Pictures of Perfection. Reginald Hill
were a dull black, unrelieved except by a star of silver studs at the breast.
The first Harley Davidson team had removed their helmets to reveal a shag of black hair, male, and a shoal of herring-bright ringlets, female, which its owner shook down over her shoulders as she stretched her arms and said, ‘Unzip me, darling. I’m dying for a pee.’
At this point the door of the café opened to reveal a statuesquely handsome woman in a blue chequered apron. She looked the new arrivals up and down and said, ‘No hippies. No bikers. In the Name of the Lord.’
The ringleted rider shrieked an incredulous laugh, and her companion said, ‘What’s the Lord got against bikers, then?’
‘God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions,’ replied the woman in a perfectly matter-of-fact voice.
The second passenger had removed her helmet to reveal a Nefertiti skull whose close-napped hair was, aptly, a billiard-table green. She lit a cigarette and said, ‘Jesus Christ!’ The café owner gave an outraged snort and took a step forward to put baize-head within reach of either the Third Commandment or a left hook, but before this could be made clear, the fourth biker, who’d been conferring with three young men climbing out of the Land Rover, whipped off his helmet with a flourish and said, ‘Dora, my sweet, it is I, Guy. And I have brought these good people to a halt within sight almost of our destination with the promise that here they would get the best apple pie this side of Paradise.’
He was in his late twenties, with curly brown hair, eyes that twinkled at will and a charming smile that couldn’t quite conceal its complacent certainty of success. His voice was vibrant with sincerity and those reverse-Pygmalion vowels which old Etonians imagine improve their street cred. He advanced as though to embrace the café owner, but she folded her arms in a counterscarp which repulsed familiarity and said, ‘I’m sorry, Master Guy. It’s got to be the same rule for all, else the law is mocked.’
For a second the biker’s charm looked ready to dissolve into petulance, but reason prevailed and he said, ‘All right, Dora, our loss is your loss. Come on, boys and girls. The good news is the Hall’s only a minute away. The bad news is, you’re going to have to make do with Cousin Girlie’s marble cake, which does not belie its name. Ciao, Dorissima! Avanti!’
The male trio got back into the Land Rover, the mixed quartet replaced their neuterizing helmets, while the solitary rider who had been observing the incident with quiet interest removed his. Behind him and to his left a nasally upper-class kind of voice said, ‘I say. You. Fellow.’
Slowly he turned his head which had all the unlikely rugosities of a purpose-built Gothic ruin.
In the doorway of the bookshop stood a tall slim man with an aristocratically aquiline face under a thatch of silver hair with matching eyebrows that shot up in surprise as he got the full-frontal view, then lowered to echo the sardonic twist of his lips as he said, ‘You are, I hazard, not a customer?’
‘Not for books, if that’s what you mean,’ said the biker politely. ‘It were more a cup of tea …’
‘I thought not,’ interrupted the bookseller. ‘Lacking as you clearly do those basic skills of literacy which would have enabled you to read the sign.’
The sign he was pointing at was fixed to the wall beneath the window. In a diminutive version of the elegant cursive script used for the shop name above, it read CUSTOMER PARKING ONLY.
It would have been possible to argue that where the message is monitory, the medium should place clarity above aesthetics. But all the biker said was, ‘Yes, well, I would have parked in front of the café, only there wasn’t room …’
‘Indeed? I suppose by the same token, if the café were closed, you would expect high tea to be served in my flat? Besides, there seems to be a plenitude of room now …’
It was true. The rejected convoy was moving off in an accelerando of engines and a brume of fume.
‘Sorry,’ said the biker, wheeling his bike the few feet necessary to take him from one forecourt to the next.
The aproned chatelaine remained in place.
‘Your friends have gone to the Hall, God preserve them,’ she said.
‘Amen, but I’m not with them,’ said the solitary.
‘He that toucheth pitch shall be defiled therewith,’ said the woman. ‘No bikers. No hippies. Not even if they’re old enough to know better.’
The biker looked slowly round as though in search of help. The convoy had already vanished up the hill beyond the church. A cyclist appeared from the bottom end of the High Street and passed rapidly and silently by. The rider was a pale-faced young man wearing a forage cap and fatigues. The bike had panniers and along the crossbar was strapped a shotgun. He could have been a youngster who’d lied about his age in 1914 to join a bicycle battalion. But slight though his build was he drove the machine up the hill past the church with no diminution of speed.
In the doorway of the Eendale Gallery directly opposite the bookshop a youngish woman watched his progress, her face as coldly beautiful as a classical statue.
The biker, finding no hope of relief, returned his attention to Dora Creed and said, ‘This Hall that lad mentioned. Have they got a tea-room there?’
He saw at once he’d touched a nerve. She drew herself up and said, ‘They have made it desolate, and being desolate, it mourneth unto me; the whole land is desolate, because no man layeth it to heart.’
‘I’d not argue with you there,’ said the biker. ‘But there’ll be another election some time. Meanwhile, this Hall …? I’m parched.’
Suddenly she smiled with a charm reminiscent of Master Guy’s but lacking his contrivance, and for a moment the biker thought he’d got inside her principles. Then she said, ‘Carry on up the hill past the church. You’ll see the estate wall on your right. There’s a big set of gates and a lodge after about two furlongs. That’s Old Hall.’
‘Thank you kindly,’ said the biker.
He replaced his helmet, restarted his engine and set off at a sedate pace up the High Street.
The church which dominated the village from the first plateau of the rising ground to the north had a curious feature which might have tempted some men to pause. The tower looked as if it had fallen out with the nave and was leaning away from it at an angle disconcerting to the sober eye and probably devastating to the drunk. But the biker was not in a mood for archaeological diversion. A cup of tea was what he craved and he doubted if old traditions of ecclesiastic hospitality still obtained in rural Yorkshire.
Beyond the church, as promised by Miss Creed, a high boundary wall reared up to inhibit the vulgar gaze. But after a quarter-mile a large sign advertising the imminence of Enscombe Old Hall suggested the vulgar gaze might no longer be considered so unbearable.
A little further on the wall was broken by a massive granite arch fit to harbinger a palace. In the headstone of the arch was carved a bird, with a long thin neck perched on a heraldic shield whose quarters variously showed a rose, a sinking ship, a greyhound couchant, and what to the biker’s inexpert eye appeared to be a dromedary pissing against a Christmas tree. Beneath this dark escutcheon ran the equally obscure words: Fucata Non Perfecta.
On the gate columns, however, had been hung signs of compensatory clarity which in a style and colouring designed to catch the motoring eye advertised the delights on offer at Old Hall.
For a mere £5.50 you were invited to tour this fortified Tudor manor house, the home of the Guillemard family since the sixteenth century. Or for £2 only you could explore the extensive grounds (except when the red flag was flying which meant they were being used for ‘skirmishing’ – details on application). In addition, the visitor too frail to skirmish, tour or explore could seek care and perhaps cure in the new Holistic Health Park centred on the refurbished stable block, where it was proposed to offer acupuncture, reflexology, aromatherapy, metaplastic