Sequel to a Nine Days' Wonder

'I find it shocking,' said Clarissa Webster. 'Shocking, and, if you must know, rather frightening.'

She pushed back the papers on her roll-top desk, put down an empty glass and lit a cigarette. The back room of the shop called appropriately The Medley, once the kitchen of a Tudor cottage, was part office, part store. Canvases, framed and unframed, lined one wall; cardboard cartons of artists' materials, convex mirrors, bookends and tourist souvenirs were stacked in that curious disarray which suggests that it is part of a system understood only by its creator.

She was past fifty but still handsome and well aware of her sex, with an easy charm that beckoned and comforted. Her customers, particularly if they were male, found her as irresistible and as memorable as the setting which had attracted them into her net. Sweet, sly, pretty Mrs Webster, a natural saleswoman who could convince any buyer that he had acquired a bargain – a future family heirloom – rather than an overpriced painting of a scene better left to coloured postcards.

'Shocking?'

The girl who had been engulfed in an armchair too low to the floor pulled herself out of it and straddled one of the squat square arms. Despite jeans and the painter's smock worn for practical reasons, the results of which were smeared all over it, she merited more than a casual glance. Everything about her, from the short, almost cropped dark hair about a face which was just too rounded for classic beauty, to the tips of her small spatulate fingers suggested an expert in her choice of work whatever it might be.

'Shocking?' she repeated. 'Frightening? Putting it a bit high, aren't you? You might say it's crackingly silly publicity hunting. I'd call it a load of old codswallop myself.'

Mrs Webster picked a thin paperback book from one of the heaps on her desk. The cover, a pale puce, swore violently with strident orange and green lettering. She held it at arm's length.

'Get with the Psalms,' she read aloud, 'by the Rev. Leslie Trump, vicar of Lindsay Carfax.' She opened a page at random. 'Get a load of this. "I was chuffed when they said let's make the God-bothering shop." That's the kick-off of Psalm 122, in case you don't know – according to Trump, the silly little ape.'

'I shouldn't have thought,' said her companion, 'that you were the religious type. You certainly never go to church. What makes you so hot and bothered?'

The proprietress of The Medley poured herself two fingers of gin, adding water from a lustre jug.

'How long have you been here, Eliza Jane?' she asked. 'Just over a year since you first appeared, I think. You're the wrong generation – miles too young. History doesn't mean a thing to you unless it repeats itself and bobs up to fetch you one across the chops. I couldn't care less about Trump – I don't even know him well enough to dislike him. What I don't want just now is trouble. We can all do without another Nine Days' Wonder which is what he's asking for. Have a drink.'

'Gobbledy-gook,' said Eliza Jane. 'Who gives a damn about what Trump says or does? He could blow till he burst without anyone paying attention. What Nine Days' Wonder?'

Mrs Webster moistened her lips from her glass and considered the slim figure perched on the chair through her convincing artificial eyelashes. She appeared to change the subject.

'Ben Judd,' she said after a pause. 'I suppose you sleep with him from time to time – I would if I were your age – but are you thinking of shacking up with him? I mean do you intend to stay here for keeps?'

The girl was clearly not embarrassed by the question.

'I might. Ben is rather too fierce for me just now. He's a real painter and my stuff drives him up the wall. Why do you ask?'

'Not out of bitchy curiosity.' Mrs Webster was thoughtful as she sipped her gin. 'I'm going to tell you something and you can believe it or not as you choose. It's always been unlucky to stick your neck out if you live here. That may sound completely mad to you, but it's true. People who do anything which might tend to destroy our image have a pretty parroty time. Perhaps you haven't been here long enough to notice that.'

'You mean those deadbeats, the drop-out crowd, who thought they'd move in last summer?'

'Them – and others. They weren't the first.'

'The Nine Days' Wonder, then?'

Mrs Webster blew a smoke ring into the air and poked a plump forefinger through it.

'This village,' she said, 'as you very well know, is not a village at all – it's a very nicely organised money-making machine. You're part of it with your blissful trick of turning out old-world paintings of it by the dozen. I'm part of it with my arty-crafty racket. So is every man, woman and child in the place. We all live in and on Lindsay Carfax the unspoiled beauty spot of Merrie England as it never bloody well was except in Cloud Cuckooland. We could just as well be working in a film set and the drains would be less smelly.

'We've been a carefully preserved gold mine for at least seventy years and it has never paid anyone to step out of line. People who do become accident-prone. One of Trump's predecessors found that out in 1910 or thereabouts. He was the original Nine Days' Wonder – or one of them.'

'The dreaded elders of the village fixed him? The Gestapo in the form of Gus Marchant's grandfather? What was he up to anyhow?'

'My Aunt Thisbe, who raised me, always said he was a very dull earnest man with theories above his pocket. His name was Austin Bonus – it's on the roll of clergy in the church – and he had an idea to establish a children's home here: East End slum children, waifs and strays and so on. There was a lot of opposition to the scheme on account of it might be noisy and dirty, and bad for the Lindsay Carfax image as a haunt of ancient peace. Bonus fought for a bit and even raised some cash for his scheme – not from the village, I promise you, but from distant do-gooders.

'Then one day he disappeared. It was just after Christmas and he was last seen at an old folks' party at the Carders Hall. He was gone for nine days and when he turned up again he dropped the children's home like a hot potato and carried on as if nothing had happened.'

'No explanation?'

'Nary a word. His wife was furious for a bit, they say, and some of the Church council weren't...