Cavalier Case (4 page)

"There must be a great deal I don't know. So - enlighten me."

"Children can see the Decimus Ghost quite safely. And many have. Down the centuries. If you believe the stories. He likes children. Because he came back the first time to save his little son. Nell - that's my funny little daughter by my first marriage, not so little now of course, fifteen? I'm hopeless about my children's ages - Nell saw him when she was quite small. And she continues to see him. If she's to be believed."

"Have you yourself seen him often? That's really what I'm getting at."

"Only children can see the Decimus Ghost in safety. If anyone else sees the Decimus Ghost, that's an omen."

"An omen?" Jemima was genuinely startled. This really was news to her.

"An omen of death. His death. Or her death. Or possibly the death of a member of the family. So - " Handsome Dan paused and drank again. "In answer to your question, Jemima, no, I haven't seen the Uecimus Ghost and I very much hope I never do." He drained his glass. It seemed like a kind of toast - to Decimus perhaps,
in absentia
.

A Ghost Walking

"This is mine," said Dan Lackland to Jemima Shore. There was a peculiar note in his voice which was not exactly family pride, more like personal triumph. Lackland Court at last: as Jemima gazed at the celebrated facade of the Elizabethan house, she felt that compared to other earlier Tudor mansions she had visited, it had the air and confidence of a Renaissance palace. Here were four high storeys serrated by groups of long narrow windows, gables, a parapet and a towering roof; the chimneys were shaped like columns, and decorating the parapet she could see further obelisks and balustrades. Yet it was not architecture which engaged her: she herself was feeling something like the excitement of a lover.

For this at last was the physical, rather than the poetical world of Decimus . . . "Mine." For an instant the word grated on her. Was she in danger of experiencing an absurd jealousy in her obsession over the dead poet? It would never do to start resenting the live owner! That would be ridiculous. Besides, Dan Lackland's remark fitted perfectly into context. He had been giving a courteous disquisition on the Meredith family history, having stopped the Mercedes to let Jemima take her first look at the mellow Cotswold stone of Lackland Court through the arched gatehouse; since that was what the architect had intended.

At first she was surprised that he was so knowledgeable, a mere tennis player to be so expert? Jemima caught herself up. This was definitely elitism, or sportism (if there was such a thing) on her part. The fact that a person was particularly good at some sport hardly meant that he or she had to be an intellectual oaf . . . After a bit she realised that the truth was slightly subtler. Dan Lackland did indeed know a great deal of history - the history of the Meredith family, that is. Presumably he had boned up on it since youth, anticipating his inheritance. On general historical matters outside the world of the Merediths, on the other hand, he was quite as ignorant or indifferent as Jemima had instinctively expected. Perhaps it was just as well that the Meredith family history touched so many points of English history during its three hundred years of progress.

"Built in the 1590's," he remarked. "A good period. Roughly the same as Montacute, if you've ever been there. According to Pevsner, it may even be by the same architect. Montacute is National Trust now, of course." And he added: "This is mine." And Dan Lackland continued with his polite little lecture. The triumphant note had vanished. "The great thing to remember about the Merediths," he continued, "is that we got the money thing right - aesthetically that is. The Merediths were fairly rich in the eighteenth century when Thomas Decimus the 8th Viscount built up the library and had himself and his wife painted by Gainsborough. But they were fairly poor in the nineteenth century, having got the railway thing all wrong, and very poor indeed by the beginning of the twentieth. So no new nasty Victorian or Edwardian wing to ruin the house."

"You've got two Gainsboroughs!" exclaimed Jemima, Decimus temporarily forgotten, fixing by habit on an obvious point for the television cameras.

"Good God, no. Cousin Tommy's father sold them to the Metropolitan years ago. The money was running out fast. Cousin Tommy w - uld have sold the whole bloody library if it wasn't for the entail, 'hat meant he simply had to pass it on intact. Or pretend to. My clever sister Zena, who knows about such things, thinks there may be one or two valuable books gone missing—" Dan Lackland stopped, as though aware that he had become altogether too intimate in his revelations to one who was after all in effect a total stranger. Jemima however, her curiosity aroused, was not inclined to let the matter rest.

"But how will you manage?" she pursued. "Will you turn to the National Trust? English Heritage, as it's now called."

"I shall manage," said the new Lord Lackland briefly. "No, no National Trust or English Heritage or whatever. As I said, this is mine." He turned to her, smiling and at his most charming. "Not the nation's, I'm afraid. Or not yet."

The car was now drawing up beside the wide stone terrace which fended off the gravel and the grass of the forecourt from the broad stone steps of the house itself. A huge heraldic carving of stone— presumably the Meredith arms—surmounted the doorway with the motto:
Amor et Honor
, in Gothic lettering. Jemima also saw the date proudly preserved: 1600.

Meanwhile a stout elderly man in a dark suit, bald, with a florid face, was clambering down the steps towards them.

"Haygarth, Cousin Tommy's old butler. He was his soldier servant in the war but he's been here for over forty years, and knows everything about the house: but he's on the point of retiring. He married Cousin Beatrice's lady's maid after the war—a dreadful old bat who terrified me as a child, called Dorothy."

"Then maybe I should talk to them about the Decimus Ghost. That could be useful." Jemima really made the remark out of politeness. She was not particularly interested in interviewing an aged butler and his wife on television when she had other fish to fry such as a former All England tennis player, captain of the Davis Cup team, whose looks alone—unquestionably justifying his nickname—had caused maidens of an earlier generation to swoon. Jemima remembered herself as a schoolgirl fancying him madly.

I suppose he's still quite sexy if you like that fair type, she thought critically, which I don't any longer. He certainly doesn't look much like his famous ancestor. Green eyes instead of brown. Give me a romantic soulful poet over a tennis player however handsome any day.

Jemima was surprised to see Dan frown.

"Not much point in interviewing servants." He sounded uncharacteristically ahrupt. "You know how they exaggerate. Dorothy died years ago and Haygarth is getting quite gaga—lives in the past and all that. No, not the seventeenth century, nothing so fascinating. Just Cousin Tommy's wartime adventures. No interviews with Haygarth. I can tell you all you need to know." Dan Lackland jumped out of the car so swiftly and easily that he might have been jumping the net after a victory in a tennis tournament.

But Jemima certainly saw nothing gaga ahout Haygarth. The man now heaving his master's suitcase out of the Mercedes might be elderly hut there was nothing necessarily wrong with his hearing: he could well have heard Lord Lackland's last dismissive remarks.

"Welcome to Lackland Court, Miss Shore," Haygarth was saying; his voice was vigorous and he did not waver as he carried rather than lugged her case up the steps.

But the sight of the Decimus portrait, hanging at the head of the broad double wooden staircase which led directly out of the great hall, put an end to other thoughts—at least for the time being. Perhaps it was the steep perspective of the staircase, the domination exercised by the single portrait at the head of it, perhaps it was her own emotion which gradually accumulated as they approached Lackland Court: for whatever reason Jemima felt a kind of faintness, dizzyness even, on seeing this particular version of the poet's portrait, which she could not remember experiencing before.

With Rupert's portrait she had fallen in love: it was as simple as that. At the N.P.G. she had been mainly occupied trying to train her untrained eye to concentrate and spot the differences between the two versions as Rupert himself had suggested: the big dog—of whatever breed—in Rupert's version, had become for example a page at the N.P.G., a page attending in some wide-eyed way to the sash of his master's armour. Decimus' white hand had passed from the dog's head to a more military-looking baton. Here the dog was back in the place of the page, with the poet's hand spread out upon its head; but his other hand was also visible, one finger raised and pointing, as though in warning ... At the sight of this third version, she found that by now the intensity of her emotion was different, almost uncomfortably fierce in its quality . . .

A pause for collecting herself, a necessary pause. It occurred to her that this after all was the portrait out of which Decimus himself was supposed to step. No wonder she felt faint. It was at the time a purely ironic thought.

A ghost walking! What an absurd concept, if you considered it properly for one single moment. The further irony of the fact that she, a rationalist, or at any rate one who did not believe in ghosts, was about to make a whole series of programmes on the subject, was also not lost on Jemima. This particular development was however the joint responsibility of Cy's desire to please Lady Manfred and Jemima's own desire to please herself.

It was at this point that Jemima realised, perhaps a little late in the day, that she had never really examined her own truthful thoughts on the subject of ghosts. If Decimus' presence lingered in this world, and for her it unquestionably did, it lingered in his poetry. What need of further corporeal hauntings on the part of a man who had written: "I fain would be thy swan" or "I could not love thy kiss." Decimus Lackland lingered alright, in the reluctant minds of young children, the romantic minds of adolescents, the ardent minds of lovers reciting "No more thy ghost" to each other (as Cass had recited it to her the other night, in an effort undoubtedly to exorcise Decimus on his own terms, if only for one night). And he lingered also in the dry, or to be less stereotyped, the carefully appreciative minds of scholars like Rupert; Decimus also lived there so long as his lines could be analysed, reanalysed, deconstructed and reconstructed again.

Under the circumstances, who needed his ghost to walk? Jemima for one did not. Who needed ghosts anyway? Once again Jemima did not. She rejected all superstition, did she not? The Catholic convent of the Blessed Eleanor which she had attended as a Protestant day girl had taught her the Catholic catechism as a matter of course.*(see 
Quiet as a Nun 
and 
Jemina Shore's First Case
) That certainly rejected superstition. Jemima could hear the precise voice of her old headmistress, Reverend Mother Ancilla, on the subject of ghosts now.

"My child, there is the Holy Ghost, and with Him, Our Dear Lord has provided us with quite enough to think about in the nature of ghosts. "

While remaining a sad sceptic where religion was concerned, Jemima thought that there was nevertheless a good deal to be said for Mother Ancilla's point of view. Let her be clear, if only to herself, that she did not believe in ghosts, and was involved in this programme entirely in order to pursue privately her own literary (and emotional) interest in Decimus the poet. The existence of Decimus the ghost was never going to be her true concern. And what of evil done in dark places, a feeling of brooding terror, savage retribution on the innocent, which still hung over, for example, the pass of Glencoe?

On her single Highland holiday—a disastrous occasion, memories of which she still did not like to confront entirely* (For these events see
The Wild Island
)—Jemima had visited Culloden moor; had learned of the Highlanders left there to die the night after the battle, left to die of their wounds, their groans for water heard by their womenfolk at the edge of the battlefield, who were yet forbidden to attend them by the orders of the English commander Butcher Cumberland . . . Yes, these "old unhappy far- off things and battles long ago" might leave an atmosphere of tragedy; she could accept that. But
actual
ghosts, that she could not and would not accept, that the ghost of Decimus should walk out of a picture, no.

Jemima gazed at the portrait fixedly, and with the eye of love, not superstition.

"What do you think of him? Our soldier-poet?" It was Dan Lackland at her elbow. He struck a rough semblance of the poet's attitude. "Any likeness? Apart from the colouring?" He was only half joking.

"I doubt whether he could have beaten Rod Laver in five sets that famous time?" replied Jemima with perfect truth; she had recently been honing up on the details of Handsome Dan Meredith's tennis career; this had undoubtedly been an extraordinary turn-up early in his career.

"You are absurd, Dan! Showing off as usual." It was a pretty, teasing female voice speaking from the gallery above their heads. "You're not half as much like Decimus as I am, face it. I'm the one with the real Meredith looks. One in every generation as the tradition goes." For the first time since she had met him, Jemima saw Dan Lackland look thoroughly boyish, because he looked discomfited. Once again she glimpsed the matinee-idol-cum-tenms-player of Jemima's youth, with his perfect Robert Redford-like features and hair (on which the only visible effect of age was to bleach it still further—and most becomingly—at the wings).

"So you're here, Zeenie. Charlotte didn't tell me you were coming." 

"Why should she since she didn't know?" countered Zena Meredith briskly, descending the stairs. "I did ring her up but she was in the middle of some crisis over the shop, as usual. Is it worth her having a shop, I sometimes wonder, with all those crises? Now that you no longer need the money. It's not as if cakes were very interesting—m themselves. Anyway, she'll be here for lunch. It was entirely my own idea that I should come down early and, as the historian in the family, tell Miss Shore all the family history she needs to know. Certainly I shall tell her details about Decimus, Olivia and the portraits. You see, Miss Shore, whatever Dan has been telling you is almost bound to be wrong; you simply cannot trust his version of anything which takes place." She paused and added with a kind of light insolence, "Except, I suppose, on the tennis court."

Jemima suddenly realised who the new arrival was. She had not connected the two names. Zena Meredith. Quite a well-known historical novelist (well-known in the sense that Jemima, who did not read the genre, had herself heard of Zena Meredith). Had they met before? Was it at Cambridge, a few years ago, at a feast at Casey College where Jemima had been Rupert Durham's guest? She seemed to associate her name with Rupert in some way.

Zena Meredith must now be nearly forty, hut with her tall spare elegant figure—she must he nearly as tall as her brother—had preserved a remarkable look of youth. As a matter of fact Zena Meredith had the sort of athletic slimness which would have gone well on a man; one could well have envisaged her in armour. One would for example call her striking rather than pretty; for all her fine features, Zena Meredith lacked a kind of essential femininity, a softness. Indeed, looking at her critically in that connection, Jemima judged that there was indeed a resemblance between Zena and Decimus. She had longish chestnut-brown hair untouched by grey and its stylish layered cut did echo—perhaps intentionally—the flowing Cavalier locks of her ancestor; her eyes were as dark as the poet's own. All this gave her a seventeenth-century air. Whereas her brother's blond American film star good looks were quintessentially twentieth century. The racket not the sword was his weapon.