LOOK, STRANGER

by MARY HOCKING

  Mary Hocking

  LOOK, STRANGER

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  To my Goldchildren

  Allison, David and Marian

  Chapter One

  Time was when the island was known as Smugglers’ Island. That was over a hundred years ago; but as late as the nineteen-thirties children played out epic chases between smugglers and customs officials along the lonely sand dunes. There were two villages, one to the east and one to the west of the island; in the centre there was farmland and woods where the children could play when they got tired of being smugglers. Only a few families came to the island for summer holidays because there was nothing for the adults to do except walk and swim. After the war, some of the summer visitors, nostalgically recalling those tranquil holidays, bought plots of land and built bungalows or renovated old cottages. It was then that the estate agents realized that there was money to be made out of Helmsley Island, ‘where everyone can have a cottage by the sea’. Bungalow estates sprouted all along the coast, and when the coast was built up, the estate agents began to extol the unspoilt beauty of the interior. The County Council, anxious to save the green acres on the mainland, many of which were owned by members of the Council, saw the island as part-answer to its housing problem and filled in some of the gaps left by the private house developers.

  There was no planning, it was a happening. By the nineteen- sixties the island looked as though a gigantic aircraft had flown overhead and jettisoned a load of matchboxes which had fallen higgledy-piggledy all over the land. By the nineteen-seventies, the gap-fillers were having to use all their ingenuity to squeeze in yet more matchboxes, but they weren’t doing anything as restrictive as planning. Planning was for the mainland. ‘The island,’ said the mayor, who was an estate agent, ‘is one of the places which always says “yes” and as long as I have any say in its future it always will say “yes”.’

  The island said ‘yes’ to day trippers who came in their hoards because parking was free on the beaches; and with the day trippers came the fruit machines, the bingo halls, and the fairground. A narrow causeway which took single line traffic connected the island to the mainland. There was no other way off the island. At week¬ends there were traffic jams morning and evening and during high summer the traffic was packed solid all the way to the big roundabout where the London road crossed the main road from Folkestone to Portsmouth. While this bottleneck was very annoying for motorists, it had the advantage that the gangs on motor bikes avoided Helmsley: if they caused havoc on the island all the police had to do was wait to pick them up as they came off the causeway. In Helmsley, crime, at least, was home produced.

  There was one small stretch along the lee shore which remained much as it had always been. There were marshes here and fields which were known as the Priory Grounds, although the priory had been crumbling away since the time of Henry VIII and only low walls and disconnected arches remained to make mute protest. This area was too remote to tempt children brought up to be dependent on Dad’s car for their outings. Also, after the noise and bustle of the rest of the island, the priory grounds were ‘different’ and regarded with suspicion. The few cottages, built from stones taken from the ruined priory, were not picturesque, they had small windows and looked like prisons; it was sometimes difficult to tell whether anyone lived in them or not. The dogs weren’t friendly.

  All Hallows at West Helmsley was on the edge of the populated area and beyond it lay the alien priory fields stretching away with nothing to break the green monotony but a line of poplars here and there. It was a bad position, parishioners had to come from the centre of the town to reach the church and this was asking a lot of people who seldom ventured further than the nearest parade of shops.

  The vicarage was alongside the churchyard. It had been built in the days when the vicars of Helmsley had large families and could afford to keep servants. Now it was a severe drain on the physical and financial resources of the incumbent and it looked rather shabby; but it was a well-proportioned, sensible house and contrived to keep a pleasant aspect in spite of the poor state in which it found itself. The big garden was given over to grass and clover; there were daffodils in the spring and dandelions in the summer.

  This was daffodil time. The front door of the vicarage was open and morning sunlight shafted into the hall. A woman was scrubbing the flagged floor while another woman stabbed flowers into a huge earthenware jug on a chest against the staircase wall. The chest was very strong and ancient and looked as though the house had been built around it. The woman in charge of the flowers used its surface as a base on which to hammer the stems of tulips: she was a more efficient smith than flower arranger.

  ‘. . . lived like pigs,’ the scrubbing woman was saying. ‘What will the new man think of us when he sees this?’

  ‘He won’t know, you’ve got it so clean.’

  ‘I couldn’t do anything about the marks on the dining-room wall, could I? Or the enamel in the bath.’ She sat back on ample haunches and wiped a forearm across her sweating, purple face; she was elderly for so much effort and self-pityingly aware of it. ‘I wonder what sort of house our lot is going to in Iowa or Minnesota or wherever it is. . . .’

  ‘Clinically clean, I expect. Americans are so up-tight about cleanliness, aren’t they?’

  A shadow fell across the doorway and the cleaner turned to see who was standing in her light. ‘He’s not here yet,’ she rebuked the newcomer. ‘Aaah! Don’t tread on that floor! Stand over there by the little window, not the big one, ’til I’ve put the polisher over it.’

  The newcomer did as he was bidden. He was a tall man wearing a navy anorak; he had untidy hair of a dusty hue and a crumpled face with the pliable features which can register at one moment a range of emotion through sorrow and pain to gaiety and joy; in another age he might have been a strolling player.

  ‘Who is he?’ the flower arranger lowered her voice minimally as she propped up the tulips with strategically placed twigs of laurel.

  ‘From the Herald. They rang up to say they wanted someone to interview the new vicar.’

  ‘Bit hard on the poor man to jump on him immediately he crosses the threshold.’

  ‘That was the idea – “a spontaneous impression of England,” they said.’

  ‘Does the editor think Helmsley is England?’

  ‘I expect the new vicar will, won’t he?’

  ‘Poor sod! But perhaps it won’t seem too bad to him. After all, he’s from the Mid-West, isn’t he? One of those awful little towns that looks as though it’s been jacked up temporarily for an exhibition and then forgotten about.’ She jammed the head of a tulip between two laurel leaves, ‘The sort where the inhabitants think Canada is still a colony.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll have us square dancing on the lawn?’

  ‘I could put up with the square dancing if it wasn’t for the folksy sermons we shall have to sit through.’ She stood back to regard her work. She was a lean, swarthy woman, carelessly dressed; one could imagine her selling flowers at a wayside stall – she had sharp brown eyes and would strike a hard bargain.

  ‘Miss Draisey says a lot of advanced thought has come from the American church.’

  ‘But not from the Reverend Matthew Vereker. They wouldn’t let
him within a hundred miles of this place if he had an advanced thought in his head.’

  ‘Helmsley’s not as bad as all that.’ The cleaner wrung out the cloth over a bucket.

  ‘But it’s hardly worth crossing the Atlantic to spend a year in it. He must be desperate for a change.’ She cuffed the clippings into a heap, caught the expression on the cleaner’s face as she was about to sweep them onto the floor, and screwed up her skirt to receive them instead. ‘I’ll put these in the bin.’ She disappeared into the darkness beyond the stairs.

  ‘You’re certainly doing a wonderful job on that floor.’

  The cleaner looked around her, startled by the deep voice with its unmistakably American intonation. There was only the “reporter” still standing by the small window. He smiled a wry apology.

  ‘Oh, my goodness!’ Her hands flew to her face. ‘What can you think of us?’ Steam came from her puffy red fingers.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ he said hastily. ‘I thought before we settled in, I’d like to look around, informally. But I guess I ought to have warned you.’ He paused, rubbing his nose with his knuckles, afraid that if he said any more he might become folksy.

  ‘Gwynneth!’ The cleaner got to her feet, painfully, with a look of reproach on her heavy face; then she backed down the hall, keeping her eye on the new vicar as though he might attack if she turned her back on him. ‘Gwynneth, come here!’ She vanished into the dark region beyond the stairs and after a whispered exchange Gwynneth emerged.

  Gwynneth was not abashed. ‘Well, now you know what happens to those who arrive early for a party!’ She spoke as though she had known him for years – probably in another life, he thought, looking at those piercing brown eyes in the swarthy face. She walked firmly across the still-wet floor to where he was marooned beneath the window. ‘I’m Gwynneth Jarman.’ She extended a strong, brown hand stained by wounded flowers. ‘My husband is your churchwarden.’

  They shook hands.

  ‘And what do you think of Helmsley now that you’ve looked around it informally?’

  ‘It’s like a building set someone has tilted So all the pieces have got jumbled on top of one another.’ He looked out through the open door. ‘I guess there’s more to it than that.’ He sounded unhopeful.

  ‘I’d love to say that it’s the warmth of the people that counts,’ Gwynneth Jarman said, not noticeably regretful. ‘But it wouldn’t be true because I’ve lived here most of my life and I don’t know half of them. It’s that kind of a place now.’

  ‘Ugh-hugh.’ He nodded his head gloomily. Then, making an effort, he excused himself, ‘I’ve been travelling the best part of a week.’ But his eyes had been tired longer than that.

  The cleaner appeared at this moment to say she had the kettle on. ‘Is it tea, or coffee, vicar?’

  Over tea the cleaner was introduced as Mrs. Maud Hooper. Her husband, now deceased, had been the verger at All Hallows for thirty years and she served the church as part-time cleaner. Matthew Vereker, feeling something was required of him, opined, ‘Thirty years is a long time.’

  A contemptuous smile dragged at Mrs. Hooper’s weary mouth. ‘Alf wasn’t ambitious.’

  Vereker selected what looked to be the least rock-like of Mrs. Hooper’s scones and glanced round the sitting-room. The Reverend Hilary Roberts might well by now be drinking coffee in the sitting- room at Coppers Town: Vereker wondered whether Roberts was finding his surroundings equally depressing. Roberts had four children, and no doubt they had brought so much life to the vicarage that it was neither necessary, nor desirable, to take much thought for the furnishings. Over the years all the tapestried upholstery had faded to the same greyish-beige as the carpet, while the worn leather armchair appeared, from its sagging cushion, to have broken springs. The velvet curtains were bleached a dusty caramel but showed a richer brown in the folds. There was a large picture on the wall of shaggy cattle paddling in misty fields with fuzzed mountains in the background.

  ‘I guess this place is pretty old?’ he hazarded.

  ‘About seventeen-sixty,’ Gwynneth Jarman shrugged.

  ‘Indeed?’ Vereker was impressed. His ancestors would still have been in England in seventeen-sixty.

  ‘Carrick Farm is much older. Early Tudor.’

  For no good reason that Vereker could see there was some kind of silent communication between the two women at this point. Mrs. Jarman raised her eyebrows and Mrs. Hooper pursed her lips; then Mrs. Hooper, who appeared to be the loser in this exchange, bent her attention to a small piece of scone, pressing it against her plate with one thumbnail until it crumbled. Gwynneth Jarman went on, ‘You can just see the chimneys of the farm between those trees.’

  Vereker looked out of the window and saw, at the far end of a distant field, a row of trees; he thought he could just make out a chimney.

  ‘Is it still a farm?’

  ‘No.’

  Mrs. Hooper smiled unpleasantly at her crumbled scone.

  ‘Zoe and Tudor Lindsay live there,’ Gwynneth Jarman said. ‘Zoe’ll be keeping house for you here. Hilary Roberts said you would need someone to help your daughter. That is right, I hope?’

  ‘I guess we’ll need a bit of help with a place this size.’ Vereker was cautious; he didn’t want to make excuses for Nan, yet he felt a need to ease the way for her. ‘She hasn’t got a lot of experience. We haven’t lived a very normal life, my wife being ill for such a long time. . . .’ He was so concerned for Nan; if he said too much he would show his distress. He broke off and muttered, ‘It’s very kind of Mrs. Lindsay.’

  ‘The kindness will be as much on your side as hers,’ Mrs. Jarman said crisply. ‘She needs something to occupy her.’

  Vereker gazed out of the window, giving himself time to think about the occupying of Mrs. Lindsay. ‘Would that be part of the farm?’ he asked idly, pointing at a jagged wall some distance to the right of the row of trees.

  ‘No. That’s the priory ruins; the nuns owned all the land around here, but that was a long time ago.’ Mrs. Jarman regarded Mrs. Hooper menacingly while she dismissed the priory from the conversation. Mrs. Hooper looked rather furtive.

  ‘Roberts didn’t say anything about a priory. Nan will be interested. She likes old things, furniture, buildings. . . we don’t have much in that line where we come from.’

  ‘Where is your daughter now?’ Gwynneth Jarman nailed the conversation to Nan.

  ‘We stayed the night in town. She’s coming later today with the luggage.’

  He didn’t want to talk about Nan. He must leave her to make her own impression on these people, anything he said would be wrong – parents are always wrong. He got up. ‘I think perhaps that now I’m here I ought to stroll across and meet Mrs. Lindsay.’

  Mrs. Hooper seemed to gather herself to speak, her shoulders braced, her bosom swelled, but all this took time and the redoubtable Mrs. Jarman had ushered Vereker out of the room before Mrs. Hooper’s lips so much as parted.

  ‘There are two rights of way; one from the church graveyard and one at the end of Virginia Close. Both will lead you across the fields to the farm.’ She saw him out of the house and pointed him in the direction of Virginia Close. As they parted, she said, ‘And it’s Miss Lindsay: Zoe and Tudor are cousins.’ She remained at the front door, watching him as he walked down the drive to make sure he didn’t play truant. On an impulse he turned at the gate.

  ‘Mrs. Jarman,’ he called out to her. ‘Are you a school ma’am?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought you might be.’ She closed the door.

  To his right was the church, a little grey stone building with a cone-shaped tower. He could see a group of people in the porch reading the notices on the board. Tourists: parishioners don’t congregate in the church porch to read the notices on a mid-week morning, not in this or any other country. He would go into the church on his return.

  He headed obediently towards Virginia Close which was a turning to the left just beyond the vicarage. It was a
short road with a T junction at the far end. Vereker walked slowly studying the solid, well-built bungalows on either side. He was drawn to other people’s homes; gazing in at lighted rooms to see a family gathered together gave him a feeling of warmth which he recognized as a sad reflection on his own lack of such joy. The bungalows were brick, but some had been painted white and there were at least two pinks and one blue among them. They all had glass porches full of healthy pot plants and the front windows were big, but, alas, most of them had blinds or net curtains to protect the inmates from ill-mannered people like Matthew Vereker. There were cars on the concrete outside several of the garages, and one or two boats. The gardens were neat in a rather fussy way and there was a profusion of hydrangeas. The other main feature was the dogs. The dogs had had a dull morning; he was the first happening of their day and they all came down to their gates to greet him, snuffling, yapping, baying according to the custom of their breed. The human inhabitants were more reserved, although a man in a thick ribbed sweater clipping an already immaculate hedge observed that it was another fine day, wasn’t it? The man was watched by a neatly dressed woman with blue hair who obviously didn’t want a stranger to intrude at this moment – perhaps at any moment?

  The people and their properties seemed reasonably prosperous and Vereker was puzzled as to why, this being the case, they chose to live with so little space around them. There was just about room for two good-sized dustbins to stand side by side between the bungalow walls. Where Vereker came from space was one thing they had plenty of and until now he had always taken it for granted, as essential as air to breathe.

  He came to the T junction and paused. To the right, on his side of the road, were more bungalows which he judged to be older than those in Virginia Close. At one time these bungalows had faced fields, but now the ground on the opposite side of the road was being torn up to make way for buildings that resembled the lakeside shacks of his childhood holidays. Vereker stared in dismay at a large notice which informed him that sixteen “luxury town houses” were being erected on this site. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he would not have credited that, even if a prize of a million dollars had been offered, it would have been possible for any architect, however greedy and ingenious, to have got sixteen houses on this pocket-handkerchief of a site. In comparison, the bungalow dwellers were living in spacious luxury. He looked at the notice again. “Sixteen luxury town houses each with two garages.” Thirty-two cars, on a site that size, would mean that all the outside area would have to be tarmac to provide driveways. The people in the bungalows, who had looked out on green fields, would now be living in the shadow of a car park, and a shanty town car park, at that.