The Long Divorce (A Gervase Fen Mystery)

  The Long Divorce

  Edmund Crispin

  1

  On the afternoon of Friday 2 June 1950, a Mr Datchery, having put his week-end bag on to a bus with the request that it be civilly ejected at an inn named 'The Marlborough Head', set out to walk the four miles which separate the market town of Twelford from the village of Cotten Abbas.

  He was a tall and wiry man of between forty and fifty, with a lean, ruddy, clean-shaven face. His brown hair, ineffectually plastered down with water, stood up in mutinous spikes at the crown of his head. His manner was eupeptic and affable. From the town hall at Twelford, where the bus had relieved him of his bag, he strode westwards along the main street, and by three o'clock he was past the outlying estate of council houses and into open country.

  The sun that Friday had risen in a blur of rain; but at breakfast time the clouds had cleared, and by mid-day all traces of the shower had been eliminated, and the earth was beginning to absorb and accumulate heat. To an obbligato of bird-song Mr Datchery marched beneath a bright sky towards Cotten Abbas. And he carolled lustily, to the distress of all animate nature, as he walked.

  'I will make my kitchen,' sang Mr Datchery, 'and you shall keep your room, where white flows the river and bright blows the broom.' And the cattle, lifting their heads as he passed, lowed a mournful burden to the tune.

  The directions given him at Twelford had been explicit. But since he believed himself to possess an infallible bump of locality, he was soon tempted to modify them with a variety of shortcuts, and after about three miles he discovered, much to his indignation, that he was lost. We first distinctly see him, then, standing oppressed by this realization at the junction of four lanes, like a pilgrim in an allegory. The land lies flat and featureless on every side; the ancient wooden finger-post is indecipherable; and for the moment, the only visible representative of organic life is a very small black kitten engaged in pouncing on something at the exact centre of a very large green field.

  The kitten, however, suggested that humanity must be somewhere in the offing – for kittens, even when avid for field-mice, seldom stray immoderate distances from their homes. Mr Datchery, selecting a lane at random, began to move energetically along it. And presently he was rewarded by coming within earshot of a combination of sounds which, though not readily explicable, were undoubtedly of human origin. Rounding a bend in the lane, Mr Datchery came upon a surprising and improbable sight.

  What he saw first was a football ground – a football ground unaccountably isolated from mankind amidst fields of wheat and pasture. What he saw next was a diminutive, but evidently new, grandstand at its far side. And what he saw last was about a hundred schoolboys jumping up and down on the grandstand with a noise like houses falling.

  This unlikely performance brought Mr Datchery temporarily to a halt. Schoolboys were apt, no doubt, to jump up and down on grandstands whenever an exiting game was being played – but in this instance there were no footballers on the field at all. Open-mouthed, Mr Datchery looked on while the boys leaped and cavorted and giggled and roared. Then, the first shock of amazement wearing away, he became aware that he was not alone in his admiration.

  Close to the more distant extremity of the stand a man and a girl stood shouting at one another – shouting not in wrath, but because the noise made communication impossible on any other terms. The man was elderly, and a member of what used to be called the artisan class; the girl was about sixteen. Beyond them, and to the left, a younger man could be seen wandering about aimlessly behind the goal-posts – but it was towards the group of two that Mr Datchery made his way, for he knew from experience that a female, however young, can always be relied upon to give more sane and accurate directions for getting anywhere than a male.

  'One – TWO – THREE!' shrieked a spotty boy. And at the final word, two hundred stoutly-shod feet descended with shattering force on the tiers of the stand, so that it quivered as if at the impact of a typhoon. 'Ah,' the elderly man said smugly to the girl. 'She'll 'old. Yes, she'll 'old all right.' It was evidently he who had been responsible for the stand's erection.

  Mr Datchery, joining them, was received incuriously. 'There's a sweet job for you, sir,' said the elderly man with inane satisfaction. 'Firm as a rock, that is. Them lads 'as got the afternoon off to try 'er out for safety and if they can't knock 'er down, then no one can.'

  'Where am I?' Mr Datchery bawled at him as the assault on the stand was renewed.

  'Ah, you may well say so, sir,' the elderly man replied. 'You'll not find a better piece of work than that, not in the 'ole length and breadth of the land.'

  'What I want to know,' shouted Mr Datchery irritably, 'is, where I am.'

  'Costly, sir?' said the elderly man. 'Not a bit of it. Why, if they'd 'ave 'ad Phelps and Co. from Twelford, they'd 'ave 'ad to pay double my price.'

  Mr Datchery stared coldly at the girl, who had lapsed into convulsions of laughter.

  'You old fool,' he yelled, 'for the last time, where am I?'

  A spark of enlightenment which now appeared in the elderly man's glazed eyes suggested that he had at last caught the drift of Mr Datchery's questions, but he was distracted from the use of this discovery by a sudden ominous noise of splintering wood.

  'Ere, you damned boys,' he bellowed, 'you watch what you're doing, can't you?'

  'Firm as a rock,' said Mr Datchery malignantly. But the elderly man had already departed on a punitive expedition. 'Is there no one,' said Mr Datchery in despair, 'who can tell me where I am?'

  The girl was by now in such uncontrollable fits of laughter that she had to lie down on the ground. She was a thin, long-legged creature, Mr Datchery saw, with straight brown hair, acid-stained fingers, and clothes which, though good, were sloppily worn and little cared for. But for all that, she was pretty in a coltish sort of way, and it seemed to Mr Datchery not improbable that she was intelligent as well.

  'You'll make yourself sick in a minute,' he said. 'For heaven's sake pull yourself together and tell me how to get to Cotten Abbas.'

  'Cotten Abbas?' The girl sat upright and spoke breathlessly through a residual attack of giggles. 'Where have you come from?'

  'Twelford.'

  'I don't know how you've managed to land up here, then.'

  'What is this place?'

  The girl relapsed into mirth. 'Ah,' she spluttered convulsively, 'sweet as a nut, that wood is. You wouldn't find a better, not if you was to search from Land's End to John o' Groats.'

  'For heaven's sake,' said Mr Datchery.

  The girl wiped her eyes with a rather grubby handkerchief. 'Oh, gosh,' she said in a choking voice. 'Laughing makes me so weak . . . Help me up, will you? This is awful.'

  Mr Datchery helped her up and stood waiting grimly while she recovered her equanimity.

  'I say, I'm awfully sorry,' she said presently. 'But honestly, I've never heard anything so funny in my life . . . What was it you were asking? Oh, I remember . . . Well, this isn't any place, really, except a football ground. Cotten's the nearest place.' With a supreme effort, she gulped the last of the giggles into extinction. 'I tell you what: I'm walking back to Cotten myself in a minute, so you can come with me.'

  'Is it far?'

  'Only a couple of miles,' she said, hitching her skirt to a more comfortable position and brushing grass and earth from it with the palm of her hand. 'But, if you're in a terrific hurry you can walk from here to the Twelford road and pick up a bus.'

  Mr Datchery's enthusiasm for physical effort had never been of a very enduring kind. 'When is the next bus?' he inquired.

  The girl considered. 'In about an hour,' she said.

  'Then it's just a
s well,' said Mr Datchery rather coldly, 'that I'm not in a terrific hurry. Do you live at Cotten Abbas?'

  But his questions to-day seemed all destined to be ignored, for at this point they were joined by the young man who had been wandering behind the goal-posts, and whom Mr Datchery supposed to be the master in hypothetical control of the schoolboys. He was a very clean, very thin young man of rather less than average height, with small, sharply-cut features, myopic pale eyes behind angular shell-rimmed glasses, and straight yellow hair; and his shirt, neat and spotless like all his clothes, was open at the neck. Upon the boys in his charge, and upon the elderly man expostulating with them, he gazed with the tolerant air of one who has acquainted himself with progressive educational theories and found them good. And when he spoke, it was in the careful, pedantic English of the German intellectual.

  'I say, Peter' – the girl turned eagerly to him as he strolled up – 'I'm afraid they've smashed something. The old man's frightfully cross.'

  The newcomer showed no surprise at this intelligence – and in the circumstances it would have been remarkable if he had.

  'It is good for the children,' he observed benevolently, 'to destroy things sometimes. If they are allowed to do that, they grow up to be saner people.' He looked politely to Mr Datchery for confirmation of this doubtful thesis. 'Is it not so, sir?'

  'No,' said Mr Datchery briefly.

  The young man smiled at him with great sweetness 'The experiments of your Neill,' he pursued equably, 'they have proved it. And in Switzerland also we have such schools. But perhaps I am tedious for you?'

  'No, please go on, Peter,' said the girl; and then flushed as she caught Mr Datchery's eye. 'After all,' she added defiantly, 'when you get an expert talking, you can–'

  But the expert was not attending to her, and Mr Datchery saw her wince as she observed it. It was not, Mr Datchery thought, that the expert was being deliberately unkind; it was just that he was not in the least interested in young girls. Producing a card, he now handed it to Mr Datchery with a stiff little bow, and Mr Datchery read on it the neatly printed words:

  Dr Phil. Peter Rubi

  Zürich

  with the written address 'Fiveways, Cotten Abbas, England' underneath.

  'Rubi,' said the young man, shaking hands.

  'Datchery,' said Mr Datchery.

  'And I'm Penelope Rolt,' said the girl.

  'It is for the experience that I am teaching for two years in England,' Rubi explained. 'I like England very much. They are an interesting people.'

  Mr Datchery, who happened to be familiar with the list of topics that appeal most readily to the foreign intelligentsia, perceived a discussion on National Character looming up over the conversational horizon.

  'You might say I was a teacher, too,' he said hurriedly. 'University people are often mistakenly supposed to be that.'

  'Ah,' said Rubi, 'you are a university person. And please what is the subject, your faculty?'

  'English,' said Mr Datchery.

  'I read many of your English writers,' said Rubi with marked self-approval. I think that of the moderns it is Evelyn Waugh I prefer, though your Graham Greene is spiritual also.'

  'And a very sound preference too,' said Mr Datchery heartily, hoping by unqualified approval to gravel in advance the debate whose shoals and shallows he glimpsed ahead. 'A very sound preference,' he repeated with emphasis, 'too.'

  It failed to work. 'Waugh is perhaps the greatest of your symbolical authors,' said Rubi, happily launched on a long-premitated disquisition. 'The girl Runcible in Vile Bodies, she is the great contemporary symbol of dissociation in our modern world. She drives the car in the race; it swerves from the course; she dies . . . I have written an article about this in the Neue Züricher Beobachter which has been praised by many of the best critics.'

  But at this early stage in his remarks, and as much to his and the girl's annoyance as to Mr Datchery's relief, the elderly man elected to rejoin them. Though worsted in his unequal encounter with the citizens of to-morrow (who by now had tired of testing the stand's endurance and were divided into two gangs for the purpose of a bloody, crack-bone fight), the elderly man continued to be in a state of considerable dudgeon.

  'Them young bastards,' he announced, breathing heavily in his exhaustion, ' 'as bust 'alf the fencing down the middle.' Then he swelled up with sudden beserk rage. 'Get 'em out of 'ere!' he shrieked. 'Get 'em out of 'ere afore they knocks the 'ole blasted lot down!'

  'You think the experiment has been sufficient?' said Rubi amiably. 'It will be proper now for me to take them back to their afternoon tea? Very well, I shall do that.'

  'I'll have to be getting back, too,' said the girl rather hurriedly; and Mr Datchery suspected that she was not anxious to witness the admired Rubi's foredoomed attempts to exert his authority over the milling rout on the field and the stand. 'Shall I see you to-morrow, Peter?'

  Rubi shook his head. 'To-morrow,' he stated firmly, 'I am to go alone for a long hiking, and I shall not be returned till very late.'

  'Well, what about Monday? It's a whole holiday for you, isn't it?'

  'Monday,' said Rubi with condescension, 'perhaps.'

  'Will you call for me? We could see a film. There's The Third Man at the Regal, that isn't commercial a bit, you'd like it.'

  'All right,' said Rubi ungraciously. 'But for the morning, I'll be busy, remember.'

  'Yes, I'll remember,' she said earnestly. 'I promise I won't disturb you.' Then after a moment's uncertain pause: 'Well, bye for now . . . Are you coming with me, Mr Datchery?'

  Mr Datchery was and it was patent that Rubi regretted the loss of him far more than the loss of the girl.

  'You are staying in Cotten Abbas, sir?' he asked; and when Mr Datchery assented: 'Then we must meet again. I would wish to talk a long time about the man Waugh.'

  Mr Datchery thought this very likely, and considered it, as an argument in favour of reopening the acquaintance, singularly lacking in force. But he managed to feign an enthusiasm for the project, and presently he and the girl departed together. They turned once to look back on the scene. Rubi, they saw, was at the centre of the field, feebly gesticulating with his arms and calling 'Boys! Boys!' while the outraged contractor stumped irascibly up and down behind him; and although the girl waved to him, he did not happen (as seemed to be common in their relationship) to be attending. She turned away, disappointed; but later, when they had climbed a stile and were making their way towards a wood of beech and birch, she said defensively:

  'He's very clever, you know.'

  'Very,' said Mr Datchery without enthusiasm.

  'I mean, he's got a terrific lot of degrees, and he's lived in all sorts of countries.'

  'So I guessed.'

  There was a pause; then: 'But you didn't think he was clever, did you?'

  'My dear girl,' said Mr Datchery mildly, 'I'm no judge of whether a man's clever or not. But I did think he behaved rather uncivilly to you.'

  'Oh, I don't matter,' she said in a flat voice. 'I expect he gets sick of having a – a child hanging about him all the time.'

  'If you mean yourself, then I hardly think the word, "child" applies.'

  Penelope, who had been walking with her head bent, scuffing at the grass with her shoes, turned to look at Mr Datchery, for the first time, with real attention.

  'You're rather nice, you know,' she said judicially.

  'No, I'm not.' Mr Datchery seemed to find the compliment obscurely irritating.

  'You are, though. That's why I wish you felt the way I do about Peter.'

  'For the way you feel about him,' said Mr Datchery with candour, 'there's a sound biological reason from which I'm luckily exempt. You're a scientist, aren't you? Well then, be scientific about it.'

  'A scientist . . . ?' For a moment Penelope was startled; then she looked at her slim, discoloured fingers and smiled. 'Oh, I see. Sherlock Holmes stuff. But as to me being a scientist, that's all hooey. I muck about with chemicals, just for somet
hing to do, but I'm no good at it. Peter's far more of a scientist than me.'

  'How is he a scientist?' Mr Datchery demanded fretfully.

  'Psychology.'

  'Psychology is a metaphysic.'

  'I don't see why.'

  'For one thing,' said Mr Datchery, 'it can never make a control experiment. For another –'

  'Oh, all right,' said Penelope rather sulkily. 'I ought to have known better than to try and start an argument with you. But whatever you like to call it, Peter's jolly good at it . . . I admit,' she said carefully, 'that some of his ideas about other subjects seem a bit odd. For instance, that book he was talking about – Vile Bodies. He told me I ought to read it, and I did, but the only thing about it I could see was that it was funny.' She shook her head, perplexed. 'Still, that's not the point. The point is that he's wizard about anything to do with people's minds.'

  And at the fringe of the wood, Penelope, who had been walking and talking a little ahead of her companion, halted so that he might catch her up.

  'For example,' she said, 'there's this business of the anonymous letters.'

  2

  'ANONYMOUS letters?' said Mr Datchery. 'What anonymous letters?'

  His tone betrayed no more than a civil interest such as any stranger, encountering a case of this sporadic affliction, might be expected to show; but if Penelope had been less preoccupied with justifying Rubi, she might have seen that his pale blue eyes narrowed at the words, and that he began to follow what she said with a new alertness. They pushed on – she still leading – along a bracken-bordered path into the wood, where rabbits thumped and rustled in the undergrowth and the sunlight was striated by a lace of boughs. And Penelope said:

  'Oh, didn't you know about them? They've been going on for two or three weeks now.'

  'What sort of letters are they?'

  'Obscene,' said Penelope with a sort of abstract relish. 'At least, some of them are. But the obscene ones aren't the worst.'

  'Why aren't they?'

  'Because they're just nonsense. It's the other sort that's causing all the trouble.'