The Lyre of Orpheus Read online

  “Does it matter? It is Arthur who is the cuckold in the Arthurian legends,” said Penny Raven.

  “So it is. This Arthur was a fool,” said the Doctor.

  “Oh, come on! I won’t have that,” said Maria. “He was a noble man, bent on lifting the whole moral tone of his kingdom.”

  “But still a cookold. He did not pay enough attention to his wife. So she gave him a big pair of horns.”

  “Perhaps there is no feminine of cuckold because the female of the species does not grow horns, however much she is deceived,” said Hollier, solemnly.

  “She knows a better trick than that,” said the Doctor. “She gives him the ambiguous baby, eh? He looks in the cradle and he says, What the hell; this is a funny-looking baby. By God, I am a cookold.”

  “But in the Arthurian legends there is no child of the adultery of Guenevere and Lancelot. So he could not have exclaimed what you have just exclaimed, madam.”

  “Not madam. I prefer to be called Doctor. Unless after a long time we get on close terms; then perhaps you will call me Nilla.”

  “Not Gunny?” said Powell.

  “I despise Gunny. But this Arthur—this stupid king—he does not need a baby to tell him. His wife and his very good friend tell him straight out. We have been in the bed while you have been lifting the moral tone. It could be a comedy. It could be by Ibsen. He was often funny like that.”

  Maria thought the time had come to change the direction of the conversation at the Round Table. “My next course is truly Arthurian. Roast pork, and with apple sauce. Very popular dish at Camelot, I am certain.”

  “Pork? No, never pork! It must be roast boar,” said the Doctor.

  “My butcher didn’t have a good roasting boar,” said Maria, perhaps a little too sharply; “you will have to put up with very good roast pork.”

  “I am glad it isn’t roast boar,” said Hollier. “I have often eaten roast boar in my travels, and I don’t like it. A heavy, dense flesh and a great provoker of midnight melancholy. In me, anyhow.”

  “You have not had good roast boar,” said the Doctor. “Good roast boar is excellent eating. I do not find it provokes to melancholy.”

  “How would you know?” said Penny Raven.

  “I do not understand you, Professor Raven.”

  “You seem to be melancholy without any roast boar,” said Penny, who had not been neglecting the Hochheimer. “You are depressing us about our opera, and you are disparaging Maria’s wonderful roast pork.”

  “If I depress you, I am sorry, but the fault may not be mine. I am not a merry person. I take a serious attitude toward life. I am not a self-deceiver.”

  “Nor am I,” said Penny. “I am enjoying Maria’s fine Arthurian feast. She is Arthur’s lady and I declare her to be a splendid hlafdiga.”

  “A fine what?” said the Doctor.

  “A fine hlafdiga. It is the Old English word from which our word ‘lady’ is derived, and it means the person who gives the food. A very honourable title. I drink to our hlafdiga.”

  “No, no, Penny, I must protest,” said Hollier. “A hlafdiga does not mean a lady. That is an exploded etymology. The hlafdiga was the dough-kneader, not the loaf-giver as you ignorantly suppose. You are muddling up the Mercian with the Northumbrian word.”

  “Oh, bugger you, Clem,” said Penny. “The modern word ‘lady’ comes from hlafdiga; the hlafdiga was the loaf-giver and down through leofdi and thus down to lefdi and so to ‘lady’. Don’t try to teach me to suck eggs, or aegru if you want it in Old English. The hlafdiga was the wife of the hlaford—the lord, you pretentious ass—and thus his lady.”

  “Abuse is not argument, Professor Raven,” said Hollier, with tipsy dignity. “The hlafdiga could be quite a lowly person—”

  “Possibly even of Gypsy origins,” said Maria, with a good deal of heat.

  “For Christ’s sake, are we going to get any pork?” said Powell. “Or are we going to get into an etymological wrangle while everything goes cold? I hereby declare that Maria is a lady in every sense of the word, and I want something to eat.”

  “There are no ladies now, thank God,” said Dr. Dahl-Soot, holding out her glass. “We are all on equal footing, distinguished only by talent. Genius is the only true aristocracy. Is that a red wine you are pouring, Professor Darcourt? What is it? Let me see the bottle.”

  “It is an excellent Burgundy,” said Darcourt.

  “Good. You may pour.”

  “Of course he may pour,” said Powell. “What do you think this is? A restaurant? That’s the wine there is and that’s the wine you are going to get, so shut up.”

  Dr. Dahl-Soot drew herself up in her chair. “Monsieur, vous êtes une personne grossière.”

  “You bet your sweet ass I am, Gunny, so you mind your manners and be a good girl.”

  There was a pause, during which Darcourt hovered over the Doctor’s wineglass. Unexpectedly she burst into loud laughter.

  “I think I like you, Powell,” she said. “You may call me Nilla. But only you.” She cast an excluding eye over the rest of the table. Then she raised her glass of Burgundy toward Powell, smiled with an elegant sweetness, and drained it to the bottom.

  “More,” she said, thrusting it at Darcourt, who now was attending to Penny Raven.

  “You wait your turn, Nilla,” said Powell.

  “You are teaching me manners?” said the Doctor. “Which manners? In my country the guest of honour is allowed certain freedoms. But I see how it is. You think you are a lion-tamer and probably a lady-killer. Let me tell you that I am a lion who has eaten many tamers, and you shall not kill me because I am not a lady.”

  “Funny thing. That had just begun to pop into my mind,” said Penny Raven. “But if you are not a lady, how do you describe yourself?”

  “Not long ago we spoke of the aristocracy of genius,” said the Doctor, whose glass Darcourt had hastened to fill, out of turn.

  “Now Penny, no fighting,” said Maria. “It isn’t the custom for the lady to propose toasts, but as Arthur is busy carving this authentically Celtic piglet, I shall claim the privilege of a hlafdiga and propose the health of Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot; I declare her to be not less than a countess in the aristocracy of genius. May we enjoy the proof of her genius.”

  The health was drunk, with enthusiasm by all but Penny Raven, who muttered something into her glass. The Doctor rose to her feet.

  “My dear new friends,” she said; “you do me honour and I shall not fail you. Have I teased you just a little bit? Perhaps I have. It is my way. I am a great joker, you should know. There often lurks behind my words some double entendre which you may not understand, perhaps until much later. Perhaps even in the night, you wake up laughing. Ah, the Doctor, you say. She is deep, deep, deep. You have drunk to my health. I shall drink back at you. You, reverend sir, with the wine—may I have something in my glass? Ah, thank you.—Though I am not sure about wine at this Arthurian feast. I am not sure that our hlafdiga is right in saying that Arthur had wine at his court. Surely it was that stuff they made with fermented honey—”

  “Mead,” said Hollier. “You mean mead.”

  “Just so. Mead. I have drunk it. And it is nasty, sweet, awful stuff, let me tell you. I casted up my stomach—”

  “Not surprising, the way you go at it,” said Penny, with a smile which did not entirely rob her remark of offence.

  “I can drink anybody here under the table,” said the Doctor, with grave belligerence. “Man, woman, or dog, I can drink him under the table. But I want no nasty words here. I want to drink to you all. Though as I say, I cannot believe that King Arthur had wine—

  “I’ve just thought of it,” said Hollier. “The Welsh did have wine in the ancient days. You remember the old cry—Gwin o eur—Wine from the gold! Not only did they have wine, but they drank it from golden vessels. Not out of cowhorns, like a road company doing the banquet in Macbeth. Gwin o eur!

  “Clem, you’re drunk!” said Penny. “And that’s a
very dubious, ill-founded quotation.”

  “And your Welsh is terrible!” said Powell.

  “Is that so? If this were not a friendly gathering I’d let you have one right on the nose for that, Powell.”

  “Would you, boy?” said Powell. “I dare you.”

  “Yes. Right on the snot-box,” said Hollier. He half rose, as if to fight, but Penny pulled him back into his chair. “The Welsh are a despicable people,” he said in a murmur.

  “That’s right. Real scum. Like Gypsies,” said Powell, winking at his hostess.

  “Am I, or am I not, making a speech?” said the Doctor. “Am I returning thanks for this splendid dinner, so exquisitely chosen and so elegantly served under the lustrous eye of our hlafdiga?” She bowed deeply toward Maria. “Yes, I am. So I bid all you rowdies and learned hoggleboes keep silence, until I am finished. I love this country; it is, like my own land, a socialist monarchy and thus unites the best of the past and the present; I love my hosts, they are true patrons of art. I love you all; you are comrades in a great adventure, a Quest for something a man longed for but did not achieve. I drain my glass to you.” And she did so, and sat down, rather heavily.

  It must have been the martinis, thought Darcourt. They all drank martinis before dinner as if they never expected to see drink again. The Doctor certainly had three, because I gave them to her myself. Now, following her speech of thanks and her toast to Maria, the Doctor was silent, and ate a large helping of roast pork and applesauce and a variety of vegetables—probably not Arthurian but nobody questioned them—in a mood that could only be called morose. The other guests murmured, more or less politely, to one another.

  The Canadians—Arthur, Hollier, Penny Raven, and Darcourt—were abashed by what the Doctor had said; they closed up at any imputation of high motives, of splendid intention, of association with what might be great, and therefore dangerous. They were not wholly of the grey majority of their people; they lived in a larger world than that, but they wore the greyness as a protective outer garment. They did not murmur the national prayer: “O God, grant me mediocrity and comfort; protect me from the radiance of Thy light.” Nevertheless, they knew how difficult and disquieting too bold a spirit might be. They settled to their plates, and made small talk.

  In the hearts of the two who were not Canadians, Maria and Powell, the Doctor’s toast struck fire. Powell was possessed by ambition, but not the ambition that puts the reward and the success before the excellence of the achievement. He meant to use his colleagues, and the Cornish Foundation, for his own purposes, but he thought the purposes good, and would provide ample reward and acclaim for anyone associated with them. He would ply the whip, and drive everyone to the last inch of their abilities, in order to get what he wanted. He knew he was dealing with a group who were primarily academics, and that the horses must amble before they could be made to gallop. But he would have his way, and in the Doctor he sensed an ally.

  As for Maria, she felt, for the first time since her marriage, a stirring of real adventure. Oh, it was wonderful to be Mrs. Arthur Cornish, and to share the thoughts and ambitions of a man of fine—yes, noble, she would say noble—spirit. There was nothing she could want in a man that she did not find in Arthur. And yet—was it the northern nature, or the Canadian greyness—there was just the least hint of chill about her marriage. They loved. They trusted. Their sexual life was a warm manifestation of love and trust. But, if only for a moment, there might be some hint of the improbable, of a relaxation of control. Maybe this opera would bring that. It was risky. It was a long time since she had sniffed the sharp, acrid smell of risk. Not since the time of Parlabane, over a year ago. Who would have thought of regretting Parlabane?

  And yet—he had brought something rare and pungent into her life.

  What her place might be in this opera adventure she did not know. She was not a musician, though she was musical. She would not be allowed to work on the libretto; Penny and Simon had that marked off for themselves. Was she to do no more than write cheques, as an official of the Cornish Foundation? Money, as a host of grant-seekers assured her, was seminal. But it was not true seed of her seed.

  Darcourt was eating and wool-gathering at the same time, a frequent trick of his. I wonder what we should look like, he thought, if a mischievous genie were to pass over this table and strike us all naked? The result would be better than at most tables. Maria would be a stunning beauty, clothed or naked. Hollier was absurdly handsome for a professor (but why? Must a professor always be a broomstick or a tub?) and without his clothes would reveal, in middle age, a Michelangelesque symmetry, agreeable to his splendid head. Arthur would be sturdy; passable but not astonishing. Powell would be less than he seemed in his clothes; like many an actor he was slight, almost thin, and his head was the best part of him. As for Penny Raven—well, there were the remains of a fine woman about Penny, but to Darcourt’s probing eye the breasts were a little languid, and there was a hint of a rubber tire around the waist. The sedentary life of the scholar was running Penny down, and her jolly face was sagging a little at the chops.

  As for the Doctor—well, he was reminded of a remark he had heard a student make about another student, a girl: “I’d as soon go to bed with a bicycle.” The Doctor, under the fine, Chopinesque get-up, might have the wiriness, the chill, the impracticable resistance of a bicycle to a sexual approach, but she was probably interesting. Any breasts? One cannot get beneath the coat. Any hips? The skirts of the coat concealed them, whatever they might be. But an elegantly formed waist. Long, elegant feet and hands. The Doctor might be very interesting. Not that he was the man who would find out.

  As for himself, Professor the Reverend Simon Darcourt, he had to admit that he did not peel well. He had been a fatty from his mother’s womb and now the stretch-marks on his belly were the wound stripes of countless lost battles against overweight.

  The table is almost silent, he thought; an angel must be passing. But not the stark-striking genie. The servant removed his plate and he got up to attend to the next service of wine. It was to be champagne. Who would be the first to protest that whatever wine Arthur of Britain may have served at the Round Table, it was certainly not champagne? Nobody. They accepted it with murmurs of pleasure.

  Maria allowed the next course to be served without comment. It was a pretty confection of eggs and cream stiffened with something elusive.

  “What is this?” asked the Doctor.

  “Nobody can say that it isn’t a genuinely Arthurian dish,” said Maria. “Its name is washbrew.”

  The company was reduced to silence. Nobody liked to ask what washbrew might be, but when they heard the name their minds misgave them.

  Maria said nothing for a minute or two, then she relieved their apprehension.

  “It can’t hurt you,” she said. “It is just very fine oatmeal, with a few things to give it a nice taste. Geraint’s Welsh ancestors called it flummery.”

  “Buttermilk and flummery say the bells of Montgomery,” sang Powell, to the tune of “Oranges and Lemons”.

  “The flavour,” said Penny. “Elusive. Delicious! Reminds me somehow of childhood.”

  “That is the hartshorn,” said Maria. “Very Arthurian. You were probably given hartshorn candy for sore throats.”

  “But not just hartshorn,” said Hollier. “There is another flavour, and I think it’s brandy.”

  “I am certain Arthur had brandy,” said Maria. “and if anybody contradicts me I shall send it back to the kitchen and get you some raw turnips to chew, and that will be authentically Early Britain, and I hope it will satisfy all you purists. The champagne should help you to worry down a few turnips.”

  “Please don’t be annoyed, dear,” said Arthur. “I’m sure nobody means to be disagreeable.”

  “I am not so sure, and I’m sick and tired of having my dinner tested for archaeological accuracy. If my intuition tells me something is Arthurian, it’s thereby Arthurian, including champagne, and that’s that!”
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  “Of course,” said the Doctor, and her tone was as smooth as the cream they were eating. “We are all being intolerable, and I demand that everyone stop it at once. We have insulted our hlafdiga, and we should be ashamed. I am ashamed. Are you ashamed, Professor Raven?”

  “Eh?” said Penny, startled. “Yes, I suppose I am. Anything served at Arthur’s Round Table is thereby Arthurian, isn’t it?”

  “That is what I like about you Canadians,” said the Doctor; “you are so ready to admit fault. It is a fine, if dangerous, national characteristic. You are all ashamed. And I am ashamed, too.”

  “But I don’t want anybody to feel ashamed,” said Maria. “Just happy. I do wish you could be happy and not nag and quarrel all the time.”

  “Of course, my dear,” said Hollier. “We are ungrateful beasts, and this is a delightful dinner.” He leaned across Penny Raven to pat Maria’s hand, but he misjudged his distance and got his sleeve in Penny’s flummery. “Oh, hell,” he said.

  “About this opera,” said Arthur. “I suppose we ought to give it some thought?”

  “I’ve given it many hours of thought,” said Powell. “The first thing we must have is a story. And I have a story.”

  “Have you so?” said the Doctor. “You have not seen the music, and you have not talked to me, but you have a story. I suppose we are to be permitted to hear the story, so that we little people may set to work on it?”

  Powell drew himself up in his chair, and swept the table with the smile with which he could melt fifteen hundred people in a theatre.

  “But of course,” said he. “And you must not suppose that I wish to impose my story on anyone, and least of all on the musicians. That is not the way we librettists work. We know our place in the hierarchy of operatic artists. When I say I have a story, I mean only that I have a basis on which we may begin discussions of what this opera is to be about.”

  How well he manages us, thought Darcourt. He uses at least three levels of language. There is his Rough Demotic, in which he tells the Doctor to bet her pretty little ass on something, and another form of that is the speech in which he calls me “Sim bach”, and “boy”, and reverses his sentence structure in what I suppose is a translation from his cradle Welsh; and there is his Standard English, in which he addresses the world of strangers, about whom he cares little; and there is his Enriched Literary Speech, finely pronounced and begemmed with quotations from Shakespeare and the more familiar poets, and soaring at need into a form of rhapsodic, bardic chant. It’s a pleasure to be bamboozled by such a man. What lustre he gives to the language that most of us treat as a common drudge. What is he going to give us now? The Enriched, I suppose.