And as she turned into her own driveway the motorbike boys roared past, an explosion of noise and wake of acrid smell, reminding her of those aeroplanes. One, two, three, four, five, six—crouched figures, carapaced and goggle-eyed—tearing round the Green, and then round again, peeling off finally down the High Street and away.
Chapter Five
George, going through to the kitchen to make himself a cheese sandwich before bed, heard the bike boys and was reminded, disagreeably, of his time in Stoke Newington, which he would have preferred to forget. The Youth Club and the Church Hall disco and the milling derisive young with whom he could not cope. And the breezy confident vicar and his acolytes, those long-haired, quick-talking women in trousers and hairy sweaters, who bore, he now realized, a distant relationship to Mrs. Paling.
He ate the sandwich, and then went up. He undressed, washed, got into bed, switched the light out, and lay for a while with his eyes open.
He proceeded with the business of making love to Mrs. Paling. First he put her on the vicarage sofa, stripped to a pair of peach-colored knickers, and dwelt for a while on the removal of these. But, arousing as this was, the satisfaction of the arrangement was marred by the twang of the spring in the sofa. Irritated at this insistent accuracy of the imagination, George removed Mrs. Paling to a sunny woodland glade, all birdsong and vibrant nature. Here, for a while, things went nicely: the lady moaned and spread; George performed with skill and consideration; bodies writhed and twined, dappled by sunlight. And then Clare Paling turned her horsey, handsome, supercilious face toward him and laughed in mockery and contempt.
Shriveled with self-disgust, George sat up in bed, put the light on, and reached for Ngaio Marsh.
The telephone, next morning, took him from his breakfast, mouth still full of toast. A coin-box call, pips going for an age, then a woman's voice he knew but couldn't place. “That the vicar?” “Yes?” “It's Mrs. Tanner.” Tanner? The phobia woman; his heart sank. “It's about you not having anyone to come in, my daughter heard at the doctor's. I don't mind giving it a try, see how we get on. I been talking it over with my husband and we both think it might get me out of myself a bit. There's no animals, is there?” He played for time: “What?” “Two mornings a week, she was doing, Shirley Binns, that right?” “That's right,” he said weakly. “But are you sure you really …” “Monday I'll start then, Vicar. As I say I'll give it a try. My daughter'll walk me there and pick me up later.” The phone clicked.
He went back to the kitchen and looked round. It was infested with crumbs and spattered with grease, had been since Shirley went off to have her baby. He would have cleaned it up eventually, just as he'd had a go with the carpet sweeper in the dining room before last night's committee. He didn't want that awful woman here, two days a week; he groaned; no way of stopping her now, he didn't even know how to get hold of her. In gloom, he walked across to the church.
There was a movement somewhere beyond the gravestones at the far end of the churchyard, he thought, squinting into the sun from the gate. Better investigate; there'd been trouble a few months back with children playing there and interfering with flowers on the tended graves. But then the striking clock reminded him how late it was and he went into the porch.
* * *
If you lay on your stomach in the long grass behind the stones no one could know you were there; you could fire at them as they came through that gate, bang-bang, and you'd got them before they had a chance. Bang-bang. Bang you're dead.
There were dead people under the ground here. Under where he lay, maybe. Skeletons. He wondered how far down they were. Did the bones ever stick up above the graves? All the stones had writing on them; often you could read it: Elizabeth Frances Hicks, born April 16th 1871, died October 7th 1942. Departed this life. Rest in peace. Martin Paul Bryan, born May 10th 1970.
He didn't want to go to school today. He felt funny inside. He'd stay here for a bit, go later, say he'd been sick and his mother'd let him stay at home.
He rolled onto his back and stared at the sky, ground his knuckles into his eyes to make colored patterns shower across his lids, tried to forget the feeling in his stomach, tried to forget last night.
He'd heard their voices downstairs in unpretending anger; open, intense, and intimate anger, like people in films or on the telly. In real life people do not talk to each other like that. He lay stiff under the bedclothes, listening; for a while, in hope, he had thought perhaps it was the telly. And then the hope had crumbled and left him with his stomach drained, empty as though he was hungry, but sick too. And down below that noise; all feeling and no words, not words you could hear. It was as though something strange and full of evil had crept into the house: an animal, a dark furtive animal, padding around the stairs and hall, with rank fetid breath. Nowhere was safe, not even his home. In the end, he hugged his pillow to his ears, and slept.
* * *
George found the church door was unlocked; Sydney Porter must have been in already for some reason. As churchwarden, he held the spare set of keys. There had been a time, last year, after the disappearance of a brass cross from the Lady Chapel and an attempt to break open the offertory box, when they had considered keeping the church permanently locked. George, anticipating the nuisance of continual callers at the vicarage wanting it opened, had been as reluctant as anyone to do this. In the end, they had compromised by locking up earlier in the evenings, with George and the churchwardens alternating a duty roster of policing visits during the daytime. So far, there had been no further trouble.
There was a starling in the vestry, trapped, thumping against the window. Droppings littered the table; it must have been there all night. George opened the door and saw it fly down the nave and come to rest on one of the capitals, where it shuffled along the head of a foliate mask, making more mess. He went back to the vestry to fetch a broom. When he returned Sydney Porter was already brandishing a pole at the bird, which flew up to one of the windows. Sydney said, “There's been those children in the churchyard again. Grass is all flattened at the back by the hedge.”
“Ah. Have to keep an eye out.”
They stood looking at the starling, fluttering against the stained glass, which depicted a ripple-bearded Noah in a storm-tossed medieval ship. “We won't get it down,” said Sydney. “Best thing's just to leave the door open for the morning.”
George nodded. “Quite a good meeting last night. Got things off the ground.”
“That's right.”
“Tactful move, I felt, to hand over the chairmanship to Mr. Coggan. We want to get the village involved as a whole.”
Sydney continued to watch the starling, non-committal.
“Mrs. Paling,” George went on, after a pause, “could turn out to be a bit of a live wire, I should imagine.” He, too, studied the Noah window. “She and I were having a chat about the church the other day, the Doom painting and so forth—knowledgeable sort of woman. Good-looking, too.”
The vicar, Sydney now noticed with surprise, was agitated; a nerve twitched in his cheek, his complexion was blotchy. He wondered what was up. The conversation was taking an odd turn, too, these remarks about Mrs. Paling. Exchanges between them, normally, were confined entirely to matters of expediency: keys and hymnals and weddings and organ music and the flower-arranging roster. Well, it was nothing to do with him, nothing to get involved with.
“Calls herself an agnostic,” said George Radwell. “Not that that bothers me at all—it takes all sorts, as far as I'm concerned. No, no—that doesn't worry one. Question of personal choice, and that's all there is to it.”
Sydney shuffled in discomfort. He didn't like that sort of talk, least of all from the vicar. It was embarrassing. He looked around for a way of escape.
“I said to her, look, Mrs. Paling, I'm as broad-minded as the next man, your beliefs are your own concern, and whatever they are, you and your family are very welcome in the parish, glad to have you with us.”
The starling flew acro
ss the nave, crashed into the War Memorial window on the west wall, and thumped to the ground.
“Ah,” said Sydney gratefully. “Pity. They're always doing that. I'll put it in the incinerator.”
He left George standing there, and carried the bird outside into the churchyard. But there, holding it in one hand, he saw the tremor of movement in one gray eyelid and felt, he fancied, a shiver in the light body. It must be stunned, not dead. He set it down gently on the grass and watched it. The bird lay motionless and now he knew what it was that had been itching away in his mind while the vicar had been talking, like a message forgotten, like an obligation overlooked.
Jennifer had found a dead bird once, in the Mansell Road garden, what passed for a garden, the scrubby London backyard. Jennifer when she was eight, a thin child with plaits wearing a green-and-white-checked cotton frock, standing at the kitchen door with the bird in her hands. And he had gone into the garden with her and dug a hole in the sour ground and buried it with her looking on, solemn. She had wanted him to put a cross with sticks, and he had explained that wasn't right, not for a creature, that was only for people. Late in 1940 that would have been, his last leave with them, the last time he saw them.
Except the very last time, in the mortuary. He'd asked to go, though there was no need, the identifying had been done already, before he came up from Portsmouth, done by the A.R.P. Warden, who was a neighbor, who knew them well. They were side by side, and the attendant had pulled back the sheet that covered Mary first and for a moment he'd been shattered anew, thought wildly that perhaps there could have been a mistake, because her hair was gray, quite gray, her short, fine, brown hair. And then he'd realized it was the plaster, the plaster dust that had spewed out of the house as it fell about them, covering them, drowning them, suffocating them. And he had stood there staring not at her face, which was gray-white too, but at her dusty hair, until at last someone put a hand on his arm and steered him away.
Perhaps the starling would revive; if not, he would deal with it later. He didn't like to see the churchyard untidy, from time to time he went through the long grass by the wall with a plastic bag in his hand, stuffing into it the rubbish that found its way from the pub car park.
* * *
Mr, Porter from next door came out of the church holding something, which he then put down on the grass by the path. Then he stood there, for ages, for hours, it seemed, staring at the ground. When at last he went away Martin had pins and needles from keeping still, crouched down behind the big stone chest thing (those had dead people in, too} under the yew tree. Mr. Porter had nearly seen him before, when he'd walked over to the wall, and Martin had had to slither off quickly, keeping low.
He slipped out, cautiously. It was a bird, a dead bird. But no, not dead, because as he approached, it lurched suddenly onto stick-like legs and stood swaying and blinking. It must be hurt, poor thing. He was filled suddenly with a surge of warm protective feeling: he would look after it until it was better, he would take it home and feed it and it would be his bird, it would be tame, it would come when he whistled. He picked it up.
* * *
Clare, circling the Green on her way back from the school, stopped the car and wound down the window. “Morning, Mr. Porter.” Oh God, now she'd made the poor man jump out of his skin.
“Good morning, er…”
“We'd better put our heads together at some point.”
“Heads…?”
“This stuff we're going to do on the history of the church—the Civil War thing and the other.”
“Oh. Oh, yes.”
“Where did you find out about it—what book?”
“There's that booklet in the library, the village library—History of Spelbury. It mentions Laddenham and the other villages.”
“Would it be an idea,” said Clare, “if I went further afield, to one of the bigger county libraries, to see if I could lay hands on a few more books, and then we can go through them together and see what we can come up with?”
“Fair enough.”
Not the most forthcoming person in the world. Or is it just my genius for alienation?
“If you've the time,” he added.
That's better; we'll win him over yet. Big smile. “Oh, I've plenty of time, Mr. Porter. Well, I'll be seeing you, then.”
All the time in the world. And for a book-junkie like me a trip to the county library is right in the line of business. In fact, come to think of it, there's no time like the present. Quick sprint home to make the beds and then off. Not a bad prospect at all, the day looks more promising already. So wave nicely to the vicar since we're feeling genial, and away.
The days are not unpromising, it's not that; Peter is wrong in his diagnosis of bored housewife. Peter, of course, has been trained to spot problems and then apply his considerable talents to solving them. Which is all very well where assembly lines and productivity targets and technical innovations are concerned but not always so effective when it comes to people. No, I am not bored.
Children are bored, because they live in a continuous present and want to escape. The old are bored, for other reasons. When I was a child I never believed I would grow up. Now I am grown I watch my own survival with disbelief. And the survival of those I love. I can look at a fourteenth-century wall painting of Judgment Day with the understanding and apprehension of a fourteenth-century peasant. Unlike the twentieth-century priest next door, who is in other respects more ignorant and less worldly than I take myself to be. So much for sophistication.
It's a crude threat, that division into the damned and the saved; as crude as the weighing of souls. All to induce guilt—guilt and therefore compliance. Do as I say, or else. Nowadays we are less gullible, but we still feel guilt: different guilts. When I contemplate the day of judgment it is not the possibility of salvation I have in mind.
When I was a child I tried to be good—to begin with because people were pleased if you were good and later because I had developed theories about the nature of goodness. I thought it was wrong to be cruel to animals or those weaker than yourself; I reckoned you should be polite, up to a point; I tried to treat others as I should like them to treat me, though I suspected a flaw somewhere in that argument. Later, I went through the Ten Commandments; most of them were straightforward enough, but some didn't seem to apply to me and there was a hectoring note that I found distasteful. And later still my unbelief blossomed and I ceased to accompany my parents to church on Sundays and my mother was upset. I explained to her that I probably shared her every opinion on what was right and what was wrong, but I could not believe in God. I said I believed in love and she said God is love and I said, no. And after that we avoided the subject.
No, my days are not empty; in fact, I find them miraculous The legacy, I think, of telling people for a thousand years that they will have to pay for their sins is that you end up with someone like me. I wait for payment to be exacted anyway. I feel guilty because it has not.
She made the beds, went downstairs and out again. Back in the mini, she sped between fleeing fields, hills, villages. Driving too fast, reproved once by an overtaking lorry, the driver in his cab towering above her, cutting in front and forcing her to slow down. Peter scolded her sometimes about her driving. Once he'd been really angry after a near accident. Tempting providence, he called it. Providence doesn't need tempting, she'd snapped, that's the problem, as far as I'm concerned. But the incident had rattled her (accounting for the ill temper}, as now she was rattled by the thunderous pressure of the lorry alongside. She drove more decorously, paying attention to the charms of the landscape.
I love my husband, she thought. I look around at other people's husbands, at other men generally, and heave a sigh of relief. His deficiencies, if one can call them that, are that he is too busy and too successful and I am no longer the only or indeed the principal person with a claim on him. I love my husband and therefore I will try to do as he would wish and not drive too fast.
There were hug
e clouds piled around the horizon, the cumulus clouds of early summer, opalescent shifting shapes, themselves a source of light so that the whole sky was brilliant. On such a day as this, she remembered, on such a day of sun and shadow and high running wind, she had climbed a hill somewhere, almost ten years ago, and at the top had flung herself down breathless on her back and stared up into just such clouds and as she did so had felt the first flutter of the child in her womb. A moment of amazement and delight and incredulity. Thus are the heightened moments of our lives tethered to the physical world, and brought back by it. Well, that interesting flutter was now Anna—screaming and whooping in Laddenham primary school playground—but the joyous instant on the hilltop one carried around yet, as something else.
The town, with which she was not familiar, although it was only fifteen miles from Spelbury, had a stern attitude toward on-street parking and the municipal car parks were all full. Eventually she found a space in the far corner of a cindery, rubbish-strewn overflow car park, tucked away the mini, and set off for the public library.
The library, plate glass without and sleekly carpeted within, was a new building. The shelves were well stocked, the catalog abundant, the squashy black chairs and individual desks invited repose or study. Clare, well pleased, browsed and dipped and selected for an hour or so. In the local history section, an agreeable and obliging young man answered her queries and provided references and information. Waiting for him to bring some books, she noted with approval that the reading desks were almost all occupied by teenagers, in refuge perhaps from inadequate school facilities, heads bowed tranquilly over their work.