Death in Devon

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Also by Ian Sansom

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CHAPTER 1 (#udc52d46a-46ed-5ba2-826a-bd169e6a1732)

GOOD TO BE BACK (#udc52d46a-46ed-5ba2-826a-bd169e6a1732)

‘AH, SEFTON, MY FECKLESS FRIEND,’ said Morley. ‘Just the man. Now. Rousseau? What do you think?’

He was, inevitably, writing one of his – inevitable – articles. The interminable articles. The inevitable and interminable articles that made up effectively his one, vast inevitable and interminable article. The über-article. The article to end all articles. The grand accomplishment. The statement. What he would have called the magnum bonum. The Gesamtkuntswerk. ‘An essay a day keeps the bailiffs at bay,’ he would sometimes say, when I suggested he might want to reduce his output, and ‘The night cometh when no man can work, Sefton. Gospel of John, chapter nine, do you know it?’ I knew it, of course. But only because he spoke of it incessantly. Interminably. Inevitably. It was a kind of mantra. One of many. Swanton Morley was a man of many mantras – of catchphrases, proverbs, aphorisms, slang, street talk and endless Latin tags. He was a collector, to borrow the title of one of his most popular books, of Unconsidered Trifles (1934). ‘It takes as little to console us as it does to afflict us.’ ‘Respice finem.’ And ‘May you never meet a mouse in your pantry with tears in his eyes.’ Morley’s endless work, his inexhaustible sayings, were, it seemed to me, a kind of amulet, a form of linguistic self-protection. Language was his great superstition – and his saviour.

To stave off the universal twilight that evening Morley had rigged up the usual lamps and candles, and had his reams of paper piled up around him, like the snow-capped peaks of the Karakoram, or faggots on a pyre, like white marble stepping stones leading up to the big kitchen table plateau, where reference books lay open to the left and to the right of him, pads and pens and pencils at his elbow, his piercing eyes a-twinkling, his Empire moustache a-twitching, his brogue-booted feet a-tapping and his head a-nodding ever so slightly to the rhythms of his keystrokes as he worked at his typewriter, for all the world as if he were an explorer of some far distant realm of ideas, or some mad scientist out of a fantasy by H.G. Wells, strapped to an infernal computational machine. A glass and a jug of barley water were placed beside him, in their customary position – his only indulgence.

It was already well after midnight. I had returned to Norfolk and St George’s after two days in London, attempting to put my affairs in order and succeeding only in disordering them further.

‘Rousseau?’ I said. It was my job in these exchanges, I had soon realised, to bat the ball gently back to him, the warmup to his Fred Perry, as it were, throwing him balls or titbits, that he might leap up and devour them. ‘My interlocutor’, he would sometimes introduce me to new acquaintances, or, alas, worse, ‘My bo’, one of those terribly unfortunate phrases he’d picked up from his beloved hard-boiled detective stories, and which got us into a number of scrapes over the years. Damon Runyon, Ellery Queen: I could never quite understand his enthusiasm for purveyors of what he might, in the argot, have called shtick.

‘Rousseau. Yes.’ I was finding it hard to think. I had, admittedly, in London, been drinking and indulging, even though I had promised myself not to return to my former habits and haunts, but had found it impossible to resist. Just forty-eight hours away from Morley and his high thinking and I had descended back down to the depths of my depravities.

‘Come, come, Sefton. Rousseau?’ He clapped his hands.

‘Well …’ I’d managed to catch the last train out of Liverpool Street for Norfolk, in the full knowledge that if I stayed a day longer the die would be cast for ever, and I would be adrift and out of employment again, at the mercy of Messrs Gabbitas and Thring, and worse …

‘Hello? Dial 0 for operator?’ He rapped his knuckles against the table. ‘Hello? Operator? It’s ringing for you, caller! Remind me why I employed you again, Sefton?’

I had at that stage been Swanton Morley’s amanuensis, his assistant, and his ‘bo’ for approximately two weeks. And I had to admit that – apart from my time in Spain – it had been the strangest, most utterly disorientating and exhilarating two weeks of my life. It had also – not insignificantly – helped to solve certain personal and practical problems I had been facing in London. Which is why, after a hectic few days, I had returned again to the wilds of Norfolk ready to clock in promptly for work on Monday morning.

‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau,’ I offered, fossicking around in my rather disordered mental store cupboard. ‘Philosopher. Educationalist—’

‘No! No! No! Come on, man. Wrong Rousseau!’ said Morley. ‘Henri. Or Henri, pronounced in the continental fashion.’

‘Ah.’ As if I should have known which continental Rousseau he had in mind.

‘Here, here. Come, come, come.’

Morley beckoned me towards him. I edged carefully around the books and papers and looked over his shoulder at one of the large volumes spread out on the desk.

‘Well. What do you think of that?’

The moon shone down brightly from the high window above the table, illuminating the book, which showed an illustration of an extraordinarily vivid, disturbed sort of painting, like the work of a brilliantly gifted child, depicting what was presumably supposed to be a lion sinking its teeth into what was presumably an …

‘Anteater?’ I said.

‘Antelope,’ said Morley. ‘Though granted it’s not entirely clear. The gaucheries of the self-taught, eh, Sefton?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not that you’d know anything about that, eh?’

‘Well, no’ – my privileged upbringing and education were a constant source of amusement to Morley, who had raised himself by his proverbial bootstraps, and who found it hard to take anyone seriously who did not possess bootstraps that needed raising – ‘although—’

‘Quite extraordinary,’ he said.

‘Quite extraordinary,’ I agreed. ‘Remarkable.’ I was rather groggy from the after-effects of my journey, and all the tobacco, and drink and too little sleep – and even under the best of circumstances it was simply easier to agree with Morley.

He turned the page to another illustration. A lion eating a leopard. And another page: a tiger attacking a water buffalo. And another: a jaguar bringing down a white horse.

‘Wonderful stuff, isn’t it, Sefton?’

‘It’s certainly … interesting, Mr Morley,’ I agreed.

‘Interesting?’ he said. ‘Interesting?’ ‘Interesting’, I learned over time, was a trigger word. There were others. ‘Literally’, for example, used incorrectly, would send him – literally – mad. ‘Effect’, as a cause, infuriated him. His ‘instant’ was never quick. And he could never see the irony in ‘irony’. His moustache bristled. ‘Is that really an aesthetic category, Sefton, do you think? Interesting? Hmm? Acceptable to the philosophers and critics of taste in your alma mater, in the old wisteria-swagged ivory towers of Cambridge, do you think? Mr Wittgenstein? Mr Leavis? “Interesting”? A common term of approbation among your peers, is it?’

‘Well …’

‘God save us from “interesting”, Sefton. God Himself save us. Jesus Christ? Hmm? What do you think?’

‘What do I think about Jesus Christ, Mr Morley?’

‘“Interesting” sort of fellow, would you say? And what about – I don’t know, take your pick – Tutankhamun? Captain Scott? Napoleon? Christopher Columbus? Any of them “interesting” in your books? J.M.W. Turner perhaps? J.S. Bach? “Interesting” at all, at all, at all?’

‘Erm …’

‘Never left France, Rousseau.’ Morley suddenly switched tack, as he was wont to do. ‘All this exotica derived entirely from images in books and magazines. And up here, of course.’ He tapped his head with his fingers, one of his favourite gestures in his wide repertoire of gestures: he would have made a fine actor in rather broad Shakespearean roles, I always thought, or perhaps an understudy to Charles Laughton, though in looks of course, as has often been remarked, he resembled rather more a mustachioed Fritz Leiber, in his heyday in The Queen of Sheba. ‘And the Jardin des Plantes,’ he continued. ‘Dioramas in museums and what have you – look at the lion there, looks like a stuffed toy, doesn’t it? Product entirely of the imagination, Sefton. An orchestration of images, ideas and desires. And yet an instinctive understanding of the mysteries of the tropical, wouldn’t you say? Look at that undergrowth.’

‘Yes.’

‘I think our friend Herr Freud would have something to say about Rousseau, wouldn’t he, eh? Monsieur Henri, eh? Eh?’

‘I’m sure he would, Mr Morley.’ Though I wasn’t sure entirely what it was Freud would have to say. Nor did I entirely care.

‘Hmm.’ He stroked his moustache. ‘The tangles, you see, Sefton. Tangles. Tangles. You see the tangles?’ I saw the tangles. ‘And the deep lush vegetation. Vines. Lianas. Terrible confrontations in deep dusky dells with mysterious hairy beasts. Look at these gashes and wounds here.’

‘Yes.’

‘One doesn’t have to be Viennese, I think, to have a guess, does one?’

‘No, Mr Morley.’ Or rather, What, Mr Morley? (Which is of course the title of his famous series of books of notes and queries, published annually, containing answers to questions posed in the form of the book’s title, thus, ‘What, Mr Morley, is the meaning of the term mah nishtana, which I have heard some of my Jewish neighbours exclaim, and which I believe may be either Hebrew or the Jewish language of Yiddish?’, or ‘What, Mr Morley, is the best way to remove coal dust from my antimacassar?’)

‘Not quite top rank though, is it?’ continued Morley. ‘In all honesty? I think we’ll grant him an accessit, shall we?’

‘A—’