Just older than almost everybody else connected with Offa's Dyke Radio. Which, OK, was not exactly
What it is, she thought, your whole life's been out of synch, that's the problem. Goes back to having a father who was already into his fifties when you were conceived. Discovering your dad is slightly older than most other kids' granddads.
And yet, when you are not yet in your teens, it emerges that your mother is threatening to divorce your aged father because of
Fay shook her head, playing with the buttons on the studio tape-machine. He'd given up the other woman, narrowly escaping public disgrace. Eight years later he was a widower.
Fast forward over that. Too painful.
Whizz on through another never-mind-how-many years and there you are, recovering from your own misguided marriage to a grade-A dickhead, pursuing your first serious career – as a radio producer, in London – and, yes, almost starting to enjoy yourself… when, out of the blue, your old father rings to invite you to his wedding in…
'Sorry, where did you say…?'
'C-R-Y-B-B-E.'
'Where the hell is that. Dad? Also, more to the point, who the hell is Grace?'
And then – bloody hell! – before he can reply, you remember.
'Oh my God, Grace was the woman who'd have been cited in Mum's petition! Grace Legge. She must be…'
'Sixty-two. And not terribly well, I'm afraid, Fay. Moneywise, too, she's not in such a healthy position. So I'm doing the decent thing. Twenty years too late, you might say…'
'I might not say anything coherent for ages, Dad. I'm bloody speechless.'
'Anyway, I've sort of moved in with her. This little terraced cottage she's got in Crybbe, which is where she was born. You go to Hereford and then you sort of turn right and just, er, jus carry on, as it were.'
'And what about your own house? Who's taking care of that?
'Woodstock? Oh, I, er, I had to sell it. Didn't get a lot actually, the way the market is, but…'
'Just a minute, Dad. Am I really hearing this? You sold that bloody wonderful house? Are you going senile?'
Not an enormously tactful question, with hindsight.
'No option, my dear. Had to have the readies for… for private treatment for Grace and, er, things. Which goes – now, you don't have to tell me – goes against everything I've always stood for, so don't spread it around. But she's really not awfully well, and I feel sort of…'
'Sort of guilty as hell.'
'Yes, I suppose. Sort of. Fay, would you object awfully to drifting out here and giving me away, as it were? Very quiet, of course. Very discreet. No dog-collars.'
This is – when? – eleven months ago?
The wedding is not an entirely convivial occasion. At the time, Grace Legge, getting married in a wheelchair, has approximately four months to live, and she knows it.
When you return to a damp and leafless late-autumnal Crybbe for the funeral, you notice the changes in your dad. Changes which a brain-scan will reveal to be the onset of a form of dementia caused by hardening of the arteries. Sometimes insufficient blood is getting to his brain. The bottom line is that it's going to get worse.
The dementia is still intermittent, but he can hardly be left on his own. He won't come to London – 'Grace's cats and things, I promised.' And he won't have a housekeeper – 'Never had to pay a woman for washing my socks and I don't plan to start now. Wash my own.'
Fay sighed deeply. Cut to Controller's office, Christmas Eve. 'Fay, it's not rational. Why don't you take a week off and think about it? I know if it was my father he'd have to sell up and rent himself a flat in town if he was expecting me to keep an eye on him.'
'This is just it, he
'All right. Let's say you do go to this place. How are you supposed to make a living?'
'Well, I've done a bit of scouting around. This new outfit, Offa's Dyke Radio…'
'Local radio?
I thought maybe I could freelance for them on a bread-and-butter basis. They've got an unattended studio actually in Crybbe, which is a stroke of luck. And the local guy they had, he's moved on, and so they're on the look- out for a new contributor. I've had a chat with the editor there and he sounded quite enthusiastic'
'I bet he did.'
'And maybe I could do the odd programme for you, if freelancing for a local independent as well doesn't break some ancient BBC law.'
'I'm sure that's not an insurmountable problem, but…'
'I know, I know. I'm far too young to be retiring to the country.'
'And far too good, actually.'
'You've never said before.'
'You might have asked for more money.'
Typical bloody BBC.
Fay spun back the Henry Kettle tape – why couldn't you rewind your life like that? – and let herself out, throwing the studio into darkness with the master switch by the door. But the spools were still spinning in her head.
She locked up and set off with a forced briskness up the alley, an ancient passageway, smoked brick walls with a skeleton of years-blackened beams. Sometimes cobwebs hung down and got in your hair. She wasn't overfond of this alley. There were always used condoms underfoot; sometimes the concrete flags were slippery with them. In winter they were frozen, like milk ice-pops.
She emerged into the centre of Crybbe as the clock in the church tower was chiming eleven. Getting to eleven sounded like a big effort for the mechanism; you could hear the
strain.
There were lots of deep shadows, even though the sun was high, because the crooked brick and timbered building, slouched together, like down-and-outs sharing a cigarette. Picturesque and moody in the evening, sometimes. In the daytime, run-down, shabby.
People were shopping in the square, mainly for essentials, the shops in Crybbe specialized in the items families ran out in between weekly trips to the supermarkets in Hereford or Leominster. In Crybbe, prices were high and stocks low. These were long-established shops, run by local people: the grocer, the chemist, the hardware and farming suppliers.
Other long-established businesses had, like Henry Kettle, gone to the wall. And been replaced by a new type of store.
Like The Gallery, run by Hereward and Jocasta Newsome, from Surrey, specializing in the works of border landscape artists. In the window, Fay saw three linked watercolours of the Tump at different times of day, the ancient mound appearing to hover in the dawn mist, then solid in the sunlight and then dark and black against an orange sky. A buff card underneath lid, in careful copperplate
THE TUMP – a triptych, by Darwyn Hall.
Price: ?975.
Wow. A snip. Fay wondered how they kept the place open, then walked on, past a little, scruffy pub, the Lamb, past Middle Marches Crafts, which seemed to be a greetings-card shop this week. And then the Crybbe Pottery, which specialized in chunky earthenware Gothic houses that lit up when you plugged them in but didn't give out enough light by which to do anything except look at them and despair.
'Morning, Mr. Preece,' she said to the Town Mayor, a small man with a face like a battered wallet, full of pouches and creases.
'Ow're you,' Mr. Preece intoned and walked on without a second glance.
It had been a couple of months before Fay had realized that 'How are you' was not, in these parts, a question