by Ian Sansom
‘It’s not me that’s lying, Florence,’ I said. ‘It’s Billy. Has he even told you about his own father?’
‘Billy’s father’s dead,’ said Florence.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘He died when Billy was a boy. And do you know how?’ And then without waiting for an answer I added, ‘He died in an accident.’
‘Why are you telling me all this? Who are you?’ asked Florence.
‘Come on, why don’t you tell her, Billy?’
Billy was silent for a moment.
‘We just wanted to be together. He didn’t think I was good enough for his daughter. I was working so hard to prove him wrong.’
‘Billy!’ cried Florence. ‘What’s happened?’
‘We were just going to – I had all the money from the Wall of Death – Florence was safe here – and we …’ You could see and hear all Billy’s plans and dreams collapsing as he spoke.
‘It was in a quarry, Florence,’ I said quietly. ‘Billy’s father died in a quarry.’
‘A quarry?’
‘Your father’s quarry.’
‘What?’
‘I’m afraid so, and a few days ago, at the Oyster Feast, Billy took the opportunity to—’
Which is when Billy lunged for me, his face suddenly contorted with rage. He gave out a roar as he leapt forward but fortunately I twitched back as he came and Florence still had a restraining hand on his arm, enough for him to hesitate as he grabbed for me and allowing me to swing with my bandaged hand – the hand he had bandaged – to hit him hard on the side of the head. I have no doubt that the punch hurt me more than it hurt him. But what happened next hurt us all.
Florence was pulling Billy back, I was pulling him towards me. We all tumbled towards the doorway and I dragged him with me as I began to fall down the short flight of steps that led down to the water tank; as we fell Florence remained and stood and locked the door of the room behind us.
Billy aimed a kick at my head but then he turned and leapt up the steps, rattling at the door handle.
‘Florence!’ he yelled. ‘Florence! I can explain! I can explain!’
But there was no more explaining to be done.
He turned and leapt down the stairs. I thought he was coming back to finish me off but he ran across the dark, airless space above the water tank towards one of the narrow arched wall openings. I got up and followed, by which time he had wrenched open a door that led outside onto a narrow parapet that ran around the edge of the tower. I remember the gust of cold air come rushing in like toxic gas, and the sudden flash of light and I realised what he was planning. He was going to climb up outside to rescue Florence. He had no fear of heights: he was used to the Wall of Death. As he pulled himself up onto the parapet I called his name and he turned and I reached out my hand towards him to pull him back in but he twisted around and leaned back as I did so, presumably thinking I was about to strike him again. I didn’t touch him. I had no intention of striking him. And he fell. The moment before he fell I thought he somehow stood a little straighter, as if a sudden realisation of his own height and powers had surprised him, the recognition that everything below was so small and so insignificant, and he fell back and over the cast-iron guard rail that ran around the tower, his still, perfectly parted hair still perfectly parted, falling from the tower. At the sound of his scream – Florence had opened the door of Wicks’ Folly and come flying down the steps – it was all I could do to stop her jumping after him. She was still screaming when PC Adkins arrived and we managed to get her down.
CHAPTER 27
PARADISE, NORFOLK
WE RETURNED TO NORFOLK in low spirits. Of all the books we wrote together, Essex was perhaps the most bitter: born in disagreement, compiled amid argument and confusion and completed in despair. As we pieced together our notes and photographs in the dull autumn days that followed our return, Miriam and I argued endlessly – ending in a terrible fight one evening after we had both been drinking heavily that I regret to say concluded with our coming to blows. She had accused me of causing Billy’s death – and perhaps she was right. I tried to explain to her again what had happened and she had slapped me, and then slapped me again, and then began sobbing and when I tried to apologise and to comfort her she went to slap me again. I tried to restrain her and she screamed at me to go away and – well, the whole thing was just a mess.
Morley of course worked on despite all this, burning bright in his perpetual furnace of endless work and self-renewal. He’d been right all along: Marden had died of natural causes and human cruelty. For him the whole episode in Essex was certainly unfortunate but the books were the only things that really mattered, and the completion of the next book, which would allow us to begin another, enabling us to head out again and to start anew, in order to try to define the thing that is by its very nature indefinable, as if our next journey and discovery could possibly prove or solve anything about England or anywhere. The County Guides, I came to realise many years later, was not a quest: it was an illness.
We worked all together in the library at St George’s, working through our meals and often through the night, plates on our knees – cold chicken and ham provided by the cook – with a fine log fire that Morley tended as one might tend a new-born baby. Late at night he would occasionally doze in his wide armchair, a bookrest before him set with his notebooks and papers ready for when he awoke. He slept, I noted, exactly as he was when awake: jaw firm, breathing calm and steady but his arms and legs restless, as though ready to leap up in amazement or astonishment at any moment.
As for Miriam, for years after, she would not speak to me about Billy Ball. For years she carried with her a signed photograph of him and eventually she persuaded Morley to buy her a motorbike, a Brough Superior SS100, the Rolls-Royce of motorbikes, set up to her exact specification, with a wide saddle and the controls on the left-hand side and within the handlebars, to resemble Billy’s Indian Scout, and so that she had one hand free, like a Chicago cop, to be able to shoot her revolver. She would often go out riding at night, on the coast road, up to Wells and to Holkham and far beyond, riding too fast and going too far.
As promised, Morley had arranged for a cottage in the grounds of St George’s to be spruced up and to be put at my disposal and the day after my big argument with Miriam, not a day too soon, the cottage was miraculously ready. Or as near ready as it needed to be. Morley was not entirely oblivious to the arguments going on around him. Finally I had somewhere to live and somewhere to be alone.
The cottage was small and secluded, tucked away at the very edge of the estate, in a little thicket of laurel and rhododendron. If you didn’t know it was there you would never have been able to find it. It had thick walls, part stone, part brick, four rooms, two up, two down, no kitchen, no running water and no electricity. The roof and floors had been rotten and had been replaced and in order to brighten things up Morley had had many windows punched in – square windows, round windows, portholes, whatever spares he could find around the estate – which gave a wonderful view of the trees: oak, birch, an ilex, firs. It also made it terribly cold: after rain the trees would drip great raindrops onto the roof and onto the glass for hours and even in the summer the place verged on the chilly rather than the pleasantly cool. Inside it had been treated with some kind of anti-woodworm poisoning and so everything had been stripped out and stripped back, reducing it to its bare minimum, the bare bones of a building. Flagged stone floors downstairs, wooden boards upstairs, an ancient stone staircase connecting the two.
Downstairs was the storeroom, for firewood and for all Morley’s old junk, everything that had been half discarded from St George’s: a vast phonograph, and phonograph parts, bicycles and bicycle parts, an odd assortment of chairs and tools, blunt axes and mementoes from his travels. Beyond the storeroom was a tiny bathroom, filled with an enormous bath, big enough for two, which Morley had recovered from a public baths in London and which he had christened Hercules. The walls in the windowless bathroom he’d had covered in t
hick dark sheet cork, which gave the room the appearance of a cave. There was no sink – water had to be hand-pumped from the nearby stream, and carried to the cottage in buckets – and there was no toilet.
‘Ah yes, you’re probably wondering,’ said Morley when he gave me the guided tour. ‘Let me show you the toilet.’ And with that he opened the door and pointed outside, beyond the cottage’s rickety wooden fence to the wooded glade beyond. ‘Rather well-appointed, don’t you think?’ He then handed me a spade. ‘You’ll be needing this.’
Upstairs was one small windowless room which Morley referred to as the pantry, which he’d had fitted with shelves and lined with aluminium, to keep the room at a constant temperature, and one large room which became my bedroom, study and sitting room, with an open stone fireplace, more shelves and a wooden plank set into the wall under one of the windows for a desk. There was no bed as such; instead, in the middle of the room Morley had had a low raised platform built over some old steamer trunks, for storage, which slid out from underneath, on top of which was a solid mattress with a thick cow-hide covering, a sleeping bag, a shabby quilt, and enough horse-hair cushions to satisfy the most demanding of loungers – more a resting place than sleeping place, but which did me well.
Basically it was in this room for the remainder of my years with Morley that I lived my entire life: when we weren’t travelling this was where I worked, ate, slept and played. Strange and spartan as it was, I loved it. It had everything I needed. If I wasn’t eating in the main house with Morley and Miriam I could boil tea and eggs on the fire and listen to records on Morley’s old phonograph. My home-cooked meals consisted solely of bread, butter, honey, jam, cold potted things and things in tins. For fire-lighting Morley gave me one of the strange black egg-type firelighters that he had picked up in America many years before, and which he so admired, made of some kind of asbestos-type material on a wire handle, which sat by the fire in a pint pot of paraffin oil, ready to be lit and set to logs at any moment. The whole cottage therefore forever smelled of paraffin, sardines, tobacco and damp.
‘We call it the old cottage,’ said Morley, having shown me round, ‘but you may name it whatever you will.’
‘I think I’ll call it … Paradise,’ I said.
And so Paradise it became.
On the day we finished Essex I walked up to the main house for dinner, a walk of perhaps a quarter of a mile. It was late October but already it felt as though everything was packing up for winter. Across the stream the rushes were withering and the reeds were turning yellow. In the hedgerows there were blackberries, elderberry, hawthorn and crabapples. The beech leaves were turning gold and the chestnuts crimson, and in among the rotting tree stumps spiders had made their homes.
As I approached the house, up through the passageway of box and red-berried yews, I reached into my jacket pocket. I had Amy Johnson’s cigarette case, which I was intending to hand over to Morley that night to return to Miss Johnson. It was the right thing to do. It was a scorching reminder of my sins and failings and of all our misunderstandings in Essex. It might easily have paid off some of my debt to Delaney, but in the end it would only have cost me more. Also, what I didn’t mention to Morley or to Miriam was that in my struggle with Billy at the top of Jumbo I had seized from him the ceremonial silver oyster that he had presumably stolen from the mayor while he lay dying – and which was worth much more than Amy Johnson’s cigarette case.
With my few free days in between books I travelled down to London, where I was easily able to find a buyer for the silver oyster at Klein’s Russian Turkish Baths, and thus to present Delaney with his money. I then happily spent my time in Soho catching up with friends, making new friends, and consoling myself in the only way I knew how.
When I eventually returned to St George’s, reporting in again for our next assignment, I found Morley and Miriam in the kitchen, Morley at his typewriter, of course, and Miriam instructing the cook over a meal.
‘Aha!’ said Morley. ‘In your honour, Sefton! We are dining tonight in your honour!’
‘My honour?’
It was oysters.
‘Well, we thought we might enjoy our own modest oyster feast. Help us all to put Essex behind us, eh? We must move forward, you see. Always moving forward. The world is our brine, Sefton, and we are oysters, extracting whatever nutriment we can from the ebb and flow!’
‘Very good, Mr Morley,’ I said. ‘Very good.’
We ate and tried not to argue. Morley revealed that in recognition of his work in uncovering the truth about the death of Arthur Marden, Colchester Town Council had arranged for him to have the rare honour of having a rose named after him by the Essex rose growers Benjamin R. Cant & Sons, ‘The Home of the Rose’, according to Morley, who were based just outside Colchester and who produced, apparently, ‘the finest and hardiest roses in the world’.
‘Congratulations, Father,’ said Miriam. ‘Next time you might consider having a cocktail named after you.’
‘The Morley,’ said Morley. ‘I suppose it does have a certain ring to it. What do you think, a weeping standard, a standard on a briar, a climber, or a rambler?’
Miriam looked at me and I looked at her. It was the only time during the whole meal she deigned even to exchange a glance.
‘Oh, I think a rambler, don’t you?’
‘Definitely a rambler,’ I agreed.
After the meal, as I was about to head down to the cottage, Morley drew me aside.
‘We must all work together, Sefton, you understand?’
‘Yes, Mr Morley.’
‘Me, you and Miriam. The County Guides rely upon us. We must take care of one another.’
‘Of course.’
‘And you, young man, must take care yourself. Do you understand?’
‘I think so, Mr Morley.’
‘You must be careful, yes?’
‘I’ll certainly try, Mr Morley.’
‘Good, good.’
When I made it back down to Paradise I found that Morley had deposited some of his old reading copies of Dickens; the first book on the top of the pile was Great Expectations, open at the page at which Magwitch remarks, ‘I first became aware of myself down in Essex, thieving turnips.’ In the margin, in Morley’s hand, was a tiny pencilled asterix. I took it – as it was doubtless intended – as a reminder and as a warning.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For previous acknowledgements see The Truth About Babies (Granta Books, 2002), Ring Road (Fourth Estate, 2004), The Mobile Library: The Case of the Missing Books (Harper Perennial, 2006), The Mobile Library: Mr Dixon Disappears (Harper Perennial, 2007), The Mobile Library: The Delegates’ Choice (Harper Perennial, 2008), The Mobile Library: The Bad Book Affair (Harper Perennial, 2010), Paper: An Elegy (Fourth Estate, 2012), The Norfolk Mystery (2013), Death in Devon (2015) and Westmorland Alone (2016). These stand, with exceptions. In addition I would like to thank the following. (The previous terms and conditions apply: some of them are dead; most of them are strangers; the famous are not friends; none of them bears any responsibility.)
Stig Abell, Roger Ashton-Griffiths, A-Wa, T.J. Binyon, Valerie Bistany, Susan J. Blackmore, Adrian Bliss, Ernest Bramah, Eoin Butler, Peter Buwalda, Cafe Zédel, Mark Campbell, Maria Alessandra Chessa, Pema Chödrön, Agatha Christie, Coey and Johnstone, John Curran, Gerald Dawe, Meaghan Delahunt, Dublin City Library Service, Jean Echenoz, the English Library (Alassio), Scott Flannigan, Lettice Franklin, Pascal Garnier, Hugh Haughton, Margaret Hayes, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Hamid Ismailov, Darryl Jones, Anne-Marie Kelly, Herman Koch, Mark Lauren, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Mike McCormack, Conor McGregor, Cathy McKenna, Duncan Minshall, Chris Morash, Scholastique Mukasonga, Jenny Offill, Judge Eugene O’Sullivan, Eve Patten, Mrs Peabody, Richard Powers, Hilary Putnam, Colin Sackett, Judith Schalansky, Yakob Shabtai, Akhil Sharma, Alessandro Silvestri, Nina Simone, Patti Smith, Gary Snyder, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Stormzy, Brendan Teeling, Yann Tiersen, Daniel Todman, Miriam Toew
s, Iglika Vassileva, Juan Pablo Villalobos.
PICTURE CREDITS
Images here are from Arthur
Mee’s King’s England Guide to Essex.
Reproduced by kind permission.
www.kingsengland.com
All other images supplied by the author.
The author and the publishers are committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others and have made all reasonable efforts to trace the copyright owners of the images reproduced, and to provide an appropriate acknowledgement in the book.
In the event that any copyright material is not properly credited the author and the publishers will endeavour to rectify this.
Burning crosses light the night sky, fireworks are exploding, flaming tar barrels are being dragged through the streets. A huge unruly crowd – men, women and children dressed in costumes as Red Indian chiefs, circus masters, Arab sheiks, jesters, harlequins, and hundreds of people with their faces blacked like Zulu warriors – are singing and chanting, part of a vast torchlit procession. It is Bonfire Night in Lewes, Sussex, November 1937.
Join Morley, Miriam and Sefton on the morning after the night before, when they discover the body of a woman who appears to have drowned in the freshwater lido in the centre of Lewes. Was it an accident or could it be … murder?
The first of the County Guides:
Quaint villages, eccentric locals – and murder!
Professor Swanton Morley needs help writing a history of England, county by county. His assistant must be able to tolerate his eccentricities – and withstand the attentions of his beguiling daughter, Miriam. Stephen Sefton is broke and looking for an adventure.
The trio begin the project in Norfolk, but when a vicar is found hanging from Blakeney church’s bell rope, they find themselves drawn into a fiendish plot. Did the Reverend really take his own life, or was it … murder?
