The Troubadour Page 4

  ‘Not exactly empty,’ said Jeremy; ‘our kit was in them. Anyhow, they couldn’t let them to anybody else, in case we came back and made a row with the Tourist Board.’

  ‘We shan’t be back for tonight either,’ said Fielding glumly; ‘nor even for tomorrow night by the look of it.’

  ‘What does it matter?’ Jeremy said. ‘There is nothing we can do about any of that – hasn’t been since we embarked. I must say, the twins have done their best to make us comfy. Those bedding rolls in the cabin were soft and warm – I wonder where they slept, by the way? – and corned beef hash makes a very decent dinner once in a way. Nice brisk wine; strong coffee and warm rolls at breakfast: a credit to the establishment.’

  He waved cheerfully (rather like the Michelin man, thought Milo; tall as he is, it’s high time he did something about that blubber) to the passing maiden, who was carrying a bucket of something or other but waved politely back with the other arm.

  ‘It’s all very well for you,’ said Fielding to Jeremy. ‘You’re a rich man. It’s all very well for Milo – he’s your guest. But these days I cannot afford to take rooms in fancy tourist hotels and then not use them.’

  ‘Your entertainment on this boat is presumably free,’ said Jeremy. ‘That makes up for it.’

  ‘I still resent paying for a room I haven’t slept in.’

  ‘Stop grizzling,’ said Jeremy, ‘as Nanny would say.’

  ‘I mean it,’ said Fielding: ‘you don’t realise how poor I am. I haven’t the energy to write as many books as I used –’

  ‘– Too much pleasure,’ Milo said.

  ‘– And nobody reads the ones I do write, or if they do they get them out of libraries –’

  ‘– What about the cash you extracted from Canteloupe,’ said Jeremy; ‘for not letting on about the – er – suspected ellipsis in the line of his inheritance?’

  ‘That was years ago, and anyway you’re not meant to know about it. That was the whole point. Canteloupe gave me…rather a lot of money…to see the secret didn’t get out. Who told you?’

  ‘You did,’ said Jeremy, ‘when you were pissed.’

  ‘Oh, well. The original agreement was to do with some book I was writing – I had to keep it all out of that, though it might have been very handy as part of the plot. As it happened the book was quite successful in any case – the last of my books that made any money. It’s gone now, of course, as well as Canteloupe’s subvention.’

  ‘Ask him for a new lot,’ Milo said.

  ‘That would be blackmail.’

  ‘Oh, would it? And what was it the first time?’

  ‘A friendly exercise in discretion. Anyhow,’ said Fielding Gray, ‘I understand that Canteloupe now has his own problems about money. Cant-Fun has fucked up.’

  ‘An ugly intransitive use,’ said Milo, ‘of a transitive verb. Shortage of greens is no excuse for mangling your grammar.’

  ‘Poor Fielding,’ said Jeremy. ‘I’ll have to see what can be done when I get home…on the strict condition that you sit right down and start writing again, if only to keep you out of mischief.’

  ‘I’m too old for mischief. Like a potted shrimp.’

  ‘Then there’s more reason to pass the time by writing.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing left to say,’ Fielding said. ‘I haven’t had for years. But one learns lots of tricks as one grows old in the profession, so one can go on for a long time doling up the same old thing to look fresh and attractive. Beef dressed as veal (like all veal these days). But sooner or later one gets rumbled, and anyway I’ve lost patience.’

  They all of them looked at the sea. They seemed to have turned a degree or two to the east: the pretty, broken theatres of Nicopolis were plainly visible, weeping in a wilderness of thorn.

  ‘Nobody goes to Nicopolis any more,’ Milo said. ‘Raisley told me. There’s a fast new road which bypasses it, and no one can be bothered to stop.’

  Isobel Stern and Jo-Jo Guiscard, each holding one hand of Oenone Guiscard, walked up the hill into St-Bertrand-de-Comminges and turned into the PTT, where they received their correspondence, together with a blast of snotch and a Pompeian shower of cigarette ash, from the postmaster. Isobel bought a technicolor ice-cream cornet for Oenone (the only person whom Isobel ever indulged); they walked down a narrow street to the ramparts, and settled on a seat to read the news from England, lifting their eyes occasionally to the massed Pyrenees.

  ‘Marius has condescended to write to me at last,’ Isobel said:

  ‘“Darling Mummy, I dreamt last night that we were all in your Lagonda, driving to Cambridge for Tully Sarum’s christening.6 You remember? You nearly ran over some old-age pensioners in Barnet, and when Daddy disapproved you said they all ought to be dead anyway. ”’

  ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ said Jo-Jo. ‘What a lovely caring person you must have been in those days.’

  ‘Was Oenone there?’ said Oenone.

  ‘Oenone was at the christening later,’ said Isobel in a satin voice, ‘inside Mummy Jo-Jo. Mummy Jo-Jo hoped Oenone was a boy.’

  ‘Oenone would like to have been a boy,’ Oenone said; ‘then she would have had one of those purdy pink prawns pour faire pé pé in the gutter, like the little French boys do. Much more convenient than Oenone’s cunt.’

  ‘Who taught her to say “cunt”?’ said Isobel.

  ‘Mummy did. Mummy said,“This is your twat, prat, quim or cunt. Little boys will want to touch it, and so will bigger boys too, but you mustn’t let them. ”’

  ‘Sex education,’ said Jo-Jo. ‘I’m not quite such a bad mother as you think. Go on with Marius’ letter.’

  ‘“Well, the old-age pensioners probably are dead by now; Tully Sarum of Old Sarum certainly is, and so is Daddy. Jeremy Morrison – ”’

  ‘– I like Jeremy Morrison,’ Oenone said. ‘When he was here he let me lie in his arms, like I used to when I was a baby. I hoped that he would touch my twat, prat, quim or cunt, but he didn’t.’

  ‘“ – Jeremy Morrison,” Isobel went on, “has gone to the Peloponnesus with Major Fielding Gray and Milo Hedley. Did you see any of them while they were in your part of the world? I don’t suppose you saw Milo, because he was in Raisley Conyngham’s camp, so you would only have seen the other lot. Milo has joined the other lot now, and has gone on to the Peloponnesus with Major Fielding Gray and Jeremy. ”’

  ‘Curiously childish style,’ said Jo-Jo; ‘writing to you must retard him somehow.’

  ‘He liked it when I fancied him as a little boy,’ said Isobel: ‘he liked being tickled and snuggled and kissed on his eyes and ears. Perhaps he wishes that it could happen again.’

  ‘So it could, if you both wanted it.’

  ‘Stop being inflammatory,’ Isobel said. ‘The next bit isn’t so childish. “The real purpose of this letter is to tell you that I have asked Jeremy to bear my greetings to my father, whose grave (as you presumably remember) is in the Jewish cemetery of Zacynthos. Although you are now one of Sappho’s gang, and started your affair with Jo-Jo Guiscard even before my father’s death, I thought you might like to know that the pieties are being observed. ”’

  ‘What are “pieties”?’ Oenone said.

  ‘That depends,’ said Jo-Jo, ‘on who’s observing them.’

  ‘“Rosie is very pleased,” Isobel read on: “I sometimes think she loved Daddy more than any of us. She is very excited, just now, because Tessa Malcolm has promised to take her to stay with Thea Canteloupe. She is particularly looking forward to talking to Canteloupe about Papa and the time when they were all young together. Love from Marius. ”’

  ‘So Rosie will be going to Dyke Castle,’ said Jo-Jo. ‘These coming school hols, I presume. Perhaps Thea Canteloupe will take a fancy to her too.’

  ‘Rosie is very different from Tessa; rather immature for her age; a jet-haired Jewish Jessica. Tessa is auburn going on for ginger – apricots and cream. Besides,’ said Isobel, ‘one thing I will say for my two children: they’re pretty normal. Mariu
s likes girls – though he could have any boy at that school of his for a nod and a wink, and as for Rosie –’

  ‘– She seems very fond of those Blessington girls, Jakki and Carolyn.’

  ‘That’s just a sentimental girlie thing.’

  ‘Please,’ said Oenone, ‘what is Dyke Castle, where you said Rosie is going?’

  ‘A castle with at least one dyke in it,’ said Jo-Jo; ‘usually more.’

  ‘And what is a dyke?’

  ‘A dyke,’ said Jo-Jo, ‘is a lady who likes touching other ladies on the twat, prat, quim or cunt.’

  ‘I thought you said only boys like doing that.’

  ‘People often get rather muddled about which they really are.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Oenone, and thoughtfully sucked her many-hued ice-cream.

  Late in the afternoon, Fielding, Jeremy and Milo realised that the caique was making directly towards the shore. Soon they saw the mouth of a river; and a little later they were chugging very slowly up it, between oozy banks that barely admitted their vessel.

  ‘ the clear young voice spoke in Fielding’s head, ‘“when in thy ship thou has crossed the waters of Ocean, to a place where is a level shore and the groves of Persephone, with tall poplars and willows that shed their fruit, there do thou beach thy ship…”’

  ‘The rest fits,’ said Fielding aloud, ‘but where is the level shore?’

  The caique turned a bend in the river, and there, on the starboard side, was a mud flat on which the golden helmsman beached his ship.

  ‘What put that in your head,’ said Jeremy, ‘about a “level shore”?’

  ‘I was just remembering how Odysseus came to a beach, near the marshes with the sad trees where the rivers meet…’

  The girl set a ladder from the gunnels down to the ‘beach’. She went down first, paused, and beckoned (with the same almost circular motion her brother had made at the cemetery), and led the way across the mud, treading neat and dry, knowing (so Fielding supposed) the best path. Fielding, Jeremy and Milo followed; the ephebe brought up the rear. That boy has the same smile as Milo, thought Fielding, as he turned to survey the file behind him, that certain smile which archaic Greek sculptors bestowed on their striding kouri, boys who were not quite youths; they are both smiling it now, as if they were faintly amused (oh, very faintly) at what they know is about to happen.

  They stepped from the landing place up on to a shallow bank of grass, which was raised just above the dank, reedy flats on the side away from the river. For half a mile or so they walked along the bank, until they came to a crude wooden bridge with only one handrail. On this they crossed the river. As he stepped off the bridge on the far side, Fielding turned back, once more, and saw a sign that would face anyone who approached the bridge from the other direction. On the sign was written:

  ΠΟΤΑΜΟS ΑΧΕΡΟΝ

  ‘The river Acheron,’ said Milo. ‘It’s on my map. Soon we come to another river. Then to a place called Ephyra.’

  As evening began to fall, the girl led them away from Ocean, along the north bank of the Acheron, her smiling brother bringing up behind lest any of their three guests should fall or fail.

  Leonard Percival, too, was walking down a small river: but he was walking along a dry path over a meadow in blithe midday, not (like Fielding and Co.) along a dyke above a quagmire at sullen twilight; and he was thinking merry thoughts, not, like Jeremy, about how and when he would ever get back to the comfort of his faraway hotel, nor, like Fielding, about how much he would have been charged in his absence. Leonard was thinking about the time when he had hidden in the wood just ahead of him, and had seen Theodosia Canteloupe and Tessa Malcolm as they strained, strong sportswoman’s muscled thigh to soft girl’s silky crotch, and cried out in an antiphony of love which rang in his old ears yet.

  But as the remembered sounds of erotic battle rose higher and higher, his steps were suddenly twisted by arthritic torment, and his thoughts changed from brisk bawdry to sour Stoic care. Time to leave the party, Leonard thought. Conjure these shadows of desire as I may, I can no longer achieve so much as a twitch in my pecker. Like the melancholy poet, Horace (whom Fielding Gray was always quoting), I should reflect that I have eaten enough, drunk enough, laughed and frolicked enough, and must now depart before I become a loathsome old voyeur and a croaking, creaking bore. But of course I already am a loathsome old voyeur and a croaking, creaking bore. Canteloupe tolerates me because I have done the man some service in my time: her ladyship, on the other hand, finds me quite disgusting (oh, how I agree with her) and is at small pains to dissimulate her nausea. Yes; no doubt of it; time to go. Yet I cannot expire simply of my own will; I am not one to fall on a sword or open a vein in my bath; God must take me hence, and God is not biddable.

  By now Leonard had reached the copse. He entered and hobbled through the thick undergrowth and the clustered lady birch by the secret path, and came to a tiny pool at the centre, on the margin of which he managed to squat, thinking of Jo-Jo as she had sat there, great with Oenone, boasting of how she would enjoy the male child she expected to bring forth in due season, and of little Tully Sarum, the changeling heir to the Marquessate of Canteloupe, who had lain drowning in the pool one summer’s afternoon while his pretty ginger nurse (only moments away, had she known, from her own death) was dallying on the bank with Marius Stern.7

  After they had trudged along Acheron for another twenty minutes, they saw that a second river was coming to join it from the north (to their left) and that this would bar their way. But again there was a flimsy wooden bridge, this without even one handrail, little more than a plank. On the ground lay a notice which had fallen from the fallen post beside it:

  KOKYTOS

  the notice announced.

  ,’ said the young voice in Fielding’s head: “There into Acheron flow Pyriphlegethon and Cocytos, which is a branch of the water of the Styx; and there at the meeting place is a rock…”

  Where is Pyriphlegethon? thought Fielding as he teetered along the plank behind the dainty treading maiden. Here is only Cocytos (that notice affirms); yet Homer distinctly states that both Pyriphiegethon and Cocytos flow into Acheron at one and the same place. Ah well: perhaps the geography has altered in the three thousand-odd years since Odysseus came this way.

  But the ‘rock’ was there still, or at any rate a bare hill of stone and scrub, which rose out of the marsh about a furlong further on, just visible in the last of the light. Behind him Jeremy started to whistle: ‘Rory Gilpin’ he was whistling, the march of the 10th Sabre Squadron, which Jeremy must have remembered (Fielding thought) from that time they had heard it played, by a British cavalry band on tour, in the gardens at Adelaide. It seemed that Milo knew the words:

  ‘“Rory Gilpin far he rode,” sang Milo softly,

  ‘“Rode among the willows;

  By the river Rory rode,

  Among the willows his white horse strode. ”’

  The dyke veered left across a hundred yards of bog, and then the path turned into a flinty uphill track.

  ‘“Rory Gilpin far he rode

  And came to a town atop a hill;

  Through streets and houses Rory road

  And up to a tower his white horse strode. ”’

  The houses they passed showed blank walls to the street, though thin lines of light glinted under some of the doorways. They came to a tall gatehouse without a gate. A prominent notice beside the entrance proclaimed, in several languages,

  CLOSED

  The girl led them on under an arch.

  ‘“Rory Gilpin far he rode,”’ sang Milo,

  ‘“He has passed the town and passed the tower;

  And now he has come to All Shadows’ road;

  And down to the pit his white horse strode. ”’

  ‘That town was Ephyra,’ said Milo after a brief silence, ‘of which I told you. It used to have a necromanteion – a sacred place below the earth, where enquirers sought oracles of the dead. It is now a tourist a
ttraction, giving welcome employment to out-of-work actors from Athens, who impersonate superior ghosts such as Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and fair Helen of Troy.’

  Sir Jacquiz Helmutt, Provost of Lancaster College, Cambridge, walked with his private secretary, known as Len, in diagonals back and forth across the rear lawn of the college. The diagonal which they were at present following led them from the corner of the lawn by the west end of the chapel to the corner of the lawn by the approach to the College Bridge over the River Cam.

  ‘Marigold,’ said Provost Helmutt. ‘She hankers, she yearns for those twins of hers. They are so very young, you see.’

  ‘I have spoken to Balbo Blakeney,’ said Len, ‘who was present when they were got on her…as you will doubtless recall.’

  ‘Vividly,’ Provost Helmutt said.8

  ‘Balbo is very ill and very vague,’ said Len. ‘As far as I can make out, he thinks, as I think, that there is nothing to be done. That mysterious youth, who was with you in the Mani – he got the twins; “gat them”, as the Old Testament has it. They are undeniably his children, not yours, gifts of God or possibly the Devil. Who knows? Such children, once they have gone, do not come back.’

  ‘Marigold is off again soon,’ said Sir Jacquiz. They came to the corner of the lawn by the bridge, executed an elegant about turn (facing inwards towards each other as they pivoted) and walked slowly, heavily and in perfect step back towards the north end of Sitwell’s Building and the west door of the chapel. ‘This time she is going to Turkey: Antalya, Ephesus, all up and down the coast.’

  ‘As good a place as any to go,’ said Len, ‘at the approach of the gaudy spring. You can well afford her passage, my fine Provost. Let her go, if it will make her happy.’

  ‘It won’t. She will find nothing to her purpose, and she will grieve.’

  ‘So did Ceres and many others in similar circumstances. She is in good company. Those children, egregious Jacquiz, were last seen in the Provosts’ Crypt of the chapel towards the climax of Tom Llewyllyn’s funeral.9 They move, like their father, in a mysterious way. ’ Len looked down happily at his light green suede booties, the ankles of which were tightly cuffed by his narrow pink trousers; the colours of the Garrick Club, he thought. And aloud, ‘You don’t, I know, resent the twins’ fatherhood, you are not jealous of Lady Helmutt’s longing for the twins themselves, these days you do not much miss her when she is gone, and she is, as you know very well, a questionable asset as your official consort. Indeed, the Provost of this college, such is his magnificence, does not need a consort. Do I speak sooth, magnificent Provost?’