The Sibyl in Her Grave ht-4

by Sarah Caudwell

“Oh, Sir Robert, this is good news.”

  “And all thanks to your friend Professor Tamar here. Advice from a total stranger — really, quite remarkable. It troubles me to think, though, how nearly I came to making a terrible mistake. I sorely miss the guidance of — well, Katharine, you know the person I mean.”

  “Yes, of course. Oddly enough, Professor Tamar asked me a few moments ago whether I knew Parsons Haver at all, and I was explaining — oh dear.” She blushed again. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything about it.”

  “Oh, I think we can trust Professor Tamar with our little secret. It wouldn’t do for it to be known in the City, of course, but — I’m sure, Professor Tamar, that you are not one of those people who deride as superstition everything that is beyond our limited human understanding. If you have friends in Parsons Haver, perhaps you had the privilege of knowing Signora del Comino?”

  “No,” I said, perceiving that my appalling suspicion was about to be confirmed. “No, alas, I had not.”

  “A woman of remarkable gifts, Professor Tamar, quite remarkable gifts. For some years I took no major step without her guidance. Katharine used to drive me down to Sussex almost every month to consult her. But she died last year. Since then — ah well. Katharine, my dear, I’m afraid that you and I must be getting back to Lombard Street.”

  He turned, with the self-confidence natural in a man who controls the financial destinies of men and institutions, and led us out through the Museum into Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Miss Tavistock and I followed a few paces behind him.

  “Professor Tamar,” said Miss Tavistock, “I ought to thank you for not mentioning — well, you know what I mean. I’d somehow assumed you wouldn’t, but I realise, when I think about it, that it was rather presumptuous of me.”

  “My dear Miss Tavistock,” I said. “I should like to think that we are friends. You may count on me to conceal almost any crime you commit — short, that is to say, of murder.”

  She smiled at the notion.

  “But Hilary,” said Selena, looking at me reproachfully over her liqueur glass, “I’ve just begun to believe in X and I want to go on believing in him. This is no time to tell me that he does not exist.”

  Having said my farewells to Miss Tavistock and Sir Robert, I had returned to the restaurant and found the lunch party still in progress. Understandably anxious, however, to witness the triumph of the horse recommended to her by the destitute Irishman, Julia had adjourned with Cantrip to a downstairs room containing a television set. They had been joined there by Selena, set free by the early conclusion of her conference for a leisurely liqueur. It was to this latter group that I announced my solution to the insider-dealing problem.

  Selena, however, now seemed displeased by the nonexistence of X. I enquired why she had become attached to him.

  “Because if X doesn’t exist he can’t have stolen the Virgil frontispiece, and if X didn’t steal it then it must have been Terry after all. And at this very moment Julia’s aunt is having a conversation with Terry which is designed to lure him into making a firm promise to install our bookcases on a specified date within the reasonably foreseeable future. And since she clearly has a lifetime’s experience of persuading men to do what she wants them to I have every confidence that she will succeed. And if she does, I don’t want to have to start worrying about what we have to lock up while Terry’s working in Chambers.”

  “I’m afraid,” I said, “that there is nothing I can do. Now that we know that every important decision taken by Sir Robert Renfrew over the past two years was taken after consultation with Isabella, we can’t doubt that he was her source of information.”

  “Look here,” said Cantrip, “are you saying no one’s been blackmailed and no one’s been murdered and nothing exciting’s been happening at all?”

  I was obliged to admit that that was my conclusion.

  “But look, no one said there were two people in the Mercedes. If there were two of them someone ought to have told us, otherwise it’s not fair play.”

  “The Mercedes, you will remember, had tinted windows and was driven through Parsons Haver at considerable speed — it is understandable that no one realised that there were two occupants.”

  “And the Reverend said that the chap in the Mercedes was middle-aged. Sir Robert Whatsit’s a hundred if he’s a day — you can’t call that middle-aged.”

  “He is in his late sixties. The Reverend Maurice, who was only a few years younger, would have described him as middle-aged. The only person he would certainly not have so described was Miss Tavistock. The thought did briefly occur to me that he might have mistaken her for a man — but it would have been for a young man. Transvestism, whether deliberate or accidental, invariably has a rejuvenating effect on women and an aging effect on men.”

  “You haven’t explained,” said Selena, with a slight frown, “the most recent incident. Surely my client hasn’t found another psychic counsellor?”

  Fearing that Selena might be placed in some embarrassment if I asked her not to mention it to her client, I had said nothing of the confession made to me by Miss Tavistock.

  “I understand,” I said, “that you yourself suggested an explanation for that, which Sir Robert found entirely satisfactory.”

  “Yes,” said Selena, “yes, I did, but — well, as you say, my client seems to be satisfied with it. And he evidently thinks it covers the earlier incidents as well, so he’s perfectly happy It would be rather a shame to upset him all over again by pointing out that they were all his own fault.”

  “As it turns out,” said Julia, “it’s rather a pity that you decided not to tell your client that the source of the leaked information seemed to be in Parsons Haver — if you had, he would presumably have realised that Isabella was a person not entirely to be trusted.”

  “No, Julia,” said Selena with some asperity, “that, if I may say so, is not what turns out to be rather a pity What turns out to be rather a pity is that I ever believed a single word of what my client told me. He told me, clearly and firmly, looking me straight in the eye, that the information needed for the insider dealing was known only to his codirectors, himself and Miss Tavistock. If he had added And of course my shady fortune-teller in Sussex’ I might have had rather less difficulty in assisting him with his problem.”

  I sympathised with her feelings on the subject. In constructing my own hypothesis I had assumed that Sir Robert’s decisions concerning the investment of enormous amounts of other people’s money were reached on the basis of careful research and sophisticated analysis by a highly paid staff of qualified economists, rather than by methods which might have been adopted in the early years of the seventeenth century by a more than usually gullible peasant girl trying to choose a husband. This assumption being false, I had been led to erroneous conclusions.

  “We quite understand,” said Julia, “that in the face of the irrational even the methods of Scholarship are powerless. You were not to know that Sir Robert was the sort of man who consults fortune-tellers.”

  I was compelled, however, to decline her kindly meant exculpation: I knew that if I had studied the evidence with the care which I would have devoted to a mediaeval manuscript, I would long ago have realised that Sir Robert was incurably superstitious.

  All the things he had done which appeared to be capricious — his sudden requests for conferences and equally sudden cancellations, his apparently irrational confidence that Selena could solve a problem quite outside her province, his decision just before Christmas to proceed with the acquisition of Lupilux — all these were the result of acting in accordance with his horoscope.

  “But Hilary,” said Julia, “how do you know?”

  “My dear Julia, from what you have told me. Sir Robert is clearly born under the same sign of the Zodiac as you are — and has even greater faith in the predictions of Madame Louisa.”

  On the television screen, the horses were lining up for the race.

  “I can’t understand it,” sa
id Julia, two and a half minutes later. “I was sure that Madame Louisa was referring to the destitute Irishman. She must have meant someone entirely different.”

  We returned to the table, where Julia was consoled with grappa for the disappointment of her financial hopes.

  The lunch, it seemed, had been a success. Terry had the dazed expression of a carpenter who has made a firm promise to begin installing bookcases on the following Friday.

  Moreover, it appeared that Regina was feeling much improved in health and spirits: the air of London, polluted as it was, had evidently a more beneficial effect on her than the air of Parsons Haver. It now seemed to her to be absurd to return straight home: she decided that after all she would remain in London for a day or two to visit exhibitions and theatres.

  “Julia,” she said, as we rose to leave, “aren’t you going to open your present from Maurice?”

  Julia took the flat, rectangular parcel from the shelf on which she had placed it and began carefully to undo the ribbon with which it was tied. She removed the festive wrapping and found within a white envelope some sixteen by nine inches, and a smaller envelope. She opened the smaller and read out the note which it contained.

  “ ‘Dear Julia — This has brought me so much unhappiness that I can no longer bear to keep it, but I hope that you may find pleasure in it.’ ”

  She took from the larger envelope a rectangle of cream-coloured parchment, a little scuffed at the edges, but now safely enclosed in a clear plastic folder. Between margins garlanded with vines, an ornate initial F, Etruscan red edged with gold, almost filled the page; a landscape of fields and mountains glowed green and blue in the space between its two horizontal arms; in the foreground a grey-haired shepherd gazed wistfully at a beautiful young man, lightly clad in a loose, diaphanous tunic; the young man looked back at him with a teasing, equivocal smile. Penned, no doubt, by a master of calligraphy, the only line of text took little effort to read: Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexim—”The shepherd Corydon was on fire with love for the beautiful Alexis.”

  The opening line, as my readers will doubtless recall, of the second of Virgil’s Eclogues.

  Having no reason to return immediately to Oxford, I yielded to the temptation to spend the weekend in London, where spring seemed at last to be in the air: the pale sunshine had begun to hold a suggestion of warmth and the lawns of Lincoln’s Inn were scattered with daffodils.

  There prevailed among my young friends a general sense of joie de vivre, due chiefly to the fact that Terry Carver was at last going to install the bookshelves. Moreover, it was no longer necessary to suspect him of stealing the Virgil frontispiece. How it had come to be lost — whether it had slipped behind the back of a drawer or been absentmindedly misplaced by the Reverend Maurice — we could only speculate; but whatever the explanation, it seemed clear from the fact of its reappearance that it had never left his possession.

  It was also gratifying — at least to most of us, though I have to say that Cantrip seemed just a trifle disappointed — to have established that in the present case the unpleasant crime of murder had not after all been committed. Since Sir Robert’s visits to Isabella had been made not under the compulsion of blackmail but in innocent confidence in her psychic powers, there was no reason to attribute her death, or that of the Reverend Maurice, to anything but natural causes.

  On the Sunday evening, since Regina’s train left from Victoria, we gathered — all or most of us, I forget quite who was there — for a final glass of wine together in the bar of the Grosvenor Hotel. Regina was in excellent spirits: three days of shops, exhibitions and theatres and a chance encounter with her favourite ex-husband had left her refreshed and invigorated. She had entirely recovered from her cold. She declined, however, to prolong her visit further, though pressed by Julia to do so: when the time for her train drew near, she made her farewells and left us.

  “Julia,” said Selena, observing that her friend seemed uncharacteristically downcast, “why are you looking as if she’d left on a three-year expedition to the Amazon jungle? She’s only going to Parsons Haver.”

  “I know,” said Julia. “I wish she weren’t.”

  “Well, she has to go back sometime. It’s where she lives.”

  “Yes, I know. But everyone seems to keep dying there. Daphne’s always saying that something awful is going to happen to people and then it always does.”

  I left it to others to reason with the poor creature: I also had a train to catch.

  On my return to Oxford, hoping to avoid a tiresome encounter with the Bursar, I dined at a modest Indian restaurant close to the station and returned late enough, as I hoped, to avoid him. On my way back to my rooms, however, I had the ill fortune to encounter him in the quad — he had been lying in wait for me, for all I know, throughout the weekend — and was obliged to listen to ten minutes of his thinly veiled reproaches for my defection on the previous Thursday. He had a heavy cold and smelt of mothballs.

  “Bursar,” I said, “forgive my asking, but are you using some interesting kind of aftershave lotion? There is a most curious aroma in the air — not unwholesome, not by any means, but decidedly pungent.”

  Tactfully as I had phrased it, the question seemed for some reason to annoy him; still, he did not decline to answer.

  “Well, if you must know, Hilary, and since you plainly find the subject far more interesting than my views about the future of our College, I suppose that I may smell somewhat of camphor. I have been rubbing it on my chest — as you may have observed, I have a rather bad cold.”

  “My dear Bursar,” I said, “I am so sorry. It’s most thoughtless of me to keep you talking out here on such a cold night — do go back to your rooms and straight to bed with a large whiskey.”

  And yet when I had made my escape the smell of camphor lingered in my nostrils, like the tune of a song long after it has been played. It haunted me even in sleep: I had a nightmare in which the Bursar was rubbing my chest with camphor and Julia was telling him to stop or something awful would happen.

  I have rooms on the same staircase as our Junior Chemistry Fellow, a pleasant young man despite his having spent his formative years at Cambridge. Thinking that by eight o’clock he would certainly be awake and that soon indeed he might have gone out, I descended at that hour in my dressing gown and knocked with apologetic urgency on his door.

  “Hilary,” he said, evidently surprised, “what are you doing up so early?”

  “I’m very sorry,” I said, “to disturb you so early, but there is something I have to ask you. Is there a poison that smells like camphor?”

  “Camphor?” he said doubtfully.

  “Yes,” I said, “camphor.”

  “Camphor,” he said again, as if attempting to familiarise himself with a newly learnt word in a foreign language.

  “Yes, camphor,” I said again. Scientists are not like us: one must be patient with them.

  “Hilary,” said my young colleague, “is this one of those questions people keep asking in Oxford about the Provost of Oriel?”

  “My dear boy,” I said, “what has the Provost of Oriel to do with it?”

  “I mean, is it one of those questions about whether if I say that I saw someone going into Blackwells who looked like the Provost of Oriel and it actually was the Provost of Oriel, it’s true or not to say that he looked like the Provost of Oriel? Because if it’s that sort of question I honestly don’t think I’m up to it at this hour of the morning.”

  “Do you mean,” I said, “that camphor is itself a poison?”

  “Well, yes, of course. Didn’t you know?”

  “No,” I said. “No, I had always supposed its qualities to be medicinal.”

  “Moths don’t think so,” said the scientist, laughing uproariously. “Anyway, any medicine’s a poison if you take too much of it. Camphor does have therapeutic uses, of course. I believe it was used quite a lot in traditional Chinese medicine — the natural form of it’s made from the bark of a
Chinese tree — and there was a bit of a vogue for it as a tranquilliser at the end of the nineteenth century. But it turned out to be rather unpredictable, so nowadays it’s only used externally.”

  “But if you swallowed it, what effect would it have?”

  “Oh, quite unpleasant, I should say. Vomiting and convulsions and so on. And possibly a certain amount of delusion. People would probably think you were drunk.”

  “When you say it’s a poison — do you mean that someone could die of it?”

  “Oh, absolutely. There’ve been quite a few cases of people taking oil of camphor by accident, because they thought it was supposed to be taken internally. It doesn’t taste all that unpleasant, you see — no more unpleasant than people expect medicine to taste.”

  “How much would it take to kill someone?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Hilary,” said my young colleague rather peevishly, “I’m a chemist, not a pharmacist — I haven’t the faintest idea. Anyway, it would depend on all sorts of things — if you’re in the prime of life and reasonably good shape physically, it’ll take a lot more to kill you than if you’re a child or an elderly invalid.”

  “And I suppose it would not be unduly difficult to obtain?”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t think so. If you went to one of the Chinese shops in Soho—” He paused and regarded me with a rather stern expression. “Now look here, Hilary — trust me, this is not the right solution to our problems with the Bursar.”

  Assuring him that nothing had been further from my mind, I thanked him for his advice and hastened back to my room.

  There had been a smell of camphor in the drawing room of the Rectory on the morning after Isabella had died there: Isabella, I recalled, had been suffering from a cold; Daphne had been looking after her. The Reverend Maurice had also been suffering from a cold shortly before his death; the cough mixture Daphne had brought for him tasted of mothballs. Sir Robert’s clothing had smelt of mothballs on the evening he was taken ill: though the incident had occurred many hundreds of miles from Parsons Haver, I supposed that so ardent a devotee of Isabella would keep himself well supplied with a stock of the natural remedies which she had advocated — and which Daphne had no doubt assisted in preparing.