The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (15 page)

They had found someone to come in and help clean the house twice a week, but met with unexpected difficulties when looking for someone to work in the garden. The locals would shake their heads and say they didn’t know of anyone. Their tone of voice implied that Jules and Tonia were asking a lot.

‘Anyone would think we were looking for a tight-rope walker,’ said Jules irritably. Their gentry acquaintances were even more annoying.

‘Of course,’ they would say, ‘we have George who’s an absolute treasure, but he wouldn’t want to work for anyone except us.’ ‘We can ask, if you like,’ added the more friendly ones, ‘but I’m afraid he won’t take you on.’

Advertisements put up in shop windows had no response whatever. ‘So much for this so-called rural unemployment,’ said Jules one day with a contemptuous little sniff. God, thought Tonia, he’s beginning to sound like his awful old father.

Relief came from an unexpected quarter. One morning their vicar called unannounced. The Reverend Herbert Somers looked after several parishes in a group ministry with the aid of a curate. Tonia did not like the perfunctory way he had conducted the services at Westhill church. Most of the congregation were already in their pews when he would arrive carrying a suitcase containing his vestments. Five minutes later, he would emerge into the choir from the vestry in stole and surplice and launch into the old prayer book matins. He read it efficiently, speedily and without enthusiasm, often obscuring his face behind part of the rood screen as he did so. His sermon was always ten minutes long and barely intelligible. It was a lamentable performance. The curate when he came to Westhill was better, though timid and sometimes scarcely audible, but mostly they got the Reverend Herbert Somers, because he lived next to the church at Westhill Rectory.

He was a big, loosely built, white haired man in his sixties who walked in a strange, awkward way as if he were limping on both legs at the same time. His face was pink and flabby. Everything about him suggested a withdrawal from the world into a private sphere; yet the pale blue eyes could still flash with angry life. There were moments in his brief but rambling sermons which showed that he had once had a good mind. He quoted widely, though nearly always irrelevantly, from the Church Fathers and the Greek and Roman Classics. Julia heard rumours of a brilliant ecclesiastical career ruined by a mysterious scandal, but she put this down to malicious speculation. Somers was not liked, and his parishioners had tried unsuccessfully on several occasions to get rid of him. In his turn Somers did not disguise the fact that the dislike was fully reciprocated which was why Tonia was so surprised to receive a pastoral visit.

But as soon as Somers had bustled into the hall of Wyvern Tonia knew why he had come: it was sheer naked curiosity. Even while she was suggesting coffee and biscuits in the drawing room he was peering around, barely taking in what she was saying. Tonia was amused rather than offended by his rudeness: it would be something funny to tell Jules when he got back from looking at rotivators in Evesham. She went into the kitchen to make the coffee and when she returned with it he was in the drawing room staring at the Philpott portrait of Adrian Clavering above the fireplace.

He had his back to her when she came in with the tray and, as she set it down, she said: ‘Did you know him?’

Somers gave a start, then said irritably: ‘Of course!’

‘Yes. How silly of me!’ said Tonia soothingly. She was thinking: he obviously doesn’t like women, why do I bother? She poured the coffee. He took it milky with several spoonfuls of sugar, and when she offered him a biscuit he put three on his plate. ‘So you know this house of old?’ she said encouragingly.

‘I first came here in the fifties with a friend from Oxford.’

‘Did he have some lovely things? Furniture and pictures?’

‘Of course!’ Again, the undisguised irritability.

‘We’re doing our best to return house and garden to something like its former glory. With rather limited resources, I’m afraid,’ said Tonia. Why was she apologising to this man?

‘Hmm.’

By this time Tonia was beginning to tire of his brusqueness, so she decided to provoke him. ‘I gather Adrian Clavering died in rather mysterious circumstances,’ she said. It had the desired effect: the pale blue eyes became fierce.

‘What do you know about that?’ he snapped.

Tonia said coolly: ‘I was going to ask you precisely the same question.’ Got him, she thought. He’s an old bully and you just have to stand up to him. Somers nodded, acknowledging the smart riposte. When he spoke again, his speech was slower, more hesitant.

‘He was found in the Temple of Pan.’

‘The Folly.’

‘Adrian wouldn’t have called it that. In fact he hated the word being applied to that building; but, yes, as it happens, Folly is
le mot juste.’

‘What happened?’

Somers ate a biscuit before replying: ‘Adrian was an amateur, you see, in everything. Gifted, of course, but essentially a dabbler because he was rich and spoilt all his life. Very charming, though, and a delightful host. I dined with him the night before he died. I tried to warn him, from bitter experience as it happens, but he wouldn’t listen. I do hope you are not a dabbler, Mrs Paige.’

‘What happened?’

‘Good heavens, is that the time? I must be away.’ Somers got up, pocketing the last biscuit on his plate as he did so.

‘Thank you for your hospitality, Mrs Paige. If there is anything I can do for you, naturally, please don’t hesitate . . .’ As he said these last perfunctory lines, he was on his way out, so that Tonia had to run after him to stop him from going.

‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘I don’t know if you could possibly . . . but we’re having terrible trouble finding someone to help out with the garden.’

Somers stopped and turned to look at her. For the first time since she had known him Tonia saw him smile. ‘Ah. Yes. Well . . . Naturally,’ he said. He made a little ‘Hm-hm’ sound in his throat that was almost a laugh. The Paiges’ inability to find a gardener was a source of malicious amusement to him. Then he nodded gravely as if correcting himself for his former hilarity.

‘Have you tried Quinton?’ he asked.

Tonia said no, she had never heard of Quinton, who was he? And how could she get hold of him? Somers told her not to worry, he would sound out Quinton himself; then he left. The following morning at ten a man presented himself at the front door of Wyvern Manor and said that he was Peter Quinton and he understood they were looking for someone to help out in the garden. He was prepared to give them one whole day, Thursday, every week. It was better than nothing, and his fee was very reasonable.

They called him Quinton, or ‘Old Quinton’ in private, though he insisted on being called Peter to his face and on addressing the Paiges as Julian and Antonia. Quinton was tall, wiry and of indeterminate age, though certainly over sixty. There was something gipsyish about his appearance: he went in for red and white spotted bandanna handkerchiefs around his neck, and his hair was dyed with Henna. His bushy eyebrows, now almost white, showed traces of ginger; his brown face and arms were freckled. His accent, certainly not local, was not easily identifiable, but Tonia thought it had a South London twang. His eyes were the most striking feature, they were green and could look positively feral at times. Jules swore that the pupils were not round but oblong and slitted, like those of a cat: it was a joke, of course.

Quinton became both indispensable and intensely annoying. On Thursdays he arrived early, left late and worked hard, but he could rarely be contacted outside his working hours. He did not have a telephone and it was a long time before he revealed where he lived. He had a small, rather isolated cottage about four miles away from Wyvern, but when Jules or Tonia tried to call on him he was hardly ever there. On the few occasions that he was, he came to the door of the cottage to talk to them. Beyond that door was an unlit dinginess, and he made it quite clear that they were unwelcome. He would very rarely change the day or the time that he came to Wyvern with the result that if he could not come on Thursday, he could not come at all that week. This inflexibility was infuriating.

He could also be quite irrationally stubborn about what he did and didn’t do in the garden. He would prune or plant or weed without complaint, but if he was ever asked to move an established plant from one location to another, he would often argue against it, or simply refuse point blank to do so. His innate conservatism led to many disputes, one of the fiercest of which was over the Herm.

The Herm was discovered one day when Jules was in a remote part of the garden. He had been following one of the many stone paths which wound their way about the property when he found his way barred by a dense patch of briars and undergrowth. He summoned Quinton and they hacked through it to discover that the path opened out into a brick paved oval space surrounded on all sides by yew hedges, now wildly overgrown. In the centre of the paved area was a stone pedestal of the kind that usually carries a sundial. No sundial was evident on its top, only a bronze disk covered in verdigris on which something indecipherable had been engraved. It seemed a gloomy place, though not without romantic charm for some, thought Jules. He looked at Quinton, who was staring about him as if searching for something.

At one apex of the oval, half buried in the yew, Jules spotted a tall object in grey, lichened stone. He turned to Quinton whose gaze had also been directed towards it. Together they attacked the yew until the object was revealed.

It consisted of a flat sided pillar, two feet wide and six feet high, slightly tapering at the bottom where it stood on a stepped pedestal. The top of it consisted of the classical bust of a bearded man which, because of the extra height given to it by the pedestal, stared down on Jules and Quinton. About half way down its flat front surface the erect genitals of a man had been carved in low relief. Jules, who was proud of having had a classical education, pointed at the object and said: ‘That’s a Herm.’

‘Right,’ said Quinton.

It was an irritating remark, and somehow typical of Quinton. It implied that he knew perfectly well that it was a Herm, indeed what a Herm was, and was simply endorsing Jules’s identification. Regardless of this Jules told Quinton that Herms were votive statues, originally of Hermes, later of other deities, which were common in fifth century BC Athens. He even started to tell him how the mysterious mutilation of their genitals caused a scandal in Athens and led to the exile of Alcibiades with disastrous consequences for the city. All the while Quinton listened to him, nodding from time to time, annoyingly like a schoolmaster approving his pupil’s recitation.

‘Of course, it will have to go,’ said Jules.

When Quinton questioned this decision, Jules explained that he was hoping to attract visitors with families and that some might be offended by the statue’s ithyphallic equipment. Quinton seemed unimpressed by the argument and said that it had been put there for a purpose and one shouldn’t move things without good reason. Jules left the discussion at that, but thereafter, whenever Jules had devised some scheme of moving the Herm, which inevitably required doughty male assistance, Quinton raised objections. There were times when Jules nearly lost his temper in front of Quinton, but he was afraid to offend him. This fear, as he ruefully admitted to Tonia, did not only stem from the fact that Quinton was their only source of help in the garden. There was something about him, quite indefinable, which made him uneasy. Tonia agreed. She particularly distrusted Quinton’s association with the children.

Millie and Tam were fascinated by Quinton, whom they always addressed and referred to for some reason by his full name, ‘Peter Quinton’. They would follow him around the garden, chattering to him. He did not slacken in his work, and most of the time he ignored them, but sometimes Jules or Tonia would hear them talking with him. Their attempts to find out what he was saying to their children always failed. He invariably spotted them before they got close enough to make out what he was telling Millie and Tam.

One afternoon in September Tonia happened to be looking out of an upper window of Wyvern onto the back lawn. There she saw Quinton with Millie and Tam. Quinton was crouching down with the girls standing over him, and he was showing them something which he held in his left hand. Tonia could not tell for certain what it was, but it was flat, black and shiny, like an ancient obsidian mirror she had once seen in the British Museum. With his right index finger Quinton began to describe a figure in the air just above its polished surface which he then covered for a while with the red and white bandanna he had taken from his neck. He said something to the children who bent further over his shoulder to look at the thing in his hand, then with a quick deft movement, like a conjurer, he swept away the bandanna. Millie and Tam stared, fascinated, into the black mirror.

Something about the way her daughters were looking at it troubled Tonia, quite apart from the oddness of the whole situation. She opened the sash window and called to Millie and Tam. They reacted by starting back in shock, as if suddenly shoved by an invisible hand. Quinton looked up at Tonia, and for a moment she saw a look of rage and hatred pass across his face. Its intensity was demonic, but it was replaced almost immediately by bland bafflement. He wrapped whatever it was he had been showing the girls in the bandanna and thrust it inside his shirt.

As Tonia descended the stairs Millie and Tam came running in from outside. She asked them what they had been doing with Quinton, to which they said ‘Nothing’.

‘What was he showing you?’

‘Nothing,’ said Tam.

Millie, the elder, felt that some explanation was owed, so she said: ‘We were just playing a game.’

‘What sort of game?’

‘Scrying in the stone,’ said Tam. Tonia saw Millie look at her sister with annoyance. Evidently Tam had said more than she should have.

‘And what on earth is “scrying in the stone”?’

‘Oh, just a game,’ said Millie, taking Tam by the hand and skipping off with her into the drawing room. Tonia knew she would get nothing more from them, but she was angry. She had a feeling that something bad had been going on. Somehow Quinton had been ‘interfering with their young minds’; that was the phrase she used to describe her unease. She went into the garden to have it out with him.