Hand in Glove (8 page)

H A N D I N G L O V E

49

her to be reasonable. And she was still determined not to be. “Miss Ladram,” he said falteringly, “I’m not accusing anybody of anything, least of all you. I’m only trying to establish the truth of what happened. Don’t you want to do the same?”

“We already have,” she replied. “The only service you can render us is to identify your brother’s accomplice.”

“He didn’t have one.”

“If that’s what you think, I’m sure we’d all be grateful if you left—and didn’t come back.”

Maurice put a protective arm round her waist. “I’ll second that.

Time you left, Mr Fairfax. Bother me if you really must. But leave my sister alone.”

Ursula moved across to Fairfax’s shoulder. “Cue to depart,” she murmured.

“What?”

“Shall I show you out?”

Ursula’s smile and her condescending gesture towards the garden completed Fairfax’s defeat. He stepped back and looked away, seeming to shrivel before them. Suddenly, Charlotte regretted their implacable show of unity. Perhaps, after all, he had meant well. But it was too late to find out. Already, he had turned and was hurrying towards the French windows. Ursula swayed out of his path with a little wave of dismissal.

“Goodbye, Mr Fairfax. So good of you to have called.”

“There’s no need for that,” said Charlotte.

“Well, I’m sorry, my dear. I thought you wanted rid of him.”

“I did. But not—” She broke free of Maurice and hastened into the garden. Derek Fairfax had reached the drive and was walking fast towards the gate. To recall him now—even had she wished—would have been pointless.

“What’s wrong, old girl?” said Maurice, coming up behind her.

“Nothing. I just . . .”

“Don’t worry. He’ll give us no trouble.”

“Perhaps we should have been less abrupt.”

“He was the one who was abrupt.”

“Even so, he’s not responsible for his brother’s actions, is he?”

“Then he shouldn’t try to excuse them, should he?”

“He didn’t. Not really.”

Maurice’s arm once more encircled her. “Let’s forget him. And his brother. Let’s forget all about the squalid crime that ended Beatrix’s 50

R O B E R T G O D D A R D

life and remember instead the many happy years she had before Mr Fairfax-Vane crossed her path. She’d want us to, you know.”

“Yes. She would.” Fairfax was out of sight now. Charlotte told herself to put him out of mind as well. “Come on, Maurice. Let’s go in and have another drink. I could do with one.”

“That’s my girl.” With a beaming smile, he ushered her back to rejoin the others.

C

H

A

P

T

E

R

NINE

Derek felt so ashamed by how he had managed—or mismanaged—his visit to Ockham House that for several days afterwards he could not think of the event without physically flinching. Colin had praised his diplomacy, but what would he say when he heard just how undiplomatic his brother had been?

Further contact with the Abberley family was, for the time being, out of the question. Derek’s only immediate hope of learning more about them was to read Tristram Abberley’s biography. This, with guilty zeal, he proceeded to do over the next three evenings.

The book was the work of an American academic, Emerson A.

McKitrick, first published in 1977. Derek, whose taste in literature seldom led him beyond the realm of light detective fiction, was surprised by how absorbed he rapidly became in the life-story of an avant-garde pre-war poet. Perhaps he should not have been, however, since
Tristram Abberley: A Critical Biography
had assumed for him the characteristics of a convoluted whodunnit. The only real difference was that, in this case, the mystery did not begin until long after the book had ended.

From the first, Derek found himself sharing McKitrick’s evident frustration. Who was Tristram Abberley? What manner of man was he? Sportsman; idler; intellectual poseur; spendthrift; communist; homosexual; womanizer; traveller; wastrel; husband; father; soldier;

H A N D I N G L O V E

51

poet. He had apparently been all of these and more. Yet, at the end of his life, it was possible to believe that he had been none.

He was born at Indsleigh Hall, near Lichfield, in Staffordshire, on 4

June 1907, the third and youngest child of Joseph and Margaret Abberley. The other children were Lionel (born 1895) and Beatrix (born 1902). Joseph Abberley was a partner in a Walsall soap manufacturing business, Abberley & Timmins. He was a man of humble origins who had risen, thanks entirely to his own efforts, to considerable prosperity.

His aspirations for his children were that they should enjoy all the social and educational opportunities he had been denied. But what they made of those opportunities was, as such men often find, not what he had anticipated.

For this—and most other insights into Tristram’s early years—

McKitrick was indebted, as he made clear, to the poet’s sister, Beatrix, the only living witness to many of the events he described. The thought that she too was now dead struck home at Derek. It transformed what must have been mere reminiscence when related to the author into a fixed and final historical statement. No more than what it told could ever now be told.

Lionel Abberley was, according to Beatrix, a young man of exceptional sporting and intellectual prowess. Destined for a place at Oxford in the autumn of 1914, he enlisted instead in the Army at the outbreak of the First World War and was killed early the following year. His mother, devastated by the loss, entered a physical and mental decline that ended in her death in November 1916.

How these two blows affected the character of young Tristram was not certain. What was certain was that his father invested all his hopes for the future in his remaining son and that Beatrix was obliged to assume a maternal role in the family despite her tender years.

Tristram followed in his brother’s footsteps at Rugby without ever quite fitting them and went up to Worcester College, Oxford, in the autumn of 1926. He had till then displayed neither poetic vocation nor political conviction, but both were soon to blossom. Oxford in the late twenties was, of course, an ideal environment for this to happen in and McKitrick went to great lengths to demonstrate how Tristram was influenced by and associated with such contemporaries as W.H.

Auden and Louis MacNiece. Excessive lengths, Derek felt, since actual links between them appeared to have been few.

Joseph Abberley’s reaction to the publication of Tristram’s first 52

R O B E R T G O D D A R D

full-length poem, “Blindfold,” in the anthology
Oxford Poetry
in 1928 was said by Beatrix to have been mixed, revealing as the work did a socialist sentiment to which the old man was bound to object.

He objected even more to the friends Tristram invited to Indsleigh Hall, suspecting that those who were not communists were homosexuals and that many of them were both. Predictably, McKitrick looked for evidence of homosexuality in Tristram’s behaviour at this time, and claimed to find some. If he did, it was not in the testimony of Beatrix Abberley. She maintained that what misled her father was merely a dandified pose on her brother’s part.

After leaving Oxford, Tristram lived for a year in London with assorted friends, writing sporadic but unpublished verse. He continued to accept a generous allowance from his father, who cherished the hope that he would eventually return home and take over the reins at Abberley & Timmins.

In the summer of 1930, Tristram embarked on a European tour to which his father had agreed only as prelude to his settling down to some kind of career. At Joseph Abberley’s insistence, Beatrix accompanied her brother. In the course of the next year, they visited nearly every country in Europe, including Russia, Germany, Italy, France—and Spain. Tristram’s exposure to the widespread economic distress they saw, coupled with a rosy-hued view of Stalin and an aversion to Mussolini, completed his conversion to socialism, though it was never to extend to a formal acceptance of Communism. What was to emerge from the rash of poems inspired by the tour was a coolly con-trolled anger at the abuse of political and economic power coupled with a keen sympathy for the underdog. Tristram Abberley struck many of those who met him in the early thirties as a witty pleasure-loving young man, but beneath this image—as the poems proved—a robust and articulate mind was at work, analysing humanity on a grand as well as a minor scale. Yet he seemed also to crave personal involvement in the events of the day, a craving rooted, as McKitrick saw it, in his presence in Madrid at the time of the anti-monarchist riots of May 1931, when he became convinced that only concerted action by the common people could achieve genuine political change.

Back in England in the autumn of 1931, Tristram at last complied with his father’s wishes and accepted a junior managerial position at Abberley & Timmins. It was a disastrous move. Within a few months, he had put his socialist principles into practice by encouraging the

H A N D I N G L O V E

53

workforce to resist a pay cut. A complete rift between father and son ensued. Tristram was dismissed and his allowance cancelled. Beatrix sided with her brother and was similarly disowned. They moved to London and lived together in straitened circumstances, Tristram scraping along as a journalist with various left-wing weeklies.

Tristram’s first collection of verse,
The Brow of the Hill
, was published in October 1932. Although it made little impact at the time, it contained what McKitrick categorized as his best and most heart-felt poems, including the frequently anthologized “False Gods.”

The sudden death of Joseph Abberley early in 1933 transformed his children’s finances. Tristram was able to abandon journalism and take up a free and easy existence in London society, whilst Beatrix left London to settle in Rye. Brother and sister drifted apart from then on and, at this point in the book, McKitrick was obliged to resort to more varied sources of opinion about his subject’s development.

The general view was that Tristram was a hedonist with an un-easy conscience. The wealth he had inherited from his father enabled him to lead an extravagant and irresponsible life, indulging his enthusiasm for travel, fast cars and beautiful women. The poems he wrote served to assuage the guilt he felt at such activities. And all the while a basic inclination towards socialism, apparent in his verse if not in his behaviour, ensured that he could not ignore the problems of the age.

After spending much of 1934 in the United States, he returned to England to put the finishing touches to his second collection of verse,
The Other Side
, published in the spring of 1935. This collection met with widespread critical approval, even though, in McKitrick’s judgement, the poems generally failed to match the originality and imme-diacy of his earlier work.

That spring also saw his engagement to Mary Brereton, a twenty-one-year-old secretary at his publisher’s offices, a girl far removed from the female company he had lately been keeping. Her description of their courtship, as recorded by McKitrick, conjured up a strangely simple image of the poet: loyal, generous and more contented than the nature of his verse suggested. They married in September 1935

and, for a while, Tristram filled the role of doting husband as easily as he had that of the free-thinking socialite.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936, he seemed at first reluctant to become involved. By the autumn, the International 54

R O B E R T G O D D A R D

Brigades had begun recruiting volunteers to fight for the Republican cause, but he made no move to join them. He expressed his support for the Republic when the periodical
Left Review
conducted a poll of English writers, but that was as far as he went. McKitrick attributed his reticence to domestic considerations. He had a young and by now pregnant wife to support, along with her orphaned brother. They had to come first. And, since he could give no practical assistance to the cause, he decided to refrain from empty rhetoric on its behalf.

As the Civil War continued, and the Republic’s plight worsened, his inaction began to gnaw at his conscience. The conflict between the Republic and Franco’s Nationalists distilled for him, as for many others, the conflicts of a whole decade. It was a heaven-sent opportunity to take a stand in defence of his principles. The birth of his son, Maurice, in March 1937, freed him of at least one domestic preoccupation and in July he accepted an invitation to attend an International Writers’ Congress in Spain. He set off claiming that he wished merely to discuss intellectual attitudes to the war, but McKitrick contended that he had already resolved to take an active part in the hostilities. A desire to emulate his dead brother’s heroism and to recapture the exhilaration he had felt during the riots in Madrid six years before combined to override all reservations. When the congress ended, he did not return home.

The first Mary Abberley knew of her husband’s decision to fight was when she received a letter from him announcing his acceptance of a commission in the British Battalion of the Fifteenth International Brigade. She was horrified. But she would have been even more horrified had she realized she would never see him again.

Tristram committed himself to the Republican cause just as others were beginning to abandon it. By the summer of 1937, the International Brigades were a weary and disillusioned force, with most of their best and brightest recruits killed in earlier fighting. But, to those who recollected his arrival for McKitrick’s benefit, Tristram Abberley had come as living proof that all was not lost. They spoke of his energy and his generosity, his contagious belief in the justice of their struggle, his ability to restore a sense of purpose even to the most disaffected. The final and most contradictory of all the phases of his life—that of the selfless warrior—had begun.

But it was not to last long. Lieutenant Tristram Abberley first saw action—and distinguished himself by his bravery—on the Fuentes