He looked at the yellowy liquid. The idea was outrageous. Pure fantasy. A party joke. His gaze returned to the faces watching him, decent, inoffensive people anyone would respect. Would a doctor or a vicar countenance such a thing? It had to be an elaborate practical joke. The hell with them all.
He raised his glass high. ‘To crime, then, ladies and gentlemen,’ he announced, his confidence returning, ‘of the fictional kind!’ Without another thought, he gulped it down and looked around the room.
No one else had lifted a glass.
The Virgin and the Bull
She was the only daughter of the vicar and he was the publican’s son. She was called Alison, he Tom. Alison had long, flaxen hair. It had once been the envy of every girl in the village school. She had let it grow so long that she could sit on it. Now, at seventeen, she wore it shorter, in a simple ponytail. She had peachy, luminous skin to match the fine fair hair. She wore no make-up. Her dresses were simple and old-fashioned and her shoes flat-heeled and practical, yet there was not a young man in Middle Slaughter whose thoughts had not been disturbed by her.
Tom Hunt was reckoned to be the only one with any prospect of turning dream into reality. Large, rough and rebellious, he had not impressed Alison in the least when they were at school together. He had ruled the playground by sheer tyranny. She had been pleased to forget him when she had transferred to secondary school, a Church of England boarding school for daughters of the clergy. The bullying in a school for girls was of a different order from Tom Hunt’s brutish behaviour. He became as unreal as the ogres in the fairy stories she had left at home on the bookshelf in her bedroom.
He had surfaced unexpectedly this summer. Alison was home from school. She had been sent into the vicarage garden to pick greengages for the jam her mother always made in the last week of August. Shyly she pretended not to notice the bare-chested young man at work repairing the stone wall in the field adjoining the garden. She started gathering the fruit on the lower branches.
Tom’s work on the wall brought him to a point where the greengage tree overhung the wheat field. Alison endeavoured to move around the tree so that she would not be forced to catch his eye.
Tom was not the sort to be ignored. He picked a greengage and tossed it neatly into the basket she was using. Alison heard him say, ‘Funny how the best ones are always out of reach.’
She made no response.
‘I was speaking of the plums, of course,’ he went on. ‘I meant nothing personal. Do you remember me?’ He moved along the wall to where she could not fail to see his grinning features and bare, brown torso. He had the physique of a man now, a strong, broad man, but she recognised his smile.
She said, ‘Tom Hunt. You used to chase the girls with nettles and sting their legs.’
He laughed. ‘I’ve given it up now.’
It was fascinating to see how the obnoxious features Alison remembered were still traceable in this ruggedly attractive face.
At the church fête the following Sunday he helped her sell programmes at the gate. He seemed quite popular with the villagers, even girls and boys he had once persecuted unmercifully.
That evening there was a barn dance in aid of parish funds. As soon as Alison appeared with her father, Tom Hunt crossed the floor and asked her to join him in a St Bernard’s Waltz.
‘That’s the way I do things,’ Tom told her as they linked arms. ‘Straight to it, like a bull at a gate. I don’t stand on ceremony.’
‘And you’d better not stand on my feet,’ said Alison, as their shoes touched. ‘Haven’t you danced a St Bernard’s before?’
‘Not very often. Have you? You seem to know the steps.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where did you learn — at school?’
She gave a nod. She did not like being reminded that she was still a schoolgirl.
‘I thought so,’ Tom said with a trace of condescension. ‘Girls’ schools do a lot of that, don’t they? Singing and dancing and skipping.’
‘They do other things too,’ Alison pointed out.
‘Cookery?’
‘Farming. My school has a Jersey herd and twelve acres put out to wheat and barley. The girls do all the work. It’s not just skipping and dancing. So it follows,’ she said with a level look at Tom, ‘that bulls don’t impress me overmuch.’
Against all the indications, the friendship between them took root. They were seen together hand in hand, walking the lanes and footpaths around the village each evening after work until it got dark. Then Tom would escort her to the vicarage porch and, according to report, kiss her briefly before making his way, whistling, to the Harrow. There, over his beer, he would shrug aside the good-natured banter of the regulars, the enquiries after the vicar’s health and whether Tom proposed to join the choir. Any young man who courted a village girl was a target for the locals’ wit. The wooing of the vicar’s daughter was better than a game of darts.
The baiting of Tom was rendered more entertaining by the knowledge that, not many months before, it would have roused him to violence. Perhaps it was the onset of maturity, or perhaps it was the fact that his father was landlord of the Harrow that kept Tom in check. He seemed to accept the chaffing in good sport, which of course was demanded by the time-honoured ritual. He even summoned an occasional smile.
On some evenings Rufus Peel added his comments to the rest. Rufus was the only one of the regulars capable of rankling Tom. He was one of Tom’s generation. Most of the others were older men. Rufus had been through the village school with Alison and Tom. He had been the star pupil, the boy who played Joseph in the nativity play to Alison’s Mary, when Tom had not even aspired to the part of third shepherd. At secondary school, Rufus had won the biology prize. He had joined the school combined cadet force and risen to the rank of junior officer. The headmaster had chosen him for school captain. Unaccountably his public examination results had fallen below average, but the head’s strong recommendation had secured him an interview for agricultural college, and he had been accepted unconditionally.
Rufus was the first Middle Slaughter boy ever to win a place at college. He was regarded with awe. He started talking to the older men as if they were his contemporaries, and they accepted it. His middle-aged manner and short, portly stature undoubtedly helped, as did his generosity in buying rounds in the Harrow. He was getting a generous grant towards his living expenses.
When Rufus joined in the wisecracks at Tom’s expense, there was often a cutting edge to his comments that seemed calculated to test the victim’s passivity to the limit. ‘Tom’s no fool,’ he told the others. ‘He’s after a cheap wedding. There’ll be no church fees, you see. It’s all on the Lord, if you’re smart enough to marry a vicar’s daughter.’
Tom would usually look as if he had not heard a word. He knew what lay behind the barbed remarks. Rufus had wanted Alison for years. He had pestered her for friendship ever since they were in junior school. He had passed notes to her and tried to arrange meetings. He had thought at first that she would be flattered by his interest. Each success in his life — the biology prize, the school captaincy, the commission in the CCF — had cued another bid for Alison’s approval.
Alison had lately described to Tom how difficult her life had become through Rufus’s persistence. She had treated him politely, but coolly. In reality she disliked everything about him.