The Cure of Souls by Phil Rickman Page A

was noon, the time of no shadows, but the sun was momentarily weakened by a trailer of muslin cloud.
    ‘What’s the, er… what’s the wife like?’ Lol asked.
    Prof gave him a curious look. Prof had sensitive, multi-track hearing – sometimes even picking up tracks you hadn’t recorded.
    ‘Never met her, Laurence. Quiet, I’m told. Often the case with a guy like that – wants a listener.’
    ‘And what happened to the uncle?’
    ‘Ha! I’m detecting – forgive me – a burgeoning interest here?’
    ‘Well, not—’
    ‘The moment I mention hop-kilns! After our discussion, am I to conclude you went for one of your little strolls and you came back with – dare I suggest – the seed of an idea? I’m thinking of the song you did a year or two back for Norma Waterson – “The Baker’s Tune”?’
    ‘ “The Baker’s Lament”.’
    ‘About the slow fading of the old village fabric – a good one. Well, I’m not pushing it, but there are strong themes here, too. Change and decay. Visit the Hop Museum – in fact, I’m going to set that up for you.’
    ‘Prof, there’s no—’
    ‘Check it out. Reject it, if you want, but check it out first.’
    Lol gave up. In an avalanche, lie down.
    ‘So what
did
happen to the uncle?’
    ‘Aha.’ Prof sat on an old rustic bench against the stable wall, tilting his Panama over his eyes. ‘Well, that, Laurence, was a
very
sick wind.’
    Lol waited. Prof seemed to have a remarkably extensive knowledge of people he claimed he hadn’t ever wanted to meet.
    He talked from under his hat, stretching out his legs. ‘I think what Simon didn’t mention about this Stewart Ash was his interest – as an author, a chronicler of social history – in our travelling friends. Not the New Age travellers – the old kind.’
    ‘Gypsies?’
    Prof nodded. ‘Romanies. Used to come here in force every autumn for the hop-picking. Enormous work in those days before the machines. Some of them even travelling over from Europe in their
vardos
, year after year. A colourful spectacle – you’ll find all this in the hop museum, as well. The Romanies were a little community inside a community, and of course Ash very much wanted to record their memories, for his book – what they thought of the hop-masters, how well they were treated. A man with a social conscience. Well, there’s a few Romany families, not many, still coming back, to help the machinery do the work – though whether they’ll be back this year, after what happened, is anyone’s guess. Anyway, off goes our Mr Ash to talk to them. Only gypsies, by tradition, don’t like to talk. It’s their history, why should the
gaujos
profit from it?’
    Prof tilted up his hat, looking for Lol’s reaction.
    ‘That’s a point,’ Lol said cautiously.
    ‘I have sympathy for the Romanies,’ Prof said. ‘A persecuted race, big victims of the Holocaust.’
    Prof rarely talked about this; he liked to call himself a ‘lapsed Jew’, but Lol knew from other sources that his family had been considerably depleted by Hitler. Aunts and uncles, certainly, if not his parents. It would explain why Prof, who was accustomedto ignoring his immediate neighbourhood, had taken a certain interest in this story.
    ‘But Ash, you see, was by all accounts a generous man, and he didn’t expect the stuff for nothing. He established what you might call a
rapport
with a few of the gypsies. What
he
might have called a rapport, though they would probably have had a different name for it.’
    ‘Like, they got more out of him than he got out of them?’
    ‘They haven’t survived, the Romanies, by passing up on opportunities, though it was probably a little more complicated than ripping off the guy for a bunch of made-up stories. Complicated, for one thing, by Ash being representative of
another
significant minority.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘Did he form too
close
a rapport with certain of his travelling friends? Did they take his money for services rendered?