Mr. Campion's Abdication

by Mike Ripley

  ‘At least the diggers are keeping warm,’ said Rupert, who was now chaffing his jacketless arms.

  ‘I can find you a shovel each,’ said a female voice behind them, ‘but you’ll get those swanky outfits all dirty.’

  The young Campions turned to see a girl some ten years their junior. She was tall, with long blonde hair held captive in a ponytail by a scrap of red silk and had a fresh, rosy outdoors complexion. Under the bulky, mud-spattered anorak she wore over a fisherman’s jersey, Perdita suspected she had a very decent figure and, hidden by tight black jeans and shiny soldier’s boots, enviably long legs.

  ‘I’m Precious Aird, your tame archaeologist,’ said the girl cheerfully, ‘and I guess you must be our guest stars, Ed and Wally.’

  ‘Actually it’s Rupert and Perdita,’ said Rupert, ‘but we are playing, or at least pretending to look like, Edward, Prince of Wales, and his paramour, Barnes Wallis.’

  ‘Rupert! Behave yourself! You’ll have to forgive my husband, Precious, he’s an idiot, or at least does a good impersonation of one.’

  ‘I’m sorry, darling, it’s just that since you told me her name was Bessiewallis Simpson, at least after her second marriage, I can’t get “Barnes Wallis” out of my head. You must admit, it’s an unusual name.’

  ‘So’s mine,’ said Precious, ‘but I don’t mind it. She, on the other hand, hated hers and she was always “Wallis”, though the newspapers back home called her Wally.’

  ‘I can tell by your accent that you ain’t from around these parts.’ Rupert turned on his best cowboy charm and tried to stop shivering in the wind coming off the saltings, sniping at his shirt sleeves.

  ‘See what I mean, Precious; my husband, the idiot,’ said Perdita.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think he is,’ said the American girl. ‘I think he’s just a good actor, like his father.’

  ‘You’ve met Dad?’

  ‘Me and your Pop …’ Precious held out her right hand, the long, slim middle finger crossed over the forefinger, ‘… are like that. I even gave him the loan of my van today for some errand he had to run.’

  ‘That garish campervan?’ blurted Perdita, her hand flying quickly to her mouth. ‘I’m sorry, I meant colourful.’

  Without a trace of irony, Precious said, ‘Yeah, it is cool, isn’t it? Albert said it would pop a few eyeballs in Frinton – wherever that is.’

  Rupert mouthed Frinton? silently, and with horror, to his wife.

  ‘We saw it last night when we had dinner at the hall,’ said Perdita, ‘but we didn’t see you.’

  ‘I was with my digging crew.’ Precious pointed to the three hunched figures digging in the trench running across the top of the Mound. ‘We’re camping in the Orangery at the rear of the hall and, as my dad always says, when in the field, a good general always bunks with his men.’

  ‘An army man, is he?’ asked Rupert.

  ‘Uh-huh, he was Air Force through and through and now he’s in the aircraft business, which is how he knows your mom, Lady Amanda and, I guess, how I got this job.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Rupert, containing his surprise. ‘How’s the job going?’

  ‘Well, it’s going … but it’s not archaeology, it’s more like set dressing. All we’re doing is digging out the backfill of the 1935 excavation to make it look like it did when the stars of the show came to visit. That’s you two, by the way. You’re the stars of this show, not the archaeology.’

  ‘Haven’t seen much evidence of anyone being star-struck in our presence, apart from Sonia round at the pub last night,’ said Perdita. ‘Otherwise, everyone seems to be ignoring us.’

  ‘Your moment will come when Cruella de Vil shouts “action” and the camera starts rolling.’

  ‘Cruella …?’ spluttered Rupert, ‘I take it you mean Daniela, our beloved director.’

  ‘She’s a piece of work, isn’t she? She’s very good at directing others: dig here, throw dirt there, no, not there, just one side of the trench, keep the pile neat, dig deeper …’

  The trench which had been outlined by Oliver Bell was roughly eight yards long and two wide and ran approximately north–south over the Barrow, the dug earth piled on the long eastern edge. The three diggers in the trench were, from the state of their clothing, already veterans of trench warfare, an image that was reinforced by the lone figure in jeans and a leather jacket who was patrolling the growing spoil heap of excavated soil wearing headphones and holding what at first sight appeared to be a metal broom, sweeping the ground in front of his feet.

  ‘Isn’t that our sound man?’ said Perdita distractedly.

  ‘He’s certainly listening for something,’ said Precious. ‘The film crew brought metal detectors with them and just started detecting. They didn’t ask my permission. Maybe he’s just an enthusiastic amateur checking the spoil to see if the diggers have missed anything.’

  ‘Is that usual?’

  ‘Maybe it’s standard practice in Europe. In the States we tend to fine sieve the dirt we take out, though we don’t wait thirty-five years to do it.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Don’t you see, darling?’ said Rupert. ‘What they’re digging out now was dug out in the first excavation in 1935 and then put back in when the dig was over. I told you I’d been reading up on this stuff. When will you get down to the level they found the boat burial?’

  ‘We probably never will, not unless you give me another ten diggers, some shoring timber, some wheelbarrows, maybe a bulldozer and a month of fine weather. Even then, I couldn’t guarantee we’d get to the right level of the archaeology. There were no detailed plans or measurements made at the time – it was amateur hour, after all.’

  Rupert grinned as Precious pronounced it ‘hammer-chewer hour’.

  ‘And even if we found the exact place where the boat was buried over a thousand years ago, we know there’s nothing left of it to find. The timbers had rotted into the soil, we know that, and if there had been a body buried with the boat, that would have gone too by now.’

  ‘So why the mine detector?’ Rupert asked.

  Precious corrected him gently, ‘Metal detector. We’re not expecting to find any ordnance here. Could be our Italian friend over there is looking for loose change dropped by the original diggers. He might get lucky and pick up a couple of pennies with your head on them.’

  ‘My head? Oh, I see what you mean. I don’t think Edward VIII was on the throne long enough to have coins minted. If he was, they’d probably be quite valuable now.’

  ‘He lasted less than a year, didn’t he? Became king in early ’thirty-six and then abdicated in December – what was the line? “To be with the woman I love”?’

  Precious grinned broadly. ‘See, I’ve been reading up on stuff too. And all because she’d been divorced.’

  ‘Twice,’ said Perdita curtly.

  ‘Then I guess that makes you the scarlet woman in British eyes! We have a far less starchy attitude to divorce in the States.’

  ‘Or perhaps we Brits just take marriage more seriously,’ said Perdita, linking arms with her husband.

  ‘Hey, he’s your king. We opted out of kings a while back, but if we were ever looking for a handsome couple of young royals to help out President Nixon then you two would surely fit the bill. Now I’d better get down in that ditch and help with the digging. We’ve still got a way to go, we’re losing the light and my team keep giving me the evil eye. If I don’t pull my weight they’ll be demanding my abdication.’

  ‘Has our beloved director abdicated?’ Perdita asked her. ‘She seems to have disappeared.’

  ‘You could ask Maurizio over there, but he pretends not to speak English. Last I saw her she was sneaking off with the cameraman towards the village.’

  Daniela Petraglia and her cameraman, Gianfranco, had slipped away from the Barrow dig unnoticed and had hoped, somewhat optimistically, to sneak into Sweethearting the same way. But Sweethearting was a small village and its only street on that chilly after
noon was devoid of vehicles and pedestrians; workers were at work, schoolchildren were in school and housewives were far too busy to stand on doorsteps gossiping or sit on guard behind a twitching net curtain. If a cottage window curtain had twitched, it might have provided more than a moment’s interest, allowing sight of the imposing leather-clad woman with a slim, leather-jacketed young man in tow (brother, lover, surely not son?) marching through the village checking the names or numbers on the gates or doors of the cottages.

  Halfway along the twisting street, beyond the small under-attended church and the even smaller Victorian primary school, the woman and her companion stopped on the narrow pavement in front of a triptych of cottages facing out over the bleakness of the River Bright and its saltings, their Suffolk Pink paintwork pock-marked and fading, the thatch of their roofs in need of refreshment.

  At the third gate, as the road curved right and left from the village towards the King’s Head, the Italian woman paused and looked around slowly and carefully. Satisfied that they were unobserved, she pushed open the small garden gate and she and her companion strode the three strides needed to reach and knock on the dark oak door where the varnish had warped and flaked and two white plastic numerals, a 4 and a 9, dangled from rusty screws.

  Had there been an observer, perhaps secreted in the privet hedge across the road – a poor, municipal attempt at a windbreak – they would have seen the door to number 49, High Street open a tentative six inches, and after a flurry of conversation the visitors had eased – no, pushed – the door aside and entered. They may even have caught a glimpse of a small figure with a blue rinse perm being squeezed to one side.

  For almost an hour that hypothetical voyeur would have witnessed a pretty dull spectacle, with only the occasional glimpse of an indistinct figure flitting across the window frames. As the afternoon darkened, lights came on in number 49, both downstairs and upstairs and curtains were drawn, quite clearly this time, by the tall Italian woman and there was nothing more to be seen from the outside. But had the inquisitive snooper moved closer, right up to the cottage’s front window, and pressed an ear rather than an eye to the pane, they would have heard raised, albeit muffled voices, the thump of footsteps travelling angrily from room to room, the crash of furniture being overturned and then the unmistakeable sound of flesh being slapped several times in succession.

  But there were no witnesses to see or hear when the Italian woman opened the front door and she and her young companion stepped out, leaving the sound of loud sobbing behind them.

  As daylight fades, so do archaeologists, and shortly after three o’clock Precious Aird called a halt to the digging. Bemoaning the fact that they had no groundsheets or planking to protect the trench, now eighteen inches deep, she offered a brief prayer to the rain gods to refrain from visiting the site during the night, otherwise, in her words, they would have created a ‘mud wallow’ and not a trench.

  Without instructions from their still-absent film director, Perdita announced that she and Rupert would join the diggers as they retreated to the shelter of Heronhoe Hall, and to that effect she shouted across the site to Maurizio, the sound engineer turned metal detectorist. Her news was acknowledged by the Italian only in that he pushed back his headphones, nodded, replaced the headphones and continued to sweep the ground with the circular metal disc of the detector. Perdita thought young Maurizio’s behaviour odd to say the least; as part of a film crew he seemed distinctly disinterested in making a film and, as a young Italian male, strangely uninterested in making advances to any of the three females in his line of sight. An educational visit to Florence long before she met Rupert had educated Perdita in the wiles of male Italian youths, if not the wonders of Renaissance art or the legacy of the Medicis.

  As the afternoon failed, the Barrow troops retreated along the road towards Heronhoe and the hall in single file, Rupert with his arm around Perdita bringing up the rear, Precious Aird leading from the front, the diggers carrying spades and shovels at the slope and stamping their feet to dislodge muddy earth from their boots. Their heads bowed with tiredness, they failed to appreciate the stunning desolation of the view over the saltings and the Bright estuary and, out beyond Heronhoe on the incoming tide, the pair of fishing boats heading home.

  The lights were on in the ground-floor rooms of the hall, offering a welcoming orange glow as the file of Barrow veterans turned into the drive. At the front door, the column divided, Precious leading the diggers around the side of the hall to the Orangery, explaining to Rupert and Perdita that hot water was limited in their unconventional dormitory and she wanted to get her fair share. The Campions said they would take their chances in the kitchen where their interest in hot water would be confined to the teapot, assuming that Oliver and Lavinia Bell were familiar with the laws of hospitality as applied to cold and dispirited strangers in a strange land wearing the fashions of the pre-war era.

  Lavinia, being a product of the best finishing school education her father could buy, was eager to play the role of hostess to the young Campions, especially as her larders had been so generously replenished by the senior Campion. She assured them the kettle was already on, biscuits were available and they should make themselves comfortable in the front room where Oliver was lighting a fire prior to his daily practice session on Hattie, his beloved harpsichord, though she did confide to the new arrivals that once the hall’s finances improved Hattie would find herself in competition with a brand-new colour television. It would mean, however, finding a new home for the hideous porcelain bust of her father which rested on the lid when the harpsichord was not being played. Treasonously, Lavinia expressed the opinion that their burglar could have done them both a favour by knocking the thing over and smashing it while making his escape.

  Once settled in front of a fire which seemed destined to disperse warmth at any moment and armed with tea and biscuits, Rupert and Perdita were treated to the first few bars of a tune Oliver had composed to accompany the finished film of the Sweethearting dig, a melody he was anxious to play to Daniela.

  It was Perdita, not Rupert, who noticed Lavinia’s sharp intake of breath at the sound of the word ‘Daniela’ and quickly declared her colours by saying loudly that if their beloved film director did deign to join them at any point in the near future, her time might be better employed telling her actors what they were supposed to be doing before she started worrying about post-production effects.

  Rather than being at all offended by Perdita’s forthrightness, Oliver became enthusiastic and informed the Campions that he could tell them exactly what they were going to be asked to do as he had discussed it with Daniela. Rupert had resisted the temptation to reach out with his fingers and gently close his wife’s lower jaw, which had drooped in surprise, and asked Oliver to explain, preferably without musical accompaniment.

  Oliver had been more than delighted to do so and had enthusiastically produced a battered scrapbook from inside the piano stool he had been warming as he played Hattie.

  The scrapbook – a converted photograph album with triangular corner sticker mounts dotted randomly over the pages – was the product of Oliver’s three-year search for what had, over time, been called the Heronhoe Horde, the Abdication Treasure and, by Lavinia Bell, ‘Father’s Folly’, the elusive rumour of something – anything – valuable which Lord Breeze might have overlooked.

  There seemed to be no chronological order to the entries in the scrapbook, which were mostly cuttings from newspapers and magazines, the odd scrap of map, a few photographs, several dog-eared handwritten letters and certainly no index, but Oliver knew what he was looking for.

  He held the book open in front of the Campions to display the yellowed and crumbling top half of a broadsheet page of newsprint taken, according to a handwritten caption, from the East Suffolk Courier for 18 July, 1935. Over a landscape picture traversing four columns was the headline ‘Heronhoe Antiquarians Prepare to Greet Their Prince by Samuel Salt’ but if there had been any text to accompany
the photograph it was now missing. Fortunately, in the true spirit of photo-journalism, the picture was relatively self-explanatory, showing the Sweethearting Mound surrounded by trees in full leaf, with the heads and shoulders of half-a-dozen men peering over the lip of a trench, the edge of which was decorated with bunting made up of Union and assorted naval signal flags. The men all wore flat hats and waistcoats, their shirt sleeves rolled up. Most had carefully trimmed moustaches and several had pipes clenched between teeth, which made it impossible to determine if any of them were actually saying ‘Cheese!’ to the camera. There was a strange, almost funereal quality to the whole pose.

  ‘Why Heronhoe Antiquarians and not Sweethearting?’ asked Perdita.

  ‘At the risk of sounding cynical,’ Oliver began, though no one in the room would have thought of accusing him of such a thing, ‘my guess is that the East Suffolk Courier sold more copies in Heronhoe than Sweethearting, it being the bigger place. Plus, I suspect it was the vicar of Heronhoe who called in the local press, being keener on public relations than his rival the vicar of Sweethearting, and he would have insisted on calling them “Antiquarians” as “diggers” would have been too agricultural, or common, for him. I think he was a bit of a snob. Anyway, that is more or less the scene Daniela wants to recreate for her television programme.’

  Both Oliver and Rupert were blissfully unaware that Lavinia had silently repeated the word ‘Daniela wants’ while rolling her eyes wildly, a gesture to which Perdita had indicated resigned agreement by raising her eyebrows in mock exasperation.

  Oliver, who for once had a captive audience, warmed to his subject. ‘This article appeared in the paper the day before the Prince of Wales, as he was then, was due to visit. I get the impression that there had not been much warning of the royal visit, as it was an informal one and not listed in the Court Circular or mentioned in any of the national newspapers as far as I could discover, though of course there was a good reason for that.’