Mrs Verity – unsuspecting half-sister of the notorious William Mainprize – lived in Cheltenham, since the modest landed property of her husband was now in the ownership of a grandson. It was only infrequently that she accepted her grandson’s annual invitation to visit him. Although careful never to fail in giving the Veritys their due – they were good people, the men mostly in the army, and impeccably descended from one of the great Duke of Marlborough’s commanders – Mrs Verity remained very much a Corderoy. It was no doubt gratifying to possess an ancestor who behaved not too blunderingly at Malplaquet; it was quite another matter to be honoured as the daughter of one of the most famous of English authors. Mrs Verity had maintained this attitude unflinchingly through the embarrassing discovery of Mr Corderoy the butler, and had even skilfully exploited that occasion to acquire from a shocked Corderoy brother-in-law what an older generation would have called Walter Corderoy’s literary remains. One consequence of this was that the Cheltenham house had become something of a shrine. And Mrs Verity had become something of a priestess.
Charles Shand reflected nervously on these matters as he drove over from Oxford a week later. The fact that he was no stranger to Mrs Verity, that she knew of various aspects of his work and had furthered him in them, scarcely made the coming interview easier. Shand didn’t quite get round to reflecting that he had very little sense of Mrs Verity’s character – the dubiety was of a sort his mind didn’t naturally focus – but he was uneasily aware that he had no idea how she would take the revelation of her kinship with a murderer. Shand’s labours had been of the most orthodox kind, and conducted by a light that which there seems none cleaner: the clear hard light of a disinterested pursuit of knowledge. But this light – through, so to speak, no fault of its own – had suddenly found itself at play upon decidedly swampy territory.
Steering cautiously through the narrows of Northleach, Shand reviewed the stages of his luckless investigation. First there had been the thought to study the trial which Corderoy had so curiously made use of in a novel. Then there had been the turning to the earlier background of that trial’s principal figure – normal if somewhat peripheral research which had brought up an interesting fact: the home of Martha Mainprize, the murderer’s long-dead mother, had been in Corderoy’s neighbourhood. There might have been nothing in that. It had been suggestive, all the same.
Then – Shand frowned over the wheel – had come the astonishing running to earth of an old woman who was Martha’s niece, and the yet more astonishing discovery – in a cupboard in this old woman’s hovel – of the little cache of Martha’s possessions: the photographs, the locks of hair, the pathetically yellowed and almost illiterate diary, with the entry ‘W.C., £10’ recorded regularly every fortnight. Martha’s niece had refused to part with these things for any reasonable sum; Shand had been prevented by some scruple from making an offer that would be exorbitant. What was going to happen when he told Mrs Verity all this? It had only been respectable biographical research all through – and yet was it not the very picture of private detection such as one reads of in squalid law suits? And here was only the start of the story. Its conclusion was in Winchester Gaol.
Shand descended the long hill into Cheltenham more slowly than even his habitual care for road safety required. A curious town, he thought. Stone flaking, stucco crumbling, paint weathered away. Behind these disgraced, these bleakly elegant façades did there still lurk the answering human detritus of an empire – the spinster daughters of retired admirals, the relics of the last administrators and defenders of British India? Shand didn’t know, but he thought probably not. It all looked depressingly run-down, yet the shops in the centre told you there was something like affluence lurking around. He shook his head, acknowledging an insecure grip of recent social history. He parked his car, found in a grey deserted crescent Walter Corderoy’s daughter’s abode, and gave a moderate but adequate downward pull at the bell.
The hall had stone pillars and stone-coloured paint. It was lined with books. But the staircase had pictures, hung close together and themselves ascending in steps, like the advertisements on the escalators in London tubes. Only whereas the advertisements inclined to be indelicate, here a high propriety ruled. The pictures were mostly large photographs of gentlemen, and on their mounts or margins or neutral sepia spaces were written things like Cordially Joseph Conrad and Comme un témoignage de profonde et affectueuse reconnaissance Marcel Proust. Shand recalled being made uneasy by them on a previous occasion. They seemed to convey a slight intimation that a scholar was an outsider, after all. He would have hurried past them now. Unfortunately a very ancient parlourmaid – even more ancient than her mistress – was preceding him slowly and with creaking knees.
Mrs Verity received him in her drawing-room. It was large, with high windows through which there crept rather than streamed a cool grey light. There was perhaps nothing too obtrusive about Walter Corderoy’s presence in the apartment. Here, almost, was an ordinary drawing-room if an upper-middle class sort: full of good taste and old furniture and faded stuffs and fabrics. But Corderoy by John Singer Sargent was over the chimney-piece, and in the big alcove where one might have expected a grand piano was Corderoy’s writing-table with Corderoy by Jacques-Emile Blanche flanking it on the wall. There was a cabinet displaying various mementos of eminence: scrolls and diplomas, medals and patents and the insignia of foreign orders, faded but gracious commands from exalted personages. There was a show-case frankly carrying some suggestion of a museum, with corrected galley-proofs and a few manuscripts. It was convenient – Mrs Verity would explain – to have such a small exhibition to hand when people with no special claim on one felt prompted to call.
‘My dear Professor, I was delighted when you wrote that you could come. I am eager to hear how your work has been going on.’
Mrs Verity invariably addressed Shand as ‘Professor’, although she knew perfectly well that it was not technically correct. It was her way of remaining at a slight remove; in fact it went along with the signed photographs on the staircase. And although she was so piously devoted to Corderoy’s memory – almost to a Corderoy legend, it might be said – she wasn’t in the least the pathetic and teetering old person whom young Coverdale had conjured up. Shand himself found that, between visits, he was inclined to forget this; to forget, as it were, how much there was left of her. He took encouragement from it now. Perhaps, he told himself, the old girl was really quite tough. He ought already to have some better estimate of this in his mind. He must, he thought, have been remiss. It was rather as if he had failed to collate a relevant text. This time, he resolved, he would go away with Mrs Verity’s character and temperament precisely noted down.
‘I have heard again,’ Mrs Verity said, ‘from Professor Barthou of the Sorbonne. A charming man.’
‘Yes, indeed.’ Shand didn’t feel worried about Barthou. ‘Do you happen to have had any correspondence with a man called Fawdry?’ He waited in suspense while Mrs Verity appeared to make an effort of memory. She was still handsome – and uncommonly like the Sargent portrait of her father – but it was only to be expected that her mind might be going a little. ‘Not a university teacher,’ he prompted. ‘Mr Fawdry is, I suppose, what is called a literary journalist.’
‘No, the name hasn’t come my way.’ Much to Shand’s relief, Mrs Verity had decisively shaken her head; Fawdry was the rather deplorable person who was also on Corderoy’s trail. ‘I receive, as you know, a good deal of correspondence about my father and his work. Much of it is from people of my own generation, who still remember him. You will recollect how much, in his later years, he came to relish society. He had a weakness for the great houses, had he not?’ Mrs Verity’s strong features appeared to be softening into an expression denoting affectionate acknowledgement of foible. ‘Badminton, Chatsworth, Blenheim.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Shand couldn’t in fact recall that bevies of cultivated dukes had been eager for Walter Corderoy’s company. But the general proposition was correct. And Mrs Verity’s so relishing her vestigial contacts with such social elevation as her father had attained made the coming revelation all the more grotesque and awkward.
‘I’m afraid,’ Shand said, ‘that I have a painful communication to make to you.’ He paused on this – ‘communication’ had been a pompously chosen word – and didn’t at all know whether to be encouraged by a glance of curiosity, swiftly veiled, which he had evoked. ‘As you know,’ he went on, ‘I’ve been working chiefly on the biographical side of late.’ He paused again, and it must have taken only a moment’s silence to disconcert him. For instead of making a statement – which was certainly what was now incumbent upon him – he shied away into a question. ‘May I ask if your mother,’ he said, ‘ever made you any confidence about the earliest period of her married life?’
‘I scarcely know whether anything of the sort is to be expected between mothers and daughters.’ Mrs Verity had started, as she well might. ‘If you are referring, that’s to say, to intimate matters.’
‘Quite so, quite so.’ Shand uttered these words without exactly knowing to what they applied. He was already feeling very upset. ‘What I have to tell you isn’t really startling,’ he said. ‘Or not,’ he added conscientiously, ‘the first part of it. I assure you, my dear Mrs Verity, that it wouldn’t seem in the least surprising to any man of the world.’ Shand wondered whether he himself at all measured up to this character. ‘The fact is that Walter Corderoy had an illegitimate son by a village girl. He was very young. Scarcely beyond the stage of sowing his wild oats.’
‘Why should my mother—?’
‘But he had married very young. And I am afraid this lapse was in the early months of his marriage.’ Shand produced a handkerchief and blew his nose. He had regretted that ‘I am afraid’ instantly. And ‘lapse’ had been bad too. The words touched in an unnecessary note of moral reprobation such as could scarcely have come into a man-of-the-world’s head.
‘My mother knew,’ Mrs Verity said.
‘You mean that you know?’ It had taken Shand a moment to grasp the implication, and his first sensation was of sharp relief. ‘I’m telling you nothing new?’
‘My dear Professor, I didn’t say that. Put it, if you like, that my mother would know. She was a remarkable woman.’
‘Most certainly. She was widely felt to be so.’ Shand made a clutch at his familiar decencies. ‘A kind of Meredithian heroine.’
‘Perhaps. But I think that Aeschylean would be my own definition.’
‘Indeed?’ It was only after a moment that Shand managed even this. Mrs Verity’s last words had come to his ear like gibberish, so that he had been obliged to reach after them, consider them in phonetic terms, and finally make at least grammatical sense of them. Mrs Verity, he recalled, had been at Girton (in Miss Jones’s time) and couldn’t be wholly vague about the dramatist of the Oresteia. It seemed a batty remark, all the same. Not that Mrs Verity looked batty. She merely looked rather grim. It was a consciousness of this that prompted what Shand went on to say. ‘I’m afraid you may judge me impertinent in bringing up this matter at all. But the man I mentioned—’
‘A Mr Fawdry, I think you said? I quite understand.’ Mrs Verity’s countenance remained inexpressive. She was giving nothing away. ‘Will you please tell me, Professor, just what you know?’
Shand began to do so, and his performance improved at once. He had an orderly mind. Once a week, during two terms out of three, he was a lucid if unexciting lecturer. With decent brevity he lectured now. William Mainprize was begotten, born, passed through his malting-house, and hanged – all within ten minutes. Even so, there had been a pause while the ancient parlourmaid brought in a tray. It was rather as when, in common room, the coffee had been brought in. Pas devant les domestiques.
‘It will be backwards from A Venation of Centaurs, and from the trial, that this Mr Fawdry, too, will work?’ Mrs Verity asked. She had, when one thought of it, a Girton way of phrasing things. And whether she had been staggered or not – whether, indeed, anything new had been broken to her – it was impossible to say.
‘I’m afraid so. When it’s a question only of the last hundred years there’s almost nobody, whether gentle or simple, about whom the basic facts may not be discovered through dogged inquiry. Fawdry will have both William Mainprize’s parentage and his ultimate function in A Venation of Centaurs to play with. I can only suggest that the facts be first given to the world in a dignified way.’
‘By yourself, Professor?’
‘I would gladly avoid the task. But I am, conceivably, the most appropriate man to undertake it. I can assure you that I experience no pleasure in the contemplation of it.’
But Mrs Verity appeared not quite to have been listening. She had risen, and was crossing the room. Her posture was upright and her step firm. The movement revealed her as a very old lady, all the same.
‘I have one or two things to show you,’ Mrs Verity said.