A Spot of Folly

by Ruth Rendell

  Five or six years later Roche died. His obituary described him as a millionaire, a traveller in Central America, and a collector of works of Mesoamerican art that were the envy of museums worldwide. He had died of natural causes. His body was found by his butler Andrew Freeman on the lowest of the nine steep steps that formed the southern aspect of a pyramid in his garden at Mandate Benedict, South Devon. This pyramid was a copy, the writer of the obituary said, of the temple of the God of the Smoking Mirror at Tenochtitlán in the Templo Mayor Precinct in Mexico. I wished I could see a picture of it. I thought of its original as the principal wonder Paul had gone there to see. In my mind I held confused images of snakes with feathers, paintings of storm gods and fire gods, stone faces, and spotted cats, and I supposed he had gone there to see them, too.

  The next thing I read about Roche was that, after bequests to his secretary, Nigel Coombs, his valet, Peter Smith, and Andrew Freeman, he had left everything he possessed to the British Museum, including the Mandate Codex. It was there, in the Mexican Room, that I saw the codex, some fifteen years after I had last seen Paul Hazlitt. And I saw it in the company of the woman who had been his girlfriend.

  The Aztecs (I now know) made paper from tree bark pressed into sheets and coated with white pigment. They had no alphabet, no writing, so they set down their ceremonies, their mythology and their terrible blood rites in glyphs: small, sinister, and beautiful pictures in scarlet and gold, black and green and crimson, gods and men and priests, serpents and eagles and jaguars, flutes and torches and flowers. The most famous of these books or codices, according to Michael, is probably the Codex Florentinus in Florence. This one, which had been Roche’s, had been hidden by a priest of Tezcatlipoca in, of all places, a recess behind the altar of a Christian church. An earthquake had brought it to light and its discoverer had sold it to Roche, reprehensibly, certainly illegally, for an undisclosed sum. It was a treasure. Even to those, like me, who knew nothing of the mythology, the ritual, or the history, it was exquisite.

  ‘Strange that a people who were so cruel could make such beautiful things,’ Rosie Thornton said.

  ‘It happens,’ I said, ‘and not just in Mexico.’

  She had asked me to meet her there. My father had had a letter from her in which she said she was in search of Paul. She had tried old college friends of his, an old school friend, his grandmother’s neighbours, all in vain. My parents could be of no more help to her than those others, but she left them a phone number in case they heard of anyone who might know, in case anything came up.

  Curiosity impelled me to phone her and make that appointment. Had she been his girlfriend in the particular sense in which this differs from a mere friend? Strangely enough, I don’t know. Rosie Thornton never really said, only that they knew each other because Paul’s grandmother and her mother were friends. They had known each other since they were children. She gave a sad smile when she said that, not at all surprised that my parents had never heard of her, taking Paul’s concealment of her existence for granted. I suppose that in her way she was as noncommittal as he, though not so secretive as to keep his letters to herself. Not that there was anything in them that the whole world might not have seen, not a word of love, no reference to any intimacy. She showed them to me on the following day in her flat in Gower Street.

  ‘I thought he’d just dropped me,’ she said. ‘But when my mother died and I tried to get in touch with him and couldn’t, that worried me. He’d been fond of my mother and I knew he’d want to know. I tried everyone. And now I’ve met you, and you say he’s never been in touch with any of you, I don’t know what to think.’

  The first letter she had from Paul seemed to have been written on the same day in August as the one to my father. It had much the same information in it, details of the flutes, the agave mantle, the monkey vase and a description of Rafael, his flute teacher, who was also teaching him Spanish and Nahuatl.

  ‘What’s Nahuatl?’ I said.

  ‘The language those people spoke. I don’t know why he had to learn anything. He didn’t go to Mandate to learn but to make an inventory.’

  The life he led was more luxurious than anything he had previously known. Rather ingenuously, he described his private bathroom. Every evening he and Roche sat down to a four-course dinner with nine feet of mahogany table between them, Roche at the head and he at the foot. Roche’s servants waited on him as if he were more honored a guest than he had any right to be.

  That was in August. In his December letter he described the house and the grounds and gave a detailed picture of the Pyramid of Tezcatlipoca. Roche, he said, had had it built five years before from Dartmoor granite. He was an eccentric, self-made and an autodidact, obsessed with what he had seen on his travels in Central America, a fanatic about pre-Hispanic history, ignorant yet passionate, totally involved with Aztec and Mayan mythology. ‘It wouldn’t be too far-fetched,’ Paul wrote, ‘to say he believes in those gods himself! In some of the cults and rituals he certainly believes. Would you credit it that I have seen him perform a ritual to make it rain and another that’s supposed to make his apple trees bear fruit? He is quite crazy! But as kind to me as can be. Nothing is too much trouble for him and his staff to do for me.’

  I asked her if she had written back.

  ‘I wrote five letters in all. Not as long as his and, of course, without as much interesting stuff in them. Strange that, really, because I was the one who was living in London, in the centre of things, and he was in this small village out in the sticks, seeing the same people every day. But his letters were full of beauty and excitement, and mine – well, I never seemed to have anything to say. I used to try to find things to tell him. I remember in one letter I asked him how long his hair was. He’d said he was growing his hair, that Roche had asked him to grow it.’

  ‘Asked him to grow his hair? But why?’

  ‘Something about making himself look like Tezcatlipoca. Those people that made the Codex, they dressed up young men to look like the god and that meant having long hair.’

  ‘Do you think Roche was …?’

  ‘Interested in him sexually? No, I don’t think so. You’ll see why not if you read the rest.’

  He wrote that he never went out alone. If ever he thought of taking a walk or driving into the village or into Exeter, Roche or one of the staff, Andrew or Peter, always said they would come, too. He was never alone, except at night. This was not a complaint, far from it, he was very happy, but it sometimes struck him as unusual, that was all.

  Another strange thing was that there were very few books in the house, no fiction, no works of reference. A Spanish dictionary, yes, and a Nahuatl dictionary, and various art books of collections in museums that were of help in his cataloguing, but that was all. It was disappointing because he would have liked to read about the ceremonies that Roche spoke of. He would have liked to learn more about that culture.

  Sometimes he thought that he was denied information that could easily have been obtained, but this he feared, was through ignorance. He suspected Roche – though it seemed disloyal to say so – of not fully knowing his subject, of not always being as accurate about some of these rituals and customs as a trained scholar would have been.

  ‘Well, it will all be over in April,’ he wrote, ‘and then I will have plenty of chances to be lonely, no doubt! When my contract comes to an end at Easter I will be a free man.’ He added, oddly, ‘The truth is that I don’t always feel quite free.’

  The next letter to Rosie was sent in March. I read a few lines, set it down, and looked at her.

  ‘What does he mean about the girls?’

  ‘It’s all there. I don’t know any more than you do.’ She took her eyes from my face. ‘I wasn’t in love with him and he wasn’t in love with me. I suppose he thought it was all right to write like that to me – about things like that, I mean. I don’t think I much liked it at the time. No woman would. But Paul was naive, wasn’t he? He had terrific blind spots. Perhaps he felt
he had to write to someone and there was no one else.’ She said quickly, as if she wanted to get it said before thinking too much about it, ‘Do you think he was a prisoner?’

  ‘In Devon? In 1964?’

  ‘There was no phone, you know. Roche didn’t have a phone.’

  The staff at Mandate House was joined by four girls, Paul wrote. Up till then there had been no women – it was months, nearly a year, since he had spoken to a woman apart from shop assistants. Roche introduced one of these girls to him ‘in a special way!’ She was to be his companion; he must be starved of female company. ‘Look on her as your girlfriend,’ Roche said. Writing about it to Rosie, Paul followed this piece of reported speech with three exclamation marks, but whether he took Roche up on this offer he omits to say.

  After two more days a second girl showed an interest in him. One night she came to the door of the flat he had in a wing of the house and, when he let her in, went into his bedroom. That was all he said, that the girl he called Xilonan showed an interest in him, tapped on his door, and came into his bedroom. The other girls were not mentioned, and he went into no further details. There was nothing about his relations with one or all of these women, nothing more about ‘female company’ or special kinds of companionship.

  Instead, he went on to write about an Easter celebration Roche was arranging. It was to coincide with the termination of Paul’s contract and would centre on a ceremony, a rite that the Aztecs performed to ensure a good summer. No doubt, Roche said, he would fail to get the details right, but he would like to perform it as best he could with the help of Andrew, Peter, Nigel, and the girls – and of course, Paul. At worst it would rain and the whole thing have to be called off, at best it would be a very beautiful ceremony and perhaps something that could in future be performed as part of a festival. He even envisaged an annual event at Mandate House, attended either by the public or else by specially invited guests.

  ‘He asked me what was I meaning to do after Easter. Go to Mexico, I said. Go and see my relatives in London first and then off to Mexico City. And what do you think he did? Next day he presented me with an air ticket! A bonus, he said, for what I’d done over and above the call of duty.

  ‘We do the ritual on Easter Monday. They dress me up and the girls – he calls them my wives! – take formal leave of me, I climb up the steps of the temple and break a couple of ceramic flutes and no doubt Roche chants some mantra or rubric, and that it. Bob’s your uncle! If all goes according to plan and it works, the sun will never stop shining! I’ll send you a postcard from Aztec-land. With love, Paul.’

  ‘He never did,’ Rosie said, ‘but people don’t, do they, no matter what they say? And they disappear from one’s life – but as utterly as that? From everyone’s life?’

  I asked her what she meant to do.

  ‘What can I do? Worry for a while, I suppose, and then – I don’t know.’

  Paul Hazlitt was probably in Mexico still, or living in Australia, or a mile or two from us in London, married, with children. I told her that. And, no, it was not surprising that he had failed ever to get in touch. We all know how we feel about those we have lost contact with over a long period of time. We are afraid to break the silence, make the tentative approach, lest they are still sore, still hurt, and liable to lash back vindictively.

  Whatever she said, I think she must have loved him, for her face was full of woe. But in time, no doubt, she forgot him, as I did. I met a man and fell in love and married him. I married a man who knew as a professional what Paul’s employer knew only as a dilettante. But Michael is no Declan Roche. For one thing, he has no money, or only what he earns teaching Latin American Studies at this university in the Midwest where we live, and the culture of the Aztecs is not his special subject. But he does, of course, know a good deal about them, as he does about all the ancient Mexica groups, and our house is full of books on Mesoamerica.

  The passage I am going to quote in a minute came not from one of them but is Michael’s own translation from the Spanish of a sixteenth-century friar. The friar must have interpreted one of the codices, perhaps even that which came into Roche’s possession, and been a devout religious who saw the gods of Mexico as demons and their customs as barbaric. Michael’s own view is rather different, dispassionate but inquisitive.

  ‘The whole notion of men impersonating gods is fascinating,’ he says. ‘Of men being gods for a while. They made bloodless war, you see, and took captives, choosing the most beautiful, “without a single corporal blemish,” to be the god. They taught him good manners and reverenced him.’

  ‘But why?’

  For answer he gave me this paper. He intends to use it in a book he is writing, just as he will use several other expositions of Aztec practices. Of course, I have told him about Paul and Roche and Mandate Benedict, but I have noticed an uncharacteristic lack of interest, due perhaps to Roche’s amateur status. Michael is an academic and academics are always like that, distrustful and even contemptuous of the likes of Declan Roche. It was lucky, is his only comment, that the Mandate Codex came to no harm while in his hands.

  All there is left for me to me to say is that I very much doubt if harm came to my second cousin once removed, Paul Hazlitt. I shall not be at all surprised if he turns up here one day at a symposium or to give a course of lectures on, say, Art in the Enlightenment or From Phidias to Giacometti. I would have paid no attention to the following translation but for the mention of the four women, one being named Xilonan, and the long hair …

  Twenty days before the feast, they removed the attire in which until then he had made penance, washing off the paint which he was used to wear. And they married him to four damsels, with whom he had conversation those twenty days that remained. They cut his hair in the way that was used by the captains and tied it in a little knot above his head. With a strange ribbon they tied to his hair two hangings with their decorations made from feathers and gold and rabbit skin, very strange, which they called aztxelli. The four damsels whom they gave him as his women were also raised with great discernment. To that end they named them after four goddesses: one was called Xochiquetzal; another, Xilonan; the third, Atlatonan; and the fourth, Huixtocihuatl.

  Five days before reaching the feast, they honoured this youth like a god. The court followed him and, all richly attired, held solemn feasts and banquets. On the first day they fêted him in the ward known as Tecanman; the second in the ward where they kept the statue of Tezcatlipoca; the third on the little hill which they call Tepetzinco, which is in the lake; the fourth, on another island also in the lake called Tepepulco.

  This fourth feast ended, they put him into a canoe in which the lord was accustomed to travel, covered with its own awning, and with

  him his women who consoled him. And leaving Tepepulco, they navigated towards a place called Tlapitzahuayan, which is near the road to Itzapalapa, that goes towards Chalco, where is a little mound called Acaquilpan or Cahualtepec. In this place his four women left him and all the rest and returned to the city. He was accompanied only by the pages who had attended him throughout the year.

  They took him to a small cu or temple, poorly adorned, which was at the side of the road outside the settlement, about a league distant from the city. He himself ascended the steps of the temple, and on the first level he broke into pieces one of the flutes which he had played in the time of his prosperity, and on the second level he broke another, and thus he went breaking them all, climbing the steps.

  At the top of the cu the satraps were waiting. They cast him on the stone, and, holding him by the arms and feet and head, thrown as he was back on the altar, he who had the obsidian knife passed it through his chest with one great slash. Into the opening thus made, the satrap put in his hand, and wrenching out his heart, offered it to the Sun.

  Trebuchet

  This is the most important thing in life, she thought on waking, yet we never talk about it. When there is something frightening on the television, the radio, we switch of
f and we say, that’s enough, it’s too depressing. Or we used to say that. Now we switch off and say nothing, knowing what is in each other’s minds.

  He slept. He would sleep on for an hour or more. She had got into the habit of waking early when the children were babies and now she seldom slept on after five. Up here the sunrise came before that, it was so far north. The room was beginning to fill with a light that looked silvery because it was reflected off the sea. Every morning, for a long time now, her first thoughts had been of this kind, on the same theme. What will I do in the few minutes we shall be allowed? What shall I say to the children? If we are here on the island shall we be safe? If we had a boat we could escape northwards or westwards across the sea. Should I – and this was a question she baulked at, gagging on unuttered words – should I get something from the doctor? See if he would give me some very strong sleeping pills? And next time we go to the mainland should we buy a bottle, or two bottles, say, of very strong spirits? Looking down at Mark, she wondered how she could propose such a thing to him. And she imagined his look of stern disgust, under which fear hid.

  In the nineteenth century it was sex people feared, in the early part of this one natural death. Those were what they shirked discussing. Now it was this. Whatever was the most important thing in life, that was what you shrank from. Mark could be dreaming of it now. She could tell he was dreaming, and not contentedly, his lips moving, his eyelids flickering, as if the Rapid Eye Movements of deep sleep were fierce enough to transmit a charge to the covering tissue. What she knew he must know. Teaching history was his job, writing his books a lucrative sideline. Better than she he must know that no nation had ever perfected a weapon and not used it. His dissertation for his Master’s degree had been on the history of weapons. There were bits of it she still knew by heart: