by Simon Raven
‘Oh,’ said Marius, beginning to have some idea of what was in the summer wind. It’s meant to be now, he thought, kindly and naturally, almost unnoticeably, but in any case now, in such a way that his going hence shall be easy and agreeable, and perhaps even honourable with it. But what about the nurse? She would surely defend her charge. She doted on him. Well, thought Marius, just let the thing go on. He took off his School Under Sixteen blazer, his white shirt, his white flannels, his shoes and socks.
‘You’se got no panters on,’ said Daisy.
‘We don’t wear them with games clothes, you see. Besides, I shall have to strap my box there, when I go in to bat.’
‘You’se got a little scar. On the bulb. Daisy do see it.’
‘It happened when I was circumcised. The skin was too tight, so I had to be circumcised when I was quite old for it. Very painful. And worse, because there was the slip there’s that scar.’
‘Daisy will coddle and kiss un better.’
Surely, he thought, she never talked like this before? Cases and conjugations crazily awry. Third person for first. Almost as if she were reverting, from being a correctly spoken and correctly conducted English nanny, to being…to being what?
He looked at Sarum’s supple little body as it skittered about the pool, and then lay back.
‘Daisy will kiss and cuddle un better. See: watch un grow in Daisy’s hand. There, my honey boy. Thee ’rt sweet as any blossoms that blooms along the tree, my cherry one, my beamish – oh see un grow so big and beautiful in Daisy’s hand, Now is time for kisses, one, two and three, o sweet as all the blossoms that blooms along the tree…two, three and four, as sweet as all the blossoms that blooms along the bough…’
Shortly after Marius left the pavilion, there was a change of bowling. A small, stooping lad with hooky arms and legs and a long, thin nose was put on at the Campanile end. He took a run of four steps, and sent down a low, shortish ball, which pitched just outside the off stump. The batsman, the more serious of the two serious Devon men, played back carefully – carefully and much too slowly. The ball whipped in, vicious and sneaky, to strike his right pad two inches above the foot. The stooping lad appealed to the umpire, in a voice so low that even the umpire could hardly hear him, and the Devon man was very properly given out.
After a time, Sarum crawled out of the water and up to Daisy and Marius. Curiously but without jealousy or resentment he watched them do what they were doing. Then he plucked at Daisy’s free arm. She put it round him and took him to her breast. Sarum closed his eyes and started contentedly to suck. The thing is quite clear, thought Marius as his pleasure began to mount. There is something strange, some sport, some divinity or devilry in this satyr child, this rollicking little noonday Pan, which has altogether infected Daisy. As he has grown, so, more and more, he has infected her. She has become like one of those nymphs in the paintings of Poussin or Boucher, she has become like a dryad or a minor country-goddess who, drunk with blood and wine and music, frolics with all as the dance quickens, with the little faun or satyr godlings as well as Priapus the Great.
The stooping lad took three wickets in his first over and two in his second.
‘Come on, girl,’ said Auntie Flo to Tessa. ‘We must find Marius. At this rate he’ll be needed to bat before lunch. Where do you think he could have gone?’
‘Anywhere…in all these trees,’ Tessa said.
‘You’ve known him for years. His tastes, his habits. What he’s likely to do when he’s nervous? Think, girl.’
‘I suppose it is possible…that his cousin Baby might have called him…guided him to her. Theodosia thinks that she is here.’
‘Baby? The first Lady Canteloupe?’
Tessa nodded.
‘She’s dead in Africa,’ Auntie Flo said.
‘Thea thinks she’s here. She always loved Marius. There’s a place we might find him, if Baby has been calling him. It’s a chance, anyway.’
‘Then we’d better buck up.’
As Tessa led Auntie Flo across the meadow and toward the grove of lady-birch, Auntie Flo said, ‘We used to come here sometimes in Loopy Canteloupe’s day. For picnics. Swimming. The pool was just big enough for two or three together. There was a funny way in – near that stream.’
‘There still is,’ said Tessa, and began to enter by it.
As Tully sucked on Daisy’s breast, Marius saw his way.
‘We must both cleave you,’ he said to Daisy. ‘The God requires. The ritual requires. The boy first.’
Daisy gently took Sarum from her breast. She desisted from her kissing of Marius, who rolled on one side, agreeably tumescent, to await his turn in Daisy’s loins…during which, having restored Sarum to Daisy’s breast, he would block the child’s snub nose with his hand and ensure that the pressure of his own breast kept Sarum’s mouth gorged with Daisy’s. Thus the boy, dazed, a few moments before, by the piercing spasms of an unripe ecstasy, but having emitted nothing and therefore ready (as Marius remembered so well from his own infantile pleasurings) for instant re-arousal – being enfolded, what was more, in the warm and quivering flesh of others as they drew towards orgasm – thus the boy, recalling delicious frenzy and feeling it rapidly remount, not realizing until it was too late that the flow of his breath had been staunched and his life drained from him, would die on his mistress’ nipple, both sated with bliss and sensing its imminent recurrence. Surely a good way, a kind way, to go, assisting his friends in their pleasure, in no wise dishonourable.
But it was not to happen this way. As Daisy raised Sarum and then eased the extravagantly swollen tissue into the centre of the labia between her thighs, Auntie Flo (having brushed violently past Tessa, who tried to restrain her) strode manically round the pool and ripped the child off Daisy’s belly.
‘O, monstrous! Demon, Beelzebub!’ Auntie Flo cried as she looked into Sarum’s eyes.
Sarum, sensing the enemy, the spoiler of joy, instinctively knowing that this intervention was not made (as Fielding’s and Marius’ had been) in order to enhance Daisy’s pleasure and therefore his own, but in order to destroy all pleasure at all, snarled and then bit at Auntie Flo’s obtrusive face. Auntie Flo, blood spurting, recoiled and dropped Sarum, whose head hit the hard earth beneath the dried up grass before he rolled, heels over head, into the pool.
Auntie Flo drooped to the ground. Marius gazed with disgust at the split nostrils and the blood and mucus which welled and bubbled from the gap between them, then reached his cricket shirt from the ground to mop at the flow. Daisy clambered towards the pool to rescue her darling, who lay unconscious from the blow to his head, prone, awash and slowly sinking in the water. Tessa came at Daisy with a hold which she had learned from Theodosia (‘You never know, my darling, when you’ll need a nasty trick to help you’) and hurled her towards the trees.
‘It must be best like this,’ Tessa yelled at her. ‘Don’t you see? Like this it’s nobody’s fault, and when it’s done this horrible curse will be gone.’
But ginger Daisy lay beneath the birch trees, not hearing auburn Tessa.
‘Now,’ said Auntie Flo, speaking through Marius’ bloodstained cricket shirt as though through a mask, ‘in a very few minutes one of us must go to summon a doctor and the police. There are a sergeant and two constables near the car park. But first I am now going to tell you all exactly what has happened, after which I shall tell you what is to be done.
‘What happened was this. Marius came to this copse to join little Sarum – who, let us remember, is his second cousin – in his morning dip. Sarum, as an infant, was swimming naked; Marius, accustomed to swim naked at his School, did likewise. In this the nanny encouraged him; when he said he had no bathing shorts, she simply told him to strip. To his pleasure and not altogether to his surprise the nurse followed suit.
‘As Marius and the nurse dallied together on the grass, Sarum, though a capital swimmer for his age, got into trouble in the water – possibly a cramp. When Tessa and I arrived, seeking
Marius who would very soon have to bat in the cricket match, Sarum was struggling desperately while Marius and the nanny were so deep in venery on the bank that they could not notice Sarum’s situation. I went to save the infant, tripped, and banged my face horribly against a tree trunk – as a matter of fact it’s not as bad as it must have looked; a few stitches at the bottom of the nose will fix it. Tessa, having seen me fall, dashed to save Sarum; the nurse, at last awakened to what was passing, thrust Marius from her and, still throbbing in her incipient climax, much disordered by guilt, furious that another should be handling and rescuing her charge as she herself should have done long since – the nurse, I say, went to snatch Sarum from Tessa, causing Tessa to drop the child on the bank, from which he rolled into the pool unconscious from his fall. Tessa went again to save him, and the nurse, in her rage and jealousy and shame, attacked her fiercely, for the while ignoring the drowning boy. As they fought, Sarum died. I managed to crawl over and fetch him out – too late.’
And now at last, briefly discarding her mask, she did fetch Sarum out and laid him on the grass. As Auntie Flo, still bleeding badly (though less) replaced the cricket shirt on her wound, Tessa made a perfunctory effort to revive him by kneeling astride him and putting pressure on his lungs.
He’d have enjoyed that, thought Marius, were he still able.
To the great relief of all of them, Tessa’s untutored efforts were futile.
‘Too late,’ repeated Auntie Flo through Marius’ cricket shirt. ‘After a time,’ she went on, ‘Tessa, using some judo hold she had learned at School –’
‘– From Theodosia,’ corrected Tessa.
‘I think, my dear, it would be more sensible – don’t you? – to say “at School”. After a time, Tessa threw the nurse, who was rendered unconscious. Now, what’s the news with her?’ Auntie Flo said.
Tessa and Marius went to look at the supine Daisy.
‘She seems to have hit her head on the bottom of a tree,’ said Marius. He picked up his cricket trousers and began to pull them on.
‘Sorry,’ he said to Tessa and Auntie Flo. ‘What with all the excitement, I forgot till now.’
‘What with all the excitement,’ said Auntie Flo, ‘I’m afraid I didn’t notice…except that your legs are rather too thin. Only very slightly, but nevertheless too thin. Just as well perhaps. If they weren’t you would be perfect, and that would be a bore. Where were we? That girl. Rather a lot depends on her. She’s not broken her neck by any happy chance?’
‘No,’ said Tessa, who had been ferreting about near and beneath Daisy. ‘She’s been impaled,’ said Tessa, trembling. ‘Christ, O Christ, it wasn’t my fault. She did attack me, you said so, you said that’s what happened, I acted in self-defence, Jesus Christ forgive me –’
‘– Shut up,’ said Auntie Flo.
She came over to Tessa. Still holding Marius’ shirt to her face with one hand, she soothed Tessa by massaging her neck with the other. Then she looked at the ground. She saw a picnic chair which had disintegrated in the undergrowth. She bent down, examined the chair, then with a practised movement of her free arm (learned many years ago in QARANC) turned Daisy from supine to prone. Nothing was immediately noticeable. Auntie Flo examined the picnic chair again: the canvas was the colour and texture of a shroud used for a burial at sea; one of the struts that had once supported it had apparently rusted away from the rest, for it was nowhere visible…until she saw a bare quarter of an inch of it, which was protruding from the narrow space between the bottom of Daisy’s spine and the mouth of her rectum.
‘So that’s what has happened,’ said Auntie Flo to Tessa and Marius. ‘An appalling accident as she fell. Nobody to blame. Nobody to blame for anything. Nobody living, that is. And here is what will happen now. Teresa will walk – walk, girl – to the car park; she will direct the police here and summon a doctor to attend to my nose. There may even be one on the ground. Marius and I will stay here and wait until the police come, tell them all that happened as I have just told you, and then go for some much-needed luncheon. Let us hope that the cricket recommences as soon as possible. I do not see why two such eminently desirable deaths should prevent it.’
The cricket, which had been prorogued for luncheon at one-fifteen (Canteloupe’s XI having made 120 for 7 wickets), was in fact resumed at three-thirty, by which time the police had heard the story of what had happened as told by Marius, Tessa and Auntie Flo, i.e. as told by Auntie Flo to Marius and Tessa in the birch grove. They were three hard nuts, Marius, Tessa and Auntie Flo, and there was no cracking any of them. The story was, no doubt, disgraceful: nowhere in it was there the slightest element of the criminal (as opposed to the merely wicked) except possibly in Daisy’s neglect of her duties while lapped in lewdness, and Daisy was now gone to a higher authority to answer for that.
Canteloupe was approached by the local rector, who said that the cricket could not decently continue on the day of his son’s death. Canteloupe replied that he was not so selfish as to let his own grief spoil the pleasure of others. It was, the rector insisted, not only a matter of private grief but also of public respect, and that not only for Lord Sarum of Old Sarum but also for the dead nurse. Canteloupe riposted that the rector, as an old Blue (Cantab) and a guest invited for the occasion, was welcome to show his public respect by leaving or his good sense by staying. So the rector (who did not have many treats these days) decided to stay, and there was an end of that.
It was, however, felt only proper to delay the resumption of play until the corpses of Sarum and his nanny had been removed from the precincts. There was an annoying delay about this, as the vehicle required for the purpose went kaputt in the clutch just as it was leaving the Great Court. Canteloupe ordered that it be towed by some of his villeins as far as the Gate of the Demesne, there to await a replacement; and as soon as it was outside the Gate the first ball after lunch was bowled.
Soon after play had restarted, the ill-favoured and stooping off-break bowler came on again and took another wicket. Marius, as Number Ten, was now to bat. Things were now very bad for Canteloupe’s XI, who had only made 125 runs for 8 wickets in conditions in which they should have been well on the way to 300.
‘That fellow,’ said Auntie Flo to Marius, as he rose to go to the wicket, ‘is only bowling low off-breaks. Poor old Galahad would have played dead straight with his dead straight bat and would have been out in three balls. You know better.’
Auntie Flo had been competently patched up by Dr La Soeur, who had come as Canteloupe’s guest and had no medical purpose in mind, but was only too pleased to oblige. ‘I retired yesterday,’ La Soeur said to Auntie Flo (who knew him or at any rate of him from the past), ‘and I’ve come here for the start of a long holiday. It is significant that the beginning of my retirement should coincide with the first honest and absolutely above board service that I have rendered for very many years.’
‘Rubbish,’ Auntie Flo had said. ‘You ran a free clinic for the poor.’
‘I also used them as guinea pigs. And the clinic to mask another, far less innocent. Don’t try to whitewash me, Miss Florence. And if you got that gash by hitting your nose on a tree, I’m the Emperor of Mars. Somebody took a bite at it.’
‘No need to mention it?’
‘None whatever, my dear. I’ve no wish to compromise your dignity. But of course my silence will mean that this job isn’t honest and above board after all. I might have known that I’ve been professionally crooked for too long to leave crookedness altogether behind me.’
Well, thank God it was him and none other, thought Auntie Flo now, as she watched Marius walk to the wicket: if it had been some nosey local GP stitching me up there might well have been questions and complications, None now. I hope Marius does know what to do with those off-breaks.
Marius did. He put his front foot down the wicket and hit the ball smoothly and exceedingly hard, with a cross bat but also with the spin, high over mid-wicket’s head, first bounce over the boundary.
/> For the first time that day there was loud and liberal applause…applause that was repeated when Marius, after stopping the next ball (a yorker) in his block, hit the third in the same way as the first, but this time a perch plus a pole plus a chain into the copper beeches.
When the last wicket of Canteloupe’s XI fell at four-fifteen, the score was 202, of which Marius had made 57 not out, a pretty wretched effort by the team, on such a beautiful wicket, but a brilliant personal performance by Marius.
‘And of course,’ said Raisley Conyngham to Marius at tea in the pavilion, ‘the worse one’s team has done, the more gratifying one’s own success. You and I must now have a word together.’
Raisley had appeared on the ground while Marius was batting, spoken at some length to Canteloupe, and been presented to Auntie Flo (with whom he had long had tenuous acquaintance through their common interest in racing) as one of Marius’ preceptors at School. He had talked to Auntie Flo only of Marius’ career at the School to date, his prospects in ‘O’ levels and his later chances of a Scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge, and said nothing of the events in the grove, of which he had had some account from Canteloupe that had been based on the collated testimony of Marius and Tessa.
What had happened, though not quite what had been planned, was irremediable. What had happened had happened, could not be altered now, and was in any case felt, both by Canteloupe and Raisley, to be tolerably satisfactory. It only remained for Marius to be, as the military say, ‘debriefed’ (so that Raisley might anticipate any possible future problems with the police or the press, and warn Marius about them) and then, from now on and for evermore, the thing must be absolutely forgotten.
‘I can’t talk now,’ said Marius to Raisley as they rose from the tea table, ‘I’ll be in the field.’