by Simon Raven
‘Luffham, he’s called now –’
‘– Oh yes? –’
‘– Luffham of Whereham. I thought young Jeremy had pretty well dropped Fielding.’
‘Come to think of it, Fielding seemed to be saying something of the sort when we came to you last Christmas. But I suppose they could have made it up. I saw them together at a race meeting a little while back. Bellhampton.’
And I saw a lot else there too, thought Giles. But we won’t open up that box of blowflies just now. As for these ‘possibilities’ Canteloupe wants to consult me about, it looks as if he’s forgotten…for the time being at least. Bloody good job too – if he means what I think he means. But of course if anyone can manage a thing of that sort, it’s Canteloupe and I. A bit like the old days in India – though I must say, that poor little brute of a Tully Sarum would make a pretty pathetic target.
‘You win fifteen-twelve,’ conceded Marius to Theodosia, ‘and take the match by three games to two.’ He remembered the audience that had assembled earlier, and shuddered. But when he came out of the Fives Court he saw that nurse and pram were gone, and that Leonard Percival was crawling away toward the far end of the Great Court.
‘Come on,’ said Theodosia. ‘Time for a bath.’
She looked at Percival, in his slow retreat, then lowered her voice, for the ex-secret agent (or ‘Jermyn Street man’, as he preferred to be called) had, she knew, a very sharp sense of hearing, however decrepit the rest of him.
‘I want you to come and have your bath with me,’ she said. Marius allowed this intelligence to sink in.
‘So that you can look at my legs?’ he said.
‘You may think I’m being very peculiar this afternoon –’
‘– Very exciting, Thea –’
‘– Perhaps not so exciting after all. But certainly peculiar. I shall explain.’
They crossed the Great Court in silence and went up a back staircase, into a small dressing room littered with white sweaters, Royal Tennis racquets and photographs of small white-flannelled groups.
‘This was Baby Canteloupe’s boudoir,’ said Theodosia. ‘There were some pretty things in it, but when I came here I turfed them out. Women always do that, you know: they always change the way things were left by their predecessors. Most men don’t care or even notice. What did you make of Sarum?’
‘I…I thought he was too old for that pram.’
‘A very delicate way of putting it.’
She unfastened the top of his slacks and pulled them down over his knees.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘too thin to be perfect, but only just. This too – though I can’t speak as an expert. How did you get that little scar?’
‘When I was circumcised.’
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m hating this.’ Her cheek reddened along the broad, high cheekbone. ‘And I don’t understand anything about it. But I thought, we’ll have a bath together, and see each other, and then it will happen. He’ll like it like that, I thought.’
‘And so I should.’
‘But I can’t go through with it, Marius. The only reason I’m doing this is to give Canteloupe an heir. You saw Sarum – there has to be another heir. What I want you to do is to…put your seed into me, as quickly as possible, and there an end of it.’
‘Thea. There has to be kindness first. I can’t just stick this into you and come. It would be horrible. Anyhow, I can’t do it like that. Nor could you. Jenny explained it all to me. You have to want me to come in.’
‘Who’s Jenny?’
‘A stable lass. Head stable lass. Where I worked earlier these hols. She showed me. She was kind to me and showed me how to be kind to her…how to be kind to you, Thea.’
‘You don’t understand. I don’t…want…any of this kindness. It would…drag me down, soil and weaken me. I want my badminton and my tennis. Clean things. That’s what I want to do with my limbs and my body. Not this.’
‘But you say you have to do this,’ said Marius, ‘to give your husband a new son?’
‘Yes. I promised him.’
‘Then this once at least you have to do this with me. Can’t we make it nice, Thea? Something we shall like to remember? Just this once?’
‘I can’t…make it nice. I was going to try. But I can’t.’
‘Then let me try. Go into the bathroom, Thea. Run the bath and get into it. Then call me.’
‘And you’ll try,’ she said bleakly, ‘you’ll try the tricks this Jenny taught you.’
‘I shall try to make you feel how beautiful I find you.’
The huge bath had ample room for both. Thea lay, rigid at first, while Marius floated beside her and washed her. Funny, she thought: no one ever washed me kindly before. My adoptive mother hated us, and all those girls she hired had unkind hands. She must have known they would have and picked them on purpose, because there were so many of them (since none would stay long in the same house as my mother) that sooner or later there must have been one that had kind hands unless she was deliberately choosing only those that hadn’t. She would have been very good at that: she would have known instinctively. But now…this little boy…is washing me as tenderly as my mother should have done.
She closed her eyes and eased her limbs in the bath.
‘Galahad,’ she murmured. ‘Galahad.’
For a moment Marius ceased soaping her thighs. Galahad, he thought: wasn’t Palairet called Galahad? He never let anyone use the name, we all called him ‘Pally’, but once he told me. ‘What does your “G” stand for?’ I asked him. ‘I’ll tell you if you promise not to tell anyone else,’ he said. So, thought Marius, as he began to soap Theodosia’s slightly parted thighs again, on the inside now, waiting for them to part still further, not hurrying, not insisting, just letting the intimation of sweet desire flow gently through his fingers as gap-toothed Jenny had taught him – so, thought Marius, Thea thinks, or is imagining, that I am poor dead Pally. She must have liked him…and chosen me for this because I was once close to him. Well, let her think, or imagine, what pleases her the best.
‘Thea, Thea,’ he whispered in her ear, ‘lovely Thea.’
‘Galahad… Yes, Galahad… Yes, Galahad… Oh, yes.’
After the day’s cricket was over, Canteloupe took Glastonbury to dine in his club, the last one in London which would in no circumstances admit a woman, not even in a menial capacity.
‘Not a bad afternoon’s play as things go nowadays,’ Canteloupe said. ‘Pity that young MCC batsman had to behave so foully when he was caught. Replacement needed there, I think.’
He brooded for a minute of two, until the lobster mousse arrived.
‘Replacements,’ he said. ‘If one chap don’t suit, you get another. Tully don’t suit, so I’m going to get another.’
‘So you said this afternoon.’
‘But then, as you said this afternoon, one still has a problem. The replacement may be as sound as you could wish, but you’ve still got the original. You’ve still got Tully. The first-born. The official heir.’
‘Precisely.’
‘So what do you do about that?’
‘You send him to a discreet nursing home,’ said Glastonbury, ‘where he contracts pneumonia, as imbecile infants are prone to.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Canteloupe. ‘So I got in touch with La Soeur. He’s been making…discreet medical arrangements…for all of us ever since I can remember. Could he, I asked, take Tully into permanent care? And La Soeur put on a poface and said: “In the old days, as I think you know, Tullius would almost certainly have died of pneumonia. As things are now, you need not worry. Such children are very carefully immunized and attended.” “Oh, are they?” I said. “So I go on paying a thousand guineas a week until he dies of old age?” “There are Nosy Parkers,” said La Soeur, obviously sick of the goody-goody act and seeing no need to prolong it with an old chum like me, “there are snoopers and pokers and pryers and delators, who are determined that every life, no matter how pa
inful, hopeless or degraded, shall be preserved as long as possible – often far beyond its natural termination. What their motive is, no one quite knows. It cannot be humanitarian…to sustain lives that can yield only agony and humiliation. Perhaps, in the case of patients who were once rich or beautiful or both, the motive is to punish them for the privilege they have enjoyed. But however that may be,” said La Soeur, “spies and meddlers there are everywhere who make damaging – ruinous – official complaints if any patient dies a day before he absolutely has to. In the case of Tullius, there are now drugs which will positively keep him alive, despite the factors – decay or atrophy, due to inaction, of certain systems, functions and organs – which would formerly have killed him of pneumonia or some related disorder. If, by some unhappy chance, I should neglect to see that these drugs were regularly administered, then informers might well inform on me and even I, with all my experience, could not survive the consequence.”
‘“But surely,” I said, “you don’t allow these informers, these snoopers and the rest, into your Nursing Home?”’
‘“I can’t keep them out,” La Soeur said. “One never knows who they are – until they act. The most modest, sensible and obedient of probationary nurses, engaged by the most clear-eyed of Matrons, may suddenly turn out to be a fanatical preserver of worthless life.”’
Canteloupe’s fastidious mouth drooped deeply with frustration and distaste.
‘Well,’ said Glastonbury, ‘that puts the kybosh on that.’
Both men ate silently through gulls’ eggs and stuffed quails, and drank efficiently through white Châteauneuf-du-Pape and red Montrachet, until at length Glastonbury remarked, ‘All this talk of La Soeur reminds me of something.’
‘Talk of La Soeur reminds everyone of something…generally an expensive late abortion or a nasty clap.’
‘One of La Soeur’s minor rackets,’ said Glastonbury, ‘was getting chaps out of National Service. For a straight hundred (good money in those days) he’d fit you up with flat feet or chronic incontinence or something that all the other doctors had somehow overlooked. But in one case, so I once heard, he refused to do this. Fellow in question was Raisley Conyngham –’
‘– Racehorse owner? Beak at my old School? –’
‘– That’s the chap.’
‘Why did La Soeur turn down Conyngham?’
‘In the end, you know, La Soeur is a thoroughly decent sort of man. He tries to bring about those things which will, as he sees it, improve the quality of life all round. His speciality, you might say, is – or certainly was – the disposal of incommoding and unsightly human litter. Now, the story runs that La Soeur took against Raisley – some kind of instinct.’
‘Didn’t like the cut of his jib?’
‘It went deeper than that. La Soeur scented some sort of evil, or moral poison, in the very centre of Raisley’s being. So he wouldn’t get Raisley out of his National Service, though Raisley offered ten times the usual fee. “The best thing that can happen to you,” La Soeur said to Raisley, “is a timely accident with a grenade or whatever that blows your cunting head off. Or perhaps your fellow recruits will take one sniff and rend you to pieces. All ways round, National Service is about the best chance of getting rid of you, Conyngham, a slim chance but the best I know of. Come to that, it might even be worth a small war.”’
‘But in fact,’ said Canteloupe, ‘Conyngham surely did quite well in the Army? Didn’t he get a National Service Commission?’
‘Yes,’ said Glastonbury, ‘but only because I put in a word for him. They were going to fail him – lack of guts on some manoeuvre – but I managed all that for him at the War House.’
‘Why did you trouble?’
‘My cousin Prideau asked me. He’d been thick with Raisley at Cambridge. And I thought at the time: Now you’ll owe me, Raisley boy. One day I’ll have something that needs fixing, something in your area as this biz is in mine, and then I’ll come asking.’
‘That was some time ago. Have you…gone asking?’
‘Oh, yes. And been very handsomely answered. At my request, Raisley engaged that poor old sozzle Jack Lamprey to train his horses. As it happened, I was doing him a good turn: Jack has been a success there. So now he may be inclined to do me another favour or two. After all,’ said Glastonbury (who came within spitting distance of calling cousins with the Queen), ‘I might very well be in a position to repay him.’
‘And you think…?’ said Canteloupe hopefully.
‘I think that if any man in the kingdom can arrange the necessary and painless extinction, without fuss, suspicion or even notice, of Tullius, Baron Sarum of Old Sarum, that man is called Raisley Conyngham.’
‘The highly respected schoolmaster? How would he go about such dirty work?’
‘I said “arrange”, Canteloupe. Conyngham is no Tyrrel. But from what I know of the man, and what cousin Prideau has told me, he will understand your predicament; he will wish to oblige us both; he will appreciate the aesthetic and social improprieties of one such as Tullius inheriting a fine Marquisate; and he will recommend or set in motion an immaculate series of entirely humdrum events…which will end in the desired yet almost unperceived result.’
At Waterloo Station, Marius rang up the Stern house in Chelsea, having not had time to do this before leaving Wiltshire. To his great relief the only present inhabitant, the cook, answered the telephone.
‘Stern residence,’ said the cook.
Is it Ethel he likes to be called, Marius now wondered, or Mavis? It was so long since he had been there that he had clean forgotten.
‘Marius here, Ethel,’ he said at a venture.
‘Oh, Master Marius, is it really you? I thought no one was ever coming here again. By the way, I’ve changed my name to Crystal. More refined.’
‘Well, Crystal,’ said Marius, ‘it is really me, and I’d like to spend a couple of nights. I’ve had to leave somewhere unexpectedly early.’
‘No trouble, sir, I hope?’
‘No. Just a…misunderstanding. I know it’s a bit late, but can you fix me up with some dinner?’
‘It will be a pleasure, Master Marius. I’ve been turning into a dreadful slut with no one to cook for. How about…Oeufs Mornay and Entrecôte Marchand de Vin?’
Better than I’d have got down at Canteloupe’s house, thought Marius. The kitchen there was getting very slovenly (‘sluttish’, as Crystal might say) to judge from the luncheon he’d had on his arrival there earlier in the day. From that point of view, he thought as he climbed into a taxi, he was glad to be out of the place.
‘You must go now,’ Thea had said as they lay in the tepid bath.
‘All right. What time’s dinner?’
‘I meant, go altogether. Leave the house. Now. I’ll give you money.’
‘I have my own, my lady.’
‘And somewhere to go?’
‘Of course,’ he said, thinking that he would return to Raisley Conyngham and Milo Hedley at Ullacote.
‘Go there. Otherwise this might happen again. It must not happen again. I feel dirty and altogether diminished.’
‘But surely,’ Marius had said, ‘if you’re to have a good chance of…getting what you and Canteloupe want…it ought to happen again. Several times.’
‘I must hope that once has been enough. If not, then I shall have to think what to do. I promise you, Marius,’ she said, touching his wrist quite kindly, ‘that if it has to happen again it shall be nobody but you. But as it is, unless I find it absolutely necessary, I never wish to sink into that horrible condition…of non-mind, non-will, non-control…ever again.’
‘But Thea, you did keep control, more’s the pity. You were going to come…I know you were going to come, just after I did, I felt it…but you stopped yourself, you thrust me away.’
‘Yes. Because you made that noise. You sort of – sort of squealed. Horrible. That brought me to my senses, gave me my sanity back before I suffered the same humiliation. But even so there had
already been much too much of my own whimpering and whining. You are very beguiling, Marius. Is that the work of the woman, Jenny?’
‘She showed me. I wanted to show you. Why did you call me “Galahad”?’
‘Did I? You see what I mean about non-mind? If I could confuse you with Galahad Palairet…’
‘You loved him, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. And I’m very fond of you. But go now. Go. Mr Percival will arrange a taxi to the station.’
As indeed Mr Percival had, civilly and without comment. He had also construed the timetable. There were no convenient trains to Minehead or Taunton, he had said; Marius would have to change three times and arrive well after 2 a.m. It was then that Marius had decided to go to London instead of Ullacote. This would probably not please Raisley and Milo, who were expecting him to go straight from Canteloupe’s house, after spending the two nights for which he had been invited, to School, where the Cricket Quarter was to begin the day after the next. But clearly, since that arrangement was now out, some other must be come to. Marius strongly supposed that Raisley would have expected him, in these new circumstances, either to return to Ullacote, as he had at first intended, or at least to consult him on the telephone. But he was no longer a child, thought Marius, and he would now show himself and anyone else who might be interested that he was perfectly capable, at a need, of making his own decisions. If he went to London for two nights, he would have a good opportunity to visit the family lawyer, ‘Young’ John Groves, whom he wished to consult about money, of which his mother, in her new roles of socialist and miser, was trying to keep him short – so far without success, but she was a persistent woman, and he must make sure that ‘Young’ John Groves wasn’t going to be got at. He also had another scheme, a scheme connected with what had passed down at Canteloupe’s but not as yet fully thought out.
When Marius arrived at the house in Chelsea, Crystal said, ‘My word, we are looking bonny. Dinner in half an hour, when you’ve had a nice bath.’
‘Thank you, Crystal. You’re very kind.’