(3/20) Storm in the Village (5 page)

'You shouldn't 'ave lifted that, miss! Might've raptured yourself. Easy enough to get a rapture, heaving rocks like that!'

I said meekly that I was only trying to clear the place up.

'Ah! I daresay!' said Mr Willet gravely, 'but you wants to give a thought to your organs now and again.'

I promised that I would give my organs every consideration in the future and Mr Willet seemed mollified.

'I'll get this straightened up, and old Rogers and I'll fix something up on the roof this afternoon, till them Caxley chaps can do their bit of glazing.'

He bustled away, and I thought as I watched him go how fully he was enjoying our small upheaval. To Mr Willet, with all the time in the world, this was no annoying interruption to his potato sorting. It was an exciting happening, a bizarre quirk in the gentle pattern of his day, and a challenge to be met with courage, common sense and joyful zest.

It was Mrs Pringle who reminded me about the committee meeting in the evening.

'Can't have it here, in this glory-hole,' she said, looking at the débris with distaste. 'All catch your deaths! The vicar's bronical enough as it is!'

'That's all right,' I said, 'we'll have it at my house. I'll put a notice on the door here, and we'll send messages after school by the children. There's only about six of us on the committee.'

'At
your
place?' exclaimed Mrs Pringle. If I had suggested the school coke-pile for our rendezvous she could not have sounded more taken aback.

'Yes,' I said, 'in the dining-room. The fire's going, and there's plenty of room, and I've even got a drop of sherry somewhere.'

Mrs Pringle surveyed me morosely.

'I'd best come over and put your place to rights, when I've done this lot,' she said, as one who knows where her duty lies, no matter how unpleasant. 'Can't have the gentry in that dining-room, with that brass of yours in the state it's in. Noticed it through the windows—and they could do with a wipe over!'

I rallied as best I could under this blow, and thanked her humbly.

'That's all right,' she answered graciously. 'Flared-up leg, or no flared-up leg, I'll do you!'

'And it isn't as dirty as all that,' I felt compeUed to point out, still smarting slightly from this surprise attack. 'Anyone would think I lived like a pig!'

'Hm! There's pigs and pigs!' boomed Mrs Pringle enigmatically. And limping heavily, she made a triumphant exit, before I could retaliate.

4. Reviving the Flower Show

B
Y
seven-twenty the committee members of the Fairacre Flower Show were assembled in my freshly furbished dining-room, enjoying, I hoped, some of my sherry, and the dazzle of my unusually clean brass.

'This really is most pleasant—most pleasant,' said the vicar from the head of the table. 'We really are indebted, Miss Read, for your hospitality.' He dropped his leopard-skin gloves, now in an advanced state of moult, on to the table, and I watched a light shower of fluff settle gently on Mrs Pringle's newly polished surface.

'Nice to be able to stretch your legs,' agreed Mr Roberts, the farmer, who is over six feet tall and has to sit on, and not in, the school desks at most committee meetings.

John Pringle, Mrs Pringle's only son and a keen gardener, made the third man, and Mrs Bradley, Mrs Mawne and I made up the rest of the committee.

Mrs Bradley, in her eighties and a person of determined character, might have been known as the mother of Basil Bradley, a popular novelist, if she had not been such a dominant personality in her own right. It was she who had pressed for the revival of Fairacre's Flower Show, and it was apparent that, despite her age and deafness, she intended to play a vital part in its organisation.

Mrs Mawne was a newcomer to Fairacre, although her husband, a retired schoolmaster and keen ornithologist, had lived in the village for a year or two. They had lived separately for some years, but had recently composed their differences and appeared to be peaceably settled (somewhat to the village's disappointment!) among us.

She was a large woman, as used to getting her own way, I suspected, as Mrs Bradley, and I surmised that a clash would soon arise between these two ladies. We did not have long to wait.

We had safely sketched out the different classes, such as 'Six Roots' and 'Six Onions' and so on, and had come to the more delicate task of deciding on the specific requirements of the Table Decoration class.

'Vawse of sweet peas,' said Mr Roberts, 'Can't beat sweet peas for the table.'

Mrs Bradley snorted.

'No scope! We must give people a chance to show their talents. What about a colour qualification? Say, in blue and pink?'

Mrs Mawne smiled deprecatingly and spread her hands.

'A little obvious, don't you think?' she suggested.

Mrs Bradley fell back upon her invaluable weapon of deafness.

'What say? I didn't hear you, Mrs Mawne!' she bellowed, though the dangerous glitter in her beady eyes belied her words.

Mrs Mawne, though a trifle discomfited, joined battle.

'I said,' she shouted menacingly, 'that I thought the colour idea a little obvious!'

'Oh! You did!' replied Mrs Bradley, her neck growing very red. 'Well, have you any better suggestion?'

'Indeed I have,' answered Mrs Mawne, with maddening composure. 'Several, in fact. When I was in Ireland I organised a most successful Flower Show and the table decorations fell into three classes—'

'Pshaw!' muttered Mrs Bradley testily, and fidgeted with her gloves. The vicar began to look very unhappy, and Mr Roberts and I carefully avoided each other's eye.

'One decoration to be not higher than four inches,' swept on Mrs Mawne, enunciating with infuriating emphasis close to Mrs Bradley's unwilling ear, 'the second to be composed of the flowers of one natural order—ranunculaceae, I believe it was; and the third to be made entirely of dead flowers.'

'
Dead
flowers?' jerked out Mr Roberts, with extreme surprise. 'Oh, I don't like
dead
flowers! They smell, for one thing.'

Mrs Mawne ignored him. As a sweet pea lover he had damned himself as a Philistine for ever in her eyes.

'That sort of thing may impress the Irish,' retorted Mrs Bradley, with octogenarian vigour. 'Poor, ignorant peasants as they are—but for enlightened Fairacre folk, it just won't do. In any case,' she added, switching abruptly, 'whatever could you get, in July, four inches high?'

'Chickweed!' suggested Mr Roberts, guffawing at his own shaft of wit. Both ladies glared at him, but he was oblivious of their fury, as with his huge head tipped back he roared out his merriment.

'Perhaps we'd better leave—' began the vicar timidly, just as I was saying:

'Annuals in a soup-plate?' in an apologetic query. The vicar fell upon this well-worn suggestion avidly.

'Excellent!' he said cheerfully, and scribbled on his little pad. 'Table decoration then, "Annuals in a Soup Plate". All agreed?'

Six hands were raised in silence, and the rest of the programme was completed in outward harmony.

'Have you heard anything about this housing estate?' queried Mr Roberts, as the ladies were collecting their gloves and handbags, and the vicar was putting his papers away in an envelope much too small for diem.

'Housing estate?' said he, looking up from his task. 'Where?'

'Only a rumour, I expect,' said Mr Roberts. 'Heard it in "The Bell" at Caxley last market day. Wasn't there a bit in the papers, about new houses being needed for the atomic station?'

'But that's miles away,' said Mrs Mawne.

'Ugly great rubbishy thing!' pronounced Mrs Bradley. 'Spoiling the view!'

'And are they building a new estate there?' pursued the vicar.

'More likely here,' answered Mr Roberts.

'
Here!
' squeaked the assembled company in six different keys. The vicar was the first to find his breath.

'My dear Roberts, are you serious?'

Mr Roberts began to look uncomfortable.

'Look! I shouldn't have said anything. It's just a rumour I heard that the atomic people may choose a site near Fairacre. Someone said that Miller's land might be picked on. Hundred Acre Field, I believe-but don't spread it round.'

John Pringle now spoke in his slow, measured burr.

'I heard that too. There was two chaps looking at it recently—and it's my belief all the tittle-tattle started from that. Nothing in it, I don't suppose.'

'I certainly hope it's not true,' said the vicar decidedly. 'It's a wonderful piece of country just there—a real beauty spot.'

'Dan Crockford made one of his best pictures of the downs from the edge of Hundred Acre Field,' said Mrs Bradley, naming a local artist of some fame, who died a few years ago.

'Dan Crockford!' commented Mrs Mawne, with some scorn.

'It is a most beautiful picture, Mrs Mawne,' the vicar assured her earnestly, 'and hangs now in the Caxley Town Hall. It was in the Royal Academy early in the century.'

'And so were dozens of other quite dreadful things!' responded that lady decisively, pulling on a glove with great vigour. Mrs Bradley seized this golden opportunity.

'Dan Crockford,' she began with deadly precision, 'was one of my dearest friends, and once did me the honour of proposing marriage.' She omitted to add that this had happened after the Hunt Ball of 1902 when the exuberant young Dan had offered his heart and hand to no fewer than six ladies within an hour.

Mrs Mawne had the grace to look abashed.

'I'm sorry, Mrs Bradley. I withdraw my remarks!' Mrs Bradley gave a stiff nod, and turned to say her farewells to me, when the vicar spoke.

'If this dreadful business does come to anything, perhaps your son might be willing to draft a few strong letters to the papers—'

'Basil would do all he could to protect his native land,' asserted the old lady militantly, and I felt extremely sorry for the unsuspecting novelist, who, I had heard, was engaged on his seventeenth historical novel and would doubtless loathe to be dragged from some elegant and urbane past century to struggle with the affairs of the twentieth.

Basil Bradley's novels had steady sales for he mixed love, duels and history in very unequal proportions, and had the whole displayed in attractive dust jackets, showing ladies in Empire gowns reclining on those uncomfortable bolster-ended sofas which are usually upholstered in striped damask in pastel shades.

The ladies were invariably unhappily married to squat, square men, much older than themselves, with purple complexions and the gout. By about page 352, however, each heroine in turn decided that she must renounce her lover and tread the stony path of duty with her unloved husband, thus leaving four or five pages for a tearful farewell scene written in unbearably tender prose. As all Basil Bradley's books were illustrated, by a man who had been a friend of his at Oxford, this touching finale gave the artist a chance to let himself rip over the intricate wrought-iron balcony from which the heroine, with draperies fluttering, waved goodbye to the gallant and diminishing figure on horseback. Unkind critics of the artist's work had not faded to point out a noticeable feature—that of horses so far distant as to be almost incapable of recognition, the animals either being held by grooms in murky shrubberies while the hero was duelling, or else cantering with such speed that a cloud of dust obscured all but the rider's wig. They had further observed, in the captious way that critics will, that the artist was incapable of drawing a horse at all. But these waspish comments luckily made no difference to Basil Bradley's admirers, who as soon as they saw the latest reclining lady in dampened muslin, swooped upon the book and, horses or no horses, knew that here they would find several hours' pleasant entertainment.

'Well, let's hope there'll be no need for letters to the papers,' said Mr Roberts heartily, 'but if you do get a few hundred people coming here to live, you'll have some fine congregations, vicar!'

The vicar's face glowed.

'Of course, they would be in my parish! It would mean a great deal of visiting, but most interesting, most interesting. I wonder how they would get on with the village folk?'

'They'd never mix!' said Mrs Mawne. 'Nothing in common. Town dwellers mainly, and would spend their time in Caxley.'

'They'll have to have a few more buses running then,' commented Mr Roberts. 'Liven us all up, wouldn't it?'

Mrs Bradley had the last word.

'There won't be a housing estate on Dan Crockford's landscape. There could never be the slightest possibility of such a monstrous project!'

We made our farewells in the little hall, and Fairacre's Flower Show Committee made its way out into the windy night.

***

But despite Mrs Bradley's brave words a most unsettling occurrence was taking place at that very moment.

Far away, beyond the roaring elms and the wind-swept young wheat of Hundred Acre Field, old Mr Miller stormed vigorously up and down his firelit drawing-room. He had just returned from an evening with friends in Caxley, and had found a letter, in a long official envelope, propped up on the mantelpiece.