LOOK, STRANGER Page 17

  ‘There are three of the choir boys out on the lawn jumping about like frogs on sticks and making a noise I could hear half-way down Virginia Close,’ Mrs. Hooper said.

  ‘They are riding hobby horses,’ Barbara told her, rattling the tambourine.

  ‘Hobby horses!’ Mrs. Hooper took a step forward and put her foot through a paper hoop.

  ‘I don’t think we can have you jumping through hoops, Maud,’ Miss Draisey guffawed as she came to the rescue. She frequently called Mrs. Hooper “Maud”, although Mrs. Hooper had never felt free to call her “Genevieve”. ‘But what about your Billy? Do you think we could train him to do it? He’s about the right size, unlike my poor Henry, who is too fat and I’m afraid too lazy as well.’ Henry, who was sitting under the window, thumped his tail at the mention of his name. Mrs. Hooper’s Billy, who found the heat irritating, trotted over to Henry and nipped his ear. Miss Draisey said, ‘Naughty, naughty, Billy!’ and put the broken hoop over Billy’s head. ‘There you are! Just like a Punch and Judy dog.’ She found this vastly amusing and so did Henry.

  Jeremy, who had the tambourine, began to sing, ‘ “I like that old time religion . . .”.’

  ‘Can you tell me what all this has to do with the Church?’ Mrs. Hooper shouted at Miss Draisey.

  ‘Oh, my dear! What has a church fete to do with the Church? A genteel affair of scones and tea, guessing games about weights of cakes, and the exchange of all the useless nick-knacks picked up at the previous year’s fete. No, no, my dear! We positively can’t do that again. It’s my turn for that awful puce tea-cosy sicked over with sequins.’ She laughed uproariously at her own joke, caught her breath and was seized by a racking smoker’s cough.

  ‘ “It was good for old Jonah . . .”.’ Jeremy sang. The Anguilo girls were clapping their hands and Milo was beating out the rhythm on a drum. ‘ “It was good for old Jonah . . .” ’

  ‘And you think this is going to be better than a church fete, do you?’ Mrs. Hooper snatched what looked like a bathing costume made of patchwork from Zoe’s hands.

  ‘That’s part of Merry Andrew’s costume,’ Zoe said mildly.

  Mrs. Hooper flung the costume across the room and Henry obligingly snapped it up. Billy, maddened by his ruff, pounced upon it and the two proceeded to lurch about, Henry dragging the smaller but no less determined Billy across the room. Miss Draisey, still whooping for breath, signalled frantically to Vereker who made a half-hearted attempt to persuade Henry, whose teeth seemed the less sharp, to loosen his hold.

  ‘ “It was good for old Jonah and it’s good enough for me!” ’ Jeremy sang. Barbara had now joined in on the penny whistle.

  ‘That was a very stupid thing to do,’ Miss Draisey whispered hoarsely to Mrs. Hooper.

  ‘Merry Andrew!’ Mrs. Hooper picked up a pair of tights one leg of which had been dyed blue and the other pink. She was by now feeling rather flustered and could not think how to get out of this situation. She decided to throw a few more articles about until she could think of something to say which would enable her to retire without ignominy. Miss Draisey, however, grabbed hold of the tights and for a moment it seemed as though the mistresses were about to emulate the performance of their dogs.

  It was at this point, while Miss Draisey and Mrs. Hooper measured up to each other, that the rudimentary fixture which held the wall-cupboard to the wall gave way. The cupboard itself did not fall far into the room, but the jars, bottles and plastic containers which Mrs. Anguilo had stacked on top of it tipped forward. The first to fall was an enormous jar which the Reverend Roberts and his wife had bought when they were first married. ‘We went into a sweet shop and asked for old jars,’ Roberts would say when showing this treasured enormity to friends. Vereker, not realizing its sentimental value, had loaned it to Mrs. Anguilo who had filled it with Swiss breakfast cereal. The jar now disgorged its contents over Miss Draisey and Mrs. Hooper. This would not have mattered much, since the cereal would have brushed off easily, had it not been for the fact that its fall was closely followed by that of a large plastic bottle of cooking oil which glued the cereal down and provided a wet surface for a cascade of castor sugar.

  In the ensuing confusion, Billy bit one of the Anguilo girls on the ankle. Henry, no doubt under the impression that the whole building was coming down, rushed up the basement steps followed by Mrs. Anguilo. Henry remained at the top of the stairs, peering down and whining piteously, while Mrs. Anguilo raced towards the vicarage screaming ‘Help, police!’ Billy remained to defend his mistress and to impede the efforts of Zoe and the Verekers to assist the two victims.

  The choir boys joined Henry at the top of the stairs. As the casualties were guided towards them, their excited chatter died away and silence seemed to fall over the land.

  ‘I don’t think I’d want to excavate an Egyptian tomb,’ Jeremy said as he watched Miss Draisey and Mrs. Hooper emerge into the daylight.

  They began to clean up the room, sometimes stopping to laugh hysterically.

  ‘What did your mother want with all this cereal?’ Barbara asked the Anguilo girls.

  ‘It was a bargain buy. So was the oil.’

  ‘A pity the lids weren’t screwed down properly.’

  ‘We don’t have lids!’ Milo exclaimed. ‘At least, not ones that fit.’

  A few minutes later, Nancy returned. Her face was scarlet, eyes bulging with incredulous horror; her hand went to her mouth and she gave a nervous whimper of laughter. ‘Do you know what? It’s the water board . . . they’ve turned off the water!’

  When at last they stopped laughing, Milo said, ‘Let’s have another go at that hymn.’

  They were quite uninhibited now and sang so joyfully that the choir boys left their hobby horses and joined in, one of them managing very well on the mouth organ.

  ‘ “It was good for old Jonah,” the tambourine rattled.

  “It was good for old Jonah,” piped the penny whistle.

  “It was good for old Jonah,” the mouth organ proclaimed.

  “And it’s good enough for me!” ’ they yelled.

  The Anguilo girls were so happy at being included that they cried as they clapped their hands.

  ‘Again!’ Milo said and began to drum out the rhythm. The rhythm held them together and they felt they were one person as they raised their voices. Even Nancy, who had considered she had outgrown this kind of thing, forgot all about her problems as she sent the words throbbing out into the drowsy air. Something was happening she had always wanted to happen and as she looked at the group of youngsters around her she thought that at last she belonged to a big family and she loved, and was loved by, each member of it.

  The heat grew more intense and towards the end of July temperatures of a hundred were recorded. There was no water during the afternoons, and there was a talk of stand pipes being brought into use. All too often dark plumes of smoke rose into the cloudless sky. A spark would set a hedge alight in a flash and given the slightest breeze the flames would race away out of control. Fire had a fascination for people; it was the awesome sound of its roaring as much as the sight of it which drew them like a magnet, sometimes making them foolish enough to stop their cars and get out to watch. People who knew the speed of light had little idea of the speed of leaping fire.

  There was smoke in the sky when Tudor drove past the house where the old woman lived with her goats. He had always been frightened of fire, so he stopped the car at once. He could hear the flames crackling and popping and he knew the fire must be near; it had not yet, however, gained a hold, that moment of breakthrough when the flames would roar their triumph was still to come. He drove forward slowly. The road bent to the right and he saw the farm cottages. The end one, where the Peters lived, was on fire. There was a little group of people huddled in the field at the side of the cottage. Tudor thought, ‘They are such stupid people, none of them will have called a fire engine and that is what I must do.’ But something about the way they were gesticulating told him that there we
re people in there for whom the fire engine would arrive too late. He had got out of his car and was running towards the cottage while his mind was still working this out. As he joined the spectators, a woman said to him, ‘He just walked out, the sod!’ She pointed to Peters who was leaning against a parked van, blank¬faced with shock. ‘The children are in there.’ A flame licked over the sill of the first floor window, like a tongue running round the palate, savouring the taste of the morsel offered to it. The van driver and a postman had broken down the door, but the stairs were ablaze and they were driven back.

  There was a westerly breeze which meant that the other cottages would stand little chance and the woman next door had dashed into the street carrying a budgerigar in a cage and leaving the front door open. Tudor ran through her living-room; the partition walls were only lath and plaster and he could hear the fire crackling. ‘I won’t go any further than is safe,’ he promised himself. The cottage was full of black smoke and the heat was intense. He went to the foot of the stairs which led out of the living-room wondering whether it was feasible to break down the bedroom wall or whether that was the last thing one should do. Above him, some obstruction shifted and slithered and now the fire had made its breakthrough. For a moment, he remained quite still, listening in fascinated horror as the fire spoke with jubilant tongues. Then he saw the flames, no longer tasting, but consuming. He ran into the scullery and turned on the tap over the sink: there was no water. On the gas stove, however, there was a saucepan filled with water and he doused his handkerchief in it before going into the backyard; he was not quite sure why he did this. An old man was already in the yard, struggling with a ladder. Somewhere above a child was screaming. The fire must have started at the front of the house and although smoke was billowing from the window of the back bedroom no flames were yet visible. ‘I told them to jump,’ the old man said, ‘but they won’t.’ Tudor helped him to place the ladder against the wall. He could see Tommy crouched at the bedroom window; his mouth was wide open but he seemed to have stopped screaming. Tudor shouted, ‘Jump, Tommy!’ The boy shook his head in a prim, inappropriate way. Flames licked out between the tiles in the roof. Tommy hung above Tudor, tantalisingly out of reach, like forbidden fruit. ‘You hold the ladder steady while I go up,’ Tudor said to the old man. He shouted encouragement to the boy; then he tied the wet handkerchief across the lower part of his face because he had once been told at a lecture that this prevents the heat from searing the lungs. He had been to several fire lectures because he was afraid he would panic in a fire, but now everything happened so fast, like a speeded-up film, that terror lagged behind and common sense was out of the running altogether.

  When he reached Tommy the flames were eating away the far wall of the little room and the blast of heat almost knocked him back. He grabbed the boy who wriggled about like a frightened animal, making it difficult to carry him. The van driver was coming up the ladder; he shouted, ‘Give him to me, you get the other one.’ Above the noise of the fire there sounded the wail of a siren. What would the firemen do without water? They must have something else, foam wasn’t it? He was going up the ladder again instead of following the van driver down. Didn’t horses do that, head straight into a fire? He reached the sill and toppled himself hands foremost into the furnace. Fire reached out and singed his hair. Smoke blinded his eyes. He would never have found the child had he not accidentally stumbled over her huddled body. The room was ablaze now. He could no longer see, but he crawled along the skirting board, holding his light burden under one arm, and reaching up with the other to feel for the window sill. Something had been said in a lecture about getting down on the floor where there might still be some air. There didn’t seem to be any air but the smoke was not so bad. It was a small room and he came to the window quickly. He managed to get out onto the ladder, but by this time there was no way down: the fire was blazing below. They were trapped at the top of the ladder and the fire raced towards them.

  People were shouting. The next door cottage was ablaze, too. He swayed and caught at the window sill; it was red hot. But he had changed his position slightly and was now looking to his left into the field. Blurred figures were gesticulating to him. He was beyond reading signals, but there was only one way to go now, so with his last remaining strength he edged the ladder further and further to the left. When he was a child he had been taken by his parents to a film in which a witch had been burnt, not at a stake, but tied to a ladder which was toppled so that she crashed down face forwards into the bonfire. The old woman’s face floated before his eyes, a terrible, terrible face. He could not topple the ladder; however much they shouted to him, he could not topple the ladder. The child was growing heavy; he tried to hold her tighter and in doing so his weight shifted and the ladder keeled over. He dived into his worst nightmare.

  Chapter Eleven

  The municipal graveyard was on a sloping site which over looked the sea. It had wide green walks cut between the rows of graves and there were pine trees in clusters and smaller, individual trees which provided shade for the old people who came and sat there during the day because it was so peaceful. Most of the old people agreed they would be happy for their bones to rest there.

  The bones of Cylla Peters who had died in the fire, before Tudor Lindsay ever got to her, were not allowed to rest. Her grave was disturbed every night by someone who wanted to make a gesture about Mrs. Peters, because she wasn’t there when the cottage caught fire, or about Mr. Peters because he abandoned the children, or about Tudor Lindsay because he did something but too late, or about the Housing Manager because he hadn’t housed the Peters family, or about Vereker because he had turned the Peters family out of the vicarage: against one, or all of these people, some demented person had a grudge which could only be satisfied by digging up the child’s grave night after night.

  ‘Does Mrs. Peters know about this?’ Vereker asked Zoe as he stood with her by the grave one evening a week after the burial.

  ‘Those flowers were put there by her. She comes each morning with fresh flowers.’

  Vereker looked around him unhappily. He and Zoe were alone. The graveyard had been locked for the night when they walked past it on their way from a meeting at Miss Draisey’s house. Vereker had seen the gap where the palings had been broken. ‘Anyone could get in here,’ he had said and had eased his way through to prove it. There had seemed no harm in strolling down the broad central path. But this had brought them all too soon to Cylla’s grave.

  It was getting dark. The flowers in the glass jam jar were fading and in this heat the night air would not restore them.

  ‘Where does she get the flowers?’ Vereker asked.

  ‘She takes some from the church,’ Zoe said. ‘I caught her doing it. She said the church owed them to her.’

  ‘Do you think I was to blame?’

  ‘No. But I can see that she has to think so; if she’s not to blame herself, she must have others to blame.’

  ‘It was a terrible thing. How has your cousin taken it?’

  ‘For the first few days the doctors said he wasn’t to be told. But one of his colleagues went to see him yesterday and told him. He said he had an idea Tudor knew already.’

  ‘He was very brave.’

  ‘Yes, he was.’ She did not sound interested.

  ‘How long will he be in hospital?’

  ‘Quite a time, because of his leg being in traction.’

  ‘You must feel. . . .’ He lost conviction in what he was about to say and left her to finish the sentence if she wanted to. She did not want to.

  The rooks cawed in the trees, a harsh, pitiless sound. Zoe was kneeling down, pulling aside bits of straw, paper bags, bus tickets which had blown over the grave during the day. A breeze parted her hair at the nape of her neck. Vereker wondered how she felt about the dead child, and immediately found himself wondering how she felt about child-bearing. The thoughts went in and out of his mind, elusive, dismaying.

  He walked down the path, exa
mining the gravestones. ‘I wouldn’t want another child,’ he thought. ‘That wouldn’t be fair to Nan. Would it?’ The older graves were in the churchyards; this graveyard had only been established at the beginning of the century when the churches ran out of space and people ran out of faith. He stopped by one gravestone and bent down to examine it more carefully. He went back to Zoe who was still tidying Cylla’s grave.

  ‘Would that John Penn be the curate at All Hallows?’

  ‘That’s right. He was killed in the war. Poor John Penn.’ Something in her tone, a suggestion that it was the frailty of man, rather than his inhumanity, which John Penn’s death evoked, made Vereker ask:

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Some say he was bewitched. Miss Draisey had two girls from her school staying with her; it was the school holidays and the girls couldn’t go home because of the blitz on London.

  John Penn had an affair with one of them. They used to meet in the priory grounds at night.

  ‘Apparently he fancied himself as a rock climber. The girl said afterwards that he climbed the great arch which was still standing then (there is only a part of it standing now, that strange hooked pillar). There had been an air raid over London and a German bomber jettisoned its load on Helmsley on its way back. The bombs came down near the priory and the blast brought down part of the arch, and John Penn with it. He broke his neck.’

  ‘Not much witchcraft in that!’

  ‘My mother said the girl was a scheming baggage. When she was asked why he should have been so foolish as to climb the arch she said he was showing off; but a lot of people thought she dared him to do it. Miss Draisey was very upset. People said Miss Draisey was too fond of her.’ Zoe looked between the rows of graves which seemed to be drawing closer together in the gloom; she might have been trying to discern the forms of those people who had disappeared from the island soon after she was born. ‘Her name was Delphina. She was pregnant and she was expelled from the school.’ She looked up at Vereker. ‘No one has seen her since, but her daughter came to the island a few years ago Mrs. Anguilo.’