The Norfolk Mystery (The County Guides) (9 page)

‘Yes. Yes. The new Leica.'

‘Good. Portable desk?'

‘Yes. Of course.'

‘Blotting paper?'

‘Yes!'

‘Writing paper.'

‘Yes! Father!'

‘Airmail paper?'

‘Yes, yes, yes. And the elephant rifle, the muskets, the swords, the daggers and the boar spears!'

‘Good.'

‘We don't really have—' I began.

‘Of course not!' said Miriam. ‘But we have everything we need, and now we are going.'

At which, without further ado, Miriam started up the car and set off down the driveway in much the manner she had been driving the day before, which is to say, suicidally. Thrilling at the speed, Morley sat bolt upright, gazing all around like a child, his fingers playing across the keys of his typewriter so much like a pianist about to perform that I almost expected him to play a scale.

‘It's a Hermes Featherweight,' he said loudly, leaning across.

‘Very nice,' I agreed.

‘Nobody else cares about your typewriters, Father!' called Miriam from the front.

‘Tools of the trade,' said Morley. ‘Sefton needs to get to know them.'

‘They're just typewriters!' said Miriam. ‘Lesson over.'

‘They're not just typewriters!' said Morley. ‘Sefton. Look. They've only just started manufacturing them. Had it imported from Switzerland. Tremendous craftsmanship.' He stroked the casing of the machine. ‘I use Good Companions as back-ups,' he said, ‘but the Swiss do seem to have the upper hand when it comes to precision engineering, don't you think? Watches and what have you.' He held up both wrists to me – a watch on each wrist. ‘Luminous dial,' he said, pointing with his right hand to his left wrist, and then pointing to the right wrist, ‘And non-luminous dial.'

‘Super,' I said.

‘Beautiful, isn't she?' continued Morley, addressing the typewriter.

‘She's certainly a very nice typewriter,' I said.

‘And incredibly light. Here.' He pulled the typewriter towards him, removed it from its wooden stays and handed it across to me.

‘Extraordinary, isn't she?'

‘It's certainly very light.'

‘Eight pounds.'

‘Very light.'

‘You could sit her on your lap almost, couldn't you? Never mind portables, Sefton. Lapwriters, that'll be the next thing, mark my word. Five, ten years, we'll have typewriters you can fit into your pocket!' He was always coming up with absurd predictions about machines of the future – he corresponded, of course, for many years with H.G. Wells about the nature and practicalities of time travel – and there was also his famous shed, more like a barn, at St George's, mentioned by all the biographers, and which contained the carcasses of many engines, clocks and bicycles, the mechanisms of which he was continually seeking to improve, or, more likely, confuse: there were clocks made from bicycle parts, and bicycles made from clock parts. The story of Morley's ill-fated steam-paraffin-driven bicycle I shan't repeat here, for we were sweeping out onto the open road, and I was having trouble keeping up with the briefing …

‘So, that's me,' he said, wedging the typewriter back into position. ‘You, meanwhile, will mostly be using the notebooks. Have them imported specially from Germany. The very best. Waterproof.'

I picked up one of the notebooks from the bag Miriam had handed me. And it was indeed a fine notebook: octavo, morocco-bound, lined, with a red ribbon marker dangling from it, like a fuse.

‘Feel the heft of it,' said Morley.

I weighed the notebook in my hand.

‘Beautiful, isn't it?' he said.

‘Yes, again, it's quite … beautiful,' I said. I had never before met a man who cared so much about his writing equipment. I had always managed to get by with pencils and the backs of envelopes and cigarette packets.

‘Leave the poor man alone!' cried Miriam from the front. ‘Nobody wants to hear about your stationery fetish.'

‘My what?' said Morley.

Miriam groaned. ‘Never mind.'

‘My advice to novice writers when they write to me, Sefton, is very simple. “Avoid haphazard writing habits. And haphazard writing materials.” And that's it.'

‘That's it?' I said.

‘That's it,' agreed Miriam, from the seat in front.

‘That's it,' said Morley. ‘
That
is the secret of my success.'

In fact, as his own notebooks clearly show, Morley's work was forever verging on the haphazard, with sketches, diagrams, coordinates and figures of all sorts crowding the pages, not to mention the words themselves. He wrote – as anyone familiar with the biographies will know – not only continuously and prodigiously, and in the same notebooks for almost forty years, but also in a tiny, lunatic hand. Indeed, over the years of our relationship, his handwriting became progressively smaller and smaller, almost to the point of being unreadable except by the use of a magnifying glass. His stated ambition was to squeeze ina hundred lines per page. Sometimes, pausing in between his labours, I would notice him counting the lines, again and again.

‘Blast it!' he would say.

‘A problem, Mr Morley?'

‘Ninety. Blast it.'

‘Ninety?'

‘Lines.'

‘Ah.'

There was, I came to realise, a relationship between the size and density of his writing and his lavishness of aim and ambition in wishing to capture reality as he felt it existed: it was as if by making things small he also somehow emphasised their magnitude and significance. I, on the other hand, averaged at best twenty lines a page. Which he believed to be a sign of moral turpitude.

‘Now. Norfolk. Norfolk. What do you think of, Sefton, when you think of Norfolk?'

‘“Very flat, Norfolk”?' I said, regretting it immediately.

Morley groaned as though I had prodded him in the side with a spear. ‘Spare us the Noël Coward, Sefton, please. Terribly overrated. Not a fan. Poor man's Oscar Wilde. Who was himself, of course, the poor man's Dr Johnson. Who one might say was the poor man's Aubrey. Who was the poor man's Burton … Who was … Anyway … A quip is not an insight, Sefton. And besides, it's not, actually, Norfolk.'

‘What?' I did my best to keep up.

‘Flat. Ever been to Gas Hill, in Norwich?'

‘No, I—'

‘Precisely. West Runton? Beacon Hill?'

‘Again, no, I—'

‘There you are, then. It's actually made up of three very distinct geological areas, Norfolk.' He made cupping movements with his hands, as though the entire county was within his grasp. ‘Flatlands in the west. Chalklands and heathlands of the north and the centre. And the rich valleys of the south and east.'

‘I see.'

‘From which we might learn much about the history of the place. “Very flat, Norfolk!” Worthless. Ignorant. Stupid. We can learn everything about a place from its landscape, Sefton, if we bother to pay attention to it. You're going to have to clear your mind of cant, if you wouldn't mind, when we're discussing these things. I want to know what
you
think when you think of Norfolk, Sefton, not Mr Know-All Coward. Independent thought, Sefton. That's the thing. The mind unshackled. So. Let's try again, shall we? When I think of Norfolk I think of …'

‘When I think of Norfolk I think of—'

‘Churches. Exactly. Very important. Beguiling county of great religious art and culture.'

‘I see.'

‘Write it down, Sefton.'

And so I took up a pen and began to write; my first notes of our grand project.

‘Saxons, Normans, came, built their churches. Churches. That's the way in to Norfolk. Not a lot you can't learn from churches. Norfolk has some six hundred medieval churches, I think. Check that. Most of them of the Perpendicular.' He pulled a piece of paper from a pocket. ‘Here. I have a little list.' He brandished a scribbled list. I read it. It was a list of churches: three columns per side, one hundred lines apiece.

‘There's certainly a lot there,' I said.

‘Six hundred,' he said.

‘Yes, that's a lot.'

‘Don't worry, Sefton. We're not going to visit them all.'

‘Right. Good.'

‘Four or five hundred should do us. I thought we'd start with the churches. Get them out of the way. And then we've got all of Norwich to do. Carrow Road. “Come on, the Canaries!” Though I'm not a great fan of association football. And I thought we might do something on the speedway at Hellesdon – terribly popular, you know, speedway. Are you a fan, Sefton?'

‘I can't say—'

‘And then something on the flora and fauna – lavender and what have you. And Thetford Forest, I suppose. Largest lowland pine forest in Britain, I think I'm right in saying, though we'll have to check, of course.'

Norfolk, county of mills

‘Of course.'

‘And all the little curiosities: Whalebone House in Cley. And the windmills and the water mills. Brick mills. Drainage mills. County of mills, Norfolk. And some of the modern industries, of course – we mustn't forget Colman's. But the churches first. Need to get our priorities right, eh?'

‘Yes.'

‘Definitely Trunch.'

‘Trunch?'

‘You know the font canopy at Trunch?'

‘I can't say I do—'

He sniffed the air, as though he could actually smell the font canopy at Trunch, like the lure of wild game beckoning to him across the East Anglian tundra.

‘And Ranworth,' he said. ‘Wonderful. And the crypt at Brisley – used for prisoners on their way to the Norwich jail, did you know?'

‘No, I can't say I—'

‘The Labours of the Month at Burnham Deepdale. Early Gothic leaf carving at West Walton, curvilinear windows at Cley and at Walsingham. Oh, yes. It's going to be a wonderful few days, Sefton. All on the list there, if you look.'

I stared at the list as Morley continued to recite the wonders of many of Norfolk's six hundred churches, and Miriam kept gunning the engine.

‘… the hammerbeam roof at Cawston, the giant St Nicholas in Yarmouth, the Seven Sacraments font at Dereham, the four great churches of Wiggenhall …'

We paused briefly, and thankfully, at a crossroads, Morley and engine idling.

‘All sounds fas-cin-ating,' yelled Miriam from the front, yawning loudly.

‘Yes, I think it will be.'

‘I was being ironical, Father.'

‘Oh? Were you? I do wish you wouldn't, Miriam. It's terribly bad manners.'

‘It's the height of sophistication, actually.'

‘Really? Sefton?'

‘Sorry, Mr Morley?'

‘Irony?'

‘What about it, Mr Morley?'

‘An adjudication, if you please?'

‘On?'

‘Irony. Good thing, or a bad thing? What do you think?'

‘It certainly shows a certain … detachment,' I said. ‘And an energy of response.'

‘Energy of response,' he said. ‘I like that. Very nice, Sefton. That's why we've hired you. He admires your energy of response,' he called out loudly to Miriam.

‘Really?' said Miriam. ‘I'm flattered, Sefton. I shan't return the compliment, though, thank you. Now, which way?'

‘Left,' said Morley.

Miriam swung the vehicle left, and we began to pick up speed.

‘Anyway,' said Morley, tapping at the keys, with one eye on the surroundings. ‘Ah!' he cried. ‘Notable roof!'

‘Sorry, Mr Morley?'

‘A notable roof. There. See?'

He pointed towards what looked like an entirely average Norfolk roof of blackish-red pantiles.

‘See?'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Make a note,' said Morley.

I wrote down the words ‘Notable roof'.

‘Sorry, Mr Morley, notable in what sense?'

‘Blackish tinge around the chimney?' he said.

I turned and looked behind me as the house and its chimney vanished into the distance.

‘Yes.' The chimney was indeed blackened.

‘And what make you of that?'

‘I don't know.'

‘And he doesn't care!' cried Miriam.

‘Don't care was made to care,' said Morley. ‘And don't know isn't an answer.'

‘Yes it is!' said Miriam.

‘A chimney fire, perhaps?' I said.

‘Oh, come on. Go for the obvious answer first, Sefton, shouldn't you? Before indulging in fantasies? A blackened chimney? Logical explanation? Primary cause?'

‘A hot fire?'

‘Aha! Exactly. And why would this particular house, among all the other houses in the village, have such a hot fire, do you think?'

‘Because the inhabitants are colder than the others?'

‘Possible, I suppose. Except that we know nothing of the inhabitants. Context?'

‘A house in a village?'

‘Correct. And moreover?'