by Jessica Mann
1927: a drawing of a publisher’s progress as a rake, done in Rex’s personal strip-cartoon style. In the last frame a centaur-like cross between a man and a peacock received a decoration from a king dressed in rags. The caption was ‘Preening his feathers’.
The messages became increasingly acerbic as the years went by. ‘Rex refuses to co-operate. He rejects any so called interest of the public in his private affairs. It has the right to know no more than what he publishes: his name.’
A memorandum on similar lines: ‘Evelyn. If you go on asking for gossip I shall find a different publisher. This is all you will get. Rex was born in the provinces, at school in the provinces, destined for the provinces. He was educated under tables, counters, stairs and hedges by girls who had been told he was not nice to know, or who he had heard were not nice to know. Escaped the ritual slaughter of young men by the accident of his birth date. Escaped ritual sacrifice on the altar of provincial propriety by running away. Taught to be a masochist by receiving and a sadist by administering corporal punishment. In short, brought up to be a bugger and a burgher. Became neither. And none of this is what you want for dust jackets.’
There was a covering note from Paul Dillon. ‘Dear Mr Cory, please find enclosed such material as there is here at the Cavalier Press about Rex. It represents the contents of the only file, and perhaps after so many years it is surprising to have retained even that, but my Uncle Evelyn, formerly the managing director of the firm, was a personal friend of the artist and that may explain why the correspondence was preserved. You might want to get in touch with Lord Munvies, who is perhaps in a position to provide more information. I shall be interested to see your completed manuscript as you kindly offer, but should perhaps warn you that it may not be a commercial proposition to publish it in these hard times.’
Which, Zoe thought, was no bad thing. The photocopied sketches among these papers were shocking.
It was a new thought. She was not in the habit of being disgusted. Indeed she had usually been surprised at other people’s low threshold of disgust. She had always wondered why they could accept naked knees or faces and not the equally universal attributes, breasts and bottoms. But today, suddenly, Zoe was revolted by, for instance, this water colour from the ‘Stella’ series, a lubricious child thrusting herself invitingly at the seeing eye, the star shaped birthmark on her thigh highlighted like an eighteenth-century dandy’s beauty spot; or this drawing of the same girl, knees receptively splayed, mouth and genitals gaping wide. Zoe pitied the lost child who had posed for Rex to paint. He used the universal attributes to say something Zoe no longer wanted to hear. Even the painting above the desk, though less explicit sexually, showed a cynicism that Zoe found herself thinking was destructive. ‘One has to respect something, after all.’ She wanted her child to grow up with some standards. She unhooked the picture and put it, along with all Lawrence’s disordered papers, back into the cardboard crate. One of the groundsmen must find somewhere to hide it all away.
Chapter Twenty-Three
On Tamara’s previous visit to Whitaker Episcopi the fields were blurred under a dreamy haze, the landscape replete. Now in a colder season this part of the north Midlands was wet, muddy and, in the eyes of someone who had grown up in the lushness of Devonshire, positively ugly.
Why on earth had Viola Hutber and her new husband chosen to settle here? Tamara thought of the Reverend Sydney Smith, that witty, sensible man forced to live in similarly unpromising rurality – not all that far from here, come to think of it – who wrote, ‘I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave.’ At this stage in her own life, Tamara would have felt it was death in life to live in the Gamekeeper’s Cottage near Whitaker Episcopi; and Viola Hutber had been younger than Tamara was now when she moved here.
The track to the cottage was slick with standing water. Tamara kept to the parallel ruts and listened to the rocks between them scraping the bottom of the car. She had four-wheel drive and would be able to get out again, but there must be days when Viola Hutber was marooned here.
The roses had been carefully pruned, the lawns punctually cut at the end of the season, the tubs from the terrace moved under cover, the flower beds dug over, and no doubt planted with rows of the next season’s bulbs. Even in this weather the cottage looked neat, but the view from its windows would be bleak indeed. Nobody ever came here; so, at least, the woman in the village shop had said. She was accustomed to reporters doing a piece on their most distinguished local resident, and reeled off a well rehearsed speech.
A nice lady who kept herself to herself. Nobody had any idea that she wrote, or what it was. It was her husband that was the writer. A nice enough sort of person when he was sober. Very depressed he would get, though, and then he took a bit too much, but you could understand it, if you think what he’d been through. He had lost every single one of his family in the war, things couldn’t have been easy for him.
Visitors? Not that anyone knew of, even now. She deserved a bit of peace and privacy when she came home. ‘We aren’t spies round here, that’s what I always say,’ the woman remarked. ‘I ought to write it all down and sell copies, that many people come asking.’
But how many of them went on to break into the cottage?
Tamara walked once round the house. The back door, through which burglars had once broken, had been replaced with a solid wooden door. The downstairs windows were shuttered. A box high up on the wall was marked with the name of a security firm.
Tamara’s car telephone was hidden in a compartment under the passenger seat, as it might have caused remark on view in this cheap looking and cheerful machine.
Whatever the time of day or night, the imperturbable Mrs Uglow always answered Department E’s telephone. She said it would take her about half an hour to find the number Tamara needed, and it was exactly thirty minutes later when she produced it – the unlisted number assigned to the extra line that connected Dame Viola’s burglar alarm to the police station. Feeling more forgiving about computers than earlier in the day, Tamara dialled it, and left the hand set on the car seat, engaging the telephone line that would otherwise send warnings of her presence to the local police. The alarm bell was easier to disconnect, and Tamara climbed on the roof of her car and then up via the porch to do so. She had learnt the technique on a refresher course at the skill centre in Bayswater to which Mr Black’s recruits were sent, and even here, where she was sure nobody was in earshot of the noise, it seemed sensible to prevent it. ‘It’s much the same as defusing a bomb,’ the man had explained. ‘Steady nerves and steady fingers. Don’t hurry, don’t snatch. Check and double check. Think carefully and then think again.’ This task was easier than the one Tamara had been set as her test. That time she had been crouched under the eaves of a house in a London suburb, from which and around which lights would clamour and explode if she made a mistake. This one is a doddle in comparison, Tamara thought, parting the filaments with delicate movements of her fingers. Entering the premises would be less easy, for the new shutters were sturdy. Eventually Tamara climbed on to the roof where she removed enough tiles to be able to break the laths beneath them, and made a gap large enough to wriggle herself through. She waited, crouched low so as to present no silhouette to distant eyes, in case there was another warning about to sound off. She thought about the instructor who had told his class that houses so unseriously barricaded would seldom be worth their efforts. He preferred to concentrate on means of entry to the domestic Fort Knoxes that presented more challenges to skill. Tamara was almost disappointed that the first time she needed to remember his advice, she had so little need of it. He was a huge, gentle man who looked like a thug and had a romantic passion for the lunatic fringe of archaeology. After training sessions, over drinks, Tamara had sometimes tried to argue him out of mystic beliefs in lines of force and objects of power.
Five minutes; no alarms. Tamara dropped on to the powder pink carpet of Dame Viola’s Hutber’s attic lobby.
&nb
sp; One floor down: the bedroom. Shades of pink and mauve; clothes, shoes, lotions. A flowery bathroom, with deep purple lavatory paper.
The living room. Books, all by Hilary Vivian, who clearly was not interested in her competition. A record player, with stacks of mid-century jazz and schmaltz. No cupboards, no concealed cubby-holes in the inglenook. Tamara’s hands were blackened after feeling round for a lost cloam oven or a hidden safe. She washed them under the kitchen tap. Shelves neatly stacked with traditional utensils. A freezer full of neatly labelled foil boxes of stews and hot-pots. A rack full of bottles of home made wine marked in the same handwriting: elderberry, parsnip, nettle beer, and a positively vintage six-year old elderflower champagne. Above the cooker dangled strings of drying produce: onions, garlic, mushrooms and chanterelles, apple rings. The dresser was stacked with jars of bottled fruit and home made jam, which, signed by their maker, would fetch high prices at Watchwomen’s fund raising auction sales.
Tamara propped the trap door to the cellar with the kitchen chairs and tested them carefully before letting herself down into Allan Cory’s tomb. It was musty, dusty, though with only a few months’ deposit, having probably been cleaned at the time of his death, fusty – why should all the applicable adjectives rhyme, she wondered idly, shining her torch around the walls, once whitewashed but now powdery and grey as the lime coating disintegrated. Somebody had made an effort to clean the place up, so that it did not smell of death. All the same, Tamara, who did not think herself sensitive to atmospheres, shuddered. She looked carefully around for messages a policeman might have missed, and wondered whether a scratch on the wall was random, or a letter, or a series of letters. Did it say Viola? Could the man have seen to write any message? Would he have known what to write? Trained as she was for emergencies, and well endowed with native resourcefulness, Tamara could not have escaped from that prison. Before seeing it she had almost been inclined to despise Allan Cory for meekly succumbing to his fate. Now she knew that there was nothing he could have done to avert it.
Panting from unaccustomed panic Tamara climbed back into the kitchen and shut the trap door. So far, she thought, a fruitless exercise.
Up again, and soon out. Under the eaves there were two tiny rooms. One held the computer. The equipment was set out on a pink painted table and the room was papered with a design of spring flowers, but the attempt to soften the visual impact of modern technology was, Tamara thought, misguided. The computer was simple to access for an intruder who had seen and memorised part of Watchwomen’s list of code numbers, and the list of Class One Members, those who were thought to be influential, was instructive, for not all the prominent women who had joined it also announced the fact. But there seemed to be nothing more sinister than that discretion. Watchwomen was what it seemed, going by the evidence Tamara had on it so far.
Its leader, however, was not. The other attic room was fitted up as a linen cupboard, warmed by the copper hot-water cylinder. Slatted shelves held an ample supply of damask napkins and linen sheets, all with enough embroidery and lace to represent a washerwoman’s nightmare.
Dame Viola Hutber’s treasures were hidden under what looked to a casual glance like a heap of old eiderdowns. Here were the silver candelabra, the mother-of-pearl work box, the miniature portrait in a frame set with pearls and the engraved silver tray, awarded to Hilary Vivian by the Lovers of Literature, that had been reported stolen last February.
Tamara took the valuables down to the living room and arranged them in a row on the tapestry footstool. Then she opened the front door, easily done from the inside, and left the cottage. She had clean clothes in her car, and pulled off her lichen stained trousers and shoes and dressed herself more respectably. When she got to the main road she broke the telephone connection and replaced the handset in its hiding place. She had lunch in the pub at Whitaker Episcopi. The police car flashed past the windows, blue light revolving, just as she was taking her first sip of dry Martini. She ate leisurely (‘hot meals our speciality, shepherd’s pie and fish pie’), fastidiously leaving the powdery pieces of dehydrated potato at the side of her plate. When she was drinking her coffee she saw two more police cars follow the first through the village. She wondered what the occupants would make of the clue she had left for them.
Chapter Twenty-Four
There were not many blank moments in Lawrence’s new life. During one of them (a cancellation by parents whose son had been awarded a scholarship to Rugby) he came across the things he had put in his pocket while George Jenkin was boring him in the attic. Unlike the pockets of Lawrence’s suit, the attic had already been cleared out, its contents sent to a saleroom, its walls painted, windows repaired and floors scrubbed. For one day it had looked bare and clean and monastic, as perhaps it had originally been. But modern boys were allowed more freedom than mediaeval monks. The white paint was already patterned with posters and notices, and every break-time boys used the new space for their hobbies. Territorial disputes had immediately arisen between the war gamers and the model railwaymen and Lawrence was devising some practical education in civics, a mock county court, to resolve it.
This book was the original Cavalier Press edition of The Stroker. Lawrence wondered how unlikely the coincidence was, that a man who had been studying the work and its author should find a copy of it in such circumstances, but concluded that a forgotten attic storeroom was exactly where he should expect to find it, hidden long since by an owner who was ashamed to let family or servants see what he had bought. Although many, probably most, copies of the original printing had disappeared, destroyed by officialdom, others would have survived along with Lady Chatterley’s Lover or The Tropic of Capricorn, illicit until changing times allowed them to emerge from brown-paper wrappings or the disguise of a boring binding on an inaccessible shelf.
The original owner of this book had read it to tatters. Allan Cory’s had remained in better condition, for he was not much of a one for books, least of all improper ones. He had maintained the standards of old fashioned puritanism throughout his life, a rather sad and limited one as Lawrence, now that he had occasion to consider it, realised.
The only advice that Allan had ever given Lawrence about women was that he should respect them. He did not mean that their capacity to give and get pleasure was respectable, rather that they were to be goddesses; but Lawrence’s mother had not found Allan’s embraces celestial. She had left him when Lawrence was less than two years old, and lived what was then called a ‘gay life’, though heterosexual, for a few years, before her second marriage. Lawrence could remember a series of ‘uncles’, whose significance he did not understand until years later. He was glad, now, that he had been brought up by his mother, and acquired from her that sense of joy that Allan Cory had not learnt from his foster parents, and could not teach. All the same, a man who had gloated over Rex’s manuals should have learnt something. And a boy who had been Basil Hutber’s pupil should have known better, but for the fact, unfortunately, that it really seemed to be the first seven years that counted, as the Jesuits had said. Lawrence wondered whether he should establish a nursery school at St Uny’s, and smiled at the thought of Rainsford Hutber’s certain reaction to the idea. Indeed, Rainsford himself, so correct and measured in everything, was not good evidence for the effect of early childhood with a man like Basil. He had missed the advantage other boys, unrelated to the Head, still remembered.
Evening sessions in this very room, with light from a wood fire, cider and currant buns. Discussions about a philosophy for life. Take ye thought for the morrow? Or better to gather ye rosebuds while ye may? In Lawrence’s childhood, and still, the new threat of universal destruction made that an important question. Should you hope to be rich? Was ambition desirable?
Basil drew thoughts out of boys who did not know they had them. During the day they were afraid of him. The small oblong of pasteboard printed with the message that they were to call on the headmaster that day filled even the oldest boy with a bowel loosening dis
may. But during the relaxed evenings they felt differently about him. They admired and wanted to impress him. They almost loved him.
‘After all, sir, you try to do good. Look what you do for the town.’
‘Perhaps I just like things to be well organised.’
‘It must be more than that sir, surely. All those playgrounds and day centres . . .’ Basil Hutber’s pupils were paraded at the opening of civic amenities. Our boys play a part in community life, his prospectus promised. He said, ‘There’s no damned merit about it. Yes Cory?’
‘The Duke of Wellington, sir. About the Order of the Garter.’
‘It was a good point. Motives are quite unimportant. It is the deed not the doer that matters.’
‘But sir, you need good motives to do the deed in the first place.’
‘Not necessarily. Think about it.’
‘Well then, sir, teaching. That’s a good deed.’
‘People like what they find they are good at. It is as simple as that.’
‘But what makes you start doing it, sir, before you know you’re going to be any good at it? I mean, sir, why did you start teaching?’
‘It was the only job I could get. There had been a slump, there was unemployment, especially here in Carmell.’
‘What subject did you teach, sir?’ By the time that Lawrence was at the school its headmaster’s only classes consisted of discussion and practice for the general essay papers that were an important part of the university entrance examinations.