by Phil Rickman
But her handshake was businesslike and her accent clipped and cultured. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘you thought he was dead. Everybody thinks he’s dead. Which is absolutely no handicap at all when we have one to sell. It gives it a certain patina of antiquity.’
‘You like her, then?’ Al Boswell asked him. ‘You like my baby?’
He meant the guitar.
Al.
Alfonso Boswell: virtuoso blues and ragtime guitarist and perhaps the most revered, if eccentric, guitar-maker of the past half-century.
‘Can’t believe this,’ Lol mumbled.
‘He’s a little older than he looks.’ Sally Boswell flicked at her husband’s snowy hair. ‘But also he’s been making guitars and things since he was just in his teens, so that rather confuses people.’
‘I wanted to stop,’ Al Boswell said, ‘but after I finished the last one, I awoke in the night with what seemed very like the first twinges of arthritis. Well, I’m a superstitious man, from a long line of superstitious men, so I started work again the very next morning.’
Lol thought of the gypsy caravan outside. According to the legend, Alfonso Boswell would travel the country lanes, selecting and cutting his own wood and then set up his workshop in some forest clearing – each instrument growing organically in the open air, under the sun, under the stars. There would be no more than three or four guitars a year; it was never a full-time job, and he’d also be doing seasonal work on the farms: fruit-picking and… hop-picking?
Looked like Al Boswell had uncoupled his caravan and settled down.
‘And if you didn’t know already,’ Sally Boswell said drily, ‘the Rom are renowned for their outrageous lies. Proud of it, too, for reasons that still escape me after all these years.’
‘Non-confrontational is all we are,’ Al said. His face carried very few lines and his skin was lighter-toned than you’d imagine on a pure-bred gypsy. ‘Amazing, it is, how much conflict can be avoided by a well-timed fib. The truth can be hurtful and dangerous sometimes. Come on, lad, what do you really think of the instrument?’
Lol thought this was getting increasingly unreal. He thought, Why should Alfonso Boswell care what the hell I think?
‘We heard your playing,’ Sally said. ‘We were listening outside the door, I’m afraid.’
‘So you’ll know why I’m not worthy even to tune it.’ Lol was embarrassed. He was still holding the guitar but careful to keep his fingers well away from the strings.
‘How long you been playing?’ Al Boswell asked him.
‘Oh…’ Lol blinked nervously. ‘Since I was a kid with a plastic one. Sad, isn’t it?’
‘It’s not the technique, lad. It’s the heart, the relationship. You know that.’ Al tapped the body of the guitar. ‘This one – she’s very young, you see. She’s the first this year. And she’ll probably be the last, I reckon. What she needs is a good playing-in. I never let one go until she’s been played-in. What do you think, now? Is she worth it?’
‘Oh, Al!’ Sally frowned. ‘You can hardly expect a snap judgement. Why don’t you let Mr Robinson take the thing away for a couple of weeks?’
Al stared at her, then he threw up his arms. ‘Well, damn it, why didn’t I think of that? Aye, you take her away, lad. Break her in. Bring her back in – what shall we say? – September? Unless you want to buy her, of course. In which case we can discuss terms.’
Lol was shocked. He put the guitar carefully back on the stand, stepped away from it.
‘Now what’s that mean?’ Al said. ‘Is it some form of gaujo insult?’
Sally closed her eyes, shaking her head.
‘This is all moving too fast,’ Lol said. ‘I just walk in here, you don’t know a thing about me… I can’t just walk out with six thousand quid’s worth of—’
‘Mother of God!’ Al cried. ‘Is that what they’re fetching now? I’ve never had more than two and a half!’
Sally smiled tiredly at Lol. ‘Mr Robinson, a short time ago, Mr Levin rang us to say you were on your way. Al has known him for many, many years. Mr Levin feels you could use a little inspiration.’ She looked at him over her half-glasses. ‘Don’t, as they say, knock it.’
Al Boswell laughed loudly, threw up his arms and walked out of the museum.
‘He loves his little games,’ Sally explained. ‘They’re mischievous sometimes, like elves. He’s just gone to find you a guitar case.’
She bent to adjust the guitar on its stand. When she straightened up she stood taller than Lol. Where Al Boswell was volatile, Sally seemed watchful and serene.
‘Al owes Prof Levin some favours from way back and wanted him to have a guitar, but Mr Levin insisted that a Boswell should never go to someone who couldn’t play. This is the guitar he was promised. Consider yourself an intermediary in this. Play it while you’re there, if it agrees with you, and then perhaps forget to take it with you when you leave. In a few years, I suppose, it’ll be worth ten or twelve thousand to a collector.’
Lol was still bemused. ‘He recorded with Prof?’
‘Mr Levin would always find Al session work when we needed money. He’s a kind man, and he’s very fond of you. He doesn’t want you to fall by the wayside.’
‘The wayside’s OK, sometimes,’ Lol said awkwardly.
She arched an eyebrow. ‘That’s the sort of thing Al says. But we are not Romanies, you and I. When we fall, we don’t just roll over and land on our feet again, grinning all over our faces.’
Lol was curious. ‘Did Prof know Al was going to be here when he bought the stables?’ I have sympathy for the Romanies, Prof had said.
‘Pure coincidence, actually, although Al knew Simon St John, of course. We’re all parts of interlinked circles, aren’t we?’
Lol wondered how this very English woman had come to link up with Al Boswell, pure-bred Romany, apparently luring him off the road for good.
‘But, according to the Prof, you want to know about the Frome Valley,’ Sally Boswell said. ‘Therefore I want to tell you… because there are aspects of life here which do need to be recorded, and nothing keeps memories flowing onwards like songs. And the Frome flows through that guitar – the vein of yew in it came from prunings from a thousand-year-old tree in Simon’s churchyard and there’s also a little willow from a tree which bends over the river itself. The Romany is ever a discreet scavenger. He lives lightly on the earth.’
She led him into the next room. Hop-bines were intertwined along the beams (silent, but as soon as he saw them he could almost hear them crackling and rustling, and he felt a small shiver). More blown-up photographs were spotlit on the walls: men in flat caps, women in print dresses, berets and head-scarves. People laughing. The strange sadness of frozen merriment.
‘Until mechanization began to take over in the sixties, hop-picking was very much a multicultural phenomenon,’ Sally Boswell explained. ‘Well… four cultures, really: the indigenous locals, the Welsh Valleys, the Dudleys, as we called them, from the Black Country, and the gypsies.’
She told him how, at picking time, in September, the local population would expand eight- or tenfold – perhaps a good thing, leaving the locals far less insular than in other rural areas. The hop-masters would have huge barrack blocks for the pickers, and the pubs were always overflowing – the police constantly back and forth, breaking up the fights.
Lol studied a photo in which the smiles seemed more inhibited and there were scowls among the caravans and the cooking pots.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Sally, ‘when did the travellers ever like to be photographed? They were always a settlement apart, but usually very honest and faithful to their particular employers. They liked being able to return to the same establishment year after year.’
‘Al was here, too?’
‘For a while.’
‘That was how you met?’
‘Romanies can be charming.’ She didn’t smile. ‘Also infuriating.’
Lol peered at a picture showing a girl lying in one of the hop-cr
ibs, laughing and helpless, men standing around.
‘Cribbing,’ Sally said. ‘When the picking was almost over, an unmarried girl would be seized and tossed into the crib with the last of the hops. The unspoken implication was that she, too, might be picked before next year’s bines were high on the poles.’ She looked solemn. ‘Al and I met when I was… drawn to the Romany ways. I’ve been planning to write a book. Well, I was planning to. In the end, I gave all my material to Mr Ash, for his book. I suppose this place is better than a book, in the end. More interactive, as they say. And Al, like most Romanies, is suspicious of the written word.’
‘Doesn’t seem to have done Mr Ash much good either,’ Lol said hesitantly, ‘in the end.’
She looked at him thoughtfully, as if deciding how much to say. ‘No,’ she agreed eventually. ‘Stewart was the last casualty – we all hope – in an unhappy chain of events at Knight’s Frome.’ She nodded towards the next doorway. ‘Go through.’
No hop-bines hung in the third and smallest room. It was also the darkest, with no windows and few lights. A long panel in a corner was spotlit. It was a painting on board, in flat oils, or acrylics, of a stark and naked hop-yard at night, with pole-alleys black against a moonlit sky, a tattered bine hanging from one of the frames. Halfway down the central row, hovering above the bare ground, was a woman in a long dark dress, like Sally’s, billowing in the wind. The caption read: The Lady of the Bines: a ghost story.
If Sally noticed he’d gone quiet, she didn’t comment on it.
‘The hop-farmer’s angel of death,’ she said with a curator’s jollity.
There was a half-smile on the face of the woman in the picture.
‘Who painted it?’
‘I did,’ Sally said.
‘It’s really good. It’s as if—’
‘As if I’ve actually seen her?’ She laughed lightly. ‘Perhaps I have. Sometimes I can imagine I have.’
Lol was glad it was dark in here. This was unreal – the sequel to a dream.
‘I expect there’s a story,’ he said.
‘She was the wife of some local lord or knight – maybe the original knight of Knight’s Frome, for all I know. And she couldn’t give him a son. So he sent her away.’
‘Like you do.’
‘Like you did, apparently. What was the point of having the king give you a few hundred acres of stolen land if you couldn’t found a dynasty? Anyway, he threw her out. Gave her some money to go away, and then settled down with his mistress. But the poor, spurned lady pined for the valley. Pined all night long in the fields and the hop-yards.’
‘Is this true?’ It sounded like the theme of a traditional folk song.
‘Until one morning, one beautiful midsummer morning, with the hops ripening on the bines,’ her voice hardened, ‘they found the poor bitch hanging from one of the frames.’
‘When was this?’
‘Don’t know. No one does. It’s a legend. I suppose, if it had any basis in fact, the story couldn’t have dated back earlier than the sixteenth century because hops weren’t grown for brewing in this country until 1520. The postscript is that, from the night she died, the knight’s hops began to wither on the bines and his yard was barren for many years. And if you see her ghost, then your crop will also wither… or someone’s will.’
Lol recalled the shrivelled old hop-garland hanging from the gibbet-like arrangement of poles. He didn’t want to think about the naked woman in the hop-yard. He found himself wanting her to have been a ghost. Ghosts were simpler.
‘She’s become a metaphor for Verticillium Wilt,’ Sally said. ‘And, before that, for red spiders, aphids, white-mould… all the scourges of the hop. Wilt, particularly, renders a hop-yard virtually sterile for a number of years. Perhaps you should write a song about her, Lol.’
‘It’s a thought,’ he said uncertainly – although he knew he could. If he knew what he was writing about.
‘Perhaps we could have it playing softly in this room.’ Sally Boswell laughed. Lol thought she didn’t seem to have much sympathy for either the knight or the Lady of the Bines.
‘She still seen?’
‘Depends who you believe. It’s certainly said she was widely observed in the sixties.’ She nodded towards a black and white photograph of a man with a heavy moustache, who looked a bit like Lord Lucan. ‘But then, people would say that – in the last days of the Emperor of Frome, when all was darkness and chaos.’
She was poised to go on, but for Lol, the darkness and chaos could wait.
He hadn’t planned to ask it. He just did. ‘Does she always have a dress on?’
Sally Boswell’s face was gaunt with shadows. From two rooms away, there was a skimming of strings: the legendary Al stowing away his creation.
‘What an extraordinary question,’ she said coldly.
6
Full of Dead People
MUFFLED SOBBING GAVE way to those time-honoured battle-cries from the generation war.
‘Leave me alone! Just go away! It’s nothing to do with you!’
The clouds were a deep luminous mauve now, and the sky looked like a taut, well-beaten drum-skin through the long window pane in the front door.
It was stifling in the small, rectangular hall with its beige woodchip and wall-lights with peeling coppery shades. Merrily stood under a print in a chipped gilt frame: Christ on the Mount of Olives. Opposite her was a cream door with a little pottery plaque on it.
Amy’s Room
The door was closed, but its plywood panels were not exactly soundproof. Merrily thought David Shelbone, historic-buildings officer, was unlikely ever to see his own home listed, except as a classic example of 1970s Utility. How did the Shelbones spend their money? Probably on their adopted child? Perhaps long, educational holidays.
‘Amy. Please.’
‘I… am… not… going… anywhere! Do you understand? There is nothing wrong with me! And… and if there is, it’s nothing to do with you. It’s nothing to do with her. Just get her out of the house. Please. This is… disgraceful.’
Please? Disgraceful? Comparatively speaking, this was a restrained, almost polite response. In extreme situations, kids were rarely able to contain extreme language. You sad old bitch had sometimes been Jane’s starting point, before things got heated.
Hazel Shelbone murmured something Merrily didn’t catch.
‘No!’ Amy screamed. ‘You… How dare you make out there’s something wrong with me?’
‘Amy, do you really think you’d be in any position to judge, if there was?’
‘What do you know? What do you know about the way I feel? How can you understand? You’re not even—’
Merrily willed her not to say it. This was not the time to say it.
‘—my moth—’
Then the unmistakable and always-shocking sound of a slap. Merrily closed her eyes.
An abyss of silence. Jane would have been composing a response involving the European Court of Human Rights.
Amy just started to cry again, long hollow sobs, close to retching.
But this was surely not the first time she’d thrown out the not-my-mother line. There had to be something additional to have provoked Hazel, the seasoned foster-mother, the reservoir. And when I look into her eyes…
With no windows you could open, it was hard to breathe in here. Merrily ran a finger around the inside of her dog collar, walked away towards the front door. She felt like an intruder. She felt this was becoming futile. She looked across into the placidly glowing face of Jesus in the picture, and Jesus smiled, in His knowing way.
Merrily closed her eyes again, let her arms fall to her sides, stilled her thoughts.
Mrs Shelbone was saying, ‘Oh, my darling, I’m so sorry, but you—’
‘Go away. Just go away.’
‘We only want to—’
‘You can’t help me. Nobody can help me.’
‘The Good Lord can help you, Amy.’
Another silence. No sniff
les, no whimpers. Then, as Merrily straightened up, Amy said,
‘There’s no such thing as a Good Lord, you stupid woman.’
‘Amy!’
‘It’s all just a sick, horrible joke! There’s nobody out there who can protect us. Or if… if God exists, he just totally hates us. He watches us suffer and die and he doesn’t do a thing to help us. He doesn’t help us, ever, ever, ever! He enjoys watching us suffer. You can plead and plead and plead, and you can say your prayers till you’re b–blue in the face and nobody’s going to ever save you. It’s all a horrible sick lie! And the Church is just a big… a big cover-up. It’s all smelly and musty and horrible and it’s full of dead people, and I don’t… I don’t want to die in—’
Merrily leaned back against the wall. Christ gave her a sad smile. The door of Amy’s Room opened. Hazel Shelbone stood there, stone-faced. ‘Mrs Watkins? Would you mind—?’
‘Don’t you dare bring her in here! I’m not talking to her, do you understand?’
Merrily took a step back along the hall. Something had happened to this kid. If not a sneering boyfriend, what about some cool, compelling atheistic teacher?
She whispered, ‘Hazel, I… think, on the whole, it might be better if Amy came out, and—’
‘I’m warning you, if she comes in here I’ll smash the window. Do you hear me? I’ll smash the window and I’ll get out of here for good! I’ll throw the chair through the window. Can you hear—?’
‘I’m sorry.’ Mrs Shelbone pulled the door closed behind her, new lines and hollows showing in her wide, honest face. ‘I don’t know what to do. She’s never been quite like this before, I swear to you.’
‘You just keep lying to me. Lies, lies, lies!’
Merrily opened the front door and stepped down to the flagged garden path, followed by Amy’s mother.
The bungalow was detached but fairly small, with a bay window each side of the door. There were other houses and bungalows either side of the country lane, well separated, with high hedges and gardens crowded with trees and bushes.