The Europe That Was (16 page)

‘I could not help feeling sorry for the ship, Inspector, though my interest in her, as a mere passenger in the slave hold, was limited. All those first-class passengers, those pointedly virile officers in white and gold, those state-rooms with private balconies, those lounges and bars which my imagination—for I hadn't seen them—clothed most gloriously with panelling and tapestries! All that urgent cargo for which you here had booked the cranes, the labour and the transport! When one thinks of the expense of it all and the charges for demurrage, one asks oneself—at least I do—whether the Line should not have handed over some vast guarantee and cleared the ship. But Latins can be difficult when they stick to the letter of the law.

‘It began to look as if I might be able to stay to dinner, though in Spain that meal is seldom taken before ten. Meanwhile the five of us settled down to a game of poker …'

‘Assuming that your story is true, Mr Vasey, how did you sit down to poker with no money in your pocket?'

‘Alonso financed me, Inspector. I had flatly refused to take a loan from him or any assistance whatever, for I wouldn't have him think that I had come ashore for that purpose. But I could hardly sit watching
the game like an empty juke-box. Politeness compelled me to accept a stake.'

‘It was at this game that you claim to have won?'

‘I did. At the time I put it down to being somewhat more sober than Alonso and Juan. I now think that unlikely. Indeed, I am regrettably certain that Alonso had arranged that they should lose to me whenever it could be done without arousing my suspicion.

‘That was all the easier since our rules were complicated. The two ladies were playing strip poker when they lost and for money when they won. It worked out to the general satisfaction. Luisa, for example, holding a full house against Juan's four twos raised him with all her cash winnings and continued to raise him on the alternative terms. Since she was a respectable secretary, the position, though not without its piquancy, was embarrassing. On the next hand, we all threw in to her pair of kings, and thenceforth could reasonably consider her heightened colour to be due to Alonso's flow of liquor.

‘I had just cleaned up a jack-pot of fifteen thousand pesetas and the poetess was looking charmingly like Botticelli's Aphrodite—a picture, Inspector, but you will have found variations of the same theme on confiscated postcards—when Alonso was called to the telephone. He came back folding and unfolding his hands—his favourite gesture when life was getting him down—and said that we should have to leave to catch the
Patagonia
. He apologized to me and to us all. When I asked him why the devil he should feel it was his fault, he replied that the fact was … but this is so important that I will give you the ensuing conversation in direct speech, translating freely but with scrupulous accuracy.

‘“The fact is, Bernardo, that she can't sail till I allow it,'” he explained, “but I have now run out of excuses for holding her. And here we are sitting down to a really promising evening with dinner nearly ready! Why do British Lines have to be so infernally correct that one can't get anything on them?”

‘“The hell they're correct!” Juan said (he must have been a brilliant administrator—he didn't even have to stop and think). “I understand that there is a passenger missing from the
Patagonia
.”

‘“That wouldn't stop her sailing without him,” Alonso replied.

‘“We should have a case if he were a very undesirable immigrant. Have you ever been a member of the Communist party?” he asked, turning on me fiercely.

‘The bags under his eyes were frightening. They filled out when he was interrogating a suspect. I said I had nothing to do with communism. For the moment I took him quite seriously. I was still trying to adjust myself to the revelation that all the
Patagonia's
troubles had been engineered by Alonso.

‘“Have you ever been in Cuba?”

‘“Not since Castro. I was there a few weeks before.”

‘“A few weeks before!” Juan exclaimed. “Did you hear that, Alonso? He is probably responsible for the whole thing. We can't have a dangerous revolutionary of that sort loose in Spain. Hold the ship until the police find him!”

‘“I still don't see how I can, Juan.”

‘“Have they reported a passenger missing?”

‘“No, they haven't.”

‘“Deliberately permitting the escape of a political, Alonso?”

‘“It demands the closest investigation. I will hold the captain personally responsible. Or should it be the purser?”

‘“Damned if I know! Let Port Police sort it out!”

‘“What about the British Consul, Juan?”

‘“What about him? Order someone with imagination to call on him at once and whisper Cuba loudly! Tell him that it is absolutely essential that the fellow be found and put on board the
Patagonia
. We don't want to have to shoot him. Your deal, Frasquita, and remember what Bernardo told you about never drawing to the middle of a straight.”

‘Inspector, it was dawn when the police found me wandering in the sort of street to which a drunk would naturally gravitate. After repeatedly embracing me, Alonso and Juan had turned me out of their car on to the pavement. They apologized for the unavoidable indignity and assured me that the police had orders to treat me with respect when I was picked up. In fact they continued to apologize in such loud voices that windows were opening and I had to beg them to drive off before they were compromised.

‘Five minutes later I was asked for my papers by two unpleasant individuals in plain clothes. They arrested me triumphantly. I was hardly treated with respect. Firm but genial contempt for an intoxicated barbarian was the general tone. From the police station I was marched on board the
Patagonia
.

‘There under the British flag the flow of language was regrettable. The jurisdiction of ship's masters is extensive, but they do not take advantage of it, Inspector, to prosecute their officers for public obscenity. My cabin door was locked upon me and only opened when we were safely at sea. That was well into the morning. Naturally the Port Offices had to open before the ship could be cleared.'

‘Very interesting, Mr Vasey. And the presents?'

‘Oh, the presents! Yes, the presents. I can't help feeling that without them the Line might never have recommended that you should grill me. They would have written me off as just another irresponsible drunk who had missed his ship and aroused suspicion. But the presents were the last straw.

‘Just before the
Patagonia
sailed, they had all been deposited in the First Class, outside the Purser's office. Such delightful baskets! Such
ribbons in the red and yellow of Spain! The Purser naturally assumed that they were intended for the Managing Director of the Line, and delivered them to his state-room. So when the director had read and with difficulty believed the name to which all this film-star loot was addressed, insult was added to demurrage.

‘My cabin was unlocked to admit a procession of grinning stewards who deposited the stuff on the opposite bunk, fortunately empty. Alonso must have ordered the lot well beforehand, but I have no doubt at all that it was Juan, still in an expansive mood and with the hangover yet to come, who insisted on the cards bearing the inscription: Comrade Bernardo Vasey, from his international admirers.

‘May I catch my train now, Inspector?'

ENGLAND

TWILIGHT OF A GOD

Sir Matthew's eyes were keen and humorous as those of a robin waiting by the spade for worms, and shielded from the sun by enormous pepper-and-salt eyebrows. Only a man whose former work and present hobby were connected with the ground under his feet could have permitted such luxuriant growth without ever finding it inconvenient.

The contractor's temporary fencing sagged as he leaned his weight on it, watching the clearance of a building site in the main street of his village. Fifteen feet below him the open jaws of a scoop had just begun to crunch and lift a pile of debris. Without the least hesitation he squashed the fence to a negotiable angle and charged straight down the slope of rubble and broken brick. The scoop clanged shut a yard from his right ear.

‘Closish shave, that, guv'nor!' said the dry, weary voice of a foreman from the lip of the excavation.

‘Miles to spare,' Matthew Fowlsey answered cheerfully, cleaning the earth from a tile which he had rescued.

‘Didn't stop to think, did you, what would ‘appen to me if your 'ead was in the truck?'

‘He knows his job,' Fowlsey said, pointing to the crane cabin. ‘He could take your hat off with that scoop without spoiling your parting. So could I.'

‘In the contracting business yourself?'

‘No. Oil. Before I retired.'

‘Don't wonder they wear tin 'ats on the job. Wotcha got there?'

‘A Roman tile. I thought I saw two Ds scratched on it. And I did.'

‘Writing, like?'

‘With the point of a sword, perhaps. I don't think he could have cut so deep with a stylus.'

‘Ain't come across a two-inch grease nipple with a screw thread, 'ave you?'

Fowlsey retired under his eyebrows and searched the ground beneath the crane. ‘Here it is,' he said.

‘Cor! I was lookin' for that little bastard 'alf an hour last night.'

Matthew Fowlsey returned home with his tile and was greeted by his wife with a cheerful cry that lunch was ready. Assuring her that he would not be a moment, he retired to his study. The slow revelations
of his soapy water, solvents and acids were more interesting than the shouted appeals which he automatically answered. Lunch could wait.

Three-quarters of an hour later he appeared in the dining-room carrying the tile. ‘Muriel! My Muriel! Vagliodunum! It is Prior's Norton, my dear. I picked this up from a hole in the main street. The grafitto of a legionary! Roughly translated, it means “God Rot Vagliodunum!”'

‘If Vagliodunum is Prior's Norton, Matthew, I entirely agree with him,' Muriel said, and left the room.

There was a cold mess on the table which had been a soufflé, and a stew on the sideboard which he recognized—though it was now glazed with cold grease—as a very creditable shot at his favourite Persian dish. Darling Muriel! Damn—and she wouldn't cool down till evening!

Ever since Fowlsey discovered a gold coin of Alexander the Great in the stomach of a Caucasian wild goat he had realized that archaeology was the ideal hobby for a mining engineer—though at the time his interest had been in the goat's diet. He polished his classics and mastered the scripts, ancient and modern, of the Middle East till his opinions aroused as much curiosity among dons as prospectors. Always more fascinated by discovery than finance, he had retired with a knighthood but only a comfortable pension. He was thoroughly happy. Living in Prior's Norton was a new experience—perhaps, he admitted, a little too new for Muriel.

Sir Matthew washed up the dishes, picked roses from the garden and deployed upon his wife that charm which, in pursuit of his hobby, had always overwhelmed authority from Ministers of Culture to headmen of villages. Having won her smiling permission to invite Charles Kinsale over from Oxford for a couple of nights, he picked up the telephone and dictated a long wire.

Kinsale's reply was uncompromising but satisfactory:
DON'T BELIEVE A WORD OF IT BUT SHALL COME FOR MURIEL AND SAUSAGES
.

‘Charles believes in nothing,' Sir Matthew complained, ‘but the Later Roman Empire and his own belly.'

‘That makes him very easy to entertain, my dear.'

The Prior's Norton sausages were unique. They lent themselves to grilling rather than frying and were temperamental at that, but Muriel—aided by the advice of Miss Mallaby who kept a tea-shop on the main street—had brought the art of cooking them to perfection. Friends from more spacious days angled for invitations to a meal as if the Fowlseys were still cossetted by a host of native cooks and house-boys.

Charles Kinsale arrived early the following afternoon. After complimenting Muriel with lengthy eighteenth-century politeness he was dragged off impatiently to the study. He was a much younger man
than his host, but lacked the air of youth which irradiated Sir Matthew. When he made a definite statement it was so, and a waste of time to try to prove it wasn't.

‘I have looked up everything known about Vagliodunum, Matthew,' he said modestly. ‘The site is unidentified. According to the Antonine Itinerary it should be about eight and a half miles south of here.'

‘That site has been excavated.'

‘Really? By whom?' Kinsale's voice rose to an academic falsetto of disbelief.

‘It's in the middle of a brickfield,' said Fowlsey.

‘Very well, Matthew. Quite. But that does not help us. Now, I agree that the scribbler on your tile was Italian. So there is a possibility—we can put it no higher—that he was a soldier. All he tells us is that he disliked Vagliodunum. He does
not
tell us that Vagliodunum is Prior's Norton.'

‘Yes, he does. Soldiers curse the place they happen to be stationed, not the place where they were stationed before.'

‘Is that fact or conjecture?'

‘Fact,' replied Sir Matthew boldly, aware that there might be exceptions to this rule but that this was not the occasion to elaborate them.

‘I will make a note of it. Now, I have another scrap of information for you. There is a fragment of a fourth-century geographer dealing with Roman Britain. It is believed by Hasensohren—who is sometimes inspired—to come from an Alexandrian commentary on the earlier geography of Marinus.'

‘The Marinus who was also used by Ptolemy?' Sir Matthew asked, scoring a point.

‘Quite. The text of the fragment is corrupt. Vagliodunum is a possible but not a very likely reading. But whatever town he is talking about had a considerable Temple of Mithras—for goodness sake don't jump to conclusions, Matthew!—two hundred paces to the right of the cross as you come from the south-east.'

‘That would put it under the church,' Fowlsey exclaimed. ‘The market cross is the Roman cross-roads. Come on! Let's go!'

Prior's Norton lay in a shallow, green valley between limestone hills. Its main street, running over well drained gravel above the stream, had been constantly used by man from palaeolithic hunters to the excavators of the hole where Sir Matthew had found his tile. The lane which crossed it at right angles, charging straight down one slope, over a paved ford and straight up the other, was Roman and nothing much else.

Kinsale, protesting, was led over the ford, by a white, wooden footbridge and up to the main street. To their right were the manor, the
church and the vicarage; to their left, the village shops. Sir Matthew introduced his distinguished friend to the vicar, who politely pretended to have heard of him.

‘Kinsale has some fascinating evidence that there is a Mithraeum under the church.'

‘I am here,' Charles insisted sternly, ‘merely in the hope of wealth. Sir Matthew's luck is fantastic. When it was his business to look for oil he found antiquities. Now that he is free to devote himself to archaeology, he will certainly strike oil. But there is no more chance of a Mithraeum under your church, vicar, than under my college.'

‘A Mithraeum?' said the vicar. ‘Well, I suppose it might be here if anywhere. So many churches are on the sites of older temples. Mithras—now, let me see …'

‘Of Persian origin,' Kinsale expounded. ‘The giver of life—intermediary between God and man. Like other mystical religions, Mithraism was very popular in the army and with old ladies. Baptism was by bull's blood. Some form of Mithraism might well be our religion today but for the accident that Christianity was better suited to the political system of Constantine.'

‘And no doubt to other purposes well,' said the vicar. ‘I remember now. It was a religion of great beauty. Perhaps it helped to prepare the way. Well, if there was ever a Mithraeum we ought to find some trace of it. The church is built on bed-rock, and we can get at the foundations.'

They could—just. But the space was less than five feet, too low to walk and too high to crawl. Fowlsey was enjoying himself on hands and knees; so, apparently, was the vicar. After half an hour of examining rock under the light of their torches Charles Kinsale, weary of repeating that all the chisel marks were medieval, considered that the vicar might have warned him what he was in for. It had possibly been tactless to mention Constantine, let alone the old ladies.

‘So what do you think?' asked Fowlsey, when they returned to daylight covered with dust and cobwebs.

‘That you should join the Boy Scouts, Matthew. No doubt they have a badge for proficiency in archaeology. Have you perhaps a clothes-brush, vicar, before we venture upon the main street of Sir Matthew's Vagliodunum?'

‘You know, I'll tell you what happened,' Fowlsey said. ‘Your geographer got turned inside out. Vagliodunum was a garrison town.'

‘What the devil has that got to do with it?'

‘He might have been dining in mess. Come on, they say, you're off in the morning but there's time to visit our Mithraeum and kill another bottle with the flute girl afterwards. Now, there's a round hill on each side of the valley, and both look reasonably alike. He wouldn't know which was which after dinner. When he said two hundred paces
right of the cross, he meant left.'

‘You are too inclined, Matthew, to judge our ancestors by yourself.'

‘And a very good thing, too!'

‘That would put it under dear Miss Mallaby's tea-shop,' said the vicar.

‘Or under the Dog and Lobster. We'll pace it out.'

‘Matthew, I have already told you …'

‘I know. It isn't. And it couldn't be if it was. But all I want you to do, Charles, is to pace out two hundred yards and have a look at the cellars of the Dog and Lobster.'

‘The pubs aren't open yet,' said Kinsale weakly.

‘For the scholar all doors are open, Charles. Even among Kurds and Yezidis. And Mr Bunn is a Christian innkeeper who at the moment will be staking his sweet-peas.'

Prior's Norton was full of Friday afternoon shoppers. Sir Matthew marched along the curb, counting aloud up to two hundred and raising his hat to the bicyclists and pram-pushers whom he incommoded. He arrived precisely in front of Miss Mallaby's tea-shop. Her neat window, decorated by home-made jams, pickles, cakes and scones, preserved a lady-like propriety between the coarser attractions of the Dog and Lobster on one side and James Ing, Butcher and Licensed Gamedealer, on the other.

Mr Bunn was not exactly staking his sweet-peas, but he was in the garden thinking about it. After ten minutes' talk on the weather and control of slugs, Sir Matthew asked if they might inspect the cellars.

‘Nothing down there but empties,' replied Mr Bunn, looking suspiciously at Kinsale. ‘What's he an inspector of?'

‘Nothing! Am I the sort of man, Mr Bunn, to set inspectors on my neighbours?'

‘Well, sir, you haven't been here long enough for us to make you out, like. Not that I've anything against inspectors,' he added hastily. ‘A quieter, more well-be'aved lot of gentlemen you couldn't want when they ain't writing in their little books.'

‘Mr Kinsale is the greatest living authority on the Later Roman Empire …'

‘Matthew, I …'

‘Shut up! If I knew a better one, I'd send for him. His University of Oxford'—Mr Bunn's brewers were in Oxford, and he made a sort of grunt of profound respect—‘is interested in the history of our village. What Mr Kinsale wants to see is if there is any trace of Roman masonry in your cellar.'

The cellars ran under the whole length of the Dog and Lobster. In front they appeared to have been dug out of the gravel and lined with stone. At the back they had been cut from the hillside.

‘Well?' asked Sir Matthew eagerly.

‘My dear fellow, when the ceiling of a rock cave has been whitewashed over and over for several hundred years, it's impossible to say off-hand who cut it. What's through the brick wall on the right?'

‘That's Ing, that is, beyond the wall,' Mr Bunn replied. ‘It all belonged to the Dog and Lobster once, when the Mallabys kept it. Four hundred years, father to son, they were here. And that's only what they knows of.'

‘Miss Mallaby hasn't any cellars then?'

‘What would she want with a cellar? Why, Ing and me, we don't use what we've got. No, she just owns the shop which 'er grandfather made for 'er when she wouldn't take over the pub. And that reminds me. There's a few bottles in the vault there from 'er grandfather's day. Would you gentlemen like to tell me what's in 'em? I'm told they drink a lot of old wine in them colleges at Oxford.'

‘In moderation,' said Kinsale. ‘In moderation. Don't wave it about, Mr Bunn! Here—let me!'

Borrowing Mr Bunn's corkscrew, he opened the first bottle with reverent care. It was dead and undrinkable. So were the next two. But the fourth was a brown sherry in the flower of great age.

‘Prefer a drop of Scotch myself,' said Mr Bunn, tasting it with disapproval. ‘But if you gentlemen are that 'appy with it, why, you can't do better than finish it up!' He refilled the tumblers.

‘Any more bottles of it?' asked Kinsale.