the Squire invited me to join himself and the youngsters in his study for a glass of sherry. We talked for a while, as one does, of the virtues of the dear departed, then the Squire took a huge meerschaum from his crowded pipe rack, slowly filled and lit it, and seemed to go into a reverie with his eyes fixed on the furthermost left-hand corner of the room. Finally he nodded, turned his attention to me, and said, ‘Edna had a fancy to see these yonkers in church again pretty soon, getting married. What do you think?’
‘More to the point, what do they think?’ I replied.
Now Guy too produced a pipe, all gleaming with stainless steel, pulled the tobacco jar towards him and went through a similarly lengthy filling and lighting process before saying, ‘I think I’m a bit young yet to be thinking of marriage, Squire. But a few years on, who knows? In the meantime, I’m happy to admit some kind of gentleman’s understanding.’
Then he sat back in his chair, smiling complacently, I presume at what he took to be his diplomatic dexterity.
The Squire looked at Girlie. Slowly she reached forward and took a smaller meerschaum from the rack. Slowly she filled it from the jar, slowly she lit it. Satisfied, at last she sat back in her chair and took two or three appreciative puffs. Finally she spoke.
‘As for me,’ she said, ‘I’d rather screw a rabid porcupine. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to see about lunch.’
When she left she took the pipe with her. What had been a gesture became first a symbol, then, alas, an addiction. There were other changes too. All the Laura Ashley dresses her grandmother thought so became her were discarded (though not destroyed, many of them reappearing a short while later when little Frances Harding came to live at the Hall) and Girlie took to wearing jeans and wellies during the working day, and stark black and white for formal occasions. Her Alice-length hair was reduced to a helmet of turbulent curls, and very soon the great local debate about who would now run the household was rendered superfluous as it became apparent that Old Hall had a new and formidable chatelaine.
The estate was managed by a factor under the notional supervision of the Squire, but the latter, never the same since the loss of his son, now retreated even further into a protective eccentricity. The task of checking the books soon devolved upon Girlie. These were the insane ’eighties when the psycho patients took over the surgery and started remodelling society in their own image of perfection, without benefit of anaesthetic. Trevor Hookey, the factor, soon revealed himself as a dedicated Thatcherite, wielding his knife with a zealot’s glee, crying, ‘If it doesn’t hurt, it’s not working!’ and assuring Girlie proudly that the new sleek and slimline Old Hall estate was the super-efficient model of the future.
Girlie listened politely to this liturgical formulary for a couple of years. Then as her calculator squeaked up the dismal ‘grand’ total at the annual Reckoning of 1986, she interrupted the zealot, saying, ‘Enough. I have seen the future and it sucks. We aren’t sleek and super-efficient, we’re emaciated and moribund. There’s only one large economy left for us to make.’
‘And what’s that, my dear?’ asked Hookey with a patronizing air.
‘Your salary,’ said Girlie Guillemard.
These Reckonings, by the way, take place on Lady Day, that is the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25th, which is in England a Quarter Day, and has in Enscombe since time immemorial, or at least since 1716, been the day for the settling of accounts. That it survives as an occasion is a tribute to Yorkshire doggedness. Naturally the largest and most general payments to be made in the area are the Squire’s rents, and while the Guillemard estate was still extensive and ways were rough, it was common courtesy to offer the tenants some refreshment before they set off home.
But over the years, even before the awful ’eighties, the estate was contracting and roads were improving, and gold coin under the floorboards was giving way to paper money in the bank, and eventually cheques and giros and standing orders made it hardly necessary for the physical collection of rents at all. In any other county, The Reckoning would have ceased to exist save in the memory of greybeards and the annals of antiquarians. But the difficulty of prising a Yorkshire terrier’s teeth from the neck of a rat is as nothing to that of persuading a Yorkshire tyke to give up a long-established freebie. So The Reckoning has evolved into an annual bun-fight at which the collection of rents occupies only a couple of minutes, and the refreshment and gossip a couple of hours.
From ’86 on it was Girlie who sat in the seat of custom and Girlie who ran the estate. With the factor’s departure the village had anticipated that perhaps Guy the Heir would appear to nurture and protect what would one day be his own. But the ’eighties, which had turned this green and pleasant land into a valley of dry bones for so many, had rendered it a loadsamoney theme park for others, and Guy the Heir was far too busy plunging his snout in the golden trough to be concerned with a run-down, debt-ridden estate in mega-boring Yorkshire.
But they were not long, the days of swine and Porsches. And by the early ’nineties the smartest pigs, those who could still remember how to walk on two legs, were putting as much distance as they could between themselves and the wrack of that frightful image of perfection they had worshipped in vain. It would be comforting to see this as conversion. Alas, I fear that they are merely searching for new horizons to pollute, new territories to exploit. I fear nowhere is safe, not even the green grass, clear air, translucent waters and simple country folk of a distant, mega-boring Yorkshire dale.
‘How horrible it is to have so many people killed! – And what a blessing one cares for none of them!’
It is the Day of Reckoning.
The sun is shining. The inhabitants of Enscombe will tell you the sun always shines on Reckoning Day, meaning it hasn’t rained much above a dozen times in the last twenty years. But this year they are right. After a week in which March seemed always looking back to January, suddenly it has leapt forward into May, and even in the shade, the air hangs warm and scented with blossom.
The village lies still as a painting, an English watercolour over which the artist has laboured with furious concentration to fix forever one perfect moment. What problems it must have posed! How to capture the almost black shadows which the sun, just past its zenith, lays on the left-hand side of the High Street, without giving a false Mediterranean brightness to the buildings opposite? And then the problem of perspective, with the road rising gently from the Morris Men’s Rest at the southern end of the village, widening a little beyond the Post Office to admit the cobbled forecourts of the sunbright bookshop and café opposite the shadow-dark gallery, then steepening suddenly into a breathless hill as it climbs alongside the high churchyard wall over which headstones peep as though eager to see how the living are doing in these hard times. Nor is the curiously slouching tower of the church easy to capture accurately without making the artist look merely incompetent! And that distant pennant of kingfisher blue which is all that is visible of Old Hall above the trees beyond the church, were it not better with an artist’s licence to ignore it as a distraction from the horizon of brooding moorland which is the picture’s natural frame?
But it is that blue pennant which explains the village’s stillness, for it betokens that the Squire is hosting his Reckoning Feast. And, more important still, for any daubster can paint a house but only the true artist can hint the life within, the pennant signals that behind this picture of still beauty there is warm pulsating humanity always threatening to burst through.
Now there is movement and the picture starts to dissolve. A woman comes hurrying down the shady side of
