by Ian Sansom
‘Yes,’ said Ridley.
‘Thank you,’ said Morley.
‘Now, shall we find you somewhere to stay?’ said the doctor. ‘In case you’re going to be with us for a while?’
Morley took one last forlorn look at a wristwatch. We were outnumbered.
‘In manus commendo me,’ he said.
‘It’s probably Latin,’ said Ridley.
‘Thank you, Constable,’ said the professor.
As we made our way out of the church, a woman came marching towards us. She was in her fifties, fashionably dressed, red lipstick, a vast silk scarf flung about her shoulders, like a pelt. We had just reached the doors of the church – Morley and me, the professor, the doctor and Ridley – and I could see Hannah still hovering outside by the graves. This other woman now confronting us seemed as vivid and as bold as Hannah seemed modest and reduced.
‘Is it true?’ she said, addressing us all.
‘I’m sorry, madam,’ began Ridley, but she cut him short with a wave of her hand.
‘Is he dead?’ she said, speaking directly to the professor.
‘I’m afraid—’ began the doctor.
‘I want to see him,’ she said.
‘I really think it would be better if you didn’t,’ said the doctor. ‘Don’t you … Mr Morley?’
‘I think if Mrs …’
‘Thistle-Smith,’ the woman said, not looking at Morley, her eyes directed, it seemed, only at the professor.
‘Well, I think if Mrs Thistle-Smith – your wife, Professor?’ – the professor gave a curt nod of assent – ‘if she wishes to see the reverend I think we should accede to her wishes, don’t you?’
‘Out of the question,’ said the professor.
‘What happened?’ she said, addressing herself now to Morley. ‘Was it poison?’
‘Hanging,’ said Ridley.
‘Hanging,’ she repeated. ‘Well, well.’
‘Are you all right, Mrs Thistle-Smith?’ asked Morley.
‘Yes, thank you,’ she said.
‘I’m sure it has come as a shock.’
‘A shock, yes,’ she agreed.
‘When was the last time you saw him?’ asked Morley.
‘Alive?’
‘Yes, of course … alive.’
‘The last time I saw him alive was …’ She studied Morley’s face before she answered, as though calculating. ‘I think the last time I saw him was on Sunday. At service, of course.’
‘That’ll be all, thank you, Morley,’ said the professor, who took his wife firmly by the arm, and proceeded to walk with her through the graveyard back towards the village, the rest of us following behind.
CHAPTER TEN
WE PUT UP IN THE BLAKENEY HOTEL. Miriam had long since departed for London. After a light supper we adjourned to the hotel’s public bar. Morley always insisted on the public bar, believing saloon bars to be places of ill-repute. ‘Strictly for duchesses, cads and travelling salesmen,’ he would say. ‘And hoity-toits like you, of course, Sefton.’
The bar was busy: locals. The ritualistic sound of pint glasses, and of low, muddy, murmuring Norfolk voices. And then there was the sound of Morley, cutting through.
‘“Set ’em up, Joe,”’ he said, unfortunately, to the barman.
‘I beg your pardon, sir?’
‘I said, “Set ’em up, Joe.”’
You could hear men squint, and the sound of calloused hands being rubbed.
Morley, as everyone knows, had a predilection for reciting nursery rhymes, and tongue-twisters, and indulging in verbal games of all sorts – it was the flipside, I suppose one might say, of his fluency, an aspect of his character much remarked upon and cherished; another sign of his droll English eccentricity. His habit of imitating phrases from American films and novels, however, and often at the most inopportune moments, was one of his lesser known and less endearing characteristics.
Tariff from the Blakeney Hotel
‘What can I get you, sir?’ said the barman stoically.
‘“Set ’em up, Joe!”’ Morley said again, rolling the phrase around in his mouth. ‘Extraordinary phrase, isn’t it? I don’t know if you’re a fan of the Western?’
‘No.’
In the public bar of the Blakeney Hotel that evening, it suddenly felt like a Western, and we were the unwelcome strangers just ridden into town.
‘No? The Texas Rangers? Custer’s Last Stand? Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy? “Mexicali Rose”? “Mexicali Rose, stop crying—”’
I stepped in quickly before Morley got into the swing of his cowboy singing.
‘A pint of beer for me, please.’ Morley looked at me disapprovingly. ‘Under the circumstances,’ I said.
‘Very well,’ said Morley.
‘And what would you like to drink, Mr Morley?’
‘A pint of Adam’s ale for me, please.’
The barman looked at Morley – as barmen often looked at him – with a sort of weariness bordering on contempt.
‘You serve Adam’s ale?’ said Morley.
‘Adam’s ale?’ said the barman.
‘Aqua vitae. The—’
‘Water,’ I said. ‘Please. If you don’t mind.’
‘Water?’ said the barman to me, having given up on a sensible conversation with Morley. ‘He’s wanting to drink water?’
‘That’s it,’ said Morley. And this of course was another of his exotic habits: the ordering of water in pubs and bars. Indeed, among all his habits – the punctiliousness, the hastiness, the continual quoting of Latin tags and English verse, his archaic Edwardian manners, the inopportune quoting of phrases from American movies – it was the drinking of water in public bars that was perhaps the one habit that over the years got us into more trouble than anything else.
‘I’m not sure I’d drink the water,’ said the barman.
‘It’ll be fine,’ said Morley, raising his considerable eyebrows in friendly reassurance. ‘Fine. Nothing finer than a glass of English water.’ He turned around to address the now silent men of the bar. ‘Isn’t that right, gentlemen?’ Reply came there none, and if in Norfolk there were tumble-weed, tumbling it would come. ‘The true and proper drink of Englishmen, barman, if I might paraphrase George Borrow.’
‘George Who?’
‘Borrow?’ said Morley. ‘Late of this parish? Local hero, surely?’
‘Who?’
‘Borrow. George Borrow?’
‘Anybody know George Borrow?’ the barman asked of the silent drinkers.
‘No.’
‘Really?’ said Morley.
‘And you say he’s from Blakeney?’
‘Norfolk, certainly. Dereham, I think. You’re not acquainted? Linguist. Novelist. Friend of the Romanichals?’
‘No,’ said the barman decisively, and he stared at Morley for a moment, attempting to get the measure of him, and then – having got the measure of him – sniffed, wiped his hands slowly on his apron and retreated to the back kitchen, where there could be heard the sound of muttering; and wherefrom an ample-bosomed and rosy-cheeked woman – who might have stepped straight from Maugham’s Cakes and Ale such was her perfectly formed barmaidliness, her body and manner expressing, if one might say so, boundless tolerance, or ‘A woman of robust and welcoming construction’, as Morley later put it – appeared.
‘Everything all right here, gentlemen?’
‘All fine, thank you, madam,’ said Morley, and then turning to me added, sotto voce, ‘Would I were in an alehouse in London, eh?’
‘Indeed, Mr Morley,’ I said, taking the comment merely as a remark.
‘Quotation, Sefton,’ he said.
‘Oh.’ I had come already, within days, rather to dread his love of quotations.
‘Guess?’
‘Shakespeare?’
‘Of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘And which play?’
‘I don’t know. Sorry. I’m tired, Mr Morley.’
‘Tired, Sefton?
’ Morley turned his steely blue gaze upon me.
I don’t think in all our years of acquaintance that I ever knew Morley to admit to feeling tired. He would, on occasion, recite out loud, ‘Let us not be weary in well doing; for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not’ – something from the Bible – which seemed to work for him as a kind of charm, or a pick-me-up, like his smelling salts, the proverbial hair of the dog, as it were. ‘What we need is a biblical bracer,’ he would sometimes say, in search of a quote to support some argument or other, as though Scripture were the equivalent of a raw egg with a dash of Worcester sauce. These biblical bracers tended to have the opposite effect on me, making me despair of ever making it through the day.
‘Titus Andronicus?’ I said, when it was obvious – his peering at me enquiringly over his moustache – that he was still waiting for an answer to the question.
‘“Would I were in an alehouse in London?”’ he said.
‘Not Titus Andronicus?’
‘Henry V at battle!’ he cried, as the barman returned and placed a glass of rather cloudy-looking water before us on the bar. ‘Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!’
‘Water,’ said the barman, spilling the contents of the glass slightly.
‘Adam’s ale!’ said Morley, raising the – rather grimy-looking – glass to his lips and then drinking a long draught. The barman watched him keenly, grinning, arms folded, from behind the bar. ‘Ah. Delicious,’ continued Morley. ‘A drop of the old aqua vitae. You know the word derives ultimately from the Irish and Scottish Gaelic uisge beatha?’
‘Does it now?’ said the barman.
‘And what does this phrase mean, you might ask?’
‘I might.’
‘Indeed.’
‘But I won’t, thank you, sir. That’ll be—’
‘Water of life,’ said Morley. ‘Or more commonly—’
I quickly handed some money to the barman and led Morley away to a quiet corner by the fire, where he could do no harm and cause no further irritation.
Eventually men returned to their drinking and smoking and playing darts, carefully lobbing, I noted, their cigarette ends into the fire with the same accuracy they were scoring on the dartboard, while Morley sat twisting the ends of his moustache, a sign he was deep in thought, as though he were jiggling the wires on a crystal set, trying to tune in to some obscure Hertzian wave or stream of thought. On a table opposite two men sat silently playing a game of shove-halfpenny, clearly listening to every word we spoke.
‘In the church,’ said Morley. ‘Why in the church? Why would he kill himself in the church?’
‘Because that’s where he was?’ I ventured.
‘But he could have been anywhere, could he not?’
‘He could, but he wasn’t.’
‘Exactly. Which brings us back to the question, why in the church? Why not in the rectory? Or out in some woods? Plenty of opportunities for a man to take his own life, aren’t there?’ He took a long sip of water and twisted his moustache some more. ‘Where would you take your own life, Sefton, if you were so inclined?’
The two men opposite listened ever more intently and suspiciously in our direction. This was clearly not everyday pub talk in rural north Norfolk. Though it would hardly have been everyday pub talk in any village, town or city throughout the length and breadth of England: it was simply Morley’s habit to ask the simple, direct sort of question that the rest of us usually see fit to avoid; he was a man who had somehow released the mental valve that most of us manage to keep tight shut. Freud, I often thought, would have had a field day with Morley – and vice versa. I lowered my voice as I replied, my own mental valve being turned firmly clockwise a number of times. I had, in fact, as it happened, considered taking my own life on a number of occasions, and only recently: in Spain, and in London, and by various methods: poisoning; shooting; hanging; jumping from some high place; starvation; lying down in front of a train. The options seemed endless, in fact, though ultimately unattractive. If I could simply disappear, that might have been the answer. Though travelling through England with Morley for all those years, I suppose I did in a sense disappear, or was constantly in the state of disappearing.
‘I’d probably go somewhere quiet,’ I said quietly.
‘Precisely!’ said Morley, too loudly. ‘Any sane man would kill himself somewhere quiet! Not in the vestry.’
‘Probably not, no,’ I agreed, shushing Morley, who could never satisfactorily be shushed.
‘Because there’d be a chance, wouldn’t there, Sefton, of someone walking in, preventing you from going through with it, popping a proverbial spanner in the suicidal works, etcetera?’
‘I suppose so, yes.’
‘So, why run the risk?’
‘Perhaps he was suddenly overcome with despair?’ I suggested, as another cigarette end hit an ember, dead centre. The whole bar seemed to have grown quieter as Morley grew more vivid. I felt the eyes of every man watching us.
‘And in his moment of despair,’ said Morley, ‘he fetched a bell-rope, climbed up on a table, onto a chair, tied the bell-rope into a noose, looped it around the beam, kicked the chair away, and hanged himself? Quite a moment, wouldn’t it be? Not so much a moment, in fact, as a short episode, which implies not only premeditation but also—’
‘I might get myself another drink, actually,’ I said, unable to bear the scrutiny of the other – now once again silent – customers any longer.
‘Good idea,’ said Morley.
‘Good idea,’ I agreed, getting up.
‘I smoked marijuana once, you know, Sefton,’ he continued, ‘through a hookah, in Afghanistan. Herat. Wore a turban. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Either the turban or the marijuana.’ He would often throw these googlies into conversation. It was best to ignore them, I found, though the darts-players were clearly having trouble doing so, staring at this white-haired, middle-aged, moustached man as though he had escaped from a lunatic asylum.
‘Another pint of—’
‘The old aqua vitae,’ he said. ‘Yes. Wouldn’t that be lovely?’ And he pulled out a notebook and began writing.
‘Does anyone commit suicide on impulse, as it were?’ he continued, on my return, tapping his notebook, which was now covered with furious little notes and diagrams. Fortunately, the novelty of having a one-time turban-wearing, marijuana-smoking autodidact among them seemed to have worn off, and men had returned to their conversations, their darts and their shove-halfpenny.
‘I’m sure they do,’ I said.
‘Young people, perhaps. Adolescents. Young Werther and what have you. But a grown man, Sefton? And a vicar, at that. With an eternal perspective? Hardly.’
I took a restoring sip of my beer, and chose not to answer, which was always the best course in such circumstances, I found, since after a few moments Morley was always prepared to pick up a ball and run with it alone.
‘So, what do you think, Sefton, reasons for suicide?’
‘Erm.’
‘If we had to draw up a shortlist. Number one reason?’
‘Erm …’
‘Number one. Mental or physical infirmity. Can’t say at the moment about the physical infirmity – he seemed a fine specimen, but we’ll have to wait for the results of the autopsy to confirm. No one has mentioned the reverend being doolally, have they?’
‘No, not to me,’ I said.
‘Me neither,’ said Morley. ‘One might have expected Mrs Snatchfold to have mentioned it, if he was crazy?’
‘Yes.’
‘So that rather rules that out. Which leaves us with our number two reason for anyone committing suicide. Which would be?’
‘Sorrow?’
‘Precisely! Yes. But sorrow over what exactly?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Loss? Mourning? Grief, as we know, abides by its own peculiar timetable; but it seems unlikely, I think. What do you think?’
‘Erm …’
‘He may of
course have been in some sort of practical discomfort. Financial distress, possibly. Debt? A gambler? In which case someone locally would be able to tell us. Which leaves us a long list of other reasons for sorrow, including perhaps remorse, shame, fear of punishment – God’s or otherwise – despair due to unrequited love, thwarted ambition—’
‘Quite a lot of possibilities.’
‘Exactly, Sefton. Which means it’s probably the wrong question to ask. Too many answers: wrong question. So, let’s work on the basis of what we do know rather than what we don’t, shall we? Let’s imagine, just for a moment, Sefton. Let’s put ourselves in the role of the poor departed reverend. This man who decides to kill himself in his own church.’
One of the darts-players scored a triple top, to much celebration.
‘Bravo!’ said Morley, joining in, and then continuing without a break. ‘Let’s just think about it for a moment, Sefton. The life of a country priest.’ He pointed to a diagram in his notebook: a series of circles and letters, and noughts and crosses, like a set of primitive pictograms or strange celestial symbols. ‘Here he is. The reverend.’ He pointed to a small black cross inside a large black circle. ‘Now, what does a reverend do, on a daily basis?’
‘Preaches?’
‘Yes, of course, he preaches. Though weekly, we might assume, rather than daily. But, you’re right of course, he does preach. Hence …’ He pointed to a line that led from the large black circle to a smaller circle containing a capital P. ‘Anything else?’
‘He visits the sick?’
‘Again, yes,’ and he traced his pen along another line out towards another circle containing the letter S. ‘He does indeed. Chum to the weak, and what have you. But what is most important about the role of the priest, town or country, in the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church?’
‘I don’t know, Mr Morley.’ My mind sometimes wandered when Morley was pursuing a theory, adumbrating a theme, or sketching.
‘The sacerdotal role, is it not?’ He drew a circle around all the other circles, creating a kind of wheel with spokes. ‘The priest is set apart from the community, Sefton. Everything that represents worldliness – the love of pleasure, of art, of ourselves. The priest is supposed to be essentially different from us.’ He drew half a dozen small arrows attempting to penetrate the large circle.
