by Ned Beauman
We had been driving west on the M3, past great drizzly industrial estates where men in overalls tended economies of scale like oxpeckers on a rhino. I was handcuffed to the dashboard cup holder. The motorway reminded me of the block of flats where I live, the way the brawny concrete seemed designed specifically to resist the mortal urge to modify one’s own surroundings. At an intersection near Winchester we slowed for a moment beside a fenced-off triangle of waste ground, and I saw a man in a bloodstained suit limping through the tall grass.
‘Hey, we should stop for him.’
The Welshman didn’t even answer. He hadn’t spoken for hours. I thought about Winchester College. Grublock had once told me it was the happiest time of his life, even though he wasn’t so rich then. ‘People assume that one is taught at public school to be callous towards the common man, Fishy, but that’s not true,’ he had once said to me. ‘I am only callous towards the common man because the common man is so callous towards me.’ In fact, as we both knew, it was for heartfelt Nietzschean reasons, but he happened to be in a self-justifying mood. ‘These days, if you blamed the world’s problems on a “conspiracy of international financiers”, you’d naturally be put down as an atavistic crackpot and most likely a Jew-hater, but it’s perfectly acceptable for good liberals to talk about “rich property developers” as if we were all united in evil. All those people who say they don’t like property developers, I suppose they live in houses they built with their bare hands on unclaimed soil. I suppose they would rather live somewhere like where you live, Fishy. A place which is to architecture as a parking ticket is to literature.’ I had wanted to defend my home, especially as Grublock had never actually seen it with his own eyes, but it wasn’t easy. Whatever I may have said about Batman, I like a lot of sixties’ buildings. Just not the one I live in. Perhaps I would like it better if it didn’t feel so much like no one was ever really supposed to live in it.
Later, as we drove on, I said to the Welshman, ‘You don’t work for anyone, do you? You don’t work for Grublock. You don’t work for the Japanese. You don’t work for the Ariosophists. You’re just a collector, like me, and you’re on your own. I should have guessed. What’s your best piece? I collect the Goebbels Gottafchen Goethe – well, I did, until what happened to Grublock. Have you heard of it?’
The Welshman still didn’t answer. But when we passed a big blue sign that predicted a knife and fork two miles down the road, he said, ‘Are you hungry?’
‘Yes, but I don’t want to go to Little Chef.’
‘I eat there quite often.’
We pulled over into the car park and the Welshman unlocked my handcuffs.
‘I don’t have to worry about you making a fuss,’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Because if you do, then you will be my brother-in-law with paranoid schizophrenia and we will be stopping for breakfast on the way to a clinic in Southampton. I will apologise to the waitress and take you out of the restaurant, everyone will forget about it, and then I will shoot you and bury your body in the New Forest. I’ve done it before. It’s very easy.’
‘Right.’ The Welshman always sounded so reasonable – it was something about the accent.
We went into the purgatorial café and sat down. I ordered smoked haddock on toast, as I sometimes do in the hope that passers-by might mistake my smell for a preternaturally pungent lump of fish. The Welshman ordered a full English breakfast, which I wouldn’t eat because of all the phosphatidylcholine in the baked beans. At the next table was a mother with three small children, bawling and brawling. I noticed that her mobile phone was lying unattended at the edge of the table.
‘Are you going to tell me where we’re going?’ I said.
‘A place called Claramore. There’s evidence that Seth Roach attended a political conference there in the summer of 1936.’
‘What is it? A country house?’
‘Yes. Until soon after the Second World War the property belonged to William Erskine, the Ninth Earl of Claramore. Then the title, house and land were sold to an American film producer. In the eighties it became a private hospital for women with eating disorders. And now it’s a hotel.’
That was when I did exactly what Batman would have done. You see, just as our food arrived, one of the children knocked a cup of blackcurrant squash off the table, spraying the Welshman’s trouser leg. There was a moment of confusion as the waitress and the Welshman and the boy’s mother all fumbled with napkins, and that was when I reached across to grab the mobile phone. Praying that nobody had seen, I hid it between my legs.
If the Welshman went to the toilet or something I could call 999, but of course he wouldn’t leave me alone in a public place for even half a minute. Could one send a text message to the police? I had no idea. I decided to text Stuart. Luckily, I know his number off by heart from the rare occasions that we speak, and with the help of the little finger-orienting bumps on the ‘5’ button I was able to type and send the message almost without looking down at the screen. ‘stuart its kevin being held hostage irl by man w gun taking me to place called claramore need help not a joke dont try to call thanks.’ Normally I find correct punctuation very important, but there was no time.
I knew Stuart would believe me – he has spent his whole life waiting for something like that to happen to him – and about fifteen seconds later the phone vibrated with a reply: ‘omfg ok will call police.’ My heart pounding, I dropped the phone between the tables. It clattered on to the sticky tiles. The mother picked it up without even looking at me and began to remonstrate with her children again.
An hour later, at about eleven o’clock, we were turning north off the A303. The Welshman made me map-read as we wound through the woods. Since a trip to Epping when I was fourteen years old, the only dense woods I had experienced were the ancient forests through which I hunted trolls and goblins as a battle mage, and the sheer quantity of leaves and shadows here seemed to speak of unimaginable reserves of computing power.
‘What are we going to do when we get there?’ I said.
‘I don’t know exactly. We will look for clues. And I hope that with your expertise in finding things that have been lost for a long time – your expertise in which Mr Grublock put such trust – we should have a good chance of finding out what really happened here in 1936.’
‘What do you mean, “what really happened”?’
‘Claramore was the site of a well-publicised murder,’ he said as the house itself came into view about a quarter of a mile down the road, a squat hulk of red brick and marble. There was something presciently functionalist about its blocky front elevation, and I felt as if we were approaching the giant processing core that simulated the forest around us, or the generator that powered the birds and the insects and the swaying wild grass. ‘The police believed they had solved the case, but their suspects had already disappeared and were never seen again. There are two points to note. The first is that everyone who knew anything about the case seemed to be convinced that the police had got it wrong. The second is that, apart from those two suspects, and apart, obviously, from the corpse, there was another fellow who was never seen again after the incident at Claramore. Seth Roach. I think he was the real murderer. And I think he died here, too.’
13
AUGUST 1936
In the last years of his life, Erasmus Erskine began to treat Claramore as if it were little more than a rusty barge conveying him towards the coral harbour of Kumari Kandam. Busy sponsoring a series of expeditions to the Coromandel coast, he made no serious repairs or improvements to his decaying ancestral home, nor did he take any notice of his wife’s increasingly pressing suggestions. But when he died in 1912 Claramore passed to his son William, who thought servants should have better things to do than shore up a ruin. Fascinated by a three-ton hand-cranked tide-predicting machine he had seen at Admiralty Arch in London, he decided to modernise the place so thoroughly that it would still be modern in a hundred years.
By the time Wil
liam Erskine left Hampshire for Flanders in 1915, a typical room would be connected to the bowels of the house in at least six different ways. You could post your dirty clothes, for instance, through an engraved letterbox inside the wardrobe and they would drop down a chute to the motorised laundry; you could pick up the telephone to speak to a girl at a switchboard who could patch you through to any other room in the house or its grounds; you could plug a nozzle into an outlet in the skirting board and suck a stray moth down into the centralised vacuum pump beneath the scullery. Erskine was also very proud of his pneumatic luggage lifts, ice-making chamber, galvanic baths and motor house. The radical Belgian architectural digest Béton devoted an entire issue to the mechanisation of Claramore, including a well-received essay by its master in which he argued that only the worship of science could avert the dark tidings of Spengler’s The Decline of the West.
But by the time William Erskine left Flanders for Hampshire in 1918, he had seen a man’s legs crushed to paste by the treads of a tank, and worse besides; so although in public he argued that the war had vindicated beyond question his belief that nothing was now more important than technology, he couldn’t prevent a certain cowardly ambivalence creeping into his private opinions. Also, during his absence, there had been problems at Claramore. By some mischance, for instance, the steam turbines in the power room and the hydro-extractor in the laundry resonated at the same electrical frequency, like a Tesla coil, so that when they were both running at full pelt the narrow corridor between them would sometimes crackle with arcs of lightning, jolting the cardiac muscle of any maid who happened to be carrying a silver jug or candlestick. Clothes sent down to be washed would be sent back up two or three weeks later, usually to the wrong room, perfectly spotless but also ripped at the seams and stinking of petrol, with the result that guests began to hoard their muddy riding breeches under their beds. One male visitor had to be driven to hospital after an accident with a vacuum nozzle that was never satisfactorily explained. William Erskine was willing to ignore all this, but then one day in 1919 his favourite footman was electrocuted by the plug chain of a galvanic bath, and suddenly, just as his father once had, he lost all interest in the details of Claramore’s functioning, leaving his wife to take charge of a house which now needed an additional cadre of servants merely to compensate for the erratic behaviour of its machines.
At only one other time in his life did William Erskine feel a spasm of optimism about the automated future. In the same week in 1928 that his son went up to Cambridge, he read in The Times that several companies were now manufacturing ‘brass brains’, the sophisticated progeny of the tide-predicting machine he had observed sixteen years earlier. Temporarily gripped by exactly the ardour that had first inspired the reinvention of Claramore, he sold some stocks and paid for a top-of-the-range brass brain to be shipped over from Binghampton, New York and installed in the library. For several months thereafter William Erskine seemed to have an endless supply of arithmetical problems that urgently needed solving, often during dinner or in the middle of the night, and the house would vibrate for hours at a time with the grinding of the beast’s polished teeth. (The library was no longer a very popular place to sit and read.) He went as far as sacking his estate manager, presuming that he basically just did a lot of sums, and a short while later was forced to write a curt note to his wife asking her to rehire the old man. His entire personality somehow rejuvenated by his purchase, he would now often ask Philip and Evelyn what they and their friends got up to for fun, embarrassing them by chuckling complicitly over even the tamest jokes and stories. But the effect couldn’t last for ever, and before long William Erskine was back to his gruff old self, with the result that there was no one there to take the slightest pleasure in Claramore’s machines until the arrival some seven years later of Amadeo Amadeo, one of the guests at the conference of fascists, who had read the original report in Béton and was now beside himself with exultation to be caressing with his own hand the house’s famous centralised vacuum pump.
‘So very superior to those puny little portable models they have these days,’ said Amadeo over the roar of the pump. ‘With this one you could suck the clouds out of the sky.’
‘Er, quite,’ said Philip Erskine.
Sinner had driven the car up from London that afternoon. By the fourth or fifth time the boy swerved merrily into the wrong lane or nudged a cyclist into a ditch as he overtook, Erskine was convinced that Sinner was doing it deliberately to frighten him; but although he wasn’t sure that either he or the car would ever quite recover from the ordeal, he could not deny that they had made astonishingly good time, arriving quite early in the afternoon to find his mother standing on the lawn in front of the house talking to a xanthomelanous gentleman in a bright yellow suit of a radically asymmetrical cut, seemingly made of some sort of shiny wrapping paper, fastened by just one large steel button halfway down the jacket.
Sinner parked near the stone griffins and they got out. Erskine’s mother came over. ‘Darling! You’re here. And who is this?’
‘Hello, mother. This is just my valet, Roach.’
Sinner doffed his cap in the way that Erskine had insisted he practise. In his waistcoat, stiff collar and pressed trousers he looked quite respectable – comically so to Erskine, who had taken some satisfaction in picking out the clothes.
‘You’ve brought your own valet with you to visit the house you grew up in?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s a pity. I was expecting my son, not Prince Francis Joseph of Battenberg, but I suppose we shall have to muddle through.’ She embraced him, and then quietly added, ‘Isn’t he a bit … I mean, what does he do if he needs to reach something on a high shelf?’
‘He’s an excellent valet.’
‘Very well, then.’ Philip Erskine, it will be possible to deduce by now, had not been an easy child to raise, and his mother assumed that he had finally found a manservant who knew how to deal with his absurd squeamishness and pickiness. She herself was not at all like her son. Very beautiful as a debutante, and indifferent to politics except when she wanted to justify her large donations to the poor, she had realised soon after her wedding that she hadn’t married a man so much as married a house – a house which, even before the slow dwindling of the Erskine family’s income and even before the damned machines, had been known for hatching troubles at a rate disproportionate to its moderate size. And at first it had all felt utterly impossible, but by now she quite enjoyed herself and sometimes wondered whether, after her husband died, she could go and manage one of the great European hotels.
Her son, for his part, liked his mother, but there were still various obstacles to a warm relationship between the two, not the least of which was his secret disgust at the very notion of family resemblance. Whenever he saw a pair of relations who looked very much alike, each face seemed to stand in relation to the other as the smell of rotten fruit does to the smell of fresh fruit, or as a caricature does to a photograph, the copy exposing the latent ugliness of the original. He hated to catch himself and his mother or father or sister reflected in a mirror. Just then, Sinner was no doubt looking at the two Erskines and thinking that Philip looked like a grotesque masculinoid parody of his mother while his mother looked like a grotesque feminoid parody of Philip.
‘Now, I must introduce you to Signor Amadeo,’ said the feminoid parody.
Amadeo smiled and stuck out his right hand so that his arm was exactly perpendicular to his body. Erskine awkwardly shook it, momentarily dazzled by the bright August sunshine gleaming off the Italian’s steel button. ‘A great pleasure to make your acquaintance,’ said Amadeo.
‘Signor Amadeo very much wants to see all the contraptions downstairs – why don’t you show him?’
‘All right,’ said Erskine. ‘Take my bags upstairs, please,’ he said to Sinner. Nowhere in the luggage was Anophthalmus hitleri; he had decided it would be better to leave the tuck box safely in the flat, stuffed with enough chicken bones to las
t the hungry beetles a month.
‘Go inside and ask for Godwin,’ added his mother. ‘He’ll show you Philip’s bedroom, and everything else. I’m afraid the luggage lifts have broken down again.’
Sinner went inside with the suitcases, leaving only the precious valise containing the bowdlerised second draft of the history of Pangaean. Erskine picked this up before going downstairs with Amadeo, who he now remembered was one of the lesser Italian Futurists. Like many others in the movement, Amadeo had called for a war to reinvigorate Europe. After war did obligingly arrive, most of his colleagues, who had not expected to get what they wanted quite so quickly, started to call for other, different things, but Amadeo just called for more war – longer, bloodier, and even more thoroughly mechanised. He thought of himself, in fact, as the most dedicated of all the Futurists, because he had not altered a single one of his aesthetic or political positions in over two decades, leaving them proudly in place like the machines of Claramore. At fifty years old he still wouldn’t eat pasta, he still used an alternative punctuation system of his own invention, he still had all his clothes made at the only ‘dynamic’ tailor left in Milan, he still fed poison to seagulls, and he still occasionally shampooed with engine oil. Like many of the speakers at the conference that summer, he had few friends.
They moved on from the vacuum pump to the hydro-extractor. ‘Its shining industrial vectors recapitulate the perfect curves of a woman’s thigh,’ said Amadeo, and then sighed wistfully. Erskine decided to leave him to it. He still hadn’t seen his father and he knew he had better get that over with. But on the way to his father’s study he heard jarring piano chords and went into the drawing room.
‘Hello, Phippy,’ said Evelyn. ‘I must admit I’m almost pleased to see you.’
