"Thus Was Adonis Murdered"

[fiefoe]

This is exactly the type of murder mystery I like, silly and smart all once. Too bad Sarah Caudwell didn't write that many of them.

• if I hesitate, it is for fear that some of my readers will suspect that my motive for publication is mere self-advertisement. The danger of incurring so contemptible an opinion has almost deterred me; but I cannot allow mere personal delicacy to deprive the public of a possibly useful and instructive chronicle. I shall set down what happened, as it happened: and if, in the cause of Truth, I am unable to minimize my own achievement, I hope that the wiser spirits—I refer, in particular, dear reader, to yourself—will not think the worse of me for it.
• the junior members of 62 New Square. They are a decorative little group—it would be a difficult taste that was pleased by none of them... But it is for those whose pleasure lies in the conquest of virtue that Ragwort’s delicate profile and demure autumnal colouring have a most particular charm. Cantrip, in sharp contrast, has eyes and hair of a witchlike blackness, more pleasing to those whose preference is for a savour of iniquity... well, if you can imagine a Persian cat which has just completed a successful cross-examination, that will give you some idea of her.
• “Nobbled?” I repeated, a little perplexed by the expression. Cantrip is a Cambridge man—it is not always easy to understand what he says. “Nobbled? By whom, Cantrip? Or, to adopt the Cambridge idiom, who by?”
• (Julia:)She must have been, no doubt, a docile, good-natured child, with a certain facility for Latin verbs and intelligence tests—but what use is that to anyone? Seeking some suitable refuge, where her inadequacies would pass unnoticed, her relatives, very sensibly, sent her to Lincoln’s Inn.
• But if she doesn’t take a holiday she still can’t afford to pay the Revenue. On the sheep and lamb principle, she has decided to go to Venice. I think it’s very sensible... “My dear Selena, we all know exactly what Julia is hoping to find in Venice, and there is, I regret to say, nothing spiritual about it.” Ragwort’s rather beautiful mouth closed in a severe straight line, as if denying utterance to more explicit improprieties. <> “After a bit of the other,” said Cantrip. It is a Cambridge expression, signifying, as I understand it, the pursuit of erotic satisfaction.
• It will not, I hope, be necessary, at any stage in my narrative, to disgust my readers with an account of the spider episode. I will say only that any exchanges of an erotic nature between Julia and Cantrip which may hereafter be referred to may be conclusively presumed to antedate the incident. Though, in all fairness, it does seem to me that a woman who retires for the night with Cantrip on the 31st of March in any year, forgetting that the following day—still, as I have said, I propose to draw a veil over the whole matter.


• He has recommended us to read the safety booklet. I have done my best; but it is all in pictures, with nothing to explain them. There is a picture of a female passenger sitting upright, then an arrow, then a picture of her leaning forward with her head in her hands.
• He has also taken to patting my knee. This is making me rather peevish. I try to be tolerant of other people’s innocent pleasures; but it is, after all, my knee.
• such a face. A face for which Narcissus might be forsworn and the Moon forget Endymion. The translucent skin, the winging eyebrows, the angelic mouth, the celestial profile—lament no more, Selena, the drabness of our age and the poverty of our arts—over the time that has brought forth such a profile not Athens, not Rome, not the Renaissance in all its glory shall triumph: Praxiteles and Michelangelo kneel in admiration.
• In the eternal struggle of Counsel against Clerks to gain a moment in which the former may call their souls their own, some yards of ground had been lost.
• He would continue, he said, to run the farm which he had inherited from his mother and would devote his life to restoring the island to peace and unity.” “‘Devote his life,’” said Selena. “Dear me, what a very unfortunate phrase.” “Yes, isn’t it? So the Revenue are likely to be a little sceptical about his forming a sudden intention to end his days in Paraguay or New South Wales.
• Two of the three lie curled together, divided only by the Grand Canal, in an embrace of such Gallic sophistication as to prevent my pursuing further the anatomical analogy. To their left, excluded from their intimacy, the long thin island of Giudecca stretches out alone, a parable in geography of the hazards of a partie a trois. For consolation, like a divine hot-water bottle, it has at its foot the little island of San Giorgio Maggiore.
• I began to be very worried about Desdemona. We are given to understand that Othello’s courtship of her consisted almost entirely of stories beginning “When I was stationed among the Anthropophagi—” or “I must tell you about a funny thing that happened during the siege of Rhodes.” The dramatist Shakespeare would have us believe that she not only put up with this but actually enjoyed it: can that great connoisseur of the human heart really have thought this possible?
• since clients of mine with important collections to be valued for tax purposes so frequently had recourse to the expertise of Frostfield’s. There is no bond like that of mutual clients: we were thereafter as Ruth and Naomi.
• “No,” he said, looking at me demurely under his beautiful eyelashes. “No, not precisely. I am employed by the Department of Inland Revenue.” <> My pen as I write these dreadful words falls trembling from my petrified fingers. I am left with hardly the strength to sign myself
• The discovery of Ned’s appalling profession has made me, as you may imagine, implacable in my resolve. Have the Revenue, in their demands on my time, my energy and my meagre earnings, been deterred by any sentiments of pity or remorse? No. Shall I, if Ned’s virtue were the dearest jewel they own, show more forbearance in pursuit of it? No, I shall not. “Canals if necessary” is my watchword now.
• What a baby cuckoo does is get itself hatched in someone else’s nest. Then it just sits there with its beak open, looking hungry. And the birds the nest belongs to, instead of chucking it over the edge, get this irresistible urge to shovel food down it. Same effect as Julia has on girls. And what’s more, they’re usually jolly attractive girls, who ought to have something better to do than collect worms for Julia.”
• The opportunity to put the finishing touches to the masterpiece came in 1204, when they more or less hijacked the Fourth Crusade. The Crusaders had meant to go to Jerusalem; but the Venetians, who were providing the transport, said about halfway across the Mediterranean that it would be a better idea to go and sack Byzantium. So they went and sacked Byzantium; as a result of which the Venetians acquired an empire in the Eastern Mediterranean and the four horses of antique bronze which stand on the balcony of St. Mark’s Basilica.
• “I don’t believe Shakespeare told Julia to try fainting,” said Cantrip. “He’s dead.” <> “She is referring,” said Selena, “to his early poem ‘Venus and Adonis.’ Julia read it at an impressionable age and has since regarded it as a sort of seduction manual.”
• For any enterprise savouring of the illicit, Cantrip is the man. He did not pause to argue the proprieties. By the time the Major’s waving hand had attracted the attention of his fellow Art Lovers, Cantrip, slipping like a needle through the crowd, was already crouched beside the trolley... Cantrip, with a nicely judged impression of imperfect sobriety, was insisting on making sure.
• Venetians looked round for someone to build them villas as similar as possible to that occupied by Horace. Andrea Palladio, therefore, then a rising young architect, went out and bought a book by the Roman author Vitruvius, also republished as part of the Renaissance, and read the chapter on building villas. That, at least, is what he meant to read: as it happens, misled by the obscurity of the Latin, he actually read the chapter on building temples. This explains why the Veneto is full of villas looking more or less like the Parthenon, with the addition of the usual domestic offices.
• No names, no pack drill—don’t want to say anything against the lad. Just—not the sort of chap I’d want to share a tent with. Hope you don’t mind my mentioning it, m’dear.” <> I was not unduly surprised by this suggestion: it is almost invariably the first thing said about men with profiles by men without profiles. Indeed, it is a benevolent dispensation of Providence that those who express most dread of an unorthodox advance are usually those whom Nature has most effectively protected from any risk of one.
• It is a most attractive building, designed with great ingenuity to persuade one, when in the auditorium, that one is in an open air theatre somewhere in ancient Greece. I invited my companions to admire this masterpiece of deception. Ned declined. <> “I don’t like it,” he said. “I don’t like looking down streets that aren’t there. I don’t like looking at the ceiling and thinking it’s the sky. I don’t like all this make-believe.” There is no pleasing some people.
• Cantrip, you may say, has his faults; but at least he can be prevailed on to engage in a health-giving frolic without expecting one to talk for weeks on end about his soul. Cantrip, so far as I am aware, has never claimed to have such a thing. “I jolly well do have a soul,” said Cantrip. “Well, don’t tell Julia,” said Selena. “It’ll only upset her.”
• It is hardly possible, when two people are sitting on the same bed and trying to read the same copy of the Finance Act, for all physical contact to be avoided. I, indeed, made no attempt to avoid it; but neither, it seemed to me, did Ned. This gave me some encouragement—one would not wish, as a woman of principle, to impose attentions actually distasteful.
• “Oh, Julia,” he said, opening his eyes very wide with reproach, “how can you be so shameless?” “Ah, Ned,” I answered, “because you are so beautiful.” And met with no further resistance. “It just shows one,” said Ragwort sadly, “how dangerous it is to gamble. Even when one knows one is right.”
• “It is an obligation,” he answered with great coldness, “that I shall be quite happy to forget.” <> From which I concluded that he is still set on proving himself not to be a young man of easy virtue and that it would accordingly take a full week of admiring his soul to prevail on him again.
• Well, what she actually said was that I was a semi-educated flibbertigibbet whose powers of dramatic appreciation would be strained to the utmost by a Punch and Judy show on Brighton Pier in the off season. So I biffed her with my umbrella. And she tried to biff me with her handbag. But she missed, of course—you know what she’s like.” <> Evidently lost in the tenderness of this recollection, Cantrip fell silent.
• It is to be remembered, however, that they are an overworked and exploited profession, who have to spend much of their energies running to and fro carrying drinks and so on, so that the duration of the pleasure given is not always commensurate to the enthusiasm with which it is offered. If the coffee brought me by the pretty waiter had been cold by the time he left, I should have been willing, in the particular circumstances, to forgive him; but my forgiveness was not called for. Still, one must not be ungrateful—strawberries are strawberries.
• had had such traumatic effects on me as to induce a series of paranoid hallucinations: whenever I opened a door, I would imagine, unless previously fortified by brandy, that I saw the Major closing one. This, with brandy the price it is, would be an inconvenient affliction.
• Stanford said afterwards he didn’t think the British behaved that way. I pointed out to Stanford that that was simply a nonempirical prejudgment and had no validity whatsoever—but Stanford swallows nonempirical prejudgments the way athletes swallow vitamin pills.
• I had forgotten how much darker Venice is at night than other cities. The darkness is broken here and there by the white silhouette of a floodlit church or palazzo; but its brightness is cold and disquieting—the building itself seems nothing but a clever lighting effect. Indeed, the whole city seems somehow illusory, like a stage set for a death-and-daggers melodrama.
• “I was intending,” I said, “to add a few days’ holiday to the end of my stay in Venice. I should be quite happy, if you don’t feel I’m imposing on your hospitality, to take it at the beginning rather than the end.” I meant, of course, that the fee for my services would not be increased by the delay; but that is hardly something, even in these permissive days, which one can say outright to the lay client.
• “If you,” said Julia, “had recently shared a bed with a young man of ethereal beauty, would it occur to you that his surname was Watson?”
• (The maids:) The book which had engaged their attention was not, as it turned out, a romantic novel: it was The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Friedrich Engels.
• “The whole object of an Oxford education is to ensure that when you want to know someone you know someone who knows them.”
• “I suppose if I asked him,” said Ragwort, with an expression of rather complacent self-sacrifice, “he’d probably agree to have dinner with us. At Oxford, he used to think . . .” Ragwort did not specify what opinion Benjamin had held of him at Oxford; but a brief consultation of the looking-glass over the mantelpiece seemed to reassure him that it was likely to be still entertained.
• do you happen to know a woman called Julia Larwood?” “Woman who knocks things over?” Ragwort nodded. .. “But Benjamin,” said Ragwort, “I have no vices.” <> “It was,” said Benjamin, “our mutual regret in reaching that conclusion which established that we were twin souls.”
• to the Latin-speaking portion of it that Art has no enemies but Ignorance: a saying attributed to Benvenuto Cellini.
• “Traditionally,” I said, “Adonis is reputed to have been transformed into some kind of anemone. I think, however, that the artist has preferred to believe that it was a species of amaranth. The flower called in English lovelies-bleeding.”
• Eleanor was charming. That is to say, her manner seemed designed to merit that description: she displayed towards us a sort of girlish archness, such as a doting father might have found captivating in an only daughter at the age of eight. The effect was as of attempting to camouflage an armoured tank by icing it with pink sugar:
• It’s more or less exactly what happened with Van Meegeren. With whom, indeed, the point has now been reached at which people are forging Van Meegeren forgeries.”
• Julia is no doubt right in attributing Ragwort’s unconquered virtue to the expression of aloof disapproval which he adopts when confronted with anything in the nature of a proposition. It is also true, however, that he can run extremely fast:
• “It is a misapprehension, you see, likely to be entertained only by someone going round Verona with the assistance of a guide book to Padua.”... I read to them the paragraph in the guide book to Padua in which reference was made to the Madonna by Tiepolo in the Church of Saint Nicholas. Then I picked up the guide to Verona, still lying on Ragwort’s desk, and read them the description of the Church in that city dedicated to the same Saint—it made no mention of any work by that particular Great Master...  I showed them how easily the blue line which represented the canal half-encircling Padua could be taken to represent the river which embraces in similar manner the city of Verona. I demonstrated that every street, square and building identified by Julia in Verona with the aid of her guide book had its counterpart in Padua.
• “With a dim and illiterate halfwit the odds against are about 250 to 1. With a highly intelligent and educated half-wit such as Julia they are astronomical. I thought from the start that there was something unnatural about Julia’s success in Verona.
• “Is it your hypothesis, Professor Tamar, that Major Linnaker stole a painting because Julia had used the wrong guide book?” <> “It is our view,” said Ragwort—the principle of giving credit where it is due has few adherents in Lincoln’s Inn—“that Major Linnaker was responsible for the theft of a painting reported stolen last week from the Church of Saint Nicholas in Verona. We also believe that he brought the picture back to England in a holdall labelled with the name of the murdered man.”
• Not Julia’s sort of thing, certainly; but to any taste less morbidly aesthetic he might have seemed a rather magnificent figure,
• The interview had left me feeling dispirited, for I perceived now that the sculptor’s attachment to Ned had been one of great intensity and passion, such as one rarely sees. One could not wish, for oneself or for one’s friends, any first-hand experience of such extremity of feeling—it is not conducive to comfortable living. And yet there is about it, when observed, something curiously touching and attractive, so that one almost, absurdly, regrets one’s own inability to entertain it.
• Among the most important of these is that of the lectum difficillimum—that is to say, that the most difficult reading is to be preferred. Suppose, to take a simple case, that you have variant readings between two copies of the same manuscript, one using a very common word and the other an unusual one. You may conclude without hesitation that the version using the rarer word is correct... “The same phenomenon, of course, occurs in the context of the spoken word. We all know, for example, that Cantrip, being, due to the deficiencies of his education—for which, as I have always said, he is rather to be pitied than censured—unfamiliar with the term ‘rococo’, is under the impression that there is a style of architecture known as rocky cocoa—after, I suppose, some beverage of popular consumption in Cambridge.”... Reporting the conversation in oratio obliqua, she tells us that Eleanor said that Bruce had stolen an armchair and a rococo mirror which she rather liked.
• My trustee thinks that I “don’t appreciate the adverse fiscal consequences of the present situation.” So he wants to instruct Counsel—that’s another sort of lawyer, it seems, who uses even longer words than a solicitor—to come and explain them to me.
• “He’s got a Master’s appointment,” said Selena. “I thought he said this morning that it was something to do with that case you’ve got against each other about the washing-line. But as you’re still here, I assume—” <> “Strewth,” said Cantrip, leaping from his chair. “The blighter, he might have reminded me.” By the time the door of the Corkscrew swung to behind him, he was no more than a blur of black and white on the other side of High Holborn, moving fast towards the Law Courts. <> “Do please go on, Professor Tamar,” said Marylou. “I think it’s simply fascinating.” She is a delightful girl.
• “Once I realized that the razor-cut must have been a fake, my mind turned immediately to the idea of an impersonation. At some stage later in the day, Ned was to impersonate someone who had sustained such an injury, or such a person was to impersonate him. But later in the day Ned had been a corpse. I was drawn irresistibly to the conclusion that the corpse was, as it were, an involuntary impostor.