Fen went and heaved the motor-cycle in to the side of the lane. He propped it against one of the high stone retaining walls which here hemmed the lane in. Returning, he found the youth still lying supine, as if laid out waiting for his coffin to be brought, while the Rector diagnosed bruises and a possible, but not really very probable, cracked coccyx.
Satisfied that these ministrations were adequate for the moment, ‘Now, what’s all this about Mavis Trent?’ the Rector went on. ‘Explain yourself.’
‘No,’ said the youth uncompromisingly. ‘Shan’t.’ With precaution he propped himself up on one elbow, meanwhile making a palsied attempt to brush some of his plentiful hair away from his eyes. ‘And it weren’t ’im, either,’ he added, indicating Fen. ‘I sees that now. ‘E’m tall enough but ’e’m not fat enough.’ But then all at once his eyes bulged in renewed alarm. ‘Listen!’ he shouted agitatedly. ‘Listen!’
They listened. The noise, coming up fast from beyond the bend in the lane, was confused but distinctive.
‘Tes Tully!’ the youth wailed. ‘Tes Farmer Tully an’ ’is cows! Move me! Move me!’ the noise grew, bell-ringing, hooting, dogs barking, a car engine, a thunder of hooves. ‘ Move me!’ the youth shrieked, wriggling convulsively. ‘Oh, save me!’ Fen and the Rector grabbed him at either end and heaved him on to the grass of the verge just as the cavalcade came into view.
At the head of it rode Clarence Tully’s third cowman, whose duty it was to precede cow migrations on a bicycle; he was a jittery man whose nervous economy had been permanently affected, he believed, by having to toil up slopes in front of a herd of animals with more stamina, and a better turn of speed for hill work, than himself. Then came the cows, fourteen-hundredweight yearling South Devons. Last came Clarence Tully himself, bulging Falstaffianly behind the wheel of his Land-Rover, surrounded by excited, yapping sheep dogs, and with two of his many enormous sons standing up, as they all for some reason always did, in the back.
Clarence Tully waved. The sons waved. They waved using the whole of the arm, like castaways trying to attract the attention of a ship hull-down on the horizon. The third cowman pedalled frantically. The cows - each of which would have lost several pounds in weight by the time the new pasture was reached - mooed angrily as they lumbered along at an ungainly trot. Clarence Tully hilloed. His sons yippeed. The third cowman rang his bell for the entrance to Fen’s lane. The dogs fell into a paroxysm of barking. Still waving at full stretch, ‘All right, then?’ Clarence Tully bawled, as the Land-Rover passed the group on the verge. ‘All right!’ The youth whimpered, shielding his eyes from the dust. The Rector signalled reassurance. Fen watched the cows’ smooth skins, glossy brown, sliding back and forth over their pumping haunches.
The procession receded, reached the further bend, was gone. The youth whimpered again; he seemed an exceptionally fainthearted lad. The Rector took him under the arms and dragged him to his feet.
‘Mavis Trent we’ll hear about later,’ the Rector said, ‘and no two ways about it. Meanwhile you come along with us to the Fete and have a word with the doctor about your bum.’
2
In all its two hundred and thirty years, Aller House - designed by Hawksmoor, destined for ornamentation by William Kent which never eventuated - had never been properly occupied even for a single night. A series of dooms had attended it: ever since the first Sir George Stanbury had run decisively out of money in the course of building it, its owners had regularly gone mad or bankrupt or to the colonies, and it had continued to stand empty even during the Hitler war, when accommodation was at a premium. Now Clarence Tully had it - but not to live in; he had bought it for the arable which was its only recommendation other than the antiquarian and the aesthetic, had converted part of what had been going to be kitchens into a ground-floor flatlet, and had leased this at a nominal rent to the Major, on the thin pretext that the place needed a caretaker, if only to keep an eye on the occasional parties of sightseers from Museum Societies and other such bodies. The Major, who had only his pension - and that less than it should have been, thanks to a bureaucratic muddle at the time of the granting of Indian independence - had accepted this arrangement without false pride, as indeed almost everyone in the neighbourhood accepted almost all Clarence Tully’s numerous dispositions for their comfort: he was a man whose unaffected goodwill made churlishness virtually impossible.
Either Hawksmoor had been in an uncharacteristically austere mood when planning Aller House, or else he had surreptitiously delegated his tiresome provincial task to some apprentice uninterested in the baroque. The place was really quite plain, its central mass rising in three well-proportioned storeys to a hipped roof with a balustraded surround, its two equal two-storey wings (flat-roofed) elegant, but apart from their balustrades, unadorned; its only serious concession to decorativeness lay in the pair of large circular bas-reliefs, depicting tangles of robust, helmeted Roman matrons, which were situated equidistant on either side of the pillared main door. Though very little had ever been done in the way of upkeep, Clarence Tully having confined himself to replacing two or three broken windows, weathering had been uniform, and the general effect was by no means dilapidated. Moreover, the gardens at the front had been kept under some sort of control, even though now reduced to trees, grass and shrubs exclusively. Their main feature was the huge lawn, bisected by the stony, unsurfaced driveway, where rankness had been kept at bay partly by sheep and partly by the occasional attentions of a man with a rotary mower: Clarence Tully was tidy-minded, and even on this white-elephant segment of his property had no intention of letting nature get the upper hand.
On the Aller House lawn, twice yearly, the Burraford Church Fetes were held.
The youth Scorer, fearing for his rump, was wheeling his motor-cycle, not riding it; his original destination abandoned without even a pretence of argument, he trailed along the lane, sweating lavishly, behind Fen and the Rector. Presently they came to where the action was. And it was a surprising amount of action, Fen thought, for a place as small as Burraford: despite its size, the Aller House lawn was crowded, as also was the adjacent field where cars could be parked.
‘People come to our Fetes from miles around,’ the Rector said complacently. ‘And it isn’t all women, either; the men come because they can get pickled in the beer tent and enter their tykes for the dog show and gawp at the legs competition, though I’m bound to say, the standard of girls’ legs hereabouts isn’t exactly dazzling: more like two pairs of bolsters, most of them. The fairground stuff helps, too, makes a change from stalls selling doilies and jam and daffodil bulbs and musty old copies of Blackmore and Annie S. Swan. There’s a sort of community of retired fairground people living in horrible little bungalows at Glascombe, and whenever we have a Fête I make them dig their gear out and bring it along here. The theory is that they’re thrilled to get back into harness again. They pocket half the proceeds, of course, when I’m not looking, but they fill in the gaps and they’re a draw, of sorts. There’s one who has a dead mermaid on show, but the moths have been at her and she’s beginning to look a bit odd. He ought to store her in polythene, I keep telling him, but for all the notice he takes I might as well be talking to a heap of boulders.’
Trembling with exhaustion, the youth Scorer staggered into the car-park with his machine, while Fen and the Rector strode on along the rutted track towards the lawn. Ahead of them, a massive uniformed policeman in a white crash helmet was moving along unexpectedly slowly, swaying a little and from time to time waggling his head cautiously from side to side.
‘What on earth’s the matter with Luckraft?’ the Rector demanded. ‘Looks as if he’s half cut… Been at the bottle, Luckraft?’ he inquired as they came abreast. Startled, Luckraft stumbled on a stone, recovered himself, said, ‘Oh, it’s you, Rector,’ feebly, and attempted a smile. In point of fact he looked not so drunk as ill. They passed him and were in turn passed by another cleric, small and wiry, running. The Rector bellowed a greeting at him. ‘That�
�s Father Hattrick,’ he said. ‘A Roman, mind you, but a sound chap nevertheless. And nowadays he’s allowed to wear trousers, liberalization and all that tosh. Under another name, he’s a sort of male C. V. Wedgwood,’ the Rector perplexingly added. ‘Always runs, says it’s better exercise than walking. Comes for Mrs de Freitas’s gooseberry jam.’
They debouched on to the lawn where a double dais stood portentously apart. On its rear section, four grubby-looking girls with guitars, drums and a microphone were pottering about, trying to get themselves organized; lettering on the bass drum identified them as The Whirlybirds. The front section, at a slightly lower level and with another microphone, was for the present unoccupied. Though a fair number of people were wandering about among the tents and stalls, reconnoitring, even more were assembled expectantly in front of the dais, and their numbers were increasing momently. The Rector detached himself from Fen and set about shaking hands. Father Hattrick stationed himself strategically. The youth Scorer arrived, peering about him in search of the doctor. P.C. Luckraft appropriated, and with evident relief slumped down on, a folding wooden chair which someone had left propped against a nearby marquee. From the car-park, engine noise signalled the return of Clarence Tully in his Land-Rover, his herding mission accomplished, his two huge sons still standing up stick-straight behind him. The crowd buzzed, the sun shone, in the distance the Pisser swapped continuity for irregular spasms, a light breeze rustled in the shrubs and the stands of trees which the first Sir George Stanbury had planted at the lawn’s margins. Diametrically opposite from the dais, over by the west wing, the Misses Bale single-mindedly mounted guard on the Botticelli, and for the tenth time little Miss Endacott re-arranged the in-congruent jumble of items on the Rectory stall. Should she, she wondered, call out, ‘Come and buy! Come and buy!’ The mere thought of it made her legs shake so much that she had to sit down.
The Rector consulted his wrist-watch, muttered a short prayer, hoisted his skirts, took a run at the front part of the dais and jumped up on to it; his impact shook the structure with such violence that an inattentive Whirlybird lost her balance, fell against the pedal cymbal and knocked it over the edge. More laboriously or with more circumspection, several other men and women followed the Rector, among them the Mayor of Glazebridge - since Burraford was in Glazebridge’s extensive Rural District - complete with chain of office.
‘We don’t want hours and hours of talk, now,’ the Rector told his companions. It emerged in a roar from loudspeakers tuned to maximum amplification; an old man said, ‘Hear, hear!’ and a child, panicking at the sudden din, broke into uncontrollable ululations of terror and dismay. ‘People don’t come here,’ the Rector said, ‘to listen to hours and hours of talk.’ ‘Hear, hear!’ the old man said again. ‘So let’s get cracking,’ the Rector said.
The opener of the Fete was a short, slim, affable, loquacious Negro, educated at Winchester and New College, who lived twenty miles away, writing lucrative science fiction under the name of Dermot McCartney. (He had begun his writing career with delicate studies of coloured men teetering between two cultures, but these, though gratifying to the Observer and the New Statesman, had in addition to selling poorly proved to be too much like hard work, since the author had no recollection at all of what Negro culture was like and was obliged to look it all up in books.) ‘Count-down!’ he shrilled into the microphone. ‘All systems “Go”! Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, Blast-Off! Vroom! I declare this Fete open!’ At ‘Vroom’ Father Hattrick, cheating, turned and ran, homing on the Jams Stall with his basket flapping against his thigh. Behind him, the Whirlybirds struck up with Make the Scene, Do Your Thing. The women made rapidly for the produce and garden stalls, and a sizeable proportion of the men made for the beer tent. The platform party descended, Dermot McCartney brandishing a well-filled wallet to signal awareness of the next stage in his responsibilities. J. G. Padmore, who had been standing at the front of the crowd appraising Dermot McCartney in an expert manner, headed for Fen. The Rector marched bandily away towards his fortune-telling tent. The fairground people, all of them well past their prime, could dimly be heard, through the Whirlybirds’ amplified yowlings, crying their wares in cracked, senile voices.
‘Any luck?’ Padmore asked eagerly.
‘Luck?’ Fen was transiently bewildered; then he remembered. ‘Oh, you mean Youings. Yes, I did talk to him, briefly. And he’s quite certain Hagberd wasn’t at the Arms at 7.30 that evening.’
‘There, I knew it.’
‘So it’s his word against Gobbo’s.’
‘And not much doubt about which to choose,’ said Padmore contentedly, his burden of apprehension slipping from him.
‘Did you see Gobbo again?’
‘No. When I got back to the pub, he’d gone. So then I had to change the wheel on that bloody car … All’s well that ends well, then.’
‘One supposes so.’
‘What does one suppose, my dear chap?’ This was the Major, who had limped across the coarse turf to join them. He was dapper in well-creased checks and a mulberry tie.
‘Gobbo,’ Padmore explained: ‘he was talking nonsense. Damn it, I knew he was talking nonsense.’
‘H’m,’ the Major said neutrally.
‘How’s the background and local colour going?’ Fen asked.
‘Not much so far,’ Padmore admitted. ‘Still, I only arrived yesterday. It’s early days yet.’
‘Well, I suppose we’d better get moving and spend some money,’ said the Major.
‘I want to see the mermaid,’ said Padmore. ‘I’ve never seen a mermaid. It’s a dugong, I expect, a halicore. Still come to think of it, I’ve never seen a halicore, either.’
3
Since neither Fen nor the Major particularly wanted to look at the mermaid (the Major had in any case dutifully looked at it several times already at previous Fêtes), they let Padmore drift away on his own.
‘We circulate,’ said the Major.
They circulated: a Books Stall, a Linen Stall, a Cakes Stall, pennies to be rolled down slotted wooden slopes on to a numbered board. Fen bought Lord Garnet Wolseley’s Narrative of the War with China in 1860, two tea towels imprinted in red with the Houses of Parliament, a dozen drop-scones; the Major bought an Ouida, some rather yellowed cotton handkerchiefs with the initial A.K.G., a seed cake; neither of them had any success, even temporarily, with the pennies. At the Lucky Dip the Major got a small whistle, which he thought might possibly amuse his dogs, and Fen got an apple. Next they came to where Broderick Thouless, the composer, at three balls for twenty-five pence, was persistently bowling for a pig; from what they saw of his performance it seemed very unlikely that he was going to win it.
‘Where is the pig, anyway?’ Thouless said, straightening up, red in the face from his exertions. ‘My back… Surely the pig ought to be here?’
But then suddenly it was. A young one, cleanly and wholesome, it arrived wriggling and snorting in the arms of big blond Youings, from whose farm it had presumably come. Apologizing to the woman in charge for his lateness, Youings deposited the pig in its pen, where it examined its surroundings with an air of refreshed surprise.
‘Now, you behave yourself, Bathsheba,’ Youings told it.
His Amazonian wife Ortrud sauntered up. She wore an expensive but ill-fitting beige suit, and her pale hair gleamed glossy in the sunshine. The Major raised his green trilby hat, but she simply stared at him. ‘Komm’ mit,’ she commanded her husband. Youings smiled flaccidly at Fen and shuffled away after her.
‘I presume,’ said Fen, ‘that whoever wins the pig will have it slaughtered. Pity.’
‘No, that’s all right,’ said the Major. ‘Youings always manages to buy it back. People don’t want the bother of it, don’t you know. New Nivea, smooth moisture,’ he sang, ‘right into your skin. Ergh.’
‘“Ergh”?’
‘It’s a sort of noise they make at the end, I can’t think why.’
‘I’m going to
win the pig,’ said Thouless, fishing in his pocket for money. ‘Three more balls, please.’ They left him still vainly trying to get a ball into one of the little doorways in the wooden trap.
A Treasure Hunt, the Jams Stall, a miniature rifle range, the platform for the legs competition, due at 4.30; this last had a wooden screen designed to occult the competitors from the groin upwards. Near it, the youth Scorer was talking tremulously to a middle-aged man - presumably the doctor - who was making soothing noises; Scorer kept turning his back on the middle-aged man and pointing to his bottom. The Garden Stall, a coconut shy, a queue of children waiting for donkey rides (‘Serry your ranks, there,’ said the Major amiably as they edged past). The Bottle Stall, where they found the Rector, still in drag, swigging Coca-Cola.
‘Business slow?’ Fen asked.
‘On the contrary, I’ve got a queue,’ said the Rector, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I have to come out every now and again, though, to keep an eye on things.’ Fen noted with interest that he was carrying his cricket bag with him.
Their progress had by now brought them close to the west wing of the house, where the Botticelli tent was pegged down; for a tent housing nothing but a picture, it was unexpectedly large. At one side of the entrance flap, cash box on a little table in front of her, sat a stout elderly woman, presumably one of the Misses Bale. Opposite her, on a camp stool, sat P.C. Luckraft; he had taken off his crash helmet, revealing a bandage round his head, and was cradling the helmet on his knees. Less explicably, another stout elderly woman, presumably the second Miss Bale, could be glimpsed sitting on another camp stool at the back of the tent.
The Glimpses of the Moon Page 8