The Towers of Trebizond Read online

  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.

  Chapter 20

  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.

  This article did not actually come out quite as I expected, owing to not being signed, so that it could be altered a good deal in the newspaper office without my being asked, and they put in a lot of mystery, and referred to the suicide of aunt Dot's husband the Rev. ffoulkes-Corbett, and mentioned again the autumnal Romance, and referred to their having been reported to have been seen in chat with Burgess and Maclean in Moscow. So it really seemed in many ways a quite different article from the one I had written, and I decided that I would not write any more unsigned articles. Vere said it was an idiotic thing to do, and I saw that Vere was right, though the money came in useful for paying some of the bills, and later even the publican got some of it, which vexed me a good deal, but my accountant thought I had better pay him something on account, to keep him quieter. I thought, if David were to turn up from Turkey now, I might borrow some money from him, because his articles were still coming out in that paper, which would make him still anxious that I should be his friend. And soon after this I met David at a party. It was a good party, but I got there rather late, owing to having come on from another party, for the autumn party season had by now well set in. When I came in someone said to me, you've missed something, and it seemed that David had thrown a glassful of hock cup, full of fruit and vegetables, into someone's face, because of something this man had said to him that he did not like. I thought it seemed rather early in the night for people to be throwing wine about, but I am used to such things occurring either just before I get to a party or just after I have left it, or, if anything happens while I am there, it happens in another room from the one I am in.

  When I spoke to David I asked him why he had thrown his hock with fruit and vegetables at this man, and David said the man had been damned offensive to him. I asked him what the man had said, but David did not seem quite clear as to this, or perhaps he was being evasive, for David is a rather reserved man.

  "Actually," he said, "I don't like him."

  I thought that if David were to go round a party throwing his hock cup at every one he did not like, he wouldn't himself get enough to drink to reach the wine-throwing stage at all.

  David, who had really quite reached this stage by now, said, "It's an extraordinary thing about Turkey. People who go there are always insulted and slandered. The same with the Levant, and Cyprus. Look at Hester Stanhope and Wilfred Scawen Blunt and those Wortley-Montagus and T. E. Lawrence and all those. One can't write a book or an article without someone being offensive. One's friends are so damned malicious. One travels all over the place and no one one meets out there is malicious at all . . . ."

  I asked, "Where? Who isn't malicious? How do you mean?"

  David said, "Oh well," and took another glass of hock cup.

  "And then," he went on, "one comes back to London, and it all starts, people being damned offensive about one, and other people repeating it. I suppose you've been saying things."

  "No," I said "I haven't mentioned you actually. Or not much. I've not been offensive."

  But I could see that David thought I probably had, and I edged away from him, because he now had his new glass of fruit salad and hock.

  He called after me, "I thought you wrote a damned offensive article about your aunt and that priest."

  "Who says I wrote it?"

  "Every one. It was obviously yours."

  "As a matter of fact, not. I supplied the facts, about how they got into Russia and why, and they filled in the surround in the office. They say I can't get an apology, because it wasn't signed."

  "I must say, you're more of a mutt than I thought. After all, you've been writing some time now. I don't know why you don't know the facts of life."

  Then he saw that he had insulted me, and remembered that this was a silly thing to do in the circumstances, so he asked me to lunch with him next day, and I went round talking to other people, who of course all wanted to know about aunt Dot and what was behind it. As they were mostly intelligent people, they didn't attach any importance to what the Sunday paper had made of my article, all they wanted to know was how much I had got for it. Some of them believed in the spying, others not. Some of them thought aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg were spying for us, not for Russia, and that this was why the Foreign Office would say nothing.

  "With the strong church views that it seems they had," someone said (he said "had", as if they had died, and a lot of people tended to do this), "it seems pretty unlikely they would be commies. Unless, of course, the church business was a blind."

  I said, "They aren't commies. They are extremely anti. Father Chantry-Pigg will scarcely say the word." In fact, I thought, he would never have called those minions of the devil by that pet name. Aunt Dot would, but she was more kind and genial.

  "So one supposed. Then do you feel they may be spying for us?"

  "It certainly wasn't what they went there to do. They may be doing it now, I suppose. I mean, they may be going to report what they are seeing there when they get back."

  "Well, we all do that when we get back from places. The point is, is the Foreign Office in touch with them, and paying them?"

  I wished I could think so, it was a happy notion. But I said, "I doubt if the Foreign Office has a clue where they are."

  "Then what on earth are they living on, all this time?"

  Someone said, "Probably on the Soviet government, in Soviet prisons, if . . . " He didn't add, "if they are living at all," but this was what we all thought.

  So it was a depressing kind of conversation, and I was glad to talk to an agent of the Shell Company of Turkey (British) who had been very kind to us in Istanbul, and to Stewart Perowne and Mrs. Antonius, who told me some Jordan gossip and talked about my mother.

  I left the party before
one, and at 1.15 an art critic punched the director of an art gallery on the head, or it may have been the other way round, so I missed both the incidents that occurred at this party, as I always do.

  Chapter 21

  Time went on. I felt pretty unsettled and sad, but I worked a little on the Turkey book that aunt Dot and I had planned, for I had aunt Dot's note-books as well as my own, and I thought she might like me to get it into some kind of shape, as well as the illustrations that I had roughly sketched. I tried to describe the missionary attempts, and how aunt Dot hoped that the Turkish women might take up with the Church of England and become more liberated and advanced, and how this had not, in fact, much occurred. But I wrote more of my own part of the book, about the Black Sea and Trebizond, and our journey into Armenia, the towns and the lakes and the churches and the people and the fish, and the final vanishing of aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg over the frontier, and it seemed to me that this made an interesting story. I put about our expedition to Troy, too, and the Gallipoli graves. I described how Charles and I had swum the Hellespont and been nearly drowned by being carried out to sea by the tide, as Byron and Mr. Ekenside had been. I got very worked up writing this, and it seemed to me that it had actually happened, and I felt the cold green water slapping at my mouth as I struggled with the tide. I was very relieved that it turned in time to carry us in to the Sestos shore after an hour or two. As poor Charles was dead, I did not have to ask his leave to put all this, and anyhow I thought he would have liked it. I thought of making aunt Dot swim with us, as she certainly would have done if we had gone, but then I thought no, aunt Dot was truthful, it was part of her religion, and when she came back and read it she would be vexed with me.