‘I think it might be a good idea. If the weather improves.’
‘This afternoon?’
Mrs Scadbolt went back upstairs, this time leaving the door wider open than before. Kenworthy left it swinging.
‘Not this afternoon, Davina.’
She looked at him with childlike disappointment.
‘I need several hours alone with the script. You are forgetting what a raw beginner I am.’
‘Tomorrow, then?’
Mrs Scadbolt called down the stairs.
‘Would you like me to get fresh lining paper for these drawers, Mr Kenworthy?’
‘Not today, Mrs Scadbolt,’ and, ‘Tomorrow’s a possibility,’ he said to Davina.
‘I feel so frustrated, Mr Kenworthy.’
‘We’ll be meeting again at rehearsal this evening. We’ll fix something then.’
Then wheels in the road outside: Elspeth arriving with her busy friends; an effusion of fixing to meet again this afternoon; a slamming of car doors, and Elspeth came in carrying a plastic bag full of super-marketing.
‘Oh, hullo, Davina.’
Not frigid; not even positively cool, but short of welcoming.
‘I’ve been discussing the play with your husband, Mrs Kenworthy.’
Spoken as if the child thought that Elspeth might mind.
Before lunch, he read another of the Hob stories: more spice for Spentlow readers. A Sopall had a field which he did not use. The down from its thistles blew gaily into the furrows of his neighbours. But when Hob’s people wanted to buy it to make a playground for their children, the Sopall refused. Yet six weeks later he sold it, at three times the offered price, to a guild that wanted to build a rest home for retired locksmiths. This project had never materialized. In ten years the land had been put to no purpose and the thistles had multiplied an hundredfold. The tale was inconclusive.
Chapter Six
He spent the afternoon with the typescript.
My dear Vicar, she is not the slubberdegullion you take her for –
For the tenth time he had to turn to the script for the next line. He made himself a pot of tea. There was a walk that he wanted to make before first dark. Eventually he judged twilight far enough advanced, but not too far gone. He retrod the route that he had taken with Dunderdale this morning, passing the Stotts’bungalow, its curtains now open, but an uninhabited look about the house. In one window stood the triptych of a dressing-table mirror, its tea-chest plywood backing matt-painted and unvarnished. The strip of lawn was like a remnant of field: tall, seeded grasses, plantains, and irregular discoloured patches.
Sidi Barrani, on the other hand, suggested a frustrated gardener: pathetic care for a patch that was barely worth it: the autumn outgrowing of regimentally trimmed edges, the flowerless shrubs, punitively tonsured, in border soil almost too poor to sustain them. The news had come through that the Colonel had multiple fractures of femur and pelvis and had chipped three vertebrae. His condition was described as ‘rather poorly’.
Kenworthy pressed on past Colonel Noakes’s cottage. The lower end of the lane, where it tapered down to the so-called ‘Roman’ paving, was derelict and unobserved. The lane was an access used by the farmer not more than two or three times a year. Kenworthy stooped and found that the base of the see-saw stone had been filled in again. Stones and loose clay had been packed back into place.
He turned to walk back to the village, past Sidi Barrani. And just as he was a few yards beyond the gate of the cottage he heard someone come out of its door. A bicycle passed him going up the lane, steering a weary course up the rough gradient, pedalled by a tall, thin woman in a drab brown coat.
Past the coarse fields, past the unconsoled-looking store cattle, past the Stotts’bungalow – or nearly past it. A pane in one of the front windows was lifted and Davina looked out.
‘Mr Kenworthy – won’t you come in and meet Mummy?’
She was still in the yellow, orange and green of this morning, or perhaps she had rushed back into it, having seen him go down the lane. She still had the hank of hair looped over one eye. He needed no second bidding.
He heard bolts being drawn, not easily: it was probably rare for the front door to be used. He stepped into a narrow and gloomy hall, heavy with stale furniture polish. There was dust on the telephone table, a strand of cobweb clinging to the flex that supported the Pre-Raphaelite hall-lantern.
‘Mummy won’t be a minute.’
Davina disappeared, having shown him into a diminutive sitting-room; hair cord carpeting, a shelf of book club editions that stopped short in the 1960s; a few pictures – surrealist horses and indigo elephants; a hockey stick in a corner, a guitar with two broken strings, a studio photograph of Davina at an earlier age, in pigtails, playing a recorder; but no sign or memento of any man; no radio or television; presumably the life of the bungalow was conducted over a kitchen table. There were oddments of paper crumpled in the bare grate behind a bar fire which had lost its plug: cannibalized, in all likelihood, for some hair-drier or record-player.
There was a long delay before Diana Stott was ready to appear. He heard her voice raised, wearily querulous, but syllabically unintelligible; she hadn’t taken kindly to the fait accompli of a visitor. When at last she came into the room, it was without a smile. She had blonde hair, whose provenance was betrayed not only by the parting, but by every furrow laid visible by hasty combing. She was wearing a green woollen dress with a square of cotton print knotted about her neck.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Kenworthy. Please do make yourself at home.’
She might have said something about being at sixes and sevens, but less effectively tried to pretend that she wasn’t.
‘May I make you a cup of tea? Or perhaps something stronger?’
‘It’s early for anything stronger for me, Mrs Stott. A cup of tea would be what they used to call grateful.’
Davina made no offer to go out and brew it; her mother did not ask her to.
‘I’ll come and watch you make it,’ Kenworthy said, and lost no time in following her into the kitchen.
The room was cluttered. It was not poky as kitchens go, but too small for two females to live in without strife. There was a chair loaded with old periodicals. There were a transistor radio and a rented television set. There was a tradesman’s calendar with milk deliveries recorded in the margin. Beside the sink, among unwashed crockery, a bowl contained the remnants of breakfast cereal. A drawer was not closed properly, the corner of a cleaning cloth sticking out of the top. An electricity bill protruded from among old letters on top of the ridge, in the red print that threatened power cut-off.
‘Davina tells me you’re helping with the play, Mr Kenworthy.’
‘In desperation they’ve asked me to try.’
She had nothing to say to this, gave the impression that she would rather not have been talking at all – better still that he had not been asked into the house. It had been mischief on Davina’s part, inviting him; sheer mischief prompted by the desire for him to see what her mother was like.
‘It will cause quite a stir in the village, the play,’ he said.
‘I dare say. Not much happens here.’
‘So will the vicar’s little book.’
She did not say anything to that. Her reaction would have been no different if she had never heard of Hob at all. She obviously knew next to nothing about the play. The biggest event in Davina’s life, and they had not talked about it?
The kettle began its commotion and Mrs Stott flipped open the lid of a tea-caddy, closed her eyes, opened them, then closed them again in the direction of the ceiling.
‘I’m sorry. We’re out of tea-bags.’
‘I told you last week,’ Davina said.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Kenworthy. Will instant coffee do? We don’t drink much tea ourselves, and none of our friends do.’
‘We have no friends,’ Davina said, not quite inaudibly. A third mug had to be washed before there could be coffee.
There was no positive evidence that Diana Stott was an alcoholic. There were no bottles or used glasses about the room. But her eyes were certainly dull and baggy, and her hand had not seemed too firm while she was handling the kettle. She had spilled some water, but that was because the thing was too full, anyway.
Kenworthy took a bold line.
‘I gather your husband’s away, Mrs Stott.’
She raised clouded eyes and for the first time they held his.
‘Do you blame him for that?’
A pause developed.
‘I asked you a question, Mr Kenworthy. Do you blame a man for giving up?’
Unable to face her real enemies, whoever or whatever they were, she was ready to quarrel with the first comer. Even with Kenworthy. Davina turned her head away and let her lips spread in a supercilious smile.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Kenworthy said. ‘It looks a nice enough little place to me. Modern, convenient, labour-saving –’
‘I wasn’t talking about the house, Mr Kenworthy.’
‘I can only talk about what I see with my own eyes, Mrs Stott.’
‘Davina, go into your room for ten minutes. Go play a record or something.’
But the girl showed every sign of standing her ground. She was leaning against the sink with her coffee mug held at a casual angle. She looked into Kenworthy’s face with amusement – satisfied amusement. On the point of provoking a stand-up row for his benefit? He signalled her out of the kitchen with a half-inch movement of his eyes. For a second or two it looked as if she was going to defy him. But then, meekly, shrugging her shoulders, perhaps out of nervousness rather than rudeness, she left them.
‘Mr Kenworthy – may I ask whether you are here on duty?’
The mother spoke with more composure now, the first sign of relative independence he had seen in her.
‘In Spentlow, do you mean, or in this house in particular?’
‘Either or both. I think if you are, we have the right to know what you are about.’
‘And what special reason do you have for thinking I might be on duty?’
‘I suppose you’re here to investigate these Beaker Folk.’
‘Why should I be? Have you some complaint you’d like to lay against them?’
‘No complaint that falls into the orbit of you people. Surely you know that that’s half the trouble?’
‘You’re divorced, Mrs Stott?’
‘He didn’t want to know any more. He just couldn’t take it. And I asked you just now: can you blame him?’
‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t clear what you meant.’
‘She broke us up, and now she’s breaking me down.’
‘Then you just must not let her.’
‘Her father has access, but he hasn’t taken it up for a year or more. I don’t blame him for that, either.’
‘And it upsets her?’
She appeared not to hear that question.
‘I had to take her to Child Guidance before she’d been at school very long. Before we came here. But it only made her worse. It was the last word in building up her importance. She was a perfect little angel in their office. All they did was give her a certificate to do as she pleased. And a note on the file – that they told her about – to say she’s a near-genius. Licensed from then on to be an oddity.’
‘Talented children are often difficult, Mrs Stott.’
‘Difficult? Say impossible. Do you know that my husband and I didn’t have an evening out together for four years because she played such hell with our baby-sitters? Do you know that she once unscrewed two stair-rods so that her father fell and broke his collar-bone?’
‘But you still haven’t told me why you think I should be professionally interested. Do you believe she has committed some crime? Or stands in moral danger?’
‘I know next to nothing of what goes on in her life.’
‘But you must suspect something, or you would not be talking like this.’
‘I know she’s fallen in with a bad lot. Or, rather, it’s them who have got into bad company. Hers.’
‘So what is your worry, then?’ he asked her. ‘Drink? Drugs?’
‘She doesn’t like drink. She won’t even touch a cigarette. Drugs – I have no fear of that. That’s one of the strange things about her. In some things she seems to have all the sense in the world. But in other ways she never seems to learn. She gets mad notions into her head and goes through with them, irrespective of consequences.’
‘For example, Mrs Stott?’
‘For example, in the second school she went to she not only played truant. She even took a case full of clothes and changed into them in a public lavatory before she went off into town.’
‘But that’s a long time ago, Mrs Stott. Children grow out of that sort of naughtiness. If you could only tell me what you’re afraid of today, this week, this minute –’
‘I don’t know, Mr Kenworthy.’
And then she was back again on the subject of the people at the Grange.
‘These hippies, Mr Kenworthy. They are anarchists.’
‘Ninety per cent of the riff-raff who call themselves that wouldn’t have the guts to puff smoke at a gnat.’
‘So, according to my ready-reckoner, there are ten per cent left. Davina’s an anarchist too, so she tells me. An Ultimate Anarchist.’
‘And what’s that when it’s at home?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine. I can’t tell you what it is that really frightens me. You must think I am out of my mind.’
‘I don’t think anything of the kind.’
The woman was weak, and from weakness had been buffeted into helplessness. There was no doubting the reality of her fear; no point in impugning her for not knowing what it was about. She made some effort to pull herself together.
‘I’ll tell you, Mr Kenworthy. You can think of me what you like. Davina broke Donald and me apart. She did it deliberately, schemingly, from the age of about seven onwards. Looking back, I can think of dozens of little things – devilishly clever things. We gave her everything she asked for, whether we could afford it or not. But I know now that she had to destroy us. That’s how her mind works. When she sees something that makes people happy, she has to destroy it. You’ll think I’m crazy, but I think she’s set out to destroy these Ultimate Anarchists too. Oh, I know they are dirty and feckless and silly, full of their mad ideas. But they are trying to do something, according to their own lights. That’s why she’ll have to destroy them. I know her too well.’
It was real to her; and she was not strong enough to handle it alone.
‘Have you tried discussing it with anyone?’ Kenworthy asked. ‘The vicar, for example?’
‘The vicar? If you ask me, he’s an Ultimate Anarchist himself. He spends enough of his time up with that crew.’
And that was more or less all there was to it. She was no easier to convince than anyone else that he was only in Derbyshire on holiday. He talked like a schoolmaster and told her that if the crunch came and she happened on something concrete she must go to the local police. Then he let himself out of the back door, avoiding another confrontation with Davina.
Chapter Seven
When Davina Stott swept off her pixie cloak in the Hall that night she was wearing her full costume and make-up for the earlier phase of Gertrude Allsop. She had backcombed her black hair and produced an elaborately casual tangle that would go well with the muck-scattered farm-set. She had shadowed her eyes, brought up her lips into a frankly carnal invitation and was wearing torn rags with downward-pointing triangles that hung about her knees. She was bare-footed. There was no hint of immaturity or under-age pertness now. She was no longer the clever girl who was the only real actress in the village. She was Gertrude Allsop, and when she went for one of her contemporaries with a playful snarl and threatening claws, the illusion was gut-sinking. The only one who was displeased was John Horrocks, who showed purposeful irascibility.
‘Davina, I tol
d you we’re not doing the farmyard scene again tonight. I want to introduce Mr Kenworthy to some of the other sequences.’
‘I’m sorry. You know how it feels when you’re looking the part.’
‘That’s not how Gertrude looked when she came back from her honeymoon. And that’s what you’re going to concentrate on tonight. Just imagine her turning up at a vicarage reception looking like that!’
‘It might have been fun if she had.’
‘Well, it isn’t fun wasting our time. Go back-stage and get into something ordinary.’
‘Where am I going to find something ordinary backstage?’
‘Go home and change, then. And please don’t take all evening.’
For a moment she seemed to stand irresolute, on the brink of a prima donna fit. But then she thought better of it, came down the length of the auditorium blushing, unwilling to meet anyone’s eye. It even looked as if she was going to cut Horrocks, but as she had almost passed him, she turned her head.
‘Sorry, John.’
‘All right, reverend gentlemen. Let’s do your showdown again.’
So Kenworthy and Dunderdale went through the routine that they had done together last night, or, rather, they set out along the same lines. When Kenworthy found himself fluffing his words he started improvising along the broad scheme of the dialogue, and the vicar played up to him neatly, inventing on the spur of the moment lines that were a good deal better than some he had cooked up by the midnight oil. When it was over, John Horrocks was laughing. He looked as if he had been compensated for the passage with Davina.
‘I can see that we’re not going to have to spend much time rehearsing that one. But if that’s the way you intend to play it, for goodness’ sake remember that seven and a half minutes is the outside limit. Otherwise the interval tea’s going to stew.’
And it was at this moment that a thousand-watt spotlight broke free from its clamp and came crashing down from the rafters. The bulb exploded like a cannon, the wrenched wiring flashed with blue and yellow lightning and blew a sub-circuit fuse that extinguished half the lights in the Hall. The lamp weighed thirty-five pounds, was too hot to touch, and took a chunk of flesh out of the shoulder of eight-year-old Susan Brightmore. If she had been standing six inches to her left, first-aid would have been superfluous.
The Anathema Stone Page 6
