by Simon Raven
‘That would be unfair and dishonourable of him. And so then, as you said in the sarcophagus, you need no longer obey him.’
‘Disobedience is difficult on an empty stomach,’ Nicos said.
‘Do you remember, Piero, when I was a little girl, that dinner at the Palazzo in Venice, and I couldn’t find the place, and I went right upstairs and out on to the roof and piddled on the balustrade?’
‘Yes, Miss Baby.’
‘Why do you call me that?’
‘Because that is how I remember you. And I remember how shocked and how excited I was, when I came on to the roof and you told me what you had done.’
‘Are you excited now?’
‘Very excited, Miss Baby.’
‘Show me.’
‘And you show me…yourself as you were on that roof…’
‘Why, Miss Baby, what are you doing, squatting there like that?’
‘Piero, oh Piero – don’t look, Piero, I’ve nearly finished – but you are looking, aren’t you, so you must let me watch you to make up.’
‘Do you think it would have been like that, if I’d come up to the roof a little earlier?’
‘I don’t know. I’d like to think so. We were both so delicious then.’
‘You are delicious now, Miss Baby. I must taste you, everywhere. That is what I would have done on the roof, if I had arrived a little earlier and not been afraid lest Mr Lykiadopoulos should follow us and catch us. I should have respected the little girl, the virgin, but I should have tasted her all over…until at last her tight young thighs were quivering along my cheeks.’
‘So that was for starters?’ Jo-Jo said the next morning, as she and Baby walked up and down outside Ptolemaeos’ summerhouse, in which they had parked Oenone and her carrycot.
‘Another instalment this afternoon.’
‘No guilt about Canty?’
‘No. It’s not happening to me, you see, but to that little girl in Venice. We are playing a game of what might have been.’
‘Very ingenious. But limiting, if Piero must continue to respect your “virginity.”’
‘All that means is no fucking. And just as well too. No fucking, no trouble, as Poppa once said to me when he was drunk. And after all, there are about a million other things you can do.’
‘I wish I wanted to do some of them,’ said Jo-Jo. There was a small burst of weeping from the summerhouse. ‘Although I haven’t had it for literally months,’ she said as they started towards the weeping, ‘and although you’d think I’d be ready to go off like a Catherine Wheel, I just am not in the tiniest bit interested.’
She peered down at Oenone.
‘Don’t be boring,’ she said.
‘I hope I’m not being boring,’ said Baby, picking up Oenone and stroking her bald little head, ‘talking about me and Piero when you’re right off the whole thing.’
‘Not so far. It’s all quite interesting in a theoretical way, like the latest discovery about subatomic particles. Better put her back before she gets a fixation or something ghastly. You see,’ said Jo-Jo, ‘I just cannot feel any keenness in the idea of doing anything myself. It’s all Oenone’s fault,’ she said, as Baby replaced the offender in the carrycot. ‘I can’t explain but I know I shan’t want to do a single bloody sex-thing until I’ve settled what to do about her. As long as she’s there she’ll be like a duenna, watching, always watching.’
‘Such rubbish. She’s asleep most of the time.’
‘I feel she’s watching. I’ve already said I can’t explain, darling, and I know it makes no sense at all, but to me Oenone is just nine pounds solid of highly concentrated anti-aphrodisiac.’
‘Poor Jo. What on earth can you do? I mean…she’s here now.’
‘I’m hoping that Ptoly will work something out before Jean-Marie gets back. Perhaps…some sort of wet nurse, you know, some country woman who takes her in with her own family, and Jean-Marie can see her whenever he wants. The fact that she won’t take my milk might make an excuse.’
‘That sort of thing hasn’t happened for a hundred years, darling. I shouldn’t think it’s allowed, these days. Anyway, Jean-Marie won’t allow it.’
‘Something else, then,’ said Jo-Jo, taut and peevish. ‘I can’t have that child with me much longer. Before she was born, I used to say that if I had a girl I’d expose her, like the Greeks used to. These days that’s not allowed either.’
‘You wouldn’t have done it.’
‘I sometimes wonder. If it could be done painlessly, without the cold and the creatures with claws coming closer over the mountains… I don’t hate her you see. I want her to have a nice time.’
‘Being exposed, darling?’
‘Painlessly, I said. What could be nicer than being painlessly exposed and then dead? But since this can’t happen, I’d like her to have a nice time while she’s here, and every now and then I’d like to go and watch her having it. But I can’t keep her with me.’
‘You have a nice long talk with Ptoly. He’ll help you if anyone can. I’m sorry you’re off sex, darling, because I wanted you to distract Jeremy Morrison from Piero, give him a good healthy interest elsewhere.’
‘You think they–’
‘–No. But even so, Master Jeremy might get jealous and that would upset Piero and take his mind off his job. Now, he’s a hulking brute, that Morrison, but all the same he’s quite dishy, don’t you think, or perhaps scrummy is a better adjective in his case, but something he certainly has got, and I do wish you would amuse him if he comes, as he might, this afternoon.’
‘Uncle Ptoly says he usually comes every other day, which would mean he won’t be coming till tomorrow.’
‘Yes, but when he was here yesterday he may have smelt something between me and Piero…which could just bring him back today. If so, darling, I rely on you to divert him.’
‘I can certainly put up a little light conversation, if that will be any good.’
‘You’re sure you can’t manage anything…more riveting than that?’
‘I have told you, darling. Not while Oenone is here or anywhere near.’
‘If that Greek boy comes with him,’ Baby went on, obsessed, ‘all will be well. They can entertain each other in that sarcophagus you’ve told me about. But if Morrison comes alone, he will want Piero.’
‘He will want Piero anyhow. Why can’t you wait until tonight?’
‘Because I can’t. I can hardly wait till this afternoon.’
‘Then why wait till this afternoon?’
‘Because Piero is with your Uncle Ptolemaeos. There are problems which will very soon have to be settled about his passport and so on.’
‘All right,’ said Jo-Jo, ‘if Jeremy Morrison turns up here and asks for Piero, I’ll do my best to turn him round and send him back to Cambridge.’
‘You promise?’
‘I shall do my best. Whatever excuse I make, Mr Morrison will almost certainly guess the truth. Yet it’s quite possible that he won’t be tiresome or jealous,’ said Jo-Jo, who was by now viciously irritated by the whole affair and was deliberately seeking to anger or injure, ‘but will go away quietly, looking forward to a blow by blow description, if you will excuse the pun, next time he sees Piero. Men are often like that: not jealous, just prurient; and Piero will probably give an hilarious imitation of you while you’re coming; and both of them will howl with laughter. But whatever happens,’ said Jo-Jo, ‘I won’t go on acting as doorkeeper for ever. It’s a fucking imposition. You’ll have to work something out for yourselves, you and Piero, and the sooner the better, because Loppylugs Morrison and Nick the Greek are not going to vanish from the earth just for your convenience.’
‘All right, darling. No need to be a shrew just because you’ve dried up between the legs. We’ll manage fine without your help,’ Baby said.
‘You see,’ said Ptolemaeos to Piero, ‘although this is an easy-going country, no identity cards required or anything like that, you must be able to explain, at a nee
d, who you are and where you came from. Now then: you say that the Franciscans took your passport when you joined their order: and obviously you were not able to get it back before absconding?’
‘It was in any case out of date by then.’
‘If’, said Ptolemaeos carefully, ‘we went to the Italian Embassy in London, we could almost certainly, with careful persuasion and explanation, re-establish you in the identity which you had before you went into that convent. You are, of course, an illegal immigrant as far as the British authorities are concerned; but I have friends who have friends who would take care of that. But something tells me,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘that you are no longer much in love with the boy who went into the convent…with Piero of Venice…and that you would like to be somebody else.’
‘I should like to be an English gentleman.’
‘Yes,’ said Ptolemaeos complacently, ‘a lot of people would like to be that. Jean-Marie Guiscard, whom you met yesterday, would give one eye to be taken for a member of the English Upper Class.’
‘Just an English gentleman will be enough for me,’ said Piero, ‘it is not, I think, quite the same thing?’
‘I’m afraid not. Many of the Upper Class in this country are not gentlemen. This is sometimes embarrassing.’
‘Jeremy Morrison, however…he is both, non è vero?’
‘Not really. He is a plausible and well-mannered boy, as they go, but he is not chivalrous, unless he finds it strictly convenient, and so not quite a gentleman. The lands he will inherit are ample, but they have not always been, and even now they make a large farm rather than a feoff or estate. All this means that the Morrisons were, until recently, yeomen rather than esquires, making their claim to be Upper Class definitely dubious. No title – but then that, as it happens, doesn’t matter. Family old, which does matter, but frankly…rather too loamy. However,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘if one is prepared to stretch a point or two, Jeremy Morrison can be taken as a fair working model of an English gentleman of the Upper Class…pour nos jours.
‘And I would wish to be…a fair working model simply of an English gentleman…pour nos jours. Can this be done?’
‘What price are you offering, Piero? You have no money and no influence. I dare say you would offer your body, which I do not want – nothing personal, you understand, it is just that these days I am too large and lazy. So how can you pay me?’
‘Jeremy tells me…that you employ people over very wide areas to find out things which you wish to know…rather like Max de Freville in the old days, when I knew him with Lykiadopoulos in Venice.’
‘Yes, one heard a good deal about that at one time. Max lost interest some time before he died, of course, was indeed already losing it when you knew him in Venice, and switching his resources to restoring Venetian buildings.’
‘You know why? It was on instructions which he kept receiving from his dead mistress. In her shrine on the roof of the Palazzo.’
‘Ah. So you are offering that little titbit on approval, so to speak?’
‘Yes; you see…I could perhaps serve you.’
‘You certainly deserve to be tried. Let us say for the sake of argument,’ Ptolemaeos said, ‘that from now on you are my personal secretary – probationary and in training. Part of your training, we hope, will be undergone at Lancaster College, which will do something, though regrettably little these days, towards turning you into a gentleman. The rest I shall have to do…during the vacations, when you will be working for me.
‘As for your identity,’ Ptolemaeos continued, ‘I have already given thought to the matter, and I see you as the son of a British Army Officer, a distant cousin of mine, who served for a time in Cyprus, came to like the place, and retired to live in the hills near Kyrenia…with his Italian wife, your mother, whose nationality explains the foreign components (which we shall do our best to lessen but cannot obscure entirely) in your own charming appearance. During the Turkish invasion of Cyprus your parents were murdered by Turkish soldiers–’
One of the brightly coloured telephones on the desk in front of Ptolemaeos began to ring. Ptolemaeos lifted the receiver, uttered a minatory greeting, listened, then said, ‘By all means, Jeremy, come this afternoon if you wish. Your parents were murdered by Turkish soldiers,’ he said to Piero without hiatus, ‘who ransacked and then fired your home. But you, who had been sent down to friends in Kyrenia harbour – whither your parents intended, in vain, to follow you with important papers and portable objects of value – you got away in an open dinghy, drifting without food or water, like the shipwrecked Don Juan, and in much the same part of the Mediterranean Sea. You were eventually rescued by the Italian Air Force, taken on by the International Red Cross…by whom, on my intervention – for by that time I had heard of my cousin’s fate and managed to trace you – you were placed in the care of a certain Doctor La Soeur, who runs a private nursing home in the outskirts of London.
‘After some years of acute nervous and physical suffering, you have now recovered and come to live with me, for I, as a distant relation and a rich philanthropist, am to oversee your present welfare and future employment. When we have drilled you long and hard enough in your history, we shall apply for documents – Birth Certificate, Passport, National Insurance (if applicable in your case), etcetera, etcetera – to replace those which were either burnt in your parents’ house before they could get them out, or mislaid by Government Officials in Kyrenia during the war.’
‘Surely, copies of such documents – of my Birth Certificate at least – would be in England already?’
‘I am glad you are joining in the spirit of the thing. If we assume you were born out of England, a copy of your Birth Certificate would have been sent to Somerset House in London, from whatever place your father was serving in at the time of your birth, by the Military or Consular Officials responsible for issuing the original Certificate. How, for a start, shall we explain that omission? Whatever the solution,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘the place of your birth will have to be very carefully chosen to accord with my cousin’s career, which itself must be submitted to painstaking research. You see the kind of problems which lie before us?’
Piero nodded. ‘My arrival in England, after the rescue,’ he said. ‘I was without name, papers, money – with only you to vouch for me. Surely my arrival should have been reported – by somebody – to many different authorities?’
‘Indeed,’ said Ptolemaeos, looking at his pupil with ironic appreciation. ‘With the aptitude which you evidently have for this kind of operation, you will not be surprised to hear that these very serious gaps and cracks have to be plugged and papered with ready money. The dead Officer and his wife will be no trouble – I did in truth have such cousins – and will not require payment: but a very large number of people will – from the supposed owner of the supposed dinghy which took you out of Kyrenia; all the way along the line to Doctor La Soeur, who received you in his nursing home in England, but did not report your presence because he understood that this had already been done by me; who, in my turn, thought it had been done by the Red Cross…which must somehow have neglected this duty, and so, and so, and so. You are going, caro mio, to be a very expensive item.’
‘I shall try to give good value. I am well accustomed to doing that.’
‘Precisely. So I have a notion that you will prove a very efficient confidential servant. It is your métier. As I grow older, I feel the need of having someone close at hand. I envy Tom Llewyllyn that Secretary, Len. Indeed it’s from there I got the idea.’
‘How do you know that I shall stay with you, after I am fully explained, equipped and trained…so to speak?’
‘I cannot be sure of that. But then, if you lose interest and wish to go, you will have ceased to be of use to me anyway. So go you would – though just where is another question, which you would find more difficult to answer once I had washed my hands of you than you might think. But I am hoping…and supposing…not without ample reason…that life in my employment will cont
inue to have appeal for you. You will, incidentally, be required to do a number of things, later on, which you will find a fascinating challenge to your talents; and even during your apprenticeship you will be faced by intermittent and quite demanding tests. In fact I have one for you even so early as this.’
‘Indeed, Mr Tunne?’
‘You will address me as “Sir” or “Ptolemaeos”, whichever you prefer. “Mister” these days, is for banausics. And what might they be?’
‘Mechanics. A class just above peasants or menials.’
‘Very good. Any deficiencies in your education can always be explained by irregular tuition, consequent on following the drum with your parents; but I am not well disposed to ignorance any more than I am to folly.’
‘I fear…sir…that a childhood in the streets of Syracuse affords severely specialised instruction, though I have tried to make up for it since.’
‘Continue. There is my library here…and all the resources of Lancaster should you be admitted there.’
‘And meanwhile, sir, you say there is a test?’
‘Yes. One in which the specialised instruction of Syracuse may assist you.’ Ptolemaeos gave a passable imitation of a Sicilian street sign which meant ‘Trespasser on our Pitch’. Piero corrected him, making the same gesture, but with his thumb (which was inserted between the third and the little finger, the fist being reversed) protruding further and titled backwards.
‘Get rid of la piccola marchesa,’ said Ptolemaeos. ‘She’s no good to my niece, just now, and I want her pert little ladyship out of this house – and preferably out of your life as well – in twenty-four hours at most. Baby Canteloupe is a superfluity, my dear Piero – Piero, by the way, will continue to be your Christian name, whatever else must change – and I shall be very interested to see how you dispose of her.’
When Jeremy reached Ptolemaeos’ house that afternoon, he rang the clinking rust-red bell outside the front door, but was not answered. He should have remembered, he told himself, that Wednesday was Mrs Gurt’s and Mrs Statch’s half day off. He opened the front door, peered into the Library, into the office with the multi-coloured telephones, into the dowdy drawing room: no one. He walked through the drawing room and through a door into the garden. Down the garden he went, to the summerhouse: empty.