by Simon Raven
‘The County Colts are some of ’em eighteen years old,’ said Auntie Flo. ‘Too big and strong for Marius to be playing against.’
‘Oh no. If he gets into the XI at School next summer – as I hear he well may – he’ll be playing against fully grown men, let alone eighteen-year-olds.’
‘That is very true, Canteloupe. And he’s well developed for his age. And in any case he’s a proper boy and can’t be coddled. He’d kill me if I turned this down for him. Of course Marius shall play for you.’
‘Bravo, old girl. We play on my ground here. You and Marius are invited for the nights of the first and second days of the match. Get him here by ten-thirty sharp for an eleven o’ clock start on the first day – that’s Friday, day after tomorrow. Sorry for short warning, but it’s an emergency as I said.’
When Auntie Flo told Marius about Canteloupe’s match, he said, ‘That’s super, oh super. They make a big Festival thing out of this game. People like May and Brearley come to watch… But all my gear’s at School, in my cricket bag. I brought everything else I might need, but not that. Have we time to go and fetch it before Friday?’
‘We don’t need to. It came by road delivery this morning. I unpacked it without disturbing you because you were working.’
‘Funny,’ said Marius. ‘I never arranged that.’
‘There was a message gummed to the handle, from your housemaster’s wife. Someone had told her you might be needing it. Very thoughtful.’
‘Yes,’ said Marius. He shook his head as if to dispel some doubt and took both of Auntie Flo’s hands. ‘I hope it goes well,’ he said.
‘It would be nice for you to do great things in front of May or Brearley.’
‘I wasn’t thinking so much of them.’
‘You know,’ she said, ‘the Palairets were always keen cricketers. Two of them played for Somerset.’
‘You’re thinking…of Pally? Of Galahad?’
‘Not really. He wasn’t near good enough for that sort of thing. I watched him in a holiday match last summer.’
‘He kept a very straight bat,’ said Marius. ‘It went up dead straight and came down dead straight.’
‘Too straight, I dare say.’
Sharp old bird, thought Marius. ‘Come on,’ he said to her. ‘Come and help me sort my gear.’
‘Marius will be coming to the cricket,’ Theodosia Canteloupe said to Teresa. ‘Shall you mind?’
‘Not in the slightest. Why should I?’
They were walking round Canteloupe’s pretty oval cricket ground. This was a quarter of a mile from the house, some of which was dramatically visible through the one gap in the ranks of the copper beech trees that marched round the oval. While they walked, Tessa and Theodosia, in easy and elegant step from the gap in the trees, through which they had come, and round the boundary towards the pavilion which was opposite the gap, they watched a chorus of groundsmen fuss and fiddle round the wicket.
‘It’s going to be fast and true, that wicket,’ said Tessa. ‘Marius likes a fast wicket. He likes to play dashing strokes off the front foot.’
‘I don’t think he’ll get a very high place in the batting order,’ Theodosia said. ‘He’ll be in a side of far more experienced players. Odd of Canteloupe to choose him. Emergency choice, Canteloupe said; but I should have thought –’
‘– Shall you mind that Marius is coming?’ Teresa said.
‘Why should I?’
‘You do seem to be rather going on about it.’
‘I just said it was odd of Canteloupe to choose him,’ said Theodosia, with a very slight edge. ‘That old woman, Palairet’s aunt, is coming with him. I like her.’
‘Does Marius know that you’re going to have a girl?’
‘I haven’t told him. Someone else may have done.’
‘Shall you tell him while he’s here?’
‘Why are you going on about Marius?’
‘He excites me. He has always excited me. The idea of him… and you…is almost more exciting than I can bear.’
Theodosia was about to reply when –
‘Hullo, girls,’ said Canteloupe, approaching them round the boundary. ‘Will you please come and help with the placement for luncheon on the first day. The Somerset Colts will be rather – er – out of their depth and will tend to huddle together. We need to sprinkle our lot very tactfully among them, so that they can be at their ease with us. Now: their Captain is called James Dankworth, of King’s School, Bruton. He can sit between our skipper, Michael Drewett, and his own headmaster, Hubert Doggart. Their Vice-Captain is a small farmer’s son from Roadwater: I’ll take him on.’
‘I should put me or Marius on his other side,’ said Tessa. ‘Roadwater’s near to Ullacote where we stayed with Raisley Conyngham last spring, so we could talk to him about the area.’
‘Good idea,’ said Canteloupe smoothly. ‘You for the farmer’s boy, I think; I might have something else in mind for Marius.’
‘These are your orders,’ said Canteloupe to Leonard Percival late on the night before the match. ‘You meet Marius and the old woman when they arrive at ten-thirty. If I know her, they’ll be punctual to the second. You pass her on to me and my wife for coffee; and you take Marius straight to the ground for fielding practice. On the way to the ground you show him the secret way into the birch grove, and you tell him that my wife is anxious to meet him there for a private talk, which will otherwise not be possible. Tell him to be there at twelve-thirty on the pip, and be ready to wait if she hasn’t arrived.’
‘And suppose, Detterling, that he’s in the field, or batting?’
‘My XI will bat first,’ said Canteloupe. ‘That is arranged. I shall be tossing the coin, as I am the host; my Captain will win; and he will elect to bat. The wicket is firm, the bowling will be moderate, and I have some of the best amateur batsmen in the West Country. By the time Marius will have to leave the ground for his tryst – at twelve-twenty, say – only two of our wickets, at the most, will have fallen. Probably none. Since Marius will be batting at Number Ten, he will not hesitate to go. What may or may not happen after he’s gone is another matter. There are several possible sequences, all designed to meet different contingencies and put Marius effectually in the way he must go.’
While Theodosia and Teresa were getting up on the morning of the match, the telephone started trilling by the bed. Thea listened with a very straight face for thirty seconds and then said, ‘So be it, Carm. If he insists on coming, he must be allowed to. But I cannot say I’m in favour.’
She put down the receiver without another word.
‘Carmilla from Cambridge,’ she said. ‘She’s bringing Sir Tom to see Tullius. They’ll be here late this afternoon.’
There was no helpful comment that Teresa could offer, so she offered none but simply accompanied Theodosia into their bathroom. While she was drying Tessa, Theodosia said, ‘I was going to tell you something by the cricket ground, but Canteloupe interrupted us. Canteloupe is hinting that after I’m delivered of this girl I’m carrying I might like to try again, for a boy. He is hinting that you and I and Marius… You understand?’
Teresa nodded. Theodosia draped the towel on the girl’s freckled shoulders and got into the bath herself.
‘And so when,’ said Theodosia, ‘you said that Marius had always excited you, and that the idea of Marius and me together excited you almost beyond bearing, I thought to myself, perhaps it is intended…so. And this was what I was about to say to you when Canteloupe interrupted.’
‘Do you want another child? After this girl?’
‘No. But I want to please Canteloupe, I want to humour his obsession, although I know very well that it is vile and dangerous. I love Canteloupe, you see.’
Theodosia stood up in the bath. Tessa began to soap her.
‘Well,’ said Tessa, passing her hands over Theodosia’s taut and gibbous belly, ‘there is a long time to decide. Little Helen will be four months yet.’
‘You are determ
ined on “Helen”?’
‘I should like our child to be named Helen,’ said Teresa, ‘because it is one of the enchanted names. But of course you must choose.’
‘Perdita.’
‘A sad name. But another of the enchanted ones.’
‘Canteloupe says,’ said Theodosia, ‘that if there is no boy, then Perdita will become a Baroness in her own right at Canteloupe’s death. The Baroness Sarum of Old Sarum.’
‘But there is already a boy: Tullius, Baron Sarum of Old Sarum.’
Theodosia sat down in her bath.
‘I think,’ said Theodosia, ‘that Canteloupe assumes that Tullius, Baron Sarum of Old Sarum, will be no longer there.’
‘Do you mind…this assumption?’
‘Not any more, if ever I did. My only concern now is with Perdita. With you and Perdita. I have a feeling,’ said Theodosia, rising out of the water like Aphrodite enceinte and being received into a huge warm towel by Teresa, ‘that whatever is to happen about Tullius is very near. There is a look in Canteloupe’s eye. But what is important,’ she said, ‘is that the old man from Cambridge should not see Tully. It will bring him more grief and increase his madness. He thinks that the tree nymphs from the elms in the College Avenue still live, and are angry with him for the destruction of their trees, and so took away his daughter, Baby. If he sees Tullius, he will imagine that here is a further token of their vengefulness and further cause for him to curse himself.’
‘There is no way,’ said Tessa, ‘of stopping the Provost from seeing the child. His grandchild.’
They walked into the bedroom and began to tend and dress each other.
‘He may be taken ill on the road. Or when he arrives. We can put him off for a day or two by saying that Sarum is ill, or being specially treated for something, here or elsewhere, But sooner or later,’ said Theodosia, deftly combing Teresa’s little triangle of ginger hair, ‘Sir Thomas Llewyllyn will have to be introduced to Lord Sarum of Old Sarum…unless one of them dies.’
And so now, thought Marius, the day had dawned, and soon he would come to the field of honour. Marius and Auntie Flo stepped out of the hired Rolls (‘Rather vulgar,’ Auntie Flo had said, ‘but rather fun’); the chauffeur drove silently away to park, under the direction of a sergeant of the Wiltshire Constabulary; Canteloupe and Theodosia greeted Auntie Flo fondly; Theodosia looked at Marius as if she were indifferent but not ill-disposed to what she was looking at; Canteloupe handed Marius over to Leonard Percival; and Leonard Percival told Marius that his kit would be taken down to the ground, where fielding and net practice would shortly commence.
‘Good,’ said Marius, ‘nothing like a little pracker with a hard ball after a month off.’
Then should they walk to the ground? Leonard suggested. Canteloupe and Theodosia and Auntie Flo had disappeared. Yes, agreed Marius; let them walk to the ground.
They started through a lush meadow, Leonard perspiring with the painful effort, and passed a grove of lady-birch. ‘Here,’ said Leonard, ‘this is how you enter; here; and here you must enter at twelve-thirty sharp as a lemon and wait for her ladyship. She may have seemed cool just now but she has things for you in private. Twelve-thirty.’
‘But the game –’
There would, said Leonard, be no difficulties about that.
The first ball of the match was bowled as the final stroke of eleven sounded from Canteloupe’s Campanile in the southwest corner of the Great Court. The Somerset County Colts opened with two up-and-downish fast medium bowlers, who apparently propelled the ball through the air and off the wicket as straight as any two men in England, but were supposedly (to judge from their respective fields) bowling in-swingers from the pavilion end and out-swingers from the Campanile end – which was known as such because the Dalmatio-Venetian Campanile towered above and behind that wing of the Great Court which was visible through the gap in the copper beeches. The Captain of Canteloupe’s XI, much prompted by Canteloupe, had sent in to bat a pair of very serious Minor County men from Devon, who, after playing out the first four overs, looked likely to stay at their blocks for ever accumulating an average of 3.75 runs an over, mostly in singles but with an occasional unobtrusive 4.
Marius, who was to bat at Number Ten and had yet to don armour, sat in front of the pavilion, to the right of the gate and to the left of Auntie Flo, who in turn was to the left of Theodosia, who was to the left of Tessa. Theodosia listened to Auntie Flo, who was full of memories of ‘Loopy’ Canteloupe, the present Marquess’ cousin and predecessor. No one else in this quartette spoke at all, and none of them looked at each other, for even Auntie Flo, in full spate to Theodosia, kept her eyes straight and almost unblinking to the front lest she should miss a single motion of the cricket.
Canteloupe, meanwhile, was strolling round the ground with Colin Cowdrey and E W Swanton. His XI lolled about the seats by the pavilion steps or on the grass at the bottom of them. Casual spectators arrived on foot (no cars allowed on the ground, though there would have been plenty of room for them between the boundary and the beeches). These came by private invitation or in response to advertisements in the local papers or on market hoardings; the guests might procure refreshment free in the pavilion, the general public (by paying) in a commodious tent. Seats were liberally provided, and as time went on the crowd became substantial. Small yokels and other of Canteloupe’s vassals circulated with score cards. But with all of this there was no noise, or not so’s you’d notice: a little applause, that little muted and educated. A great peace settled on the noonday green, made yet more peaceful by the chant of the cicadas beyond the beeches. Marius thought of The Scholar Gipsy:
Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill.
Several times the line repeated itself in his brain; then:
…Here will I sit and wait,
While to my ear from uplands far away
The bleating of the folded flocks is borne,
With distant cries of reapers in the corn –
All the live murmur of a summer’s day,
until at last his ‘eye travels down to Oxford towers’, which, in the shape of the Campanile and four handsome chimneys, flickered through the gap behind the wicket.
As the bell struck noon, Theodosia rose, excused herself to Auntie Flo, and, walking in step with faithful Teresa, departed round the boundary, into the gap and towards the house.
‘Can’t just be having a pee,’ said Auntie Flo. ‘There’s a perfectly good place behind the pavilion. Tired, I suppose. Nice for her to have that little girl to attend her.’
A few minutes later Tessa came back alone. ‘Thea’s getting forty minutes with her feet up,’ she explained. ‘She may even cut luncheon; but she’s sent me back as I’ve got to chat up one of the Colts when they come off.’
She patted the empty seat between herself and Auntie Flo, and looked at Marius. ‘I know we’ve parted,’ her eyes seemed to say. ‘I know that I’ve left them and you’re still with and of them. But we can be friends, surely. Perhaps you might even want to tell me something and I could say something back.’
Marius rose from his seat; Tessa smiled happily; but, ‘I must go for a little walk,’ he said, ‘alone. I know I needn’t bother to pad up till at least five wickets are down, and that I probably won’t have to bat at all, but I’m feeling jittery. See you both at lunch.’
But would he? he thought. If Theodosia had important private things to say to him, it might be some considerable time before he was back. The bell struck the quarter. Presumably Thea was even now rising from wherever Tessa had left her and proceeding slowly over the meadow behind the beeches, between these and the near end of the wing visible through the gap. If Marius now walked very slowly through the gap, he thought, and then to the right, round and behind the beeches on the other side, then struck across the meadow and so to the grove of lady-birch, he could enter it by the hidden way which Percival had shown him and either find Theodosia there already or wait for her if she were not. In any cas
e he would not be a second later than twelve-thirty. He hoped that Auntie Flo and Tessa didn’t think that he was being either peculiar or unfriendly; but plainly there had been no choice but to leave them, for was it not by my lady’s command that he came hither to the grove?
When Marius came through the trees to the pool at the centre of the grove, he found Daisy, the nanny, who was sprawled naked on the grass, and Sarum of Old Sarum, who was also naked and was mounted astride Daisy’s left knee, leaning forward slightly and keeping his balance by clasping with his right hand at her pelvis and by clamping his left within her open crutch. Seen from behind, Sarum was an entirely normal and wholesome child; it was only when Marius (as he moved round the pool) began to see the simian and wizened face in profile, and also the grotesque length and thickness, for so small a child, of the flamboyantly curved pego which he was frotting along Daisy’s white and mole-flecked thigh, that Marius was reminded that this creature was alien.
‘Master Marius,’ said Daisy. ‘We hadn’t expected you. Not but what we’ll be pleased if you wish to stay and play with us. Go on, you swim a little,’ she said to Sarum. She prised him off her knee and threw him (pego flailing) backwards into the pool. He surfaced quickly, shook his head, emitted something like a chuckle, and started swimming in vigorous circles.
‘I has to cool him off now and then,’ Daisy said. ‘He be a horny little baggage, bain’t he just? Sit thee down, honey. Strip, if thee likes. Be free.’
‘I think,’ said Marius, still standing, ‘that Theo – that Lady Canteloupe may be coming here to meet me. Rather soon.’
‘Not her,’ said Daisy. ‘She used to come here with her little sweetheart, that little Tessa. Then, one day, her ladyship sniff something wrong. I were coming here myself with Tully, see, and I spots ’em e’en through the trees, so I does, and I stops and hides. “It’s Baby,” her ladyship say to Tessa, “Baby, o Baby. She don’t like us being here. Not now this child is growing inside me.” So they stops their bussing and their goosing, and they comes out past me and Tully and never sees us, and they has no time been here since, so now we comes here, TulIy and I, all the live day, knowing ’tis secret – till you’ve come, young Master.’