Arthur & George

made up for any inaccuracies and false emphases, which offered balm to one whose suffering had been so humiliatingly quantified. Here it was: ‘He came to my wedding reception, and there was no guest I was prouder to see.’ Yes. George decided to take
Memories and Adventures
with him to the service, in case anyone objected to his presence. He did not know what Spiritualists looked like – let alone six thousand of them – but he doubted he looked like one himself. The book would be his passport in case of difficulty. You see, here on page 215, this is me, I am come to bid him farewell, I am proud to be his guest once more.
    On Sunday afternoon, shortly after four o’clock, he turned out of No. 79 Borough High Street and headed for London Bridge: a small brown man in a blue business suit, with a dark blue book tucked under his left arm and a pair of binoculars over his right shoulder. A casual observer might think he was going to a race meeting – except that none was held on a Sunday. Or could that be a birdwatching book under his arm – yet who went birdwatching in a business suit? He would have made a strange sight in Staffordshire, and even in Birmingham they might have put him down for an eccentric; but nobody would do so in London, which contained more than enough eccentrics already.
    When he first moved here, he had been apprehensive. About his future life, of course; about how he and Maud would manage together; about the magnitude of the city, its crowds and its noise; and beyond this, about how people would treat him. Whether there would be lurking ruffians like those who had pushed him through a hedge in Landywood and damaged his umbrella, or lunatic policemen like Upton threatening to do him harm; whether he would encounter the race prejudice Sir Arthur was convinced lay at the bottom of his case. But as he crossed London Bridge, which he had been doing now for more than twenty years, he felt quite at his ease. People generally left you alone, either from courtesy or indifference, and George was grateful for either motive.
    It was true that inaccurate assumptions were habitually made: that he and his sister had recently arrived in the country; that he was a Hindoo; that he was a trader in spices. And of course he was still asked where he came from; though when he replied – to avoid discussing the finer points of geography – that he was from Birmingham, his interlocutors mostly nodded in an unsurprised way, as if they had always expected the inhabitants of Birmingham to look like George Edalji. Naturally there were the kind of humorous allusions that Greenway and Stentson went in for though few to Bechuana Land but he regarded this as some inevitable normality, like rain or fog. And there were even some people who, on learning that you came from Birmingham, expressed disappointment, because they had been hoping for news from distant lands which you were quite unable to supply.
    He took the Underground from Bank to High Street Kensington, then walked east until the Albert Hall bulged into view. His cautiousness over time – about which Maud liked to tease him – had made him arrive almost two hours before the service was due to begin. He decided to take a stroll in the park.
    It was just after five on a fine Sunday afternoon in July, and a bandstand was blaring away. The park was full of families, trippers, soldiers – though at no point did they form a dense crowd, so George was not made anxious. Nor did he look at young couples flirting with one another, or at sober parents organizing young children, with the same envy he might once have done. When he first came to London, he had not yet given up hope of getting married; indeed, he used to worry about how his future wife and Maud might get on. For it was clear that he could not abandon Maud; nor would he wish to. But then a few years passed, and he realized that Maud’s good opinion of his future wife mattered more to him than the other way round. And then a few more years passed, and the general disadvantages of a wife became even more apparent. A wife might appear agreeable but turn out to be a scold; a wife might not understand thrift; a wife would certainly wish for children, and George thought he probably could not bear the noise, or the disturbance it would bring to his work. And then, of course, there were sexual matters, which often did not lead to harmony. George did not handle divorce cases, but as a lawyer he had seen evidence