Page 25 of The Christmas Invitation
But then she said, ‘Just a quick spin as far as Underhill, though we won’t visit Sybil, so we’ll have plenty of time to pop down and collect Teddy from school and save Lex another trip up here. Luckily the weather is very mild for December, so we can use the scenic route down the Grimlike Pass.’
‘Grimlike? That’s a very odd name.’
‘The story goes that whenever visitors asked about the road down the pass, the locals would tell them it was ‘grim-like’ and eventually the name stuck,’ she said.
I could hardly wait.
Later that afternoon Den brought round an aged and battered white Range Rover and would have driven us, had Clara not insisted that she do so herself.
‘I love to drive and, after all those digs in the Far East, no vehicle or road state is too much for me,’ she declared, setting off with brio. ‘At least here one isn’t likely to round a hairpin bend and come face to face with a herd of camels.’
‘No, I suppose not,’ I murmured faintly, as we hurtled down the drive and then, with the briefest of pauses, shot out and turned right on to the narrow, but mercifully empty, road.
‘Not much traffic about at this time of year, though it’s different in summer, when all the holiday home people, the sailing and water sports enthusiasts, campers and the like infest the place,’ she said cheerfully. ‘The moment townies buy afour-wheel-drive vehicle, they assume all country roads are one way: the waythey’reheading.’
‘The Red House is quite isolated really, isn’t it?’ I said, because it was about half a mile until the first cottages of Starstone Edge appeared.
‘Isaiah Gillyflower built the Red House when Victorian Gothic was all the rage. He was a wealthy brewer who liked the imposing position of the plot, looking down on the village. I expect, like most of the second-homers, he only saw it in summer before he moved in. Lots of people buy the cottages here when the weather’s lovely and then realize how awful it can be from autumn to early spring … and sometimeslatespring. Then they either shut them up or sell them again.’
‘It must be an entirely different place in summer.’
‘Yes, a bit of sunshine and it’s like Blackpool on a Bank Holiday.’
‘I’ve never been to Blackpool,’ I confessed.
‘Really?’ She turned her head to stare at me in astonishment, which seeing the speed she was driving at, I’d much rather she hadn’t. ‘You’ve never lived till you’ve eaten a stick of rock while walking along the Golden Mile, seen the Illuminations, or heard the mighty Wurlitzer in the Tower Ballroom. Henry and I used to take the nieces and nephews there sometimes when they were little and stayed with us during the school holidays. Their parents are my younger sister, Bridget, and her husband. They were in the diplomatic service, so often abroad. Now they’ve retired to New Zealand, where Lex’s elder brother, Chris, lives.’
I devoutly wished that Lex had gone with them.
‘You’ll see the dam and the pumping house, or whatever you call it, when we go down the Pass,’ she said. ‘But in this direction the road is almost a dead end after Underhill. There’s justa thin strip of track over the moors, which has endless cattle grids and gates to open, so no one much bothers with it except the farmers. If you keep going along it, though, you end up in Yorkshire. It’s an old drovers’ road.’
She slowed right down as the houses clustered closely together, presumably so she could gesticulate more easily with one arm.
‘This is the centre of the metropolis of Starstone Edge, mercifully spared the Great Flood,’ she announced, with a lordly wave that encompassed the terraced stone cottages huddled on either side, a couple of ramshackle wooden sheds, one with an ancient rusty petrol pump outside it, and a few semi-detached properties from the twenties and thirties.
A larger villa, painted an insouciant and incongruous lemon yellow and set back from the road, had a swinging wooden sign that had been shrouded in sacking.
‘That’s Bella Vista, run as a guesthouse during the season,’ Clara said, with another wave that sent the Range Rover halfway across the road. ‘Deirdre shuts it up in winter and goes to stay with her daughter in Australia,’ she added. ‘Then there’s the Adcock family, who live in the end cottage of the next row and do a nice little line in looking after Deirdre’s place, the holiday lets and the second homes, while their youngest son, Gil, runs the bar at the Sailing Club and keeps an eye on any boats stored there over winter.’
‘They sound a very enterprising family,’ I said.
‘They are, to make a decent living here all the year round. The Sailing Club is a fancy name for something that’s just a big hut, really, and most of the members only have little dinghies, or canoes and kayaks.’
I peered out of the scratched windscreen, having caught sight of a flat window at the end of the final, straggling terrace. ‘Is that a shop?’
‘Yes, that’s Bilbo’s – sort of a souvenir-cum-New Age affair, though he sells ice cream and drinks from a hatch in the side wall when there are tourists about. This time of year, he only opens if someone rings the bell and shows him the colour of their money.’
‘Did you sayBilbo?’ The sign over the shop had certainly read ‘B. Baggins’ and, in larger letters, ‘Preciousss’. And now I came to think of it, they’d mentioned someone of that name as being part of the Solstice ceremony.
‘That’s right. The Bagginses are an old Starstone family, though he was Bob until he got totally Tolkiened. Such a lot of people seem to, don’t they? And then the surname, of course – it must have been too much to resist.’
‘I expect you’re right.’
‘Everyone calls him Bilbo now. He’s not a bad chap. The family moved up here when the valley was drowned. It was a handy little general shop before Bilbo took over. He’s got a wife and baby now … or Isupposeshe’s a wife. I asked her once and she said they’d jumped the broomstick and were handfasted.’
‘That’s more or less the same thing,’ I agreed.
‘She’s called Flower and the baby’s Grace-Galadriel.’
