Thus Was Adonis Murdered (Hilary Tamar, #1)

by Sarah Caudwell

Scholarship asks, thank God, no recompense but Truth. It is not for the sake of material reward that she (Scholarship) pursues her (Truth) through the undergrowth of Ignorance, shining on Obscurity the bright torch of Reason and clearing aside the tangled thorns of Error with the keen secateurs of Intellect.

And you may think, dear reader, that those who had been able – modesty forbids me to say, if others do not choose to, privileged – to observe for themselves the process of my reasoning would have competed in eagerness to undertake the task.

‘This made,’ said Selena, ‘a great impression on Julia. If some of the tours are optional, the remainder, she reasons, must be compulsory.

The truth is, I think, that she did not, in her heart of hearts, really believe in income tax. It was a subject which she had studied for examinations and on which she had thereafter advised a number of clients: she naturally did not suppose, in these circumstances, that it had anything to do with real life.

The day had come on which the Revenue discovered her existence and reminded her of theirs.

I myself am not entirely sure that the age and defectiveness of the typewriter were an essential feature of the Revenue’s planning. But Julia was: every time it stuck, her bitterness towards them deepened.

Because it seems to her that every effort she makes to reduce her liability will in fact simply serve to increase it.

After a moment’s reflection, Selena thought it prudent to qualify her last statement with the words ‘Deo volente’. The phrase was intended, no doubt, to allow for some lesser catastrophe than Julia’s arrest on a charge of murder.

they have taken me from a place where there was gin to a place where there is no gin, and from a place where I could smoke to a place where I cannot smoke. That is to say, from the departure lounge to the aeroplane.

Or am I doomed to be shuffled for ever between Venice and London, with occasional diversions, on account of administrative error, to Ankara and Bangkok?

She has that ethereal pallor which one associates with idealism: a large proportion of hijackings are committed by idealists.

his manner indicates that he expects an untruthful answer, his accent that he is an American. The proportion of hijackings committed by Americans is also very large.

‘Aesthetic considerations,’ said Selena, ‘have prevailed over concern for her personal safety. It reflects very well on her.’

The captain has announced that we are about to take off. 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. Is the only thing required of me in an emergency to lean forward and put my head in my hands? If so, I shall be equal to it. I may, however, be missing some deeper significance. The artist intends, perhaps, to depict an act of contrition – the lady is preparing to meet her Maker. That is a less agreeable idea.

The man sitting next to her may indeed be an American; but, though many hijackings are committed by Americans, it by no means follows that many Americans commit hijackings. One must avoid the fallacy of undistributed middle.

A face for which Narcissus might be forsworn and the Moon forget Endymion.

‘Crime in Italy is a national industry. If an Italian isn’t murdering someone in Calabria, it’s only because he’s too busy kidnapping someone else in Lombardy. Or embezzling public funds in Friuli. Or stealing little-known pictures from churches in Verona. Or burgling the Courthouse at Monza.

My entry into the vessel was accordingly at an angle rather obtuse than perpendicular to the quayside and at a speed rather rapid than graceful. In short, I fell in head first.

I set about collecting them with, as I now realize, imprudent haste and insufficient thought for the effect on my balance of an attitude of semi-genuflection.

Venice, as one sees from the map in Ragwort’s guide, consists essentially of three large islands, though subdivided by canals into a great many smaller ones. 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 à trois. For consolation, like a divine hot-water bottle, it has at its foot the little island of San Giorgio Maggiore.

‘Timothy,’ said Selena, ‘Cantrip did say “stabbed”, didn’t he?’ ‘Oh yes,’ said Timothy, ‘ “stabbed” was certainly the word.’

HAhahah!

He studied his wine list with the furtive squint which has characterized the English abroad since the decline of the pound sterling: it comes of comparing prices while pretending to study the vintage.

I already knew, of course, that I was Julia Larwood, and the others, I dare say, also knew who they were; but there is presumably some sense in which the sum of human knowledge was increased.

‘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.

Hahahaha!

Department of Inland Revenue. She is under the impression that it is a vast conspiracy having as its sole objective her physical, mental and financial ruin.

To demonstrate their piety, the Venetians sent out a body-snatching expedition, which abstracted the sacred corpse from its resting-place and brought it back through Customs packed between two sides of pork, so discouraging investigation by the fastidious Muslims.

Having secured the body, they spent three hundred years building a church to house it, during which time they pillaged the Levant for suitable building materials. In the meantime, they lost the corpse; but they did not allow this to discourage them.

‘It lasted six hundred years, signor,’ said Graziella. ‘And when it was quite worn out and would not work at all any more, it was exported, of course, to the United States of America.’

but if people are going to let sentiment interfere with their tax planning, there is no helping them.

Rancour, I have always supposed, is the fruit of long acquaintance.

There we swam very energetically and drank a good deal of Campari soda. That, I mean, was the sum of our joint achievements: Marylou and Ned did most of the swimming and I drank most of the Campari.

“Venus and Adonis”. Julia read it at an impressionable age and has since regarded it as a sort of seduction manual.’

Feeling that if they were going to live the simple life they ought to do the thing properly, the Venetians looked round for someone to build them villas as similar as possible to that occupied by Horace.

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,

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.

Browning had been inspired to write his celebrated poem ‘Pippa Passes’ – the one, if my memory serves me, in which there was joy in the morning.

Knowing how infrequently in the real world things obey the laws of mathematics or any other logical system, I would not, perhaps, but for the wine we had drunk at lunch, have ventured to put this theory to any empirical test; but Verona showed a proper respect for the laws of geometry.

I had already established, as you know, that it was logically impossible for Kenneth to be distressed by anything that might occur between Ned and myself; but Kenneth, being an artist, has perhaps not studied logic and is unaware of the impossibility.

I would think it odd, he said, that he had never married. I did not in fact think it at all odd – the statistical chances against any woman being prepared to endure both the hairiness of his legs and the tedium of his conversation seemed to me to be negligible.

the Othello chap’s meant to have done frightfully well in the army and be a wiz at strategy and all that. And in that case, he wouldn’t be the sort of twit who thought his wife was having it off with someone else just because she lost her handkerchief.

the way Julia saw it was that a chap who’d spent all his life in the army was just the sort of chap to get a bee in his bonnet about pure womanhood and so on, because he wouldn’t get the chance to find out that women were more or less like anyone else and he’d start getting all idealistic about them. So as soon as he found out Desdemona wasn’t perfect – I mean, the first time she spilt coffee or dropped cigarette ash on the carpet – he’d start feeling all disillusioned and thinking she’d betrayed his ideals. And after that, making him think she was having it off with some other chap would be absolute child’s play.’

The travel agents did say, after all, that service was included.

Still, one must not be ungrateful – strawberries are strawberries.

I have responded sympathetically, if not accurately, to all these enquiries.

‘We understand,’ said Selena, ‘that a guest in the same hotel has been the victim of an act of violence, unfortunately fatal,

Indeed, the whole city seems somehow illusory, like a stage set for a death-and-daggers melodrama. One feels the designer has overdone it rather – the water is too black, the alleyways too narrow, the silence of the gondolas too improbably sinister for anyone to believe they are real.

‘The whole object of an Oxford education is to ensure that when you want to know someone you know someone who knows them.’

Since her late husband took refuge in mortality, Eleanor has been the majority shareholder and guiding spirit.

‘I don’t doubt if Faust had had the good sense to consult you about his contract with Mephistopheles you’d have thought of a way of getting him out of it.