Judgment Day

  And later, in the still stagnant heat of early evening, it is decided to put the floodlighting on again tonight, for one last time. A gesture, declares Miss Bellingham. Pity not to get the benefit, says Harry Taylor, while the gear's still all in situ.

  * * *

  George, coming into the vicarage, was knocked out suddenly by weariness. He went into the study and sat down on the sofa without even putting the light on. His limbs ached. All day people had been asking him things and telling him things and his head was a jumble of what must be done: letters, phone calls, arrangements. What he could not understand was the neutrality of his feelings. Louts had done thousands of pounds worth of damage, some of it irreparable, dished the pageant and with it for the time being the Appeal Fund, and he could feel no rage, merely a shocked resignation. They had no faces, these people; what they had done was as elemental and impersonal as weather–a hurricane, a flood. You picked up the pieces.

  He sat in the gathering dark and outside the floodlight went on and the church rose suddenly in the blank space of the window, a golden castle in the sky, turreted and glowing, untethered to time or place. A vision. He sat staring at it; it made him think of those banal illustrations in the children's Bible, angels appearing in a golden sunburst, incandescent Gabriels slung against a starry sky. Clare Paling smiling from the east window of the church, removing her blouse. Promises. Dreams. Today Mrs. Paling had stood talking to him in the chancel, with sympathy in her eyes, and he had heard only one word in ten of what she said and he had not wanted to put out his hand and touch her arm, her thigh.

  He was unbearably tired.

  “Vicar? You there?”

  He must have left the front door open. Mrs. Tanner, monumental in the gloom, stood in the entrance. There was a smell of cooking.

  “I said to my husband, I think I'll take Mr. Radwell around a dish of the steak and kidney, they've been in the church since breakfast, he'll have nothing in the house. Your electric hasn't gone, has it?” She snapped the hall switch on. George stood blinking.

  “That's very land,” he said. “I must have…”

  “Sat there in the dark like that …” She marched to the kitchen. “Ten minutes it'll want, on high, just to heat through again.” She looked at him curiously. “There's a rip in that jacket, did you know? I'd offer to mend it but it looks too far gone to me. Well, what a day. They say there was muck, as well as the damage.”

  “Yes.”

  “You wouldn't believe it, would you? Well, I'll be off. My husband's walking along to meet me at the corner.”

  He put the pie in the oven, went back into the study, into the darkness. He stood at the window. Outside, the leaves of the chestnuts and the copper beech swam in the beams of the floodlighting, multi-colored dancing fish; the church glimmered; children swooped in the shadows, Anna and Thomas, Thomas leaping at the Bryan boy on his red bike, his red bike with the curving handles and high saddle, crying, “My turn! My go now!” And the bike hurtled off again, round the Green, into the darkness at the far side, back again into the floodlighting, past the church, past the vicarage, past Mrs. Tanner stepping massive into the road.

  The lorry, coming from the High Street, must have masked the solitary motorbike behind, masked both sight and sound; the lorry, slowing to let Mrs. Tanner across so that the impatient cyclist pulls out, screams ahead, swerves wildly round the trundling figure of Mrs. Tanner, round her and into the bike, the red racing bike, which spins sideways onto the pavement flinging from it a rag-doll shape that goes tumbling into the wheels of the lorry.

  Afterward, he could not remember going outside. He had been there at the window with it happening in front of him and then by some unsensed propulsion he was outside on the pavement and Clare Paling was coming out of her front gate. She was saying something: not to him, not to anyone, just to the air. She was saying, “No, no, no. Please God no. Please, please, no.” The driver of the lorry was getting down from his cab and Mrs. Tanner was standing on the far side of the road and someone else was running along the pavement and there was a man on a motorbike, a middle-aged man removing his crash helmet and staring backward.

  And Anna and Thomas were standing at the edge of the Green. Anna and Thomas. Thomas and Anna.

  Later, he remembered that they stood there for quite a long time. Nobody took any notice of them, after the first minute or two. George looked up and they were still there, frozen in the floodlighting, looking no longer themselves but smaller and more detached, the anonymous children at any scene of horror on a news film, in a newspaper photograph: shocked by the world. There they stood, and suddenly Anna's face turned red and ugly with tears and she ran into the house by herself, making a strange noise, neither a sob nor a scream.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “They're saying he didn't die quite straightaway. You don't like to think about it, do you? He was alive for quite a bit after. They said he was asking for his mother in the ambulance. It was his back, see, it got him across the back. They said if he'd lived he'd have been paralyzed. I saw the whole thing. I said to my sister, there I was stepping onto the pavement and I turned just in time and I saw the whole thing.”

  It must be the morning, then. Somehow the night had gone, as they do, and it was the morning.

  “You been on that sofa all night, Vicar?”

  Presumably. And in a lot of other places too. He went through to the kitchen and put the kettle on.

  “I don't mind a cup myself, if you're making a pot. It's a terrible shock, a thing like that. I've not slept well, not a bit well. My husband had to get up twice and get me an aspirin.”

  He couldn't remember where the sugar was kept. He stood staring at the dresser, seeing many things, but not sugar. Wheels and Anna Paling's crumpled face and, for some reason, a part of the wall painting in the church. Not sugar.

  “Were you still out there when that Mr. Porter from opposite was walking about the Green all by himself? After the ambulance had gone. Up and down, like that. You'd have thought he was gone a bit funny. Of course, it's not a nice thing to have happen, almost on your doorstep. That lady from down the road came and took him in her house, her with the two little girls. The kettle's on the boil.”

  He must have fallen asleep, some time after midnight, and then had woken again and seen the church floodlighting still on and remembered that he had undertaken to switch it off. He went across the empty Green in the tranquil night and turned the switch in the church porch, the apparition was snapped off, the castle in the sky, the golden pile. He looked into the church for a moment, quiet and silent and smelling of detergent and polish, and walked back through balmy rustling darkness.

  He attended death once a week or so; had done so for fifteen years. He received the coffin on the chancel steps and turned to the altar with the appropriate words. He stood at the graveside in sun or wind or rain and spoke more words. He saw people putting on a brave face; or not. He performed necessary rites; the facts of the matter, by then, did not come into it. Once a woman had said bitterly, “Why him? Tell me that, why him?” She had had a little boy in tow, the husband was only thirty-five, George gathered. He'd had to mumble something and turn in relief to an old mother, talking of memorials.

  The facts of the matter, this time, were with him all the night; sitting in darkness on the sofa or plunging into dream-racked feverish sleep. He saw the child, the bike, Clare Paling's face livid in the floodlighting, Anna and Thomas. He had never spoken to the other boy; for some reason this troubled him. But he never knew what to say to children.

  At one point, when it was all over, he had found himself standing beside Mrs. Paling on the empty pavement. She had turned and they had bleakly looked at each other for a moment and then she had gone into her own house.

  * * *

  Peter said, “I could come back. I could get on a plane this afternoon.”

  “No. Don't. Finish what you're doing. We'll see you on Friday.”

  “You're sure you're all right?”
>
  “I'm all right.”

  “The children?”

  “They went to school. It seemed the best thing.”

  “Quite. Well, bye then, love. Take care of yourself.”

  She put the phone down. It was raining. The day had begun, she had seen it begin, with a liverish yellow sky and thunder distantly rolling and now the rain had come. She had a curious sensation, stemming presumably from shock and lack of sleep, that the floors were tipping; she walked gingerly about the house, like someone old, pausing to put her hand on pieces of furniture.

  She wanted Peter badly, and yet did not. The strength of his presence would perhaps have seen her through, and he would have had the sensitivity to ask no questions, but at the same time she knew she was better alone. It had taken determination to send the children to school. She had longed to keep them by her, their bodies within sight and touch; had known that they must go, that it was essential they went. She watched them trudge off into the rain, wearing plastic macs, scarlet and orange, vivid as boiled sweets.

  In the middle of the morning she thought of Sydney Porter and was horrified that she had not already done so. She threw on an anorak and walked across the sodden Green. For a long time there was no answer to her knock. Then at last a bolt rattled, the door opened. He looked at her as though he had never seen her before. “Yes?”

  “I wondered—I just wondered if you were all right.”

  He stared. The shuttered stare of an old man; mistrustful, parrying interference.

  “If,” she said desperately, “there's anything you need…”

  “Nothing. Very kind.”

  “A bit of company. Later, maybe. Do please, just, you know—say.”

  “Company?” Bitterness, now, not mistrust. “I'm accustomed to being on my own. Quite accustomed. Been on my own thirty-five years.” He began to close the door.

  “If you'd like me to take Martin's things,” she went on, deliberate, insisting, “keep them till his mother…”

  Expressionless, his old face; just the eyes flickering, at the name, suffering. “All in hand already. Thanks all the same. Very kind.” The door closed. She turned away.

  On the Green, men were dismantling the floodlighting apparatus. George Radwell came toward her. “Sydney Porter. I remembered of course the boy had been staying with him. But you've already been. Is he all right?”

  “I don't think so,” said Clare. “But there isn't anything he'll let anyone do.”

  George nodded. He looked, she thought, knocked out, drained. He nodded again, barely glancing at her, and turned to go to the church. It came to her as extraordinary that they had moved together, she and this man, through the previous day; like being trapped with a stranger in a lift. But he was not, now, a stranger. We are in the world with other people, she thought, like it or not. I don't dislike George Radwell any more; now why is that? She said, with diffidence, so that he looked at her in perplexity as though perhaps he had not quite heard, “I've got this stew we never got around to last night—come and help me eat it now if you're not too busy.”

  * * *

  He sat on a sofa in a room that mirrored the vicarage study in dimensions and outlook. In every other way it was so unlike as to induce a sense of cultural shock: there were bare polished boards instead of worn carpeting and many pictures and books rampant in the alcoves beside the fireplace. The sofa was covered in some striped material and had no broken spring. The room smelled of flowers, not damp: there was a bowl of branches from some flowering bush on the table.

  Clare Paling squatted at a cupboard. “Sherry? Vermouth? Or vodka if you like the stuff, or whiskey or Pernod or God knows what. You name it, we have it. Duty free, of course. Peter goes to Brussels every other week, I think I'm going to have a gin, which is not normal for me at this time of day but I feel pretty awful.”

  He said, “The children…?”

  “They're as all right as can be expected. They didn't go to sleep for a long time.”

  She went to the kitchen. He sat looking at a picture above the mantelpiece, a bright, rather childish painting of red and blue flowers in a pot; he supposed the childish quality to be deliberate, an inverted sophistry. He didn't know anything about pictures.

  Dear Mother, Yesterday vandals smashed up the church and a child was lolled by a lorry outside the vicarage door. I have been lunching with my neighbor, Clare Paling, You will remember my mentioning her before. One was glad to be able to lend a bit of moral support, her husband being away at the time. It is a refreshing change after some of my parishioners to come across a woman who…

  Dear Mother, Last night I saw a child dying and now I can think of nothing else. I have sat in Mrs. Paling's house which I have many times visited in the imagination, and the experience meant nothing at all.

  Clare came back into the room and sat down in the armchair. She took a gulp of her drink.

  “You thought,” he said, “at first, that it was…”

  “Thomas. Yes.”

  They sat in silence. She finished her drink and poured another. “More?” He shook his head.

  “Have you ever played roulette?” said Clare.

  He looked at her, startled.

  “We did once, on some French holiday. I've never been so bored in my life. The only game I've ever found of any interest is chess, and even that palled after a bit.”

  He saw, he supposed, what she was on about. He nodded. She said, “Don't you find it pretty difficult to live with?”

  He licked his lips. “It?”

  “Blind fate. The blindness of fate. Or whatever.”

  “I suppose,” he began cautiously, “one has always hoped somehow to come to terms…”

  “Come to terms is what one never does. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snap. That's just what I didn't mean to do. I feel a bit unhinged today.”

  He stared at the floor. Boards. Grainy, nicely polished. “And of course with faith …” He stopped. Faith?

  “Does it,” she said, “actually, really, practically—help?”

  He scanned the boards; there was a blue thread caught on a splinter. She was asking him a question; she wanted an answer, genuinely wanted. If he looked up she would be staring at him with those greenish, rather cold eyes. Yesterday he had seen stark terror in those eyes.

  He had wondered, sometimes, about children; looking at the faces of those who have them. Love, the other love, you saw at the cinema, or walking the streets, aged twenty, arm in arm. There wasn't anybody in the world, including his mother, whose death would have caused him more than a momentary regret.

  Yet last night he had roved from sleeplessness to nightmare.

  The floorboards were offering no help. He looked up. “I've seen people, occasionally, sometimes the very old, a sort of calm …”

  “What,” she said, “about you?”

  And of course, his mother used to say, it's a wonderful thing, it'll always be a comfort to you, you'll have something to fall back on that others don't. The stipend's not much, but there it is.

  He searched. He traveled from one gray moment to another, examining. Gray, though, they had been, rather than black. Disappointment, disillusion, disenchantment. Eventually he began, cautiously. “When I was at school I used to want to be Manners, the Captain of Cricket.” At this point, normally, there would come that snorty laugh; it didn't, for some reason; she was listening to him, not bored—attentive. “I used to lie in bed at night and will myself to turn into Manners. I used to tell myself stories in which I was Manners. He was tall, that kind of hair that goes over one eye, I don't remember ever speaking to him, even the masters used to kowtow to him, the younger ones. I knew I wasn't ever going to be Manners, not really, or even anyone like Manners, but it made it more possible to put up with not being him, or like him, to go on thinking like that. At night.” He paused. The glass of sherry was almost empty; he finished it.

  “Yes?” said Clare Paling. “And later?”

  He studied the flower picture ab
ove the mantelpiece; the flowers became the faces of various girls, girls until this moment almost forgotten, girls quite unlike Mrs. Paling, girls who had not, at one time or another … Girls who also, at night, had been quite otherwise.

  No, he could not go into that.

  “I have never,” he went on, “been ill. Or in any danger. It has been a question more of what hasn't happened. I suppose going on believing it might sometime be different has helped.”

  “That's not faith,” said Clare. “That's hope.”

  He had never had a conversation like this before; he was filled with unease.

  “‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three,' “she said; “‘but the greatest of these …' Only you will insist on calling it love, which is not the same.”

  “I…?”

  “Not you personally, sorry. That repellent new Bible. Charity,” she went on, “is what I'm a bit short on.” She was silent for a moment. “Tolerance and generosity and understanding.”

  He did not hear her. He thought about words. Hope? There was an old woman in his congregation, a woman in always the same dun-colored coat and hat, always in the same seat, always present; dour, unapproachable. Was it for words that she was there? He looked up at Clare Paling, sitting in her light, bright sitting room with books all over her walls and a glass in her hand; he felt a stir of that old confused hostility, a little rush of bile. He said, “Oh, it's all so simple for people like you, you've got an answer to everything. You don't believe in God and you know exactly why you don't believe. The sort of people I know, just ordinary people who come to church, mostly they haven't much idea of why they do believe and I've never been able to tell them because to begin with I wasn't all that clear myself and then …” He paused and looked away. “But you—you go into the church and all you see is carvings and different kinds of windows, you might as well be in an art gallery. Or a museum. There's more to it than that.”