Victoria — ah, Victoria, starting-point of all true journeys, all southward voyages of pleasure or exploration, all escapes, all elopements, all flights from financial and emotional creditors. At the thought of her infinite possibilities what pulse could fail to beat faster?
“My dear Hilary,” said Ragwort, “we are only going into Sussex.”
“You fail,” I answered, “to discourage me. It is a charming county for a visit.”
Under the grimy sunlight which filters through her vaults of corrugated glass there prevails an atmosphere of almost Continental exuberance — the bars and station cafes strive gallantly for a Parisian look, and it is possible, even on a Sunday morning, to purchase not only a newspaper but also a coffee and croissant: waiting for a train to take us to Godmansworth, Ragwort and I availed ourselves of this circumstance.
Godmansworth College, possibly known to my readers as a public school of sound if unflamboyant reputation, had the privilege at that time of including among its pupils Leonidas Demetriou and among its teaching staff, as junior classics master, a boyhood friend of Ragwort’s — a young man by the name of Peter Hayward. A telephone call on the previous day had conveyed to Ragwort’s friend my own passionate desire to visit the celebrated pleasure gardens, laid out in the eighteenth century by William Kent, which were not, however, open to the general public at any time convenient to me. The young schoolmaster had issued with a good grace the invitation which, had he wished to, he could scarcely have withheld. Ragwort had further mentioned, splendidly en passant, his brief professional acquaintance with Leonidas; the possibility, as Ragwort supposed it to be, that the boy might be going up to Oxford in the following year; the thought that it might be pleasant for him, in that event, if he already had one or two friends there; and that if Peter cared, therefore, to invite him to join us for lunch…
“I didn’t speak,” said Ragwort, as our train clattered happily through the green countryside, “of your influence with the Admissions Board. I thought it would be wrong, since so far as I know you don’t have any. If Peter, however, should somehow have gained the impression that you do, it would be unkind to disabuse him.”
“He surely cannot imagine,” I said, a little shocked, “that the prospects of Leonidas securing admission to Oxford could be affected by any personal partiality which might be entertained by a senior member of the University?”
“He may,” said Ragwort, “have some such notion… no doubt it is quite misconceived.”
“My dear Ragwort,” I said with some severity, “certainly it is. Admission nowadays is based entirely on merit. The boy is the son of one of the greatest poets of our time: at Oxford, whatever may happen elsewhere, I hope that will always be accounted sufficient merit to secure entry, without resort to influence or patronage.”
The village of Godmansworth, a cluster of red brick houses enfolded in the gentle Sussex hills, lay becalmed in the drowsiness of a warm summer Sunday. The cobbled High Street, deserted by all save a sleeping tabby cat, became after fifty yards or so no more than a country road: in the fields on our left browsed a few indolent cattle; on our right lay woodlands, unruffled by any breath of wind; all was rustic tranquillity. There was nothing to prepare us for any scene of violence or alarm.
We turned, about a mile from the village, down an avenue of chestnut trees, at the far end of which could be seen the facade of the great eighteenth-century mansion which is now Godmansworth College. There was no sound to be heard but the distant humming of bees, the warble of a wood pigeon, and, as we drew nearer, the high clear voices of boys singing in the chapel. The avenue divided; and we followed a path which led us round the western wing of the house, away from the sound of the singing. The terrace on the west looks out across the former deer park: we paused there to admire the distant prospect of the lake, an agreeable vista charmingly interrupted by a coppice of oak trees.
A figure emerged suddenly from the coppice, running with the swiftness of panic, yet with such graceful lightness that I could scarcely believe it was any girl of flesh and blood who fled so desperately through the long grass, her fair hair streaming wildly, her thin white dress savagely dishevelled, but rather that the dryad inhabitant of the oak trees was in flight from some gross and violent intrusion. The youth who a moment later appeared in enraged pursuit was well suited to the role of satyr: a heavy, hairy, hulking sort of boy, with a look, even at a distance, of loutish brutality. The fugitive seemed at first to be gaining ground; but stumbled; was overtaken and seized; and cowered pitifully from the instantly threatened blow.
It had not, I confess, occurred to me — so rapidly and unexpectedly had these events taken place — that any practical assistance ought to be offered to the victim. Ragwort, however, murmuring “Quite disgraceful” in the severest tone, had begun to remove his light-weight sports jacket.
“My dear Ragwort,” I said, “do you really think…?”
But it would take more than any such mild remonstrance to deter Ragwort from what he conceived to be his duty. He threw down the jacket, and set off at great speed towards the scene of action. Pausing to retrieve the garment so impetuously discarded, I followed him at a more leisurely pace.
The dryad was not enduring her wrongs in silence. I could not distinguish the words in which she reproached or pleaded with her assailant; but they were uttered with an astonishing fluency, and in a rhythm curiously familiar to me, which for several seconds I sought in vain to identify. Continuing to struggle, she again managed to break free and once more, though with her head still turned to continue her tirade, began to run away from the coppice in the direction of the house.
Ragwort, as my readers may recall, was at the same time running away from the house in the direction of the coppice, at a speed which admitted of neither check nor swerve. Collision in such circumstances was scarcely to be avoided: I was close beside them before either recovered breath.
“Oh dear,” said Leonidas Demetriou, removing his blond wig, “I’m terribly sorry. It’s Mr. Ragwort, isn’t it?”
“My dear Ragwort,” I said, assisting my young friend to his feet, “you might reasonably imagine, I suppose, that a dryad would address her ravisher in Greek; but surely you could not expect her to achieve ex tempore the actual meter of classical tragedy?”
“Poor Tomkinson is quite upset,” said Leonidas, demurely pouring sherry in Peter Hayward’s oak-panelled study, “at being suspected of an attempted ravishment. He’s very respectable, and wants to go into the Stock Exchange. I’ve told him, of course, that after today’s incident it will be quite impossible — unless we can all be persuaded to keep it very dark.”
Leonidas had changed from the floating white chiton which he had worn to rehearse the title role in Euripides’ Helena into more conventional garments. There remained about him, even so, something curiously equivocal — that slight wariness, that imperceptibly more alert apprehension, that attentiveness even in repose to the evidence of the senses, which is found in those who in some alien environment never cease to watch for danger or advantage: in migrants between countries or classes; in those conscious of some unorthodox erotic preference; in spies; and in cats always, however domesticated.
“I do hope he didn’t believe you,” said Peter Hayward. Fair-haired, fresh-complexioned, with the square-cut features which seem incapable of guile, the master looked more boyish than the boy.
“Of course he didn’t,” said Leonidas. “Even Tomkinson has more sense than that.” But he smiled as he said this a rather Byzantine smile, full of malice and intrigue.
We talked for a while of Euripides. The open-air performance of the Helena which was shortly to mark the ending of the Godmansworth summer term was under Peter Hayward’s direction: having sometimes been prevailed upon by the undergraduates of St. George’s to undertake a similar responsibility, I was well able to sympathize with the difficulties of his task. I happened, moreover, to be at that time rather particularly well-informed about the play itself. A few days before my young colleague Sebastian Verity had sought my advice as to how he might persuade Selena to enter into some more formal — that is to say, matrimonial — arrangement; knowing well how attached she is to the darling douceurs of the single life, I had thought it kind to divert him from so unfruitful a topic. I invited him to tell me about an article he had lately published in one of the learned journals, and which I had heard much praised, concerning the transmission of the texts of Euripides, with particular reference to the Helena. The diversion proved so successful, and he addressed me at such length on the discrepancies between the L Codex and the P Codex, that I almost repented of having raised the subject. I now had the pleasure, however, of displaying more learning than I was truly possessed of.
I was recalled with some reluctance to the purpose of our visit. It would be prudent, said Ragwort, if I were to gratify at once my desire to see the gardens: Leonidas, perhaps, would be kind enough to act as my guide, while Ragwort himself assisted his friend in the final preparations for lunch. He gave me a glance intended to remind me that I should make the most of the opportunity to question Leonidas. Peter Hayward gave his pupil a rather similar look, intended no doubt to remind him that he should not waste the opportunity to impress favorably a fellow of St. George’s.
The boy did very well. Familiar, or contriving to appear so, with the history of the distinguished family who had formerly lived at Godmansworth, he diligently pointed out to me how it was reflected in the design and architecture of the place. Traces remained of the manor house built by the first to be eminent, the businesslike adventurer knighted by the first Elizabeth; his grandson, by two judicious marriages, sufficiently improved his fortune to buy a peerage from James II and rebuild the house in the style of the English Renaissance, with that grand simplicity which disdains all ornament but its own harmonious proportions; a more remote descendant, rising to an earldom under one of the Georges, had commissioned William Kent to design the gardens — a created Arcadia, in which duchesses and statesmen might play at nymphs and shepherds.
Over winding paths silent with moss the chestnut trees spread a network of translucent green. Wherever the eye might have wearied of shade there was a shaft of sunlight; wherever it might have surfeited of green it found the dark glow of a copper beech, the purple of a rhododendron, or a wild pink hyacinth among the grass. At the highest point was a little rotunda, with gray stone columns of the Ionic order: the paths all led towards it, but with a teasing circuity; catching a glimpse of it through the trees and thinking to walk in that direction, one somehow lost sight of it; and at last came upon it again as if unexpectedly, with a sense of discovering by chance some hidden and mysterious place.
I sat down on the shallow steps of the rotunda to admire the view laid out with such careful carelessness for that purpose. With perhaps an equally studied abandon, the boy lay full length on the grass nearby, the sunlight through the leaves dappling him with shadows. I reminded him (though I thought he already remembered) of our previous brief meeting, and expressed my regret at its tragic sequel.
“Deirdre? Yes, poor Deirdre.” His tone did not imply any depth of personal grief.
“Forgive me,” I said, “if the subject is too painful to speak of. You were, I dare say, on very close terms with your cousin?”
He gave me a slightly satirical look, knowing that his manner had not suggested that. “She and Millie used to spend a lot of time with us when we were living in England. And after we went back to Corfu, they generally stayed with us for the holidays. So I suppose we’d seen a good deal of each other. But I’m afraid I didn’t like her much — you will think, perhaps, Professor Tamar, that I ought not to say so?”
He smiled again his malicious Byzantine smile, as if mocking the convention which he imputed to me. His eyes were not dark, as his coloring led one to expect, but a bright clear shade of blue — the color of lapis lazuli.
“My dear boy,” I answered, “I am an historian — my profession largely consists of speaking ill of the dead.”
“You see,” he went on, as if feeling after all some need to justify himself, “there was nothing she seemed to like. She didn’t like sailing or dancing or having lunch in the taverna or anything else the rest of us did. But if we didn’t take her with us, she complained of being left out. And if we did, she just kept saying how miserable she was until we had to take her home again.”
“Irritating,” I said. “One should think it fortunate, no doubt, that your cousin’s death is not a deep personal loss — at least to you. I fear it must have been so to your aunt and grandmother — they brought her up, I believe?”
“My grandmother is very old, Professor Tamar, and used to people dying. And Aunt Jocasta has been controlling her feelings for so long, I’m not sure she has any left to control. They brought up Deirdre, after all, because they could hardly avoid it: her parents died in a car accident, you know, and her father had no relatives. But of course they never cared about her in the way they do about Millie.”
For Jocasta, no doubt, it was a natural preference: to favor a daughter’s child above a sister’s is a customary inclination. I remembered, moreover, that her daughter had died in the same accident as Deirdre’s parents — if she blamed them for it, her feelings towards their child could hardly be unequivocal. But the girl’s grandmother, it seemed, without these motives, had also regarded Camilla as entitled to be preferred — as though she were marked by priority of inheritance to be the favorite of affection as well as fortune.
“You think, then, that there was no one,” I said, “who was much affected by your cousin’s death?”
“My mother was rather upset, I think. She was quite fond of Deirdre — at least, she tried to be. Poor Mama — she believes that if one loves people they become lovable: nothing disillusions her.” The malice of his smile was qualified by an indulgent tenderness. “And she was upset, of course, about the way it happened. She was the last person Deirdre talked to, and she had to give evidence about it at the inquest. It was all rather horrid for her.”
A lizard lying motionless in the warm sunlight was startled by some over-sudden movement of my hand, and disappeared with the swiftness of mercury through a crack in the weather-marbled stone. I wondered how far I might venture to pursue my questions without seeming more than idly curious.
“No doubt it is always disagreeable,” I said, “to be required to give evidence in court. One may be asked questions one would prefer not to answer, for some reason quite unconnected with the case in hand. I speak generally, of course — I do not imagine there was anything which your mother would not have wished to tell the Coroner.”
“As you say,” said the boy, as if the thought amused him, “there’s always something. She wouldn’t have wanted, for example, to tell him about the row between Rupert and my father.”
As one might have expected, it had been about politics.
In the cause of family harmony, Dorothea had sometimes in previous years coaxed one or more of her children to attend Rupert’s Boat Race luncheon party and present an appearance of amiability; but this, I gathered, was the first occasion that her husband Constantine had been among the guests. The poet, in recent years, had been very little in England, and the two men had seldom met; not often enough, certainly, to be friends; not often enough, it was rashly assumed, to be enemies.
Hostilities opened almost at once. The poet made some reference, as they sat down to lunch on the roof terrace, to the years he had spent in England when his native country was under the rule of the Colonels. Rupert took the opportunity to say that he personally had a lot of time for the Colonels, who had at least done something to get the Greeks to pull themselves together a bit. The poet responded with thoughtful civility, as if to a rather abstract proposition put forward in some impersonal political dialogue. Rupert said that he personally would rather see the Colonels back in power than a pack of so-called intellectuals who whined about free speech and probably took their orders from Moscow. And so forth: despite various attempts by those about them to change the subject to one less acrimonious, the two men continued thus throughout lunch.
From time to time during the meal there were exchanged between Leonidas and Camilla the apologetic glances and grimaces commonly employed by the young to deplore their parents’ conduct and their own inability to control it. The other guests, on the pretext of wishing to observe on television the scenes preliminary to the start of the Boat Race, escaped one by one to the comparative tranquility of the drawing-room; but Leonidas and his cousin continued to hover anxiously on the outskirts of the battlefield, watching for some opportunity to separate the combatants. Deirdre also, indifferent to the dispute and its outcome, chose to remain on the roof terrace.
Hopes of a cease-fire were raised when Rupert, at his daughter’s persuasion, went downstairs to make coffee for his guests; but the poet insisted on following his host — it would be discourteous of him to do otherwise, he said with apparent sincerity, when they were in the middle of such an interesting conversation.
“Parents,” said Leonidas, with a sign of remembered weariness, “can be very difficult.”
“They have suffered,” I said, “a traumatic experience — you must make allowances.”
Obedient to an appeal from Camilla that he should go after them and make sure they didn’t come to blows, Leonidas also went downstairs. In the kitchen, where Rupert was making coffee, battle had again been joined: Rupert was telling Constantine that he personally believed in old-fashioned democracy, and thought that anyone who didn’t should be put up against a wall and shot. It seemed to Leonidas, watching them, that his father’s Olympian serenity was driving Rupert into a kind of frenzy, as though the need to make the other man lose his temper had become with him an overmastering passion: his hands shook as he filled the coffee percolator, and there was sweat on his forehead.
The thought occurred to Leonidas after a few minutes that his own presence was not improving matters. He accordingly retreated to the drawing-room, and sat down with his Aunt Jocasta in front of the television set to watch the start of the Boat Race. Camilla, when she joined them, looked reproachfully at him; but he indicated, with an apologetic shrug of the shoulders, that he had done his best in the role of peacemaker and proposed to do no more.
The Fairfax twins had already installed themselves on the drawing-room balcony with a bottle of Rupert’s champagne: they would not have felt that Boat Race Day was Boat Race Day (said their half-brother tolerantly) if they had not jumped up and down waving blue handkerchiefs and shouting “Come on, Oxford” for at least ten minutes before the boats came into view. From time to time they called out to those round the television set to inquire who was leading and at what stage in the course. Leonidas joined them when the boats were approaching Chiswick. As he passed the kitchen he heard Rupert, more enraged than ever, asking whether Constantine was calling him a fascist.
His recollection was very clear of the moment at which the boats first came into view from the balcony, since it was also the moment at which Rupert was heard shouting that he wasn’t going to be called a fascist by a greasy little Greek gigolo.
“And that, of course,” said Leonidas, “was altogether too much.”
The poet had come out of the kitchen looking, as his son described it, all grand and patriarchal, and said they must leave at once: he evidently took it for granted that his stepchildren, as well as his wife and son, would accompany him in his departure. He stood in majestic silence while Lucinda went to call her mother to come down quickly from the terrace. When Dorothea, bewildered, appeared in the drawing-room, he told her only that Rupert’s opinion of him was such that he could no longer accept his hospitality.
“And we would have left,” said Leonidas. “But Lucian was still on the balcony — poor Lucian, he was really quite keen on seeing the Boat Race — and he noticed something odd going on the towpath. And it was because of Deirdre, of course.” He sighed: he had told me of these events in the light and ironic tone appropriate to an account of social discomfiture recollected in tranquility, and seemed almost to have forgotten that the quarrel between his father and their host had not been the chief catastrophe of the afternoon. “Poor Deirdre. But you will understand, Professor Tamar, that my mother would not have wished to tell the Coroner what Rupert said to my father.”
The boy looked very graceful and at ease, lying on the grass beside the little temple, and I thought how well the surroundings became him: if the designer of the garden had had the power to choose not only the shrubs, flowers, trees, temples and statuary but also some living inhabitant for his Arcadia, it would have been, I could not doubt, a boy who looked like Leonidas — with the same delicately carved profile, the same grape-black hair, the same olive-tinted smoothness of complexion. There was something about him, all the same, which reminded me that there is a darker side of Arcadia: the gods who have their birthplace in that remote and mountainous region are not the good-natured and reasonable deities who have their home on Olympus, and their purposes are not always benign.
“I quite understand,” I said, “that your mother would not have cared for so an offensive a remark to be repeated in the newspapers. It seems surprisingly fortunate that nothing was asked which obliged her to mention it. I should have supposed — but I am very ignorant of such matters — that the Coroner would have inquired rather closely about the time immediately preceding your cousin’s death: to establish, for example, exactly how long she had been alone on the roof terrace.”
“He mostly wanted to know what sort of mood she was in — whether she seemed at all depressed, and so on. We were able to tell him, as it happened, that she had been in unusually good spirits.” There was again an ironical note in his voice, which I could not quite account for. “My mother noticed at lunch how pleased she seemed to be, and asked her if she had something special to be excited about.”
“And had she?”
“Yes, so she said. It was still a secret, she said, but when we knew about it it would be a great surprise for us. My mother of course assumed she was talking of some love-affair. But it wasn’t really quite like that. She had the sort of look she used to have when she’d found something out that she knew you didn’t want her to know — it was rather a habit of hers. You could tell, if you knew her, that she meant the surprise to be an unpleasant one for us — something that would make her the center of attention, and make us all wish we’d been nicer to her.”
“It sounds,” I said, “like a rather disagreeable form of high spirits. But at least you can be satisfied that her death was accidental.”
He had been lying on his side, looking towards me. He now made a quarter turn and lay on his back, his hands clasped behind his head. I could not tell, therefore, with what expression he said, “Oh no, Professor Tamar, it wasn’t an accident.” His tone, however, was one of detachment; of slight irony; and a certainty that sounded like knowledge.
The honey-scented air was almost unnaturally still. Leaves, flowers and shadows were as motionless as stone, and the birds were no longer singing. It is in such conditions, I have heard it said, that cattle and goats and certain other animals may behave wildly and unpredictably, as if in terror of some unseen presence.
“I understood,” I said, “that the verdict was accident.”
“It couldn’t have been an accident,” said the boy. “The wall around the terrace is too high to fall from by accident.”
“But you say that your cousin behaved as if she were in good spirits?”
“I say that she behaved, Professor Tamar, as if she expected to be the center of attention and make us all wish we’d have been nicer to her. Yes. How else could she have done that except by killing herself?” He turned towards me again, looking at me with his curious lapis lazuli eyes; and what he said seemed for a moment quite reasonable and persuasive.
I thought it idle to question him further: if he knew more of his cousin’s death than he had already told me, I could not doubt that the knowledge was very dark indeed. And yet it occurred to me — the young have such curious consciences — that it might be no more than remorse for some slight or unkindness to her which persuaded him to believe, with that certainty which sounded like knowledge, that she had committed suicide. Since the habit dies hard of discouraging the young from thoughts considered morbid—
“My dear boy,” I said, “that is altogether too fanciful, you know. People do not commit suicide in such a mood as you have described — I do not believe for a moment that your cousin killed herself.”
This afterwards proved to have been a most dangerous remark.