out walking their dogs, but the warning signs about the cliff fall had been taken away.
Angela de Mauny’s pink-painted cottage stood at the end of Tuppenny Row, facing away from its neighbours in an offhand fashion, but occupying a spot where you could see the whole of Nelson’s Bay. Miss Dimont had seen the view many times but as she staggered inelegantly out of Valentine’s infernal machine its broad sweep caught her gaze once more, and for a moment she stood quite still on the pavement.
‘Look,’ she said.
It was late in the afternoon and, though the heat had gone out of the day, the sun still shone brilliantly on the water. The piercing blue of the sky was beginning to give way to a more complex colour, purple and grey and yellow, and Athene Madrigale’s clouds were starting to put in their appearance – the altostratus, the cumulonimbus, and especially the cirrus which looked like so much candy floss hanging gently in the sky. Wide-eyed guillemots patrolled the air above, while far beneath a pair of gannets flew off the headland, occasionally slicing into the water to collect their dinner.
Valentine came up behind her. ‘Fabulous,’ he murmured, adding after a moment’s pause, ‘is it always like this in Temple Regis?’
‘My dear boy,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘You don’t know it, but you’ve arrived in Heaven.’
There was no St Peter, however, to answer Miss de Mauny’s green-painted front door, instead an angular lady with steel-grey hair and complexion to match who seemed startled, not to say frightened, to see the two reporters.
‘Yes?’
Having shrugged her disapproval after learning their identities, she was on the point of shutting the door again when Valentine stepped forward and said, ‘Margaret Plantagenet.’ Miss de Mauny stepped back and looked more closely at the young reporter. ‘Yes?’ she said again, but her tone was different this time – interested almost.
‘Just a guess,’ offered Valentine cheerfully. ‘She married into your family in the fourteenth century. I’m on the other side. My—’
‘—ancient family, lots of them,’ interrupted Miss Dimont starchily, but a dubious family connection stretching back five hundred years, if that’s what it was, looked as though it might at least get them into the house. First two rules of journalism – (i) knock on the door, (ii) get inside.
What they found, once inside, was breathtaking.
Ancient timepieces glistened as if made of gold. They chattered and clicked and donged, and on a workbench the innards of a large hall clock were laid out in regimented lines as if they were the parts of a firearm.
‘…thought they had called to warn you I was coming,’ Miss Dimont was saying disingenuously. ‘Your speech the other day, you know, attracted a great deal of interest. So sorry if this is an intrusion, we can go if you’d prefer.’
The apology was less than sincere. Miss Dimont had heard that Miss de Mauny was known to be prickly, to say the least, and took the decision not to telephone ahead in the hope she could sweet-talk her way through the door.
As it turned out, it was this very new, very junior cub reporter who’d pulled it off. She’d have to have a word with him later!
‘…though we did the article on your lecture on Lady Rhondda – fascinating,’ she added encouragingly. ‘I wanted to do something for the women’s interest pages, expanding on the role of women today.’
‘I’m no expert,’ said Angela de Mauny scratchily, sitting down at her bench and pointedly turning her back to her visitors.
‘Well, let’s say you know more than most,’ said Miss Dimont soothingly. ‘I’d like to write a piece talking about where women are, fourteen years after the War has ended.’
‘Why?’ said Miss de Mauny, but you could tell she was listening.
‘In your speech you made the point that the War was a time when women finally came into their own, were recognised for the skills which had been waiting to be utilised ever since … ever since the Vote, ever since they were allowed to take their university degrees, ever since they were accepted as doctors and lawyers and factory workers. The First War broke down some of those barriers, but this one finally gave us true emancipation.’
‘Well, yes, yes, yes!’ said Miss de Mauny irritably. ‘My very point!’
Miss Dimont had used the old journalistic trick of getting a reluctant interviewee to talk by repeating back her own words – words with which she would be forced to agree, and would want to expand on. As a subterfuge, it worked as well on members of the public as it did on politicians.
The clock woman fell for it.
‘Come the peace, everything went backwards,’ she said. ‘It’s continuing to go backwards. We women represent half the population, but only have twenty-four Members of Parliament to speak for us – the laws of this country are made by men. And while I am fond of the male of the species, he seems to have taken it upon himself to grab hold of the steering wheel of life on the foolish assumption that women can’t drive.’
Judy Dimont nodded vigorously in agreement. Her notebook was in hand, the strange curlicues thought up by Mr Pitman a century before magically spiralling their way across the page. Miss de Mauny looked nervously down at their progress and eyed her interlocutor with caution. ‘Who runs your paper, male or female?’ she asked sharply.
‘Male.’
‘Well, we know how this’ll end up. “Weepy old woman bewails her wage packet woes”, that sort of thing. I think I’d rather not go any further.’
She turned to Valentine, deliberately changing the subject. ‘Which family are you? An awful lot of people married into the de Maunys. Most seem to have lost their bloodline while we’ve managed to hang on to ours.’
‘Actually,’ said Valentine, ‘we also—’
‘Let’s talk about that later,’ said Miss Dimont snippily. ‘There’s no room in the paper to write about family trees. Tell me, Miss de Mauny, how many men are there in your distinguished profession?’
It’s what made her such a brilliant interviewer. She had done her homework. Horology was a closed shop to that gender.
‘All men, no women,’ snapped Miss de Mauny.
‘Then how come …?’
‘I’m fortunate enough to come from a wealthy family. After university, I wanted to do something no other woman had done, and for a while I seriously considered climbing Mount Everest – I’ve done a bit of mountaineering – but in the end it came down to this. I paid for my apprenticeship, bought my own tools and premises, and weathered the storm while people got used to having a woman go up the church steeple or the town hall.
‘I was helped by the death of old Fred Shallowford, who’d been here forty years. There wasn’t anybody else, so gradually I was granted—’ she used the word quite bitterly ‘—his work.’
‘I wonder what Lady Rhondda would have to say about that.’
‘She was a marvellous woman. Without her, without the Six Point Group, women would be in a far worse position than they are now.’
The conversation flowed on like this for some time. Valentine quietly let himself out of the front door and wandered down Tuppenny Row, drinking in its pink-bricked cottages which were really more like rich men’s houses.
He returned a quarter of an hour later to hear Miss de Mauny’s voice raised almost to a screech.
‘Just so degrading – appalling!’ she was saying agitatedly. ‘After all we’ve been through – that women allow this to be done to them, while the public sits by and lets the men take advantage like that!’
‘To be fair,’ interjected Judy, ‘it is a passport to another world. Or it can be. There’s