He went back to his room, next to the tyrant’s. He waited for everything to go quiet, counting the sweet-tongued bells of Milan as they tolled the hours. He was perfectly calm, and the time passed quickly. At one hour after midnight he rose and went into the tyrant’s chamber.
Galeazzo’s sleeping face gave away none of his secrets. A little lamp flickered at the foot of his bed. As Lytto came near, he started up and, still half-asleep, enquired:
“Who is it?”
“It is I, Ippolyto di Franghipani,” the boy replied calmly.
He drew his dagger, and freed Milan from the tyrant.
1923
PART TWO. 1932–43
CYNTHIA
(a fragment)
WHEN THEY THREW ME OUT of Cambridge for my poor taste in neckties and generally immoral conduct, I enrolled at University College London, whose chief claim to fame (though they kept this private) was that its Dean was obliged, as a matter of principle, to see off any clergyman who dared set foot on the premises.
So one fine day, by way of experiment, I dressed up in the traditional garb of an Anglican vicar, so familiar from popular films, and seated myself conspicuously by the main entrance to the college, where English girls and Persian boys in sporting attire bathed themselves in the pallid English sun. I lowered my eyes reverently and waited in delicious terror for the Dean, the sanctified elders and university proctors to process before me. I love processions. But none came; teatime was approaching, and I suddenly realised how naive I had been, yet again. So I began to preach. I spread my arms wide and held forth to my brothers and sisters present, as seemed appropriate, about certain revelations of the divine intentions supposedly vouchsafed me on the Liverpool to London train, and how the Great Beast of the Apocalypse was actually Scotland. Clearly unimpressed, the English girls heard me out with an air of devout boredom. Only then did I leave. Utterly humiliated, I went off for some tea. I felt that English good breeding had rejected my entire being, and that, even as a cautionary example, my whole existence was theologically unsound. I was oppressed by the immensity of the world and my own insignificance in it. That evening I wandered tearfully around Hyde Park, and, in a great, rueful gesture, I made a present of the reflections on the lake, which she so loved, to my girlfriend Cynthia. I would have offered the whole world to her, or to anyone else who might be kind enough to stroke my hand in a spirit of nocturnal sentimentality. I kept nothing back. I gave it all away — most generously of all, given my incurable snobbery, the London Halberdiers.
As a result, I was once again the first person to arrive the next morning at the Reading Room of the British Museum. Ever since my late uncle’s Jules Verne-like will had sentenced me to a life of scholarly pursuits, library visits had become practically second nature to me — though my real nature might well have been to drive a locomotive or charge on horseback across the Great Hungarian Plain. I really can’t say. I never did grow out of that adolescent phase in which — in an experimental kind of way — you are forever dressing up as different people. When I contemplate the extent of my wardrobe it astonishes even me.
I sat in my usual place. Before me lay the usual books, with their divine smell of dust and their shamefaced air of not having been read for centuries. One or two of them had, to my precise knowledge, last been handled by the poet laureate Southey in about 1830, the thought of which moved me deeply. Then the young man who sat beside me every day turned up. I was rather fond of this fellow. He seemed to me to be truly part of the atmosphere of the place, along with the great dome above our heads, the rings of shelves with their endless rows of books, and the silence, deeper and more intense than in a temple, in which the only sound was the constant rustling of paper. I settled myself down and began to read.
Later I found myself browsing through the catalogues and wondering whether I might make Cynthia a gift of them too, or perhaps bestow them on Eileen, keeping only the letter ‘T’, to which I was so devoted, when I became aware of the same young man standing beside me and wanting a word. I had long intended doing the same myself, and had he been a woman I would surely have already done so, but I had been unable to overcome my shyness with other men. But I now saw that the great moment had come when a new friendship, one determined in some cloudy pre-existence, was about to be born.
“Yes?” I said, and smiled obligingly.
“Oh, sorry,” he said, and stammered a bit, in his confusion deploying one or two phrasal verbs incorrectly, but very politely for all that. “You’ve been using that book by Henry Thomas on the novels of Amadis de Gaula for two weeks now, and I need it rather urgently. Would it be a very great nuisance if you could let me have it for a couple of days?”
“Not at all. But… you’re also working on Amadis?”
“Oh, yes,” he replied, with that warm, deeply confiding and slightly myopic smile that only philologists can produce when talking about their subject. A tingle of comfortable recognition shot through my heart. I knew that this was the heaven-sent person I so much needed. Not because of Amadis de Gaula. What was Amadis to me, and what was I to him? But I was gazing at the one man to whom in 1930 Amadis still had something to say: a man over whose head the centuries of cold reason had passed without trace; a man who still had a feeling for the charming, ever surprising and truly heroic folly that had once been Europe.
Meanwhile teatime had come round again, as it always does, and we went out, so rapt in our great discovery of each other that we cast not a glance at the old woman who fed the pigeons every morning in the gardens outside the Museum with a strange, erotic joy written all over her face. We made our way straight to the Bury Street tearoom and, as if by unspoken agreement, both ordered buttered crumpets with our tea, and gazed at one another in wonder and expectation.
Amadis, the unparalleled knight, must have been turning in his grave. Whole decades, perhaps I should say centuries, must have passed since anyone had spoken about him at such length as we did that day. For a full three hundred years ungarlanded oblivion had squatted on his once-great novels. Now we summoned to memory that Spanish nobleman who called on a friend one day to find the whole family in mourning. “Amadis is no more,” declared his grieving host, and pointed to an open book, that great and challenging folio whose disturbing sentences captured the dream of the centuries — the dream that has since been lost. We spoke of the wonderful names he gave his characters — Oriana, and Urganda la Discognue, and Galaor — and his countless fantastical islands set in the mystical Mediterranean Sea.