The Anathema Stone

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘There is a nauseating timbre of truth about it.’

  It stood out from Dunderdale’s eager telling of it that there had been equal enthusiasm on both sides of the confessional.

  ‘She staged her nightmares, beautifully timed, struggling to stay awake until her parents came upstairs, straining her ears to listen whether they went into the lavatory together. She was convinced that the lavatory was the normal place for it, because of the organs involved. This was only, I remind you, Phase One of her misunderstandings. Phase One did not last long.’

  Dunderdale looked knowing. He might, for that one second, have been telling a tale in a golf club.

  ‘Phase One did not last long – Phase Two – for the next year or so she applied herself to the study of sex, as the bright lads of your generation and mine used to apply themselves to fossils and butterflies. Some of her conversations with children of her own age, if they were ever reported at home, must have caused consternation. She had a detailed knowledge of the mechanics of contraception that left me with a feeling of callow ignorance.’

  ‘All in a day’s work, Vicar.’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t encourage her. Once she started to talk, she went on talking.’

  ‘One can see what split her parents up.’

  ‘Yes; but make some allowance for their own ineptitude too. I don’t think that that pair could have handled a normal child – if there is such a thing. At any rate, by the time she was eight, Davina might still not have known what love and passion meant, but she had a consummate knowledge of their outlets and inlets.’

  ‘And they disgusted her?’

  ‘I don’t know that they disgusted her. She was obsessed by them. She must have been a horrible child. She knew what was going on behind the bedroom wall. She even knew from the looks on her parents’faces the evenings when they fancied each other. She knew the critical moment at which to sit up in bed and scream. She knew how and when to get taken into her parents’bed. She developed the sleep-walking habit – pure theatre, of course: a nine-year-old Lady Macbeth teetering on the landing. Once, and once only, she managed to break in on her mother and father in the act. And, of course, basically – here’s their complete failure to cope – they were ashamed. Her father lost his temper and thrashed her. Her mother fell out with him over that – and then sheered off sex herself.’

  ‘Which Davina knew?’

  ‘To her smirking satisfaction. It’s not easy for me to sit here and make it real for you.’

  ‘I’ve had more than my share of confessional urges in my time,’ Kenworthy said, ‘but I’ve never sat it out with a child of that age on that subject.’

  Dunderdale replenished their glasses. They had already made significant inroads into the bottle.

  ‘Of course, the Stotts did not go to pieces all at once. There were attempts at a fresh start, even serious efforts to persuade the child that certain things in life are sweet and natural. She was sent away one summer to an organized children’s camp, but her behaviour was outrageous, disruptive. She could not bear to be away from home, not knowing what might be going on there. She was escorted back after three days, with a strong recommendation to take her to a psychiatrist. But even then the Stotts procrastinated; still the stupidity of false shame. They did not want their social set to know that they could not manage the child. God knows what their social set did think. Davina cannot have been the most popular of guests in other people’s houses – though she knew how to behave like an angel when it suited her book. If you’ll excuse me a moment, I rather think a tray’s been got ready for us.’ Dunderdale got up suddenly. He left the room. He had revealed nothing at all about his domestic arrangements. There had to be a housekeeper in the background somewhere; the house was beautifully kept. But she had never been mentioned. Kenworthy took the chance to move inquisitively about the room. Dunderdale’s current reading, over the arm of a chair, appeared to be Leggett’s First Zen Reader. There were manuscript sheets lying about his desk that suggested that even at this late stage he was wrestling with a better ending for The Anathema Stone.

  In a minute or two he came back, carrying a tray with a garnished board of assorted cheeses. He went on with his story as if there had been no interruption.

  ‘The crunch came when the girl was still only ten. There had been an accident in a neighbour’s house. An au-pair girl had left clips unfastened on a stair-carpet, and mother-in-law had come a cropper. Within a week or two of that incident, Donald Stott had had to go to an executive stag-night that came his way two or three times a year. He usually came home late from it, flushed and noisy – he wasn’t a practised drinking man – and Davina knew that a glass or two too many brought him home in a randy mood. Mother had had half a bottle of gin and betaken herself to bed early. Davina was quiet in her bedroom, pasting pop-group cuttings into an album. She had mastered the art of being convincingly out of harm’s way. That was the night she fixed the stair-rods. Father had to be taken to Casualty. After that, it had to be the clinic for her. Maybe they’d left it too late; or maybe she was too clever for the shrinkers.’

  ‘Full marks for this Stilton,’ Kenworthy murmured.

  ‘Local breed.’

  ‘So the Stott family foundered? Fell out about how the girl ought to be treated. Fell out about everything under the sun, until they became intolerable to each other. And Stott played the gallant, and the wife got the child. Maybe he wasn’t being all that gallant.’

  ‘I do know that he was crippled financially,’ Dunderdale said. ‘And Phase Three evolved.’

  ‘Phase Three being? Not that I don’t know.’

  ‘Onset of puberty. Sex in her own right now – aware of her development in mirror and bath.’

  ‘Dawning nymphomania?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think we’re going to be told by the pathologist that she was still a virgin. I think so: I’m not sure what happened one night up at the Grange. Sex still obsessed her; but I don’t think it became something she wanted. I think it was something to wield.’

  ‘Did you at no time think of trying to tackle the mother?’

  ‘You’ve met her. You can imagine how far I got.’

  ‘An unofficial word with her GP?’

  ‘Without the co-operation of either parent or child he was powerless.’

  ‘School?’

  ‘I think that was her only hope. She was John Horrocks’s protégée. He did more than anyone else to get her and keep her on the rails. I think she even tried to be good just to please him. And the concentration on the play this autumn has helped.’

  ‘Other kids?’

  ‘All scared stiff of her. She was not of their world. They knew that without understanding it.’

  ‘So she was conscious of a new power. And who were her victims?’

  But before Dunderdale could answer, there was the gentlest rap of knuckles on the study door. Dunderdale called to come in. A woman appeared, slender and well-groomed, and in her late thirties. She was wearing an outdoor coat, and did not actually come into the room.

  ‘If that’s all, Mr Dunderdale, I’ll be making for home.’

  ‘Yes, that’s everything, Mrs Malkin. Thank you for the cheese.’

  Malkin: the neutral clan. A Brightmore or an Allsop in the vicar’s camp might have led to awkward situations. She wished them goodnight, politely and separately – but shyly, and without the presumption of a smile for either of them.

  ‘We were talking about Davina’s new power,’ Kenworthy said, ‘and where she was likely to try it out.’

  ‘I hate naming names, but I must. Jesse Allsop for one, believe it or not. But nobody knows what really passed between them. For a time, as you heard this morning, she became a regular caller at Dogtooth. Then it all stopped suddenly. You saw Jesse this morning: a bachelor, tormented, a scowling introvert, commercially successful, because commercially ruthless. Perhaps that’s a bit strong: commercially fierce, let’s say. But tortured. Tortured by his own dark t
houghts, whatever they are. Tortured by thoughts of the twisted limb of the family he’s descended from. He regards himself, I think, as doomed to be an oddity, doomed to be off-beam, master of a village clan, yet doomed to be friendless.’

  He interrupted himself to suggest a small piece of Cheddar for palate-cleansing.

  ‘When a man gets into that frame of mind, he sometimes gets satisfaction by living up to the false image. You can imagine what the village children think him: a warlock; no rapport between him and them whatever. But he does use a few of them, now and then, as you heard, for work on his caravan sites. It’s cheap labour, good labour at that. They’re a conscientious crowd. But to Davina his inaccessibility was itself a challenge. They all thought they’d been underpaid for a piece of Bank Holiday work, and she swore she’d beard him in his den about it. She made a lone sortie to Dogtooth one evening in September last year. It was the only talking point that day amongst the Spentlow juveniles. She was gone a long time and came back with the bombshell that Jesse had invited her to tea after school the next day. Until well into the autumn Davina went regularly to Dogtooth. I might say I was unhappy about it. I kept my ear as close to the ground as I could. But that’s not very close where Jesse Allsop is concerned. Then, as I say, it stopped suddenly. Nothing said. Nothing hinted.’

  ‘You never tried to probe Allsop?’

  ‘He simply took the line he took this morning. She kept plaguing him for non-existent arrears, and he finally gave her her marching orders.’

  ‘I hope that Gleed will get to know all this.’

  ‘Gleed surely knows. He was closeted with Jesse for a long time this morning. Jesse Allsop is softer than he looks. He doesn’t set about it in the right way, but, more than anything else, he wants to be liked. Jesse wants it both ways. He wants to be himself, and he wants men to understand him. Davina would have the intuition and wits to keep both ends in view. Gleed may possibly overlook the need for that. You, of course, would do well with the man.’

  Kenworthy made no comment on that score. Dunderdale reached again for the brandy bottle. The tide-line was now perceptibly below the halfway mark.

  ‘Any other names to name?’ Kenworthy asked.

  ‘If you can clear your mind of prejudices against these Beaker Folk –’

  ‘The Ultimate Anarchists?’

  ‘You’ve picked up the term? A fair description of them, if by Ultimate you mean “never”. A bunch of liberal romantics so out of tune with the existing order that they cheerfully imagine disorder to be the antidote. The advent of Davina into their midst seems to have created some major disturbance. Nobody knows what that was about, except possibly John Horrocks, and no power on earth will make him talk if he doesn’t want to.’

  ‘How deeply has he been involved with Davina?’

  ‘Professionally. He’s her teacher. And, though you may not believe it to look at him, too professional to take any risks. Apart from the fact that he’s so besotted with Christine. He isn’t the leader of the Folk: they don’t, of course, admit to leadership. But he was a founder-member – under Christine’s aegis – and, thanks to his teaching job, is the only one with roots in the ground. He is, for example, their authority on squatters’rights, and in that department his word is anarchists’law. The rest are a mixed bunch; there’ll be about twenty of them when they’re at full strength – there’s perpetual coming and going. There is a poet or two; one man has had a sonnet accepted by a review magazine that went broke before they could print it. Another is writing a novel on an endless roll of paper. Another has had an idea for a documentary rejected by ITV in encouraging terms, and is still working on the idea. There is a potter amongst them, and if he had had a wheel he could have made them their beakers, if he had had any clay. And there was Kevin O’Shea –’

  Dunderdale paused to see what effect the name might have. Kenworthy ensured that it had none.

  ‘Kevin O’Shea is a big stage Irishman, Mark Two. By that I mean a huge, flabby, hairy man, every square inch of his face bar his eyes sprouting untrimmed red beard. And into a gap in that beard he can insert an incredibly small and delicate tin whistle, from which he produces incredibly dextrous and delicate melody. Not the leader of the movement; I repeat, they don’t have one. But the most frightening. Frightening in the eyes of the village, I mean. He really did go about looking objectionable. Noisy when drunk; usually drunk. Pugnacious in his cups; and looked pugnacious, in or out of them.’

  ‘But you don’t usually get a bunch such as this without some crime going on.’

  ‘That’s what Spentlow thinks, but I’d give the Beaker Folk a pretty clean bill. They can’t traffic in drugs – they haven’t the capital. For the same reason their own indulgences are modest. They don’t pilfer – they are too protective of their own image. For a bunch of revolutionaries, they are an extraordinarily solemn and passive crowd. They take their ideals very seriously.’

  ‘You see rather a lot of them, do you?’

  ‘I have done. They fascinate me. I find them more interesting than cowmen and caravan speculators. They may be misguided, but at least they are trying.’

  ‘And Davina saw a lot of them, too?’

  ‘She did. She had to persevere to insinuate herself. For all their pride in their flexibility, they are an inward-looking bunch.’

  ‘But she made it?’

  ‘By sheer assiduity.’

  ‘And sex?’

  ‘I have no doubt that she was up to her usual brinkwomanship.’

  ‘Brinkwomanship: a good word. And for the first time in her life, she was playing round a brink that wasn’t fenced in.’

  ‘That’s just it.’

  ‘So she might have got what she seemed to be asking for?’

  ‘There is a school of thought in Spentlow that believes so. Some think she learned a memorable lesson.’

  Kenworthy held two fingers over his glass at the offer of a refill.

  ‘Are the Beaker Folk sexually promiscuous?’

  ‘In theory. In practice, most of the couples have stumbled on a natural stability.’

  ‘So Davina, pirouetting round the edges, may have taken too much for granted?’

  ‘Possibly. But I don’t think that that was where the trouble lay. They believe, in the Recruiting Sergeant, that O’Shea was responsible for the moment of truth. She may have teased his patience without realizing that he hadn’t any. Hence my uncertainty as to whether she was virgo intacta. With Kevin O’Shea as instructor it would be a memorable lesson. He wouldn’t be fingering a dainty little flageolet this time.’

  ‘Ought all this not to have been brought to the attention of the police or the welfare authorities?’

  ‘On what evidence? There was none. And there was no complaint from Davina. Whatever happened, there wouldn’t be that.’

  ‘There ought to have been a Care and Protection Order on the child ages ago.’

  ‘To drive her into open rebellion against society at large? The play was doing her far more good.’

  ‘So what did eventually happen between her and the Beaker Folk?’

  ‘We don’t know. We know that one night in August Kevin O’Shea trekked away. We know that Davina ceased to be interested in the Grange as suddenly and completely as she had given up Jesse Allsop.’

  ‘Gleed has plenty to work on.’

  ‘You’d do it better than he can, Kenworthy.’

  ‘You’re very anxious to have it in my hands. It can’t be, Dunderdale. I’d be the last man to want it.’

  ‘Pity.’

  Kenworthy got up and settled his glass back on the tray.

  Men converged diagonally on him from the shadows as he left the vicarage.

  ‘Is it true that the Yard have seconded you to this case, Mr Kenworthy?’

  ‘Was it really an accident that you took a letting cottage two weeks ago, Superintendent?’

  ‘When are you going to call a press conference, sir?’

  ‘Can we quote you as saying that re
lations with the county force are all that could be desired?’

  ‘I’m just an ordinary member of the public,’ Kenworthy said, and when that failed to give any kind of satisfaction he was compelled to stand and address them.

  ‘Do you know how many days leave a Yard man gets in a year, gentlemen? I came up to Derbyshire not to be bothered –’

  They were still clamouring as he slipped through the gate. Elspeth was waiting to help him escape in through their rented front door.

  Chapter Eleven

  A clear day, and, for the Kenworthys, a gift island of time, like a clip from a film of what might have been. They walked miles over hilltops and across the heads of cloughs that fed ice-cold rivulets down into the dales. The air was clean. They had immense tracts of country to themselves. Except for the white rubble walls, parcelling the middle distance into tiny, irregular, unviable fields, there was nothing on the skyline that would have seemed alien to Neolithic man. And even the rectangular enclosures had something about them that was primeval in spirit.

  Whatever Gleed’s priorities were, he was leaving Kenworthy alone; perhaps pointedly alone. It might have been psychological warfare; or maybe there seemed nothing to add to the depositions that Kenworthy had already made. There was frequent movement of police vehicles in and out of the village. One was parked outside the vicarage for a very long time. Sometimes the centre of attraction was Dogtooth, and an augmented team came and searched the farm. Diana Stott was called for and driven to County HQ, and was away so late that it was rumoured that she was being detained overnight. But a car drew up outside her bungalow between eleven and midnight, and Mrs Scadbolt reported that lights were again showing behind the curtained windows.