Роберт Эйкман - The Late Breakfasters (Faber Finds)

‘Sir Travis,’ said Griselda, ‘tell me about life.’

‘Lord Beaconsfield told me that men are governed either by tradition or by force. I have since found it to be true.’

‘But,’ said Griselda, a little disappointed, ‘that’s a rule for governing other people. What about yourself?’ She noticed that the distant music was ebbing.

‘You do not need to govern yourself, my dear, if you succeed in governing other people.’

Suddenly Griselda thought of something: something that it was past belief she had not thought of before.

‘Sir Travis,’ she said, eagerly; too eagerly for a sick-room.

He did not answer.

‘Sir Travis!’ She almost shook his hand and arm.

But Sir Travis’s mind was elsewhere. ‘Tell Venetia,’ he said smiling wickedly, ‘that I’m leaving her for ever.’ And his high musical voice died away.

‘Sir Travis!’

‘One more thing only,’ said a voice from the shadows. ‘And then you will be free to go.’

A young man in a dark suit stood before Griselda on the other side of the huge bed. He was small and looked French. He seemed to hold some small object clasped in each of his hands.

‘I thought we were alone.’ Griselda looked over her shoulder. There was no sign of the tall woman, but the door through which she had entered, had disappeared behind the black hangings.

The young man smiled slightly; then stretching out his hands across the bed, opened the palms. In each lay a large gold piece, which glittered in the candlelight.

‘You know what to do?’ His alien mien was confirmed by a slight accent.

‘Is he dead? How do you know?’

‘I know.’

Looking at the man in the bed, Griselda knew too.

‘Poor Sir Travis!’

‘Of course. It is very sad.’

Griselda lifted the hand which had just held hers and laid it on the bed. She had never before touched a corpse. She almost expected the hand to be cold: it was much more shocking that it proved as warm as in life.

‘You know what to do?’ The young man still held out the gold pieces.

‘I think so,’ said Griselda. ‘But why me?’

‘It is all that remains. Then you can go.’

Griselda took the pieces from his hand.

‘They’re five-pound pieces! And quite new!’

‘Sir Travis made a special arrangement with the Mint.’

‘For this?’ Griselda’s voice sank in awe.

‘For what else? Gold coins are no longer taken in shops. Only pieces of paper.’

‘They’re beautiful.’

But the young man indicated the slightest touch of impatience.

Very carefully and tenderly, Griselda laid the gold pieces on the dead man’s eyelids.

‘Thank you, mademoiselle,’ said the young man, indicating the slightest touch of relief. ‘Now if you will follow me.’

Coming round the bed, he drew a section of the black hangings, and Griselda followed him back to the dim hall.

At the top of the stairs, the tall woman awaited them in the shadows.

‘Is all in order, Vaisseau?’

‘But naturally.’ His tone was as proud as hers.

‘And she can go?’

‘Immediately.’

Lena stood below. ‘Is everything all right, Griselda?’

Griselda squeezed her hand. ‘There’s nothing to keep us, Lena. Let us go.’

The tall woman and the young man silently, and almost invisibly, watched them go back into the hot sun.

Outside was a strange disturbance. The hatchment had gone and the dwarf, it seemed, with it; but looking round for the origin of an unaccountable noise which filled the summer air, the two women saw him crouched on the paving stones in a corner behind the porch. He was not weeping, since there were no tears; he was crying like an animal, but like no known animal, for, as they now perceived, he had hitherto been dumb.

They looked up from the distressing sight and saw that high above them, beneath the immense mailed fist, hung the hatchment, polished and varnished and renewed, until in the afternoon sunshine it shone the very pennant of death triumphant.

XXV

Griselda was unable to imagine why she had never thought to look up Hugo Raunds’s address in ‘Who’s Who’, or even in the Telephone Directory, and write to him for possible news of Louise’s whereabouts.

Distracted by the omission, and full of resolve to repair it as soon, as possible, she imparted to Lena, who seemed pleasingly without over-pressing curiosity, a somewhat slender account of her recent experiences.

‘But is it a madhouse?’

‘I think it’s just a very old family.’

They were walking down the drive towards the main entrance to the park. As the big elaborately wrought gates came into view, it appeared also that a small crowd was assembled outside. The first idea that they were faithful tenants come to enquire about the course of their protector’s illness, or to mourn his passing, was dispelled by the way they stood packed together in the heat, by the fact that the lodge-keeper seemed to be remonstrating with them from behind the bars, and, most of all, by the noise they were making. In the end, Griselda saw that some of them carried placards, hideously lettered with slogans: ‘Aid To Abyssinia, Guatemala, Democratic Spain, And Chiang-Kai-Shek’; ‘Workers! The Intelligentsia Stands Behind You’; and, most immediate in its application, ‘Sir Travis Raunds Must Go’. The inclusion of the title struck Griselda as a courteous detail, inconsistent with much else; but perhaps it served to spur David by making Goliath look fiercer.

‘I wonder you ’aven’t all something better to do on a nice day like this,’ the lodge-keeper was saying. Clearly he had allowed himself to be drawn into unwise disputation. He was a mild elderly man with lank hair and an habitual air of having recently been rescued from drowning.

His remark was greeted with catcalls.

‘Why don’t you join us in fighting the enemy of your class?’ enquired a tall prematurely bald young man with spectacles. He carried a battered puppet dangling from a crude gallows, which he had looted, during a university rag, from a Punch and Judy stand. Two or three of his fellow demonstrators began to chant the Internationale.

‘My tea’s waiting for me, you know.’

At this there was a burst of perceptibly forced laughter.

‘I’ll send for a policeman.’

‘Call out the Cossacks!’

Lena went up to the lodge-keeper and spoke in his ear. He stepped back. Lena raised her hand.

‘Sir Travis Raunds is dead. He died this afternoon,’ she said in her clear voice. ‘So go home.’

There were a few jeers, and a cry of ‘Why couldn’t you say so?’ but the group began to retreat, more or less content in the knowledge that they were alive and that the future was theirs. It seemed to occur to none of them to doubt Lena’s statement.

‘That was brave of you, Lena,’ said Griselda.

‘So it was, miss,’ said the lodge-keeper. ‘But, of course, I ’ad old Cupid up my sleeve all the time.’

‘Would Cupid have helped?’

‘Torn ’em apart, miss. Cupid only needed a word from me to tear ’em apart. Just one word. That’s Cupid.’ He indicated a vague black shape which looked too big for the white wooden kennel placed in the lodge-keeper’s miniature garden. ‘Sir Travis named him after a gentleman he used to know when he was in politics.’

‘Good old Cupid.’

It seemed unnecessary to pat Cupid, as he was asleep. He wore a collar with large spikes, like a drawing by Cruikshank; and his muzzle was matted with some sticky substance. When Griselda mentioned his name, he growled in his sleep.

‘It’s sad news about Sir Travis.’

‘Yes and no, miss. Times have changed since the Old Queen’s day. Not that either of you young ladies will care about that. But up at the house it’s just as if the Old Queen was still with us. Just like Windsor Castle, it is.’