Pale and with sad eyes, silently ruminating an unhappiness which five days of rain on the Atlantic and three more of London gloom had done nothing to alleviate, Virginia sat aloof in the front seat.
At the wheel (for he had thought it best to take no chauffeur on this expedition) Dr. Obispo whistled to himself and, occasionally, even sang aloud—sang “Stretti, stretti, nell-estasí d’amor” ; sang “Do you think a 1-ittle drink’U do us any harm?”; sang “I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls.” It was partly the fine weather that made him so cheerful—spring-time, he said to himself, the only merry ring-time, not to mention the lesser celandines, the wind flowers, whatever they might be; the primroses in the copse. And should he ever forget his bewilderment when English people had started talking about cops in the singular and in contexts where policemen seemed deliriously out of place? “Let’s go and pick some primroses in the cops.” Surprising intestinal flora! Better even than the carp’s. Which brought him to the second reason for his satisfaction with life. They were on their way to see the two old Hauberk ladies—on their way, perhaps, to finding something interesting about the Fifth Earl, something significant about the relationship between senility and sterols and the intestinal flora o£ the carp.
With mock-operatic emphasis he burst again into song. “I drea-heamt I dwe-helt in mar-harble halls,” he proclaimed, “with vas-s-als and serfs at my si-hi-hide. And of all who assembled with-hin those walls, that I was the hope and the pri-hi-hide.”
Virginia, who had been sitting beside him, stony with misery, turned round in sudden exasperation. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” she almost screamed, breaking a silence that had lasted all the way from Kingston-on-Thames. “Can’t you be quiet?”
Dr. Obispo ignored her protests. “I had riches,” he sang on (and reflected, with an inward chuckle of satisfaction as he did so, that the statement now happened to be true); “I had riches too grea-heat to cou-hount.” No; that was an exaggeration. Not at all too great to count. Just a nice little competence. Enough to give him security and the means to continue his researches without having to waste his time on a lot of sick people who ought to be dead. Two hundred thousand dollars in cash and forty-five hundred acres of land in the San Felipe Valley—land that Uncle Jo had positively sworn was just on the point of getting its irrigation water. (And if it didn’t get it, God! how he’d twist the old buzzard’s tail for him!) “Heart failure due to myocarditis of rheumatic origin.” He could have asked a lot more than two hundred thousand for that death certificate. Particularly as it hadn’t been his only service. No, sir! There had been all the mess to clear up. (The ninety-five dollar, fawn-coloured suit was ruined after all.)
There had been the servants to keep away; the Baby to put to bed with a big shot of morphia; the permission to cremate the body to be obtained from the next of kin, who was a sister, living, thank God, in straitened circumstances, and at Pensacola, Florida, so that she fortunately couldn’t afford to come out to California for the funeral. And then (most ticklish of all) there had been the search for a dishonest undertaker; the discovery of a possible crook; the interview, with its veiled hints of an unfortunate accident to be hushed up, of money that was, practically speaking, no object; then, when the fellow had fired off his sanctimonious little speech about its being a duty to help a leading citizen to avoid unpleasant publicity, the abrupt change of manner, the business-like statement of the unavoidable facts and the necessary fictions, the negotiations as to price. In the end, Mr. Pengo had agreed not to notice the holes in Pete’s skull for as little as twenty-five thousand dollars.
“I had riches too gre-heat to cou-hount, could boast of a hi-high ancestral name.” Yes, decidedly, Dr. Obispo reflected, as he sang, decidedly he could have asked for a great deal more. But what would have been the point? He was a reasonable man; almost, you might say, a philosopher; modest in his ambitions, uninterested in worldly success and with tastes so simple that the most besetting of them, outside the sphere of scientific research, could be satisfied in the great majority of cases at practically no expense whatsoever, sometimes even with a net profit, as when Mrs. Bojanus had given him that solid gold cigarette case as a token of her esteem—and then there were Josephine’s pearl studs, and the green enamel cuff links with his monogram in diamonds from little what’s-her-name . . .
“But I a-halso drea-heamt which plea-heased me most,” he sang, raising his voice for this final affirmation and putting in a passionate tremolo, “that you lo-hoved me sti-hill the same, that you lo-hoved me sti-hill the same, that you loved me,” he repeated turning away for a moment from the Portsmouth road to peer with raised eyebrows and a look of amused, ironical inquiry into Virginia’s averted face, “you lo-hoved me sti-hill the same,” and, for the third time with tremendous emphasis and pathos, “that you lo-ho-ho-hoved me sti-hi-hill the same,”
He shot another glance at Virginia. She was staring straight in front of her, holding her lower lip between her teeth, as though she were in pain, but determined not to cry out.
“Did I dream correctly?” His smile was wolfish.
The Baby did not answer. From the back seat Mr. Stoyte snored like a bulldog.
“Do you lo-ho-hove me sti-hi-hill the same?” he insisted, making the car swerve to the right, as he spoke, and putting on speed to pass a row of Army lorries.
The Baby released her lip and said, “I could kill you.”
“Of course you could,” Dr. Obispo agreed. “But you won’t. Because you lo-ho-ho-hove me too much. Or rather,” he added, and his smile became more gleefully canine with every word, “you don’t lo-ho-ho-hove me; you lo-ho-ho-hove . . .” he paused for an instant: “Well, let’s say it in a more poetical way—because one can never have too much poetry, don’t you agree? you’re in lo-ho-hove with Lo-ho-ho-hove, so much in lo-ho-ho-hove that, when it came to the point, you simply couldn’t bring yourself to bump me off. Because whatever you may feel about me, I’m the boy that produces the lo-ho-ho-hoves.” He began to sing again, “I drea-heamt I ki-hilled the goo-hoo-hoo-hoose that lai-haid the go-holden e-he-heggs.”
Virginia covered her ears with her hands in an effort to shut out the sound of his voice—the hideous sound of the truth. Because, of course, it was true. Even after Pete’s death, even after she had promised Our Lady that it would never, never happen again—well, it had happened again.
Dr. Obispo continued his improvisation. “And that thu-hus I’d lo-host my so-hole excuse for showing the skin of my le-he-hegs.”
Virginia pressed her fingers more tightly over her ears. It had happened again, even though she’d said no, even though she’d got mad at him, fought with him, scratched him; but he’d only laughed and gone on; and then suddenly she was just too tired to fight any more. Too tired and too miserable. He got what he wanted; and the awful thing was that it seemed to be what she wanted—or, rather, what her unhappiness wanted; for the misery had been relieved for a time; she had been able to forget the blood; she had been able to sleep. The next morning she had despised and hated herself more than ever.
“I had grottoes and candles and doodahs galore,” Dr. Obispo sang on; then relapsed into speech: “not to mention fetishes, relics, mantras, prayer wheels, gibberish, vestments. But I also dreamt which pleased me most—or rather more, seeing that we have to rhyme with galore” (he opened his mouth and let out his richest and most tremulous notes), “that you lo-hoved me sti-hill the same, that you lo-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-hoved me . . .”
“Stopl” Virginia shouted at the top of her voice.
Uncle Jo woke up with a start. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“She objects to my singing,” Dr. Obispo called back to him. “Goodness knows why. I have a charming voice. Particularly well adapted to a small auditorium, like this car.” He laughed with whole-hearted merriment. The Baby’s antics, as she vacillated between Priapus and the Sacred Grotto, gave him the most exquisite amusement. Along with the fine weather, the primroses in the copse and the prospect of learning something decisive about sterols and senility, they accounted for the ebullience of his good humour.
It was about half past eleven when they reached their destination. The lodge was untenanted; Dr. Obispo had to get out and open the gates himself.
Within, grass was growing over the drive and the park had sunk back towards the squalor of unmodified nature. Uprooted by past storms, dead trees lay rotting where they had fallen. On the boles of the living, great funguses grew like pale buns. The ornamental plantations had turned into little jungles, impenetrable with brambles. Perched on its knoll above the drive, the Grecian gazebo was in ruins. They rounded a curve and there was the house, Jacobean at on6 end, with strange accretions of nineteenth-century Gothic at the other. The yew hedges had grown up into high walls of shaggy greenery. The position of what had once been formal flower beds was marked by rich green circles of docks, oblongs and crescents of sow thistles and nettles. From
