Crybbe

CHAPTER III

'Bit for level, Fay.'

'OK, here we go…'

Mr. Kettle said, '… All right then, we know there's got to be water yereabouts…'

'OK, that's fine, Fay… I'm rolling. Go in five.'

She wound back, set the tape running and took the cans off her ears, leaving them around her neck so she'd hear the engineer call out if he ran into problems.

Leaning back in the metal-framed typist's chair, she thought, God, I've been shunted into some seedy sidings in my time, but this. ..

… was the Crybbe Unattended Studio.

Ten feet long and six feet wide. Walls that closed in on you like the sides of a packing case. A tape-machine on a metal stand. A square mahogany table with a microphone next to a small console with buttons that lit up. And the chair. And no windows, just a central light and two little red lights – one above the door outside to warn people to keep away in case whoever was inside happened to be broadcasting live to the scattered homesteads of the Welsh Marches.

This studio used to be the gents' lavatories at the back of the Cock, before they'd built new ones inside the main building. Then some planning wizard at Offa's Dyke Radio had presumably stuck a plastic marker into the map and said without great enthusiasm: Crybbe – well, yeah, OK, not much of a place, but it's almost exactly halfway up the border and within couple miles of the Dyke itself… about as central as we can get.'

Then they'd have contacted the Marches Development Board, who'd have told them: No problem, we can offer you a purpose-built broadcasting centre on our new Kington Road Industrial Estate at an annual rent of only…

At which point the planning wizard would have panicked and assured them that all that was required was a little room to accommodate reporters and interviewees (one at a time) and for sending tape down a land-line to Offa's Dyke main studios.

All self-operated. No staff, no technicians. Very discreet: You walk in, you switch on, and a sound-engineer records your every word from fifty miles away.

Which was how they'd ended up with the former gents' at the Cock. A tired, brick building with a worn slate roof, at the end of a narrow passageway past the dustbins.

The original white tiles with worrying brown stains had gone now. Or at least were hidden behind the black acoustic screening which formed a little soundproof module inside the building.

But sometimes, especially early in the morning, Fay would swear she could smell…

'That's lovely, Fay, thanks very much.'

Thanks, Barry,' Fay told the microphone on the desk. All engineers were called Barry.

'It's Elton, actually,' he said. 'Hang on, Gavin's here, he'd like a word.'

Elton. Jesus, nobody in this country who was called Elton could possibly be over twenty-one. Even the damned engineer at Offa's Dyke were fresh out of engineering school.

Gavin Ashpole came on the line, the station's news editor, an undeveloped rasp, unsure of whether it was supposed to sound thrusting or laid-back. He wanted to know if Fay was any closer to an interview with Max Goff about his plans for Crybbe Court. Or at least some sort of statement. 'I mean, is it going to be a recording studio, or what? We going to have enormous rock stars helicoptering in? We need to know, and we need to know before we read about it in the bloody papers.'

'No, listen, I told you, his PA insists he doesn't want any publicity yet, but…'

Calm down, woman, don't rise to it.

'But when he's got things together,' Fay finished lamely, he says they'll tell me first.

I… I've no reason to think she's bullshitting.'

'Why can't you doorstep him? Just turn up. Put the fucker on the spot.'

'Look, isn't it better to try and stay on the right side of the guy? There could be a lot of mileage in this one for us, in… in the future.' Hesitating because 'in the future' she wasn't going to be here, was she?

Absolutely no way she could tell him about the late Henry Kettle being hired by Goff to do some dowsing around the Court. Partly because she hadn't been able to persuade Mr. Kettle to tell her what he was supposed to be looking for. And partly because loony Gavin Ashpole would start wondering how he could implicate the famous Goff in Henry's death.

I don't know, Fay.' Ashpole switching to the Experienced News Editor's pensive drawl. 'I'm not into all this pussyfooting about. We're gonna lose out, here. Listen, try him again, yeah? If you don't get anywhere, we'll have to, you know, reconsider things.'

He meant if she didn't get him an interview soon they'd send in some flash kid from the newsroom to show her how it was done. Nasty little sod, Gavin Ashpole. All of twenty-four. Career to carve.

You've got to stop this, Fay warned herself, as the line went dead. You're becoming seriously obsessed with age. Good God, woman, you're not old.

Just older than almost everybody else connected with Offa's Dyke Radio. Which, OK, was not exactly old old, but…

What it is, she thought, your whole life's been out of synch, that's the problem. Goes back to having a father who was already into his fifties when you were conceived. Discovering your dad is slightly older than most other kids' granddads.

And yet, when you are not yet in your teens, it emerges that your mother is threatening to divorce your aged father because of his infidelity.

Fay shook her head, playing with the buttons on the studio tape-machine. He'd given up the other woman, narrowly escaping public disgrace. Eight years later he was a widower.

Fast forward over that. Too painful.

Whizz on through another never-mind-how-many years and there you are, recovering from your own misguided marriage to a grade-A dickhead, pursuing your first serious career – as a radio producer, in London – and, yes, almost starting to enjoy yourself… when, out of the blue, your old father rings to invite you to his wedding in…

'Sorry, where did you say…?'

'C-R-Y-B-B-E.'

'Where the hell is that. Dad? Also, more to the point, who the hell is Grace?'

And then – bloody hell! – before he can reply, you remember.

'Oh my God, Grace was the woman who'd have been cited in Mum's petition! Grace Legge. She must be…'

'Sixty-two. And not terribly well, I'm afraid, Fay. Moneywise, too, she's not in such a healthy position. So I'm doing the decent thing. Twenty years too late, you might say…'

'I might not say anything coherent for ages, Dad. I'm bloody speechless.'

'Anyway, I've sort of moved in with her. This little terraced cottage she's got in Crybbe, which is where she was born. You go to Hereford and then you sort of turn right and just, er, jus carry on, as it were.'

'And what about your own house? Who's taking care of that?

'Woodstock? Oh, I, er, I had to sell it. Didn't get a lot actually, the way the market is, but…'

'Just a minute, Dad. Am I really hearing this? You sold that bloody wonderful house? Are you going senile?'

Not an enormously tactful question, with hindsight.

'No option, my dear. Had to have the readies for… for private treatment for Grace and, er, things. Which goes – now, you don't have to tell me – goes against everything I've always stood for, so don't spread it around. But she's really not awfully well, and I feel sort of…'

'Sort of guilty as hell.'

'Yes, I suppose. Sort of. Fay, would you object awfully to drifting out here and giving me away, as it were? Very quiet, of course. Very discreet. No dog-collars.'

This is – when? – eleven months ago?

The wedding is not an entirely convivial occasion. At the time, Grace Legge, getting married in a wheelchair, has approximately four months to live, and she knows it.

When you return to a damp and leafless late-autumnal Crybbe for the funeral, you notice the changes in your dad. Changes which a brain-scan will reveal to be the onset of a form of dementia caused by hardening of the arteries. Sometimes insufficient blood is getting to his brain. The bottom line is that it's going to get worse.

The dementia is still intermittent, but he can hardly be left on his own. He won't come to London – 'Grace's cats and things, I promised.' And he won't have a housekeeper – 'Never had to pay a woman for washing my socks and I don't plan to start now. Wash my own.'

Fay sighed deeply. Cut to Controller's office, Christmas Eve. 'Fay, it's not rational. Why don't you take a week off and think about it? I know if it was my father he'd have to sell up and rent himself a flat in town if he was expecting me to keep an eye on him.'

'This is just it, he doesn't expect me to. He's an independent old sod.'

'All right. Let's say you do go to this place. How are you supposed to make a living?'

'Well, I've done a bit of scouting around. This new outfit, Offa's Dyke Radio…'

'Local radio? Independent local radio? Here today and… Oh, Fay, come on, don't do this to yourself.'

I thought maybe I could freelance for them on a bread-and-butter basis. They've got an unattended studio actually in Crybbe, which is a stroke of luck. And the local guy they had, he's moved on, and so they're on the look-out for a new contributor. I've had a chat with the editor there and he sounded quite enthusiastic'

'I bet he did.'

'And maybe I could do the odd programme for you, if freelancing for a local independent as well doesn't break some ancient BBC law.'

'I'm sure that's not an insurmountable problem, but…'

'I know, I know. I'm far too young to be retiring to the country.'

'And far too good, actually.'

'You've never said before.'

'You might have asked for more money.'

Typical bloody BBC.

Fay spun back the Henry Kettle tape – why couldn't you rewind your life like that? – and let herself out, throwing the studio into darkness with the master switch by the door. But the spools were still spinning in her head.

She locked up and set off with a forced briskness up the alley, an ancient passageway, smoked brick walls with a skeleton of years-blackened beams. Sometimes cobwebs hung down and got in your hair. She wasn't overfond of this alley. There were always used condoms underfoot; sometimes the concrete flags were slippery with them. In winter they were frozen, like milk ice-pops.

She emerged into the centre of Crybbe as the clock in the church tower was chiming eleven. Getting to eleven sounded like a big effort for the mechanism; you could hear the strain.

There were lots of deep shadows, even though the sun was high, because the crooked brick and timbered building, slouched together, like down-and-outs sharing a cigarette. Picturesque and moody in the evening, sometimes. In the daytime, run-down, shabby.

People were shopping in the square, mainly for essentials, the shops in Crybbe specialized in the items families ran out in between weekly trips to the supermarkets in Hereford or Leominster. In Crybbe, prices were high and stocks low. These were long-established shops, run by local people: the grocer, the chemist, the hardware and farming suppliers.

Other long-established businesses had, like Henry Kettle, gone to the wall. And been replaced by a new type of store.

Like The Gallery, run by Hereward and Jocasta Newsome, from Surrey, specializing in the works of border landscape artists. In the window, Fay saw three linked watercolours of the Tump at different times of day, the ancient mound appearing to hover in the dawn mist, then solid in the sunlight and then dark and black against an orange sky. A buff card underneath lid, in careful copperplate

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?'