Fete Fatale Read online

  ‘At least Miss Morse and Mrs Primp don’t seem to be succeeding in damping anyone’s spirits.’

  ‘Aren’t they incredibly childish? And all simply to make trouble—simply to get a bit of excitement into their lives.’

  ‘Certainly I can’t see one priest being replaced by another making that much difference to Hexton life,’ agreed Mrs Nielson, lighting up a cigarette. ‘Of course, Mary says she owes it to her dead mother . . . ’

  ‘Ha! No doubt Queen Victoria said she owed it to her poor dead Albert when she was intent on doing something particularly selfish and disagreeable . . . Oh God, let’s forget Hexton and its doings. When are you going on holiday this year?’

  ‘I don’t know that I’ll have one. Too soon after the move here, which was really rather expensive. And I’m not sure of the best place to go, now that I have to decide for myself.’

  ‘Was your husband the type who did everything for you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not consciously, perhaps, but he was a doctor, and in fact his word was mostly law. Oh, Gustave—be quiet!’

  But Gustave, having finished up all his meal, was determined on a walk. He had a splendid confidence about getting his way, and no doubt he felt it his due, after having been tied for so long to the leg of the stall. Gwen Nielson stubbed out her cigarette and took him off, he barking rapturously at having made his point. I lay back in the sun and closed my eyes. Now, if I was sensible, I’d take twenty minutes off and enjoy a little snooze. It was really quite pleasant here, almost peaceful, apart from the distant shouts and songs of the drunken soldiery. And, really, Mr Horsforth had not pulled his weight so far, not by a long chalk. I really ought to leave him to get on with it . . .

  But of course I didn’t. What is operating in such cases I don’t know—my conscience, Marcus’s conscience, or what—but my pleasure rarely gets the upper hand over my duty, and my duty assumes ridiculous forms. I dragged myself back towards the tent. People were showing the exhaustion that overcomes Englishmen after quite a small amount of sun. Father Battersby, though, was still spry, enjoying a picnic with the Blatchleys down by the river. At the Test Your Strength machine Colonel Weston had apparently taken over from Marcus, and his ‘lady wife’ (as he often called her, and to which term, incredibly, she made no objections) was apparently intending to stand fluffily by him and offer admiring remarks to the local youth (who in fact had more flab than bicep under the sleeves of their T-shirts). I greeted them casually, and passed into the tent and out of the sunshine.

  The Hexton choir was putting in their third stint of duty that day, exhorting everybody to climb every mountain. The crowd was definitely thinning now. At my stall Mr Horsforth had disposed of little of the remaining stuff. He looked at me reproachfully and made off—as if we had come to some sort of arrangement about shift working, and I had somehow reneged on it. I ground my teeth and smiled compassionately at the rummagers around my stall. Now the crush was over one could see all sorts of things that one hadn’t noticed before. Howard Culpepper had a stall of second-hand jigsaws and games only two stalls down from my own, but I hadn’t registered him all day. Par for the course with Howard, of course. A good quarter of the stalls were sold out, though mostly their keepers lingered round them, either because they were terrified of Franchita, or because they did not want to forgo the gracious thanks of Lady Godetia. Mrs Nielson, on the other hand, had only five jars of jam left, and when she had sold these, she locked up her cash box, packed up and left, in spite of my warnings about the wrath of Franchita.

  I wished I could do the same. There were still three cartons of junk behind the stall, and still latecomers trailing in and contemptuously turning over Thyrza’s things, in default of anything else much worth buying. We were paying the penalty of success, and the day was quite early wearing an enervated, faded, stale-end sort of air. Outside, no doubt, was better, and the games and sideshows would be flourishing as the weather got cooler. I breathed in the stale air and wished I could get out. A tent on a wet day was bad enough, but a tent on a hot day was pure hell.

  Suddenly I noticed that others seemed equally possessed by a passion to escape the tent. Or at any rate, down at the far end the area around the entrance that gave out on to the meadows and the river was almost empty. The people down that end—attracted, presumably, by something I had not heard—had gone out, and were standing around outside, whispering to each other.

  The people around the junk stall had noticed too. ‘What is it?’ they said to each other. ‘Must be something happening.’ And they started to drift in that direction. I was pricked by the needle of curiosity, and the desire to escape into the fresh air. When there was no one in front of my stall, I nipped over and retrieved the old sheet that Gwen Nielson had used at lunch-time. I threw it over the remaining junk, and then darted down to the other entrance, which was still uncrowded, and then out into the open. The freshness of the late afternoon air was wonderful. I breathed it in two or three times, and then walked round to the other side of the tent, and to the river.

  It was the river they were all looking at. Floating down it, propelled by the currents of the weir and kept afloat by a hefty branch to which it had become attached, was the body of a man. I ran forward to the river bank, though someone—Colonel Weston, I think—had put out a hand to hold me back. From the bank I could see clearly: the dark green tweed jacket; the old flannels; above all the jaunty little hat with the feather which had somehow clung to the branch, and which he always wore to these do’s. Which Marcus always wore to these do’s.

  CHAPTER 6

  CURTAINS

  You will not, I imagine and hope, have set me down as the fainting type. But from the moment of that sight until perhaps an hour later I have no memories—only feelings: a feeling of being loaded gently on to a stretcher; a feeling of being somehow in my own house again; a feeling that an ice-cream van was playing outside, and that it shouldn’t be, leading to a drowsy consideration of whether I hated the one that played ‘Greensleeves’ more than the one that played the Harry Lime Theme or the one that played ‘O Sole Mio’, ending with a lazy decision that I did. When I had come, solemnly, to that conclusion, I opened my eyes, and saw the light and the lampshade in the ceiling over my own bed, turned and saw the bold patterned curtains drawn across the windows. It was then that the memories began, and the pain.

  ‘She’s coming to,’ I heard a voice say. It was Dr McPhail’s voice, my own GP. I sensed his shape approaching the bed.

  ‘Helen, I’m going to give you a sedative. I want you to have a long sleep. The nurse will stay with you.’

  I pushed myself with painful slowness up in the bed, looked at him, and shook my head.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Helen, I know you don’t like taking orders, but this time I want you to do as I say.’

  ‘It’s true, then? He’s dead?’

  ‘They brought the body in a quarter of a mile down river. Yes, I’m afraid he’s dead.’

  I stared ahead, and a great wave of grief, bitterness and anger swept over me. Marcus—the gentlest soul alive, the warm, quiet, loving man who had been with me in this bed for twelve years. I did not want to share my grief with these people, and I did not want to have it sedated out of me either. I did not even want to know how it happened, merely to come painfully to terms with the fact that it had, and the feeling of black emptiness that it left me with. Yet even as I thought this, something inside me said: Marcus was not the type to fall into rivers and not be able to get out again.

  Dr McPhail left me alone for a few seconds, and then approached again with his glass.

  ‘Now, Helen—’

  I waved him aside.

  ‘Harold, if you will go away, both of you, I promise you that I’ll rest. You can look in again if you want, say about nine or nine-thirty. But I won’t take anything to put me out.’

  Harold McPhail looked at me. He knew my reading tastes, and it did not surprise me when he quoted: “The highest calling and elect
ion is to do without opium . . . ”

  ‘And its delusively attractive modern equivalents,’ I said.

  ‘But I wish you’d let Nurse Burwash stay.’

  I looked at Nurse Burwash. She was a nice enough soul, but she always reminded me of a policeman in drag.

  ‘I’m sure you understand, Nurse. I have to be alone.’

  So in the end they went, and Dr McPhail left his damned sedative by the bed, instead of inside me, and I lay there crying my grief into manageable order for some time. In the end, all the memories and the love reduced themselves in my mind to one simple proposition: Marcus had been such a living person. Not lively, but so largely involved in life, getting such pleasure from it, putting himself so generously back into it. Not mourning for the things he didn’t have—children, for example—but getting such an immediate satisfaction out of the things he did have. And that warm, comfortable presence—smelling, as often as not, mainly of animals and tobacco—had been cut out of life.

  Why did I use that expression ‘cut out of life’? I think in my mind I had been going through all the alternative possibilities and rejecting them, though quite subconsciously. I went through them consciously now. I knew Marcus’s mind, and his faith, too well to even consider suicide. An accidental slipping into the river, followed by an inability to get out again, I had already rejected: Marcus was a strong swimmer, and generally capable on a physical level. The only possible scenario I could imagine was something like a heart attack while he was standing on the river bank (the path was a couple of feet from the bank, so he would have had to have been standing on the very verge). Marcus was of course coming up to the age of heart attacks, though in fact his heart, and his health generally, was strong. Gradually there had stolen into my brain the conviction that it was not God who had struck him down, but man. Or perhaps more specifically woman. Hexton had got him. He had been deliberately, wantonly sheared off, as a vandal might cut at living blooms, because their naturalness offended him. I understood now the graveyard words staled by use: ‘cut down in his prime’. I had been denied the years I should have had with him.

  I then did something very illogical. I went slightly uncertainly downstairs, and I poured myself a small whisky. So much for doing without opium. I went back to bed, and lay there sipping it, and thinking ahead to the next stage: how had he come to be in the river? Who had killed him?

  The first image that came to my mind was Marcus, almost the last time I had seen him alive. He was standing by my stall, listening to the din and the talk all around him, but looking at a party of tipsy servicemen who had just come into the tent. My brain struggled with memories rendered fuggy by my faint. That was the less drunk of the two lots of servicemen: the group outside had been louder and nastier. Had Marcus in fact gone to ‘do something’ about them? He dearly hated unpleasantness. Had that hatred brought upon him the greatest unpleasantness of all?

  But I put the idea from me. If he had remonstrated with them near the tent, there would have been crowds around to see him go in the water. If, on the other hand, the servicemen had left the area of the meadows—and the body had obviously been floating for some time down from the weir, to judge by the crowd that had collected to watch it—then there would have been no reason for him to remonstrate with them, since they would not be disturbing the fête. In any case, I put the idea from me for another reason: I believed it was Hexton that had killed Marcus. The servicemen were, on occasion, brutal and rough enough, but they were not murderous. And they were not in any real sense Hexton.

  Yet, when it came down to it, the body that one might have expected to see floating down the river was not Marcus’s, but Father Battersby’s. Admittedly there was something about the Father that repelled the ultimate familiarity of murder. Just as he had sailed serenely through Mary and Thyrza’s ambushes and attempts at snubs, so he would have fixed his would-be murderer with that determined eye, and forced him to drop his weapon. So, at any rate, one felt. Perhaps Marcus was in a sense a second-best choice.

  Yet Marcus, too, was in his way an unlikely murder victim. Not that he had that spiritual steeliness that Father Battersby possessed: Marcus was another type altogether—cosy, accommodating, approachable; he saw good in everyone, and let it be a source of wonder to him that everyone in his world could not be friends. And yet Marcus was a formidable bulk of a man to murder: tall, burly, physically confident. Certainly I’d have backed him against three or four of those drunken soldiers. Did this mean, then, that the blow, shot, or whatever it was, was unexpected? Was he shot, perhaps, totally unawares? Yet who in Hexton, apart from Colonel Weston and a few more or less competent grouse-shooters, could one visualize handling a gun?

  I had finished my whisky. I felt drear, heavy, yet totally clearheaded. I put the glass down on the bedside table, swung my legs from the bed to the floor, and stood up: a little groggy now, no more. I had promised Dr McPhail to rest, not to rest until he came. I walked downstairs, more confidently this time. I took one of my rare cigarettes from the box on the mantelpiece and lit it. Then I did something very strange: I took from the ’fridge the steak I had been saving for Marcus, and put it into a pan and fried it. I threw together a salad, and then I sat down and ate ravenously, cutting and wolfing at it again and again. I suppose this will seem heartless—a sort of symbolic eating of Marcus out of my life. I only know that all these steps back to normality were helpful—did not make my grief less, but put it into a controllable shape. They also made me more and more determined that Hexton would pay for what it had done to Marcus.

  The attack on Marcus was probably unexpected. I had got that far. Yet how small a way that really was. Because Marcus would never suspect anyone of murderous designs on him. Short of the killing occurring in the middle of a stand-up fight with knives, Marcus would not conceivably have anticipated being killed. And I didn’t think he had got into any fight with knives. I thought he had got into a conversation with one of the upright burghers of Hexton, and in the course of it had been killed. What had it been done with? How had the weapon come to be so readily to hand? And what had the talk been about?

  As I chomped hungrily through the large steak, the Marcus-sized steak, I projected a scene on to the screen of my mind. On the way home, walking along by the river—but why that way home? The longer way?—Marcus meets one of our pillars of the community. They engage in conversation, and in the course of it Marcus upbraids him (her? almost certainly her) about the happenings of that afternoon. The conversation becomes rancorous, and the other person—

  There my invention lagged. And in any case, re-running the scene in the cinema of my mind, I found it less than satisfying, or rather less than convincing. Though Marcus had been apprehensive about the fête, in the event it had gone off swimmingly from his point of view. Would he then, in his euphoria, willingly open up the subject with any member of the opposition? Would he so gratuitously cause an ‘unpleasantness’? That went quite against Marcus’s nature, his habits of conciliation. Of course if the other party had opened up the subject . . . Then it would have to be someone so stupid as to be insensible to the shame and ridicule that the afternoon’s fiasco had brought on them . . . There were candidates for that role.

  Then there was the question of opportunity. There the mind began to boggle. That I had remained aware of the comings and goings in the tent earlier in the day was true, but by the time Marcus must have been killed, things were becoming very hazy indeed. And even though the fête tent was becoming less crowded, it was still perfectly easy for someone to be there without my knowing. Mr Horsforth, for example, when he wasn’t at the stall (as he mostly wasn’t), could have been down by the tea-and-coffee table, or outside around the Test Your Strength games, and thus have a perfectly good alibi that I could know nothing about. It was going to be difficult enough for the police to establish alibis in a setting of constant comings and goings, and it was quite impossible for me to. There was nothing to be gained by thinking along those lines as yet.
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br />   I was startled by a ring at the door. It was Harold McPhail, come back to see how I was. I led him through into the dining-room, and when he saw the nearly-eaten steak on a plate the dear man did not even raise an eyebrow. But I, new in that twilight world of the newly-widowed, felt the need to excuse myself.

  ‘I somehow needed to get back to normality,’ I said. ‘Or to some version of it.’

  ‘You don’t have to explain to me, Helen. I haven’t been a doctor for twenty-five years without knowing that people find their own ways of coping with sudden death. There’s nothing unnatural about being hungry, whatever the circumstances. But some people prefer sedation, I can assure you, and there’s nothing unnatural about that either.’

  ‘I’m sorry. You think me arrogant. Perhaps the sedation will come later,’ I said, more humbly.

  He sat himself down at the dining table.

  ‘I don’t know the details, Helen, but he was killed.’

  ‘Of course he was killed,’ I said abruptly. ‘Sorry. But there was no other possible explanation, was there?’

  ‘You don’t mean you know who might have done it?’

  ‘Good God, no. I meant that he could hardly have got in there accidentally. And if there’s one thing I know about Marcus, it’s that he was not the suicidal type. That’s ruled out both by temperament and by religion. Someone killed him—but as to who had motives . . . Of course, there’s been all this unpleasantness recently about the appointment of Father Battersby, but I find it difficult . . . After all, it’s all so trivial, isn’t it?’

  Harold McPhail smiled.

  ‘I can imagine you would think so. You’re not really a wholehearted churchwoman, are you, Helen?’

  ‘I’m an agnostic, converted by marriage rather than reason,’ I admitted. ‘Still, even if I were passionately involved, I can’t see myself getting that het up about one kind of vicar rather than another. I mean, you’d have to be a pretty funny kind of Christian to murder for your point of view, wouldn’t you?’