The Troubadour

by Simon Raven

  ‘Yes,’ said Rosie: ‘I can believe that he had kind hands.’

  Len drove his Porsche so fast that Marigold and he arrived far too early for the funeral service (which was to be in an oratory by the Campanile, just off the Great Court) and had to hang about in the area of Cant-Fun, which was shut in honour of the funeral, not that it had been open much lately in any case.

  ‘How poor Balbo would have enjoyed this dismal spectacle,’ said Len, having helped Marigold into the fairground through a gap in the rotting fence. ‘Just think: he may be dead by now.’

  ‘I fell asleep in the car,’ said Marigold, ‘and dreamt that he had just died. My twins were with him.’

  ‘Very like, very like,’ said Len; ‘though I still think that they’d have had a more amusing time here. But they were always fond of Balbo, in so far as they were fond of anybody. They certainly weren’t all that fond of you or Helmutt, thought they were usually more or less civil. So now I should think of them, as you say you have just dreamt of them, as the comforter of Balbo in his passing and his courier to the realm of death. Like Hermes, the twins serve as Messengers, Guides and Messengers. Like Hermes, they come to men and women and bid them follow. This is what they will always do. Think of them this last time, Marigold, and then forget them.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Marigold, who had always respected Len’s judgements and the advice he based on them. She looked round the jagged spaceships and sex saucers of Cant-Fun. ‘If they’re not careful,’ she said, ‘there will soon be a nasty accident here.’

  ‘I fancy,’ said Len, ‘that it is now closing time in the playground of Cant-Fun.’

  Teresa sent messages to Theodosia by hand of Leonard Percival, who, although Theodosia had formerly loathed him so much, was now the only person whom she would see. Always Leonard came back to tell Teresa that she must occupy herself in helping Doctor La Soeur with ‘the arrangements’.

  ‘All the arrangements have been made,’ said Teresa; ‘you know that. Why was she so urgent that I should come here?’

  ‘I expect she wanted to make sure of you,’ Leonard Percival said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For the funeral. For your part in it.’

  ‘Never before have I been here and not slept with her in her room.’

  Finally, on the morning before the funeral, Leonard brought Teresa a message that she was to come to the Marchioness’ apartments as soon as the funeral was over.

  ‘Don’t go to her,’ said Doctor La Soeur when Teresa told him of this. ‘Just go away instead.’

  ‘How can I not go to her?’

  ‘I’ve told you. If you go to her, you go to someone or something which she calls Artemis. Now you’re a clever girl for a girl, girl. You’ve read about Artemis. Artemis is trouble for a girl, girl. Don’t ask me to spell it out, girl: just go away.’

  Raisley Conyngham and Marius Stern drove from the school to the funeral in Raisley’s BMW.

  ‘I asked your sister, Rosie, to come with us,’ said Raisley, ‘but she said she would go by train.’

  ‘I think she is sad about Canteloupe, sir.’

  ‘Is that a good reason for riding in British Rail’s filthy and unpunctual trains? For enduring the incompetence and the insolence of the black and white trash which British Rail employs?’

  ‘I think,’ said Marius, ‘that just at the moment Rosie prefers to be alone.’

  ‘So be it. Now, if anyone asks you what I’m doing at the ceremony, tell him that I’m representing the school.’

  ‘I should have thought, sir, that Luffham would be doing that.’

  ‘Luffham may be representing the old boys. I am representing the body of the school itself – the boys and the masters.’

  ‘As you say, sir,’ said Marius, and fell silent all the way from Haslemere to Petersfield, thinking of dead Carmilla and dead Canteloupe, of dead Jack Lamprey and dead Gat-Toothed Jenny, of dead Gregory Stern, his tall and valorous father, and of dead Maisie Malcolm and dead Piero Caspar. Then, as they turned north-west toward Salisbury, Raisley said:

  ‘I was at school near here. Brydales.’

  ‘I know, sir. Where our Headmaster is going next autumn.’

  ‘An unattractive appointment, I should have thought, even for him. But evidently he covets it; and his departure will leave the field clear for me.’

  ‘So that’s what all this is about, sir? You want to be the new Headmaster, but Luffham of Whereham will oppose you; so I am to discredit him by vilifying his son?’

  ‘You have already consented to do so. You will not go back on your promise now?’

  ‘Oh no, sir. You will never be able to say that I have broken my word to you. I promise you that.’

  The purple spring was forth. Along their road the coloured fields of hither Wessex flaunted and flared.

  ‘We hear that there is to be no wake,’ said Marius: ‘no funeral bakemeats. A pity, sir. I could have spread the word you wish me to spread far more comfortably and effectively at a feast, particularly since it would almost certainly have been a buffet. As it is…I shall have to whisper in the ears of the mourners between the oratory and the grave, and between grave and car park. I shall have to move among them as swift and sly as death himself.’

  ‘You will play the role to perfection, little Egyptian. You are the courier who brings a tale of death. Your manner must suit your message.’

  The official car park was on the cricket ground, something which Canteloupe would have abominated, as he never allowed a car within sight of the wicket. While Marius, who had played on the ground himself, was explaining this to Raisley Conyngham, a gaitered figure, jet black cap-a-pie and sporting a tall silk topper with flying buttresses, strode across the field and confronted Marius as he climbed out of the BMW.

  ‘Mungo Avallon,’ said the figure, raising its topper, grasping and nearly pulping Marius’ right hand, totally ignoring Raisley Conyngham, ‘Bishop of Glastonbury. I am to conduct the funeral. I knew Canteloupe, you see, in the old days during the war. And since. And since.’

  ‘I remember you well, my lord bishop,’ said Marius. ‘You christened Canteloupe’s son, Sarum, in Lancaster Chapel.4 There was an interruption.’

  ‘Yes. Canteloupe interrupted to demand that I should use the old and proper form of the christening service instead of some rubbishy modern text. He was, of course, quite right. But at that time I was in the habit of obeying my wife in such matters…on pain – er – of marital ostracism. She insisted that I fall in with every progressive fad that a crazed Synod could promulgate. Now she is dead – of spleen at the success of another woman (Margaret Thatcher, who else?) – and I have resumed the traditional and seemly forms of the Church, liturgical and sartorial. ’ He swelled in his sable accoutrements. ‘There will be no fudging of words at this funeral – in which, incidentally, you have a part to play.’

  ‘My lord?’ said Marius.

  ‘You are to help Miss Teresa Malcolm carry the smaller coffin – that of the late Lady Nausikaa Sarum. One handle each, one of you on either side. Lady Nausikaa will weigh little enough, I apprehend.’

  So, thought Marius, I am to carry my daughter to her grave.

  So, thought Conyngham, he will have far less opportunity, at least on his way from oratory to grave-mouth, to put about his story. Nothing to be done about that. He will have to make it up on the way back.

  ‘Come,’ said Mungo to Marius. ‘I must instruct you and Miss Teresa in your duties and movements on the ground itself.’

  ‘My lord,’ assented Marius. And to Raisley, ‘You will excuse me, sir.’

  Just before the guests entered the oratory for the service, a helicopter descended into the Great Court, near the Eton Fives Court. The noise of the engine, reverberating round the Tudor, Carolingian, Georgian and pseudo-Gothic ensemble, sent flocks of crows, pigeons and sea birds (the latter having flown from the Aestuary of the Severn to render their duty at the obsequies of their liege lord) hurtling in panic to the sky. />
  Out of the helicopter stepped Giles Glastonbury and Luffham of Whereham, Luffham in the robes of a baron of the United Kingdom (with bicorn hat in place of coronet), Glastonbury in the full dress (cherry trousers and tunic of light blue) of a field officer of the 49th Earl Hamilton’s Light Dragoons. Glastonbury wore golden spurs of a length appropriate to those of a thirteenth century banneret, with fiercely spiked rowels at the end of them. In place of a sabre he carried an ornamental dagger with a jewelled hilt.

  When Glastonbury and Luffham had been helped to the ground – a proceeding which took some time, such was the complexity of their kit – the helicopter rose to the height of the Campanile, then veered away to the west. When the racket had ceased, the birds descended. Many of the sea birds settled on a huge black coffin, which was now being carried, by eight of Canteloupe’s tenants, into the oratory (having hitherto rested, according to the custom of the house, in the banqueting room). Behind the bearers of the black coffin walked Marius and Tessa, carrying between them at knee height the white coffin of Lady Nausikaa.

  All present then filed into the oratory. They will be named and numbered later; for the present, pray imagine a straggling procession led by Mungo Avallon (now robed in royal purple, with crozier of gold and mitre of green and crimson) and Theodosia Marchioness Canteloupe, who was (somewhat to the surprise of her guests) dressed in a track suit of Cambridge blue, thus nearly but not quite matching Glastonbury’s tunic, and a pair of trendy Kickers.

  When the mourners were seated in the oratory, Mungo Avallon, with Theodosia as his acolyte, began the ceremonial ‘dressing’ of Canteloupe’s coffin, which lay, massy, black and absolutely rectangular, on a catafalque in front of the altar (Nausikaa’s little white box having been placed by Teresa and Marius on a set of Sedilia under the aumbry on the right of the tiny chancel).

  The manner of the ‘dressing’ was as follows. At a sign from Mungo Avallon, the sea birds perched on the coffin flew quietly to the back of the oratory, over the heads of the assembly, and settled on a ledge under the west window, a colourful rather than tasteful representation of the death of Jezebel. Mungo Avallon then draped the huge black sarcophagus with the banner of St George of England, a red cross on a white background, such a banner as the Christ is often to be seen grasping (though no one seems to know why) in depictions of his rising from the tomb in the garden. After this, Theodosia fetched from the aumbry and placed on the altar Canteloupe’s accoutrements and achievements: the coronet bearing the strawberry leaves and low balls of a marquess; the busby, sabretache and sabre, which Canteloupe had carried on mounted parades long ago before the Second World War; and also his personal standard, which showed a gold minotaur of Crete against the deep blue never-resting sea, the creature being bonneted, between his horns, with a cerise cross of Malta. Avallon now drew the sabre from its sheath, kissed the hilt and lowered the blade in salute to the coffin; he then placed sabre and sheath, crossed, over the left hand transverse (as seen from the body of the building) of the red cross on the banner, and some way along it; the busby he set upright to the left of the intersection of the axes formed by sheath and sabre, so that it was now near enough over the encoffined Canteloupe’s breast; the coronet he placed over Canteloupe’s head; and the standard, which was encrusted with heavy embroidery, he arranged just to the front of the busby, its pole bisecting the angle between the curved sabre (on which was embossed in gold along the blade Hostes Defutantur Mei – ‘Fuck Mine Enemies’) and the gilded sheath. When he had made these dispositions, Mungo Avallon gestured peremptorily to Theodosia to join the congregation, which he proceeded to harangue as follows:

  ‘Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas. What other message can I have for you? The daintily decked flesh of this worthless nobleman lies rotting in his mighty coffin, surmounted by emblems of whorish pageantry and lethal hate, each one of these baubles being worth a price in money that would feed an honest labourer and his family for a year.

  ‘Vanitas vanitatum. What is here of honour or true valour? Of charity or steadfastness? Of conscience, of purity, of reverence – or even of common use? This lord, this prince, this most honourable marquess has walked among us long enough, and we heartily recommend his carcass to the dust and dung whence it came and his spirit to the boatman – are you there, Old Boatman? – that it may be borne across Cocytus and suffer torment for eternity in the ninth and lowest circle of the Inferno, along with the Grand Master of Betrayal, Harlotry and Fraud.’

  Mungo Avallon paused, half turned towards the coffin by which he stood, and raised both hands on high, hooked in execration.

  When he turned back towards his listeners, two tears were running aslant his cheeks, and the voice, with which he now continued to address them, was soft.

  ‘And yet, my friends, there have been many worse than Canteloupe. He was idle and trivial, but he was pretty – a pretty toy in a world of much ugliness. He was a man, too, of some slight learning, pagan learning, it is true, but then pagan learning, though vile at its worst, often speaks of sweet reason and comely virtue at its noblest, and was much loved by Augustine, by Jerome, by Aquinas. Again, while Canteloupe did little for others, he expected none to make sacrifice for him. He used his powers of patronage with generosity and, as a rule, with discrimination. He did not pry into the affairs of others, unless this was strictly necessary in the defence of his own. He did not get up trouble and nuisance, whether public or private. He minded his business, such as it was. He was not self-righteous and he was not puffed up. He could be a considerate and entertaining companion; and in his youth, so they say, he sat his horse like a knight of King Arthur, and cut the ball later than any man in England.’

  Mungo turned again towards the coffin; this time he raised one hand only and waved it as to a dear friend who is leaving on a boat train for a leisurely tour of the Continent.

  He then turned towards the small, white box on the sedilia, and said:

  ‘As for Lady Nausikaa Sarum, let us be grateful that she has not lived to be served, as no doubt she would have been, with dope and democratisation. Let the bearers take up the coffins, which you will all follow to the place of burial.’

  As the great bell, Old Mortality, cracked and crunched its eponymous message from the Campanile, Mungo Avallon, Lord Bishop of Glastonbury, led the way through the Great Court.

  Canteloupe’s coffin followed immediately after him, borne by the eight tenant farmers, who had remained, and would remain, po-faced through the entire affair.

  Lady Nausikaa in her little white box followed the richly caparisoned sarcophagus of her titular father. She was carried by Tessa and Marius, who for their part were as silent, at this stage in the proceedings, as were the bearers in chief.

  The sea birds flew low, screeching and keening, over both coffins…behind the second of which marched Theodosia Marchioness Canteloupe of the Aestuary of the Severn.

  After that, no particular precedence was observed, and quite often the mourners, who were mostly in pairs, overtook each other or walked out on a flank.

  The first behind the Marchioness were the Honourable Jeremy Morrison with his friend and some-time lover, Milo Hedley. ‘You will observe,’ Milo said to Jeremy, ‘that the cerise horseman, of whom Gregory Stern spoke in that pit in Greece, has now fallen – I refer to Canteloupe, who, as a Light Dragoon, once wore the same cherry trousers as Giles Glastonbury is now wearing.’

  ‘But was this…cerise horseman…overcome by a silver horseman?’ Jeremy enquired.

  ‘No doubt. Six armoured knights come for the souls of the Sarums – or so the legend has it. I imagine they escort their charges to Charon’s ferry – referred to, you will recall, by Mungo Avallon in his address.’

  Fielding Gray came next with hobbling Leonard Percival. They spoke of the days when they had been soldiers together (though of very different regiments, Leonard having been a mere fusilier) in Germany, encamped above the City of Göttingen.

  ‘Those were good days,’ said Leon
ard: ‘the days of the Tavern and the Garden.’

  ‘There was a viper in that garden,’ said Fielding.

  ‘In which garden is there not?’ Leonard replied.

  Next came Rosie Stern, walking with the girl who had short, blonde hair and had scored for Benenden during the match on Harlequin’s. ‘I played truant to come,’ said the girl: ‘I liked Canteloupe a lot, that one time. And I thought you might need a bit of support.’

  Len came next, with Lady Helmutt. Marigold was telling Len how she had visited the island of Vis, during the journey which she had made before her more recent journey to Turkey, and had found Dobrila. ‘Or rather,’ said Marigold, ‘she found me. I was sitting on the shore crying, because I could not find the twins.’

  Rosie overheard this, and turned her head. ‘Funny,’ she said: ‘my mother telephoned very late last night – they had to fetch me out of bed – to say that she was going to Vis because her mother once went there. Perhaps my mother will meet Dobrila.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Marigold. ‘It’s a tiny island. But Dobrila is very innocent.’

  ‘I know,’ said Rosie.

  ‘But does your mother know? And will she respect Dobrila’s innocence?’

  ‘My mother respects nothing,’ said Rosie, ‘and never has done. She is an egotist – a bully and a sham. But if she is in the right mood she can be very funny in a coarse fashion.’

  ‘I fear Dobrila has little humour,’ said Marigold; ‘but she has lots of integrity to make up.’

  ‘Does it make up?’ said Rosie.

  ‘Perhaps they could both learn from each other,’ said the girl with the very short blonde hair.

  Next walked Giles Glastonbury and Luffham of Whereham. Giles was carrying his busby on the crook of his left arm: Luffham was trailing his bicorn between the finger and thumb of his right hand. They were talking of India, of the time when Glastonbury had been a colonel in Special Intelligence and Luffham had been plain Peter Morrison, an officer cadet.5