Doug Allyn: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 104, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 633 & 634, October 1994

I hadn’t chased her. We knew each other, that was all — for a time. Then the Arts Council sponsored a Year of Wessex Culture or some such nonsense. Selina and I found ourselves on a dim subcommittee charged with choosing a logo. I was Mr. Local Literature and she Ms. Fashion and Design. There’s nothing like shared dislike to foster intimacy, and the committee chairman was a pain’s pain. We got into the habit of adjourning to an Italian restaurant after suffering him, to slander the old fool.

Committee meetings were held in Bristol. One evening I forgot about having to drive home and drank too much. Selina whisked me to her boutique in Park Street to sober me up with black coffee. The upshot being that neither of us got back to Drawbel that night.

Since then there had been four or five discreet meetings at a motel on the far side of Bristol. We’d have a hell of a good time, then ruefully agree it was silly and pointless, and from Selina’s standpoint, a menace to her stable future. All very immature for thirty-mumble year olds. On the other hand, there was the chemistry... Both of us kept saying it couldn’t go on like this; but it and we did.

The most frustrating feeling in the world is to worry about something indefinable.

Days passed and Selina didn’t ring back. I fretted: an obvious diagnosis was bruised ego. However, I’ve lost count of attractive women who have tired of and dropped me; such treatment is not a male monopoly. So it wasn’t hurt feelings, sprained pride, or not only that. My malaise might have nothing to do with her.

Imagine trying to grasp soap when your hands are wet. I kept getting flashes of that horrible Sunday morning, a mad montage of images: Mr. Toad partially visible under the tree, Tom Oates’s damaged hands after he strove to shift several times his own weight, and Ben’s pathetic cap resting on the windowsill. Somewhere in there was a message I could not get straight.

The tragedy had got to me. Belatedly it registered that if I had been one of Mr. Toad’s few friends, the reverse was true. Acquaintances far outnumber my friends, and none of them spends much time around Drawbel.

Clearly what I needed was a holiday. My agent pestered me to go sailing in the Grenadines, a berth was going begging on the schooner he’d chartered, all it would cost was the fare to Barbados and a few pounds a day towards food and drink... I was all set until a producer friend offered an obscene amount of money to script-doctor a pilot show, so the vacation fell through. I’m still unsure whether I am glad or sorry about that. Because if the trip had been made, then Solly might never have confided in me...

Three weeks after Ben Basgate’s funeral, I was still up there on my hillside, and the camping-gas ran out. The cottage has mains water and drainage but wood fires provide the heating and my cooking stove runs on butane gas.

I keep running out because — this makes weird sense, if only to me — Solly Purchis keeps nagging me about always running out. He has a vulturine air, most appropriately. Solly urged me to keep a reserve cylinder, a spare. When the stove’s flame dwindled, I could hook up the reserve and get the empty one refilled.

However, that involved buying a second cylinder. From Solly. He loves money so much that malicious pleasure is gained from refusing to listen to him. Local lore proclaims that he ran one and a half miles after a tourist in a sports car, having given him one penny too much in change for a road map. Solly sputters, “People round here will say anything — that feller went off with ten pence of mine.” (In Britain a ten-penny coin will not buy the cheapest postage stamp.) “And I only went to the crossroads, never no one and a half miles.”

That afternoon I hefted the empty gas cylinder and pushed through the door of the lean-to beside the filling station, gritting my teeth at the prospect of Solly’s invariable sermon. He wrong-footed me by accepting the cylinder in silence, before rolling a fresh one out from behind the counter. It’s not a store, or doesn’t look it, that lean-to. More of a barn and workshop where he repairs garden tools and sharpens mowers.

I was thankful for the truce. Solly Purchis broke it by grumbling, “I suppose you’re another as doesn’t want a chain saw.” He sounded bitterly resigned. One had to smile: such a novel pitch that I filed it away for a possible sketch about an anti-salesman desperate to be turned down.

“That’s right,” I agreed, poker-faced. “Top marks, Solly.”

“Daft, living in a wood and buying logs by the half-ton.” His voice trailed away. My logs are bought from Solly Purchis. He decided to plunge for a profit in the hand rather than several, come winter. “Top-of-the-line saw, Japanese, can’t say fairer nor that. Cut your own logs, eh? Let you have it at discount, fi — um, two and a half percent off.”

For obvious reasons, not many customers chat to Solly. They get out in a hurry while their wallets are still in one piece. But I find him good value... “Not like you, keeping inventory on spec,” I teased. He is notorious for selling from catalogs before ordering the goods, sooner than have costly merchandise on his shelves.

“Customer let me down. Speak no ill of the dead, but Mr. Basgate let me down good and proper. Ordered that saw, he did. My own fault, showing a bit of initiative, see. When there was all that fuss about his ruddy tree, him wanting it down, ol’ Pete Stuckey swearing he’d take him to court if he touched it... I sort of mentioned a chain saw was what he needed.

“Should have kept my trap shut. He wasted hours of my good time, fiddle-faddling over which one to get. Wanted it light. Great paunch on him and arms like wet string, ’course it had to be light. Had to be powerful, though, to get the job done quick. I never asked for a deposit, more fool me. Trusting, I am. Never again.”

“You should have been quicker off the mark. In fact, you probably got the poor devil killed,” I accused, half seriously. “He got sick of waiting and took an axe to the thing. Might be alive today if you hadn’t kept him waiting.”

Solly’s face darkened. “There wasn’t no wait! Chap who delivers my paraffin, his brother works at a wholesale place down Yeovil, he could get me what Basgate wanted. I give him the cash the same day Mr. Basgate made his mind up. My driver brought it two days later. I phoned right away, that was the Saturday. ‘I’m busy now,’ he says, ‘and you don’t open Sundays. Tell you what, I shall be in first thing Monday.’ Fat chance, with what happened! Now I’m stuck with the ruddy thing.”

Follow the impulse to tell Solly Purchis he was the most selfish, quietly despicable character to be found in a long day’s march, and he would be indignant. So I confirmed that I could get by without a chain saw and went home.

You will think me remarkably dense, but hours passed before I asked myself why Ben Basgate had gone to all the trouble of chopping down the hated monkey puzzle when by waiting a day he could have let a machine do the work for him. A machine, moreover, that he had ordered for that purpose.

All right, he was Mr. Toad, impatient, volatile, capricious. Yet as Solly Purchis had pointed out, he wasn’t a strong man. It had taken time to hack those notches into the trunk, and knowing Ben, his enthusiasm would have wilted after a few strokes and vanished once he began sweating.

I had a drink, and another. Between one sip and the next, all those flashbacks assumed significance as never before.

It was like staring at an overtly senseless pattern, nagged by a hunch that it is nothing of the kind — and then somebody turns the sheet of paper forty-five degrees and you marvel at not having recognised the picture of a faucet or a sleeping cat.