THE HOLES
IN THE AIR:
the misadventures of Dr Felix Culpepper,
Fellow and Tutor in Latin
at St Wygefortis’ College, Cambridge:
a serial novel
Richard Major
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2.
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Primo, dit Julien, l’Anglais le plus sage est fou une
heure par jour; il est visité par le démon au suicide,
qui est le dieu du pays.
2º L’esprit et le génie perdent vingt-cinq pour cent de
leur valeur en débarquant en Angleterre.
3º Rien au monde n’est beau, admirable, attendrissant
comme les paysages anglais.
STENDHAL
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3.
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Foin
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As persons have lately been slain in frays by reason of
sudden foynes with swords or other weapons, anyone
who shall in a fray use such foyne or foynes with his
sword, or henceforth shall slay any person by such
foyne or foynes shall suffer death.
PROCLAMATION UNDER THE GREAT SEAL,
18 APRIL, 29 HEN. VIII.
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5.
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i.
T
HKWEAMING’S NOT A VALID OPENING,
y’know.”
“Aaa!”
“Even in a houth-hold as dithorderly ath
ourth, thertain wulth cover conver –.”
“Grra!”
“And thpeaking of rulth: did you knock? I didn’t
hear. You know I alwayth want people to knock. I imagine
you knocked. I hope you knocked.”
“Aagh!”
“Thinth you’re in, I would athk you to thit. But you
theem to pwefer to flail.”
“Yagh! Eeek. Come. Eeek. You’ve got. There’s a bo!
A body. Behind, behind – ”
“Yeth? We can’t go on like thith, y’ know.
Langwidge.”
“Yagh! Blood. Come – .”
“You know, Thelia, I’m going to waithe my Le
Monde and vanish fwom view. Thee? I’m weading. Only
thenthe will catch my attention.”
“AAAH.”
“… I’m thimply not attend –.”
“THERE’S A BODY!”
“Yeth; but you’re thtill thkweaming. ”
“I’ve found a body, sofa, I went in, a body it’s behind –”
“Good, I underthand that much.”
“But it’s a body!”
“So you keep thaying. Fwesh matewial. Where’th
this body you’re so int’wethted in?”
“I found it. I, I. Found. Behind sofa. Aaagh!”
“A thofa. This thofa, beneath me? – no. That other
thofa on the far thide the dwawing-woom? No? A more
remote thofa then – no, don’t thmash that, Thelia, put it
down, I’m fond of it. Look, I wise. I’m tho blathé about
being blathé I can put being blathé athide, and act. Thee? I
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clothe Le Monde, I take leave of clathical reathon; conduct
me to your funfair. Thow me without thhrieking your
pu’pworted corpthe…. Thith ugly thofa beneath the
Beidermeier clock? No. Not in the hall at all, then? Good.
The pwothpect of gore on thith particular Ithfahan wug ….
Not in the hall wathwoom, not in the dining-woom, not in
the –. In your morning-woom? Here? Behind thith – … Ah.
Ah.”
“Mphrr.”
“No, don’t do that. Don’t keen or heave or whatever
thith new noise ith. Thtand back. No, don’t jutht thtand.
Get me a dwink. And one for yourthelf. And a towel. Ah.”
“Frrm.”
“If you vomit there’ll thoon be two mythteewuth
corptheth in your morning-woom. Pour two large glahtheth
of thkotch from over there and lock the door. (How can
the thervants not have heard your wumpus? Well, it
theemth they haven’t.) Thank you. Now the door…. Now
the towel from the wathroom. Don’t thnivel.”
“Here. Here.”
“What a dithguthting mess. Thtill, look, there’s hardy
any thtaining. It hathn’t thoaked thwough to the boardth at
all. The towel. I thaid towel, Thelia.”
“Rupert, Rupert, why, Rupert –.”
“Hand me the towel, Thelia, and compothe a whole
thententh in your idiot bwain before making any noithe.”
“… Why does it – why does it have no head?”
“Why doth it have no head, you bloody thkwap of
fluff? Why doth it have no head? Why doth it have thwee
handth?”
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ii.
“A shortish slender male corpse in tails, minus a head, with
someone else’s severed hand tucked into its waistcoat?”
“Yeth, Dr Culpepper. Tucked deep into the
waistcoat – almost clutching the fob. Thevered, and a bit
chopped about.”
“A corpse found by Lady Rievaulx in her morningroom at eleven this morning?”
“At eleven-twelve pwecithely, Dr Culpepper.”
Pronounced CUL-pah. “That’th when she thtarted
howling.”
“And here it is getting on for lunch-time, and you
evidently haven’t told the police.”
“No.”
“Instead you’ve come upstairs to your daughter’s
tutor’s room to entertain him with the news – not ‘under
the seal of the confessional’, I gather, but man to man. Or
chap to chap. Anyway, gentlemanly protocols of some sort
apply.”
“Well, yeth, I thuppose tho.”
“Lord Rievaulx,” pronounced rivers, “you are –”.
“Wupert. If we’re going to talk about thith like thith,
I think I’d better be Wupert.”
“Rupert, you’re a strange man.”
“Felikth, you’re the clev’west man I’ve ever met, and
I am only a nob.”
“Humph.” (‘If only you knew.’) And Culpepper
stood to stare out his window, hands grasped behind his
back.
It was a wintry summer midday, typical of England,
and the view was not just typical of London, it was the
epitome and climax of a certain aspect of the city.
Culpepper’s rooms were high in ffontaines House, just
under the pediment: upper servants’ quarters from the days
when the ffontaines-Laighs kept troops of servants. But the
outlook, although too high to be quite perfect, was sublime
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up and down Nash’s long creamy stately confidant façade.
‘Kent Terrace!’ (thought Culpepper, wandering from the
point). ‘Guarantor of order! Guarantor of me! Guarantor
of the the ffontaines-Laighs? Well, hardly that. They don’t
look for support. Besides, Rievaulx himself is an athlete of
indifference. The training involved in not caring about
what his wife has just done must be like running up a
mountain every morning, heart barely turning over. Did his
beats-per-minute increased when he saw the corpse? I
doubt it.’
Lord Rievaulx, bored by so much as he was, grew a
little bored now with Culpepper’s silence. He coughed.
Culpepper ignored his employer and kept staring out
along the Terrace. Although by deliberate choice not a
religious man, now and then he felt inclined to pray to
architecture for guidance and strength. ‘This Terrace, for
instance: it’s survived inter-war taste, Luftwaffe, post-war
barbarism, mustn’t it know what’s what? Even now.
Despite this vicious gray rain on the glass, despite that
horrible huge mosque off to the side of my view, despite
that foul nasty postmodern six-storey tower of glass going
up opposite, doesn’t it speak of spaciousness, arrogance?
Wit, poise, a certain splendid disdain for the laws of God
and man, ease? Terraces of Regent’s Park, pray for me,
show me what to do!’
“I don’t mean to pwethume, of courthe. I thought a
body might amuthe you. A new outlet for your donnith
intelligenth.”
“Humph,” repeated Culpepper over his shoulder. ‘If
only you knew! I’m a don, but scarcely. I’m an expert in
Gaius Julius Hyginus, not even the world expert, just one
among the Hyginists, and the reason I research him is that
he’s a bit of an idiot and so am I. I’ve never clicked as a
classicist. Nor as anything else. I’m at St Wygefortis’
College, the shame of the university. Clever! Yes in that I’m
not stupid. But what does it amount to? I can talk, that’s all.
And I look dashing enough. Three-parts-Byron to sevenparts-English-rainwater. Although that’ll be gone before I’m
forty.” He was thirty-three, and both very young and very
old for his age. “God, this rain….”
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9.
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Lord Rievaulx, sodden with absent-mindedness (the
final mellowness of mellowness, a mellowness so intense as
to be almost frantic), was often bored. But he was
incapable of being restless. So “I’m thorry to have
intwuded,” he said, perfectly sedately, quite unembarrassed,
uncrossing his emaciated legs. “I’d hoped –.”
Culpepper spun round. “You want me to detect the
crime as a clever amateur in case it has to do with Lady
Rievaulx’s, Celia’s, misadventures. Solve it before the police
arrive in case she’s guilty of something. Eh?”
“I – no; not that. Thertainly not.”
“Ah?”
“Fuck the muwd’wa, Felikth. I thimply don’t care.
Excuthe my Fwench. I don’t want to tholve thith crime, I
want to compound it. I need you to help me ditch the
cadaver and thwab down the parquet. Thewiously, we’re
not characters in thome thort of detective thtorwee.”
“Ah.” Now Culpepper turned back to the view,
resting his forehead against the glass. ‘Too sharp to be
called pattering, this rain. Each drop’s cruel as a bullet, it
does its ineffectual worst. And my thoughts are just like
this midsummer winter. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.’
In a confused fashion, it seemed to him that the wretched
weather might touch and heal the wretched weather of his
mind – that inside and outside might meld: which is the
one thing than cannot possibly happen, not in imagination,
not in eternity, not even in books.
The minds of the timid classes are oddly furnished.
Felix Culpepper had been bookish all his life. Yet he
harboured an itch for macabre carry-on. He’d often set
himself, man and boy, the problem what he should do if
(when) he found himself with a human body on his hands.
‘Not road-kill. Not the clichéd escapee from a shallow
grave I stumble over in a suburban corpse while walking
my fat spaniel should I ever have one. These I negligently
pass on to the police. No, a controversial stiff. Terminated
by me or someone I like inasmuch as I like anyone. Let’s
say I’ve played amateur executioner. Or at least become
accomplice after the fact. Now for amateur undertaking.
How? O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve
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10.
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itself into a dew. BLOOD, I’ll cry, raising my fists like this. And
other assorted cavity fluids of course, nothing than can’t be
washed, eyes will stare up best shut them, skin goes purple
within half-an-hour of death livor mortis or suggillation, what
a word, that passes after twelve, limbs stiffen after two
hours loosen after eight hours much more in the cold, best
move it either before rigor mortis or after, yes, yes, cover for
a day, hung like game, it is a game, just think of the right
ploy. I have it. Lily pond. Big one, mind. Weight the fellow
down, decay lost in legitimate bubble and stink.’
So now his thought was: ‘There aren’t any large lilyponds in Regent’s Park….’
Which is, obviously, outrageous. Lord Rievaulx was
proposing a crime to him, the first crime of his soft,
formless life. There must, surely, have been a moment for
Culpepper to remember himself as a citizen, as a man, if
nothing else as a Fellow (albeit an unpopular one) of a
Cambridge college (albeit a feeble one). Damnation must
be palpable: that’s a matter of cosmic decency.
Or do we, after years of meaningless noisy thrashing
about, slip quietly into our proper role, with no more than a
quiet click of satisfied machinery, free because at last we’re
doing what we were always fated to do? Is liberty precisely
the same as predestination, judgement no more than a
letting-go?
Culpepper’s instant of choice, if he had one, slipped
past undetected. He paused only to adjust his tone. ‘I
mustn’t sound jaunty. Eager. Solemn. Rievaulx can’t be
shocked but he’s easily bored, stiffens up. Suggillates.
Dryness, that’s what’s called for.’
“Well then Rupert, I suppose you’d better show me
the goods.”
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iii.
“Hmm. Mmm. Mm.”
“What d’y’think?”
“I scarcely know. He’s quite absolutely dead, isn’t he?
Couldn’t really be any deader.… Do you mind if I think
aloud? My thoughts’ll turn baroque if I let them fester in
cranial darkness.”
Lord Rievaulx faintly sighed.
“A male in his twenties, then. Well-fed, not
unmuscular, not obviously in ill-health. (Although God
knows it wouldn’t be obvious to me if he had, say, died of a
stroke or an overdose or an inserted bicycle pump). Hallo,
what’s this? A thin cut across the palm of the left…. The
palm of the left hand. And rings on two of the fingers of the
right. This one’s a signet: three ravens above a broken
Jerusalem cross, I suppose that could be traced. And this is
heavier, brass, a snake biting its tail: Norse work to look at,
Jörmungandr I think that’s the name, it surrounds the
whole earth, it’s destined to be bane of Thor. Hm. Silver
cuff-links: again, the bisected cross and three ravens.
Round his neck a gold chain with, what’s this? A tree of
rather heavy vermeil, Yggdrasil I think, the cosmic ash that
connects the nine worlds. Hm. Hm. So much for jewelry.
Flesh ... well, I don’t know; pretty much what dead flesh
always is. I imagine .... Handmade shoes; the right foot half
a size bigger than the left. Socks indigo, not black; a recent
pedicure; rather un-English that, but nowadays who can say?
Wing-collar hacked it two, white tie thoroughly gory.
Evening trousers well-pressed … a faint smell of what? A
sharp chemical smell. What? … Humph-hmm-rrr. –
Cotton rather than silk boxer-shorts. Not, of course,
monogrammed. Ebony studs on his shirt, but fairly new
and not suggestive. At least, they don’t suggest anything
to … Rupert? (Hmmm.) … Rather a showy white waistcoat,
silver thread, a pattern of pineapples. Not a real fob: just a
chain. No watch, so no engraved initials to save us
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trouble…. I can’t think of anything clever to say about the
torso or shoulders. …. Anyway, a smoothness that shows it,
he never did manual work, although his forearms are
sinewy enough. And now the spare hand, as we might call it.
A right hand. Male. A bit mangled. Symmetrical chopmarks. White and waxy. Drained. Obviously it bled
elsewhere.
“There’s a look in your eye, Rupert. The opposite of
furtive – no, too late to change it now. You obviously
know who this is. You’re bored with pretending to watch
me pretend to try to find out. I’m bored with balancing on
one knee over a mysterious corpse as if I were a character
in a ‘who-done-it’. (‘Who-did-it’?) Now I’m going to sit and
you’re going to tell.”
“Very well. I’m thowwee if I wathn’t perfectly fwank.
I didn’t think it made any diffewence who it wath …. Hith
name is Count Nils von Gyldenløve. He ith or wath my
wife’s lover. Norwegian. Well, Viking weally. He’th jutht a
modern Viking. Or wath. Doth one thtay Viking in hell?”
“A dull hell if not. Tell me about him.”
Rievaulx might pretend to be indifferent, but there
was a dread or grief that was so this is the tale that emerged.
The von Gyldenløves are a dreadful lot. They didn’t
convert to Christianity when all the other Vikings did –
indeed it’s not clear they ever gave up the Norse gods.
They have a place on an island high up the fjord above
Trondheim. It’s a Renaissance castle now, but they’ve held
it since it was a circle of wattle huts, and nothing seems to
have softened their rule. Still at midnight sunsets in June
certain noises carry across the still waters to harrow the
decent folk on the mainland. What’s happening?
Impossible to know. The islanders always intermarry and
never leave. But rumour says there are mead-feasts in
honour of Woden, orgiastic revels in honour of Frigg, for
holocausts for Thor.
When the King of Denmark and Norway had a
modest colonial empire, the von Gyldenløves were his
most aweful servants. They ranged the coasts of Africa and
India spreading terror, committing deeds you’d think had
stopped with the Dark Ages. Once the Danish empire
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faded they came back to Europe and settled down to
hereditary piracy and brigandage – waged sometimes on the
high seas, sometimes at Monte Carlo. During the Russian
Civil War they smuggled mustard gas to the Whites and
gold to the Reds. During the Second War they shattered
the nerves of the occupying Nazis. A young German
soldier would go missing; the search party would look up,
they wouldn’t know why, and there he was, far above them,
impaled on an inaccessible pines atop a cliff impossibly
high, his head black with magpies: he’d have to be brought
them down with artillery fire.
The cause never mattered to the von Gyldenløves.
They adored violence for its own sake, or for the sake of
the risk of Valhalla.
Young Nils is a transient. It’s not clear he owns a
passport. What he has is a yacht, eighty foot long, painted
black, very fast, called Hringhorni. She plies between
Trondheimfjord and various quiet coasts in Europe. He
brings with him contraband from Asia that’s made its way
through St Petersburg. Heroin from Afghanistan, forged
euros from the workshops of Hanoi, tiger paws for the
cancerous, rhinoceros horns for the impotent. He lands his
cargo by night, and then he spends a few weeks at parties in
London, flaunting his gray-blue eyes, which are so pale that
they’re almost empty of colour and humanity, like an
animal. Ridiculous women throw themselves at him. Celia
Rievaulx is naturally one of those women. He’s here at the
moment; Rupert has been ignoring him (“If it weren’t von
Gyldenløve it’d be thomeone else. Of course”). When he
leaves, Hringhorni is full of loot: paintings, vases, tapestry,
things that would never get an Arts Council export license.
Folk hand them over for cash, and they end up in Moscow
and Shanghai, in the mansions of men whose fathers
dreamed of enough bread or rice.
Of course there are always blokes with watery eyes
to be had in England. A woman like Celia is charmed by
von Gyldenløve’s lawlessness and her own danger.
“You didn’t kill him, by the way, did you? You’re the
most obvious culprit.”
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“I? Yeth. But ath it happenth, no.” Lord Rievaulx
looked a little regretful. “He has many other enemeeth. I
don’t mean the Arth Counthil. There’s an auwa of
unexploded bomb about him. I mean there wath. Now
there’th nothing but a faint thmell. Or am I wong?”
“A faint smell, perhaps, yes. Chemical, though, like
chlorine. Not rot. …. But why, if gangsters caught him and
beheaded him, did they leave him here? And how did they
get him in?”
“I don’t know, Felikth, and ath I keep thaying I
don’t care. I jutht want him gone.”
“Very well. Let’s move him.”
“We’re in the middle of London. Evewybody’th
about.”
“Yes, but happily its raining. I have a scheme. You’re
not going to like it” –
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iv.
and he didn’t; yet there was something eerily simply and
swift about what followed so that he could hardly complain,
it was an easy plunge forward, a ballet between the acts.
Two figures came down the stairs of ffontaines
House with an air of rather aggressive nonchalance.
Culpepper had, as usual, a countrified look to him: a tweed
suit that wasn’t right for London, even on a wet day when
he hadn’t planned to go out. He had an umbrella very
tightly wound in his left hand. But the Earl of Rievaulx was
simply, a disgrace. His baggy mackintosh was not clean
and it seemed to have aged him: the trim figure was bowed;
he shuffled; he even seemed fat.
The two men didn’t go very far. They simply crossed
the road, waiting for a double-decker ’bus, sidling between
two cabs, and presented themselves in front of the high
wire fence that surrounded the building site.
It was now after noon, and through the wire they
could see the workmen at their midday dinner. Some were
smoking and some reading tabloids and one (because
nothing is ever quite covered by the obvious) a Penguin
paperback of the complete Dorothy Sayers. The ground
floor was already glazed; everywhere else more vast sheets
of blackish glass stood about in wooden racks.
An enormous billboard showed a depressing
painting of what the black panes would amount to when
the building was done. FUTURE HOME, said one sign, OF
VOX POPULI PUBLIC RELATIONS, and NO ENTRANCE
said another. But it’s easy for a prosperous-looking
Londoner to trespass. Indeed it’s credit to such people that
so little mischief is done, since there’s never much physical
evidence of what Rievaulx had in mind, and since
convictions (which are rare enough) turn on witnesses who
happen to have noticed shady customers sidling about. If
you are not shady, you can go anywhere without protest. If
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you are actually brilliant, people leap out of your way or
open the gate.
This is what happened now. The foreman
recognised Rievaulx as the gent who lived in the big house
opposite, and had (so far) been tolerant of the clamour and
dust and coming-and-going of trucks.
“Oh, good morning,” he said, unpadlocking the gate.
“Good morning, good morning, good morning. Here for a
look-round?”
It was as easy as that. The Earl seemed in no mood
for chatter; he simply nodded, Culpepper smiled a bit too
broadly, and the foreman showed them in.
He showed them the blueprints, he showed them
more ‘artist’s impressions.’ “You want to look upstairs? I
should get you in hard-hats but let’s stretch a point ...
along nicely … ahead of schedule, done by … architect
wanted to … told him it would … millions more …
overheads … green.” He was ignored. Rievaulx made heavy
weather of working his way up the raw concrete stairs, to
the first floor, then the second.
There they stopped to get their breath. Concrete had
been poured, so there was a floor of sorts, but iron rods
stood up everywhere from gaps and trenches, bent and
hacked off; and there was sawdust, and freshly-cut timber,
and stacks of nameless expensive plastic stuffs sure to drip
liquid fire, and vats of paint certain to produce industrial
heat. It was God’s plenty.
“Good heavens!” said Culpepper suddenly, looking
out the gap where a huge sheet of plate glass would soon
be, “I think one of your men’s smoking a spliff.”
“The little shit!” The foreman bounded away; they
could heat him bellowing and wearing as he plunged down
the stair.
The two men got to work, very swiftly and almost
speechlessly, whether with shame or anxiety it is hard to tell.
There was only one security camera. Felix pulled a
crate over just beneath it, gingerly got himself into position,
and with a sharp upward motion stabbed the ferrule of his
umbrella through the lens and deep into its innards.
“There.”
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Rievaulx had turned his back on Felix. Felix got off
the crate, took the mackintosh by its shoulders and
awkwardly worked it off. Beneath was the headless corpse,
stripped to its boxer shorts, and strapped to Rievaulx’s tall
scrawny back: dead wrists bound to living wrists with a
curtain rope, ankles to knees. Culpepper got the cords
loose and the body thudded to the concrete floor.
“Hath he bled on me?”
“Not much. Except on the rain-coat.” Felix rolled it
with his foot into the corner, into a muddle of sawdust and
crushed cardboard boxes, half-heartedly covering it up.
They stood staring down at it, thinking. After a
second Rupert took the mackintosh, removed the third
hand from its pocket, balled it up, and chucked it down a
gap, so it fell to the next floor. “In cathe the body –.”
“Yes,” growled Felix, who was also thinking how to
make the pathologists earn their keep should the corpse be
unlucky enough to survive the inferno. He found a heavy
hunk of timber, took a deep breath, and with one blow
bashed in the chest. There was virtually no blood left to
shed, it was neat as tenderising meat. He smashed the legs
in turn. “So the cause of death might have been –”
“Yeth, yeth,” muttered Rupert, whose mind was also
racing. He went and stowed the hand in a heap of greasy
rags. “Even if they find one thkeleton, they won’t
nethetharily –”
“Yes,” snapped Felix. They were both, suddenly,
madly impatient to be gone. He knelt, produced a cigar, bit,
lit and sucked it; touched it to a crumpled newspaper;
stepped back. How hungry an infant flame can be, as if it
knows what feasts have been laid (and how like begetting a
child arson is! The generations cascade from your body,
unimaginable, over the horizon.) The flame rushed up the
paper and started sizzling the sawdust.
As they strolled out, he applied his cigar here and
there to promising heaps and rags; then, just before they
emerged, flicked into a carton, untasted – not from
remorse or anxiety, to judge from his expression, but
because he didn’t want to spoil his palate.
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Quickly, but without hurrying in the least, they left
the unfinished building. The foreman met them as they
came out with an eloquent gesture: parting his raised hands,
opening wide his mouth and eyes. “Apologeeth,” said
Rievaulx; “here” (he slipped him a little wad of banknotes:
five hundred pound bills); “let’th thay nothing about it”,
and left him agog.
They slipped through the gate against a thin crowd
of workmen coming back from lunch. Their calm made
them invisible. They stepped out and made it unremarked
into the street – .
Because they were listening for it, they could make
faint dull roar beginning already, behind them and above.
No one else had yet noticed.
Perhaps the world is impatient for its final fire, due
to consume it. Perhaps everything tilts downward toward
the flame. Anyway, this is how straightforward arson is.
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v.
There is a restaurant just down the street from the building
site, in Palgrave Gardens, called the Palgrave, in which
Lord Rievaulx had never set foot. It was all the things he
hated, brown upholstery, brown walls, neo-’Fifties
banquettes of brown velvet, an ironic aquarium containing
a single brown electric ray; it was designed. But it was there,
and our heroes wanted to stay close. So there they went to
lunch.
Behind them, as they pushed open the glass doors,
they could hear the first shrieks, a fire alarm – “Ah!” said
Culpepper taking a deep breath: “Ah. What have we here?”
And when the waitress brought them menus he
reached out and took her by the lapel.
“Hudidi feet feet,” he said to her, confidentially. “Feew,
hudidi. Does this sound familiar?”
She was a sturdy long-timer from Birmingham, she’s
seen it all, even with the lunch-crowd, even in a posh place
like this; she was often admired for her way with mad
people. “Would sir like a cocktail? To steady his nerves?”
“Two glasses of the nicest champagne you have. But
meanwhile, I want you to concentrate. Feet feet, feew, etcetera.
Some weeks ago a handsome young creature, lets call him
Timothy, chubby, young, very young, indeed immature,
erotically over-charged you know how they are, was
warbling Hudidi to himself thinking about females.
Somewhere north of the Border. Looking out, let’s say,
from a ridge above burbling Strath Nethy in the
Cairngorms, and in that lovely lonely spot and pleasant
mood he came to grief! He was set on by criminals when
he was least expecting it. Hudidi fee – criminals who seized
him and took him off in a small farm-house, and blinded
him with hot needles.”
“Lithen!” murmured Rievaulx. “Fire engines. Three,
four, five – more.”
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“Yes. Timothy. The next day he was flown out from
Inverness, and kept in a locked back room in a reputable
part of London. Here, in fact. Thrice a day he was held
down and force-fed millet and figs. He began to bloat in
the darkness, until four or five tunes the size he’d been
ranging free in Scotland. I think Timothy’s had enough
bother, don’t you? I want him drowned in Armagnac and
roasted with his guts and bones still in. And the same for
my friend here too. With your best bottle of burgundy.”
The waitress’ look had been getting darker and
darker. “This is a serious accusation, sir. I think you’d
better leave.”
“Too late. I can tell the scent of roasted Snow
Bunting as well as the next man.”
“We have never served – ”.
“Plectrophenax nivalis insulæ, island bunting of the
snows. Sounds almost as good as he tastes, doesn’t he? A
French chef, would call him an ortolan-de-neige, not precisely
the classic ortolan of grand cuisine, Emeriza hortulana, which
has been hunted into near-extinction, but a emberizid
nonetheless.”
“Oh?” said Rievaulx, brightening. “But aren’t thnow
buntingth illegal too?”
“Extremely. Which is why I don’t think we’re paying
for lunch. You – bring us illicit Plectrophenaces and get a
move on.” She went. “Is it the smell of gore or of burning
that turns me into a bullying mobster? Wooo – ” for with a
tremendous noise the façade of the unfinished building had
come down into Palgrave Gardens. The customers leapt
from their tables and rushed to the window; the kitchen
people appeared from the kitchen, gasping. “Oi!” shouted
Culpepper with such pugnacity everyone turned, although
clouds of ashy dust were billowing down the street. “You”
(the waitress) “bring us booze. You” (the staff) “back into
the kitchen, there are you-know-whats to drown. The rest
of you – enjoy the fire.”
“Felikth: are you dwunk?”
“On blood,” and his laugh was precisely mad.
*
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“Blood!” said Culpepper once more, about thirty minutes
later. They had finished their buntings – eaten ortolanfashion, head-under-napkin, pushing the birds in whole
from the bottom up, crunching their little bones – and
were now sharing a saddle of venison so rare the juices ran
across the charger under the gentle pressure of a fork.
“Eh?”
“Effusion has a bad press, hasn’t it? Bloodshed,
bloodthirsty – words to grate on the ear. Bloody: why’s that so
rude? But the outpouring of blood’s not a disaster. It’s
constant. It’s necessary as exhalation. The outpouring of
breath.”
“Yeth?” sighed Lord Rievaulx.
“You know they reintroduced wolf to Yellowstone
two decades ago? He’d been absent for seventy years, the
place was a wreck. Now he preys on deer, which flee the
valleys where the trees can grow high again, ungrazed, and
the birds return; he kills coyotes, so that that the bunnies
multiply, and with them the fox and badger; the regenerate
trees grow more berries, there are more bears, more beardroppings, the riverbank vegetation growing lush puts out
more roots so the banks cease to collapse, and the rivers no
long meander but thrust forward in a manly fashion.”
“Ith that all twue?”
“I read it last year. Didn’t understand it then. Do
now. The earth is renewed by having hot blood poured on
it.”
“You’ll be arguing for human thakwhyfythe next.”
“What d’y’think we’ve just done, Rupert? That little
Viking chieftain was immolated, as Viking chieftains always
were at midsummer. Then we consummated the rite. We
put the hecatomb on the pyre. And I’m reborn. I’ll never
be satisfied again being a pedagogue –”
“I thay – you’re not abandoning Margot, are you?”
“No, no. I’ll still tutor. I’ll probably even go back to
Cambridge next month. But my real life lies elsewhere. I’m
going to wage private war ....”
“Dear me. Ath far ath I can thee, war’th awfully tediouth.”
“That’s a shocking thing to say, Rupert.”
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“Ith it? My family’th never been any good at
fighting. We alwayth get thlaughtered. Overthwown.”
“Yes, but England always wins.”
“Felikth. We don’t.”
“We do. Louis XIV, Napoleon.”
“I can’t count how many anthethtors thothe fellows
killed.”
“Eighteen ninety-five: Ashanti War. British victory.”
“Yeth, but my Gweat-Uncle Arthur had both hith
legs amputated.”
“Did he? I’m sorry to hear it. Eighteen ninety-nine:
the Boer War.”
“Bwitith victowee in the end.”
“Yes. Nineteen fourteen: the Great War.”
“Victory with lots of help from Grandmother
Fanny’s people. The Amewicanth, that ith.”
“Nineteen thirty-six, the Rhineland.”
“That wathn’t a pwoper war at all. It took, what? ten
days for uth and the Fwench to dwive the Germans back
over the Whine. They just wan. Outnumbered. Mad of
them to twy it. I feel sorry for – what was the chancellor’s
name?”
“Hitler. Adolphus Hitler.”
“Him. The generalth had no business thhooting him
thince they obeyed his orders to march.”
“We still won. Nineteen fifty-one: the Second Indian
Mutiny.”
“Bwitith victowee. But my Uncle Percy dwowned
when a pwison barge capthithed. You thee? No talent for
war.”
“Nineteen ninety-one. Finno-Novogrod War.”
“Ah That wath jutht a muddle. We thould never
have got involved. A wotten war.”
“There are no bad wars. The earth,” roared
Culpepper, “is athirst for our rich gore –”
The waitress, who had come to hate them, came
trotting over on her heels. “Sir. Sir. You are disturbing our
other customers.”
The boisterous mood was rare for Culpepper, who
generally felt himself to be almost as surfeited with life as
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Lord Rievaulx, and he was reluctant to let it go. “There are
no others!” he bellowed, which was so; it was getting on for
three, and the racket of fire engines and collapsing walls
had put most people off.
“But remember where you are.” The Palgrave is very
full of itself. “You are disturbing,” pronounced the waitress
with dignity, “the atmosphere of this restaurant.”
“Nonsense! It’s thirsty for noise! Look at those
wretched hemp walls. They ache.”
Rievaulx remained mild. “Perhaps thome port?”
“Good bloody port, yes. And bring us cocaine.
Illegal afters to go with your illegal birds.”
“Sir –”.
Culpepper smiled at her and turned away, staring out
the too-big window. Up and down the A41 go London’s
apex predators, scattering death, that is, life. Their tyres
crush here and there a squirrel – no, many squirrels, a
whole scurry of squirrels. Whose corpses nourish carrion
birds: parliaments of rooks, murders of crows (crows are
too clever to get crushed themselves, they understand
traffic-lights), unkindnesses of ravens, titterings of magpies.
The crows keep down the kits of pigeons, the intrusions of
cockroaches. Back in Regent’s Park orphaned squirrels
starve in their drays, do not grow up to dig seeds; therefore
reedbeds flourish, shielding from gulps of cormorants the
Lake’s schools of gudgeon, schools of stickleback, armies
of frogs, knots of toads. And the roadkill blood trickles
through the gutters into the local sewer (grandly named
King’s Scholars’ Pond) to nourish the river-fish with
mammalian nutrient, hovers of brown trout, barbel, roach
– “What’s this?”
The waitress had smacked down in front of them a
small lacquered tray, black inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a
matching box four inches long, a little mirror set into a
matching frame, and two nicely-polished silver tubes. It
was one of those opulent trinkets that make the uppermiddle-class so happy.
“What you ordered. Sir,” she said in an unfriendly
voice.
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Rievaulx’s eyes grew wide but Culpepper laughed
aloud. He’d been joking: he didn’t think she’d bring
anything of the sort; but when he opened the lid there
indeed was a deep bed of pearlescent white.
What a piece of work is a man! “Thank you! Thank
you! Very kind. And perhaps, since we’re outraging decency,
two cigars?”
They smoked. Still the killer cars went by and by,
and still Culpepper’s heart exulted. ‘London wars on herself,
she feeds herself on the havoc. The planet bubbles blood
like a fountain of porphyry, the basin teems. And atop it all
is – what’s the collective noun for men? A massacre of
humans? A shambles of people?’ He was scarcely smiling
now; his mind was transitting provinces it rarely visited. ‘A
propitiation of people? A slaughter, an art, a sanguination, a
conspiracy, a fusillade?’
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vi.
When they got back to Kent Terrace they found the street
clogged with half-a-dozen fire-engines. Their lights were
still flashing but there were no sirens; the firemen could be
seen through the wire fence hosing down the ruins, not
hurrying themselves; above, the pall of dark smoke was
breaking up in the breeze. Rievaulx and Culpepper had
lunched too well, on buntings and beef, to feel furtive.
They paused on the doorstep to watch. The foreman,
always a one for gestures, was waving his arms over his
head while he spoke to a television crew. The two culprits
caught the words “wiring, bad wiring” and had the temerity
to smile. The foreman caught sight of them through the
wire, smiling, and nervously glanced away. Clearly he felt
guilt for letting them onto the site; guilt and the money
would keep him silence.
“Papa! Dr Culpepper!” The door of number 6,
ffontaines House, had opened behind them. “Did you see it?
It was very beautiful. The sheets of glass reflected the
flames as long as they could, then they blew up. Then the
walls fell down. There’s a disgusting burned plastic smell,
though, right through the house.”
Felix had been tutoring Margot ffontaines-Laigh for
three weeks. But she had just been a student, five foot ten
of the raw material of his unworthy trade. Now he looked
at her for the first time.
She had billows and billows of massive chestnut hair,
pouring all about her head and her strong shoulders. She
had sleepy green eyes, possibly intelligent, which would
pause on a thing or a face, rest heavily for a moment, fly
away again. She had a big discontented mouth, inclined to
an asymmetric (down on the left) moue. She had a cleft chin.
But what interested him about her was that she was lying.
Margot was pretending to be an excited child when she was,
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for the moment, an anxious and bewildered eighteen yearold woman. Why?
“Dithguthting,” said her father, stepping through the
door, and it took an instant for Culpepper to realise he
meant the industrial smell. “We’ll have to go out for
dinner.”
Culpepper, stepping after him, stared into Margot’s
eyes (which were almost on a level with his own). If he
hoped to disconcert he, he failed – “No lesson today, then,
Dr Culpepper?” But he was sure about the guilt.
“No. Finish book IV of the Heroides and we’ll talk
about it tomorrow.”
“Where ith your mother?”
“She’s taken to her bed, again.”
“I do hope,” murmured Culpepper, staring up at the
Georgian plasterwork, “that she’ll be able to join us for
tea.”
Lord Rievaulx regarded him dryly, perhaps
calculating what it meant to have initiated this hireling into
family secrets. “Weally, Felikth?” he said at last.
Margot raised her eyebrows at this use of a Christian
name. Culpepper pursed his lips,
“Very well. Will you go and thummon her, child?”
Margot, who against the odds loved her father,
raised her eyebrows again, at him, then turned and went.
“Felikth, ith it weallee nethethary to talk to Thelia
about thith? Ithn’t it over?
“But I don’t understand what happened.”
“What ith there to underthand? Von Gyldenløve laid
hands on her. Now he’th gone.”
“Yes, Rupert, but how many hands? Eh? I’ll see you
at five.”
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vii.
The first Earl of Rievaulx, Rupert’s grandfather, having
married Fanny the New York heiress, renovated his town
house to make her feel at home. When she died young his
relations wanted him to take out the preposterous lift, zinc
ice-box, electric bells in the servants’ hall, speaking-tubes,
and blue-green-gilt art nouveau swimming-pool in the
basement. But he wouldn’t; he kept them as mementos of
Fanny’s modern vivacity. A century later these contraptions,
which were all still in place, had become mementos of pre1914 quaintness and charm. They were also a confounded
nuisance. No one really understood how the speaking-tube
worked, or no one but the Stella Maze, their huge, slovenly
and insolent cook, and the ffontaines-Laigh family spent a
lot of time shouting into it or shouting about it.
That is what they were doing at five. (It felt later.
The calendar said late August, sunset wasn’t due until eight,
but already the dingy Novemberish day was drawing in, and
the lights were on.) “No, Mrs Maze,” Margot was roaring,
“more hot water. And anchovy sandwiches.” Tea is always a
substantial meal in ffontaines House, since the excesses of
the evening mean that people often don’t dine until
breakfast-time.
“It don’t work unless you loothen the clathp firtht,
before you take it off the hook.”
“I didn’t take it off, Papa, don’t – no, Mrs Maze, not
cake, water.” She shut the brass clasp and hung the long
green satin pipe back on the wall. “Damn The Poisoner.
She only pretends not to hear. To torment us.”
“Don’t call her the The Poisoner. Oh, you’ve always
been so hard on Stella. Hard, hard,” declared a thrilling,
theatrical voice, which belonged to the Countess of
Rievaulx. Everyone looked at her, which is just as she liked.
She was poised on a small green armchair, the least
comfortable chair in the library, twisted in a curious
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sideways fashion away from her husband and daughter, and
her daughter’s tutor, almost so that she faced a case of
books about hunting. Her profile was well-preserved,
meaning that the hard shape of the nose had outlived the
ambiguous cheeks, and revealed her as a bird of prey. Her
hair was still splendid. Men dropped their eyes before her
moist-lipped gaze. Her teeth had never been very good, but
as her smile was a tight crush of lips and lift of jowl, this
did not matter. Her voice was excellent, though: it could
thrill, sob, shake, droop, glitter, swell, die away into little
rivulets, it was odiferous and spangled. It seemed she was
about to use it: about to speak of her own affection for
Stella and the cold indifference of her family. This was a
common variation on her favourite theme.
But then Lord Rievaulx cleared his throat.
The ffontaines-Laighs, and before that the Laighs,
have never been an amiable family. Apart from a knack of
marrying rich women, they have generally been untalented;
despite having no particular principles, they are not
politically able; and often enough they have proved
downright wicked. But not many of them have been
cowards. So now Rupert Rievaulx did not swerve. “We
have something more therious to dithkuth,” he remarked,
with splendid simplicity. “Thith morning, my dear”
(Margot raised her eyebrows), “you mother found thome,
ah, human wemainth in her morning woom. Behind the
thofa ath it happenth. Felikth and I have dithpothed of
them. But how did they get there?” He delivered this like an
aphorism. “Thelia?”
“Lady Rievaulx,” said Culpepper: “it is time for you
to confess.”
“Confess?” Her voice had dropped an octave, she’d
clapped both hands to her throat. It would have too
hammy for amateur theatre – had always been, indeed,
considered too hammy, so that Celia Rievaulx scarcely ever
got a decent part in school and university productions. Her
falseness had therefore never been drained away. But
because it was all of a piece, each individual affection fell
into place and became curiously plausible.
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“Yes. Tell us how it got there. Consider telling the
truth.”
But before she could tell either truth or lies, the door
was flung open – kicked, probably – and her interrogation
was suspended by the aggressive rattle of a sizeable teatrolley, which looked, however, tiny, and almost quailing,
thrust forward as it was by the giantess Stella Maze.
Stella, the cook, nicknamed The Poisoner, was not,
in strict mathematical fact, so very tall; she simply had an
ogress form, mountainous. From the bleak rocky pinnacle
of her pate she fell away in crags and bluffs and crevasses
for which there were no obvious human terms. Her face
was an abrupt escarpment between cliff-like forehead and
jutting plateau of bust, and its features (minute eyes,
blubbery gash of a mouth) were quite insignificant beside
the warts and tufts, and a boil like a volcanic vent. Further
down she was a complication of canyons and outcrops; no
one could guess where the legs parted and began. She liked
to stand with her raw hands on the dual alps that served as
hips and her peak flung back, fuming with disgust. Now
she noisily replenished the tea-pot, banged about the cakeplates, and took her time.
The four of them chaffed at her presence, Celia
sniffling to herself at the cruelty of the world, and the other
three, under cover of tea, considering her for want of
anything better to do.
Margot’s thoughts were not very good ones, for she
watched her mother through a smog of contempt and
resentment, infant love curdled into shame. ‘She’s so
scrawny. Smokes so hard she consumes her flesh and puffs
it out. Soon she’ll collapse inward, ashes. Meanwhile, as
usual, she’s in blatant pink.’ (A diaphanous cropped
double-layered blouse over her Gaultier skirt, a heavier
material and lighter shade.) ‘How does Mama manage to
make her clothes so indecent? That’s really just rose-colour,
but she makes it papillic, vulval, tonsilar ….’
Culpepper was holding back his head so that he
could watch Celia over his chin. ‘What’s your essence,
under the histrionics? ... You’re a person addicted to your work.
You keep at it even when too tired and no longer doing
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good work. You cling to it not because it justifies your
existence (nothing ever does that), but because it softens
your certainty of being unjustifiable. It eases the pain. If
your inner life were boiled down, what’s its sediment? The
cosmos might be cleaner without me, but at least I do this as well as
anyone. And what is this? What your work? Not seduction
of younger men, that's incidental and preliminary. It’s the
being brutally cast-off. The tang’s in humiliation. You've
addicted yourself to playing Dido.’
It was Rupert Rievaulx who had most to reproach
her with, today as on most days; but his gaze was
surprisingly soft. ‘Celia, Celia! She was so lovely when I
wooed her. In a sense not even so stupid as now. Am I to
blame? It’s deadening to be found boring, after all, and I
could never disguise.’
That six eyes should silently rest on her, awaiting her
confession, was rather terrible. But ‘actors are the opposite
of people’. Celia enjoyed her predicament, and was sorry
when abruptly it ended: for Mrs Maze, having made a
business of getting the trolley out the library door, was
gone out at last, nearly slamming it behind her with her
monstrous foot. And that cold handsomish man Felix was
speaking once more.
“Well, Lady Rievaulx? You’ve had time to think.
Tell us of your deeds last night.”
“Last night?” she wondered, in the full glory of her
imbecility.
“Lady Rievaulx, I know I’m an out-of-the-way don.
But even I know that every 25th August the Honourable
Artillery Company mounts its Foundation Ball. The most
extravagant party of the London summer. Perhaps notorious
is the right word. Last year Hi! magazine published a ten
page colour-spread which had to be seized by the
authorities in Ireland, Japan, Texas and, as it happens, St
Wygefortis’ College, Cambridge.”
Celia struck a new pose, head back, bosom stuck
out, right hand resting on left breast: she was a queenly
tragedienne, traduced. “I am a Patron. I have to go,” and (as
Margot noticed) Culpepper’s eyes glanced wistfully off
those breasts, since last August he had managed to leaf
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through Hi! before it was confiscated from the Senior
Common Room by the Master.
“Quite. But I don’t suppose even Patrons attend
unaccompanied. I can’t believe Rupert would go” (Lord
Rievaulx’s eyes widened with horror at the thought of
himself at a public bacchanalia). “So I have to ask: who was
your date?”
Celia lowered her head a little at the gross word.
“Your escort. It’s been suggested that you were
taking Count von Gyldenløve.”
“I wasn’t,” hissed Celia, Lady Macbethish all of an
instant – “it’s a lie.”
“Very well. You’ll realise Rupert and I have been
committing crimes all morning to cover the matter up. I
feel obliged to ask.”
“A person. A man. I told him to come here and pick
me up at nine. But as it happens he didn’t show. Stood me
up, in fact. So about eleven I gave up and went alone.”
“By cab?”
“Yes. But he wasn’t there either and the ball was so
sombre –”
“It was?” Culpepper was genuinely disappointed. Hi!
had made an impression the previous August.
“Compared to last year. About two I gave up and
came home and went to bed” – the word alone was so
tangibly in the air, so carefully touched with finger-tips as it
passed by Margot and Rupert and Felix, that Celia did not
have to utter it.
“And this discourteous person wasn’t Nils von
Gyldenløve?”
“No.”
“Well …?”
“As it happens,” she said, making a pretty business
of divulging more than honour strictly required, “since you
ask, I was going with Hugo.”
For a few heartbeats, while Margot ostentatiously
put milk into her tea, Rievaulx’s distinguished but torpid
face ran through his acquaintances. Lurid light dawned.
“Not Hugo Cleveridge? Anguth Moxgwave’th thon?
“Yes.”
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“Thelia! He’tth thtill an undergwaduate!”
“A graduate student. He’s all of twenty-six.”
“He – is twenty-three,” said Margot, quietly and with
a hesitation. “Twenty-four at Christmas.” She stirred
unnecessarily a tea-spoon.
“He’th a boy. Zoë’s youngest.”
“He’s at Oxford.”
Which made Felix chortle ruefully. “Oxford, eh?
Oxford for tragedy, Oxford for serious comedy. Not to
mention tragical-historical and tragical-comical-historicalpastoral. But Cambridge – Cambridge for farce”, and for
the first time it occurred them he cared whether Margot got
in. ‘And St Wygy’s,’ he added to himself, ‘for criminal
farce.’ In an instant he thought out a new career for
himself, as an intellectual rough. Yes, he’d potter along at
Wygefortis’, but being a don would just be cover. He’d
contact the great (the Foreign Secretary was an old
schoolfellow), make himself available – and as for Margot,
initiate in his violence, she could come and study classics at
Wygy’s. ‘She’ll always be about for him to boast to…. I like
talking to her,’ he realised, surprised; hitherto it’d hardly
mattered who his audience was, he spoke to listen to
himself. ‘Her specifically.’ And so, almost for the first time
sicne childhood, he looked at another human being with
mere curiousity, forgetting himself. ‘She’s able, resourceful.
She may have an inner life’ – normally he assumed people
were like refrirgerator lights, on only when he opened the
door to inspect them. ‘Margot ….’
With a start he realised he’d missed some seconds of
conversation. Lord Rievaulx was admonishing his wife: “…
to Anguth Moxgwave’s son – not that for a moment I
think he ith, Zoë being as thee ith. But it wathn’t fifteen
yearth ago that you and Anguth – ”.
Margot interrupted with a heavy sigh. (Felix was
remembering that Lady Moxgrave had also been prominent
in the Hi! photospread. Cavorting on a table in a waste of
shattered plate-glass. ‘Limber.’) “Isn’t this beside the point,
Papa? Hugh didn’t turn up. He’s not relevant.”
“No,” said Felix, sitting up and forcing himself to
attend. “But von Gyldenløve is. When, Lady Rievaulx, did
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you last” (and again an unspoken term whished through the
air, perceived by all) “see him?”
“A few days ago. Tuesday. Here. But it was horrible.
Nils was, was very rude. Said we were finished. Everyone’s
heard – ”.
A banal enough remark. But it provoked in
Culpepper an illumination. ‘To be humiliated! To be flung
off by impossible youths again and again, each time more
grotesquely. Always before everyone, the world. Meaning Zoë
Moxgrave and the other four dozen rich London women
visible to you, Celia, amongst all humanity. People must
addict themselves to something, of course, to escape being
free, but why such a painful hobby? Why do you do it? ... Ah!
Because you do it so well. Better than anyone else. It’s your
extremity, your art.’ That morning he would have laughed
at the word; but since then he had stopped being a narrow
academic and embraced a new avocation. What right had
he, who had elected to be an outlaw, to sneer at her career
as sexual jetsam? ‘It’s a pointless excellence. But less
pointless than champion golf. No doubt you think of
humiliation as the price you pay for your superior
sensibility. As you call your sensuality. As your call your
boredom.’ He gazed at her with a certain wonder, for it is
wonderful when humans make what is original from their
common clay. The quality of what they make isn’t the
point. ‘Being ditched by boys is your art. In other words, it
is mysteriously earnest. Beyond what nature can
understand. Beyond what angelic intelligence can predict.
Why shouldn’t I take it seriously? It’s ineffable as all art is
ineffable, sacramental, orphic – by the way, what a piece of
snobbery is Orpheus! Imagine a joiner sidling his way into
hell to stand before the Dark Throne. Beg pardon Your
Grisliness may I point out that my drawers slide ever so smoothly and
I think you’ll find my dowelling is likewise of a superior quality, so
could you see your way to resurrecting my good lady wife? But
Oprheus is a poet so we don’t titter. We’ve moved that he
should want cosmic order flung aside for his convenience.
Of course he buggers it up anyway, turns back to make
sure his achievement is being appreciated, loses her
again…. But you, Celia Rievaulx! You work your doom
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before the eyes of heaven and earth and care for nothing
else!’ He found she was still chattering, complaining of the
brutal treatment by peered at von Gyldenløve. He listened
with sincere respect.
“ … he said he didn’t want to see me again, wouldn’t
see me even if we were at the same party …”.
The same party: that was the difficulty. Why would
this social-climbing Viking break with Celia two days
before the Artillery Ball, an occasion which recreates so
authentically the sack and rape of a coastal town by
corsairs? If von Gyldenløve had broken with ffontaines
House, how did he end up here, by the basement pool?
“Lady Rievaulx. Forgive me for interrupting. I must
press you. Why did von Gyldenløve quarrel with you?”
“Because he’s a beast, a barbarian! He wanted me to
do, to do something, that I couldn’t, couldn’t –”.
“He wanted,” said Margot, massively, slowly,
apparently against her will, “Mama to bring a second guest
to the ball.”
“Who?” asked Rupert, all his jadedness gone for the
moment, his eyes startled open by thoughts of nameless
triangular congresses.
“Me.”
Lord Rievaulx fell back in his chair. Even he, it
seemed, had never conceived of his wife taking their only
child on a sexual rampage with Lady Moxgrave, and Lady
Moxgrave’s son, and a swashbuckler from the fjords. (And
even Culpepper felt an odd tightening round his collarbone which he couldn’t place.)
“But I said no, Rupert. I said no. So don’t look like
that. I had a perfectly horrible evening, boring, boring. Zoë
kept pretending to commiserate. ‘Scandinavians, darling,
they’re even more flighty than Arabs.’ I’m not certain my
dress worked, it was the beaded coral Thierry Mugler, the
emerald choker was a mistake. I felt so low I came home
early. I must be growing old. I’ve never left an Artillery Ball
early before.”
“Think what you’re missing, Mama. It’s probably still
going.”
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“Don’t the hard-core adjourn to Paris?” asked
Culpepper, whose few moments with Hi! had bitten deep.
“We usually do. There’s a carriage reserved on the
Eurostar. Last year for breakfast we trashed a three-star
Michelin on the Faubourg St-Honoré.” She sighed
piteously. “But no fun this year for little Celia. I came
home, and my reward was finding that – thing – this
morning in my morning-room. I’ve been wretched ever
since. I have nothing more to tell you. I don’t think it’s
been fair. I know nothing.”
There was an appalling pause.
Rievaulx spoke. “The’th telling the twuth, you know,
Felikth. Thee does. Thee never lieth.”
“Much,” remarked Margot with the open candour of
children, “too stupid.”
Felix too lay back and breathed noisily, twice. Then
he sat up. “Yes. Lady Rievaulx, congratulations: you’re the
only person in this household not guilty of a crime.” He
put down his tea-cup so firmly it rattled, sending circular
ripples that broke against the rim. “Now, Margot, we need
to hear about what you committed last night.”
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viii.
“Good God,” cried Rupert Rievaulx clapping his forehead,
“Margot too? Wath I the only person who thpent any time
athleep?”
Margot’s eyes measured Culpepper’s for a second.
(Curious how intimate it feels to be hunted, brought to bay,
by another perosn’s mind.) Then she too sat up, folded her
hands in her lap, put away all that nonsense of being a child,
and began to narrate, brightly.
“I’m not sure if the right word is honour, or irritation.
The thing is, I’ve always hated having Mama’s ridiculous
short Viking about the house, whenever he was in England
smuggling things. I didn’t like his looks or his hands on me
– although he only tried the hands once, when I’d come
back from a long walk, sweaty and flushed. I was holding a
shooting-stick and must have given him quite a bruise,
which Mama will have overlooked later.” Lady Rievaulx
peered about evasively. “But his loathsome idea about the
Artillery Ball – that was one outrage too many. I decided he
needed frightening off. It didn’t work out as I meant, but it
did work. We’re not going to see him haunting this house
again. And I don’t think he’ll be smuggling quite so readily.
That’s a good thing, isn’t it?
“Mama, who always tells the truth, or at least never
tells untruths, is right about Hugo Cleveridge. It was a
perfectly kosher date. Kosher for her. Not for him. He’d
got himself in trouble of various sorts and wasn’t allowed
out of St Anne’s College at night. Certainly not to leave
Oxford for a bender in London with his mother’s bosom
friend. Even the beery friends wouldn’t approve of that.
Anyway – he told me – he didn’t trust them. What a
remark.”
“He sounds,” said Culpepper, “like an uncommon
shit.”
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“Indeed. So he hadn’t told anybody about the ball.
He was just going to slither out the garden gate with his
things in a ruck-sack, get dressed in the train, and slither
back in time for breakfast. He was due here at nine. But I
sent him a message to come early, at eight.
“Getting in touch with the revolting von Gyldenløve
was trickier. So many people wanted him dead. He never
stayed in the same hotel for more than a night. Just drove
about England in his preposterous yellow stretch limousine,
which I think he thought of as a longboat. But eventually I
got his cellphone. ‘Hei, dette er meg.’ ‘Mother’s changed
her mind about the ball, Nils. She says yes to a threesome.
Come at eight.’ What he said back is neither here nor there.
It was worthy of a Viking about to burn a village.
“There’s not much to say about Hugo. My –”.
“Come on,” sighed Culpepper, “say that little.”
“A boring rugger-bugger. Round face like a dinnerplate, all forehead, overhanging eyebrows, a flat nose. And
his mother’s evil little mouth, entirely out of place amidst
the stubble. But he’d told me he was a fencing Blue, and
my idea was simply to get him to fight von Gyldenløve. I
mean almost fight him. The ruffian didn’t wouldn’t want to
die, would her? So he’d have to flee, wouldn’t he? In the
face of the bold Englishman. And if he fled he wouldn’t
dare come back and show his face. I know this sounds oldfashioned. But between them, von Gyldenløve and Mamma
had made me feel unclean, and I thought a good clean
flourish of swords –”.
“What swords? Those scimitars there? Above the
mantel? Sorry to interrupt. But I’ve noticed you eyeing
them.”
“Thothe thingth?” said Lord Rievaulx in
astonishment. “But they’re just souvenirs. Uncle Horace
brought them back from the souk in Port Said.” (‘Along
with the clap,’ he didn’t add; venereal disease was a topic
that always antagonised Celia.)
But Culpepper had already said “Ah” and, pushing
an ottoman across and climbing up, taken one of them
down. (‘He’s making himself at home,’ thought Celia, vexed
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at being innocent and ignored.) “Mameluke work. Wellbalanced.”
“Do you fence, Dr Culpepper?” Lady Rievaulx
sounded sceptical.
“I did. Once. A little. But I’ve always admired
swordsmithery. This one’s splendid. Seed-pearls in the
pommel. Silk tassel, not original I think. Persian calligraphy
on the blade, which is silver-chased –”.
“And very sharp,” said Margot drily. “Dangerous as
well as pretty. I got them down yesterday and honed them
with Mrs Maze’s butcher’s steel.”
Culpepper was examining it lovingly. “Scary.”
“You’d think…. Oh damn, it went so well to begin
with. Mama was still upstairs getting her look together and
the servants were out of sight. I hovered by the front door.
Hugo turned up, and I got him in here, got him a drink,
told him Mama was excited about taking him to a sex party
which is true, we all know and admire Mama’s candour.
Actually I think the real thrill was going to be seeing Lady
Moxgrave’s face when she saw whom you’d brought –
wasn’t it, Mummy?” A faint groan. “Then the long long
yellow car pulled up and out came the short yellow crook,
looking even more like a pirate than usual in white tie. It
went and parked round the corner, with his driver and his
bodyguard, or whoever that hairy thug is. I got him into the
library without being groped and – . What a pity Lady M
never got to see her son in his evening finery. The look on
that flat Norwegian face was all you could have hoped for,
Mama.
“They were both primitives, the one a Northman,
the other a rugby-player, and you know how easy it is to
embarrass a primitive. Social bafflement turns to rage
because they’re too shy to think of anything else to do with
it. So they got angry with each other, although neither
particularly cared for you, Mama. It’s a steadying thought,
isn’t it, that you’re only a smidgeon younger than their
combined age?”
“Almost five years younger,” spat our Lady Rievaulx,
now performing snatches of Victorian melodrama. “You
are unnatural.”
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“They got angry. ‘The old bitch is mine,’ said von
Gyldenløve, or words to that effect, and I slapped him as
hard I could. He snatched at my wrist, but I got Hugo’s
gin-and-tonic out of his hand and dashed the lot in his
face.”
“Von Gyldenløve’s face?” said Culpepper rather
thickly, not following.
“No of course not – Hugo’s. I wasn’t trying to make
sense, I was trying to get them to fall on each other. For a
minute I thought they were simply going to start swinging
at each other with their fists, which would have done
nothing but smash the furniture. ‘Stop!’ I cried. ‘She will
hear,’ which of course is nonsense, you can’t hear a thing
when you’re getting dressed, Mama, can you? You listen to
heavy metal. I suppose that accounts for some of your
choices.”
“Always an unnatural child to me.”
Margot’s indifference was marvellous, her father
could not have outperformed it. “I said: ‘Stop it! Do it
properly! With these!’ And I hopped up on the coffee table
and got down the scimitars.” She stood and took the
scimitar from Culpepper’s hand. “Sit.” He sat. “Like this.”
She struck a pose: en garde! “Shouldn’t it have worked?”
Thrust, parry, thrust, thrust.
“Darling! –”
“I thay, be careful.”
“Brava!” said Culpepper, drily. “Yes, it should’ve
worked.”
“But it didn’t. It all went wrong. I thought Hugo
would swagger once he had a sword in his hand, thus. And
that von Gyldenløve would back away. Not a bit of it.
Hugo looked sick as a lamb, but the Viking turned into a –
what did they call it? A berserker. He started making this
low rumbling noise, and then suddenly he was swishing his
blade through the air. Like this! Thwack: and that was the
end of the chrysanthemums, their stalks went flying.” (But
she was more careful.) “Oomph: a cushion was impaled –
that cushion, turn it over. Whoosh: he’d flung his white silk
scarf into the air and halved it as it fell. His heathenish
features shone with crazed joy. – This wouldn’t do.
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Obviously I had was to calm him down so that he would
leisure to be afraid and run away.” Margot sighed and
leaned on her sword.
“Our garden, with all that fraught Mexican statuary,
isn’t really a place for a bout with swords. It would have to
be – my brain was moving quickly, although I was busy
hopping about, keeping myself between the two rivals,
snatching at their sleeves – the swimming-pool.
“I don’t know quite how I shepherded them out of
the library and down the servants’ stairs, but I did. We
didn’t meet anyone, thank God, because we looked like
refugees from the worst sort of costume party. I was still in
my day clothes, but here were two shortish young men in
tailcoats, each rigged out with a bright operetta Mameluke
sword, one man shining with murderous pleasure, the other
paling and graying. Down the stair we went, Hugo so nervy
his blade kept rattling on the metal balustrade, von
Gyldenløve humming war-music to himself and now and
then guffawing. Through the walls I could hear Mrs Maze
in her pantry, chanting to herself – it always sounds like
recipes for poison. You realise, Felix, she’s almost a
recluse? Hardly leaves that one little room. The other
servants are terrified of her …. I could hear Cannibal
Corpse, Mummy’s getting-dressed music, kerranging down
the stairs. And from your drawing room, Papa, I could
somehow hear your vast indifference to everything as you
sat and read, or simply sat. (You, Felix, I couldn’t detect at
all.)”
“I was dozing.”
“Ah? ... I wish I’d thought to bring a candelabrum. I
could have stood with it over my head, quite in the
eighteenth-century duelling manner. As it was when I
turned the switch the lights came on with a jolt of noise
that made Hugo leap in the air. Also that machine that
cleans the pool water came on too with a nasty bang,
beginning to churn and to churn.”
She sat down, apparently tired from all this talking.
Sat in a straight-backed wing-chair with her legs demurely
crossed at the ankle, her hair of smouldering-brand colour
falling heavily dowmn her right, the sabre in her left hand,
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point down, so she could twirl it as she spoke. Culpepper
noticed her.
“I’ve always liked our swimming-pool. I like the gold
tessellation. I like the wavy painted tiles and the mosaic
dolphins and the marble triton and the lewd marble waternymph. I like the quiet, and the big lonely potted palms,
and the hanging smoke-green glass lamps. I like the water,
so still and never-swum-in – we being such a depraved
family. The meniscus is so faint and motionless you can
barely detect it, it’s just a smear on the lucidity, warm
slightly misty air, cool water, luminous tiling.... When I was
a child, when I swam in it, it was like being naked inside a
Byzantine icon. When I was pubescent I’d go down there at
night, and sit in the darkness smoking a joint.”
“Oh? Weally?”
“Yes. Isn’t this the afternoon for confessing things?
Don’t look shocked Papa, go back to not caring about
anything. I want you bleak and indifferent. Then perhaps
you can it explain it to me. What happened. It was horrible,
it was sudden, and it didn’t make sense even at the time.”
“All howwible thingth make thenth. Thith ith what
the world ith like.”
“That’s the spirit, Papa.... My idea was that the trek
down to basement, and the muted turn-of-the-century
charm of the pool, would cool their blood. And so it did.
But in quite different ways. Hugo, the tosser, Hugo – he was
simply shattered with terror. A trouser-wetting mess. He
had alsmots ceased being human, he couldn’t speak, there
was a crust of spittle all over his lips and chin. He was so
petrified he couldn’t even do the sensible thing, throw
down the sword with a clatter, shout ‘Damn it, you win, I
don’t want to fight, I don’t care who squires Lady Rievaulx
to the orgy, and nobody has ever cared who goes to her bed.’
Which is perfectly true, Mama.”
“Hurl insults at me if you will –”.
(It was scarcely an insult, Margot’s remark was just.
‘Still,’ thought Culpepper, ‘you might remember, my dear,
this strange law: a child can like, love, patronise, neglect or
forget a parent, and nothing much happens. But if she
hates, the effect’s like matricide; she’s doomed to become her.
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So the priest of Nemi, in the volcanic forests south of
Rome, was always a runaway slave and a homicide; who
served the shrine until another runway took him by
surprise, and slew him. Margot, Margot: be careful.’)
“Hugo couldn’t back away from his doom. I don’t
believe it was self-respect that kept him fixed. Perhaps he
was afraid of me. Morally afraid of me, physically afraid of
that unreconstructed heathen. Unable to run though sick
with dread of the man-cutting blade –”.
“Hold up. I don’t understand this at all. Why was he
so frightened? He was a Blue in fencing. No one could hurt
him in a fair sword-fight.”
“Oh yes, he was a god among sportsmen. Almost
unmatched at Oxford in rapiers, quite unmatched in sabres.
He’d told me so. I only checked this morning. He was
nothing of the sort. Didn’t fence at all. Just a half-blue in claypigeon shooting. Even in rugby he was only in his college’s
second XV. Being sporty for Hugo meant having a childish
sense of humour and leaving his short untucked.”
Culpepper tutted unironically.
“Yes, I manouevred him into swordplay. But I was
sure he was immune from harm. How was that my fault?
Of course I might have inspected his cap more closely. But
what’s a naïve schoolgirl to believe? These aren’t matters a
bloke should lie about. Don’t you think that’s a capital
offence? Really and truly, I think he had it coming.”
“Had what coming? Did von Gyldenløve cut him to
bits?”
“Not at all. Now the first rush of anger had
dissipated, von Gyldenløve was quite talkative. Or bardic.
He made us a speech. Quite a clever speech. For a notvery-noble savage. Someone somewhere had once taught
him something – I wonder who. ‘Now we fight,’ he said. ‘I
am most happy. Always I want holmgang. No one else want
it. Shoot I men, yes, drown, hang, but never they hold
sword so no chop chop. You know holmgang? It mean go for
walk on island. It is how my ancestors did when there was
matters to be settle. One small island, two men, two big big
axes. Now we by pool and is like island. I kill you for you
rude. No, I kill you for Celia my woman. No, I no care
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why. I like kill. I like kill.’ He was working himself, you see,
into a proper bloodlust. His eyes were shot, his breath was
roughening, their was an uneven flush over his face, just as
if he were erotically excited. Or so I suppose. Mama?”
“Unnatural, unnatural.”
“Yes yes,” said Margot (her studied callousness
fitting wonderfully with her mother’s studied anguish).
“Nils was swaying now, waving his body back and forth on
fixed feet. ‘I know you English fencing. Gentlemans going
haw haw, nice clean gentlemans. They make a mandoble,
like this’ – a sideways flick of the wrist, a slight slash
through the air. ‘Or a pronation’ – he twisted his sabre
round, knuckles up, as if to scoop butter. ‘All most precise,
most scientish, most brainish’ – he showed us what he felt
with his sabre; little mincing twitches in mid-air – ‘right for
girls. Not for me. Me of the old times. Me do foining.’ And
he suddenly thrust straight forward, straight as a line in
geometry, a manly thrust that stopped an inch from the
waistcoat of poor Hugo. Who was clearly within a hair’s
breath of shrieking like a whipped child. ‘Ho, you like that
no?’ Another tremendous poke out to the side, over the
water of the pool. ‘You know foin? It mean cut sudden in
straight line not waiting for enemy. It not English. It as we
Vikingene fight. A moment and this girl make signal. Then
we fight. You do you English tricks. I foin. I cut little hole
in you gut. Another.’ Ah, ah!”
(Although she was making a fine lively business of
acting this out, I’m afraid Felix’s attention had meandered.
“Pronation,” he murmured as if to himself, “foin.
Mandoble.” He was always too easily beguiled by
outlandish new words. “Holmgang.”)
“Ah I boring you, Dr Culpepper?” She was her
mother’s understudy: she’d learned her repertoire of offence.
“I beg your pardon!” He sat up. “Count von
Gyldenløve was getting himself excited. Do go on.”
“Yes. He was hopping about on the tiles now,
almost dancing. ‘Out fall gut. I put sword in eye. I turn it.
Other eye. Tongue I takes out.’ And so forth. Such was
Nils’ speech.
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“Hugo was never much of one for speeches, and just
now he seemed unable to do any sort of language, not even
howls. He simply stared, mouth loose, eyes huge. Like a
man on a scaffold, staring at the guillotine. Which is what
Nils’ sword must have looked like. ‘A few more seconds
and I’ll have to endure that’: I could follow these thoughts
across his flat face. All at once he remembered that he too
was holding a sword, probably for the first time in his life,
the great fraud. He peered down at it. ‘Your right ear I cut
off,’ Nils, was saying, chanting, signing. He capering about
now, almost beside himself. ‘Then your other. Slow slow I
think.’ Hugo lifted his sabre and stared at it. Then, gently,
he touched the cutting-edge with his left palm, testing it –
and snatched his hand back. There was a thin red line right
across, dripping.
“Then Hugo Cleveridge sank into the last abyss of
horror, where I have not been and hope never to go. His
face was terrible. ‘Softy Englishman!’ cried von Gyldenløve,
swirling his sabre above his head so the air sang. ‘Softy
flesh! It is time! It is time! Let us start butcher!’ he paused,
arms extended, head slightly back, sweaty, ecstatic, berserk.
I’d never imagined such an utterly pagan posture. He was
so close to being a unselfconscious animal, so comfortable
with the old brutal gods, such obviously nourished on
blood. The fact that this nightmare from the Dark Ages
wore white tie and tails, like any modern gent on the razzle,
made it worse. His eyes were shut. He was praying. Offering
to Thor (I think) the sacrifice of Hugo Cleveridge: ‘Far
Thor! Gi meg styrke! La mye blod –’
“As he prayed the unthinkable happened. Fast, fast.
Impossible, unthinkable. I’m not sure it’s correct to speak
of it. What’s the point of words? They tidy away after the
fact.”
“In the beginning was the word,” murmured
Culpepper, whose forefathers had been clerics.
“Yes but before the beginning, before creation,
what? Chaos. This was a reprise from Chaos. Why make it
slower, saner, wordier than it was?” She shrugged and
stood. “This is what happened” – stabbing deep into the
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void before her, cutting a hole in the air. “That.” And sat
down again.
“What?” asked Culpepper, bewildered. “Von
Gyldenløve cut – ?”
“No. No. Hugo…. Thor was bilked. Poor Nils’
terrible prayer was cut off. His flourish was trimmed, he
stopped.”
“Um.”
“It wasn’t a sensible event. Hugo just lunged. An
unscientific rip, an outrageous foin. Caddish, blind, eyes
shut. Struck out at the terrible sword that was about to
open his stomach wall and slit his nose. His flesh couldn’t
bear standing waiting. Poor slug. The sabre went straight
through the Count’s wrist and out the other side and there
he was, your handsome lover, Mama, I mean one of them.
Staring at the empty air just above his stump where the
blood came in gobs, like a blocked-up fountain.
“My eye stayed with the hand. The sword went
flying one way, the hand the other. The sword simply
clattered on the tiles, but the hand was elegant, it sailing
high, parabola not hyperbola, splashing into the pool. Into
the pool and, with the most disgusting chumping noise,
was sucked into the pool filter. Pinkness came bubbling out
but the circles went out and out smoothly, lapping against
the side of the pool.
“On the whole the effect was comic.
“Where are we? Clatter. Splash. Chump-chumpchump. Nils is staring through the hand-shaped void,
spasmodic with red. Hugo’s staggered back somehow, he’s
got the with sabre-point on the ground between his legs,
awkward – like a nong. A pause of low long, how long? If
any idiot had been there reciting integers, I think he’d have
got to four or five before the next unimaginable thing.
“I think, I think: isn’t that the source of all our
problems? Thinking’s what knocks us down. Cogito ergo bum.
A beast might manage mutilation, not us. Even in the
extreme of amazingness the human brain keeps
unmercifully plodding forward through time, conceptconcept-concept. Even a brain as dim as Hugo’s. ‘Fuck,
fuck-fuck I’ve lopped off the bugger’s hand this ain’t a
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fucking duel anymore I’m done for it means prison I’m
going to have to run the bugger through the heart and leg it
fuck fuck what’s he got in his hand now fuck.’
He was one step behind, as usual. I’d run through all
these ideas and was wondering if Hugo was going to kill me
through as well, the blithering rugger-head, as the only
witness.
But Nils – Nils was well ahead of both of us. ‘Is
there an alternative? No, he’ll have to kill me. Will the girl
scream for the police? Am I going to die anyway? Is there
an alternative? No.’ By this stage he had awkwardly reached
under his left arm-pit with his left hand – his hand – where
he evidently kept his holster, and, calmly enough although
his face was mottled gray and white, produced a gun and
pulled the trigger so a bullet went neatly through Hugo’s
forehead. A third eye, opened, seeing Nothing, which the
usual two eyes cannot see for light. I thought of this aperçu
at the time. Isn’t the human mind odd? Or just mine? Or
death, or metaphor, or violence, or language? Or swimming
pools?
“So now there was another spurt of blood, out the
back of Hugo’s head, not the front; and he pitched
forward, the opposite direction from the blood, and banged
onto the tiles. His sabre made another terrible racket. For a
second or two his face wasn’t quite still, but somehow this
didn’t strike me as human motion at all, just chemicals
settling into decay. Shreds of electricity in a ruined
machine. His third eye was fathoming the abyss, no longer
interested in a lump of cells like me.
“Nils, not unreasonably, fell over too, and I thought,
more thinking you see, it might be a good idea to sit down.
“So there I crouched, amidst the chlorine smell, with
the two men prone before me, Hugo bleeding a little, a
dribble out of his trivial brains, and Nils a great deal.
Spasmodically. Pause; hush. Pause; gush.
“Concept-concept-concept. Nils wasn’t in such a
bad way. I’d staunch his stump and get him out the door,
round the corner, into his yellow limo. It’d take him to the
coast, he’d get on his yacht, be gone.
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“But Hugo was a problem. The police would take an
interest, make a rumpus. And since they’re not clever
enough to believe impossible things, they’d come up with
their own story. Then prison, I thought; social workers. I
couldn’t bear that. Because they’d possibly think I’d moreor-less murdered him.”
“You more-or-less had.”
“I hardly think so…. What struck me was that there
hadn’t so much been a crime as a muddle. These wretches
were simply the wrong way round. Hugo was supposed to have
frightened off Nils. And if even if that hadn’t worked, even
if they’d come to blows, how much better if Nils were dead,
not Hugo. The goon, not the viscount’s son.”
“Is this just class-solidarity?”
“Not clarth. Moxgwave’th a Lloyd George
cweation.”
“My point is that Cleveridge and von Gyldenløve
sound equally worthless.”
“In life, perhaps. But they’re quite different in death.
Don’t you see? Nils’ corpse couldn’t be a scandal. He was a
gangster, and gangsters are always disappearing at the
hands of other gangsters. We expect them to vanish. Their
bodies are soluble in air.”
“Ah.” (‘How’s she doing this? I’m hoping to teach
her.’)
“There is, for instance, a gangster living not far from
here, on the other side of Regent’s Park, a Serbian. What
would be easier – I imagined, wistfully – than lugging Nils’
not-very-large corpse across the Park and tossing it over
Mr Krkobabich’s garden wall? Krkobabich would know
what to do. If only .… Equally worthless, you say. Yes!
That was the pity of it. Both so empty-headed they were
only bodies. Mama’s interchangeable bed-fodder.” Lady
Rievaulx managed a sharp wee moan and covered her
mouth. “Crying out to be swapped.
“That’s what I felt.
“Then, in the treacherous way of thought, I thought.
“There were two rings on Nils’ left hand, I mean his
hand. One with a snake, one with three birds.”
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“An unkindness of ravens,” murmured Culpepper to
no one in particular and was ignored.
“I worked them off, pocketed them. I noticed a gold
tree round his neck; I stole that too. Then, very gently, I
roused him. I got a towel out of the big mahogany towelpress, and bound his stump as hard as I could. Got his arm
round my shoulder, heaved him up, and worked him round
to the back-door to the pool – where they bring supplies,
Felix. I used to watch them, I like chemical smells. I got
him through this, out into the cold air and darkness.
There’s a flight of steep concrete stairs there, it brings you
out behind the tool-shed. It was quiet. I could hear my
footsteps, his dragging feet, on the gravel. I worked him
round the side of the house, in the alley-way where there
are sometimes rats but not last night. He was half-awake,
almost drunk. His head shook, he breathed in my face,
herring and whiskey. We got to the street. No one around.
A bit more to the right, where his car was parked – but his
driver and bodyguard had seen us, and came running.
“‘Helvete!’ they said and ‘Breiddjame!’ No English. It
didn’t matter. There was nothing to explain in any
language. I simply handed him over. They would dearly
liked to have shot or strangled me, but they couldn’t, not
out in the open in Kent Terrace. So they snarled at me
ungratefully and took him. I watched them put him into the
car, tenderly. they drove away at great speed. Let’s see.
Ninety minutes to Sheerness the way they were moving.
There must be a doctor on board, living the way von
Gyldenløve lives. He’d be sewn up and they’d be underway
by midnight. Not such a bad evening, don’t you think? He’s
probably had worse. Fates worse than death, eh, Mama?”
Celia was staring at her child as if she had never seen
her before.
“I went back to the pool. The pump was still making
its noise, the ripples had broken up into meaningless
random waves, in fact the surface was barely agitated at all.
Hugo was lying stone-still on his face with his sword beside
him.
“The next bit’s not so neat. I’d thought it through,
but we’ve seen how worthless thought is. I took off my
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dress, shoes and my underwear, made sure Hugo was lying
straight, face down of course, got his sabre lined up, and
took off his head.
“That’s just the way it has to be retailed. But you
mustn’t think I was cold or precise about it. It was too odd
to describe. Do you remember, Papa, when I was very
small and we stayed with Aunt Maggie at Glenrotham? You
let me stay on after the hunt and watch Auntie’s minions
gut the deer. I was frightened then, but what a useful
afternoon!
“Now I remembered the ghillies, lined up the
vertebræ – and made an awful mess. Most of his right ear
came off. Blood sprayed me, quite hard, flick of a liquid
whip. The second hack’s better: we’ve smashed the
backbone through, shards show through the skin. The third
chop misses entirely, and chips the tiles. What a good thing
the police aren’t going to be involved and start messing
about with magnifying glasses. Then I did shriek, for the
first time, and threw down the sword. Then after sobbing a
bit I fell back on the crude option and sawed – I was
squirted all over.
“This time yesterday carnage was as much beyond
my experience as it is beyond yours now. Now I’m expert
and always will be, and you, Mama and Papa dear, never
will know ….” But her eye was resting on Culpepper.
“Once the head was off it rolled over the smooth
sticky tiles and dropped into the pool. I tried to grab it but
it got away. Hilarious of it. I sat down again to think. It
bobbed about, face down, a relief that, it’s the other way in
all the paintings. You know, those Greek ones.
“All right. I’d stow what was left of Hugo in the
towel-press, get rid of the head, go to bed. I simply wasn’t
strong enough to carry him anywhere now. Tomorrow
night would do. I’d carry him across the Park, in a sack
perhaps, and leave him with at the Krkobabiches. They
find him at dawn, recognise Nils von Gyldenløve from his
rings. News of a rubbing-out would ripple through the
underworld, where bodies dematerialise, and cause
satisfaction. Good.
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“Meanwhile, Hugo Cleveridge would simply have
absconded from his college without telling anyone where
he was going. He’d sneaked off, perhaps to London,
perhaps – here I was inspired to grope in the pocket of his
tailcoat. How absolutely absolutely still his heart was.
Warmish though, ugh. Here it was: his passport! He knew
the Artillery Ball often rolls on abroad the next morning,
he’d come prepared. I pocketed it. All right: Hugo vanishes
from his rooms, passport too. Clearly he’s run away, natural
enough for a boy about to sent down from Oxford. Sent
back to Moxgrave Hall, think of that. After a few months
there’s tepid speculation about him in College. No one
much liked him, everyone’s pleased to have another flick of
varnish added to Oxford’s mysterious patina.”
“This,” said Culpepper (it wasn’t at all what he was
thinking) “is cold-blooded. I almost preferred it when you
felt class-solidarity with the Moxgraves.”
“Oh, Lord M.’s never believed Hugo is his.”
“What,” put in Celia, desolately, “of poor Zoë?”
“She’ll be distressed, but not very. As you know,
Mummy, her life’s one long consoling of herself. She’ll
manage.”
“She’s –”.
“Anyway, these are stale thoughts. I had them all last
night. I spoke aloud. That always clarifies my mind. I
explained it to myself, argued it through, overcame my
compunction. There were no weaknesses. It was a beautiful
scheme, a work of art.
“I stood up. I got the hose out of the cleaners’
cupboard and doused the tiles. The blood ran off into the
pool and made a billowing pink cloud, but the pump was
still working and I was sure the water would be unstained
by morning – not that anyone ever comes down to our
swimming-pool in the mornings. Then I pulled Hugo into
the press and covered him with towels. Of course I was
caked with gore myself by now, so I turned on the shower
beside the pool and stood under the hottest water I have
ever borne. Then I dried and got my clothes on. I cleaned
off the befouled sabre and collected the unused one. I crept
upstairs – Mrs Maze was still muttering spells in the pantry
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– and hung the swords up in the library. It was only a few
hours since I’d been there last, a different person.
“Then down to the pool again. I got the net-on-apole they use to scrape insects off the surface and fished
for Hugo’s head, which was bobbing out of arm’s length in
the centre. Almost I took it upstairs, I was going to open the
pantry door and show to Mrs Maze, all of a sudden. But his
expression seeemed much too serious to share the house
with overnight. And I considered the police. There was a
good chance, one way or another, that they’d be raiding us.
Searching it. This family pursues a remarkably Gothic
course – doesn’t it? – behind our Regency façade, but we
don’t usually keep severed heads with bullet-holes. It had
to go.
“I wrapped it in a towel, crept out the back stairs,
disposed of it. Came back, let myself in the front door,
went up to bed. No sign of the Maze, Mummy, anyone.
Stillness. I was suddenly so tired I pulled myself upstairs by
the bannisters. I fell into a sort of wholesome coma as I
stepped through my bedroom door.
“I woke very late this morning, no, this afternoon,
and spent a long time frowning up at the plaster of my
ceiling, trying to work out which memories were genuine
and which weren’t. Since Chaos is come again, perhaps
nothing’s genuine, and I may as well tell you about what I
saw of Fenrir, the most terrible of all wolves. (I read a book
of Norse myths once. I’d forgotten this story. Never again.)
Fenrir was the gods’ pet until he got worryingly big. They
told him they were tying him up for fun, but the wolf,
suspicious, demanded a god put his hand in his mouth to
prove good faith. Týr the god of mortal combat
volunteered. It turned out the gods were in earnest. The
monster was bound and all the gods laughed except,
naturally, Týr, whose hand had been bitten off and
swallowed. That laughter distressed me in my sleep. Now
Fenrir’s fettered, out there in the void, his foaming jaws
propped open by a sword. There he’ll remain until
Ragnarök, when he’s destined to eat Woden, then slay and
be slain by Týr. This morning I still had a touching faith in
reality. Tuesday’s named for Týr, Wednesday for Woden,
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but today’s Friday, for Frigg, your favourite, Mama.
Therefore that had been just an irresponsible nightmare.
Whereas this, the decapitation of Hugo, was real. A clean
distinction.
“I went down to check. I peered into the towelpress. All the towels were perfectly white and folded, there
was no stain anywhere, which is just as you’d expect
because there was nothing in the towel-press but towels. No
headless boy in evening dress, for instance. The whole
swimming-pool looked quite ravishingly clean. After a
minute or two, when I had persuaded myself I was sane, I
went upstairs. Everything was normal. No it wasn’t. There
was a terrible hullaballoo outside, sirens, roaring. I looked
out and there was smoke, an anarchy of firemen in plastic
coats. The ugly unfinished building opposite us was in
flames. I couldn’t think of anything else to do but watch it
burn. By and by I saw you, Papa, and you, Dr Culpepper,
coming along the street, looking very pleased with
yourselves, very well-lunched. (What did you have? You
haven’t told me.) I came and said hallo. And – and there
we are.
“I’m done. What a lot of words. I’m not sure I’ve
told you the truth because that’s not the sort of thing that
can be told. But I haven’t held anything back.
“There’s nothing left to explain, is there?
Everything’s clear. Zoë Moxgrave is straddling a gendarme in
the Tuileries Garden, he came over to command Madame
and her friends to stop pushing park benches through the
windows of l’Orangerie. Nils will be sitting up in his stateroom on Hringhorni, she must be half-way across the North
Sea by now, awkwardly leafing through a glossy catalogue
of prosthetic hands, something hollow I think for him to
hold heroin and a flaying knife or two, gold-plated of
course, showy, he can have it carved with runes. And
obviously Hugo wasn’t really dead, his head was never his
important part, Mama only liked him for his rugger bum,
didn’t you, Mama? Obviously he got up before dawn and
strolled up the stairs, found his way into Mama’s fragrant
morning-room, helped himself to a cushion or two, no
pillow ever needed again but he’d have wanted to shield his
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splendid bottom against rigor mortis, bedded himself down
behind your sofa as a more comfy place to die, died for
real. That’s rational as anything in this demented so-called
cosmos. Nothing’s puzzling once you grasp that chaos has
come again, Ragnarök is upon us. It’s so bloody bloody
obvious,” and at once she was sobbing, sobbing without
comfort (and nobody came over to comfort her), not at all
like a child or a wit or a comedienne.
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ix.
Two ounces of Noilly Prat vermouth. Sixteen ounces of
Tanqueray gin. Lord Rievaulx stirred these with a glass rod
in a glass jug full of ice. Then, grave as a priest, he shared
the mixture between four conical glasses, opaque with frost,
just out of the freezer, twisting a strip of lemon peel over
each, so a spray of citric oil played a tiny timpani on the
surface and formed an incandescent slick. He dispensed
one to his wife, one to Margot, who had just ceased
weeping, one to Culpepper, bowing to each. There was
nothing facetious in these solemn movements. Finding
everything dull, he found nothing particularly trivial; he was
could not be embarrassed by taking small things seriously.
“Chin,” he said sternly, “chin,” and there was a
diffuse echo. Then: “It won’t do, you know.”
“No,” said Culpepper, distracted, staring down into
his martini as a pythoness might stare into her tripod. “It
won’t.” (I’m sorry to say he wasn’t considering the problem,
he was enjoying Fenrir, of whom he’d never heard before –
not that he’d admit that to Margot, his student. For Felix
was a voluptuary of the datum, engrossed by scraps of
information: symptom of a pitiful, fifth-rate mind.)
“Tho what are we going to about it?” Vexedly: “Do
you have any idea?”
“Oh yes.” He put up his head. “I think I see what’s
what. But I’m not sure I want to do what I …. Oh very well.
The important thing for you Rupert is” – and he performs
an odd silent circling motion gesture with his forefinger,
indicating make more of this stuff in the glass jug. “And the thing
for me to do is to shout. Are you ready?”
“Good God, Felixth –”.
But Culpepper was already shouting. “Mrs Maze!
Come here, Stella Maze!”
“Thee can’t pothiblee hear you.”
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“Can’t she? Have any of you ever had a look at these
speaking-tubes? You’re all so attached to the family
tradition of not understanding how they work. Don’t you
realise that –”.
“She can hear us,” said Margot, composed again and
suddenly luminous, “all the time.”
“Exactly. They’re never off. Every noise made in this
house, every bedroom groan or drawing-room whisper,
resounds in Mrs Maze’s pantry. Doesn’t it? –” and he
whipped about as the door flew back.
The wintry August afternoon was fading into a dingy
evening; the library where the guilty ones huddled was
already dark; the corridor behind lit; and so the
mountainous mass of their housekeeper appeared in the
opening in silhouette. Out of the formless black shape
came a voice from which all servantly deference, all
courtesy, was gone. “Yes! And so I know. You are wicked
evil naughty people. I’ve been listening to you for seven
years now, and what I want to know is how a nice girl like
Stella Maze ended up with such little toes of Antichrist.”
She lumbered forward into the room, and the
mellow light did what it could to make sense of her
outcroppings and re-entrants. (“Why do you call her The
Poisoner?” Culpepper had asked a few weeks before.
“Because she is I think. It’s one of the reasons we can’t get
rid of her, it might be dangerous.” “Really?” “She doesn’t
mind Mama’s men on the whole, she enjoys being outraged,
but there was one who looked more serious, a Hawaiian
surfer, empty-headed, sweet as molasses. He actually
seemed to be falling in love with mummy. Stella couldn’t
stand that. He started getting ill. Wasting away. Went back
to Hawaii to recover and was dead within a month.” “Oh.”
“She can’t abide Daddy’s sister either, and Aunt Maggie
always gets cramps the day after she visits. – So watch your
step.”)
“Little toes of Antichrist. It’s dirtied my ears, it has,
night after night, day after day, sitting in that nasty
underground pantry, listening to all your doings.” She
glowers at them, mother, father, daughter, like a flabby
valkyrie, then smirks, pulls a leather armchair to herself and
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seats herself in it, legs akimbo. Most of her manifold
buttocks squeeze in, but some ooze over the arms, and she
leans forwardly so eagerly her chins sweep across her
bosom. “Listening, and writing it all down. I’m going now.
Going home. For good. The nice gents from the Daily Maul
will send a car for me like they’ve promised. They’re going
to put me up in a fancy hotel, and I’m going to have
secretaries, two of ’em, at my beck, putting things in shape,
and another one to fetch me breakfast and elevenses and
lunch and tea and dinner and supper, until it’s done. A very
tidy advance they’re going to make too. Course the real
money will be syndication rights in the States says nice Mr
Deery. ‘Sins enough indicated I should say!’ I say to him,
and he says ‘You are a one! Sign here.’ Film rights is a
different matter, mind, I’m reserving those. Julia Roberts is
playing me, that’s my hope. As for you My Ladyship, given
the sex scenes and the carrying on, I don’t know who we’ll
get, full fronties in the contract put another zero on the
asking price says Mr Deery, and as for Lady –”.
“Stop this disgusting patter!” bellowed Culpepper,
and the creature flinched (wobbles working their way
upward and down from her shoulders), and subsided.
“That’s better.”
“Charmed I’m sure.”
“Come, don’t sulk, Mrs Maze. It’s a fair cop, as they
say, and it’s a privilege for us to know such a famous
authoress.” He pulled up a chair close to hers. “A glass?”
“What’s this?” She sniffed at the tumbler warily.
“Lemonade. It’s very soothing. We’re assimilating, as
you heard, the shock.”
“Oh yes,” and Mrs Maze (the noise was lie the first
stirrings of a cone volcano) tittered knowingly. She took an
enormous swig.
Culpepper replenished. “Since you’ll be off in a
moment, to fame and fortune, I wondered if you’d, well,
explain.”
“Me?”
“You. Oh Mrs Maze,” he filled her glass, “I don’t
underestimate you. Who else could have carried poor Mr
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Cleveridge up the stairs and tucked him behind the sofa?
Who else would have dared?”
“Well then,” she simpered, “I won’t deny it. It was
dreadful listening to it all last night – oh Lady Margot, I
can’t think how you did it!” Margot, curled up a sofa,
faintly shrugged. “Those moans and that bang and the
scraping of the blade. Then you talking to yourself. Awful
doings. Just a dribble more, yes.” Lord Rievaulx, selfeffacing as a butler, silently took the emptied jug from
Culpepper and handed him a full.
“And this morning –”.
“This morning I said to myself, ‘Why should Her
Ladyship get off so easy? It was she that got the poor
young gentleman into bad ways. And it’s been mortal hard
work listening to those bad ways all this time.”
“Seven years is a long time to spend on research, of
course.”
“Seven years! Oh, Dr Culpepper, I’ve worked my
fingers to the bone, writing it all down. It would have
driven a weaker woman to drink.”
“Ah. But you never touch a drop. That’s what these
depraved family tell me.”
“It’s God’s truth! I didn’t dare. Having to be awake
at all hours, down in that hole, listening, always listening.
Any tippling and I’d be asleep and miss a scandal. If I’ve
told myself once I’ve told myself a thousand: ‘Stella,’ I say,
‘there’ll be time enough for that when you have your big
place at Malibu with the all-glazed living room, and
lifeguards bringing you babycham, and Julia Roberts
coming by in her helicopter to ask how to say her lines.’ –
Might I trouble you,” she added with slightly tipsy hauteur,
“for the least portion more of this lemonade drink, if you
would by, be, if you would b’s’ kind.”
“There! And, frankly, I quite understand.” Dropping
his voice. “Superior servant to superior servant. Her
Ladyship could do with a healthy shock.”
“Zackly! This morning I decide to move all the
human remains out of the pool and up to the morningroom, so Lady R could see what she’d done. I takes poor
Mr Cleveridge out of the towel-presh and tidy it up.” She’s
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beginning to slur her words. “And I open the plastic sump
of the pool-filter, where rubbish is caught that’s too big to
go down the –”.
“Ach!” cried Margot, putting her hand over her eyes.
“Stupid! Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid! How could I have
forgotten the hand?”
“Yesh, the hand. It was bobbing about in there,
horrible white and battered, like a bit of fat cut off a leg of
veal and left out overnight. With the foam and the smell of
pool-cleaner – ”.
“The frothing mouth of Fenrir! I told myself in my
dream and I still didn’t remember. Oh, Dr Culpepper, I
fear if I’m too thick for Cambridge.”
“No one’s too thick for St Wygefortis’ College, my
girl, that’s why it exists. But hush. Mrs Maze.”
“I wiped the foam off the hand with my apron, and
tried it with my dentures to see if it was still fresh or if had
gone funny with all those chamcalls. Shamcells.” The third
time she managed it. “Chem’cals. I didn’t want it blowing
up. It wash all right. So I tucked it in’o Mr Cleveridge’s
waishty-coat and carried him upstairs in my arms to the
morning-room and popped him out of sight behind the
blue sofa. What you done with him, I wonder?”
“He’s not so far away.”
“Well then, that means police all over the house
tomorrow. I’m glad I won’t be here. I went up to my room
and packed my bags earlier. I will,” she added with drunken
grandeur, “have them shent for tomorrow. To my three-star
hotel.”
Spy and blackmailer those she was, Stella Maze as
also, it is clear, a born author. Deery of the Maul frankly
kept her at arm’s length. No one had ever listened to her
before for so long. Now her eyes were bright, not just with
gin, but with the high joy of narrative.
“So,” said Culpepper, rising to his feet, “you have
defeated us all. I hope this abandoned family” – he raked
his eyes over the three of them – “appreciate the justice of
their terrible penalty. They will have to change their name
and flee the realm, but they will nonetheless, I think, Mrs
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Maze, enjoy reading your book. – Let me see you out. You
ride, I believe, a motorcycle.”
To see her sway most unsteadily upright was like
watching miraculous reverse landslides. For a second it
seemed she must fall; but her centre of gravity was low, and
her upper parts lurched back to the perpendicular.
“Yush.”
“A Honda Goldwing they tell me. Mrrum mrrum all
the way to, I understand, Tooting Bec. You must be quite
a sight.
She tittered like a girl of ten and laid a hand like a
porterhouse steak on his sleeve. “Yam!”
“Let me take you to it,” and off they went.
Rievaulx exploded as soon as the door was closed.
“That damned don! Whath he playing at?”
“I think,” said Margot with caution.
But “Think! It’s a travesty!” cried Lady Rievaulx,
stagily. “After all I’ve done for Stella! To be spied on –”.
“Don’t thuppothe they’ll print it. They’ll come to me
and athke for bakthheeth, the bwutes. Ith jutht blackmail
weallee. I don’t imagine the Poisoner will get a penny.”
“Oh. So she’s a victim too,” said Celia, taken aback.
“Yeth. An innothent. Of thuch is the kingdom of
heaven.”
“The kingdom of heaven must be like the Algarve.”
“Mama, Papa, you seem to be missing –”.
But the door was flung back once more, and in
bounded Culpepper, full of himself. The Rievaulxs
regarded him distantly.
“Well? Thee hath driven off?”
“She has! I covered her with her greasy leather-jacket,
the size of a tent, handed her her fishbowl of a helmet, told
her ‘Drive fast before the rain comes!’ and on the third
stamp of her elephant foot she got the engine started. She
zigzagged off and went careering past the Palgrave.”
“Dwunk.”
“As a newt. Oh, glory, glory – and I have begun to
live. I’ve justified my mother’s labour pains at last. I have
rent my chrysalis. This is the turning point of my career. In
thuggery henceforth I live and move and have my being.”
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“Oh?”
“Margot, Margot, Hugo was nearly an accident,
wasn’t he? But now there’s been a murder after all. This is
only my first case; I know there’ll be thousands more. I am
very happy. I’ve just met myself, and admire myself
intensely. It’s like falling in love.”
“You seem,” declared Celia, striking a wounded pose,
“overwrought.”
“I don’t take all the credit. The four of us between
us have did for Mrs Maze. D’y’see? She doesn’t recognise
the symptoms of drink. In twenty minutes she’ll be roaring
onto the South Circular. She’ll go faster and faster. It’s
nearly dusk. There’s a fine London drizzle beginning. The
road will be slick. I loosened, as it happens, the screws on
her wheels. I slid a pencil into her brakes. She’s sure to go
straight under a truck. Or into a bus. A lamp-post will do. I
hope she won’t hurt anyone else. Motorcyclists rarely do.”
“Thee’s huge. Thee’ll live.”
“There’s a fine sharp letter-opener on the sideboard
in the hall. As she was getting her boots onto those squidgy
tree-trunks of legs, I cut the strap on her helmet half-way
through. Up near the rim. Roughly, so it looks like an
honest tear. When she comes off at speed, her helmet will
go flying off, and that bulbous head of hers will scrape over
the road like a white truffle grated over pasta.” There is a
peculiar silence. “Blackmailers deserve no less, don’t you
agree? But if you have compunction …. We haven’t
murdered her, you know, we are murdering her. She has a
cellphone, she’ll still be alive at the moment. Ring her
quickly. Tell her she’s too drunk to ride, tell her to get a taxi
and get to a police station. Let’s make a clean breast. The
police could still find traces of blood in the pool. Sieve the
ash from that glass tower and find shards of bone. The
Norwegian coastguard can intercept Hringhorni. We can all
be honest and in prison by Christmas.”
Nobody moves. There is silence, which coagulates
and grows rancid.
“When he had opened the seventh seal”, says Margot in a
little cold voice, “there was silence in heaven about the space of half
an hour. But half an hour would be intolerable. I see that.”
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“Actually, she’s been gone fourteen minutes,” says
Celia, the half-wit.
Another painful pause.
“Fourteen minutes and thirty seconds.”
“Mother!”
“Thelia be quiet. Felikth: I’m overwhelmed. This
whole family’th thaved and cwiminalithed. I think I need to
go to bed. Are we done?”
“Are we – no, not quite. There’s one more thing.
Margot” (he shouts it): “what did you do with the head? You
haven’t lost that, the way you lost the hand?”
“I haven’t lost it the way I lost the hand. No. I – I
thought of elephants. I went out in the wee hours, and sat
under a tree with the head in my lap, and thought of
elephants…. No I’m not going to tell you. All this chatter,
I’m sick of it. And I’m sick of this terrible house. Stella’s
squashed, waiting to be scraped up. Hugo is sludge, waiting
to be hosed down. Papa, Mama, come and say bye-bye to
Hugo. If we linger Felix may assassinate more of our
servants. Get your coats on and come quickly – before it
closes.”
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x.
“Where are we bound?” The four of them were trudging
over Regent’s Park, through the stifling gloom of a failed
English August evening, light smudged, air soiled with mud,
dankness not yet rainy.
On their right was the Lake (badling of ducks, skein
of geese); to their left the anomalous bulk of the great
mosque (a submission of Muslims); overhead a depression
of clouds, with the literally leaden look of certain London
skies – as if the chains might break at any moment to send
them crashing down, laying waste whole districts. ‘Cumulus
humilis,’ chirped a different part of Culpepper’s brain, ‘even
the least of them weighs eighty tons.’ Then, giving himself
more pleasure: ‘They cannot live longer than forty-five
minutes.’
In the busy course of the day Culpepper had
acquired a new vice, blood, but this only exacerbated his
existing addiction to facts (over which we have already had
to shake our heads). He loved to sit at high table listening
to his colleagues’ lunch and dinner prattle; then go off and
for the rest of the day turn over what he’d heard, facts
botanical, palaeographical, metereological, phytochemical,
phenomenological, lithostratigraphical; even pseudo-facts
from the soft sciences were sometimes pungent enough to
tipple. It’s an innocent vice, if you like – his mental tract
was simply too infantile to digest information – but it
debauched him thoroughly none the less, it prepared him
for worse things.
She was ignoring him. “Margot. Where are we
going?”
She’d turned sullen and remote. It was the onset of
love, but no one noticed that, she didn’t notice it herself.
The loathsome weather was to blame, she thought; or
anxiety about Hugo.
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“We are going,” she said at last, “to the Elephant
House at the Regent’s Park Zoo.”
“Why?”
She stomped a few more stomps. “Because that’s
where I went last night.”
“Why?”
The intensity of her irritation with Felix should have
been a clue. “Because, Dr Culpepper, of the – what I had –
in my hand. Too big, now I felt its weight, to plunge into a
rubbish bin. That’d been my first idea. Too vast and too
biological to hide amidst screwed-up ice-cream wrapping.
So I thought of vast biology. Where do you hide something
hefty and almost alive? With hefty live things. So I came
here.”
“But that was – what? – two in the morning. The
Zoo must have been locked.”
Margot simply sighed in disgust, but Lady Rievaulx,
trotting to keep with everyone’s long strides, breathlessly
explained “But we’re Patrons of the Zoo, you see.”
Culpepper glanced at her. She wore a long suede
coat dyed the inevitable pink, with a fluffy rabbit collar.
‘Bombus campestris. That’s it. The female’s fur is thin on
dorsal side, hairier round the top of the thorax. One of the
cuckoo bumblebees, campestris. A specialised lineage, as they
politely say: bees who’ve lost the knack of finding pollen,
can’t rear their own young, don’t have a worker castes,
produce only “sexuals”. One invades the colony of a
respectable bee species, kills the queen, usurps her power,
enslaves the workers, makes them nourish her own
absolutely decadent brood.’ He shivered, although it was
not yet really cold.
“We have to be Patrons,” grunted her lord, “living
tho close.”
“And because we’re Patrons they let us have a key,
of course they shouldn’t, but I sometimes like going there
at night” – with men; to mate, in front of the monkey cage:
Margot’s thought was so fierce it was perfectly audible – “at
night, that’s when I go,” she said, stumbling, “it’s – restful
– ”.
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“I have a copy of Mama’s scandalous key. So I let
myself in. We can’t do that now. Too many people about….
Good evening, Higgins.”
They were at the gate. “Oh, Lady Margot! And Lord
and Lady Rievaulx. And sir”: he nodded at Culpepper.
Higgins was a breezy balding fellow of seventy, with
windblown white hairs and a fine outdoors look to him. He
wore a leather-elbowed tweed jacket which smelled rather
nicely of fresh dung. “Nasty weather for the season, isn’t it?
Ducks appreciate it though. We’re about to close, I’m
afraid.”
“Can I just show our friend Bertie? He’s very keen.”
Culpepper, who had rarely felt more apathetic, tried
to smile brightly.
“I suppose I can stretch a point. But you won’t find
him very perky. He’s been in the dumps all day. Missing the
sunshine, perhaps. In you come.”
They went through the turnstile.
The last of the day’s visitors were wandering out,
with cameras and shorts and baseball caps, and all about
was the subdued barking and baying of wildlife settling for
the night. In the wild, this is the crepuscular hour of peril:
leopards slither up trees panting for primates, vampire bats
set out thirsty for goats, ocelots fish elegantly with their
paws for turtles. But zoo animals are decadent. They know
nothing happens once the prying humans leave; and an
immense boredom falls on them with the dying of the light.
The ffontaines-Laighs knew their way through the
beasts’ dens. They went straight past the reptiles and the
baboons to the Elephant House. There the four of them
stood in a line (in this order, seen from behind: whore,
knifeman, nymph, dotard), gazing into the thickening
gloom.
The Elephant House is an anomaly, unreformed
heavy Edwardiana, louche as a vaudeville girl, florid as an
pot of conservatory orchids, an outrage to modern
sensibility. Even Culpepper, who was old-fashioned
enough, looked a bit dismayed.
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“I know it lookth a bit too woomy. There uthed to
be a thkore of the brueth,” Lord Rievaulx apologetically
explained. “A whole herd.”
“A memory of elephants,” insisted Culpepper, whose
thoughts were wearily bending and curling back on
themselves in quaint paradox: the clubbishness of living
things – clubbed to death – public-service cut-throats –
Margot – the ecology of assassination – collective life-indeath – the renewal of life – Margot’s face: why think of
that, when he could turn and see it if he wanted? Why
daren’t he turn?
“Quite. They’ve moved them out to Whipsnade,
where they can woam. All except poor Albert Edward. The
committee agweed that he’th too old to bear expulthion.
Not after eighty yearth. So here he thtill ith.”
And there Bertie barely was. He stood right at the
back of the polychrome enclosure (which resembled a
working-class ’pub), massive and miserable. Before him
was an artificial pond and some trees; about his feet a
rubbish of cabbage-heads and carrots. The view was nearly
monochrome; wall, water and trunk were alike elephantcolour.
“Why,” said Felix, not looking at her; “why on earth
did you bring – the thing – here?”
Margot considered. “Because I’ve read –”
Celia Rievaulx impertinently released a slight groan.
She’d never reconciled herself to having bred such a
bookworm of a child.
“I’ve read, Mama, as you’ll be fascinated to hear, that
elephants make fine executioners. It’s ancient. Sometimes
the condemned was lifted up in the elephant’s trunk and
squeezed, sometimes his limbs were plucked off,
sometimes he was simply trampled, sometimes he was
gored with tusks. But the essential, classical action was to
place his head on a block and have the beast stomp. The last
King of Kandy was addicted to the custom, it was the one
thing that didn’t bore him. Antiochus Epiphanies invented
a cocktail of red wine and frankincense to enrage his beasts.
Khosrau II, a Sassanid –”.
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Celia actually dared to sigh over these titbits. (No
one noticed how inebriated they made Felix Culpepper. He
was a stereotypic savage, anyone who dropped anchor on
his coast could win him with baubles: ‘You cede me
hinterland I give you fine stories, fine words, look, much
pretty-pretties.’)
“Then I shan’t tell about King Khosrau, Mama, it’s
your loss. Anyway, the rajahs were punishing with
elephants until quite recently, when the British Viceroys
bullied them into being dull. Bertie’s quite old enough to
remember those days. I thought he might enjoy one last
thrill. So I came here and tossed the head high over that
railing.”
Bertie had seemed to recognise Margot’s voice. He
not like it. He shook himself from his stupor and came
forward a little out of the dense shadow to look at her. He
seemed to be trembling.
“Did it work?”
“No. He started when the thing came down bang in
front of him. Peered at it. Found a face looking back up at
him. Hugo was horribly white in that light – an ugly little
waning quarter of a moon had just come up. Bertie snorted,
trumpeted, became quite wild. Retreated to the furthest
corner, stamped, butted the wall. And just glared at me, full
of hatred. I tried to encourage him with a few war-cries, but
it made not difference. The apes had woken up by now, of
course, and seemed to be screaming insults. Something was
roaring for meat. And I could hear a nightwatchmen
coming, clink, clink. So I scarpered. Hoping for the best.”
“Silly silly stupid girl,” said Celia, unexpectedly.
“What an offhand way of getting rid of a body-part.”
“Thteady on –”.
“This whole idiotic botched affair is going to ruin
my –”.
“Hush,” said Culpepper, who had been examining
the compound carefully. “Look.” His voice sounded odd,
but that was not because of what he had spied. It sounded
odd because a hand had just stolen to his in the darkness (it
was really quite dark now): not Celia’s hand, as he had
momentarily thought with great dread; Margot’s. Margot
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had taken his hand and squeezed it. So now he was
standing with his hand being held by his, well, his student,
his tutee, but also, he thought (with joy and panic and
bewilderment and whimsy and surprise and satisfaction and
revulsion and pride) also his inevitable love. She was the
only creature crawling across this bloody, blooming planet
who was like him. Or able to understand what he was up to.
Or to share in his hooliganism. In his exact shade of
murderousness – .
“Tho what are we looking at?” which made
Culpepper jump guiltily; which earned him another,
calming, squeeze.
“There,” he said, getting his voice back, and pointing
with the unheld hand. “That.”
It was hard to make out; it was farcical, surreal,
nonsensical, like most of the day’s doings. But it was quite
unmistakable once you looked in exactly the right place
(over in the left-hand corner, behind Bertie’s hind leg): a
human face, lying on its side, atop a muddled pile of
mouldy cabbages. It’s teeth were bared in the deathgrimace, which resembled a smirk, a ribald smirk, and its
eyes were shut in the death-blink.
The three ffontaines-Laighs, and the one Culpepper,
put their own heads on an angle to look at him. He duly
leered back: a youth legally in line for the Moxgrave
viscounty (however dubious his paternity); occasional bedpartner of Margot’s mum; hope of the Oxford University
Clay-Pigeon Shooting Club.
“You can hardly see his third eye,” said Margot in a
tiny voice (but she didn’t let go her lover’s fingers). “I mean
the hole. He’s drained. All of a colour. – O God, what are we
going to do? They’ll muck out the cage tomorrow and find
him.”
“You’re the motht thpry of uth all, Thelia,” said
Lord Rievaulx, with a coarse laugh. “And a dab hand with
body-parth. Clamber over the wailing and fetch it out.”
Celia spluttered and whimpered. “You’re not
serious?”
“No I’m not. Felikth: can we finith thith off? Thet
uth fwee. Then we can go out to dinner. We can’t decently
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go home to Theila’s thtwoganoff. In fact, I never much cared
for her thtwoganoff.”
“BLOOD!” bawled Culpepper suddenly, dropping
Margot’s hand and raising his fists above his head. The Zoo
seemed empty, tourists were gone, keepers were nowhere
to be seen; only the simians overheard Culpepper traducing
the mysteries of life, and although they gnashed their fangs
and shook the wires of their enclosure, no one attended.
“DISINTEGRATION! Noble rot! Three-glorious surrender of
tissue! Never-ending sacrifice!”
Elephants are clever enough to understand human
language, although these noble creatures, quite rightly,
don’t demean themselves by learning very much. What do
we usually have to utter but bawdy, slander, complaints,
impudent orders, make-believe, or yelps for undeserved
mercy?
“Whalefall! Albert Edward, consider whalefall! The
only creature more copious than yourself tumbles in death
into the abyssal zone. For two years she gives her flesh to
hagfish and sleeper sharks. Her death forms a metropolis,
forested, thronged with bristleworms, sea cucumbers,
lobsters and giant isopods, creatures uncountable, richness
beyond measure.”
Bertie roused himself, and presently raised his
massive head.
“When all is consumed at last comes Osedax, eyeless,
mouthless, without innards, steeped in sulphuric acid; they
fed on the dinosaurs, then after the extinction waited
twenty million years in volcanic vents for the coming of the
whales. Now she fixes Osedax on her bones and has them
break into little trees. She is a hundred years dead, yet she
lives.”
Bertie had caught the drift of Culpepper’s tirade. To
shatter is to form, to crush life is to multiply it. Yes, there
was something in what the monkey was saying.
Self-respect returned to him. Was he not, even in
decrepit age, greatest of all animals? If this scrap of
chimpanzee meat offended him, should he not dispose of it?
He came forward from his corner. The ffontaines-Laighs
and Culpepper gasped admiringly; he glared at them in
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contempt. He rolled Hugo’s head upright on its jumble of
greenery, looking outward, tragical-comical-pastoral; and
placed his foot on it.
Here we might hope for a clean, titanic motion, an
abrupt foin, a crashing down of the stage-curtain on a
body-littered fifth act. Not a bit of it. There are men who
do not know their own strength, only discovering it on the
verge of middle age. But elephants grow up knowing their
strength perfectly well. They never overdo things. So now
Bertie began with the most tentative downward push. He
increased the pressure until, after a long four seconds,
Hugo’s head did indeed burst into something
unrecognisable, pulp sure to be hosed unnoticed out of the
Elephant House at dawn. But during those seconds the
skull, more malleable than we might expect, swelled
sideways and spread itself, so that Hugo’s smirk became
very wide, wider than any living smile has ever been (at
least since the dwindling of the rajahs) – as it he were privy
to the impossible joke stashed in the axle of the universe.
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