The Troubadour

by Simon Raven

  ‘I’m sorry, Piero. It comes of reading too many bad books in the course of research. Very well. The facts of our adventure were simple. Raisley Conyngham, Milo Hedley, and that Frenchman Gagneac conspired to trap us on that island in the hope that we should die there in total isolation. Then Milo thought better of it and rescued us – more for Jeremy Morrison’s sake than for any other reason.’

  ‘But rescue us he did, Carmilla, for whatever reason.’

  ‘These blinis are soggy.’

  She beckoned the head waiter, a grinning, bustling sycophant, and asked, none too politely, for a new lot properly cooked.

  ‘Our conclusion,’ said Piero, ‘must be as simple as the facts. Raisley wants us out of the way so that he can get on, unimpeded, with the corruption and exploitation of Marius Stern. Not sexual corruption or exploitation; far worse. He wants to possess Marius’ mind, his intellect and his soul. He wants morally and spiritually to enslave him.’

  ‘And now he has a bonus coming his way: that imbecile mother of Tessa Malcolm’s has made her Raisley’s ward in her will.’

  ‘I don’t think she quite understood the position,’ said Piero, ‘before she died. ’ His pretty Sicilian face, which had successfully defied the years (usually so cruel to Latin beauty) of his early and middle twenties, now suddenly shrivelled in pain. The cold of the fenland winter always made a long, clammy ache in his crippled foot and from time to time tightened its grip to cold fierce torture. ‘I don’t think,’ he said, willing the agony away, ‘that she understood anything of importance. Imbecile, as you say. Her conception of wickedness envisaged nothing worse than the physical molestation of children or deliberate transmission of the pox. Her notions of evil did not comprehend the seduction of the psyche.’

  ‘In Teresa’s case it might have to be rape – if he wants to dominate her psyche. He will not have time for the long and gentle process he used on Marius.’

  ‘The problem of Tessa increases the urgency for action,’ said Piero: ‘it does not change the nature of that action. Our only solution must be to destroy Raisley Conyngham. Not just to discredit him, as we once thought. We know now that he is powerful enough to take his disciples with him (despite the surprising defection of Milo Hedley) however deeply he might be disgraced. Nothing which anyone has been able to think of, and no degree of foulness in Raisley himself, has so far detached Marius from him. Mere exile would never achieve this. There is only one answer: Raisley must be altogether…taken out, in the tactful new expression.’

  ‘Might he not take his disciples with him even in death?’ Carmilla said. ‘If only out of spite?’

  ‘That is a risk that must be run.’

  ‘Another thing,’ said Carmilla. ‘I do not think Jeremy and Fielding understand quite how immediate the danger is. They are simply footling around in the Peloponnese, with Milo as I now hear. Meanwhile, Raisley Conyngham will be putting time and effort to endeavour.’

  ‘Not, at the moment, in England.’

  ‘He will be in England before long, I think.’

  ‘When he gets back to that school, Tessa and Fielding will be on holiday,’ said Piero, ‘unless he comes almost at once.’

  ‘Raisley Conyngham will whisk them back with a flick of his fingers – if it suits him.’

  ‘Look,’ said Piero, after a pause during which Carmilla waved her beautiful bare arms around out of her sleeveless tunic, signalling to the head waiter for her blinis; ‘look, Carmilla, my tall goddess, my Athena of the Cam. I do not think that Fielding and Jeremy are necessarily wasting their time. While we were on our journey in France, they told me a story. It seems that during their voyage along the Mediterranean coast from Ithaca to Brindisi last autumn3 they met Jacquiz Helmutt’s twin children, who are now apparently on the loose in that part of the world.’

  ‘There is something odd about them,’ said Carmilla. ‘There are some curious tales of their birth – and conception. Balbo Blakeney knows something of all this, but he never speaks of it.’

  ‘Nor will he…if his illness does not let go. Poor Balbo.’

  ‘Never mind him now. Those Helmutt twins – their growth has been unusually swift; their beauty is breathtaking. Their mother, Marigold, won’t even discuss their whereabouts. She just smiles sadly.’

  ‘However peculiar their circumstances,’ said Piero, ‘there is no doubt but that the Helmutt twins are in full control of them. Jeremy and Fielding saw them in the basilica at Bari. Later they saw them again – or so Jeremy and Fielding both think. It was when they were in bad trouble on the sea between Bari and Brindisi. A boat appeared, out of a squall, with two figures aboard it, and led them to safety.’

  A lugubrious waiter arrived with Carmilla’s blinis.

  ‘They’re burnt,’ said Carmilla, to the back of the receding waiter. ‘Two figures?’ she said to Piero. ‘Lend me some of your toast to go with my lumpfish roe.’

  ‘At first,’ said Piero, passing a dismal slice of toast, ‘they thought the two figures were the Dioscuri, the twin gods that bring sailors to haven. When they calmed down, they knew this must be rubbish; and since Fielding recognised a certain gesture of the hand and arm with which one of them signalled, and Jeremy was convinced that one of them was female – something to do with the way she held herself in the storm – they decided the two figures must have been the Helmutt twins.’

  ‘Why on earth should they have been?’

  ‘Their demeanour; the way they had waved in the basilica earlier on; somehow it made Jeremy and Fielding feel that they were being watched for their own good – protected. And then the two figures in the storm…even though their faces were hidden by oil skins…the way the whole thing happened…the other boat coming out of nowhere just when it was needed – the sum of it was, Carmilla, that Fielding and Jeremy, when they discussed it all later, much later, were visited with a kind of revelation, that the Helmutt twins were their good daemons who had been sent to preserve them.’

  ‘How conceited men can be. First they thought Castor and Pollux had come to rescue them, then they thought that the Helmutt twins, endowed with extraordinary powers on sea and land, had followed them and hovered about them all the way from Dalmatia to Apulia. As if those children had nothing better to do.’

  ‘Well,’ said Piero, ‘what had they got to do?’

  ‘Further their education,’ said Carmilla; ‘presumably that’s why they were sent down there in the first place.’

  ‘But is it not just possible,’ said Piero, ‘that if the twins were to be encountered again – in pretty much the same area – they might again be of assistance? And that, if only subconsciously, Jeremy and Fielding realise this?’

  Carmilla chewed and discarded her deplorable toast. The lugubrious waiter removed it, with an air of paranoia and brought gnocchi in tomato sauce for both of them. When Carmilla had unstuck her jaws from her first mouthful of gnocchi, she said:

  ‘If I grant your absurd hypotheses, Piero, will you kindly tell me just how those pretty twins are to help Fielding and Jeremy solve the problem of…taking out…Raisley Conyngham, without at the same time destroying or alienating Marius Stern and Tessa Malcolm?’

  ‘Your trouble, darling,’ said Piero, ‘is lack of imagination. That’s why your research into mediaeval diseases is now going so badly. You understand symptoms and processes of infection; you do not understand the suffering of the sick or the special insights required for diagnosis.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Carmilla, bitterly hurt.

  ‘Lack of imagination leads to lack of tolerance,’ Piero pursued crossly as he surveyed his dish of lank, dank gnocchi, ‘and lack of tolerance explains your utter failure to sympathise with (say) Jeremy’s pathological addiction to being sodomised or Marius’ yearning to find a way (other than sodomy, which Marius would abominate) to love and comfort him.’

  ‘At least I understand why Marius is obsessed by Raisley Conyngham,’ Carmilla said: ‘Marius is weak and longs for a master. Particularly now he has no fa
ther.’

  ‘That is about half the story,’ Piero said. ‘The other half lies in the same realm as Jeremy and Fielding’s belief in the powers of the twins to guard and guide them, something you will never understand, my long, lovely goddess of Wisdom, if you live to be a thousand. That is why Jeremy and Fielding told me the tale of the twins’ appearance to them in the troubled waters of the Adriatic only when they knew that you were safely out of the way at the hairdresser’s.’

  As Jeremy, Fielding and Milo followed the Helmutt twins through the sheep and out of the Jewish Burial Ground, and then along the shabby and attractive streets towards the harbour of Zante, Milo said: ‘Still not very chatty, those two.’

  ‘When I was up at Lancaster,’ Jeremy said, ‘their mother, Marigold Helmutt, used to say that when they wanted something they would ask for it by some sort of thought transference which was so clear that it actually sounded in her brain like a voice. It was only when she looked at them, in the course of a “conversation”, that she realised they couldn’t be talking because their mouths never moved.’

  ‘How old are they?’ said Milo.

  ‘They can’t be more than ten,’ Jeremy said. ‘They were born early in the Seventies. Marigold came back preggers (so I’ve been told) after she and Helmutt had been to Greece,4 on that expedition which got him his knighthood.’

  ‘I thought,’ said Milo, ‘that he’d been knighted, like most of ‘em, just for growing old without putting his prick in the wrong place or his fingers in the money pot.’

  ‘He discovered a legendary necklace of rubies,’ Fielding said, ‘the so-called Roses of Picardie. I think Balbo Blakeney was in on it all. That’s why Balbo’s still a Fellow of Lancaster. He’d been sacked for the drink, but was such a help to Jacquiz Helmutt in tracking down the necklace that he was restored, as Fellows’ Steward. Or perhaps that was a bribe – to keep him quiet about something.’

  ‘Like who was the real daddy of these twins?’ suggested Milo. ‘I can’t imagine that that old stick, Jacquiz Helmutt, ever had the spunk to get two bouncing beauties like that.’

  ‘– Who look sixteen at least when they’re barely ten,’ said Fielding, ‘and are allowed out alone all over the Mediterranean.’

  ‘Apparently Marigold says they just took off,’ said Jeremy; ‘last summer, after Tom Llewyllyn’s funeral.’

  The twins halted on the quayside, by a caique which had no name but two eyes painted on the bow, one to starboard and one to port.

  ‘This was not the boat on which they came to us on the sea south of Bari,’ said Jeremy to Fielding.

  ‘You’re still sure it was them?’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  As Fielding, Jeremy and Milo walked along the quay, the ephebe fetched a gangplank. His sister boarded the caique; Fielding and Co. followed; the boy then followed them, and drew the plank aboard. The maiden took a length of cord and started a small, smokey, comfortably chugging engine at the rear of the deck. Her brother took the wheel, which was for’ard of a ramshackle erection that resembled a hut on an allotment and was itself for’ard of the vibrating engine.

  ‘No sails, thank God,’ Jeremy said: ‘one might have been made to help.’

  ‘What does one call you?’ leered Milo at the girl, who totally ignored him and went through a doorless doorway into the hut and then down some steps, presumably to a cabin below. They chugged out of the harbour and turned north. Fielding and Co. stood about. Since no deck chairs appeared, they then sat about, on coils of rope and life belts and gunnels. After a while, the boy turned and looked at Fielding; and into Fielding’s head came the lines, so clearly that someone might have been speaking them, speaking them in the light voice of a fifth former called upon to read them, nearly fifty years ago at school:

  “But first you must go forth on another journey, and come to its ending at the House of Hades and dread Persephone. ”… ous “To seek prophecy of his soul, if perchance the horseman will come forth to you. ”

  ‘What’s all this about a horseman?’ said Fielding to the boy. ‘The poet says, “to seek prophecy of the soul of of Theban Teiresias, even of the blind seer.” No horsemen in the text just here.’

  The boy turned his eyes away and the voice in Fielding’s head was silent.

  ‘We are offered a prophet,’ Fielding said to Jeremy and Milo, ‘a horseman who will perchance come forth to us from the House of Hades and Persephone.’

  ‘Riding with the King’s Men, do you think?’ said Milo. ‘After all, it was that horseman whom Jeremy came to greet.’

  Lady Nausikaa (often in slovenly mode pronounced ‘Nausika’) slept in the first (the larger) night nursery with her nurse, a jolly snub-nosed girl from the Dalmatian coast, who sang and chattered to the infant all the day long. The Marquess and Marchioness Canteloupe came to say goodnight to their daughter, while the nurse, Dobrila, who always dressed as a fisher-boy from her own town of Koviza on the tiny island of Vis, celebrated their arrival with a ballad in English about how the King and the Queen came to say goodnight to the little Princess.

  ‘See, my lord and lady, Nausikaa is asleep,’ said Dobrila (who pronounced the name properly and in full) at the end of her ballad.

  ‘Where did you learn that song, Dobrila?’ said Theodosia Canteloupe.

  ‘An English lady who lived on our island taught me.’

  ‘That would have been Patricia Llewyllyn’s mother,’ said Canteloupe to his wife, as they walked across the Great Court, past the Fives Court, towards the Rose Garden, ‘and also Isobel Stern’s… Lady Turbot, wife of Sir Edwin. She left him when Isobel was born, because she couldn’t stand the sight of the child, and went to live on Vis…lived until she was over a hundred, so Gregory once told me, though he may have been sacrificing accuracy to romance – or to his Jewish love of round numbers.’

  ‘It is funny to think of her,’ said Theodosia, ‘as old as a Sibyl, teaching that silly little song to Dobrila.’

  ‘She was rather dotty,’ said Canteloupe; ‘so was Sir Edwin. No wonder Isobel is so eccentric…to say nothing of poor, mad Patricia –’

  ‘– And her daughter, poor, mad Baby, who was once your wife.’

  ‘I preferred to call her Tullia. Tullia was never mad, just difficult.’

  ‘The strain was bad,’ said Theodosia. ‘It is just as well her son, little Tully, died so young.5 It was a sensible idea, Canty, to arrange for his murder.’

  ‘You knew about that? I tried to keep it from you. Yes, we arranged for his murder – but in the end his death was accidental, however dramatic. Now we have Nausikaa there need be no more plotting. She is a fine child. She should be. She is yours by young Marius.’

  ‘Even Marius is suspect. After all, he is Isobel’s son.’

  ‘I say: there shall be no more plotting,’ Canteloupe decreed.

  ‘Good,’ said Lady Canteloupe. ‘You will not ask me to couple, with Marius or another, to get a son? I want your final word.’

  ‘I love Nausikaa. I need no son, by Marius or another, now or ever.’

  ‘Good,’ repeated Theodosia. ‘Then I shall never know a man with my body again. Teresa shall be all, and all.’

  ‘If she is all you wish for.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘She won’t be yours for ever. She will grow.’

  ‘I shall love her nevertheless.’

  ‘She will wish to marry,’ said Canteloupe; ‘or at least to fornicate.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘You must not try to possess her whole being, her whole life.’

  ‘What do you care?’

  ‘If you do try, she will turn, at the last, and rend you.’

  ‘Again,’ said Theodosia: ‘what do you care? You will be dead by then.’

  ‘So much the more will Nausikaa need her mother – a soft, contented woman, not a wounded virago.’

  ‘I do not care much about the needs of Nausika.’

  ‘Then perhaps, like old Lady Turbot, you should retire for ever to Vis
. Find a girl like Dobrila there.’

  ‘I love Teresa.’

  ‘Who did find Dobrila for you?’

  ‘Marigold Helmutt. She goes more and more to the Mediterranean Sea, seeking for her two lost twins. She went to all the islands in the Adriatic, and at last she came to Vis. There she sat crying on the shore, when Dobrila came along the sand and comforted her. She asked Dobrila to come to England for a while, and when she heard about Nausika’s birth, she sent her to me, to be the nurse.’

  ‘Did Marigold not want to keep Dobrila, her comforter, to herself?’

  ‘Dobrila was pining for her brother and her sister on her island. She was just about to return to them, but her mother wrote to say that they had both died. It was then Marigold sent Dobrila to be Nausika’s nurse…so that Dobrila might at least have a little sister.’

  ‘A pity,’ said Canteloupe, ‘that you too cannot love Nausikaa.’

  ‘I am told that mothers often dislike their babies – sometimes murder them. Dobrila will do well enough for Nausika. My love is for Teresa.’

  ‘I have told you. You cannot have Teresa for ever,’ said Canteloupe: ‘you could have Nausikaa for ever.’

  ‘Nausika too will grow and marry and rut.’

  ‘She will always be your daughter.’

  ‘Teresa will always be –’

  ‘– I have warned you,’ interrupted Canteloupe. ‘I shall say no more. Do as you please. Publicly, of course, you will show proper affection for Nausikaa. Otherwise you may leave her to Dobrila, and, for as long as I live, to me. As for Teresa, please do not make a tedious fuss in my house when you find she has betrayed you.’

  ‘I told you,’ said Theodosia, without spite and even with sorrow: ‘you are an old man, and by then you will be dead.’

  By the late morning of their second day at sea, Fielding, Jeremy and Milo reckoned (from a crude map in Milo’s guide book) that they had now left Leucas behind and to starboard and were still sailing pretty well due north, past Actium and Nicopolis. Since questions to the twins elicited no response other than a distant smile, they put away the guide book and fell to speculating whether or not their hotel in Zante would charge them for the previous night, during which their rooms had been empty.