A Hovering of Vultures

by Robert Barnard

  Taxi from Leeds! Charlie thought. Well, no ride in a scruffy little Sprinter train for this lady. Almost certainly one of the conference-goers, he thought: a rich American enthusiast.

  “Will this do?” he asked as she hobbled behind him to a corner table with a good view down the length of the bar. “Do you want to be alone, or would you mind if I joined you?”

  “I’d be delighted if you would join me, and I never want to be alone. I’ve been alone all too much since my second husband died. You’ll know how strange and unpleasant that can be, young man, if you ever are widowed.”

  “Haven’t even managed to get a wife yet,” grinned Charlie, as they settled down on the sofa seats that gave them the best view. “Not that I’m at the Weekend to find one. I don’t think Susannah Sneddon’s novels are an encouragement to matrimony.”

  “Ah, so you’re at the Conference, are you? Or jamboree, or Weekend, or Celebration, or whatever we are to call it.” There was a light scepticism in her tone that made Charlie revise his estimate of her as an enthusiast. Perhaps she recognised in him a kindred spirit, a fellow-ironist, for she continued: “Now offhand I wouldn’t have picked you as a literary enthusiast or a culture vulture.”

  Charlie blinked, recognising the idea he had had of the conferees as birds of prey.

  “There have got to be a few surprises in the pack,” he replied in neutral tones. “Still, looking around this bar I feel I could pick the Sneddon people.”

  “So do I: there, there, there and there.” She had launched a sweeping gaze over the drinkers and then pointed unobtrusively to four of them—just the ones that Charlie would himself have picked.

  “Right,” he said. “And just possibly there. But we’re probably entirely wrong. And even if we’re right, it’s not all that clever, because the locals mark themselves out by the way they behave, and there aren’t that many left.”

  “Thank you for that douche of cold water on my self-esteem, young man.”

  “Anyway, what do people who attend literary do’s like this look like?”

  The woman set down her glass after a hefty swig.

  “You’re asking me? I’ve never been to one in my life. It’s not my sort of scene at all. I’ve got a friend who goes, though—Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, that kind of thing. She says that you get all ages and types, but that what is common to most of them is a sort of mild mania.”

  “Sounds nasty.”

  “It can make them very quarrelsome, she says. They’ve got themselves fixated on this one author, often for some odd, personal reason. Some of them hardly read any other author, just madly re-read the one.”

  “Slightly unbalanced, she means? I don’t think of myself as slightly unbalanced.”

  “Give it time, young man. Think of those people who go through the Sherlock Holmes stories as if they were literal fact, finding mad reasons for all the contradictions, whereas really it was just Conan Doyle forgetting what he’d written years earlier. And by the way, it’s not just literary obsessions that grow into something a little mad. My friend says there’s a Richard III Society full of people who never read any history except the life and times of Richard, and only that to show that he was a saint on earth.”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows.

  “The inference being that you’ve got to be a bit dotty to join one of these specialist societies?”

  “Too right—or so my friend says. And we are to be founder-members of a new dottiness, as you call it.”

  “Right,” agreed Charlie. “A sobering thought.” Then he incautiously asked the very question that he hoped she wasn’t going to ask him. “What got you hooked on Susannah Sneddon?”

  The American woman swigged again at her gin and tonic.

  “I’m not. I read one years ago, and another on the plane coming over. Competent enough, but not my cup of tea.”

  “Joshua, then?”

  “Gahd, no! I’d better explain. I come from Micklewike. I was born and brought up there.”

  Charlie’s face expressed his surprise.

  “So you’re not American?”

  “Americanised. I feel American. England is a foreign country to me, though I visit it fairly often. But I thought I’d come back to Micklewike just for once, before it gets too late . . .” She seemed just about to get started on her explanation when she caught sight of someone at the door and her jaw dropped. “Good Lord! Heathcliff!”

  Charlie’s eyes followed hers to the door that led to the foyer and Reception. A tall, dark man in a sombre tweed jacket had come into the bar. His sharply chiselled features and erect bearing bore the stamp of command, or at any rate personal arrogance, and his body proclaimed him sturdy country stock.

  “I can’t find anyone at Reception,” his said, in ringing tones to the woman behind the bar. His voice had money in it, though perhaps not old money.

  “Oh no, lovey. We have to double up at opening times. Just let me finish this order and I’ll be with you.”

  The man let his eyebrows rise a fraction, but he turned and went back to the foyer.

  “Not Heathcliff,” said Charlie. “Too smooth. More like some kind of guards officer.”

  “Well, perhaps I do mean Hollywood Heathcliff. Have you ever seen the film with the young Olivier? All brilliantine and beautiful voice? That sort of Heathcliff.”

  “A conference attender, would you say?”

  “I didn’t see the light of madness in his eyes. But then, I didn’t with you, young man.”

  “Charlie—Charlie Peace.”

  “I’m Lettie Farraday. And now I’ve finished this drink I’m going to go up to Micklewike to my old home. I do wonder if I’m mad: I always hated the place.”

  “You’re not going to walk it?”

  “Hell, no. I’ll get them to call me a cab.”

  “I’ll get them to call you one from the bar,” said Charlie, getting up. “I’m going up myself, but I’d rather walk.”

  “There’s a path up from the Pack Horse Bridge, or there was in my day. That path! I did it so often it was a matter of course, but it’s a back-breaker. If we meet up at the village I’ll buy you a drink. You’ll need it.”

  There was no one behind the bar when Charlie got to it, and he rang for a taxi from the phone in the foyer. He was only a couple of feet away from the darkly handsome man who was bent over the reception desk registering himself in. His suitcase was by his side, and Charlie could see an old airline tag tied around the handle. It bore the name Randolph Sneddon.

  • • •

  The path up to Micklewike was every bit as backbreaking as Lettie Farraday had said it was—steep, cobbled, with only a rusty old handrail for support. When he reached the point where it bisected the road Charlie paused and looked over the rolling Yorkshire hills, dotted with disused mills and clusters of houses: grand, inspiring, but hell to walk in, he thought.

  Then, as he paused to recuperate, another thought occurred to him: how old was Lettie Farraday? She was well-preserved, apart from her lameness, but he would still put her definitely into her seventies. What would that make her birth date? Say 1915, or a bit later. That would mean that if she grew up in Micklewike she could have known Susannah Sneddon and her brother Joshua. No—it was such a small place it would mean that she would have known them. It was hardly one of those legendary conjunctures that make the heart stop, like meeting someone who had survived the sinking of the Titanic, or someone who had watched Queen Victoria’s funeral, but nevertheless it was interesting, suggestive . . .

  Charlie looked up at the continuation of the path: daunting, and starting with a long flight of steps. The road might take longer, but it would certainly be easier. When he had been walking along it for nearly ten minutes he realized that he might not be going in the right direction. He grinned wryly at himself for a city boy. When he came to another path, gentler, which claimed to lead to Micklewike he turned gratefully up it, and five minutes later he landed up, through an overgrown back lane, in one of the co
bbled side-streets of Susannah Sneddon’s home village. His calf and thigh muscles shouldn’t be aching, he thought, but they undoubtedly were.

  Charlie was getting used to Yorkshire villages. When he had first come to live and work in Leeds and the West Yorkshire area he had found them unsettling—had felt an intruder there. It was not just his colour but his London accent that had made him stand out and feel foreign. Now he had accustomed himself to them and to his feeling of foreignness, and he was happy to acknowledge that Micklewike was an exceptionally interesting and well-preserved example. Set on the brow of a hill, horribly exposed to wind and weather, it seemed to bear its history lightly but proudly. The main street wound up towards open countryside, and off it poky little cobbled lanes edged with cottages led to a chapel, the parish church, or quite often to nowhere very much. Other tourists and conference-goers were wandering around, giving it a more peopled air than it would normally have, Charlie guessed. He made for the church first, and found that it was in fact two—a ruined one and a stolid Victorian one separated only by a churchyard. He lounged around looking at the gravestones, noting the names that kept recurring: Greenwoods, Arkwrights, Hobsons. He saw no Sneddons, but he had no doubt they were there somewhere, and that the graves would be visited over the weekend. Or had they, having no children, been buried in unmarked graves and the place forgotten?

  He went back to the main street and toiled up to the top. Somewhere just beyond where the village ended must lie High Maddox Farm. Ahead of him he saw a gate with a girl leaning on it, gazing into the horizon: that would surely be it. As he approached he realized it was the girl he had seen on Leeds station with her parents.

  “Hi,” he said. She turned and smiled, losing the look of discontent for a moment and showing an attractive approachability.

  “Hi.”

  “This is it, then, is it?” Charlie asked, leaning over the gate beside her and looking towards the low, bleak farmhouse approached by a mean little dirt track. “That’s where they lived . . .” He turned his eyes towards a clump of trees further in the distance. “And that, I suppose, is where Joshua shot himself?”

  “Do you think a lot of this interest is a bit News of the World?” the girl asked suddenly. “I mean, say she’d just gone on churning out that sort of book till she died naturally, would there be the same interest?”

  “Don’t know,” said Charlie simply. Then he thought for a moment. “Murder gets people in. No point in feeling superior about it: it always does. And there’s another thing: I think maybe that if she’d gone on writing novels like that for another twenty years or so, there’d have been too many of them. As it is they get a bit—”

  “Samey. Yes, that’s what I think.”

  “Why are you here then?”

  “Oh, my parents were coming here, and as I’m at university in Leeds they dragged me along.”

  “Reluctantly, by the sound of it.”

  The girl pouted.

  “I think my father wants to make publicity for himself out of all this.”

  “Publicity? How come? Is he a Sneddon or something?”

  “Oh no, but he is a writer. I think he wants to generate a bit of publicity for himself: him as Susannah Sneddon’s present-day successor.”

  “Does he write rural-passion novels?”

  “He writes all sorts. He’s very versatile. He has to be because he’s not very good at any one thing. Oh God, I sound like a bitch, don’t I?”

  “If you can’t bitch about your own parents, who can you bitch about? Your father didn’t by any chance write a book called Starveacre, did he?”

  “Yes. It’s pretty rotten. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing. Feel like a drink?”

  The girl brightened up, then looked at her watch and screwed up her face.

  “I’d have loved to, but I’ll have to go down the hill. They keep me on a very short leash when I’m around them, which is silly because I’ve got away from them now, haven’t I? Dad is giving interviews to the Keighley Advertiser and the Bradford Telegraph and Argus—big deal, eh?—but he said he’d be free at eight, and then we’d all go and have dinner somewhere. I’d prefer a hamburger, but being interviewed always makes Dad rather stately, so I expect it’ll be the plushiest restaurant in town, and probably ghastly heavy food.”

  “With a bit of luck he’ll find there isn’t any plushy restaurant in Batley Bridge. It isn’t that sort of place. What about tomorrow? A drink after the jamboree?”

  “I’d love that. Where? The pub down the road?”

  “Where Joshua Sneddon mooned into his pint pot and meditated his tiny sales—where else?”

  “See you there.”

  She smiled again, waved, and began the walk down the hill. Charlie thought he could get to like her, then remembered he had not even asked her name, or where she was staying. He turned back and gazed towards the farm. Starveacre, indeed! It would have been that sort of place in the Sneddons’ time, made worse by Joshua’s lack of aptitude for farming. Probably it had been madly prosperous in more recent times, rolling in Common Market subsidies. It wouldn’t be surprising if the farmer had built himself more commodious and less gloomy accommodation elsewhere, and sold off this place to someone connected to the Sneddon Society. Except that the Society—or Fellowship, or whatever they decided to call themselves—was not yet constituted. To the interesting Mr Gerald Suzman, then. He was presumably the owner at the present time.

  Meditating on the little he knew about the said Gerald Suzman, Charlie turned and began the walk down the main street towards the Black Horse.

  • • •

  Lettie Farraday’s walk around Micklewike was less carefree than Charlie’s, burdened as it was with memories and associations. She told the taxi driver to take her to High Maddox Farm, gave him a splendid tip, and told him to come back to the Black Horse in two hours’ time. Like Charlie she leaned over the gate, in her case not to speculate but to get her memories in order. Then she started heavily down the hill.

  The main street and the occasional cobbled alleyway off it had no charms for her. She disliked the grimy stone, the four-square style of building, the pokiness of the cottages—each pokiness joined to the next pokiness in a mean little row. Those places would still be dark and cramped, though nothing like as dark and cramped as had been the one that was her home. She had a vision of herself, her father and mother and the brother who had died of pneumonia all cooped up together night after dark night, eating coarse food off chipped plates on ugly sticks of furniture. Anything beautiful her parents had classed as a ‘vanity’. Almost anything that wasn’t basic and plain was a ‘vanity’. On an impulse she turned aside and went towards the Methodist Chapel. There the family had worshiped, when they had not gone to a sect still more narrow and doom-laden in Batley Bridge. The Micklewike Chapel had once been an attractive octagonal building, but it was marred by an added section at the back. That’s the trouble with Nonconformity, Lettie thought: no style.

  Back in the main street she stood for a moment at the end of the alleyway that included her own family hovel. She remembered the atmosphere: obsessive scrubbings, nightly Bible-readings by gas lamp, continual hectoring reproofs, spankings for small or imagined naughtinesses. Had things changed in the house, she wondered? They could only have changed for the better.

  As she watched her old front door opened. An elderly woman in a tweed skirt and cardigan came out, called “Just popping down to Alice’s for a few minutes” into the house, then marched past her without a second glance. Change indeed! The house is now a retirement home for a middle-class couple, Lettie thought. Could it be that people are happy there?

  She went slowly towards the churchyard and found the spot where her brother was buried. He was the only living thing in her home for whom she had had affection. She had loved him, passionately. When he had died she had known immediately that she would leave. Nothing could bind her to this place, these people. She stood for a moment by the spot, remembering him. Then, as te
ars came to her eyes, she turned and hobbled painfully back towards the main street, wishing she had not come.

  “I’m an old fool,” she berated herself bitterly. “Coming back to this.”

  She paused for breath when she regained the tarmac, and looking down towards the Black Horse she saw that Charlie Peace was standing in the doorway with a pint glass in his hand. She cast one more look up the street, then back at the alley where she was born, and was about to turn down towards Charlie and the company of the living when she realized that an old woman coming down the street was looking at her curiously.

  “I know you, don’t I?” the woman said. “Or used to, any road.”

  Lettie felt herself gripped by a reluctance to take up with her past, but she did not like lying.

  “You could do,” she said. “I grew up here.”

  “Lettie Blatchley!” said the woman triumphantly. “I can still make out your features. I’m Milly Winkworth. I were the year after you in school.”

  “I think I remember the name . . .”

  “I used to be a bit sweet on your brother.”

  “A lot of girls were.”

  “Well, you have done well for yourself, I can see that. Folk sometimes said as how you had, but no one really knew. Come for this weekend do, have you?”

  “Yes, I have. Rather on an impulse. I don’t know why.”

  The woman looked at her conspiratorially.

  “Never thought owt to the Sneddons in our day, did we?” She said it in the reductive way some Yorkshire people have. “She were a bit of a slut, that’s what folk said. And we thought the books were mucky.”

  “Perhaps we were wrong,” said Lettie, finding the woman’s attitude distasteful. “Perhaps we were a bit jealous because she did write things, did get them published, did get known.”

  “Happen. Any road, it’s a good thing for the village.” She nodded down the hill in the direction of the Black Horse. “Mike Bradshaw says he’s never known so many tourists and gawpers.”

  Lettie Farraday smiled a farewell that was also a dismissal.