Oxford Blood

by Antonia Fraser

  Jemima certainly could not imagine her married to her cousin Saffron, although she would have made an excellent Marchioness of the old-fashioned school; but the pair of them would have driven each other to desperation. Jemima only hoped that the dominating streak Fanny had inherited from her father - at present concealed under the softness of girlhood - would not lead her in the same political direction as Andrew Iverstone.

  It was Andrew Iverstone who constituted the problem for Jack, confided Fanny. That and his political ambitions.

  'Can you imagine what it's like for him, being the son of Old Rabblerouse? For Jack who won't allow any violent emotion whatsoever to surface? Quite apart from being ambitious to save the world and all that sort of thing. So it's twice as important for Jack to make his name as for anyone else. You must feature him on your programme. Doing his thing. This protest with that rather dishy tutor who eats nuts, in his shorts and sandals. Just so everyone can see he doesn't agree with Daddy. Please, Jemima.'

  'What about you, Fanny?' asked Jemima curiously. 'Do you mind being the daughter of Old Rabblerouse, as you kindly term him?'

  'It's different for girls, isn't it?' Fanny gave her confident upper-class laugh which was possibly more charming now while she was still young than it would be when she got older. 'I'll change my name when I get married. For me, frankly, it's much worse being Mummy's daughter. All that ghastly debutante stuff and the match-making! I ask you. In this day and age. Quite a relief when the Prince of Wales finally got married, I can tell you. If only the other two would follow suit. Prince Andrew, as you may suppose, is Daddy's ultimate idea of what a hereditary leader figure should be.'

  'I gather she even had cousin Saffron in mind.' Jemima spoke carelessly.

  'Who told you that?' Fanny sounded - and looked - quite put out. 'Oh just gossip! said Jemima hastily. 'Poppy Delaware, someone like that.'

  'She should talk. She's been after him for ages. Oh well, now Tiggie Jones has got him. For the time being. We've been bidden, you know, to the great engagement weekend. And Mummy and Daddy. All very feudal: political differences to be strictly put aside: blood is thicker than politics.'

  'For the time being?' questioned Jemima, catching at one of Fanny's seemingly careless remarks. 'You don't think the marriage will last?'

  Fanny gave another of her confident smiles. 'Did I say that? I didn't exactly mean it wouldn't last if they did get married. I just meant that they're not married yet.' But Jemima had the impression that this time Fanny's jauntiness was slightly forced.

  'Many a slip between engagement and lip,' Fanny went on, 'or at least where that couple is concerned. Tiggie Jones is going to have to give up one or two of her bad habits, for one thing.'

  'Her universal displays of affection? Or as she put it herself once to me, I just love love. Is that what you had in mind?’

  'Oh absolutely,' replied Fanny in a tone of voice which made it quite clear that it was not.

  It was noticeable that Jack Iverstone, whom Jemima interviewed about the programme in his rooms at St Lucy's, took rather the same line about the engagement. Fanny was perhaps animated by a certain feminine jealousy. Jack had to be acquitted on that score. Nevertheless he frowned over the prospect, that deep rather weary frown which from time to time marred his cheerful face and made one see the anxious politician he would one day become.

  'Trust Saffer to pick on the one girl who can be guaranteed not to pull him together.'

  'You don't like Tiggie?'

  'Tiggie isn't someone you like or dislike. She's a perfectly idiotic force of nature, if such a thing is possible. I just think they're far too alike. That dreadful capriciousness of hers and those mad ideas of his - did he ever talk to you about his Marxism? Marxist! Saffer! Who even has his shoes cleaned by Wyndham, at least fifty years his senior. It's all part of his plan to provoke, and Tiggie, in so far as she has any plan, has roughly the same idea. You have to have one sane one in a marriage. It's terrible when people think alike and they're both wrong.'

  He stopped at Jemima's expression.

  'Yes, I am thinking of my own parents, if you're interested. My mother's lifelong adoration of my father - they married when they were both twenty - it's one of his chief problems. No one at home has ever argued with him.'

  'Except you.'

  'Except me. And I don't argue, I reason. But you won't find me reasoning with him at the coming weekend. I shall rein it all in - keep it perhaps for your television programme,' Jack said with a slight smile. 'It's going to be grisly enough without a father-and-son confrontation. Cousin Ivo will be giving us his celebrated impersonation of a very parfait gentleman, as a result of which he was able to appear as our most popular Foreign Secretary for years, in spite of being quite a tough customer underneath it all. Cousin Gwendolen needs no impersonation to be the very parfait English lady.' He shuddered.

  'Such politeness all round! When we stayed there as children and my father was making all those terrible speeches about immigration in the seventies. Just The Times handed over to you at breakfast: "Jack, your father's making the headlines again." Perfect politeness, no reproach. I wanted to die. I was so embarrassed I couldn't read it and had to sneak into the library later. I used to be sick before coming down to breakfast in anticipation.'

  'And Fanny? The same?'

  'Good God, no! Fanny's much more straightforward. "Has Daddy been spouting tosh as usual?" she'd say brightly. And help herself to the rest of the sausages. Fanny's one of the strongest characters I know. And I don't mean physically.'

  'I take it there'll be a great deal of politeness around this weekend. Including your father.'

  'Oh yes, you know Daddy's manners when he wants things to go well. At Saffron Ivy there'll be so much politeness about on the surface that we'll all be swimming in a great dish of rich cream. But what about the hatred underneath? You should worry about that, Jemima Shore Investigator.'

  Jack leant back in his large worn green armchair, the bottom of which was visibly sagging. He had installed Jemima in the only vaguely new chair in the room, something which had evidently arrived, but none too recently, from Habitat. His mantelpiece was crowded with cards of various societies, mainly of a political nature, amongst which Jemima noticed the official programme of the Union. The contrast with his cousin Saffron's mantelpiece at Rochester was marked: there she had glimpsed practically no traces of Oxford life at all (unless you counted Chimneysweepers' menus) but a number of rather grand engraved invitations to London parties. Her eye lit upon a rather pretty water-colour of a house hanging to the left of the fireplace, much the most attractive object in the room. Jemima recognized Saffron Ivy.

  'Nothing that happens in a house like that can be all bad,' she said. But afterwards she would always swear that even at the time some frisson, some faint expression of her famous instinct, had warned her that these words were, like those of the Megalith spokesman on the subject of Spike's expenses at Oxford, absurdly optimistic.

  13

  Saffron Ivy

  There were a number of cars drawn up in the sweep of the drive which ended with a flourish in front of Saffron Ivy like the dramatis personae of a play. Jemima saw a Rolls, not a new Rolls, at least fifteen years old Jemima guessed, but so beautifully kept and shining that it gave the impression of being a treasured yet still useful antique, like an immaculately polished dining-room table. Drawn up alongside was a sharp little mini, navy blue with tinted glass windows. Jemima thought the mini might belong to Fanny Iverstone. There was also a rather fine motor-bike, probably a Harley Davidson, since it was remarkably similar to that owned by the legendary cameraman Spike Thompson and thus occasionally ridden pillion by Jemima Shore (amongst others). Next to that was a Porsche.

  Then there was a dusty grey Cortina, looking like a poor relation: Jack Iverstone? Beside it Jemima recognized Saffron's car, a Maserati, dashing and rather too ostentatious like its owner; in case she hadn't, the final note of ostention was presented by the initial S on the dr
iver's door and a coronet over it. The back seat of the Maserati had a jumble of cassettes on it and some white and frilly garments spilling about. Tiggie's presumably, not Saffron's. Would his car be unpacked as well as his suitcase? Jemima remembered Saffron's description of the chauffeur Wyndham 'looking after everything in my car'. That led her to Saffron's account of the original attack, the fixing of the car. Jemima shivered.

  Above her head, above the surrounding flat but gracefully wooded landscape, a vista of greens beneath an enormous bowl of grey sky, rose up the imposing shape of Saffron Ivy. To Jemima there was something menacing as well as palatial about its magnificent facade. She felt that the rich and newly respectable Iverstones, who dragged Robert Smythson from the employment of Bess of Hardwicke to build the house, did not intend their robber baron origins to be entirely forgotten.

  The front door opened and at the head of the steps stood a welcoming figure in ‘I-shirt and jeans. Saffron. She assumed it was Saffron. The informality of his clothes was, she thought, in pleasing contrast to the formality of the late Elizabethan facade. The welcoming figure then trotted down the steps and revealed itself to be a good deal older as well as stouter than Saffron.

  Slightly startled, Jemima put out her hand. Instead of taking it, the ‘I-shirted figure deftly possessed himself of her car keys and before she could protest, was burrowing in the back of her car for her luggage. Her suitcase emerged with its conspicuous labelling (ordered by Cherry - but that was really no excuse) JEMIMA SHORE. Jemima found that she was gazing at the T-shirt, strained over an impressive chest, which also bore a piece of conspicuous labelling.

  I'M BINYON she read.

  The jean-clad figure looked down at her suitcase, tapped his chest and smiled even more broadly.

  'Good afternoon, Miss Shore. We've both of us nailed our colours to the mast, as it were, haven't we? But then in a manner of speaking, we're both in the same line of business. If you don't think me presumptuous.'

  Jemima, even more baffled, smiled back, her beautiful smile of all-purpose sweetness which was particularly useful when total strangers accosted her, apparently confident of recognition.

  'I'm Binyon' - the chest was tapped again - 'Binyon the swinging butler.'

  Some vague memory stirred.

  'And of course I don't need to be told who you are. Label or no label. You're just like you are on television. Very friendly.' Binyon shepherded Jemima up the steps. 'The staff are so excited. What with his lordship's engagement and your arrival.'

  To be accurate, thought Jemima, out of the two of them it was Binyon who was the friendly one. And what was a swinging butler anyway? Unless it was simply a butler who wore jeans and a T-shirt in the afternoon. Jemima found she was oddly disappointed; atavistic snobbery no doubt, but she had been expecting the sort of butler you saw on television - except that Binyon seemed to indicate that he had been on television. Oh well...

  'His lordship is in the library,' said Binyon. At least that was a conventional butler's observation. And the library, the famous Saffron Ivy library founded by some intellectual Iverstone in the early eighteenth century, was everything of which a romantic might dream: tooled leather, dark bindings, deep embrasures by the windows, heavy chairs, a large globe, a beautiful deep desk, it was all here. So for that matter was his lordship: not Saffron, however, but Lord St Ives, jumping up with extraordinary briskness from his chair and lolloping to greet her, as though a second's delay might indicate a fatal degree of impoliteness.

  At the same moment, a large labrador, so pale it was almost white, started towards her. The dog, unlike Lord St Ives, was remarkably fat which perhaps accounted for the discrepancy in their respective gaits. The words 'well-preserved' might almost have been coined for Lord St Ives: he was so spare as to suggest that the familiar cartoons which showed him as a series of narrow straight lines were in fact portraits not caricatures.

  While the dog sniffed slowly and cynically at Jemima's high-heeled shoes, as though little that was good could be expected from them, Lord St Ives shook Jemima's hand with a particular kind of energetic delight. Jemima found it oddly familiar until she realized that she had watched him displaying it on the television news, on numerous occasions, as he greeted world leaders when he was Foreign Secretary. The more the ensuing talks were expected to be 'controversial' in the words of the newscaster, the more pleasure Lord St Ives evinced; he had the air of running into a friend from his London club. How different, how very different was the Cy Fredericks style of greeting! The Chairman of Megalith was apt to welcome even those he knew well with a very slight air of unease beneath his rapture, as though they might have gone and changed their name or in some other way subtly betrayed him since their last meeting.

  Then Jemima saw that Lord St Ives had not been alone in the library. At the far end, an elderly woman was struggling out of a deep leather chair, similar to that from which Lord St Ives had sprung with such trapezoid agility. Finally she was able to stand up with the aid of a stick, two sticks. Jemima, recognizing Lady St Ives from Saffron's photograph at Rochester, thought that she actually seemed years older than her husband. This was partly because Lady St Ives, like the dog, moved slowly and had pure white hair. She wore spectacles, secured with a cord round her neck; Lord St Ives' hair on the other hand, in line with his general air of preservation, retained a kind of sandy colour which made Jemima suppose he must have looked much the same even as a young man. How old was he? How old was she7.

  The most surprising thing about Lord St Ives was that even now he was actually an attractive as well as a charming man: something to do with centuries of having things your own way, thought Jemima suspiciously. But then Lady St Ives must have had her own way too: perhaps illness had prevented her from developing this particular kind of allure; Jemima remembered Saffron's references to his mother's health.

  In the meantime Jemima was being briskly guided to the far end of the library by her host; managing however to take in the famous Lawrence of The Strawberry Children, which showed a little girl and boy holding a basket of fruit between them, on the way.

  Jemima shook Lady St Ives' extended hand which bore a number of splendid but slightly dulled diamond rings. (Was it nouveau riche, she wondered, to have one's jewellery cleaned? Jemima neither possessed a lot of precious jewellery nor coveted it - except perhaps the odd emerald; so far the offer of an odd emerald had not come her way.) Lady St Ives wore a handsome diamond brooch pinned to her flowered dress, as well as three rows of pearls; the brooch was similarly dulled. The pearls looked superb.

  'We're all so excited, Miss Shore,' Lady St Ives echoed her husband's words. 'And Binyon has been polishing the silver as he only does when the Queen comes.'

  'Rather more so!' exclaimed Lord St Ives gaily. 'He's been practically polishing us.'

  Jemima saw an opportunity to get at least one mystery solved: 'Yes, do explain to me about Binyon.'

  'Oh we thought you might know him' - surprise from Lady St Ives. 'From the telly—'

  'Nonsense, my dear, she's much too grand.'

  'Yes, but he's Binyon.' Lady Ives turned to Jemima, quite eagerly: 'Binyon, the singing butler.'

  'Oh singing, you said singing. Singing, not swinging.' Puzzlement from Lady St Ives.

  'I don't think Binyon swings. What would he swing from? But he has a very nice voice. Rather like John McCormack, we always think.'

  Jemima was distinctly relieved to find that Binyon, jeans or no jeans, was no new breed of butler, but had simply entered an amateur talent competition on television. He had won a series of rounds culminating in an exciting final in which Binyon the Singing Butler had defeated Mirabel O'Shea the Crooning Cook.

  'At least, that's how the papers described it,' confessed Lady St Ives. 'But Mirabel O'Shea, while being an absolute darling, all twenty stone of her, we loved her, Binyon invited her down here afterwards with her children, there wasn't a father, all the same she wasn't exactly what you'd call a cook. She'd been frying bacon and eggs i
n a motorway cafe, you see.'

  'Nonsense, my dear, move with the times! That's exactly what you'd call a cook these days.' Lady St Ives did not answer her husband but instead displayed to Jemima an enormous and very ugly television set, facing her chair, to which they had all been glued during Binyon's weeks of fame. Above it hung an exquisite double portrait of a mother and child, the mother with a mass of powdered curling hair, the baby with its fat white arms thrown upwards; once again Jemima had seen so many reproductions of the picture that she found the sight of the original, sited so cosily above the television set, slightly disconcerting. The label read: 'Frances Sophia, Marchioness of St Ives and the Honble Ivo Charles Iverstone'.

  Lord St Ives followed the direction of her gaze. 'Sir Joshua. We think ours is better than the one in the National Gallery. So did K. Clark, I'm glad to say.'

  'It's ravishing. Site's ravishing.'

  'Oh, Frances Sophia. I'm afraid she was no better than she should be -you remember Greville's phrase.'

  'Of course. And the baby is delicious,' replied Jemima firmly, who had never read Greville, but did not intend to be wrong-footed, at least not on that score, by her host.

  'The baby - Ivo Charles - he grew up to be the corrupt MP, I fear. And a terrible gambler. Fox's friend.'

  'We used to think Saffron looked rather like him as a baby,' volunteered Lady St Ives. There was a small quite unmistakable pause: Jemima was quite sure about it. Then Lord St Ives gave a light laugh.

  'I do hope the resemblance is not carried through. As far as I am aware, gambling at least is not among my son's vices.'

  'But he used to love playing Vingt et Un as a child, when we all went to Bembridge.' What further reminiscences Lady St Ives might have produced of Saffron's childhood - the topic was after all not absolutely without interest - was not to be known, since the subject himself now arrived in the library.