‘Outrageous, not outraged! Mind your innuendos, Grandmamma,’ protested the handsome Bernardo. ‘You should go to evening classes and learn English.’
‘So why you are dodging the synagogue?’ his relative demanded hotly, taking the battle on to her own ground.
‘But I’m not dodging it, Grandmamma. I just don’t care to go, that’s all. A lot of old men in beards, and all of them wearing their hats! The synagogue doesn’t appeal to me at all, especially on a Saturday. I’d rather play golf with my friends.’
‘Of course, there was Asmund, a professional writer of runic inscriptions, who seems to have lived, (or, more likely, to have worked), somewhere between a.d. 1025 and 1050.’ went on Sweyn, patiently, to Laura. ‘By that time, of course, Christianity had taken over, and we find a rune-stone of the period commemorating a death — the death of a much-loved son. It concludes with the words:‘God and God’s mother help his soul.’
‘So what was good enough for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, is not good enough for you!’ yelled the Jewish grandmother to Bernardo.
‘But the patriarchs didn’t go to the synagogue, Grandmamma dear. There weren’t any synagogues in those days,’ explained Bernardo, amused, but also slightly apprehensive.
‘So you risk to die, like poor little Isaac, for someone’s jealousy, yes?’ demanded Rebekah.
‘At one time,’ pursued Sweyn, ‘the runic alphabet was reduced to sixteen letters. Later, however…’
‘You’re talking through your top-knot, Grandmamma,’ protested Bernardo, his voice rising higher.
‘I am? Then think of this, maybe. Who else but this Hagar is wishing to see this Isaac dead? Yahweh? Phooey! Why He should wish to murder a little small boy on the top of a hill? Hagar is pitched out, with child Ishmael, no? Jealousy, envy, hatred, malice, all in Sarah’s heart. She made to have Hagar turned away into the desert. I tell you, Abraham was got at! Why he should want to have a son by this Sarah, when he has already this beautiful little boy by slave-girl Hagar?’
‘The magical inscriptions,’ went on Sweyn, ‘protected, not only people, but the rune-stones themselves. There is quite a powerful curse put on the Bjorketorp stone in Norway, for example.’
‘But nobody killed Isaac, Grandmamma,’ argued Bernardo. ‘There was a ram in a thicket, if you remember.’
‘I remember good. Why not? He is in my stars, this ram. In April I am born, isn’t it? You may give me a little ram in diamonds for a coat-brooch on my birthday, April ninth. You are not forgetting?’
‘The Golden Fleece!’ muttered Bernardo to Binnie, who giggled wildly and began to choke.
‘Runes,’ went on Sweyn, his quiet voice now audible in the silence which had followed Rebekah’s request, ‘were little used from the end of the sixth century until the beginning of the eighth century. England then developed her own alphabet of twenty-eight letters and this was increased in the ninth century to the number of thirty-three.’
‘So twenty pieces of money are given for Joseph, sold into Egypt,’ said Rebekah, glaring at Bernardo.
‘Bulbs,’ announced Binnen, from her seat between Bernardo and his grandmother, who had been arguing with one another across her, ‘are of more importance than money, in my opinion. Anything which grows is of more value than something which does not grow.’
‘Money does grow,’ muttered Rebekah.
‘Ah, yes, dear aunt,’ said Derde, ‘do tell Dame Beatrice about the bulb-fields. She tells me she has a very large garden at her country home in Hampshire. I am sure she would be interested.’
‘Well, some of us would not!’ shouted Rebekah. ‘Bulbs? Phooey! I spit on bulbs!’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ groaned Bernardo. ‘Be quiet, darling Grandmamma. You’re making yourself conspicuous! Look at poor Aunt Petra! She blushes for her mother!’
Petra, beautifully dressed, handsome and slim, grimaced at him from the opposite side of the table. It was difficult to believe that the quiet, well-mannered, sophisticated woman was the dreadful Rebekah’s daughter. She must take after her father’s side of the family, Dame Beatrice thought. Rebekah, abandoning her war with Bernardo, leaned forward and studied the rings on Dame Beatrice’s left hand. She gesticulated.
‘The emerald,’ she said. ‘What you are asking for the emerald?’
Dame Beatrice finished the last morsels of a delicious rijsttafel. Then she removed several of her rings and took off the one to which Bernardo’s grandmother had referred. She passed it over to her. The old Jewess dived into her handbag, which she had been prudently clasping underneath the table between her feet, and produced a watchmaker’s eye-piece. She screwed this in, picked up the ring, scrutinised it closely and then announced:
‘Flawed. Twenty-five pounds I offer in English money.’
‘It is not flawed,’ said Dame Beatrice equably. ‘Moreover, it is not for sale.’
‘The first bulbs,’ said Binnen anxiously, ‘date from about the year 1560. They were experimental and, of course, all were tulips.’
‘There was speculation in bulbs at one time,’ said Derde, nobly backing up his aunt. ‘And, another thing, we used to divide off the bulb-fields by hedges, but these impeded mechanisation and so are disappearing.’
‘Bulbs are to be sold by auction,’ announced the Jewish grandmother, scornfully. ‘No commercial savvy has anybody in bulbs. All are cheated. All auctions are cheat. Somebody runs up and then backs down. Fake buying!’
‘But, Grandmamma,’ protested Bernardo, ‘you couldn’t sell all those millions of bulbs any other way than by auction.’
‘I,’ responded his relative, ‘would be having all those silly little bulbs through my fingers.’
‘Like the pea-shucks, eh?’ retorted Bernardo.
‘You know, Aunt Rebekah,’ said Derde, desperately, ‘there is State control of the bulb-fields. All diseased bulbs are weeded out and destroyed. The auctions are perfectly fair, I can assure you.’
‘Mrs Gavin,’ put in Sweyn, ‘has been telling me about the British rune-stones, particularly in relation to a story which she is prepared to lend me, and which I want very much to read.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Laura, accepting the ball which had been lobbed to her. ‘It’s a story by M. R. James, once Provost of Eton, called Casting the Runes. I don’t know that it has much bearing upon the subject,’ she added, ‘because the runes don’t appear to have been, so to speak, the official ones.’
‘One never knows,’ said Sweyn cheerfully. ‘The story has its origin in magical practices, no doubt. The word “runes” means mystery, secret, secrecy.’
‘The festival of flowers is well worth seeing,’ said Binnen. ‘The growers do not need the flowers, only the bulbs. They are glad to have the flowers used in the festival. The floats are miraculous.’
‘So is the Three Arts Ball,’ said the immaculate Jewish daughter, making her voice heard almost for the first time. ‘I like it very much.’
‘Barbarity!’ said her mother. ‘One talks of the morals of ostriches!’
‘Do ostriches have morals, Grandmamma?’ enquired her handsome grandson, in a dangerously interested and solicitous voice.
‘In West Friesland,’ said Binnen, still sounding anxious, ‘are tulips and irises, on a nice, heavy clay soil. Straw and fine peat…’
‘I am telling you Abraham, Isaac, Jacob are living 1900 b.c., Christian date,’ shrieked Rebekah, completely ignoring Binnen, and joining in the conversation between Sweyn and Laura.
‘And I,’ said Sweyn, impassively, ‘am telling, not you, dear Aunt Rebekah, but Mrs Gavin, that Jacob slept on a pillar of stone and dreamed of angels. Why not an early type of rune-stone? We know that the runic alphabet was based on a script invented or inherited by a North Etruscan people in the second or first century b.c., and it could be…’