by Raven, Simon
“You see, the point, my dears, is this. Walter is really angrier than ever because, paradoxically enough, he thinks Richard hasn’t had trouble in Greece. If he had had trouble, then that would have given him some sort of excuse for coming home despite W’s wishes – and would incidentally have put him deeper in W’s debt. But since all that’s happened, as far as W knows, is that Dickie’s been a bit off colour, Dickie’s return takes on an aspect of distinct defiance. And when, on top of all this, Penelope does her little bit in helping to ball things up, you can see that poor Walter is feeling rather maltreated. And so, if you want an answer to the question, ‘Is Walter still going to be difficult?’, the reply, my dears, is ‘Yes, he’s going to be very difficult indeed’.”
The port went its brief round in complete silence. Then Marc got up, carrying his glass, and stood with his scrawny buttocks to the fire.
“Have I answered your question?” he said.
“Very fully,” said Tyrrel, looking rather overwhelmed. “So now,” said Marc, who was exploiting the privilege of a host in order to dominate the assembly, “I suppose the next question is, ‘What is to be done to see that Dickie doesn’t hit W on the head with a battle-axe?’”
“Roughly speaking,” said Tyrrel.
“Because,” continued Marc, “if Dickie doesn’t come back here his career and his modest income will be in jeopardy?”
“Exactly so,” I said. “But there is one hopeful element in the situation. Up to this present, Richard has seemed perfectly content with the idea of coming back here and has – so far – shown no particular animus against Walter or anyone else.”
“And according to Doctor Smarty-pants Holmstrom, if I do not mistake you, he will probably stay peaceable as long as he is not kicked about?”
“Correct,” said Tyrrel.
“Then surely,” said Marc, “the matter is very simple. When Walter and Penelope get back at the end of the week, loyal Penelope must be taken on one side by tactful Anthony Seymour, told the deplorable facts, and made to realise exactly how serious things are. She must then be told that it is up to her, since she is one of the few people Walter will listen to, to control her rampaging Daddy. She must be a good, unselfish girl; she must stop Walter nagging Richard into matrimony; and she must explain to Walter daily that Richard, having suffered from overwork and strain, must now be left to work out his own salvation in peace and quiet. Walter, of course, will be told nothing of what has really happened; but if Penelope buckles to, she can make her request seem like good general products of plain common sense – as indeed they are.”
“And Doctor Goodrich will listen to her?” said Tyrrel.
“If not to her, then to nobody… Look at the way she’s whisked him out of England when he was determined to lie in wait for Dickie.”
“You have a point,” I said, grudgingly resentful of the fact that Richard’s destiny should be so coolly dealt with by, of all people, Marc.
“Of course I have a point, Anthony Seymour, and you needn’t look so constipated about admitting it. And there’s another thing. I don’t suppose you’ll trust me to look after Richard, but you should remember that wicked Piers Clarence, to whom you seem so very attached, will be here in Lancaster as well. So what with Penelope soothing down Walter and Piers dancing attendance on Richard, and all of us getting ready to bang the warning gong at the least sign of trouble, I don’t think you need worry too much. You, Anthony Seymour, can go back to your absurd magazine, and you, John Tyrrel, can go back to your detection, and Alma Mater Cantabrigiensis can be left to care for her own wayward children in her own wise way.”
“If there is trouble,” I said, “it’s likely to be very sudden.”
“So is the Last Trump. There comes a point, my dear, beyond which prudence cannot be carried.”
“Should Mr Fountain come here at all before the beginning of term?” said Tyrrel – his question, to my annoyance, being aimed at Marc rather than myself.
“He must, I think, come and call upon the Provost. That will be no more disturbing than a visit to Salisbury Cathedral. If he comes here before Walter gets back, then he can leave a polite note for W saying he’s sorry to find him still away, and that he’s now going to the Lake District or wherever for some quiet reading and walking. Then, of course, it will be up to Penelope to see that W does not go charging up to Windermere in hot pursuit, and that he does not send Richard four ounces of vituperation through Her Majesty’s Mail. I think she can manage that.”
“Can she?” said Tyrrel, this time, I was glad to notice, directly to myself.
“I think so,” I said. “She is loyal, intelligent and tough.”
“On one of her good days,” said Marc, “she’s a tolerable match for Medusa.”
Later that night Tyrrel and I left Marc to go to our own rooms.
“You seemed very much in agreement with Marc,” I said.
“I am. What else can we do? If Fountain is to stay free – and we’ve agreed that he is – then he must come here and he must be dependent on his friends here. You and I cannot spend our lives in Lancaster College. Honeydew’s suggestions seem sound enough.”
“I wish I could be more certain,” I said.
Tyrrel gestured impatiently.
“I’ve told you,” he said. “Either he goes to…some place or other for treatment, in which case you would have the kind of certainty you do not want, or else he stays free and comes here. If the latter, then there will be risk. You can’t have it both ways. And if it’s your friend in jeopardy, it’s also my career.”
“I know… I’m sorry…”
“That’s all right,” said Tyrrel. “I know you’re worried. You’ll just have to live with it, that’s all.”
And so it was settled between us. I would tell Penelope, as soon as she returned, all that had happened in Greece, and would urge her to see that Walter was easy and tactful. Piers would always be at hand to be of comfort to Richard; and Marc would be sniffing hard for the least scent of coming trouble. Richard himself would visit the Provost in a few days’ time, leave a note for Walter, and then go somewhere quiet with Piers to read and, if he wished, to work: he would return to Lancaster only when October and its mists proclaimed that summer was finally dead and that a new academic year had begun.
And with this, though far from easy, I must rest content. I said good night to Tyrrel and went off to my damp college bed.
XIII
“So all in all,” Piers Clarence was saying to Tyrrel and myself, “it might be a great deal worse.” A month had now passed since my visit to Lancaster with Tyrrel. Piers and Richard had duly returned from Kent and gone to Cambridge. Richard had been warmly received by the Provost, had left a long and agreeable letter for the yet absent Walter; and had then gone on, still accompanied by Piers, to spend some time in Scotland. Walter and Penelope had then returned from their holiday in Scandinavia; and in the course of a long and painful interview with Penelope – an interview of which Walter knew nothing – I had received her promise that she would do everything in her power to make Walter behave as gently as possible to Richard…
“You surely knew that,” Penelope had said. “You surely knew that I would do anything for him.”
“Of course,” I had answered: “but all of this is not…too easy to understand.”
“Why should I need to understand it? If Richard needs my help, that is enough. In any case, I do understand. Richard, for all his strength and his intellect, is a weak man. So this creature was able to get at him.”
“You forgive him then?”
“What is there to forgive? I find no cause for blame, Anthony. Only for sorrow…
And then she had left me, but not before she had renewed her promise. Nor had she failed in the keeping of it. Walter had made no trouble; he had merely sent Richard the friendliest of letters, in which he said that he hoped Richard was now feeling stronger and that he much looked forward to seeing him in October.
All this was hop
eful. But there was even better news, and it was this which Piers was now telling Tyrrel and myself in my flat. For it was now October 9; Richard had gone to see a friend in Oxford until October 12, when he and Piers would travel together to Cambridge; and so Piers was filling in the days with me, and we had thought it as well to take final conference with Tyrrel before Richard and Piers disappeared to face Cambridge – and Walter Goodrich.
“The great thing,” Piers was explaining, “is that he now talks entirely sensibly about Chriseis. Not that he talks of her much – and who shall blame him? – but when he does he talks of her as someone now dead and he is totally frank about his relationship with her.
“He says he can’t really explain why he first let her have her way with him. It started as some sort of caress, and then he suddenly realised what she was doing: it was a soothing, dreamy kind of feeling, he said, lying there with her lips against his throat. But later, when she had left him, he realised not only how horrible it was but also how dangerous it might become. He resolved that it should never happen again. When he next saw her, he told her this; but she was so charming, so…loving, that he could not bring himself to be angry. In any case, she apparently accepted what he said, and made no attempt to…seduce him again for several days. Then, after about a week, without a word being said, she started to caress him one night and he found himself waiting, without annoyance and indeed almost, with longing, for her to press her lips to his throat… She did so without being asked; but he says that if she hadn’t he might well have guided her kisses there with his own hands… And so it went on. From time to time he would suffer from revulsion or fear, especially when he felt himself growing weaker. But whenever she came to him all disgust and fear vanished: he would just relax contentedly and wait for her to take him…”
“Has he said anything about the things they did together before this started?” Tyrrel asked. “These…activities…which went on when they first met.”
“He’s mentioned them several times. He says that his memory of them is very clouded; and that on each occasion he had the feeling that he was only dreaming what happened, that none of it was real at all – that even if it was real there was nothing he could do to stop it, so that he was entirely without responsibility. In any case, he says, as far as he knows he was only a spectator: he just sat somewhere near, unable to move or speak, watching what was enacted. ‘Enacted’ is his word; for it all had the feeling, he says, of some kind of ritual, so that whatever was done, no matter how monstrous, had the sanction of a preordained sequence, like a Liturgy or a dance.
“He says that he can only remember one of these occasions with any clarity – and even then he may be mixing it up with others. But what he remembers is this. Chriseis had asked him to hire a car and drive her into the country to visit a special village. They started after lunch and drove till it was dark – she told him not to worry about getting back as she had arranged somewhere for them to sleep. After it was dark they had a meal of sorts and then drove on still further. Eventually, at about ten o’clock, by which time the road was just a track and he had no idea at all where they were, she said to pull up for a time. Then she got out of the car and told him to sit and wait.
“–Well, after about fifteen minutes she came back and told him to follow her; and they set off down a path and continued until they reached a small olive grove. In the middle of this was a large fire, round which were standing two peasants – men – of an indeterminate age and a pair of children – a boy and a girl – both of them about eleven or twelve. There was a large container of wine, Richard says, and some cups for drinking from, and for some time everyone, including the two children, just stood about drinking it. He was sorry for the children, because they looked very dirty and tired, and he thought they should have been in bed; but then he remembered that the Greeks aren’t too fussy about that kind of thing, and he was going on to speculate as to where this little gathering had come from, since he hadn’t seen a light or a building for miles, when suddenly this feeling of…indifference, of dreaminess, descended upon him, and he found himself sitting down some ten yards from the fire, unable to move or even to think very clearly, just numbly watching what was going on.
“It seems that quite suddenly, at a sign from one of the men, the two children sat down by Chriseis. She then started caressing them, but in a curiously absent and joyless fashion, while for their part they seemed hardly conscious that she was doing anything at all… After a time the two peasants came forward; and one after the other they violated the little girl. No elaboration. They just took her. Nor did she show reaction of any kind. No pain, no pleasure; she just lay there utterly without movement or expression.
“Meanwhile Chriseis was busy about the boy. He too showed no emotion at all; from the look on his face he might just as well have been in church or in school or wondering what he was going to have for breakfast… When the two peasants had finished, they just slunk off through the grove, and that, Richard says, was the last he saw of them. At this stage Chriseis started to encourage the children to make some show of mutual endearments. They didn’t seem very interested, but they did as they were shown; while Chriseis knelt over them – becoming, at last, visibly excited. This went on for about five minutes; at the end of which both Chriseis and the boy reached some sort of climax – though the little girl seemed still as indifferent as ever. So then Chriseis lay down on the ground between the children and turned her attention to the girl. Whatever she did seemed to have an effect, because after a little the girl stopped looking so bored and rigid and started to snuggle up against Chriseis with a dreamy, contented look on her face. Meanwhile, the boy had fallen asleep. And it was at this point, Richard says, that Chriseis started kissing the girl’s throat. Of course this was before his own initiation, and he couldn’t see all that well in the dying light of the fire, so he thought that kissing was all she was doing. Nevertheless, he thinks that in a distant way he was conscious of something being really wrong now – wrong in a far more desperate sense than anything which had happened so far, though God knows most of that was bad enough. So he thinks that he tried to cry out; but whether he did or he didn’t, he suddenly felt a wave of exhaustion sweeping over him; and the next thing he remembers is waking up, back in the car, with the sun streaming through the windows.”
“None of which,” I commented after a long pause, “goes very far towards explaining some of the things the police found.”
“Perhaps not,” said Tyrrel. “But Mr Fountain seems to have missed a substantial part of the evening’s entertainment. And there were other occasions, you remember.”
“But did he never…take it up with Chriseis?” I asked Piers. “Try to get an explanation out of her?”
“Not really,” said Piers. “He was in love with her, he had failed her sexually, he was simply anxious to be allowed…to be of service. These things, when they happened, happened unexpectedly; and his memories were usually vague and utterly incomplete. He understood that she was a woman of strong sexual needs – and at that time there was nothing he could do about it himself. So he just kept quiet, or so he says. But in any case,” Piers went on, “none of that matters now. It’s in the past and whatever happened, it was plainly none of Richard’s doing. The point is that he is now talking sensibly about all this. And there is none of this obscene pretence that Chriseis is still alive.”
“What feelings does he express about her?”
“Hatred and disgust. He realises that she nearly killed him and that she certainly killed Roddy. As a civilised man, he does not condemn her for being perverted: he does condemn her for not keeping her perversion under some sort of control. Though even so, he sometimes remarks that she was very beautiful and that no one could be held to blame for feeling her fascination…”
“All this seems reasonable enough,” I said. “Is he looking forward to getting back to Cambridge?”
“Apparently. He’s been spending a lot of time going over the notes he made in Gr
eece and seems very keen to start organising them with the help of the authorities.”
“Meaning books or people?” Tyrrel said.
“Both… But he doesn’t talk much about Walter, though he seemed pleased with his letter; and as for Penelope, he hasn’t mentioned her at all…”
Later on we took Piers to tell his story to Holmstrom. The little basement office was damper and more dismal than ever, and this despite the fact that the central heating had now been turned on. The result was not so much warmth as a charnel-house fetidity – an atmosphere which evidently suited Holmstrom, whose voice was riper and whose manner was even more self-congratulatory than they had been a month earlier.
“This tale of the bonfire,” he said. “It’s a pity your friend didn’t stay awake a little longer, but the pattern of the whole affair is quite consistent. The wish to corrupt is a common subcomponent of sadic conditions. The two men had probably produced the children and were allowed to violate the girl as part of their reward; but in any case the near-rape to which she was subjected would be very satisfying to Chriseis. Her next step was to take active pleasure at the spectacle of two ‘innocents’ defiling one another under her instruction: also very much in keeping. And then she goes on to indulge her most characteristic desire on the girl – and does so with the greater satisfaction as she conceives that a certain amount of male strength and substance has flowed into the child, that she has in some way become richer or riper, a more succulent morsel… You see what I mean?”