They played out the rest of the scene. It was a dialogue in which Dunderdale, in the role of his own predecessor, was upbraiding his curate for clandestine comings and goings in the precincts of Dogtooth Farm by moonlight. The Allsop of the day, it seemed, had had a daughter who was not considered fit company for a clerk in Holy Orders.
‘My dear Gabbitas –’
‘My dear Vicar –’
‘No. Hear me out, dear Gabbitas. I promise you that when I have finished, you shall have your say. I have your interests as close to my heart as I have those of the Mother Church. But we must look to our reputations, Gabbitas. We must be as Caesar’s wife.’
‘All I did was go over to the farm to give her a copy of The Christian Year in exchange for an oven-bottom loaf.’
‘It is immaterial what transaction you considered economically sound. Even when it concerns John Keble and our daily bread. Moreover, the exchange, if my informant is to be believed, seems to have taken an unconscionable time.’
‘I went at some length into the Tractarian Movement.’
‘Wait for the laugh,’ the producer said.
‘You are asking me to believe, young sir, that in the midnight moonlit shadows of Reuben Allsop’s shippon, you talked for an hour and a half to his daughter Gertrude about the Tractarian Movement?’
The scene went on for another five or six minutes and the Gabbitas characterization began to emerge. Wilbur Gabbitas, a shy, newly-ordained curate, had come to Spentlow in the middle of the century. He had been accident-prone, naive, on no sort of wavelength to communicate either with his vicar or with any stratum of the parish. He was amiable, poor, and pathetically eager for success – which he came within no visible distance of achieving. And then, visiting about the bleak hills in his district he crossed paths with Gertrude Allsop. On the subject of Gertrude, Dunderdale had pulled out all the stops. He bellowed his lines at Kenworthy, who sat with his script on his knees, affecting meek astonishment.
‘Gertrude Allsop? Do you know what she is? She is a heathen, sir. She is a servitor of false gods, a worshipper of hideous idols, a fetishist of corrupt symbols. She is a betrayer of men and an abomination unto all we hold sacred. She will have your heart, sir, and your bowels at the same time. She will stab the one while she ties knots in the other. She will entice you by lunar magic into the orbit of the Anathema Stone, and there she will have her will of you. And her will of you is your destruction. The wages of dalliance in that quarter, sir, are annihilation. Make no mistake of it.’
Kenworthy read humbly from his script.
‘I would have you know, sir, that you are speaking of the woman I –’
‘In faith, sir, and are you so steeped in your circulating library trash that the best you can think of is –?’
‘I was about to say, sir, that you are speaking of the woman to whom I was talking last night about the Tractarian Movement.’
In the next page and a half the exposition was more specific about Gertrude. Her father, Reuben, great-grandfather of Jesse, the present farmer, had not been a trusted man about the village. Dark-visaged, moody, humourless, he had been left a widower when his daughter was only eight years old. A man who kept his own counsel – and dark counsel indeed – he rebuffed any attempt to help him with the management of the child – aggressively, if the charity happened to be offered by a woman. He withdrew from companionship, abjured the church of his forbears. He would not pass under the lychgate again, he vowed, until he was carried through it in the wake of his Arabella. And the Reverend Carrow, when he ventured to call with the conditions of redemption, left the farm with a sample of his suiting in the jaws of a bull-mastiff.
Reuben Allsop, however, was not a static man. He was a diligent farmer, so impervious to the disasters that regularly struck his neighbours that he gained a reputation for alliance with uncouth forces. Gales did not wreck his roofs, blight shrugged away from his potatoes, footrot spared his sheep, and aphids scorned his beans. He began quietly to make money, and being indifferent to what money might buy, went on quietly to put that money to work. He invested in the catastrophes that afflicted others, letting himself be persuaded with apparent reluctance into loans and mortgages, but evincing no sloth when interest was due and unforthcoming. He was never hesitant about foreclosure. Strips and parcels about the Spentlow hills came into his possession, and it became known that once he had begun to covet the spaces between his holdings he had a habit of cornering the deeds sooner or later. Thus was acquired the empire that continued to support the Allsops in the late twentieth century: no Promised Land, agriculturally considered, but relatively speaking an empire, none the less.
‘You speak of him as a poor man, sir, but time will tell what milk and honey the third and fourth generations will find in the aftermath of Reuben Allsop.’
So this was the nurturing of Gertrude Allsop, a long way from other children, barely catching sight of a man and rigorously shielded from female influences. Certain callers at the farm, having encountered her, had been heard to say that they would rather take their chance with the bull-mastiff. She was raven-haired, bare-footed, had cow-dung caked down the calves of her legs, and eyes that flashed an arrogant challenge. By the age of nine she was doing the milking and could wring a chicken’s neck; at ten she was said to have finished off with her own hands a fox caught in a gin-trap; at thirteen she could have laid a dry-stone wall alongside a champion; and at sixteen she bit a reconnoitring Brightmore so viciously in the hand that he had to have the wound cauterized. In twentieth-century jargon she might have been called autistic, but this would have been a misjudgement; it was possible to communicate with her. But she chose for herself, from some poisoned well of intuition, those to whom she cared to be accessible, and they were few.
And then Wilbur Gabbitas, ill-advised as ever to the point of a positive talent, had called at Dogtooth on a self-inspired quest for souls to care for. Perhaps he had visions of tea and Genoa cake in a heavily brocaded farmhouse drawing-room. Instead he was confronted by an unanswered door which he had had to cross a muck-strewn yard to reach, windows curtained by muslin in the last discernible shade of grey, a cracked chimneypot lying across an upturned trough. And in a corner, by a water butt, a girl was watching him. He did not see her at first. It was as if she had materialized at his second glance, come alive from the background of flaking whitewash, tottering downpipes and broken implements. Perhaps it was because she had been standing so deathly still, in the frozen act of filling a ladle at a barrel. She looked at him with eyes that he could not interpret – dark and defensively challenging. The thought was slow to strike him that she was the daughter of the house.
What Gertrude saw was a handsome young man with a beard, athletic limbs and a friendly smile, that was not afraid of her. He asked her if there was anyone at home and she made no sign of having heard him. Her stance was statuesque, the ladle unmoved in her hand. But when he began to cross diagonally back towards the gate, she came a couple of steps nearer to him.
‘What do you want?’
In his ears her voice had a sweetness that was quite out of keeping with her rags. She was wearing the shortest dress that he had ever seen on a woman outside a classical painting, and because she was either brazen or innocent, there was more of her to be seen than he had ever seen of a woman’s body before. He did not look directly at her for long.
‘And this, Master Gabbitas, is the woman to whom you have parted with your Christian Year? What use can she have for the printed page?‘
‘She could surprise you, sir. She reads clearly and with confidence and writes in a tolerably formed hand. Her father has not neglected the entire gamut of his obligations.’
‘You are playing with fire, Wilbur Gabbitas – with fire and vitriol and the fiends of hell and beyond. Of hell and beyond, Mr Gabbitas!’
Curtain.
‘Thank you, Mr Kenworthy. That was first-rate. What a pity you’re not playing the part! Check! Don’t let the Colonel know I said th
at, or maybe you will be.’
Kenworthy was taken over and introduced to the producer, John Horrocks, who was a teacher of English at a secondary school somewhere between Ashbourne and Derby.
‘Shall we go on now with the scene between Gertrude and Wilbur?’
Kenworthy looked at his watch.
‘I’m afraid I shall have to wish you goodnight now. But if ever you’re pushed for a stand-in, don’t hesitate –’
‘But Mr Kenworthy, I’d been hoping you’d –’
Then a young player came up and approached the platform with clear anticipation of stardom. It was the youngster with the pixie cloak, now discarded to reveal a short-skirted green dress. Every other girl in the room was in jeans. Was the distinction due to parental control, or to this one’s natural sense of apartness from the crowd? Her black hair looked as if it had been washed for the occasion, and was done in a professional style older than her years, which to some extent compensated for the immaturity of her features. And yet at certain angles she might still have been taken for an older girl. She came down the central aisle with quick steps, bouncing almost, conscious beyond doubt that she was something special.
At the same time Kenworthy noticed that Elspeth was also unaccountably in the room. She must have slipped in while he was concentrating on his script, and seemed happily at home amongst the sewing women. So she had got herself drawn in? He raised his hand to give her some sort of message. But words were not necessary.
‘No need to worry, Simon. It’s only ham salad. Nothing to spoil. I wouldn’t miss this for a ransom.’
Concerted laughter from the women. John Horrocks was issuing directions to his stage hands.
‘Two folding chairs for the bales of straw. Put that weighing machine at the back on the right. That can be the pump.’
‘The welfare people will go off their heads,’ some woman said, ‘if they find he’s been at their scales.’
‘The scene is the yard at Dogtooth, Mr Kenworthy. You’re sitting on the straw. Behind you’s the barn with the infamous doorstep. There are cowpats all round you, and you eye them fastidiously from time to time. There’s very little else for you to do except sit there – that’s right, left-hand corner – and let Davina do her stuff. You don’t co-operate. Just let her take you by storm. But if you can suggest to the audience that you’re beginning to get more pleasure out of it than you expected, then that’s all to the good. Give her a shy little pat from time to time.’
Already Davina was on one knee in front of him, looking up into his eyes with her left hand on his shoulder. He could smell the cleanness of her hair, the precocity of her perfume, look down at the firm development of breasts barely past puberty.
‘Good evening, Mr Kenworthy.’
‘Good evening.’
‘Who’d have thought we’d be meeting under these conditions.’
And ‘Action!’ shouted John Horrocks, whereupon she leaped upon Kenworthy, smothered him with her arms and budding bosom, pressed her lips on his so that his nose was as twisted as that of an adolescent in a first encounter. A whoop of delight went up from the women.
‘Cut!’ said the producer. ‘Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut! Very convincing, very convincing indeed. And God knows what state your make-up’s in by now. Don’t think I begrudge you your pleasures, Davina, but now that you’ve said hullo to him, do you think we could start again and play it as a stage kiss? There’s no need for your lips to touch. You’ve got your back to the audience, and you’re masking Mr Kenworthy. And just bear in mind that it’s Colonel Noakes you’ll be kissing on the night.’
‘More’s the pity,’ she whispered to Kenworthy. ‘OK, John.’
‘All right, then. Quiet, everybody! Last few bars of interval music. Pum-te, pum-te, pum-te, pum. Curtain up. Action!’
She came at him again, this time more soberly, yet with her face only an inch or two away from his, looking soulfully up into his eyes. He looked as if he wished himself many miles away, but she had not even left him marginal room to turn his head. And his position was made all the more awkward because he had to wriggle his arm away from her so that he could read his script over her shoulder. At last she pushed herself away from him and pinned him down by his shoulders at arm’s length.
‘Oh, Wilbur –’
‘Actually, I had hoped that we might continue our discussion of Pusey’s views on everlasting punishment. I wonder if you have had time to read the copy I gave you of his paper to the Hebdomadal Council’?
She got up and took a few steps away from him. The release enabled him to turn a page. He blew out his cheeks in relief. The audience was delighted.
She plucked a small book, improbably, from somewhere under her neck-line. It was the second part of Hall and Knight’s Algebra.
‘No. But there are some lines that have been ringing in my head from that other book you gave me:
Thou who hast given me eyes to see
And love this sight so fair,
Give me a heart to find out thee
And read thee everywhere.’
‘Excellently rendered,’ Kenworthy read, ‘but yours is not, I fear, the interpretation favoured at Oriel.’
She came back to him, laid down the book on the notional straw, stroked it fondly and knelt down in front of him on the opposite side from before. Kenworthy gingerly patted the top of her head and awkwardly shifted his knees to accommodate her. Laughter, in which Elspeth’s was prominent. Davina put up her hand under his jacket and found a sensitive area of his ribs.
‘This scene really warms up in a minute,’ she said.
Chapter Four
‘Simon – it’s time I took you home.’
Elspeth’s voice was raised for the sake of the female gallery. Her eyes were filmed over with tears of hilarity. She held his arm tightly as he piloted her across the Green. The rain had rung the changes and degenerated into a penetrating drizzle.
‘I didn’t know you had it in you, Simon. You’ve missed your vocation.’
‘All I had to do was sit still and behave normally. The girl’s a natural.’
‘She’s good. But I’m surprised that the vicar’s letting her go through with it. The part’s evidently going to her head.’
‘Well, I think the village is lucky to have her.’
‘You think so? Or is she just good at being herself? Don’t think I mind – but did she have to throw herself at you quite as she did? Amateur dramatics can be dangerous. Especially when somebody young and impressionable happens to shine in the wrong kind of part.’
‘There was a German actor before the war who ended up thinking he really was Frederick the Great.’
‘That’s just what I mean. And this is the wrong time in Davina Stott’s life for her to be making a hit as a budding nympho or an Emily Brontë primitive.’
‘She seems highly intelligent to me. I dare say she’ll salvage her sense of proportion.’
‘I hope you’re right. But she does come from a broken home. And, thanks to the asinine law, is in the custody of the wrong parent.’
‘Indeed?’
‘The father was weak-willed and gallant. The mother’s an alcoholic.’
‘Is she now? Well, the girl looks well-turned-out, well-nourished, full of self-assurance. If ever a girl knew where she wanted to go –’
‘And that’s not on a bale of straw with an Oxford Movement curate. She may even aim higher than a Detective-Superintendent.’
He did not reply at once. ‘You’ve evidently thrown in your lot with an extremely well-informed sewing circle,’ he said at last.
She looked at him for a second with sidelong suspicion.
‘You can’t hide anything in a village,’ she said.
‘Or rely on a fair deal from public opinion, either.’
By now they were at their door. She had the only key and let them into the grey interior. They took off their coats and shook them over the doorstep. It was hard to tell whether the boiler was in or out. Kenworthy bu
rned and soiled his fingers.
‘I’m sorry it’s a cold supper, Simon. I’ll warm up a tin of soup, if you like.’
‘I would like, please.’
He laid the table and they sat facing each other.
‘Simon, I’m sorry about this morning; I don’t want to shelter behind my “Time of Life”. I suppose little things do loom large sometimes. But I’d be telling less than the truth if I didn’t say it still rankles.’
He waited.
‘Next time you want cover for a provincial ploy, take me into your confidence. I’ll come with you, if you’ll let me. But don’t pretend we’re on holiday. And don’t let them take it out of you at holiday time. They have their pound of flesh, most weeks.’
‘We are on holiday.’
‘Don’t, oh don’t try to keep that up. If you do, I can’t answer for what might happen to me.’
He was silent, looking steadily at her.
‘More soup?’
‘If there is any, please.’
She went to the cooker, served him, ran cold water into the pan, came back and sat opposite him.
‘Having said that, may I add that I am ready to cooperate in any way, holiday or chore?’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘I think I may claim to have found out more about the Beaker Folk than you have unearthed since we arrived here.’
‘Some of your new friends must be archaeologists.’
‘Maintain your fiction if it amuses you.’
‘As far as I am concerned, the Beaker Folk were a migrant civilization who appeared in these hills in about 1800 BC in the wake of the Neolithic tribes. They were precursors of the Bronze Age and took their name from the receptacles with which they believed it necessary to equip the recently deceased.’
‘As far as Spentlow is concerned, the Beaker Folk are the members of a commune that has squatted in the squalor of Spentlow Grange since last Easter. They include the colourfully-dressed gentleman who is producing the play and his common-law wife.’
‘Christine.’
The Anathema Stone Page 3
