by Gary Newman
‘Yes, Leah,’ she said. ‘You really gave it to that journo in your letter in last week’s paper – your name was all over it.’
Chapter Eleven
‘I wonder what all that was in aid of?’ I said to Leah, when we were back on the road to Wivenhoe again.
My companion shrugged. ‘Life’s too short . . . The more seriously we take Pat’s tricks, the more fool us.’
‘I’m with you there!’
‘Seb, the business of your memory lapses . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘You mentioned that, after your last family row with Reet and Paul in Dunstanburgh, you found yourself sitting at the wheel of your parked car, looking over some cliffs.’
‘That’s right: over a year ago. I’d no recall at all of driving there from our cottage in Dunstanburgh.’
‘The cliffs would’ve been at Embleton Bay.’
‘You know the area?’
‘Mum and Dad had some friends in Jesmond in Newcastle,’ Leah explained. ‘We spent a couple of summers in their chalet near Alnmouth when I was a kid – it made a change from Scarborough, where we usually went. And you’ve no recollection at all of how you got there?’
‘No, and I’ve always had an odd dread of cliffs. The incident I described would’ve been a vague memory of flight, I suppose – ending in white cliffs. It’s disquieting not being able to remember significant parts of one’s life.’
‘We’ve all got things we’d rather not remember – a sort of moral amnesia.’
‘Some sort of guilt complex, you mean?’
‘If you like,’ Leah said. ‘I certainly agree with your doctor about ruling out epilepsy.’
‘Aren’t shrinks – saving your reverence – supposed to be all for bringing it all out into the open?’
‘For one thing, I don’t happen to be a shrink, as you’re pleased to put it – I’ve no actual medical qualifications – and for another, some things are best left buried.’
‘So the truth doesn’t necessarily set you free?’
Leah’s pleasant heart of a face was turned to me, and her dark eyes were grave.
‘The truth isn’t for the weak.’
‘Well, thanks a bundle, Leah!’
She patted my knee.
‘I didn’t mean it like that, but it’s something you should think about: that applies to all this stuff about your grandfather, too.’
‘Ah, but now that I’ve decided to write a book about it, it’ll count as therapy.’
We fell silent for a while, then I drove on to a straight, narrow road through heavy arable land, the tractors busy on it, with their usual train of white gulls. In the distance, the faint popping of practice fire could just be heard from the direction of Colchester army base.
‘What have you got planned for the rest of the day?’ I asked.
‘Marking bloody scripts – freshers’ terminal tests.’
‘Do I detect a hint of disillusionment?’
‘It’s the same every year, now – same subjects, same questions, same students: they seem to come out of a six-pack . . . I’ve had twelve years of it now.’
‘Any sabbaticals in the pipeline?’
‘I’ve a term free in a couple of years’ time, but ideally, I want out.’
‘Really? Any other line in mind?’
‘I’d like to live the way you do – you’re a lucky sod in many ways, Seb – but what else does a thirty-seven-year-old psychology lecturer do?’
I laughed.
‘Marry a poor sap with money, like Frank Hague – like Pat did.’
‘Pat’s a Reader,’ Leah replied. ‘She’s good at her subject, and she’s written quite a lot, too. Pity she happens to be barmy . . .’
‘What do you want most of all, Leah?’
‘What everyone wants – to be fully myself.’
‘And what would that take?’
‘Money!’ she pronounced, making her already deep voice positively boom. ‘Lots of it!’
We both laughed.
‘Fine chance,’ Leah finally remarked, with an ironic sigh.
By now I was driving under the vast entrance portal of the main university building, then I turned off in the direction of the high-rise where Leah’s flat was housed. I reflected that, if I worked here and came into money, the first thing I’d do would be to get the hell out and buy some accommodation on a more human scale. I pulled up, and Leah got out.
‘What’ll you be up to?’ she asked me, as she slung her shoulder bag on.
‘Unavoidable shopping in Colchester,’ I said. ‘I’ve been dodging it for as long as I could.’
‘Ciao,’ Leah said, pecking me on the cheek.
‘Catch up with you, darling.’
She turned and strode towards the entrance to the block, and I drove back in the direction of Colchester. After our little talk in the car, I felt I’d glimpsed a new side to Leah, not having guessed before at the evident depths of her discontent. To me, she was a clever, sexy young woman, on top of her profession and her world, to the extent, even, of giving time to a wreck like me. To herself, though – allowing for the ever-tightening screw of academic bureaucracy that was demoralizing the whole profession – it seemed she was a bored academic, approaching middle age, and with nowhere else to go. And that stuff – half-serious though it might have been – about money: well, at least I could be sure she wasn’t interested in me for mine . . .
Having got my shopping in a bit earlier than normal, I popped into my favourite second-hand bookshop. I eventually arrived at the English poetry section, and felt a tingle of excitement when on its shelves I made out The Magus, by Tarquin Rivers, on the spine of a slim, clothbound volume. Rivers, again – that erstwhile member of Julian Rawbeck’s Camden Hill Convocation, and pensive night-wanderer and discoverer of devastating truths in 1899 East Hackney. Who was it who’d said that if you looked long enough for something, it ended up by looking for you? I opened the book, and found from the date of the edition – 1952 – that it had come out two years after my grandfather’s death and nearly forty years after that of its author, Rivers, in the Near East.
I skimmed through the stiff, deckled pages of this book of Rivers’ ‘hitherto unpublished poems’, to find that it was only a hundred and thirty pages long, and that there were only about twenty lines of text in the middle of each page. It was priced very reasonably – I’d have it.
That afternoon, after a scratch lunch, I sat down in my cane armchair at home and read through Rivers’ book in one sitting. It was highly varied in subject matter – from the poet’s public school and college reminiscences, through the meaning of Beauty and so on to his travels in the Near East. Like most ‘previously unpublished’ collections by dead, once eminent folk, it soon became clear why the poems hadn’t found publishers during Rivers’ lifetime: they were obviously not his best work. The lack of a central theme and of the dark emotional intensity of his later Near Eastern poems made for facile and not very interesting reading, except for the last – ‘The Burial of the Magus’.
The poem was set in Syria during the Roman Empire, and its narrator is Creon, a worldly-wise soldier-philosopher. Creon relates how Esdras, a naive young provincial scholar, comes up to Antioch in search of a teacher. While listening to the various philosophers in the market-place, Esdras spots Cleoma, a ‘lascivious handmaid’ of Simeon, a celebrated Magus. Enslaved by Cleoma, Esdras through her finds his way to Simeon, who becomes his guru.
Esdras soon becomes disillusioned with the Magus, who he sees is a manipulative sensualist, using his powers to dupe rich fools into parting with their money. Part of Simeon the Magus’s racket is procuring young men, through drugs and blackmail, to cater for the ‘unholy loves’ of his wealthy followers. To Esdras’s dismay, he learns that the Magus is using his love for Cleoma to groom him for the attentions of Lollius, a rich and foolish Roman sensualist, who’s a member of the Magus’s circle. Faced with the Magus’s machinations, Esdras feels powerless – his attracti
on to his guru’s creature, Cleoma, is too strong – to avoid the loathsome role being prepared for him.
Rivers goes on in his poem to explain how, meanwhile, the slave Silas, an ‘unclean minion’ of the Magus, and Cleoma’s lover, conspires with other disgruntled dependants of the Magus to kill him, planning to incriminate the hapless Esdras, whom Silas hates on account of his rivalry for Cleoma’s favours.
With all of this going on, the narrator, Creon, who’s an occasional sitter-in at the Magus’s more legitimate lectures, gets to know Esdras, in whom he finds the Ideal Friend he’s been seeking all his life – ‘In our One, there is neither Thee nor Me.’ Creon soon sees through the way the Magus, Silas and Cleoma are using Esdras for their respective ends, and pities his young friend as ‘the Seer, who cannot see . . .’
The poem goes on to describe how Creon uncovers Silas’s plot to destroy his master and put the blame on Esdras, and late one night, follows two members of the band of plotters to a ‘low tavern’ in the Bactrian Quarter, where they’ve already lured the Magus. Muffling himself in his cloak, Creon awaits developments outside the tavern, but to his alarm, two other plotters arrive, shouting and singing like revellers, while propping between them a drugged Esdras. The ‘revellers’ shout for girls, and drag the seemingly drunk Esdras upstairs.
Creon waits in the street, his fears mounting, till, half an hour later, the clients of the tavern stream out and the innkeeper douses the lamps. Fearing he’s left things too late, Creon crosses the road and hides in the shadows of an alleyway next to the tavern door, where he waits for the way to be clear for him to sneak in. He’s about to do so, when all four plotters slink out of the tavern – minus Esdras.
The poem moves to its climax as a now thoroughly alarmed Creon waits for the plotters to go their ways, then slips unseen into the tavern entrance and makes his way upstairs, where he finds the Magus, dead and with his throat cut, in a squalid room with a window ‘that signified an Emperor’s blood’. Creon looks all over for Esdras, but he’s not there – he must have come to in time to sneak out of the tavern somehow. To that extent, the plotters’ scheme to incriminate Esdras has come unstuck, but there’s still the problem of the Magus’s body . . .
Here Creon does some quick thinking: the best thing he can do is to get the body out of the tavern, and, ‘hard by Reuben’s ground’, to ‘ash it in unhallowed fire’. There can be no religious ceremony for the Magus, ‘only nearby, the undying smoke.’ Creon then buries the ashes so that no one will know of the Magus’s fate, and, whatever the evil Silas and his fellow plotters may say later, Esdras can never be accused of the Magus’s murder.
The endpiece to the poem describes how, after Creon has got rid of the Magus’s remains and put Esdras in the clear, his young friend is more besotted with Cleoma than ever, and has no time for Creon . . . Finally disillusioned with earthly attachments, Creon wanders off into the desert to seek truth as a hermit. So ended ‘The Burial of the Magus’.
And so, I thought, sitting in my cane chair back in the early 2000s, ended the mystery of how Julian Rawbeck had met his death! For Antioch, read Camden Hill, and for the era of Imperial Rome, read 1899 . . . Rawbeck, of course, appears as the Magus. All the circumstances of the Camden Hill Convocation set-up were mirrored in the poem, which was a barely disguised confession by Rivers – ‘Creon’ in the poem – that he’d been the one who’d got rid of Rawbeck’s body after my grandfather – clearly ‘Esdras’ – had woken from his drugged trance beside it! ‘Cleoma’ had been a dead ringer, too, for Carrie Bugle, and who could the malign slave ‘Silas’ have been in real life but Laurence Victor Pidgeon – the Vickybird? And ‘Silas’ had led the plot to murder the Magus/Rawbeck.
My hands trembling with excitement, I read through the poem again, just to see if I hadn’t missed anything. No: it was all there, down to poor Jimmie Toland as the rich Roman fool, Lollius, who’d fancied the candid lad, Esdras . . . Then there was the description in the poem of where the Magus’s body had been cremated: ‘hard by Reuben’s ground . . .’ Where had I seen that before? I put the book down on the side table, and, jumping up, made for the kitchen, where I’d left my jacket, and took Grandfather’s notebook out of the pocket. Turning to the page with the enigmatic disjointed entries, I found what I was looking for: Reuben’s Court and Smoking Altars. The latter expression could well tie in with the ‘undying smoke’ that was the only funerary mark of the Magus’s cremation in the description in Rivers’ poem. But why should smoke from a funeral pyre be ‘undying’? If that was only a poetic effect, it was a pretty lame one. I dashed back into the sitting room, hopping up and down in triumph – ‘Got it! Cracked it!’ – then rang Leah and blurted out the details of my new discovery.
‘The poem’s clearly cathartic on Rivers’ part,’ was my companion’s initial reaction. ‘Getting the fact that he’d burned Rawbeck’s body off his chest. And I think the fact that the poem wasn’t published until forty years after his death strongly suggests that he never meant it to be published in his lifetime. And after all Rivers’ efforts, your grandad still only had eyes for Carrie . . .’
‘But this Reuben’s Court reference is still stumping us,’ I complained.
‘Though the Smoking Altars mention in your grandad’s notebook could tie in with the “eternal smoke” Rivers says in his poem marks the grave of the Magus – Rawbeck. Remember, I looked up Reuben’s Court in the modern London street guide . . .’
‘Mmm . . . you found one near Gunnersbury station, but that area presumably wasn’t built up in 1899, and there’s none in the East End on my grandfather’s 1871 map.’
‘Seb, have you thought about the fact that your grandfather was using an 1871 map in 1899, a gap of twenty-eight years?’
‘You’re right! There’d have been slum clearance and so on in the meantime. I may have been looking for places – streets and houses – that Grandfather knew, but mightn’t have figured on his 1871 map . . .’
‘Yes,’ Leah went on, ‘the map would just have served for general reference, as we might use a 1980s map today, if we found one lying around.’
‘Right. But back to how Rivers might have got rid of Rawbeck’s ashes: what about actual burial grounds around Hackney? They’d be the obvious places to scatter someone’s ashes without arousing suspicion, and there can’t have been that much chopping and changing round of graveyards. There may be something suggestive, too, in the surrounding streets and features.’
‘It’s worth trying – process of elimination, and all that. Keep me posted, Seb.’
I rang off, then got the 1871 street map and spread it out on the floor. I then got my magnifying glass out of the bureau and knelt over the map. I’d make the radial point of my circle the Home in the East in Hackney.
Moving westwards from there – there was only open country to the east – the first cemetery of note was the Victoria Park one, and there were no Reuben references in the surrounding streets. Moving on from there, the same applied to the Jews’ Burial Ground, just south of the park, in front of the Mile End Workhouse. A bit farther west, alongside the Whitechapel Workhouse, was another Jews’ Burial Ground, off North Street, which, reasonably enough, branched north, off the Whitechapel Road. Still no features with a Reuben label, though . . .
I sat back for a think: right, call in the professionals. I glanced at my watch: three-fifteen – the Central Library in Colchester should still be open. I got up off the floor and went over to the side table with the Yellow Pages, and rang the library. I was referred to a helpful voice, to whom I explained the situation.
‘You say your map’s the 1871 one?’ asked the young girl on the desk.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘But the events I’m researching took place in 1899.’
There was a short interval, filled with the click of fingers on a keyboard.
‘We’ve the 1894 Ordnance Survey map of East London: it’s pretty exhaustive. And it’s cemeteries and street or place names with Reuben or Smoke
you’re after?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Could I ring you back?’
She could, and I spent the next twenty minutes rummaging in vain through my reference books for anything on East London topography pre-1899. Then the phone rang, and I dashed over to answer it.
‘There’s a Jews’ Burial Ground north of the Whitechapel Road,’ said the pleasant female voice. ‘It’s marked “disused” on the XVII. II Middlesex Sheet of the 1894 OS map. Bordered on the east by Brady Street.’
‘Ah! That’s marked North Street in the 1871 map – the street must’ve been renamed between 1871 and the time of your map.’
‘And there’s a Reuben Street,’ the voice went on, ‘branching off eastwards again from Brady Street – just opposite the Burial Ground, in fact.’
‘Excellent! And the Smoke or Smoking connection?’
‘Mmm . . . not as such, but . . .’
‘Yes – please go on.’
The girl at the other end laughed.
‘Not unless you count the smoke that would’ve come from the Animal Charcoal Works in those days – the Works abutted directly on to the Burial Ground.’
‘That’s really splendid – better than I could have hoped for. Many, many thanks – you’ve been a great help!’
I put the receiver down, and, in a fever of excitement, started to pace the room. It all fitted! After Rivers nips up the stairs into the murder room above the pub in East Hackney, to find my grandfather gone and Rawbeck’s corpse lying there, he manages – with help, surely? – to get the body of the artist into a coach or cart. He then takes it somewhere where he can safely burn it, and scatters the ashes in the Whitechapel Road Burial Ground, which is ‘hard by’ if not Reuben’s Ground in Rivers’ poem, then at least Reuben Street, near the eastern, Brady Street boundary of the Burial Ground. And, as it says in the poem of the Magus’s cremated remains, Rawbeck’s ashes will receive a tribute of ‘eternal’ – or as long as the nearby Animal Charcoal Works’ chimney lasts – smoke.