The Pendragon Legend (3 page)

I gazed in wonder at this Münchausen and began to question whether he’d ever been near the tropics. But he was an agreeable young chap. He was practically chinless, his arms were
uncommonly
long, and he moved with the ease and grace of an animal. Altogether he seemed somewhat closer than most to our primal nature.

By the time we got back to the British Museum the usual old madwoman was already centre stage in the garden outside the entrance, giving the pigeons their midday feed. As ever, her face was transfigured with the joyous smile of a Franciscan saint
soaring
up to Heaven. Around her you could see nothing but pigeons. Her whole person was smothered in pigeons. Three sat on her head, five on each shoulder, and countless numbers clung to her dress. I could tell that she fancied herself as saintly as Francis
himself
, and she filled me with loathing.

“I’d like to shoot her,” I said to my new friend, as we ascended the stairs.

Almost as I said this, he spun round and hurled a large pebble—I didn’t even see him pick it up—which hit her a glancing blow on the nose, a full fifty metres away. She uttered a powerful scream and dropped the pigeon feed, the birds took flight and the woman collapsed. She had clearly never reckoned on being hit by lightning while performing the great good deed of her life. Her sense of a moral universe must have collapsed with her in that moment.

Maloney continued walking, very calmly. The whole thing had happened so quickly that, apart from myself, no one had seen who did it.

“What was all that about?” I asked in amazement when we got inside the foyer. We were standing in the half-light, under the bearded heads of Assyrian kings some four thousand years old.

“Why do you ask? You yourself said you could shoot her. But all you can do is talk. You aren’t from Connemara.”

From that point on, and after what followed later, I became inclined to believe about half of the impossible yarns Maloney spun. And I could see that Connemarans weren’t quite like
anyone
else.

We returned to our reading for a while.

The seventh Earl, and those following him down the century, were relative nonentities. It was as if the memory of the great Asaph had cast a shadow of dullness over them. The tenth Earl moved away from the ancestral seat at Pendragon and built the castle at Llanvygan, the family home since 1708, which has been so much praised for its beauty.

With the move away from dismal Pendragon, the family
history
took a brighter turn. Throughout the eighteenth century, like every other noble house, it produced distinguished admirals, diplomats and minor poets, and the enigmatic shadow of Asaph appeared to have been lifted. Or not entirely. The thirteenth Earl requires a mention.

This gentleman, despite his unfortunate number, was the most convivial and thoroughly human character in the whole saga. He was the only Earl who had affairs with actresses, the only one who knew how to drink, and the only one who could crack a good joke in company.

One of these jokes was considered particularly witty in its time, though it is difficult now to see exactly where its humour lies. He was told one day, while at cards, that his mistress—whom he had raised from the level of a simple orange-seller—had run off with the fencing master, taking a significant quantity of the family
baubles
with her. His sole response was, “Every good deed gets the punishment it deserves,” and he carried on with the game.

His Christian name, incidentally, was John Bonaventura, his mother having been Italian. This odd combination of names stopped me in my tracks. I had the feeling that I had come across it, or one very like it, once before. But the memory escaped me, and did not come back to me until much later, in connection with some very odd occurrences.

To the remaining pages I gave only a cursory glance. They dealt with the nineteenth-century Pendragons, who flourished
peacefully
and with honour in the never-ending reign of Victoria. The
present Earl’s father had been caught up in the fashionable
imperialism
of the day and was seldom at home. He served in various colonial regiments, held high office over subject peoples and died, in 1908, as governor of one of the provinces of Indo-China. His death was due to some sort of tropical disease that had broken out in the area at the time.

My limited information about the present Earl, the eighteenth, is provided by
Who’s Who
. Born in 1888, he was thus forty-five at the time of my tale. His full name was Owen Alastair John Pendragon of Llanvygan. Educated at Harrow and Magdalen College, Oxford, he served in various colonial regiments,
distinguished
himself in several different ways and belonged to a great many clubs.
Who’s Who
usually goes on to give details of
hobbies
and interests—these being of the greatest importance to the English—but the Earl seemed not to have provided any response to this question.

Lunchtime was upon us. I returned my books, along with Maloney’s, and was about to leave.

“Well, this is something else I’ve learnt,” he remarked. “So now I know what goes on in a library. I’d rather be in a nice little swamp. My God! I haven’t read so much in ten years. Where are you eating, by the way?”

“Greek Street. In a Chinese restaurant.”

“Would you swear blue murder if I joined you? I hate eating on my own.”

Even by Continental standards this was a rapid beginning of friendship—or whatever you might call it—and I was taken by surprise. But there was something rather touching about him, like a chimpanzee on the loose in the London streets, misunderstood by everyone but full of well-meaning.

“I’d be delighted,” I said. “But I ought to warn you, I’m
lunching
with a Chinese friend. I don’t know how developed your sense of colour is, or how you feel about yellow gentlemen.”

“I’ve nothing against Chinks if they aren’t cheeky. We
Connemarans
make no distinction between one man and another. Only if they give cheek. I once had a kaffir boy who didn’t clean my boots properly, and when I spoke to him about it he answered me back. So I grabbed him, stuck some kid’s shoes on his feet and made him
walk in them for three days in the Kalahari Desert. It’s a pretty hot place. I tell you, by the third day the kaffir’s feet were half their
original
size. You could have used him as a fairground exhibit.”

We had reached the restaurant. Dr Wu Sei was already
waiting
for me. When he saw that I’d brought a stranger with me he retreated behind his most affable oriental smile and fell silent. But Maloney simply chatted all the more, and won my heart by proving not just a lover of Chinese food like myself, but a real connoisseur. Normally when I ate there I would let Wu Sei do the ordering, then enjoy whatever was brought without bothering to find out whether the finely-chopped delicacies were pork,
rose-petal
soup or bamboo. Maloney conducted himself like a man discriminating between veal escalope and
boeuf à la mode
; he could distinguish seventeen flavour gradations of chop suey, and he won my unstinting admiration.

“Which way are you going?” he asked me after lunch.

I told him.

“Would you curse me if I went part of the way with you?”

Now I was really surprised.

“Tell me,” he asked, with some embarrassment, as we strolled along: “you’re a bloody German, aren’t you?”

“Oh, no. I’m Hungarian.”

“Hungarian?”

“Hungarian.”

“What’s that? Is that a country? Or are you just having me on?”

“Not at all. On my word of honour, it is a country.”

“And where do you Hungarians live?”

“In Hungary. Between Austria, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.”

“Come off it. Those places were made up by Shakespeare.”

And he roared with laughter.

“Alright, so you’re a Hungarian … Good country, that. And what language do you Hungarians speak?”

“Hungarian.”

“Say something in Hungarian.”

It was some years since I had last spoken the language and, strangely moved, I recited some Ady:

“Very nice. But you don’t fool me. That was Hindustani. It means: ‘Noble stranger, may the Gods dance on your grave in their
slippers
.’ I’ve heard that one before. However, since you’re the first Hungarian I’ve met, let’s do something to celebrate this splendid friendship. Come and have dinner with me tonight. Please, I’m
asking
you. If you find me a bit mad, don’t worry—you’ll get used to it, everybody does. And anyway there’ll be three of us. I’ll introduce you to a very clever chap, just down from Oxford, nephew of some Lord or other. He’s a scream. He can get his mouth round
five-syllable
words you’ve never even heard of, easy as you could say ‘hat’.”

After a little hesitation I accepted. I love meeting new people, and as it happened I had nothing else to do. To tell the truth, I was rather bowled over by the fact that he was inviting me to the Savoy, a place so grand I would never have been able to afford to go there at my own expense. I even began to see Maloney in a new light. Mad, I said to myself, but a gentleman.

We met that evening in the bar.

I found him there in the company of a young man: a tall, very slim young man with a remarkably engaging, delicate and
intelligent
face; rather effeminate, perhaps, with the athletic sort of effeminacy that characterises so many interesting Oxford men.

“Allow me to introduce you to the Hon Osborne Pendragon,” said Maloney.

“Pendragon?” I exclaimed. “Would you perhaps be related to the Earl of Gwynedd?”

“As a matter of fact, I have the honour to be his nephew,” he replied, in a curiously exaggerated and affected drawl. “What’s your cocktail?”

My least concern just then was a cocktail.

“Might you be spending your summer vacation at Llanvygan?” I asked.

“That is absolutely correct. I’m off to the family home in Wales the day after tomorrow.”

“I’m going there myself, fairly soon.”

“Bathing no doubt in the sea off Llandudno? I prefer a private bathroom, myself. Fewer people, and rather more select.”

“No, no.”

“Or perhaps you’re off to climb Snowdon?”

“Not at all.”

“Where else does one go in North Wales?”

“Llanvygan, for example.”

“Excuse me?”

“The Earl has very kindly invited me to his place at Llanvygan.”

At this point Maloney gave vent to an ancient Irish battle cry.

“Man, man!” he roared, and almost dislocated my arm.

“Well?”

“So we can travel together! Osborne has invited me too. What a coincidence! First of all, I ask myself, how did I end up in the Reading Room of the British Museum? Well, we all have our moments. And of all the five hundred freaks sitting there, it
happens
to be this gentleman I start to pester, and go on
badgering
, until it turns out we’ll soon be staying in the same place. Magnificent. Let’s drink to it!”

And indeed it was a strange coincidence. I felt truly
exhilarated
. It was as if the mystical power of Llanvygan Castle had projected itself all that distance. I felt the hand of Fate upon me, and was once again seized by the old, pleasurable angst that had so often haunted me, the feeling that once again things were
stirring
around and above me; that the Parcae were teasing out the threads of my future.

But then again: neither the half-wit Maloney nor this
thoroughly
affected young aristocrat carried the mark of destiny on their brows, unless it were the mocking destiny of a degenerate and cynical age such as our own.

Through all this, the young Pendragon had remained perfectly impassive. Then:

“These days even Fate has become debased,” he remarked, his voice rising towards the end of the sentence. “In Luther’s time, for example, the notion of Chance consisted of no more than a bolt of lightning striking the ground before him. It didn’t even have to hit him. And the result was the Reformation. Nowadays it means nothing more than two chaps going off together on the same holiday. Where now is
ananké
, where is Destiny? Or the
amor
fati
Nietzsche praises, if I remember correctly, as the noblest thing a man could pursue?”

“Osborne is amazingly clever,” said Maloney.

“Yes, but only because it’s so unfashionable in England. If I’d been born in France I’d have become an idiot, just to spite them. So what do we say to getting stuck into that dinner?”

The dinner was superb. Over the meal, Maloney did most of the talking. His adventures became more and more
richly-coloured
with each glass of Burgundy.

His first story concerned a routine tiger hunt, but he went on to set entire Borneo villages aflame to make the point that Connemara men could light their pipes even in a stiff breeze, and he ended by tying the tail of a king cobra in a knot while its head was held by his tame and ever-faithful mongoose William.

“I envy our egregious friend,” observed Osborne. “If only a quarter of what he relates in the course of a dinner is true, his life could be described as decidedly adventurous. It seems things do still happen, out there in the colonies. A merry little tiger or king cobra might produce a pleasurable
frisson
even in the likes of me. My one wish is to go there myself. To some place out in the back of beyond, where missionaries remain the staple diet of the natives.”

“So why don’t you?”

“Sadly, since my grandfather of blessed memory died of some wonderful tropical disease my uncle has concluded that the air in those parts doesn’t agree with us. I have thus to spend the greater part of my time in Wales in our electrified eagle’s nest, from which every self-respecting spook since the time of the late lamented Queen Victoria has been driven out. Sir, three years ago, the last remaining ghost in Wales was assaulted with tear gas: the poor fellow—an elderly admiral—was sobbing like a child. But for me, belief in these things would be extinct in the region. However
I have some interesting plans for the summer, and I hope you’ll assist me in them. I’ve had terrific success at Oxford with my supernatural recordings on the portable gramophone. I can
produce
heartfelt sighings in the most improbable of places, together with the rattling of chains and lengthy prayers in Middle English. But of course this is just sport. Real adventure is dead and buried. It couldn’t take the smell of petrol.”