Fete Fatale (6 page)

I often said to Marcus that his religion was inherited. This was quite unfair, for his religion was deep-rooted and sincere. It was his busy-ness in Church matters that was inherited. His father was a schoolteacher and churchwarden who, to his family's surprise, took orders late in life and died in a small parish in the Midlands. Marcus had spent all his life, from choirboy days on, doing things
in and for the Church. It was impossible for him now to wash his hands and say that things would have to take their course; that Father Battersby was the Bishop's appointee, that he, Marcus, had done all he could to make the appointment acceptable to Hexton-on-Weir, and that now they'd just have to see how things worked out. It just wasn't in Marcus to do that. The next morning, after surgery, he went to have it out with Mary.

I heard about the interview in a somewhat fragmented fashion. By chance I met during the morning an old colleague from the High School in Ripon, and we arranged to have lunch in the Chinese Restaurant. We were deep in the menu, and Mr Li was bending over us and indulging in his ‘You like sweet-sour plawns?' talk (outside the restaurant he spoke broad Australian English, but he claimed it disconcerted the tourists if he did it at his place of business, so he maintained a cheerfully split personality); and thus we did not notice when Mary and Thyrza Primp came in and took the table next to ours. The restaurant, by the way, was quite half empty. When I looked up I'm sure my face revealed my displeasure. I'm equally sure that this pleased Mary, who felt she had somehow made a point. She leaned across to me, with a brave smile that was adapted from the one that was part of her funeral mien.

‘Your Marcus has been most unkind to me today,' she said. ‘He accused me of making a great fuss about trivialities. I wish you could make him see that matters of faith are not to be characterized as trivial. Especially by one who is a churchwarden.'

I smiled in steely fashion, and turned back to my friend without a word. I'd had Mary Morse. Mary and Thyrza, ostentatiously
not
lowering their voices, began talking about hiring a bus every Sunday to ferry the orthodox to St Mary's, in Shipford. This project, which became known to the amorphous opposition to Mary's doings as the ‘God bus' or the ‘Godmobile' later became the subject of much ridicule, I'm pleased to say.

Marcus told me a little more that evening.

‘I told her that she'd got too little to do, and she was filling up her time by making a great fuss about nothing . . . I think I also said she was a bit of a trouble-maker, and that she should stop thinking of herself as the keeper of the town's conscience.'

‘Not bad,' I said, ‘though erring on the side of mildness, as usual with you. Did you actually lose your temper?'

‘I didn't explode in a great fuss-fumble, if that's what you mean,' said Marcus, with a grin. ‘I lost it enough to give her a piece of my mind.'

‘I saw her later, so I won't bother to ask if it had any effect.'

‘I did extract a promise that when Father Battersby came for the fête, he would be courteously received.'

‘A fat lot of good such a promise will be,' I said dismissively. ‘Courtesy comes in a variety of temperatures, particularly for Thyrza. She lowers her temperature automatically for Methodists. For Father Battersby it's going to feel like solitary confinement in Siberia. You realize that in the Chinese restaurant today they were discussing laying on a bus to Shipford every Sunday?'

‘Damn those women!' shouted Marcus, banging his pipe down on the fireplace so hard that he broke the stem. ‘If Mary wants a fight, I'll fight her! I'm going to make sure the man is properly received, and has a congregation to come to!'

‘Hmmm,' I said. ‘I should start organizing one of those armed bodyguards American presidents have if you want the man to see sunset on the day of the fête.'

The fête, you notice, was now beginning to loom large in the calendar of Hexton's Anglicans. It was always the big event in June, held in a marquee on the meadows beneath the castle. Marcus had suggested that this year I might organize it, but I had jibbed. I am not a pillar of the Church of England, merely a minor buttress. Thyrza Primp could not do it, being occupied with moving her snuffy odds and ends to the happy haven of Harrogate. Mary, in her bereaved state, could not, since a fête was essentially festive (though remembering some of the earlier Hexton fêtes I had been to, I felt this argument had very little weight to it). Thus the job fell to Franchita Culpepper and Mrs Mipchin. Franchita returned from her visit to the dentist like a giant refreshed, and repolished. She threw herself into organizing the event with a ferocious energy that was quite terrifying, and would have been excessive if she had been arranging the Edinburgh Tattoo. Wheedling, cajoling, threatening, bullying, everything was done in a tremendous whirl, and up and down the wynds of Hexton people began to shrink inside the doorways of their old stone houses when
they saw Franchita coming. Mrs Mipchin burrowed along industriously in her wake.

I was beginning, in fact, to find Mrs Mipchin useful. I, inevitably, was involved in a minor way with the fête. I call it a fête, but it is really a mixture of bazaar, bring-and-buy sale, and fairground. There are outdoor games and indoor games, to provide for both kinds of weather, and stalls selling all imaginable kinds of things, from baby clothes to homemade coconut ice. The aim of the sensible attender was to get rid of a lot of his own unwanted rubbish, without acquiring any of somebody else's, but you had to be really strong of mind or short of purse to manage that. The outdoor games were mostly macho affairs of the trial-of-strength kind, by which the local boys and the lads from the army camp vied with each other to impress the local girls. The indoor ones were more varied. Last year I had run a roulette-type game that had brought a faintly wicked whiff of the casino to Hexton. This year, so as not to associate the pro-Battersby party with even the faintest suspicion of moral laxity, I opted to run the ‘Antiques and Nearly' stall with Mr Horsforth, the Grammar School headmaster, father of the ineffable Timothy. This was, of course, the junk stall, and as everyone said, ‘It was surprising what you could pick up' (if you weren't careful). Anyway, in the run-up to the fête, I was on occasion thrown into the company of Mrs Mipchin, and, as I say, she proved useful.

She was a woman totally devoid of humour. She made Mrs Thatcher sound like a stand-up comic. Rigid, narrow-minded and dull, she walked all her days veiled in the dreariest garb of propriety and respectability. So totally incapable was she of detecting irony that I found I could drop into the conversation suggestions for the most outrageous courses of action for the anti-Battersby party. Provided these were not reported to Franchita (and Franchita was busy for much of the time, hallooing up hill and down dale, lassooing in helpers and netting home produce of all kinds), these suggestions might get straight back to Mary or Thyrza Primp, who were similarly devoid of humour, and then be seriously canvassed. I would say, ‘I'm surprised Mary doesn't get up a petition to British Rail to reopen the station for a Sunday service to Shipford.' Or: ‘Of course the Archbishop of Canterbury is the ultimate court of appeal.' The fact that Mary and her committee
could so gravely discuss such absurd ideas resulted in a great deal of rough bucolic scoffing, and did great harm to their cause.

I was enlisting myself, you notice, into the Battersby cause. I suppose I did so for Marcus's sake, and because I so detested Mary Morse and Thyrza Primp. I had certainly liked Father Battersby (though in general I prefer a more comfortable sort of man), but I had a suspicion that he would not thank anyone for organizing support for him. I rather thought he felt he could carry off things perfectly well on his own account when he took up the living.

So that was the position as the day of the fête approached. On the one hand stood Mary, Thyrza, Franchita, Mrs Mipchin, and a band of like-minded souls, well- or ill-meaning. I would not want you to think that the tide was turning against Mary. Hexton was a town afflicted with a kind of mental sciatica, and most of its inhabitants were always two or three steps behind everyone else. Change of any kind being suspect, they were not likely to welcome the new ways and views that Father Battersby represented. Nor were they any too bright: I came to believe that the word ‘celibate' conjured up for them all sorts of steamy but ill-defined images that made them wonder how he could have managed hitherto to keep out of the Sunday papers.

On the other side stood Marcus, Colonel Weston, and a large, amorphous group of people who had no particular feelings about ceremonial versus evangelical plainness, or indeed about celibacy, but who resented being dictated to by a middle-aged, middle-class woman who arrogated to herself the right to set the tone for Hexton. This group, as I say, was amorphous, but they looked into each other's eyes and recognized their fellowship. Marcus did as little as possible overt recruiting, but the Blatchleys, with whom Father Battersby was staying for the fête, were more shamelessly drumming up support, so that experts were predicting that Father Battersby's first service would have the largest congregation seen in Hexton for years, and the most working-class. It was all mildly exciting, as well as decidedly amusing.

One day in late May, a week or so before the fête, I was walking Jasper on the path around the castle. Hexton Castle is in ruins, or nearly so, and of course it looks much better that way. The path is high and shady, with precipitous descents down to the weir, and a
fine view of the meadows. The descents meant that I had to keep a sharp eye on Jasper, which I have to do in any case: he is a dog of quite undiscriminating sexuality, who is liable to throw himself on top of dog, bitch, squirrel or fox. He is a lovable black mongrel, an RSPCA £10 Special Offer. Marcus never said so openly, but he was upset by the cruelty involved in a lot of dog-breeding. Anyway, mongrels are healthier, and he said he was damned if he was going to spend his home time physicking his own dog.

The first person I met on Castle Walk this particular day was Mr Mipchin—he of the Crippen moustache and the much-suppressed sense of humour. It was nice to think he had emerged from his career as a tax man with no manic passion about Clause 94, subsection 23A (iv), and that there might lurk a real and quirky person somewhere there, if only he were allowed out. On this occasion, he actually nudged me in the ribs.

‘I suspect you're being naughty, Mrs K,' he said, his moustaches bobbing up and down like walrus leaping for fish.

‘Why, Mr Mipchin,' I replied, in traditional style, ‘whatever can you mean?'

‘Having my good lady on is what I mean. And all the other good ladies too.'

‘I don't think I know any good ladies,' I said.

‘ “Unco, guid”, as my wife's fellow-countryman once said. I suspect you're leading them on! Well, I must say, I like a good blowup. All adds a touch of spice to life, eh? eh?'

And he toddled off round the curve, chuckling asthmatically. Another secret sympathizer, I thought; another member of the underground resistance, terrified into apparent submission by Hexton's SS.

Amusing myself with the thought of how much
secret
support Father Battersby would have by the time he arrived in Hexton, and wondering whether any of it could be harnessed into action, I walked on from the precipitous paths around the north wall of the castle, and down the pleasanter slopes back towards town. And the next person I bumped into was Marcus—standing near the steps down to Castle Wynd, and talking to my partner-to-be on the junk stall, Mr Horsforth.

I knew Mr Horsforth quite well, because I am on the County's list of supply teachers, and I quite often have had spells filling in at
the Hexton Grammar School (as we still called it, though the powers-that-be had altered it to something more democratic-sounding). Mr Horsforth was tall, bony, authoritarian and fond of the sound of his own voice. He gave the rest of the world the feeling that they would have trouble living up to
his
standards. ‘Silly little boy' was his favourite expression of rebuke to his pupils, and he gave teachers the impression that he would like to say something similar to them. As I said, Timothy—he of the fair hair and the long, loving fox-trot around Hexton with Fiona Weston—was his son, and on the infrequent occasions when I felt charitable, I had to admit that the role could not have been an easy one. He had had a wife, thin, wispy and self-effacing, but she had slipped out of the world apologetically some five or six years before.

I let Jasper off the lead to romp around the castle slopes with Smokey, Mr Horsforth's humorous Old English sheepdog, who, like Jasper, was a dog of rampant sexuality. I watched them for a moment, like a voyeur, then I joined the men.

No prizes for guessing what they were discussing.

‘She is being incredibly childish,' said Mr Horsforth, in his thin, precise voice. ‘Stirring up trouble, driving the town into opposing camps, and generally behaving like someone in a Victorian novel. Somebody should tell her.'

‘I have,' said Marcus. ‘You could try doing the same, if you liked. It's like banging your head against the Tower of London.'

‘I'm afraid she wouldn't acknowledge
my
having any right to lay down the law for her,' said Mr Horsforth, his voice regretful of human perversity. ‘I suppose the only one who might have done that was Walter Primp.'

‘And he was too weak to try,' I put in. ‘Mary and Franchita and Co. get away with murder because nobody stands up to them.' I looked up towards the castle walls, where Jasper was giving a new meaning to the song. ‘On Top of Old Smokey'. ‘Oh, Jasper—
really!'

‘Smokey! Here! At once! Heel! Heel, boy!'

Mr Horsforth, having demonstrated his authority over his dog, in default of being able to do it over Mary, smiled thinly at me and went on: