Wexford 10 - A Sleeping Life

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Oh, and Edward Edwards,’ he said. ‘Know who Edward Edwards was? The Father of Public Libraries, it said underneath his statue. Apparently, he was instrumental in getting some bill through Parliament in 1850 and . . .’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Burden exploded, ‘can’t you get on to West? What’s this Edwards got to do with West?’

  ‘Not much. He stands outside libraries and West’s book are inside.’

  ‘Then where is West? Or are you saying he’s going to turn up now he’s read in the paper that one of his girl-friends has murdered the other one?’

  ‘He won’t turn up.’

  ‘Why won’t he?’ Burden said slowly. ‘Look, d’you mean there were two people involved in murdering Rhoda Comfrey? West as well as the girl?’

  ‘No. West is dead. He never went back to the Trieste Hotel because he was dead.’

  ‘I need another drink,’ said Burden. In the doorway he turned round and said scathingly, ‘I suppose Polly Flinders bumped him off too?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Wexford. ‘Of course.’

  The Olive was getting crowded and Burden was more than five minutes fetching their beer. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘who d’you think’s out there? Griswold. He didn’t see me. At least, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then you’d better make that one last. I’m not running the risk of bumping into him.’

  Burden sat down again, his eye on the doorway which held no door. He leant across the table, his elbows on it. ‘She can’t have. What became of the body?’

  Wexford didn’t answer him directly. ‘Does the word eonism mean anything to you?’

  ‘No more than all those names you flung at me just now. Wait a minute, though. An aeon means a long time, an age. An aeonist is - let’s see - is someone who studies changes over long periods of time.’

  ‘No. I thought something like that too. It has nothing to do with aeons, there’s no a in it. Havelock Ellis coined the word in a book published in 1928 called Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Eonism and other Studies. He took the name from that of the Chevalier d’Eon, Charles Eon de Beaumont, who died in this country in the early part of the nineteenth century . . .’ Wexford paused and said, 'Having masqueraded for thirty-three years as a woman Rhoda Comfrey masqueraded for twenty years as a man. When I agreed that Pauline Flinders had murdered Grenville West, I meant that she had murdered him in the body of Rhoda Comfrey. Rhoda Comfrey and Grenville West were one and the same.’

  'That’s not possible,’ said Burden. ‘People would have known or at least suspected.’ Intently staring at Wexford’s face, he was oblivious of the long bulky shadow that had been cast across the table and his own face.

  Wexford turned round, said, ‘Good evening, sir,’ and smiled pleasantly. It was Burden who, realizing, got to his feet.

  ‘Sit down, Mike, sit down,’ said the Chief Constable, casting upon Wexford a look that implied he would have liked the opportunity to tell him to sit down also. ‘May I join you? Or is the chief inspector here indulging his well-known habit of telling a tale with the minimum of celerity and the maximum of suspense? I should hate to interrupt before the climax was reached.’

  In a stifled voice, Burden said, ‘The climax was reached just as you came in, sir. Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘Thank you, but I have one.’ Griswold produced, from where he had been holding it, for some reason, against his trouser leg, a very small glass of dry sherry. ‘And now I too would like to hear this wonderful exposition, though I have the advantage over you, Mike, of having read a condensed version. I heard your last words. Perhaps you’ll repeat them.’

  ‘I said she couldn’t have got away with it. Anyone she knew well would have known.’

  ‘Well, Reg?’ Griswold sat down on the settle next to Burden. ‘I hope my presence won’t embarrass you. Will you go on?’

  ‘Certainly I will, sir.’ Wexford considered saying he wasn’t easily embarrassed but thought better of it. ‘I think the answer to that question is that she took care, as we have seen, only to know well not very sensitive or intelligent people. But even so, Malina Patel had noticed there was something odd about Grenville West, and she said she wouldn’t have liked him to kiss her. Even Victor Vivian spoke of a “funny high voice” while, incidentally, Mrs Crown said that Rhoda’s voice was deep. I think it probable that such people as Oliver Hampton and Mrs Nunn did know, or rather, if they didn’t know she was a woman, they suspected Grenville West of being of ambivalent sex, of being physically a hermaphrodite, or maybe an effeminate homosexual. But would they have told me? When I questioned them I suspected West of nothing more than being acquainted with Rhoda Comfrey. They are discreet people, who were connected with West in a professional capacity.'

  'As for those men Rhoda consorted with in bars, they wouldn’t have been a bunch of conservative suburbanites. They’d have accepted her as just another oddity in a world of freaks. Before you came in, sir, I mentioned three names. Isabelle Eberhardt, James Miranda Barry and Martha Jane Burke. What they had in common was that they were all eonists.'

  'Isabelle Eberhardt became a nomad in the North African desert where she was in the habit of sporadically passing herself off as male. James Barry went to medical school as a boy in the days before girls were eligible to do so, and served for a lifetime as an army doctor in the British colonies. After her death she was found to be a woman, and a woman who had had a child. The last named is better known as Calamity Jane who lived with men as a man, chewed tobacco, was proficient in the use of arms, and was only discovered to be a woman while she was taking part in a military campaign against the Sioux.'

  ‘The Chevalier d’Eon was a physically normal man who successfully posed as a female for thirty years. For half that period he lived with a woman friend called Marie Cole who never doubted for a moment that he also was a woman. She nursed him through his last illness and didn’t learn he was a man until after his death. I will quote to you Marie Cole’s reaction to the discovery from the words of the Notary Public, Doctors’ Commons, 1810: “She did not recover from the shock for many hours.”

  ‘So you can see that Rhoda Comfrey had precedent for what she did, and that the lives of these predecessors of hers show that cross-dressing succeeds in its aim. Many people are totally deceived by it, others speculate or doubt, but the subject’s true sex is often not detected until he or she become ill or wounded, or until, as in Rhoda’s case, death supervenes.’

  The Chief Constable shook his head, as one who wonders rather than denies. ‘What put you on to it, Reg?’

  ‘My daughters. One saying a woman would have to be an eonist to get a man’s rights, and the other dressing as a man on the stage. Oh, and Grenville West’s letter to Charles West - that had the feel of having been written by a woman. And Rhoda’s fingernails painted but clipped short. And Rhoda having a toothbrush in her luggage at Kingsmarkham and West not having one in his holiday cases. All feelings, I’m afraid, sir.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ said Burden, ‘but what about the age question? Rhoda Comfrey was fifty and West was thirty-eight.’

  ‘She had a very good reason for fixing her age as twelve years less than her true one. I’ll go into that in a minute. But also you must remember that she saw herself as having lost her youth and those best years. This was a way of regaining them. Now think what are the signs of youth in men and women. A woman’s subcutaneous fat begins to decline at fifty or hereabouts, but a man never has very much of it.'

  'So even a young man may have a hard face, lined especially under the eyes without looking older than he is. A woman’s youthful looks largely depend on her having no lines. Here, as elsewhere, we apply a different standard for the sexes. You’re what, Mike? In your early forties? Put a wig and make-up on you and you’ll look an old hag, but cut off the hair of a woman of your age, dress her in a man’s suit, and she could pass for thirty. My daughter Sheila’s twenty-four, but when she puts on doublet and hose for Jessica in The Merchant of Venice she lo
oks sixteen.’

  Remarkably, it was the Chief Constable who supported him. ‘Quite true. Think of Crippen’s mistress, Ethel Le Neve. She was a mature woman, but when she tried to escape across the Atlantic disguised in men’s clothes she was taken for a youth. And by the way, Reg, you might have added Maria Marten, the Red Barn victim, to your list. She left her father’s house disguised as a farm labourer, though I believe transvestism was against the law at the time.’

  ‘In seventeenth-century France,’ said Wexford, 'Then, at any rate, were executed for it.’

  ‘Hmm. You have been doing your homework. Get on with the story, will you?’

  Wexford proceeded: ‘Nature had not been kind to Rhoda as a woman. She had a plain face and a large nose and she was large-framed and flat-chested. She was what people call “mannish”, though incidentally no one did in this case. As a young girl she tried wearing ultra-feminine clothes to make herself more attractive. She copied her aunt because she saw that her aunt got results. She, however, did not, and she must have come to see her femaleness as a grave disadvantage.'

  'Because she was female she had been denied an education and was expected to be a drudge. All her miseries came from being a woman, and she had none of a woman’s advantages over a man. My daughter Sylvia complains that men are attentive to her because of her physical attractions but accord her no respect as a person. Rhoda had no physical attractions so, because she was a woman, she received neither attention nor respect. No doubt she would have stayed at home and become an embittered old maid, but for a piece of luck. She won a large sum of money in an office football pools syndicate. Where she first lived in London and whether as a man or a woman, I don’t know and I don’t think it’s relevant. She began to write. Did she at this time cease to wear those unsuitable clothes and take to trousers and sweaters and jackets instead? Who knows? Perhaps, dressed like that, she was once or twice mistaken for a man, and that gave her the idea. Or what is more likely, she took to men’s clothes because, as Havelock Ellis says, cross-dressing fulfilled a deep demand of her nature.'

  ‘It must have been then that she assumed a man’s name, and perhaps this was when she submitted her first manuscript to a publisher. It was then or never, wasn’t it? If she was going to have a career and come into the public eye there must be no ambivalence of sex. By posing - or passing - as a man she had everything to gain: the respect of her fellows, a personal feeling of the rightness of it for her, the freedom to go where she chose and do what she liked, to walk about after dark in safety, to hobnob with men in bars on an equal footing. And she had very little to lose. Only the chance of forming close intimate friendships, for this she would not dare to do - except with unobservant fools like Vivian.’

  ‘Well,’ said Burden, ‘I’ve just about recovered from the shock, unlike Marie Cole who took some hours. But there’s something else strikes me she had to lose.’ He looked with some awkwardness in the direction of the Chief Constable, and Griswold, without waiting for him to say it, barked, ‘Her sexuality, eh? How about that?’

  ‘Len Crocker said at the start of this case that some people are very low-sexed. And if I may again quote Havelock Ellis, eonists often have an almost asexual disposition. “In people”, he says, “with this psychic anomaly, physical sexual urge seems often subnormal.” Rhoda Comfrey, who had had no sexual experience, must have decided it was well worth sacrificing the possibility - the remote possibility - of ever forming a satisfactory sexual relationship for what she had to gain. I am sure she did sacrifice it and became a man whom other men and women just thought rather odd.'

  ‘And she took pains to be as masculine as she could be. She dressed plainly, she used no colognes or toilet waters, she carried an electric shaver, though we must suppose it was never used. Because she couldn’t grow an Adam’s apple she wore high necklines to cover her neck, and because she couldn’t achieve on her forehead an M-line, she always wore a lock of hair falling over her brow.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ said Burden. ‘An M-line?’

  ‘Look in the mirror,’ said Wexford.

  The three men got up and confronted themselves in the ornamented glass on the wall above their table. ‘See,’ said Wexford, putting his own hands up to his scanty hairline, and the other two perceived how their hair receded in two triangles at the temples. ‘All men,’ he said, ‘have to some degree, but no woman does. Her hairline is oval in shape. But for Rhoda Comfrey these were small matters and easily dealt with. It was only when she paid a rare visit to Kingsmarkham to see her father that she was obliged to go back to being a woman. Oh, and on one other occasion. No wonder people said she was happy in London and miserable in the country. For her, dressing as a woman was very much what it would be like for a normal man to be forced into drag. But she played it in character, or in her old character, that, but perhaps she ought to see the old man first and find out how the land lay.’

  ‘What d’you mean by that?’

  ‘I mean that if he was very seriously incapacitated she would know that her greatest fear, that her father might have to be parked on her one day, would be groundless and she could go off to France with a light heart. But she had to go down there and find out, even though this would mean putting off her holiday for a day or two. Never mind. That was no great inconvenience. She phoned her aunt to tell her she would be coming and when she did so Polly Flinders was in the flat, but not all the time in the room.'

  ‘Now, if no one else did, Polly knew that Grenville West had once or twice before disappeared mysteriously at weekends. I think we can assume that Rhoda rather enjoyed keeping her in the dark about that, and guessed she was giving her cause for jealousy. On that Friday evening Polly had very likely been troublesome - she may, for instance, have wanted West to take her away on holiday with him and Rhoda vented her annoyance by calling Lilian Crown “darling”. Polly overheard, as she was meant to overhear, and believed that West was involved with another woman living in the country. No doubt she asked questions, but was told it was no business of hers, so she determined to go to Stowerton on the Monday and find out for herself what was going on.’

  Burden interrupted him. ‘Why didn’t Rhoda or West or whatever we’re going to call him or her - it gets a bit complicated - go to Kingsmarkham that day? Then there wouldn’t have been any need to postpone the holiday. Where does the Trieste Hotel come in?’

  ‘Think about it,’ said Wexford. ‘Walk out of Elm Green in make-up and high-heeled shoes and a dress?’

  ‘I should have thought a public lavatory . . .’ Burden stopped himself proceeding further with this gaffe, but not in time to prevent Griswold’s hoot of laughter.

  ‘How does he manage to go in the Gents’ and come out of the Ladies’, Mike?’

  Wexford didn’t feel like laughing. He had never been amused by drag or the idea of it, and now the humorous aspects of this particular case of cross-dressing seemed to him quenched by its consequences. ‘She used hotels for the changeover,’ he said rather coldly, ‘and usually hotels in some distant part of London. But this time she had left it too late to pick and choose, especially with the tourist season at its height. On that Saturday she must have tried to book in at a number of hotels without success. The only one which could take her was the Trieste which she had used once before - on the occasion of the visit to Dr Lomond. You can see, Mike, how she walked out of the Trieste on that day, crossed Montfort Circus, went up Montfort Hill, and chose an address from a street name and an advertisement.'

  ‘So back to the Trieste she went, with her car packed up for the French holiday and allowing Vivian to believe she was leaving directly for France. The car was left in a garage at the hotel with her passport and French currency locked up in the boot. On her person she retained the car keys and her new wallet, and these went into her handbag when on the following day she left the hotel as Rhoda Comfrey.’

  ‘That must have been as bad as walking out of Elm Green. Suppose she’d been seen?’

  ‘By w
hom? An hotel servant? She says she’s calling on her friend, Mr West. It would have been easy enough to mingle with the other guests or conceal herself in a cloakroom, say, if Hetherington had appeared. As a respectable middle-aged lady, she’d hardly have been suspected of being there for what you’d call an immoral purpose.’