by Ian Sansom
And then … her back was pressed against the wall, and we were kissing, and then we were moving frantically together, her moaning a little as we did so, pressing against me, turning her head as she placed my hand gently over her mouth as she rocked her body against mine.
It was not the right place, or the right time. It was real, and yet had the substance of dreams.
It was just something that happened.
I returned to the hotel around two in the morning, took two sleeping tablets, and fell into a troubled sleep, confusing the softness of Hannah’s body and her dark flashing eyes with memories of couplings in Spain, when we were all maddened by war, and under threat, and desperate, our lives glowing white-hot in the heat of the burning sun, the sands of time running out before us.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I CAME DOWN to breakfast late the next morning, Morley having long since eaten, and his breakfast table having been cleared and converted into his portable office – typewriter before him, pens and pencils lined up in a row, fresh paper stacked neatly, books on the floor, and the ever-present egg-timer at his elbow. He was dressed, as usual, in bow tie, light tweeds and his stout brogue boots, spruce and ready for adventure.
‘Early start?’ I said, feeling rather grisly. It was difficult to measure up to Morley at any time of day or night, but particularly first thing in the morning. He didn’t mean to make people inadequate: in his presence, one simply felt that one was inadequate. It wasn’t a matter of shame or guilt, or, at least, it wasn’t always a matter of shame or guilt; it seemed merely a fact.
‘Ah, good morning to you, Ishbosheth,’ he said, without looking up.
‘Sorry?’ I said. It was too early in the morning.
‘Good morning to you, Ishbosheth,’ he repeated, still without a glance of recognition. I didn’t say that I didn’t know what on earth he was talking about; it was too often and too obviously the case for me to need to say so, and anyway Morley could sniff out incomprehension at a hundred paces, and so instantly clarified.
‘Second Book of Samuel, Sefton. Look it up.’
‘I shall, Mr Morley. Thank you.’
‘Now,’ he said, reaching down beside him and handing me a Bible, which sat conveniently stacked in his portable reference section, which included also a Pocket Oxford, which he insisted on calling ‘the mini-Murray’, a Roget’s, and Fowler’s The King’s English: ‘Roget, Murray and Fowler,’ he would say. ‘My business partners.’ He found the Second Book of Samuel for me. ‘There we are. No time like the present, and what have you.’
I took a deep sigh, Morley raised an eyebrow, and I dutifully read the story of Ishbosheth – one of those grisly and apparently pointless biblical stories, in which, in this case, a bunch of chaps come into someone called Ishbosheth’s bedroom and cut off his head.
On which merry note, and without further comment from Morley – who clearly felt he had proved his point – I ordered coffee and toast, while he turned back to the task in hand. He had brought with him on our trip the proofs of his latest book, Morley’s Last Words, another in his seemingly endless works of anthology, which he somehow produced alongside all his other work, without ceasing, sometimes as many as three or four volumes a year. His procedures in compiling the books were essentially the same as his procedures for composing all his books, and is the method he famously describes in How To Write – A Lot!, a little pamphlet published in 1935, in which he set out his modus operandi as an encouragement to others, though the effect was almost certainly the opposite. (Personally I felt the exclamation mark – another of his tics – was in itself off-putting enough, though he often defended its use stoutly in argument. ‘Readers must be herded!’ he would say. ‘For like sheep we have gone astray.’) In How To Write – A Lot! Morley ascribes genius merely to method and exertion of effort, conveniently overlooking the fact that there is always genius at work in the application of method, and forgetting also that encouragement by the great and the good can in itself be dispiriting. Nonetheless, for the purposes of explanation, and at the risk of dispiriting yet more readers, the method is perhaps – briefly – worth restating here.
Thus: for newspaper articles, speeches, lectures and the like, Morley’s first draft would always be composed straight onto the typewriter, ‘The rhythms of the typewriter,’ as he remarks in How To Write – A Lot!, ‘representing and resembling the very rhythms of our minds’ (the very rhythms of his own mind, perhaps, with its clicks and clacks and endless returns, but a rhythm quite unlike my own and, I fancy, the rhythms of others). He would then augment this first typescript with notes from his notebooks, and would type it again, making further corrections to the new typescript by hand. He would then type a third and final draft of the article, and send it away. In this fashion he could average a thousand words an hour, or precisely four turns of the egg-timer, enabling him to write three or four articles before lunch. When it came to the books, the process was similar. Once he’d finished a typescript of a book – having worked on each chapter in the fashion as outlined above – he would then send it to his publishers, who would send back the proofs, which Morley would then amend, sometimes as many as three or four times, until he agreed on the final proofs, which were sent for publication. ‘By application of this simple method,’ he concludes in How To Write – A Lot!, ‘a man may comfortably write whate’er he might, and indeed whate’er he will.’
And so as he continued at whate’er he might and whate’er he will on that dark morning, I sat and drank my coffee in silence.
‘Soap dish?’ he said suddenly, and apropos of nothing, as I crunched my way through a piece of hotel-hardened toast.
‘Sorry?’
‘Soap dish? How was yours?’
‘It was …’
‘And the enamel on the bath?’
‘Erm …’
‘Width of the bed?’
‘Was …’
‘Tooth tumbler? Notice anything strange?’
‘No. Should I have done?’
‘Unwashed tooth tumbler a major source of bacteria in hotels, I would have thought. Do you take no note of your surroundings at all, Sefton?’
‘Yes, I do, Mr Morley, but—’
‘I have already made a list of deficiencies, and suggested improvements, and given them to the management.’
‘I’m sure they appreciated that,’ I said.
‘They seemed to, Sefton, yes. Certainly, rather more than the chambermaid, who I had to show how to mitre a corner correctly. Rather ungrateful, I thought.’
‘Really?’ I took another sip of coffee.
‘Balsa cement,’ he continued, without pausing.
‘I didn’t have any balsa cement in my room, I don’t think …’
‘Not in your room, Sefton. Eighth wonder of the world.’ In the moments between correcting the proofs on Morley’s Last Words, it turned out, he was also mulling over an article that he was about to write for a newspaper on how to make a model of Mevagissy Harbour out of balsa wood. And in the moments between annotating the one thing and typing the other, at each turn of the egg-timer, he made a few brief notes for an article on British woodland birds from one of all four volumes of Thorburn’s British Birds which were set at his left elbow. He was, in other words, behaving exactly as always. Which made his next announcement all the more shocking.
‘Time to bear the sacred plume de littérature over another ridge, then?’ I said, having by now drunk enough coffee to raise my spirits. I knew Miriam had already arranged a number of trips and interviews with locals for us: there was an itinerary.
‘Terrible business last night,’ said Morley.
‘Last night?’ I said.
‘You haven’t heard then?’
‘Heard what?’
‘She’s dead.’
‘Who’s dead?’
‘The German girl.’
Sometime during the night, moments after we had been together, Hannah had committed suicide. She had set light to herself on Blakeney qua
y, having doused herself in petrol. The flames were seen by the night porter of the hotel, who had rushed down to try to save her.
Morley narrated the story as though reading a clipping from an old newspaper. I made out only snatches of detail: just before dawn; unable to quench the flames; locals shocked.
I was speechless.
Having recounted the news to me, Morley then got up and started gathering his papers.
‘Come on then, Sefton, up, up, please, and doing.’
‘I …’
‘What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?’
‘I’m sorry. I …’
‘What?’
‘I can’t believe it.’
‘Can’t believe what?’
‘That … I’m just … astonished.’
‘About the girl you mean?’
‘Of course.’
‘Ah. Yes, well. Terribly sad. But, abyssus abyssum invocate, I’m afraid, Sefton. Isn’t that right? Hell calls to hell. One tragedy bids forth another. In fact, it has often seemed to me there is nothing astonishing in this world, except our absolute inability to understand our capacity for making ourselves and others miserable. Definitely hanging, by the way, according to the doctor. Autopsy. Would have liked to see it myself. But. We have work to do. With Miriam away in London, you’ll be driving the Lagonda and in charge of logistics. I’ll meet you in the lobby in, say’ – he glanced at both wristwatches – ‘twenty-one minutes?’
I stared at him, disgusted. His buoyancy – though there was never anything forced or exaggerated about it, nothing unnatural – seemed nonetheless at that moment irresponsible, arrogant, childlike and appalling.
‘How can you keep on working, with …’
‘How can I keep on working, Sefton?’ He looked shocked. ‘Surely, rather, the question is how can one not? Do you know Bruegel’s The Fall of Icarus?’
‘No, I don’t think I—’
‘Worth looking up, Sefton, I’m afraid. Worth looking up. The Old Masters. Never wrong.’ He gazed fixedly into the middle distance for a moment. ‘And anyway, ink is our lifeblood and words – think you not? – our only friends. So. Doesn’t do to dwell on these things.’ With which he turned his back on me and strode sharply from the dining room.
I didn’t know what to do. Despite Morley’s admonitions, vast miserable spaces seemed to open up in my mind, horrible fantasies and imaginings, abysms of despair, and yet of course the normal business of the hotel continued all around me. I felt a buzzing in my head. It was Spain all over again. I smoked several cigarettes, went to my room, lay down. Got up.
And then drove with Morley to our first appointment in total silence.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘HIDEOUS STATUARY,’ he said, as we pulled up a driveway flanked by three carved female figures. ‘What do you think: Pandora, Eve, Aphrodite? Difficult to tell. Could be the Furies. Could be the Graces. Could be the Gorgons. What do you think, Sefton?’ My mind was elsewhere; statues were not my concern. ‘Hideous anyway. And a house that seems to have been designed for a maharajah by a Chinaman. Make a note, Sefton.’ I did not make a note; I was driving; the two tasks were incompatible, though this mattered not to Morley. ‘Sefton?’ he repeated. ‘Sefton?’ When answer came there none he simply continued. ‘Why do the English love to dress their buildings in other people’s clothes?’ I was thinking of Hannah’s clothes going up in flames. ‘The Gothic and Grecian country house, our Romanesque gaols. Our Italianate villas. Or – as here – our eccentric Indian country houses? Is it the imperial impulse, Sefton, do you think? Or simply our love of narrative, of telling stories about ourselves and other cultures?’
‘I don’t know, Mr Morley.’
‘Cool, dark and mysterious,’ he said, referring to what it was not clear. ‘Come on, Sefton, concentrate, please. Eyes open. Mind alert. Mouth shut. We do have work to do.’
Miss Harris’s house: the imperial impulse
We were greeted and ushered into the house by a maid, who showed us into a drawing room – a sick-making combination of pale green walls, swirling red paisley fabrics and assorted knick-knacks – where a middle-aged woman sat on a straight blue wooden chair by a bay window hung with damask, apparently having framed herself deliberately, as though for a photograph. She was in her late fifties, possibly older, and wore a long flowing dress in faded magenta, with a pair of low-heeled black boots that might suit for a fishing or hunting trip, and her hair, which was a dusty grey, she wore cropped close to the head, like a weak-featured man going deliberately for the look of a powerful Roman emperor. Her eyes were a piercing blue, and her lips, though thin, suggested the potential of passion – violent passion even, one might say. She wore a black silk shawl draped around her shoulders, which made her look as though she might at any moment rise up, throw it off, and declaim, which she might have done, had the shawl not been fixed firmly in place with a silver brooch of the most horrible design, in the form of a dog’s head, with tiny, pinprick red jewels for eyes. In my troubled and downcast state, the room, and the woman, struck me as bogus, vile and somehow asharbingers of doom.
‘Miss Harris,’ said Morley, going over.
Miss Harris, in regal fashion, raised her hand to be kissed, nodded, but said nothing.
‘It is an honour to meet you, Miss Harris.’
‘Indeed,’ said Miss Harris, who was – Morley had briefed me – a faded star of the stage, with a sideline in light opera, and who clearly felt that honour should indeed be granted where honour was due.
‘This is my assistant, Mr Sefton,’ said Morley.
I nodded. Miss Harris forced a smile.
‘It’s a wonderful place you have here,’ said Morley, rather convincingly, I thought, since he later described the house to me, with characteristic frankness, as being more like a stage set than a home. He thoroughly disapproved of interior decoration, believing in simplicity and spartan values in all things except cars, books, stationery, pets and of course his own eccentric home and its furnishings, which he believed to be exemptingly and self-evidently exquisite in every regard. I had described the place, in my notes, as containing fine examples of antique furniture. ‘It was not antique furniture,’ Morley corrected me. ‘It was furniture with antique pretensions. There is a difference, Sefton.’ Fortunately, Miss Harris was not privy to this later conversation.
‘I know, I know, we are frightfully lucky,’ said Miss Harris. ‘The house came up a few years ago, just when we were looking to move out of London. I can’t tell you, Mr Morley, how much we appreciate it. It was designed by John Norton. Do you know him?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t, madam, no.’
‘He designed the Maharajah Duleep Singh’s house at Elveden?’
‘Ah. Yes. Our first Sikh settler.’
‘Indeed. Norton specialised in houses in the Indian manner, after he had created Elveden.’
‘I see.’
‘This is on a very modest scale, of course, but it has been a labour of love, restoring it and updating it. But it has been worth it, don’t you think?’ Miss Harris was the sort of woman who spoke as though she were speaking a citation – to herself – or reciting verse to an audience of the hard of hearing in a large auditorium. She measured each sentence as though she were handing out precious gifts, or fifty-guinea notes, fully aware of the worth and weight of every syllable, and the price in pence and pounds of every slight change in tone and pitch. She also happened to have at her feet a willing audience and accompanist, in the form of a continually snorting Pekinese, whose rhythmic snufflings made it sound as though it was either about to die, or to leap enthusiastically into life, though during the course of our visit it did neither, and acted merely as a small furry metronome, drawing attention to the forced tempo of Miss Harris’s pronouncements. ‘Times have changed so in London, have they not, Mr Morley?’
‘They have indeed, Miss Harris. You prefer Oxford, I think?’
‘Yes, I do. How did you know?’
‘I
was just admiring your mezzo-tints in the hallway, on the way in. Balliol, was it?’
‘Yes, my brother attended college there. We shared many happy times together.’
‘All of you as a family?’
‘That’s correct. It seems like another age. Barbarousness everywhere these days. I blame three things, Mr Morley: the war; the Spanish flu; and the Americans. And Emily Davison. But that makes four. Do you agree?’
‘It’s certainly one argument, Miss Harris.’
‘Particularly the Americans. I have no time for Americans, Mr Morley, even though I spent much time there in my youth, touring with the D’Oyly Carte. We might as well be living in America these days, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I’m not sure, Miss Harris. I think Norfolk is still quite—’
‘Clothes. Jazz. Conversation. All fashions follow a very simple and direct route, Mr Morley, in my opinion. They come first from the Negroes, and then on to the brothel, and then to “movie” stars, and then hence to high society, and finally to maids and servants and secretaries in the suburbs, where they meet again with their origins. Do you see?’
‘A vicious circle,’ said Morley.
‘Precisely,’ said Miss Harris. ‘A positive cyclorama of degradation. The amount of young women one sees these days in high heels, Mr Morley, even in Norwich. It’s really quite extraordinary. High heels might be suitable for the salons and arcades of Paris, but they are hardly practical for country living.’
‘You haven’t met my daughter,’ said Morley.
‘No,’ said Miss Harris. ‘Why? Has she fallen for the current fashions?’
‘I’m afraid she has,’ said Morley.
‘“Dainty skirts and delicate blouses aren’t much use for pigs and cows-es. The answer is overalls and trousiz,”’ sang Miss Harris, rather tunefully, I have to admit. The Pekinese, for a moment, stopping grunting and staring up at her.
