Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (10 page)

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
and therefore did not require a reply on the lines of, 'I'm fine, Mr. Preece,
Ow're
you
?' or, 'Quite honestly, Mr.
Preece, since you ask, I'm becoming moderately pissed off with trying to communicate
with the dead.'

   
Brain-dead, anyway, most of
them in this town. Nobody ever seemed to get excited. Or to question anything.
Nobody ever organized petitions to the council demanding children's playgrounds
or leisure centres. Women never giggled together on street corners.

   
Fay stopped in the street,
then, and had what amounted to a panic attack.

   
She saw the spools on the great
tape-deck of life, and the one on the right was fat with tape and the one on
the left was down to its last half inch. Another quarter of a century had wound
past her eyes, and she saw a sprightly, red-faced little woman in sensible
clothes returning from the Crybbe Unattended, another masterpiece gone down the
line for the youngsters in the newsroom to chuckle over.
Poor old Fay, all those years looking after her dad, feeding him by
hand, constantly washing his underpants . . . Think we'd better send young
Jason over to check this one out?

   
And the buildings in the town
hunched a little deeper into their foundations and nodded their mottled roofs.
   
'
Ow're
you
, they creaked.
'Ow're you.
   
Fay came out of the passageway
shivering in the sun, tingling with an electric depression, and she thought she
was hearing howling, and she thought that was in her head, too along with the
insistent, urgent question: how am I going to persuade him to turn his back on
this dismal, accepting little town, where Grace Legge has left him her cottage,
her cats and a burden of guilt dating back twenty years? How can I reach him
before he becomes impervious to rational argument?

   
Then she realized the howling
was real. A dog, not too far away. A real snout-upturned, ears-back, baying-at-the-moon
job.

   
Fay stopped. Even in the middle
of a sunny morning it was a most unearthly sound.

   
She'd been about to turn away
from the town centre into the huddle of streets where Grace's house was.
Curious, she followed the howling instead and almost walked into the big blue
back of Police Sergeant Wynford Wiley.

   
He was standing facing the
police station and a woman, who was hissing at him. Who was half his size,
sharp-faced, red-faced, sixtyish, back arched like a cornered cat.

   
'What you want me to do?'
Wynford was yelling, face like an Edam cheese. 'Shoot 'im, is it?'

   
'I don't care what you do,' the
woman screeched. 'But I'm telling you this . . .
I don't like it.
' She looked wildly and irrationally distressed.
She was vibrating. 'You'll get it stopped!'

   
The dog howled again, an eerie
spiral. The woman seized the policeman's arm as if she wanted to tear it off.
Fay had never seen anyone so close to hysteria in Crybbe, where emotions were
private, like bank accounts.

   
'Whose dog is it?' Fay said.

   
They both turned and stared at
her and she thought, Sure, I know, none of my business, I'm from Off.

   
The ululation came again, and
the sky seemed to shimmer in sympathy.

   
'I said, whose dog is it?'

CHAPTER IV

FROM A wicker basket in the pantry
Mrs
Preece took the fattest
onion she could find. She crumbled away its brittle outer layer until the onion
was pale green and moist in the palm of her hand.
   
She sat the onion in a saucer.

   
'Stuff and nonsense,' commented
Jimmy Preece, the Mayor of Crybbe. The sort of thing most of the local men
would say in such situations.

   
With a certain ceremony, as if
it were a steaming Christmas pudding,
Mrs
Preece carried the onion on its saucer into the parlour, Jimmy
following her.

   
She placed it on top of the
television set. She said nothing. 'A funny woman, you are,' Jimmy Preece said
gruffly, but not without affection.

   
Mrs Preece made no reply, her
mouth set in a thin line, white hair pulled back and coiled tight.

   
They both heard the click of
the garden gate, and Jimmy went to the window and peered through the gap in his
delphiniums.

   
Mrs Preece spoke, 'Is it
him
?'
   
Jimmy Preece nodded.

   
'I'm going to the shop,' Mrs
Preece said. 'I'll go out the back way. Likely he'll have gone when I gets
back.'

   
What she meant was she wouldn't
come back until he was good and gone.

Jocasta Newsome, a spiky lady, said in a parched and bitter voice, 'It
isn't working, is it? Even
you
have
to admit that now.'

   
'I don't know what you mean.'
Her husband was pretending he didn't care. He was making a picture-frame in
pine, the ends carefully locked into a wood-vice to form a corner. The truth
was he cared desperately, about lots of things.

   
'You,' Jocasta said. 'Me. It.
Everything.' She was wearing a black woollen dress and a heavy golden shawl
fastened with a Celtic brooch at her shoulder.

   
'Go away.' Hereward started
flicking sawdust from his tidy beard, 'if all you can be is negative, go away.'

   
On the workbench between them
lay the immediate cause of this particular confrontation: the electricity bill.
He'd let sawdust go all over that deliberately. 'We'll query it,' Hereward had
stated masterfully. 'Yes,' Jocasta had replied, 'but what if it's correct? How
long can we go on paying bills like that?'

   
The worst of it was, they
couldn't even rely on a constant supply. He'd never known so many power cuts.
'One of the problems of living in a rural area, I'm afraid,' the electricity official
had told him smugly, when he complained. 'Strong winds bring down the power lines,
thunder and lightning, cows rubbing themselves against the posts, birds flying
into . . .'

   
'I'm trying to run a business
here!'

   
'So are the farmers, Mr, ah,
Newsome. But they've seen the problems at first hand, up on the hills. So they,
you see, they realize what we're up against.'

   
Oh yes, very clever. What he
was saying to Hereward, recognizing his accent, was: 'You people, you come here
expecting everything to be as smooth as Surrey. If you really want to be
accepted in the countryside you'd better keep your head down and your mouth
shut, got it?

   
Hereward growled and Jocasta,
thinking he was growling at her, looked across at him in his new blue overalls,
standing by his new wooden vice, and there was a glaze of contempt over her
sulky eyes.

   
'The rural craftsman,' she
observed acidly. 'At his bench. You're really rather pathetic.'

   
'I'm trying to rescue the
situation,' Hereward snarled through clamped teeth, 'you stupid bitch.'

   
Jocasta looked away, walked
out, slammed the studio door.

   
And in the vice, the newly
constructed corner of Hereward's first frame fell symbolically apart.

   
Hereward sank to his knees.

   
Very deliberately, he picked up
the two lengths of moulded wood and set about realigning them. He would not be
beaten. He would not give up.

   
And he would not let her
disdain get to him. If they couldn't sell enough original works of art they
would, for a limited period, sell a number of selected prints at reasonable
prices. And the prices would be kept reasonable because he would make the
frames himself. Dammit, he
did
know
what he was doing.

   
And he
had
recognized that there would be problems getting a new gallery
accepted in a lesser known area. Obviously, places like Crybbe had fewer
tourists - all right,
far
fewer. But
those who came were the
right sort
of
tourists. The intelligent, childless couples who didn't need beaches, and the
cultured newly-retired people with time to construct the quality of life they'd
always promised themselves.

   
Slowly but emphatically, The
Gallery would build a reputation among the discerning. They would travel from
as far away as Shrewsbury and Cheltenham and even Oxford and London. The
Gallery would expand, and then other specialist dealers would join them, and pretty
soon it would be Crybbe for fine art, the way it was Hay-on-Wye for books.

   
'Of course, it took time,' he
would say at dinner parties. 'Good Lord, I remember, in the early days, when,
to save money, one actually made one's own frames . . .'

'Festival, is it?,' Jimmy Preece's eyes were like screwheads countersunk
into old mahogany. 'We never had no festival before.'

   
'Precisely the point, Mr
Mayor.' Max Goff tried to smile sincerely and reassuringly, but he knew from
hundreds of press photos that it always came out wide and flashy, like car radiators
in the sixties.

   
'No.' Mr Preece shook his head
slowly, as if they were discussing water-skiing or first-division football,
things which, transparently, were not part of the Crybbe scene. 'Not round yere.'

   
Goff leaned forward. He'd given
a lot of thought to how he'd sell this thing to the townsfolk. A festival. A
celebration of natural potential. Except this festival would last all year round.
This festival would absorb the whole town. It would recreate Crybbe.

   
'The point is, Mr Mayor . . .
You got so much to be festive
about
.'
Go on, ask me what the hell you got to be festive about.
   
The Mayor just nodded. Jeez.

   
'Let me explain, OK?' White-suited
Goff was feeling well out of place in this cramped little parlour, where
everything was brown and mottled and shrunken-looking, from the beams in the
ceiling, to the carpet, to Jimmy Preece himself. But he had to crack this one;
getting the Mayor on his side would save a hell of a lot of time.

   
'OK,' Goff said calmly. 'Let's
start with the basics. How much you heard about me?'

   
Jimmy Preece smiled slyly down
at his feet, encased in heavy, well-polished working boots with nearly as many
ancient cracks as his face.

   
Goff flashed the teeth again.
'Never trust newspapers, Mr Mayor. The more money you make, the more the c . .
. the more they're out to nail you. 'Specially if you've made it in a operation
like mine. Which, as I'm sure you know, is the music business, the recording
industry.'

   
I've heard that."

   
'Sex, drugs and rock and roll,
eh?'

   
'I wouldn't know about those things.'

   
'Nor would I, Mr Mayor,' Goff
lied. 'Only been on the business side. A business. Like any other. And I'm not
denying it's been highly successful for me. I'm a rich man.'

   
Goff paused.

   
'And now I want to put something
back. Into the world, if you like. But, more specifically . . . into Crybbe.'
   
Mr Preece didn't even blink.

   
'Because you have a very
special town here, Mr Mayor. Only this town, it's forgotten just how special it
is.'