An Affair to Remember (8 page)

He and Clarrie met again on the day following the puncture episode, in a pub on the main Belchester road. After a couple of drinks they’d made love in the back of Jack’s Volvo, and for Clarrie, despite the discomfort of being cramped in the back seat of a car, their lovemaking had been a revelation. After it she had felt wild and wicked, and more alive that she had for months. Before they parted Jack had given her a card with the phone number of the pub he stayed in when in the area, and although hating herself for it, when she and Sel finally moved in to Brown End, she had rung him. That was how it had started; how it would end, heaven only knew.

“Clarrie, for heaven’s sake come down and get off the phone. I’m expecting a call from the States any minute, and anyway that wretched girl might ring, she’s already half an hour late.” Sel stands at the bottom of the stairs, he’s wearing his heavy hornrims and an ancient cardigan: he looks harassed. A smell of sub-Mediterranean food emanates from the kitchen. Juan, their Spanish chef, (also doubling as butler, manservant and general factotum) will no doubt once again threaten to give in his notice if he has to keep lunch back much longer.

“Perhaps we shouldn’t wait, Juan can heat something up for the new girl when she finally decides to arrive.” Clarrie ignores Sel’s remark about a call from the States, there won’t be one, she knows; he’s been expecting it every day since they moved in.

“I could do with a drink first,” Sel, removing his spectacles, leads the way into their enormous sitting room. Once the farmhouse kitchen and adjacent pantry, the room retains its massive inglenook fireplace, but the two casement windows that faced on to the garden and the road to the village have been replaced with massive patio doors. Actually, they’d had a lot of trouble with the listed buildings people over these, but got their way in the end – Sel, despite his slipping celebrity status, still had friends in high places – and now wished they hadn’t. Expensive rugs are scattered here and there on the floor over the original Suffolk pammets; carefully re-laid, sealed and polished by Clarrie’s minions. (The minions would no doubt have been greatly surprised to learn that if they’d dug a little deeper, they’d have hit the garish but equally, in its time, expensive, Roman mosaic pavement Marcus Gaetulicus’s minions – in his case, slaves – laid down when enlarging his state-of-the art villa in the year AD 346.)

Sel goes over to the mini bar in the corner (quite ghastly, what could Giles have been thinking about – it’ll have to go of course), and pours them both a gin and tonic. “Where has the bloody woman got to?”

“Perhaps she’s lost the way.”

“Nonsense, she couldn’t have. I gave her the most concise directions.”

“Well you know how you always pick your women for their beauty rather than their brains –”

“Balls! Are you implying you have no brains?” Drink in hand, he walks over to the window. “Oh God, what now? There’s a tractor turning in at the gate; looks like Josh Bogg. Does he have to choose lunchtime to unload his manure – honestly these people. Get rid of him quickly darling, I’m not in the mood for dealing with groundlings.”

“It’s not manure, he’s got a passenger,” Clarrie’s looking too, “and what’s more I think it’s your new secretary.” Together they watch as Josh and his tractor, instead of keeping on towards the yard at the back of the house, turn left into the newly laid gravel sweep in front of the house, scattering wisps of straw and mud in the process.

Sel watches, interested in spite of himself, as Beatrice, looking somewhat dishevelled, is handed down from the tractor cab by a grinning Josh. “Action stations!” He puts down his drink, straightens his cardigan and after a quick look in the Georgian mirror over the fireplace, all smiles, hurries to the front door, arms outstretched. “My dear, welcome to Brown End, what a delightfully original mode of transport. Clarrie, darling – our new helper.”

Early evening: Beatrice sits in a chair by the window of her bedsitter looking out at the view: a wild and straggly farmhouse garden (naturally scheduled for rejuvenation but still well down on Clarrie’s priorities list) slopes gently downwards to the flat, tussocky field that borders the little river. The river, not much more than a wide stream whose name, if it ever had one, no one seems to know, is a tributary of the Levit, the river that runs through Kimbleford, and joins it a couple of miles up the valley. Though narrow it’s quite deep in places and there are plenty of fish. You often see a heron there, sometimes even a kingfisher. To the left of her view a high stone wall divides the garden from the lane; she can just see the humped-backed bridge over which it passes before climbing the hill on its way to the village. If she screws up her eyes against the setting sun she can make out the clump of trees at the top of the hill where she’d met Major Mallory, and despite the warmth of the evening she shivers. What made her call him Brian? She didn’t know his first name, how could she? He hadn’t looked surprised either, which too was odd. Perhaps he hadn’t heard her? Somehow, though, she knows he had.

Admittedly after that things returned to some sort of normality. She’d explained as best she could what had happened. He’d said he didn’t know too much about cars, but would she like him to have a look, and she’d said yes. Together they’d lifted the bonnet and after peering doubtfully into the Mini’s seething interior, gave up and shut it again; apart from baffling them both, the heat and fumes were overpowering. “I’m afraid,” she’d said, “it needs a garage. It passed its MOT only a few weeks ago, but I have had a bit of trouble with it lately, and it doesn’t seem to like these hills. The problem is this couldn’t have happened at a worse time. I’m on my way to start a new job with the Woodheads at Brown End, and we arranged I’d be there for lunch.”

“Oh dear,” he’d said, screwing up his eyes against the sun and smiling at her – and she had to admit he did have a lovely smile – “so you’re going to work for Selwyn Woodhead, are you?”

“You know him?”

“Not from the TV, although my wife’s a fan,” (he has a wife then) “but I’ve had dealings with him; I happen to be the village grocer.”

“Oh.” She knew you shouldn’t stereotype people, but he didn’t look like a village grocer; more like… She didn’t know really what, but then nothing at the moment was as it should be.

“Actually I haven’t been in the grocery business long, for my sins, I’m ex-army. Look, I’m sorry I can’t offer you a lift, the best I can do is ring the local garage – Battersby’s out on the main road are pretty good, I use them myself – as soon as I get home, and if you like, ring the Woodheads at the same time and let them know what’s happened. They might even send a car to collect you – unless, that is, you’d like to walk back with me?”

Oh dear, she was beginning to feel odd again, had the feeling he was, too. Why were they talking of such mundane matters when there were other, much more important things to discuss? She looked nervously over her shoulder to see if the rook was still there; he was. A cloud passed over the sun, Major Mallory seemed to be getting blurred, was she? What was he saying? Why were they there, what was happening? She couldn’t cope with all this, it was too much, too… Then, thank God, the spell was broken by the welcome everyday sound of a tractor breasting the hill behind them.

“We’re in luck,” the major looked as relieved as she felt, “it must be Josh Bogg on his way back to the farm for his dinner, he goes right past Brown End – if you don’t mind arriving at your new job in a tractor, that is?

“Morning Major, got a spot of bother have we?”

“Well yes, this lady’s car’s given up the ghost and she’s trying to get to Brown End…” So it was settled. She was handed up into the cab of the tractor together with her luggage, Radio Belchester blaring away in the background, Josh and the major pushed the Mini on to the grass verge at the side of the road, and they were off. Peering out of the cab’s rather murky rear window, she smiled and mouthed her thanks at the major, who smiled back, raising his arm in a sort of farewell salute, she thought he said something, but of course she couldn’t hear what, then they were away round a bend in the road and he’d disappeared from sight.

Their descent into the valley had been fun, exhilarating even, and she had laughed as they bounced over the little bridge at the bottom of the hill. Josh was plainly agog with curiosity, but what with Radio Belchester and the noise of the tractor, any conversation was difficult, not to say impossible. She managed to make out a few words as the tractor slowed down to turn into the gates of Brown End: something to do with Mr Woodhead being on the telly, and was she going to help him with that, to which, not wanting to get involved with explaining about Sel’s book, let alone its subject, deeming (rightly) that he might get the wrong idea, she simply smiled and, nodding vigorously, left it at that.

Her first reaction to the sight of Brown End had been that there was something wrong with it. It was like looking at a familiar picture that had been touched up. It was right and it was wrong at the same time. Perhaps she’d seen the house, or somewhere like it, in a dream and that was why it was so familiar. As they emerged from the trees, the Bogg tractor bumping over potholes and scattering mud, you could see the house basking in the sun, a few hundred yards up the other side of the valley. A belt of trees behind it, surrounded by undulating fields. The perfect location.

Sel had told her earlier over their modest dinner of nut cutlets, cheese and fruit – the wine accompanying it, however, had been of top quality and extremely plentiful – that the house in its present incarnation was mostly Victorian, built over a much older foundation by the last of his line, Harold Durlston. The Durlston family had owned and farmed the land at Brown End since the Middle Ages, some said for much longer than that, but during the agricultural slump in the 1870s Harold, struggling with rock bottom prices, had been forced to diversify and branch out into the building trade. Doing this had proved so successful, he decided to demolish the ancient farmhouse his family had inhabited for centuries and build a modern house on the site. Luckily, he didn’t demolish everything: bits and pieces of the old house remained, including the inglenook fireplace in the sitting room. The farm buildings too were left, together with the great yard, whose crumbling walls had been pronounced by the local archaeological society to be partly Roman, the Tudor barn and the small copse behind it, the latter inhabited for time immemorial by a colony of rooks. Harold Durlston died in 1920 aged nearly ninety, both his grandsons having been killed in the first World War there was no one left to inherit, and in 1923 Brown End, together with its three hundred acres, was sold at auction – the times being what they were – at a knock-down price. In the years since then it had had a fairly chequered career. Most of the land, apart from a few acres round the house, was sold off in the thirties, and during World War Two, Suffolk being a military zone, the house had served as HQ for a contingent of the US army. Post-war owners came and went. Some doing a bit of gentrifying of the property, others leaving it to rot, but seemingly no one able to make a go of it or stay there very long, and when the Woodheads bought the house it had been empty for nearly five years. The locals said there was a curse on the place; that was why no one stayed, but when questioned were unable to say what the curse was or who had made it. This, among many other things, Sel told her, was one of the reasons why he had bought the house; there was nothing he loved more than a good, old fashioned mystery.

“I hope you’re not afraid of ghosts, dear,” he’d asked, as they bid each other goodnight, “so far we haven’t seen any, but there’s no doubt the place has atmosphere.”

“No,” she’d said, “I’m not afraid of ghosts, in fact I’m pretty sure they don’t exist, but I see what you mean about the atmosphere.”

She does too, and as she draws her bedroom curtains, shutting out the darkening landscape, and prepares for her first bath in her quite gorgeous bathroom, she’s aware that in some part of her, a part that hasn’t yet declared itself, she knows its cause.

Chapter 5

“That new girl of Sel’s who arrived today, there’s something odd about her; she comes out with these weird things and there’s this funny aura.” Jack Fulton and Clarrie Woodhead are smoking a post coital cigarette in the front of Jack’s green Volvo, parked by the Grove at the top of Dog’s Head Hill, where only a few hours earlier Beatrice and Sam had met by the smoking, broken down Mini. The Mini has gone, towed away by Sid Brockly from the Half Moon Garage on the Belchester road, only wheel marks in the grass remain to show it was ever there, plus the butt end of a cigarette left by the Major.

Jack’s right leg is beginning to get a touch of cramp; he surreptitiously looks at his watch; as always with his love life, Jack’s on a tight schedule. “Funny aura, pet, what can you mean? You know old Jack only understands words of one syllable. Anyway, ‘take people as you find them’ has always been my motto, and it hasn’t let me down yet. Talking of auras, did I ever tell you about the nun and the stamp collector?” Clarrie giggles, somehow or other Jack manages to bring out the silly schoolgirl in her. Odd, really; looking back she didn’t think she’d ever been a silly schoolgirl. There never seemed to have been time in her life to be silly, even at school, until now, that is. Perhaps that was his attraction; he gave her the youth she’d somehow missed out on.

“No you haven’t, you idiot, and I don’t want to hear it – anyway, you’re a damned sight shrewder than you make out, so don’t pretend otherwise,” she gives him a friendly kick on the shins, then gets serious again. “Honestly, Jack, I mean it, there is something odd about this Beatrice, there really is.”

“Alright then, I’m not that stupid, I can spot a bright bird when I see one, I give you that, and it’s plain this Beatrice has upset you. So… you’d better tell me all about it, I reckon I won’t get any peace until you do.”

Clarrie goes quiet for a moment, trying to put what she feels about Sel’s new secretary into words. “Well, for a start it’s like she’s looking through you rather than at you. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s as though every now and then she leaves you, becomes a different person, then just as you’re trying to make out what’s going on, she’s back again. The first time this happened I thought it was me, I know I’m a bit over sensitive when I meet new people,” (you could have fooled me, Jack thinks) “but after it had happened several times, I realised it was her. It’s odd Sel hasn’t noticed it. He insists it’s all in my imagination, and says I’ve overdone things and need a break. Anyway, if that was all, it wouldn’t amount to much, but something much odder happened when I was showing her round the place this afternoon. We’d finished going over the house, I was explaining some of the things Sel and I were planning to do, and happened to mention we were thinking of having the rookery behind the barn cut down, as it was a bit of an eyesore with all the mess they made, let alone the noise, and do you know what she said?”