Murder at the Villa Byzantine

17

Devices and Desires

I did not kill my mother, Moon wrote, tears streaming down her face. Nobody seems to believe me, but I didn’t kill her. I didn’t like her, but I didn’t kill her. I guess I used to love her when I was a kid, when I was nine or ten and we lived in Bulgaria, but it all feels like a dream now. I remember her taking me mushroom-picking in the Vitosha mountain once. We saw a roe deer, which stood very still and stared back at us. My mother held me by the hand and whispered, ‘She’s going back to her child. Her child is waiting for her.’ I know it’s dumb, but thinking about the roe deer and her child and my hand in my mother’s hand makes me want to cry.

Tancred Vane sat in front of his computer, working on the historical background of the Prince Cyril biography.

The Bulgarian monarchy was a casualty of the rival totalitarianisms of Hitler and Stalin in the 1940s. The independent Bulgarian kingdom was a product of the balance-of-power diplomacy that characterized the period preceding World War I. The practice of despatching dashing German princes to fashion modern kingdoms out of backward Balkan lands was fanciful, arrogant, even absurd; the motivation was a typically nineteenth-century blend of faith, greed and intrigue.

He heard the front door bell ring. Miss Hope. Couldn’t be anyone else. He glanced at his watch. On time, as always. The feeling of vague unease returned. He remembered his dream. Stella Markoff trying to warn him – pointing to her wired lips Nonsense!

The front door bell rang again. He clicked on Save and rose.

The lodge, he reminded himself. He would have to tackle the matter of the lodge.

‘You, my dear boy, are devoted to your art to the exclusion of everything else. That can be quite dangerous,’ Miss Hope said. She was watching Tancred Vane as he wrote down something she had said earlier on. As usual they were sitting in his study, she in the window seat, he beside his desk.

‘Dangerous?’ Vane looked up with an abstracted smile. ‘Surely not? In what way dangerous?’

‘Well, you allow this biography to claim every ounce of your attention, not to mention your energy. In consequence, I fear, you may be missing out on some of the things that really matter in life.’

‘You don’t think the Prince Cyril biography matters?’

‘No. To be perfectly honest, I don’t. Why are you looking so very shocked? It’s in the Bible. Do not put your trust in princes. Ah, Tancredi, my Tancredi, perhaps one day I will write a story about you!’

‘What kind of story?’

‘It will be the kind of story that moves like a series of tapestries as it enacts the consequences of an artist’s strange encounter with his own being. It will be an extended metaphor for the separation, even estrangement, between the artist and the conventional world, and the artist’s sense of an inner glory and necessity, which can be shirked only at the expense of his true relationship to himself.’

‘What do you mean? Sorry – all this is a bit above my head.’

‘Do you think you know yourself? Tell me truthfully!’ Her eyes were fixed on him.

‘Do I know myself? Well, I think so, yes. Don’t most people?’

‘No! Of course they don’t.’

‘In that case perhaps I don’t… I don’t really know.’

‘I was once told that I had no idea what I was really like, that I hid my feelings even from myself. It was even suggested that there was a great wild forest within me, of which I was not aware.’

‘A forest?’ Miss Hope, Vane decided, was in a decidedly fanciful mood today. He was not in the least interested in the wild forest inside her, honestly, though of course he wouldn’t dream of saying so. It wouldn’t do to hurt the old girl’s feelings.

‘As the river flows to the ocean, my soul shall flow to thine,’ she murmured. ‘For some reason I am haunted by these lines.’

‘Shall we continue? You started telling me about the fancy dress party at the lodge?’

‘Oh dear!’ Miss Hope threw up her hands in a gesture of mock despair. ‘From the sublime to the ridiculous! Very well, Tancred. You shall have your fancy dress party if that’s what you want. I remember it was crazy weather for January. A sudden balmy spell had swept a froth of showers and the fresh breezes of April into Sofia in the dead of winter… The fancy dress party was Cyril’s idea.’

‘Was Prince Cyril a good host?’

‘He was a terrible host. He liked to say tactless and embarrassing things to people. But there were always a lot of guests at the lodge. Some people don’t mind being insulted and discomfited, I suppose, so long as it is a prince of the blood who does the insulting.’

‘What was the lodge like?’ Tancred asked. He had a particular reason to want to know about the lodge.

‘It was made of creamy-coloured limestone and had a shiny, rather intricate, steel-trimmed art nouveau canopy. A most enchanting building… You look as though you want to ask something?’

‘N-no – nothing.’ He couldn’t bring himself to say it.

‘Are you sure? You have a secretive mouth, you know. Cyril’s fancy dress party was not of the ordinary kind. Everybody had to impersonate a character from fiction and had to behave consistently all the time, and at the end of the party a specially selected jury had to decide who or what one’s character was. The person who was voted to have acted his or her character with the greatest conviction got a prize.’

‘What kind of a prize?’

‘A box of cigars for the men, a box of the finest chocolate creams for the ladies. I don’t need to tell you that there existed among Prince Cyril’s entourage a tendresse for all things Teutonic. So, unsurprisingly, we had several Brunnhildes and Nibelungen and half a dozen Siegfrieds.’

‘What character did you dress up as?’

Miss Hope’s lips hovered on the edge of a smile. It was as if she knew some strange secret, which she would almost, but never wholly, divulge. ‘Nannies don’t dress up, Tancred. But you might be amused to know I was made to recite a funny English poem! On account of my extreme youth, no doubt. So I recited “The Young Lady of Clare”. Do you know it? No?’ Miss Hope clasped her hands on her lap and cleared her throat.

‘There was a Young Lady of Clare, Who was sadly pursued by a bear; When she found she was tired, she abruptly-’

She looked at him. ‘Can you guess what it was the Lady of Clare did?’

‘Retired?’ Tancred suggested. ‘Perspired?’

‘Expired, Tancred. She expired! That unfortunate Lady of Clare! Edward Lear, I think. Well, it was at that very same party that Cyril decided to make me his confidante. Till then he’d treated me with amiable indifference. Oh, he was so unpredictable!’

‘What was it he confided in you?’

‘Well, he started by telling me that he preferred bad weather to good weather. If he woke up in the morning and saw it was grey and drizzly outside, he felt reassured that life would go on for ever. Sunny days, on the other hand, made him want to hide under the covers and think of dying.’

‘Think of dying! How very strange.’

‘He was a very strange character. Prince Cyril had an “innate” dislike of wrapping paper. He called it “my peculiar animus”. He was sick at the mere sight of it! An “inexplicable” feeling surfaced within him, he said. For that reason he found Christmas particularly trying.’

‘I assume presents were given to him unwrapped?’

‘They were. It eliminated the element of surprise completely. Oh, his oddities were endless! In his study he kept different seals to suit his different moods. I remember one particular occasion when the Montenegrin charge d’affaires and various other dignitaries stood round, waiting for him to seal a document. “Has anyone seen my mellow seal?” Cyril asked. But the mellow seal seemed to have vanished into thin air.’

‘What happened?’

‘Cyril went on smiling – he was in a mellow mood, you see – but then he became furious – which was fortunate since he decided to use his “furious” seal instead, after which he calmed down. There was a collective sigh of relief, I remember, like a gust of wind.’

‘I wonder if he was a manic-depressive – bipolar?’

‘He used to say things like, “My pain is crushing when I suffer, but my joy, when I’m happy, is also inexpressible.” He said it in German, of course. Well, that night – the night of the fancy dress party – he told me how much he enjoyed racing up and down the streets of Sofia in his Lagonda Rapier and the high price he had paid for his pursuit of speed records when his beloved dog Fritzie was catapulted out of the car and killed!’

Tancred Vane looked up slowly. ‘I thought you said before his beloved dog’s name was Sascha?’

‘Sascha was Prince Cyril’s second beloved dog, Tancred. He had two dogs.’ Miss Hope’s eyes remained steady. ‘Prince Cyril then spoke to me about international affairs and the possibility of war, which he gave every impression of relishing. He seemed convinced of a German victory! I must say his abstractions and absolutes had an unmistakably Teutonic stiffness about them.’ She adjusted her pince-nez. ‘What happened next took me completely by surprise, it was so terribly sudden.’

‘What happened?’

‘He started whispering in my ear that he felt the irresistible urge to make love to me. He said fresh young girls were his passion, that my smooth cheeks drove him to distraction, words to that effect. Again he spoke in German. I misunderstood him completely – oh dear! I was so naive, so innocent!’ Miss Hope gave a girlish laugh.

‘You mean – Prince Cyril made a pass at you?’

‘Well, yes, since you choose to put it like that.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I said – oh, what was it? No, I can’t remember. I am so sorry, Tancred… I must look up my diary notes… Call me a muddle-headed old ass, but I can’t remember a thing! Don’t look so disappointed, it’s not the end of the world.’ Her hands continued to be clasped on her lap, but now she was looking out of the window. There was a pause. ‘Tell me, Tancred, how would you feel if this project of yours were to be snatched away from you?’

‘What do you mean, snatched away?’

‘If you were to learn that, for some reason, you couldn’t go on writing this silly biography? Would you be upset?’

‘Would I be upset if-?’ He broke off. Had he misheard? Had she said ‘this silly biography’? ‘Of course I would be upset! Terribly upset!’

She did look odd today and no mistake! The way she sat, something taut about her, like a spring. Her pince-nez kept catching the sun and flashing its reflection back at him.

‘You haven’t heard of someone making trouble, have you? Of someone trying to prevent the biography from being published?’ Tancred said in an anxious voice. ‘Cyril’s nephew – King Simeon – or some of the other living Coburgs? I haven’t heard anything from the Fleur-de-Lis Press. I am sure they would have informed me if there’d been a problem.’

She smiled indulgently. ‘Of course they would have. The estimable Fleur-de-Lis Press would have been the first to know, should anyone have started muddying the waters. Their legal department would have got in touch with you without fail. No, nothing of the sort. Nothing as literal as that.’

‘Thank God… What do you mean “nothing as literal”?’

‘I have been trying to understand you better, Tancred, to see what kind of person you are… What your priorities are… Life is so short… I care an awful lot about you, you know.’

‘I care about you too,’ he said after a pause.

‘Do you, Tancred? Do you really? My dear boy.’ She rose slowly from her seat. Her shoulders, he noticed, were less hunched than before. ‘That is what I always thought, but it’s good to hear the actual words spoken out. I knew it from the very start of our association. I knew we were meant to be together, work together, exist together, the very moment I saw your photograph, the very moment I heard your name!’

‘Really? What photograph?’

‘Oh Tancred, you have moved the flowers from left to right.’ She pointed with her forefinger.

‘Have I?’

‘Yes!’

Her face had gone pink. He didn’t see what the fuss was about, but she seemed absolutely delighted by this discovery. She meant the little bronze vase with the petunias she had brought him during her previous visit – pale mauve with deep red complicated veins that made them look like a medical diagram of human lungs.

He didn’t know why he chose that particular moment to tell her about the lodge.