by Ian Sansom
‘It would have meant she’d have lost her job. After all those years of study. And what would he have done, do you think? Stood by her?’
‘I’m sure Henry Harper is a man of honour, Mrs Walter.’
‘Ha!’ Mrs Walter spat out a bitter laugh. ‘He’s a rich American is what he is. Drifted in here, working on some … thing for a couple of months. Lizzie meant nothing to him. She was just a bit of fun for him.’
‘I’m not sure that’s true, Mrs Walter.’
‘Are you married?’
‘I was …’
‘I’ve been married twenty years. I know what you’re like. You’re all the same. You’re worse than dogs.’
‘I do not know what happened between Henry and Lizzie, Mrs Walter,’ said Morley. ‘But I do know that whatever happened, Lizzie was terribly disappointed with Henry and that her … actions may have been intended to punish him, but I’m not sure that she would have wanted him to go to prison, and possibly hang.’
‘And you’d know her mind, would you?’
‘I know that in order for justice to be seen to be done, justice must be done, Mrs Walter – not injustice.’
‘And I know that oftentimes people like you get away with murder.’
‘Even if it wasn’t murder?’ said Morley.
A boy came clattering down the stairs. He was perhaps six or seven years old. He was dressed in a thin woollen jersey and a pair of ill-fitting shorts. He looked vaguely familiar.
‘Good morning, Sidney,’ said Morley.
It was the boy from King’s Road School. Lizzie’s little brother?
‘Good morning, sir,’ said Sidney.
‘How do you know this man, Sidney?’ asked Mrs Walter, furious.
‘He was at school.’
‘And Sidney did himself proud, Mrs Walter,’ said Morley. ‘Everyone deserves a chance. Isn’t that what your daughter had devoted her life to?’
‘Goodbye,’ said Mrs Walter, indicating the door.
We lifted up the latch – by means of an old shoelace – and stepped outside.
Morley took a deep sigh as we set off down the street.
‘Well, we did our best, Sefton.’
As we were about to turn onto the main street, Sidney ran up to us and gave us an envelope.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘From Mother.’
And then he ran off happily down the street, kicking a stone as he went.
CHAPTER 31
HENRY WAS RELEASED from police custody after the unexpected emergence of Lizzie Walter’s suicide note. According to a report in the local newspaper, Lizzie had attempted to asphyxiate herself before drowning in Pells Pool. There was no mention of the anonymous note listing Henry’s lovers, or of the shoelace found in Henry’s pocket, or indeed of Lizzie’s having been pregnant.
There was much jubilation at Henry’s release. He made it to the Hudsons’ just in time for the first night of Don Giovanni, which was considered by all to be an absolute triumph.
After the show, back up at the Hudson house, where there was a grand celebratory party, at which wine and good humour were flowing, the cast were surrounded by well-wishers and admirers. Molly was signing programmes. I thought I’d get mine signed, as a sort of souvenir of our time in Sussex. She was still in her Donna Anna costume and wearing her stage make-up, which gave her a bawdy, mutinous sort of a look. Her manager, Giacomo, was standing close by. The Hudsons, proud patrons of the arts, were hovering, laughing, chatting. Everybody was there. Everyone was having a good time. I joined the throng swirling around Molly and she happily, absentmindedly signed my programme with her loopy handwriting, quite unEnglish. I recognised it instantly.
She said nothing to me, and turned immediately towards another young man waiting to meet her in the crowd.
Morley didn’t come to the performance.
‘What happened to your father?’ I asked Miriam. ‘He’s not here to support Molly?’
‘No,’ said Miriam. ‘It’s rather odd, given their great – or should I say terrible – friendship. What do you think’s happened, Sefton?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, which was not true. ‘But I think I’m going to head back to the hotel. I’m tired. Shall I leave you the Lagonda?’
‘No,’ said Miriam. ‘You take it, I’m sure I’ll persuade someone to drop me back, Sefton.’
‘I’m sure you will,’ I said.
Out the back of the Hudson house, where the cars were parked, I found Henry smoking and laughing and talking with a young woman – she was perhaps eighteen. Local. One of the other stagehands.
‘Sefton!’ he said, calling me over.
The girl said something out of my hearing, and hurried back inside.
He ground out his cigarette as I approached.
‘I hear from Mother that we owe you and your boss a debt of gratitude.’
‘Hardly,’ I said.
‘Come on,’ he said, lighting another cigarette and patting me on the back. ‘English modesty.’
‘Not really.’
‘Buddy, look. I do appreciate what you did. If there’s anything I can ever—’
‘I’m not your buddy,’ I said.
‘Hey,’ said Henry. ‘Just trying to be friendly.’
‘But I’ll tell you what you can do: you can be a little less friendly in future.’
‘What?’
‘You know what I mean,’ I said.
‘I’m not sure I do.’
‘You had Lizzie,’ I said. ‘You had Miriam. And I see you’ve already got yourself another lined up.’
‘Oh, right!’ he said, laughing. ‘All’s fair in love and war, yeah? We are staging Don Giovanni, after all.’ He thought it was hilarious.
I could feel my fists clenching.
‘First, I doubt you’ve been to war,’ I said. ‘Second, you clearly have no idea of the meaning of love. And third, if you’re really so fucking stupid you can’t tell the difference between life and art, then you’re even more stupid than you look.’
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you,’ he said, ‘but I’ll tell you what, buddy, you really need to cool it.’
I could imagine him saying exactly the same to Lizzie, her confronting him in the heat and excitement on Bonfire Night, finding herself powerless in the face of his cool American superiority, and her rushing away to Pells Pool, perhaps having planted the shoelace in his pocket, and then tying the other around her neck as a kind of token, and abandoning herself to her fate.
‘I’ll tell you what, buddy,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you fuck off back to where you came from.’
He grabbed me by the lapel.
‘Easy,’ I said.
‘Don’t you ever talk to me like that again,’ he said. ‘You cheap piece of English shit. I do what I want, with whoever I want, whenever I want.’
‘The American Dream, eh?’ I said.
As his grip tightened and his face contorted I reached into my jacket pocket, found exactly what I was looking for, and thrust my right arm up, swift and hard.
You’d be amazed at the damage you can inflict with a stick of Brighton rock.
Back at the hotel I was surprised to find Morley in the bar, nursing a glass of water with ice and listening disconsolately to a swing band who called themselves the Meteor Quartet.
‘Not bad,’ he said, ‘but alas not quite as meteoric as their name perhaps suggests.’
They were playing what Morley referred to, disapprovingly, as ‘gutbucket’ blues, meaning, I think, that they were making a particularly sorry sort of sound; which indeed they were, but which seemed appropriate, Morley being in an uncharacteristically sombre sort of a mood. He said very little while I made my way through a couple of consolatory glasses of whisky, except to complain that the band were ‘barrel-housing’, which was again something of which he heartily disapproved. Exactly where he acquired these sorts of terms I wasn’t sure; although I recall that in one of his most extraordinary articles, in something called Upbeat magazin
e, in March 1934, ‘Why They Call Him Satchmo’, he describes how he had met Louis Armstrong on a number of occasions, and that they had discussed Debussy, race and laxatives.
‘Rather limited, xylophonically speaking,’ he said, as the band struck up another tune.
‘Pardon?’
‘Xylophonically speaking, not the best,’ he said. ‘If you listen.’
I listened to whatever it was, which sounded to me like any other jazz standard, though perhaps with a little bit of added jingle.
‘It’s supposed to be “Dance of the Octopus”, by Red Norvo,’ said Morley. ‘A xylophone classic. Not so much dance as a bit of a lumber.’
‘How did you know?’ I asked, on my third whisky.
‘How did I know what, Sefton? About Red Norvo and the “Dance of the Octopus”? It’s a very popular tune.’
‘How did you know that Lizzie had killed herself?’
As he spoke, Morley kept his gaze upon the Meteor Quartet.
‘The list of names that we found, Sefton, since we established it was not written by Lizzie, was clearly written by someone wishing to cause her pain and humiliation, in an attempt to warn her off.’
‘But that wouldn’t necessarily have led her to kill herself.’
‘No, but she was a young woman, Sefton, who had lived here all her life, who had worked hard to become a teacher – an example to young people – and who clearly held herself to the highest standards of personal conduct and public duty. She had been abandoned by her fiancé.’
‘Michael Anderson.’
‘Correct. And had fled into the arms of an unsuitable lover.’
‘Henry.’
‘That’s right. Who, I assume, also rejected her on learning of her pregnancy.’
‘And so she—’
‘I think she used her body, Sefton, as a final reminder to the men in her life that she was not to be forgotten or underestimated. It came to me at Potter’s Museum, that grim tourist destination memento mori …’
‘I think I know who sent the note to her, Mr Morley,’ I said.
Morley held up his hand, as Miriam approached our table and the strains of ‘Dance of the Octopus’ faded away.
‘No more, thank you, Sefton.’
Miriam, fresh from the Hudsons’, proceeded to cheer Morley with a discussion of the work of Mr Red Norvo, compared to the work of Teddy Brown, Lionel Hampton, Rudy Starita, Sid Plummer and Chick Webb, all xylophonists of note, apparently, about whom I knew little, if anything. (At St George’s Morley had a vast collection of musical instruments, including a collection of xylophone-type instruments, not one of which I could tell apart from another, but which were apparently as different as, say, a trumpet from a cornet from a flugelhorn. God save a man who visited the music room at St George’s and mistook a vibraphone for an octarimba.)
At the end of this discussion – to the accompaniment of the band’s version of ‘Star Dust’ – Morley made a surprise announcement.
‘We’re leaving tomorrow,’ he said.
‘But are there not lots of other places on our Sussex itinerary?’ asked Miriam, who was drinking a cocktail, and who was clearly settling in for the night.
‘I’m tired of Sussex,’ said Morley.
Miriam looked at me and raised her eyebrows triumphantly.
We sat in silence through ‘Bugle Call Rag’ and ‘Lady Be Good’ and then the xylophonist left the stage, presumably for refreshments. Banging sticks on sticks is no doubt thirsty business.
‘Come on, Father,’ said Miriam, taking Morley’s hand.
‘Miriam!’ protested Morley.
‘It’s our big chance,’ she insisted. ‘Our big break into the world of showbiz. We’re going tomorrow. Let’s show these boys really how to kick out, shall we?’
The two of them got up onstage. Morley spoke to the bandleader, and promptly stationed himself behind the xylophone: he looked bizarrely businesslike, like a priest preparing to celebrate Mass. I had heard his xylophone playing before: after his morning exercises he often liked to limber up with a few scales and hymns. If you’ve never been woken to the sound of ‘Will Your Anchor Hold in the Storms of Life’, then don’t.
I thought for a terrible moment that Miriam was going to start singing. Miriam’s talents were almost but not quite endless, ending exactly at around the point at which she would occasionally break into some Gilbert and Sullivan, or some weird chanson française she’d managed to pick up on her foreign travels, and at which sound even the cats and dogs at St George’s would flee. In fact, to my great relief, rather than starting to sing, she leaned over and spoke a few words to one of the band members, who, grinning, and to my horror, handed her his – I think I am right in saying that the right word is – banjolele. The only banjolele tune anyone knows – apart from ‘My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock’ – is ‘The Window Cleaner’, with its lyrics chronicling exactly what a window cleaner gets to see on his window-cleaning rounds, and it occurred to me that Miriam might indeed launch into the song, perhaps encoring with some other bawdy celebrations of what Morley liked to refer to as the body’s ‘lower stratum’. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she had, but I was completely and utterly astonished at what in fact followed.
The bandleader counted in, the band struck up, and Miriam went scorching through a set of three or four numbers, soloing on ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)’ and ending with a barnstorming performance on ‘Sophisticated Lady’. She seemed almost possessed, her fingers moving at a speed and with a rhythm and fluency I had never seen.
‘My God, Miriam!’ I said when she came offstage, and had made her way back to our table, amid the cheers and applause of the audience.
‘I had no idea you could—’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You didn’t. Please do not underestimate me, Sefton. It really doesn’t suit you. I saw Henry, by the by, on the way out of the Hudsons’.’
‘How was he?’
‘Not the best, actually,’ said Miriam.
‘Oh dear.’
She leaned close to me and whispered in my ear. ‘If you ever do anything like that again, Sefton, you’ll have me to answer to. Do you understand? And if you think that by that sort of show of bravado you were defending poor Lizzie Walter’s honour, I have to tell you, you were far too late.’
It wasn’t Lizzie’s honour I was defending.
The Martyr’s Monument
CHAPTER 32
LEAVING LEWES, we made a brief detour to the Martyrs’ Memorial, a granite obelisk that stands in a garden on the Cuilfail Estate, upon which the following words are inscribed:
IN LOVING MEMORY OF THE UNDERNAMED SEVENTEEN PROTESTANT MARTYRS, WHO, FOR THEIR FAITHFUL TESTIMONY TO GOD’S TRUTH, WERE, DURING THE REIGN OF QUEEN MARY, BURNED TO DEATH IN FRONT OF THE THEN STAR INN – NOW THE TOWN HALL – LEWES, THIS OBELISK, PROVIDED BY PUBLIC SUBSCRIPTIONS, WAS ERECTED A.D. 1901
DIRICK CARVER, OF BRIGHTON.
THOMAS HARLAND, AND JOHN OSWALD, BOTH OF WOODMANCOTE.
THOMAS AVINGTON, AND THOMAS REED, BOTH OF ARDINGLY.
THOMAS WOOD (A MINISTER OF THE GOSPEL) OF LEWES.
THOMAS MYLES, OF HELLIGLY.
RICHARD WOODMAN, AND GEORGE STEVENS, BOTH OF WARBLETON.
ALEXANDER HOSMAN, WILLIAM MAINARD, AND THOMASINA WOOD, ALL OF MAYFIELD.
MARCERY MORRIS, AND JAMES MORRIS (HER SON) BOTH OF HEATHFIELD.
DENIS BURCIS, OF BUXTED.
ANN ASHDON, OF ROTHERFIELD.
MARY GROVES, OF LEWES.
‘AND THEY OVERCAME,
BECAUSE OF THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB, AND
BECAUSE OF THE WORD OF THEIR TESTIMONY, AND
THEY LOVED NOT THEIR LIFE EVEN UNTO DEATH’
REV. XII. II (R.V.)
We took the road from Lewes to the sea, through Kingston, Ilford, Rodmell, Southease, Piddinghoe and on to Newhaven.
Morley was subdued. He seemed exhausted.
Whenever we left a county, there was for him always
a sense of grief, of loss, that we had not encountered all we could have encountered, or discovered all we could have discovered. This time, as we drove through Sussex, the sense of loss was overwhelming.
‘We never made it to Hurstmonceux, then,’ he said.
‘Well, never mind, Father,’ said Miriam.
‘Or Battle.’
‘Where did the Battle of Hastings take place, Sefton?’ asked Miriam.
‘Hastings?’
‘Sefton!’ cried Miriam. ‘That hoary old chestnut. The Battle of Hastings occurred on a ridge several miles to the north-east, in the place we now call …’
‘Battle?’ I said.
‘Correct.’
‘No matter,’ said Morley. ‘We’ll not now see Battle.’
‘As it were,’ said Miriam. ‘Or perhaps we have already seen it, Father.’
‘Or Rye,’ said Morley.
‘Ditto,’ said Miriam. ‘And home to?’
‘Lots of people,’ I said.
‘Come on, Father. Rye? Home to, most notably?’
‘Henry James,’ said Morley.
‘A very large head, Henry James,’ said Miriam. ‘I think I would have preferred William, on the whole. Or Alice.’
‘Pevensey Castle,’ continued Morley, in his mournful listing of the many good things of Sussex that had gone unseen. ‘The birds’ egg collection at Hastings Museum.’
‘The birds’ egg collection at Hastings Museum, Father?’
‘One of the great birds’ egg collections in the world.’
‘I’m sure it is.’
‘Tarring,’ said Morley.
‘Tarring?’
‘Famous for its figs.’
‘Famous, Father?’
‘Commonly believed that Thomas Becket planted the first fig trees there. Perfect climate.’
‘Oh well, next time,’ said Miriam.
‘And Worthing, of course, the centre of the country’s tomato-growing industry – we never made it to Worthing.’
‘Too late in the season now anyway.’
‘But it would have been nice to have seen the tomato fields.’