September Castle

by Simon Raven

  Why am I so resigned? Because having taken a large dose of Aristarchos’ herb (when I heard that tyre go off and realized that capture was inevitable) I am still in absolute control of my own soul: I tell it to be at peace, and it is so. But how much longer will the dose last? It might be advisable to renew it before they start their work; but the herb is in a phylactery on a chain round my neck, and my hands are bound behind my back. And yet…if somehow I could come at the herb in the phylactery, I should have the means – why did I not think of this before? – of controlling not only my own soul but also theirs. If somehow I could persuade them to chew a flake of the leaf, I could command them utterly.

  The eldest of Ivan’s four guardians, a frizzy-haired man with an ‘Homme qui rit’ moustache, crossed the room from the fireplace and waved a pair of red-hot tongs under Ivan’s nostrils.

  ‘This is an end of patience,’ he said. ‘Tell us exactly where and how and what we may discover.’

  ‘I have told you,’ said Ivan, ‘that it is not possible to be exact. But in so far as advice may be given, it is to be obtained from a small metal cylinder which you will find, if you open my shirt, on a chain around my neck.’

  The frizzy-haired man unbuttoned Ivan’s shirt, then summoned another from the group by the fire, one with a wide mouth and protruding underlip, beneath which the chin was dotted with ripe blackheads. Together the two men looked at Ivan’s phylactery. Then the second man put out a furry paw with stubby fingers and long filthy nails and tentatively began to fondle the metal object, breathing heavily the while.

  ‘Bye-bye, Baby,’ said Jo-Jo. ‘Please be a trés sage Baby, all the time.’

  ‘Bye-bye, Tullia,’ said Ptolemaeos. ‘Goodbye, Canteloupe.’ Ptolemaeos shook hands with Canteloupe. Jo-Jo tilted her head and put her tongue as far down Baby’s throat as it would go.

  Jo-Jo and Ptolemaeos were at Heathrow, seeing Baby and Canteloupe off. In the end it had been decided that Baby and Canteloupe should fly to Marseille, hire a car in which to drive to Saint-Gilles, meet Ivan there that evening, spend the following morning making any investigation in the area which Ivan might deem necessary, and then drive north to Dieppe through the afternoon and the night in the hired car, leaving Ivan’s Land Rover in Saint-Gilles for later collection. This was very different from the original scheme, whereby Baby, Canteloupe and Ivan were to have rolled north at leisure, examining all important places on Xanthippe’s route by the way. Such a dilatory proceeding was no longer possible because of the restorations imminent at Arques and the necessity (as Ptolemaeos insisted) of their being there eight days before these began.

  ‘In which case,’ Canteloupe had said, ‘there doesn’t seem much point in our meeting Barraclough down there. Just send him a wire at the hotel and tell him to meet us in Dieppe.’

  ‘No,’ Ptolemaeos had replied. ‘In the first place I want to preserve the pretence that Ivan is your valet – and this will be possible only if you arrive in Dieppe with him. Secondly, I want someone on the spot in Saint-Gilles when he gets there to emphasize the new urgency imposed by the restorations. And thirdly, I want you there to signal me in case he doesn’t appear at all. He has been…diverted. Not radically, I trust, but one can never quite tell in this sort of a circus.’

  ‘And so,’ Ptolemaeos was now saying to Canteloupe as he shook hands with him at Heathrow, ‘telephone me at once if Ivan is not there by the time you have finished your coffee and cognac this evening.’

  ‘I think I shall have Marc this evening. They do it rather well down there, you know. Roughish, of course, but very euphoria-making.’

  ‘Then have two large glasses of the stuff,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘and if he’s not there when you get to the bottom of the second, get on to the blower. Ivan is the most punctual man in the world and allows ample margins. If he’s not there by the end of dinner, it means he won’t come. Which in turn means that he can’t.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Baby, as Jo-Jo at last withdrew. ‘You shouldn’t do that to a girl at Heathrow. It makes her go all funny in front of all the people.’

  ‘You’re sure you still want to go,’ said Jo-Jo, ‘after all I told you?’

  In accordance with her agreement with Ptolemaeos, Jo-Jo had reported to Baby the entire tale of Xanthippe’s death and subsequent disposal, and had thus given her full warning of the kind of thing she really might be in for at Arques, which wasn’t just acting as upper-class cover for Ivan Barraclough. But Baby had said that she had always really suspected this and found the prospect quite exciting.

  ‘I only hope poor old Canty doesn’t get too bored,’ she now said to Jo-Jo as they all moved towards the passport barrier, ‘but he can always go to the Casino… Oh good: here’s that heavenly Len with my novel. I’m glad he’s popped up.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Jo-Jo breathlessly.

  Len gave Baby a paper bag.

  ‘They hadn’t got Middlemarch,’ Len said, ‘so I settled for Deronda.’

  ‘Blissikins,’ said Baby. ‘All about a young girl who marries a crinkly. I shall read it aloud to Canty.’

  She blew out her cheeks and pointed to one of them. Len kissed it in elegantly caddish style and then shook hands with Canteloupe.

  ‘Ta-ta, you two,’ said Len.

  ‘Cheery-bye,’ said Jo-Jo, and sniffed loudly.

  ‘Chin-chin,’ said Baby, and to Len sotto voce, ‘You be molto gentile with my dolce Jo-Jo.’

  ‘Ciao,’ said Canteloupe amiably.

  ‘Go well,’ said Ptolemaeos to Tullia and Canteloupe as they passed through the barrier.

  The first time Ivan had used Aristarchos’ herb, on the Messenger on the island in the lake of Ioannina, he had been lucky. For in fact the Messenger, as he himself admitted to Ivan, had clandestinely read Hubert of Avallon’s Appendix while on a visit to Ptolemaeos. He should therefore have known all about the herb and its powers, in which case he should have been on his guard against them. But evidently his reading of the Appendix had been so hurried and jumpy that he had omitted or failed to retain the passages about Aristarchos. This being so, Ivan argued to himself (as the furry paw of his second jailer caressed the phylactery), this being so, none other of the conspirators could know anything about the herb or what could be done with it. None of these four men in this low-built house could know that the herb, self-administered, enabled one to command one’s soul, and, if deliberately administered by oneself to others, enabled one to command theirs. Thus, they could not know that, if they tasted the herb at his bidding or suggestion, they were his, body and spirit, for at least forty-eight hours.

  The furry paw found a little spring. One end of the cylinder flipped open. The frizzy-haired man now took over, shaking out what looked like green cigar leaf into his palm.

  ‘What advice can be here?’ he asked.

  He called a third man, handed him the tongs, bade him re-heat them.

  ‘What advice?’ he repeated.

  ‘To find what you seek,’ said Ivan, ‘you will need vision. This will give you that vision. You must surely remember, you have surely been told, that this matter is a mystery which has to do with a Lady who died of a broken heart.’

  ‘So you have been saying since we took you. I tell you, English, all this talk of mysteries is just to confuse and hide. We are men of reason’ – he tapped its seat beneath its frizzy hair – ‘and we talk of bearings and measurements, of distances along and across and down, not of mysteries.’

  ‘Then you will find nothing.’

  ‘Suppose,’ said the second man, ‘that we trusted you. How is this advice sought?’

  ‘By chewing the leaf. It conjures vision and from vision comes advice.’

  ‘From the dead Lady?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘We could reach her from here?’

  ‘Only with difficulty. It is easier if you are closer to her tomb. And in order to address her it is necessary that you should know many things about her. But you can make experiment here. You can chew the le
af and raise the vision. If the Lady does not answer you in the vision, you may still converse with another, alive or dead, whom you know or love.’

  You can emancipate a peasant from poverty, ignorance and disease, Ptolemaeos used to say to Ivan during their travels, from gross diet and even from insanitary habit; but from superstition – never. Well…one would see.

  Baby and Canteloupe drove from Marseille to Saint-Gilles by way of Arles and being in no hurry went to look at the Arena there which now serves as a bull ring.

  ‘Got the guide book?’ said Canteloupe.

  ‘You know better than that, Canty. You know very well that one should look at the guide book before and after but never when one’s actually there. While you’re there you must use your eyes, not glue them to print.’

  ‘Yes. I remember your saying that in Venice. That was when I first began to love you. What a funny little thing you were in your tartan skirt and your kneesocks. Full of guts.’

  ‘Silly Canty. Now just sit quiet on this stone and hold my hand, and I’ll tell you a poem. It’s about Arles, though not about the bit we’re in now.

  ‘“Dans Arles, où sont les Alyscamps,”’ Baby began, and then continued to the end of the poem, which said that when one is among the tombs or monuments of the dead one is apt to feel very keenly the joy of living, and that then, of all times, one should beware, treading humbly and talking low.

  ‘I do not trust it,’ said the man with the frizzy hair.

  ‘So far we have got nowhere,’ said the man with the furry hands. ‘Why not give this a try? If one of us tries it, whatever happens there are still three of us to take care of him.’

  He pointed down at the bound and supine Ivan.

  ‘If you are going to try it,’ said Ivan, ‘it is better that two of you should. With two of you together the vision will be more powerful. If you first agree whom you wish to summon, and summon him or her together, your call will have the power, not of two, but of four.’

  ‘Could we summon the Lady from her tomb if there were two of us?’

  ‘Perhaps. You would be more likely to succeed if we were in some place in which the Lady had actually lived, like Ilyssos, or which she had passed through on her journey, like Bari or Corfu, because a summons from a place known to her would travel more easily to her. But even from here, if there were two of you –’

  ‘Did the Lady travel to Venice or Trieste?’

  ‘No,’ said Ivan, gratefully noting that the question implied proximity to these cities and thus confirmed his hope and supposition that he had been brought north, near to the Italian border. His plan now was simple. If he could persuade two of his interrogators to taste the herb of Aristarchos, he could command them to overpower the other two and bring him swiftly to his trysting-place in Saint-Gilles. He was due there that very evening for dinner: punctual he could not be, but since he would need only two hours to cross Italy and drive on to Saint-Gilles, he could be there before the night was spent (having telephoned the hotel to put those whom he must meet at ease), yes, he could be there before dawn tomorrow…if only he could get away now.

  ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘The Lady did not travel to Venice or Trieste…but she would have passed through Venice had her Guardian not been warned that there was plague in the city. So you might say there was an association with Venice. How far are we from it?’

  ‘About fifty miles,’ said the blubber lips, grudgingly.

  ‘Not very helpful. Still, if there were two suppliants… Anyway, what can you lose? I am powerless, and there would still be two of you to keep me so.’

  ‘Why are you so eager that we should take this herb?’

  ‘Because it may give you information…or at least advice… which I cannot give, and thus save me from being tortured to no purpose.’

  The two faces (ferret snout below frizzy hair, black-speckled chin below labial droop) bent over the green shreds. You can wean a peasant from wife-beating, incest, hoarding grain or clipping coin, Ptolemaeos had said years ago, or even from his atavistic greed for land; but only when fishes lay their eggs in trees will you wean him from superstition.

  ‘Very well,’ said the ferret snout, he that was leader of them all: ‘very well. We shall try it. You two,’ he called to the couple by the fire, ‘keep good watch and heat those tongs white-hot. And now,’ he said to his lippy companion, ‘you taste first.’

  ‘I think I’d like to come now,’ said Len.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Jo-Jo. ‘The whole point is that you don’t come. You get quite near coming, then you stop and let it all die down, and then you start again and get quite near coming, and then –’

  ‘You go stark raving bonkers.’

  ‘It’s all a matter of discipline. It’s often better to stick to a kind of skin massage which eases rather than arouses. Then there are all sorts of ways of tickling which are simply delicious but wouldn’t make you actually come in a hundred years. So don’t keep concentrating on my clitoris the whole time: play with my bottom instead.’

  ‘Lovely little bottom. Strong and tight.’

  ‘That’s better. And in the same way I’ll leave your foreskin alone – though I love the way it slides up and down – and play with your backbone. There are so many marvellous things to do,’ said Jo-Jo, ‘things which can go on for hours and hours, that it’s quite absurdly wasteful to knock ourselves out with spurts and spasms after only a few minutes – or indeed at all.’

  ‘And this is what that Ptoly’s taught you?’

  ‘Yes. This is what that Ptoly’s taught me.’

  ‘Well, I don’t say but what there might be something in it, though a fellow likes to squirt his nuts off from time to time. Does Ptoly mind…our being together like this?’

  ‘No. You heard what he said. He’s not a jealous man and he knows that people need a change from time to time. Ooooooh. Do that again – at the bottom of the crack.’

  ‘You know…all you need is a prick and you’d be a lovely boy.’

  ‘That’s what Baby Canteloupe says.’

  ‘Never mind her. Do that thing with your tongue – between my shoulder blades.’

  ‘What a blissful day it’s been,’ said Baby as she poured the coffee in the Hotel Cours in Saint-Gilles. ‘I know they say the Camargue is dreary, but there’s something about those salt-marshes. Childe Roland country.’

  ‘We can see more of them tomorrow,’ said Canteloupe. ‘The idea is that Ivan Barraclough may want to examine something or other here in Saint-Gilles, or nearby, before we leave. If he doesn’t need us, we can go for a drive.’

  ‘We’d better take care not to take the wrong turning,’ Baby said.

  ‘What can you mean?’

  ‘If you take the wrong turning in Childe Roland country,’ Baby prompted him, ‘and if you go so much as five yards down it, you can never get back on to your proper road. It’s vanished.’ Baby giggled. ‘You go back and look for it and it isn’t there. All there is is a flat plain of mud, stretching forever in all directions, oozing fog.’

  ‘I sometimes wonder if we haven’t taken that turning already. This whole business: Xanthippe and her soul and her treasure: there’s madness here – or worse. Can we ever get out of the fog, one asks oneself, and back on the proper road?’

  ‘We came in with our eyes open,’ Baby said.

  ‘And of course Ptolemaeos has been very obliging over the money. But it was really only a small private thing. Our Stately Home Corporation,’ said Canteloupe, ‘has always been in the best of nick. All I needed was a cure for a small bout of financial hiccups – something to do with a bad year on Lloyd’s, a sum low in six figures. Was that worth getting us into this weirdness of Ptolemaeos Tunne’s?’

  ‘Anyway, we are in,’ Baby said, ‘so we’d better make the best of it. And now I’ll tell you another thing. That’s your second Marc de Provence.’

  ‘You’ve taken to counting?’

  ‘Just for tonight. Your second Marc, nearly finished, and no sign of B
arraclough. You’d better ring up Ptoly.’

  ‘Give him a few minutes more.’

  ‘Certainly. Until that Marc’s actually finished. Then you ring. That’s what Ptoly said, and that’s what we’ll do. If you stray down the wrong turning in Childe Roland country,’ said Baby, ‘then the only hope lies in strict discipline.’

  When I wake up, thought Jean-Marie Guiscard, there will be just nine days to go before we start on the Castle. Nine days before I start positively disobeying the voice that begged me to desist. Will the voice speak again? Or will the soul which (according to the eighteenth-century chart) is imprisoned somewhere between the donjon and the tilting yard and ‘shapes the air around it by its virtue’ – will this soul make some pronouncement, express some sentiment of pain or anger?

  If it is confined, thought Jean-Marie, then pronounce is all that it can do. Or is it? If it can ‘impose shapes’ upon the air in the vicinity, might it not, even although it is immobile, be very active in its own place?