Rainbow's End

George thought of Miss de la Pole, with her finger on the valley’s pulse like a family doctor, saying almost absently: ‘What a pity he isn’t in the least degree musical!’

‘You do seem to have acquired a king-sized headache,’ he said with sympathy. ‘You’ve frozen out tougher propositions before, though. What’s so special about this one?’

‘A hide like a rhinoceros,’ said Sergeant Moon succinctly, ‘and far better insulation. With the money he’s got he can isolate himself inside his own world, apart from actual functions at which he has to appear officially. He can bring in his own society, be independent of us and anything we may feel about him. Do you realise we’ve never had a rich man living among us since the eighteenth century? The mistake was ever to let him in. Now he’s in I’m damned if we know how to get at him.’

‘Somebody’ll find a way,’ said George, rather too lightly.

‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ agreed Sergeant Moon, not lightly at all.

‘As bad as that? Look, Middlehope has digested some pretty odd customers in its time, and turned them into part of the soil. Is Rainbow really impossible?’

‘Others,’ said Moon seriously, ‘have blundered in and fought it out with us on equal terms, we can appreciate that. They end up talking loftily about the next arrivals as incomers, and then go on to assimilate them. Nobody’s going to assimilate Rainbow, he isn’t fighting it out on equal or any terms. He came in and asserted his own terms, no question of adapting, no question of parleying or feeling his way, no acknowledgement that Middlehope has any identity of its own. Have you ever walked round with a twig of blackthorn stuck in your sock? He’s got to go! He’s something we can’t afford. He cripples us. So something’s got to be done. The hell of it is, everybody’s asking, what?’

And well they might, where the foreign body was fully provided with funds, society, interests of his own, independent of the community in which he had set up house. Even if they gradually froze him out of all the offices he had acquired – and that would take some doing! – he still had space and wealth enough, transport to where he was welcome, the means to import his own kind to fill any gaps left by the defection of the natives. He was the least vulnerable intruder with whom Middlehope had ever had to deal. What had begun almost as a joke began to look like a serious problem. You cannot drop a large foreign object into a still and mantled pool without starting dangerous and disruptive ripples.

‘What about his wife?’ George wondered. ‘How’re they making out with her? She could well be the last straw.’

‘Ah!’ said Sergeant Moon cryptically, and sat thinking for half a minute before he expressed any further opinion. ‘Now there we’re up against a different problem. How did he ever come by her, in the first place? And if you know what to make of her, you tell me, because we don’t! All that Estee Lauder and haute couture, and sports car and all, and she breezes into the shop and asks for Woodbines, and cheerfully, too. Or drops off when Charlie’s frying, just by the way when she smells the oil, and picks up a paper-full of fish and chips. Not when he’s with her, but then, he seldom is. And still looking like a million dollars, with all the aplomb in the world. I bet she does the lady of the manor as to the manor born – if you’ll pass over the pun. Out of the manor she looks the same but acts different. As if she’d bust out of school. And I tell you this, she fetches a few of her husband’s mates buzzing like bees round a flower – that big fair fellow who’s been advising on marketing some of the Mottisham Abbey stuff, for one – but there’s more than one local chap been risking his fingers round the fire, too. And I wouldn’t say but what she enjoys them just as much, if not more. Novelty, I reckon. Most people thought she’d be bored to hell, stuck up there in the hills at the back of beyond, but if you ask me, she’s not losing any sleep over being rusticated, the other way round, in fact. It’s been an eye-opener.’

‘I suppose he hasn’t got her into the Women’s Institute yet?’ said George, and had to smile at the idea.

‘No, he does the joining, she presides at home and looks handsome. And keeps his friends and rivals coming,’ said Moon with shrewd perception, ‘so he knows what they’re up to. But as far as public functions go, her job is just to be his consort. I don’t think public distinction for her was ever in the contract.’

At St Eata’s church in Abbot’s Bale it was the custom of the trebles, during the sermon, to amuse themselves with various ingenious games invented by themselves. The choir-stalls, part of the elaborate renovations perpetrated in the nineteenth century, were deep, and covered a multitude of sins. The boys on the decani side had to be wary, since a couple of the tenors behind them were tall enough to see down into the stall in front, even when seated, but happily they were also the two who were most likely to be dozing themselves. The Reverend Stephen’s sermons were painstaking and worthy, but not exciting. They also tended to end abruptly, which gave an added spice of danger to some of the games. Passing the chocolate orange, for instance (orange by courtesy of Toffee Bill, whose mother kept the village shop, and paid for by communal funds!), entailed slipping the orange from hand to hand all along the cantoris side to the altar end of the stalls, each boy detaching one section for himself, whereupon Ginger Gibbs, last in the line, had the hair-raising job of lobbing the remnant, precariously re-wrapped in its gold foil, across the intervening space to Bossie Jarvis on the decani side, so that the progress could continue along that stall, too. Nobody had yet thought of a way of getting the few remaining sections across the other end, in full view of the congregation. If any survived, the direction had to be reversed. Judging the right instant to throw required immense coolness and precision. Neither Ginger nor Bossie had ever yet been caught in the act.

There were other pursuits, of course. Those who still carried clean handkerchiefs sometimes tied them into animal shapes, and gave puppet-shows, mainly for their own stall, but sometimes, snatching the right moment, above the desktop for the line opposite. Consequences also had its days, with appropriate variations. Sometimes Bossie, at one end, started a paper slip with the invented name of the dear departed, and each boy after him added one line of the epitaph to appear on his tombstone. But on this particular Sunday it was a similar game played with lines extracted from hymns. This was too difficult to be taken beyond the quatrain, and the fourth participant, if stuck, was allowed to invent his line without being tied to actual hymns. The system had just produced the following:

‘The voice says, Cry. What shall we cry?

When heated in the chase,

Behold, the bridegroom draweth nigh

With his arm round amazing Grace.’

Resulting giggles had to be suppressed, and the next player could start a new stanza, in this case generously enough with a simple line:

‘This is the first of days’

to which Spuggy Price, always enterprising, added:

‘When our heads are bowed with woe’,

and Toffee Bill contributed:

‘Let our choir new anthems raise’.

The manuscript had now reached Bossie, just as the vicar concluded his sermon, as suddenly as ever, and announced the next hymn. Number 193, ‘Jesu, Lover of my soul’. Now this, thought Bossie contentedly, as the congregation squared up hopefully for ‘Aberystwyth’, is one he