The Paper in the Ottic
There comes a point in the telling of any first person story, as it seems to me, when the narrator has either to confess himself stumped or to practise some sort of evasion. An example of confessing yourself stumped comes in
The Moonstone,
when the narration changes from the first person narrative of Franklin Blake to that of the steward Gabriel Betteredge, and then on to other people. The objection to this is not merely that Gabriel Betteredge is an old bore, but also that we never really believe that he would be capable of putting pen to paper. Evasion occurs in
Treasure Island,
where the story changes suddenly from Jim Hawkins’
narrative to a third person account of things Jim didn’t see, although they are described very much as though he
did
see them. Do I hear you saying that I am making too much fuss about something that readers are quite happy to accept as a convention? I don’t agree. It would be wrong, as I see it, for me to start describing the inspector’s interviews with the other people in the house as though I had been present, lively as I’m sure some of them were. I intend to be fairly strict about it, and to tell you only what I saw and heard myself. I had little to do with the official police investigation, and anyway this isn’t an ordinary crime story so much as – I don’t know what to call it – a romantic mystery, perhaps.
Sergeant Hasty came out with me, and took Markle away. I wondered whether the inspector was seeing him next to annoy the Wainwrights, or whether he really had some special reason. The rest of them were in the drawing-room. Stephen was grumbling both about the inefficiency of the police and about their discourtesy in making inquiries so late at night, rather as though he had not called them in himself. At the other end of the room David was busy with the whisky bottle. He looked ill, and his hand was shaking. He said what I had been thinking. “You called them in, Brother Stephen.”
“Did you hope that they wouldn’t be called in?” And he added, “Don’t call me Brother Stephen.”
“It’s your name.” David came over and faced me. I realised that he was a little drunk. “What did he say to you?”
“Asked a lot of questions.”
“You surprise me. About me?”
I was saved from answering by Clarissa, who barked, “For a man who’s seen as much death as you say you have, you’re very nervous.”
“It doesn’t mean you get used to it. Quite the contrary.”
Markle was not gone long, and when he returned there was an interchange between him and David. “I’m going back to London,” the solicitor said.
“No.” David’s face twitched. “I need you here. Please.”
“Nothing I can do here that I can’t do in London.” Markle looked round at us with his somehow insulting gaze. “No need to wash our dirty linen here, let’s go outside. All right?” he said to Hasty, who nodded. They were outside for five minutes, and I could hear the murmur of voices. Then Markle poked his head inside the door. “Goodbye all. Hope I haven’t put you to too much trouble. Be seeing you again, I expect.” His head was withdrawn, and we heard his car starting up.
Miles was sitting hunched in a corner. “Thank goodness he’s gone. A most objectionable fellow.”
“He’s a shyster solicitor.” Stephen felt at his collar. “I asked a friend of mine about him today, and that’s what he told me. The sort of man who goes round after people who’ve been injured in accidents and offers to make a claim if he gets half the proceeds.”
“Good God, are there people like that?” Clarissa bayed.
Stephen looked at me. “You’re safe in telling us, now that they’ve gone. What did the inspector ask you about?”
He used a wheedling tone that didn’t suit him. I should find it hard to say what tone did suit Stephen, but he never rubbed me the wrong way so much as when he was trying to be nice. “He asked me about–” I nodded after the departed David, and Stephen nodded too, well pleased. “And he said he’d come here ten years ago on a case.”
Silence. Then Stephen said, “That man Arbuthnot is a trouble maker. It takes Mamma to deal with him, she doesn’t stand any nonsense.”
“I wondered what it was all about. You weren’t here?” I said to Uncle Miles, who started.
“No, no. I was with an ENSA party up at Catterick – the camp, you know. But I believe it was a very disagreeable business.”
“He said it was murder.”
“It had nothing to do with this,” Stephen said. “And there’s no need to talk about it.”
We were silent then, until Hasty reappeared and asked for Uncle Miles. David didn’t come back. He had evidently gone to bed, and after vainly trying to get Stephen and Clarissa to talk I followed him. It was nearly midnight. I got into bed and fell asleep immediately, undisturbed by Vofs or Voffers.
Again I was struck by the different face life wears on a fine morning. Night is the time for extremists, for revolutionaries, illicit loves of all kinds, heavy gamblers, murderers, thieves. Last night I had found it easy to contemplate David as a murderer, and to accept the idea that he might be behind bars by this evening. But in the morning it was much more difficult to believe that this pale worn man in his shabby suit had killed old Thorne. I couldn’t really believe, when I came down and found him eating haddock, that I was sitting at breakfast with a murderer.
After breakfast I was walking through the hall when I heard Uncle Miles saying “murderer,” and paused to listen. Was it an accusation? What followed undeceived me. In a hoarse whisper the voice went on: “Ten shillings double Lovely Relations in the four-thirty and High Flyer in the five o’clock. That’s all, yes.” There was the sound of the telephone receiver being replaced, and then Uncle Miles came out of the telephone extension in the hall. He smiled sheepishly. “Just having a little flutter. Life must go on, you know, life must go on.”
“Uncle Miles, do you really believe David killed Thorne? I know you say he’s not David, but I have to call him something,” I added hurriedly.
“Just don’t know, my boy, the whole thing’s too much for my addled old brain. I can tell you one thing, though. That inspector’s got a very hectoring manner. And I’m not talking about Troy.”
The world was not wholly changed, I reflected, if Uncle Miles could still make puns.
A few minutes later I found David himself in one of the corridors, looking in an abstracted way through one of the piles of junk that, as I have said already, had accumulated like snowballs in various parts of the house. I asked if there was anything he wanted. He started when I spoke to him, and seemed certainly to have lost the composure of twenty-four hours earlier.
“No, no, I’m just passing the time. Tremendous lot of stuff here, Mamma ought to get rid of it.”
“She has got rid of some. All those eighteenth-century military prints that used to be piled up outside your room.”
He frowned. “I don’t remember them.”
“There was a set about Marlborough’s campaigns, Blenheim and Malplaquet and so on. General Wainwright liked them, I believe.”
He said more decisively, “I don’t remember,” and this was not surprising because I had just invented the prints. I tried another tack.
“I’ve been helping with the research on the book. Perhaps we shall be able to get on with that when you’re free.”
He had been kneeling to look at the things. Now he sat back on his heels and smiled at me, and there was something charming about his smile, “I’ve got a feeling you’re testing me out. Yes, I do know what you’re talking about, but I can’t say the prospect of delving again into the details of Tel-el-Kebir really stirs me. After the last few years I’ve had enough of playing soldiers. Besides – ”
He had paused. “Besides what?”
“Doctor McNulty came again this morning. He said Mamma can’t last more than a week or two, less perhaps. You knew, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I knew.” It was true that I knew she could not live long, yet to be faced with the idea of her death as something real and imminent shocked me. Behind my eyes I felt the unfamiliar prick of tears, and I was glad when he turned away, saying soberly, “I’m glad I came back when I did.”
I left him, thinking not of the mystery of his identity, but of the reality of death. I had known Lady W for only six years, yet she seemed to have been part of my life for ever. I had a sense, much stronger than the bewilderment I had known at the death of my parents, that the fabric of my life was being torn apart, and that what was happening at Belting would change the pattern of things for ever. I went up to my Thomas Lovell and wandered around the room, touching the Japanese grass paper, looking at the pictures, trying to induce the sense of pleasure that these things had so often given me in the past. This morning they failed, or rather, it was as though I were anaesthetised and could not feel them. I went to the cupboard where I kept the poems and stories I wrote, but never sent to editors. Work, I knew, could be a solace, and there was a fantastic tale called
The Unburied Dead,
which I had started during my last holidays and which I thought I might look at again. But I could not find the story, and it occurred to me that I had probably left it lying about somewhere in the room and that Lily or Jane or Susan or one of our other occasional dailies had put it in the ottic.
The ottic was one of Uncle Miles’ whimsical inventions, evolved after I had had a row with Clarissa which had begun absurdly, as so many rows do, by my saying that bull terriers were extremely ugly. After it was over, Uncle Miles said I looked awfully neurotic. He added solemnly:
“When you feel neurotic
Take refuge in the ottic.”
I had often done so since then, and in fact one of the ottics had been made into a sort of workroom for me. It was a big room with a covered ceiling and a dormer window, and I would sit up there when I wanted leisure to write or think. A large scrubbed deal table had been put there, and this was often littered with manuscripts, books and pamphlets I was reading, and quill pens, for which at this time I had a passion. Lady W felt a deep admiration for writers of all sorts, and our dailies were given instructions that if they ever found any manuscripts of mine they were to be preserved and put into the ottic.
I could not find
The Unburied Dead
(I may add parenthetically that I discovered later that Uncle Miles had found it in my Thomas Lovell, taken it away to read and left it in the bathroom cupboard – and a wretched piece of writing it was too). I began to look elsewhere. Like so much of the house the ottics were repositories for old trunks, bits of broken furniture, dusty children’s games, boxes containing used tennis balls, and so on. It was while I was searching through one of the trunks, that I came across a pile of papers beneath it, and started looking at them. Among the bills from the electricity board and the butcher I found an issue of our local newspaper, the
Kent Record.
I was about to put it aside when I saw that the date was 18th July, 1944, and that a story in it was ringed in black pencil. The story was headed Mysterious Death of Estate Agent. “Was it Foul Play?” asks Coroner.
I sat in an old chair that had been in the ottic as long as I could remember – when I first sat in it I was afraid that rats lurked somewhere in the decayed horsehair with which
it was stuffed – and read. I soon realised that Inspector Arbuthnot’s reference to coming up here ten years ago on a case must refer to the paper I was reading. The report, for those wartime days, was a long one.
On Wednesday of this week the inquest was held on Edward Charles Sullivan, age 38, of 82 Rampiter Gardens, Folkestone, partner in a firm of local estate agents, who disappeared from his home on 3rd June. Sullivan’s body was found in the Grand Military Canal, near Hythe, a fortnight after his disappearance. He had been drowned.
Det. Inspector Greensword gave evidence of the body being discovered by a local girl, and said the cause was asphyxiation from drowning. The Coroner (Mr F Eustace) asked him: “Can you give us any further help? Can you say positively whether or not there was foul play?”
Inspector Greensword: “I cannot do that.”
“I understand that the deceased was able to swim, so that if he had fallen into the canal he should have been able to save himself.”
“Probably, sir. It would depend on the spot. In any case, the medical evidence is not conclusive.”
“I understand that Sullivan had taken a considerable amount of alcohol. How would that affect him?”
“He had taken the equivalent of six pints of beer. The effect would be to slow down his reactions and lessen his resistance. He also had a heart condition, although it was not serious.”
Evidence was given by Det.-Sergt. Arbuthnot of finding marks on the towpath near West Hythe on the morning after Sullivan’s disappearance, indicating that a struggle had taken place. Sullivan was known to have been in the Duck and Drake nearby, until closing time. He was alone, C Payne and J Fry, farm workers, gave evidence that they had heard sounds of two men quarrelling by the canal, although they could not recognise voices. Miss Margaret Clay, of Freelands, near Folkestone, gave evidence that she was engaged to be married to the deceased, who was in business as an estate agent with Mr Hugh Wainwright, of Belting. She had also met Flt.-Lieut. David Wainwright, brother of the above, and had gone out with him. Sullivan had objected to this and there had been a quarrel. Sullivan was of a very jealous disposition. She knew Sullivan and Flt.-Lieut. Wainwright had had an argument, but did not know any details. On the night of 3rd June she attended a “Victory War Fund” meeting, and after that went straight home.
Flt.-Lieut. Wainwright said that he knew Sullivan, and also knew Miss Clay. He was on leave, and had seen her once or twice.
The Coroner: “Were you carrying on an affair with her?”
Flt.-Lieut. Wainwright: “We were friends, nothing more.”
“But Sullivan objected to the association?”