Cucumber Sandwiches

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘It led to a baby.’

  ‘I don’t think I was meaning that. If this daughter of Corderoy’s, Mrs Verity, has never heard the story – and I gather you can’t be quite certain of that – there’s no reason why she should like it a bit. In fact, Charles, you ought to keep the lid on it till she’s dead. As she’s the daughter of an eminent Victorian she must be even older than you are, after all.’

  ‘Lavinia Verity is seventy-seven.’ Shand glanced with conscientious humour at Coverdale. ‘And if you care to look me up you can check that I’m fifty-three.’

  ‘We haven’t had the second reason why Mrs Verity should be upset,’ Fenton said. ‘The horrible one. Not that I believe I need it myself. The penny has dropped. There aren’t all that many Mainprizes.’ He turned to Shand. ‘This bastard son was called William Mainprize?’

  ‘Yes, and I see you know about him.’

  ‘Most people did, at one time. And it would have been round about 1910?’

  ‘1911. William Mainprize, the famous novelist’s illegitimate son, was hanged in Winchester Gaol for a peculiarly revolting series of murders.’

  The great Christ Church bell had stopped booming, and there was silence alike in common room and in the still autumn night outside. Coverdale was the first to speak.

  ‘Hard cheese on Corderoy, I must say. First a butler for a grandfather, and then a murderer for a natural son. Good God, Charles!’—Coverdale was suddenly excited—’what you’re proposing is an absolute outrage. Here’s this old woman, Mrs Verity, tottering and teetering on the brink of the grave, probably with her long-dead father’s literary eminence as her only comfort and stay – and along you propose to come, drink a cup of China tea, nibble a genteel cucumber sandwich, and announce that she’s own half-sister to a notorious criminal. Not that I know anything about William Mainprize myself. Murderers don’t get themselves much remembered, thank goodness. I think the notion of dredging him up in this way is extremely . . . extremely repellent.’ Young Coverdale, who had found this last word with some difficulty, sat back in his chair.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t know anything about William Mainprize,’ Shand said harshly. ‘But you would – although you mightn’t exactly be aware of the fact – if you’d ever read A Venation of Centaurs.’

  ‘What the dickens is that?’

  ‘It’s the title of Corderoy’s last novel.’

  ‘It sounds pretty affected to me. What’s a venation?’

  ‘Consult Sir Thomas Browne. Gnomic titles were fashionable. The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove. But what vas pretty well known at the time—’

  ‘Of course!’ Hilliard had broken his silence again. ‘Corderoy took certain material for his novel from the Mainprize case. And the thing’s done with extraordinary insight and compassion. It’s regarded as an element in the book’s being a masterpiece.’

  ‘Nothing like it since Crime and Punishment, I suppose.’ Coverdale had scarcely produced this when he blushed. He was prone to suddenly seeing himself as unmannerly. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Nothing to jeer at. I think it all sounds frightful.’

  ‘You can now guess how I got on to this,’ Shand continued. ‘Studying the novel led me to studying the trial – and I suppose I know more about Walter Corderoy’s life than anybody else who has ever done just that. Or, conceivably, than anybody else save one.’

  ‘Ah,’ Fenton said.

  ‘Eventually something clicked. After that, only pertinacious detective work – I suppose “research” sounds more respectable – was needed. I rather wish I hadn’t undertaken it now. Still, here’s something the world must one day know. A great author’s son – his unacknowledged son – ends his life in degradation and on the gallows. And the father faces it in a novel. Or should we say exploits it in a novel? At least it’s a unique creative situation.’

  ‘Did Walter Corderoy feel responsible for his illegitimate son’s disaster?’ Fenton asked. ‘Did he feel guilty?’

  ‘I don’t know. There’s nothing of the kind in the novel. The William Mainprize figure isn’t described as a bastard, any more than the real man was in court. The facts have undergone a great deal of imaginative transformation. But of course he must have felt guilty.’

  ‘How had he coped at the start with the consequences of seducing the girl?’

  ‘Not in a way that commands our sympathy. I can find no evidence that he ever acknowledged the child, or had any personal contacts with him. Nor have I found out what if anything, the boy ever came to know. The mother – Martha Mainprize – died when her child was five years old. William – Bill, he was called – was handed over to foster-parents. Corderoy did recognise a continuing responsibility of a sort. He put up money.’

  ‘A court could have made him do that,’ Coverdale said. ‘Rupert, isn’t that right?’

  ‘If there had been proof of paternity, most certainly.’ Fenton turned to Shand. ‘He kept the boy in his own neighbourhood?’

  ‘Yes – which suggests that he did take an interest in him, and risk a glimpse of him from time to time.’

  ‘Like Razumov’s father, Prince Somebody, in Under Western Eyes’ It seemed rather to his own surprise that Coverdale produced this literary parallel. ‘Did Corderoy plan to bring up the boy in anything like what he’d call his own station in life?’

  ‘I’m not sure whether that’s a fair question. Corderoy was never rich. Bill was sent to a local school, and at seventeen he was found a job as a clerk in a malting business. It was still nearby.’

  ‘Which seems to answer that,’ Coverdale said contemptuously. ‘The bastard was coped with on the cheap. What was he like – before, I mean, he took to murder?’

  ‘Extremely attractive. He grew into an uncommonly good-looking young man, and he had a way with women.’

  ‘Which was what led to his destruction in the end,’ Fenton said. ‘Too much of a way with too many women. But what happened after the malting-house?’

  ‘I don’t know much more. But I suspect he got into serious trouble, and that his father decided to pack him off to foreign parts. Money still went to him – I have no doubt of that – but it was to somewhere or other abroad. William Mainprize is over thirty before any further record of him turns up. And by that time the Old Bailey lies dead in front of him.’

  ‘Charles, are you really going to give all this to the world?’ It was Hilliard who spoke, and he was looking at his colleague in perplexity. ‘At least, in the lifetime of this ancient daughter of Corderoy’s?’

  ‘If I don’t, somebody else will.’

  ‘I see.’ But Hilliard’s perplexity showed no sign of resolving. ‘You wouldn’t care to be beaten in a race?’

  ‘One doesn’t, I suppose. But it’s obvious, surely, that I could scarcely think in such terms in this instance?’ Shand was looking less hurt than astonished. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Charles, I’m sorry. We had this foolish talk about China tea and cucumber sandwiches.’

  ‘Cucumber sandwiches? Ah, yes. Well, I’ve thought about it a lot, and I feel the old lady simply must be told. And the facts made known with dignity and decency. I’ve hinted there’s another man on the trail. Not a scholar at all. An unprincipled sensationalist.’

  Silence fell, and everybody looked suitably grave – so grave, that the small company rapidly broke up. There was a distracting noise in the quad – young men were shouting across it in the confidence of absolute ownership – and it was a moment before Shand realised that he had been followed into the open air by the Casaubon Professor of Greek. In the common room the Casaubon Professor hadn’t uttered a word. But he did murmur now.

  ‘My dear Charles, a rapid and judicious protasis. Should epitasis and catastrophe succeed, I hope we may hear about them.’

  ‘A good many people will hear,’ Shand said. And as hewalked slowly through the darkness to his rooms he wondered just how competent he would be in the strange situation that had overtaken him.

  2

  Mrs Verity – unsus
pecting half-sister of the notorious William Mainprize – lived in Cheltenham, since the modest landed property of her husband was now in the ownership of a grandson. It was only infrequently that she accepted her grandson’s annual invitation to visit him. Although careful never to fail in giving the Veritys their due – they were good people, the men mostly in the army, and impeccably descended from one of the great Duke of Marlborough’s commanders – Mrs Verity remained very much a Corderoy. It was no doubt gratifying to possess an ancestor who behaved not too blunderingly at Malplaquet; it was quite another matter to be honoured as the daughter of one of the most famous of English authors. Mrs Verity had maintained this attitude unflinchingly through the embarrassing discovery of Mr Corderoy the butler, and had even skilfully exploited that occasion to acquire from a shocked Corderoy brother-in-law what an older generation would have called Walter Corderoy’s literary remains. One consequence of this was that the Cheltenham house had become something of a shrine. And Mrs Verity had become something of a priestess.

  Charles Shand reflected nervously on these matters as he drove over from Oxford a week later. The fact that he was no stranger to Mrs Verity, that she knew of various aspects of his work and had furthered him in them, scarcely made the coming interview easier. Shand didn’t quite get round to reflecting that he had very little sense of Mrs Verity’s character – the dubiety was of a sort his mind didn’t naturally focus – but he was uneasily aware that he had no idea how she would take the revelation of her kinship with a murderer. Shand’s labours had been of the most orthodox kind, and conducted by a light that which there seems none cleaner: the clear hard light of a disinterested pursuit of knowledge. But this light – through, so to speak, no fault of its own – had suddenly found itself at play upon decidedly swampy territory.

  Steering cautiously through the narrows of Northleach, Shand reviewed the stages of his luckless investigation. First there had been the thought to study the trial which Corderoy had so curiously made use of in a novel. Then there had been the turning to the earlier background of that trial’s principal figure – normal if somewhat peripheral research which had brought up an interesting fact: the home of Martha Mainprize, the murderer’s long-dead mother, had been in Corderoy’s neighbourhood. There might have been nothing in that. It had been suggestive, all the same.

  Then – Shand frowned over the wheel – had come the astonishing running to earth of an old woman who was Martha’s niece, and the yet more astonishing discovery – in a cupboard in this old woman’s hovel – of the little cache of Martha’s possessions: the photographs, the locks of hair, the pathetically yellowed and almost illiterate diary, with the entry ‘W.C., £10’ recorded regularly every fortnight. Martha’s niece had refused to part with these things for any reasonable sum; Shand had been prevented by some scruple from making an offer that would be exorbitant. What was going to happen when he told Mrs Verity all this? It had only been respectable biographical research all through – and yet was it not the very picture of private detection such as one reads of in squalid law suits? And here was only the start of the story. Its conclusion was in Winchester Gaol.

  Shand descended the long hill into Cheltenham more slowly than even his habitual care for road safety required. A curious town, he thought. Stone flaking, stucco crumbling, paint weathered away. Behind these disgraced, these bleakly elegant façades did there still lurk the answering human detritus of an empire – the spinster daughters of retired admirals, the relics of the last administrators and defenders of British India? Shand didn’t know, but he thought probably not. It all looked depressingly run-down, yet the shops in the centre told you there was something like affluence lurking around. He shook his head, acknowledging an insecure grip of recent social history. He parked his car, found in a grey deserted crescent Walter Corderoy’s daughter’s abode, and gave a moderate but adequate downward pull at the bell.

  The hall had stone pillars and stone-coloured paint. It was lined with books. But the staircase had pictures, hung close together and themselves ascending in steps, like the advertisements on the escalators in London tubes. Only whereas the advertisements inclined to be indelicate, here a high propriety ruled. The pictures were mostly large photographs of gentlemen, and on their mounts or margins or neutral sepia spaces were written things like Cordially Joseph Conrad and Comme un témoignage de profonde et affectueuse reconnaissance Marcel Proust. Shand recalled being made uneasy by them on a previous occasion. They seemed to convey a slight intimation that a scholar was an outsider, after all. He would have hurried past them now. Unfortunately a very ancient parlourmaid – even more ancient than her mistress – was preceding him slowly and with creaking knees.

  Mrs Verity received him in her drawing-room. It was large, with high windows through which there crept rather than streamed a cool grey light. There was perhaps nothing too obtrusive about Walter Corderoy’s presence in the apartment. Here, almost, was an ordinary drawing-room if an upper-middle class sort: full of good taste and old furniture and faded stuffs and fabrics. But Corderoy by John Singer Sargent was over the chimney-piece, and in the big alcove where one might have expected a grand piano was Corderoy’s writing-table with Corderoy by Jacques-Emile Blanche flanking it on the wall. There was a cabinet displaying various mementos of eminence: scrolls and diplomas, medals and patents and the insignia of foreign orders, faded but gracious commands from exalted personages. There was a show-case frankly carrying some suggestion of a museum, with corrected galley-proofs and a few manuscripts. It was convenient – Mrs Verity would explain – to have such a small exhibition to hand when people with no special claim on one felt prompted to call.

  ‘My dear Professor, I was delighted when you wrote that you could come. I am eager to hear how your work has been going on.’

  Mrs Verity invariably addressed Shand as ‘Professor’, although she knew perfectly well that it was not technically correct. It was her way of remaining at a slight remove; in fact it went along with the signed photographs on the staircase. And although she was so piously devoted to Corderoy’s memory – almost to a Corderoy legend, it might be said – she wasn’t in the least the pathetic and teetering old person whom young Coverdale had conjured up. Shand himself found that, between visits, he was inclined to forget this; to forget, as it were, how much there was left of her. He took encouragement from it now. Perhaps, he told himself, the old girl was really quite tough. He ought already to have some better estimate of this in his mind. He must, he thought, have been remiss. It was rather as if he had failed to collate a relevant text. This time, he resolved, he would go away with Mrs Verity’s character and temperament precisely noted down.

  ‘I have heard again,’ Mrs Verity said, ‘from Professor Barthou of the Sorbonne. A charming man.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ Shand didn’t feel worried about Barthou. ‘Do you happen to have had any correspondence with a man called Fawdry?’ He waited in suspense while Mrs Verity appeared to make an effort of memory. She was still handsome – and uncommonly like the Sargent portrait of her father – but it was only to be expected that her mind might be going a little. ‘Not a university teacher,’ he prompted. ‘Mr Fawdry is, I suppose, what is called a literary journalist.’

  ‘No, the name hasn’t come my way.’ Much to Shand’s relief, Mrs Verity had decisively shaken her head; Fawdry was the rather deplorable person who was also on Corderoy’s trail. ‘I receive, as you know, a good deal of correspondence about my father and his work. Much of it is from people of my own generation, who still remember him. You will recollect how much, in his later years, he came to relish society. He had a weakness for the great houses, had he not?’ Mrs Verity’s strong features appeared to be softening into an expression denoting affectionate acknowledgement of foible. ‘Badminton, Chatsworth, Blenheim.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Shand couldn’t in fact recall that bevies of cultivated dukes had been eager for Walter Corderoy’s company. But the general proposition was correct. And Mrs Verity’s
so relishing her vestigial contacts with such social elevation as her father had attained made the coming revelation all the more grotesque and awkward.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Shand said, ‘that I have a painful communication to make to you.’ He paused on this – ‘communication’ had been a pompously chosen word – and didn’t at all know whether to be encouraged by a glance of curiosity, swiftly veiled, which he had evoked. ‘As you know,’ he went on, ‘I’ve been working chiefly on the biographical side of late.’ He paused again, and it must have taken only a moment’s silence to disconcert him. For instead of making a statement – which was certainly what was now incumbent upon him – he shied away into a question. ‘May I ask if your mother,’ he said, ‘ever made you any confidence about the earliest period of her married life?’

  ‘I scarcely know whether anything of the sort is to be expected between mothers and daughters.’ Mrs Verity had started, as she well might. ‘If you are referring, that’s to say, to intimate matters.’

  ‘Quite so, quite so.’ Shand uttered these words without exactly knowing to what they applied. He was already feeling very upset. ‘What I have to tell you isn’t really startling,’ he said. ‘Or not,’ he added conscientiously, ‘the first part of it. I assure you, my dear Mrs Verity, that it wouldn’t seem in the least surprising to any man of the world.’ Shand wondered whether he himself at all measured up to this character. ‘The fact is that Walter Corderoy had an illegitimate son by a village girl. He was very young. Scarcely beyond the stage of sowing his wild oats.’

  ‘Why should my mother—?’

  ‘But he had married very young. And I am afraid this lapse was in the early months of his marriage.’ Shand produced a handkerchief and blew his nose. He had regretted that ‘I am afraid’ instantly. And ‘lapse’ had been bad too. The words touched in an unnecessary note of moral reprobation such as could scarcely have come into a man-of-the-world’s head.