by Simon Raven
‘Stop,’ said Leonard. ‘Balbo Blakeney, you just said. He was a close friend of your cousin’s for the last four years of his life. He designed the new garden to help hide the growing enormity of Cant-Fun, he was intimate with the inside of the house, he was there when you discovered the Canzonis and became an expert on them. He even knew, before either of us did, that the Ragazzi della Peste in San Martino had gone for restoration. Why isn’t he present at this discussion?’
‘Balbo blabs. He gets arseholes drunk…though he’s not as bad as he used to be. And then Baby doesn’t like having him in the house.’
‘Lady Canteloupe is away, Detterling.’
‘Probably not for long.’
‘Then get Balbo here quickly. Send the Cant-Fun helicopter to Lancaster. It can land on the rear lawn.’
‘Odd,’ said Len as he carried in the second course (a gratin of écrevisses). ‘Canteloupe’s man, Leonard Percival, has just been on the telephone. He wants permission for Canteloupe’s helicopter to land on the rear lawn. Early tomorrow morning.’
‘Jesus,’ said Ptolemaeos Tunne, ‘who’s been telling Canteloupe already? We’d much better keep him out of this until Baby is fit to be sent home. His distress would be terrible – if he heard exactly how she acted.’
‘Canteloupe’s request has nothing to do with Baby. He simply wants to collect Balbo Blakeney in a hurry – he’s got some antiquarian bee buzzing in his bonnet.’
‘Did you give permission for the helicopter to land here?’ said Tom.
‘Subject to your approval, Provost. He’s to assume it’s all right unless I ring back within half an hour.’
‘Let it land,’ said Tom. ‘It belongs to his corporation but for some reason it flies the pennant of the Hereditary Commodore of the Severn Reaches. This will give the students and Junior Fellows something rather than myself on which to focus their resentment.’
‘So that’s all settled,’ said Fielding. ‘Now, where were we? Repeat, please, Piero. I want to make sure I’ve got it all straight.’
‘I am with Miss Baby – with Lady Canteloupe – in my bedroom at about three o’clock this afternoon.’ Tom sat shivering over his plate, looking miserable. ‘We are playing chess. We do not wish to play downstairs, because Madame Guiscard’s baby distracts us with its noises, and Madame Guiscard with her melancholy remarks.’ Tom looked partly reassured: since he has heard this once already (through Isobel) there is really no need for these blow-by-blow reactions; but then he always was…well…funny about the idea of Baby’s being alone with a man, even for a game of chess (and is this little wop, one well may ask, telling us the strict truth?).
‘We are joined by Girolamo – by Jeremy Morrison,’ Piero went on. ‘I have left a message with Madame Guiscard to tell him to come up, and when he does I think we shall all play backgammon – Chouette – a game in which three players may take part, though one of them is only giving advice to another. So when Jeremy arrives, I topple my King to Lady Canteloupe – for she has a Castle to my Bishop and already one passed Pawn – and I go to fetch the backgammon set which I have foolishly left downstairs in the Gaming Room.’ Piero paused and wetted his lips with his tongue. ‘As I return up the stairs and along the landing,’ he said in an even, neutral tone, ‘I hear a sort of howling, of a man in pain.’
‘In pain, Mr Caspar?’ said Isobel, who had not met Piero before that evening.
‘In pain, Mrs Stern. I go in. Miss Baby is crouched on the bed, fully dressed, as she was for our game of chess, in a tweed jacket and rough brown corduroy trousers. She is hissing, hissing with her mouth spread wide, almost, it seems, from ear to ear; and she is poised, as if to claw or to leap at Jeremy who is standing at the end of the bed, fully dressed too, like Miss Baby, and crying and howling and saying, “I’m so sorry, if only you knew, oh please stop, I am so sorry.” When he sees me, he howls again, and he rushes past me out on to the landing, and he is gone.’
‘And…and Tullia?’ said Provost Llewyllyn.
‘Tullia, Tom?’ said Piero.
‘Baby’s proper name.’
‘I had forgotten. She is there, hissing still. Not at me, but at the place where Girolamo had been standing. Her eyes are narrow, almost closed, and her cheeks bulging and knotted, and she hisses through her parted lips, showing her teeth very forward. It is horrible.’
‘Does she…say nothing?’
‘Nothing. I must have help, I think. The two women, Mrs Gurt and Mrs Statch, are having their afternoon off. I call for Madame Guiscard, down the stairs, but she does not come. Then Mr Tunne comes. He has been at the Horse Racing, at Newmarket, but he has returned early, thank God–’
‘–Nardo Cumbria was there, making me quite ill with his new scheme for a cut-price equine sperm bank. So I came home,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘to escape from Nardo and found Piero coming down the stairs and yelling for Jo-Jo…whereat I went upstairs and found Baby still crouched on the bed and hissing like a vampire. She wouldn’t listen or talk or make any gesture of recognition; so I fetched a syringe and filled it with Mother Statch’s knockout lotion, and then, with Jo-Jo’s help – she’d heard the rumpus at last and come into the house from the garden – Piero managed to hold Baby still enough, despite all her writhing and kicking and butting and gnashing, for me to inject her in one arm.’
Tom’s face shrivelled.
‘She always hated injections,’ he said.
‘It had to be done.’
‘And all this time she said nothing?’ said Fielding.
‘Nothing,’ said Ptolemaeos. ‘It’s going to be very interesting to hear what she has to say when she wakes up at four this morning. I want you there, Isobel, as you’ve already guessed, to cope with her – you were always close to her, I believe – and I want you, Fielding, to hang about the place and latch on to any clues you can find about Jeremy – what he did or where he’s gone.’
Tom, it was clear, was not invited, and was apparently relieved not to be.
‘I’ll just enquire if Wilfred has found Jeremy,’ said Len…who returned, five minutes later and with the main course, to report, as all present had expected, that Jeremy Morrison was nowhere to be found in the precincts of Lancaster College.
When Leonard Percival rang up Balbo Blakeney, told him that a helicopter would pick him up on the rear lawn of Lancaster the following morning at nine of the clock, and then indicated what was going forward in the house in Wiltshire, Balbo was both flattered and amused, flattered by the attention and amused by the purpose assigned. He had heard, through Sir Jacquiz Helmutt and other of his art world informants, that the supposed Asolano had now been found, on thorough examination, to be a copy by Canzoni; and he had speculated as to the possible fate and present whereabouts of the original and genuine picture: but it had not occurred to him to connect its disappearance from Burano with the pseudonymous Mr fitzAvon, for the simple reason that he, Balbo, did not know, as Canteloupe did, just how ruthless, devious, cunning and determined a man Mr fitzAvon had been.
The picture which Balbo had been encouraged to form of fitzAvon was that of a debauched and pathetic fop, a public embarrassment to his father who was only too happy to pay for his absence. Mr fitzAvon, in the orthodox view promoted by the family, had been the kind of futile jackanapes who might well commission a series of naughty pastiches from an ingratiating hack, but not a man capable of planning and perpetrating a major crime of robbery and violation. And another thing, Balbo thought now: no one ever seemed to remember or to use fitzAvon’s real name. He was always known by his alias, never by the family name or by the courtesy title in which he must, as the eldest son of a senior peer, have been addressed at the time. In short, thought Balbo gleefully, Canteloupe has been keeping quite a lot back about Mr fitzAvon. If he deserves, in Canteloupe’s present view, to be considered capable of pulling off an affair like this, then he is a very different man from the one I have been hearing about all this time. True, I always knew he was murdered, a fact which implies that
he moved in a fairly tough milieu; but I had put this down to a squalid bar-room brawl in a season of anarchy, that kind of a thing. Any number of more spectacular conjectures, both about the murder and the man, are now in order.
Why, thought Balbo, has Canteloupe been at such pains to conceal the true character of fitzAvon under an effigy of straw? And how much does Leonard know about it all? Well, these questions, though fascinating, could be put aside for the time. The immediate problem was, of course, what Mr fitzAvon’s father, had made of, and then done with, the Asolano when it reached Wiltshire…if, that was, one was prepared to assume that it had ever done so, and one might just as well go along with the assumption for the sheer fun of the thing. Very well: if Mr fitzAvon, now promoted from philandering dandy to vicious rakehell, from a mere porn-fancier to a potential Vautrin, had sent a painting of that kind home from Venice under diplomatic seal, some time around 1796, what should I, as his father, knowing what I did of him, have done on its arrival?
Presumably, thought Balbo, fitzAvon would have addressed the freight to himself. Therefore I, as his father, having regard to the conventions in the matter and perhaps fearing my son’s violent displeasure, would not have opened the crate (or whatever) but would have had it stored away. And later, when I heard my son was dead? Hmm…careful now, I should have said to myself: who knows what that infernal brute may have been up to? So I’ll send for two senior and reliable servants, tell them to bring crowbars and so on, and then, swearing them to secrecy just in case, have them open up that box or at least enough of it for me to have a cautious look inside…
Isobel and Jo-Jo were appointed to be at Baby Canteloupe’s bedside in Tunne Hall when she awoke from her drugged sleep, which she did at 4.20 am. She was bored, calm and hungry. Jo-Jo, knowing the household, was despatched for refreshment. ‘None of your damned fen fishes,’ said Baby, ‘I crave the flesh of mammals,’ and was shortly provided with a platter of thickly sliced red beef, mustard and cornichons.
‘And so,’ said Isobel when Baby had wolfed this refection, ‘what happened?’
‘When?’ said Baby.
‘Yesterday afternoon.’
‘Nothing very much,’ said Baby in a matter-of-fact manner. ‘When that Morrison boy arrived up in Piero’s room, Piero stomped out, waggling his bottom, to fetch the backgammon set. Then Master Morrison said how delighted he was to have been invited to join us – said it in a knowing sort of way, and started coming altogether too close – and I told him to get out of the room. I imagine he got out of the house as well?’
‘Yes,’ Isobel said. ‘You don’t know where he went? He seems to be lost, and we thought that Fielding…as his friend might go to look for him.’
‘He can stay lost for what I care,’ said Baby. ‘God knows what happened to him. He simply went…just as Piero came mincing back with the backgammon. Can you mince with a club foot – anyway he does. Just as Piero came mincing back, Morrison left at the double. Piero will tell you.’
‘He has,’ said Isobel. ‘What happened after Morrison had gone?’
‘I had hysterics. It all seemed more and more ludicrous, and I couldn’t stop laughing. I suppose I must have sounded very odd, going on and on…’
‘You did,’ said Jo-Jo.
‘…So eventually Ptoly came and gave me stuff to quieten me down. And now I’ve woken up, but I think, if you don’t mind, that I shall go to sleep again.’
Which she did.
Isobel looked at Jo-Jo carefully.
‘For whatever reason,’ Isobel said, ‘she’s taken against both of them – against Mr Caspar even more than Mr Morrison. She’d better go home to Wiltshire. In her present state she won’t alarm Canteloupe – though she may depress him. So if nothing sensational happens within the next thirty-six hours, we’ll send her home. Then I must go to my old Hebrew in London and get him ready to go off to Trieste. Shall you go with Baby? Just in case she needs looking after later?’
‘I can’t go back to Wiltshire. That’s where I was betrayed by Alexandre…where Oenone was dumped on me instead.’
‘I see,’ said Isobel. ‘So what shall you do?’
‘Stay here…with Ptoly and Piero. One of them may think of something – something to be done about Oenone, I mean. I shall be contented, in a numb sort of way. I’ve remembered a place where I used to read, by a pool in the garden; so I shall take Oenone there every day, as long as this lovely, autumn weather lasts, and read her poetry, about women who have been unhappy, to warn her what’s waiting when she grows up.’
‘A pool with a waterfall,’ Isobel said.
‘No. Just a pool among small fir trees, with a little ring of grass round it.’
‘A pool with a waterfall,’ Isobel repeated. ‘Every day, for many days, I was taken there by a girl who looked like you.’
‘When you…you and Mr Stern…went missing last summer?’
‘Yes. I loved that girl. My captor, that’s how I thought of her, though really she was just my jailer. I longed to kneel and bow my neck to her. You know what stopped me? She had begun to think of me as her queen. Although I was her prisoner, I was also her queen, a royal victim of conspiracy or civil war, princely as well as captive. So I did not kneel to her, on pain of destroying her love; and she, my beloved captor, could not kneel to me on pain of destroying mine.
‘Very soon my husband is going to Trieste,’ Isobel went on, ‘to treat with the people who detained us last summer. This time they do not want me. He will not be long in Trieste, but he has decided – so he told me on the telephone a few hours ago, when I rang up from Cambridge to make sure he was all right – he has decided to go on a tour, all by himself, when he has finished in Trieste, somewhere, he said, in the lands of legend. He was always a Romantic.’
Isobel paused, came round the bed, and knelt before Jo-Jo.
‘I can serve you if you will let me, you and your child. While my husband is away, I can send my Rosie to stay with her friend Tessa, and take you to a place where I can serve you. I have always loved Baby, who loves you and whom you love, so let me take you and serve you in my way.’
‘Stand up. Please stand up.’
‘I cannot make you come with me. But think of this when you sit by your pool. Think of me, as I sat by another pool, where I wished to serve but was thwarted. When you have thought, make up your mind and prepare accordingly. My husband leaves after the weekend. On Tuesday morning I shall come here. If you are sitting by your pool–’
‘–You do not know where it is, you could never find it–’
‘–If you are sitting there, I shall find you and take you with me, you and your child. If I do not find you, I shall go away alone.’
‘Very well,’ said Jo-Jo. ‘If you find us by our pool you can have us – for what we are worth.’
Some three hours after Isobel had knelt before Jo-Jo, Ptolemaeos woke Piero and told him to come down to his study. Since Ptolemaeos tended not to rise until ten or eleven, this did not bode well.
However, Ptolemaeos seemed quite mild when Piero came into his study fifteen minutes later. He had arranged all the coloured telephones on the desk in two ranks, as though he was about to review them, and it was to them rather than to Piero, at first, that he directed his voice.
‘Isobel Stern tells me,’ he said, ‘that Baby has gone right off you. Good. Presumably she will want to return to Wiltshire, and this she will be fit to do tomorrow. Again, good. But now tell me, Piero Caspar: what went wrong?’
‘I don’t know, sir. I wasn’t there when it happened.’
Ptolemaeos lifted his gaze from the ranks of telephones and turned it on to Piero Caspar.
‘No. You were fetching the backgammon set. What should have happened?’
‘To be candid, sir, I should not have been fetching the backgammon set. It should have been there already, but I had forgotten it. I had told Lady Canteloupe, who does not like Jeremy, that Jeremy was coming over with your permission, and I begged her to be friendly to him,
just for a little while, as he had been kind to me before she came here. She agreed. So what should then have happened was this: as soon as Jeremy appeared, we should have started to play backgammon – the three-cornered version, Chouette – and at some early stage I should have suggested a system of forfeits – that the loser of each game must take off one garment, which he might not replace. This would suggest to Lady Canteloupe that I was attracted to Jeremy as well as to her and desired to turn the game into an eventual orgy, when we were all nude or nearly. When she realised that this was my intention one of three things would happen. Either she would be angry or jealous or disgusted or humiliated – in which case she would go away from here, as you wished; or she might like the idea, despite her apparent coldness to Jeremy; or she might pretend to like the idea in order to please me. In either of the two latter cases, I had thought of means, probably more effective than mere oral suggestion, of disgusting or humiliating her, etcetera, etcetera, and thus compelling her to leave this house and not come back.’
‘I see. A Sicilian machination. None the worse for that, perhaps. But as it was, when Jeremy arrived as expected, you had to leave him alone with Baby Canteloupe while you fetched the set – and during your absence something quite appalling took place. What, Piero Caspar?’
‘I do not know, sir.’
‘But there must be an explanation of the state they both got into.’
‘No doubt, sir. But I can’t give it to you. When I left them, they were talking, uneasily but politely. When I returned – well – you know what I found–’
‘–Baby hissing like a serpent in hell and Jeremy howling like a stuck hyena. Jeremy lit off, still howling, and hasn’t been seen since. Baby went on hissing until she was sedated, a job which took all the strength of you and me and Jo-Jo combined.’