The Shortest Way to Hades (10 page)

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.