Sunshine, streaking slantwise through the clerestory windows, fell like spot lighting on the Doom wall painting so that Sydney saw its details more sharply than ever before: the gray spectral figures, the spry, grinning red devils. He didn't believe in hell himself, nor heaven either, not put like that. But, looking at the painting, he heard again the whine of bombs in Portsmouth harbor, the rattle of gunfire at sea, saw the smoking shell of Mansell Road. Beneath the crossing arch, Ray Turnbull and the Swing rioters played out their charade. Sydney wondered if this pageant had been all that good an idea after all. Well, they were into it now, and if it brought in the money, there was no harm done.
George could only follow one word in three of what the electrician said. Technicalities were compounded with colloquialisms. “The thing is,” said George, “we'd rather not have all these wires showing above the pulpit.” The boy nodded, intent on something else. “O.K., squire, not to worry.”
The church, draped in flex, resembled the wings of a stage; spotlights clustered like exotic fruit around the capitals and at the apex of windows. From time to time, as they were tested, one section or another of the building would leap into brilliant relief, even amid the hazy sunshine: pulpit, font, altar, or doorway. The whole place, George realized, had been skillfully transformed; it had become a setting, the backdrop for events. Uneasily, he wandered into the nave, noticing the changed smell and the unfamiliar noises; were it not that this kind of thing was a commonplace nowadays, and well thought of, he would have had qualms about the wisdom of it all. At St. Mary's in Spelbury they had concerts every first Saturday of the month, and St. Damian's at Tamerton had been given over for a fortnight last summer to that art exhibition for the festival: orange and scarlet plastic sculptures all down the aisle and the chancel hung with pictures made of raffia and bits of cut-up clothing. He stood staring at the lady from the drama group, who wore a long flowery skirt and what seemed to George to be the top half of a bathing costume. Beside him, Sydney Porter was saying something about programs.
* * *
The children, Thomas, Anna, and Martin, squatted behind the big stone tomb at the end of the churchyard and argued, halfheartedly, about what to do next.
Thomas said, “We could watch them playing dressing-up in the church.”
“It's not playing, you stupid. It's acting. They're acting real things that happened.”
Thomas, rolling on his back, sucked a grass stem. “Stupid yourself. That's a play. A thing people act is a play. So they're playing. So ha ha.”
“I'm thirsty,” said Anna.
“So am I thirsty.”
“We could go back to the house and get iced drinks from the fridge. She's in the church with the others, I saw her go in.”
“We could have a go on Martin's bike.”
“Can I have first go on your bike, Martin?”
And Martin, a person of subtly enhanced status, exercised carefully and fairly his powers of patronage. Presently, in the endless sultry evening, the children speed round and round the Green, in turn, on the red bike with a racing saddle and dynamo lights, while, within the church, their elders simulate emotion and involvement and tempers grow short.
* * *
Sydney had drawn up a menu for the fortnight. He would know where he was then, with the shopping, and the boy would get things in the right order, not too much of anything, a bit of fish for midweek, a small roast at the weekend, stews and the odd fry-up in between. The menu, in Sydney's neat script, hung above the kitchen dresser: “Tuesday dinner—chops & veg. Tea—ham & salad, treacle tart.” Against this, in a childish hand, was penciled, “Chips too?” Sydney grinned, unloading groceries. There was an unfamiliar sound in the house; it was a moment or two before he realized it was himself, humming. It was a beautiful day, sun pouring into the room, the world outside a pleasure to behold, bright and fresh and clean.
* * *
It was going to be too hot again. George, getting up with a headache, looked out onto the Green and saw the trees standing already in pools of shade and a heat-haze shimmering above the road. The headache was the product of a restless night, which had in turn arisen from the rehearsal, continuing too late and with gathering acrimony. The younger members of the cast, the various extras and helpers, had got bored and started larking about. The lady from the drama group fell out with Ray Turnbull and others, pitching standards over and beyond what was thought appropriate. “It's not bloody Stratford, you know,” someone said, not sotto voce enough. The lady from the drama group threatened resignation; John Coggan and Harry Taylor succeeded in persuading her not to. Mrs. Paling, throughout, leaned against a pillar at the back of the church, looking amused.
And then there was the business of the execution scene. The three Levellers, having been sentenced at a kangaroo court presided over by the Cromwellian colonel and taking place actually within the church, were to be dragged out into the churchyard whence were to be heard, after a telling pause, three musket shots. “Super,” said the lady from the drama group, who was now Iris to everybody. “Lovely. I'll buy that. But the lead up won't do. Much, much too static.” She paced round the chancel, her face contorted in thought, moving people from place to place. “Stand there a minute, love, let's see what that looks like.” Presently she announced, “I've got it! We have the colonel's wife throw herself on one of the prisoners and try to hold him back by force. Right? He's been her lover, that's the thing—that's why she's so mad keen to get them off, it all comes out when she realizes they're actually going to be shot.”
“It didn't happen,” said Sydney Porter stolidly.
“All right. So it didn't. But it might have done.”
“That's a point,” said Harry Taylor. “I mean, how's anyone to know what happened and what didn't?”
“Oh, go on!” cried the barmaid from the Crossed Keys. “Let's put it in! Who'm I going to throw meself at, then? Jim?”
Sydney Porter, having repeated again that it never happened, removed himself to the back of the church in disassociation. There was argument. Iris stalked off to sit on the altar steps. “No way do I rehearse that scene again like it was. It's dull, dull, dull.”
And George had found himself butting in. He didn't like Iris and he didn't, suddenly, like what had happened to the church and he didn't like all this to-ing and fro-ing about something which, if it had been thus, then could not have been otherwise. As someone who all his life had hoped that what palpably was might somehow turn out to be quite other, he knew all about that. You do not through force of fantasy acquire personal magnetism or qualities of leadership or sexual success. You are stuck with the way things are. Or were. He said, “Bit pointless, really, if this woman wasn't really there anyway. I mean, the thing is, we were trying to have scenes from the church's past. This wouldn't be, would it—what you're suggesting?”
“Oh, for goodness' sake!” Iris snapped. “Do you people have to be so frightfully realistic? I mean, do you want this show to be a success or not?”
George felt himself redden; he heard his voice grow shriller; he heard his snorty laugh. He saw contempt in Iris's eyes; he saw the exasperated lift of her eyebrows. And who, she implied, are you? He felt his supporters fall away. “Oh, come on, Vicar,” someone said. “She's got a point. I mean, it does drag a bit. Fine once they're onto the execution.” “Oh, Vicar,” said Iris. “Terribly sorry, I didn't realize. But look, now don't you see…”
And all of a sudden Clare Paling was there, arrived from nowhere, stepping cool and calm from shadows, proposing this and that. Iris switched her attention, alert to a superior presence. “Quite,” said George. “That's just what I was going to suggest.” But no one was listening to him any more. “O.K.,” Iris was saying, “O.K., I like it, let's try it out. Mandy throws herself on her husband, not the prisoner, he wasn't her lover, she's just a softhearted lady. Mandy, love, let's have a run through of that…”
And, in the soupy evening heat and gloom, moths banging against the spotlights,
they got down to it yet again. It was eleven o'clock before George locked the church and went home to bed.
* * *
“We're fine,” said Clare, to Brussels. “A bit hot, if anything, Sirocco weather. Bad temper weather. They had the rehearsal last night, with lighting and everyone in full fig. What? Oh, all right, except that they were ganging up on the vicar, poor wretch.”
And that, for reasons she was unable exactly to define, would not do. Sympathy for the underdog? Unwillingness to see anyone trounced by that harpy in the eastern harem get-up? Sheer meddling? Whichever it may have been, there had come a point when she could no longer loiter in the shelter of the nave, idly watching; when, suddenly, the spectacle of George Radwell making things worse for himself with every blundering remark had become intolerable. Persecution will not do, even of those who invite it.
“Sorry? No, love, I am not harboring a secret passion, merely a bit of everyday charity. Or maybe local patriotism is breaking out. It's neither here nor there. When shall we see you?”
He had lurked around in the aisle, George, fidgeting, tripping over a cable once and fetching up on his knees so the actors were giggling behind their hands. And then he had stumbled into an argument with Iris—she sitting on the altar steps with her chin cupped in her hands and eyebrows raised at this red-faced quacking fool. And the more he bleated on the more irritated became the onlookers, the cooler and the more destructive Iris's rejoinders. On the pulpit steps, out of George's range of vision, someone was imitating his mannerisms. And it would not do, Clare found. Despite the fact, she uncomfortably thought, that that is much as I have behaved to him too, in my time.
She put the receiver down. The copper beech on the Green, sun shining through its leaves, was a glowing port-wine red, incandescent, shimmering; a butterfly, opening and closing its wings in the warmth of the windowsill, was finely dusted with golden fur; Thomas, speeding past on Martin Bryan's bike, thin brown legs stretched to the utmost to reach the pedals, fair head bent low over the handlebars, was charged with the wild grace and energy of a young animal: a kitten, a puppy. When the world looks as it does, she thought, how can it be that there is anything wrong with it?
* * *
Martin said, “I'm four hundred and twenty-seven and you're five hundred and six.”
The rummy score, accumulating every evening, two neat columns, was on a pad propped on the mantelpiece. Alongside it was the Attack! score (straight wins and losses} and the Halma score. They were thinking of switching from Halma to checkers.
“There was a postcard from Mum in the house.”
“Ah,” said Sydney.
“She said it's ever so hot and she's got a smashing tan. Are we having cocoa or Ovaltine?”
They considered.
“Ovaltine,” said Martin. “It was cocoa last night. Shall I put the chocolate digestives on the tray?”
“No harm.”
It was almost dark, the windows open to the sultry night. Continuing warm and dry, the weather forecast had said, possibility of thundery showers in the south. Sydney drew the curtain and sat down, picking up his cup. “Have to get the hose out tomorrow.”
They drank. “Tell me about the time you were in that action off the Persian Gulf.”
“We had that last night.”
“Actually I'd like it again,” said Martin.
And Sydney, who is not a man given to reminiscence, tells again. And with the telling there comes a curious cleansing of the head. The sounds are still there, and the sights, but they slip somehow into another dimension: they have lost resonance. He reaches the end of the account, and pauses. “There's a naval hatband upstairs I've kept. HMS Reliant. Souvenir. You could have it, I daresay.”
Martin's eyes widen. “Could I?”
Sydney finishes his drink, stacks the cups on the tray.
“It'ud have been for Jennifer, but of course she was gone by then.”
“Jennifer?” says Martin.
* * *
George, coming into one of the several empty bedrooms in the vicarage in search of an active light bulb, caught sight of himself in the freckled wardrobe mirror. The wardrobe, empty, was the only piece of furniture in the room except for an iron bedstead and a couple of chairs. It had been given him by a parishioner who had no use for it and had acquired, in the giving, a pleasing glow of charity. Much of George's furniture had come to him in this way; the sofa downstairs, the sofa of the broken spring, had been Miss Bellingham's until she replaced it with a new, chintz-covered suite. He saw himself in the oval, brownish mirror, advancing through murky sunshine in which spun columns of dust: a man with thickening waist and thinning sandy hair, rather older than George had thought. The man sat down on the bed and continued to look at himself in the mirror.
Some while ago, ten years or so, it had come to George —in the middle of Evensong, in fact—that he had lost what faith he had. When he was young, fresh from college, he had believed, or believed that he believed; more importantly, he had been shored up by membership of an institution. He was no longer on his own; he was a part of something large and solid. All that had come, over the years, to seem less sustaining. And now, stumbling through the Magnificat with Miss Bellingham, Sydney Porter, and seven other members of the congregation, he realized that he felt nothing at all; that he had not prayed, in months, with any expectation of comfort. He stared over the top of Miss Bellingham's head at the rose window and tried to assess what he felt about this: there should be an aching void, but there was not. He did not feel particularly easy, but neither did he feel particularly bereft. Over the next days and weeks he thought the matter over. Should he discuss things with those who were available for such purposes? Should he leave the Church? He shrank from both courses. And in the end he decided, if decision it could be called, that he both could and would perform his duties as adequately or inadequately as he ever had, that while not easy in his mind he was not a great deal less easy than he ever had been, and that he might as well go on as he was.
The man in the mirror wore gray flannel trousers baggy at the knees, blue open-necked shirt, and corduroy jacket with a rip in the sleeve. He had a pink shiny face whose features seemed to George an unfair travesty of the studio portrait on his mother's mantelpiece in Scarborough: the carefully cosmetic photograph of a fresh-faced reliable-looking young man in clerical dress. He looked at the man and the man looked relentlessly back.
He had made a fool of himself at the rehearsal last night. He had bumbled into an argument with that woman Iris and she had made mincemeat of him. He had seen, out of the corner of one eye, mocking faces; he had known that those who might have agreed with what he said were growing impatient and hostile. He had not known how to extricate himself. And then Mrs. Paling had stepped in and put an end to it. Afterward, he had wanted to say something to her—not a further humiliation by thanks, but some acknowledgment. Looking round, though, as the church emptied, he found her already gone: crossing the Green, he had seen her lit and curtained bedroom window.
George, and the man in the mirror, continued to sit in the empty room, in silent mutual observation. The rectangle of sunlight on the floor changed planes and began to climb the side of the wardrobe. A fly that had been patrolling the windowsill walked into a spider's web and died with flailing wings. Bring me a woman like Mrs. Paling, said George. Please, God. Before it is much, much too late. Make me a person able to cope with a woman like Mrs. Paling.
He removed the light bulb from the ceiling fitting and went downstairs.
Chapter Twelve
Anna sits with eyes clenched shut and an expression of religious fervor.
“Anna! I said, more cream?”
“Ssh! I'm wishing. I've got a wish because I took the last strawberry.”
“Huh!” says Thomas. “I could have had the last strawberry if I wanted. Anyway, wishes don't come true. What are you wishing?”
“Not telling you.”
“I know anyway.”
“Don't
be stupid. How can you? He doesn't, does he, Mum?”
“Yes I do. You're wishing for a Cindy doll and a bikini bathing costume like Julie Stevens and a calculator.”
“Shut up!” bawls Anna, scarlet and tearful. “Shut up! It spoils it if you say!”
“When I wish,” says Thomas smugly, “I don't wish things. I wish for there to be no more thunderstorms or earthquakes ever and for people not to die any more. I wish for everyone to be happy forever and ever.”
“That's stupid!” Anna snaps. “Because it couldn't happen. Could it, Mum?”
Clare looks thoughtfully at her daughter. “You've got a point there. Whereas a Cindy doll and a bikini…”
“Ssh!” wails Anna. “Don't say…”
“What do you wish for, Mum,” says Thomas, “when you wish?”
Clare gets up from the table. “That would be telling.”
When I was your age and beyond, I went into churches to do my wishing. Having given that up, I suppose I have given up wishing too. Besides, for people like me, a wish is something negative: my requests would be to avert the hand of fate, not to be granted further indulgences. I have had more than my fair share already, it always seems to me. But then, nothing is fair; we know that.
She piles crockery into the sink, watching Anna and Thomas rush jostling one another down the garden path: Thomas, who still has the faith to wish for the world to be different; Anna, who has learned to settle for a Cindy doll. Is that, Clare wonders, what is meant by loss of innocence?
And presently she goes upstairs to Anna's bedroom which is, as it happens, a pair to the empty bedroom in the vicarage, in which George Radwell is at this moment staring at his reflection in a mottled mirror. The two houses, built 1905, are of similar design. There, though, the likeness ends. Anna's bedroom is prettily wallpapered with a willow-leaf pattern and the bed has a patchwork cover; there are bright cotton rugs on the polished floor and curtains that match the wallpaper. There is a pine dressing table with brass handles, laden with a clutter of Anna's things: hairbrush and one dirty sock and a green glass cat with broken tail and a postcard collection in a shoe box and a packet of Smarties (empty}. Clare picks up the sock and looks at herself in Anna's bamboo-framed mirror. She sees a woman with a long thin face and straight hair, lately streaked by the sun: a woman with, it seems to her, a somewhat uncompromising stare, probably off-putting. The mouth is wide, of the kind meaninglessly known as a generous mouth. Generous in what way? I am not particularly generous, Clare thinks. What have I ever done for anyone, except for my nearest and dearest, which does not count.