Free The Norfolk Mystery (The County Guides) by Ian Sansom Page B

that’s me,’ he said, wedging the typewriter back into position. ‘You, meanwhile, will mostly be using the notebooks. Have them imported specially from Germany. The very best. Waterproof.’
    I picked up one of the notebooks from the bag Miriam had handed me. And it was indeed a fine notebook: octavo, morocco-bound, lined, with a red ribbon marker dangling from it, like a fuse.
    â€˜Feel the heft of it,’ said Morley.
    I weighed the notebook in my hand.
    â€˜Beautiful, isn’t it?’ he said.
    â€˜Yes, again, it’s quite … beautiful,’ I said. I had never before met a man who cared so much about his writing equipment. I had always managed to get by with pencils and the backs of envelopes and cigarette packets.
    â€˜Leave the poor man alone!’ cried Miriam from the front. ‘Nobody wants to hear about your stationery fetish.’
    â€˜My what?’ said Morley.
    Miriam groaned. ‘Never mind.’
    â€˜My advice to novice writers when they write to me, Sefton, is very simple. “Avoid haphazard writing habits. And haphazard writing materials.” And that’s it.’
    â€˜That’s it?’ I said.
    â€˜That’s it,’ agreed Miriam, from the seat in front.
    â€˜That’s it,’ said Morley. ‘
That
is the secret of my success.’
    In fact, as his own notebooks clearly show, Morley’s work was forever verging on the haphazard, with sketches, diagrams, coordinates and figures of all sorts crowding the pages, not to mention the words themselves. He wrote – as anyone familiar with the biographies will know – not only continuously and prodigiously, and in the same notebooks for almost forty years, but also in a tiny, lunatic hand. Indeed, over the years of our relationship, his handwriting became progressively smaller and smaller, almost to the point of being unreadable except by the use of a magnifying glass. His stated ambition was to squeeze ina hundred lines per page. Sometimes, pausing in between his labours, I would notice him counting the lines, again and again.
    â€˜Blast it!’ he would say.
    â€˜A problem, Mr Morley?’
    â€˜Ninety. Blast it.’
    â€˜Ninety?’
    â€˜Lines.’
    â€˜Ah.’
    There was, I came to realise, a relationship between the size and density of his writing and his lavishness of aim and ambition in wishing to capture reality as he felt it existed: it was as if by making things small he also somehow emphasised their magnitude and significance. I, on the other hand, averaged at best twenty lines a page. Which he believed to be a sign of moral turpitude.
    â€˜Now. Norfolk. Norfolk. What do you think of, Sefton, when you think of Norfolk?’
    â€˜â€œVery flat, Norfolk”?’ I said, regretting it immediately.
    Morley groaned as though I had prodded him in the side with a spear. ‘Spare us the Noël Coward, Sefton, please. Terribly overrated. Not a fan. Poor man’s Oscar Wilde. Who was himself, of course, the poor man’s Dr Johnson. Who one might say was the poor man’s Aubrey. Who was the poor man’s Burton … Who was … Anyway … A quip is not an insight, Sefton. And besides, it’s not, actually, Norfolk.’
    â€˜What?’ I did my best to keep up.
    â€˜Flat. Ever been to Gas Hill, in Norwich?’
    â€˜No, I—’
    â€˜Precisely. West Runton? Beacon Hill?’
    â€˜Again, no, I—’
    â€˜There you are, then. It’s actually made up of three very distinct geological areas, Norfolk.’ He made cupping movements with his hands, as though the entire county was within his grasp. ‘Flatlands in the west. Chalklands and heathlands of the north and the centre. And the rich valleys of the south and east.’
    â€˜I see.’
    â€˜From which we might learn much about the history of the place. “Very flat, Norfolk!” Worthless. Ignorant. Stupid. We can learn