The Complete Short Stories (62 page)

They lie in Vicarage
Road churchyard, Watford, every one, they are marked by two stones: Deeply
Mourned.

I explained them one by
one to Joe, and added what I knew of family lore.

Next came my mother,
born 111 years back, dead these twenty-seven years. And a cousin whose name I
can’t recall but who, I know, was very ambitious. Alas, she never achieved her
ambition, which was to own a Rolls Royce with a chauffeur to drive her from
shop to shop, as was possible in those days. This cousin — what was her name? —
oh, well, she became a Mrs Henderson, wife of an accountant, and got as far as
Paris on the Golden Arrow one year. No Rolls, no chauffeur. But Mrs Henderson
always said that she wanted one.

Now where was that other
photo of Mrs Henderson, one that I remembered well because it was so
uncharacteristically informal, where she was standing over her sewing machine?
She was slightly bent, in profile, slim-waisted and handsome. Someone with a
camera had caught her examining the bobbin of her machine, her beloved
treadle-operated Singer. Something was wrong with the machine and Mrs Henderson
—what
was
her name? — was looking intently at it. An enchanting photograph.
It was gone. Someone had removed it.

The same with a few
others I now remembered. My paternal grandmother from a Jewish family in
Lithuania, very blonde and Polish looking, her hair piled and plaited, not at all
Jewish to look at, unlike my grandfather with his lovely smile inside his
beard; he was so like my father, who, however, was always clean shaven. My
grandmother Henrietta’s beautiful photograph was missing. I remembered her so
well in the photograph, never having known her in the flesh. I remember the
large space between the eyes which I have inherited. Blue eyes. Where has she
gone?

I thought of all the
people who had slept in this room and others who had been within easy access of
it. Some dozens of friends over the years. Who would have an interest in those
meaningless photographs? Sometimes, because I am a writer, journalists have
been known to snaffle a photograph of myself without permission, but these old
Victorian and Edwardian pictures, without even artistic merit …?

I concentrated on the
bundle of photographs that were left to me. They weren’t a bad selection, enough
to illustrate my long-ago origins and in some cases my memories. I gave them to
Joe and put away the rest. I had other things to think of.

Damian de Dogherty — you
mention Damian de Dogherty — Oh, my God, I haven’t thought of him for five
years. Before that he saw to it that I thought of him every month, if not every
day. I lived in Paris at the time.

According to his spin,
or rather, one of his spins, the family were Huguenots originating from
Ireland, taking refuge in France; members of the family were later in the
service of Maria Theresa of Austria who conferred on them a princedom. Being
modest people they accepted to be merely barons and he, the last survivor of
the family, was Baron Damian de Dogherty. Damian was, I must say, a lot of fun.
That is, he was fun at the dinner table and of diminishing fun elsewhere. He
was a positive bore on the beach where he would leave whatever companion he was
with (he was two ways) and take his good slinky body after strange gods such as
arose from the glittering sea.

One of Damian’s many
curious characteristics was his habit of suddenly falling asleep. I believe it
is called narcolepsy. It might be at a quiet meeting of friends sitting round a
table drinking in a mild way, it might be in a library while he was taking
notes from a book (he loved to study), or sitting beside you on a sofa.
Suddenly, he would be gone into sleep. It was quite a healthy sleep, and
eventually his friends gave up being alarmed. I always, vaguely in my mind,
explained this trait as a reaction to reality; all in a moment, I felt,
something would cause him to face an unacceptable truth, and he just tuned out.
I still think I was right, there. His narcosis was partly, at least,
psychological.

In my early acquaintance
with Damian I took his story at its charming face value. I addressed him on the
envelopes of my letters as Baron de Dogherty, strange as it sounded. His name
was not to be found in any of the reference books for the titles and old
families of Europe, although he claimed that it was to be found somewhere. This
information, unsought, went unchecked so far as I was concerned. I had other
things to do. According to those who had known him some years before, he had
been married to a rich Peruvian girl. They had gone their separate ways. It was
said she was a talented photographer, still practising in Paris. I took in this
fact vaguely; only afterwards did I have some reason to bring it to mind.

I tried to get to his
real personality but after a while I realized that there was none. He was, in
fact, pure fake.

To a considerable extent
I think Damian believed his own stories. He was trying to write an
autobiography, for which reason, I think, he rang me or dropped in frequently.

‘I’ve come to the bit
when my aunt, la Comtesse Clémentine de Vevey came to visit me at school in
Switzerland.’

‘I believe you went to
school in Salt Lake City,’ I said, having been so informed by one of his
schoolmates.

‘Oh, that was earlier.’

In my role of his
literary adviser I suggested that he should turn his autobiography into a
novel. He adopted this suggestion.

Another strange fact:
everybody liked to be with Damian while he was alive; he was greatly sought
after for weekends, dinner parties and simple picnics in the country; however,
in spite of his decided popularity, when he died he was not mourned in any
sort of proportion to the force of his attractiveness in life. He was not
grieved over at all. He was here, he made us smile, nobody believed a word he
said, then he was gone.

Shortly after his death I was in a bookshop
in Ghent, rummaging through some old prints. I came across a pile of
photographs, all in quite ornate frames. People would buy these, the owner was
explaining to me, precisely for the frames. ‘But personally,’ he said, ‘I also
find the photographs very attractive, very nostalgic.’

I found myself looking
at my hard-working grandmother, my great-aunts Nancy and Sally. There was
Mary-Ann. And Sarah Rowbottom, stout and bold. And Gladys with a regal sash
across her bosom.

But these were not the original
faded sepia images. They were blacker and whiter, with an attempt at a sort of
golden-brown haze.

‘Where did these come
from?’ I said.

‘I bought them in
England,’ said the owner. ‘They were in a house sale.’

There was something
wrong with my grandmother. My God, she was wearing a tiara and round her neck
was the unmistakable Order of the Golden Fleece, an ornate necklace with a ram’s
skin hanging from it. The same sort of thing with my great-aunt Nancy. Gone was
her ebony locket and in place was a medal that was later identified as the
Order of the Black Eagle, a Prussian order exclusive to royal families. My
humble relatives, one by one, had been exalted with Orders and Garters, ropes
of pearls (my grandmother Henrietta had seven strands), bejewelled tiaras. My
great-uncle Jim had the Manchurian Order of the Dragon on his breast.

‘Who were these people?’
I inquired.

‘Oh they are the noble
relations of the late Baron de Dogherty,’ said the owner. ‘These photographs
were on the walls of his study. No great interest except for the frames. He was
very well connected, of course, so perhaps historians …’

I bought the pictures
without the frames for a price which was too high, although, according to the
owner, it was too low; the usual thing.

On examination by a
photographic expert, and comparison with the photos that had not been stolen,
it was plain they had been re-photographed with those fake ensignia, about
which Damian had been a real expert, tricked in. He had also learned something
from his marriage to that Peruvian photographer; it had not been a total loss.
But this was what he had lived for: the Order of Henry the Lion, the Order of
the Starry Cross, even the Order of the Red Flag …

I love these fake
pictures, all of them. But my favourite is that of my mother’s cousin, slim Mrs
Henderson, in profile, stooping, not to examine her sewing machine, but to
enter her superimposed Rolls. And standing by the door of the car is the
superimposed chauffeur, her dream of a lifetime come true.

The Hanging Judge

‘The passing of sentence,’ wrote one of the
newspapers, ‘obviously tried the elderly judge. In fact, he looked as if he had
seen a ghost.’ This was not the only comment that drew attention to Sir
Sullivan Stanley’s expression under his wig and that deadly black cap required
by British law at the time. It was the autumn following the lovely summer of 1947.
The yellow and brown leaves scuttled merrily along the paths in the park.

It had been Justice
Stanley’s lot to condemn to death several men in the course of his career — no
women, incidentally, but that was due to the extreme rarity of women murderers.
Certainly, no one would have suggested that Sullivan Stanley would hesitate in
the case of a woman to pronounce the words, like a tolling bell, ‘that you be
taken from this place … and that you be there hanged by the neck until you be
dead’. (And, almost as an afterthought, ‘May the Lord have mercy on your soul.’)

The man in the dock was
in his thirties, good-looking, as respectable a person in appearance as might
be found briskly crossing the street outside the Old Bailey where the trial was
taking place. He was George Forrester, perpetrator of what were known to the
radio-listening and newspaper-reading public of those days as ‘the mud-river
murders’.

Sir Sullivan Stanley’s
facial expression throughout the trial had been no different from his
expression at any other time or in any other trial. He invariably gave the
impression that he was irritated by the accused —especially in one notable case
where a man had pleaded guilty and refused to be persuaded by his own counsel
or anybody else that ‘guilty’ and ‘not guilty’ were mere technicalities, that
in fact to plead guilty dispensed more or less with the trial. In no previous
case, then, had the press remarked on this expression. Sir Sullivan had loose,
spaniel-like jowls and looked the age he was and as annoyed as he was. But ‘something
seemed to come over the Justice,’ wrote another reporter. ‘He was plainly
shaken, not so much when he heard the foreman of the jury pronounce the word “guilty”
as when he put on the black cap which had been lying before him. Can it be
possible,’ speculated this reporter, ‘that Judge Stanley is beginning to doubt
the wisdom of capital punishment?’

Sullivan Stanley was not
beginning to doubt anything of the kind. The reason for the peculiar expression
on his face as he passed judgment on that autumn afternoon in 1947 was that,
for the first time in some years, he had an erection as he spoke; he had an
involuntary orgasm.

It was said that a man who was hanged
automatically had an erection at the moment of the drop. Justice Stanley
pondered this piece of information. He wondered if it was true. However that
might be, he could find no connection with his own experience at passing
sentence. But whenever, throughout the months and years to come, he thought
about this case, he felt an inexplicable excitement.

The murderer, George
Forrester, had stayed, as everyone knew, at the Rosemary Lawns Hotel in north
London. It was there he had met the last of his victims, and the discovery of
her body and the clues he furnished led to the other bodies. During the course
of the trial, Justice Stanley had by way of a working scruple deliberately gone
to look at the hotel from the outside. It was small, private, moderately
priced, refined, and did not seem to deserve the two policemen who stood
outside the entrance during the trial to keep the press and other intrusive
elements from bothering those few remaining guests who had not packed up and
fled as soon as the mud-river murder case hit the headlines.

In court, the manager
gave evidence. A man of good presence, aged thirty-five, direct and frank, he
impressed Justice Stanley in inverse proportion to the contempt the judge felt
for George Forrester, the man at the bar. Justice Stanley usually despised the
accused on some account or other quite distinct from the facts of the case.
This time, it was the bright brown, almost orange, Harris tweed coat that the
prisoner wore, in addition to his rusty-brown little moustache.

In 1947 George Forrester managed to murder
three women in one year. Before that, he had no criminal record whatsoever. He
was a commercial traveller in fishing tackle and gear, and apparently,
according to his frightened and helpless wife, was in the habit of going off
fishing in rivers throughout the country, wherever he happened to be at the end
of a working week. His victims, three in all, were discovered shot in the head
among reedy marshes where he had been seen wearing waders, plying his rod.

The three victims had in
common that they were large, overweight women, widowed and middle-aged. George
Forrester met them all in medium-priced genteel hotels where the guests had a
fixed arrangement. His object was to rob the women of their jewellery and the
contents of their handbags, and this he did in all three cases. The last case,
that of Mrs Emily Crathie, was the one for which he was tried before Justice
Stanley. An interesting feature of the case was that George Forrester claimed
to have had sex with Mrs Crathie before bringing her to her muddy death among
the reeds, although the forensic evidence argued against any sexual activity.

George Forrester
admitted that he had offered Mrs Crathie ‘a day out fishing’. She occupied the
next table to his at the Rosemary Lawns Hotel. This had been noticed by the
manager and his wife and also by some of the other permanent clients. Her
sudden absence was also noticed and, after a few days, reported to the police,
no relatives being known.