FOUR

Endings

George

On the Tuesday, Maud passed her Daily Herald silently across the breakfast table. Sir Arthur had died at 9:15 the previous morning at Windlesham, his home in Sussex. DIES PRAISING HIS WIFE announced the headline; and then “YOU ARE WONDERFUL!” SAYS SHERLOCK HOLMES’ CREATOR and then NO MOURNING. George read how there was “no gloom” in the house at Crowborough; the blinds had deliberately not been drawn; and only Mary, Sir Arthur’s daughter by his first marriage, was “showing grief.”

Mr. Denis Conan Doyle talked freely to the Herald’s Special Correspondent, “not in a hushed voice, but normally, glad and proud to talk about him. ‘He was the most wonderful husband and father that ever lived,’ he said, ‘and one of the greatest men. He was greater than most people knew, because he was so modest.’ ” Two paragraphs of proper filial praise followed. But the next paragraph made George embarrassed; he almost wanted to hide the paper from Maud. Should a son speak like this about his parents—especially to a newspaper? “He and my mother were lovers to the end. When she heard him coming she would jump up like a girl and pat her hair and run to meet him. There had never been greater lovers than these two.” Apart from the impropriety, George disapproved of the boasting—the more so as it followed close upon the assertion of Sir Arthur’s own modesty. He, surely, would never have made such claims for himself. The son continued: “If it had not been for our knowledge that we have not lost him, I am certain that my mother would have been dead within an hour.”

Denis’s younger brother Adrian corroborated their father’s continuing presence in their lives. “I know perfectly well that I am going to have conversations with him. My father fully believed that when he passed over he would continue to keep in touch with us. All his family believe so, too. There is no question that my father will often speak to us, just as he did before he passed over.” Not that it would be entirely straightforward: “We shall always know when he is speaking, but one has to be careful, because there are practical jokers on the other side as there are here. It is quite possible that they may attempt to impersonate him. But there are tests which my mother knows, such as little mannerisms of speech which cannot be impersonated.”

George was confused. The instant sadness he felt at the news—as if, somehow, he had lost a third parent—was deemed to be impermissible: NO MOURNING. Sir Arthur had died happily; his family—with one exception—was resisting grief. The blinds were not drawn; there was no gloom. Who was he, then, to pronounce himself bereft? He wondered whether to express this quandary to Maud, who would be able to think more clearly about such matters; but judged it might seem egotistical. The dead man’s own modesty perhaps compelled a modesty of grief among those who had known him.

Sir Arthur had been seventy-one. The obituaries were substantial and affectionate. George followed the news all week, and discovered to his slight discomfort that Maud’s Herald gave him rather more information than his own Telegraph. There was to be a GARDEN FUNERAL which was JUST A FAMILY FAREWELL. George wondered if he would be invited; he hoped that those who had celebrated Sir Arthur’s marriage might also be allowed to bear witness to his . . . he was going to say death, but the word was not in use at Crowborough. His passing over; his promotion, as some termed it. No, this was an inappropriate expectation—he was not in any sense a member of the family. Having settled the matter in his mind, George felt slightly piqued to discover from the next day’s paper that a crowd of three hundred would attend the funeral.

Sir Arthur’s brother-in-law, the Revd. Cyril Angell, who had buried the first Lady Conan Doyle and married the second one, took the service in the rose garden at Windlesham. He was assisted by the Revd. C. Drayton Thomas. There was little black in the congregation; Jean wore a flowered summer dress. Sir Arthur was laid to rest near the garden hut which had served him so long as a study. Telegrams arrived from all over the world, and a special train had to be run to carry all the flowers. When laid out on the burial field, they looked, according to one witness, as if a fanciful Dutch garden had grown as high as a man’s head. Jean had ordered a headboard made of British oak, inscribed with the words BLADE STRAIGHT, STEEL TRUE. A sportsman and a chivalrous knight to the end.

George felt that all had been done properly, if unconventionally; his benefactor had been honoured as he would have wished. But Friday’s Daily Herald announced that the story was not yet complete. CONAN DOYLE’S EMPTY CHAIR read the four-column headline, and beneath it an explanation which jumped from type-size to type-size. CLAIRVOYANT to attend GREAT MEETING. 6,000 Spiritualists at Memorial Meeting. WIFE’S WISH. Medium Who Will Be Quite Frank.

This public farewell would take place at the Albert Hall on Sunday July 13th 1930 at 7 p.m. The service was to be organized by Mr. Frank Hawken, secretary of the Marylebone Spiritualist Association. Lady Conan Doyle, who would attend with other family members, said that she looked upon it as the last public demonstration she would attend with her husband. An empty chair would be placed on the stage to symbolize Sir Arthur’s presence, and she would sit to the left of it—the position she had occupied tirelessly over the last two decades.

But there was more. Lady Conan Doyle had asked that there be a demonstration of clairvoyance in the course of the meeting. This would be performed by Mrs. Estelle Roberts, who had always been Sir Arthur’s favourite medium. Mr. Hawken favoured the Herald with an interview: “Whether Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will be able to demonstrate sufficiently yet awhile for a medium to describe him is problematical,” he stated. “I should imagine that he would be quite capable of demonstrating already. He was quite prepared for his passing.” Further: “If he did demonstrate it is doubtful whether the evidence would be accepted by the sceptics, but we who know Mrs. Roberts as a medium would have no doubt on the matter at all. We know that if she cannot see him she will be quite frank about it.” There was no mention here, George noted, of any threat from practical jokers.

Maud watched her brother finish the story. “You will have to go,” she said.

“You think so?”

“Definitely. He called you his friend. You must say your farewell, even if the circumstances are unusual. You had better go to the Marylebone Association for your ticket. This afternoon or tomorrow—otherwise you will be anxious.”

It was strange, but agreeable, how decisive Maud could be. Whether at his desk or not, George was in the habit of chasing one argument after another before coming to a decision. Maud refused to waste such time; she saw more clearly—or at least more quickly—and he handed over household decisions to her just as he handed over whatever money he did not require for clothing and office expenses. She looked after their living costs, placed a certain amount each month in a savings account, and gave the remainder to charity.

“You do not think Father would disapprove of . . . of this sort of thing?”

“Father has been dead for twelve years,” replied Maud. “And I always like to think that those who are in God’s presence find themselves somewhat changed from how they were on earth.”

It still took him by surprise that Maud could be so forthright; her statement verged on the critical. George decided not to discuss it, but to consider it later in private. He returned to the newspaper. His knowledge of spiritualism was mostly based on a few dozen pages written by Sir Arthur, and he could not say they had received his fullest concentration. The notion of six thousand people waiting for their lost leader to address them through a medium struck him as an alarming proposition.

He had an aversion to large numbers of people gathered in one spot. He thought of the crowds at Cannock and Stafford, of the rough loiterers besieging the Vicarage after his arrest. He remembered men thumping violently on the cab door and waving their sticks; he remembered the crush of men in Lewes and Portland, and how it sharpened the pleasures of solitary confinement. In certain circumstances he might attend a public lecture, or a large meeting of solicitors; but as a general rule he regarded the tendency of human beings to agglomerate in one place as the beginning of unreason. It was true that he lived in London, a most populous city, but he was able largely to control his contact with his fellow men and women. He preferred them to come into his office one by one; he felt protected by his desk and by his knowledge of the law. It was safe here at 79 Borough High Street: the office downstairs, and upstairs the rooms he shared with Maud.

It had been an excellent notion that they should live together, though he could no longer recall who proposed it. When Sir Arthur was helping vindicate him, Mother had stayed some part of the time with him at Miss Goode’s lodgings in Mecklenburgh Square. But it became evident that she must return to Wyrley, and the idea of exchanging the women of the household had seemed logical. Maud, to their parents’ great surprise, though much less to his, had proved immensely capable. She organized the house for him, cooked, acted as secretary when his own was away, and listened to his stories of the day’s work with as much enthusiasm as if she were back in the old schoolroom. She had become more outgoing and more opinionated since moving to London; she had also learned how to tease him, which gave him rare pleasure.

“But what shall I wear?”

Her speed of reply meant that she must have foreseen the question. “Your blue business suit. It is not a funeral, and in any case they do not believe in black. But it is important to show respect.”

“It is a vast arena by the sound of it. I doubt I shall be able to get a ticket near the stage.”

It had become part of their living together that George habitually looked for objections to plans that had already been decided. And in return, Maud indulged such prevarication. Now she disappeared, and he heard the sound of objects being dragged around the attic room above his head. A few minutes later she placed before him something that caused a sudden frisson: his binoculars in their dust-laden case. She fetched a cloth, and wiped the dust away; the leather, long unpolished, shone dully with damp.

Instantly, brother and sister are standing once more in Castle Gardens, Aberystwyth, on the last entirely happy day of his life. A passer-by points out Mount Snowdon; but all George can see is the delight on his sister’s face. She turns and promises to buy him a pair of binoculars. Two weeks later his ordeal began, and afterwards, when he was free and they moved to Borough High Street, on their first Christmas together she had given him this present which had made him come close to weeping for himself.

He had been grateful, but also puzzled, since they were now far from Snowdon, and he doubted they would ever return to Aberystwyth. Maud had anticipated this response, and suggested he take up birdwatching. This had immediately struck him, like all Maud’s proposals, as eminently sensible, and so for several Sunday afternoons he had gone off to the marshes and woodlands surrounding London. She thought he needed a hobby; he thought she needed him out of the house from time to time. He stuck at it dutifully for a few months, but in truth he had trouble following a bird in flight, and the ones at rest seemed to take pleasure in being camouflaged. Additionally and alternatively, many of the places from which it was deemed best to watch birds struck him as cold and damp. If you had spent three years in prison, you did not need any more cold and damp in your life until you were placed in your coffin and lowered into the coldest, dampest place of all. That had been George’s considered view of birdwatching.

“I felt so sorry for you that day.”

George looked up, the picture in his head of a twenty-one-year-old girl by the disappointing ruins of a Welsh castle replaced by a greying, middle-aged woman behind a teapot. She spotted some more dust on the binocular case and gave it another wipe. George gazed at his sister. Sometimes he could not tell which of them was taking care of the other.

“It was a happy day,” he said firmly, holding to the memory he had made into certainty by repetition. “The Belle Vue Hotel. The tramway. Roast chicken. Not going to pick up pebbles. The railway journey. It was a happy day.”

“I was pretending for most of it.”

George was not sure he wanted his memories disturbed. “I could never tell how much you knew,” he said.

“George, I was not a child. I might have been a child when it all began, but not then. What else did I have to do except work it out? You cannot keep things from someone of twenty-one who rarely leaves the house. You are only keeping things from yourself, pretending to yourself, and hoping she will go along with it.”

George thought his way back from the Maud he knew now, and realized there must have been a lot more of this woman in that girl than he was aware of at the time. But he had no desire to pursue the complications of this. He had decided long ago what had happened; he knew his own story. He might be willing to accept a general correction of the kind just made; but the last thing he wanted was fresh detail.

Maud sensed this. And if, back then, he had kept things from her, she had also kept things from him. She would never tell him of the morning Father had called her into his study and announced that he feared greatly for the mental stability of her brother. He said George had been under much strain and was refusing to take the slightest holiday; so he would propose over dinner that brother and sister take a day trip to Aberystwyth, and whether she wanted to or not she was to concur and insist that they must, absolutely must go. And this was what had happened. George had politely yet stubbornly refused his father, then yielded to the pleas of his sister.

It had been a piece of scheming quite untypical of the Vicarage. But more shocking to Maud had been Father’s assessment of George’s condition. To her he had always been the reliable, conscientious brother; while Horace was the frivolous one, who lived life on a whim, who lacked stolidity. And as it turned out, she had been right and Father wrong. For how could George have survived his ordeal if he had not possessed much greater mental fortitude than Father ever attributed to him? But these were thoughts Maud would always keep to herself.

“There was one matter on which Sir Arthur was profoundly wrong,” George declared suddenly. “He opposed votes for women.” Since her brother had always supported female suffrage during the time it had been an issue, this opinion came as no surprise to Maud. Rather, it was the fierceness in his voice that was unaccountable. George was now looking away from his sister in embarrassment. The trail of memory, and all that came with it, had set off in him the tenderest of emotions towards Maud, and a realization that these had been, and would continue to be, the strongest feelings of his life. But George was neither skilled nor easy at conveying such thoughts, and even this most indirect of confessions disturbed him. So he rose, folded the Herald unnecessarily, handed it back, and went downstairs to his office.

There was work to be done, but instead he sat at his desk thinking about Sir Arthur. They had last met twenty-three years ago; still, the link between them had somehow never been broken. He had followed Sir Arthur’s writings and doings, his travels and campaigns, his interventions in the public life of the nation. George often agreed with his pronouncements—on divorce reform, the threat from Germany, the need for a Channel Tunnel, the moral necessity of returning Gibraltar to Spain. He permitted himself, however, to be frankly dubious about one of Sir Arthur’s lesser-known contributions to penal reform: the proposal that hardened recidivists in His Majesty’s gaols should all be transported to the Scottish island of Tiree. George had cut articles from the newspapers, followed Sherlock Holmes’s continuing exploits in The Strand Magazine, and borrowed Sir Arthur’s latest books from the library. Twice he had taken Maud to the cinema to watch Mr. Eille Norwood’s remarkable impersonation of the consulting detective.

He remembered, the year they first came to Borough High Street, buying the Daily Mail solely to read Sir Arthur’s special despatch on the marathon race at the London Olympics. George could not have been less interested in athletic endeavour, but he was rewarded by a further insight—if any more were needed—into the nature of his benefactor. Sir Arthur’s description had been so vivid that George read it again and again until he could picture it in his head like a newsreel. The vast stadium—the expectant crowd—a small figure enters ahead of all the others—an Italian in a state of near collapse—he falls, he rises, he falls again, he rises again, he staggers—then an American enters the stadium and begins to catch him up—the plucky Italian is twenty yards from the tape—the crowd is hypnotized—he falls again—he is helped up—willing arms propel him through the tape before the American can catch him. But the Italian has, of course, broken the rules by accepting assistance and the American is declared the winner.

Any other writer would have left it at that, pleased with his success at evoking the drama of the moment. But Sir Arthur was not any other writer, and had been so touched by the Italian’s bravery that he started a subscription for the man. Three hundred pounds had been contributed, which enabled the runner to open a baker’s shop in his native village—something a gold medal would never have been able to effect. This was typical of Sir Arthur: generous and practical in equal parts.

After his success with the Edalji Case, Sir Arthur had involved himself in other judicial protests. George was rather ashamed to admit that his feelings towards subsequent victims consisted of envy verging occasionally on disapproval. There was Oscar Slater, for instance, whose case took up years and years of Sir Arthur’s life. The man had, it was true, been wrongly accused of murder, and nearly executed, and Sir Arthur’s intervention had spared him the gallows and eventually gained his release; but Slater was a very low sort of fellow, a professional criminal who had shown not an ounce of gratitude towards those who had helped him.

Sir Arthur had also continued to play the detective. Only three or four years ago there had been the curious case of the woman writer who disappeared. Christie, that was her name. Apparently a rising star of detective fiction, though George had not the slightest interest in rising stars, as long as Holmes was still compiling his casebook. Mrs. Christie had vanished from her home in Berkshire, and her car was found abandoned some five miles from Guildford. When three police forces could find no trace of her, the Chief Constable of Surrey had called in Sir Arthur—who had, in his time, been Deputy Lieutenant of the county. What happened next surprised many people. Did Sir Arthur interview witnesses, scour the trampled ground for footprints, or cross-examine the police, as he had done in the famous Edalji Case? Not a bit of it. He had contacted Christie’s husband, borrowed one of the missing woman’s gloves, and taken it off to a psychic who had laid it against his forehead in an attempt to locate the woman. Well, it was one thing—as George had proposed to the Staffordshire Constabulary—to use real bloodhounds to sniff out a trail, quite another to employ psychic ones who merely stayed at home and sniffed gloves. George, on reading of Sir Arthur’s novel investigative techniques, had felt quite relieved that more orthodox ones had been applied in his own case.

However, it would take a great deal more than a few such eccentricities to dent George’s utter respect for Sir Arthur. He had it as a young man of thirty, newly released from prison; and he had it still as a fifty-four-year old solicitor, his moustache and hair now quite grey. The only reason he was able to sit here at his desk on a Friday morning was because of Sir Arthur’s high principles, and his willingness to convert them into action. George’s life had been returned to him. He had a full set of law books, a satisfactory practice, a choice of hats, and a splendid—some might even say gaudy—fob chain strung across a waistcoat that each year felt a little tighter. He was a householder, and a man who had his opinions about matters of the day. He did not have a wife, it was true; nor did he have long lunches with colleagues who cried “Good old George!” as he reached for the bill. Instead, he had a curious kind of fame, or half-fame, or, as the years had passed, quarter-fame. He had wanted to be known as a lawyer, and he had ended up being known as a miscarriage of justice. His case had led to the setting-up of the Court of Criminal Appeal, whose decisions over the last two decades had elaborated the common law of crime to an extent widely recognized as revolutionary. George was proud of his association—however unintentional it had been—with this event. But who was aware of it? A few people would respond to his name by shaking his hand warmly, treating him as a man who once, long ago, had been famously wronged; others looked at him with the eyes of farm boys or special constables in country lanes; but most nowadays had never heard of him.

At times he resented this, and felt ashamed of his resentment. He knew that in all his years of suffering, there had been nothing he longed for more than anonymity. The Chaplain at Lewes had asked him what he missed, and he had replied that he missed his life. Now he had it back; he had work, enough money, people to nod to in the street. But he was occasionally nudged by the thought that he deserved more; that his ordeal should have led to more reward. From villain to martyr to nobody very much—was this not unfair? His supporters had assured him that his case was as significant as that of Dreyfus, that it revealed as much about England as the Frenchman’s did about France, and just as there had been Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards so there were those for and against Edalji. They further insisted that in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle he had as great a defender, and a better writer, than the Frenchman Émile Zola, whose books were reportedly vulgar and who had run away to England when threatened in his turn with gaol. Imagine Sir Arthur scuttling off to Paris to evade the whim of some politician or prosecutor. He would have stayed and fought and made a great noise and shaken the bars of his cell until the prison collapsed.

And yet, for all this, the name of Dreyfus had constantly increased in fame, and was known around the globe, while that of Edalji was scarcely recognized in Wolverhampton. This was partly his own doing—or lack of doing. After his release he was frequently asked to address meetings, to write newspaper articles, and give interviews. He invariably declined. He did not wish to be a spokesman, or the representative of a cause; he did not have the temperament for the public platform; and having once recounted his sufferings for The Umpire, he felt it immodest to do so again whenever invited. He had considered preparing a revised edition of his book on railway law, yet felt that this too might be exploiting his notoriety.

But more than this, he suspected that his obscurity was something to do with England itself. France, as he understood it, was a country of extremes, of violent opinion, violent principles and long memories. England was a quieter place, just as principled, but less keen on making a fuss about its principles; a place where the common law was trusted more than government statute; where people got on with their own business and did not seek to interfere with that of others; where great public eruptions took place from time to time, eruptions of feeling which might even tip over into violence and injustice, but which soon faded in the memory, and were rarely built into the history of the country. This has happened, now let us forget about it and carry on as before: such was the English way. Something was wrong, something was broken, but now it has been repaired, so let us pretend that nothing much was wrong in the first place. The Edalji Case would not have arisen if there had been a Court of Appeal? Very well, then: pardon Edalji, establish a Court of Appeal before the year is out—and what more remains to be said about the matter? This was England, and George could understand England’s point of view, because George was English himself.

He had written twice to Sir Arthur since the wedding. In the last year of the war his father had died; on a chilly May morning he was buried close to Uncle Compson, a dozen yards from the church where he had officiated for more than forty years. George felt that Sir Arthur—having met his father—would wish to know; in reply he had received a brief note of condolence. But then, a few months later, he read in the newspaper that Sir Arthur’s son Kingsley, having been wounded on the Somme and left in a weakened state, had like so many others been carried off by influenza. A mere fortnight before the Armistice was signed. He wrote again, a son who had lost a father to a father who had lost a son. This time he received a longer letter. Kingsley had been the last name of a bitter roll-call. Sir Arthur’s wife had lost her brother Malcolm in the first week of the war. His nephew Oscar Hornung had been killed at Ypres, along with another of his nephews. His sister Lottie’s husband had died on his first day in the trenches. And so on, and so on. Sir Arthur listed those known to himself and his wife. But in closing he expressed the certainty that they were not lost, merely waiting on the farther side.

George no longer counted himself a religious person. If he was any sort of Christian at all, it was not down to the vestiges of filial piety; it was down to fraternal love. He went to church because it gave Maud pleasure that he did so. As far as the afterlife went, he thought he would wait and see. He was suspicious of zeal. He had been somewhat alarmed at the Grand Hotel when Sir Arthur had talked so intensely about his religious feelings, which were scarcely germane to the matter in hand. But this had at least prepared George for the subsequent news that his benefactor had become a fully-fledged Spiritualist and was planning to devote his remaining years and energies to the movement. Many right-thinking people were grossly shocked by the announcement. If Sir Arthur, the very ideal of an English gentleman, had restricted himself to a little genteel Sunday-afternoon table-turning among friends, they might not have minded. But this had never been Sir Arthur’s way. If he believed something, he wanted everyone else to believe it as well. This had always been his strength and sometimes his weakness. So there had been mockery from every direction, with impertinent newspaper headlines asking HAS SHERLOCK HOLMES GONE MAD? Wherever Sir Arthur lectured, there were counter-lectures from opponents of every stripe—Jesuits, Plymouth Brethren, angry materialists. Only the other week Bishop Barnes of Birmingham had attacked the “fantastic types of belief” currently proliferating. Christian Science and Spiritualism were false creeds which “drove the simple to resuscitate moribund ideas,” George had read. Yet neither mockery nor clerical rebuke could ever deter Sir Arthur.

Though George was instinctively sceptical about Spiritualism, he declined to side with the attacks on it. While he did not think himself competent to judge such matters, he knew how to choose between Bishop Barnes of Birmingham and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He remembered—and it was one of his great memories, one he had always imagined sharing with a wife—the conclusion of that first meeting at the Grand Hotel. They had stood to say goodbye, and Sir Arthur had naturally towered over him, and this large, forceful, gentle man had looked him in the eye and said, “I do not think you are innocent. I do not believe you are innocent. I know you are innocent.” The words were more than a poem, more than a prayer, they were the expression of a truth against which lies would break. If Sir Arthur said he knew a thing, then the burden of proof, to George’s legal mind, shifted to the other fellow.

He took down Memories and Adventures, Sir Arthur’s autobiography, a stout, midnight-blue volume, published six years previously. It fell open where it always did, at page 215. “In 1906,” he read yet again, “my wife passed away after a long illness . . . For some time after these days of darkness I was unable to settle to work until the Edalji case came suddenly to turn my energies into an entirely unexpected channel.” George always felt a little uneasy at this beginning. It seemed to imply that his case had come along at a convenient moment, its peculiar nature being just what was required to drag Sir Arthur from a slough of despond; as if he might have reacted differently—indeed, not at all—had the first Lady Conan Doyle not recently died. Was this being unfair? Was he scrutinizing a simple sentence too closely? But that was what he did, each day of his professional life: he read carefully. And Sir Arthur had presumably written for careful readers.

There were many other sentences which George had underlined with pencil and annotated in the margin. This, of his father, for a start: “How the Vicar came to be a Parsee, or how a Parsee came to be the Vicar, I have no idea.” Well, Sir Arthur did once have an idea, and a very precise and correct idea, because George had explained his father’s journey at the Grand Hotel, Charing Cross. And then this: “Perhaps some Catholic-minded patron wished to demonstrate the universality of the Anglican Church. The experiment will not, I hope, be repeated, for though the Vicar was an amiable and devoted man, the appearance of a coloured clergyman with a half-caste son in a rude, unrefined parish was bound to cause some regrettable situation.” George found this unfair; it practically blamed his mother’s family, in whose gift the parish had been, for the events that occurred. Nor did he like being characterized as a “half-caste son.” It was doubtless true in a technical sense, but he no more thought of himself in those terms than he thought of Maud as his half-caste sister, or Horace as his half-caste brother. Was there not a better way of putting it? Perhaps his father, who believed that the world’s future depended upon the harmonious commingling of the races, could have come up with a better expression.

“What aroused my indignation and gave me the driving force to carry the thing through was the utter helplessness of this forlorn little group of people, the coloured clergyman in his strange position, the brave, blue-eyed, grey-haired mother, the young daughter, baited by brutal boors.” Utter helplessness? You would not think from this that Father had published his own analysis of the case before Sir Arthur had even appeared on the scene; nor that Mother and Maud were constantly writing letters, rallying support and obtaining testimonials. It seemed to George that Sir Arthur, while deserving of much credit and thanks, was rather too determined to annex for himself the whole credit and thanks. He certainly diminished the long campaign by Mr. Voules of Truth, not to mention Mr. Yelverton, and the memorials, and the petition of signatures. Even Sir Arthur’s account of how he first became aware of the case was manifestly faulty. “It was late in 1906 that I chanced to pick up an obscure paper called The Umpire, and my eye caught an article which was a statement of his case, made by himself.” But Sir Arthur had only “chanced to pick up” this “obscure paper” because George had sent him all his articles with a long covering letter. As Sir Arthur must have very well known.

No, George thought, this was ungracious of him. Sir Arthur was doubtless working from memory, from the version of events he had himself told and retold down the years. George knew from taking witness statements how the constant recounting of events smoothed the edges of stories, rendered the speaker more self-important, made everything more certain than it had seemed at the time. His eye now sped through Sir Arthur’s account, not wishing to find any more fault. The words “travesty of Justice” near the end were followed by: “The Daily Telegraph got up a subscription for him which ran to some £300.” George allowed himself a slightly taut smile: it was the very sum that had been raised the following year by Sir Arthur’s appeal on behalf of the Italian marathon runner. The two events had touched the heart of the British public to exactly the same measurable degree: three years’ false imprisonment with penal servitude, and falling over at the end of an athletic race. Well, it was no doubt salutary to have your case put in true perspective.

But two lines later there was the sentence which George had read more than any other in the book, which made up for any inaccuracies and false emphases, which offered balm to one whose suffering had been so humiliatingly quantified. Here it was: “He came to my wedding reception, and there was no guest I was prouder to see.” Yes. George decided to take Memories and Adventures with him to the service, in case anyone objected to his presence. He did not know what Spiritualists looked like—let alone six thousand of them—but he doubted he looked like one himself. The book would be his passport in case of difficulty. You see, here on page 215, this is me, I am come to bid him farewell, I am proud to be his guest once more.

On Sunday afternoon, shortly after four o’clock, he turned out of No. 79 Borough High Street and headed for London Bridge: a small brown man in a blue business suit, with a dark blue book tucked under his left arm and a pair of binoculars over his right shoulder. A casual observer might think he was going to a race meeting—except that none was held on a Sunday. Or could that be a birdwatching book under his arm—yet who went birdwatching in a business suit? He would have made a strange sight in Staffordshire, and even in Birmingham they might have put him down for an eccentric; but nobody would do so in London, which contained more than enough eccentrics already.

When he first moved here, he had been apprehensive. About his future life, of course; about how he and Maud would manage together; about the magnitude of the city, its crowds and its noise; and beyond this, about how people would treat him. Whether there would be lurking ruffians like those who had pushed him through a hedge in Landywood and damaged his umbrella, or lunatic policemen like Upton threatening to do him harm; whether he would encounter the race prejudice Sir Arthur was convinced lay at the bottom of his case. But as he crossed London Bridge, which he had been doing now for more than twenty years, he felt quite at his ease. People generally left you alone, either from courtesy or indifference, and George was grateful for either motive.

It was true that inaccurate assumptions were habitually made: that he and his sister had recently arrived in the country; that he was a Hindoo; that he was a trader in spices. And of course he was still asked where he came from; though when he replied—to avoid discussing the finer points of geography—that he was from Birmingham, his interlocutors mostly nodded in an unsurprised way, as if they had always expected the inhabitants of Birmingham to look like George Edalji. Naturally there were the kind of humorous allusions that Greenway and Stentson went in for—though few to Bechuana Land—but he regarded this as some inevitable normality, like rain or fog. And there were even some people who, on learning that you came from Birmingham, expressed disappointment, because they had been hoping for news from distant lands which you were quite unable to supply.

He took the Underground from Bank to High Street Kensington, then walked east until the Albert Hall bulged into view. His cautiousness over time—about which Maud liked to tease him—had made him arrive almost two hours before the service was due to begin. He decided to take a stroll in the park.

It was just after five on a fine Sunday afternoon in July, and a bandstand was blaring away. The park was full of families, trippers, soldiers—though at no point did they form a dense crowd, so George was not made anxious. Nor did he look at young couples flirting with one another, or at sober parents organizing young children, with the same envy he might once have done. When he first came to London, he had not yet given up hope of getting married; indeed, he used to worry about how his future wife and Maud might get on. For it was clear that he could not abandon Maud; nor would he wish to. But then a few years passed, and he realized that Maud’s good opinion of his future wife mattered more to him than the other way round. And then a few more years passed, and the general disadvantages of a wife became even more apparent. A wife might appear agreeable but turn out to be a scold; a wife might not understand thrift; a wife would certainly wish for children, and George thought he probably could not bear the noise, or the disturbance it would bring to his work. And then, of course, there were sexual matters, which often did not lead to harmony. George did not handle divorce cases, but as a lawyer he had seen evidence enough of the misery that could be inflicted by marriage. Sir Arthur had long campaigned against the oppressiveness of the divorce laws, and been president of the Reform Union for many years, before handing over to Lord Birkenhead. From one name on the roll of honour to another: it had been Lord Birkenhead, as F. E. Smith, who had asked Gladstone searching questions in the House about the Edalji Case.

But that was by the by. He was fifty-four years old, living in adequate comfort and largely philosophical about his unmarried condition. His brother Horace was now lost to the family: he had married, moved to Ireland and changed his name. Quite in which order he had done these three things George was not sure, but they were all clearly linked, and the undesirability of each action bled into the others. Well, there were different ways of living; and the truth was, neither he nor Maud had ever been very likely to marry. They were similar in their shyness, and in seeming to fend off those who approached them. But the world contained enough marriages, and was certainly not threatened with underpopulation. Brother and sister could live as harmoniously as husband and wife; in some instances, more so.

In their early days together, he and Maud would make the journey back to Wyrley two or three times a year; but they were rarely happy visits. For George they brought back too many specific memories. The door-knocker still made him jump, and in the evening, as he looked out into the darkened garden, he would often glimpse beneath the trees shifting outlines which he knew to be nothing and yet still feared. With Maud it was different. Devoted as she was to Father and Mother, when she stepped back inside the Vicarage she became withdrawn and tentative; she had few opinions and her laugh was never heard. George could almost swear that she was beginning to ail. But he always knew the cure: it was called New Street Station and the London train.

At first, when he and Maud went out together, people sometimes mistook them for husband and wife; and George, who did not want anyone to think he was incapable of marriage, would say, rather precisely, “No, this is my dear sister Maud.” But as time passed, he would occasionally not bother to make the correction, and afterwards Maud would take his arm and give a little laugh. Soon, he supposed, when her hair was as grey as his, they would be taken for an old married couple, and he might not even care to dispute that assumption.

He had been wandering randomly, and now found himself approaching the Albert Memorial. The Prince was sitting in his gilded, glittering surround, with all the famous men of the world in attendance on him. George extracted his binoculars from their case and started practising. He swept slowly up the Memorial, above the levels at which art and science and industry held sway, above the seated figure of the pensive Consort, up to a higher realm. The burred knob was hard to control, and sometimes there was a mass of unfocused foliage filling the lens, but eventually he emerged at the plain vision of a chunky Christian cross. From there he tracked slowly down the spire, which seemed as heavily populated as the lower reaches of the monument. There were tiers of angels and then—just lower than the angels—a cluster of more human figures, classically draped. He circled the Memorial, frequently losing focus, trying to work out who they might be: a woman with a book in one hand and a snake in the other, a man in a bearskin with a big club, a woman with an anchor, a hooded figure with a long candle in its hand . . . Were they saints, perhaps, or symbolic figures? Ah, here at last was one he recognized, standing on a corner pedestal: she had a sword in one hand, a pair of scales in the other. George was pleased to note that the sculptor had not given her a blindfold. That detail had often drawn his disapproval: not because he didn’t understand its significance, but because others failed to. The blindfold permitted the ignorant to make gibes at his profession. That George would not allow.

He returned the binoculars to their case, and moved his attention from the monochrome, frozen figures to the colourful, moving ones all around him, from the sculpted frieze to the living one. And in that moment, George was struck by the realization that everybody was going to be dead. He occasionally pondered his own death; he had grieved for his parents—his father twelve years ago, his mother six; he had read obituaries in the newspapers and gone to the funerals of colleagues; and he was here for the great farewell to Sir Arthur. But never before had he understood—though it was more a visceral awareness than a mental comprehension—that everybody was going to be dead. He had surely been informed of this as a child, although only in the context of everyone—like Uncle Compson—continuing to live thereafter, either in the bosom of Christ or, if they were wicked, elsewhere. But now he looked about him. Prince Albert was dead already, of course, and so was the Widow of Windsor who had mourned him; but that woman with a parasol would be dead, and her mother next to her dead sooner, and those small children dead later, although if there was another war the boys might be dead sooner, and those two dogs with them would also be dead, and the distant bandsmen, and the baby in the perambulator, even the baby in the perambulator, even if it lived to be as old as the oldest inhabitant on the planet, a hundred and five, a hundred and ten, whatever it was, that baby would be dead too.

And though George was now nearing the limit of his imagination, he continued a little further. If you knew someone who had died, then you could think about them in one of two ways: as being dead, extinguished utterly, with the death of the body the test and proof that their self, their essence, their individuality, no longer existed; or you could believe that somewhere, somehow, according to whatever religion you held, and how fervently or tepidly you held it, they were still alive, either in a way predicted by sacred texts, or in some way we had yet to comprehend. It was one or the other; there was no position of compromise; and George was privately inclined to think extinction the more probable. But when you stood in Hyde Park on a warm summer’s afternoon among thousands of other human beings, few of whom were probably thinking about being dead, it was less easy to believe that this intense and complex thing called life was merely some chance happening on an obscure planet, a brief moment of light between two eternities of darkness. At such a moment it was possible to feel that all this vitality must continue somehow, somewhere. George knew he was not about to succumb to any uprush of religious sentiment—he was not going to ask the Marylebone Spiritualist Association for some of the books and brochures they had offered him when he had taken his ticket. He also knew that he would doubtless go on living as he had done, observing like the rest of the country—and mainly because of Maud—the general rituals of the Church of England, observing them in a kind of half-hearted, imprecisely hopeful way until such time as he died, when he would discover what the truth of the matter was, or, more likely, not discover anything at all. But just today—as that horse and rider trotted past him—that horse and rider as doomed as Prince Albert—he thought he saw a little of what Sir Arthur had come to see.

It all made him feel breathless and panicky; he sat on a bench to calm himself. He looked at the passers-by but saw only dead people walking—prisoners released on licence but likely to be recalled at any moment. He opened Memories and Adventures and began flipping its pages in an attempt to distract himself. And instantly two words presented themselves to his eyes. They were in normal type, but they struck him like capitals: “Albert Hall.” A more superstitious or credulous mind might have found significance in the moment; George declined to view it as anything more than a coincidence. Even so, he read, and was distracted. He read how, nearly thirty years previously, Sir Arthur had been invited to judge a Strong Man competition in the Hall; and how, after a champagne supper, he had walked out into the empty night and found himself a few steps behind the victor, a simple fellow preparing to walk the London streets until it was time to catch the morning train back to Lancashire. George feels himself in a sudden, vivid dreamland. There is fog, and people’s breath is white, and a strong man with a gold statue has no money for a bed. He sees the fellow from behind, as Sir Arthur had; he sees a hat at an angle, the cloth of a jacket pulled tight by powerful shoulders, a statue clamped casually under one arm, its feet pointing backwards. Lost in the fog, but with a large, gentle, Scottish-voiced rescuer padding up behind, and never afraid to act. What will happen to them all—the wrongly accused lawyer, the collapsed marathon runner, the disoriented strong man—now that Sir Arthur has left them?

There was still an hour to go, but people had already started moving towards the Hall, so he joined them to avoid a later crush. His ticket was for a second-tier box. He was directed up some back steps and emerged into a curving corridor. A door was opened, and he found himself in the narrow funnel of a box. There were five seats, all currently empty: one at the back, two side by side, and another pair at the front by the brass rail. George hesitated for a moment, then took a breath and stepped forwards.

Lights blaze at him from all around this gilt and red-plush Colosseum. It is less a building than an oval canyon; he looks far across, far below, far above. How many does it hold—eight thousand, ten thousand? Almost dizzy, he takes a seat at the front. He is glad Maud suggested bringing the binoculars: he scours the arena and the sloping stalls, the three tiers of boxes, the great pipe organ behind the stage, then the higher slope of the circle, the row of arches supported by brown marble columns, and above them the beginnings of a soaring dome cut off from view by a floating canopy of linen duck, like a cloudscape over their heads. He examines the people arriving below—some in full evening dress, but most obedient to Sir Arthur’s wish that he not be mourned. George sweeps the binoculars back to the platform: there are banks of what he takes to be hydrangeas, and large drooping ferns of some kind. A line of square-backed chairs has been set up for the family. The middle one has an oblong of cardboard set up across it. George focuses his glasses on this chair. The sign reads SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE.

As the hall fills up, George stows his binoculars back in their case. Neighbours arrive in the box on his left; he is only a padded armrest away. They greet him in a friendly manner, as if the occasion, while serious, is also informal. He wonders if he is the only person present who is not a spiritualist. A family of four arrives to complete his box; he offers to take the single seat at the back, but they will not hear of it. They seem to him like ordinary Londoners: a couple, with two children approaching adulthood. The wife unselfconsciously takes the seat next to him: she is a woman in her late thirties, he judges, dressed in dark blue, with a broad, clear face and flowing auburn hair.

“Halfway to Heaven already, up here, aren’t we?” she says pleasantly. He nods politely. “And where are you from?”

For once, George decides to respond precisely. “Great Wyrley,” he says. “It’s near Cannock in Staffordshire.” He half expects her to say, like Greenway and Stentson, “No, where are you really from?” But instead she just waits, perhaps for him to mention which spiritualist association he belongs to. George is tempted to say, “Sir Arthur was a friend of mine,” and to add, “Indeed, I was at his wedding,” and then, if she doubts him, to prove it from his copy of Memories and Adventures. But he thinks this might appear presumptuous. Besides, she might wonder why, if he was a friend of Sir Arthur’s, he is sitting so far away from the stage among ordinary folk who did not have that luck.

When the hall is full, the lights are dimmed and the official party walks out on stage. George wonders if they are meant to stand up, perhaps even applaud; he is so used to the rituals of the Church, of knowing when to stand, to kneel, to remain seated, that he feels rather lost. If this were a theatre and they played the National Anthem, that would solve the problem. He feels everyone ought to be on their feet, in tribute to Sir Arthur and in deference to his widow; but there is no instruction, and so all remain seated. Lady Conan Doyle is wearing grey rather than mourning black; her two tall sons, Denis and Adrian, are in evening dress and carry top hats; they are followed by their sister Jean, and half-sister Mary, the surviving child of Sir Arthur’s first marriage. Lady Conan Doyle takes her seat at the left hand of the empty chair. One son sits next to her, the other on the far side of the placard; the two young men rather self-consciously place their top hats on the floor. George cannot see their faces at all distinctly, and wants to reach for his binoculars, but doubts the gesture would be held appropriate. Instead, he looks down at his watch. It is seven o’clock precisely. He is impressed by the punctuality; he somehow expected spiritualists to be more lax in their timekeeping.

Mr. George Craze of the Marylebone Spiritualist Association introduces himself as chairman of the meeting. He begins by reading a statement on behalf of Lady Conan Doyle:

At every meeting all over the world, I have sat at my beloved husband’s side, and at this great meeting, where people have come with respect and love in their hearts to do him honour, his chair is placed beside me, and I know that in the spiritual presence he will be close to me. Although our earthly eyes cannot see beyond the earth’s vibrations, those with the God-given extra sight called clairvoyance will be able to see the dear form in our midst.

I want in my children’s, and my own, and my beloved husband’s name, to thank you all from my heart for the love for him which brought you here tonight.

There is a murmur round the hall; George is unable to tell if it indicates sympathy for the widow, or disappointment that Sir Arthur will not be miraculously appearing before them on stage. Mr. Craze confirms that, contrary to the more foolish speculation in the press, there is no question of some physical representation of Sir Arthur manifesting itself as if by magic trick. For those unacquainted with the truths of Spiritualism, and especially for journalists present, he explains that when someone passes over, there is often a period of confusion for the spirit, which may not be able to demonstrate immediately. Sir Arthur, however, was quite prepared for his passing, which he faced with a smiling tranquillity, leaving his family like one going on a long journey yet confident they would all meet again soon. In such conditions it is expected that the spirit will find its place and its powers quicker than most.

George remembers something Sir Arthur’s son Adrian told the Daily Herald. The family, he said, would miss the patriarch’s footsteps and his physical presence, but that was all: “Otherwise, he might only have gone to Australia.” George knows that his champion once visited that distant continent, because a few years ago he borrowed The Wanderings of a Spiritualist from the library. In truth, he found its travel information of greater interest than its theological disquisitions. But he remembers that when Sir Arthur and his family—along with the indefatigable Mr. Wood—were propagandizing in Australia, they were christened The Pilgrims. Now Sir Arthur is back there, or at least in the spiritualist equivalent, whatever that might be.

A telegram from Sir Oliver Lodge is read out. “Our great-hearted champion will still be continuing his campaign on the Other Side, with added wisdom and knowledge. Sursum corda.” Then Mrs. St. Clair Stobart reads from Corinthians, and declares that St. Paul’s words are fitting to the occasion, since Sir Arthur was often in his life described as the St. Paul of Spiritualism. Miss Gladys Ripley sings Liddle’s solo “Abide With Me.” The Revd. G. Vale Owen speaks of Sir Arthur’s literary work and agrees with the author’s own view that The White Company and its sequel Sir Nigel were his best writings; indeed, he judges that the description in the latter work of a Christian knight and man of high devotion may serve as the very picture of Sir Arthur himself. The Revd. C. Drayton Thomas, who took half the funeral service at Crowborough, praises Sir Arthur’s tireless activity as Spiritualism’s mouthpiece.

Next they all stand for the movement’s favourite hymn, “Lead, Kindly Light.” George notices something different about the singing, which he cannot at first identify. “Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see / The distant scene; one step enough for me.” For a moment he is distracted by the words, which do not seem especially appropriate to Spiritualism: as far as George understands it, the movement’s adherents have their eyes on the distant scene all the time, and have precisely laid down the steps it takes to get there. Then he shifts his attention from matter to manner. The singing is different. In church people sing hymns as if reacquainting themselves with lines familiar from months and years ago—lines containing truths so established that they need neither proving, nor thinking about. Here there is directness and freshness in the voices; also a kind of cheerfulness verging on passion which most Vicars would find worrisome. Each word is enunciated as if it contains a brand new truth, one which needs to be celebrated and urgently conveyed to others. It all strikes George as highly unEnglish. Cautiously, he finds it rather admirable. “till / The night is gone, / And with the morn those angel faces smile, / Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.”

As the hymn ends and they take their seats again, George gives his neighbour a small, indeterminate greeting—modest enough, yet even so, something he would never do in church. She responds with a smile that fills every surface of her face. There is nothing forward in it, nor anything of the missionary either. Nor is there any evident complacency. Her smile merely says: yes, this is certain, this is right, this is joyful.

George is impressed, but also slightly shocked: he is suspicious of joy. He has come across little of it in his life. In his childhood there was something called pleasure, usually accompanied by the adjectives guilty, furtive or illicit. The only pleasures allowed were those modified by the word simple. As for joy, it was something associated with angels blowing trumpets, and its true place was in Heaven not on Earth. Let joy be unconfined—that was what people said, wasn’t it? But in George’s experience, joy has always been closely confined. As for pleasure, he has known the pleasure of doing one’s duty—to family, to clients, and occasionally to God. But he has never done most of the things that afford his compatriots pleasure: drinking beer, dancing, playing football and cricket; not to mention things that might have come if marriage had come. He will never know a woman who jumps up like a girl, pats her hair, and runs to meet him.

Mr. E. W. Oaten, who once proudly chaired the first large meeting Sir Arthur addressed on Spiritualism, says that no man better combined within himself all the virtues we associate with the British character: courage, optimism, loyalty, sympathy, magnanimity, love of truth and devotion to God. Next Mr. Hannen Swaffer recalls how less than a fortnight ago, Sir Arthur, though mortally ill, struggled up the steps of the Home Office to plead for the repeal of the Witchcraft Act, which those of malevolent intent sought to invoke against mediums. It was his last duty, and in his devotion to duty he never faltered. This showed itself in every aspect of his life. Many people knew Doyle the writer, Doyle the dramatist, Doyle the traveller, Doyle the boxer, Doyle the cricketer who once dismissed the great W. G. Grace. But greater than any of these was the Doyle who pleaded for justice when the innocent were made to suffer. It was due to his influence that the law of Criminal Appeal was carried. It was this Doyle who so triumphantly took up the causes of Edalji and Slater.

George instinctively looks down at the mention of his name, then proudly up, then surreptitiously sideways. A pity he has been coupled yet again with that low and ungrateful criminal; but he may, he thinks, take honourable pleasure in having his name spoken at this great occasion. Maud will be pleased too. He glances more openly at his neighbours, but his moment has passed. They have eyes only for Mr. Swaffer, who has moved on to celebrate another Doyle, and an even greater one than Doyle the bringer of justice. This greatest of all Doyles was and is the man who in the hours of the War’s despair carried to the women of the country the comforting proof that their loved ones were not dead.

They are now asked to stand in silence for two minutes to honour the memory of their great champion. Lady Conan Doyle, as she rises, looks briefly down at the empty chair next to her, and then stands, with one tall son on either side of her, gazing out at the hall. Six—eight? ten?—thousand gaze back, from gallery, from balcony, from tiered boxes, from the great curve of stalls, and from the arena. In church, people would lower their heads and close their eyes to remember the departed. Here there is no such discretion or inwardness: frank sympathy is conveyed with a direct look. It also seems to George that the silence is of a different nature to any he has felt before. Official silences are respectful, grave, often deliberately saddening; this silence is active, filled with anticipation and even passion. If a silence can be like suppressed noise, then this is such a silence. When it ends, George realizes that it has held such a strange power over him that he has almost forgotten about Sir Arthur.

Mr. Craze is back at the microphone. “This evening,” he announces as the many thousand take their seats again, “we are going to make a very daring experiment with the courage implanted in us by our late leader. We have with us a spirit sensitive who is going to try to give impressions from this platform. One reason why we hesitate to do it in such a colossal meeting is that it places a terrific strain on the sensitive. In an assembly of ten thousand people a tremendous force is centred upon the medium. Tonight, Mrs. Roberts will try to describe some particular friends, but it will be the first time this has been attempted in such a tremendous gathering. You can help with your vibrations as you sing the next hymn, ‘Open My Eyes That I May See Glimpses of Truth.’ ”

George has never been to a seance. He has never, for that matter, crossed a gypsy’s palm with silver, or paid twopence to sit before a crystal ball at a funfair. He believes it is all hocus-pocus. Only a fool or a backward tribesman would believe that the lines on a hand or the tea leaves in a cup reveal anything. He is willing to respect Sir Arthur’s certainty that the spirit survives death; perhaps, too, that under certain circumstances such a spirit might be able to communicate with the living. He is also prepared to admit that there might be something in the telepathic experiments Sir Arthur described in his autobiography. But there comes a point where George draws the line. He draws it, for instance, when people make the furniture jump around, when bells are mysteriously rung and fluorescent faces of the dead appear out of the darkness, when spirit hands leave their supposed imprint on soft wax. George finds this all too obviously a conjuring trick. How can it not be suspicious that the best conditions for spirit communication—drawn curtains, extinguished lights, people joining hands so that they cannot get up and verify what is happening—are precisely the best conditions in which charlatanry can flourish? Regretfully, he judges Sir Arthur credulous. He has read that the American illusionist Mr. Harry Houdini, whose acquaintance Sir Arthur made in the United States, offered to reproduce every single effect known to professional mediums. On numerous occasions he had been tied up securely by honest men, but once the lights were out always managed to free himself sufficiently to ring bells, set off noises, shift the furniture around and even engender ectoplasm. Sir Arthur declined Mr. Houdini’s challenge. He did not deny that the illusionist might be able to produce such effects, but preferred his own interpretation of that ability: Mr. Houdini was in fact the possessor of spiritual powers, whose existence he perversely chose to deny.

As the singing of “Open My Eyes” comes to an end, a slim woman with short dark hair, dressed in flowing black satin, comes forward to the microphone. This is Mrs. Estelle Roberts, Sir Arthur’s favourite medium. The atmosphere in the hall is now even more intense than during the two-minute silence. Mrs. Roberts stands there, slightly swaying, hands clasped together, head cast down. Every eye is upon her. Slowly, very slowly, she begins to lift her head; then her hands are unclasped and her arms begin to spread, while the slow sway continues. Finally, she speaks.

“There are vast numbers of spirits here with us,” she begins. “They are pushing behind me like anything.”

It does indeed seem like this: as if she is holding herself upright despite great pressure from several directions.

Nothing happens for a while, except more swaying, more unseen buffetting. The woman on George’s right whispers, “She is waiting for Red Cloud to appear.”

George nods.

“That’s her spirit guide,” the neighbour adds.

George does not know what to say. This is not his world at all.

“Many of the guides are Indians.” The woman pauses, then smiles and adds, without the slightest embarrassment, “Red Indians, I mean.”

The waiting is as active as the silence was; as if those in the hall are pressing upon the slim figure of Mrs. Roberts much as any invisible spirits are. The waiting builds and the swaying figure plants her feet wider as if to hold her balance.

“They are pushing, they are pushing, many of them are unhappy, the hall, the lights, the world they prefer—a young man, dark hair brushed back, in uniform, a Sam Browne belt, he has a message—a woman, a mother, three children, one of them passed and is with her now—elderly gentleman bald head was a doctor not far from here a dark grey suit passed suddenly after a dreadful accident—a baby, yes, a little girl taken away by influenza she misses her two brothers Bob is one of them and her parents—Stop it! Stop it!”—Mrs. Roberts suddenly shouts, and with her arms outstretched seems to push back at the spirits crowding behind her—“There are too many of them, their voices are confused, a middle-aged man in a dark overcoat who spent much of his life in Africa—he has a message—there is a white-haired grandmother who shares your anxiety and wants you to know—”

George listens to the crowd of spirits being given fleeting description. The impression is that they are all clamouring for attention, fighting to convey their messages. A facetious if logical question comes into George’s mind, from where he cannot tell, unless as a reaction to all this unwonted intensity. If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue? If they have been promoted to a higher state, why have they been reduced to such an importunate rabble? He does not think he will share this thought with his immediate neighbours, who are now leaning forwards and gripping the brass rail.

“—a man in a double-breasted suit between twenty-five and thirty who has a message—a girl, no, sisters, who suddenly passed—an elderly gentleman, over seventy, who lived in Hertfordshire—”

The roll-call continues, and sometimes a brief description will draw a gasp from a distant part of the hall. The sense of anticipation around him is feverish and overwrought; there is also something fearful to it. George wonders what it must be like to be picked out in the presence of thousands by a departed member of your family. He wonders if most would not prefer it to happen in the privacy of a dark and curtained seance room. Or, possibly, not at all.

Mrs. Roberts goes quiet again. It is as if the competing babble behind and around her has also subsided for the moment. Then suddenly the medium flings out her right arm and points to the back of the stalls, on the other side of the hall to George. “Yes, there! I see him! I see the spirit form of a young soldier. He is looking for someone. He is looking for a gentleman with hardly any hair.”

George, like everyone else with a view across the hall, peers intently, half expecting the spirit form to be visible, half trying to identify the man with little hair. Mrs. Roberts raises her hand to shelter her eyes, as if the arc lights are interfering with her perception of the spirit form.

“He looks to be about twenty-four. In khaki uniform. Upright, well built, a small moustache. Mouth droops a little at the corners. He passed suddenly.”

Mrs. Roberts pauses, and tilts her head downwards, rather as counsel might do when taking a note from the solicitor at his side.

“He gives 1916 as the year of his passing. He distinctly calls you ‘Uncle.’ Yes, ‘Uncle Fred.’ ”

A bald-headed man at the back of the stalls rises to his feet, nods, and just as suddenly sits down, as if he is not sure of the etiquette.

“He speaks of a brother Charles,” the medium continues. “Is that correct? He wants to know if you have Aunt Lillian with you. Do you understand?”

The man stays in his seat this time, nodding vigorously.

“He tells me that there was an anniversary, the birthday of a brother. Some anxiety in the home. There is no need for it. The message continues—” and then Mrs. Roberts suddenly lurches forward, as if violently propelled from behind. She spins round and cries, “All right!” She seems to be pushing back. “All right! I say.”

But when she turns to face the arena again, it is clear that contact with the soldier has been broken. The medium places her hands over her face, fingers pressed against forehead, thumbs beneath her ears, as if trying to recover the necessary equilibrium. Finally, she takes her hands away and stretches her arms out.

This time the spirit is of a woman, aged between twenty-five and thirty, whose name begins with a J. She was promoted while giving birth to a little girl, who passed over at the same time. Mrs. Roberts is scanning the front of the arena, following the progress of a mother with a spirit infant in her arms, as she tries to locate her forsaken husband. “Yes, she says her name is June—and she is looking for—R, yes R—is it Richard?” At which a man rises straight up from his seat and shouts, “Where is she? Where are you, June? June, speak to me. Show me our child!” He is quite distraught and staring all around him, until an elderly couple, looking embarrassed, pull him back down.

Mrs. Roberts, as if the interruption has never taken place, so total has been her concentration on the spirit voice, says, “The message is that she and the child are watching over you and taking care of you in your present trouble. They are waiting for you on the farther side. They are happy, and they wish you to be happy until you all meet again.”

The spirits are now becoming more orderly, it seems. Identifications are made and messages passed. A man is seeking his daughter. She is interested in music. He is holding an open score. Initials are established, then names. Mrs. Roberts gives the message: the spirit of one of the great musicians is helping the man’s daughter; if she continues to work hard, the spirit will continue with his influence.

George is beginning to discern a pattern. The messages conveyed, whether of consolation or encouragement or both, are of a very general nature. So too are most of the identifications, at least to begin with. But then comes some clinching detail, which the medium will often take time searching for. George thinks it highly unlikely that these spirits, if they exist, can be so surprisingly incapable of conveying their identity without a lot of guessing games from Mrs. Roberts. Is the supposed problem of transmission between the two worlds no more than a ploy to raise the drama—indeed, the melodrama—until the culminating moment when someone in the audience nods, or raises an arm, or stands up as if summoned, or puts their hands to their face in disbelief and joy?

It could be just a clever guessing game: there is surely a statistical probability that someone with the correct initial, and then the correct name, will be present in an audience of this size, and a medium might cleverly organize her words to lead her to this candidate. Or it could all be a straightforward hoax, with accomplices planted in the audience to impress and perhaps convert the credulous. And then there is a third possibility: that those in the audience who nod and raise an arm and stand up and cry out are genuinely taken by surprise, and genuinely believe contact has been made; but this is because someone in their circle—perhaps a fervent Spiritualist determined to spread belief by however cynical a means—has passed on private details to the organizers. This, George concludes, is probably how it is done. As with perjury, it works best when there is a clever mixture of the true and the false.

“And now there is a message from a gentleman, a very proper and distinguished gentleman, who passed ten years ago, twelve years ago. Yes, I have it, he passed in 1918, he tells me.” The year Father died, thinks George. “He was about seventy-five years of age.” Strange, Father was seventy-six. A longish pause, and then: “He was a very spiritual man.” At which point, George feels his flesh begin to prickle, all along his arms and up into his neck. No, no, surely not. He feels frozen in his seat; his shoulders lock solid; he stares rigidly at the stage, waiting for the medium’s next move.

She raises her head, and starts looking at the higher parts of the hall, between the upper boxes and the gallery. “He says he spent his first years in India.”

George is now utterly terrified. No one knew he was coming here except Maud. Perhaps it is a wild guess—or rather, an exactly accurate guess—by someone who worked out that various people connected with Sir Arthur would probably be here. But no—because many of the most famous and respectable, like Sir Oliver Lodge, have merely sent telegrams. Could someone have recognized him when he arrived? This was just about possible—but then how could they have discovered the very year of Father’s death?

Mrs. Roberts now has her arm outflung, and is pointing to the upper tier of boxes on the other side of the hall. George’s flesh is throbbing all over, as if he has been thrown naked into a bank of nettles. He thinks: I am not going to be able to bear this; it is coming my way, and I cannot escape. The gaze, and the arm, are moving slowly round the great amphitheatre, holding the same level, as if watching a spirit form go questingly from box to box. All George’s rational conclusions of a moment ago are worthless. His father is about to speak to him. His father, who spent all his life as a priest in the Church of England, is about to speak to him through this . . . improbable woman. What can he want? What message can be so urgent? Something to do with Maud? A paternal rebuke to his son’s failing faith? Is some terrifying judgment about to fall on him? Close to panic, George finds himself wishing Mother were by his side. But Mother has been dead these six years.

As the medium’s head slowly continues to turn, as her arm still points to the same level, George feels more scared than the day he sat in his office, knowing that at some point a knock would come and a policeman would arrest him for a crime he had never committed. Now, he is again a suspect, about to be identified in front of ten thousand witnesses. He thinks he must simply rise to his feet and end the suspense by crying, “That is my father!” Perhaps he will faint and fall over the balcony into the stalls below. Perhaps he will have a seizure.

“His name . . . he is telling me his name . . . It begins with an S . . .”

And still the head turns, turns, seeking that one face in the upper boxes, seeking the glorious moment of acknowledgement. George is quite sure everyone is looking at him—and soon they will know exactly who he is. But now George shrinks from the recognition he wished for earlier. He wants to hide in the deepest dungeon, the most noxious prison cell. He thinks, this cannot be true, this absolutely cannot be true, my father would never behave like this, perhaps I am going to soil myself as I did when a boy on the way home from school, perhaps that is why he is coming, to remind me I am a child, to show me his authority continues even after he is dead, yes, that would not be unlike him.

“I have the name—” George thinks he is going to scream. He is going to faint. He will fall and hit his head on—“It is Stuart.”

And then a man of about George’s age, a few yards to his left, is on his feet and signalling to the stage, acknowledging this seventy-five-year-old who was brought up in India and passed in 1918, seeming almost to claim him as a prize. George feels that the shadow of the angel of death has been cast over him; he is chilled to the bone, sweaty, exhausted, threatened, utterly relieved, and deeply ashamed. And at the same time, part of him is impressed, curious, fearfully wondering . . .

“And now I have a lady, she was about forty-five to fifty years of age. She passed over in 1913. She mentions Morpeth. She never married, but she has a message for a gentleman.” Mrs. Roberts starts to looks downwards, into the arena. “She says something about a horse.”

There is a pause. Mrs. Roberts drops her head again, turns it sideways, takes advice. “I have her name now. It is Emily. Yes, she gives her name as Emily Wilding Davison. She has a message, she had arranged to come here to give a gentleman a message. I think she told you through the planchette or Ouija board she would be present.”

A man in an open-necked shirt, sitting near the platform, rises to his feet, and as if conscious he is addressing the whole hall, says in a carrying voice, “That is correct. She told me she would communicate tonight. Emily is the suffragette who threw herself before the King’s horse and died from her injuries. As a spirit figure she is well known to me.”

The hall seems to take in a vast collective breath. Mrs. Roberts starts to relay the message, but George does not bother to listen. His sanity feels suddenly restored; the clear, keen wind of reason is blowing again through his brain. Hocus-pocus, as he always suspected. Emily Davison indeed. Emily Davison, who broke windows, threw stones, set fire to postboxes; who refused to obey prison regulations and was consequently force-fed on numerous occasions. A silly, hysterical woman in George’s view, who deliberately sought death in order to advance her cause; though some said she was merely trying to plant a flag on the horse, and misjudged the speed of the animal. In which case, incompetent as well as hysterical. You cannot break the law to advance the law, that was a nonsense. You do it by petition, by argument, by demonstration if necessary, but by reason. Those who broke the law as an argument for obtaining the vote thereby demonstrated their unfitness to receive it.

Still, the point is not whether Emily Davison was a silly, hysterical woman, or whether her action resulted in Maud getting the vote of which George fully approves. No, the point is that Sir Arthur was such a well-known opponent of Women’s Suffrage that the notion of such a spirit attending his memorial service is absurd. Unless the spirits of the departed are as illogical as they are unruly. Perhaps Emily Davison thought of disrupting this gathering just as she once disrupted the Derby. But in that case, her message ought to be for Sir Arthur, or his widow, rather than for some sympathetic friend.

Stop, George says to himself. Stop thinking rationally about such matters. Or rather, stop granting these people the benefit of the doubt. You were given an unpleasant shock by a clever false alarm, but that is no ground for losing your reason as well as your nerve. He also thinks: yet if I was so scared, if I panicked, if I believed I might be going to die, then consider the potential effect on weaker minds and lesser intelligences. George wonders if the Witchcraft Act—with which he is admittedly unfamiliar—should not remain on the Statute Book after all.

Mrs. Roberts has been giving messages for half an hour or so. George spots people in the arena getting to their feet. But now they are not competing for a lost relative, or rising en masse to greet the spirit forms of loved ones. They are walking out. Perhaps the appearance of Emily Wilding Davison has been the last straw for them too. Perhaps they came as admirers of Sir Arthur’s life and work, but are refusing to associate themselves further with this public conjuring trick. There are thirty, forty, fifty people on their feet, heading determinedly for the exits.

“I can’t go on with all these people walking out,” Mrs. Roberts announces. She sounds offended, but also rather unnerved. She takes a few steps backwards. Someone, somewhere, gives a signal, whereupon a sudden skirling blast comes from the vast pipe organ behind the stage. Is it intended to cover the noise of the departing sceptics, or to indicate that the meeting is being brought to an end? George looks to the woman on his right for guidance. She is frowning, offended at the vulgar way in which the medium has been interrupted. As for Mrs. Roberts herself, she has her head cast down and her arms wrapped round herself, shutting out all this interference with the fragile line of communication she has established to the spirit world.

And then, the last thing George expects comes to pass. The organ suddenly cuts off in mid-anthem, Mrs. Roberts throws her arms open, lifts her head, walks confidently forward to the microphone, and in a ringing, impassioned voice, cries,

“He is here!” And then again, “He is here!”

Those on their way out stop; some turn back to their seats. But in any case, they are now forgotten. Everyone gazes intently at the stage, at Mrs. Roberts, at the empty chair with the placard across it. The blast on the organ might have been a call to attention, a prelude to this very moment. The entire hall is silent, watching, waiting.

“I saw him first,” she says, “during the two-minute silence.

“He was here, first standing behind me, though separate from all the other spirits.

“Then I saw him walk across the platform to his empty chair.

“I saw him distinctly. He was wearing evening dress.

“He looked as he has always looked in recent years.

“There is no doubt about it. He was quite prepared for his passing.”

As she pauses between each brief, dramatic statement, George studies Sir Arthur’s family on the platform. All of them except one are looking across at Mrs. Roberts, transfixed by her announcement. Only Lady Conan Doyle has not turned. George cannot see her expression from this distance, but her hands are crossed on her lap, her shoulders are square, her carriage erect; head proudly high, she is gazing above the audience and out into the far distance.

“He is our great champion, here and on the farther side.

“He is quite capable of demonstrating already. His passing was peaceful, and he was quite prepared for it. There was no pain, and no confusion to his spirit. He is already able to begin his work for us over there.

“When I first saw him, during the two minutes’ silence, it was as in a flash.

“It was when I was giving my messages that I first saw him clearly and distinctly.

“He came and stood behind me and encouraged me while I was doing my work.

“I recognized once more that fine, clear voice of his, which could not be mistaken. He bore himself as a gentleman, as he always did.

“He is with us all the time, and the barrier between the two worlds is but a temporary one.

“There is nothing to fear in passing over, and our great champion has proved it by appearing here amongst us tonight.”

The woman on George’s left leans across the velvet armrest and whispers, “He is here.”

Several people are now on their feet, as if to get a better view of the stage. All are staring fixedly at the empty chair, at Mrs. Roberts, at the Doyle family. George feels himself being caught up again in some mass feeling that transcends, that overwhelms the silence. He is no longer seized by the fear he had when he thought his father was coming for him, nor the scepticism when Emily Davison was putting in her appearance. He feels, despite himself, a kind of cautious awe. This is, after all, Sir Arthur they are speaking of, the man who willingly used his detective abilities on George’s behalf, who risked his own reputation to rescue George’s, who helped give him back the life that had been taken from him. Sir Arthur, a man of the highest integrity and intelligence, believed in events of the kind George has just been witnessing; it would be impertinent for George in this moment to deny his saviour.

George does not think he is losing either his mind, or his common sense. He asks himself: what if there was in the proceedings that mixture of truth and lies he earlier identified? What if some parts of what has happened are charlatanry, but others genuine? What if the theatrical Mrs. Roberts, despite herself, was truly bringing news from distant lands? What if Sir Arthur, in whatever form or place he now might be, is obliged, in order to make contact with the material world, to use as a conduit those who also deal in fraud some of the time? Would that not be an explanation?

“He is here,” the woman on his left repeats, in a normal, conversational voice.

Then the words are taken up by a man a dozen seats away. “He is here.” Three words spoken in an everyday tone, intended to carry a mere few feet. But such is the charged air in the hall that they seem magically amplified.

“He is here,” someone up in the gallery repeats.

“He is here,” responds a woman down in the arena.

Then a man at the back of the stalls suddenly bellows, in the tone of a revivalist preacher, “HE IS HERE!”

Instinctively, George reaches down at his feet and pulls his binoculars from their case. He crams them to his spectacles and tries to focus on the platform. His finger and thumb nervously twirl past the proper focus in each direction, then finally land on the mid-point. He examines the ecstatic medium, the empty chair, and the Doyle family. Lady Conan Doyle has remained, since the first announcement of Sir Arthur’s presence, fixed in the same attitude: straight-backed, square-shouldered, head up, gazing out with—as George can now see—something resembling a smile on her face. The golden-haired, flirtatious young woman he had briefly met has grown darker-haired and matronly; he has only ever seen her at Sir Arthur’s side, which is where she still claims to be. He moves the glasses back and forth, to the chair, the medium, the widow. He finds his breath coming quickly and harshly.

There is a touch on his right shoulder. He drops the binoculars. The woman shakes her head and says gently, “You cannot see him that way.”

She is not rebuking him, merely explaining how things are.

“You will only see him with the eyes of faith.”

The eyes of faith. The eyes Sir Arthur brought with him when they met at the Grand Hotel, Charing Cross. He had believed in George; should George now believe in Sir Arthur? His champion’s words: I do not think, I do not believe, I know. Sir Arthur carried with him an enviable, comforting sense of certainty. He knew things. What does he, George, know? Does he finally know anything? What is the sum of knowledge he has acquired in his fifty-four years? Mostly, he has gone through his life learning and waiting to be told. The authority of others has always been important to him; does he have any authority of his own? At fifty-four, he thinks a lot of things, he believes a few, but what can he really claim to know?

The cries of witness to Sir Arthur’s presence have now died down, perhaps because there has been no answering acknowledgement from the stage. What was Lady Conan Doyle’s message at the start of the service? That our earthly eyes cannot see beyond the earth’s vibration; that only those with the God-given extra sight, called clairvoyance, would be able to see the dear form in our midst. It would have been a miracle indeed if Sir Arthur had managed to endow with clairvoyant powers the various people still on their feet in different parts of the hall.

And now Mrs. Roberts speaks again.

“I have a message for you, dear, from Arthur.”

Again, Lady Conan Doyle does not turn her head.

Mrs. Roberts, in a slow waft of black satin, moves to her left, towards the Doyle family and the empty seat. When she reaches Lady Conan Doyle, she stands to one side of her and a little behind, facing towards the part of the hall where George sits. Despite the distance, her words carry easily.

“Sir Arthur told me that one of you went to the hut, this morning.” She waits, and when the widow does not answer, prompts her. “Is that correct?”

“Why yes,” replies Lady Conan Doyle. “I did.”

Mrs. Roberts nods, and goes on, “The message is: tell Mary—”

At which moment another tremendous blast comes from the pipe organ. Mrs. Roberts leans closer and carries on speaking under the protection of the noise. Lady Conan Doyle nods from time to time. Then she looks across to the large, formally clad son on her left, as if enquiring of him. He in turn looks to Mrs. Roberts, who now addresses them both. Then the other son gets up and joins the group. The organ peals on relentlessly.

George does not know if this drowning of the message is in consideration of the family’s privacy or a piece of stage management. He does not know whether he has seen truth or lies, or a mixture of both. He does not know if the clear, surprising, unEnglish fervour of those around him this evening is proof of charlatanry or belief. And if belief, whether true or false.

Mrs. Roberts has finished communicating her message, and turns towards Mr. Craze. The organ thunders on, yet with nothing to drown out. The Doyle family look around at one another. Where is the service to go from here? The hymns have all been sung, the tributes paid. The daring experiment has been performed, Sir Arthur has come amongst them, his message has been delivered.

The organ continues. Now it seems to be modulating into the rhythms which play out a congregation after a wedding or funeral: insistent and indefatigable, propelling them back into the daily, grimy, unmagical, sublunary world. The Doyle family leave the platform, followed by the officers of the Marylebone Spiritualist Association, the speakers and Mrs. Roberts. People stand up, women reach under their seats for handbags, men in evening dress remember top hats, then there is shuffling and murmuring, the greeting of friends and acquaintances, and a calm, unhurried queue in every aisle. Those around George gather their belongings, rise, nod and grant him their full and certain smiles. George returns them a smile which is no equal of theirs, and does not rise. When most of his section is empty, he reaches down again and presses the binoculars to his spectacles. He focuses once more on the platform, the hydrangeas, the line of empty chairs, and the one specific empty chair with its cardboard placard, the space where Sir Arthur has, just possibly, been. He gazes through his succession of lenses, out into the air and beyond.

What does he see?

What did he see?

What will he see?