Basil Street Blues by Michael Holroyd Read Free Book Online Page A

estate was valued at £11,992 16s, which would be equivalent to approximately half-a-million pounds at the end of the century. The chief beneficiaries were indeed Dr and Mrs Macnamara who continued living at Beaufort House until 1920. But Norah’s Will gives a good reason for allowing what money she controlled to pass out of the Holroyd family. For fifteen years she had been able to ‘enjoy the income’ of a one-third share in her father’s residuary estate. But because she was dying unmarried, her capital would pass to Pat and Fraser. For this reason ‘I do not consider it necessary,’ she writes, ‘to bequeath to my said brothers or either of them any portion of the savings accrued or which may accrue in my lifetime in respect of the income of the said share and I have for that reason made the dispositions hereinafter contained without reference to my said brothers.’
    But there is no malice against Pat and Fraser whose sons and daughter are each left a specific gift – for one nephew ‘my gilt Empire clock’; for another ‘my sleevelinks and tie clips’; and for her niece ‘my gold watch and chain’. All of them receive £100 on their twenty-first birthdays. But my father, who was born four days before his aunt made her Will, is not mentioned; and, since there was to be no codicil, nor did Pat’s daughter born in 1908 receive anything. The implication is that Norah’s contact with her brothers’ families had grown more distant during the last six years of her life.
    Her largest legacy of all – £1,400 – goes to ‘my friend Frances Mary Macnamara wife of the said Eric Danvers Macnamara’ who is himself merely given ‘my gold ring set with two diamonds and my crescent scarf pin’. Unless Norah’s solicitor had advised against the impropriety of leaving the bulk of her estate to a married man, the conclusion any reader of this testament reaches is that the special friend of this woman with the watch chain, tie and cufflinks, was not the doctor but his wife.
    Dr Macnamara was a well-known psychiatrist who practised in Harley Street. He ‘devoted his life to mental disease’, his obituary in the British Medical Journal states, ‘...even his domestic life had many associations with his special study’. Norah Palmer Holroyd was almost certainly the subject of one of the papers he published in medical journals and encyclopaedias on neurological and psychopathological matters – on paralysis, insomnia, the use of morphine and what was called ‘functional insanity’.
    Whatever he believed her to be suffering from, her death certificate at the Marie de Vernet-les-Bains in the Pyrenees provides no cause of death. It is as if she simply gave up living. She died at four o’clock in the afternoon of 22 October 1913 at the Hôtel du Parc, an ‘établissement thermal’. There appear to have been no friends with her. The note of death is of a life unlived, ‘célibataire’, ‘sans profession’, signed at ten o’clock the following morning by two local Frenchmen and the mayor. There is no more.
    After his sister’s death, Fraser increased his holding in Rajmai Tea to 1,752 shares, and continued to hold this special number, with a nominal value of £10 a share, until the decline and fall of his own fortunes.

5
The Breves Process: Tea into Glass
    In the late eighteen-nineties my grandfather fell into the company of a large, noisy, ramshackle Irish family. The Corbets had been brought up in the Sunday’s Well district of Cork and were utterly unlike Fraser’s own family – indeed that was probably their principal charm. There were eleven Corbet sisters and one brother who, to compensate for his solitary condition, had been blessed with fifteen Christian names which his sisters were obliged to learn by heart: Roland, Hudson, Sands, De Courcy, Blennerhassett… He sailed away to the United States, built up a chain of garages and eventually perished under a car.
    The sheer femininity of these vivacious