Crow Trap Page 8

  ‘I have proof,’ she said gaily. ‘There are letters from HAVOC which bear your signature to local supporters. I don’t think you can deny it. And it seems very bizarre to me, Mr Benn, that you are so concerned to provide work for the youth of our community through the development of the quarry, yet so reluctant to give the same benefit to your own. I’m sure the open cast mine would have provided work too.’

  She sat down. Behind her there was cheering and clapping and a couple of catcalls. It served Derek Benn right. If he’d been more even-handed in his chairing of the meeting she’d never have brought up that business of HAVOC. He hadn’t given a toss about the open cast mine, hadn’t even attended most of the meetings. His involvement with the group had provided an alibi, an excuse to be out of the house when he was meeting her. Good God, she thought, whatever did I see in him?

  After the meeting a group of protesters went to the pub to discuss strategy. It was midsummer and still light. Anne would have preferred to be in her garden, but she followed them across the road to the Ridley Arms. Living at the Priory had given her a certain, ambiguous status within the village. A responsibility. She wasn’t in the same league as the Fulwells at Holme Park. They wouldn’t be expected to participate in village events, except occasionally to open the church Summer Fayre. All the same she had a standing.

  They’d invited her to be St Mary’s churchwarden, for example, although she hardly ever attended church. The job seemed to go with the house. They’d thought her a stuck-up cow for refusing.

  Inside the pub it was noisy and chaotic and very quickly she was forced to take charge. Some of them wanted to organize a petition. She talked them out of it. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Planners don’t take much notice of petitions. They get them all the time. They know people sign bits of paper without reading them properly or because they don’t like to say no. You should organize individual letters of protest. They carry more weight.’

  When she sat down Sandy Baines, who had the garage, asked shyly if she’d like a drink.

  ‘I’d have thought this quarry would be in your interest,’ she said. ‘The lorries would have to fill up somewhere, wouldn’t they?’

  It seemed that this idea hadn’t occurred to him and she saw with amusement that as soon as he delivered her G&T, he disappeared. He had been caught up in the village’s general suspicion of change and strangers. She doubted if even self-interest would make a difference to that.

  She was approached next by the small man, whose name she could never remember, who lived in the modern ugly bungalow on the way into the village.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘A few of us have been talking. We’d like you to sit on our action committee. Speak for us, like.’

  He had a head the shape of a sheep’s and white woolly hair. She fancied the ‘like’ came out as a ‘baa’. She seemed to remember now that he had once been a butcher. She declined graciously. Despite her support for the project and enjoying a fight, she knew she’d soon be bored with it. Bored at least with them. She finished her drink and stood up to go.

  ‘My husband will be wondering where I am.’ Though she knew that even if Jeremy were at home he wouldn’t give a shit.

  Outside the pub she stood for a minute enjoying the last of the birdsong. Someone had been cooking a barbecue. She realized she was hungry and almost turned back into the pub because although Milly was a crappy landlady who understood sod-all about customer service, as Anne was some sort of heroine, she would at least have to come up with a plate of sandwiches.

  Then a sleek, black car pulled up in front of her, moving out of the shadows with hardly a sound. The window was lowered with a purr. She saw Godfrey Waugh and knew then that he must have been waiting for her.

  ‘Mrs Preece,’ he said, as though he had arrived there quite by chance. ‘I wonder if I might offer you a lift.’

  She had recognized him at once as the owner of the quarry company. She had seen him on the platform during the meeting. He had been introduced though he had hardly spoken. When she had looked at him from the audience, stiff and uncomfortable in his subdued suit and highly polished shoes, he had reminded her of an interview candidate trying too hard to please.

  ‘I have my own car, thank you.’

  A grotty little Fiat. When she married Jeremy she had assumed there was money in the background. It hadn’t quite worked out that way.

  ‘I would very much like to speak to you. Have you eaten? Perhaps I could buy you dinner.’ He was diffident, a bit like the old men in the pub.

  ‘I’m not bribed that easily.’

  ‘No, of course not!’ He took her seriously and was shocked.

  She smiled. She might look, in a bad light, like Camilla Parker-Bowles but she knew the effect that smile could have.

  ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Why not?’ By now it was too dark to do much in the garden and she was curious.

  ‘Would you like to come with me? Or perhaps you would prefer to follow me in your own car? I was thinking of the George.’

  Very nice, she thought. The George was an unpretentious hotel in the next village where the chef worked magic with local ingredients.

  ‘No, I’d rather come with you if you don’t mind bringing me back here later.’

  Suddenly she didn’t want him to get too close a view of the grotty Fiat. There was something about him which made her feel the need to impress. At the time she thought it was his money.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘Tell me about yourself,’ she said. She was leaning across the dinner table, her elbows on the white cloth. There was candlelight for which she was grateful. Recently she had noticed fine lines above her upper lip and knew that she could no longer get away with sleeveless dresses. It wasn’t the George Hotel but another evening, another restaurant. Godfrey Waugh had called her that morning.

  ‘I thought we should get together again. I found the last meeting very useful. I’d like to hear any suggestions you might have for making the quarry more acceptable to the community.’

  But she told him here in the restaurant she would rather discuss him.

  ‘There’s not much to tell,’ he said, though she could see he was pleased to be asked. He spoke with a local accent, with a slight stutter. He was very shy. She realized at their first meeting that if it ever came to seduction, it would be down to her. She would have to be the active partner. He might be as old as she was, but there was something awkward and adolescent about him. She had been expecting a brash and vulgar businessman not a boy, and she was touched.

  He continued, mumbling so she had to strain to hear him.

  ‘I was brought up in Kimmerston. Failed the eleven-plus and went to the secondary modern. I was never much good at school. Couldn’t see the point really. Not that I mucked about. I just didn’t bother. When I was fifteen I left and went to work in the quarry at Slateburn. It wasn’t much of an operation then, nothing to what it is now. The old man prepared dressed stone for mantelpieces, ornamental walls, headstones, you know the sort of thing. He’d lost interest in it, the business side at least. He liked fiddling with the stone and his chisels but he couldn’t be bothered chasing up unpaid bills. I got a chance to buy in. Making money always appealed to me, even when I was at school.’

  He smiled at her apologetically. Perhaps he thought she was a woolly-minded environmentalist to whom money didn’t matter.

  ‘That’s it really. We were able to expand. It was as much a matter of luck as anything else. Being in the right place at the right time. You know.’ He stopped abruptly. ‘Look, I shouldn’t be going on so much about myself.’ As if it was something he’d read in a magazine.

  ‘Are you married?’ she asked, thinking it was probably the advice page in his wife’s magazine that he’d been reading. He wasn’t wearing a ring but she thought he was married. He had the look.

  He paused and she was expecting him to lie but he said: ‘Yes, to Barbara. She doesn’t get out much.’

  ‘What a strange thing to say!’ So strang
e that she pressed him to elaborate but he refused.

  ‘I’m married,’ she said at last, stretching extravagantly. ‘And I get out all the time.’

  For some reason the remark seemed to embarrass him. He didn’t answer and stretched over to fill her glass. She’d drunk most of the bottle already. He’d offered to drive.

  ‘Are you local?’ he asked. He was very polite as if they’d just met. ‘I mean, were you born near here?’

  ‘Quite near.’

  She hated going into her background. She’d always considered that her parents were rather horrible little people. Her father had been headmaster of a boys’ prep school. Until she was old enough to go to school herself she was brought up in that atmosphere of petty tyranny and ritual, of competitive games and fake tradition. Her mother lorded it over the other wives and her father lorded it over them all.

  ‘Where did you go to school then? The grammar, I suppose.’ She was amused that this business of education seemed to matter so much to him. She rather despised people with formal qualifications but it seemed to be his way of defining them.

  ‘Lord, no! I got sent away to a ghastly heap on the North York moors. I didn’t learn a thing.’

  She always described her years at the ghastly heap in this way but she knew it wasn’t quite true. There was a woman who taught Biology, Miss Masterman, who had seemed as lonely and isolated as any of the girls. She was young, straight out of college, rather prickly. A Scot who would have been more at home in an inner city secondary modern than this gothic pile. Even then Anne had wondered what she was doing there. It was hard to imagine her drinking afternoon tea in the panelled Mistresses’ common room with the stuffy spinsters who made up most of the staff. And she certainly seemed to prefer the company of a small set of older girls to that of her colleagues. She arranged tramps on the moors, and away from the school she seemed to relax. She carried with her a sketchbook full of pencil drawings. The lines were fine, the pictures full of detail. She sprayed them with a fixative which smelled of pear drops to prevent smudging.

  Occasionally, Miss Masterman led them on fungus forays. Away from the school she encouraged the girls to call her Maggie but Anne always thought of her as Miss Masterman. They’d carry flat wicker baskets and listen with delicious horror as she recounted, in her dry Edinburgh voice, tales of people who’d taken poisoned fungus by mistake. Putting off the return to school as long as possible they would build a camp fire at dusk and fry up the edible fungi, the field mushrooms and the ink caps.

  Sitting in the restaurant, watching the candle flicker, Anne could remember the smell of woodsmoke, the feel of the battered tin plates, the taste of buttery juice wiped up with crusty bread. She had learnt something from the Biology teacher. She’d learnt that she never wanted to be like Maggie Masterman, depending on adolescent girls and mushrooms for fun. And that she had a passion for plants.

  ‘Do you work?’ Godfrey asked, breaking into the memory. ‘Or perhaps you have children?’

  As if the two were mutually exclusive.

  ‘No, no children. And no permanent work. Bits and pieces, you know.’

  When things were tight. When Jeremy’s mysterious deals failed to come off. She learnt, very soon after marriage, that Jeremy was gay in a camp, rather jolly way. Of course he knew when he married her but perhaps thought, like the old Archbishop of Canterbury, that the right girl would cure him. She was sure that no malice or spite was intended in the transaction but there were other deceits – the impression, for instance, of money. He did have the Priory, which had sounded grand at the time but which had turned out to be no more than a glorified farmhouse built from the stone of a Tudor chapel. And he hadn’t paid for that, it had been left to him by his grandfather.

  By nature Jeremy was wonderfully optimistic. He imported antiques, art, books. Usually he managed to make enough just to tide them over but recently she suspected he might even fail to do that. They never discussed finance. If she asked about money he wagged a podgy finger at her. ‘Now, old girl. Leave all that to me.’

  Recently there had been fewer plans for the house, less discussion about interior decoration – usually he loved talking fabric and furnishing. She wondered, not for the first time, if he was being blackmailed by one of his little boys.

  But Anne resented working for money. It came hard to put in so much effort and receive so little reward. She found it demeaning. For example, she could spend a whole day landscaping someone’s garden and still not be paid enough to buy this dinner. It hurt her pride to be valued so little. She found she preferred to work as a volunteer. That was how she first met Peter Kemp.

  She responded to an advertisement in the Wildlife Trust magazine. People with botanical skills were required to help with an English Nature survey. She was sent on a course and shone. Since then she’d worked regularly for the trust as a volunteer, and loved every minute of it. It was like Miss Masterman’s botanizing expectations all over again.

  Sitting in the restaurant, Anne realized that Godfrey was looking at her, pleadingly.

  Oh God, she thought. He wants to talk about his offspring.

  ‘And you?’ she asked with resignation. ‘Do you have children?’

  He replied immediately, becoming much more animated than when talking about his business. ‘We’ve a little girl. Felicity. She’s nearly ten. Very bright for her age. At least that’s what we think. She’s still at the village school at the moment; Barbara says the teachers there are good. Later we’ll have to see . . .’

  Anne yawned discreetly into the back of her hand. She almost expected him to bring out the photo which he certainly kept in his wallet. Yet this was the moment she decided she could afford to have an affair with him. He would never get too serious. There would be no talk of divorce, of their moving in together. He would do nothing to upset his daughter.

  Now the restaurant was almost empty. It was in Kimmerston, right on the bank of the river. They were alone in an extension built almost entirely of glass. A cold green light was reflected from the water. The candle on their table provided the only pool of warmth in the room.

  ‘Do you have to get back?’ she asked. She spoke abruptly. Certainly there was no seduction in her voice. She leant forward over the table and stretched a long white hand towards him. She would never use gloves for gardening or fieldwork and was aware that her hands wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny. There was a stain on her thumb which she couldn’t get rid of, they were scratched, she had to keep the nails short. But she wanted to touch him. He watched the hand slowly approaching his with fascination. When the fingers met she looked up at his face and saw that he was blushing, breathless.

  ‘Well?’

  His fingers were rough, like hers.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Will Barbara be expecting you?’

  ‘I could phone. Say I’d been held up.’

  He was stroking the palm of her hand with his thumb. She was surprised by the effect the simple gesture had. She thought she was getting old and jaded, yet here she was, wanting this upright, middle-aged man so much that she was almost fainting.

  ‘Why don’t you do that? Because Jeremy’s in London and you could come home. For a nightcap. If you’d like that.’ She could hardly articulate the words.

  Outside they stood for a moment hand in hand. Anne could smell the river. Although they were a long way from the coast it had traces of salt and seaweed. Across the road a car started up. For a moment it caught Godfrey’s attention and she felt the hand tense. He turned his face away from the headlights. She was flattered by the reaction of guilt. Adultery obviously didn’t come easily to him. It occurred to her that this might be the first time he had ever been unfaithful to his wife.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Will you come back with me?’

  But they didn’t make it home to the Priory. Their first sexual encounter was in the back of the BMW. Godfrey pulled it off the road and parked in a farm track overhung with trees. Afterwards, lying
back on the leather seats, she saw the moonlight filter through the summer foliage. She identified the trees as elder and hawthorn.

  Chapter Fourteen

  That summer Anne saw Godfrey regularly but secretly. She was discreet in a way which didn’t come naturally to her. In the past she had flaunted her men. Jeremy had pretended he didn’t mind, and perhaps he really didn’t, though he liked the fiction that they were a happy couple of independent means, devoted to each other and to country pursuits. Anne was afraid that if he found out about Godfrey he would laugh. At the Marks & Spencer suits, the pretentious gold watch, the shiny shoes. Despite the company he kept, Jeremy was a snob. Godfrey was even more eager than she that the affair remain secret. He couldn’t face the prospect of his wife or his child finding out that he had a lover.

  Therefore, she continued as usual. It was a hot dry summer and she spent long hours working in her garden. Her forehead turned as brown as leather and her arms and neck spotted with freckles, so once she said to Godfrey, ‘I look at least sixty. How can you possibly fancy me?’ She expected a quip about his liking older women; instead he said, ‘I don’t fancy you. It’s much, much more than that.’ And she believed him. By the beginning of autumn she had picked the early apples, wrapped them in newspaper and stacked them in boxes at the back of the garage. And she still looked forward to the clandestine meetings.

  By the autumn too, opposition to the super quarry had gathered in momentum. She continued to be involved. She liked attending meetings to which Godfrey had been invited. There was an anticipatory thrill in standing outside the door of a shabby church hall, knowing that he was inside. Sometimes she could hear his voice, low and monotonous, making a point. His points were often technical. He might not have passed exams but he carried statistics in his head and could recite them flawlessly, like a child performing a favourite nursery rhyme. She loved arguing with him in public.

  The people in the action group thought she disliked Godfrey Waugh intensely.