated for their efforts. Oh, I don’t actually owe them any more, but I would have done, and been quite happy to welsh on them altogether, had it not been for my father’s sudden decision to pass a lot of land and money over to me. I’ve cheated them in other ways too…emotionally. So they make me feel ashamed, Marius, and I bear them a grudge for it, and work for them or for their firm I shall not, now nor ever.’
‘Beggars can’t be choosers. Only, of course, you’re not exactly a beggar.’
They walked down the beach, across firm, wet sand towards the distant sea, but paused when the sand turned into grey, smelly mud.
‘I was prepared to beg for work, but not from them.’
Jeremy’s third introduction, and the second arranged by Fielding Gray, was to the Arts Editor of The Connaught Muse (published from a house in Connaught Mews, ha, ha). He was a spare and sibilant Scot who took him to lunch at a restaurant called The Meat and Two Veg Ad Lib, and chomped like a bulldozer through huge quantities of all three.
‘My wife,’ he said, ‘used to be a brilliant cook. People like Fielding Gray begged me to ask them to dinner. Then she got socialism – the extreme kind, I mean. She had always been pretty left wing, like me, but now she went crazy with it. First of all her meals were reduced to peasant dishes full of beans, bones and potatoes: then there was only rice and seaweed: then there was nothing. She was too busy shaking her fist in Downing Street or outside American air bases, even to put maize into the pot. So do you wonder I like a bit of a blow-out here? The old mag has an arrangement with the place at a twenty per cent discount: otherwise we shouldn’t be able to afford even this.’
‘All very trying, I do see,’ Jeremy had said. And then, a few minutes later, after his host had demolished a mountain of mash, ‘Fielding Gray was saying that you might need an occasional article…’
‘It’s broke we are, as ever,’ the Arts Editor had countered; ‘but of course if Fielding recommends you, I’d like to give you a trial. Five pieces without payment, and if we like ’em we’ll start you off at the minimum rate for the sixth.’
‘The minimum rate?’
‘Forty pence a hundred words.’
‘Oh.’
When the first book had arrived from The Connaught Muse (a closely printed Goliath on the Portuguese Epic), Jeremy had sent it back with a polite plea of indisposition, and this, thank God, had been the end of that connection.
‘You could have given it a chance,’ Marius said now, as they turned left along the line which divided sand from mud. ‘After all, you didn’t need a fee and you did have a chance to get published.’
‘Magazines that don’t make an effort to pay properly – with the partial exception of school and university magazines – are not to be taken seriously. No good being published in a journal that no one takes seriously.’
‘So by now,’ said Marius, ‘you were pretty fed up with the world of letters? You felt you were not appreciated at your true worth?’
‘Yes,’ said Jeremy, who failed to detect any irony in Marius’ remark. ‘I thought perhaps the so-called media – television and that kind of thing – might suit me better. So Fielding arranged for me to meet a man called Jacobson, a director he’d once worked with who was now in a firm which specialised in up-market TV serials. He wore short silk socks,’ said Jeremy, ‘which hardly even covered his skinny ankles.’
‘So of course that put you right off him straight away.’
‘No. I gave him the benefit of the doubt because he was Jewish and Jews have their heads screwed on where the entertainment world is concerned.’
‘Thank you for your graceful compliment to my people.’
‘You,’ said Jeremy, ‘are about as Jewish as golden tressed Apollo.’
Very lightly, he pressed Marius’ blond hair with the palm of one hand.
‘My father was a Jew,’ Marius said.
‘Precisely. To be a proper Jew, you must have a Jewish mother.’
‘I may not be a proper Jew,’ said Marius, swivelling his green eyes out over the sea and back, ‘but I have my father’s Hebrew blood. And this Mr Jacobson – how did he turn out?’
‘A mocker. He told me that he’d started work at the age of thirteen as clapper-boy to his uncle, who made dirty films in his garden in Epping. He had no time for la-di-da young men, he said, unless they were prepared to forget their university education and come and do likewise. I said that I could hardly make thirteen any more but I’d happily be clapper-boy to sex films in Epping…under his direction, I presumed? Like all mockers, he was extremely self-important and would not take his own turn at being mocked. The idea that he, the great Jules Jacobson who directed the Odyssey and the Idylls of the King, should go back to directing porn shows, was too much for him. No sense of humour or proportion, you see. So I was sharply shown the door.’
/> ‘And which was the next one you knocked on?’
‘I didn’t. I was finally through with all that. I didn’t, you see, have to suit anyone except myself. I certainly didn’t have to suit Tom Llewyllyn and Fielding Gray any more.’
Jeremy turned briskly away from the Wash and walked up the beach towards the remains of a semaphore tower that was perched on an unusually high dune.
‘Isn’t that rather unfair to them?’ said Marius, bringing up the rear. ‘They arranged those interviews at your request. You mucked them up because you wouldn’t give the people a fair chance–’
‘–A fair chance, I ask you. Who sat in that cinema having his cock rubbed raw?’
‘Well, you didn’t give any of the others much of a chance. Anyhow, what I mean is that just because they all came to nothing, those interviews, that’s no reason for turning on the Provost and Major Gray. They did their best for you – and you say you’re done with them.’
‘I associate them…particularly Fielding…with failure.’
‘So what are you going to do now?’ Marius said.
‘Withdraw from Lancaster and begin a new and serious endeavour. To do with the land, my land, at Luffham. A proper task, a proper purpose, for any man of intelligence and vision. And now we come to the message that I want you to pass on to Fielding. For some time he has been pressing me to go on another of our journeys. The Provost has said I can have leave of absence – not that he matters now I’ve withdrawn – and Fielding wants me to go with him to Italy, Greece and Turkey.’
‘How very nice. Do you remember, you and Fielding once promised to take me on one of those trips? I’m still hoping.’
‘There aren’t going to be any more. That’s my message for Fielding. From now on that sort of thing’s over…for a long time at least, and as far as Fielding is concerned, forever. Please tell him.’
‘No. I shan’t have a chance. He won’t be there, as I told you, when I get back to Buttock’s, and immediately after that Rosie and I are going to Mummy in France. And after that I shall be back at school.’
‘You promised you’d find a way.’
‘I said that if you told me your message to Fielding, I would see what was to be done. About such a horrible message nothing is to be done. Or not by me. You do your own dirty work.’
‘You must understand that I have come to a crucial stage in my life. Firm decision is now necessary; I must drift no longer, Marius. So a firm decision I have now made – to set a new and definite course that will take me ever further from Fielding Gray.’
‘You are leaving him. He has come to need you – you have encouraged him to come to need you – and now you are deliberately going away from him. Why should I be the one to tell him this?’
‘Because you would do it so charmingly.’
‘Ugh. How can anyone trust you, Jeremy? How can I be sure that you will not go away from me?’
‘Come to that, I don’t suppose you can be.’
‘Oh, Jeremy.’
They passed the semaphore tower, at the top of which the stumps of the maimed arms signalled a sloppy ‘N’, and started down the reverse slope of the dunes back towards the golf course.
‘At least I never encouraged you to need me, Marius,’ said Jeremy. ‘You made all the running, remember?’
“Yes. I was desperate. But after that, I thought you had come to like me.’
‘Well enough. I hope that I shan’t leave you.’
‘Then why are you leaving Major Gray?’
‘Because I have now had my fill of everything he has to offer. His knowledge, insight, philosophy, talent, experience and technique – all of them, such as they ever were, are for me stale and nearly exhausted. Nor do I need his money – of which I suspect there is now much less – since I have many times as much of my own.’
‘You could still be kind to him,’ Marius said, as they marched over the fairway towards Fielding’s house. ‘You could remember what he has done for you and show your gratitude by being with him, even travelling with him, from time to time.’
They collected their clubs from under Fielding’s veranda and went back down the jungly path to the end of his garden.
‘Fielding Gray takes up too much room in my life,’ said Jeremy. ‘You will come across the same thing pretty soon in your own. Someone you have loved suddenly becomes a boring, importunate nuisance.’ Jeremy shut Fielding’s gate behind them. ‘This person may be the same as ever he was but he will now be distasteful to you nevertheless. He asks no more than he ever did, but this will now be too much for you. For you yourself will have changed, Marius, as I have changed, and what you once held precious will suddenly have been changed to lumber of which you wish only to be quit, so that you can go on unburdened towards your new goal.’
‘What you are leaving behind is not lumber,’ Marius said: ‘it is somebody who has a right to expect your care. You are indecent, Jeremy.’
‘You will find, Marius, that when the struggle is between decency and convenience, convenience has a way of winning, and that is the way of it here. Quite simply, Fielding Gray has become inconvenient to me, an embarrassing feature of a life which I now forswear.’
‘Oh, Jeremy, Jeremy,’ said Marius as they climbed into Jeremy’s car (no longer the little Morris that had been his mother’s gift but a quivering Alfa Romeo): ‘Oh, Jeremy,’ Marius said, and was silent all the way back to Luffham by Whereham.
‘Jeremy Morrison has withdrawn from the College,’ said Len, the Private Secretary to the Provost of Lancaster: ‘his letter arrived this morning, so it must have been posted just before Christmas Day.’
‘Good riddance as far as you are concerned,’ said Ptolemaeos Tunne, one of the Provost’s guests for the Twelve Days.
The other guest, Piero Caspar, an undergraduate of Lancaster and a ward (in a complicated way) of Ptolemaeos, considered this remark in silence, then turned to Carmilla Salinger (a Fellow of the College, who was spending her Christmas there) as if to invite the comment of someone better qualified than himself.
‘Jeremy is such a horrible cheat,’ said Carmilla, cocking her enormous arse in order to scratch the seat of her corduroy trousers. ‘He made both Theodosia and me love him, though in very different ways, then just turned and vanished into thin air…only to emerge from it as solid as ever when there was something he really wanted. Usually money.’
‘Did you let him have it?’ said Len, knowing the answer.
‘Yes. On one occasion we both gave him money to pay the same debt…without knowing it, of course. He juggled his affairs very cleverly.’
‘He’s settled up with you now, I dare say?’
‘Oh yes. Now his father’s handed over half Norfolk at three grand an acre…to say nothing of the house and some liquid money…he has seen his way to settling up with us.’
Sir Thomas Llewyllyn rose from his chair and shuffled across the chamber to a glass door which led into the Provost’s walled garden. How old he looks, thought Carmilla: he can’t be sixty yet, but he’s creeping about on a stick, with his head awry like a weeping chancel. What has done this to him? Death, she thought: too much death; and now the desertion of Jeremy Morrison?
‘Tullia never liked that Morrison boy,’ the Provost said, looking out over the garden.
‘Tullia’ had been his daughter, commonly known as ‘Baby’, formerly married to Lord Canteloupe.
‘You all remember the day we christened Tullia’s son, Sarum,’ said the Provost, turning back to face into the chamber. ‘It was in the spring of the year in which the elms died. But they were not yet dead when we christened Sarum, christened him in the Chapel and then came in here, into this room, to drink his health. You were all here, except you, Piero’ – he pointed his stick at Caspar – it was before you exhumed yourself from that convent of yours. But apart from Piero, you were all here,’ he said, ‘and a great many more people, and young Jeremy Morrison among them.’
‘Yes,’ said Carmilla. ‘I remember. He
made up to Thea and me in front of our Da. A very smooth performance.’
‘And he tried another smooth performance,’ said Tom Llewyllyn, ‘on Tullia. She set his nose quivering, I could tell. But I didn’t mind, because I saw the way she sent him about his business. Like throwing a bucket of cold water on a randy mongrel. I was pleased with her and almost sorry for him. I had a soft spot for him, you see. It was after Tullia snubbed him that he came and made up to Carmilla and her sister.’
‘As you observe, Provost, I was not here,’ said Piero; ‘but it is clear, in general, that something about Jeremy affected your daughter with nothing less than sheer revulsion…in the end with extreme and hysterical revulsion.’
‘Which sent her bolting off to Africa,’ said Ptolemaeos.
‘Surely…it was what happened in Burano that did that,’ said Carmilla. ‘Gregory Stern’s crucifixion, and that weird picture underneath the cross.’
‘The picture,’ said Piero, ‘was that of a woman who is about to alleviate suffering by loving attention. To be more precise, a woman who is about to give sexual consolation to boys who are already far gone with the plague. Like Gregory Stern’s death on the cross, it taught her that the way to salvation must be by compelling herself to love that which repelled her.’
