Medea's murder: another version

Cobb's school for scandal

Brian Inglis

For some reason I cannot recall, I pegged my contribution to John Bull's Schooldays, a sporadic series which ran in the Spectator from 1959 to 1960, to my first day at Shrewsbury: the day before term began, because new boys were invited early in a well-meant attempt to let them settle down together and acclimatise. But I happened to come in a summer term, the only new boy in my house. Wandering lonely and nervous round the empty school site, I encountered only one other new- comer; and although he looked friendly, `we were too shy of each other to do more than make polite conversation'.

This was Edward, the anti-hero of Richard Cobb's A Classical Education. They were in the same house and became, if not exactly close friends, close collabor- ators in `two-boy acts of provocation', japes spontaneous or planned. Their acts continued until, after they had left school, Edward was charged with the murder of his mother, the wife of a well-known Dublin doctor. At the trial, it was established that he had gone for her with a hatchet, driven her corpse in her Baby Austin to a nearby cove, sat in the back with it until other visitors had all departed, and then thrown it into the Irish Sea. It was never seen again, which may have influenced the jury to settle for its verdict of Guilty but Insane.

As readers of the Observer's extracts from the book will have realised, this gruesome tale was made the more macabre by Richard's revelations of Edward's atti- tude when, 12 years later, he was released. `What a pity we went to a classical school!', his first words were when they met. 'How would you wash an axe if it had traces of blood on it?' Shrewsbury had not taught him that, to remove the traces, the water must be cold.

I feature in the book = peripherally, yet with the implication that I was involved in the events leading up to the murder, or at least well aware that there was every likelihood that Edward would kill his appalling mother — neurotic, dishonest, a kleptomaniac: Edward called her Medea — if she did not first kill herself. So may I set the record straight? In the Preface, Richard admits that as he is 'not always sure at what stages fictional inventiveness takes over from the chronicle of memory', there may be other versions of the story. There certainly is one: mine.

Richard describes, correctly, how and when we met in Oxford in 1936, I told him I had seen a notice in the Times that Edward's mother had been reported miss- ing, and I surmised that this might be Edward's doing. 'Brian's home was in Swords, to the north side of Dublin Bay, and he was as well-informed of the doings of Edward's family as I was.' Richard claims. 'We'd both been so often served with such portentous statements as "You'll see, there'll be a drama in my family one of these days". We laughed in the apprecia- tion of a shared joke, and as if we had both seen it coming all the time, from very far back (Brian had been at prep school with Edward, even farther back than myself).'

Edward and I had not, in fact, been to the same prep school. Not merely had I never met him before that first day at Shrewsbury: I had no contact with him while we were there, for a reason I gave in my Schooldays article. 'One of the unwrit- ten laws explained to us when term began was that for two boys from different houses to be seen in each other's company was Not Done' — the assumption being that they could be up to no good.

I can remember talking to Edward only once, when we met on the mailboat from Holyhead to Kingstown (as we of the Prod. Ascendancy still insisted upon calling it, rather than accept the awful Dun Laoghaire). But this must have been ex- ceptional, as ordinarily I took the rival B&I from Liverpool direct to Dublin. I did not live in Swords (Ascendancy snobbery comes back to me, at the very idea! We in Malahide, three miles away, thought of ourselves as a different species). The chances that I, chiefly concerned as I was to get my golf handicap down to single figures, would have heard about the dis- cord in a family living the other side of the capital were minimal. I neither saw nor heard of Edward, after he left school, before the murder. I knew about 'Medea' only from Richard's spiced-up accounts.

His fictional inventiveness is not con- fined to my role. He is careless about names: Richard's flat mate was Cecil, not Cyril, Monson. He embellishes, unwisely: Edward's effort to push the Baby Austin over a cliff was frustrated not by a 'wind- swept overhanging tree' but by a simple barrier. And sometimes Richard soars off into fantasy. On the way to the cove, he claims Edward made a long detour through the centre of Dublin, ran out of petrol, and had to push the car from Grafton Street to O'Connell Street to find a garage. Edward barely knew how to drive (he could not put the car into reverse); he actually damaged the car while leaving his mother's house. Understandably, he then drove straight to the cove.

Was it Richard's fantasy, or Edward's? Probably it was a two-way concoction, in liquor, while they were reviving their old two-way provocation act. Edward, to out- ward appearances the 'straight' man, good- looking, well-spoken, well-mannered', would put on outrageous turns while Richard, the real joker, egged him on, revelling in the spectacle of shocked people — as I don't doubt he still does. I cannot believe he was really contrite at being slung out of the Palace Banquet for Giscard; still less at Private Eye's description of him as The Compleat Imbiber.

Because Richard and I spent our last two years at Shrewsbury in the History Side together, I got to know him much better than I knew Edward; but my enduring memory is of encountering him in Paris, shortly before Munich, where neither of us had any money, but where he assured me he knew of somewhere we could have a night out without expense. It turned out to be a seedy café somewhere near Montpar- nasse, with some sinister-looking barflies. At a signal, they all took off their jackets, putting on high-necked pullovers and slouched caps. Moments later, a bus un- loaded 'Paris By Night' tourists, their guide pointing out to them the wicked apaches, in their Maurice Chevalier outfits, getting ready for violence on absinthe.

It was not, of course, absinthe. It was the same glutinous blanc that was served to the tourists. Many of them took only a sip.

before the guide hustled them out, warning that the violence might . blow up at any moment. While the apaches divested them- selves of their fancy dress, Richard swooped on the glasses; and the rest of the evening cost us no more than a diabolical hangover.

I have often wondered how Richard. capable as he has always been of flaunting convention, should have climbed to an Oxford Chair; but reading A Classical Education paradoxically makes this easier to understand. He was the beneficiary of admirable teaching at Shrewsbury: J. K. M. Senior, though not inspiring, was ex- tremely good at encouraging budding geniuses like Richard to develop, and even managed to turn some of the rest of us from sows' ears into passable imitation Shantung. What Senior would have thought of Richard's admission that A Classical Education is 'often embellished by my own imagination', I do not care to contemplate (still less the 'fictional inven- tiveness'). But my irritation faded away under the lulling influence of his remark- able 'feel' for a period, or for an institution such as Shrewsbury — a hell-hole fo the 'scum', as boys for their first two years were called, ministering to the physical requirements of monitors with unrestricted opportunities for sadism.

Richard and Edward at least managed to get some of their own back — if not on their tormentors, who had left, at least upon such odious individuals as the 'unct- uous cleric', the school chaplain. Hoskyns- Abrahall, with his 'juicy new prayers that seemed to run • with treacle'; known to those who read the Wallopian, a mild parody of the school magazine, as Oilskins- Overall (and to those who preferred the Romilly brothers' Out of Bounds — ban- ned, but furtively circulated — as Foreskins-Urinal).

And Richard, I have to admit, is not the only one who lets imagination trick mem- ory. I have often dined out on the whole story, including the bit about the Dublin police finding letters from Richard to Edward which they thought incriminating, and asking the Oxford police to arrest him as an accessory. The arrest, in my version, was foiled because Merton College is Sanctuary, and the police were only able to interview Richard through the window of the porter's lodge.

Not so — assuming Richard's current version is correct. The Chief Inspector did indeed respect the college's privileges (do they really exist?); but he was invited to the law tutor's rooms, where he not merely made it clear that they thought the Irish police were making fools of themselves, but also warned Richard not to spend the next vacation in France, which had an extradition treaty with Dublin and where he might find himself subpoena'd as a witness at the trial.

And Edward? At the Irish Times one day in the late 1940's, I was told somebody wanted to see me, and he came in, looking much the same as I remembered him at Shrewsbury, though happier. He had ac- quired a passion in the asylum for the works of Charles Morgan and the music of Wagner: could the Irish Times help him to get tickets for the Ring, at Bayreuth?

As he was going to leave Ireland, I did not expect to see him again; but some 20

Years later, when I was collecting some-

thing from a London agency, the man behind the counter said, 'Inglis?' and,

When I nodded, said simply — his sur- name. We had all used surnames at Shrewsbury, until acquiring seniority. I had never thought of him as Edward: indeed I doubt I even knew it was his name, while we were at school.

He had aged; I would not have recog- nised him. According to Richard, he is now a rather stately, slow-moving figure, slightly bent, an elderly gentleman'. He has actually taken steps to join the Old `alopian Club.