The Long Divorce

by Edmund Crispin

  ‘I had a row with my father last night.’

  ‘Did you? I’m not surprised. You’re probably very exasperating sometimes. Why do you have to tell me about it?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Penelope kicked peevishly at the long grass which grew beneath the bridge’s parapet. ‘I just wondered what you’d think, because when all’s said and done you’re quite sensible in some ways.’

  ‘Thanks very much. But you haven’t mentioned what the row was about.’

  ‘Oh, it was Peter, of course,’ she said petulantly. ‘Pa said I wasn’t to see him any more, so later on, when I said that in spite of that I had seen him—’

  ‘And had you?’

  ‘No. He’d gone off hiking for the day, or anyway, that was what he was going to do. Me telling Pa I’d seen him was a Gesture.’

  ‘Very proper,’ said Mr. Datchery without enthusiasm. ‘Very proper and independent.’

  ‘And the reason I’m here now is a Gesture, too. I’ve been here since six o’clock this morning.’

  ‘You must be bored.’

  ‘Yes, I am rather. But the point is, I hardly ever get up as early as that, so Pa’ll be wondering if I’ve run away from home because of last night.’

  ‘You’re a nice amiable girl,’ said Mr. Datchery, ‘aren’t you? If I were your father, I should probably whack you for that.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Penelope airily. ‘I don’t mind.’ She grinned, and Mr. Datchery, without feeling any desire to take advantage of the offer, was pleased to see her so human and so normally naughty-minded. But then her face clouded, and for the second time she abruptly changed the subject. ‘I say, What do they do to you for writing anonymous letters?’

  ‘You get a prison sentence probably, but not, I think, a very long one. Why?’

  ‘I just wondered, that’s all. I suppose you’ve been hearing an awful lot about them.’

  ‘The letters? Something.’

  ‘Well, who do you suspect?’

  ‘Anyone. Everyone.’

  ‘Including Pa, of course.’

  ‘Yes, including him. But I take it that you don’t imagine—’

  ‘No,’ she said too quickly. ‘I know him, you see, and it just isn’t the sort of thing he’d ever think of. But people here don’t like him, and he doesn’t like them, so you could make out a case—’

  ‘Of course you could. It wouldn’t be impossible to make out a case against you.’

  She stared incredulously. ‘Me?’

  ‘Or Dr. Helen Downing. Or Mr. Weaver, who is religious. Or Inspector Casby. Or about a dozen other people I’ve met or heard of.’

  Half to herself she said quietly: ‘I think if they found it was my father I should die…’ And then with finality: ‘Well, I’m sick of here. I’m going.’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘No, not yet. I’m not hungry enough yet. I’ll go and potter about in the water-meadow, I think. There’s a little glade in the copse there where Peter and I once—I mean, where I sometimes go to sit and think.’ She turned away from the parapet. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Meddle,’ said Mr. Datchery, ‘in one way or another.’ At which Penelope laughed delightedly, waved him good-bye, and ran off. A capricious child, Mr. Datchery reflected as he left the bridge in the opposite direction; and at her age that was of course healthy and right. Mr. Datchery had not much liked her talk of suicide, for he knew better than to subscribe to the popular fallacy that those who talk of suicide never commit it, but on the other hand he had not felt that that talk was morbid or dangerous, or would ever become so; unless—Mr. Datchery scowled, thereby intimidating unawares a harmless old lady whom he happened to be passing at the moment: unless—so his thoughts ran on—Penelope’s obvious fear that her father might be responsible for the anonymous letters should happen to receive confirmation, or what appeared to be that. In such an event she might need watching… Thus ruminative, Mr. Datchery ambled staidly back into Cotten Abbas.

  Later, at half past eleven, Mr. Datchery went to chapel.

  During the short period of his stay in Cotten Abbas, his first impression of it had been confirmed: it was essentially a residential village for members of the cultured upper middle class—intelligent company directors, fashionable portrait painters and so forth—who needed to be within reach of London but who could dictate their own time of arriving there; and it was they who had been responsible, at some sacrifice to themselves, for preserving the villages amenities. They had restricted new building, and dictated its style when it proved inevitable; they had sat in judgement on inn-signs; they had pestered the Vicar to remove the Victorian pews from the great church, and had paid for better ones to replace them; they had supervised restoration and rebuilding; by titanic wangling they had brought into being a by-pass to divert main-road traffic from the village’s broad and airy street; they had ordained a minimum bus service from Twelford, and stringent anti-charabanc laws, in their determination to keep trippers at bay. But their best efforts had not succeeded either in preventing the erection of Rolt’s saw-mill or in encompassing the destruction of a hideous yellow-brick conventicle, dedicated to the use of an obscure nonconformist faction called The Children of Abraham, which affronted the eye not twenty yards from the church. Against these two edifices the animus of the intelligent company directors, not less than of the fashionable portrait painters, simmered and bubbled perennially. And their schemes for the discomfiture of the persons most closely associated with the offending structures—Rolt himself on the one hand, and on the other the village butcher, Amos Weaver, who preached heterodoxy in the conventicle on Sunday mornings—imparted to the small community a liveliness which it might otherwise have lacked.

  Now, it was one of Mr. Datchery’s peculiarities that he collected religious sects as other men collect stamps or butterflies; and The Children of Abraham being new to him, it was inevitable that he should make an effort to acquaint himself with them before leaving Cotten Abbas. The striking of the half-hour, then, found him seated on one of the hard benches with which the conventicle was furnished, among a motley group of worshippers most of whom had been conveyed to the village from outlying parts in a bus regularly chartered for the purpose. Though the place was small enough, in all conscience, they were still far from adequate to fill it, and the only company Mr. Datchery had on his bench, which was situated at the back, was an ancient man who choked and spluttered unintermittently into an extremely dirty handkerchief. After five minutes of this Mr. Datchery leaned across to him and said: ‘You seem troubled with a cough, brother.’

  ‘Ah,’ the old man whispered painfully. ‘’Tis the Lord’s will, sir.’

  Mr. Datchery thought this on the whole unlikely, but the moment was not apt for theological dispute, and he contented himself with asking how soon the service was expected to begin; at which the ancient man, clearly taking this inquiry for an indirect form of supernatural prompting, got hurriedly to his feet, announced a hymn, and embarked solo on its first verse with such haste and immediacy that Mr. Datchery suspected him of wanting to get through the maximum possible number of lines before the rest of the congregation could collect its wits sufficiently to join in. The key he had set resulted in the low notes being too low for the high voices, and the high notes too high for the low, so that a sinister drone alternated throughout with a surprised mewing; the text selected was of that lengthy narrative sort which almost always has to do with fish, apostles and storms on Galilean lakes; and the total effect gratified Mr. Datchery extremely. In front of him, a spinster lady offered at irregular intervals a descant or faux-bourdon in thirds; to his right, a solitary pioneer was singing a bass part so wholly speculative as to really dissociate him from the proceedings altogether; and Mr. Datchery himself, whose voice had range if no great beauty, boomed forth the tune with such power as presently to carry all before him.

  At the end of the hymn a rather long pause supervened after they had all sat down, and soon Mr. Datchery, tiring of it, o
nce more lapsed into conversation. ‘Which,’ he demanded of the ancient man, ‘is Mr. Weaver?’

  ‘Not here yet,’ said the ancient man with unexpected pertinence and brevity. ‘Preaching at Brankham, that’s what he’ll be doing now. But never you fear, sir. He’ll be with us here at the last, to speak to us of sin and the Lord’s work with the words of his tongue.’ The ancient man paused, seeming to contemplate this last sentence and not, on the whole, to like it very much. ‘Oh yes, he’ll be preaching all right,’ he amended more cheerfully. It was possible, Mr. Datchery thought, that there were the rudiments of a literary critic here.

  A prayer followed, of the catalogue type which by attempting to get everything in only succeeds in focusingattention on what has been omitted. ‘For all miners, steelworkers, farmers’ (the boot and shoe trade?), ‘for all mothers in childbirth, sufferers from cancer’ (herpes? Scarlet fever?), ‘for all doctors, nurses, surgeons, for all whose business lies upon the great waters’ (does this include submarine crews? Does it include them when submerged? And if it doesn’t, what have they done to deserve being left out? And if you can’t mention everyone specifically, why mention anyone specifically?), ‘for the King and Queen and all the royal family, for the sick and the homeless, for all those…’ It lasted for nearly a quarter of an hour, persons eventually unsupplicated for including, by Mr. Datchery’s estimate, musicians, tailors, greengrocers, and Mr. Aneurin Bevan. Then there was another hymn, and then a selection of the moony fancies of the author of the book of Revelation, and then another hymn, and then the sermon.

  Amos Weaver, who had somehow contrived to enter the chapel unnoticed by Mr. Datchery, proved to be a tall, lean, powerful man with a long neck, unreadable but slightly mad-looking eyes behind thick horn-rimmed glasses, a sallow complexion, a blue chin, too-short sleeves revealing hairy muscular wrists, and too-short trousers revealing stick-like ankles; and the manner of his homiletic—a diarrhoea of ‘thous’ and ‘thees’, a twangling of seraphic harps, a laundryful of white robes, a Cumberland of lost sheep, an assault-course of pitfalls, a capricorn of goats, an ocean of tempestuous Galilean lakes, a Wall Street of moneychangers, a pirate horde of unfruitful talents, an orchard of barren fig-trees, an Ecclesiastical Commission of Pharisees and Sadducees, a mass migration of flights into Egypt, a warren of snares, a Ritz bar of gins and lime and adulteresses—the manner of his homiletic was nothing novel. But for all that, he had a certain authentic rhetorical power, and Mr. Datchery heard him out with attention. Mr. Weaver hated sin, it seemed. His text was the twenty-third chapter of Ezekiel, and he made no secret of hating sin with as much vehemence (and with nearly as much gross allusion) as the prophet hated those symbolical daughters of joy Aholah and Aholibah. And the choice of text was significant, Mr. Datchery thought: the distinction between sin and sinner, so easy to recommend but in practice so difficult to achieve, could be side-tracked very conveniently by the use of allegorical prostitutes; a pretended impersonal abhorrence of evil could be stated in decidedly personal terms; and if the congregation elected to identify those wanton damsels of Ezekiel with actual young ladies living in the neighbourhood—well, so much the worse; no one, at least, could accuse the preacher of lacking a proper Christian charity… So Weaver denounced, and Mr. Datchery listened. ‘Oily sort of fellow, Weaver,’ Colonel Babington had said when on Mr. Datchery’s leaving his house the previous afternoon they had spoken again of the steel. ‘Can’t stand that sort of religion myself, all this showy piety and riding about on the tops of buses reading tracts. Nasty obsequious way of doing business Weaver’s got, too—though I suppose in a tiny place like this he can’t afford to risk offending people or they’d put him out of business…’ Obsequious perhaps, Mr. Datchery reflected, to his customers in the week and to God on Sundays. But Mr. Weaver was certainly not obsequious to sin…

  But now he was perorating; several previous ‘lastlys’ had been duds, but Mr. Datchery had hopes of this one, and they were not disappointed… The only thing was that now he seemed to be going to pray. ‘For all that have erred from Thy ways; for all that have offended against Thy laws; for all that are sick and in sorrow; for her who took her own life, that it may please Thee to forgive her great trespass; for the young soul torn from us this day in our village by hideous murder; for the aged and infirm; for…’

  Mr. Datchery was not the only person there to jerk upright and stare incredulously; but he was the only one immediately and unceremoniously to leave.

  Chapter Eight

  By seven that Sunday morning Helen Downing was out of doors.

  On the Friday night, that following the suicide of Beatrice Keats-Madderly, she had slept long and deep. But the Saturday night had seen a recurrence of her old habits of wakefulness, and such little sleep as she had been able to snatch had been troubled by nightmares—nightmares the more distressing in that she seldom dreamed at all, and since early childhood had not dreamed of terror. At six o’clock, then, she got up, dressed, and went out, turning right outside her garden gate—away, that is, from the direction of the main street—and following the road out of the village to where, beside the raw, aggressive pile of Rolt’s saw-mill, it crossed the stream on the back of an ancient stone bridge. Here she turned left through a gap in the hedge, slithered cautiously down a nettle-covered bank, and with the mill behind her crossed the first of the water-meadows towards the coppice at its far side, intending to walk on beside the stream as far as the point at which the boundary wall of Sir Charles Wain’s estate (through which the stream flowed) made further progress impossible. From there she could cut across country through Satchel Farm, and by rejoining the Cotten Abbas-Brankham road near the ruins of Brankham Priory be back at her house in good time for an early breakfast.

  The sun promised another day of intense heat. Scarlet of poppies flared in the ripening corn, and the osiers with their sky-pointing branches were like shocks of uncombed silver hair. Water-insects, blind to lurking trout, volplaned ecstatically on the surface of the water; fledglings babbled incoherently in their nests; at the edge of the coppice bloomed showy foxgloves in bowers of fern. And presently, as Helen approached the uneven drift of small trees through which she must pass, she became aware that she was not the only inhabitant of the village thus early abroad, for a hatless figure pushed its way out from under the birches and stood there for a moment, in apparent indecision, before noticing her. Then it looked up, saw her, and spoke.

  It said: ‘Hey! Hey, you!’

  Now to be addressed as ‘Hey, you!’ is an experience apt to exasperate even the mildest-tempered of adult human beings; and Helen’s temper, after a worried and sleepless night, was far from being mild. She veered deliberately from the path in order to move away from the direction of the man who had called to her, and walked on without pause or reply, biting her lower lip in a spasm of annoyance. There was a moment’s silence; then, more civilly this time, he called to her again.

  ‘Hey, lass! Dr. Downing!’

  With considerable reluctance Helen halted. But she made no attempt to join him, which was what he seemed to expect; if he wanted to talk to her, it was up to him to do the walking.

  ‘What is it?’ she answered curtly.

  He came up to her mopping his brow with a damp and grubby handkerchief—for although the day was still cool, he was sweating profusely, and his breath was as laboured as if he had been running.

  ‘Have you seen my girl?’ he demanded.

  ‘Penelope? No, I haven’t. What’s happened to her?’

  ‘That’s what I’d like to know.’ Harry Rolt’s North-country accent was usually not more than just perceptible, but the effect of excitement on speech is regressive, and this morning the accent was much broader than commonly. ‘Ay, that’s what I’d like to know myself.’

  He was a large man, gross as to body and ill-favoured, with small close-set eyes and a limp, wet mouth distorted by badly fitting dentures. There was coarse grey-black stubble on his cheeks and neck and chin, and the swea
t had matted his thick eyebrows. His hands were large, the nails bitten and grimy, and his clothes had apparently been thrown on anyhow. Like most people in Cotten Abbas, Helen had little use for Harry Rolt; but in his manner this morning, though superficially it was as offensive as usual, there was an undertow of anxiety which held her repulsion temporarily in check.

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What makes you think there’s anything wrong?’

  He laughed, shortly and unpleasantly. ‘Ah, you’d like to know, I dare say. Then you could go and blab it all to your fine aristocratic friends. But Harry Rolt’s not quite such a fool as all that. Let me tell you, lass—’

  At any other time Helen would simply have abandoned the conversation at this point, and walked off; but on this occasion she was too tired to make the gesture, and what she said was:

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t be such a damned fool. I don’t care a brass farthing about your domestic troubles, and nor does anyone else. If you want to tell me about Penelope, get on with it. But I’ve got quite enough worries of my own without bothering my head about yours, and if it wasn’t that I like Penelope I shouldn’t have listened to you as long as this.’

  He was taken aback. ‘Easy, now,’ he expostulated. ‘No need to jump down a man’s throat like that. I was a bit hasty, I dare say, but that’s Harry Rolt’s way and always has been.’

  ‘You,’ said Helen vulgarly, ‘are telling me.’

  At that he unexpectedly grinned. ‘I like a lass as speaks up for herself. You’re all right.’

  ‘Dear, dear, what flattery.’

  The grin broadened—but there was not the least trace of salaciousness in it, and it occurred to Helen for the first time that whatever his other faults, Rolt was no philanderer. ‘You’re all right,’ he repeated—and there was an odd note of satisfaction in his voice. ‘Your high-and-mighty pals, now, they don’t answer back. Oh no. That’d be beneath their dignity. But you—’