In a Dry Season

by Peter Robinson

  “Yes,” said Mrs Kettering. “Just after war broke out, actually. It was painted from the fairy bridge, looking towards the mill.”

  Annie stood back and examined the work carefully. The first thing she noticed was Stanhope’s peculiar use of colour. The season was autumn, and he seemed to take the hues and tones hidden deep in stone, fields, hillsides and water and force them out into the open, creating such a pattern of purples, blues, browns and greens as you never saw in a real Yorkshire village. But it made perfect sense to the eye. Nothing seemed to be its true colour, yet everything seemed right somehow. It was uncanny, almost surreal in its effect.

  Next, she noticed the subtly distorted perspective, probably a result of cubist influences. The mill was there, perched on the rise in the top left corner, and though it looked as if it should dominate the scene, somehow, by some trick of perspective over size, it didn’t. It was just there. The church, to the right of the river, managed much more prominence through its dark and subtly menacing square tower and the rooks or ravens that seemed to be circling it.

  The rest of the composition appeared simple and realistic enough: a village High Street scene whose people reminded her of Brueghel’s. There was a lot of detail; an art teacher might even describe the work as too busy.

  The villagers were doing the normal things: shopping, gossiping, pushing prams. Someone was painting a front door; a man straddled a roof repairing a chimney, shirt-sleeves rolled up; a tall girl stood arranging newspapers in a rack outside the newsagent’s shop; a butcher’s boy was cycling down the High Street beside the river with his basket full of brown-paper packages, blood-streaked apron flapping in the wind.

  The rows of houses on each side differed in size and design. Some were semis or terraces, front doors opening directly onto the pavement, while some of the larger, detached houses stood back behind low stone walls enclosing well-kept gardens. Here and there, on the High Street side, a row of shops broke up the line of houses. There was also a pub, the Shoulder of Mutton, and its sign looked crooked, as if it were swinging in the wind.

  Normal life. But there was something sinister about it. Partly it was the facial expressions. Annie could detect either the smug, supercilious smiles of moral rectitude or the malicious grins of sadism on the faces of so many people. And Stanhope had included so much detail that the effect had to be deliberate. How he must have hated them.

  If you looked long enough, you could almost believe that the man on the roof was about to drop a flagstone on some passer-by, and that the butcher’s boy was wielding a cleaver ready to chop off someone’s head.

  The only characters who looked in any way attractive were the children. The River Rowan was neither very wide nor very deep where it ran through the village. Children were playing in the shallows, splashing one another, paddling, the girls with their skirts gathered around their thighs, boys in short trousers. Some of them looked angelic; all of them looked innocent.

  The more Annie looked, the more she recognized that there was something religious, ecstatic, in their aspects, and the link with the water also brought to mind baptism. It was a sort of religious symbolism reminiscent of Stanley Spencer, though not quite so blatant. Over it all, the church brooded with its sense of menace and evil. The mill was nothing but a husk.

  Annie looked away. When she turned back, the scene appeared more normal, and she noticed the strange colours the most again. It was a powerful work. Why had she not heard of Stanhope before?

  In the bottom right, just above the artist’s signature, stood the outbuilding where the skeleton had been found, next to a small, semi-detached cottage. Beside the door, a wooden sign announced the name: BRIDGE COTTAGE. “What do you think?” Mrs Kettering asked.

  “Have you noticed the way everyone looks? As if—” “As if they were all either hypocrites or sadists? Yes, I have. That’s Stanhope’s vision. I must say I didn’t see Hobb’s End like that at all. We had our share of unpleasant characters, of course, but I’d hardly say they dominated the place. Michael Stanhope was, in some ways, a very disturbed individual. Would you like to go back out to the garden?”

  Annie looked at the painting once more, seeing nothing that she had missed, then she followed Mrs Kettering outside.

  The sunlight came as a shock. Annie shielded her eyes until she got to the chair and sat down again. There was still an inch or so of lemonade in the bottom of her glass. She drank it down in one. Warm and sweet. For some reason, the painting had unsettled her in the same way some of her father’s more disturbed works did; she wanted to know more about it, more about Michael Stanhope’s vision of Hobb’s End.

  “How old was Stanhope at that time?”

  “He’d be in his late forties when I knew him.”

  “What became of him?”

  “I think he stayed in the village until the bitter end, and then I heard he moved to a small studio in London. But he didn’t do much after that. Didn’t achieve much, I should say. I saw his name in the papers once or twice, but I think he was like a fish out of water when he left Hobb’s End. I don’t think he managed to find a foothold in the big-city art world. I heard he was in and out of mental institutions during the fifties, and the last I saw was his obituary in 1968. He died of lung cancer. The poor man always seemed to have a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. It made him squeeze his eyes almost shut against the drifting smoke when he painted. I was convinced that must have affected his perspective.”

  “Probably,” said Annie. “What happened to his paintings?”

  “I wouldn’t know, dear. All over the place, I suppose. Private collectors. Small galleries.”

  Annie sat quietly for a moment, taking it all in. “Bridge Cottage,” she said, “where we found the skeleton. It looked neglected in the painting.”

  “I noticed that, too,” said Mrs Kettering, “and it made me remember something. Now, I can’t be certain of this, not after so much time, but I think an old lady lived there. Bit of a recluse.”

  “An old lady, you said?”

  “Yes, I think so. Though I can’t tell you anything about her. I just remembered, looking at the painting, that some of the children thought she was a witch. She had a long, hooked nose. She used to scare them away. I think it was her, anyway. I’m sorry I can’t be of much help.”

  Annie leaned forward and touched Mrs Kettering’s arm. “You have been helpful. Believe me.”

  “Is there anything else you want to know?”

  Annie stood up. “Not that I can think of. Not right now.”

  “Please call again if you do think of anything. It’s so nice to have a visitor.”

  Annie smiled. “I will. Thank you.”

  Back in her car, Annie sat drumming on the steering-wheel and watching the gulls’ reflections on the water’s surface. She had learned that the place was called Bridge Cottage and an old woman may have been living there in the autumn of 1939. Of course, she still had no idea how long the body had lain under the outbuilding floor, so she didn’t know whether this new information helped or not.

  Perhaps more important, though, she had got her first real feel for Hobb’s End from the Stanhope painting, and that might come in useful further down the road. Annie had always thought it important to develop a feel for a case, though she had never expounded her philosophy to any of her male colleagues. Why was it that feminine intuition sounded as insulting to her as hysterical and time of the month?

  She turned around and headed back down towards the station, a long day on the telephone looming ahead of her.

  When Matthew met Gloria that first time, I could feel their immediate attraction like that eerie, electric sensation you get before a storm, when you feel jumpy and ill at ease for no apparent reason. It scared me; I don’t know why.

  Something about Gloria changed when a man entered the room. It was as if she were suddenly on, the way I feel when the curtain goes up on one of our amateur dramatic productions and the real audience is there to watch us
at last. I don’t mean to indicate that there was anything deliberate about this, just that a change came over her and she moved and spoke in a subtly different way when there was a man around. I even noticed it with Michael Stanhope. He must have sensed something, too, or he wouldn’t have given her those cigarettes.

  But with Matthew it was the real thing. From that first April meeting, events progressed quickly between them. That very afternoon, Matthew showed her around the village, what little there was to see. A few days later they went to the pictures in Harkside and then to the May Day dance at the Mechanics Institute there. I was helping out behind the refreshments counter, and I could see the way they danced so close together, the way they looked at one another.

  I wasn’t at all surprised when Matthew announced that he had invited Gloria to tea one Sunday. It was 11 May, and Mother was in one of her states, so the preparation all fell to me. I’m sure I could have got away with a plate of sandwiches, but I was a good cook and, more important, I was good at making the best of what little was available, and I suppose I wanted to show off my skills.

  All day we had been hearing disturbing rumours of a terrible air raid on London. Some people claimed that the House of Commons and Westminster Abbey had been completely destroyed and that thousands had been killed. I had already learned to take these things with a pinch of salt. After all, one of the first casualties of war is truth, to paraphrase Hiram Johnson.

  I was listening to “The Brains Trust” after putting the rabbit stew on to simmer. Joad and Huxley were arguing about why you can tickle other people but not yourself, when Gloria popped her head around the door, Matthew right behind her. They were a bit early and Mother was still titivating herself in her bedroom.

  Gloria’s golden hair, parted on the left, tumbled in long wreaths of sausage-curls over her shoulders. She wore very little make-up, just a dab of face powder and a trace of lipstick. She was wearing a blue blouse with padded shoulders and puffed sleeves tucked into a simple black skirt with silver buttons down the side. I must admit that I was surprised at her restraint; I would have expected something far more garish from her. Even so, I felt dowdy in my plain old pinafore dress.

  “Look what Gloria’s brought for us,” Matthew said, holding out a pint of milk and half a dozen eggs. I took them and thanked her. As soon as Mother saw the eggs, I knew her eyes would light up. She would put them in water-glass, the way she always did. Suspended in the clear jelly, they would last for months. Seeing them like that always made me uneasy; they looked sinister floating there in the transparent space, like wombs forever on the verge of giving birth, but never quite managing it, trapped there instead, frozen forever in stillborn becoming.

  Sinister or not, though, the water-glass meant we always had fresh eggs as well as the powdered stuff, which was only good for scrambling.

  “Hello, Gwen,” Gloria said, “I should have known you’d be a ‘Brains Trust’ fan. Tell me, who’s your favourite? Joad or Campbell? Surely not Huxley?”

  “Joad.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s the most intelligent, the best read, the most eloquent.” “Hmm. Probably,” said Gloria, sitting down on the sofa, carefully arranging her skirt as she crossed her legs. Matthew sat next to her looking like the proud new owner of . . . well, of something. “I like Campbell myself,” she said. “I think he’s far more entertaining.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought you even listened to something like that,” I said, regretting my rudeness almost as soon as the words were out of my mouth. After all, this was the woman my beloved brother clearly adored.

  Gloria just shrugged. “I’ve heard it once or twice.” Then her eyes lit up in that way they had. “But you’re right. If I had a wireless, I’d listen to nothing but music all day long.”

  “You don’t have a wireless?” I couldn’t believe it. We might have been short of food, but surely everyone had a wireless?

  “Mr Kilnsey won’t have one in the house. He’s rather a strict sort of Methodist, you know. Thinks they’re the devil’s loudspeaker.”

  I put my hand to my mouth and giggled, then blushed. “Oh, dear. I am sorry.”

  “It is rather funny, isn’t it? Anyway, I don’t mind that much. All I do is work and sleep there. It’s sad for Mrs Kilnsey, though. I don’t think she’d mind a bit of music now and then to cheer her up, but, of course, if the wireless is the devil’s loudspeaker, then music is his voice at its most seductive.”

  “Oh, good heavens,” said Matthew, shaking his head. Gloria nudged him. “It’s true! He really talks like that.”

  “I must go see to the food,” I said.

  First I put the kettle on to make us all some tea, then I peeled a few potatoes and prepared the carrots and parsnips. If I say so myself, it was a good meal I put together that Sunday. Matthew had caught the rabbit in Rowan Woods on one of his weekend Home Guard exercises, and there was plenty of meat on it to feed the four of us. We also had some onions from the garden, and some rhubarb for a pie. Talk about Dig for Victory!

  The kettle boiled. I made tea and carried it through, along with a plate of biscuits. With rationing, you had to be sparing, and the tea was a lot weaker than we were used to. With sugar rationed at only a pound a fortnight, and most of that in the rhubarb pie, the three of us had all stopped taking it. I didn’t know about Gloria, so I offered her some.

  “I gave it up,” she said. “Actually, I’ve got a far better use for my sugar ration.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  “Yes.” She shook her curls. “If you mix it with warm water you can use it as a setting lotion.”

  That was something I had never thought about, my rather fine and mousy hair being short, in the page-boy style, at the time. “It must make your head feel terribly sticky,” I said.

  She laughed. “Well, sometimes it’s hard to get my hat off, I can tell you. But that can be quite a blessing in the wind we get up at the farm some days.”

  At that moment, Mother made her grand entrance. She walked slowly because of her arthritis and her stick tapped against the bare floorboards, so you could hear her coming long before you saw her. She was wearing one of her old flower-patterned frocks, and had taken the trouble to curl her hair, though I doubt she had used sugar and warm water. Mother never wore make-up. She was a small, rather frail-looking figure, a little stooped, with a round, ruddy, pleasant face. It was a kind face, and she was a kind woman. Like me, though, she had a sharp way with words sometimes. Whatever the arthritis had done to the rest of her body, it hadn’t progressed as far as her tongue. I expected fireworks when she met Gloria for the first time, but then I had been wrong about a lot of things lately.

  “What a lovely blouse, my dear,” Mother said after the introductions. “Did you make it yourself?”

  I almost choked.

  “Yes,” said Gloria. “I managed to scrounge a bit of parachute silk, then I dyed it. I’m glad you like it. I can make one for you, if you like? I’ve got a bit more put away up at the farm.”

  Mother put her hand to her chest. “Good heavens, my dear, you don’t want to waste your time making fancy clothes for an old, crippled woman like me. No, what I’ve got will do to see me out.” Typical Mother that, the world-weary tone, as if we might well “see her out” in the next few minutes.

  “The Brains Trust” ended and a special about Jerome Kern came on. Gloria liked that better, all the songs she had heard in her beloved Hollywood musicals. She hummed along with “A Fine Romance,” “You Couldn’t Be Cuter” and “The Way You Look Tonight.”

  You could have knocked me over with a feather when Mother and Gloria got talking about how they both loved Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Swing Time. It was time to serve tea and I was feeling really sick by then.

  Jerome Kern finished and we turned the wireless off while we ate. “So, my dear,” said Mother when the stew was served, “tell us all about yourself.”

  “There’s not much to tell, really,” Gloria said.


  “Oh, come, come. Where are you from?”

  “London.”

  “Oh, you poor girl. What about your parents?”

  “They were both killed in the bombing.”

  “Oh, dear, I’m so sorry.”

  “A lot of people have died.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last year. September. I’m all alone now.”

  “Nonsense, my dear,” said Mother. “You’ve got us.”

  I almost choked on my rabbit. “It’s not as if we’re adopting her or anything, Mother,” I managed.

  “Don’t be so rude, Gwen. It’s wartime, in case you hadn’t noticed. People have to pull together.”

  “Anyway,” Matthew said, “Gloria’s away from all that now, aren’t you, darling?”

  She looked at him with those big, beautiful eyes of hers, adoration just dripping out of them like treacle. “Yes,” she said. “I am. And no matter what happens, I’m never going back.”

  “Is there no one left?”

  “No one. I was out visiting a friend a few streets away when the air raid came. We had no warning. My friends had an Anderson shelter in their back garden, so we went down there. I wasn’t even worried. I thought my family would go to the underground or church on the corner like we always did in air raids, but they didn’t make it in time. Our house went up and the ones on either side along with it. My grandparents lived next door, so they were killed, too.”

  We were all silent for a few moments digesting the matter-of-fact horror of what Gloria had just told us. Somehow, it made us and our little rationing problems seem insignificant.

  “What made you decide on a Godforsaken place like Hobb’s End?” Mother asked.

  “It wasn’t my choice. That’s where they sent me, the Land Army. I did my training at Askham Bryan, which isn’t far away. Mr Kilnsey needs a lot of help since his boy joined up, and he’s not getting any younger. I was just glad to get away to the countryside. You don’t see much of it in London, of course, but I’ve always loved the country, and I just couldn’t stand the idea of working in a dirty, smelly munitions factory.”