Fete Fatale

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Failed to hit that damned bell again.’ It was Marcus, coming up behind me. ‘Still, I was no further off than last year. I say, that’s Father Battersby, isn’t it?’

  ‘I can’t imagine there’s likely to be anyone else at the fête wearing that gear.’

  ‘Perhaps I’d better go and welcome him.’

  ‘Don’t. Let it happen naturally. It’s all quite spontaneous and informal at the moment, and I think it’s better that way.’

  As I spoke, the Blatchley and Battersby party were approaching the marquee, and the town clock over the square struck eleven. As if by magic, the substantial figure of Franchita appeared through the flap in the marquee.

  ‘Roll up! Roll up!’ she shouted with fearsome gaiety, as she pushed back the flap. When she noticed the approach of the Battersby party her jollity stopped dead in its tracks: one could almost see contending in her face the duty of inflicting a snub, and the desire not to mar the beginning of ‘her’ fête with unpleasantness. In the end, what I like to think of as her good nature won out, and she stepped forward to meet the party, her hand outstretched.

  ‘Welcome to Hexton-on-Weir . . . Father.’

  Father Battersby smiled, nodded, shook hands, and passed in. I slipped through the flap and raced to my stall. Mr Horsforth, naturally, was nowhere to be seen, though I could hear his voice through a mêlée of helpers. The Blatchley party came in, in the wake of the new vicar, then a mere trickle of others, then more and more. The Annual Hexton Church Fête had begun.

  The first hours of a fête are usually the busiest, and this one was no exception. The fête worked up to a kind of climax around lunch-time and drooped rather thereafter. I certainly had my hands full, because Mr Horsforth’s appearances behind the stall were so spasmodic as to be almost token. He irritated me a great deal and had I not been to some extent dependent on his goodwill, being a possible supply teacher, I would have said something sharp, never finding it difficult to find something sharp to say. I was quite willing to believe that a headmaster had more duties to fulfil and more people to have a word with than the wife of a vet, but in that case why volunteer for duty at all? Meanwhile it was I, on my own, who had to cope with the rush of customers.

  Mr Mipchin was one of my early buyers, and one with a good eye. Among the better things that I had accumulated or wheedled out of people was a charming mid-Victorian tea-caddy, which he took a fancy to. I pushed him up to a good price, and insisted that he take something from Thyrza’s stuff as well. He chose a little model of a lady in Welsh national costume, holding a broom, and in her dusty and decrepit state looking tolerably like a witch.

  ‘Something to remember her by,’ he said, and I could swear there was a malicious little smile playing around somewhere underneath the walrus moustaches.

  Thyrza’s stuff usually met with an incredulous rummaging, with a racking of memories among the elderly to dredge up the purpose of this or that item. ‘Egg cosies!’ they would say contemptuously. ‘Who on earth uses them these days?’

  ‘Cor, look, Annie,’ said one fat lady, the wife of one of Hexton’s greengrocers. ‘A toasting fork! And hatpins! She could never have used all them hatpins. And remember them things, Annie? They called them chafing dishes in the olden days.’

  ‘That’s very cheap,’ I said determinedly, for it was one of the more saleable items. ‘You should buy it as a souvenir of Thyrza Primp.’

  ‘Best souvenir I can have of her is the sight of her back when the bus leaves,’ came the dour reply. So much for ‘dear Thyrza’, so irreplaceable, in Mary’s eyes, in Hexton life.

  Father Battersby, meanwhile, was going around, meeting people, having a word here, a nod there, and generally seeming to need no outside help in getting to know people. I was glad Marcus had made little effort to arrange anything, because what was happening was so obviously unpremeditated. I never saw him but that he was surrounded by one or two, or by a little knot. Timothy, I noticed, obedient to his father’s detail, brought along periodically some schoolboy or other to have a shy word with the new vicar. (What Timothy’s father was doing with the time he was not spending at the stall I had no idea.) When Father Battersby got round to my stall, I had some new experience of his talent for the mal à propos. By chance Mrs Mipchin was standing at Mrs Nielson’s stall opposite, having her sandalled toes licked disdainfully by Gustave, and examining pots of strawberry jam to try to avoid the runniest. (‘They’re all a bit runny,’ Mrs Nielson was saying dubiously, ‘but I expect it’s just the heat.’)

  ‘Hello, hello—I still haven’t thanked you for your hospitality last time I was here,’ said Father Battersby, in his carrying, clergyman’s voice. (He hadn’t, either. That was one of the little formalities that I suspect he set little store by.) ‘Golly, what a collection of this and that you’ve got here. Where does it all come from?’

  ‘That’s all Thyrza Primp’s,’ I said, neutrally. ‘Stuff she’s clearing out of the vicarage, to let you in.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, gazing down at the pile. ‘As soon as one moves, one realizes what an awful lot of rubbish one has accumulated.’

  It wasn’t much, but it was enough. I heard, even over the babble of the crowd, a sharp, shocked intake of breath; when I was conscious of Mrs Mipchin’s sandalled feet scurrying away, I had no doubt where she was going: straight to the vicarage and Thyrza, to retail it, with many a tut-tut. But Father Battersby had moved blithely on, and just then Mr Horsforth reappeared, so that I could take the opportunity (as I realized I had to, on his rare visitations) of snatching a break.

  Outside the stuffy, sweaty tent, the atmosphere was pleasanter. True, I was unlucky enough to witness the arrival of Lady Godetia, even as I took my first breaths of fresh air. Lady Godetia did not open our fêtes (it was said because she was too lazy to get up that early, and spent too much time making herself up), but she closed them with a gracious speech of thanks to the helpers which I always tried hard to miss. Lady Godetia was chronically gracious, like royalty at the end of a particularly gruelling tour. She was our local gentry—in fact the widow of Sir Frank Peabody, who had been something in packaging, but also the daughter of some obscure Earl whose interests in life had been exclusively horticultural. She passed into the marquee, smiling a smile of weak honey, and I stood there, hoping that she would have got round to my stall and expended her graciousness on Mr Horsforth before I went back in.

  Otherwise it was lovely outside. The marquee was set fairly close to the river, and a breeze flowed welcomingly along with the stream. It was a regular place of resort on any sunny afternoon, and today there were many couples in swimsuits by it, some just lying, some bathing tentatively—for it flowed fast from the weir. Such as these were not likely to come into the marquee, but they were now and then tempted by the outdoor games, which were doing famously. Marcus was boyishly cock-a-hoop.

  ‘Only three have rung the bell so far,’ he said, ‘so I didn’t do badly, for an old ‘un.’

  ‘Such vanity,’ I said, ‘at your age.’

  ‘It’s at my age that vanity sets in. How are things going in there? How is Father B. doing?’

  ‘Splendidly, so far as I can judge. Meeting hundreds of people, and everyone pleased to meet him.’

  ‘So whatever it was that Mary and Thyrza were planning, it hasn’t come off?’

  ‘Mary and Thyrza,’ I said, in a mock-ominous voice, ‘have not yet arrived.’

  Back at my duty-station behind the junk stall, I parried Mr Horsforth’s reproachful look with a bright smile. After a moment or two of looking much-put-upon, he made a rapid departure with scarcely a mutter of apology. I soon understood why: Lady Godetia approached, in company with Franchita, the pair of them looking like a gracious yacht in the custody of a man-o’-war.

  ‘Awfully pleased to see you again,’ oozed Lady Godetia, with a brilliant, generalized smile. ‘Weren’t you running some kind of frightfully amusing and wicked game last year?’ (She kept us all card-indexed, I was convinced of it.)
‘And your husband is the terribly attractive vet who’s been out to see to my horses. Such a charming man—you should keep him under wraps if you don’t want him stolen! And what have you got this year? . . . Such an interesting jumble of stuff. What a delightful screen! You’re not going to let me have that cheap, I suppose?’

  Her greedy eye, peering through the piles of Max Factor, had alighted on a pretty little hand-embroidered screen placed among my better things.

  ‘Fifteen pounds,’ I said.

  ‘Ah well, no, I thought you wouldn’t . . . What an amusing collection you have here. Things you hardly ever see these days. Hatpins, for instance—you never see those.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Franchita brusquely. ‘Depends on the hat. Damned useful in a high wind.’

  ‘15p each,’ I said. ‘Six for 50p.’

  ‘Ah well, then, I might,’ said Lady Godetia, who spread her patronage, like her graciousness, thinly. ‘Perhaps I’ll take two.’

  She was counting out 30p, mostly in small change, into my hand when I noticed that Mary Morse had arrived. In a dress the colour of fog over Birmingham she was standing at the end of our row, clutching a handbag, and surreptitiously letting her eyes dart everywhere. It soon became clear what she was looking for. Father Battersby was at the moment passing between my stall and Mrs Nielson’s stall, accompanied by Timothy and Fiona, who looked as if they were advertising some aid to personal freshness, and three schoolboys, who didn’t. Whatever they were talking about, he was giving his all to the conversation, and as Mary approached along the aisle, her face set in a stony expression, her eyes staring straight ahead of her, as in a prison photograph, I wondered whether he was going to notice her at all. I think in fact he did, but did not remember her. Certainly he passed her, still listening to one of the grubby schoolboys, and showing no sign either of recognition or of registering a snub. Mary’s prim little mouth contracted, her eyes clouded over. Then she came up to my stall, noticed my amused eyes watching her, turned in my direction the coldest of cold shoulders, and greeted Lady Godetia—sketching, I swear it, a sort of suggestion of a curtsey, a half-bob. They bustled off together, all condescension and fawn, and soon were deep in conversation. Mary and Lady Godetia served on several committees together in the town, on which they did a great deal of quiet harm. Their energetic talk was probably about persuading the librarian only to buy ‘nice’ books for the library. Lady Godetia had a taste for innocuous pap, and Mary was the sort who still finds Thomas Hardy controversial.

  Watching them go, I raised my eyebrows sky-high. Mrs Nielson, observing everything from across the way, giggled. Franchita said, ‘Now, Helen—’ but she rather looked as if she’d like to give way to her braying laugh too. Then she bustled off energetically to organize something—anything.

  ‘What time are you going for lunch?’ shouted Mrs Nielson, over the heads of some customers.

  ‘Heaven knows if I’ll get any,’ I said.

  ‘I certainly intend to have some.’

  ‘Have you got a stand-in?’

  ‘No. I’ll just put a sheet over this lot.’

  ‘But people will pinch them.’

  ‘Surely not. But good luck to them if they do. I signed up for voluntary work, not slave labour.’

  The idea of lunch was very attractive. I was beginning to drop on my feet. Voluntary work did have a habit of turning into slave labour.

  ‘Franchita will be furious,’ I said dubiously.

  ‘Let her. As soon as your man puts in another appearance, we’ll scoot off to the Chinese.’

  ‘No—that I wouldn’t dare. But we could pick up some sandwiches from the stall and eat them outside.’

  Meanwhile Mr Horsforth was nowhere to be seen. The crush of people was at its height, but most of my good things had gone, so as people rummaged through Thyrza’s rubbish my attention could wander. By now Thyrza had also arrived, chugging bleakly around the place like an ancient tug destined shortly for the scrapyard. Passing my stall, she cast black looks at the amount of stuff still unsold, and picked up something that looked like (but I’m sure was not) some primitive piece of contraceptive equipment.

  ‘Now I thought that would be sure to go,’ she said reproachfully, and then put it back and steamed heavily ahead.

  Her ill-humour was marvellously augmented by the scant success of her and Mary’s intention publicly to snub, pointedly to ignore, Father Battersby. So crowded was the tent, so surrounded by people was Father Battersby, that he was proving unsnubbable. Really, there was something a little inhuman about the man: after all, anyone else entering a living would feel it necessary, or would find it courteous, to pay public attention to the widow of his predecessor. Father Battersby felt no such compulsion; or else he felt that, after the encounter at ours, it would be best for all concerned if he avoided further meetings with Thyrza Primp. So she and Mary could march up the aisles he was proceeding along, they could fix him with long-range, unseeing stares, they could turn icy shoulders, sniff as if they smelt gas leaking—it all went for nothing. Father Battersby chatted, listened, stopped to buy, and was apparently quite unconscious of their presence. It was like an old regime giving way painfully to a new. And if Father Battersby did not notice the antics of some members of the old order, others did, and rejoiced at their discomfiture.

  ‘Silly women,’ came a voice at my back, as I witnessed one such non-encounter. ‘Silly, silly women.’

  It was Marcus, come in for a ten-minute break from the mallet and the bell.

  ‘Forget it. They’re not getting through, and it’s doing them no good whatsoever. Who’s testing their strength?’

  ‘Weston. He’s taking over entirely at three-thirty. Then I’m going home for a cup of tea and a pipe in the peace of my own armchair. Coming?’

  ‘No such luck. Would that I could. I’m stuck here until all this junk goes. And Mr Horsforth is damn-all use as a partner.’

  ‘He’s a busy man—I expect he has lots of other things to do,’ said Marcus comfortably.

  ‘I have a lot of other things to do, but I don’t get to do them,’ I said resentfully. ‘Are you coming back later?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course: I’ll be here for the finish.’

  ‘For Lady Godetia and her “absolutely magnificent effort on the part of all concerned”?’ I said, amused by Marcus’s inbred stickling for doing the right thing. “That’s when I shall take off. I’ll go home and prepare you an absolutely enormous dinner—a steak the size of a plate.’

  We stood there in companionable silence, letting the fête flow around us. Marcus noticed the arrival of some slightly tipsy soldiers from the barracks, and he kept his eye on them for any sign of their causing ‘unpleasantness’. Marcus could never abide unpleasantness. I really rather liked it. I grinned secretly as I listened to the subterranean mutterings and grumbles around me: ‘She had the cheek to charge . . . ’ ‘Charity’s one thing, but I don’t like being done! . . . ’ ‘It’s not a chutney I’d expect anyone to pay good money for; and then she goes and gives me 20p too little change . . . ’ ‘I meantersay . . . ’

  Our brief moment of intimacy, hands held under the stall, was ended by Mr Horsforth’s breezy and unapologetic reappearance.

  ‘Right!’ I said briskly. ‘Mrs Nielson and I are going for lunch. I can’t stand here in this heat all day without a bite to eat, or I’ll faint.’

  ‘I’ve only had a cup of tea and a scone myself,’ protested Mr Horsforth.

  ‘Well, that’s a cup of tea and a scone more than I’ve had. Come along, Gwen.’

  Gwen Nielson had got distracted by a lost child, a tiny mite, howling and blubbering for its mother. She was on her haunches, comforting it with nonsense talk. When she saw I was at last free, she held it up over the crowd, called ‘Anybody own this little lad?’, delivered it over to a not-noticeably-grateful parent, then shoved a sheet roughly over the few jars remaining on her stall and made off with Gustave and me to the sandwich bar. Really, she was a very capable wom
an.

  With a few packages of standard fête fare, we pushed our way outside. The crush on the meadows was beginning to diminish, and people were wandering home to late lunches, or to get a drink in before the pubs closed down for the afternoon. Down by the river there was a group of five or six soldiers, noisier than the ones inside, who had been jolly and good-natured. These had clearly been getting their drinks in since the pubs opened. We took ourselves as far away from them as possible, and sat on the cool grass in a far corner of the meadows, eating the regulation ham sandwiches. Gwen Nielson fed Gustave with cooked meat she had brought in a bag—his yaps for the next bit, meticulously timed, being the only disturbances to our peace.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it seems to be going well this year.’

  ‘Is this what you call going well? Financially I suppose—even my stall: I had ninety-seven jars to start with, and about eighteen are left. Say eighty jars at forty pence—I make that thirty-two quid. And even then Franchita will say I should have charged more. But I can’t say it’s my favourite sort of occasion: I’m standing there thinking I’ll make sure and take my holidays in early June next year. Too many people, too much bustle.’

  ‘Well, better busy than dismal,’ I remarked, with uncharacteristic optimism. ‘We’ve had some pretty dire occasions in the past, as you can probably imagine: if it wasn’t because of the weather, it was because of the people.’