Fete Fatale by Robert Barnard Page B

to the local youth (who in fact had more flab than bicep under the sleeves of their T-shirts). I greeted them casually, and passed into the tent and out of the sunshine.
    The Hexton choir was putting in their third stint of duty that day, exhorting everybody to climb every mountain. The crowd was definitely thinning now. At my stall Mr Horsforth had disposed of little of the remaining stuff. He looked at me reproachfully and made off—as if we had come to some sort of arrangement about shift working, and I had somehow reneged on it. I ground my teeth and smiled compassionately at the rummagers around my stall. Now the crush was over one could see all sorts of things that one hadn’t noticed before. Howard Culpepper had a stall of second-hand jigsaws and games only two stalls down from my own, but I hadn’t registered him all day. Par for the course with Howard,of course. A good quarter of the stalls were sold out, though mostly their keepers lingered round them, either because they were terrified of Franchita, or because they did not want to forgo the gracious thanks of Lady Godetia. Mrs Nielson, on the other hand, had only five jars of jam left, and when she had sold these, she locked up her cash box, packed up and left, in spite of my warnings about the wrath of Franchita.
    I wished I could do the same. There were still three cartons of junk behind the stall, and still latecomers trailing in and contemptuously turning over Thyrza’s things, in default of anything else much worth buying. We were paying the penalty of success, and the day was quite early wearing an enervated, faded, stale-end sort of air. Outside, no doubt, was better, and the games and sideshows would be flourishing as the weather got cooler. I breathed in the stale air and wished I could get out. A tent on a wet day was bad enough, but a tent on a hot day was pure hell.
    Suddenly I noticed that others seemed equally possessed by a passion to escape the tent. Or at any rate, down at the far end the area around the entrance that gave out on to the meadows and the river was almost empty. The people down that end—attracted, presumably, by something I had not heard—had gone out, and were standing around outside, whispering to each other.
    The people around the junk stall had noticed too. ‘What is it?’ they said to each other. ‘Must be something happening.’ And they started to drift in that direction. I was pricked by the needle of curiosity, and the desire to escape into the fresh air. When there was no one in front of my stall, I nipped over and retrieved the old sheet that Gwen Nielson had used at lunch-time. I threw it over the remaining junk, and then darted down to the other entrance, which was still uncrowded, and then out into the open. The freshness of the late afternoon air was wonderful. I breathed it in two or three times, and then walked round to the other side of the tent, and to the river.
    It was the river they were all looking at. Floating down it, propelled by the currents of the weir and kept afloat by a hefty branch to which it had become attached, was the body of a man. I ran forward to the river bank, though someone—Colonel Weston, I think—had put out a hand to hold me back. From the bank I could see clearly: the dark green tweed jacket; the old flannels;above all the jaunty little hat with the feather which had somehow clung to the branch, and which he always wore to these do’s. Which Marcus always wore to these do’s.

CHAPTER 6
CURTAINS
    You will not, I imagine and hope, have set me down as the fainting type. But from the moment of that sight until perhaps an hour later I have no memories—only feelings: a feeling of being loaded gently on to a stretcher; a feeling of being somehow in my own house again; a feeling that an ice-cream van was playing outside, and that it shouldn’t be, leading to a drowsy consideration of whether I hated the one that played