Honoured Sir,
A line to tell you we are narks of the detectives and know Edalji killed the horse and wrote those letters. No use trying to lay it on others. It is Edalji and it will be proven for he is not a right sort nor…
Arthur turned the page, read on, and let out a roar:
… there was no education to be got at Walsall when that bloody swine Aldis was high school boss. He got the bloody bullet after the governors were sent letters about him. Ha, ha.
A supplementary request was despatched to the Headmaster of Walsall School, asking about the circumstances of his predecessor's departure; then this latest piece of evidence was forwarded to Dr Lindsay Johnson.
Undershaw felt quiet. Both children were away: Kingsley in his first half at Eton, Mary at Prior's Field, Godalming. The weather was gloomy; Arthur took solitary meals by a blazing fire; in the evenings he played billiards with Woodie. He could see his fiftieth birthday on the horizon – if a horizon could be as close as a mere two years away. He still turned out at cricket, and every so often his cover drive proved a thing of beauty, on which opposing captains were kind enough to comment. But all too often he would stand at the crease, watch a disrespectful bowler arrive in a whirl of arms, feel a thud on his pads, glare down the pitch at the umpire, and hear, from twenty-two yards away, the regretful judgement, 'Very sorry, Sir Arthur.' A decision against which there was no appeal.
It was time to admit that his glory days were over. Seven for 61 against Cambridgeshire one season, and the wicket of W.G. Grace the next. Admittedly the great man had already scored a century when Arthur came on as fifth-change bowler and dismissed him with off-theory, that duffer's trick. But even so: W.G. Grace c W. Storer b A.I. Conan Doyle 110. In celebration he had written a mock-heroic poem in nineteen stanzas; but neither his verse nor the deed it recorded were enough to get him into Wisden. Captain of England, as Partridge had once predicted? Captain of Authors v Actors at Lord's last summer was more his mark. On that June day, he had opened the batting with Wodehouse, who got himself comically bowled for a duck. Arthur himself made two, and Hornung didn't even get an innings. Horace Bleakley had made fifty-four. Perhaps the better the writer, the worse the cricketer.
And it was the same with golf, where the gap between dream and reality grew wider with every year. But billiards… now billiards was a game where decline was not automatically the order of the day. Players continued without any obvious falling-away into their fifties, their sixties, even their seventies. Strength was not paramount; experience and tactics were the thing. Kiss cannons, ricochet cannons, postman's knock, nursery cannons along the top cushions – what a game. Was there any reason why, with a little more practice and perhaps some advice from a professional, he should not enter the English Amateur Championship? He would need to improve his long jennies, of course. He had to tell himself each time: spot the ball in baulk for a plain half-ball into the top pocket, and then play it as a steady half-ball with as much pocket side as you can manage. Wood had little trouble with long jennies; though he still had a devil of a distance to go with his double-baulks, as Arthur constantly pointed out to him.
Nearing fifty: the second half of his life about to begin, if tardily. He had lost Touie and found Jean. He had abandoned the scientific materialism he had been inducted into, and found a way to open the great door into the beyond just a crack. Wits liked to repeat that the English, since they lacked any spiritual instinct, had invented cricket in order to give themselves a sense of eternity. Purblind observers imagined that billiards was the same shot played over and over again. Poppycock, both notions. The English were not a demonstrative race, it was true – they were not Italians – but they had as much of a spiritual nature as the next tribe. And no two billiards shots were alike, any more than any two human souls were alike.
He visited Touie's grave at Grayshott. He laid flowers, he wept, and as he turned to go, he caught himself wondering when he would come next. Would it be the following week, or would it be in two weeks' time? And after that? And after that? At a certain point the flowers would cease, and his visits would become rarer. He would start a new life with Jean, perhaps over at Crowborough, near her parents. It would become… inconvenient to visit Touie. He would tell himself that thinking of her was sufficient. Jean would – God willing – be able to bear his children. Who would visit Touie then? He shook his head to clear away this thought. There was no point anticipating future guilt. You must act according to your best principles, and then deal with what came later on its own terms.
Even so, back at Undershaw – back in Touie's empty house – he found himself drawn to her bedroom. He had given no instructions for it to be rearranged or redecorated – how could he? So there was the bed on which she had died at three o'clock in the morning with the scent of violets in the air and her fragile hand resting in his great clumsy paw. Mary and Kingsley sitting in exhausted and frightened politeness. Touie raising herself with almost her last breath and telling Mary to take care of Kingsley… Sighing, Arthur crossed to the window. Ten years ago he had chosen this room for her as having the best view, down into the garden and the private narrowing valley where the woods converged. Her bedroom, her sick-room, her death-room – he had always tried to make it as pleasant and as painless as he could.
That is what he had told himself – told himself and others so often that he had ended up believing it. Had he always been fooling himself? For this was the very room where, a few weeks before her death, Touie had told their daughter that her father would marry again. When Mary reported the conversation, he had tried to make light of the matter – a foolish decision, he now realized. He should have taken the opportunity to praise Touie, and also to prepare the ground; instead he had been panicked into jocularity and asked something like, 'Did she have any particular candidate in mind?' To which Mary had said, 'Father!' And there was no doubting the disapproval with which that word had been pronounced.
He continued looking out of the bedroom window, down past the neglected tennis ground to the valley which once, in a moment of whimsy, he had found reminiscent of a German folk tale. Now it looked no more than the part of Surrey that it was. He could hardly reopen the conversation with Mary. But one thing was certain: if Touie knew, then he was destroyed. If Touie knew and Mary knew, then he was doubly destroyed. If Touie knew, then Hornung was right. If Touie knew, then the Mam was wrong. If Touie knew, then he had played the grossest hypocrite with Connie and shamefully manipulated old Mrs Hawkins. If Touie knew, then his whole concept of honourable behaviour was a sham. On the wold above Masongill, he had said to the Mam that honour and dishonour lay so close to one another that it was hard to tell them apart, and the Mam had replied that this was what made honour so important. What if he had been paddling in dishonour the whole time, fooling himself yet nobody else? What if the world took him for a common adulterer – and even though he was not, he might as well have been? What if Hornung had been right and there was no difference between guilt and innocence?
He sat heavily on the bed and thought of those illicit journeys to Yorkshire: how he and Jean would arrive by different trains, and leave by different ones, so that they could pretend to innocence. Ingleton was two hundred and fifty miles from Hindhead; there they were safe. But he had confused safety with honour. Over the years, it must have become perfectly plain to everyone. What were English villages but vortices of gossip? However Jean might be chaperoned, however clearly he and Jean never stayed under the same roof, here was the famous Arthur Conan Doyle, who married in the parish church, striding over wold and fell with another woman at his side.