Thus Was Adonis Murdered (2 page)
Read Thus Was Adonis Murdered Online
Authors: Sarah Caudwell
This was a kindness beyond mere courtesy. Visiting Venice in the previous spring Ragwort had formed a passionate attachment to the city and all connected with it—the guide books were as dear to him as the last mementoes of a love affair. To hand them over to Julia, particularly when one remembers her tendency to spill things—
“I have told her,” said Ragwort, “that she is to take great care of them and not to read them while drinking gin. Or coffee. Or while eating pizza with her fingers. And I have put brown paper covers on them to protect them on the outside. So it really should be all right.”
“Of course it will be all right,” said Selena. “And it doesn’t matter about some of them being in Italian. Julia speaks very good Italian.”
This opinion of Selena’s is erroneous but incorrigible. Selena herself declines to learn any foreign language. Julia, on the other hand, makes her way along the shores of the Mediterranean in the happy belief that everyone still speaks some version of Latin, with the endings of the nouns slurred and a slightly lilting accent: she achieves in this way a sufficient fluency to be regarded by Selena, when they travel together, as the one who speaks the language.
I raised another question which was perplexing me. “It all sounds,” I said, “very expensive. How can Julia afford it? I thought that the Inland Revenue had reduced her to destitution.”
Julia’s unhappy relationship with the Inland Revenue was due to her omission, during four years of modestly successful practice at the Bar, to pay any income tax. The truth is, I think, that she did not, in her heart of hearts, really believe in income tax. It was a subject which she had studied for examinations and on which she had thereafter advised a number of clients: she naturally did not suppose, in these circumstances, that it had anything to do with real life.
The day had come on which the Revenue discovered her existence and reminded her of theirs. They had not initially asked her for money: they had first insisted, unreasonably but implacably, that she should submit accounts. They had shown by this that they were not motivated by a just and lawful desire to fill the public purse for the public benefit: their true purpose was to make Julia spend every evening for several months copying out the last four years’ entries in her Clerk’s Fee Book on an old typewriter that did not work properly. I myself am not entirely sure that the age and defectiveness of the typewriter were an essential feature of the Revenue’s planning. But Julia was: every time it stuck, her bitterness towards them deepened. The Revenue, on receiving the result of her labours, had uttered no word of gratitude or commendation. They had demanded a large sum of money. More than she had. More, according to her—though I think that she cannot be quite right about this—than she had ever had. More than she could ever hope to have.
In this extremity, she had appealed to her Clerk. Julia’s Clerk is called William, an older man than Henry, and perhaps more indulgent. It took a mere two hours of sycophantic pleading, freely laced with promises of perpetual industry, to secure his assistance. He sent out fee notes, as a matter of urgency, requesting immediate payment from those solicitors who were indebted to Julia for her services.
His efforts raised a sufficient sum to pay the Revenue, but left Julia with nothing to live on. Or at any rate with only so much as might support the bare necessities of life. I did not see how she could afford to go to Venice.
“The unhappy events to which you refer,” said Selena, “occurred some months ago. That is to say, in the financial year which ended on the fifth of April. On or about that date, the Revenue wrote to Julia, reminding her that they were now entitled to another year’s accounts.”
“And Julia was jolly miffed,” said Cantrip. “Because the way she saw it, she’d done her bit as far as accounts were concerned.”
“But she consoled herself,” said Selena, “with the reflection that it was only one year’s accounts and couldn’t be as bad as last time. So she went back to her typewriter and in less than three months prepared her accounts for the previous year.”
“But since,” said Ragwort, “her income for the previous year included the rather substantial sum raised by William to pay her previous liabilities to the Revenue—”
“She now owes them even more than she did last year. And she’s really rather despondent about it. Because it seems to her that every effort she makes to reduce her liability will in fact simply serve to increase it. And it is difficult to point to any fallacy in her reasoning.” Selena gazed sadly into her coffee cup.
“It is still not clear to me,” I said, “why she now feels able to afford a holiday.”
“It is true,” said Selena, “that if she takes a holiday, she can’t afford to pay the Revenue. But if she doesn’t take a holiday she still can’t afford to pay the Revenue. On the sheep and lamb principle, she has decided to go to Venice. I think it’s very sensible. She will return to London spiritually refreshed and able to cope with life.”
“Spiritually?” said Ragwort. “My dear Selena, we all know exactly what Julia is hoping to find in Venice, and there is, I regret to say, nothing spiritual about it.” Ragwort’s rather beautiful mouth closed in a severe straight line, as if denying utterance to more explicit improprieties.
“After a bit of the other,” said Cantrip. It is a Cambridge expression, signifying, as I understand it, the pursuit of erotic satisfaction.
“Julia has been working very hard all summer,” said Selena, “and has had few opportunities for pleasure. No one, I hope, would grudge her a little innocent diversion. My only fear is that she may be over-precipitate. I have reminded her that young men like to think one is interested in them as people: if one discloses too early the true nature of one’s interest, they are apt to be offended and get all hoity-toity. But we must hope someone takes her fancy in the first day or two, or she may feel she hasn’t got time for the subtle approach.”
“How long does she have?” I asked.
“Ten days. But effectively only eight, because two are spent travelling. She gets back to London on Saturday week.”
After a moment’s reflection, Selena thought it prudent to qualify her last statement with the words
“Deo volente.”
The phrase was intended, no doubt, to allow for some lesser catastrophe than Julia’s arrest on a charge of murder.
Despite her professed confidence that Julia would come to no harm, Selena’s conversation betrayed, in the days that followed, an unusually anxious acquaintance with those columns of
The Times
which carried the news from Italy. It was full, suddenly, of casual references to student unrest in Bologna; the problems of the Tuscan peach farmers; and the doctrinal innovations of the Vatican and the Italian Communist Party. Happily, it appeared that neither crime nor accident, civil commotion nor natural disaster had impinged on any person answering to Julia’s description.
In addition to this negative intelligence, she expected letters. She had impressed on Julia her duty to write daily, for the edification and amusement of those left in Lincoln’s Inn.
“You made it clear, I hope,” said Ragwort, “that the letters should be suitable to be read in mixed company and the activities described of unquestionable decorum?”
“Not precisely,” said Selena. “I said that what we hoped for was a picaresque series of attempted seductions. I told her we would not insist, however, on their uniform success. I said that on the contrary we might think it inartistic.”
Ragwort sighed.
I had thought Selena optimistic to expect that any letters sent from Venice would reach London before Julia herself; but we were fortunate, throughout the period of which I write, in the efficiency of the postal services. The first of Julia’s letters arrived on Tuesday, and Selena, who alone can decipher her writing, read it to us over coffee.
Heathrow Airport.
Thursday afternoon.
Dearest Selena,
“Twelve adulteries, nine liaisons, sixty-four fornications and something approaching a rape” are required of me for your innocent entertainment. Well, you will have to be patient—the aeroplane is not designed to accommodate such adventures. I am beginning, however, as I mean to go on, and in accordance with your own instructions—that is to say, with an exactly contemporaneous account of everything that happens.
It occurs to me that to abide literally by this resolution may have a slightly inhibiting effect on the adulteries, liaisons, etc. In certain circumstances, therefore, I shall hope, as regards precise contemporaneity, for a measure of indulgence—which, since you are the most reasonable of women, I do not doubt to receive.
It is about an hour and a half since you left me at the airport. Things, since you left, have not gone well with me: they have taken me from a place where there was gin to a place where there is no gin, and from a place where I could smoke to a place where I cannot smoke. That is to say, from the departure lounge to the aeroplane. They have also taken my passport.
“They can’t do that to Julia,” said Selena. “She is a British subject.”
And it’s no use your saying, Selena, that I am a British subject and they can’t do that to me. They have done. It began with a difference of opinion about my suitcase; I had thought it was hand luggage, which I could keep with me; the stewardess, at the last moment, decided that it was not. Deferring to the expert view, I handed it over, and she pushed it down a sort of chute. Only as it slid, with irreversible momentum, into the bowels of the aircraft, did I remember that my passport is in the side pocket. I shall not see my passport again until I get my luggage back: which will be, if my memory of airport procedure is not at fault, on the other side of the Passport Control Barrier. We have the makings of an impasse.
Too late, too late, Selena, I recall your as always excellent advice, to keep my passport at all times in my handbag. Together with such other essential documents as my ticket, my traveller’s cheques, my Italian phrasebook, Ragwort’s Guide to Venice and my copy of this year’s Finance Act. Will any of these, do you think, be accepted as proof of my identity? Or am I doomed to be shuffled for ever between Venice and London, with occasional diversions, on account of administrative error, to Ankara and Bangkok?
“I would not wish,” I said, “to say that I told you so.”
“The postmark is Venice,” said Selena. “We may infer that the Finance Act was accepted in lieu of the passport.”
And that, I may say, is the optimistic view, assuming as it does that we actually get to Venice. The pessimistic view is that the aeroplane will be hijacked. There is sitting next to me a man of about fifty, of vaguely military appearance, who looks the type for such an undertaking: his suntan is too deep to have been acquired in England; his white moustache bristles piratically; his blue eyes are of a fanatic brightness. And he is wearing Bermuda shorts: these expose to public view his legs, which are hairy and prehensile, like those of a spider. A man who parades such legs as I have described in such clothing as I have mentioned on an aeroplane full of passengers—some of tender years, others perhaps of nervous disposition—that man, you will surely agree, Selena, is capable of any depravity. His hand luggage bears a distinctive label, similar to those given to me by the travel agency, proclaiming him to be, like me, an Art Lover. But one cannot be an Art Lover without some minimum of aesthetic sensibility. That minimum he lacks—for evidence,
vide supra.
I conclude that he is an impostor.
“Can’t bear spiders, poor grummit,” said Cantrip. “Did I ever tell you—?”
“Yes,” said Selena. “We have heard all about the spider episode, Cantrip, and we don’t want to hear it again. It’s a revolting story.”
“I thought it was rather witty,” said Cantrip.
“I gather,” said Ragwort, “that Julia didn’t.”
“No,” said Cantrip, rather sadly. “No, she didn’t, actually.”
It will not, I hope, be necessary, at any stage in my narrative, to disgust my readers with an account of the spider episode. I will say only that any exchanges of an erotic nature between Julia and Cantrip which may hereafter be referred to may be conclusively presumed to antedate the incident. Though, in all fairness, it does seem to me that a woman who retires for the night with Cantrip on the 31st of March in any year, forgetting that the following day—still, as I have said, I propose to draw a veil over the whole matter.
Mind you, Selena, when it comes to looking round for potential hijackers, I am by no means happy about the armour-plated matron on the other side of the gangway. I am suspicious of her coiffure—can any hair grown in nature be moulded to such iron symmetry? And can any lady so closely resembling the late Queen Boadicea be without military aspirations?
I notice with apprehension that she too is labelled as an Art Lover. Perhaps there is a conspiracy. In furtherance of some desperate enterprise, a band of ruthless extremists have disguised themselves as amateurs of the artistic and historical. I shall look round carefully and see if there are any more of them.
There is another Art Lover’s label a few rows back, on the other side of the gangway, attached to the shoulderbag of a rather pretty girl. Her hair is of the shade which you yourself favoured in the spring—“Harvest Moonlight,” I think, was what the manufacturers called it. She has that ethereal pallor which one associates with idealism: a large proportion of hijackings are committed by idealists.
There is a young man sitting next to her. They seem, though they do not converse much, to be travelling together. If so, then presumably he too is an Art Lover. His face is of the shape known in geometry as trapezoid: rectilinear but not rectangular, being wider at the jaw than across the forehead. His figure is of the same geometric form, but the other way up, being broader at the shoulders than the hips. Still, he is of clean and wholesome appearance and could be quite pleasing to look at; but he has a distrustful, peevish expression, as if on constant guard against someone pulling a fast one.
He is asking the stewardess just how much longer we’re going to have to wait here: his manner indicates that he expects an untruthful answer, his accent that he is an American. The proportion of hijackings committed by Americans is also very large.
The only other Art Lovers I can identify are two young men sitting some rows ahead of me. I would not have noticed them; but one has just stepped out into the gangway to allow the other to lift their hand luggage on to the luggage rack. (One is not supposed to put luggage in the luggage rack. They have been reproved by the stewardess.)
The one who did the lifting (up, and, following reproof, down again) is well suited to the task, having the physique of a more than usually muscular ox—rather like that Rugby full-back who was in love with you at Oxford, the reliable-looking one who was always threatening to commit suicide. His face, which was briefly turned in my direction, has a heavy, overcast sort of look, and eyebrows that almost meet. Not my sort of thing at all.
But the other—the one who stood aside to let the lifting be done—he looks like a more attractive proposition. His hair is an even paler shade than the blonde girl’s. And he is thin, very thin. He is wearing a rather beautiful wide-sleeved shirt of that coarse muslin material that Ragwort sometimes likes—I think it is called cheesecloth. He has adopted a most graceful and decorative attitude, leaning back against the top of the seat with just sufficient pressure to emphasize the charming hollow of the left hip. But I haven’t been able to see his face.