‘Did you ’ear about the commercial radio people, then, Miss Potts? No? I’m surprised, you and Mrs Withens being so close. Well, I ’eard it from the lady ’erself . . .’
• • •
Destiny is inexorable in a town as tiny as Twytching, and Jean Jimson was fated to hear about Mrs Withens and the commercial radio people before the day was out. When she went to change her library books in the middle of the afternoon, Miss Potts, primly sitting behind her desk and subjecting every title to fierce scrutiny from behind a wicked pair of rimless spectacles, remembered that she had missed the glad tidings.
‘Did you like that, Mrs Jimson? Really? Yes, I believe people do say she’s a good read, but she’s not what I’d call a nice novelist, is she? She’s an Oxford don, so I’ve heard, so perhaps that explains it. Now I’ve got the latest Denise Robins. Mrs Carrington brought it back, and she said it’s the best Denise Robins she’s ever read – and she reads them all, you know: Denise Robins has no more devoted fan than Mrs Carrington. Shall I put it by for you? No, well, please yourself, there’s plenty that will.’ Miss Potts could not suppress a sigh at the vagaries of human taste as she laid down the Denise Robins. ‘You’ll find plenty of new things on the shelves: we had a visit from the county people this morning – I haven’t had time to go through and see what’s there myself yet.’
Jean had timed her visit on the assumption that both these last items of news would be the case – she resented the best things disappearing under Miss Potts’s desk as soon as they came in, especially as the casual reader had no means at all of knowing what was there and what was not. While she leafed her way along the shelves, trying to leave them less regimented than she found them, Miss Potts put the inevitable question:
‘You didn’t hear about Mrs Withens and the commercial radio people, did you, Mrs Jimson?’
‘No,’ said Jean. ‘Have they asked her to do a commercial for them?’
She idly wondered whether it would be for whale-bone corsets, or a cure for dyspepsia. Miss Potts looked at her reproachfully, as if she had belched during prayers.
‘They are coming here,’ she said firmly, ‘to do a documentary on Twytching, for our American twin town. A sort of Down Your Way Mrs Withens said when I rang her. A whole programme on us – just fancy! I’m ever so excited, I can tell you.’
‘Do you think you’ll be on it, then?’ asked Jean, idly thinking it would be difficult to select a more thoroughly uninteresting specimen of the local population than Miss Potts, strong though the competition was.
‘Well, of course, Mrs Withens will be on – naturally. And we are good friends, what with the library committee, and the Decent Standards League and so on, and I did wonder.’ Later, as Jean was taking out her chosen books, Miss Potts asked: ‘What would you choose, Mrs Jimson, as your piece of music?’
‘I haven’t thought,’ said Jean. ‘I don’t imagine I’ll have to choose. What would you?’
‘I thought perhaps something devotional. “All in the April Evening” or “Land of Hope and Glory” – something like that.’
‘I’m sure everyone would like that,’ said Jean.
‘It’s all in the lap of the gods, of course,’ said Miss Potts with a simper. The lap of Mrs Withens, more like, thought Jean. ‘Have you found something nice, then? Oh, Angus Wilson! Well, you could almost call him a local, I suppose, couldn’t you? Oh, Mrs Jimson! I didn’t know this was there. Are you sure you want this?’
‘Quite sure, thank you,’ said Jean.
‘Well, you must please yourself, of course. But I always think that people who mock the royal family are the lowest of the low. I’m afraid I think horsewhipping is too good for them. Good afternoon, Mrs Jimson.’
And Miss Potts tightened her lips, in a gesture of disapproving dismissal.
It wasn’t Jean Jimson’s day, because outside the library she met Alison Mailer.
CHAPTER II
ALISON MAILER
Alison Mailer was Jean’s next-door neighbour – they lived in almost identical detached houses of some small pretensions on the outskirts of Twytching, if so tiny a town could be said to have outskirts. When she saw Alison coming up the street, Jean’s hand went instinctively to her hair, for Alison had the gift of making other women feel they had had a trying day, and were showing it. Sometimes, indeed, she told them directly that they were, for there was little subtlety about Alison. Today, as always, she was looking cool, clean, well-pressed and deadly.
‘Jean, lovely to see you,’ she said, looking with quite unconcealed contempt at Jean’s brown check skirt and chain-store sweater. ‘For a neighbour you can be quite a stranger. Where’ve you just been? Don’t tell me you use that pokey little library?’
‘Oh, it’s not too bad. I don’t get that much time to read. In any case, there doesn’t seem to be any alternative.’
‘We belong to the London Library,’ said Alison. ‘It’s really the only civilized way . . .’
‘Have you read anything good recently?’ asked Jean maliciously, pretty sure that Alison had hardly opened a book since her schooldays.
‘I’ve just finished the latest Greene,’ said Alison, coolly offhand, and clearly about to pass on to another ground for superiority.
‘Oh?’ said Jean. ‘I didn’t know Graham Greene had published anything recently.’
‘Henry Green,’ said Alison. ‘Of course.’
Jean Jimson racked her brain to remember whether Henry Green was still alive and publishing. She thought not. But you had to hand it to Alison. She managed to pick up all the right names.
‘Did you hear about Radio Broadwich?’ said Jean as they approached their own front gates.
‘Radio Broadwich?’ said Alison, bored. ‘No. Are those old sex-kittens suing it for playing smutty pop songs?’
‘No,’ said Jean, unwisely; ‘they’re coming here, to Twytching. To do a programme.’
‘Really?’ said Alison, perking up. ‘Are you making tea, Jean? You make such a wonderful cup, and I’m dying for a bit of gossip.’
Jean held open the gate with a forced smile, and kicked herself for bringing up such a topic so close to home. When Alison Mailer neglected an opportunity of insinuating herself into prominence, it could confidently be forecast that she was on her death-bed. Now she strolled calmly through the gate and up the path, smiling condescendingly at the rhododendrons, and making it obvious that she registered the weeds in the lawn. Jean let them into the kitchen, and sat Alison down determinedly at the kitchen table, shutting the door on the living-room with its mess of Meccano, half-done jig-saws and hockey-sticks. Alison, who had caught a glimpse, smiled with understanding, and then glanced around the kitchen.
‘You don’t have many herbs, do you?’ she said, her gaze resting on a line of three or four little jars. ‘Don’t you use them in your cooking?’
‘The children don’t like them,’ said Jean, trying not to grind her teeth. ‘And Timothy’s not too fond, though he pretends to be.’
‘I don’t see what they’ve got to do with it,’ said Alison. ’I don’t know what I’d do without my little collection. Anyway, what’s this about Radio Broadwich? Have I missed something? Has something been going on here that they could be interested in?’
‘Nothing that I know of,’ said Jean, slapping too much tea in the pot. ‘I’d have heard from Mrs Leaze if there was anything like that – she never misses a trick. No, it’s some sort of documentary, for the Americans. You know this twin-town nonsense Mrs Withens has been busybodying herself about. Well, the programme will be sent there, and the local station will broadcast it, and I gather we’ll get a chance to hear it first. Apparently it will be a Down Your Way type of programme.’
‘Down Your Way?’ said Alison, wrinkling her nose.
‘You remember – it’s been going for years. They visit a place, and interview people, and play their choice of music – you know the sort of thing.’
‘Really?’ said Alison, her interest now caught.
‘And how are they going to choose the people to be interviewed?’
‘I’ve no idea. I expect I’ll listen to Down Your Way this Sunday, to see what they do. I haven’t heard it for years, because Timothy likes quiet for his writing on Sundays. He’ll probably want to hear it himself this Sunday, though.’
‘Sunday,’ said Alison meditatively. ‘Radio Four, I suppose. It sounds awfully like Radio Four. I must try and catch it.’
‘I imagine they choose people to represent all activities and industries and things in a town,’ said Jean. ‘And I suppose the Radio Broadwich people will do the same – though God knows, they’ll be pushed for material in Twytching. I gather Mrs Withens is already signed up – or she thinks she is,’ said Jean. ‘And little Miss Potts thinks she’s got a chance. Apparently old Mother Withens will be vetting the lists of who should and who shouldn’t appear.’
‘Really?’ said Alison again. ‘We’ll see about that. I can’t think why that human dreadnought should have anything to tell the waiting millions. What music do you think she’d choose? “If I Ruled the World”?’
‘As far as I can remember,’ said Jean, ‘that’s what most people on Down Your Way choose.’
‘So I’d imagine,’ said Alison, sipping thoughtfully. ‘Lovely tea, Jean, really lovely. Have you tried using the filter system, though? I wonder what I’d choose now – as music, I mean . . . something to make people sit up, don’t you think?’
Jean decided not to venture on any conjecture of what she might have in mind, for fear of a snub: ‘Sit up? How do you mean, exactly?’
Alison thought gracefully.
‘What about some Schoenberg, now,’ she said finally. ‘I wonder what they’d say. Or perhaps some Alban Berg.’
‘They’d probably say “no”,’ said Jean. ‘Scrub the interview off the tape and forget you.’
‘You’ve got a point there,’ said Alison.
‘Still, it’s a nice idea,’ said Jean. ‘I can just imagine how Old Mother Withens would glare next day. Disgracing the fair name of Twytching, and all that. But the point is, there’s no question, so far as I can see, of any of us ordinary housewives getting on. Obviously they’ll be going for the nobs.’
Alison raised an eyebrow at the ‘ordinary housewives’, but she merely said: ‘There might be ways. You forget, dear, after all, that there are no nobs in Twytching. Or if there are, I haven’t met them. Do you really like those big red spots for a kitchen curtain, Jean? I just ask – I can’t quite make up my own mind.’
• • •
Alison Mailer walked slowly, meditatively, between Jean Jimson’s scruffy, slightly dirty house and her own, her mind half on the approaching descent of the Radio Broadwich Assyrians on the Twytching fold, and half, as usual, complacently meditating on the very obvious differences between her own spotless, sanitized, disciplined dwelling and the dwellings of anyone else in Twytching you would care to name. She looked at the roses, ruthlessly pruned in accordance with the advice of the textbooks and ready for a splendid advance that would turn the neighbours bilious green at the sight of their profusion; she looked at the lawn, evenly cut like a young recruit’s poll, not a blade out of place, weedless, punished severely if it strayed on to the paths or beds. How Alison loved watching from her bedroom window the faces which gazed long at her lawn in reluctant, loathing admiration; how she loved being asked how she managed it; how she loved not telling. It was Jean Jimson’s contention that the only suitable monument for Alison Mailer, supposing she should ever be obliging enough to die, would be an enormous marble sarcophagus in dubious taste with the words ‘the neighbours will be terribly jealous’ picked out in gold.
Alison let herself in by her front door, hung her coat up on a hanger in the hall cupboard, and drifted into the lounge, nodding on her way in to her daughter who was doing her homework on the kitchen table. The lounge, like most rooms in the house, had no particular characteristics, except that it was clean and cold – maintaining this last quality quite miraculously, in view of the stiflingly high level at which Alison kept the central heating. The room had been furnished by Alison little by little in the earlier days of her marriage, when money had been much scarcer than it was now, and when her husband had had, sometimes, to deny her things. Each month’s Home Beautiful had contributed its share to the scheme, and the result was an uneasy mix of tubular-steel-and-leather with bulgy-Victorian, with a substratum of hideous imitation period furniture. The second-rate taste of several generations had gone into the making of the room, and it was no wonder that Alison’s daughter preferred the kitchen to do her homework in. Alison looked around the room with a passing dissatisfaction, and sank gracefully (part of her perfection sprang from the fact that she acted, even when quite alone) into the chilly white leather depths of her sofa.
By the time her husband came home, the situation had at least clarified itself in Alison’s mind. The first thing that had been decided was that she did indeed want to be interviewed on Radio Broadwich’s documentary. It had occurred to her some time after Jean’s breaking the news that this programme was unlikely to be an Akenfield, that Radio Broadwich was the sort of station listened to mostly by spotty adolescents and the occasional resentful old-age pensioner who couldn’t afford a television licence, and that therefore it might be best to stand aside and sneer at the frantic scramblings of everyone else in the town to get on. Mature consideration had persuaded her that it would be still better to be on the programme first and sneer at it afterwards.
This decided, the next step was to resolve that either she was on the programme, or else she would have to take a sudden holiday in the South of France at the time of the recording. Or the West Indies. Nothing less would do, if ridicule was to be stifled. Alison was not usually very conscious of what other people thought. She was too wrapped up in her cosy cocoon of egotism and self-satisfaction. But she was conscious that if on this occasion she made determined efforts to get herself on to the programme and then failed, people would laugh at her. Their laughter would spring from their jealousy, of course, she was sure of that, but this was the one side-product of jealousy which she had no desire to bring to birth.
The next step in her thought process was that if she was to be on the programme, she had to find some way of getting on it. It was not going to come along to her front door of its own accord. One possible avenue, of course, was Mrs Withens. That was the avenue most would be taking, and for that reason alone Alison was inclined to shun it. Then again, though Alison had no moral scruples about sucking up to Twytching’s Boadicea, she did have doubts (unusually for her) about whether she could manage it successfully. She had once been photographed beside the Chairman’s Lady after the local school prize-giving: even before the picture was taken she had caught Mrs Withens eyeing her tall, svelte elegance as if she regarded it as an invitation to some sophisticated and hardly describable form of sexual activity. Delicious! Alison was confident in her own mind that Mrs Withens kept that picture hidden under her bloomers in her bottom drawer and spent hours comparing Alison’s cool grace with her own olive green woolly dress with the lacy neckline, and the dumpy round brown hat, like a failed Yorkshire pudding, with the suspicion of veil drooping down here and there as if uncertain whether to come or go. Perfectly good Twytching wear, of course, but Alison prided herself on having put Twytching wear quietly and eternally in its place. No, it seemed to her that, though she would back herself against Mother Withens any day of the year in a straight fight, nevertheless the old monster was not such a fool as to be deceived by professions of long-intended friendship, by offers of help in some worthy urban enterprise or other, or by vows to stand side by side with her, commanding the waves of public indecency to recede even as they lapped around their chaste ankles.
It would have to be some other way, then. The best thing would be to listen to Down Your Way on Sunday, to see what sort of thing was required. She was aware, though, that three and a half thousand people in Twytching would be doing the s
ame thing, of whom something like five hundred would be nourishing firm hopes of themselves putting in an appearance in the Radio Broadwich documentary. However realistic or unrealistic those hopes might be, still the competition would be enormous. Alison liked competition. It was her life-blood. Yet in this case, might it not be amusing to circumvent the opposition? An acorn of a notion fell to the earth of her mind, and a sapling started sprouting. Could it be done? Could it? A cat-like smile of self-approval spread over Alison’s face.
By a quarter to seven, when Arnold Mailer came home from his work in London, Alison’s daughter, Cressida, had cooked the dinner. Alison went into the kitchen five minutes before he was due in order, as she put it, ‘to put the finishing touches’ to the meal - in reality to get ready to serve it out the moment he came in the door. She prided herself on always having his meals ready exactly when he needed them; in fact she prided herself on being a good wife to him altogether. And except when her demands for material possessions to match and outstrip any bought by the neighbours drove him over the brink of desperation, Arnold Mailer agreed. He liked women to be decorative and feminine and she was decidedly both; he liked – though he was amiably unconscious of this – he liked women to be able to talk intelligently, but he didn’t like them actually to be too intelligent. He told himself, poor fish, that he had a very clever wife. He was a quiet man, infinitely patient, and he saw her for such a small portion of the day that he could put up with her little ways, with her scorn, with her badgering, without the least feeling that he had made anything but a superb bargain in marrying her, without ever once telling himself that he was to be pitied. He was ten years older than Alison, and a clever woman can always give a husband in that position the feeling that she did him a favour by ever considering him in the light of a husband at all. Arnold was duly grateful. When he had finished his beef pizzaiola with the sauté potatoes, had praised the cooking and had had his praise accepted without so much as a glance passing between mother and daughter, he was quite willing to listen to an evening’s gossip and conjecture about the approaching visit of the Radio Broadwich team.
A Little Local Murder Page 2