Anything For a Quiet Life

by Michael Gilbert

  “Did it never occur to you,” he said, “that by showing him that cutting, you were warning him that he was suspected?”

  “Suspected, possibly. But in no danger when Jock Lovibond accepted my advice against exhumation.”

  Jonas looked at her speechlessly. Then, “You advised him to oppose it.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Did you not consider that it was your duty, to the authorities, to the court, to the state, that this matter should be cleared up?”

  “As a solicitor,” said Sabrina coldly, “my first duty was to my client.”

  9

  The Freedom Folk

  In the four years they had been established in Shackleton the lunching arrangements of Jonas and his staff had become, like many other things, a matter of habit. Sabrina took hers at the Central Café, with others of her sex and totem; more talking was done than eating. Jonas went to the Conservative Club and usually managed to get in a rubber of bridge before going back to the office. Claire brought sandwiches and liked, weather permitting, to eat them in the open. So far that year she had been lucky.

  It had been an exceptionally mild spring. March was half-over and sunny day had followed sunny day with the wind blowing steadily from the south-west. Her favourite lunch place was the Dingle. This was where the Shackle stream frothed and bubbled its way out to sea over a bed of white stones.

  It was a pleasant spot in any weather. The banks of the little valley were gradual on the Shackleton side, more sheer on the far side. The bottom was formed of smooth South Down turf, through which the stream had cut its bed. On the far side, a flight of steps ran up to the only human habitation in sight. This was the cottage of Francis Delamere, a meteorological hermit, who had roosted up there for nearly half a century, observing the weather of the Channel coast.

  He discouraged visitors, but Claire remembered being taken up there once with Jonas, who had acted for the old man in a family matter. He had shown them his vast collection of weather maps, graphs and statistical records. A monomaniac, she had concluded, but harmless.

  As she was thinking about him she caught sight of a figure moving on the knoll between the cottage and the cliff edge. Certainly not Delamere. Now that her attention had been attracted she made out that someone had set up an easel and was painting. She finished her sandwiches, crossed the rustic bridge over the stream and climbed the steps to inspect his efforts. Some of the amateur artists who frequented Shackleton in summer disliked being watched at work. Others appreciated an audience.

  This seemed to be one of the latter sort. He smiled agreeably as Claire came up and stepped back from the easel.

  About forty, Claire guessed. A face tanned by the weather, with wrinkles round the eyes as though he spent much of his time staring into the sun. His short pointed beard, cut in the Vandyke fashion, was beginning to show a sprinkling of grey. He had been painting in watercolour, using a simple palette. It was a composition of sea and sky, a chiaroscuro of blues and whites and greys. Claire knew little about painting, but enough to find the picture effective and attractive.

  She said, “I suppose it wouldn’t be for sale, by any chance?”

  The man said, “You would have to consult Gus Levy about that.”

  “Gus—”

  “He runs the Wardour Galleries. They handle all my work. You may have heard of them.”

  This was said gravely, but there was a hint of laughter behind it and Claire realised that she had been stupid. This was not the sort of painter who set up his easel on the front and sold his pictures to bystanders for a few pounds. She said, “I’m sorry. Yes, I know the Wardour Galleries. They’re in Bond Street, aren’t they?”

  “Correct. If you know them, do I take it you’re a Londoner?” He seemed to have abandoned painting for the moment and wanted to talk.

  She said, “I used to work in London, yes. That was some years ago. I’ve become a confirmed Shackletonian now.”

  “I can’t suppose you’ve retired.”

  Definitely he was laughing at her, but she was not annoyed. She said, “My employer, Mr Pickett – he’s a solicitor – moved down here from London a few years ago and I came with him.”

  “Not Jonas Pickett?”

  “Correct. You know him?”

  “I met him when he acted for me in an unpleasant dispute over the lease of my flat. That was one of the reasons I decided to abandon urban life and bought myself a caravan. A great improvement on a flat in West Kensington, let me tell you.”

  “As long as the weather stays fine.”

  “A modern caravan,” said the man firmly, “is proof against any vagaries of the climate. I can’t imagine why half the populace of our overcrowded, insanitary inner cities don’t take to them. They’d be healthier and happier if they did.”

  “If you can spare the time,” said Claire, who found herself liking him more and more, “do please drop in. My name’s Easterbrook, by the way. Claire Easterbrook. We’re at the far corner of Middle Street. I’m sure Jonas would like to see you again.”

  “I’ll do that. And since there’s no one here to effect an introduction, I must do it myself. The name is Wroke. Spelled with a ‘W’. Philip Wroke.”

  When, on her return to the office, Claire told Sabrina about this encounter she said, “You didn’t really offer to buy the picture, did you?”

  “Yes. But I saw that I’d made a mistake.”

  “The last time I went to a Summer Exhibition at the Academy,” said Sabrina thoughtfully, “there were three Wroke seascapes on view. The cheapest, I seem to remember, was priced at three thousand guineas.”

  “Then,” said Claire, “perhaps it’s just as well that he didn’t take me up on my offer.”

  The faintest preliminary ripples of possible trouble had reached Shackleton that morning. The ladies who were lunching together at the Central Café were too engrossed in dissecting the character of the new rector’s wife to bother about it, but the stout estate agent who was partnering Jonas at bridge did say, “I hear they had a spot of bother with a nature camp at Portree. Three no trumps.”

  Jonas was too busy trying to analyse this gross overbid to pursue the matter. So it was Sam who got the story first.

  He took his midday cheese and beer at the Fisherman’s Arms. He was welcomed by the company in the saloon bar, partly from the dignity of his connection with the law (“Crafty old bastard that Pickett”), partly for his Rabelaisian wit and partly, no doubt, from the consciousness that this ex-fairground boxer and strongman could have slung any one of them out of the door with one hand tied behind his back.

  On this occasion he was making no attempt to hold the floor. He was prepared to drink his beer and listen, for the conversation had taken an interesting turn.

  “Heard about it from my cousin over at Poole,” said a gnome-like man who mowed the golf club greens. “Seems they nipped in at Portree. Small place, just this side of Walden.”

  “When you say they nipped in” – this was a tall fisherman – “you mean they didn’t ask no one? They was just trespassing.”

  “Difficult to talk about trespass, when you don’t know who the land belongs to.”

  “All the land belongs to someone,” said the landlord.

  “I beg to contradict you,” said a thin man whose glasses and manner of speaking had earned him the honorary title of Professor, but who, in fact, kept a live bait store. “The land below high-water mark belongs to no one.”

  “Surely you’re wrong, Professor,” said the landlord. “It belongs to the Queen. Like whales.”

  “Not so. It is terra sine titulo.”

  Baffled by this display of Latin, the landlord said, “Anyway no one in their senses is going to pitch a camp where the tide can come up and wash it away. Stands to reason.”

  “From what I heard,” said the gnome-like man, “there isn’t a lot of reason in anything these people do. They’ve got a flag with FF on it. Standing, so I understand, for the Freedom Folk, but it could be so
mething different.”

  A number of alternative suggestions were offered, most of them unprintable. Sam, who had finished his beer, intervened for the first time.

  “Diddun I see in the paper,” he said, “that Portree had got rid of ’em? How’d they manage that, eh?”

  “By force,” said the small man. “They’re a rough crowd down there. What they did, they turned up one morning early, about a hundred of them, slung out the caravans and tents and pulled down the shacks. Then they ran a fence of barbed wire round the place before anyone could stop them.”

  “A bit rough,” said the landlord. “Wasn’t there nothing they could do about it?”

  “Well, of course, the man who seems to boss them – Lipitt, or some name like that – he went off to the police. When they arrived they found them camped out beside the road and a dozen tough characters guarding the way back through the barbed wire what they’d put up. The Inspector said, ‘We’re not going to have any trouble. The first one who starts a fight, we run him in.’”

  “Meaning,” said the tall fisherman, “that since they were out they’d got to stay out.”

  “The law,” agreed the Professor, “favours the status quo.”

  “So what did they do?” said the landlord.

  “What could they do? They couldn’t get back without a fight, so they packed up their traps and moved off down the road. At night they pitch camp on the roadside. Provided they move on each day, no one can do anything about that.”

  Sam said, “How long ago was it they got turned out?”

  “It was last week.”

  “And Walden’s – what – about thirty miles from here?”

  The landlord said, “Don’t you worry, Sam. The council won’t have a crowd like that in here, not in a month of Sundays.”

  Sam said, “Come to that, I don’t suppose Portree wanted them neither.”

  At the next office coffee break he retailed what he had heard and found an attentive audience.

  “I read something about it in the local paper,” said Jonas. “Opinion seemed to be divided about the rights and wrongs of it.”

  “I can’t see that it’s a question with two sides to it,” said Claire. “The people who turned them out were the ones who used force. Surely that put them in the wrong.”

  “The first wrongdoing,” said Sabrina, “was when they camped on someone else’s property without permission.”

  “Apparently it was common land.”

  “You’re using the expression very loosely, darling. If it was what the law calls common land, that only means that the inhabitants had the right to graze their animals on it. It certainly does not mean that strangers had a right to come along and live on it.”

  “I don’t think it was that sort of common. It was a piece by the seashore without a private owner.”

  “If it was above a median tide mark it belonged to the community and came under the jurisdiction of the local council.”

  Sam said, “That was what they was saying at the pub. They’re nothing but a crowd of no-good dropouts and the council would turn ’em out neck and crop if they tried the same game round here.”

  “Then I’m afraid, Sam,” said Claire, “that your worthy friends in the saloon bar of the Fisherman’s Arms are, as usual, talking nonsense.”

  The tone in which she said this made Jonas look up at her. He said, “Have you got some information that we haven’t?”

  “You can call them dropouts if you like. They are people who have got tired of an insanitary overcrowded life in our inner cities” – unconsciously she found she was quoting the artist – “and find a gypsy life healthier and happier.”

  “Happier for them,” said Sabrina. “What about the people they impose themselves on?”

  “There should be room in this country for everyone. Wasn’t the government telling us, only the other day, that the countryside was over-farmed? The mistake people make is thinking about these people as criminals. Some of them are very poor, it’s true. They can’t even afford a proper tent, let alone a caravan. They just lean two pieces of corrugated iron together—”

  “Claire,” said Jonas, “you seem to know a lot more about this than we do. Who have you been talking to?”

  “As a matter of fact I happened to run into Philip Wroke again in a café in the town.”

  “Don’t tell me he’s one of them.”

  “He has been with them now for some months, yes.”

  “That certainly gives them a touch of respectability.”

  “Oh, he’s not the only one. There are several artists, not as well known as he is, I agree. And writers.”

  “Poets, no doubt,” said Sabrina.

  “I don’t know about poets, but they’ve got a radio dramatist. And a pop group. They call themselves The Strollers. They’ve made quite a few records.”

  “That was one of the things they told me about,” said Sam. “They practise all night. Keep people awake, you see. No thought for others.”

  Jonas said, “I should imagine it’s difficult to discipline a crowd like that. Have they got a leader?”

  “Wroke is regarded as second in command. The leader, the man who founded the group, is called Lipsett.”

  “And what is he?” said Jonas. “An artist, a writer, or a musician?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “If it’s Raymond Lipsett,” said Sabrina, “he’s a man who writes articles for left-wing publications. I’ve read quite a few of them. Able stuff, but totally perverted, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Claire sharply. “If his views are left of centre they must be perverted, mustn’t they?”

  “Children, children,” said Jonas. “Don’t scratch each other’s eyes out.” He could see that Claire was losing her temper and that Sabrina would like nothing more than to provoke her. “May I point out that it is now half past eleven and that I, at least, have work to do.”

  This was true. It was a question of mineral rights at Maggs’s farm which had reached the Crown Court at Brighton. Jonas had decided to brief counsel and was drafting a case for Mr Kendrick, QC. It was a complex matter and he had to devote his full attention to what he was dictating, but something was niggling him. He knew his secretary as well as any shrewd professional man would be likely to know a girl who has been working for him for nearly six years, but he had never suspected her of holding strong left-wing views.

  Perhaps Wroke had got something to do with this? To date Claire’s relationships with the young of the opposite sex had been casual to the point of flippancy. But a forty-year-old artist . . . He realised that Claire had been sitting with her pencil poised for some seconds and wrenched his mind back to the question of the minerals which underlay Farmer Maggs’s fields.

  At a quarter to seven on the following morning a matter which had been of remote interest took a sharp step forward. Jonas blinked his eyes open and picked up the telephone from the table beside his bed.

  It was the hermit, Francis Delamere, and he was very angry.

  He said, “They’ve come. You’ve got to do something.”

  “Do you mind,” said Jonas swinging his legs out of bed and sitting up, “telling me what you’re talking about?” He found that he could think more clearly when sitting up, which was as well, because Delamere was almost incoherent with rage.

  “Last night,” he said, “after dark. Like thieves in the night.”

  “Your house has been burgled.”

  “No, no. Worse. Much worse. They’re all over the Dingle.”

  There was no need for Jonas to ask who they were. He could guess only too easily. He said, “I suppose you’re talking about those campers.”

  “A rabble. You’ve got to move them on.”

  “I’m very sorry about it. But it’s not really my job.”

  “Certainly it’s your job. You’re my solicitor, aren’t you? Start an action.”

  Jonas’s experience had hardened him to clients who demanded actions on every conceiv
able and some inconceivable points. He said, patiently, “Just who would you suggest I start an action against?”

  “These people. The FF.”

  “The first difficulty is that they’re not, as far as I know, a corporate body. And if we could get over that one, what are we starting an action for?”

  “Trespass.”

  “You can’t sue them for trespass. You don’t own the land.”

  “You’re making difficulties. If the law won’t help us we shall have to take matters into our own hands. Like they did at Portree.”

  “No,” said Jonas. “Whatever you do—” But he found that the telephone had gone dead.

  He dressed hastily, thought about breakfast, decided that speed was all-important and got his car out. As he was starting it, Sam appeared and jumped in beside him. The quickest approach to the Dingle was along the golf club road. They parked the car in a lay-by and took the track which led down the winding left-hand bank of the stream. As they turned a corner they came on the scene of the action.

  A strong fence, three lines of barbed wire fixed to uprights of angle iron, barred their way. There was a narrow opening through which the track ran. The men standing beside it were clearly both sentinels and guards. Some action was going on in the camp itself. Men and women were crowding round a shanty composed of two corrugated iron sheets. Jonas said, “Good God! Isn’t that Delamere? The stupid old coot. He must have wriggled in under the wire at the top end. What did he think he could do?”

  The crowd parted and they could see that two men were carrying the old hermit, who was still struggling.

  “Better get him out, hadn’t we?” said Sam. “Before he hurts himself. Or gets hurt.”

  He marched up to the gate. The guards said, “You can’t come in.”

  “No such word as ‘can’t’ in my vocabulary, chum,” said Sam and marched on. The guards took one look at his formidable bulk and decided that he was out of their class. Jonas, like a small tender being towed by a battleship, followed in his wake.

  At the foot of the path they met the carrying party coming up.