“I know,” she said.
The bile had subsided. Why wasn't she answering back? She sat there, instead, staring into her glass.
“And words…”
She looked up. “Words I must insist on. Sorry, I didn't want to do battle, though. Not today.”
There was a smell of food. Nice food. He wasn't at all hungry. He had a curious sense of displacement, as though none of this were real. The first time he went abroad, as a young man, he had felt that, continuously.
Clare said, “The trouble with people like me, one of the many troubles, is not so much that we've got all the answers as that we are incapable of suspending disbelief. Not just religious disbelief, either. It's not entirely comfortable, I promise you. In fact often it isn't comfortable at all. This probably isn't very coherent—I shouldn't drink gin in the middle of the day. We try to make sense of the world, and it doesn't make sense, so we take it out on all those other explanations that we find unsatisfactory. And we pile up guilt. Guilt for not having suffered and guilt for being intemperate and uncharitable and”—she looked out of the window at the Green, aqueous in misty rain—”guilt today because my child is alive and someone else's isn't.”
She stared across the room at him, across the polished floor and the oblong of hairy brightly-colored rug. “I must have seemed pretty nasty sometimes. To you. I'm sorry.”
George considered. In his present state of unreality such a remark could only be taken on its merits. He said, “Not particularly. You made me feel stupid.” He waited for his spluttering laugh; again it didn't come. “Not all that many go out of their way to be nice, anyway.”
Clare blinked. There was an odd look about her, he thought, slightly dilated, as though for her too the occasion was in some way detached from ordinary existence. She got up. “Would you like another sherry?”
He nodded. She brought the bottle across, poured into his glass. A little spilled onto the floor. She knelt down beside him, mopping with a tissue. She tilted against his legs: her flat bony thighs, the pointed breasts under the thin jersey, the fingers with long clean nails. She sat back, screwing the tissue into a ball. She turned and looked straight at him. “If there's anything you would like,” she said, “if there's anything I can do, I think just at this moment I'd rather like you to say. It would be all right.”
He stared at her. A grinning face in the east window of the church; nights of promise, of conjecture. He waited for someone he was not to reply, to act.
“No, thank you,” he said sadly.
He got up. “I think if you don't mind I'll get back. I'm not that hungry, and there's someone due to telephone about moving the screen for restoration. I hope you don't think I'm being rude.”
Clare Paling rose. She stood with her back to the mantelpiece. “I don't think you're being rude in the least.”
George went out of her front gate and round into his own. He walked up the patchy grass-invaded gravel of the vicarage path and in at the front door. There were five circulars on the mat and a letter from his mother. He picked them up and went into the study. He sat at the desk and entered two christenings and a wedding in the church diary. He made a list of people to be thanked for their endeavors of the previous day.
He looked up. It had stopped raining. The plastic bunting along the forecourt of the Amoco garage dripped onto the tarmac. The road gleamed with puddles, a trembling reflection of sky and leaves. The church, the gold of its stone all darkened by damp, sat hunched among the churchyard trees. George picked up the report of the church restoration expert and began to read his proposal to include cleaning of the Doom painting in the general reparations, an expensive and tricky job, evidently, but one which, the expert felt, would bring out the colors and greatly enhance the effect.
Table of Contents
Logo
Halftitle
Also by
Title
Copyright
Book Opening
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Penelope Lively, Judgment Day
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