by Mavis Cheek
Up they went on this beautiful morning, taking the climb quite slowly for the sheer pleasure (in Dorcas and Molly’s case) of being out on a balmy spring morning, walking on the newly springing turf of the season with the breeze in their faces and the sun on their backs. In the distance the last of the sheep were being nosed off the Hill by the Braddle working dogs. ‘I thought there was to be no using the Hill as pasture?’ said Molly.
‘It’s a new arrangement,’ Miles cut in quickly.
‘Well, it will have to stop,’ said Molly.
And Dorcas, pointing to the last scrubby rump as it ran off to its fellows, said, ‘Looks like it already has. Perhaps it’s less a question of frightening the horses than shocking the sheep.’
Molly looked at Dorcas curiously. She looked back at Molly, wide-eyed. No one is ever that innocent, thought Molly Bonner.
On they climbed. If this is work, thought Molly Bonner, give me more of it. The Hill reminded Dorcas of happier times but she put away the little sadnesses that came creeping when she (rarely) climbed here and smiled for the pleasure of the day. Miles smiled back at her, thinking she was being conspiratorial.
‘How long did you say you would want access for, Miss Bonner?’ he called.
‘Several months I should think,’ she said. ‘We’d hope to film it, too.’
‘Of course.’ Miles very nearly rubbed his hands. They could sell the DVD in the shop, he dreamed. He had been quite wrong about the lady. She might look confident and alarming, but she was just a little pussycat who rolled over and put her paws in the air. As soon as he suggested that the money on offer would be spent on protecting the site, Miss Bonner had agreed. ‘Once I’ve cleared it back to its origins,’ she said, ‘it would be good to keep it that way. I will help you get the necessary permissions if there are any objections.’
‘Have you any idea what you are looking for?’ he asked.
‘Oh,’ said Molly dismissively. ‘Just the original outline, I think. Not much more than that.’
Dorcas stole a look at Molly. She was wide-eyed with innocence.
No one is that free from guilt, thought Dorcas.
Miles walked on and dreamed some more; he would have his car park, his entrance turnstile, his staff – and his protective erection over the Gnome’s most vulgar (and most interesting) part. No more trespassers committing unspeakable acts. All visits to be paid for. And everything to be funded by someone else. Miss Bonner’s grandmother, it seems, had been a very wealthy woman. Arthur Bonner might have come from nothing but he had married a lady of fortune all the same. Some men had all the luck.
Just for a moment in the village below, the vicar, coming out of the bungalow that was now the vicarage, looked up to the Hill and saw in the far distance (the bungalow was at the far end of the street near the church) a man and two women pottering around what could still be seen of the Gnome’s shape – a particular part of the Gnome’s shape. He absent-mindedly hummed the tune to ‘There is a green hill far away’, thought better of it – wished it were far away – and refocused. Even though it was distant he knew that two of the figures were female as they were wearing skirts, one of a particularly bright hue – and the tall thin one was a man in trousers. He closed his eyes and – without much thought – crossed himself. He prayed to his Maker that those up there were not about to perform heinous acts in full daylight – and together. It could hardly be construed as seeking the gift of fecundity in any moral sense, not if whoever the man was had taken two of them up there. Two. Something must be done about the pagan thing. And quickly. He was very much on Miles’s side in this.
The vicar of Lufferton Boney bestrode, he felt, two worlds. His bungalow, set near to the church, marked the demarcation line of the village Old and the village New. From there, all down the street and towards the Old Holly Bush was the old part of the village, representing hundreds – some might say more than a thousand – years of its existence. The two parts seldom mixed and their vicar privately considered them to be of two categories – hoi polloi and society. Very few from either elevation looked at the Gnome, let alone walked on him.
The vicar, despite wishing to bestride things like a Colossus, was a very short man and like many very short men (Napoleon, Joseph Stalin, the Marquis de Sade) he had a rather elevated notion of his place in the world. It did not help that his very fine and much loved by the villagers pulpit was of a height that made him stand on tippy-toes, but the bungalow added further insult. The new houses, the awful village hall, the noisy playground, the frightful new pub and the shop were all built on what had once been the garden and house and outbuildings of the vicarage.
The vicar, who longed to be in one of the older, more refined houses, curled his lip as he locked his door (you couldn’t be too careful) and set off down the street without delay in the direction of Hill View House, giving Marion Fitzhartlett a little bow as she tottered towards him. ‘Oh vicar,’ she said. But, as she seemed in danger of turning round and seeing what was going on up the Hill, he did not stop. Here was opportunity. ‘I have an appointment, Miss Fitzhartlett,’ he said. ‘But I will call at the Old Manor later today.’
‘Very well,’ she said, a little sadly he thought, and they both moved on. ‘But I wouldn’t make it much later than twelve. Not if you want to talk to my mother, that is.’
Marion’s mother, Dulcima Fitzhartlett, lay on the grass among the first crop of daisies and turned her face to the sun. Her admiration for Dryden Fellows would never, ever, ever be requited, of that she was quite, quite, quite sure. He was everything that Harty was not. Erudite, calm – perhaps a little obsequious (Harty’s pronouncing) but sensitive to her moods and desires. She loved talking about elegant furnishings and fine things with him. Next to her in the grass nestled a half-bottle of white burgundy. An empty half-bottle of white burgundy. Half-bottles, she had told herself as she removed this one from the cellar a short while hence and opened it, half-bottles were notorious for going off. Especially the ones with real corks. She was just helping out, really. There were so many of them down there.
She winced as she heard the sound of a gunshot. Harty was shooting the pigeons again. Good. They had already ruined the early lilacs. She hoped he would not get cross if he missed them because that was when he was moved to try for bigger targets – something to get your teeth into, as he put it – and he would not wear his spectacles. That was how old Sally the Labrador had met her end (merciful, really) and Nelly Braddle had only just escaped when she was pegging out the washing behind the beech hedge. Neither of which targets could be construed as items into which to get your teeth.
Dulcima rolled over once more, enjoying the unusually warm weather and picked up the bottle, holding it up to the sun. It was empty. Another would be nice. But dratty-drat-drat, just at that moment she heard the clop, clop of Sparkle’s hooves. Marion had returned. With unerring eye, Lady Fitzhartlett hurled the half-bottle into a distant row of bay hedging. Not for nothing had she and her team won the cricket cup at Garminster all those years ago. It landed where she wished it to land and there was the faintest of cracking and tinklings. Spot on. Exactly where she had aimed all the others. And from where, discreetly, from time to time they were scooped up and removed by the butler and man of all work, Orridge.
On arriving at Hill View House, knocking several times and receiving no answer, the vicar dared to raise his head and look towards the Hill again – whence, very definitely, came not his help. Indeed, whence came great hesitancy at looking at all. Then he saw that the figures were familiar, or two of them were, and he sank on to the top step of Miles’s home, got out his handkerchief, and wiped his face. Relief. They were not strangers in search of unspeakable acts, but Dorcas and Miles and a visitor. The sooner something was done about that terrible thing, the better. Pagans. Pah! They had nothing better to do, obviously, than celebrate that which should remain hidden. Lust, thought the vicar, lust was a frightful curse upon the land. Though it did, of course, give him scope for a ve
ry fine sermon.
Molly Bonner stood enraptured by the sight. ‘My grandfather,’ she said, ‘wrote several long letters to my grandmother about the work he was doing up here. She was still at school, boarding school, at the time and he pretended they were from her Uncle Harold. She was only seventeen and he was nearly thirty – she was high born, he was low born, she had prospects, he had none but his teaching and his brilliance in his field, and they were in love … deeply in love. It was all very secret and very romantic.’
‘Rather young,’ said Miles.
‘Girls married younger then,’ said Molly. ‘Not much else for them to do. But at least they were in love.’
Dorcas, touched by being on the Hill with all its memories and touched by hearing the word love spoken with such candour, said, ‘How did they meet? If their worlds were so different?’
‘He gave a lecture on Darwin in Edinburgh and my grandmother’s class attended it. The teacher who accompanied the class liked what he said and the way he said it and persuaded the headmistress to employ him for a further three lectures. My grandmother was fascinated by it all, loved the idea of science making sense of things that the Bible said, and – well he began teaching at the school and they did that very terrible thing of meeting in secret and falling in love.’
‘How romantic,’ sighed Dorcas.
‘Almost underage,’ said Miles. ‘She was a minor. He took advantage.’
Molly laughed. ‘My grandmother says it was the other way around. She reckoned that she took great advantage. Anyway, it was real love. And then, in her last term as a schoolgirl, he came here and started the work on the Gnome – and he wrote to her as Uncle Harold – until that August when war was declared. In the autumn he enlisted and was due to go out to the Front in the following spring. My grandmother telephoned him at his training camp. Arrangements were made. When he next had his leave he raced up to Edinburgh, they rushed off to Gretna Green, and were married. He went off to the Front, was killed, and my grandmother gave birth to my father in 1916. My father married my mother, late in life, and here I am. In the steps of my famous grandfather.’
‘Is he famous?’
‘He is to me,’ she said stoutly. ‘And the world of archaeology, now. But I don’t think he wanted fame. He wanted to do his job and he wanted what he found with my grandmother – he wanted love.’
‘Don’t we all,’ said Dorcas, half to herself.
‘Not like you to get all sentimental, Dorcas,’ said Miles.
She shook her head. ‘Some of us, Miles,’ she snapped, ‘can distinguish between sentiment and love.’
Molly looked up at the monumental priapus that spread before them. ‘Or love and lust,’ she said.
He shrugged. The two women smiled at each other and Molly nodded. ‘Grandfather wrote her some beautiful letters while he was here on the site. She left them to me. And his notebooks. I was only a child when she died so everything was put in trust but they let me have those things. I think they were more precious to her than her fortune – at any rate they have been read over and over again. I’ve always wanted to continue the excavation and now I’m old enough, wise enough and I can afford it.’
Miles all but rubbed his hands. ‘So you want to return the Gnome to his original shape?’ he said. ‘Clear the edges, so to speak?’
Molly nodded.
‘And why do you think this isn’t his original shape?’
‘Instinct. And my grandfather’s preoccupation with it. I want to finish the dig,’ she said. And quickly added ‘Clearance’ as if to correct herself.
Miles shrugged again. What was it to him if a young woman wanted to be so self-indulgent? At the next opportunity he slid beside Dorcas and whispered, ‘Cheer up. I thought you would be pleased now we’ve got what we want.’
‘Did you,’ she said, and marched on towards the Gnome’s hat, leaving him puffing behind. She caught up with Molly Bonner. ‘So you said you think the original Gnome might have been a bit different from the way it is now?’
Molly seemed not to hear the question. They had reached the outer circle of stones and were standing on the tip of the Gnome’s hat. Molly Bonner gave the scene her absolute concentration and Dorcas decided that any further questions would have to wait. Eventually, having paced around the hat, Molly came to a halt and nodded. ‘Different? Considerably different? Yes,’ she said. ‘Almost certainly. I’d like to find out how he really came about. Gnome is quite a modern name for this kind of figure – not even mediaeval, really – but we can probably solve some of the mystery with this excavation. Different originally. Do I think that? Yes I most certainly do.’
Four
DULCIMA FITZHARTLETT PRESSED her nose up against the glass of the large front window of Beautiful Bygones. She could just about discern the shadowy shape of Dryden moving around in the back of the shop, and she sighed. In the window was one item, a very pretty Georgian sideboard with polished handles, and set upon it was a little blue and white dish. She already had a perfectly delightful George II sideboard, probably a better one than this, yet she looked at the polished wood yearningly and wondered if Harty would notice if she brought yet another piece of furniture back to the Manor.
There had been an incident a few months ago when he entered the library and tripped over a pretty little footstool (Hepplewhite style, mahogany, c.1790) and had his foot in tight bandaging for more than a fortnight – he went down very heavily, did Harty once he was going – and had asked on several occasions with increasing irritation what yet another footstool was doing in the library. Dulcima had bought one or two others over the years from Dryden; it seemed the least she could do when he was so nice to her and talked about elegant things. Harty pointed out plaintively that they had far too many knocking around the place as it was, and as he only had two feet at the best of times, why should he need more of the things cluttering up the library? Why was yet another one there and – worse – come to think of it – where had it come from? Still Dulcima gazed through the shop window yearningly.
Footsteps came up behind her and stopped by her side. ‘A penny for them?’ It was Dorcas Fairbrother. In the days following her walk up the Hill with Molly and Miles she had been in altogether better spirits than for a long time. Something was shifting, she felt, even though she was not sure what.
Dulcima steadied herself against the glass and turned round, laughing. ‘It’d take more than a penny for that,’ she said. They both looked at the sideboard.
‘How beautiful,’ said Dorcas. ‘What a lovely piece of furniture. How covetable.’
But Dulcima was seeing something quite different as she stared. Something she vaguely envied. She put her arm through Dorcas’s and said, ‘When George II’s wife, Caroline of Anspach, lay dying, he slept in a cot by her bed. At the end she told him that he must marry again. He said that he would not, he said he would prefer just to take mistresses. And his wife rallied enough to sit up and say very loudly “Good heavens George, marriage is no impediment to that …”’
They both laughed.
‘He never did marry again, though. He was that rare thing – a Hanoverian who loved his wife.’
‘Well, he made very fine furniture all the same. I suppose I might be able to afford the little dish on the top of it,’ said Dorcas. ‘Just. If I paid for it on the never-never.’
‘It’s Spode – a bonbon dish. Do you like bonbons?’
‘Love them,’ said Dorcas.
‘Then I shall buy it for you.’ And without paying any attention to Dorcas’s insistence that she should do no such thing, Dulcima entered Beautiful Bygones closely followed by a protesting Dorcas.
Dryden was in the workroom at the back when the two women arrived in the shop and, unusually, there was only Nigel in attendance. Up he came, wearing the smile his father had taught him to smile, and making Dorcas flinch as she was given the full benefit. As a smile it was not entirely successful. It might have been more successful as a grimace of bravery under immense pain or
even a malevolent look of murderous intent. It reminded Dulcima of one of the leaden gargoyles that sat atop the down-pipes at the manor – a thought she found no stranger than the many others that tended to float in and out of her mind from time to time.
‘I am so glad to see you,’ said Nigel.
‘And I am glad to see you, dear,’ replied a slightly puzzled Dulcima.
‘Not you –’ he said, oblivious to the rudeness. ‘I mean Dorcas. Dorcas – I haven’t seen you to speak to for ages.’
Dorcas stared at him. He saw her every day as she crossed the street on her way to Hill View House. From the shop he could – and did – see everything. They never spoke, having nothing to say to each other whatsoever. They might exchange a hallo if they passed in the street, or a nod if they saw each other in the pub, or a shuffle of acknowledgement in the queue for the post office, but conversation was not something that had ever entered their relationship.
‘How can I help you, Dorcas, hmm?’ He moved nearer. Dorcas stepped back. Dulcima slid into the space between them and looked, birdlike, over Nigel’s shoulders from side to side.
‘Is your father here?’ she said wistfully. ‘I need some advice from him. I think one of our little seascapes is a Boudin. I like Boudin.’ She paused for a moment, her blue eyes becoming misty and sad, ‘When I told Sir Roger he thought I was referring to a blood-pudding.’
Nigel did not take his eyes from Dorcas. ‘He’s in the back,’ said Nigel peremptorily. But he did not move out of the way.
Dorcas blinked herself back into action. ‘We’re only browsing,’ she said.
‘Oh no we’re not,’ said Dulcima.
She pushed Nigel to one side and wiggled her way around the furniture to the back of the shop, then went through the archway where she knocked on the door to the workshop. There was no reply. She knocked louder. Above the sound of the knocking Nigel said urgently to Dorcas, ‘That girl, the one who visited you yesterday. Who is she?’
