It
takes a split second to kill someone with a hammer. I had just seen it
happen. There could be no mistake: such force would crush any skull. It
was not what I had expected as I cycled slowly along the narrow country
lane out of a small Berkshire village. Two hundred feet above me the last
of the day's sunlight was glowing on the lush green of the long line of
escarpment running north through England. The Ridgeway was once one of
England's most ancient routes along the western edge of Salisbury Plain,
the plateau where stone circles of Stonehenge and of Avebury were built.
Some say they are both older than the Pyramids.
The darkness in this narrow lane was almost complete
and the lighted window had naturally attracted my attention. I would have
ignored it at any other time. The window was in the side of an old clapboard
building; one wall being at the very edge of the road. There had been
time only for a casual glance, but in it I found myself looking into an
almost empty workshop, is white painted walls reflecting the glare from
high in its ceiling. In it, as on a brightly lit stage, I had glimpsed
a small man in an old brown coat with his back to the window. In front
of him another seated figure was almost invisible. Only the back of the
head was clearly visible. But it was on the back of this head that I saw
him bring down his hammer. I even heard the thud of the impact. The window
was only one pane thick. It had been a killing blow.
The workshop was already fifteen feet behind me as I
braked gently to a halt in the centre of the road. It seemed a good idea
to make no outcry and no noise. Murder will out, so they say: but not
with no witnesses, no evidence. The village was completely silent behind
me. Clearly the old man believed he had been neither seen nor heard.
He could not have seen or heard me. He had been most
unfortunate. In any other fraction of a second I would have noticed nothing:
not the raised arm; the glint of steel; or the swift descent. The sound
of the impact - that alone - would have meant nothing to me. But I puzzled
now that the victim had made no movement: not even the automatic wince
at the other raising his hand. Evolution provides us with this reflex.
It is very hard to suppress it. But this could also mean that he - or
was it she - was unconscious already. Which could only also means that
this was possibly not been the first blow to that defenceless head.
I leant my bike carefully against the hedge beyond the
workshop's wall and walked back to the window - being sure to keep well
away from the loose gravel at the road's edge. The workshop itself was
to the left of the road on the very edge of the village, indeed virtually
beyond it; and what I called a village was really scarcely that: a few
small cottages and thatched pub. They were now all a hundred yards behind
me.
On my right there was possibly a much larger house behind
a higher wall, but there were no lights or sounds from there either. My
bike had no lights to betray me, and I had not seen or heard a car for
the past hour. But that the workshop's window was completely uncurtained
showed further how little traffic moved in these lanes. Yet to kill like
that, so careless of being seen, so suddenly, so crudely, and yet so deliberately:
this was surely evidence, not of a man lacking concern at being seen,
but of an outburst of anger, spite, jealousy - possibly revulsion - that
suddenly could be no longer contained.
Still out of sight from inside the room, I stopped to
decide what I to do. Whatever the reason for it, a fatal blow to the head,
is easily concealed, even in the home. A tragic slip, a deadly fall. But
this is even easier to arrange in the countryside, where there are walls,
gullies, high places and low, even rocks and cliffs. The problem is to
clean the murder site of evidence and then to move the body unseen to
a credible site for the supposed 'accident'. Then I realized that a short
distance behind me, just twenty yards from the workshop, a deep cutting
led a stream under the road. Its bridge had only a low stone parapet,
with an even lower iron rail, much bent by age, on top of that.
A perfect solution! A fall into the stream-bed - I had
heard the water gurgling over stones - would explain the injuries to the
head. The running water would wash away the blood from the shoulders and
the face. He had only to drag the body that distance in the night and
tip it into the water. Better would be to use a wheelbarrow, covering
the body with a sack - or with his old coat. All gardens have wheelbarrows.
Standing well back from the light that the room cast
on the road, I moved cautiously to one side to look in again. The old
man was now fidgeting with the body. He was hopping about and hitting
it repeatedly: no longer single heavy blows, but with what looked like
triumphant little swipes and taps. I saw now that he had a tarpaulin spread
out under his feet and - with increasing disgust - that he was now using
a chisel. Its cold grey blade glistened under the harsh light - which
also sparkled on its cutting edge.
Which should surely be dull - with blood! There should
be blood everywhere. Head wounds bleed heavily. There should be blood
on the tarp. Although I could still not see him fully, there should be
blood all over his front. There were lots of unspeakable little bits which
might be bone around his feet, and more were being scattered even now
by his continued evil pecking. But there was still no blood.
It was a sculpture. Dammit. The old man - his grey hair
was pulled smoothly back in an elegant pigtail - was working on a rough
head of stone on a high wooden stand. He continued to bash the head a
few more times; and then, either dissatisfied or impatient with the result,
laid his tools abruptly in a large wooden tray containing a number of
similar instruments, moved to his left, and was gone.
I felt a little disappointed - and yet, despite my superb
physical condition and knowledge of unarmed combat: "An' if all else
fails, sir, you bite orf 'is nose" - relieved to find that I would
not have to grapple with this nasty old man - who, judged by the disorder
of his workshop, had not cleaned his nose for some time - when a door
suddenly opened a short distance away in the wall to my left, and a fearlessly
upper-class Englishwoman's voice fearlessly inquired of the stranger peering
into her workshop from a dark country lane: "Wouldn't you like come
inside to see what I am doing: properly, that is?"
This is - or was - Miss Ulrica Fitzwilliam-Hyde. Being
so completely English - Norman-English, the Fitz suggests - it should
have been a puzzle how she came to have such a very German first name;
but I never asked her. It was much later in our acquaintance that I noticed
a scrap of dusty mirror on the wall opposite her workshop window which
allowed her to notice what was happening in the road behind her.
It was undoubtedly because of her first name that she
was universally known as Heidi, although this was spelt Hyde, as in her
original last name. She was married to a tall, thin, kindly chain-smoking
professor of archaeology called Seton Lloyd, and she was probably the
most completely happy person I have ever known. She was also a moderately
successful artist. Very moderately might be better. Most of her sculptures
were for churches. Some, I think, may have been given rather than commissioned.
I was once her model for a crucified figure.
Quite naturally, of course, I fell in love with her
as well, but since she was at least thirty years older than me, adored
her husband, and had three children of around my age, I don't think it
occurred to either of us that it had happened. I was sometimes warmly
hugged - but this was not important: Hyde hugged everyone whom she liked;
but I only once received from her what might be called a caress, and that
was for a special reason. I never showed Hyde - nor she, me - anything
but conventional affection, and perhaps because of this I did not realize
how much I had loved here until I learnt she had gone. I was in Ireland
then, and by the time I learnt of her final illness, her death, and then
all the other rituals of passing on, it was all over. She and her beloved
husband are buried together in the little churchyard another hundred yards
up the hill above the pub I have mentioned. I have visited them there
twice. I lost touch with the rest of the family completely.
It is the simplest explanation to say that Hyde became
my friend at once. I certainly felt the attraction even as she was showing
me - and chuckling - over her half-hewn sculpture together with the sketches
of how it was supposed to look in the end; and certainly I wanted her
as a friend. But the choice, of course, was hers. It was not just that
she had a family and a home whereas I was still a soldier living, in essence,
in a barracks a few miles away. There was also a serious difference in
our class.
The English, I have found - to my surprise - are not
more conscious of their class than others are. France has still an aristocracy,
and a very self-conscious aristocracy at that; so has Germany; and so
has Austria; and so has Spain - and so, indeed, has America, although
there it may be most vociferously denied. In all of these there is usually
a very lively awareness of which class division one can claim to belong
to and which one can claim not to belong to.
The very great difference between the English class
system and all the others is, simply, that the real English upper class
do not need to have money - they may indeed have little - but they do
need to own - or to have owned - land.
But just owning land is, of course, not enough. Their
land will have been passed down for generation after generation of their
family.
But even this is not enough, for none of these is the
essential qualification of the truly English upper class.
This essential thing is place. To have a place within
this class is to be acknowledged to have it by all the others in it: and
if this is true this place is then a position as incapable of being changed
as the stars can be moved from the sky - and it is also to be perfectly
impossible to lose it. Nothing can possibly take place away and nothing
can change it: mania, murder, theft, sexual perversion, idiocy, dishonesty
- well, dishonesty possibly, since it must mean a wish or need to conceal,
and a true aristocrat is ashamed of nothing and has nothing whatever that
needs to be concealed. Not even treason - as witness Alcibiades: a type
of early Englishman - can change constellations or ever diminish the value
of place.
Hyde belonged to this class: and I did not. This never
worried me, even at this early age - as Ari would complain - my egotism
was far too strong to be bothered by such trivia, and my father's notions
of the greater brotherhood (but note the gender) of man helped in this
too. Nevertheless, I was not only strongly attracted by Hyde - she was
a ravishingly attractive lady - but I also knew at once that she could
teach me something that I lacked. What I lacked was manners.
I was now resident in Berkshire rather than still defending
democracy in Germany because my university education had finally begun.
As had been promised, it was being paid for by the Army. But by now I
had been a soldier for almost four years and an officer for two, and the
offer of a place at Cambridge had vanished long ago. The Army had deep
suspicions anyway of such louche, promiscuous, badly organized places
like the universities at Oxford or Cambridge: moral cesspits full of pinkoes,
fellow-travellers, homosexuals and spies - often leading separate lives:
and now, it heard, there were girls as well! - and it preferred to run
its own. It had duly taken over a former anti-aircraft training centre
on the edge of Salisbury Plain - where, we were told, we were fortunate
to find ourselves, for previously it had been proven to have the best
visibility for longer in the year than anywhere else in the British Isles:
which supposedly was to compensate wonderfully for the lack of practically
everything else to help life to be attractive - and had there established
something like a college within a boot camp.
The plan was well-intentioned, I suppose. We did not
have drill every day. It attracted some very good professors, who were
happy to run a department with ample time for their own research; together
with some very mediocre lecturers, who liked the salaries and the lack
of competition. They were boring. Their courses were unimaginative and
also badly planned. Almost all of their students had known each other
for years. The bicycle and long rides in the countryside were as much
recreation as escape. My vacations were all taken up with visits to Germany
and I had no interest in looking for other girls in the frequent parties
to which my friends invited me. To save money I even laid up my car -
the great Humber saloon that had been my pride and joy - in a corner of
one of the old tank hangars in the college grounds. For most of this year,
my only transport was my bicycle.
But once I was accepted by her family - and they were
are as generous in this respect as she was - Hyde remained a fiercely
strong and valued friend for many years. She was quite small. She only
came up to my chin, and she had still a good figure, almost girlishly
slim, which she liked to show off, especially in an evening dress. But
it was her fine eager features - the strong Saxon nose; fierce dark sparkling
eyes like a hawk; a frown to make men tremble, and a smile to make them
laugh without a cause at all - that were her greatest attraction. I was
far from being her sole admirer. Very much like Ari, who of course was
also thirty years her junior, she was used to being admired.
Hyde was an exceptionally kind, generous, and thoughtful
person. And she had that rare gift of giving her attention wholly to anyone
she was listening to or addressing. She was rarely critical, although
she hated bad manners in anyone - the heir to a dukedom was once rebuked
for his carelessness in tearing up the gravel of her drive with his car
- and although able to suffer the boring, she could not bear people who
seemed to think too much of themselves. She was not so much highly educated,
I think, but she was capable of much of the organization of several of
her husband's archaeological expeditions. She was clever in a very English,
adaptable, modest, and unconsciously efficient way.
Although by no means wealthy by any modern measure of
wealth, they had, I suppose, some old money and in London they had a small
apartment near to the centre, and this allowed them to maintain their
connections with the parts of society they favoured: mainly of the literary
kind - historians, writers, poets, and artists; many of whom I was to
meet at their table - and of course they owned the old low rambling house
that did indeed lie behind the brick wall on the right hand side of the
lane and opposite the workshop in which I had seen her commit murder.
Being close to the escarpment with its great horse emblem
carved in the chalk by the local tribe long before the Romans came, being
close too to the great hill fort above it, but especially because of the
little stream of sparkling pure water that sprang from its base, it is
very probable that the lowest edge of this little fold in the land had
probably been occupied before the time when the Pyramids were built. Now
it was the site of a low rambling L-shaped house with sagging red-tile
roofs. Much of it was always half smothered by wisteria, whilst throughout
the summer - and even into the winter - twenty or thirty white doves whirled
around above. When these got too many and too noisy Seton would take an
air-rifle and without visible emotion would shoot a dozen or so.
Although it had ample lawns, and the stream now filled
a large quiet pond behind a clay damn - a pond in which trout were hunted
tirelessly by Seton, pipe in mouth and rod in hand, but which were never
caught - the house looked far more suited to a farm than a manor. The
rooms were all low-ceilinged with simple pargetting. The drawing room,
which was just to left of the front entrance, had fine oak panelling,
and a fire in the winter; whilst in the big wide stone-floored hall that
one entered from the front of the house and in the big stone fireplace
opposite the stone stairs to the upper floor there was almost always a
bigger fire quietly burning, never with much enthusiasm, but rather smouldering
and muttering to itself on a fine great heap of fine grey ash that accumulated
over the whole year. Because of this fire the house always smelt of wood-smoke:
always sharp, always welcoming. I find I can smell it now.
And all my memories of this house seemed to be a mix
of tastes and sounds and smells - as well as conversations, of course:
intelligent, humorous, never rancorous, always informed and always intentionally
gently entertaining, opinions of every kind but perfectly articulated
and meticulously expressed. The reader will be surprised to learn that
to this wonderful flow of talk I usually contributed absolutely nothing.
Thinking back now I can only wonder - with some dismay - why I was invited
so often when I had so little to say. Could it be - God forbid! - that
I was just an ornament. I hope not.
But I must still suppose this is possible. I was good-looking
once. I thought, of course, that it was for my intelligence: only latent
as it might have been. I remember being intensely proud one evening when
a very glamorous, articulate, and stupendously intellectual lady, who
had been holding forth on my right for some time on some splendid analysis,
interrupted herself to ask me for the salt. She did not ask as politely
as she might have, and, when I was able to point out that it was in front
of her, I was as pleased as if I had reduced the whole company to open-mouthed
delight. Of course no-one else seemed to notice my flash of wit. The lady
took her salt and continued without a check. I might have been salt myself
that evening. At least I had proved that this salt could speak.
The other sounds in the house are the slow and quick
ticking of its several clocks. Their dining room was small and really
rather unremarkable except for a fine old mirror, its mercury speckled
with age in an ornate gilt frame on one wall, the elegant long windows
with shutters which were usually at my back - and on the right hand wall
was another of the clock-paintings of the kind that I had first seen in
Ari's parent's sitting room.
This room was to the right of the hall, and one took
a step down into it. But the whole house was like that, bits having been
added to it - doubtless subtracted too - for centuries. Beyond the dining
room was the domain of their cook housekeeper, Mrs Swayne. Betty Swayne
was also to become a friend. At meal times, if there guests, there was
the very special taste of pink gin - Gordon's with angostura bitters -
and at the meal there was always a glass or two of good wine; but no-one
ever made a fuss about the wine. Betty would bring it the hot dishes from
her kitchen, which overlooked the inner courtyard, and set them on a buffet;
then wait until everyone was served; then disappear again to her own quarters.
She was a valued and trusted friend of the family and was never treated
as a menial, but always with great respect.
The manners of conversation that I learnt at that table
are quite subtle and complex, and I am not sure that I can summarize them
easily. The most important were always, if possible, first to get a measure
of the intelligence and knowledge of each guest and to address or reply
to them accordingly; never to boast; never to defame; never to claim to
knowledge or an opinion that one could not either substantiate or defend;
but, on the other hand, to be positively expected and encouraged to express
almost any idea, however eccentric, so long one could substantiate it
or defend; to do so passionately by all means, amusingly if possible,
but never angrily; rarely to talk about sex, only a little more so about
love, never with any enthusiasm of religion; and of politics only as a
distant, faintly ludicrous occupation of the unfortunate, the corrupt
and the damned. To be at all time polite, scarcely needs a mention: it
was de rigeur.
Since I was scarcely a Neanderthal in the first place,
I do not mean to suggest that I had no sense of civil manners at all.
Military academies must attempt to ensure that their young officers are
not complete oafs; whilst service life - although it still fails too often
- should weed out any who become oafs with authority and power.
The difference was that this was all as natural for
these people as breathing. It was all so very different from my father's
furious brawling and bawling that the only proper opinions to be spoken
at his table were his opinions, and that the only right ideas to be held
at his table were his ideas, as ink is different from wine. And I could
think of other contrasts.
And they could laugh at themselves! One evening I was
at first puzzled then delighted to hear the whole company - then including
two professors of ancient history, a distinguished English poet, and the
terrifying bluestocking, she of the salt, who was a frequent guest, though
less so by now than me - entertaining one another with the difficulties
they had all encountered with the peculiar English word: mizzled.
One by one these clever people all confessed that some
of them had taken years to realize - just like me - that this word, which
is spelt misled and pronounced mizzled, does not mean to thwart, blind,
puzzle or confuse - as in for example: "once her mizzen had fallen
onto her quarter-deck, the great battleship, all her officers being now
completely mizzled, drifted helplessly under our brave lads' guns."
It is, of course, just the past participle of the verb to mislead.
Given the gentle kindness that she always showed me
- and her equally kind interest in my love affair with Ari, who now wrote
to me almost every week. I longed for them to meet and so it was inevitable
that when I got a rather shorter letter than usual from Ari telling me
that, apparently on an impulse, she had got engaged to be married to a
nice man whom she had known for some time, and that she hoped I would
not mind too much and understand - it was inevitable that I should take
this utterly fantastic idea to show to Hyde: as if the hope that she could
magic it away.
The house that afternoon, fortunately for me, was nearly
deserted. Seton was in London. Even Betty was away. After listening to
my first stumbling explanations, Hyde took me to Betty's kitchen, which
she would never usually approach, and began to fill a large frying pan
with bacon, sausages, mushrooms and eggs. Presumably she thought that
food would reduce my distress. All that she could think to suggest in
addition to this immediate comfort was that I should try as soon as possible
to get to Germany to: 'see if you can talk the dear gel into putting it
all orf for a year or two'.
Hyde really did say 'gel' - also 'orf', exactly like
my Army PTI:, but the last is the way that all Londoners talk. On the
other hand she pronounced ears as 'years' - and, with perfect clarity,
would pronounce 'Wed-nes-day' - and never the ugly modern mangling of
'Wengsday' - and 'gov-ern-ment', not 'gumment'. I have tried ever since
to say Wed-nes-day completely, in her memory. Her speech was never mine,
it was a little too cut-glass; but I was always delighted by it. It is
the same with any accent: clarity matters, not the lengths of vowels.
Just then, however - although I knew that I would attempt
to follow her suggestion, and I did - I believed I knew Ari well enough
to be sure that once she had made such a decision - and getting married
is a pretty damned important decision - she would not change it. With
this thought - to the very great embarrassment of us both - the last remnant
of my reserve collapsed, and I began to gush large heavy hot tears rather
like a teapot.
At this Hyde placed her hand gently on the back of my
neck - the nearest she could offer to a caress - murmured: "It happens
quite a lot, you know!" and left me with the bacon, the sausages,
the mushroom and the eggs.
I began dutifully to eat my great heap of food - a soldier
never refuses food - whilst watching these tears still falling - 'plop',
'plop', 'plop' - onto the flat yellow domes of my two fried eggs and rolling
off again, leaving them both intact, and I wondered if, anyone - in the
whole history of the world - had ever noticed that tears do that.
At the same time, however, another less lachrymose part
of my mind was beginning to form a new resolution. I would certainly try
to persuade Ari that she had made a mistake: was making a mistake - but
almost certainly this would not succeed.
So, that was a very major battle lost. But yet not the
war. Almost certainly the marriage would happen. I would just have to
find a way to prove to the dear gel that it should have been to me.
Colin
Hannaford,
28/07//05
