A Hovering of Vultures

by Robert Barnard

  When they got back to the Black Horse at about a quarter to two he braved the lowering looks of her parents with an insouciant wave and gave his arm to Lettie Farraday for the walk up to the farm. She took it demurely.

  “Thanks for the rescue,” he said. “I hope you didn’t have to endure him all through lunch?”

  “I managed to edge away when they started getting worried about their missing chick,” she said. “On the grounds that I’d ‘taken up too much of his valuable time.’ Before that I had to endure a lot of horse manure on the subject of ‘the writer’s craft.’ ”

  “The man’s a bore.”

  “And a petty tyrant. Watch out for him.”

  “I’m not poised to propose marriage to the girl,” Charlie pointed out. “Want to stop for a rest?”

  “No. I’m getting used to this street. Again.”

  Around the gate to High Maddox Farm a little knot of people were gathering, with others strolling further along the road and stopping to get a view of the farm from a different angle. Mrs Cardew, the lady who had taken their names at the meeting, was installing herself beside the gate, and as they approached she began with a tight smile to let the tour people on her list through the gate, waving them unnecessarily in the direction of the farm. Among the group Charlie registered what he (like Mr Suzman) had already put down as the Scandinavian couple, and Gillian Parkin, from the evening before. Otherwise there was a motley collection of elderly couples, the odd young enthusiast, and one Japanese woman, birdlike and eager. As they straggled towards the farm’s main door their hands were shaken by Gerald Suzman, who introduced them to an ample, motherly woman.

  “Mrs Marsden, our excellent curator.”

  Mrs Marsden was friendly and welcoming. When she registered from Lettie’s “Hello” that she was American she shot her a glance, but she merely said: “It’s good to know that Susannah Sneddon is being read in America.”

  “To a degree,” said Lettie cautiously. “To a degree. You’ll know about the article in Time magazine, I guess.”

  “Yes. Mr Suzman was delighted with that.”

  Now the group was assembled, and Mrs Marsden smiled and ushered them through into the farmhouse. In spite of the sunny day outside the interior was dim. Charlie realized that, as with many old rural buildings, the windows were too small for such a large room. Not much reading done in such buildings in former centuries, he concluded. He blinked, and stood for a moment close by the door to get accustomed to the poor light.

  “I’m here to answer questions, if I can,” said Mrs Marsden. “If anyone wants information or explanations, just come along to me.”

  “You go round at your pace, Dexter,” whispered Lettie Farraday to Charlie. “And I’ll go round at mine.”

  Which Charlie interpreted quite rightly as a wish to be on her own.

  He sauntered round, his eyes beginning to be accustomed to the gloom. As furniture and other objects came to be seen more clearly the impression started to form of something decidedly artificial. It was all superficially accurate, but dead, like those fake streets of Victorian shops that some museums have: altogether too posed and pristine to present any real feeling of the visitor having strayed into another century or another way of life. On a rough wooden table in the kitchen area of the barn-like room there was a rolling-pin, a floury surface and an appearance of pastry being made: only he knew that if he touched it, it would not turn out to be pastry. Nor would the fire in the range turn out to be a real fire, so that the kettle on the hob beside it would never boil. There was not enough dirt, not enough muddle. The floors should be gritty and muddy, not swept clean.

  As the thought struck him his eye was caught by something. He squatted down on his haunches. If all around was vaguely bogus, here was reality! Charlie knew a bloodstain when he saw one, though he did not recall seeing one as old as this. Was it here that?—

  There were legs standing beside him, and looking up he saw the curator—Mrs Marsden, was it?—looking down at him.

  “Sorry,” he said, raising himself upright. “Morbid. I suppose you were hoping nobody was going to notice that.”

  She smiled tolerantly.

  “We always knew there would be some as would ask. Now you’ve noticed it, you’ll have been seen noticing it, so everyone will, and tell people in the other groups who come in later. It’s natural, all part of the story—the sad part.”

  “So that is—”

  “Oh yes. That’s where she was found. Fallen by a chair just like this one here, that she’d been sitting on. Well, not so much fallen as felled. He came up from behind. They say in the village that’s one thing he didn’t botch up. They say it must have been a quick death.”

  “He’d have been used to killing animals, I suppose.”

  “Oh yes, he’d have done that.”

  Charlie nodded his thanks and moved on. His eyes were now fully accustomed to the lack of light. He saw Lettie standing stiffly by a small table with a typewriter and piles of paper beside it, her forehead furrowed. She stood there for some time, then moved painfully on towards the old sofa under the small window that admitted the sun so begrudgingly. Charlie moved towards the table himself, but the Japanese lady was there before him, peering at the little framed card on the wall beside it.

  “Ah! Susannah Sneddon’s lighting desk!” she said, looking enthusiastically at Charlie.

  It was indeed, or something that could stand in for it. The typewriter was an ancient machine, a real bonecruncher, that looked as if it would require special finger-strengthening exercises to operate with comfort. There were pencils, a stubby fountain pen and a bottle of Waterman’s blue-black ink. The pile of typescript was on thin paper, brown with age and curling at the edges, though lower down the pile, apparently, the pages became photocopies. Peering close with the Japanese lady Charlie recognised a torrid love scene from Susannah’s best-known novel.

  “Ah—The Ballen Fields!” the lady said, pleased with herself for recognising it.

  Charlie nodded. He thought to himself that this, the little table and all the apparatus of writing, seemed the most authentic things—or at least the most convincing things—he had seen so far. Perhaps this was because Susannah Sneddon, whatever her merits, was undoubtedly a writer. She was never more than marginally a housewife. He longed to type “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” on her machine, but he caught Gerald Suzman’s eye on him, and he smiled and desisted. “There’s a quick brown fox” he thought to himself, with reference to Gerald Suzman. Charlie knew quite a lot more about Mr Suzman than anyone else in the room.

  Gradually the tour party was moving towards the stairs and up to the first floor. Charlie moved over to Lettie and offered her his arm, and she gratefully accepted it. The stairs were wooden, rickety and uncarpeted.

  “Beastly things!” said Lettie.

  They separated when they got to the top. Charlie thought that the bedrooms had more of a “feel” to them than the big room downstairs. Perhaps this was because there was less need to suggest a multiplicity of activities. They were there to be slept in, and that was that: there were heavy blankets, coarse sheets, and rough bedside tables with books turned down on them: in Joshua’s bedroom the book was Dubliners, in Susannah’s a May Sinclair. There was a third bedroom even more sparsely furnished than the other two. That seemed right: the Sneddons were not people who had visitors. There was a bathroom, the plumbing of which, the visitors were informed on an information card, was a later addition, circa 1950. It was hoped to restore it to roughly what it had been in the Sneddons’ time. The lavatory was an addition too, formed from part of the spare bedroom, but there was no intention of restoring things to what they were. Charlie Peace, a real townee, shuddered to think what the arrangements were before it had been put in.

  From the window of Joshua Sneddon’s bedroom he saw the next tour group beginning to assemble at the gate by the road. He noticed that Randolph Sneddon was among them, and was shaking the odd hand—awkward
ly enough, but at least showing willing. On the landing Lettie Farraday was ready to go downstairs, and he gave her his arm. She was, he noticed, unusually silent. At the bottom of the stairs Mrs Marsden was directing people towards the back door, and they thanked her with a smile. The door was in the kitchen area, latched, but with two new and heavy bolts fitted. It creaked, dramatically and convincingly. Outside they were suddenly transported to suburbia, finding a small but colourful garden, with flagged paths and a riot of Spring shrubs and bulbs making a brave show against the wuthering climate of Micklewike.

  “All wrong,” whispered Lettie to Charlie. “She only had a few primroses out here.”

  The whisper—there were two other couples from the tour already in the garden—confirmed what Charlie had begun to suspect. When they had wandered through the paths and reached the little patch of lawn beyond the flowerbeds, he said:

  “You’ve been keeping quiet about your connections with the Sneddons. Don’t you want it known?”

  “It is known. It’ll be all around the village, since Milly Winkworth recognised me. And that rather over-enthusiastic student last night may well have told people, unless she has some idea of keeping me to herself. But I don’t want to be badgered by Gerald Suzman, don’t want to be made part of his set-up, at least not yet. I may decide to say something tomorrow, but it will be in my own time.”

  They wandered round to the front of the farm, where Gerald Suzman was once again holding court for the next tour. He was being cornered, however, by Gillian Parkin and the Scandinavian girl, who, having interests in common, had clearly teamed up.

  “I assure you a transcript is already being prepared,” he was saying, smiling ingratiatingly. “The new edition of The Barren Fields is already at the publishers, and we hope to have a full text of the first two novels ready for publication by the end of the year.”

  The Scandinavian woman’s boyfriend was standing a bit aside, and he raised his eyebrows at Charlie.

  “Vi are a bit out of things here,” he said. “Textual problems in the Sneddon novels—not my scene!”

  He was a strong-boned man in his mid-forties, with the flesh of good living beginning to cling. He had a coarse fair beard, but the hair on his head was thin. He was looking with tolerance at the trio nearby: Gillian Parkin and her friend shoulder to shoulder, Gerald Suzman fending them off—and the women knowing they were being fended off, but unable to do anything about it. Bent forward, eager, there was something in their stance of the beast of prey. But Gerald Suzman did not look like anybody’s prey.

  “I can’t say I’m much bothered by little changes in the texts,” agreed Charlie easily.

  “A bit difficult to see Susannah Sneddon as a Shakespeare,” commented Lettie dryly, “with scholars arguing over emendations. I think I’ll creep away. That young lady is a bit too inclined to regard me as valuable source material!”

  Charlie was about to move away with her towards the road when he saw that there was another couple waiting impatiently beside the little group, obviously hoping to talk to Gerald Suzman. The man was tall, gangling, with a craggy, misshapen face and hideous teeth which obtruded themselves on the observer by their fang-like shape and discoloured state. His wife was small and dumpy, with a puddingy face and faded hair that she let fall around in an apparently random manner. After a moment or two Gerald Suzman saw them and used them to make his escape.

  “Someone else wants to talk to me. I’m quite happy to discuss the manuscripts any time,” he said in parting—Charlie thought with particular emphasis to the Scandinavian woman, indeed with a look at her that was almost meaningful. “Yes?” he said, turning towards the couple. “Did you want to see me?”

  The lanky man bent over him. Charlie moved closer.

  “My name is Felix Potter-Hodge.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “My grandmother was a great friend of Susannah Sneddon’s.”

  “Really?”

  Now Mr Suzman’s interest was genuinely aroused. His body took on a new spryness, tense with interest. He gave them his real as opposed to his token attention.

  “How did they know each other? Was it a literary friendship?”

  “Oh no. They were at school together, first here in Micklewike, then in Batley Bridge.”

  “How fascinating. A Micklewike girl, then. And did your-grandmother talk much about her friend?”

  “She did occasionally, yes. But she married young and moved to Ilkley, so her memories were mostly of their schooldays.”

  “They could be very valuable. We have very few records of that time.”

  “She never wrote anything down, of course.”

  “I imagine not. If only the revival of interest had come earlier . . .”

  “But there are letters!”

  “Letters? They corresponded?”

  “Oh yes. Not frequently, but regularly, over a long period. It was a case of maybe two or three letters a year.”

  “And you said—did you say ‘there are letters’?”

  “Oh yes. She kept them all.”

  “She’ll be dead by now, of course.”

  “Yes, she died in 1960. But we inherited them.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, we inherited the house. The letters were in an old suitcase in the attic. We might well have thrown them out, but we’d heard her talk of her friend the novelist, and we thought she wouldn’t want them destroyed. So we just left them up there.”

  “They’re still there?”

  “Actually we brought them down when there began to be all this talk about Susannah Sneddon. Dusted them off, you know, and read a page or two.”

  “Their place is here!” said Gerald Suzman, emphatically and enthusiastically.

  The man’s craggy face crumbled into a smile. His place in the Susannah Sneddon story had been acknowledged. His part of her was being exhibited in the light of day.

  “We would be quite happy to lend one or two letters for exhibition,” he said.

  “No, no: they should all be here. As an archive. There are very few letters of the Sneddons in existence that we know of. They didn’t have a great many friends. The letters should be here—I would be happy to make you an offer for them.”

  The man turned his stubbled, cavernous face to his wife’s.

  “Oh, I don’t think we’d want that, would we, Mavis?”

  “Oh no,” she said, surprisingly positive. “No, we didn’t think of selling.”

  “But why not? Susannah Sneddon was nothing special to you.”

  “Well, but she is now,” said Felix Potter-Hodge, nodding complacently. “We’ve never had anyone of interest in our family. My grandmother was just an ordinary farm girl from around here—Janet Hodge, who married an Ilkley grocer older than herself. Mind you, I daresay she was a very intelligent woman, for someone with very little education. Anyway, now we have someone not in but at least connected with the family who is of interest, and we’d like to hold on to what we have of hers. Of course if anyone wants to study the letters, or see the snapshots—”

  “Snapshots?”

  “There’s one or two, in with the letters. As I say, we’d be happy to make them all available to people. People like those two young ladies you’ve been talking to, people with a special interest in Susannah Sneddon. But we’d want to hold on to them ourselves, wouldn’t we, Mavis?”

  “Oh, we would. Definitely.”

  The little knot of visitors was getting restive. The star performer was being monopolised. Gerald Suzman looked around, and began to usher them towards the door and Mrs Marsden.

  “We’ll talk about this,” he called, in the direction of the Potter-Hodges. “We certainly must talk about this.”

  Charlie watched the little group go towards the farm, meet Mrs Marsden, and then pass through into the gloom of the farmhouse, Felix Potter-Hodge having to bend his ungainly height to get in the low door. Charlie had a slight, unaccountable sense of unease. Shaking himself he turned away and began wa
lking, deep in thought, to the gate. There he found Lettie Farraday watching him through narrowed eyes. He hauled himself out of his reverie.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Dreaming. Where to now?”

  “Down, I hope, to my waiting taxi.”

  They began the walk down the main street.

  “Your fame doesn’t seem to have spread yet,” said Charlie. “No Sneddon fans crowding round you with questions about the home life of Susannah and Joshua.”

  “No,” said Lettie briefly. She looked round to see if they were out of earshot of the woman on the gate. “I’m the one with questions.”

  “Oh?”

  “Let’s start with one to you: what exactly are you here for, Dexter?”

  Chapter 7

  Mother and Daughter

  “Eventide Home.”

  “Oh hi. That is Mrs Clandon, isn’t it? This is Lettie Farraday again.”

  “Oh, good evening, Mrs Farraday. By the way, it is Mrs Farraday, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Only your mother has been . . . well, going on, frankly, about your being married to a foreigner—’an ovsky or a chinsky’ were her exact words.”

  “Ciesinski. My first.”

  “Oh, I see. I should have guessed. Only I’m afraid your mother said she wasn’t going to have you bringing any ‘ovsky or chinsky’ in tow.”

  “No danger of that. Ciesinski died at Okinawa, two years after we were divorced. Howard Farraday died of a stroke six years ago.”

  “I don’t suppose she would have objected to a Farraday.”

  “She would. He was American.”

  “Ah yes. Well, in spite of all this, I don’t get the idea that your mother is opposed to your visiting her.”