LEAVING HOPWOOD’S, disheartened but with my integrity more or less intact, I made my way back to the hotel and was about to enter when Morley came purposefully striding outside, looking disturbingly trim and kempt, as always.
‘Ah, Sefton! Excellent! Saw you through the window,’ he said. ‘We’ve set up HQ in the breakfast room.’ He nodded inside and sure enough I saw his typewriter and reference books piled up, incongruous on a white linen tablecloth on a table set with tea and toast. I’m sure the hotel staff were delighted; wherever we went throughout the country, Morley always liked to establish a centre of operations where he could set up his beloved Hermes Featherweight and his vast stationery supplies depot and start banging out his articles, essays, columns and of course The County Guides. Basically he ran a low-cost, high-profit portable writing factory, with Miriam and me the only full-time operatives, with hotel staff and resources deployed as necessary. During my years with Morley I very often felt like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, screwing endless nuts on an assembly line.
‘We were wondering where you’d got to. Out for your morning constitutional? A matutinal stroll? Everything all right? You look rather as if you’d lost a shilling and found a farthing.’
Not quite. I’d found an expensive cigarette case but was still painfully short of a hundred pounds.
‘Yes,’ I said. What else could one say?
‘You missed some excellent porridge.’ Morley rated hotels and guesthouses almost exclusively on the quality of their tea and porridge. I remember once he returned from staying at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris for some ceremony or other and all he could say afterwards was, ‘Terrible tea and porridge.’ There were guesthouses in the west of Ireland that he rated more highly. ‘Well, what do you make of Colchester, then? Take any photographs?’
I didn’t actually have the Leica with me. I was supposed to carry a camera and notebook at all times, to collect material for The County Guides, but half the time I forgot and the rest of the time I couldn’t be bothered.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d get some photographs later. It’s a bit quiet at the moment.’
‘Quiet?’ said Morley. He looked perplexed. ‘As in somnolent?’
‘I suppose, yes.’
‘Colchester, Sefton?’ He threw out his arms, gesturing towards the busy sunlit morning High Street. ‘Somnolent, Colchester? The capital of Roman Britain? The town that gave birth to Helena, the mother of Constantine, and possibly to Constantine himself? The oldest town in Britain? Our greatest garrison town? The town that in 1884 was the epicentre of Britain’s most destructive earthquake? The town that indeed just last night witnessed perhaps the greatest outbreak of crowd hysteria since the dancing plague of the sixteenth century? And which saw its own mayor struck down before the assembled guests at a grand civic occasion? Somnolent, Sefton? I do sometimes wonder, sir, if you are sleepwalking through this life.’
I sometimes wondered it myself – especially when Morley went off on one of his jags. I could have done with a little something to make my sleepwalk all the sweeter, frankly, but it was too early in the day to start drinking. The only thing to do in the circumstances was to try to steer Morley elsewhere.
‘You heard about Len Starling?’ I asked.
‘The Town Sergeant?’ said Morley. ‘Yes. Arrested. Nothing in it, Sefton. He’ll be released by this afternoon, mark my words.’
‘Do you think?’
‘Absolutely certain. Lot of nonsense. Poor Marden died, goodness knows why, but of natural causes I have no doubt. And not poisoned oysters, for sure. Not that it stops people jumping to all sorts of ludicrous conclusions. Do you know, one of the women serving breakfast claimed that the Oyster Feast was the target of the communists, for goodness sake, trying to kill off the great and the good! Total stuff and nonsense, the whole thing. I’m going to write an article today about crowd hysteria. Interesting case study. If only Mr Fort were here to view it for himself. But. All a distraction from the book, Sefton. We must focus on the book.’
He took me by the elbow, in his usual irresistible fashion, as though leading a horse to water, or a lamb to the slaughter.
‘Now, Miriam has arranged for us to visit the Colchester Oyster Fishery, I believe. Few miles away, West Mersea. But she’s just mentioned that there was some problem with the car yesterday, is that right?’ He nodded again towards the hotel breakfast room, where I spotted Miriam busy looking languid over coffee – at which she was most definitely succeeding. ‘I’m rather concerned, Sefton, to be frank. You didn’t mention it before.’
Miriam winked at me through the window.
‘Didn’t mention what, sorry, Mr Morley?’
‘The Lagonda, man! The problem with the Lagonda? You didn’t see fit to mention it?’
‘No, well, with everything that’s happened.’
‘No excuse, Sefton! A workman always looks after his tools, first and foremost. Doesn’t matter what chaos may surround us. What do we do in a storm? What do we do in a crisis? Blame others, or take responsibility ourselves? Without the Lagonda, where would we be?’
‘In Norfolk, Mr Morley?’
‘Very funny, Sefton. I take it that’s supposed to be a joke?’ Morley could never quite tell. ‘You know we rely on that car. The County Guides rely on that car. Our whole project. A modern Domesday Book doesn’t write itself, you know.’
‘No.’
‘We can hardly cycle the length and breadth of the country, can we?’
‘No, Mr Morley.’
‘Unless we could find a bicycle that could fold and we could take it with us on trains and on buses … Hmm. Something worth thinking about, eh?’
‘Yes, Mr Morley.’ A folding bicycle? He often had these lunatic ideas. It was always best to ignore them.
‘So what’s wrong with her?’ he said.
Miriam was now making faces at me through the window. It was rather distracting.
‘Who?’
‘The car, man! What was wrong with the car? Poor fuel consumption?’
‘I’m not sure about the fuel consumption.’
‘Losing power?’
‘It may have been losing power, yes …’
‘Is that it?’
‘Well, yes. Although it was also making a rather funny sound.’
‘Funny? Funny in what way, Sefton?’
‘Just … funny.’
‘Oh come on, Sefton. Describe, please. Knocking? Clunking? Clicking?’
‘Erm …’
‘Clanging? Rumbling? Roaring? What?’
‘I’d describe it as … more of a knocking, Mr Morley.’
‘Knocking, eh? Loud knocking? Quiet knocking? A rat-a-tat-tat? Or a tum-ti-ti-tum? Pounding? The sound of an actual door knocker knocking? A knocker-upper knocking? A—’
‘A kind of metallic knocking, I’d say, Mr Morley. The sort of knocking you’d hear in a car.’
‘Hmm. Doesn’t sound good, Sefton, does it? Not good at all.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘Where is it then?’
‘The knocking sound?’ I said.
‘The car, man! The car.’
‘We had to park a way away.’
‘Come on then, chop chop, let’s tend to the poor beast.’
We found the Lagonda parked where Miriam and I had left it the night before. I was always half-expecting the car to be stolen – it wasn’t exactly an unnoticeable sort of a vehicle. (Indeed, on one very memorable occasion it was stolen, but that’s another story.) On that fine Essex morning it was, thank goodness, quite simply there, in all its glory.
‘The old white charger,’ said Morley. ‘Keys?’
The car had been fitted with a special key ignition at Morley’s request: in many ways he had the mind of a thief, and could always foresee opportunities for crimes and misdemeanours; the Lagonda was clearly an invitation to sin.
‘I don’t have the keys, I’m afraid, Mr Morley. I think Miriam has them.’
‘Ah, well, fortunately I think I have a spare set.’ He dug into the many pockets of his tweeds; he had his tailors, Davies & Co. – ‘Oldest on the Row, and still the best,’ according to Morley – make extra pockets everywhere in his suits, so that they became his home from home, equipped with every household item bar the kitchen sink. In fact, one wouldn’t have been surprised if one of the pockets did indeed contain the kitchen sink, or at least a small folding version, of the kind that one used to find in the cabins of continental sleeper trains. Sure enough, in a key pocket there was an extra set of keys for the Lagonda – and the house, St George’s, and all the rooms in the house, and its various outbuildings, and his other cars. If he’d produced a starting handle from his pockets I wouldn’t have been shocked. ‘Start her up, then.’ He tossed the keys to me and then hoisted up the bonnet and started fiddling around inside.
The car was certainly making a very unhappy sound, and the longer Morley fiddled in there the unhappier it became. After a few minutes he slammed down the bonnet.
‘That’ll do, Sefton.’
I turned off the engine.
‘Well?’ I said.
‘Did you say she started playing up in Ongar?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘Something wrong with the place?’
‘Not as far as I recall, Mr Morley, no, it seemed perfectly—’
‘Dirty sort of place?’
‘Dirty?’
‘Lot of grit or anything lying around? Mud?’
‘No, I don’t think so, although there was a big delivery of sand and gravel while we were down in Becontree, and the car was sort of dusted with—’
‘Dusted? What do you mean dusted?’
‘Well, sort of dusted—’
‘With sand and gravel? Good grief, man! Great Jerusalem save us! Why didn’t you say so before? Sand and gravel, for goodness sake! Sand’ll destroy an engine as quick and as sure as the Royal Navy setting its sights on Zanzibar, Sefton! Have you no idea whatsoever about the workings of the internal combustion engine?’
I did not.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think, Mr Morley.’
‘Clearly. Sometimes I do wonder, Sefton, if it’s a good idea to leave you and Miriam unattended with the Lagonda.’ Sometimes I wondered myself if it was a good idea for me and Miriam to be left unattended, with or without the Lagonda. ‘She is not a toy,’ he continued – meaning the Lagonda. ‘She is a valued member of our team.’ He did have a terrible tendency to anthropomorphise, metaphorise, exaggerate and otherwise make things up. ‘We need to get the old girl to a garage quick and have her looked at. Didn’t we pass a place up on the High Street, by the Town Hall?’
‘I don’t know, Mr Morley, did we?’
‘What are our rules, Sefton!’
‘No funking, no shirking, no shilly-shallying? Or no shirking, no shilly—’
‘Not those rules!’
‘Always look on the bright side of life?’
‘Nor that!’
I tried ‘Interdum vulgus rectum videt’, one of Morley’s favourite Latin phrases.
‘In plain English, man! Common sense and observation, Sefton! Are they not our bywords?’
We had so many bywords it was difficult to know which words were bywords and which were just by-the-way words.
‘What was it called?’ asked Morley, consulting his mental file-card index for recent additions under ‘Mechanics, Essex, Signs, Observed’. ‘Harold J. Willett?’
‘I’m not sure, Mr Morley.’
‘Well, fortunately I’m sure. Come on.’