Death in Devon

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Pixies?’ I said.

‘Indeed.’

‘You’re not serious?’

‘Deadly,’ said Miriam. ‘Deadly serious.’

‘Pixies?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Absolutely. Father is as serious about his pixies as Conan Doyle was about his fairies. Didn’t you know? Deadly, deadly serious.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Well, I suppose we must allow for the possibility of—’

‘Of course he doesn’t believe in pixies, Sefton!’ cried Miriam.

‘Joke!’ cried Morley. ‘Jolly good, Miriam.’

They roared with laughter: they had a curious sense of humour, the pair of them.

‘Pixies!’ cried Morley, tears coursing down his face. ‘Pixies!’

‘Pixies!’ cried Miriam, sobbing with laughter also.

‘Do you think I have entirely taken leave of my senses?’ This was not a question that required an answer. He wiped the tears from his eyes.

‘People will believe anything, won’t they?’ said Miriam.

‘Indeed they will, my dear,’ said Morley. ‘Indeed they will.’

‘Ghoulies and ghosties!’

‘Gremlins and goodness knows what,’ said Morley. ‘Do you know Yeats’s poem “The Land of Heart’s Desire”, Sefton?’

‘I’m—’

He began to intone, in Yeatsian fashion:

The Land of Faery Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.

‘Pure fantasy,’ said Morley. ‘Absolute nonsense.’

‘Pixies!’ cried Miriam.

‘Pixies!’ echoed Morley. ‘Marvellous! Marvellous!’

And so, in characteristic fashion, we arrived at our destination.

CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_e64b25c2-7ab4-58e1-b519-7b97e2396d18)

THE VERY BOUNDARIES OF ENGLAND (#ulink_e64b25c2-7ab4-58e1-b519-7b97e2396d18)

ROUSDON, according to White’s History, Gazetteer and Directory of Devonshire (1850) – a copy of which Morley had usefully brought with us, along with several other dusty old directories, including Pigot’s, Kelly’s and Slater’s, and a small suitcase-worth of up-to-date guidebooks to the geography, topography, history, culture, coastal scenery and cider-making heritage of a county that most of them insisted on referring to, inevitably, at some point in their Exmoor sheep-herd-like ramblings as ‘Glorious’ – ‘is an extra parochial estate belonging to R.C. Bartlett Esq., and lying within the bounds of Axminster parish, adjoining the great landslip of Dowlands and Bindon’.

This hardly does the place justice. Rousdon is not merely extra parochial. It is ultra-extra parochial. It is far, far, far beyond the parochial. It might best be described as a place at the edge of the world.

The land, with its few original buildings, according to all accounts, was purchased some time around 1870 by a Sir Henry Peek, who undertook various schemes of improvement, including rebuilding the existing church, providing a small school, the vast mansion, a coach house, a bake house, farm buildings, cottages, a walled garden, tennis courts, and every other possible kind of dwelling, convenience and requisite for what became effectively a small private village. The Peek family – latterly Peek Brothers and Winch – had made their fortune as importers of tea, coffee and spices, and Rousdon does indeed have rather the feeling of a plantation complex, ‘with all the appearance of having been planned by the Tudors, built by the Jacobeans, and completed by the Victorians’, according to Morley in The County Guides, ‘and with perhaps just a touch of the Lombardic, in what one might generously describe as an act of freestyle Anglo-Euro-Renaissance sprezzatura’. For all its undoubted pizzazz and sprezzatura, the estate’s development was in fact overseen and undertaken by a redoubtable Englishman, Ernest George, who was one of Morley’s great heroes, and responsible also for Cawston Manor in Norfolk, one of Morley’s favourite English houses, and Golders Green crematorium – undoubtedly his favourite crematorium.

The estate is approached by a long driveway, though since it was dark by the time we arrived, having stopped off at Lyme Regis in order for Morley, in his words, to ‘acquaint myself with some ammonites’, I wasn’t aware initially of the extraordinary dimensions of the place and it wasn’t until we – just – managed to stop the car at the bottom of a steep, deep dark lane, our having taken another wrong turning in a maze of roads, that I realised that the entire estate seemed to have been built along a clifftop that dropped precipitously down to the sea.

Rousdon isn’t just isolated: it is simply on its own. It is one of the very boundaries of England. And we were about to go sailing headlong over the edge of it …

Morley, as usual, was expounding on some subject or another, Miriam was energetically riposting, and I was doing my best to keep the peace. None of us was paying much attention to what was ahead. Fortunately we were travelling slowly, and it seems we all at once caught a glimpse of the cliff’s edge and the moon on the sea beyond it. Miriam gave a yelp, Morley uttered, accurately, if not entirely helpfully, ‘Thalatta! Thalatta!’ and I realised that if nothing was done then the fate of the overloaded Lagonda, stationery, surfboards, passengers and all, was going to be not dissimilar to that of the steam train in Buster Keaton’s The General (a film that Morley writes about at great length in his book Morley Goes to the Cinema, published in America as Morley’s Movies, a misleading title which rather implies that Morley himself were a film star, which he most certainly was not; his personality, if anything, was too big, too boisterous and too boundless for the silver screen; he was, I often thought, a strictly novelistic character, a panoramic soul from a panoramic story, of the kind found in the pages of Balzac, or Victor Hugo).

I yelled ‘Stop!’, leapt up out of my seat, leaned across and yanked on the handbrake. Miriam stamped on the footbrake, and Morley …

Morley had leapt out of the car – I thought initially to save himself from what might have been certain death. As it turned out, to my astonishment, he’d leapt out only to get closer to the cliff edge, where he immediately launched into another recitation. This time it was Kipling, ‘Mandalay’:

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,

Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst;

For the temple-bells are callin’, an’ it’s there that I would be –

By the old Moulemein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea.

‘Well,’ said Miriam, rather breathless, ‘we certainly seem to have found the limits of the estate, Sefton.’

‘Quite,’ I agreed.

‘I could have sworn the sign for the school pointed down this way.’

‘Apparently not,’ I said.

‘Did you see the sign, Father?’

‘Sign?’

‘For the school?’

‘No idea,’ said Morley. ‘But I think we might be able to climb down here, actually. Onto a little beach.’ He was standing perilously close to some loose scree.

‘Father!’ called Miriam. ‘For goodness sake, not tonight!’

‘A night-time descent might be rather fun,’ said Morley, staring down, illuminated by the headlamps of the car and framed by the bright-lit moon, making him appear rather like his own ghost, or a velvety shadow puppet.

‘We’re going back to find the school, Father.’