by Simon Raven
‘They just stopped breathing.’
‘Sir?’
‘Rather like Lady Nausikaa Sarum, who suffered a cot-death. Infants are sometimes smothered in their cots, I understand, and sometimes…they just cease to breathe. That is probably what happened to Caspar and Salinger.’
‘Lady Nausikaa was a tiny child, sir. My child, as you know, but that is beside the present point…which is, sir, that whereas Nausikaa was an infant, Piero and Carmilla were adult.’
‘Adults die of spontaneous combustion, boy. Not only in Bleak House but in the real world. Why should they not die of spontaneous congestion, which would seem to have happened here?’
‘Both of them, sir? Rather improbable.’
‘Highly improbable…which should assist you, Marius, in convincing people that they in fact committed suicide…when you tell them so at Canteloupe’s funeral, which will be, I agree with you, an excellent time and place to begin.’
Theodosia Marchioness Canteloupe announced a huggermugger burial (though this was not the phrase she used) of her lord and master. It was stipulated in TheTimes that only intimate friends of the late Marquess should attend the affair (which would happen three days after Canteloupe’s death) and that there would be no refreshments after the interment.
‘So that’s all right,’ said Ivan Blessington to his wife, Betty: ‘we needn’t go, nor need we disturb the girls at school.’
‘You are surely much beholden to her?’ said Betty.
‘That is not the same thing as being an intimate friend of his. True, we were once in the same squadron of Hamilton’s Horse, but that was very many years ago and even at the time it didn’t make us intimate.’
‘I remember,’ said Betty, ‘your sending him special messages1 when he was in Parliament and you were an attaché in Washington.’
‘I did that for the money, which we sorely needed.’
‘But he surely counted as a friend?The girls wrote to me that you seemed very pleased to see him at that cricket match at the school the other day.’
‘So I was. I like being reminded of the past. And Canteloupe never fails to arouse in me a kind of pleasurable astonishment, that creatures like him are still permitted to exist. But I am not and have never been his intimate, and truth to tell I have always disapproved of him. What was it that Trollope said of the old Duke of Omnium – the one played by Roland Culver in that admirable dramatisation by Simon Raven? “No man should live idly, as His Grace had lived” – something like that. Whether as Detterling or as Canteloupe, this man has lived idly. I doubt if he ever performed a single useful act.’
‘Aren’t you being rather censorious?’ said Betty Blessington. ‘For many years he was in publishing as Gregory Stern’s partner – to say nothing of his being in the House of Commons before he inherited. Didn’t he have something to do with a young England movement – something of the sort – back in the Fifties?’
‘Crypto-Fascism,’ said Ivan, who was becoming fond of silly clichés in his old age. ‘As for being a publisher, he just used it as an excuse for getting foreign currency – you remember, when those Labour johnnies did their damnedest to stop anyone going abroad…except for politicians who were going on footling conferences and the like.’
‘But Detterling was a politician, or at any rate an MP. So he got a lot of foreign currency anyway.’
‘No doubt,’ said Ivan; ‘but he was still greedy for more, so he used to get a business allowance as well.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because it’s exactly what I should have done,’ said Ivan Blessington; ‘only I was a soldier and spent my whole life abroad in any case.’
‘Then why are you getting at Canteloupe?’
‘I suppose I shall have to own up. The thing is, old girl, that I’ve become sick and tired of hearing, my whole life long, that he was the only boy at school who ever made a double century on Green in a school match.’
‘How very improper,’ said Isobel Stern, reading her India paper airmail copy of The Times in the Café Albigeois in St-Bertrand-de-Comminges: ‘Theodosia Canteloupe isn’t providing refreshments at Canteloupe’s funeral.’
‘So he’s dead?’ said Jo-Jo Guiscard.
‘And pretty well buried too, from what it says here. They’re planting him in the Sarum family Grave Ground tomorrow.’
‘Rosie will be sad,’ said Oenone Guiscard. ‘She has a pash on Canteloupe.’
‘Who told you?’ said Isobel.
‘You did. Last time you had a letter from Rosie. Mummy said it sounded from the letter as if Rosie had a pash on Canteloupe, and you agreed, because you said that Canteloupe would be much better than some silly boy, because Canteloupe would know what to do with her.’
‘Well, he won’t now,’ Jo-Jo said.
‘So will Rosie get some silly boy instead?’
‘Dozens,’ said Isobel. ‘After her money.’
‘And will she give it to them?’ Oenone persisted.
‘Some of it,’ said Isobel, ‘if they give good value. She’s a calculating little madame… I’m glad, really, that Theodosia is putting on the funeral so quickly. No one can expect us to attend at such short notice.’
‘The only one of that lot I ever really cared for was Baby Canteloupe,’ Jo-Jo said, taking Oenone on to her lap, ‘the first wife, Tullia. She cheered me up a lot when I was carrying Oenone. We used to sit by a pool all day, in a copse of lady birch. She wouldn’t let anyone else come, except a jolly ginger nurse who brought Tullia’s own baby for feeding…that disastrous little Tullius. I enjoyed looking at Baby’s breasts, and quite often Tullius would get an erection. Lovely Baby Canteloupe. What a pity she went potty. She went to Africa, you know, and started putting out for the lepers in leper colonies.’
‘What’s putting out?’ said Oenone, amusing herself on her mother’s knee.
‘An Americanism,’ said Isobel: ‘it means being intimate with a man. Of course I knew about Baby,’ she said to Jo-Jo. ‘Do you remember the time she pissed over the floor of that church – the day they crucified my old Jew, Gregory?’2
‘Pints and pints of it,’ said Jo-Jo dreamily; ‘standing up, with her legs apart. I thought she was never going to stop.’
‘And now she’s dead and so is Canteloupe. No heir, none at all. So I suppose Theodosia will keep the loot. Such a waste, when she’s got such heaps of her own.’
‘Will she keep the house?’ said Jo-Jo.
‘Oh, I expect so. According to that letter of Rosie’s, the Eton Fives Court is still in good nick. You don’t have the luck to own one of those very often.’
‘Is Auntie Isobel still a socialist?’ said Oenone to her mother. ‘She’s been saying a lot of funny things this morning, for a socialist.’
‘Well, are you?’ said Jo-Jo to Isobel.
‘To tell you the truth, I’m somewhat revising my notions. I rather think my socialism was a phase – something to do with the menopause.’
‘Oh,’ said Jo-Jo. ‘Well, thank goodness for that. But was I something to do with your menopause? Am I going to be revised…so to speak?’
‘You’ve got Oenone…now. You don’t need me. ’ Isobel rose from her seat. ‘So I’ll be off,’ she said, ‘to do my packing.’
‘Shall you be putting out for lepers at leper colonies?’ Oenone said.
‘I rather think not,’ said Isobel. ‘I am not quite brave or generous enough. I am going to an island called Vis, off the Illyrian coast. That was where my mother went, you know. She lived happily to a great age.’
‘You might just as well go on being a socialist,’ said Jo-Jo, ‘as live on the island of Vis.’
‘I may have stopped being a socialist,’ said Isobel, ‘but I have not stopped being mean about money. According to my mother’s occasional letters, Vis was exceedingly cheap.’
‘Only because there wasn’t anything to buy there,’ Jo-Jo said.
‘I have always hated shopping. All those grasping shopkeepers, and lower-class w
omen in one’s way with their cheap prams and filthy, unkillable babies. Goodbye, Oenone. I’ll have gone by the time you and Mummy get home.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Oenone. ‘We’ve still got the shopping to do. And today’s the worst day for lower-class women and unkillable babies. I think it’s the day they collect their free money at the PTT.’
‘Goodbye, darling,’ said Isobel to Jo-Jo; ‘it’s been great fun, all things considered.’
‘Yes, hasn’t it?’ said Jo-Jo. ‘I wonder if I can churn up Jean-Marie into action again.’
‘What do you mean, churn up poor Pappy?’ Oenone said.
‘Mummy will tell you about all that when you’re older,’ said Isobel, blowing both of them a smacky kiss from the café door.
‘Shall you go to Canteloupe’s funeral?’ said Len to Provost Helmutt of Lancaster College.
‘Nothing to do with me,’ said Sir Jacquiz.
‘Canteloupe’s first wife, Baby, was the daughter of your predecessor, Tom Llewyllyn.’
‘The connection is rather tenuous,’ Helmutt observed.
‘I thought Marigold might like to go,’ said Len. ‘A bit of an out might cheer her up – now she’s back from Turkey with nothing to show for it.’
‘Lady Helmutt must do as she pleases,’ said Helmutt, who was beginning to be rather grand because he knew he was to be made a baron in the Birthday Honours. Then he repented of his hauteur, being wily enough to know that God might be listening, and said,
‘Why don’t you take her? She’s spending the afternoon with Balbo Blakeney.’
Len went to Balbo Blakeney’s rooms in Sitwell’s Building.
‘Like to come to Canteloupe’s funeral?’ he said to Marigold, who was watching by Balbo’s bed.
‘Canteloupe dead?’ croaked Balbo. ‘You go, Marigold. Represent me.’
‘I thought…that the twins might come here. I couldn’t bear to miss them.’
‘They’re far more likely to be at Canteloupe’s funeral,’ said Len: ‘that’s the kind of thing they really enjoy.’
So Marigold and Len went to Canteloupe’s funeral, in Len’s Porsche and rather a casual spirit.
Fielding Gray went by train, for driving had long ago become troublesome to his one eye. Fielding did not go in a casual spirit. He had known Detterling since 1945, for more than a generation, and Detterling (or later Canteloupe) had popped up at a great many crises in his life: when he was a wretched recruit in the Army, and when he was under arrest (or about to be) in Göttingen, and when he was derelict in Yugoslavia, and when he needed money in Venice, and so on and so forth. From now on there would be no more Detterling (or Canteloupe) to intervene. Fielding would have to pull himself out of his own scrapes and make his own decisions. However, this was going to be a lot easier than it might have been as he had just inherited (so he had been informed that morning) a stiffish sum of money from Piero Caspar. Most of Piero’s money (formerly Ptolymaeos Tunne’s) had gone to Lancaster College, which did not need it, but some had gone to Fielding, who, as Piero had fondly and fortunately remembered, did.
Fielding could now get out of bloody London and live in Broughton Staithe, writing more books, not because (as things now stood with him) he would need the pittance they would bring him, nor because anybody much would read them, but because one had to have an occupation other than pleasure most of the time in order to keep one sane. Anyhow, he rather enjoyed writing books. The time went much faster when he was doing that than when he was doing anything else. He could dine in the L’Estrange Arms every night and walk among the abandoned gun sites in the dunes each evening to get up an appetite – something sorely needed by diners in the L’Estrange Arms, where the food was uninspired to say the least of it.
He had already asked Geddes if he too would like to come and live in Broughton Staithe. Geddes, somewhat to his relief, had replied that he could not endure the country, not even for hols, and had not spent a single hour out of London ever since he left the Army – a rule which he was breaking today, as he was accompanying Corporal Major Chead (who had been his contemporary in the 10th Sabre Squadron) to Captain Detterling’s funeral. Geddes had once cut the hair of Detterling’s soldier servant (who was of course coming to the funeral too); while ‘Corpy’ Chead had once driven all four of them (Detterling, Fielding, Detterling’s soldier servant, and Geddes) from Rollesdon Balloon Camp to Salisbury Races, in a ‘borrowed’ Land Rover with an illicit work ticket. There could be worse reasons than those, Fielding now thought (with a tiny sob), for attending a man’s funeral. It would be pleasant to see Corporal Major Chead again and hear his opinion of the death of his jockey son Danny, whom he hated and who had impaled himself on the spiked rails of the run-in at Regis Priory while riding Prideau Glastonbury’s gelding, Mercury.3
Unlike almost everyone else who was going to the funeral, Teresa Malcolm had left (having been released by Raisley Conyngham) pretty near as soon as Canteloupe’s death had been announced. This, of course, was because she was going not only to the funeral but to comfort Theodosia Canteloupe first. But although Theodosia had been exigent in sending for her, she showed no interest in her arrival; she merely sent her a note by hand of Leonard Percival to ask her to assist Doctor La Soeur in ‘making the necessary arrangements’.
‘What arrangements?’ said Tessa to La Soeur.
‘The child. Nausika.’
‘Nausikaa. What about her?’
‘Lady Canteloupe wants you to carry the coffin,’ said Doctor La Soeur. ‘I’m sorry to say that it’s white.’
Doctor La Soeur was pinched and neat, the sort of man that wears silk socks with suspenders.
‘Surely too heavy for one,’ said Tessa, ‘whatever its colour?’
‘She says that Marius Stern can help you. It will be appropriate, she says. For Christ’s sake don’t make a fuss, girl. I’ve had enough trouble, with the police, already. They don’t care for cot deaths.’
‘I thought you were Doctor Fix-it,’Tessa said spitefully.
‘There’s a smart young local police inspector who’s after promotion and don’t like aristocrats. Name of Oake. Son of a retired general – a lean, mean general, noted for making trouble. Like father, like son. This Oake went to the nursing home where Theodosia and the infant had had minor surgery a few days before. The staff said that when the child left she was one of the healthiest they’d ever seen.’
‘Healthy babies do suffer cot deaths,’Tessa said.
‘Unfortunately there is evidence that that child could have been dead much longer than Theodosia says. Luckily Leonard Percival served for a time in the same regiment as the general. He took young Oake into a corner and told him a few tales about Daddy’s behaviour in India and, more to the point perhaps, about Mummy’s behaviour in Germany…with a young PT instructor, who may well have been his father. So now this business of Nausika is all right – but only just.’
‘Doctor Fix-it.’
‘Percival fixed it. Now listen, girl. When this funeral is done, you want to keep your pretty eyes open. Theodosia’s been babbling. I gave her something…to relax her…because I like to know what’s going on; and of course she babbled. But not about Nausika, as I’d hoped; about you. She says that Rosie Stern and Canteloupe spied on you and her…exciting themselves. She says this has contaminated you. She says Artemis, the Virgin goddess, is angry that a man’s eyes have caressed you. There must be vengeance, she says, and there must be purification. But not until after the funeral. It seems that Artemis can wait till then, and anyway you’re needed in one piece to carry the baby’s coffin. But the moment the first chunk of earth falls on Nausika and Canteloupe, just you watch out for whatever’s coming from my lady’s corner of the ring.’
‘Why does she want me and Marius to carry Nausikaa?’Tessa said.
‘Marius, because he’s the real father. You, because you were in her company all those months while she was carrying Nausika.’
‘I loved Thea all those months. How can she wish me ha
rm?’
‘It’s Artemis that wishes you whatever it is. “Queen and Huntress, Chaste and Fair.” Through no fault of your own you’ve broken the rules. The Queen and Huntress doesn’t care for that. Remember Actaeon? But he was a man and a Peeping Tom, and you’re a girl that got peeped at, which makes it rather different. All the same, take my tip, and take care you don’t end up like dear little Iphigeneia.’
‘I must help carry Nausikaa,’ said Teresa; ‘and I must try to love and comfort her mother, both before the funeral and after it.’
‘Well, I’ve warned you,’ Doctor La Soeur said; ‘now suit yourself.’
On the day of the funeral, Rosie rose up early and took a train alone. By chance she met Milo Hedley while she was changing at Waterloo. Although she hardly knew Milo, it would have been impolite not to travel with him into Wiltshire.
‘I’m gate-crashing,’ Milo said. ‘I don’t know any of the dead, but I’m coming to see what will happen to the living.’
‘Why should anything happen?’ Rosie said.
‘Because a cerise horseman is dead,’ deposed Milo. ‘I didn’t know Canteloupe, but I do know that he was in a cavalry regiment called Earl Hamilton’s Light Dragoons. They’ve been abolished now, of course, because they were too proud and too pretty; but when they were still serving, they wore cherry trousers. Cerise.’
‘What has that got to do with anything?’
‘I recently heard a prophecy,’ Milo said, ‘that when a cerise horseman was overcome, then a certain matter (which concerns both of us) would soon draw to a close. We are burying that cerise horseman today.’
‘My father used to say,’ said Rosie, ‘that Hamilton’s Light Dragoons kept their horses longer than any regiment except the Scots Greys and the Household Cavalry; but even so they had to give them up well before the war.’
‘They still had them when Canteloupe…when Detterling… joined as a cornet. Raisley Conyngham once said that Giles Glastonbury once said that Detterling… Canteloupe…had the soundest seat and the kindest hands with a horse of any officer or man in the regiment.’