The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories

by Oliver, Reggie

  The interior was grey and dim, but I had the feeling that it was far from empty. The place seemed to be populated by softly murmuring voices. I did not hear them in the normal sense of the word. They came from the house but they seemed to enter my head without assaulting the outer ear. The tone was that familiar rippling babble that I knew so well from the conversation of John Digby Phelps, but there was more than one of him. It was as if a thousand tracks of his soft, burbling self-aggrandisement had been recorded and were all playing at once. I caught few words, but those I did were familiar: ‘genius’, ‘brilliant’, ‘masterpiece’, ‘my son, you know’, ‘my son . . .’ Then these voices were joined by another, similar in timbre but subtly different, sharper, higher, more dissipated. A note of discord entered and the voices began to bicker.

  I stood in the hall trying to make sense of this cacophony which surrounded me and threatened to suffocate. It was as if I was wrapped in an invisible sheet of sound. My own thoughts began to slide and lose their power. It was like the sensation one has before drifting off to sleep, except that a part of me remained fully conscious. It was my will that was being withdrawn from me.

  The voices began to speak almost together, as if chanting. It was like the sound of a psalm being recited by a cold congregation in a dark church. Phrases were repeated and more and more often I began to hear the words: ‘Golden Basilica, Golden Basilica . . .’ With this chanting, I seemed to lose all control over myself. Something soft and insistent was pushing me upstairs to a part of the house. A hideous, mumbling corporate entity was dragging me upwards, urging me to include myself utterly, to immerse myself in a ritual, quite mysterious and unknown except for its name: The Golden Basilica.

  I reached the landing of the grey house. Soft hands pummelled and pushed me towards the half open door of a bedroom.

  I entered the bedroom, drawn by the horrible force. I remember nothing of the room, only the mahogany bed on which was a cream-coloured candlewick bedspread. Something vast and misshapen was writhing and thrashing under it, or it may have been two things because a struggle seemed to be going on beneath the covering. I watched the bedspread heave up and fall like a stormy sea, expecting any moment the thing or things beneath to throw it off and reveal themselves. Apart from the awful rustling of bedclothes which seemed to crackle in my ears like gunfire, the sound was of the continuous murmuring dispute that I had heard before, its pitch now raised to a frantic falsetto. I stood as in a dream, unable to move or look away.

  One vast heave and the coverlet was off. On the bed was a vast bag of wiggling, pulsating skin, white but blotched and bloodshot, slimed with mucus. Its shape changed constantly so that occasionally an arm or a leg would emerge from the fleshy chaos, and almost always there were two heads, both male, both with slimy and receding blonde locks, one marginally younger than the other. One I immediately recognised as Phelps; the other, I suppose, I don’t know, must have been somehow his son, Peter. The two heads faced one another, mouthing incoherent noises, intimate yet antagonistic. Then one head would launch itself at the other and start to gnaw and suck so that one face would gradually become absorbed in the other. But always the other head would emerge somewhere else out of the great bloated bladder of flesh, and so the struggle went on. It was a parody of passionate love, a war for possession and mastery in one obscene body. But no victory would be won. Down dark avenues of death’s eternity they must fight on. Then something merciful crossed between me and the foul bed: a telephone rang in the dark house; I was able to regain some of my own will and tear myself away.

  Some hours later a member of the company found me wandering in a daze along the sea front at Seaburgh. He told me that Phelps had had a massive heart attack soon after lunch, was taken to hospital by Nanny and Joy. He had died at about four o’clock, the time I entered the Old Rectory. The telephone had been Joy, ringing me at the house to tell me what had happened.

  **

  John Digby Phelps and his son were buried side by side in Tiddenham churchyard. His widow Joy inherited surprisingly little because the Old Rectory was found to be heavily mortgaged and Phelps’s other assets did not amount to much. As for the Royalty Theatre, it had been given to Peter Phelps some years previously and was merely managed by John Digby Phelps. Peter Phelps in turn had left the theatre to his mother Vera, Phelps’s first wife. The season at the Royalty Theatre continued as before because Vera Phelps ordained that it should be so, not out of sentiment but because she realised that she would have to pay the actors anyway, so they might as well work for their money. She even kept on Joy Phelps to run the box office and the bar.

  One Sunday I was invited to visit Vera Phelps at her flat on the outskirts of Seaburgh. It seemed like a strange but inevitable repetition of my former Sunday ritual. Vera was a small, bitter woman with dyed blonde hair who might once have been beautiful. Her flat, on the first floor of a row of terraced houses facing the sea, had pretensions to elegance. She had heard something of my experiences with Phelps and wanted to know more. I in turn wanted to hear about Phelps and their son.

  ‘John and he were incredibly close when Peter was a boy.’ she said. ‘I know it sounds absurd, but I got quite jealous. Then something went wrong; I never got to the bottom of it. Men. Two big egos, I suppose. Peter was always trying to get away, John wanted him to stay. He even bought the theatre to keep Peter—my darling son was theatre mad at the time. But the big break came when John decided to marry Joy, his box office girl. I don’t know how that happened. I mean John had always had his girls before, but there was never a question of him marrying them. She had got her claws into him somehow. I was told she knew some sort of secret involving him and Peter. I don’t know. . . . Anyway I was pretty fed up with John by this time, so I wasn’t too upset, but Peter, bless him, took it very hard. Championed me, bless him, which he didn’t need to do. Anyway there was a big row and Peter moved to Italy. He and I kept in touch, but he never spoke or wrote to John again.’

  I asked her about what Peter did in Italy. Was he, as Phelps had said a professor at ‘Venice University’?

  ‘No, darling. He taught at a language school. In Venice. Teaching Italians English.’

  Of course, I thought, Phelps’s fantasies about his son Peter had been as extravagant as they were about other aspects of his life. So I asked Vera if Peter Digby Phelps really had written a book called The Golden Basilica, and if he had, had it been published?

  Vera gave me a curious look. ‘Oh, yes, darling, it’s been published, all right,’ she said. ‘What did the old man tell you?’

  She went to a bookshelf, pulled out a slim paper-backed book with a glossy cover and handed it to me. I opened it and read the title page:

  The Golden Basilica, A Guide to St Mark’s Venice by Professor Francesco Loredan of Padua University, translated by Peter Digby Phelps B.A. (Oxon)

  DEATH MASK

  Being sent away to boarding school at the age of eight was not regarded as cruel or strange in the 1960s. My parents were enlightened by the standard of their day, but my father, a diplomat, worked abroad, so they had little choice except to abide by this upper middle class convention. I always joined my mother and father for Christmas and the Summer holidays, but I sometimes stayed with an aunt over Easter. Though I was not constantly unhappy, I had an almost permanent feeling of dislocation, of travelling from one place to another, not having a real home.

  Most of the year I was at school, which meant that a good deal of my emotional and imaginative life was bound up in it. Stone Court, near Broadstairs in Kent was, even for the early 1960s, an old fashioned place. Its academic standards were modest; its facilities for sport and other activities were no more than adequate. Its advantages lay in the spacious and attractive grounds and the geniality of its headmaster, but even at nine years old I had a vague sense that this was not enough. There was something dusty and Victorian about its atmosphere: comics and sweets were banned; the school library was dominated by the works of Henty, Rider Haggard
and Conan Doyle. Works by anyone more contemporary than these Edwardian giants were hard to find. There were lantern slide lectures and the occasional film on Saturday evenings. The only events I ever saw on television there were the Derby and Winston Churchill’s funeral.

  Despite its general air of benevolence, the school was run with the aid of an infinite number of petty regulations. Infringements were as inevitable as their consequent punishments. One folded clothes a certain way, one went to the lavatory at a certain time, one could talk only in certain parts of the building. Life was needlessly regulated, and rebellion against the restrictions had a pre-adolescent sexual allure. One of the most thrilling experiences of my young life was had scrambling over the school’s roof after lights out.

  The assistant masters were an odd collection. A few were permanent staff who seemed to our eyes to have been there forever, in other words since before we were born. They were mostly human flotsam who had been washed up into this forgotten creek by an unremembered tide and then stranded. They had few qualifications beyond the obligatory public school education, but they knew the ways of the school and survived by doling out their meagre stock of learning to reluctant boys. They cultivated little eccentricities behind which they could conceal their timid souls. One wore a woollen muffler even on the hottest day; another had an ancient car which he called Bucephalas, after Alexander the Great’s horse. The Headmaster and Deputy Head made allowances for them, knowing that their permanence offered a certain stability to the boys, and a somewhat spurious assurance of respectability to their parents.

  There was also a floating population of masters who came and went, some with bewildering speed. Those who came from other preparatory schools usually showed why they had been on the move before a term was out. There were the young men seeking temporary employment between public school and university, or between university and life. There was also a small unclassifiable category and, of these, the one I remember most vividly was Gordon Barrymore.

  Mr Barrymore managed to cause a sensation among the boys even before we saw him. He had a Jaguar car which appeared on the gravel drive of Stone Court on the first day of term. All the other masters, if they had a car at all, had at best one of the serviceable and second-hand variety, but Mr Barrymore’s was new, bright blue and conspicuously luxurious. The gleaming dashboard was of dark walnut veneer; the seats were of real soft leather, with a masculine aroma that one could almost smell through the closed windows. One of the boys examining this work of art knew it to be the new master, Mr Barrymore’s car, and we speculated wildly about what he would be like.

  Surprisingly perhaps, Mr Barrymore did not disappoint our expectations. He was in his late forties, of middle height, and though he had put on some weight he carried it well. Though not handsome, he had a pleasant face and dark, humorous eyes. His black hair was slicked back and he wore a neat little moustache. He dressed habitually either in a suit, obviously tailor-made, or in a blazer and slacks, always fresh and neatly pressed. A silk handkerchief adorned his breast pocket; he never wore the same tie on successive days. This set him apart from the other assistant masters who kept rigidly to the traditional patched tweed jacket and grey flannels dress code. If we were conscious that there was just a touch of the cad about Mr Barrymore’s appearance, it could only have enhanced his appeal: at least he wasn’t boring.

  Mr Barrymore’s charms were not confined to his appearance. He soon became very popular with us by treating us as equals. Not that he allowed us to take liberties. He kept discipline in his classes by the force of his personality and by our anxiety to please him. He taught French with little regard to rules of grammar, but with a fluent and intimate knowledge of its idiomatic usage. By means of jokes, conversations, games and stories in French we picked up much more of the language than we would have done from a text book. He always seemed at ease with us in class and we, at ease with him, learned much.

  He also appealed to us for a darker reason. He made it very clear, but by the subtlest means possible, that though he liked us boys, he looked on his fellow masters with contempt. In particular, he showed an active dislike for the Deputy Headmaster, Mr Capstick.

  Looking back, one can see that Mr Capstick had his good qualities. To begin with, he virtually ran the school because our amiable Headmaster, Mr Villiers, known to us as J.V., used often to slip away for a few days’ shooting or fishing. Capstick had a good academic brain and taught a wide variety of subjects with efficiency and some imagination. He had a genuine love of poetry and inspired a few of us with it by reading to us in his melodious voice from his favourite Victorians: Tennyson, Browning and Matthew Arnold. But he was one of those people who are instinctively disliked, especially by instinctive creatures, such as pre-adolescent boys.

  It is hard now to think of any specific reasons for this dislike, except for an element of pretence, even pretentiousness, in his character. The skill and enthusiasm with which he produced the school play each year revealed the actor in his make-up, and there were signs that it was present in other parts of his life. There was something histrionic in his teaching, and in the exercise of his authority. It was effective perhaps, but to a small boy suspect. Much of the man was hidden, and so potentially dangerous.

  He was also, by our boyish standards, an ugly man. Physical appearance played a large part in our judgement of people. Looking back, though, I tend to agree with my mother’s judgement that he was a ‘joli laid’. He had a bulbous nose, high cheekbones and the general appearance of a satyr which was accentuated by a neat, dark beard and moustache. He cultivated certain dandyisms in his dress, such as bow ties, loud checks and corduroys, which made him look like a fairly successful minor artist. He was married to a woman considerably younger than himself and this too, for some odd reason, did not find favour with us.

  Our dislike of Mr Capstick was exploited by Gordon Barrymore to increase his popularity. A mutual antipathy between the two masters soon established itself, Capstick, the dedicated professional, no doubt resenting the easy success of the gifted amateur.

  The year Mr Barrymore came, I was twelve and soon in his senior French class. As my early childhood had been spent in France where my father had held a junior post at the Paris Embassy, I was almost bilingual. My facility with French made me a favourite with Mr Barrymore and, when he discovered that I was not often visited at the school, an only child, somewhat isolated from my family, he showed me great kindness.

  The second term that Mr Barrymore was there was the Summer term. My memory can only recall long sunny days. It must have rained at some time, but it certainly did not on the school Sports Day which occurred in the middle of that term. It was customary for all parents to visit their offspring on this day, but this was not possible for mine because they were in Athens. The only other available relative was an aunt who very rarely took me out from school because she did not drive. So I was one of the few boys without anyone to take me out to lunch that day until Mr Barrymore offered to do so. He was pleased to hear that I was not in the finals for any of the sporting events. ‘We’ll slip away early and avoid the whole ghastly shooting match,’ he said conspiratorially. I was, I think, a little shocked by this attitude because Sports Day was a sacred event in the school’s calendar, but I was also excited and relieved. I had hitherto been rather ashamed of my inadequacies on the playing field, but Mr Barrymore had given me permission to disregard them.

  I had no idea where or how Mr Barrymore lived as I stepped into his purring, leather-scented Jaguar at midday. I did not know where we were going, but I did not ask. It was my habit then as now not to ask questions, but simply to watch and let events unfold, allowing ignorance to give me a fresh eye.

  ‘I’ll take you home first,’ said Mr Barrymore. ‘It’s not far. We’ll pick up my wife. There’s a pub in the village which has quite a decent menu and a perfectly acceptable wine list. I thought we’d go there. All right?’ He winked at me and I laughed back. ‘Right then. Let’s get the hell out of here.�
�� He roared his engine and the Jaguar sped off down the drive of Stone Court, scattering gravel to right and left. Half way down the drive we saw Mr Capstick walking up it. He stepped smartly out of our way with a look of severe disapproval. Mr Barrymore laughed.

  ‘Old sourpuss!’ he said and switched on the car radio—then something of a novelty. A comedy programme was on the ‘Home Service’—Round the Horne as I remember—and we laughed our way through the sunlit Kentish lanes.

  Gordon Barrymore—I was encouraged to call him Gordon outside the school—lived some twenty or thirty miles from Stone Court in a village called Halton off the Canterbury road. His home was called Halton House, which impressed me, a long, half-timbered two-storey building standing in its own grounds. My first impression of it in the full glare of a high Summer sun was vivid. It was just the kind of home I wished my parents had, rambling and ancient, full of quiet corners and immemorial silences. The lawns that surrounded it were heavily shaded with ancient oaks and the occasional copper beach more recently planted.

  When we arrived Mrs Barrymore—Freda—was sitting in a lounger on the terrace, a drink beside her. She waved gaily to us.

  ‘Hullo, sweetie,’ said Gordon. ‘Started on the G and T already? You naughty girl!’

  ‘Couldn’t wait, angel,’ said Freda, then, turning to me: ‘So, you’re the young prodigy. I’ve heard a lot about you. Come and tell me all about yourself.’ Then, to Gordon: ‘Be an absolute saint and freshen my drink, would you darling? And get the young prodigy a lemonade or something.’ Gordon merely laughed and took her glass through the French windows into the house while I sat down opposite her.