The Burry Man's Day (18 page)

After these, and hardly a respite to the senses, came a rather noisome, brick-walled privy, evidently shared between the two families, and with a sudden sinking of the heart and a flush of shame it struck me that
this
might be the solution to the mystery of Joey Brown’s morning excursion. Nothing more than this. If she were the dainty, easily discomfited type, she might well have been thrown into confusion upon meeting me on her way back from a visit here. But if such a visit had been her object would she not have asked one of the sisters to sit with Robert’s body? Could she possibly be so ludicrously modest as all that? And her a barmaid. I could hardly believe that a girl robust enough to sit with a corpse could not summon the grit to mention a visit to a privy. If it came to that, however, I could hardly believe that the same girl who shrieked and fled Robert Dudgeon in his burry suit could calmly sit beside him in his shroud.

Since this could, I feared, be the answer to my little mystery, and since I could not skulk about here any longer without apparent purpose, I stopped, put my hands on my hips, looked about me and tutted.

‘Where has he got to?’ I said in what I hoped was a carrying-enough voice to reach the cottage in case anyone was watching and listening but not ludicrously stagy.

‘Here, boy!’ I shouted, the stable lad having assured me that he would come only to his name and nothing else. ‘Here, doggy-dog! Come to heel. Oh, blast it all to heaven, what did he say the name was?’

So it went on. I strode about around the back shouting for Scamp, for Laddie, for Jock, standing still ostensibly listening for him but really looking about for anything there was to see: something hastily buried, or a hole where something had been hastily dug up, footprints – not that that dry forest floor could reasonably be expected to yield these, or anything at all. Eventually, grudgingly deciding that the privy was the answer after all, I gave up and called for Nipper. He did not appear. I called louder, but still there was no sign of him. Then with all thought of detecting forgotten, I began to shout in earnest. How awful if I should have lost him! He really was an excellent little animal and the stable lad could hardly have said no to me when I asked. If he had gone off for good, I should never forgive myself.

‘Nipper? Ni-ppaaar . . . Nipper!’ I shouted, trying a variety of intonations in case he was as particular as all that. I rounded the cottages on the far side, and saw him at last. Being a dog, he was of course rolling with abandon in the fresh horse droppings from Mr Faichen’s hearse.

‘Nipper!’ I exclaimed. ‘You little beast. Get up this minute!’

With a final snort, Nipper rolled over and sprang to his feet, trotting towards me with his tongue out in a happy grin.

‘Shocking behaviour,’ I told him, but one could not be cross with him really. For one thing Bunty would have done exactly the same, and for another I should have seen it coming. ‘I must say, though,’ I went on, ‘even if one has to expect that sort of behaviour from you, I think it’s a bit much for an undertaker to come round all solemn and respectful and then leave it behind him, don’t you?’ Of course, as soon as I had had this thought tongue-in-cheek, simply to make conversation with the dog, I immediately had it for real. What is more, Mrs Dudgeon might well feel the same and if the neighbours were all out then there was no chance of one of them coming to clear the mess before she could be offended by it. Only one course of action was open to me.

‘What a glamorous life I do lead,’ I said to myself, as I reattached the string to Nipper’s collar and went around the side of the cottage to get a coal shovel.

Nipper, trotting along quite happily on a slack string as I made my way to the midden heap moments later, looked scrupulously uninterested in the contents of the brimming shovel, as though
I
might concern myself with such matters but they were far beneath
his
notice. I had almost got there, breathing through my mouth and trying not to think of what my disgusting sons said about this method of dealing with bad smells (‘But if you breathe through your mouth you’re eating it’), when I realized that I could have simply scraped it off the lane into the verge, and that it was the clearest sign yet of how the drip-drip-drip of Hugh’s propaganda on the subject of ‘compost’ as he calls it was warping my brain that it never occurred to me to do anything but put it where it would do such bucolic good, even if that meant I had to carry the stuff a hundred yards at arm’s length as though I was in some revolting new take on a pancake race.

I was cross, then – with Hugh for corrupting me, with my sons for their crudity, and with Nipper – by the time I got there and emptied the shovel on to the heap but my temper faded into sadness as I looked in and saw there, spread all over the top, the burrs from Robert Dudgeon’s suit, some of them still with white scraps of his undergarment clinging to them. They must have been the last thing Mrs Dudgeon wanted ever to see again when she returned home a widow on Friday evening, but I supposed they had to be dealt with somehow. I even thought for a moment of digging around a bit with my shovel and trying to cover them, but there were limits. The smell and the bluebottles were not easily to be ignored, so I contented myself with scraping the shovel clean and rehanging it on its nail then setting off into the woods to take Nipper home.

We did not make very good progress. Before we were even properly under the trees Nipper gave a sudden yelp and started to the side, bumping into my legs and knocking me off balance. I dropped to my knees at once and, when I did, I saw immediately what was the problem. There was a bottle, cracked in two, lying on the rough grass. A whisky bottle no less – its label was still fresh and clearly legible: Royal Highlanders single malted Scotch Whisky. I sat back on my heels and took Nipper’s paws one by one in my hands squeezing gently, until I found the tender one.

‘Poor old thing,’ I said. ‘And poor old me having to take you back to your master with a cut paw and covered in horse dung, too. My name will be mud around the stables tonight.’ I sacrificed my handkerchief (another one), using it to wipe out the cut – it was not much more than a scratch really – and then turning it to the fresh side and tying up the paw to keep it clean on the way home.

‘What kind of fool would throw a bottle away like that when they know there’s a houseful of children nearby?’ I asked Nipper, trying to keep his mind off what I was doing to him. When I stood up, however, I saw that there was a more innocent explanation at least than that. The bottle might easily have tumbled off the rubbish heap at the cottage of the red-haired children and rolled down, cracking through on its way, for there were countless other whisky bottles there; Vat 69 bottles for the most part and I wondered if the man of the house worked in the bottling hall and purloined them in the way I had heard so much about. Or no, I realized, living here, he must work for Cadwallader in some capacity and must simply spend his wages on them. My sympathy for the mother of the red terrors continued to rise, as I imagined him draining bottles, sticking the corks back in – one was still stuck in the top half of this one – and then tossing them out into the garden with never a thought for his little ones’ bare feet as they scampered at play. Well, clearly I could not just leave this broken one where it was, and I was damned if I was going to rootle about in the rubbish to put it safely out of harm’s way, nor dig a hole here in full view of the cottage windows, in case anyone should come back and see me, so I simply picked up the two halves, gingerly avoiding the jagged ends and trying not to breathe in the fumes, and set off on my way.

‘I’ll get rid of it somewhere,’ I told Nipper, ‘but first things first. We need to get you home and have that cut cleaned out. In fact, a head-to-toe bath wouldn’t do you any harm, and if I have to administer it myself as punishment for being such a poor nanny, then I’ll take it on the chin.’

At times in the past, I have wondered whether there is something to that belief that we are all but pawns being moved around to make sport for the gods, and I was just about to wonder it again. If asked to pick who I would least like to encounter just at that moment, walking along carrying a broken whisky bottle, leading a dog on a string, he liberally coated in horse dung and with one paw tied up in a grubby hanky and I slightly besmirched with some of the same horse dung, at least on my hands where I had grabbed his paws to doctor him, and with dirty knees from grovelling on the ground while I did so, and with no handkerchief to remedy any of it . . . if asked who I would least like to meet in this state the people I glimpsed through the trees on course to bump right into me would certainly be amongst the top few.

Mr and Mrs Turnbull, the schoolmaster and his wife, teetotal, shining clean and with sober wholesomeness radiating from every pore, were strolling through the woods, without a broken bottle, reeking mongrel or muddy knee between them.

I could do nothing about Nipper, nor about my own dishevelment, but I hastily dug into a heap of leaf-mould with the heel of my shoe and dropped in the two pieces of glass, careful not to let them clink.

I gasped as I did so. I was no aficionado of whisky, as is well known, but this stuff must have been worse than the usual; even the empty bottle smelled powerful enough to give one goose pimples, harsh and yet sickly-sweet like burnt jam, reminding me of the terrible day when my cook Mrs Tilling was making crab-apple jelly for the War Effort and got a bad telegram just after adding the sugar to the pan. She had been found an hour later by our butler, sitting in the smoke as the mess boiled over on to the stove, forgotten. Odd how smell can be the most irresistible trigger to our unbidden memories. I shook myself, kicked some leaves back over the hole and stood straight ready to face the Turnbulls.

‘Why, Mrs Gilver,’ said Mr Turnbull, when he saw me. Mrs Turnbull nodded rather simperingly from his elbow. ‘We’re on a nature walk,’ he went on. My eyebrows must have risen: this was a bit too much even for them. ‘I mean to say,’ he went on, ‘we’re preparing possible nature-walk routes for the children, next school year. Excellent educational aid, the nature walk. Science, Art and PT all rolled into one. For instance, there are seven different kinds of mushroom on this path alone.’

‘In August?’ I said. ‘Rather early for mushrooms, isn’t it?’ He had raised my suspicions with this flood of unnecessary information about what they were up to here in the woods. I wondered how long they had been skulking and whether they were the reason that my hackles and Nipper’s had been prickling. Furthermore, I knew that
I
only babbled on to practical strangers about what was my business and mine alone when I had something to hide. Mr Turnbull was a match for me, however.

‘You should join us, Mrs Gilver,’ he said jovially. ‘I would wager you have lived in the countryside all your life and yet you know nothing of mushrooms. Certainly the common field variety has not come into its own yet for the year, but there are boundless others to be found.’

‘Toadstools, you mean?’ I asked, trying to keep Cad’s ‘untraceable poison’ out of my thoughts. Mr and Mrs Turnbull shared a rueful smile.

‘We try to discourage such fancies,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘They are all fungi, plain and simple. Some good to eat and some not, but we try to discourage any superstitions about them.’

I had just about had enough of them already and this tipped me right over the edge. True they were perfectly free to think I was ignorant and credulous about country matters (I after all thought that they were tedious and rude about all matters we had yet conversed upon), but at least I had the manners to keep my thoughts to myself. Besides, they were on my list of suspects for Robert Dudgeon’s nobblers. I decided to see if I could jolt them.

‘I think you’re on a hiding to nothing round here, I must say,’ I told them. ‘Fearfulness and superstition appear to be the norm. Look at the Burry Man, for instance.’

They frowned at me but said nothing.

‘What do you think the local folklore will make of Robert Dudgeon’s death?’ I went on, remorselessly. ‘Do you think anyone new will volunteer for next year? Or will there be stories of curses to add to all the others by then?’

‘What do you mean?’ said Mr Turnbull.

‘Oh nothing, in particular,’ I said. ‘Only I wouldn’t be at all surprised if in ten years’ time children of Queensferry are as frightened of touching burdock seeds as they are today of touching toadstools.’

‘Not if I can help it,’ said Mr Turnbull, grimly determined. ‘We have spoken before about the unfortunate prevalence of nonsense for those working underground or out at sea, but it irritates me beyond measure when the bounty of nature’ – he spread his arms wide about him, and his voice took on an unmistakable note of sermonizing – ‘the bounty of nature itself is corrupted to make their silly tales.’

‘Quite right, dear,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘But we shall show them the error of their ways.’ Her eyes were gleaming with unblinking zeal, like a missionary.

‘You’re all set to lead them into the light,’ I said, fatuously and thinking I was pushing it, but they took it as a compliment and simply nodded, smugly. ‘Well, good luck,’ I told them. They frowned again at that. Of course, they would not believe in luck’. ‘But your work is cut out for you. I’ll lay you good odds’ – this phrasing was deliberate; I was sure they would not believe in gambling either – ‘that before the year is out, there will be playground skipping-rhymes about poisonous burrs and children will be daring each other to touch the Burry Man as he passes, and even the mothers and fathers will think twice before they put burdock seeds in their midden heaps to spread on their kitchen gardens. You wait and see.’

‘My dear Mrs Gilver,’ said Mr Turnbull, ‘your imagination must be a great resource to you, but leave the horticulture to me. No gardener in his wits would put burrs on a midden heap. No goodness in them whatsoever and they’d take years to break down to a mulch. Harmless but useless, and our children know that very well.’

‘But –’ I began then I managed to stop myself in time. I nodded my goodbye to them, planning to sweep away with as much dignity as I could muster, but I was forced to wait for Nipper, who had chosen that very moment to make use of the facilities provided by the forest floor. Mr and Mrs Turnbull smiled stiffly at me and walked away, as though this most natural of canine functions was to be classed with the nasty shale mines and fishing boats and had no place in their land of flowers.