8 Winderby's Last Case - Duncan McGibbon (read book txt) 📗

have read Calvin on Adam's sin
and find myself confused
I stare into the blue eyes
of innocent children
and know they are depraved
and bidden to perdition,
but how did Adam fall?
If God can name the saved.
No! I do not doubt,
or is he just a being addicted to distance.
Today we are going to look at
the foundations of a ruined villa
which was once owned by
the great Silentio family. We are very
excited. We have just met Padre
Piero, himself a Silentio, who has
offered to be our guide. As he is at
the door, I must finish “
To the music of Empires,
Republics and Protectorates.
the slow Adagio of repression,
secrecy and hoarded lands rolls on.
“You were there with Silentio,
weren’t you Mr Winderby?”
I turn into a past become mine.
She hurries off; her daughter stays,
a woman officer of the British Blackshirts,
marching to the sound
of canned, ribald laughter.

19.. Supporting Document

"The Two in One Spirit Company (UK) Plc.
guarantee absolutely
that their patent 'Unio' Furnace
will realise all hopes,
human ambitions, wishes and
less specific desires
from which the customer may be suffering
and consolidate them all
in a fixed, ineradicable craving
for the impossible.

Your present not unedifying taste
for the human condition
will be manageably converted
into one consuming and simple craving.

Live the life of commmercials
in a suburb of green lawns now.
Wear eternal white flannels, or tracksuits
behind the clear security
of double glazed self-confidence.

Watch your chattels insure themselves
against the containerised outcome
of your hope.
Forget workaday ambition
learn to love the judgements
of abstract management.
Breathe the fragrance of
anodyne perfumes and
enjoy a fixed appetite.
Learn to glue yes and no together
without payment of tuition fees
Yet to achieve desire consolidation
the following visit to the authorities
must be complied with
if the customer is to gain
the specified result.
Excerpt:
How many times did you respond
to the emotional intuitions
of your local police?


20. The Wanderings of Winderby 3


The daughter begins to speak:
“My father told me about rubble, friable brick
a humid, gritty holocaust of dust,
George Peake Bart F.R.A it seems, went on
tunnelling, breaking apart dessicated
mortar, pounding at dead stucco
with his sleeper
He told me about that roar
with which the masonry gave way
and he found himself
staring through the ceiling
of the Capella Silentini.
The vaults had been built in the form
of a small capella,
He said he could see three tombs,
whose relief-work seemed to combine
on four walls. One of the tombs was empty.
At a glance the first
was in the style of the Mid Renaissance,
The work of Tullio Lombardo
or perhaps a pupil, but it showed
signs of Bregno workshop too.
Its design resembled the Foscari monument
which Perkins had seen in Venice.
He could see from the inscription
that the remains of Cardinal
Silentio were to be found here,
What perplexed him was the statuary.
Momentarily he told me he thought
of my mother, Emma, of me
and her sister Louisa Harding
who were picnicking on the
lawn by the ruins of a semicircular
colonnade. The vagabonds were very active
in these parts. Yet a minute later
according to a confession he made to me,
the image of the living Silentio came to his mind
and pausing no longer, he slid into the
chapel causing an uproar of dust.
Regaining his feet, he went over
to examine the iconography in closer detail.
The figure of the Holy Man was not in
ecclesiastical vestments, but in the
clothing of Orpheus or Bacchus.
It lay on a lightly moulded bed, underneath
which was the sarcophagus, upheld by
three crouching cataryids which resembled
maenads, were their arms not interlinked.
Two were facing outwards, while the
third, supporting the sepulcre with
outstretched arms faced the opposite
way and unlike the other two,
looked towards a figure of
Eurydice who stood with her finger
over her lips in a gesture
of beseeching silence.
My father told me he had a flash of insight.
His noble patron, would be
proud to know he had found a group that
at least alluded to the last triad of
the graces which used to stand in
the now ruined Cortile of the same Palazzo.
Yet the maenads seemed to be looking
to Antiope as if in reversal of the myth,
not Orpheus' killers but his worshippers.
On the tomb was carved the inscription
“The soul cannot wholly fall
without ascending into the whole.”

My father had felt his way towards the next
tomb in the fading light. The humid air
was arid with thick dust.
It gave him a permanent cough.
On the west wall of what obviously
was not a chapel, but a 'tempio.'
George could see the tomb of Silentio Silentini.
It was in Rococo style, markedly similar
to that of Pigalle's elaborate sarcophagus
for Maurice of Saxony
in the Eglise St Thomas in Strasbourg.
The inscription was carved on a relief Pyramid,
Canova style, against the wall.
The Holy Man strode erect towards his
open tomb with a slab of granite displaced
by the hand of Procris, or fortitude
wrapped in a thin white sheet
and in a marble winding sheet,
Callisto wearing a bear's skin
and a short tunic weeps by his tomb,
but Polyxena opens the tomb,
yet her figure is only a block of marble,
uncut by any chisel.
Below, on a plinth, Penthesilea
brings Alcestis and Iphigenia to see.
The whole is dominated by the figure of Erato
again only a name on a block
which dominates in flight
above the pyramid inscription:
'Ex bello pax' – from war, peace.
He told me that as he left he could hear
the curious crying of a child from within.
Foxes have been known to raise such cries.
My father would always listen out for them
back in Surrey.
He turned to what he thought was a
third tomb on the west wall opposite to Piero's.
At first it seemed to be a black façade,
but coming closer he said later he caught sight of
a face which reminded him of his wife's.
The third tomb was of Francesco Silentio,
Its style horrified him more than the
amazing resemblance of one of the figures,
it was in the most recent fashion,
quite brutally plain and seemed untouched
by dust, the three figures which reminded him
of the virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity
accompanied Chastity towards
a narrow door. Except my father confided to me
they expressed no such virtues.
He told me how much he wanted to get papers
for export at once. My father went
to where his wife and her sisietr had been waiting,
yet there was no sign of them. Nor was there ever a sign
to be seen of them. I was found crying in a nearby grove.
Despite his letters to Palmerston,
my father returned to Earmley House,a saddened man,
but you were there Mr Winderby.
You can explain. I saw you.”

Throughout her story, explosions of laughter
ripped through the narrative, sometimes
making it difficult to go on.
The woman fell to on the ground,
hit by a sudden brick thrown by someone
in the British anti-Fascist league.’
again to peals of helpless mirth.
To the chords of Wolf, Schoeck and Szymanowski,
she is carried off. The impossible poles
of love and violence reconciled only
in the music of an age of change.
The whole absurd charade just
an excuse for a bellylaugh
at the expense of kings and prelates.

21 Police Notice of Disinstallation:

Suspect: Norman Stanley Cley
Claim: disallowed
Reason:
Interrogation broken off
for robust exercise.
Insured accidentally sustained several eye wounds,
while using the boxing facilities at the station.
His wife in the meantime has been accepted.
She has left for Cythère,
enjoying our calm luxury, the Police Holiday Raffle.
Notice she has gone. Husband must not follow her.

22. The Wanderings of Winderby 4

A man in a black coat lifts off the mask
of Penthesilea’s face . I remember it was myself.
Now I understand the laughter.
It was Thersites the satririst.
(Hand held camera)
“I reached the Channel
(Cross cut, globe universal time)
And evaded the bearded Dover Patrol.
To seagulls and siren blasts,
the boat sailed soon enough,
its glossy windows picturing
my cropped, serious face
against the cold, leaden waves,
(close up)
which is all I remembered
before the sudden invocation
of the fog -horn.
(Dissolve)
Now an endless trundle
of Flanders thoughtscapes
(Stock shot Brabant)
and only this tall girl
I pictured,
with a laughing face,
who got on in Paris,
her supple birch learning to sway,
who sat opposite me,
wearing a Nineteenth Century
Arlecchino dress, with cloth rhombs.
and a Bergama cap.

(Cut to close up, Winderby)

She told the young man sitting next to her,
her father was a poet in Paris and she was travelling
as far as Héricy, for Valvins, having watched
Axel in Paris, when her father had gone
to Oxford to lecture.
She could not see the other women, who lay
now on my side of being.
It was strange to see such clothes,
but I gathered from her
friend she is to perform in
an amateur theatrical.
this evening, about which
she was very excited.
( Fizzle to close up. Cut away section
on studio train)
The train stopped at Héricy.
I saw the river, the Fontainebleau hills,
the bridge lost to the years
we pretend to call war.
I wondered would she notice if I too slept?
Swinburne’s snore in the mind can
disturb some sensitive souls:
she cannot hear or see me, so she sleeps
impetuously turning, unaware of
my unseen presence.
Her friend, a young, strapping man says
( Fizzle to the Valvins Theatre)
‘I’m Pathelin’ He speaks his
lines with a theatrical gusto,
staring, gesturing
and exclaiming.
(Close up)
‘Crowned out,
mother of Divinity
my creel, my Credo!
I want to excuse me,
enthuse me,
I denounce the Lord expat
I enounce the sward
The maw of omnipotence
I speak the sackbut.
Noise is forbidden,
compute instead.
Gag his money talk.
Capisco,
dearest swine
nearest mine?”
( Studio shot.
Enter Genevieve Mallarme as Guillemette)
“He had an uncle from Oxford
that’s why he prattles
so in metaphysics.”
(Re-enter the same man as the tailor
This time playing for laughs)
“He’s gone mental
with my cloth in his crotch”
The lady gasps and laughs.
The man resumes Pathelin
“Why enter, fine dame.
What are the reptiles after?
Alcestis, the girl in the box,
dallying wi’ the men.
Get lost, crap bags.
Ordain me at once.
At the double
I’ll be Old Nick,
Old Admetus,
in the seminary
of the senile.
When they belch
instead of intoning the Mass.
(Enter Genvieve Mallarme asAlcestis)
“Iolcus, country and house and virgin bedroom
of my forebears “
"I am ready," the girl says.
“I gaze upon the boat with with twin-oars,
andhe who ferries the dead, Charon,
shouts out at me fingering the the blade.
“what’s the point of being late,
you’re losing me time.
Bad tempered, he hurries me on,
as you saw