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CHAPTER 1
"I Am Born"
In the flat but not altogether unpleasing Fen country, about sixty miles northeast of London, lies the small market town of Cambridge. If you have an Oxford tradition in the family, you may have heard that it achieved a certain amount of notoriety as a seat of learning during the Middle Ages.
Should you chance to possess an uncle or a cousin who was a Rhodes scholar, he may have casually mentioned the fact that Cambridge University is now devoted almost entirely to the winning of boat races and the mass production of marvelous, if somewhat moronic, athletes.
If, as a tourist, you are a disciple of the ubiquitous Baedeker, you will probably know even less than this. For, in his discussion of the University towns of England, after a glowing and lengthy tribute to the beauties of Oxford, he summarily dismisses her less ostentatious sister with the curt phrase —"If pressed for time, Cambridge may be omitted."
After which modest preamble on the subject of my Alma Step-Mater, I feel that I am now perfectly justified in diverting my reader's attention entirely towards myself.
My name is Fenton, but you had better call me Hilary. Somehow or other I don't seem to smell as sweet by the name which my godfathers and godmothers saw fit to bestow on me at my baptism, viz., Hilarion Aloysius. I am at present an undergraduate in residence at All Saints College. Cantab., where I am ostensibly studying English.
My real purpose, however, is to polish off any odd corners that may have survived four years at Harvard. I am, amongst other things, a native of Philadelphia and consequently an American citizen.
But when I imply that I was born in Philadelphia, I am using the word in its most crass, material and corporeal sense. Mentally, spiritually and emotionally, I was born in a Cambridge lecture room at about 10:15AM on a certain Monday halfway through the May term. My birth, I might add, took place in the twenty-fourth year of my life.
That was the exact moment when all the trouble really started, and if any enterprising pathologist should happen, in the (I hope) fairly distant future, to perform an autopsy on my remains, he will find this particular date scrawled across my heart in letters of flame and magenta.
The fateful day dawned clear and surprisingly warm for May. No comets, no fall of meteorites had occurred during the night to announce the portentous happenings with which it was to be so richly fraught. I rose reasonably early. On returning from the half mile or so which usually separates the inmate of a Cambridge college from his bath, I caught a glimpse of the Cam, still winding peacefully along between its daisied banks.
I could hear the majestic notes of a Bach chorale from the organ in Kings Chapel. An occasional undergraduate sauntered across the old gray pavements of the court — the bright colours of his bathrobe forming a striking contrast against the encrusted stones of the college building.
Black-coated servants carried heavily laden breakfast trays up oaken staircases and a cluster of white surplices announced that chapel was over. In short, everything was just as usual, and the University was turning over in bed and opening one sleepy eye exactly as it had in the days of Queen Elizabeth.
"A" staircase, however, had not yet done more than merely stretch itself, and the only people stirring were Hank, our solemn gyp, and Mrs. Bigger, who performed the mystic offices of bedmaker. These I saluted with democratic cordiality and then proceeded to my room where I ate an uneventful egg over an antiquated copy of The New Yorker.
All this was punctuated at rare intervals by glimpses into Blake's Songs of Innocence, in leisurely anticipation of a lecture I was to attend that morning. At about 9:30 I tucked under my arm the abbreviated gown required by the authorities for all those in statu pupillari and strolled downstairs.
That all this sounds terribly trite and trivial, I am well aware. And yet, in the light of future events, every triviality which occurred that morning, in fact, almost everything which occurred that day, later became gravid with significance and rich with sinister possibility.
As I reached the ground floor, I almost collided with a tall, fair-haired youth in gorgeous sky-blue pyjamas. An arm, languid yet muscular, was thrown around my neck and I felt myself forcibly propelled into a room redolent of roasting coffee, Virginia cigarettes and Yardley's shaving soap. A Daily Mail was thrust into my hand as a harsh, nasal voice, supposedly in imitation of my transatlantic accent, said mockingly:
"Take a peek at that, kid. It sure will send your old man."
I glanced at the paragraph indicated and then up into the smiling blue eyes of my persecutor. Stuart Somerville was one of those blond young giants who are sent to Cambridge with the express purpose of giving inferiority complexes to us scrubby individuals of five feet nine or thereabouts.
Always perfectly dressed, perfectly poised and perfectly sure of themselves, they exhale the very essence of the English remnants of the feudal system. They are the fruit of cricket and cold tubs. In later life they talk about Empire, write letters to The Times, and invariably they think about — nothing. They are decorative but dumb; lovely but limited.
Stuart Somerville, however, had broadened his horizon somewhat by an athletic trip to America and enjoyed nothing better than practicing the vernacular on me. His memory with regard to Bowery slang was remarkable and, where memory failed, the movies and detective stories had stepped in to fill the breach.
"I really see nothing in the paper that would be of special interest to my father," I said, with what dignity I could muster under the circumstances. "And I wish —"
Stuart ran a hand through his dishevelled, corn-colored hair and raised his eyebrows in mock-surprise.
"So Hilary doesn't read pappy's law books, eh? Well, get a load of this, buddy. William North has escaped. He's done one beautiful big bunko. And all after your inestimable pop had made him figure so large in the dullest of all his dull text-books, Fenton's Famous Second Trials."
I was used to this kind of nonsense from Stuart and it was, to some extent, justifiable. He was reading for a "special" in Law and thus was constantly victimized by Fenton on Torts, Fenton's Legal Theory and the aforementioned Famous Second Trials. That my father, though a perfectly good American, was a sometime fellow of All Saints and a well-known writer of law books was considered by most people to be my misfortune rather than my fault.
They kindly overlooked this blot on my family escutcheon. But Stuart Somerville never let me forget it. The sins of my father were repeatedly visited on me, even though they had been committed a full generation ago — before marriage with my mother had put mayonnaise on the paternal salad days once and for all.
My father now sat lofty and unassailable on the bench of the United States Supreme Court. His lectureship at Cambridge had long ago ended, but his text-books lingered on to be thorns in the flesh of the budding barrister and the embryo K.C.
And so, whenever Stuart Somerville saw any reference to my father or to one of the cases which he had used as illustrations in his text-books, he took an unholy delight in drawing my attention to the matter. This reverberation from the once famous North trial was a typical case in point.
"I wish," I said at length, "you would let my poor father alone for awhile. It's not his fault that North has got out and it's certainly not my fault that the Cambridge Law School is still antiquated enough to use his text-books. Supposing I were to make scathing remarks about your father every time I see a cow or a turnip." (Sir Anthony Somerville owns about one half of Cambridgeshire.)
Stuart gave a whoop of delight at this feeble sally and promptly threw me down on the couch and sat on me for several very uncomfortable minutes. As he did so, he improved the shining hour with some pregnant remarks about the moulting of the American eagle and the prowess of the British lion.
I finally escaped from his room and proceeded to my lecture in a thoroughly dishevelled condition. Even in my most intellectual moments I am not capable of appreciating the somewhat exotic mysticism of William Blake; and I was certainly in no mood for it that morning.
I managed, however, to listen attentively for the first few minutes while the lecturer explained that the famous poem about the Sunflower was in no sense of the word botanical, but that it really symbolized a sex repression or the early symptoms of pernicious anemia. After that my thoughts began to wander and I found myself looking along the row of faces.
There were thoughtful youths in old tweeds; boys with fresh complexions, boys with spotty faces — the usual assortment. Then there was the sprinkling of girls from Newnham and Girton, most of them wearing particularly unsightly hats.
All, so it seemed, had pencils working overtime on any tit-bits of solid fact that might advantageously be reproduced in an examination paper. I saw nothing new or exciting. I was rather bored. My brain was lethargic. My hands were idle and Satan was undoubtedly cooking up some mischief.
And then, all of a sudden, out of a sea of ordinary, everyday faces, I caught a glimpse of the Profile. Up to now it had been concealed behind the rather prominent girl in spectacles. At first I thought it must be just a phantasy bred of some obscure wish-fulfilment complex.
I didn't, I couldn't believe that it really existed in a musty old Cambridge lecture room. And yet, there it was standing out from the rest like a scarlet tanager among a flock of sparrows. Nothing that I had seen before had ever seemed so perfect.
Probably she didn't measure up to the world's most rigid standards of perfection. But which of the famous heroines of history really did? There is documentary evidence to prove that Cleopatra was positively plain; that Mélisande was an untidy creature with wispy hair and staring eyes, and that Juliet was a long-legged and precocious sub-deb of about fourteen.
And yet each of these ladies appeared as visions of light and beauty to Anthony, Pelléas and Romeo respectively. They set a fashion for love at first sight and now who shall dare to say that such cannot exist? Perhaps it is only at first sight (as the cynics have told us) that perfect beauty can exist.
To me the Profile seemed perfectly and utterly beautiful. The contours were classical without being severe. The nose, coming down in an almost straight line from the forehead, was Greek rather than Roman. The line of the cheek was clearly yet delicately marked. A curve of dark hair was just visible beneath a plain and perfectly negligible hat. The complexion was clear olive.
I could not see the colour of her eyes. But, as I twisted my head in a vain effort to find out, something absurd seemed to be happening inside of me. In that one hyperbolic moment I felt that I was really seeing things for the first time in my life.
I seemed to understand, in a flash, what the poets had been writing about all down the centuries. Even the obscurity of William Blake became amazingly clear. I knew what pictures were about. The whole of art, music and life stood suddenly revealed.
I was in love. But surely it was not really I who was experiencing these tempestuous feelings. Not the Hilary Fenton whose only emotional experiences to date were to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra and to hand out a rapid line to hard-boiled Radcliffe girls. It was — it must be — a new Hilary Fenton. Someone utterly different. Some strange, primitive creature who had suddenly become overpoweringly and sensuously alive on a warm, steel-blue day in spring — at Cambridge — in a lecture room with thirty or forty other undergraduates; alive and alone with the Profile.
A piece of paper was thrust towards me by my neighbour. It was the attendance list. Immediately my mind snapped back into action and I did some of the fastest mental arithmetic since my prep school days. I counted the names backwards. Jean Higginbotham — that was the girl who came first. Camilla Lathrop — that must be the prominent one with the spectacles. Dorothy Dupuis — that must be the name which a stupid world applied to the Profile. I pushed the paper away from me.
"Aren't you going to sign it?" whispered the solemn young man by my side.
I had forgotten to add my own name to the list. Just as I scribbled Hilary Fenton across the page with a brand new, triumphant kind of flourish, I caught the prophetic voice of the lecturer rising loud and clear above the tumult of my emotions.
"O Rose, thou art sick!
The lecture was over. I made a rush towards the door but a milling group of chattering undergraduates temporarily barred my passage. I pushed and shoved, and when I finally reached the court, I was only just in time to catch a glimpse of the Profile in the distance, as she slipped on a quite unnecessary raincoat and hurried across Clare Bridge with the prominent girl in spectacles.
Pursuit would have been both useless and undignified. She had gone as suddenly as she came, but I didn't seem to care. I knew her name. I knew she must be reading English and I knew the way her chin joined on to her throat. That was quite enough to go on with.
There were no more lectures on my schedule for that morning, so I strolled back towards my own college, puffing at a meditative pipe. As the hazy smoke ascended in the clear May sunshine, vista upon vista seemed to be opening up in my imagination — and at the end of each one was inscribed the magic name, Dorothy Dupuis.
Skilfully avoiding the bicycles in Trinity Street, I kept repeating it over and over again. It didn't seem to suit the Profile in the very least. Somehow or other, I vaguely connected the name with an incident that didn't suit her either. For a few moments the half memory of that incident tortured me, hanging on the brink of my conscious mind. Then it began to come back to me.
It was at the dinner party given by the American Ambassador last vacation. What was her name — the stout lady who sat next to me at table and snorted over her soup? Lady — Lady Lusinger, that was it! I could hear her distinctly now:
"So you are up at Cambridge, young man. Well, I have a niece there too. The men in our family go to Oxford, of course. (Snort.) But Dorothy Dupuis is a very sensible sort of girl. I might say a thoughtful girl. (Two snorts.)"
The adjective might perhaps have been more suitably applied to the mackintosh rather than to the girl and I remembered how they had made me wince at the time. In fact, I had made an inward resolve that Dorothy Dupuis' acquaintance would not add to the gaiety of nations. But now I blessed the American Ambassador and his dull dinner party. I blessed Lady Lusinger and I blessed every snort that she had snorted. I felt absurdly happy.
And being happy, I had the natural instinct to share my happiness with someone else. But there was only one person at Cambridge to whom I ever talked about myself and that was Michael Grayling, who occupied the room directly below mine on "A" stair-case. He was my best and most intimate friend at college, but for the last few weeks he had been almost as difficult of approach as my next door neighbour, Julius Baumann, who lived on the fourth floor.
The two of them were working in deadly rivalry for the Lenox Open Scholarship — Michael because he really needed the money to complete his third year at Cambridge — Baumann because he wanted to fling his success in the world's teeth and prove that he was not only a marvelous cricketeer but a considerable classical scholar as well.
It was with some surprise, therefore, that I saw Michael's door standing invitingly open as I passed up the stairs. He looked up from Plato's Republic as I entered the room. His brown eyes, I noticed, seemed very tired and there were faint parallel lines on his broad, bulgy forehead. My friend's smile of welcome, however, was as warm and sunny as ever.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Murder At Cambridge"
by .
Copyright © 1933 Farrar & Rinehart, Inc.
Excerpted by permission of MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media.
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