The Face of the Waters (First Born of Egypt Series)

by Simon Raven

  ‘Question one,’ said Jeremy Morrison to Nicos Pandouros, who was floating in the sarcophagus wearing only a pair of tiny purple Y-Fronts, ‘have you ever had a woman?’

  ‘No,’ said Nicos so flatly that there seemed no point whatever in pursuing or qualifying the question.

  ‘Your turn,’ said Jeremy to Piero.

  ‘Tell me, Nico,’ Piero began, ‘you have sworn this oath to the Professor Barraclough–’

  ‘–He is not a Professor,’ said Jeremy pedantically.

  ‘In Italy,’ said Piero, ‘we call any man of learning a Professore from respect. Please do not interrupt.’ And to Nicos in the sarcophagus, ‘You have sworn an oath to honour and obey him. In what case would you break this oath?’

  There was the sound of a car, an ebullient changing down of gears and a scrunching of gravel.

  ‘I should cease to honour him,’ said Nicos, ‘if ever I found he was no longer honourable.’

  ‘And at the same time would you cease to obey him?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nicos after some time. ‘One need not – must not – obey a man who has forfeited his honour.’

  After Canteloupe had spoken on the telephone to Len, the Provost’s Secretary, Len paced through Lancaster in his pearl-grey suede brogues in search of Carmilla Salinger, who had rooms in Sitwell’s Building which overlooked the Great Court of the College and the South wall of the Chapel. With Carmilla was her twin sister, Theodosia: they were seated at a round table, examining a pile of letters. When Len had knocked and entered, the sisters rose together, placed Len (literally) in an armchair, and set refreshment in the form of a bowl of fruit before him on a shining stool.

  ‘“Thou are an honourable guest and a welcome,”’ Carmilla said. ‘“Speak what is in thy mind; our heart bids us fulfil it, if fulfil it we can, and if it is a thing that hath fulfilment.”’

  Both girls smoothed the velvet trousers over their fine shanks and smiled down at Len. ‘Calypso speaking to Hermes, the Messenger of the Gods,’ said Theodosia, ‘so you at least are appropriately cast.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Len. He loosened the knot of his mauve knitted tie and gave a twirl to his eyebrows, bringing them both to resemble tiny pointed horns. ‘Are you two in a lenient mood?’ he said.

  ‘Not,’ said Carmilla, ‘if you’re talking of Jeremy Morrison.’

  ‘I’m talking,’ said Len, ‘of Gregory Stern.’

  ‘The publisher?’ said Theodosia. ‘The one who’s been writing those ugly anti-Jew pieces in Strix and the Scrutator?’

  ‘Right,’ said Len. ‘He’s about to write an even uglier anti-Jew book. Lord Canteloupe rung up just now to tell me he badly needs a publisher.’

  ‘What’s wrong with himself?’

  ‘Canteloupe, as his partner, won’t have it. But Canteloupe is anxious that he should find somebody to help him.’

  ‘Let us hope not,’ Theodosia said.

  ‘If he doesn’t, he’ll be in trouble.’ Len gave a brief account of the pressures that had already been brought to bear on Gregory Stern, and of the graver ones that would follow his default.

  ‘I’m sorry for that little Marius Stern,’ Carmilla said. ‘He’s getting it rotten, one way and the other.’

  ‘Marius will be all right,’ said Len, ‘and so will the rest of them, if I can get your agreement to one very simple request.’

  The twins looked puzzled.

  ‘Salinger & Holbrook,’ said Len. ‘The printing firm. Your father’s printing firm, Holbrook having long since retired. The one thing which your father kept when he sold out in the sixties. I suppose you two now own it.’

  Carmilla looked down at the letters on the table.

  ‘I suppose we do,’ she said.

  ‘Can I tell Canteloupe to tell Gregory that your firm will print, with the utmost care and for generous payment, Gregory’s anti–Israel book? That you will make of it what they call in the trade a “quality job”?’

  ‘There’ll be plenty of firms that will do this if the money’s big enough,’ Carmilla said. ‘Why should we publish the kind of filth which this is going to be?’

  ‘He needs your sort of presentation and prestige. And I said “print” not “publish,”’ Len said.

  ‘You also said, earlier, that he badly needs a publisher.’

  ‘So he does, but he won’t get one. I’m trying, Canteloupe is trying, to fix the next best thing. A decent piece of printing for him to set his name to. That’s all. You would in no way be responsible for or giving countenance to what he’s written. You would not even undertake to deliver the volumes when they were bound. You – your firm – would simply see to it that Gregory’s words were correctly and elegantly printed, so that those who wished might read them, as is their right.’

  ‘You’ll have to do better than that, Len,’ Carmilla said.

  ‘All right. Although the need is Gregory’s, remember that the request is Canteloupe’s.’

  ‘So what do we owe Canteloupe?’

  ‘He was your father’s friend. He played cricket with him. He dined and drank with him afterwards.’

  Carmilla shook her head. But Theodosia remembered a day when she was about fourteen and had been taken by her father to the last big match of the season at Lord’s. Carmilla was abroad learning French, she remembered, as their adoptive mother was having one of her bouts of “keeping those girls separate”, and her father had promised to take her to this match, a festival match which was to be between an XI of England and an XI from the Rest of the World. Her mother had opposed the expedition, because she knew that happiness would come of it, but had suddenly been invited to a grand garden party and had forgotten, during her hysterical preparations, to interfere further with Theodosia and her father …who had left the house that morning while her mother was in the hands of a visiting hairdresser. Shortly after they had sat down in the Warner Stand, her father and she, at the end of the third or fourth over, a high grey flannel figure under a huge Panama hat had come flickering along the row towards them. ‘Hullo, Donald,’ the figure had said, removing the hat, ‘can you budge up a bit and let me sit with you?’ Then her father had flushed with pleasure, and said, ‘Yes, oh yes, this is my daughter, Theodosia – Thea, this is Captain Detterling.’ And although Theodosia was nearly squashed to a pap, she had never forgotten how happy she had been…how happy her father had been…as they all sat there during the next hour and Captain Detterling had commented lightly on the play (rather bad and boring, as she remembered) and occasionally told her about some match he had played in with her father, when her father had done rather well. Captain Detterling: Captain Lord Canteloupe.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said now, and nodded. ‘If Captain Detterling asks, we shall do this thing for Mr Stern.’

  Carmilla, very surprised at first, looked Theodosia in the face, saw what she saw there, and then nodded also.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘if Captain Detterling asks, we shall.’

  When Jeremy, Nicos and Piero went to join Ptolemaeos in the kitchen for a late lunch, they found that the car which they had heard earlier had contained Jo-Jo and Jean-Marie Guiscard, and Oenone in a carrycot. Although both Jeremy and Nicos had met the Guiscards when they had visited Lancaster College (for Sarum’s christening) during the previous Spring, neither they nor Piero were acquainted with recent events in that gallery, and all three were rather put out by this unscheduled irruption into what they were beginning to regard as their own territory.

  The situation became gradually more comprehensible, though not much more agreeable, as curious dishes, concocted from Fenland produce by Mrs Gurt and Mrs Statch, were distributed round the table.

  ‘Those women have fucked up the tench mousse,’ Jo-Jo said, ‘it’s just as well you’re going to have me in charge of the cooking for a while.’

  A wail came from the carrycot.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Jo-Jo, with indifference rather than unkindness, ‘Cow & Gate later.’

  The wail persisted. Jean-Mari
e took the child up and comforted it. The wail turned to a bubbly grizzle.

  ‘Better make the best of Dadda while he’s here,’ Jo-Jo said.

  What had happened, it appeared, was that Jean-Marie’s mother, who had been ill for some time in her home in Clermont-Ferrand, had now been moved into hospital, where it was thought she would stay about another month before catching Charon’s ferry. Meanwhile, Jean-Marie’s father was uncared for and, being himself not many miles from Acheron, quite unable to cope; and Jean-Marie, the only child, had been summoned to take charge of him by a nonagenarian Great Aunt, who was Abbess of a Convent outside Grasse.

  Quite what solutions Jean-Marie would contrive and impose must be uncertain, to say the least; what was certain was that he was obliged, by every rule in the book, to go at once to Clermont-Ferrand. This, Jeremy inferred from gestures and parentheses, Jean-Marie was not eager to do, as he would not yet wish to leave Jo-Jo alone with Oenone, to whom her attitude was ironic when not contemptuous. Jo-Jo, it seemed, regarded Oenone at best as a bad joke and at worst as a tedious parasite…who must, however, be nourished, cleaned and suffered. None of this was pleasing to Jean-Marie, who, furthermore, remembered Jo-Jo’s once telling him that Fen air was unhealthy. Why then, he now enquired, was Jo-Jo so keen to bring Oenone here while he was absent in France? Why could she not stay with their good friends in Wiltshire?

  They had been in Wiltshire long enough, responded Jo-Jo, apparently objecting no more than her husband to having three (more or less) strange boys privy to all this (perhaps, thought Jeremy, they were being regarded as a kind of Greek chorus and would be expected, at some suitable crisis, to stand in line on the table and moralise on the affair). They had been in Wiltshire long enough, Jo-Jo repeated: Wiltshire had been fine until the baby was actually born, but now they must move elsewhere, and since no definite decision could be taken until Jean-Marie had settled what to do with his aged parent, she might just as well stay here…where she would have her darling Uncle Ptoly to love and care for her (as he had done so copiously before her marriage), to say nothing of his advice on young motherhood – and Jesus Christ, she could use it.

  Jean-Marie, too polite to impugn Ptolemaeos’ qualifications as a pediatrician, repeated his fear that Fen air was bad for babies. Had not Jo-Jo herself once said this when they were discussing the possibility of coming to live near her Uncle Ptoly?

  Yes, she had, but she had really meant during the winter, not during the autumn, which would still be with them for some time; and anyway, look how she herself had thrived while living there – obviously the Fens were in Oenone’s blood, so to speak.

  Ptolemaeos, appealed to by Jean-Marie in the matter, said there was nothing wrong with the Fens once you understood them, and that Mrs Gurt and Mrs Statch knew effective remedies for every Fenland ailment that Oenone could conceivably contract. Jean-Marie, knowing when he was beaten, looking at his watch and saying that he must be at the airport by six thirty, gently replacing his daughter in her carrycot, courteously saying goodbye to Jeremy, Nicos and Piero, largely unheeded by Jo-Jo, who was banging about the kitchen complaining of ‘those two filthy old sluts, they’re not fit to sweep out a cat house, Ptoly only employs them because he thinks they’re witches’ – Jean-Marie, having given a last sad little look into the carrycot and having been granted a lascivious kiss by Jo-Jo to make up for her recent neglect, faded away into an unconvincing taxi which had been conjured up from somewhere, and set off through the gathering fen mist, bound (one assumed) for Heathrow.

  ‘Thank God he’s gone,’ Jo-Jo announced. ‘I dote on my husband but since Oenone came he’s been a nightmare… behaving as if he were Joseph of Nazareth, Doctor Spock and Madame Curie all rolled into one. Let’s hope that old woman in Clermont-Ferrand goes the full distance, because as long as she’s above ground Jean-Marie’s stuck there.’

  ‘What will you do about Jean-Marie’s father when the old lady dies?’ said Ptolemaeos.

  ‘A very pertinent question, good Uncle, but one of which, with your permission, we shall postpone discussion. There are, there just are, more immediate questions,’ she said, tipping a tin of Cow & Gate over a seething saucepan, ‘like what does one do with a perfectly amiable infant whom one simply finds supererogatory? Is there any hope – after all – that the Fen air may help?’

  ‘I know I’m vulgar and insensitive,’ said Len to the Provost of Lancaster, ‘but this I must declare: if I had the sort of money Jo-Jo Guiscard has, or even the sort of money I myself have, I’d not be marking this event – happy or unhappy – by crouching in the Fens.’

  Ptolemaeos had just rung up Tom to report on the situation.

  ‘The boys have gone back to playing games in the bath,’ Ptoly had said, ‘and Jo-Jo is giving Oenone her bottle in the kitchen, and I thought you might be amused to hear about it all.’

  ‘Though why I should want to hear about that ill-conditioned minx,’ said Tom to Len a little later, ‘I cannot imagine. Thank God she’s had a girl – at least we’ll hear no more of a christening in the Chapel.’

  ‘There might be more spectacular disruptions,’ said Len, ‘than christenings in the Chapel.’

  ‘Expand.’

  ‘Jo-Jo Guiscard is your daughter Tullia’s best friend, the one Baby loves more than anyone at all, and probably vice versa. Now, Ptoly Tunne is telling you, in his own cool way, that Jo-Jo is ripe for heap big trouble, and we needn’t expect that Baby will be left out of it. Ptoly is giving out a gale warning.’

  ‘But what trouble?’ said Tom. ‘Madame Guiscard will be perfectly contented in the Fens with her Uncle, as she has been in the past. The Fenland effluvia will not kill that child, nor does she think they will: she clearly made that remark about Fen air as a bad taste joke. And again, Len, if anyone can give her good advice in the circumstances, it probably is Ptolemaeos. So what is all this about gale warnings?’

  ‘You are being obtuse, Provost,’ said Len. ‘You are reckoning without our little chum, Piero.’

  ‘It has a fascination, that game in the sarcophagus,’ said Nicos to Jeremy as they drove through the mist and out of the Fens towards Cambridge, ‘but I don’t think I wish to play again for a while.’

  ‘We’ll miss you,’ said Jeremy, and meant it. He had enjoyed the sight of Nicos’ hard limbs in the bath: he had been intrigued by Nicos’ strained attempts to play the game in the spirit intended and yet to conceal anything of real importance to him.

  ‘Funny,’ said Nicos, ‘Lady Canteloupe arriving like that.’

  Baby had arrived, rather breathless, while Jeremy, Nicos, Piero and Ptolemaeos were having tea with Jo-Jo and Oenone in the kitchen.

  ‘I knew you’d come here,’ Baby had said to Jo-Jo, ‘and I knew you’d only left Wiltshire because you thought I’d had enough of you. So I’m here to prove that I haven’t. I think you want me,’ she said, and kissed Jo-Jo softly on the lips. Jo-Jo did not demur. Baby gave a slanting look towards Piero.

  ‘Madame Guiscard and her child are the excuse,’ Nicos said now in Jeremy’s car, ‘Piero is the reason.’

  ‘Yes. She knew Piero when she was a little girl, on a holiday in Venice. You saw and heard,’ said Jeremy, ‘what an effort she made to hijack him the other day in Lancaster.’

  ‘She could hijack me and welcome,’ Nicos said. ‘A little too fat, but who cares? I bet…plenty of juice.’

  ‘I see what you mean. I don’t like her…but as a lust object she has plenty to be said for her. Jo-Jo too. She must absolutely crackle when her tail’s up.’

  ‘It is not up just now,’ Nicos said. ‘I’ll tell you something, Yeramy: although Lady Canteloupe is seething for Piero, and although Piero is doing his best to appear enthusiastic, I do not think his heart is in it.’

  ‘He could have fooled me. He evidently fooled her. Do you think that he doesn’t like girls – prefers men?’

  ‘I think he is fairly easy as to that. I think he fancies Lady Canteloupe quite a lot, and he will acquit himself
with credit: but though his prick is in it, Yeramy mou, his heart is not.’

  ‘He will also be worried about our good Provost, whether he will give him a place in the College. On the one hand, a happy Baby might make good interest for him with her Daddy.’

  ‘And on the other,’ said Nicos, ‘an unhappy Daddy, not liking his Baby to be naughty with dirty street boys when she has a lovely lord for a husband, might bar the gate of Lancaster to Piero for ever.’

  ‘Well, Piero is never tired of telling us he is a whore – every other answer he gave in the sarcophagus seemed to turn on that – and these are pre-eminently whorish calculations. We had best leave them to him.’

  ‘I should like to see them together,’ said Nicos greedily, more relaxed alone with Jeremy in the dark, moving car than ever in the soothing waters of the sarcophagus: ‘dainty Piero and the hot little Canteloupe.’

  ‘I’m sure that Piero would arrange it if the price was right.’

  Both boys laughed, grating and coarse.

  ‘Come and have dinner at Malvolio’s,’ said Jeremy, ‘my treat.’

  ‘I am sorry. I cannot accept this invitation.’

  ‘If we are to be friends, Nico, you must learn to accept my hospitality without worrying about returning it.’

  ‘Oh, it is not that. The Kyrios Barraclough dines on High Table tonight. He will be curious if he does not see me in Hall. He will wonder where I am, and question me, and be angry.’

  ‘Then let’s sit together in Hall. I’ll order some Burgundy.’

  ‘No Burgundy for me, Yeramy. The Kyrios quite likes you and thinks you are a suitable friend for me…but he is always suspicious, and expensive restaurants and bottles of Burgundy he does not approve. Such things are not for orphans from the Mani unless generously bestowed by himself. It is not good that you are a friend of Major Gray; and if Kyrios Barraclough should see that we had…the high life with one another, he would forbid our friendship.’