Arthur & George (5 page)

Sergeant Upton is a red-faced man with the build of a blacksmith; his dark serge uniform constricts him, and is perhaps the cause of the wheezing noises he makes. He looks George up and down, nodding to himself as he does so.

“So you’re the young fellow that found the key?”

George remembers his attempts to play the detective when Elizabeth Foster was writing on walls. Now there is another mystery, but this time with a policeman and a future solicitor involved. It feels appropriate as well as exciting.

“Yes. It was on the doorstep.” The Sergeant doesn’t respond to this, but carries on nodding to himself. He seems to need putting at his ease, so George tries to help. “Is there a reward?”

The Sergeant looks surprised. “Now why would you be wondering if there’s a reward? You of all people?”

George takes this to mean that there isn’t one. Perhaps the policeman has only come to congratulate him on returning lost property. “Have you found out where it’s from?”

Upton doesn’t reply to this either. Instead, he takes out a notebook and pencil.

“Name?”

“You know my name.”

“Name, I said.”

The Sergeant really could be more civil, George thinks.

“George.”

“Yes. Go on.”

“Ernest.”

“Go on.”

“Thompson.”

“Go on.”

“You know my surname. It’s the same as my father’s. And my mother’s.”

“Go on, I say, you uppish little fellow.”

“Edalji.”

“Ah yes,” says the Sergeant. “Now I think you’d better spell that out for me.”

Arthur

Arthur’s marriage, like his remembered life, began in death.

He qualified as a doctor; worked as a locum-tenens in Sheffield, Shropshire and Birmingham; then took a post as surgeon on the steam-whaler
Hope.
They sailed from Peterhead to the Arctic ice field, off after seal and anything else they could chase and kill. Arthur’s duties proved light, and since he was a normal young man, happily given to drinking and, if necessary, fighting, he swiftly won the confidence of the crew; he also fell into the sea so often that they nicknamed him the Great Northern Diver. And like any healthy Briton, he enjoyed a good hunt: his game-bag on the voyage came to fifty-five seals.

He felt little but vigorous male competitiveness when they were out on the endless ice battering seals to death. But one day they took a Greenland whale, and he found it an experience of a different order to any he had known before. To play a salmon might be a royal game, but when your Arctic prey weighs more than a suburban villa, it dwarfs all comparisons. From no more than a hand’s touch away, Arthur watched the whale’s eye—to his surprise, no bigger than a bullock’s—slowly dim over in death.

The mystery of the victim: something was now changed in his way of thinking. He continued to shoot ducks from the snowy sky, and felt pride in his marksmanship; yet beyond this lay a feeling he could grasp at but not contain. Every bird you downed bore pebbles in its gizzard from a land the maps ignored.

Next he sailed south, on the
Mayumba
out of Liverpool, bound for the Canaries and the west coast of Africa. Shipboard drinking continued, but fighting took place only over the bridge table and the cribbage board. If he regretted swapping the sea boots and informal dress of a whaler for the gilt buttons and serge suit of a passenger vessel, there was at least the compensation of female company. One night the ladies sportingly made an apple-pie of his bed; the next he took his amiable revenge by hiding a flying fish in one of their nightgowns.

He returned to dry land, common sense and a career. He set up his brass plate in Southsea. He became a Freemason, admitted to the third degree in the Phoenix Lodge No. 257. He captained the Portsmouth Cricket Club and was judged one of the safest Association backs in Hampshire. Dr. Pike, fellow member of the Southsea Bowling Club, referred patients to him; the Gresham Life Insurance Company hired him to perform medical examinations.

One day Dr. Pike sought Arthur’s view on a young patient who had recently moved to Southsea with his widowed mother and elder sister. This second opinion was a mere politeness: it was evident that Jack Hawkins had cerebral meningitis, against which the entire medical profession, let alone Arthur, was powerless. No hotel or boarding house would accept the poor fellow; so Arthur offered to take him into his own house as a resident patient. Hawkins was only a month older than his host. Despite a thousand palliative cups of arrowroot, he swiftly deteriorated, became delirious, and smashed up everything in his room. Within days he was dead.

Arthur looked more carefully at this corpse than he had done at the white, waxen thing of his infancy. He had begun to find, during his medical training, that there was often much promise in the faces of the dead—as if the strain and tension of living had given way to a greater peacefulness. Post-mortal muscular relaxation was the scientific answer; but part of him wondered if this was the full explanation. The human dead also bore in their gizzard pebbles from a land the maps ignored.

As he rode in the one-carriage funeral procession from his own house to the Highland Road cemetery, Arthur’s chivalrous feelings were aroused by the black-clad mother and sister, now alone in an unfamiliar town with no male support. Louisa, once her veil was raised, proved a shy, round-faced young woman with blue eyes shading to sea-green. After a decent interval, Arthur was allowed to call at her lodgings.

The young doctor began by explaining how the island—for Southsea was an island, despite appearances—could be represented as a series of Chinese rings: open spaces at its centre, then the middle ring of the town, and then the outer ring of the sea. He told her about the gravelly soil and the quick drainage that resulted from it; about the efficiency of Sir Frederick Bramwell’s sanitary arrangements; about the town’s salubrious reputation. This last item caused Louisa a sudden distress, which she disguised by an enquiry about Bramwell. She was told a great deal about that distinguished engineer.

The groundwork thus laid, it was time to inspect the place properly. They visited both piers, where military bands seemed to play all day. They watched colours being trooped on the Governor’s Green, and mimic engagements on the Common; through binoculars they inspected the nation’s battle fleet riding at anchor in the middle distance at Spithead. They walked up the Clarence Esplanade while Arthur explained to her, one by one, all the trophies and memorials of warfare on display. Here a Russian gun, there a Japanese cannon and mortar, everywhere tablets and obelisks to sailors and infantrymen who had died in all quarters of the Empire and in every fashion—yellow fever, shipwreck, the perfidious action of Indian mutineers. She wondered if the doctor had a morbid streak to him; but preferred to decide, for the moment, that his interested curiosity matched his physical tirelessness. He even took her by horse-tram to the Royal Clarence Victualling Yard to watch the manufacturing process of ship’s biscuit: from bag of flour to dough, to its conversion by heat into a souvenir which visitors had between their teeth as they left.

Miss Louisa Hawkins had not realized that courtship—if this was what it was—could be so strenuous, or so resemble tourism. Next they turned their eyes southward, to the Isle of Wight. From the Esplanade, Arthur pointed to what he termed the azure hills of the Vectian Isle, a turn of phrase which struck her as most poetic. They had a distant glimpse of Osborne House, and he explained how an increase in water traffic told when the Queen was in residence. Then they took a steamer across the Solent and round the island; her eye was directed to the Needles, Alum Bay, Carisbrooke Castle, the Landslip, the Undercliff—until she was obliged to call for a deckchair and a rug.

One evening, as they gazed out to sea from the South Parade Pier, he described his exploits in Africa and the Arctic; yet the way tears came into her eyes when he mentioned their purpose on the ice field made him refrain from bragging about his game-bag. She had, he discovered, an innate gentleness which he took to be characteristic of all women, once you got to know them. She was always ready to smile; but could not bear any humour which verged on cruelty, or implied the superiority of the humorist. She had an open, generous nature, a lovely head of curls, and a small income of her own.

In his previous dealings with women, Arthur had played the honourable flirt. Now, as they strolled this concentric resort, as she learned to take his arm, as her name changed in his mouth from Louisa to Touie, as he surreptitiously looked at her hips when she turned away, he knew he wanted more than flirtation. He also thought she would improve him as a man; which was, after all, one of the principles of marriage.

First, however, the young prospect had to be approved by the Mam, who travelled to Hampshire for the inspection. She found Louisa timid, tractable and of decent if not distinguished family. There was no vulgarity or obvious moral weakness likely to embarrass her beloved boy. Nor did there seem any lurking vanity which might at some future time make the girl bridle at Arthur’s authority. The mother, Mrs. Hawkins, seemed both pleasant and respectful. In giving her approval, the Mam even allowed herself to muse that there might perhaps be something about Louisa—just there, when she held herself in the light like that—which was reminiscent of her own younger self. And what more could a mother want than that, after all?

George

Since starting at Mason College, George has developed the habit of walking the lanes most evenings after his return from Birmingham. This is not for exercise—he had a lifetime of that at Rugeley—but to clear his head before settling down to his books again. As often as not, this fails to work, and he finds himself back in the minutiae of contract law. On this cold January evening, with a half-moon in the sky and the verges still shiny from last night’s frost, George is muttering his way through his argument for tomorrow’s moot debate—the case is about contaminated flour in a granary—when a figure jumps out at him from behind a tree.

“On your way to Walsall, eh?”

It is Sergeant Upton, red-faced and puffing.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard what I said.” Upton is standing close to him, staring in a way George finds alarming. He wonders if the Sergeant is a little loony; in which case, best to humour him.

“You asked if I was on my way to Walsall.”

“So you do have a bloody pair of ears after all.” He is wheezing like—like a horse, or a pig or something.

“I only wondered why you asked, because this is not the way to Walsall. As we both know.”

“As we both know. As we both know.” Upton takes a pace forwards and seizes George by the shoulder. “What we both know, what we both know, is that you know the way to Walsall, and I know the way to Walsall, and you’ve been up to your little tricks in Walsall, haven’t you?”

The Sergeant is definitely loony now; also hurting him. Is there any advantage in pointing out that he hasn’t been to Walsall since this time two years ago, when he was buying Christmas presents for Horace and Maud?

“You been into Walsall, you’ve took the key to the school, you’ve brought it home and you’ve put it on your own front step, didn’t you?”

“You’re hurting me,” says George.

“Oh no I’m not. I’m not hurting you. This isn’t hurting you. You want Sergeant Upton to hurt you, all you have to do is ask.”

George now feels as he did when he used to stare at the distant blackboard with no idea what the correct answer was. He feels as he did when he was about to soil himself. Without knowing quite why, he says, “I’m going to be a solicitor.”

The Sergeant releases his grip, steps back, and laughs in George’s face. Then he spits down towards George’s boot.

“Is that what you think? A so-li-ci-tor? What a big word for a little mongrel like you. You think you’ll become a so-li-ci-tor if Sergeant Upton says you won’t?”

George stops himself saying that it is up to Mason College and the examiners and the Incorporated Law Society to decide whether or not he is to be a solicitor. He thinks he must get home as quickly as possible and tell Father.

“Let me ask you a question.” Upton’s tone seems to have softened, so George decides to humour him a moment longer. “What are those things on your hands?”

George lifts his forearms, spreads his fingers automatically in his gloves. “These?” he asks. The man must be mentally deficient.

“Yes.”

“Gloves.”

“Well then, being a clever young monkey and intending to be a so-li-ci-tor, you will know that a pair of gloves is known as Going Equipped, won’t you?”

Then he spits again and stamps off down the lane. George bursts into tears.

He is ashamed of himself by the time he gets home. He is sixteen, he is not allowed to cry. Horace has not cried since he was eight. Maud cries a lot, but then she is an invalid as well as a girl.

George’s father listens to his story and announces that he will write to the Chief Constable of Staffordshire. It is disgraceful that a common policeman should manhandle his son on a public highway and accuse him of theft. The officer should be dismissed from the force.

“I think he is rather loony, Father. He spat at me twice.”

“He spat at you?”

George thinks again. He is still frightened, but knows this is no reason to tell less than the truth.

“I cannot be certain of that, Father. He was about a yard away, and he spat twice very close to my foot. It’s possible he was spitting just like rough people do. But when he did it he seemed to be cross with me.”

“Do you think that is sufficient proof of intention?”

George likes this. He is being treated as a future solicitor.

“Perhaps not, Father.”

“I agree with you. Good. I shall not mention the spitting.”

Three days later the Reverend Shapurji Edalji receives a reply from Captain the Honourable George A. Anson, Chief Constable of Staffordshire. It is dated January 23rd 1893, and does not contain the expected apology and promise of action. Instead, Anson writes:

Will you please ask your son George from whom the key was obtained which was laid on your doorstep on Dec. 12? The key was stolen, but if it can be shown that the whole thing was due to some idle freak or practical joke, I should not be inclined to allow any police proceedings to be taken in regard to it. If, however, the persons concerned in the removal of the key refuse to make any explanation of the subject, I must necessarily treat the matter in all seriousness as a theft. I may say at once that I shall not pretend to believe any protestations of ignorance which your son may make about this key. My information on the subject does not come from the police.