Family Matters Read online

  Family Matters

  With an Introduction by

  Martin Edwards

  Anthony Rolls

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Originally published in 1933 by Geoffrey Bles

  Copyright © 2017 Estate of Anthony Rolls

  Introduction copyright © 2017 Martin Edwards

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library

  First E-book Edition 2017

  ISBN: 9781464207433 ebook

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

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  Contents

  Family Matters

  Copyright

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Epilogue

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Dedication

  To

  O. G. S. Crawford

  Introduction

  Family Matters is a long-forgotten novel of domestic crime that richly deserves republication. Witty and original, it was very well received on its original appearance in 1933. Reviewing the book in the Sunday Times, Dorothy L. Sayers—as stringent a critic as you might wish to find—heaped praise on it: “The characters are quite extraordinarily living, and the atmosphere of the horrid household creeps over one like a miasma.”

  As Sayers said, the story “concerns the efforts of various members and friends of the Kewdingham family to get rid by poison of one of the most futile and exasperating men who ever, by his character and habits, asked to be murdered. Oddly enough, the poisons they select counteract one another, and this leads to a most original and grimly farcical situation, and an ironic surprise-ending, pregnant with poetical injustice.”

  The intended victim is Robert Kewdingham. In his late forties, Robert has been out of work since losing his job in the Slump. Increasingly, he dwells in a world of make-believe, and his behaviour becomes a source of deep frustration to his young and lovely wife Bertha. She is admired by a doctor and by a novelist, both of whom would prefer Robert to be out of the way. But the plot soon begins to thicken. Sayers commented that she had no idea whether the medical details about poisoning that play such an pivotal role in the narrative were technically correct (and nor do I, come to that), but although she was normally a stickler for accuracy, she concluded: “I am quite ready to accept anything that is told me by so convincing an author”. Praise indeed.

  Colwyn Edward Vulliamy (1886–1971) was a man of many accomplishments. A Welshman, he was born in Radnorshire (now part of Powys) and educated privately before studying art under the guidance of the Irish painter Stanhope Forbes, founder of the Newlyn Art School. During the First World War, he served in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry and the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and when peace came, he set about establishing himself as a writer. The Fabian Society had published his Charles Kingsley and Christian Socialism in 1914, and later books reflecting his wide interests include Voltaire, The Archaeology of Middlesex and London, English Letter Writers and a book about the Crimean campaign of 1854–6.

  He turned to crime fiction in 1932, with The Vicar’s Experiments, published under the pseudonym Anthony Rolls, and known in the United States as Clerical Error. He was no doubt inspired by the success of Malice Aforethought, an ironic study of the psychology of a middle-class murderer by Francis Iles (a pen-name of Anthony Berkeley Cox, who also wrote as Anthony Berkeley.) The Vicar’s Experiments was highlighted by Julian Symons, in his pioneering study of the genre, Bloody Murder, as one of the most notable books written under Iles’ influence. As Symons said, it concerns: “a clergyman who suddenly begins to suffer from homicidal delusions…a good deal of what follows is very amusing, although the story falters sadly once suspicion of the clergyman has been aroused”.

  Vulliamy’s fondness for satire is evident in much of his work, including his crime fiction. The Vicar’s Experiments was well received, and he was encouraged to continue in the same vein. Lobelia Grove, Family Matters, and Scarweather appeared under the Rolls name in quick succession; each book displayed Vulliamy’s inventive turn of mind, as well as his wit. Yet after producing four crime novels in three years, he abandoned the genre until the fifties.

  Don Among the Dead Men (1952) was the first of six crime novels which Vulliamy published under his own name. The storyline resembled that of The Vicar’s Experiments, but this time the deranged killer was an Oxford academic. The storyline was developed for the cinema by Robert Hamer, who no doubt hoped to repeat his triumph with Kind Hearts and Coronets. After Hamer died, Don Chaffey took over, and the film was released in 1964 as A Jolly Bad Fellow. This black comedy, also known as They All Died Laughing, boasted a superb cast including Leo McKern, Leonard Rossiter, Dennis Price, and Miles Malleson, and a soundtrack written by the young John Barry, but the whole did not quite add up to the sum of its impressive parts. Vulliamy’s later work received less attention, but it remained interesting and unorthodox. His last book, Floral Tribute (1963), was rather ahead of its time, and is possibly the first crime novel to address in some depth the subject of dementia.

  Vulliamy was a more ambitious novelist than most writers who display comparable versatility. His satire was sharp, but he also made serious points about human behaviour and the nature of society. As Symons noted, he found it easier to come up with intriguing and unusual narrative premises than to sustain and resolve a complicated plot over the full length of a novel, and this is why the renown of his books never quite matched that of Francis Iles’s work. But such is the flair and wit of his crime fiction that it does not deserve the neglect into which it has fallen. It is a pleasure to welcome this fascinating writer back into print.

  Martin Edwards

  www.martinedwardsbooks.com

  Chapter I

  1

  If you fly over the town of Shufflecester at an altitude of ten thousand feet you see the town below you like a dirty grey splash on the variegated patterns of brown, purple and green which mark the level landscape of the great Shuffleshire plateau. Through the middle of the town run the gentle sinuosities of the River Shuff like a white ribbon. Seen from a lower altitude Shufflecester has a most fantastic and irregular appearance, reminding you of a lot of grey and yellow bricks thrown at random upon a carpet by some heedless child. The builders of the town seem to have been sobered or restrained by the wide levels of the country; their houses are flat, uniform, depressed, with hardly a tall building among them. Only the towers of the cathedral suggest a vertical idea, and even these are square and heavy. Outside the town are purple masses of timber, green or dun streaks of arable land, flowing towards the misty line of the Wyveldon Hills
, above the sea.

  Even this aeroplane view gives the impression of a placid, agricultural place, resisting innovation, unmoved by the hustling spirit of the age. On the outskirts of the town, it is true, smudges of amber smoke hang above the brickyards; but these brickyards are few and isolated, nor do they indicate a prosperous industry. As for the breweries of Malworth, they hardly come within the Shufflecester scene.

  It may be said, without much fear of denial, that Shufflecester is one of the most English of English towns. If the archaeologist is not mistaken, it was a fortified place in Roman times—the Tasciodunum of the Antonine Itinerary. Its fine alms-house is one of the oldest in the kingdom. All the inconvenience, though not the charm of antiquity, is preserved in its narrow streets, where even the moderate crowd of a market-day wanders perilously in the main thoroughfare because there is no room on the pavement. There is no plan or regularity. The market has an open space, and there is a little green square near the cathedral which is called (heaven knows why) the Queen’s Bower. No single street runs for any distance without reaching a curve or corner. Even the main road, which comes level and straight over the plateau, a Roman military way, has to bend and wriggle in a series of bewildering contortions before it gets out of the town.

  The same absence of intelligent planning gives a perverse and unhappy appearance to those parts of the town which are termed “residential”. Blocks, curves and angles of grey and yellow brick, with roofs of lilac slate, produce an effect of morose, impregnable respectability. Here you have streets no longer; you have roads, avenues and crescents. The more pretentious houses arrogantly stand in twos, or even singly, with handsome gardens; the humbler dwellings cling together, distinguishable only by numbers. It may be doubted whether you can see in any other town so many perfect, unaltered examples of 1860 design, or so many areas which faithfully preserve the high Victorian standard.

  We are particularly concerned in this drama with a house in one of the less fashionable quarters—Number Six, Wellington Avenue. It is like all the other houses in the Avenue, small, with a slate roof, a grim bit of grass between the front and the pavement, and a scrubby garden at the back. In this house lived Mr. Robert Arthur Kewdingham, his wife, his young son, and his venerable father.

  2

  Poor Mr. Kewdingham had not been lucky. He came of a good middle-class family, of the sort which is capable of producing anything from a bishop to a broker—his father had been estate agent to the Duke of Tiddleswade. Mr. Kewdingham was (or had been) an engineer, employed by the great firm of Hayle, Trevors and Ockersley. He had served in the firm for twenty-one years without reaching a very high position. Yet he was competent in his way, and was considered reliable. The firm came down heavily in the post-war slump, and in 1925 two hundred members of the engineering staff were reluctantly dismissed. Mr. Kewdingham was among the two hundred. He was then forty-five years of age, a man who believed himself to be afflicted by a series of subtle though deadly disorders, which caused him to administer to himself a series of subtle though deadly drugs.

  Mr. Kewdingham was tall and solid. His face had an expression of baffled, vague tenacity, such as you may often see on the face of the Nordic man who feels that he ought to have done better—feels, rather, that he would have done very well if it had not been for the unaccountable hostility of circumstances. It is like the face of a bulldog who wants to bite something, but has nothing to bite. He could be extremely amiable, he could be extremely rude. When people asked him what he intended to do (in view of his obvious poverty), he said that something would be sure to turn up. But he had not, so far, gone to the length of looking for a job.

  And yet it must not be supposed that Mr. Kewdingham was idle. To begin with, he was a famous collector. “I am a born collector,” he said with a touch of pride.

  He did not limit himself, as a man of narrow vision might have done, to any particular class of objects. Other collections might be more valuable, but few were so comprehensive. Since his father had occupied the spare rooms, this collection overflowed in the most undesirable and unlikely places. Great cabinets thrust out their angles from the corners of the drawing-room. On the tops of these cabinets wobbled immense, precarious piles of cardboard boxes. More boxes, tins, trays and paper parcels were standing on each side of the fire-place and on various parts of the floor. Inside these receptacles there was an astounding medley of junk: bits of coral, broken pots, beetles and butterflies impaled on pieces of cork or stuck on cards, odd fossils, bones, brasses, dried flowers, birds’ eggs, little figures in soapstone and ivory, ushabtis from the tombs of Egypt, fragments of uncertain things, weird scraps of metal, badges, buttons, mouldy coins and innumerable varieties of suchlike trash. But everything was arranged with meticulous care, and indeed with a certain dexterity. Even the most unrecognisable rusty bit of iron was mounted on a card, with the date and place of discovery—“Field H. Probably Roman.” Mr. Kewdingham also had a vast library of occult books and magazines, which he was constantly reading.

  In a huge cupboard in the bathroom there was a collection of a less harmless kind—Mr. Kewdingham’s medical department. On the shelves of this cupboard were hundreds of bottles, lotions, washes, drugs, tabloids, mixtures, glasses, tubes, bulbs of india-rubber, jars, tins, brushes; and again bottles, bottles, whole companies of bottles—plain or fluted, big and little, green, blue, white, amber, flat, round, polyhedral, full, empty; with creams, liquids, powders, crystals, juices, distillations and goodness knows what.

  In these collections there was enough to keep Mr. Kewdingham busy, or at least to occupy his leisure. He prided himself, not unjustly, upon his knowledge as a collector and upon his wide experience of medicine. But there were other things which took up a good deal of his time.

  Like many engineers, Mr. Kewdingham was a mystic. He knew the occult meaning of the Pyramids, he had a private revelation of things long concealed, through a long series of transmigrations he was aware of life—his own life, presumably—in the lovely regions of Atlantis.

  Then again, he was political. He was a local leader in that interesting though reviled organisation, the Rule Britannia League. He believed in the divine mission of arms, the rights of the conqueror, dominion of the azure main. To him, pacifism was a poor wishy-washy stuff, the shirking of ordained responsibility. After all, he had been concerned in the production of guns and high explosives, he had taken his part in the shaping of those monsters which fought (we are told) for the noble ideals of civilisation. His views, if archaic, were perfectly sincere.

  Unemployed as he was, in the vulgar sense, Mr. Kewdingham had a lot to think about: science, politics, mysticism. Perhaps it was for this reason that he thought so little about his wife and his family.

  3

  Mrs. Bertha Kewdingham was a plump though very handsome woman with reddish hair and large languorous eyes. She was the daughter of a village schoolmaster. Her father, Josiah Stiles, the son of a Wesleyan minister in Quebec, had come to England when a young man in the eighteen-sixties and set up a school for farmers’ children at Pen Dillyn in North Wales. Here, in middle life, he fell in love with, and married, a young French governess, employed to teach the daughters of Sir Walter Wilkins of Dillyn Castle.

  Stiles was a gentle, dim creature. He was intensely serious, loved Ruskin and had a complete set of the Waverley Novels. His young wife, a gay, alert and very intelligent woman, helped him to make the school a success. But she was unpopular in the village, not so much on account of her smartness and vivacity but because she was a foreigner. They had two daughters, Rachel, the elder by seven years, and then Bertha. In 1912 Stiles’s wife died, and he, sorrowfully giving up the school, bought a little house in the village and settled down to end his days in peace.

  Bertha and Rachel had shared their mother’s unpopularity. They had learnt French in their childhood, and they had the misfortune of speaking with a definite foreign accent. There was no place for them in
the society of Pen Dillyn. They were too good for the farmers’ families and not good enough for the gentlefolk. Of the two girls, Bertha was the more attractive. The neighbours thought her absurdly proud; and while the women were jealous of her beauty, the men were afraid of her wit, for she had cruelly snubbed not a few of them.

  Richard Kewdingham, Robert’s uncle, had bought a small property at Pen Dillyn. In the spring of 1914 Robert Kewdingham came to spend a fortnight’s holiday with his uncle. On the day after his arrival, as he was tramping over the moors with a gun, he met Bertha Stiles. He met her again, and yet again, and before he left Pen Dillyn he announced his engagement.

  The Kewdingham family did not welcome the news. The daughter of a Wesleyan schoolmaster was not good enough for Robert Arthur Kewdingham—or for any Kewdingham, if it came to that. But Uncle Richard, who knew and liked old Stiles, and who had often talked to his daughters, observed in his bluff way that his nephew might have done a damned sight worse for himself. Bertha, said Uncle Richard, was a devilish fine girl; and what was more, she had brains and knew how to use ’em.

  Old Stiles died in the winter of 1915, and Rachel went to live with her father’s people in Quebec.

  The situation of Mrs. Kewdingham in Shufflecester was not by any means a pleasant one. After losing his job, her husband had chosen Shufflecester for his residence, because it was a stronghold of the family: there had been Kewdinghams in Shufflecester for nearly forty years.

  To Kewdingham, therefore, Shufflecester was a thoroughly congenial place. In times of trouble he could shelter himself in the family as in a warm and comfortable recess, an impregnable refuge. He could shelter in tranquil obscurity, avoiding unpleasant encounters or unfair criticism. Whatever the world might say, the family knew his worth. The family patted him on the back, telling him that he was a brave, good man. If he was unlucky in some ways, if he found it extremely hard to live on his reduced income, that was due to no fault of his own; it was all in the wonderful and merciful design of Providence. But Providence only plagues the Kewdinghams—that chosen family—in a playful sort of way, and it would be all right in the end.