Death by Sheer Torture (2 page)

Not, I suppose, that the state of the family finances, or the state of the family limbs come to that, encourages that sort of genteel hoboism nowadays.

Anyway, I caught the ten fifty Edinburgh train (because, when all is said and done, you may wrangle and grumble, wriggle and chafe with your superiors in the Force, but you don’t disobey their orders) and after changing trains at Newcastle I chugged into Thornwick some time around four. I was oddly touched when the stationmaster, after all these years, said ‘Sad business, Mr Peregrine’ as he took my ticket, though no one had used the appalling full form of my Christian name with my permission for years.

When, twenty minutes later, my taxi swung through the gates of Harpenden House and up the curved approach, I was cured of any lump-in-the-throat nostalgia by the sight of the house itself. (You are getting all this stuff about trains and stationmasters and ancestral piles because I don’t think you’re strong enough yet to meet the Trethowan family
en masse.
Did you think you’d heard all there was to hear about them in the first chapter? Oh no, dear reader: you haven’t heard the half of it yet.)

The house, Harpenden, has just nothing to recommend it—except its size, and even that is more than a trifle ridiculous. My great-grandfather had few qualities
to plead his case at the Judgment Seat except a very great deal of money, but even a filthy rich Victorian was expected to build with a modicum of discretion. Pevsner, who is searingly honest about the building, names the architects as ‘Hubert Selby-Grossmith, succeeded at a late stage in the enterprise by Auberon Biggsworth,’ and he might have added that my great-grandfather aided, abetted and tyrannized over the enterprise from beginning to end, having the infernal good fortune to die between completion and moving-in day. The architects, chivvied, bullied and finally swapped midstream, were told to impose the Trethowans on Northumberland: they did so in the form (roughly) of an enormous lowish central block with four turretty wings at each corner. Does that sound regular and sane to you? Well, I should add that each wing is a fantasy based on a different style and period of architecture, that the massive central block acquired certain accretions, that . . .

In fact, even John Betjeman, faced with it on arrival for a house party in the early ‘thirties, could only stutter ‘It’s jolly . . . jolly
arresting.’
And when he tried to write an impromptu verse about it during his visit, the future Laureate’s feet moved in classical metres, and the result was so lugubrious it has appeared in none of his collections. The house has affected most of its visitors in pretty much the same way. It depressed me no end, even now, and as we drove up the sudden swerve in the drive which led to the front door (the result of a last-minute geriatric whim of my great-grandfather’s) and I was disgorged on to the main steps, I fancied that the taxi-driver shook his head in sympathy. Or perhaps he had heard about the death. Or had driven some of the inhabitants.

It seemed funny to ring, but ring I did. The taxi sat there, the driver separating his tip from his fare, unnecessarily slowly, I thought, and I wondered whether he knew who I was and was interested to see my reception.
Was this the beginning of the hideous general public interest that I had foreseen? Eventually the door opened on a smallish, sandy-haired manservant with a manner that (perhaps assumed temporarily) seemed set to repel invaders.

‘Good afternoon,’ I said, feeling slightly ridiculous. ‘I’m Perry Trethowan . . . Mr Leo Trethowan’s son.’

His face changed, but only to cautious welcome. ‘Oh, Mr Peregrine.’ (His voice was gentle, Lowland Scots, and made a meal of the r’s in Peregrine.) ‘Won’t you come in, sir?’ Once in the hall he turned on the soft sympathy. ‘A terrible business, sir. You have my wife’s and my sympathy, indeed you do. Would you . . . would you wait while I inform Miss Sybilla . . . and Sir Lawrence?’

And without waiting for an answer he left me in the hall, while he made off in the direction of the main drawing-room. I reflected on the order of the names: would it not have been natural to mention my Uncle Lawrence first? I stood there, looking around the entrance hall, four times the size of a family council flat, its ceiling five times a man’s height, looming in some brown cobwebby heaven up there. It was exactly as I remembered it—its gloom, its stuffed heads of animals slaughtered for the size of their antlers, its monstrously large picture of my great-grandfather, executed (the picture, I mean) by Sir Harold Hardacre, RA, in 1887. Many painters of the period have long ago recovered from the rock-bottom prices they fetched in the ’twenties, but my great-grandfather selected, to commit him to posterity, artists whom no amount of recovered piety could render desirable. One had the impression that he paid them by the square yard.

Nevertheless, since the little Scotsman did not return, I went to the far wall to gaze irreverently on my great-grandsire. He had been, like me, a large man, and the size therefore had a certain appropriateness. Mill- and
mine-owner, captain of industry, were written on his face. He had been as well in his time a ‘useful public figure,’ and that was there too. Believing in the untrammelled freedom of Capital, in the absolute right of men such as himself to pay their men as little as possible and to take no thought whatsoever to their safety at work, he had naturally entered Parliament as a Radical. In the course of time he had become an orthodox Liberal; then he had split with his leader over Home Rule and become a Liberal Unionist. It was very easy, then, to move to the Right without giving anyone the opportunity to label you turncoat. He had held minor office in weak governments that needed the broadest possible basis of support, and had been a great trial. Lord Rosebery had called him, under provocation, a pig-headed nincompoop, and in spite of the best efforts of Sir Harold Hardacre, RA, that had got into the picture too.

Still the little Scot did not return. An impossible hope rose in me. Could it be that they were refusing to see me? Was I being barred from the ancestral door? Could I not then return quite justifiably to Scotland Yard and report to Joe the satisfactory failure of my mission? I was just weakly nourishing such hopes when a door softly opened.

‘Sir Lawrence is in the drawing-room, Mr Peregrine, with your two aunts,’ said the ingratiating voice, ‘and they’ll be pleased to see you now.’

My heart sank again. ‘Thank you—I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.’

‘McWatters, sir. Shall I take your case to one of the guest rooms?’ He gestured towards the tiny case (suitable for a
very
short stay) which I had set down by the main door.

‘No, McWatters, better wait a bit,’ I said, ever the optimist. Squaring my shoulders I marched across the vast expanse of hall and into the drawing-room.

My eye was met, first of all and inevitably, by my great-grandfather
again, in position over the mantelpiece in the version of himself perpetrated, for just that position, by Sir Richard Fairweather, RA, in 1896—very much the same as the one in the hall, except that nine more years of pig-headedness and nincompoopery had lined their way on to the face. Around the other walls were large masterpieces I remembered, by Maclise, Frith, Waterhouse and others, as well as newer ones, portraits, by my Aunt Elizabeth, the real artist of the family, who died when I was still a child. Dwarfed by all this oil and varnish, in two uncomfortable armchairs and a wheelchair, were my Aunt Sybilla, my Aunt Kate, and my Uncle Lawrence. Sybilla rose, somewhat unsteady on her pins, to greet me.

‘Good afternoon, Peregrine,’ she said. ‘This is quite a surprise. Oh dear, still so
large?
 . . . Even
larger,
I think?’ (Six-feet-five, seventeen stone, enthusiastic amateur weightlifter and shot-putter, I could only nod agreement that I was even larger. She shook her head regretfully, as if shrinking would have been the best sign that I repented my odd notions.) ‘Your Aunt Kate, your Uncle Lawrence.’

I kissed Aunt Kate, who stood to attention to allow it, and then burst into a disconcerting chuckle of laughter. I had to take Uncle Lawrence by the hand to shake it, since he seemed immobile, but as I did so he shouted, ‘Who? Who?’, and then seemed to relapse into a doze. To relieve the awkwardness of the situation Sybilla said ‘Would you like some tea?’ but she seemed displeased when I accepted. She was forced to ring for McWatters and order tea and, after a pause, sandwiches and cake. The prodigal son, I felt, got a much more wholehearted culinary welcome.

‘Er . . . you’ve come about your poor father, I suppose?’ said Sybilla, unusually uncertainly for her, I felt, since she was so seldom less than mistress of any situation.

‘Of course he’s come about Leo,’ bellowed Aunt Kate.
‘Don’t be a blithering ninny. Give him the details, then! Give him all the details!’

‘Kate!’ shrilled Sybilla. But Kate’s parade-ground tones had unfortunately woken Uncle Lawrence, who immediately started up with his ‘Who? Who?’ routine again.

‘Pere
grine,’ said Aunt Sybilla in her loud, hard tones, like a malignant bell-bird. ‘Your nephew Peregrine. Leo’s son, you remember.’

‘Oh, Leo’s son,’ nodded the patriarchal head. ‘Well, what are you wasting time for? Show him up to Leo!’

At which, mercifully, he nodded off again, and McWatters came in with the tea-things.

Perhaps I should take advantage of the pause to describe the surviving members of my father’s generation, grandchildren of the imperious, frock-coated numbskull staring down at us in all his eight-feet-high splendour from over the marble fireplace. My Uncle Lawrence’s most remarkable physical feature was his shaggy, venerable man-of-letters head: its mane of white hair might have been (in fact, probably was) combed outwards to emphasize its size and distinction, to provide a striking frame for the classic lines of the face, the shaggy moustache, the keen (though now senseless) eyes. Lawrence Trethowan, his appearance proclaimed, was a Literary Man. He had survived the First World War and had written some agonized sonnets on it, much praised by Eddie Marsh and other literary gents of the era. After that (for want of subject matter, I take it) he had declined into writing rather feeble nature lyrics, stuff about country lanes and whatnot, and this was hardly attuned to the public mood. But he had also written occasional essays—‘delightful’ was the usual way of describing them—for declining periodicals, and in collected form they entranced the Boots library subscribers of the ’thirties and ’forties. He had been inexplicably knighted in 1964, by which time he was unread if not forgotten (my family, alas, has never
been forgotten.)

My Aunt Sybilla had aged less gracefully. In her youth she had been known for her spry, sharp, gamine qualities—qualities which easily grow sour with age. She had designed the sets and costumes for that bright young review
Wits!
in 1929, and its nearly as successful successor
Quits!
in 1931 (both revues still affectionately remembered by old ladies in St John’s Wood and their older flames in Highgate). She had designed things for Coward (who had seen through her), for the young Rattigan, and had even done a spry, witty
Orfeo
for Sadler’s Wells, which nobody who understood the opera had really liked. Her career had collapsed with the war and had never got going after it, though Covent Garden, notoriously prone to pick lame ducks when it comes to designers, did employ her on a couple of misconceived ballets. She was now—and had been as long as I can remember—a vinegary, pretentious bundle of egocentric extravagances, a succession of ghastly, ill-fitting artistic poses. It’s living with people like Aunt Sybilla makes a man take up weightlifting.

Aunt Kate, as ever, was square, gruff and ludicrous, but now she had—perhaps regained from her childhood, and the result of last year’s breakdown—a dreadfully hockey-stick schoolgirl roguishness peering through the heartiness. I never could actually dislike my Aunt Kate, but she exasperated me thoroughly: plenty of people were silly enough to admire Hitler before 1939, but to persist in that admiration forty years later seemed to call for a superhuman kind of silliness that was all but repellent.

Anyway, there we sat, over tea and cress sandwiches, one big happy family.

Lawrence ate little. He woke, looked at me, muttered ‘Oh, yes,’ and was handed a cress sandwich, which he wolfed down. Kate handed him another, but after one bite he fell asleep, and she took the rest of it from his
hand with surprising gentleness, then went back to stolidly munching her own.

‘I apologize for Lawrence,’ said Sybilla sharply. ‘He is
not
always like this. In fact, this is what Mrs McWatters calls “one of his off days”—which is a very vulgar phrase, but it does rather sum it up, doesn’t it?’

I did not respond to this invitation to ridicule my Uncle Lawrence (though only, probably, because it came from my Aunt Sybilla). Aunt Kate, by this time, was positively bouncing with suppressed puppyish enthusiasm.

‘Syb!’
she said. ‘You haven’t told him. Oh, go on, Syb! Tell him the details!’

I found this—even
I
found this—rather ghoulish. ‘I think I know the main outlines.’

‘Really?’
said Sybilla, clearly affronted at being cheated of her story. ‘But no. You can’t possibly. You can’t have talked to Cristobel, and nothing has appeared in the public prints.’

Deliberate archaisms were one of Aunt Sybilla’s favourite forms of affectation.

‘I’m not dependent entirely on the public prints,’ I said. ‘I heard it from my superior in the police force.’

‘The Po
lice
! Have you joined the Po
lice
? I thought you were in the army! Kate, did we know Peregrine was a Peeler?’

‘I knew,’ said Kate, chomping vigorously at her sandwich like a young horse. ‘I’ve known for jolly ages!’

‘I left the army eight years ago,’ I said. ‘I went into the police. I’m a detective-inspector with the CID. I expect to be a superintendent before long.’

‘Spare me the details of the promotional ladder in the Metropolitan Police Force,’ said Aunt Sybilla, flapping an aesthetic claw. But I thought she was interested too, because, nibbling delicately at a piece of seed cake, she said: ‘Well, well, so you’re in the police. Really, you must forgive me, Perry dear—not knowing, or forgetting. But
the fact is, your father did not . . . very frequently . . .
talk
about you, you know!’