The Troubadour

by Simon Raven

  ‘As I have just said,’ capped Fielding. ‘Let me repeat that there was an implication, at least, that we simply were not required to interfere.’

  ‘Right,’ said Jeremy. ‘How very convenient.’

  ‘Ghosts,’ said Milo, ‘or even actors who pretend to be ghosts, notoriously mislead people. Sometimes they stir up unholy trouble about nothing. This was very well known to Hamlet, and explains why he delayed so long before heeding the commands of his ghostly father. On the other hand, ghosts also frustrate and inhibit those whom they visit by counselling inaction when action is urgently needed. This could be the case here.’

  ‘Ghosts or not,’ said Jeremy, ‘why should any of them bother? This food is the most disgusting I have ever tried to eat. It is, for a start, stone cold.’

  ‘They heat it up,’ said Fielding, ‘then they let it get cold again, in case the heat should be harmful. That is the modern Greek mentality in one of its more obliging aspects.’

  ‘If that production was the work of Carmilla,’ Jeremy said, ‘I should say that she was saying that she no longer wants or trusts us.’

  ‘Rather an elaborate idiom for such a simple statement,’ said Fielding. ‘Have I not already told you that it cannot be the work of Carmilla, who has not had time to arrange it? Anyway, Carmilla originally co-opted you and me, Jeremy, because she most emphatically did want and trust us. What have we done to make her change her mind?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Milo. ‘Mere time would take care of that, without any provocation from you two. Women are changeable, as every single poet of any perception tells us ad nauseam, particularly rich women.’

  ‘If anyone mentions money again,’ said Jeremy, ‘I shall take all my clothes off and have a fit. Carmilla has the constancy of a man, an honorary man, and in any case common sense and Fielding both tell us, unarguably, that Carmilla could not possibly have arranged this evening’s little pageant. God knows who did or how, so we may as well pass to an answerable question: what next?’

  ‘Carmilla is chief among Marius’ champions,’ said Fielding, ‘and you are her first lieutenant. So you tell us: what next?’

  Fielding, Jeremy and Milo arrived back on Zacynthos early in the afternoon of the day after their visit to the necromanteion at Ephyra. Jeremy went straight to his bedroom in their hotel (the manager of which announced that he was charging them in full for their absence) and telephoned Carmilla, who was busy with her notes on mediaeval diseases in her rooms in Lancaster College, Cambridge.

  Jeremy gave Carmilla a brief, general account of what had occurred at Ephyra. Carmilla was, she said, at a total loss to explain any of it. She had not, she added, been feeling very well; a morning’s concentration on mediaeval diseases had made her feel much worse; she was about to go to bed with a mug of Ovaltine. In her present view nothing more should or could be done in the matter of Raisley Conyngham until a full appraisal had been made of the likely consequences of his newly inherited guardianship of Tessa Malcolm. This development was so unexpected, its possibilities for evil (or, perhaps, for good) so difficult to calculate, that ‘watch and pray’ must now be the order of the hour. It was as though, Carmilla said, Raisley had suddenly been handed a rare and fragile hostage, whose vulnerability might encourage him to commit even crueller enormities or, just conceivably, move him to embrace amendment of life.

  ‘And until his choice is clear,’ said Jeremy, ‘you will not be needing Fielding or me?’

  ‘Just tell me where you are going to be,’ Carmilla said; ‘and if I want you I shall wire you poste restante.’

  ‘Olympia tomorrow,’ said Jeremy, ‘for two days; then Corinth, for two days, Nauplion for two days, Monemvasia, Gytheion, Pylos, each for one day and a night. If still not summoned, we may extend our trip to the north: Thebes, Volos, Tempe, Thessalonika, Samothraki and Constantinople. But in that case we should warn you later and more precisely of our movements.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Carmilla: ‘I’ve just about got all that. Now please ring off without more ado, because I’m going to the jakes to upchuck.’

  Some time later, when Carmilla came back to her sitting room to tidy her notes before retiring to bed, Piero Caspar came in.

  ‘I’ve been most damnably sick,’ Piero said.

  ‘So have I. It must be something we’ve both eaten. Not just something to cause a bilious attack; something pretty poisonous. I have been…racked.’

  ‘So have I. Those gnocchi at the Sharing and Caring? Out of a frozen package that had been improperly defrosted – or refrozen?’

  ‘The Caring and Sharing, Piero. I should have thought that at their prices one might have deserved fresh food.’

  ‘No restaurant ever has fresh food these days. The staff are too sluttish. I was once given tinned tomatoes at breakfast in a five-star hotel in Kensington. Christ: here we go again,’ Piero said, and threw open the window.

  Since the matter which he had to communicate was both solemn and complicated, Jeremy decided that a letter to Marius would be more suitable than a telephone call.

  ‘Caro,’ he wrote: ‘We went to your father’s grave in the Jewish Burial Ground on the hill over Zante, and some rather surprising things happened.’

  Jeremy then gave a full and accurate account of these.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ he concluded, ‘that I understand none of them. But I thought (O Marius, animae dimidium meae) that you should know of all this. Fielding, Milo (now definitely “ours”, I believe) and I myself are now touring round the Peloponnese. We were half expecting that one or other of us would be called home by now, but as none of us has heard anything, we shall go slowly on to the north, possibly as far as Byzantium. Best love, caro, from Jeremy.’

  Jeremy could think of no good reason for giving the details of their intended journey to Marius, but since he had promised to give them to Carmilla if she had not summoned them home by the time they reached Pylos, and now here they were at Pylos and she hadn’t, he telephoned Lancaster College, gave her extension number, and received no answer from it. He therefore walked to the telegraph office near the harbour with Milo (Fielding being asleep on his bed in the Xenia Nestor). There he wired a list of places and dates to Carmilla for her information, and on the way back to dinner at the Nestor enjoyed a zestful conversation with Milo about the curious Gaian rites formerly practised on Samothraki, an island which they hoped to visit in about a fortnight’s time.

  Marius received Jeremy’s letter while Jeremy and his friends were in a small boat on a sick-making sea, being carried to Samothraki. Marius read the letter with great care, and was filled with fear.

  Like Jeremy, Marius did not understand the subterranean alarums which Jeremy reported. He had no notion who had been responsible for getting them up, or who could have been using his father’s voice, or what the tedious speech about the ‘horsemen’ was intended to convey in practical terms.

  But one thing Marius understood very clearly indeed: the white Maltese crosses on the black overmantles of the six knights boded ill. For Marius, who had loved his mother (perhaps still did) with a soft, sensual love, had honoured, trusted and obeyed his father with the steadfastness of a royal page (this was part of the reason for his later becoming so deeply attached to Raisley Conyngham: when his father died, he had overmuch loyalty to offer elsewhere); and the bond which bound Marius to his father had been the stronger for certain private codes and signals they had between them – one of which was the Maltese cross.

  This particular item had been introduced into their code during an expedition to Cambridge, many years before, to see Tom Llewyllyn. When Tom had taken Gregory and the five-year-old Marius on a tour of Lancaster College chapel, Marius had been terrified by a large fissure in a box tomb in one of the chantries. After he was calmed, he confessed that he had imagined that a ghost might at any moment come sliding and hissing out of the crack; and since the crack had been just above a Maltese cross, carved in low relief, this emblem had then and thenceforth been associated by him
with irrational suspicion and even terror. Ever since that occasion, if either Marius or Gregory, in writing to the other, drew a Maltese cross on the page, it signified that the news thereon communicated had (in the writer’s opinion) a disagreeable and perhaps sinister connotation, whether or not this were at present readily discernible.

  It was a sign they seldom used. In fact, Marius could only remember once using it himself, during a bad patch at his preparatory school, when he was being taunted and tortured by boys whom he had thought to be his friends; and he could remember only one occasion on which his father had used it – when Gregory had written him a little note of love before leaving on the journey which he was to finish nailed to a cross.

  And now, thought Marius, here is some vision, of whatever origin, which Jeremy has seen, accompanied by, or at any rate immediately succeeded by, a speech in the voice of my father: and in the vision were six crosses of Malta, worn on black backgrounds by murderous knights. My father seemed to be saying, in his speech as Jeremy records it, that matters would conclude more or less well for me, if possibly in mild disgrace at least not in horror or disaster; yet surely those crosses must mean that the road before me is dark and that I shall be pursued and haunted by larvae along the way.

  He yearned for Jeremy, that he might talk to him about this; he would have been glad of Fielding Gray, or even of Milo Hedley, who had once been his companion and now, after having been for long an enemy, seemed to have changed, in some fashion, to a companion once more. He longed to speak to Piero Caspar, who had been his watchful guide and tutor across Europe not many months before, and to Carmilla Salinger, his stern patron and doctor in the Art of Love: but Piero and Carmilla were far away from him, farther than any of the others, at Lancaster College, Cambridge, lying in the Fellows’ Crypt.

  Footnotes

  1 See Blood of My Bone, by Simon Raven (House of Stratus; 2001).

  PART THREE

  Two on a Tower

  We took sweet counsel together, and walked into the house of God in company.

  Psalms of David: 55; 14

  Raisley Conyngham, having completed his tour of inspection and injunction, drove without haste from St Sebastian to Boulogne, where he purchased a copy of the Daily Telegraph and caught the next hovercraft to Dover. On his way over the Channel he learned from his paper that the first racquets pair of the school at which he taught would be playing Eton in the finals of the Public Schools Racquets Tournament at Queen’s Club that very afternoon. It was lucky, he reflected, that he had chosen the Telegraph from the journals available at the hoverport, as every other newspaper, including The Times, would have omitted this information on the ground that it was ‘elitist’.

  In the gallery above the racquets courts he saw, among others, Colonel Ivan Blessington, an old boy of the school who was barely kown to Raisley but now marched boldly up to him and said:

  ‘Ah, Conyngham. A word with you.’

  Raisley bowed from the neck.

  ‘You have been abroad, I understand, on some kind of brief sabbatical. You may or may not know, therefore,’ the Colonel pursued, ‘that you have been bequeathed the privilege and responsibility of acting as guardian to Miss Tessa Malcolm.’

  Raisley bowed again, this time from the shoulders.

  ‘Mr John Groves contrived to telephone me while I was in the South of France,’ Raisley said. ‘He had something to say of the matter.’

  ‘Did he not mention that Mrs Maisie Malcolm’s will appointed myself as financial trustee to Tessa?’

  ‘No. Nothing, Colonel, of that.’

  ‘Nevertheless it is so. My appointment was made in a separate and later codicil, I understand. It is possible that this was at first mislaid.’

  Or later forged, thought Raisley: I had an impression that Groves was not enthusiastic about my appointment; he may well have decided to insert his own man through some legal slot in order to protect Teresa’s money, or, in general, to hold a watching brief. Annoying for me: very sensible, I have to admit, of Groves. Whether the method used by him for his introduction of Blessington into this affair was proper or otherwise, there is nothing I can do about it, and so I shall accept the situation with good grace.

  ‘We shall have a lot to discuss,’ he said to Blessington, bowing a third time and placing his right hand over his left tit: ‘the whole future of Buttock’s Hotel to begin with.’

  Ivan Blessington half opened his mouth in a cautious fashion, revealing some cleverly chipped and stained false teeth, then closed it again before smiling broadly and with candid pleasure as a long figure in black trousers and a black polonecked sweater leaned elegantly from the verticle and applied its head to his ear.

  ‘I have been playing tennis with the pro,’ the figure said. ‘He told me he had seen you come up here.’

  ‘Theodosia: this is Mr Raisley Conyngham.’

  ‘I have heard of Mr Conyngham.’

  ‘Conyngham, this is Lady Canteloupe.’

  ‘I have heard of Lady Canteloupe.’

  Neither offered to shake hands with the other. There was a silence.

  ‘One of the things I have heard about you, Marchioness,’ said Raisley, ‘is that you play royal or real tennis. Is that what you meant just now?’

  ‘I play tennis,’ said Theodosia Canteloupe; ‘the other game should be referred to as “lawn tennis”. So the game I have just been playing, with the incumbent professional, was neither royal nor real, but simply tennis. It requires the same knowledge of angles and ballistics as this game of racquets, which is now being indifferently played before this gallery, but stipulates the use of a far more cumbrous racket and a much larger and heavier ball. Most women, therefore, are not strong enough to play it – another instance of the demonstrable inferiority, in sporting matters, of my own sex.’

  ‘But you, Marchioness, are strong enough to play it,’ Raisley said. ‘Is that attractive black ensemble which you are wearing the customary costume for females when they play at tennis?’

  ‘No. Like men, we play in white. This “ensemble” is a mourning outfit.’

  ‘But it is already afternoon.’

  ‘Conyngham has been abroad,’ volunteered Ivan Blessington; ‘it is at least possible that he has not seen the newspapers.’

  ‘Not until this morning,’ Raisley said. ‘When I am abroad, I leave the news to take care of itself.’

  ‘Suppose there were a slump on the stock market?’ said Ivan, genuinely inquisitive on this point. ‘Would you not wish to hear of it?’

  ‘My stockbrokers, bankers and agents have standing instructions against all contingencies.’

  ‘Such people often grow careless, nowadays, if they know a client is away,’ said Theodosia, who evidently shared Blessington’s concern in this field. ‘They resent others who are in a position to absent themselves without care, and although they do not dare to practise deliberate negligence, they are subconsciously motivated to make cretinous mistakes.’

  ‘The last man of business who made a cretinous mistake at my expense,’ said Raisley, ‘whether his motive was deliberate or subconscious, finished up in prison.’

  ‘His mistake was criminal as well as cretinous?’ Lady Canteloupe enquired.

  ‘His mistake lay in disobliging me,’ Raisley Conyngham said. ‘The standard of play in this contest is, as you observe, poor. It will be improved in a year or two when Marius Stern represents the school at racquets.’

  Knowing that Marius, both at school and away from it, was a friend of Ivan Blessington’s two daughters (as was Marius’ sister, Rosie), and that Marius was both the father of Theodosia’s ten-week-old baby (by arrangement of Theodosia) and the lover of her sister, Carmilla (by desire of Carmilla), Raisley now waited to see in what manner his companions would respond to the obtrusion of his name.

  ‘It is a pity,’ said Theodosia with indifference, ‘that Marius has such thin legs. This, with his circumcised penis, detracts from his aesthetic appeal.’

  ‘You seem�
�intimate with the details of his physique,’ said Raisley.

  ‘Oh yes: he was the apprentice paramour of my dead sister, Carmilla. She furnished several reports of his progress.’

  ‘Your dead sister?’ said Raisley.

  ‘Yes. Her death is one of the items you must have missed by neglecting to procure English news sheets in France. It accounts for my subfusc “ensemble”. Another death you must have missed was that of Carmilla’s friend and colleague, Piero Caspar. They were both apparently poisoned by a dish of decaying gnocchi served to them at a Cambridge restaurant, the Sharing and Caring.’

  ‘Sorry, Thea,’ said Ivan Blessington: ‘The Caring and Sharing.’

  ‘I am very sorry to hear this sad news,’ said Raisley: ‘when next in Cambridge I shall eschew the Sharing and Caring at all cost.’

  ‘The Caring and Sharing,’ insisted Ivan Blessington.

  ‘In either case, I shall shun it… Miss Carmilla Salinger was a fine scholar.’

  ‘How would you know?’ said Theodosia. ‘Carmilla was an expert on mediaeval diseases. Your line, I’m told, is Latin and Greek, with particular reference to verse composition.’

  ‘True. I have two outstanding pupils, at the moment: Marius Stern, other aspects of whom we have just been discussing, and my own ward’ – high time to get this in, Raisley thought – ‘Miss Teresa Mal –’

  ‘– None of which entitles you to pass judgements, adverse or favourable, on the forensic, diagnostic or historical scholarship of my dead sister.’

  Theodosia Canteloupe nodded brusquely to Raisley, smiled sweetly at Ivan, turned about with the stylish precision of an ensign at gentlemen’s drill before the Changing of the Guard, and lumbered smoothly off towards the exit.

  ‘You realise,’ said Raisley Conyngham to Ivan Blessington, ‘that that woman has an overwhelming and unwholesome influence on my ward and the subject of your trusteeship, Teresa Malcolm.’