by Simon Raven
He shifted again and then was still.
‘He always blamed those tree nymphs for what happened to his daughter,’ Len said. ‘Poor Tullia. Poor Baby.’
‘Poor Baby – nothing,’ said Carmilla, hard as cut glass. ‘She made trouble everywhere she went. She couldn’t even make Sarum properly. Theodosia’s having to do the job all over again. Much against her will.’
‘So I have inferred. Tell me, Carmilla: if Theodosia delivers a bouncing boy, Sarum will be superfluous. So…what are the plans for Sarum?’
‘Sarum isn’t my problem.’
‘But the enquiry – do admit, darling – is of interest. And could be pertinent to you, no matter what you say. After all, whatever arrangements are made for Sarum, your sister and your brother-in-law are bound to be involved in them.’
‘But not I. I have enough to do busying myself with Marius. Strictly, he’s not my concern either. But somehow – after what Dick said – it’s all been more and more thrust upon me.’
‘Well, then. Marius is one of the principal actors in the whole of the affair.’
‘Only an understudy.’
‘Understudy for Canteloupe himself. The onlie begetter, you might say. The begetter of this new heir and therefore of the problem about the old one. No, darling Carmilla: if you persist in taking on Marius –’
‘– Somebody must –’
‘– then you take on the problems which his actions promote. For these will rise up against him to accuse his conscience; and of this conscience you have made yourself the keeper.’
Raisley Conyngham steered his rowing boat (the Palinurus) into a little creek of the River Wey about halfway between Farncombe and Guildford. Milo Hedley shipped the oars. The bows nuzzled into a bank of reeds and mud. The waters lapped about the midships and the stern.
‘When?’ said Milo.
‘When what, dear boy?’
‘When do we brief Marius and oblige Canteloupe? What is the matter with this coming half-Quarter? ’Twere best quickly done, Raisley.’
‘When you leave this school at the end of the Quarter, you may call me “Raisley” or “Conyngham” as you will. Until then, you will address me as “sir”.’
‘Then ’twere best quickly done…sir.’
‘No, Milo. ’Twere best very slowly done. The longer it takes, the longer we may relish the proceedings. And then think what is required: a long sequence of absolutely ordinary events, each following normally from the last, and finally bringing about the desired result so naturally that it provokes the minimum of remark, no guilt, blame nor accusation, no surprise and no shame…and at the same time has something dignified and even endearing about it, so that gentle words of pity and commiseration, if not quite of encomium, may be carved on Sarum’s stone.’
‘I see what you mean, sir. Canteloupe seemed to be thinking of a monument, or at least a sarcophagus.’
‘With no ghosts or Furies in the region of either. So we proceed with decorum.’
‘Indeed, sir. But at some stage Marius must be briefed.’
‘As late as possible. For the sake of discretion.’
‘But he must be prepared, sir, in good time.’
‘Prepared, certainly. Mentally and physically prepared, but with no immediate act assigned or order issued. The sequence of events (which will lead to the quiet and untroubled tomb) can be and must be set in train without Marius’ particularly noticing, without his making very much of it. The…Prime Mover…must be bland and casual. The whole thing must be distanced. This will be managed by me, during the break at half-Quarter. While you are acting as the Ambassador of the School in the Provost’s Lodging at Lancaster (amusing the good Provost and teasing secrets out of his henchman), Marius and I will be following in the footsteps of another distinguished Lancastrian, one Montague Rhodes James. We shall be antiquarians, Milo, in the area of Wells-Juxta-Mare and Holkham. There I shall soothe any resentment Marius may still entertain against me for preventing his attendance at the funeral of Nestor (so to speak), indulge him in some small matter which should please him –’
‘– What matter, sir?’
‘– Give him an agreeable time, Milo, full of the good food and intelligent discourse which he enjoys, and also promise him the passage, for which he hankers, out to his friend Jeremy Morrison this summer. As it happens, Morrison has offered to pay for his ticket, but I can contrive that I should be the one bathed in his gratitude, by my very clemency in granting him permission to go.’
‘But he can’t go. We shall need him here this summer. Unless, that is, your sequence of normal events is to be stretched so far and so fine that it will snap.’
‘Do not worry, Milo. Marius’ visit to the missionary Morrison will form part of the sequence.’
‘You mean…you only have to twitch the thread to bring him back when needed?’
‘Something like that,’ said Raisley Conyngham. ‘But let us return to our little expedition – Marius’ and mine – to the Norfolk coast. Dunes, conifers, vast beaches with ridges and quicksands; saltmarshes and ruins (from Saxon chapels to American gun sites); the setting for so many stories of M R James. Have you read them, Milo?’
‘I have no time for ghost stories, sir.’
‘Silly, intolerant boy… Somewhere in all of this the sequence will begin – while Marius as yet scarcely remarks its beginning – the sequence of events which will bring Sarum of Old Sarum, without pain or fear or even notice, to his comfortable and honourable grave.’
On a bandstand in the gardens of Adelaide, not far from the public entrance to the Oval, a Combined British Cavalry Band (on a goodwill visit to Australia) was playing a lively yet somehow haunting air.
‘Stop,’ said Fielding Gray to Jeremy Morrison. ‘Christ, man, it’s Rory Gilpin…’
‘What can you mean?’
‘Rory Gilpin. The March of the 10th Sabre Squadron. The regiment – Hamilton’s Horse – had one march, Prince Harry it was called, but in the 10th Sabre Squadron we had our own. Rory Gilpin.’
‘I see, old man,’ said Jeremy, and stood still by Fielding.
Fielding’s eyes pricked. ‘Christ, Jeremy,’ he said, ‘…so the cavalry still has its uses. A performance of some versatility,’ as he opined later in their Travel Lodge.
‘I hope that Serjeant-Trumpeter will perform with equal versatility – mutatis mutandis,’ Jeremy said.
‘For Christ’s sake, Jeremy. They’re leaving by air at ten p.m. for Alice.’
‘Just five hours then. Say four, if they have to be at the airport an hour before take-off. Four hours in which to enjoy pneumatic bliss.’
‘I’m looking forward to your half-Quarter leave,’ said Rosie to Tessa, as they walked down Pall Mall towards the National Gallery. ‘Let me see. It starts a fortnight from last Friday, and today is Sunday, so there’s only twelve days to go. And you’ll be at home – for how long?’
‘Eight days,’ said Tessa. ‘But I shan’t be at home.’
Rosie carefully said nothing. She did not want to spoil Tessa’s Sunday home from School by being inquisitive or possessive, the less so as something in Tessa’s voice told her that such Sundays were now to be much fewer. Whatever was claiming Tessa for the half-Quarter exeat would probably not stop there. She therefore kept a wary silence as they walked up the steps from Trafalgar Square to the loggia and through the entrance, maintained it as they went past a uniformed official (who dutifully stared at them with piercing and piecemeal lechery, in case they were carrying a bomb), and continued to maintain it until they were in front of the pictures which they had come to see, in the basement. These were four huge pieces by Horace Vernet, whom Tessa had muddled up with his father. So where they were expecting four depictions of the Seasons they found four Napoleonic battles instead.
‘I didn’t know you weren’t coming home for your half-Quarter,’ Rosie said casually. ‘Where are you going?’
‘These are the wrong pictures,’ said Tessa crossly. She consulted a gl
ossy handbook. ‘The ones I wanted are in the Musée Calvée in Avignon. By Claude-Joseph Vernet.’
‘There is one by Claude-Joseph upstairs,’ said Rosie, anxious to be helpful. She ran one hand down her black hair, from scalp to shoulder-blade. ‘Daddy and I looked at it once. Some eighteenth-century tourists in pretty clothes in a jolly little harbour near Naples. And what Daddy described as “loose washerwomen”, only I read somewhere later that they were really collecting shellfish.’
‘Let’s go and see it, then. I expect it’s near the Claude Lorraines.’
‘But first,’ said Rosie, ‘we should look at what is here. At this one.’
The paintings were arranged, on the inner wall of the circular chamber, at the four cardinal points of the compass. The one Rosie had chosen for inspection was at the north of the circle, therefore facing south.
‘This is the yard of a large farmhouse or the court of a small manor house,’ Rosie said. ‘The General – the one in the blue and silver with the tricolor cockade in his hat – is sitting on horseback with some members of his staff. Another important officer in blue and silver is being carried away on a stretcher of muskets and blankets. Here, at the end of the yard, at the bottom centre of the painting.’ She pivoted to look at Tessa.
Tessa nodded and smiled.
Rosie pivoted back. ‘He has lost his cockaded hat. He is very pale. He is wounded to the death, and he and the stretcher-bearers know it. So does the General at the top end of the yard. He is paying no attention to the arrival of the Galloper. He is watching them carry away his friend. For they were friends,’ said Rosie; ‘see how they are waving to one another. The General is lifting his white-gloved hand, half in farewell and half in benediction, and making little motions of distress with his fingers. The other one has lifted one hand with his palm towards the General, saluting him as the victor and at the same time bidding him goodbye forever.
‘Now let us go and see the Claude-Joseph Vernet,’ said Rosie, prinking on her thin legs up the spiral stair to the ground floor, ‘and also Claude Lorraine’s Enchanted Castle. What a lot of Claudes for one afternoon.’
‘I am sorry I am leaving you,’ said Tessa, ‘at half-Quarter. And for longer than that, I fear,’
‘Don’t be. I don’t suppose you can help it. I shan’t pry. I don’t really want to know – not topographically, so to speak – where you are going, though I rather think your Auntie Maisie may. See here now,’ said Rosie, ‘The Enchanted Castle on the Shore, otherwise known, my Daddy said, as The Palace of Eros. Of love. Keats adored this picture, my Daddy said; for see here, Tessa, the “magic casements opening on the foam/ Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.” And so now you are going, I suppose, to the Palace of Eros. You were bound to, fairly soon. And here am I’ – she pointed to a dark female figure, crouched in a wilderness beneath the ramparts – ‘excluded.’
‘You will get in later.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s all entirely natural and comme il faut. You are the older: my turn next. I’m not complaining.’
No, thought Tessa, she really isn’t: she knows that when one is called to the Enchanted Castle one must go there; but all the same I have hurt – hurt so cruelly – her sad little sense of honour.
‘The thing is, Provost,’ said Milo Hedley, ‘that the more perceptive of the young are beginning to find “the permissive society” exceedingly dull.’
Milo was walking with Len and the Provost in the Provost’s enclosed garden, outside the windows of his withdrawing room. It had been arranged that he should come to the Lodging in Lancaster for some days of the half-Quarter exeat, on the pretext of ‘liaising’ between the School and the University, though the real reason was to see whether he would be up to ‘amusing’ the Provost for a longer period later in the summer, after the School holidays began. As things stood now, Milo was making a very good fist of amusing the Provost and an even better one of alienating everyone else, with the possible exception of Len. Piero Caspar and Nicos Pandouros came to the Lodging as little as possible after their first meeting with Milo, and Carmilla Salinger came not at all. Epithets applied by them to Milo were variously ‘oily’, ‘conceited’, ‘creepy’, ‘slimy’, ‘saurian’, or, tout court, ‘snake’. Milo, said Piero, was ‘snake’ – not a snake but just ‘snake’, which was to say the Platonic idea of snake-substance as laid up in the Ideal Realm. The truth was, of course, that Milo had made Piero, Nicos and Carmilla exceedingly jealous by his succès fou with the Provost.
‘In the permissive society,’ Milo was saying now, ‘sexual pleasure has none of the heady fascination induced by moral guilt, none of the frisson lent by fear of being caught and punished. Venereal disease is readily preventable and, if contracted, readily curable. Sex, Provost, has become a bore, or at best a hygienic exercise for ridding oneself of superfluous fluids.’
He’s pitched his level just right, thought Len. Sophisticated, paradoxical, but with a basically simple argument which the Provost can follow quite easily despite the flagging pace of his intellect.
‘All of which is all very well, dear boy,’ the Provost said, ‘but people seem to go on having quite a lot of it.’
‘Habit,’ said Milo, ‘or, as I was saying just now, for the purpose of glandular evacuation. Or simply because they are too unimaginative or too stupid or too wanting in taste to think of any other way of passing the time.’
‘Like reading? Or the arts?’
‘Certainly. Or like plotting, Provost: intriguing. Emotional or social engineering.’
Now he’s gone too far, thought Len: Tom would never approve this kind of exploitation.
Nor did Sir Tom approve: but that did not mean that he was not interested, as Milo started an elementary account of the theory (in which he had plainly been instructed by a more mature mind) of moral manipulation, of achieving certain ends – good or bad – by the discreet, indeed unnoticed, deployment of certain persons, their talents or their frailties.
‘If you encourage a man in the use of an ability or a vice for which he is well known,’ said Milo, ‘his behaviour will not be noticed. Everyone will just say “There’s X, at it again, translating Herodotus’ History or touching up Sea Scouts”: entirely predictable behaviour of little intrinsic interest. It follows that if you, so to speak, divert, angle, aim or adjust this behaviour so that it may bring about an end which you desire, you will never be discovered because the means you have employed are everyday phenomena and the end that has resulted from such phenomena will be seen as a necessary consequence of them – as something which, however painful on the one hand or pleasing on the other, had an entirely obvious and natural and unsensational cause; so that deliberate foul play can never be suspected, no blame can ever be imputed, no accusation can ever be preferred.
‘For if X falls off a cliff while spying on Sea Scouts who are bathing naked, no one will ever know that it was you that directed him, through a long chain of casual and unwitting informants, to the loosest and most treacherous overhang. People will just say: “X up to his old tricks again; no good could ever have come of it.” Or again, if one’s pupil or protégé wins a brilliant prize for a classical essay, nobody is to know that one has quietly directed his attention (for plausible reasons that ostensibly have nothing to do with the essay prize) to those passages of Herodotus’ History by which Y, one of the judges this year, is particularly fascinated. People will just say, if they say anything at all, “How lucky for young Tyro that he shared X’s obsession with Xerxes.”’
‘And you find such skulduggery of interest?’ said the Provost mildly.
‘The instances I have given, Provost, are very simple. Imagine a whole chain of events, dividing and ramifying, reuniting, returning in on themselves, and then expanding yet again, all stemming (as calculated) from one unnoticed and utterly ordinary word or action. It has the beauty and fascination of a mathematical series. One little remark, Provost; or a suggestion; or an invitation: “Come with me next week to watch th
e Varsity Match from the Pavilion at Lord’s.” But the inviter knows that the invited man has been expelled from the MCC for petty pilfering in the changing rooms attached to the Squash Court. Either the invited man must confess to this, or (which is much more likely) he will utter some excuse. If the excuse is genuine, of course, the series stops there. But if it is not, the inviter has an initial hold – slight but real – on the invited. This hold can be used in a number of ways: possibly to embarrass the victim in front of a close friend or relative (why not his mother?), thus making him angry or nervous or resentful or dejected, in any case impairing his powers of judgment and making him more easy to use and control during the next stage of the events in train.’
‘What a pity,’ chuckled the Provost, ‘that you are not coming to this College. We could have had such fun trying out your theories on the more unattractive of the left-wing Fellows.’
Len, feeling it was time that Milo was put in the wrong about something, recalled to him his remarks about the dullness of sex now that guilt and punishment and disease were no more. Conceding that guilt might indeed have ceased to be a factor in sexual behaviour, ‘It is still easily possible,’ he said, ‘to choose some extreme form of sex which carries high social penalties. As for disease, there are, as you may have heard, rather alarming rumours from the United States and from Africa.’
‘Always something new out of Africa,’ interjected Provost Llewyllyn, ‘and usually something nasty.’
‘Tell me more,’ said Milo, who had not yet heard, to vulpine Len, who was wearing a shirt of the Campbell tartan with a tie of the College summer pattern – white with thin stripes of royal purple.
‘Nothing much to tell,’ said Len: ‘not yet. Rumours of an incurable disease which destroys one’s power of resistance even to the most trivial infection and is distributed by sexual – most notably anal – activity.’
‘That,’ said Milo with relish, ‘really will get ’em sweating and squealing with terror. A threat to human rutting for the first time in three decades – a whole generation.’