Celestial Chess

by Thomas Bontly

  Professor Trevor-Finch laughed in my face. “America—the great barbarian bully of the world—civilized? Tell me, has there been any remorse or second thoughts in your country about Hiroshima, let us say?”

  “Hiroshima?”

  “Surely you recall what your government did to Japan in the Second World War—incidentally establishing the potential for a world-wide nuclear holocaust.”

  “I believe most Americans felt at the time that we had to drop the bomb in order to shorten the war,” I said, naively supposing that most Englishmen remembered whose side we’d been on.

  “Had to!” Trevor-Finch blustered. “The poor Nips were trying to arrange a treaty at the very moment the bomb went off. They were down, they were beaten, they simply wanted to get out of the whole affair with their national pride intact—which was precisely what your government refused to allow them. Have you ever heard what Rome did to Carthage? They not only sacked the city, slaughtered the inhabitants and burned all its buildings; they also poured salt on the ground so that nothing would ever grow there again. That’s the kind of barbarism I’m talking about, Fairchild. Savagery!”

  “I think all the Allies, including England, had agreed to accept only unconditional surrender from the Axis,’’ I said.

  “Tommyrot,” Trevor-Finch replied. “No one but an American President could’ve ordered that bomb dropped on those innocent civilians. Besides, Churchill was a barbarian too. More of a Yank than a proper Englishman. His mother was an American.”

  I was beginning to see why the professor was such a feared debater in Cambridge political circles. Accepting defeat in one arena, I tried to engage him in another. “My field is medieval literature, Professor, not contemporary affairs. There was plenty of barbarism in this country too, in ages past.”

  ‘‘Of course, but at least we had no atomic bombs to throw at one another in those days, or I’m sure there’d be very little England left for you to putter about in. I’m a physicist, mind, but I’ve often thought it a pity that America developed a technology before it had taken the time or trouble to produce a civilization capable of handling the fruits of modern science.”

  He chuckled again and I sensed that I had just been treated to one of his favorite aphorisms. “Have you ever been to America, Professor?” I asked him.

  “Briefly, a couple of times. Couldn’t wait to get back to England. Same thing happens whenever I go on the Continent. The French are a decent people, by and large, but those Germans . . . ! The majority of your countrymen are of German extraction, I believe.”

  “So, I believe,” I said quickly, “are the majority of yours.”

  “Oh, if you go back that far,” Trevor-Finch said, with a look of surprise in his pale eyes. “But we’ve had so much longer, you see, to mitigate the Teutonic strain, which has moreover been diluted by various infusions—’’

  “The Normans,” I said, “were originally Vikings—another Germanic tribe. As were the Danes, the Picts, the Franks, the Saxons, the Scots. In fact, if you go back far enough, all the peoples of Europe have a common ancestry. They were all barbarians at one time, Professor. They collected heads as trophies of war. They believed in demons, goblins, fairies, werewolves, vampires, witches . . . They tortured innocent people and sometimes even burned them alive.”

  Trevor-Finch pulled back as if I’d accused him personally of such atrocities. “I’m quite aware that man has only recently crawled out of the swamp, as it were. My point is simply that we in England, thank heavens, have gone beyond all that.’’

  “I hope so,” I said, angrier than I quite realized at the time. “And yet I wouldn’t call those silly prejudices of yours a particularly enlightened response to the problems of the world.”

  Professor Trevor-Finch turned so red in the face that I was afraid I’d never get an invitation to Creypool now. But in the next moment he laughed and said, “Good show, Fairchild! You put up a spirited defense, for a political ingenue! I’m not quite the chauvinist that I seem—though I must admit I have very little love for the Germans. Few of us in England who remember the last war do. But we shall have to go into all this at greater length some other time. Tell me, how are you getting on with your research? Have you managed to make any sense out of all that medieval gibberish?”

  I decided that the professor was one of those individuals who couldn’t help being offensive. “I was beginning to catch hold of a few things,” I told him, “when I was denied access to the Special Collections. I’m anxious to get back to work, since I’m very close, I think, to some important discoveries.”

  “Really! But I understood that most of that material is impossible nonsense, even for a specialist.”

  “It has always seemed that way, but I’m in possession now of certain facts which may enable me to crack the code.”

  Trevor-Finch raised his eyebrows. “So it’s written in code, is it?” He chuckled as he refilled his pipe. “A bloody code, hey?”

  “Are you at all interested in that sort of thing?” I asked, the American tail wagging furiously now.

  The professor watched a bit of pipe smoke curl away from the window. “As a matter of fact, codes are my special line. The codes of nature, Fairchild—the secret messages of the universe, which we are only now beginning to decipher. As for those manuscripts the College is so bloody proud of—no, I can’t say I care about what they have to tell us, except for a certain geographical coincidence. My family is a very old one, you see, and has lived for centuries on the Norfolk coast. There are the ruins of an old monastery nearby, which you may have heard of.”

  “Creypool Abbey,” I said. “I’ve been wanting to visit it for some time now.”

  Trevor-Finch’s gray irises swiveled beneath droopy lids to focus sharply on me. “You have! Then I suspect you’ve heard of the insane monk who’s supposed to have taken refuge there—back in the twelfth century, I believe it was.”

  “Geoffrey Gervais,’’ I said, and wondered if the professor had actually flinched at the mention of the name. “I’m particularly interested in him. I’ve been toying with the possibility that he may be one of the authors of the Westchurch manuscripts.”

  Trevor-Finch seemed at first not to react. He stared so fixedly at my collar that I began to wonder what he saw there. Finally, he drew himself up, sipped his sherry and made a face highly critical of the Master’s cellar. “In that case, Fairchild, you certainly should visit the abbey. There’s not much left to see, I’m afraid, but the village parson is something of an authority on our local legends. I suppose you know this Gervaise—was that his name?—was executed for witchcraft?”

  “Burned at the stake,” I said. “The first instance on record in the Christian era—but I’m surprised you’ve heard about that, Professor.”

  Trevor-Finch smiled to himself as he recalled our earlier exchange. “I take a passing interest in such matters, when they’re close to home. We may have inaugurated the practice of burning witches, but I assure you we gave it up a long time ago. The abbey is supposed to be haunted, though.”

  “By Gervaise?”

  “I don’t know if he’s ever told anyone just who he is,” the professor said. “A tall, gaunt figure in a monk’s robe and cowl is how he’s usually been described. The common folk are dreadfully superstitious, and that goose of a parson doesn’t help matters. Nevertheless, you ought to have a look at the place while you’re in England. I’m sure it can be arranged—perhaps during the upcoming vac, if you’ve no other plans.”

  “I’d like that very much,” I said. “I’ve no plans at all.”

  “Let’s get you down for several days, then, shall we? I’ll be there next week to visit Mama”—he pronounced the word in the Victorian fashion, with the stress on the second syllable—“and we should be happy to entertain you. There’s a good deal to see in the area, and of course we shall want to continue our debate on the existence of an American civilization. I do enjoy getting the other chap’s point of view, even when it’s incred
ibly naïve.”

  “I can be very stubborn,” I promised him.

  “So much the better. Your visit has the makings of an interesting experiment.”

  “Experiment?”

  The professor’s nervous eyes nipped at my neck, my shoulder, and leapt across the room. “Merely a scientific turn of phrase, Fairchild. I shan’t subject you to anything too drastic. Perhaps a mere”—he chuckled almost fiendishly—“a mere vivisection of your American ideals.”

  “Oh, well, in that case,” I said, and laughed the matter away, for it seemed that when it came to ideals, I really had nothing to lose.

  ~§~

  That night Colin Douglas and I played squash at the College courts on the outskirts of town. No mention was made of Yvetta throughout three vigorous games, though I thought that Colin (always an athletic sadist) pushed me even more unmercifully than usual. He had youth, strength, talent and clean living on his side, where I had only guile and spite to keep me in the game. I was dripping sweat, my breath still a series of gasps, as we had our lemon squeeze in the gallery above the courts.

  “You’ve not been playing, David,” Colin said. “You really shouldn’t let yourself get out of condition. You’re reaching an age where you can’t afford to remain sedentary.”

  “Or to go up against a fanatic like you,” I gasped. “I was never much of a physical sort at all, until you took me in hand.”

  “That’s the trouble with the academic life in America,” Colin said. “It has no balance, no vigor, no physical dimension whatsoever. No wonder American scholars are such a sorry lot.”

  Colin had a right to criticize America; he’d been born there, but his parents had had the money, and the good sense, to get him into an English public school when he was still relatively unspoiled by an American education. His “firsts” at “dear old Tunbridge,” as he called it, had opened the doors of Oxford, and his undergraduate triumphs there had got him into the London School of Economics. His London Ph.D. had led to his fellowship at Cambridge, and it was only a matter of time until he made senior fellow, or left academic life for an excellent career in government or business.

  I appreciated Colin’s patronage (so much more useful, if less appealing, than poor Archie’s) and enjoyed studying such an exemplar at close range, but it was difficult to like a man whose advantages in life so exceeded mine in every way. Sometimes I couldn’t help wondering on the court how that aristocratic sneer of his would look forming itself around a mouthful of broken teeth.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Colin said, as we gathered up our gear for the bike ride back to the College. “Whatever became of that little creature you carried off to London—that Austrian bird?”

  “Yvetta and I had several pleasant days together,” I said, “and then she decided to return to Vienna. I think she was rather disappointed in England—and in you, Colin.”

  “So that’s how it was, was it? I’m not sorry you took her off my hands, David. She was becoming rather an embarrassment over here. Continental girls seldom get on well in England. They expect entirely too much of us.”

  “All Yvetta expected,” I said, ‘‘was for one or the other of us to deal honestly with her. We just weren’t capable of that, Colin.”

  ‘‘Deal honestly with her? Good heavens, I never promised her anything, I’m sure of that. What did she tell you about me, anyway?”

  “That you’re afraid of women. That you can’t take them seriously. That you’re not quite complete as a man, and that you’ll always wind up hurting people until you are.” I didn’t add that Yvetta had applied those criticisms to me, as well.

  “Hmm. That was rather hard, wasn’t it? Still, I suppose it’s fair enough. One doesn’t want to get too serious about a girl like that. Poor little twit!”

  I decided to cap the conversation with a line from Henry James I’d always admired. ‘‘She would have appreciated,” I said, “our esteem.” But the reference rang no bells for Colin Douglas.

  ~§~

  Back in my room by eleven, I got into a bathrobe, gathered up my soap, deodorant, shaving supplies and shampoo, and went across the courtyard for that Spartan exercise which was still an ordeal for me—the College shower.

  These showers had been added to the College in recent times and, to spare the ancient walls and preserve architectural authenticity, had been built underground, just off the lane that connected the Old Court to a narrow side street of the town. You passed through a gloomy archway, followed the lane beside a churchyard full of crumbling tombstones, descended a flight of unlighted stairs, and came out into the large, cold, damp, frequently filthy and vile-smelling dungeon that served the sanitary needs of the entire College.

  None of the showers were in use at this late hour. I turned on a spigot and slipped into the rush of hot water. Enveloped in steam and dripping suds, I recalled what a pleasant time Yvetta and I had had one afternoon in our hotel bathtub. How sweetly her soapy breasts had filled my palm, how lovely her white tummy was as it broke the water! I resisted the urge to procure prompt relief from the past week of celibacy and left the dungeon some little time later, clean of body but not yet entirely pure of mind, totally unprepared for the sudden sensation of dread that swept over me as I stepped out into the lane.

  I stood quite still, my skin giving off steam in the night air, and in the dim light of the lane I probed the shadows of the little churchyard across the way. There, was nothing there to account for my tingling scalp and sprinting pulse, yet my sense of alarm did not lessen. If anything, it became more intense as I watched and listened, feeling once again my helplessness and vulnerability in a world suddenly bristling with invisible menace.

  Then, turning toward the archway that led to the Old Court, I saw that this time there might indeed be something to validate my fright—for within the heavy shadows of the archway another shadow, of more or less human shape, awaited my approach. Whether it meant to speak, to attack or simply to reveal itself, I recognized its presence as a threat. It was not human, I knew that at once. But what on earth was it? The air reeked of spiritual contamination, of some screaming infamy from ages past, of which the thing in the shadows had been either witness, victim or agent. Ancient, ugly, pitiful and perverse, yet not without a sort of quaint dignity, the thing stood there waiting for me as if it knew who I was—as if we had unfinished business between us.

  Oh, God, I prayed, or perhaps protested; there must be some mistake! I’m not the sort of man who sees visions. Could I be misreading some harmless inanimate object propped against the wall? Was someone trying to play a trick on me? Dressed only in robe and slippers, I couldn’t retreat down the lane and around the corner to the busy street that passed the main gate. Nor could I return to the showers, for the thing could easily corner return there. The graveyard was bordered by an iron fence which, even if I could clear it, would leave me trapped between fence and church, the back door of which was surely locked. No, there was nowhere to go but straight ahead, and nothing to do but meet the phantom head on.

  Still, I hesitated, drawing back from what gradually defined itself to me as a spiritual sodomizing. Had the shadow actually taken on the shape of a monk’s robe and cowl, or was I interpreting too freely its fluid ambiguity? I saw how easy it was to lose faith in one’s senses, one’s reason, and to suffer a sudden paralysis of the will. I might have stood there forever—or throughout the night, at least—quite stymied by so unexpected and unwonted a salutation from the void, if the presence had not suddenly disintegrated. At first I couldn’t guess what good angel had provided my deliverance, and then I heard footsteps coming up the lane behind me—brisk, purposeful, yet unhurried footsteps, accompanied by the sound of a man trying without much success to whistle a strain from a Bach concerto. I recognized Professor Trevor-Finch.

  “What—Fairchild, is that you? You’ll catch your death of cold haunting this alleyway. Is something the matter?”

  “Good evening, Professor. I was just coming from the
showers when I”—my glance rose above the steep, dormered rooftops of the College—“when I noticed how bright the stars are tonight.”

  Trevor-Finch looked up. “My word, yes—an uncommonly fine display for this time of year. Are you interested in the stars? If so, I have something down at my place you should find quite fascinating.”

  We were proceeding together through the shadowed archway, where I saw nothing which could explain my vision of a few moments previous. “And what’s that, Professor?” I asked.

  “I’ll save it for a surprise,” Trevor-Finch said. “I may have several little surprises worked up for your visit. This your staircase, then? Better run along up. It’s no sort of night to be out stargazing in a robe.”

  As I entered the stairway, I heard him mutter—surely he meant for me to hear—“An odd lot, these Yanks!”

  “So you’re off to Norfolk to visit Trevor-Finch,” Archie Cavendish said over his last spoonful of soup. “When do you leave?”

  “Tomorrow morning,” I said, “on the nine forty-five train.”

  “Hmm. Then I expect I won’t be seeing you again. Unless you can manage to make a short stay of it. I’ll be leaving myself before the vac is over.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” I said. “I’ll miss you.”

  Archie glanced down the table, then said in a low voice, “You’ll be the only one. I’ve had the distinct feeling for several weeks now that I’m the only mourner at my own wake.”

  The atmosphere in Hall that night did rather resemble a wake. Most of the undergraduates had already “gone down,’’ as leaving the University is so aptly termed, and we were a lonely little group at High Table. Silent waiters attended to our needs like spirits in bondage to our dark arts, and chandeliers blossomed faintly above our heads. The entire College seemed to sigh over visions of its vanished glory.

  “Quite an exciting time you’ll have of it, I’m sure,” Archie said. “If you’re a good boy, Finchie may show you his tower laboratory. He listens to the stars, you know. Radio astronomy is one of his many hobbies. Your archetypal Renaissance man, old Finchie, with a dabbler’s interest in just about everything—including young Americans.”