The Troubadour

by Simon Raven

‘Canteloupe once told me,’ said Glastonbury, ‘in Berhampore – you remember? – that you had a lot of shit in your tanks.’

  ‘I’ve funnelled it through to my son, Jeremy,’ said Luffham of Whereham, ‘like a tanker aircraft refuelling a fighter in flight.’

  ‘You think your son is going to do any fighting?’

  ‘No. But he might drop a bomb or two in a cowardly sort of way. At the very least he’ll drop the shit I’ve pumped into him, probably on somebody who’s never done him any harm whatsoever – his best friend, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  After this precious pair came three men in a row, all of whom, like Giles Glastonbury, were wearing the full dress of Earl Hamilton’s Light Dragoons, but in their case that appropriate to other ranks – short and sensible spurs of metal, white sword belts instead of scarlet, plain dirks where Glastonbury carried his jewelled dagger. The soldier on the left was Corporal Major Chead, who, as a senior non-commissioned officer, wore a crimson sash from right to left and was palpably (but by no means uncontrollably) drunk. He was telling his companions that he was responsible for the death of his jockey son, Danny Chead (who had been killed riding in a hurdle race), as he had wished him dead so violently that he had developed the gift of the evil eye and had thrown the curse that killed his boy.

  ‘But as I understand it, Corporal Major, you weren’t even at the meeting where he was thrown and spiked,’ said the soldier to his right. This was the ‘Chamberlain’ from the house at Luffham, who had once upon a time been Canteloupe’s soldier servant and galloper in the rank of corporal, had retired with him into civilian life, and had later been sent to Luffham by Canteloupe ‘for a change of air’, which for various reasons, none of them very interesting, had lasted until the present.

  ‘I wished him dead,’ sobbed the Corporal Major; ‘the last time I seed him before that meeting, I looked at him and wished him dead.’

  ‘So you’ve got worries,’ said the Chamberlain: ‘now, I’m being sent to a ’ome. A ’ome for old soldiers in Norwich.’

  ‘Really,’ said (ex-Trooper) Geddes, who was on the right of the line, ‘you are a dismal couple of downers. Here we are on a beautiful sunny day, burying Captain Lord Canteloupe in real style, with lovely Major Gray and spiffing Colonel Glastonbury –’

  ‘– Colonel was only ’is wartime rank,’ said the Corporal Major.

  ‘– He was still a colonel in India in forty-six,’ said the Chamberlain: ‘I know, because I was there with Captain Detterling what’s being buried. Detterling was a captain, then as ever, but Glastonbury was a colonel – and a ripe lot of mischief they got up to in their Special-Intelligence-how’s-your-father-and-bloody-mother.’

  ‘But he was a major in Göttingen six years later,’ said Ethel, Mavis, Hilda, etc., etc., and now Lucretia Geddes. ‘He commanded the Tenth Sabre Squadron – you remember as well as I do, Corporal Major – until there was some row about a duel with a Kraut. Then they packed him off God knows where, and lovely Captain Fielding Gray (as he then was) took over.’

  ‘It don’t half cheer a man up, having a natter with old chums,’ said Chead. ‘Please to call me “Corpy”, like you did back in BAOR. And why, I wonder, is your “lovely” Major Fielding Gray (as he later became before his face was mashed by them treacherous wogs in Cyprus) not wearing his uniform on this occasion?’

  ‘He lent it to me,’ said Geddes, ‘and I changed the officer bits into what was proper for troopers. Otherwise I couldn’t have come, see, because I’ve only got skirts and ladies’ costumes these days, and I couldn’t have come in one of them, now could I?’

  ‘So you’re a drag number, are you?’ said ‘Corpy’ Chead. ‘Not that I’m criticising, ’cos I always fancied young Lamb in the spare-parts stores, fancied him something fierce but I never quite fancied drag. Makes a man too vulnerable, don’t you find?’

  ‘Makes a man free, Corpy, free. Wear a long dress, no knickers needed, you save on laundry and you can piss while you’re standing on the pavement – anyway on a wet day…which it isn’t today, I’m happy to say, sun shining like the young Apollo, see how it flashes on Captain Canteloupe’s sabre.’

  ‘I used to keep that sabre as bright as water,’ said the Chamberlain (a lifelong teetotaller); ‘chain mail and Brillo pads.’

  Last in the procession came Doctor La Soeur with Raisley Conyngham. Raisley had meant to tag on to Glastonbury, but as Giles was heavily accompanied by Raisley’s No. 1 enemy, Luffham, this plan was now inappropriate. In the old days, La Soeur had hated Raisley every bit as much as Luffham did and wouldn’t have been seen dead with him at a funeral or anywhere else; but all that had changed since Raisley had begun to be of material assistance to La Soeur in his retirement. And so now,

  ‘There’s the Fives Court,’ said La Soeur in a friendly way. ‘There is an interesting tablet on the wall in memory of someone called Gat-Toothed Jenny.’

  ‘Once a stable lass of mine,’ said Raisley. ‘She left me and came here. Hit her head on the corner of that buttress, so I’m told, while having a knock-up. Poor Jenny. That fat soldier in front is drunk.’

  ‘Rolling around a bit, I grant you. He’s too old to be in uniform, one would have thought. Ah. The Rose Garden. Not far now. Just as well by the look of it. You seem to be sweating up, old fellow.’

  ‘Funny,’ said Raisley; ‘I don’t usually feel the heat. I don’t carry an ounce overweight…unlike that drunk soldier. I’ve been a bit seedy the whole morning. Ghastly headache in that horrible oratory… Better now.’

  ‘What did you think of the bishop’s address?’ La Soeur enquired.

  Raisley looked a bit vague. La Soeur repeated his question.

  ‘Can’t remember much,’ Raisley said. ‘That headache in there. Bishop of Glastonbury, isn’t he? No relation of Giles, I think. But of course not,’ Raisley rambled. ‘How should he be? Glastonbury not his name, only his bishopric. Diocese? Bishopric? Dioc –’

  ‘– Steady, old man, steady. Ah. Here we are. The Grave Ground.’

  When the bearers reached the graveside, they placed Canteloupe’s coffin on the cross-cables prepared for its lowering. While the other mourners arranged themselves round the bottom end of the pit (near Canteloupe’s feet, so to speak), with Giles and Luffham prominent and Raisley and La Soeur well over to the right, Mungo Avallon and Theodosia, at the far end, removed Canteloupe’s achievements from the coffin and arranged them on a frame nearby: the standard at the foot of the frame; sheath and sabre, still crossed and now supported by a system of brackets halfway up; sabretache slung above these; the busby placed on a small shelf a little higher; and the coronet, fitted over a wooden sphere at the top of the main vertical shaft, crowning all.

  The banner of St George of England, however, remained on the coffin. On this Tessa and Marius placed Nausikaa’s small white box. They then moved back behind Theodosia, who was behind Mungo Avallon, who stood at the head of the grave, and now began:

  ‘MAN THAT IS BORN OF WOMAN –’

  ‘– Sorry, my lords, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Glastonbury, in an impenitent voice, ‘but I can’t hold my water these days, and I’m so hemmed in that I can’t get out of this crush either, so here we go.’

  He produced a huge, floppy, uncircumcised peego and pissed with gusto on to his end of the red cross. ‘Sorry, Canteloupe, old chap,’ he said as he pissed, ‘but I feel sure you’ll understand. I’m aiming well short of Nausikaa.’

  Everyone turned to watch Glastonbury’s micturation, even Raisley, whose half-closed eyes had hitherto been concentrated on Marius.

  ‘I warned him,’ said Raisley to La Soeur, ‘that he ought to have something done about his prostate. ’ He sagged sideways towards La Soeur. ‘Christ. My head. My poor h –’ he began and never finished, but fell at La Soeur’s feet, supine, his head in half, the cutting edge of Canteloupe’s sabre now wedged into his lower front teeth and the hilt protruding from his chin.

  Marius, who was grasping the hilt, now withdrew the sabre.
Glastonbury gave a wry look and went on watering the coffin. Marius kissed the hilt of the sabre, lowered the point (correctly exposing his wrist), raised and kissed the hilt, saluting his dead master from whom he had learnt so much. Then he retired and placed the sabre on the ground, the point towards himself and the hilt at Theodosia’s feet.

  ‘Very nice cut, young Marius,’ said Glastonbury, as he put away his still-dripping tool; ‘but I think you’ll have some explaining to do.’

  ‘The golden horseman,’ said Milo to Jeremy, ‘has possessed himself of the sword of the cerise horseman and cut down the horseman of the west. I shall elaborate the details of this analysis later.’

  ‘Major Glastonbury were right about that cut,’ said the Corporal Major: ‘classic backhand down-stroke.’

  ‘I like to remember,’ said the Chamberlain, ‘that it was me that sharpened that sabre. Almost the last thing I did before leaving His Lordship’s employment here and going to the household at Luffham. Without my efforts that stroke would never have been possible.’

  ‘That’ll give you something to boast of, dearie,’ said Geddes, ‘when you’re shut up with all those senile squaddies in Norwich.’

  ‘I think,’ said Luffham of Whereham to Marius, ‘that, as Major Glastonbury says, some kind of explanation is called for.’

  ‘Very simple,’ said Marius. ‘I took the sabre from the frame behind me, and while you were all distracted by Major Glastonbury’s performance I walked down the grave and split the skull of Mr Conyngham. I had thought of decapitation, but felt that that would be in bad taste.’

  ‘It is customary in such cases,’ said Luffham, ‘either to justify one’s action, or express regret for it, or both.’

  ‘Very well. I regret the premature demise of a fine Classics master. I justify my part in it by telling you – as Tessa Malcolm here will confirm – that Mr Conyngham was blackmailing me into spreading foul rumours about you and your son Jeremy, who is my friend of many years now, in order to discredit you and destroy your influence with the governing body of our school, to the headmastership of which he is – he was – aspiring.’

  Luffham looked at Tessa, who nodded.

  ‘Very civil of you to take my side, Marius,’ Luffham said, ‘but wouldn’t some…less spectacular approach to the problem… have been prudent?’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t,’ said Theodosia, who hitherto had been motionless and silent. She now moved to Marius’ side. ‘Raisley Conyngham was a brilliant scholar (particularly of Greek and Latin verse), a notable connoisseur of dessert wines, and a pretty fair judge of racehorses. In every other respect, as you all very well know, he was too bad to breathe. He was a defiler of innocence and a corrupter of the spirit. He was the worm in the apple and the canker in the rose. He was a seducer and besmircher, not of bodies, but of souls. He was anathema, that which is cursed by God, of whom Marius stands as the champion.’

  ‘I do not conceive that many judges or juries will take that view,’ said Luffham. ‘Sympathetic as it may be to most of those present, some here will feel it their duty’ – he pointed to the bucolic coffin bearers, who were standing in a group, with a pair of local undertakers, by the nearby monument to Muscateer – ‘to come forward as evidence for the Crown. What is your opinion, Avallon?’

  ‘Very similar to yours,’ said Mungo. ‘One really can not allow this kind of thing to go unrecognised. It would lead to anarchy. Much may be forgiven if it is perpetrated in the name of true friendship, but operatic homicide is overdoing it.’

  ‘Miss Rosie?’ said Luffham. ‘You are Marius’ sister.’

  ‘I am delighted that Mr Conyngham is dead,’ said Rosie, ‘and I hope that you will all have the nous to pitch him into that hole with the coffins and bury the whole matter with him.’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ said Marigold and the girl with the short blonde hair.

  ‘Impracticable,’ said Leonard Percival. ‘Enquiries are bound to be made, sooner or later, when he does not reappear at that school. However, I have one or two old friends and colleagues in a special unit housed in Jermyn Street. They might be able to help.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Fielding, ‘that that unit, Leonard, was a bit too special. It was disbanded by Petty Officer Callaghan.’

  ‘Come on, Len,’ said Marigold: ‘you’re pretty good at greasing out of tight places. Help us – help Marius – grease out of this one.’

  ‘From what I’ve heard,’ said Len, ‘the paramount greaser in this sort of area is Doctor La Soeur.’

  Everyone, including the bucolics, looked at Doctor La Soeur. ‘I’m glad you’ve got round to me,’ said La Soeur. ‘You see, although I can’t be absolutely certain for the time being, it’s about ten to one on in the betting that Conyngham died instantaneously of a stroke –’

  ‘– No doubt of that,’ guffawed the Corporal Major, ‘and what a stroke, as beautiful a backhander as ever I seed in all my service.’

  ‘Now be a good boy, Corpy,’ said Geddes, ‘and listen quietly to the clever gentleman.’

  ‘– Of a stroke,’ resumed La Soeur, ‘in the sense of a haemorrhage, probably massive, in the brain. He was describing to me, and exhibiting, the standard prefatory symptoms of just such a trauma all the way from the oratory to this grave. At the very last he complained piteously of his head, and then began to collapse towards me a good half-second before he actually sustained the sabre cut. If I am right, he could have been dead as he started to fall, in which case young Marius is entirely innocent of causing his death. One cannot be charged with murdering a corpse.’

  ‘It will be said,’ remarked Glastonbury, ‘even if proof of cerebral haemorrhage is forthcoming in autopsy, that Conyngham might not have been finally dead when he fell, or when he received the sabre cut, but was only in a coma.’

  ‘It probably will be said,’ replied La Soeur. ‘But there must be doubt – enough doubt to exculpate Marius, legally if not morally. As to the morals of this affair, it is not within my competence to pronounce,’ he went on. ‘Meanwhile, Lady Canteloupe, upon whose ground we stand, will know what to do. I think the solution is pretty simple, Theodosia,’ he called down the grave.

  Theodosia smiled obliquely. ‘Lower the coffins and bury them,’ she ordered the two undertakers; and to the tenant farmers, ‘Take Mr Conyngham’s body,’ she said, ‘and put it in the oratory, on the catafalque, so that Doctor La Soeur and the police may examine it.’

  ‘Surely, my lady,’ demurred the bucolic-in-chief, ‘a more convenient place might be found. The police may be surprised that the body has been moved at all, let alone to the –’

  ‘– Oratory. Put it in the oratory,’Theodosia said.

  ‘That’s my good girl,’ murmured Doctor La Soeur. Avallon and Luffham looked at each other thoughtfully, then nodded to Theodosia.

  ‘You see,’ said Milo Hedley to Jeremy Morrison: ‘as Gregory Stern warned us, this solution of the Marius/Conyngham business offers no moral satisfaction to anybody. Lady Canteloupe has proclaimed an heroic victory for Marius; but the blow was cowardly and his pretext altogether too specious and smug.’

  ‘He is, however, in luck,’ said Jeremy, ‘though that is scarcely a moral recommendation.’

  ‘Luck?’ queried Milo. ‘You mean…the way in which Glastonbury’s startling exhibition pre-empted general attention? So that Marius could act unnoticed, until it was too late for him to be stopped?’

  ‘No,’ said Jeremy. ‘I do not mean that – though Glastonbury’s incontinence certainly helped him. I mean, Milo darling, that unless I am very mistaken we are about to witness a fascinating phenomenon – the capacity of the English upper class to protect, absolutely and without scruple, one of their own…when, and for whatever reason, they consider this to be desirable. You remember the Lucan mystery?’

  ‘You are maintaining,’ said Milo, ‘that this upper-class lot here is conspiring to extricate Marius. But the whole thing surely depends on the professional plausibility…of Doctor La Soeur…who is only �
��client gentry”.’

  ‘La Soeur has already conjured enough doubt to compel a verdict of not guilty of murder. But vexatious ancillary charges,’ said Jeremy, ‘of “criminal intent” or “violating a corpse” might still be preferred. The upper class will now take action to eliminate any possibility of even the slightest nuisance of that kind from the official or the officious. At least, that’s my bet.’

  Jeremy Morrison paused, and for once his big round face drooped into a lugubrious ovoid.

  ‘But that apart,’ he concluded, ‘I think that although Marius has undoubtedly rid himself of Conyngham, who can no longer use him to further his own devices, Conyngham, like a dead insect, has left his sting and his poison behind him – in Marius’ heart.’

  At this juncture, uncertainty spread among those on the Grave Ground, except for those who had received definite orders. The majority of the mourners was doubtful whether to stay put or to move somewhere else in the precincts or simply to clear off and go home. They were, they supposed, witnesses to the unusual event that had occurred by the grave-mouth; and yet they were now assured that, in all probability, what they had seen was merely a commonplace instance of death by cerebral haemorrhage, fortuitously accompanied, or rather succeeded, by a violent attack on a body that was already dead.

  In the end, Mungo Avallon and Lord Luffham persuaded the guests to withdraw from the Grave Ground to the Rose Garden and there to await developments. Marius Stern they asked to sit with them (and between them) on a bench by a small fish pool, on the surface of which many of the fish were floating underside up, promoting rather a smell. Before they finally settled in this disagreeable spot, Mungo announced that those with previous instructions, which was to say the undertaker, the erstwhile coffin bearers, and (as she insisted) Teresa Malcolm should be about their business at the double.

  So the undertakers lowered the two coffins and began to shovel earth on to them; the tenant farmers, who had carried Canteloupe encoffined, now carried Raisley Conyngham, not encoffined but seated in a kitchen chair which one of them had procured, to the oratory, and laid him along the catafalque in front of the altar; and Teresa Malcolm waited on Theodosia Canteloupe in her bedroom (whither her ladyship had retreated after rapping out her commands in the Grave Ground), as she had been instructed earlier that day by mouth of Leonard Percival.