Murderers and Other Friends (32 page)

Rosie is wearing her mother's shirt, her mother's earrings, her mother's skirt, and between her fingers rests one of her mother's fags, and she is gazing dreamily at a glass of wine. When Tom introduces her, in the manner of a gossip columnist, she pushes away her glass and says wearily, ‘Piss off, Tom!' Claire Boxer, aged twelve, is wearing my hat, my glasses, my shirt, with a cushion acting as my stomach. Other children play other parents. They are us, in a new, fresh, well-lit and entertaining version, while we sit tongue-tied in the shadows, trying to put the best possible face on it.

‘All women become their mothers,' Oscar Wilde said. ‘That's their tragedy.' It may not be tragic, but it's inevitable, just as men turn into their fathers. We may wear different clothes and dance to different music, but we take over the same parts, the same loves, the same loyalties and the same old quarrels and unforgivable wrongs. Your mum and dad don't necessarily fuck you up, they just step into the darkness and invite you to take their place.

Humanity doesn't so much progress as constantly renew itself, carrying the same old baggage down the centuries, and in this luggage the grievances are greatly treasured. It's impossible to understand the bloodshed in Bosnia without some understanding of the Roman Empire and the Ottoman invasion; just as Ireland is still suffering from Oliver Cromwell. The British Civil War is now long over but the divisions are still clearly marked between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers. It's not just a split between left and right, for there are many Conservative Puritans and left-wing Cavaliers. It's not only the opposing claims of guilt and pleasure, the voice of duty or the hymn to Dionysus, the urge to gather roses on earth or lay up treasure in heaven. The division is stronger and more subtle. We live among Civil War battlegrounds, on a hill between two valleys where two families conscripted their servants to fight against each other.

Sometimes it wasn't even war between families but brother against brother. In Hambleden church there is the seventeenth-century tombstone of a husband and wife; half their kneeling children are dressed as Cavaliers, the others are in the uniform of Parliament. This may have been an astute political move to make sure the family would be seen right, no matter who won. I suppose anyone wanting an easy life would mix their Cavalier and Roundhead qualities like a sort of cocktail. The trouble with that is one of these heady draughts is bound to taste stronger and drown out the other.

Just past the rare orchids and the trees, on the other side of a sunken road from us, is a great and seldom visited valley with a house, once disintegrating, in which lived the descendants of Colonel Scrope, a regicide who signed Charles I's death warrant. The last member of the family to live there had kept Oliver Cromwell's boots in his downstairs lavatory. The Cavaliers were on the other side of the hill. Mass has been said at Stonor Park, it seems, since the Norman Conquest and the Camoys family withstood persecution and huge fines, hid Father Campion, the Elizabethan martyr, in a priest's hole and maintained the observance to this day. It was only broken on one Sunday during the present Pope's visit to Britain, when the priests went off to catch a glimpse of His Holiness. When I was young the inhabitants of Stonor village were loyal to the old religion and the village school was Catholic.

Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh used to visit Stonor and the 1930s chapel has its romantic echo in
Brideshead.
They came, I'm sure, out of affection for Sherman Stonor, the late Lord Camoys, who knew a great deal about wild flowers and came to the mistaken belief that he had been a parachutist during the war. After some long, and no doubt happy evening, he fell off a table and broke his leg. When he appeared in the House of Lords on crutches and was asked how he'd come by this injury, he is alleged to have said, ‘When your parachute fails to open at twenty thousand feet, you are rather inclined to break a leg, aren't you?' He often set off for London, sometimes getting no further than the Angel pub by the bridge in Henley. If he achieved his goal he would spend his money unwisely on a large variety of objects, including unsaleable pictures, and visit his good friend Eartha Kitt. He was a man with a sweet nature and a fine turn of phrase. When asked why a relative had his term of training in a priests' seminary cut short he said, ‘I believe he was jumping a little too low at the leapfrog.'

Our friend was Jeanne Camoys, Sherman's widow, the dowager, the avenger, the endlessly quarrelsome, whose abundance of malice made her excellent company. She was a small, pale, dark-haired woman who had been a great beauty in the thirties, with the exotic habit of painting her fingernails green. At some time a dose of Spanish blood had been pumped into her, making her liable to take instant offence and she was singularly unforgiving. Her features were small, but her jaw was strong and could set like an iron trap. Although from some upper-crust family, she had been hard up when she met Sherman and working in a hat shop. When we met she was living with her youngest son Bobby, at whom she would hurl demands from various parts of the house in a voice which was alarmingly powerful in so small a woman. She had been able to equal her husband in the matter of serious and devoted drinking.

I liked her because she carried the strange art of being herself to unbelievable lengths. When she first invited us to lunch and we suggested we should ask her back, she said, ‘No need to swap cutlets.' She regularly visited the King of Nepal, whom her son had tutored, and on her return would immediately ask for and obtain an audience with Mrs Thatcher to discuss the affairs of that remote kingdom. When a rat appeared on her garden wall she rang up Michael Heseltine, then Minister for the Environment, and told him to do something about it at once. When he failed she vowed undying enmity to Heseltine and said she was voting Labour. Bobby prepared himself to fight the minister for his Henley constituency as a Gay SDP candidate. She was extremely well read and had worked in some capacity for Edith Sitwell. She hinted at a distant, passionate relationship with Graham Greene, but I noticed that he was nervous of visiting England when he heard she was in the country.

Jeanne was the only character I put directly into a work of fiction. One day she came to lunch, loud-mouthed, fragile and beautifully dressed. As I was sitting on the sofa beside her, she asked me to admire her shoes. I did so obediently and told her that she had very pretty legs, if I might say so. ‘You already have said so, I think.
In your book.''
I apologized for the use of her, and she smiled tightly. ‘Better to be lampooned than ignored,' she said, a motto for everyone who suffers from the attentions of
Private Eye.

She sold the Dower House and bought a small, rather ugly building which she renamed Camoys Cottage. She would sit there at a long lunch, eating like a bird and discussing her rival beauty, the Duchess of Argyll. ‘Having an affair with her nowadays must be like making love to a kipper,' she decided. Sometimes the room was full of treasures: Georgian bookcases, silver candlesticks, china and paintings of Stonor Park. Suddenly these rare things would vanish, as she had sold them when she and Bobby went off on a spree to London. Then, as she paid a surreptitious visit to the family mansion, coming away with a few pictures, a collection of antique cutlery or a set of Carolean lace-bordered napkins, some traces of splendour would return to Camoys Cottage. At the end, when she took to her bed, it seemed that the living-room was equipped with only a few pieces of garden furniture.

I remember one night, when we were drinking the proceeds of some small antique, she began to talk about her wedding and produced scrapbooks of yellowing press-cuttings. In the photographs she looked brilliantly young, probably dangerous, and desirable, with Sherman smiling modestly as he carried off the prize she agreed she was. And then, at the command ‘Bobby, fetch the wedding dress!', her youngest son went upstairs and came down with a battered suitcase. ‘Norman Hartnell,' Jeanne announced, ‘did this for me. Open it, Bobby!' The suitcase was opened, releasing a cascade of white satin sewn over with seed pearls. Jeanne looked at it with wonder and longing for a past that may have seemed more alluring in retrospect, and then collapsed into its lengthy and voluminous train. Penny helped our hostess upstairs and then into bed. As I sat downstairs and Bobby poured another drink he said, as though it were the first article of his creed, ‘A fellow should not be called on to undress his own ma.'

At the end she seemed to shrink and become a child again, and a small, thin-armed, deprived child at that. She was in bed and Bobby and I were sitting with her; the drinks were poured out and we were discussing old scandals when a jovial Irish priest arrived from the local Borstal. He also brought a small case, from which he took the materials for a Mass. As he lit the candles and kissed and put on the stole, I said I ought to be going. ‘Stay,' Jeanne said, ‘do stay. Father won't mind, will you, Father?' ‘It won't worry me in the least.' So Bobby poured fresh drinks and we continued to chat while some unction was given. It was not extreme. She lived on for many subsequent drinks and Masses.

The soul of Jeanne Camoys eventually floated off, no doubt complaining vociferously, to await the forgiveness of her God. The chapel at Stonor was so crowded that the funeral service had to be broadcast to those who stood outside in the park where she was to be buried. The aged monsignor who conducted the ceremony said that she had always been a ‘strong character'. It was, unlike most religious pronouncements, a considerable understatement.

Unconvinced of immortality, and not having the Stonors' privilege of burial on their own bit of land, my mother and father are commemorated on one extended stone, which lies flat on the ground, often overgrown and covered with dead leaves, in Turville churchyard. On one side of them the graves give way to the tall grass of a field; on the other the path winds to the church door. The name of the village has a Danish ring, and it might have been the site of an Anglo-Scandinavian settlement. It's certain that the King of Mercia's son gave the place, and the lands round it, to the monks of St Albans in the year 796. The squat tower and body of the church are built in flint – the only material available in the stony Chilterns – but because ‘flint can't turn corners' the edges are stone. The nave is simple, with a Norman font. In one wall is a piece of stained glass, a hand holding a lily, which is the work of John Piper. A new aisle was built in 1733 by William Percy, who had become Lord of the Manor. He married Elizabeth Sidney of Penshurst in Kent, whose daughter was to be Shelley's grandmother. The arms of the Percy family are displayed in the church and twenty-eight quarterings of families from whom Elizabeth Sidney claimed descent. This great show of ancestors is largely fictional. Sir Henry Sidney, two centuries before, had commissioned a pedigree from a researcher, who found it both simpler and more impressive to forge it. All the same, Elizabeth Sidney was proud of the display.

During some restoration work in 1900, a huge stone coffin was dug up in the south-east corner of the nave. It has a single cross on the top and was carved some time in the thirteenth century from a block of that Oxfordshire limestone which is composed of rounded granules, like the roe of a fish. At the time the coffin seems to have been made for a single man – he must have been both tall and rich – who lay there, unaccompanied, until the seventeenth century when he was joined by the body of a woman. A hole had been driven through her skull; so was this body the result of a successfully planned murder? Did some man unknown kill his wife or mistress and lift the great stone lid of the coffin to conceal her? ‘Where does a wise man hide a pebble?' Father Brown asks, and the answer comes, ‘On the beach.' ‘Where does a wise man hide a leaf?' ‘In the forest.' From this it follows that a wise man hides a body in a graveyard.

There are a number of miscellaneous bones in the coffin. Up till the mid eighteenth century the villagers didn't enjoy the luxury of a box, but were buried in the earth, wrapped in woollen shrouds. When the graveyard boasted more bones than soil, they were dug up and put in any old coffin that had room for them. So the tall and wealthy thirteenth-century landlord had his privacy further invaded.

Through the Middle Ages runaway serfs and outlaws lived in the surrounding woods. Now an MP who wants to retire becomes Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds, which was not always a sinecure; in the old days his task was to catch and hang all such malefactors. Turville was also, for many years, the home of highwaymen who held up coaches on the road to Oxford.

By the 1930s things were more peaceful and the artist John Nash, writing of that period, describes the chairmakers, sitting in the sun, at work in front of their cottage doors.

Paul Nicolson has been the vicar of Turville for a decade or more. He's a tall man with a balding head, glasses and a perpetual smile, which is bravely worn through all adversity. He came to the priesthood late in life, having worked for many years in his family wine business, supplying Veuve Cliquot to West End nightclubs. On fund-raising expeditions it appears that he was in the same regiment or is, at least, a distant cousin of the establishment gents in charge of charitable funds. He has the quality essential to all friends, and indeed worthwhile human beings, of being entirely unpredictable. He was violently opposed to the poll tax, holding it, as most people did, to be a grossly unjust imposition on the poor. However, he went further and refused to pay it, and would have been imprisoned for this offence had not the church, to his extreme disappointment, paid it for him. He is a high churchman who blesses domestic animals at a special service on the village green, a country clergyman whose life has not always been happy and who spends much of his time caring for the poor and homeless in High Wycombe, to the annoyance of Turville commuters who think the church should keep its nose out of politics. He can be whimsical. When his daughter, who won the title of Miss Henley, took to a spiky pink hairdo he made no comment at all, but sat at breakfast reading
The Times
and wearing a purple female wig. In church he gives a feeling of excitement to the prayers as he commends both the employers and the TUC to the particular attention of the Almighty, to sharp intakes of breath from kneeling Conservatives. He is a resolutely good man and we have to depend nowadays, for sane and liberal opinion, on the judges and on the church.