Murderers and Other Friends Read online

  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.

  My father knew about Turville because a friend of his, a stained-glass artist, lived there over a butcher’s shop. At the end of the war my first wife lived in the same cottage and I used to walk across the fields to visit her. The pub was then kept by a fat, winking, moustached rogue who could obtain anything for anybody and, in the time of rationing, had petrol on draught behind the saloon bar. Rationing also caused the death of the couple who kept the sweetshop. They couldn’t understand the points system, which regulated the sale of chocol
ate bars and gob-stoppers to children, and were reduced to such a state of despair by this that a suicide pact seemed the only way out. The husband shot his wife and then himself, and the shop never reopened.

  Later the village school was also condemned to death. Edicts went out from a local council closing a number of schools, inflicting long, exhausting bus journeys on the children and robbing the villages of youth and vitality. One of the last cases I did as a barrister was a fight to keep our village school open. The judge was charming, the vicar an anxious supporter; good sense and justice were on our side but bureaucracy triumphed. For many years the school was an empty shell, and the voices of children were no longer heard on the green. This, it transpired, was exactly how many of the wealthier inhabitants, who had moved to the country after the school’s death, wanted it to be.

  The school building belongs to the church, and the local clergymen thought it should be bought from the diocese and turned into a place where inner-city children might come for holidays, discover that bacon doesn’t come from pink packages in Sainsbury’s and something more of life and death in the countryside. What was suggested was that about a dozen primary school children should visit at a time with four adult minders. The bishop thought it an excellent idea, others of the clergy were enthusiastic; but this modest proposal, apparently so harmless and admirable, divided the village and the surrounding countryside more bitterly than anything since ship money and the Battle of Chalgrove Field.

  Strangely it was the Cavaliers, some actors and certain barristers, together with older inhabitants who had pleasant memories of the school when it was alive, who favoured the plan. The Puritans from the city, perhaps anxious about the commercial value of their properties, were rigidly opposed to it and were deeply shocked when the vicar suggested that their views were not entirely consistent with Christian charity. Some of them had, after all, agreed to read the lessons in church.

  We heard, by chance, of a character called Brother Jonathan who lived in the West Country and had run a similar holiday home for inner-city children. He had grown too old to continue running it and the money he had collected might, by the grace of God and the Charity Commissioners, be transferred to our school. Full of hope we found Brother Jonathan in his priory, which also served as the shop and post office in a West Country village. Part of the premises sold cornflakes, cheese, ham and postage stamps; the other represented the priory and had been consecrated. There the two monks of an Anglican order, Brother Jonathan and Brother John, who had periods of absence as a part-time schizophrene, conducted services, administered their charity and, judging by the smell which hung about the place, cooked a good deal of cabbage.

  Brother Jonathan was one of six children of a London docker. He was a big man with strong hands and considerable charm. He’d had success with all sorts of people who needed help to get off drugs. The world also missed a talented tycoon when he took his vow of poverty, for he had managed to acquire a number of properties for his trust. He told us that holiday homes for children ran perfectly smoothly so far as the children were concerned, but you had to watch the adult minders carefully.

  He seemed to be entirely in favour of transferring his funds to buy and run the Turville school for a similar purpose. So we were still optimistic when we left Brother Jonathan, but we had underestimated the Ironsides of the opposition. They fought a long and laborious campaign, voicing their objections to any charity which might have helped us; dropping, we suspected, a word or two in the ears of persons close to the Charity Commissioners. Brother Jonathan died unexpectedly and then Brother John died also. The West Country post office and village shop was bereft of monks. Our schemes were not approved and our troops were disconsolate. Paul had a number of inner-city children to stay in his vicarage; they required endless bowls of cereal and seemed most at home in the environment of the Wycombe supermarket, but they caused no disturbance at all.

  I suppose there may still be some hope, but it seems likely that the diocese will sell the school and it will be turned into a desirable residence for a stockbroker or a person in public relations. There will be no sound of children to disturb the contemplation of the town dweller who, moving to the countryside, takes out summonses to stop cocks crowing, sheep baaing or guns being let off to scare birds off the crops. A heavy blanket of smothering silence will now fall upon our landscape, where the sounds of living have come to be seen as an intolerable nuisance.

  Chapter 24

  In the grimmest days of tyranny, Jaraslova Moserova used to translate my books into Czech. She is small, bright-eyed, with a bell of grey hair and a face on which life and history have drawn lines which she shows as honourable scars. Apart from being a translator, she is a doctor who specialized in burns and an artist who drew illustrations for Rumpole.

  During the bad old days she visited England for a medical conference. We drove round the village churches and pubs where I live and she was overcome by the sight of so much freedom. The regime she had to return to was unspeakably stupid, brutal and oppressive. She felt she was going back into a long tunnel with no particular sign of life at the end of it. At the end of our days together she was near to tears. Would we come to visit her in Prague? Would I telephone from time to time just to cheer her up? After a number of such calls I telephoned Jara to say that we were at last coming to Prague to visit her.

  Czechoslovakia’s bloodless, velvet revolution had taken place and Vaclav Havel had been transformed from prisoner to President. For Jara freedom was no longer a tourist attraction to be found in Henley-on-Thames. Yet her voice still sounded tragic as she said, ‘That is so sad.’

  ‘Jara, why is it sad?’

  ‘I shall not be here. I shall be in Australia.’

  ‘What are you going to be doing in Australia?’

  She answered as though it were a minor inconvenience. ‘As a matter of fact I have just been made our ambassador.’

  ‘I thought for a long time before I accepted,’ she said when we met for breakfast in a London airport hotel as she was about to step into the first-class cabin of the BA flight to Sydney. ‘I had to be careful before the revolution because of my job at the hospital. When the change came I stood as a deputy in the countryside, and I won the election. Then I was in the council and Mr Havel asked me to go to Australia.’

  Her husband, a lawyer who had been reduced to painting bridges by the Communists, smiled at her proudly as they dissected their kippers. In Canberra, as an ambassador’s spouse, he would have to sit with the Middle-Eastern wives drinking coffee and talking about shopping while his wife discussed affairs of state with their husbands. I said goodbye to Jara and saw her small figure disappear through the revolving hotel doors. At least the victory of the West had one indisputably good result. Her Excellency Jaraslova Moserova was off to represent her country in the southern hemisphere.

  In Prague Jara’s sister Boska, a gynaecologist who gets about 15p an hour for doing hysterectomies and Caesarian sections on the night-shift, made us welcome. She drove us through the eighteenth-century squares which look like sets for Don Giovanni, immaculately kept. ‘These houses are all lived in by ordinary families paying controlled rents,’ she told us. ‘Now they’re going to be given back to people who are living abroad and owned them long ago, before the war. I really don’t know what will happen. Some of them will be pulled down to build hotels, and we don't want that.’ We were on the way to call on Dr Ota Motelj, the chief judge of the Supreme Court, who was, so Boska told us, a great man for the ladies. She also told us that her son, a film editor who had been kept busy on Czech films that won international prizes, was now unemployed as no one had any money to put into films or plays. The National Theatre was empty and everyone stayed at home to watch American television. We passed an area of dark trees and bushes near the Central Station. ‘We call that Sherwood Forest,’ Boska said, ‘because it’s where the outlaws rob the men and rape the girls.’

  The chief judge sat at the head of a long table where all the
judges meet and confer. He was short, square-headed, with a deep, gentle voice, and he smoked with the energy and enthusiasm of someone who has to spend many hours in court, deprived of cigarettes. Outside was the place where the Communists carried out executions. Not far away is the street where a woman dissident was hanged; it now contains one of Prague’s first sex shops. Dr Motelj talked of what seems to me a complete nightmare, the life of a lawyer under a long reign of terror.

  ‘The worst time was just after the Communists took over,’ he said, ‘when they got rid of proper judges and the cases were decided by workers’ committees. If you weren’t one of the workers you had no hope at all, but if you were, you were bound to win. Things got a little better after a while, but now we have to get rid of a lot of old Communist judges. We are in desperate need of judges. Lawyers can earn about three times as much as judges now, so no one wants to take on the job.’ I discovered that a Czech judge earns the equivalent of £250 a month, and I told Dr Motelj that an English High Court judge makes more than £6,000 a month. ‘I’m glad my judges cannot read English,’ he said. ‘I would not like them to know that.’

  After a morning in the law courts he drove us, at an alarming speed, to lunch. Menus are not enormously varied in Prague and conversations with waiters start with the simple question, ‘Pork meat or beef meat?’ The chief judge told us his recent trip to Canada had been the first time he had ever been outside Czechoslovakia. ‘All the time the Communists were in power they said that, because I had defended in spy trials, I couldn’t go abroad in case I betrayed the official secrets.’ So the lawyer who risked his life in defending dissidents became a prisoner of the state. Then he thought of happier times in Ottawa. ‘I told them that in Prague we only had one woman Supreme Court judge, and she’s not even beautiful! The newspapers said that I was a sexist. I am very proud of that. Does it mean that they found me sexy?’