by Angus Wilson
Madame Houdet meanwhile had gone on from the current market price of vegetables to the economy of M. l'Abbé Tartaglio's housekeeper. "The money goes into her pocket and nothing goes on to M. l'Abbé's plate,' she confided in Gerald. 'And quelle mauvaise langue, that woman! I told the poor man ...'
It was Yves' voice that was loudest and hence his conversation that most battered Gerald down. 'Do you know Etruscan?' he asked, and when Gerald shook his head, he laughed. 'No,' he cried, 'I don't suppose you do. No one can read it.'
Gerald suggested that some words in Etruscan had in fact been deciphered.
'You're right there,' Yves said. 'I ought to know. I gave them a few hints. I know all those guys. They showed me the inscriptions. It's all mathematics, really. I did codes and cyphers in the war. But I'm not talking about that.'
'Yves was with the American Air Force,' Madame Houdet said proudly. 'He has still many American friends.'
'I should say I have,' Yves declared. 'If this cold war blows up hot, which it may any minute, I've got my orders. But I'm not talking there, either,' he announced defiantly to Gerald.
'Oh! please don't,' Lilian cried, furious by now at his continuous interruption of her reminiscences. 'We don't wish to be burdened with the barbarian's secrets - Russian or American.'
Yves smiled patronizingly. 'The barbarians sacked Rome,' he said. 'The Professor'll tell you that.'
'Of course,' Lilian was saying, 'they don't train them to speak nowadays. When I started at the Court Theatre we were told that even when we were whispering we were expected to be audible to every single person at the back of the pit. ...'
'But then what are they, these Tyrolese? Simply dirty pigs,' Stéphanie cried. 'The poor little girl had already been violée by her own father before she was twelve years old. Mais oui, c'est vrai, Yves, she affirmed, mistaking the interested light in Yves' eye for incredulity, 'par son père. Je l'ai entendu de M. l'Abbé lui-même. Quelle cochonnerie!'
'Well,' said Yves, stretching back in his chair, for an expansive man-to-man talk with Gerald, 'how do you feel about Europe? Do you think it's decadent? No, no,' he cried before Gerald could answer. 'I agree with you. It may be new to the Yanks, but we know it's all as old as time. Incest, rape, they've happened before. It's not news to us. I don't say a word against the Yanks; they're our friends, yours and mine. They're grand guys. But it's a new civilization. They've got a lot to learn. The art of life - that's what we've got to teach them. Good food, good wine.'
Madame Houdet here nodded vigorously. 'Mais c'est affreux, ce coca-cola,' she said.
'And,' Yves continued - his gestures seemed to become more exaggeratedly French as his accent became more absurdly American - 'the art of love. Why do you think these American dames are so frigid?' he asked Gerald.
Mrs Portway winced.
'Because,' Yves answered himself, 'they've never been woken up. Their men don't know how to make love, they just know how to go to bed.' He paused, for this was usually one of the most successful remarks in his repertory. On this occasion, for varying reasons, none of his audience responded. 'It's not the same thing,' he said.
The lack of sympathy in his audience had a curious effect on him, for suddenly, without any bridge in his conversation, he began to take up the opposite point of view. 'Yeah,' he said. 'Europe's decadent. She's finished. And why? Because she's living in the past. Look at you all now. What are you talking about? The past. What have you come to Italy for? The past.' His eyes flashed malignantly at Gerald. His manner had changed from loud to offensive. He turned on his mother, shouting at her. 'France is finished. Do you understand me?'
Madame Houdet's rouged cheeks trembled a little, her lipsticked old mouth twitched. 'Jamais, Yves, jamais,' she said.
Her son leaned across the table. For a moment Gerald thought he was going to hit her, but he only flung his arm towards her in contempt. 'Tu es folle,' he cried, 'on lui déjà tordu le cou, ton coq.' He imitated the quick turn as the bird's neck was twisted and then he let out a hideous crow. He got up and flung his napkin across the table. 'I've got an appointment,' he said. 'What do you use for money?' he asked his mother, and picking up her bag from the table he helped himself to some notes.
When he turned to Gerald, his manner was once more ingratiating, though brash. 'Pleased to have met you,' he said, shaking Gerald's hand. 'If you want any introductions to the big people in Florence or Rome, let me know.' Draping his light grey coat across his shoulders, he swaggered out of the room, his buttocks swaying under his tight trouser seat as he walked. Madame Houdet, with tears in her eyes, excused herself in order to superintend the coffee-making in the kitchen.
Mrs Portway had closed her eyes. She sat rigid in her chair, her head shaking slightly. Then, opening her lovely eyes and turning them on him, 'I'm so terribly sorry, Professor Middleton,' she said, 'for all this.'
Gerald made a deprecating gesture. 'I'm only concerned for you,' he answered.
'Oh! I've seen too much bullying and vulgarity to mind by now.' She shrugged her shoulders wearily. 'It's not what I should have chosen for my last years, but one no longer makes one's life when one is old. Life is made for one. An unpleasant return to the nursery. However, it helps Stéphanie my being here, and she is a good soul. Narrow, you know,' her voice was redolent with the drawing-rooms of high social comedy, 'but we have been through the same horrors. It is another of the prices of age - our bonds, our companionships are those of sorrow. I always hated sorrow and pain or anything ugly.'
She rose from her chair and motioned him away as he moved to assist her. 'Let us go into the garden,' she cried. And as they walked on the veranda, she said, 'That vulgar young man is disordered in his wits.'
Looking at her, Gerald saw that she meant this literally; and reflecting on Yves' behaviour, he was inclined to agree with her.
It was amid the cloying scent of the dying lilac, its purple and white horns turning an ugly brown in the hot sun, that Gerald told her of his doubts about Melpham. He spoke tentatively at first; and it was clear that he had need to do so, for he had not proceeded far before she waved him aside with her hand. 'No! no!' she cried. 'Lying and deceit! That's not the colour of those days. It's the present that is a perjurer, not the past.'
'It's to clear the past of a lie that may have been laid upon it that I am asking these questions,' Gerald replied. We're not going to get very far if we talk in Delphic oracles like this, he thought. 'You spoke just now,' he went on, trying a different tack, 'of that young man being disordered in his wits; I am suggesting that Gilbert Stokesay too was capable of freakish, insane actions.'
'I don't know, I don't know,' Mrs Portway cried. 'I only know that I want those days at Melpham left alone in their rosy glow. You've seen something of my life now, surely you don't want to poison the memories I live in. Reggie, above all, is my happiest, my finest memory.'
Gerald raised his eyebrows. 'I was not for one minute suggesting that Canon Portway had any knowledge of the fraud, if fraud it was. No, if it happened, Gilbert regarded it as a genius's joke on the dead world of scholarship; and I'm afraid that included your brother-in-law as much as his father, or shall I say it was intended to make his father look a fool, and if anyone else was caught in the net, so much the more amusing. Stokesay, you know, even in those days, was looking forward to a knighthood, and if my guess is correct Gilbert was looking forward to that day too as the occasion for revealing the fraud. Only fate decided otherwise.'
Mrs Portway sat with the palm of her hand pressed against her temple. Gerald was not even sure if she heard what he was saying. 'The whole thing seems very fanciful, I know,' he continued, 'only I can't get away from the conviction which has stuck with me all these years that Gilbert Stokesay was telling the truth that night in Soho.'
Mrs Portway looked up. 'Does it matter now?' she asked. 'He's dead and we're old. Heaven alone knows who lives at Melpham now! The last time I heard anything, there was talk of making it an Eventide Home for old people. And very
fitting too.'
Gerald felt a moment of impatient anger. 'I'm afraid it isn't a question of what happens to Melpham House. It's a far larger question of historical truth. This lie, if lie it is, has become the cornerstone on which a whole false edifice may be erected. And even if it wasn't so, even if it was just one single historical oddity, I see now that I've been wrong all these years in treating it lightly. If an historian has any function at all, it is to maintain honesty. The study of history can't be the plaything of the sort of egoistic mockery that I'm suggesting Gilbert indulged in.'
'You make a lot of your conscience,' Mrs Portway said bitterly.
'It's not my conscience,' Gerald cried, 'it's the good faith of a humane study in a world rapidly losing its humanity.'
Some spark seemed to catch Mrs Portway's feelings. 'Yes, I see,' she said. 'If I could help you. But I don't see why you come to me. What do you think I could know of it?'
'Nothing, I suppose,' Gerald replied dully. 'It is only that I have always thought that when people do things secretly there is usually some slip up, some suspicion, some talk. I only hoped that you could remember a word or a deed that would suggest a dissatisfaction or a doubt. For example, you knew the servants at Melpham well, the men who assisted the "dig". Gilbert had great hauteur towards the lower orders. He would not have hesitated to enlist the help of one of the workmen, he would certainly not have bothered to conceal things from them with the care he would have taken with regard to the others. They might have seen things of which they didn't even realize the significance. No, I see now, it's hopeless. I must allow the negative answer of the dead to tell me I am wrong.'
There was a silence, then Mrs Portway began to trace lines in the grass with the ferrule of her parasol. 'I am not sure that you are,' she said. 'Oh! I don't know. What I can tell you is again no more than a surmise, only it's one that makes me happy because it removes a far more awful belief from my mind.'
She stopped for a moment and seemed intent on the scratchings of her parasol. 'Understand this,' she cried. 'Reggie Portway was a great and good man. Nothing I say alters that. There was only one thing on which we did not agree. He had a foolish, a deeply foolish affection for a lad in the village, a deceitful, smooth-tongued boy who'd got above his station. Reggie thought him brilliant; he indulged him, talking of sending him to Oxford. The war, which did so many foolish things, at least put a stop to that. The boy went into the Navy. But the connexion, I'm afraid, did not end. Oh! don't mistake me. Reggie did nothing wrong. It's I who have been wrong in allowing myself to suspect such a thing for many years. That is why what you have said today relieves my mind, for I see that the whole thing has quite another explanation. I've wronged Reggie deeply all these years in my mind. The boy came back to him after the war as a sort of secretary. I had lost touch. My place was in Italy when Mussolini made her strong again.' She waved her hand to dismiss anything he might say in disagreement. 'We will not argue about that. There was no coldness between Reggie and me, but we let time draw us apart. I cannot regret it too much.' She smiled bitterly. 'It's a habit of the Portways. I've let myself be cut off from my granddaughter in the same way.'
Gerald was about to speak to her of Elvira, but he reflected that he would do nothing by such an intervention except distract her from her story.
'I felt deeply unhappy at the association being renewed. I wrote and told Reggie so, but he ignored my letter. I comforted myself with the thought that our old servant Barker and his daughter were there to look after him, and I knew that while those loyal souls were with him he would come to no harm. Some years before Reggie died, Alice Barker wrote to tell me that this vile creature had left the house. My brother was no longer at Melpham, you know; he had been made a Canon at Norwich and lived in the Close. I read between the lines of her letter that she had driven him out, and I rejoiced. But far worse was to come. When Reggie died, he left every penny to this dreadful man, for man he was by then, I suppose, if he ever deserved the name. Oh! it was shameful. He had no reason to leave money to me. I had my own. But to have left the Barkers unrewarded after all those years of service! I did what I could to make up for it.' She paused and smiled. 'Not that they need any help now. Alice is in the news. She married that Mr Cressett whom your son - it is your son, isn't it? - has been writing about so much in the papers.' She shook her head. 'We live in a topsy-turvey world when good simple people like Alice Barker are pushed into the headlines.'
'The Cressett of the Pelican affair?' Gerald asked in surprise.
'Yes,' Mrs Portway replied with a laugh. 'But that absurdity doesn't alter the way Reggie treated the Barkers. That was bad enough, but what upset me so was the fact that the money left, though far more than a creature like that could possibly know what to do with, was only a small part of what my brother-in-law once had. It was obvious to me that this man had been bleeding poor Reggie for years. I've told you what I allowed myself to think. Oh! I didn't blame Reggie even then, though I abhor anything unnatural. I thought that a moment's foolishness had been paid for by a lifetime. The creature had wiles enough, and Reggie had always insisted on the very false notion that a clergyman should be celibate. Men should be men, Professor Middleton, whether they wear cassocks or not.'
She was silent, and Gerald could hear Madame Houdet's voice coming from the house. She was scolding the maid.
'But now,' said Mrs Portway, and her long body relaxed in its cane chair as though she had thrown off the weight of years. 'I see now what it was. Reggie must have learnt of this fraud, and it was for that that the wretched Frank Rammage blackmailed him.'
Gerald jerked with surprise. 'Rammage!' he cried. 'Oh! but it can't be the same. I remember the boy you spoke of. He came into the room the day I sprained my ankle. An angelic-looking youth with red hair.'
'Angelic!' Mrs Portway spat the word. 'A mollycoddle! But, yes, he had red hair.'
'This man I know called Rammage is a fat little creature with a bald head. I suppose it must be the same. He's got reddish tufts. Do you know if he lives in Earl's Court Square?'
'He has the impertinence to send letters from that address.' Mrs Portway would commit herself no further on such a subject.
'In any case,' said Gerald, 'I'm afraid this is all the wildest guess of yours, you know. How could Rammage have known of the fraud?'
'He committed it, no doubt. He was very quick to make up to Gilbert Stokesay that summer. A great London poet! Frank Rammage didn't let the grass grow under his feet. I thought Gilbert Stokesay was making fun of him. He called him "Little Mr Self-Educated". But perhaps I was wrong. Rammage was probably his assistant in this fraud as well as in other vilenesses. Indeed, I remember that they were together when Gilbert Stokesay made the discovery.' Mrs Portway seemed to be releasing a lot of pent-up emotion.
Gerald smiled. 'I really think you had better not let your imagination travel too far. You've already done your brother-in-law an injustice of that kind.'
'Frank Rammage was capable of anything vile,' she cried. 'I hated him. He was the only person I ever felt jealous of with Reggie. And there seemed to be no way of getting at him. He was so meek.'
Gerald laughed. He hoped that a humorous attitude might lower the tension. 'Well, Gilbert,' he said, 'whatever his faults, was completely normal.' He paused and shook his head.
'No, it just won't work, you know,' he said. 'It's kind of you to try to find an answer for me. But if Canon Portway was blackmailed - and I do suggest to you that there may be a hundred other reasons for his money disappearing - he wouldn't let himself be got at on a thing like this. He had only to speak his knowledge at any time. Indeed, it was his duty to do so.'
Mrs Portway protested. 'Oh no, you're asking too much of him. The Melpham discovery meant such a lot to him. He believed it had done more than anything to increase the prestige of local historians and of local traditions too. And then he had to think of Professor Stokesay. It's not like now, you know. He was still alive. What a terrible thing to say of his son! Oh
no, Reggie would not have done a thing like that. He was a great Christian.'
Gerald looked at her in amazement, but he saw that it would be useless to explain to her what Canon Portway's duty as a scholar would have been. 'In any case,' he said, 'all this is pure guess-work. We have no evidence at all that he ever doubted the genuineness of the excavation.'
Mrs Portway smiled. 'Ah! That's what I'm coming to. It was while you were talking that I remembered something he once wrote to me. Oh! it was during the nineteen-thirties. He did not write often then. We disagreed over Abyssinia. Reggie was so easily misled. He wrote to me, "It may be that we have no real right to much of our money. My conscience is not clear about this yet, but you must not be surprised if I write some day to tell you so." I thought it was some Socialist idea of his, you know. He lived by the gospels and he did not see that others could not be so good. But now I wonder. Perhaps he referred to the money we were paid for the Melpham treasure. Of course,' she said proudly, 'if this proves to be true, I shall do my best to refund it.'
'Oh, that would hardly be necessary. The Melpham idol, even if it came from, elsewhere in East Folk, as I suspect, is unique so far in English archaeology. That's why the fraud - if fraud it is - could not have been the work of a real scholar. It would have been too senseless.'
Mrs Portway had closed her eyes; she looked a very old woman.
'I have tired you,' Gerald said. 'Thank you for being so patient with me. I'm afraid we haven't got very far, but you have been very kind. May I come to see you tomorrow, not as an investigator, but just as an old friend in search of a chat about the past?'
