Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series

by John Whitbourn

  I sighed.

  ‘Is there any point in asking why?’

  ‘Surely. You see, tomorrow evening, courtesy of Mr Fersen, for a little time out of time, Binscombe will be sur la mer, the Mediterranean mer to be precise. If you were to ask me, I’d sooner have the good old River Wey, but it takes all sorts to make a world, doesn’t it, Mr Oakley? Even a Mr Fersen type.’

  ‘You’re making no sense at all, Mr Disvan, if I may say so.’

  ‘Exactly, Mr Oakley. There isn’t really any particular sense to it. Why should there be in a randomly developed cosmos, eh? Bide puzzled a while longer, Mr O; tomorrow evening, in stark contrast to the modern Mediterranean, all will be clear.’

  * * *

  ‘And what’s that medal for?’ I asked through the noise and chatter.

  ‘The Croix de Guerre said Fersen with genuine modesty. ‘There was a great deal of confusion in Marseilles in ‘44. When the smoke cleared and the bodies were put away, the French felt I deserved it for some reason. Personally, I only recall treating both sides with equal courtesy, with equal robust goodwill. It just shows you there’s no justice, doesn’t it.’

  ‘And that pretty token?’ asked Lucretia Patel, applying the very slightest pressure with her elegant forefinger to the golden sunburst affixed to Mr Fersen’s lapel.

  I felt as green as his superbly tailored jacket. Samuel Patel, a man I counted as a friend, despite his high morals, had several times warned me off his delectable young daughter. However, he’d seemed unperturbed at her disappearing into the night with Fersen the previous evening. Nor did he register the moist gleam now residing in her eyes. It was so unfair.

  ‘Live another thirty years, earn wisdom, and then you will understand,’ he had said when I’d had a brief whine to him about this outrageous discrimination.

  Meanwhile, Fersen smiled in a self-deprecating way and declined to explain the splendid decoration. The audience around his table urged him on.

  ‘Well,’ he conceded at last, ‘I believe it’s called the Order of the Blessed Henry IX, first class. The Jacobite movement awards it for outstanding service towards the restitution of the Stuart monarchy.’

  ‘And what did you do to deserve it?’ I asked, a shade sourly.

  ‘Oh,’ he murmured, indicating with delicate flicks of his be-ringed fingers that we were discussing mere trifles, ‘a little influencing here, a nudge there...’

  ‘An abdication in 1936,’ interrupted Mr Disvan; ‘a hushed-up constitutional crisis in 1979.’

  Mr Fersen smiled again but kept discreetly silent.

  That had been his role throughout the whole party. He was a provoker of conversation, an inciter of action; that much but no more. I had to admit it worked wonderfully. All was going well under his invisible guidance.

  His work now done, Mr Fersen left us all agog and glided off to another section of the Argyll where things might be in danger of flagging.

  ‘Can you never forgive him, Mr Oakley?’ said Disvan, appearing at my side.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Come on, Mr O; right now your face would curdle fresh milk. Forgive him for being what he is.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Everything you will never be. At the same time, you could forgive yourself for enjoying his party—the strain is showing.’

  As ever, Mr Disvan was more or less right. The effort of trying to have a miserable time was getting a bit much. I loosened up a little.

  ‘That’s better,’ said Disvan approvingly. ‘Control of your jealousy will minimise the danger to you.’

  I span so rapidly I spilled my drink. Suddenly my brand new white linen suit had a red wine motorway map down one side.

  ‘Danger? What danger?’

  ‘Ever the magic word to you, Mr Oakley. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’

  ‘But now that you have...’

  ‘All I’m saying, Mr Oakley, is that you should be satisfied with what you are. Mr Fersen is an amusing sort of chap, but that’s all. When all’s said and done, your life is... okay, a bit humdrum perhaps, but basically okay. Why put it all at risk?’

  ‘I do wish you’d speak English sometimes, Mr Disvan,’ I said sadly, attempting to mop my trouser leg with a serviette. ‘Not all the time, I’m not asking for that, but maybe one statement in seven, say.’

  Mr Disvan didn’t seem to bear a grudge.

  ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘I did try—and you’ll find out for yourself anyway. Enjoy the party, Mr Oakley.’

  I was going to say that I’d been doing that, despite myself, but Disvan had wandered off.

  Mr Fersen had called this his ‘Capresi evening.’ Quite how authentic it really was I couldn’t say, never having graced the shores of Capri (apparently Fersen’s main residence) myself. That said, the overall effect seemed pretty ‘spot on’ to me.

  The gods and the landlord had indulged Mr Fersen by, respectively, arranging a warm, star-bright evening and closing the Argyll for the night.

  Fersen’s contribution was the limitless chilled red wine, the bowls of pistachio nuts, the canopy in the beer-garden, exotic seafood snacks and a wide screen video showing of AFC Milan (or someone) playing embarrassingly good football.

  Fersen had surveyed these completed arrangements and pronounced them perfect.

  ‘Sunday evening, my promenade is over, I arrive at the village bar,’ he’d said, relishing every syllable. ‘Children, let us begin.’

  Whereupon festivities had started with a whirl. The locals seemed straightaway at home in this far from home. Even Disvan and the landlord, who thought England ended at Binscombe parish boundary, were happy to join in and let themselves be hijacked far away. I had the not so sneaking suspicion that all this had happened before, perhaps many times. This led naturally to the question of why I’d not been invited on past occasions.

  I caught up with Fersen as he was oozing charm all over Mrs Bretwalda (a madly dangerous thing to do as the human volcano, Mr Bretwalda, was also present) and put the query to him.

  ‘Goodness knows,’ he said casually. ‘Mr Disvan is always in charge of the guest list. If you were left out, what can I do to make up for the oversight..?’

  Somehow, in the course of this swift speech, Fersen had contrived to put his arm round my shoulder in a just-this-side-of-decency friendly manner. With surprising strength, he guided me away and over to a vacant table.

  ‘We never did have our little chat, did we?’ he said, smiling blandly. ‘So let us now make amends for that and other past omissions.’

  To add to my unease, I noticed that Daisy Bretwalda was giving me the blackest of jealous looks. By contrast, her husband had what I called his ‘crocodile smile’ on. Neither contained comfort.

  Mr Fersen poured me a glass of wine from one of the wicker-clad jugs placed all about.

  ‘Have you ever tried risotto all’ Emiliana, Mr Oakley?’

  His Italian was faultless and, in his mouth, ancient and sensuous compared to the plain English that preceded it.

  ‘Um... no, not that I recall.’

  Fersen fixed me with his bleak grey eyes. ‘You should, Mr Oakley, you should. Prepared correctly, it is the nearest a man can approach to paradise this side of the grave.’

  There was no answer to this, even assuming Fersen was only talking about food, which I doubted. Leastways, there was no answer from me.

  ‘I’m more of a corned beef fritter man, myself,’ said Mr Disvan, arriving, I obscurely realised, in the nick of time and seating himself uninvited between us. ‘Mind you, that’s not to say I haven’t got a lot of time for that sort of cucina povera tradition. I just think it’s much abused nowadays—all that grated white truffle toppings and stuff, it’s not in the spirit of things. One must remain true to the spirit of things, mustn’t one, Mr Fersen?’

  Fersen nodded his sad agreement.

  ‘I’m so glad we see eye to eye on that. Incidentally, have you ever tried a corned beef fritter, Mr Fersen?’

&
nbsp; Without saying anything, Fersen gave every indication that he had not and never would. However, he saw that some answer was expected of him.

  ‘In Rome,’ he said hesitantly, a mite unsure in this world of allegories, ‘I believe it is traditional to eat fritters on Saint Joseph’s day...’

  ‘March the nineteenth,’ Disvan obligingly informed me.

  ‘…but, er... “corned beef”, no, I think not.’

  ‘Shame,’ said Mr Disvan concisely. ‘Them and bitter beer are as near as a Binscomite gets to heaven in this vale of tears.’

  I was lost. There was a greater issue than gastronomy being debated here but, like a man full of corned beef fritters, I couldn’t hold it down. Mr Disvan seemed to be on sure ground, whereas Fersen had suffered some opaque defeat. Surrendering to destiny, I let my complete inability to ever learn prompt me to try and find out more.

  ‘Do you live in Italy, Mr Fersen?’

  He was studying the secrets of the universe held in a pistachio nutshell but politely roused himself to answer me.

  ‘Yes. In Capri,’ (he firmly pronounced it Car-pri, not Cap-pri) ‘Mr Oakley, though my work takes me all over the world.’

  ‘But you’re not Italian, are you?’

  ‘No. I was, or am, English,’ he mused, ‘in origin, a long time ago.’

  ‘Inglese Italianato è un diavolo incarnate,’ said Mr Disvan, also with a faultless accent.

  Mr Fersen laughed aloud but there was little humour to it.

  ‘And there, Mr Oakley,’ he said, ‘in one elegant medieval proverb, the game is rather given away. ‘An Italianised Englishman is a devil incarnate.’’

  ‘Sorry?.’

  Fersen leant forward earnestly.

  ‘Mr Oakley, I suspect you are what is called a career man. In this idle hour, since I am perforce “off-duty”, permit me to tell you about my job...’

  * * *

  ‘That’s awful!’ I said.

  ‘Morality in a money-broker!’ laughed Fersen to Mr Disvan. ‘Surely not?’

  ‘And it’s nonsense!’ I added

  Mr Fersen was more amused than slighted.

  ‘To paraphrase the sublime Bard, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Mr Oakley, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.’

  ‘But there’s no such things as “souls”!’

  ‘The evidence is against you, Mr Oakley,’ said Disvan, who was entirely unshocked by what we’d heard. ‘If what you say were true, then Mr Fersen has been perpetrating a hoax on his employer all these years. I rather doubt that would be possible. The employer is known to be a subtle and unforgiving person.’

  ‘If person he be, prior to the final days,’ added Fersen graciously.

  ‘And, being the master of duplicity,’ Mr Disvan went on, ‘you’d have to get up very early to put that sort of trick over on him.’

  ‘I never get up early,’ confirmed Mr Fersen. ‘It’s a barbaric custom.’

  ‘There you are, then,’ said Disvan in his ‘two plus two equal four, you stupid boy’ voice. ‘The balance of probability, if Mr Fersen says his job is to harvest souls for the Prince of Darkness, is that he’s telling the truth. I so happen to know that he is, but I can sympathise with your initial doubt.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Fersen understandingly. ‘I mean, it all sounds so... archaic, doesn’t it, all that souls and Satan business. I prefer to call myself a “recruitment officer”, or possibly a collector of objets d’art if I’m feeling refined. After all, what is life but the purest form of art anyway? As Oscar Wilde said, “I’ve put my genius into my life; all I’ve put into my works is my talent.” An amusing fellow, he, but one of my rare failures, alas. He had a nasty stubborn streak of integrity.’

  I gaped, wondered whether to run and, pending a decision, floundered for something to say. Eventually I settled for a horrified ‘why?’

  Mr Fersen relaxed into his chair and looked almost sad.

  ‘I’ve often asked myself that, Mr Oakley. I suppose it’s because life, any life, is so beautiful. I couldn’t bring myself to part from it. A deal was struck and here I am. It’s a simple story, although occasionally messy in the details.’

  A pre-politeness training stage of behaviour got the upper hand in me.

  ‘Sod this!’ I said. ‘I’m off!’

  A couple of seconds would have seen me make record time to the door had not Disvan restrained me in my seat. For an elderly man he also was suspiciously strong.

  ‘There’s no call for that,’ he said softly. ‘There is a treaty of long standing which makes us safe. Binscombe is excluded from Mr Fersen’s sales area.’

  ‘In return for what?’ I asked, half dreading what I might hear.

  Disvan looked offended.

  ‘In return for nothing,’ he said huffily. ‘We’re just left alone. We don’t strike bargains with Pandemonium; if they want war, they can have it!’

  Mr Fersen held up placating hands.

  ‘As Mr Disvan says, with the very rarest of exceptions, I do not practise my trade here. I wouldn’t dream of undermining such a sweet and charitable peasantry. I must confess, it can be particularly succulent to debauch the chaste and innocent, but that is a temptation I resist during my visits. Perhaps you’d agree, Mr Disvan, after all these years, I think I deserve some credit for showing that restraint.’

  ‘There is that,’ nodded Disvan. ‘Give the Devil his due.’

  ‘And in any case, Mr Oakley,’ continued Fersen at his most persuasive, ‘when you’ve been corrupting and collecting as long as I have, you plump for the easy life and go to places where the work is most easily done.’

  ‘Mr Fersen spends a lot of time in London,’ explained Mr Disvan.

  ‘I need to spend a month or so there every year,’ confirmed Fersen, ‘ “since the harvest is great, the workers few”, to quote the enemy’s book. Honestly, the state of public morality today, I’ll be needing a full time assistant soon!

  I found myself laughing politely along with Disvan, even though a swift study of the balance on my ethical ledger would have wiped the smile off my face.

  ‘At any rate,’ Mr Fersen continued, ‘when I’m through there, I always try and pop in to see how Binscombe’s getting along. I have such an affection for this delicious little frontier region.’

  ‘What frontier?’

  ‘This is disputed land, Mr Oakley—between town and country, between here and the metropolis, between Kent, Mercia and Wessex, between ancient brooding enmities. It’s ideal for my purposes. We have our little “Capresi Evening”, exchange the news, and I get the chance to unwind before pressing on to the good ol’ US of A.’

  He took a sip at his wine and seemed to appreciate it to the greatest possible extent. He was, I now saw, a man who enjoyed life to the full. With a bargain of the sort he had hanging round his neck who could blame him? Fersen was storing up joyful memories for the judgement to come.

  Despite Disvan’s reassuring presence, I still jumped when Fersen turned his head to study me closely.

  ‘You know, Mr Oakley,’ he said cautiously, ‘it occurs to me that you’d like Capri. Once upon a time, Capri was a rare haven of liberality. It was a refuge from the prudish morals of the cold nineteenth century north, a place where the cultured found sympathy for... proclivities and... predilections.’

  ‘A reference, I suppose,’ said Mr Disvan in a suitably chilly voice, ‘to fisherboys and opium.’

  Fersen ignored this. ‘There was elegance and style, the electricity of art and indulgence, and a wonderful disregard for petty bonds.’

  ‘Surely not,’ said Disvan. ‘I understand that the famous resident, Baron Krupp used to enjoy bonds...’

  ‘And there was a freedom about it,’ Fersen gamely pressed on, ‘an almost conscious revival of the Emperor Tiberius’s pleasure gardens on the island and the games of his spintriae.’

  I was hooked in a salacious sort of way. ‘His what?’

  ‘His spintriae,’ Fersen repeated with
relish. ‘Threesomes of artistes, trained since youth in the art of erotic tableaux, who would—’

  ‘Yes, all right, all right,’ said Disvan primly, ‘Mr Oakley can go away and read Suetonius if he wants to.’

  Mr Fersen kindly conceded the issue. ‘Of course, Mr Oakley.’ he said, ‘the “permissive society” has rather spoiled all that, made it somewhat redundant. Capri’s golden age may have gone, but I think that the residual shine would appeal to you. There are some types of Englishmen, a few, who... blossom and grow in the sunshine.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been to Magaluf,’ I stuttered, ‘but I got heat-stroke.’

  Fersen ignored the confession. He seemed to be half talking to himself.

  ‘I have a rather civilised villa there. Only turn of the century, mock-palazzo style, I admit, but it has... memories attached to it. It’s a... beguiling place, Mr Oakley, a combination of cool, walled privacy and sunny, town square vulgarity. It just whispers possibilities to you of its own accord.’

  Tearing my attention from this sales pitch, I could sense that Mr Disvan didn’t quite approve of the way the conversation was going.

  ‘Mr Fersen met Lenin there, didn’t you?’ he interrupted.

  ‘Yes indeed.’ Fersen smiled in a genuinely modest way. ‘Maxim Gorky and some other ultra-leftists lived in a nearby villa for a while, fiddling about with a new theory called “Fideism” or something like that. Dear Vladimir came to visit them roundabout... oh, 1908, 1909, I think. He wanted to sort them out. He didn’t approve of the mysticism they were dabbling in.’

  ‘ “The Capri School are fishing in polluted waters”,’ recited Disvan, ‘“…religion, metaphysics, revisionism; dragging every kind of fad and fashion into Marxism”…’

  ‘Precisely,’ Fersen agreed. ‘And while he was there I had some chats with him, enjoying the sun in the main piazza. Such a tiger in debate, but in the boudoir what a let down. A cardinal would have been more mettlesome—barely worth my trouble. An indifferent chess player as well, never mind what you read in the biographies. Mind you, I found him very receptive in some other ways. I could do business with him.’