"The Shortest Way to Hades"

[fiefoe]

This is my second Sarah Caudwell. Both stories are light-hearted and arch, and easier to listen to than read.

• How admirably, and with what profusion of persuasive detail, would a novelist convey the scene: the dark old-fashioned office, its walls lined with Law Reports and Encyclopaedias of Conveyancing Precedents; the window looking out on the green rectangle of Lincoln’s Inn Fields;
• “If a bird’s all set to come into five million quid,” said Cantrip, “you don’t need to meet her to know she’s fantastically attractive.”
• Endeavoring to steer a moderate course between the avaricious and the quixotic, we suggested that a sum of forty thousand pounds, to be equally divided, would represent an acceptable douceur.”
• “If you think my client’s going to fork out an extra eighty thousand quid, you must be even further round the twist than I’ve always thought. Come off it, Larwood old thing.” The professional exchanges of Chancery Counsel are not always characterized by such robust informality; but Julia and Cantrip were once on those terms conventionally called more intimate than friendship, and this perhaps accounts for it.
• “In view of what occurred yesterday,” said the older woman, in a voice like the crack of a glacier,
• said the solicitor with rotund benevolence.
• There are Greek boys and Greek boys. There are many Greek boys, no doubt, who are fat and have spots; whose profiles are in no way reminiscent of fifth-century Athens; whose hair has not the blue-blackness of a cluster of ripe grapes; Greek boys, in short, who leave the observer baffled by Homer’s reference to “that most charming age when the beard first begins to grow.” Leonidas Demetriou was one of the others.
• When we arrived at the doors of Court 25, she prevailed on him to assist her in the adjustment of her wig and gown and the restoration to proper symmetry of her collar and white bands. It was all, as Ragwort said afterwards, perfectly disgraceful.
• “Sir Thomas More, saint and martyr,” said Ragwort, “as of course you know, Hilary, was the only member of Lincoln’s Inn ever to be canonized: a very proper object of admiration for Julia, and indeed all of us. Were it possible, however, to dwell excessively upon so improving a topic, one might be tempted to say that Julia had done so.”
  “You bet one might,” said Cantrip. “Anyway, if he was allowed to waste time playing detectives instead of getting on with his paperwork, he can’t have had a Clerk like Henry. The thing is, you see, we’re all frantically busy at the moment, and we just can’t spare the time. So what we thought we’d better do,” said Cantrip happily, “was get you to do it, Hilary. It’s just your sort of thing—digging up odds and ends of gossip and finding out things that aren’t your business.”
  I remarked with some coldness that my own time was not so entirely undisposed of as my companions appeared to believe, and I doubted whether my academic responsibilities would allow me to undertake the task they envisaged for me. If they wished merely to prevent Julia from talking about Sir Thomas More, I supposed some simple but humane form of gag would sufficiently serve the purpose.
• Finding Wandsworth County Court was an enterprise, according to Julia’s account of it, of more or less equivalent difficulty to tracing the source of the Blue Nile; but she had surmounted the rigors of the journey,
• “My dear Ragwort,” I said, assisting my young friend to his feet, “you might reasonably imagine, I suppose, that a dryad would address her ravisher in Greek; but surely you could not expect her to achieve ex tempore the actual meter of classical tragedy?”
• * There remained about him, even so, something curiously equivocal—that slight wariness, that imperceptibly more alert apprehension, that attentiveness even in repose to the evidence of the senses, which is found in those who in some alien environment never cease to watch for danger or advantage: in migrants between countries or classes; in those conscious of some unorthodox erotic preference; in spies; and in cats always, however domesticated.
• Over winding paths silent with moss the chestnut trees spread a network of translucent green. Wherever the eye might have wearied of shade there was a shaft of sunlight; wherever it might have surfeited of green it found the dark glow of a copper beech, the purple of a rhododendron, or a wild pink hyacinth among the grass.
• I sat down on the shallow steps of the rotunda to admire the view laid out with such careful carelessness for that purpose. With perhaps an equally studied abandon, the boy lay full length on the grass nearby
• “My dear boy,” I answered, “I am an historian—my profession largely consists of speaking ill of the dead.”
• But then she went all stiff upper lip and said that Latin thing about mortuaries.” <> “The phrase you have in mind,” said Ragwort, “is ‘de mortuis nil nisi bonum’—that of the dead one should say only what is good.”
• “It’s an extraordinary thing,” said Julia, “how every solicitor who loses a piece of paper anywhere in the area of Greater London always claims that it’s my fault. It seems to be an official policy of the Law Society.” <> “The notion is certainly rather widespread,” said Ragwort, “that if any document goes missing in a case in which you have been concerned it’s probably somewhere on your desk.”
• It was, I explained, an instance of the phenomenon known to students of textual criticism as dictation interne—the copyist, mentally repeating the words of the original, copies them not as he sees them but as he imagines hearing them—it is a fruitful source of error.
• * that the missing paragraph had begun with the same half-dozen words as that which succeeded it: the typist, having copied them for the first time, would have looked back at the draft to see what followed; the same phrase, occurring again a few lines later, would have caught her eye; and she would have continued from that point, omitting what lay between. <> “It is an instance,” I said, “of the mistake known as haplography—a fruitful source of error in ancient and medieval manuscripts.
• we were somewhere in that area of south-west London where the artistic overlaps the opulent, no doubt to their mutual advantage. <> Having reflected during the journey on the best means of obtaining news of her missing friend, Selena had concluded that it was in the character of one who loved not wisely but too well that she was most likely to attract sympathetic assistance.
• * All right, so she’s got curves. So’s a roller-coaster got curves—it doesn’t mean you can have a steady relationship with it.”
• “It can’t have done,” said Ragwort. “There aren’t any.” <> “There are and it did. The attitude of the management is that they want people to enjoy themselves but they have to draw the line somewhere. They drew it at Julia.”
• “I know how to open it without a key. Cantrip very kindly showed me how, in case I accidentally locked myself out. Ah, here we are.” She took from her handbag a credit card widely publicized as ensuring entry to places from which the holder might without its aid be excluded.
• “I acted,” said Julia, “for the best.” She paused to allow us to admire the excellence of her motives.
• Considering, however, the lateness of the hour and the amount we had drunk, I cannot think it likely that anything of an improper nature occurred.” <> “Hm,” said Ragwort. It was not an expression designed to convey unqualified belief.
• * The cries, wails, protests and lamentations with which Julia received the news that it was now half past three and that she had irretrievably missed her conference, the clutchings of the forehead, the tearings of the hair, the knockings over of bedside tables, the rushings about wrapped only in a sheet—all these would be too pitiful to recount, and were so indeed to observe.
• Rupert stepped out on to the balcony. His mouth, when he perceived our presence, fell open under its drooping mustache; his watery blue gaze, as it passed from one to another of us, held much of surprise and little of delight. He seemed about to speak. With a smile of infinite complicity and infinite reassurance, Selena raised her forefinger to her lips and gently shook her head: it was a gesture, as I understood it, designed to suggest that our presence on Rupert’s balcony was in some way connected with aspects of his private life of which he might prefer his mother-in-law to remain unaware. After a moment of perplexity and hesitation, Rupert understood it in a similar sense: he withdrew from the balcony.


• a distance which she covered with such rapidity as to move me to remark diffidently on the possible existence of a speed limit.
• “Oh look,” she added, with every sign of pleasure, “there’s one of Selena and me.” The picture showed them sitting side by side on a sofa: Selena, with a look of judicial detachment, seemed to be appraising the quality of her champagne; Julia was smiling with sleepy and bemused benevolence at two other persons—one male, the other female, both naked, in an attitude of greater intimacy than I would wish to describe in detail to my readers: though Selena and Julia were fully dressed, the photograph was taken at such an angle as somehow to suggest that all four figures were part of a single tableau.
• In the early hours of Friday morning she was discovered by a fisherman somewhere on the seashore between Parga and Ayios Ioannis, wearing only a black silk negligée—by some accounts, indeed, entirely naked, but the black negligée version is preferred by connoisseurs. After going overboard she had simply struck out for the shore and kept swimming until she reached it—a distance, it was thought, of about three miles. She was bruised and fairly exhausted, naturally, but otherwise (said the sailing men, leering) in perfect condition.
• Further unrest among the crew, who complains of hunger and thirst and wants to go ashore for dinner. He instructs me to send you his love and to tell you of his sufferings and hardships—you will agree that I have done so in almost unseemly detail.
• (Corfu, as I dare say you know, was under British rule for a period of about fifty years in the nineteenth century: here, as in other parts of our Empire, it was our enlightened policy to prepare the inhabitants for self-government by teaching them to play cricket.)
• Under the heading “What to do when running on to a lee shore without power in a gale” the advice given by the better sailing manuals is “Do not allow such a situation to occur.” Bearing in mind the savagery of the Parga coastline, one would have described the Sycorax as being at this juncture on a very direct course for Hades.
• I have sometimes suggested, I think, that when your fancy is taken by a young man of slender figure and pleasing profile you should not disclose at too early a stage the true nature of your interest. Young men, I seem to remember saying, like to be thought of as people, not as mere physical objects: you should therefore begin by seeming to admire their fine souls and splendid intellects and showing a warm interest in their hopes, dreams and aspirations.
• “Ah, Sebastian, my dear friend, I know that you don’t believe King Alcinous ever existed—you think that Homer imagined him, him and his palace and his wife and his daughter and his daughter’s washing. Wouldn’t you think, though, with all that imagining, that he could imagine some better reason for a princess to go down to the seashore in the morning? Something sublime and majestic and suitable to be mentioned in a great epic? But no, it’s to do her washing, just like a peasant girl.
• * while I was left stranded at the Villa Miranda in the company of people who towered over me in the Brobdingnagian fashion previously objected to. Without the stimulus of coffee, however, I could work out no way of regarding this as Sebastian’s fault rather than mine, and so was prevented from sympathizing with myself as fully as I would have wished.
• It is wrong for a ship’s captain to spread unnecessary alarm among the crew. I therefore thought it better not to mention that the Kymothoe was at present not so much a sailing-boat as a floating bomb and liable, if the engine were started or a match struck, to disperse herself rather messily all over the harbor.
• * Corfu has the charm of a place which reminds one of other places—which and for what reason one is not altogether certain. The deviousness of the narrow streets, winding in and out of small, unexpected squares; the elaborate little balconies tête-à-tête above long flights of marble steps; the bazaar-like profusion of merchandise outside obscure shopfronts; the noises of seafaring; the occasional smell of drains mingling with the scent of flowers—these things, I suppose, remind one chiefly of Venice, especially of those things in Venice which remind one of Istanbul. The Liston, however, has a certain Parisian flavor; and there is something about the Esplanade—the neo-Classical architecture and the circular bandstand—which irresistibly recalls Cheltenham or Bath. A town, one can hardly deny it, in every sense provincial; but with the faded, rather sluttish elegance of a provincial beauty who a long time ago spent a season in the capital.
• But that’s how it is—le coeur a ses raisins, as the French say, which the raisins know nothing about.
• They both sighed, overtaken by that indulgent despair so often induced in children by reflecting on the conduct of their parents—closely resembling that induced in parents by reflecting on the conduct of their children.
• “I shouldn’t say that now she’s dead. Oh dear, poor Deirdre.” The difficulty seemed almost universal of remembering, in relation to Deirdre, the maxim de mortuis nil nisi bonum.
• “—that their uncle, in his own private life, is himself accustomed to indulge in practices which would cause a raised eyebrow among the strictly conventional... Having learnt from some mutual acquaintance that their uncle had invited several of his friends to join him on a particular evening in certain idiosyncratic diversions, they intruded on the gathering in the guise of members of the police force, conducting what is known as a raid.” <> “I say,” said Lucinda, resolutely ingenuous, “how awful of them. Weren’t they afraid they’d be recognized?”
• A narrow, steep-sided channel, deep enough for small sailing-boats to bob about in it, divides the town of Corfu from the projection of rock which by some irony of Nature makes the gentlest of islands one of the most powerful naval strongholds in the Mediterranean, impregnable save by guile for almost a millennium. The Citadel, I remembered, had not always been completely encircled by sea; but in the sixteenth century, perceiving the slender connecting isthmus as a weak point in the defenses, the Venetians had slit it as neatly and efficiently as if it had been the throat of some inconvenient diplomat.
• “I’m really very sorry about this, Professor Tamar,” said Leonidas, holding me by the shoulder and the knife against my throat. <> By declining the duties of examiner I had hoped to avoid this sort of treatment on the part of the young. I now saw that I had, on the contrary, deprived myself of the specialized experience required to deal with such contingencies.
• The twins were covering for her, the way they always do. So when Dolly came back into the drawing-room, she pretended she’d come down from the roof—and of course she thought Deirdre was still up there.”
  “From your point of view,” said Selena, “a rather fortunate combination of circumstances.”
  “Yes, it was rather, because it meant no one twigged that I was the last person who’d been alone with Deirdre.
• I was much at fault in overlooking the significance of Tancred’s addressing her as “Camilla, my dear,” though he punctiliously referred to Deirdre as “Miss Robinson”—I should have asked myself how he came to be on more familiar terms with the heiress than with her cousin. The explanation was simple: she had been his temporary typist.
  Camilla, succumbing to temptation, searches in the Probate for the magic words which make her an heiress—which make her interesting and desirable, which make her an object of envy, admiration and love, which make her the person she is and has always been—when she looks for them, they simply aren’t there. It is Deirdre who is the heiress.”
  The chief purpose was to seize the opportunity offered by her position as temporary typist—she wanted a pretext for bringing into existence a number of neatly typed copies of the Will, remedying the unfortunate omission, whose authenticity would never afterwards be questioned. At the same time, she intended to contrive an occasion on which the Probate might appear accidentally to have gone astray.” <> “Do you mean,” said Julia, with astonishment, “that it really wasn’t my fault?”
• But I still don’t see how Camilla got the idea that Sebastian and I were going to blackmail.”
  “Don’t you? You arrived at the Villa Miranda, and on your first day there Sebastian talked about his article on the transmission of the texts of Euripides. The central argument, as I believed I mentioned once before, turns on a rather striking instance in the text of the Helena of the mistake of haplography.
• “You mean,” said Selena, “that she thought he was telling her that we knew about the Will? Oh really, didn’t it occur to the silly woman that it might be a coincidence?”
  “It would have seemed from her point of view an improbable one. She had met you, after all, because you were instructed on the variation: she would not think of you as a person unconnected with the matter of her inheritance, but on the contrary as someone who had been closely concerned with it. If she had any doubts, they would have been resolved when Sebastian began talking, a few minutes later, about Book XI of the Odyssey: describing vividly, I expect, how the ghosts of the young who have died by violence or treachery gather on the banks of the Acheron to cry out for vengeance. My dear Selena, what would you have thought?”
• He intends, when he is qualified, to accept Julia’s offer of a pupillage: it is to be hoped that by then the passage of time will have qualified the beauty of his profile or the warmth of Julia’s ardor, but at present I am bound to say that there is no sign of it.