Gentleman's Relish

by Patrick Gale

  She put her father in a home when he went peculiar – a home substantially refurbished by Proveg’s charity. She drove several growers to the wall. There was a suicide or two, nothing compared to what BSE caused, but enough to register as a local outrage. Women in their cups joked that some lucky bloke would get his hands on the money soon enough but no man tamed Janice in matrimony. No woman either, for all the mutinous gossip. She lived alone in the hacienda-style estate that had sprouted from the paternal bungalow. She went to church; her pretence of worker solidarity didn’t extend to attending Chapel. She smoked with defiant satisfaction. She took one holiday a year – in the brief interval between the end of the winter cauliflowers and the start of the early potatoes – always somewhere fiercely hot from where she would return with a leathery tan that showed off the gold chains that were her only visible finery. She kept a horse and bred Dobermans. She had been bringing the latest puppy to classes for several weeks now. She favoured the lean, houndlike ones rather than the overweight thugs.

  When he had mentioned this, Val said, ‘Lean or no, she’ll never get a husband with those around the house. Devil dogs, they are.’

  ‘Maybe she doesn’t want one,’ he said. ‘A husband, I mean. Maybe she’s happy as she is.’

  ‘Happy? Her?’ Val asked and snorted in the way she did when she wanted to imply that there were some things only a woman could understand.

  ‘Toffee, heel. Good boy. That’s it. Down. Down!’

  ‘Don’t repeat your order,’ Chris said, as he knew she would. ‘He’ll just learn to ignore you.’ But Toffee went down after a fashion, largely because he was tired.

  ‘Good boy,’ Perran said, then tugged him back onto his feet. ‘Toffee, heel. Good boy.’

  Val set great store by marriage. She thought he couldn’t understand or wasn’t interested, but he could tell. He saw how she divided women into sheep and goats with marriage the fiery divide between them. Women who lived with a man without marrying him first she thought not loose but foolish. She did not despise spinsters or think them sad, not out loud at least, but it was plain she thought of them as lesser beings. Childlessness, her childlessness, was thus a great wound in her self-esteem. He could tell from the way she huffed and puffed over the young mothers in the village who sometimes blocked its one stretch of pavement with their double-occupancy pushchairs.

  ‘As if they’re something really special,’ she snorted but her glare would have a kind of hunger to it.

  He did not mind staying on to give a statement. He was collecting Val from the First and Last and she wouldn’t thank him for appearing early and cramping her style. He gave his name and recognized the sergeant from schooldays. Garth Tresawle. A mate’s younger brother, forever trailing behind them as they skived off, whining wait for me. And they’d had to wait because even then he had a tendency to take notes and bear witness.

  ‘And when did you last see Ms Thomas?’

  ‘Here,’ Perran said. ‘Last time we had a class. We talked a bit about boarding kennels because she was about to go on holiday to Morocco. The next day, she said.’

  ‘You drove straight home afterwards?’

  ‘Not exactly. I stopped off at the pub to pick up my wife.’

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘Nearly closing time. Only she wasn’t there. Found out later some friends had taken her on to theirs. Someone’s birthday. I went back on my own.’

  ‘Talk to anyone at the pub?’

  ‘Er…’ He cast his mind back to smoke, music, turned backs around the television. ‘No.’

  ‘Did anyone see you get back?’

  ‘No. There’s just the two of us and I was asleep when Val got back.’ He remembered her drunken curses as she stubbed a toe on one of the bed’s sticking-out legs.

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘I was asleep. Past midnight.’

  ‘How well did you know Ms Thomas?’

  ‘We were at school together. You remember that, Garth. You were there too.’

  ‘Sorry, Perran,’ Garth sighed. ‘We have to do this by the book.’

  ‘Okay. Sorry.’ Toffee whined and Perran settled him back on the sawdust. The wind was rising again, whistling round the barn roof and flapping a loosened tab of corrugated steel. ‘I was at school with her so you could say I’d known her all my life, but we weren’t friends. Of course I had dealings with her later, through Proveg. She buys…I mean she bought our broccoli and crispers. Pushed a hard bargain. Did with everyone. She won’t have many friends, I reckon.’

  ‘You harvest your own broccoli?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What with?’

  ‘Knives. Same as everyone else.’

  ‘Stainless steel?’

  ‘No. Proveg have been on at us to change. New rules. Supermarkets don’t want rust on their precious broccoli stalks. But there’s nothing wrong with the old ones if you look after them. Dry and oil them. Keep them sharp with an angle grinder. And they’re not brittle. The stainless ones get chipped on all the stones.’

  He had been cutting broccoli since he was twelve, and in that time had seen the move from boxing them up in hessian-lined wooden crates that were taken to Penzance Station on a trailer to bagging them individually and arranging them in supermarket crates on the spot. There were health and safety regulations now. Knives had to be signed out and in by the cutters and so did any (regulation blue) sticking plasters, for fear someone get a nasty shock of finding a bloody bandage in their cauliflower cheese. Other Proveg rules forbidding smoking, eating or dogs and insisting that in the absence of a chemical toilet, allowable where teams number five or less, antiseptic wet wipes are to be handed out to workers needing to relieve themselves in the field he and Val blithely ignored. They had even discovered that, once the tractor had driven down a row once or twice so that tracks were well cut into the mud, it was possible to send the tractor slowly through the field without a driver, thus freeing up an extra pair of hands to cut while Val rode in the makeshift rig at the back trimming, bagging and packing. Health and safety regs would surely have outlawed this but Val kept a weather eye open and if she saw a Proveg four-wheel-drive in the distance could tip him the wink to down knife and drive for a while.

  Garth Tresawle made an extra note and underlined it. He looked up.

  ‘How many do you have?’ he asked.

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Where d’you keep them?’

  ‘In a shed. And no. It isn’t locked.’

  ‘How many men work for you?’

  ‘On the broccoli?’ Garth nodded. ‘Two. Ernest Penrose and Peter Newson.’ He gave their addresses, as best as he could remember them, and his own, and that was all.

  They would have a hard time pinning charges on the mere basis of a knife. West Penwith was bristling with knives at this time of year. The daffodil and broccoli harvests brought crowds of itinerant workers into the area in search of hard labour and tax-free bundles of earthy notes. There was some resentment among the local hands, jobs being scarce, but Eastern Europeans would always be prepared to work for that little bit less than Cornishmen, especially with the threat of deportation hanging over them. Every winter there was a flurry of lightning raids by customs officers and police, tipped off about the latest troupe of illegal immigrants slaving in the eerily weedless bulb fields or in stinking acres of vegetable but every spring brought fresh vanloads. Many of them slept rough in barns and hedges to save money. Perran had found them in his sheds occasionally, or evidence of their passing through.

  It was said that many of the home-grown cutters were fresh out of prison or dodging parole. He had seen the way Val discreetly clicked down the locks on the car doors when she rounded a corner at dusk to find a gang spilling across a lane, their shapes bulked out with extra clothing, their muddy knives flashing as the headlamps swept across them. There was no lack of suspicious and appropriately armed strangers to pin a local murder on.

  As always, Toffee was too exhausted by
the class even to remember to be carsick on the way home. Perran left him in the Land Rover while he went inside the pub.

  It was a ladies’ darts match night – Val played on the pub team – so there was a scattering of unfamiliar faces, though not half as many as during the tourist season. Then everyone staying on the windswept campsite would take refuge in here until closing time forced them back to caravan and canvas. There was, however, an unmistakable holiday atmosphere tonight. He would have expected to find the women in one room, garrulous around a table, the men hunched, wordless, around Sky Sports in the other. Instead, he found the outsize television neglected and almost everyone squeezed around two long tables beside the fire, a jumble of glasses, exploded crisp packets and overflowing ashtrays in their midst. The landlady was with them, sure sign of a rare celebration, like the occasions – cup finals, the occasional wake – when she locked the doors and declared the gathering a perfectly legal private party. Ordinarily sat amongst her cronies, women she had known since childhood, Val would only have acknowledged him to demand he bought the next round or a packet of cigarettes. She certainly would not have asked him to join them but would expect him to wait with the men until she was ready to leave.

  Tonight was quite different. She spotted him at once and called out, ‘Here he is,’ with something like eagerness. A drink was bought him and space made on the settle beside her. It was quite as though they had all been waiting for him. Someone asked how the puppy classes were going and he told her but quickly realized no one was really interested.

  Then Val said, ‘Well?’ and it transpired that they had heard the police were questioning everyone at the class because Garth and a couple of detectives had been in the pub at the beginning of the evening and one of the detectives, the younger one with the funny eye, was a cousin by marriage of the landlady. It was not like on television, where the facts of a murder were kept under wraps so as not to influence key witnesses. Correct police procedure was near impossible in a community this small and inter-related. They might have thought they were withholding crucial details but the women who had found the body, or most of it, Proveg employees on the night shift, were cousins of a woman on the visiting darts team and, in any case, had been far too traumatized by their discovery not to phone at least two people each before the police arrived on the scene.

  Janice had been stabbed in the stomach repeatedly with a cauliflower knife. This last detail was a fair guess, given the width of the wounds the less squeamish of the witnesses had glimpsed on lifting Janice’s shirt. There was no blood on the floor, so presumably she had been killed elsewhere. Her mouth had been stuffed to overflowing with cauliflower florets and a Proveg Cornish Giant Cauliflower bag strapped over her head. Her hands and arms had been hacked off. The girls could find no trace of them but, hours later, there were horrified phone calls from branches of Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s, Safeway’s and the Co-Op where they had arrived, neatly tucked into trays of Proveg quality assured produce. And the body was said not to be fresh so the landlady, something of an expert on serial murder, was backing the theory that Janice had never been on holiday at all. No one knew what had become of the Dobermans or the horse but Perran asking that gave rise to a small wave of horror-struck and morbidly inventive suggestions.

  ‘Still,’ Val put in, barely keeping the relish from her voice. ‘At least it looks as though they didn’t suffocate her. She must have been dead already when they put the stuff in her mouth because there was no sign of a struggle. Judy said the florets weren’t broken at all. Still fit to cook, she said. So what did they ask you, love?’

  ‘Oh.’ Perran shrugged. ‘How long I’d known her. If we talked at the class that night – which we did, of course. What time I got home. What kind of knives we use.’

  ‘Reckon Garth thinks you did it, boy,’ someone put in. Laughter faded quickly into uneasiness.

  ‘Well,’ Perran admitted. ‘I don’t have a whatsit. An alibi.’

  ‘You do!’ Val insisted.

  ‘Hardly,’ he told her. ‘You were out when I got home and drunk when you finally made it in.’

  There was uproarious laughter at that then one of the women said, ‘Maybe Val did it. She always had it in for that bitch.’

  ‘Val had an alibi. She was with us.’

  ‘Not like Perran. Who’d have thought it!’

  ‘Ooh, Perran! Here, Val. You sure you’re safe going home with him and everything?’

  ‘Good on you, boy. She had it coming.’

  There was teasing and laughter and, amazingly, Val clutched his thigh under the table as she laughed back and faked girlish terror. Perran felt an unfamiliar sensation as the teasing and backslapping continued and the conversation turned to Proveg and how the growers might now join forces to buy it and run it as a co-operative, which is what they should have done all along. It took a minute or two for him to identify it as pride. He had not felt like this since their wedding day.

  ‘She’ll stop,’ he thought, ‘once we’re alone. Once we’re back outside.’

  And certainly Val seemed sobered by the night chill and the silence in the Land Rover. But as he drove her back to the farm, she slipped her hand over his where it rested on the gear stick.

  ‘Poor Janice, though,’ she said. ‘I mean, I know she was a cow but the thought of her all alone…Things like that don’t happen to married women. Not so often, anyway. I’m glad there’s you. You too, Muttface,’ she added because Toffee had woken and was leaning over from the back, sniffing the smoke in her hair. ‘I’m glad there’s you too. You’ll keep us safe, won’t you, boy?’

  ‘Reckon he’d just wag his tail and lick the blood off the mad axeman’s fingers,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t!’ she squeaked and shuddered.

  They drove the few minutes home in silence but when he pulled up inside the garage and cut the engine she turned to him in the darkness and asked, ‘You didn’t do it. Did you?’ And from something in her voice he sensed the distinct possibility of sex.

  IN THE CAMP

  Lara could normally spot the new children a mile off because they tended to cling either to their parents or to some token articles of clothing – swimming trunks, typically, but one new arrival had memorably retained long socks and sandals. But he approached them directly, as unencumbered by textiles or relatives as any regular in their little gang. Lara had not noticed until then that that summer they were all black- or brown-haired; they tended to become so muddy and stuck with leaves and twigs that such physical niceties could be hard to distinguish. He strode confidently into their midst in the forest clearing and they instinctively formed a respectful circle about him.

  He was blond – real, golden blond – and his skin had the even tan of a committed naturist. Lara guessed he was twelve or even thirteen. He was just starting to grow pubic hair – she was eleven so pubic hair had begun to fascinate her – which was as golden as the hair on his head, but he still had the leanness and thin arms of a boy. He looked like the illustration of Narcissus in her book of Greek myths, only Narcissus wore a skimpy sky-blue tunic with a Greek key design and carried a bow and arrows. This boy was beautiful, she decided, and rather frightening.

  ‘Hello,’ he told them. ‘I’m Wolf.’ He pronounced it Volff but otherwise his English was excellent. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘We were playing rounders,’ Lara told him.

  ‘You were pitching the ball wrong,’ he told her. ‘If you throw the ball underarm like that it’s too easy to hit. Let me show you how to pitch properly.’ He held out his hand for the tennis ball.

  ‘I’m Lara,’ she said as she handed it to him.

  ‘Hello Lara,’ he said and enslaved her with a quick, dazzling smile. ‘Now watch me,’ and he pitched the ball with such ferocious speed that Chubby Eric jumped aside to avoid it and tripped, which made everyone laugh. It was a bloodless coup. They had been a muddy democracy of sorts but from that moment Wolf was in charge.

  He showed them how to pitch and how
to strike and the game became fiercer and more exciting and a couple of children, including Chubby Eric, didn’t want to play any more and slipped away, un-lamented, to find their parents. Then Wolf taught them Ball He and they chased each other back and forth between the trees, scratching their skin and bruising themselves as they slipped on the mossy patches. In fact they played He often – it was one of the best ways of keeping warm when naked as, unlike some games, it kept everybody in motion. But Ball He had an edge to it since whoever was He didn’t have to get close enough to their prey to touch them but simply had to hit them with the ball. Now that Wolf had taught them how to throw, to make even a fluffy tennis ball like a bullet from a gun, their throws were more accurate and quite painful, more to be feared than a playful tap from a friend’s fingers.

  Lara dreaded being hit. The ball had become wet and muddy and she saw how it was leaving splatter marks on its targets that made the game more than ever like shooting. She was a swift runner and as nimble as a whippet at changing direction on her summer-toughened feet. She dodged several attacks, including one from Wolf, who shouted something in his own language when he missed her and had to retrieve the ball from the undergrowth.

  At the same time she found she longed to be He, longed to be at once victim and aggressor, so she lingered on purpose, taunting him, skipping from side to side then ran in a straight line precisely so he would hit her at last. The blow stung and she felt a great spatter of cold mud it sent across her back, but now she was He and had the power she found she was laughing so hard she could barely run. She’d chased Wolf for a while but then crossed the path of Eileen, an older girl she had never much liked, and threw the ball hard at her head and darted away laughing with Wolf and the others, as Eileen cursed and slithered after the ball in the mud.

  Eileen was a bad throw and, possibly on purpose, threw one of her next attempts so that the ball flew out into the lake. People moaned and said she was a spaz but, as it happened, retrieving the ball gave them all a chance to let the furious game dissolve in a leisurely swim out to the pontoon where they all flopped, panting in the sun like so many pink and brown seals.