(2011) What Lies Beneath

by Sarah Rayne

  It would be as well for dear, respectable Gran not to be told that Amy had recently been entangled with a very unsuitable person indeed or there would be a big row and boring lectures about correct behaviour and breaking the rules. It would all be devastating and Amy was devastated enough as it was, and screwing a tutor was only breaking the rules a very little bit. But Gran would be shocked to her toes and, even worse, Gramps might say he would have a word with Amy’s College, because tutors were not supposed to have – h’rrm – relationships with students. That would be utterly mortifying, because Amy had so far managed to keep everything quiet, not wanting anyone to know she had been taken in by the tutor of English, the biggest screwer-around in college. It was utterly shameful to find you had been lured into bed with velvet-voiced quotations from John Donne and Shelley. Thirty years ago he would have been called a wolf and a rat, that tutor. He was a rat, anyway. He was not even a very good English tutor, and he had probably looked up the Donne and Shelley lines in a dictionary of quotations.

  Veronica had seen Ella driving through the village, but had not waved to her because of being in discussion with a very interesting new acquaintance. She had first encountered him at the Red Lion, when some neighbours had taken her there for a meal. She did not particularly like the neighbours, but she had gone because she had a rather elegant new jacket and it was a pity not to give it an airing.

  The man had been at an adjoining table, eating the Red Lion’s lasagne, apparently absorbed in reading a book propped up against his wine glass. Veronica had glanced at him indifferently, vaguely thinking him rather scruffy, and wondering that the Red Lion had deigned to serve him, because they were generally quite particular. But later, going up to the bar to order some drinks for the neighbours who had brought her, she had heard the man asking for the key to his room at reception. She had instantly revised her opinion, because he had the most beautiful voice she had ever heard – pure BBC, it was – and the landlord had called him Doctor somebody – the surname had sounded vaguely foreign. And, of course, circumstances altered cases, and you heard of absent-minded professors and research people who went about looking positively tattered. Considered again, in the light of this new knowledge, whoever he was, whatever kind of doctor he was, he had the kind of face you saw in old portraits – Henry VIII and people – well, not Henry himself, of course, but those people whose heads he had chopped off. Martyrs and suchlike. Paul Schofield had played one of them in a film.

  Seeing the man again in Market Street, Veronica made a point of pausing to say good morning, and that she hoped he was enjoying his stay in Upper Bramley. This was not being forward, and anyway Veronica was entirely caught up with the new man in her life, but you had to be polite to visitors to your home place. Seen at closer quarters, the doctor with the foreign name was a bit younger than she had first thought, although it was still difficult to be sure. He might be mid-thirties. Asked, he said he was in Bramley for perhaps two or three weeks for local research; Veronica would like to have asked more, but he nodded a polite dismissal and went back to the Red Lion. Still, she thought he had looked at her quite fixedly and she was glad she had put on a particularly smart outfit, even though she was only shopping for a rather intimate little supper party. She went into the delicatessen to buy smoked oysters, pâté and French bread. No need for wine, that would be provided by her guest. In Boots she bought two packs of condoms so people would know she was still what nurses at clinics called sexually active. To emphasize the point, she added to her wire basket a pair of expensive black stockings with lace tops.

  After this, she looked in at the library, to ask Clem if he knew who the visitor at the Red Lion might be. If he was really here for local research, the library would be his first port of call. But Clem was not much help. He had developed a cold since going to the decontamination of Priors Bramley and it was as much as he could do to sit at his desk, which he said was very annoying because he wanted to write an account of the day. Pressed about the man at the Red Lion, he admitted he had seen him, but he did not know anything about him.

  ‘Well, that’s other than the fact that he dresses like a dropout and looks like the Holbein portrait of Sir Thomas More,’ said Clem, sneezing four times into a large handkerchief.

  Veronica supposed, crossly, that she might have expected Clem to be absolutely useless.

  Chapter 9

  Clem Poulter had not really wanted to have Ella’s granddaughter working in the library because she might disrupt his orderly routine. Also, he wanted to nurse his cold and sip mugs of hot blackcurrant and be given sympathy.

  But Ella could be a bit of a steamroller at times and it had been difficult to get out of it, so in the end he had agreed.

  And in fact he found he rather liked Amy being there. He had forgotten how unusual-looking she was – dark-haired and dark-eyed, with an odd cast of features that, in some lights, were very nearly simian and in others, nearly catlike. It was something to do with the length of the upper lip, which was unusually long, and the jawline. A lot of men would find her unattractive to the point of ugliness, but other men would see her as beautiful in a very singular way and consider her a one-off. But it would take a very particular kind of man to appreciate her. Clem thought about this, until some inner demon said, in the language of today’s youth: Yeah, like you’d know about those things. Nobody’s perfect, said Clem crossly to the urchin-voiced demon, and set about drafting plans for his Old Bramley exhibition.

  Amy was full of energy and intelligence. She mixed Clem’s cold remedies cheerfully, smuggled in a miniature bottle of rum for his sore throat, and entered into the exhibition project with enthusiasm. She helped Clem drag several boxes of archive stuff out of the cellars, dusted off display screens, and went off to the stationery store to dig out Blu-Tack, drawing pins and green baize. After this, she designed posters on the computer: bright jazzily worded advertisements with requests for people to loan any photos they had for the duration of the exhibition.

  ‘We’ll ask the Red Lion and the shops to display the posters,’ she said to Clem. ‘Oh, and I thought I’d see if the local newspaper has any archive stuff we can use.’

  Clem felt a bit as if a whirlwind had dashed in and turned his orderly world upside down, but he was pleased. Meeting Ella in the greengrocer’s two days later, he said Amy was turning out to be a great help.

  ‘Derek says it sounds as if she’s having a pretty wild time of it at that university,’ said Ella, who seemed displeased with life in general and with the greengrocer’s display of mushrooms in particular. ‘I feel responsible for her, you know, with Andrew being in Africa. Why he ever wanted to go out there to build a bridge I can’t think, because he could just as well build a bridge in this country I should have thought.’

  Clem heard a faint note of envy in her voice. Poor old Ella, who had been born and lived in Upper Bramley all her life. Clem, with his three years of emancipation at Warwick University, from which he had emerged with a modest degree and a wish to do nothing other than come home to the familiar security of his home, felt quite sorry for her at times.

  Amy had not expected to get so absorbed in Clem Poulter’s exhibition, but it turned out to be rather fun. She unearthed packets of ancient sepia photographs of St Anselm’s church, which looked utterly Gothic and gloomy, and several of the village street of Priors Bramley with the kind of shops you never saw nowadays: ironmongers offering paraffin for lamps, and flypapers, and sweet shops with bull’s-eyes, and blocks of toffee you smashed up for yourself, and drapers who sold interlock vests and liberty bodices. What had a liberty bodice been, for goodness’ sake, and when did you wear it?

  There were photos of Cadence Manor, which looked as if it had been hugely grand and decadent. Amy was not in anti-Establishment mood at the moment, so it was OK to admire Cadence Manor, with its stone scrolls and porticoes and its air of having been teleported from seventeenth-century Italy. It was very OK indeed to admire some of the men in the photographs. Some o
f them were pretty sexy: there was one guy of about twenty, who had dark hair and amazing eyes, and who you would certainly look at twice, if not three times. He was in several of the shots. There was a really cool one of a bunch of people at a party. Somebody had written ‘Cadence Manor, Christmas 1910’ on the back, and the man with the come-hither eyes was at the centre, wearing evening dress and drinking from a champagne glass. We’ll have you in the exhibition for sure, said Amy to him.

  Clem Poulter fussed and flapped around, wanting to see everything Amy found, exclaiming in delight over some of the stuff, trotting off to talk to the vicar and the choirmaster about the church, so that Amy began to feel as if she had fallen backwards into Trollope or even Jane Austen. But it was all restful after the stomach-churning roller-coaster ride with the faithless English tutor. (Will he phone/will he turn up/will he ignore me . . .) She enjoyed pottering round the library, which was in an ugly Victorian building with a tiny art gallery on the first floor, and a meeting room for book clubs and craft groups and music societies.

  Clem asked if she would mind helping out with a talk one evening, handing out coffee at half-time and things like that. He would normally do it himself, he said, but his cold had progressed to laryngitis and he had hardly any voice. Amy was agreeable to helping out, particularly since the evening happened to be a rehearsal night for Gramps’s operatic gang, and Gran was taking the opportunity to give one of her polite sherry parties. Amy would rather help with a library talk – she would rather listen to a library talk, for heaven’s sake! – than hand round Bristol Cream and defrosted savouries.

  At first the talk did not seem particularly interesting. It was about the early church music that had been played at St Anselm’s in its heyday, and Amy thought she would sit at the back with a book. In the event, however, she got quite interested. The choirmaster from St Michael’s church was giving the talk. He was thin and bespectacled and earnest, and he said Ambrosian plainchant was less well known than Gregorian chant, but just as interesting and beautiful. He demonstrated a few bars of the Ambrosian stuff on a recorder. Amy thought it was not music you would want to hear when you were glammed up for a night out with a crowd of friends, but you might want to hear it when you were on your own and feeling a bit introspective and dreamy.

  She handed out the coffee, collected the cups afterwards, and tidied up the leaflets the choirmaster had given out. She talked to some of the people who had come along, and thought it was a pity the faithless English tutor was not here to see how unconcerned she was about him and how well she was doing on her own. People were smiling at her quite approvingly, which put paid to the English tutor’s last hurtful jibe about her having the face of a cat and a personality to match. A man did not want to wake up and find a scraggy alley-cat on his pillow, he said, and Amy had only just managed to get out of the bedroom before crying. She knew she was not especially pretty, but she had hoped she was interesting-looking. She did not think she had the personality of a cat, and she hoped the English tutor ended up with some vapid empty-headed chocolate-box.

  Quite a lot of people were at the talk, some of whom Amy vaguely recognized as library users, others who came to Gran’s house or to see Gramps about his opera rehearsals. But there was one she had not seen before: a shabbily dressed man who sat by himself, studying some notes with absorption. At first Amy thought he was a tramp who had wandered in to avoid the rain and drink the free coffee. One or two vagrant-type people came into the library sometimes during the day, pretending to read the newspapers, falling asleep and emitting meths and stale sweat. Clem always tried to get them out, but Amy thought they were as entitled as anyone to a read of the newspaper and a comfortable sit-down in a public library, and anyway, it was in the good old English tradition of coffee houses, if it was not in the even older one of soup kitchens.

  The man tonight was not emitting meths or stale sweat, and he was making notes in the margins of the hand-out from the talk. Amy collected his cup and he looked up and said, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Did you enjoy the talk?’

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘I’m tracing the usage of Ambrosian plainchant, along with one or two other threads of obscure music and poetry.’

  ‘What kind of obscure?’

  ‘Connections between music and poetry and their surroundings,’ he said. ‘Tracking down links – trying to establish if a local legend has brought about the use or even the composition of a particular piece of music or a sonnet.’

  His voice did not match his ragamuffin appearance, and he looked a bit like a Pre-Raphaelite painter or even a consumptive poet from the days when romance had a capital R. Oh God, not Shelley again. And he had talked about sonnets, as well.

  But he said, ‘You’ve got an abandoned village here, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Priors Bramley.’

  ‘I’m hoping to go out there when they finish disinfecting it,’ he said. ‘Oliver Goldsmith wrote a poem called The Deserted Village. It’s a bit idealized, but it’s full of thumbnail sketches of people going about ordinary lives in the eighteenth century, then having to leave because the land was “usurped”.’

  He paused as if unsure whether to go on, and Amy said, ‘ “Usurped”? Enclosure? Some feudal overlord yomping arrogantly across the fields, snaffling people’s cottages to build a palladian folly or something?’

  He smiled, but he said, ‘Yes, something like that.’

  ‘With Priors Bramley it was a government who did the yomping in order to build a motorway,’ said Amy. ‘Only then they sloshed a load of corrosive stuff everywhere and poisoned the place for years. Some people still call it the Poisoned Village.’

  ‘That’s what interested me. Goldsmith has a line about poisoned fields in his poem. That’s why I thought I’d stay for a few days – I’d like to see if anything about Priors Bramley mirrors Goldsmith’s fictional Auburn.’

  ‘Art imitating nature,’ said Amy. ‘Or the other way round.’ And then, because it was Priors Bramley they were talking about and she had spent the last few days buried in the place’s history, she said, ‘Did you find any other echoes?’

  ‘As a matter of fact there is another one,’ he said. ‘An old, virtually vanished opera called The Deserted Village. It’s by an Irish composer from the mid-to-late 1800s – John William Glover, he’s called – and he based it on the Goldsmith poem. But the curious thing is that there’s a recording of that music here in this library. It’s old and very scratchy, and it’s not the whole opera, of course – just a kind of potted version. Maybe even only the overture. But whatever it is, it’s full of harmonies that chime with the cadences of the poem and it’s really surprising to find it in any library . . . Sorry, I’m getting carried away, and it looks as if they’re waiting to lock up. Do you work here?’

  ‘Holiday job,’ said Amy.

  ‘Student?’

  ‘Second year at Durham.’

  He nodded as if this was an acceptable explanation, thanked her again, and went out.

  ‘He’s been into the library once or twice,’ said Clem, when questioned about the man next morning. ‘He’s staying at the Red Lion, I think. Some sort of music researcher, somebody said. Unusual chap, isn’t he?’

  ‘I didn’t notice,’ said Amy, burrowing into her photographs.

  It was an odd feeling to see the faces of people who had lived in the village – the deserted village, thought Amy, remembering the conversation about the poem. Some of the wartime photos were interesting as well. Amy liked seeing the hairstyles of the females, and the clumpy shoes, and she liked the paragraphs snipped from the Bramley Advertiser as well. They told how you could rub gravy browning on your legs to make it look as if you were wearing stockings, and what to do if the moth got into your woollen frock. There were reports of how the Spitfire Fund was getting on, grisly ‘Beware’ warnings to look out for German spies who might still be roaming the countryside, and what to do if people thought they had identified one. But to balance that were reports of the ce
lebrations for D-Day and VE Day – street parties and victory marches. It looked pretty good fun. The Red Lion had provided most of the food for the celebrations, although Amy supposed it would have been fairly spartan, what with people’s cupboards being bare after six years of war. Spam and eggless cakes.

  As she went back to Gran’s house for lunch, the air was misty from the spraying that was still going on down in Priors Bramley. People were finding it a bit irritating – it got in your hair and made everything damp. But there were only another few days left before the village would be ready to be reopened.

  Entries From an Undated Journal

  There are only another five days left.

  I’ve tried every way I can to escape, but it’s impossible and I’ve run out of ideas. It looks as if I must acquiesce – sit here with my hands meekly folded and allow death to come to me. But it’s a nightmare prospect, and then there’s the matter of what comes after death – that’s even worse. Or is it? I’ve been a good member of the Protestant Church – none of your papist rubbish for me, thank you very much – and I attended church service on Sundays, well, most Sundays.

  When I pace the length of this small room, and when I see how swiftly the clock ticks its way round to yet another midnight, I’m filled with such despair and fury I can scarcely contain it. Who would have thought it would end here? Who would have thought that hell-inspired journey in 1912 would lead to this?

  I didn’t know the entire truth about that journey, not at the beginning. That was Crispian again. Devious, you see. I promise you, Machiavelli had nothing on Crispian Cadence. But if I’m honest – and since I’m staring death in the face it’s probably the time to be completely honest – long before we set off it had occurred to me that the journey could present a whole range of opportunities to get rid of him. Travel’s hazardous. People fall under railway trains or off ships. In foreign countries they’re poisoned by peculiar food, or they contract malaria or jungle fever. They’re bitten by venomous snakes or knifed by people with grudges against the British Empire. The list seemed endless. But whatever I did would have to be carefully planned and I still needed to be wary of the periods of darkness. I suspected I was not entirely in control at those times, and it would be no good doing something dramatic and unplanned during one of those spells. For one thing, it might fail. More to the point, I might get caught.