A Prospect of Vengeance

— eh?'

But with a five-hundred-year-old beam, eh? she had thought lovingly, understanding that he felt he was coming home at last, even if only temporarily here, but at least away from his hated asphalt jungle in Highbury.

But, very strangely, it hadn't been like that at all.

Or, at first, it had been —

'Mummy, Mummy!' Mel had cried, as she came down the back stair into the kitchen that first morning. 'There's an old cottage in the trees down there — ' She pointed vaguely in the fatal direction.

'What, darling?' Rachel had pretended not to hear.

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Larry looked up from his yesterday's paper, which he hadn't got round to reading in the chaos of their arrival. 'That's the old Griffin place,' he had said, matter-of-fact and ready to fulfil his promise as Chris arrived breathlessly behind his sister. 'It's part of our property. But it's only a ruin.' He had looked down at his paper again. 'An old lady named 'Griffin'

was the last occupant. That's why it's called 'the old Griffin place'.'

Chris had sat down without a word. And, as Chris played his cards close to his chest even then, that meant that Chris had his plans worked out.

'Was she a witch?' inquired Mel. 'It looks like a witch's cottage, Daddy — it's . . . yrrch!'

Chris had considered the choice between cornflakes and muesli with ostentatious innocence. 'There are no such things as witches,' he admonished his sister. Then he had selected the cornflakes. 'Can I have two boiled eggs, Mother?'

Rachel knew her son almost as well as she knew her husband. So she had waited for his next move.

And Chris had waited too until the second egg. 'I think I'll go down and have a look at it,' he addressed no one in particular. 'Is that okay, Father?'

'What?' Melanie, at the age of six, didn't know anyone very well, but she knew her brother better than anyone else. 'Me too!'

Larry looked up from his paper. 'Not just you — all of us, dummy2

Chris.' He grinned at Rachel, then at Melanie, and finally at Chris. 'After the washing-up we'll go down and look at old Mrs Griffin's cottage. And then we'll make the rules. Okay?'

And it had been much better than Rachel had expected, after Larry had slashed his way through all the obstacles with a terrifying weapon he had acquired from somewhere, which looked as though it had last been carried by an angry sans-culotte in the French Revolution.

So, finally, they had reached the mouldering wreck of old Mrs Griffin's home: all the paraphernalia of a humble, long-lost and once-upon-a-time existence had still been there, among the nettles and fallen bricks and timbers, and the coarse-leafed growth: broken chairs and smashed furniture, the bits of an immense iron bedstead; the shards of crockery, and bottles and broken bottles — bottles everywhere — and the rusty evidence of tinned food — tins of every shape and size, mixed with rusty springs from an antique armchair mouldering on the edge of the pond.

'What's this?' Melanie held up half of a chamber-pot by its handle. 'Is it for fruit salad?'

'I'll have this, for my bedroom,' Chris, eagle-eyed, held up a pewter candle-stick. But then he'd looked at his father.

'Father — let's go back now.'

Larry looked at his son. 'What's the matter?'

'I don't like the smell.' Chris had balanced himself on a sheet dummy2

of corrugated iron. 'It smells like ... I don't know what —

drains, maybe?'

' Yyyrrrch!' Melanie threw her half-chamber-pot into the pond, raising oily circles of water, to disturb clouds of insects. ' Drains!'

'Let's go back,' Chris had repeated his demand. 'This is a beastly place.'

'Yes,' agreed Melanie. 'And ... I bet she was a witch — old Mrs Griffin!'

So they had gone back.

And it had been all right — even all right while the children ranged far and wide over the moor, and under the hill and over the hill and beyond, on foot and then on bicycle, as times had changed, and public inquiry (and government, and minister) had succeeded public inquiry, and the years had passed over the moor, and overhill and underhill, and Dr Groom's job had developed. And Rachel had been a member of the Women's Institute, and then treasurer, and then secretary. And, in the seventh year, Madam President.

And all their plans had changed, as the motorway had taken a different line, and Underhill Farm survived.

Until that day when Chris — Chris with his voice broken, out of the school choir and into the Junior Colts rugger XV, but Arts-inclined in the run-up to his A-level exams, had cycled dummy2

over to the archaeology unit which was blazing the trail for the new line of the motorway, beyond the edge of the moor —

'Mother — Rachel . . .' (Chris wasn't sure how a chap ought to address his mother: some chaps thought Christian names were OTT, some were still old-fashioned) '. . . you know the old Griffin place — ?'

Long since, Rachel had stopped worrying about the old Griffin place. It was where it had always been, more-