The Quality of Mercy (11 page)

‘Thank you,’ she said, a trifle breathlessly. ‘I know who you are, of course, although for some reason I don’t think we have ever met, but my uncle talked of you. He wasn’t very sociable, particularly recently.’ She hurried on. ‘Are you able to come to the memorial meeting on Friday? It’s down near Romsey, where he died. Tarn Hill was a favourite place of his –– do you know it? It’s a well-known beauty spot. He painted it – and the view from it – time after time but never got tired of it. I’m glad that, if he had to die, he died there, not in some London hospital.’

‘I remember it from his pictures. I don’t think I have ever been there. He’s not being buried . . .?’ Adrian inquired.

‘No, no. He was an atheist, I’m afraid. There’s a cremation at Putney on Wednesday, after the inquest, and then we are going to scatter his ashes on Friday where he was happiest.’

‘I see. There has to be an inquest?’

‘Yes. It’s just a formality but the way he died . . .’

‘It was ergot poisoning, wasn’t it?’ Verity chipped in.

‘How did you know?’ Vera Gray looked rather put out.

‘The fact is my friend, Lord Edward Corinth, was there when his body was discovered . . . I’m so sorry, perhaps I shouldn’t have . . .’

‘No, please don’t worry. Lord Edward’s a friend of yours, is he? I have heard of him, of course. I gather it was his nephew and a friend who actually stumbled on . . . It must have been a terrible shock for them.’

‘Do you know why your uncle was on the Broadlands estate?’

‘I told you, he liked to paint . . .’

‘He was two or three miles from Tarn Hill, wasn’t he?’

‘He liked to walk . . .’ she said uncertainly.

‘But in his state of health?’

‘That was the odd thing. He had been feeling so much better in the last year or two. He had – at least I thought he had – quite given up taking ergot. His depressions had become so infrequent . . . That was why I thought it safe to move out and get my own flat. I have one of those “cabins” in that new, modern block – you know the one I mean? It’s built like an ocean liner in Lawn Road in Hampstead. It’s only two or three stops on the Under-ground from Mornington Crescent. I used to look in on him almost every day.’

She sounded, Verity thought, as if she were defending herself against unspoken charges of neglect.

‘Painting is very therapeutic,’ Adrian said, trying to be soothing.

‘Yes, it is, but it was simpler than that. I think, as time passed, he began to forget. He was beginning to forget everything.’ She laughed nervously. ‘I mean,’ she seemed to correct herself, ‘he began to forget the past. That was good, of course. To tell the truth, I’d heard enough of his war memories.’

Verity looked at her curiously and, catching her glance, saw that she thought she had revealed rather too much.

‘I was very glad for him, of course. The horrors of the war, which had almost unhinged him, faded. He stopped having nightmares. There were so many nights when I heard him screaming. When I was younger, I put my fingers in my ears and hid under the bedclothes but later on I used to go into his room and try to soothe him.’ She shuddered. ‘The sight of him writhing in a tangle of sheets, sweating like a . . . It almost broke my heart.’

‘It must have been awful,’ Verity said with feeling. ‘Adrian said you were an orphan . . .?’

‘Yes. It was very Victorian.
Bleak House
is a favourite of mine. I can so easily identify with the Jarndyce children. You remember the wards of court who went to live with their cousin?’

Verity had not read
Bleak House
and looked puzzled. Seeing she had to explain a little more, Vera continued, ‘My parents died in a railway accident when I was a baby. My uncle and aunt, who had no children of their own, took me in.’

‘I see, but your aunt . . .’

‘She died a year or two after. I don’t remember her. I wish I did.’

‘So your uncle had to look after you alone? That was brave of him.’

‘Yes, wasn’t it? He ought to have put me in orphanage. For a time, he had an old woman to look after me – a cousin of his – but we didn’t really get on. I must have been a very tiresome child.’

‘But you repaid the debt to your uncle a hundred times,’ Adrian said. ‘You were the light of his life. You looked after him and kept him sane.’

Vera looked surprised at his vehemence and he started to apologize. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that but he told me so himself.’

‘Did he really? I wish he had told me,’ she said wistfully.

‘But you must have known?’

‘Yes, of course I did,’ she said, pulling herself together. ‘But it is nice to be told,’ she could not resist adding, her voice regretful, almost bitter.

Verity felt she knew what Vera had suffered.

‘My mother died when I was born,’ she said in a low voice, ‘and my father was so busy – he is a lawyer, you know, a very fine one – that I hardly ever saw him when I was a child and I see him even less now that I’m so often out of the country. I think I know what it must have been like for you to be an orphan.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Vera said. ‘I’m still so upset. You mustn’t think I did not love my uncle. We adored each other. It was just that he could be a bit of a burden. And now, of course, I regret we didn’t talk more about important things.’

Verity looked at Vera with pity. She had been entrusted to a succession of nannies and had been lonely but that was surely preferable to being a sick man’s nurse. It suddenly came back to her like a sharp pain how much she had wanted a mother when she was a child – how much she had envied other children. She shook herself mentally. It had given her strength to do the job she was doing – at least that was something to be thankful for.

‘He began to forget the war and his . . . his injury?’ she prompted Vera.

‘Of course, when he was reminded of it – when he saw a friend from those days or read a book about the war he started to . . . I don’t know . . . to have that look I recognized. I particularly dreaded November the eleventh. He refused to parade at the Cenotaph. He said he wasn’t worthy.’

‘What would he do if he did feel depressed?’ Verity asked, perhaps tactlessly.

‘After I moved out, you mean?’

Verity nodded.

‘He’d telephone me. I made him put in a telephone when I moved to Lawn Road so I could check on him.’ She laughed. ‘He made such a fuss. Said he didn’t need new-fangled instruments and that he had managed quite well without one but I insisted and he was glad of it, I know. When he felt down he would ask me to go round . . .’ she hesitated, ‘or he’d take off for Tarn Hill. He had an old Bullnose Morris in which he travelled about the country . . .’

‘I am very sorry, Miss Gray,’ Adrian put in, seeing that she was becoming distressed. ‘It must have been an awful shock for you. We would very much like to come to the memorial meeting if we won’t be intruding.’

‘Not at all. Everyone is welcome.’

Verity thought she was about to say something else but had checked herself.

Over lunch, Verity passed on to Adrian what Edward had told her about the discovery of Peter Gray’s body at Broadlands.

‘Gray was a very good painter,’ he said, after a moment’s thought. ‘Very dark, in the manner of Paul Nash. As Vera was saying, his war experience had left him . . . what shall I say . . . ?’

‘Shell-shocked?’ Verity suggested.

‘Yes, but that’s not the half of it. Or rather it’s not very helpful to say he had shell shock. It’s as vague as saying he was mad. I was going to say his suffering made his paintings more powerful. They have a depth to them which I can never hope to achieve.’

It was one of the things Verity liked about Adrian – his genuine modesty. She had an idea. ‘Mersham isn’t very far away from Tarn Hill and I know Edward will want to come and pay his respects. Why don’t you and I spend the night there and the three of us can go to the memorial meeting together? Would Charlotte like to come?’

It amused Adrian that Verity was sure enough of Edward not to have the least doubt that she and her friends would be welcome guests of his brother. It seemed not to occur to her that she might be overstepping the line.

‘I would be very pleased to come if the Duke doesn’t mind but Charlotte is trying to finish a novel and the publishers are chasing her. I think they fear that any novel published just when war breaks out will sink like a stone.’

‘You think war is that close?’ Verity asked, interestedly.

‘I don’t know – probably. Isn’t that what you think? Despite what I said to you about being grateful for every day of peace, we have been expecting it for so long now that I really think it will be a relief when it’s finally declared.’

Verity’s mind went back to Gray’s death. It didn’t some-how
smell
right to her.

‘Do you know what happened to him to drive him . . . well, mad?’

‘What sent Gray off his rocker? He told me once – he didn’t like talking about it . . . understandably. He said he had refused officer training because he wanted to be with the men. He had been in France from September 1916. In October 1917, when they were being very heavily shelled, two of his officers were killed in front of him. He remembered helping to pick up the bodies, or rather the pieces he could find, but nothing more. He had some sort of fit. He had no recollection of being sent down the line or being in hospital in France. He was shipped back to England. In the military hospital in Brighton, he was alternately depressed and violent. On one occasion, he attacked a doctor and twice tried to kill himself. He felt rage at having been so abused, he told me, by events he could not control. I also got the feeling that he felt guilty for having survived when so many of his friends had been killed.

‘He was lucky enough to find a doctor – Captain Hubert Norman, his name was – who traced the source of his madness back to before the war. As a child, he had suffered a bad bout of pneumonia and had pains in his head and felt that life was not worth living. Anyway, thanks to Norman, he recovered after a fashion and found in painting a way of overcoming his depression. Every now and again though he would have another attack. He was very angry at the Ministry of Pensions which defined people like him – ordinary servicemen, not officers, of course – as “post-war inefficients”. He was labelled a “psychiatric casualty of war”. One forgets but people like Gray were officially termed “harmless lunatics”. He, at least, was spared being “segregated” – in other words locked up in an asylum where the mentally ill would be “free of all responsibility”, as the authorities put it. You can imagine that the condition of most of those shut up in institutions away from their family and friends quickly deteriorated.’

‘Gosh!’ Very exclaimed. ‘It makes me feel quite ashamed. So, after the war . . .?’

‘Gray had a bad knock in 1919 when his wife died of influenza like so many millions of others. He was left without his strongest support and with the responsibility of bringing up Vera on his own. An old aunt or cousin of his came to help but he hinted that she wasn’t much use. He had a bad relapse in 1921 and was sent to Storthes Hall Asylum in Yorkshire for “Insane Ex-Service Men”. I visited him there once. It was an awful place. If you weren’t depressed when you went in, you certainly were when you came out. What he saw there made Gray a bitter opponent of locking people away without proper psychiatric care just to get them out of the way. I remember he said he was frequently punished for not showing due deference to the doctors and for “putting on airs”.

‘I don’t know what the rights and wrongs of it were. No doubt he was a difficult patient. Vera says she’s sure everything was done with the best intentions. I think the truth is that Storthes Hall was a kind of failed Craiglockhart – that excellent hospital where they did pioneering work on shell-shocked troops. Sassoon’s written about it. Now it was different. Gone was the urgency of the war but the patients were still treated as failed soldiers. There was now no battlefront to which these men were to be returned. Anyway, Storthes Hall was eventually wound up in 1931 and the inmates sent to other asylums or hospitals.

‘I know Gray regularly visited friends from Storthes at a place called Brookwood in Surrey. It was one of the mental hospitals to which patients from Storthes were sent. I knew when he had been because he always came back sane but very depressed. It was very hard for Vera. She hardly had a life of her own. That was why it was such a wonderful thing when she was able to move away – not far but the physical separation was the important thing. There was never much money – Gray had a tiny pension from the army – but Lawn Road is a sort of co-operative and she pays very little rent.’

‘Did Gray sell his pictures?’ Verity asked.

‘Not many. They were too repetitive. The view from Tarn Hill doesn’t have quite the same fascination for others as it has . . . had for him. Just recently, however, I gather he was being “discovered” and getting quite good prices.’

Verity had been listening intently as she chewed at her lamb chop. She suddenly started and looked at her watch. ‘Oh God! I must go. I’m meeting my refugee at Victoria in half an hour. I almost forgot.’

‘Would you like me to come with you?’ Adrian said gallantly.

‘Would you really? I’d be so grateful. Edward was going to come but he telephoned this morning to say he couldn’t make it. I don’t know why but I feel a bit nervy about the whole thing. I’m not used to having someone to look after.’

‘I thought he was going to stay at Mersham?’

‘Yes, in due course, but he’s staying with me in Cranmer Court for a day or two at least. He has to get a job and that means being in London and he can’t afford to stay anywhere half decent. He wasn’t able to take any money out of Austria. He’s been staying with a Jewish refugee group in Switzerland while his papers to come here were finalized.’

‘How good’s his English?’

‘Very good.’

‘I’ve got a friend at the BBC. I think they are looking for people to broadcast to Europe in the event of war. I could put him in touch.’

‘Oh, would you, Adrian? That would be marvellous. He’s very intelligent.’

Adrian paid the bill and they got a taxi in Charlotte Street. ‘I’m so jumpy,’ Verity confessed. ‘What if he doesn’t find a job? What if he hangs around and I can’t get rid of him?’