Feeling more cheerful he got to his feet and set off again; he passed a farm and came to a T-junction where he turned left towards a bridge over a river. Beyond it there was the village he had been looking for. A village with a pub. Wilt hurried on only to discover that the pub was shut for refurbishment and that there were no cafés or B&B guest-houses in the place. There was a shop but that too was shut. Wilt trudged on and finally found what he was looking for, an old woman who told him that, while she didn’t take lodgers in the normal way, he could stay the night in her spare bedroom and just hoped he didn’t snore. And so after a supper of eggs and bacon and the down payment of £15 he went to bed in an old brass bedstead with a lumpy mattress and slept like a log.
At 7 the old woman woke him with a cup of tea and told him where the bathroom was. Wilt drank the tea and studied the tintypes on the wall, one of General Buller in the Boer War with troops crossing the river. The bathroom looked as if it had been around during the Boer War too but he had a shave and a wash and then another apparently inevitable helping of bacon and eggs for breakfast, and thanked the old woman and set off down the road.
‘You’ll have to get to Raughton before you find a hostel,’ the old woman, Mrs Bishop, told him. ‘It’s five miles down thataway.’
Wilt thanked her and went down thataway until he came to a path that led uphill into some woods and turned off along it. He tried to forget the name Raughton, perhaps it was Rorton, and whatever it was he no longer cared. He was in the English countryside, old England, the England he had come to discover for himself. For half a mile he climbed up the hill and came out on to a stunning view. Below him a patchwork of meadows and beyond them a river. He went down and crossed the empty fields and presently was standing looking at a river that flowed, as it must have done for thousands of years, down the valley, in the process creating the flat empty fields he had just crossed. This was what he had come to find. He took off his knapsack and sat on the bank and watched the water drifting by with the occasional ripple that suggested a fish or an undercurrent, some hidden obstacle or pile of rubbish that was sliding past under the surface. Above him the sky was a cloudless blue. Life was marvellous. He was doing what he had come to do. Or so he thought. As ever in Wilt’s life he was moving towards his Nemesis.
It lay in the vengeful mind of a justifiably embittered old woman in Meldrum Slocum. All her working life, ever since she had entered the service of General and Mrs Battleby forty-five years before, Martha Meadows had been the cleaner, the cook, the housekeeper, the every help the General and his wife depended on at Meldrum Manor. She had been devoted to the old couple and the Manor had been the centre of her life but the General and his wife had been killed five years before in an accident with a drunken lorry driver; the estate had been taken over by their nephew Bob Battleby and everything had changed. From being what the old General had called ‘our faithful retainer, Martha’, a title of which she had been exceedingly proud, she had found herself being called that ‘bloody woman’. In spite of it she had stayed on. Bob Battleby was a drunk, and a nasty drunk at that, but she had her husband to think of. He’d been the gardener at the Manor but a bout of pneumonia followed by arthritis had forced him to leave his job. Martha had to work and there was nowhere else in Meldrum she could find employment. Besides, she had hopes that Battleby would drink himself to death before too long. Instead he began an affair with Ruth Rottecombe, the wife of the local MP and Shadow Minister for Social Enhancement. It was largely thanks to her that Martha had been replaced by a Filipino maid who was less disapproving of what they called their little games. Martha Meadows had kept her thoughts to herself but one morning Battleby, after a particularly drunken night, had lost his temper and had thrown her things–the clothes she came in before changing into her working ones–into the muddy yard outside the kitchen; he had called her a fucking old bitch and better off dead at that. Mrs Meadows had walked home seething with rage, and determined on getting her own back. Day after day she had sat at home beside her sick husband–who’d recently had a stroke and couldn’t talk–grimly determined to get her revenge. She had to be very, very careful. The Battlebys were a rich and influential family in the county and she had often thought of appealing to them, but for the most part they were of a different generation to the General’s nephew and seldom came to the Manor. No, she would have to act on her own. Two empty years passed before she thought of her own husband’s nephew, Bert Addle. Bert had always been a bit of a tearaway but she’d always had a soft spot for him, had lent him money when he was in trouble and had never asked for it back. Been like a mother to him, she had. Yes, Bert would help, especially now he’d just lost his job at the shipyard at Barrow-in-Furness. What she had in mind would certainly give him something to do.
‘He called you that?’ Bert said when she told him. ‘Why, I’ll kill the bastard. Calling my auntie a thing like that when you’ve been with the family all those years. By God, I will.’
But Martha shook her head.
‘You’ll do no such thing. I’m not having you go to prison. I’ve got a better idea.’
Bert looked at her questioningly.
‘Like what?’
‘Disgrace him in public, so he can’t show his face round here no more, him and that hussy of his. That’s what I want.’
‘How you going to do that?’ Bert asked. He’d never seen Martha so furious.
‘Him and that Rottecombe bitch get up to some strange things, I can tell you,’ she said darkly.
‘What sort of things?’
‘Sex,’ said Mrs Meadows. ‘Unnatural sex. Like him being tied up and…Well, Bert, I don’t like to say. But what I do say is I’ve seen the things they use. Whips and hoods and handcuffs. He keeps them locked away along of the magazines. Pornography and pictures of little boys and worse. Horrible.’
‘Little boys? He could go to prison for that.’
‘Best place for him.’
‘But how come you’ve seen them if they’re locked away?’
‘Cos he was so drunk one morning he was dead to the world in the old General’s dressing room and the cupboard was open and the key still in the lock. And I know where he keeps his keys, like the spare ones. He don’t know I do but I found them. On a beam over the old tractor in the barn he don’t ever use and can’t cos it’s broken. Shoves them up there where no one would think of looking. I seen him from the kitchen window. Keys of the back and front doors, key of his study and his Range Rover and the key of that cupboard with all that filth in it. Right, now here’s what I want you to do. That is if you’re prepared to, like.’