A Family Affair Read online

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  A Family Affair

  First published in 1969

  © Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1969-2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755120949 EAN: 9780755120949

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

  After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel, Death at the President’s Lodging. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

  After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature.

  Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

  Part One

  The Voonderble Vorlt of Art

  1

  Bobby Appleby’s Oxford life was not altogether an easy one. Providence was responsible. Providence had framed Bobby as an athlete, but had added to this certain mental endowments of which one of the earlier manifestations had been a notably rapid cunning. In a scrum-half nothing is more prizeable than such a combination. Bobby had become a very good scrum-half – despite owning half a dozen more inches (and perhaps a couple of dozen more pounds) than very good scrum-halves are commonly endowed with. Bobby, in fact, even when crouched beside a scrum, couldn’t avoid the appearance of towering over it, and all his days this had lent an embarrassing suggestion of comedy to his appearances on the Rugger field. But for the challenge which this physical disparity (and the amusement it occasioned) presented, Bobby might have got clear of the game on leaving school. As it was, he had gone on playing it, and in due course had gained his Blue.

  But, lurkingly at least, Bobby was an intellectual. His tutors knew that he would put up a good show in Schools, and only wondered how good it would be. And in his final year this brainy bent was no longer to be concealed. Bobby continued to go about with clumps of muscular characters, who puffed and sweated and had mud behind their ears. But he also went about with the cleverest young men in the college. And it was a college in which the cleverest young men were reputed to be very clever indeed.

  Living thus between divided and disparted worlds required a certain amount of tact and flexibility. For one thing, the worlds were divided and disparted. In Bobby’s father’s time juvenile Oxford had been divided into hearties, aesthetes, and unobtrusive youths commonly known as the sub-men. Since then, the words had changed, and perhaps the categories had a little shifted as well. The sub-men had become grey men, and occasionally showed alarming streaks of colour. The aesthetes might be said virtually to have vanished from the scene, since nobody would have been gratified by the appellation, and only the ineradicable conservatism of undergraduate journalism kept the word in being at all; still, an inclination to the arts lingered here and there. One would have had to say, at least, that aesthetes had diminished as compared with another category – one hardly known in Bobby’s father’s time, but perfectly well known in his grandfather’s. Bobby’s grandfather would have called them the reading men – and it was they, of course, whom the newspapers called intellectuals. The hearties, although qualitatively much as before (only the word, again, had become rather old hat), were a dwindling race numerically. In fact there seemed to be rather a strong current of feeling among the young that organized games, if proper at all, were proper only for the younger still. So there was something slightly embattled and defensive about those who still believed that an honourable number of boats should be propelled up and down the river, and that fifteens and elevens ought to be fielded as required. Bobby Appleby didn’t find moving in and out of this fortress altogether easy.

  Sir John Appleby, although by no means an intrusive parent, was sufficiently aware of this situation to be interested in it. Bobby was his youngest child; in the others it was harder and harder to detect any sign that they were still growing up; Bobby’s progress was the more in focus as a result. Nothing but amusement was involved, since Bobby seemed not remotely likely to become in any substantial way an odd man out. Still, perhaps a couple of times a term, Appleby and his wife would motor up to Oxford and have lunch with Bobby at the Mitre, or tea in his rooms. That sort of thing. Bobby employed these occasions for the purpose of affording his parents a preview of friends whom he proposed bringing home in vacations. Rough shooting or beagling, or a proposal to read together the Choephoroe or the Trachiniae, would be discussed with equal gravity. It was all rather well-behaved, and the young gentlemen would treat Judith Appleby as if she were a duchess with Edwardian views. These occasions were entertaining, all the same.

  But this occasion was different. It was a dinner en garçon – although the members of the dining club (w
hich was called, indeed, the Patriarchs) might not have cared for its being so described. Bobby had recently become a member of the Patriarchs. Following a custom which was understood to be of immemorial antiquity, the Patriarchs had then invited Bobby’s father to dine as a guest of the club. One doesn’t have to make speeches at an affair like the Patriarchs. So here Appleby was.

  The Patriarchs had dined in a common room which Appleby supposed to have been borrowed for the occasion from yet graver persons; at least it was an apartment hideously hung with fading photographs of whiskery Victorian dons. But now they had adjourned to the rooms of a member who appeared to have taken on the duties of host, and who dispensed port with gravity. When all had been thus accommodated, the company rose to the toast of Church and King. Appleby, reflecting on ‘King’ rather than ‘Queen’, concluded that the Patriarchs must attribute to themselves some vaguely Jacobite persuasion. But his host was now producing an out-size candle in an outsize candlestick (the latter, Appleby suspected, sacrilegiously purloined from the college chapel), and upon this the members advanced one by one for the purpose of lighting cigars. They made a very deep bow to the candle – which was something savouring, surely, a little too much of idolatry for the original biblical patriarchs to have approved of. After these ritual solemnities, the young men became entirely natural again. Appleby wasn’t sure that Bobby hadn’t felt rather a fool behaving in this way under the eye of a parent. But at least he had seen his father perform the rite with the most unflawed decorum.

  The port was excellent. It must also be expensive, and Appleby noticed that there was a crate of beer under a table. He resolved to leave before the beer. But that would be a long time off, and he hoped in the meantime to enjoy quite a lot of the Patriarchs’ conversation. It was rather sparing at the moment – perhaps because they were nervous about their cigars going out. If that happened, you were probably required to go through the business with the candle again. He looked round at the assembled youths. Their complexions, fair and clear, were almost as uniform as their dinner jackets. But some wore their hair very long, and the conjunction of this with evening clothes had the odd effect of seeming to withdraw them by a century or more from the modem scene; they might have been contemporaries of Tennyson’s or Thackeray’s (only that would be at Cambridge) conscientiously entertaining themselves at what used to be called a wine. My dear Mama, I hope you are well. Tennyson of Trinity gave a wine last night. It was mostly serious men who were there, and I enjoyed it very much. An Etonian called Hallam, rather senior to the rest of us, introduced the theme of Religious Doubt. Tennyson has become quite a “swell” (our new word, Mama), having won a medal for a poem about Timbuctoo…

  Appleby jerked himself out of this fantasy, since to lose himself in it would be uncivil. Besides, a further stage in the evening’s proceedings had been reached. The President of the Patriarchs was calling upon a certain Paddy Moyle (who had been looking nervous for some time) to “introduce a topic”.

  And at this the assembled Patriarchs assumed expressions of severe attention. Appleby, without any difficulty, did the same.

  Mr Moyle’s topic proved to be ‘Practical Jokes’. This at least gave promise of more liveliness than ‘Religious Doubt’, even although – as it turned out – Mr Moyle started off from Holy Writ. What, he asked the company, was the first practical joke? He was inclined to give his own vote to the Flood. Flood switched on; Flood switched off; roars of laughter in heaven. This was the very type, the very archetype, of practical joking.

  A tall youth sitting next to Bobby (of a privileged class of society, clearly, since he was having no difficulty with his cigar at all) interrupted to disagree. God had contrived a much earlier practical joke than that. Think of the first sunset! Adam pottering complacently round his new estate, not much noticing what was going on in the sky. Then the whole thing faded out on him, and in no time he couldn’t see a yard in front of his nose. Think of the shivering despair in which the poor devil passed the night! But morning arrived, and the Prime Orb bobbed up again. Heaven’s laughter must have been very loud indeed. Top practical joke.

  ‘But hadn’t Eve already been created?’ Bobby asked. ‘She was a pretty stiff joke at the innocent Adam’s expense, wasn’t she? Think of Marvell. “Two paradises ’twere in one, To live in Paradise alone”.’

  ‘Talking of the Flood,’ somebody said, rather belatedly. ‘There’s a practical joke about it in Chaucer. The first recorded English practical joke. It’s in The Reeve’s Tale, isn’t it?’

  ‘The Miller’s Tale, you ignoramus,’ Mr Moyle said. Mr Moyle was becoming a little impatient to get on with his own remarks.

  ‘That’s right. One chap is persuaded to spend the night in a tub hoisted up to the rafters, because they tell him there’s going to be another Flood. It enables another chap to sleep with his wife. In the end, he’s cut down with a crash. Uproarious, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘At least a practical joke,’ Bobby pointed out. ‘Joker gets wench. Some point to the thing.’

  This remark excited a ribaldry not at all inhibited by the presence of the Patriarchs’ elderly guest. It was against the background of this that Mr Moyle had to assert himself.

  ‘That’s what I want to go on to,’ he said. ‘Why they’re called practical jokes. I don’t think it has anything to do with the deception paying a dividend, as in Chaucer’s story. Think of the most rudimentary kind, that you can buy in squalid little shops for a shilling. Something you put on the floor or the table, to pretend the ink’s been spilt or the cat’s been sick. There are more ingenious ones that are quite revolting. Their purpose is to disgust or frighten or humiliate. The basis of the ploy is always essentially malicious.’

  ‘I say – talking of Chaucer.’ It was the man who had harked back to the Flood who now harked back again. ‘There’s a story by Rudyard Kipling called “Dayspring Mishandled”. It’s about somebody spending years and years first forging and then planting a Chaucer manuscript, just in order to fool and discredit another scholar, who is supposed to be frightfully disagreeable. At least, it’s something like that. And I think a practical joke might really be defined as applied satire. The castigation of folly, and all that. Sadism – and malice, as Paddy says – masquerading as moral zeal. But I still don’t understand the word “practical”.’

  ‘You will if you let me get on to it,’ Mr Moyle said with some warmth. ‘As a matter of fact, it seems to me quite an interesting bit of semantics. And it hasn’t been remarked hitherto, so far as I can discover.’

  ‘Mr Moyle’s essays,’ someone said in a don’s voice, ‘may be relied upon for an air of making a contribution to their subject.’

  ‘Machination,’ Mr Moyle said, ignoring this. ‘In the sixteenth century, a “practice” is a stratagem directed at an evil end. And the adjective was used in the same way. So that’s what a practical joke is. A crafty one.’

  ‘Do we understand,’ Bobby asked, ‘that the expression “practical joke” is known to have been current in a period when “practical” could still mean “crafty”?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Mr Moyle appeared slightly at a loss for a moment, but then recovered confidence. ‘However,’ he added, ‘the use may doubtless be inferred.’

  ‘Don’t the best practical jokes tend to be disinterested?’ Appleby asked. It was plain that the Patriarchs’ guest must utter in the course of the evening.

  ‘Do you mean without a victim, sir?’ somebody said. ‘I don’t see that that’s possible.’

  ‘Well, I admit that a practical joke is always, broadly speaking, a hoax; and that in any hoax there has to be somebody to be taken in. But it need scarcely be a specific somebody. Swinburne – at least, I think it was Swinburne – once invented an obscure French poet – I believe it was a poet – and published a substantial essay on him. The victim was something quite vague; say, the literary world at large. Or there were the people who dressed up as navvies and dug an enormous hole in the middle of Bond Street. Or thin
k of some of the most famous impersonations carried off by practical jokers. More often than not, any element of malice was minimal in them.’

  ‘A joke may be disinterested,’ Mr Moyle said. ‘But it can’t be unmotivated. And that’s what I rather wanted to go on to: what may be called the psychology of the joker. I have come to the conclusion that the typical practical joker labours under a sense of inferiority and insecurity. So he has to prove himself sharper-witted than other people. For example, there was a real man not long ago who forged things rather as that scholar in Kipling’s story does.’

  ‘T J Wise,’ somebody said.

  ‘That’s right. He was quite a well-heeled business gent with cultivated interests. He collected books in a big way, with the result that he was much run after by scholars. But he wasn’t himself a scholar. I don’t think he’d even had the kind of education that is the privilege of everybody in this room.’

  ‘A deprivation painful to think of,’ the Patriarchs’ host of the evening said. He was still going conscientiously round with the port.

  ‘As a consequence, Wise inclined to feel these learned hangers-on really had a patronizing attitude to him. So he did all his forgeries, and took all these chaps in. Probably they hadn’t really been laughing at him at all. But he felt they had. And now – without their knowing it – he was in a position to laugh at them.’

  ‘He sounds a bit of a special case to me,’ Bobby said. ‘I don’t believe many people would respond with practical jokes to some embittered sense that they hadn’t themselves made a grade. Wasn’t there a chap who hired the Oxford Town Hall, and gave a very successful lecture in the character of some eminent continental philosopher? I don’t believe for a moment that he was a failed philosopher himself. He was from some quite different walk of life, and just out for a little quiet fun.’