Arthur and George (36 page)

Arthur

As soon as Wood had familiarized himself with the dossier, he was sent ahead in a scouting capacity. He was to survey the area, assess the temper of the locals, drink moderately in the public houses, and make contact with Harry Charlesworth. He was not, however, to play the detective, and was to stay away from the Vicarage. Arthur had not yet decided his plan of campaign, but knew that the best way to cut off sources of information would be to set up a public stall and announce that he and Woodie had come to prove the innocence of George Edalji. And, by implication, the guilt of some other local resident. He did not want to alarm the interests of untruth.

In the library at Undershaw, he bent himself to research. He established that the parish of Great Wyrley contained a number of well-built residences and farmhouses; that its soil was light loam, with a subsoil of clay and gravel; that its chief crops were wheat, barley, turnips and mangolds. The station, a quarter of a mile to the north-west, was on the Walsall, Cannock & Rugeley branch of the London & North Western Railway. The Vicarage, with a net yearly value of £265, including residence, had been held since 1876 by the Reverend Shapurji Edalji of St. Augustine’s College, Canterbury. The Working Men’s Institute, nearby at Landywood, seated 250 for lectures or concerts, and was well supplied with daily and weekly newspapers. The Public Elementary School, built in 1882, had Samuel John Mason as its master. The Post Office was held by William Henry Brookes, who was also grocer, draper and ironmonger; the Station by Albert Ernest Merriman, who had evidently inherited the stationmaster’s cap from his father, Samuel Merriman. There were three beer retailers in the village: Henry Badger, Mrs. Ann Corbett and Thomas Yates. The butcher was Bernard Greensill. The manager of the Great Wyrley Colliery Company was William Browell and its secretary John Boult. William Wynn was the plumber, decorator, gas-fitter and general dealer. So normal, all of it sounded; so ordered, so English.

He decided, with regret, not to drive: the arrival of a twelve-horse-power, chain-driven, one-ton Wolseley in the lanes of Staffordshire would not exactly render him inconspicuous. A pity, since it was to Birmingham that he had gone, only two years previously, to collect the machine. A journey with a lighter purpose, that had been. He remembered wearing his peaked yachting cap, which had recently become the badge of fashion for the motorist. A fact perhaps not widely recognized among the local citizenry, for as he was pacing the platform of New Street waiting for the Wolseley salesman, a peremptory young woman had accosted him, demanding to know how the trains were running to Walsall.

He left the motor in the stables and took the Waterloo train from Haslemere. He would break his journey in London and see Jean for only the fourth time as a widower and free man. He had written and told her to expect him that afternoon; he had closed with the tenderest of farewells; yet as the train pulled out of Haslemere he found himself wishing, more than anything, that he was in his Wolseley, yachting cap crammed down over his ears, goggles tight against his eyes, roaring up through the heart of England towards Staffordshire. He could not understand this reaction, which made him feel both guilty and irritated. He knew that he loved Jean, that he would marry her, and make her the second Lady Doyle; yet he was not looking forward to seeing her in the way he would wish. If only human beings were as simple as machinery.

Arthur found something near a groan about to break from him, which he suppressed for the sake of the other first-class passengers. And that was all part of it—the way you were obliged to live. You stifled a groan, you lied about your love, you deceived your legal wife, and all in the name of honour. That was the damned paradox of it: in order to behave well, you had to behave badly. Why could he not bundle Jean into the Wolseley, drive her up to Staffordshire, register at a hotel as man and wife, and give his sergeant-major’s stare to anyone who raised an eyebrow? Because he couldn’t, because it wouldn’t work, because it looked simple but wasn’t, because, because . . . As the train passed the outskirts of Woking, he thought again with quiet envy of that Australian soldier out on the veldt. No. 410, New South Wales Mounted Infantry, lying inert with a red chess pawn balanced in his water bottle. A fair fight, open air, a great cause: no better death. Life should be more like that.

He goes to her flat; she is wearing blue silk; they embrace wholeheartedly. There is no requirement to pull back, and yet also, he realizes, no need; he remains unstirred by their reunion. They sit down; there is tea; he enquires after her family; she asks why he is going to Birmingham.

An hour later, when he has still reached no further than the committal proceedings at Cannock, she takes his hand and says,

“It is wonderful, dear Arthur, to see you in such spirits again.”

“You too, my darling,” he replies, and continues his narrative. As she would expect, the story he tells is full of colour and suspense; she is also both moved and relieved that the man she loves is shaking off the cares of recent months. Even so, by the time his story is finished, his purpose explained, his watch consulted, and the railway timetable re-examined, her disappointment lies close to the surface.

“I wish, Arthur, that I was coming with you.”

“How quite extraordinary,” he replies, and his eyes seem to focus on her properly for the first time. “You know, as I was sitting on the train, I imagined driving up to Staffordshire with you at my side, the two of us, like man and wife.”

He shakes his head at this coincidence, which is perhaps explicable by the capacity for thought-transference between two hearts that are so close. Then he gets to his feet, collects his hat and coat, and departs.

Jean is not hurt by Arthur’s behaviour—she is too indelibly in love with him for that—but as she rests her hands on the lukewarm teapot, she realizes that her position, and her future position, will require some practical thought. It has been difficult, so difficult, these past years; there have been so many arrangements and concessions and concealments. Why did she assume that Touie’s death would change everything, and that there would be instant embraces in full sunshine to the applause of friends, while a distant bandstand played English tunes? There can be no such sudden transition; and the small amount of additional freedom they have been granted may prove more rather than less hazardous.

She finds herself thinking differently about Touie. No longer as the untouchable other whose honour must be protected, the self-effacing hostess, the simple, gentle, loving wife and mother who took so long to die. Touie’s great quality, Arthur once told her, was that she always said Yes to anything he proposed. If they were to pack up instantly and depart for Austria, she said Yes; if they were to buy a new house, she said Yes; if he were to go off to London for a few days, or South Africa for several months, she said Yes. This was her nature; she trusted Arthur entirely, trusted him to make the correct decisions for her as well as him.

Jean trusts Arthur too; she knows he is a man of honour. She also knows—and this is another reason she loves and admires him—that he is constantly in motion, whether writing a new book, championing some cause, dashing around the world or hurling himself into his latest enthusiasm. He is never going to be the sort of man whose ambition is a suburban villa, a pair of slippers and a garden spade; who longs to hang over the front gate and wait for the paper boy to bring him news from distant lands.

And so something which it is too early to call a decision—more a kind of warning awareness—begins to form in Jean’s mind. She has been Arthur’s waiting girl since March the fifteenth, 1897; in a few months it will be the tenth anniversary of their meeting. Ten years, ten treasured snowdrops. She would rather wait for Arthur than be contentedly married to any other man on the globe. Yet, having been his waiting girl, she has no desire to be a waiting wife. She imagines them married, and Arthur announcing his impending departure—whether to Stoke Poges or Timbuctoo—in order to right a great wrong; and she imagines herself replying that she will ask Woodie to arrange their tickets. Their tickets, she will say quietly. She will be at his side. She will travel with him; she will sit in the front row when he gives a lecture; she will smooth his path and make sure of proper service in hotels and trains and liners. She will ride with him flank to flank, if not—given her superior control of a horse—a little ahead. She may even learn golf if he continues golfing. She will not be one of those harridan wives who pursue their mates even to the steps of the club; but she will be there at his side, and she will indicate, by word and constant deed, that this will remain her place until death do them part. This is the kind of wife she intends to be.

Meanwhile, Arthur sat on the Birmingham train, reminding himself of his only previous experience of playing detective. The Society for Psychical Research had asked him to assist in the investigation of a haunted house at Charmouth in Dorsetshire. He had travelled down with Dr. Scott and a certain Mr. Podmore, a professional skilled in such inquiries. They had taken all the usual steps to outwit fraud: bolting doors and windows, laying worsted threads across the stairs. Then they had sat up with their host for two successive nights. On the first, he had refilled his pipe a lot and fought narcolepsy; but in the middle of the second night, just as they were giving up hope, they were startled—and, for the instant, terrified—by the sound of furniture being violently cudgelled close at hand. The noise appeared to be coming from the kitchen, but when they rushed there the room was empty and everything in its place. They searched the house from cellar to attic, hunting for hidden spaces; they found nothing. And the doors were still locked, the windows barred, the threads unbroken.

Podmore had been surprisingly negative about this haunting; he suspected that some associate of their host’s had lain concealed behind the panelling. At the time, Arthur acceded to this view. However, some years later, the house had burned to the ground; and—more significantly still—the skeleton of a child no more than ten years old had been dug up in the garden. For Arthur, this had changed everything. In cases where a young life is violently taken, a store of unused vitality often becomes available. At such times the unknown and the marvellous press upon us from all sides; they loom in fluctuating shapes, warning us of the limitations of what we call matter. This seemed the irrefutable explanation to Arthur; but Podmore had declined to amend his report retrospectively. In fact, the fellow had behaved all along more like a damned materialist sceptic than an expert charged with authenticating psychic phenomena. Still, why concern yourself with the Podmores of this world when you have Crookes and Myers and Lodge and Alfred Russel Wallace? Arthur repeated to himself the formula: it is incredible, but it is true. When he first heard the words, they had sounded like a flexible paradox; now they were hardening into an iron certainty.

Arthur made his rendezvous with Wood at the Imperial Family Hotel in Temple Street. He was less likely to be recognized here than at the Grand, where he might normally stop. They had to minimize the chance of some teasing headline on the society page of the
Gazette
or the
Post:
WHAT IS SHERLOCK HOLMES UP TO IN BIRMINGHAM?

Their first foray out to Great Wyrley was planned for late the following afternoon. Profiting from the December dusk, they would make their way to the Vicarage as anonymously as possible, and return to Birmingham as soon as their business was done. Arthur was keen to visit a theatrical costumier and equip himself with a false beard for the expedition; but Wood was discouraging. He thought this would draw more rather than less attention to them; indeed, any visit to a costumier would guarantee unwelcome paragraphs in the local press. A turned-up collar and a muffler, together with a raised newspaper in the train, would be enough to get them unscathed to Wyrley; then they would just stroll along to the Vicarage by the badly lit lane as if—

“As if we are what?” asked Arthur.

“Do we need to pretend?” Wood did not understand why his employer was so insistent upon disguise; first material, then psychological. In his view it was an Englishman’s inalienable right to tell others, especially those of a nosy inclination, to mind their own business.

“Certainly. We need it for ourselves. We must think of ourselves as . . . hmmm . . . I have it—emissaries from the Church Commissioners, come to respond to the Vicar’s report on the fabric of St. Mark’s.”

“It is a relatively new and sturdily built church,” replied Wood. Then he caught his employer’s glance. “Well, if you insist, Sir Arthur.”

At New Street, late the next afternoon, they chose a carriage which would deposit them, at Wyrley & Churchbridge, as far from the station building as possible. By this stratagem they planned to escape the intrusive gaze of other alighting passengers. But in the event, no one else got off the train, and as a consequence the ecclesiastical imposters received extra scrutiny from the stationmaster. Pulling his muffler defensively up around his moustache, Arthur felt almost larky. You do not know me, he thought, but I know you: Albert Ernest Merriman, the son of Samuel. What an adventure!

He followed Wood along a darkened lane; at one point they skirted a public house, but the sole sign of activity was a man lolling on the front step, studiously chewing his cap. After eight or nine minutes, with only an occasional gas lamp to trouble them, they came upon the dull bulk of St. Mark’s with its high, double-pitched roof. Wood led his employer along its southern wall, so close that Arthur could note the greyish stone streaked with purply-red. As they passed the porch, two buildings came into view some thirty yards beyond the west end of the church: to the right, a schoolroom of dark brick, with a faint diamond pattern picked out in lighter brick; to the left, the more substantial Vicarage. A few moments later, Arthur found himself looking down at the broad doorstep where, fifteen years previously, the key to Walsall School had been laid. As he raised the knocker and calculated how gently he should make it fall, he imagined the more thunderous arrival of Inspector Campbell with his band of specials, and the turmoil it had brought to that quiet household.