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“I’ve had quite a bit to do with women. Professionally, as well as personally. They can be useful in Intelligence work. D’you know, I even met the famous Mata Hari a few times. A stu
“Still—I didn’t ask you here to talk about that. Just about women in general. My advice is: never have anything to do with a woman, high or low, who expects to be paid. They’re all crooks, and unless you pay very high you’re likely to end up with something you never wanted to buy. No pay: that’s a good rule. I’d say—stick to widows. There are lots of them, especially since the War, and you don’t have to go outside your own class, which is important if you have any real respect for women. Be generous, of course, and play decent and straight, and you’ll be all right. That’s that, I think. Now, what do you intend to do?”
“I don’t think I know any widows.”
“Oh, you will. But that’s not what I meant. Will you go to England this summer? Spook in the autumn?”
“Yes, Father. It sounds great.”
“Good. And when you’re in England you’d better meet one or two of the chaps. I’ll arrange it.”
Frank missed his chance to ask his father about the Looner, said the Lesser Zadkiel.
–Did you think he had a chance? The Major was a very accomplished talker—which took the form of not seeming to be accomplished at all, but never losing his grip on the way things were going. He overwhelmed Francis with new ideas—the profession, going to England to meet the Cornishes, how to cope with women. With a glass of sherry and a glass of club wine in his unhabituated gizzard, Francis never had a chance to initiate any new subject, or challenge a long-held secret. You know about secrets: they grow more and more mysterious, then suddenly they crumple away and everybody wonders why they were ever secret. The secret of the Looner was some years behind him in Blairlogie, and Francis couldn’t keep up with the extraordinary things his father was telling him—that he didn’t much mind his mother kissing Fred Markham, that he had really been in the Secret Service, that widows were the thing. The Major was an old hand at important conversations.
Francis sat in the ruins of the Castle of Tintagel, trying to think about King Arthur. This was holy ground, the very place in which Arthur was begotten by Uther Pendragon upon the beautiful Igraine, wife of the Duke of Cornwall. The enchanter Merlin had made that possible. But try as he would to think about the great story, all Francis could do was to look north-west over the heaving, gleaming sea from which came, so it seemed, all the light of Cornwall. This sea-light, reflected back toward the sky as if the sea itself had some source of light beneath it, had puzzled and dominated him during the whole month he had spent with the Cornishes of Chegwidden. The light gave new meaning to the legends he had brought, as appropriate luggage for a Cornish holiday. This was not the nght of the pre-Raphaelite pictures, the moony glow that bathed those impossibly noble men and perversely beautiful women; this was a world-light, a seemingly illimitable light that the sea, like a dull mirror, yielded in a form so diffused that the whole peninsula of Cornwall was pervaded by it, and although manifestly there were shadows to be seen, nevertheless the light seemed to defy shadows, and cast itself on every side of every object.
In this extraordinary, unfamiliar light—unfamiliar to Francis, who had never lived near the sea—it was surely possible to plunge oneself into the world of legend? Looking from this storied headland might one not imagine one saw the painted sails of the ship that bore Tristan and Iseult toward their meeting with King Mark? But try as he would to bully his thoughts into this legendary and poetic mode, all Francis could think of was the Cornishes of Chegwidden, and how odd they were.
Odd because they lived in this enchanted land, and appeared to be utterly impervious to enchantment. Odd because they lived where the saints of the ancient Celtic Church had proclaimed Christ’s gospel in a truly Celtic voice, long before the dark-ski
Odd because they seemed unaware that King Arthur might have ridden over what were now their own parklands, and that some of their oldest trees might have grown from grandacorns of trees under which the great King—the dux bellorum of the earliest records—had reined in his horse to rest and look about him in the mysterious light of the peninsula that was Cornwall. When Francis had mentioned this as a possibility, his uncle—who was named Arthur Cornish, of all things—had looked at him queerly and said that unquestionably there was a tree in the park that had been planted to celebrate the coronation of Queen Victoria, and it was coming into promising maturity, for an oak, at this very moment, having survived two serious periods of blight.
What really interested Uncle Arthur was something called the Local Bench, upon which he sat as a magistrate as every Cornish had done for as long as there had been a Bench, and which he was now disagreeably expected to share with tradesmen and even a local socialist, who could not understand that the essence of local justice lay in knowing the local people—which ones were decent folk and which were known poachers and riff-raff—and treating them accordingly. Uncle Arthur owned a good deal of property in lands and cottages, and it was on the rents of these that Chegwidden and all its ancient glory depended. If Uncle Arthur had ever heard of Oscar Wilde as anything but a damned bad type who would have received no mercy from the Local Bench, he had certainly never heard Wilde’s comment that land gives one position and prevents one from keeping it up. He would have agreed that there, at least, the bugger knew what he was talking about. The merciless exactions of modern government on landowners was his favourite topic, and if any of his kin had ever heard the word paranoia, they might have recognized that on this theme Uncle Arthur was distinctly paranoid. Modern government, he was sure, was a gigantic plot to ruin him, and in him all that was best in rural England.