Sarah Rayne - What Lies Beneath

Seeing the man again in Market Street, Veronica made a point of pausing to say good morning, and that she hoped he was enjoying his stay in Upper Bramley. This was not being forward, and anyway Veronica was entirely caught up with the new man in her life, but you had to be polite to visitors to your home place. Seen at closer quarters, the doctor with the foreign name was a bit younger than she had first thought, although it was still difficult to be sure. He might be mid-thirties. Asked, he said he was in Bramley for perhaps two or three weeks for local research; Veronica would like to have asked more, but he nodded a polite dismissal and went back to the Red Lion. Still, she thought he had looked at her quite fixedly and she was glad she had put on a particularly smart outfit, even though she was only shopping for a rather intimate little supper party. She went into the delicatessen to buy smoked oysters, pâté and French bread. No need for wine, that would be provided by her guest. In Boots she bought two packs of condoms so people would know she was still what nurses at clinics called sexually active. To emphasize the point, she added to her wire basket a pair of expensive black stockings with lace tops.

After this, she looked in at the library, to ask Clem if he knew who the visitor at the Red Lion might be. If he was really here for local research, the library would be his first port of call. But Clem was not much help. He had developed a cold since going to the decontamination of Priors Bramley and it was as much as he could do to sit at his desk, which he said was very annoying because he wanted to write an account of the day. Pressed about the man at the Red Lion, he admitted he had seen him, but he did not know anything about him.

‘Well, that’s other than the fact that he dresses like a dropout and looks like the Holbein portrait of Sir Thomas More,’ said Clem, sneezing four times into a large handkerchief.

Veronica supposed, crossly, that she might have expected Clem to be absolutely useless.

Clem Poulter had not really wanted to have Ella’s granddaughter working in the library because she might disrupt his orderly routine. Also, he wanted to nurse his cold and sip mugs of hot blackcurrant and be given sympathy.

But Ella could be a bit of a steamroller at times and it had been difficult to get out of it, so in the end he had agreed.

And in fact he found he rather liked Amy being there. He had forgotten how unusual-looking she was – dark-haired and dark-eyed, with an odd cast of features that, in some lights, were very nearly simian and in others, nearly catlike. It was something to do with the length of the upper lip, which was unusually long, and the jawline. A lot of men would find her unattractive to the point of ugliness, but other men would see her as beautiful in a very singular way and consider her a one-off. But it would take a very particular kind of man to appreciate her. Clem thought about this, until some inner demon said, in the language of today’s youth: Yeah, like you’d know about those things. Nobody’s perfect, said Clem crossly to the urchin-voiced demon, and set about drafting plans for his Old Bramley exhibition.

Amy was full of energy and intelligence. She mixed Clem’s cold remedies cheerfully, smuggled in a miniature bottle of rum for his sore throat, and entered into the exhibition project with enthusiasm. She helped Clem drag several boxes of archive stuff out of the cellars, dusted off display screens, and went off to the stationery store to dig out Blu-Tack, drawing pins and green baize. After this, she designed posters on the computer: bright jazzily worded advertisements with requests for people to loan any photos they had for the duration of the exhibition.

‘We’ll ask the Red Lion and the shops to display the posters,’ she said to Clem. ‘Oh, and I thought I’d see if the local newspaper has any archive stuff we can use.’

Clem felt a bit as if a whirlwind had dashed in and turned his orderly world upside down, but he was pleased. Meeting Ella in the greengrocer’s two days later, he said Amy was turning out to be a great help.

‘Derek says it sounds as if she’s having a pretty wild time of it at that university,’ said Ella, who seemed displeased with life in general and with the greengrocer’s display of mushrooms in particular. ‘I feel responsible for her, you know, with Andrew being in Africa. Why he ever wanted to go out there to build a bridge I can’t think, because he could just as well build a bridge in this country I should have thought.’

Clem heard a faint note of envy in her voice. Poor old Ella, who had been born and lived in Upper Bramley all her life. Clem, with his three years of emancipation at Warwick University, from which he had emerged with a modest degree and a wish to do nothing other than come home to the familiar security of his home, felt quite sorry for her at times.

Amy had not expected to get so absorbed in Clem Poulter’s exhibition, but it turned out to be rather fun. She unearthed packets of ancient sepia photographs of St Anselm’s church, which looked utterly Gothic and gloomy, and several of the village street of Priors Bramley with the kind of shops you never saw nowadays: ironmongers offering paraffin for lamps, and flypapers, and sweet shops with bull’s-eyes, and blocks of toffee you smashed up for yourself, and drapers who sold interlock vests and liberty bodices. What had a liberty bodice been, for goodness’ sake, and when did you wear it?

There were photos of Cadence Manor, which looked as if it had been hugely grand and decadent. Amy was not in anti-Establishment mood at the moment, so it was OK to admire Cadence Manor, with its stone scrolls and porticoes and its air of having been teleported from seventeenth-century Italy. It was very OK indeed to admire some of the men in the photographs. Some of them were pretty sexy: there was one guy of about twenty, who had dark hair and amazing eyes, and who you would certainly look at twice, if not three times. He was in several of the shots. There was a really cool one of a bunch of people at a party. Somebody had written ‘Cadence Manor, Christmas 1910’ on the back, and the man with the come-hither eyes was at the centre, wearing evening dress and drinking from a champagne glass. We’ll have you in the exhibition for sure, said Amy to him.

Clem Poulter fussed and flapped around, wanting to see everything Amy found, exclaiming in delight over some of the stuff, trotting off to talk to the vicar and the choirmaster about the church, so that Amy began to feel as if she had fallen backwards into Trollope or even Jane Austen. But it was all restful after the stomach-churning roller-coaster ride with the faithless English tutor. (Will he phone/will he turn up/will he ignore me…) She enjoyed pottering round the library, which was in an ugly Victorian building with a tiny art gallery on the first floor, and a meeting room for book clubs and craft groups and music societies.

Clem asked if she would mind helping out with a talk one evening, handing out coffee at half-time and things like that. He would normally do it himself, he said, but his cold had progressed to laryngitis and he had hardly any voice. Amy was agreeable to helping out, particularly since the evening happened to be a rehearsal night for Gramps’s operatic gang, and Gran was taking the opportunity to give one of her polite sherry parties. Amy would rather help with a library talk – she would rather listen to a library talk, for heaven’s sake! – than hand round Bristol Cream and defrosted savouries.

At first the talk did not seem particularly interesting. It was about the early church music that had been played at St Anselm’s in its heyday, and Amy thought she would sit at the back with a book. In the event, however, she got quite interested. The choirmaster from St Michael’s church was giving the talk. He was thin and bespectacled and earnest, and he said Ambrosian plainchant was less well known than Gregorian chant, but just as interesting and beautiful. He demonstrated a few bars of the Ambrosian stuff on a recorder. Amy thought it was not music you would want to hear when you were glammed up for a night out with a crowd of friends, but you might want to hear it when you were on your own and feeling a bit introspective and dreamy.