“Anything, my darling, anything…” Aware of an unexpected feeling of joy, Sel nods enthusiastically; she can call it anything she damned well likes – at a pinch Horace, even Percy, although that would be pushing it a bit – his/her existence was all that mattered.
“That’s settled then,” she says briskly, as having donned a T-shirt and pair of jeans, she expertly rearranges her ponytail and puts on a dab of lipstick. “While we’re on the subject, though, there is one more thing before we return to the fray.” Her eyes, questioning, meet his in the dressing table mirror. “I don’t think whoever it was who you allege gave you the snip can have done a very good job, do you?”
*
Eleven am and the party, their differences for the time being forgotten, gather in Sel’s office for a progress report on his trip with Josh. Through the window behind Sel’s desk, the sky, in stark, almost savage contrast to the scene of desolation in the yard beneath, is now a cerulean blue, a sprinkling of small, white clouds scudding across it in the gentle breeze. While waiting for Sel’s return Ron and one of the Bogg boys have cleared the gateway into the lane and made a start at sweeping up some of the debris, but in daylight, it has to be said, the great yard at Browns probably hasn’t looked like this since some time in the 1540s, when the then owner, one Thomas Willingcote, having made a pile out of wool, hops and a spot of black market trading in the stuff from the broken up monasteries, decided to dazzle his neighbours by building a super barn.
“Gather round children, and take a pew, I’m sure you’ll be relieved to hear that is mission accomplished.” Eyes alight with purpose and an enthusiasm which, to be absolutely honest, he’s far from feeling, Sel addresses his somewhat unenthusiastic flock. Pippa, looking sceptical, takes the only other decent chair, Izzy, looking half asleep, takes the other; and there being only two, Ron, who could do with a drink, but feels it’s a bit too early to ask for one, remains standing. Clarrie herself perches on the desk beside her husband.
“I hope this won’t take long,” Pippa says, lighting her fifth cigarette that morning; and she’s supposed to be giving up, “that bloody pair have been on the run several hours now, you know – surely our first priority is to organise a search party?”
Sel looks at her with distaste, wonders for the nth time what possessed him to invite her down. It wasn’t as if she’d been any help, and whatever the outcome of the present mess, she would, by dint of manipulation, fabrication or any other means available, succeed in making a bomb out of it. That’s showbiz, though isn’t it, he tells himself. Or is it? Clarrie squeezes his hand, and he remembers their secret. Who cares anyway?
“Of course, darling, of course,” he says, smiling sweetly at the bloody woman, “but I’m sure you’d agree a brief update is necessary before we do anything too drastic?” There’s a murmur of assent from the others and Pippa, closing her eyes, prepares to be bored.
The journey on Josh’s tractor, he tells them, had apparently been a hazardous one, initially at least. But after viewing the various unpromising options open, they’d finally made it to the main road by taking to the fields instead of using the lane; after which it had been plain sailing. Bypassing the village and making for the small market town of Puddington a few miles along the main road from Belchester to Ensworthy, had been Josh’s idea. It turned out to be a good one, as Puddington appeared relatively unscathed by the storm. Not only had he managed to do the phoning, and a bit of shopping, but get a decent breakfast in the local pub for himself and Josh as well. He’d given the police a full description of the errant couple; they’d promised to do their best, but said he’d have to appreciate they currently had their hands full with accidents and damage caused by the storm, and dealing with these would have to take priority over everything else.
“In other words they won’t do a bloody thing!” Philippa interrupts yet again, “I sometimes wonder what we pay our taxes for.” Clarrie gives her a look, and Sel, raising a hand for silence, continues.
He’d managed to get through to the guy at the local rag, who’d promised to alert the rest of the Press of the cancellation – “He said only two of their people, both of whom lived near the town centre, had managed to make it into the office so far, but that it looked as if our area was the worst hit. He’d just come off the phone to a friend in Fleet Street, who said he’d made it into work without difficulty. There was a bit of disruption, but on the whole things weren’t too bad.”
“We certainly seem to have upset the powers that be. One wonders what else they have in store – a plague of frogs.” This time it’s Ron who interrupts. He appears to have gone broody again as, hands in the pockets of his parka, he looks soulfully out of the office window. He’s almost sure there’s a rook perched on a branch of that oak tree on the far side of the lane. If he’s right and there is, could it be trying to tell them something? At least the cup was safe, though. He can feel it, snugly wrapped in cotton wool in the pocket of his parka. Just to make sure, he pulls it out and, removing the wrapping, holds it up to the light. “Well, whatever happens at least we have this…”
“Surely it should be in the safe, I mean anyone could…” Pippa again, this time with a snort of disapproval, but Ron isn’t listening, no one is. They’ve heard the sound of a car coming up the lane from the direction of the river. Slipping off her perch on the desk, Clarrie hurries over to the window; opens it. The others gather behind her; no one speaks. Now they can see the car, a beat-up Mini, bright red in colour and seemingly crammed with people. They watch in silence as it sidles in through the yard gate, and plainly unable to proceed any further, pulls up beside a pile of rubble.
“My God, it’s them!” With cries of excitement the party, jostling one another in their efforts to be there first, follow their leader out of the office, down the passage to the kitchen, where Juan has already opened the back door.
Sylvia is the first to emerge from the car and pick her way through the rubble towards them, followed by Tris, who’s obviously been driving. From the back seat, after a moment’s scuffle, emerge first the vicar, then Sam and last of all Beatrice. Allah be praised, Sel whispers to himself, then wonders if he should not have invoked a more appropriate deity. He hurries towards them, one hand raised in benediction.
“Darlings, where on earth have you been?”
Beatrice, radiant, wearing a duffle coat streaked with mud, several sizes too large for her, her hair in rats’ tails, breaks away from Sylvia and the two priests; who, horrified, are looking about them at the wreck of the great barn; and taking Sam by the hand, runs forward to meet him. “Oh Sel, I’m so frightfully sorry about everything, I know I’ve been a dreadful nuisance, and I’m sure you wish you’d never employed me, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy in my entire life.”
Sel, aware of a slight roughness at the back of his throat, as usual does the right thing. He takes her in his arms and kisses her. Clarrie, behind him, looks over their heads at Sam, her eyes questioning. Unnoticed by the others, he gives the thumbs up sign. Clarrie grins. Mission accomplished, indeed…
Epilogue
That was it, really. Clarrie was right. Mission had indeed been accomplished. No one was ever able to say quite how, but as far as anybody was aware. the unquiet ghosts of Tavey, Brian and his formidable mother were, at long last, laid to rest.
As was to be expected, after the red tape connected with his and Emmie’s bigamous marriage had been sorted out – Emmie was given a suspended sentence, so it wasn’t too bad – Sam and Beatrice were duly married. The ceremony, on Mrs Roper’s insistence, was quite a grand affair, taking place in her local parish church, followed by a reception in a specially erected marquee on the Roper lawn. They’d wanted a quiet wedding; it was not to be; but as far as Beatrice was concerned, anything that kept her mother quiet was fine by her.
Initially, a little sniffy about her future son-in-law’s background – Kitchener Road and the local Comprehensive – Mrs Roper soon came round, and the fact that in
the course of his army service Sam had attained the rank of major helped smooth his way into her good graces. His apparent possession of certain occult powers could not of course be disguised, but these she took in her stride. Apparently Beatrice’s father, Marcus, had also possessed them, and far from being a disadvantage they added, in her opinion, a much needed spice to married life. Of Sam’s disastrous liaison with Emmie it was thought best to keep her in ignorance.
Inevitably a certain amount of publicity had surrounded the wedding, but as it took place several months after the much bowdlerised version of the dig had appeared in the Press, it was comparatively low key. The presence at the ceremony of such TV personalities as Beatrice’s father, Marcus Travers, who gave her away (“Darling I couldn’t resist it – should one, one wonders, sport a toga?”), the two Woodheads, plus an assortment of media hangers on, did attract a certain amount of interest, but Mrs Roper, despite complaining to friends about the fuss of having to cope, not only with her ex-husband – ‘such an embarrassment, darling’ – but ‘that dreadful TV man and his wife as well’, was not wholly averse to a bit of showbiz razzmatazz, and after the ceremony even agreed to pose with Sel outside the church, although she drew the line at being photographed with his arm round her.
As to Sam and Beatrice, after a blissful honeymoon spent somewhere in Scotland recovering from their ordeal and disentangling themselves from their alter egos – happily already becoming a distant memory – they made the decision to sell the shop in Kimbleford, and with the proceeds buy a house in the area, which despite the bizarre events of the past few months, perhaps even because of them, they had come to love. Ignoring Emmie’s somewhat half-hearted protests (he was learning the masterful approach was best) the shop was snapped up by Sid Parfitt, who knew a bargain when he saw one, before it ever went on the market, and after a prolonged search during which they stayed at Brown End, Sam supervising re-building operations, while Beatrice continued as Sel’s secretary, they at last found what they wanted; a smallish Victorian house with a large garden in the village of Pen a few miles up the valley. The building work completed, Sam found himself a job as personnel officer in a factory making hot water tanks in an industrial estate on the edge of Belchester, and with Beatrice already three months pregnant with their first child, they settled down at last to what – both being not only fed up, but worn out by the vicissitudes of their previous lives – they most wanted; namely a happy, uneventful married life.
And the others?
Granny Bogg died on the night of the storm. Found by a frightened carer the following morning lying on her back in bed staring at the ceiling, the expression on her face one of vengeful fury. Her funeral, a few days later, was the most impressive seen in Kimbleford for many years, only outclassed by that of the innocent victims found under Tavey’s tree.
Inevitably perhaps, the latter internment, despite the efforts of all those who had been in any way involved to keep it low key, was somewhat of a media event and indeed attained nationwide publicity. After considerable, and in one or two cases acrimonious, discussion, it was decided to mark the infants’ burial site in Kimbleford churchyard by a single stone on which was carved in a suitably Roman looking script, the words:
In Memoriam to the Lost Children of Kimbleford.
300 AD – 1900 AD.
Requiem eiternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua
Luceat eis.*
*Grant them eternal rest, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine on them.
The silver cup and lead casket, together with various other artefacts found in the dig, much to the annoyance of the curator of the local museum (an acrimonious correspondence on the subject helped fill the letters columns of the Daily Telegraph for many months) were deemed too important to remain in the area and are now in the British Museum. However, undeclared, quite a few items of lesser importance remained behind and can be seen in assorted households in that part of Suffolk. The Woodheads, for example, have several pieces of decorated Samien ware in their possession, and the contents of the Bogg family barn is so filled with artefacts as to amount to a small museum; which following Mrs Bogg’s decision a few years later to diversify into the B&B business, helps boost trade enormously and is always greatly enjoyed by her many visitors.
Ron Head and Philippa Cardew made it up, and indeed in the years to come frequently lectured together on their part in what became known as The Brown End Dig. Another of their subjects, and one extremely popular with the punters, was ‘Rooks and their role in English Folklore’. As a result of all the publicity, which ironically enough, for the first time in his life, he hadn’t sought, Sel at long last got his call from the States and appeared shortly afterwards on a television chat show in New York. His version of the legend of Brian and Tavey and the death and burial of little Marcus under Tavey’s tree excited such interest that not only offers for TV chat show appearances and lecture tours on the subject poured in, but suggestions to turn the story into anything from opera, to the whole thing being re-enacted on ice. However, sadly perhaps, nothing ever came of these suggestions, and apart from several TV documentaries on the subject on both sides of the Atlantic, and a greatly acclaimed fringe production at the Edinburgh Festival – Brian in leathers and a crash helmet and Tavey topless in jeans – the general public, with the exception of the inhabitants of Kimbleford, where their story, having survived for fifteen hundred years, would no doubt continue to do so, soon forgot about Brian and Tavey and they were, at long last, left in peace.
Clarrie Woodhead duly produced her baby – in a blaze of publicity too, and she didn’t mind a bit. Little Julia turned out to be a lovely child, somewhat on the wilful side perhaps, but who cared, and her parents doted on her. She had her mother’s good looks and imperious manner, but her eyes, especially when she wanted something, held the same mesmeric quality as those of her father’s. And if, as on certain occasions, especially in her rebellious teens, Sel found his daughter’s persuasive powers just that tiny bit irritating, he recognised them as his own, and let things be. She also, not so fortunately perhaps, inherited his nose.
Emmie and Sid Parfitt stayed on at the shop, but life was very different there under Sid’s dynamic management. Karen Warren stayed on too and to the surprise of all concerned, not least her father, found herself working harder than she’d ever done in her life, and, what’s more, enjoying it. By the time little Julia Woodhead had reached her fifth birthday, the shop was out of debt and showing a considerable profit, and the Parfitts were able not only to purchase a nearly-new Volvo and Emmie to have her own small run-around, but to take two holidays a year: Emmie’s dream of knocking them back in a bar in Torremolinos fulfilled at last.
As to Emmie, she couldn’t imagine how she’d ever come to let Sid go in the first place, and soon forgot those lonely years following his departure for Oz, and her subsequent, disastrous liaison with Sam. Although perhaps, as she frequently told herself, when having had one G&T too many she found herself dwelling on the past, if she hadn’t ‘married’ Sam, she and Sid would never be where they were now. So it all came right in the end, didn’t it?
Jack Fulton was never quite the man he had been after his disagreeable experience in the Grove. He returned to Barnsley and his wife, and managed to wangle a transfer to an area not far from home. In the fullness of time, due no doubt to his new subdued and responsible image, he was promoted to District Manager, and after that seldom strayed far from hearth and home. Just occasionally something triggered off a memory: for example, happening to glance at his wife’s copy of Hello magazine one evening, while waiting for her to finish titivating, he came upon a photograph of Clarrie, glorious in motherhood, dancing little Julia on her knee; and for a moment, only a moment, the memory of those wild days at Kimbleford when he’d tried and failed to juggle with two formidable ladies and came the inevitable cropper, returned with a vividness he’d no desire to re-experience and, hastily placing the magazine under a sofa cushion out of harm’s way, he hurried o
ff to tell Evangeline that if she didn’t get a move on they’d miss the Rotary Club Dinner.
The great barn at Brown End was duly re-built, and with Ron Head acting as adviser, an authentic replica of a Roman bath house fitted out as a sauna, complete with the requisite mosaics and erotic wall paintings, was erected on the site of the rookery, proving extremely popular with the many Woodhead guests. In the years to come Daniel Mallory and Julia Woodhead too would spend many happy hours there and, as so many before them, it was here they came to learn the delights of love and all the pain and joy that discovery brings.
And the rooks? To Clarrie and Sel’s relief they never returned to Brown End: their long guardianship over, they set up a new colony in a group of young ash trees behind the Bogg farmhouse, where to this day they daily torment the Bogg family, not to mention their visitors, with their raucous, mocking cry.
THE END
If you enjoyed An Affair to Remember you might be interested in Running to Paradise by Virginia Budd, also published by Endeavour Press.
Extract from Running to Paradise by Virginia Budd
Prologue
Evening. Summer lightning intermittently flashed across the grey-green sky, as though some inter-galactic signaller were trying to get a message through to the misguided denizens of planet earth. Thunder rolled far away and storm clouds spiralled. It was very hot. The people in the grey village houses shut their casement windows, left open to catch the least vestige of the sultry air, anticipating the coming storm. The people on the executive housing estate at the northern end of the village reached for their digital telephones to warn their friends that evening’s barbecue was cancelled and what about a blue video session instead. The people in the council estate ignored the coming storm. They were most of them out anyway; there was nothing to do in the village on a Saturday night.
An Affair to Remember Page 24