The Hollow Land (14 page)

So Jimmie Meccer, in a straw sombrero, a stick across his knees, a dog at his feet and the walking aid close by but not noticeable in the bushes, sat magnificently in the telephone box to guard the village.

“Mind we could give him a gun,” said Kendal, sensational as usual.

“Heaven forbid!”

“I'm no fool,” said Jimmie suddenly. “There seems some idea going about that I'm a fool. I'll not watch your blessed houses if you don't think on. It's not owt to me what any gypsies take. There's nothing of mine they'd want. For all I'll ever lose I could sit here and watch 'em crawling in and out of all your houses with your three-piece suites and silver sheep-cups. I'm not likely to bestir myself if I'm not appreciated.”

“Come on now, Jimmie,” they said more kindly, “we'll bring you presents back. You'll be grand.”

 

Mrs. Teesdale and Mrs. Bateman set out for the antique shop about half past two. It was only a few miles over Stainmore, over the wonderful old road the Greeks and Celts and Romans and Vikings, Angles, Saxons and the odd Jute had used before them more adventurously. Ghost upon ghost haunts this road from Greta Bridge, where a spirit got caught under a stone and twice they've had to put her back; to the blue ghost you can see sometimes on bright sunny afternoons near Bowes, the wife of a Saxon lord still wearing her Saxon dress, but without her head; to the white ghost near the old mines who walks quietly in her apron. These are only a few of the people you are likely to see. Another—very much alive—is Mrs. Teesdale's cousin at the wool shop at Brough. Mrs. Teesdale hadn't seen her for at least three weeks and as they were passing the door they felt they must just look in.

Time passed. “Dear me,” said Mrs. Teesdale at four-thirty, “this antique shop on Stainmer'll be shut if we don't mind.”

“Well, but stop for your tea,” said the cousin.

“No—we've left Jimmie Meccer in charge of the whole village this afternoon and there's gypsies about, and he'll be asleep as like as not.”

The cousin said she'd take it badly if they didn't stop for their teas. Armed guards against gypsies, she said, were just ridiculous. In her opinion gypsies were not so bad at all. There were ordinary thieves about now, yes. Believe it or not, yes. Her father had never once had to take his front-door key off the kitchen beam where he'd found it when he moved into his farm fifty years back, but now she'd heard, because of the motorways, they were putting up grid things even in the post office and how they were to get the eggs and that over the counter she did not know. This old road was a godsend to thieves. When the trains were running down the bottom in the old days and before motor cars, her grandfather said there wasn't a thing on the road—green grass growing on it. Now there's fleets of motor coaches and caravans and boats on top of cars and bikes standing on their heads on sports-car lids and you can get a real good prawn cocktail, she'd heard, at the Old Spital Inn where they used to keep the Hand of Glory.

At length—long length—they got away, with a great deal of waving and calling and wool for winter jerseys. Hold fast, said Mrs. Teesdale as she reined in the car and then let it leap furiously the eighteen inch step at the turn-off onto Stainmore—engineering that would have made the Romans wince and fall on their swords. They sped across the moor among the dotted farms and up onto the top of the fells again to the Castle Antique Shop.

As they swept down its long drive they passed a car travelling fast in the other direction, then came upon the castle moat and tremendous studded door—the sort of door that Eric Bloodaxe might have been carried through dead to be laid out by his lesser lords, all doffing their horned helmets, upon some great table-top.

There, in fact, inside the antique shop's great door, was just such a table-top. A magnificent, ancestral king of tables stood there, the size of a caravan or a small chapel. “Put curtains round it,” said Mrs. Teesdale, “and you could call it a four-poster.”

The antique dealer was standing by this table, stroking it as they came in, and waved them quite dreamily past him.

“Go where you like,” he said. “All the ground floor's on view. Everything for sale. Go as you please.”

“What a huge old table,” said Mrs. Bateman.

“Just arrived,” said the antique dealer, stroking away. “I've never seen anything like it.”

“Hmmm,” said Mrs. Teesdale.

“Don't ask to buy it. It's on its way to London. It's very early.
Very
early. Pre-Reformation,” said the dealer.

“Goodness,” said Mrs. Teesdale. “It's just like mine was. We chopped it up when we got the units.”

The dealer closed his eyes.

Mrs. Bateman went up to the table. There was a huge old drawer in its side. She pulled it out crooked, with a knocking noise. It was smoothly made within. The boards that made its top were ridged and silky from hundreds of years of scouring. The dark wood had turned silvery, like driftwood on a clean shore.

“Before King Henry the Eighth,” said the dealer. “Oh, well before. I've not seen another so fine. It's just arrived. I bought it from the gypsies. They left as you arrived. Used to deal in horses and pots and pans, the gypsies. But mending pans has gone, and horses are scarce. Antiques are easier and gypsies—my, they know their stuff! They have the chance to learn, too—they get a view through the back door of every farm they want to call at. They can see with one flick of an eyelash, while they wait for a milk can to be filled or a dozen eggs, every stick of furniture in a back kitchen. They know the value, too. They're clever. They're cleverer than us folk are gypsies.”

“Is it valuable?” asked Mrs. Bateman, stroking in her turn the old ridges and whorls and knots on the table-top, worn bare as the fells and in contours not unlike them.

“Between twelve and thirteen hundred pounds,” said the dealer.

Mrs. Teesdale, who had been prowling around by herself in the back of the shop and picking things up and putting them down again, saying in rather loud asides “
Over
priced,
over
priced”, came up and looked long and hard at the table. The two women gazed at one another.

“Yes. Twelve to thirteen hundred pounds,” said the dealer. “When these gypsies arrived here half an hour ago with this table on the top of their car—pressing it so hard into the ground I thought they'd step out with flat heads—they said, ‘We've a table.'

“‘Where from?' says I.

“‘A back kitchen. Been standing there for ever. Folk didn't want it. Did them a favour. Took it off them. Grand old table.' I played it very quiet, ladies.”

“Back
kitchen
table?” said Mrs. Teesdale thoughtfully. She drew her hands that had kneaded dough about on tables for a good many years—not to mention girdle cakes, tea cakes, Sally Lunns, maids of honour, scones, biscuits, pastry and granny loaf, milk fadge, fatty cakes and swedish fingers. She said, “Well now!”

“So I thought,” said the dealer, “my stars! I'm in for a fortune—maybe thirteen hundred and fifty pounds! ‘Nice table,' says I, ‘nobody wants this sort of thing nowadays though. Not with kitchen units and such-like. I'll find it hard to get rid of again, but I'll give you a fiver.'

“‘That you will not,' said the gypsy standing on the spot you're on now with his eyes all slant. The other feller was sat picking his teeth in the porch.

“‘Well,' said I. ‘Make it ten.'

“‘Make it between twelve hundred and thirteen hundred,' said he. ‘You'll get near fourteen hundred in the south.'

“So what about that? They're no fools aren't gypsies. We settled for a thousand and they made off fairly satisfied—not over-thrilled though. Level-headed. Off down the road to London. I got their car number mind—I've my reputation to consider.”

“It's a nice story,” said Mrs. Bateman.

“Hmmm,” said Mrs. Teesdale yet again. “
Back
kitchen.”

There was not a word out of her as they went whirling over the hill to Brough Sowerby, twisting into Kaber, through the ruined railway bridge to Barras. The south of Stainmore rolled out before them with not a sign of all the history that had happened all over it. The car flew along. You felt that if the Saxon lady on her horse had suddenly appeared in her blue dress and without her head, Mrs. Teesdale would hardly have swerved.

“Aren't we going rather fast?” asked Mrs. Bateman. “I suppose we are a bit late. It was a lovely shop. My word, what a wonderful table.” She held tight to the needlework picture she had bought and closed her eyes and prayed as they nearly hit a passing sheep.

“Hmmm.”

“Didn't you think so?”

“Wonderful no,” said Mrs. Teesdale. “Wonderful no.”

They arrived back in the village, where people were beginning to arrive home from the long day at the fair. Bell and Harry and Mr. Bateman and Mr. Teesdale and Old Hewitson were unloading and exclaiming over sheep and prizes from the back of the trailer. “Fust prize for best-beast-overall!” cried Harry in a voice his friends in London never heard.

“That's right then,” said Mrs. Teesdale striding past without a glance.

Up the village street she strode, to where Jimmie Meccer sat outside his telephone box like the Buddha in the evening sun, eating a slice of prize apple pie. “Well now, Jimmie,” she said, “how did you get on?”

“A right quiet day,” said Jimmie.

“And no intruders?”

“Nowt of owt,” said Jimmie, “nowt of any kind.”

“No gypsies?”

“No. Mebbe a car or two went by through to Quarry Hill and passed down back again when they found Dark Trees' dead-end at the fell gate.”

“You had your little nap I dare say?”

“Not at all. Mind I had my thoughts like usual.”

“Deep thoughts,” said Mrs. Teesdale and marched Jimmie across the road into his house and out the back and into his shed where there were two great bags of potatoes, bridles of long-dead horses and Jimmie's stack of winter kindling. And a space. A large space. On the floor in the middle of it stood Jimmie's supper—a big lemon jelly setting nicely. Jimmie had been putting jellies to set on his back shed table for years and years and years.

“My table! My table's gone! Well bye! Well bye! It's been spirited off. My rickety rackety old table.”

 

They caught them just north of Luton, thanks to Mrs. Teesdale's wits, and the dealer having taken their number.

At first the police said they would have to look after the thousand pounds and the table as evidence until the trial came up, but when they saw the size of the table they weren't sure it would fit in the police station and decided they could give the thousand pounds back to the dealer and the table back to Jimmie.

But Jimmie said no.

If it was all the same, he said, he would like the thousand pounds and the dealer could sell the table. He was quite definite about this and everyone was astonished—Jimmie not being renowned for being definite. Or really for being anything, except good at sitting about.

“The thousand pounds,” said Jimmie. And in the end he got it.

Then he did get rather topsy-turvy—the doctor said it was delayed shock—and had to be taken into hospital for a few days and the village said, “He's finished!”

But this wasn't true either, for in the hospital the doctors got a good look at him and told him there were things to be done for legs nowadays and with a couple of plastic hips they could have him skipping down the village street like a new lamb.

And all this happened.

Jimmie paraded that autumn down the village like the Lord of the Marches and his dog watched him, utterly terrified.

Later Jimmie announced that he was off to South America to see his sister, who was very comfortable there, her father having inherited a fortune from the Meccer who'd gone storming off up the fell one dinnertime, leaving his marmalade duff untouched, to make a fortune.

And like that Meccer, Jimmie Meccer married somebody in South America and never came back.

And it was months and months and months before people had stopped examining their old bits and pieces in their back sheds. But there was never another table found like the one that was kidnapped by the gypsies—if, of course, it
was
the gypsies, for the address of the thieves turned out to be Park Lane, London.

No, there was never another discovery like the one on the day of the Appleby Horse Fair.

S
ome things, if you know enough, can be worked out in advance. For example, a total eclipse of the sun. Other things are considered accidents.

The visit of Henry Roberto Hewitson III
 
from South America to North Westmorland was considered an accident. For who on earth could have known that because Mrs. Bateman left it so late in her holiday to visit the antique shop on North Stainmore, Jimmie Meccer would go to South America? And in South America that he would meet someone who could threaten all that he had left behind?

When Jimmie reached South America his sister invited to meet him every local Hewitson, Metcalf and Teesdale who had left the Pennine fells and mines in the hard times long ago, and their children and grandchildren. One of these grandchildren was Henry Hewitson III—a man with a very rigid mind and a tremendous lot of money. As a result of the meeting there occurred in this rigid mind a little chink, like a chink in Pennine limestone made by the minerals in the hard water flowing over it; the little chink that in years to come turns hard hills into honeycomb and makes out of solid-looking rock great tunnels and caves and potholes and deep unknown cathedrals, running sometimes with water which falls roaring over underground precipices, whirlpooling and surging along, so that above, as you tread over smooth green turf, small yellow pansies and little blood-red toadstools, you hear a sort of beating under your feet, like a heart beating strongly.