The Sponge Tent

In thirty-one years of teaching the children of Lower Pibbleton their seven-times table, Tilly Marsh had learned to recognise trouble by its posture, and the man hurrying across the fete green toward her at half past two had the posture of a great deal of trouble indeed. It was Norman Tuck, who ran the tombola and had run it, badly, for as long as anyone could remember. Norman did not hurry. Norman was a strolling sort of man, the kind who could make a journey to the next stall last a whole afternoon. So when Tilly saw him moving at something close to a trot, with his straw hat in his hand rather than on his head, she set down her cup of tea on the trestle table, because she had a feeling she would shortly need both hands free. "Miss Marsh," said Norman, arriving in a small storm of his own breath. "Miss Marsh, you'd better come. It's the sponge tent." "What about the sponge tent, Norman?" Norman opened his mouth, and shut it, and tried again. "It's Mr. Albemarle. The judge. He's — he's gone over." "Gone over," Tilly repeated. It was a phrase that could mean a number of things, and she found, walking briskly beside Norman toward the long white marquee where the baking competitions were held, that she was already sorting through them. Fainted. The day was warm and the tent was warmer, and Cuthbert Albemarle was a stout man who took his judging seriously and his lunch more seriously still. Tripped, perhaps, over a guy rope. Or simply sat down heavily in the manner of a man who had been on his feet since the gates opened. But Norman had not said any of those things. Norman had said gone over, and Norman had been holding his hat. The marquee smelled, as it always did on fete day, of warm grass and warmer cake — that particular sweet, slightly eggy fug of forty Victoria sponges all giving up their fragrance at once. The trestle tables ran the length of it, and on the tables sat the cakes, in their careful rows, each with its little folded card. Best Victoria Sponge. Best Fruit Cake. Best Novelty Bake, which this year had produced a worrying number of hedgehogs. And at the far end, beside the Victoria sponge table, where the judging had plainly got about two-thirds of the way along, Cuthbert Albemarle lay on the trampled grass, face down, one arm flung out as if reaching for the last sponge he would ever assess. A small crowd had gathered the way crowds do, in a loose unhelpful ring, and the Reverend Pinch was kneeling beside the body with his hand pressed to its wrist and an expression Tilly did not care for at all. "Reverend," she said, and the crowd parted for her, because thirty-one years of teaching gives a woman a voice that crowds part for. "Reverend, is he —" The Reverend Pinch looked up. He was a young man for a vicar, pink and earnest, and just at this moment he was rather a green-tinged pink. "I'm afraid so, Miss Marsh," he said quietly. "I'm afraid Mr. Albemarle is quite dead." Tilly Marsh stood very still in the warm cake-scented tent and looked down at the judge, and at the row of half-assessed Victoria sponges, and at the little fork still resting on its plate beside the fourth cake along — the cake, she noted, with a small fastidious part of her mind that never switched off, that had a single neat bite taken out of it. The Lower Pibbleton Summer Fete had been held every July for one hundred and four years. In all that time it had survived two world wars, a thunderstorm of biblical enthusiasm, and the year the bouncy castle escaped. It had never, not once, had a fatality. "Well," said Tilly Marsh, mostly to herself, and she rolled up the sleeves of her good cardigan. "It seems it has now."