Read Long Live the King Online
Authors: Fay Weldon
Long Live the King (7 page)
As she passed the farm she ran into George, who as it happened had not finished up for the day. She took him back round to the milking parlour and found the tiled floor and wooden stalls still wet from where he’d been rinsing down the vacuum tubes which took the effort out of hand milking, and had meant another three of his friends were now without jobs. Fortunately, the tickets had not got wet, or only a little bit. She showed them to George who said she should tell no one what she had done – as if she was likely to: she’d only left them with George, who was over six foot tall, so he could perhaps have a word with Tim Peasedown the postman, who was barely five foot, to make sure he denied all knowledge of having delivered either parcel or letter. George said he would, and would make enquiries. The tickets might be worth a little: they might be worth a lot. The seat numbers could perhaps be altered or removed; he had friends in the Art Department at college. It was interesting that someone, somewhere, knew the date of the Coronation. He pocketed the envelope and nudged Ivy further into the milking parlour. They would have to be quick. He had to cycle the eleven miles into Bath to get to his two o’clock class with his tutor Mr Edfield on Theories of Perception. Ivy couldn’t be too long away; the Mrs Hon. Rev. would get suspicious.
George was very clever. Just a few more exams to pass and he would be qualified to train as a science teacher. The government would pay him a guinea a week to do so and he would be done with farm life and milking parlours for ever. He was ambitious, not like the other boys in the village. He would go far, and then probably not have time for her, of course, but Ivy would face that when she came to it.
She crept round behind George and put her arms round his large frame. They would only reach so far. She really enjoyed that. There was no fat, it was all muscle. There was a difference in scale between the two of them that she found very satisfactory: he made her feel tiny, helpless and looked after. Though when it came to it, she had to admit, he was more likely to look after himself than anyone else. He would look at you intently with his bright wide blue eyes – he needed glasses; a pity, but whoever was perfect – and smile his easy smile and be so innocent and boyish you would end up doing whatever it was he wanted. He was a charmer, with an instant smile and white, even teeth. People trusted him on sight. She was not sure they were right to, but she knew how to look after herself.
He turned her round, grabbed her arms, quick as a flash and steered her round to the hay pile at the end of the parlour where it was comparatively private and had her on her back – she hadn’t bothered with knickers – and was into her within minutes. ‘Careful, careful,’ she managed to say the other side of her moaning, and he was. He would sometimes ask her to do what the Bible forbade, so he didn’t have to withdraw but could carry on, but so far she had resisted. It didn’t seem decent and her friend Beryl said it hurt a lot though you got used to it. The last thing she wanted to do was get pregnant, mind you, even though her mother would know what to do if she did, so it was a temptation, just to see what it was like. But she didn’t want to end up like Beryl, with a reputation as the village bicycle.
And then he had to be off, but not before he had given her a lecture on how the vacuum tubes of the milking machines worked, and how and why the cows preferred the tubes to hand milking, facts and theories she perhaps had rather not known. George was like that. You had to stand and listen and be told and agree. But it was worth it.
He was going to be late back that night, he was going to a lecture – but perhaps she’d be able to slip out from the Rectory while everyone was asleep and meet him up at the farm? – his employers were away for the night and they could have a comfortable bed for a change.
‘Oh go on, Ivy,’ he said. ‘Be a brick. I’ll sort out the tickets for you. We could get up to a thing or to if we had peace and quiet. You know how I love you.’
Oh yes, yes, yes, love, she thought. Do you believe I’m an idiot?
She said she’d think about it, and asked him what the lecture was and he said he was going to a public séance with some of the fellows from college. They were all interested in theories of life after death. Fame and fortune awaited the one who could prove there was. Most séances were fraudulent – but this particular medium seemed to be genuine. If she was, they’d pay her to call by the college to do a range of controlled experiments. Just as some people had talents – good at art, good at writing – some people, often very simple people, were sensitives, good at communicating with the other side.
‘Good at conning gullible folk out of their money, more like,’ said Ivy. ‘Now there’s a way to make a living!’
But she said she’d meet him, sneak out when everyone else was asleep. There was no way she wasn’t going to, and he knew it.
When the salesman from Jones and Willis, Church Furnishers, carelessly tapped out his pipe on the wall of the lych-gate, a glowing ember flew up in the wind and landed in the splintered wreckage of the musicians’ gallery. The wood was dry and powdery. The ember continued to smoulder quietly, stuck under the raised wooden seam of St Cecilia’s gown where she’d kicked it up high in her dancing so many centuries ago. The fire started by devouring what was left of St Cecilia and her musicians, and having succeeded in that crept round to the other side of the panel, but its underside was thick with the powder left by a myriad boring beetles, and that blocked oxygen to the flames. For almost twenty minutes it looked as if all would be saved.
It was at this time that Ivy Baines slipped out of the Rectory for a further assignation with the would-be scientist George Topp. She marvelled at the sudden strength of the wind. There were spots of rain in the gale and thunder in the distance. She counted three seconds between thunderclap and lightning. The storm was three miles off. She’d hoped it would pass at a distance: she didn’t want the Rectory roused from sleep to notice her absence. She’d seen no sign of fire, she said later. She passed by Swaley’s Farm without noticing a thing.
But a fierce gust from the south-west had sent sparks to wrap flames round the pale, dry, fragile fingers of the charred lute player, and send flaking fragments back down into the pile. Soon the whole bonfire was ablaze, and the lych-gate too.
Whether now it was that the steeplecock was struck by lightning and the roof started to burn, or whether flames leapt from lych-gate to tree and then onto the porch could not later be determined – the thousand-year-old yew with its dark, oily leaves and dry hollow trunk had certainly gone up at some stage, probably early on.
It was a nasty night and few were venturing out. It was not until the flames set off the great expanse of the thatched roof of the tithe barn with what was almost an explosion that Yatbury was roused to danger. The bell tower of St Aidan’s itself being out of action, and there being only a single bell at the new Baptist Chapel, there was no possibility of reverse peals, the traditional alarm. The wealthy Methodist St Bart’s, its copper spire completed in 1814, an upstart compared to Yatbury’s ancient St Aidan’s, had twenty-four bells in its belfry, famous for its peals, but was locked at night because of fear of theft of its silver plate by rogues and vagabonds. The telephone exchange was closed. The churchwarden had to cycle all the way to the next village for help.
One way and another it was a full hour before engines from Lacock and Bath arrived. By then most of the able-bodied males of Yatbury were there with hoses, buckets and axes, doing what they could to save church and barn, but to no avail. No one thought to make sure that those in the Rectory had been alerted to danger: it was a surprise to everyone when flames leapt from the barn roof to run down the Rectory walls, devouring dead ivy on the way, to catch the window sills of the ground floor, crack the windows, suck out the heavy velvet curtains, belch them back in again, in flames, and let in a funnel of air to turn the wide central staircase into a furnace and pour heavy smoke into adjacent rooms.
And where was the family? The firemen checked the master bedroom with its big curtained double bed and, finding it empty, assumed the occupants had escaped: no one had told them there was a child, or indeed a maid. The firemen turned their attention back to the barn: the hoses ran dry: the wind howled. Rain did not fall, but ill-fitting hoses had turned hard ground to sucking mud. Confusion reigned. There seemed to be no one in charge. Putting out flames was one matter: seeking out and imposing their will on the Rev. Hedleigh’s life, even to save it, seemed too complex a matter to undertake.
It was fortunate for Adela that Ivy and George came running up to the house when they did: one quick look showed Ivy both that the house was alight and that the family had not escaped to the garden. She hustled George round to the back of the house, and pointed out Adela’s window on the first floor, above the back stairs to the kitchen annexe. Flames were flickering round the back door of the annexe and the handle was already hot. George seized it and turned it nevertheless; but the door was locked. He shouldered it open with one powerful thrust and crashed through to the corridor. Flames followed him down the passage; he looked back to find them leaping after him up the stairs like hounds determined to follow their master, come what might. He outran them.
Ivy directed firemen to the two small attic bedrooms where the Hedleigh parents slept, two separate rooms for two hard, narrow beds, and two single horsehair mattresses. The rescuers had to find ladders and manoeuvre them into position in slippery mud and sudden driving rain. It all took time which the Rev. and Elise, alas, did not have.
Adela slept: her dreams were troubled, sometimes of fairy princes, sometimes of monsters, often the one melding into the other. She had been reading
The Blue Fairy Book
in bed, and fallen asleep reading, a silly thing to do. She needed to stay awake, in case she heard her mother’s foot on the creaking stair, first one from the bottom, which gave Adela time to push the book under the mattress and pretend to be asleep. Not that the book had been specifically forbidden but Ivy had given it to her the Christmas before last, spoils from her own mother’s market stall, and one look at the curly blue swirls and slender, waiting maiden of the cover, and Adela had hidden it at once. It would put ideas in her head, it would lead her astray, whatever astray was. She knew the book by heart by now, every illustration, the lineaments of every fabulous dragon, monster, pretty maiden, cruel stepmother and damsel in distress, as delivered in pen and ink by Henry Justice Ford. She was the beautiful miller’s daughter, tormented by the hideous goblin, Rumpelstiltskin. Perhaps she was the goose girl, once a princess until her maid betrayed her, waiting for the prophecy to come true: that she would bear the queen’s daughter. However one worked that out. Snow White and Rose Red, bear and dragon, came and went in her half-waking dreams, and tonight more than ever. She was hungry. Ivy had forgotten the cream, and the sugar: she, Adela, thank you very much, might as well go hungry as eat dry bread. Come to think of it she would rather be asleep.
She slept, or half slept, luxuriously: she was in love with the shape, the feel of her own bare arm, curved over her head. It was the bare arm of the miller’s daughter as Rumpelstiltskin pushed open the door to peer at her with curious eyes, and then the blanket was pushed back. She was uncovered. She was lifted from the bed. She was being abducted. Her nightgown was rucked up: she tried to pull it down, but where were her hands? Hanging down, as was her head, her hair falling free; her body slung over a shoulder, a male shoulder, the prince’s shoulder. He hadn’t even bothered with the kiss. She could smell burning, she smelled sweat and cows: she could hear crackling, and crashings and hissings; she opened her eyes and stared at white fabric, moving as the body beneath them moved, as she moved. A man’s shirt. White linen. That’s what a prince wore. Bump, bump, bump; her own body moving as his moved. They were coming down stairs. She turned her head to one side, to save her nose, opened her eyes. Flames. She was being saved from fire; her prince had come, to snatch her from the jaws of death. The house was burning down. Her fault. He had the strongest, broadest shoulders. It was all totally extraordinary yet all totally inevitable. She was coughing: smoke was down her throat. A most remarkable feeling was rising in her: an excitement: a power she could not control both pleasurable and terrible; something you struggled to achieve, it was a bubble: it swelled and swelled, without so much as a by-your-leave, and then it burst, leaving her with the oddest tingling of completion, some need served, some duty done, that all that was meant to be was satisfied, and they were out of the house, and everything was normal again except she was lying on the ground on cold grass with rain spattering onto her face, and a hundred Rumpelstiltskins staring at her:
Today do I bake, to-morrow I brew
The day after that the queen’s child comes in;
And oh! I am glad that nobody knew
That the name I am called is Rumpelstiltskin!
Where on earth had that come from? The goose girl had been asked to guess his name, of course. Someone put a blanket on her and she thought it would be nice to go to sleep again, and wake up and deal with things in the morning.
But Ivy was there looking down at her.
‘Who was that man?’ asked Adela.
‘My boyfriend,’ said Ivy. ‘Quite the hero. I hope it doesn’t go to his head. He’s got nasty burns on his hands. I’d better go and look after him. This kind lady here will look after you.’
And Ivy’s face went away.
The kind lady was taking off her own cloak and putting it under Adela presumably to save her bottom from damp, which was nice of her. The lady had big teeth and a big jaw, very many smart clothes and an air of being in charge.