And as fictional characters go, there is less of him than most. After all, what is a character in a book? Four facts, a speech impediment, boss-eyes, a fluffy moustache from a box of costumes. Mycroft is empty. But it’s a pregnant emptiness. And Patrick had seen something moving there, something that reminded him of himself.
Doyle portrays Mycroft as an indolent genius, with more natural aptitude than his younger brother, but without the drive to achieve anything with it. The first time he meets Watson (in ‘The Greek Interpreter’) he astonishes him by out-deducing Sherlock. In ‘The Bruce Partington Plans’, we learn that Mycroft plays a significant role in the British government of the time. Sherlock calls him ‘the most indispensable man in the country’. The only other things about Mycroft that are certain are that he is very fat, and a member of the Diogenes Club, where conversation is forbidden.
Sherlock Holmes trivia was one of Patrick’s minor enthusiasms. Vivian and I didn’t share it to the extent of actually reading the stories, but we were able to participate in Patrick’s quizzes because, like his anecdotes and riddles, the questions were the same every year: ‘What was the curious incident of the dog in the night-time?’ (The dog didn’t bark, that was the curious incident); ‘In which story does Holmes say, “Elementary, my dear Watson”?’ (He never says it); and, of course, ‘What is the name of Sherlock’s smarter older brother?’
Patrick had mentioned Mycroft in one other place. In a footnote to Amazon Basin (the unplagiarised section) he calls him one of literature’s three most intriguing absences. The other two are Yorick — the fool who’s dead before Hamlet begins — and camels from the Koran. Patrick maintained that if God had indeed written the Koran, He would have remembered to put in the camels.
Patrick’s typescript began where Doyle had left off. It consisted of three stories which delved into the absent personality of Mycroft. Even before I got down to reading them, I was virtually certain that Mycroft was the unnamed hero of the fragment that had puzzled me on the plane. The stories would confirm it. They were written in the same antique style. Serena Eden was not mentioned again, but Doriment was — the mad painter — and in an aside in the final story, Mycroft referred to his time in India.
As impatient as I was to read them, I was conscious of my obligations to Patrick. Before beginning, I made some tea to sober me up. I found a comfortable chair in the library. I moved a standard lamp to give me the right degree of light: the yellow bulb spawned a twin in the rainswept window behind it.
The first completed story, ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke’, found Mycroft back in London. He’s trying to help rehabilitate the crazy painter Richard Doriment, who has been put in an insane asylum after murdering his father. Mycroft petitions the governors of the asylum to allow Doriment to exhibit his work. However, when Mycroft finally succeeds, the weird new paintings confirm the judgement that Doriment is completely bonkers. Among the VIPs invited to the exhibition are Sherlock and Watson. They and Mycroft find themselves standing baffled in front of a portrait of a bizarre-looking mythical beast which is in the process of ingesting a human corpse. This is how the story ends:
The doctor paused before the canvas. His gaze fixed on the organs of the ranged beast, which appeared visible through an opening on the crown of its head.
‘The beast’s tubes must serve some purpose!’ cried the doctor.
My brother looked at me in bafflement.
‘Alimentary, my dear Watson,’ I said.
The last line makes me think of one of those replica guns that fire a flag saying BANG! Patrick seems to have based Doriment on the mad Victorian painter Richard Dadd.
In the second story, ‘The Duellist’, Mycroft goes to visit the painter Horace Vernet in Paris. Vernet (1789–1863) was a real French painter whom Doyle claimed was Sherlock’s maternal uncle. Horace needs to get some money for a purpose that is never made clear and takes Mycroft with him to the apartment of an old Russian émigré by the name of d’Anthès. The description of d’Anthès, who is attended by an elderly lady called Yelena Gravanova, was one of the funniest things I had read in the stories so far. Patrick/Mycroft describes ‘the great bully-bag of his testicles bulging out of his trousers’, and the old man ‘wheezing through interminable descriptions of his salad days at the Russian court, name-dropping lists of the titled ladies he had bedded’. My croft and Horace leave the apartment and the story concludes with the following exchange.
‘What an unbearable fraud with his hideous Countess Gruffanuff!’ I said, finally free to reveal the extent of my revulsion.
‘He may be loathsome, but his notoriety is, I assure you, genuine, and rests on a very singular claim indeed,’ said my uncle.
‘Which is?’
‘The Baron d’Anthès killed Pushkin.’
D’Anthès, a real historical figure, died in Paris in 1895 without ever having expressed remorse for killing Russia’s greatest poet in a duel. I don’t think this fact improves the story, but it authenticates it as one of Patrick’s. D’Anthès was a man in the same mould as the other antiheroes who peopled our summer quizzes: John Wilkes Booth, Charles Manson, Reginald Christie, David Berkowitz. Something in Patrick’s internal world drew him towards vivid examples of human cruelty.
Reading these two stories at two o’clock in the morning on a leather armchair in Patrick’s library, I felt sorry for my uncle. It was a sad thought: Patrick, isolated and embittered, directing all his energies into pastiching Victorian prose. I remembered that haunting line in the notebook: ‘(I am writing this alone, in an empty house, in silence).’ It made me think of a rock climber, doing a tricky solo ascent which no one will see or remember. After the long wind-ups, the endings were a bit facile, but I liked the stories. They were funny, and as Mrs Delamitri might have said, ‘so Patrick!’
And I wondered if Patrick realised how revelatory his writing was. Mycroft was clearly a fantasy Patrick had about himself. But there was more to the character than simple wish-fulfilment. Mycroft had a dark side, absent from Doyle’s originals, but worked up in Patrick’s version of him. He was almost a tragic figure. He was a kind of Atlas — carrying the world inside his brain instead of on his shoulders — though it was no less a burden to him there. He was paralysed by his knowledge; it oppressed him. His corpulence was symptomatic of this: like the overspill of his stuffed cranium. If only he could know less …
The third story was separated from the others by a couple of blank pages. It was quite different from the previous ones. There was no sense that the narrator was trying to set up another surprise ending. In fact, the darkness and guilt that were hinted at in the other stories grew more explicit. The narrative drew nearer to Mycroft’s empty centre and sought to explain what it found there. Beneath the costumes and the grease-paint, I glimpsed real people, people I actually knew. I heard Patrick’s voice speaking to me through Mycroft. And as I surrendered to the story, I had the odd feeling that I was entering my uncle’s dream life.
TWENTY-TWO
The Death of
Abel Mundy
BY PATRICK MARCH
Gods‚ judge me not as a god,
but as a man
whom the ocean has broken
WHOLE DAYS together I dwell among ghosts.
I saw Abel Mundy in a dream again last night, drowned and dripping, with dead eyes, and river water running from the folds of his drenched clothes. His cold fingers burned like whipcord where I shook my wrist free from his grip.