Crybbe aka Curfew

CHAPTER VI

When the Mercedes estate carrying Simon and his three young assistants had vanished into the lane, Rachel watched Andy Boulton-Trow, stripped to the waist, supervising the loading of three long stones into the back of a truck. There was a small digger m the back, too, one of those you could hire to landscape your own garden.

'Last ones,' Andy said, jibbing a thumb at the stones. He'd acquired, very rapidly, an impressive black beard, somehow hardening his narrow jaw.

Rachel said, 'The others are in?'

'The ones that are safe to put in, without arousing complaints from the landowners We've got a nice one here for your friend Joe.'

He didn't, she noticed, put any kind of stress on the words 'your friend'.

'And then I'm pushing off for a day or two,' Andy said, stretching.

'Is Max aware of this?'

'I really don't know, Rachel.'

She wondered if perhaps he was pushing off somewhere with Max. 'A very heavy guy,' Max had said once. 'He knows all the options.'

Whereas J.M. had implied that while Andy knew as much about earth mysteries as anybody could reasonably be expected to, it was unwise to trust him too far. 'He takes risks, especially when the potential fall guy is someone else.' The implication being that he, J. M. Powys, had once been the fall-guy. One day, away from here, he would tell her about this.

'What's going on over there?' Rachel had seen a cluster of men emerging from the rear entrance of the Court. Two of them carried a rotting plank which they hurled on a heap of rubbish in a corner of the courtyard.

'Big clean-out,' Andy said. 'Before the renovation proper begins. All the junk from upstairs – the detritus of the various attempts to modernize the Court, anything not in period has to go. Didn't Max tell you?'

'I think he mentioned something,' Rachel said uncomfortably. He hadn't, of course. Increasingly, things had been happening around her without any kind of consultation.

Like the appropriation of Gomer Parry's bulldozer in the night?

Max liked to live dangerously; she didn't. She was deeply glad to be leaving his employ.

'Make a good bonfire,' Andy Boulton-Trow said, nodding at the pile of rubbish. 'Maybe we should organize one for Lammas or something. A cleansing.'

He stretched his lithe body into the truck. 'Have fun,' he said.

Powys raced out of the church, clutching the Uher by its strap She'd left it there, on the pew, still recording, with a motor hum and a hiss of turning spools.

He scanned the churchyard, but she was gone. He ran to the gate, looked both ways, thought he could hear running footsteps, but there was nobody in sight. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a white-bearded, dog- collared old man in the church entrance, also looking from side to side.

Her father. Both of them looking for Fay.

Powys stabbed vaguely at the Uher's piano-key controls until the hum and hiss ceased with a final whirr. Then he slung the machine over his shoulder, stuck the microphone in his pocket and set off towards Bell Street. Or would she have gone to the studio?

Making an outburst in church was a clear sign of instability. People who made outbursts in church were usually basket-cases.

Except in Crybbe. Leaping up and screaming, Powys thought was surely a perfectly natural reaction to the miasma of almost-anaesthetized disinterest emanating from that congregation.

Bloody weird, though, what she'd said.

Why can't you just get on with your death and leave him alone?

Bloody weird.

As he came to the corner of Bell Street, he almost lost a foot to a familiar red Ford Fiesta, shrieking round the corner in low gear, crunching over the kerb.

The driver saw him, and the Fiesta squeaked and stalled. The passenger door flew open and bumped the Uher, and the driver called out, 'Get in!'

Powys climbed in and sat with the Uher on his knee. 'You left this in the church,' he said.

'Thanks.' Fay started the engine and the car spurted into the square.

'Your father…'

'Fuck my father,' she snapped, and she didn't speak again until they passed the town boundary and there were open hills all around and a rush of cold air through the side windows, the glass on both sides wound down to its limits.

Fay breathed out hard and thrust her small body back into the seat, the Fiesta going like a rocket down a lane originally created for horses.

'Got to be something awry,' she said remotely, 'when the most newsworthy item on the tape is the reporter having hysterics.'

Powys said, 'When's visiting time at the vet's, then?'

She turned towards him. 'You want to come?'

'I've got a choice? Watch the road, for Christ's sake!'

She said, 'You want me to talk about it, I suppose.'

'Up to you.'

'Well,' she said, 'I suppose if I can talk about it to anybody, I can talk about it to you. Don't suppose I'll be telling you anything you haven't heard before.'

'That's right,' Powys said. 'I'm an accredited crank. And I'll be a dead crank if you don't…'

'Yet so cynical.' Fay slowed down. 'You didn't used to be cynical. Unless that wide-eyed, wow-man-what-a mind-blower feel to The Old Golden Land was a put-on.'

'Well,' he said, 'the light-hearted element kind of dissipated.' He closed his eyes and the past tumbled down to him like a rock slide.

Joey goes round the Bottle Stone

And he goes round ONCE.

What's happening is you're developing a link with the stone, in an umbilical kind of way. You're feeling every step you take, bare feet connecting sensuously with the warm, grassy skin of the earth. And all the while the terrestrial magnetism – let's imagine it exists – is seeping up through the soles of your feet…

And he goes round TWICE.

Stop it.

He rubbed his eyes. 'That was your dad, was it, with the white beard? Rachel told me about him. She said he was, er. something of a fun guy for his age.'

'He was always fun,' Fay said. 'That was the problem. Clergymen aren't supposed to have that much fun.'

Powys watched her drive, not like Rachel. She bumped the gears, rode the clutch and went too fast round blind bends.

He tried to watch the landscape. 'Nothing like this where I grew up. Love at first sight, when I came down here.'

'Where was that? Where you came from.'

'Up north. Very industrialized part. A long bus-ride to the nearest cow. Every square yard, for as far as you could see, built on for about the fourth time. Where we lived they'd eradicated grass like a disease. It's quite nice now, if you like Georgian-style semis with concrete barbecue-pits.'

Fay said, 'I grew up in old vicarages and rectories, in little villages with thatched houses. And Oxford for a time.'