To Run Across the Sea Read Free Page B

to emit a dribble of doubtful water, removed the mummified jackdaw from the chimney, dropped a pebble by way of a test into the black and silken surface of the fluid in the septic tank, and nodded with satisfaction. The horse was a bother to her. It was impossible to leave it free to crop the grass because of holes leading to tunnels, where, as she thought, the inhabitants had once hidden themselves in the bad times of old. I said, ‘I saw you on a bicycle the other day. Why don’t you use it to come over here?’ She replied, nodding apologetically in the horse’s direction, ‘Well, I just ride it when I can. It’s something you have to do.’
    She went with me in the car to point out the baker’s, the man who might agree to cut the grass and mow the lawn, and the one who could fix up a television aerial. Assistance of this kind was easily procured in Long Crendon, as Dorothea explained, by adopting a tactful, even ingratiating approach.
    We passed two men in baseball caps, one wearing dark glasses and a lumberjack shirt, chatting outside a pub. ‘Americans?’ I asked.
    ‘No, locals. Carpenters up at the base.’
    ‘They look like Yanks.’
    ‘Well, they want to, don’t they? Most of the fellows work on the base these days. If you can call it work.’
    The village was a long, narrow street, straggling in fits and starts for the best part of a mile, hence its name. There was a bad smell at one end from a rubbish dump that looked like a collapsed volcano that had been smouldering for several years, and at the other from a pig farm. The houses were simple and plain, with white plastered fronts, the poorer and smaller ones thatched, some still with leaden lights. A substantial mansion standing in gardens back from the road had suffered brutal modernisation, the garden being now enclosed with a ranch-style fence. Until the previous month it had been named Hill Top, said Dorothea, but now with a new owner who had been in property development, it had become Rancho Grande. It was the only evidence that money had been spent in the village, either on preservation or ornament.
    We passed three depressed-looking pubs and a grey little school with children squabbling in the playground. The church was the only building of note, with a Norman door, good stained glass and tombstones packed close in separate familiar groups as if to carry earthly associations beyond the grave.
    The tour ended with a passing glance at the village hall. ‘That’s where I go dancing with my friend Mr Short on Saturday night,’ Dorothea said.
    ‘Your friend?’
    ‘Well, not my boyfriend . Actually I don’t like him all that much. We just go dancing together. Otherwise I don’t find him all that interesting. I expect you heard all about Dick’s accident?’
    ‘Doesn’t Dick mind?’
    ‘Mind, why should he? He doesn’t dance and he realises I have to have some sort of break. Well, I mean it’s only normal isn’t it?’
    Later I heard the gossip: that she was the target of village adulterers, who were encouraged by Dick, her complaisant husband.
    I questioned Dorothea as to why she felt she had to ride, mentioning that, according to village opinion, the horse was a bad one, with the habit of tripping over its legs.
    ‘It’s an old jumper,’ she said. ‘It’s not so much its legs as its back. It’s hit the deck a few times.’
    ‘They were telling me you were a member of one of the Cloate families, whatever they mean by that.’
    ‘It’s a sort of clan,’ she said. ‘The thing they have in Scotland. Dick and I belong to it. About half the village used to be Cloates, but there’s only five families left now. They say only the Cloates were allowed to ride in the old days, but they say anything.’
    ‘What else do you do beside ride horses?’
    ‘Well, nothing really. We’re supposed to help each other, but that’s a laugh. Really it’s more a question of keeping in touch. You sometimes get Cloate people who’ve gone overseas