Wicked Spirits, page 14
The last word went through Duke’s body as if a claw were tearing him apart. For an instant, he seemed poised on the edge of an unfathomable void, while the smell and touch of clammy flesh came over him and squeezed him together in a small and narrow space. ‘The grave,’ he thought, ‘the grave!’ and with a convulsive movement, he threw out his arms and legs.
All at once the rhythm ceased, and he was filled with a sane and miraculous calm. A distant lorry rumbled towards the river. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked gently. Duke opened his eyes and looked at it. Five minutes past six. Then urgently the telephone bell rang downstairs.
‘Hello. Is that you at last, Mr Duke? Joan Averil speaking. I’ve tried eight times to get you.’
They had a long conversation, in which, full of wisdom, she told him what to do.
V
‘MISSING ARCHITECT FOUND.
‘MRS GARLEY’S EXTRAORDINARY STORY.
‘The mystery of the disappearance of Mr de Milas was solved yesterday evening in an amazing and tragic fashion. Mrs Garley states that she was disturbed several times during the afternoon by telephone calls from persons who had, as they thought, recognised Mr de Milas from his photograph in the Press, and were eager to give information as to when and where they had seen him. In each case, Mrs Garley requested the speaker to communicate at once with Mr de Milas’s solicitors or the police. Two of the calls, however, were of an unusual nature. On both occasions a man’s voice began by asking to speak to a lady, whose name Mrs Garley did not catch. On Mrs Garley’s suggestion of a wrong number, the speaker did not ring off at once, but, in his first call asked for news of Mr de Milas, and in his second call announced that he was Mr de Milas himself. It is now thought that the inquiry was a piece of facetiousness on the part of some irresponsible person who had accidentally been given Mr de Milas’s number instead of the number he required, and that on a repetition of the same accident, the unknown was so far exasperated as to be guilty of a joke in exceedingly bad taste, pardonable only on the assumption that he was ignorant of the circumstances into which he was intruding.
‘No further incident occurred till shortly after seven, when Dr Polder, who had attended Mr de Milas during his illness, called at the house and asked Mrs Garley if she knew of a black box belonging to her master. It seems that the doctor had been rung up about a quarter to seven by a man who purported to be speaking for Mr de Milas. The speaker had requested him with great urgency to visit Mr de Milas’s residence and search it for a black box, which he was to open immediately. He was assured that the opening of the box would throw a light on Mr de Milas’s disappearance, and that circumstances might arise in which medical skill would be essential. Garley replied that there was such a box in a big cupboard opening out of Mr de Milas’s bedroom. To her knowledge the box-an old-fashioned leather trunk—had not been used or opened for some years. She accompanied Dr Polder to the cupboard in question and saw the box in its usual position. The doctor attempted to lift it into the light, but could not do so owing to its great weight. He then asked Mrs Garley to bring him a candle or lamp, and when she had left the room, he raised the lid of the box, which was unlocked. Inside, huddled up on some blankets, was the dead body of Mr de Milas. The body was fully clad, and covered in part by a waterproof sheet such as was used extensively by soldiers during the war … It is the opinion of Dr Polder that death occurred about six o’clock the same afternoon, though the body might have been in a trance or state of catalepsy for several hours beforehand.’
STOP PRESS
‘Call to Dr Polder traced to Piccadilly subway.’
So ran the account of the finding of the missing architect as given to the public. Two people alone could have added substantially to it—Harry Duke, who was playing golf at Wimereux, and that devotee of psychical research, Joan Averil, who was recovering from measles in Park Lane. But neither of them cared to do so.
C. H. B KITCHIN
Clifford Henry Benn Kitchin was born at Harrogate in Yorkshire on 17 October 1895. His third name was for his mother, Sarah Ellen Benn; and his first for his father, a prosecution barrister and, in his spare time, a keen chess player and amateur gardener. Both of Clifford’s parents wrote: his father had been a journalist and wrote poetry, and Nellie wrote and performed monologues for performance at church events.
Their son, ‘Master Cliffie’, first appeared in the newspapers aged just three when he was page of honour at the wedding of his aunt Florrie, at which he and the bridesmaids wore ‘cream satin frocks, trimmed with lace, and carried bouquets of lilies of the valley’. Around the turn of the century, the family moved to Goyfield House in Felixstowe, Suffolk, and in 1907 they moved again to Bristol where they lived at Cabot House, 50 Clifton Down Road. Clifford and his younger brother John attended Braidlea School in Goodeve Road, Stoke Bishop, before moving to Clifton College. It was at Clifton that Kitchin met the future novelist Leslie Poles Hartley, who would become a lifelong friend and almost invariably give his books an ecstatic review.
Kitchin did well at Clifton, winning an open scholarship in Classics to Exeter College at Oxford University. Aside of his studies and officiating at the annual sports day, he did a little acting, appearing in June 1914 as the gatekeeper of Hades in a scene from Aristophanes’ The Frogs, presented as part of the College’s annual Guthrie commemoration. After he left Clifton, Kitchin’s mother—who was by now a widow—moved with both sons to Holmwood, a house in Boar’s Hill, Berkshire. Clifford helped John with his education in the expectation that they would both go up to Oxford. However, the First World War intervened and the brothers enlisted. After a brief spell in the Officer Training Corps of the Inns of Court, Kitchin joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, serving as a second lieutenant until January 1917 when he was wounded in France. John had joined the Royal Air Force as a lieutenant but on 21 June 1918 he was accidentally killed when starting out on a patrol. The impact on Kitchin of his younger brother’s tragically early death, as well as his own war experiences, is clear from his first book. This was Curtains, a slim volume of poetry published in 1919 by Blackwell’s.
After the war, Kitchin completed his studies and came down in 1920 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. A second volume of poetry followed, entitled Winged Victory (1920), which won him praise and favourable comparisons with the French symbolist poets. In 1924, he was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn, forty years after his father. While practising, he also began writing in earnest. As well as poetry, he had written several short stories under his own name, and anonymously, for the Oxford Outlook and the Oxford Chronicle & Reading Gazette. In 1925 he published Streamers Waving (1925), an enigmatic novel about an androgynous woman, her love for a mountaineer and her death from a broken heart, worsened by pneumonia. The presentation of the story through a female character was a feint for Kitchin’s homosexuality, which became less ambiguously disguised in several of his later, equally elegaic novels.
Kitchin became a stockbroker and moved to London. His next novel Mr Balcony (1927) was inspired in part by a childhood encounter at Bexhill, but reviewers drew unfavourable comparisons with the work of Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley. Perhaps it was this that led him to attempt a detective story. The result, Death of My Aunt (1929) introduced Malcolm Warren, a timid stockbroker who shared his creator’s temperament and profession. Warren would go on to appear in three more novels including Crime at Christmas (1934), but his first case was his best—in the words of a contemporary reviewer, ‘there is a human, ordinary motive for the murder, which still has a touch of surprise in it’. The book was widely praised but Kitchin would come to hate it, balefully referring to as ‘that wretched book’ and bemoaning the fact that his small output of crime fiction overshadowed the work of which he was genuinely proud. In one of his ten ‘serious novels’, he sought to satisfy both his muse and the market. This was the excellent Birthday Party (1938), wherein a death—which might be an accident, suicide or perhaps even murder—is described in retrospect by four different characters, emulating Wilkie Collins and anticipating crime writers like Agatha Christie and her mystery Five Little Pigs (1941).
After Nellie’s death in May 1930, Kitchin bought two houses: The Byletts in Pembridge, Herefordshire, and Chiddinghurst, a smaller house in Chiddingly, Sussex. A frequent visitor to both was Clive Preen, an accountant nine years Kitchin’s junior. In Chiddingly, the two men enjoyed village life both serving as vice presidents of the football club, while Kitchin helped to revive the moribund annual flower show, run by the Women’s Institute. He was a keen gardener, specialising like his father in roses. He won many prizes for his flowers and vegetables, with his roses and dahlias winning first prizes, as well as his cauliflowers, celery, gooseberries and cooking apples; his ‘tinted eggs’ fared less well, coming only third.
At the start of the Second World War, Clive Preen’s firm moved to Leominster, within easy reach of The Byletts, and the two men also spent periods at River House in Mawnan Smith near Falmouth, Cornwall. They planned to retire to the South-West but in 1944, Preen died while staying at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool. He left quarter of his estate to Kitchin, who was by now a very wealthy man. Heartbroken, Kitchin threw himself into local life, taking part in the Mawnan show of garden and farm produce, once again winning prizes, and he served as vice president of the Mawnan Cricket Club. He also belonged to the Falmouth Philatelic Society for which he ran quiz nights, setting and asking the questions as well as providing the prizes. As he had before the war, Kitchin spent time in London where, among other things, he could indulge his eclectic passion for collecting, whether Dutch flower paintings, George II silver, French paperweights, Meissen teapots, books or stamps—his own collection was sold at auction in 1953. Kitchin was an excellent pianist and he enjoyed playing bridge, algebraic puzzles and gambling.
While he spent most of the time in Cornwall or London, Kitchin continued to own Chiddinghurst until the early 1950s, when he sold it to the father of the Oscar-winning scriptwriter and novelist Julian Fellowes, who lived there as a child and was told by his parents of Clifford and Clive’s ‘tremendous parties, one taking the theme of a ship going down … Men were hired to stand round the house throwing water against the windows, in rhythm, for the entire evening’.
Kitchin moved to Brighton, where he lived on the King’s Road, first at Embassy Court and then at Abbotts, another block of purpose-built apartments. During the 1950s and ’60s, he produced arguably his best books: The Auction Sale (1949) is very much a collector’s novel, dealing with the lives that lie behind the different lots at the eponymous auction; The Secret River (1956) is a story about a tyrannical mother and her daughter; and The Book of Life (1971) harks back to Kitchin’s childhood holidays in Bexhill and, with echoes of his own inheritance, focuses on a small boy who will one day inherit a fortune.
C. H. B. Kitchin died in Brighton on 2 April 1967 (not the 4th, as misstated in some sources). He left £360,000 (equivalent to over £4,000,000) to Lord Ritchie of Dundee, deputy chairman of the Stock Exchange, his osteopath John Bond and the author Francis King. His final book A Short Walk in Williams Park was published posthumously.
‘Dispossession’ was first published in Lady Asquith’s anthology Shudders in 1929.
BLIND GUESS
Valentine Williams
Young Timmie Herron, I decided, was asking for a thick ear. Ever since Sara Carshill’s arrival that afternoon, he had scarcely had a word for any of us, least of all for Antonia, his wife. He was whispering to Sara now and making her giggle as she sat crouched on a low stool before the flaming hearth, her tawny head pillowed against his knee.
Timmie would explain that Sara was his guest, that it was his duty to make her feel at home at Herron Place. But that was no excuse for the way he was cutting up, as I could see Antonia was also thinking. Perched on the arm of Jack’s chair, she affected to be smiling over an argument that was in full cry between Virginia and Isobel Sprote, on the one hand, and Mark Bendall and the three Air Force youngsters, brother officers of Jimmie’s—I knew them only as Bill, Kenneth and Geoffrey—on the other. But I was aware that Antonia was watching her husband and Sara through her long lashes. Her proud and lovely face gave me no clue, but I had known her fiery temper since her childhood, and I asked myself how much of this sort of thing she was willing to put up with. There was Roger Carshill, too; sodden hulk though he was, I wondered what he thought of his wife’s carryings on.
Around eleven o’clock, after the Christmas tree in the Long Gallery and some osculatory rough-and-tumble under the mistletoe, we had trooped off to Jack’s study to drink punch. We put out the lights and piled in round the elm logs blazing in the huge Tudor fireplace of old rosy brick. It was young Isobel Sprote who started Jack off on the legend of Tiffany’s Walk.
Tiffany’s Walk is the distinctive feature of Herron Place. It is a covered arcade dating back to the late 17th century, which, in the shape of an E with the central bar missing, makes three sides of a parallelogram at the back of the house, to which it is joined through two small lobbies situated in the north and south wings respectively. With its low, deep-eaved roof carried on massive cross-beams, it affords adequate protection against almost all varieties of English weather, notwithstanding the fact that it is open, through a succession of wide bays, to the air. Within, it is lined with majolica tiles representing, with pleasing naïveté, birds and beasts, fishes and flowers, and floored with old red brick.
‘I bet you’ve got a ghost in this topping old house of yours, haven’t you, Major Jack?’ Isobel piped up—‘Major Jack’ was what they all called him.
‘Indeed we have,’ Jack retorted, with proprietorial pride. ‘And, what’s more, it’s a lady and a relative of mine!’
There was an immediate clamour of ‘Tell us about her!’ Said Antonia, lackadaisically, ‘Oh, Jack, you’re not going to make us listen to that old story again?’
‘Shut up, Antonia!’ Virginia cried indignantly. ‘Just because you live here … Go on, Major Jack,’ she encouraged our host. ‘Make our flesh creep!’
‘You all know Tiffany’s Walk,’ Jack began. ‘It’s called after Theophania Herron, an ancestress of mine—Tiffany is an old diminutive of Theophania. She was born in the reign of Charles the Second as an only child, and the legend runs that from birth her face was covered with fine, silky hair, like a spaniel’s …’
An eruption of ‘Ughs’ and little feminine squeaks ran round the circle. ‘So that she never appeared in public,’ Jack’s quiet voice overtoned the hubbub, ‘without a thick black veil. When her parents died and she became mistress of this house and estate, she grew more and more sensitive of her horrible disfigurement. To avoid the necessity of showing herself in public, she got a Bologna architect named Bonaventura to build her this arcade. Here it was her habit to promenade the greater part of the day. Then the catastrophe happened. A new steward was engaged, a handsome, strapping fellow, with an eye to the main chance. At any rate, he made up to Aunt Tiffany …’
‘A-ha!’ knowingly. This from Geoffrey, who had his arm about Virginia.
‘You can imagine,’ Jack pursued, ‘the tumult in that maiden breast. She had reconciled herself to the prospect of lifelong spinsterhood, believing that, even with the Herron Place rent-roll, no one would want to marry a dog-faced lady of uncertain age. And here was the dashing steward kissing her hands and bringing her posies and pestering her to lift her veil and let him see her face, vowing that his love was proof against anything. Well, she let him have his way at last. But when he looked upon that terrible face, his heart failed him and he fled away and was never heard of again …’
‘And what happened to poor Tiffany?’ Sara Carshill enquired in her caressing voice.
‘She became more of a recluse than ever, spending the whole of the day and often half the night in the arcade, the scene of her broken romance. One morning, when the servants went to look for her, they found her, in the long black cloak and veil she always wore, hanging from a beam …
‘O-ooh!’ A shudder rippled through the audience.
‘And ever since that day’—our host’s voice was deliberately dramatic now—‘they say that poor Tiffany walks the arcade by night, sighing and wailing and ringing her hands. And if she encounters any human in her path, she parts her veil and reveals her face, and, so the story goes, the sight is so bloodcurdling that anyone who looks upon it drops dead on the spot …’
‘Have you ever seen her …?’ Isobel broke off, her cheeks aflame. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Major Jack …’
He laughed good-humouredly, ‘My dear child, I’m spook-proof. No ghost is going to waste her time on me, especially when her trick is mainly visual. But all my family firmly believe in Aunt Tiffany. My great-aunt Ada had a grisly tale about a Swiss valet, whom my great-grandfather brought back with him from the grand tour, being found dead early one morning in Tiffany’s Walk with his features convulsed with horror …’
‘B-rr!’ ejaculated Roger Carshill, suddenly waking up—he had drunk a lot of champagne at dinner. ‘You give a feller the creeps, Major!’ ‘Pretty grim!’ said Kenneth. ‘What a rag if one met her!’ murmured Isobel ecstatically. ‘Good for you, Isobel,’ Bill cried joyously. ‘You and I’ll go out some night with a dog biscuit and see what happens.’ He snapped his fingers and began to prance about. yelling ‘Here, Tiff! Tiff, Tiff, Tiff! Good dog! Come and kiss the steward!’ They all started ragging and the party broke up in a turmoil.
It was Jack’s habit to stroll for a while in Tiffany’s Walk before turning in. That night I accompanied him. ‘Tell me about this Mrs Carshill that Timmie’s so stuck on,’ he said suddenly.
