A Little Local Murder

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Of course, I seldom hear the radio nowadays,’ said Arnold, ‘and so far as I know I’ve never heard Radio Broadwich at all. Heaven knows if they’re capable of producing a competent programme.’

  ‘One wonders what the American audience will be expecting,’ said Alison.

  ‘Something quaint, something drenched in history, something just a little boring,’ said Arnold. ‘That would be about their idea of the typical English village.’

  ‘If it’s boredom they want,’ said Alison, stretching herself elegantly into the chair, ‘they shouldn’t be disappointed. If Old Mother Withens has her way, though, this will be something extra-special – the greatest mass-switch-off since the days of Mrs Dale.’

  ‘Mrs Withens? Poor old Ernest’s wife? Is she going to have anything to do with it?’

  ‘Everything, as far as I can gather. Ernest is Chairman of the District Council at the moment, in case you hadn’t registered. So our Deborah is going to vet the lists of who is and who is not to be interviewed - or so Jean Jimson says, at any rate.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe,’ said Arnold. ‘She may not find it as easy as she thinks, though. I don’t imagine these commercial radio chappies kow-tow as much as the BBC.’

  ‘Arnold,’ said Alison thoughtfully, ‘don’t we know anyone at Radio Broadwich?’

  They both knew perfectly well that none of their mutual friends answered to that description. Such friends as they had were mostly connected with Arnold’s construction company, Alison having cast off most of the friends of her youth as insufficiently smart shortly after her marriage. So Arnold rightly took her to mean ‘Don’t you go up on the train with anyone at Radio Broadwich?’ He thought for a bit.

  ‘No, I’m pretty sure we don’t,’ he said. ‘There’s Fisher – he’s in an advertising firm. He’s concerned with the visual side, though, so I don’t suppose he’d have much to do with radio.’

  Alison allowed a long pause. ‘Very helpful,’ she said sourly. She looked at the clock, but almost before she did so her daughter had begun collecting up her books. It was the invariable custom of the household that the first spasm of irritation after dinner was the signal for Cressida to be sent to bed.

  ‘Goodness,’ said Alison. ‘Time for bed, darling. Give Mummy and Daddy a kiss.’

  Cressida planted a perfunctory kiss on her mother’s cheek and a much more enthusiastic one on her father’s. She and her mother seemed to get on excellently. Cressida consented to do much of the housework and cooking in return for being left alone, and not subjected to any of those embarrassing occasional displays of mother love for the benefit of friends or visitors which had embittered her earlier childhood. Neither cared for the other, but they had thus managed to reach an acceptable public modus vivendi. Cressida never minded being sent to bed, for she could rely on being left alone to read or write till midnight or beyond – indeed until she fell asleep over her book. This was her idea of paradise.

  ‘If only, Arnold,’ said Alison pensively when her daughter had gone, ‘if only just once in a while you could get to know the right people.’

  Arnold Mailer accepted the rebuke meekly.

  ‘I got to know you, after all,’ he said. ‘That’s surely one time when I did.’

  Alison treated this bit of sickliness with the contempt it deserved.

  ‘God,’ she said. She let a moment pass to convey her feelings, and then she continued: ‘I wonder about music . . .’

  ‘Music?’ said Arnold, not following.

  ‘Music,’ said Alison; ‘the music I shall choose’ – spacing it out as if to a dull child.

  ‘Oh, are you that far already? Well, I don’t know – what do you like?’

  Alison gave him another withering look.

  ‘That is hardly the point. I thought of Schoenberg or Rodney Bennett or someone like that first – just to annoy Old Mother Withens. But Jean said they’d probably scrub the whole interview, and she may be right for once in her life. What would be the OK names among the older composers at the moment, do you think?’

  Her husband was on her wavelength now, and was used to such questions. He pondered for a bit.

  ‘It used to be Vivaldi or Corelli, that sort of figure. Or Purcell, of course. I’m not quite sure who it would be now. Haydn does seem to be very in at the moment, though. Yes – I think you’d be safe in putting your money on Haydn.’

  Alison got up from her chair and stretched her shapely length ceiling-wards.

  ‘God, I’m bored with this ghastly little town,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll take a trip to Ipswich tomorrow.’

  • • •

  ‘Haydn,’ said Alison vaguely to the young man behind the counter of the largest music-shop in Ipswich.

  ‘Yes, madam,’ said the young man patiently. ‘Was it the symphonies you were interested in?’

  ‘That’s right, the symphonies,’ said Alison, less vaguely.

  ‘Was it the complete symphonies you wanted?’ asked the young man.

  ‘Of course,’ drawled Alison in her most Bond Street voice.

  She watched, coolly and impassively aghast, as he went to the shelves and took down boxed set after boxed set after boxed set. Something like a tear of emotion came to the corner of her eyes as she took her cheque-book from her handbag.

  Someone’s going to pay for this, she thought.

  CHAPTER III

  JOCKEYING FOR POSITION

  It made a change, Jean Jimson thought, not to have to go through Sunday afternoon and evening on tiptoe. The usual pattern after lunch was that her husband would spend half an hour sleeping or having a last flip through the Sundays, and would then retire to the second bedroom which he used as a study (or ‘den’, as he called it) for the rest of the day. From then on it was a matter of constantly muffling the children’s exuberance, and nothing was more exhausting than that – not even having her husband actually around.

  Timothy Jimson was a short, ratty little man whose clothes always hung loosely around him, as if they were giving him plenty of air. He had the appearance of having just recovered from a serious and wasting illness, and his twisted, petulant expression gave colour to this notion. Timothy Jimson was a schoolteacher, and he maintained a precarious ascendency over his pupils by means of tortuous sarcasms which were not the less resented for being only dimly or partially understood. Like any teacher who needed constantly to assure himself of the immense difference in learning between himself and his pupils, he actually taught very little.

  Timothy Jimson was also a writer. ‘I write,’ he would say to people, without any of the customary masks of irony, defensiveness or self-depreciation: ‘I write’, pure and simple. He had written a clever little play about the Trojan wars, in verse indistinguishable from bad prose, which wittily suggested that the real cause of the wars was not the rape of Helen, but the fall in the commodity prices of copper and wheat. It had been performed to glum little audiences by the Barstowe Players. He had written too for some years a column for the Barstowe paper, which he called ‘Twytching Tattle’ and signed ‘Taper’. He had written ironic fairy stories, with clever twists at the end, and he had been encouraged by the boredom and distaste evinced for them by his own children to collect them and look out for a publisher. At school he was the bore of the common room, having few subjects but himself; at home he was irritable, self-pitying and dogmatic. Jean was a placid type, but she often caught herself, unawares, wondering why she had married him. No reason ever presented itself. She concluded that it was a long time ago, that she had been very young, and that she had much better put the subject out of her mind.

  This Sunday, then, was unusual for the Jimsons – and indeed for most of Twytching. People kept telling each other that they ‘mustn’t forget’ what was on at 5.15, and even the children consented to miss their favourite television programmes, though in some cases it needed a mountain of rather disgusting sweets to win their consent to this. The Jimsons went for a little walk, the first in eighteen months, and then s
ank in to tea and crumpets. At five-ten Jean cleared away. Timothy told Ellen to stop scratching with her crayons, Jeremy to stop banging his Meccano pieces together, and Peter to stop crawling around the floor. Then the whole family settled around the radio set in the sort of frozen immobility that must have greeted Churchill’s early war broadcasts, or Edward VIII’s abdication speech.

  Down Your Way was that week visiting a medium-sized town in the far north of Scotland. Medium-sized towns in the north of Scotland are not, at the best of times, the liveliest of places, and it could not be said that the programme managed to disguise the fact. The compère talked to an amateur archaeologist about the origins of the place, to the star of the local drama group, to the head of the town’s WVS, the manager of a local factory making tartan egg-cosies for export, and to someone who designed and produced jewellery, a rather precious gentleman who kept talking about his ‘craft’ and assuring the interviewer that each piece was ‘a unique work of art’. His musical choice was some lyric witterings by Grieg; for the rest it was Kenneth McKellar, Moira Anderson, and various defunct choirs from Luton, Glasgow and the Rhondda valley.

  When the programme finished, there was a silence for a few moments in the Jimson household. Jean signalled to the children to go out and play, and then waited to hear what the party line was to be.

  ‘Well,’ said Timothy, after a prolonged period of mature consideration, ‘so that’s the sort of programme they’re aiming to send to America.’

  ‘It’s very old-fashioned,’ said Jean tentatively. ‘I didn’t know they still made radio programmes like that.’

  ‘You’ve got to remember, Jean,’ said her husband, in his schoolmaster’s voice, ‘that we get a quite erroneous impression of the States here. Chicago isn’t America. Large parts of it are sleepy, old-fashioned, homely places, and if Twytching, Wisconsin, is in that sort of area, I’m sure this type of programme will suit very nicely.’

  ‘True,’ said Jean, bored as usual by her husband’s habit of expounding his views as if they were a geometrical theorem.

  ‘One hopes that the makers of our programme will try to avoid the element of commercialism that I thought crept into the programme today.’

  ‘Commercialism?’ said Jean.

  Timothy’s face twisted itself into a well-known smile of lordly contempt. ‘You mean you didn’t notice? Don’t you realize that every little squireen within a mile of that place will be ordering something from that jewellery-maker for the lady wife? And you can bet your bottom dollar that the sale of tartan egg-cosies to Hong-Kong will quadruple. Wake up, Jean – it’s not like you to be quite so naive.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Jean, mentally noting that for once he probably was.

  ‘I hope,’ said her husband impressively, ‘that this documentary on Twytching will not only go deeper into things, but will take a much healthier attitude. Not be so completely materialistic, and concentrate on the things that matter.’

  ‘Well, perhaps,’ said Jean. ‘But what exactly had you in mind? We don’t have a WVS. We don’t even do meals-on-wheels for pensioners, so far as I know.’

  Her husband sneered. ‘Meals-on-wheels!’ he said with pregnant scorn. ‘I was not thinking of meals-on-wheels, nor Women’s Institutes, nor wireless for the blind – nor the whole range of do-goody organizations, nor the whole range of goody-goody organizations . . .’

  ‘What then?’ said Jean, feeling fairly sure he had exhausted his limited range of invective.

  ‘Well,’ said Timothy, hesitating, and forced at last to bring out over-baldly what had been on his mind all the time; ‘there’s education, for example.’

  Jean was a submissive wife well beyond the calls of duty, but she let this hang in the air several seconds before replying: ‘Ye-e-es. Someone at the local school, do you mean? Who would you suggest, then?’

  Timothy taught at the grammar school in Barstowe, and she let him digest in silence the idea that this would probably disqualify him from representing Education on This is Twytching. Finally he managed to swallow the idea.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ he said. ‘There’s no one really. They’re a very dim bunch.’

  ‘Not altogether,’ said Jean. ‘I find Ellen’s Miss Marriot very approachable. And there’s Jack Edgar.’

  This last name was brought out with malice aforethought. Jack Edgar had brought his class to see a performance of Troy Weight, Timothy’s leaden comedy. He had allowed those who wanted to to leave at the interval, with the result that a great block of thirty-five seats was conspicuously empty out of a total audience of eighty-five.

  ‘Jack Edgar,’ said Timothy. ‘My God! Skip the idea entirely.’

  He sat sunk in gloom for some seconds, his scraggy little hand draped in an artistic pose along his forehead. Jean had noticed that whenever he was thinking about himself as an author he tried to elongate his fingers, as if to make them more artistic. She wondered whether the audience was already at an end and she could get up and do the washing up, but finally he said:

  ‘Of course the arts, if they were approached in an entirely non-commercial spirit . . .’

  ‘The arts?’ said Jean. ‘But who is there? There may be the odd flower-arranger, but I don’t know anyone in the village who paints, or sculpts, or makes jewellery.’

  ‘You forget, Jean,’ said Timothy Jimson, ‘that I write.’

  • • •

  It took Twytching some little time to digest its first taste of Down Your Way for at least two decades. Most of the inhabitants had bought television for the present Queen’s coronation, which had been the emotional high-spot of most of their lives, and since then had not listened to the radio after half past four in the afternoon. The implications of the programme sank but slowly into the rural brain. This, then, was the sort of programme that was to be made for their American cousins. But what were the lessons for those who aspired to appear? Even Mrs Withens was for a time dubious as to the significance for Twytching of what she had heard, and was troubled. Dubiety was not a state of mind she relished. It had the invariable consequence of making her more aggressive than usual. Thus she was, next morning, particularly hard on her husband as, at ten to seven, he performed the Eileen Fowler Keep Fit exercises in the hall, stripped to his woollen underwear, his face a tense mask of athletic enthusiasm. His endeavours were accompanied by wifely bellows from the bedroom above. ‘Stretch,’ yelled Mrs Withens when the sprightly Eileen said ‘stretch’. ‘Higher, higher,’ she yelled, to turn the screw harder. But when the sprightly Eileen said ‘relax, relax, lower your arms’, the voice from the bedroom was silent. Perched as she was in bed, with her cup of tea and marie biscuit resting on her magnificent bosom, Mrs Withens could not see whether or not her husband was actually doing the exercises. She did not need to see. He was doing them.

  It was not until a quarter to nine, when she had finished her three-course breakfast and was sitting down to read her daily paper, that the phone rang for the first of many times that morning. It was Mrs Brewer, the local fishmonger’s wife, and she wanted to discuss with Mrs Withens, who was, as you might say, the lady mayoress of the town (Mrs Withens nodded gravely into the mouthpiece of the phone) a plan which she had – she said – been turning over in her mind for many months, that of providing meals-on-wheels for all the incapacitated yet deserving pensioners of the town. The scheme conjured up little more in Mrs Withens’s mind than a picture of plates with little rollers underneath them, but she lent a gravely interested ear.

  ‘I don’t know about you, Mrs Withens dear, but I feel one can’t do too much for the senior citizens, provided they are the right sort of senior citizen of course, and nobody knows better than myself that the fact that they’re incapacitated doesn’t mean that they’re deserving – far from it often enough, God knows – but I did wonder, you know, whether Twytching hadn’t fallen just a little behind over the years in that sort of work, not your fault, dear, naturally, but some of us felt that now your good gentleman w
as chairman we could look to you for a more energetic line on what you might call the civic welfare level . . .’

  Mrs Withens took advantage of Mrs Brewer taking a short pause for a breath of fishy air to give a snort of modified approval. She approved of welfare services only if the recipients could be proved to be both humble and grateful. An automatic grovel should be the condition of receipt in her opinion.

  ‘Why I’m ringing now,’ continued Mrs Brewer, ‘was that I did hear as how Mrs Buller was on to the same idea, and though I’ve nothing against her, as you know, nothing against her personally at all, and when you’re in business you can’t afford to have likes and dislikes, can you, still, well, you’ll have heard about her daughter, I suppose . . . yes . . . yes . . . exactly . . . so what I say is it’s not a family I’d ever want to have too much to do with, as you say, and one would want our old people to be in the right sort of hands, because a good example goes a very long way, I’m sure you’d agree, Mrs Withens love . . .’

  Mrs Withens made noises of conditional assent, and intimated that the matter should have her immediate attention: it suited her power-hungry mind, like any minor civil servant, to keep her petitioners waiting a little in her civic antechambers.

  The next call was not in fact Mrs Buller, but Mrs Buller’s Val, who said she wanted Mrs Withens’s opinion on a little idea she had had: she didn’t know if Mrs Withens had noticed, but she was sure she had, that there was very little really for some of the younger women in the village to do, and she’d had the notion of forming a Young Mothers’ League, which would meet on . . .

  She was interrupted at this point by a thunderous snort from Mrs Withens which shook the telegraph posts, and told her all she needed to know about the reception of her little idea.

  In the course of the morning Mrs Withens received telephone calls from Mrs McGregor, the doctor’s wife, suggesting that she, Mrs McGregor, should start flower-arranging classes one night a week at the Secondary School, and no doubt Mrs Withens remembered that she had got one first and two seconds at the Barstowe show, not to mention a Highly Commended in the ‘Illustrate a Song-Title’ class; from June Marriot, an unmarried schoolteacher who proposed to remedy the shameful lack of any amateur drama in Twytching; and from Mrs Smith, a woman of no importance who had had a forlorn hope of starting a sewing-bee. In addition, Mrs Buller rang, but her enthusiasm for motorized meals seemed to wane when she heard that she had been forestalled, and finally she said that she hoped she might be able to help out on one morning a week, but it wouldn’t do to count on her. All in all, though, it was a most satisfactory morning, and highly gratifying to Mrs Withens’s feelings. She could now be confident that by the time the documentary programme came to be made, Twytching would present the appearance of being quite a lively and thriving little community.