A Kind of Healthy Grave (Tamara Hoyland Book 4) Read online

  A KIND OF HEALTHY GRAVE

  Jessica Mann

  © Jessica Mann 1986

  Jessica Mann has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1986 by Macmillan London Limited.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE I: 1929

  PROLOGUE II: 1969

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  ‘I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave.’

  The Reverend Sydney Smith, to Miss G Harcourt, 1838

  The Characters

  Mr T.G.H.BLACK, a civil servant

  ALLAN CORY, a businessman, the foster son of the Reverend Herbert Cory

  LAWRENCE CORY, the son of Allan Cory; a schoolmaster

  ZOE CORY, née MEREDITH, his wife; an actress

  Mr DEEBLE, the custodian of Maxton Hall

  CHANTAL, LADY DIGBY, a socialite

  SIR ENGLEBERT (BERTIE) & LADY (SUKIE) DIGBY, the last Digbys to live at Maxton Hall

  EVELYN DILLON, a publisher

  PAUL DILLON, his nephew, also a publisher

  BASIL HUTBER, the Headmaster of St Uny’s School, Carmell; widower of

  NELL, née St Uny

  GILLIAN HUTBER, the wife of

  RAINSFORD HUTBER, Basil’s son, a solicitor in Carmell

  Dame VIOLA HUTBER (also known as Hilary Vivian), President of Watchwomen and the sister of Basil Hutber

  TAMARA HOYLAND, an Investigator of Ancient Monuments, and other things

  C.K.ISBISTER, a veteran feminist, once the assistant of XAVIER MURPHY, a psychologist

  GEORGE JENKIN, the second master at St Uny’s School, Carmell

  ZOE MEREDITH, star of a television series called Stacey’s Sleuths; wife of Lawrence Cory

  Lord (PETER) MUNVIES, a life peer

  DANNY PEDLAR, once a friend of

  REX, a painter and writer, well known in the 1920s

  ANGELICA (ANNIE) HAMILTON ROUTLEY, a public relations consultant

  Lady (EVANGELINE) SMITH, a committee-woman

  STELLA, a model frequently painted by Rex

  NOELLE STEPHENSON, a Watchwoman

  JULIAN TAPSELL, an English poet, now living in America

  Mrs WISEMAN, a resident of Carmell

  Mr WOOTTON, a junior partner in Wootton, Hardman & Co., Solicitors

  PROLOGUE I: 1929

  A smell of mouldering and decay is natural in late September, but the men who were approaching the charred remains found it disgusting and had to force themselves past the scorched beech trees towards the clearing. At one time there must have been a track at least wide enough for the caravan to be drawn along to its site, but for a long time now it had been accessible only on foot.

  The autumn had been fine. As they walked two of the policemen argued whether it should be called St Martin’s or an Indian summer. The ground was very dry, and the stream that had provided the water supply for the caravan was too low for quenching such a fire. There was no sign that the dead man had even tried to do so.

  Nobody in the neighbourhood seemed to know anything about him. He had bought the caravan from the last survivor of a family of woodmen or, as the local constable called them, poachers. The old woman, recently widowed, and childless since the death of her four sons in the war, was thought to have moved over Oxford way.

  The caravan’s purchaser had been young, unremarkable in everything except that he always paid for what he bought in ready cash. He said that his name was ‘Rex’, but he was the kind of man to be addressed as ‘Sir’. The woman who kept the village shop thought that he came down at odd times to stay a few days before going off again. He had never received any mail. Sometimes he would arrive on the bus and buy bread and milk before walking off towards the woods. Occasionally he came with friends, men and women, who brought motor cars that were parked to other people’s inconvenience on verges and in gateways. Among them was the notorious Lady Digby. Once her chauffeur came to the village pub and told tales about her.

  A girl from a labourer’s cottage nearby admitted with many giggles that she had sometimes spied on ‘goings-on’ in the caravan. She was simple, but there seemed no reason to doubt her stories. She described music from a gramophone and drinks from bottles with popping corks. The visitors used to do naughty things, she said; there were men without any clothes on, and ladies, and a girl, she added, ‘No bigger than me’.

  Nobody had noticed the man’s return to the caravan that day. The only stranger in the village had been a tramp. There were a lot of tramps around at the time, eleven years after the end of the war to end all war. It was the smoke that drew attention, black smoke curling above the trees, thicker and more pungent than was usual from the controlled fires of the season. The farmer sent a man to make sure that the whole wood did not catch.

  The neighbours had limited their firefighting to the flames that reached the edge of the clearing. There was no saving the caravan, and it was not worth trying, since nobody was thought to be in it.

  After the fire had died down they found human remains in the blackened mess. The pig-man was sick, and the police were amused that he, who spent his working life in a stinking sty, should have so much weaker a stomach than they; but the police had known what to expect in the ruins.

  Later on in the day, too late to blow up the fire, a gusty wind scattered ashes and debris. The conditions were far from ideal for collecting evidence, but they did their best. The human remains were the most difficult to handle, but at last, by nightfall, the clearing was empty.

  The wind brought heavy clouds up from the west. Rain fell during the night, and for much of the following winter. Leaves fell from the beech trees and rotted down into the soil. Later in the year the soil was broken by frost and churned by wind and worms. Within a very few years all visible traces of the caravan and even of the clearing it stood in would disappear, concealed by spring’s bluebells – especially vivid and profuse after the fire – by their later covering of stinging nettles and autumn leaves, and gradually, as the years went by, by new, self-seeded trees.

  The traces of the man who had died there disappeared also. In 1944 a flying bomb fell on the police station at which records of the investigation were stored. None of the massed paperwork survived. All later enquirers knew was that the man who died in the fire was
the artist, Rex.

  The verdict at the inquest was accidental death. Evidence as to identity could only be circumstantial, for nothing identifiable except teeth remained, and Rex was not known to have dental records. A grey trilby was found in the fork of a tree at the edge of the wood. It was similar to that which Rex usually wore when he went to the village shop. A lump of melted metal was identified as an umbrella’s spokes, adhering to the distorted brass ring on which was the letter R. One of the witnesses, Lady Digby, told the Coroner that she had given the umbrella to Rex.

  The Coroner was a solicitor who had seen his first client in the year of the Zulu War. He seized the opportunity now offered him to express his disapproval of Bohemians, even implying that Rex deserved such a death.

  Rex: an artist, self styled, the Coroner said, and no better than a cheap pornographer; the author of books, printed in Paris, whose importation to the United Kingdom was a criminal offence; the exhibition of whose work, in a gallery in Theobalds Road in 1928, had been closed after one day; who had already been convicted and served a three-month prison sentence for gross indecency and obscene libel, and of whom a second prosecution was pending. The Coroner reminded the jury that the exhibited pictures had been destroyed by order of the Court and that the Director of Public Prosecutions had been congratulated for his initiative in a leading article in The Times. It was implied that Rex King (perhaps not his real name, but the only one he ever gave) was no loss.

  Nor did Rex’s friends look heartbroken in the photograph taken when they were leaving the Coroner’s Court; disreputable people by those rustic standards, all three of whom had admitted occasional visits to that caravan, and to participating in the junkets that went on – orgies, as the Coroner thought the jury might well suppose. There was Lady Digby, a society hostess, Evelyn Dillon, a publisher, and Peter Munvies, a young man who aspired to being about town.

  The Daily Mail and the Evening Star ran articles about the behaviour of Bohemians and offered moralistic conclusions, but soon their staff writers moved on to newer crusades, and Rex’s life and death and work were left to be forgotten except in the diminishing circle of those who once had known him or admired his work.

  Little of it survived him, since forty-eight paintings, in macabre anticipation of their creator’s fate, had been burnt by order of the Court. The books had been published in tiny editions and the second pair, Tumuli and In the Pothole, which were published in Paris, were liable to seizure by British Customs officers; equally few copies of the Cavalier Press’s The Stroker and Drivers seemed to remain. They were volumes of captioned drawings, full of a sardonic wit and energy that appealed to the sophisticated, and a brutal immodesty that delighted the licentious. All four became rarities of which copies were held in the locked stores of copyright libraries, or in the secret collections of men who, dying, left them to the destructive disgust of sorrowing widows. Very few examples of Rex’s work were visible after his death, though sometimes a knowing eye might recognise a picture signed with a tiny, camouflaged crown. The Tate Gallery owned but did not hang a painting in the ‘Stella’ series, received as part of a bequest.

  On the whole, however, Rex’s work vanished with him. Other painters had newer inventions, other books that were smuggled into London took the connoisseur’s fancy, and the Second World War scattered the people who might have brought the man into their conversations.

  A forgotten artist; remembered at last.

  Those who were young between the wars grew old enough to write memoirs as their claim – revised, improved and heavily edited – to immortality. Then among other names Rex’s was revived and some of his work exhumed to be shown freely in the uninhibited society of the eighties. His name was one that fashion watchers began to know.

  PROLOGUE II: 1969

  Sir Englebert Digby, preparing his family home for its first public opening, told the newly employed curator to put the books and drawings by Rex on show in the library. Sexual repression was over, or so it seemed to the young who spent most of their time in the south-east of England, and so it would seem to later historians as they consulted the newspapers and novels of the period, whose authors usually lived in liberated places.

  Prejudice had not disappeared in the provinces. Both the curator and Sukie Digby questioned Bertie’s decision. The curator said that the Rex material did not go well with the shelves of fine bindings and the dignified Grinling Gibbons chimney piece. Sukie simply wondered whether they were Bertie’s to display.

  ‘They must have belonged to that ghastly Chantal,’ she said.

  ‘That would make them the only thing the family ever got out of her.’ Bertie, who was the son of his father’s second wife, had been brought up to believe that the grasping Chantal had cleaned the Digbys out. ‘Anyway, she’s safely out of the way in Argentina.’

  Hand in hand Sukie and Bertie leant on the glass case and enjoyed Rex’s funny sexiness in those economical depictions of lust and love. There was no hatred, envy or revulsion in his work.

  ‘Doesn’t he make it all look like fun,’ Sukie murmured; and that, of course, was exactly what the authorities had objected to before, fearing that Rex’s pictures might seem to be recipes. He would have aroused less fury if he had made everything seem disgusting.

  In the dim light Sukie and Bertie saw their own joined reflections swimming above the tough, busy little drawings. Sukie said, ‘Do you really think it will be all right?’

  ‘It’s the permissive society, isn’t it?’ Bertie replied. ‘Anything goes.’

  Anything went in Bertie’s set. Bertie himself went seven years later, killed in a crash when he was racing along the motorway stoned on pot. Sukie had already gone by then, overland to Nepal with her backpack, where she died of a heart attack brought on by the altitude. But in 1969 they still expected security and prosperity. Aggrieved and dignified they stood together to hear the Recorder find them guilty of the charges brought against them. He asserted that the work of Rex tended to deprave and corrupt. ‘I feel’, the Recorder said, ‘corrupted by it myself.’

  That Recorder, soon elevated to the High Court, was a judge who recognised depravity. Perhaps it was by design of a reactionary Lord Chancellor that he became, in a way, a specialist in obscenity trials. He made many opportunities to pronounce upon moral standards from his Bench and he became the darling of one section of the press and the bugbear of the other. It was a two-sided quarrel.

  It was pure chance, just bad luck, or perhaps good luck, on a young actress otherwise known as a starlet, model, playmate or pet, called Zoe Meredith, that it was her naked body sprawled across eight pages of high gloss print in the publication prosecuted during a notorious trial of 1971. She had done nothing that was unusual in her set. One had to earn a living somehow while waiting for the big break. She waited on tables too, and served in shops or cleaned richer people’s houses or minded children.

  Girls like Zoe came by the dozen, and Toys and Teases, for which she had posed, was only one of the many magazines that appealed to flesh-fanciers. In them the new exhibitionists filled the correspondence columns with their verbose fantasies. Zoe, illustrating what they described, became to the Judge, and afterwards to many of the people on whose behalf the Judge claimed to speak, a symbol of society’s decadence.

  Like Rex’s pictures at Bertie Digby’s Maxton, Toys and Teases was judged likely to deprave and corrupt. Nearly the whole edition was destroyed, so that copies containing Zoe’s photographs became collectors’ pieces, changing hands during the ensuing years at ever increasing sums. ‘I wish I had kept a few myself,’ Zoe Meredith complained. ‘I would have been made.’

  She was made, in any case. She had become well known, her face widely recognised. Journalists wondered whether her hair could naturally be so fair, whether she made her eyes greener with contact lenses, whether any girl’s skin could naturally be so white, so transparent, as though she had one less cutaneous layer than other women. Strangers stepped forward to touch her, not alwa
ys gently. It was the price of fame.

  Zoe was transported by the excitement, the tension, the snowball effect of notoriety. She posed to publicise an old car, a new scent, a down-market novel, an up-market sherry. She performed publicity stunts, with photographers prepared to snap as she was turned away from a charity ball for wearing too revealing a dress or as she streaked naked across a cricket pitch. She played panel games on television and was charmingly coy about her sex life. Whenever a judge or bishop or politician pronounced on morality, Zoe’s photograph was likely to appear on the page that carried a report of the speech, even when there was no apparent connection between its subject and a girl who was now, as people said, famous only for being famous. During the seventies Zoe could never make up her mind whether she regretted that original naked pose. She knew that almost anything was worthwhile that would make an actress stand out from a crowd of equally qualified hopefuls, to make a casting director at least stop and look again at her pretty face among many others, even if he did not choose it. Zoe knew that she did not have ‘star quality’.

  ‘I am a realist. I shan’t end up a Dame of the British Empire, and playing Hamlet’s mother at school was probably my last chance at Shakespeare.’

  The interview, published in one of the magazines devoted to the new, unfettered woman, was a step on the road to Zoe’s rehabilitation. By the end of the decade her looks, still as good as when they graced a centrefold, her reputation for being a free woman, her general air of adventurous liveliness – ‘I am a try-anything-once-girl’ – made her seem exactly the right person to be a celluloid heroine. She landed the leading part in a new series about a girl-sleuth and her team.

  The cast was to be mid-Atlantic: Zoe herself, by now married to a one hundred per cent Englishman, but whose own father was an American diplomat and whose mother had been an Irish aristocrat; and her team, one American-Chinese, one Liverpool-West Indian, and one a New York Jew.

  The settings had to be instantly comprehensible in any country that might buy the series. The first episode took place in Paris, the second in the Sahara, though the cast got no nearer to either than studio sets with pretty peeps through the scenery windows. There were to be six programmes.