by Mavis Cheek
Marion Fitzhartlett, who that morning had ridden her chestnut mare from the Old Manor to the village street, as she did every morning, and was even now curving round the bottom of Pound Hill on her usual riding circuit, was Dryden’s goal. He saw her with her straight back, sturdy thighs, in all her well-bred glory and at her best on a horse. It was, of course, a shame that when she smiled she did so with a rather lopsided wink that could be a little unnerving for the uninformed. It was all to do with that wretched figure cut into the Hill. Up the Hill she had gone alone for the first time, riding her pony with tremendous skill and confidence though only ten years old, when the pony – obviously owning far less of each commodity – reared – and off she came, landing firmly on her head at the very top of the Gnome’s manliness. The nervous tic of a wink had stayed with her after the event.
There were some that said it was the fault of the Gnome that the pony stumbled on the edge of the cutting, that it was shocked to its equine core to find something so much better endowed than itself, but no one could be sure. What was known was that Marion should not have been up there riding alone – that her nanny or a groom, or one of her parents should have accompanied her – and the ensuing rows and recriminations in the Old Manor left Marion disinclined to ride up the Hill or go anywhere near the Gnome ever again. But she was of old Norman stock and her riding continued. She could not think of a life without it. The nanny was dismissed, the groom sulked for weeks, and Marion’s mother was never the same again. As to her father, Sir Roger, it was hard to say if he was affected by the incident or not. For he was also of old Norman stock where teeth-gritting was the best you’d get in a severe situation. Ever afterwards Marion skirted the Hill on her various mounts. Nor did she, as she grew into her teens, give up her love of horses for the love of young men. No. Marion stayed faithful to the equines in her life – and left the young men to dash about, snigger at the Gnome, and admit defeat where the possibility of getting Marion up the Hill and on to her back was concerned.
Nigel, when asked by his father if he liked Marion Fitzhartlett, said that in his opinion Marion Fitzhartlett looked like his infant drawings of his now dead mother: hair sticking out straight and untamed, face asymmetrical, eyebrows all over the place – and that peculiar facial tic. Come to that, she had no bosoms whatsoever. In vain did Dryden point out that she had a fine, curvaceous bottom (from many years of hard horse riding). Nigel did not see a fine, curvaceous bottom in the same light as the fine and curvaceous bust revealed to him atop the Gnome one moonlit night by his secret fiancée.
Until this morning, Nigel would have been perfectly happy to marry in secret and own that bust for the rest of his life. Until this morning Julie Barnsley, who might not have been the first love of his life but whom he was very happy to make his last, had been everything he wanted. And then, in a moment, just a moment, all that had changed. Julie Barnsley, the most perfect little woman in the world, the love of his life, the (secret) bride of his choice, was as dust in the street since the advent of Molly Bonner and the exciting pink, red and black of her. He did not know how he was going to effect this new relationship – but he knew that he would begin trying at once. He also knew that – unless he kept well out of her way – Julie Barnsley would not take it lightly. She had once told him that, should he stray, she would take it upon herself to make a gelding out of him. The laugh she had emitted after this statement still rang in his ears.
Nigel, turning away from the view which now held nothing of interest for him, nor would, he vowed, until the girl in pink re-emerged, caught sight of Mrs Webb out in her gnome garden, inspecting her little men. Nigel thought them rather sweet and liked their brightness. The houses at this end of the village street for the most part being rather dull and good and respectable with traditional colours, Nigel thought the gnomes added a bit of fun. Fun was not paramount in the hierarchy of the village but Mrs Webb, though much frowned upon with her garden of gnomes, was tolerated, since Mrs Webb was part of the occasional staff of the Old Manor and therefore untouchable.
Two
DORCAS FAIRBROTHER REMOVED her hands from the keyboard, placed them in her lap, and waited for the visitor to be shown in. She closed her eyes momentarily after watching her employer exit the room. In the matter of Miles’s prathood, she thought, Oh My Giddy Aunt does not come near it. If there were a bigger, meaner prat living in Lufferton Boney, then Dorcas had yet to meet him. Miles took the laurels. Prat of Prats. She put her hands to her mouth to suppress a laugh, which was a shame as laughing did not come very easily to Dorcas these days. But Miles must never suspect her true feelings about him. That would never do. Unfortunately for Dorcas, she relied on him for a living and for the little portion left over that she put away in her building society account every month.
Dorcas Fairbrother sometimes, but not very often nowadays, considered how different it might have been. Almost five years ago she had been engaged to Robin Whittington, Miles’s brother. And if giddy aunts did not come into it, chalk and cheese certainly did. It was hard to imagine two less similar human beings, and that they were brothers made it all the more remarkable. Miles, the younger by two years, was tall and thin, not given to kindness, pale of eye, thin of lip and of a waspish temperament. Robin had a cheerful, easy nature, willing to help anyone and on the whole always thought the glass was half full. Miles was a musician by training, a pianist and a violinist, neither of which instruments he played with any great feeling or warmth; in consequence, they produced for him a very thin living. He had not touched either instrument since he gained his parental inheritance. Robin, who in most regards was a loyal brother, said once (when he’d had more than two pints of Old Romany) that his brother was to music what an accountant was to poetry (and Dorcas, who had not had more than half a pint of Old Romany) did not like to point out the flaw in the argument called T. S. Eliot. But so it was. The little baby grand sat under its dustsheet in the small music room at the back of the house, and the violin was wrapped in faded brown velvet and stuffed inside a trunk. Dorcas might have played the piano but it was valuable and – as Miles said – best not to tinker with an heirloom. Miles, however, did tinker with anything that met with his disapproval or blocked his finances in any way. And currently, at the top of the pile was that contemptuous word heritage.
Robin, to whom heritage meant something positive, might have been found in a basket on his parents’ doorstep, so different was he from his brother. To Robin, nature was all and he had trained as a doctor of medicine; after qualifying he specialised in tropical medicine. He started to conduct his research in South America and – almost inevitably, as he told Dorcas – graduated to becoming more of an explorer, a bit of a botanist, and a touch political seeing that the world was under attack from human greed and corruption.
He was a young man with a heart and a mission and he recognised early on that the planet he loved was in trouble and that its wildlife, its whole life, depended on people like him publicising the fact. He knew that the more he found to prove that the key to survival was natural resources, the better for all. The greatest excitement in his professional life was to discover, at the age of only twenty-nine, that the bark of a tree deep in the Peruvian hinterland contained the possible cure for Winterton’s Disease. He travelled to far-off places and he wrote newspaper articles, books, pamphlets – he gave lectures at the Royal Geographical Society, he talked on television and on radio. He was full of energy and hope and governments and businesses without consciences would have quite liked him to disappear off the face of the earth. He had even had threats. But still he continued. One national newspaper called him Superman, which had made Robin blush and Dorcas puff up like a boastful toad. Here Dorcas paused to allow a smile at the memory – and not a bad looker, either. Shorter and more muscular than his brother, he had crisp reddish curls that could somehow never be tamed, and a bright, open face that Dorcas – entirely inexplicably – once found it impossible not to kiss on a fairly regular basis.
How Dorcas tried not to kiss that face and how she forced herself to walk away from that face on at least two occasions! But she failed. Robin was the last thing she needed: a traveller like her parents, crazy about landscape and green cultivation, a man without dust on his shoes – no moss on any part of him – but – it seemed – he was the first thing she wanted. And despite her doubts, she got him. He was the first stable adult she had ever dared to be close to. And look what happened.
Dorcas was the child of neo-hippies; she was brought up – or rather brought herself up – largely in the back of her parents’ old VW van as it traversed what her mother and father liked to call Glorious Albion. Dorcas had no formal education, no formal health care, no formal parenting and, as many who have been left to their own devices in such matters will, she developed a strong set of rules for herself, a set of moralities and a way through the confusions of life that helped her grow into a remarkably sane and balanced young woman. A young woman who had seen the side of life called itinerant and riddled with fecklessness and would have none of it. No. What Dorcas wanted was to be settled and calm and ordinary. To do this she needed an income, and to get that – she must have a job. But of course she was a young woman without any qualifications whatsoever, unless having read an enormous number of books counted as a qualification which of course it did not. Even so, at the age of seventeen she said goodbye to her parents (somewhere on Barra) and went south.
Over the years she had saved a small sum in her Post Office account, from fruit picking, helping out at stables and the like, and now she withdrew it, stayed at the YWCA in London, and paid for six typing lessons. The Geographical Society was looking for a clerk typist. Dorcas applied, talked at the interview about aspects of the British landscape instead of her typing speeds – and was successful. The rest, as you might say, was history. For almost immediately, bouncing into the office with a request for an envelope, came Robin.
Shortly after the envelope incident, and after Dorcas had attempted to remain aloof for a considerable amount of time – at least a week – Robin told her that his most exciting moment in all the world was finding the tree with the bark for the Winterton’s – until he met her. That moment, he said, was even more wonderful. He could never bring himself, he said, to use the envelope that had brought them together. He said this in a very surprised voice. And Dorcas received the news in a very surprised way. For she instantly said that she, too, felt the same and that, as far as she was concerned, he could have as many envelopes as he wanted from her.
So Robin loved Dorcas and she loved him and he understood her doubts about the roving way of things. ‘My parents …’ she began to say, apologetically, but he put his finger to her mouth. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘and in any case it’s probably about time I stayed in one place.’ For Dorcas he was prepared to set aside his long absences and dangerous pursuits and become more circumspect. ‘You,’ he told her, ‘are too precious to stay so far away from.’ One of Dorcas’s favourite books was Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. She was hooked. Sadly it became much more akin to a romantic history as Robin never returned from South America.
Of course, Robin had said, there would be other, smaller trips over the coming years, but this one, funded by the Bolivian government and designed to get his advice and help on land settlements for peasants along its borders, would be his last big expedition. The peasants were better at looking after the land than the greedy landowners, and these areas of South America were precious. He would then come back and after they married he would do more broadcasting, more writing and more gentle film-making, and he would leave the big stuff to the next generation – it was time to settle down. Robin was thirty-three, Dorcas was twenty-five and the future looked wonderfully golden for both of them.
So, while Dorcas went down to stay at Lufferton Boney, and lived in the Squidge, a tiny house on four floors, but just one room and a passageway wide, built in the space between the The Orchard House and what was now Beautiful Bygones but was then the butcher’s, Robin set off for his last great adventure. Robin had inherited Hill View House from his parents, and Miles owned the Squidge. You could not fit a baby grand into the Squidge, so Miles continued to live in the parental home and the Squidge was let to seasonal holidaymakers who wished to see the Gnome and the tumuli and other ancient sites all around. Miles made a decent profit from the letting, lived free with his brother who paid most the bills, and resented the whole situation like fury. This he kept to himself.
While Robin was away Miles asked Dorcas to help him with sorting and cataloguing or dispersing his parents’ library which – he hoped – might be valuable and was, unsurprisingly, made up of books on music (his mother was a music historian) and the flora and fauna of the world (his father had been something of a naturalist which is how Robin’s interest had been kindled). Miles found Dorcas very useful. She found Miles astonishingly unlike his brother, but who cared? It would not be for ever. She was engaged now and soon she would be mistress of the house.
And then, one day, almost five years ago, the news came that Robin had vanished. The jungle, it seemed, had eaten him up. One moment he had been investigating the viability of setting up farms without hurting the amazing biodiversity in Central America: the next it appeared to have killed him. If not the jungle, then another malign force. The threats of earlier years were remembered. It was known that a handful of rich Bolivians owned more than the rest of the poor peasantry put together – and wanted to keep it that way. There were bandits who worked for them, and bandits who worked for themselves. Who knew what or which was the source of Robin’s disappearance? Dorcas preferred to think it was Nature rather than Man that took him from her. If so, being jungle, there was nothing of him to send home to England but his equipment left back at base which went to the Geographical Society, a boot that was found near where he was last seen, his well-used leather hat, ditto and, tellingly, Dorcas’s photograph. These last three items arrived with Dorcas some weeks after the announcement that he had disappeared.
For the first few years, while the Foreign Office and newspapers took up the story and looked for Robin, she kept the boot and the hat, into which she tucked her photograph, ready for when he walked back through the door. Then, on the first day of this New Year, she put them away and admitted that he was gone for good. Or at least, gone for good insofar as the FO was concerned. But Dorcas would not entirely accept the disappearance until she had travelled to where Robin was last seen and had stood in that place herself. Only then, she thought, would she know. Hence the small amount of savings she put away each month. Unfortunately, Miles did believe Robin was gone for good and immediately raised her rent.
Nothing much mattered after Robin’s disappearance except the hope that she would one day, at the very least, get to see where he last had trod. Once she had done that, she felt, she could move on. So, for now, Dorcas remained in Lufferton Boney, which she found suitable for her mood, being a village of disparate beings none of whom seemed really happy – and she continued to live in the Squidge, and went on working for Miles, for a (not very big) salary. After years of living like that, she thought it was probably how she would end her days. The library in Hill View had long been sorted out, but Miles was now wealthy enough to indulge himself in whatever fool’s errand took his fancy, to enjoy having a secretary to shore him up in all his money-making fantasies, and Dorcas – who took a sour view of such pomposity – simply carried on. That Miles stood to inherit Robin’s not inconsiderable estate, and did not offer Dorcas a share of it, was something that had not gone undetected by the rest of the village. They took Dorcas to their troubled hearts (even eating her chocolate brownies which were little better than Winifred’s). Miles made sure that her rent to him was a tad lower than his salary to her so that she could survive but never be free. I am like Rapunzel, she thought, and immediately – because the thought was so fanciful – had her very long hair cut short.
Miles’s greatest annoyance came from the inclusion in the fam
ily inheritance of the Gnome of Pound Hill and the requirement, through some agreed codicil, to keep it in good order. He had not done so and the powers that be in his despised world of heritage were making noises. It was part of his duty. And if he did not look after the site properly, they would do it for him and send him the bill accordingly. It would be substantial. Or they would buy the Hill for the nation. Perish the thought. Miles could imagine the armies of heritage-seekers trotting past his window, chucking their crisp packets and drinks cartons and who knew what else over his garden wall. Not to mention the infuriating sight of them queuing up to buy tickets. Money that should and could be his. It seemed there was no way out of it. Though Miles fumed and fought, he was stuck. As Dorcas pointed out, he was in a lose–lose situation. If he sold the Hill and its priapic incumbent once it was provenly his, he would have to sell the house, and vice versa. And he did not wish to sell the house. That was a socialist government for you. In Miles’s opinion all British governments were socialist and much of the current cabinet were next in line to Lenin. No, it was a terrible dilemma. But at least Dorcas had stopped saying that it would all be resolved when Robin came home. She seemed to have given up on that one at least.
Dorcas watched this struggle of Miles’s with the hard eyes of something considerably less than Christian charity. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, she enjoyed every minute of his predicament and – where possible – dripped a little lemon juice on the wound from time to time. Not much made her smile nowadays but this fed a newly discovered vein of sour amusement within her. Miles had tried, and failed, to find a way to make money out of the Hill, but the Gnome was said to be an aid to fecundity and he was, by custom, free for access by the public at large. Therefore Miles could not charge admission. If they could do it at Kew Gardens, he raged at Dorcas, why couldn’t he do it here? One day Kew was the National Botanical Gardens, a so-called lung for poor Londoners at a penny a go, the next they had changed all that and it cost a fortune to get in. Clever. Very clever.