Death in Devon. Ian Sansom

road again.”’

      ‘Not tonight, thank you, Father!’

      ‘Very well,’ said Morley.

      ‘Onwards!’ said Miriam.

      ‘Or backwards,’ said Morley, ‘to be accurate.’

      ‘Thank you, Father.’

      Eventually managing to reverse back up the lane in the Lagonda – after much pushing and the grinding of gears – we picked up another route and soon found ourselves stopping in a courtyard outside an enormous building that by all appearances – mullioned windows, finialled gables, coats of arms and what-not – had to be the main Rousdon manor house. We had arrived at All Souls.

       CHAPTER 5

       A SODALITY OF PEDAGOGUES

      AT THE SOUND OF OUR APPROACH the vast door of the manor house was swung open by a worried-looking young woman, apparently a nurse, who was done out in a most striking outfit, consisting of a blood-red dress with a white apron over it, and a little Sister Dora cap perched jauntily on her head, which gave her the appearance of someone having just rushed panicking from performing some particularly grisly surgery. From behind this rather ghoulish creature first came there a voice, and then a man, shuffling into view.

      ‘Do I hear John Bull’s roar?’ cried the voice. ‘The People’s Professor?’

      ‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,’ Morley said to the figure who now stood in the doorway. Their exchange of words caused much mutual amusement – it was some kind of private greeting, I understood. There was then a prolonged and vigorous shaking of hands – the two men seemed to operate on the same frequency and gave off exactly the same vibration of relentlessly hearty vigour – and Morley then introduced us.

      ‘This is Dr Standish,’ he said. ‘Headmaster of All Souls.’

      ‘Well, well, well,’ said Dr Standish. ‘What do we have here?’

      What we had here was a man who might almost have been Morley’s double, though perhaps a little more careworn, his face perhaps rather coarser-featured, his cheeks perhaps a little redder and rounder, his moustache rather more drooping, and his eyes small and hard and bitter, like a blackbird’s.

      ‘This is my assistant,’ said Morley, ‘Mr Stephen Sefton.’

      ‘Your Boswell, eh, Swanton?’ said Dr Standish, in a rather sniggering fashion, I thought.

      ‘I don’t know about that,’ I said. We shook hands: he gave off a slight whiff of lavender, as though having only recently bathed.

      ‘I have always been of the opinion,’ said Morley, ‘that the Great Cham was in fact a fictional character invented by the scheming Scotsman as a way of making a reputation for himself.’

      ‘Ha ha! Very good!’ said Dr Standish, smiling and showing a set of gleaming teeth. ‘Though I’m sure such treasonous thoughts are far from the mind of your young assistant.’

      ‘Indeed,’ I agreed. Nothing could have been further from my mind.

      ‘And this is my daughter,’ said Morley.

      ‘Charmed,’ said Miriam, offering her hand, and simpering rather.

      ‘Well, well,’ said Dr Standish. ‘You have grown up since last we met.’

      ‘Indeed, we are now full-grown,’ said Miriam, hoisting herself up to her not inconsiderable height, and gazing at him, mesmerisingly, in her fashion, over her cheekbones.

       Puer Aeternus, The Eternal Boy

      ‘You haven’t aged, though, Headmaster,’ said Morley.

      ‘Well, teaching keeps one young, I suppose.’

      ‘Puer Aeternus,’ said Morley. ‘The Eternal Boy.’

      ‘Indeed,’ said Dr Standish. ‘No need to stand on ceremony though, old friend. Come in, come in, come in!’

      Given Morley’s well-known quirks and attributes – his extraordinary working habits, his odd detachment from others, his fixation on objects, his obsession with classification, and his complete and utter inability to understand or to be able to empathise with others – one might have suspected that he would have found close relationships almost impossible to maintain. In fact, as I was to discover during the course of our time together, he was a man who attracted and enjoyed the company of all sorts of individuals, of both sexes, of all ages, all classes and all kinds. Of course above all he attracted fans, with whom and about whom he was always polite and courteous. Much of my time was spent protecting him from these fans, and from all sorts of other less well-meaning hangers-on and acolytes. (He was most often beset and troubled by those whom one might call Morley-mimickers: one thinks most readily perhaps of Frederick Bryson and John Fry, Morley-mimickers of brief renown. Such individuals often started out as fans, became acolytes, and then attempted to actually become Morley – ‘stealing our bread from the table’, as Morley often complained – trying to forge careers as hacks and popular writers, though none of them could match Morley’s own ferocious output. About such types Morley could be surprisingly and shockingly discourteous. Bryson, for example, I recall him once describing as a ‘sunburned nut’: he famously kept a house on the French Riviera. And Fry he often referred to simply as ‘the Pygmy’: he was a man famously short in stature.) But Morley also had real actual friends, and Dr Standish was one of them: he had contributed to a number of volumes edited by Morley for the edification of the young, including Manners Maketh the Man: A Guide for Parents and Teachers (1932), and A Boy’s First Fingering: Easy Piano Pieces for Small Hands (1934).

      While the two men caught up with all their news and gossip, Miriam and I were shown through by the nurse to what seemed to be the old drawing room of the manor house, which had been converted into the school’s staff common room. The transformation had been entirely successful – and was, of course, quite appalling. Noticeboards had been erected on the oak-panelled walls, a long coat-rack was hung with gowns and mortarboards, and where there once might have been pleasing arrangements of bibelots, vases and ornaments there was now a mess of packets of chalk, cigarettes, brass ashtrays and bottles of ink. An elephant’s foot umbrella-stand in one corner held a quiver of canes, ranging from a thin-strip willow to a heavy hardwood beater. Windows high up allowed for no views, and little natural light. I knew exactly what the place had become, having wasted so much of my time over the course of the past five years in similar rooms throughout the country. It was a place for the gathering of the unredeemed before their trials: we had come upon a sodality of pedagogues.

      We entered into a thick fug and hubbub of tobacco being smoked, of jokes being cracked, of sherry glasses tinkling, of the crackle of corduroy and tweed, and of the infernal sound of a gramophone playing music of a Palm Court trio kind – ‘the music of the damned’, Morley would have called it – but upon our entrance all noise abruptly ceased. From deep within the fug a dozen or so pairs of eyes fixed upon us. Only the Palm Court trio played on: the dreaded sound of Ketèlbey’s ‘In a Persian Market’, a tune regarded by Morley with particular horror (‘self-aggrandising nonsense’