Dezzie and the Historian

About the Author

A.D. Harvey was born and brought up in Colchester, read history at St. John’s College Oxford, obtained his Ph.D. at Cambridge, taught there for some years and then became an antiques dealer. Later he taught at Italian, French and German universities. He is the author of a number of historical works that were favourably reviewed in the national press and of three previous novels, including Warriors of the Rainbow, described by The Guardian as ‘weirdly compelling’ and by The Independent as ‘free-flowing and poetic… unforgettable’.

Dedication

For Tanika

Copyright Information ©

A.D. Harvey 2022

The right of A.D. Harvey to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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 publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781786938480 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398400122 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781398400139 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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E14 5AA

1

I was downstairs in what we called the library – there were too many books to call it anything else – writing an essay on the suffragettes, when the doorbell rang. Rupert was upstairs in the living room, sorting through the DVDs to choose a film for later in the evening, so being closer I went to the front door.

Standing well back from the doorstep as if expecting to be greeted with a bucket of acid was a young man who seemed to be disguised as an estate agent in an Ealing Comedy, complete with pencil-line moustache and retro-style suit: distinctly out of place against the back-drop of gothic buildings across the street.

‘Good evening. Thames Valley Police,’ he said. ‘I’d like to speak to Dr Roberts.’

‘Who is it?’ called Rupert from the top of the stairs.

‘A policeman to see you,’ I called back. It didn’t seem a big deal: there was some first-class Moroccan upstairs, plus the last of the skunk I had scored at Magdalen, but this was clearly not a raid: the days were long past when a visit from even a single member of the local Gestapo was as welcome as rat’s poop in the bath. To the spiv I said, ‘You’d better go up.’

‘Who are you?’ he asked as he came into the hall, evidently trying to figure out how a black teenager wearing only a man’s shirt and with a half-eaten spring onion tucked behind her ear fitted into the household: a home at such an eligible address might well have a maid or au pair but even the most eccentric academics would be hardly likely to let her dress like that.

‘Dezzie Roberts. Dr Roberts’s wife,’ I said, and noticed a change in his expression, almost as if he had had an Eureka moment. ‘Go on up.’

By the time I had written another paragraph of my essay, nibbled a bit more of my spring onion and checked that the spines of all of the volumes of Pastor’s History of the Popes were aligned on the book shelf opposite my seat – Rupert kept complaining that individual volumes kept moving an inch in or out, apparently all on their own – my male and the spiv-policeman had concluded their business and come downstairs together. I went to the door of the library and as he passed the spiv gave me an odd, almost triumphant look, as if he now knew my sleazy secret, or at least the secret of the spring onion. Not a nice look: it went with his suit and his moustache.

‘They want us both to come in for a chat at the police station on Thursday,’ Rupert said, in an ordinary enough voice, when he had closed the front door on our visitor. ‘Some woman I barely remember, who I tried to get off with in the British Library about twenty years ago, indignant at all the publicity we’ve been having, is accusing me of having done everything but rape her.’

‘At last. Now we can start a Hashtag MeToo Club and share our stories,’ I said, trailing my fingers over the curve of his tummy. ’But why do they want me to go with you? I didn’t know you twenty years ago. I wasn’t even born twenty years ago.’

‘I think that’s why they want to talk to you,’ he said.

2

How does one start one’s first and last book? It did occur to me to paraphrase the opening sentence of Harriet Wilson’s Memoirs and begin, ‘I shall not say how and why I became, at the age of sixteen, the mistress of sexagenarian failed genius Rupert Roberts M.A., D.Phil.’, but it helps to understand what happened afterwards if I admit that in our first encounter I was just another of Rupert’s casual, objectless and essentially innocent pick-ups. As I learnt later picking up women – and not just inappropriately young girls – on buses and at bus stops, libraries and supermarket queues was almost a reflex with him: it even happened in a short story he had published.

I was on a No. 393 bus heading back to the council Children’s Home where I lived after a routinely numbing day at school, and was on page 417 or thereabouts of Charles Dickens’s least appealing novel, Our Mutual Friend, when an elderly man plonked himself down on the seat just vacated beside me. I didn’t even bother to glance up, though I did notice his bottle-green corduroy trousers and sensed rather than saw a white beard. After I had read on and turned the page at least once he suddenly spoke.

‘I’ve figured out where the Wilfers live in Holloway Road,’ he said. The Wilfers are of course characters in Our Mutual Friend. I looked up, took in blue eyes, white – no silver – beard, shiny bald head with silver hair sticking out at the sides and over his collar at the back. ‘There’s a row of houses built in the 1840s, either side of the junction with Tavistock Terrace, that match Dickens’s description almost perfectly. He would have passed it often enough on his way to funerals he attended at Highgate Cemetery.’

I was used to being chatted up, but this was interesting. I asked him to describe the houses and we made would-be intellectual conversation till he got off at the stop before the Children’s Home. It was only when he stood up to leave and I realised that he was checking out my boobs (as far as they showed in my school uniform sweat shirt) as if making sure they weren’t falsies that it occurred to me that he might simply be just another dirty old man.

I was a Year 11 pupil at Stoke Newington School in the London Borough of Hackney, supposedly studying for my GCSEs. Like any other female who’s grown up in London I knew a fair amount about the way dirty old men looked at teenage girls.

Well, of course, I never expected to see him again – one of the piquancies of life in the capital consists of running into unusual, memorable people who never come your way again. Not in this case though. About ten days later he got on my bus again. I looked up from my book and there he was, coming from the entry door at the front of the bus and looking around for a vacant seat. I signalled him to come and sit with me at the back. We talked this time about the causes of the First World War – he pointed out that for two of the four countries fighting against Britain the World War was phase three or phase four of a war that had begun in 1911 (in the case of Turkey) or 1912 (in the case of Bulgaria) – and this time I got off at the same stop as him in Cazenove Road, saying I had to collect something at a shop. I ducked down the alley way leading to the Jehovah Witnesses’ meeting hall and the railway station, counted thirty and stepped out again just as he neared the next corner, which was perfect for following him without being noticed.

We passed bay-windowed house fronts as identical as rows of decaying teeth all the way down Alkham Road, turned a corner, passed more house fronts in need of a dentist and came at last to a necrotic Victorian semi-detached house at the next corner. It was pretty much like other houses I had crashed in on the various occasions I had done a runner from the Children’s Home. My quarry climbed the steps to the front door and let himself in with a bunch of keys. I moved closer, saw lights come on in a window on the first floor, and a moment later, a light in a second window. That’s OK, I thought, he doesn’t live in just one room. (I had noticed his tweed jacket was a bit frayed at the cuffs and had been wondering how moth-eaten his wallet was). Curiosity satisfied, I returned to the Children’s Home.

And found ‘Dezzie Beckford is a ho’ spray-painted in the loo, but never mind that.

Not seeing my new acquaintance again for a week, I went round to his house after the usual fraught supper at the Children’s Home, having changed out of my school uniform into jeans, zip-up leatherette jacket and white trainers. (Someone had stolen my pink ones.) I hesitated between a woolly hat with a bobble and a NYPD baseball cap but finally chose the latter as the peak would get in his way if he tried to kiss me. Why did I go to his house? Not to be kissed, that’s for sure. I went because he was interesting, much better informed about history and literature than any of my teachers at school – he had said he had taught history at Oxford a long time ago but had never been able to get a permanent job so he had written books and articles and short stories instead – and also because he seemed to find me worth talking to, which was flattering, even if he was a dirty old man (sub-species innoxius, I hoped).

At this juncture, I was planning to do another bunk from the Children’s Home but I hadn’t yet lined up a boyfriend to do the bunk with and knew I would need some money if I was going to avoid getting into a situation where I wasn’t in control, as had happened more than once in Year 9 and 10. A couple of girls in my class had told me that they had used their ability to look pathetic to get money out of old geezers who fancied them, and it did occur to me that I might have a try at this. I was not sure how I was going to set about it, though, particularly as I thought Rupert – that was his name – was rather a good guy who didn’t deserve to be ripped off. When I rang his bell – it had a label saying Dr R.J. Roberts – I really had no clear ideas about what I might or might not be about to do. I remember it had just set in to rain and the puddles were blinking at me with raindrops, and I thought, if he lets me in for an hour or so there’s a chance I might not have to walk home in the rain.

‘Who is it?’ came his voice through the little grill below the column of bell-pushes. At least I’d got the right bell.

‘It’s Dezzie. I wanted to ask you