The Knox Brothers

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  The governments of the world now began to close down the Soviet consulates and trading posts in their midst. In 1926 the Turks raided the Soviet-Turkish delegation, and made arrests; there were also arrests in Switzerland and Austria, and in April 1927 the Chinese police entered the Soviet consulate in Peking.

  In December 1926, after various protests and rebuffs, a Foreign Office memorandum was circulated privately to key ambassadors, giving notice that a breach with the Soviet Union, and a raid on ARCOS, were probable in the near future. On 13 January 1927 Dilly bought himself a new Burberry overcoat, costing £6 10S, and ordered dinner at John Fothergill’s rather expensive inn at Thame, the Spread Eagle. These expenses might pass as unremarkable, but with Dilly they could only mean a celebration, and it is at least possible that the Government, apart from any other intention, had agreed, in his own phrase, to “get something from the post office”.

  At 4:30 on the afternoon of 12 May, the British police raided Southampton Buildings on an ordinary magistrates’ search warrant. The editorial staff of the ARCOS magazine, who in January had announced that they were gaining “more opportunities of getting to know the situation of our hosts, the British people,” were thrown into confusion. Rather oddly, they printed an issue dated 16 May with a leading article on the raid. We are told that “in the cipher room Comrades Meler and Zudyakov tried to explain to the police that as fundamental principle of right they could not allow anyone to see the ciphers and telegrams,” but met with a “harsh rejoinder.” The paper then goes on to discuss the market in heavy machinery.

  The police were not dissatisfied, because they were able to pick up several “known spies” in Southampton Buildings. Of the confiscated secret papers, most were ludicrous. They found a complaint, for example, that the British Communist Party had made a terrible mess of providing “politically conscious seamen” for the three Russian vessels which remained under the British flag after 1918; they had sent “the refuse of the Labour Party”—some drank, some were good orators but bad stokers, some did no work at all. Such things were hardly worth knowing, but it has been said that a mysterious “missing document” was never found because the police gave proper warning, and ARCOS had time to destroy it. Indeed, the Soviet chargé d’affaires encouraged this idea, cabling to Moscow on the 18th: “I consider it expedient for you to publish as a rumour a statement that the missing document refers to the aerial bombardment of a certain European capital.”

  How was this last message—which must have been in cipher—translated in London? The real prize which Scotland Yard brought back was what the ARCOS leading article described as “the writing machines and all that they had printed”. These would give away the general system, even if the specific key was changed. When they realized that the material would not be returned, the Russians appealed to Khinchuk, the head of the trade delegation, to protest on the grounds of diplomatic immunity. The reply was unfavourable. No more numbers of the ARCOS magazine appeared, and the delegation were requested to leave Great Britain.

  Our information about Soviet Russia between the two world wars is usually considered to have been good, though it was derived, of course, from many other sources beside cryptography. The question remains: did our cryptographers break the cipher, and provide information which led to the expulsion of ARCOS, or did they fail to break it, but profit from the raid far more than anyone else?

  Dilly was promoted to a higher grade—which may have been for a number of reasons—and joined the Wine Society, although he never became, like Eddie, a connoisseur. Olive also thought they ought to buy more land, and in 1929 E. S. P. Haynes acquired for them another small estate, North Dean, let out at a yearly tenancy of £17 10s.

  The family felt that Dilly’s woodlands were too much for him already. Small accidents abounded with the saws and choppers. Olive’s shelves, put up by Dilly, collapsed with the year’s preserves. Aunt Ethel, visiting, fell into a deep pit full of brushwood and hurt herself quite badly. There was no real safety at Courn’s Wood, just as there was no real warmth, outside Dilly’s study.

  VII

  1930–1938

  “The Fascination of What’s Difficult”

  IF DILLY’S INTEREST IN THE ARCOS AFFAIR can be presented only as a series of disconnected clues, that, at least, is appropriate to the late Twenties, the period of the classic detective novel. The “rules” for these novels were drawn up by Ronnie in 1928, and adopted in 1929 as the Solemn Oath of the members of the writers’ Detection Club. The criminal must be mentioned in the first five chapters, and the reader must not have been allowed to know his inner thoughts; only one secret passage is allowed, no unknown poisons, no mysterious Orientals, no lucky chances or unexplained intuitions to help the detective; the detective must “declare” all his clues, so must the “Watson”, or uncomprehending friend; and the detective must not turn out to be the criminal. Agatha Christie, although a founder member of the Detection Club, broke nearly all of these rules, and G. K. Chesterton had broken most of them, but Ronnie was happy with their safe dimensions. A game should be an imitation of life’s dimensions in which the players themselves can decide when to stop and get off.

  Between 1926 (The Viaduct Murder) and 1937 (Double Cross Purposes) he wrote six detective stories. All of them, even the earliest, were backward-looking. To feel at home in them, you need to be familiar with Bradshaw’s railway timetables, canoeing on the upper reaches of the Thames, vicarages, gas taps, and country house parties in which the first duty is consideration for one’s hostess. Time has obscured these things, although time may well restore the wish to read about them. The solutions to the mysteries are most scrupulously set out, and page references are given, in case the reader has missed the clues.

  As a novelist, Ronnie was not strong on characterization. In 1920, when formidable Aunt Ellen (the college Principal) wrote from Toronto: “I have been trying my hand at a story of Old Canada, and am sending six chapters so that my nephews can put more life and buoyancy into the ‘conversations,’ ” none of them, not even Eddie, was prepared to take on the job. Some of Ronnie’s characters he found to hand, just as he used the familiar scenery of Scotland, Oxford and Herefordshire—the convert clergyman, for instance, in The Three Taps, or Miss Morel, the lady motor-car driver in The Body in the Silo, who was taken from Miss Gompertz. But he was not able to establish a popular detective to carry him through book after book—couldn’t even think of a name for him, but opened his Shropshire Lad and found:

  In summertime on Bredon …

  In valleys miles away …

  Miles Bredon, Ronnie’s investigator, is a stick. He smokes a pipe and plays patience, as both Dilly and Ronnie did, to clear his mental processes, but without coming to life for a single moment. Yet Ronnie had admirable models—Dilly himself (except that flashes of intuition were forbidden by the rules) would have served, and Wilfred would have been even better, though here the pain of the old association stood in the way; and besides, the figure of the wise, ageless, shabby priest who puts the conventionally-minded to shame had been done once and for all, Ronnie thought, by Hugh Benson and Chesterton; no one guessed how soon Graham Greene was going to drag him out again for The Power and the Glory.

  Ronnie’s six detective stories, which earned him about four hundred pounds a year each, were written in the vacations at Beaumont to supplement his income from the chaplaincy at Oxford. They made it possible for him to bear most of the expenses of hospitality himself, although it worried him that it might establish a precedent and that all his successors might have to find extra money, and perhaps write novels, as well. Although he was still modestly uncertain as to what the job entailed and whether he was the right man to do it, he left St Edmund’s for Oxford in the Michaelmas of 1926, with sober expectations of success.

  The chaplaincy house at Oxford, misleadingly called the Old Palace, is on the corner of St Aldates. It is a very old place, part of it pre-Elizabethan, with the oak beams that support it—“if anything doe
s,” Ronnie said—showing through the plaster. A stream, a tributary of the Isis and once used for a mill stream, runs beneath the whole building into Christ Church Meadows. Different levels, sloping floors and low passages make getting about an achievement; two ancient chimneys go up the whole height of the house, and the drainage system is a study in itself. As a link with the past, the Old Palace could not be improved upon. Bishop King, the first and last Catholic bishop of Oxford, had lived there. As a link with the future, it was less suitable, but Ronnie could not foresee its later metamorphoses, its doors open to down-and-outs and unfortunates, a thriving cafeteria, open debates with all the world’s religions. His vision did not extend so far. He saw it as a centre of exchanged confidences, prayer and peace.

  It was also a home. Ronnie became a householder. Before that he had always been in school or college, or a guest, or a lodger. In an essay, “Joys of Householding”, he described the heady sensation; he was sleeping, for the first time, in his own bed: “I could go out and sell it in a shop if I wanted to.” And he could have food because he liked it, not because it was all he would get, or “because it would look so rude if I didn’t.”

  Food, however, depended on a good housekeeper. Mrs Lyons—she never married, the “Mrs” was honorary—was an old family retainer supplied by Lady Lovat, who acted for more than ten years as Ronnie’s cook, business manager, almoner, sacristan and clothesmender. Pious and frugal, refusing to give up work until a few days before her death, she was fiercely protective of all priests, and of Ronnie, of course, in particular. With her, his comfort was assured, that of his visitors rather less so, as Mrs Lyons did not take to everybody. Some were in perpetual disfavour. To these the Old Palace became the Den of Lyons.

  The move from Ware was easier than he had feared. He chose the blue chintz curtains himself, or thought he did, for every woman guest, including Christina, was consulted. He stood gazing wistfully out into St Aldates, to see whether people were looking at them, and whether they noticed that there were no linings. The Sisters of Nazareth came with a hand-cart to clear away the junk, and Ronnie took possession, as the chaplain’s room, of the long panelled room on the first floor where once again he could sit down on his own fender, with his back to his own fire.

  Oxford welcomed him without reserve. One disappointment was the departure of Father Martindale, who had suddenly gone off, with the speed of a whirlwind, and returning only for an occasional sermon to a wider apostolate. Otherwise there were old friends everywhere, and no reproaches at his change of faith. His old college, Trinity, elected him at once to dining rights; this, and the Honorary Fellowship they gave him at the end of his chaplaincy, he felt as two of “the nicest things that ever happened to me”.

  He proved himself to be a good, if anxious, organizer, better, though less successful, than Eddie and Dilly, who were able by instinct to find others to organize for them. In 1931 he personally raised and gave six thousand pounds for the building of a new chapel. With none of the folie de pierre which is the last infirmity of so many priests, he dismissed the architect’s Gothic plans and asked for something that “could be turned into tea-rooms later on”, as indeed it was. His main object was to find a reliable routine for the household, the chapel and the University societies, which he hesitantly hoped might become a tradition. In “The Whole Art of Chaplaincy”, a document which he bequeathed to his successors, he gives not only a summary of his pastoral methods but a loving description of loose gas taps, frightful draughts and creaking doors which could, surely, have been put right on the spot. The chapel harmonium had not been tuned for thirteen years; a white stole, picked up in the ruins of Ypres, Ronnie would rather have liked to get rid of, but didn’t. He did not want to change these things, any more than he changed the position of the picture which was hung upside-down in the passage and stayed like that till 1938. He was at Oxford. This was his home. As a Catholic priest, he felt more deeply united with the medieval foundation which, he now felt, had lost its way for a few centuries—but what did that matter at Oxford?—and to which the Faith had now quietly returned.

  Writing to his publisher, Tom Burns, about a collection of chaplaincy sermons, Ronnie explained that he wanted to call it The Hidden Stream because of the mill stream that ran beneath the Old Palace. “It is the easiest thing in the world to go down it in a canoe, but I find that my name has become immortal as the intrepid paddlesman who did it. It would draw a parable between this single, unsuspected branch of the Isis and the stream of teaching which goes on at the Old Palace, rather shiftily, quite differently from the main stream of University teaching, etc., etc.” By “rather shiftily” he meant what others might call unobtrusively and profoundly. In that spirit he undertook his new duties.

  At Courn’s Wood, Dilly hacked away persistently at the chalky slopes of beechwoods, and planted several acres of trees himself, a gaunt figure in half professorial, half woodlander’s attire, ending in grey flannel trousers tucked into waders.

  Two miles from our sombre home in the Chilterns [writes his son Oliver], across a valley, up a broad bridlepath, then down a meandering track left almost invisible, stood the log-cabin built by my father, in a glade surrounded by ash-saplings and willow-herb. He had built this hut with his own hands, sawing and splitting the larchwood, with relentless energy, all day so long as there was any light, every Saturday and Sunday through one summer in the early ’30s. Here one afternoon I returned from some expedition, to hear the murmur of my parents’ conversation. What I heard was disturbing.

  My father was talking of the frustrations of life at the Foreign Office, and of the yearnings to return to Cambridge and resume his passionate studies of Greek. My mother was reminding him, low but firmly, of his duty to educate his sons, and of the national importance of his work, and adding, too, that she herself could not bear the thought of returning to the chill wastes of fenland and the inhospitable society of dons.

  I didn’t dare to shuffle, or announce my presence, but peeped between the cracks of the timber wall. My father was in his shirtsleeves, holding his saw. His pipe lay neglected on the crude windowsill. For once he wasn’t wearing his horn-rim spectacles, so that his eyes looked unfamiliarly naked.

  This was one of the very few times indeed that I saw him looking as though not in control of his destiny.

  The yearning prevailed, even though Dilly had become somewhat impatient recently with the wave of supernaturalism which appeared to be invading King’s. Monty James, the scholar of malignant hauntings, had transferred to Eton, but Dilly’s old friend, the historian Esmé Wingfield-Stratford, had been receiving poems from the spirit world dictated by Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke, while his once rational and cynical tutor, Nathaniel Wedd, was attending séances to conjure up the philosopher Ellis McTaggart from the dead. In 1929, indeed, McTaggart apparently did return to a séance in Redhill in the form of a man with a stout walking-stick, which he tried to poke into the ground, repeating “I have loved you all the time”; when Wedd failed to recognize him, the medium told him he had summoned the wrong McTaggart, and declined to enter into any further correspondence. Dilly, in the name of Cambridge, objected bitterly to all this. “Middle age is drifting away,” he told Lytton Strachey, and unbelief seemed to be weakening. Yet Dilly, quite rightly, felt that King’s would in the end resist the temptations of faith, and the discussion about his future was particularly acute because in 1929 he had challenged fate with another scholarly publication, the Loeb Classical Library edition of Herodas.

  This was a condensed edition, presenting many new readings and conjectures, and including fragments of Hipponax, Cercidas and the Life of Alexander, which, Dilly characteristically tells us, “was more popular between the 3rd and 12th century in the Greek and Byzantine world than any other book except the New Testament, and is some of the worst poetry ever written.” Its childishness should correct, he says, the mistaken notion that the Greeks were intellectuals. He also, in accordance with the scheme of the Loeb series, provide
d an English translation, skilfully reproducing the metre as well as the sense of the Greek verse:

  But now that there gleam on my head

  White hairs but a few at the edge

  Still does my summer

  Seek for the thing that is fair …

  However, he only did this if, in his judgment, the original poems were good enough. Herodas himself, like the Alexander, did not “pass”, so the Mimes appeared translated into prose.

  But what prose! There is no trace of what the Loeb editors said to their wayward contributor when they saw this version, designed, in principle, as a key for advanced students. The language of the Mimes is precious, with unpleasant affected archaisms, and an honest translation, it seemed to Dilly, must be the same. Cloistered in his study, with a new, terrifying form of patience which he had invented himself and taught to Ronnie to celebrate his move to the chaplaincy, Dilly worked out his English equivalent to Herodas. “La no reke hath she of what I say, but standeth goggling at me more agape than a crab” is a typical sentence, while “Why can’t you tell me what they cost?” comes out as “Why mumblest ne freetongued descryest the price?” Satisfied, Dilly corrected his proofs; he read the reviews, all of which praised the accuracy of the text but considered the translation a complete failure, with indifference. “If I am unintelligible,” he wrote, “it is because Herodas was.”

  Nineteen thirty-one was a year marked out by the Fates for disappointment. The long-dreaded motor-bike accident took place at last, a serious crash, and Dilly’s leg was badly broken. Afterwards he always walked with a slight limp, sometimes on tiptoe, sometimes breaking into a jog-trot, to avoid cramp. Laid up in the Acland Home, at Oxford, he expected Ronnie to visit him, and felt disproportionately hurt when Ronnie never came. True, he might have sent a note round to the Old Palace, but “surely one doesn’t have to write to one’s brothers?” Dilly complained.