Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (41 page)

   
And then despising herself
utterly for wishing all that.

   
'Come in, Guy. Dad's gone for a
walk; he'll be devastated to have missed you.'

   
'How is he?' Guy stepped into
the hall and looked closely at everything, simulating enormous interest in the
chipped cream paintwork, the wallpaper with its faded autumn leaves, the nylon
carpet beneath his hand-stitched, buffed, brown shoes.

   
He wore a short, olive, leather
jacket, soft as a very expensive wallet.

   
'We used to have some fascinating
chats, your father and I, when I was in Religious Programmes.'

   
'I expect he learned quite a lot,'
Fay said, going through to the kitchen.

   
'That was how I swung the
Crybbe thing, you know. It cut plenty of ice with Max Goff, me being an
ex-religious-affairs producer. Indicated a certain sensitivity of touch and an essentially
serious outlook. Nothing crude, no juvenile piss-taking.'

   
'Tea or coffee?' Fay said. 'Why
did you leave Religious Programmes, anyway? Seemed like a good, safe earner to
me. Just about the only situation where you can work in television and still
get to heaven.'

   
'Well, you know, Fay, there
came a time when it was clear that Guy Morrison had said all he needed to say
about religion. Is it ground coffee or instant?'

   
'Would I offer you instant
coffee, Guy?'

   
'I don't like to make presumptions
about people's financial positions,' Guy said sensitively.

   
'We're fine.'

   
'I did tell you, didn't I, that
I'd probably have brought you in as researcher, except for this J.M. Powys
problem?'

   
'Thanks, but I doubt I'd've had
time, anyway. Pretty busy, really.' The handle came off the cup she was holding
- that'd teach her to lie twice.

   
'He was foisted on me, Fay.
Nothing I could do.'

   
'I met him last night. Seemed a
nice bloke.'

   
Just before lunch, J. M. Powys
had phoned to ask how Arnold was. Comfortable, Fay had said, having been on the
phone to the vet as early as was reasonable. Stable. As well as can be
expected.

   
Guy crinkled his mouth.
'One-book wonder, J. M. Powys. A spent force.'

   
Must
be a nice bloke if Guy despises him, Fay thought. She began to
filter the coffee in silence.

   
Eventually, Guy, sitting at the
kitchen table, said, 'Long time since we met face to face, Fay. Three years?
Four?'

   
'At least.' Physically, he'd
hardly changed at all. Perhaps the odd characterful crease, like the
superb-quality leather of his jacket. Pretty soon, she thought in dismay, he'll
be looking too comparatively young ever to have been married to me.

   
Guy said, 'You're looking . . .
er, good. Fay.'

   
What a bastard. She made a
point of net replying in kind.

   
Guy said, 'Quite often, you
know - increasingly, in fact - I find myself wondering why we ever split up.'

   
'Didn't it have something to do
with you screwing your production assistant?'

   
Guy dismissed it. 'Trivial, trivial
stuff. I was young, she threw herself at me. You know that. I'm essentially a
pretty faithful sort of person. No, what we had . . .' He pushed Grace's G-plan
dining chair away from the table and leaned back, throwing his left ankle over
his right knee and catching it deftly with his right hand. He obviously
couldn't quite remember what they'd had.

   
'I often wish we'd had
children, Fay.'

   
Oh hell.

   
Guy's intermittent live-in girlfriend
had apparently proved to be barren. Fay remembered him moaning about this to
her one night on the phone. She remembered thinking at the time that
infertility was a very useful attribute for an intermittent live-in girlfriend
to have. But Guy was at the age when he wanted there to be little Morrisons.

   
'I'm at the Cock.'

   
'What?'

   
'The Cock Hotel,' Guy said,
it's an appalling place.'
   
'Dreadful,' Fay said, pouring his
coffee,
   
'I think I'm going to have to make
other arrangements when we start shooting in earnest.'
   
'I should.'

   
'Can you think of anywhere?'
   
'Hasn't Goff offered you
accommodation?'
   
'Nothing suitable, apparently. He
says. Though we do have special requirements - meals at all hours.'
   
Sore point, obviously.

   
'Still,' Fay said cheerfully.
'I've heard he's going to buy the Cock, turn it into a New Age Holiday Inn or
something.'

   
She brought her coffee and sat
down opposite him. If anything, he was even more handsome these days. It had
once been terribly flattering to be courted by Guy Morrison. And unexpectedly
painless to become divorced from him.

   
'I've changed, you know, Fay.'

   
'Hardly at all, I'd've said.'

   
'Oh, looks . . . that's not what
it's all about. Never was, was it?'

   
Of course not, she thought.
However, in your case, what else is there to get excited about?

   
'And you're obviously just as
arrogant,' she said brightly.
   
'Confidence, Fay,' he said patiently.
'Not arrogance. If you don't continually display confidence in this business,
people think you're . . .'

   
'A "spent force".
Like J. M. Powys?'

   
'Something like that. I should
have held on to you,' he said softly, a frond of blond hair falling appealingly
to an eyebrow. 'You kept me balanced. I was terribly insecure, you know, that's
why . . .'

   
'Oh, for God's sake, Guy, you
were never insecure in your life. This is
me
you're giving all this bullshit to. Let's drop this subject, shall we?'

   
He looked hurt. But not very
hurt.

   
'How did you get on yesterday?'
Fay asked him, to change direction. 'They never managed to pull the wall down,
did they?'

   
'Don't ask,' Guy said, meaning
'ask'.

   
'All went wrong, then?' This
was probably the reason Guy was here. He was in urgent need of consolation.

   
'I've just been looking at the
rushes.'

   
'What, you've been back to
Cardiff?'

   
'No, no, I sent Larry to a
video shop in Leominster last night to transfer the stuff to VHS so I could
whizz through it at the Cock. When he came back, he said, "You're not
going to like this," and cleared off quick. I've just found out why. Good
grief. Fay, talk about a wasted exercise. First, there's bloody Goff - plans a
stunt like that and doesn't tell me until it's too late to hire a second crew
and then . . .'

   
'But it didn't happen, anyway.
The wall's still there.'

   
'I know, but I had what ought
to have been terrific footage of Goff going apeshit on top of the Tump, when
the sound system packed in and the bulldozer chap said he couldn't do it. But
the light must've been worse than I thought or Larry hadn't done a
white-balance or something - he denies that, of course, but he would, wouldn't
he?'

   
'What, it didn't come out?'
Fay, who'd never worked in television, knew next to nothing about the
technicalities of it. 'I thought this Betacam stuff didn't need much light.'

   
'Probably something wrong with
the camera, Larry claims. First this big black thing shoots across the frame,
and then all the colour's haywire. By God, if there's any human error to blame
in Cardiff, somebody's job could be on the line over this.'

   
'But not yours, of course' said
Fay. 'Hold on a minute, Guy.' She was listening to a vague scraping noise, it's
Dad. He can't get his key in the door.'

   
Fay dashed into the hall,
closing the kitchen door behind her and opening the front door. The Canon
almost fell over the threshold, poking his key at her eye.

   
'Thank God.' Fay caught his
arm, whispered in his ear, 'Come and rescue me, Dad. Guy's here, and he's in a
very maudlin mood.'

   
'Who?' He was out of breath.

   
'Guy, you remember Guy. We used
to be married once. I've got this awful feeling he's working up to asking me to
have his baby.'

   
A blurred film had set across
the Canon's eyes. He shook his head, stood still a moment, breathing hard, then
straightened up. 'Yes,' he said. 'Fay. Something you need to know.'

   
'Take your time.'

   
'Tape recorder. Get your tape
recorder.' His eyes cleared, focused. 'There's been an accident. A death. Everybody's
talking about it. I'll tell you where to go.'

'There'll be no delay,' the dodman said. 'We start tonight.'
   
'Don't you need planning permission?'
Powys asked.
   
The dodman only smiled.

   
As expected, he'd turned out to
be Andy Boulton-Trow with a mobile phone and a map in a transparent plastic
folder.

   
'There are six we can put n
immediately. Either on Max's land around the Court or on bits of ground he's
been able to buy. Not a bad start. You're getting one, did you know that?'

   
'Thanks a bunch.'

   
'The top of your little acre,
where it meets the road. See?' Andy held out his plastic-covered photocopy of
Henry's map. 'Right there.'

   
It was a large-scale OS blow-up.
The former location of each stone was marked by a dot inside a circle and the
pencilled initials, H. K.

   
They were standing in Crybbe's
main street, just above the police station, looking down towards the bridge.
Two of Andy's dodmen were making their way across, carrying white sighting-poles.
Powys asked him how long it had been going on, all this planning and surveying
and buying up of land.

   
'Months. Nearly a year, all told.
But it's all come to a head very rapidly. In some curious way, I think Henry's
death fired Max into orbit. Henry's done the leg-work, now it was down to Max
to pull it all together. There are more than fifty workmen on the project now. Stables'll
be finished by Monday, ready for a start on the Court itself next week. First
half-dozen stones in place by tomorrow night. That's moving, Joe.'

   
'No, he doesn't piss about,
does he?'

   
'All that remains is to persuade
the remaining few die-hards either to sell their land or accept a stone on it.
Hence Tuesday's public meeting. A formality, I'd guess. He'll have bought them off
by then. Agent's out there now, negotiating. Farmers will do anything these
days to stay afloat. Caravan sites, wind-farms, you name it. They take what
comes. Most of them have no choice.'

   
Powys wondered if you could
stop people planting a standing stone close to where you lived, perhaps
diverting some kind of energy through your house? How would a court make a ruling
on something which had never been proved to exist?

   
'It seems amazing,' he said, 'that
there were so many stones around here and every single one of them's been
ripped out.'

   
'Except for one Henry found.
Little bent old stone under a hedge.'

   
'Do you think they destroyed
them because they were superstitious?'

   
Andy shrugged.

   
'Because you'd think, if they were
superstitious, they'd have been
scared
to pull them out, wouldn't you?'

   
'People in these parts,' Andy
said, 'who knows how their minds work?'

   
Powys looked up the street
towards the church tower.

   
'There's a major ley, isn't
there, coming from the Tump, through the Court, then the church, right through
the town to the hills?'

   
'Line one.' Andy held out the
plan.

   
'I was up in the prospect
chamber at the Court. It might have been constructed to sight along that ley.'
   
'Might have been?'
   
'You think it was?'