Dennis and Nancy continued to prepare for their wedding. Wheatley’s grandfather had never knowingly allowed a Jew or a Catholic into his house, but Nancy was a Catholic, and she refused to give up her religion. Religiously mixed marriages were still difficult, so it was Wheatley who had to pretend he might be interested in converting.
They went to see a priest at Margate, and Wheatley took to him at once. For one thing he liked his library, full of crumbling leather-bound books. The priest said it was quite clear nothing he said would make Wheatley take up the faith, and they proceeded to talk about Eastern religion. Wheatley then signed a document to say that any children would be baptised as Catholics, and the priest gave him his dispensation.
There was just one thing the priest wanted. “I would like you to promise to read Mallock on Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption,” he said, and added “But you must not read the last chapter.” Wheatley acquired a copy of the book (subtitled Being an Examination of the Intellectual Position of the Church of England) and admired Mallock’s thorough demolition of the Protestant case. Naturally, having been told not to, he then had to read the last chapter. In it, Mallock conceded that although Catholicism was the only form of Christianity sanctioned by God, there was no proof God existed: so while Catholicism was the only way to be a Christian, it was quite possible not to be a Christian at all. This amused Wheatley.
*
Wheatley’s father and Nancy were both adamant that he must cease to meddle in Tombe’s disappearance. This meant Wheatley had to pull the drawbridge up on Beatrice. He let her pay Meyer’s bill and settle his own expenses, for which he had made characteristically detailed accounts. He had been to Scotland Yard, he told Beatrice, but they were not very interested and felt Eric might have his own reasons for disappearing. Now Wheatley had to draft quite firm letters to both Beatrice and Doctor Atkinson telling them that he could do no more:
I am strongly advised both by my father and his legal adviser that I must not take any further active part in prosecuting further enquires. As you know, I am more than busy getting my flat ready for my forthcoming early marriage, and having done all that I could to assist you in this very unfortunate affair, any further action I must not take, for my own safeguard [crossed out and replaced with ‘reputation’] and that of my future wife I cannot, of course, allow any scandal to attach to her name or my own.
Beatrice – the only person who comes out of this whole business with much credit – was now ill. Wheatley still had various of Eric’s possessions – Cartier watch, gold cigarette case, tie pin – but Beatrice had no interest in them, “only to know the Boy who was dearer to me than life itself is safe and alive.”
The thing she did want back was a photograph of Tombe in a suede case, which Wheatley had given to Meyer for identification purposes. Beatrice had broken down under the strain, and she wrote to Wheatley from Rochdale, apologising for her handwriting as she was sick in bed, pleading with him to tell her the truth. The uncertainty was killing her, she said. She promised not to divulge anything Wheatley might tell her. She wanted the truth, however cruel, and even if Eric had committed the most terrible crime she would rather know. “I only pray and long for death, but if you have it in your powers to give me any help, then I ask you as a last request to do so.”
Wheatley really didn’t know what had happened.
And then, a few months later, he happened to meet Desirée again. More than slightly flaky, as we have seen, this was the woman who alternated between dreams of introducing Tombe to her friend Jesus on the one hand, and murderous revenge on the other. She was back from the continent, and she had some startling news for Wheatley. She told him that she had caught sight of Eric, alive and well and in Madrid.
*
Wheatley’s wedding came around on the 17th June, 1922. His father wanted him to come to the office for drinks on the morning, but he wanted to be alone and spent the morning walking around a park. He would only have been human if he had at least some thoughts of Beatrice and Eric. He then had a glass of champagne at the Savoy with Bertie Davis, his best man, and Tanko Moate, and they went with him to St.James’s, Spanish Place, the Catholic Church in Marylebone. Owing to the mixed nature of the marriage, the priests decreed that lavish display was not appropriate, and they were allowed just two vases of flowers on the altar before a brief ceremony.
A reception followed at the Grand Central Hotel. Nancy’s mother had asked them if they would prefer a quiet wedding and £500 towards furnishing their flat (around £15,000 at today’s values), or a grand reception. They plumped for the latter, and “wisely” notes Wheatley: “Between them some 500 guests sent us over 300 presents which, when I later had them assessed for insurance, were valued at more than £800.”
Nancy gave him The Masterpiece Library of Short Stories, a twenty-volume red leather set subtitled ‘The Thousand Best Tales of All Times and All Countries’, inscribing it “To my darling One with all my love, in memory of June 17th 1922.”
Wheatley wasn’t himself that day. Having wanted to spend the morning alone, now – after the enormous cake had been cut, and the health of the bride and bridegroom drunk – he refused to reply to the toast. This wasn’t the Wheatley who sang songs, climbed on tables, and took public speaking in his stride. “Some contrary devil had got into me.”
Wheatley and Nancy left for the Savoy, where they were spending the first two nights of their honeymoon. Two mornings later they took the train for Dover, and for once Wheatley’s obsession with money had temporarily abated: “the expenses had led to my being £114 overdrawn,” he writes. “But I could not have cared less.”
*
They went to Belgium for their honeymoon, where Wheatley visited Waterloo. Back in London, Wheatley totted up his outgoings and income, Mr Micawber style, and found things were quite tight, but with the addition of Nancy’s money they managed. It was a fairly comfortable life at 20a Trebovir Road, where they had a maid. Having just the one was something of a privation, but it was becoming a feature of modern life: The One Maid Book of Cookery had been hailed by the Pall Mall Gazette as a good idea, “Now that so many people live in flats, and have only accommodation for one maid.”
There was another marriage in the summer of 1922, shortly after Wheatley’s own, when Barbara Symonds married Cecil Cross at St.Leonard’s Church, Streatham, with a reception at the Parish Hall. Wheatley’s years of suffering were over, and he now felt a sense of one-upmanship: “I had passed out of the suburban society of Streatham into wealthier bourgeois circles.”
Wheatley wore a grey morning suit complete with waistcoat, grey top hat, and spats on his patent leather boots. Better yet, beside him stood Nancy, “a blue-eyed blonde, every bit as lovely as Barbara – and an heiress to boot – wearing a huge befeathered hat and clothes that came from Paris.”
Wheatley’s satisfaction must have increased when Cecil came to see him a month or so later. Barbara had left him, the day after their marriage. “I could only condole with Cecil,” writes Wheatley in his autobiography, “but it did now seem that the Gods who protected me had saved me from what might have proved a most unhappy marriage.” Wheatley seems to be putting in his own parting shot by hinting that Barbara was frigid, as if to explain their own unhappy relationship.
*
Nancy brought Wheatley a new life and new friends. One of these was Cyril Eastaugh, known as Bobby, who had earlier courted Nancy. Bobby was a tall, distinguished man who eventually became a notably conservative Lord Bishop, but like Wheatley he wasn’t quite out of the top drawer. Born in South London, he was the youngest of thirteen children. Having been a scholarship boy, he became an officer in the war and won the Military Cross.
At the time Wheatley met him, Eastaugh was secretary to Maundy Gregory, a flamboyant but sinister character. The monocle-wearing Gregory collected first editions and manuscripts, and became a stalwart of the Wine and Food Society. He was an honours broker under the Lloyd George government, illegally fixing peerages for cash, and one of his associates, Gerald Hamilton, remembers he rigged up his office to impress guests and pretended to have a private phone line communicating directly with the Prime Minister. More discreetly, the drawer of his desk was solidly stuffed with fifty pound notes.
Hamilton saw him as a “kind, jovial” man, with “a great hatred of any form of Socialism”. Gregory had worked for MI5 since 1909, and was later involved in propagating the Zinoviev Letter, which helped to defeat Labour at the 1924 election.
Gregory was the particular bête noire of an independent socialist MP named Victor Grayson. Gregory had been spying on Grayson for the Special Branch since 1918, and Grayson’s counter-investigation discovered that Gregory was selling honours. After threatening to expose him, Grayson was attacked on the Strand early in September 1920, probably on Gregory’s orders.
On the 28th of September 1920 Grayson was drinking with friends when he received a telephone message. He left, telling them he was going to a hotel in Leicester Square, and he was never seen again. A witness recognised him entering a house beside the Thames, and the mystery of his disappearance only became clearer in the 1960s, when a new investigation revealed that the Thames-side house belonged to Maundy Gregory.
Gregory also seems to have murdered his own wife for her money. Wheatley’s autobiography vaguely suggests Gregory’s murky career might have come later (he “later became notorious”) but it was in full shady bloom while Eastaugh was his secretary. No doubt Eastaugh knew little of the full picture, but working for Gregory must have been an interesting apprenticeship on the way to being the very worldly cleric that Eastaugh became.
Since Bobby had religious leanings, a rich elderly lady paid for him to go to Oxford to study theology, and in due course he became the Bishop of Kensington, and then the Lord Bishop of Peterborough with a seat in the House of Lords. “During over half a century,” says Wheatley, “we have spent many a happy evening enjoying good conversation and the finest wines.”
*
It was also at Margate that Wheatley met Joseph Gluckstein Links, another lifelong friend. Links’s father was a furrier at the bottom end of the market, who specialised in skunk. His mother died when he was twelve, and when he was fourteen his father became terminally ill. Knowing he was soon to die, he took Joe out of school to learn the fur trade. Joe’s mother’s relatives, the wealthy Glucksteins – who owned the Lyons teashop chain – urged Joe to come into business with them, but Joe stayed with fur. In due course he became a leading furrier with the firm of Calman Links, and eventually gained the post of Furrier to the Queen.
Joe Links was probably the most cultivated of Wheatley’s friends. Venice for Pleasure, by J.G.Links, has been described as the best guidebook to any city ever written, and he later became a world authority on Canaletto. He shared Wheatley’s taste for German white wines, and looking back in old age, Wheatley wrote “I am very proud to have had such a man as an intimate friend for over fifty years.”
Wheatley also made a lasting friendship with Frank van Zwanenberg, who had made his fortune as a bacon importer, and more particularly with Mervyn Baron, whose family business was lead smelting, and who became the model for Simon Aron in Wheatley’s fiction.
Along the lines of the old anti-Semitic cliché, “Some of my best friends are Jewish …” it is interesting, given what look like flashes of anti-Semitism in his work, that not just some but most of Wheatley’s best friends at this period really were Jewish. For now, we can see that Wheatley positively liked Jews. It may be that to Wheatley, who was highly class-conscious and snobbish, but painfully aware that he was merely middle class, Jewish company could offer a little holiday from the English class system. Better yet, he could have had the benefits of what one might hope upper-class people are like – charming, highly civilised, and so on – without the drawbacks of what they really are like, much of the time.
Wheatley was impressed by Nancy’s step-brother-in-law, one Clement Spindler. Born on the Continent, Clem Spindler had lived in Margate and, by the time Wheatley knew him, “lived in a fine Regency house in Hove … He had a fine library of beautifully bound books, loved fine wine and was so selective that he would eat only the undercut of a sirloin of beef.”
*
Wheatley’s own book collection was getting under way. He had a definite taste for multi-volume sets, of the sort he would be photographed against in later years, and he already had Nancy’s twenty volumes of short stories, and Tombe’s six volume Havelock Ellis. In 1920 he bought the Secret Court Memoirs in twenty volumes, and not long after he bought the works of Le Sage in six volumes, including Gil Blas and Asmodeus or The Devil Upon Two Sticks.
He was also starting to build up a collection of modern first editions, and in July 1923 he bought James Joyce’s Ulysses, a recent and still controversial book, from the London Foreign Book Company. He judged it to be “The ravings of a lunatic possessed of extraordinary erudition.”
I had heard this book spoken of as “a man’s thoughts during a day set down without reserve,” if it were this alone it might be readable, as it is it is several people’s thoughts – and unfortunately one often does not know who is thinking or speaking. It is both sacrilegious and vicious – but this is nothing against it if it is supposed to be a study of the psychology of human brains. If so it is a work of Genius, considering that the author has taken types lower than the average.
In Spring 1923 Nancy had become pregnant, and things were well advanced by the autumn, when the expectant father received a nasty shock. A major news story broke on September 14th, giving rise to headlines such as Surrey Farm Murder, Body in Cesspool, The Kenley Horror, Farm Sensation, and Garden’s Grim Secret. The previous morning, police had recovered a hideously decomposed body from a cesspit at The Welcomes. It was Tombe.
*
Wheatley subscribed at once to a press-cuttings agency, Romeike and Curtis on Ludgate Circus, in order to miss nothing about the case. Cuttings arrived thick and fast, filling several scrapbooks. A Mr Tombe, Tombes, Toomb or Toomber – or in one case Tom Tombs – had been shot in the back of the head with a pistol, a revolver, a rifle, a sporting gun or shotgun. His skull was partly blown off and his body had been dumped down a well. Foul play was suspected.
It transpired that he had been shot, by Ernest Dyer, at close range behind the right ear with a shotgun. The body was fully dressed, and from the clothes it was wearing he was probably shot outdoors. He may have been shot by surprise, and must have been killed instantly. Without removing Tombe’s engraved gold watch, Dyer put the body down one of several well-like cesspits in the area, covering it with an overcoat and a quantity of bricks, rocks, lumps of cement and debris from the burned stables. By the time the body was found, under about ten feet of water, the filled-in pit was grown over with grass. After the murder Dyer had proceeded to impersonate Tombe and tried to empty his bank account.
The Tombe murder was a newspaper sensation of 1923, sharing the headlines with the Madame Fahmy case. Wheatley’s intense study of the murder must have been tempered with anxiety about exactly what would be revealed about Tombe’s criminal past. Were the police, for example, seeking to trace a David Watson who frequented a letter drop at 131 Jermyn Street? They were not. Were they looking into Tombe’s movements on the night the Welcomes burned down? They were not. Were there any revelations about Tombe’s orgiastic private life? There were none (“Tombe was a sober, hard-headed business man,” reported one paper, “careful of his expenditure and never given to excesses.”) As usual, Wheatley’s luck was holding.
Wheatley found the murder very distressing, and for the rest of his life it was a subject he refused to talk about. Anyone who cared about Tombe and followed the case could hardly fail to wonder if he really was killed by surprise on the night he went down to the Welcomes, or whether – as Wheatley had originally suspected – he had been held captive there before being killed. The remains, so decomposed that they had to be taken to the mortuary in a sack, were beyond revealing any signs of violence. With the body was a long length of leather strap, which might have been used to lower the body down into the cess pit, but could have been used to tie Tombe up before he was shot. None of the headlines read “Ordeal of Kenley Farm Victim”, but there may have been one, and it must have occurred to Wheatley that if he had acted at once he might even have saved Tombe’s life.
There was a further twist to the Tombe case which kept it in the headlines. It was widely reported at the time, and in several books since, that Tombe was only found after his clergyman father – or in some accounts his mother – dreamed that the body was down a well, and insisted the police re-open the case of his disappearance. This is the account Wheatley gives in his autobiography, but fifty years earlier he had followed the real story.
‘Dream Drama’, ran the headlines: ‘The Dream Vision’, ‘Gruesome Discovery Through A Dream’, ‘Terrible Drama Revealed by Mother’s Dream’. His father was reported to have had an extraordinary dream; then his mother (“It was she, and not her husband, as had been reported, who dreamed that her son was buried in the garden. ‘In my dream,’ she said, ‘I heard him say, “Oh, let me out.” I felt that he was shut up somewhere and could not get free.’ ”). Then they both denied having a dream, and finally “The Rev.Gordon Tombe ridiculed the report that that his conduct had been influenced by a dream.”
The real story was hardly less extraordinary, giving rise to headlines such as ‘Relentless Trail of a Parson-Detective.’ Tombe was not as distant from his parents as he pretended. He was now their only child, following the death of his brother in a fire in America, and he wrote to them regularly. They had last seen him for dinner at the Strand Palace Hotel, when he was arranging to help them move into a new house. No sooner had Tombe gone missing than his father was on the case, placing adverts in The Times, and exploring his haunts in the West End.
Visiting a hairdresser that Tombe used, John Richards at 59 Haymarket, he asked if there was anybody who might know anything. Looking into his customers’ book, Richards found an entry reading “Ernest Dyer introduced by Mr Eric Gordon Tombe.” He went on to disclose Dyer’s bad reputation, and the fact that the insurance company had refused to pay up for the fire at the racing stables. Immediately the Reverend Tombe felt that Dyer and the stables had something to do with his son’s disappearance.
At Tombe’s tailor, Walkers in Albemarle Street, the Reverend Tombe discovered several uncollected suits which Eric had been planning to take to Paris, and this confirmed in his mind that his son had not disappeared of his own free will.
The Reverend Tombe then went to Kenley, telling a local clergyman “I have felt for some time that my boy is somewhere about here.” A Mrs Hales remembered he told her he had come down to find out about his son: “When I told him that I had known his son at the farm, tears ran down his face. I described his son to him, and he said: ‘Yes, that’s my dear boy!’ ” He noticed a number of filled-in holes, and his suspicions were strong enough to go to the police.
*
There were “affecting scenes” when Tombe’s parents identified his remains, largely from a gold tooth. A police surgeon confirmed he had been dead for at least six to eight months and two women (’Veiled Mystery Women In Farm Drama’) gave evidence at the inquest, heavily veiled and in mourning. It was Beatrice and Dolly Stern, who said she had been engaged to marry Tombe.
Beatrice produced a piece of evidence omitted or suppressed from Wheatley’s own private memoir of the case. Her suspicions were principally aroused by the wording of the telegram Dyer said Tombe had sent, which said he had to go “overseas”. This was a word Tombe would never have used, and she immediately knew something was wrong. Several of her replies were inaudible in court, but she managed to say clearly “I told Dyer I thought he had made away with Tombe, and if he did not tell me all I should go to Scotland Yard. He replied: ‘If you do that I shall blow my brains out.’ ”
Wheatley was not called as a witness and did not attend the inquest, though he was obliquely referred to during it. Nor did he attend the funeral. Perhaps due to the circumstances of Tombe’s death, the only mourners were his father and mother, and an uncle. There were numerous wreaths, however, none of which bore cards to indicate the senders, and the word ‘BOY’ was lettered in violets on a bed of white flowers.
*
Wheatley’s grieving was necessarily private. He associated Oscar Wilde with Tombe – and he now owned Eric’s Selected Prose of Wilde, his “little friend the shilling book” that they had found when they opened his trunk – so he began a Wilde collection as a library within a library, in memory of Tombe. He thought of having a special bookplate for it, for which he made a draft:
Collected by
D Yates Wheatley
In memory of this his charming and erudite friend
Gordon Eric Gordon Tombe
Connoisseur in Wine, in Food, in Women, [illegible] and in Books
The Joyful Sensualist
Who cultivated so assiduously the Gentle Art of Pleasure
And yet was Murdered in April 1922
So active was his Zest for the [illegible] of Life and
So unabating his search for new experience.
*
As for the killer of his friend, Wheatley would like to have seen him hanged, “but Fate had already caught up with him in a curious way.” Ernest Dyer had come to a sticky end of his own.