Arthur and George (55 page)

He took down
Memories and Adventures,
Sir Arthur’s autobiography, a stout, midnight-blue volume, published six years previously. It fell open where it always did, at page 215. “In 1906,” he read yet again, “my wife passed away after a long illness . . . For some time after these days of darkness I was unable to settle to work until the Edalji case came suddenly to turn my energies into an entirely unexpected channel.” George always felt a little uneasy at this beginning. It seemed to imply that his case had come along at a convenient moment, its peculiar nature being just what was required to drag Sir Arthur from a slough of despond; as if he might have reacted differently—indeed, not at all—had the first Lady Conan Doyle not recently died. Was this being unfair? Was he scrutinizing a simple sentence too closely? But that was what he did, each day of his professional life: he read carefully. And Sir Arthur had presumably written for careful readers.

There were many other sentences which George had underlined with pencil and annotated in the margin. This, of his father, for a start: “How the Vicar came to be a Parsee, or how a Parsee came to be the Vicar, I have no idea.” Well, Sir Arthur did once have an idea, and a very precise and correct idea, because George had explained his father’s journey at the Grand Hotel, Charing Cross. And then this: “Perhaps some Catholic-minded patron wished to demonstrate the universality of the Anglican Church. The experiment will not, I hope, be repeated, for though the Vicar was an amiable and devoted man, the appearance of a coloured clergyman with a half-caste son in a rude, unrefined parish was bound to cause some regrettable situation.” George found this unfair; it practically blamed his mother’s family, in whose gift the parish had been, for the events that occurred. Nor did he like being characterized as a “half-caste son.” It was doubtless true in a technical sense, but he no more thought of himself in those terms than he thought of Maud as his half-caste sister, or Horace as his half-caste brother. Was there not a better way of putting it? Perhaps his father, who believed that the world’s future depended upon the harmonious commingling of the races, could have come up with a better expression.

“What aroused my indignation and gave me the driving force to carry the thing through was the utter helplessness of this forlorn little group of people, the coloured clergyman in his strange position, the brave, blue-eyed, grey-haired mother, the young daughter, baited by brutal boors.” Utter helplessness? You would not think from this that Father had published his own analysis of the case before Sir Arthur had even appeared on the scene; nor that Mother and Maud were constantly writing letters, rallying support and obtaining testimonials. It seemed to George that Sir Arthur, while deserving of much credit and thanks, was rather too determined to annex for himself the whole credit and thanks. He certainly diminished the long campaign by Mr. Voules of
Truth,
not to mention Mr. Yelverton, and the memorials, and the petition of signatures. Even Sir Arthur’s account of how he first became aware of the case was manifestly faulty. “It was late in 1906 that I chanced to pick up an obscure paper called
The Umpire,
and my eye caught an article which was a statement of his case, made by himself.” But Sir Arthur had only “chanced to pick up” this “obscure paper” because George had sent him all his articles with a long covering letter. As Sir Arthur must have very well known.

No, George thought, this was ungracious of him. Sir Arthur was doubtless working from memory, from the version of events he had himself told and retold down the years. George knew from taking witness statements how the constant recounting of events smoothed the edges of stories, rendered the speaker more self-important, made everything more certain than it had seemed at the time. His eye now sped through Sir Arthur’s account, not wishing to find any more fault. The words “travesty of Justice” near the end were followed by: “The
Daily Telegraph
got up a subscription for him which ran to some £300.” George allowed himself a slightly taut smile: it was the very sum that had been raised the following year by Sir Arthur’s appeal on behalf of the Italian marathon runner. The two events had touched the heart of the British public to exactly the same measurable degree: three years’ false imprisonment with penal servitude, and falling over at the end of an athletic race. Well, it was no doubt salutary to have your case put in true perspective.

But two lines later there was the sentence which George had read more than any other in the book, which made up for any inaccuracies and false emphases, which offered balm to one whose suffering had been so humiliatingly quantified. Here it was: “He came to my wedding reception, and there was no guest I was prouder to see.” Yes. George decided to take
Memories and Adventures
with him to the service, in case anyone objected to his presence. He did not know what Spiritualists looked like—let alone six thousand of them—but he doubted he looked like one himself. The book would be his passport in case of difficulty. You see, here on page 215, this is me, I am come to bid him farewell, I am proud to be his guest once more.

On Sunday afternoon, shortly after four o’clock, he turned out of No. 79 Borough High Street and headed for London Bridge: a small brown man in a blue business suit, with a dark blue book tucked under his left arm and a pair of binoculars over his right shoulder. A casual observer might think he was going to a race meeting—except that none was held on a Sunday. Or could that be a birdwatching book under his arm—yet who went birdwatching in a business suit? He would have made a strange sight in Staffordshire, and even in Birmingham they might have put him down for an eccentric; but nobody would do so in London, which contained more than enough eccentrics already.

When he first moved here, he had been apprehensive. About his future life, of course; about how he and Maud would manage together; about the magnitude of the city, its crowds and its noise; and beyond this, about how people would treat him. Whether there would be lurking ruffians like those who had pushed him through a hedge in Landywood and damaged his umbrella, or lunatic policemen like Upton threatening to do him harm; whether he would encounter the race prejudice Sir Arthur was convinced lay at the bottom of his case. But as he crossed London Bridge, which he had been doing now for more than twenty years, he felt quite at his ease. People generally left you alone, either from courtesy or indifference, and George was grateful for either motive.

It was true that inaccurate assumptions were habitually made: that he and his sister had recently arrived in the country; that he was a Hindoo; that he was a trader in spices. And of course he was still asked where he came from; though when he replied—to avoid discussing the finer points of geography—that he was from Birmingham, his interlocutors mostly nodded in an unsurprised way, as if they had always expected the inhabitants of Birmingham to look like George Edalji. Naturally there were the kind of humorous allusions that Greenway and Stentson went in for—though few to Bechuana Land—but he regarded this as some inevitable normality, like rain or fog. And there were even some people who, on learning that you came from Birmingham, expressed disappointment, because they had been hoping for news from distant lands which you were quite unable to supply.

He took the Underground from Bank to High Street Kensington, then walked east until the Albert Hall bulged into view. His cautiousness over time—about which Maud liked to tease him—had made him arrive almost two hours before the service was due to begin. He decided to take a stroll in the park.

It was just after five on a fine Sunday afternoon in July, and a bandstand was blaring away. The park was full of families, trippers, soldiers—though at no point did they form a dense crowd, so George was not made anxious. Nor did he look at young couples flirting with one another, or at sober parents organizing young children, with the same envy he might once have done. When he first came to London, he had not yet given up hope of getting married; indeed, he used to worry about how his future wife and Maud might get on. For it was clear that he could not abandon Maud; nor would he wish to. But then a few years passed, and he realized that Maud’s good opinion of his future wife mattered more to him than the other way round. And then a few more years passed, and the general disadvantages of a wife became even more apparent. A wife might appear agreeable but turn out to be a scold; a wife might not understand thrift; a wife would certainly wish for children, and George thought he probably could not bear the noise, or the disturbance it would bring to his work. And then, of course, there were sexual matters, which often did not lead to harmony. George did not handle divorce cases, but as a lawyer he had seen evidence enough of the misery that could be inflicted by marriage. Sir Arthur had long campaigned against the oppressiveness of the divorce laws, and been president of the Reform Union for many years, before handing over to Lord Birkenhead. From one name on the roll of honour to another: it had been Lord Birkenhead, as F. E. Smith, who had asked Gladstone searching questions in the House about the Edalji Case.

But that was by the by. He was fifty-four years old, living in adequate comfort and largely philosophical about his unmarried condition. His brother Horace was now lost to the family: he had married, moved to Ireland and changed his name. Quite in which order he had done these three things George was not sure, but they were all clearly linked, and the undesirability of each action bled into the others. Well, there were different ways of living; and the truth was, neither he nor Maud had ever been very likely to marry. They were similar in their shyness, and in seeming to fend off those who approached them. But the world contained enough marriages, and was certainly not threatened with underpopulation. Brother and sister could live as harmoniously as husband and wife; in some instances, more so.

In their early days together, he and Maud would make the journey back to Wyrley two or three times a year; but they were rarely happy visits. For George they brought back too many specific memories. The door-knocker still made him jump, and in the evening, as he looked out into the darkened garden, he would often glimpse beneath the trees shifting outlines which he knew to be nothing and yet still feared. With Maud it was different. Devoted as she was to Father and Mother, when she stepped back inside the Vicarage she became withdrawn and tentative; she had few opinions and her laugh was never heard. George could almost swear that she was beginning to ail. But he always knew the cure: it was called New Street Station and the London train.

At first, when he and Maud went out together, people sometimes mistook them for husband and wife; and George, who did not want anyone to think he was incapable of marriage, would say, rather precisely, “No, this is my dear sister Maud.” But as time passed, he would occasionally not bother to make the correction, and afterwards Maud would take his arm and give a little laugh. Soon, he supposed, when her hair was as grey as his, they would be taken for an old married couple, and he might not even care to dispute that assumption.

He had been wandering randomly, and now found himself approaching the Albert Memorial. The Prince was sitting in his gilded, glittering surround, with all the famous men of the world in attendance on him. George extracted his binoculars from their case and started practising. He swept slowly up the Memorial, above the levels at which art and science and industry held sway, above the seated figure of the pensive Consort, up to a higher realm. The burred knob was hard to control, and sometimes there was a mass of unfocused foliage filling the lens, but eventually he emerged at the plain vision of a chunky Christian cross. From there he tracked slowly down the spire, which seemed as heavily populated as the lower reaches of the monument. There were tiers of angels and then—just lower than the angels—a cluster of more human figures, classically draped. He circled the Memorial, frequently losing focus, trying to work out who they might be: a woman with a book in one hand and a snake in the other, a man in a bearskin with a big club, a woman with an anchor, a hooded figure with a long candle in its hand . . . Were they saints, perhaps, or symbolic figures? Ah, here at last was one he recognized, standing on a corner pedestal: she had a sword in one hand, a pair of scales in the other. George was pleased to note that the sculptor had not given her a blindfold. That detail had often drawn his disapproval: not because he didn’t understand its significance, but because others failed to. The blindfold permitted the ignorant to make gibes at his profession. That George would not allow.

He returned the binoculars to their case, and moved his attention from the monochrome, frozen figures to the colourful, moving ones all around him, from the sculpted frieze to the living one. And in that moment, George was struck by the realization that everybody was going to be dead. He occasionally pondered his own death; he had grieved for his parents—his father twelve years ago, his mother six; he had read obituaries in the newspapers and gone to the funerals of colleagues; and he was here for the great farewell to Sir Arthur. But never before had he understood—though it was more a visceral awareness than a mental comprehension—that everybody was going to be dead. He had surely been informed of this as a child, although only in the context of everyone—like Uncle Compson—continuing to live thereafter, either in the bosom of Christ or, if they were wicked, elsewhere. But now he looked about him. Prince Albert was dead already, of course, and so was the Widow of Windsor who had mourned him; but that woman with a parasol would be dead, and her mother next to her dead sooner, and those small children dead later, although if there was another war the boys might be dead sooner, and those two dogs with them would also be dead, and the distant bandsmen, and the baby in the perambulator, even the baby in the perambulator, even if it lived to be as old as the oldest inhabitant on the planet, a hundred and five, a hundred and ten, whatever it was, that baby would be dead too.

And though George was now nearing the limit of his imagination, he continued a little further. If you knew someone who had died, then you could think about them in one of two ways: as being dead, extinguished utterly, with the death of the body the test and proof that their self, their essence, their individuality, no longer existed; or you could believe that somewhere, somehow, according to whatever religion you held, and how fervently or tepidly you held it, they were still alive, either in a way predicted by sacred texts, or in some way we had yet to comprehend. It was one or the other; there was no position of compromise; and George was privately inclined to think extinction the more probable. But when you stood in Hyde Park on a warm summer’s afternoon among thousands of other human beings, few of whom were probably thinking about being dead, it was less easy to believe that this intense and complex thing called life was merely some chance happening on an obscure planet, a brief moment of light between two eternities of darkness. At such a moment it was possible to feel that all this vitality must continue somehow, somewhere. George knew he was not about to succumb to any uprush of religious sentiment—he was not going to ask the Marylebone Spiritualist Association for some of the books and brochures they had offered him when he had taken his ticket. He also knew that he would doubtless go on living as he had done, observing like the rest of the country—and mainly because of Maud—the general rituals of the Church of England, observing them in a kind of half-hearted, imprecisely hopeful way until such time as he died, when he would discover what the truth of the matter was, or, more likely, not discover anything at all. But just today—as that horse and rider trotted past him—that horse and rider as doomed as Prince Albert—he thought he saw a little of what Sir Arthur had come to see.