Death in Leamington (6 page)

Along the route, he planned to take a detour up into Colorado to pursue a research project he had taken on to fund his trip. A century ago, prospectors had discovered gold on the Ute Indian lands in south-western Colorado. The miners had ignored the reservation boundaries and swarmed over the native hunting grounds. The Utes threatened war. Baxter had agreed to research the history of the federal commission that went to the reservation to preserve peace – an interesting historical event that had never before been documented in detail by any other writer.

While travelling in this mountain land, he also developed an increasing interest in the role of guns in the American frontier story and throughout this time met many men who still considered a gun part of their everyday apparel. Jake Chisholm taught him how to shoot after rescuing him from two men preparing to skin him at poker. Wild Bill taught him the meaning of ‘the drop’ and warned him against wearing a gun in town unless he wanted trouble. Shooting was the source of his later deafness. He brought quite a collection of hunting rifles and handguns back with him to England, most of them still working. He had never bothered much with gun licenses but they made a nice display now on his study walls.

After finishing this project and in the weeks left before returning to Harvard, Baxter stopped at Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, a village west of Santa Fe. He took a room in the pueblo where his blue eyes and rosy English cheeks earned him the name of ‘Poshizmo’, or ‘Dawn God’. He was inspired and writing prose again. After one morning session, with nothing to do
except wait for the shadows of ladders to the flat roofs creep along the smooth walls,
he wrote the following:

Richard Baxter Townshend,
Lone Pine

It was at that time that he learnt belatedly of his father’s death. The distressed letters from England soon convinced him that after a three-year absence he should go home directly to his widowed mother. So instead of returning to Massachusetts, he boarded a cheap flight bound for London from Denver.

As soon as he set foot back in England, Baxter found the mellowness of an English autumn oppressively muggy compared to the Rockies’ bracing air. Moreover, he felt like a stranger in his native land having become accustomed to the expansiveness of the desert landscape for so long. His heart was soon longing for escape and adventure again.

Returning to England, he had also immediately realised that most of his friends were already well established in their various situations, most in stable relationships, many married, nearly all with professional jobs. He found it difficult to break into a social circle again, feeling excluded by these mature relationships, frustrated that few listened to his stories of the Wild West with any degree of interest or conviction. Fortunately, he was introduced by his mother to a sweet girl, Lettice Dorothy, or Dottie as she preferred to be known, a cousin of the famous Lygon family. She wrote poetry and read English history – she was later to become the biographer of Endymion Porter and an expert on the Long Parliament. Baxter wasted no time in falling for her and decided almost at once that he wanted to marry her but without a steady job this was deemed impossible by her father.

Baxter was obviously frustrated by this rejection, but set about trying to find work at a publisher to please his prospective father-in-law. He moved to a village near Dottie’s home and then in 1997 settled in rooms at Oxford. Through influential friends he became a member of the Common Room at Wadham where he could sip tea on the emerald lawn and dream of the desert light. He spent many hours in the Pitt Rivers Museum studying old photos and shamans from the Ute reservations. Through this research into the traditions and beliefs of the Indians he began to form and write about his own version of secular humanism; a belief in an ethical life, morality without religion, about coming to terms with the consequences of human decisions while being at ease with nature. Maybe it was the mathematical genes within him but his adversity to religious thought could sometimes boil into stridency. He became interested in the works of E. F. Schumacher: ‘
Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity
.’

In 1998, Baxter saw his first novel published. It was a Pueblo Indian story with his own blue-eyed, curly-haired self as an important character complete with a fictional meeting with Billy the Kid. A story told through his eyes that contained a maze of contemporary detail and silvered prose.

A year later, he made a nostalgic return visit to Colorado. Armed with a camera this time, he visited the Great Plains, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado and the pueblo at Jemez. The open-range life he had known for a time in his youth was rapidly giving way to asphalt, casinos and second-home developments. The old friends he sought out no longer possessed the energy and youthful glamour that he remembered, and he returned to Oxford with a portfolio of photography, yet feeling somewhat disillusioned, wondering why these toothless middle-aged rednecks had ever seemed as appealing as compatriots.
Where have all the cowboys gone?
he lamented. The photos were made into a nice coffee-table book.

Richard Baxter Townshend,
Lone Pine

After he returned to England, Dottie and Baxter lived together for a while but never married; for a while they appeared to be slowly drifting apart as sweethearts but still saw each other frequently as friends. She was by necessity increasingly devoted to her elderly father and became his constant nurse during his later years. With Baxter’s literary connections, she was able to get her father’s book of memoirs published. In the manuscript of one diary entry, written shortly before his death, she had recorded his personal annotations consisting of these consoling words:
Life has not been a disappointment, and there is a good deal of truth in the line: ‘And for His chosen, pours His best wine last.’

Released from this constant caring, she had travelled for a while both alone and sometimes with Baxter and then returned to Oxford where she found a new desire and mission to help the underprivileged. Rather than make a permanent move to Leamington, she instead visited Baxter and his sister most weekends. During these regular visitations she was the tender homemaker, taking his sister’s place in the kitchen and he was the detached writer, hurtling now towards sixty, unable to put on the brakes.

*

Breaking my daydreams, my sister Claudia, dressed still in her dressing gown, came up alongside me in my study and put her arm around my waist, self-consciously moving her hand away from the line of my trouser belt
.

‘Do you think I should go out and help them?’ I asked.

‘I think it’s too late now. Dottie’s out there; best let sleeping dogs lie.’

There was almost immediately a ring at the front door. Claudia went out into the hall to answer it.

‘Who is it?’ I shouted after her.

‘It’s Dottie with Penny,’ she shouted back, letting Dottie and the policewoman in.

‘Do you need some help?’ I asked, coming out of my study into the hall.

Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream

On the day they were going to kill him, Arish Nariman got up at five-thirty in the morning, far too early to wait for the train his friend the American architect was arriving on. He’d dreamed again of the lush tea plantations of his boyhood and he had been happy in his dream, a dream of an arcadia built by his ancestors on the coconut oil trade of the nineteenth century. There were elephants then, and tigers and monkeys and he had been treated like a little prince as a boy, with a hundred servants at his beck and call and a blue and silver Rolls-Royce to drive him to school everyday. Exiled now from his beloved Sri Lanka to this new Arcadia-Arden, he felt the sweat of the early morning in his sheets. Like his mother had once said, ‘Arish, you always dream of trees.’

The Regency pleasure dome, in which he now resided, was the home of his granddaughter, who had recently married the owner, Sir William Flyte. It was both a house of escape and a house of correction. A place of self-exile for sins that he had committed but never confessed. He was revered by name in a hundred towns and villages in his native land but he knew deep in his heart the canker of his own thoughts, the obstinacy of his own will and the measure of both the right and the wrong he had done. Fortune favours the brave. He had been brave and he had amassed a fortune. He always tried to do this in an ethical way but of course this was not always possible in business.

For years he spoke out against corruption and avoided any association with the scams and government bribery that plagued his country. But late the previous year he had been caught up in a scandal involving a former associate that threatened to blacken even his good name. It was a sordid affair. He was grilled for hours by the parliamentary investigations committee about allegations of fraud during a privatisation deal and all through this painful experience he grew increasingly weary and tired of the commercial world. Towards the end of the hearings, he built up an irresistible longing to escape from the family business, to regain the freedom of his academic youth, to enjoy again the solitude and loneliness of his own thoughts, away from the concerns of money, princes and empires. In short, he’d had enough of making money. Finally he had acted upon that impulse.

For him, it was an unexpected but welcome discovery that the future King of France had lived here too. On learning about this connection, Arish had thought that maybe he too would live here for two years, he liked both the irony and the symmetry; but the restrictions of being Sir William Flyte’s houseguest soon became an increasingly tiresome burden to him. Of course, he was grateful for the immediate sanctuary he had been offered as he needed to recover physically from his courtroom ordeals. He was also plagued now by a raft of minor ills and sleep loss. He had soon begun to resent the interference and loss of privacy that being part of his this man’s household imposed on him. Therefore, although he had arrived with no specific plan, he became increasingly anxious to move on, to see what came his way, preferring serendipity to grand plans or any notion of destiny.

During the past few weeks, he had largely kept himself to himself, taking long walks in the town parks with his newly-acquired dogs, avoiding the tedium of social intercourse with Sir William’s endless list of houseguests. Like his French predecessor, his ancestry was an adopted one, uncertain, born of the necessity of family dynasties and maternal infertility. Like Louis he was the jewel in the family crown, the last pretender. He felt that burden keenly, and had always tried to succeed through merit, but the powers of family cronyism were intense. The brutal and often cruel behavior of his business lieutenants was now a source of regret to him and in some cases guilt, so he had banished himself into self-exile, his chosen retirement to this foreign wooded Arden, amidst a countryside of rolling hills and fields, rather than further pollute the luxurious thick jungle of his Ceylonese youth.

He had been thinking a lot during this time. His mind had always been a battleground; he was smart, talented at design, visionary sometimes but fundamentally his gift had turned out to be making money. He believed that good could come from such creative tension, but his own weaknesses and temptations had equally become continuous sources of regret. Unable to quell the cynical manipulation of his cronies, who were thoroughly corrupted by his reflected power; order and truth, falsehood and disorder had all become jumbled. His was a mind that had become increasingly filled with a sense of shame. And as he neared the end of his days, he was evermore mindful of his approaching appointment with the old woman who would lead him down the bridge that narrows until the departed fall off into the abyss of hell.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

*

He was haunted most in these thoughts by the little people who lived in the shadow of his wealth, exploited, poorly educated and often hungry; exposed to poor safety conditions in his factories. Their downtrodden lives starkly contrasting with the fabulous wealth and privilege of his family and business associates. He felt dishonoured by the extreme poverty and despair that was still on view night and day on the streets of his native city of Colombo.

The ten richest men in his home country owned more wealth than the 20 million poorest and he was certainly one of, if not, the richest. But he was also too weak to resist the self-serving flattery of his counsellors and advisors, the ugly sycophants, the venomous toads that surrounded him. Sometimes he dreamt of flying his little tin airplane over those slums, showering money over them, flying through the despairing prayers of the little people, the poor villagers trying to find gold in the downtrodden streets. But in the reality of those streets, he would still seek to avoid them, fearful of bumping into anything that was too nasty, that might stain his smart tailored suits. The auguries were clear: in the dreams that filled the darkest hours, on the nights before his predetermined death, in this godless foreign forest.

Of course he had not acknowledged the portents, or else he might have taken a different course of action that day. Compared to Colombo, where he was under the constant watch of bodyguards and security cameras, Leamington was safe, a fabulous peace, just him and his dogs and his granddaughter; believing his enemies and so-called friends to be half a world away.

Although he had a large extended family, he counted only his granddaughter as close blood now. His parents were dead and he had no siblings or wife. He had nearly married once and he had fallen in love secretly many more times. His college days in the US were a history complicated by both male and female affairs. His adopted daughter had been an accident of one of those romantic interludes. Her mother was a renowned cellist who had played like an angel but had taken fright at the thought of marrying into a dynasty. She had, instead, run off with one of his friends, even though she was already carrying Arish’s child. She died only a few days after the girl, his daughter, was born. On hearing the news, he had punished himself by carving a small letter
A
into his chest, the initial of his lover’s and his own name, a symbol that would remind him forever of his lost love. All he had of those days of romance now were her recordings – her Elgar cello concerto was still his favourite. At the time of her death, he had been broken hearted but on this one occasion had taken responsibility for the product of his loins and arranged for the child to join him in Colombo, rather than become a long-term burden on his friend. This same architect friend was the man of molten wax who was to visit him today.

Anon,
The Arabian Nights Entertainments

In a bitter repeat of the earlier tragedy, his adopted daughter had also died in childbirth after an affair with an unknown employee. The sad cycle had continued as he had taken on the responsibility now of caring for her child, his granddaughter Nadia. This was no chore, he had watched with delight as Nadia grew up to be a precociously talented girl, clever and well-read as well as beautiful. But her ambition soon outgrew what she could find in her native city. Arish had therefore supported Nadia’s desire to study overseas and although she was certainly good enough in her own right to claim a place at any US grad school, he had made sure of her place at this lesser known English business school with a little endowment just to be sure. England was safer for a young girl than the US; he knew that from his own bitter experience. However, he had definitely not bargained for her falling in love with an English knight while she was studying here.

The two of them had met first at a university event; Sir William Flyte, the guest of honour, Nadia invited to attend as a student representative to demonstrate the university’s commitment to diversity. This political knight was apparently bewitched by her right from the start as she held the whole table in her thrall with her eloquent arguments and rhetoric; she in turn was flattered by the close attention of one so powerful in this ennobled land. There had been a return invitation to his home and soon the relationship had become official, despite their considerable age difference.

As soon as he found out about it, Arish had objected to this new association. He agreed however to meet her chosen suitor at his London club for dinner but took an instant dislike to him, finding him arrogant and far too old for her. He had his assistant do some research and was soon presented with a dismaying collection of distinctly seedy stories and articles about the former MP’s previous relationships. But something had clearly turned the girl’s head and before he had had time to intervene, he was informed that she had travelled with Sir William to the Caribbean where they had married on the beach. Furious, Arish refused to accept the situation at first but after several long months of venting saw that his granddaughter was immovable and seemingly happy. He relented and become reconciled to the situation rather than fall out forever with the remaining love of his life. But he would get his revenge one day.

Richard Burton
, The Three Apples
from
The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night

This be-knighted husband was undeniably a charismatic and successful man, an engineer from an illustrious family background, who had worked in various industrial companies in the Midlands and built up a personal fortune that outshone even the huge fortune squandered by previous generations of his once ennobled family. Small, brash and wiry, his ancestors had apparently enjoyed dalliances with royalty and could trace themselves back to Edward Hyde, the First Earl of Clarendon. His father, Frederick, had been a younger brother of a previous Earl, but through a series of missteps had lost huge amounts in gambling and misplaced land deals and had died before the title passed down to him. This meant that the Earldom was now forever lost to Sir William’s family line. Wherever Sir William’s new money had come from, and this was by no means clear despite all Arish’s assistant’s research (there were rumours of a mining venture in New South Wales as well as tea plantations in Sri Lanka), it had been his ticket to influence and political intrigue.

Arish could see at once that Sir William was an inveterate self-publicist and chameleon, a ruthless man who was expert at tailoring his views to be supportive of the right part of the political elite at any one time and even more expert at getting those views published in the press without ever being directly attributed. His mastery of these black arts had even earned him the nickname ‘The black dog of Arden’ within the party, a reference to Guy, Earl of Warwick, who was Piers Gaveston’s executioner. The knighthood had been a political reward from the grateful new Prime Minister, along with his selection as the local MP in a by-election following his predecessor’s death. During his short time as a legislator, he had narrowly avoided censure over parliamentary expenses and undeclared consultancy contracts and had run into trouble with red-top stories about a series of mistresses around the country. These colourful adventures however appeared not to be major obstacles for a man of his ambition.