by Simon Raven
‘But he can. Now his father’s handed so much over.’
‘But he wouldn’t,’ Fielding said.
‘Why not? You’ve given him enough treats. Really generous ones.’
‘He wouldn’t think it worth it. Leave aside the fact that he’s extremely mean with money, except when spending it on himself, he just would not see any point in paying for somebody who no longer has anything new to teach him or amuse him with.’
‘But…he could enjoy your company for its own familiar sake. At his age he can’t expect something new the whole time. And he certainly doesn’t need a travelling tutor any more.’
‘With Jeremy, what is familiar is boring. He is too shallow to understand or enjoy the pleasures of recognition. I once proposed a visit to Holkham, which is not very far from Luffham – only to be told that he had no need to go there again, as he had been taken when still a child. You see what I mean?’
‘Leaving all that aside,’ said Leonard, ‘there comes a question of reciprocity: he owes you.’
‘He doesn’t think like that. All those treats you say I gave him – that was in another world, he’d say. What counts is where we are now. I failed to do any good for him last autumn, when he was trying to get into the plush end of Grub Street, and so now I’m pretty certain he’s going to give all that up and move on to the next thing – and whatever that is, it won’t include me.’
For some time they had been walking through a wood which grew on both banks of the river. Now they emerged into a meadow.
‘There is a legend about this meadow,’ said Fielding. ‘Six knights in black armour murdered Geoffery the Troubadour here. He’d been singing too sweetly to their wives and daughters. His grave is in a churchyard near Salisbury. A…very old friend once took me there.’
Leonard considered this. His scimitar nose seemed suddenly to grow another inch out of his forehead, and its tip to curve downward and inward until it almost pierced his chin.
‘Six to one is unfair odds, of course, but as we know, the wages of sin is, in one form or another, death. If you are short of money,’ said Leonard, as a result of some crooked process of association, ‘why not sell your half-of-Buttock’s Hotel?’
‘The only buyers would be the developers. They’d simply flatten the place, so I am bound not to sell it to them as a condition of Tessie Buttock’s will. That wouldn’t stop me if I were desperate enough, as it is binding in honour only, but it would stop Maisie selling her half, without which mine is of no value.’
‘Honour,’ said Leonard Percival: ‘an attractive word but what a nuisance it can be. Tell me: those documents you discovered in Venice in 1973…the ones which led you to Samuele in the marshes and so to the discovery of the true reigning line of the Sarums, with Paolo at the end of it…have you still got them?’
‘I used them for my novel. Then I put them away in the bank.’
‘How very prudent. And would your honour prevent you from disposing of them for cash?’
‘You mean… Canteloupe might like to have them for safe keeping…in his bank rather than mine? I once thought of that before. Luckily, I was saved by the proverbial outsider at sixty-six to one. Money came in from elsewhere.’
‘And now?’
‘Blackmail is an ugly thing.’
‘So is poverty. After all, if you were not extortionate…’
‘I am not desperate yet, Leonard…though I will admit, I should very much like to be in a position to offer Jeremy this journey to Greece and Turkey as an entire and total gift. My gift. There would be something rather grand about that…to say nothing of how I yearn…yearn, Leonard…for his company as I used to know it.’
‘From what you have just been saying, his company will obviously never be “as you used to know it” again. Now then. Six black knights against one troubadour, you said: in this very meadow. Wasn’t he unarmed, this troubadour, and attended only by a page boy? Wasn’t he playing and singing to the boy as they rode?’
‘Yes. You’ve heard the story before. From Canteloupe, I suppose. The family has always revelled in it.’
‘No. I did not hear it from Detterling. From somebody else. I shall remember presently.’
In the distance, a cathedral suddenly rose off a ridge like a cardboard cut-out from the centre pages of a Christmas Annual.
‘Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges,’ said Marius to his sister.
‘Ah,’ said Rosie. ‘It looks pleasant enough, doesn’t it? But whenever we come here I always remember that M.R. James wrote the most horrible ghost story about it: Canon Alberic’s Scrapebook.’
The taxi passed into a narrow lane with high-hedged banks. The cut-out collapsed into the annual.
‘M.R. James had a diseased mind,’ said Marius. ‘Glinter Parkes at Oudenarde House told us, after reading us his story about the schoolboy who was drowned in a well and kept on crawling up out of it. It was one more good reason for not going to Eton, he told me later. Imagine being at a school where they would put up with M.R. James as Provost.’
‘How very silly of Mr Parkes,’ said Rosie. ‘To start with, the Provost of Eton is not the Headmaster and stays almost entirely in the background, so that no one knows he is there; and in the second place it happened many years ago. No reason at all for not going to Eton now.’
‘He also told me that M.R. James had read a story of his to the Eton Boy Scouts in camp one year, about a Boy Scout who had all his blood sucked out by a vampire. The Scout Master threw the body over his shoulder like a rag doll.’
‘Still no reason for not going to Eton now.’
‘Glinter was quite desperate that I shouldn’t. Mummy had turned against Eton and was putting on the pressure, and he’d begun to be afraid that I wouldn’t quite get into College, whereas I was almost certain to get a school, to our school, which would be one up to Oudenarde instead of one down, so in the end…what with all of them…and what with Jeremy… I gavein.’
‘Why call it our school? I’m not there yet.’
‘Tessa is, and Jakki. And you and Caroline are coming next autumn.’
‘So Mummy had her way,’ said Rosie. The cathedral, now definitely made of stone and not of cardboard, reappeared in the windscreen of the taxi.
‘Ah,’ said Rosie, assessing the quality of its appearance: ‘We’re nearly there.’ Then, ‘Why can’t Mummy find a proper man,’ she said crossly, ‘instead of that tiresome girl, Jo-Jo?’
‘I expect Daddy’s death upset her.’
‘She’d started carrying on with Jo-Jo before Daddy died,’ Rosie said.
‘Jo-Jo is a conceited bitch,’ said Marius.
‘I like her husband.’
‘He lets her wear the trousers.’
‘She didn’t want little Oenone, you know. She wanted a boy. I think it’s Mummy that mostly takes care of Oenone.’
The taxi stopped by the entrance to the graveyard of a Romanesque church, that stood in a meadow just under the southern ramparts of Saint-Bertrand. The nave and the transept were in ruins. The chancel still had a roof and some appearance of stability.
‘I hope they’ve made the place more comfortable than it was in the summer,’ said Marius: ‘all that money Mummy’s got…and she has to live in a deconsecrated chancel.’
Leonard Percival remembered how he had originally come to hear the story of the black knights and the troubadour. The story had been passed down in the Sarum family, until some time in the 1940s it had been told by the previous Marquess Canteloupe (the present one’s distant cousin) to his son, the Earl of Muscateer (a title which had become extinct when the marquessate passed, by an elaborate instance of female remainder, from the family of the Sarums to that of their cousins Detterling). Lord Muscateer, while an Officer Cadet in India in 1946, had told the legend to a crowd of fellow cadets gathered round his deathbed. One of the cadets, Peter Morrison (now Lord Luffham of Whereham) had told it to his son Jeremy; and Jeremy had told it to his friend, Piero Caspar, who had told it, along with its proven
ance as detailed above, to Leonard.
This had happened while Leonard was on a visit to Piero’s guardian, Ptolemaeos Tunne, who wished to examine an irregular edition of Valerius Flaccus, which was in Detterling’s library, and had been too lazy or debilitated to travel to Wiltshire to do so. Since Detterling had been too busy with lawyers (discretionary trusts for Sarum) to go to Ptoly’s home in the Fens, he had despatched Leonard with the book; and one evening, while Ptolemaeos was pouring over Valerius’ tenth rate hexameters, Piero had told Leonard the story of the black knights and the unarmed troubadour, Lord Geoffery of Underavon. Thinking of all this now, and thinking also of the manifold and polymath investigations which Ptolemaeos conducted from his Fenland lair, Leonard suddenly conceived an idea which might appeal to the rotund savant, and went to the telephone to ring up Piero, who, as he knew, was still sitting out the Twelve Days of Christmas, along with his guardian, in the Provost’s Lodging at Lancaster.
‘A taxi?’ said Isobel to Rosie and Marius, as the three of them sat in a row on the sedilia behind the south choir stalls. ‘A hotel for the night in Toulouse? Do you think that we’re made of money?’
‘Pretty well,’ said Marius. ‘Anyway, what else were we meant to do? Walk here in the dark, carrying our luggage?’
‘I told you in my letter. Wait in the airport waiting room until daylight, get a bus to Toulouse Railway Station, a train from Toulouse to Saint-Gaudens, and then a bus from Saint Gaudens to Saint-Bertrand.’
‘Which would have taken so long,’ said Marius, ‘that we’d have had to go home as soon as we got here. Though come to think of it,’ he said, eyeing the choir stalls and the steel spiral stairway that led up to the improvised first floor under the barrel vaulting, ‘that might not have been too bad a thing.’
‘Don’t be unkind,’ said Isobel. ‘I’ve been looking forward so much.’
‘Oh, Mummy…‘
Both children rose from the sedilia and stood before Isobel. To Marius she gave her throat to kiss. To Rosie she gave both hands, stretching her arms out on either side of the nuzzling Marius.
‘Oenone is upstairs,’ she said, ‘having her mid-morning nap. Jo-Jo and Jean-Marie have gone away to make room for both of you.’
‘Why didn’t they take Oenone?’ said Rosie. ‘She’s theirs, after all.’
‘I think she is almost more mine. I would like,’ she said, ‘to have a child out of Jo-Jo, that was actually by me.’
Marius giggled into her bosom. ‘Don’t be silly, Mummy,’ he said. ‘Thank God you’re so nice and warm. It’s freezing in this place.’
‘I’ve turned the oil stove off to save money.’
‘What is all this about saving money?’ said Marius. ‘Daddy left plenty. You explained to me at the time how it had all been arranged, and so did the lawyers, and I know that we have at least three quarters of a million pounds between us – not counting the value of the firm.’
‘We must try to pretend we haven’t, darling,’ said Isobel. ‘We must try to be like everybody else, like Jo-Jo and Jean-Marie, for example, and live on very little.’
‘But Jo-Jo,’ said Marius, ‘is loaded. Everyone in her family was killed in a car crash, which left her and her Uncle Ptoly to scoop the entire kitty – much more than we’re worth. It comes from lavatory pans,’ he said.
‘You haven’t understood, darling. Jo-Jo has to pretend to be poor in order not to offend Jean-Marie.’
‘Jean-Marie’s books have been doing extremely well,’ said Rosie, ‘and one of them has been serialised by the BBC. Canteloupe came to lunch with Mrs Malcolm one day and told us all about it. Jean-Marie is making more money than almost any of his authors, he told us.’
‘But that still leaves him poorer than Jo-Jo, poorer than us. Our money is an insult to Jean-Marie, just as Jean-Marie’s money is an insult to those even poorer. We must all try to pretend we have nothing, behave as if we had nothing.’
‘Don’t you see,’ said Marius to his mother, ‘how stupid, how dishonest that is? To have all the money you need, but to pretend to have none – making everyone round you thoroughly miserable when they might be having a very nice time. It’s worse than dishonest: it’s diseased.’
Rosie came down the metal stairway with the happily babbling Oenone.
‘Marius doesn’t like me any more,’ said Isobel to Rosie. ‘Just as well you are only staying a very few days. I do not think Marius will come at Easter: he will go to the lawyers, and will amuse himself in London, in Buttock’s Hotel.’
‘Or elsewhere,’ Marius said, remembering Milo Hedley’s invitation on the last day of school before the Christmas holidays. ‘Raisley Conyngham has a place in Somerset,’ Milo had said: ‘very comfortable with lots of servants – he is rich for a schoolmaster, you see. And horses, beautiful horses, which he races. You ride, don’t you, Marius? The Riding Master at Oudenarde said you were the best horseman he’d ever seen, even better than your father, with whom he’d ridden in the Household cavalry. He knows Raisley, this Riding Master of yours, and when he knew you were coming here and not to Eton, he told Raisley about you when he met him one day at Cheltenham Races. So Raisley wants to meet you. He hasn’t gone out of his way so far, because it is bad if a master is seen to seek out a small boy in his first year. But now you are in your second year, Marius, and Raisley wants to meet you very soon. Raisley will invite you for Easter, Marius. You’re not quite sure? Your mother in France? Well, let’s see how things go on. You can leave it all – except of course your mother – to me.’
‘Elsewhere,’ Marius said.
‘And you, Rosie?’ said Isobel. ‘Shall you want to come at Easter?’
‘For Oenone,’ said Rosie.
‘As good a motive as any, I suppose. But what about Tessa? Won’t she miss you? Especially if Marius is not at Buttock’s.’
‘I do not think,’ said Rosie coolly, ‘that Tessa is going to miss me much any more. Besides, she has already hinted that at Easter she will have a special invitation.’
‘What invitation?’ Marius said.
‘She was not candid. She was guilty, you see. The one thing which I absolutely realise is that the invitation will not include me.’
‘Poor Rosie,’ said Marius, clasping the inside of her elbow with one hand. ‘It’s a wretched business, being dumped. I hope I never am.’
‘You would do better to hope,’ said Rosie, ‘that you never do any dumping. Being dumped is horrible, yet it can be endured. But to do the dumping is to dishonour the past – to poison all that has been between you and the other person – to murder your own soul.’
Piero telephoned from the Provost’s Lodging in Lancaster to Leonard Percival in Wiltshire.
‘That idea of yours for Ptoly’s entertainment,’ he said: ‘the Canteloupe inheritance. I’ve been discussing it with him. Now as it happens, the idea had already been put into his head by the Provost,who was going on about the thing a day or two ago. Ptoly got quite inquisitive then, and now your suggestion – that he might be able to buy the documents that started it all off – has really hooked him. How much would Major Gray want for those manuscripts?’
‘Nothing that Ptolemaeos couldn’t afford. But both he and I,’ said Percival, ‘will want a promise as well…a promise that the whole thing is to be treated strictly as a matter of scholarship… that any further investigations are to be conducted only for Ptoly Tunne’s private interest and entertainment.’
‘In short,’ said Piero Caspar: ‘no spiteful tricks to disturb the status quo. Why should Ptoly want to upset Canteloupe?’
‘He might feel like having fun and games with the real heir. Do you remember that chap during the Regency who brought an orang-utang to London, and bought it a baronetcy and a seat in the Commons? Ptoly might find it funny to play some similar joke with the idiot Paolo Filavoni.’
‘No, Leonard. You spent too many years of your life spying before you want to Canteloupe. You’re corroded with mistrust. Any trick of the kind you mention
is strictly not Ptolemaeos’ style. He is an analyst, not an impresario. He’ll take an enormous interest in the background and history of the thing – all those pranks in the garden of the Palazzo Albani, he’ll just love those – and he’ll probably cast a sharp eye at the actual pedigree of Paolo-in-the-marshes. He will want to check everything that actually happened – a privilege he’ll be paying for. But he won’t be getting up a Paolo-for-Marquess movement, I promise you that.’
‘Right,’ said Leonard: ‘what shall I tell Fielding?’
‘Tell him to get the manuscripts out of his bank and come down to the Fens any day after tomorrow – when Ptoly and I are going back there – giving two hours’ notice for the benefit of the domestics. Then we’ll see.’
‘See what?’
‘The manuscripts and what they’re worth.’
‘Be generous, Piero,’ Leonard said. ‘Fielding is rather low, what with one thing and the other.’
‘Personally, as you may know, I am exceedingly mean. Once a kept boy, always a kept boy: we expect to be treated and fêted and never to spend a penny of our own even if we get rich – least of all on those who were open-handed with us when we were poor. It was our due, we tell ourselves, so it is a point of honour not to repay it. But I digress. Since we shall be spending Ptolemaeos’ money, I dare say I can afford to be…not illiberal.’
‘What will Ptolemaeos think about it?’
‘More and more,’ said Piero Caspar, ‘he is leaving such matters to me.’
At school, Marius was in the Fifth Form (Classical) and Tessa in the Fifth Form (History). Marius was in the Headmaster’s House, Tessa in one of the Domi Vestales recently established to absorb the new females. They did not, therefore, meet very often, except at twice-weekly ‘O’ Level Art lectures, which were conducted for the paradoxical and salutary purpose of taking the ‘O’ Level candidates’ minds, at least briefly, off their ‘O’ Levels.
Jakki Blessington, though only on her first year, was encouraged to attend the ‘O’ Level Art lectures on a voluntary basis. And so it came about that on the third Friday of January, the three of them met and sat together for the first time since well before Christmas. During the lecture, which was given by a retired master of enormous age, still known as the Senior Usher, having been the last ‘beak’ to hold this now obsolete office, the children held their peace: not only out of respect for their instructor but out of considerable interest in his witty, worldly and somewhat improper instruction. When the lecture was concluded, they remained companionably in place for a little gossip about the events of the holidays; but no sooner had Marius begun to describe the horror of dossing down in a sleeping bag on the planks of the improvised first floor of the Sanctuary at Saint-Bertrand, than they were interrupted by an ephebe two sizes (so to speak) bigger and taller than Marius, wearing his hair in a style which approximated to that of an Athenian kouros of the Archaic period, and smiling the beguiling yet faintly contemptuous smile which distinguished the sculpture of the same era. He mounted the lecturer’s rostrum, and:
