by Alan Clark
‘Of course, I have no idea whether Nora will want to go on with the preparations for the festival now. Really, it’s too trying with poor Canon Brooke coming all the way from Canterbury this afternoon.’
As the conversation developed I slowly closed my eyes.
They remained closed, more or less, for the whole of that morning. Little Paul’s tutorials—‘Are you feeling dizzy, Mr. Crane?’—Hot tea at eleven. Lunch, with various arrangements being made and mooted while I drank a lot of water and ate nothing.
Then, miraculously, after lunch there was a great deal of banging of doors and Gevaert starting up the Rover and shouting and running about, and there I was alone.
I stood about irresolutely in the hall. The house seemed to have emptied in some curious way, and I was debating whether to go to bed after another dose of physic from the bathroom cabinet or, and this latter prospect appealed to me more, take a turn in the sun away, well away, from the turbulent affairs of Scattercrumb Street.
After some further thought I went out through the front door, glanced uneasily up and down the street, and stepped out with the quick, cramped gait that I seem to find myself adopting when ill, sniffing and swallowing rapidly. Pick’s cold on this, its D + 1 day, was working up to a thunderous climax for that night. Get physically tired, I felt, breathe great lungfuls of ozone; such treatment seemed to hold out the only hope of being able to sleep later.
Down at the edge of the Flats I caught a bus. ‘CUMBER’, it said on the front. ‘Cumber’ it would be, then, I felt, proffering a sixpence in conformity with what seemed the practice among the other occupants, and attempting to reproduce the same set of syllables which, though not corresponding to any English word known to me personally, seemed familiar to the conductor. After I had been given my ticket I reflected that with only fourpence left now I would have to do quite a bit of walking. Never mind. Heat-shock therapy had failed, as had, it was clear, big Schweize-Deutsch-quinine-base-tablet therapy. Now for a spot of clean-limbed Christian science.
The main road east out of Westerlea cut inland and ran north of the Marsh for about twenty miles before emerging on to the coast, where the concrete proms and sodium-lit double carriage-ways led it up to the Channel ports. The intervening stretch of territory was a desolate affair. Windswept dunes, large, barren tracts of tidal sand baked hard and brittle by the sun except where washed by the low tides of summer, it bubbled in an oozy stink. Dotted about were little clusters of hideous bungalows, small, failure holiday settlements, operating at subsistence level; occasionally a fish-and-chip shop or tobacconist ‘Open June to September’.
Farther on still was a firing range for military weapons of various calibre and as the bus grumbled its way along the narrow sand-dusted road it was confronted from time to time with careering, flat-nosed, 30 cwt. Army trucks. The disgruntled faces of the occupants peered out of the windows or yelled obscenities from the tail-gate. Once one of these, towing a 17-pounder anti-tank gun which swung wildly on its limber, forced us on to the verge.
Cumber itself, a decayed shanty-town of prefabs and unwashed beach-huts, centred round The Old Trader, a large concrete public house constructed in the contemporary style. The bus swung on to the wide glacis of cinders that surrounded the pub and stopped. The driver switched off the engine with an air of finality. Those who had not already risen from their seats did so and began to dismount, exchanging pleasantries with the conductor. Gingerly, I brought up their rear and stepped down into the ashy yard: whiffs of dry sand from the dunes blew in piquant, horizontal gusts at my face. I wished very strongly that I had enough money to buy even a half-pint of beer at the pub, which, judging from the immense size and shabby appearance of its largest outbuilding, that carried the label ‘Gents’, must be a pretty jolly place on some evenings. The question was no more than academic, however, as there were still two and a half hours to go before opening time.
The conductor and driver were leaning against the bonnet of the bus and had lit cigarettes. They looked at me with, it seemed, suspicion. The other passengers were disappearing about their business. Squaring my shoulders resolutely—I was now feeling absolutely awful, with an almost continuously running nose and a throat occupied by a piece of corn-on-the-cob at boiling temperature in which pinheads had been substituted, haphazard, for maize—I set off, feet crunching on the cinders. I headed in the general direction of the dunes, which with their tufts of blue-green spiky grass ran up to the fringe of the car park.
Short sight and unfamiliarity with the terrain led me to select a gate in the boundary fence, itself trimmed with barbed wire, that had been padlocked. I could feel the crew of the bus watching me as, anxious not to lose face by returning, I made heavy weather of climbing over it.
Then followed a purgatorial period—an hour? two hours?—stumbling about in the soft powdery sand of Cumber dunes. I soon found that it was better to keep to the valleys, for on breasting the peaks one would be virtually blinded by stinging blasts of granulated (it seemed) flint. It was curious, this wind, for in the cobbled streets of Westerlea the atmosphere had seemed perfectly still. From time to time I would catch glimpses of the famous Cumber beaches. The tide was out, of course, and a great grey vista of damp, rivulated sand stretched directly out for about four and a half miles to the white edge of the surf.
At intervals I would surprise people. A fat woman exposing her legs; a child relieving itself; inevitably, a courting couple—noticing with annoyance in this case that the girl was really quite pretty. Each time my intrusion aroused resentment and indignation. Persecution mania developed and soon I began to feel desperately hunted. I was a convict, ‘framed’ of course, on the run from Sing-Sing, or Alcatraz; my breath came in gasps; round every corner lurked an armed warder, corrupt, sadistic; there was a price on my head; ‘Shoot on sight’, the sheriff had said.
Then I had a rather odd experience.
Parched and utterly exhausted, I was attempting to make my way inland again, hoping to cut the road farther back and nearer Westerlea, there to pick up the, or a, bus which would take me home on my remaining fourpence. When finally I breasted the last range of dunes I came out at a little settlement of beach bungalows, the majority of them, it seemed, unoccupied and with their shutters closed. But from the one nearest to me, a distance of about sixty yards I should say, a figure emerged. It was Gevaert, wearing a seaman’s roll-top jersey over his red shirt. Hopeful of a lift back in the Rover, I called to him and waved.
I had expected him to respond grudgingly, but comprehensively, in order to be able to indulge his fondness for the implied rebuke: ‘Aha, my friend, enjoying the air, eh? I see you managed to get little Paul’s exercises corrected sooner than you had anticipated,’ and so on; perhaps even man-to-man out in the open, away from the womenfolk, a few more confidences. But instead he looked up quickly and then away again, making no acknowledgment, and disappeared at a jog-trot behind one of the lean-to’s.
How very odd. It had been him, surely? My short sight often made me fail to recognize people, but rarely ever to misidentify them, and then only at extreme range. Perhaps he had not noticed me properly. My voice was distorted by Pick’s cold and he was not expecting me down there. Nevertheless it was faintly peculiar. I was still convinced that I had not made a mistake and ran down the bank towards the compound. However, it was protected, as in the case of The Old Trader, by a barbed-wire fence, and by the time that I had got through this the scent was cold.
Peering about among the huts, I came across two children rolling about in the dirt in their knickers and said to them:
‘I say, have you seen a man in a red shirt and a seaman’s jersey?’
They said nothing and on my repeating the question more firmly one of them began to cry. The sound of this brought a female parent, equally negligent in matters of dress, and of the lower orders, out of one of the bungalows. To her I addressed the same question, but her reply, though more colourful than theirs, was equally negative.
&n
bsp; 9 * Canon Brooke
Canon Brooke, the latest but by no means the least imposing addition to the menagerie, arrived at 4.45 p.m. in a dirty but still impressive Armstrong-Siddeley Sapphire limousine with glass partition, driven by a thin young man, who was also wearing a dog-collar.
The adjectival prefix ‘poor’ often attached to his name by Mrs. Gevaert was inappropriate, I thought. He was a tall, big-boned man, with the chairman’s manner showing intermittently through an unctuous, old-world veneer; and tufted eyebrows like furry caterpillars set very high up on his forehead so that he had a faintly incredulous appearance.
I watched with envy the authoritative, gracious manner in which he received and dispensed greetings. Myself, I was in a sorry state, having returned some five minutes before from my ordeal at Cumber, and stood by the fireplace (the fire was unlit) shivering, with sand in my shoes and my eyes watering.
How prosperous and self-assured Canon Brooke seemed. A career in the Church? The thought flickered across my mind. Perhaps, though, there was a ‘maximum commencing age’ as in the R.A.F. or the Coal Board or other matriarchal institutions whose advertisements in the daily Press caught my eye from time to time.
‘A pleasure as always, dear lady,’ he was saying, looking at a heavy, gold pocket watch which he had taken from his waistcoat pocket. ‘As always. I fear that I am a trifle behind time. I had business at Grebe and it appears that en route my—er—we’—the caterpillars rubbed noses briefly—‘lost the way.’
‘So easy on these winding lanes,’ smiled Mrs. Gevaert. ‘Which do you prefer, Canon? Tea’—she waved an ornate silver teapot that I had not previously seen—‘or sherry?’
Everyone else in the room, with the exception of myself who had not so far been offered either, had a tea-cup in his hand. These included Gevaert himself, no longer in fisherman’s jersey but neatly changed in a brown suit, Mrs. Roydon, and the Reverend Pick. Canon Brooke, however, gave immediate confirmation of his proconsular status by saying:
‘Dear lady, may I? The vicar of Grebe was most generous with his offer of tea and I partook, I indulged, perhaps too freely: now, at this moment, a glass of your delicious sherry would, I feel … Dear me, will I be alone?’
‘I’ll join you,’ I felt like saying, and then said. But it was an inaudible croak which Gevaert smothered by sidling up to me with a cup of tea and hissing:
‘Take this up to little Paul, who’s studying in his room. Then come down and lend a hand.’
On my way back down the stairs I felt so ill that I thought I would pop into the bathroom and take my temperature. This proved to be, rather alarmingly, 101 degrees. I sat down on the edge of the bath and lit a cigarette. This was bad. The cigarette tasted very unpleasant. As a gesture of solidarity with the white corpuscles or whoever it was that were combating, so ineffectively, Pick’s microbes, I emptied the bottle of quinine tablets into the palm of my hand and swallowed them rapidly one by one. I looked round for any further source of comfort and noticing a tube of Veganin tablets also took three or four of these.
There, then, that should fix things for the evening, at any rate. Rather shakily I made my way down the remaining flight of stairs and back into the lounge.
They were discussing, of course, the harvest festival. It was apparent, however, that Kitty’s disappearance had given rise to another shifting of the complex of alliances built up round this subject. The Gevaerts seemed to be taking advantage of the situation to try to back out altogether, although Mrs. Roydon gave the impression of having veered round and was occupying a ‘You must stand by your commitments’ position.
Canon Brooke himself was showing, or feigning, surprise at these shiftings. ‘Now, let me see, we’ll write down the order of events, shall we, starting with the assembly at Chandler’s Yard? Dear me, I seem to have mislaid, to be without my—can I have a pencil, someone?’—this last request addressed to Pick, who scuttled about obediently and produced one.
He stood in considerable awe of his superior, it was apparent, and I allowed a smirk to pass over my features as I dwelt, momentarily, on Canon Brooke’s reaction to being shown a few blue snaps of the vicar of Westerlea helping one of his choir-maidens into her surplice.
His voice boomed fruitily on: ‘… the concern of us all to ensure a smooth and harmonious running of the ceremony.’
‘But, Canon,’ Mrs. Gevaert interrupted timidly, ‘little Kitty du Chair has gone away, and it does make it just a little awkward for us to press on as arranged.’ She gave further details of Kitty’s absence.
‘Ah yes, to be sure. But verily a domestic upheaval of this kind, deplorable, lamentable, though it may be, indeed is, should not be allowed to loom overlarge. I take it that no harm has come to the young lady?’
‘But, you see, Canon,’ weighed in Gevaert, ‘this is not known. Poor Nora, she was to have been here this evening, as you know, but she is quite broken down by the event. That is why Elizabeth and I feel——’
‘My good Max’—there was just a hint of steel fibre in this one—‘we cannot allow a personal factor such as this to disorganize a traditional, Christian, function of such long standing and universal repute as the Westerlea harvest parade. One, moreover, which is upon us so soon: we cannot allow this. It is now many weeks since, at your wife’s request, I began to work out details for the incorporation of your own float in the parade. I am directly responsible to my Lord Bishop for the smooth running of a function which takes place under a not inconsiderable glare of publicity both local and national. Last-minute alterations are most inimical to this.’
‘Quite,’ said Pick, catching Canon Brooke’s eye, only.
‘If by chance,’ Canon Brooke went on, ‘it should so happen that Mrs. du Chair feels that her circumstances render it impossible for her to fulfil the role that she has selected, what fairer substitute,’ he made a wide sweep of his arm and beamed, ‘than the lovely Mrs. Roydon?’
Notionally, that is to say by gesture, tone, and colouring, Mrs. Roydon said, ‘Oh, Canon, this is so sudden.’ Actually, she said, ‘Well, I had never thought of it.’
The Gevaerts looked nonplussed. Mrs. Gevaert, an experienced conversational guerilla, said, after looking dreamily out of the window at the Armstrong-Siddeley, ‘Wouldn’t your …’ She was clearly uncertain whether to say ‘driver’ or ‘friend’. ‘Would that young man like to come in for a cup of tea?’
‘No, no,’ said Canon Brooke, conveying by the manner and tone of his rejection of the offer the young curate’s minimal status. ‘He’s a probationary student from Culham. Kind though it is of you, dear lady.’
So much for a career in Holy Orders, I thought to myself.
While we all looked, with some complacency, at the thin young man in the dog-collar who still sat upright and staring gauntly ahead from the driving seat, another object came into our field of vision, namely the nose of Ponsonby’s Packard as it oozed gently up to park beside Canon Brooke’s car.
Gevaert gave a deep belly-groan of despair.
Mrs. Gevaert said, ‘Oh dear, there’s Oliver.’
Mrs. Roydon said, ‘The more the merrier.’
Canon Brooke said, ‘Who?’ crossly.
‘My dears, guesties,’ screamed Ponsonby as he entered the room, garters flashing—‘and Brookie! What fun! How are you, Canon?’
‘Oliver,’ said Mrs. Roydon, ‘you’re just in time to help us make up our minds.’
‘Delighted. There’s nothing I like casting better than a vote.’
‘Oh, I don’t think that there is any problem, is there?’ said Canon Brooke, making loud grating noises with his throat. He emptied his sherry glass and went on: ‘Is there, dear lady?’
‘Oh, Canon,’ exclaimed Ponsonby, ‘you and your old-world manners! I do love the clergy so, don’t you?’ He turned, embarrassingly, to me for confirmation and support.
‘Well,’ I replied, thinking of Pick, ‘it depends.’
‘Mm, I know what you mean, but they are so much more sen
sible than the laity.’
I caught Mrs. Gevaert’s eye. She didn’t look pleased.
Ponsonby went on: ‘Now, I’ve got very exciting news. The training ship will be at Appledore on Friday afternoon. “Bunny” Bannister is bringing her down, with a whole host of gorgeous children. Who is coming? Paulie, I know, wants to. Max, dearie, you won’t be able to resist it. The tutor? Of course. Brookie, I’m not so sure if it’s really quite your cuppa, and Claude Pick will, I know, regrettably, have other duties. Flew, darling, how about you?’
Canon Brooke said, ‘Could we not settle first these other matters connected with the festival?’
He seemed rather more nervous of Ponsonby than I would have expected. Perhaps they used to see each other at the Rockingham?
Gevaert said, ‘It is not yet certain who, if any of us, will be coming, my good Oliver.’
At this point little Paul started jumping up and down and shouting and I thought that I might leave the room (which now contained eight people) for a bit. But just as I got to the door and had my hand on the knob it opened and in came Riddle-Brede.
‘Well, everybody,’ he said, in tones of the utmost gruffness, ‘I really came to see Max about this, but you may as well all know about it. Poor little Kitty du Chair has disappeared. I’ve been talking to Nora about it—the poor woman is practically out of her mind with grief—and we are both of us agreed that it is a police matter.’
‘Let us not do anything precipitate,’ spat Gevaert.
10 * More of Mrs. Roydon
When they had all gone and we were left to ourselves at the table I was beginning to form, though not to savour, the opinion that it really was a police matter. The straight fact was, after all, that she had gone, genuinely disappeared, now. It would be in the papers tomorrow: and my germ-clouded reason dropped smoothly into the groove of casual inference—girls who are reported in the papers as having disappeared have invariably been murdered, therefore the fact that the Press had got hold of it was as good as saying she was dead.