Flowers for a Dead Witch, page 4
‘Yes, I’ve seen them there,’ said Polly.
‘And, of course, you don’t approve,’ he sneered.
‘It all looks so pointless!’ she said. ‘Such a sickening waste of youth and opportunity for youngsters just to be sitting there, preening themselves in their bedraggled finery, as if they were … were … a gaggle of monkeys on some desert island.’
He laughed aloud, showing the backs of his very white teeth.
‘You’re so simpatico!’ he cried. ‘You may not know it, but you’re one of us. You dig the meaning of the scene. Being monkeys on our own private desert island is basically what it’s all about!’
‘NO!’ She felt an angry vein hammering in her temple. ‘I’t isn’t what it’s all about, is it? Dropping out isn’t quite all there is to it. There’s … dirt and disease mixed up with it … drugs and drug peddling … the cynical debasement of what used to be called love-making … it’s evil! Evil!’
‘Evil?’ He was on his feet, face blood-drained with fury. ‘You just don’t know what evil’s all about, Miss Canadian Cheddar!’ He pointed wildly about him, taking in the house and the surrounding countryside, and ending with a gesture towards the village hidden down the lane. ‘I’ll tell you where evil is: it’s what stinks in the nostrils here! They’re all at it! The whole damned gang, with their front of upper class and bourgeois respectability. The squire and his lady; the landed mob; the week-ending stockbrokers with their tarted-up hovels; my old man—the lot!
‘They’ve got evil on the move here, the way it hasn’t been moving since the Dark Ages!’
Then he was gone: back the way they had come, his tall figure loping.
CHAPTER III
She ate a late lunch in the solar, silverside of beef and salad; and great cumulo-nimbus clouds massed in from the west, turning the Italian tiled floor alternately light and dark as the sun edged in and out of the gaps. With the clouds came the wind.
Emma Chesham served her, and was gruffly monosyllabic; returning her question about the patient’s condition with the reluctant comment:
‘No change.’
Polly took her empty dishes into the kitchen. Miss Chesham was eating at the serving-table with a newspaper propped up in front of her. There was an empty tumbler by her plate, and Polly caught the faint tang of whisky fumes—and this sparked off an interesting speculation about the old woman’s private habits.
‘I thought,’ said Polly, ‘that I’d walk down to the village and see if there’s any news about my car.’
Miss Chesham mumbled something, but seemed to have difficulty in articulating; she settled for a sketchy gesture with her large hands, and Polly realized—with a slight shock—that she was probably quite drunk.
It was less than half a mile from the park gates to the village; the tiled rooftops were visible round the first bend in the lane. There was a line of cottages at each side of the village street, which split into a fork at the end, under a gorse-covered hill—one branch rounding the hill in the direction of the sea, and signposted:
To the Beach
The other road swung sharply right, and mounted the side of the hill. Near the junction, next to the pub, was a garage and filling station. With a curious stab of fondness, she saw her little red sports car standing in the forecourt, among the sagging piles of old tyres and empty carboys of battery acid.
The proprietor was E. Wakes—Motor Engineer—so announced in stencilled letters over the corrugated iron shed that was his workshop. He was young, bald, and monstrously fat. He ran one grimed hand over the sleek red bonnet and pronounced the car to be sick—but not fatally. He asked her where she’d bought it, and rolled his eyes when she mentioned the dealer in Cambridge. Yes, he knew him all right, and it was no use her trying to claim for a free repair: that chappie specialized in flogging salvaged wrecks to overseas students, and wasn’t at home to after-sales complaints. But he—Ted Wakes—would undoubtedly be able to fix the old banger quite quickly, if he could get hold of the spares before noon. Leave it to Ted.
Polly thanked him gratefully and turned to go. He walked across the forecourt with her, and was watching her speculatively.
‘The village is very quiet,’ she said.
‘You wouldn’t have said that this time last week,’ he said. ‘Last Saturday, the cars were double-parked right down to the sands. Yesterday’s rain’s put off the day trippers, and it didn’t look too promising this morning, did it? This old wind and cloud’ll keep ’em away tomorrow, and all. I expect we’re in for the first quiet week-end this year. Nights are drawing in, and it’ll soon be winter again.’ He rubbed the side of his pudgy nose with his forefinger. ‘I expect you’ll be going up to see the witch’s grave, miss, eh? You being connected with the family and all.’
‘I … I thought I might go down and have a look at the sea first,’ said Polly.
‘You can’t miss the graveyard,’ said Ted Wakes, pointing. ‘That’s just on the cliff on t’other side o’ the hill. You’ll see that from the beach, and there’s a little bit of a pathway up there.’
‘Thank you, Mr Wakes,’ she said.
‘Watch out for the cliffs,’ he called after her. ‘They’re on the move all the time. A couple o’ little kiddies were buried alive last month!’
The roadway petered out into shingle; and there were two old fishing boats lying above the tide line: Denwich Lass and Princess of Suffolk; they looked like heavy pieces of Victorian furniture washed up from the sea. A whitehaired man in a rusty blue sweater was crouched by the stern of one of them; he glanced up and nodded when she passed, then went back to scraping the green patina from the propeller blades.
When she turned her back on the old man and the boats, there was nothing before her but sea and shore, and sandpipers flickering like gadflies in the wind over the low line of cliffs on her right. Cliffs and shoreline ran ruler-straight to a distant headland half-shrouded in overcast; and the tumbled clouds sat squarely over it all—dominant—like the clouds in an old Dutch landscape.
She slipped off her casuals and tucked them into the pockets of her windcheater; then slanted towards the edge of the sea, till the spent breakers were curling in icy tendrils round her bare feet, and she was walking on smooth wet sand that yielded luxuriously beneath her tread,
Then, slowly—as the solitude washed over her—she reassembled some of the incidents of the last few hours, since she had come to Mondisfield: the nodules of tension and strangeness …
There was her great-aunt, who lay in an upper room in the ramshackle old mansion, with only the jealous possessiveness of her housekeeper-companion to care for her. Shouldn’t she, Polly, confront Emma Chesham and demand to see the stricken woman? Henrietta Granchester had sent instructions to her solicitor to summon her sole surviving relation. Did she know that she had arrived? Would Miss Chesham have told her?
Possibly not.
After—what was it?—thirty-seven years, to be confronted by an alien young woman who was almost certainly designated as the next mistress of Mondisfield; what sort of response but stubborn resentment was that likely to spark off in the mind of a crabbed old eccentric who probably had no other roof to shelter her?
Yes, definitely, she would—she must—see Great-Aunt Henrietta this very day, when she got back to Mondisfield. And have a word with the doctor about her condition, when next he called. Doctor—what was his name?—Doctor Mays, the girl Griselda’s father …
The chain of association gave her the face of the mophaired boy looming over her, angry-eyed, and pointing an accusing finger. She heard his harsh voice again, above the bass boom of the breakers:
‘They’ve got evil here … the way it hasn’t been since the Dark Ages! …’
Next she saw the pallid face of the clergyman with the eyes of a cornered marmoset. ‘I am Jonathon Ayers,’ it said, and my wife has known half the men in the village. But, before she dies, it is my solemn duty to give what comfort I can to that old woman …’
The painted face in the picture on the top landing: her own: the face of Polly Lestrange, of Toronto, Canada—yet a face which had been consumed in hellish fire in another time but in this very place, and whose charred skull lay in the shifting mausoleum somewhere up on those sandstone cliffs …
Something else stirred in a dark corner of her mind: a recollection of unease so disturbing that she tried to quench it before it took shape—and failed.
The sensation of being watched …
The wind caught her hair as she turned, and when she had cleared it from her eyes she saw the great distance she had come, all unknowing. The roofs of the village were out of sight behind the cliffs, and there were only the twin white specks of the fishing boats to show from where she had started.
Before her: the blank face of the cliffs, overtopped by scrub, where the sandpipers wheeled. Behind her: the crawling grey waters of the North Sea.
Trapped on the open shore, with only the wide waste of sand and shingle for refuge. So that, if those watching eyes on the clifftop scrub were to materialize into a form that came loping down the sloping cliffside, and out across the open space towards her …
She tried common sense: firmly attacking the nameless and unreasonable by dragging visions of the familiar and commonplace before her mind: white river steamers on the St Lawrence, and flaky bread rolls; pine forests and the feel of the inside of a new wool sweater.
Terror—real physical manifestation of terror—came upon her almost unawares. It was as if a finger trailed over the back of her scalp, causing each separate hair to come erect.
Then she was running; splashing through the chill shallows, back the way she had come.
She nearly cried out with relief to see three small figures toiling on the lower side of the cliff, half-way between her and the distant fishing boats. They were young girls apparently absorbed in some childish game—and she headed towards them.
At close quarters, the cliff was not all that high—no more than thirty feet in parts—and the upper stratum of earth, capped with rank grass and speckled with white stones, was plainly visible from the beach.
The upper part rose vertically above a slope of fallen scree, and one of the girls was scrambling, ankle deep, on the scree. She seemed to be searching for something.
The other two were at the bottom, crouched over a square of scarf silk laid out like a tablecloth. They looked round querulously as Polly approached. Both were barefoot, and wearing faded fawn mackintoshes like their companion above. They could have been sisters: something between eight and ten years old; identical tow-fair hair, china-blue eyes, deeply tanned limbs and faces. The idealized little Anglo-Saxon misses of the breakfast food commercials, thought Polly. The sight of them made her feel blessedly relaxed again. Relaxed and indulgent. There were shards of what appeared to be broken stone lying on the coloured scarf; the kids were collecting shells and fossils maybe.
‘Hi!’ she said.
‘Hello.’ They replied in polite unison, and turned back to their task of picking over the pieces on the scarf.
‘I really think this is a femur,’ said the elder. ‘Do you see, Sandra? This knob thing at the end is where it fits into the hip.’
‘Is this a femur too—or a piece of rib?’ They both spoke with the mandarin accent of the English upper class.
With a sudden shock of revulsion, Polly realized that what they had was a small pile of broken bones. But what kind of bones? Her mind wavered at the possibility …
‘Planning to make soup?’ she said, in as bright a voice as she could muster.
Two pairs of china-blue eyes panned up to meet hers, and they both gave her the half-indulgent, half-pitying smile that children reserve for adult facetiousness. But before either of them could reply, there came an excited squeal from the slope above:
‘Wheeeee! I’ve found a piece of a skull! Come and see! Come and see!’
‘Oh, Mary! You haven’t!’ They leapt to their feet and began toiling up the scree, stamping hard into the yielding surface, to keep their footing.
After a few moments’ indecision, Polly set off to follow them. The going was harder than she’d bargained for: some of it was firm underfoot; in other places she sank calf-deep in hidden crannies below the pulverized sandstone. All the time, the movements of the girls above her sent miniature landslides tumbling down the scree, and she thought back to Ted Wakes’s warning about being buried alive.
She reached a long ledge that ran beneath the vertical upper part of the cliff; pulling herself on to it by gripping a tussock of dry grass. It looked a long way down to the beach. The girls were grouped together, peering at something one of them was holding.
‘I don’t think it’s part of a skull. I don’t think it’s bone at all. It looks more like a piece of an old shell.
‘It could be bone.’
‘More likely it isn’t. It’s sort of the wrong colour.’ The speaker turned, and proffered the object to Polly. ‘Do you think it’s bone—or shell?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know much about these things,’ said Polly lamely. ‘It’s human bones you’re collecting, isn’t it?’ she added.
‘Oh yes. There’s loads of them here, you know.’ The girl pointed upwards. ‘The old graveyard’s just above us. We come here quite a lot.’
And then Polly saw that what she had taken to be white stones was the human detritus of the dying graveyard, exposed to view in the section of the crumbling clifftop, and due to fall down at the inexorable rate of the erosion; the stratum of earth above her head was studded with knobbly vertebrae and. phalanges, twisted skewers of ribs, and anonymous fragments.
Almost exactly six feet below the grassy summit—where they had been laid, after the toiling of some longgone sexton’s mattock—the stumps of a pair of leg bones protruded, side by side, from the earth; harmless and mutely pathetic.
The girl pointed to them. ‘We’ve been watching that one become uncovered since about last Easter,’ she said. ‘And I know the person who has the whole skull.’
There was a gust of wind, and the first splattering of rain. One of the girls shivered.
‘It’s time for tea. Come on.’
They glissaded down the scree, and Polly followed more carefully. When she reached the bottom, one of them had gathered up the four corners of the scarf into a bundle.
‘Goodbye,’ they said, with grave politeness.
The pathway up the cliff was fifty yards farther along. Her good sense of direction suggested that it might provide a quicker way into the village than continuing along the beach as far as the road. That was her rationalization; but she was already wryly aware of a compulsion to visit the graveyard after all, in spite of her recent terror; if only to glance at it from a distance, or to walk quickly through it and see the mausoleum. The encounter with the three children had been strangely cathartic; had enabled her, in a curious way, to dismiss what she now recognized as an unreasonable terror.
Who, in a place like Denwich, would possibly waste his time and energy in spying on Polly Lestrange of Toronto, Canada, she asked herself.
The pathway was a flight of rough steps cut deeply into the sandstone. There was a wooden notice-board at the bottom:
DANGER NO DIGGING
Cliff falls have killed.
She climbed to the clifftop and stood there. The wind had dropped, and the rain had settled down to a light drizzle that murmured refreshingly upon the knee-high bracken. Below her, and less than a hundred yards away, behind a tangled hawthorn hedge, was the tin roof of Ted Wakes’s garage. A car came down the village street, turned the corner by the garage, and mounted the hill in low gear; she saw the top of its roof slide past behind the hedge.
Nothing on the clifftop but grass, bracken and thicket. No churchyard, or anything resembling it. No sound but the whispering of the rain. No movement but the dark grey overcast drifting past overhead.
With a distinct sense of anticlimax, she chose one of two paths presented to her: it led away from the village, paralleling the cliff edge, and then swung towards a clump of thicket, with a promise that it might lead out on to the road along which the car had just passed.
The delusion was borne upon her almost imperceptibly. Once into the thicket, gnarled yew branches closed in overhead. For a while she was almost totally absorbed in edging along carefully to avoid the wet undergrowth of nettle and bramble that lashed painfully at her legs. Then, when she had gone a little farther, it seemed absurd to turn back—particularly when the path broadened slightly, and she was able to walk without any difficulty. Another few yards, and there was a clearing in the thicket: a small open space bounded on three sides by the yews, and on the fourth by the cliff edge and the open sky.
Drunkenly sagging in the shifting soil, a solitary tombstone stood sentinel near the cliff edge. It’s very unexpectedness fascinated her, drawing her towards it.
Yellowed with lichen, the worn surface of the stone bore hardly any remains of an inscription; but she crouched and, tracing the faint shapes of the letters with her fingertip, she was able to pick out the legend incised in copperplate:
Sacred
To the memory of
JAMES BRINKLEY ELSE
Who died August 1st
1825 Aged 22 years
Her first thought was that she must be on the fringe of the old graveyard—but then she saw another half-sunken slab a few yards away under a yew. Then another.
Drawing back a screen of branches, she peered into the dark thicket, and picked out more lumped shapes part-hidden by the undergrowth. Most were simple headstones, but there was a broken-faced cherub on a green-moulded marble plinth, and a fallen angel gesturing in blind compassion from a curtain of ivy.
No question, now, of regarding the graveyard from a cool distance; peering, perhaps (as she had imagined), over a tumbled wall at neat rows of tombstones; or even walking through them with quick, dismissive strides. The vanishing graveyard was not like that at all; it had become part of the dying cliff, secret and overgrown. All unknowing, she had strayed into its hidden heart, and the shifting dead were all about her.
