The Norfolk Mystery (The County Guides)

by Ian Sansom

  ‘Are you always at the heel of the hunt?’ said Morley, as I caught up with him, striding towards the hotel, and then added, ‘W.H. Ponsford.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That was the name of the chap.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who partnered Woodfull and Bradman. The manner of his swing there, that reminded me …’

  ‘Well, we were lucky Podger didn’t hit us for six there.’

  ‘He was harmless.’

  ‘He might have killed us!’

  ‘Hardly. He wasn’t going to touch us. He just wanted to get rid of us. Sometimes you have to tread on a tiger’s tail to get what you want, Sefton.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. Now, finally, we’re getting somewhere, Sefton, eh!’ he said as we ran towards the hotel.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘WHAT EXACTLY is a sherry party?’ asked Morley. ‘I’ve often wondered.’

  ‘It’s like a cocktail party, Mr Morley. Only on good behaviour.’

  ‘Ah. Yes. So I feared.’

  We had received our invitation on our return to the Blakeney Hotel. I had to persuade Morley to agree to attend, he was beginning to fret so terribly over the continuing delay to our timetable. We should, according to Morley’s plan, have visited most of the churches of Norfolk by now, and investigated its major industries, visited all other places of cultural and historical interest, written up our notes, and been preparing to leave for our next county. Instead, we were stranded in a quayside village in the middle of nowhere, and Morley was becoming restless – a terrible danger, like the dog without its bone, or a man without meaningful work. Morley had to be – as he himself might relate it – in mobile perpetuum. If he wasn’t, he grew first irritable, and then angry, and then, curiously, utterly listless, like a man falling into a trance or a coma. He was, at this stage in his perpetual cycle, becoming so restless that it was all I could do to talk him down from a plan to start producing our own evening expedition newspaper, based on the model of Scott’s South Polar Times (‘All we need is a printing press,’ he claimed. ‘Miriam could bring us something up from London, I’m sure’). To distract him, I had taken to playing speed chess with him, but things had got so bad, and he won so consistently, without joy or pleasure, that he was now threatening to get out his knitting – another one of those hobbies that, during our years together, was the cause both of much amusement and much trouble. (He was apt to launch into demonstrations and explanations of the craft – which had been taught to him by the menfolk of Taquile Island on Lake Titicaca, he said – at the most inappropriate of moments. The story of Morley, the dead baby and the mystery of the knitted shawl is perhaps not as widely known to the general public as some other episodes; I shall relate it at another time.) Frankly, the sherry party seemed like a welcome alternative to an evening discussing the history of Peruvian woolly hats.

  ‘But I cannot abide parties, Sefton,’ he protested.

  ‘But this is only a sherry party, Mr Morley.’

  ‘Sherry party. Cocktail party. Card party. Shooting party. House party. Musical party. Salon. Cénacle. Soirée … Same region, soil and clime, Sefton. Waste and wild, the lot of them. Waste and wild.’ He sighed a grand, Miltonic sigh. ‘And as for the timetable … It’s slipping, Sefton. We’re drifting dangerously off course. We must keep to the timetable.’ Panicked and agitated, he could sound worryingly like Ismay on the Titanic. ‘I don’t know if I can get us back, Sefton. It may not be possible.’

  Given how far we were now off course, I managed to persuade him that a sherry party would hardly prove disastrous and that, besides, it might give us an opportunity to find out more about the unfortunate death of the reverend, which of course remained the cause of our spirit-sapping detention.

  And so we found ourselves, on a balmy summer’s evening, at the Thistle-Smiths’, a rather bleak eighteenth-century house on the edge of Blakeney village, set about with mournful, desolate-looking laburnum hedging but stuffed inside both with lively guests and with Mrs Thistle-Smith’s extraordinary bonsai collection, displayed in Ming bowls set on tables, shelves and plinths in the entrance hall to the house, and which gave the impression of one entering an enchanted forest inhabited by gibbering giants.

  ‘Imitation Ming bowls, actually,’ Morley later corrected me. ‘For what I think might be more accurately described not as an “extraordinary” collection – for what, one wonders, might a merely “ordinary” collection of bonsai be, eh? – but rather as a plethoric collection of bonsai. Hmm? Plethoric, somnolent bonsai, one might say, if one needed the extra adjective, Sefton.’

  In attendance, in addition to the plethoric somnolent bonsai, were the Grices, the Chapmans, the Wells, and many other north Norfolk worthies and dignitaries whose names escaped me.

  ‘Everyone is here!’ proclaimed Mrs Thistle-Smith on our arrival, meaning, presumably, everyone in the village with an income, earned or unearned, above about ten pounds per week: a sherry party in north Norfolk being most definitely not a place for the common man. One might as well have been in Mayfair, the only difference being that the rich in the remoter corners of England seem uniquely and peculiarly unburdened when compared to their city counterparts, as though permanently on holiday, the men utterly self-satisfied and comfortable in their moth-eaten, third-generation tweeds, and the women thoroughly relaxed about both their mothballed appearance and their antique charms, though with the exception, I should say, of Mrs Thistle-Smith herself, who was a rather determinedly glamorous, made-up sort of lady, who would not have been out of place as a hostess at one of Miriam’s parties down in London, and who was doggedly hanging on both to blonde hair and to fashionable clothes, and who clearly had no intention of allowing her young mob-capped and aproned maids to steal any of her sherry party limelight. Mrs Thistle-Smith was one of those older women who possess – and who are clearly not unaware of possessing – what one might call full candlepower presence, her welcoming smile, her voice, her manner and her powerful wreath of perfume acting like the rays of the sun shining down upon one. One had the feeling with Mrs Thistle-Smith that she had just conjured you into life on her doorstep, and that any previous existence had been merely a kind of limbo, waiting to be summoned forth into her life-giving light. I’m afraid I found her scintillations rather off-putting, but was nonetheless delighted to be able to accept the proffered glass of oloroso, and the promise of an evening’s conversation unrelated to cross-stitch, needles and thread.

  ‘Remember, sherry is not a cordial, Sefton,’ said Morley, peering at me disapprovingly over his moustache.

  ‘Now, Mr Morley, what can I get you, a dry fino or a sweet amontillado?’ said Mrs Thistle-Smith in her finest silk-and-cashmere tones. She quickly and gently brushed a hand against Morley’s arm as she spoke, establishing contact. I thought I saw Morley jerk away slightly as she did so. It was not an auspicious start.

  ‘I’ll have a glass of water, madam, if I may?’

  ‘Water? Really? Are you not well?’

  ‘No, not well, madam. That’s right.’ Morley seemed uncharacteristically guarded.

  ‘If you’re sure? You wouldn’t rather something else? A cocktail, perhaps?’

  ‘No, thank you. Not a cocktail.’

  ‘I know that Mr Thistle-Smith has a nice Cockburn ’96 reserved for himself, but I could get one of the girls to fetch it.’

  ‘No. That won’t be necessary, madam. Water would be my preferred choice.’ His tone was disapproving.

  ‘Ariston men hudor,’ said Mrs Thistle-Smith.

  ‘Indeed,’ agreed Morley. I detected an instant thawing of tone. He loved a Latin – or indeed a Greek – tag. And, as it turned out, he loved a woman who loved a Latin – or indeed a Greek – tag.

  ‘Well, I for one am in complete agreement with you, Mr Morley. There is surely nothing better for man than the taste of water.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Morley, who seemed suddenly to be flushing under Mrs Thistle-Smith’s warming
attentions. ‘I couldn’t agree more.’

  ‘I have a great love of water,’ said Mrs Thistle-Smith, sherry glass in hand. ‘Fountains, springs, mountain pools. So refreshing. So joyous.’

  A maid was duly dispatched for water, and we were shown through the house into the garden room, passing on the way a vast excess of paintings, furniture and ornaments which had somehow been hoisted, yanked and crammed into every nook and cranny. One room we passed was filled almost entirely with chairs, huddled together like sheep in a pen – Chippendales and Hepplewhites, Charles the Second chairs with straight backs, little duets and trios and quartets of Victorian slipper chairs, every conceivable type of chair. It really was the most peculiar sight: the house as a storeroom rather than a home. I had recently read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short novel The Great Gatsby: the house struck me as the Norfolk equivalent of a West Egg mansion. I mentioned this later to Morley. ‘Wrong,’ he said. ‘East Egg, you mean. Not West Egg. Do pay attention in your reading, Sefton.’

  ‘Are you or Mr Thistle-Smith a collector, perhaps, madam?’ asked Morley.

  ‘I am, Mr Morley, for my sins. I don’t know what Herr Freud would say about it.’

  This seemed further to arouse Morley’s interest, his interest already having been well and truly piqued, truth be told, by Mrs Thistle-Smith’s welcoming balm. She might as well have revealed that her real name was Flaubert or Turgenev.

  ‘If you don’t mind my saying so,’ he said, ‘the name of Sigmund Freud is not one that one would expect to hear from the lips of the average Norfolk hostess.’

  Mrs Thistle-Smith raised a well-tended eyebrow in response and pursed her carefully lipsticked lips.

  ‘Then – if you don’t mind me saying so – you can perhaps assume, Mr Morley, that these are not the lips of an average Norfolk hostess.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  And so ineffable charm met endless curiosity, and seemed to find each other quite fascinating. The two of them proceeded to spend some time discussing the finer points of collecting and psychoanalysis.

  I made my excuses, took another glass of sherry, and mingled.

  Small tables had been arrayed around the garden room, without chairs, intended presumably to suggest that one might move casually and informally among one’s fellow guests, but suggesting also, alas, the odd, uncertain appearance of a railway station waiting room. The combination of faded velvet brocade, the cool tiles, the golden, misty light of the early evening, and the vague promise of less than fresh viands, reminded me also of a brothel I had visited in Barcelona.

  There was the chattering murmur of voices, there were men and women of Dickensian features, there were fanciful flowers displayed in fine porcelain vases, and there were canapés. After one or two more glasses of sherry and a polite conversation with a woman who insisted on telling me about her love for the work of E. Nesbit, I realised that I was hungry, having subsisted largely, despite Morley’s deprecations on breakfast, on cigarettes and coffee. Maids were circulating with small plates of food, and I excused myself from my interlocutor and homed in on the nearest tray. Quail’s eggs. I was disappointed, the peeling of quail’s eggs being a task, I find, requiring efforts much greater than the rewards, which are both insubstantial and less nourishing even than a railway sandwich.

  Thomas Thistle-Smith

  ‘I’ll do it for you, mister.’ A boy in a blue velvet suit had appeared at my elbow. He held out his hand. He was probably no more than twelve or thirteen years old; there was, on his lip, the faintest hint of an incipient moustache, and his voice wobbled on the very furthest, most querulous edge of the soprano. He had thick, dark hair that hung down to his shoulders.

  ‘You’ll peel the egg?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I will, sir. I’m an expert, sir.’ His face and his manner were, all at once, open, bold, mild and teasing – as though I were merely an entertaining discovery, and he knew well in advance the outcome of our exchange.

  ‘You’re a quail-egg-peeling expert?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, sir. That’s right, sir.’

  ‘Employed especially for the evening?’

  ‘By my mother, sir. Yes, sir.’

  I glanced around but could see no obvious hovering maternal presence. ‘Is your mother the cook?’

  ‘No, sir. My mother is the lady of the house, sir.’

  ‘Mrs Thistle-Smith?’ I was surprised. Mrs Thistle-Smith seemed a lady long since past her child-rearing years.

  ‘Indeed, sir. I am Thomas Thistle-Smith, sir.’ He shook my hand, one eye still firmly on the quail’s egg. ‘My friends call me Teetees, sir.’

  ‘Teetees?’

  ‘Yes, sir. And my mother always allows me to assist at her parties, sir, if I’m home from school. I’m not allowed to eat them. Only to peel them. I’m a champion quail-egg peeler, sir.’

  ‘Are you, indeed?’

  ‘Yes, sir. If you’d like, sir, I’ll challenge you.’

  ‘Challenge me?’

  ‘If you can peel a quail’s egg quicker than me I’ll give you a shilling, sir.’

  ‘A shilling? And I suppose if you can peel an egg quicker I give you a—’

  ‘Shilling. That’s correct, sir.’

  ‘Very well, then.’

  I held my quail’s egg at the ready. The boy took a quail’s egg from a dish.

  ‘Ready,’ he said. I braced myself. ‘Steady. Go!’

  I started fumbling with the blasted thing, but only a second later the boy held his peeled egg aloft, triumphant.

  ‘That’s incredible,’ I said, for incredible indeed it was.

  ‘Practice makes perfect, sir.’

  He held it – tiny, bald, rather grey-looking – out towards me. It looked sad and old rather than shiny and new. I detected hints of pocket lint. I suspected foul play and sleight-of-hand.

  ‘That’ll be a shilling then please, sir.’

  ‘A shilling!’

  ‘Yes, sir. It goes towards my school fees, sir.’

  ‘Your school fees? You need to peel a lot of quail’s eggs to cover your school fees.’

  ‘Just for the incidentals, sir. There are always incidentals.’

  ‘I’m sure there are.’

  I handed over sixpence. He handed over the peeled egg. He looked at the coin. I ate the egg.

  ‘Hold on,’ said Teetees, too late. ‘This is only a sixpence.’

  ‘Correct,’ I said. ‘And this is not a freshly peeled egg, is it?’

  ‘Of course it is!’

  ‘Really?’

  The boy had exhausted my patience. I was hungry. I had drunk several glasses of sherry, and I had the prospect of a long evening ahead with Morley. I reached forward and forcefully patted the pocket of his blue velvet jacket – and sure enough there came the answering sensation of a handful of tiny pre-peeled eggs squashing together.

  ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘Hey! They’re my eggs!’

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said.

  He scowled at me, and I scowled back, and he disappeared into the crowd, ready to pester others with his pre-pubescent upper-class begging.

  Morley, meanwhile, had been temporarily abandoned by Mrs Thistle-Smith, who was now busy elsewhere in scintillating sherry-party conversation, and he had sought out, or been found by Dr Sharp, who had attended the body of the reverend on our first night in Blakeney. Their voices could be heard faintly over the hubbub, and I felt the distant twitching of Morley’s moustache, always a sign of great danger. I hurried over.

  ‘The answer, Morley, if you would care to listen, is birth control,’ the doctor was saying. It looked as though I was too late. ‘As you know, nature exercises a certain amount of control by effectively sterilising the alcoholic and the diseased, and I am simply saying that there is no good reason why we shouldn’t augment her role and prevent some other types of unsuitable breeding. It’s hardly unreasonable, man.’

  ‘It’s eugenics,’ said Morley.

  ‘It’s birth control,’ said the doctor flatly.

  �
�And who is it who controls the births? Doctors like yourself, presumably?’

  ‘I can think of no others better suited, Mr Morley. Can you? And certainly if individuals are incapable or unwilling to make the right decision—’

  ‘Sorry, doctor. Forgive me. Incapable or unwilling in precisely what sense?’

  ‘Precisely through background, or education or—’

  ‘Race?’ said Morley.

  ‘Potentially, yes,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Mr Morley?’ I said, alerting him to my presence.

  ‘Ah, there. You see, Sefton?’ He had – as was his habit – instantly recruited me onto his side of the argument. ‘A rather troubling suggestion, wouldn’t you agree, doctor?’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Well, try telling the Aga Khan he can’t have any more children, doctor. Eh? Or the Emperor of Nepal. Or the tribal chiefs of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Or the rabbi of—’

  ‘That is clearly not what I meant, Mr Morley, and I have to say that I am rather disappointed by your failure to take my argument seriously.’

  ‘I’m taking your argument very seriously, doctor.’

  ‘Mr Morley?’ I said again, to no avail.

  ‘Good,’ said the doctor. ‘So you’ll understand that I am talking about individuals who cannot provide or account for the consequences of their actions.’

  ‘And you can provide and account for the consequences of all your actions, doctor?’

  ‘I certainly expect no one else to bear the consequences. And I hardly see why we as a nation should bear the responsibility for those born without the capacity to progress or succeed in life.’

  I glanced at Morley’s face. He looked utterly disgusted, as though having eaten half a dozen rotten quail’s eggs.

  ‘I would have thought, doctor,’ he said, ‘that was an argument beneath the dignity of a man like yourself. But clearly I was wrong.’

  The doctor’s face reddened. ‘I don’t see what’s wrong with it,’ he said.