The Remorseful Day

Chapter forty-one

Twenty miles west of Oxford, twenty miles east of Cheltenham, lies the little Cotswold town of Burford. It owes its architectural attractiveness to the wealth of the wool merchants in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and up until the end of the eighteenth century the small community there continued to thrive, especially the coaching inns which regularly served the E-W travel. But the town was no longer expanding, with the final blow delivered in 1812, when the main London road, which crossed the High Street (the present-day Sheep Street and Witney Street), was rerouted to the southern side of the town (the present-day A40). But Burford remains an enchanting place, as summer tourists will happily testify as they turn off at the A40 roundabout. Picturesque tea shops, craft shops, public houses — all built in the locally quarried, pale-honey-colored limestone — line the steeply curving sweep of the High Street that leads to the bridge at the bottom of the hill, under which runs the River Windrush, with all the birds and the bright meadows and cornfields around Oxfordshire.

Mrs. Patricia Bayley, aged seventy, had lived for only three years in Sheep Street (vide supra), a pleasingly peaceful, tree-lined road, first left as one descended the hill. The house-date, 1687, had been carved (now almost illegibly) in the greyish and pitted stone above the front door of the three-storied, mullion-windowed building. Her husband, a distinguished anthropologist from University College, Oxford, had died (aged sixty-seven) only two months after his retirement, and only four months after buying the Sheep Street property. Often, since then, she had considered leaving the house and buying one of the older persons’ flats that had been springing up for the last decade all over North Oxford, for her present house was unnecessarily extensive and inappropriate for her solitary needs. Yet the children and the grandchildren (especially the latter) loved to stay there with her and to find themselves lost amid the random rooms. Only one real problem: she’d have to do something about the windows. There could be no Council permission for replacement windows, but the casements were quite literally falling apart. And the whole of the exterior just had to be repainted, from the gutterings along the top to the front door at the bottom. Should she get it all done? Three weeks earlier she’d stood and surveyed the scene. Could she ever find anywhere else so pleasingly attractive as this?

No! She’d stay.

She’d consulted the Yellow Pages and found Barron, J., Builder and Decorator; not so far away, either — at Lower Swinstead. She’d rung him and he’d called round to survey the job. He’d seemed a personable sort of fellow; and when he’d quoted a reasonable (if slightly steep) estimate for both the restructuring and the repainting, she’d accepted.

He’d promised to be with her at 7:30 A.M. on Monday, August 3. And it was precisely at that time that he knocked in civilized manner on the front door of “Collingwood,” again admiring as he did so the dripstone molding above it.

Born in North Oxford, Mrs. Bayley spoke her mind unapologetically: “You look as if you’ve just come straight from the abattoir, Mr. Barron!”

The builder (rather a handsome man, she thought) grinned wryly as he looked down at overalls bespattered with scarlet paint. “Not my choice, Mrs. B. I’m with you, all the way. If there’s a better combination of color than black and white and yellow, I don’t know it.”

Mrs. B. felt gratified. “Well, I’ll let you get on then. I won’t bother you — no one will bother you. It’s all very quiet round here. Would you like some coffee later?”

“Tea, if you don’t mind, Mrs. B. Milk and two teaspoons of sugar, please. About ten? Smashing!”

From the ground-floor window she watched him as he removed the aluminum ladders from the top of the van, stood there for a few seconds looking up at the dormer window, then shaking out the first extension and, by means of a rope and pulley at the bottom, elongating the ladder to its fullest extent with a second, smaller extension. For a few seconds he stood there, holding the loftily assembled structure at right angles to the ground; then easing the pointed top of the third stage — most carefully, lovingly almost — into place against the casement of the dormer window some thirty feet above, before finally firming the bottom of the ladder on the compacted gravel of the pathway which divided the front of the houses there from the wide stretch of grass leading to the edge of Sheep Street, some four or five feet below.

For several minutes Mrs. B. stood by her front window on the ground floor, looking out a little anxiously to observe her builder’s varied skills. Across the road, a solitary jogger in red trainers was running reasonably briskly past the Bay Tree Hotel, his tracksuit hood over his head, as if he were trying to work up a sweat; or just perhaps to keep his ears warm, since there was an unseasonal nip in the air that morning. Mrs. B thought jogging a silly and dangerous way of keeping fit, though. She’d known the young North Oxford don who had written the hugely popular Joys of Jogging, and who had died aged twenty-seven, whilst on an early-morning not-so-joyful jog.

Jogging was a dangerous business.

Like climbing ladders.

And Mrs. B.’s nerves could stand things no longer.

She would repair to the second-floor back bedroom to continue with her quilting — as well as to quell the acute fear she felt for a man who (as she saw it) was risking his life at every second of his working day. But before doing so, she knew she had the moral duty to impart a few cautionary words of advice. And she opened the front door just as the builder was beginning his ascent, his left hand on a shoulder-high rung, his right hand grasping a narrowly serrated saw, a long chisel, and a red, short-handled Stanley knife.

“You will be careful, won’t you? Please!”

The builder nodded, successively grasping each rung (each “round” as the firemen say) at a point just above his shoulders as he climbed with measured step, professionally, confidently, to the top of the triple-length ladder. He’d always enjoyed being up high, ever since the vicar of St. John the Baptist’s in Burford had taken him and his fellow choirboys up to the top of the church. It was the first time in his young life he’d felt superior, felt powerful, as he traversed his way along the high places there with a strangely happy confidence, whilst the others inched their cautious way along the narrow ledges.

It was just the same now.

Once he had reached the top rung but three, he looked up and immediately decided he would be able to work at the top of the dormer without any trouble. Then he looked down, and saw that the ladder(s) beneath him, though sagging slightly in the middle (that was good), seemed perfectly straight and secure. Funny, really! Most people thought you were all right on heights just so long as you didn’t look up or down. Rubbish! The only thing to avoid was looking laterally to left or right, when there really was the risk (at least for him) of losing all sense of the vertical and the horizontal. He dug his red Stanley knife into the upper lintel, then the lower sill; in each case, as he twisted the blade, finding the wooden texture crumble with ominous ease. Not surprising though, really, for he’d noticed the date above the door. He secured the top of the ladder to the gutterings — his normal practice — and began work.

At the appointed hour Mrs. B. boiled the kettle in the second-floor front (as her husband had called it); squeezed a Typhoo bag with the kitchen tongs; and stirred in two heaped spoonsful of sugar. Then, with the steaming cup and two digestive biscuits on a circular tray, she was about to make her way downstairs when something quite extraordinary flashed across her vision: she saw a pair of oblique parallel lines passing almost in slow motion across the oblong frame of the second-floor window. So sharply was that momentary configuration imprinted upon her retina that she was able to describe it so very precisely later that same afternoon; was able to recall that earsplitting, skin-tingling shriek of terror as the man whose skull was about to be smashed to pieces fell headfirst on to the compacted pathway below, so very few yards from her own front door.

“Dead,” the senior paramedic had told her quietly, six minutes only after her panic-stricken call on 999. Incontrovertibly dead.

For the next hour or so Mrs. Bayley wept almost uncontrollably. Partly from shock. Partly, too, from guilt, because (as she repeatedly reminded herself) it was her fault that he’d appeared upon the scene in the first place. She’d found his name among the local builders and house renovators listed alphabetically in the telephone directory. In the Yellow Pages, in fact. Exactly where Sergeant Lewis, also, had discovered the address of J. Barron, Builder, together with a telephone number in Lower Swinstead.