Fete Fatale Read online

  ‘What did the Bishop say about Father Battersby?’ I asked.

  ‘Chariots of Fire on television tonight,’ said Marcus, leafing through the Radio Times.

  ‘Oh God—high-minded athletes. Don’t change the subject. What did the Bishop say about Battersby?’

  ‘He said he’d heard that feeling among our ladies was running high . . . The Bishop knows our ladies.’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’

  ‘He said he’d be happy to organize a visit to us by him . . . and he said he’d rely on me to see Battersby suffered no discourtesy while he was here. He said I was to make sure he wasn’t victimized.’

  ‘Ha! And how do you propose to do that?’

  ‘I said if necessary I’d form a human phalanx round him of the churchwardens and sidesmen.’

  ‘Ho-ho. A lot of chance you men would have if Mary and Franchita wanted to get at him. If they take against him, there’s nothing on earth the Hexton males can do about it. They’ll murder him.’

  Later that evening, in bed, and on the verge of sleep, I drowsily said to Marcus:

  ‘What was that book . . . by Ira Levin . . . about the community where the men had all their wives wiped out and lifelike dummies put in their places, who never contradicted, or made demands, or anything?’

  ‘The Stepford Wives. I didn’t think you liked the book at the time. Why?’

  ‘It seems to me that what we have here is the Stepford husbands,’ I said, going off to sleep.

  CHAPTER 3

  FATHER BATTERSBY

  It was three weeks before Father Battersby could get away from his parish duties in Sheffield to pay us a visit. Marcus said that that would give us time to organize his reception, to make sure it was civil and accommodating. Ever the optimist, Marcus ignored the fact that it would give the ladies of Hexton time to organize as well, and that, good as he was at relaxing tensions, they were even better at screwing them up again—especially since Mary Morse had emerged from her mortuary purdah, and was organizing her campaign as if it were some sort of personal by-election.

  I had had from the moment she first raised the issue misgivings about the new Mary that was emerging. The weeks leading up to Father Battersby’s visit fully confirmed them. Dressed consistently in colours drab and dun (though of course she had never been a Mary Quant figure at the best of times), Mary scurried hither and thither around the town, assuming alternately an expression of brave bearing-up when anyone commiserated with her on her recent bereavement, and one of eager-beaver determination when she was discussing the question of the vicar-to-be. Wherever one went shopping, at every social event or meeting, there she was to be seen, bearing down on some unsuspecting member of the Anglican congregation (sometimes so unsuspecting that they were hardly aware that they were members of the Anglican congregation). She was, as they say, tireless—and how one hates people who are that! They are always, whether intentionally or not, mischief-makers, be they charity workers, schoolteachers or politicians. Mary was certainly a mischief-maker, and she was it intentionally.

  The only hopeful sign was that, like all such busybodies, Mary inevitably aroused opposition. ‘What’s she getting so het up for?’ was a question often asked, or implied, and though the tendency of the questioners was of the quietistic or do-nothing school of behaviour (one suspects that some members of the congregation would have accepted a black mass on Sunday, provided the Satanist had been properly appointed by the Bishop), still, one did sympathize: who was Mary to lay it down as an immutable rule that the vicar of Hexton-on-Weir should have a wife? The opposition to Mary tended to be lower middle to working class, and to voice its opposition under its breath or behind its hands. Marcus was, in any case, not the man to use this opposition, perhaps wisely: it would make it too obvious, as he said, that battle lines were being drawn up. But, in spite of his scruples, battle lines there were, and we all knew it.

  ‘I think we should do something for him,’ said Marcus, one morning at breakfast.

  ‘Do something?’ I asked, knowing perfectly well what he meant.

  ‘Have some people round in the evening.’

  ‘I’m always happy to do that . . . ’ I said cautiously. ‘Depending on the people . . . I am not having any fights about incense and thuribles in my living-room.’

  ‘Oh, they wouldn’t—’

  ‘They would. You get all that over during the day, then we’ll have some nice people round, and show him that some people in Hexton can behave in a civilized fashion.’

  In the end, of course, the guest-list was a compromise, because Marcus was so good at quiet but stubborn insistence.

  ‘I won’t have Mary,’ I said, when we got around to giving thought to actual names. ‘I’ll say to her that we’d love to have had her, but we know it’s too soon. We’ll have the Westons, because he’s a sweetie, and she’s all right if the others are not there to egg her on. We won’t have the Culpeppers.’

  ‘You like Franchita.’

  ‘I do, but I can’t control her, and in her present mood she’d bring faggots and burn the poor man in the back garden. If I hear she’s going to be away I’ll invite them. I’d like to have a talk with Howard, to find out if he exists. Same with the Mipchins, but she’s never away, so we can forget them. I think I’ll ask Mrs Nielson: she seems nice, she’s new, and she doesn’t know many people. Are there any younger people, I wonder?’

  ‘I thought of that,’ said Marcus. ‘I thought we might invite Timothy and Fiona.’

  ‘Oh God,’ I said, ‘isn’t there anyone else?’

  But as I said it I knew there was nobody else. Timothy and Fiona were Hexton’s resident young people. Fiona was the Westons’ daughter, Timothy the son of the Grammar School headmaster. Just the mere sight of them together in the town square made people sigh and say what a lovely young couple they were—though they were not married, nor even, so far as I knew, engaged. Both of them were fair, anonymously good-looking, and they swanned it around Hexton like a Torvill and Dean begrounded by a universal thaw. Perpetually holding hands, gazing publicly into each other’s eyes, greeting their elders with eager and courteous friendliness, they seemed like refugees from a ’thirties play, though their paraded courtship seemed to have lasted well beyond the regulation three acts. I found the performance quite stomach-turning, but I did not expect Marcus to share my feelings.

  ‘All right,’ I said, giving up with a sigh before the self-evident lack of alternative young people. ‘Timothy and Fiona it is.’

  ‘And of course we’ll have to ask Thyrza Primp,’ said Marcus.

  ‘Marcus! No!’

  ‘But we ought to, darling. As the widow of the former incumbent—it’s something she’ll expect.’

  ‘Oh, expect, expect! She’ll just sit there, Marcus, pursing her lips and saying things weren’t like that in her Walter’s time. She’ll cast a blight over the whole evening.’

  ‘She won’t be with us long. You know, it is an attention she has a right to expect.’

  ‘Couldn’t she carry a load of high dudgeon with her into retirement at Harrogate? You could surely arrange for Father Battersby to call on her earlier in the day.’

  ‘I think we’ll have to ask her,’ said Marcus, and I knew that was the effective end of the discussion.

  The Primps had been carrying the banner of the Church Moribund in Hexton for as long as anyone could remember. He had become incumbent of St Edward the Confessor’s round about the time of the Festival of Britain, though it seemed more like the Great Exhibition. Walter Primp, whom Mrs Nielson had charitably described as dull, had carried irresolution to a high art, and on all the great issues that had faced the Church of England, from the ordination of women to the remarriage of divorcées, he had dithered. But then so, of course, had the Church of England. His sermons were old-fashioned homilies on upholding moral standards, though it would have been extremely difficult to define what he thought those standards were. Thyrza Primp—well, you will meet Thyrza. Thyrza was about to r
etire to Harrogate, where many elderly people freeze away their last years. I could just imagine her icing over the pump waters, and curdling the cream on the cakes in Betty’s Tea Shop.

  ‘All right,’ I said with a sigh. ‘I’ll ask Thyrza.’

  It was very weak of me. I should have stood out against it. I think that on occasion, perhaps in reaction to Hexton ways, I veer towards the policy that Victorian wives adopted: let the husband take all the decisions, and then blame him afterwards. The fact is that though Marcus had the better understanding of principle, I had much the better understanding of people.

  So that, as it turned out, was the line-up for the party: the Westons, Mrs Nielson, dear Timothy and Fiona, and Thyrza Primp. By dint of some tactful nosing around, I found that Franchita Culpepper was to be away (she made periodical visits to her dentist in Barnard’s Castle, and was always away overnight, which made me very suspicious, though it had to be admitted that her teeth, like entrenched castanets, could be flashed with splendid effect for a woman of her age). Anyway, I asked them both, and Howard accepted for himself alone, seeming to wag some metaphorical tail at the thought of a run-around on his own.

  ‘Don’t put up with any nonsense from Howard,’ said Franchita to me, sternly.

  I did, I am afraid, make one big mistake, which I could not blame on Marcus. My formula for not asking Mary was, I thought, rather clever: I stopped her in the street as she was buzzing round the town on her daily business of stirring up trouble, and I said that Marcus and I were having a party in the evening for Father Battersby, and I was asking her, though I quite understood, naturally, that this wasn’t the sort of occasion she could go to, so soon after her bereavement. And Mary put on her brave smile, which was now as automatic as a mac in bad weather, and said how kind it was of me to ask, but no, she didn’t think that . . . I went away congratulating myself on my combination of cunning and tact.

  It was the day before Father Battersby’s visit that Mary rang up and said she understood it was to be quite a small gathering—she’d got quite the wrong impression when I’d mentioned a party—and she felt she could manage just five or six, particularly as she so wished to meet the Reverend Battersby, and she so wanted Marcus to understand that there was nothing personal in her opposition.

  I should have realized that the mourning etiquette of Hexton was a thing that could be subtly manipulated to suit individual convenience. I ground my teeth and added Mary.

  The day of the visit dawned, and it dawned badly. Marcus had decided to take the day off entirely, and had delegated everything to Simon Fox, his junior partner. As always happened on such days, he got a call over breakfast from a farmer whose prize cow, with a complicated medical history that only Marcus apparently knew the ins and outs of, had gone down with a nasty bout of something-or-other that he said only Marcus could pull her through. The farm lay twenty-five miles north of Hexton-on-Weir. Cursing slightly, Marcus got out his car; cursing robustly, I walked towards the town square to meet Father Battersby.

  He wasn’t difficult to pick out when the bus drew in, that was one thing. None of this ‘I’m just one of the chaps’ informality that most clerics go in for these days. He actually wore robes—a cassock, or a soutane, or whatever the goddam thing is called. He was about thirty-five, I supposed, and while he was not good-looking, he was impressive in a gaunt, craggy, rather Victorian kind of way. He was a strong, determined man—if he had been a schoolmaster, the boys would have respected him enormously, and feared him not a little. In the 1840s one could imagine him renouncing all sorts of things for conscientious reasons—which presumably was what he had done in the 1980s, though today the climate of opinion rendered the renunciations ever so faintly ridiculous. From the start I liked him; from the start I thought what a nice change after Walter Primp to have someone who self-evidently knew his own mind and spoke it; from the start I knew that his coming would mean trouble in Hexton.

  As I went round with him, desperately wishing Marcus would return from his silly cow, I became aware of something else which it is less easy to put into words. He was very slightly inhuman. He said the wrong thing, or he said the right thing to the wrong person. As a consequence he sometimes left people uneasy or resentful. I can illustrate this easily enough. I took him first to visit St Edward the Confessor’s, down in its little hollow, and an attractive enough church to gladden the heart of a new incumbent. While we were there, Mrs Bates came in to freshen up the flowers, and naturally I introduced them, and they got talking. The conversation strayed around to a stint of three years Father Battersby had had in a remote mission in Tanzania. While he was talking about the disease and misery there, he was at his most intense: ‘It makes me quite ill, when I remember all the suffering I saw in and around the place, to see how people begrudge making the least sacrifice from the absolute luxury we live in, to alleviate it.’

  I saw Mrs Bates stiffen, the line of her mouth harden. Mrs Bates’s husband had been declared redundant two years before, and had never found work; they had three children, and times were very hard for them. Of course, by any standards Father Battersby was right, and even Mrs Bates lived in absolute luxury in comparison with his remote Tanzanian tribesmen. And yet, one felt that another man might have noticed on her the signs of pinching and scraping—I could certainly see them, all too many of them, and one felt he ought to have been used to them in his parish in Sheffield—and would not have said that. As I say, I liked him; on any other occasion I would have enjoyed talking to him on my own, perhaps joshing him a little; as it was, I was pleased to hand him on to Marcus.

  I had set the party at an early time. Father Battersby had to catch the 11.15 train to Sheffield from Darlington, and Marcus was to drive him there, so I’d said seven o’clock. I’d prepared a buffet supper, so that everyone could perch how and where they could, even in the garden if it was fine. It wasn’t a very Hexton way of doing things, but I certainly couldn’t seat so many round my dinner table. Promptly at two minutes past seven the doorbell rang, and there stood Timothy and Fiona, looking all scrubbed and eager and dewy, as if they had been auditioning for roles in a particularly tepid soap-opera. Just behind them came the Westons, Fiona’s parents. Nancy Weston was one of the leaders of the ‘Aren’t they a lovely couple?’ brigade; Colonel Weston, on the other hand, I had sometimes caught casting glances at Timothy that were charged with something very close to suspicion.

  Then they all started coming: Mrs Nielson arrived almost simultaneously with Howard Culpepper. She had, by arrangement, brought Gustave (‘I know other people’s dogs are a pain, but he does bark when I’m out and annoy the neighbours’), and we put him up in our bedroom. Then Mary arrived, with a conspicuously sober demeanour, like a Roman virgin at her first orgy of the season. She was terribly and unremittingly sweet to everyone. Then Marcus and Father Battersby got back from calling on the town’s oldest communicant, with whom Father Battersby, it seemed, had been a great success (he reminded her, apparently, of what ‘the cloth’ had been like in her girlhood, and she kept looking at him and saying ‘That’s more like!’). And then, lastly, came Thyrza, bringing with her—not by arrangement but pretty much by tradition—her dog Patch.

  Patch was a Jack Russell. At bottom he was a rather nice-natured dog, I was convinced, but at top he was a highly aggressive yapper. He formed quite a fitting accompaniment to Thyrza Primp, but in her case I was much less sure of the nice nature at bottom. We put Patch in what we called the nursery, destined for children who had never come, and scenting the presence of Gustave and my dog Jasper in the vicinity he created merry hell for about ten minutes, and then settled down for a bit of shut-eye.

  Thyrza, meanwhile, had been accorded the armchair of honour in the sitting-room while she had graciously allowed me to settle her dog. She sat there, her short, squat body encased in a tight black dress of a hideous crimply material, her black eyes drilling slowly and painfully through one person in the room after another. On her lap was a handbag, clutched tightl
y with both hands, as if she were in Sicily. The bag snapped open—‘Primp!’ I always heard it say—and snapped shut, and at moments when she wished to express shock or disapproval she would snap it open—Primp!—take out a tiny embroidered handkerchief, raise it to her nose, and sniff. Then she would return it to her handbag—Primp!—and sit staring fixedly in front of her. This was Thyrza Primp, wife, helpmeet, taskmaster and terrorizer of poor dead Walter. As Mary kept saying, what would we do without Thyrza? Soon, praise God, we were going to find out.

  I managed to busy myself in the kitchen, so as not to worry too much about the ill-assorted guests and how they were shaking down with each other. On my trips in and out ferrying food I noted that Father Battersby was in a little group with Mrs Nielson and Howard Culpepper, which seemed a way of letting him down lightly. Howard was doggy and enthusiastic, and getting in opinions from time to time, which Franchita would doubtless have said was very bad for discipline. Mrs Nielson was being apologetic (in a manner Father Battersby had no doubt heard countless times before) about the half-heartedness of her Anglicanism.

  ‘I used to work in a hospital, and of course I saw all the good work done by priests there, when people were in trouble, or dying, or often just generally by coming and talking to them; but I’m afraid I got into the habit of thinking of them in that way: people for special occasions—often very unhappy occasions.’

  ‘You’re far from alone in that,’ said Father Battersby. ‘That’s one of the tasks of the Church today: we’re not integrated into the whole of people’s lives . . . ”

  It was standard churchy chat. No doubt something similar was going on around Thyrza Primp, for there in a dutiful and duty-bound group were collected Marcus and the Westons, all bent forward over her in a vaguely deferential manner, as if she were a distinguished visitor who would shortly be asked to snip a ribbon or push a button. On the other side of the room Mary stood talking to Timothy and Fiona, who were holding hands on the window-seat, smiling innocently, and looking as if someone ought soon to bounce in and invite them to make a foursome at tennis.