by Simon Raven
‘“Hubertus Nivalis Narbonnensis”,’ the guide read from the tablet: ‘“Deliciarum Campos petens.” That is, “Hubert Nivale of Narbonne, who seeks the fields of Pleasure.” That, madame, messieurs et signore, we may assume to be the Satanic Paradise.’
‘How did a man from Narbonne come to die here?’ said Fielding.
‘How does anyone come to die anywhere?’ said Carmilla briskly.
‘Narbonne was a long way from here in those days,’ Fielding persisted.
‘Not too far,’ said Carmilla, ‘to prevent his making a visit here if there was some matter of importance to be sorted out. But far enough to make it very inconvenient to transport the body back to Narbonne for burial. We may assume that his friends here in Montaillou knew that he was a dualist and a heretic – they were almost certainly so themselves – and therefore had him buried in the appropriate manner. But not, perhaps, without some embarrassment. There was always a risk of spies from the priesthood or the Inquisition. All in all, then, such a man was best buried at once and wherever he died, before word could spread. Least said soonest mended.’
‘No names, no pack drill. Then why such a sumptuous sarcophagus?’ said Fielding. ‘It could only draw attention.’
‘The coffin might have been buried hugger-mugger,’ said the guide, ‘to borrow a phrase from your national poet, in the best interests of secrecy and celerity. Later, perhaps, time and rough weather exposed and dismantled it; and then a sympathizer, a brother in heresy, who had record in his family of the original swift and sordid interment, might have placed the remains of the coffin in this noble pagan sarcophagus. This work of corporal charity could have been performed centuries after the death of Hubert Nivale, at a period when the Cathar beliefs were no longer punishable or even noticeable.’
‘Would records of his original burial have lasted so long?’ objected Jeremy.
‘Oh yes,’ said the guide, bland-faced. ‘Records were certainly kept…in some cases. As it happens, quite a lot, apart from the circumstances of his burial, is known about Hubert Nivale of Narbonne.’
‘What is known?’
‘You must go to Narbonne to find that out. The curator of the Museum of Antique Sculpture might assist you. The museum is housed in the huge and deconsecrated Priory Church. Anyone will direct you there.’
‘Hubertus Nivalis,’ said Carmilla. ‘Hubert Snowy. Snowy Hubert. A black Cathar, who came from Narbonne – presumably on some affair of moment – and then died in or near Montaillou. How did he die, one wonders? Or of what? There are many more questions to be asked and answered.’
‘Some of which, at least,’ said Jeremy, ‘may apparently be unravelled by the curator of this museum in Narbonne.’
‘To be sure, to be sure,’ said Carmilla: ‘but let us remember the main reason we are here. Our problem is: can we conceivably see Raisley Conyngham in any of this?’
‘Quatorze; rouge, pair et manque,’ announced the croupier.
‘Second time running, sir,’ said Milo to Raisley Conyngham: ‘well done.’
There was only one table in the Salon des Jeux. This was placed in the centre of an oval arena fifty yards long by twenty yards wide, canopied by an enormous cupola. Milo and Raisley were the only players and indeed the only clients. Apart from them, the three croupiers and the chef du parti, there was nobody in the Salon, not even the usual hustler to dish out unwanted pencils and paper and breathe down his victim’s neck until presented with a tip.
‘I wonder,’ Milo had said soon after Raisley and he had arrived, ‘that they keep the place going at all.’
‘There are more people to play later on,’ Raisley had said, smirking gently. ‘Gamblers come out of holes and corners, you know, like insects at the setting of the sun. However, we shall have left before it gets dark – I hate driving at night.’
Since then Raisley had been winning, off and on. Milo, for the most part, simply watched. When he wagered, he lost.
‘The reason I win sometimes,’ said Raisley, ‘is because I am indifferent. The reason you lose is that you are avid to win. In a word, you are greedy, although you are pretty well supplied with money for this expedition by me.’
‘Agreed, sir.’
‘One more bet,’ Raisley said now.
Raisley left his winning stake on fourteen and directed one of the croupiers by the wheel to treble it, using some of the counters which he had just won. The croupier scowled while he went about this task because Raisley did not tell him to take the customary three per cent of the winning counters and place them in the slot marked ‘Service’ for the staff.
‘Merci, M’sieur, pour les employés,’ said the croupier sarcastically.
‘I was going to tip him and the rest of them when I finally left the table,’ said Raisley to Milo: ‘now I shall not.’
Raisley’s increased bet was now placed and the wheel was spun.
‘Quatorze,’ said the croupier, through his teeth.
‘You see?’ said Raisley. ‘They would have had a very nice pourboire indeed from a win like this.’
‘Over five hundred quid.’
‘Say “pounds”, “sovereigns”, “Bradburies” – almost anything you choose,’ said Raisley, ‘but not “quid”. Let us not have proletarian usage.’
‘Surely, sir, “quid” was perfectly good Edwardian slang.’
‘Only among on-the-make Jews of the most slimy kind.’ Raisley rose. He began to pocket the multicoloured slabs which were piled before him.
‘Merci, M’sieur,’ said Raisley to the chef du parti. ‘Rien pour les employés parce que celui-ci’ – he pointed to the croupier who had thanked him in derision – ‘ne fait pas comme il faut.’
‘Canteloupe’s Regiment had a motto,’ Raisley said to Milo as they walked towards the cashier’s desk (Milo carrying the surplus ‘plaques’ that would not fit into Raisley’s pockets), ‘“Res Unius, Res Omnium” – “the affair of one is the affair of all” – recommending co-operation, you understand, and, one presumes, a just division of the spoils. This little incident provides an amusing example of that motto when it works in reverse. “The fault of one is the fault of all”, as is the consequent deprivation. If only the chef du parti had disciplined his wretched subordinate for his rebarbative performance, I might have relented.’
‘I think, sir, that discipline and morale are low in this Casino.’
‘No particular reason why they should be. As I told you, many more clients come by night…seeking Red Gold from the Black Wheel. I wonder how our explorers got on today, Milo. Wherever they went, you know, they will have found…hints and suggestions to point them further east. And so it will go until they reach the ground and the situation in which I wish to confront them.’
Teresa Malcolm had a telephone call at school, from the Nursing Home in which Maisie Malcolm lay in a coma, and was told that the coma had turned to black death. So she went to find Marius Stern, who was walking up the steps from the Fives courts with friends with whom he had been playing. When they reached the top of the steps, Teresa beckoned to Marius to come to her, and he, seeing what lay in her eyes, at once did her bidding.
‘Auntie Maisie is dead,’ said Tessa as they walked by the boundary of the cricket ground (where, in the bitter winter, the unseen ghosts were playing their games long past). ‘It was very sudden, they said. No awakening and no pain.’
‘Auntie Maisie,’ echoed Marius. ‘Your mother.’
‘My mother.’
Shall I tell her, he thought, that it was my father that got her on the body of the whore that was once Maisie Malcolm? No. I shall do as Mr Conyngham tells me. I shall keep my options open.
‘Tessa,’ he said. ‘You know that it is good that she is dead?’
‘Yes. And yet I shall miss her.’
‘You cannot miss the thing that was lying on the bed in the Nursing Home. She died easily and swiftly, you say, when the time came, and she suffered little or nothing in the time before. And think, Tessa: her frien
ds, those of her age, are growing old and boring and impotent and inept, like poor Fielding Gray; and her younger friends – you and I, and my sister Rosie, and Jakki and Carolyn Blessington – we are all growing up and away from those, like your Auntie Maisie, your mother, who cared for us when we were young. She is better dead, Tessa. Everyone should be dead before the age of seventy, before the pitcher is broken at the fountain: good riddance both for the dead themselves, and for the living.’
‘“Some be so strong that they come to fourscore years – ”’
‘“Yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow, so soon passeth it away and they are gone.”’
‘Not always,’ Tessa said; ‘not nowadays, with the new drugs and the new medical knowledge.’
‘The new drugs and the new medical knowledge…which enable them to escape dying when they should and rot slowly in special homes, slobbering round television sets,’ said Marius, ‘until they are ninety, ninety-five, a hundred, parcels of flesh being put to bed at six in the evening and being got up again fifteen hours later to face one day more of atrophy, insanity, imbecility – would you wish that for those you love?’
‘Can you not speak more kindly of them, Marius?’
‘No. I cannot. See here, Tessa: if geriatric care, as I think it is called, continues, at the present rate, to keep larger and larger numbers of very old people alive (or what the doctors euphemistically call “alive”), in not many years’ time the resources, the energy and the wealth of the entire nation will be utterly consumed by the needs of legion upon legion of Tithoni. You know who Tithonus was?’
‘The lover of Aurora, who at his request granted him eternal life.’
‘Yes. He forgot to ask for eternal youth to go with it. He was unkillable and unspeakable. Do I need to labour the point?’
‘I suppose,’ said Tessa, who was beginning to hate this conversation and wished at any cost to turn it, ‘I suppose,’ she said, cheaply but not seeing how else to attain her wish, ‘that you resent the idea of all your money being taxed and taken to pay for the comfort of the old?’
Marius laughed.
‘They’ll tax and take your money too,’ he said, matching her in cheapness. ‘You are going to have rather a lot now, little Tessa. Your auntie, your mummy, will have left you everything.’
‘I don’t think she had all that much, except her interest in that dismal hotel.’
Marius laughed again.
‘Do you realize,’ he said, ‘what Buttock’s Hotel is now worth – simply for its site in the Cromwell Road?’
‘The owners are bound in honour not to sell it…by the wish and the will of the late Mrs Buttock.’
Marius laughed a third time.
‘Honour?’ he said. ‘Bound in honour by the wish and the will of the late Mrs Buttock? Darling Tessa, these days such a concept can be killed by a deft lawyer in five minutes flat.’
‘That woman’s dead,’ said Isobel Stern to Jo-Jo Guiscard: ‘the old Quean of Buttock’s Hotel. I’ve had a letter all about it from Rosie. Here.’
‘Dear Mummy,’ Rosie wrote and Jo-Jo read, ‘I hope Oenone and Jo-Jo and you are all well. I am.’
‘Do you suppose the first sentence expresses an order of preference?’ Isobel interrupted Jo-Jo as she read.
‘Very probably,’ said Jo-Jo; ‘I shall congratulate her on her good taste when I see her.’
‘Even though she puts Oenone before you?’
‘Her penchant for Oenone is no secret,’ said Jo-Jo.
‘The fact that I detest the little wretch myself is quite beside the point.’
‘And what is that?’
‘That she writes what she means, plainly and honestly.’
Jo-Jo returned to the letter.
‘Auntie Maisie is dead,’ wrote Rosie, ‘so we all went to the funeral: Teresa, Jakki and Carolyn Blessington, Marius and myself. Jakki and Carolyn’s mother and father were going round the world, or some of it, at the time; they are very rich now that Colonel Blessington is employed by our firm.’
‘Rosie does not appear to realize,’ said Jo-Jo to Isobel, ‘that your firm also belongs to the Salingers and the Canteloupes.’
‘She knows all that perfectly well,’ said Isobel. ‘To ignore the others is Rosie’s idea of a joke.’
‘Here is another,’ said Jo-Jo. ‘“Lord Canteloupe and his friend, Major Glastonbury, also came,”’ she read aloud. ‘“Lord Canteloupe said that since they were both in Major Fielding Gray’s old regiment they were representing him, as Major Gray, of all people, should be represented on this occasion.”’
‘That,’ said Isobel, ‘is a Canteloupe joke.’
‘But here comes the next Rosie one. “Lady Canteloupe didn’t come. Perhaps she didn’t like the idea of seeing Teresa all in black.”’
‘I think I can be spared further examples of my daughter’s wit,’ said Isobel; ‘I’ve read the thing once. She clearly has no social conscience whatever – or is just trying to annoy me.’
‘On the whole the funeral was voted a success,’ Jo-Jo went back to reading to herself. ‘Nothing went positively wrong, and our old chef from Kensington you remember, Ethel and/or Mabel we used to call him – who has been running Buttock’s since Mrs Malcolm was taken poorly, put on a magnificent spread back at the hotel: caviar (fresh beluga, Mabel said), golden plovers’ eggs (frozen from the season before – totally forbidden and illegal, Ethel told us), and a marvellous dish of baby lobsters and crawfish (also forbidden and illegal). Ethel and/or Mabel has had a lot of names since I last saw him: Christabel, Titania, Clarissa and Lucrezia, to mention only a few; but now he prefers plain Hilda – he says that we live in an era in which it is advisable to be common and will soon be obligatory.
‘Anyway, plain Hilda will go on running Buttock’s until Fielding gets back, and then, she says, everyone can decide what will be the best thing to do next.
‘Odd items of interest. Canteloupe says that his baby daughter is very well, and that he adores her. It seems, however, that Theodosia Canteloupe no longer adores her (if ever she did) and Canteloupe has had to procure a wetnurse from among the peasant women on his estate.
‘Marius’ friend in Somerset, whom he calls Auntie Flo, has won a small football pool (£2,053 and nine new pence), and got into trouble for making a “racist” remark while celebrating. Apparently she told Thea Canteloupe (with whom she was dining à deux) that there is a mysterious new disease, so secret that it hasn’t even got a name yet, and that American faggots who go in for buggery (either way) are getting it by the thousands and then dropping dead as soon as they catch so much as a cold in the nose, because this new disease stops you resisting all other illnesses. It was very much worse, said Auntie Flo, in parts of black Africa, where it had probably begun in the first place; but this was meant to be even more secret than what was happening in the US because nowadays we are not allowed to be told anything nasty about blacks. Well, some catering student who was being trained in the restaurant and chanced to be waiting on Thea and Auntie Flo overheard what had been said and immediately made a row, and Auntie Flo was reported to the Race Relations Board. They were going to make a showcase of it, only Canteloupe’s old chum, Doctor La Soeur, produced an expert on African diseases, with every letter in the book after his name, who was prepared to give evidence that A. Flo was telling the truth and nothing but. Even then some of the race fanatics wanted to go on with the case, because they said that A. Flo had spoken in malice and that no one could prove this disease had started in Africa. But it seemed that Doc. La Soeur’s expert, even if he couldn’t absolutely prove that, could and would prove so many other things about the blacks and what they’d got that the Race Relations Board had the sense (for once) to shut up.
‘So that’s all for now. Incidentally, does Major Fielding Gray know that Maisie Malc. is dead? Marius says he’s somewhere in your part of France. He didn’t send any flowers to Maisie or any message to Tessa. If you see him, let him know – for all the good it w
ill do anybody.
Love to all at St-Bertrand
from Rosie.’
‘I suppose,’ said Jo-Jo to Isobel, ‘that Fielding Gray won’t have heard about Maisie – unless he’s read about her in the Deaths column of an English paper.’
‘There aren’t any nearer than Lourdes,’ said Isobel; ‘and he wouldn’t have read them even if there were. I once heard Fielding say that when he was abroad he took it as a God-given dispensation to remain totally ignorant of the imbecilities perpetrated in England.’
‘Ought we to tell him?’ said Jo-Jo.
‘They’ve gone,’ said Isobel: ‘the whole group. Carcassone or some such place. Jeremy came especially to say goodbye to Oenone. Just as well that he’s gone anyhow. He was upsetting both Oenone and Jean-Marie. Now we can resume our accustomed peace and economy.’
‘It appears,’ said Raisley Conyngham to Milo Hedley over dinner in their hotel (Les Stigmata Christi) in Lourdes, ‘that old Maisie Malcolm is dead. I have a letter here from Marius which I collected from the Poste Restante this evening while you were sleeping in your usual hoggish fashion.’
‘It is a French custom to have a nap in the evenings,’ said Milo: ‘it is called le cinq à sept.’
‘Yes. A French custom,’ said Raisley Conyngham. ‘You are English, to the best of my belief, and should eschew unwholesome foreign habits. Poor old Maisie: so respectable of late years, so becomingly dressed in her black bombasine. Do you know why retired whores always favour black bombasine, Milo?’
‘Penitence, I suppose.’
‘Rubbish. Never was there a less penitent woman than Maisie. Can they teach you nothing at Trinity? Retired whores favour black bombasine, Milo, because a whore who reaches the stage of retirement (as opposed to a pauper’s grave) must be a very prudent, wary and economic woman. She wears black bombasine because she need no longer wear more showy garments, because it lasts a very long time, and because it does not show stains and need be sent infrequently to the laundry. Good old Maisie. She gave a lot of pleasure in her heyday, Milo. She used to put on lupanal exhibitions of Byzantine ingenuity and Roman enormity. I attended once, and was grossly overcharged.’