Arthur & George (6 page)

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.