A Hovering of Vultures by Robert Barnard Page B

Coggenhoe.
    â€œNo, no, dear lady: La Clemenza di Tito .”
    Phoney! thought Charlie, moving away. He didn’t know much about Mozart’s operas, but he did know that his greatest was not one nobody had heard of. Still, the phoniness of Mr Gerald Suzman was not in doubt: the question was what particular piece of trompe l’oeil he was fabricating here in Micklewike.
    Charlie led the drift back into the hall, and once again took his place towards the back. The opening part of the meeting was mainly formal: the Fellowship was set up, an interim constitution was established, and an Executive Council voted into being. Mr Suzman proposed a lean, active Council of five members, to get the Fellowship off the ground. He put forward five names, and these were agreed from the floor: Rupert Coggenhoe seemed to be there to represent Literature; Randolph Sneddon was there to represent Family; Gillian Parkin was there to represent Academic Research; the lady who acted as Secretary, Mrs Cardew, was there to represent Micklewike; and Mr Suzman was there as the Founding Father.
    Things got more interesting when they came to Any Other Business. Mr Suzman had said at the beginning of the meeting that he hoped this would become a general discussion of the experience of the Weekend, what members hoped for from the Fellowship, suggestions for next year’s gathering, and so on. Rupert Coggenhoe said he thought walks to places featured in the Sneddon novels would be an appropriate and enjoyable feature for future weekends, and mentioned Beckett’s Falls, which had featured so prominently in The Hard Furrow , and which, coincidentally, could be paralleled with a waterfall in his own novel Starveacre. One of thesentimental ladies suggested a church service on the Sunday morning of the Weekend, and Gillian Parkin protested against the emasculation (“significantly there is no female equivalent of that term”) of Susannah Sneddon’s texts in their printed versions. Vibeke Nordli called for the establishment of international Chapters of the Fellowship.
    It was quite late in the meeting when Lettie Farraday got up to speak.
    â€œMr Chairman, I wonder if I can say a few words as one who knew the Sneddons.” (Small buzz of interest, turning heads. Mr Suzman nodded, as if this was something he’d known all along, perhaps had arranged.) “Though you wouldn’t think it from the sound of me, I was born and brought up a few hundred yards from this hall. My mother used to go up and clean for the Sneddons once a week, and sometimes in the school holidays I used to go up with her. Of course what you’ve got up there now is a sanitised version of the farm. I’m not criticising you for that: nobody wants to go into a mess of dirt and disorder. But that’s what it was. If they hadn’t employed my mother it would have been a slum. Thinking back on it, I can respect Susannah for that: she made her choice, and the choice was that she wanted to be a writer. So far as she was concerned the rest could go hang, and it did. But that wasn’t how we saw it in the village at the time.”
    â€œI’m sure it wasn’t,” said Mr Suzman, apparently just to say something.
    â€œNo, to us she was a mucky housewife, a real sloven. And that was a real judgment on somebody, for us, then. And I think you should try to get something of that into the Museum, because that was a distinctive part of Susannah Sneddon’s life: dirt, poor food badly cooked, nasty smells.Another thing: the farmhouse is far too full of things from the ’twenties—fire-tongs, pudding basins, beds, knives and forks. But the Sneddons never bought anything. The things the farm was full of were much older—’nineties stuff, I suppose, or even earlier. So the fire-tongs and the cutlery and the kitchen utensils would have been Victorian ones, heavier, uglier—and dirtier, of course.”
    â€œThat’s