August 28th 1976
“How much? You’re joking! She is… it’s a bloody laugh. Jan… Jan, she wants three pounds for the wreath,” Caro complained, nodding at the woman behind the counter who stood, implacable, her arms folded.
Jan rolled her eyes. She had been peering through the florist’s grubby window, trying to catch sight of Gail. Her view was cramped, restricted by the peeling white lettering that, from outside, read Wedding Flowers by Irene and the cork noticeboard with assorted small ads and leaflets pinned to it that sat on the sill, leaning against the glass. With relief she finally made out the figure of her friend, asking directions from someone outside the grocer’s.
“Caro, no.” Jan turned to her sister, shaking her head. “We can’t spend that. We’ll need money to get home, then there’s food, drink… we’re going to need to think about somewhere to stay, as well.” She turned to the woman, presumably the Irene of the wedding flowers, though she seemed to lack the joie de vivre for the job. “What else have you got, please?”
The florist nodded to a display stand of plastic buckets, bottle green and filled with tired gerberas, hanging their orange heads between slightly off-white sprigs of gypsophila. A few spiky dahlias, their petals drying up at the ends, sat in the end bucket, together with a ragged bunch of pom-pom-headed chrysanthemums, already starting to shade from white to brown and giving off a distinctly sour smell.
“No.” Caro shook her head. “Jan…!”
Jan sighed.
“Nothing else?”
Presumably-Irene sniffed and folded her arms.
“Well, it’s on account of the increased costs, isn’t it? You’ve no idea, my girl, what it’s like keeping this lot fresh. We’ve had standpipes, you know, water rationing. The lot. Have you seen the trees round by the hospital? Worse for the flowers. I’ve lost whole loads of stock, thanks to this bloody weather… not to mention growers’ crops failing. Entire market’s facing ruin, you mark my words. Now, do you want them or not?”
Caro gave an exasperated growl, and it looked to Jan like she might cry again, so she pulled her purse from her pocket.
“At least the chrysanths are white. How much?”
“Sixty pence a bunch. I’ll do you a nice big one, with some gyp.”
Jan took her sister’s arm as Caro mumbled something about gyp being bloody well right and nodded.
“Fifty a bunch, and we’ll take three.”
Presumably-Irene pressed her narrow lips together.
“Fifty-five.”
“Fine.” Jan ignored Caro’s squeak of protest and handed over the money. “Thank you,” she said as Presumably-Irene came out from behind the barricade of her counter to haul the flowers from their stagnant bucket.
The girls watched her make up three generous bunches, wrapped tight in waxed blue paper and held with red elastic bands. Jan gave the flowers to Caro and hustled her back outside before she could cause an incident. Gail met them by the door, sweltering in a long seersucker skirt and short-sleeved blouse, freckles standing out like beacons from her forehead to her fingertips. She stared at the flowers.
“Oh, no… was that it?”
“I know.” Caro glanced over her shoulder. “Bloody bitch in the florist wanted three pound—”
“Look,” Jan cut in, “we’ve got the flowers. That’s the important thing.”
“Yeah, but,” Caro began, the threat of tears clouding her eyes again.
Jan glared at her. “Gail, did you get directions?”
“Yes. A man in the grocer’s knew where it was. Well, sort of. He said we want the A48 and we have to go to Minsterworth, then turn right at the Severn Bore pub, go up the hill, and he thought it was around there somewhere. He said he didn’t ‘rightly know exactly’.”
“Which way’s the A48?” Caro squinted along the road, back towards the station, the light thick and hazy.
Jan wiped the back of her hand across her forehead. The sun beat back at them from the pavement, and the gold crucifix she wore at her neck was uncomfortably hot against her skin.
“We have to go that way to pick it up.” Gail pointed, still unsure. “Past the cathedral. Look, it’s more than eight miles, Caro, and we don’t even know where the house is…. I asked how we could get there, and he said best try for a bus. They go from the bus station out that way, but he didn’t know how often… there’s not so many in school holidays. But it might be cooler to wait down there, mightn’t it?”
“We’ll be stuck there for hours.” Caro was already stepping down from the kerb. “We’re better off hitching.”
“Caroline! You know what Dad said…!”
“Grow up, Jan. Anyway, there’s three of us,” she added, darting out into the road to wave down a passing car.
Jan and Gail watched her make attempt after attempt at attracting the attention of the vehicles going by and exchanged weary looks. Finally, a grey Morris Minor coasted to a halt. They broke into a run and caught up with Caro, explaining their predicament to its cheerfully perplexed middle-aged owners.
The car was hot and cramped. They shared the back seat with the couple’s shopping and an elderly, smelly Yorkshire terrier, sitting on a folded tartan blanket among the bags of fruit and veg. It wagged its tail as they got in, widdled on Gail’s skirt as she slid across the seat, and then went to sleep, the pervading odour of doggy ammonia mixing with the steadily wilting (and increasingly reeking) chrysanthemums. The Fullers, as the couple introduced themselves, appeared not to notice, and Gail, not liking to say anything, sat quietly and tried to spread her wet skirt out as best she could on the upholstery. The couple were politely sympathetic to their young lady passengers, yet seemed not to have heard of the tragedy at Westleve House, or even of Damon Brent, although Mr. Fuller did remark that “th’are a lot of cars about, yun’t there?”
The Fullers took them to Minsterworth, stopping the car outside the village’s pretty redbrick school. They waved, set off towards the bridge that would take them on to Elmore Beck, and wished the girls luck in finding a lift to Rodley. The Morris puttered away into the heat haze. A warm, gentle wind bowled along the road in its wake, rippling through the pollen-heavy verges and trees. Gail scowled.
“It peed on me! The bloody thing peed all over my leg!”
“It doesn’t show. Honestly.” Jan took a tissue from the pocket of her frayed denim shorts and dabbed ineffectually at the damp patch. “See?”
“That’s not the point. I smell like dog wee.”
“You don’t. Not really. Honest.”
The sound of ducks and miscellaneous waterfowl drifted up from the river, echoing among the trees that framed the school’s sharply-pointed roof, light glinting along the line of tiles that cut into the sky. Caro strode out towards the village church, looking for a car to flag down, cream sundress billowing in the dusty breeze.
“What time is it?”
Jan crumpled the tissue back into her pocket and looked at her watch. “Nearly quarter to two.”
She peeled off the checked shirt she’d layered over her t-shirt and tied it around her waist, fanning the still, thick air uselessly with her hand. Gail sighed, letting the flowers droop in her grasp.
“We’re going to be stuck out here forever.”
Jan peered over at her sister, arm extended as a dark blue Volvo turned past the end of the road. Caro kicked her sandal against the tarmac and, Jan thought, probably swore. Just like at New Year, when Dad had let them go to that party at Naomi’s house, up in Cambridge (he hadn’t known that her parents would be away for that weekend—quelle surprise!) and it had seemed like such a great idea to all walk down to the river and try to look cool in front of the partying students, which had worked amazingly well and they’d had a wild time… until they realised that Naomi and the other girls had gone home without them, and they didn’t know how to get back to her house. Jan wondered what Dad would have done if he ever found out about that night. It had been sheer dumb luck that they’d got back to Naomi’s place in one piece, but of course Caro had that in her veins, didn’t she? Luck, charm, bloody-minded determination… and the looks to go with it.
Jan felt the sister’s prerogative of bitter criticism stir at the back of her mind and pushed it firmly away. Not today. A patriotically grubby red Ford Consul pulled up at the side of the road, the first success of Caro’s efforts, and they ran to join her.
“You’re for Westleve House are you, girls? Jump in.”
The voice sounded cheerful and rounded. It belonged to a dark-haired woman of much the same appearance, red-cheeked and smiling compassionately.
“How did you know?” Caro asked without a trace of irony, taking the passenger’s seat. Jan and Gail slid into the back, fighting the odiferous chrysanthemums for space.
“Just a hunch. Heard all about what happened on the radio this morning… everyone’s been talking about it. Terrible business. Such a shock. Awful. Now—are we all in?—I’m on my way home, but I’m sure I can drop you down at least as far as Rodley.” She tapped the fuel gauge. “D’you know where you’re going from the Methodist Chapel?”
“Er, not really. Well, not exactly,” Gail volunteered. Jan nudged her in the ribs. “Is it near the Severn Bore pub?”
The dark-haired woman crunched the gearbox and swung the Ford around the corner with jolly abandon, not back onto the main road, but out into the network of impossibly narrow, leafy country lanes riven with jack-in-the-hedge and rabbits. Popularly known as ‘local roads’, for few tourists knew about them and fewer still had the nerve to tackle them.
“Close,” she said. “The pub’s about a mile or so that way, back on the main road. Really, if you want to avoid the traffic, you need to get up to Goose Hill, then on for another couple of miles ’til you come to the Chapel, then you go right and follow the lane up to Westleve, though I understand it’s quite a walk.”
Caro gaped, blue eyes wide in the rearview mirror.
“Do you, like, know…? I mean, have you—”
“Oh, good grief, no. Never been up there myself, though Westleve House is quite the local landmark. One of our historic buildings… I say ‘our’, I’m from Salisbury, actually. Still, surprising it’s not a listed building. The local history society was absolutely up in arms about it when Mr. Brent bought the place, but I’m told he’s done a lovely conservation job. Did, I mean. Gosh, it’s dreadful, isn’t it?” She tutted and pushed the Ford through another agonising gear change. “Of course, he was very well-known, locally. When he was ‘at home’, as they say. Used to come into the butcher’s in Westbury—it is very good, does lovely game and everything—and he always came in himself, you know…. Very pleasant chap. Of course, all the girls in my 6B class are absolutely struck on him… they’ll be devastate—um.”
She glanced in the rearview mirror, took in the three pairs of wide eyes, the three mouths rounded into ‘o’s of amazement, and cleared her throat.
“I teach at the school in Minsterworth, just where I picked you up, you see,” she said cheerfully.
“You met…?” Caro melted a little against the seat. “Ohh… you actually met Damon Brent? Cor!”
“Miss Lenham, incidentally. Dora Lenham. Nice to meet you.”
“Oh. Um, Caroline Ross,” Caro said absently. “That’s my sister Janet, and our friend, Gail Masklin.”
There was an associated shuffling and muttering of greetings from the back seat.
“What was he like? What’d he say? What was he wearing? Did he—”
“Caro….” Jan warned.
Dora Lenham smiled. She threw the Ford around another bend, flinging the brakes on to allow safe passage for an oncoming tractor.
“Like I say,” she said diplomatically, “he was a lovely man. Very polite. So, have you three come far?”
“Hertfordshire,” Caro replied, surreptitiously gripping the edge of her seat.
Miss Lenham sucked her teeth and waved at the tractor driver as his vehicle inched past, pushing against the hedgerow with a graunching series of splintering, woody twangs.
“Quite a way.”
“We had to, Miss,” said Caro, her voice starting to crack, “soon as we heard.”
“I see.” Miss Lenham waited for the tractor to chunter further down the lane and the young girl beside her to stop quietly weeping. “Um. Very… very laudable. Yes. There do seem to be quite a lot of people coming, don’t there? Popping up all over the place. Er. Lucky the Bore’s not rising this weekend, I have to say… especially with the bank holiday. You can’t move for tourists when the tide’s up and the river’s putting on a big show! The Severn’s a tidal river, you see,” she added, lapsing into the broad, comforting tone of her profession as she propelled the Ford back out of the hedge. “The Bore rises up and pushes all the way in from the sea. Very powerful. Most impressive to watch when there’s a big surge. Naturally, we do get a lot of silly so-and-sos coming to surf it. There was one lad taken to hospital back in March, but I suppose they won’t be told…. Years ago, centuries, there used to be a harbour down Rodley way, you see. Matter of fact, Westleve was originally a captain’s house. Dates from somewhere in the sixteenth century, I think… at least, originally. Good grief, will you look at all these people!”
Miss Lenham rounded the turn into Goose Hill and drew the Ford to a rather abrupt halt. Here, gaggles of teenagers, white-faced and waiflike even in the heat, clutched flowers. Cars crawled like sun-baked beetles, people weaving in and out of their paths with the same dull stride. The silence seemed nearly as hard, as oppressive as the heat.
“Like pilgrims,” Caro whispered.
The Ford edged into the formation, and they crept along the length of the hill, up towards the Chapel, where a hastily painted sign had been erected offering tea, use of a telephone, and parking facilities. A uniformed police constable directed cars to the gravelled forecourt beside the grey stone building, and the minister stood in the doorway, proffering a handkerchief to a red-faced, near-hysterical girl in a yellow dress.
“Right. Best let you out here, I think,” Miss Lenham said, drawing the Ford to a standstill on the narrow verge. She rummaged in the glove compartment for a few moments, came out with a paper napkin and a biro and wrote down her telephone number, which she pressed into Caro’s hand. “Now, listen. You take this, all right? That’s my telephone number. You promise you’ll call me if you get stuck.”
“Thank you, Miss.”
“It’s no trouble. I would have said the pub’ll be doing cheap rooms, but looking at the number of people here…. Are you three all right for money?”
“Yes. Thank you,” Jan cut in, because she believed there should be limits to the kindnesses of strangers. “We really are. Thank you ever so much.”
“All right, then. Take care.”
“We will,” Caro promised, and the three of them left the car, Jan and Gail still struggling with the flowers.
Dora Lenham inched the Ford back down the lane, and the girls walked on towards Westleve, just glimpsing the house’s roof, black against the darkening sky, its bulk obscured by the thick hedges that lined the lane.
“I can’t believe it,” Caro murmured as they came into the heart of what was, to all intents and purposes, an impromptu camp. “Can’t believe it.”
They noticed the flowers first, pooled around the gates, forming great drifts either side of the dirt-and-grit turning circle. The fragrance of lilies, marguerites, and a dozen other summer blooms mixed in the air, leaving it heavy with pollen and heat, tinged with the dust and hot metal of the cars. A couple of police vehicles, accompanying the uniformed officers that stood by the gates, enforced a nominal cordon of yellow tape. A St. John’s Ambulance crew waited in attendance, and journalists, sated on the morning’s diet of famous faces and scandal, loitered in the shade of the beech trees, smoking and talking amongst themselves, the occasional burst of laughter breaking the quiet. And it was quiet… unbelievably so. Mourners lined the grass verges and hedgerows. Sitting, standing, huddled, but all recognisable by shocked, pallid faces and hollow eyes, most united by long hair and flashes of old denim and bright colours. Beside a battered camper van, parked at the far end of the lane, a young man in a pair of cut-off jeans patched with jewel-like glimpses of different coloured fabric sat, cross-legged, playing an acoustic guitar in a manner not really very much like Bob Dylan. His hair hung down his bare, brown back as the strains of Shelter From the Storm filtered over the gathering, the sound of muffled crying mixing with his tearful rendition of the song.
Caro, Jan, and Gail found themselves pushed through the ragged crowd, propelled in part by jostling elbows and in part by the strange wave of emotion that pulsed through the assemblage; half grief and half awe, almost made tangible, it drew them like iron filings across paper, without thought or control, just response. Within minutes, they stood before the gates themselves, the pathetic bunches of dry, wilted chrysanthemums in their hands.
The tributes had been piled high, some bound to the gates, some propped beside them, the scents of summer in waxed paper wraps and crinkled cellophane, peppered with the pastel In Loving Memory cards of a dozen florists. The messages on them, in so many different hands, were a tumult of silent voices driven by a sense of outraged justice, of sorrow and desperation, clamouring to know why, struggling to understand.
Tears ran hotly down Jan’s cheeks as she laid her flowers down, and one of the WPCs on gate duty—with a kind smile and nearly as many freckles as Gail—guided them along the lee of the gate, helping them add their tributes to the swell and helping them support Caro when, with a wail, she collapsed into floods of desolate, jaw-cracking tears.
The WPC took the time to settle the three of them back behind the cordon—on a grassy patch of verge beneath the hedge, close enough to the gates that the scent of the flowers still enveloped them—and made sure that Caro remembered to breathe. Jan untied the shirt from her waist and spread it out on the ground. She sat beneath the oaks and ashes and held her sister as she cried, her own tears making Caro’s hair damp. Gail went with the WPC to fetch some water from the St John’s crew, returning with a paper cup and a wad of napkins
“Here you are.” She sat beside them on the grass, dabbing at her own wet cheeks and streaming nose. “God, I didn’t think it would be so….”
She sniffed noisily and blew.
“You should have been here this morning, poppet,” the WPC volunteered, pulling a soft bar of chocolate from her pocket and breaking off a few rapidly melting squares for Caro. “There you go, eat that. There… better? Blimey, I don’t know! Six fainters, four hurlers, and one who needed oxygen. Mind you, she was asthmatic….” She glanced up at the sky. “Is it me, or is it clouding over a bit? That’d be nice. Could do with it cooling off… last thing you need with this lot is heatstroke.” A whistle pierced the air behind her, and she turned. “What?”
“Oi, Vonny. Incoming.”
Jan stared. Behind the gates—the gates, the actual gates—a man with a walkie-talkie, long hair, and a large moustache was calling to the WPC.
“She’s coming,” he said. “Frank reckons about five minutes.”
The WPC’s face fell. “Oh, God… why? The Super’s going to go ape. He wanted her kept out of the way, ’specially with this lot hanging around…!”
She glanced over her shoulder at the assembled journalists. The long-haired man shrugged.
“Ain’t much I can do, love, ’cept let you know.”
The walkie-talkie crackled, and he exchanged a few words with the voice on the other end, though Jan, listening from behind her hanky, could barely make out anything beyond his curt reply.
“Roger that.” He turned to the WPC. “Hey, if I was one of your lot, Vonny, I’d be saying you ought to get yourselves on standby.”
“Great. And you said there’s no back way in? Oh, bugger… all right. Thanks, Tim.”
“Pleasure.”
The long-haired man winked and moved off. Jan watched the WPC, with the studied nonchalance of one caught in the middle of something very urgent indeed, talking to her colleague at the other end of the gate. The policeman nodded, and the two constables went to confer with their compatriots, leaning quietly against the panda car and sharing a smoke.
“Psst.” Jan elbowed Gail in the ribs. “Something’s going on.”
“What?”
“Look.”
She pointed. The police had started to tighten up the cordon, edging people back along the lane.
“What are they doing?” Gail asked, sliding Caro’s head from her shoulder, pushing forward to get a better view. “What’s happening?”
They heard the commotion from beyond the dog leg in the lane, the hollering and thud of running feet, together with the short, sharp pulses of a car horn and the stern calls of policemen trying to assert authority without causing a riot. Simultaneously, from behind the gates, there came the sounds of crackling radios and slamming doors. They heard shouting, saw the gaggles of people part, and the journalists spring into action with well-oiled pack co-ordination, even as the car turned into the lane.
It was a saloon, the colour of pallid, dusty oatmeal rather than the black that might have been expected. The windows weren’t even tinted. The rear door opened before the car had fully halted, and with the crunch of heels on grit, Inez half-stepped, half-fell from the vehicle. Apparently oblivious to the barrage of camera flashes and shouted questions, she lurched towards the gates, a pair of huge, tortoiseshell sunglasses shielding her eyes, a high-collared dress in a psychedelic print of cerise and purple showing off her tanned limbs and shoulders.
“Let me in,” she said over and over as the young policewoman with the freckles tried to take her by the elbow. “Let me in! I need to get in… I need to see— Will you just let me through?”
The young WPC plugged courageously on with the speech about coming down to the station probably being best and how they were terribly sorry, but madam really couldn’t do anything here, the area still officially being a closed scene and…. It did little good.
The crush of people behind pressed Caro, Gail, and Jan closer to the cordon, jostling them in the excitement. Almost on a level with the gates, they heard the raised voices within, the sounds of running feet, scuffling bodies, and the rough whirr of the gates themselves starting to open. Staff—in the informal uniform of black tees and worn jeans—and police darted to and fro, trying to instigate damage limitation before the grieving widow did something everyone would regret. Nearly close enough to reach out and touch, close enough to smell her French perfume and see the thickness of her make-up, the girls watched Inez Blackman—tennis star and celebrity wife—bob helplessly in the whirl of movement. The journalists hit with the ferocity of water on a break wall, questions flying up like foam and cameras clicking wildly.
“Inez! Inez, this way, sweetheart—you weren’t at the house when it happened, were you? Where were you, darlin’?”
“How did it feel when you found out, Inez? Can you tell us who told you? Was it the police?”
“Have they given you details? Is it true it’s an overdose?”
“Did Damon often throw parties when you were away, love? Were you having problems? Inez?”
“Would you say your husband had a drug habit, Inez?”
“Come on, sweetheart, one little comment!”
“Inez!”
The last shout came from the crush at the gates. A tall figure in worn blue jeans and an overtight t-shirt barrelled through. Inez looked up, and her mouth twisted, caramel lips framing a terrible, choking cry. Her hands reached out, dark red nail varnish livid against the pale fabric of his shirt.
“Charlie…! Oh, God… oh, God,” she repeated, a stifled mantra as she sagged against his chest. “Oh, God, Charlie… what happened?”
Beside Jan, Gail squeaked. Jan glanced at her friend: wide blue eyes, hands clasped over her mouth, and a deep blush fading up to her cheekbones. Not three feet from them stood Charlie Davies… and it looked like Gail might wet herself.
Brother Rush’s bassist was a tall, broad man, built like a rugby player but with a great shock of tightly permed mouse-brown hair, thick sideburns, and heavy, straight brows framing his face. His tight t-shirt highlighted the firm planes of muscle beneath it and demanded Freedom for Tooting in a sparse, black font. He frowned and put a protective arm around Inez, pushing back the more overeager hacks.
“You wanna jump back, man? Give her some bleedin’ air! C’mon… can we get the lady inside? It’s all right… come on, girl. I know,” he soothed. “I know. It was a stupid accident. It just— Look, man, you wanna get out of my face?”
It seemed for a moment that punches might be thrown. The offending photographer backed off and held up his hands, his voice wheedling.
“Hey, chill, Charlie… just want to show the real story, right, friend?”
The bassist’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not your friend, you evil little sod. Now fuck off.”
Amid the jumble of sight, sound and tension, Inez’s voice carried on a high, ethereal chant.
“Oh, God,” she moaned again, sinking to the ground, hanging between Charlie and a uniformed police constable for a moment, the tears coming fast now.
The pushy photographer made another sortie at Inez. Charlie shoved him hard enough to send the man spinning and, in the ensuing fracas, the two stars were bundled through the gates, the pale car following at a crawl. The sound of Inez’s weeping faded along the driveway, with the crunch of feet and wheels on gravel and the crackle of radios. The journalists dissipated, some departing to take another circuit of the perimeter in the hopes of finding low-boughed trees or ill-watched side exits and some sloping back to their cars. The WPC on the gate gently dissuaded a few of the more enthusiastic fans from trying to sneak in, and the photographer with whom Charlie had got physical stood, brushed himself off, and made a few choice utterances, met with jeers and heckles from the assembled fans.
“Frigging vulture!”
Jan glanced at her sister in surprise. Caro, hands still cupped around her mouth, looked embarrassed.
“Well?” She lowered her hands and made a pretence of smoothing out her dress. “It’s no way to behave when the poor cow’s just lost her husband.”
“Wasn’t he manful, though?” Gail crowed, still pink and glowing. “Him. Couldn’t believe it. Right there! Charlie Davies… right there! Actually, really… oh, wow…!”
The whispers passed through the lane like waves, those mourners that still lingered growing restless with the heat and the activity. Slowly, the sense of silent expectation settled back over the crowd. At the end of the lane, a young man with an old-fashioned ice cream cart mounted on a barrow had rolled up and started crying his wares.
“Got ice creams! Ice cream, Coca-Cola, sausage rolls…!”
Jan’s stomach growled for the first time since breakfast. She’d been about to ask the girls whether they wanted something to eat when something patted against her bare shoulder. She looked up. Ragged grey clouds drifted across the sky. Another drop fell, then another, thudding into the grit, the first rain in months.
Gradually, like a curtain falling across a lit window, the rain pattered the length of the lane and beyond. The assembled crowd stood in silence, just watching. Then, as if a bung had been removed, a key turned somewhere, distant thunder began to grumble and the rain fell harder, thrashing against the ground, thrumming against the cellophane and the flowers. Some of the crowd whooped, some squealed, others wept, and others just stood and stared at the sky, squinting into the fall.
Jan held her shirt over her head, looking around to see where Caro had darted off to. The echoes of lightning paled against the clouds and, as the rain continued to steam down, the crowd began to break apart, and the young man with the camper van suddenly found himself becoming extremely popular.