A Family Affair (24 page)

It is possible that the Patriarchs were here a little at fault in not having what is called contingency planning prepared. As it was, there had undeniably been a short period of dismay behind the scenes. Then somebody – it was significant that, later, nobody could quite remember who – suggested that Paddy’s final passing could be turned into a kind of water-pageant. It could be in the manner of the
Morte D’Arthur
, with a barget (which presumably was a little barge) draped in black samite. Unfortunately samite turned out to be a rich silk fabric interwoven with gold. This sounded a shade daunting – whereupon somebody else urged a Viking funeral. This would be superior in itself, as being altogether more archetypal. A Ship of Death was the thing. Long before Beowulf and all that crowd, the Etruscans had gone in for something of the sort, and there was a notable poem about it by D H Lawrence. You needed a great deal of fire, or at least a great deal of smoke. The blazing craft would drift down the Isis and vanish – no doubt with the corpse waving vigorously and cheerfully from the stern.

In the interest of this modest proposal (which remained a shade muddled, if the truth be told) various emergency arrangements were made. They had involved Bobby Appleby in a number of mysterious telephone calls. But, in the general excitement, nobody had taken much notice of that.

Christ Church Meadow is a quiet sort of place (a circumstance which has prompted some proponents of turmoil to propose building a motorway across it). The citizens of Oxford eat their sandwiches in it, or perambulate it with their dogs. From time to time its secluded and pastoral character is emphasized by the appearance of some judiciously paraded cows. Young men in boating costume traverse it at a conscientious double as they go to and fro their aquatic occasions. It contains a Long and also a Broad Walk; and either of these, being wide and stately, is well accommodated to an occasional ceremonial purpose. It was such a purpose (although, it must be admitted, of a somewhat burlesque character) that was transacting itself now.

The Isis, when finally attained at the end of one of these vistas, presents, if in a modest and muddled way, what the English language, hotfoot after the American one, has come to call a marina. A variety of small craft, that is to say, are tied up, or anchored, or (whether manned or unmanned) appear simply to be drifting about. There are the river cruisers of Mr Salter, which are really quite large, and which emphasize the fact by having names like
Majestic
painted pleasingly on their bows. There are all sorts of houseboats and motor launches which, although it is intended that they should be confined to the south or farther bank, very understandably get in where they can. Not far off is the first of the few survivals of the stately college barges, once the centre of so brilliant a life during Eights Week and the like. And just as, in the huddled and roaring streets of Oxford, a maelstrom as they are of rubbery and shuddering buses and of gigantic ‘articulated’ commercial vehicles, the young men and women of the university continue recklessly to assert the absolute supremacy of their own intrepid bicycling selves, so here their slender and fragile craft – eights and fours and shells –

Various vessels, moored in view,

Skiff, gig, and cutter, or canoe –

manoeuvre with an equal disregard of modern hazards. It was to this spot (unfortunately) that the genius of the Patriarchs had finally conducted Mr Patrick Moyle and his coffin. Quite a lot of water (controlled however skilfully by the genius of the Thames Conservancy Board) was flowing downstream. Quite a lot of wind (controlled only by that same Providence to which the rapidity of Bobby Appleby’s mental operations has been attributed in the opening paragraph of this sober chronicle) was blowing up stream. The water was therefore a little choppy.

The person of Bobby Appleby was now conducting itself with every appearance of slightly imbecile jollity. But equally it might have been said of Bobby that

on his Front engraven

Deliberation sat and publick care.

Bobby, like Satan, felt that there was a tricky operation on hand. The event – the almost immediate event – was to prove that this was so. Bobby felt, in these moments, that he could have done with the backing of Oswyn Lyward – of Oswyn whom he had lately permitted the comparatively guileless Paddy to describe as virtually decerebrate. But Oswyn, for good and sufficient reasons, was at present lying low. To be precise, he was lying low, together with Sir John Appleby and certain professional persons, in a police launch beneath the arch of Folly Bridge. Some fifty yards upstream, that was, from the extravagant events now gathering momentum before him.

Certainly the Ship of Death was in evidence. It had punctually appeared. It was even now being contemplated in mild perplexity by the President of Magdalen from above his enormous white beard. The President invariably took an afternoon stroll this way. But now the President strolled away again. And this was a fortunate issue of things for the President’s peace of mind. For the beard of the venerable scholar might have turned yet more snowy had he been constrained to witness the alarming spectacle which at once succeeded.

The species of mortuary ritual now being simulated was, of course, that of a funeral pyre afloat. The dead warrior is put on board his ship; fire is applied to it; it drifts away blazing on the tide; finally it burns to the water and vanishes beneath the flood. Not quite all this, needless to say, was readily to be achieved on the Isis. But there was at least no difficulty in getting Paddy Moyle, together with his ponderous coffin and its equally ponderous lid, on board, for the Ship of Death (which appeared to be no more than a cabin cruiser appropriately dolled up) lay low on the water and there was very little heaving and shoving to do. Almost before the crowd was aware of what was happening – and there was now a considerable crowd on both banks of the river – the craft had cast off its moorings and glided towards the middle of the stream. All but the inner circle of the Patriarchs were plainly disconcerted by this. They had not purposed that Paddy should depart with only such maimed rites. There was, for example, to have been a poetic celebration of his career and lineage, delivered in a bardic manner by a young man – present and now in a state of high indignation – who had got himself up to look vaguely like a Druid. But at least there was nothing to complain about in the matter of the fire; it broke out instantly and to quite startling effect. Flames soared in air. There was an astonishing volume of smoke.

From either bank the younger sort produced a somewhat uncertain cheer. Presently these fireworks, as they must be, would extinguish themselves; the great cloud of smoke would be blown up-stream; the absurd little craft would appear again; the rag would be over. Indeed, it was over already in the opinion of some, for people were already beginning to drift away from the river. But suddenly most of these were halted. For something odd had occurred.

The motor boat (as it must soberly be called) had speeded up. It had so surprisingly speeded up as to have emerged, at least for a moment, from its own smoky penumbra. So there could not be the slightest doubt of what was at the moment transacting itself on board. Mr Patrick Moyle, treacherously and suddenly seized by somebody from behind, had been yanked out of his sarcophagus and pitched into the river. His features, strangely enough, were recorded by those nearest to the scene to have expressed – as he came to the surface and swam for the Oriel raft – neither annoyance nor surprise. Which was very strange. For it had been, after all, a scurvy fashion in which to treat a corpse.

And now there was pursuit. From beneath Folly Bridge flashed the police launch containing Sir John Appleby. From out of the New Cut came a second launch, manned by purposeful employees of the Thames Conservancy Board. The escaping motor boat roared down the Green Bank. It was a thousand pities that this was about all that the great majority of the assembled concourse saw. For the catastrophe took place half a mile farther on – beyond Long Bridges (where there is a bathing place nowadays) and in the tricky stretch of water which rowing men know as the Gut.

The Gut is not what it was. It has been monkeyed with. But not to the extent of totally obviating all navigational hazards in its double curve. Those who had strolled down the towpath thus far were to display a surprising unanimity in their testimony before the Oxford City Coroner. The fleeing motor boat – clearly to be seen as manned by two elderly men – was cutting its corners in a dangerous way. This was to be expected of persons in an extravagant hurry. Anywhere but in the Gut, it might have mattered little. But just here, as it happens, one may have very little notice of some other craft, coming head-on upon an orthodox course. Such a craft appeared now. And it was the Varsity Boat!

The horror of this moment will not soon be forgotten by those who witnessed it. Here were the nine young men (for one ought never to ignore the cox) on whom the fortunes of the University of Oxford, vis-à-vis the University of Cambridge, solely depended in a few weeks’ time. And bearing directly down upon them was the fugitive motor boat, its character as a projectile enhanced by its notable burden of a massive stone sarcophagus, complete with lid, and understood by the learned to be carved in peperino stone and to date from the third century BC It is agreed by all that the motor boat, had it roared on regardless of what it did, would have smashed the slender Oxford shell to matchwood, and doubtless hurled the dismembered limbs of its occupants down the hurrying Isis – as once the fragmented Orpheus (another very handsome youth) down the even swifter Hebrus to the Lesbian shore.

This comprehensive calamity did not take place. For the elderly man at the wheel of the motor boat, seeing the imminent peril, hurled his craft into a reckless arc. At this point the south bank of the Isis is solid concrete, three feet high. The motor boat hit this glancingly, for its bows were already up in air. It somersaulted grotesquely amid flying spray, plunged into the river, and vanished. The Oxford stroke looked only at the cox’s nose. The seven men behind him looked only at the back of the head of the man in front. This is called keeping one’s eyes in the boat. The cox gave a single cold glance at the piece of nonsense which had thus troubled the water. Then, unperturbed and magnificent, the Varsity Boat rowed on. For good measure, the cox gave them ten. A bicycling figure on the tow-path, with a red face and a pink Leander scarf, bellowed at them encouragingly through a megaphone. Half a minute later the motor boat surfaced, bottom up. Two or three humane persons, allowing themselves to be diverted from pounding along on foot behind Oxford’s hope, started to run around looking for lifebuoys. They judged they would be useful when the crew of the motorboat also surfaced.

But nobody surfaced. It was a full hour before the frog-men came. As dusk fell they discovered the bodies. Pinned beneath the sarcophagus and its lid respectively, Lord Canadine and Professor Sansbury (a Cambridge man) lay pinned in Isis ooze.

‘Awfully good of you to have come in and given me early word of the thing,’ the Commissioner said. ‘I suppose it will have repercussions here in due course.’ The Commissioner was standing at his window gazing out over the Thames, now brown and broad and tidal, as it emerged beneath Westminster Bridge. ‘A pity the Boat Race doesn’t come as far downstream as this,’ he said. ‘One would get a nice view. Only it sounds as if, this year, there might have been no Boat Race at all.’

‘Quite so – in which case the Applebys would not have been very popular. Judith says it ought to be a lesson to me.’ Sir John Appleby paused thoughtfully. ‘And I dare say she’s right.’

‘But she took a hand too, didn’t she? And actually with Canadine himself.’

‘Perfectly true. But she didn’t encourage her own son to organize an extravagant and – as it turned out – lethal rag.’

‘Ah, well.’ The Commissioner, who seemed a little at a loss before this aspect of the matter, turned back to his desk. ‘As I was saying, there will be repercussions here. Some of these defrauded people will come asking for their stolen property.’

‘I hardly think they’re likely to get it. Cockayne’s Duccio and Carrington’s Stubbs will by now be in private collections – very private collections – in the United States. Braunkopf is presumably to be deemed the legal owner of the Nanna and Pippa, and will no doubt part with it advantageously to some well heeled art lover quite soon. The Meatyards are unlikely to try to get some money back for “Autumn Woods”. The Lewis and Short Sarcophagus is now home again in college, and will be all right after a good scrub up. As for Canadine’s antique statue, it was never, of course, anything of the sort. There are places in Germany where you can commission gross objects of the kind, and that is probably what Canadine’s father did.’

‘My dear Appleby, I am curious. How did you come to pick out Canadine from, so to speak, the middle of all this nonsense?’

‘It was partly what I’ve just been saying. A valuable antique statue for long leading an unregarded life as a garden ornament is a most implausible conception – as Judith felt at the start. Then Canadine was the only person who, when defrauded or practised upon, didn’t, initially at least, make some public fuss. Canadine only told a few private friends. His little insurance policy, that is to say, was to remain confidential unless it was by any chance needed. He could at any time show that he belonged with the cheated, and so could hardly be regarded as the cheater.’

‘It sounds a crackpot notion to me.’

‘Certainly. But Canadine
was
a bit of a crackpot. And he was the kind that gets fun out of
knowing
that he is. But you were asking me how I plumped for him. In the end, it was a matter of the most utterly primitive criminal investigation. He gave Judith a plan of his blessed railway, you know. Well, there – bang in the middle of it – was the vital fingerprint.’