But perhaps the most satisfying moment came when I managed to steal the crimson handkerchief she'd so cherished. She held it in her right hand where it lay outside the bedspread. My father and I were sitting on opposite sides of the bed, the curtains drawn tight shut. A single feeble lamp burned on a cabinet to my side of the room. The room stank of illness. I remember eyeing that handkerchief, waiting for the moment I could make my move, for I knew my unbeloved mother was close to death. I wanted to prise the scrap of crimson from her living fingers.
Then my moment came. Father left the room briefly. I stood up quietly and walked over to where my mother lay. I slipped the handkerchief from between her enfeebled fingers, thrust it into my pocket and returned to the chair just as Father stepped back into the room. The horrible woman died that night. I celebrated by taking the handkerchief down to the river and burning it in the silvery moonlight. I have a certain Dr Egbert Farmer to thank for facilitating my eventual escape from Hemel Hempstead. Dr Farmer was my headmaster, and it was he who first took notice of my emerging artistic talent. He was a ridiculous, fat man with an absurd sense of self-importance, but he was also one of those individuals who felt the need to encourage those he believed to be talented.
I had conceived a great love for drawing, and later painting, which was my only release from the strictures of my unhappy childhood. My walks and adventures along the river and my occasional dalliances with the Lord's furred and feathered creations held limited charms, which I quickly outgrew. For a long time the incident with the boy from London loomed large in my mind, as you may appreciate. I relived the experience over and over again, my memory of it fresh and powerful. I could recall every fine detail of that hour by the river. I learned that his stinking body had been washed up downriver two days later. I would have given anything to have seen his corpse, but of course that was not possible.
I often sketched Fred, the drowned boy. I spent long hours struggling to bring to the page his expression of terror, the pleading light in his eyes as he slid away from this world. I fantasised about the look of him as he drifted under the water carried by the current, his head battered against rocks, his face cut by rushes, and I tried to visualise his bloated, green-tinged form as his parents would have seen it after he was fished from the river.
Needless to say, these were not the pictures Dr Farmer saw. By the time I was sixteen, I had quite a decent portfolio of conventional pieces, and I had entered a landscape in a school art competition. When I won the prize, it seemed to be the first time anyone at school even noticed I was there. Before then, I had been little more than a shadow. Even Father took some notice when he heard of my success. Until then, he had not shown the slightest interest in my efforts but merely scoffed at the very idea his son should be interested in something so meretricious as art.
As a consequence, my father was quite bemused when Dr Farmer wrote to him inviting us to meet him. We dutifully went along to tea at the head-master's cottage not far from the school, and when the good doctor explained to my father that he thought I was the most promising young artist he had ever seen, and that he believed I had a chance of a scholarship to study Fine Art at Oxford, Father was struck dumb.
He himself was not in the least bit academic, but he held Dr Farmer in high regard. Farmer had been an Oxford man himself and had once been something of an ambitious young fellow. Sadly for him, he had been wounded in the Crimea and never regained his health. He came from a wealthy family with connections who had secured him a teaching post in Hemel Hempstead, and when the former headmaster, Mr Bathurst, had died back in the late sixties, the good doctor had succeeded him in the post. And I'm grateful he did or else I might never have achieved the wonders for which I am now infamous. On my first view of it, Oxford was shrouded in rain. The carriage taking me from the railway station rattled over cobbles and splashed through muddy puddles swamping Botley Road. It travelled past Northgate, on to Turl Street, and pulled up outside my new home, Exeter College. I was in reflective mood, paying little heed to my surroundings. It was only the next morning when bright sunshine lit up my meagre room that I felt I had actually arrived.
My dear lady, to whom I have promised to tell only the truth and only the relevant details of my tale, I will not bore you with the minutiae of my introduction to university life. We have all heard such mundanities before, have we not? Let us not waste time, but instead move straight on to the meat of the story. If you'll excuse the pun.
Since my earliest childhood, I had, as you know, led a solitary existence, and so being thrust suddenly into a community like the University came as something of a shock. I quickly realised that I could spend my three years there in one of two ways. I could remain isolated, a misanthrope, or I could make a performance of it. The first path was more in keeping with my true nature and was seductive to me, but I also knew that I would gain far more from the experience of being a student at Exeter College, Oxford, if I… how should I put it?… partook fully of it.
I found I was rather a good actor – something of a natural mimic, in fact. I learned to disguise my voice and adopt different personae. I experimented with sartorial styling, facial hair, dyes and postures. I actually enjoyed it. And, I have to say, I'm quite a handsome fellow. I have fashionably long hair which is dark blond. I have a strong, intelligent face and large blue eyes. My lips are perhaps my least attractive feature, they are slightly too thin, but I have a manly chin, a powerful neck and broad shoulders. I'm several inches above average height, and of muscular build. But, more important than my physical appearance, I succeeded utterly in taking on the role of someone devoid of any anomalies of character, which meant I was readily able to make friends with others of my own age. I knew these were not real friendships, these people were mere stage props to me. Some may even have been fellow thespians – who could tell?
One such associate was Winston Merryfield, a medical student at Lincoln College. I can't honestly remember how I first met the man, and really it does not matter. I liked the sharpness of his mind. He was something of an old-fashioned intellectual type, always reading weighty German novels in the original language and extolling the virtues of his favourite composers. I hate music, always have done, and Merryfield's insistence that I attend the concerts he so loved tested my acting skills to the limit. But I thought from the off that young Winston would be a useful person to know, so with him I made a special effort.
One of the things I learned early in my university career was that there is a very important link between art and medicine. This is a fact many people ignore. As a student of Fine Art I was taught the rudiments of anatomy in the belief that it would facilitate a more realistic rendering of the human and animal form. That is an important area of expertise for the artist. Indeed, the Renaissance painter Leonardo da Vinci wrote about it. But the teaching of anatomy for painters is, well, let us say, less than comprehensive. And, as you know of me already, dear lady, I have always been inquisitive when it comes to bodies, dead or alive.
Merryfield was delighted when he learned that I was happy for him to bore me with his intellectual posturing, and even more so when I told him one evening, after a particularly tiresome performance of a plinky-plonky Mozart concerto at the Sheldonian, that I wanted to know more about human anatomy than I could gain from my own courses of study.