A Hovering of Vultures (10 page)

“So you didn't inherit them?” Vibeke Nordli asked.

“Oh no. They come from the publishers, I think.”

“What did you inherit? Any of the things here?”

“I'm afraid not. I didn't have anything at all to offer Mr Suzman. What happened was, when they died, or soon after, the farm and all its contents were put on the market. Public auction—quite a few sensation seekers there, I wouldn't mind betting, buying up mementoes of a minor local scandal.
So I know Mr Suzman's hoping that more things will turn up . . .”

“But didn't your people care
anything
about her?—”

“Country people are very unsentimental, you know. And I believe my grandfather was rather straight-laced.”

Over her head Charlie and Randolph Sneddon looked at each other, two tall men communing. Sneddon's face was a picture of wry long-suffering. Charlie was interested to register that now, apparently, he was accepted by the other as one of his part of the human race.

• • •

“Now, now, Mrs Blatchley,” began Mrs Clandon.

“Don't you ‘Now-now' me like I was a school-child! I'll tell my own daughter she looks a sight if I want to!”

“You don't look any oil painting yourself,” said Lettie equably.

“Don't talk to me about painting! What have you plastered your face with?”

“It's called make-up.” Lettie sat down heavily in the other chair. “People have been painting themselves since prehistoric times. You don't have to stay, Mrs Clandon. Mother and I will get on just fine.”

Dorothy Clandon looked dubious for a moment, then nodded and withdrew.

“Well!” said her mother with relish as the door shut. “I never expected my daughter to come home a painted woman!”

“I should think that's exactly what you did expect,” said Lettie. “Make-up may not make me look any better, but it makes me feel a hell of a lot better.”

“Language!”

“Well, I think we've exhausted that topic. How have you been all these years, Mother? When did Father die?”

The lips parted in a sort of snarl, revealing a small and miscellaneous collection of discoloured teeth.

“Nineteen sixty. Or it may have been nineteen seventy. I don't remember exactly. Time doesn't mean much any more. He'd been ill for years. He was terrible when he was poorly, always whining and complaining.”

“It must have been a bundle of laughs in the old house. You were still in the cottage in Tanner's Alley, were you?”

“All the time. Right up to when I had to come here. The Methodist minister was on at me for years to come here. Said I shouldn't be living down there in Micklewike all on my own. Very concerned he was.”

Lettie's opinion of the cunning of Methodist ministers took an upward turn. She had no doubt of his real reason for thinking her mother should leave Micklewike for the Eventide Home.

“And what did Father die of?”

“Pneumonia in the end. Just like your brother Paul.” She nodded meaningfully. “He was a good son. If only Paul had lived. He'd have taken care of me.”

Lettie saw that her dead brother was now shrouded in an affection and regard that had never been lavished on him while he lived. She knew her brother would have got away as she had. They had often discussed it, in bed at night. It had given an added sad pang to his early death.

“And what have you lived off? Do you get some kind of pension?”

“Of course. It's more than enough. There's plenty as complain, but they're the soft livers. I've never been one for the vanities of life.”

“Except the vanity of a thoroughly good opinion of yourself,” Lettie opined.

“Those that walk in the way of the Lord shall see the Lord plain,” her mother said complacently. Lettie smiled. Her mother had not lost her habit of producing improvised scripture, then.

“I've no doubt you're right,” she said. “And before very long, too. I suppose you're wondering why I've come back?”

This was greeted with a hard stare.

“Why should I wonder that? There's no explanation needed when someone comes home to see their mother.”

My God—she's more deluded than I thought, Lettie said to herself. She carefully ignored the suggestion.

“There's this conference, you see. You may have heard of it. A sort of weekend in honour of the Sneddons.”

“What?”

“Don't you remember, Mother? The Sneddons, Joshua and Susannah? You used to go and work for them at High Maddox Farm.”

“Oh, I remember
them.
Why would anyone honour
them
? I shouldn't have demeaned myself, going up there. She wrote mucky books. All novels are lies, and she wrote dirty lies.”

“Well, it's a point of view, I suppose. I used to go up with you sometimes, didn't I?”

The lips parted again into that wolfish snarl.

“Thought herself such a Lady Muck, didn't she? Couldn't even keep the place clean. Couldn't keep herself clean either, for all the money she earned with that filth.”

“The farm is a sort of museum now.”

“A what?”

“A museum. A sort of shrine to the Sneddons.”

“Shrine! That's blasphemy, that is! But then, there's nowt so daft as folks.”

“Do you remember going up there sometimes when Susannah Sneddon was writing?”

“'Course I do. Used to shoo me off somewhere so she could get on wi' writing her mucky lies.”

Lettie bent forward and asked her mother a question. When she got her answer she was satisfied that, as with many old people, her memory for things that happened long ago was better than her memory of recent events. She almost felt glad she had come.

O
n the Sunday morning Charlie awoke with feelings of dissatisfaction: what had he done, found out, achieved? He had attended the inaugural meeting of a literary society that was, to all appearances, completely aboveboard, composed of genuine enthusiasts as well as others with connections, close or peripheral, to the Sneddons, their writings, and their tragedy. He had seen things, heard things, that interested him, but nothing that had got him any further forward. He had also, be it said, had a rather enjoyable couple of hours with Felicity Coggenhoe after the wine and cheese party, but that could hardly be said to have contributed to his investigations—apart, perhaps, from some grisly details that filled in the picture of the awfulness of her parents.

Perhaps it was just because he felt he had got nowhere that he decided to stay over that night.

“I'd like to do a bit of walking this evening,” he told his landlady when she brought in a laden plate that included
black pudding and practically everything else that conceivably could be fried. “And perhaps some more tomorrow before I go back to Leeds.”

“I'll keep the room for you,” Mrs Ludlum said comfortably. “No probs, as they say in
Neighbours
.”

Charlie shuddered quietly to himself and got down to making a dent in the pile in front of him.

When he had finished, or eaten as much as the human stomach could bear, he went to his room and dressed rather more sportily than he had the day before. When he was ready, on an impulse, he sat down at his typewriter and wrote “Manuscripts? Where? Where from?” Then he left the house on the Haworth Road and walked down to Batley Bridge. He didn't, though, start at once up the hill path to Micklewike. Instead he went to the Duke of Cumberland and, using the phone in the foyer, rang up to Room Twenty-one and Lettie Farraday.

“My, you are attentive!” she said.

“Attentive—and curious.”

“Well, you don't have to tell an old woman that a young man who's attentive has an ulterior motive.”

“Are you going to the meeting?”

“Sure. But I need a quarter of an hour or so to turn myself into what my mother would call a painted woman. Are you walking up, Dexter?”

“I made a resolution to walk up every day, to compensate for all the stodge I'm eating.”

“Have you ever yet made a resolution you haven't broken?”

“Never.”

“Come up in the taxi with me then.”

“You're on.”

“Wait down there and I'll see you in fifteen minutes.”

Once she was settled in the back of the taxi Charlie got in beside her and asked:

“Well, how was your mother?”

“A vicious old crone with a veneer of religion.”

“Did you row?”

“Nothing we couldn't both handle. I managed to stand her for nearly an hour.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Never you mind, young man. You're a good deal too curious for someone who won't tell me
why
he's curious.” She thought for a moment and then asked: “Dexter, has it occurred to you that there's really not much of the Sneddons at High Maddox Farm?”

Charlie nodded.

“Yes, it has. Oddly enough not when I went around for the first time, but when I was there at the party last night. It's all ‘typical' rather than actually things of theirs. ‘Their bedrooms must have looked rather like this,' rather than ‘This is Susannah's bed, this is her bedside table.' Most of it could have been picked up for a song—probably was. But I can see the difficulties, and I suppose he's hoping that genuine stuff will turn up.”

“Hmmm. I may say I recognised nothing from my visits as a child. To me it was more like a stage set than a museum. What is he getting out of it, do you suppose?”

“Search me. He's not going to make a fortune from admission charges. It's hardly Haworth, as he said yesterday. I imagine the farm was probably going cheap, with agriculture in the state it's in at the moment, but still . . .”

“But still, indeed. I take it he sees it as the shrine of a new cult. But a very minor one, surely. I just don't see what's in it for
him
, Dexter.”

“Nor,” said Charlie grimly, “do I.”

“And we're agreed there must be something, aren't we?”

“It seems likely,” said Charlie, more guardedly.

“That's what you're here for, isn't it?”

“No comment, as politicians ought to say when people make allegations about their sex life.”

Lettie got out a note to pay the taxi driver, and looked meaningfully at the man, who was now a friend.

“And you haven't heard a word of this conversation, Len.”

“I haven't. Any more than I heard any of the names you called your mother on the way back last night.”

“Too right. I'm glad we see eye to eye.”

The crowd milling around the village hall was much more animated and united than it had been the first morning. As Charlie helped Lettie out of the taxi he saw the two ladies who had been making sentimental remarks about Susannah Sneddon, the devoted gardener and flower-lover. He whispered to Lettie:

“Are you ‘coming out' today?”

“What can you mean?”

“As someone who knew the Sneddons?”

“I was thinking of saying something at the meeting.”

“Good. You could become the Fellowship's mascot. Or perhaps its bête noir. Anyway, there are these people I want you to meet.” And leading her over to the sentimental pair, he introduced her: “Ladies, this is Lettie Farraday, from New York. I mentioned her to you yesterday: born and brought up here in Micklewike. She used to go up with her mother to clean for Susannah Sneddon.”

He saw the suspicion in their eyes change to greedy interest: they were in the presence of one who had touched greatness. He thought he heard the flapping of large wings.
He stood there for only a second or two, but even so the questions had begun tumbling out: “Did you really? What was she like? What was her relationship with her brother really like? Did they row?” As he moved away he thought to himself that he would rather like to know the answer to that last question. And as he surveyed the smiling, chattering throng, and saw several members of the new Fellowship dart over and join in the inquisition of Lettie, a further thought occurred to him. Lettie was ‘coming out' today, but effectively as far as the village was concerned she had been ‘out' since Friday evening. Mr Suzman had close contacts with the village: he had been frequently in the area while setting up the Museum—that much Charlie had been told at Scotland Yard. So someone from the village, probably Mrs Marsden or Mrs Cardew, the woman who was acting as Secretary, must surely have told him that at the Weekend there was a woman who had known Susannah Sneddon, had known the interior of the farm while she lived there. Yet he had made no attempt to contact Lettie.

Odd.

He moved over to the group around Gerald Suzman, which consisted mostly of the Coggenhoe family. He braved the looks of hostility from the great author and his wife and grinned at Felicity—a grin that expressed appreciation of their time together the previous evening. Then he stood listening. It was Mr Suzman who was doing most of the talking.

“Yes, indeed, a
very
busy weekend. But exhilarating tool Glad when it's over? Not at all, dear lady. But perhaps a little relieved that it's all gone so well. I shall relax tonight in my cottage in Oxenthorpe with a bottle of my favourite Alsace, and perhaps soothe myself with Mozart's last and greatest opera.”

“
The Magic Flute
?” hazarded Mary Coggenhoe.

“No, no, dear lady:
La Clemenza di Tito
.”

Phoney! thought Charlie, moving away. He didn't know much about Mozart's operas, but he did know that his greatest was not one nobody had heard of. Still, the phoniness of Mr Gerald Suzman was not in doubt: the question was what particular piece of trompe l'oeil he was fabricating here in Micklewike.

Charlie led the drift back into the hall, and once again took his place towards the back. The opening part of the meeting was mainly formal: the Fellowship was set up, an interim constitution was established, and an Executive Council voted into being. Mr Suzman proposed a lean, active Council of five members, to get the Fellowship off the ground. He put forward five names, and these were agreed from the floor: Rupert Coggenhoe seemed to be there to represent Literature; Randolph Sneddon was there to represent Family; Gillian Parkin was there to represent Academic Research; the lady who acted as Secretary, Mrs Cardew, was there to represent Micklewike; and Mr Suzman was there as the Founding Father.