A Hovering of Vultures Read Free

mother was very religious, but also a great reader—dreamy, romantic. She saw education as a means of escaping from a life she hated, or at least as a means of escape for her children. This meant the children always had books about them—they used to trudge down to the free library at Batley Bridge at least once a week.”
    â€œWhen was this? Victoria’s last years?”
    â€œEdwardian, more like. Though they were both born in the early ’nineties. Joshua joined up in 1914, but he was invalided out quite soon. And he had to take over the farm when his father died in 1916, though there is abundant evidence that it’s the last thing he would have done by choice. Their mother died in the great influenza epidemic just after the Armistice, and from then on they were there on their own.”
    â€œScribble, scribble, scribbling?”
    â€œYes, pretty much so. It’s thought they wrote a lot in childhood, but none of it survives beyond the odd school exercise book. But Susannah’s first book was accepted and published in 1921.”
    â€œHot breathing in the hedgerow?”
    Gillian looked at him disapprovingly.
    â€œBe your age. It was rural, yes, and there was love interest, yes. I’ve never seen why the combination of those two things should be regarded as funny.”
    â€œSorry I spoke. Go on.”
    â€œWell, from then on there was a book every year or eighteen months until she died. There was a mild success with Between the Furrows in 1923, and something of a succès-de-scandale with The Barren Fields in 1927. The Home Secretary, Joynson-Hicks, wanted to ban it.”
    â€œIs that the man Waugh was getting at? ‘Powerful against literature, the Home Secretary’?”
    â€œYou are a very well-read oik.”
    â€œYou are too kind, lady . . . Anyway, no prizes for guessing what they were getting up to in the barren fields, or even between the furrows. How did she summon up all this steamy passion? Who was the man in her own life? Not her brother, I hope?”
    â€œWell, there is a school of thought that says so, but not a large one. There are suggestions that she was in love with a farmer from over Oxenthorpe way.”
    â€œWhat happened? Killed in the trenches?”
    â€œHe was married. There were difficulties, in those days, if one of you happened to be married.”
    This was a thoroughly underhand reference to an episode in Gregory’s past to which he himself had confessed, in an unguarded moment. He ignored it.
    â€œWhat about the brother? He wrote too, didn’t he?”
    â€œYes—most unlikely books. He was bitten by the modernist bug—read early Joyce, Ezra Pound, all that sort of thing. He wrote experimental novels published by a tiny publishing firm called the Frolic Press. Perhaps this name led the critics to assume the books were just meant as a joke, though the humour was often very bitter. Anyway, they met with nothing but ridicule, when they were noticed at all. They sold in tens, and Joshua made practically no money from them. The farm was often in difficulties because he was a lousy farmer.”
    â€œWalking around thinking of agenbite of inwit when he should have been ploughing a straight furrow?”
    â€œSomething like that.”
    â€œMeanwhile the sister was doing rather well? So what was the relationship between them like?”
    â€œMore and more fraught, apparently. They only had each other, you see. Neither of them mixed much in the village.”
    â€œBy the way, how do you know the situation between them got more and more fraught?”
    â€œBy the result.”
    â€œUnscholarly, but go on.”
    â€œWhen Susannah had free time she wrote. Joshua had very little, but he did manage three slim novels. Tension grew and grew. Even the village must have sensed it, because there was very little surprise when it happened.”
    â€œWhen what happened?”
    â€œOne day in 1932