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.
She carried her two cases, which were not heavy enough to be troublesome, across the high, arched foot bridge and past the ticket office. She gave her ticket and a warm smile to the man leaning casually by the window. He looked more like a sailor than a railwayman. His calm, appraising stare followed her out of the booking hall. For her age, Lucy Teatime was remarkably trim and handsome. People instinctively approved of her, for there was in her appearance the flattering suggestion that she had taken pains to spare one personally the spectacle of yet another dumpy, disgruntled, defeated old woman.
For her part, she regarded self preservation (short of courting grotesqueness) to be as much a public duty as a private pleasure. Decrepit bodies were no less offensive than decrepit buildings; tasteless clothes as inexcusable as ugly shop fronts. There ought to be inspectors, she told herself sometimes, with power to demand the production of a lipstick or to serve a bosom restitution order.
Outside the station she looked round for a taxi, then changed her mind. London habit was here an extravagance, almost an eccentricity. One could walk without being mown down, so why not? Anyway, there wasn’t a taxi in sight.
She crossed the station square and began walking up the narrow lane that opened from it and led to where she could see an intersecting stream of cars and buses. This, she remembered from the guide map, would be East Street, at the other end of which was the Roebuck, the hotel she had selected for no better reason than that of liking its name.
East Street was a much busier thoroughfare than she had anticipated. It did not justify her optimism in regard to pedestrian safety. The footpath was about three feet wide, a mere ledge from which one was in constant danger of being extruded into the wheeled torrent. It was only when Miss Teatime found opportunity to look into the faces of her fellow walkers and see there either bland indifference or, just as often, a lively amusement at the expressions of desperately braking drivers, that she took courage from the discovery that the whole thing was really a game—a contemporary version of bear-baiting. She relaxed a little and turned part of her attention to the shops.
After a while, the street and the pavement widened and the congestion eased. There were space and time to stare around. Miss Teatime noticed a cinema and a Woolworth’s and a self service store plastered with the slogans of twopence-off evangelism. Not so different from Twickenham after all, she reflected. Then she looked up to the surmounting buildings and saw the dignified, gracious face of the eighteenth century. For the whole length of the street, these Georgian façades had survived and there was now an air of almost jaunty self-congratulation about their new coats and bright pastel colour-wash.
For some reason, the road was empty of traffic—it had probably coagulated at the scene of some particularly rash act of pedestrian provocation farther back. Miss Teatime crossed over. She had spotted a short row of market stalls. They proved disappointing. No piles of miraculously undervalued coach lamps, paper weights and copper kettles. Just garden plants, dress materials, cut-price sweets. Again her optimism sagged. But she was learning, she told herself; she’d soon have the measure of the place.
While standing still by the plant stall, she noticed a man cleaning a first floor window a few yards farther along. A bucket stood near the foot of the ladder. His barrow, on which rested another ladder, was in the gutter. She glanced at the barrow idly and again at the window cleaner. Then, incredulous, she stared at the barrow once more. In bold white letters along the side was proclaimed: THE QUEEN MUST MAKE WATER.
Miss Teatime looked covertly at passers-by to see if they, too, had seen the astounding message. None gave any sign of finding it unusual. Only one, a boy who had slipped from a group of companions, seemed at all concerned. Keeping one eye on the window cleaner, he walked warily past the ladder and let something fall from his hand into the bucket. Then he doubled back to his friends and stood with them, watching.
Soon afterwards, the man came down from the window. He had a pale, bird-like face and quick, worried eyes. He knelt by the bucket and plunged his leather into the water, swirling it about while he looked up and down the street like a nervous sentry. He withdrew the leather and with a single ferocious twist wrung it out.
The effect was horrible. From between his fingers there gushed and squirted blood.
Miss Teatime gave a little squeal. The man glared at her, then looked down. With a bellow of dread he sprang to his feet, dropped the encarmadined leather and staggered across the pavement.
“The grape!” he howled. “The accursed grape!”
Miss Teatime heard a tut of disapproval from the woman behind the stall. “It’s too bad of those boys. They’ll have him off his ladder one of these days.”
A packet of dye. Of course. She felt a bit cross at having squealed.
“They tease him, do they?” she said to the stallholder.