Crybbe (AKA Curfew)

by Unknown

  Calm down, woman, don't rise to it.

  'But when he's got things together,' Fay finished lamely, he says they'll tell me first.

  I . . . I've no reason to think she's bullshitting.'

  'Why can't you doorstep him? Just turn up. Put the fucker on the spot.'

  'Look, isn't it better to try and stay on the right side of the guy? There could be a lot of mileage in this one for us, in . . . in the future.' Hesitating because 'in the future' she wasn't going to be here, was she?

  Absolutely no way she could tell him about the late Henry Kettle being hired by Goff to do some dowsing around the Court. Partly because she hadn't been able to persuade Mr. Kettle to tell her what he was supposed to be looking for. And partly because loony Gavin Ashpole would start wondering how he could implicate the famous Goff in Henry's death.

  I don't know, Fay.' Ashpole switching to the Experienced News Editor's pensive drawl. 'I'm not into all this pussyfooting about. We're gonna lose out, here. Listen, try him again, yeah? If you don't get anywhere, we'll have to, you know, reconsider things.'

  He meant if she didn't get him an interview soon they'd send in some flash kid from the newsroom to show her how it was done. Nasty little sod, Gavin Ashpole. All of twenty-four. Career to carve.

  You've got to stop this, Fay warned herself, as the line went dead. You're becoming seriously obsessed with age. Good God, woman, you're not old.

  Just older than almost everybody else connected with Offa's Dyke Radio. Which, OK, was not exactly old old, but. . .

  What it is, she thought, your whole life's been out of synch, that's the problem. Goes back to having a father who was already into his fifties when you were conceived. Discovering your dad is slightly older than most other kids' granddads.

  And yet, when you are not yet in your teens, it emerges that your mother is threatening to divorce your aged father because of his infidelity.

  Fay shook her head, playing with the buttons on the studio tape-machine. He'd given up the other woman, narrowly escaping public disgrace. Eight years later he was a widower.

  Fast forward over that. Too painful.

  Whizz on through another never-mind-how-many years and there you are, recovering from your own misguided marriage to a grade-A dickhead, pursuing your first serious career - as a radio producer, in London - and, yes, almost starting to enjoy yourself. . . when, out of the blue, your old father rings to invite you to his wedding in . . .

  'Sorry, where did you say . . . ?'

  'C-R-Y-B-B-E.'

  'Where the hell is that. Dad? Also, more to the point, who the hell is Grace?'

  And then - bloody hell! - before he can reply, you remember.

  'Oh my God, Grace was the woman who'd have been cited in Mum's petition! Grace Legge. She must be . . .'

  'Sixty-two. And not terribly well, I'm afraid, Fay. Moneywise, too, she's not in such a healthy position. So I'm doing the decent thing. Twenty years too late, you might say . . .'

  'I might not say anything coherent for ages, Dad. I'm bloody speechless.'

  'Anyway, I've sort of moved in with her. This little terraced cottage she's got in Crybbe, which is where she was born. You go to Hereford and then you sort of turn right and just, er, jus carry on, as it were.'

  'And what about your own house? Who's taking care of that ?

  'Woodstock? Oh, I, er, I had to sell it. Didn't get a lot actually, the way the market is, but . . .'

  'Just a minute, Dad. Am I really hearing this? You sold that bloody wonderful house? Are you going senile?'

  Not an enormously tactful question, with hindsight.

  'No option, my dear. Had to have the readies for . . . for private treatment for Grace and, er, things. Which goes - now, you don't have to tell me - goes against everything I've always stood for, so don't spread it around. But she's really not awfully well, and I feel sort of . . .'

  'Sort of guilty as hell.'

  'Yes, I suppose. Sort of. Fay, would you object awfully to drifting out here and giving me away, as it were? Very quiet, of course. Very discreet. No dog-collars.'

  This is - when? - eleven months ago?

  The wedding is not an entirely convivial occasion. At the time, Grace Legge, getting married in a wheelchair, has approximately four months to live, and she knows it.

  When you return to a damp and leafless late-autumnal Crybbe for the funeral, you notice the changes in your dad. Changes which a brain-scan will reveal to be the onset of a form of dementia caused by hardening of the arteries. Sometimes insufficient blood is getting to his brain. The bottom line is that it's going to get worse.

  The dementia is still intermittent, but he can hardly be left on his own. He won't come to London - 'Grace's cats and things, I promised.' And he won't have a housekeeper - 'Never had to pay a woman for washing my socks and I don't plan to start now. Wash my own.'

  Fay sighed deeply. Cut to Controller's office, Christmas Eve. 'Fay, it's not rational. Why don't you take a week off and think about it? I know if it was my father he'd have to sell up and rent himself a flat in town if he was expecting me to keep an eye on him.'

  'This is just it, he doesn't expect me to. He's an independent old sod.'

  'All right. Let's say you do go to this place. How are you supposed to make a living?'

  'Well, I've done a bit of scouting around. This new outfit, Offa's Dyke Radio . . .'

  'Local radio? Independent local radio? Here today and . . . Oh, Fay, come on, don't do this to yourself.'

  I thought maybe I could freelance for them on a bread-and-butter basis. They've got an unattended studio actually in Crybbe, which is a stroke of luck. And the local guy they had, he's moved on, and so they're on the look-out for a new contributor. I've had a chat with the editor there and he sounded quite enthusiastic'

  'I bet he did.'

  'And maybe I could do the odd programme for you, if freelancing for a local independent as well doesn't break some ancient BBC law.'

  'I'm sure that's not an insurmountable problem, but . . .'

  'I know, I know. I'm far too young to be retiring to the country.'

  'And far too good, actually.'

  'You've never said before.'

  'You might have asked for more money.'

  Typical bloody BBC.

  Fay spun back the Henry Kettle tape - why couldn't you rewind your life like that? - and let herself out, throwing the studio into darkness with the master switch by the door. But the spools were still spinning in her head.

  She locked up and set off with a forced briskness up the alley, an ancient passageway, smoked brick walls with a skeleton of years-blackened beams. Sometimes cobwebs hung down and got in your hair. She wasn't overfond of this alley. There were always used condoms underfoot; sometimes the concrete flags were slippery with them. In winter they were frozen, like milk ice-pops.

  She emerged into the centre of Crybbe as the clock in the church tower was chiming eleven. Getting to eleven sounded like a big effort for the mechanism; you could hear the

  strain.

  There were lots of deep shadows, even though the sun was high, because the crooked brick and timbered building, slouched together, like down-and-outs sharing a cigarette. Picturesque and moody in the evening, sometimes. In the daytime, run-down, shabby.

  People were shopping in the square, mainly for essentials, the shops in Crybbe specialized in the items families ran out in between weekly trips to the supermarkets in Hereford or Leominster. In Crybbe, prices were high and stocks low. These were long-established shops, run by local people: the grocer, the chemist, the hardware and farming suppliers.

  Other long-established businesses had, like Henry Kettle, gone to the wall. And been replaced by a new type of store.

  Like The Gallery, run by Hereward and Jocasta Newsome, from Surrey, specializing in the works of border landscape artists. In the window, Fay saw three linked watercolours of the Tump at different times of day, the ancient mound appearing to hover in the dawn mist, the
n solid in the sunlight and then dark and black against an orange sky. A buff card underneath lid, in careful copperplate

  THE TUMP - a triptych, by Darwyn Hall.

  Price: £975.

  Wow. A snip. Fay wondered how they kept the place open, then walked on, past a little, scruffy pub, the Lamb, past Middle Marches Crafts, which seemed to be a greetings-card shop this week. And then the Crybbe Pottery, which specialized in chunky earthenware Gothic houses that lit up when you plugged them in but didn't give out enough light by which to do anything except look at them and despair.

  'Morning, Mr. Preece,' she said to the Town Mayor, a small man with a face like a battered wallet, full of pouches and creases.

  'Ow're you,' Mr. Preece intoned and walked on without a second glance.

  It had been a couple of months before Fay had realized that 'How are you' was not, in these parts, a question and therefore did not require a reply on the lines of, 'I'm fine, Mr. Preece, Ow're you?' or, 'Quite honestly, Mr. Preece, since you ask, I'm becoming moderately pissed off with trying to communicate with the dead.'

  Brain-dead, anyway, most of them in this town. Nobody ever seemed to get excited. Or to question anything. Nobody ever organized petitions to the council demanding children's playgrounds or leisure centres. Women never giggled together on street corners.

  Fay stopped in the street, then, and had what amounted to a panic attack.

  She saw the spools on the great tape-deck of life, and the one on the right was fat with tape and the one on the left was down to its last half inch. Another quarter of a century had wound past her eyes, and she saw a sprightly, red-faced little woman in sensible clothes returning from the Crybbe Unattended, another masterpiece gone down the line for the youngsters in the newsroom to chuckle over. Poor old Fay, all those years looking after her dad, feeding him by hand, constantly washing his underpants . . . Think we'd better send young Jason over to check this one out?

  And the buildings in the town hunched a little deeper into their foundations and nodded their mottled roofs.

  'Ow're you, they creaked. 'Ow're you.

  Fay came out of the passageway shivering in the sun, tingling with an electric depression, and she thought she was hearing howling, and she thought that was in her head, too along with the insistent, urgent question: how am I going to persuade him to turn his back on this dismal, accepting little town, where Grace Legge has left him her cottage, her cats and a burden of guilt dating back twenty years? How can I reach him before he becomes impervious to rational argument?

  Then she realized the howling was real. A dog, not too far away. A real snout-upturned, ears-back, baying-at-the-moon job.

  Fay stopped. Even in the middle of a sunny morning it was a most unearthly sound.

  She'd been about to turn away from the town centre into the huddle of streets where Grace's house was. Curious, she followed the howling instead and almost walked into the big blue back of Police Sergeant Wynford Wiley.

  He was standing facing the police station and a woman, who was hissing at him. Who was half his size, sharp-faced, red-faced, sixtyish, back arched like a cornered cat.

  'What you want me to do?' Wynford was yelling, face like an Edam cheese. 'Shoot 'im, is it?'

  'I don't care what you do,' the woman screeched. 'But I'm telling you this . . . I don't like it.' She looked wildly and irrationally distressed. She was vibrating. 'You'll get it stopped!'

  The dog howled again, an eerie spiral. The woman seized the policeman's arm as if she wanted to tear it off. Fay had never seen anyone so close to hysteria in Crybbe, where emotions were private, like bank accounts.

  'Whose dog is it?' Fay said.

  They both turned and stared at her and she thought, Sure, I know, none of my business, I'm from Off.

  The ululation came again, and the sky seemed to shimmer in sympathy.

  'I said, whose dog is it?'

  CHAPTER IV

  FROM A wicker basket in the pantry Mrs Preece took the fattest onion she could find. She crumbled away its brittle outer layer until the onion was pale green and moist in the palm of her hand.

  She sat the onion in a saucer.

  'Stuff and nonsense,' commented Jimmy Preece, the Mayor of Crybbe. The sort of thing most of the local men would say in such situations.

  With a certain ceremony, as if it were a steaming Christmas pudding, Mrs Preece carried the onion on its saucer into the parlour, Jimmy following her.

  She placed it on top of the television set. She said nothing. 'A funny woman, you are,' Jimmy Preece said gruffly, but not without affection.

  Mrs Preece made no reply, her mouth set in a thin line, white hair pulled back and coiled tight.

  They both heard the click of the garden gate, and Jimmy went to the window and peered through the gap in his delphiniums.

  Mrs Preece spoke, 'Is it him?'

  Jimmy Preece nodded.

  'I'm going to the shop,' Mrs Preece said. 'I'll go out the back way. Likely he'll have gone when I gets back.'

  What she meant was she wouldn't come back until he was good and gone.

  Jocasta Newsome, a spiky lady, said in a parched and bitter voice, 'It isn't working, is it? Even you have to admit that now.'

  'I don't know what you mean.' Her husband was pretending he didn't care. He was making a picture-frame in pine, the ends carefully locked into a wood-vice to form a corner. The truth was he cared desperately, about lots of things.

  'You,' Jocasta said. 'Me. It. Everything.' She was wearing a black woollen dress and a heavy golden shawl fastened with a Celtic brooch at her shoulder.

  'Go away.' Hereward started flicking sawdust from his tidy beard, 'if all you can be is negative, go away.'

  On the workbench between them lay the immediate cause of this particular confrontation: the electricity bill. He'd let sawdust go all over that deliberately. 'We'll query it,' Hereward had stated masterfully. 'Yes,' Jocasta had replied, 'but what if it's correct? How long can we go on paying bills like that?'

  The worst of it was, they couldn't even rely on a constant supply. He'd never known so many power cuts. 'One of the problems of living in a rural area, I'm afraid,' the electricity official had told him smugly, when he complained. 'Strong winds bring down the power lines, thunder and lightning, cows rubbing themselves against the posts, birds flying into . . .'

  'I'm trying to run a business here!'

  'So are the farmers, Mr, ah, Newsome. But they've seen the problems at first hand, up on the hills. So they, you see, they realize what we're up against.'

  Oh yes, very clever. What he was saying to Hereward, recognizing his accent, was: 'You people, you come here expecting everything to be as smooth as Surrey. If you really want to be accepted in the countryside you'd better keep your head down and your mouth shut, got it?

  Hereward growled and Jocasta, thinking he was growling at her, looked across at him in his new blue overalls, standing by his new wooden vice, and there was a glaze of contempt over her sulky eyes.

  'The rural craftsman,' she observed acidly. 'At his bench. You're really rather pathetic.'

  'I'm trying to rescue the situation,' Hereward snarled through clamped teeth, 'you stupid bitch.'

  Jocasta looked away, walked out, slammed the studio door.

  And in the vice, the newly constructed corner of Hereward's first frame fell symbolically apart.

  Hereward sank to his knees.

  Very deliberately, he picked up the two lengths of moulded wood and set about realigning them. He would not be beaten. He would not give up.

  And he would not let her disdain get to him. If they couldn't sell enough original works of art they would, for a limited period, sell a number of selected prints at reasonable prices. And the prices would be kept reasonable because he would make the frames himself. Dammit, he did know what he was doing.

  And he had recognized that there would be problems getting a new gallery accepted in a lesser known area. Obviously, places like Crybbe had fewer touris
ts - all right, far fewer. But those who came were the right sort of tourists. The intelligent, childless couples who didn't need beaches, and the cultured newly-retired people with time to construct the quality of life they'd always promised themselves.

  Slowly but emphatically, The Gallery would build a reputation among the discerning. They would travel from as far away as Shrewsbury and Cheltenham and even Oxford and London. The Gallery would expand, and then other specialist dealers would join them, and pretty soon it would be Crybbe for fine art, the way it was Hay-on-Wye for books.

  'Of course, it took time,' he would say at dinner parties. 'Good Lord, I remember, in the early days, when, to save money, one actually made one's own frames . . .'

  'Festival, is it?,' Jimmy Preece's eyes were like screwheads countersunk into old mahogany. 'We never had no festival before.'

  'Precisely the point, Mr Mayor.' Max Goff tried to smile sincerely and reassuringly, but he knew from hundreds of press photos that it always came out wide and flashy, like car radiators in the sixties.

  'No.' Mr Preece shook his head slowly, as if they were discussing water-skiing or first-division football, things which, transparently, were not part of the Crybbe scene. 'Not round yere.'

  Goff leaned forward. He'd given a lot of thought to how he'd sell this thing to the townsfolk. A festival. A celebration of natural potential. Except this festival would last all year round. This festival would absorb the whole town. It would recreate Crybbe.

  'The point is, Mr Mayor . . . You got so much to be festive about.' Go on, ask me what the hell you got to be festive about.

  The Mayor just nodded. Jeez.

  'Let me explain, OK?' White-suited Goff was feeling well out of place in this cramped little parlour, where everything was brown and mottled and shrunken-looking, from the beams in the ceiling, to the carpet, to Jimmy Preece himself. But he had to crack this one; getting the Mayor on his side would save a hell of a lot of time.

  'OK,' Goff said calmly. 'Let's start with the basics. How much you heard about me?'