by Ned Beauman
‘Which servants?’ said Erskine.
‘Godwin, and that girl of your sister’s.’
‘Tara?’
‘Yes.’
Erskine felt great relief about Sinner, but he still couldn’t help saying, ‘They wouldn’t have eloped. She detests him. I remember Evelyn saying so.’
‘I think my daughter probably has better things to do than keep up-to-date with her servants’ romantic lives. Or at least I hope she does.’
‘Have you told her? She’ll be upset.’
‘Your mother will tell her.’
‘Were either of these servants Jewish?’ said Berthold Mowinckel.
‘If it were up to me I’d have my footmen neutered,’ said Bruiseland.
‘Will the conference continue?’ said Aslet.
‘That boy, whatever his faults, was supposed to be my son-in-law,’ said Erskine’s father. ‘The conference will not continue.’
‘Why put your trust in the police?’ said Amadeo. ‘We should capture these beasts ourselves.’
There was a small cheer, and soon the five fascists were rushing off to find out how many hunting dogs you could fit in a motor car. Erskine followed them as far as the hall, not wanting to be left alone with his father, and then sneaked upstairs to his bedroom and woke up Sinner.
‘Something pretty bad has happened. Morton’s dead. You know, my sister’s fiancé.’
‘Do they know who did it?’ said Sinner. His face showed no reaction.
‘Two of the servants here.’
‘Which ones?’
‘Godwin the footman and Tara the maid. They’ve run off with a lot of valuables. My father says Morton must have caught them and so they beat him to death and threw him in the pond. It’s rather horrifying. But a relief in a way because – I won’t lie to you – I did think for a moment it might have been—’
‘No,’ said Sinner.
‘What?’
‘That’s wrong.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It weren’t them.’
‘How can you possibly know that?’
‘I seen it. Well, I ain’t seen it, but I heard it. Last night.’
‘What do you mean? Who was it, then?’
‘The beefy old toff.’
‘Bruiseland?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s nonsensical.’
‘I heard it,’ said Sinner.
‘Why on earth would Bruiseland want to murder Morton?’
‘He thought he was trying to blackmail him.’
‘Morton thought Bruiseland was—’
‘No, the fat one thought the other schmuck was sending the fat one letters.’
Erskine’s heart almost stopped when he remembered what he’d heard through the library door the previous afternoon. Still, there were other ways that Sinner might know about that – one of the other servants might have eavesdropped on a related conversation and then gossiped about it.
‘I was talking to Tara last night,’ said Sinner. ‘She didn’t say nothing about wanting to leave. And your sister says she hates that other bloke.’
‘Yes, but. …’
‘The other schmuck got done in the library, right? So how could he have caught ’em stealing? What would they be stealing from a library?’
‘My father owns some important rare books,’ said Erskine, but he realised how implausible it sounded that servants fleeing a house on foot would decide to weigh themselves down with a few antique folios.
‘And, last, that slimy one – what’s his name?’
‘Godwin?’
‘He couldn’t knock the wings off a moth. How was he supposed to smash the other schmuck’s face in on that machine?’
‘Fine, fine, I admit all that, but still, Bruiseland – it’s too ridiculous.’ And then Erskine remembered something his sister had heard from Casper Bruiseland: that on the day Leonard Bruiseland’s wife had finally left for Florence, he had strangled all five of her terriers with his bare hands.
He sat down heavily on the bed. ‘Or, well, what if it is true? What does it matter? What can anyone do?’
‘Tell them the truth.’
‘Be serious.’
‘What about the maid? What’ll happen to her?’
‘So you’re going to go down there and say, “You’re all wrong, I know what happened, arrest the Master of Foxhounds”? It’s impossible. They’d start asking questions, they’d find out exactly who you are – that you’re not really a valet – that, even worse, you’re a Jew. They’d ignore everything you said and just insist you were part of the plot. You’d end up in the village jail on charges of conspiracy to commit murder, or something like that. That is if Mowinckel or Amadeo didn’t try to stage a summary execution.’
‘I know all that. I’m not a bleeding half-wit.’
‘Good.’
‘You’d have to come with me.’
‘What?’
‘If I go and tell ’em on my own, I’m fucked. If you’re with me, what can they do?’
‘In principle, yes, I might be able to stop them putting you in jail. But they’d ask all the same questions and find out all the same things. Am I supposed to admit I brought an East End Jew into my parents’ house? This week of all weeks? How could I explain it?’
‘What about your sister? What if she knew it was really the fat cunt who’d knocked off her fella, but her maid was going to get done for it? What would she have you do?’
‘That’s a bad example. My sister has no idea what’s good for her or anyone else. What about the trouble it would cause? How could I possibly carry on with my work? How could I do anything at all after that?’
‘There ain’t any other way.’
‘It’s impossible.’
Sinner looked Erskine in the eyes for a moment, then grabbed Erskine’s shoulders and pulled him down on to his back so that Erskine’s legs were dangling off the side of the bed. He got down, kneeled on the carpet, unbuttoned Erskine’s trousers, freed Erskine’s cock, and licked it with his dry morning tongue all the way from the balls up to the tip. Erskine went bright red.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he whispered.
Sinner began to slide the head of Erskine’s narrow cock in and out of his mouth, stroking Erskine’s balls with his nails. Erskine squeaked and slapped the palms of his hands on the bed like a frustrated child. Sinner started to push the tip of his little finger into Erskine’s arsehole. This was too much, and Erskine tried to sit up, but Sinner cuffed him across the face, just as he once had outside the Caravan, and pushed him back down. Before long, Erskine’s trousers were around his ankles, the whole of Erskine’s cock was in Sinner’s mouth, and Sinner’s middle finger was in Erskine up to the second joint. Erskine was making a continuous low groaning sound like the vacuum pump downstairs. Then Sinner got to his feet, took a pot of hair tonic from the dressing table, and flipped Erskine effortlessly on to his front. Outside, the hunting dogs were barking.
Although Sinner tried to be nearly as gentle with Erskine as he’d been with his sister, Erskine soon found himself biting into his own forearm through his shirtsleeve. Tears streamed down his cheeks and he struggled to stop himself from screaming. He felt almost as he had in the cave in Fluek, except that now he was the rabbit on the dissecting table, he was the one getting his little heart squeezed in a grimy fist. He’d fantasised about this moment a thousand times, but only in the most abstract terms, and now the idea was getting fucked by the reality.
But despite the pain, as Sinner thrust faster, the pinched friction of Erskine’s penis against the sheets was bringing him closer and closer to climax, and at the same time he became intensely, deliriously aware of a process going on in his own cells, from his testes up to his brain. Every time a cell divided, it now struck him, a new copy was produced of its codex: all the maps, diagrams, timetables, hierarchies, procedures. Once in a while a mistake was made, and most of the time that mistake was corrected, but if it was mis
sed, then almost anything might happen: a tumour might sprout like a potato in the rich soil of his hypothalamus, or his sons might be born with teeth instead of eyes.
Of course, he also might grow wings from his shoulder blades, or his sons might grow up to catch bullets like conkers. In all probability, though, something would go wrong, which was why the scriveners had to be so vigilant. But, now, for the first time, he wondered: did the tiny scriveners have a choice? When they failed to correct a mistake, was that always a redoubled oversight, or was it sometimes a deliberate gamble? Could a diligent copyist, a decent, responsible man, notice an irregularity, a sin, and just leave it to perpetuate itself, not knowing whether the result would be a swoop of seraphic feathers or a suppurating goitre? As a whole library of these untrustworthy documents were gathered for their dissemination at the base of his penis, and he perceived Sinner approaching a powerful orgasm of his own, he remembered something Amadeo had said about fascism creating a ‘new man’ – and he realised that a new man could be conceived and born here on this bed, a new man who was nothing like the one Amadeo or any of the others wanted, a new man who could see salvation in the imprecise and the illegible – the only sort of new man worth having, the only sort of new man who was really capable of doing anything really new. Tears springing to his eyes for a second time, Erskine began to exult, and he wanted Sinner to exult with him, so that afterwards they could go down hand in hand and tell the truth about Morton’s death and after that who could say what might happen? He was ready. And then he heard the bedroom door creaking open, followed by Millicent Bruiseland’s voice.
‘Just as I suspected!’
Erskine’s heart caught like a toe in a mousetrap. Sinner showed no sign of stopping, and Erskine didn’t have the strength to throw him off, so in desperation he tried to pull a sheet over the two of them, but his arms were trapped.
‘I’m going to tell everyone,’ Millicent said. Erskine, cringing, heard her run out of the room. And just then, with a last excruciating jab, Sinner completed his task.
The boy rolled off his owner and they lay there panting. Erskine smelled the insolent smell he knew from that incident in his lab. He wanted to suffocate himself with the pillowcase, but instead he said, ‘Get dressed. Someone else might come up.’
‘They ain’t going to believe her.’
‘You should have stopped!’
‘Wouldn’t have made any difference.’
‘Shut up.’ Erskine put on a dressing gown. ‘I’m going to have a bath.’ He couldn’t look at Sinner. He spoke in a monotone. Something inside him had drowned like kittens in a sack. For a second time he remembered the cave in Fluek. Why must he be interrupted every time? Were Gittins and the girl in league? ‘If that … act was intended to persuade me of something, then it failed. I’m not one of your nightclub boys.’
‘You liked it.’
‘Shut up.’
‘You think I can’t tell?’
‘Shut up.’
‘What’s that, then?’
Sinner pointed. Erskine looked down. There was a damp patch on his shirt tails and white sap oozing from the pubic hair on his belly. He had been so wrenched with horror by Millicent Bruiseland’s arrival that he had been oblivious to his own choked pointless orgasm. Quickly he closed the dressing gown and tied the cord in a tight complicated knot. He thought of the Australian orchid dupe wasp, which is tricked into ejaculating on a flower because it mistakes it for a female, and even comes to prefer the flower when given a choice.
Two hours later he got out of the bath and went back to his room. Sinner was gone but it still stank. He got dressed. Outside in the corridor he found his mother. She looked as if she’d been left in somebody’s trousers while they went through the wash.
‘Your little man drove off in your car,’ she said.
‘Er, yes, I asked him to.’
‘Why on earth would you do that, Philip?’
‘He – there was some urgent business for him to take care of in London.’
‘At a time like this?’ Her eyes were very red.
‘Yes.’
‘Mrs Erskine!’ said Millicent Bruiseland, who had appeared at the end of the corridor.
‘Not now, Millicent.’
‘But I have the most important news about your son.’
‘You often do.’
‘But I utterly utterly promise that this time it’s—’
‘For heaven’s sake, girl, even you are old enough to realise that this is not the time for your interminable filth,’ barked Erskine’s mother. ‘You and your parents should be ashamed of yourselves. Go to your room.’
Millicent Bruiseland looked angrily at Erskine and then ran off. Erskine’s mother took a moment to calm herself and then said, ‘If the car’s gone, how are you going to get home?’
‘On the train,’ said Erskine.
‘You hate the train.’
‘Oh, what the hell does it matter, Mother?’ he shouted, and pushed past her to the stairs. He wondered what Sinner was laughing most heartily over as he drove back to London – how easily Erskine had been overcome, or the disgusting unmanly noises he’d made in the process? But in fact as he passed Camberley Sinner was not thinking about Erskine at all, but rather about a remark that Casper Bruiseland had made in the observatory last night; a remark that had been submerged in the Polish honey mead until that pre-coital conversation with Erskine had jogged his memory; a remark about a clever new scheme that Casper had developed to get some money out of his father.
16
As I sat sipping tea on Tara Southall’s comfortable sofa, this is what I thought: Kevin, you need a bit of focus. If you hadn’t been chatting to Stuart at the same time as you ran a search for ‘Philip Erskine’, you might have realised that the scientist who got the letter from Hitler and the planner of a town in Berkshire weren’t necessarily two different people. If you hadn’t got used to skim-reading Wikipedia pages, you might have been able to remember whether the latter man had a confirmed date of death. And if you hadn’t been so obsessed with Ariosophist conspiracies, it might not have taken you quite so long to come to the conclusion that it was Philip Erskine himself who, at the age of ninety-eight, had employed a murderous Welshman to track down Seth Roach’s body.
In 1957, shortly before his second, fatal stroke, Edgar Aslet was appointed to the committee of the East Berkshire Regional Plan. Asked to suggest some talented young men to carry out the committee’s recommendations, he chose the fellow who he thought was most likely, of all his friends’ sons, to impose a calming conservative influence on the dubious notion of socialised housing. But when Philip Erskine arrived for his first meeting, Aslet hardly recognised this bright-eyed evangelist for the government’s New Towns policy. Erskine couldn’t stop talking about the ideas of an American called Balfour Pearl, who had become his friend and mentor after a chance meeting at a black tie gala in Manhattan in 1949. (Neither The Perception of Harmony: A Life of Philip Erskine nor Look Upon My Works: Balfour Pearl and the Fall of New York is able to pinpoint exactly which black tie gala this might have been.) Pearl had been forced out of government and now spent most of his time in Los Angeles; but his ideas were as influential as ever, and Erskine was determined to apply them in the south of England, where even after a decade of rapid house-building there was still, as he wrote in one report, ‘a desperate need to rescue good families from our dark, overcrowded, morally ruinous cities and install them in rational new communities which combine the most desirable qualities of rural and urban life’. Though Erskine, now forty-seven, still had little or no hands-on experience of town planning, his enthusiasm and knowledge were so impressive that the committee soon put him in charge of a New Town that was to be built south of Hungerford. After consultation with local historians (The Perception of Harmony is, again, unable to say when this took place) Erskine decided to name the new settlement after a little-known medieval village called Roachmorton.
Drive into Roachmorton, as I did wit
h the Welshman three or four hours after our visit to Claramore, and the first thing you will notice is the quantity of giant roundabouts, which so dominate the landscape that it is difficult to believe that the road system has been built for the benefit of the town and not the other way round. But there is a lot more to Roachmorton than roundabouts. Despite a projected population of under fifty thousand, Erskine was determined that Roachmorton should have a little of the shining grandeur of a city like New Delhi, the designer of which, Edwin Lutyens, Erskine admired almost as much as Balfour Pearl. (Erskine regretted that he had not had the chance to meet Lutyens before his death in 1948, but at least by then he was acquainted with Lutyens’ daughter Elisabeth, who had become great friends with Erskine’s sister Evelyn.) Consequently, Roachmorton is almost unique among British towns for having its public facilities arranged in classical fashion, like entries in a grammar table, along a wide treelined boulevard. And while many postwar estates were notorious for lacking anywhere to socialise, Roachmorton puts in pride of place a boxing ring (Premierland), a pub (the Caravan), a working men’s club (the UUC), and a hotel (the Hotel de Paris), all named with the help of those same diligent local historians to give a sense of what later eras would call ‘heritage’ and ‘continuity’. Nearby are St Panteleimon’s Hospital, the Gittins Museum of Entomology and Philology, and a town hall built of red brick and marble in a distinctive country-house style, incorporating the well-stocked public library, from which visitors can look out over a large artificial lake, colloquially known as ‘the Pond’. Like Oscar Niemeyer, the designer of Brasilia, Erskine had declined to visit the site before making his plans, so he didn’t set eyes on Roachmorton until 1961 when it was nearly half-complete. By then, his ambitious vision had already received special praise from both the Minister of Housing and the leader column of The Times. But within only a few months of the arrival of the first optimistic residents, while the town was practically still under manufacturer’s warranty, the complaints began.