by Simon Raven
‘Nothing unwholesome about Thea’s influence on Tessa that I know of. You want to be careful of making remarks like that, Conyngham. Unprovable accusations can constitute criminal libel.’
Raisley, unprepared for opposition, let alone rebuke, from this good-humoured and reputedly malleable ex-soldier, gave a poo-poohing pout.
‘You forget,’ said Ivan: ‘I was appointed, by Carmilla and Theodosia, quite a long time ago, to be their liaison officer with the other partners and members of the board of their own firm, including Theodosia’s husband, Canteloupe, and with particular reference to senior employees who grew too big for their suede boots – like that slimy bugger, Ashley Dexterside, whose bloody-mindedness was the original cause of my recruitment. Since then, I have come to know those two girls as if they were my own, and to have a very sharp eye for all the turds that float about on (or under) the pools of shit which they must frequently step across. I’m on their side, and I love them, and now Carmilla’s dead, God bless her soul, I love Theodosia double. So I despise and abominate, Conyngham, any vile chatter, Conyngham, that may emanate from the filthy throats, Conyngham, of the likes, Conyngham, of you.’
‘Commendable loyalty, Colonel,’ said the dominie breezily. ‘By the way, where is Miss Malcolm?’
‘Tessa? Down at the school, I suppose. The quarter’s not quite over, or my own girls would be home. Dear God, Theodosia’s right about that racquets pair. The only way they could have got into this final is by rubbing off their previous opponents in the changing rooms before the game started.’
‘And you think they have failed to take that precaution before this match?’ Raisley enquired.
‘The opposing pair today is from Eton. I expect Etonians are too grand or too fastidious to shag with our lot. Do they still call it “shagging”?’
‘I believe so,’ said Raisley. ‘I must get down to Farncombe Hill. We shall correspond about Teresa’s well-being?’
‘I’ll come down and see you at school early next quarter. On the day of the Butterfly Match.’
By which time, thought Raisley as he drove along the Cromwell Road, I shall have done my sums and made my plans, and shall altogether be on firm ground. But I cannot really think of this blunt booby as a serious threat. Did I not hear that he went through a religious phase, not when he was fourteen, which is about par for that sort of nonsense, but well over forty? A retarded religious phase suggests something not far off imbecility. He has, of course, grown out of it, to judge him by his own judgements and the idiom in which he expresses them; and he has also, one may infer from his bombastic bluster immediately followed by his genial and fatuous obscenities, grown into the habit of lunching pretty lengthily. If religion rots the wits, gourmandry rots the guts, and in either case effective action is precluded, whether by mental or visceral liquefaction.
In a chantry off the quire and chancel of the chapel of Lancaster College, Cambridge, Marigold Helmutt knelt on the stone floor, staring at a Maltese cross sculpted on the wall of a cracked tomb, praying that she might find her twins when she resumed her search.
‘In two days’ time, God,’ said Marigold aloud, ‘I fly to Istanbul and set off down the Turkish coast. I have not tried the Turkish coast before. I have tried Greece, and all the Ionian and Aegean islands; I have tried Yugoslavia and its islands in the Adriatic Sea; I have tried Bulgaria and Romania and Israel and Egypt; but the Turkish coast – Antalya and Ephesus and Bergamos – I have not yet tried. Please, God, grant that I may come across my twins, or that they may come to me, somewhere on the coast of Turkey, among the dunes of the temples or the pine trees that border the sea.’
‘Dear Marigold,’ said Len, her husband’s private secretary, who had appeared behind her, ‘if your twins wished to come to you they would come to you here in Cambridge. If they wished you to come across them elsewhere they would long since have arranged it.’
‘I thought they might come when we committed Carmilla and Piero to the crypt. It was by way of the crypt that they left us, when it was opened for Tom Llewyllyn’s burial. I thought they might return that way, when it was opened once more for Carmilla and Piero.’
‘Tom Llewyllyn was buried in the Provosts’ Crypt: Piero and Carmilla in the Fellows’.’
‘The distinction,’ said Marigold, ‘is academic. The bodies went down through the same hole; the same slab was raised to receive them and lowered to secure them.’
‘But their coffins slid along a ramp beneath the slab to a different resting place, a good hundred yards west of where the Provosts of the college lie.’
‘Even so, it is in the same crypt. Had they wished to return to it, they could have done so. They know the way. I was about to leave for Istanbul when Carmilla and Piero died. I postponed my journey, thinking that at the funeral the twins might come back to me. Now I have bought fresh tickets and shall leave the day after tomorrow.’
‘So I heard you inform God,’ Len said. ‘Let me repeat, Marigold: if the twins wanted to meet you, they would, without any of your contriving, without any opening or closing of crypts. You will never find them without they wish it.’
‘So there is no point in searching?’ Marigold said.
‘I did not say that; for journeys, of themselves, are good. It does not matter whether you arrive where you intended to arrive, still less whether you find what you are looking for. There are plenty of things to find instead. You should do what the poet Cavafis advises: you should listen to voices and linger in harbours and drink exotic liquids and buy expensive perfumes. Only in the narrowest sense did Ulysses’ voyage have anything to do with returning to Penelope. All accounts, even Homer’s, if we are to believe the words of Tiresias uttered in Hades, agree that Ulysses very soon tired of his faithful, dreary wife, and decided to journey on – on and away from the Isle of Ithaca, far into the heart of Europe, according to Tiresias; west over the ocean and through the Pillars of Hercules, according to Dante, then south, until, after many moons, he came in sight of a conical island which, though he could not know it, was the mountain of Purgatory.’
‘Did he go ashore?’ asked Marigold, climbing, with Len’s assistance, to her feet.
‘That was not considered fitting. When he had seen the island, he sank. His soul was assigned, rather unfairly in my view, to the eighth chasm of the eighth circle of the Inferno, on the ground that he had disseminated evil counsel. But all that is beside the point…which is that Ulysses had his marvellous journeys, and never mind what they did or did not achieve. So go to Ephesus with my blessing, Marigold, not caring whether or not you get there and what if anything you may find…an attitude conducive to pleasure of the body and peace of the spirit. Did you not tell me, some months ago, that you had dreamt of your twins?’
‘Yes. They were leaving a harbour in a ship, and waved to me from the poop as they passed.’
‘What more could you possibly want than that? Your dream tells you that they are well and safe; that they greet you and love you; that they too have set out on a journey.’
‘Do you believe in dreams, Len?’
‘I believe in nothing,’ said Len; ‘I am therefore fully as prepared to trust dreams as to trust any other source of information.’
They passed out of the chantry into the quire and under the organ to the nave.
‘Do you remember when we were lovers?’ said Marigold, looking up at the sumptuous windows. ‘All those years ago, when you were just a research student and such a ghastly oik?’
‘Vividly,’ said Len.
‘You taught me some really disgusting tricks. I never could make Jacquiz do them.’
‘I should hope not. They are not the sort of tricks which Provosts should practise.’
‘I’ll bet Tom Llewyllyn practised them.’
‘Only before he was Provost,’ said Len.
‘I sometimes wish I had the heart,’ said Marigold, ‘to find someone to practise them on me again. I know you’re too old and lazy.’
‘Not so much t
hat. Bored with sex. All that fuss and bother about a quick tickle – a quick squirt of what our grandparents called “jism”.’
‘I was wondering,’ said Marigold, ‘whether that appetising little boy, Marius Stern, would be interested, next time he comes here.’
‘He came to see his mistress, Carmilla Salinger, or his amico per le pelle, Piero Caspar. Carmilla and Piero are dead.’
‘Leaving the field open.’
‘But now he will not come.’
‘I suppose not. That beastly restaurant which killed Carmilla and Piero – have they closed it down yet?’
‘No. The kitchens, on examination, were spotless, and there was good evidence they had always been so. Despite what Carmilla and Piero said before they died about the gnocchi, an autopsy revealed not the slightest sign of food poisoning. Anyway, they dined at the Caring and Sharing some days before they fell ill, let alone died. And whoever heard of anyone being poisoned to death by gnocchi – however rotten?’
‘Then what did they die of?’
‘Ask me another,’ said Len, looking down with pleasure at his orange and violet suede chukka boots.
When Raisley Conyngham arrived at the school on Farncombe Hill, early in the evening of the day of the racquets match at Queen’s Club, he sent a servant from his chambers to fetch Marius Stern from his house and Teresa Malcolm from her Domus Vestalis.
Only Marius arrived.
‘I’m glad you’re here, sir,’ Marius said. ‘The school is breaking up tomorrow morning – three days early as there’s an epidemic of ’flu – and I don’t know where to go. I don’t want to go to my mother in the Pyrenees, because she’s so horribly socialist and teaching these days, and I can’t go to Carmilla or Piero in Cambridge because they’re dead.’
‘So you hoped I would put you up?’ said Raisley Conyngham.
‘I’ve got plenty of money,’ said Marius, ‘to put myself up. It’s just a question of where. I hoped you might make an amusing suggestion.’
‘How flattering of you. What’s the matter with your family’s house in London? I understood it had been kept open.’
‘It was. And it still is – but only just. You see, the cook-cum-caretaker, who is a gentleman called Mavis – or Ethel or Hilda, he changes it every month – has been appointed manager – or manageress – of Buttock’s Hotel, now that poor old Mrs Malcolm’s dead, until someone decides what’s to be done with the place. And although he’s still in charge of our house in London, he can’t be there as much as he used to be, which makes it rather forlorn and means irregular meals.’
‘My poor boy. How ghastly for you,’ Raisley said. ‘But if, as you tell me, you have so much money, you could perhaps go out for your meals?’
‘Rotten value, these days, eating out in restaurants.’
‘A very percipient and provident attitude, Marius. One should never forget that your father was a Jew.’
‘You are not being very agreeable,’ Marius said.
‘I shall start being agreeable again when you start calling me “sir” again – and tell me what has become of Teresa Malcolm. My houseboy went to her Domus and she couldn’t be found.’
‘Tessa left early, sir.’
‘It seems that you are all leaving early.’
‘Tessa left earlier still. Lady Canteloupe wrote to the mistress of Tessa’s Domus, and said that Tessa was very tired after her O levels, and could she come down to Wiltshire before the quarter ended? She also got permission for my sister Rosie, who’s going there with Tessa.’
‘How did Lady Canteloupe know – that Teresa was so tired?’
‘Tessa rang her up and said that she was worried about her ancient history paper.’
‘How do you know that Teresa did that?’
‘Because she told me, sir. She’d already told me that she was worried about that paper, and I suppose she got into a state and telephoned Lady Canteloupe. So Lady Canteloupe arranged for Tessa and Rosie to leave before the end of the quarter –’
‘– How long before the end of the quarter?’
‘Today, sir. They were to take a train to Waterloo after lunch, and meet Lady Canteloupe in London this afternoon, and drive down to Wiltshire all together in Canteloupe’s Rolls Royce.’
‘I saw Lady Canteloupe this afternoon at the Queen’s Club. She said nothing about this.’
‘Perhaps she forgot…sir.’
‘I am, after all, Teresa’s guardian.’
‘So she tells me.’
Raisley Conyngham bullied the fire with a poker and said:
‘Still, whatever plans I may have for Teresa, keeping her away from Lady Canteloupe is not one of them.’
‘I’m glad, sir. They wouldn’t care for that. And what are your plans for – for Teresa? She will be of age in two years or so.’
‘I plan to use those two years well, in her interest and ours, Marius. More of this anon. As you are uncertain what to do with yourself, you can spend the school holidays with me…if you wish.’
‘Can we go down to your house at Ullacote, sir? And ride the horses?’
‘The horses have been sent elsewhere. To Prideau Glastonbury’s stable. I thought you knew.’
‘I did. I hoped they might be back by now.’
‘They will never be back, Marius. Ullacote is – shall I say? – under a curse. Any creature that has been there is endangered. Lover Pie, the horse you particularly cared for, is dead.’
‘Oh. Lover Pie. Oh.’
‘Captain Jack Lamprey, the trainer, died some time since. Jenny, the stable lass, fell and died a few weeks ago. Carmilla Salinger and Piero Caspar –’
‘– What had they to do with Ullacote?’ Marius said.
‘They went there, in order to make impertinent enquiries, with your so-called Aunt Flo from Burnham-on-Sea. ’1
‘You have not harmed Auntie Flo, sir?’
‘The curse has not harmed her, Marius. Nor will it, if she minds her business from now on. But come, little Egyptian: we are men of the world: we do not believe in curses.’
‘Then why did you mention this one?’
‘As a manner of saying that Ullacote, and many of its connections, have been shrewdly out of luck. Reason tells us that this is sheer coincidence. And no ill luck has come to you or to Teresa, or even, so far, to Milo Hedley, although he has betrayed me.’
‘Then if there is no curse, sir, surely there is nothing to prevent you and me from going to Ullacote this Easter?’
‘To an Ullacote with no horses, Marius? Besides, even if there is no curse, we do not want to expose ourselves to this persistent misfortune that must now be associated with the place.’
‘You just said that reason tells us that this persistence is mere coincidence. Surely, the laws of chance must prevent any more unpleasant coincidences to do with Ullacote?’
‘The laws of chance serve as a useful guide by which to calculate the odds, but they do not forbid or prevent anything, however long the odds they find against it.’
‘I suppose not,’ said Marius. ‘Lover Pie was always winning at long odds. When I was with Jeremy at Newmarket once, years and years ago –’
Marius broke off and looked into the fire.
‘What do you see in the flames… Marius the Egyptian?’
‘I see odds longer than those against Lover Pie could ever have been. I see astronomical odds, sir. I see chains of coincidence which may extend to infinity…’
‘Not to infinity, Marius. At infinity, we are told, everything comes to be evenly balanced at last. However long the runs of good or ill luck may be in the world, however long the runs of rouge or noir, of this number or of that, at infinity…if only we could reach it…all would attain a strictly equitable average. Every number on the wheel would have turned up exactly as often as all the rest; all the casualties of Ullacote would have been exactly compensated, both in number and degree, by felicitous occurrences.’
‘But since we never shall come to infinity,’ said Marius,
‘we must respect the possibility that runs of misfortune, however long already, may well stretch even longer, far longer, and on no account must we go to Ullacote?’
‘Good,’ said Raisley Conyngham, filling two glasses of Canary and passing one to Marius: ‘you have seen to the heart of the matter. We, who live in the fickle country “beneath the visiting moon”, cannot afford to think in terms of the even and frankly rather boring dispensations of infinity. We shall stay here these holidays, and you shall mind your books. If you need a change of air, we shall go for a few days to Paestum, to look at the Greek temples.’
‘I once saw them with Piero Caspar.’
‘When you see them again, you can reflect on his premature demise, and, by extension, on how very unwise it would have been of us to visit unhealthy Ullacote.’
March winds blew through the Great Court of Canteloupe’s pile in Wiltshire, but play was possible in the Fives Court. Theodosia Canteloupe and Teresa Malcolm were playing against two brothers from a neighbouring house. The brothers were Harrovians and persistently cheated, pretending, for example, that one of them had got the ball ‘up’ when in fact he had taken it half-volley on the second bounce. Thea Canteloupe played in long white (real) flannel trousers, Tessa in short white (real) flannel trousers, and the Harrovian brothers in grey slacks of chemical composition and ugly texture. Since Tessa’s pretty freckled legs were the only pair visible, everyone looked at them a lot, especially Leonard Percival, Canteloupe’s private secretary, who had braved the cold to stand near the Fives Court, as he always did when a match was playing, to see if any succulent flesh were on exhibition. Tessa’s legs weren’t exactly succulent, being long and well-muscled, as she was given to many kinds of demanding sports including cross-country running; but they were certainly a sight worth braving the cold for, Leonard thought, as he listened with automatic courtesy to what Canteloupe was saying into his good ear.
‘Money’s getting tight,’ Canteloupe was saying.