Some Lie and Some Die

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘ “And thou,” ’ he said, ‘ “what needest with thy tribe’s black tents who hast the red pavilion of my heart?” There’s going to be a lot of that going on, Mike, so you’d best get used to it. Letts’ll have to put a couple of men on that quarry if we don’t want gate-crashers.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Burden. ‘You couldn’t get a motorbike in that way.’ He added viciously: ‘Personally, I couldn’t care less who gets in free to Silk’s bloody festival as long as they don’t make trouble.’

  On the Sundays side the chalk slope fell away unwalled; on the other it was rather feebly protected by broken chestnut paling and barbed wire. Beyond the paling, beyond a narrow strip of grass, the gardens of three houses in The Pathway were visible. Each had a tall new fence with its own gate. Wexford looked down into the quarry. It was about twenty feet deep, its sides overgrown with brambles and honeysuckle and wild roses. The roses were in full bloom, thousands of flat shell-pink blossoms showing against the dark shrubby growth and the golden blaze of gorse. Here and there rose the slim silver trunks of birches. In the quarry depths was a little natural lawn of turf scattered with harebells. One of the flowers seemed to spiral up into the air, and then Wexford saw it was not a flower at all but a butterfly, a Chalkhill Blue, harebell-coloured, azure-winged.

  ‘Pity they had to build those houses. It rather spoils things, doesn’t it?’

  Burden nodded. ‘These days,’ he said, ‘I sometimes think you have to go about with your eyes half-closed or a permanent crick in your neck.’

  ‘It’ll still be lovely at night, though, especially if there’s a moon. I’m looking forward to hearing Betti Ho. She sings those anti-pollution ballads, and if there’s anything we do agree on, Mike, it’s stopping pollution. You’ll like Miss Ho. I must admit I want to hear this Vedast bloke do his stuff, too.’

  ‘I get enough of him at home,’ said Burden gloomily. ‘John has his sickly love stuff churning out night and day.’

  They turned back and walked along under the willows. A boy in the river splashed Wexford, wetting his trouser legs, and Burden shouted angrily at him, but Wexford only laughed.

  2

  ‘On the whole, they’re behaving themselves very well.’

  This remark was delivered by Inspector Burden on a note of incredulous astonishment as he and Wexford stood (in the words of Keats) on a little rounded hill, surveying from this eminence the jeunesse dorée beneath. It was Saturday night, late evening rather, the sky an inverted bowl of soft violet-blue in which the moon hung like a pearl, surrounded by bright galaxies. The light from these stars was as intense as it could be, but still insufficient, and the platform on which their own stars performed was dazzlingly illuminated, the clusters of arc-lamps like so many man-made moons.

  The tents were empty, for their occupants sat or lay on the grass, blue now and pearling with dew, and the bright, bizarre clothes of this audience were muted by the moonlight, natural and artificial, to sombre tints of sapphire and smoke. And their hair was silvered, not by time but by night and the natural light of night-time. The calor-gas stoves had been extinguished, but some people had lit fires and from these arose slender spires, threads of blue melting into the deeper blue of the upper air. The whole encampment was blue-coloured, azure, jade where the parkland met the sky, tinted here and there like the plumage of a kingfisher, and the recumbent bodies of the aficionados were numberless dark blue shadows.

  ‘How many, d’you reckon?’ Wexford asked.

  ‘Seventy or eighty thousand. They’re not making much noise.’

  ‘The moan of doves in immemorial elms

  And murmuring of innumerable bees,’

  quoted Wexford.

  ‘Yes, maybe I shouldn’t have thought of them as rats. They’re more like bees, a swarm of bees.’

  The soft buzz of conversation had broken out after Betti Ho had left the stage. Wexford couldn’t sort out a single word from it, but from the concentrated intense atmosphere, the sense of total accord and quietly impassioned indignation, he knew they were speaking of the songs they had just heard and were agreeing with their sentiments.

  The little Chinese girl, as pretty and delicate and clean as a flower, had sung of tides of filth, of poison, of encroaching doom. It had been strange to hear such things from such lips, strange in the clear purity of this night, and yet he knew, as they all knew, that the tides were there and the poison, the ugliness of waste and the squalor of indifference. She had been called back to sing once more their favourite, the ballad of the disappearing butterflies, and she had sung it through the blue plumes of their woodsmoke while the Kingsbrook chattered a soft accompaniment.

  During the songs Burden had been seen to nod in vehement endorsement, but now he was darting quick glances here and there among the prone, murmuring crowd. At last he spotted his son with a group of other schoolboys, and he relaxed. But it was Wexford who noted the small additions John and his friends had made to their dress, the little tent they had put up, so that they would appear to conform with the crowd and not be stamped as mere local tyros, day boys and not experienced boarders.

  Burden swatted at a gnat which had alighted on his wrist and at the same time caught sight of his watch.

  ‘Vedast ought to be on soon,’ he said. ‘As soon as he’s finished I’m going to collar John and send him straight home.’

  ‘Spoilsport.’

  The inspector was about to make a retort to this when the buzzing of the crowd suddenly increased in volume, rising to a roar of excited approval. People got up, stood, or moved nearer to the stage. The atmosphere seemed to grow tense.

  ‘Here he comes,’ said Wexford.

  Zeno Vedast was announced by the disc jockey who was compèring the festival as one who needed no introduction, and when he advanced out of the shadows on to the platform the noise from the audience became one concentrated yell of joy. Rather different, Wexford thought wryly, from the chorus of ‘Off, off, off …!’ which had been their response to his own well-thought-out speech. He had been proud of that speech, tolerant and accommodating as it was, just a few words to assure them there would be no interference with their liberty, provided they behaved with restraint.

  The police didn’t want to spoil the festival, he had said, inserting a light joke; all they wanted was for the fans to be happy, to co-operate and not to annoy each other or the residents of Kingsmarkham. But it hadn’t gone down at all well. He was a policeman and that was enough. ‘Off, off, off,’ they had shouted and ‘Out, fuzz, out.’ He hadn’t been at all nervous but he had wondered what next. There hadn’t been any next. Happily, law-abidingly, they were doing their own thing, listening to their own music in the blue and opalescent night.

  Now they were roaring for Vedast and at him. The sound of their voices, their rhythmically clapping hands, their drumming feet, assailed him in a tide and seemed to wash over him as might a wave of floodwater. And he stood still in the white ambience, receiving the tide of tribute, his head bent, his bright hair hanging half over his face like a hood of silver cloth.

  Then, suddenly, he flung back his head and held up one hand. The roar died, the clamour softened to a patter, dwindled into silence. Out of the silence a girl’s voice called, ‘Zeno, we love you!’ He smiled. Someone came up to the stage and handed him a bulbous stringed instrument. He struck a single, low, pulsating note from it, a note which had an esoteric meaning for the crowd, for a gentle sigh arose from it, a murmur of satisfaction. They knew what he was going to sing first, that single note had told them and, after a rustle of contentment, a ripple of happiness that seemed to travel through all eighty thousand of them, they settled down to listen to what that note had betokened.

  ‘It’s called “Let-me-believe”,’ whispered Burden. ‘John’s got it on an L.P.’ He added rather gloomily: ‘We know it better than the National Anthem in our house.’

  ‘I don’t know it,’ said Wexford.

  Vedast struck the single note again and began imm
ediately to sing. The song was about love; about, as far as Wexford could gather, a girl going to her lover’s or her husband’s house and not loving him enough or something and things going wrong. A not unfamiliar theme. Vedast sang in a clear low voice, face deadpan, but they didn’t let him get beyond the first line. They roared and drummed again; again he stood silent with head bent; again he lifted his head and struck the note. This time they let him complete it, interrupting only with a buzzing murmur of appreciation when his voice rose an octave for the second verse.

  ‘Remember me and my life-without-life,

  Come once more to be my wife,

  Come today before I grieve,

  Enter the web of let-me-believe …’

  The melody was that of a folk-song, catchy, tuneful, melancholy, as befitted the lyric and the tender beauty of the night. And the voice suited it utterly, an untrained, clear tenor. Vedast seemed to have perfect pitch. His face was bony with a big nose and wide mobile mouth, the skin pallid in the moonlight, the eyes very pale in colour, perhaps a light hazel or a glaucous green. The long, almost skeletal, fingers drew not an accompaniment proper, not a tune, from the strings, but a series of isolated vibrant notes that seemed to twang into Wexford’s brain and make his head swim.

  ‘So come by, come nigh,

  come try and tell why

  some sigh, some cry,

  some lie and some die.’

  When he had finished he waited for the tide to roar over him again, and it came, pounding from and through the crowd, a river of acclaim. He stood limply, bathing in the applause, until three musicians joined him on the stage and the first chords from their instruments cut into the tumult. Vedast sang another ballad, this time about children at a fair, and then another love-song. Although he hadn’t gyrated or thrown himself about, his chest, bare and bead-hung, glistened with sweat. At the end of the third song he again stood almost limply, sensitively, as if his whole heart and soul were exposed to the audience, the clapping, the roaring, flagellating him. Why then, Wexford wondered, did he feel that, for all the man’s intensity, his simplicity, his earnestness, the impression he gave was not one of sincerity? Perhaps it was just that he was getting old and cynical, inclined to suspect all entertainers of having one eye on the publicity and the other on the money.

  But he hadn’t thought that of Betti Ho. He had preferred her childlike bawling and her righteous anger. Still, he must be wrong. To judge from the noise the crowd was making as their idol left the stage, he was alone in his opinion, apart, of course, from Burden, who had been determined from the start to like nothing and who was already off in search of John.

  ‘God, when I think of my own youth,’ said Wexford as they strolled towards an open space where a van had arrived selling hot dogs. ‘When I think of the prevalent attitude that it was somehow wrong to be young. We couldn’t wait to be older so that we could compete with the old superior ruling people. They used to say, “You wouldn’t understand at your age, you’re too young.” Now it’s the young people who know everything, who make the fashions of speech and manners and clothes, and the old ones who are too old to understand.’

  ‘Hum,’ said Burden.

  ‘We’re two nations again now. Not so much the rich and the poor as the young and the old. Want a hot dog?’

  ‘May as well.’ Burden joined the queue, coldly disregarding the hostile glances he got, and bought two hot dogs from a boy in a striped apron. ‘Thanks very much.’

  ‘Thank you, dad,’ said the boy.

  Wexford laughed gleefully. ‘You poor old dodderer,’ he said. ‘I hope your ancient teeth are up to eating this thing. How d’you like being my contemporary?’ He pushed through the queue towards a stand selling soft drinks. ‘Excuse me!’

  ‘Mind who you’re shoving, grandad,’ said a girl.

  Now it was Burden’s turn to laugh. ‘Contemporary? We’re three nations, young, old and middle and always will be. Shall we go and look at the quarry?’

  There was to be no more live music for an hour. People had got down to cooking or buying their evening meals in earnest now. A strong smell of frying rose and little wisps of smoke. Already boys and girls could be seen dressed in red and yellow tee-shirts, stamped with the words ‘Sundays Scene’ on chest and sleeves. The arc-lamps’ range wasn’t great enough to reach the river, but as the night deepened, the moon had grown very bright. No one was bathing in the clear shallow water, but bathers had left evidence behind them, trunks and bras and jeans spread over the parapet of the bridge to dry.

  They walked round the rim of the quarry, brambles catching at their ankles, the tiny, newly formed berries of the wayfarer’s tree occasionally tapping their faces, berries which felt like ice-cold glass beads.

  The place seemed to be entirely empty, but on the estate side the barbed wire had been cut and broken down. The twisted metal gleamed bright silver in the moonlight. Neither Wexford nor Burden could remember if the wire had been like that yesterday. It didn’t seem important. They strolled along, not speaking, enjoying the loveliness of the night, the scent of meadowsweet, the gentle, keening music coming from far away.

  Suddenly a gate opened in the fence of the last house in The Pathway and a man came out. He was a tall man with a hard, handsome face and he looked cross.

  ‘Are you by any chance running this’—he sought for an appropriate word—‘this rave-up?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Wexford.

  The man said rudely, ‘You look too superannuated to be audience.’

  ‘We’re police officers. Is anything wrong?’

  ‘Wrong? Yes, plenty’s wrong. My name’s Peveril. I live there.’ He pointed back at the house whose garden gate he had come from. ‘There’s been an unholy racket going on for twenty-four hours now and the pace has hotted up revoltingly in the past three. I’ve been attempting to work, but that’s quite impossible. What are you going to do about it?’

  ‘Nothing, Mr Peveril, provided no one breaks the law.’ Wexford put his head on one side. ‘I can’t hear anything at present, apart from a distant hum.’

  ‘Then you must be going deaf. The trees muffle the noise down here. I don’t know what use you think you’re being here. You ought to hear it from my studio.’

  ‘You were warned in plenty of time, sir. It’ll all be over tomorrow. We did advise people who live near Sundays and who felt apprehensive about the festival to notify us of their intention and go away for the weekend.’

  ‘Yes, and have their homes broken into by teenage layabouts. Experience ought to have taught me not to expect decency from you people. You’re not even in the thick of it.’ Peveril went back into his garden and banged the gate.

  ‘We ought to have asked him if he’d seen any interlopers,’ said Burden, grinning.

  ‘Everyone’s an interloper to him.’

  Wexford sniffed the air appreciatively. He lived in country air, he was used to it. For years he had never troubled to savour it, but he did now, not being sure how much longer it would last. The night was bringing its humidity, little mists lying low on the turf, wisps of whiteness drifting over the quarry walls. A hare started from a tangle of dog roses, stared at them briefly and fled across the wide silver meadow, gawky legs flying.

  ‘Listen,’ Wexford whispered. ‘The nightingale …’

  But Burden wasn’t listening. He had stopped to glance into the brake from which the hare had come, had looked further down, done a double take, and turned, his face red.

  ‘Look at that! It really is a bit much. Apart from being—well, disgusting, it happens to be against the law. This, after all, is a public place.’

  The couple hadn’t been visible from the Sundays side. They lay in a small declivity on the floor of the quarry where the lawn dipped to form a grassy basin about the size of a double bed. Burden had spoken in his normal voice, some twenty feet above their heads, but the sound hadn’t disturbed the boy and girl, and Wexford recalled how Kinsey had said that in these circumstances a gun
could be fired in the vicinity and the report pass unheard.

  They were making love. They were both naked, eighteen or nineteen years old, and of an absolute physical perfection. Across the boy’s long arched back the fern-like leaves of the mountain ash which sheltered them scattered a lightly moving pattern of feathery black shadows. They made no sound at all. They were entirely engrossed in each other. And yet they seemed at the same time to be one with their surroundings, as if this setting had been made for them by some kindly god who had prepared it and waited yearningly for the lovers to come and make it complete.

  The boy’s hair was long, curly and golden, the girl’s black and spread, her face cut crystal in the moonlight. Wexford watched them. He could not take his eyes away. There was nothing of voyeurism in the fascination they had for him and he felt no erotic stimulus. A cold atavistic chill invaded him, a kind of primeval awe. Bathed by the moonlight, enfolded by the violet night, they were Adam and Eve, Venus and Adonis, a man and woman alone at the beginning of the world. Silver flesh entwined, encanopied by an ever-moving, shivering embroidery of leaf shadows, they were so beautiful and their beauty so agonising, that Wexford felt enter into him that true panic, the pressure of procreating, urgent nature, that is the presence of the god.

  He shivered. He whispered to Burden, as if parodying the other’s words, ‘Come away. This is a private place.’

  They wouldn’t have heard him if he had shouted, any more than they heard the sudden throb which thundered from the stage and then the thumping, yelling, screaming tumult as The Verb To Be broke into song.