that mean? It would mean another bloody caravan site, and us with two already and can’t fill them, not even when ’tis season.
But as to asking the trespassers themselves: well, that wouldn’t be proper now, would it?
It wasn’t till the camper appeared at Ben Painter’s garage, which does a line in do-it-yourself hardware, and a tall, angular, cheery fellow in his sixties jumped out, that speculation came to an abrupt halt:
‘Now, sir. Would you be Ben, by any chance?’ he begins, leaning forward and downward, Ben being eighty years old and five feet tall on a good day.
‘I’m Ben,’ Ben concedes.
‘Well, I’m Kit. And what I need, Ben, is a pair of man-sized metal-cutters. Sort of chaps that’ll snip through an iron bar this size,’ he explained, making a ring of his finger and thumb.
‘You off to prison then?’ Ben enquires.
‘Well, not just at this moment, Ben, thank you,’ replies the same Kit, with a raucous hah! of a laugh. ‘There’s this giant padlock on the stable door, you see. A real thug of a chap, all rusted up and no key in sight. There’s a place on the key board where it used to hang, but it’s not hanging there any more. And believe you me, there’s nothing more stupid than an empty key-hook,’ he asserts heartily.
‘The stable door down the Manor, you was talking about then, was it?’ says Ben, after prolonged reflection.
‘The very one,’ Kit agrees.
‘Should be full of empty bottles, that stable should, knowing the commander.’
‘Highly likely. And I hope very shortly to be picking up the deposit on them.’
Ben reflects on this too. ‘Deposit’s not allowed no more, deposit isn’t.’
‘Well now, I suppose it isn’t. So what I’ll really be doing is running them down to the bottle bank for recycling, won’t I?’ says Kit patiently.
But this doesn’t satisfy Ben either:
‘Only I don’t think I should be doing that, should I?’ he objects, after another age. ‘Not now you’ve told me what it’s for. Not the Manor. I’d be aiding and abetting. Not unless you own the bloody place.’
To which Kit, with evident reluctance because he doesn’t want to make old Ben look silly, explains that while he personally doesn’t own the Manor, his dear wife Suzanna does.
‘She’s the late commander’s niece, you see, Ben. Spent her absolute happiest childhood years here. Nobody else in the family wanted to take the place on, so the trustees decided to let us have a go.’
Ben absorbs this.
‘She a Cardew, then, is she? Your wife?’
‘Well, she was, Ben. She’s a Probyn now. Been a Probyn for thirty-three glorious years, I’m proud to say.’
‘She Suzanna, then? Suzanna Cardew as rode the hunt when she were nine year old? Got out in front of the Master, had to have her horse hauled back by the Field Master.’
‘That sounds like Suzanna.’
‘Well I’m buggered,’ says Ben.
A couple of days later an official letter arrived at the post office that put paid to any lingering suspicions. It was addressed not to any old Probyn but to Sir Christopher Probyn, who, according to John Treglowan, who’d looked him up on the Internet, had been some sort of ambassador or commissioner, was it, to a bunch of islands in the Caribbean that was still supposed to be British, and had a medal to show for it too.
*
And from that day on, Kit and Suzanna, as they insisted on being called, could do no wrong, even if the levellers in the village would have wished it different. Where the commander in his later years was remembered as a lonely, misanthropic drunk, the Manor’s new incumbents threw themselves on village life with such zest and goodwill as even the sourest couldn’t deny. It didn’t matter that Kit was practically rebuilding the Manor single-handed: come Fridays, he’d be down at Community House with an apron round his waist, serving suppers at Seniors’ Stake-Nite and staying for the washing-up. And Suzanna, who they say is ill but you wouldn’t know it, like as not helping out with the Busy Bees or sorting church accounts with Vicar after the treasurer went and died, or down Primary School for the Sure Starters’ concert, or up Church Hall to help set up for Farmers’ Market, or delivering deprived city kids to their country hosts for a week’s holiday away from the Smoke, or running somebody’s wife to the Treliske in Truro to see her sick husband. And stuck-up? – forget it, she was just like you and me, ladyship or not.
Or if