The Towers of Trebizond (25 page)

We both brooded over this. I wondered how Halide's affair with the Moslem man was going, and what would come in the end of my own affair to which I was hurrying back. Love, marriage, what are they indeed?

Since we did not know, we did not discuss them further.

Halide added, "The newspapers have even made a romance for Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg. True they are middle-aged and elderly; that matters nothing when there is Love. Are they spies, have they been kidnapped, or do they elope, that is what the journalists wonder."

"When I get home," I said, "I will perhaps write a piece myself, about how they just wanted to see Russia."

I went to my hotel and to bed. Next morning I called at the British Embassy. I thought they were rather cold about aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg, and it seemed to me that they had adopted the spy theory, and of course they may have been quite right, but I said, if they were spying for Russia, it would not be in Russia that they would be, but hanging round Harwell or the Foreign Office, and if they were spying in Russia it would be for us. But the Embassy, I could see, thought that it was in their past that they might have been spying for Russia, and that they had now perhaps gone there (for how without Soviet connivance could they have crossed the frontier?), because they thought their activities had been discovered. The Embassy man asked me if aunt Dot had ever belonged to the Party, or had been a fellow traveller. I said this was most unlikely, for aunt Dot had always been a liberal, and had
not voted in elections lately because no liberal had stood, though no doubt the Embassy man was thinking that probably no communist had stood either.

"She is a very keen Anglican," I said, "she goes to church a lot."

The Embassy man said, "Actually, that is a not uncommon cover. As to that, her companion, Mr. Chantry-Pigg, is, of course, a priest, and that is a better cover still."

I said, had not this cover been rather damaged by the Dean of Canterbury, but he said it was still used sometimes. Then he said that, according to the accounts that had come over, very likely unreliable, aunt Dot and Mr. Chantry-Pigg were doing a good deal of hob-nobbing with the Soviet police.

I said, "My aunt hob-nobs with everyone. Father Chantry-Pigg is probably trying to convert the police to the Church of England. Or, it may be entirely the police who are doing the hob-nobbing, which is usually the way round it is, in any country. I have heard that they are also in Siberia."

The Embassy man nodded, as if he had heard that too, and sighed a little.

"So entirely unreliable, all this news. Spies are trained, and so very successfully, never to tell the truth, whatever it may cost them to refuse. In this case, it costs them nothing; indeed, they receive payment for lies. Well, we will let you know if we hear any firm news; please leave us your address in England."

There seemed no point in staying on in Istanbul, and I left it next day by sea, with the camel in the hold. I had a small ape too, which I bought from a Greek sailor on the quay side; it was a nice little ape, and I thought I would try to teach it to play chess, like the ape I had seen in my dream of the Byzantine court at Trebizond when the Greek enchanter had given me the elixir, for it is a fact that apes have learned chess, and particularly in the east. I thought I would also try to teach it to drive my car, and I supposed that the most difficult thing for it to learn would be to know when the petrol was running out. I kept it with me on the voyage and played chess with it and it was quite quick at picking it up, but always made the same moves that I had just made, and I wondered if this was the way the Byzantine apes had played too.

The voyage was erratic, and took some time, but at last we arrived at Tilbury and disembarked. I had to leave the camel and the ape in quarantine, which was a good thing, as I did not want them in my flat. I thought that later I would put the camel in the Zoo till aunt Dot came home, and perhaps the ape too, for I did not really want that either.

Coming home after some months abroad is very neurotic. The letters that have not been forwarded lie in a great mountain, and one feels that one will never climb it. A great many can be thrown away unopened, such as all the ones called on the envelope "Free Bulgaria", which is a magazine that has been arriving in my flat for several years, and, as I have never opened the envelopes, I never have discovered whether the magazine is about some Bulgarians who have come to Britain to be free, as the Free French used to do, or if it is about the Bulgarians in Bulgaria who believe they are free, which is a very common belief, and I suppose I never shall know this as I shall never have time to open one of them.

But most of the letters are bills. Some of these say that the gas and the electricity and the telephone will very soon be cut off if the bills for them are not paid, and higher up on the pile there lie more letters on these subjects, saying that this has now occurred, and that the gas, electricity and telephone are now quite gone, and it will cost a very great deal of money to put them back. The rent for the flat was also overdue, and the landlord's letters had gone on getting stiffer and colder ever since midsummer day, and I half expected to find bailiffs and their daughters sitting about playing canasta and smoking my cigarettes and drinking my gin, or perhaps asleep in my bed, for I had now missed Lady Day and Midsummer Day and Michaelmas without sending my landlord a line. It is a pity how we spoil these feast days by paying rent and bills on them, or else by feeling that we ought to, whereas on Lady Day we should be eating lamb and mint sauce and listening in vain for cuckoos, and on Midsummer Day eating strawberries and cream in gardens or punts, and on Michaelmas Day eating goose and sage and apple sauce, instead of which we are scribbling away in our cheque books and getting ruined.

I saw that I would soon be ruined now, what with the rent and the bills and putting back, at great expense, the telephone and the electricity and the gas, and generally resuming life once more. The worst thing is income tax, and this is a thing that no one can face alone, so I send all the letters which look as if they were about this subject straight on unopened to the accountant who does my income tax returns, for if I open these letters I become neurotic and cannot face life. I do not care that publicans should write to me, or I to them, for they have had always a very bad name, and though we know that they have been sometimes justified in the sight of heaven, that is only if they repent, and the publicans who write to me have not yet repented. Certainly Christ ate and drank with them, but that is one of the many ways in which I do not try to follow him, so I send on their letters unopened, and do not even say "God be merciful to him, a sinner".

Sometimes I think I should like a secretary, who would open all my letters and answer them, so that I need never see them, but actually to have a secretary about would make one more neurotic still, and it is better to push on, desperate and alone.

Presently I had a martini to pull myself together, and then went out to a kiosk and telephoned to Vere, and on account of the martini and talking to Vere, I stopped feeling neurotic and felt instead happy and at peace and as if nothing mattered but that we should be together in an hour. And then I thought how odd it was, all that love and joy and peace that flooded over me when I thought about Vere, and how it all came from what was a deep meanness in our lives, for that is what adultery is, a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and guarded by lies lest it should be found out. And out of this meanness and this selfishness and this lying flow love and joy and peace, beyond anything that can be imagined. And this makes a discord in the mind, the happiness and the guilt and the remorse pulling in opposite ways so that the mind and soul are torn in two, and if it goes on for years and years the discord becomes permanent, so that it will never stop, and even if one goes on living after death, as some people think, there will still be this deep discord that nothing can heal, because of the great meanness and selfishness that caused such a deep joy. And there is no way out of this dilemma that I know.

During the next few days I read a lot in the papers about aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg. It seemed that they were spies, probably long known as such by the Foreign Office and M.I., neither of which departments would consent to reveal to an eager and anxious public what they knew. The people of this country had a right to know; they were deeply concerned and worried by the affair, and less, it seemed, by what aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg might be revealing on the other side of the curtain than by who was protecting them on this side, for it was apparent that someone was, and probably this was because of their hyphenated names and their ties. Later, on, when I had, at great cost, had my telephone replaced, I was several times rung up about these ties, and I explained that Father Chantry-Pigg never wore ties, on account of his collar being round, and that I did not remember that aunt Dot wore ties much, though I had seen her in ties in old school and college hockey groups, but I did not actually know of what colour or pattern they had been. I was asked also about their names, Chantry-Pigg and ffoulkes-Corbett, and why these names had hyphens. I said that I supposed that marriage and property arrangements in some past period of their family histories had occasioned this, and it did not indicate duplicity or double-mindedness, or any desire for an alias. One of them said, "Funny, those two little fs," and his voice sounded as if he thought the two little fs stood for fanatical foes, or fleeing fellow-travellers, or something of that kind. I said I did not think it was so terribly funny, and anyhow ffoulkes-Corbett was not my aunt's original name but that of her husband.

"Dead, would he be?" said the reporter, hoping that aunt Dot's husband was less dead than cuckolded, or a
mari
complaisant.

I said he would.

"From natural causes, no doubt," said the reporter, still hoping, and before I thought I had answered, "No, he shot himself, ages ago."

The reporter said, "Ah", as if he had expected no less and did not blame aunt Dot's husband at all for his rash act. Had he known that before his fatal shot the Reverend Reginald ffoulkes-Corbett had attempted his wife's life also, this reporter still would not have blamed him. Before I got round to explaining that my uncle by marriage had taken his life because of advancing cannibals, he had changed the subject from this clergyman and asked if there was any question of a Romance between aunt Dot and her companion.

"An autumn Romance," he suggested tentatively. "Was there a question of that?"

"No question at all."

"Ah," he said. "I thought as much."

Leaving this topic, as if he had got what he wanted about it, he enquired whether the Reverend Chantry-Pigg was protected by the Archbishop of Canterbury. I said I did not know about this, but I thought that archbishops certainly ought to protect their clergy, within limits, so I hoped that this was the case, and that the Archbishop was protecting him, so far as was possible, from the Soviet police.

Then this reporter rang off, first saying that he knew I would not have minded being bothered, and would realise that the people of England were very anxious and concerned about this matter of espionage. I said I believed that the people of England could not care less what information was passed to anyone, but that they did enjoy a good spy melodrama, there were few news items they enjoyed more. He said, "You're dead right," and rang off.

Next day I read a piece in a newspaper which was headed, "Vanished priest is under Canterbury protection ", and the writer seemed to have rather a poor opinion of Canterbury, such as used to be expressed in the seventeenth century by puritans and papists, when the puritans wrote, "Look about you for the protector and prime mover of them that creep among us spinning plots against this state of England and spying out the land for foreign princes, and you will see Canterbury in his rochet, rowing out from his palace of Lambeth," and the papists wrote, "Canterbury himself is our prime foe," and these two Canterburies were Laud.

Half-way down this article there was another heading, which was "Autumn Romance ", and it said that it had been revealed to this paper that there was no question but that there was a romance between Mrs. ffoulkes-Corbett and the Rev. Chantry-Pigg.

I rang up the paper and said that there seemed to be some mistake here, as I had said the opposite to this, and would they please withdraw it. The girl I spoke to, who was perhaps only the telephonist, said she would pass up my message. Nothing, however, happened about it, so I wrote the paper a letter, pretty firm and stiff, but it did not seem to get into print, so I saw that they would stick to their autumn romance. They did, however, print a letter from the Archbishop's chaplain, as no doubt letters from archbishops' chaplains have to be printed; it said that the Archbishop had failed to understand the statement about how he was protecting Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg, and would the paper be good enough to explain it. Under this letter there was a little piece by the editor saying that this item had been given to the paper by me, for I had said that I hoped the Archbishop was extending his protection, so far as was possible, to this clergyman. After that the chaplain wrote and asked me about it, and I saw that I had said the wrong thing, and I tried to explain it away, by saying that it had merely been wishful thinking and I did not really think that the Archbishop had any opportunity of protecting any one in Russia, though the Dean might possibly be able to do so if he tried.

After this, I was asked to write an article myself about the whole affair, in a Sunday paper. As I needed the money, which seemed quite a lot, and also thought it was time that the readers of this paper had something true to read on this subject, I said I would. They said there was no need to sign it if I preferred not, and I thought I would prefer not. So I wrote an article about how my aunt and Father Chantry-Pigg, who were travelling together to do mission work among Turks, had gone across the Russian frontier to fish in a very nice lake there was and to see the Caucasus and some Armenian churches, and I feared that they might have got into trouble with the Soviet police.