This was a very long speech for Joyce, and was charged with resentment. I decided not to ask her what of it, and said instead, ‘I know. I’m sorry, darling. This is a busy time of the year.’
‘Every time of the year is a busy time. That’s no reason why we should never see each other.’
I thought how pretty she looked, leaning against the wall of the passage just next to one of my hunting prints—prettier even than Diana, her full but finely proportioned body shown off by her blue silk dress, yellow hair smoothly piled up to reveal her handsome ears. ‘I know,’ I said.
‘Then do something about it I’m your business partner and housekeeper and Amy’s stepmother and that’s it.’
‘Is it? I make love to you too, don’t I?’
‘Sometimes. And lots of people make love to their housekeepers.’
‘I haven’t noticed you being a very active stepmother, I must say.’
‘I can’t be it on my own. You and Amy have got to join in, and neither of you ever do.’
‘I don’t think this is the time, the right day to start—’
‘It’s the right day of all days. If you’ve got nothing in particular to say to me the day after your father dies, what would have to happen to make you talk? I can’t remember the last time we … No,’ she said, catching my wrists as I stepped forward and tried to embrace her, ‘I don’t count that. That’s not talking.’
‘Sorry. Well; when would you like to have a talk?’
‘Talk, not have a talk, and when’s no good. Hopeless. There’s no time now, anyway. You go and have your nap.’ She walked past me.
Some talk was certainly going to be called for, I reflected, not only in order to get Joyce into bed with Diana and me, but as prelude to that conversation. I must start working on that first thing in the morning. Meanwhile there was work (of an unexacting sort) to be done.
I went into the dining-room, where four covered pots of soup stood on the table, and moved over to the bookshelves to the left of the fireplace. Here I kept two or three dozen works on architecture and sculpture, and a hundred or so plain texts of the standard English and French poets, stopping chronologically well short of our own day: Mallarme and Lord de Tabley are my most modern versifiers. I have no novelists, finding theirs a puny and piffling art, one that, even at its best, can render truthfully no more than a few minor parts of the total world it pretends to take as its field of reference. A man has only to feel some emotion, any emotion, anything differentiated at all, and spend a minute speculating how this would be rendered in a novel—not just the average novel, but the work of a Stendhal or a Proust—to grasp the pitiful inadequacy of all prose fiction to the task it sets itself. By comparison, the humblest productions of the visual arts are triumphs of portrayal, both of the matter and of the spirit, while verse—lyric verse, at least—is equidistant from fiction and life, and is autonomous.
However, the book I had come to fetch lay in none of the categories mentioned. It was Joseph Thornton’s massive
Thornton devotes nearly three pages to Underhill in his chapter on ‘Magicians and Conjurors’, but the greater part of the passage concerns Underhill’s alleged reappearances in supernatural form during the century and a half or so after his death, together with an account of that other being said to have been heard making its rustling, crackling progress round the outside of the house after dark. The treatment of the murders and their aftermath is less full; through lack of time or sheer absence of surviving evidence, as opposed to just talk, Thornton failed to establish any tangible link between Underhill and the two unsolved killings, and had to be content with recording the strength and persistence of the tradition—among people in Baldock and Royston as well as in the surrounding hamlets—that the man had acquired the ‘mysterious and evil art’ of striking from a distance at those foolhardy enough to cross him, ‘of causing his victims to be torn to pieces by hands that were not mortal, so that a villager would not pass his house, by day no more than by night, for dread that the nefarious Doctor’s eye would light upon him and find in him a fresh object of fear or hate.’
With no clear idea of what I was looking for, I read inattentively through the four or five long paragraphs, or rather reread them for the dozenth time. Then, towards the end, I came to a couple of sentences I could not remember even having seen before:
‘… Such were the events attending the obsequies of this infamous creature, for such I hold him to have been at the least, whatever be the truth of the copious testimonies to his wizardry. His effects, whether by chance or by malignity, appear to have been dispersed: the greater proportion of his books and papers suffered destruction at a fire on his premises (for which I can find no cause adduced) the second day following his death; some small part, at his own request, was buried with his person; a fragment of a journal survives in the library of his college, All Saints’ at Cambridge. Of this relic it should be said, that it is not worth the pain of perusal, save by him whose curiosity in the manners of that still barbarous age may be sufficient to abate his natural aversion from the task.’
I thought I saw something faintly odd about the last part of this. Why should Thornton, normally keen to infect his readers with his own enthusiasms, to the extent of (perhaps too often) exhorting them to go and look up his sources for themselves, have mentioned this bit of journal, together with its location, and then warned them off taking the trouble to ‘peruse’ it? Well, any mystery here might easily be cleared up tomorrow. If that Underhill manuscript had been in the All Saints’ library in the early nineteenth century, there was a good chance that it was there still. Anyway, I was going to drive to Cambridge in the morning and find out. I could not have said why I was immediately so determined to do this.
Between the pages of the
‘I,
Grace Mary had added a careful signature and somebody called William Totterdale, rector of the parish, who had obviously written out the statement, had been a witness. Between them they had put my mind at ease, on one matter anyhow: the three accurately expressed facial details were enough on their own, without the reference to a kind of clerical garb to which the nearest parallel in Grace’s experience would have been what she remembered having seen an old clergyman wearing in the 1720s. I drank to her and blessed her for her powers of observation and recall.
Through no fault of hers, on the other hand, her service to me was limited. I could not tell Lucy or anyone else, including myself, that I had not read the affidavit before. It was possible—I disbelievingly supposed it to be just possible—that my earlier couple of readings had impressed the facts on some buried part of my mind, from which something had dredged them up to create an illusion. What that particular something might have been was in itself mysterious, because any thought of Underhill’s ghost I had about my mind at the time had also been pretty deeply buried, but that sort of problem is no problem in an unphilosophical age in which lack of total disproof is taken as the larger half of proof.
I had refolded Grace’s statement and was about to close the book on it and the other papers, when my eye fell on another passage of Thornton’s I had forgotten, more precisely on a single phrase in brackets in the middle of his account of the unseen nocturnal prowler: ‘which some suspect to have been the Doctor’s agent’. At once I saw what I should have seen earlier, or had seen without knowing what it was I saw. The witness who had disagreed about the expression on the face of Underhill’s ghost had not really disagreed at all: they had seen him as he had been in life at different times, separated perhaps by a matter of seconds. He had had a look of clinical curiosity as he waited to find out just what sort of creature he had conjured up out of the wood, and this look had changed to
