New Seed For Old Page 5

  Marius glowed through his whole body. Milo’s praise was nectar; the prospect of Raisley Conyngham’s was ambrosia. He glanced the ball to left off the front foot, right off the leg stump in the perfect Prince Ranjhi manner.

  ‘But let’s not get too brilliant,’ said Milo. ‘That sort of stroke is allowed only to people with an England cap. Still, as regards the Provost you have done well – though Raisley and I will want to hear a lot more about these friends of his whom you refer to.’

  Although Rosie had not expected, or even much wanted, to see Tessa when she arrived back in London, she found Tessa still at her home in Buttock’s Hotel, her departure for School having been delayed by a bout of colic. (‘Overexcitement after all those goings on in Somerset,’ said Maisie, not knowing anything about them.)

  ‘I’m glad of an early chance to talk to you,’ Tessa said to Rosie, as they walked in Hyde Park. ‘Please understand that I’m now through with all of them.’

  ‘All of whom?’

  ‘Mr Conyngham. Milo Hedley. I’m free.’

  Jakki Blessington, who, like Tessa, should normally have been back at their school by now, but had been kept at home by a plague of lice contracted on a recent visit to Greece with her family, now met them, as had been arranged by telephone, under the pedestal of the Albert Memorial.

  ‘Free of what?’ Jakki enquired, having overheard the last words.

  ‘I’m not quite sure of the answer to that,’ said Tessa, ‘but certainly of something one does well to be free of.’

  She surveyed, with some distaste, the allegorical figures of Science, Industry and whatnot which were carved in relief on the pedestal.

  ‘What about Marius in all this?’ said Rosie anxiously.

  ‘Marius is not free,’ said Tessa. ‘Infatuation has done its work. They have him.’

  ‘Could you not help him to get away?’

  ‘No. I knew that before I left them.’

  ‘What are you going to do, then?’ Jakki Blessington said.

  ‘Be with you and Rosie again,’ replied Tessa. ‘Will you come with me tomorrow, Jakki? On the train back to School?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Last time we were on that train to Farncombe, I was horrid. I won’t be now. And when I come back for the weekends, Rosie, all of me will come back here to you. The spirit as well as the flesh.’

  ‘I could almost wish,’ said Rosie, ‘that some of you would stay at School with Marius and the rest, as it used to. What is to become of him now? Will nobody help him?’

  ‘He does not wish to be helped. Before you can be saved from anything, you must wish to be saved.’

  ‘How do you know,’ said Rosie, ‘that he does not wish to be saved?’

  ‘I saw his face…when they took him away from the racecourse.’

  ‘Racecourse?’ said Rosie and Jakki.

  So Tessa told them her story: how Marius, acting as groom to Raisley Conyngham’s stallion Lover Pie, had been saved from riotous racehorses by Conyngham’s head lass at Bellhampton racecourse a few weeks previously…while Tessa herself had been cruelly and squalidly betrayed amid the horseboxes; how Marius had been infatuated with his saviours, and she had fled clean away from her deceivers.

  ‘…So he went with them,’ she now said, ‘and I took a train home. I wrote to Marius when I got to London, wrote to him at their house at Ullacote, begging him to leave them. He wrote back that I had missed the chance of a lifetime because of jealousy and disobedience. He said that we would not be seeing each other any more, and that at School, though we should always treat each other politely for the look of the thing, that would be all.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Rosie, ‘oh dear, oh dear. But you will have Jakki at School at Farncombe, while I must stay here and go to Collingham’s all alone.’

  ‘You’ll be joining us in the autumn,’ Jakki said, ‘and for now you have my sister Caroline.’

  ‘Caroline’s a bit young to understand all this.’

  ‘Your age,’ said Jakki.

  ‘My Jewish blood,’ explained Rosie, ‘makes me older and wiser.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to have made Marius older and wiser.’

  ‘Ātē,’ said Rosie. ‘Infatuation – the word Tessa used. Infatuation, ātē, “she that blindeth all”, even, according to Homer, the King of the Gods himself. So what chance has Marius?’

  In Wiltshire, Captain The Marquess Canteloupe and his Private Secretary, Leonard Percival, walked in the Rose Garden. Not fifty yards away from them the engines of Cant-Fun throbbed and sweated and belched poison in order to entertain the proletarians (and even some members of the middle class) who had paid £2.50 to enter the Multi-Dimensional and Trans-Galactic Travel Port (TAKE A SPACE-TIME CAPSULE TO THE END OF THE UNIVERSE); but in the Rose Garden, so skilfully had the abomination of Cant-Fun and its patrons been camouflaged and insulated, there was silence, except for the small and pleasant voices with which God’s creatures celebrated the progress of the spring. Thus did the mills of Cant-Fun grind filth to extract the ore that would support a magnificent Marquisate; while my lord Marquess walked in his garden undisturbed. Undisturbed, that was, by sound or spectacle of Cant-Fun: he had other matter to mar his peace.

  ‘Tullius,’ he said to Leonard Percival now, ‘commonly called Sarum. When and if we know that Theodosia is ripe, we shall have to think a lot about Tully.’

  ‘We already have done. We have explored all the possibilities in our friend, La Soeur. La Soeur grows older and less daring. He wants to retire respectably; he is not prepared to jeopardize his considerable fortune by taking any further risks of the kind that amassed it. He will certainly take Tully into his keeping, for a very fat price: he will not procure his quietus, even for a fatter. So much for La Soeur. What about Daisy the nanny?’

  ‘She loves the brat.’

  ‘Like all nurses to small children, she doubtless has her dreams. “If there were dreams to sell,”’ said Leonard, ‘“What would you buy? Some cost a passing bell…” Persuade that nurse that the most brilliant of her dreams is surely worth a passing bell – such a very small passing bell in this case: Tully’s.’

  ‘I can’t risk it. If she chucked the offer back in my face, that would mean ruin. The lower classes,’ said Canteloupe, ‘love making drama of their integrity. We need somebody… who is too well conditioned to make a row even if he rejected the assignment. Someone who thinks rows are in bad taste – has better and more interesting things to do than make them. That’s the trouble with people like this nurse: they have nothing much of interest to do – nothing to stop ’em making rows, in fact everything to encourage them, for rows mean that at least and at last they get a lot of attention.’

  ‘There are surely other things which you can easily provide, things far more worth having than attention. Generous life cover, for example. If you were well served, Detterling, you would go as far as…generous life cover?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Unrefusable, by any sensible person; and this nurse, Daisy, looks pretty sensible to me.’

  ‘Yes. She also looks fundamentally decent. What we require is an act of fundamental indecency.’

  ‘Well then, Detterling. You are a trained expert in the field.’

  ‘Giles Glastonbury is another,’ said Canteloupe, evading, at least for the time being, the implications of Percival’s last remark. ‘He advises approaching that schoolmaster, Raisley Conyngham. He is a man that understands this kind of predicament, Glastonbury says, does not take priggish moral views, and would be glad to be of service to…somebody like myself.’

  ‘Then, why not let him be?’

  ‘Any approach of this nature to Conyngham puts me in his power.’

  ‘Not if he accepts,’ said Leonard, ‘as Glastonbury seems pretty sure he will do. He’ll be as keen on secrecy as you are.’

  ‘We should be in collusion, Leonard. I do not relish being in collusion with men like Raisley Conyngham.’

  ‘You can’t have it al
l your own way, Detterling. If you want your dirty work done for you, you can’t expect lily-white hands in those that do it. It is absurd to be so fastidious.’

  ‘You wouldn’t take the thing on, I suppose?’

  ‘No. I’m too close to it all. Just as you are, Detterling. You must see that.’

  ‘I do,’ said Canteloupe. ‘That was desperation speaking.’

  ‘Why not wait until her ladyship makes the happy announcement? After all,’ said Leonard, ‘she could be sterile for all we know, incapable of conceiving or bearing. Many women are. And in that case, there would be no point in…disposing… of Sarum, since there would be no other heir to replace him.’

  ‘And why should there not be? If Theodosia is sterile, there are other women.’

  ‘She adores you, Detterling. If you put her away, you’d break her heart.’

  ‘What I must,’ said Canteloupe, ‘and what I will have, Leonard, is a satisfactory heir. It’s no good your getting sentimental about Theodosia or anything else. As I have told you and others before, I want my dynasty to continue.’

  ‘Not your dynasty, Detterling. A spurious one.’

  ‘That is not what it will say in Burke.’

  ‘Why does it matter to you what it says in Burke after you yourself are dead?’

  ‘Because in such matters Burke states the truth. If Burke names my heir as the Marquess Canteloupe, then it is so.’

  ‘If you will leave things be, Burke will name Tully as Canteloupe when you are gone. Why not settle for that?’

  ‘Because Tully is not a proper human being, and will sire none. I simply want the thing to be comme il faut, Leonard.’

  ‘But it isn’t,’ insisted Percival, stubborn as indeed he was paid to be. He was paid to find fault, to expose lies, to rip apart fraudulence…but at the very last to capitulate, to acquiesce, to reassure. This conversation, he reckoned, was about to reach the point when he must turn about and do that; but first, ‘It isn’t comme il faut,’ said Leonard, ‘and it never can be.’

  ‘It can appear to be…and on the best authority.’

  ‘Very well, if that is what you want. However, it seems you disdain the services of this versatile schoolmaster, highly recommended as they come, on some quirk of snobbery. Can you not persuade Glastonbury himself to oblige you in this little matter of Tully Sarum?’

  ‘Glastonbury is a man of honour. He is permitted to devise dishonourable deeds, if his country or his friends have need of such, but not to take part in person. If only La Soeur hadn’t turned into such a ghastly old woman…’

  ‘No good bothering about him any more. Look, Detterling,’ said Leonard. ‘You are trying to devise a kind of hereditary tableau. The fact that it is not really hereditary does not make it any the less colourful or any the less splendid. So far, my blessing with thee. The snag is Sarum. Now then: Glastonbury, the expert, advises you to approach this dominie, Conyngham. You demur, because you object to having such a man as an ally. This is nonsense. Men, even the greatest, that have played your game before you have always had men such as Conyngham (himself, after all, a gentleman) as allies. This is dead central to the tradition which you seek to preserve, Detterling – quite apart from being, as far as I can see, the only way of advancing your purpose. And in any case; surely you have already arranged to be introduced to Conyngham by Glastonbury?’

  ‘The arrangement is provisional: I am committed to nothing.’

  ‘Then if you want what you say you want, it is high time that you were.’

  This was pretty much what Leonard was meant to say, at the end of such discussions, in ratification of the action proposed and desired by Canteloupe, who could then indulge himself with a few moral frills and furbelows, if he wanted to, before going on to follow the course agreed. On this occasion he said, ‘I shall have to consult, not exactly my conscience, but my sense of fitness. ‘I think it will be satisfied if I can be sure that Tully’s fate will somehow be worthy, worthy of his purported name and title.’

  ‘You should have been in showbiz,’ Leonard remarked, for he could not resist it. ‘You are a natural ringmaster.’

  This was not what Leonard was meant to say, either at the end of these exchanges or indeed at any other stage of them. Not only was he meant to conclude strictly on a note of reassurance, he was meant to persist in taking the whole affair seriously, a requirement which precluded observations of the kind he had just made. In this instance, however, Canteloupe seemed inclined to overlook the misdemeanour, possibly because the unexpected appearance of Theodosia (who seldom came within a furlong of Leonard Percival unless there was no help for it) now claimed his attention.

  ‘Today,’ said Raisley Conyngham, ‘we will only gossip.’

  Conyngham, Marius and Milo Hedley walked on the Terrace above Green, where a First XI Trial was being played. Milo Hedley, a very fair cricketer who had deserted the game for lawn tennis, had no part in this Trial; nor had Marius, who was too young. Conyngham, who was too old and for many other reasons disqualified, was wearing, rather oddly, long white trousers and a Free Forester blazer. Such kit, on his spare figure, made him resemble a cox who had been carefully chosen not to inspire amatory notions in the oarsmen.

  ‘I am not a cricketer,’ Conyngham had explained when Milo and Marius called for him at his chambers, ‘but I am what is known as Founder’s Kin, and was therefore elected to the Foresters automatically at the age of eighteen. Since the blazer is quite decorative, I like to give it an airing from time to time.’

  And now, on the Terrace, ‘The form our gossip will take is this,’ he said. ‘Let us consider what advantage would accrue if Milo were in fact invited to spend some part of the late summer with Provost Llewyllyn of Lancaster.’

  ‘A pleasant introduction to Cambridge,’ said Milo, ‘though Lancaster is not my college. I have always heard that the long vac is a time for leisurely reading while the university, one quarter full, drowses around one.’

  ‘That was the case forty years ago,’ said Raisley. ‘Now there is a full-blown Festival of every kind of cultural rubbish in the almanack, and the whole place is heaving with Americans terrified of being fleeced of twopence and swaggering nigger trash.’

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ said Marius, ‘that either will be allowed in the Provost’s Lodging.’

  ‘But both will be allowed into the College at large. And some of the artistes and conferenciers and creative personalities or whomever will certainly be billeted there. I understand that this year there is to be a Soul Festival running parallel with the other one.’

  Raisley Conyngham shuddered. Milo Hedley patted his helmet haircut (Greek Archaic style), scowled at Raisley for shattering his Edwardian dream of Cambridge in the long vacation, and smiled his kouros smile at Marius, who simpered foxily back.

  ‘The point is,’ said Milo, ‘that I should get to know the Provost. That has to be a good thing.’

  ‘Why?’ said Raisley. ‘I hear Sir Thomas is visibly declining – he was too ill to see Marius, we recall. I also hear that his intellects are disturbed. Winstanley writes that he has been mentally unbalanced ever since the elms in the College Avenue had to be destroyed.’

  ‘Apart from other dons whom Milo might meet,’ said Marius, ‘there are two figures of interest. The Provost’s Private Secretary, Len, and –’

  ‘“Len” what?’

  ‘He never told me. “Hallo, darling, I’m the Provost’s Secretary,” he said. “You call me Len.” But though he talks like that, he isn’t at all camp. In fact he’s very tough. And virile. His dress is so vulgar – mauve shoes with a blood-orange tie – that it hits you in the face like a hammer, and is obviously meant to.’

  An aspirant to the First Xl was clumsily caught at the wicket. Raisley applauded with delicate aplomb.

  ‘What is the point of this Len person?’ he said.

  ‘He seems to run the College in the Provost’s name. Just before I left – after he’d taken down Milo’s full name and address, so
that he could be called on “at a need”, said he, to amuse the Provost – just before I left,’ Marius said, ‘there was a telephone call. It was the police, to say that they suspected one of the Lancaster undergraduates of pushing cocaine. He’d taken refuge inside the College, where they had no powers of entry or arrest without the permission of the Provost, who is Sovereign on College Grounds – quite apart from being, as Fielding Gray once told me, the Avatar of the Founder, the Blessed King Henry VI.

  ‘“Right, darling,” said Len on the telephone to the police. “The Provost is too ill to be consulted. I have his seal and his delegated Jus Judicis – in other words, I’m boss of the circus. Now it’s no good your coming in here in broad daylight and asking for this nasty little junk artist – even if I give permission – because all the beastly lower-class students would start shouting ‘Fascist’ and tear you and your lovely constables to pieces. And that would upset the College peacocks. On the other hand, if I expel him from the College, so that you could get him as he comes out, he would probably just refuse to budge. So what we do is, we give you a key to the postern gate, you come in at two in the morning, and I will meet you and guide you to the young man’s rooms…where you prick him with something to keep him quiet and carry him out of here for ever, but I mean for ever, darling, and no one any the wiser about how it all happened. Just see that your charges stick. I shall come to your station at four-thirty this afternoon, and there we can arrange details…” “And jolly good riddance,” Len said to me, “that’s one more of these dope pests out of the way.”’

  Milo, whose elder brother had died of heroin, approved of this story.

  ‘It’s not only that they’re pests,’ he said, ‘they’re so bloody boring. All they can talk about is their habit and how to supply it.’