He looked at me, and I, weakly, looked down at the floor.
‘Well, how do I know that you didn’t? How do I know that you’re not all in it? Pritchard-Jones, what poison is it that smells like almonds?’
‘Don’t know, m’boy. Have to look it up in m’books.’
‘It must have been brought here.’ I looked desperately round the room. ‘Look! Here it is.’ I picked up from one of the side tables a tiny glass phial. ‘This is how it was brought.’
‘No doubt it contained some medicament that poor Wittling was taking for his heart,’ said the Master.
‘He did not have heart trouble,’ I said. ‘We’d have heard about it endlessly if he had. Smythe: you can see what’s happening, can’t you? Can I rely on you to support me?’
‘Fight your own battles,’ said Auberon Smythe, making for the door. ‘I’ve no love for the police, believe me. As far as I’m concerned, I went straight to my rooms after Hall. Haven’t been near the SCR all evening. ’Bye, duckies.’
‘What did he say?’ roared Carmody, but we ignored him.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘If I have to fight my own battles, so be it.’ I marched over to the telephone, recently installed in the SCR as a concession to the times. ‘If you won’t listen to me, perhaps you’ll listen to the police.’
‘The police?’ neighed the Master. ‘Really, Mr Borthwick, if we can’t settle a little matter like this without calling in outside authorities, what has become of academic freedom?’
I didn’t deign to answer, and was just beginning to dial when the Master spoke again, with that authoritative undertone to his whine that always got his point across.
‘Mr Borthwick, you really must be careful, you know. I don’t think you have quite thought this thing through.’
‘What do you mean?’ I demanded.
‘Well, let us say, for argument’s sake, that we are all “in it”, as you put it a moment ago. It will be very easy, will it not, for us, all of us, to inform the police of a most unfortunate altercation, really quite violent, that took place last week between you and poor Wittling—’
‘Altercation? There was no altercation. I hardly spoke to the man if I could help it.’
‘Precisely. Your hostility was well known to us. And in an enclosed community such as our own, it is well known how little things can fester, and become great ones. There was that altercation, as I say. On the subject of—what was it?—Milton’s debt to Virgil. Yes, I think that was it. We all heard it, of course. Now, would the police believe your story, of a collusion between a large number of elderly and impeccably respectable academic gentlemen to murder one of their colleagues? Or would they not rather accept our unanimous view that you—your mind unhinged, perhaps, by the notorious infidelities of your wife—had a brainstorm and decided to do away with a colleague with whom you were publicly on the worst of terms?’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Or say our splendid British police discovered that this was the work of one man. Say Mr Peddie. Say Mr Carmody. Say, even, myself. Leaving the rest of the SCR intact. You have been so taken up, I fear, with the terms of the Fellowship in Ancient Persian that you have forgotten the terms of your own Fellowship . . .’
‘My own—?’
‘As some of us here remember, when the Jeremy Collier Fellowship in English was established, English was still a comparatively new university subject. Many of us hoped it would go away. So, in their wisdom, the governing fellows made this Fellowship renewable every five years.’
‘But that’s just a formali—’
‘It has been hitherto. Quite. We have been generous, as is our habit. However, the Fellowship comes up for renewal, does it not, next year. I think you may find that the SCR will not take kindly to the idea of renewing the Fellowship of one who has been responsible for arraigning one of their colleagues on a capital charge.’
‘Damned bad form,’ said Carmody.
‘Quite,’ said Peddie.
‘Quite,’ said all of them, sounding like a flock of ducks in St James’s Park.
‘You wouldn’t dare,’ I said, but my voice sounded hollow.
‘I think you would find that to get a job at your time of life is far from easy. A cold academic wind is blowing, is it not, Borthwick? Positions are being abolished, rather than created, I believe. I’m told that even in the Colonies the universities are no longer the refuge for Oxonians that they once were. And though you are a great reader, Borthwick, you are hardly a prolific writer, are you? Isn’t that what they want these days? Acres of little papers on this and that? It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it, Borthwick? One of the great army of three million unemployed.’
I took my hand slowly from the telephone. He had me over a bubbling cauldron of boiling oil. When threatened where it hurts most, our jobs and our pockets, we liberal intellectuals do not hesitate. Or rather, we hesitate, because that is in our natures, but in the end . . .
I took a symbolic step away from the telephone.
‘Splendid!’ neighed the Master, rubbing his hands. ‘I felt quite sure you’d see you’d been mistaken. Sad that the death of a respected and valued colleague should have been disfigured in this way. Now I fear I must to the Residence, to set in motion the necessary formalities.’ He looked around the room carefully. He took up the little phial from the table, and hurled it into the fire. Then he took the copy of the Sun and placed it carefully in his briefcase.
‘I shall ring Lockitt’s, talk to the old man. I’ll tell him to bring along a certificate for you to sign, Pritchard-Jones. Perhaps you would stay here too, Peddie, to see if there’s anything else? The rest of us can go, I think. Borthwick, we’ll quite understand if you are too upset to attend tomorrow’s meeting: you have taken the death of your friend very hard, we can all see that. I shall propose to change the terms of the Heatherington Fellowship to one in Chinese. I think Wittling would have approved, with his concern for the older languages. And it will show that we in Potty’s can, in our small way, adapt ourselves to the new patterns of the modern world.’
And that’s how it turned out. We appointed two new Fellows. One was a Chinese scholar of great age and Buddha-like inscrutability, the other an elderly Winchester schoolmaster who was having disciplinary problems. They fitted in very well. Life in college goes on pretty much as before. For a time I did not care to go to High Table. I dined constantly at home, driving my wife to a frenzy of irritation. Even when I started to eat in Hall again, I avoided the port. But Time takes the edge off most things. Now I take my glass of Founder’s Port with the rest, with scarcely a thought.
It’s amazing what we liberal intellectuals can take in our strides, when we set our minds to it.
DAYLIGHT ROBBERY
In any league table of Britain’s stately homes, Hardacre Hall would not figure in the top ten. Nor in the second ten, nor yet in the ten after that. Only in a list of the least stately homes open to the public could Hardacre be expected to be given any prominence. People wondered why Lord Woolmington bothered to open it at all, for the receipts could hardly recompense him for his trouble, but the fact is that it gave him and Lady Woolmington an interest, and something to talk about. ‘That chappie with the dentures—insurance salesman, wouldn’t y’say?’ Woolmington would chuckle at the end of his day’s activity of showing the occasional visitors round in ones and twos. ‘And did you notice that frightful woman’s hat?’
Lady Woolmington, Cissie, sat in the entrance hall in an old print frock, a little electric fire by her be-socked ankles, and took the money—a pound a time for adults, 50p for children, pensioners and the unemployed. When the money was safely in her possession, she would say: ‘Tours of the house go on the hour and the half-hour,’ and the visitor was compelled to mooch around the hall for anything up to twenty-five minutes, watched over by a dyspeptic moose over the main door, which had one eye falling disconcertingly out of its socket. Almost never did anyone else come during this wait, and Lady Woolmington woul
d make bright remarks such as ‘This rain’s keeping people away,’ or ‘In this heat people want to be outside.’ The implication that normally the house was athrong with tourists was not one the visitors ever tested. Visitors never came back.
Hardacre Hall was, in truth, only the pokey dower house where generations of dowager Lady Woolmingtons had been shunted off by their newly ennobled sons. True it was built in 1818, but it only proved that inelegant and inconvenient domestic architecture was not suddenly born with the Victorian age, any more than prudery or hypocrisy was.
The Woolmingtons had been country squires and baronets in Pendleshire for two centuries, and had been raised to a barony in 1901, for the first Lord Woolmington had lent Edward VII a large sum of money to cover a gambling debt when he was Prince of Wales. It would, in truth, have been better for the family if he had repaid the loan, for shortly after the First World War they had been forced to sell Woolmington Hall to a speculative builder, who had pulled it down and built half-timbered semis. The Lords Woolmington had retired to Hardacre, adding Hall to its name, and had been there ever since, dwindling.
Promptly on the hour Lord Woolmington would potter in. He would go around shaking hands with the waiting party of two or three, saying ‘Rotten day, isn’t it?’ or ‘Gardens need rain, what?’ Then the tour would commence.
The rooms open to the public—the dining-room, the drawing-room, the green bedroom and the library—left the minds of the more discriminating visitor boggling as to what the unseen rooms could contain. Bumbling along through the dark and ill-decorated rooms, crammed with undistinguished or positively decrepit furniture, Lord Woolmington would seize arbitrarily and unpredictably on some article or other and proffer it before the visitor’s listless gaze.
‘That’s a knife,’ he would proclaim, after a lunge at the mantelpiece had yielded a shoddy little tourist souvenir from the Iberian peninsula. ‘Sent by m’cousin Maud from Oporto. Family tradition says it’s Toledo steel. Shouldn’t think so m’self.’ For favoured visitors he would add: ‘Retired there for her health, m’cousin Maud, so she said. We thought it was for the port.’
So the tour continued. Here was the second Baroness’s work basket—‘just as she left it’. Here in a glass case was a pike caught by the seventh Baronet: ‘not specially large, but it was practically the only time he caught anything at all’. He would flick his hand at an old candelabrum in a dusty corner, in the holders of which were dried arrangements done by his cousin Sylvia in 1957: ‘Candlesticks. That sort of thing appeal to you?’ Here was a picture of the first Baron in his 1911 Coronation robes; here was the present Lady Woolmington, before her marriage, doing her debutante’s curtsey before Edward VIII, he looking positively lethal in his boredom. The second Baron’s saddle and the first Baroness’s false front did not add significantly to the interest of the place, nor did the library, which contained bound volumes of Punch from 1840 until they could no longer afford to take it, a large collection of old green Penguins, and the odd copy of Men Only.
In the middle of this fascinating collection of forgettabilia, Lord Woolmington’s mind was often distracted by things of even less import. ‘There’s last week’s Radio Times,’ he would mutter, and the visitor would shoot a glance there as if it were a collector’s item. Or: ‘Don’t tell me Ben’s done his business by the coal scuttle,’ he would fret, and the visitor would keep his distance, since Ben had already been identified as the old sheepdog, faithful of heart if incontinent of bowel, who accompanied every guided tour.
Sometimes in undistinguished houses the discriminating visitor’s spirits are kept up by the hope of discovering some gem from an Old Master’s hand. Not at Hardacre Hall. ‘That’s a genuine Witherspoon,’ Lord Woolmington would say, darting into a dark corner. ‘Friend of Whistler’s, y’know.’ The nearest any member of the family had come to being painted by a ‘name’ had been when John Singer Sargent was engaged to paint the wife of the first Lord Woolmington. ‘Couldn’t come. Dose of the clap or some damned thing. Sent this chap Bootle instead. Came a damned sight cheaper.’
The visitor gazed for a moment at the wife of the first Baron, in pink and purple cretonne against a background of Sheffield fog, and then Lord Woolmington was away again. ‘And this is an Atkinson Grimshaw. Boar Lane, Leeds. Know Leeds at all?’ Only when they were nearly back at the entrance hall did the visitor momentarily perk up when Lord Woolmington suddenly barked: ‘That’s a Turner.’ Only to sink when he added: ‘Reproduction. Got it at the Tate Gallery Shop. Always did like Folkestone.’
At the end of the tour the victims slunk speechless away. Few attempted to tip the guide, but if one should, an American or an Arab, Lord Woolmington murmured genially, ‘Quite unnecessary. Thank you very much,’ and pocketed the base coin.
When the last tour had set off—if there was one—at half past five, Lady Woolmington went down to the gate and swivelled round the sign to read CLOSED FOR THE DAY. Then she ambled off to the kitchen to prepare the haddock or the lamb chops she had bought for their dinners. After dinner they watched television in the library, or played Happy Families, or sometimes Lord Woolmington walked into the village to the Woolmington Arms, where he was an honoured customer, despite the fact that, in the manner of his kind, he always accepted offers of drinks, but never made them.
It was in the Woolmington Arms that the turn in the house’s fortunes was first publicly broached.
‘Took twenty pounds today,’ Lord Woolmington announced to Jim behind the bar. ‘Can’t remember when I last took that much.’ Which was not surprising, for he never had. To celebrate he added: ‘Best bitter, please, Jim.’
Lord Woolmington had no notion that this was anything other than a flash in the pan. The next day’s takings were down to an ordinary ten pounds, the day after to fourteen. But on Saturday they took twenty-five pounds, and the Wednesday after thirty-four. Not once in that week did they go below twenty.
‘Double whisky, please, Jim,’ Lord Woolmington began saying, in the Woolmington Arms.
At the end of that second week of prosperity he went to a jumble sale in Little Pemberley and bought a chamber pot, which he began displaying to visitors as the first Lady Woolmington’s. ‘Waterworks trouble, y’know,’ he always added. One or two other things that he picked up at auctions or second-hand shops he incorporated imaginatively into the family tradition.
The fact was, Lord Woolmington and Hardacre Hall were becoming a fashionable joke. It had not happened by accident. It all came back to Edwina, Countess of Carbury, who lived at Burtlesham Towers, some twenty miles away. Pendleshire had in fact been swallowed up, during the last local government reorganization but one, and was now part of Greater Cumbershire, but the Pendleshire gentry and aristocracy were a clannish lot, and they stuck together. Thus Lady Carbury knew the Woolmingtons quite well, and thought them ‘a tremendous scream’. One day she had been driven by rain to stop at the Hall with some visitors from London—journalists, for she was herself saleroom correspondent for the Country Lady—and Lady Woolmington had insisted on believing they had come not to call, but to take the guided tour. ‘Five quid it cost me!’ Lady Carbury said ruefully to her husband afterwards. But she had not been unaware that her guests had found the tour of the house gloriously risible, and had spent much of the time in the car back to Burtlesham giving spirited imitations of Lord Woolmington’s dottier pronouncements and odder mannerisms.
‘The joke of it is,’ Lady Carbury said, in the middle of her guests’ mirth, ‘that in among all that junk he’s got the most lovely Atkinson Grimshaw.’
And her guests, most of whom had never heard of Atkinson Grimshaw, nodded wisely, until someone shrieked ‘That’s m’Great Aunt Flora’s tea-caddy!’ and the car rocked with laughter again.
The Countess’s mention of Atkinson Grimshaw was a matter—as most things were with the Countess—of pure calculation. Burtlesham Towers was a very different kind of stately home from Hardacre. It was run most efficiently by the young Earl
and his Countess: it had an adventure playground and a tropical aviary, a collection of Chippendale and a fine Van Dyke, to say nothing of a Gainsborough and two Sir Thomas Lawrences. It was a house that coach parties visited, families made the object of day outings, and it advertised on railway stations throughout the North. Nevertheless, the Earl and the Countess were regrettably short of the ready, and the Countess was—in wish if not in fact—an expensive young lady who had perpetual and urgent uses for the ready. Hence, of course, her taking on the job of saleroom correspondent.
Now to sell off any of the house’s real treasures was out of the question. The Earl would never have consented, and to do so would have been self-defeating, since it must lessen the appeal of the house to the public at large. In addition, all the really important pictures were part of an entail which it would have been costly and time-consuming to undo. There were, on the other hand, works by lesser hands, among them three Atkinson Grimshaws, bought by a Victorian ancestor from the Leeds artist to make less grim some of the guest bedrooms in the East Wing. These the Earl would never regret, could surely be persuaded to sell. Thus, over a few months previous to Hardacre’s sudden access of visitors, there had crystallized in the Countess’s mind a plan—not a criminal conspiracy, for it certainly is not criminal to increase in value one’s own possessions—but a series of delicate manœuvres which would have precisely that effect.
Twice over the last year the Countess’s column in the Country Lady had hinted that if there was an artist whose stock was rising, it was that fascinating late-Victorian Atkinson Grimshaw, whose atmospheric townscapes . . . fascinating experiments with light . . . and so on, and so on. It was a name, too, that the Countess continually yet delicately brought into conversations with friends on the fringes of the art world.
On the other hand, such delicate manœuverings seemed likely to have but marginal success. If, on the other hand, the campaign to boost Grimshaw’s saleable value could be linked with someone . . . someone with the capacity to be a personality of some kind . . .
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