The Charity Raffle at Piper’s Hollow
The bunting had been strung between the elms since Tuesday, and by Saturday morning it had begun to sag in the middle, drooping like a wet washing line over the Piper’s Hollow village green. Agnes Cloke noticed it as she crossed from the post office with her paper tucked under one arm. She noticed most things. It was, as her late husband used to say, both her gift and her affliction.
The fete opened at ten. By half past, the green smelled of trampled grass, hot sugar from the doughnut stall, and the faint metallic whiff of the tombola barrel being cranked by young Marcus Fenn, who looked as though he’d rather be anywhere else. Agnes bought a jar of plum chutney, admired the flower-arranging entries without commenting on their considerable shortcomings, and eventually made her way to the raffle table, where she purchased four tickets from Dorothea Briggs.
“Lovely turnout,” Agnes said.
Dorothea straightened the roll of pink stubs on the table. “Wonderful, yes.” Her fingers, Agnes noticed, were working the paper too tightly. “Though I must say the morning’s been rather hectic.”
“Has anything gone wrong?”
A pause barely longer than a heartbeat. “Not at all.”
The main raffle prize that year was a hamper donated by Cranmere’s, the delicatessen in the market town four miles down the road. Agnes had seen it displayed the previous Saturday in the post office window: a wicker basket the size of a small dog, wrapped in cellophane and stuffed with oil, preserves, a whole Stilton in a ceramic pot, and a bottle of something amber and well-regarded. Mrs. Pelsworth, who ran the post office, had affixed a card reading “Value: £95” in her careful block letters.
By two o’clock, the hamper was not on the raffle table. In its place sat a cardboard box with a ribbon taped to the front.
Agnes bought a cup of tea from the WI stand and stood where she could see without being seen to look. Dorothea was speaking in low tones with Geoffrey Nabb, the fete committee chairman, a man whose comb-over and enthusiastic handshake had been a fixture of village life for thirty years. Geoffrey was nodding too quickly. His jaw was set.
Agnes finished her tea and walked over.
“Geoffrey. Dorothea. What a marvellous afternoon.” She let her gaze rest gently on the cardboard box. “Has the display changed? I thought there was a rather splendid hamper.”
Geoffrey’s smile stayed exactly the same width. “Small mix-up with the display. Nothing to worry about, Agnes.”
“Of course not.” She smiled back. “Only I happened to see the hamper being loaded into the boot of a car this morning, just after nine. A dark green estate. Parked on the lane beside the elm trees.” She paused. “I assumed it was being moved for safekeeping.”
Geoffrey’s smile lost approximately one centimetre on each side.
Dorothea looked at the table.
“Whose car would that have been?” Agnes asked pleasantly.
What followed was not a confession so much as a slow, uncomfortable unwrapping. Geoffrey had, it emerged, promised the Cranmere’s hamper to his sister-in-law before the fete opened, on the grounds that she had admired it the previous week and that he could, in his capacity as chairman, arrange for it to be set aside. A replacement box of biscuits and cordial, assembled that morning from Geoffrey’s own kitchen cupboards, had been substituted. The draw had not yet taken place. Technically, he explained, no harm was done.
“The harm,” Agnes said, without raising her voice at all, “is that fifty-three people bought raffle tickets believing they were in with a chance of winning something worth ninety-five pounds, not a tin of shortbread and a bottle of elderflower pressé.”
Geoffrey’s comb-over seemed to wilt slightly in the afternoon warmth.
Agnes gave him until half past two. At twenty-nine minutes past, Geoffrey’s dark green estate pulled back along the lane, and the hamper was reinstated on the raffle table. Geoffrey made a brief announcement about a display error now resolved, and the assembled villagers, most of whom had no idea anything had happened, applauded mildly and returned to the coconut shy.
The draw was made at three o’clock. Agnes did not win. The Stilton went to a retired plumber from the new houses on Carver Road, who shook the hamper with visible delight.
She walked home through the green as the stalls were beginning to pack up, the bunting still sagging between the elms, one triangle of yellow fabric twisted back on itself so that it showed only its pale, unprinted side. A small error in an otherwise orderly display. She straightened it with two fingers as she passed beneath, pressing the fabric flat along the line.
It was a small enough thing. But small things, in Agnes Cloke’s experience, were almost always where you had to start.
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