In the end, the bus did not take me where I wanted to go. I was headed straight across the Humber to Barrow, but the bus went only as far as Barton. So I spent part of the afternoon walking to Barrow. Yet the prospect of finding the place excited me. I knew someone who lived here. Just that morning I had seen how near I was to it, and I thought: Why not pay the old boy a visit?
Ten years before, I had met Mr. Duffill on the Orient Express, going from Paris to Istanbul. His frailty and his shabby clothes had made him seem a little mysterious. He smelled of bread crusts. He carried paper parcels tied with string. He avoided questions. I took him to be an embezzler or someone in the midst of a strange fugue, bound for Turkey in a mouse-gray gabardine coat.
We had shared a compartment. One morning at Domodossola, on the Italian frontier, Mr. Duffill got off the train to buy some food—there was no dining car—and while he was still on the platform, the Orient Express began moving. Mr. Duffill went rigid, biting on his pipe. And then we were speeding to Milan without him. His name became a verb for me. To be duffilled was to be abandoned by one's own train. You got off at a sleepy place to buy some gum or a newspaper, and before you could get back on, the train pulled away, taking your suitcase, your clothes, your money, and your passport with it. The point was not merely that you were left behind, but that you were left behind in a strange country, figuratively naked.
I never saw Mr. Duffill again. I had left his suitcase and his paper bags at Venice with a note, and I had wondered whether he caught up with them and continued to Istanbul. Once, I had tried to call him, but he did not have a telephone. One of the few things he had told me was that he lived in Barrow-upon-Humber, in Lincolnshire—here.
It was a tiny place—a church, a narrow High Street, a manor house, and a few shops. It had an air of rural monotony that was like the drone of a bee as it bumbled slowly from flower to flower. No one ever came here; people just went away from it and never returned.
I walked down the street and saw a man.
"Excuse me, do you know a Mr. Duffill?"
He nodded. "The corner shop."
The corner shop had a small sign that said duffill's hardware. But it was locked. A square of cardboard in the window was lettered Gone on Holiday. I said out loud, "Goddamn it."
A lady was passing. This was Mrs. Marden. She saw that I was exasperated. She wondered if I needed directions. I said I was looking for Mr. Duffill.
"He won't be back for another week," she said.
"Where has he gone this time?" I asked. "Not Istanbul, I hope."
She said, "Are you looking for Richard Duffill?"
"Yes," I said.
Her hand went to her face, and I knew before she spoke that he was dead.
***
"His name was Richard Cuthbert Duffill. He was a most unusual man," said his sister-in-law, Mrs. Jack Duffill. She lived at Glynd-bourne, a bungalow just beyond the churchyard. She did not ask who I was. It seemed only natural to her that someone should be inquiring about the life of this strange man, who had died two years before, at the age of seventy-nine. He had been as old as the century—seventy-three the year he had stepped off the Orient Express at Domodossola. Mrs. Jack said, "Do you know about his adventurous life?"
I said, "I don't know anything about him." All I knew was his name and his village.
"He was born right here in Barrow, in the Hall cottages. The Hall was one of the grand houses. Richard's father was the gardener and his mother was a housemaid. Those were the days of servants The Hall was the manor—Mr. Uppleby was the Lord of the Manor—and of course the Duffills were servants, and rather poor..."
But Richard Duffill was brilliant. At the age of eleven he was encouraged by the headmaster of the village school to go to the Technical College in Hull. He excelled at math, but he was also a gifted linguist. He learned French, Latin, German, Russian, and Spanish while still a teen-ager at Hull. But he had become somewhat introspective, for when Richard was twelve his father died. Mr. Uppleby took an interest, but the young boy usually just stayed inside and read and did his lessons, or else he went for long solitary walks.
His main recreation was swimming, and his skill in this resulted in his becoming a local hero. One summer day in 1917 he was on a swimming expedition with some friends at a quarry called the Brick Pits, near the Humber Bank. One of the boys, a certain Howson, began to struggle. He shouted, and then he disappeared beneath the murky water. Duffill dived repeatedly after him and finally surfaced with Howson and dragged him to shore, saving the boy's life. A few days later, the Hull newspaper reported the story under the headline A PLUCKY BARROW BOY.
For this, Duffill, a Boy Scout, was awarded the Silver Cross for Bravery. It was the first time this honor had ever come to a Lincolnshire scout. Some months afterward, the Carnegie Heroes' Fund presented Duffill with a silver watch "for gallantry," and gave him a sum of money "to help him in his education and future career."
In 1919, still young, and fluent in half a dozen languages, he joined the Inter-Allied Plebescite Commission and was sent to Allenstein, in what was then East Prussia, to deal with the aftermath of World War One—sorting out prisoners and helping at the Special Court of Justice. In the following few years he did the same in Klag enfurt (Austria) and Oppeln (Opole, Upper Silesia—now Poland). Berlin was next. Duffill got a job with the celebrated firm of Price, Waterhouse, the international accountants. He stayed in Berlin for ten years, abruptly resigning in 1935 and leaving—fleeing, some people said—for England.
Politically, he was of the left. His friends in Berlin thought he might be gathering information for the British secret service. ("One felt he would have made the ideal agent," an old friend of Duffill's told me.) In any case, he left Germany so suddenly, it was assumed that he was being pursued by Nazi agents or wolves from the Sturm Abteilung. He made it safely home, and he was also able to get all his money out of Germany ("an exceedingly clever and daring feat," another friend told me. "His fortune was considerable").
He may have had a nervous breakdown then; there was some speculation. He sank for a year, re-emerging in 1936 as a chief accountant for an American movie company. Two years later, a letter of reference said that Duffill was "thoroughly acquainted with various sides of the film trade." In 1939 there was another gap, lasting until 1945: the war certainly—but where was Duffill? No one could tell me. His brother said, "Richard never discussed his working life or his world-traveling with us."
In the late forties, he apparently rejoined Price, Waterhouse and traveled throughout Europe. He went to Egypt and Turkey; he returned to Germany; he went to Sweden and Russia, "for whose leaders he had the greatest admiration."
After his retirement he continued to travel. He had never married. He was always alone. But the snapshots he kept showed him to be a very stylish dresser—waistcoat, plus fours, cashmere overcoat, homburg, stickpin. A characteristic of natty dressers is that they wear too many clothes. Duffill's snapshots showed this; and he always wore a hat.
He wore a ruglike wig, I was told. "It stuck out in the back." He had had brain surgery. "He once played tennis in Cairo." He had gone on socialist holidays to eastern Europe. He hated Hitler. He was very "spiritual," one of his old friends said. He became interested in the philosophy of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and was a close friend of the great Gurdjieff scholar John Godolphin Bennett. "And after a while Richard got frightfully steamed up about dervishes," Bennett's widow told me. That was why Duffill was on his way to Istanbul, she said—to renew his acquaintance with some whirling dervishes!