by Simon Raven
‘Tomorrow,’ said Isobel, ‘this place closes. They are most of them seasonal, you see. So today we must look for somewhere else. Do you wish me to look alone, or will you and Oenone come too?’
‘Oenone can go in the back, in her carrycot.’
‘No. The roof is torn. You must be with her to protect her against draughts.’
‘Then I will take her on my lap in the front.’
‘No. It is not safe for infants to ride in the front. Even now I should not let Marius or Rosie ride in the front.’
‘Then I must sit in the back with Oenone?’
‘Yes.’
‘It has been like that all the time,’ Jo-Jo said, ‘except once, when you let me leave Oenone for an hour with an elderly maid, whom you trusted, and took me to a cathedral. Then, and then only, I sat in the front. It was almost unbearably exciting. The way you sat over the controls and mastered them… bestrode and rode them. Can this not happen again?’
‘Not now. Not today.’
‘Very well…though for someone who promised to serve you are very severe. Where are we going on this fair blue morning?’
‘Over these hills. Pine and rock. Down the other side, to cypress and flat fields. Along a straight road on which the Romans marched. By castle and abbey to ramparts and towers, and thence to the Elysian Fields. Near these we shall find a new hotel, and then we shall return to this one, to have dinner for the last time before we pack.’
‘Are you tired of driving?’ said Piero Caspar to Fielding Gray.
‘Rather. Beguile me.’
‘I have an idea. A fairly obvious one, but I think I should state it. It is something I think we shall have to cling to.’
‘Well?’ said Fielding, and felt a quick, warm shiver as he saw the first Aleppo pine.
‘Miss Baby, Lady Canteloupe – she is alone with Girolamo, with Jeremy, in my bedroom in the Fens. I go to fetch the backgammon set from downstairs. What can happen then? She looks at Jeremy, and says to herself – as I intend she should, sooner or later – “Piero likes this Morrison. Piero, who has just spent last night with me, likes this huge, round boy. Why?” She looks at Jeremy again. Just a big, shambling peasant. A yokel, you would say. “I see nothing in him,” thinks Miss Baby. “But he is smiling at me. Shyly? In suggestion? In either case I detest him – that mound of flesh. What does Piero see in him? And what, for that matter, does Fielding Gray see in him, that he fancies him enough to take him all over Europe?” You see, she is jealous, Miss Baby, on your account too. During the night she has told me how you have gotten the child on her for Lord Canteloupe–’
‘–She should not have told you that–’
‘–She has told me, Major Gray. She has told me how she excited you by asking about her mother: she has imitated you in your imitations of her mother. Although she has no more need of you, she remembers your intimacy, not without pleasure, and she wonders why you now like Jeremy. She does not want this to be. She does not want you any more, but she does not want Jeremy to have you. She wonders also why I too like Jeremy, why two of her men like Jeremy, and she is very jealous.’
‘Possibly. But jealous enough to put on the sort of show she did?’
‘That hissing. While I was in the Fens, I read Milton in Mr Tunne’s library. When the fallen angels came to themselves in Hell, Fielding, they started uncontrollably to hiss. Envy: jealousy.’
‘Not quite the same things.’
‘But with a base in common: wanting what somebody else has got. The fallen angels wanted what God had got. They started to hiss…and went on hissing until Lucifer himself took control of them. Miss Baby wanted what Jeremy had got – or at any rate wanted him not to have it. So she started to hiss, and went on until Mr Tunne himself came to deal with her.’
‘What you say may be true, Piero. But in Baby’s case the cause you assign is insufficient. The fallen angels, you remember, had good cause not only to envy but to despair. To account for Baby’s behaviour mere jealousy will not do. To produce such formidable and relentless hysteria, something really radical is needed: desperation or despair. I cannot see that Baby was suffering from anything radical enough, deep enough, to drive her to such extremity.’
‘Yet there she was in extremis, Major Gray. Can you better my explanation?’
‘We are looking for Jeremy to do that.’
With great difficulty Jeremy found a place to park his Morris 1000 under the ramparts. Having carefully memorised the plan in the Green Michelin (for it was now some weeks since he had last been in this place, and then only for a brief first visit) he walked along the base of the ramparts, up some steps to his right, past the Roman Theatre (which was on his left), and turned left round the southern end of the amphitheatre. Then he skirted the northern side of the theatre enclosure, went down a narrow Street, took a turn to his left, walked past the west door of the cathedral in the square, turned left again, and very shortly came to the entrance to the cloister.
Why am I hanging around here? he thought. There is nothing for me here. Why don’t I journey on to where I am really going?
He paid for his ticket and went into the cloister.
‘This place is named,’ said Isobel to Jo-Jo and Oenone, ‘either from the Campi Elysii of the old Romans or from a flower called the Alys which is supposed to grow here. Formerly the tombs covered a much larger area – where the railway now runs and the canal.’
‘You sound like a guide book,’ said Jo-Jo.
‘A French poet warns us,’ said Isobel, ignoring this ingratitude, ‘that in this place we should beware of the douceur de vivre, of the sweetness of living, and that we should speak no word of love among the dead.’
‘That will suit me and Oenone,’ said Jo-Jo, ‘we do not believe in words of love. We heard them from Alexandre, our Alexander, who spake us false.’
‘But many of the sarcophagi,’ said Isobel, ‘bear inscriptions, sculptures, variously Pagan or Christian in subject and feeling, which are vibrant with the phrases and the shapes of love.’
‘I do not see them here,’ said Jo-Jo. ‘These sarcophagi are plain, crude, uncarven.’
‘That is because all the finest have been stolen or given away by the Mayor and Corporation to distinguished visitors. A very few remain, specially preserved in two museums near the cathedral and cloister, one devoted to coffins of the preChristian epochs, the other to coffins dated Anno Domini. Most of these are carved with scenes in low or medium relief,’ said Isobel, ‘scenes Christian or Pagan, as I have just remarked, and sometimes, on some of the later coffins, both. And so now, in order to see what the tombs here were once like, we shall go to see the tombs there.’
‘In the days when we bathed in Mr Tunne’s sarcophagus,’ said Piero Caspar to Fielding Gray, ‘Jeremy, Nicos and I, Nicos told us that the house in which he once lived with the Kyrios Barraclough (as he insists on calling him) was only a few miles from Cape Taenarus, which is one of the gateways to the kingdom of the dead. Did he believe in such a place? Jeremy asked Nicos, as Nicos lay (not quite naked) in the sarcophagus. He believed, Nicos told us, in some kind of afterlife, but not in such a kingdom as one might enter through a gate at Cape Taenarus.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ asked Fielding, almost dizzy from fatigue and the whirling ranks of cypress through which he was now driving.
‘Because a little later, when Jeremy lay (totally naked) in the sarcophagus, Nicos and I asked him the same question as he had asked Nicos: did he believe in a world or a kingdom of the dead? His reply was curious. If there were such a place, he said, its entrance could not be at Taenarus because Taenarus was by the sea. He felt very strongly that an entrance to the underworld could not be on the edge of the sea because the sea was too wholesome and bracing and clean; it would sweep away and altogether dissolve the dead (whether crumbling bodies or wailing spirits) who sought passage in its vicinity. A suitable entrance to the kingdom of the dead, Jeremy told us, would be near a still lake, such as Nemi or Avernus
or a slow and sluggardly river such as Styx or Acheron; or a brackish pool or marsh, such as the Fens around Tunne Hall; could show in abundance; or, best of all perhaps, the inner waters (well away from the sea itself) of a stagnant lagoon, such as the Laguna Morta round Venice. Torcello, he said, or any of the smaller islands in that lagoon: there would be a proper entrance, for corpse or wraith, to the kingdom of the dead. Torcello…in whose Cathedral the Madonna weeps a tear for the dead with one eye while she watches them pass with the other.’
‘I think her tear is for the living,’ Fielding said.
‘For both, perhaps. He had also heard, he said, of another Madonna in that region, though he had not yet seen Her. The two together…presiding side by side over a gate to the kingdom of the dead…they might explain.’
‘Explain what?’
‘He did not say. In those days he did not require any particular explanation. But now, to judge from what you say this Salinger girl told you about his reason for vanishing, he wants, he needs, he is compelled to search for some explanation of what occurred in Mr Tunne’s house…an explanation, he told her, which may possibly be found in one of the places you and he visited last autumn. So what about Torcello, where I myself met you both, an island which obviously made a great impression on him? Why not Torcello?’
‘There are…other places we visited…where there are two Madonnas who could “explain” and where there is also perhaps an entrance to the kingdom of the dead – since he seems to set some store by that. We went to Avignon, for example, where there is a slow river, making it a fitting location, in his view, for a gate to Hades.’
‘The River Rhône. Too powerful. He said that a river, to make a suitable gate to the underworld, must be slow and sluggardly. There is nothing sluggardly about the Rhône at Avignon.’
‘But there are two Madonnas, by which he also set store, two extraordinary Madonnas, up at Villeneuve-les-Avignon, one coal black and the other all the colours of the spectrum–’
‘–But he particularly specified Torcello, Major Gray, Torcello and the Madonna in the Cathedral who sheds a single tear. Why are you so anxious to divert us to Avignon?’
‘Because it is on the way, and it could be the answer, and I am not wholly convinced by your advocacy of Torcello. Obviously, you see, he liked the idea of two Madonnas – one on each side of the gate to Hell. He made this picture very clear to you–’
‘–Yes indeed, and persistently connected it with Torcello.’
‘But that is the whole point, Piero. The second Madonna he referred to in the area simply is not there. He must have been thinking of the weird Madonna with the Plague Children in the church on the neighbouring island, Burano. But she is not there, Piero, and he knows She is not there, because we went to see Her and found Her gone. So if he is heading for a place with two powerful Madonnas, it must be somewhere other than Torcello.’
‘Rubbish, my dear Major. This second Madonna – he associates Her with the area; for all Her temporary absence She has been there a very long time; and in any case at all She may be back by now. Added to this, he named the place, almost obsessively, a great many times. Torcello, Torcello, Torcello.’
‘But this was all before the incident with Baby.’
‘And why should not his obsession be quite as powerful after the incident with Baby? Torcello was, and could very well have remained, predominant in his thoughts as a place of mystery and perhaps of oracle. It is surely the most likely place to find him. Why do you not wish to go there?’
‘Why indeed?’ Fielding suddenly felt too drained to resist any longer. He trembled, and turned up the heating in the car. Piero was impermeable, he thought: arguing with him was like trying to wriggle through a fence of barbed wire. ‘Why indeed?’ he repeated. ‘You are quite right. If he spoke as you say he spoke, he may very well, when in grave trouble or doubt, have made for Torcello. I wish to find him very much. To Torcello we shall go. I shall not turn off for Avignon,’ he said in a low, sing-song voice. ‘It was foolish of me to chatter about Villeneuve. I shall drive south and east towards Cannes and the Italian border and keep on until it is dusk.’
‘But you are tired?’
‘Yes. But I wish, so much, to find Jeremy. I shall drive on towards Italy until it is dusk.’
In the cloister, as Jeremy remembered from his visit with Fielding on their way back to England in the autumn, were many carven capitals. As Jeremy moved slowly along the eastern gallery he spotted the drunken Noah with his two sons (who were holding their hands up in priggish reproof), Elijah and the Ravens, and the infant Moses, afloat in his little cradle on the Nile (looking rather like Oenone when Jeremy had seen her by the pool in her carrycot), just about to be discovered by the Pharaoh’s daughter. The capital which topped the next pillar was plain, but the one after was worked with a low relief version of (as it appeared) Abraham and Isaac. There was Abraham with his knife raised (Jeremy diagnosed) and there was the angel coming down to stop the proceeding in the nick of time. The only trouble was (it now occurred to Jeremy) that Isaac was looking terrified, whereas in the Old Testament he had surely been resigned. Once Jeremy had noticed that, other discrepancies were instantly evident. Abraham was not a sorrowing parent set to perform his melancholy duty but a snarling youth of much the same age as Isaac. And the angel was not descending in merciful intercession but lowering in grievous wrath. Not Abraham and Isaac, then: Cain and Abel.
Jeremy backed away from the pillar while his stomach turned in nausea. Don’t be foolish, he told himself; it wasn’t your fault: you didn’t kill Nickie, who in any case is not dead. But still his belly ached and churned. Not dead, no, but worse: a shambling frame of flesh and bone. Not murdered by his brother, but written off by him, left to rot. And yet, thought Jeremy, I am not being fair to myself: I do go there, I went only the other day, just before term began; I asked questions of the nurses, and I went to see him. ‘Hullo, Nickie,’ I said, as he turned his empty eyes to me, ‘hullo, old boy.’ But he just turned away…to that woman he was with. ‘I am Patricia,’ she said, ‘Patricia Llewyllyn. You are Nicholas’ brother. I knew your father, long ago and in another world, though I never knew him as well as my husband, Tom. But I knew him, and now I shall take care of Nicholas.’ As she cradled Nickie’s head on her breast, her eyes became fierce. ‘He is my son in the eye of God,’ she said, ‘never seek to take him.’
Remembering the story about Patricia Llewyllyn, that some years back she had hideously savaged and maimed an adolescent boy (with her teeth, some said, though Jeremy was uncertain about that), had at any rate committed some atrocious assault which had been the cause of her confinement to St Bede’s, Jeremy had sought out a Senior Superintendent and asked whether the relationship between Patricia and his brother was in order.
‘They are company for one another,’ said the Senior Superintendent. ‘She will not harm him. When she is not with him, she is on her knees in sackcloth, repenting of what she was and what she did.’ ‘Nevertheless,’ Jeremy had said, ‘with someone so unstable…is it safe?’ ‘Safe?’ said the Senior Superintendent. ‘Nothing can hurt your brother now. He is as safe…as safe as a corpse, Mr Morrison. But there are just a few…basic responses…left in him, and these she rouses from time to time. She is all of life that is left to him.’
Jeremy had decided to question the affair no further. He did not tell his father, whom indeed he had not seen again before returning to Lancaster. He did not choose to discuss the matter with Tom Llewyllyn. (‘I say, Mr Provost, your wife and my brother are getting together in St Bede’s. What do you say to that?’ No, that was a discussion, de bas en haut, which was better far in the breach and would for ever remain so). He had, however, just begun to remark on this odd friendship to Patricia’s daughter, Baby Canteloupe, by way of making conversation and riding over an awkward gap while Piero was fetching the backgammon set that afternoon in the Fens…‘I saw your mother the other day,’ he had said diffidently, ‘she was with my brother Nickie; t
hey seem to be…contented…with each other.’ This much he had said thinking to treat sympathetically of the topic, also to show that they had something (if only a sadness) in common, perhaps to please her by reporting that her mother had an interest. And at first it had seemed that he had succeeded. She had made some comment, about her mother’s fondness for boys, to which he had replied that although Nickie was hardly a boy any more they seemed to suit each other well enough. An anodyne, harmless remark, he had thought: but this time Baby’s response had been horrible, catastrophic. Oh, how could he have been such a fool as to start the subject in the first place? He might have known that such an area must be mined with dynamite. Yet how was he to have known that a brief mention of Patricia and Nickie would produce a reaction so fundamentally violent that it would wrench Baby right out of the present reality which they were sharing, that it would carry her away, in a split second and by the width of a galaxy, from the room, the house, the Fens, the world, that it would transform her into an alien thing crouching and hissing on the bed? What had done that? Surely not just a reference, however tasteless and tactless (and indeed it had hardly been allowed to continue long enough to be either) to her mother and his brother in St Bede’s?
But he had seen what he had seen, it had happened before his own eyes, and he could not return to England, to Lancaster, with a quiet mind until he knew what was at the bottom of this appalling phenomenon. He could not face Tom Llewyllyn until he had some explanation of his daughter’s seizure, her worse than seizure, her dissolution. And of his own. As for Baby Canteloupe, he knew she had now recovered, for he had persuaded Theodosia (on the day they had had lunch at Saffron Walden) to institute tactful enquiries through Len, and a telegram from her, waiting at the Poste Restante at Pau, had informed him that all was apparently well. But the hideous transformation which he had witnessed, however brief its period, still required explanation; and his own vile reaction to it required even more: it required, it necessitated, expiation. There was a riddle here that must be read; a spectre that must be exorcised; above all, a personal abomination that must be cleansed.