Twelve Drummers Drumming (3 page)

He half expected a response, but Mrs. Pike continued to smile at him in her faintly robotic way.

There was even a little stand for it, he noted on the table. Just like his.

“How much is it?”

“Oh, Father, why don’t you just have it.” She had a girlish voice, at odds with her age and her anxious bearing.

“I couldn’t do that …”

“Well.” Joyce hesitated. “Five pounds, then.”

“I’ll give you twenty,” Tom responded brightly, reaching again into his pocket. “I’m that chuffed. I never thought I’d find another one like it in my life.”

Joyce received two ten-pound notes in silence. Tom studied her a moment as she placed the money in an open cashbox. Thin-faced, sombre-eyed, devoid of makeup, apparently oblivious to hairstyle (it was a sort of grey mop-end), she had the look of a woman either
long suffering or long depressed. Her son, Charlie, was in his new confirmation class—a very sharp, if somewhat gauche, lad. Tom could hardly believe sometimes that Fred and Joyce, late in life, had spawned this bright fish.

“You’ll want a carrier bag for that,” Joyce said, offering him a used but neatly folded plastic Sainsbury’s version that she pulled from a box on a chair beside her.

“Yes, thanks.” Tom reached for the bag and carefully slipped the egg and its stand into it. It was then that he felt an arm slide into his open elbow.

“B
onjour, Papa.”

“Bonjour, ma petite pamplemousse,”
Tom replied, regarding his daughter with a burst of pure pleasure. Miranda, who had been very attached to their French au pair, Ghislaine Poirier, when they had lived in Bristol, was reading Nancy Drew novels in
la belle langue
, only the heroine was called “Alice Roy” because the French, apparently, were unable to pronounce “Nancy” or, possibly, “Drew.” Tom’s French, indifferently learned at school, ran largely to half-remembered bits out of Whitmarsh’s awful textbooks and phrases picked up busking through Europe when he was younger.

“Have you met Mrs. Pike? Her husband fixed our washer.”

“Hello,” Miranda responded brightly, peeking around his jacket. Then she looked up at him. “What did you buy?”

“You’ll never guess.” He nodded good-bye to Mrs. Pike. “It’s a china egg. Just like the one your mum gave me. The one that I lost. Do you remember me trying to find it when we first moved into the vicarage?”

“Yes,” she replied, slipping her arm from his and taking the carrier
bag. She reached inside and half pulled the egg out. She studied it a moment, then asked: “Did you buy it at Mrs. Pike’s stall?”

“Yes.” Tom brushed a loose strand of hair off her forehead.

Miranda glanced behind her, then tugged her father forwards. “Daddy,” she began in a whisper, “this isn’t just like the one you lost.”

“But—”

“It
is
the one you lost.”

“What?”

Miranda smiled as though in possession of the biggest secret in the world. “Mr. Pike is a kleptomaniac.”

“That’s a big word for—”

“Emily told me,” Miranda interrupted excitedly, full of the power of knowledge. “Mr. Pike takes things when he’s on the job—he can’t help himself—and every year Mrs. Pike sells them back to their owners at the white-elephant stall.” Her smile grew wider. “Isn’t it funny? No one seems to mind, Emily says … except if he takes your television remote.”

“And the money goes to the church.” Tom resisted the urge to look back at Joyce Pike and the white-elephant stall. Funny indeed, he thought, ruing spending twenty pounds on something that was already his. “What if the owner needs it back desperately?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does he ever take anything that’s worth a lot of money?”

“Emily didn’t say.” Miranda frowned in thought as she handed him back the Sainsbury’s bag.

“Well, never mind. I’ve got my curate’s egg back and that’s the important thing. Where is Emily, by the way?”

“Gone to help her sister get ready.”

“Ah,” Tom responded, glancing towards the pole that had been set up in the centre of Purton Farm. Its ribbons fluttered in the breeze off the river. “Well, maybe you’ll be queen of the May some year soon, like Lucy Swan.”

“I hope not. It’s
feudal
.”

“Does Emily think that?”

“No, I do. I think Emily wants to be queen of the May someday.”

Tom was relieved to hear Miranda wasn’t shy of her own views. Since coming to Thornford Regis, she had fallen in quickly with the swarming brood of sociable Swans, who seemed to absorb one more into their family activity with barely a notice. It had been two months of breathless “Emily says” and “Emily thinks” from Miranda. It was almost like watching someone fall in love, he thought, not without a pang for his own situation: young (relatively), widowed, alone, lonely at times (even with a child), so much missing Lisbeth, who had vanished from his side so abruptly, too soon. Before his wife’s death, he had sometimes suspected Miranda disliked being a child and detested not being able to take care of herself—traits that seemed to serve her well (and Tom, who could barely manage his own grief) in the weeks and months after Lisbeth was killed. He was relieved to see her embrace childhood (or at least his idea of childhood) in league with the Swans, although he couldn’t resist fretting at times that in a few years it would all be over. She would be a teenager, all the sweetness drained away.

“Shall we have ice cream?” he suggested, deciding this was not the day to brood on such things, motioning towards the stall that Liam Drewe, the owner of the Waterside Café, had set up.

“Have you seen the quilts Mrs. Drewe has hung in the village hall?” Miranda asked, skipping ahead. “They’re brilliant. I even think you’re in one, Papa.”

“How could I be in a quilt?” Tom rummaged in his pocket for coins.

“Then you haven’t seen them. Let’s go look at them.”

“Well—”

“They’re memory quilts,” Miranda rushed on. “Mrs. Drewe takes pictures, then scans them onto … cotton, I think, then makes the quilt. We took one of the brochures.” She rooted in her own pocket. “Oh, I must have given it to Emily.” Her face fell. “Anyway,
the quilts are all of the village. There’s the school and the hall and the church …” Miranda rattled off a half dozen of the village’s landmarks. “… And, in one, it looks like you coming out of the pub.”

Startled, Tom said, “Really?”

“It must have been when we visited here last year. You’re with Aunt Julia. You’re just coming through the pub doors.”

“We must have been leaving Red Ned’s wake. How odd. I don’t remember—” And then he did. When he and Julia left the pub, a trim Japanese woman was photographing the exterior. He had barely registered it at the time, assuming she was a tourist who had strayed from the pack that Japanese tourists seemed to travel in. Now he realised: Of course, the woman was Mitsuko Drewe, Liam’s wife.

Well, he thought, as they joined the short queue at Liam Drewe’s stall, immortalised in fabric! Ought he to be gratified?

Liam Drewe was suffering the indecisiveness of Enid Pattimore, whose son owned the village shop. His lips were pinched and his eyelids had descended to tight crescents, as if he were silently compelling Enid to choose between vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. He noted Tom, more than a head’s height behind the tiny, bent figure, and forced a quick acknowledging smile. “C’mon, love,” he addressed the old woman with barely concealed impatience, “vicar’s waiting.”

“Oh, dear, I’m awfully sorry,” Enid murmured, twisting her neck to take in Tom’s presence. “I think, oh, perhaps strawberry would do.…”

“Wise—”

“No! Chocolate. Yes, definitely chocolate.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Wise choice.” Liam jammed his scoop into the tub of ice cream like a man thrusting a spade into hard ground. On his first visit to the Waterside over a year ago, Tom had noted the letters A C A B
tattooed between the knuckle and first joint of each finger on Liam’s left hand when he’d taken Tom’s money at the till. He knew what the letters stood for. The fingers of one man in his Kennington parish were similarly rendered. His parishioner had been in The Scrubs for armed robbery and had been leading a pious life since. He told Tom they were prison tattoos.

That cool April day a year ago, Liam had been wearing long sleeves. Now, on this warm May day, he was wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt. Tom couldn’t help staring at the carapace of tattoos—an Eden of vines and flowers and fish and birds that coiled up the sinewy forearms, along the meaty biceps, to disappear under the dark cloth, portending who knew what along his chest or down his back: mammals and man, perhaps, Adam and Eve, the creation story traced in ink on skin? Likely not. His Christian mind was at play. But it wasn’t the imagery that set his mind to wondering. It was putting up with all those bloody awful needles. He must have been lingering too long in his reverie, because only Miranda’s decisive response—“strawberry”—alerted him to his new place at the front of the queue.

“Vicar?” He heard Liam say.

“Um …”

Liam narrowed his eyes again.

“Is there anything besides vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry?”

“Are you trying to be funny?”

“Bad day?”

When Julia had filled Tom in on the village’s dramatis personae, “short-fused” had been her description for Liam Drewe. Verbal explosions in the Waterside kitchen, etc. “He’s not the ideal
mein host
when he’s mein hosting,” Julia had continued, “but luckily he has a very capable wife, who does some of the serving duties. That is, when she’s not running her little gallery or working on her own art or running the art classes at the village hall or trying to manage the usual tugs-of-war on the flower rota.”

“My wife’s had to go to Wales, and Sybella was supposed to be minding this stall,” Liam snapped, responding to Tom’s observation. “But she seems to have bloody gone missing.”

“Chocolate,” Tom said humbly, watching the arm once again dive into the iced confection. He recalled that he had never seen Liam in church. He had seen Mitsuko only intermittently, though she was indeed on the flower rota. As for the missing Sybella Parry, he had never expected to see a pew contain her. The girl left the impression, with her whiff of the Goth, that the dark arts were her cup of tea, but he had—to his surprise—in the last month. She came with her father and stepmother and didn’t look like she’d been dragged.

Tom took both cornets of ice cream from Liam, handed one to Miranda, and passed over a five-pound note. Liam tucked it into the pocket of his apron, but proffered no change. Tom should have received a pound coin in return, but he didn’t press the point: It was for charity, after all. But in the parting glance Liam cast him, Tom detected, just for the time it takes to split a second, a flash of the purest, blackest hatred.

Taken aback, he hustled Miranda away, pondering probable cause, but could find none, other than simply being despised for the uniform and what it represented. When Liam had taken the five pounds, Tom had noted again the acronym inked into his fingers. A C A B meant Always Carry A Bible—if the bearer was trying to make a good impression. That’s what the man in his Kennington parish had told him. What it really meant, he had said, was All Coppers Are Bastards. But what flitted through Tom’s mind now was this, improbable though it seemed: Liam had a special, private animosity. All coppers aren’t bastards.

All Clergy Are Bastards.

“S
ee!” Miranda gestured towards the quilt.

Tom watched his daughter’s finger, sticky with ice cream, nearly graze the soft fabric rectangle hanging from a rod in the larger of the village hall’s two public spaces. “Mind you don’t get anything on that,” he warned. But his attention was caught by the novelty before him.

Miranda shifted her attention to the fingers of her right hand and began licking them rather than the cornet in her left. “That
is
you and Aunt Julia,” she added for emphasis.

There was no mistaking it. Even with the lights off and the narrow east windows affording little illumination, the detail was remarkable. About eight feet by six feet, the quilt was large enough for a bed of decent size. The border was a patchwork of tawny golds and muted greens, like Devon’s countryside seen from the air, but the centre pane was the most arresting: It was an exterior view of the heart of Thornford Regis social life—the Church House Inn, with its white-daubed walls, black-lacquered window frames, and the tubs of spring blooms like sentries along the steps.