At Reggio di Calabria, where we were to turn about, we lost Gino in obscure circumstances to a citizen of Hamburg, over from Messina for the day. As a replacement, and through some quirk of temper, Anderman took on a grubby old creature who, anxious to impose himself for the rest of his days upon a granddaughter living in Salerno, was willing to work his passage to that end. This annoyed Frediano, who had enjoyed unobtrusively bullying Gino from time to time. He appeared to regard the old man as not quite fair game.
We turned north. Frediano was to disembark where we had taken him on, presumably to return to his occupation as a labourer. I wondered what sort of farewells there were going to be, and whether, either at that parting or earlier, any clearer light would play upon the enigmatical relationship that had so rapidly built itself up on the Ithaca. And one further small incident did take place. We spent the night before the youth’s departure moored to the crumbling quay of what appeared to be a deserted village. According to Anderman, it had been devastated by an earthquake many years before. I was curious about this, and got up unusually early with the idea of an exploratory walk before breakfast. As I left my tiny cabin I ran into Frediano leaving Tindale’s. He went past with an unembarrassed but oddly absent smile. It seemed to me that he was bewildered. I felt bewildered myself, although it wasn’t the response that the situation might have been expected to elicit. Had Frediano left a Tindale who was murmuring: ‘The dawn—ah, God I—the dawn it comes too soon’? I found I didn’t believe it. Had they spent the night together playing Snakes and Ladders – or on their knees, praying to the Blessed Virgin? I hadn’t a clue, I never was to gain a clue, as to this aspect of the affair. Later that day Tindale and Frediano said good-bye to one another. It was after a short – and, as I judged – serious conversation. Frediano wasn’t mentioned again, except by Anderman, who casually remarked to me that the name was an uncommon one, and that its main association was with the criminal quarter of the city of Florence.
This didn’t prove, however, to be the boy’s epitaph, for he turned up in Amalfi some months later. Tindale, it seemed, was sending him to school. It can’t have been exactly a children’s school, since Frediano was too old for that. And it had no ecclesiastical character, so he didn’t have to dress in a quasi-monkish fashion. (His clothes were clearly provided, and a little too lavishly, by his patron.) Perhaps Frediano had been placed in what would elsewhere be called a college of further education – although any education he’d had to start off with had certainly been negligible. However, he was clever enough to make do.
He lodged somewhere in the town. Anderman and Tindale, when at home, were ministered to by a couple of respectable elderly women, and were far from holding themselves out as running any sort of youth club. (In this they differed from my old friend Colonel Morrison, whose housekeeper had always enjoyed the assistance of one or two young men.) I suppose that Frediano went, as it were, to tea from time to time, but it was clear that he was by no means under Tindale’s wardenship round the clock. I glimpsed him several times in a bar, and on each occasion in the company of a different girl – a circumstance confirming me in the view that he commanded a very normal sexual orientation at need. Once, aware of being thus under observation, he gave me a look of alarmed appeal, as if begging me not to tell tales. Tindale’s radical feelings about the other sex, I reflected, were such that he would regard his protege’s ‘going with a woman’ (which had been Colonel Morrison’s forbidding phrase) as a very deep treachery indeed.
But Tindale continued to turn up at the Villa d’Orso from time to time, and he talked to Penny as much as to myself. I think this was partly because, unlike his housemate, he was nervous of public opinion and fearful of gossip, and had got her into his head as a respectable association. There may have been some deeper prompting one could know nothing of. I was now almost sure that about Frediano he was in a high old muddle: the sort of muddle in which sons and lovers become telescoped conceptions. He might be in some similarly odd muddle about my wife. That their relationship, such as it was, remained quirky and unstable was all that I could be certain of.
Apart from their longer cruises in the Ithaca, Anderman and Tindale did a good deal of pottering about the Gulf of Salerno. They took Frediano with them from time to time – sometimes, but not always, accompanied by one of the parroco’s pious young men. Occasionally, indeed, they took the parroco as well; he was inordinately fond of fishing. In several of these day-trips, as they were, Penny and I had joined. I saw them as a kind of civil tailing-off of the nautical phase in our Italian life, since I was determined that we shouldn’t again go on a long cruise down the coast. Penny was more enthusiastic, although it was clear that the sea in itself now bored her. As soon as Frediano turned up in Amalfi I had given her an account of his history as it was known to me. For by this time, I had got into the way of doing a certain amount of thinking about young men in relation to her, and I must naively have supposed that she would refrain from developing much interest in one seemingly committed as Frediano was. Naturally, the information didn’t in fact work that way. And as Penny made several of these short expeditions without me, I’d have been a greater fool than I was if I hadn’t sometimes wondered whether she was a little trying the enigmatical boy out. What I failed to recall was the perverseness (and ingenuity) of her imagination.
Anderman owned an informed interest in the fauna and flora of the region, and had recently taken up its herpetology (a study pursued by Douglas, if I remember aright). He had now heard a rumour that on one of the few minute islands west of Capri – it was called the Piccolo Gallo – there had lately been discovered a new variety of a blue and black lizard (Lucerta muralis faraglionensis) of considerable zoological curiosity. He was eager to confirm this, and we set off accordingly on one very fine late September morning: Anderman, Tindale, Frediano, Penny and myself. We were all suitably and soberly equipped. Anderman had paraphernalia for securing and transporting specimens if he found any. I, as being more interested in uccelli (of which there were few) than rettili (of which there were many), took binoculars. Tindale had a garment in which he could swim with decency. Frediano had fishing tackle and may have hoped for his old adversary, pesce spada. Penny, whose reading was always at random, had provided herself with a small volume called The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates (rather, it occurred to me, as if Socrates had been Chairman Mao).
We anchored off the island, and Anderman and I rowed over to it in the dinghy, which on these occasions bobbed along behind the Ithaca. We left Frediano already fishing, Penny deep in her studies, and Tindale letting down the rope-ladder by which he would regain the deck after his swim. The Piccolo Gallo proved, when we disembarked, to be long and narrow, with a rocky spine which rose at its western extremity to a sort of comb or crest from which the island presumably took its name. We worked along it for about an hour. Anderman found this and that, but not his lizard. I had a similarly thin time with birds. Eventually we scaled the crest, and commanded a considerable view. I swept the sea with the binoculars and then let them rest on the Ithaca, which lay nearly half a mile off. Anderman observed the action.
‘Are they up to anything ?’ he asked, in his casual manner.
‘Nothing out of the way,’ I answered, and swiftly restored the binoculars to their case. The truth of my reply might have been a matter of opinion. Amidships on the yacht was a small deck-house, the roof of which made an agreeable spot for sunbathing. Penny was lying on top of it now, and might have been described as fully exposed to the sun but for the fact that Frediano was in turn lying on top of her. As both were stark naked there couldn’t be much doubt about what was going on. But it wasn’t quite all that was going on. The rope-ladder had been drawn up, as if Tindale were already back on board. Only he wasn’t. His head was bobbing on the surface of the sea a dozen yards from the Ithaca. Helpless to intervene, or to do more, I suppose, than cry out with heaven knows what emotion, he might very well have been described as permitted to watch this small dra
ma from the pit.
I don’t think Penny had thought about the binoculars, or about their owner either. I had no part in the atrocious fantasy she had so brilliantly and economically actualised. I don’t suppose she had bothered her head about the performance’s sequel, although she may have supposed that Frediano would be silent, that Tindale would have no choice but to swallow his humiliation, and that the brief divertissement would remain three people’s secret to the end.
I didn’t in the least puzzle over Penny’s part in the affair. But what about Frediano? Perhaps there is no great puzzle there either. Even supposing him (and I do so suppose him) to have developed decent feelings in response to Tindale’s devotion, he can’t have done other (or be blamed for having done other) than harbour a certain impatience and resentment in face of the bewildering role in which he had been cast. And, again, what young man, not of morbid mind, could resist having Penny when Penny was suddenly on offer to him? There remains Tindale, bobbing impotently in the sea. Frediano – for it was that sort of moment, after all – may simply have forgotten about him. Or Penny may so have spun out her enticements that Frediano’s sense of time became confused and he believed that his patron must still be swimming a safe half-mile away. In any case, Penny had them both just where she wanted them.
Come son’ crudele, le donne! I don’t recall these words as impudently spoken, and they suggest to me that Frediano, although his lapse would have pained the parroco, was not a conspirator. But I may be wrong. Perhaps I have too much kindness for him – for the queer reason that he rang down a curtain so resoundingly on an unsatisfactory marriage. I drove to Naples that night, and was in London on the following day. There seemed nothing else for it. Crudelta was the only word for Penny’s last experiment. And that she could carry it out after nearly three years of marriage meant that I had been no use to her at all.
XV
Between Frediano and the Sheldrake twins, even the physical resemblance may not have been all that striking. The memory of Frediano had undoubtedly stirred in me just below the level of consciousness at the moment of my first glimpsing Mark Sheldrake outside my rooms in Surrey. But that might have been largely because Frediano had remained for me – again in a scarcely conscious fashion – the archetype of good looks in a young man. And a little, no doubt, it had been because those rooms had been Tindale’s long ago. The odd experience on the Cherwell had followed. I couldn’t, as a result, be ignorant of the nature of Penny’s current conduct.
It was conduct which was blessedly no longer any business of mine – or at least so it would be rational to conclude. Yet there was one aspect of her Oxford foray that I couldn’t help reflecting on as I walked back to college from that river picnic. The plurality of the Sheldrakes was the circumstance that must most attract one with Penny’s peculiar turn of mind. She was finding amusement in the thought of having – and in so unusual a manner – two strings to her bow. That might be almost innocent in itself. But the situation would undoubtedly set her imagination to work. And there was little likelihood that she had outgrown her liability to convert undisciplined fantasy into fact. Of course, it was scarcely possible that the twins, being as they were, lacked experience on how to cope with predatory persons. But then Penny was more formidable than most.
Passing through the college gate with these thoughts in my head, I came upon Charles Atlas. Although a young man, he had some old-fashioned tastes and habits, and he was now engaged in strapping a small pile of books to the carrier of his bicycle. He took a glance at my clothes.
‘Duncan,’ he said, ‘how pleasant to see that even a university reader can snatch a brief period of leisure now and then.’
‘I’ve been on the river most of the day, as a matter of fact. Holding the fort with the Bedworth children, among other things, while Cyril supports the college on his shoulders.’
‘What about supporting the affair above our heads at this moment? How is that committee getting on?’
‘The committee on the tower? Not too rapidly, Charles. Of course I lack experience of the pace at which such deliberations are conducted. But I’d say not too rapidly at all.’
‘Is Edward dragging his feet?’ As he asked this question Atlas looked round rapidly – I suppose to insure that nobody could possibly overhear our Provost’s being referred to on a critical note.
‘Yes, he is—but I feel with some deep intent. I have a notion he’s going to spring a mine of some sort.’
‘Surely nothing could be less appropriate than that’ Atlas, who liked mild jokes, paused to appreciate this one. ‘And it seems it’s what the undergraduates are going to do anyway with their tiresome Tamburlaine. I suppose you’re producing it, Duncan?’
‘No, I’m not. But it looks as if Albert Talbert is.’
‘Albert?’ Atlas giggled joyfully at this absurd idea. ‘Preposterous!’
‘Well, he seems to think he is, but it’s possible the young men will head him off. As for the tower, there’s nothing to report.’
‘It’s becoming clear there must be an appeal – but just to the old members, at least in the first place. A number of people are coming to think that way, Duncan. And we have an idea that Arnold Lempriere should be in charge of it.’
‘Arnold?’ It was my turn to be incredulous. I’d have thought he wasn’t at all the man to organise such a thing.’
‘Well, jointly with the Provost, of course. Arnold has the advantage of being terribly concerned about the venerable pile. And he’s had more of the nobility and gentry and affluent classes generally as his pupils than any half dozen tutors in the college bundled together. Just wait for his memorial service, and you’ll see.’
‘I hope I’ll have to wait a long time for that. But I take your point.’
‘It might get his mind off all those schools, as well.’
‘Schools—what schools?’
‘All those places of primitive education I have to deal with as Tutor for Admissions. Arnold believes in visiting them.’
‘So he does, Charles. He’s been on at me about it. Wants me to go talent-scouting to Loretto and Glenalmond and God knows where.’
‘Unfortunately he has been rather stepping it up himself.’ Again Atlas looked rapidly round, and I knew there was gossip to come. ‘Proposing himself to headmasters like mad. Provided they have swimming-pools – open-air ones. And a spot of puris naturalibus, as he likes to say. Arnold goes and blamelessly goggles. It takes the place of Parson’s Pleasure. He’s dropped that this term.’
‘That wretched Mumford boy!’
‘Quite so. Mind you, one can be sure Arnold always behaves perfectly. It’s an embarrassment, all the same. I’ve had a tactful letter or two – simply as being the man the headmasters generally correspond with.’
I don’t know how I’d have reacted to this disconcerting news if we had not been joined at this moment by the Estates Bursar, Geoffrey Quine. Quine was not seen all that frequenctly in college, but this didn’t mean he was lacking in devotion to his job. He had to keep his eye on a large number of agricultural properties scattered over the kingdom, and when he wasn’t discussing the crimes and follies of various government departments with disgruntled tenants he was likely to be conferring with persons of influence in the City of London. These may have included, for all I knew, the egregious Cyril Mumford himself.
‘Chatting about the tower?’ Quine asked, genially.
‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘And I was saying to Charles that our plans don’t seem to be advancing very fast.’
‘At least the legal position has come clear. These are rather absurd places, you know. Oxford colleges, I mean.’
‘Just what’s absurd now, Geoffrey?’ It was with a trace of irritation that Atlas asked this. Quine remained to a certain extent an outsider. Despite his skills being held in high regard, he was expected to be moderate in any censures directed upon our ways.
‘I gave you all a hint at that G.B. meeting, didn’t I, that there might be a certain eleme
nt of personal discomfiture ahead of us if things go wrong? Well, I’m going round in my unobtrusive way being more explicit about that now. It’s those troublesome Statutes again. They make it clear that the maintenance of the fabric is a first charge on the revenues of the college. And now I’ve had counsel’s opinion on the ramifying consequences of that. If the tower really begins to totter the college would be in breach of Statute if it paid any of us a penny until it was clear we had the means to prop it up again. How do you take that, Charles?’
It was clear that Atlas took it seriously. I’m not sure he hadn’t turned pale. All right-thinking members of Governing Bodies regarded being in breach of Statute as the ultimate sin that mortal man can commit.
‘Of course one would accept some element of sacrifice,’ Atlas said. ‘But what you suggest is quite outrageous. And a statute can always be emended or abrogated by the Queen in Council.’
‘With the sanction of the University nowadays, my dear Charles.’ Quine chuckled, happily. ‘And everybody believes us to be as rich as Croesus. We’d have to move uncommonly cautiously. Pedetemptim etgradat’tm, as you learned folk would say.’
Here, too, was disconcerting intelligence, although it upset me less than hearing about the unfortunate conduct of Lempriere. This wasn’t because sudden academic penury would affect me less than some other people. It was simply that I didn’t believe what Quine said. It is true that one learns from Hedda Gabler the fallaciousness of insisting there are things people don’t do. But here was something that doesn’t happen. Whatever might befall a college tower it was certain that, so long as the general social fabric held, no large body of Oxford scholars would find itself suddenly on the dole. Reading of such an event in one’s newspaper, for example, was totally inconceivable.
The Madonna of the Astrolabe Page 21