‘Yes. How silly of me!’ said Tonia soothingly. She was thinking: he obviously doesn’t like women, why do I bother? She poured the coffee. He took it milky with several spoonfuls of sugar, and when she offered him a biscuit he put three on his plate. ‘So you know this house of old?’ she said encouragingly.
‘I first came here in the fifties with a friend from Oxford.’
‘Did he have some lovely things? Furniture and pictures?’
‘Of course!’ Again, the undisguised irritability.
‘We’re doing our best to return house and garden to something like its former glory. With rather limited resources, I’m afraid,’ said Tonia. Why was she apologising to this man?
‘Hmm.’
By this time Tonia was beginning to tire of his brusqueness, so she decided to provoke him. ‘I gather Adrian Clavering died in rather mysterious circumstances,’ she said. It had the desired effect: the pale blue eyes became fierce.
‘What do you know about that?’ he snapped.
Tonia said coolly: ‘I was going to ask you precisely the same question.’ Got him, she thought. He’s an old bully and you just have to stand up to him. Somers nodded, acknowledging the smart riposte. When he spoke again, his speech was slower, more hesitant.
‘He was found in the Temple of Pan.’
‘The Folly.’
‘Adrian wouldn’t have called it that. In fact he hated the word being applied to that building; but, yes, as it happens, Folly is le mot juste.’
‘What happened?’
Somers ate a biscuit before replying: ‘Adrian was an amateur, you see, in everything. Gifted, of course, but essentially a dabbler because he was rich and spoilt all his life. Very charming, though, and a delightful host. I dined with him the night before he died. I tried to warn him, from bitter experience as it happens, but he wouldn’t listen. I do hope you are not a dabbler, Mrs Paige.’
‘What happened?’
‘Good heavens, is that the time? I must be away.’ Somers got up, pocketing the last biscuit on his plate as he did so.
‘Thank you for your hospitality, Mrs Paige. If there is anything I can do for you, naturally, please don’t hesitate . . .’ As he said these last perfunctory lines, he was on his way out, so that Tonia had to run after him to stop him from going.
‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘I don’t know if you could possibly . . . but we’re having terrible trouble finding someone to help out with the garden.’
Somers stopped and turned to look at her. For the first time since she had known him Tonia saw him smile. ‘Ah. Yes. Well . . . Naturally,’ he said. He made a little ‘Hm-hm’ sound in his throat that was almost a laugh. The Paiges’ inability to find a gardener was a source of malicious amusement to him. Then he nodded gravely as if correcting himself for his former hilarity.
‘Have you tried Quinton?’ he asked.
Tonia said no, she had never heard of Quinton, who was he? And how could she get hold of him? Somers told her not to worry, he would sound out Quinton himself; then he left. The following morning at ten a man presented himself at the front door of Wyvern Manor and said that he was Peter Quinton and he understood they were looking for someone to help out in the garden. He was prepared to give them one whole day, Thursday, every week. It was better than nothing, and his fee was very reasonable.
They called him Quinton, or ‘Old Quinton’ in private, though he insisted on being called Peter to his face and on addressing the Paiges as Julian and Antonia. Quinton was tall, wiry and of indeterminate age, though certainly over sixty. There was something gipsyish about his appearance: he went in for red and white spotted bandanna handkerchiefs around his neck, and his hair was dyed with Henna. His bushy eyebrows, now almost white, showed traces of ginger; his brown face and arms were freckled. His accent, certainly not local, was not easily identifiable, but Tonia thought it had a South London twang. His eyes were the most striking feature, they were green and could look positively feral at times. Jules swore that the pupils were not round but oblong and slitted, like those of a cat: it was a joke, of course.
Quinton became both indispensable and intensely annoying. On Thursdays he arrived early, left late and worked hard, but he could rarely be contacted outside his working hours. He did not have a telephone and it was a long time before he revealed where he lived. He had a small, rather isolated cottage about four miles away from Wyvern, but when Jules or Tonia tried to call on him he was hardly ever there. On the few occasions that he was, he came to the door of the cottage to talk to them. Beyond that door was an unlit dinginess, and he made it quite clear that they were unwelcome. He would very rarely change the day or the time that he came to Wyvern with the result that if he could not come on Thursday, he could not come at all that week. This inflexibility was infuriating.
He could also be quite irrationally stubborn about what he did and didn’t do in the garden. He would prune or plant or weed without complaint, but if he was ever asked to move an established plant from one location to another, he would often argue against it, or simply refuse point blank to do so. His innate conservatism led to many disputes, one of the fiercest of which was over the Herm.
The Herm was discovered one day when Jules was in a remote part of the garden. He had been following one of the many stone paths which wound their way about the property when he found his way barred by a dense patch of briars and undergrowth. He summoned Quinton and they hacked through it to discover that the path opened out into a brick paved oval space surrounded on all sides by yew hedges, now wildly overgrown. In the centre of the paved area was a stone pedestal of the kind that usually carries a sundial. No sundial was evident on its top, only a bronze disk covered in verdigris on which something indecipherable had been engraved. It seemed a gloomy place, though not without romantic charm for some, thought Jules. He looked at Quinton, who was staring about him as if searching for something.
At one apex of the oval, half buried in the yew, Jules spotted a tall object in grey, lichened stone. He turned to Quinton whose gaze had also been directed towards it. Together they attacked the yew until the object was revealed.
It consisted of a flat sided pillar, two feet wide and six feet high, slightly tapering at the bottom where it stood on a stepped pedestal. The top of it consisted of the classical bust of a bearded man which, because of the extra height given to it by the pedestal, stared down on Jules and Quinton. About half way down its flat front surface the erect genitals of a man had been carved in low relief. Jules, who was proud of having had a classical education, pointed at the object and said: ‘That’s a Herm.’
‘Right,’ said Quinton.
It was an irritating remark, and somehow typical of Quinton. It implied that he knew perfectly well that it was a Herm, indeed what a Herm was, and was simply endorsing Jules’s identification. Regardless of this Jules told Quinton that Herms were votive statues, originally of Hermes, later of other deities, which were common in fifth century BC Athens. He even started to tell him how the mysterious mutilation of their genitals caused a scandal in Athens and led to the exile of Alcibiades with disastrous consequences for the city. All the while Quinton listened to him, nodding from time to time, annoyingly like a schoolmaster approving his pupil’s recitation.
‘Of course, it will have to go,’ said Jules.
When Quinton questioned this decision, Jules explained that he was hoping to attract visitors with families and that some might be offended by the statue’s ithyphallic equipment. Quinton seemed unimpressed by the argument and said that it had been put there for a purpose and one shouldn’t move things without good reason. Jules left the discussion at that, but thereafter, whenever Jules had devised some scheme of moving the Herm, which inevitably required doughty male assistance, Quinton raised objections. There were times when Jules nearly lost his temper in front of Quinton, but he was afraid to offend him. This fear, as he ruefully admitted to Tonia, did not only stem from the fact that Quinton was their only source of help in
the garden. There was something about him, quite indefinable, which made him uneasy. Tonia agreed. She particularly distrusted Quinton’s association with the children.
Millie and Tam were fascinated by Quinton, whom they always addressed and referred to for some reason by his full name, ‘Peter Quinton’. They would follow him around the garden, chattering to him. He did not slacken in his work, and most of the time he ignored them, but sometimes Jules or Tonia would hear them talking with him. Their attempts to find out what he was saying to their children always failed. He invariably spotted them before they got close enough to make out what he was telling Millie and Tam.
One afternoon in September Tonia happened to be looking out of an upper window of Wyvern onto the back lawn. There she saw Quinton with Millie and Tam. Quinton was crouching down with the girls standing over him, and he was showing them something which he held in his left hand. Tonia could not tell for certain what it was, but it was flat, black and shiny, like an ancient obsidian mirror she had once seen in the British Museum. With his right index finger Quinton began to describe a figure in the air just above its polished surface which he then covered for a while with the red and white bandanna he had taken from his neck. He said something to the children who bent further over his shoulder to look at the thing in his hand, then with a quick deft movement, like a conjurer, he swept away the bandanna. Millie and Tam stared, fascinated, into the black mirror.
Something about the way her daughters were looking at it troubled Tonia, quite apart from the oddness of the whole situation. She opened the sash window and called to Millie and Tam. They reacted by starting back in shock, as if suddenly shoved by an invisible hand. Quinton looked up at Tonia, and for a moment she saw a look of rage and hatred pass across his face. Its intensity was demonic, but it was replaced almost immediately by bland bafflement. He wrapped whatever it was he had been showing the girls in the bandanna and thrust it inside his shirt.
As Tonia descended the stairs Millie and Tam came running in from outside. She asked them what they had been doing with Quinton, to which they said ‘Nothing’.
‘What was he showing you?’
‘Nothing,’ said Tam.
Millie, the elder, felt that some explanation was owed, so she said: ‘We were just playing a game.’
‘What sort of game?’
‘Scrying in the stone,’ said Tam. Tonia saw Millie look at her sister with annoyance. Evidently Tam had said more than she should have.
‘And what on earth is “scrying in the stone”?’
‘Oh, just a game,’ said Millie, taking Tam by the hand and skipping off with her into the drawing room. Tonia knew she would get nothing more from them, but she was angry. She had a feeling that something bad had been going on. Somehow Quinton had been ‘interfering with their young minds’; that was the phrase she used to describe her unease. She went into the garden to have it out with him.
Quinton was tinkering innocently with the lawnmower on the gravel drive. As she approached he looked up casually and said ‘Hello, Antonia’. He seemed to be pretending that they had never exchanged glances when she was at the upper window. The word ‘insolence’ formed in her mind, even as she realised that such a term did not belong to the present egalitarian age. Tonia made a conscious effort not to sound feudal as she spoke.
‘Peter, what was it you were showing Millie and Tam just now?’
‘Oh, that! Just something I picked up.’
‘Can I see?’
Quinton took the bandanna from inside his shirt and unwrapped it to reveal a thin, irregularly shaped slab of black stone with a flat, highly polished surface. He only showed it to her for a few seconds before putting it away again, but in that time Tonia had noticed that it had been finely engraved—so finely you could barely see the lines—with some kind of geometrical figure.
‘Where did you pick that up?’ she asked.
‘Oh, you pick these things up.’
‘The girls said you were playing a game with them.’
‘A game? Well . . .’
‘What is “scrying in the stone”, Peter?’ She was watching his expression carefully now, but he gave nothing away.
‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘We were just seeing if they could see theirselves, like in a mirror. Just a game.’ Tonia paused before replying, hoping that the pause and the quizzical look she gave him would imply scepticism without her having to express it verbally.
‘I’m not at all sure about these games of yours, Peter,’ she said eventually. Tonia’s intention was to make it quite clear, without being heavy handed, that she was telling him off, but she failed. She managed only to sound petulant and condescending.
‘Right you are, Antonia,’ said Quinton starting up the lawnmower and thereby putting an end to all further conversation. Later in the day he left a note in the hall to say that he would be unavailable the following Thursday.
That night Millie and Tam had nightmares. This was not unusual as they were both highly strung, imaginative children. What was odd was that their nightmares were almost identical. They said that in their dream they were running through the garden at nightfall and wherever they went faces would suddenly poke out at them from the hedges and undergrowth. What kind of faces? White faces, said Tam. Old-fashioned faces, said Millie. What did she mean, ‘old-fashioned’? Like the faces you see in old art books, said Millie, with curly lips and beards, sometimes with little horns. Laughing, said Tam. But not nice laughing, added Millie, horrible laughing, like they were playing a game with you that they knew, but you didn’t. Jules read them to sleep again with a story and made a mental note to talk to Quinton when he next came.
But he didn’t. Quinton, for all his faults, was invaluable. There was so much clearing and tidying to be done before the Spring. The garden was slowly yielding up its secrets, some of which were agreeable to Jules, others, like the Herm, not. For such a large area it had very few open spaces. Adrian Clavering had gone in for features, most of them, especially those involving water, very decorative. But even these tended to be over-elaborate: water did not merely emerge from a simple aperture, it was belched from the mouth of a grotesque head, or was blown from the conch of a Triton, or cascaded over a shell grotto. Quinton’s uncanny ability to restore these and get them flowing and splashing again reconciled Jules, up to a point, to both them and Quinton.
The problem was, as Tonia said to Jules, that Wyvern was not one garden, but many: rose gardens, knot gardens, walled gardens, water gardens. There was also a maze which neither of them liked, though neither said so to each other, even when Millie had run in one afternoon to tell them that there was an old woman with long grey hair crawling about in the maze, carrying a bottle. No such woman was found, of course, and the story was briskly dismissed as fantasy. Millie was a very imaginative child.
And there were statues everywhere, all of fine quality, but none of them entirely likeable. If there was a cherub carrying a basket of fruit, he was, unaccountably, weeping. A faun leered at you aggressively. A serene seated greybeard, in classical robes, was contemplating a skull. Mithras in his Phrygian cap was slitting the bull’s throat in a peculiarly violent manner. It goes without saying that there were several representations of Priapus, the god of gardening, with his erect penis, most of them mercifully small and easily concealed, but one of them was a fountain. Even the leaden urns on the terrace were decorated with low relief scenes in which Centaurs carried off struggling Lapith women, or nymphs fled in terror from lustful satyrs. Tonia found a curious marble version of Leda and the Swan in one of the old stable buildings. Zeus in the guise of a swan seemed to be perpetrating a rape rather than a seduction. Tonia locked the outhouse, grateful that this sculpture at least had not seen the light of day.
By the end of that year nearly all the ground had been cleared of its accretion of weeds and superfluous growth. Many parts of the garden had been restored almost to their former picturesque selves, and in this Quinton was invaluable. Though he was still det
erminedly against innovation, he had a genius for restoration. With the aid of a few old black-and-white photographs, and some sketchy plans, he was able to tell what had been planted where. He even proposed a compromise solution over the Herm. He had been able to find an attractive variegated ivy which would grow fast enough up the Herm to cover its offending appendages before the following Spring.
At the beginning of the following year Tonia and Jules were fairly confident they would be able to open in June, but there was still much to be done. All gardens have a habit of suddenly revealing some hidden area of neglect just as one is beginning to believe that it is at last tamed, but Wyvern had this habit to excess. One Friday in mid March Jules found that he had not really investigated what was to be found at the bottom of the steep bank behind the Temple of Pan which they called the Folly.
He was delighted to find that a meandering path led down to a dell through a thick planting of crocuses. At the bottom was a hollow surrounded by a grove of poplars and sweet briar, in the middle of which, embedded in undergrowth, was an oblong object that looked from a distance like a tomb. Closer inspection showed it to be the statue of a reclining figure on a plinth.
It was a sculpture in lichened marble of a sleeping girl with an exquisite figure and small, beautifully formed breasts. She lay on her side, one arm carelessly thrown over the delicate features of her smiling face. Jules was charmed. This at least was a tasteful addition to the garden. He would make a feature of this one. There was nothing to shock or alarm. But then he saw to his dismay that there was. Between the almost crossed legs the sculptor had carved a penis and testicles. It was a hermaphrodite. When Jules had cleared some moss and ivy from the plinth he found a carved inscription:
HERMAPHRODITUS
And whosoever hath seen thee, being so fair,
Two things turn all his life and blood to fire;
A strong desire begot on great despair,
A great despair cast out by strong desire.
The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories Page 14