Across the corner of the table she caught his eye, gave him a dazzling smile and invited him, if he had half an hour to spare after lunch, to come and teach her and the girls how to pitch horseshoes.
Chapter VII
THE meal was over at last; the party broke up. Dr. Mulge had an appointment in Pasadena to see a rubber goods manufacturer’s widow, who might perhaps give fifty thousand dollars for a new girls’ dormitory. Mr. Stoyte drove into Los Angeles for his regular Friday afternoon board meetings and business consultations. Dr. Obispo was going to operate on some rabbits and went down to the laboratory to prepare his instruments. Pete had a batch of scientific journals to look at, but gave himself, meanwhile, a few minutes of happiness in Virginia’s company. And for Jeremy, of course, there were the Hauberk Papers. It was with a sense of almost physical relief, a feeling that he was going home to where he belonged, that he returned to his cellar. The afternoon slipped past—how delightfully, how profitably! Within three hours, another batch of letters from Molinos had turned up among the account books and the business correspondence. So had the third and fourth volumes of “Félicia.”
So had an illustrated edition of “Le Portier des Carmes”; and, bound like a prayer book, so had a copy of that rarest of all works of the Divine Marquis, “Les Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome.” What a treasure! What unexpected fortune! Or perhaps, Jeremy reflected, not so unexpected if one remembered the history of the Hauberk family. For the date of the books made it likely that they had been the property of the Fifth Earl—the one who had held the title for more than half a century and died at more than ninety, under William IV, completely unregenerate. Given the character of that old gentleman, one had no reason to feel surprised at the finding of a store of pornography—one had every reason, indeed, to hope for more.
Jeremy’s spirits mounted with each new discovery. Always, with him, a sure sign of happiness, he began to hum the tunes that had been popular during his childhood. Molinos evoked “Tara-rara Boom-de-ay!” “Félicia” and the “Portier des Carmes” shared the romantic lilt of “The Honeysuckle and the Bee.” As for the “Cent-Vingt Jours,” which he had never previously read or even seen a copy of—the finding of that delighted him so much that when, as a matter of bibliographical routine, he raised the ecclesiastical cover and, expecting the Anglican ritual, found instead the coldly elegant prose of the Marquis de Sade, he broke out into that rhyme from “The Rose and the Ring,” the rhyme his mother had taught him to repeat when he was only three years old and which had remained with him as the symbol of child-like wonder and delight, as the only completely adequate reaction to any sudden blessing, any providentially happy surprise:
Oh, what fun to have a plum bun!
How I wish it never was done!
And fortunately it wasn’t done, wasn’t even begun; the book was still unread, the hours of entertainment and instruction still lay before him. Remembering that pang of jealousy he had felt up there, in the swimming pool, he smiled indulgently. Let Mr. Stoyte have all the girls he wanted; a well-written piece of eighteenth-century pornography was better than any Maunciple. He closed the volume he was holding. The tooled morocco was austerely elegant; on the back, the words “The Book of Common Prayer” were stamped in a gold which the years had hardly tarnished. He put it down with the other curiosa on a corner of the table. When he had finished for the afternoon, he would take the whole collection up to his bedroom.
“Oh, what fun to have a plum bun,” he chanted to himself, as he opened another bundle of papers, and then, “On a summer’s afternoon, where the honeysuckles bloom and all Nature seems at rest.” That Wordsworthian touch about Nature always gave him a special pleasure. The new batch of papers turned out to be a correspondence between the Fifth Earl and a number of prominent Whigs regarding the enclosure, for his benefit, of three thousand acres of common land in Nottinghamshire. Jeremy slipped them into a file, wrote a brief preliminary description of the contents on a card, put the file in a cupboard and the card in its cabinet, and, dipping again into the bran pie, reached down for another bundle. He cut the string. “You are my honey, honey, honeysuckle, I am the bee.” What would Dr. Freud have thought of that, he wondered? Anonymous pamphlets against deism were a bore; he threw them aside.
But here was a copy of Law’s “Serious Call” with manuscript notes by Edward Gibbon; and here were some accounts rendered to the Fifth Earl by Mr. Rogers of Liverpool; accounts of the expenses and profits of three slave trading expeditions which the earl had helped to finance. The second voyage, it appeared, had been particularly auspicious; less than a fifth of the cargo had perished on the way, and the prices realized at Savannah were gratifyingly high. Mr. Rogers begged to enclose his draft for seventeen thousand two hundred and twenty-four pounds, eleven shillings and fourpence. Written from Venice, in Italian, another letter announced to the same Fifth Earl the appearance upon the market of a half length Mary Magdalen by Titian, at a price which his correspondent described as derisory. Other offers had already been made; but out of respect for the not less learned than illustrious English cognoscente, the vendor would wait until a reply had been received from his lordship. In spite of which, his lordship would be well advised not to delay too long; for otherwise . . .
It was five o’clock; the sun was low in the sky. Dressed in white shoes and socks, white shorts, a yachting cap and a pink silk sweater, Virginia had come to see the feeding of the baboons.
Its engine turned off, her rose-coloured motor scooter stood parked at the side of the road thirty or forty feet above the cage. In company with Dr. Obispo and Pete, she had gone down to have a closer look at the animals.
Just opposite the point at which they were standing, on a shelf of artificial rock, sat a baboon mother, holding in her arms the withered and disintegrating corpse of the baby she would not abandon even though it had been dead for a fortnight. Every now and then, with an intense, automatic affection, she would lick the little cadaver. Tufts of greenish fur and even pieces of skin detached themselves under the vigorous action of her tongue. Delicately, with black fingers, she would pick the hairs out of her mouth, then begin again. Above her, at the mouth of a little cave, two young males suddenly got into a fight. The air was filled with screams and barks and the gnashing of teeth. Then one of the two combatants ran away and, in a moment, the other had forgotten all about the fight and was searching for pieces of dandruff on his chest. To the right, on another shelf of rock a formidable old male, leather-snouted, with the grey bobbed hair of a seventeenth-century Anglican divine, stood guard over his submissive female.
It was a vigilant watch; for if she ventured to move without his leave, he turned and bit her; and meanwhile the small black eyes, the staring nostrils at the end of the truncated snout, kept glancing this way and that with an unsleeping suspicion. From the basket he was carrying, Pete threw a potato in his direction, then a carrot and another potato. With a vivid flash of magenta buttocks the old baboon darted down from his perch on the artificial mountain, seized the carrot and, while he was eating it, stuffed one potato into his left cheek, the other into the right; then, still biting at the carrot, advanced towards the wire and looked up for more. The coast was clear. The young male, who had been looking for dandruff suddenly saw his opportunity. Chattering with excitement, he bounded down to the shelf on which, too frightened to follow her master, the little female was still squatting. Within ten seconds they had begun to copulate.
Virginia clapped her hands with pleasure. “Aren’t they cute!” she cried. “Aren’t they human!
Another burst of screaming and barking almost drowned her words.
Pete interrupted his distribution of food to say that it was a long while since he had seen Mr. Propter. Why shouldn’t they all go down the hill and pay a call on him.
“From the monkey cage to the Propter paddock,” said Dr. Obispo, “and from the Propter paddock back to the Stoyte house and the Maunciple kennel. What do you say, angel?”
Virginia was throwing potatoes to the old male—throwing them in such a way as to induce him to turn, to retrace his steps towards the shelf on which he had left his female. Her hope was that, if she got him to go back far enough, he’d see how the girl friend passed the time when he was away. “Yes, let’s go and
