The Corpse in the Cellar (2 page)

Alfred Rose drew a deep breath and continued, ‘Of course this meant that the butler had no further loyalty to Sir Rafael. If anything, the very reverse. So the next morning he went in secret to the town magistrates and told them what he'd seen in the cellar: the ghost of the missing footman, pointing at the floor. The magistrates ordered the cellar floor dug up. What they found was the remains of the murdered footman, and the cavalry sword with Sir Rafael's coat of arms on the hilt buried beside him. Sir Rafael Black was charged with the murder and hanged.'

Jack smiled knowingly and asked, ‘But that wasn't the end of the matter, was it, Alfred?'

‘Indeed not, sir. From that day to this the ghost has reappeared once every year, on the anniversary of the murder. When the building was taken over by the bank, the old coal hole into the cellar was closed up, and the strongroom, the vault, was built into the back part of the basement—but that didn't stop the ghost. Over the years quite a few bank tellers or clerks who've gone down into that cellar on the anniversary of the murder have rushed back out again, their faces as white as a sheet, saying they'd seen the ghost.'

Alfred shook his head and added, ‘I take the bus into Tadminster to do my banking. I'd never walk into that bank, gentlemen—never.'

‘Jolly entertaining story,' chuckled Warnie. ‘I must remember that—tell it to the chaps in the mess when I go back to barracks. But tell me this, landlord: surely this bank building you're so nervous about is perfectly safe for 364 days of the year? If the story is just as you tell it, the ghost will lie silently in its grave, or wherever it is ghosts lie, and only pop out on the one day each year.'

‘That's the problem, isn't it?' gushed Alfred Rose, leaning forward over the table. ‘Once a place is haunted . . . well, you never can tell. Best to keep away, that's what I say.'

‘Tell us more about this annual “haunting day”, Mr Rose,' I said. ‘When exactly is the anniversary of this murder? When is the ghost due to make its annual appearance?'

‘Well, as it happens, sir,' the publican replied, after clearing his throat, hesitating for a moment and glancing wildly around the room, as if looking for a way to avoid what was coming next, ‘as it happens . . . it's today.'

As we slipped our rucksacks onto our backs in the warm morning sunshine outside
The Cricketers' Arms
, I said to Jack and Warnie, ‘A colourful piece of local folklore, but not all that original.'

‘You're saying it didn't happen?' asked Warnie.

‘Something happened,' I replied. ‘But a grim murder is fertile ground for growing colourful imaginary flowers.'

‘If you say so,' Warnie muttered, half to himself. ‘But I've heard some rum stories in the army—dashed rum. Now, which way did the landlord say we should head to find this walking track?'

‘Down this road out of the village,' said Jack, pointing with the stick he always carried on a rambling holiday, ‘then across a farmer's field and through a wood to the crown of the hill.'

The morning sun was as warm as a teapot and as yellow as butter as we started out. White clouds like inverted snowy hilltops drifted lazily across the sky, as if they were finding the morning so pleasant they were in no hurry to go anywhere. A gentle breeze followed us down the lane, politely offering to cool us if we found the walk too warming.

The first few minutes were spent in silence as we looked for the landmarks Alfred Rose had told us to watch for. Then, just beyond the last cottage at the end of the village, we saw the stile that would take us over a fence and into the field beyond.

My two companions were the Lewis brothers: Warren, known as Warnie, a major in the British Army, and my old university tutor C. S. Lewis, known since childhood to all his friends as Jack. It was Jack's suggestion that I join them on this holiday, and that we start at the site of my job interview with Sir William Dyer by spending our first night in the village of Plumwood.

Jack was dressed as he always was: an old grey Harris Tweed jacket with leather patches in the elbows; trousers of thickish grey flannel, uncreased and very out at the knees; sturdy brown walking boots; and an old grey felt hat. With his ruddy, cheerful face he looked like a farmer who'd be happy to stop for a chat about the weather and price of sheep.

When he was walking in the country, Jack always carried a stout ash stick. I was never sure whether this solid implement was just a walking stick to lean on over rough ground or also a weapon to beat off possible attackers. Jack was the mildest of men, but his stick looked to me more like an Irish cudgel than an aid to walking.

Even when dressed in mufti Warnie managed to make his tweeds as neat as a uniform, and kept his handkerchief in the cuff of his jacket, in the military fashion. As an impoverished student I was wearing my baggy flannels and an old sleeveless pullover. And, having shared digs with students who were often careless of other people's property, my haversack had my name, ‘Tom Morris', carefully stencilled down one side.

Across the field we walked ankle-deep through lush green grass scattered here and there with buttercups greeting the morning sun. On the far side of the field a small herd of cows had their heads down, eating their breakfast, studiously ignoring our presence. ‘Ramblers,' they seemed to be thinking, ‘another lot of ramblers—can't see the point in all this walking.' And they kept on eating.

The rhythmic action of those bovine jaws matched our steady walking pace—which freed my mind to do some rambling of its own. I don't know if you've had my experience where walking seems to stimulate thinking: the steady rhythm of the feet seems to set the synapses firing. Under this stimulation I decided to tackle my former tutor about a book he had just published.

‘I've read
Pilgrim's Regress
, Jack,' I said. ‘Most enjoyable.'

‘Ah, but did you understand it?' he asked with glee. ‘The thing about allegory is that either you provide a key, in which case there's no point in writing allegory, or you don't and run the risk of being misunderstood, or of simply baffling the reader.'

‘The point you were making,' I said, rising to his bait, ‘was that if thinking and feeling are kept in balance—that is, if we don't become dry-as-dust intellectuals on the one hand or get sucked into a swamp of self-indulgent feelings on the other—then we will end up in religion. That is where the balanced life, taken to its proper conclusion, leads.'

‘Well done, young Morris,' he chortled. ‘You still know how to read a text. And how did you weigh up my conclusion?'

‘I found it very narrow-minded,' I replied with a sly grin, deliberately appealing to Jack's fighting spirit, knowing there was nothing he liked better than a broadside attack.

Jack chuckled with delight at the prospect of a lively debate. ‘Well, the right path is often like that. Indeed, it's often like the path we're on right now—quite narrow. That doesn't make it the wrong path; it just makes it a narrow one.'

‘Now Jack,' I protested, ‘you know perfectly well I'm not the least bit religious. I don't have a spiritual bone in my body. And your implication that anyone who's not religious has missed the whole point of life and is on entirely the wrong track . . . well, even you must admit that's decidedly narrow-minded and exclusive.'

‘So your mind is closed on that subject?' His great, booming voice carried a lilt of laughter.

‘No, the boot is on entirely the other foot. It's you who have the closed mind. Your Christian exclusivism—for that's what it is—is preposterous. More than that, it's offensive.'

‘Go on, young Morris, go on. Lecture me on the subject. In what way am I being both offensive and preposterous at the same time?'

‘By insisting that there is one true, proper goal at the end of every life's journey, a goal that some find and others miss out on. In a world as diverse and complex as this, that simply cannot be true. Everyone's journey through life is different.'

‘So you object to the claim that there's a universal truth that can be found and felt and thought about rationally?'

‘That's it!' I cried. ‘That's exactly it. It's that expression “a universal truth” I find offensive.'

By now we'd reached the end of the field. Warnie unlatched the gate and we all trooped through. When I, as the last, went to walk on, Jack hurried back to close and latch the gate.

‘Must be considerate to the farmers whose fields we walk through,' muttered Warnie as he once again took the lead. The path now led us through a sparse woodland of scattered trees and small bushes on a steadily increasing upward incline.

Jack paused to light his pipe, puffing great blue clouds of smoke around his head, and then resumed our debate.

‘You're annoyed,' he said between puffs, ‘by what you see as my claim to have discovered where real truth and purpose and satisfaction can be found.'

‘That's it,' I gasped, stumbling over a knotted tree root. ‘It's the claim that one way of understanding the world is right and all the other ways are wrong that's simply preposterous. Truth cannot be unique and exclusive in that way.'

‘Oh, but it can. If I say there's only one Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour, I am making a very narrow truth claim, but I'm quite right for there is only one. And if I say there's only one correct way of doing the eight times table, again I'm right. If you attempt to do calculations using the eight times table and you arbitrarily change some of the numbers to suit your tastes, you'll get your sums wrong.'

Whether Lewis was right or wrong he could always argue well. I had found these rapid logical strides of his frustrating when he was my tutor, mainly because I could never quite keep up. There had been moments in our discussions of medieval literature when I felt I was slogging through a valley while he was leaping from peak to peak. Now he was doing it again.

‘Hang on a bit,' I complained. ‘Slow down there. I think that was a bit tricky.'

Jack hooted with laughter. ‘The hand was quicker than the eye, was it?'

I concentrated for a moment and then said, ‘It was the comparisons that were wrong. The Statue of Liberty and the eight times table are very precise, specific things. What is not, and cannot be, neat and precise like that is the way we look at the world, what the Germans call our world view, our philosophy of life, our framework through which we interpret the world . . . what's their word?'

‘
Weltanschauung
,' supplied Jack. ‘But we don't need a German word. We know perfectly well what we're talking about in plain English. And we're not talking about technical or academic philosophy here; we're simply talking about how you look at life—what you think it's all about, where you think you're going and what you think matters. In that sense everyone has a world view, from professors to plumbers to pastry cooks.'

‘Yes,' I agreed hesitantly. ‘And sometimes we want to stand back and ask ourselves if our way of looking at the world is right—'

‘Or whether it's wrong,' Jack leaped in. ‘So, you see, a world view can be either right or wrong. And I am proposing that there's one way of looking at the world that sees it rightly while all the others see it slightly out of focus or distorted in some way.'

We came out of the wood and ahead of us was a grass-covered slope up to the crown of a hill. As the path became steeper, we ceased talking until we reached the high point. Here we stopped to catch our breath.

Laid out before us were the rolling green hills and valleys of England. High hedges marked where the roads cut through the valleys and wound around the hills. In the distant fields were tiny animals that looked like miniatures that had spilled out of a child's toy Noah's Ark. The occasional car or truck or motorbike on those winding country roads looked like the toy tin cars I played with on the nursery floor as a child.

Below us, but still some distance away, was the small market town that was our destination. It was laid out like a collection of wooden blocks from a toy box, painted to look like buildings. Snaking around it was a silvery river fed by streams from the low hills beyond the town. Crossing the river on an iron bridge and plunging into the town was a ruler-straight railway line. A train was crossing the bridge as we looked—half a dozen carriages pulled by a small locomotive that puffed grey smoke and white steam into the morning air.

Between the foot of the hill below us and the town was a patchwork of farms and fields. In one of those fields a tractor was pulling a plough, leaving a feathery cloud of brown dust trailing behind it. Immediately in front of us was a ridge of high land we could follow to the outskirts of the town.

‘Now, Jack,' I said, turning around to find his ruddy farmer's face only a few feet away, ‘this business of you claiming that Christianity is exclusively true and every other view of the world is wrong—'