"What could we possibly say to them?"
"Exactly. Do you know the Vicar at the Church where the grave IS? "Mr Drax. He doesn't like scholars. Or students. Or Randolph Ash, I think.”
“Everybody concerned with this business seems to be very prickly.”
“And Ash himself was such a generous man," said Dr Nest, not refuting this judgment. "Let us hope he sees off Mortimer Cropper. Perhaps we should go and see him?"
"I don't know. I don't know what to do."
"Let me consult. I'll call you back tomorrow."
"Please-Dr Bailey-hurry."
Maud was excited. She told Roland they must go to London, and suggested that they consult Euan Maclntyre about Cropper's possible courses of action and how to foil them. Roland said that this was a good plan, which it was, in its way, though it increased his own sense of unreal isolation. He lay awake at night, alone in the white bed, and worried. Something that had been kept secret had gone. He and Maud had felt impelled to keep the "research" secret, and whilst it was secret they had silently shared it and each other. Now it was out in the light of common day he saw it somehow diminished by the excited curiosity of Euan and Toby as much as by the hot desire and rage of Cropper and Blackadder. Euan's charm and enthusiasm had not only smoothed the resentment and sullenness out of Val's face but had somehow brought a brightness and recklessness to Maud herself. He fancied she spoke more freely to Euan and Toby than she had done to him. He fancied Val took pleasure in taking over the pursuit. He remembered his earliest impression of Maud-managerial, arrogant, critical. She had once belonged to Fergus. Their own strange silent games were the product of chance, of a brief artificial solitude, of secrecy. They could not survive in the open. He did not even know if he wanted them to. He looked for his own primary thought, and said to himself that before Maud came he had had Randolph Ash and his words, and now even that, that above all, had been changed and taken from him.
He said nothing of all this to Maud, who appeared to notice nothing.
Euan, consulted the next day, was also excited. They would all go to London, he said, and talk to Miss Nest, and have a council of war. Perhaps they could follow Cropper around and catch him in flagrante delicto. The law was subtly different as to the disturbance of interments in burial grounds and alternatively cemeteries. Hodershall sounded like an Anglican graveyard that would qualify as a burial ground. He and Val would go in the Porsche and meet up with Roland and Maud. Why didn't they come to his pad and telephone Dr Nest from there? He had a flat in the Barbican, very comfortable. Toby must stay and mind his deedboxes and Sir George's interests.
Maud said, "I might stay with my aunt Lettice. She's an old lady in Cadogan Square. Would you like to come?”
“I think I shall stay in the Putney flat.”
“Shall I come with you?"
No.
It was not the sort of place for her, with its dingy chintz and feline smell. And it was overlaid with memories of his life with Val, with his thesis. He didn't want Maud there. "I need to think a few things out. About the future. What I am going todo. About the flat, how to pay the rent, or perhaps not to. I could do with a night on my own."
Maud said, "Is anything wrong?"
"I have to think my life out. "
"I'm sorry. You could come to my aunt's-"
"Don't worry. I'd like to stay alone, that one night."
Chapter 25
ELLEN ASH'S JOURNAL
NOVEMBER 25TH 1889
I write this sitting at His desk at two in the morning. I cannot sleep and he sleeps his last sleep in the coffin, quite still, and his soul gone away. I sit among his possessions-now mine or no one's-and think that his life, his presence, departs more slowly from these inanimate than from him, who was once animate and is now, I cannot write it, I should not have started writing. My dear, I sit here and write, to whom but thee? I feel better here amongst thy things-the pen is reluctant to form "thee,”
“thy," there is no one there, and yet here is still a presence. Here is an unfinished letter. There are the microscope, the slides, a book with a marker, and-oh, my dear-uncut leaves. I fear sleep, I fear what dreams may come, Randolph, and so I sit here and write. When he was lying there he said, "Burn what they should not see," and I said, "Yes," I promised. At such times, it seems, a kind of dreadful energy comes, to do things quickly, before action becomes impossible. He hated the new vulgarity of contemporary biography, the ransacking of Dickens's desk for his most trivial memoranda, Forster's unspeakable intrusions into the private pains and concealments of the Carlyles. He said often to me, burn what is alive for us with the life of our memory, and let no one else make idle curios or lies of it. I remember being much struck with Harriet Martineau, in her autobiography, saying that to print private letters was a form of treachery-as though one should tell the intimate talk of two friends with their feet on the fender, on winter nights. I have made a fire here, and burned some things. I shall burn more. He shall not be picked by vultures.
There are things I cannot burn. Nor ever I think look at again. There are things here that are not mine, that I could not be a party to burning. And there are our dear letters, from all those foolish years of separation. What can I do? I cannot leave them to be buried with me. Trust may be betrayed. I shall lay these things to rest with him now, to await my coming. Let the earth take them.
Mortimer Cropper: The Great Ventriloquist 1964, Chapter 26, "After Life's fitful fever," pp. 449 et seq.
A committee was hastily constituted to see whether it might not be possible to inter the great man in Westminster Abbey. Lord Leighton went to see the Dean, who was understood to have some doubts about Randolph Ash's religious beliefs. The poet's widow, who had watched devoted and sleepless by his bedside during his last illness, wrote to both Lord Leighton and the Dean to say that it was her wish, as she was sure that it had been her husband's, that he should lie in the quiet country churchyard of St Thomas's Church at Hodershall on the edge of the North Downs, where her sister Faith's husband was Vicar, and where she hoped to lie herself. Accordingly a great number of fashionable and literary personages made their way through the leafy lanes of Downland, on a dripping English November day, when yellow leaves were pashed into mud by the hooves of the horses and the sun was red and low in the sky.[22] The pall-bearers were Leighton, Hallam Tennyson, Sir Rowland Michaels and the painter Robert Brunant.[23] When the coffin had been lowered into the clay, covered with huge white wreaths, Ellen laid upon it a box, containing "our letters and other mementoes" which were "too dear to burn, too precious ever to expose to the public view."[24] Then the grave was filled up with flowers and the mourners turned away, leaving the last sad acts to the spades of the sextons, who engulfed both the ebony casket and the fragile flowers with the local mixture of chalk, flint and clay.[25] The young Edmund Meredith, Ellen's nephew, carried away from the grave's edge a cluster of violets which he carefully pressed and kept among the leaves of his Shakespeare.[26]
In later months, Ellen Ash caused a simple black headstone to be set up, with a carving of an ash tree, showing the spread of both the crown and the roots, such as he would occasionally playfully draw beside his signature in some of his letters.[27] Beneath it was carved Ash's own translation of Cardinal Bembo's epitaph for Raphael, which is carved around Raphael's tomb in the Pantheon, and appeared in Ash's poem about the painting of the Stanze in the Vatican, The Sacred and the Profane.