HOLY DISORDERS:
GERVASE FEN — A COMFORTABLE MARRIAGE?

How happy was the marriage of Gervase and Dolly Fen? Dolly was a plain, spectacled, sensible little woman, whose man preoccupation seems to have been knitting. She was so placid and imperturbable that even when shots rang out in Gilded Fly, she remained calmly knitting.

The theory of the attraction of opposites must surely account for their initial union but could someone like Dolly ever hold long-term fascination for, and hold on to, the effervescent Fen? When his frequent and lengthy absences from home are taken into account, I fear not.

And it is possible to place a more sinister interpretation on that incident in Gilded Fly, where Fen apparently absent-mindedly tells Dolly to shoot herself. She had, on his suggestion, picked up a gun and pointed it at her head, to demonstrate the way anyone would grasp a pistol (this was a key element of Fen’s proof that the ghastly Yseult Haskell had not committed suicide). Dolly asked him if she should pull the trigger and he said yes. The others present chorused hastily that the gun was loaded and Dolly calmly told them she knew that and wouldn’t have fired it anyway.

But is it possible that Fen, whose absent-mindedness was occasionally more than superficial and for effect, secretly wished her dead?

And what, I wonder, became of Dolly? She is never mentioned in any of the later cases. Fen spent three months alone in Devonshire in Glimpses. Was she still there at home, calmly knitting, or had she peacefully passed away? Or could she have been done away with? For there can be no doubt that if Fen, with his knowledge, had decided to rid himself of his wife, he would have had the wit, the resourcefulness and the ruthlessness to commit the perfect murder.

It has to be said that this speculation is based on one aberration, and is no more than conjecture. Against the case it can be argued that Fen showed his abhorrence of murder throughout his career, and an abundance of sympathy. And, in the same case, a further example of absent-mindedness is revealed, when Fen turns up at the opening night of Warner’s new play without tickets (Gilded Fly). Freeman, with the foresight of one who seems to know his man well, had taken the precaution of bringing them for him — a strong indication that he at least was familiar with Fen’s wool-gathering.

Let us therefore push such distressing notions away and assume that Dolly predeceased her husband, from natural causes, and that her very placidity was what gave the so-volatile Fen a basis of stability throughout his life.

Dolly’s common-sense approach to Fen’s detection is illustrated in Gilded Fly when, after he melodramatically claims the repercussions of the case will be with him to his grave, she tells him, "Nonsense… You’ll have forgotten completely about it in three months. Anyway, a detective with a conscience is ludicrous. If you’re going to make all this fuss, you shouldn’t interfere in these things at all."