“I don't bloody care what she said. You put it out tomorrow morning, do you hear?”
Martin went out of the room, banging the door.
“Finished?” said Shirley. “Had enough? Satisfied?”
He felt suddenly weary, done in, fed up. “Oh, shut up, Shirl.”
She switched the telly on. The room was flooded with laughter. He flung himself down on the sofa, the far end from her. She was smiling now, eyes on the screen. After a minute he began to grin; they were bloody funny, those two, no getting away from it, he'd have to remember that line.
* * *
The house was full of laughter. He sat on the edge of his bed and laughter came up through the floor. He shuffled through his pile of comics, looking for one he might not have read for a while. He didn't know how much he minded about the bird, really. It had strange reptilian eyes and he didn't like the cold scaly feel of its clawed feet. It smelled nasty, too. He wished he could have a dog. There wasn't much chance, he knew, that he ever would. Not till he was grown-up.
Downstairs, the laughter. In his stomach, that clenched lump again, hurting. He read a comic, his face contorted into a scowl.
* * *
“Why are we going to church?”
“For various reasons.”
“But you don't believe in God.”
“Tidy your hair,” said Clare.
“Do you?”
“And yours, Thomas.”
“Do you, Mummy?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“To have a look,” said Clare briskly. “That's what. See if it's all going on as I remember. Come on.” She bundled them toward the door. “There, that's for the collection.”
“Have I been christened?”
“You know perfectly well you haven't.”
“Julie Stevens says if you haven't been christened you go to hell when you die.”
“Julie Stevens is talking rubbish.”
“Where is hell?” Thomas, walking very slowly eighteen inches ahead of one, so that rising irritation is tempered by that melting of the vitals produced by the sight of the back of his neck, of such downy delicacy that one never ceases to marvel, and lament.
“There's no such place. Tom, could you not walk just in front of me.”
“Then why do people talk about it?”
“Because … Well, in the old days I suppose because they needed to frighten each other.”
“Why do they now, then?”
“They don't.” Thomas, again, dropping his collection money in the gutter and stooping to retrieve it with that grace, that stylish folding of bony limbs, that makes the movements of children a perpetual delight. One's own miraculous children above all.
“You just have yourself, stupid. So does Julie Stevens.”
“Anna darling, Julie Stevens is not an oracle. I suppose nowadays people think hell isn't a separate place, but a part of things.”
“What things?”
I am all for candor with children, she thought, but this conversation is getting a bit beyond me. “Well, just the way things are some of the time. Tom, please don't scuff your shoes like that.”
“There's the Coggans.”
There indeed; father, mother, and little girls in matching pink dresses with spanking white socks.
“I don't believe in God either,” said Thomas. “Or Jesus. Or angels and things. I think it's stupid.”
“You aren't old enough to decide yet. And don't talk so loudly.”
“Why not? Aren't you allowed to say you don't believe in God outside the church?”
“Just shut up, will you?” hissed Clare. “Be quiet. And once inside, sit still.”
* * *
George, in the middle of the Venite, caught sight of Clare Paling, stood transfixed, in silence, for the next two sentences, pulled himself together, and fixed his eyes resolutely on the undisturbing person of Sydney Porter in his accustomed place beside the aisle at the back of the church. She was flanked by her children. What, exactly, was she doing here? And what, if anything, was one to say to her, given that one was almost bound to find oneself within a yard or two in the porch afterward? Nothing? Some sharp comment? A chat with the children? Now he was off his stride, flustered, would have to contend for the rest of the service with that looming problem and the present problem of how to look at the congregation while not looking at Mrs. Paling. How to avoid, above all, catching her eye.
* * *
Sue Coggan, rising to her feet, checking quickly on her children (behaving nicely, looking sweet: all well} glanced round the church and saw with surprise Mrs. Paling and her two (fidgety, dressed all anyhow: hmn …}. Well, goodness, she's not a churchgoer, not normally. But of course she's on this committee, I s'pose she felt she should.
Mrs. Paling, Sue noted, made no pretense at joining in the hymn but appeared to be reading the form of service (Morning and Evening Prayer, Alternative Services, Series 3, Pew Edition}; she read intently and as though it were not a booklet but a gripping novel. The children sang lustily, rather too lustily. Pity they don't get on with our two, Sue thought, it would have been handy, just across the road. Still, I'm not sure really … Just as well, maybe, one way and another. The rest of the casserole tonight, with some carrots, and I'll do an apple flan this afternoon. Lovely altar flowers, I wonder who did them?
* * *
“The Lord is my Shepherd,” said George, “I have everything I need. He lets me rest in fields of green grass and leads me to quiet pools of fresh water. He gives me new strength. He guides me in the right paths, as he has promised. Even if I go through the deepest darkness, I will not be afraid, Lord…”
And shifting his gaze from the top of the central pillar, there is Clare Paling staring at him, with what appears to be an expression of slight amazement, as though he were the intruder here, and not her.
* * *
The Coggan girls, stiff and smug with reflected glory, watched their father take his place at the lectern.
“The second lesson is from the first Book of Corinthians, Chapter thirteen, verse one. ‘I may be able to speak the languages of men and even of angels, but if I have no love, my speech is no more than a noisy gong or a clanging bell. I may have the gift of inspired preaching; I may have all knowledge and understand all secrets…’”
* * *
Sydney Porter, on his knees, said what he had always said and always would say. He rose, reached under his seat for the collection bag, and stepped into the aisle. As the voices of the congregation swelled with confidence and adjustment to the idiosyncratic timing of the organist, he moved from pew end to pew end, escorting the embroidered damask bag on its way down the church. Mrs. Paling, he saw, was caught unawares, the Good News Bible in her hands rather than the hymnal, apparently reading and impervious to the bag until prodded by one of her children, whereupon she groped hastily in her purse and produced a note. There would be four notes, on average, the rest silver. The total would be between eleven and twelve pounds.
* * *
I beg your pardon? I beg your pardon? You did say Corinthians one thirteen? I did hear you correctly?
What has happened? Is nothing sacred? Where are sounding brasses and tinkling cymbals, for God's sake? What have they done, in the years of my unbelief, since at eight, and at ten, and at sweet sixteen, and finally at skeptical eighteen, I last took part in this? Do we no longer trespass? Where are the paths of righteousness, and the valley of the shadow of death? In my childhood, I lifted up mine eyes unto the hills, I did not look to the mountains, and in what now appear to be those more enlightened times, the kingdom, the power, and the glory were not yours but thine. God never told people to reproduce, he told them to be fruitful and multiply, as also did he create man in his own image, not to be like himself. What have they done, these people? Where is the majesty of language? Words were a matter for martyrdom, time was. Have they exchanged a birthright for this mess of pottage?
* * *
 
; The Palings, George uneasily noted, did not join the general exodus at the end of the service, but hung back. Mrs. Paling appeared to be treating her children to a conducted tour of the church. Out of the corner of his eye, as he stood in the porch receiving the greetings of his flock (or, more frequently, their nods, grins, or embarrassed avertings of the head} he could see her stooping before the font, pointing out the carvings, and he caught, from time to time, a fragment of conversation. “Why haven't they got any heads?” “Because in the Civil War Cromwell's soldiers knocked them about.” “Why?” “Because they were saints.” “Why didn't they like saints?” “Because…”
“Nice day, Vicar.”
“I just thought I ought to mention, Mr. Radwell, the Mothers' Union committee…”
“Turned out fine after all.”
“Good morning, Vicar.”
“Morning.”
“Say good morning to the vicar, Tracy.”
The Palings were now in front of the Noah window, down through which sunshine streamed, giving Mrs. Paling a halo. A most inappropriate halo. She stood with a child at either side, the three of them rainbowed over with light filtering through Laddenham's last remaining fragments of medieval glass, patterned in blue and red and purple and gold by the figures of the prophets and the apostles and the whole company of angels and archangels. “That's Noah in the Ark, letting the dove go,” said Mrs. Paling. “I know the story of Noah's Ark, it's a good story.” “So do I know the story of Noah's Ark.” “And that is Cain, who killed his brother Abel.” “Is that a good story?” “It's an interesting story,” replied Mrs. Paling, after a fractional pause. “Why's that man holding half a baby?” “It's a story called the Judgment of Solomon; that's an interesting story too.” “Do they all tell stories?” “I suppose most of them do.” “Are they true stories?” Mrs. Paling's reply, at this point, was inaudible. “Stories don't have to be true stories to be good stories, do they?” “No,” Mrs. Paling agreed. “They don't.”
“Ah, Vicar, I just wanted a word with you about…”
And so, at the point when at last Mrs. Paling and her offspring had done with the church furnishings, George was cornered by Miss Bellingham, and Mrs. Paling was through the porch, with a good morning and a baring of those large teeth, before he could shake off the knotty problem of the outworn hassocks. And at the very moment when he had known suddenly what he would say, and how he would say it, and what it would lead to.
The church was empty now. He went into the vestry, where Sydney Porter was seeing to the collection money. He exchanged a word or two with Sydney, removed his surplice, and went back into the main body of the church where, he saw, someone had dropped a glove in the aisle. He picked the glove up and stood holding it, a woman's glove, red leather with stitching. He said to Mrs. Paling, ah, good to have you with us, and the children, splendid, Anna, isn't it? And Thomas. Glad to see you're exposing them to the temptations of belief (Mrs. Paling at this point looked away, a touch embarrassed}. No offense meant and none taken, I hope—I'm as broad-minded as the next man. Mr. Paling not with us this weekend? Well, since you're all on your own, why not come back to the vicarage for a glass of sherry before lunch, I'm on my own too as it happens, we could have a chat about the restoration fund, to tell the truth there are one or two things I feel you and I might well sort out between ourselves before we involve the rest of the committee. And Mrs. Paling, her expression of shy pleasure confirming the wisdom of this approach, replied that she'd love to, and yes, she'd been feeling they ought to have a private get-together sometime, what a good idea, thank you so much.
He stared in despondency at the blackened figures of Sir Peregrine and Lady Rushton, c. 1472, let into the floor of the nave, stylized and preserved forever as a work of art in brass. All his life, it seemed to him, he had been addressing people who had already left the room. Always he had known what to do and how to do it slightly too late, ever since, as a boy, he had invariably grasped the rules of the game just as everyone else moved on to another activity. It did not seem to him likely, now, that he would change, or that the world would change to accommodate him. There were things of which he knew nothing; he read newspapers and books and watched the television and perceived waters into which he had never ventured. He had never been very happy or very unhappy; sometimes, as now, he knew a paralyzing gloom, but suspected that there was worse. Once, he had been in love. At least, he had wanted desperately to go to bed with the girl and thought continuously of her, which fitted descriptions of the state. Mercifully, he discovered that there was already another man before he exposed himself to the humiliation of rejection. Now, he couldn't remember what she looked like.
He wished, sometimes, that he had married. Sex he would have enjoyed, and a wife would have been armor against the more aggressive female parishioners. He stood in the aisle, still holding the red glove, and pictured the wife he did not have; she swam into the rose window above the west door, a realistic figure, nothing like Mrs. Paling, but dumpy and rather plain, wearing a brown raincoat and carrying a pile of organ music, not an arousing figure but a reassuring one.
Sydney, coming out of the vestry, had thought himself alone in the church until he saw the vicar standing there. He cleared his throat, not to make the man jump, but was ignored. He wondered if there was something wrong, the way Mr. Radwell was staring at the rose window, but he couldn't see anything himself, just that frayed bell rope that needed replacing.
He said, “I'll be off now, then.” The vicar went on standing there, in the dusty sunshine; above him, the mottled plaster of the Doom painting, and all around the cluttered admonitions of the place—the symbolisms of the Creation and the Passion, of Noah and the Lamb and the Tree of Life, and the record of Laddenham's past, the naming of names, the Williams and Thomases and Elizabeths and Janes who were born and married and now rest, possibly, in peace.
Chapter Seven
Peter Paling, wearing one of five expensive suits he owned, sat on the sofa drinking a late-night whiskey, talking of foreign parts, and looking, his wife fondly thought, like a visitor in his own home. Between them, on the coffee table, in a luscious candy-striped wrapping, stood a very large bottle of scent. “Thank you, darling,” she said. “Lovely. That'll make them look even more askance at me in the next church appeal committee.”
“Ah. That. By the way, what's all this about going to the Sunday service?”
“Anna has spilled the beans, has she? I told her she wasn't to stay awake for you.”
“She barely had. It was pretty incoherent. Something about someone cutting a baby in half.”
“They found biblical imagery engrossing.”
“So,” said Peter. “It's not been too bad a week? I've missed you.”
“I've missed you too.”
“I had to have dinner with Belgian industrialists with awful fat wives. I even had to dance with one of the wives.”
“What sort of dance?”
“I don't know,” he said. “What does it matter?”
“Sorry. It's the sort of detail that's interesting.”
“There are times, you know, when you can be faintly aggravating. You were meant to sympathize.”
“Oh dear. I am. I do.”
He re-filled his glass. “Sometimes I feel you've got a bit detached. It worries me. I don't always know what you mean.”
“I've always been considered a bit odd,” said Clare. “Surely you must have realized that? Your mother used to say I was too clever by half. Darkly. It wasn't meant to be flattering.”
“Oh well, so long as you love me.”
“I love you all right.”
Time was, she thought, in youth, one tried to explain oneself to people. One engaged in interminable tête-à-tête exchanges of self-revelation and analysis. Growing older, you lose both the knack and the inclination. I am devoted to my husband, but we are dissimilar people and too much mutual investigation might be a bad thing. I am periodically racked by insecurities; Peter is bless
ed with an untroubled spirit. We do not always experience things in the same way.
Soon after Thomas's birth the world had entered one of those phases of teetering instability when, for a matter of days or weeks, it seems as though catastrophe might well be the outcome. For others, albeit in far-away places, catastrophe was already there: nightly, on the television screen, rockets split the sky, people ran howling at the camera. Clare, sitting up in bed, the baby clamped to her breast, felt a sinking in her stomach; she looked down at Thomas's blue, milky, unseeing eyes and knew the awful responsibility of those who have created another being. And the awful apprehensions. Reading the newspaper, she said to Peter, “What do you think?” “What do I think about what?” “About—the news. What will happen?” “It'll be all right,” he said, and held out his cup for more coffee.
And it was. That time. For us, she thought, who have the luck to live where we do, to be what we are. Other places, other times—not so good. But for Peter, she saw, these spectral thoughts—guilts—had no place. And, seeing this, she realized one of the larger differences between people.
“I'm not detached,” she said. “Not in any way that matters, at least. Do you want to hear about my committee meeting? Not the most stirring occasion, but it had its moments.”
* * *
George, hastily tidying the vicarage dining room in preparation for the committee, looked out of the window and saw Mrs. Paling come up the garden path. Surprised and disconcerted, he glanced at the clock: three-fifteen. The doorbell rang. He pushed the dustpan under the sofa and went to answer it.
Clare, following him into the empty room, said, “Gracious—am I the first? That's a change.” And then: “It was for quarter past, wasn't it? Three-thirty? No wonder, then—sorry, how stupid, I can't have looked at the note properly. I'll come back.” She turned for the door.
“Don't. No need. Not worth it. Do sit.” He fussed round the sofa, patting it. As though, she thought, one were a dog.
“Oh, all right. But don't let me be in the way. Do get on with whatever you were doing.