‘There’s nothing to be frightened of. She’ll be better in a minute. She gets these attacks sometimes, it’ll pass. It’s nerves.’
The voice was chanting, more faintly now.
‘Go … so dim here … dim … can’t see … but soon see with her eyes … ah – ah – ah only light on the tunnel … grass … so green … so … Can’t go there you fool. Never go there. You fool.’
It ceased abruptly and there was complete silence. No-one moved until Annie dared to drag a hand across her face to wipe away her streaming tears of terror. Mr Fisher suddenly gave her feet a sharp push, freeing himself.
‘Peggy?’ said Mrs Pearson’s voice faintly out of the dimness. ‘I dropped off, I’m so sorry, everyone, I was dreaming.’
‘Dreaming!’ Gladys exclaimed, very ready to welcome this explanation. She was chilled, inwardly and outwardly, by the cold that had checked the fire’s warmth and the uncanny breezes that had stirred the paper-chains. ‘Of course you were – feeling bad, are you? or better for your forty winks? I shouldn’t wonder if it wasn’t that tinned pudding, say what you like it’s not natural. Tinned pudding.’ She gave a nervous laugh.
‘Put the light on, Peggy dear,’ Mrs Pearson went on tranquilly, ‘you’ll have to be going, you’ll be late. Erika, schatz, wake up.’
Their eyes, fixed on the outline of her dim reclining shape, saw her hand steal out and rest on Erika’s bent head, ‘It’s tea-time – “would-you-like-your-tea-now”,’ she coaxed softly. ‘We’ve got a Christmas cake.’
Peggy suddenly flooded the room with light, and Erika went off docilely towards the kitchen.
The explanation offered by the familiar word dreaming, with its lifelong connotation for them all of nightmares and garbled speech, has soothed some of the party. Gladys felt a glow of anticipation, in spite of her distended person, at the mention of Christmas cake, and Annie, glancing at Mr Fisher, experienced a revival of the friendly feelings momentarily quenched by his abrupt movement.
Mr Fisher, however, did not seem restored. He was even paler than usual, and continued to gaze silently at the floor. In a moment, while preparations were being made for tea, he tottered slowly to his feet and made his way perilously and silently between chairs and coffee-table to where Mrs Pearson sat.
He began slowly to incline himself above her, performing a bow so deep that Gladys, idly watching, was on the verge of screaming, ‘Watch out, Mr Fisher!’ in anticipation of his overbalancing when he began tremulously to come up again.
‘Thank you indeed, madam,’ he said in his weak voice. ‘A very pleasant party and a very agreeable occasion. Hospitality. Unfortune, I must be off now. My daily walk. Even Christmas I don’t miss it so will say good-afternoon and many thanks. The dinner was much appreciated. Turkey. Many a year since turkey. Good-day, all.’
Turning, he tottered away, so slowly that Gladys had to resist a second impulse to grab him and arm him out of the room and into the hall, where they heard him, through the half-open door, slowly climbing the stairs.
‘Just go and see what young Erika’s up to,’ announced Gladys; it was the first opportunity she had had for being alone with the interesting newcomer; ‘shan’t be not a tick. You and Peggy can keep Mrs Pearson company,’ she added to Annie, who fixed a glare of the liveliest alarm on her hostess at the suggestion. Peggy slowly lit a cigarette, looking thoughtfully at her mother.
The kitchen looked less gloomy than usual, scattered as it was with the remains of the Christmas dinner and the various packets and cartons that had contained it. Erika was standing by the cooker, twisting her hands together and staring vacantly at the kettle on the hot plate.
She looked up not quite smiling as Gladys marched in. The past days had taught Erika something; in this house that was like a shop window people did not suddenly hit you, and although she understood perhaps a sixteenth of Gladys’s Niagara of words, she felt dimly that they were something that was not directed adversely at herself: she had no concept or words to express kind.
‘Just on the boil is it?’ began Gladys. ‘Don’t like these ’lectric stoves, never did, you can’t trust them, give me gas any day, you can see what it’s up to, and takes all night and blow you up if you get water on it, she swore by it, had the latest kind, but I never could, I’ll just put the cups on the tray, how many are we, you, me, Annie, and Mrs P. four, s’pose Peggy’ll be off; the old gentleman’s gone out, very arbitary, can’t stop him if he makes up his mind, can you? You come from far off? Germany? Ger-ma-ny? Dootch?’
Glady’s intention to act kindly by Erika did not affect a determination to find out everything possible about her.
Erika nodded. ‘Germany, ja,’ she almost whispered.
‘All your family – people – dad and mum –’ Gladys swerved hastily from dead and, instead, pointed upwards with a lightening assumption of solemnity. Erika stared, then slowly nodded.
‘Sad,’ said Gladys, swooping on the kettle, ‘give us the tea – that’s right – shan’t be long now – Nana bring you up, then?’
Then, as this was met only by a stare – ‘Nana – Nan – your grannie. She bring you up?’
Some memory stirred in Erika’s skull of another conversation resembling this one; there had been someone who neither shouted nor threatened nor pushed her aside, who had asked her about grössmutter and grössvater, talking slowly to her in a quiet, clean room.
‘Grossmütter,’ she said, while she struggled with the cellophane wrappings round the cake, ‘I – go – wiz – her und grössvater. Heim.’ She shook her head. ‘Nein.’
‘Then where’s she now, then?’ Gladys again sharply pointed upwards, ‘Passed on?’ Curiosity had temporarily driven the kindness from her face; her expression was all Must Know.
‘Altersheim,’ and as the unintelligible word came out Gladys saw, to her dismay, tears rise suddenly into the small eyes, while out came an unsteady sob.
‘Here, here, cheer up’ – Gladys seized the cake and tore off its wrappings with a hand contemptuous of modern packaging – ‘if she’s passed on she’s all right, God’ll be taking care of her. Had her life. Glad of a rest, I’ll be bound.’
Erika could only shake her head, swallowing her numb grief, but an emotion that was not disagreeable overcame her as Gladys suddenly thrust a thick old arm about her shoulders, nearly overbalancing her, and bestowed what children once called ‘a hug and a kiss’.
‘There! Soon be better. Now you take the cake and I’ll take the tray and off we go on the road to Zigazag.’
Erika, comforted, picked up the cake and followed her through the connecting door.
They met Mr Fisher shuffling down the stairs, and Gladys hailed him.
‘You off out, Mr Fisher? Look what we got, you’re missing something nice, won’t you change your mind? Freezing outside and they say it’s going to snow, I’m dreaming of a White Christmas, White Boxing Day it’ll be instead, won’t it, not that they’re always right, beats me how they can guess it right at all.’
The old man shook his head. ‘It’s kind of you to suggest it, but you know I never miss my daily walk. I could never have kept my health, not if I hadn’t ’ad my daily walk all these years.’
‘Pitch dark and snowing,’ cried Gladys dramatically, pausing with the tea-tray at the door, and Mr Fisher shook his head with the faintest of smiles.
‘Not yet, Miss Gladys. It’s a clear night.’
Gladys made a gesture implying ‘wilful man must have his way’ as best she could, being hampered by her burden, and he went out.
But the thin grey clouds of the early evening had thickened and grown yellow and now hung low over the little houses with their brightly lit rooms, while innocent blasts of wind, born only of earth, stirred the paper-chains through ill-fitting window-frames. On the corner of Rose Walk the old man met a fierce blast, pure and icy and fanged – the herald of the snow, and, walking ever slower, by the time he had reached the corner where Saint James’s Church stood, he was bre
athing painfully and his limbs were trembling.
The church was lit, its windows glowed dim rose and blue and gold and the door stood ajar. He hesitated for a moment, looking up at the spire soaring against the threatening sky. Then he began to shuffle at a creeping pace across the churchyard grass towards the open door.
17
The Rev. Gerald Corliss had some difficulty in preventing an exclamation of ‘Good!’ when the vicar warned him that Evensong, said instead of sung on Christmas Night, would probably take place in an empty church.
Mr Geddes had added, firmly, that he would not be present.
His plan for bringing his mother down from Yorkshire to keep house for himself and the curate had at last, and very suddenly, been put into action. She had arrived on the day before Christmas Eve; and Mr Geddes decided that he owed her a quiet time.
He was going to sit by the fire with her on Christmas Night and nibble something appropriate, and gossip. He did not add ‘What is a curate for?’ but Gerald sensed the remark poised on his tongue’s tip.
So Gerald read the service to himself in the darkened church, the wind slapping and shaking sixty feet up in the dim curves of the roof and two lamps shining gently over the altar in the side chapel and its white flowers and evergreens.
In the pauses, when the congregation should have given responses, the silence seemed to him not empty but filled with the invisible presences whose company he so much preferred to that of human beings; and he listened to it, lingering over the words and over the unheard voices that answered them. It was an hour of peace for him – delicious, he feared, was the word.
Though the light faded off into obscurity near the door, it nevertheless did not leave the far end of the church in complete darkness, and during one of his long dreaming stares towards this region he gradually became aware of a figure slumped in one of the pews. He felt not the slightest suggestion of its belonging to another world; indeed, something in its posture gave it the painful, weary stamp that belongs peculiarly to earth, and he supposed that it was one of Saint James’s devout elderly ladies, who had crept out through the flaying wind to do her last Christmas duty that day.
Only – the ladies of Saint James’s did not slump.
The last moments of Gerald’s Christmas Day Evensong were not such pure delight as the first; he felt the presence of that figure, so different from the happy Unseens who had answered in the silence, and he also felt it would be his duty to go and say something to it.
The service over, and a prayer for patience and forgiveness offered up, he walked swiftly down the aisle towards the doors, peering, as he approached it, at the half-reclining figure.
In a moment, he recognized the old man brought to the Vicarage some weeks ago by Mr Geddes. He seemed to be asleep.
He gently touched the old boy’s shoulder. It was irritating that he could not recall his name; he did remember Mr Geddes using one, but that was all.
‘Er … wake up … er …’ And then, as frustration and a little anxiety grew – ‘er … hi …’
Leaving his task for a moment, he darted across to the switchboard near the door and flooded the church with light. How ugly it looked … Oh damn. What use am I, Lord?
In his absence, the old man had awakened. His faded eyes stared up solemnly and his lips moved uncertainly.
‘Just dropped off … no ’arm done.’
‘Of course not,’ said Gerald heartily. His voice, pitched louder than usual because of presumed deafness, echoed desolately back from the lit emptiness. The next thing was to get the old chap out of here and on his way home – but how the wind was thundering overhead! The church seemed filled with the twelve sons of Aeolus now …
‘It’s a very cold night, I think snow’s coming. Now how are you going to get home?’
‘The name this month is Benjamin Jowett,’ said Mr Fisher mildly, ‘if you should wish to use a name. The real name is Lancelot Fisher. But you may take your choice.’
‘Suppose we stick to the real name, it’s easier. Now – about getting home. Look here, we’re in luck – I’ve got the use of a friend’s car, he’s gone to France for Christmas, it’s in the Vicarage garden – I can run you back. You come with me and I’ll have you home in – where do you live? Near here?’
He felt that the interview was going rather well. He had banished the bewilderment aroused by Mr Fisher’s assumption of the great classical scholar’s name as firmly as he had banished the twelve sons of Aeolus, and there seemed a fair prospect of an act of human kindness getting done. But—
‘Now I do ’appen to be here,’ said Mr Fisher, slightly rearranging himself so as to present an appearance more suitable to his surroundings, ‘there’s somethink I would wish to take you into my confidence. Worrying – like.’
‘Oh?’ was all Gerald could find to answer. Had he been wearing boots, his heart would have made the familiar descent. ‘Er … some trouble about … funds … money, is it?’
‘No, it isn’t funds. You must be surprised, sir, but that is not the worry. I got my pension and something from the Board of Assistance and … I make a bit every day by my handiwork. I don’t suppose you seen my handiwork? Model figures and that?’
The curate shook his head. Patience, he told himself, and suddenly, wildly, wanted to laugh. The brightly-lit hollow in which they sat, thundering faintly with the threatening blast, the crowded silence all around them, and the old creature’s half-dignified, half-pompous manner, and now the sudden intrusion of handiwork, had induced mild hysteria.
‘I ’aven’t none about me this evening or I would show you.’
‘Another time, I hope … What is the trouble, then?’
Mr Fisher leant forward and spoke in a voice so lowered that Gerald had to lean forward as well to catch the words.
‘Our house, where I live, that is, has recent been bought by one of them property speculators, what uneducated people call a rackman. (Because of that case in the papers. You will recall, being an educated young man.) Bought it for his wife, a Mrs Pearson. Very delicate, and goes about in ’er dressing-gown all day. Kind enough. ’Ad us all in the house down to a party this evening and sent us up a turkey dinner. Very enjoyable, it was.’
He paused; divided, Gerald thought, between recollections of the turkey dinner and an attempt to control wandering thoughts.
‘Yes – well. That all sounds very nice,’ he encouraged. ‘This Mrs Pearson is your new landlady, then?’
‘Presume-ably. Yes, presumably. But in very bad health. Looks like a walking corpse you would say, if you could see her –’ (I’m sure I shouldn’t, thought Gerald irrelevantly.) ‘Kind enough, oh yes. Kind enough. But – a lost soul, I would say, myself.’
The words, almost sighed out and accompanied by a solemn and questioning glance from the pale old eyes, banished every trace of Gerald’s desire to laugh.
A lost soul!
It must have been many years since the words had been spoken from the pulpit at the far end of the church or said in private conversation anywhere, or used without mockery in any novel or on any stage.
But to the priest of three months’ standing they came home with their ancient force. Their power was such that it called out in him an authority he did not know he possessed. He said instantly:
‘No soul is lost. You mustn’t say that.’
Mr Fisher’s solemn expression vanished – to be replaced by one of that obstinacy invariably associated with mules.
‘Oh mustn’t I?’ he said, with as much tartness as his near-century-old voice could summon. ‘I suppose I can have my own views, I suppose I’m entitled to them? It still being a free country.’
‘I meant that the mercy of God is infinite. No soul is ever lost.’
‘I don’t believe in no God. I hates the brute.’
It took Gerald’s breath. He could only stare. The gentleness of Mr Fisher’s usual manner, combined with an aura of reasonableness that seemed to surround him, made the words astonishing – a
nd Gerald had an instantaneous depressing conviction that, at ninety, no change of heart was likely. Before he was aware of what he was going to say, he heard his own voice, with the true priestly sharpness:
‘It makes no difference whether you believe in Him or not. He is – and no soul is ever lost.’
‘I should say different. In this case. If you was to see her you’d say different too. I know you’re an educated man – and a parson – and you got to say what they teach you. But I got my right to my beliefs. Free-will,’ Mr Fisher ended triumphantly. ‘Same as you have.’
But he did not pause to let this sink in. He hurried on – ‘And that isn’t all. This afternoon, it’s not two hours ago, we was all sitting round the fire. Down in her place. As natural and comferable as you like. And – off she went.’ He nodded twice. ‘Like that,’ a feeble attempt at snapping fingers inside a thick woollen glove. ‘What they call a trance.’
For the second time, Gerald stared.
‘A kind of fit, do you mean?’ He supposed that the old man was mis-using the word. But Mr Fisher shook his head in some impatience.
‘Fit! No – I knows a fit when I sees one. My sister had fits. (Twelve of us, and five died, and one had fits.) This wasn’t no fit. Mrs Pearson breathed funny and she talked funny. In another voice. This wasn’t no fit. It was a trance.’
There was a pause. Mr Fisher appeared to sink into a reverie, staring down at the floor with his eyes half-shut, while Gerald studied him, in perplexity and irritation. All he wanted to do was to bundle the old creature into Paul’s Mini-Minor and run him back to whatever den he lived in.
But the words a lost soul had sunk into his own soul. It might be only the dramatic language of the uneducated – but for him it possessed compulsion. He must learn more about this Mrs Pearson who spoke ‘in another voice’, and then – God give him wisdom – try to see her. It might merely be a case for psychiatric treatment. He stifled a sigh, and said:
‘“Another voice”, you say … what kind of a voice?’
Mr Fisher slowly raised his head. He looked very tired.