The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  DAVID BALSAM

  Great Milton | 22nd December, 1979

  It was the first meeting between professor and peer, and their conversation tapered off as they approached the bronze in the glass cabinet. Professor David Balsam had been promised a private viewing of a major antique that had been in the Risborough family for ninety years. As he reached for it, he knew the same thrill of expectation that had sentenced him to a lifetime in antiquities.

  ‘One second,’ warned the Ninth Marquis of Wye from behind, as he entered a combination on the keypad by the light switch. A red light in the ceiling winked off, disabling the proximity alarm. He nodded, and David lifted the glass guard and took the bronze head in his hands.

  It was exquisitely worked, mesmerising in its coldness. There was the usual disconnect between compact size and heavy weight. He raised it to the light and traced the irregular lines of the base. As he interrogated the piece, he felt he had entered into a separate universe with it. Unconsciously, he was matching it against the vast categories in his mind; the tiny holes were a dead giveaway, the stylistic distinctions notwithstanding. It was of Benin provenance, perhaps from an earlier period, in the light of its divergences from traditional Bini art. The bronze seemed unfinished . . . the dome of the bald head had a shine and perfection that the stylized beard lacked, as though the work had been separated from the craftsman by death or boredom before being completed. He nodded as the gears of recognition suddenly meshed.

  Under his professional veneer, he was deeply disappointed. He was not looking at anything new after all. He must have been delusional to believe he would discover a new, thousand-year-old African bronze in a castle in rural Oxfordshire. He set down the bronze head, still nodding, and pushed his hands into his pockets. Although he still stood there, he had disengaged mentally. Lord Risborough read his body language.

  ‘You don’t think it’s—’

  ‘Excellent,’ he said, turning away. ‘It’s an excellent imitation.’

  There was a small Constable landscape on the wall, among grand pastorals of idyllic English villages, but there was nothing in the room to hold his interest. The voices of the boisterous party filtered over from the hall beyond, but he had accepted the invitation only for the chance to see the bronze behind him. He drifted towards the large double doors that opened onto a balcony, followed by his anxious host.

  ‘How can you tell so quickly? You barely looked at it . . .’

  ‘It’s an unfinished piece,’ said David, parting the drapes and peering out into the premature darkness. ‘Still, it has a couple of unique features. I saw the original years ago in the Grant Collection.’ He hesitated. The balcony looked inhospitably cold, but it offered a temporary respite from the compulsory good cheer of the Christmas season. ‘I do hope you didn’t pay a lot of money for yours.’

  ‘As it happens, I did,’ said Conrad, Lord Risborough, with a grim smile. He was tall and silver-haired, with blue, haunted eyes that set off what seemed to be a kindly disposition. ‘But my granddad must have paid a lot of other people’s blood for it.’

  David paused, his hand on the large doorknob. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s been in the family’s collection since 1899, when he returned to this castle from the Benin Campaign. He brought back a good many trophies, but this one he liked too much to sell.’

  ‘So the piece at The Grant . . .’

  ‘. . . was sold to them by my brother five years ago. When he died this year, I paid to buy it back.’

  ‘I’m sorry about your brother.’ David opened the doors. He was indeed very sorry, for original or not, the piece was already catalogued. While it would be valuable to collectors, for curators and academics like him it was artistically insignificant. He hesitated again as the cold barrelled in.

  ‘Maybe tea will help?’ suggested Conrad. ‘Or cognac, perhaps.’

  ‘Tea sounds good, thank you.’

  * * *

  TEA WAS a wintry affair. In warmer months, it would have been a pleasant view, even in the moonlight, but the trees in the orchard were bare and the view from the balcony was a featureless sweep of snow-covered fields. A bracing wind strafed the balcony, and David looked out on a prospect as bleak as his own future. From a bright and meteoric beginning as the don to watch in his small cubicle in Baliol College, he had acquired his PhD at twenty-five, producing an influential monograph every year for seven years and building a reputation respected on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Then, back in June, while he was in the middle of a messy divorce, his last book, Genesis of Mythical Africa, had debuted with a first paragraph that doused his career in petrol. A reviewer in College Historian had lit the spark by discovering the unattributed, word-for-word, source in a two-year-old article by an unknown Nigerian research student.

  Six months had passed since the College Historian article, and the bonfire was yet to die. He still marvelled at how quickly his hard work of the previous decade had gone down the toilet. He knew he was guilty of the crime of carelessness, but it took a charge of plagiarism to demonstrate the superficiality of his friendships and the cutthroat environment he worked in. His earlier books were now the most borrowed in academic libraries. Students and lecturers alike were keen to share the instant celebrity status of the College Historian reviewer by showing how his Genesis episode was not a one-off gaffe. His lecture tours had collapsed in a deluge of cancellations.

  The invitation to Wye Castle, and the titillating note attached to it, had been difficult to resist: for a start, it was the only one he’d had all month, which was depressing enough in December. For another, it promised a project outside academe. He was due for a year’s sabbatical, but all the prospects he had lined up six months ago had melted away. He needed something to absorb his energies for the next year or so. His lifelong aversion to fieldwork had vanished in the light of his current predicament. In his circumstances, his ideal sabbatical was miles away from academia and from the sort of people who read books like Genesis of Mythical Africa.

  David took his second sip of a now-tepid tea and locked eyes with the other man. ‘Why am I here?’ he asked.

  Conrad put his cup down on the balustrade. He smiled thinly. ‘You mean, apart from the Christmas party?’

  David did not bother to reply.

  There was another silence, in the course of which the professor sipped his tea and the peer’s cup grew colder. Set beside David’s experience, Conrad’s life had been one of sheer privilege: he had been born in the same thirty-room castle in which they stood, where Risboroughs had been born for several generations. His grandfather had sat in the House of Lords, and the family wealth and title had been established at least two hundred years earlier. They held family estates in five counties, from Berkshire to Wales, and they still owned 22 percent of the equity of Smythes Private Bank.

  But there was a deficit side: he was also the last of the Risboroughs and walked as though he carried the very stones of the castle on his shoulders. David had read somewhere of a rare and, as yet, undiagnosed genetic problem that had kept the male heirs of the lineage from living beyond their fifty-fifth birthdays. Conrad’s elder brother had died on schedule, leaving the castle and title to him. And he was a couple of years off the mark himself.

  ‘Please come,’ said Conrad, turning on his heel. He returned to the warmth of the castle’s reception rooms, followed by his guest. They walked through the cocktail room, through the midst of chinking glasses and laughter, exchanging smiles and handshakes, nothing dissipating the gloom of their personal clouds.

  David could not help noticing the only other suit at the party, worn by a pale, smallish man with a permanent smile who stood aloof from the carefree crowd and followed the peer with a fixed stare. ‘I’m keeping you from your friend,’ murmured David.

  ‘Penaka will wait,’ Conrad said shortly. He led the way up a spiral staircase to another level of the castle and entered a room where their heels rang an echo on a stone floor, whose int
ricate patterning was too valuable to be covered with anonymous carpeting. Wall-length tapestries draped the high walls. An Edwardian suite crouched in a corner. The opposite corner was dominated by a crest, under which was sketched an intricate family genealogy tracing generations of the Risboroughs. Conrad stood before the chart and shrugged apologetically. ‘I’m sorry to inflict this on you, but you need to see it, to appreciate where I’m coming from.’

  ‘Shoot,’ said David.

  ‘My grandfather, Laddie Anthony Risborough,’ said Conrad, pointing. ‘He was thirty-eight when he served the Queen in the Benin Campaign. That was one of the wars of pacification that brought the peoples of present-day Nigeria under British rule. He survived the war only to die in his sleep, at the age of fifty-five.’

  ‘I know of him.’

  ‘My father, Paul Christopher, inherited everything, including that bronze. He was born in 1890, and he died on his fifty-fifth birthday. Now it gets interesting. Here’s my brother. He was two years my elder, and he inherited the castle and the peerage. He died this year, at—’

  ‘—the age of fifty-five.’

  Conrad paused. He bit his lip, then he continued, ‘I used to take that flippant tone with my mother. She was the one that drew up this chart. But my brother was unmarried and childless. I am now the owner of Wye Castle and all that is in it.’

  There was a little more gravity in David’s voice as he said, ‘I read something about your genetic predisposition in a local rag many years ago, but why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Because all the medicine money can buy hasn’t diagnosed a genetic condition that can explain the coincidence.’

  ‘Conrad, I’m sure you know I’m no expert in these things. I am just a historian with a special interest in antiquities.’

  There was a final hesitation, then Conrad blurted, ‘I read one of your papers on the ancient Benin kingdom. You wrote that their kings were god-kings, that their court art was almost always used in spiritualist rituals. I know what you are an expert on, and that is why I asked you here today. My mother found my grandfather’s diaries. She won’t let me read them, but she is convinced that our early deaths are linked to that infernal bronze!’

  ‘And you?’

  Conrad hesitated. ‘I am fifty-three. That’s enough to make a believer of anyone. Look at the evidence.’ He indicated the chart. ‘This early-death-syndrome only afflicts Risborough heirs, those who inherit the peerage and the castle—and, by implication, the bronze. My father’s two bachelor brothers died in their eighties. Yet Risboroughs have been inheriting Wye Castle for the past three hundred years.’

  David shook his head. He looked around theatrically, trying for a jocularity he did not feel. ‘This is the Christmas party trick, right? This is the point at which the candid camera comes out of hiding?’

  There was a moment of puzzlement, before Conrad said with cold fury, ‘Do you imagine for one moment that I am sporting with you?’

  ‘Listen, Conrad, pull yourself together. I’ve articulated the belief systems of a pagan ethnic nation. That’s my job. I don’t subscribe to it. This is twentieth-century England, for goodness sake! There may be an explanation for your fifty-five-year syndrome, but you won’t find it in a centuries-old hex!’

  Conrad stared wordlessly at David, and the professor realised—with sudden apprehension—that the peer was not merely frightened; he was terrified. David had heard similar stories from his colleagues in cancer research: otherwise intelligent terminal cancer patients with millions of pounds in assets who descended into shamanism as the veils of despair came down in the terminal stages of cancer. He sighed, beginning to wish he had declined the invitation. ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘I want you to take this on as a project. Research this bronze, David. Where does it come from? What is it? Does it have any . . . occult powers? Is it behind the premature deaths? What can be done to . . . break its power . . . ? All the experts I’ve spoken with tell me that I should look to medicine, not hocus-pocus. But my mother has this gut feeling, which I also share, now, that the bronze is at the root of it. David, I’m begging you, please take this up as your sabbatical project. Money is no object.’

  Indeed, thought David. The last nail he needed for the coffin of his reputation was a new article on the occult powers of centuries-dead craftsmen. He decided to say no, nicely. He knew where to hit rich men: where they lived. ‘Your bronze is worth a fair packet on the block. It could cost you a quarter million to fund my research for a year. Are you prepared to return it free of charge to a Bini king? Just for a stab at a fifty-sixth birthday?’

  Conrad Risborough did not blink. ‘Of course.’

  The professor swallowed, feeling a little of the chill from the death sentence the peer had lived under, ever since he was old enough to realise that his brother might predecease him just in time to pass him their poisoned chalice of a heirloom.

  ‘Fifty-five years, that’s better than half the third world . . .’

  ‘I don’t live in the third world,’ snapped Conrad, ‘I live in England, and fifty-five is twenty years below the national average. Thirty years below my family average. This is the bloody prime of my life!’

  ‘Why don’t you just sell the damn bronze? Or melt it down! You’ve set up an idol, for crying out loud!’

  ‘Sell it!’ A lady hovered tentatively at the door, but Conrad waved her off impatiently. ‘That will be music to Penaka’s ears. He’s been trying to buy it off me, ever since he saw it, but my brother sold it, didn’t he? Fat lot of good it did him.’ Conrad bit his lip. ‘That’s why I got it back. Better have the bugger here where I can keep my eyes on it, eh?’

  His attempt at humour fell flat. David turned away from the chart. He felt insulted. No one would have dared present a project this crackpot to him six months ago. Now it was open season on Professor David Balsam. As he explored that train of thought, his hackles rose. What made him so eminently qualified to exorcise a piece of tribal artwork, after all? His black skin?

  He suddenly tired of it all. He wanted to get into his empty car and drive the sixteen miles of empty country roads to his empty house. He stuck out his hand. He had no more time for niceties. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  Conrad took a while before he accepted the handshake. ‘So am I,’ he said eventually. ‘You will, of course, keep this between us,’ he said as he walked his guest to the car. ‘I should hate to read about our conversation in the Daily Mail.’

  ‘That would embarrass me more than you,’ David snapped.

  The peer stopped in his tracks, and the professor walked to his car alone.

  * * *

  London | 28th April, 2004

  Twenty-four years was a long time in any career, and Professor David Balsam had used the two dozen years since his plagiarism embarrassment to turn his moribund career around. He had joined the Stroud Institute for Humanities Research and, finding himself particularly gifted in its insular brand of politics, had risen over the years to become executive director. He found himself in the very satisfactory position of stinting paymaster to hundreds of academics, many of whom had persecuted him during his travails in Oxford. David Balsam had a long memory for things like that. But even that memory was sorely tested when he received an envelope taped to a heavy gift-wrapped box from a law firm on his birthday.

  His desk was busy, and the mail sat unopened until the end of day, when he took a cognac to the suite of easy chairs in his office. The envelope contained a birthday card, the only one he had received that day. Not that he expected any: he had never married again and had no close relations. The name Conrad on the card did not ring a bell. A letter accompanied the card, but he opened the gift-wrapped package first. The sight of the bronze struck a chill in his heart, bringing back to his mind, for the first time in two decades, his meeting with Conrad Risborough in Wye Castle.

  He reflected that perhaps he had taken offence too quickly at the end of that meeting, but at the time he had been to
o wrapped up in his own problems to make allowance for the state of other people’s minds. With growing disquiet, he sat back and read the letter.

  Happy 54th birthday, David,

  If you are reading this letter, it will mean that I never got the chance to change my will, and that I did not survive my fifty-fifth birthday. I am the end of my line, so I had to think hard about my estate. It may be that we Risborough heirs do have a genetic defect that kills us at fifty-five, in which case you have no reason to fear this valuable bequest of our eighteenth-century Benin bronze. I am passing it on to you, in the same way I got it, by inheritance, for the sake of scientific research. My friend and business partner, Penaka Lee, would have killed for it, but I can think of no other person better qualified to test your genetic defect theory. I am giving you this in time, so that you can, if you choose, take the one-year sabbatical I had so anxiously requested, to investigate the occult powers of your new inheritance. Of course, you may be too busy to do so, in which case you may wish to sell, throw away, loan or melt down the bloody lump of bronze.

  Many more birthdays,

  Your friend,

  Conrad.

  DAVID PUT down the letter. He had concluded, after having met Conrad, that there probably wasn’t a genetic defect to start with: just that overwhelming death wish of a fear. He had died because he believed he would die. David stared at the bronze for a long minute, then went home. He slept well.

  The next morning, the cleaner had moved the head to his desk. It was beautiful, in an ominous sort of way, and an inexplicable dread settled on David. There was an intensity to the bronze that was unnatural. He felt an overwhelming desire to get rid of it, but that, he told himself, would be irrational. It was an exquisite work of art, as every visitor to his office remarked. He resolved not to make the slightest concession to irrationality.

  The months passed, and he behaved with utmost rationality. He even moved the head from his desk to a plinth in the common room where it could be admired by even more visitors to the institute. Still, he rationally observed that he had lost six kilogrammes since the arrival of the bronze and that he spent, on average, one sleepless hour each night, picturing Conrad settling into the chair in which he was found on the morning after his fifty-fifth birthday.