‘One of mine, that were,’ said Youings. He gazed sentimentally at the sack. ‘Pretty little girl, were Tabitha, pink as a rose.’
Bypassing this valediction, Fen embarked on an account of Gobbo’s reminiscences, and Jack Jones’s, and the Rector’s. Towards the end of it, Youings’s wife Ortrud appeared at the side door of the house, carrying a paper bag. An Amazonian woman almost as tall as her husband, she had great physical strength and an emphatic, Junoesque figure. (‘Those bosoms, don’t you know,’ the Major had once pronounced, more in amazement than in admiration. ‘Prodigious things - dazzling -flesh-bulbs.’) Her inexpressive nordic head combined dark eyebrows with cheese-coloured hair put together in a complicated bun at the back, like pallid worms transfixed in mid-orgy.
‘Zu mir, Liebchen,’ she said, evidently addressing Wilfreda. ‘Konditoreisachen.’ She paid no attention to Fen, the ordinary civilities of life being unknown to her.
Wilfreda stopped swaying from side to side and began swaying from back to front instead. In this way she developed enough forward momentum to be able to get her trotters on the move. Wheeling, she lumbered over to Ortrud and was fed with handful after handful of yellow boiled sweets out of the paper bag. Against the resultant background of scrunching and snorting Fen finished his recital, while Youings stood frowning concentratedly.
Then Youings spoke. He did this in low tones, presumably in order to avoid scarifying his wife’s sensibilities by reference to the macabre events of eight weeks previously. Since Wilfreda’s eating made a perfect acoustic baffle, and Ortrud was practically out of earshot anyway, it was an unnecessary precaution. Because of it, however, and because he was sunk in the ninth beatitude of expecting nothing, Fen failed at first to grasp what was being said to him, and had to ask for a repetition. Getting it, he sharpened to attention. For what Youings was asserting amounted to an unqualified denial of everything Gobbo had asserted. In short, wherever else Hagberd might have been at the time when Routh was getting himself brained in the copse at Bawdeys Meadow, he hadn’t, Youings assured Fen, been talking to Gobbo outside The Stanbury Arms.
It worked out this way. Taking the short cut through Mrs Clotworthy’s garden from Chapel Street, where he had been delivering a home-cured ham at the village shop, Youings had seen the Rector stalking past along the lane towards the Arms, and had followed him at a distance of some thirty yards, arriving at Gobbo, the elm and the horse-box just as the Rector was vanishing round the lane’s first bend. By this time Gobbo had lurched to his feet and was setting off home to his supper, mumbling tetchily and scratching his bottom as if, said Youings, ‘a load of old fleas was eating at him’. And quite definitely Hagberd hadn’t been there. Youings knew this because he had paused to inspect the horse-box, a new double-axle Rice which Clarence Tully had just bought; and Hagberd couldn’t possibly have been lurking in or behind that, or behind the elm, or anywhere else in the car-park. He couldn’t have nipped into the pub unobserved, since there had been three people drinking in there as well as Isobel Jones serving. He couldn’t have crossed the lane unobserved, even if there had been anything but a blank wall for him to cross to. And finally, he couldn’t have got round to the side or back of the pub without shinning up another wall or breaking down a locked door in it, which was about as likely, Youings gave Fen to understand, as that he’d flown up into the air and perched himself on a twig. Besides, said Youings reasonably, why should Hagberd have done any of these things? Granted, he’d been a bit mazed up top, but only, when you got down to it, about work and animals and Routh and Mrs Leeper-Foxe. And anyway, he hadn’t been the skulking sort - quite the opposite, in fact.
Fen pointed out that if Hagberd had murdered Routh, he’d skulked when it came to the Bust child.
‘Didn’t want to frighten en, simly,’ Youings surmised.
All this, taken in conjunction with the others’ testimony, seemed decisive enough, and Fen wondered why now, for the first time, he was perversely inclined to believe that there might have been something in what Gobbo had said. He kept this thought private, however, thanking Youings with the air of one whose skein of string has been obligingly untangled by a passerby less ham-handed than himself. Simultaneously, Ortrud Youings shovelled the last of the boiled sweets into Wilfreda, dropped the empty paper bag on to the ground, and turned to go back into the house.
‘Mittagessen gleich’ she called to Youings over her shoulder. In spite of fifteen years’ residence in England, she still never used English when German would do, or even when it wouldn’t.
‘Dinner, that means,’ Youings translated. ‘Proper little cook, my Ortrud.’ He gazed wistfully after her as her bun, broad back, muscular buttocks and long legs disappeared from view through the side door.
And apart from her quite liking the pigs, Ortrud Youings’s cooking - Fen reflected as he went on up the lane - was about the best that anyone ever seemed able to find to say about her. ‘Oh, my dear soul! That Ortrud, er leads en a turrable dance,’ Mrs Clotworthy had confided to Fen on one occasion, discussion of brawn and M.A.S having temporarily palled - a statement which had been confirmed, with trimmings, by everyone Fen had talked to on the subject except Thouless, whose preoccupation with his own sorrows made it difficult for him to keep track of anyone else’s. Youings had met Ortrud while doing his military service with the B.A.O.R. A willing horse, he had been led up the bridal-path only to discover that in addition to having been married for his money (he owned a small amount of investment capital as well as the pig farm) he had saddled himself with a nymphomaniac of a peculiarly tiresome kind. It was bad enough that Ortrud kept having affairs. What made it even worse was that instead of going off with the current favourite, as any other wife would have done, she invited him, if single, to live in Youings’s house, and it was Youings who went off, making do for weeks at a time in a flatlet over Clarence Tully’s stables and commuting daily in order to look after the pigs. Yet through all these frequent intermissions of misery, Youings’s devotion had remained unshaken. It had even grown. Grieving, he doted more and more. The local women, offended at the waste of a perfectly workable husband, were inclined to be censorious about Youings’s apparently limitless tolerance, but the men, in between suggesting that Ortrud, if not divorced, ought at any rate to be beaten - an enterprise few of them would have cared to attempt themselves - were more sentimental, an exception being the Major.
‘Poor silly fellow’s no better than a muffin,’ the Major said of Youings, sternly.
Unfortunate Gobbo, discredited by a muffin.
All the same, Fen was now beginning to ask himself if there hadn’t been more to Routh’s murder than the bizarre details that had met the eye.
3
The Dickinsons’ cottage which Fen had rented had originally been two eighteenth-century semi-detacheds, housing farm labourers; but recently the two had been knocked into one, with the addition of a bathroom at the top of one of the two narrow, precipitous flights of stairs, and of a scullery at the back, so that where the peasantry had once banged their heads rushing out of doors to the earth-closet, the professional classes now banged theirs on their way to do the washing-up. (After two such experiences, Fen had taken to stooping whenever he went through any of the cottage’s doorways, even though all but the one between the kitchen and the scullery were quite high enough to allow him passage upright.) To the outer side wall of the cottage, near the modern garage, clung a garden telephone bell - a clapper set between two enormous mammiform metal domes, their overall effect, through weathering, suggesting some fertility goddess dug up at Benin and rejected as worthless on account of the black bakelite box inscrutably attached to it just above the navel. Downstairs consisted of the scullery, the big kitchen with its Rayburn, and a pleasantly furnished living-room with an upright piano on which Fen played hymn tunes, bits of Don Giovanni, and A Little Sea Picture by Alec Rowley, which he had learned at the age of eight and for some not easily analysable reason had been unable to forget; upstairs there were three bedrooms as w
ell as the bath. A good small garden surrounded three sides of the cottage, petering out at the back in a neglected half acre of grass, shrubs, trees and what seemed to be rabbit tracks. This part (the Dickinsons had encouragingly told Fen, prior to departing for Canada, where they were now touring around music-examining for the Associated Board) -this part of the estate provided an excellent close approach to the cottage for burglars, who would also be helped by the fact that any ground-floor window would swing open at once if a midge collided with it, even glancingly.
Fen’s cleaning was done for him three mornings a week by Mrs Bragg, a big, henna-ed woman who shrieked with happy laughter all the time. He cooked, if you could call it that, for himself.
Trudging up the drive, an access constructed of sharp, ankle-turning rocks lightly filigreed with mud, Fen was displeased to see that Ellis the tortoise, who had gone into hibernation ten days previously, had changed his negligible mind and re-emerged, presumably because of the continuing summery weather. He had also been capsized by a dog - or else, as was quite conceivable if you knew him at all, had somehow managed to get himself wrong way up unaided - and was lying on his back on the lawn, head retracted, feet waving slowly about in the air in what Fen took to be extreme agitation. Restoring him to normal, Fen circled the lawn picking petals from late pansies to feed him with. Ellis was specially fond of pansy petals, but like other foods, they unfortunately had to be premasticated for him. He was undershot, his biting surfaces nowhere near in alignment; left to his own devices, he bolted things and became, according to the Dickinsons, ill. Fen was not so fond of pansy petals. No matter what their original colour, they came out of his mouth black, in the form of tidy, shreddy pellets; they also left him feeling as if his teeth had been sprayed with a particularly odious cheap face-powder. Frowning, Fen conscientiously mumbled pansy petals between tongue and soft palate until Ellis gave signs of being sated. Then he went indoors to rinse his mouth, while Ellis set out on one of his trips to the wall at the lawn’s end, a favourite destination which yet never failed to amaze and terrify him by its impermeability when he arrived at it.
Fen would get on with the brawn that very evening, he thought. Meanwhile, the interior of the small refrigerator being almost entirely filled with shin of beef, he left the pig’s-head sack beside it, adopted his Quasimodo crouch and ducked successfully back into the kitchen. Here he paused by the mirror, from which, not unexpectedly, his own face looked out at him. In the fifteen years since his last appearance, he seemed to have changed very little. Peering at his image now, he saw the same tall lean body, the same ruddy, scrubbed-looking, clean-shaven face, the same blue eyes, the same brown hair ineffectually plastered down with water, so that it stood up in a spike at the crown of his head. Somewhere or other he still had his extraordinary hat. Good. At this rate, he felt, he might even live to see the day when novelists described their characters by some other device than that of manoeuvring them into examining themselves in mirrors.
His entry into the living-room shook the ancient floor-boards and disturbed a mixed pile of Duffy, Powell and Naipaul, which collapsed in several different directions simultaneously. Other post-war British novelists, in other piles, held firm. On the chesterfield the second of Fen’s animal responsibilities, a marmalade tom-cat called Stripey, lay heavily asleep. Stripey had returned earlier that morning exhausted after one of his three-day forays among the district females, expeditions which he seemed to Fen to tackle less for pleasure than because of some vague, oppressive sense of social responsibility, like a repentant long-term convict volunteering for medical experimentation. He was archetypically male, at once coarse, bumptious and pathetic.
Fen sat down beside him, letting his eyes wander over Snow, Mortimer, Manning, Fielding, Murdoch, Golding, Mittelholzer. He let them wander away again. Instead of criticizing other people’s novels, he would write one himself. It would be entitled A Manx Ca.
Now all that remained was to think of something for it to be about.
The veal-and-ham pie at The Stanbury Arms had been because of having missed breakfast. Digesting, it was deterring Fen from lunch. He decided to do without lunch, a policy he would regret around about mid-afternoon. He felt like a hero continually arriving a good deal too late to save a succession of women in distress.
The Fête didn’t open till 2.30.
Stripey slumbered on, resting his gonads so as to be fit for another public-spirited bout of propagation when darkness fell. With a sigh, Fen reached over the arm of the chesterfield and picked up a bundle of the Western Morning News, ten days’ issues which had been lent him by the Major, but so far had remained unread. The fact was that Routh’s murder, though admittedly outré, had somehow failed to snare Fen’s interest. It had snared the Major’s. When Fen had first moved into the Dickinsons’ cottage, the Major, an early acquaintance, had talked about the murder often and at length, giving many minutiae which even as good a paper as the Western Morning News obviously hadn’t the space to take cognizance of. But although the Major’s extensive local colour had registered in Fen’s retentive mind, he hadn’t, up to now, felt any urge to disinter it and pick it over. Up to now, Routh’s murder simply hadn’t seemed to him mysterious enough to be genuinely interesting.
Was it, in fact, mysterious even after Gobbo?
Necessary to find out.
While Stripey twitched in his sleep and Ellis crept on towards the dry-stone edge of the world, Fen settled down to read what the Western Morning News had to tell him, supplementing its facts with the details supplied by the Major.
4. Prompt Hand and Headpiece Sever
I believe the right question to ask … is simply this: Was it done with enjoyment - was the carver happy while he was about it?
John Ruskin: The Seven Lamps of Architecture
1
His parents dying when he was three, Hagberd was brought up in a Kalgoorlie orphanage which also acted as trustee for the small amount of money his father had left him. This money he spent, as soon as he was twenty-one, on four hundred acres inland from Esperance, on a herd of Herefords to graze them, and, as more or less of an afterthought, on a pre-fabricated shack for himself to live in. He had always got on well with animals, and the beef production thereabouts was at the time inconsiderable.
Other factors were not. With the Western Australia irrigation scheme still several years in the future, Hagberd found it desperately hard to water his cattle, even, let alone the pastures which kept them fed. Again, Australia lacks coprophages. Enormous expanses of it have none at all. The industrious beetles which elsewhere gobble up cow-pats as if they were coffee meringues have to be imported, and even then are liable to pine. Consequently, the cow-pats poison not only the grass they lie on, but also a quite extensive area round them.
With more money Hagberd might have survived - money for wells and ditches and an ingenious but expensive mechanical stand-in for the dung-beetles called McGlashan’s Chemical Foraging Facility. With more money he could also have hired an assistant or two, instead of trying to do everything himself. But there was no more money to be had. After three years he abandoned the unequal struggle, sold the land and the herd for what they would fetch, and worked his passage to England.
It was reasonable that he should be temporarily disenchanted with farming. What was not so reasonable was that a man deeply in love with hard work should take employment in a Midlands boiler factory. Flabbergasted to find that his fellow-workers knocked off every day at an hour when the edge of his own appetite for toil was still completely undulled, Hagberd had at first expostulated and then, when that had no effect, taken to staying on after hours in order to sweep up cigarette butts in the yards, mend the wire of the car-park fence, disinfect lavatories, whiten doorsteps and clean windows. Once, at 10.30 p.m., he was discovered polishing the floor of the Personnel Director’s office, which by some mischance had been left unlocked. Five weeks and six strikes after his arrival, he was sacked. As far as the shop stewards were concerned, he
might have lasted longer than that: his passion for work being clearly pathological, they bore him no resentment, and in any case he supplied a valuable pretext, Union-approved, for downing tools. The management, however, saw matters otherwise: there were enough pretexts for strikes already, without adding Hagberd to the list. From his office window the Managing Director watched the final departure, recoiling when Hagberd spat on the windscreen of the directorial Rolls Royce (but this, it turned out, was only in order to wash a bird-dropping off it), ringing frantically for his secretary when Hagberd paused to weed a large geranium bed near the main gate, and at length heaving a groan of relief as the lean, gangling figure disappeared into the traffic and the industrial murk.
Temporarily at a loss, Hagberd now decided to make a pious pilgrimage to Plymouth, where in 1809 an ancestor of his, a naval rating, had been hanged on Devonport dock for trying to push his Captain overboard instead of getting on with manning his gun against the French. So he came to Devon. And so, his thoughts turning again to farms and all the delightful beasts they supported, he in due course came to be employed in Burraford by Routh, with consequences which were to prove disastrous for them both.
Hagberd not only was an Australian cattleman, he looked like one. He was sinewy, lanky, long-armed, easy-striding. He wore broad-brimmed hats. His weather-beaten face was a yard of muddy pump-water, his nose a beak. He had small, intensely blue eyes, set very close together. His ears stood out like jughandles. Routh was physically his antithesis - short, pulpy and white-skinned, with a compressed sort of face, the little ears and nose seeming as if tight-laced by invisible Sellotape.
And Routh was Hagberd’s antithesis not only in the physical sense.
Routh was a very bad farmer. And when he thought it safe, he was deliberately cruel to animals. Routh liked hearing an animal scream.
The Glimpses of the Moon Page 5