An Affair to Remember (22 page)

Pippa decides, on balance, not to take offence. “You really needn’t worry about them darling. From now on they’ll be under constant surveillance.” (Poor them, thinks Clarrie.) “I took the liberty of ringing Professor Moss last night, he’s the man on hypnotherapy, as I’m sure you know, and he’s agreed to do what he can to help. He said he has an early meeting this morning he can’t miss, but should be down here well before lunch.”

Clarrie looks doubtful, takes another sip of coffee. “But Pippa are you sure, I mean –?”

“I wouldn’t suggest it if I wasn’t. Izzy Moss is, among other things, a qualified medic, so he can cope on that side of things as well, and he will of course be monitoring the single and collective reaction of both subjects round the clock. There simply is nothing to worry about.”

Unconvinced, Clarrie says: “Have you told Sel?”

“There hasn’t been time.” (There had actually, but she’d thought it better to confront Sel with a
fait
accompli
– he could be difficult about such things.) “But if you’d rather I put Izzy off…?”

“Too late for that. If Moss is who I think he is the cat’s already out of the bag, and I don’t doubt it won’t be long before the Press has the story – half Fleet Street will be sniffing round.”

“If that’s how you feel.” Pippa’s getting angry again. “I don’t think you realise, my dear, just how important this experiment could be. The marriage of folk memory, reincarnation, dreams, whatever, to actual solid archaeological evidence, Izzy says, will be quite unique.”

“And what Izzy says goes! Honestly, Pippa, we’re talking about two very vulnerable human beings here, not a pair of guinea pigs.”

Pippa places her coffee cup carefully down on the table beside the bed, rises gracefully to her feet: “I’ve known you more years than I care to remember, Clarrie Woodhead, but this is the first time I’ve ever put you down as the sentimental type. We’ll see what Sel has to say.” She stalks to the door.

“You do that.”

*

Beatrice and Ron are seated under the monkey puzzle drinking coffee. Beatrice has brought out a rickety old card table and two chairs she found in a cupboard under the stairs – Clarrie hasn’t got round to garden furniture yet – a bee buzzes in a nearby clump of ragged Michaelmas daisies; the sun is warm on their backs. Ron sighs voluptuously, sips his coffee: “Petronius, he is still away?” he asks casually.

Beatrice screws up her eyes against the sun. “I hope he never returns,” she says.

Sam stands under the shower and lets the tepid water spray gently over him. Never in his life has he seen such a bathroom, talk about a five star hotel! Had they abducted him, he wonders, or is he still dreaming? There’s a gentle knock on the bedroom door and, hastily turning off the shower and draping himself toga-like in a voluminous orange bath towel, he hurries across the room to open it. To his considerable surprise it turns out to be Clarrie Woodhead, still in her dressing gown, bearing a breakfast tray. “Mrs Woodhead, you shouldn’t have bothered, I mean I could easily have come down,” he says, taking the tray from her and placing it on the table in front of the window. Clarrie smiles, she looks a little nervous, but her smile, he thinks, has warmth.

“I’m so glad you’re speaking in English,” she says, “you see last night…”

“Was I so very peculiar?” he asks her shyly.

She sits down at the table; gestures him to follow her. “You were a bit. Would you like to tell me about it?”

Sam, painfully aware of his nakedness under the bath towel, sits down opposite her. “I would rather,” he finds himself saying, “you see so far I haven’t really been able to tell anyone…”

“Go ahead – I’m listening.”

*

“Is that Mrs Roper?” (Mrs Roper had retained her first husband’s name; somehow it had seemed more distinguished than the others, and besides one couldn’t keep changing one’s name, could one, no one would know who you were.) “Sylvia Campbell here, don’t know if you remember me. I am, or was, your daughter’s flatmate.”

“Hullo, my dear, and what can I do for you?”

“Well nothing, actually, Mrs Roper.” Why should the woman think she could? “It’s just I was wondering if you’ve heard from Beatie since she started her new job?” A pause. Surely even a mother like Mrs Roper must remember if she’d heard from her daughter or not.

“I think we did have a card the other day saying she’d arrived and giving her new address, but Roddy’s been in one of his organising moods lately and he must have tidied it away before I had time to read it properly – goodness knows where it is now. Why, haven’t you heard from her?”

“Once or twice, but the thing is I had this rather odd letter a couple of days ago…”

Mrs Roper laughs her tinkling, mother-knows-best laugh. “Nothing new in that! When does one ever get anything else from Beatrice, you’re lucky she’s bothered to write at all.” Old cow, Syl thinks, old cow. She takes a deep breath, calms herself.

“No, really, Mrs Roper, I’m serious about this. I think Beatie’s in some sort of trouble, but it’s hard to make out from her letter quite what the trouble is.”

“Fallen in love with her boss, I expect. It was bound to happen – I told her at the time…”

“No, it’s not that. Although she does seem to have met somebody, an ex-army major who runs the village shop; most odd. The letter says they keep having psychic experiences together, but what I don’t understand is –”

“Sharing a psychic experience, that’s a first I must say! I don’t want to appear unfeeling, my dear, but if that turns you on, why not? It’s different, I agree, but could be rather fun, especially if other nice things follow, and –”

“Mrs Roper, I don’t think you quite understand what I’m saying; Beatie’s frightened! She seems to think she’s being ‘taken over’ and when this happens, she becomes violent. At one point in the letter she says: ‘I caused a bit of damage by throwing an ash tray at a photo of Peter Sellers in a pub’ – her exact words, and if you don’t think that’s unlike Beatie, I do. Someone really should go down to this Brown End and find out what’s going on. Hence my call…” Mrs Roper, however, is rapidly losing interest. She can distinctly hear sounds of hoovering emanating from the box room; what on earth was Roddy up to now?

“Well, my dear,” she suggests, shocking Sylvia even more than she had before, by her apparent lack of interest in the fate of her daughter, “if you’re so worried, why don’t you pay her a visit yourself? It’s a lovely part of the world and the weather’s still fine. I’d go with you, but quite honestly I’ve too much on my plate at the moment, besides which Beatrice never listens to anything I say, never has. Or what about ringing Horace and Lottie, I’ve got their number somewhere, they’re much more genned up on this sort of thing than I am.” Syl, thinking of her own over-protective but loving mother, wonders not for the first time what it must be like to have a family such as Beatie possessed.

“Lottie and Horace are in China, Mrs Roper, they’re not due back for a month.”

“Silly me!” Mrs Roper gives another of her tinkling laughs. “Of course they are. I wonder what Roddy’s done with the letter we had from them – pages and pages, I seem to remember, and so difficult to read.” Syl, assuming rightly the question was purely rhetorical, doesn’t reply, and Mrs Roper continues in a different vein. “Of course it’s in the family, you know. Beatrice’s father, Marcus Travers the Romanologist, is none too – how can I put it… Suffice to say it’s one of the reasons – although of course there were many others – why I was compelled to leave him – I mean I’m all for individuality in people, but you have to draw the line somewhere, don’t you agree?”

The hoovering’s stopped now, to be replaced by a rather sinister knocking noise. Mrs Roper decides it’s time to wind things up. “Look, my dear, delightful to talk but I really must go. Don’t worry about Beatie, I’m sure everything’s alright and let me know when you get back. Bye.”

Fuming, Syl replaces the receiver; picks up Beatrice’s letter and for the nth time reads it again. ‘…I hope I’m not going round the bend, Syl – I always said I would one day, didn’t I?’ she writes, in a hand quite unlike her usual, tidy script, ‘But honestly I feel so strange here. Sel’s a super boss, no bother with that, and the work is fun. It’s just, well, partly the place I suppose: luxurious, but ancient, with this really strange atmosphere, and I know, as I said earlier, you’ll think I’m bonkers, but I’m pretty sure I’ve lived here before. Then there’s this man, Sam Mallory, who has a shop in the village, who’s sure he lived here before too. We first met in this spooky grove on a hill above the house, and because of the things that have happened, we think we lived here in another life, and the two people we were then were in love, until somehow everything wrong…’

But Syl’s had enough; it was no good, she’d have to take Mrs Roper’s advice, visit Brown End herself and find out what was happening. No use ringing – what on earth could she say? If Tristram could manage to tear himself away from the Mission for a couple of days – which would do him a world of good anyway – they could drive down in his car, and stay in a pub in the village. Patrick could take over while Tris was away, it would be good for him too to have the responsibility. Relieved to be doing something positive at last, she picks up the phone again and dials the Mission’s number in Brixton. “Can I speak to Father O’Hara, please, it’s Sylvia Campbell…”

*

“Whatever are we going to do, Sid,” wails Emmie, settling herself in the passenger seat of Sid’s Mini Clubman en route for Brown End. True to his word, Sid had arrived at the shop within half an hour of his phone call, providentially interrupting her in a lively scene with Karen’s dad.

Karen had carried out her threat and complained to her father about constantly being left alone in the shop and thereby becoming the innocent prey of would-be muggers and the lord knows what else. Mr Warren, a man of action, had taken her at her word, and paid a visit. “To be honest with you, Mrs Mallory, in these days with violence everywhere you look, it’s not right for a kid like my Karen to be left alone all day minding the shop. Anything could happen.”

“Quite frankly, Mr Warren, I doubt whether the danger is as great as you seem to be implying, even if there’s any danger at all. As I’ve already told you, yesterday was an exceptional case – an unforeseen accident; my husband not himself. And –”

“More responsibility, more money. I think you’ll agree that’s fair.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t agree at all. I can assure you that Karen receives an extremely generous wage as it is, she’d be lucky to get as much anywhere else round here, but as my husband and myself always say, if you want value you must pay for it.” Plainly unconvinced, Mr Warren was about to make a withering reply when he was interrupted by Karen, who’d just spotted Sid Parfitt pulling up outside.

“Oh look, there’s that Aussie, Mr Parfitt – he’s staying up at The Trojan…”

“I hope I don’t intrude?”

Emmie’s eyes fill with tears. He’d come – her hero! And Sid’s assessment of the situation had been masterly. After introductions he had a man to man conversation with Mr Warren, in which he explained he was helping out in the shop for the day as the major was poorly, and what with one thing and another his dear friend, Emmie Mallory, needed all the help she could get. Not that Karen wasn’t a wonder, because she was, but he was sure Mr Warren, whom he could see at a glance was a man of sense, understood how things were. Mr Warren didn’t understand how things were, but having forgotten what he’d been going to say, nodded bemusedly.

Emmie, lost in admiration for her newfound saviour, watched with something like awe as with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of badinage, everything somehow got sorted, and Mr Warren, having abandoned any further talk of a wage rise, cheerfully whistling
Waltzing Matilda
, was sped on his way after a friendly exchange of insults as to the merits and demerits of the Arsenal football team. Meanwhile, wonder of wonders, Karen herself, after an avuncular word or two from Sid, had begun putting together the enormous Woodhead order with a deftness and efficiency quite unprecedented in Emmie’s experience.

How could she have let him go so easily, Emmie wonders, as Sid expertly negotiates the Mini Clubman through a slow moving herd of cows. Something to do with his ears, she vaguely remembers; she’d got fed up with looking at them over the breakfast table. Then of course there’d been that big bloke at the supermarket, Henry something – she couldn’t remember his surname – she’d always been a sucker for big men; and look where that had got her…

*

“The way I see it,” Clarrie says, pouring the last of the coffee into Sam’s cup, their discussion nearly at an end; they’d reached the stage of what should be their next step. Sam, more relieved than he ever could have imagined to have such a formidable ally, waits patiently for further words of wisdom. “The way I see it is you, Brian/Sam, have some sort of task to perform and until you have performed it, despite the efforts of Sel and his team of so-called experts, things will continue as they are.”

Is she right, he wonders? Surely Ron and Pippa have a lot going for them, Ron especially. As to this guy Moss, who knows? They’d have to wait and see. He can’t do any harm, surely. But there’s a lot going for Clarrie too – hard to say quite what. A sort of inner authority perhaps. It’s almost as if
she
knows
what
’
s
to
be
done
. She hadn’t ‘gone back’ too, had she? If she had, then… Don’t go there, Mallory, just don’t go there. He longs for a cigarette, but doesn’t like to suggest one; feels called upon to say something intelligent, but can’t think of anything; comes up at last with: if she’s right and there is a task he must perform in order to break the curse, what is it? You’d think at least ‘they’, whoever ‘they’ are, would have given him some sort of sign.

“Perhaps they have,” Clarrie says, “and you didn’t pick it up.” Sam looks at her dreamily, she could be some sort of seer, sitting there in her scarlet robe, dark hair pulled back in a knot behind her head, gazing through half-closed eyes out across the valley. “There’s a pattern in all this, I’m sure of it,” she goes on, “and you coming to Kimbleford and falling in love with Beatrice has somehow broken the pattern. From what Granny Bogg told my husband, it’s always been a female who’s come under the influence of the legend: people like her Great Aunt Ali and now Beatrice. These women are in some extraordinary way the inheritors of the curse and perhaps all that’s needed is for Brian, i.e. you, to return and forgive – d’you see what I mean?” Sam nods, although he’s far from sure he does.