They all put on solemn Sunday faces and shook their heads before taking another drink.
The landlady, who had been polishing glasses and listening behind the bar, said in her smoky voice, ‘You gentlemen want to get your story straight. As I was told by someone who knows, Mr Billy Lamb did not kill himself because he lost his job. He didn’t even know he was to be declared redundant.’
Her statement was immediately challenged, but she went on unperturbed, resting her fists on her counter as if prepared to take them all on in physical combat if necessary. ‘Reason he done what he did was because the girl, Margy Sulston, who once worked for my cousin at the Ostrich, threw him over. Margy’s quite a decent girl – no chicken, mind you – and as I understand it she couldn’t put up with some of Mr Lamb’s obnoxious habits.’
‘Such as?’ Craske asked.
‘I’m not one to gossip,’ said the landlady with finality, turning away to polish another glass.
To ease himself into the company, which had not yet settled down properly, Tebbutt went over to the counter and bought everyone a round of bitter. They all drank it, except for old Craske, who was reckoned strange for sticking to cider, and Georgie Clenchwarden, who preferred ginger beer shandy.
Swallowing their pints, the company cheered up and began to tell stories of the unfortunate Billy Lamb. The only man there who knew him at all was Pete Norton, a dark-complexioned brickie and plasterer in his forties who worked for a Fakenham builder. He was soon holding them spellbound with details of Lamb’s sex life.
‘There’s a girl works in Boots as I took out a time or two. She’d been with Billy Lamb when he was working in the DIY. She reckoned as he had a problem. Some problem it was too. Seemed Billy was keen enough to get it in but he couldn’t stand the sight of women.’
They all roared with laughter, agreeing he certainly had a problem.
‘So what he done, he borrowed a sheet of hardboard out the DIY, and he’d stick that between them, so’s he could just see her legs and twot, and the rest of her was covered. Bit like screwing a fence, if you ask me.’
This revelation caused much discussion, some debating how long a girl would put up with such treatment, others dismissing the story as a complete fabrication, though later agreeing that nothing to do with sex could be either believed or disbelieved. Only Georgie Clenchwarden, reputed lover of Pauline Yarker, said nothing, sitting back on his bench with his shandy, smiling and listening over the top of his glass.
The Bluebell was a curious pub, with a collection of ornamental shoes on display upstairs. Tebbutt felt himself to be something of a curio in this company, displaced rather like the old shoes.
He took a certain interest in the hollow-chested young Georgie Clenchwarden, whose reported exploits with Mrs Yarker had earned him the sack. This crestfallen lad, who squirmed when he caught Tebbutt’s eye on him, lived over in Saxlingham with a decrepit aunt.
Tebbutt had wondered idly how so insignificant a youth as Georgie could bear a resonant name like Clenchwarden, guessing the family had come down in the world, much as he had himself; this he later found to be the case. In the eighteenth century, the Clenchwardens had owned a large house and estate the other side of Hartisham. Captain Toby Clenchwarden had been a compulsive gambler. One night, playing cards with a group of cronies that included a novelist and pamphleteer, he had staked his mansion on a hand at brag – and lost. The novelist won.
After which, Clenchwarden had ridden his mare back to Hartisham at dawn and roused his wife – so it was reported – with the cheering words, ‘Get up, you sloven, it’s the poorhouse for you today!’
The novelist had taken over on the following morning. The two men, so the story went, shook hands at the gates, one going, one coming.
Since then, it seemed, the Clenchwardens had never lived more than a stone’s throw from the poorhouse.
The company at the Bluebell was three or four pints along the way when in came Yarker with Pauline. Yarker had abandoned his Wellingtons for a pair of trainers – his way of smartening up. Pauline dressed in a common way, in a tight red satin dress which the men admired; as the men often agreed among themselves, she was welcome as the lone female in their group because she had good big tits on her. Pinned over these assets was a white carnation from the garden centre. She wore large bronze earrings made in an obscure country which rattled when she laughed.
Yarker bought them all a round of beer and sat down next to Tebbutt. Clenchwarden sank back on his bench, unwilling to catch his ex-employee’s eye, and tried to drown himself in his shandy.
‘I done well this afternoon,’ Yarker told his employee, genially. ‘Bought a whole load of furniture off of an old girl Dereham way who didn’t know no better. Drove it round to a mate of mine in King’s Lynn and sold it all for ten times as much. Well, eight or nine. Not bad for one afternoon, hey, bor?’
‘Who was that then, Greg?’ asked Burton.
‘Woman name of Fox, whistles when she talks, looks at you out of one eye, keeps an old dog who smells like a bit of used toilet paper.’
The ferret man laughed heartily. ‘That’s my missus’s aunt, Dot Fox. Funny thing happened to her some years back when she was married. She used to live over Happisburgh way, woke up one morning and found her back garden had fallen over the cliff. Apparently she’d been drinking so heavy the night before, she slept through one of the worst storms on the coast for twenty years. What was funny, was her husband Bert had gone out in his nightshirt to see to the chickens, what they kept in the garden shed, and he went over the cliff edge with the rest of ’em. Three in the morning, it was.’
Everyone present roared with laughter. The ferret man followed up his success with a postscript. ‘They found Bert washed up on Mundesley beach a week later, they did, still wearing his nightshirt. Old Dot Fox kept that nightshirt for years as a souvenir. She’s probably still got it, ’less you bought it off her, Greg.’
More laughter, and more drink called for.
Yarker said to Tebbutt, when they were comfortable, ‘You know that line of poplars where you been digging this week? Me and Pauline been thinking. They’re getting on a bit, must be ninety year old, and poplars don’t last that long. We reckon they best come down.’
Tebbutt frowned. ‘They look all right to me. They aren’t that old, are they?’
‘Ah, I can see the notion ent very poplar with you,’ Pauline said, leaning revealingly forward and bursting with laughter at her pun. Soon the whole table was laughing and making puns about trees. I knew a gell but she was a bit of a beech. I ent going to die yet ’cause I ent made no willow.
It was quite an uproarious evening. The suicide was soon forgotten.
Old Craske was unfolding a familiar tale about how, when he was a lad, he had seen a naked woman run through the village with a dog on a lead, and maybe it was a ghost or maybe it wasn’t.
Tebbutt felt an impulse like lust blossom in him. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ he announced to the company. ‘When I was in Birmingham, I knew a man by the name of Cracknell Summerfield. A real rough diamond. He made a packet of money at one time or another. I used to go down to this place near London, near Heathrow, where he gave lavish dinners for his clients.
‘Cracknell dealt in swimming pools in a big way. Mind, this was before the Obnoxious Eighties. This time I was down at his place, he was negotiating a deal with some Kuwaitis. There were three of them to dinner, very polite in lounge suits. They were going to finance hotels, Cracknell was going to build the pools and do the landscaping. I was going to print all the prospectuses and brochures. There was also a pretty young duchess there.’
‘Now comes the sexy bit,’ said Yarker, winking.
‘The duchess had a contract to supply all the internal decor of these Kuwaiti hotels. Worth millions. She’d begun the evening very off-hand with everyone, but we’d all had