Twelve Drummers Drumming Read online

  The Reverend Peter Kinsey never did show. In fact, the vicar seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. Consternation had turned to outright worry three days later when Jago Prowse pointed out that the vicar couldn’t have left the village in his car, because he, Jago, was servicing the very car at Thorn Cross Garage and was having trouble with a very tricky fuel injection system. After that it was police, press, and endless speculation. As the village attempted to recover from this unsettling situation, retired clergy were called upon to fill in for Sunday services. The archdeacon helped, too, as did the rural dean. Even the bishop came down from Exeter to preach a wise sermon. But after two months of intermittent police investigation, Peter Kinsey’s reappearance was declared unlikely. There was, officially, a vacancy in the parish.

  But a week’s rest, contemplation, and solitary walks in Devon had helped soften the metaphysical rage that had scorched Tom’s soul in the wake of Lisbeth’s death and decided him for change. He needed a safe place for his daughter, and he needed a rest from the turmoil of inner-city team ministry. As soon as he’d returned with Miranda to Bristol, he sent his CV to the bishop of Exeter, asking to be considered for any vacancy. There was a vacancy, as it turned out—in Thornford Regis—and, in due course Tom was appointed to the living of Thornford Regis. In the magisterial terms of the Church of England, the interview and inspection process was extraordinarily speedy. But a traumatised flock needed a new shepherd. Tom packed up Miranda’s and his things, bade sad farewell to his colleagues at St. Dunstan’s, and made the journey to Thornford Regis for the buttercup-strewn life in a West Country village described by the Times travel supplement as “sleepy” and by the AA Guide to Country Towns and Villages of England as “really a very pretty place.”

  On this May morning, nine months later, that very prettiness was splayed out before him and made him smile. His eyes descended from the counterpane fields glimpsed beyond the last of the cottages on Thorn Hill, down past clusters of rooftops and chimneystacks to Purton Farm, a community field, which, he thought, looked a little like the set of The Prisoner, only with a coconut shy at the centre and none of those disagreeable balloons. As he pocketed Mao’s book of quotations and wished Belinda Swan good luck with her sales, Tom surveyed the newly erected white-elephant stall, the hot dog stand, the beer tent, the tea tent, the tombola and the face-painting, the petting zoo where toddlers were cooing over fat rabbits, the politically incorrect Punch-and-Judy where Punch was still beating his wife and child with a stick, and the inflatable slide down which he could see his daughter careening, and, farther off, the open-air stage onto which the two teenage boys had successfully trollied the out-sized drum.

  It was a tsukeshime-daiko, a long, heavy, rope-tensioned drum, part of the repertoire of Japanese taiko drums which that weekend had set the old Victorian village hall to throbbing and lent the so-called “sleepy” village an ominous ambience—rather, Tom declared, like some old Ealing Studios idea of vexed Zulus revving up for disputatious acts. The natives are restless, he had thought, passing the hall on his way out of the village to one of the country trails where he could have a walk and a think free of the distractions of the vicarage. And they were restless, in a way. Having taiko drummers debut their talents at the May Fayre in lieu of the traditional pipe band had not been wholly welcomed. Even though the Reverend Mr. Kinsey had been absent more than a year, his legacy of innovation, admired by some, loathed by many, still sparked little eruptions of novelty in the village.

  At Tom’s first Parochial Church Council meeting, taiko entertainment at the May Fayre reignited a few simmering tempers—notably that of ancient church treasurer Colonel Northmore, who had suffered through a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in the Second World War and had no truck with anything Japanese. But twelve teenagers from the village and outlying area, schooled by Julia, had taken to taiko drumming like bees to blossoms and were eager to show off their skills. “Better than what they might get up to,” warned Tom, who knew from his ministry in Bristol what bored youth were capable of. Colonel Northmore had cast him a rheumy eye, but was silenced.

  Tom thought about his church council and its personalities as he passed the white-elephant stall attended by Joyce Pike, the village handyman’s wife, caretaker of the village hall, and skivvy to a handful of Thornfordites.

  “ ’Morning, Father,” she said with the kind of smile that looked like it had been hard practised. Tom replied in kind, then stopped. There was a curious object among the obsessively tidy array of unloved gewgaws on the table. A shaft of sunlight latched on to a smooth white surface overlaid with what, to an undiscerning eye at first glance, would look like a web of black lines.

  His heart leapt.

  It was an exact match to his curate’s egg, the one that Lisbeth had given him when he’d been appointed to his first curacy at Kennington Park. Lisbeth had had it made specially. He didn’t think there was another one like it in the world. It so neatly encapsulated Lisbeth’s sense of humour and wry views of the Church, and he loved it more than any gift she had given him—other than Miranda, of course. He’d been grieved when the egg somehow got lost in the move between Bristol and Thornford. He had even phoned the removals company to see if they had found an egg on the lorry somewhere. They’d thought he was having them on.

  “This is astonishing,” he said to Mrs. Pike as he lifted the porcelain egg and examined it. Yes, there it was: George du Maurier’s 1895 Punch cartoon of a hapless curate taking breakfast at the bishop’s house. “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr. Jones,” the bishop is saying. “Oh, no, my Lord,” responds the nervous curate, desperate not to make offence, “I assure you that parts of it are quite excellent.”

  Life was a curate’s egg—a mixture of good and bad, but more than that, Lisbeth had pointed out: The excellent parts compensate enough for the bad parts that complaining about it just isn’t on. Her words—he could hear her voice, her saying it—sounded forcefully in his head in the dull, dark weeks following her inexplicable, seemingly random death. He’d clung to them, and to the egg. And now, as her voice again reverberated in his memory, a sharp pang of loss seared him. He took a moment, then looked to Mrs. Pike. “Do you know I used to have one just like this?”

  He half expected a response, but Mrs. Pike continued to smile at him in her faintly robotic way.

  There was even a little stand for it, he noted on the table. Just like his.

  “How much is it?”

  “Oh, Father, why don’t you just have it.” She had a girlish voice, at odds with her age and her anxious bearing.

  “I couldn’t do that …”

  “Well.” Joyce hesitated. “Five pounds, then.”

  “I’ll give you twenty,” Tom responded brightly, reaching again into his pocket. “I’m that chuffed. I never thought I’d find another one like it in my life.”

  Joyce received two ten-pound notes in silence. Tom studied her a moment as she placed the money in an open cashbox. Thin-faced, sombre-eyed, devoid of makeup, apparently oblivious to hairstyle (it was a sort of grey mop-end), she had the look of a woman either long suffering or long depressed. Her son, Charlie, was in his new confirmation class—a very sharp, if somewhat gauche, lad. Tom could hardly believe sometimes that Fred and Joyce, late in life, had spawned this bright fish.

  “You’ll want a carrier bag for that,” Joyce said, offering him a used but neatly folded plastic Sainsbury’s version that she pulled from a box on a chair beside her.

  “Yes, thanks.” Tom reached for the bag and carefully slipped the egg and its stand into it. It was then that he felt an arm slide into his open elbow.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Bonjour, Papa.”

  “Bonjour, ma petite pamplemousse,” Tom replied, regarding his daughter with a burst of pure pleasure. Miranda, who had been very attached to their French au pair, Ghislaine Poirier, when they had lived in Bristol, was reading Nancy Drew novels in la belle langue, only the heroine was called “Alice Roy”
because the French, apparently, were unable to pronounce “Nancy” or, possibly, “Drew.” Tom’s French, indifferently learned at school, ran largely to half-remembered bits out of Whitmarsh’s awful textbooks and phrases picked up busking through Europe when he was younger.

  “Have you met Mrs. Pike? Her husband fixed our washer.”

  “Hello,” Miranda responded brightly, peeking around his jacket. Then she looked up at him. “What did you buy?”

  “You’ll never guess.” He nodded good-bye to Mrs. Pike. “It’s a china egg. Just like the one your mum gave me. The one that I lost. Do you remember me trying to find it when we first moved into the vicarage?”

  “Yes,” she replied, slipping her arm from his and taking the carrier bag. She reached inside and half pulled the egg out. She studied it a moment, then asked: “Did you buy it at Mrs. Pike’s stall?”

  “Yes.” Tom brushed a loose strand of hair off her forehead.

  Miranda glanced behind her, then tugged her father forwards. “Daddy,” she began in a whisper, “this isn’t just like the one you lost.”

  “But—”

  “It is the one you lost.”

  “What?”

  Miranda smiled as though in possession of the biggest secret in the world. “Mr. Pike is a kleptomaniac.”

  “That’s a big word for—”

  “Emily told me,” Miranda interrupted excitedly, full of the power of knowledge. “Mr. Pike takes things when he’s on the job—he can’t help himself—and every year Mrs. Pike sells them back to their owners at the white-elephant stall.” Her smile grew wider. “Isn’t it funny? No one seems to mind, Emily says … except if he takes your television remote.”

  “And the money goes to the church.” Tom resisted the urge to look back at Joyce Pike and the white-elephant stall. Funny indeed, he thought, ruing spending twenty pounds on something that was already his. “What if the owner needs it back desperately?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does he ever take anything that’s worth a lot of money?”

  “Emily didn’t say.” Miranda frowned in thought as she handed him back the Sainsbury’s bag.

  “Well, never mind. I’ve got my curate’s egg back and that’s the important thing. Where is Emily, by the way?”

  “Gone to help her sister get ready.”

  “Ah,” Tom responded, glancing towards the pole that had been set up in the centre of Purton Farm. Its ribbons fluttered in the breeze off the river. “Well, maybe you’ll be queen of the May some year soon, like Lucy Swan.”

  “I hope not. It’s feudal.”

  “Does Emily think that?”

  “No, I do. I think Emily wants to be queen of the May someday.”

  Tom was relieved to hear Miranda wasn’t shy of her own views. Since coming to Thornford Regis, she had fallen in quickly with the swarming brood of sociable Swans, who seemed to absorb one more into their family activity with barely a notice. It had been two months of breathless “Emily says” and “Emily thinks” from Miranda. It was almost like watching someone fall in love, he thought, not without a pang for his own situation: young (relatively), widowed, alone, lonely at times (even with a child), so much missing Lisbeth, who had vanished from his side so abruptly, too soon. Before his wife’s death, he had sometimes suspected Miranda disliked being a child and detested not being able to take care of herself—traits that seemed to serve her well (and Tom, who could barely manage his own grief) in the weeks and months after Lisbeth was killed. He was relieved to see her embrace childhood (or at least his idea of childhood) in league with the Swans, although he couldn’t resist fretting at times that in a few years it would all be over. She would be a teenager, all the sweetness drained away.

  “Shall we have ice cream?” he suggested, deciding this was not the day to brood on such things, motioning towards the stall that Liam Drewe, the owner of the Waterside Café, had set up.

  “Have you seen the quilts Mrs. Drewe has hung in the village hall?” Miranda asked, skipping ahead. “They’re brilliant. I even think you’re in one, Papa.”

  “How could I be in a quilt?” Tom rummaged in his pocket for coins.

  “Then you haven’t seen them. Let’s go look at them.”

  “Well—”

  “They’re memory quilts,” Miranda rushed on. “Mrs. Drewe takes pictures, then scans them onto … cotton, I think, then makes the quilt. We took one of the brochures.” She rooted in her own pocket. “Oh, I must have given it to Emily.” Her face fell. “Anyway, the quilts are all of the village. There’s the school and the hall and the church …” Miranda rattled off a half dozen of the village’s landmarks. “… And, in one, it looks like you coming out of the pub.”

  Startled, Tom said, “Really?”

  “It must have been when we visited here last year. You’re with Aunt Julia. You’re just coming through the pub doors.”

  “We must have been leaving Red Ned’s wake. How odd. I don’t remember—” And then he did. When he and Julia left the pub, a trim Japanese woman was photographing the exterior. He had barely registered it at the time, assuming she was a tourist who had strayed from the pack that Japanese tourists seemed to travel in. Now he realised: Of course, the woman was Mitsuko Drewe, Liam’s wife.

  Well, he thought, as they joined the short queue at Liam Drewe’s stall, immortalised in fabric! Ought he to be gratified?

  Liam Drewe was suffering the indecisiveness of Enid Pattimore, whose son owned the village shop. His lips were pinched and his eyelids had descended to tight crescents, as if he were silently compelling Enid to choose between vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. He noted Tom, more than a head’s height behind the tiny, bent figure, and forced a quick acknowledging smile. “C’mon, love,” he addressed the old woman with barely concealed impatience, “vicar’s waiting.”

  “Oh, dear, I’m awfully sorry,” Enid murmured, twisting her neck to take in Tom’s presence. “I think, oh, perhaps strawberry would do.…”

  “Wise—”

  “No! Chocolate. Yes, definitely chocolate.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wise choice.” Liam jammed his scoop into the tub of ice cream like a man thrusting a spade into hard ground. On his first visit to the Waterside over a year ago, Tom had noted the letters A C A B tattooed between the knuckle and first joint of each finger on Liam’s left hand when he’d taken Tom’s money at the till. He knew what the letters stood for. The fingers of one man in his Kennington parish were similarly rendered. His parishioner had been in The Scrubs for armed robbery and had been leading a pious life since. He told Tom they were prison tattoos.

  That cool April day a year ago, Liam had been wearing long sleeves. Now, on this warm May day, he was wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt. Tom couldn’t help staring at the carapace of tattoos—an Eden of vines and flowers and fish and birds that coiled up the sinewy forearms, along the meaty biceps, to disappear under the dark cloth, portending who knew what along his chest or down his back: mammals and man, perhaps, Adam and Eve, the creation story traced in ink on skin? Likely not. His Christian mind was at play. But it wasn’t the imagery that set his mind to wondering. It was putting up with all those bloody awful needles. He must have been lingering too long in his reverie, because only Miranda’s decisive response—“strawberry”—alerted him to his new place at the front of the queue.

  “Vicar?” He heard Liam say.

  “Um …”

  Liam narrowed his eyes again.

  “Is there anything besides vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry?”

  “Are you trying to be funny?”

  “Bad day?”

  When Julia had filled Tom in on the village’s dramatis personae, “short-fused” had been her description for Liam Drewe. Verbal explosions in the Waterside kitchen, etc. “He’s not the ideal mein host when he’s mein hosting,” Julia had continued, “but luckily he has a very capable wife, who does some of the serving duties. That is, wh
en she’s not running her little gallery or working on her own art or running the art classes at the village hall or trying to manage the usual tugs-of-war on the flower rota.”

  “My wife’s had to go to Wales, and Sybella was supposed to be minding this stall,” Liam snapped, responding to Tom’s observation. “But she seems to have bloody gone missing.”

  “Chocolate,” Tom said humbly, watching the arm once again dive into the iced confection. He recalled that he had never seen Liam in church. He had seen Mitsuko only intermittently, though she was indeed on the flower rota. As for the missing Sybella Parry, he had never expected to see a pew contain her. The girl left the impression, with her whiff of the Goth, that the dark arts were her cup of tea, but he had—to his surprise—in the last month. She came with her father and stepmother and didn’t look like she’d been dragged.

  Tom took both cornets of ice cream from Liam, handed one to Miranda, and passed over a five-pound note. Liam tucked it into the pocket of his apron, but proffered no change. Tom should have received a pound coin in return, but he didn’t press the point: It was for charity, after all. But in the parting glance Liam cast him, Tom detected, just for the time it takes to split a second, a flash of the purest, blackest hatred.