Judgment Day

  Sydney emptied the trug, put it down and straightened up. He looked over the fence at the Bryans' rank and brimming garden, where all things contended and the more strident elements won: elder and couch grass and bindweed and thistle. He looked at Shirley Bryan. He said, “You'll take the boy with you, then?”

  “That's right. He'll amuse himself on the beach, he won't be any trouble, and there'll always be someone to keep an eye if we want to go off to discos and that—it's a two-star hotel, it should be really nice. Rick's friend's in the car-rental business, he's got this firm in north London. His marriage went bust too, Judy says.”

  Sydney cleared his throat. “If the boy's not all that keen—if he's not set on going, that is—he could stop here with me.”

  Shirley stared. “Are you sure, Mr. Porter? That's ever so kind. I don't know … Fact is, it wouldn't be all that much fun for him, I daresay—tagging along with the four of us. I mean, I said to Judy, well, he's no trouble, he's a quiet kid, always has been, but the fact is we'd be a lot easier without him.”

  Sydney said, “Ask him what he'd like.”

  “Yes. Yes. I'll do that. It's really kind. You're sure?”

  “It's a question of what he'd like. The boy. It's up to him.”

  * * *

  “Thank heaven,” said Clare, “for full-time compulsory education.”

  “Have they been getting you down?”

  “Oh, not really. I dote on them, as you well know. More coffee? What are you doing today?”

  “Gingering up British industry. At least that will be the intention.”

  “How nice it must be to live in the real world. I shall be arranging for the delivery of frock coats and agricultural smocks from a theatrical costumier.”

  “Ah. The pageant. How's that going?”

  “Engagingly dotty. Nevertheless, I now know more about the cost of temporarily wiring and spot lighting the interior of a parish church than anyone in central England.”

  “You must be heaven-sent, from their point of view.”

  “There are those that have their doubts. Miss Bellingham would gladly see me consigned to hell—I should imagine she's been putting in a word or two in the right quarters about that already. And George Radwell is a problem.”

  “I can see he would get on the nerves.”

  “It's not just that. I'm afraid he has inappropriate feelings where I am concerned.”

  “I beg your pardon, love?”

  “He would like,” said Clare conversationally, “to go to bed with me.”

  Peter laughed, at length.

  “I'm glad you take it so lightly.”

  “Do you want me to have a stern word with him?”

  “No, thank you. I shall manage.”

  “You must admit, it's amusing.”

  “Oh, hilarious. Here am I, who might be thought of as fairly privileged, and there is he.”

  “A Church of England vicar,” said Peter, “though admittedly not among the affluent, would not usually be thought of as deeply deprived.”

  “I wasn't talking about his income. Or mine. I was talking about being inadequate and knowing you are inadequate and failing to attract anything more vital than indifference from other people and probably knowing that too. And having presumably the normal instincts toward love and lust and other kinds of emotional participation but apparently neither wife nor children nor family nor friends. Nobody ever goes into the vicarage except on church business.”

  “I thought you didn't like him.”

  “I don't think I do. That doesn't preclude guilt.”

  “Guilt, with you, my girl, is a form of self-indulgence.”

  “It's a good thing I'm fond of you,” said Clare, “or I'd clock you one.”

  “Why not just accept things and be thankful?”

  “Some of us,” she said sweetly, “are more complex in our responses,”

  He got up. “Well, prosaic fellow that I am, I'd better get stuck into the daily round. I hope you manage to fend off your admirers. Mind, I don't blame them, as I've often pointed out myself your…”

  “Go away,” said Clare. “Go and get on with some industrial mismanagement.”

  She sat in the empty kitchen, reading the newspaper. A ten-mile traffic jam on the M4 made the front page; elsewhere, more briefly, fire killed five children in a Nottingham terrace house, hundreds died in Indian floods.

  Later, she looked out of the window at the Green and saw that the two tasteful slatted cedar litter bins had been overturned and their contents flung around the grass. The motorbike boys had been through again in the night. She had woken to hear them roaring past—once, twice, three times, circling the Green. She had got out of bed, infuriated, with vague notions of telephoning the police, and had seen their lights disappearing in the direction of Spel-bury; the smell of high-octane fuel drifted in and she closed the window. From across the landing Thomas called out and she went into his room.

  “What was that noise?”

  “Nothing. Some motorbikes. Go to sleep again.”

  He was barely awake. He rolled onto his side, eyes closed. “I love you.”

  “Good,” she said. “I love you too.”

  He sighed, asleep already. He had been playing with his models and lay, apparently without discomfort, in a midden of miniature bulldozers, fire-engines, racing cars, and cement mixers. She removed them and went back to bed.

  Looking now at the rubbish-strewn Green, she thought about these nocturnal visitations. They seemed like the unleashing of some elemental force, sinister and uncontrollable. It was hard to reduce them to the reality of a few restless, frustrated, destructive youths. The same people, no doubt, as handed her a pound of mince and four chops across the butcher's counter, or brushed against her in the supermarket, re-stocking shelves.

  Presently she went out and righted the bins, cleared up the mess.

  In the afternoon, when the children were back from school, Martin Bryan came across to play with them. After a while Clare found him sitting alone on the back doorstep. He looked white.

  “Are you O.K., Martin?”

  “I've got a stomachache.”

  “Come and sit down inside for a bit.”

  He huddled into a corner of the sofa, chewing his lip.

  “Perhaps it's something you've eaten.”

  He shook his head. “I often get stomachaches. Usually they go away.”

  “Does your mum know about them?”

  He muttered something, his head down.

  “Would you like a book to read?”

  “Could I put the telly on?”

  “Of course.”

  He lay there, staring at the set. Clare, at the desk, wrote to her parents and dealt with some bills. When she looked across at him again she saw that he had fallen asleep, slumped across the arm of the sofa, a thin child in jeans that were too baggy for him and a T-shirt from which grinned an inane face below the caption SUNNY JIM.

  * * *

  “Martin's dad,” announced Thomas, “has given him the most fantastic bike. It's got three speeds and a racing saddle and those bent back handlebars. It's fantastic. It's bright red and it cost more than fifty pounds. His dad had it sent from the bike shop in Spelbury. Martin didn't know he was going to get it. His dad's got to go away for a long time.”

  “Aren't you going to finish those sausages, Anna? Milk, Tom?”

  “Three speeds. And dynamo lights.”

  “That is not,” said Clare, “a fantastic bike. A fantastic bike would have wings and be able to talk. Kindly treat the language with respect.”

  “Fairy stories,” said Anna smugly, “are fantastic.”

  Thomas glared. “Copycat. That's what Mum said, you don't know it by yourself. Copycat, dirty rat!”

  “Shut up.”

  “This bike, this fantastic bike, has dynamo lights and special clips at the back for a carrier.”

  “Fantastic is things that aren't real, like fairy stories. So ha ha!”

&nbs
p; “Hush,” said Clare, “both of you. Turn your minds to something else, such as dessert, for which there is a choice of ice cream or stewed apricots, or conceivably both.”

  And she goes to the fridge, thinking with grief of Martin, who has a shiny new bike with three speeds and a racing saddle, and, with love and indulgence, of Thomas, who has a rusty old three-wheeler and does not know his own good fortune.

  * * *

  George. Not Mr. Radwell. George. They had stood there in the church, chatting about this and that, he holding the end of a tape measure for her, and she had called him George. “George,” she had said. “Of course I quite see your point, George.” He had told her, face to face, no mincing words, what he felt about her way of looking at things, and she'd said well, of course, George, but I see it like this … They'd had an interesting discussion, on a different level from the sort of thing he usually met up with. She'd been wearing a blue skirt and a sort of red shirt that pulled out when she reached up to measure something, leaving this slice of bare skin, bare soft skin. He would only have had to put a hand out and he could have touched it.

  “Weston-super-Mare. Or Bournemouth.”

  He jumped.

  Mrs. Tanner stood over him, thrusting a cup of tea. “I was saying we're reckoning on a holiday this year, seeing as I'm so much better. You're not quite with me this morning, are you, Vicar? I've sugared it for you.”

  “There's sea,” said George savagely, “at Weston-super-Mare and Bournemouth.”

  Mrs. Tanner looked at him with dignity. “They think at the clinic I'm doing so nicely I can probably take it. It'll be a challenge, the doctor says. It's tackling things little by little, that's the secret. Made any plans for your holidays yet, Vicar?”

  George muttered that he'd probably go up to Scarborough for a week or so to see his mother.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Tanner. “Well, that's quite pleasant I should imagine if you've nothing special arranged. I'll get going on the kitchen, then.”

  He would, as for the last five years, since Frank Brim-low with whom he was at college had married a fifty-year-old widow and ceased to be available for walking tours of the Lakes, spend a week in Scarborough and a weekend in Leeds. In Scarborough he would shuffle the length of the sea-front with his mother, watch the Test on television, and put new washers on her taps. In Leeds he would stay two nights with his other college friend, in a house rowdy with children, and wonder if his visits were indeed as welcome as they were made out to be.

  Last year, his mother had been in the hospital at the time of his visit. Gastric trouble. He went to see her daily, walking the length of the ward to the bed at the end in which she sat, wearing a salmon-colored nightdress. He found these walks excruciating, past the rows of swiveling eyes, the coveys of pretty, busy, confident nurses, the patients from whom sprouted disconcerting arrangements of tubes and colored plastic bags, at which he carefully did not look. His mother would inspect his daily offerings of grapes or flowers and take up the theme of complaint, criticism, and erosion of any signs of complacency. “That's a nice bunch of grapes. I wonder there aren't peaches in the shops yet. You'd do well to keep out of the sun, with your skin. I can see you've been out too long, you're shining like a beacon. It was the same when you were a child—no good letting you play hours on the beach like all the others, red and raw you'd be, and I'd be up all night with the calamine lotion.” Lowering her voice a little, she would embark on a rundown of her neighbors by social status and medical condition. “The one in the next bed's got a husband who's a racing driver. You meet all kinds, in hospital, it's interesting, I'll say that. I've not had an interesting life, your father was a stay-at-home sort of man, not ambitious either, he could have made more of himself, but he wouldn't set about it. And then with just the one child, and you were a quiet sort of boy, you kept to yourself a lot. I've not been extended. And with no grandchildren to take me out of myself.”

  George would sit, mainly silent. Visiting hours two-thirty to four.

  “The chaplain's very nice. He's a real live wire. He has the nurses in fits sometimes. He's young, of course, nice-looking fellow.”

  Dear Mother, he wrote, unfortunately I shan't be able to fit in my visit to you this summer. My new next-door neighbors, some people called Paling—I don't know if I mentioned them, he's an executive with United Electronics and she is an intelligent sort of woman, turning out a valuable helping hand over church matters—anyway, they've asked me to come along with them for a fortnight or so to this cottage they have in Wales. Peter may have to go off for a while on business and I daresay he feels he'd like to have someone around as company for Clare and the children. So, as I say, I'm afraid…

  Dear Mother, I will be up on Friday 27 th as planned, arriving Scarborough on the two-thirty train.

  * * *

  Martin sat in the place at the end of the garden, his old hiding place in the bushes from when he was young, and thought about it. Thought about what she'd said. Did he want to or didn't he? Did he want to go to Spain with her and Auntie Judy and some other people, or didn't he? Mr. Porter had said he could stay here with him if he liked.

  There would be a beach in Spain, and a swimming pool. Spain was abroad. You'd go in an aeroplane. Auntie Judy would be there. He didn't really like Auntie Judy very much: she giggled a lot and whispered things to Mum and she smelled of scent all the time. And Dad wasn't going to come, Mum said. When Martin had said, “Why? Why isn't he coming?” she'd said sharply, “Maybe we don't want him.” So he wasn't coming but these other people were.

  If he stayed here he could sleep in Mr. Porter's spare room and it would be all right. Mr. Porter didn't bother you, he just got on with things, but he knew good card tricks and he liked playing Halma and Attack! And he cooked good dinners, better than Mum actually; he'd stand at the stove with everything arranged round him just so, the fat and the salt and milk, frowning a bit and tutting if things weren't going right.

  He wanted to be with Mum, and yet at the same time he didn't. It made him feel funny, the way she was nowadays, the things she said; he was getting his stomachaches again.

  He thought he'd say he didn't want to go to Spain. He'd stay here and play cards with Mr. Porter and go over to Tom's house and ride the new bike round the Green. He'd got the new bike, anyway. The red bike. The bike Dad sent.

  Chapter Eleven

  “You're mincing,” said the lady from the drama group. She sprang athletically from her perch on the back of a pew and advanced on Ray Turnbull, the hairdresser, black-sideburned and tight-waistcoated as the Georgian squire. “You're behaving as though you were in drag. Give him a bit of machismo.” She strode down the nave, miming the virility of status. The Swing rioters slouched on the chancel steps.

  Miss Bellingham, in Puritan costume, voiced misgivings from the back of the church. “In York they used to do these mystery plays for the Festival. All very charming and medieval. I suggested something along those lines for us but of course no one else would hear of it.”

  “In the Middle Ages,” said Clare, “they boiled people in oil. They also dropped them off castles, impaled them, and flayed them alive. It wasn't universally charming.”

  Miss Bellingham, smoothing the crisp white Dacron of a cuff, remarked that some people had a passion for looking on the gloomy side of things.

  It was hot. Outside, the Green baked in torrid sunshine, the trees sagging in the still air, the tarmac sticky underfoot. Even the church had lost its stony coolness and felt clammy; its smell was different, too—no longer that universal church aroma of brass polish, damp hymnals, and dusty hassocks but a more pungent human smell of sweat and hair lacquer.

  Sydney Porter, coming in, was taken aback. Until this moment, the first costume rehearsal on the spot, with lighting and so forth, he hadn't quite reckoned what it would be like. He was reminded of concert parties at Portsmouth in the war: people in the mess done up in fancy dress for a song and dance routine. He joined Mrs. Paling, standing by a pillar at
the door, and watched Ray Turnbull stride up the nave once more and confront the rioters, strung out now behind the altar rail in attitudes of belligerence. He said doubtfully, “You can't help wondering if it's anything like it was—I mean, the actual time.”

  “Quite. Never mind. That's not the point, really.”

  Ray Turnbull muffed a line and there was general laughter. Sydney looked away and muttered something.

  “Sorry?”

  “I said you can't help feeling a bit it's not quite right, this sort of thing. Not respectful. After all it actually happened to those blokes, them that were shot, the ones that were sent to Tasmania.”

  “That's the awful thing about the past. It's true.”

  “You think,” Sydney went on after a moment, “about how it might have been you or me.”

  “Exactly.” They watched, together, as Ray Turnbull harangued the rioters. “Hold it,” said the lady from the drama group. “I'm not happy about the grouping. Can you shift left a bit, darling?”

  “But the thing is,” Clare continued, “that it's not much more of a manipulation or distortion than lots of other things. The past is always our own projection—in a sense it's quite unreal anyway.”

  Sydney grunted, non-committal.

  “Up to a point, we always invent it. I mean, the real past is no longer accessible, because you can never divest it of our own wisdoms and misconceptions. Like Miss Bellingham probably has Marks & Spencer's knickers on under her costume, and Ray Turnbul's forgotten to take his digital watch off.”

  Sydney shuffled awkwardly. He didn't know about Miss Bellingham's knickers, nor want to, and Mrs. Paling was getting a bit involved for his taste. “Well,” he said, “I'd better have a word with Mr. Radwell. This stuff should be through from the printers for the programs.” He moved away and stood waiting for the vicar to finish talking to one of the electricians, a boy in jeans and a purple T-shirt who squatted on the floor, unreeling flex and whistling through his teeth.