Colin Watson: Lonelyheart 4122

The third letter was more brief.

Lilian, My Dear—Something has “cropped up”, as they say. That literary luncheon in Town has been brought forward to Wednesday. What a nuisance! but my publisher says it cannot be helped because J. B. Priestley couldn’t manage Friday so you will understand I am sure. Come to Our Tree on Friday at seven and I shouldn’t be surprised if I bring “something special” from a certain merry goldsmith in Old London Town!!

Your Impatient Rex.

“Exit Mrs Bannister,” said Purbright. “Via Our Tree.” He folded the letters and slipped them into an envelope before peeling off the white cotton gloves.

“He certainly writes like an author,” Love said. The inspector gave him a shocked stare.

Downstairs, Purbright emptied the contents of the sideboard drawer upon the dining table. They consisted mainly of household bills and receipts for small amounts, insurance documents, old building society records, recipes snipped from magazines, ageing snapshots and detergent circulars. In a separate envelope was correspondence relating to the sale of the house. There were also two bank statements covering a fairly lengthy time and a cheque book with seven cheques remaining. Mrs Bannister clearly had not made frequent use of her bank’s services. All the better, thought Purbright.

He turned back the counterfoils, one by one. The uppermost, dated a month previously, was marked “Self”, a withdrawal of four hundred pounds.

The “investment in happiness”, obviously.

There followed stubs recording payments to the borough council—rates, presumably—and to such other unexciting bodies as water and electricity boards, an insurance company and a mail order house.

Only one counterfoil related to a transaction that could not be immediately dismissed as orthodox.

Its date was four months old; the amount, twenty guineas; the payee, Sylvia Staunch.

Purbright looked at it for several seconds. He turned to Sergeant Love.

“Have you any notion, Sid, of who Miss or Mrs Sylvia Staunch happens to be?”

Love pondered. He pulled at his smooth, pink, cherubic cheek.

“It rings a bloody bell,” he said at last.

Chapter Three

Flaxborough. What a nice name. Long before the London train pulled in behind the Gothic extravagance of Flaxborough station’s façade—before even it had rumbled across points somewhere north of Derby and settled to a smooth pace on a lonely line towards the ever enlarging, ever brightening skies of eastern England—Miss Lucilla Teatime had decided that Flaxborough was going to be very much to her taste.

She was ready for a change, for a withdrawal from familiar places and the familiar round. That round, she warned herself, had been on the point of catching up with her lately. And if one wanted to preserve one’s independence and interest in life, it didn’t do to be caught up with.

A slight sense of disloyalty—a twinge, merely—had visited her with the decision to leave London for a while. She had spent nearly all her life there and with keen enjoyment. Her physical health remained excellent and she was fairly sure that she was as alert as ever. But she realized that she was not necessarily the best judge of that. There had been one or two occasions in the past year when a lapse of memory or of shrewdness had put her at a temporary disadvantage. In a way, she was thankful for them; they were timely signals of the danger of complacency.

Londoners, Miss Teatime reflected now in the cosy solitude of her first-class compartment, did tend to be complacent. It explained their gullibility. The cleverness one needed to be an active component of that vast turbulent city was so obvious that the possibility of being outsmarted was unthinkable. Hence the success of so many hard-headed provincials in creaming off their fortunes in London before the natives realized that they hadn’t come just for a football match and a look at the pigeons.

No, it would do her no harm to spend a spell away from dear, parochial old London. Her faculties needed a stretch. Something fresh, something challenging was indicated.

She looked out of the window. Huge rectangles of cultivated land, bordered by long, cleft-like drains and low hedges, succeeded one another as far as the misty, blue-grey horizon. The clusters of farm buildings, lying at what seemed miles apart, looked clean and symmetrical and efficient. Not in the least picturesque. Miss Teatime thought of the farms pictured in television commercials for processed foods and smiled at the simple faith of the city dweller.

Not a smock in sight. The place seemed depopulated. Only the occasional scarlet flash of a tractor crawling over the black acres testified to human activity. She gazed to the landscape’s indistinct, lavender-coloured rim. It was smudged with clumps of trees and spiked, here and there, with steeples—mere thorns they seemed against the vastness of the sky.

Miss Teatime picked up the book on the seat beside her. Barrington-Hoole’s Guide to Eastern England . She began to glance through its illustrations and soon came to a scene that corresponded almost exactly with the view through the carriage window. She felt pleased with herself and with the book too, and turned to the chapter on Flaxborough.

It confirmed what she had been told already: that Flaxborough was a market town of some antiquity with a remarkable record of social and political intransigence. The Romans had lost a legion there; the Normans had written it off as an incorrigible and quite undesirable bandit stronghold; while the Vikings—welcomed as kindred spirits and encouraged to settle—had fathered a population whose sturdy bloodymindedness had survived every attempt for eight centuries to subordinate and absorb it.

Flaxborough was blessed, she read, with steady and well-founded prosperity. There was no reason to suppose that this would diminish while the town was surrounded by a thousand square miles of rich farming land. It had docks (its river, as the Vikings had been delighted to discover, was navigable) and food factories and a plastics industry.

Municipal tradition was colourful. Of the two hundred and five mayors who had held office since the extortion of a charter of incorporation from a hard-up sixteenth-century king, twenty-three had been knighted, one canonized (in genuine error, some historians claimed), six had risen to eminence in the New World and four had been hanged in the Old. To the borough’s freemen still nominally belonged the privilege of emptying a chamber pot from the balcony of the Assembly Rooms once a year on the mayor’s birthday, but the requirement of there being marshalled beneath “twelve able-bodied paupers of the parish” had fallen into desuetude. Not so the observance of the ceremony of “pudding tussle”. There were still, apparently, plenty of willing contestants in this curious All Souls’ Day version of a football match, in which a ring of black pudding was booted to disintegration in the Market Place—symbolic, said wishfully thinking antiquarians, of a communal intolerance of maidenheads.

By the time she had absorbed all this and more, equally stimulating information, about the town she had elected to visit, Miss Teatime became aware of a change in the rhythm of the train’s wheels. It had slowed and become disjointed. She looked up. A water tower and a warehouse glided by, followed by a dilapidated engine shed. Trucks crowded up to the window and fell away again with a noise like the clucking of iron poultry. Across the emptiness of a goods yard she glimpsed pantiled roofs, red in the sun as country apples, and beyond them a church tower, honey-sunned and sharply tangible in clear air.

“Saint Laurence’s,” murmured Miss Teatime, happily confident.