Fete Fatale (2 page)

‘No doubt I'm not,' I said. ‘I'm very stupid on church matters.'

Mary leaned forward dramatically.

‘The fact is, Father Battersby is a
celibate.'

She hissed it, very much as she might if she were accusing him of pederasty or leather-fetishism. I refrained from saying that so far as I knew her own life had not in its first forty-five or so years been marked by unremitting copulation.

‘Well,' I said, ‘that's hardly a matter that it would be easy to use as an objection.'

‘It most certainly is!' said Mary. ‘Father Battersby is not just a bachelor, which would be bad enough: he is a celibate on principle. So that, though he is quite a young man, there is no question of
there ever being a vicar's wife. Think of it! A celibate vicar is quite inconceivable here in Hexton. The parish revolves around the vicar's wife. What would Mr Primp have been without Thyrza? Nothing! Less than nothing! I can't imagine what the Bishop is thinking of. He has the disposal of the living.'

I shivered presciently. ‘What an unpleasant phrase.'

‘It simply means that the decision is his alone. But he should take account of the congregation's wishes. Has nobody made him aware of them?'

‘That would be Colonel Weston's job,' I said hurriedly. ‘He's the senior churchwarden.'

‘Quite. And one can only conclude that Colonel Weston has
not
been doing his job. That's why I do so want you to have a word with Marcus.'

‘Well, I'll certainly tell him how you feel about it,' I said dubiously. ‘I really have no idea of his views on the subject. I know he'll want to hear your views, if he knows you're worried.'

‘Not just
me
, dear. Please don't give him the idea that I'm being selfish or quirky about this. It's the whole parish who will object if the Bishop does dispose of us in such an unsuitable way. And
please
, Helen
dear, do
emphasize to Marcus that I've nothing personal against the
man.
Your husband is so good-natured—I'd hate him to think there was any feeling against Father Battersby
himself.
As a person.'

‘It's just his ritual and his wifelessness that's the problem. Yes, I'll make sure Marcus understands that.'

Mary gave me a long, cold stare.

‘From your tone, Helen, I rather gather that you're not taking this altogether seriously. Of course I know you're not a church person by birth, but I do think you might try to enter into Marcus's interests more thoroughly. I assure you, it's not something I'm taking up in any light spirit. I feel it
deeply.
I think I owe it to Mother's memory to do something about it.'

I sighed. If that was to be the line of argument, there was no opposing or ridiculing it. The matter of the new vicar had been declared a sacred cause by the spirit of the late Mrs Morse, the Blessed Gertrude. I saw through the dim gloom the grim set of Mary's thin lips. Mary, without a doubt, was to be the subject's leader and orchestrator, the protector of Middle Church against
the inroads of Popery. It was a role that Mrs Morse had often played in the past, for there was nothing ecumenical about her sort of Christian spirit, and now by some kind of apostolic succession it had descended on Mary. Even in her mother's lifetime, Mary had been no mean concerter of outrage. She it was who had spotted Hexton's first male ear-ring, she who had scotched the idea of bingo in the church hall, she who had had the trading licence revoked of the town's first and last video library. Now, it seemed, she was moving by natural progression to the central position she had always aspired to.

‘I'll talk to Marcus about it,' I said, feeling that I had done all that convention demanded, and getting to my feet. ‘Though of course, as you know, it's Colonel Weston who is the senior of the two churchwardens.'

‘Naturally I've spoken to Mrs Weston, but what can a wife do if her husband has no backbone? In my experience there is nothing so weak as a military man. I expect the Bishop rode roughshod over such protests as he saw fit to make.'

‘Well, if Colonel Weston has already been—' I was about to say ‘got at', but I drew back—‘approached, I don't suppose you will do much good with Marcus. He would never go behind the Colonel's back.'

‘It may be necessary to go behind the Colonel's back,' said Mary forcefully. We were at the sitting-room door, and she suddenly changed her tone. ‘Oh, Helen—I've just remembered that I wanted to talk to Marcus about Sophronia.'

Mary's manoeuvre was quite transparent: she saw that I was likely to be a lukewarm advocate, and she wanted to put her case herself. I looked at the easy chair where Sophronia Tibbles, a lazy and evil-minded Persian, dozed oblivious, dreaming dreams of the slow dismembering of mice.

‘She looks healthy enough.'

‘She's bringing up so much. I think maybe she's missing Mother. Of course normally I'd bring her to Marcus's surgery . . . '

‘All right,' I said, suppressing a sigh. ‘I'll tell him to call.' And I'll tell him there's nothing wrong with your damned cat too, I thought.

As we crossed the hall, Mary took up a couple of library books from the hall stand.

‘Oh, Helen, I wonder if you would be so kind as to return these two to the library? At the moment, of course . . . '

I felt I learned more and more about the minutiae of Hexton
mores
every day that I lived there. Now, after twelve years, I was discovering that it was not permitted to take your cat to the vet or to change your library book during the first fortnight of mourning. Was there some point, I wondered, some intermediate state of half-mourning, during which it was permitted to take your cat to the vet, but not to change your library books? It was no wonder, with a code of such subtlety, that I was stepping on toes from morning to night. I took the books from her and looked at them.

‘Oh, Barbara Pym, how nice. So restful, with all that church activity,' I said, with sardonic intent.

‘She's just a little too
modern
for me,' said Mary. ‘So little of what I'd call story, don't you feel? I can't see her ever replacing Angela Thirkell.'

‘She certainly won't
now,'
I said. ‘But I'm sure there's a waiting list at the library. And for the C. P. Snow, now that he's on television.' Mary had opened the front door a fraction, and I blinked as the murk was pierced by a shaft of sunlight. ‘Oh, splendid. The sun has come out.'

Mary was peering through a crack in the door.

‘Oh dear—
look
at Roote. How vexatious. He has no
idea
of how to prune. Men simply shouldn't be allowed to do it—they're nowhere
near
ruthless enough. Will you tell him as you go by, Helen: cut
closer.
Tell him he won't do any good by being so timid.'

It was typical of Mary, and typically aggravating, that she should have a gardener called Roote, that she should pay him less and get more work out of him than any of the rest of us in Hexton, and that she wasn't even pleasant to him.

‘I suppose I can try, though I don't think Roote will want me telling him his business . . . Well, goodbye, Mary. I'm glad you're getting over things, and beginning to take an interest. I do hope you will come round and have a little supper with us when—' I wanted to say ‘when the statutory period of court mourning is over', but I concluded lamely: ‘when things have sorted themselves out for you.'

‘I shall love to. Of course at the moment I'm still feeling Mother's loss . . .
terri
bly.' She dabbed at her eyes. ‘But I mustn't forget
that in the future I shall be freer, freer to do more. And freer to take an interest in the town. Mother's going was a release for her, but in a way it was one for me too. Now that she's gone, I can really be myself.'

Contemplating the new Mary as I walked down the driveway, I wondered whether that was really such a good idea.

It was brought home to me in the following few days just how little Mary's ability to organize outrage was impaired by the exigencies of Hexton's mourning customs. It was the week before Easter, and perhaps that put religion into people's minds, though really the spirit in which they went about it seemed more akin to the people who cried ‘Crucify him!' than to anything I would care to call Christian. In the places where people met in Hexton they appeared to be talking of little else, and with a relish for the fray that seemed to recall the days of bare-fisted prize-fighting.

Hexton-on-Weir is a town of stone houses, most of them very old and slightly cramped, centred around a town square which is not a square, but a highly irregular form unknown to geometry. In the centre of this square is a church, a fine building which has fallen into disuse as a place of worship, and has been turned into a museum to a famous regiment whose barracks are a few miles out of town. The present parish church is now a smaller one, in a hollow to the east of the town centre. The other most notable architectural feature of the town is the castle, situated on a promontory, surrounded by a path, and overlooking a steep descent to the river and the weir. The castle probably had some military purpose at the time it was built, but if so it has never served it. Its only brief importance in seven hundred years was when Mary of Scots bed-and-breakfasted there during her English imprisonment. From the path around the castle, a favourite with dog-walkers and, in the evenings, with courting couples, one can see the meadows, where many sporting events take place, and where various social and horticultural functions are held in the summer
months. For the rest, the old part of the town meanders up and down hill, in streets that are called ‘wynds'—thigh-torturing streets they are, too, to the tourists who are not used to them, though they seem to produce in the residents a certain hardiness which no doubt contributes to their longevity.

The classes mingle, in Hexton, but in an aware, slightly prickly way, such as used to be common, my parents told me, in wartime. Hexton is, in its modest way, an anachronism, which the modern world intrudes on cautiously. Tourists come in summer, but as they rarely stay longer than overnight they make only a passing impact. The barracks, eight miles away, sends its high-spirited, loud-voiced youth into town at weekends, to drink, play billiards, and chat up such local girls as there are. My husband once told me that in the gents' loo in the centre are scrawled various suggestions as to how ‘lads' can earn £5 to £10 in a simple and undemanding way; but whether they ever take advantage of these offers—and who makes them—I have no idea. In general, Hexton takes the military in its stride, though it grumbles and calls them names; and at moments of national crisis, such as the Falklands affair, they readily cover them with a halo of patriotic warmth, and talk about ‘our gallant boys', where previously they had been ‘those hooligans'.

Similarly with racial minorities. Black or brown faces were seldom to be seen in Hexton, but many of the corner shops on the outskirts were owned and run by Indians or Uganda Asians, and ‘men of colour' also ran one or two of the restaurants and takeaway food places, as well as the splendid delicatessen on the square. These immigrants were all so quiet and obliging, and were so respectful in their demeanour, that they were unhesitatingly voted an asset to the town, and gave the middle-class residents a quite delicious sense of après-Raj.

It was in the delicatessen owned and superbly run by Mr Ahmed Hussein that I first realized the extent of the trouble that Mary Morse was brewing up. Hexton is full of off-licences and undertakers, but Mr Hussein's is the only delicatessen, and he is generally found to be quite indispensable—especially at such a time as Easter, when modest entertainments are planned, and something a little special is called for. As usual, Mr Hussein stood behind his refrigerated counter, beaming over the cheeses, the pâtés and the
salami at Mrs Nielson, a widow recently arrived in Hexton; while in the self-service part of the shop stood Mrs Franchita Culpepper with her Rottweiler puppy Oscar, brought in in blithe disregard of the ‘No dogs
PLEASE'
notice on the door. Oscar was built like a tank, but gazed out on the world with eager amiability, ever ready to wag his rump and the stump of his tail. Mrs Culpepper could also, as she surged through town, put one in mind of a tank—but in her case a more aggressive variety, for she usually showed a ferocious eagerness for the fray—any fray.

‘I hear Mary's going to nobble your Marcus,' she brayed at me, baring her splendid array of teeth as she waded straight in, as was her wont. ‘And quite right too. Never heard such a silly proposal. The congregation simply won't stand for it.'

Mrs Culpepper was to my certain knowledge an Easter communicant and not much more at St Edward the Confessor's, our parish church. But though I had a sneaking fondness for her, I also had the general awe, and I did not remind her of this.

‘I must say I can't work up any great enthusiasm for the cause,' I said.

‘
That
I heard, too,' boomed Franchita. ‘You're wrong, you know. I wouldn't trust one of those celibate clergymen an inch. First thing you know, he'll be arrested for feeling up a plain-clothes policeman in a Soho club. Or he'll want to do a drag act at the church social. No, no: it just won't do at all.'

‘Aren't you rather prejudging the poor man?'

‘Not at all. Once upon a time gentlemen used to go into the church, if they hadn't any money and couldn't do any better for themselves. Not any more. There are so many weird types getting ordained these days that you've got to be damned careful if you're going to get one who's half-way sane. If it's not sex, it's nuclear disarmament or poverty in the Third World. What we want here is a good, safe, sane, middle-of-the-road man, with a nice, dowdy wife who wears hats.'