Passing Strange Page 2

  “Quite apart from the academic point of whether she should be unclothed.”

  Mrs Jervis regarded her husband fondly. Any man who thought that point academic was best in the church. As a man of the cloth he could be as unworldly as he liked. She chose an iced bun. “Always supposing,” she added drily, “that Boadicea was as young as the Pageant Committee thought.” Almstone Pageant had been two years ago but reverberations from it still echoed round the parish like the grumble of thunder in mountains.

  “I think,” said Thomas Jervis mildly, “that they were confusing her with Lady Godiva.”

  “Ivy Challender wasn’t a day over seventeen at the time. My guess,” said the Rector’s wife, who had a position of her own to keep up, “is that no one – queen or not – could lead a tribe – civilised or not – at seventeen.”

  “Lady Godiva wasn’t leading a tribe.”

  “It wasn’t Lady Godiva they were confusing her with,” said Mrs Jervis triumphantly.

  “No?”

  “No,” she said. “It was someone else in a chariot.”

  “Jehu?” he said, surprised.

  “Jezebel,” said Mrs Jervis, biting into her iced bun. She tasted it critically. “Rose Burton made this. She leaves them in the oven too long.”

  “Does she?” The Rector eschewed the buns and reached for a rock cake instead. “Jezebel didn’t drive up in a chariot.”

  Mrs Jervis ignored this. “And as for Ivy Challender …”

  “Yes?” said the Rector with interest.

  “I don’t need a tent and a shawl and a crystal ball to tell what’s going to become of her and neither does Nurse Cooper. That reminds me, Thomas, have you seen Joyce Cooper? She doesn’t seem to be anywhere and that’s not like her.”

  “It isn’t,” he agreed heartily. “She usually seems to be everywhere.”

  “Now, Thomas …”

  “A good woman,” he said at once.

  “And that’s not a compliment, the way you said it, Thomas Jervis.”

  “Perhaps she’s gone home with a headache.”

  “She’s never ill. Besides, someone’s been to check. There’s a note on her door which says ‘At Flower Show’.”

  “Then I expect she is,” said the Rector reasonably.

  “But whereabouts?”

  It was a question that wasn’t answered until later.

  2

  Stopped diapason

  Ken Walls and Fred Pearson weren’t looking for Joyce Cooper. They were hunting Norman Burton, the Show Secretary.

  “He might not be able to do anything,” said Ken.

  “The Rector said he should be told,” said Fred.

  “He also said that there were Mrs Wellstone’s feelings to be considered as well,” pointed out Ken.

  “He had to say that, didn’t he? He’s a Christian.”

  “Well, she’s going to think her tomatoes were best now, isn’t she? Bound to.”

  “But they weren’t,” said Pearson flatly.

  “At least,” noted Walls with approval, “she wasn’t standing beside them.”

  The practice of an entrant demanding the winner’s meed of praise by hovering within congratulatory distance of the winning entry was roundly condemned in Almstone, Calleshire. If there was a lower standard of behaviour at Chelsea, London, the village of Almstone neither knew nor cared.

  The pair caught sight of a man called Maurice Esdaile looking at them.

  “What’s he doing here?” demanded Fred.

  “Search me,” said Walls.

  Pearson hailed someone else he knew. “’Afternoon, Mr Kershaw. You haven’t seen the Show Secretary anywhere by any chance, have you?”

  Herbert Kershaw was one of the leading farmers in Almstone. Abbot’s Hall Farm, which he ran with evident success, was one of the three large farms which made up the Priory estate. The others were Home Farm and Dorter End.

  “He’s somewhere about, Fred. You could try the Decorative Classes tent.”

  “Mrs Kershaw do well this year?” asked Pearson promptly. He could get the message as quickly as the next man.

  “Two Firsts and a Third.”

  Pearson nodded. It was known that Mrs Kershaw liked to win.

  “Perhaps now,” said Herbert Kershaw with mock ruefulness, “I’ll be given a proper meal for a change. Haven’t had one for days. You couldn’t move in our house for flowers.”

  Fred Pearson acknowledged this politely. The rising prosperity of farmers had affected their wives too. Time was when the farmer’s wife had worked as hard as her husband, with the profit from the poultry and the hand-turned butter as her only prerogative. Fred Pearson, who knew most things about Almstone, was prepared to bet that the nearest Mrs Kershaw got to nature was searching in the hedges for likely teazles. She went in for flower-arranging in a big way.

  “Did the judging go well?” asked Ken Walls cunningly.

  “Two Firsts and a Third,” repeated the farmer.

  “I meant were there any complaints about it.”

  “None that I’ve heard,” said Kershaw, shrugging his shoulders, “and I wouldn’t know myself. I can’t tell a good flower arrangement from a bad one and I’m damned if I know how anyone else can either.” He threw his head back. “Now if it had been sheep …”

  Both the other men nodded dutifully. While Mrs Kershaw went in for flower arranging, Herbert Kershaw had gone in for sheep.

  “I’ve just been up to Scotland,” added the florid-faced farmer.

  “Oh yes?” said Fred unencouragingly.

  “And bought myself a real winner.”

  “Good.”

  “The best ram at the market – a prize Border Leicester Cheviot.”

  “That’ll help the flock along,” said Fred Pearson.

  “So the Secretary might be with the Decorative Classes, then?” said Ken Walls with more pertinacity.

  “He was there,” said Kershaw, beginning to move away. “He was looking for the District Nurse.”

  When the farmer had gone Pearson exploded. “I don’t know how he does it,” he said, with all the poor man’s contempt for the rich one. “I really don’t.”

  “Cedric Milsom at Dorter End isn’t doing too badly either,” said Walls. “He’s driving a Range-Rover nowadays and he’s bought something new on four legs for his wife, too.”

  With Mrs Milsom it wasn’t Flower Arrangements. It was horses.

  Pearson was still talking about Herbert Kershaw. “Do you realize he didn’t even get an Honourable Mention for his ewes at the Berebury Show, let alone win anything at the County one at Calleford?”

  “Perhaps that’s why he needs a good ram,” said Ken Walls briefly. “Come on, Fred, this way. Mr Burton must be about somewhere.”

  He was.

  And he was rapidly coming to the sad conclusion that it was not his, Norman Burton’s, day. While he knew from past experience that everything in the Horticultural Society Secretary’s garden was not lovely and never likely to be, he had not bargained for quite so much trouble as he seemed to have on his hands at the moment.

  “What sort of a car did you say it was, Sam?” he was asking an older man just as Fred Pearson and Ken Walls hove into view.

  “A Mini,” said Sam Watkinson.

  “Surely,” said an exasperated Burton, “everyone in the village knows not to park a car there! Whose car is it?”

  “That’s the whole trouble,” said the other man. “If I knew whose it was I’d ask them to move it.”

  “Sorry, Sam. I know you would.” The Honorary Secretary was speaking quite genuinely. Sam Watkinson ran the Priory Home Farm, which lay immediately behind the old Priory, and was no trouble-maker. He was People’s Warden at the Church and a magistrate, too.

  “If it wasn’t milking time,” he said reasonably, “it wouldn’t matter.”

  Burton shot a quick look at his watch. “It’s after four already.”

  “That’s right,” said Watkinson amiably. “And it’s Saturday
afternoon, which is why I’m doing the milking myself, agricultural wages being what they are.”

  “I didn’t realize it was as late as that,” said Burton.

  “As it is,” said Watkinson in tacit agreement, “I can’t get the cows into the milking parlour.”

  Burton nodded. Time, tide and milking cows waited for no man. “I’ve always said we should have had a public address system for the Show …”

  “Noisy things,” said Watkinson. “Stop you thinking properly, let alone talking.” He was a calm man in late middle age, known for his fair judgement on the Bench. “I don’t like them myself and whoever’s coming to the Priory might not like them either.”

  “I’ve heard that it might be going to be someone young,” said Burton absently. “A Mellows, though.”

  “The nephew’s daughter was what I’d heard,” said Sam Watkinson, “but no one seems to know for sure. Not even Edward Hebbinge. He says it’s all in the solicitors’ hands. They’ve been hunting her up.”

  “That’ll be why it’s taking all this time, then,” said Norman Burton sagely. “They never hurry.” He remembered the cows and recalled himself to the matter in hand. “Can’t we find out whose car it is?”

  Sam Watkinson shook his head. “It’s been hired. The name of the hire company’s plastered all over the back of the rear window – Swallow and somebody.”

  “Wait a minute, Sam. I’ve had an idea.” Burton’s eyes had lit upon the approaching Ken and Fred. “Do you think the four of us could lift it?”

  Sam Watkinson smiled gracefully. “We’d be a proper collection of old crocks if we couldn’t, wouldn’t we?”

  He led the way across the Priory garden away from the Flower Show activities and out on to a narrow road which led beside the old house and then curved down to a group of farmhouse and agricultural buildings which lay behind it. On their right was the parish church and beyond that the houses and shops of the village. The whole made up a pattern of manor, church, farms and village dwellings repeated in all its permutations up and down England. At the far end of the village was a tiny brick-built Dissenting Chapel. It was over a hundred years old now, but still contrived to look new.

  Beyond that was a little outcrop of Victorian villas and behind them a neat close of houses put up by the Rural District Council since the war. On the opposite side of the High Street was a rather self-conscious group of modern houses built in the style known unkindly as Post Office Georgian. From here the young executives for whom they had been designed commuted daily to their places of work but thought of themselves as country-dwellers. The true villagers called those houses the Development and thought of the occupants as town people.

  Fred Pearson fell into step beside Norman Burton. “You’d have thought anyone in their right mind could have seen that there were cows in that field, wouldn’t you?”

  “You would,” agreed Burton as they rounded the bend, “though I don’t think Mr Watkinson’s bothering very much with the gates and fences on that side of the road any more. Esdaile Homes’ll have them down pretty soon when they start building.”

  “I dare say, Fred,” contributed Sam Watkinson, “that what they didn’t know was that the cows would need to come out for milking …”

  “Not everyone knows about cows, I suppose,” Fred conceded grudgingly. Almstone was Fred Pearson’s world. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons his wife got him as far as Berebury High Street. On occasion he went to the county town of Calleshire, Calleford. He had been to London once and not liked it. He did, however, know all about cows.

  “What car, Mr Watkinson?” asked Ken Walls pertinently, as the gate came into sight.

  The entrance to the field was not impeded by a Mini car or anything else. On the other side of the old gate there was nothing at all but a few light tyre prints.

  “Good,” said Norman Burton briskly. “It’s gone.”

  Sam Watkinson called out his thanks and waved without even looking round. He undid the gate to the pasture field without delay and the leading cow – there was always a leading cow – immediately began her stately way across the road towards the milking sheds, lowing as she did so.

  The Horticultural Show Secretary watched her out of the field and then turned to Ken Walls and Fred Pearson and grinned. “Don’t you two think you’ve missed all the work, will you? We shall need you both after the prize-giving. All the tents have got to come down tonight as usual.”

  “Talking about prize-giving,” began Fred Pearson obliquely. “Ken’s tomatoes …”

  The Secretary sighed. It was not, he knew only too well, going to be roses, roses all the way for Norman Burton. “Nurse Cooper must be somewhere,” insisted the doctor. He was keenly interested in cacti and was not prepared to be taken away from them without a struggle.

  “You tell me where,” said a middle-aged woman tersely, “and I’ll tell her about Granny myself.”

  “She always says where she is,” said the doctor. “It’s written up in her window.”

  “I can’t find her anywhere in the village and no one can find her here at the Show,” countered the woman.

  “The Fortune Teller’s tent …”

  The woman snorted. “She hasn’t been there since half past three at least. Everyone says the same. Told the first rush of people their fortunes and then disappeared.”

  “It’s not like Nurse Cooper.”

  “That’s as may be,” said the woman implacably, “but it’s well after five now. By rights Granny should have had her injection already and I can’t give it to her.”

  The emphasis in the last sentence was not lost upon the doctor. He cast a farewell glance at a particularly fine example of astrophytum myriostigma and sighed.

  “All right,” he said to the importunate relative, “I’ll come down and see to it myself.” If he went straightaway there was always a sporting chance that he might be back in time to collect his second prize certificate for the mammillaria bocasana that he had been nurturing in his greenhouse for the last three years. Cacti needed a long term view. Unlike Ken Walls, he felt no resentment about the first prize winner. It was a superb specimen and – like the judges – he hadn’t been able to fault it.

  The doctor regretfully hurried away to administer an injection just as a preliminary stirring took place round about the improvised little dais at one end of the marquee. The officials of the Almstone Horticultural Society were beginning to cluster round a well-dressed woman in a good hat, who was soon to present the prizes. She had already done a conducted tour of the exhibits, taking a meet and seemly interest in all the Show entries.

  These ranged from garden vegetables whose size and shape bordered on the obscene through fruit of a quality seldom seen in a greengrocer’s shop down to the entries in the children’s classes. There was a uniformity of look about the latter that smacked of the press-gang in the classroom but the lady in the good hat was too experienced in public life – she was the Member of Parliament’s wife – to comment directly.

  “Most interesting,” she murmured from time to time.

  “What a magnificent effort everyone has made,” she exclaimed as the platform party assembled.

  She reached for the notes she didn’t need and began, “The judges must have had a very difficult time indeed …”

  Fred Pearson gave an insubordinate snort. Fortunately only Ken Walls heard him.

  “The decision,” Walls began to remind him, sotto voce, “as to the worthiness …”

  “Worthiness!” exploded Pearson under his breath.

  “… and relative merits of the exhibits,” equally under his breath Walls parroted the Show Secretary’s pat answer to their complaint about the judging of the tomatoes, “will be final.”

  “Relative merit,” intoned Pearson richly. “Those tomatoes didn’t have any merit. That was their trouble.”

  The Chairman cast a quelling look in their direction.

  Like Admiral Lord Nelson in slightly different circumstances, Fred Pearson
was damned if he saw any signal but Ken Walls did and subsided into silence.

  By and by the proceedings came to an end. Silver cups, prizes, inscribed certificates, and tokens were handed over with a gloved handshake. The platform party descended, the Member’s wife departed, an extrovert member of the Society with no skill but plenty of wit auctioned the entries, and the Honorary Treasurer went home well laden.

  Norman Burton still had duties, though.

  “All the tents have got to come down tonight, lads,” he said to the hard core of real helpers, those who were prepared to stay until all the work was done.

  Ken Walls and Fred Burton tackled their tent-striking together, working their way methodically round the site. By common consent the big marquee was left until the last by them all. Time-honoured practice was that they would all work together on that one when all else was done and then adjourn to the King’s Arms for suitable liquid refreshment.

  In the meantime each man turned his attention to the nearest small tent. While Norman Burton and two others started to dismantle the one that the Honorary Treasurer had used, Fred and Ken set to work on the guy ropes of the Fortune Teller’s booth. It subsided gently on to the grass, revealing a small pile of tarpaulin behind it.

  Pearson pulled the canvas straight and started to fold it from the end where he was standing.

  “This had better come too,” said Walls, tugging on the tarpaulin. “Give us a hand, Fred, and we’ll take this straight over to the pile for the lorry.”

  Fred obediently bent to the task and together the two men started to lift the tarpaulin. They stopped as what seemed to be an untidy heap of colourful clothing came into view. Then Ken Walls caught sight of a stockinged leg sticking out from under it.

  “Oh, my God!” he said.

  The angle of the leg was too ungainly for life. There was no doubt about that.

  “Nurse Cooper,” said Fred Pearson, going quite pale under his normal countryman’s ruddy complexion. “That was what she was wearing.”

  This time the two men did not need to confer on whom to consult. Neither the Show Secretary nor the Rector entered their thoughts for a moment.