by Simon Raven
‘Not the only one round here,’ said Canteloupe.
‘Don’t talk such rubbish, Canty. As for Percival, you can pension him off comfortably enough in one of those retreats for elderly gentlefolk. Or there are old soldiers’ homes – there’s a famous one in Norwich, where ex-officers, as I must presume Mr Percival to be, are carefully segregated at meals and so on from the ex-other ranks.’
‘I shall miss Leonard.’
‘Better that than have him die on us – and depress us to death in the process.’
‘And your other condition?’ Canteloupe said.
‘That Campanile must come down. The cracked bell grates and grinds like the hammers of Mulciber.’
‘We could have the bell… Old Mortality…taken away. Cheaper than bringing the whole Campanile down. We could even have another put in if you would pay, Thea; one of those marvellous deep bells, like Old Mortality used to be before it was flawed, like the Marangona in Venice.’
‘No, Canty. The whole tower must come down.’
‘Why? It isn’t dangerous.’
‘Because you, and Rosie, and others, for all I know, have looked out from it at Teresa’s nakedness.’
‘And yours,’ chuckled Canteloupe. ‘What does that matter? Rosie and I enjoyed looking at you both. You were a fine sight, Thea.’
‘And suppose Leonard Percival has used it for the same purpose?’
‘You really have got poor Leonard on the brain. You surely wouldn’t grudge the poor old wreck a little pleasure? He can’t even toss himself off any more, he told me. Don’t be such a prude, Thea.’
‘I sometimes suspect, Canty, that you are morally derelict. No point in discussing it any more. My conditions for coming to the rescue are absolute: Percival goes and so does the Campanile.’
‘I’m in no position to object, Thea.’
‘You do not look well, certainly. You’d better get some sleep. I shall now go and take over Nausika –’
‘– Nausikaa –’
‘– From Leonard Percival.’
‘I wonder you’ve trusted him so long if you hate him so much.’
‘As I have already said, and as we both know, Percival is trustworthy.’
‘But hardly suitable for his present office?’
‘You don’t understand, Canty. There was no one else. Leave aside the time of night, we have almost no servants left.’
‘Come, come. We – you – can still afford them.’
‘It’s not that, Canteloupe. They are all well and regularly paid, and would always be. But they are…sneaking away. I think they cannot bear the sound of the ruined bell any more. They appear to have sensed something about the place. The men will not do their work in the grounds. Or perhaps cannot. There is wasteland everywhere, Canty. There is a chill cloud which comes lower every day.’
‘My sickness, perhaps. Yet you have returned, Thea. And will remain, I think.’
‘Because I love you, in my way. I must go to the child. Goodnight, Canteloupe.’
‘Goodnight, Theodosia.’
Theodosia kissed his damp forehead and left. Canteloupe, as he lay, thought of the stream that flowed through the meadow and made a pool in the centre of the copse of lady birch, then flowed on to the river. By the river were other, wider meadows, separated by other, deeper woods. From one of these meadows came the sound of a lute; along the river, back up the stream and past the copse of lady birch, on up the stream to the orchard and Rose Garden, in through Canteloupe’s windows, closed as they were; and with the music of the lute a light male voice:
‘Ver purpuratum exiit – “The coloured spring will soon be forth. ”’
Leonard Percival stood up as Lady Canteloupe entered the night nursery.
‘Lady Nausikaa is very quiet, very well behaved,’ Leonard Percival said.
Theodosia Canteloupe went to the cot, let down one side, and leaned over the child. She moved the sheet down from the little face. After a time,
‘This child is dead,’ she said.
‘I dare say,’ said Leonard. ‘They often die for no apparent reason. It is called a cot death. There have lately been several cases in the newspapers.’
‘You do not appear to mind very much.’
‘I don’t. Do you?’
‘Canteloupe will mind.’
‘Not for long. Soon he will not be able to mind about anything. What would then have happened to the child…had she lived?’
‘Canteloupe must be told.’
Theodosia picked up the white bundle from the cot.
‘Leave her here,’ said Leonard.
‘Canteloupe must see for himself.’
‘Very well. But after that…you must leave Lady Nausikaa to people who understand such matters.’
‘Here is your daughter, Nausikaa,’ said Theodosia, proffering the white bundle to Canteloupe. ‘She is dead. Leonard says it was a cot death.’
‘A pretty common affair. Nobody’s fault,’ Leonard said.
Canteloupe nodded. He looked briefly at the bundle, then turned, with some difficulty, on to his side, and looked away from Theodosia and Leonard towards the closed windows.
‘Then go,’ said Canteloupe, speaking away from his audience and towards the windows. ‘You may go now. I have other matters on my mind.’
‘You see,’ said Leonard, to Theodosia and the bundle, when they were outside the room. ‘He would not have cared for long, whether she died or lived. He has other matters on his mind.’
‘Should I go back and stay with him?’
‘No. He will not require you. You must return with me to Lady Nausikaa’s night nursery. (Let me take her from you; you are tired after your drive.) When we are back there, we will put her to bed again. You yourself will sleep there, as you intended, until the morning. In the morning you will find that Lady Nausikaa has died during the night. You will telephone at once for Doctor La Soeur.’
‘He has retired.’
‘He will never retire from the service of old friends. The police can be very officious over this kind of thing. Doctor La Soeur will see to it that all the necessary explanations are forthcoming and that there is no unpleasantness. So. There is the child safely in her cot, with the side up, lest she should fall out. You go to bed too, my lady, comforting yourself with the thought that your love, Teresa, red and gold Teresa, will be here with you at the end of the week. I gave instructions about her room in your absence.’
‘She will sleep in mine.’
‘They always prepare one for her. For the look of the thing.’
‘Were there any servants to obey you?’
‘One old woman,’ said Leonard Percival, ‘who has been here for sixty years. She and I prepared Teresa’s room.’
‘Thank you, Leonard. Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight, sweet ladies. Goodnight. Goodnight.’
Captain the Most Honourable Marquess Canteloupe of the Aestuary of the Severn stood on Green before six horsed knights, who wore light silver body armour but whose heads were bare. Each knight was flanked, on the left, by a dismounted page, who supported a shield with escutcheon and carried a helm with crest. By each page was planted in the ground to his right a lance with pennant.
‘They said you came in black armour and vizored,’ Canteloupe said; ‘without banner or crest or coat of arms.’
‘We vary our order of dress according to the nature of the occasion,’ said one of the knights. ‘We decided that you deserved the kind of display which you have always enjoyed, and that if we went bare-headed it would promote a more fluent conversation.’
‘Is there anything about which to converse?’
‘We wish to clear up a misunderstanding,’ said a second knight. ‘We feel that we have had rather a bad press, and we should like to put ourselves right with you, as you are an important client, even if you are also an impostor. The various people who have told you about us – Muscateer in India, repeating what his father had told him, or your friend, Fielding Gray, repeating w
hat his headmaster had told him – they have all made one fundamental mistake: they have represented us as murderers instead of benefactors.’
‘That troubadour you killed, Lord Geoffery of Underavon –’
‘My dear Canteloupe,’ said the third knight, ‘that was a prefectorial action, as many of our actions are. Be reasonable, my dear fellow. That troubadour had seduced almost everybody within ten leagues of Salisbury, of whatever age, rank or sex. It simply couldn’t go on. Not that we bothered about the morality of the thing – that’s not our line at all – but it was such an infernal nuisance, so untidy. You must be able to appreciate that, after your time with Hamilton’s Horse. Even the nobility was rather put out, and as for the lower classes – their self-righteousness was insufferable. The man had to be stopped before there were protest meetings and witch hunts.’
‘That’s all very well,’ said Canteloupe, ‘but Lord Geoffery was a troubadour, a musician, a poet. There are too few of those in the world for you to go about “stopping” them just because they are sexually indiscreet.’
‘There’s another thing,’ said the fourth knight, ‘about Geoffery of Underavon: he was a rotten poet and a rampant plagiarist. That’s how he got his best lines, like the one about “the coloured spring”. Otherwise both himself and his verses were extremely boring, he was always cadging half-crowns and drinks, and he was far too pleased with himself.’
‘If you say so,’ said Canteloupe. ‘But then why did you have to make away with young Muscateer in Bangalore? He didn’t cadge drinks or seduce the whole county: he was thoroughly amiable.’
‘Too amiable to live,’ said the fifth knight: ‘we were doing him a good turn. Like all school monitors (for that is more or less what we are) we do have our favourites, whom we enjoy pampering from time to time. It is one of the privileges of our responsible and sometimes unenviable position.’
‘And now,’ said Canteloupe to the sixth and last knight, ‘why have you come for me? I should have expected, what with the miracles of modern medicine, at least fifteen years more.’
‘What would have been the point?’ said the sixth knight. ‘First, you would have become incontinent, like your old brother-in-arms, Giles Glastonbury – so humiliating, Canteloupe, even if you didn’t go potty as well. Next, some busybody was very soon going to spread the word that your title was bogus, your inheritance purloined from a peasant,9 and your daughter (dead or alive) gat on your wife, as the Bible would put it, by young Marius Stern. Think what a fool you would have looked then. Anyway, you wouldn’t have enjoyed life in England for much longer. All this whining and wauling about equality and compassion – not your scene, Canteloupe, as you will be the first to admit. And it’s going to get worse, believe me. Margaret Thatcher, strident and hysterical as she may be, is England’s last hope – and even a stringy old vulture like her can’t last for ever.
‘And so, Canteloupe: you’ve had a very good run for other people’s money; now be a man, be a soldier, and be gone.’
The pages handed up the lances. The knights advanced over Green. On every pennant, Canteloupe saw, was embroidered Res Unius, Res Omnium. Ah, he thought, as the lances were lowered, the Old Motto of the Old Gang that had once been the Old Regiment, but this time with a different twist: ‘The Fate of One is the Fate of All.’
Footnotes
1 See Before the Cock Crow, by Simon Raven (House of Stratus; 2001).
2 See The Survivors, by Simon Raven (Blond & Briggs; 1976).
3 See Before the Cock Crow, by Simon Raven (House of Stratus; 2001).
4 See Sound the Retreat, by Simon Raven (Anthony Blond Ltd; 1971).
5 See The Judas Boy, by Simon Raven (Anthony Blond Ltd; 1968).
6 See Sound the Retreat, by Simon Raven (Anthony Blond Ltd; 1971).
7 See Before the Cock Crow, by Simon Raven (House of Stratus; 2001).
8 See The Judas Boy, by Simon Raven (Anthony Blond Ltd; 1968).
9 See The Survivors, by Simon Raven (Blond & Briggs; 1976).
PART FOUR
Beau Sabreur
Full bravely hast thou flesh’d
Thy maiden sword.
Shakespeare: Henry IV, Pt. I;V iv 132
Teresa malcolm ran to Raisley Conyngham’s chambers and stormed into his study.
‘Canteloupe and the child are dead,’ she announced.
‘So I have heard,’ said Raisley: ‘Canteloupe of senile disintegration and Lady Nausikaa of infantile misadventure.’
‘Lady Canteloupe has asked for me. I must go, sir. Now.’
‘You may go, Teresa, just as soon as I have Marius’ assurance of his dutiful obedience. I have made that quite clear.’
‘The situation has changed. Lady Canteloupe is urgent.’
‘Very well,’ said Raisley Conyngham; ‘then so shall we be. Find Marius and send him here. I shall make my request of him immediately. If his intentions are as I would have them, you may leave for Wiltshire at once.’
‘And if his intentions are not as you would have them?’
‘You shall remain here,’ Raisley Conyngham said. ‘How shall you prevent my going?’
‘By telling the police what you are going for – i. e. to abandon yourself to the vicious embraces of an older – a much older – woman. I shall request them, as your guardian, to take the whole disgraceful matter firmly in hand.’
‘Relations between women are not illegal.’
‘Corruption of minors is. Let us not quarrel, Teresa. Send Marius here, and let us settle the matter.’
Left alone, Raisley Conyngham resumed his reading of Ben Jonson.
‘“Madam, had all antiquity been lost,”’ he read aloud,
‘All history sealed up, and fables cross’d;
That we had left us, nor by time, nor place,
Least mention of a nymph, a muse, a grace,
But even their names were to be made anew,
Who could not but create them all, from you?’
Teresa to a ‘T’, thought Raisley: little nonpareil, little cynosure, little enchantress. I’ll warrant she has her way with Marius. This sudden decease of Canteloupe and the brat will make things quicker and easier by a long chalk.
Teresa was directed from Marius’ house to the gymnasium, where she found Marius at sword practice with the Sergeant Major instructor who came, twice a week, from Aldershot.
‘Good, sir, good,’ said the Sergeant Major, who called no one else at the school, except the Headmaster, ‘sir’. ‘Even sharper than your father when I fenced with him at Windsor in the old days…the good days… Parry, and riposte. Parry, parry, parry – and riposte. Beat; beat…withdraw in feint, beat, beat – and LUNGE. That will do for now, sir. I’ll put you down for foil, epée and sabre against the Royal Military Academy next week. I think, sir, you have a friend to see you.’
The Sergeant Major and Marius took off their masks and saluted Tessa with their sabres, kissing the hilt, lowering the point (exposing the wrist), and again raising the hilt to the lips.
‘You have been here long?’ said Marius.
‘Five minutes,’ said Tessa, who had known better than to interrupt.
‘Just let me change and have a shower.’
‘No. You are to come to Mr Conyngham. Straight away. For God’s sake,’ said Tessa, to the astonishment of the Sergeant Major, ‘promise to do what he asks. If you don’t, he won’t let me go to Theodosia.’
Marius’ lips parted in puzzlement.
‘Why should you go to her? Just like that?’
‘Have you not heard? Canteloupe is dead. And the child.’
‘You refer, miss – please excuse me – to Captain the Marquess Canteloupe? Formerly Captain Detterling of Earl Hamilton’s Light Dragoons?’
‘I do, Sergeant Major.’
‘My father knew him in Egypt, miss. A fine cricketer with a firm seat on a horse, but not a good example of an officer, if I may say so. He was arrested, my father used to tell me, as he came in from making the winning hit
at a cricket match – arrested for stealing Army petrol.’
‘And was subsequently cleared of the charge,’ said Marius.
‘You may fall out, Sergeant Major, if you please.’
‘SIR,’ answered the Sergeant Major, and turned smartly to his right before doubling off into the changing-room.
‘Tell Mr Conyngham you’ll do whatever he asks,’ said Tessa; ‘then he’ll let me go to Theodosia.’
‘But –’
‘– Don’t ask me for details now, Marius. We’ll go into the whole thing later, and make a plan if we have to. Go now, Marius. Go as you are.’
Once more Marius saluted Teresa with his sabre; then he placed it in the rack and went.
‘So,’ said Marius to Raisley Conyngham: ‘I think I understand, sir.’
‘Tell me what you understand,’ said Raisley.
Marius smoothed the white flannel trousers, which he wore for fencing instead of white breeches and stockings, as stockings drew attention to the slight thinness of his calves.
‘I understand, sir, that you wish me to put it about that Piero Caspar and Carmilla Salinger, both of them very close friends of mine in one way or another, had contracted this new and incurable disease called AIDS, and that in consequence they committed suicide. You wish me to attribute their infection to congress, former or recent, with Jeremy Morrison, another friend of mine; and to accuse Jeremy of boasting that his father, Luffham of Whereham, used his influence to hush the whole matter up.’
‘Right,’ said Raisley. ‘You need not, you must not, try to be precise as to sexual or medical detail.’
‘Why do you want this rumour put about, sir?’
‘Because I want Luffham of Whereham discredited, lest he should be able to oppose me in an important purpose. You will do as I ask, Marius?’
‘When have I not, sir?’
‘Answer my question. You will do as I ask, in this particular matter, NOW?’
‘As you say, sir,’ Marius said, smoothing his trousers again with his left hand. ‘I think that Canteloupe’s funeral might be a good occasion on which to start telling people, as so many that might be interested will be there. Meanwhile, sir, I should like to ask an incidental question. How did Piero and Carmilla die?’