The Manticore

Later: That was how I put the question to Ramsay when I cornered him this afternoon in the room he uses for his writing. Pargetter's advice: always go to a man in his room, for then he has no place to escape to, whereas you may leave when you please. What did he say?

– Davey, you are behaving like the amateur sleuth in a detective story. The reality of your father's death is much more complex than anything you can uncover that way. First, you must understand that nobody – not Eisengrim or anyone – can make a man do something under hypnotism that he has not some genuine inclination to do. So: Who killed Boy Staunton? Didn't the Head say, "Himself, first of all?" We all do it, you know, unless we are taken off by some unaccountable accident. We determine the time of our death, and perhaps the means. As for the "usual cabal" I myself think "the woman he knew and the woman he did not know" were the same person – your mother. He never had any serious appraisal of her weakness or her strength. She had strength, you know, that he never wanted or called on. She was Ben Cruikshank's daughter, and don't suppose that was nothing just because Ben wasn't a village grandee like Doc Staunton. Boy never had any use for your mother as a grown-up woman, and she kept herself childish in the hope of pleasing him. When we have linked our destiny with somebody, we neglect them at our peril. But Boy never knew that. He was so well graced, so gifted, such a genius in his money-spinning way, that he never sensed the reality of other people. Her weakness called him, but her occasional shows of strength shamed him.

– You loved Mother, didn't you?

– I thought I did when I was a boy. But the women we really love are the women who complete us, who have the qualities we can borrow and so become something nearer to whole men. Just as we complete them, of course; it's not a one-way thing. Leola and I, when romance was stripped away, were too much alike; our strengths and weaknesses were too nearly the same. Together we would have doubled our gains and our losses, but that isn't what love is.

– Did you sleep with her?

– I know times have changed, Davey, but isn't that rather a rude question to put to an old friend about your mother?

– Carol used to insist that you were my father.

– Then Carol is a mischief-making bitch. I'll tell you this, however: your mother once asked me to make love to her, and I refused. In spite of one very great example I had in my life I couldn't rise to love as an act of charity. The failure was mine, and a bitter one. Now I'm not going to say the conventional thing and tell you I wish you were my son. I have plenty of sons – good men I've taught, who will carry something of me into places I would never reach. Listen, Davey, you great clamorous baby-detective, there is something you ought to know at your age: every man who amounts to a damn has several fathers, and the man who begat him in lust or drink or for a bet or even in the sweetness of honest love may not be the most important father. The fathers you choose for yourself are the significant ones. But you didn't choose Boy, and you never knew him. No; no man knows his father. If Hamlet had known his father he would never have made such an almighty fuss about a man who was fool enough to marry Gertrude. Don't you be a two-bit Hamlet, clinging to your father's ghost until you are destroyed. Boy is dead; dead of his own will, if not wholly of his own doing. Take my advice and get on with your own concerns.

– My concerns are my father's concerns and I can't escape that. Alpha is waiting for me. And Castor.

– Not your father's concerns. Your kingdoms. Go and reign, even if he has done a typical Boy trick by leaving you a gavel where he used a golden sceptre.

– I see you won't talk honestly with me. But I must ask one more question; who was "the inevitable fifth, who was keeper of his conscience and keeper of the stone"?

– I was. And as keeper of his conscience, and as one who has a high regard for you, I will say nothing about it.

– But the stone? The stone that was found in his mouth when they rescued his body from the water? Look, Ramsay, I have it here. Can you look at it and say nothing?

– It was my paperweight for over fifty years. Your father gave it to me, very much in his own way. He threw it at me, wrapped up in a snowball. The rock-in-the-snowball man was part of the father you never knew, or never recognized.

– But why was it in his mouth?