Robin Jarvis-Jax 01 Dancing Jax (31 page)

They were so successful at portraying these two temperamental but lovable old ladies from a bygone age that some people refused to believe that they were really two men in drag. In fact ‘drag’ was the wrong term entirely. This was no crude, ‘I’m a Lady, I do Lady things’ type of sketch that couldn’t sustain interest for more than five minutes at a time. The illusion here was absolute. Their skill at weaving this convincing world made their audiences long to believe it was true and their policy of never giving interviews as their real selves helped it along enormously.

Martin continued to stare. He was trying to look through the impeccable, yet simple, make-up of the woman standing before him, to see if he could recognise anything of Gerald in there. But no, it really did stand up to close scrutiny. Carol had always warned him that if he was ever lucky enough to be introduced to ‘Evelyn’ then he had to obey certain rules. Staring with your mouth open, trying to see the joins in the disguise, was a definite shattering of rule number one.

“Yes, young man?” a female voice, not a bit like that of Gerald Benning, asked.

Martin hastily pulled himself together, but questions were gurgling through his mind. Why was Gerald dressed up like this? They had cancelled tonight’s dinner over the phone yesterday, as soon as they told him Paul had run away. Then he recalled what Carol had once explained about ‘Evelyn’.

The Hole and Corner act had been in existence for over thirty years and in that time Gerald and Peter had created a detailed and totally believable life and history – not just for those two characters and the always absent musicians, but also their whole world. When Peter had died, taking the querulous Bunty Corner (MBE) with him to the grave, Gerald found he couldn’t kill off Evelyn. She had been such a massive part of his life for so long, he felt it would have been disloyal, even disrespectful, to pretend that she never existed. To him – and indeed to the millions who enjoyed their performances – she did. And so, every few months, Professor Evelyn Hole was allowed to breathe again, and enjoy the house she had paid for.

Carol had her own theory as to why Gerald had to keep his alter ego ‘alive’. Yes, it was another way of keeping the memory of Peter fresh and close, but it wasn’t just that. After imbuing Evelyn with such vivid life and energy for so long, perhaps she really had taken over a part of the old man’s psyche and refused to be forgotten. She was bonded to his identity now. Anyone who was honoured enough to be let in to enjoy her company on these occasional reappearances understood that they had to maintain the illusion completely. Those who blundered, or were crass enough to try and catch her out, were never invited back.

“I’m Martin,” the maths teacher said, remembering this basic premise, but still wondering why this charade was being played out. “A friend of Gerald’s.”

“Ah, yes,” Professor Hole answered as though meeting him for the first time. “Carol’s fiancé, the one who’s frightfully clever at sums. I’ve heard so much about you from Gerald – all good I might add. Do come in.”

Martin followed Evelyn into the large, airy house and she led him into the gleaming designer kitchen. She glanced sniffily at the brushed steel surfaces – the decor wasn’t to her taste at all.

“I’m so deeply sorry to hear about my friend Paul,” she told Martin. “Have you heard anything more?”

Martin shook his head. This was really weird. The walk, the mannerisms, the vocal inflections, the bird-like tilt of the neck, this really could be an old lady.

“Nothing from the police,” he replied. “But Carol thinks they’ve been got at by the book now as well.”

Evelyn clasped her hands before her. “This is a deadly business,” she said gravely. “You may not realise just how perilous it is. Typical of Gerald not to see the significance of it straight away when you first told him. The man’s a perfect imbecile at times. I don’t know why you and Carol put up with him.”

Martin wasn’t sure how to react to that.

“Gerald said he had something to show me,” he said, really hoping it wasn’t simply this performance. He had always wanted to meet Evelyn, but this wasn’t an appropriate moment. There wasn’t time for this today.

“I upbraided him for not going straight round to show it to you last night!” Evelyn declared. “But what’s done is done. Let us hope it isn’t too late.”

“What isn’t?”

“You must learn and understand what you’re dealing with here,” she told him. “That man, Austerly Fellows. Anything to do with him… is incalculably dangerous.” She paused and pointed at the designer kettle. “Would you like a cup of tea? It may be an ugly thing, but it still boils water. Please don’t ask me to make you a coffee. His machine looks like something from Flash Gordon.”

“No, thanks.”

“Then what are we doing in this hideous kitchen? Come along with me, Martin. Hurry – there’s a lot to see.”

She left the kitchen and entered the private part of the guesthouse. Martin followed, noticing the subtle changes that took place whenever Evelyn was in residence. There were different photographs on the piano, including a large one of her and Bunty meeting the Queen after a Royal Variety Show, fresh flowers were arranged in porcelain vases that Gerald wouldn’t give houseroom to and a Tiffany lamp shone a warm glow over the wall.

A large, black trunk was another foreign element in the room. Evelyn knelt before it and turned to Martin.

“Gerald has his uses,” she began. “Before he departed this morning, I made him lug this old chest down from the attic. Before you see what it contains, allow me to explain…”

She waved Martin to a seat – one of Gerald’s masculine leather armchairs that had been softened by draping a fringed shawl over it.

“Has Gerald ever told you where his family came from?” Evelyn asked.

“From round here, wasn’t it?”

“Just so, and did he tell you what his grandparents did for a living, his grandmother in particular?”

“Don’t think that ever came up. I don’t see how this is relevant…”

Evelyn held up her hand. “You will,” she explained. “Indulge me a little, I beg you.” Resting her elbow on the lid of the trunk, she continued.

“Before she was married, Gerald’s grandmother was in service. She was the upstairs maid in a grand house, owned by a very well-off country doctor – Bartholomew Fellows.”

She let the name sink in before carrying on. “Imagine what this town was like, a hundred years ago,” she said. “A thriving little resort with good connections to London, not just by rail but steamer too. Doctor Bartholomew had a very successful practice in the capital before he came to settle here. But his wife died young, leaving him only one heir.”

“Austerly!”

“No, a clever little boy called Ezra. And then there was a scandal – the doctor remarried.”

“Why was that so scandalous?”

“Because he married one of his servants. No, not Gerald’s grandmother – the woman who was employed as nanny to little Ezra. In Victorian London society, such things simply were not done. It still raises eyebrows when that kind of thing happens today, so think how outraged people were back then. Doctor Bartholomew had no choice but to leave London altogether. He took his new bride and Ezra out to the Suffolk countryside, not far from Felixstowe, and that was when he discovered his new bride was not quite what she seemed.”

“How do you mean?”

“The new Mrs Fellows, Nettie, was what was known in those days as a fallen woman. She already had a child of her own. She had been seduced by her previous employer and had kept the existence of the poor mite a complete secret by entrusting it to one of those disgusting baby farms – one of the grimmest places imaginable. They were squalid houses where old crones were paid to take in babies because society decreed it impossible for the mothers to keep them. They were terrible times. The shame and stigma of being an unmarried mother was the ruin of many. Women would lose their jobs and their homes if such secrets were discovered and so there was no choice but to pay these greedy hags to mind the baby for them and visit the little mites as often as they could.

“Of course, those baby farmers weren’t interested in the welfare of their charges. They could have dozens of infants under their roof at any given time and drugged them with laudanum to keep them quiet. If the children didn’t sicken and die from neglect then they were starved to death or perished as a result of the powerful drugs stirred into their milk. It was nothing less than wholesale infanticide. Do you know, there were more laws about the keeping and mistreatment of livestock than there were for children. Anyone could become a baby farmer and advertise their services in the newspaper. Children had no rights at all. There’s Victorian values for you.”

Her fingers tapped out a tune from HMS Pinafore on the lid of the trunk. Then she sang the words.

She pursed her lips with displeasure and shuddered.

“The infant that Nettie had put into the ‘care’, for want of a better word, of one of those foul people was called Austerly.”

Martin sat up, but Evelyn had not finished; there was still much more to tell him.

“When Doctor Bartholomew found out about Nettie’s secret, he was incensed and accused her of marrying him under false pretences, but somehow she managed to calm him. What a character she must have been and how she must have had him wrapped around her finger in those first years. Bartholomew forgave her and even raised the boy as his own, bringing him to Suffolk to grow up alongside Ezra. Then a year later Nettie bore him a daughter, Augusta.”

Evelyn gazed at the colours and shapes the Tiffany shade threw across the wall. “That’s where Gerald’s grandmother came in,” she said. “She began working in the great house the doctor had bought near here and hated every moment of it.”

“Why? Were they cruel to the servants?”

“Not cruel, but extremely strange, as you’ll discover. It was a peculiar house. Bartholomew shelled out a considerable part of his fortune to remodel it in the high Gothic style he admired so much. But he was no architect and so it ended up an ugly, frightful place and the atmosphere within matched it perfectly. Nettie Fellows was never happy there, and her misery mounted with each passing season. She and Bartholomew grew apart and she eventually took to her bed and stayed in it for the rest of her life, never once moving from that room, until they came to carry her out. There were other macabre occurrences in that house and every year the shadows deepened.”

“But what about Austerly?”

Evelyn took a deep breath and stared down at the trunk.

“When Gerald’s grandmother married his grandfather,” she said, “a year before Nettie died, in 1907, she was given this as a wedding present.”

Evelyn lifted the heavy lid. It contained musty clothes. “A trunk full of cast-offs,” she announced. “Gerald’s grandfather was furious, but didn’t dare say anything and appear ungrateful. They were so poor you see and had to make their way in the world and couldn’t afford to insult the rich doctor in the big house. Anyway, he forbade Gerald’s grandmother ever to wear any of these hand-me-downs. It didn’t stop her looking at them though and that was how she came across this…”

Evelyn reached into the trunk – delving under the Victorian day dresses and broken corsets – and brought out a large photograph album.

“This may have been left in here by accident,” she said. “But I don’t think so. I think Nettie wanted someone else to see what her husband was really like.”

She handed Martin the album and he glanced at the first page.

“Bartholomew took up the relatively new hobby of photography almost as soon as they moved in,” she explained. “He turned one large room on the first floor into a studio and made the adjoining one his darkroom. He fancied himself as something of an artist and roped many of the household in to take part in historical tableaux so he could photograph them. Have you ever seen such wretched expressions? Nobody is enjoying that.”

Martin studied the sepia pictures. They showed uncomfortable-looking people decked out in crudely made costumes wielding wooden spears and swords, in ridiculous poses.

“There,” Evelyn said when Martin turned the page. The next image was of two young boys.

The eldest could only have been about seven years old. He sat astride a rocking horse, his face in profile, holding a sword out in front as if charging at an enemy. The other boy could have been no more than four. He stood alongside, in a sailor suit, staring straight at the camera. It was a striking face. Martin had seen those penetrating eyes before; last night before Paul’s computer had blown up.

“That’s Austerly,” he said.

“Yes, that’s him. There are a few more of him with Ezra or his sister, but always the same intensity of expression – did you ever see such eyes?”

“It’s as though he’s looking right through the lens, right at me,” Martin murmured, shifting uneasily.

“Indeed. He was a horrible child. As he grew, his nature showed itself more and more. He would torture pets for pleasure. Once he took hold of Augusta’s canary and squeezed the life out of it because he didn’t like its song. He was inhumanly cruel, but fiercely intelligent. Now turn the page and see the other sort of pictures Doctor Bartholomew enjoyed taking.”

Martin did so and his eyebrows lifted high into his forehead.

“Quite,” Evelyn said, reading his reaction.

These photographs were of scantily-dressed women masquerading as historical or mythical figures. Some of them weren’t wearing any clothes at all.

“Are these the servants as well?” he asked. “What a dirty doctor.”

“No, I think they were from the village. Gerald’s grandmother certainly didn’t recognise them as being part of the household. Imagine how shocking that would have been at the time when even the sight of a bare leg was enough to cause outrage. No wonder Nettie fell out with him.”

Martin leafed through several more saucy pages. Then he paused when he saw a much more formal, and clothed, portrait of a severe-looking woman sitting stiffly on a chair with Ezra and Austerly on either side. The boys were a few years older now.