The Bookworm
By Mason Dixon
- 621 reads
Angelica Swann, aged forty-nine, of Heaven’s Gate Bungalow, Upper Downwood, was just in the process of attacking the ‘Loft Conversion’ section of the Chormly-on-Sea Community Library (closed half-days Wed and Sat) when two officers from the local constabulary finally arrived. Despite their best efforts, Ms. Swann failed to respond to the constable’s requests for calm and orderly behavior, leaving them with no alternative but to arrest her on a charge of malicious damage to public property. She was driven to Lower Chislehurst Police Station where she was detained for further questioning. There she waived the right to legal representation, opting instead to ramble rather incoherently about seemingly unrelated events in a manner which could only be described as somewhat disjointed. It is at this point, dear reader that I, your humble narrator, will attempt to stitch together this strange but alluring tapestry.
When Ms. Swann first moved to the village I couldn’t help but think it was almost as if she was born middle aged, from her oversized berets and tweed twin-sets, to her stoically sensible shoes which, it had been noted by many of the locals, were always pristine. Angelica was one who, despite all the good deeds, could never quite give enough to her community. She was a stalwart of St Cecilia’s RC Church, although her unique style on the organ recital led some in the congregation to suggest that she would struggle to hold a tune in a bucket, while her marmalade Victoria sponges regularly remained untouched at the end of each fortnightly WI Bring & Bake coffee morning. It was often said that her green fingers had about as much lightness as a sack of King Edwards, while her evening classes in Nineteenth Century Romantic Fiction put the cause of creative writing back to the time of Thomas Caxton. In short, it could be said that Ms. Swann was to charitable endeavors what Genghis Khan was to world peace, although it would ultimately be the oft derided genre of romantic fiction that would eventually lead poor Angelica Swann down the rocky road to self-destruction. Are you still sitting comfortably? Good. Then allow me to enlighten you further….
It was a wet Wednesday in early January when Ms. Swann, stuffed on turkey yet starved of stories, first encountered one Nancy Stewart and her erstwhile heroine Violet Greene, a character as wild and free as the rugged Yorkshire landscape in which she inhabited. She was immediately captivated by the cover and the somewhat lurid image of a brunette, her heaving bosom fighting a losing battle with the forces of gravity, and was instantly enamored by the promise of a world in which women are mere playthings but were more than glad of it. She snatched it from its place on the mobile library shelf and, after having it summarily stamped by Miss Bridges, the rather frumpy looking assistant with a penchant for horn rimmed spectacles and fawn coloured cardigans, literally raced back to her quaint little whitewashed bungalow. The remainder of that afternoon was spent in a haze of heightened expectation as she sped through the crisp white pages like the chestnut mare ridden recklessly by Mr. Edward Newstate, the novel’s all round bounder and lord of the local manor, luxuriating in her favourite armchair as the words swept her away on a tide of unbridled passion. To suggest that she couldn’t put it down would be a gross understatement – it was literally glued to her fingertips. If this story were set in a restaurant what you’ve heard so far would merely have constituted the prawn cocktail. So, like the dutiful waiter that I am, it’s at this point that I’d like to move on to the main course.
Ms. Swann was nothing if not a voracious reader, consuming novels as a lion would attack a freshly killed gazelle, hungrily devouring the words into the early hours until her eyelids finally succumbed to the demands of sleep. A creature of habit, she would always place the book face down, pages open, on the bedside table, before extinguishing the art deco lamp, pulling the mask over her eyes, and drifting away into a deep slumber, always remembering to throw open the bedroom window to the night, regardless of the elements or the vagaries of the seasons. As soon as dawn’s early light crept through the open curtains, Ms. Swann would instinctively remove the mask, reach for the book and continue reading from the very same place from which she had departed the night before. This ritual was performed with the minimum of fuss and contemplation until, that is, one Friday morning which may or may not have been the thirteenth of the month, when she discovered faint but nonetheless visible markings of what appeared to be a 2H pencil, underlining the passage where Mr. Newstate was taking up his riding crop in order to administer a good thrashing to a lowly servant girl for having the audacity to resist his advances, something Angelica Swann could never imagine herself doing. Why would anybody find the words “you’ll pay for your sins. No woman has ever refused me” of any interest? It was not as if the works of Nancy Stewart were on the national curriculum and she couldn’t imagine them teaching this at Cambridge. Her annoyance was tempered with curiosity, but also a feeling of muted outrage that someone could be so inconsiderate as to deface public property in such a randomly cavalier manner. Even stranger still was the nagging doubt that the indentation had not been there when she’d turned out the light a mere six hours previously. It was almost as if unseen hands had stolen into her room under cover of darkness in order to desecrate the sacred text.
The remainder of the week had passed in a haze of predictability; a trip to the park on Thursday, choir practice on Friday, Saturday confession, Sunday Service, wash day on Monday, market day on Tuesday, until we arrive at the following Wednesday and the much anticipated return (by Ms. Swann at least) of the mobile library, when she was finally able to exchange her ‘Lonely Teardrop’ for a ‘Violent Heartbeat’, the next installment of the Violet Greene saga. As was the case with any new literary acquisition, Angelica Swann could barely contain her excitement at the thought of yet another five hundred pages of studiously suppressed sensuality. Across the village green, around the duck pond, past the post box, and along the hedgerow that divided her garden from that of her neighbor, one Mr. Louis Cipher, a gentleman of Antipodean extraction from ‘down under’ and somewhat new to the village who, to a casual observer such as myself, appeared to be brandishing a pair of antique garden shears in a manner that suggested the poison ivy wasn’t the only thing he was intent on severing. Indeed, if Ms. Swann hadn’t been so light of step and nimble of tread, her head may have been nestling amongst the discarded flora. As it was, she narrowly avoided an early appointment with the Grim Reaper, making it back to her bungalow unscathed and unaware of her close brush with Fortune’s Broom.
At this point, the hands of Fate take the reigns of Routine and guide the dogs of Destiny towards the igloo of Inevitability. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that Angelica spent the rest of the day with her nose firmly embedded between the pages of the pot-boiler that constituted the next gripping adventure in the Violet Greene saga, where once again our intrepid heroine escapes the clutches of the evil Mr. Newstate. The well-trodden path was once more trudged by her literary slippers and here our story repeats itself somewhat, an occurrence of some fortuity in that it conveniently saves me the trouble of doing it myself. All I can say is, the very next morning Angelica awoke to find the following passages underlined ‘It’s no use you lying to me, for I know you see far more than you tell…’. To say Ms. Swann was puzzled would be an understatement, although by this point her annoyance had escalated from lukewarm bath to boiling kettle as she mentally castigated the invisible hand of the unseen perpetrator. How dare they deface a work of such magnitude as this? Letters would be written, concerns duly noted, and heads most definitely roll.
But heads didn’t roll, although Ms. Swann’s came dangerously close to her neighbor’s shears on more than one occasion over the intervening weeks when, despite scrupulously scouring the pristine pages for evidence of wrongdoings of a 2H kind but finding nary a smudge of printer’s ink, she awoke each successive Thursday to the inevitable underlining’s of seemingly random sentences. You may ask both yourself and me, or anyone else for that matter, as to the nature of these words, and I admit that a part of me would love to dish the dirt, but at this point the kitty must stay firmly inside the bag. What I will say is, after the eighth installment, Ms. Angelica Swann was beginning to become flakier than a rusty nail, her normally ordered demeanor igniting a shambolic series of unfortunate events. Her trip to the park degenerated into an aerial assault of stale Victoria cake bombarding innocent ducks and frightened children, Friday choir became Friday cringe as she wailed like a banshee from The Book Of Modern Hymns, a five minute confession turned into a four hour confrontation, while Sunday Churches morphed into Satanic Verses. As for Monday, whites became pinks and large became small and Market Day was myopia of colour collisions, where orange became lime and sweet became sour.
Which takes us back to Wednesday. Mobile Library Day. Book Number Nine. Or rather, the absence of The Scarlet Rose, in which the despicable Mr. Newstate finally has his evil way with our virginal Violet, deflowering her Garden of Innocence with his Pitchfork of Passion. Just as Violet had been violated, so Angelica had flipped, which somewhat neatly brings us back to where we began, and the unfortunate incident regarding Her Majesty’s Constabulary. In a nutshell, Ms. Swann had stridden purposefully a distance of five miles to the town library where, to the horror of the elderly assistants, she proceeded to tear the books from the shelves. To say she resembled a bull in a china shop would be an understatement of the century; not just our century, but any century one cares to mention, as she was in the history section, somewhere between Early Aztec and Ancient Rome, when the whole ghastly business got underway. Later, under calmer circumstances, she would reveal that the source of her frustration had been the revelation that the mobile library had ceased to stock the works of Nancy Stewart on the grounds that only one person had ever bothered to take them out, hence her arrival in town and the frantic searching for the final book in the series; the missing link, The Holy Grail, the Mona Lisa of all this romantic rubbish. The last underlined passage, the final piece in the jigsaw, the message in the bottle. I know, I’m overdoing it a bit here, but if it’s worth saying once, it’s worth saying three times. Allow me to quote from the pages of The Chormley Gazette, dated August 3rd, 1983.
‘Angelica Agnes Swann (49) of Heaven’s Gate Bungalow, Upper Downwood, was today remanded into the custody of Her Majesty’s Psychiatric Referral Unit at Babel Towers, where she will undergo tests to establish her capacity to stand trial on the charge of willful destruction of public property. Ms. Swann, who was defending herself, entered a plea of not guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Presiding magistrate Gwendolyn Clarke accepted the plea on condition that the accused embarked on a course of anger management. The trial continues next week…’
It’s now six months since that fateful day and life in Upper Downwood has returned to what passes for normality in this part of the world. The mobile library still visits every Wednesday, only now, instead of the frumpy Miss Bridges with her cardigans and her horn rims, we have Mr. Stone, resplendent in his crotch hugging slacks, tight fitting t-shirts and steel-toed shoes. Oh, and Nancy Stewart has been replaced by Chuck Le Roc. Apart from that, everything was just as it ever was. Or was it? You see, dear reader, it’s at this point that things really begin to hot up…
As a reward for your quiet perseverance allow me enlighten you further as to what actually happened to the faithful Ms. Swann. Several months after the unfortunate incident her property, now owned by the state, had been put up for auction and sold at a meager seventy-eight thousand to Angelica’s next door neighbor, the kind of man who, it had been noted, enjoyed a roaring bonfire every so often and was locally recognised for the red hat he tended to sport when stalking through the village. Some questioned Mr. Cipher’s intentions regarding Ms. Swann’s home, believing that he was ultimately responsible for her tragic downfall, while others dismiss it as a somewhat foolish notion to be regarded as little more than an innocent gesture made by an aloof and unearthly fellow. All this conjecture served to illustrate was how little they actually knew of his devilish plans…
After the proceedings finally went through, the house and adjoining land officially became Mr. Cipher’s. It was a Friday evening in June when Angelica’s garden, once renowned for the white delphiniums that raised their heads seasonally, became the victim of the local farmer’s JCB, which Louis Cipher had intended to ‘borrow’ for a spot of ‘ landscape realignment’, much to the consternation of the local parish council. Although I’m obligated to omit the finer details, what I can tell you is that, when the men in blue dragged him away, his left hand was grasped tightly on to a stained, yellow-tinged map, the kind that regularly crops up in stories of pirates and adventures on the high seas. Beats me what he wanted to find in that garden. Apparently he kept rambling on about a box that contained ‘precious’ things, although the poor bloke had obviously lost it by then. I mean, what could possibly be hidden beneath the soil? The remains of a dead king? An old diary? Lost souls? God knows what, and he’s not telling. All I can say is, there must be something about Heaven’s Gate Bungalow that drives one to the brink of insanity.
Mr. Louis Cipher was eventually taken to Her Majesty’s Psychiatric Referral Unit at Babel Towers after his mental state was placed into question, the very institution where Ms. Swann had since secured a full time position as prison librarian. Although she had long been declared sane by the state, Angelica felt obliged to bring a touch of heaven to this otherwise dismal dungeon.
As for your humble narrator? Allow me to formally introduce myself. My name is Sypal, and I’m a retired Detective Inspector on the local force. I can report that I observed Ms. Swann this very morn at the WI’s Bring & Bake sale, where I can report that she appeared as saintly as ever with that golden smile she always seemed to carry around with her everywhere she went. Normally one to avoid the pastries (as the wife is often fond of commenting on my ever expanding waistband) I none the less purchased a selection of slices of Angelica’s Angel Cake, a somewhat radical change to her baking regime, but one which would appear to have been much appreciated by the locals. Indeed, it seemed to be so popular that the slices were literally flying off the plate and, upon sampling a piece, I feel duty bound to conclude that their taste was nothing short of heavenly.
So there you have it. The strange case of Ms. Angelica Stone and the underlined library books, and a fiendishly simple plot that, one could surmise, backfired very badly. Poor Mr. Cipher. I mean, say what you will about his somewhat eccentric ways, but he knew how to keep a good hedgerow. It’s just a pity that, in his eagerness to drive Angelica insane, he failed to notice that she was, in effect, playing him for a patsy. She had arrived in our sleepy hamlet in search of lost souls, and had discovered them in a metal casket inside the hollow of an old oak tree. However, sensing the unsolicited attentions of her somewhat unconventional neighbor, she had placed the box in a willow basket and cleverly secreted it amongst the bulrushes beside the pond at the bottom of Mr. Cipher’s garden, the very last place he would ever think of looking. Then, feigning madness as a result of her neighbors nightly excursions with a 2H pencil via the ever open bedroom window, she had engineered her removal from the scene, which in turn served to kick start her adversaries erratic behavior, a wonderfully executed move which, as a man who’s seen a thing or two in his time, can only applaud for its sheer originality and audacity. There’s an old saying around these parts that the closer you get to something the less chance you have of actually seeing it. In the case of Mr. Louis Cipher, never was a truer word spoken.
As for the Lost Souls? Well I think we can safely assume that, like that song by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes, they’ve been lifted up where they belong. And Poor Mr. Cypher? Well he’s been sent down for a long stretch, although something tells me he’ll be over the wall and far away before breakfast. As for me? Well D.I.Sypal (retired) likes to keep busy, pottering around here and there. I may be long way from Gethsemane, but hopefully those twelve Angel Cakes of Ms. Swann’s won’t be my last ever supper.
- Log in to post comments
Comments
Nice one, Mason, kept my
- Log in to post comments