TP Fielden - The Riviera Express

Quite often these careless and unthinking citizens would shuffle off the mortal coil without bothering to warn the Express beforehand, which could be irksome when it came to press day. Each new edition of the paper brought with it complaints from readers that their beloved one’s journey to the Other Side had gone unmarked.

Rudyard Rhys did not like complaints. He drummed into Judy and Betty and the other members of staff – Terry, even – how they must keep eyes open and ears firmly to the ground on this fundamental point. Miss Dimont had once asked him, mid-tirade, if her job now was to walk about the town centre stopping people and asking, ‘Know anyone about to die round your way?’ But though this raised a snort of laughter in morning conference, Rudyard simply ordered her to add the town’s undertakers to her lengthy list of morning calls.

Truth to tell, Miss Dimont was rather good at obituaries. Why, only the other month she had written a corker about William Pithers, one of the town’s roughest diamonds, who’d risen from obscurity during the War to become one of its most prominent citizens. His cerise Rolls-Royce, yellow tweed suits and the fat Havana sticking out of his breast pocket did not denote a man of breeding, perhaps, nor yet of great intellect, but Bill Pithers had made his mark all right. His fat-rendering business, though noisy, smelly, and hardly the town’s greatest visual attraction, had made him richer than most. Money allowed him a voice in the community far louder than if he’d been elected to the Town Council or the Bench.

Pithers threw his money around (‘noted for his extraordinary generosity’, typed Miss Dimont pertly) and lorded it down at the golf club (‘a sporting enthusiast’). After a lucrative week’s work rendering fat, he would sit in the bar dishing out drink and opinion in equal measure to a befoozled audience made up of the thirsty, the hard-up, the deaf and the occasional owner of a rhinoceros skin.

‘An enthusiastic conversationalist,’ tapped Miss Dimont, who had bumped into the ancient Pithers when the Ladies’ Inner Wheel invited her to their annual nine-hole tournament dinner, ‘he often encouraged others into lively debate.’ Indeed so; that night the lard-like entrepreneur had treated his audience to a twenty-minute peroration on how Herr Hitler was a much misunderstood man; it led, regrettably, to fisticuffs.

‘Indeed his love of life’ (barmaids) ‘and the Turf’ (he rarely paid his bookies) ‘set him aside in the community’ (he had no friends) ‘and will make him a much-missed figure’ (three people went to his funeral, all of them to make sure he was dead).

Weaving such barbed encomiums was Miss Dimont’s consolation, for through the office window she could see across the red rooftops to the promenade, the beach and the glorious turquoise sea, which this morning was like glass. Young lovers strolled hand-in-hand, children built their dreams in the sand, the Temple Silver Band parped joyfully in the Victorian bandstand.

Miss Dimont sighed and picked up another green wedding form.

‘It was love at first sight in the Palm Court of the Grand,’ she rattled. ‘Waiter Peter Potts and cleaner Avril Smedley met under a glittering chandelier and . . .’

This was an inspired introduction to the lives of two very nice but humdrum Temple Regents employed by the town’s grandest hotel. The rest of her report – the guipure lace, the bouquet of white roses, stephanotis and lily of the valley, the honeymoon spent at a secret location – was standard pie-filling, but Miss Dimont adorned the crust with a little more care because she happened to know Peter. She was often in the Grand on business, and he was always most attentive. She was happy that he had found love with Avril for he was rather a sad boy. She would insist that their picture was not added to the Thank Heavens! board, but in truth it was a prime contender.

Her reports had only to be one hundred and fifty words long – on an average Saturday morning she would get through three or four – but she found it difficult to concentrate. Part of her longed to be set free from her desk so she could enjoy the glorious weather this lazy Indian summer was so generously providing, but another part kept returning to the deaths of Gerald Hennessy and Arthur Shrimsley.

The coroner’s clerk had confirmed to Betty that one of the inquests might be troublesome because of certain suspicious circumstances, but refused to add a name or further clues. She would have to wait till Monday at 2 p.m., when proceedings would be opened and adjourned.

If it was suspicious it had to be Shrimsley, Miss Dimont decided, because of the note in his hand. But then again, as she thought about it, that of itself wouldn’t be suspicious if indeed he’d gone against character and done away with himself – a suicide is a suicide. Where was the ‘foul play’ which Rudyard Rhys had hissed at her last night?

It must therefore be Hennessy. She had definitely felt a frisson of fear when she saw that ‘M . . . U . . . R . . .’ traced in the carriage dust, but distance lends clarity and it was quite clear that with no sign of violence or personal distress Hennessy could have suffered no foul play – and though she was no expert, it did indeed look like a heart attack.

It left her nowhere.

Her morning’s work done, she covered up the Quiet-Riter and gathered up the delectable bunch of asters Mrs Reedy had left at the front desk as a thank you for her glowing report on the Mothers’ Union all-female production of Julius Caesar . It had taken a quite extraordinary suspension of disbelief to see this crinkle-permed bunch of ancients, clad in togas and brandishing knives, posing a serious threat to ancient Rome’s democracy, but Miss Dimont had pulled it off magnificently, and here was her reward.

Such was the exchange of kindnesses in Temple Regis. It made it such a wonderful place to live.

Her ride home on the redoubtable Herbert took her along the kind of route that film directors dream about and scour the world trying to locate. But here it was, the coast road out of Temple Regis back to her cottage three miles distant, where the road gently rose to where you could see right across Nelson’s Bay out into the English Channel. Out there, the faded blue of the sea met the white-blue of the sky at some point of infinity which, no matter how hard you tried, you could not pinpoint. The seascape was massive, blinding in its brilliance, making you feel that no other place on earth could touch it. Below, the ribbon of white beach skirted the waves modestly before turning into a sandbar dividing the sea from a freshwater lake which was home to a thousand contented species, winter and summer.

This was England’s Riviera in its simple, unadulterated glory. Miss Dimont had been to Nice and to Cannes, but the Grande Corniche, which hemmed that southernmost part of France, was not a patch on the Temple Road – for here were no unsightly developments of blocks of flats and concrete villas vying with each other for a sight of the sea; instead just an open road with the occasional house on the headland to remind the traveller he was not quite in Paradise.

The thin ribbon of tarmac rounded a bend and made a steep descent to sea level, and as she urged Herbert ever onwards, the spume which rose from the rocks cooled her brow and moistened her lips with its salty zest. Her corkscrew hair bobbed in the wind and Miss Dimont was in seventh heaven.

These moments, of course, are fleeting, evanescent. Life’s realities return all too soon and on arriving home she discovered a note from her neighbour Mrs Alcock complaining about Mulligatawny leaving his collection of mouse entrails on her doorstep. Again!

She unlocked her door, gazed fleetingly at the handsome face staring back at her from the silver frame on the mantelpiece, and made herself a cup of tea.