I recognised it at once. Miss Wellington. If it had been Mrs Binney, after all the tales I'd been hearing – mostly from Fred Ferry – about her being seen around the country lanes at twilight with a companion in a pork-pie hat, I wouldn't have been so surprised. But Miss Wellington? What on earth was she doing out and about almost in darkness?
SIX
I soon found out. Miss Wellington, having revealed her presence in the lane, obviously thought she'd better explain why she was there before the rumour went round that she, too, was having secret assignations in the gloaming.
It seemed that her sister, widow of a headmaster and herself recently retired as headmistress of an infants' school in Wiltshire, had bought a cottage which was for sale further up the lane from me and was shortly moving into it. I'd mentioned the cottage to Mrs Binney as a possibility for Bert, but she said Shirl was a town girl and din't fancy living up among all them trees, whereas mine was in a spot where there were more people about and had a proper road running down to it. Shirl wanted her own car when they got settled, she said importantly.
Which took care of Shirl, and why Miss Wellington's sister wanted to live in such a remote spot, up a side lane off the main one, with a very rough stretch of bridle path to drive over before she got to it and, if it came to that, close to Miss Wellington, was anybody's guess. But she did want it, and had bought it, and Miss Wellington was keeping a self-appointed eye on it. To see that vandals didn't damage it before Poppy moved in, and dusk was the time when they were most often about, she told me, which left me with two thoughts uppermost in my mind: first that from now on I could expect Miss Wellington to be hovering in the lane any time I was in the garden at twilight; and second that if her sister's name was Poppy what on earth could Miss Wellington's own Christian name be? I'd never heard her referred to as anything but Miss Wellington. If I'd been asked to hazard a guess I'd have said something like Augusta or Victoria with that surname. In fact in the fullness of time, when Poppy Richards had moved in and started to refer to her sister in conversation around the village, we discovered at Miss Wellington's name was Pansy. Before long the two sisters' cottages – one at the top of the hill and the other up the valley in the other direction – were known as Pansy's and Poppy's, and Miss Wellington had become Old Pans when spoken of by the more disrespectful locals such as Fred Ferry, while her sister needless to say became Old Pop.
This is jumping ahead of events, however. For weeks before Mrs Richards moved in Miss Wellington was as consistent a visitor to the valley as Mrs Binney had been, lurking around like MI5 at dusk, marching through proprietorially during the day, picking up loose stones from the bridlepath on her way up to the cottage in case, she explained, she turned her ankles on them; and snapping off odd sticks and branches in the hedge on her way back in case, she said, they scratched her sister's car when she moved in. The stones she dumped on the grass verges of the lane which, as I owned the land on both sides of it, were mine, and I kept the grass on them cut down with the hover-mower and from then on was forever catching the blade on the stones with a horrible scraping noise and using language about Miss Wellington that would have shocked the Rector. The branches she tossed into the wood on her way back up the hill – always at the same spot. The wood, too, was mine and the collection was starting to look like the beginnings of a Guy Fawkes bonfire. I didn't like to say anything to her, but the air was rapidly becoming electric.
There was also the question of the lawn at Poppy's cottage. It was June, and the grass was growing fast. Miss Wellington mowed her own small patch with a hand-mower but she couldn't possibly cut her sister's much larger lawn that way, so she engaged Ern Biggs to do it, thereby putting another foot firmly through the sacrosanct crust of village etiquette.
Once upon a time Father Adams had been the village odd-jobber, but he was now too old and rheumaticky to do more than potter round his own garden. Fred Ferry regarded himself as the old boy's natural successor, but Fred, never seen without the mysterious knapsack over his shoulder, reputed to be given to overcharging mightily for any job he did, wasn't everybody's choice, and when Ern Biggs, who lived in the next village, was invited to do some gardening by a newcomer who'd met him in the Rose and Crown one day, and his reputation for doing a fair job at a passable rate got round, quite a few people – newcomers themselves, who didn t know about village etiquette – switched to him. Now he had become as familiar a sight around our village as if he belonged to it.
Miss Wellington had always coped with her own small garden and its population of concrete gnomes and toadstools herself, and when it came to Poppy's property, if there was anybody she wasn't going to employ it was Fred Ferry. Not only did she disapprove of the implications of the knapsack and of his rolling home singing from the pub at night to his cottage practically opposite hers, but once, when there'd been a spate of break-ins in the village and Miss Wellington, scared of being burgled herself, had been seen bobbing about behind her hedge with a trilby hat on a stick – presumably to give would-be intruders the impression that there was a man about the place – Fred had seized the opportunity to start the story that she had a fancy man, and he knew who it was, and Miss Wellington had never forgiven him.
To Fred it was all a joke. Starting rumours is a traditional country pastime and nobody took much notice of his fabrications. But when Miss Wellington, who'd lived in the village as long as anybody could remember (though she hadn't been born here: her family had been a county one, with a big house some miles away, but she and her mother had moved here when she was a young girl, after her father died) when she so far forgot village propriety as to employ Ern Biggs to do her sister's garden, things, in Fred Ferry's eyes, had gone beyond the pale.
He went round looking daggers every time he saw her and gazing pointedly in the opposite direction when he passed Poppy's cottage. Ern hadn't helped matters by copying an idea he'd picked up at one of the big houses, where a contractor had put a board outside reading ALTERATIONS BY W. BROWN. Ern now carried a board which he put outside places where he was working which read GARDEN BY E. BIGGS and seeing it outside Poppy's place was like a red rag to a bull to Fred.
Fate having its own idea of fun and games, the next thing was that Ern slipped one day while mowing the steep hillside lawn at Poppy's cottage, broke his ankle and was off work for several weeks. At that point Miss Wellington had no option but to humbly beg Ferry to take on the garden as there was no-one else and Fred accepted. The first thing he did on taking over was alter the wording on Ern's board so that it read GARDEN BY E. BIGGS PUT RIGHT BY F. FERRY. And Miss Wellington, unable to find anyone else to do the work had to put up with it. Father Adams likewise went on record as telling a visitor who looked over his wall, saw his rampant row of raspberries and asked whether he took orders, that he was British and didn't take orders from nobody, and so the summer moved on.