The Sussex Murder

by Ian Sansom

  There is a very particular class, or at least a small, self-selecting sub-group of a very particular class in England, and indeed elsewhere, that one might describe as aristocratic impresarios. This type tend to be found outside the major cities, having either acquired or inherited vast country estates and wealth, usually from the proceeds of some dark eighteenth- or nineteenth-century industry or endeavour – such as plundering the natural resources of far-off lands, or exploiting the labour of the home-grown working poor – but who have turned away from their ancestor’s diabolical business towards the arts, or who have set about turning the arts into yet one more diabolical business. The great American families – the Rockefellers, for instance – are perhaps better known for this than their English counterparts, but the Hudsons were very much of the same breed and type, if not quite possessed of the same astronomical wealth. They were merely very – rather than fabulously or absurdly – wealthy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such English/Scotch/Welsh/Irish/Anglo-anything types would have contented themselves with building fake Roman temples, ruined medieval castles, or pineapple-shaped follies in their gardens: in the twentieth century they liked to indulge themselves as patrons of the arts, constructing theatres and concert venues to entertain their friends and occasionally the hoi polloi. This peculiar breed were on the whole more Miriam’s type than Morley’s but we seemed to spend much of our time during our years together dining with, entertaining and being entertained by such individuals, who ranged, in my opinion, from the merely irritating to the utterly intolerable, and who all seemed to be weirdly obsessed with the arts and music, without actually being artists or musicians themselves, in a way that I found patronising in every sense. Thus, although I had never actually met the Hudsons before, I felt I knew them already. As it turned out, I was to be proved entirely wrong: I knew them and their type not at all. I had no idea what they were capable of.

  We had arrived shortly before dinner was due to be served in a private dining room up on the first floor of the hotel. Having checked in for Morley, Miriam and Molly, and having organised the delivery of their luggage, I was preparing to absent myself to my room for a couple of hours’ well-earned rest and relaxation while they joined the Hudsons, but as I was about to slip away there was a brief sotto voce discussion between Miriam and the hotel’s ruddy-faced sergeant major-looking maître d’, who then approached me to inform me that the Hudsons had requested that I join their party for supper. It was a request I considered declining, rather fearing that it might be the sort of meal that involved oyster forks and entremets. But then I recalled with a rather sharp pang that my last meal had been my long-ago Brighton breakfast, which had consisted entirely of coffee, cigarettes and a walk of the dog, who I had by now safely stowed round the back of the hotel, under the attentive care of the kitchen staff, who were feeding him the finest scraps.

  When in London I tended rather to subsist on a liquid diet, while at St George’s in Norfolk with Morley mealtimes could be rather monotonous. (Left to his own devices, Morley’s daily diet would consist of a spoonful of cod liver oil, one or two of his bottled plums, for regularity, a slice of bread and butter for lunch, one with paste and one with jam, and then a series of evening meals that his cook would produce week in, week out, with a predictability bordering on the insane: on Monday there was cold meat and milk pudding, on Tuesday a shepherd’s pie and pea soup, on Wednesday vegetables, on Thursday liver and bacon, on Friday fish and on Saturday roast beef.)

  So I decided that a dinner, of any kind, and in any company, would be most welcome.

  CHAPTER 16

  UPON OUR ARRIVAL UPSTAIRS in the small wood-panelled dining room there was much excited kissing of cheeks on Molly’s part: she was an extremely enthusiastic kisser and hugger, one of the many things that failed to endear her to Miriam.

  ‘“A complicated gentleman allow me to present, / Of all the arts and faculties the terse embodiment,”’ Molly trilled, in her best D’Oyly Carte style, introducing Morley to anyone he hadn’t met, while Morley bored anyone who didn’t already know, and indeed anyone who already did – which included Miriam and me, since he had already bored us with the information on the journey down – with the dull fact that the great Thomas Paine had been part of a debating society, the Headstrong Club, which had met regularly in this very wood-panelled dining room in this very hotel during the late eighteenth century, before setting off to the American colonies to pen his great revolutionary works, Common Sense, The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason. Molly managed to look on enraptured as Morley explained how and why Paine was such an important political thinker, while I gladly accepted a glass of hock from a waiter and Miriam introduced me to a tall, handsome man, possessed of what one might think of as classic continental features who had of course instantly and instinctively gravitated towards her. He looked like he had recently stepped offstage at La Scala, Milan – and indeed he turned out to be the celebrated conductor Fritz Bauer, celebrated certainly by Miriam in her introduction to me, which included a long list of his most notable recent engagements and accomplishments and which ended, I thought, with a distinct diminuendo, ‘And this, Maestro, is my father’s assistant.’

  ‘Assistant?’ said Mr Bauer, unsmiling. ‘Really?’ He had long hair swept back from his face, and wore a tight-fitting dark suit and a white shirt buttoned to the neck with no tie. From the end of a long chain attached to his waistcoat he produced some pince-nez with which and through which he proceeded to scrutinise me.

  ‘And with what exactly do you assist?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, Sefton’s our factotum,’ said Miriam. ‘He does absolutely everything.’

  ‘Everything?’ said Herr Bauer, indicating that he rather doubted my ability to do anything, and that anyway he had nothing to say to someone else’s assistant. With this charming welcome he then turned abruptly away from me and began to usher Miriam towards the table. ‘He’s dining with us?’ he asked.

  ‘Sefton’s our fourteen,’ said Miriam to Bauer, and then to me, ‘There were thirteen of us to dinner, Sefton, so we thought you might be our Kaspar.’

  ‘Your what?’ I said.

  ‘Kaspar the cat? The Savoy cat. You know the legend of the poor chap who hosted a dinner at the Savoy for thirteen and left the table and was promptly shot dead? If you have thirteen to dinner at the Savoy you have to dine with Kaspar the cat.’

  ‘A cat?’ asked Bauer.

  ‘A wooden cat,’ said Miriam. ‘At home we usually use an old mannequin for the same purpose, just to make up the numbers.’

  ‘Well, thank you, Miriam,’ I said, taking my seat at the table, feeling about as much use and as welcome as a tailor’s dummy, or a wooden cat.

  The other guests were all friends of the Hudsons, plus the director of the opera, the singer who was playing the role of Don Giovanni, who sported a colourful scarf knotted at his throat and who one assumed was a homosexual, and the singer who was playing the Commendatore, who was both notably American and notably black, it being much less common in those days in England to meet anyone who was either, let alone both. I was seated next to a man on my left who told me within moments of our being acquainted that he’d been at Balliol, had been a teacher, and that he was now the director of the Lewes Museum, and one of the stalwarts of the local Grey Shirt cadets, the Blackshirt Pippins, and the local amateur operatic society. His name was Michael Anderson. When I told Mr Anderson that I had recently been in Spain fighting with the International Brigade, conversation quickly dried up. As are so many dining companions on these sorts of occasions – certainly in my experience – the chap was perfectly pleasant and yet also, simultaneously, utterly repulsive.

  During my many years with Morley I spent more time than I care to remember swirling venerable – and often less than venerable – wines in crystal glasses warmed by candlelight and the murmuration of voices, listening to the English upper and middle classes espousing the most peculiar and outrageous political views and ideas: fasci
sm, crypto-fascism, Austro-, British, German and Italian fascism, anarchism, communism, occultism, communalism. The rich always seem to have strange ideas about how to organise society and how to run things, how to distribute wealth and what have you – though funnily enough, in all those years the one and only thing none of them ever liked to talk about was money. Money talk was strictly forbidden at all gatherings of all kinds. To talk about politics was permitted, to talk about religion, and – in some company, particularly among Miriam’s sort of company – even to talk about sex, but to talk about money among the upper echelons of English society was instantly to demean oneself. Morley – who was essentially a working-class autodidact with Joe Chamberlain-style socialist sympathies and Merrie Englande ideas about the organisation of the social order – had no such qualms about talking about money, and so in polite society was often regarded as an ill-mannered arriviste. It was therefore often rather painful to dine with the rich and the privileged, whose manners, tastes and opinions were often, frankly, appalling; but I have to say that our dinner in Lewes on that first night was, on the whole, rather jolly and civilised. And the food was superb.

  Mr Hudson welcomed us all to Sussex, claiming that there were five great continents – Europe, Asia, Africa, America and Romney-marsh – and that Sussex was not only becoming a hotbed of cultural activity, it was just about the hottest of hotbeds in the country, with Bloomsbury having long since set up shop in Charleston, Picasso and Henry Moore and some other people I’d never heard of at some place called Farley Farm House, Paul Nash and Edward Burra at Rye, Eric Gill at Ditchling, someone called Eric Ravilious somewhere or other, and Edward – James? James Edward? – at West Dean. Acknowledging Morley’s presence, he paid tribute to all the famous and esteemed writers associated with Sussex: Richard Jefferies, Kipling, Belloc, Galsworthy.

  ‘Esther Meynell,’ added Morley.

  ‘Hear hear,’ said Miriam.

  ‘Quite so, quite so,’ said Mr Hudson. ‘The contribution of the ladies to the literary and artistic history of the county should not be underestimated.’

  Miriam raised her eyes to the heavens.

  The meal consisted of something called ‘Huffed Chicken’, which is a local Sussex delicacy, apparently, and which is essentially a chicken pie, rather like a pasty, filled with sage, walnut and apple, and which was served with bread sauce, green peas and potatoes. Good hearty local hotel fare, and all the more welcome for being so.

  ‘Do you know Florence White’s book Good Things in England?’ asked my Balliol-educated friend, between bites of huff.

  ‘I can’t say I do, sir, no.’

  ‘Compendium of recipes – awfully good. The daughter of a local Sussex innkeeper, you know.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How extraordinary.’

  ‘Robert of course is good friends with Marcel Boulestin,’ continued my companion, which meant nothing to me but Miriam, who was sitting opposite, instantly perked up at the mention of this Monsieur Boulestin.

  ‘Marcel Boulestin of the Restaurant Boulestin?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Oh, that’s one of my favourite restaurants!’ said Miriam.

  ‘Naturally,’ said my dining companion. ‘For it is surely one of the prettiest and possibly finest restaurants in all of London. A very decent fellow, Boulestin. He came and cooked for Robert and Marie one weekend at a house party. The escalopes were divine. Did you know he’s started broadcasting programmes on the BBC television?’

  ‘Has he really?’ said Miriam. ‘Television cookery? What will they think of next?’ (Morley’s disastrous experiments in the then new medium of television – including his once famously awful talk for the English Folk Cookery Association – have been discussed in passing by others, but there is much more to tell, though perhaps not here: both the radiophonic and the televisual form a large part of the background to the sad story that lies behind the elaborate façade that is The County Guides: London. Another time.)

  On my right was my old friend the ill-mannered conductor, Fritz Bauer, who clearly felt that being seated next to a mere assistant was entirely beneath his dignity and who successfully managed to ignore me for the duration of the meal, until pudding, which was a Sussex pond pudding, no less, oozing with a buttery sugary sauce and dotted with currants, and which was so utterly delicious that Bauer was moved to speak even to the likes of me, deigning to remark on the pudding’s sheer delectableness. ‘Das schmeckt mir sehr gut,’ was his considered comment, which thankfully requires little if any translation and to which I deigned to reply with my own murmured ‘Mmm’.

  There ensued around the table a debate about the origins and purity of the Sussex pond pudding recipe, Mrs Hudson – who could trace her family’s roots in the county back to the thirteenth century – declaring the addition of a lemon to be a recent aberration. Her mother’s cook, apparently, used to make it with a whole apple inside, while Morley pointed out that, strictly speaking, the addition of currants made it a Kentish, rather than truly a Sussex pond pudding. There was then a discussion of the various other puddings for which the county is renowned – though, I’ll be honest, it was the first I’d heard of it – including Ashdown Partridge Pudding, Sussex Bacon Pudding, Sussex Hogs’ Pudding, Sussex Blanket Pudding, Well Pudding, Chichester Pudding and goodness knows how many other super-local variations of churdles, plum heavies and lardy Johns. The list went on and on. Indeed, it turns out that Sussex is so well known for all things suety and crusty that it is often said – at least according to Morley in The County Guides – that to venture into the county is to risk being turned into an actual pudding yourself.

  By the end of the meal I was certainly beginning to feel rather puddingy and I dozed a little through coffee, awakening only with the bonfire assembly almost upon us and the sound of Mr Hudson asking guests before they departed if they could name the proverbial seven good things of Sussex. Once again, as with the Sussex puddings, I had no idea there were such good Sussex things, but there are, apparently, and it seems there are seven of them.

  ‘The Pulborough eel,’ said Morley.

  ‘Correct!’ said Mr Hudson.

  ‘The Selsey cockle,’ said Morley.

  ‘Correct!’

  ‘The Chichester lobster.’

  ‘Correct!’

  ‘The Rye herring, the Arundel mullet, the Amberley trout and the …’

  Morley got stuck on this last.

  ‘The …’

  It wasn’t like him. The pudding had perhaps defeated him also, or Molly was dulling his edge.

  ‘No?’ said Hudson.

  ‘No, I can’t remember,’ said Morley.

  ‘The Bourne wheatear,’ said Hudson.

  ‘Of course!’ said Morley. ‘The Bourne wheatear.’

  Unable and unwilling to devote my full attention to the ensuing, doubtless fascinating wheatear chat between Morley and Mr Hudson, I found myself attempting another conversation with Mr Bauer as we got up to leave.

  ‘How did you meet Molly?’ I asked.

  ‘I do not remember,’ said Mr Bauer.

  ‘It was through Rotha Lintorn-Orman,’ offered Miriam.

  ‘Oh yes, of course, dear Rotha,’ said Bauer.

  ‘It was a party,’ said Miriam.

  ‘Of course it was,’ said Bauer.

  ‘Rotha’s parties!’ said Miriam.

  ‘Indeed,’ agreed Mr Bauer.

  There was then some brief mingling before we all departed for the bonfire processions and it was at this point that I met Molly’s son, Henry, her son from her first marriage – or possibly second, or third, annulled, divorced, it was difficult to keep up and, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t paying much attention, except to note that Henry was a young man with what one might describe as a mid-Atlantic accent and east coast confidence.

  ‘And what exactly is it you do, young man?’ asked Morley, who had made it over to introduce himself to Molly’s son, about whom he’d heard
so much from Molly herself.

  ‘I’m helping out on set design here for the Hudsons at the moment, Mr Morley.’

  ‘Set design,’ said Morley. ‘Really? Marvellous. You don’t know Appia’s book, Die Musik und die Inszenierung?’

  ‘I can’t say I do, sir,’ said Henry.

  ‘Best book I think I’ve ever read on the subject,’ said Morley. He had read most books on most subjects, though it has to be said that in the rather more obscure areas and topics his knowledge was often rather outdated.

  ‘When was that published?’ asked Molly’s son.

  ‘Some time ago now, I think,’ admitted Morley. ‘I remember I visited the Moscow Art Theatre some years ago,’ he continued. ‘I think I was reading it then, so that would have been … certainly back in the twenties.’

  ‘Well, things have probably moved on since then,’ said Henry, gazing over the top of Morley’s head, I couldn’t help but notice, presumably in the hope of finding someone else more up-to-date to talk to.

  ‘I’m sure they have,’ said Morley. ‘Do you know, I’m sure my daughter Miriam would love to talk to you about your work, Henry, she likes to keep up with theatre. Miriam!’ He called her over.