Before the Poison

8

Famous Trials: Grace Elizabeth Fox, April 1953, by Sir Charles Hamilton Morley

The snow finally stopped falling, and on the morning of Sunday, 4th January, 1953, over two full days after the tragic events at Kilnsgate House, a local snow removal vehicle was able to clear the lane. The telephone wires were still down, so no communication had been possible between the house and the outside world. In no time at all, though, once the situation had been explained, an ambulance arrived, but there was nothing to be done for Ernest Fox except to remove his body to the mortuary. Grace had left him in his bed and covered him with a clean white sheet. She had let the fire burn out in his bedroom and had not relit it, so that the winter chill had provided a natural preserving effect, ensuring that no unpleasant decay occurred in the body. It is difficult for anyone who was not there to imagine the tension, the despair and the horror of the four people marooned in Kilnsgate House for two days while the storm raged and the snow deepened. When help, therefore, finally arrived, the Lamberts and Hetty Larkin especially were no doubt grateful to find themselves homeward bound after spending two days trapped with a corpse and a grieving widow. What the grieving widow felt, we cannot know. There was, at this time, no possible reason to suspect foul play, and therefore there was no immediate police search of the house. Because of the amount of time that had passed between Dr. Fox’s death and the ‘discovery’ of his body, however, and the need to determine an official cause of death, a coroner’s inquest was ordered. Grace Fox described the actions she had taken on discovering that her husband was suffering a heart attack. The medical evidence was presented, and the pathologist who carried out the perfunctory post-mortem noted that Dr. Fox had, indeed, died of natural causes – of a myocardial infarction – and the certificate of death was duly registered to that effect. The inquest was adjourned, the loss of the doctor was mourned by the whole community, and the funeral was planned for Friday, 9th January. Grace’s sister Felicity and her husband Alfred drove up to Kilnsgate as soon as they could after hearing of Ernest Fox’s death. That should have been the end of the matter. However, on 8th January, the local superintendent of CID, Kenneth Dettering, received a disturbing message from one Mrs. Patricia Compton, who ran a boarding house in Leyburn, to the effect that Grace Fox had been ‘carrying on’ there with a local artist and odd-job man by the name of Samuel Porter, that Mr. Porter was, in her own words, ‘nobbut a boy’, and that she had overheard the two of them in her guests’ lounge planning to rid themselves of Mrs. Fox’s husband by poison and run away together. Samuel Porter was in financial distress, of course, and without access to Ernest Fox’s money, the two lovers would soon have found themselves in a pretty pass. And Grace Fox was known to have rather extravagant and expensive tastes. She might want to run off with a younger man, Detective Superintendent Dettering concluded, but she would want to do it with her husband’s money. On making discreet enquiries in the area, Detective Superintendent Dettering learned from some of the local shopkeepers and innkeepers that Grace Fox most certainly had been seen with the Porter boy in Leyburn that day, and that they had also been seen together in other places. He also learned of the new job prospect to which Dr. Fox had alluded at the New Year’s dinner, which would take not only the good doctor, but also his wife Grace, away from Richmond and, more important, away from Grace’s lover Samuel Porter. Suspecting that this threat of separation was the final straw for Grace Fox, Detective Superintendent Dettering immediately informed the coroner of his suspicions, and after a brief legal skirmish, the funeral was postponed, a second post-mortem was ordered, the inquest reconvened and a police investigation into the death, now termed ‘suspicious’, was ordered to commence immediately.

October 2010

After coffee and rich chocolate desserts, Sam brushed aside all my offers to pay and asked me whether I would care to join him for a nightcap back at his apartment. It was still early, not much past ten, and a very pleasant evening for strolling the boulevards of Paris, so I said I would be happy to do so.

We walked up the narrow Rue Delambre, past the closed poissonerie , where you could still catch a whiff of the day’s deliveries on the wet pavement. Sam wore a panama hat and carried a stick with a lion’s-head handle, which he used more as a prop than as a necessary aid to walking. He walked slowly, but with a straight back, and without any noticeable shortness of breath. We waited for the lights to change at the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, by the dark cemetery.

‘This may sound like an odd question,’ I said, ‘but was anything bothering Grace when you last saw her? Did she seem upset, worried, unusually depressed, anything on her mind?’

‘Not when I last saw her,’ said Sam. ‘But you have to remember, that was three weeks before her husband’s death, and our relationship wasn’t like that. We lived in our own world, a fantasy world, if you like. Grace didn’t tell me about her domestic problems, if she had any. Most of the time I didn’t really know what she was thinking. She loved art, music, books, and that’s what we talked about when we weren’t making love. We cared nothing for money and the material world. For Grace, I think, our relationship was an escape, time out of time. She would have tired of me before long, I’m certain. There was a restlessness to her nature. I couldn’t fathom her, didn’t know what she was searching for.’

‘Was she religious?’

‘I wouldn’t say so. Certainly not in the ordinary way. She said she’d lost her faith, though she never amplified on why, but I think it was something she still struggled with. I think she was a deeply spiritual person. You know, with some people, you think they can go either way, become complete atheists or Catholic converts. Grace liked Graham Greene. He was one of her favourite novelists. That tells you something about her, I think.’

‘Greene was a Catholic convert.’

‘Yes, but it always seemed a bit of a struggle for him. Grace went to church for the sake of appearances. Most people of her social standing did attend back then. But she probably thought more about God than many who professed to be believers. The only thing that made church bearable for her was the music. She sang in the choir and played organ from time to time. She loved Bach and Handel. I mean, I’m an atheist, but it doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate Michelangelo or Giotto.’

‘Did she never talk about her problems or her feelings about her husband?’

‘Oh, she told me about the separate rooms. But that was because I got jealous and started telling her how I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else touching her, making love to her, especially him. She rushed to assure me that nobody did, not even her husband. And she mentioned her little day-to-day problems now and then, but she never overburdened me with them. They weren’t part of our relationship. I wasn’t there to comfort her over Randolph’s scraped knee or his getting into trouble at school, that sort of thing. She was quiet sometimes, distracted, even moody, but mostly, as I said, we inhabited a kind of idealised, romantic world. Other people didn’t exist for us – until one burst into our haven with a vengeance. It was a very fragile, rarefied sort of affair. No, she didn’t say anything else about how her husband treated her. I only inferred his coldness and cruelty from certain moods she had and things she alluded to.’

‘If you loved each other so much and didn’t care about money, why didn’t Grace just divorce Ernest and the two of you run away together? Surely people did that, even back in the fifties?’

‘Oh, yes, of course they did. Sometimes. But it was more difficult and had far more stigma attached. Ernest Fox wouldn’t have allowed it, for a start. I couldn’t imagine a man like him accusing his wife of adultery and being branded a cuckold in public. People like him swept these things under the carpet, came to some sort of arrangement, carried on with their private cruelties and presented a civilised veneer to the world. He’s the kind of man who would have dragged her back home if she dared to desert him, just to prove his power.’

‘From what I can gather, though, Grace had always been a bit of a rebel, headstrong, a bit unconventional, wasn’t she? She rode a motorbike, for one thing. That must have been unusual back then?’

Sam regarded me with a sad smile. ‘The Vincent. Yes. It was a bit of an affectation, really. She learned to ride during the war and found she quite enjoyed it. But that hardly meant she was the kind of woman who’d just abandon her husband and child, not to mention the status and comforts of her life. She wasn’t that much of a rebel. Oh, we might have done it eventually, run away, had the relationship lasted, but we didn’t, and then it was too late. If anyone overheard us saying anything, it would have been indulging in fantasies about running away together. But whatever we felt in each other’s company, perhaps we both knew, when we were apart, that it wasn’t going to happen. That we didn’t have the courage, or whatever it took. Sometimes dreamers are only dreamers. And there was the child, don’t forget. She wouldn’t have abandoned Randolph to Ernest, and we could hardly have taken him with us. There was no room for a child in our fantasy world. God knows, Ernest didn’t particularly like the boy, but if we had taken Randolph, he would have hunted us to the ends of the earth to get back his rightful heir.’

The lights changed and we crossed to the Rue de la Gaite and carried on towards the Rue Froidevaux, off which Sam’s narrow street ran. There were plenty of people sitting out at the cafes and bistros, and passing one place, I actually caught a whiff of Gauloises, which took me back to school days. We used to buy all kinds of exotic cigarettes in a little tobacconist on Boar Lane, in Leeds city centre – Sobranie Cocktails, which came in different pastel colours and had gold filters, Sobranie Black Russians, with the long black tube, the oval Passing Cloud, Pall Mall and Peter Stuyvesant from America, along with Camel, which we believed were made of genuine camel dung, and from France, Disque Bleu, those yellow Gitanes, and Gauloises. Most of them tasted awful and made us cough, but we persisted, thinking ourselves sophisticated.

‘How did you meet?’ I asked, as we approached the tenement building.

Sam flashed me a smile. ‘At a local artists’ exhibition in the indoor market in summer. It was 19 July, I remember, the day the Olympics started in Helsinki. There’d been all that fuss about the Russians coming back in.’

‘And Grace?’

‘She was just browsing around the exhibits. I thought she looked stunning. If you’d only seen her…’ He shook his head. ‘“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety”. Age just didn’t come into it. It was a warm day, and she was wearing a yellow summer frock and a wide-brimmed hat with a matching band and a feather in it. You might think it odd, but one of the first things I noticed was her feet. She was wearing light, high-heeled Italian sandals, and you didn’t see them very often in Richmond. Very elegant ankles, she had, and a fine arch.’

‘The artist’s eye?’ I remarked.

He shot me a wicked grin. ‘Exactly.’ The twinkle was still in his eye, all these years later. ‘She also carried a fan with an oriental design, which she used to swish the humid air about now and then. A bit affected, but attractive, nonetheless. Anyway, we got talking about one of the paintings she was thinking of buying for her sewing room, a rather anaemic watercolour of Easby Abbey, I thought, and I was trying to steer her towards buying one of mine. I needed the money. In the end, she realised what I was up to and laughed.’

‘Did she buy it?’

‘Yes. We went for a cup of tea in the market square, all perfectly innocent, you understand. Like I said before, I used to fiddle about with cars and mechanical stuff a lot back then, too, made a bit of money at it. She said she had a Vincent she was having a bit of a problem with, and I said I’d have a look at it. I asked if I could sketch her portrait in return. She knew quite a lot about art, music and poetry. She was a fan of the Pre-Raphaelites, whom I thought represented a sort of overblown eroticism. We disagreed, argued, but it didn’t matter. That’s how it all started. I was smitten from the beginning.’

‘And Grace?’

‘I rather like to believe I amused her. You have to remember, we were both very shy. This sort of thing was new to both of us.’

‘She told you that?’

‘That she hadn’t had any other lovers since her marriage? Yes. I was very jealous. I’m sure I questioned her relentlessly. She did tell me that an officer kissed her once, during the war, but that was all.’

‘So why then? Why you?’

Sam paused and stared into space. ‘God only knows. She was bored, unhappy. She’d been living a lie for too long.’ He shrugged.

‘The painting she bought?’ I asked. ‘Do you remember what it was?’

‘Do I remember? How could I forget? It was an oil painting of the lime kiln opposite Kilnsgate House. She hung it over the fireplace in one of the upstairs rooms, at the back. That was her room. She used it for sewing and reading and getting away from her husband for a bit of peace and quiet, and she had a lovely antique roll-top walnut escritoire where she used to sit and write her letters. She recognised the view immediately, of course, and we both thought it odd that I’d been out there several times making preparatory sketches and she hadn’t seen me. You usually do notice strangers out Kilnsgarthdale way.’

‘It’s still there,’ I said. ‘The painting. I like it.’ What Sam had just said excited me in a way I couldn’t explain. It was my study now, Grace’s old sewing room. In a way, it had chosen me. Sam’s painting of the lime kiln still hung on the wall, the chair where she had sat reading or sewing into the small hours still stood near by, the roll-top escritoire where she had written her letters and dealt with household matters was now my work desk.

‘Thank you,’ said Sam.

‘Did you ever see the family portrait at Kilnsgate, in the vestibule?’

Sam made a face. ‘Oh, my God, yes. Vivian Mountjoy, an old pal of Ernest Fox’s from the golf club. Perfectly dreadful, isn’t it?’

‘I think the artist caught Grace’s inner turmoil quite well.’

Sam gave me a stern look.

‘What about the boy, Randolph?’ I asked, sensing that it was probably a good idea to change the subject. ‘Didn’t he get in the way?’

‘He was away with some relatives in Devon for the summer holidays. Seaside. Then, in the autumn, he went back to boarding school.’

We arrived at the flat, and I must confess that the stairs gave me more trouble than they did Sam, though his knees seemed to be giving him a bit of gyp. He grinned at me through his pain and said, ‘I’ve been thinking of moving for years, but I probably never will. It’s too much trouble. I’ve acquired far too many possessions. Besides, I’d never be able to afford anywhere as grand as this now. They’ll probably have to carry me out in a box.’

He led me through to the living room and poured us both a generous measure of Armagnac, before flopping down in a well-worn armchair. I noticed a slight sheen of sweat on his brow. He lit a small cigar, the first I had seen him smoke. ‘Another little indulgence,’ he said. ‘But only after dinner, and only the one.’

‘It was an excellent meal,’ I said, raising my glass. ‘Thank you.’

‘My pleasure. As I said, I don’t get many English visitors these days. How are things in old Blighty?’

‘Same as ever. The taxes are too high and the standard of living is miserable. Cutbacks all over the place. I understand you still travel there quite often?’

‘For sales and exhibitions sometimes. But I tend to live a life of luxury when I’m there. Nice hotels, gentlemen’s clubs, high-priced escorts, expensive restaurants. It’s not the same as actually being part of the fabric of life, the way I used to be, paying taxes and worrying about bills and all that. Not exactly grass roots.’

‘Well, you still wouldn’t find too much fancy stuff in Richmond,’ I said. ‘For that, they tell me, you have to go to Northallerton or Harrogate.’

‘Some things never change. Grace used to love going shopping in Harrogate.’

‘What did you do after the trial?’

Sam paused before answering. ‘Nothing. Not for a while. I stayed on at the flat in town at first, but people threw stones at the windows and scrawled obscenities on the door, so the landlord chucked me out. I couldn’t get any work. I went back to live with my parents for a while, up at the farm. They didn’t approve of what I’d done, of course, but they were good to me. I suppose it’s true that home is the place they always have to take you in. I still hoped there’d be a reprieve or something, that it would all turn out to be just a bad dream.’

‘Did all the townspeople turn against you?’

‘No. Not all. Some offered sympathy, some pitied me, and some pretended nothing had ever happened. Wilf always stuck by me, I’ll give him that.’

‘Did you go to Armley?’

‘Once. Just to see it. I knew where it was, of course. My uncle lived in Wortley. I just stood outside, next to the school, and stared up. It was a forbidding building, like some dank medieval fortress.’

‘It still is,’ I said, ‘though there are modern additions now.’

‘I didn’t want to be anywhere near there, when they… you understand? Call me a coward if you like, but I simply couldn’t face it. I moved to London, then travelled around the Continent for a couple of years, then I came here in the summer of 1956. Grace wrote me a very nice letter just before she died. A bit stiff, perhaps, a bit formal, but considering the circumstances, she was hardly going to pour out her soul. Still, she remained affectionate and tender to the end.’

‘What did she say?’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Now, that I’m not going to tell you!’

‘Fair enough.’

He gazed at me for a moment as if considering something, then got slowly to his feet. ‘Come with me,’ he said.

I followed Sam down the hall, then he turned left along another corridor. Just how large was this apartment? I wondered. After another turn, we arrived at a door, which he opened, turning on the light and standing aside to let me enter. ‘Sorry it’s so untidy,’ he said.

It wasn’t really untidy, just cluttered, and there wasn’t a great deal of space to move around. We were standing in a small room, not much more than a storage area, really. Several shelves were piled high with sketchbooks, and stacks of canvases leaned against the walls. He searched through a heap on one of the shelves and pulled out a large, nicely bound sketchbook and handed it to me. I opened the pages. Inside, I found sketch after sketch of the same beautiful woman I had seen on the wall at Kilnsgate. I felt my breath catch in my throat. For one absurd moment, the image of the reflection in the wardrobe mirror also flashed across my mind. It was foolish, I told myself. I hadn’t seen the figure clearly enough to recognise her. My imagination was playing tricks on me again.

‘Grace,’ I said.

Sam nodded.

Some were nudes. I could see the firmness of her breasts, the little mole just over her heart and another beside her navel, the triangle of hair between her legs rendered like a mysterious dark mist. Her tummy was slightly rounded, her thighs slim, tapering down to shapely calves, exquisite ankles and small, delicate feet. Though her skin was pale, it wasn’t without blemishes, discoloured patches and perhaps rather more moles than you would expect.

Some of the sketches were close-ups of various parts of her anatomy, a hand, an arm, a torso, and some were portraits, head and shoulders. There was a challenge in her gaze, her wide mouth, lips slightly parted, her big dark eyes narrowed as if she were squinting to see something beyond the artist, the tumbling black waves of her hair falling over her straight shoulders. Some of the sketches showed her lying on her back, hands behind her head with her eyes closed, a serene expression on her face, dozing in a field of grass and wild flowers, some close up, others with cliffs and sea in the background.

I must have been holding my breath as I looked at them, for I felt a sudden need for air. I turned to the door.

‘There’s more,’ Sam said.

He reached into a stack of canvases and handed over the first one. It was an oil painting of a pose from one of the sketches, in which Grace reclined not unlike Goya’s Nude Maja on a chaise longue. It was a good painting, I thought, trying to be objective, the lines flowed well, curves and loops, the swell of her hips, the draped fabric, the light and shade were all evocative, mysterious, hinting at pleasure enjoyed, or yet to come.

Another canvas showed her head and shoulders from behind against a neutral background, emphasising the contrast of her dark tresses against the pale skin of her long neck and symmetrical shoulders. It reminded me of a Dali painting I had seen in St Petersburg, Florida, once.

Another showed her full face, head slightly inclined. She was in profile, almost pouting, sad or distracted, absorbed elsewhere. One of the dark moods, perhaps, that Sam had spoken of.

There were more: Grace in a meadow kneeling to pick a flower, Grace naked on a bed looking playful and mischievous, Grace dipping her hand in the sea water, its impressionist surface sparkling like diamonds into the distance. Grace against a dark window, the moon outside casting a pale ghostly light on one side of her face.

One thing they all had in common was that when you looked at her, you never thought of age. Later, I calculated that she must have been close to forty when they were painted, but it didn’t show. There was no doubt that Sam had idealised her image and projected his own desire into his creations, but they gave me a definite, palpable sense of Grace, something I had been unable to grasp before, when I was chasing after whispers, searching for the motif, the theme, or the telling detail that would bring her to life. And here it was, in Sam Porter’s storeroom. A cascade of images of Grace, with nothing hidden but her soul, though I even fancied I could glimpse that in certain expressions, certain poses, certain turns of the head and angles of the neck. I felt intoxicated by her, dizzy, entranced, under her spell.

Sam studied my reaction. ‘Still rate Vivian Mountjoy?’ he asked.

I could only shake my head in wonder. ‘Did the police see these?’ I asked, my mouth dry.

‘Good Lord, no! Can you imagine their reaction? Philistines. That would certainly have added fuel to the fire.’

‘But surely they searched your flat?’

‘My flat was the size of a water closet. I did most of my painting in Staithes, in a studio a local group of artists let me share. They were all older than me, but they sort of took me under their wing. They had connections with the Staithes Group, quite collectible these days, and I picked up a bit of the Impressionist influence from them. Have you heard of Laura Knight?’

‘I’m afraid not. My modern art isn’t quite up to scratch.’

‘She was one of the few surviving members at the time. Formidable woman. Must have been about seventy-five around then, but you wouldn’t have known it. And the things she’d seen. She was the official war painter at the Nuremberg trials, you know. That’s when she did “The Dock, Nuremberg”, one of her most famous works. She wasn’t up at Staithes often, but the times we met she and Grace got along like a house on fire, spent hours together gabbing away, God knows what about. I’ve never seen Grace so animated as those times.’

‘Did you know any of her other female friends?’

‘I don’t think she really had any. Acquaintances, yes, from the various societies she belonged to, and from other social activities, but not close friends.’

‘Didn’t she keep in touch with anyone from the war?’

‘She mentioned a woman called Dorothy once or twice. They might have seen one another now and then. But other than that… no, I don’t think she did.’

‘I thought I recognised the east coast in some of the backgrounds.’

‘Very perceptive of you, when the foreground’s so absorbing.’

‘So you kept them at your studio?’

‘One of the older artists, Len, let me use his lock-up, and I kept all my nudes of Grace there. The police didn’t search the Staithes studio, but even if they had, they wouldn’t have found them. They would have had no reason to search Len’s property.’

‘When did you paint them?’ I asked, as Sam turned out the light and we made our way back to the living room.

‘In the summer and autumn of 1952, when we were first together. As you can see, they’re mostly derivative, the poses and styles, at least. There was nothing derivative about Grace’s beauty. She wasn’t perfect. Perfection is so boring. You probably noticed the flaws on her skin. She must have suffered badly from the sun at one time. But I couldn’t imagine anyone more beautiful. She deserved much better than I could ever do. I’ve never… since. I haven’t been able to, even from the sketches, haven’t wanted to try. I study them sometimes, but not so often as I used to do. I sometimes wonder what my executors will make of them when I’m dead.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘for allowing me to see them.’

Sam grunted, sat down and took a long sip of Armagnac. ‘You’re the first person I’ve ever shown them to since they were painted,’ he said. ‘I don’t even know why I did.’

‘You never thought of exhibiting them, or selling any?’

‘Never.’

He seemed weary now, pale and spent, as if it had all been too much for him: the day, me, dinner, our conversation, the paintings, his memories.

I was just about to take my leave when he looked at me with a desolate, almost frightened, expression on his face and said in a trembling voice, ‘Christ, she was so beautiful. So alive. So alive. Please go now, Chris. I’m sorry… I…’ He waved his hand. ‘It’s unbearable. I’m so tired. Please just go.’

I went.