ONE

Beginnings

Arthur

A child wants to see. It always begins like this, and it began like this then. A child wanted to see.

He was able to walk, and could reach up to a door handle. He did this with nothing that could be called a purpose, merely the instinctive tourism of infancy. A door was there to be pushed; he walked in, stopped, looked. There was nobody to observe him; he turned and walked away, carefully shutting the door behind him.

What he saw there became his first memory. A small boy, a room, a bed, closed curtains leaking afternoon light. By the time he came to describe it publicly, sixty years had passed. How many internal retellings had smoothed and adjusted the plain words he finally used? Doubtless it still seemed as clear as on the day itself. The door, the room, the light, the bed, and what was on the bed: a “white, waxen thing.”

A small boy and a corpse: such encounters would not have been so rare in the Edinburgh of his time. High mortality rates and cramped circumstances made for early learning. The household was Catholic, and the body that of Arthur’s grandmother, one Katherine Pack. Perhaps the door had been deliberately left ajar. There might have been a desire to impress upon the child the horror of death; or, more optimistically, to show him that death was nothing to be feared. Grandmother’s soul had clearly flown up to Heaven, leaving behind only the sloughed husk of her body. The boy wants to see? Then let the boy see.

An encounter in a curtained room. A small boy and a corpse. A grandchild who, by the acquisition of memory, had just stopped being a thing, and a grandmother who, by losing those attributes the child was developing, had returned to that state. The small boy stared; and over half a century later the adult man was still staring. Quite what a “thing” amounted to—or, to put it more exactly, quite what happened when the tremendous change took place, leaving only a “thing” behind—was to become of central importance to Arthur.

George

George does not have a first memory, and by the time anyone suggests that it might be normal to have one, it is too late. He has no recollection obviously preceding all others—not of being picked up, cuddled, laughed at or chastised. He has an awareness of once having been an only child, and a knowledge that there is now Horace as well, but no primal sense of being disturbingly presented with a brother, no expulsion from paradise. Neither a first sight, nor a first smell: whether of a scented mother or a carbolicy maid-of-all-work.

He is a shy, earnest boy, acute at sensing the expectations of others. At times he feels he is letting his parents down: a dutiful child should remember being cared for from the first. Yet his parents never rebuke him for this inadequacy. And while other children might make good the lack—might forcibly install a mother’s doting face or a father’s supporting arm in their memories—George does not do so. For a start, he lacks imagination. Whether he has never had one, or whether its growth has been stunted by some parental act, is a question for a branch of psychological science which has not yet been devised. George is fully capable of following the inventions of others—the stories of Noah’s Ark, David and Goliath, the Journey of the Magi—but has little such capacity himself.

He does not feel guilty about this, since his parents do not regard it as a fault in him. When they say that a child in the village has “too much imagination,” it is clearly a term of dispraise. Further up the scale are “tellers of tall stories” and “fibbers”; by far the worst is the child who is “a liar through and through”—such are to be avoided at all costs. George himself is never urged to speak the truth: this would imply that he needs encouragement. It is simpler than this: he is expected to tell the truth because at the Vicarage no alternative exists.

“I am the way, the truth and the life”: he is to hear this many times on his father’s lips. The way, the truth and the life. You go on your way through life telling the truth. George knows that this is not exactly what the Bible means, but as he grows up this is how the words sound to him.

Arthur

For Arthur there was a normal distance between home and church; but each place was filled with presences, with stories and instructions. In the cold stone church where he went once a week to kneel and pray, there was God and Jesus Christ and the Twelve Apostles and the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins. Everything was very orderly, always listed and numbered, like the hymns and the prayers and the verses of the Bible.

He understood that what he learned there was the truth; but his imagination preferred the different, parallel version he was taught at home. His mother’s stories were also about far distant times, and also designed to teach him the distinction between right and wrong. She would stand at the kitchen range, stirring the porridge, tucking her hair back behind her ears as she did so; and he would wait for the moment when she would tap the stick against the pan, pause, and turn her round, smiling face towards him. Then her grey eyes would hold him, while her voice made a moving curve in the air, swooping up and down, then slowing almost to a halt as she reached the part of the tale he could scarcely endure, the part where exquisite torment or joy awaited not just hero and heroine, but the listener as well.

“And then the knight was held over the pit of writhing snakes, which hissed and spat as their twining lengths ensnared the whitening bones of their previous victims . . .”

“And then the black-hearted villain, with a hideous oath, drew a secret dagger from his boot and advanced towards the defenceless . . .”

“And then the maiden took a pin from her hair and the golden tresses fell from the window, down, down, caressing the castle walls until they almost reached the verdant grass on which he stood . . .”

Arthur was an energetic, headstrong boy who did not easily sit still; but once the Mam raised her porridge stick he was held in a state of silent enchantment—as if a villain from one of her stories had slipped a secret herb into his food. Knights and their ladies then moved about the tiny kitchen; challenges were issued, quests miraculously fulfilled; armour clanked, chain mail rustled, and honour was always upheld.

These stories were connected, in a way that he did not at first understand, with an old wooden chest beside his parents’ bed, which held the papers of the family’s descent. Here were different kinds of stories, which more resembled school homework, about the ducal house of Brittany, and the Irish branch of the Percys of Northumberland, and someone who had led Pack’s Brigade at Waterloo, and was the uncle of the white, waxen thing he never forgot. And connected to all this were the private lessons in heraldry his mother gave him. From the kitchen cupboard the Mam would pull out large sheets of cardboard, painted and coloured by one of his uncles in London. She would explain the coats of arms, then instruct him in his turn: “Blazon me this shield!” And he would have to reply, as with multiplication tables: chevrons, estoiles, mullets, cinquefoils, crescents argent, and their glittering like.

At home he learned extra commandments on top of the ten he knew from church. “Fearless to the strong; humble to the weak,” was one, and “Chivalry towards women, of high and low degree.” He felt them to be more important, since they came directly from the Mam; they also demanded practical implementation. Arthur did not look beyond his immediate circumstances. The flat was small, money short, his mother overworked, his father erratic. Early on he made a childhood vow and vows, he knew, were never to be swerved from: “When you are old, Mammie, you shall have a velvet dress and gold glasses and sit in comfort by the fire.” Arthur could see the beginning of the story—where he was now—and its happy end; only the middle was for the moment lacking.

He searched for clues in his favourite author, Captain Mayne Reid. He looked in The Rifle Rangers: or Adventures of an Officer in Southern Mexico. He read The Young Voyageurs and The War Trail and The Headless Horseman. Buffaloes and Red Indians were now mixing in his head with chain-mailed knights and the infantrymen of Pack’s Brigade. His favourite Mayne Reid of all was The Scalp-Hunters: or Romantic Adventures in Southern Mexico. Arthur did not as yet know how the gold glasses and velvet dress were to be obtained; but he suspected it might involve a hazardous journey to Mexico.

George

His mother takes him once a week to visit Great-Uncle Compson. He lives not far away, behind a low granite kerb which George is not allowed to cross. Every week they renew his jug of flowers. Great Wyrley was Uncle Compson’s parish for twenty-six years; now his soul is in Heaven while his body remains in the churchyard. Mother explains this as she takes out the shrivelled stems, throws away the smelly water, and stands up the fresh, smooth flowers. Sometimes George is allowed to help her pour in the clean water. She tells him that excessive mourning is unChristian, but George does not understand this.

After Great-Uncle’s departure for Heaven, Father took his place. One year he married Mother, the next he obtained his parish, and the next George was born. This is the story he has been told, and it is clear and true and happy, as everything ought to be. There is Mother, who is constantly present in his life, teaching him his letters, kissing him goodnight; and Father, who is often absent because he is visiting the old and the sick, or writing his sermons, or preaching them. There is the Vicarage, the church, the building where Mother teaches Sunday school, the garden, the cat, the hens, the stretch of grass they cross between the Vicarage and the church, and the churchyard. This is George’s world, and he knows it well.

Inside the Vicarage, everything is quiet. There are prayers, books, needlework. You do not shout, you do not run, you do not soil yourself. The fire is sometimes noisy, so are the knives and forks if you do not hold them properly; so is his brother Horace when he arrives. But these are the exceptions in a world which is both peaceful and reliable. The world beyond the Vicarage seems to George filled with unexpected noise and unexpected happenings. When he is four, he is taken for a walk in the lanes and introduced to a cow. It is not the size of the beast that alarms him, nor the swollen udders wobbling in his eye-line, but the sudden hoarse bellow the thing utters for no good reason. It can only be in a very bad temper. George bursts into tears, while his father punishes the cow by hitting it with a stick. Then the animal turns sideways, raises its tail and soils itself. George is transfixed by this outpouring, by the strange splatty noise as it lands on the grass, by the way things have suddenly slipped out of control. But his mother’s hand pulls him away before he can consider it further.

It is not just the cow—or the cow’s many friends like the horse, the sheep and the pig—that renders George suspicious of the world beyond the Vicarage wall. Most of what he hears about it makes him anxious. It is full of people who are old, and sick, and poor, all of which are bad things to be, judging from Father’s attitude and lowered voice when he returns; and people called pit widows, which George does not understand. There are boys beyond the wall who are fibbers and, worse than that, liars through and through. There is also something called a Colliery nearby, which is where the coal in the grate comes from. He is not sure he likes coal. It is smelly and dusty and noisy when poked, and you are told to keep away from its flames; also, it is brought to the house by large fierce men in leather helmets which carry on down their backs. When the outside world brings the door-knocker down, George usually jumps. All things considered, he would prefer to stay here, inside, with Mother, with his brother Horace and new sister Maud, until it is time for him to go to Heaven and meet Great-Uncle Compson. But he suspects that this will not be allowed.

Arthur

They were always moving: half a dozen times in Arthur’s first ten years. The flats seemed to get smaller as the family grew larger. Apart from Arthur, there was his older sister Annette, his younger sisters Lottie and Connie, his little brother Innes, and then, later, his sisters Ida and Julia, known as Dodo. Their father was good at engendering children—there were another two who had not survived—but less good at providing for them. This early realization that his father would never furnish the Mam with the proper comforts of old age made Arthur all the more determined to provide them himself.

His father—Dukes of Brittany aside—came from an artistic family. He had talent and fine religious instincts; but was highly strung, and his constitution was not robust. He had come to Edinburgh from London at the age of nineteen; an assistant surveyor in Scotland’s Board of Works, he was precipitated at too early an age into a society which, though kindly, was often rough and hard-drinking. He did not progress at the Board of Works, nor at George Waterman & Sons, the lithographic printers. He was a gentle failure of a man, with a soft face behind a full, soft beard; he perceived duty distantly, and had lost his way in life.

He was never violent or aggressive; he was a drunkard of the sentimental, open-pursed, self-pitying kind. He would be brought home, dribbling into his beard, by cabmen whose insistence on being paid would wake the children; the next morning he would lament at maudlin length his inability to support those he loved so tenderly. One year Arthur was sent away to lodgings rather than witness a new stage of his father’s decline; but he saw enough to endorse his crescent understanding of what a man could or should be. In his mother’s tales of chivalry and romance there were few parts for drunken illustrators.

Arthur’s father painted in watercolour, and always intended to supplement his income by selling his work. But his generous nature constantly intervened; he gave his pictures away to all-comers, or at best accepted a few pence for them. His subjects could be wild and fearsome, and often gave evidence of his natural humour. But what he liked to paint best, and was most remembered for painting, was fairies.

George

George is sent to the village school. He wears a deep starched collar with a loose bow tie to hide the stud, a waistcoat which buttons up to just below the tie, and a jacket with high, almost horizontal lapels. Other boys are not so neat: some wear rough, home-knitted jerseys or ill-fitting jackets passed on from elder brothers. A few have starched collars, but only Harry Charlesworth wears a tie as George does.

His mother has taught him his letters, his father simple sums. For the first week he finds himself seated at the rear of the classroom. On Friday they will be tested and rearranged by intelligence: clever boys will sit at the front, stupid boys at the back; the reward for progress being to find yourself closer to the master, to the seat of instruction, to knowledge, to truth. This is Mr. Bostock, who wears a tweed jacket, a woollen waistcoat, and a shirt-collar whose points are pulled in behind his tie by a gold pin. Mr. Bostock carries a brown felt hat at all times and places it on the desk during class, as if he does not trust it out of his sight.

When there is a break between lessons the boys go outside into what is called the yard, but which is merely a trampled area of grass looking across open fields towards the distant Colliery. Boys who already know one another instantly start fighting, just for something to do. George has never seen boys fight before. As he watches, Sid Henshaw, one of the rougher boys, comes and stands in front of him. Henshaw makes monkey faces, pulling at the sides of his mouth with his little fingers while using his thumbs to flap his ears forward.

“How d’you do, my name’s George.” This is what he has been instructed to say. But Henshaw just carries on making gurgling noises and flapping his ears.

Some of the boys come from farms, and George thinks they smell of cows. Others are miners’ sons, and seem to talk differently. George learns the names of his schoolfellows: Sid Henshaw, Arthur Aram, Harry Boam, Horace Knighton, Harry Charlesworth, Wallie Sharp, John Harriman, Albert Yates . . .

His father says that he is going to make friends, but he is not sure how this is done. One morning Wallie Sharp comes up behind him in the yard and whispers,

“You’re not a right sort.”

George turns round. “How d’you do, my name’s George,” he repeats.

At the end of the first week Mr. Bostock tests them at reading, spelling and sums. He announces the results on Monday morning, and then they move desks. George is good at reading from the book in front of him, but his spelling and sums let him down. He is told to remain at the back of the form. He does no better the next Friday, and the one after that. By now he finds himself surrounded by farm boys and mine boys who don’t care where they sit, indeed think it an advantage to be farther away from Mr. Bostock so they can misbehave. George feels as if he is being slowly banished from the way, the truth and the life.

Mr. Bostock stabs at the blackboard with a piece of chalk. “This, George, plus this” (stab) “equals what?” (stab stab).

Everything in his head is a blur, and George guesses wildly. “Twelve,” he says, or “Seven and a half.” The boys at the front laugh, and then the farm boys join in when they realize he is wrong.

Mr. Bostock sighs and shakes his head and asks Harry Charlesworth, who is always in the front row and has his hand up all the time.

“Eight,” Harry says, or “Thirteen and a quarter,” and Mr. Bostock moves his head in George’s direction, to show how stupid he has been.

One afternoon, on his way back to the Vicarage, George soils himself. His mother takes off his clothes, stands him in the bath, scrubs him down, dresses him again and takes him to Father. But George is unable to explain to his father why, though he is nearly seven years old, he has behaved like a baby in napkins.

This happens again, and then again. His parents do not punish him, but their evident disappointment in their first-born—stupid at school, a baby on the way home—is as bad as any punishment. They discuss him over the top of his head.

“The child gets his nerves from you, Charlotte.”

“In any event, it cannot be teething.”

“We can rule out cold, since we are in September.”

“And indigestible items of food, since Horace is not affected.”

“What remains?”

“The only other cause the book suggests is fright.”

“George, are you frightened of something?”

George looks at his father, at the shiny clerical collar, at the broad, unsmiling face above it, the mouth which speaks the frequently incomprehensible truth from the pulpit of St. Mark’s, and the black eyes which now command the truth from him. What is he to say? He is frightened of Wallie Sharp and Sid Henshaw and some others, but that would be telling on them. In any case, it is not what he fears most. Eventually he says, “I’m frightened of being stupid.”

“George,” his father replies, “we know you are not stupid. Your mother and I have taught you your letters and your sums. You are a bright boy. You can do sums at home but not at school. Can you tell us why?”

“No.”

“Does Mr. Bostock teach them differently?”

“No, Father.”

“Do you stop trying?”

“No, Father. I can do them in the book but I can’t do them on the board.”

“Charlotte, I think we should take him into Birmingham.”

Arthur

Arthur had uncles who watched their brother’s decline and pitied his family. Their solution was to send Arthur to be schooled by the Jesuits in England. Aged nine, he was put on the train at Edinburgh and wept all the way to Preston. He would spend the next seven years at Stonyhurst, except for six weeks each summer, when he returned to the Mam and to his occasional father.

These Jesuits had come over from Holland, bringing their curriculum and methods of discipline with them. Education comprised seven classes of knowledge—elements, figures, rudiments, grammar, syntax, poetry and rhetoric—with one year allotted to each. There was the usual public-school routine of Euclid, algebra and the classics, whose truths were endorsed by emphatic beatings. The instrument deployed—a piece of India rubber the size and thickness of a boot sole—had also come over from Holland, and was known as the Tolley. One blow on the hand, delivered with full Jesuitical intent, was enough to cause the palm to swell and change colour. The normal punishment for larger boys consisted of nine blows on each hand. Afterwards, the sinner could barely turn the doorknob of the study in which he had been beaten.

The Tolley, it was explained to Arthur, had received its name as a Latin pun. Fero, I bear. Fero, ferre, tuli, latum. Tuli, I have borne, the Tolley is what we have borne, yes?

The humour was as rough as the punishments. Asked how he saw his future, Arthur admitted that he had thought of becoming a civil engineer.

“Well, you may be an engineer,” replied the priest, “but I don’t think you’ll ever be a civil one.”

Arthur developed into a large, boisterous youth, who found consolation in the school library and happiness on the cricket field. Once a week the boys were set to write home, which most regarded as a further punishment, but Arthur viewed as a reward. For that hour he would pour out everything to his mother. There may have been God, and Jesus Christ, and the Bible, and the Jesuits, and the Tolley, but the authority he most believed in and submitted to was his small, commanding Mam. She was an expert in all matters, from underclothing to hellfire. “Wear flannel next to your skin,” she advised him, “and never believe in eternal punishment.”

She had also, less deliberately, taught him a way to popularity. Early on, he began telling his fellow pupils the stories of chivalry and romance he had first heard from beneath a raised porridge stick. On wet half-holidays, he would stand on a desk while his audience squatted around him. Remembering the Mam’s skills, he knew how to drop his voice, how to drag out a story, how to leave off at a perilous, excruciating moment with the promise of more the next day. Being large and hungry, he would accept a pastry as the basic price of a tale. But sometimes, he might stop dead at the thrill of a crisis, and could only be got going again at the cost of an apple.

Thus he discovered the essential connection between narrative and reward.

George

The oculist does not recommend spectacles for young children. It is better to let the boy’s eyes adjust naturally over the years. In the meanwhile, he should be moved to the front of the classroom. George leaves the farm boys behind and is placed beside Harry Charlesworth, who is regularly top in tests. School now makes sense to George; he can see where Mr. Bostock’s chalk is stabbing, and he never again soils himself on the way home.

Sid Henshaw carries on making monkey faces, but George barely notices. Sid Henshaw is just a stupid farm boy who smells of cows and probably cannot even spell the word.

One day, Henshaw rushes at George in the yard, barges him with his shoulder, and as George is recovering himself, pulls off his bow tie and runs away. George hears laughter. Back in the classroom, Mr. Bostock asks where his tie has got to.

This presents George with a problem. He knows it is wrong to get a schoolfellow into trouble. But he knows it is worse to tell lies. His father is quite clear about this. Once you start telling lies you are led into the paths of sin and nothing will stop you until the hangman slips a noose around your neck. No one has said as much, but this is what George has understood. So he cannot lie to Mr. Bostock. He looks for a way out—which is perhaps bad enough anyway, the start of a lie—and then he simply answers the question.

“Sid Henshaw knocked me and took it.”

Mr. Bostock leads Henshaw out by the hair, beats him until he howls, comes back with George’s tie, and gives the class a lecture about theft. After school, Wallie Sharp stands in George’s path and as he steps round him says, “You’re not a right sort.”

George rules out Wallie Sharp as a possible friend.

He rarely feels the lack of what he does not have. The family takes no part in local society, but George cannot imagine what this might involve, let alone what the reason for their unwillingness, or failure, might be. He himself never goes to other boys’ houses, so cannot judge how things are conducted elsewhere. His life is sufficient unto itself. He has no money, but also no need of it, and even less when he learns that its love is the root of all evil. He has no toys, but does not miss them. He lacks the skill and eyesight for games; he has never even jumped a hopscotch grid, while a thrown ball makes him flinch. He is happy to play fraternally with Horace, more gently with Maud, and more gently still with the hens.

He is aware that most boys have friends—there are David and Jonathan in the Bible, and he has watched Harry Boam and Arthur Aram huddling at the edge of the yard and showing one another things from their pockets—but he never finds this happening to himself. Is he meant to do something, or are they meant to do something? In any case, though he wants to please Mr. Bostock, he is not especially interested in pleasing the boys who sit behind him.

When Great-Aunt Stoneham comes to tea, as she does on the first Sunday of each month, she scrapes her cup noisily across its saucer and through a wrinkled mouth asks him about his friends.

“Harry Charlesworth,” he always replies. “He sits next to me.”

The third time he gives her the same reply, she puts her cup noisily back in its saucer, frowns, and asks, “Anyone else?”

“The rest of them are just smelly farm boys,” he replies.

From the way Great-Aunt Stoneham looks at Father, he knows he has said something wrong. Before supper, he is called into the study. His father stands at his desk, with all the authority of the faith shelved behind him.

“George, how old are you?”

This is how conversations often begin with Father. They both of them already know the answer, but George still has to give it.

“Seven, Father.”

“That is an age by which a certain intelligence and judgement may reasonably be expected. So let me ask you this, George. Do you think that in the eyes of God you are more important than boys who live on farms?”

George can tell that the correct answer is No, but is reluctant to give it immediately. Surely a boy who lives in the Vicarage, whose father is the Vicar and whose great-uncle has been Vicar as well, is more important to God than a boy who never goes to church and is stupid and also cruel like Harry Boam?

“No,” he says.

“And why do you call these boys smelly?”

It is less clear what the correct answer to this might be. George considers the matter. The correct answer, he has been taught, is the truthful one.

“Because they are, Father.”

His father sighs. “And if they are, George, why are they?”

“Why are they what, Father?”

“Smelly.”

“Because they do not wash.”

“No, George, if they are smelly, it is because they are poor. We are fortunate enough to be able to afford soap, and fresh linen, and to have a bathroom, and not to live in close proximity with beasts. They are the humble of the earth. And tell me this, whom does God love more, the humble of the earth or those who are filled with wrongful pride?”

This is an easier question, even if George doesn’t particularly agree with the answer. “The humble of the earth, Father.”

“Blessed are the meek, George. You know the verse.”

“Yes, Father.”

But something in George resists this conclusion. He does not think Harry Boam and Arthur Aram are meek. Nor can he believe it to be part of God’s eternal plan for His creation that Harry Boam and Arthur Aram shall end up inheriting the earth. That would scarcely conform to George’s sense of justice. They are just smelly farm boys, after all.

Arthur

Stonyhurst offered to remit Arthur’s school fees if he was prepared to train for the priesthood; but the Mam declined the proposal. Arthur was ambitious and well capable of leadership, already marked down as a future Captain of Cricket. But she did not foresee any child of hers as a spiritual guide. Arthur, for his part, knew that he could not possibly supply the promised gold glasses and velvet dress and seat by the fire if he vowed himself to a life of poverty and obedience.

The Jesuits were not bad fellows, in his assessment. They considered human nature to be essentially weak, and their mistrust seemed justified to Arthur: you only had to look at his own father. They also understood that sinfulness began early. Boys were never permitted to be alone together; masters always accompanied them on walks; and every night a shadowy figure would perambulate the dormitories. Constant surveillance might undermine self-respect and self-help; but the immorality and beastliness rife at other schools were kept to a minimum.

Arthur believed, in a general way, that God existed, that boys were tempted by sin, and that the Fathers were right to beat them with the Tolley. When it came to particular articles of faith, he argued in private with his friend Partridge. He had been impressed by Partridge when, standing at second slip, he had taken a blinding catch from one of Arthur’s fastest deliveries, pocketed the ball quicker than the eye could see, and turned away, pretending to watch the ball disappear to the boundary. Partridge liked to bamboozle a fellow, and not just on the cricket field.

“Are you aware that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception became an article of faith as recently as 1854?”

“Somewhat late in the day, I’d have thought, Partridge.”

“Imagine. The Church has been debating the dogma for centuries, and all that time it has never been heresy to deny it. Now it is.”

“Hmm.”

“Now why should Rome decide, so far after the event, to downgrade the participation of Mary’s corporeal father in the matter?”

“I say, steady on, man.”

But Partridge was already addressing the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, pronounced only five years previously. Why should all the popes of centuries past be implicitly declared fallible, and all popes present and future the opposite? Why indeed, Arthur echoed. Because, Partridge rejoined, it was more a question of Church politics than theological advance. It was all to do with the presence of influential Jesuits high up in the Vatican.

“You are sent to tempt me,” Arthur would sometimes reply.

“On the contrary. I am here to strengthen your faith. Thinking for ourselves within the Church is the path of true obedience. Whenever the Church feels threatened, it responds by imposing stricter discipline. It works in the short term, but not in the long. It’s like the Tolley. You are beaten today, and so you do not offend again tomorrow or the next day. But not offending for the rest of your life because of a memory of the Tolley is a nonsense, is it not?”

“Not if it works.”

“But in a year or two we shall be quit of this place. The Tolley will not exist any more. We need to be equipped to resist sin and crime by rational argument, not the fear of physical pain.”

“I doubt rational argument will work on some boys.”

“Then the Tolley by all means. And the same in the world outside. Of course there must be prison, and hard labour, and the hangman.”

“But what is the Church threatened by? It seems strong to me.”

“By science. By the spread of sceptical teaching. By the loss of the Papal States. By the loss of political influence. By the prospect of the twentieth century.”

“The twentieth century.” Arthur mused on this a moment. “I cannot think that far. I shall be forty by the time the next century begins.”

“And captain of the England team.”

“I doubt it, Partridge. But not a priest, at any rate.”

Arthur was not exactly conscious of his faith weakening. But thinking for himself within the Church slipped easily into thinking for himself outside it. He found that his reason and conscience did not always accept what was placed in front of them. In his last year at school, Father Murphy came to preach. High in the pulpit, fierce and red-faced, the priest threatened sure and certain damnation for all who remained outside the Church. Whether their exclusion came from wickedness, wilfulness or mere ignorance, the consequences were the same: sure and certain damnation for all eternity. There followed a panoramic description of the torments and desolations of Hell, especially designed to make boys squirm; but Arthur had stopped attending. The Mam had told him what was the case; and he now gazed up at Father Murphy as at a storyteller he no longer believed.

George

Mother teaches Sunday school in the building next door to the Vicarage. Its brickwork has a diamond pattern to it which Mother says reminds her of a Fair Isle comforter. George does not understand this, though wonders if it has anything to do with Job’s comforters. He looks forward to Sunday school all week. The rough boys do not attend: they are running wild in the fields, trapping rabbits, telling lies, and generally going down the primrose path to everlasting damnation. Mother has warned him that in class she will treat him exactly the same as everyone else. George understands why: because she is showing them all—equally—the way to Heaven.

She tells them exciting stories which George can follow easily: like Daniel in the Lions’ Den, and the Burning Fiery Furnace. But other stories prove more difficult. Christ taught in Parables, and George finds he does not like Parables. Take the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. George understands the part about the enemy planting Tares among the Wheat, and how you shouldn’t gather up the Tares in case you root out the Wheat at the same time—though he isn’t entirely sure about this, because he often sees Mother weeding in the Vicarage garden and what is weeding except gathering up the Tares before they and the Wheat are fully grown? But even ignoring this problem, he can go no further. He knows the story is all about something else—that is why it is a Parable—but what this something else might be his mind will not reach to.

He tells Horace about the Wheat and the Tares, but Horace does not even understand what Tares are. Horace is three years younger than George, and Maud is three years younger than Horace. Maud, being a girl, and also being the youngest child, is not as strong as the two boys, who are told it is their duty to protect her. Quite what this involves is left unspecified; it seems to consist mainly of not doing things—not poking her with sticks, not pulling her hair, and not making noises in her face as Horace likes doing.

But George and Horace prove inadequate at protecting Maud. The doctor’s visits begin, and his regular inspections cast the family into a state of anxiety. George feels guilty whenever the doctor calls, and stays out of the way, in case he is identified as the prime cause of his sister’s illness. Horace feels no such guilt, and cheerfully asks if he may carry the doctor’s bag upstairs.

When Maud is four, it is decided that she is too frail to be left on her own all night, and that neither George nor Horace, nor even the combination of the two, can be trusted with her nocturnal care. From now on she will sleep in their mother’s room. At the same time, it is decided that George will sleep with his father, and Horace will have the nursery to himself. George is now ten, and Horace seven; perhaps it is thought that the age of sinfulness is approaching, and the two boys should not be left alone together. No explanation is given, and none is sought. George does not ask whether being put to sleep in his father’s room is a punishment or a reward. It is how things are, which is all there is to be said.

George and his father pray together, kneeling side by side on the scrubbed boards. Then George climbs into bed while his father locks the door and turns out the light. As he falls asleep, George sometimes thinks of the floor, and how his soul must be scrubbed just as the boards are scrubbed.

Father is not an easy sleeper, and has a tendency to groan and wheeze. Sometimes, in the early morning, when dawn is beginning to show at the edges of the curtains, Father will catechize him.

“George, where do you live?”

“The Vicarage, Great Wyrley.”

“And where is that?”

“Staffordshire, Father.”

“And where is that?”

“The centre of England.”

“And what is England, George?”

“England is the beating heart of the Empire, Father.”

“Good. And what is the blood that flows through the arteries and veins of the Empire to reach even its farthest shore?”

“The Church of England.”

“Good, George.”

And after a while Father begins to groan and wheeze again. George watches the outline of the curtain harden. He lies there thinking of arteries and veins making red lines on the map of the world, linking Britain to all the places coloured pink: Australia and India and Canada and islands dotted everywhere. He thinks of tubes being laid along the bed of the ocean like telegraph cables. He thinks of blood bubbling through these tubes and emerging in Sydney, Bombay, Cape Town. Bloodlines, that is a word he has heard somewhere. With the pulse of blood in his ears, he begins to fall asleep again.

Arthur

Arthur passed his Matriculation with Honours; but being still only sixteen, he was sent for a further year among the Jesuits in Austria. At Feldkirch he discovered a kindlier regime, which allowed beer drinking and heated dormitories. There were long walks, on which English pupils were deliberately flanked by German-speaking boys, thus obliging them to speak the language. Arthur appointed himself editor and sole contributor of The Feldkirchian Gazette, a hand-written literary and scientific magazine. He also played football on stilts, and was taught the Bombardon tuba, an instrument which wrapped twice around the chest and made a sound like Judgement Day.

On his return to Edinburgh, he discovered that his father was in a nursing home, officially suffering from epilepsy. There would be no more income, not even occasional coppers from watercolours of fairies. So Annette, the eldest sister, was already in Portugal, working as a governess; Lottie would soon join her, and they would send money home. The Mam’s other recourse was to take in lodgers. Arthur felt embarrassed and affronted by this. His mother, of all people, should not be reduced to the status of a landlady.

“But Arthur, if people did not take in lodgers, your father would never have come to live with Grandma Pack, and I should never have met him.”

This struck Arthur as an even stronger argument against lodgers. He knew he was not allowed to criticize his father in any way, so he remained silent. But it was a nonsense to pretend that the Mam could not have made a better match.

“And if that had not happened,” she went on, smiling at him with those grey eyes which he could never disobey, “not only would there have been no Arthur, there would have been no Annette, no Lottie, no Connie, no Innes and no Ida.”

This was indisputably true, and also one of those insoluble metaphysical conundrums. He wished Partridge were there to help him debate the question: could you remain yourself, or at least enough of yourself, if you had a different father? If not, it also followed that his sisters would not have remained themselves either, especially Lottie, whom he loved the best, even though Connie was said to be prettier. He could just about imagine himself being different, but his brain would not stretch to changing one iota of Lottie.

Arthur might have better stomached the Mam’s response to their reduced social condition if he had not already met her first lodger. Bryan Charles Waller: just six years older than Arthur, but already a qualified doctor. Also a published poet, whose uncle had received the dedication of Vanity Fair. Arthur did not object to the fact that the fellow was well-read, even scholarly; nor to the fact that he was a hot-hearted atheist; he objected to the way he was far too easy and charming around the house. The way he said, “So this is Arthur,” and smilingly held out his hand. The way he implied he was one step ahead of you already. The way he wore his two London suits, and talked in generalities and epigrams. The way he was with Lottie and Connie. The way he was with the Mam.

He was easy and charming with Arthur, too, which went down ill with the large, awkward, stubborn ex-schoolboy just back from Austria. Waller behaved as if he understood Arthur even when Arthur could not seem to understand himself, when he stood there by his own fireside feeling as absurd as if he had a Bombardon tuba wrapped twice around him. He wanted to blow a blast of protest, the more so when Waller affected to peer into his very soul and—which was the most annoying part—to take what he found there seriously and yet also not seriously, smiling away as if all the confusion he detected was unsurprising and unimportant.

Far too easy and charming with life itself, dammit.

George

For as long as George can remember, there has been a maid-of-all-work at the Vicarage, someone in the background scrubbing, dusting, polishing, laying fires, blackening grate and setting the copper to boil. Every year or so there is a change of maid, as one gets married, another goes off to Cannock or Walsall or even Birmingham. George never pays them any attention, and now that he is at Rugeley School, taking the train there and back each day, he notices the maid’s existence even less.

He is glad to have escaped the village school with its stupid farm boys and odd-talking miners’ sons, whose very names he soon forgets. At Rugeley he is generally with the better sort of boy, while the masters consider it a useful thing to be intelligent. He gets on well enough with his fellows, even if he does not make any close friends. Harry Charlesworth goes to school in Walsall, and nowadays they merely nod at one another if they meet. George’s work, his family, and his faith, and all the duties that flow from these adherences, are what count. There will be time for other things later.

One Saturday afternoon, George is called to his father’s study. There is a large biblical concordance open on the desk, and some notes for tomorrow’s sermon. Father looks as he does in the pulpit. At least George can guess what his first question will be.

“George, how old are you?”

“Twelve, Father.”

“An age at which wisdom and discretion might to a certain degree be expected.”

George does not know if this is a question or not, so he remains silent.

“George, Elizabeth Foster complains that you look at her strangely.”

He is puzzled. Elizabeth Foster is the new maid; she has been there a few months. She wears a maid’s uniform, like all the previous maids.

“What does she mean, Father?”

“What do you think she means?”

George ponders this for a while. “Is it something sinful she means?”

“And if it is, what might it be?”

“My only sin, Father, is that I am hardly aware of her, though I know her to be part of God’s creation. I have not spoken to her more than twice, on occasions when she has mislaid objects. I have no reason to look at her.”

“No reason at all, George?”

“No reason at all, Father.”

“Then I shall tell her she is a foolish and malicious girl who will be dismissed if she gives further grounds for complaint.”

George is eager for his Latin verbs, and does not mind what becomes of Elizabeth Foster. Nor does he wonder if it is a sin not to mind what becomes of her.

Arthur

It was decided that Arthur would study medicine at Edinburgh University. He was responsible and hard-working; in time he would surely acquire the stolidity patients liked to trust. Arthur was agreeable to the idea, if suspicious about its origins. The Mam had first proposed medicine in a letter to Feldkirch, a letter sent within a month of Dr. Waller’s arrival into the household. Mere coincidence? Arthur hoped so; he did not care to imagine his future being discussed between his mother and this interloper. Even if he was, as people constantly reminded him, a qualified doctor and published poet. Even if his uncle was the dedicatee of Vanity Fair.

It also seemed a little too damned convenient that Waller was now offering to coach him for a scholarship. Arthur accepted with adolescent ill grace, which drew a private word from the Mam. Nowadays he towered over her, and her hair, which had already lost its fairness, was beginning to whiten where it was drawn back behind her ears; but her grey eyes and her quiet voice, and the moral authority implicit in them, remained as powerful as ever.

Waller proved an excellent tutor. Together, they crammed the classics, aiming for the Grierson bursary: £40 a year for two years would be a great help to the household. When the letter came, and the household was united in acclamation, he felt it was his first real achievement, his first act of paying back his mother for her sacrifices over the years. There were handshakes and kisses all round; Lottie and Connie became absurdly sentimental and wept like the girls they were; and Arthur, in a spirit of magnanimity, resolved to lay aside his suspicions of Waller.

A few days later, Arthur called at the University to claim his prize. He was received by a small, embarrassed official whose precise status was never made clear. It was all entirely regrettable. It was still unclear how it had happened. A clerical error of some kind. The Grierson bursary was open only to arts students. Arthur’s entry should never have been accepted. They would take steps in future, and so on.

But there were other prizes and bursaries, Arthur pointed out—a whole list of them. Presumably they would give him one of those instead. Well, yes, that could be the case, in theory; indeed, the next bursary down on the list was available for medicals. Unfortunately, it had already been claimed. As, indeed, had all the others.

“But this is daylight robbery,” Arthur shouted. “Daylight robbery!”

Certainly it was unfortunate. Perhaps something could be done. And the following week it was. Arthur found himself awarded a solatium of £7, which had accumulated in some overlooked fund, and which the authorities graciously felt could be applied to his purpose.

It was his first experience of rank injustice. When he had been beaten with the Tolley, it was rarely without some reasonable cause. When his father was taken away, it had struck a pain to his son’s heart, but he could not protest that his father was blameless; it had been a tragedy though not an injustice. But this—this! He had a case in law against the university, everyone agreed. He would sue them and reclaim the bursary. It took Dr. Waller to persuade him of the inadvisability of suing the institution you were relying upon to educate you. There was nothing to be done except swallow pride and bear disappointment like a man. Arthur accepted this appeal to a manliness he had yet to inhabit. But the calming phrases he pretended to find persuasive were mere breath in his ear. Everything within him festered and burned and stank, like a tiny corner of the Hell he no longer believed in.

George

It is unusual for George’s father to speak to him after prayers have been said and the light turned out. They are supposed to reflect upon the meaning of the words while yielding themselves to the bosom of God’s sleep. In truth, George is more inclined to carry on thinking about the next day’s lessons. He does not believe God will count this a sin.

“George,” his father suddenly says. “Have you noticed anyone loitering near the Vicarage?”

“Today, Father?”

“No, not today. Generally. Recently.”

“No, Father. Why would anyone be loitering?”

“Your mother and I have been receiving anonymous letters.”

“From loiterers?”

“Yes. No. I want you to report anything suspicious to me, George. Somebody pushing something through the door. People standing around.”

“Who are these letters from, Father?”

“They are anonymous, George.” Even in the dark he can sense his father’s impatience. “Anonymous. From the Greek, then the Latin. Without a name.”

“What do they say, Father?”

“They say wicked things. About . . . everyone.”

George knows he is meant to be concerned, but finds it all too exciting. He has been given authority to play the detective, and does so as often as possible without interfering with his school work. He peers from behind the trunks of trees; he obscures himself in the cubbyhole beneath the stairs to watch the front door; he examines the behaviour of those who come to the house; he wonders how he might afford a magnifying glass and, perhaps, a telescope. He discovers nothing.

Nor does he know who starts chalking up sinful words about his parents on Mr. Harriman’s barn and Mr. Aram’s outbuildings. As soon as they are washed off, the words mysteriously reappear. George is not told what they say. One afternoon, taking a circuitous route like all the best detectives, he creeps up on Mr. Harriman’s barn, but all he espies is a wall with some wet patches drying.

“Father,” George whispers after the light has been put out. He assumes this is the permitted time to talk about such matters. “I have an idea. Mr. Bostock.”

“What about Mr. Bostock?”

“He has lots of chalk. He always had lots of chalk.”

“That is true, George. But I think we may safely eliminate Mr. Bostock.”

A few days later George’s mother sprains her wrist and wraps it in muslin. She asks Elizabeth Foster to write the butcher’s list for her; but instead of sending the girl with it to Mr. Greensill, she takes it to George’s father. After comparison with the contents of a locked drawer, Elizabeth Foster is dismissed.

Later, Father has to go and explain things to the magistrates at Cannock. George secretly hopes he might also be asked to give evidence. Father reports that the wretched girl claimed it was all a foolish joke, and has been bound over to keep the peace.

Elizabeth Foster is not seen again in the district and a new maid soon arrives. George feels he could have done better at playing the detective. He also wishes he knew what was chalked on Mr. Harriman’s barn and Mr. Aram’s outbuildings.

Arthur

Irish by ancestry, Scottish by birth, instructed in the faith of Rome by Dutch Jesuits, Arthur became English. English history inspired him; English freedoms made him proud; English cricket made him patriotic. And the greatest epoch in English history—with many to choose from—was the fourteenth century: a time when the English archer commanded the field, and when both the French and Scottish kings were held prisoner in London.

But he also never forgot the tales heard while the porridge stick was raised. For Arthur the root of Englishness lay in the long-gone, long-remembered, long-invented world of chivalry. There was no knight more faithful than Sir Kaye, none so brave and amorous as Sir Lancelot, none so virtuous as Sir Galahad. There was no pair of lovers truer than Tristan and Iseult, no wife fairer and more faithless than Guinevere. And of course there was no braver or more noble king than Arthur.

The Christian virtues could be practised by everyone, from the humble to the high-born. But chivalry was the prerogative of the powerful. The knight protected his lady; the strong aided the weak; honour was a living thing for which you should be prepared to die. Sadly, the number of grails and quests available to a newly qualified doctor was fairly limited. In this modern world of Birmingham factories and billycock hats the notion of chivalry often seemed to have declined into one of mere sportsmanship. But Arthur practised the code wherever possible. He was a man of his word; he succoured the poor; he kept his guard against baser emotions; he treated women respectfully; he had long-term plans for the rescue and care of his mother. Given that the fourteenth century had regrettably ended, and that he was not William Douglas, Lord of Liddesdale, the Flower of Chivalry himself, this was the best Arthur could currently manage.

It was the rules of chivalry, and not the textbooks of physiology, which governed his first approaches to the fairer sex. He was handsome enough to attract women, and robustly flirtatious; once, he proudly informed the Mam that he was honourably in love with five women at the same time. It was different from being bosom friends with fellows at school, but at least some of the same rules applied. Thus, if you liked a girl, you gave her a nickname. Elmore Weldon, for instance: a pretty, sturdy thing with whom he flirted furiously for weeks. He called her Elmo, after St. Elmo’s Fire, that miraculous light seen about the masts and yardarms of ships during a storm. He liked to picture himself as a mariner in peril on the seas of life, while she illuminated the dark skies for him. Indeed, he almost became engaged to Elmo; but then, after a while, he didn’t.

He was also much concerned at this time about nocturnal emissions, which had featured little in the Morte d’Arthur. Damp morning sheets rather detracted from chivalric dreams; also from a sense of what a man was, or might be, if he put his mind and strength to it. Arthur sought to impose discipline upon his sleeping self by increased physical activity. Already he boxed, and played cricket and football. Now he also took up golf. Where lesser men consulted filth, he read Wisden.

He began to submit stories to the magazines. Once again he was the boy standing on the school desk, deploying his vocal tricks; the cynosure of raised eyes, the cause of mouths dropped open in credulity. He wrote the sort of tales he enjoyed reading—this seemed to him the most sensible approach to the writing game. He set his adventures in distant lands, where buried treasure could often be found, and the local population was high on black-hearted villains and rescuable maidens. Only a certain kind of hero was fitted to take part in the hazardous missions he sketched. For a start, those whose constitutions were enfeebled, those given to self-pity and to alcohol, were manifestly unsuitable. Arthur’s father had failed in his chivalric duty to the Mam; now the task had devolved upon his son. He could not rescue her by fourteenth-century methods, so would have to apply those available in a lesser age. He would write stories: he would rescue her by describing the fictional rescue of others. These descriptions would bring him money, and money would do the rest.

George

It is two weeks before Christmas. George is now sixteen, and no longer feels the excitement of the season as he once did. He knows our Saviour’s birth to be a solemn truth, annually celebrated, but he has left behind the nervous exaltation that still infects Horace and Maud. Nor does he share the trivial hopes his old schoolfellows at Rugeley used openly to express: for frivolous presents of a kind which have no place at the Vicarage. They also annually set their hearts on snow, and would even demean the faith by praying for it.

George has no interest in skating or sledding or the building of snowmen. He has already embarked on his future career. He has left Rugeley and is studying law at Mason College in Birmingham. If he applies himself, and passes the first examination, he will become an articled clerk. After five years of articles, there will be final examinations, and then he will become a solicitor. He sees himself with a desk, a set of bound law books and a suit with a fob chain slung between his waistcoat pockets like golden rope. He imagines himself being respected. He imagines himself with a hat.

It is almost dark when he gets home late on the afternoon of December 12th. As he reaches the front door of the Vicarage he notices an object lying on the step. He bends, then squats to examine it more closely. It is a large key, cold to the touch and heavy in the hand. George does not know what to make of it. The keys to the Vicarage are much smaller; so is that of the schoolroom. The church key is different again; nor does this seem to be a farm key of any kind. But its weight suggests a serious purpose.

He takes it to his father, who is equally puzzled.

“On the step, you say?” Another question to which Father already knows the answer.

“Yes, Father.”

“And you saw no one put it there?”

“No.”

“And did you meet anyone coming away from the Vicarage on your way from the station?”

“No, Father.”

The key is sent with a note to Hednesford police station, and three days later, when George returns from college, Sergeant Upton is sitting in the kitchen. Father is still out on his parish rounds; Mother is hovering anxiously. It crosses George’s mind that there is a reward for finding the key. If this was one of those stories the boys at Rugeley used to love, it would open a strongbox or treasure chest, and the hero would next require a crumpled map with an X marked on it. George has no taste for such adventures, which always strike him as far too unlikely.

Sergeant Upton is a red-faced man with the build of a blacksmith; his dark serge uniform constricts him, and is perhaps the cause of the wheezing noises he makes. He looks George up and down, nodding to himself as he does so.

“So you’re the young fellow that found the key?”

George remembers his attempts to play the detective when Elizabeth Foster was writing on walls. Now there is another mystery, but this time with a policeman and a future solicitor involved. It feels appropriate as well as exciting.

“Yes. It was on the doorstep.” The Sergeant doesn’t respond to this, but carries on nodding to himself. He seems to need putting at his ease, so George tries to help. “Is there a reward?”

The Sergeant looks surprised. “Now why would you be wondering if there’s a reward? You of all people?”

George takes this to mean that there isn’t one. Perhaps the policeman has only come to congratulate him on returning lost property. “Have you found out where it’s from?”

Upton doesn’t reply to this either. Instead, he takes out a notebook and pencil.

“Name?”

“You know my name.”

“Name, I said.”

The Sergeant really could be more civil, George thinks.

“George.”

“Yes. Go on.”

“Ernest.”

“Go on.”

“Thompson.”

“Go on.”

“You know my surname. It’s the same as my father’s. And my mother’s.”

“Go on, I say, you uppish little fellow.”

“Edalji.”

“Ah yes,” says the Sergeant. “Now I think you’d better spell that out for me.”

Arthur

Arthur’s marriage, like his remembered life, began in death.

He qualified as a doctor; worked as a locum-tenens in Sheffield, Shropshire and Birmingham; then took a post as surgeon on the steam-whaler Hope. They sailed from Peterhead to the Arctic ice field, off after seal and anything else they could chase and kill. Arthur’s duties proved light, and since he was a normal young man, happily given to drinking and, if necessary, fighting, he swiftly won the confidence of the crew; he also fell into the sea so often that they nicknamed him the Great Northern Diver. And like any healthy Briton, he enjoyed a good hunt: his game-bag on the voyage came to fifty-five seals.

He felt little but vigorous male competitiveness when they were out on the endless ice battering seals to death. But one day they took a Greenland whale, and he found it an experience of a different order to any he had known before. To play a salmon might be a royal game, but when your Arctic prey weighs more than a suburban villa, it dwarfs all comparisons. From no more than a hand’s touch away, Arthur watched the whale’s eye—to his surprise, no bigger than a bullock’s—slowly dim over in death.

The mystery of the victim: something was now changed in his way of thinking. He continued to shoot ducks from the snowy sky, and felt pride in his marksmanship; yet beyond this lay a feeling he could grasp at but not contain. Every bird you downed bore pebbles in its gizzard from a land the maps ignored.

Next he sailed south, on the Mayumba out of Liverpool, bound for the Canaries and the west coast of Africa. Shipboard drinking continued, but fighting took place only over the bridge table and the cribbage board. If he regretted swapping the sea boots and informal dress of a whaler for the gilt buttons and serge suit of a passenger vessel, there was at least the compensation of female company. One night the ladies sportingly made an apple-pie of his bed; the next he took his amiable revenge by hiding a flying fish in one of their nightgowns.

He returned to dry land, common sense and a career. He set up his brass plate in Southsea. He became a Freemason, admitted to the third degree in the Phoenix Lodge No. 257. He captained the Portsmouth Cricket Club and was judged one of the safest Association backs in Hampshire. Dr. Pike, fellow member of the Southsea Bowling Club, referred patients to him; the Gresham Life Insurance Company hired him to perform medical examinations.

One day Dr. Pike sought Arthur’s view on a young patient who had recently moved to Southsea with his widowed mother and elder sister. This second opinion was a mere politeness: it was evident that Jack Hawkins had cerebral meningitis, against which the entire medical profession, let alone Arthur, was powerless. No hotel or boarding house would accept the poor fellow; so Arthur offered to take him into his own house as a resident patient. Hawkins was only a month older than his host. Despite a thousand palliative cups of arrowroot, he swiftly deteriorated, became delirious, and smashed up everything in his room. Within days he was dead.

Arthur looked more carefully at this corpse than he had done at the white, waxen thing of his infancy. He had begun to find, during his medical training, that there was often much promise in the faces of the dead—as if the strain and tension of living had given way to a greater peacefulness. Post-mortal muscular relaxation was the scientific answer; but part of him wondered if this was the full explanation. The human dead also bore in their gizzard pebbles from a land the maps ignored.

As he rode in the one-carriage funeral procession from his own house to the Highland Road cemetery, Arthur’s chivalrous feelings were aroused by the black-clad mother and sister, now alone in an unfamiliar town with no male support. Louisa, once her veil was raised, proved a shy, round-faced young woman with blue eyes shading to sea-green. After a decent interval, Arthur was allowed to call at her lodgings.

The young doctor began by explaining how the island—for Southsea was an island, despite appearances—could be represented as a series of Chinese rings: open spaces at its centre, then the middle ring of the town, and then the outer ring of the sea. He told her about the gravelly soil and the quick drainage that resulted from it; about the efficiency of Sir Frederick Bramwell’s sanitary arrangements; about the town’s salubrious reputation. This last item caused Louisa a sudden distress, which she disguised by an enquiry about Bramwell. She was told a great deal about that distinguished engineer.

The groundwork thus laid, it was time to inspect the place properly. They visited both piers, where military bands seemed to play all day. They watched colours being trooped on the Governor’s Green, and mimic engagements on the Common; through binoculars they inspected the nation’s battle fleet riding at anchor in the middle distance at Spithead. They walked up the Clarence Esplanade while Arthur explained to her, one by one, all the trophies and memorials of warfare on display. Here a Russian gun, there a Japanese cannon and mortar, everywhere tablets and obelisks to sailors and infantrymen who had died in all quarters of the Empire and in every fashion—yellow fever, shipwreck, the perfidious action of Indian mutineers. She wondered if the doctor had a morbid streak to him; but preferred to decide, for the moment, that his interested curiosity matched his physical tirelessness. He even took her by horse-tram to the Royal Clarence Victualling Yard to watch the manufacturing process of ship’s biscuit: from bag of flour to dough, to its conversion by heat into a souvenir which visitors had between their teeth as they left.

Miss Louisa Hawkins had not realized that courtship—if this was what it was—could be so strenuous, or so resemble tourism. Next they turned their eyes southward, to the Isle of Wight. From the Esplanade, Arthur pointed to what he termed the azure hills of the Vectian Isle, a turn of phrase which struck her as most poetic. They had a distant glimpse of Osborne House, and he explained how an increase in water traffic told when the Queen was in residence. Then they took a steamer across the Solent and round the island; her eye was directed to the Needles, Alum Bay, Carisbrooke Castle, the Landslip, the Undercliff—until she was obliged to call for a deckchair and a rug.

One evening, as they gazed out to sea from the South Parade Pier, he described his exploits in Africa and the Arctic; yet the way tears came into her eyes when he mentioned their purpose on the ice field made him refrain from bragging about his game-bag. She had, he discovered, an innate gentleness which he took to be characteristic of all women, once you got to know them. She was always ready to smile; but could not bear any humour which verged on cruelty, or implied the superiority of the humorist. She had an open, generous nature, a lovely head of curls, and a small income of her own.

In his previous dealings with women, Arthur had played the honourable flirt. Now, as they strolled this concentric resort, as she learned to take his arm, as her name changed in his mouth from Louisa to Touie, as he surreptitiously looked at her hips when she turned away, he knew he wanted more than flirtation. He also thought she would improve him as a man; which was, after all, one of the principles of marriage.

First, however, the young prospect had to be approved by the Mam, who travelled to Hampshire for the inspection. She found Louisa timid, tractable and of decent if not distinguished family. There was no vulgarity or obvious moral weakness likely to embarrass her beloved boy. Nor did there seem any lurking vanity which might at some future time make the girl bridle at Arthur’s authority. The mother, Mrs. Hawkins, seemed both pleasant and respectful. In giving her approval, the Mam even allowed herself to muse that there might perhaps be something about Louisa—just there, when she held herself in the light like that—which was reminiscent of her own younger self. And what more could a mother want than that, after all?

George

Since starting at Mason College, George has developed the habit of walking the lanes most evenings after his return from Birmingham. This is not for exercise—he had a lifetime of that at Rugeley—but to clear his head before settling down to his books again. As often as not, this fails to work, and he finds himself back in the minutiae of contract law. On this cold January evening, with a half-moon in the sky and the verges still shiny from last night’s frost, George is muttering his way through his argument for tomorrow’s moot debate—the case is about contaminated flour in a granary—when a figure jumps out at him from behind a tree.

“On your way to Walsall, eh?”

It is Sergeant Upton, red-faced and puffing.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard what I said.” Upton is standing close to him, staring in a way George finds alarming. He wonders if the Sergeant is a little loony; in which case, best to humour him.

“You asked if I was on my way to Walsall.”

“So you do have a bloody pair of ears after all.” He is wheezing like—like a horse, or a pig or something.

“I only wondered why you asked, because this is not the way to Walsall. As we both know.”

“As we both know. As we both know.” Upton takes a pace forwards and seizes George by the shoulder. “What we both know, what we both know, is that you know the way to Walsall, and I know the way to Walsall, and you’ve been up to your little tricks in Walsall, haven’t you?”

The Sergeant is definitely loony now; also hurting him. Is there any advantage in pointing out that he hasn’t been to Walsall since this time two years ago, when he was buying Christmas presents for Horace and Maud?

“You been into Walsall, you’ve took the key to the school, you’ve brought it home and you’ve put it on your own front step, didn’t you?”

“You’re hurting me,” says George.

“Oh no I’m not. I’m not hurting you. This isn’t hurting you. You want Sergeant Upton to hurt you, all you have to do is ask.”

George now feels as he did when he used to stare at the distant blackboard with no idea what the correct answer was. He feels as he did when he was about to soil himself. Without knowing quite why, he says, “I’m going to be a solicitor.”

The Sergeant releases his grip, steps back, and laughs in George’s face. Then he spits down towards George’s boot.

“Is that what you think? A so-li-ci-tor? What a big word for a little mongrel like you. You think you’ll become a so-li-ci-tor if Sergeant Upton says you won’t?”

George stops himself saying that it is up to Mason College and the examiners and the Incorporated Law Society to decide whether or not he is to be a solicitor. He thinks he must get home as quickly as possible and tell Father.

“Let me ask you a question.” Upton’s tone seems to have softened, so George decides to humour him a moment longer. “What are those things on your hands?”

George lifts his forearms, spreads his fingers automatically in his gloves. “These?” he asks. The man must be mentally deficient.

“Yes.”

“Gloves.”

“Well then, being a clever young monkey and intending to be a so-li-ci-tor, you will know that a pair of gloves is known as Going Equipped, won’t you?”

Then he spits again and stamps off down the lane. George bursts into tears.

He is ashamed of himself by the time he gets home. He is sixteen, he is not allowed to cry. Horace has not cried since he was eight. Maud cries a lot, but then she is an invalid as well as a girl.

George’s father listens to his story and announces that he will write to the Chief Constable of Staffordshire. It is disgraceful that a common policeman should manhandle his son on a public highway and accuse him of theft. The officer should be dismissed from the force.

“I think he is rather loony, Father. He spat at me twice.”

“He spat at you?”

George thinks again. He is still frightened, but knows this is no reason to tell less than the truth.

“I cannot be certain of that, Father. He was about a yard away, and he spat twice very close to my foot. It’s possible he was spitting just like rough people do. But when he did it he seemed to be cross with me.”

“Do you think that is sufficient proof of intention?”

George likes this. He is being treated as a future solicitor.

“Perhaps not, Father.”

“I agree with you. Good. I shall not mention the spitting.”

Three days later the Reverend Shapurji Edalji receives a reply from Captain the Honourable George A. Anson, Chief Constable of Staffordshire. It is dated January 23rd 1893, and does not contain the expected apology and promise of action. Instead, Anson writes:

Will you please ask your son George from whom the key was obtained which was laid on your doorstep on Dec. 12? The key was stolen, but if it can be shown that the whole thing was due to some idle freak or practical joke, I should not be inclined to allow any police proceedings to be taken in regard to it. If, however, the persons concerned in the removal of the key refuse to make any explanation of the subject, I must necessarily treat the matter in all seriousness as a theft. I may say at once that I shall not pretend to believe any protestations of ignorance which your son may make about this key. My information on the subject does not come from the police.

The Vicar knows his son to be a decent and honourable boy. He must overcome the nerves he seems to have inherited from his mother, but is already showing much promise. The time has come to begin treating him as an adult. He shows George the letter and asks for his view.

George reads the letter twice and takes a moment to assemble his thoughts.

“In the lane,” he begins slowly, “Sergeant Upton accused me of going to Walsall School and stealing the key. The Chief Constable, on the other hand, accuses me of being in alliance with someone else, or several others. One of them took the key, then I accepted the stolen item and put it on the step. Perhaps they realize I have not been in Walsall for two years. At any event, they have changed their story.”

“Yes. Good. I agree. And what else do you think?”

“I think they must both be loony.”

“George, that’s a childish word. And in any case it is our Christian duty to pity and cherish the feeble of mind.”

“I’m sorry, Father. Then all I can think is that they . . . that they must suspect me for some reason I do not understand.”

“And what do you think he means when he writes ‘My information on the subject does not come from the police’?”

“He must mean that someone has sent him a letter denouncing me. Unless . . . unless he is not telling the truth. He might be pretending to know things he doesn’t. Perhaps it is just a bluff.”

Shapurji smiles at his son. “George, with your eyesight you would never have made a detective. But with your brain you will be a very fine solicitor.”

Arthur

Arthur and Louisa did not get married in Southsea. Nor did they get married in Minsterworth, Gloucestershire, the bride’s parish of origin. Nor did they get married in the city of Arthur’s birth.

When Arthur quit Edinburgh as a newly qualified doctor, he left behind the Mam, his brother Innes, and his three youngest sisters—Connie, Ida and little Julia. He also left behind the flat’s other occupant, Dr. Bryan Waller, supposed poet, incontrovertible lodger, and a fellow too damned at ease with the world. Despite all Arthur’s gratitude for Waller’s tutorial help, something still rankled. He could never quite allay his suspicion that the lodger’s assistance had not been disinterested; though where exactly that interest might lie Arthur was unable to detect.

When he left, Arthur had imagined that Waller would soon set up his own Edinburgh practice, would acquire a wife and a little local reputation, and then fade into the status of an occasional memory. Such expectations were not to be fulfilled. Arthur went out into the world to forage on behalf of his unprotected family, only to find that Waller had taken on the task of protection himself, which was none of his damned business. He had become, in a phrase Arthur deliberately avoided using in letters to the Mam, a cuckoo in the nest. Each time Arthur came home, he found himself credulously imagining that the family narrative, suspended since his last visit, would resume where it had left off. But each time he was made aware that the story—his favourite story—had moved on without him. He found himself catching at words, at unexpected glances and allusions, at anecdotes in which he no longer featured. There was a life going on here without him, and that life seemed to be animated by the lodger.

Bryan Waller did not set up as a doctor; nor did his poetry-scribbling turn into a professional habit. He inherited an estate at Ingleton in the West Riding of Yorkshire and settled for the idle life of an English squire. The cuckoo now had twenty-four acres of his own woodland surrounding a grey stone nest called Masongill House. Well then, so much the better. Except that Arthur had scarcely absorbed this good news when a letter arrived from the Mam, informing him that she, Ida and Dodo were also leaving Edinburgh; also for Masongill, where a cottage on the estate was being prepared for them. The Mam did not attempt a justification—the healthy air, an unhealthy child, perhaps—merely stated that this was happening. Indeed, had already happened. Oh yes, here was a justification: the rent was very low.

Arthur felt it as a kidnapping and betrayal combined. He entirely failed to persuade himself that this was a chivalrous action on Waller’s part. A true courtly knight would have arranged for some mysterious inheritance to come the way of the Mam and her daughters, while himself departing to a distant land on a long and preferably perilous quest. A true courtly knight would also not have jilted Lottie or Connie, whichever of the two it had been. Arthur had no proof, and perhaps it had been no more than a flirting which induced false expectations, but something had been going on, if certain hints and female silences meant what he guessed.

Arthur’s suspicions did not, alas, end there. He was a young man who liked things clear and certain, yet found himself in a place where little was clear and some certainties were unacceptable. That Waller was more than just a lodger was as plain as the nose on your face. He was often referred to as a friend of the family, even one of the family. Not so by Arthur: he did not want an elder brother suddenly thrust upon him, let alone a sibling at whom the Mam smiled in a different way. Waller was six years older than Arthur, and fifteen years younger than the Mam. Arthur would have thrust his hand into fire in defence of his mother’s honour; his principles, and his sense of family, and the duty owed to it, had all come from her. And yet, he sometimes found himself wondering, how would things appear in a police court? What evidence might be given, and what assumptions made by a jury? Consider, for instance, this item: his father was an enfeebled dipsomaniac occasionally confined to nursing homes, his mother had borne her final child while Bryan Waller was part of the household, and she had given that daughter four Christian names. The last three of these were Mary, Julia and Josephine; the child’s nickname was Dodo. But her first given name was Bryan. Apart from anything else, Arthur did not agree that Bryan was a girl’s name.

While Arthur was courting Louisa, his father managed to obtain alcohol in his nursing home, broke a window trying to escape and was transferred to the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum. On the 6th of August 1885 Arthur and Touie were married at St. Oswald’s, Thornton-in-Lonsdale, in the county of Yorkshire. The groom was twenty-six, the bride twenty-eight. Arthur’s best man was not a fellow member of the Southsea Bowling Club, of the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society, or of Phoenix Lodge No. 257. The Mam had made all the arrangements, and Arthur’s best man was Bryan Waller, who seemed to have taken over as future provider of velvet dresses, gold glasses, and comfortable seats by the fire.

George

When George pulls back the curtains, there is an empty milk churn standing in the middle of the lawn. He points it out to his father. They dress and investigate. The churn is missing its lid, and when George peers in he sees a dead blackbird lying at the bottom. They bury the bird quickly behind the compost heap. George agrees that they may tell Mother about the churn, which they put to stand in the lane, but not about its contents.

The next day George receives a postcard of a tomb in Brewood Church showing a man with two wives. The message reads, “Why not go on with your old game of writing things on walls?”

His father receives a letter in the same unformed hand: “Every day, every hour, my hatred is growing against George Edalji. And your damned wife. And your horrid little girl. Do you think, you Pharisee, that because you are a parson God will absolve you from your iniquities?” He does not show this letter to George.

Father and son receive a joint communication:

Ha, ha, hurrah for Upton! Good old Upton!

Blessed Upton. Good old Upton! Upton is blessed!

Dear old Upton!

Stand up, stand up for Upton

  Ye soldiers of the Cross

Lift high your royal banner

  It must not suffer loss.

The Vicar and his wife decide that in future they will open all mail addressed to the Vicarage themselves. At all cost, George’s studies must not be interfered with. Therefore he does not see the letter which begins: “I swear by God that I will do harm to some person the only thing I care about in this world is revenge, revenge, sweet revenge I long for, then I shall be happy in hell.” Nor does he see the one that says: “Before the end of the year your kid will be either in the graveyard or disgraced for life.” However, he is shown the one beginning: “You Pharisee and false prophet you accused Elizabeth Foster and sent her away you and your damned wife.”

The letters increase in frequency. They are written on cheap lined paper torn from a notebook, and posted from Cannock, Walsall, Rugeley, Wolverhampton and even Great Wyrley itself. The Vicar does not know what to do about them. Given the behaviour first of Upton and then of the Chief Constable, there seems little point complaining to the police. As the letters pile up, he tries to tabulate their chief characteristics. These are: a defence of Elizabeth Foster; frantic praise of Sergeant Upton and the police generally; insane hatred of the Edalji family; and religious mania, which may or may not be assumed. The penmanship varies in style, as he imagines it might if you were disguising your hand.

Shapurji prays for enlightenment. He also prays for patience, for his family, and—with a slightly reluctant sense of duty—for the letter writer.

George leaves for Mason College before the first post arrives, but on his return can normally detect if an anonymous letter has been delivered that day. His mother will be falsely cheerful, flitting from one topic of conversation to another, as if silence, like gravity, might pull them all down to ground level, to the mud and filth that rest there. His father, less equipped for social dissimulation, is withdrawn, and sits at the head of the table like a granite statue of himself. The reaction of each parent frays the nerves of the other; George tries to find a middle ground by talking more than his father but less than his mother. Meanwhile, Horace and Maud chatter away unchecked, the sole if temporary beneficiaries of the writing campaign.

After the key and the milk churn, other items appear at the Vicarage. A pewter ladle on a window sill; a garden fork pinning a dead rabbit to the lawn; three eggs broken on the front step. Each morning George and his father search the grounds before Mother and the two younger ones are allowed outside. One day they find twenty pennies and halfpennies laid at intervals across the lawn; the Vicar decides to regard them as a donation to the church. There are also dead birds, mostly strangled; and once excrement has been laid where it will be most visible. Occasionally, in the dawn light, George is aware of something that is less than a presence, a possible observer; it is more like a close absence, the feeling of someone having just left. But nobody is ever caught, or even spotted.

And now the hoaxes begin. After church one Sunday, Mr. Beckworth of Hangover Farm shakes the Vicar’s hand, then winks and murmurs, “Starting a new line of business, I see.” When Shapurji looks puzzled, Beckworth passes him a clipping from the Cannock Chase Courier. It is an advertisement surrounded by a scalloped box:

The Vicar visits the newspaper offices and is told that three more such advertisements have already been ordered. But no one has set eyes upon their purchaser: the instruction came by letter with a postal order enclosed. The commercial manager is sympathetic, and naturally offers to suspend the remaining insertions. If the culprit tries to protest or reclaim his money, the police will of course be summoned. But no, he does not think the editorial pages will be interested in the story. No offence to the cloth, but a newspaper has its reputation to consider, and telling the world it has been hoaxed might undermine the credibility of its other stories.

When Shapurji returns to the Vicarage, there is a young red-headed curate from Norfolk waiting to see him, and holding his Christian temper with some difficulty. He is impatient to know why his fellow servant in Christ has summoned him all the way to Staffordshire on a matter of spiritual urgency, perhaps requiring exorcism, of which the Vicar’s wife appears quite ignorant. Here is your letter, here is your signature. Shapurji explains and apologizes. The curate asks to be reimbursed for his expenses.

Next the maid-of-all-work is called to Wolverhampton in order to inspect the dead body of her non-existent sister, which is supposedly lying in a public house. Quantities of goods—fifty linen napkins, twelve young pear trees, a baron of beef, six crates of champagne, fifteen gallons of black paint—are delivered and have to be sent back. Advertisements appear in newspapers offering the Vicarage for rent at such a low price that there is an abundance of takers. Stabling facilities are offered; so is horse manure. Letters are sent in the Vicar’s name to private detectives, engaging their services.

After months of persecution, Shapurji decides to counter-attack. He prepares his own advertisement, outlining recent events, and describing the anonymous letters, their handwriting, style and contents; he specifies the times and places of posting. He asks newspapers to refuse requests in his name, readers to report any suspicions they might have, and the perpetrators to examine their consciences.

A broken soup tureen containing a dead blackbird appears on the kitchen step two afternoons later. The following day a bailiff arrives to distrain goods in favour of an imaginary debt. Later, a dressmaker from Stafford comes to measure Maud for her wedding dress. When Maud is silently brought before him, he asks politely if she is to be the child-bride in some Hindoo ceremony. In the midst of this scene, five oilskin jackets arrive for George.

And then, a week later, three newspapers publish a response to the Vicar’s appeal. It is in a black box and headed APOLOGY. It reads:

We, the undersigned, both residing in the parish of Great Wyrley, do hereby declare that we are the sole authors and writers of certain offensive and anonymous letters received by various persons during the last twelve months. We regret these utterances, and also utterances against Mr. Upton the sergeant of police at Cannock, and against Elizabeth Foster. We have examined our consciences as requested and beg forgiveness of all those involved and also of the authorities, both spiritual and criminal.

signed, G. E. T. Edalji and Fredk. Brookes.

Arthur

Arthur believed in looking—at the glaucous eye of a dying whale, at the contents of a shot bird’s gizzard, at the facial relaxation of a corpse who was never to become his brother-in-law. Such looking must be without prejudice: this was a practical necessity for a doctor, and a moral imperative for a human being.

He liked to tell how he had been taught the importance of careful looking at the Edinburgh Infirmary. A surgeon there, Joseph Bell, had taken a shine to this large, enthusiastic youth and made Arthur his out-patient clerk. His job was to muster the patients, take preliminary notes, and then lead them to Mr. Bell’s room, where the surgeon would be sitting among his dressers. Bell would greet each patient, and from a silent yet intense scrutiny try to deduce as much as possible about their lives and proclivities. He would declare that this man was by trade a French polisher, that one a left-handed cobbler, to the amazement of those present, not least of the patient himself. Arthur remembered the following exchange:

“Well, my man, you’ve served in the army.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Not long discharged?”

“No, sir.”

“A Highland regiment?”

“Aye, sir.”

“Stationed at Barbados?”

“Aye, sir.”

It was a trick, yet it was a true trick; mysterious at first, simple when explained.

“You see, gentlemen, the man was a respectful man but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British.”

Arthur had been educated, during those most plastic years, in the school of medical materialism. Any residue of formal religion had been expunged; yet he remained metaphysically respectful. He admitted the possibility of a central intelligent cause, while being unable to identify that cause, or understand why its designs should be brought to fulfilment in such roundabout and often terrible ways. As far as the mind and the soul went, Arthur accepted the scientific explanation of the day. The mind was an emanation of the brain, just as bile was an excretion of the liver—something purely physical in character; while the soul, as far as such a term could be admitted, was the total effect of all the hereditary and personal functionings of the mind. But he also recognized that knowledge never stayed still, and that today’s certainties might become tomorrow’s superstitions. Therefore, the intellectual duty to continue looking never ceased.

At the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society, which met every second Tuesday, Arthur encountered the city’s more speculative minds. Telepathy being much under discussion, Arthur found himself one afternoon sitting in a curtained and unmirrored room with a local architect, Stanley Ball. They placed themselves back to back and several yards apart; Arthur, with a drawing pad on his knee, sketched a shape and attempted by a powerful concentration of the mind to convey the image to Ball. The architect then drew whatever form his own mind seemed to propose. Then they reversed the procedure, with the architect as shape-despatcher and the doctor as recipient. The results, to their astonishment, showed a matching significantly above the random. They repeated the experiment enough times for a scientific conclusion to be reached: namely that, given a natural sympathy between conductor and receiver, thought-transference could indeed take place.

What might this mean? If thought could be transferred across distance without any evident means of conveyance, then the pure materialism of Arthur’s teachers was, at the very least, too rigid. The congruence of drawn shapes he had achieved with Stanley Ball did not allow the return of angels with shining swords. But it nevertheless raised a question, and a stubborn one at that.

Many others were simultaneously pushing at the ironclad walls of a materialist universe. The mesmerist Professor de Meyer, who was famous—according to the Portsmouth newspapers—across the continent of Europe, came to town and induced various healthy young men to do his bidding. Some stood with their mouths agape, incapable of closing them despite laughter from the auditorium; others fell to their knees and were unable to rise without the Professor’s permission. Arthur inserted himself into the line of candidates on stage, but Meyer’s technique left him unmesmerised and unimpressed. It smacked more of vaudeville than of scientific demonstration.

He and Touie began attending seances. Stanley Ball was often present; also General Drayson the Southsea astronomer. They found the instructions for conducting a circle in Light, the weekly psychical paper. Proceedings would begin with a reading of the first chapter of Ezekiel: “Whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, thither was their spirit to go.” The prophet’s vision—of the whirlwind and the great cloud and the brightness and the fire and the four cherubim each with four faces and each with four wings—prepared those present to be receptive. Then it was the flickering candle, the felty dimness, the concentration of mind, the emptying of self and the communal waiting. Once, a spirit answering to the name of Arthur’s great-uncle appeared behind him; on another occasion, a black man with a spear. After a few months, spirit lights became occasionally visible, even to him.

Arthur was uncertain how much evidential weight should be granted to these collaborative circles. He was more convinced by an elderly psychic he met at the house of General Drayson. After various preparations of a rather thespian nature, the old man went into a heavy-breathing trance and began dispensing both advice and spirit communications to his small, hushed audience. Arthur had come fully armed with scepticism—until the misted-over eyes were directed towards him, and a frail, distant voice pronounced the words,

“Do not read Leigh Hunt’s book.”

This was more than uncanny. For some days, Arthur had been privately wondering whether or not to read Hunt’s Comic Dramatists of the Restoration. He had not discussed the matter with anyone; and it was hardly a dilemma with which he would bother Touie. But then to be given such a precise answer to his unvoiced question . . . It could not be a magician’s trick; it could only have happened through the ability of one man’s mind to gain access in a so far inexplicable way to another man’s mind.

Arthur was so persuaded by the experience that he wrote it up for Light. Here was further proof that telepathy worked; for the moment, nothing more. This much so far he had seen: what was the minimum, not the maximum, that could be deduced? Though if reliable data continued to accrue, then more than the minimum might have to be considered. What if all his previous certainties became less certain? And what, for that matter, might the maximum turn out to be?

Touie regarded her husband’s involvement in telepathy and the spirit world with the same sympathetic and watchful interest that she brought to his enthusiasm for sport. The laws of psychical phenomena seemed to her as arcane as the laws of cricket; but she sensed that with each a certain result was desirable, and amiably presumed that Arthur would inform her when such a result had been obtained. Besides, she was now much absorbed in their daughter, Mary Louise, whose existence had come about through the application of the least arcane and least telepathic laws known to mankind.

George

George’s “apology” in the newspaper affords the Vicar a new line of inquiry. He calls on William Brookes, the village ironmonger, father of Frederick Brookes, George’s supposed co-signatory. The ironmonger, a small, rotund man in a green apron, takes Shapurji into a storeroom hung with mops and pails and zinc baths. He removes his apron, pulls out a drawer and hands over the half dozen letters of denunciation his family has received. They are written on the familiar lined paper torn from a notebook; although the penmanship varies more.

The top letter is in a childish, unconfident scrawl. “Unless you run away from the black I’ll murder you and mrs brookes I know your names and I’ll tell you wrote.” Others are in a hand which, even if disguised, seems more forceful. “Your kid and Wynn’s kid have been spitting in an old woman’s face at Walsall station.” The writer demands that money be sent to Walsall Post Office in recompense. A subsequent letter, pinned to this one, threatens prosecution if the demand is not met.

“I assume you sent no money.”

“Course not.”

“But you showed the letters to the police?”

“Police? Not worth their time or mine. It’s just kids, isn’t it? And as it says in the Bible, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will ne’er harm me.”

The Vicar does not correct Mr. Brookes’s source. He also senses something idle about the man’s attitude. “But you didn’t merely put the letters in a drawer?”

“I asked around a bit. I asked Fred what he knew.”

“Who is this Mr. Wynn?”

Wynn is apparently a draper who lives up the line at Bloxwich. He has a son who goes to school at Walsall with Brookes’s boy. They meet on the train each morning and usually return together. A while ago—the ironmonger does not specify how long—Wynn’s son and young Fred were accused of breaking a carriage window. Both swore it was the work of a boy called Speck, and eventually the railway officials decided not to press charges. This happened a few weeks before the first letter arrived. Perhaps there was some connection. Perhaps not.

The Vicar now understands Brookes’s lack of zeal in the matter. No, the ironmonger does not know who Speck is. No, Mr. Wynn hasn’t received any letters himself. No, Wynn’s boy and Brookes’s boy are not friends with George. This last is hardly a surprise.

Shapurji describes the exchange to George before supper, and pronounces himself encouraged.

“Why are you encouraged, Father?”

“The more people involved, the more likely the scoundrel is to be discovered. The more people he persecutes, the more probable it is he will make a mistake. Do you know of this boy called Speck?”

“Speck? No.” George shakes his head.

“And I am also encouraged in one respect by the persecution of the Brookes family. This proves it is not merely race prejudice.”

“Is that a good thing, Father? To be hated for more than one reason?”

Shapurji smiles to himself. These flashes of intelligence, coming from a docile boy who is often too much turned in on himself, always delight him.

“I will say it again, you will make a fine solicitor, George.” But even as he pronounces the words, he is reminded of a line from one of the letters he has not shown his son. “Before the end of the year your kid will be either in the graveyard or disgraced for life.”

“George,” he says. “There is a date I wish you to remember. The 6th of July 1892. Just two years ago. On that day Mr. Dadabhoy Naoroji was elected to Parliament for the Finsbury Central district of London.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Mr. Naoroji was for many years Professor of Gujerati at University College London. I was briefly in correspondence with him, and am proud to say that he had words of praise for my Grammar of the Gujerati Language.”

“Yes, Father.” George has seen the Professor’s letter brought out on more than one occasion.

“His election was an honourable conclusion to a most dishonourable time. The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, said that black men should not and would not be elected to Parliament. He was rebuked for it by the Queen herself. And then the voters of Finsbury Central, only four years later, decided that they agreed with Queen Victoria and not with Lord Salisbury.”

“But I am not a Parsee, Father.” In George’s head the words come back: the centre of England, the beating heart of the British Empire, the flowing bloodline that is the Church of England. He is English, he is a student of the laws of England, and one day, God willing, he will marry according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England. This is what his parents have taught him from the beginning.

“George, this is true enough. You are an Englishman. But others may not always entirely agree. And where we are living—”

“The centre of England,” George responds, as if in bedroom catechism.

“The centre of England, yes, where we find ourselves, and where I have ministered for nearly twenty years, the centre of England—despite all God’s creatures being equally blessed—is still a little primitive, George. And you will furthermore find primitive people where you least expect them. They exist in ranks of society where better might be anticipated. But if Mr. Naoroji can become a university professor and a Member of Parliament, then you, George, can and will become a solicitor and a respected member of society. And if unfair things happen, if even wicked things happen, then you should remember the date of the 6th of July 1892.”

George thinks about this for a while, and then repeats, quietly yet firmly, “But I am not a Parsee, Father. That is what you and Mother have taught me.”

“Remember the date, George, remember the date.”

Arthur

Arthur began to write more professionally. As he put on literary muscle, his stories grew into novels, the best of them naturally being set in the heroic fourteenth century. Each page of work would be read aloud to Touie after supper, and the completed text sent to the Mam for editorial comment. Arthur also took on a secretary and amanuensis: Alfred Wood, a master from Portsmouth School, a discreet efficient fellow with the honest look of a pharmacist; an all-round sportsman too, with a very decent cricket arm on him.

But medicine remained Arthur’s current livelihood. And if he was to advance in his profession, he knew it had become time to specialize. He had always prided himself, through every aspect of his life, in looking carefully; so it did not require a spirit voice, or a table leaping into the air, to spell out his chosen calling—ophthalmologist. He was not a man to prevaricate or palter, and knew at once where best it was to train.

“Vienna?” repeated Touie wonderingly, for she had never left England. It was now November; winter was coming on; little Mary was beginning to walk, as long as you held her sash. “When do we leave?”

“Immediately,” replied Arthur.

And Touie—bless her—merely rose from her needlework and murmured, “Then I must be quick.”

They sold up, left Mary with Mrs. Hawkins, and took off to Vienna for six months. Arthur signed up for a course of eye lectures at the Krankenhaus; but quickly discovered that the German learned while walking along flanked by two Austrian schoolboys whose phraseology was often less than choice did not fully prepare a fellow for rapid instruction littered with technical terms. Still, the Austrian winter provided fine skating, and the city excellent cakes; Arthur even knocked off a short novel, The Doings of Raffles Haw, which paid all their Viennese expenses. After a couple of months, however, he admitted that he would have been better off studying in London. Touie responded to the change of plan with her usual equanimity and despatch. They returned via Paris, where Arthur managed to put in a few days’ study with Landolt.

Thus able to claim he had been trained in two countries, he took rooms in Devonshire Place, was elected a member of the Ophthalmological Society, and waited for patients. He also hoped for work passed on by the big men in the profession, who were often too busy to calculate refractions for themselves. Some regarded it as mere donkey-labour; but Arthur considered himself competent in this field, and counted on overflow work drifting his way.

Devonshire Place consisted of a waiting room and a consulting room. Yet after a few weeks he began to joke that both were waiting rooms, and that he, Arthur, was the one doing the waiting. Idleness being repugnant, he sat at his desk and wrote. He was now well-apprenticed in the literary game, and turned his mind to one of its current bedevilments: magazine fiction. Arthur loved a problem, and the problem went like this. Magazines published two kinds of stories: either lengthy serializations which ensnared the reader week by week and month by month; or single, free-standing tales. The trouble with the tales was that they often didn’t give you enough to bite on. The trouble with the serializations was that if you happened to miss a single issue, you lost the plot. Applying his practical brain to the problem, Arthur envisaged combining the virtues of the two forms: a series of stories, each complete in itself, yet filled with running characters to reignite the reader’s sympathy or disapproval.

He needed therefore the kind of protagonist who could be relied upon to have regular and diverse adventures. Clearly, most professions need not apply. As he turned the matter over in Devonshire Place, he began to wonder if he hadn’t already invented the appropriate candidate. A couple of his less successful novels had featured a consulting detective closely modelled on Joseph Bell of the Edinburgh Infirmary: intense observation followed by rigorous deduction was the key to criminal as well as to medical diagnosis. Arthur had initially called his detective Sheridan Hope. But the name felt unsatisfactory, and in the writing Sheridan Hope had changed first into Sherringford Holmes and then—inevitably as it seemed thereafter—into Sherlock Holmes.

George

The letters and hoaxes continue; Shapurji’s plea to the malefactor to examine his conscience seems to have acted as further provocation. Newspapers announce that the Vicarage is now a boarding house offering rock-bottom terms; that it has become a slaughterhouse; that it will despatch free samples of ladies’ corsetry on request. George has apparently set up as an oculist; he also offers free legal advice and is qualified to arrange tickets and accommodation for travellers to India and the Far East. Enough coal is delivered to stoke a battleship; encyclopaedias arrive, along with live geese.

It is impossible to continue for ever in the same state of nerves; and after a while the household almost turns its persecution into a routine. The Vicarage grounds are patrolled at first light; goods are refused at the gate or returned; explanations are given to disappointed customers for esoteric services. Charlotte even becomes adept at appeasing clergymen summoned from distant counties by urgent pleas for assistance.

George has left Mason College and is now articled to a firm of Birmingham solicitors. Each morning, as he takes the train, he feels guilty for abandoning his family; yet the evenings bring no relief, merely another form of anxiety. His father has also chosen to respond to the crisis in what seems to George a peculiar fashion: by giving him short lectures on how the Parsees have always been much favoured by the British. George thus learns that the very first Indian traveller to Britain was a Parsee; that the first Indian to study Christian theology at a British university was a Parsee; so was the first Indian student at Oxford, and later the first woman student; so was the first Indian man presented at Court, and, later, the first Indian woman. The first Indian to enter the Indian Civil Service was a Parsee. Shapurji tells George about surgeons and lawyers trained in Britain; about Parsee charity during the Irish famine and later towards suffering millworkers in Lancashire. He even tells George about the first Indian cricket team to tour England—Parsees every one of them. But George is quite without interest in cricket, and finds his father’s stratagem more desperate than helpful. When the family is required to toast the election of a second Parsee Member of Parliament, Muncherji Bhownagree in the constituency of North-East Bethnal Green, George finds a shameful sarcasm rising within him. Why not write to the new MP and suggest he help prevent the arrival of coal, encyclopaedias and live geese?

Shapurji is more concerned about the letters than the deliveries. Increasingly, they seem to be the work of a religious maniac. They are signed by God, Beelzebub, the Devil; the writer claims to be eternally lost in Hell, or earnestly desiring that destination. When this mania begins to show violent intent, the Vicar fears for his family. “I swear by God that I will murder George Edalji soon.” “May the Lord strike me dead if mayhem and bloodshed do not ensue.” “I will descend into Hell showering curses upon you all and will meet you there in God’s time.” “You are nearing the end of your time on this Earth and I am God’s chosen instrument for the task.”

After more than two years of persecution, Shapurji decides to approach the Chief Constable again. He writes an account of events, encloses samples of the correspondence, points out respectfully that a clear intention to murder is now being expressed, and asks for the police to protect an innocent family thus threatened. Captain Anson’s reply ignores the request. Instead he writes:

I do not say that I know the name of the offender, though I have my particular suspicions. I prefer to keep these suspicions to myself until I am able to prove them, and I trust to be able to obtain a dose of penal servitude for the offender; as although great care has apparently been exercised to avoid, as far as possible, anything which would constitute any serious offence in law, the person who writes the letters has overreached himself in two or three instances, in such manner as to render him liable to the most serious punishment. I have no doubt that the offender will be detected.

Shapurji hands his son the letter and asks his opinion. “On the one hand,” says George, “the Chief Constable maintains that the hoaxer is skilfully using his knowledge of the law to avoid committing any actual offence. On the other hand, he seems to think that clear offences liable to result in penal servitude have already been committed. In which case the hoaxer is not such a clever fellow after all.” He pauses and looks at his father. “He means me, of course. He believes I took the key and he now believes that I wrote the letters. He knows I am studying law—the reference is clear. I think, to be honest, Father, the Chief Constable might be more of a threat to me than the hoaxer.”

Shapurji is not so sure. One threatens penal servitude and the other threatens death. He finds it hard to keep bitterness against the Chief Constable out of his thoughts. He still has not shown George the vilest of the letters. Could Anson really believe that George wrote them? If so, he would like to be told in what way it is an offence to write an anonymous letter to yourself threatening to murder yourself. He worries night and day about his first-born son. He sleeps badly, and often finds himself out of bed, urgently and unnecessarily checking that the door is locked.

In December of 1895 an advertisement appears in a Blackpool newspaper offering the entire contents of the Vicarage for sale by public auction. There will be no reserve price on any item as the Vicar and his wife are eager to dispose of everything prior to their imminent departure for Bombay.

Blackpool is at least a hundred miles as the crow flies. Shapurji has a vision of the persecution spreading throughout the whole country. Blackpool might be only the beginning: next it will be Edinburgh, Newcastle, London. Followed by Paris, Moscow, Timbuctoo—why not?

And then, as suddenly as it began, it stops. No more letters, no unwanted goods, no hoax advertisements, no intemperate brothers in Christ on the doorstep. For a day, then a week, then a month, then two months. It stops. It has stopped.