Died and Gone to Devon

Auriol had put on a pound or two since her uniform days, but it suited her. ‘La patronne mange ici,’ she explained airily to friends who came to try out her lardy cake and Welsh scones – and anyway, who was counting calories?

In winter, and especially around Christmas, there was little trade and plenty of time to think of other things.

‘That’s why I’m glad you’re here, Arthur,’ she said as her companion returned from the bar. ‘I wanted to ask you about Sir Frederick Hungerford.’

‘Freddy? We’re both old Seale-Haynians, you know. Haven’t seen him for years. He’s your MP, isn’t he?’

‘Not for much longer. Standing down at the next election. Been here for yonks. You’re not friends?’

‘Far from it. We met only briefly, forty years ago, when I came back from the Front. Seale Hayne was an agricultural college but it was used as a hospital for chaps suffering from shell-shock. Well, we both had a bit of that. Freddy and I spent a few weeks in bath chairs lying next to each other, though we didn’t get on awfully well.’

‘Rich, truculent, and litigious said one newspaper when he announced his retirement,’ said Auriol.

‘Obviously no friend of yours either, then,’ laughed Arthur.

‘Well, he’s charming enough when you meet him, that I will say. But soon to be replaced by an absolute poppet. It’ll be something of a relief to have a real person as our MP instead of that…’

‘Shall we have another?’

‘Bit soon for me – you go on.’

‘I wanted to talk to you about Huguette before she gets here. Keen to ask your advice. If we’ve finished with Freddy?’

‘Well, that can wait. What about her?’

‘You know her better than anyone.’

‘Yes.’

‘Her closest friend.’

‘Yes.’

‘Auriol, she’s going round in circles. Her life seems to have become one long chase after the next sensation. It’s this story, it’s that headline. It’s this crime and that murder. I feel she was made for better things.’

‘Well, Arthur, I wonder whether I can agree with you about that. She distinguished herself in war service. She had a second career during the Cold War. She found a third career down here, working in local newspapers, away from the combat zone you might say. You might argue she has a fourth career solving the crimes she has since she started working on the Express. Is there something wrong with that? I should have thought you would have been proud of her.’

‘Well, old girl, I am, I am! But…’

‘Aha! This is Madame Dimont talking, Arthur, isn’t it? You’ve been nobbled!’

Arthur looked at his empty glass and then up at the bar. He looked at the glass again but made no attempt to get up.

‘Look, Auriol,’ he said, ‘you know that one day Huguette will be very well off. Her father left everything to her mother when he died, but she is the eventual heir – after all, when Monsieur Dimont became ill she took over the diamond business and did wonders with it. Wonders! You might almost say she made more money than her father, and he was a shrewd one.’

‘She knows all that. She doesn’t need money, Arthur, she needs peace of mind. She found it working at the Riviera Express. She’s got her cottage, her cat, her career.’

‘Grace wants her to change her life. Give up the journalism business. Go to live in Essex and enjoy what is rightly hers.’

‘Not Essex, Arthur!’

‘You’ve been there, it’s a lovely house. Right on the edge of the marshes. It needs to be lived in, have some life brought back to it.’

‘But it’s huge. She doesn’t need all that – how many bedrooms, for heaven’s sake!’

‘Grace hates the thought of it going out of the family. She always hoped Hugue would marry.’

‘Well,’ said Auriol, ‘you can tell her all this yourself when she gets here.’

The old boy looked shyly at his companion. ‘I was rather hoping you’d say it for me. I do so hate rubbing her up the wrong way,’ he said.

‘And you – awarded the military Order of the British Empire!’ laughed Auriol, planting an imaginary medal on his lapel. ‘Sir Arthur Cowardy Custard!’

The old soldier rose to his feet and headed towards the bar looking perhaps a trifle green round the gills.

Hector Sirraway made quite a fuss when he first arrived in the public library on Fore Street. It was a small building, no bigger than the size of a large terraced house, but perfect for the needs of Temple Regis – during the summer months the residents were far too busy serving their guests, refugees from less attractive parts of Britain, to sit around reading. And in winter they were too busy repairing, and preparing, for the next season.

To say Temple Regents weren’t bookish would do them an injustice, but it followed that their modest library needed only the smallest area reserved for reference work – and even then its one desk remained empty most of the year. Was it any surprise that this is where the Christmas tree should be placed when Advent came around?

Given their modest budget, Miss Greenway and Miss Atherton had done a wonderful job, lavishing the lofty conifer with love and, it might be said, the necessary splash of vulgarity. Everyone said what a marvellous sight it presented, with the exception of Mr Sirraway.

‘What have you got that thing there for?’ he asked starchily when he first showed up a month before Christmas. ‘Can’t you get rid of it?’

Since then, he’d been in every day, and his temper never seemed to improve. Miss Greenway had offered him her desk if he needed somewhere to sit, and even made him a nice cup of tea. But nothing budged Mr Sirraway from his hatred of the tree.

Or it could have been something else that bothered him, it was hard to tell. Tall, white-haired, with a pinched face and a permanent dewdrop at the end of his nose, it emerged from the few sentences he uttered that he was researching a book on the industrial buildings of Dartmoor.

‘Fine time to come in and make a nuisance of himself,’ muttered Miss Atherton on the fourth day. ‘Why couldn’t he wait till after Christmas?’ But Miss Greenway loved to see her library used, whether by schoolchildren, housewives or scholars like Mr Sirraway. In fact, she especially liked Mr Sirraway’s presence because very few asked much of the library, apart from a light novel or a Jane Austen and the occasional Shakespeare.

‘We must show him what we’re capable of,’ she told her assistant, and so they did.

The two librarians watched with interest the growing pile of books their visitor ordered from the shelves. From an ancient leather satchel he drew large sheets of paper which looked like plans of some kind, spreading them out on an adjacent table, grunting and whispering to himself and only occasionally remembering to reach for a handkerchief for his nose.

Miss Greenway was inclined to look up to him – she adored learned people! – but Miss M had taken against.

‘Rude, secretive – and you can tell he doesn’t have a wife. Look at those socks!’ One red, one grey – what wife would allow their man to go out dressed like that?

Mr Sirraway was oblivious to these whisperings. Though he originally demanded books on buildings from all over the moor, he seemed after the first couple of days to be concentrating on an area towards the eastern edge, nearest to Temple Regis. His interest stretched from tin mines to corn mills to peat cutting and even granite blasting – for such a large and barren place as the moor, it was extraordinary how many different ways there were to earn a living from it. He’d even demanded, and got, a book on warrening, the mass farming of rabbits.

But he remained unimpressed with the raw material he was being fed. ‘Look at these charts – crude, outdated, and frankly inaccurate,’ he barked, waving a lanky finger at some ancient roll of papers Miss Greensleeves had unearthed after considerable effort. ‘How can you possibly present a case – an important case – using erroneous data like this?’ But he seemed more to be arguing with himself than complaining about the service the librarians provided.

Over by the desk the occasional last-minuter would wander in, returning books before they collected a penny-ha’penny fine, but nobody lingered over the shelves – they were far too busy preparing for the festive season. As each one entered there would come through the door a mournful sound offering a reminder of the approach of Christmas.

‘There’s old Wilf, left behind again,’ said Miss Greenway to Miss Atherton. ‘I’d better take him a cup.’

The noise, like a cow calling for her calf, also wafted through the high window and irritated Mr Sirraway no end, but it wasn’t likely to cease any time soon – Old Wilf was a stalwart of the Salvation Army silver band, whose gentle harmonies stirred up the Christmas spirit in the marketplace and encouraged everyone to dip into their pockets.

Wilf was old and lame now, and could no longer wander through the town with his bandmates, so they would set him up on a chair outside the library with his euphonium and leave him to it. Somehow ‘Away In A Manger’ tootled through his silver tubes lacked joy and encouraged sorrow. You could get tired of it pretty quickly.