Death in Devon. Ian Sansom

– latterly Peek Brothers and Winch – had made their fortune as importers of tea, coffee and spices, and Rousdon does indeed have rather the feeling of a plantation complex, ‘with all the appearance of having been planned by the Tudors, built by the Jacobeans, and completed by the Victorians’, according to Morley in The County Guides, ‘and with perhaps just a touch of the Lombardic, in what one might generously describe as an act of freestyle Anglo-Euro-Renaissance sprezzatura’. For all its undoubted pizzazz and sprezzatura, the estate’s development was in fact overseen and undertaken by a redoubtable Englishman, Ernest George, who was one of Morley’s great heroes, and responsible also for Cawston Manor in Norfolk, one of Morley’s favourite English houses, and Golders Green crematorium – undoubtedly his favourite crematorium.

      The estate is approached by a long driveway, though since it was dark by the time we arrived, having stopped off at Lyme Regis in order for Morley, in his words, to ‘acquaint myself with some ammonites’, I wasn’t aware initially of the extraordinary dimensions of the place and it wasn’t until we – just – managed to stop the car at the bottom of a steep, deep dark lane, our having taken another wrong turning in a maze of roads, that I realised that the entire estate seemed to have been built along a clifftop that dropped precipitously down to the sea.

      Rousdon isn’t just isolated: it is simply on its own. It is one of the very boundaries of England. And we were about to go sailing headlong over the edge of it …

      Morley, as usual, was expounding on some subject or another, Miriam was energetically riposting, and I was doing my best to keep the peace. None of us was paying much attention to what was ahead. Fortunately we were travelling slowly, and it seems we all at once caught a glimpse of the cliff’s edge and the moon on the sea beyond it. Miriam gave a yelp, Morley uttered, accurately, if not entirely helpfully, ‘Thalatta! Thalatta!’ and I realised that if nothing was done then the fate of the overloaded Lagonda, stationery, surfboards, passengers and all, was going to be not dissimilar to that of the steam train in Buster Keaton’s The General (a film that Morley writes about at great length in his book Morley Goes to the Cinema, published in America as Morley’s Movies, a misleading title which rather implies that Morley himself were a film star, which he most certainly was not; his personality, if anything, was too big, too boisterous and too boundless for the silver screen; he was, I often thought, a strictly novelistic character, a panoramic soul from a panoramic story, of the kind found in the pages of Balzac, or Victor Hugo).

      I yelled ‘Stop!’, leapt up out of my seat, leaned across and yanked on the handbrake. Miriam stamped on the footbrake, and Morley …

      Morley had leapt out of the car – I thought initially to save himself from what might have been certain death. As it turned out, to my astonishment, he’d leapt out only to get closer to the cliff edge, where he immediately launched into another recitation. This time it was Kipling, ‘Mandalay’:

      Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,

       Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst;

       For the temple-bells are callin’, an’ it’s there that I would be –

       By the old Moulemein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea.

      ‘Well,’ said Miriam, rather breathless, ‘we certainly seem to have found the limits of the estate, Sefton.’

      ‘Quite,’ I agreed.

      ‘I could have sworn the sign for the school pointed down this way.’

      ‘Apparently not,’ I said.

      ‘Did you see the sign, Father?’

      ‘Sign?’

      ‘For the school?’

      ‘No idea,’ said Morley. ‘But I think we might be able to climb down here, actually. Onto a little beach.’ He was standing perilously close to some loose scree.

      ‘Father!’ called Miriam. ‘For goodness sake, not tonight!’

      ‘A night-time descent might be rather fun,’ said Morley, staring down, illuminated by the headlamps of the car and framed by the bright-lit moon, making him appear rather like his own ghost, or a velvety shadow puppet.

      ‘We’re going back to find the school, Father.’

      ‘But—’

      He had edged close enough now for us both to be concerned about his safety.

      ‘Should I?’ I asked Miriam.

      ‘Would you mind awfully?’ she replied.

      And so I jumped out of the car and edged close enough to Morley to make a grab at his clothes if he were to lose his footing.

      ‘What do you think, Sefton?’

      ‘It is certainly a steep cliff-face, Mr Morley. And we’re all rather lucky not to be heading over the edge.’

      ‘Five-hundred-foot drop, would you say?’

      ‘Something like it,’ I said.

      ‘V. diff., do you think?’

      ‘V. diff.?’

      ‘Climbing-wise.’

      ‘Yes,’ I said, not entirely sure what he meant.

      ‘Straight down to a nice little hidden beach.’

      ‘Indeed. Quite a drop.’

      ‘Into the ocean.’

      ‘Indeed.’

      ‘The abyss – tehom, in the Hebrew, isn’t it? “Draw me out of the mire, that I may not stick fast: deliver me from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters. Let not the tempest of water drown me, nor the deep swallow me up: and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me.” What is that? Psalms … 68? 69?’

      ‘I don’t remember exactly.’

      ‘Ever done any mountaineering of any kind, Sefton?’

      ‘I can’t say I have, Mr Morley, no.’

      ‘Well, we’ll have to put that right. I was lucky enough to have climbed with Mallory and Sandy Irvine. Long time ago. Do you know Lisle Strutt?’

      ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

      ‘Glad to hear it. President of the Alpine Club. I resigned in protest. Not a fan.’

      ‘Father, come on!’ said Miriam. ‘Enough shilly-shallying. It’s late.’

      ‘Next trip, we’ll bring along some rock boots and rope and see where it takes us, shall we?’

      ‘That sounds like an excellent idea,’ I said. ‘I look forward to it.’

      ‘Not tonight though, chaps, eh?’ cried Miriam, who had lit a cigarette and who seemed to have instantly recovered from our near-death experience and was enjoying the cool breeze from the sea. She, like her father, rather enjoyed risk-taking, near-misses and every other kind of calamity. Neither of them, of course, had ever been to war.

      ‘Thing to remember, Sefton,’ said Morley, as we made our way back to the car, ‘is that the top of the ascent is the most dangerous part of any climb. The summit, you see. Gets the old heart racing.’

      ‘Is your heart racing, Sefton?’ said Miriam, as we clambered back into the car.

      I was in fact feeling my stomach grumbling – we hadn’t had anything to eat since our filthy Nell Gwynn buns.

      ‘You know, we could camp out here for the night,’ said Morley. ‘Do you remember we used to do that when you were young, Miriam? In the old Standard? It had the detachable front seats, and your mother would—’

      ‘Not