by Stephen Fry
“I believe I’m not the only one,” I said, then wished I hadn’t.
Max flashed his eyes at me and then down to the stem of his glass. “Well, well. Now who on earth can have told you that, I wonder?”
“These things get about.”
“No they don’t. Oh no they don’t. Only happened once. A Christmas some years back. In this very house. And I thought we’d been so very discreet. Well, well, well. There’s a mystery. Can’t be the lady in the case, can it? Fancy that, just fancy that.”
I wriggled a bit on this hook. It was hardly my intention to land David in the poo; in his relation of the Great Shooting Sabotage (you’ll have read that by now, Jane) he had only told me the story of Rebecca and Max in the night-time as an incidental detail. He hadn’t even understood it himself at the time.
In casting about for a convincing way to change the subject, I recalled something that Donald Pulsifer the wild-life photographer had once told me. The way to confuse and pacify an angry gorilla, he said, is to start hitting yourself. If you make a blistering assault upon your own person, slapping your cheeks, punching yourself in the stomach, tearing at your hair and clawing at your face, the animal will stop in its tracks, tilt its head and—likely as not—come forward to cuddle and caress you in sympathy, licking your wounds and cradling you like a baby.
“Can’t deny it was a shock to see Rebecca coming through the door this evening,” I said, deciding to test Pulsifer’s theory. “We had a furious row at Jane’s christening. Well, that’s what I tell the world. The fact of the matter is I was drunk and I was dreadful. A couple of years earlier Rebecca had nourished something of a tendre for me, you see. To her I was rather more than a casual bedmate. My first wife Fee had run off with that American Open Field poet and I had become a sodden and available mess. Then Patrick Burrell started lapping and sniffling around her loins and she gave me an ultimatum. ‘If you don’t marry me, I’ll up and marry Patrick,’ she said. ‘Then marry the daft turd,’ says I. ‘What the fuck do I care?’ That was bad. Very bad. She kept to her word, duly wed the oily rat and out popped Jane, for whom I was chosen as godfather, as much, I believed, to prove to me that she was ‘Happy! Ha, ha! Blissfully, blissfully happy,’ as anything else, and I accepted to show that there were no hard feelings on my side either. And then at the . . . what do you call them . . . wakes? That can’t be right, at the christening party . . . there must be a proper name for them . . . I did a very stupid thing.”
“Oh yes?” Max was sucked in now and seemed to have lost interest in my knowledge of his own little secret.
“I found Rebecca alone in the conservatory. I said to her that I missed her. I said to her that I wished I hadn’t let her marry Patrick.”
“Oh, you idiot.”
“It was true. Damnation, it was true.”
“What use was that to her?”
“Well, I know that now, don’t I? I had imagined, in my champagne blur, that she would be touched. Instead of which she smashed fifteen panes of conservatory window and roof in her fury. I let it be put about that she had been repelling my unwanted advances.”
“Well, that certainly explains a great deal,” said Max. “Do you know, I have always wondered why Rebecca freezes at the sound of your name?”
“Well, now you know.”
“Lord, Ted, I’d’ve thought you knew women better than to have made a blunder like that.”
This egregious man-of-the-world matiness hardly qualified in my book as cradling my head and licking my wounds, but it was an improvement on the icy stare of a minute ago.
“Let’s have you down this end, you two,” called Michael. “We’re going to have some fun with the ladies and those balloons.”
So we filled our lungs with helium, crept into the drawing room and made the women scream.
An evening of games followed, the details of which you won’t be anxious to hear. I rather shone in charades, fooling everyone with my vivid portrayal of an army of rabbits calling a truce.
“It must be Watership Down!” everyone cried.
Ha, ha. It was War and Peace. Warren Peace, do you see?
Simon made an arse of himself as guesser in a round of “In the Manner of the Word,” on account of never having heard of the word “archly.” I’m afraid he is rather an oaf, that boy.
I tried to get Oliver alone to quiz him about our earlier, interrupted conversation, you remember the one I mean?
“Patricia . . . wanted sinful Davey all for herself . . . And we know why, don’t we?”
“We do?”
“Well, of course we do! Don’t we? I mean, darling. I assumed you were here for the same . . .”
But Oliver proved elusive, and after bidding goodnight to the non-resident guests, we all wound our ways to our several beds.
And now it is Saturday morning, an equestrian party has departed for trottings, canterings and gallopings about the park, my neck is stiff, Podmore has promised to provide a late breakfast and this letter is done.
Yours aye
Ted
CHAPTER 5
I
12a Onslow Terrace
London SW7
27th July 1992
Dear Ted,
What a long letter. How beautifully printed. How absorbing. How alarming. I shall answer your numerous questions one at a time.
Patricia: Yes, I did know that she would be joining you at the weekend. I saw no special reason to tell you. She is not spying on the spy if that has been worrying you. She is there simply because she wants to be. As you discovered, she is recovering from an unhappy love affair. I am very interested in her comings and goings, however, and would beg you to watch closely there. Patricia is very vulnerable and I want her to come to no harm.
Mummy: I had no idea that she would be coming down, although I am not surprised to hear it. I am very grateful for the elliptical (is that the word?) way in which you have filled me in about your relationship with her. She often moves from place to place without telling me, there is nothing unusual in that. She knows nothing of the reason for your visit (nor does Patricia) although both of them are aware of my leukaemia, as are the Logans.
Michael: I am sure he will consent to your request. If he doesn’t it hardly matters, you will just have to be an unofficially inquisitive guest instead of a licenced writer-in-residence.
There are now a number of specific things that you can do for me.
Firstly: Please stop using Latin tags in your letters. You should by now be beyond the stage of having to demonstrate your superiority over me. The same goes for pointing out spelling mistakes and incorrect usages.
Secondly: Enquire about the twins, Edward and James. You have hardly mentioned them. You say they are “staying with family.” What family? Where? Why? When are they returning? This may be important.
Thirdly: Find out how Oliver is and what brings him here.
Fourthly: I need more information about Aunt Anne. You told me nothing for instance of her reaction to David’s outburst about Michael’s newspaper holdings at the dinnertable on Thursday.
Fifthly: On no account mess around with Patricia. She is very special and not to be trifled with.
Sixthly: You have talked only about the guests. The house is full of other men and women. There are indoor and outdoor servants, there is Podmore. I have heard nothing of them.
Seventhly: Constant vigilance; constant awareness; constant observation; constant openness.
I shall write no more because I want you to get this as soon as possible.
Much love
Jane
II
Swafford Hall
Swafford
DISS
Norfolk
25th July 1992
Jane—
As you can see, I’m at Swafford! Y
ou’ll never imagine who’s here too! Your mother for one, looking fantastically elegant, and . . . wait for it . . . Ted Wallace, your long-lost godfather. I wish you could make it over too. You’ve always said you wanted to get to know him. As far as I can tell he’s here for simply ever, so why don’t you come on down? He and your mother seem to be getting on rather well, which is a bit of a surprise—David tells me they used to hate each other.
And what about David?! Everything you said seems to be absolutely true, though there is the veritablest queue for his attentions. I’m having to fight off that dreadful Oliver Mills as well as Ted and even, I think, your mother, just to get five minutes alone with him.
Who else is here? Oh, Max and Mary Clifford, natch, and their daughter Clara who’s rather squinty and peculiar and unfortunate. Michael’s been a bit quiet but we had an incident-packed dinner party on Thursday, lots of local worthies present, including Ronald Leggatt, the Bishop of Norwich, and his fat wife, Fabia. The Draycotts were there naturally, those dreary literary people the Whitings, and some other couple I couldn’t place.
As soon as we sat down, Oliver started behaving dreadfully, telling all kinds of shatteringly inappropriate stories and talking about sex in a loud voice, so I gave Ted who was sitting beside me a swift kick to get him to try and change the subject. Big mistake! I think you have been well off not knowing that man. There are football hooligans in gaol who could fairly claim to be more sensitive and less piggish.
“I blame this ghastly obsession with therapy,” he said, on the subject of everybody’s obsession with sex. “It’s a short space between ‘therapist’ and ‘the rapist,’ after all.”
“What’s wrong with therapy, Ted?” I asked—I hope not too snappishly. I didn’t want to give the impression that I’d been under one myself.
“Well, it comes down to which damned language you choose, doesn’t it?” he said, in an extravagantly patient voice, as if I were a two-year-old. I think he is one of those kind of men who would talk to Marie Curie as if she were a drooling illiterate.
“Are you talking about sexual discourse here?” Malcolm Whiting asked.
“No, he’s discoursing about sexual talk,” said Oliver.
“I wrote a book called The Love Tree which you may have . . .” the Whiting idiot started to say.
“I’m saying this,” Uncle T. interrupted. “In the old days, when we thought that our souls were at stake, Latin had all the authority and it was the curate or the curé who did the curing. Now, in the technical age, we say psyche for soul, and therapist for curate, Greek being the language of science. Mind you, with all this New Age wank around, we’ve turned to Anglo-Saxon too and the world has started to blather on about ‘healing.’ Same process—holy, sane or healthy: cure, therapy or healing.”
“You really don’t see a difference, Mr. Wallace?” asked the Bishop. “You don’t perceive different kinds of ill-health?”
“Different kinds of ‘unholiness,’ you mean? Well. If I break my leg I go to see my old friend Doctor Posner. If I break my heart I go to see my old friend Doctor Macallan.”
“Doctor Macallan?”
“He means whisky,” your mother explained, while directing an acid “Why-can’t-you-shut-up-and-leave-well- alone?” look at Ted.
“Ah,” said the Bishop, “and suppose one of your children were sick in some way?”
“Loopy?”
“If you like. I assume you wouldn’t fill them up with whisky?”
“It’s always struck me,” said Max, “that if someone believed they were Napoleon I’d send them to someone else who believed that they were the Duke of Wellington. That’d sort them out.”
“Few people are spiritually unhealthy in quite such a clear-cut way, however,” the Bishop said.
“Ah well, ‘spiritually’ is your word, you see,” replied Ted. “One man’s ‘spiritual ill-health’ is another man’s ‘lack of self-esteem’ is another man’s ‘oversupply of blood-sugar’ is another man’s ‘holistic imbalance.’ You pays your exorbitant fee and you takes your worthless choice. The fact is nothing can ever be truly cured or therapied or made whole.”
“Whatever do you mean?” Michael asked. This was getting dangerous.
“Everything rots. At the risk of special pleading, only art can halt the process.”
“What a load of pompous balls, darling,” said Oliver. “Gone are the days when art bestowed immortality. ‘So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’ and all that wank. The invention of the camera gave us all eternal life. The Dark Lady and the Golden Boy of the sonnets are no more immortal now than Oprah Winfrey or the contestants on the ‘Wheel of Fortune.’”
Ted wasn’t having any of that. “You don’t believe that for a moment and besides, it isn’t what I meant. You must surely confess that artists, certainly dead ones, are more intelligent, sensitive and intuitive than any therapist with a degree in psychogibber from Keele university or any scurfy outreach parson with a diploma from King’s or for that matter any mad Druid channeling energy with hot hands and a lump of amethyst.”
“But, honey, we all know that art is what drives people mad.”
“Oh, artists are mad, Oliver, I’ll give you that. Every man Jack and every woman Jill of them. All practitioners of the spirit are mad. Show me a sane psychotherapist and I’ll show you a charlatan, show me a holy priest, saving the Bishop’s reverence, and I’ll show you an apostate, show me a healthy New Age healer and I’ll show you a mountebank. But who’s to say that sending a patient to a recital or an art gallery isn’t a better balm for hurt minds than forcing them to talk about their relationship with their mothers or stuffing them full of Holy Bread?”
“But you do distinguish between the mind and the body I suppose?” Rebecca said. “I mean, you wouldn’t send a man with a physical disease to an art gallery, surely?”
“Of course he would. That’s why the Tate is already so full of lepers,” said Max, earning rather a cheap and obvious laugh, I thought.
“The anti-hero of The Love Tree is brought down by . . .”
“No, no.” Ted was getting het up now. “A mechanical fault can be corrected and medicine is perfectly competent at that. But it isn’t healing, it isn’t making whole.”
“And healing can only come from art?”
I felt we were drowning in precisely the sort of conversation we shouldn’t be having, but I honestly couldn’t see any way out of it. All the Logans, David, Simon, Michael and Anne, were staring at Ted, practically open-mouthed.
“Put it this way,” replied Ted, “we’re all grown-ups. Even the religious amongst us are no longer superstitious. Nobody happy and confident believes in ghosts or telepathy or miracles. But art abides. It is the only thing that not only cannot be disproved, but can actually be tangibly and incontrovertibly proved.”
He looked round with an indecently smug expression on his face, as if challenging us to disagree. Most of us just gawped down at our dinner-plates in embarrassment. It couldn’t have been more killingly awful if he had taken out his whanger and stuffed it in Lady Draycott’s ear. David stared at me in consternation and Rebecca shook her head sorrowfully. Then Simon, stupid clod-hopping Simon, above whose head the whole undercurrent had flowed (if that makes sense), started to speak.
“Well, I think that there are some things that can’t be explained . . .” he began, but mercifully Michael galloped to the rescue by talking about his newspapers.
Even that wasn’t safe ground, mind you. It provoked a very strange scene with David blurting out how he’d always hated Michael owning tabloids. The young can be so puritanical, can’t they? I can remember being a bit like that at his age, but not quite as daring. Michael took it like a lamb, but all in all it had turned into a very odd dinner party.
But what was Ted up to? I mean he does know, I assume? Perhaps I should take him aside
and tell him not to meddle? Unless his slobbery grins mean nothing, he’s desperate to sleep with me, so I should be able to get him to behave. He spent all of yesterday banged up in his room “writing,” which probably means drinking his shame away.
It’s such a pity you aren’t here, Jane. Surely those doctors will have finished their tests by now? I don’t know how you can bear to miss all the fun. I reluctantly confess that Oliver ought to be first in the queue as his need is greater than mine, but my Lord is looking forward to it all . . .
All my love
Pat
PS: Blast, I’ve missed the Saturday post, so you won’t get this till Tuesday at the earliest.
III
Swafford
28.vii.92
Jane,
Disaster. Absolute fucking disaster. I don’t know how it happened and I don’t know how I’m going to tell you. I am tempted to run from Swafford squealing the words “Fly, fly! All is lost!” It may be that flight will be pre-empted in any case, by a swift and savage ejection. The threat hangs over me like the sword of Damocles. That’s Greek by the way, so it’s allowed . . . which brings me to this point: where the hell do you get off telling me to avoid Latin tags? Amongst the dwindling number of perks that come with old age are included:
A) a literal and metaphorical presbyopia which allows distant schoolgirls and distant schoolboy Latin to come sharply into focus
B) a contempt for self-image and the opinion of others
C) the respect and deference of one’s juniors (or—if that is too Latinate for you—”the high thought and fealty of one’s youngers”).
Or so I had fondly imagined.
We’ll make a deal: I will lay off the Latin if you promise never EVER to use words like “special” again. Thank you.