A Treasonable Growth

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  Canon Ribbs displayed his celebrated tact.

  ‘You’re not in class or anything—er—Brand? No, I thought not. Be a good man and scout out just what is keeping Mr M’Tooley, will you?’

  Richard looked at Mr Winsley. Mr Winsley’s expression gave not the least hint of his intense anxiety.

  ‘Yes, do, Brand,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’d have time to come back and tell us just what has happened. Ask him if my wife can get him anything. Poor old chap … he does work, you know, Canon …’

  As he went away, Richard heard the Canon remark, ‘I thought he was just a bit peaky last night. His bézique was certainly below par …’ The Canon’s index finger was fumbling its way round the appreciable space existing between his neck and his dog-collar, like a dredger clearing a moat.

  ‘Settling down all right, Cadman?’ he enquired when they had the room to themselves.

  Mr Winsley was judicial.

  ‘I think so …’ he said slowly.

  ‘Well, I hand it to Freda——’

  Mr Winsley found this more than familiar.

  ‘Miss Bellingham has always been a very able judge of character,’ he declared loftily.

  ‘She has; she has,’ agreed Canon Ribbs at once. Any suspicion of asperity in others immediately acted as a stimulant to his own perfectly svelte manners; manners in themselves so devastating that they usually ended up by leaving him in control of the most irate situations. He had a particular reason for giving them full rein this morning. Something very odd was happening, or had happened, at Copdock and he was intensely curious to know exactly what. ‘You forget, Caddie, that it wasn’t me who joined the staff for the first time last Christmas!’ he scolded charmingly.

  ‘No, no. Of course not. I didn’t mean that. You’ll have to forgive me. It’s all this M’Tooley business. It’s making me fretful—I never lose my temper as you know. It’s this casualness. I couldn’t say anything in front of that boy, but M’Tooley is casual. Never once has he told me what he is thinking! He looks ill, but is he? He’s never said so. You know how I always get a bit hipped with—with irresponsible behaviour!’

  ‘Oh, come,’ the Canon said. He remembered his official rôle in the world, and made a deliberate move towards the milk of human kindness. ‘Not “irresponsible”, Caddie; not at least until we know …’

  The frightened look reappeared on Mr Winsley’s face. Whatever it was he prayed God it wouldn’t get into the newspapers. When Richard came back just five minutes later both he and they seemed to be meeting afresh after a whole lifetime apart. Shock had stripped Richard’s features of all trace of their usual expression and had left in place of it, a flat, colourless immaturity against which the shape of his beard showed up in patchy stains. Mr Winsley and the Canon listened very exactly to what he said, so there was no need for him to repeat what he had had the greatest difficulty in mumbling the first time.

  The door to Mr M’Tooley’s room was a poor little arrangement, narrow and flimsy, like the door to a broom-cupboard. Richard knocked on it three times and waited as many minutes before he tried its small dented brass nob. He did so very gently because Mr M’Tooley’s room emanated a sacrosanctity so pronounced, it filled all the passage outside and could even be felt on the narrow staircase which led up to the room and nowhere else. On this particular morning, however, the room would have emanated something more suffocating than sanctity, had not Mr M’Tooley discovered an early use for the rolls of gummed paper they were selling at the local stationer’s as a protection against bomb-blasted windows. Nothing happened when Richard tried the knob, except a small papery creak. He knocked again, loudly this time—aggressively—like somebody in Macbeth and the silence, returning, was heart-breaking. After this he just turned the knob and pushed. There was a crisp tearing noise. He pushed harder, leaning his entire weight against the panel, and was precipitated into the room and the world-obliterating fumes which Mr M’Tooley had purchased for exactly three shillings. He had pasted-up the chimney, the door and the windows and Richard rushed back choking, the gas following in his wake like an importunate despair for whom one surrender was not enough. At the bottom of the little staircase he took his jacket off, muffled it against his face, ran back to the room and managed to wrench its large sash window open. The beautiful, stimulating, cold, but living, day poured in.

  Mr M’Tooley lay neatly in his bed dressed in fresh-looking pyjamas. His eyes were closed and their lashes made thick faded gingery crescents above each polished cheek-bone. The red rubber tube dangled from the gas arm above his head, but the nozzle through which he had sucked oblivion had fallen down behind the bedhead and although his lips were still slightly parted, they could have been so in a faint smile. There was no other suggestion of his end. A half-glass of water and a bottle of Gee’s cough linctus on the bedside table and M.R. James’s Suffolk and Norfolk open at ‘Jurmin, Botolph and Withburga’, the pages still under his hand, only emphasized the essential ordinariness of his departure. The only disfigurement of any kind in the room, excepting the red tube which normally led from the main to the ring on which he made his early morning tea, was the sticky brown paper everywhere; though here again, one felt it was only out of consideration for others that it had been applied, since Mr M’Tooley must have known it was unessential to his lonely decision. He hadn’t locked the door. He hadn’t written a letter. Only one small fib separated him from his usual behaviour. He had said he was going to bed early and he hadn’t. He had slipped out into the brilliant January night and taken a last look at the Perpendicular majesty of Stourfriston church. The winter cold and the moon-bright stone had produced the catharsis he required. Not quite certain why he was doing it, but absolutely assured in the doing itself, he put three shillings in the meter, his best linen pyjamas on, wound his watch and read himself to—death.

  *

  ‘It will be apparent—I very much trust that it will be apparent, gentlemen, that for the sake of human charity, as well as for the law, I am bound to seek answers to questions which in themselves may occur to you as frivolous.’ The coroner motioned towards Mr Winsley and the handful of other people sitting in the front row of chairs set out before the mayor’s desk. The considerable number of questions he had already asked, instead of throwing a light on Mr M’Tooley’s suicide, only made it appear the more incomprehensible. The coroner drummed a restrained tattoo on the blotter with white, bloodless fingers. Those who hid their grief presumably didn’t want charity anyway, he was thinking. But the general opinion was that the law should be as Christian as respectability allowed in such matters and he would do his best to prove that Mr M’Tooley was mad when he did it.

  ‘On the twenty-eighth,’ he recommenced gently, ‘Mr M’Tooley supervised in the dining-room—quite naturally, would you say?’

  ‘Oh, quite.’ Mr Winsley dragged his attention from the smoky oil painting of a hirsute alderman which was the chief ornament of the mayor’s parlour.

  ‘Then, that same evening, he dined alone?’

  Mr Winsley took this critically. ‘He didn’t have to. That was how he preferred it. Darwin, he’s the odd-job man, generally took a tray up to Mr M’Tooley’s room.’

  ‘There was nothing different about the room? It was just as it was? Darwin isn’t present …?’

  ‘Should he be …? I didn’t realise …’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if I can accept it that you asked him about the room.’

  ‘He said it was just the same.’

  ‘He didn’t notice the gummed paper, or that letters were being burnt?’

  ‘No, nothing. Letters could not be destroyed anyway—at least I don’t think they could, as the gas-fire is fixed in front of the grate.’

  ‘And,’ insisted the coroner, ‘you remain convinced that Mr M’Tooley wasn’t in any sort of trouble …?’

  ‘I am not convinced of that. What I believe I said to your earlier enquiry was that I had no suspicion that he could have been—er—troubled.’

&nb
sp; ‘Then you think that he might have been?’

  ‘I think nothing. Why should I? That he was troubled is unquestionable—to have done what he did—but I have no notion of what troubled him.’ It was now obvious that Mr Winsley was mildly enjoying himself.

  The coroner turned on the Canon.

  ‘I have it that at eight-ten, or thereabouts, Mr M’Tooley came down to join you for cards?’ There was a distinct innuendo in the way he pronounced the word ‘cards’. It jolted the Canon severely, as it was intended to do, making him recall that Mr Elgin, the coroner, was Scotch and Presbyterian, and that he had been an advocate before he came south to be a solicitor. The Canon saw his poor little pleasures opened up to the most heinous interpretations and he himself made a byword, though for what he couldn’t be certain. It would be Tranby Croft all over again.

  ‘We never played for money, you know,’ he declared unhappily.

  This gave the coroner a chance to lighten the dragging proceedings with a faint quip.

  ‘No one is suggesting, Canon, that the gentleman concerned took this sad way out because of his misfortunes at bézique …’

  Bateson, sitting behind, made a choking noise. The Canon twitched, amused, though hardly mollified. It’s all very well, he was thinking, but if this gets out it will look extraordinary—especially so soon after Evensong … He bent his head round gradually and there, sure enough, was the lank representative of the Courier scribbling it all down.

  ‘Do you remember what you talked about as you played?’

  ‘Archaeology,’ replied the Canon promptly. ‘Mr M’Tooley was very keen, as you know.’ This was a reference to the fact that Mr Elgin, the coroner, also belonged to the High Suffolk Archaeological Society and since Mr M’Tooley’s presence had been a familiar one at all the Society’s digs, excursions and meetings, Mr Elgin must have known him quite well and that his present manner of speaking of him as total stranger was both irritating and uncalled for. ‘We discussed the possible opening of the Parham tumulus, I remember. M’Tooley said he thought …’

  ‘Did you discuss other members of the staff?’

  ‘What——? Er, no; of course not. We were in the Common Room.’

  ‘You were all together … I see …’

  ‘Oh no; we weren’t,’ said the Canon hurriedly. ‘I merely meant to explain that it isn’t our custom to—well—er—gossip in the Common Room.’

  But Mr Elgin by-passed this faint rebuke. It was the earlier part of the Canon’s statement which intrigued him.

  ‘Then, Canon. I am wrong in believing that all the staff were present?’

  The Canon was astonished. ‘Quite wrong. Who is maintaining that it was?’

  ‘Oh nobody. But I have been left with that inference.’

  The Canon was waspish. ‘Through no fault of mine, I assure you. And, anyway, I have always understood that inference was something one was more likely to gather than be left with.’

  Mr Elgin regarded the room with brown, sad, puppy eyes, in a silent appeal that recriminations, even where they were mildly justified, should be dropped. It was a wretched affair this, and the sooner it was dealt with and filed away the better.

  ‘All I wish to say, Canon, is that until this moment I have continued to believe that when Mr M’Tooley went up to bed early he left all of you still sitting in Common Room and that was the last any of you saw of him. But in fact he only said goodnight to Mr Winsley and yourself—is that it?’

  ‘That is correct.’

  ‘In which case you will agree with me that you may not have been the last persons to see him alive?’

  At this point, armed with Bateson’s agonised permission to speak given by his raising his eyebrows to a fantastic height and pursing his lips grimly, Richard said, ‘Excuse me …’ only to be frustrated by Mr Winsley’s lengthy explanation of what ‘rounds’ were and that it was Mr M’Tooley’s night for making them and that so far as he knew they had been made quite properly and, although it was still moderately early, no boy had encountered Mr M’Tooley as he went from room to room, quietly fixing doors and windows and seeing that all was safe.

  ‘Mr——?’ the coroner asked after this rigmarole. ‘You wished to add something?’

  ‘Brand—Richard Brand. Yes. I think that we, Mr Bateson and myself must have been the last people to speak to Mr M’Tooley.’ He looked round to see if Bateson approved of this way of committing themselves. Bateson, from his seat on what seemed to be a municipal version of a small plush throne, moved his head scarcely perceptibly. Richard went on to describe the meeting near the church and their dull and unremarkable talk and last of all, the unambiguous and quite ordinary manner in which they had all said goodnight.

  It was Mr Winsley and not the coroner who took exception to all this and he was furious. Up to five minutes before he had been congratulating himself on the superior way he had conducted himself and forced the others to conduct themselves in the whole affair. In his own mind he had even contrived to reduce the tragedy to manageable proportions. It was a retirement of sorts, he told himself. There was no one to blame, least of all M’Tooley, for the extreme tact of whose withdrawal from scenes he had found untenable, Mr Winsley had nothing but the profoundest admiration. No mess, no fuss; an enigma of human behaviour to which heaven alone had the answer, an answer which, so far as he was concerned, heaven was welcome to keep. There was altogether too much prying into things these days. An affair as regretful as this should slide away into decent obscurity. The number of questions already asked had surprised him. He had always understood that in a matter like this an inquest was more of a formality than anything else. After all, there was the doctor’s report and the police statement. Wasn’t that enough? What had Brand’s bicycle ride to Sheldon to do with it? And why did that filthy little man from the local paper have to gobble up every syllable with his nasty chewed pencil and stare at them as though they were murderers? One good thing about Herr Hitler was that his government exercised some guidance over what should be put into the newspapers.

  ‘And you returned to Copdock School about halfpast-six?’

  ‘About then.’

  ‘So in fact you had been absent the entire day?’

  ‘I had been absent the entire day.’

  ‘Please don’t repeat my words. Just confine yourself to “yes” or “no”.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘Then you went out again, this time drinking with Mr Bateson?’ Mr Elgin said ‘drrrinking’ and the reproachful stare from his mournful eyes made it no secret that his duty alone obliged him to stir up this nest of vice, and nothing else.

  ‘We did have a drink—at Stokely.’ Richard was aware of Bateson’s wholehearted, though mute, approval as he said this.

  This time it was Mr Elgin’s turn to apologise.

  ‘I’m only trying to get a fairly complete picture of the evening,’ he said. ‘Where did you say you drank? Which public-house, I mean?’

  ‘Stokely. It’s called The Case is Altered.’

  Richard, without looking round, knew that Bateson was staring hard at the coroner as he said this, in an effort to discover if the name conveyed anything beyond the fact that it described just a small village inn where anyone might have gone for a talk and a pint. It was much more than this, of course. Bateson had heard quite enough of The Case’s reputation not to have been surprised at what had happened, only a sense of justification. He recalled how grateful he had been that rumour hadn’t lied; to that gratitude he could now add further thanks—rumour hadn’t spread either. It was quite obvious as he looked at the faces of Mr Elgin and Mr Winsley that they were both very willing to invest The Case is Altered with a folksy innocence and see it as a rural tavern with roses round the door.

  Mr Elgin passed on quickly to the last few questions. The entire affair, so far as he could see, persisted in being undramatic. Nothing had come of the investigation except everybody giving their account of Mr M’Tooley�
�s mild eccentricities. These little quirks when they were added up still did not constitute even one complete side of his nature. They were the harmless, unhideable extremities of a confused nature. Everybody knew of them and so when the Canon spoke of Mr M’Tooley’s habit of going into Retreat for part of the Easter holidays—a thing which struck the Canon as fantastic—or Mr. Winsley of his bizarre enjoyment of jazz, records of which he played on an ancient gramophone and was even reported to dance to by himself in the solitariness of his room; of his refusal to speak of a translation of Catullus, a brilliant piece of work undertaken in his youth which still sold and had produced for him year after year a sprinkling of meagre royalties and his air of overwhelming self-sufficiency which had made it so impossible to offer him anything, whether it was in the realm of help or affection; they weren’t really adding to a fuller account of Desmond M’Tooley, but giving hackneyed repetition to facts already famous. Desmond Vincent M’Tooley, aged fifty-one, of Copdock House School, Stourfriston, Suffolk, with motives that remained reticent, had plainly killed himself. There was no mitigating madness and Mr Elgin unwillingly returned a verdict of felo-de-se. Then they all rose and went out into the beautiful sunshine.

  The varieties of human experience, when they press too hard upon each other, are inclined to bring about a hankering for nice dull ordinary things and good plain company. Friends who, although not cast off, have had to take fourth or fifth place to the latest excitements, are welcome again. After all, old friends are old friends if only because of their power to put up with occasional cavalier treatment. Their thread of love can be dropped for a week or a month or a year. Any pain they might feel in the first place is soon compensated by the conviction that they are good, yet neglected, and so in a way, martyrs.