Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series (56 page)

Mr Fersen poured me a glass of wine from one of the wicker-clad jugs placed all about.

‘Have you ever tried
risotto all’ Emiliana
, Mr Oakley?’

His Italian was faultless and, in his mouth, ancient and sensuous compared to the plain English that preceded it.

‘Um... no, not that I recall.’

Fersen fixed me with his bleak grey eyes. ‘You should, Mr Oakley, you should. Prepared correctly, it is the nearest a man can approach to paradise this side of the grave.’

There was no answer to this, even assuming Fersen was only talking about food, which I doubted. Leastways, there was no answer from me.

‘I’m more of a corned beef fritter man, myself,’ said Mr Disvan, arriving, I obscurely realised, in the nick of time and seating himself uninvited between us. ‘Mind you, that’s not to say I haven’t got a lot of time for that sort of
cucina povera
tradition.  I just think it’s much abused nowadays—all that grated white truffle toppings and stuff, it’s not in the spirit of things. One must remain true to the spirit of things, mustn’t one, Mr Fersen?’

Fersen nodded his sad agreement.

‘I’m so glad we see eye to eye on that. Incidentally, have you ever tried a corned beef fritter, Mr Fersen?’

Without saying anything, Fersen gave every indication that he had not and never would. However, he saw that some answer was expected of him.

‘In Rome,’ he said hesitantly, a mite unsure in this world of allegories, ‘I believe it is traditional to eat fritters on Saint Joseph’s day...’

‘March the nineteenth,’ Disvan obligingly informed me.

‘…but, er... “corned beef”, no, I think not.’

‘Shame,’ said Mr Disvan concisely. ‘Them and bitter beer are as near as a Binscomite gets to heaven in this vale of tears.’

I was lost. There was a greater issue than gastronomy being debated here but, like a man full of corned beef fritters, I couldn’t hold it down. Mr Disvan seemed to be on sure ground, whereas Fersen had suffered some opaque defeat. Surrendering to destiny, I let my complete inability to ever learn prompt me to try and find out more.

‘Do you live in Italy, Mr Fersen?’

He was studying the secrets of the universe held in a pistachio nutshell but politely roused himself to answer me.

‘Yes. In Capri,’ (he firmly pronounced it
Car-pri
, not
Cap-pri
) ‘Mr Oakley, though my work takes me all over the world.’

‘But you’re not Italian, are you?’

‘No. I was, or am, English,’ he mused, ‘in origin, a long time ago.’

‘
Inglese Italianato è un diavolo incarnate
,’ said Mr Disvan, also with a faultless accent.

Mr Fersen laughed aloud but there was little humour to it.

‘And there, Mr Oakley,’ he said, ‘in one elegant medieval proverb, the game is rather given away. ‘An Italianised Englishman is a devil incarnate.’’

‘Sorry?.’

Fersen leant forward earnestly.

‘Mr Oakley, I suspect you are what is called a career man. In this idle hour, since I am perforce “off-duty”, permit me to tell you about my job...’

*  *  *

‘That’s awful!’ I said.

‘Morality in a money-broker!’ laughed Fersen to Mr Disvan. ‘Surely not?’

‘And it’s nonsense!’ I added

Mr Fersen was more amused than slighted.

‘To paraphrase the sublime Bard, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Mr Oakley, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.’

‘But there’s no such things as “souls”!’

‘The evidence is against you, Mr Oakley,’ said Disvan, who was entirely unshocked by what we’d heard. ‘If what you say were true, then Mr Fersen has been perpetrating a hoax on his employer all these years. I rather doubt that would be possible. The employer is known to be a subtle and unforgiving person.’

‘If person he be, prior to the final days,’ added Fersen graciously.

‘And, being the master of duplicity,’ Mr Disvan went on, ‘you’d have to get up very early to put that sort of trick over on him.’

‘I never get up early,’ confirmed Mr Fersen. ‘It’s a barbaric custom.’

‘There you are, then,’ said Disvan in his ‘two plus two equal four, you stupid boy’ voice. ‘The balance of probability, if Mr Fersen says his job is to harvest souls for the Prince of Darkness, is that he’s telling the truth. I so happen to know that he is, but I can sympathise with your initial doubt.’

‘Quite so,’ said Fersen understandingly. ‘I mean, it all sounds so... archaic, doesn’t it, all that souls and Satan business. I prefer to call myself a “recruitment officer”, or possibly a collector of
objets d’art
if I’m feeling refined. After all, what is life but the purest form of art anyway? As Oscar Wilde said, “I’ve put my genius into my life; all I’ve put into my works is my talent.” An amusing fellow, he, but one of my rare failures, alas. He had a nasty stubborn streak of integrity.’

I gaped, wondered whether to run and, pending a decision, floundered for something to say. Eventually I settled for a horrified ‘why?’

Mr Fersen relaxed into his chair and looked almost sad.

‘I’ve often asked myself that, Mr Oakley. I suppose it’s because life, any life, is so beautiful. I couldn’t bring myself to part from it. A deal was struck and here I am. It’s a simple story, although occasionally messy in the details.’

A pre-politeness training stage of behaviour got the upper hand in me.

‘Sod this!’ I said. ‘I’m off!’

A couple of seconds would have seen me make record time to the door had not Disvan restrained me in my seat. For an elderly man he also was suspiciously strong.

‘There’s no call for that,’ he said softly. ‘There is a treaty of long standing which makes us safe. Binscombe is excluded from Mr Fersen’s sales area.’

‘In return for what?’ I asked, half dreading what I might hear.

Disvan looked offended.

‘In return for nothing,’ he said huffily. ‘We’re just left alone. We don’t strike bargains with Pandemonium; if they want war, they can have it!’

Mr Fersen held up placating hands.

‘As Mr Disvan says, with the very rarest of exceptions, I do not practise my trade here. I wouldn’t dream of undermining such a sweet and charitable peasantry. I must confess, it can be particularly succulent to debauch the chaste and innocent, but that is a temptation I resist during my visits. Perhaps you’d agree, Mr Disvan, after all these years, I think I deserve some credit for showing that restraint.’

‘There is that,’ nodded Disvan. ‘Give the Devil his due.’

‘And in any case, Mr Oakley,’ continued Fersen at his most persuasive, ‘when you’ve been corrupting and collecting as long as I have, you plump for the easy life and go to places where the work is most easily done.’

‘Mr Fersen spends a lot of time in London,’ explained Mr Disvan.

‘I need to spend a month or so there every year,’ confirmed Fersen, ‘ “since the harvest is great, the workers few”, to quote the enemy’s book. Honestly, the state of public morality today, I’ll be needing a full time assistant soon!

I found myself laughing politely along with Disvan, even though a swift study of the balance on my ethical ledger would have wiped the smile off my face.

‘At any rate,’ Mr Fersen continued, ‘when I’m through there, I always try and pop in to see how Binscombe’s getting along. I have such an affection for this delicious little frontier region.’

‘What frontier?’

‘This is disputed land, Mr Oakley—between town and country, between here and the metropolis, between Kent, Mercia and Wessex, between ancient brooding enmities. It’s ideal for my purposes. We have our little “Capresi Evening”, exchange the news, and I get the chance to unwind before pressing on to the good ol’ US of A.’

He took a sip at his wine and seemed to appreciate it to the greatest possible extent. He was, I now saw, a man who enjoyed life to the full. With a bargain of the sort he had hanging round his neck who could blame him?  Fersen was storing up joyful memories for the judgement to come.

Despite Disvan’s reassuring presence, I still jumped when Fersen turned his head to study me closely.

‘You know, Mr Oakley,’ he said cautiously, ‘it occurs to me that you’d like Capri. Once upon a time, Capri was a rare haven of liberality. It was a refuge from the prudish morals of the cold nineteenth century north, a place where the cultured found sympathy for... proclivities and... predilections.’

‘A reference, I suppose,’ said Mr Disvan in a suitably chilly voice, ‘to fisherboys and opium.’

Fersen ignored this. ‘There was elegance and style, the electricity of art and indulgence, and a wonderful disregard for petty bonds.’

‘Surely not,’ said Disvan. ‘I understand that the famous resident, Baron Krupp used to enjoy bonds...’

‘And there was a freedom about it,’ Fersen gamely pressed on, ‘an almost conscious revival of the Emperor Tiberius’s pleasure gardens on the island and the games of his
spintriae
.’

I was hooked in a salacious sort of way. ‘His what?’

‘His
spintriae
,’ Fersen repeated with relish. ‘Threesomes of artistes, trained since youth in the art of erotic tableaux, who would—’

‘Yes, all right, all right,’ said Disvan primly, ‘Mr Oakley can go away and read Suetonius if he wants to.’

Mr Fersen kindly conceded the issue. ‘Of course, Mr Oakley.’ he said, ‘the “permissive society” has rather spoiled all that, made it somewhat redundant. Capri’s golden age may have gone, but I think that the residual shine would appeal to you. There are some types of Englishmen, a few, who... blossom and grow in the sunshine.’

‘Well, I’ve been to Magaluf,’ I stuttered, ‘but I got heat-stroke.’

Fersen ignored the confession. He seemed to be half talking to himself.

‘I have a rather civilised villa there. Only turn of the century, mock-palazzo style, I admit, but it has... memories attached to it. It’s a... beguiling place, Mr Oakley, a combination of cool, walled privacy and sunny, town square vulgarity. It just whispers possibilities to you of its own accord.’

Tearing my attention from this sales pitch, I could sense that Mr Disvan didn’t quite approve of the way the conversation was going.

‘Mr Fersen met Lenin there, didn’t you?’ he interrupted.

‘Yes indeed.’  Fersen smiled in a genuinely modest way. ‘Maxim Gorky and some other ultra-leftists lived in a nearby villa for a while, fiddling about with a new theory called “Fideism” or something like that. Dear Vladimir came to visit them roundabout... oh, 1908, 1909, I think. He wanted to sort them out. He didn’t approve of the mysticism they were dabbling in.’

‘ “The Capri School are fishing in polluted waters”,’ recited Disvan, ‘“…religion, metaphysics, revisionism; dragging every kind of fad and fashion into Marxism”…’

‘Precisely,’ Fersen agreed. ‘And while he was there I had some chats with him, enjoying the sun in the main piazza. Such a tiger in debate, but in the boudoir what a let down. A cardinal would have been more mettlesome—barely worth my trouble. An indifferent chess player as well, never mind what you read in the biographies. Mind you, I found him very receptive in some other ways. I could do business with him.’

Something about this story refused to accept standard filing in my brain. I pondered the problem and, after a bit of brow furrowing, came up with the reason why.