The Troubadour

by Simon Raven

  ‘Cant-Fun doing bad? It’ll pick up when the summer comes. ’ Cant-Fun was the ‘fun complex’ in which Canteloupe entertained the public that visited his ‘stately home’.

  ‘No it won’t neither,’ said Canteloupe, who some times employed a double negative when he was vexed. ‘Everybody’s sick of bloody Cant-Fun. They want something new.’

  All this was articulated in Canteloupe’s usual clear, easy tones and so was audible, despite the wind, to Rosie Stern, who was watching the fives with the two men.

  ‘Then give ’em something new,’ Leonard said.

  ‘What do you think they want?’

  ‘Squealing music. Writhing nautch-girls and blackamoor studs.’

  ‘We do quite well in the tit and cunt department already.’

  ‘These days the young want it jet black,’ said Leonard. ‘They want priapic bucks to be straddling over open-groin girlies with chain saws and road drills. I bet we haven’t got that.’

  ‘They’d probably like a few under-age girls as well,’ contributed Rosie.

  ‘Why not?’ said Leonard. ‘During the last war they had choruses of prancing ten-year-olds in variety shows and pantomimes. Everyone loved it.’

  ‘It isn’t mentioned much these days,’ Canteloupe said.

  ‘That’s because we’ve lost our innocence,’ said Rosie. ‘People feel guilty if they like looking at little girls’ legs. In the old days it would have been put down to paternal or avuncular affection, like letting them straddle your knee with their knickers showing. Now everyone realises just where that sort of thing can lead. And so they’ve all got guilty – and enjoy it more than ever when they get the chance.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ said Canteloupe, ‘that whatever changes we have in the type of amusement offered, we shall certainly have to repair and rebuild. The whole place is a shambles. And if we make alterations in structure, we shall need Balbo Blakeney to come from Lancaster to rearrange the acoustics. As an amateur architect and a scientist, he’s a real pro at fixing things so that nasty noises inseparable from proletarian junketings do not penetrate to the private quarters. He set up Cant-Fun years ago in such a way that all the hullabuloo of the space ships and sex saucers was quite inaudible even as close as the Rose Garden and the Grave Ground. But they tell me that poor old Balbo’s too ill to move, let alone start designing new pleasure parks. He’ll probably be the next to join my sister-in-law in the Lancaster Crypt.’

  ‘And I’ll be the next,’ said Leonard in a fit of self-pity, ‘to join your ancestors in the Grave Ground here – that’s if you’ll let me into the place.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Canteloupe. ‘I shall be having a hole here myself when my day comes, and God knows my claims are pretty dodgy. A chancy remainder on the distaff side granted by a mad king –’

  ‘– To say nothing,’ said Leonard, ‘of that potty by-blow2 in the marshes of the Veneto.’

  ‘– If you’re going to bring that up again,’ Canteloupe said, ‘I certainly shan’t fit you into my Grave Ground. In any case, that boy – Paolo, was he called? – is now in an island prison in the Lagoon for the criminally insane.’

  ‘But still the rightful Marquess Canteloupe,’ huffed Leonard.

  ‘Little pitchers,’ said Canteloupe, indicating Rosie, ‘have enormous ears.’

  ‘No need to worry about me, my lord,’ said Rosie, who was a very formal child in many respects. ‘I shan’t be telling anyone. Anyhow, the story’s perfectly well known to most of your friends by now. Major Gray let it out when he was in drink. Still nothing to worry about, as nobody really believes it: a wicked young lording in exile in Venice raping peasant girls in the middle of a swamp – that sort of thing died with Dumas.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it, Miss Rosie,’ said Canteloupe. ‘By the way, since you’re a gentlewoman, you call me “Canteloupe”.’

  ‘Not “Lord Canteloupe”?’

  ‘No. Still less “my lord”.“Canteloupe”.’

  ‘With pleasure. And now, Canteloupe, what are you going to do about money? This business of reviving Cant-Fun – with or without the help of poor Mr Blakeney – is absolute rubbish. You don’t need to go on with sucking up to the Jacquerie, like Bath and Bedford and the rest. You’ve got a huge share in our printing and publishing firm – after all, you and my father founded the publishing half of it – and so has your wife, whose adoptive father founded the other half; and her share will be even bigger now that Carmilla’s dead. So if you haven’t enough to keep all this up’ – Rosie lifted her arms to embrace the Great Court, the Fives Court, the Campanile – ‘you go and ask Lady Canteloupe, politely of course, and I’m sure she’ll give you what you need.’

  ‘What makes you think that, Miss Rosie?’

  Rosie shook out her raven hair, then gathered it about her throat against the cold.

  ‘You see the way those two rebarbative young men are cheating Lady Canteloupe and Tessa?’ Rosie said.

  ‘It’s so obvious it’s pathetic.’

  ‘But neither your wife nor Tessa protests about it. As it happens they’re winning easily enough; but they wouldn’t make a row even if they were losing. Quite simply, Canteloupe, they are too grand – grand in the best sense, I mean; too generous, too magnanimous. They do not wish to make those two boys look any more squalid and nasty than they look already. They pity those boys – my darling Tessa and your queenly wife. By the same token they are incapable of cruelty or meanness. That is why Lady Canteloupe will give you what you ask, always providing you are civil. And how could you be other?’

  ‘You are cold, Miss Rosie. Their match is nearly done. I would wish to hear more from you of grandeur and civility. Leonard…good afternoon.’

  Canteloupe raised his brown racing trilby to Leonard, waved it to his wife and Teresa in the Fives Court, then led Rosie through a door in the wall so low that both of them had to stoop.

  Ten minutes later, as Theodosia and Teresa came away from the Fives Court, having trounced the two fouling brothers from Harrow, she said curtly to Leonard, who was still there looking at Tessa’s downy legs,

  ‘Tell those boys to have a shower in the room allotted to them, and see that a liberal tea is sent up to them there. Under the circumstances, I do not wish to see them again before they go.’

  She turned and nodded to the two boys, who had clearly heard every word she said to Leonard, then strode away across the Great Court; Teresa nodded a little more kindly than Theodosia to the pair, then skipped for a few paces to catch up with her friend.

  ‘Go and change,’ said Leonard to the Harrovians. ‘Your tea will be coming up by the time you’ve finished.’

  ‘We know,’ they said sheepishly, and went on their way, in the opposite direction to that taken by Theodosia and Teresa.

  One more local family we shan’t be seeing again, thought Leonard as he watched the two boys slouch away. Theodosia may be too grand to raise a row, as little Rosie was saying, but she leaves no one in doubt as to her opinions.

  He started towards the kitchens to order the boys’ tea. Out of the kitchen door came Dobrila, carrying a white bundle at her breast. Little Lady Nausikaa, thought Leonard. Dobrila made towards Theodosia and Tessa, and began to hold out the bundle; but Theodosia merely waved perfunctorily, without stopping, while Tessa, although she turned to smile as well as wave, kept pace with the Marchioness.

  So Dobrila kept on towards Leonard.

  ‘Dobro vece, Dobrila,’ said Leonard; ‘kako ste?’

  ‘Well, hvala. And you, gentleman?’

  ‘It is a bitter day for the very old and the very young. Lady Nausikaa would surely be warmer in a pram.’

  ‘In my island we do not have prams. We carry our babies everywhere. I do not think the Lady Canteloupe would carry the Lady Nausikaa. I do not think she loves her enough.’

  ‘But Lord Canteloupe loves her,’ said Leonard; ‘and so do you. As the world goes, she is lucky.’

  ‘But I shall not always be here with he
r, gentleman. Nor will my lord, I think. What will she do for love then?’

  ‘Doubtless she will learn, as most of us do, to live without it.’

  ‘On my island there would always be somebody to love and to carry her. Even if all her family died (which would not, on my island, be possible) there would still be somebody to hold her and to love her.’

  ‘This is not your island, Dobrila, it is England. Perhaps you should take Lady Nausikaa to your island. Perhaps she would be happier there than she is going to be here.’

  ‘She would be poor there,’ said Dobrila; ‘here she will be rich.’

  ‘That,’ said Leonard, ‘remains to be seen. Laku , Dobrila,’ he said as he started again towards the kitchens.

  Canteloupe and Rosie observed the events in the Great Court from a small window halfway up the Campanile.

  ‘What do you make of that?’ said Canteloupe, as the two Harrovians were dismissed with barely a gesture. ‘You said she pitied those boys –’

  ‘– And so forbore to humiliate them in public. That is not to say she was bound to gush all over them. Such hypocrisy would have been intolerable.’

  ‘Hypocrisy is the necessary lubricant of good manners,’ Canteloupe said. ‘Was she not almost cruel, leaving them like that?’

  ‘No, Canteloupe. Merely firm. She put them in their place.’

  ‘I suppose so. ’ The window was narrow and they were very close. ‘And was she putting Nausikaa in her place – striding past her like that?’

  ‘It is just as well that she should stay away from Lady Nausikaa,’ said Rosie, ‘if she does not much care for her. Women sometimes kill their babies if they mislike them. I am sure Lady Nausikaa will do very well with that jolly girl from the sea.’

  ‘I dare say, Miss Rosie. There’s something I want you to enjoy. First we must go higher, to another window.’

  ‘As high as the bells?’

  ‘Not quite as high,’ said Canteloupe, ‘as that.’

  When she left Leonard Percival, Dobrila crossed the Great Court and went down a passage into the Rose Garden, where there wasn’t much in the way of roses.

  ‘A bare and dreary garden,’ said Dobrila, in her own tongue, to the infant Nausikaa in her arms; ‘but soon, when the summer comes, it will be happier. I shall be with you, I think, at least until the summer.’

  Lady Nausikaa dribbled. Dobrila put her hand in her trouser pocket, pulled out a very clean handkerchief, and wiped Lady Nausikaa’s toothless mouth.

  Dobrila walked on through the black bushes. To her right was a hedge, through which a path led into a meadow and along a stream to a little wood of lady birch. Since Dobrila had already been in the meadow, she now looked to her left, where was a grass bank or rampart topped by a high and handsome stone wall beyond which sprang the trunks of Aleppo pines, spreading and flattening into canopies of rifle green. Dobrila saw that there was no way through the wall (which, with the trees and the green rampart, had been designed by Balbo Blakeney to exclude both the crowds and the cacophony that might otherwise issue from Cant-Fun on the other side), and she therefore decided to go straight on.

  At the far right-hand corner of the Rose Garden a small area was enclosed by a yew hedge some ten feet high. An arch cut through this admitted Dobrila and her charge to the Grave Ground, in which stood slabs of marble and occasional obelisks, all of moderate size and elegant workmanship. The dates on the stones, still clearly legible because deeply and sharply incised, began on a slab sunk far into the earth with 12 August 1680, and ended (Dobrila saw as she wandered) with an early day of this very year, 1982, on a Grecian altar erected in honour of someone called ‘Gat-Toothed Jenny’, a person also referred to (Dobrila recalled) on a tablet set in the wall of the Fives Court, in which she had, apparently, fallen and died.

  ‘Why do we walk here, my darling?’ said Dobrila to Nausikaa. ‘It is a sad place, and the stones tell tales of mystery and disquiet. Who can be this lady with such a name as Gat-Toothed Jenny?3 And now, see here: a broken column with a tall plinth, and on that plinth:

  ‘YOU THAT PASS

  THINK OF THE BLITHE BOY

  MUSCATEER4

  WHO SICKENED AND DIED

  IN BANGALORE SOUTH INDIA

  AGED BARELY NINETEEN YEARS

  ANNO DOMINI MDCCCCXLVI

  WHEN THE KING AND EMPEROR YET

  REIGNED

  OVER THAT UNHAPPY CONTINENT

  ‘FOR MUSCATEER HIS BODY

  IT LIES IN THE CEMETERY OF THE GARRISON

  CHURCH

  OF BANGALORE

  BUT FOR HIS SOUL

  THE BLACK KNIGHTS CAME FOR HIM TO

  TAKE HIM

  AS THEY SHALL COME FOR ME AND MINE

  AND ALL OF OUR NAME WHO SUCCEED ME

  UNTIL THE LAST’

  Having read this inscription four or five times (her English being yet imperfect) until she understood it (in so far as she ever would), Dobrila shook her head and crossed herself, clutched the Lady Nausikaa more closely to her (lest the Black Knights should come into the garden seeking one of her name) and ran with her, swift and true, until she had brought her safe to her nursery.

  Canteloupe stationed Rosie by an even narrower window than the one which they had previously looked through lower down in the Campanile. Then he stood behind her, put his arms round her waist, and said:

  ‘I think you suffer from vertigo. I can tell by the way you are trembling. Even though there are bars across this window, you fear lest you may fall from it.’

  ‘Yes…my lord.’

  ‘Canteloupe. But you feel safe, now that my arms are round you?’

  ‘Yes, Canteloupe.’

  ‘Now look: slightly to the left; and slightly down. What do you see?’

  ‘I see a bay window, and through it a naked back. Auburn hair above it. Tessa. On her back is a small lump, on the right shoulder blade. When she was younger it appeared much larger: we used to make jokes about it, calling it her hump, her Rumpel Stiltzkin, and I took a delight in touching it. Now she has grown but…it…has not grown. It was, and is, the size of a large marble, no longer of consequence if ever it was. But I see that Lady Canteloupe takes a delight in it, just as I used to. Her hand has come to fondle it.’

  ‘Her delight is different from yours,’ Canteloupe said. ‘Yours was just childish amusement and curiosity. Thea’s is a yearning for a peculiarity of the flesh. Why are you trembling, Miss Rosie? Is it the vertigo again?’

  ‘No…my lord.’

  ‘Canteloupe.’

  ‘No. Canteloupe.’

  ‘Is it, then, what you are watching? The desire in action of a woman for a girl and a girl for a woman?’

  ‘No. Canteloupe.’

  ‘Then what is it, Miss Rosie?’

  ‘It is desire for you, Canteloupe, who loved my father and will now love me as my father loved me.’

  ‘But you did not desire your father? Nor he you?’

  ‘No. One may not admit to desiring one’s father, or one’s daughter. But I may admit to desiring you.’

  ‘I am an old man.’

  ‘One may desire old men. Once the Lord God had given his permission, Lot’s daughters desired Lot.’

  ‘No they did not,’ said Canteloupe: ‘they merely did their duty as the Lord God commanded them, that their race might live.’

  ‘I have seen pictures,’ said Rosie, ‘in which Lot’s daughters are taking a delight in the matter.’

  ‘There are other pictures in which they are not. In any case, these are only pictures.’

  ‘Many young females have desired old men,’ said Rosie. ‘Aurora continued to desire Tithonus even after he was old.’

  ‘But not when he became impotent.’

  ‘Ah,’ Rosie said. ‘Tessa has turned. She is standing to Lady Canteloupe as I am standing to you. ’ Rosie loosed the clasp of the belt round her corduroy trousers, which were an old pair of her brother’s. ‘Lady Canteloupe is kissing Teresa’s little lump. Her hands are where you
rs are on me. Can they see us?’

  ‘Perhaps. If they looked upward.’

  ‘Lady Canteloupe is looking upward. So is Tessa. But Tessa at least can see nothing. Regard Tessa’s thighs. It is as though they were melting wax.’

  The cracked bell, Old Mortality, began to chime the half-hour above them. Rosie shuddered violently. Canteloupe lowered his right hand.

  ‘There?’

  ‘Yes. Canteloupe. And down.’

  Canteloupe lowered his other hand. Rosie’s thin legs jerked and kicked like a merry puppet’s.

  Raisley Conyngham, wearing the bottle-blue blazer of his regiment, the Blue Mowbrays, with its two ranks of four jade buttons stamped with an earl’s coronet, fussed round the columns at the west end of the Temple of Hera at Paestum.

  ‘Fluted with no plinths,’ Raisley said. ‘No plinths, or soccles as they are sometimes called. Archaic Doric.’

  His brown-gaitered legs, tripping and twinkling, gave his lower half a look of Peter Cushing, Marius thought. His head and face, on the other hand, rather reminded one of Christopher Lee. His skull seemed to have expanded of late. No doubt about it: Raisley Conyngham was top heavy.

  Marius turned to look west over a wilderness which became a salt marsh as it approached the unseen sea. Does Raisley really believe there is a curse over Ullacote? thought Marius: does he really believe that this curse killed, or helped to kill, Lover Pie and Jenny and Captain Lamprey and Carmilla and Piero? When I was here with Piero, in the autumn, Piero said almost exactly the same as Raisley about those columns, though Piero didn’t use the term ‘soccles’ and did say something about the columns being barrel-shaped. He also said, I remember, that I was an excellent companion, when I chose to be, but was lacking in charity.

  ‘A lire for your thoughts,’ said Raisley Conyngham.

  Marius turned back to the temple.

  ‘I was thinking of when I was here with Piero Caspar,’ he said. ‘Piero accused me of lacking charity. Do you think, sir, that the charge is fair?’

  ‘All boys of your age lack charity,’ said Raisley Conyngham; ‘they have too much else to think about. I have a surprise for you. Just before we left for Heathrow, I received, sub rosa, an early and privileged account of your O level results. You had a distinction in every paper you did.’