Arthur and George (34 page)

Arthur’s mind, being both powerful and intransigent, pursues the matter further. His conversation with Mary has further ramifications than those he first saw. Touie’s death, he now realizes, will not put an end to his deceits. For Mary must never be allowed to know that he has been in love with Jean for these past nine long years. Nor must Kingsley. Boys, it is said, often take the betrayal of their mother even harder than girls do.

He imagines finding the right moment, practising the words, then clearing his throat and trying to sound—what?—as if he is barely able himself to credit what he is about to say.

“Mary dear, you know what your mother said before she died? About it being possible that I might one day remarry. Well, I must inform you that, to my own considerable surprise, she is going to be proved right.”

Will he find himself saying words like these? And if so, when? Before the year is out? No, of course not. But next year, the year after? How quickly is the grieving widower allowed to fall in love again? He knows how society feels on the matter, but what do children feel—his children in particular?

And then he imagines Mary’s questions. Who is she, Father? Oh, Miss Leckie. I met her when I was quite little, didn’t I? And then we kept running into her. And then she started coming to Undershaw. I always thought she would have been married by now. Lucky for you she’s still free. How old is she? Thirty-one? So was she on the shelf, Papa? I’m surprised no one would have her. And when did you realize you loved her, Father?

Mary is not a child any more. She may not expect her father to lie, but she will notice the slightest incongruity in his story. What if he blunders? Arthur despises those fellows who are good liars, who organize their emotional lives—their marriages, even—on the basis of what they can get away with, who tell a half-truth here, a full lie there. Arthur has always thundered the importance of truth-telling at his children; now he must play the fullest hypocrite. He must smile, and look shyly pleased, and act surprised, and concoct a mendacious romance about how he came to love Jean Leckie, and tell that lie to his own children, and then maintain it for the rest of his life. And he must ask others to do the same on his behalf.

Jean. Quite properly, she did not come to the funeral; she sent a letter of condolence, and a week or so later Malcolm drove her over from Crowborough. It was not the easiest of meetings. When they arrived, Arthur found he could not embrace her in front of her brother and so, on an instinct, he kissed her hand. It was the wrong gesture—there was something almost facetious about it—and it set a tone of awkwardness that would not go away. She behaved impeccably, as he knew she would; but he was at a loss. When Malcolm tactfully decided to inspect the garden, Arthur found himself casting around hopelessly, expecting guidance. But from whom? From Touie installed behind her tea service? He did not know what to say, and so he used his grief as a disguise for his maladroitness, for his lack of joy at seeing Jean’s face. He was glad when Malcolm returned from his bogus horticultural expedition. They left soon afterwards, and Arthur felt wretched.

The triangle within which he has lived—frettingly but safely—for so long is now broken, and the new geometry frightens him. His grieving exaltation fades, and lethargy overtakes him. He wanders the grounds of Undershaw as if they had been laid out by a stranger long ago. He visits his horses, but does not want them saddled. He goes daily to Touie’s grave, and returns exhausted. He imagines her comforting him, reassuring him that wherever the truth lies, she has always loved him and now forgives him; but this seems a vain and selfish thing to demand of a dead woman. He sits in his study for long hours, smoking and looking at the glittering, hollow trophies acquired by a sportsman and successful writer. All his baubles seem meaningless beside the fact of Touie’s death.

He leaves all his correspondence to Wood. His secretary has long since learned to reproduce his employer’s signature, his inscriptions, his turns of phrase, even his opinions. Let him be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for a while—the name’s owner has no desire to be himself. Wood may open everything, and discard or answer as he wishes.

He has no energy; he eats little. To be hungry at such a time would be an obscenity. He lies down; he cannot sleep. He has no symptoms, only a general and intense weakness. He consults his old friend and medical adviser Charles Gibbs, who has attended him since his South African days. Gibbs tells him it is everything and nothing; in other words, it is nerves.

Soon, it is more than nerves. His guts give way. This at least Gibbs can identify, even if there is little he can do about it. Some microbe must have got into his system at Bloemfontein or on the veldt, and it remains there, waiting to break out when he is at his weakest. Gibbs prescribes a sleeping draught. But he can do nothing about the other microbe abroad in his patient’s system, which is equally unkillable; the microbe of guilt.

He always imagined that Touie’s long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief and guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.

He knows he must rouse himself, but feels incapable; after all, this will mean rousing himself to lie again. First, to perpetuate, to make historical, the old lie about his devoted love-marriage to Touie; afterwards, to organize and propagate the new lie, about Jean bringing unexpected solace to a grieving widower’s heart. The thought of this new lie disgusts him. In lethargy there is at least truth: exhausted, gut-plagued, dragging from room to room, he is at least misleading no one. Except that he is: his condition is ascribed by everyone merely to grief.

He is a hypocrite; he is a fraud. In some ways, he has always felt a fraud, and the more famous he has become, the more fraudulent he has felt. He is lauded as a great man of the age, but though he takes an active part in the world, his heart feels out of kilter with it. Any normal man of the age would not have scrupled to make Jean his mistress. That is what men did nowadays, even in the highest ranks of society, as he has observed. But his moral life belongs more happily in the fourteenth century. And his spiritual life? Connie judged him an early Christian. He prefers to locate himself in the future. The twenty-first century, the twenty-second? It all depends how quickly slumbering humanity wakes up and learns to use its eyes.

And then his thoughts, already on a downward slope, tumble further. After nine years of wanting—of trying not to admit to wanting—the impossible, he is now free. He could marry Jean tomorrow morning and face only the bickering of village moralists. But wanting the impossible canonizes the wanting. Now that the impossible has become the possible, how much does he want? He cannot even tell this now. It is as if the muscles of the heart, overtaxed for so long, have turned to fraying rubber.

He once heard a story, narrated over port, of a married man who maintained a long-term mistress. This woman was of good social standing, certainly fit to marry him, which is what had always been anticipated and promised. Eventually, the wife died, and within weeks the widower duly remarried. But not his mistress; instead, a young woman of a lower social class whom he had met a few days after the funeral. At the time he had sounded to Arthur like a double cad: cad to the wife, then cad to the mistress.

Now, he realizes how easily such things happen. In the ragged months since Touie’s death, he had scarcely entered society, and those to whom he has been introduced have left only the faintest impression. Yet even so—and allowing for the fact that he does not understand the other sex—some of its members were flirting with him. No, that is vulgar and unfair; but certainly, they were looking at him differently, at this famous author, this knight of the realm, who is now a widower. He can well imagine how the fraying rubber might suddenly break, how a young girl’s simplicity, or even a coquette’s scented smile, might suddenly pierce a heart grown temporarily impervious to a long and secret attachment. He understands the behaviour of the double cad. More than understands: he sees the advantage. If you allow yourself to succumb to such a
coup de foudre,
then it is, at least, the end to lying: you do not have to produce your long-secret love and introduce her as a new-met companion. You do not have to lie to your children for the rest of your life. As for your new wife: yes, you say, I know how she strikes you, and she could never replace the irreplaceable, but she has brought a little cheer and consolation into my heart. The forgiveness sought might not be immediately forthcoming, but at least the situation would be less complicated.

He sees Jean again, once in company and once alone, and on both occasions the awkwardness between them continues. He finds himself waiting for his heart to pulse again—no, he is instructing his heart to pulse again—and it refuses to do his bidding. He has been so used to forcing his thoughts, to pressing them and directing them where they have to go, that it comes as a shock that he is unable to do the same with the tender emotions. Jean looks as adorable as ever, except that her adorability does not set off the normal response. Some impotence of the heart appears to have struck him.

In the past, Arthur has eased the torments of thought by physical exertion; but he feels no desire to ride, to spar, to strike a ball at cricket, tennis or golf. Perhaps, if he were instantly transported to a high, snow-covered Alpine valley, an icy breeze might disperse the mephitic air which hangs around his soul. But it seems impossible. The person he once was, the
Sportesmann
who brought his Norwegian skis to Davos and crossed the Furka Pass with the Branger brothers, seems to him long departed, long out of sight on the other side of the mountain.

When, at length, his mind stops descending, when he feels less febrile of mind and gut, he tries to make a clearing in his head, to establish a little area of simple thought. If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty. This is what he did with Touie, and what he must now do with Jean. He has loved her hopelessly and hopefully for nine years; such a feeling cannot simply disappear; so he must wait for its return. Until then, he must negotiate the great Grimpen Mire, where green-scummed pits and foul quagmires on every side threaten to pull a man down and swallow him for ever. To plot his course, he must call on everything he has learned up to now. In the Mire, there were hidden signs—bunches of reeds and strategically planted sticks—to guide the initiate to firmer ground; and it is the same when a man is morally lost. The path lies where honour directs. Honour has told him how to behave in the past years; now honour must tell him where he is to head. Honour binds him to Jean, as it bound him to Touie. He cannot tell at this distance if he will ever be truly happy again; but he knows that for him there can be no happiness where honour is absent.

The children are away at school; the house is silent; winds rip the trees bare; November turns to December. He feels a little steadier, as they suggested he would. One morning he wanders into Wood’s office to look at his correspondence. On average he gets sixty letters a day. Over the last months Wood has been obliged to develop a system: he answers himself anything that can be dealt with immediately; items requiring Sir Arthur’s opinion or decision are placed in a large wooden tray. If, by the end of the week, his employer has not had the heart or stomach to offer any guidance, Wood clears it off as best he can.

Today there is a small package on top of the tray. Arthur half-heartedly slides out the contents. There is a covering letter pinned to a file of cuttings from a newspaper called
The Umpire.
He has never heard of it. Perhaps it deals with cricket. No, from its pink newsprint he can tell it is a scandal sheet. He glances at the letter’s signature. He reads a name that means absolutely nothing to him: George Edalji.

THREE

Ending with
a Beginning

Arthur
&
George

Ever since Sherlock Holmes solved his first case, requests and demands have been coming in from all over the world. If persons or goods disappear in mysterious circumstances, if the police are more than usually baffled, if justice miscarries, then it appears that mankind’s instinct is to appeal to Holmes and his creator. Letters addressed to 221
B
Baker Street are now automatically returned by the Post Office stamped
ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN
; those sent to Holmes c/o Sir Arthur are similarly dealt with. Over the years, Alfred Wood has often been struck by the way his employer is simultaneously proud of having created a character in whose true existence readers effortlessly believe, and irritated when they take such belief to its logical conclusion.

Then there are appeals directed to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
in propria persona,
written on the presumption that anyone with the intelligence and guile to devise such complicated fictional crimes must therefore be equipped to solve real ones. Sir Arthur, if impressed or touched, will sometimes respond, though unfailingly in the negative. He will explain that he is, regrettably, no more a consulting detective than he is an English bowman of the fourteenth century or a debonair cavalry officer under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte.

So Wood has laid out the Edalji dossier with few expectations. Yet on this occasion Sir Arthur is back in his secretary’s office within the hour, in mid-expostulation even as he barges through the door.

“It’s as plain as a packstaff,” he is saying. “The fellow’s no more guilty than that typewriter of yours. I ask you, Woodie! It’s a joke. The case of the locked room in reverse—not how does he get in but how does he get out? It’s as shabby as shabby can be.”

Wood has not seen his employer so indignant for months. “You wish me to reply?”

“Reply? I’m going to do more than reply. I’m going to stir things up. I’m going to knock some heads together. They’ll rue the day they let this happen to an innocent man.”

Wood is as yet unsure who “they” might be, or indeed what “this” is that has “happened.” In the supplicant’s petition he observed little, apart from a strange surname, to distinguish it from dozens of other supposed miscarriages of justice which Sir Arthur is expected single-handedly to overturn. But Wood does not at this moment care about the rights or wrongs of the Edalji case. He is only relieved that his employer seems, within the hour, to have shrugged off the lethargy and despondence that have afflicted him these past months.

In a covering letter George has explained the anomalous position in which he finds himself. The decision to free him on licence was taken by the previous Home Secretary, Mr. Akers-Douglas, and implemented by the present one, Mr. Herbert Gladstone; but neither has offered any official explanation of their reasons. George’s conviction has not been cancelled, nor has any apology been tendered for his incarceration. One newspaper, doubtless briefed over a complicit luncheon by some nod-and-wink bureaucrat, shamelessly let it be known that the Home Office had no doubt as to the prisoner’s guilt, but had released him because three years was considered the appropriate sentence for the crime in question. Sir Reginald Hardy, in deciding upon seven, had shown himself a touch over-zealous in the defence of Staffordshire’s honour; and the Home Secretary was merely correcting this fit of enthusiasm.

All of which leaves George in moral despair and practical limbo. Do they think him guilty or not guilty? Are they apologizing for his conviction or reaffirming it? Unless and until the conviction is expunged, it is impossible for him to be readmitted to the Rolls. The Home Office perhaps expects George to display his relief by silence, and his gratitude by slinking away to another profession, preferably in the colonies. Yet George has survived prison only by the thought, the hope, of returning to work—somehow, somewhere—as a solicitor; and his supporters, having come thus far, have no intention of giving up either. One of Mr. Yelverton’s friends has given George temporary employment in his office as a clerk; but this is no solution. The solution can only come from the Home Office.

Arthur is late for his appointment with George Edalji at the Grand Hotel, Charing Cross; business with his bank has detained him. Now he enters the foyer at speed, and looks around. It is not difficult to spot his waiting guest: the only brown face is sitting about twelve feet away from him in profile. Arthur is about to step across and apologize when something makes him hold back. It is, perhaps, ungentlemanly to observe without permission; but not for nothing was he once the out-patient clerk of Dr. Joseph Bell.

So: preliminary inspection reveals that the man he is about to meet is small and slight, of Oriental origin, with hair parted on the left and cropped close; he wears glasses, and the well-cut, discreet clothing of a provincial solicitor. All indisputably true, but this is hardly like identifying a French polisher or a left-handed cobbler from scratch. Yet still Arthur continues to observe, and is drawn back, not to the Edinburgh of Dr. Bell, but to his own years of medical practice. Edalji, like many another man in the foyer, is barricaded between newspaper and high-winged armchair. Yet he is not sitting quite as others do: he holds the paper preternaturally close, and also a touch sideways, setting his head at an angle to the page. Dr. Doyle, formerly of Southsea and Devonshire Place, is confident in his diagnosis. Myopia, possibly of quite a high degree. And who knows, perhaps a touch of astigmatism too.

“Mr. Edalji.”

The newspaper is not flung down in excitement, but folded carefully. The young man does not leap to his feet and fall on the neck of his potential saviour. On the contrary, he stands up carefully, looks Sir Arthur in the eye, and extends his hand. There is no danger that this man is going to start babbling about Holmes. Instead, he holds himself in wait, polite and self-contained.

They withdraw to an unoccupied writing room, and Sir Arthur is able to examine his new acquaintance more closely. A broad face, fullish lips, a pronounced dimple in the middle of the chin; clean-shaven. For a man who has served three years in Lewes and Portland, and who must have been used to a softer life than most beforehand, he shows few signs of his ordeal. His black hair is shot with grey, but this rather gives him the aspect of a thinking, cultured person. He could very well still be a working solicitor, except that he is not.

“Do you know the exact value of your myopia? Six, seven dioptres? I am only guessing, of course.”

George is startled by this first question. He takes a pair of spectacles from his top pocket and hands them over. Arthur examines them, then turns his attention to the eyes whose defects they correct. These bulge somewhat, and give the solicitor a slightly vacant, staring appearance. Sir Arthur assesses his man with the judgement of a former ophthalmologist; but he is also familiar with the false moral inferences the general public is inclined to draw from ocular singularity.

“I am afraid I have no idea,” says George. “I have only recently acquired spectacles, and did not enquire about their specifications. Nor do I always remember to wear them.”

“You did not have them as a child?”

“Indeed not. My eyesight was always poor, but when an oculist was consulted in Birmingham, he said it was unwise to prescribe them for a child. And then—well—I became too busy. But since my release I am, unfortunately, less busy.”

“As you explained in your letter. Now, Mr. Edalji—”

“It’s
Ay
dlji, actually, if you don’t mind.” George says this instinctively.

“I apologize.”

“I am used to it. But since it is my name . . . You see, all Parsee names are stressed on the first syllable.”

Sir Arthur nods. “Well, Mr.
Ay
dlji, I should like you to be professionally examined by Mr. Kenneth Scott of Manchester Square.”

“If you say so. But—”

“At my expense, of course.”

“Sir Arthur, I could not—”

“You can, and you will.” He says it softly, and George catches the Scottish burr for the first time. “You are not employing me as a detective, Mr. Edalji. I am offering—offering—my services. And when we have won you not only a free pardon but also a large sum in compensation for your wrongful imprisonment, I may send you Mr. Scott’s bill. But then again I may not.”

“Sir Arthur, I did not imagine for a moment when I wrote to you—”

“No, and nor did I when I received your letter. But there we are. And here we are.”

“The money is not important. I want my name back again. I want to be readmitted as a solicitor. That is all I want. To be allowed to practise again. To live a quiet, useful life. A normal life.”

“Of course. But I disagree. The money is very important. Not just as compensation for three years of your life. It is also symbolic. The British respect money. If you are given a free pardon, the public will know you are innocent. But if you are given money as well, the public will know you are completely innocent. There is a world of difference. Money will also prove that it is only the corrupt inertia of the Home Office that kept you in prison in the first place.”

George nods slowly to himself as he takes in the argument. Sir Arthur is impressed by the young man. He seems to have a calm and deliberate mind. From his Scottish mother or his clergyman father? Or a benign mixing of the two?

“Sir Arthur, may I ask if you are a Christian?”

Now it is Arthur’s turn to be startled. He does not wish to offend this son of the manse, so he replies with his own question. “Why do you ask?”

“I was brought up, as you know, in the Vicarage. I love and respect my parents, and naturally, when I was young, I shared their beliefs. How could I not? I would never have made a priest myself, but I accepted the teachings of the Bible as the best guide to living a true and honourable life.” He looks at Sir Arthur to see how he is responding; soft eyes and an inclination of the head encourage him. “I still do think them the best guide. As I think the laws of England are the best guide for how society in general may live a true and honourable life together. But then my . . . my ordeal began. At first I viewed it all as an unfortunate example of maladministration of the law. The police made a mistake, but it would be corrected by the magistrates. The magistrates made a mistake, but it would be corrected by the Quarter Sessions. The Quarter Sessions made a mistake, but it would be corrected by the Home Office. It will, I hope, still be corrected by the Home Office. It is a matter of great pain and, to say the least, inconvenience, that this has happened, but the process of the law will, in the end, deliver justice. That is what I believed, and what I still believe.

“However, it has been more complicated than I at first realized. I have lived my life within the law—that is to say, taking the law as my guide, while Christianity has been the moral support behind that. For my father, however—” and here George pauses, not, Arthur suspects, because he does not know what he is about to say, but because of its emotional weight—“my father lives his life wholly within the Christian religion. As you would expect. So for him my ordeal must be comprehensible in those terms. For him there is—there must be—a religious justification for my suffering. He thinks it is God’s purpose to strengthen my own faith and to act as an example for others. It is an embarrassment for me to say the word, but he imagines me a martyr.

“My father is elderly now, and becoming frail. Nor would I wish to contradict him. At Lewes and Portland I naturally attended chapel. I still go to church every Sunday. But I cannot claim that my faith has been strengthened by my imprisonment, nor”—he gives a cautious, wry smile—“nor would my father be able to claim that congregations at St. Mark’s and neighbouring churches have increased in the last three years.”

Sir Arthur contemplates the odd formality of these opening remarks—as if they have been practised, even over-practised. No, that is too harsh. What else would a man do during three years of prison except turn his life—his messy, inchoate, half-understood life—into something resembling a witness statement?

“Your father, I imagine, would say that martyrs do not choose their lot, and may not even have an understanding of the matter.”

“Perhaps. But what I have just said is actually less than the truth. My incarceration did not strengthen my faith. Quite the contrary. It has, I think, destroyed it. My suffering has been quite purposeless, either for me or as any kind of example to others. Yet when I told my father that you had agreed to see me, his reaction was that it was all part of God’s evident purpose in the world. Which is why, Sir Arthur, I asked if you were a Christian.”

“Whether I am or not would not affect your father’s argument. God surely chooses any instrument to hand, whether Christian or heathen.”

“True. But you do not have to be soft with me.”

“No. And you will not find me a man to palter, Mr. Edalji. For myself, I cannot see how your time in Lewes and Portland, and the loss of your profession and your place in society, can possibly serve God’s purpose.”