could.
6
Famous Trials: Grace Elizabeth Fox, April 1953, by Sir Charles Hamilton Morley
The dinner was supposed to be a joyous celebration of the new year, 1953, and of the prospect of a new position for Dr. Fox at a hospital near Salisbury, a prospect that would mean moving out of Kilnsgate House and all the way south to Wiltshire. As was their custom, Grace and Ernest Fox had invited two of their closest friends to dinner on Thursday, 1st January: county Schools Inspector Jeremy Lambert and his wife Alice. This was something they had done every New Year’s Day since the war ended. Sometimes another couple, the Lynleys, joined them, but this year they were on holiday in Italy. Hetty Larkin, Grace’s regular maidservant, had agreed to handle the cooking and cleaning-up duties, as usual. Though rationing was still very much in force, those who dwelt in the country had a distinct advantage over town and city folk, and no doubt Ernest’s contacts with the Dales farmers from before the war years and beyond ensured that his larder was always full, and that fresh meat, fruit, butter and vegetables were plentiful. A plain Yorkshire lass from plain Yorkshire stock, Hetty Larkin was not an adventurous cook, but she was reliable, and that evening she produced a simple but excellent meal – a menu suggested by Grace Fox herself – of roast beef, mashed potatoes, roast parsnips and Brussels sprouts, along with a dessert of rhubarb pie and custard. Dr. Fox was known to keep an excellent wine cellar, and a significant quantity of claret was enjoyed by the two men, in particular. As was usually the case at such gatherings, young Randolph was given a light meal early and packed off to his room. Already, at the age of seven, a keen reader, Randolph there spent some time reading William and the Tramp, which he had bought with his Christmas book token from his Aunt Felicity on a trip to Leeds with his father the previous day, then the boy fell fast asleep. Downstairs in the music room, Grace serenaded her guests with the third Schubert Impromptu before dinner was served, and then the group adjourned to the dining room before a blazing fire. Alice was first to notice that it was snowing outside, but nobody thought any more of this as they sat down to dine, snow hardly being a rare winter occurrence in the Yorkshire Dales. Conversation ranged over such events of the previous year as the king’s death and the new queen, whose coronation was due later in the year, the recent atomic bomb tests in Australia, and Sir Edmund Hillary’s conquest of Everest. According to Alice, Grace chatted animatedly about her favourite films of the year, The African Queen and Singin’ in the Rain, and enthused over Barbara Pym’s latest novel Excellent Women, while Ernest explained the importance of the first mechanical heart to Jeremy. In other words, it was a perfectly ordinary evening in a perfectly ordinary English household. There were no arguments witnessed between Grace and Ernest Fox, though Alice Lambert did mention later on that there seemed to be more than the usual tension and distance between them. Otherwise, all seemed harmonious and in keeping with the spirit of the season. The new job was only vaguely alluded to, and according to Alice Lambert, Grace Fox showed no reaction at its mention. During the trial, however, the prosecution managed to get Hetty Larkin to admit to having heard Dr. and Mrs. Fox arguing twice during the course of the week leading up to the dinner. On the first occasion, a Tuesday evening, Hetty thought she had heard Mrs. Fox tell her husband that she ‘couldn’t let him do it’, which the prosecuting counsel swiftly interpreted to mean she couldn’t let him leave Yorkshire for Wiltshire. Later, on Thursday afternoon, Dr. Fox had seemed angry about a letter he insisted was private, that his wife had somehow tampered with. Meanwhile, on the evening of 1st January, the storm outside raged beyond the drawn curtains and blazing fire of Kilnsgate House. Bad weather had been predicted, but nobody expected such an onslaught as was now unleashed on the unfortunate North. Snow from three to six inches deep fell in a wide area of northern England. Drifts blocked roads radiating from Alston, Cumberland, to Penrith, Barnard Castle and Stanhope. Many roads were slippery in Lancashire and the north-west Midlands. Thick ice on roads near Glossop, Derbyshire, made driving difficult. Kilnsgarthdale was soon cut off by snowdrifts up to six feet deep in places, and the wind was bitterly cold. As the diners enjoyed their evening and their conversation, they had no idea how bad the conditions were becoming outside. All they could hear was the wind whistling down the chimneys from time to time, or the rattle of a loose window frame. Hetty Larkin had already arranged to stay over for the night, as it would be a late evening’s duty for her, so she was not especially concerned about the weather outside, and she had far more to occupy her time than glancing out of the window to see how deep the snow was. Already this winter was shaping up to be as memorable as those of 1940 and 1947, the last times Kilnsgate had been cut off. The Lamberts had parked their car by the garden gate, and when it became clear later that they would not be able to drive back down the lane to the main road in such conditions, and that the main road itself would probably be impassable anyway, they accepted Grace and Ernest’s invitation to remain at Kilnsgate House for the night in the guest bedroom, which Hetty had already made up for them, rather than attempt a dangerous, perhaps impossible, return to their home in Gilling West. By that time, though, something rather odd and disturbing had occurred in the house, something that further altered the course of the evening.
October 2010
I left the Volvo at home and took a taxi to Darlington station, then the train down to London. I had talked with Bernie Wilkins, my art dealer colleague, on the telephone the previous day, and he had given me Samuel Porter’s address. He was intrigued by my interest and suggested we meet for dinner. It would be good to see him again, I thought, and he might be able to tell me a bit more about Sam. I had booked a room at Hazlitt’s, on Frith Street, where I usually stay when I’m on business in London, so we arranged to meet at Arbutus, just across the street.
I have always found train travel relaxing, despite the frequent delays and general lack of sympathy towards passengers on the part of the staff, who act as if they’re doing you a big favour by letting you ride on their train in the first place, and you ought to be jolly well grateful for it. But you only notice these things if you’ve spent a long time away. If you live here all the time, I should imagine you just think it’s the norm and expect nothing better. But I still love train travel. Many’s the time I’ve stood in the security line at LAX wishing there were a train I could take to San Francisco that took less than about twelve hours to travel 383 miles!
Still plagued by childhood memories of British Rail sandwiches curled at the edges, I bought a ham and cheese baguette at the station, and a large Costa latte. The train arrived on time. No one had the seat next to me, so I was able to spread out, eat my lunch and sip my latte and watch the world go by. It was a pleasant enough day, with only a few clouds and the occasional brief shower, but mostly with enough blue sky to make baby a new bonnet, as my mother used to say. Shadows flitted over the Vale of York and the distant hills of Wensleydale, and soon we were past York and Doncaster, well on our way out of Yorkshire. I passed the time pleasantly listening to Tchaikovsky’s string quartets on my iPod and reading my Alan Furst.
There were no delays, and the train rolled into King’s Cross at 2.44, as promised. I followed the signs for the taxi rank opposite St Pancras. The London crowds came as quite a shock after my weeks of peace and relative solitude at Kilnsgate House. The sun was out, so the streets were crowded as the taxi made its slow progress along Euston Road, and became even slower in the maze of narrow one-way streets of Soho. People stood or sat at tables outside the pubs and coffee shops drinking and smoking – Cafe Italiano, Caffe Nero, Nelly Dean’s, the Dog and Duck – as we went up one street and down another. There were roadworks everywhere, it seemed, as men replaced the old Victorian sewers. It cost more to get from Oxford Street to the hotel than it did from King’s Cross to Oxford Street.
Hazlitt’s has undergone a few changes over the years I’ve been staying there, including the installation of air-conditioning and a library bar. Most recently they have extended the reception area and added a wing of renovated, modern rooms with showers. But I was happy to find, when I first arrived in London just a few weeks ago, that the old-fashioned charm hadn’t disappeared.
My room this time was as delightfully eccentric as the others I remembered staying in over the years, with uneven, creaky floors, worn rugs, heavy silk curtains, antiques, gilt-framed paintings of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century gentlemen and ladies in their finery, a marble bust of some Greek or Roman orator, and a high carved oak bed. It was hot, so I slid open the large sash window a few inches. It overlooked a small courtyard, where an imitation Greek sculpture stood. The bathtub was the old claw-foot style, with telephone-handset shower. The toilet chain hung from the overhead cistern, the way they all used to do when I was a child.
I had plenty of time to kill, so after a little shopping on Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road, I indulged in a quick pint of Timothy Taylor’s at the Dog and Duck. I had had no success tracking down the Famous Trials account
