Arthur & George

time Arthur came home, he found himself credulously imagining that the family narrative, suspended since his last visit, would resume where it had left off. But each time he was made aware that the story – his favourite story – had moved on without him. He found himself catching at words, at unexpected glances and allusions, at anecdotes in which he no longer featured. There was a life going on here without him, and that life seemed to be animated by the lodger.
    Bryan Waller did not set up as a doctor; nor did his poetry-scribbling turn into a professional habit. He inherited an estate at Ingleton in the West Riding of Yorkshire and settled for the idle life of an English squire. The cuckoo now had twenty-four acres of his own woodland surrounding a grey stone nest called Masongill House. Well then, so much the better. Except that Arthur had scarcely absorbed this good news when a letter arrived from the Mam, informing him that she, Ida and Dodo were also leaving Edinburgh; also for Masongill, where a cottage on the estate was being prepared for them. The Mam did not attempt a justification – the healthy air, an unhealthy child, perhaps – merely stated that this was happening. Indeed, had already happened. Oh yes, here was a justification: the rent was very low.
    Arthur felt it as a kidnapping and betrayal combined. He entirely failed to persuade himself that this was a chivalrous action on Waller’s part. A true courtly knight would have arranged for some mysterious inheritance to come the way of the Mam and her daughters, while himself departing to a distant land on a long and preferably perilous quest. A true courtly knight would also not have jilted Lottie or Connie, whichever of the two it had been. Arthur had no proof, and perhaps it had been no more than a flirting which induced false expectations, but something had been going on, if certain hints and female silences meant what he guessed.
    Arthur’s suspicions did not, alas, end there. He was a young man who liked things clear and certain, yet found himself in a place where little was clear and some certainties were unacceptable. That Waller was more than just a lodger was as plain as the nose on your face. He was often referred to as a friend of the family, even one of the family. Not so by Arthur: he did not want an elder brother suddenly thrust upon him, let alone a sibling at whom the Mam smiled in a different way. Waller was six years older than Arthur, and fifteen years younger than the Mam. Arthur would have thrust his hand into fire in defence of his mother’s honour; his principles, and his sense of family, and the duty owed to it, had all come from her. And yet, he sometimes found himself wondering, how would things appear in a police court? What evidence might be given, and what assumptions made by a jury? Consider, for instance, this item: his father was an enfeebled dipsomaniac occasionally confined to nursing homes, his mother had borne her final child while Bryan Waller was part of the household, and she had given that daughter four Christian names. The last three of these were Mary, Julia and Josephine; the child’s nickname was Dodo. But her first given name was Bryan. Apart from anything else, Arthur did not agree that Bryan was a girl’s name.
    While Arthur was courting Louisa, his father managed to obtain alcohol in his nursing home, broke a window trying to escape and was transferred to the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum. On the 6th of August 1885 Arthur and Touie were married at St Oswald’s, Thornton-in-Lonsdale, in the county of Yorkshire. The groom was twenty-six, the bride twenty-eight. Arthur’s best man was not a fellow member of the Southsea Bowling Club, of the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society, or of Phoenix Lodge No. 257. The Mam had made all the arrangements, and Arthur’s best man was Bryan Waller, who seemed to have taken over as future provider of velvet dresses, gold glasses, and comfortable seats by the fire.

George
    When George pulls back the curtains, there is an empty milk churn standing in the middle of the lawn. He points it out to his father. They dress and investigate. The churn is missing its lid, and when George peers in he sees a dead blackbird lying at the bottom. They bury the bird quickly behind the compost heap. George agrees that they may tell Mother about the churn, which they put to stand in the lane, but not about its contents.
    The next day George receives a postcard of a tomb