He hovered, interfering with rugs and cushions.
“I saw you,” he said. “On Sunday. In church.”
“I saw you too,” she replied, amiably enough.
There was a silence.
“Hope you enjoyed the service,” he managed, at last.
She stared at him, incredulous. “Enjoyed?”
“The flowers”—he rushed on—“the altar flowers, I don't know if you noticed, the altar arrangement was done by Mrs. Bradley, I wonder if you and your husband have met—Jennifer Bradley who lives at the Cedars. Miss Bellingham of course does the pulpit.”
“The flowers I didn't notice, I'm afraid,” said Clare. “Sorry. I was more concerned with language.”
“Language?” His turn now to be taken aback.
“There seems to have been a clean sweep. The Authorized Version. The Book of Common Prayer. Out, I see. Superseded.”
“Ah. The new texts, you mean. The alternative services.”
“Those.”
He sensed danger. “Younger people find them—um-find them more accessible. The old forms—all those long words, you know”—a laugh (you and I, of course, can cope with long words}. “It's made it all more meaningful, putting things in a straightforward modern style.”
“Has it?” she said. “Meaningful,” she went on, more to herself, he felt, than to him. “Accessible.”
“Don't you think so?”
“Frankly, no.”
Gray eyes, looking at him: cool, dismissive. Small, neat breasts pushing against a red cotton shirt thing. Untouchable; poles apart; not for the likes of you. Fury swept him, all of a sudden. Fury and recklessness.
“I shouldn't have thought it would matter to you all that much,” he said, “as a non-believer.”
She grinned, after a moment. “Touché.”
He crashed on, emboldened. “It's only words, after all.”
“Only words? Only words! Oh, dear. But you see, words are what I do believe in. They're all we've got.”
He stared at her. Very thin bony wrists; golden hairs on her arms; flat, narrow thighs.
“And there are you people,” she went on, “chucking out some of the finest words in the language. If you aren't to be trusted with that, what are you to be trusted with?”
George snorted; he had intended a laugh, a sardonic laugh—what came out she could interpret any way she liked. “What? It's just a question of modernizing, after all. There was a great deal that's not relevant to here and now and…”
“Oh, quite.” She was bored, suddenly: you could see that. Teeth flashed at him. “Oh, I daresay, and I'm an intruder, in a sense, you've got a point there. Sorry, Mr. Radwell.”
“George,” he began. “Do call me …” and the door-bell rang, swamping him. Clare Paling got up, hitched a tight skirt down over that small behind, went to the table; outside, Miss Bellingham trundled up the path, peering toward the window, hung about with shopping bags and cardigans.
At about four o'clock, the committee ran into trouble.
“All so gloomy,” accused Miss Bellingham. “My goodness, people need cheering up these days, I would have thought—not harping on this kind of thing.” The account of the Swing riots and the shooting of the Levellers drawn up by Clare and Sydney Porter lay in front of her.
“I'm sorry,” said Clare. “Mr. Porter and I couldn't find a hilarious historic episode. They're a bit thin on the ground.”
Miss Bellingham sniffed. Once upon a time, thirty years ago, in Laddenham, you knew what to expect of a person by how they spoke and what they were; a woman like Mrs. Paling would have been involved in certain proper activities and you could have relied on her responses. For a long time now, things had been all anyhow; no wonder you got vandalism and illegitimacy.
“I fail to see how you're going to make a pleasant afternoon's entertainment out of this.”
Clare murmured something about the Tower of London.
“We took the boys there,” said Harry Taylor. “Year or so ago. Shocking entrance fees and queues halfway down the road.”
Clare said she had meant it ironically. That the sufferings of others—especially if comfortably in the past—had proven drawing power.
“Well, I think that's a very cynical attitude,” said Miss Bellingham. “If you don't mind my saying.”
John Coggan intervened to point out that the format they were thinking of was not so much straight entertainment as some kind of broad-based event including several different things: a pageant, yes, probably, but exhibitions and displays as well. On the general theme of the church's history. A responsible, instructive program.
Miss Bellingham, a little mollified, agreed that people like to feel they've learned something. “I do myself. I don't think we should any of us feel complacent about what we know. I'm studying Italian at the moment. And of course I'm very systematic about my reading.” Unlike, she thought, some. Only last week she had run into Mrs. Paling in the public library with a pile of glossy-jacketed novels quite blatantly displayed in her shopping basket. It told you a lot about a person, that sort of thing. One might well, of course, pick up the odd thriller oneself occasionally, but at least it would be discreetly popped underneath the travel and biography.
Silly old bag, thought Sydney Porter. He was surprised at the vehemence of his own irritation; he had, after all, endured Miss Bellingham, week in, week out, for many years now. The period when she had been People's Warden was particularly trying. It had been a great relief to see her unseated and her place taken by Jim Squires. He himself remained Vicar's Warden, and Squires was a great deal easier to work with. Miss Bellingham gave herself airs but when it came down to it she couldn't follow the basic rules of bookkeeping. And she didn't know how to do decimal multiplication or division; he had noted that, at the time, with interest and silent contempt.
He leaned over to remind Mrs. Paling of the plan they'd drawn up. Let her do the talking, she'd put it better.
George had spent the first half hour of the committee simmering down. He had very deliberately not looked at Clare Paling and concentrated on getting his color back to normal and reducing his heart beat; you could do that, by sitting still and trying to think about nothing. Consequently, he had missed a lot of the proceedings. He became aware, suddenly, that Clare Paling was talking at some length, and he would have to listen. She seemed to have got it all worked out, this pageant business, or nine hundredth centenary celebration or whatever it was they ended up calling it.
“Nine hundred happy returns, eh?” said Harry Taylor. “How about that, then?”
Mrs. Paling thought not, on the whole.
Miss Bellingham was silent. The idea of the costumes attracted her. If everybody was doing it you wouldn't feel silly, and that Quaker sort of dress, with those white caps, was very becoming.
“You won't get me into knee breeches and a funny hat,” Harry Taylor went on heartily. “Fancy yourself in a frock coat, Vicar?”
George said that it seemed an ambitious scheme, lot of work involved, not the sort of thing Laddenham was used to, bound to go down well though, he felt. He searched wildly for a telling contribution and came up, just in time, with some ideas about contacting the Tourist Boards and maybe the travel agents. Coachloads of Americans, that sort of thing. All the while he was talking there hovered before his eyes, ineradicable and exasperating, an image of Mrs. Paling in one of those eighteenth-century dresses out of which the bosom so engagingly spills. Except that Mrs. Paling's wasn't the land of bosom that spills. He substituted a sort of medieval page-boy get-up, very tight around the thighs; that was better.
“Had you finished, Vicar?” said John Coggan politely.
George jumped. They were all looking at him. Yes, he said, that was all, just thought he'd mention about the tourist possibilities, very good scheme, bound to pull in a lot of cash.
I am always maddened, Clare thought, by people whose speech is so inconclusive that nobody knows when they have finished what they hav
e to say, least of all themselves. You'd think a man with the reassurance of the pulpit behind him could do better, instead of going off, apparently, into a trance. Visions of what? Not apocalyptic anyway, a more mundane bloke I never met.
“This re-enactment of the rioting business,” asked Harry Taylor. “I take it we're not going to have them really chopping down the screen? Or jumping on the altar?”
Clare explained the scheme for spot lighting different parts of the church, so that the action would seem to flit from one part to another, probably with backcloths and sound effects to replace actual destruction.
“I still think,” said Miss Bellingham, “we should have maypole dancing,”
* * *
Sydney Porter slept badly, the night after the committee meeting. He lay long awake, and then sank into a lurid dream-racked sleep, one fantastic crazed sequence sliding into another. At one time there was a great noise in his ears, a crashing and a shattering, and he was in Mansell Road, a Mansell Road that crunched underfoot, that tinkled and sparkled as though strewn with Christmas decorations, and there was The Warden sweeping up broken glass—glass in splinters and glass in chunks and glass in a fine dust that frosted the pavements and the front gardens. And he stood outside number forty-nine, where the windows gaped black and empty, and heard, as Mary and Jennifer must have heard, the crash of the glass blown in, and a roar, an awful irresistible roar—the one meant for them, the one with their name on it, nothing to be done, no way of escape, their number up. And he screamed in his sleep, soundlessly, his mouth open in the dark room, engines thundering outside along the Green.
In the morning, coming downstairs, he saw the broken fanlight above the front door with amazement. When he had fetched the dustpan and brush and carefully swept up the mess, he stood staring uneasily at the hole, through which a draft howled. The wind? A burglar? Neither made sense. He opened the door and saw, now, a further trail of destruction. Nearly all the newly planted young trees on the Green—some willows, a copper beech, chestnuts to replace the aging ones—had been snapped off half-way down the stems. John Coggan was there.
“Did you hear them? Three or four in the morning, it must have been. That motorbike gang. My God, if I'd known what they were up to I'd have been out like a shot.”
Sydney felt a curious lift of relief. The thing ceased to be personal; it wasn't meant particularly for him, it could have been anyone else. That mattered less, somehow. He indicated his broken window.
Later in the morning, the police came. “Heaved a stone through it, did they?” said the young man cheerfully. “Bad luck.” Sydney, stolidly, gave such information as could be given. “Do you know who they are?” The policeman shrugged. “From Spelbury, probably, we'll have a look around.”
* * *
In the vicarage, Mrs. Tanner stood at the window and surveyed the Green with relish. “Now why do you think they'd want to do a thing like that, Vicar?”
George replied that he didn't know.
“On our estate, last year, there was some got a cat and put petrol on it and set light to it. Shocking, isn't it? Running about, it was, screeching, half-mad with the pain. I said to my husband, I think that's shocking. Shocking. And I don't care for animals, personally.”
The irritation that she set up in him was a tangible physical discomfort, like nettle rash, or pins and needles. He felt it in the groin, at the back of his neck. He felt it as soon as she set foot in the house and it lasted until she departed again. At moments such as this it reached crisis proportions; he would have left the room, but it was his study, and he had a mountain of paper work to get through and it was she who should be elsewhere in the house, not him. He said, “Don't bother with this room, Mrs. Tanner—it'll do till next time.”
She gave the windowsill a perfunctory swipe with a duster. “I don't mind. I'll give it a go-over all the same. You get on with whatever it is you're doing. Of course they won't get them, those boys, they'll never find out which lot it was.”
“I daresay not.”
“Dangerous, too, motorbikes. My sister's boy came off his and broke his leg in two places, there was splinters of bone sticking through the skin, they say it'll never be quite right, only eighteen he is…”
George gritted his teeth. This could go on for some time. He took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote “Dear Sir,” his pen scoring the paper.
“…Just thought you'd like to know,” said Mrs. Tanner. There was a note of grievance in her voice.
“Sorry?”
“Thought you'd like to know we were right, my husband and I, about it taking me out of myself, coming here once a week. I'm feeling a bit of change. Thursday evening, I went along to the corner shop on my own. They're very surprised, at the clinic, they say they wouldn't have expected it.”
“Oh,” said George. “Well, that is good. Splendid.”
“They broke the window of that Mr. Porter opposite,” she went on. “Shame. I stopped by to have a look on the way here, I had my daughter walk me that way instead of the usual. They cost a bit to fix, that type of glass.”
“Perhaps you could have done that on your own too,” said George nastily.
Mrs. Tanner gave him a look of contempt. “They say we can't expect miracles, at the clinic. They say it'll take time; time and patience. D'you want me to do anything more in here or is it all right if I have my cup of tea now?”
* * *
“Come here,” said Clare. “Come here and sit down. I'm going to read to you.”
“Good-o. Can we have…”
“No, you can't. We're going to read something rather different tonight.”
“That's the Bible,” said Anna, shocked.
“This, as you rightly point out, is the Bible. The Authorized King James Version, with which you are sadly unfamiliar. My fault, principally. I am a bad mother. You eat sweets between meals and go to bed at all hours and there are holes in your socks. But there is one thing I can try to put right. I can expose you to the language, like it or not.”
“‘The Lord is my shepherd,’” she read; “‘I shall not want …’ Stop fidgeting and take that gob-stopper out of your mouth … ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’”
* * *
Keith Bryan, leaving the house in a hurry, did not notice the vandalizing of the Green. He had been one of the only residents who had refused to contribute to the Tree Planting Fund. “Oh, come on,” Shirley had said. “A pound or two, it's all they want, it's so embarrassing saying no.” “Why the bloody hell should I? It's not my personal property, is it? What's it got to do with me? They can whistle for it—busybody Coggan and the rest of them.” “Well, we all look at it, I suppose, the Green, and it's nicer with trees than not.” “You can tell them to sod off,” he said sulkily, “if they come back. You just want to get in with the other wives, that's all.” And they had had a row—no rare event—not that Shirley cared much more than he did, she was only trying to get a rise out of him. And it was a bloody nerve, these people expecting you to shell out for something that was basically none of your business. Like some new form of bloody income tax.
When Shirley told him about the vandalism he laughed. “Well, that'll show them.”
“I think you're disgusting. Anything that doesn't affect you personally you don't care about.”
“That, my girl, is human nature, isn't it?”
He was in a glow of well-being. Debbie Comstock's perfume was on his hands still; there was a glittery hair on his lapel. Better get upstairs and have a clean up.
Shirley said, “You might have said you wouldn't be back for supper.”
“I tried to ring—the phone must be on the blink again.”
“It's not the phone that's on the blink, it's you.”
He was halfway up the stairs. “I don't have to answer to you for everything I do. So I went out for a drink.” He slammed the bathroom door. Below, he co
uld hear her keening on.
The trouble was, he didn't know how serious Debbie was. Oh, she was saying and doing all the right things, but was it, when it came to the crunch, more than just a pretty heavy affair? He was going to have to find out—take the risk and find out—because he couldn't stand it like this much longer.
He washed and changed. It was that American series tonight, thank God, which would shut Shirley up for the next hour. When he was at the top of the stairs, he heard Martin's voice. “Dad?” It was funny how you could clean forget about the kid, he'd always been a quiet, buttoned-up sort of boy. Keith went into the bedroom.
He was sitting up in bed, with a pile of tattered comics. “Dad—it's the Air Show next week.”
“Is it?”
“Would you take me?”
“Yeah,” said Keith. “O.K., then, why not?” He was filled with geniality, with generosity. Why not, indeed. Give the kid a smashing day out—it wasn't that often he took him anywhere. He saw himself, in a flash, walking with Martin among the planes, explaining, instructing, the benign indulgent father, the boy hanging on his every word—“Look, Martin, here's an old Spitfire Mark II, now the superstructure's interesting …” “Gosh, Dad, fancy you knowing all about this land of thing.”
“Will you honestly?” There was amazement in Martin's voice, and disbelief.
“Yes, sure, great—we'll have us a day out together.”
“The Red Devils are doing a display.”
“Good, good.”
The boy's eyes shone. “Fantastic! Cor!”
“O.K., it's a date, then.”
“Promise?”
“Cut my throat,” said Keith cheerfully. He could afford a bit of largesse, feeling the way he did, Debbie only eighteen hours away, at the Black Horse at six, and later—well later they'd have to see about.
“Cut my throat and may I die. Good night, kiddo.”
* * *
“Why do we have to go with you to Spelbury?”
“Because,” said Clare, “there is food to be got and new shoes for you both and a business about the broken mixer. Come on, hurry up.”
Outside, Anna said with exaggerated concern, “The poor trees. The poor baby trees, all spoiled. I think those naughty boys ought to be—ought to be beaten”