Death of a Literary Widow

by Robert Barnard

  That was all. Not much to go on. But at least, it seemed, he was alive, even if only just. That was something to be thankful for. Perhaps he should put him top of his visiting list: at his age, it might be urgent.

  CHAPTER XI

  GRAND OLD MAN

  THE SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR at the University of Grimsby was firm but quite helpful. Professor Seymour-Strachey had been retired for some time now, and had left Grimsby. But, no–she had no objection to giving Greg his address and telephone number. He now lived, it seemed, in a small village on the Yorkshire/Lincolnshire border.

  Greg thanked her and put the phone down. He decided to ring Seymour-Strachey later, about tea-time, when he might be presumed to be in. Since he had ten minutes of lunch-break left he strolled into the canteen and sat down with Hickson, one of his more elderly colleagues–an avuncular type, deep in local politics, and decidedly cynical about Greg’s attempts to resuscitate an era of Oswaldston history long and thankfully closed. But Greg knew he would answer his questions about anyone local, for he knew everyone, and dearly loved to display his knowledge.

  ‘Know anything about a chap called Desmond Seymour-Strachey?’ he asked casually, after the usual preliminaries of cursing the weather, the students, and the teacher’s lot.

  ‘A bit,’ said Hickson. ‘Not my party, but he gets himself in with both lots. Why?’

  ‘Chap I know,’ lied Greg, ‘had some dealings with him. Some insurance claim or other. Felt he got twisted somehow.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be surprised,’ said Hickson. ‘That’s his reputation. Sails close to the wind. You’ve got to watch him, but I don’t think he’d do anything obviously crooked. Much too smart for that. Keeps in with us too, does our Desmond.’

  ‘Oh–how?’

  ‘You know the ways–gets invited to council functions, writes letters of qualified support in the local paper, or just shows friendliness and interest. He’s too smart to pretend to be Labour, but he makes sure we don’t forget him. He’d send us all whisky at Christmas if it was worth his while, only these days it’s hardly worth the risk.’

  ‘You wouldn’t think he was involved in any local corruption, or anything of that sort?’

  ‘Local corruption? Come, come, lad–this isn’t the North-East. We call it legitimate furthering of mutual interests here. I expect he knows all about it, that’s for sure. His dad-in-law was a Markby–the big building contractors. They’ve had their share of what’s going, and more. But as to being involved–he’s never been part of the firm himself, so I doubt it.’

  Greg pondered on this information during his teaching hours that occupied the remainder of the day. At about four he rang up the number given him for Gerald Seymour-Strachey, but he was answered by a not too refined woman’s voice–a voice with a touch of the treacle tart in it, and a touch of the plain tart as well.

  ‘Gerald? He’s out, love, I’m sorry. Can I give him a message, or will you ring back?’

  ‘Oh–well, he won’t know me. My name is Hocking and I’m ringing from Oswaldston. I wondered if I could come over and see your h–see him some time?’

  ‘Oh yes, that’ll be all right, love. When will you come?’

  ‘You’re sure I’ll be able to see him? It’s a long trip, and I wouldn’t want to do it for nothing.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll see you. He’s lonely as hell, poor old bugger, and doesn’t know what to do with his time. You know what it’s like when they retire, don’t you? He walks miles, just because he’s no one to talk to and he’s bored stiff. If I tell him when you’re coming, he’ll be here to meet you. I’d welcome it too–get him out of my hair for a bit.’

  ‘Well, I have a half-day off Wednesday. I could be there by about four, Mrs–er–’

  ‘Right-e-oh. He’s not my husband, by the way. I know a better trick than that, any day of the week.’

  For some reason she found what she had just said enormously funny, and exploded into the phone with a fruity laugh before putting down her receiver. She had rung off without asking Greg what his business was. On the whole, he thought to himself, perhaps it was just as well.

  • • •

  It was tea-time when Greg got to Borthwick, a tiny village with a pub, a shop, and the bare population to support them. He had borrowed a car from one of his colleagues, and he felt hot, sweaty and uncertain of himself, having had to spend more time mastering the crate’s uncertain ways than in preparing himself for the meeting to come. The evening before he had procured from the local library a copy of Gerald Seymour-Strachey’s essay in autobiography, but a quick flick through the index had assured him there was no mention of Walter Machin, and he hadn’t had time to bone up on the details of the man himself’s career. He was going into the interview blind.

  In the garden of the cottage there was a woman weeding a rose-bed. She was buxom, and the rust-red pullover she wore was not designed to minimize the fact. She looked, in fact, blowzy but good-humoured, and of an age which is usually politely said to be around thirty-five. She smiled at him cheerily and opened the gate as he got out of his car.

  ‘Mr Hocking?’ she said. ‘He’s expecting you. Pleased as Punch, like I thought. Excuse me not shaking hands–’ she looked down at her own hands, then looked around the garden. ‘I don’t know why I bother. It’s not as though I’m stopping . . . Could you find your way in, do you think? He’s in the study–straight through the hall, and then far door on your right. Oh–and lad: pretend you’re interested in him–just for a bit, to start with. It’ll make him happy, and things will go easier if you do.’

  Primed with the good advice, but uncertain how far he could follow it, Greg went in through the hall of the cottage, artificially created by modern alterations, and knocked at the far door on the right. Pleased as Punch at the thought of his visit Gerald Seymour-Strachey might be, but the ‘Come in’ that answered his knock was lordly. Greg pushed the door and found himself in what must have been the largest room in the cottage. Every inch of available wall space was taken up with bookshelves, and every inch of shelf-space was taken up with books–books, mostly, with tattered jackets or sun-faded bindings and dating, Greg guessed, from the ‘twenties, ‘thirties and ‘forties–presentation copies, review copies and remaindered copies among them. The room itself, however, was perfectly neat, and provided an excellent foil for Gerald Seymour-Strachey, who was no drivelling dotard, but a smart, upright, handsome old man, his clothes admirably cut and suitable for the occasion, his profile cunningly arranged to impress, his mane of white hair, thick and shiny, suggesting intellect and a sense of the aesthetically satisfying. He was the Patriarch, the Fount of Wisdom, the man to whom pilgrimages are made. Here I am, he seemed to say, in the fullness of my years. Come sit at my feet and drink the wisdom learned of experience.

  Only the desk, empty and sparsely furnished, suggested that he was a Patriarch with time on his hands, a Fount of Wisdom from whom too few cared to drink.

  ‘Do sit down,’ he said magisterially. ‘Good of you to come. Mr–Hocking, was it?’

  ‘That’s right. Gregory Hocking,’ said Greg, nervously sitting.

  ‘A–a student, perhaps?’ hazarded Gerald Seymour-Strachey, smiling benignly.

  ‘I have been,’ Greg allowed himself to say. ‘English literature.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said the Patriarch, opening out his hands in an expansive gesture. ‘The teaching of English–it was a wonderful profession in my time. Of course, since–’

  ‘It is since that I studied it,’ said Greg.

  ‘I saw it all happen,’ said Seymour-Strachey, leaning forward in a burst of confidentiality and exposing a set of amazingly white teeth. ‘When I went to Grimsby, in the war, there was just me and a few students–invalided servicemen, some nice girlies just out of school–things were lovely. We tasted, we enjoyed, we discussed. Then the soldiers started coming back after the war, and we got new members of staff–earnest young men who got all intense about everything. Started chucking names around, made me f
eel I ought to read them. I read Leavis–it was like eating barbed wire. By the ‘fifties we were taken over by Leavisites–ghastly neurotics shrieking about maturity. Then there were other names–Raymond Williams, someone with a name like a chamber pot, Fry–after a time I didn’t even bother to learn the names.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘It’s not a profession for a gentleman now. My God, I wonder what “Q” would say.’

  Greg felt that it would be appropriate to leave a Remembrance Day silence in the room when he finished speaking.

  ‘But I think of you as a creative writer,’ he hazarded at last, amazed at his own effrontery.

  ‘Nice of you,’ said Gerald Seymour-Strachey, flashing at him those miraculously even teeth, and looking every inch the debonair squire of dames he must have been in his youth. ‘Creative I wouldn’t claim to be, but I’ve known them–lots of them.’ His eyes dimmed. ‘Upward, Douglas, Currey.’ The dimness seemed appropriate. Greg had never heard of any of them.

  ‘You knew Walter Machin too, didn’t you?’ he asked.

  The eyes cleared, the relaxed body tightened, and Gerald Seymour-Strachey cast a glance at Greg almost quizzical. ‘Ah yes–Walter. Everyone seems to be getting interested in him lately. I knew they would eventually. Yes, I knew him, and his wife too. See she died. Sad. Nice little woman.’ He paused, seeming to survey the landscape of his relationship with the Machins. Then he said: ‘Actually, as I suppose you know, I got rid of my first wife on to Walter.’

  ‘Well–yes, I knew he married her after the war,’ said Greg diplomatically.

  ‘I tipped him the wink after I left her,’ went on the Patriarch, with an expression of lubricious meditation. ‘Told him there was Viola, waiting alone in London with no one to warm the bed up for her. And Bob’s your uncle!’

  ‘That was in –?’

  ‘I left her in ‘forty-three,’ said Seymour-Strachey promptly. His face assumed an expression of sublime conceit, and once more he leaned forward with an air of confidentiality: ‘I’ve married again since then, of course–married often.’ He chuckled, in self-approbation: ‘But it’s always been me who left them . . . ’

  There seemed nothing to say to this. If Greg had understood the lady in the garden aright, Gerald Seymour-Strachey was in for a new experience. He was now, though, in a groove of reminiscence which seemed to please him mightily.

  ‘We were alike in a lot of ways, Walter and I,’ he said nodding happily. ‘We both liked women. It marked us off, you might say–from the literary crowd, I mean. When Walter came up to London just before the war–those were times! Wot larks, as Joe Gargery says! And then during the war too, he had his fun. And I did too. I remember we met up in Grimsby, just after I got there–‘forty-four it must have been. He insisted on calling me the Professor of French Letters–introduced me to everyone as that in the pubs. That was his sort of humour, you know. Tickled him no end when people took it seriously–I can hear his great golden laugh now.’

  ‘So you remained friendly right through the war, did you?’

  ‘Oh yes–right up to the end, you might say. I always intended to visit him after the war, but you know how it is: things were difficult, I was confoundedly busy at the University, I didn’t particularly want to see Viola again–though you’ve got to swallow the pill with the jam, haven’t you, and there was no particular reason why I shouldn’t see her again. But then the next I heard he was dead. Life’s like that, isn’t it?’

  ‘How did you meet up in the first place? Was it when his first book was published?’

  ‘No, no–before.’ Gerald Seymour-Strachey put himself in a self-conscious pose of memory, as if rehearsing for a television down-memory-lane programme. ‘We met in a pub–back in, oh, ‘thirty-seven, ‘thirty-eight. Hilda and he were in London on a spree, Viola and I had come out of the theatre for the interval–Noel Coward, Rattigan, I forget what. Anyway, we met up, and we never did get back for the last act. We clicked–all of us.’

  ‘You mean Walter was–interested in your wife then?’

  Gerald Seymour-Strachey looked at him with something close to outrage on his face: ‘No, no–nothing of the kind. What minds you young people have. No–we just had a gay evening out. Later on we got talking, more seriously–about the North, the unemployment. And then Walter mentioned this book he’d written, or was writing, I forget which. He thought I might be useful, I suppose. I’d told him I wrote the fiction criticism for Time and Tide.’

  ‘Did you help him with it at all?’

  ‘With the writing? Oh no. Walter didn’t need that sort of help–wouldn’t have welcomed it, either. But I told him the best publishers to try–the pink-ohs, you know. And when it came out I gave it a puff in my little rag, and made sure the others did the same. I had a bit of influence in those days.’ The handsome old man chuckled in childish vanity.

  ‘What was Walter Machin like, before the war?’

  ‘The same as he always was–happy, open, full of jokes, lots of them terrible. Always ready for a game, particularly if there was a woman involved. He was so full of life, it was–well, you felt you could light your cigarette off him.’

  ‘But he must have been very politically conscious as well–I mean The Factory Whistle –’

  ‘Oh, he was, he was. Certainly. But he wasn’t one of those bitter little bigots. He saw the humorous side–even of the slump. That’s what marked Walter off. He enjoyed life, a hundred per cent, twenty-four hours a day. Lawrence kept saying he was living intensely with his whole body and all that, but Walter really did. And it gets into his writing. Read some of the short pieces–the one called “Lydia Horton and the Vile Seducers” for example. That’s from life. That’s the real Walter.’

  ‘Why do you think his reputation didn’t last?’

  Gerald Seymour-Strachey leaned forward excitedly. ‘Ah, but it did! In little pockets–that’s nothing unusual, in the literary world. Why do you think these mentions of him kept cropping up over the years? People had been reading him, recommending the books to each other, lending them.’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ said Greg, feeling he was talking about a coterie that was way outside his usual sphere of research. ‘But as far as the public at large was concerned, he was forgotten, wasn’t he? For example, he was totally out of print.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Gerald Seymour-Strachey, spreading his hands wide as if in despair at the fickleness of public taste. ‘These things can’t be explained. What do you think would happen if Wuthering Heights were published today? Three lines at the bottom of a column in the TLS. Even the feminist loonies wouldn’t be interested in it. It would sink without trace. Well–something of the kind happened to Walter, after the initial interest.’

  ‘I notice you didn’t mention him in your autobiography . . . ’

  ‘Sins of My Old Age and Earlier? Good title, eh? Thought for a long time before I hit on that. Didn’t sell as well as it ought to have, that book. What were you asking . . .?’

  ‘You didn’t mention Walter Machin in–’

  ‘Oh yes! No, well I didn’t think anyone would be interested. Nobody was when I wrote it–four or five years ago–nobody much anyway. Now they’ve rediscovered him. He’s the missing working-class novelist, the link between Lawrence and Sillitoe. If I were writing it now . . . I wonder if they’d be interested in putting out a revised edition?’ He meditated, dubiously.

  ‘But you do think Walter Machin was a major writer?’

  ‘Eh? Oh yes, undoubtedly.’

  ‘Why? What was it he–he had?’

  Again Gerald Seymour-Strachey adopted a pose, this time pontifical. ‘He never cut himself off from his class. He was one of the working-class, he stayed one of the working-class, and he drew his inspiration from the working-class.’ He relaxed his pose and looked at Greg roguishly. ‘That’s the sort of thing one says at the end of lectures–especially now we have all those bed-sitter Marxists as students. Still, it’s true enough. All the others left–went to Mexico, or Majorca, or Cambrid
ge, or wherever, and wallowed in their guilt feelings. Walter stayed in the North, felt at home there, so his books are authentic–the real McCoy. That’s why he’ll live. Have a drink, m’boy?’

  • • •

  After a small glass of Cyprus sherry, Greg took his leave, amid pressing invitations to come back anytime in the future when he felt like a chat. He would like to have gone more fully into the subject which was second in interest in his mind to Walter Machin–Viola Machin, and the way she had come by her second husband. But it looked like being a long, hot drive home, and he was teaching at nine on Thursday. At the door Gerald Seymour-Strachey said in his most patrician manner: ‘I’d be glad if you’d let me know when Hilda Machin’s funeral is. Like to send a wreath.’

  ‘The inquest is tomorrow,’ said Greg. ‘I expect it will be soon after that.’

  ‘Inquest? Oh yes, of course. Died in a fire, didn’t she? Have to in cases of that sort, I suppose. Terrible way to go, awful. But if you could let me know . . . ’

  ‘Of course,’ said Greg. Turning back he said: ‘What was she like when you knew her?’

  ‘Hilda Machin? Bright little thing. Lively. Plenty of spunk. Gave him hell when he stepped out of line, I imagine. But made it up pretty quickly afterwards. Like they all do, eh, m’boy? Like all these women do.’

  And laughing a laugh of benign condescension, Gerald Seymour-Strachey struck a pose of farewell against the doorway of his cottage. The final image he imprinted on Greg’s mind was a handsome wreck, a St Pancras Station of a man.

  By the gate the Patriarch’s buxom companion was still at work, weeding a not particularly fertile-looking patch of edging. She smiled and straightened as Greg approached and said: ‘It looks as if you’ve cheered him up.’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Greg. ‘He was very helpful.’

  ‘He’s got a fund of memories,’ said the woman. ‘Boring as hell, but still–if you’re interested in that kind of thing it’s all right I suppose.’

  ‘He’s remarkably spry,’ said Greg, ‘for a man of his age. Hasn’t lost any of his faculties.’