A Sleeping Life

Chapter 19

Little John. Sweet affectionate little love, the way them mongols are… Mrs Parker’s voice was among the whisperers. He could hear it clearly in the receiver of his mind, and hear too Lilian Crown’s, brash and tough and uncaring. Been in a home for the backward like since he was so high…

‘I looked up the parents too, sir, just to be on the safe side. Ronald West’s parents were John Grenville West and Mary Ann West, and Ronald’s birth was also registered in Myringham in 1914. The mother, Lilian West, was the daughter of William and Agnes Crawford, and her birth was registered in Canterbury in 1917. Ronald and Lilian West were married in Myringham in 1937.’

‘You’re sure there’s no other John Grenville West born on that date and registered at Myringham?’

How could there be? Such a coincidence would evince the supernatural.

‘Quite sure, sir,’ said Loring.

‘I know who this man is. He’s mentally retarded. He’s been in an institution for the greater part of his life.’ Wexford was uncertain whom he was addressing. Not Baker or Loring or the baffled Clements. Perhaps only himself. ‘It can’t be!’ he said.

‘It is, sir,’ said Loring, not following, anxious only that his thoroughness should not be questioned.

Wexford turned from him and buried his face in his hands. Burden would have called this hysterical or maybe just melodramatic. For Wexford, at this moment, it was the only possible way of being alone. Fantastic pictures came to him of a normal child being classified as abnormal so that his mother, in order to make a desired marriage, might be rid of him. Of that child somehow acquiring an education, of being adopted but retaining his true name. Then why should Lilian Crown have concealed it? He jumped up. ‘Michael, may I use your phone?’

‘Sure you can, Reg.’

Baker had ceased to hint, had stopped his impatient fidgeting. Wexford knew what he was thinking. It was as if there had been placed before him, though invisible to others, a manual of advice to ambitious policemen. Always humour the whims of your chief’s uncle, even though in your considered opinion the old boy is off his rocker. The uses of nepotism must always be borne in mind when looking to promotion. Burden’s voice, from down there in the green country, sounded sane and practical and encouraging.

‘Mike, could you get over to the Abbotts Palmer Hospital? Go there, don’t phone. I could do that myself. They have, or had, an inmate called John Grenville West. See him if you can.’

‘Will do,’ said Burden. ‘Is he seeable? What I’m trying to say is, is he some sort of complete wreck or is he capable of communicating?’

‘If he’s who he seems to be, he’s more than capable of communicating, in which case he won’t be there. But I’m not sending you on a wild goose chase. You have to find out when he entered the institution, when he left and how. Everything you can about him, OK? And if you find he’s not there but was cured, if that’s possible, and went out into the world, confront the man’s mother with it, will you? You may have to get tough with her. Get tough. Find out if she knew he was Grenville West, the author, and why the hell she didn’t tell us.’

‘Am I going to find out who his mother is?’

‘Mrs Lilian Crown, 2 Carlyle Villas, Forest Road.’

‘Right,’ said Burden.

‘I’ll be here. I’d come back myself, only I want to wait in Kenbourne till Polly Flinders gets home this evening.’

Baker accepted this last so philosophically as to send down for coffee. Wexford took pity on him.

'Thanks, Michael, but I’m going to take myself off for a walk.’ He said to Loring, ‘You can get over to All Soul Grove and find out when the Flinders girl is expected home. If Miss Patel is taking another of her days off, I daresay you won’t find the work too arduous.’

He went out into the hazy sunshine. Sluggishly people walked, idled on street corners. It seemed strange to him, as it always does to us when we are in a state of turbulence, that the rest of humanity was unaffected. He that is giddy thinks the world turns round. Giddiness exactly described his present condition, but it was a giddiness of the mind, and he walked steadily and slowly along Kenbourne High Road. At the cemetery gate he turned into the great necropolis. Along the aisles, between the serried tombs, he walked, and sat down at last on a toppled gravestone. On a warm summer’s day there is no solitude to be found on a green or in a park, but one may always be sure of being alone in the corner of a cemetery. The dead themselves seem to decree silence, while the atmosphere of the place and its very nature are repellent to most people.

Very carefully and methodically he assembled the facts, letting the whispers wait. West had been cagey about his past, had made few friends, and those he had were somehow unsuitable and of an intellect unequal to his own. He gave his publishers and his readers his birthplace as London, though his passport and the registration of his birth showed he had been born in Sussex. His knowledge of the Sussex countryside and its great houses also showed a familiarity with that county. No one seemed to know anything of his life up to fourteen years before, and when he had first come to Elm Green and two years before his book was published.

Not to his neighbour and intimate friend did he ever speak of his origins, and to one other bearer of the name Grenville West he had denied any connection with the family. Why? Because he had something to keep hidden, while Rhoda Comfrey was similarly secretive because she had her blackmailing activities to keep hidden. Put the two together and what do you get? A threat on the part of the blackmailer to disclose something. Not perhaps that West was homosexual – Wexford could not really be persuaded that these days this was of much significance – but that he had never been to a university (as his biography claimed he had), never been a teacher or a courier or a freelance journalist, been indeed nothing till the age of twenty-four when he had somehow emerged from a home for the mentally handicapped.

As his first cousin, Rhoda Comfrey would have known it; from her it could never have been kept as it had been kept from others. Had she used it as a final weapon – Burden’s theory here being quite tenable – when she saw herself losing her cousin to Polly Flinders? West had overheard that phone call made by her to his own mother, even though she had called Lilian Crown ‘darling’ to put him off the scent. Had he assumed that she meant to see his mother and wrest from her the details of his early childhood, the opinions of doctors, all Mrs Crown’s knowledge of the child’s incarceration in that place and his subsequent release?

Here, then, was a motive for the murder. West had booked into the Trieste Hotel because it was simpler to allow Polly Flinders and Victor Vivian to believe him already in France. But that he had booked in his own name and for three nights showed surely that he had never intended to kill his cousin. Rather he had meant to use those three days for argument with Rhoda and to attempt to dissuade her from her intention.

But how had he done it? Not the murder, that might be clear enough, that unpremeditated killing in a fit of angry despair. How had he contrived in the first place such an escape and then undergone such a metamorphosis? Allowing for the fact that he might originally have been unjustly placed in the Abbotts Palmer or its predecessor, how had he surmounted his terrible difficulties? Throughout his childhood and early youth he must have been there, and if not in fact retarded, retardation would surely have been assumed for some years so that education would have been withheld and his intellect dulled and impeded by the society of his fellow inmates. Yet at the age of twenty-five or six he had written and published a novel which revealed a learned knowledge of the Elizabethan drama, of history and of the English usage of the period.

If, that is, he were he.

It couldn’t be, as Wexford had said to Loring, and yet it must be. For though John Grenville West might not be the author’s real name, though he might be a suitable pseudonym by chance have alighted on it – inventing it, so to speak, himself – other aspects were beyond the possibility of coincidence. True, the chance use of this name (instead, for example, of his real one which might be absurd or dysphonious) could have brought him and Rhoda together, the cousinship at first having been assumed on her part as Charles West had also assumed it. But he could not by chance have also chosen her cousin’s birthday and parentage. It must be that John Grenville West, the novelist, the francophile, the traveller, was also John Grenville West, the retarded child his mother had put away when he was six years old. From this dismal state, from this position in the world…

He stopped. The words he had used touched a bell and rang it. Again he was up in the spare bedroom with his daughter, and Sylvia was talking about men and women and time, saying something about men’s position in the world. And after that she had said this position could only be attained by practising something or other. Deism? No, of course not. Aeolism? Didn’t that mean being longwinded? Anyway, it wasn’t that, she hadn’t said that. What had she said?

He tried placing one letter of the alphabet after another to follow the diphthong after the O and settled at last with absolute conviction for ‘aeonism’. Which must have something to do with aeons. So she had only meant that, in order for sexual equality to be perfected, those who desired it would have to transcend the natural course of time. He felt disappointed and let down, because, with a curious shiver in that heat, he had felt he had found the key. The word had not been entirely new to him. He fancied he had heard it before, long before Sylvia spoke it, and it had not meant transcending time at all.

Well, he wasn’t getting very far cogitating like this. He might as well go back. It was after five, and by now Burden might have got results. He left the cemetery as they were about to close the gates and got a suspicious look from the keeper who had been unaware of his presence inside. But outside the library he thought of that elusive word again. He had a large vocabulary because in his youth he had always made a point of looking up words whose meaning he didn’t know. It was a good rule and not one reserved to the young. This was the place for which Grenville West had a ticket and where Wexford himself had first found his books. Now he spared them a glance on his way to the reference room. Four were in, including Apes in Hell, beneath whose covers Rhoda Comfrey’s name lurked with such seeming innocence.

The library had only one English dictionary, the Shorter Oxford in two bulky volumes. Wexford took the first one of these down, sat at the table and opened it. ‘Aeolism’ was not given, and he found that ‘aeolistic’ meant what he thought it did and that it was an invention of Swift’s. ‘Aeon’ was there – an age, or the whole duration of the world, or of the universe; an immeasurable period of time; eternity’. ‘Aeonian’ too and ‘aeonial’, but no ‘aeonism’ Could Sylvia have made it up, or was it perhaps the etymologically doubtful brain-child of one of her favourite Women’s Lib writers? That wouldn’t account for his certainty that he had himself previously come across it. He replaced the heavy tome and crossed the street to the Police Station.

Baker was on the phone when he walked in, chatting with such tenderness and such absorption that Wexford guessed he could only be talking to his wife. But the conversation, though it appeared only to have been about whether he would prefer fried to boiled potatoes for his dinner and whether he would be home by six or could make it by ten to, put him in great good humour. No, no calls had come in for Wexford. Loring had not returned, and he, Baker, thought it would be a good idea for the two of them to adjourn at once to the Grand Duke. Provided, of course, that this didn’t delay him from getting home by ten to six.

‘I’d better stay here, Michael,’ Wexford said rather awkwardly, ‘If that’s all right with you.’

‘Be my guest, Reg. Here’s your young chap now.’

Loring was shown in by Sergeant Clements. ‘She came in at half past four, sir. I told her to expect you some time after six-thirty.’

He had no idea what he would say to her, though he might have if only Burden would phone. The word still haunted him. ‘Would you mind if I made a call?’ he said to Baker.

Humouring him had now become Baker’s line. ‘I said to be my guest, Reg. Do what you like.’ His wife and the fried potatoes enticed him irresistibly. ‘I’ll be off then.’ With stoical resignation, he added, ‘I daresay we’ll be seeing a good deal of each other in the next few days.’

Wexford dialled Sylvia’s number. It was Robin who answered.

‘Daddy’s taken Mummy up to London to see Auntie Sheila in a play.’

The Merchant of Venice at the National. She was playing Jessica, and her father had seen her in the part a month before. Another of those whispers hissed at him from the text – ‘But love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit.’ To the boy he said:

‘Who’s with you, then? Grandma?’

‘We’ve got a sitter,’ said Robin. ‘For Ben,’ he added.

‘See you,’ said Wexford just as laconically, and put the receiver back. Clements was still there, looking, he thought, rather odiously sentimental. ‘Sergeant,’ he said, ‘would you by any chance have a dictionary in this place?’

‘Plenty of them, sir. Urdu, Bengali, Hindi, you name it, we’ve got it. Have to have on account of all these immigrants. Of course we do employ interpreters, and a nice packet they make out of it, but even they don’t know all the words. And just as well, if you ask me. We’ve got French too and German and Italian for our Common Market customers, and common is the word. Oh, yes, we’ve got more Dick, Tom and Marias, as my old father used to call them, than they’ve got down the library.’

Wexford controlled an impulse to throw the phone at him. ‘Would you have an English dictionary?’

He was almost sure Clements would say this wasn’t necessary as they all spoke English, whatever the hoi polloi might do. But to his surprise he was told that they did and Clements would fetch it for him, his pleasure. He hadn’t been gone half a minute when the switchboard, with many time-wasting inquiries, at last put through a call from Burden. He sounded as if the afternoon had afforded him work that had been more distressing than arduous.

‘Sorry I’ve been so long. I’m not so tough as I think I am. But, God, the sights you see in these places. What it boils down to is that John Grenville West left the Abbotts Palmer when he was twenty…’

‘What?’

‘Don’t get excited,’ Burden said wearily. ‘Only because they hadn’t the facilities for looking after him properly. He isn’t a mongol at all, whatever your Mrs Parker said. He was born with serious brain damage and one leg shorter than the other. Reading between the lines, from what they said and didn’t say, I gather this was the result of his mother’s attempt to procure an abortion.’

Wexford said nothing. The horror was all in Burden’s voice already. ‘Don’t let anyone ever tell me,’ said the inspector savagely, ‘that it was wrong to legalize abortion.’ Wexford knew better than to say at this moment that it was Burden who had always told himself, and others, that.

‘Where is he now?’

‘In a place near Eastbourne. I went there. He’s been nothing more than a vegetable for eighteen years. I suppose the Crown woman was too ashamed to tell you. I’ve just come from her. She said it was ever so sad, wasn’t it, and offered me a gin.’