Death in Devon

‘But—’

He had edged close enough now for us both to be concerned about his safety.

‘Should I?’ I asked Miriam.

‘Would you mind awfully?’ she replied.

And so I jumped out of the car and edged close enough to Morley to make a grab at his clothes if he were to lose his footing.

‘What do you think, Sefton?’

‘It is certainly a steep cliff-face, Mr Morley. And we’re all rather lucky not to be heading over the edge.’

‘Five-hundred-foot drop, would you say?’

‘Something like it,’ I said.

‘V. diff., do you think?’

‘V. diff.?’

‘Climbing-wise.’

‘Yes,’ I said, not entirely sure what he meant.

‘Straight down to a nice little hidden beach.’

‘Indeed. Quite a drop.’

‘Into the ocean.’

‘Indeed.’

‘The abyss – tehom, in the Hebrew, isn’t it? “Draw me out of the mire, that I may not stick fast: deliver me from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters. Let not the tempest of water drown me, nor the deep swallow me up: and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me.” What is that? Psalms … 68? 69?’

‘I don’t remember exactly.’

‘Ever done any mountaineering of any kind, Sefton?’

‘I can’t say I have, Mr Morley, no.’

‘Well, we’ll have to put that right. I was lucky enough to have climbed with Mallory and Sandy Irvine. Long time ago. Do you know Lisle Strutt?’

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘Glad to hear it. President of the Alpine Club. I resigned in protest. Not a fan.’

‘Father, come on!’ said Miriam. ‘Enough shilly-shallying. It’s late.’

‘Next trip, we’ll bring along some rock boots and rope and see where it takes us, shall we?’

‘That sounds like an excellent idea,’ I said. ‘I look forward to it.’

‘Not tonight though, chaps, eh?’ cried Miriam, who had lit a cigarette and who seemed to have instantly recovered from our near-death experience and was enjoying the cool breeze from the sea. She, like her father, rather enjoyed risk-taking, near-misses and every other kind of calamity. Neither of them, of course, had ever been to war.

‘Thing to remember, Sefton,’ said Morley, as we made our way back to the car, ‘is that the top of the ascent is the most dangerous part of any climb. The summit, you see. Gets the old heart racing.’

‘Is your heart racing, Sefton?’ said Miriam, as we clambered back into the car.

I was in fact feeling my stomach grumbling – we hadn’t had anything to eat since our filthy Nell Gwynn buns.

‘You know, we could camp out here for the night,’ said Morley. ‘Do you remember we used to do that when you were young, Miriam? In the old Standard? It had the detachable front seats, and your mother would—’

‘Not tonight, Father,’ cried Miriam.

‘“Only the road and the dawn,”’ said Morley, ‘“the sun, the wind and the rain, / And the watch fire under stars, and sleep and the road again.”’

‘Not tonight, thank you, Father!’

‘Very well,’ said Morley.

‘Onwards!’ said Miriam.

‘Or backwards,’ said Morley, ‘to be accurate.’

‘Thank you, Father.’

Eventually managing to reverse back up the lane in the Lagonda – after much pushing and the grinding of gears – we picked up another route and soon found ourselves stopping in a courtyard outside an enormous building that by all appearances – mullioned windows, finialled gables, coats of arms and what-not – had to be the main Rousdon manor house. We had arrived at All Souls.

CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_c47a6588-3447-56be-8fc2-f9ce6ba944ec)

A SODALITY OF PEDAGOGUES (#ulink_c47a6588-3447-56be-8fc2-f9ce6ba944ec)

AT THE SOUND OF OUR APPROACH the vast door of the manor house was swung open by a worried-looking young woman, apparently a nurse, who was done out in a most striking outfit, consisting of a blood-red dress with a white apron over it, and a little Sister Dora cap perched jauntily on her head, which gave her the appearance of someone having just rushed panicking from performing some particularly grisly surgery. From behind this rather ghoulish creature first came there a voice, and then a man, shuffling into view.

‘Do I hear John Bull’s roar?’ cried the voice. ‘The People’s Professor?’

‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,’ Morley said to the figure who now stood in the doorway. Their exchange of words caused much mutual amusement – it was some kind of private greeting, I understood. There was then a prolonged and vigorous shaking of hands – the two men seemed to operate on the same frequency and gave off exactly the same vibration of relentlessly hearty vigour – and Morley then introduced us.

‘This is Dr Standish,’ he said. ‘Headmaster of All Souls.’

‘Well, well, well,’ said Dr Standish. ‘What do we have here?’

What we had here was a man who might almost have been Morley’s double, though perhaps a little more careworn, his face perhaps rather coarser-featured, his cheeks perhaps a little redder and rounder, his moustache rather more drooping, and his eyes small and hard and bitter, like a blackbird’s.

‘This is my assistant,’ said Morley, ‘Mr Stephen Sefton.’

‘Your Boswell, eh, Swanton?’ said Dr Standish, in a rather sniggering fashion, I thought.