“A practical joke. But they’ve always been so kind to us—”
“Perhaps you’ll meet them then, you and Bell at your meetings.”
“Meet them?”
“You are looking for a quiet place aren’t you?”
“Edwin said something.”
“Well then.”
Stanhope nodded at him, looked briefly towards Sandra then withdrew, ting! A loud thump came from the ceiling. Sim hurried upstairs and held Ruth while she brought up some phlegm. When she was better she asked who he had been talking to.
“Stanhope. Just a chess book. Fortunately we had it in stock.”
Her head turned from side to side.
“Dream. Bad dream.”
“Just a dream. Next time it’ll be a good one.”
She drifted off to sleep again and breathed easily. He tiptoed down into the shop. Sandra was still sitting. But then the shop bell tinged again. It was Edwin. Sim made shushing noises and then breathed the reminder melodramatically.
“Ruth’s poorly. She’s asleep up there—”
Edwin’s declension from noise to near silence was as dramatic.
“What is it, dear Sim?”
“Just a cold and she’s getting better. But you know at our kind of age—not that she’s as old as me, of course; but all the same—”
“I know. We’re in the bracket. Look, I have news.”
“A meeting?”
“We are all there is, I’m afraid. Yet I’m not afraid, really. Many are called, et cetera.”
“Stanhope’s place.”
“He told you?”
“He was here just now. Dropped in.”
Sim was faintly proud of Stanhope having dropped in. Stanhope was, after all, a celebrity, with his column, broadcasts and chess displays. Ever since chess had moved out of the grey periphery of the news and with Bobby Fischer edged into the full limelight, Sim had come to an unwilling respect for Stanhope.
“I’m glad you didn’t object.”
“Who? I? Object to Stanhope?”
“I’ve always had the feeling that your attitude to him was faintly, shall we say, illiberal.”
Sim cogitated.
“That’s true, I suppose. After all, I’ve spent my life here, like him. We’re old Greenfield people. You see, there was a bit of scandal and I suppose I’m prudish. When his wife left him. Women, you know. Ruth has no time for him. On the other hand his twin girls—they’ve been a delight to us all, just to watch them grow up. How he can ignore, could ignore such, such charmers—let them grow up any old how—”
“You will be able to sample the charm again, although at second hand.”
“They’re not!”
“Oh no. You wouldn’t expect it, would you? But he says we can use their place.”
“A room?”
“It’s the stabling at the end of the garden. Have you been in?”
“No, no.”
“They used to live there, more or less. Glad enough to get away from Stanhope, if you ask me. And he from them. They took it over. Didn’t you know?”
“I don’t see what’s so special about it.”
“I know the place. After all, I live at the top end of the garden. I should, don’t you think? When we came here first, the girls even invited us to tea there. It was a kind of dolls’ tea party. They were so solemn! The questions Toni asked!”
“I don’t see—”
“You old stick-in-the-mud!”
Sim made himself grumble.
“Such an out-of-the-way place. I don’t see why you can’t use the community centre. After all, that way we might get more members.”
“It’s the quality of the place.”
“Feminine?”
Edwin looked at him in surprise. Sim felt himself begin to blush, so he hurried on his explanation.
“I remember when my daughter was at college, once I went into the hostel where she was living—girls from top to bottom—good Lord, you’d never believe perfume could be so penetrating! I just thought, if it’s where a couple of—Well. You see.”
“Nothing like that at all. Nothing whatsoever.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.”
“This quality.”
Edwin took a turn round one of the middle bookcases. He came back, drawing himself up, beaming. He threw his arms wide.
“Mmm-ah!”
“You seem very pleased with yourself.”
“Sim. Have you been in the, the community centre?”
“Not since.”
“It’s all right of course. Just the thing and it’s where I met him—”
“I’m not, you know—not as impressed as you are, no not half as impressed. You’d better understand that, Edwin. I don’t doubt that to you in particular—”
“Just listen. Now.”
“I am. Go on.”
“No, no! Not to me. Just listen.”
Sim looked round him, listening. The traffic produced a kind of middle range of noise but nothing unusual. Then the clock struck from the community centre and like an extension of the sound he heard the clang of a fire engine’s alarm bell ring as the machine nosed over the Old Bridge. A jet whined down, mile after mile. Edwin opened his mouth to speak, then shut it, holding up one finger.
Sim felt it with his feet, more than heard it—the faint vibration, on and on, as a train rocked across the canal and drew its useful length through the fields towards the midlands.
There came a thump on the ceiling.
“Just a minute. I’ll be back.”
Ruth wanted him to wait outside the door while she went to the loo. Thought she might come over queer. He sat on the attic stairs, waiting for her. Through the shot-window he could see that men were already opening up the jumbled roofs that had held Frankley’s ridiculous stock. Presently the breakers would come with their flailing ball and chain, though it was hardly needed. They had only to lean against the old place and it would collapse. More noise.
He came back to the shop to find Edwin perched on the edge of the desk and talking to Sandra. He felt indignant at the sight.
“You can go along now, Sandra. I know it’s early. But I’ll lock up.”
Sandra, still ruminating, took a kind of loose cardigan from the hook behind the desk.
“’Bye.”
He watched her out of the shop. Edwin laughed.
“Nothing doing there, Sim. I couldn’t interest her.”
“You—!”
“Why not? All souls are of equal value.”
“Oh yes. I believe.”
Indeed I do. We are all equal. I believe that. It is more or less a fourth-class belief.
“You were going to explain a crazy idea to me.”
“They used to build churches by holy wells. Over them sometimes. They needed it, water, it was stuff you drew up out of the earth in a bucket, the earth gave it you. Not out of a pipe by courtesy of the water board. It was wild, springing, raw stuff.”
“Bugs.”
“It was holy because men worshipped it. Don’t you think that infinite charity would fix that for us?”
“Infinite charity is choosy.”
“Water is holiness. Was holiness.”
“Today I have not struck a believing streak.”
“And now; as water was then, so something as strange and unexpected and necessary in our mess. Silence. Precious, raw silence.”
“Double-glazing. Technology has the answer.”
“Just as it put the wild holiness in a pen and conducted it demurely through a pipe. No. What I meant was random silence, lucky silence, or destined.”
“You’ve been there now, in the last few days?”
“As soon as Stanhope offered us the place. Certainly. There’s a kind of landing passage at the top of the stairs with the rooms opening out. You look through small dormers, that way to the still, untouched canal, the other way into the green of the garden. Silence lives there, Sim. I know it. Silence is the
re and waiting for us, waiting for him. He’s not aware of it yet. I’ve found it for him. The holiness of silence waiting for us.”
“It can’t be.”
“I wonder how it comes about? Certainly there’s a sense of going down, of all the town being built up there and this being, as it were, at the bottom of steps, shut away, a kind of courtyard, a private place farther down into the earth almost holding the sunlight like a cup and the quiet as if someone was there with two hands holding it all—someone who no longer needed to breathe.”
“It was innocence. You said—a kind of dolls’ tea party. That’s sad.”
“What’s sad about it?”
“They’ve grown up, you see. Look, Edwin. There’s some trick of the building, some way in which sound is reflected away—”
“Even the jets?”
“Why not! Somehow the surfaces will have done it. There’ll be a rational explanation.”
“You said it was innocence.”
“My aged heart was touched.”
“Put that way—”
“Have the girls left any traces behind them?”
“The place is still furnished, more or less, if that is what you mean.”
“Interesting. Do you think they would be interested? The girls, I mean.”
“They aren’t home.”
Sim was on the point of explaining that he had seen Sophy walking past the shop but thought better of it. There was a touch of curiosity in Edwin’s face whenever he heard an inquiry about them—almost as if the non-events, the strange, sensual, delightful and poignant linkage that did not exist except in the world of a man’s supposing, were not private, but out there, to be detected, read like a book, no, like a comic strip, part of the generation-long folly of Sim Goodchild.
Because he was old, felt himself to be old and irritable with himself as much as with the world, he did a violence to his accustomed secrecy and revealed a small corner of the comic strip.
“I used to be in love with them.”
There—it was out and blinding.
“I mean—not what you might think. They were adorable and to be, be cherished. I don’t know—they still are—well she is, the brunette, Sophy, or was still when I last saw her. Of course the fair one—Toni—she’s gone.”
“You old romantic.”
“Paternal instinct. And Stanhope—he really doesn’t care about them you know, I’m certain; and then with those women—well that’s all a good while ago. One felt they were neglected. I wouldn’t have you for the world think—”
“I don’t. Oh no—”
“Not that—”
“Quite.”
“If you see what I mean.”
“Absolutely.”
“Of course my child—our children—were so much older.”
“Yes. I see that.”
“So it was natural with two such decorative little girls living practically on our doorstep.”
“Of course.”
There was a long pause. Edwin broke it.
“I thought tomorrow night if that’s convenient for you. It’s his evening off.”
“If Ruth is well enough.”
“Will she come?”
“I meant if she’s well enough to be left. What about Edwina?”
“Oh no. No. Definitely. You know Edwina. She met him, you see. Just for a minute or two. She’s so, so—”
“Sensitive. I know. I can’t think how she can bear her job as almoner. The things she must see.”
“It is a trial. But she makes a distinction. She said plainly afterwards. If he were a patient it would be different. You see.”
“Yes I see.”
“In her own free time it’s different you see.”
“Yes.”
“Of course if there were an emergency.”
“I understand.”
“So it’ll just be the three of us, I’m afraid. Not many is it, when one remembers the old days.”
“Perhaps Edwina would care to come and sit with Ruth.”
“You know how she is about germs. She’s as brave as a lion really, you see, but she has this thing about germs. Not viruses. Just germs.”
“Yes, so I believe. Germs are dirtier than viruses. Germs probably have viruses, would you say?”
“She simply has this thing.”
“She’s not a committee. Women often aren’t. Are you a committee Edwin? I am.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh Lord. Different standards of belief. Multiply the number of committee members by the number of standards of belief—”
“I’m still not with you, Sim.”
“Partitions. One of me believes in partitions. He thinks, for example, that although Frankley’s is on the other side of this wall—or is until they knock the place down—the wall remains real and it’s no good pretending otherwise. But another of my members—well, what shall I say?”
“Perhaps he’ll pierce a partition.”
“Your man? Let him do it really, then, and beyond doubt. I know—”
I know how the mind can rise from its bed, go forth, down the stairs, past doors, down the path to the stables that are bright and rosy by the light of two small girls. But they were asleep and remained asleep even if their images performed the silly dance, the witless Arabian thing.
“Know what?”
“It doesn’t matter. A committee member.”
All is imagination he doth prove.
“Partitions, my majority vote says, remain partitions.”
One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.
Edwin glanced at his watch.
“I must rush. I’ll let you know the time when he gets in touch.”
“Late evening is best for me.”
“For the whole committee. Which one had a thing about the little girls?”
“A sentimental old thing. I doubt he’ll bother to come.”
He ushered Edwin out of the shop door into the street and gestured courteously to his hurrying back.
A sentimental old thing?
Sim sighed to himself. Not a sentimental old thing but the unruly member.
At eight o’clock, Ruth being propped up with a good book and his stomach rather distended with fish fillet and reconstituted potato, together with peas out of a tin, Sim made his way through the shop, relocked the door behind him and walked the few paces to Sprawson’s. It was broad daylight but on the right-hand side of the building there was nevertheless a light in Stanhope’s window. The town was quiet and only a jukebox in the Keg of Ale disturbed the blue summer evening. Sim thought to himself that the alleged silence of the stables was not really necessary. They might well hold their small meeting—but meeting was hardly the word for three people—might well hold it in the street; but as he thought this, a helicopter, red light sparking away, flew the length of the old canal, and as if to rub in the point a train rumbled over the viaduct. After both machines had passed, his ears, newly sharpened perhaps, detected the faint chatter of a typewriter from the lighted window where Stanhope was still working at his book or a broadcast or his column. Sim ascended the two steps to the glass door and pushed it open. This was familiar ground—solicitors and the Bells to the left, the Stanhope door to the right—at the other end of the short hall the door which gave on to the steps down to the garden. It was all an absurdly romantic area to Sim. He felt, and was aware of, the romance and the absurdity. He had no connection whatsoever with the two little girls, had never had and could expect none. It was all pure fantasy. A few, a very few visits to the shop—
There was a clatter from the stairs on the left. Edwin appeared tumultuously, a man this time of gusto, who threw his long arm round Sim’s shoulder and squeezed it tremendously.
“Sim, my dear fellow, here you are!”
It seemed so silly a greeting that Sim detached himself as quickly as he could.
“Where is he?”
“I’m expecting him. He knows where. Or I think so.
Shall we go?”
Edwin strode, larger than life, to the end of the hall and opened the door above the garden steps.
“After you, my dear fellow.”
Plants and shrubs and smallish trees in flower trespassed on the path that led straight down to the rosy-tiled stables with their ancient dormer windows. Sim had a moment of his usual incredulity at the reality of something that had been so near him and unknown, for so many years. He opened his mouth to speak of this but shut it again.
Each step you took down the steps—there were six of them—had a quite distinct quality. It was a kind of numbing, a muffling. Sim who had swum and snorkeled on the Costa Brava found himself likening the whole process at once to the effect of going under water; but not, as with water, an instant transition from up here to down there, a breaking of a perfect surface, a boundary. Here the boundary was just as indubitable but less distinct. You came down, out of the evening noise of Greenfield, and step by step, you were—numbed was not the right word, nor was muffled. There was not a right word. This oblong of garden, unkempt, abandoned and deserted, was nevertheless like a pool of something, a pool, one could only say, of quiet. Balm. Sim stopped and looked about him as if this effect would reveal itself to the eye as well as the ear but there was nothing—only the overgrown fruit trees, the rioting rose stocks, camomile, nettles, rosemary, lupins, willowherb and foxgloves. He looked up into the clear air; and there, astonishingly at a great height, a jet was coming down, the noise of its descent wiped away so that it was graceful and innocent as a glider. He looked round him again, buddleia, old man’s beard, veronica—and the scents of the garden invaded his nostrils like a new thing.
Edwin’s hand was on his shoulder.
“Let’s get on.”
“I was thinking how preferable all this is to our small patch. I’d forgotten about flowers.”
“Greenfield is a country town!”
“It’s a question of where one looks. And the silence!”
At the end of the path down the garden they came to the courtyard, shadowed away from the sun. At some time the entrance had been closed by double doors but these had been taken away. Now the only door was the small one, opposite, that led out to the towpath. Stairs went up on their left hand.