Alice Hartley‘s Happiness

by Gregory, Philippa

  Alice breathed in a deep sigh of excitement and pleasure. She walked through the gap in the hedge where the broken fence posts marked the excessive enthusiasm of the man from the Sun newspaper, and strode towards the circle. It was about twenty feet across. A wide green circle, with the fresh green hay squashed symmetrically down in a perfect pattern.

  Alice took her crystal on its chain from around her neck and held it carefully in one hand.

  ‘Are you communicating with me?’ she asked the indifferent air and the sunny morning. ‘Have you come here to give me a sign?’

  The crystal moved slightly in the warm breeze. Alice glanced around the field. There were hordes of nutters and charlatans trying to dowse with sticks or with crystals on string, or with Y brackets of wire. Alice sighed impatiently. All these amateur dabblers would interrupt her communication with the powers which were coming through. She could feel the free flow of her communication to other astral planes being blocked by their slap-happy amateurism.

  ‘Are you getting through?’ a little weasel-faced man at her elbow asked. ‘Who d’you think did it, Missus?’

  Alice spread her arms wide. The sleeves of the red gown billowed dramatically. There was a rattle of sound behind her as a dozen camera shutters whirred and clicked. Alice affected not to notice.

  ‘I feel another life force,’ she said. ‘I feel it very powerfully.’

  ‘Was it pranksters?’ the man asked. ‘Practical jokers?’

  Alice glanced at him and turned away. ‘It may be powers from another astral plane,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Or powers from another planet. Or, who knows, it may be my own psychic power which is manifesting itself in Doctor Simmonds’s hay –’ she paused. ‘I am surprised it happened in Doctor Simmonds’s meadow. I would not have thought him the sort of man to attract psychic energy.’

  ‘He won’t speak to us,’ the reporter offered resentfully. ‘What sort of a man is he?’

  ‘Lumpish,’ Alice said graphically. ‘Stupid. All sorts of miracles have occurred around him all his life and he denies them. Miracle cures, crop circles, growth, natural birth, he denies everything.’

  The reporter was writing frantically. ‘And it always happens around him?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Alice said gently. She was barely listening to him. ‘His life, like that of everyone on this planet, is a whirlwind of powerful phenomena. But he pretends that none of it takes place. He pretends that nothing happens.’

  ‘That’ll do for me!’ the reporter said, pleased. ‘I’ll be off now.’ He nodded at Alice and scuttled off through the field, waving his arms at a mobile film unit who were unpacking at the corner of the hay meadow. Alice barely noticed he had gone. She was attuning to the energy of the crop circle and before her half-shut eyes she could see, with mysterious clarity, eight or even twelve moving shapes. Probably UFOs, possibly parent-ships. Undoubtedly trying to communicate with her.

  Alice spent some time in the hayfield. She only left when the Rithering local policeman came and ordered everyone out, warning them of the laws against trespass and damage, and tied a strip of white and red plastic across the gap in the hedge. As the field emptied of psychic day-trippers Alice saw the kitchen curtain twitch as Mrs Simmonds regarded the trampled wasteland of what had been her husband’s pride and joy, his hobby hayfield, his little bit of rural England.

  Alice drifted home, her head full of strange incomplete sentences and a throbbing ache, communications, no doubt, from Beyond.

  Aunty Sarah was in the sitting-room, she beckoned Alice in. ‘Come and see this! Come and see this!’ she exclaimed delightedly.

  It was the midday local news on the television. The first shot was an aerial inspection of the Simmonds’ paddock. As the helicopter hovered you could see the Simmonds’ back door open and Patricia Simmonds come out into the garden, holding her iron-grey permed curls with both hands and staring upwards at the noise. Then the down-blast of the helicopter engine snatched at her washing line and one end broke free. With one hand still on her hair, Patricia Simmonds tried to catch the wildly flapping line and rescue her washing. Watched by all the viewers of the South Television area, Patricia Simmonds struggled to hold her laundry down to earth. All over the home counties hundreds of bored women watching midday television and drinking the cooking sherry sniggered in malicious joy as one week’s wash billowed up, up, and finally tore free of its moorings and vanished out of sight.

  ‘Watch!’ Aunty Sarah commanded.

  The reporter who had been in the field with Alice was now beaming out of the television screen.

  ‘Today as I stood at the edge of the latest crop circle phenomenon in the little village of Rithering, local people told me that the owner of this field, Doctor James Simmonds, lives among a vortex of paranormal happenings. This is not the first time that extraordinary events have happened around him. His neighbours tell of miracle births, faith healing and extraordinary cures, which are putting the village of Rithering on the map as the psychic centre of the south.’

  The film cut rapidly to a picture of the Simmonds’ doorway half open and Doctor Simmonds’s face, purple with rage, peering around the crack of the door and mouthing obscenities.

  ‘The doctor denies his extra-normal powers,’ the reporter went on, ‘possibly for fear that his talents might be abused. But his neighbours, who have just launched an Alternative Healing and Growth Centre, attest to his living in what they call a whirlwind of unexplained phenomena.’

  The film cut back to the little man in front of the field. Behind him in the background, among the other dowsers and believers, was Alice holding out her crystal and waiting for a message.

  ‘Whatever the cause, the local doctor of Rithering woke up this morning to find himself a media sensation!’ the reporter proclaimed. ‘And students of the paranormal will be beating a path to his house at Rithering for a long time to come!’

  In case any nutter had any doubt where to find the doctor, the film ended with a long panned shot of the main road into Rithering and focused on his house. The report ended. The bland face and aggressive hair of the midday news-reader replaced the picture of Rithering, and her perky, falsely bright voice started hammering the guts out of another non-story. Alice clicked the switch off.

  ‘Doctor Simmonds isn’t going to like that,’ Alice said thoughtfully.

  Sarah nodded her head in complete agreement. She looked like a satisfied boa constrictor which has just swallowed a hugely enjoyable pig belonging to someone else.

  ‘I think I’ll have a little lie down,’ she said. ‘I’m exhausted with all this excitement. Fancy Doctor Simmonds being the centre of miraculous phenomena and alien spacecraft landings.’

  Alice glanced at Sarah, her suspicions alerted. ‘Aunty Sarah,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t anything to do with you, was it?’

  Sarah leaned forward and patted Alice’s hand. ‘Doesn’t matter, does it?’ she asked sweetly. ‘Just as long as Simmonds has something else to worry about and keeps his nose out of our business?’

  Alice gasped. ‘You did the crop circle?’ she demanded.

  Sarah nodded. ‘Last night,’ she said with quiet satisfaction. ‘While I was baby-sitting. You said Simmonds wouldn’t believe a spacecraft if it landed in his own hayfield. So I did it! Now we’ll see what he makes of that! And it’ll keep him too busy to come in upsetting us while we are doing so nicely. Keep him out of our hair for a while, won’t it?’

  Alice felt herself smiling. ‘You did it?’ she confirmed.

  Aunty Sarah nodded, her lizard-bright eyes gleaming. ‘I’ve settled him,’ she said. ‘He won’t be coming over here bothering us. He won’t be seen dead on our doorstep in case someone thinks he’s converted! And he can moan all he likes to the parish council – no one’s going to listen to him when they’ve said on the radiovision that he’s a crank.’

  Alice took Aunty Sarah’s hands. ‘You are a spiteful and scheming old lady,’ she said. ‘And I love you very much. That was an insp
ired thing to do. The vicar is on our side, the doctor is discredited. We’re home and dry. Nothing can hurt us now!’

  But even as she spoke, you – the reader – felt a deep sense of foreboding. For you are aware of the convention of Dramatic Irony, even if Alice is not. This is the device whereby just as everyone says that everything is wonderful … something goes dreadfully wrong. And Alice said the worst thing that anyone in a novel ever can say.

  Why do they never learn – these fictional characters who so blithely trigger their own dénouement? They read enough novels – we see them reading all the time. Some of them, indeed, tediously many of them, are novelists. Why, therefore, do they not realize that it is Utterly Fatal to express any satisfaction with life in a novel? Better by far to moan on like Silas Marner than to dance like Polyanna towards a zimmer frame.

  ‘We’re home and dry,’ Alice said with satisfaction.

  The reader gasped.

  There was a thunderous knock at the front door.

  Alice strolled across the hall, the heels of her sandals tapping on the loose tiles and opened half of the big double door. It was Doctor Simmonds on the doorstep, not at all abashed at his sudden rise to fame, angrier, fatter and even redder-faced than yesterday.

  For one brief childishly hopeful moment, Alice thought that he might have been so shocked by the dramatic communication from Aliens (or Aunty Sarah) that he had come to be stripped naked and rubbed all over with passion fruit and ginseng; but then she saw his scowling face and knew he had come for a very different satisfaction. He had come to get back at Alice for telling him that he was fat and old and ugly.

  Also, without evidence to support him, he blamed her for the crop circle and for his sudden reputation as the guru of Rithering. He did not need to know about Synchronicity to believe that Alice Hartley meant trouble for conventionally minded stick-in-the-muds like himself. And he believed that everything which had gone wrong since Alice had arrived in the village was somehow connected with her.

  And there was worse.

  With Doctor Simmonds, standing half a pace behind him with an expression of studied neutrality, was a man she did not know. He was wearing an illcut suit, shiny at the seams. It was a suit which was trying so hard to look like a suit which a normal person might choose off a rack with the exercise of his free will, that Alice knew at once, with a sinking heart, that he must be a CID officer trying to look like a normal man in a normal suit.

  He took the lead. ‘Inspector Bromley, Brighton CID,’ he said, a man too important to waste time with verbs. ‘Can we come in, Missus?’ He was halfway across the doorstep before Alice murmured, ‘Yes,’ and led the way into the dining-room. Out of the corner of her eye Alice saw Aunty Sarah drift noiselessly and unseen up the stairs to avoid Doctor Simmonds once again.

  Alice seated herself in the large carver chair behind the massive dining-table with the wide bow window behind her. She let them perch themselves dangerously on Professor Hartley’s stacking studio chairs which creaked and tipped warningly when they moved too quick.

  Alice moved a sheet of clean paper before her and picked up a pen. Her hands were trembling slightly but she felt better with the artefacts of Professor Hartley’s power around her.

  ‘How can I help you?’ she asked.

  ‘Firstly, let’s have some details,’ the CID man said. ‘You are?’

  Alice told him her name and former address and he wrote it down very carefully, checking the spelling of everything. When he came to her surname he turned back his notebook to a marked place and compared the spelling against something already written on an earlier page. Alice felt her throat tighten with anxiety. She was wondering if he had come about the Jaguar.

  ‘Date of birth?’ the policeman asked.

  Alice told him.

  ‘That means, you are now …’ he paused while he completed slow but essential mental arithmetic. Alice tried to be amused by the delay but it seemed to her that he deliberately took an unflattering length of time, as if he were working through the twenties and the thirties and thinking about taking his socks off to use his toes to help him count through the forties and fifties.

  ‘I’m forty-two,’ she said snappishly at the very moment when he had worked it out for himself.

  ‘As I thought,’ the Inspector said, with conspicuous lack of gallantry. ‘And do you live here, Mrs Hartley? Is this your permanent address?’

  Alice nodded. The doctor shifted impatiently in his seat and muttered, ‘Hardly permanent! Just moved in this week, more like squatters, really.’

  The Inspector frowned at him and Doctor Simmonds fell resentfully silent.

  ‘With whom exactly do you reside?’ he asked.

  Alice told them Michael’s name, his former address and his occupation. The Inspector asked his age and looked at her from under his eyebrows when she told him that Michael was twenty.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, as if the news were somehow very agreeable. ‘And what is his home address?’

  ‘He lives here,’ Alice said foolishly. She could feel her cheeks were growing hot.

  ‘I mean during the vacations,’ the Inspector said stolidly. ‘He’s only a young lad, isn’t he? He’d go home to his mum in the holidays.’

  Alice swallowed. ‘I don’t know the precise address of his family,’ she said. She gripped the pen to remind her that it was her behind the desk, it was her with a clean sheet of paper before her. She had committed no crime against persons (unless you counted Thomas the cat, and surely no one would send a CID officer around for a cat whose Life Force was already weak?). ‘They live somewhere in Tunbridge Wells,’ she said, clearing her throat.

  The CID officer turned back the pages of his notebook to another marked place. ‘Would that be Mr and Mrs P. Coulter of 23 The Walk, Tunbridge Wells?’ he asked.

  Alice looked at the notebook as a little bird might look into the hypnotic eyes of a dancing snake. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It could be. You would have to ask Michael when he comes home.’

  ‘Out, is he?’ asked the Inspector, as if that were more than usually evasive.

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘At the university,’ she said. ‘He went in for a lecture.’ She heard a humble note in her voice, seeking praise for getting Michael off to work, as if the CID man was a truancy officer sent around by the university to fetch Michael into class.

  ‘Did he drive in, Mrs Hartley? Do you have a car?’

  ‘No,’ Alice said. ‘He had a lift in with some friends.’

  ‘Do you not have a car?’ the Inspector asked. ‘A car, Mrs Hartley?’

  Alice flushed slightly. ‘We have a Jaguar,’ she said.

  ‘Ah,’ the Inspector said pleasantly. ‘Would that be the Jaguar CHH 100?’

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said in a very small voice.

  Doctor Simmonds moved restlessly in his chair which tipped sideways but unfortunately he saved himself. ‘Ask about the old lady!’ he prompted irritably.

  ‘All In Good Time,’ the Inspector said firmly. He turned a page of the book and licked the stub of his pencil. ‘Jaguar CHH 100, the property of Charles Henry Hartley, your husband?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said shortly.

  ‘And you have this car in your possession?’ he confirmed with irritating slowness.

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said again.

  Inspector Bromley waited for Alice to volunteer how the car, which was never allowed anywhere but Professor Hartley’s locked garage or his labelled parking space at the university, should come to be in the old stables of Rithering Manor stained and spotted with the pollen of rural spring and smelling strongly of fish and old seawater.

  Alice, sensibly, said nothing.

  ‘And now the house,’ the Inspector said, turning a page. ‘Does anyone else live here, in this house?’ he asked. He eyed Alice acutely. ‘I mean live. I mean alive.’

  Alice shrugged her broad shoulders. ‘Yes,’ she said, on safer ground. ‘Michael’s Aunty Sarah lives here.’

/>   ‘She can’t!’ snapped Doctor Simmonds at once. ‘She can’t! It’s medically impossible!’

  Alice’s eyes blazed for a moment but she said nothing.

  ‘You mean she is alive,’ the CID man said slowly. When Alice nodded he wrote the words carefully down.

  ‘That’s not possible,’ Doctor Simmonds said again. ‘She is dead. I have filed the death certificate, and the funeral is booked for tomorrow.’

  The Inspector cleared his throat. ‘Would it be possible for us to see this … lady?’ he asked.

  Alice shrugged. ‘I’ll ask her if she’ll see you,’ she said. She got up from her chair and went out of the dining-room door to stand at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Sarah!’ she called.

  ‘This is macabre!’ the doctor exclaimed. ‘I tell you, she’s dead. I signed the certificate myself after a full examination.’

  ‘Sarah!’ Alice cried.

  The doctor and the Inspector had followed Alice out into the hall.

  ‘She’s dead!’ the doctor said again. ‘Of course she won’t answer.’

  ‘She’s alive!’ Alice snapped, rounding on him at last. ‘I can’t help it if you can’t tell a live person from a dead one. It’s nothing to do with me! I’m not one of your patients, thank God. But I can tell you, after one of my herbal remedies, some herbal tea and a chance to express herself, she was out of that bed and happier and fitter than she has been for years. She has been down for her meals, she has been teaching classes. The other night she danced in the garden in the moonlight. Herbalism has given her a new lease of life. I have made her well!’

  Doctor Simmonds was about to explode. ‘Poppy-cock and quackery!’ he shouted enraged. ‘Witchcraft and nonsense! Corpses raised and corn circles in my hayfield. Don’t think I don’t know who’s to blame for all this! And then telling the journalists that it’s my influence. Good God! That’s trespass and libel you’re guilty of today alone! – and it’s not even lunch-time yet!’