Basil Street Blues by Michael Holroyd Read Free Book Online

heart-broken Fraser’.
    Probate was granted at the end of October, and the Major-General’s estate was valued at £80,913 8s 10d. A hundred years later such a sum would be roughly equivalent to four-and-a-half million pounds.
    On 4 June 1899 Patrick was twenty-five and The Links became his absolute property. He immediately sold the house which was converted into an expensive ‘Ladies School’ – among its pupils were to be Edwina Ashley, god-daughter of Edward VII, later to gain fame as Lady Mountbatten; and the Marchioness of Bath who, as Daphne Fielding, was to write a celebrated autobiography, Mercury Presides . Later, The Links was bought by the Methodist Guild, and became a Christian Holiday Centre, its interior partitioned and sub-divided by the tortured geometry of fire regulations.
    The Militia was to do good service in the Boer War and Lieutenant Patrick Holroyd was one of those who volunteered to embark for South Africa. He took his wife Coral, and there, in the summer of 1900, their son Ivor was born. Fraser, who accurately described his occupation as being ‘of independent means’, had meanwhile fallen in love, a complaint that was to carry him off to Ireland. But while the two brothers were abroad what became of Norah? There was a family rumour that she died young. But my father wrote of having seen her once when he was aged about six – ‘someone lying down who was very gentle to a little boy’ and who (my aunt recalled) had ‘beautiful hair’. That must have been approximately in 1913. So I went in search of a death certificate.
    Birth, death and marriage certificates were still held in 1996 at St Catherine’s House in the Aldwych. The National Statistics Public Search Room there looked like a medieval place of torment. I joined the panting crowds of fellow-researchers, sweating, glazed, cursing as we bumped against one another, jostling with decades of unwieldy volumes and staring at the lists, and more lists, of the dead. All of us apparently were hunting for our family stories. But I could find no death certificate for Norah Palmer Holroyd. Had she secretly married? She seemed to have vanished.
    I had no other information about her, except a whisper my father had picked up from among the grown-ups that she lived with a Dr Macnamara. The family whispers had it that he was a Svengali, with an uncanny hold over this unmarried girl, plotting to get her money. There appeared to be no way of checking this. The trail had ended.
    Then I had an idea. Maybe Norah made a Will. Wills and certificates of divorce were then lodged at Somerset House which was just the other side of the Aldwych from St Catherine’s House. The crowds are less dense there and the torture more refined. No one who searches for a Will was allowed to take off his or her overcoat in winter lest it contain high explosives. The central heating was kept high, very high, and all the staff worked in shirtsleeves. In this unbalanced atmosphere I began my hot pursuit. I started in the year 1913, tracking backwards and forwards, and came across a Will Norah had made in 1907. This revealed that she died, aged thirty-six, on 22 October 1913. There had been no death certificate because she died at Vernet-les-Bains, a spa town in the far south west of France that was popular among British travellers in the late nineteenth century. Evidently she had visited her brother Fraser, and met her nephews and niece, shortly before setting out on that last journey.
    Norah’s Will fills a few of the empty spaces in her life and plants some signposts over this lost territory. Whatever immediately happened to her when The Links was sold late in 1899, she was according to the Census living at Beaufort House at Ham in Surrey at the beginning of 1901. The house was occupied by a Dr William Simpson Craig who was replaced as its occupant by his son-in-law Dr Macnamara in 1907, the year Norah made her Will.
    When probate was granted in the summer of 1914, Norah’s