Fault in the Structure

CHAPTER 2

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Those who are wise in their own conceit

The garden seemed hardly the right setting for the conversation which was taking place in it. Its tranquillity and its age-old peacefulness were at odds with the matter which was being discussed. Its smooth green lawn was bordered by a broad, moss-grown path and between the path and that part of the old city wall which formed a bastion between the college and a busy street there were flower-beds in their summer colours of red, yellow, white, blue, purple, cream and pink. Trees and shrubs made a background to all this variety of tints and hues and, as though to add a touch of romance to the scene, there was a long flight of stone steps which led up from a scent-filled rose-bed to the top of the crenellated wall. It served as a reminder, perhaps, of old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago, but it was overgrown with lichen now, and never used.

Dividing the lawn into two unequal parts was the famous lime walk. Between its two rows of trees whose pale flowers hung in clusters, filling the air with their elusive fragrance, the two men strolled up and down.

Beyond the lime walk a retaining dry-stone wall separated the lawn from the terrace and from another riotous pageant of summer flowers; this second mass of colour was thrown into masterly assertiveness by the long façade of the fifteenth-century College buildings which acted as its background and its foil.

This long line of pointed gables which made up the west front of the College was broken in the middle by a bold and massive tower which formed part of the Warden’s lodging, and it was the Warden himself who was pacing up and down between the rows of lime trees with his guest, the pair so much engrossed in their conversation that the garden, as such, went unnoticed and, so far as one of them was concerned, brightness fell from the air and no birds sang.

‘So there it is,’ he said at last. ‘Old Sir Anthony will have to be told, I suppose, and what we are to do if a scandal of magnitude is to be avoided, I cannot think. I suppose you have no suggestion to offer?’

If some arrangement could be made – if somebody, for instance, was willing to guarantee the sum involved – could Lawrence pay back the money by instalments?’

‘I know of nobody who would be prepared to offer such security. My own fortune falls short of forty thousand pounds by a considerable margin and in any case I would not be willing to reduce my sister and her daughter to penury on Lawrence’s account. He does not deserve it. It is not, either, as though he were my son. He is not even, strictly speaking, my nephew.’

‘He is not in the hands of the police?’

‘It is only a matter of time, and a short time at that. I have managed to persuade the auditors to keep their findings to themselves for a few days, but they were very unwilling to allow us even that much grace.’

‘Does Lawrence say why he had such need of the money?’

‘He tells me nothing except to deny the charge in its entirety.’

‘Has he ever been in trouble before?’

‘Not in trouble of this magnitude, and not since his undergraduate days. At that time there were occasional debts to be settled and two or three jilted shopgirls had to be compensated. Fortunately he had seen to it that he was not a student here, and as Warden of Wayneflete I was not at all anxious to have him bring his profligate habits to this University, let alone to my own College, so we were in agreement so far as that was concerned.’

‘Is it possible that he is being blackmailed? You say you have settled debts for him before, so one assumes that he would have mentioned the fact if it was simply that he owed the money to someone – although, to a young man on a fixed salary plus, as I understand it, a small annuity, forty thousand pounds must seem a pretty considerable sum, even in these days.’

‘Considerable enough for him to know I could not replace it,’ said the Warden grimly.

‘I wonder whether you would like me to have a word with him?’ suggested Sir Ferdinand Lestrange.

‘I was hoping that you would offer to do so. Your legal training may enable you to elicit something from him which he has not confided to me. I feel that if only we knew why he needed the money so badly, there might still be some way of helping him cope with this dreadful situation. He is staying in College for the present. You will find him in the Senior Commonroom.’

‘From which I excused myself after dinner, as you had suggested this talk. I will return there.’

The Senior Commonroom, like the west front of the College buildings, belonged to another century. It was part of the Tudor wing and its principal features were the linenfold panelling of its walls, a magnificent fireplace and a ceiling heavily plastered with meaningless arabesques and with oval lozenges incorporating the coats of arms of the various benefactors to the College.

Surprisingly, the College bore the name of the founder of Magdalen College, Oxford. Above the fireplace were carved the mitre and the arms of Bishop William Wayneflete and on the ceiling in the largest of the ovals were ‘in lozengy ermine and sable a chief sable with three lilies therein’ the chaste ecclesiastical bearings of the late fifteenth-century prelate, one-time headmaster of Winchester College and, later, the Provost of Eton before he became exalted to the See of Winchester.

In front of the fireplace stood Lestrange’s quarry. Thaddeus Edison Lawrence, as Swinburne now called himself, was a tall, thin man of thirty-two. His untidy, dark hair was worn collar-length, and he had large hands which he was using freely to emphasise his remarks to his only companion, an elderly, totally deaf don named Bagg. Lawrence had a peevish, sensual, melancholy face which reminded himself of Lord Byron and others of a disgruntled although rather handsome camel.

As soon as he saw Lestrange enter the room he broke off what he was saying, raised his eyebrows and stared distastefully at the intruder. Lestrange, however, ignored him and joined the Dean and the Bursar, who had been arguing a point of law and who seized upon Lestrange to give a verdict.

Finding that the mountain was in no hurry to come to Mahomet, Lawrence strolled over to the group of three, listened to the argument without joining in it, and then said to Lestrange, ‘I saw you walking in the garden with my uncle.’ His voice was not cordial.

‘Yes.’ The College dignitaries moved away, so, for the moment, the two men were alone. ‘I should be glad of a word with you.’

Lawrence led the way to the rooms which had been allotted to him during his stay in College. Here he sported his oak and then produced whisky.

‘Sit down,’ he said ungraciously, ‘and if you intend to question me, please make the catechism short.’

‘Very well, I’ll be brief to the point of brutality. I suppose you’re being blackmailed,’ said Lestrange.

The other was so surprised that he almost dropped the decanter.

‘Why on earth should you suppose that?’ he demanded.

‘It seems obvious, my poor chap. Look, Lawrence, come clean and I’ll see what I can do to help you. I owe that much to your uncle.’

‘Nobody can help me. I’m supposed to have embezzled forty thousand pounds and haven’t one chance in ten million of being able to prove that I did nothing of the sort. The auditors think they know better.’

‘Forty thousand is not such a vast sum. Relax and tell me the whole story. It is blackmail, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but not for forty thousand pounds. That is ridiculous,’ said Lawrence, after a pause.

‘You didn’t think of telling the blackmailer to go to hell and to spill the beans and be damned?’

‘I couldn’t.’ He hesitated and then resumed: ‘It’s a matter of a previous marriage. It would kill my wife if she knew. You see, I thought Coralie was dead when I married Margaret, but a few months ago she bobbed up again and is bleeding me of sums I can hardly afford in return for not exposing me.’

‘But if you had reason to think she was dead, you have a good case. I call to mind R. v. Tolson, where an almost similar set of circumstances arose. In that case, a woman named Martha Ann Tolson had good reason to believe, on the evidence of his elder brother, that her husband, a sailor in the merchant navy, had been lost at sea on a voyage to America. Some years after his presumed death she re-married, supposing herself to be a widow.

‘However, her first husband turned up again and her second marriage was held to be bigamous. As she was able to plead that she genuinely believed the sailor to be dead, she was not convicted. There was no mens rea, you see.’

‘What does that mean in law?’

‘In layman’s language it means that Martha Ann Tolson had not meant to commit a criminal act; in other words, when the act was committed it was committed in good faith. She had not a guilty mind. It seems to me that, if you truly believed your wife was dead when you married Margaret, you have a good defence and can have no reason to give in to blackmail.’

‘But Margaret would know that I had been married before I met her.’

‘Did you not tell her?’

‘No. I was not even divorced, you see.’

‘What steps did you take to make certain that your first wife was dead?’

‘Well, she wasn’t dead, was she?’

‘How long were you married to her before you parted?’ asked Lestrange, without commenting upon this equivocal answer.

‘Two years. I’ve been married to Margaret for seven, but there was an interval, of course.’

‘So it was how long since you had seen or spoken to your first wife?’

‘Nearly twelve years. I went north to take up an appointment when I left College and did not take her with me. She was hardly an asset in university circles. She is a chorus girl.’

‘Nearly twelve years? I suppose you are certain it was your first wife who turned up again?’

‘Oh, yes, I insisted on a second meeting to make sure, although I hadn’t any doubt the first time. We arranged to meet in a pub out on the Bicester road where I thought there was little chance of running into anybody I knew.’

‘And you recognised her again?’

‘Oh, yes, there was no doubt it was Coralie. I was in my second year at university when I married her, but she hadn’t changed a bit. She made herself very charming in her uneducated, low-class way and said she was down on her luck and asked me what I was prepared to do about it.’

‘How long did you live with her?’

‘I’ve never lived with her. I had rooms in College when I married her, and I could hardly take her there.’

‘So the marriage was never consummated.’

‘Oh, yes, it was. We used to meet secretly at her mother’s place when she wasn’t on tour.’

‘But you said you’d never lived with her.’

‘Oh, I see what you mean. I thought you referred to our setting up an establishment. We never did.’

‘Was there a child?’

‘I don’t know. After I’d done a bit of private coaching I got this job at a northern university and after a time – I forget how long – Coralie and I ceased to correspond. It began with me. I stopped answering her letters. All she did was ask for money. I sent her what I could, but she kept on pestering to join me. By that time I knew what a fool I’d been to marry her. We had nothing whatever in common and the tone of her letters became vulgar and abusive in the extreme.’

‘She never attempted to seek you out and challenge you face to face to acknowledge her as your wife?’

‘It was soon obvious that such was not her aim. All she wanted was money and for a time I was glad enough to send it so long as she kept away from me. Then I changed my digs without leaving a forwarding address. I was living out of my College – all the staff and students up there do – and in my next letter I did not give her my new address. I kept my eyes open after that, thinking that she would put in an appearance and renew her demands, but she didn’t, and very soon I thought I had found out why. A friend, an undergraduate who was in my confidence, wrote to me and told me to go back at the first opportunity and study the grave-stones in the town cemetery.

‘I realised what he was telling me, so on my next vacation I went back. I searched among the graves until I found the one I was looking for, the grave of Coralie St Malo.’

‘She wasn’t using your name, then?’

‘She’d stuck to her stage name. She’d been a chorus girl, as I said, and I expect she thought St Malo sounded better than Lawrence. At any rate, there the grave was, and mighty relieved I was to see it. Meanwhile I’d fallen in love with Margaret and, as I thought, I was free to marry her. My uncle was pleased with the match. Margaret is a junior don at Abbesses College, in this his own University, so he knew her. Naturally he knew nothing of Coralie. At least I’d had the sense to keep her dark.’

‘So you assumed that the happy ending was in sight when you married for the second time.’

‘Wouldn’t anyone? And then, clean out of the blue, I ran into Coralie in the town market here at the beginning of the Long Vacation. I had the shock of my life, I can assure you. I must simply have stood and gazed at her. She said, “Well, dearie, have you come back to keep me in the style to which I am not accustomed? I know all about your second marriage, you rat.” I managed to gargle out something to the effect that I thought she was dead and that I’d seen her grave. She laughed in a very nasty way. “That was my poor mum’s grave,” she said. “Her stage name was the same as mine. Ever been had, you two-timing Casanova? Well, you’ve done for yourself now, haven’t you? I suppose you’re prepared to pay me to keep my trap shut? Wouldn’t do you or the lady don much good to be labelled as bloody bigamists, would it? All right, my greatest lover of all time, I want my first instalment and I want it soon.” ’

‘And you met her again at the pub on the Bicester road?’

‘Yes, I hoped I could persuade her to call off her vendetta. However, as I said, she made herself very pleasant at first, but she stuck to this outrageous demand for what she was pleased to call alimony, although there had never been any question of divorce. She mentioned her marriage lines and said that they were in a safe place, but that she could and would produce them at any moment if I refused to pay up. I was scared out of my wits because I knew she meant what she said, so, in despair, I gave in. You see, she could prove that when I married Margaret it really was bigamy. Well, all that was bad enough and now, on top of it, comes this charge of embezzlement. It’s untrue, but I simply don’t know how to refute it.’

‘All right, Lawrence. For the sake of your uncle and his position in this my old College, I am prepared to guarantee you a long-term loan of forty thousand pounds, which will clear your name for the time being. I shall then go into the matter with your auditors. Who are they, by the way?’

‘Lestrange, Collins and Dobbs.’

‘My cousin Harry? Well, that’s a bit of luck for you, anyway. Once the money is repaid, I can fix Harry and ask for his discretion, so that nothing need be made public. That isn’t for your sake, but for Sir Anthony’s and the Warden’s. A stink of this nature wouldn’t do either of them any good. I shall need you to sign an undertaking to repay the money, of course, and with reasonable interest.’

‘There’s been some mistake, some ghastly mistake, Lestrange. I’m going to get another firm of auditors on the job.’

‘You would be very unwise to do that. I have influence with Harry, but none with any other firm if you have a second audit carried out.’

‘Oh, well, if you can get your cousin to stall for a bit, I suppose that will help. I’m going on holiday the week after next with old Sir Anthony, so I shan’t be on hand for a bit.’

‘Yes, it might be as well to get him out of the way while we settle things up and put you in the clear.’

‘And I suppose you expect me to thank you into the bargain!’

‘Oh, hardly! I feel I know you better than that,’ said Sir Ferdinand, going towards the door.