It would be different from the accidents with Enid and Mary Lou, because, with a man, those things generally did matter a good deal, even when you didn’t mean them to matter. Which was the only reason for not doing them, outside of their being sins, of course; but somehow that never seemed to count very much when the boy was a real good looker (which one had to admit Sig was, even though it was rather in the style of Adolphe Menjou; but, come to think of it, it was those dark ones with oil on their hair that had always given her the biggest kick). And when you’d had a couple of drinks, maybe, and you felt you’d like some thrills, why then it never even occurred to you that it was a sin; and then one thing led to another and before you knew what had happened—well, it had happened; and really she just couldn’t believe it was as bad as Father O’Reilly said it was; and anyhow Our Lady would be a lot more understanding and forgiving than he was; and what about the way Father O’Reilly ate his food, whenever he came to dinner? like a hog, there wasn’t any other word for it; and wasn’t gluttony just as bad as the other thing? So who was he to talk like that?
“Well, and how’s the patient?” Dr. Obispo inquired in the parody of a bedside manner, as he took Virginia’s place on the couch. He was in the highest of spirits. His work in the laboratory was coming along unexpectedly well; that new preparation of bile salts had done wonders for his liver; the rearmament boom had sent his aircraft shares up another three points; and it was obvious that Virginia wasn’t going to hold out much longer. “How’s the little invalid this morning?” he went on, enriching his parody with the caricature of an English accent; for he had done a year of postgraduate work at Oxford.
Mr. Stoyte growled inarticulately. There was something about Dr. Obispo’s facetiousness that always enraged him. In some not easily definable way it had the quality of a deliberate insult. Mr. Stoyte was always made to feel that Obispo’s apparently good-natured banter was in reality the expression of a calculated and malignant contempt. The thought of it made Mr. Stoyte’s blood boil. But when his blood boiled, his blood pressure, he knew, went up, his life was shortened. He could not afford to be as angry with Obispo as he would have liked. And what was more, he couldn’t afford to get rid of the man. Obispo was an indispensable evil. “God is love; there is no death.” But Mr. Stoyte remembered with terror that he had had a stroke, that he was growing old. Obispo had put him on his feet again when he was almost dying, had promised him ten more years of life even if those researches didn’t work out as well as he hoped; and if they did work out—then more, much more. Twenty years, thirty, forty. Or it might even be that the loathsome little brute would find some way of proving that Mrs. Eddy was right, after all. Perhaps there really and truly wouldn’t be any death—not for Uncle Jo, at any rate. Glorious prospect! Meanwhile . . . Mr. Stoyte sighed, resignedly, profoundly. “We all have our cross to bear,” he said to himself, echoing, across the intervening years, the words his grandmother used to repeat when she made him take castor oil.
Dr. Obispo, meanwhile, had sterilized his needle, filed the top off a glass ampoule, filled his syringe. His movements, as he worked, were characterized by a certain studied exquisiteness, by a florid and self-conscious precision. It was as though the man were simultaneously his own ballet and his own audience—a sophisticated and highly critical audience, it was true; but then, what a ballet! Nijinsky, Karsavina, Pavlova, Massine—all on a single stage. However terrific the applause, it was always merited.
“Ready,” he called at last.
Obediently and in silence, like a trained elephant, Mr. Stoyte rolled over on to his stomach.
Chapter V
JEREMY had dressed again and was sitting in the subterranean store-room that was to serve as his study. The dry acrid dust of old documents had gone to his head, like a kind of intoxicating snuff. His face was flushed as he prepared his files and sharpened his pencils; his bald head shone with perspiration; behind their bifocal lenses, his eyes were bright with excitement.
There! Everything was ready. He turned round in his swivel chair and sat for a little while quite still, voluptuously savouring his anticipations. Tied up in innumerable brown paper parcels, the Hauberk Papers awaited their first reader. Twenty-seven crates of still unravished brides of quietness. He smiled to himself at the thought that he was to be their Bluebeard. Thousands of brides of quietness accumulated through centuries by successive generations of indefatigable Hauberks. Hauberk after Hauberk; barony after knighthood; earldom after barony; and then Earl of Gonister after Earl of Gonister down to the last, the eighth. And, after the eighth, nothing but death duties and an old house and two old spinster ladies, sinking ever deeper into solitude and eccentricity, into poverty and family pride, but finally, poor pets! more deeply into poverty than pride. They had sworn they would never sell; but in the end they had accepted Mr. Stoyte’s offer. The papers had been shipped to California. They would be able, now, to buy themselves a couple of really sumptuous funerals. And that would be the end of the Hauberks. Delicious fragments of English history! Cautionary perhaps, or perhaps, and more probably, merely senseless, merely a tale told by an idiot.
A tale of cutthroats and conspirators, of patrons of learning and shady speculators, of bishops and kings’ catamites and minor poets, of admirals and pimps, of saints and heroines and nymphomaniacs, of imbeciles and prime ministers, of art collectors and sadists. And here was all that remained of them, in twenty-seven crates, higgledy-piggledy, never catalogued, never even looked at, utterly virgin. Gloating over his treasure, Jeremy forgot the fatigues of the journey, forgot Los Angeles and the chauffeur, forgot the cemetery and the castle, forgot even Mr. Stoyte. He had the Hauberk Papers, had them all to himself. Like a child dipping blindly into a bran pie for a present which he knows will be exciting, Jeremy picked up one of the brown paper parcels with which the first crate was filled and cut the string. What rich confusion awaited him within! A book of household accounts for the year 1576 and 1577; a narrative by some Hauberk cadet of Sir Kenelm Digby’s expedition to Scanderoon; eleven letters in Spanish from Miguel de Molinos to that Lady Hauberk who had scandalized her family by turning papist; a collection, in early eighteenth-century handwriting, of sickroom recipes; a copy of Drelincourt’s “On Death”; and an odd volume of Andréa de Nerciat’s “Felicia, ou Mes Fredaines.” He had just cut the string of the second bundle and was wondering whose was the lock of pale brown hair preserved between the pages of the Third Earl’s holograph, “Reflections of the Late Popish Plot,” when there was a knock at the door. He looked up and saw a small, dark man in a white overall advancing towards him. The stranger smiled, said, “Don’t let me disturb you,” but nevertheless disturbed him. “My name’s Obispo,” he went on, “Dr. Sigmund Obispo. Physician in ordinary to His Majesty King Stoyte the First—and let’s hope also the last.”
Evidently delighted by his own joke, he broke into a peal of startlingly loud, metallic laughter. Then, with the elegantly fastidious gesture of an aristocrat in a dust heap, he picked up one of Molinos’s letters and started, slowly, and out loud, to decipher the first line of the flowing seventeenth-century calligraphy that met his eyes. “ ‘Ame a Dios como es en si y no como se lo dice y forma su imaginacion.’ ” He looked up at Jeremy with an amused smile. “Easier said than done, I should think. Why, you can’t even love a woman as she is in herself; and after all, there is some sort of objective physical basis for the phenomenon we call a female. A pretty nice
