I Capture the Castle

  “But how can one know?”

  “By filling it oneself.”

  “With faith ?”

  “With faith. I expect you find that another boring word. And I warn you this slot-machine metaphor is going to break down at any moment. But if ever you’re feeling very unhappy-which you obviously aren’t at present, after all the good fortune that’s come to your family recently—well, try sitting in an empty church.”

  “And listening for a whiff?”

  We both laughed and then he said that it was just as reasonable to talk of smelling or tasting God as of seeing or hearing Him.

  “If one ever has any luck, one will know with all one’s senses—and none of them. Probably as good a way as any of describing it is that we shall “come over all queer.”” “But haven’t you already ?”

  He sighed and said the whiffs were few and far between.

  “But the memory of them everlasting,” he added softly. Then we fell silent, both of us staring at the fire. Rain kept falling down the chimney, making little hissing noises. I thought what a good man he is, yet never annoyingly holy. And it struck me for the first time that if such a clever, highly educated man can believe in religion, it is almost impudent of an ignorant person like me to feel bored and superior about it—for I realized that it wasn’t only the word “God” that made me feel like that.

  I wondered if I was an atheist. I have never thought of myself as one, and sometimes on very lovely days I have felt almost sure there is something somewhere. And I pray every night, though I think my prayers are only like wishing on the new moon -not quite, though: I pray just in case there is a God. (i haven’t prayed about my misery over Simon because I mustn’t ask that he shall love me, and I won’t ask that I shall stop loving him—I’d rather die.) Certainly I never felt any sense of communion with God while praying-the only flicker of that I ever had was during those few minutes I wandered round King’s Crypt cathedral at sunset, and it went off when I heard our head-mistress’s voice droning on about the Saxon remains. Sitting there with the Vicar, I tried to recapture my feelings in the cathedral, but they merged into the memory of the cathedral-like the avenue I saw when I was describing Midsummer Eve—and then the cathedral, the avenue, my love for Simon and myself writing about all these in the attic were in my mind together, each enclosed in its own light and yet each one part of the other. And all the time, I was staring into the Vicar’s fire.

  I didn’t come to earth until the church clock struck the half-hour. Then I jumped up to go—and got invited to stay and lunch;

  but I felt I ought to get back to cook Father his meal.

  While the Vicar was helping me on with my raincoat, he asked me to look in at the church in case he had left the vestry window open and the rain was driving in. Actually, we found the rain had stopped, but he still wanted the window shut;

  he said it was sure to start pouring again, probably just as he was beginning his after-luncheon nap. He stood watching me as I ran across the churchyard-I gave him one last wave before I went into the church by the little side door. As I closed it behind me, it struck me as almost funny that he had sent me into a church, even advised me how to get consolation from religion, without having the faintest idea I was in need of it.

  The window wasn’t open, after all. As I came from the vestry, I thought: “Well, here you are in an empty church —you’d better give it a chance.” I was close to the altar so I had a good look at it. The brasses and the altar-cloth seemed quite extraordinarily meaningless to me. The white roses were fresh but rain-battered;

  they had the utterly still look that altar flowers always have—everything about the altar seemed unnaturally still..” austere, withdrawn.

  I thought, “I don’t feel helped or comforted at all.” Then I remembered the Vicar’s nice, fat voice saying: “Sit—listen.” He had told me not to pray, and as looking at an altar always seems to turn my thoughts to prayers, I sat on the steps and looked towards the main body of the church. I listened hard.

  I could hear rain still pouring from the gutters and a thin branch scraping against one of the windows; but the church seemed completely cut off from the restless day outside—just as I felt cut off from the church. I thought: “I am a restlessness inside a stillness in side a restlessness.”

  After a minute or so, the enclosed silence began to press on my ears—I thought at first that this was a good sign, but nothing interesting happened. Then I remembered what the Vicar had said about knowing God with all one’s senses, so I gave my ears a rest and tried my nose. There was a smell of old wood, old carpet hassocks, old hymn books—a composite musty, dusty smell; no scent from the cold altar roses and yet there was a faint, stuffy sweetness around the altar—I found it came from the heavily embroidered cloth. I tried my sense of taste next, but naturally it only offered a lingering of madeira and biscuits. Touch:

  just the cold stone of the steps. As for sight-well of course there was plenty to see: the carved rood-screen, the great de Godys tomb, the high pulpit-which managed to look both particularly empty and slightly rebuking. Oh, I noticed dozens of things, many of them beautiful, but nothing beyond sight came in by the eyes. So I closed them-the Vicar had said “All senses—and none of them” and I thought that perhaps if I made my mind a blank I have often tried-I once had an idea it was the way to foresee the future, but I never got any further than imagining blackness.

  Sitting on the altar steps, I saw a blacker blackness than ever before, and I felt it as well as saw it—tons of darkness seemed to be pressing on me. Suddenly I remembered a line in a poem by Vaughan: “There is in God (some say) a deep but dazzling darkness” -and the next second, the darkness exploded into light.

  “Was that God—did it really happen?” I asked myself.

  But the honest part of my mind answered: “No. You imagined it.”

  Then the clock up above boomed the three-quarters, filling the air with sound.

  I opened my eyes and was back in a beautiful, chilly, stuffy church that didn’t seem to care whether I lived or died.

  The clock made me realize that I was going to be late with Father’s lunch, so I ran most of the way home—only to find that he had helped himself to food (the cold meat looked as if he had carved it with a trowel) and gone out. As his bicycle was missing, I guessed he had ridden over to Scoatney. I took a chance on getting my face right in time for tea and had a very good cry, with cake and milk afterwards; and felt so much better than I usually do, even after crying, that I wondered if I really had come by some little whiff of God while I was in the church.

  But the next morning, the weight on my heart was the worst I had ever known. It didn’t move at all while I got our breakfasts, and by the time Stephen and Thomas had gone and Father had shut himself in the gatehouse, it was so bad that I found myself going round leaning against walls— I can’t think why misery makes me lean against walls, but it does. For once, I didn’t feel like crying;

  I wanted to shriek. So I ran out in the rain to an empty field a long way from anywhere and screamed blue murder; and then felt quite extraordinarily silly-and so very wet.

  I had a sudden desire to be sitting with the kind Vicar by his fire, drinking madeira again, and as I was almost half-way to Godsend as the crow flies, I went on, scrambling through hedges and ditches. I kept trying to think of a good excuse for this second visit—the best I could manage was that I had been caught out without my raincoat and was frightened of taking a chili—but I was really past minding what the Vicar or anyone else thought of me, if only I could get to the warm fire and the madeira.

  And then, when I arrived at the vicarage, there was no one in.

  I stood there ringing the bell and banging on the door, feeling I could somehow make someone be there, yet knowing all the time that I couldn’t. “Shall I crawl into the church and wait?” I wondered, coming down the streaming garden path. But just then, Mrs.

  Jakes called across from “The Keys” that the Vicar and his
housekeeper were shopping in King’s Crypt and wouldn’t be home until the evening.

  I ran over and asked if she would trust me for the price of a glass of port. She laughed, and said she couldn’t legally sell me a drink before twelve o’clock but she would give me one as a present.

  “And, my goodness, you need it,” she said, as I followed her into the bar.

  “You’re wet through. Take that dress off and I’ll dry it by the kitchen fire.”

  There was a man mending the sink in the kitchen so I couldn’t sit in there without my dress; but she bolted the door of the bar and said she would see that no one came through from the kitchen.

  I handed my gym-dress over and sat up at the bar in my vest and black school knickers, drinking my port.

  The port was nice and warming, but I don’t think old country bars are very cheerful places; there is something peculiarly depressing about the smell of stale beer. If I had been in a good mood, I might have liked the thought of villagers drinking there for three hundred years; but as it was, I kept thinking of how dreary their lives must have been, and that most of them were dead. There was a looking-glass at the back of the bar, facing the window, and reflected in it I could see the wet tombstones in the churchyard. I thought of the rain going down, down to the sodden coffins.

  And all the time my wet hair kept dripping down my back inside my vest.

  However, by the time I finished the port I was less violently miserable. I just felt lumpish and my eyes kept getting fixed on things.

  I found myself staring at the bottles of creme de menthe and cherry brandy that Rose and I had our drinks out of on May Day.

  suddenly I felt the most bitter hatred for Rose’s green creme de menthe and a deep affection for my ruby cherry brandy.

  I went to the kitchen door and put my head round.

  “Please, Mrs. Jakes,” I called, “can I have a cherry brandy? It’s striking twelve now, so I can owe you for it without breaking the law.”

  She came and got it for me, and after she put the bottle back I could gloat over there being more gone out of it than out of the creme de menthe bottle.

  “Now everyone will think the cherry brandy’s the popular one,” I thought. Then two old men came knocking at the door, wanting their beer, and Mrs.

  Jakes whisked me and my drink out of the bar.

  “You can wait in Miss Marcy’s room,” she said.

  “Your dress won’t be dry for quite a while yet.”

  Miss Marcy has an upstairs room at the inn, well away from the noise of the bar. Ever since she came to Godsend she has talked of having her own cottage, but year after year she stays on at “The Keys” and I don’t think she will ever move now.

  Mrs. Jakes makes her very comfortable and the inn is so handy for the school.

  As I climbed the stairs I was surprised to find how wobbly my legs were. I said to myself, “Poor child, I’m more exhausted than I realized.” It was a relief to sit down in Miss Marcy’s wicker armchair—except that it was much lower than I expected; I spilt a valuable amount of cherry brandy. I finished the rest of it with deep satisfaction—each time I took a sip I thought, “That’s one in the eye for the creme de menthe.” And then the very confusing thought struck me that generally green is my color and pink is Rose’s, so the liqueurs were all mixed up and silly. And then I wondered if I was a little bit drunk. I had a look at myself in Miss Marcy’s dressing-table glass and I looked awful-my hair was in rats’-tails, my face was dirty and my expression simply maudlin. For no reason at all, I grinned at myself, Then I began to think: “Who am I his Who am I ?” Whenever I do that, I feel one good push would shove me over the edge of lunacy; so I turned away from the glass and tried to get my mind off myself—I did it by taking an interest in Miss Marcy’s room.

  It really is fascinating—all her personal possessions are so very small. The pictures are postcard reproductions of Old Masters. She has lots of metal animals about an inch long, little wooden shoes, painted boxes only big enough to hold stamps. And what makes things look even tinier than they are is that the room is large, with great oak beams, and all Mrs. Jakes’s furniture is so huge.

  While I was examining the miniature Devon pitchers on the mantelpiece (five of them, with one wild flower in each), the glow from the cherry brandy wore off-probably because the wind down the chimney was blowing right through my knickers. So I wrapped myself in the quilt and lay on the bed. I was on the fringe of sleep when Miss Marcy arrived home for her lunch.

  “You poor, poor child,” she cried, coming over to put her hand on my forehead.

  “I wonder if I ought to take your temperature ?”

  I told her there was nothing wrong with me but strong drink.

  She giggled and blinked and said “Well, reely!” and I suddenly felt very world-worn and elderly in comparison with her. Then she handed me my gym-dress and got me some hot water. After I had washed I felt quite normal, except that the whole morning lay on my conscience in a dreary, shaming sort of way.

  “I must dash home,” I said.

  “I’m half-an-hour late with Father’s lunch already.”

  “Oh, your Father’s at Scoatney again,” said Miss Marcy.

  “They’re giving him a nice, thick steak.” She had heard from Mrs. Jakes, who had heard from the butcher, who had heard from the Scoatney cook.

  “So you can stay and have your lunch with me.

  Mrs. Jakes is going to send up enough for two.”

  She has her meals on trays, from the inn kitchen, but she keeps things she calls “extra treats” in the big mahogany corner-cupboard.

  “I like to nibble these at night,” she said as she was getting some biscuits out.

  “I always wake up around two o’clock and fancy some thing to eat.”

  I had a flash of her lying in the wide, sagging bed, watching the moonlit square of the lattice window while she crunched her biscuits.

  “Do you lie awake long?” I asked.

  “Oh, I generally hear the church clock strike the quarter. Then I tell myself to be a good girl and go back to sleep.

  I usually make up some nice little story until I drop off.”

  “What sort of story ?”

  “Oh, not real stories, of course. Sometimes I try to imagine what happens to characters in books-after the books finish, I mean. Or I think about the interesting people I know—dear Rose shopping in London, or Stephen being photographed by that kind Mrs. Fox.

  Cotton. I love making up stories about people.”

  “Don’t you ever make them up about yourself?”

  She looked quite puzzled. “Do you know, I don’t believe I ever do his I suppose I don’t find myself very interesting.”

  There was a thump on the door and she went to take the tray in.

  Mrs. Jakes had sent up stew and apple pie.

  “Oh, good,” said Miss Marcy.

  “Stew’s so comforting on a rainy day.”

  As we settled down to eat, I said how extraordinary it must be not to find oneself interesting.

  “Didn’t you ever, Miss Marcy ?”

  She thought, while she finished an enormous mouthful.

  “I think I did when I was a girl. My dear Mother always said I was very self-centered. And so discontented!”

  I said: “You aren’t now. What changed you?”

  “God sent me a real grief, dear.” Then she told me that her parents had died within a month of each other, when she was seven teen, and how dreadfully she had felt it.

  “Oh, dear, I couldn’t believe the sun would ever shine again.

  Then our local clergyman asked me to help with some children he was taking into the country-and, do you know, it worked a miracle for me his I suppose that was the beginning of finding others more interesting than myself.”

  “It wouldn’t work a miracle for me,” I said, “—I mean, if I were ever unhappy.”

  She said she thought it would in the end; then asked me if I was missing Rose much. I
noticed she was looking at me rather searchingly, so I said “Oh yes,” very casually and talked brightly about Rose’s trousseau and how happy I was for her, until we heard children’s voices under the window as they trooped back to school. Then Miss Marcy jumped up and powdered her nose very white with a tiny powder-puff out of a cardboard box.

  “It’s singing this afternoon,” she said.

  “We always look forward to that.”

  I thought of the singing on May Day, and of Simon, so embarrassed and so kind, making his speech to the children.

  Oh, lovely day-before he had proposed to Rose! We went downstairs and I thanked Mrs.

  Jakes for everything, including the loan of the cherry brandy. (a shilling—and that was a reduced price. Drink is ruinous.) The rain had stopped, but it was still very gray and chilly.

  “I hope it cheers up by Saturday,” said Miss Marcy, as we dodged the drips from the chestnut tree, “because I’m giving the children a picnic. I suppose, dear, you couldn’t find time to help me? You’d think of such splendid games.”

  “I’m afraid I’m a bit busy at the castle,” I said quickly—the children were screaming over some game in the playground and I didn’t feel I could stand an afternoon of that.

  “How thoughtless of me! Of course you have your hands full at the weekends—with the boys home to be looked after as well as your Father. Perhaps you have some free time in these long, light evenings-some of the old folks do love to be read to, you know.”

  I stared at her in astonishment. Neither Rose nor I have ever gone in for that sort of thing; incidentally, I don’t believe the villagers really like good works being done to them. Miss Marcy must have noticed my expression because she went on hurriedly: “Oh, it was just an idea. I thought it might take you out of yourself a bit-if you’re finding life dull without Rose.”

  “Not really,” I said, brightly—and heaven knows, one can’t call misery dull, exactly. Dear Miss Marcy, little did she know I had more than missing Rose on my mind. Just then, some children came up with a frog in a cardboard box, so she said good-bye and went off with them to the pond to watch it swim.