by Ian Sansom
‘Harpo Marx is a tremendous whistler, you know,’ said Morley. ‘Virtuoso really. He can hum at the same time. Lovely chap also. He was always my favourite.’
‘You know the Marx Brothers?’ I asked.
‘Father’s long corresponded with Groucho,’ said Miriam.
‘Eccentric, of course,’ said Morley. ‘But a wonderful correspondent.’ There was no one, it seemed, that Morley hadn’t met, or corresponded with, dined with, travelled with, or otherwise encountered on some enterprise or other. It gave him extraordinarily broad horizons – but also alas meant that he was an expert, for example, on the history and culture of whistling, much of which knowledge he had acquired from his old friend Harpo. ‘I think it’s in the Canaries, Miriam, isn’t it, that there are communities who whistle to one another across the valleys? Homo sibilans, I suppose the term might be—’
I coughed loudly. I often had to try to interrupt and redirect their wandering conversations. It was an essential part of my job. The flow of words between them and around them was seemingly never-ending. Miriam of course was happy to debate with anyone anytime on anything, and Morley simply spoke incessantly, while working, while walking, standing, waiting, in transit by vehicle, on land and sea and, I rather suspected, in his sleep. On those exceedingly rare occasions when he was sick, he would continue to talk, on and on, from his bed, often to himself, and often while writing. Both Miriam and Morley also had freakish memories, seemingly accumulating everything and losing absolutely nothing, able to recall facts and quotations and remarks that people had made years before, and continually shaping and polishing every piece of information and every incident and episode into stories that could be reused for multiple purposes, in order to illustrate and illuminate some little nub. It made actually getting to the point of anything tremendously difficult.
‘So, did the milkman hear or see anything unusual on the morning of the 6th?’ I asked.
‘Nothing, no,’ said Miriam. ‘But he did let me have one of these.’ She produced a milk bottle from her handbag. ‘Look at the legend, Father. I thought it would amuse you.’ The milk bottle bore the legend, in black Gothic script, ‘The Milk is Thine, the Bottle Mine’.
‘Wonderful!’ said Morley.
‘Anyway,’ I said.
Miriam had also spoken to three brothers, Bill, Bob and Bernard, one of them a blacksmith, one a saddler and one an ironmonger, again tremendous characters all of them, according to Miriam, and none of them having seen anything suspicious or unusual. And she’d been to a high-class greengrocer – the high-class greengrocer – in Lewes.
‘Virginia goes there,’ she said.
‘Virginia?’
‘Woolf,’ she said. ‘Sussex is absolutely stuffed full of Bloomsberries, Sefton: Leonard and Virginia are just up the road at Rodmell, there’s Vanessa and her friends at Charleston.’
‘We should really go and visit Leonard and Virginia,’ said Morley.
‘Well, they can be a bit … much, Father,’ said Miriam, ‘can’t they.’
‘They can,’ agreed Morley. He rather disapproved of the Bloomsbury set, though he did admire the work of the Hogarth Press and spoke very highly of Leonard Woolf’s skills as a printer and publisher. ‘Dear Leonard,’ he said.
‘Pozzo Keynes and his crazy Russian have got a place somewhere nearby,’ said Miriam. ‘They’re great fun.’
‘That’s one way of describing them,’ said Morley. If he rather disapproved of the Bloomsbury set, then it would be safe to say that Morley very much and very particularly disapproved of John Maynard Keynes, describing him to me on various occasions as a ‘beast’, a ‘swine’ and a ‘blackguard’, though in fairness many of Keynes’s friends would probably also have described him as such. Keynes was a man, shall we say, in those years, with a certain reputation.
‘Perhaps Virginia Woolf saw something suspicious at 5 a.m. on the morning of the 6th, when she was out shopping for her leeks and potatoes?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Miriam. ‘She doesn’t strike me as an early riser.’
Our own cups of tea arrived, sans rarebit.
‘So,’ said Miriam. ‘How did you get on at the school, chaps? How was the headmaster?’
‘I would describe the headmaster,’ said Morley, ‘as a man like Chaucer’s Sergeant of the Law, who—’
‘Seems busier than he is. I’ve heard you tell that one before, Father. Bit of a waste of time then?’
‘Not at all,’ said Morley. ‘We know now that Lizzie had a boyfriend.’
‘A boyfriend?’ said Miriam. She dabbed at the corner of her red-lipsticked mouth with a napkin. ‘Is that right?’
‘Apparently so. Some chap at the museum. Michael. We’re going to go and visit him, obviously. But first.’ Morley checked around that no one could overhear us. ‘Sefton?’ He nodded at me.
‘What?’
‘Your trousers, man. Look at this, Miriam.’
‘What?’
‘Ah, yes,’ I said, reaching round to produce the papers from my waistband.
‘What on earth?’ said Miriam. ‘I thought you were going all Keynes on me for a moment there, Sefton. And what on earth’s that in your pocket?’
‘It’s a stick of Brighton rock,’ I said.
Miriam raised both her eyebrows.
The papers we had filched from Lizzie Walter’s drawer included mostly blank sheets of paper, but also a few local newspaper cuttings, some sheet music (‘Kitten on the Keys’, ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart’, ‘O Lovely Night’, and several other undistinguished tunes), and, most significantly, a copy of something called the Blacklist, which appeared to be a conspiratorial, right-wing sort of a journal and which contained an article by a certain ‘LW’ titled ‘Knowledge For All’. We passed the article around. It was really rather good. ‘Education should provide an equal opportunity for all to rise to the top,’ wrote LW. ‘I submit that knowledge should not be the monopoly of the well-to-do, but available to all our children, as part of their birthright as true-born Englishmen and women.’
‘Perfectly reasonable,’ said Miriam, which indeed it was, except perhaps for some references to ‘foreign influences and ideas’ diluting and spoiling the purity of the British educational system, and its – entirely contradictory – praise for the German model of education, with its emphasis on a sound body and a sound mind, which was claimed to be preventing national decline. I rather expected Morley to approve of the gist of the article. He most certainly did not.
During the late 1930s, Morley attracted all sorts of un-savoury characters, drawn to him by his various ideas about localism, his strong favouring of ‘the common people’, and his general distaste for big business and middlemen. These were the years when many good men and women – myself included – drifted inexorably towards the extremes politically, while Morley did his best to steer a steady middle course, which, as always in politics, as in life generally, cost him dearly. Throughout this time his work and his ideas were claimed by all sides and he was often accused of betraying some cause or other. His great friend Chesterton, for example, eventually disowned him, and by 1939 he was increasingly intellectually isolated and alone, particularly in his ideas about England and about Englishness. Perhaps Morley’s clearest statement on the subject came in a book that he worked on continually during those years, returning to it again and again, like a dog to its vomit or a sow to its mire, but which was never published, alas, because he rather feared the effect it might have on British morale. These were the years of big books on big themes: John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power, George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England, Walter Brierley’s The Means Test Man, Gollancz’s Handbook of Marxism.
Morley’s big idea – the title of his great unpublished work was The Invention of Britain – was that Britain was invented, or ‘confected’ in his words, in order to give credibility to the Union and to sustain the Protestant religion, and that despite it all, however much we cooperated
and coexisted, the Scots would always be Scots, the Irish Irish, and the Welsh forever Welsh. According to Morley, this idea – that Britain was an idea – did not invalidate the idea of a United Kingdom, but on the contrary recognised its great power as a story, rather than as a fact. Morley would often insist that the three of us debate this idea on our journeys together around the country in the Lagonda, in order for him to develop the finer points of his argument.
‘I’m with Lord Acton,’ he liked to say.
‘We’re all with Acton,’ Miriam would retort.
‘Sefton?’
‘I’ll abstain,’ I usually said.
‘I believe that our nation, like all other nations, is a kind of invention, a creation. No less magnificent for that, but an invention nonetheless. An act of the imagination. I like to think of Britain, indeed, as a kind of imagined community.’
‘An imagined community, Father?’
‘Yes, what do you think, Miriam?’
‘As an idea? It’ll never catch on.’
It never did catch on. His belief that Britain and the British are essentially the product of the stories we choose to tell about ourselves rather than some immutable national identity based on race, or religion or ideology, was unwelcome at the time and has remained so ever since. Morley basically believed that anyone could become an Englishman if they adopted certain habits of mind and behaviour, and if they understood certain aspects of the country’s history and culture – hence The County Guides.
But back to Lizzie Walter’s article in the Blacklist.
‘Balderdash,’ said Morley. ‘If you combine a passion for education with an obsession with birthrights and an idea of national decline linked to the influence of foreigners and immigrants, I’m afraid you have a very dangerous mix indeed,’ said Morley.
‘Oh,’ said Miriam, whose attention had shifted to the one remaining unexamined sheet of paper in our haul. ‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right, Father. What is this?’
She held up the sheet for us to examine. It was a sheet of notepaper. Quality notepaper. It appeared to be a list of women’s names – about a dozen in total.
‘Why on earth would she have written such a list?’
‘If she wrote it,’ said Morley. ‘We don’t know if this is Lizzie’s handwriting.’
‘But what is it?’
‘Well, you know what it reminds me of?’ said Morley, taking an innocent sip of tea.
And so Morley launched into what I now recognised as the catalogue aria from Don Giovanni:
Madamina, il catalogo è questo
Delle belle che amò il padron mio;
un catalogo egli è che ho fatt’io;
Osservate, leggete con me–
‘Oh, that woman’s dreadful influence, Father,’ said Miriam.
Morley paused in his recitation, looked as though he were about to go on, but then lapsed into silence.
‘What?’ asked Miriam.
‘Actually, I’m sure this is nothing, my dear,’ said Morley, pocketing the piece of paper. ‘Just some list she’d drawn up for some reason.’
‘But what reason?’
‘Who knows, Miriam? It’s a … mystery. Anyway, why don’t Sefton and I meet you back at the hotel in, say, an hour or so and we can wander up to the museum and talk to this boyfriend chap. In the meantime, I think Sefton and I are going to go shopping for a trug.’
‘A trug?’ said Miriam. ‘This is no time to go shopping for a trug, Father.’
‘I would have thought this exactly the time to go shopping for a trug, Miriam. The trug-makers of Sussex are renowned worldwide.’
‘Are they really, Father?’
‘Of course. The trug.’ Morley savoured the word. ‘Rectangular-shaped wooden basket, made from willow and chestnut, beloved of the lady gardener.’
‘Right, yes, we all know what a—’
‘Incredible craftsmanship involved.’
‘In trug-making?’
‘Absolutely. It would take years to become an expert.’
‘Years?’ said Miriam
‘At least,’ said Morley.
‘Years, though?’ said Miriam.
‘Have you ever felled a tree, Sefton?’
‘I can’t say I have, Mr Morley, no.’
‘Stacked and seasoned logs, Miriam? Split and sawn them into boards? Sefton?’
‘Erm …’
‘No, thought not. So it is probably safe to say that the pair of you have little or no idea about the manner and method of trug manufacture, would that be true?’
‘No idea and care less,’ said Miriam.
‘Well.’ Morley rose from the table. ‘In an hour at the hotel, Miriam, and in the meantime Sefton and I are going to go and meet someone who does possess such knowledge and who does care.’
CHAPTER 25
‘AND WHO, MOREOVER, might be able to tell us something about his daughter’s tragic death,’ said Morley, out of Miriam’s hearing, as we left the tea shop.
‘Pardon, Mr Morley?’ I said.
‘We’re going to go and talk to Lizzie’s father,’ said Morley.
‘Right. Is that really a—’
‘I have taken the precaution of making enquiries, Sefton, and it turns out that Lizzie’s father is a trug-maker. Which is fortuitous, is it not, since we are simply tourists in Lewes out trug shopping?’
‘Erm …’ Sometimes I couldn’t see exactly how his mind worked, though I could see that it was working. Sometimes it was better not to think about it too much.
‘Not a word about Lizzie, understand? Trug shoppers, merely.’
‘Very well, Mr Morley.’
Mr Walter’s trug shop was a short walk from the White Hart, down a steep narrow street. The shop had clearly been a house at some time in the recent past, and in all probability was at least a semi-house still, having become an emporium of trugs with the simple addition outside of a sign and inside with an array of trugs. And arrayed they most certainly were: rectangular trugs, round trugs, square trugs, oval trugs, long shallow trugs, short fat trugs, stacked on the floor, piled on tables and chairs, and hanging from hooks in the ceiling. Morley and I manoeuvred ourselves inside with some difficulty. It was more like a trug cave than a trug shop, or a ‘truggery’, according to Morley, who was, obviously, completely and utterly thrilled by the place.
‘Good day, sir!’ he said, to a man sitting with his head low behind a table in the corner, by a fireplace lit with a poor fire. He was hunched, busy eating something, which he put aside when Morley spoke, looking up at us and slowly wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
‘Is it?’ he said.
‘Is it what?’ said Morley.
‘A good day, you said.’
‘Indeed,’ said Morley.
The man looked out beyond us. ‘A goin’ to rain,’ he said.
‘Well, yes, perhaps, but …’ said Morley. ‘Anyway, don’t let us interrupt you.’
‘It’s my elevener,’ said the man.
‘Would that be a Sussex churdle, might I ask?’
‘Would be and is,’ said the man.
‘Liver and bacon?’ asked Morley.
‘And apple,’ said the man.
‘And do I detect sage?’ Morley sniffed.
‘Bit reeky?’ said the man, sniffing at the churdle and then producing a well-used handkerchief from his apron pocket and placing it carefully over the half-eaten pie.
‘There. Now, can I help you?’
‘Is it Mr Walter?’ asked Morley.
‘It is.’
(And I will tell you what I thought then, to my shame. I thought, this – a man eating a churdle – does not look like a man whose daughter has been murdered. I’m ashamed now even to admit it, years later, to admit that what I expected to find was a grieving man, whatever that might be, for a man or a woman who has suffered such a terrible loss, what are they supposed to look like? How are they supposed to behave? This is one of the great lies of literature, actually, one of its many illusory promis
es: that people can be read and understood, that they will appear as they truly are, or at least if interpreted rightly. If I learned one thing working with Morley for all those years, producing all those words together, all those millions of words of seeking and understanding, it is this: that literature is a gigantic, terrible lie. No human can tell another human’s story. No place, no person, no face ever fully reveals itself. And it is a disgusting assumption, actually, that they should, like assuming that a man whose daughter has been murdered will always and should always look like a man whose daughter has been murdered. Mr Walter that morning looked like nothing so much as a man hunched in the cold, in the corner of a shop, eating a Sussex churdle.)
‘Excellent!’ continued Morley, who always took people and places at face value. ‘I am looking for a trug.’
Mr Walter simply raised an eyebrow and gestured towards his amazing stock, as if to say, are you blind, or stupid, or both?
‘Which size?’ he asked.
‘About …’ Morley stretched out his arms.
‘We’ve got everything from a pint up to a bushel, sir.’
‘Something in between a pint and a bushel, I would have thought.’
‘A number 6 or a number 7 then.’
He pointed up to a range of what were, apparently, number 6s and number 7s.
‘And they’re all willow and chestnut?’ asked Morley.
‘That’s what a trug’s made from, sir, yes.’
He got up slowly and brought down a couple of trugs from their hooks.
‘And where do you get your willow, may I ask?’ said Morley.
‘From the marsh,’ said Mr Walter.
‘Of course,’ said Morley. ‘The marsh.’
‘And the handle and the rim are sweet chestnut there. That’s the traditional method. Willow strips, chestnut frame and trim.’
‘Yes,’ said Morley, holding the admittedly very fine trug that Mr Walter had handed him. ‘Very fine, sir. Very fine indeed.’
‘We do all different shapes, as you can see, as well as different sizes.’