Then, with eccentric dignity, he tottered out into the sun of Pelling Street. Curious tourist eyes followed him. There was a ripple of nervous laughter. So far as they were concerned, he was just another small-town drunk, but Carole and Jude knew that Roddy Hargreaves was – or could have been – so much more.
Nineteen
As James Lister had said, he and his wife lived in Dauncey Street, far away – well, at least fifty yards – from the Bohemian excesses of Pelling Street. The house was a three-storey Victorian edifice, unadorned almost to the point of being forbidding. Indeed, when Carole and Jude arrived in the rain of the Friday evening, the house looked positively unwelcoming. But it was solid, respectable and undoubtedly worth a lot. There had been money in being a butcher in Fedborough.
Not that his wife chose to draw attention to James Lister’s commercial origins. When the Tournedos Rossini were being served at dinner and he mentioned the fine quality of the beef, he was cut short from the other end of the table by his wife’s voice saying, “I don’t think we need to talk about meat, James.”
Blushing like a schoolboy who had told a dirty joke at a maiden aunt’s tea party, James Lister was duly silent, enabling his wife to steer the conversation to more rarefied planes. “Do tell us about your plans for the Art Crawl, Terry.”
Fiona Lister’s voice was, like her person, so encrusted with gentility that it had to be hiding something less genteel underneath. Though probably in her late sixties, she was one of those thin straight women whose looks don’t change much throughout their adult life. She was dressed in a white blouse with a plain collar and a grey silk dress. Though the clothes were undoubtedly expensive, they made her look like a failed nun. And also somehow gave the impression that she’d worn the same style for many years.
Her dinner menu hadn’t changed for a while either. Though beautifully presented, the food came from the ancien régime when Constance Spry and cordon bleu had ruled the kitchens of Britain; before that mildest of revolutionaries, Delia Smith, had achieved her coup d’état; and long before the excesses of fusion added by ever-wilder television chefs.
Each course looked exactly as it must have done in the recipe book photographs. Not a lemon slice was misaligned on the smoked salmon pâté. For the Tournedos Rossini, the toast, the foie gras and the disc of entrecote were piled in perfect symmetry, identical on every plate. Glacé cherries and angelica sticks made an exquisitely regular clock-face on the yellow surface of the sherry trifle; the sponge fingers were exactly parallel around the Charlotte Russe.
The choice of wines was also from another generation, the existence of the New World unacknowledged. James Lister poured copious amounts of Châteauneuf-du-Pape and an icy sweet Niersteiner. When it came to coffee (and After Eight mints), the guests would be offered Cointreau, Benedictine and Rummel.
The overall effect was rich and rather cloying.
The guest list for the dinner once again included the Durringtons and the Rev Trigwell. Jude wondered if this helped to explain the unexpected invitations to herself and Carole. Without desperate infusions of new blood, perhaps all Fedborough dinner parties ended up with exactly the same personnel.
There was another couple she hadn’t met. The fact that they were gay clearly gave Fiona Lister quite a frisson. She kept making unambiguous remarks, destined to show what a broadminded hostess she was to have friends ‘like that’. She was so determinedly relaxed with the gay couple that the effect was very unrelaxing.
Terry Harper, the one to whom she’d addressed the question about the Art Crawl, was the older. A neat man with short grey hair styled like one of the lesser Roman emperors, he wore owl-like tortoiseshell glasses and an immaculately cut charcoal sports jacket. His partner was thin and dark, Mediterranean looks at odds with his very English name, Andrew Wragg. He wore tight black leather trousers and a shimmering black V-necked sweater, deliberately contrasting with the collars and ties of the other male guests. Had someone else turned up to one of her dinner parties dressed in that way, Fiona Lister would have been vocal in her disapproval, but the fact that Andrew had seemed to give her some kind of charge. She was being so daring, inviting someone ‘like that’. She beamed indulgently whenever he spoke, impressed by the astonishing breadth of her own mind.
Andrew could have been as much as twenty years younger than Terry, and he was clearly the volatile element in the partnership. He flirted outrageously with the other guests, regardless of gender, and was prone to calculatedly shocking remarks. Terry looked on benignly, a parody of the steady older man, with a lot of raised eyebrows and comfortable ‘What on earth can I do with him?’ grimaces.
Terry Harper, it was established when Jude and Carole were introduced, ran the Yesteryear Antiques, which James Lister had pointed out during his ‘Dawn Walk as being Fedborough’s former grocery. Andrew Wragg was some unspecified kind of artist, and worked in the studio that had been converted from the smokehouse behind his partner’s shop.
The Art Crawl turned out to be the one Debbie Carlton had described to Carole, and, as its organizers, Terry and Andrew were more than happy to talk on the subject.
“I’m quietly confident it’s going to be rather good this year,” said the older man. He spoke with the same restrained neatness as he dressed.
“Remind me, Terry – when does the thing actually start?” asked Dr Durrington.
Fiona Lister saw it as her duty to provide the answer. “Really! Don’t you pay any attention to what’s going on in this town, Donald?”
Joan Durrington also looked daggers at her husband, but said nothing and took a sip of her mineral water.
The doctor’s protestations that he was kept rather busy in his practice were swept away by his hostess. “There’s Fedborough Festival literature and posters all over the town. There’s even a big banner out on the A27. The Festival starts with the Carnival Parade on Thursday night, and the Art Crawl is open to the public at two o’clock on Friday. Open two to six every afternoon of the Festival. You really ought to know that, Donald – particularly since one of the artists is exhibiting in your house.”
She sounded genuinely offended that any prominent citizen of Fedborough should remain ignorant of what was going on in the town. Donald Durrington looked suitablychastened. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “Joan deals with all that sort of thing.”
His wife’s expression suggested this was not an arrangement with which she was happy. It also suggested their marriage was not necessarily an arrangement with which she was happy.
“Yes, just a week to go,” said Terry Harper. “All in place, though. I think it’ll work well.” He smiled coyly. “Though I’m afraid we may have put one or two backs up around the town.”
“One or two?” screeched Andrew. “Always had a way with the old understatement, didn’t you? I think he’s offended so many people, soon he’s going to need police protection.”
“Why is that?” asked Fiona Lister with steely gentility. “Who have you been offending, Terry?”
He made a shrugging gesture of studied innocence. “All I’ve done is to suggest that we should broaden the range of artists we include. Get some of the bright new talent from London, from Paris, from Hamburg, Amsterdam. As a result, of course, there is inevitably less room for some of the local artists…no, sorry, I’d better qualify that…some of the local people who think of themselves as artists.”