Skelton drained the soggy bits of stray biscuit, the residue from dunking, from the bottom of his cup and started filling his pipe. He and his clerk Edgar, a dapper man with broad hips and tiny feet, were having their regular morning meeting, in chambers at 8 Foxton Row. To the oak panelling, formidable desk and leather-bound books common to most barrister’s rooms, Skelton had added two easy chairs, the sort with wooden arms, and a low table. He’d never been comfortable at a desk. Sometimes, if he had a lot of hard reading to do and wasn’t expecting any visitors, he would lie on the Turkish carpet.
Today, he felt a particular need for soft furnishings. He was still in pain from the previous day’s misfortunes, stuck 30liberally with plasters and smelling of Germolene, but he had his pipe, there was tea, there were biscuits, and the fire in the grate had reached that comforting stage when the drama of the flames had given way to a sensible glow.
Edgar poured a third cup, moved the tea tray from the low table to the desk and replaced it with the pile of paperwork that needed attention.
‘Do you have curtains?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘In your house? Do you have curtains at the windows?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are they like?’
‘Green, I think. Or red. One or the other.’
Edgar frowned impatiently. ‘No, I mean what are they made of?’
‘Cloth, I’d imagine.’
‘Velvet? Brocade?’
‘Possibly. Or … is there such a thing as just ordinary cloth?’
Over the previous weeks, Edgar had frequently raised questions of interior decoration. Having lived in boarding houses of one sort or another practically all his life, now, at the age of forty-six, he had acquired a flat of his own, in a mansion block in Belsize Park, and had engaged an excellent housekeeper to cook and clean.
‘I don’t think I can have curtains,’ he said.
‘No?’
‘I mean, I have curtains at the moment. They came with 31the flat. A sort of jacquard damask with a floral pattern in washed teal and a royal blue.’
‘Oh,’ Skelton said, slightly alarmed, the way you would be if somebody suddenly and for no reason began speaking in the language of the Iroquois people.
‘They’re very ugly. And I know I have to replace them with something, and I look at this fabric and that fabric, and they all seem equally unpleasant. There are one or two Eloise Bourgeois very angular geometric designs that just about pass muster, but I am tempted to go the way of Le Corbusier, dispense with curtains altogether and have shutters installed. Or would that be too austere, do you think?’
Skelton sat back and smoked his pipe happily, enjoying the way Edgar made a meal of the nonsense syllables – ‘jacquard damask’, ‘Eloise Bourgeois’, ‘Le Corbusier’.
Edgar, like Skelton, was not top drawer by birth. As a boy he’d lived an almost feral life with a mother and a varying number of brothers and sisters – some of whom may have been strays taken in from other families – in a series of hovels, usually in the Bethnal Green or Stepney areas of London. Somewhere along the line he had acquired the habit of reading – anything from a discarded sardine tin to Plato’s Republic – and, under the tutelage of Tyser Knapp, a career criminal, had learnt the art of the snakesman as well as dipping, parlour-jumping, and flying the blue pigeon. He would, like Tyser, almost certainly have ended up dying young of prison fever were it not for an enlightened magistrate who, impressed by the boy’s carefully argued 32rebuttal of the charges against him (he cited Blackstone twice), instead of sending him for a whipping and a lagging, secured him a position as errand boy at a chambers in Chancery Lane where Edgar had learnt his lessons as quickly as he had done under Tyser Knapp. Within six months he had acquired beautifully legible handwriting and absorbed the rules of punctuality, politeness, spickness and spanness, as well as a good grounding in the workings of the legal professions. He had also acquired the voice he had possessed ever since and would be the first to admit that he might have overdone it. Hard work rounding the vowels and sharpening the consonants had resulted in, rather than the timbres of gravelly gravitas he had hoped for, the shriek of an outraged duchess. Over the years he had learnt to control both the volume and pitch of the shriek so that it was bearable at all times, and now and then pleasant to listen to, even musical. In the space of a single sentence he could run from a dolcemente basso profundo to Wagnerian soprano and the elastic eyebrows always followed the pitch.
‘You need space, though, don’t you?’ he said, ‘for shutters. To allow freedom of movement when they open and close.’ He mimed the opening and closing, first with arms out and eyebrows up, then arms in and eyebrows down. ‘Although, sometimes in old houses you see shutters in two or three hinged sections, don’t you? I wonder if Ernest could run something up for me.’
He’d mentioned Ernest before, a man in a mews who made things from wood and metal. Edgar swore by Ernest. 33
‘What do you think?’
‘I think …’ Skelton said, and, after a long pause, decided to leave it there.
It had never occurred to him that what Edgar called ‘interior design’ could be a topic of interest. He remembered, a long while ago, when he and his wife Mila had first moved into their house in Lambourn, going to a shop in Reading that seemed to sell ordinary-looking furniture and ordering a houseful of it, and then choosing, from sample books, whatever seemed the least offensive wallpaper and curtains. Neither of them had taken any real interest in the proceedings. Pictures had proved a little more difficult until they discovered that people were often only too happy to let you have their unwanted ones, often nicely framed. So, they’d hung some of those here and there wherever the walls seemed bare. Fruit and views, mostly.
Edgar took a Gold Flake from his cigarette case and lit it thoughtfully, then, deciding they should get on, picked up the pile of papers and started sorting them.
‘Letters from all over the place about the Abrasives business,’ he said.
Romero and Gaines versus Anglo-American Abrasives was a case that had been going on, in one form or another, for months. Sometimes it reared its head as Anglo-American Abrasives versus Thomas, Briggs and Studely-Hogg, and sometimes as Thomas and Briggs versus Studely-Hogg. Skelton had yet another meeting about the matter later in the morning and picked through the correspondence to see if 34anything might require his immediate attention. He had practically lost track of exactly who was suing whom and had long ago ceased to care one way or the other, but he persisted if only because Edgar’s share of the majestic fees provided him with the means to go the way of Le Corbusier and keep Ernest-in-the-mews gainfully employed.
Edgar untied the ribbons on a new brief and announced, ‘Rex versus Denison Beck.’
Skelton already knew something of the case. It had come in from Aubrey Duncan, the solicitor who’d been shanghaied by General Ewers to summon a barrister, and with whom Skelton and Edgar had worked so frequently in the past that he was almost family.
Denison Beck was a ‘medical electrician’ with premises in Wimpole Street who, according to his advertisements, claimed to be able to cure, with his Frankenstein apparatus, anything from ‘incapacity for exertion’ to ‘disrelish for food’ to ‘spermatorrhoea’. Skelton could only guess the nature of ‘spermatorrhoea’.
Beck’s ‘cures’ had become quite the thing among the smart set, who hoped they might alleviate their permanent hangovers thus enabling them to drink more, and among old fogeys who wanted neither to be old nor fogeys.
Mrs Edith Roberts was a former Gaiety Girl whose dancing career had been brought to a tragic end when, while executing a particularly difficult manoeuvre during a song entitled ‘A Lot of Funny Folks One Sees at Ladies’ Universities’, she collided at speed with a canvas horse 35and sustained some injury to her back that forced her into retirement from the musical stage.
Luckily, she subsequently made a good marriage with a wine and spirits dealer three times her age, who died soon after the wedding leaving her comfortably off.
The bad back had never got better and at times gave her great pain. According to friends and her maid, though she had searched high and low, she had never been able to find a medical practitioner who could form an accurate diagnosis, never mind suggest an effective cure. Until, that is, she encountered Denison Beck. She made frequent visits to Beck’s consulting rooms, sometimes twice or three times a week. Over the course of a year, the back was considerably improved.
Then poor Mrs Roberts had suffered a heart attack and died. She was a forty-two-year-old woman, healthy apart from her bad back, with no history of heart disease. The coroner smelt a rat. Suspicion fell on Beck’s treatments. Experts inspected his electrical equipment and concluded that mechanical fault or human error could easily have fatal consequences.
Beck was arrested on a charge of manslaughter.
Skelton picked up the brief and glanced at the first page. ‘And the prosecution think they can make this stick?’
‘Apparently so.’
Skelton wrinkled his nose sceptically. ‘Manslaughter by negligence?’
‘It is indeed the slimmest of cases. I’d imagine the defence 36would simply be a matter of repeating the arguments that were used in the Bateman appeal.’
They were both aware of Rex versus Bateman, in which a doctor who had botched the delivery of a baby, killing both the mother and the child, was found guilty of ‘gross negligence manslaughter’ but subsequently had the verdict quashed when the appeal judge ruled that mens rea – criminal intent – had not been proven.
‘Except there is a difference,’ Skelton said. ‘Does Beck have any formal qualifications?’
‘There might be a certificate from a Peruvian university, but nothing that’s recognised by the British Medical Association.’
‘So, if the prosecution argues that Beck has no recognised medical qualifications and that therefore the entire enterprise is fraudulent, they’ll have their “criminal intent” and Rex versus Bateman won’t apply. Is Beck in Brixton?’ Skelton asked.
‘He got bail.’
‘Really?’
‘Marylebone Police Court,’
‘Mariner on the bench?’
‘I’d assume so.’
‘That man really does work on the assumption that anyone with a posh voice and an income of more than £800 a year is innocent and everybody else is guilty. Can we arrange a meeting with Beck, perhaps later this week?’
Edgar stood up to get the appointments book from 37Skelton’s desk. As he did so, Skelton’s attention was drawn to his trousers. They had the most impeccable creases he had ever seen. Brand-new trousers, fresh from the tailor, were never creased so perfectly. And the sides, between the creases, were smooth as glass. Skelton looked down at his own trousers, which looked, as they always did, as if they’d recently seen service for potato storage.
‘I can see you’re admiring my trousers,’ Edgar said, smiling. ‘All the work of the redoubtable Mrs Stewart, my housekeeper. I think I may have already mentioned that her cleaning is of a standard rarely met in operating theatres, but that is far from being the greatest of her arts. If wars could be settled on the ironing board Mrs Stewart could conquer the world.’
‘Does she have some special trick?’
‘Several, I think, the most noticeable being the use of pins.’
‘Pins?’
‘She pins the trousers to the board so they’re practically rigid and you don’t get all that unexpected rumpling.’
‘Don’t the pins make holes?’
Edgar put one foot on the low table to get a closer look.
‘None that I can see. Perhaps she’s very careful to pin through the weave. Or perhaps you can get special pins. Very thin ones.’
Skelton began to notice other details. Edgar had always been nicely turned out but today his shirt looked like something in a book about angels, his shoes, which were 38the ones specially made for Edgar’s difficult feet, looked brand new even though they were at least a year old, and his waistcoat, that most difficult of all garments, sat tight and seemed to move with him like a second skin. He decided to contact his old Cambridge college and suggest they institute a degree in Domestic Management and Maintenance with Mrs Stewart as Senior Professor.
He was on his way to the Anglo-American Abrasives meeting in Chancery Lane when the clocks struck the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The city came to a standstill. Trams stopped. Horses snorted. Women clutched prams and bowed their heads as if at an altar rail. A sandwich board man, advertising two-shilling permanent waves, stood rigidly to attention.
In the two minutes’ silence, Skelton thought of the snapshot, taken when he was at Cambridge, of him and four other students posed in what they had hoped was a dignified manner in the quad at Pembroke. It stood, framed, on the mantlepiece at his parents’ house in Leeds. He was the only survivor of that group of five. Both of his brothers had come through it, thank God, but he’d lost cousins and schoolfriends. Edgar had lost two brothers and had another brother who, shell-shocked, took his own life in ’21. And everywhere, twelve years after it was all over, you saw men with a leg, an arm or half a face missing, men still trying to cough the gas out of their lungs, men and women who at the going down of the sun and in the morning could not 39unknow what they knew and could not unsee what they had seen.
The American Abrasives meeting was as tedious as mumps. The room was overheated by steam radiators. One of the Romero and Gaines people spoke for forty-five minutes in an unchanging drone about the ultra vires rule and the principle of vicarious liability until Skelton was digging fingernails into his thighs in an effort to stay awake.
It was, therefore, with a sense of half-holiday relief that, just before six, he found himself picking a way through the rotten fruit and cabbage stalks left over from the Leather Lane market for an early dinner.
Mila, his wife, had, for years, taken part in a discussion group in Maidenhead. They chose a topic a week. Mila thrived on a robust political discussion. She had caused outrage among the more staid members of the group by her support for Bolshevism, but, more recently, appalled by Stalin’s treatment of Trotsky, she had veered away from Bolshevism and towards the collectivist anarchism advocated by Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. This, of course, outraged the staid members even more. There was talk of banning her lest she brought the bombs they were sure she must possess to meetings.
Often the Maidenhead group would invite guest speakers, one of whom, Gillian McPhail, a lecturer in French literature at Birkbeck College in London, gave a talk on French symbolist poetry and its legacy. 40
Afterwards, Mrs McPhail and Mila had fallen into conversation about Proudhon, the anarchist philosopher and Gillian had suggested that Mila should come along to an informal course that she was planning at Birkbeck called ‘Trends in Modern Thought’ and Mila had thought it would suit her down to the ground. She’d been looking for a new challenge. Earlier that year she had learnt to fly an aeroplane, but had found it was an expensive hobby and, in light of the various aeronautical disasters that seemed to crop up on a weekly basis, most notably the crash of the R101 airship in the previous month, possibly too perilous for a woman with a husband and two children. So, she gave it up not long after getting her licence. Though her understanding of politics could put most cabinet ministers to shame, she had never had much in the way of formal education. Her girls’ school, while giving students a firm grounding in the need to play up and play the game, regarded more scholarly matters as men’s business. So, Gillian’s course seemed just the thing.
Before the seven o’clock class (Gillian preferred to call them ‘meetings’) she and Skelton had got into the habit of taking an early dinner together in a little cafe she’d found not far from the college on Leather Lane.
The cafe’s Victorian sign had faded, leaving only the letters ‘Mel Hy’ visible. Nobody could remember what was there before the cafe came into existence. Reg, the current proprietor’s theory – that it was the ‘Melton Mowbray Hygienic Pork-Pie Company’ – was probably as good as 41anybody’s, but Skelton preferred to believe that it was once the premises of a violin-playing mesmerist who traded as ‘The Melodious Hypnotist’, while Mila went with an ice-sculpture workshop specialising in flowers called ‘Melting Hydrangeas’.
The people who worked in the market never called it anything except ‘Smelly Melly’s’.
The menu, based on various kinds of stodge, suited them. Though they both enjoyed French cuisine when they were in France, in England the folderol that usually came with it in posh restaurants didn’t suit them at all. Their mistrust of anything fancy – Mila was a Socialist, Skelton was from Leeds – like their penchant for the smell of boot polish and their aversion to satin, was a key ingredient in the cement that bound them together.
Skelton saw his wife through the steamy window, deeply absorbed in one of the several newspapers she read each day. She had a pencil in her hand which meant that she was either marking up stories which, for one reason or another, particularly outraged her – she was fond of outrage – or she was doing the crossword.
‘It was all started by some students, apparently, from King’s College,’ Mila said, as soon as she saw him enter. This was par for the course. She rarely bothered with formalities, preambles and preliminaries, preferring to jump straight to the middle of a conversation and keep going until her husband caught up.
She picked up the Daily Graphic and read aloud, ‘“They 42were waiting with the college mascot representing a lion. The mascot was waved, and fireworks discharged”.’
Skelton twigged. The elephants at the Lord Mayor’s Show.
‘I don’t remember hearing any fireworks,’ he said. He eased his bad leg out to one side. It would present a tripping hazard for an inexperienced waiter bearing a tray of badly stacked glasses, but Reg, he knew, was canny.
‘Perhaps they were the ones that fizz without banging.’
Skelton nodded and Mila continued, ‘“The elephants decided that they had had enough and charged the students. One of them was chased around a tree but escaped. Other people who had nothing to do with the escapade were knocked over and trampled on by the crowd”.’
‘Was anybody actually killed?’ Skelton asked.
‘“Eleven persons were treated at Charing Cross Hospital for slight injuries”,’ Mila read, ‘“but no one was detained. Mr Race Power, of Brixton Hill, manager of Power’s Dancing Elephants, said tonight: ‘The four elephants, which belong to my wife, are all about thirty years old. This is the first time in our whole experience that they have been involved in anything of the kind. They are four big pets, and they are as good as little children.’” “Colour slightly”.’
‘What?’
‘Crossword clue. Five letters. “Colour slightly”.’
‘Paint.’
‘Ends in an E.’
‘Rouge.’ 43
‘Second letter I.’
‘Filne.’
‘That’s not a word.’
‘You’re so fussy.’
The food came. Both had ordered pie with spuds, greens and gravy. Once, a customer, a city type, had asked Reg what kind of pie it was.
‘Meat,’ Reg had replied.
‘What kind of meat?’ the gent had asked, and Reg had laughed all the way back to the kitchen.
‘Poachers do rabbits.’
‘What?’
‘Twelve across. Something something S something something something E.’
‘Poachers do rabbits?’
‘That’s what it says.’
‘Shouldn’t it be “Poachers do this to rabbits”? Trap, shoot, eat, kill, snare.’
‘Snare would fit at the end, but it’s only five letters. There’s another two on the front.’
‘Resnare, unsnare. Is “ensnare” a word?’
‘More of a word than “filne”.’ Mila wrote it in.
The pie came. The crust was exactly the right consistency to soak up gravy without getting soggy.
‘Did you finish your homework?’ Skelton asked.
‘It’s not homework. It’s recommended reading.’ Mila passed him a book called Russian Poetry, An Anthology. Skelton turned a couple of pages. It didn’t look promising. 44‘And Gillian gave us some cyclostyled notes.’ Skelton sniffed the notes. Sometimes cyclostyles smelt interesting. These didn’t.
‘Pushkin,’ he said.
‘What about him?’
‘He was a Russian poet. I can’t think of any others.’
‘Gillian is very keen on the revolutionary ones, Mayakovsky and Esenin.’
‘Are they good?’
‘It depends what you mean by “good”.’
‘Like Longfellow.’ At school, Skelton had learnt chunks of Longfellow’s The Wreck of the Hesperus, Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade and Wordsworth’s Daffodils. He liked the Hesperus best, so considered Longfellow his favourite poet.
‘Not much like Longfellow, no.’
‘Are they old or young?’ Young poets, he knew, were often feckless recent graduates pretending to be poets. The old ones had at least stuck at it.
‘Fairly young, I think. But dead.’
‘Famine?’
‘Suicide.’
‘How?’
‘Esenin hanged himself, Mayakovsky shot himself.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. Moscow, I expect.’
‘No, I mean … in the head?’
‘What difference would it make?’ 45
‘It would make all the difference in the world. You remember that chap I defended six or seven years ago. Shot himself in the heart, missed, hit a rib and a lung, had an awful time getting better, then got sent to prison for attempted suicide. Shooting yourself in the head is fast and certain. Bang. Anywhere else, in the heart or what have you, you’ve no idea how long it’s going to take, have you?’
‘Freezing to death is supposed to be a lot more pleasant than is often imagined,’ Mila said.
‘Who says?’
‘Polar explorers. Apparently, you get cold. Then you get very cold. Then you start feeling warm and sleepy. Then you go to sleep and you never wake up again.’
‘The warm and sleepy is probably not too bad but the very cold might be irksome.’
‘Better than burning, though. Did you see the man in the paper?’
Skelton had. ‘In the car in …’
‘Bedfordshire. He had debts, apparently, and was facing a bigamy charge and God knows what else. All the same, pouring petrol over yourself and lighting a match …’
Mila cleaned her plate. Skelton had two spuds left so she stole one of them. ‘What time is it?’ she asked.
Skelton looked at his wristwatch.
‘Twenty to. Are you going to have a pudding?’
‘I thought I might just have some more pie with spuds, greens and gravy.’
‘Excellent idea. “Tinge”?’ 46
‘What?’
‘Colour slightly.’
Mila wrote it in.