Death Lives Next Door Read online

  GWENDOLINE BUTLER

  Death Lives Next Door

  Dedication

  To

  Aylmer Macartney

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Keep Reading

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Oxford, which presents so glamorous and beautiful a face to the world, has also its seedy side. The world of grey stone colleges and elegantly panelled common rooms is not the only one. Not all scholars are dons comfortably housed in college rooms with cheerful and dignified servants or live happily in North Oxford in a house with trees in front and a lawn behind. There is a sadder side made up of those who have not quite succeeded in the battle, a sort of sub-world of failures and hangers-on.

  At the top of the scale are the newly graduated but not yet established, living outside college life but teaching for the colleges and looking at them with envious eyes. A fellowship is their ambition and they look at the possessors of them hopefully, longing for a death, an early retirement or a promotion. There are not nearly enough to go round. So for some hope dies, and some move away, while others obstinately linger on. If they linger long enough they sink towards the bottom of the scale where are all the people who should never have hung on at all, the people for whom Oxford represents a dream, a drug, an illusion. And these people you must pity because they are in thrall to a harsh deity who takes no notice of them and never will. Such people are the third class honours students, the women graduates who find an exciting world here they find nowhere else, the people who don’t want to go home. They take poor teaching jobs, hack coaching, a job as a porter, as Father Christmas, a warder in Oxford prison by night, a poet and scholar by day, or so they hope, in order to hang on.

  To this group are attached all the people who should never have been in Oxford anyway and would be banished if the Proctors knew they were there: the refugee who is so rootless that he has no real home anywhere except an attic in Wellington Square and who fills in his time and his pockets with a little odd blackmail, spying, and petty theft, and who is on the black lists of half the Embassies of Europe, even if low down: the actress without a play who hovers hopefully around the Playhouse and Ma Brown’s café.

  Prominent among this society is the perpetual scholar; the man who is always proceeding to the next and then the next degree. Labouring endlessly on theses which he may never present, eternally concerned with the minutiae of scholarship and losing the vitality, the perpetual scholar seems specially a product of the nineteen forties and fifties, of a society lavish with grants, eager to compensate for the security it cannot really provide.

  Geographically this world centres on Wellington Square and Walton Street, although of course its members may be found anywhere. The hallmark of their lodgings is that they live in a contrived sort of way, with kettles hidden under the bookcase and dirty cups tucked neatly away in cupboards.

  Because all the members of this world know each other or of each other, rumours spread rapidly; deliriously rapidly in the case of the rumour that the Dean of Gaveston was giving an open party which brought two-thirds of the members thirstily but mistakenly to the unhappy man’s rooms. This day was afterwards known as the Glorious Thirst of June. Or with sinister rapidity as in the case of the present rumour, which was that in Oxford at the moment one was liable to be followed.

  The gossip snowballed. Everyone adding his share.

  Ezra added his.

  Ezra found passing on the gossip a useful relief from thinking. Thirty-five years of being Ezra had accustomed him to all the thoughts he was likely to have, he didn’t see much chance now of his thinking anything new, he was stuck with his old mind, with all its connections, associations and responses, and they were boring. He was even bored with his work. There was not the freshness to the study of Beowulf and Guthric that there had been ten years ago when he started it, he himself had not the same enthusiasm that he had felt when he had first landed in Oxford after five years in the army. That had been three years before starting on Beowulf so altogether he had been at it thirteen years now. Thirteen years too long possibly. It depended how you. looked at it. You could say he was adding to scholarship, which was how Ezra’s supervisor put it, or you could say he was wasting his time, which was how Ezra’s father put it. Ezra himself put it half way between: he had added perhaps half a dozen new facts to the study of Beowulf, he had suggested a new interpretation of the Grendel figure (another myth he thought) and he had enriched his own mind. If he had wasted any time it had been his own.

  But so far it had not brought him any further in the world. He was still living in the same rooms in which he had set himself up ten years ago with an electric gramophone and an electric coffee pot as a student, he still had to hide his tea tray under the bed when his pupils came (he did a great deal of tutorial work for Prelims, grinding Anglo-Saxon into the heads of dull girls from St. Agatha’s). In all this time it had never dawned on Ezra that his pupils could see his tea tray perfectly clearly under the bed drape. He always sat in the same chair. He had noticed however that the girls who had once seemed more or less his own contemporaries now got younger and younger every year and that he himself had almost got to thinking of them indulgently as pretty young things. He did occasionally ask them out for a drink or for dinner but now they always seemed shy and nervous whereas ten years ago everything would have gone bouncingly. He had no idea that his young pupils regarded his sombre good looks with respectful and romantic eyes: to them he was an elderly, but attractive figure, and it was a great treat to be sent as a pupil to him.

  Out early one morning doing his marketing, which he did himself and on foot, for the sake of his liver (Ezra was something of a valetudinarian and took his health seriously), he met a young man with whom he had a party acquaintance.

  “Hello, Ezra dear,” said the young man. “Don’t pad behind me so in your crêpe soles.”

  “You nervous? Believe in this creeper?”

  “Oh my, yes.”

  “Someone follows, you don’t know it, and then suddenly there he is.”

  “Have you been followed?”

  “Oh no, not me.”

  “Who then?”

  “Not sure. I’ve just heard about it.” The young man looked puzzled. Then his face cleared. “Everyone’s talking about it. It must be true.”

  There were no details, but a sort of group conviction.

  “This person watches,” said the young man.

  Ezra raised his eyebrows and walked on thoughtfully.

  At the delicatessen in the market the queue was standing peacefully reading and in one case apparently writing a book. Ezra took his place behind a large man whom he had certainly seen in the Bodleian working upon Bracton’s ‘De Legibus Antiquis’. Peeping, Ezra could see that his present study was the Newgate Calendar, which was roughly in keeping. But after a bit Ezra could see that he was really engaged in trying to make acquaintance with the tall girl in front, something of which he seemed to have small chance as she appeared at the moment to be interested only in Mrs. H’s liver garlic sausage and the Manchester Guardian.

  “Would you mind stepping off my foot?” she said sweetly, turning round. But after this Ezra saw to his amusement that they went away amicably together. You
could never tell. Ezra nodded in approval. Over the years a grandfatherly attitude had grown up in him, a feeling that love and marriage were not for him. It had been unconscious, he had hardly noticed it, he thought, until lately, when it had taken a beating. It had been a peaceful state to be in, he recalled wryly.

  As he thoughtfully pinched the lettuce for his dinner and eyed the rye bread to see if it was stale, the subject came up again. Mrs. Hofmanstall leaned over the sauerkraut and breathed her fears and garlic at him in the same breath.

  “Of course it may not be true, Mr. Barton, I do not say it is, but my customers tell me.” Mrs. Hofmanstall’s customers told her everything; there was certainly every opportunity to as shopping there was a slow business. There was time for life friendships to be built up.

  “Have you been followed?”

  Mrs. Hofmanstall drew herself up. “Me? No. Naturalich not.” She lowered her voice again. “All we hear is not right. It is not always follows. Sometimes he is there before.”

  Ezra said seriously: “You know there’s a fallacy there somewhere, Mrs. H. But I get the feeling you describe. Nasty.”

  He gathered up his shopping and went on.

  He continued his walk, through Market Street, down Cornmarket, under the trees of St. Giles, casting a longing but declining look at The Playhouse beside whose doors he could see three of the people who amused him most and whom he most wished to impress. He squared his shoulders and assumed the stern look of a warrior king. One of the things Ezra did most was to act and they were casting for Henry IV, Part Two. He was longing to be the young Prince Hal. He realised however that he was most likely to get the part of the sick Henry IV. These were the parts he always got, he had been the King in Hamlet more often (he reckoned) than any man living. It was beginning to affect his character; you couldn’t be called lecherous so often without beginning to feel it.

  He cleared his throat and began to recite the great lines from Henry IV,

  Oh sleep, O gentle sleep,

  Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee?

  going through the catalogue of the sick king’s symptoms and ending:

  Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

  Yes, he could see himself in the part. He could see Lamia Beauregard tossing her golden locks at the producer and he remembered how good, in a dreadful sort of way, she had been as Hamlet’s mother. But then to be good in a dreadful sort of way was just what was demanded of Hamlet’s mother. No doubt Lamia, an improbable but suitable name now he came to think of it, remembering Keats’ girl who was metamorphosed into a snake, was not at all worried about anyone following her. Probably she expected that someone would be following her, just as she expected (and certainly would get what she expected) that she would soon go to London and throw her lustre upon such totally unknown stars as Dorothy Tutin.

  He could see that Lamia was beckoning and after wondering whether it would look undignified or not to turn round and go, curiosity took him. After all he could walk down St. John Street to pay the call which he intended to pay before lunch and the thought of which was making a little warm fire of pleasure burn in his mind.

  “We are talking about doing Ibsen,” said Lamia at once.

  “Well, I think I’m more of a Shakespeare man.”

  “There are other actors.”

  “Shakespeare’s always safe,” said the producer. “You can do him very badly indeed, and frankly we mostly do, and still get away with it.”

  “How are you getting on with Henry IV, Part Two?”

  “Very nicely. We’ve got a lovely Harry,” said the producer with enthusiasm, “just the right mixture of bounder and cad. No Henry IV yet though,” and he looked thoughtfully at Ezra who sighed. Old dying Henry was just made for him.

  “What about King Lear?” he suggested, remembering that there were great parts for dying old men.

  “No part for me in it,” said Lamia sternly. She knew her limitations, which included Cordelia.

  “There are other actresses,” he reminded her. “And other parts; what about Goneril and Regan?”

  “Oh, that old bitch.”

  “I always think, Goneril and Regan, yes and Cordelia, too, are just the other faces of one personality,” said the producer. “That’s how I’d do it. All of them with the same face, only different. A triple split personality.”

  “And then you might have them all looking exactly like Lear,” said Ezra entering into the spirit of the thing. “Which, when you come to think about it, is really most likely.”

  “I’m afraid it might seem a little like a Crazy Revue,” said the producer regretfully. “Talking of Regan,” he said, looking doubtfully at Ezra, “have you seen anything of Rachel lately?”

  “Yes,” said Ezra shortly. “And I don’t know why she reminds you of Regan.” The worst of being in love was that it made you so touchy.

  “Oh, just the initials,” said the producer. “I wanted to talk to her.”

  “She was at Marion Manning’s. I’m on my way round to Marion’s now.” Marion’s name produced the silence it usually did. She was a fabulous figure. But what did people really know about her? That she had been four years old when the First Great War started, in which her father had been killed, and only nine when it ended, and yet she had written one great poem on it which anyone would have been glad to have written, and then never touched the subject again. That she had become an anthropologist, been a member of a highly publicised and tragic expedition to Central America on which two men had died; that she had written a controversial book about it and then announced that anthropology did not provide the discipline she wanted, and turned herself into a philologist and a very good one at that, but that her name was still good for a paragraph in the Sunday newspapers. What did this young producer know about her? That he had seen her stocky grey-haired figure (with the slightly dragging left leg where the bomb had lamed her) at parties and heard her talking?

  The three of them walked a little way with him before the producer looked at his watch and remembered a tutorial, and with an anxious look, which at once reduced his age by ten years (and, so Ezra thought, added them to his) disappeared.

  “Give my love to Tommy,” Ezra shouted. He knew the producer’s tutor.

  “Unless I have had some good things to say about the French Revolution I won’t dare,” called back the young man. The third member of the party was a silent young man from St. John’s who had never in all the time Ezra had known him spoken one word, but drew constantly upon an old pipe and looked deep. Lamia and the silent man, who was continuing to look deep, went off together.

  Ezra continued on his way down St. John Street and through Wellington Square to where Chancellor Hyde Street runs into Little Clarendon Street. When the houses it contained were built there were fields where Walton Street now lies. The houses were old pretty red brick cottages converted at great cost into cosy little houses watched over by the Georgian Trust. Marion lived in the corner house and although Ezra had got used to it the house was unmistakably Marion’s.

  Marion was standing in the window reading a book and her tom-cat, Sammy, was sunning himself in the garden. There was no love lost between Sammy and Ezra. Sammy raised his head as Ezra came past, and glared at him, slightly showing his teeth as he did so. All right, thought Ezra, if that’s how you feel, I don’t feel any better about you, and he bared his teeth back. The Professor of Morphology who was passing looked apprehensive, and Ezra realised sadly that the Professor, a nervous and humble man, had taken the threat as directed at himself. By the time he got to Marion’s he was in a bad temper.

  “I find the human race difficult and incomprehensible at the moment, Marion,” he said, falling back into a chair.

  Marion stood there running a hand through her short silver hair which seemed to shine with a light no one else’s had; her bright friendly brown eyes looked at him with inquisitiveness.

  “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you to number yourself among the unacc
ountable?” Marion’s tone was wry.

  Ezra blinked.

  “Oh, do you think so?” He considered. Perhaps this curious atmosphere he had noticed among his friends lately was coming from within him and not from without.

  “I think I’m having an intellectual crisis!”

  “What a luxury for you. I couldn’t afford one.” Marion was continuing in wryness. “Too old.”

  “You’ve had them though,” pointed out Ezra, remembering the change-over from anthropology to linguistics. He looked at Marion and saw that she looked dry and thin. It struck him that he had not really observed Marion for a long time. She did look older.

  “Oh, you have the special Oxford disease … Ennui, reluctance, it comes over everyone. Closely related, I always think, to the medieval ‘accidie’, one of the seven deadly sins, you may remember. Sloth is its other name.”

  Ezra flushed. Marion could always sting.

  “It especially attacks intellectuals. I suppose you count as that?”

  “You’ve brought me up to be one.” Ezra regarded Marion as his intellectual mother. He hardly remembered his real one. Marion, however, was not obviously maternal. He had come to her for teaching in his first term, young and earnest, and she had moulded him. It was going to be difficult to tell Marion what he wanted to tell her.

  “I begin to feel that perhaps I’d better get away and strike out in a new sea.”

  Marion frowned.

  “I’ve had a sort of offer,” he hurried on. “From Bridport. You know John Farmer has the new Chair, he’s sort of offered …”

  “Oh, there! They have a vested interest in mediocrity there.”

  “That’s unfair.” He wanted to say, “Hold back your blows, Marion,” but he could see she was deeply hurt.

  “Go if you like.” She shrugged.

  That was the trouble, Ezra did not know if he did like. He was happy here. He loved the rhythm of his life, the autumn and winter for quiet work, his acting in the spring and summer, the cheap trips abroad; in some moods he even loved his pupils. He knew all the little side streets of Oxford. Blue Boar Lane which lets on to the back premises of Christ Church and the houses, so like country mansions, of the Canons of the Cathedral. He knew and loved Magpie Lane and New College Lane and the tiny stretch of Catte Street. As a ghost, thought Ezra, this would be the world he would haunt, these loved little streets. He had walked them in the autumn when they smelt of wood smoke, and when they were frosty with snow, but he thought he liked them best in the summer. If condemned ever to be a revenant it would be to this summer world he would come back, walking the streets on warm moonlit evenings, dreaming of long-dead Commemoration Balls and evenings on the river. (In real life Ezra was a poor hand with a punt and hardly ever went near the water, but a ghost, of course, would be able to do everything.) Or perhaps the ghosts of the dancers and the musicians would be there, too, and he would hear music floating across the wall from Merton or over from the New Buildings at Magdalen which were new when Dr. Johnson was a young man. He loved all this and didn’t really want to be uprooted, but Rachel, with her acid clear judgements, had changed everything. His indecision was mirrored in his face and Marion saw it.