Money still seemed to be at the forefront. There were no prizes for guessing, after tonight, that the Desmond Seymour-Stracheys were living on a financial knife-edge, and would be interested in any sudden accession of wealth, by any means, from any source. But then money, or something, seemed suddenly to have brought Gerald Seymour-Strachey from the hazy background to the centre of the picture. He remembered the woman he lived with saying ‘she’s the only woman in the world for him’. And now he had found that Viola was convinced he was itching to propose again. Was this just because she saw herself as a Frieda Lawrence figure, or was there some firmer basis for it? And was the basis love (in one of its many varieties) or money? She had made her second husband’s life a hell, it seemed. Had her first husband had it any better? Why should Shadrach contemplate for a moment stepping back into the burning fiery furnace?
‘With the unexpected accession of their parents to the throne,’ said the voice from the television, with that odd blend of reverence and condescension reserved for royalty and its doings, ‘the little princesses had to reconcile themselves to seeing less and less of their mother and father. In April nineteen thirty-nine they went to the quay at Southampton to see them off on a three months’ visit to the United States and Canada . . . ’
Two rather pudding-faced little girls in a limousine were succeeded on the screen by a smiling George VI and Roosevelt, with wives, at the Roosevelt country estate. Greg tried to switch his mind back to the problem in hand.
Gerald Seymour-Strachey’s name coming to the forefront of the picture so unexpectedly made it worth looking more closely at him–in the past as well as the present. Had he really moved out before the Viola-Machin romance got going? Had he ditched Viola, as he said, or was it vice versa? Had he, perhaps, put up a fight? Greg had managed to get all his major books from the library, so they could conceivably help . . .
‘Three months’ trip to the United States and Canada . . . Three months’ trip to the United States and Canada . . . ’
The words from the television set pounded relentlessly to the front of his mind. ‘In April nineteen thirty-nine. . . for a three months’ visit . . . ’
And yet–and yet. There was that letter from Walter in the archive at Jackson’s, dated 2 June 1939. ‘The King and Queen went by. What guys!’
They could not have driven by. They were in America. The letter was a fake. Kronweiser had been right after all.
One up for American scholarship.
CHAPTER XVIII
HALF LIGHT
WHEN HE WOKE from an exhausted sleep Greg had–he felt–one piece of the jigsaw definitively in place: the letter from Walter Machin to Hilda dated 2 June 1939 was a fake.
Of course there were other possible interpretations: that Walter Machin did not recognize his sovereign; that the people who swept by him in a limousine through Admiralty Arch were no higher in the scale than some uppity Tory MP and his lady wife. But no. That sort of mistake was almost inconceivable, in an age of mass communications.
The next step forward would seem to be: that the letter had been forged by Hilda Machin. The transcript had been labelled by Kronweiser, ‘Given me by Mrs Hilda Machin, 21 April 1978.’ Hilda, then, had been forging letters from her late husband. No doubt she had felt safe: probably she still had his old typewriter, not greatly used since the separation. Probably she had found a sufficient stock of unused paper in the attic–yellowed enough with age to carry conviction. She had thought it a foolproof notion, but had slipped up on detail, like so many.
Why had she done it? Greg thought back on the Hilda he had known with a surge of affection: he could almost see her, chuckling over the typewriter as she composed the letter. Or perhaps her whole being had been flooded with the personality of the real, dead Walter, as she tried to reproduce his style, the dash of his personality, his iconoclastic irreverence. Surely she had been enjoying herself. Surely it had been a joke, prompted by the dreadful heavy seriousness of Dwight Kronweiser and the over-reverent attitude to Walter taken up for public reasons by Viola. It had been an attempt to let in a bit of fresh air on the subject.
But perhaps the joke had had a serious point to it too, or at any rate a serious side-effect: it had enabled Hilda to get her side of the story over to posterity. By forging letters from Walter she, paradoxically, felt she could convey a real image of him to stand against the false one. It was one way of having her say.
And the step after that in the deductive process? Who would object to Hilda’s little game? Well, Kronweiser, certainly, from a scholarly point of view. But then he had only to ignore the products of Hilda’s ingenuity. But what if he had voiced his suspicions to Viola? . . . Greg’s mind played on Viola’s concern with keeping the record ‘straight’, meaning that it must tell only her version. He remembered the anguish in her voice as she cried: ‘I wonder what she is saying about me!’ He remembered the row on the day the newspaper interview had come out–so violent as to be heard from the street. . . . If Mr Kronweiser had confided his suspicions that Hilda was forging letters, what would Viola’s reactions have been?
He registered in his mind one other possibility: that the letters had been forged by Kronweiser himself, to fill out the picture of Walter Machin for his book. He furrowed his brow. Would he have had the inventive capacity, the command of idiom? And why that trip to Olivera’s? But he docketed the possibility in the filing cabinet of his mind. Then he went and had a vigorous shower.
The vigorous shower did not have any of the beneficial effects such things were generally said to have by public-school games-masters of a previous age. As he rather gloomily put together a breakfast of poached egg and grilled bacon he felt neither particularly healthy nor particularly clear-minded. He was like a man who has made one step forward into unknown territory and stands looking for a path. If only the will had come. He had sent for a copy, but the bureaucratic machine seemed to be taking its time. Still, he had until two o’clock before he had to go into the College–today was the day he did evening teaching. He shoved his plates into the sink and took his tea into the living-room. There, by the easy chair, he had placed the works of Gerald Seymour-Strachey–three fairly substantial-looking volumes. With a sigh, and a glance of regret at the clear, bright day outside, he settled down in his chair and took up the first of the tomes.
The autobiography–Sins of My Old Age and Earlier–he had already dipped into, and he went back to it reluctantly for a more systematic reading. The story it had to tell was interesting enough: childhood and adolescence in New Zealand, university life in Australia and a stint on the literary pages of the Sydney Morning Herald; arrival in London in the late ‘twenties, when the Katherine Mansfield boom was at its height and there was an unusual keenness to welcome literary talent from New Zealand; London literary life in the ‘thirties–and so on. What Greg did not greatly like was the tone. It grated. This was particularly so in connection with the sexual adventures hinted at in the title–adventures which became a sort of leitmotif, in that the author seemed to feel he had to have one in every seven or eight pages, preferably with some piquant variation. It was rather pathetic, like an ageing colonel looking back on the days of Empire. And they were narrated with a snickering self-satisfaction, a dated coyness, which Greg found unappetizing. After his sexual initiation by a barmaid in an outback pub, while his father was drinking downstairs (at an age which would seem to be about twelve and a half–but Greg felt the incident had been brought forward significantly, from a feeling that the narrative pace of the opening pages was already flagging), Gerald Seymour-Strachey went on to a variety of girls (occasionally called ‘girlies’) and later women. Most of them were accorded pseudonyms (‘I will call her Sylvia’) and given a few lines of narrative, where their function was little more than to illustrate our hero’s appetite and prowess.
His marriage was treated very briefly: he recorded it as taking place in 1934, and the bride as being ‘at that time newly arrived from New Zealand and as a writer cons
idered highly promising–alas, of how many has this been said!’ Her name came up now and again in succeeding chapters, though she was not allowed to have played a significant part in his life. The break-up of the marriage was recorded as taking place in 1943, ‘due to the pressures and uncertainties of war’–as if Gerald had been at the very least a fighter ace or undercover agent. The next chapter, however, had him going to Grimsby University, ‘to keep the torch of literature alive in a dark period’.
Putting aside the book after an hour or more of solid dipping, Greg decided that Gerald Seymour-Strachey was one of those people who are quite unable to hide the less attractive sides of their personalities from outsiders because these are precisely the sides they themselves are most pleased with. Perhaps this was something he had in common with his elder son.
The major critical work revealed a rather different side to Gerald’s personality. The title itself was designed to pull you up short: The Heterosexual Strain in Modern English Literature. Greg had first read it as ‘Homosexual’, and that of course was the joke. Heterosexuality among English writers, it was being implied, was so much the exception to the rule as to demand special treatment. The whole of the introduction was a solemnly tongue-in-cheek exposition of this notion, though Greg had the impression that later the joke rather ran out of steam (as the book very nearly did run out of authors to treat).
The Ern Malley Affair, a slimmer volume, was an examination of a famous Australian literary hoax of the mid-’forties, in which bogus poems of impenetrable obscurity were foisted on a literary magazine. It was not clear why the matter deserved a book to itself.
Putting the volumes aside, Greg tried to consider the personality they evoked as a whole. They were rather unpleasantly self-satisfied for a start–and this was not incompatible with the impression made on him by the man himself at their meeting. These books were also very dated, in that they were jokey–look at me being clever, they seemed too often to be crying. And nothing dates more easily than the clever wheezes of a previous generation. It was rather as if the author–for all the breadth of his experience which he was constantly insisting upon–had never quite grown up. All in all, this was a man who delighted in proving how clever he was–and sometimes, as a corollary, in suggesting how dim and credulous other people were.
He let his mind play over the man as he had felt him at their meeting, as he now knew him from his books: vain, opinionated, hearty, jokey. Why, he though idly, why had Walter Machin not appeared in the volume of autobiography? Gerald Seymour-Strachey had not explained that satisfactorily at their meeting. On the one hand he had said that he was forgotten, so why mention him? On the other, that he was not forgotten–that there were pockets of admirers who still cherished his books throughout the long years when they were out of print. He couldn’t have it both ways. And as far as Greg could judge there were a great many writers who had found a place in the book who were quite as obscure or more so–poets whose flame had died with the end of the war, one-off playwrights whose experimental verse dramas had caused no more than a ripple of interest even in their own time.
Why then omit to mention Walter? Surely the reason must lie in the ridiculous sexual vanity of the man: he had left him out to pay him back, posthumously, for stealing his wife. To mention him would be to revive an old humiliation. Otherwise, if place could have been found for these minor poets and playwrights, not to mention jumped-up journalists who also figured all too prominently, surely a few sentences could have been spared for the man he himself had described as the one working-class writer who remained working-class–the man whom the Sentinel had called ‘the poet of work’.
The phrase stirred a vague uneasiness in his mind. ‘The Poet of Work’. It sounded good. And yet, and yet. . . The man in the pub who remembered one of his workmates complaining to Walter that he had got the details of the factory machinery wrong . . . Mr Causeley at Jackson’s saying in his superior Southern style that people had written complaining that Machin had said ‘bobbin-waggler’ when he should have said ‘throcket-shuttle’. He was flim-flamming, of course, but that must have been the general burden of the letters.
But Walter Machin should not have got the mechanical details wrong.
There were the other readers, of course. The man on the train, the teacher who had been in Lancashire for three years, but felt he never really knew it until Walter Machin revealed it to him. There were the critics on the newspapers who had praised the vividness and accuracy of the books. But when it came down to it, it was the people who didn’t really know Lancashire who found Walter Machin impressive. The ones who knew, the men of his own class, the men who worked in the mills with him, they were unconvinced. . . .
Ern Malley . . .
His meditations were interrupted by a plop on the front-door mat. It was the second post. Going absently to see what it was, Greg found it was from Somerset House. The photocopy of the will he had requested. Feverishly opening it, he scanned it through with his mind in a whirl. Most of it he knew: the copyright on his works to his wife Viola; the manuscripts to his former wife Hilda Machin; a small sum of money to his mother, still alive at the time of the making of the will. There was nothing out of the ordinary.
But the surprise came at the end. The signature was not the signature of the letters and contracts he had seen at Jackson’s. The name Walter Machin was written in a large, rounded, unconnected and uncertain script.
It was the signature of a man who was to all intents and purposes illiterate.
CHAPTER XIX
THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES
GREG HOCKING’S second trip to Borthwick was undertaken on one of the most glorious days of the year, when the dales spread out before his eyes in rolling profusion, as if they were concerned to proclaim: there are beauties in England still.
Greg hardly saw them.
He drove, he munched sandwiches prepared by Helen the night before, and he thought. Round and round like circus horses went the questions in his mind: He must have done it–surely he must have done it–but why? Is there a link I haven’t come across yet? A link with Viola? An emotional link? Or is there a financial link? A financial link with Viola?
A quotation came to his mind: ‘Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?’ He amended it to: ‘Who would have thought the old man to have so much spunk in him?’
The guts to commit murder. Could he see Gerald Seymour-Strachey as a killer? Had he completely misunderstood him at their first meeting? What was there that could make that man into a murderer? Money–at his age? But then, most misers were old. Vanity–yes, that seemed more likely. Especially sexual vanity. Or to keep his secret? But surely . . .
He pulled up some way from the cottage and left the car on the outskirts of the village. He was dressed very inconspicuously in jeans and short-sleeved check shirt, but he found everyone looked at him, as people in villages will. But he came on the cottage obliquely, and was able to stand for a minute or two in the shadow of a tree, watching the man he had come to see.
The figure wandering through the garden towards the front door of the cottage was not quite as Greg remembered him. For a start, he seemed to be wandering aimlessly, like a dog through a ghost town. At their first interview, Gerald Seymour-Strachey had seemed to be a decided old man, quite confident of himself and his needs. Then, this figure looked as if seediness was beginning to set in: his shoulders drooped, and the bottom button of his jacket was missing. The old Gerald had been as much a model of smartness for the over-sixty-fives as his ex-wife.
When Greg touched the latch of the garden gate, Gerald Seymour-Strachey’s head spun round hopefully. The expression on his face faded, however, to one of mere polite welcome.
‘Oh hello,’ he said. ‘I thought. . . ’ Then he came forward and extended his hand. ‘Nice of you to come back so soon.’
‘I hope it’s not inconvenient?’
‘No, no, not in the least.’ The hands flopped indeterminately, and he looked do
ubtfully at the front door. ‘Only thing is–the house is in a bit of a mess. Do you want to come in?’
‘Well, it might be easier,’ said Greg. ‘I don’t worry about mess. I’m a bachelor myself.’
Gerald Seymour-Strachey looked at him hard. ‘Just temporarily in my case, you know. The little lady’s had to go away for a bit–sick relative–you know how it is.’
‘Of course,’ said Greg.
They went inside the cottage. So far there were no very obvious signs of Gerald’s forlorn status. Things seemed tidy enough to the unpractised eye. Only through the door of the kitchen could Greg see any indications that the usual female hand was absent. There were piles of washing-up, a smell of burnt food, and plates still on the table.
‘Difficult when there’s no woman around,’ said Gerald. ‘Not used to it. Tried to get a woman from the village, but I couldn’t.’ A tired imitation of the old roguishness wafted over his face. ‘I suppose I have a certain reputation . . . ’
They went into the study, slightly dusty, but still immaculately tidy. Gerald offered tea or beer, but withdrew the first by adding: ‘Beer’s quicker.’ Greg accepted the beer. He did not want to strain his host’s goodwill from the beginning.
‘Thought of a story I didn’t tell you last time,’ said Gerald, as he brought the beer in. He settled himself into his desk chair and launched into an endless story of cowardice, duplicity and spleen among the minor luminaries of his set in ‘thirties literary London. It was not edifying, it was not even interesting–and to add insult to injury Greg had already read the story in the autobiography. Does he really think I’m interested in these people, he thought to himself? I certainly didn’t give any indication last time. Or is he just trying to keep me off one particular subject?
Death of a Literary Widow Page 16
