A Hovering of Vultures

by Robert Barnard

  “Well, it’s a point of view, I suppose. I used to go up with you sometimes, didn’t I?”

  The lips parted again into that wolfish snarl.

  “Thought herself such a Lady Muck, didn’t she? Couldn’t even keep the place clean. Couldn’t keep herself clean either, for all the money she earned with that filth.”

  “The farm is a sort of museum now.”

  “A what?”

  “A museum. A sort of shrine to the Sneddons.”

  “Shrine! That’s blasphemy, that is! But then, there’s nowt so daft as folks.”

  “Do you remember going up there sometimes when Susannah Sneddon was writing?”

  “’Course I do. Used to shoo me off somewhere so she could get on wi’ writing her mucky lies.”

  Lettie bent forward and asked her mother a question. When she got her answer she was satisfied that, as with many old people, her memory for things that happened long ago was better than her memory of recent events. She almost felt glad she had come.

  Chapter 8

  Coming Out

  On the Sunday morning Charlie awoke with feelings of dissatisfaction: what had he done, found out, achieved? He had attended the inaugural meeting of a literary society that was, to all appearances, completely aboveboard, composed of genuine enthusiasts as well as others with connections, close or peripheral, to the Sneddons, their writings, and their tragedy. He had seen things, heard things, that interested him, but nothing that had got him any further forward. He had also, be it said, had a rather enjoyable couple of hours with Felicity Coggenhoe after the wine and cheese party, but that could hardly be said to have contributed to his investigations—apart, perhaps, from some grisly details that filled in the picture of the awfulness of her parents.

  Perhaps it was just because he felt he had got nowhere that he decided to stay over that night.

  “I’d like to do a bit of walking this evening,” he told his landlady when she brought in a laden plate that included black pudding and practically everything else that conceivably could be fried. “And perhaps some more tomorrow before I go back to Leeds.”

  “I’ll keep the room for you,” Mrs Ludlum said comfortably. “No probs, as they say in Neighbours.”

  Charlie shuddered quietly to himself and got down to making a dent in the pile in front of him.

  When he had finished, or eaten as much as the human stomach could bear, he went to his room and dressed rather more sportily than he had the day before. When he was ready, on an impulse, he sat down at his typewriter and wrote “Manuscripts? Where? Where from?” Then he left the house on the Haworth Road and walked down to Batley Bridge. He didn’t, though, start at once up the hill path to Micklewike. Instead he went to the Duke of Cumberland and, using the phone in the foyer, rang up to Room Twenty-one and Lettie Farraday.

  “My, you are attentive!” she said.

  “Attentive—and curious.”

  “Well, you don’t have to tell an old woman that a young man who’s attentive has an ulterior motive.”

  “Are you going to the meeting?”

  “Sure. But I need a quarter of an hour or so to turn myself into what my mother would call a painted woman. Are you walking up, Dexter?”

  “I made a resolution to walk up every day, to compensate for all the stodge I’m eating.”

  “Have you ever yet made a resolution you haven’t broken?”

  “Never.”

  “Come up in the taxi with me then.”

  “You’re on.”

  “Wait down there and I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”

  Once she was settled in the back of the taxi Charlie got in beside her and asked:

  “Well, how was your mother?”

  “A vicious old crone with a veneer of religion.”

  “Did you row?”

  “Nothing we couldn’t both handle. I managed to stand her for nearly an hour.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Never you mind, young man. You’re a good deal too curious for someone who won’t tell me why he’s curious.” She thought for a moment and then asked: “Dexter, has it occurred to you that there’s really not much of the Sneddons at High Maddox Farm?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “Yes, it has. Oddly enough not when I went around for the first time, but when I was there at the party last night. It’s all ‘typical’ rather than actually things of theirs. ‘Their bedrooms must have looked rather like this,’ rather than ‘This is Susannah’s bed, this is her bedside table.’ Most of it could have been picked up for a song—probably was. But I can see the difficulties, and I suppose he’s hoping that genuine stuff will turn up.”

  “Hmmm. I may say I recognised nothing from my visits as a child. To me it was more like a stage set than a museum. What is he getting out of it, do you suppose?”

  “Search me. He’s not going to make a fortune from admission charges. It’s hardly Haworth, as he said yesterday. I imagine the farm was probably going cheap, with agriculture in the state it’s in at the moment, but still . . .”

  “But still, indeed. I take it he sees it as the shrine of a new cult. But a very minor one, surely. I just don’t see what’s in it for him, Dexter.”

  “Nor,” said Charlie grimly, “do I.”

  “And we’re agreed there must be something, aren’t we?”

  “It seems likely,” said Charlie, more guardedly.

  “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?”

  “No comment, as politicians ought to say when people make allegations about their sex life.”

  Lettie got out a note to pay the taxi driver, and looked meaningfully at the man, who was now a friend.

  “And you haven’t heard a word of this conversation, Len.”

  “I haven’t. Any more than I heard any of the names you called your mother on the way back last night.”

  “Too right. I’m glad we see eye to eye.”

  The crowd milling around the village hall was much more animated and united than it had been the first morning. As Charlie helped Lettie out of the taxi he saw the two ladies who had been making sentimental remarks about Susannah Sneddon, the devoted gardener and flower-lover. He whispered to Lettie:

  “Are you ‘coming out’ today?”

  “What can you mean?”

  “As someone who knew the Sneddons?”

  “I was thinking of saying something at the meeting.”

  “Good. You could become the Fellowship’s mascot. Or perhaps its bête noir. Anyway, there are these people I want you to meet.” And leading her over to the sentimental pair, he introduced her: “Ladies, this is Lettie Farraday, from New York. I mentioned her to you yesterday: born and brought up here in Micklewike. She used to go up with her mother to clean for Susannah Sneddon.”

  He saw the suspicion in their eyes change to greedy interest: they were in the presence of one who had touched greatness. He thought he heard the flapping of large wings. He stood there for only a second or two, but even so the questions had begun tumbling out: “Did you really? What was she like? What was her relationship with her brother really like? Did they row?” As he moved away he thought to himself that he would rather like to know the answer to that last question. And as he surveyed the smiling, chattering throng, and saw several members of the new Fellowship dart over and join in the inquisition of Lettie, a further thought occurred to him. Lettie was ‘coming out’ today, but effectively as far as the village was concerned she had been ‘out’ since Friday evening. Mr Suzman had close contacts with the village: he had been frequently in the area while setting up the Museum—that much Charlie had been told at Scotland Yard. So someone from the village, probably Mrs Marsden or Mrs Cardew, the woman who was acting as Secretary, must surely have told him that at the Weekend there was a woman who had known Susannah Sneddon, had known the interior of the farm while she lived there. Yet he had made no attempt to contact Lettie.

  Odd.

  He moved over to the group around Gerald S
uzman, which consisted mostly of the Coggenhoe family. He braved the looks of hostility from the great author and his wife and grinned at Felicity—a grin that expressed appreciation of their time together the previous evening. Then he stood listening. It was Mr Suzman who was doing most of the talking.

  “Yes, indeed, a very busy weekend. But exhilarating tool Glad when it’s over? Not at all, dear lady. But perhaps a little relieved that it’s all gone so well. I shall relax tonight in my cottage in Oxenthorpe with a bottle of my favourite Alsace, and perhaps soothe myself with Mozart’s last and greatest opera.”

  “The Magic Flute?” hazarded Mary Coggenhoe.

  “No, no, dear lady: La Clemenza di Tito.”

  Phoney! thought Charlie, moving away. He didn’t know much about Mozart’s operas, but he did know that his greatest was not one nobody had heard of. Still, the phoniness of Mr Gerald Suzman was not in doubt: the question was what particular piece of trompe l’oeil he was fabricating here in Micklewike.

  Charlie led the drift back into the hall, and once again took his place towards the back. The opening part of the meeting was mainly formal: the Fellowship was set up, an interim constitution was established, and an Executive Council voted into being. Mr Suzman proposed a lean, active Council of five members, to get the Fellowship off the ground. He put forward five names, and these were agreed from the floor: Rupert Coggenhoe seemed to be there to represent Literature; Randolph Sneddon was there to represent Family; Gillian Parkin was there to represent Academic Research; the lady who acted as Secretary, Mrs Cardew, was there to represent Micklewike; and Mr Suzman was there as the Founding Father.

  Things got more interesting when they came to Any Other Business. Mr Suzman had said at the beginning of the meeting that he hoped this would become a general discussion of the experience of the Weekend, what members hoped for from the Fellowship, suggestions for next year’s gathering, and so on. Rupert Coggenhoe said he thought walks to places featured in the Sneddon novels would be an appropriate and enjoyable feature for future weekends, and mentioned Beckett’s Falls, which had featured so prominently in The Hard Furrow, and which, coincidentally, could be paralleled with a waterfall in his own novel Starveacre. One of the sentimental ladies suggested a church service on the Sunday morning of the Weekend, and Gillian Parkin protested against the emasculation (“significantly there is no female equivalent of that term”) of Susannah Sneddon’s texts in their printed versions. Vibeke Nordli called for the establishment of international Chapters of the Fellowship.

  It was quite late in the meeting when Lettie Farraday got up to speak.

  “Mr Chairman, I wonder if I can say a few words as one who knew the Sneddons.” (Small buzz of interest, turning heads. Mr Suzman nodded, as if this was something he’d known all along, perhaps had arranged.) “Though you wouldn’t think it from the sound of me, I was born and brought up a few hundred yards from this hall. My mother used to go up and clean for the Sneddons once a week, and sometimes in the school holidays I used to go up with her. Of course what you’ve got up there now is a sanitised version of the farm. I’m not criticising you for that: nobody wants to go into a mess of dirt and disorder. But that’s what it was. If they hadn’t employed my mother it would have been a slum. Thinking back on it, I can respect Susannah for that: she made her choice, and the choice was that she wanted to be a writer. So far as she was concerned the rest could go hang, and it did. But that wasn’t how we saw it in the village at the time.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t,” said Mr Suzman, apparently just to say something.

  “No, to us she was a mucky housewife, a real sloven. And that was a real judgment on somebody, for us, then. And I think you should try to get something of that into the Museum, because that was a distinctive part of Susannah Sneddon’s life: dirt, poor food badly cooked, nasty smells. Another thing: the farmhouse is far too full of things from the ’twenties—fire-tongs, pudding basins, beds, knives and forks. But the Sneddons never bought anything. The things the farm was full of were much older—’nineties stuff, I suppose, or even earlier. So the fire-tongs and the cutlery and the kitchen utensils would have been Victorian ones, heavier, uglier—and dirtier, of course.”

  “That’s something I hadn’t thought of,” interjected Mr Suzman. “It shows how very little Susannah thought of her immediate physical surroundings.”

  “That’s right. She didn’t care about them at all. What they did with their money—whether it went to subsidize the farm, or was saved up, or what—I don’t know. But it didn’t go on clothes, it didn’t go on furniture or food or everyday comforts. Susannah—and Joshua, but I only had much to do with Susannah—she just lived for her writing. And by the way, she only ever wrote by hand. That typewriter for Susannah is out of place: Joshua used one, but she never did. Got someone to type her things up for the publishers, I suppose, but she used an old fountain pen—you got that right, I think, in the one up there—and wrote the novels in ruled exercise books. I’m pretty sure Joshua never typed for her: what little time he had he used for his own books. And of course it was said in the village that he resented hers. By the way, someone mentioned a church service. Neither of them ever went to church. Joshua used to say in the pub that he’d done his last praying in the trenches in 1915 . . . Oh, one last thing: don’t ever do away with that loo. There’s some things we do a hell of a lot better today.”

  Lettie sat down to laughter, a little smattering of applause, and a great deal of interest. The meeting meandered towards its close, and when it was finally over, with happy admonitions from Mr Suzman to be sure to come back next year, there was a minor rush of people, both pushy and shy, over towards Lettie to question her.

  Mr Suzman, Charlie noticed, did not join the rush. He talked earnestly to the new Secretary to the Fellowship, Mrs Cardew, and gradually one or two members of the newly elected Council went over to them, and they all began taking out diaries and arranging dates for meetings. The last Charlie saw of Suzman was his standing by the door and announcing that he was going to drive away and have a nice quiet lunch on his own before the final event, the afternoon lecture.

  “I believe the Chinese in Batley Bridge is very good,” ventured Mrs Cardew. “Though it was closed down briefly by the health people a little while ago.”

  “I would never go to a restaurant that was given a clean bill by the health inspectors,” said Mr Suzman grandly. “They would obviously have their priorities wrong.”

  Charlie waited outside the hall, talking in a desultory way to Vidkun Mjølhus. The man had an amiable impenetrability to which Charlie couldn’t relate. Susannah Sneddon might have described his eyes as bottomless pools, but what was in their depths? Ageless wisdom, or simply nothing? After several minutes’ conversation which blandly skimmed surfaces Charlie saw Lettie emerge from the hall, surrounded by an admiring troupe. He could see that she didn’t need his help to the Black Horse, and when the Coggenhoes came out he muttered apologies to the Norwegian and went over to them.

  “Yes?” said Rupert Coggenhoe, as if he were a doorstep salesman.

  “There’s a farmhouse restaurant a mile along the road to Abbothall,” said Charlie, with his most ingratiating smile. “Felicity and I were thinking of giving it a try for lunch.”

  The hostility of the Coggenhoes prevented them seeing the look of surprise, pleased surprise, on their daughter’s face.

  “That’s quite impossible,” said her father. “As you will know, I have just been elected to the Council. I need to be in Micklewike to be available to members.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” said Charlie. “We quite understand. Come on, Felicity.”

  “Felicity! You can’t think of . . . Felicity! We’ve hardly seen anything of you!”

  But they were talking to her back.

  “Hardly seen anything of me!” grumbled Felicity, as they walked at a pace that verged on running. “How can they say that when I’ve seen a great deal of them?”

  The lady who ran the farmho
use restaurant, an attempt to fight the agricultural depression, clearly regarded them as an odd couple, but she had had several other customers who were attending the Sneddon Weekend, so she took them in her stride.

  “It’s the murder that attracts you,” she said, half-accusing, half-amused. “If it weren’t for that, you’d not be here. Morbid, I call it. Now, I’ve got a lovely hot-pot . . .”

  The walk there and back took them a while, because they weren’t hurrying, and by the time they got back to Micklewike the lecture had started. Charlie wasn’t too disappointed. It was on “Susannah Sneddon—a Marxist Perspective,” given by a lecturer from Bradford University. Charlie wondered how much longer there would be Marxists to have a perspective. He and Felicity mooched around Micklewike, noticing the other conferees who were giving the lecture a miss. These included the unattractive pair who had inherited letters from Susannah. Charlie watched curiously their progress around the town. The news had got about, so that other members of the Fellowship kept coming up to them and asking about the connection. The unattractive pair blossomed unattractively.

  About three they went back to the village hall and mingled with the audience coming out as if they’d been there all along.

  “I’d better stay with the oldies for the rest of the day,” said Felicity. “You’ve got my phone number.”

  “Right,” said Charlie. “I’ll be around here, and at the Duke of Cumberland keeping an eye on Lettie.”

  Felicity raised her eyebrows.

  “What do you mean? Why do you have to keep an eye on her?”

  “Oh—just if she needs my help getting anywhere,” said Charlie.

  But it was not just physical assistance that Charlie had in mind. There niggled in the back of his brain the thought that Gerald Suzman’s reaction to Lettie’s presence had been odd. Of course there were no doubt others in Micklewike who had known the Sneddons . . . Yet Lettie’s particular connection to the farm through her mother—wouldn’t one have expected that Suzman would welcome her with open arms, question her, consult her?