Through the few stark villages, with their half-Welsh, half-English names, they made better time, and had something better to look at than the butt-end of the car in front. Road and river wound inextricably along the valley, crossing and re-crossing in an antique dance of their own. In some of those bridges there was Roman masonry. There was even a short stretch of Roman causeway still exposed at the approach to one of them, perhaps twelve yards of huge stones laid like crazy paving, none too smooth even now, after centuries of weathering. Those who knew the road slowed to a crawl and shambled over them with respect; the unwary from the cities hit them at speed, and banged their heads on their car roofs at the first bound. Strangers, hearing they were Roman, assumed they had been carefully preserved for archeological purposes. The truth was that in Middlehope things survived; no one preserved them. They had always been there, and were still serviceable, why move them?
Outside the narrow ribbon of level fields that fringed the road, this was sheep country, and the pastures rose steeply into rough slopes of grass and heather, broken at the crests by a few outcrops of rock. Gradually the red and white brick chapels of Wales gave place to the small, squat-towered stone churches of England. The bracken along the hills was already russet, the heather a brownish purple so dark as to match the occasional patch of bare, peaty soil. Sheep minced along the contours with slow, delicate movements, heads down, as deliberately as though they possessed the whole of time, the elders still showing the shapeliness of their summer clipping, the yearlings fat rolls of wool. Life did not change much in Middlehope. Why should it? The basic way of living here, in a hard but beautiful solitude, had been evolved long ago, and only minor adaptations had been made to them since.
Until they drew near to the village of Mottisham, that is. Along with several other similarly attractive places scattered round the rim of a ten-mile circle surrounding the county town of Comerbourne, Mottisham was just beginning to feel the effect of the progressive withdrawal of the wealthier townspeople from their town. The latest ripple of the expanding ring had only just reached them; but there in the opening bowl were the first two new estates, one of council houses but the other, more significantly, of that curious modern phenomenon, the “executive-type” dwelling. A few of the older houses at the edge of the village had also been taken over and done up by new and obviously well-to-do owners. And in the thin copse behind the churchyard half a dozen artfully deployed “desirable residences”—one step higher up the social scale—were just being built, so carefully arranged that no one should look into anyone else’s windows, or, indeed, see anyone else’s roof, and most of the trees should be retained in what would certainly be advertised as “picturesque wooded grounds.”
The road made a great loop all round the churchyard, shrinking between old buildings; and there, stationed at the curve by “The Sitting Duck,” was a white-gloved police sergeant, waving all traffic to a standstill with a palm the size of a spade. George pulled in obediently to the side and stopped. Within seconds there were three more cars drawn up behind him.
“Now what’s going on?” he wondered aloud, and wound down the window to peer ahead. The sergeant, having secured the desired effect, rolled ponderously alongside and stooped to the obvious inquiry. The car was new, along with George’s recent promotion, and country members of the constabulary had as yet no reason to associate a pale grey VW 1500 with the deputy head of the County C.I.D.
“Shan’t be keeping you more than a few minutes, sir…”
He did a double take with admirable equanimity, and continued in the same tone and the same tempo: “Well, well, I see I caught a big one. How are you, George? And Mrs. Felse, ma’am… we haven’t seen you up this way for quite some time. How’s the boy?” Sergeant Moon was a very old acquaintance, and but for the remoteness of his chosen solitude, now apparently becoming rapidly less remote, he would have ranked as a close friend.
“Fine, thanks, Jack!” Dominic was away in France with his fiancée, as it happened, recovering, he said, from post-examination exhaustion and pre-life cold feet, and considering for the first time entirely seriously and for the first time with trepidation, what he was to do with himself and his career. “How about your own family? Well, I hope?”
Sergeant Moon acknowledged the inquiry gravely; his wife and daughter were well. “You don’t find us much to do up here, or you’d see more of us,” George said. At the time this was a strictly truthful statement, but somebody somewhere was certainly listening, and took malicious note.
“Ah, that’s right,” acknowledged Sergeant Moon, leaning a sharp blue elbow on the VW’s roof. “Crime, by and large, we don’t go in for. A bit of riotous behaviour now and again, that’s about it. Sin, now, sin’s more in our line.” The distinction was clear, thoughtful and comforting. The sins of Middlehope were time-honoured, the contrivances of an enclosed community still governed by pre-feudal sanctions, and generally speaking the sinners were disciplined by their own society and did not totally shirk responsibility for their acts. The sergeant knew where the law ought to restrain its hand and leave older laws to function, with profounder humanity and sounder common sense. “Today,” he said, “we should be whiter than snow. We’ve got company.”
“So I see,” said George. “What exactly is going on?”
“You haven’t been reading the ecclesiastical news and notes, have you? We’ve got the bishop, no less. Look out, here he comes!”
And here he came. The church, a square-towered conglomeration of seventeenth- and nineteenth-century renovations on the poor remnants of a very ancient foundation, lay on the left of the road, half-screened by old trees and ringed by its crowded graves. To the right, on the other side of the road, was the nineteenth-century vicarage, three-coloured brick with dozens of gables and mock-Gothic windows, a pretentious and unmanageable mess. It had, however, a generous and well-stocked garden with plenty of fruit trees. Towards this green shade the bishop took his unhurried way. He was undoubtedly impressive. All the women watching from windows, doorways and pavement touched their hair and smoothed their dresses at the sight of him. The word that entered George’s head was “bridled.” The word that entered Bunty’s was “blossomed.” Six feet tall and something over, fragile and ascetic as a primitive saint (and every bit as durable), with a fleshless face honed into an incredible refinement of benevolence and beauty, and longish silvery hair framing it, the bishop paced slowly along the flagged path, his frilled sleeves falling back from emaciated hands, posed exquisitely in the frame of the lych-gate for half a dozen photographers who materialised surprisingly out of nowhere in particular, and flowed majestically across the road towards his promised vicarage tea.
“If you’re going to do a thing,” observed Sergeant Moon approvingly, “I like to see it done well. These hearty modern clerics don’t know they’re born.”
“But what’s he been up to?” George wanted to know.