The Lady in the Van

  Geoffrey sat down in the nearest pew. He was trembling. After a bit he got up and went into the vestry where he opened the safe in which was kept the parish plate, the chalice (Schofield of London, 1782) and the two patens (Forbes of Bristol, 1718), each in its velvet-lined case. On the shelf below them Geoffrey put Clive’s book.

  * * *

  Over the following weeks Geoffrey would often open up the safe and take a peek at the book, trying to decipher Clive’s cryptography and gauge the extent and nature of his activities. None of it shocked him: indeed he found the exercise vaguely exciting and as near to pornography as he allowed himself to come.

  Whether it was thanks to the book or to that almost involuntary pass that had allowed him to retain it Geoffrey found his life changing. Disappointed of immediate promotion he was now more … well, relaxed and though ‘Relax!’ is hardly at the core of the Christian message he did feel himself better for it.

  So it might be because he was easier with himself or that his unique pass at the geology student had broken his duck and given him more nerve but one way and another he found himself having the occasional fling, in particular with the bus-driving crucifer, who, married though he was, didn’t see that as a problem. Nor did Geoffrey’s confessor who, while absolving him of what sin there was, urged him to see this and any similar experiences less as deviations from the straight and narrow and more as part of a learning curve. In fairness, this wasn’t an expression Geoffrey much cared for, though he didn’t demur. He preferred to think of it, if only to himself, as grace.

  He still kept the book in the safe, though, as it represented a valorous life he would have liked to lead and still found exciting. It happened that he had been to confession the day before and just as a diabetic whose blood tests have been encouraging sneaks a forbidden pastry so he felt he deserved a treat and went along to the church meaning to take out Clive’s book. It was partly to revisit his memory but also because even though he now knew its mysterious notations by heart they still gave him a faint erotic thrill. He knew that this was pathetic and could have told it to no one, except perhaps Clive, and it was one of the ways he missed him.

  Pushing open the door of the church he saw someone sitting towards the front and on the side. It was the geology student, slumped in the same pew he had sat in at the memorial service.

  ‘Hail,’ said the young man. ‘We meet again.’ Geoffrey shook hands.

  ‘I meant to come before now,’ he said, ‘only my car’s not been well.’

  Geoffrey managed a smile. Seeing him again, Geoffrey thought how fortunate it was that his advance had been rejected. God had been kind. It would never have done.

  Hopkins made room for Geoffrey to sit down, just as he had on the first occasion they had talked.

  ‘I came back,’ he said, as if it were only that morning he had fled the church. ‘I thought about it and I thought, why not?’ And now he turned towards Geoffrey and looking him sternly in the eye put his hand on the vicar’s knee. ‘All right?’

  Geoffrey did not speak.

  There was a click, then another and the turning of a wheel and faintly, as if from a great way off, Geoffrey heard the cogs begin to grind as the clock gathered itself up and struck the hour.

  Father! Father! Burning Bright

  ON THE MANY OCCASIONS Midgley had killed his father, death had always come easily. He died promptly, painlessly and without a struggle. Looking back, Midgley could see that even in these imagined deaths he had failed his father. It was not like him to die like that. Nor did he.

  The timing was good, Midgley acknowledged that. Only his father would have managed to stage his farewell in the middle of a ‘Meet The Parents’ week. It was not a function Midgley enjoyed. Each year he was dismayed how young the parents had grown, the youth of fathers in particular. Most sported at least one tattoo, with ears and noses now routinely studded. Midgley saw where so many of his pupils got it from. One father wore a swastika necklace, of the sort Midgley had wondered if he felt justified in confiscating from a boy. And a mother he had talked to had had green hair. ‘Not just green,’ muttered Miss Tunstall, ‘bright green. And then you wonder the girls get pregnant.’

  That was the real point of these get-togethers. The teachers were appalled by the parents but found their shortcomings reassuring. With parents like these, they reasoned, who could blame the schools? The parents, recalling their own teachers as figures of dignity and authority, found the staff sloppy. Awe never entered into it, apparently. ‘Too human by half’ was their verdict. So both Nature and Nurture came away, if not satisfied, at any rate absolved. ‘Do you wonder?’ said the teachers, looking at the parents. ‘They get it at school,’ said the parents.

  ‘Coretta’s bin havin’ these massive monthlies. Believe me, Mr Midgley, I en never seen menstruatin’ like it.’ Mrs Azakwale was explaining her daughter’s poor showing in Use of English. ‘She bin wadin’ about in blood to her ankles, Mr Midgley. I en never out of the launderette.’ Behind Mrs Azakwale, Mr Horsfall listened openly and with unconcealed scepticism, shaking his head slowly as Midgley caught his eye. Behind Mr Horsfall, Mr Patel beamed with embarrassment as the large black woman said these terrible things so loudly. And beyond Mr Patel, Midgley saw the chairs were empty.

  Mrs Azakwale took Coretta’s blood-stained track record over to the queue marked Computer Sciences, leaving Midgley faced with Mr Horsfall and Martin.

  Mr Horsfall did not dye his hair nor wear an earring. His hair was now fashionably short but only because he had never got round to wearing it fashionably long. Nor had his son Martin ever ventured under the drier; his ears, too, were intact. Mr Horsfall was a detective sergeant.

  ‘I teach Martin English, Mr Horsfall,’ said Midgley, wishing he had not written ‘Hopeless’ on Martin’s report, a document now gripped by Mr Horsfall in his terrible policeman’s hand.

  ‘Martin? Is that what you call him?’

  ‘But that’s his name.’ Midgley had a moment of wild anxiety that it wasn’t, that the father would accuse him of not even knowing the name of his son.

  ‘His name’s Horsfall. Martin is what we call him, his mother and me. For your purposes I should have thought his name was Horsfall. Are you married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Horsfall was not impressed. He had spent long vigils in public toilets as a young constable. Many of the patrons had turned out to be married and some of them teachers. Marriage involved no medical examination, no questionnaire to speak of. Marriage for these people was just the bush they hid behind.

  ‘What does my son call you?’

  ‘He calls me Mr Midgley.’

  ‘Doesn’t he call you sir?’

  ‘On occasion.’

  ‘Schools…’ Horsfall sniffed.

  His son ought to have been small, nervous and bright, Midgley the understanding schoolteacher taking his part against his big, overbearing parent. He would have put books into his hands, watched him flower so that in time to come the boy would look back and think ‘Had it not been for him…’ Such myths sustained Midgley when he woke in the small hours of the morning and drowsed during the middle period of the afternoon. But they were myths. Martin was large and dull. He was not unhappy. He would not flower. He was not even embarrassed. He was probably on his father’s side, thought Midgley, as he sat there looking at his large inherited hands, and occasionally picked at one of a scattering of violet-painted warts.

  ‘What worries me,’ said Horsfall, ‘is that he can scarcely put two words together.’

  This was particularly hurtful to a man who, in his professional capacity, specialised in converting the faltering confessions of semi-illiterates into his plain policeman’s prose. He could do it. At four o’clock in the morning after a day spent combing copses and dragging ponds, never mind house-to-house enquiries, he could do it. Why not his son?

  ‘You show me up, Martin, having to come along here. I don’t grudge coming along here. But what I would like to have come along
here as is a proud father. To be told of your achievements. Be shown your name in gilt letters on the honours board. Martin Horsfall. But no. What is it? It’s Geography: Poor. History: Poor. English: Hopeless. PE: Only fair. Why Martin?

  ‘Why, Mr Midgley? And why hopeless? Geography: Poor. History: Poor. English: Hopeless. Is he hopeless or are you?’

  ‘He doesn’t try.’

  ‘Do you challenge him? We challenge him at home. His mother and I challenge him. Does he get challenged at school? I don’t see it.’ Horsfall looked round but caught the eye of Mr Patel, who was smiling in anticipation of his interview. Mr Patel’s son was clever. Blacks, Indians. That was why. Challenge. How could there be any challenge?

  ‘I never had chances like he had. And I dare say you didn’t. We never had chances like that, Martin.’

  At the ‘we’ Midgley flinched, suddenly finding himself handcuffed to Horsfall in the same personal pronoun.

  ‘A school like this. Modern buildings. Light. Air. Sporting facilities tip-top. Volleyball. If somebody had come up to me when I was your age and said “There are facilities for volleyball”, I would have gone down on my knees. What do you say?’

  The question Horsfall was asking his son had no obvious answer. Indeed, it was not really a question at all. ‘Justify your life’; that was what this dull and dirty youth was being asked to do. Not seeing that justification was necessary, the son was silent and the father waited.

  And it was in the middle of this silence that Miss Tunstall came up to say the hospital had telephoned. Except that, sensing this was not simply a silence but an essential part of what was being said, she did not immediately interrupt but made little wavings with her hand behind Mr Horsfall’s head, who—a policeman and ever on the watch for mockery—turned round. So it was to him that Miss Tunstall gave the bad news (a man in any case used to transactions with ambulances, hospitals and all the regimes of crisis).

  ‘The hospital’s just rung. Mr Midgley’s father’s been taken ill.’ And only then, having delivered her message did she look at Midgley, who thus heard his father was dying at second-hand and then only as a kind of apology.

  ‘They’re ringing the ward,’ said Midgley. ‘It’s a fall, apparently.’ One ear was in Miss Tunstall’s office, the other fifty miles away in some nowhere behind a switchboard.

  ‘You want to pray it’s not his hip,’ said Miss Tunstall.

  ‘That’s generally the weak spot.’ She had a mother of her own. ‘The pelvis heals in no time, surprisingly.’ She did not sound surprised. Her mother had broken her pelvis and she had thought it was the beginning of the end. ‘No. It’s when it’s the hip it’s complicated.’

  ‘Switchboard’s on the blink,’ said a voice.

  ‘Join the club,’ said another. ‘I’ve been on the blink all day.’

  ‘It’s the dreaded lurgi,’ said the first voice.

  ‘Hello,’ said Midgley. But there was silence.

  ‘She took a nasty tumble in Safeway’s last week,’ went on Miss Tunstall. ‘They do when they get older. It’s what you must expect.’ She expected it all the time. ‘Their bones get brittle.’

  She cracked her fingers and adjusted the spacing.

  ‘Maintenance,’ said a new voice.

  ‘I’ve been wrongly connected,’ said Midgley.

  ‘It’s these ancillary workers,’ said Miss Tunstall. ‘Holding the country to ransom. Other people’s suffering is their bread and butter.’ She was wanting to get on with a notice about some boys acting the goat in the swimming baths but felt she ought to wait until Midgley had heard one way or the other. Her mother was 82. The last twenty years had not been easy and had she known what was in store she thought now she would probably have stabbed her mother to death the second she turned 60. These days it would only have meant a suspended sentence or if the worst came to the worst open prison. Miss Tunstall had once been round such an institution with the school and found it not uncongenial. A picnic in fact.

  ‘Records are on the warpath again,’ said a voice in Midgley’s ear.

  ‘It never rains,’ said another.

  ‘Should I be sterilisin’ this?’ said a black voice.

  ‘Search me, dear,’ said an emancipated one.

  ‘Hello,’ said Midgley. ‘HELLO.’

  Softly Miss Tunstall began to type.

  Midgley thought of his father lying in bed, dying but not wanting to be any trouble.

  ‘No joy?’ said Miss Tunstall, uncertain whether it would be better to underline ‘the likelihood of a serious accident’. ‘And then they wonder why people are stampeding to BUPA.’

  Midgley decided he had been forgotten then a crisp voice suddenly said ‘Sister Tudor’.

  ‘I’m calling about a patient, a Mr Midgley.’

  Noiselessly Miss Tunstall added an exclamation mark to ‘This hooliganism must now STOP!’ and waited, her hands spread over the keys.

  ‘What is the patient’s name?’

  ‘Midgley,’ said Midgley. ‘He came in this morning.’

  ‘When was he admitted?’

  ‘This morning.’

  ‘Midgley.’ There was a pause. ‘We have no Midgley. No Midgley has been admitted here. Are you sure you have the right ward?’

  ‘He was admitted this morning. I was told he was seriously ill.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Her tone changed. ‘Midgley. What is your name?’

  ‘Midgley.’

  ‘Are you next of kin?’

  ‘My father is dead,’ he thought. ‘Only the dead have next of kin.’

  ‘I’m his son.’

  Miss Tunstall folded her hands in her lap.

  ‘He’s not at all well.’ The tone was reproachful rather than sympathetic. ‘We think he’s had a stroke. He’s been lying on the floor. He ought to have been in hospital sooner. There’s now the question of pneumonia. It’s touch and go.’

  ‘It’s touch and go,’ said Midgley, putting the phone down.

  ‘How old is he?’ said Miss Tunstall, noticing she had typed ‘tooling’ for ‘fooling’.

  ‘He’s 74.’

  Her mother was 82. She ripped out the paper and wound in another sheet. Life was unfair.

  The door opened.

  ‘Been on the phone again, Midgley?’ said the headmaster. ‘I’m the one who has to go cap in hand to the Finance Committee.’

  ‘Mr Midgley’s father’s ill,’ said Miss Tunstall, once again the apologetic herald. ‘Apparently it’s touch and go.’

  And she started typing like the wind.

  ‘Of course you can go. Of course you must go. One’s father. There can be no question. A filial obligation.’ Midgley was in the headmaster’s study. ‘It’s awkward, of course. But then it always is.’ It was death. It was a reshuffling of the timetable.

  Midgley’s thoughts were with his father in Intensive Care.

  ‘Was he getting on in years?’

  No effort was being spared to keep him alive and in the present and yet grammatically he kept slipping into the past.

  ‘He’s 74.’

  ‘Seventy-four. Once upon a time I thought that was old. You won’t be gone long? What, three, four days?’ In his mind the headmaster roughed out a timetable whereby Midgley senior could decently die, be buried and Midgley junior be back in harness. Radical surgery on the timetable might still be avoided.

  ‘Let me see. It’s English, Integrated Humanities and Creative Arts, nothing else, is there?’

  ‘Environmental Studies.’

  The headmaster groaned. ‘That’s the awkward one. Pilbeam’s off on another course. That’s the trouble with the environment, it involves going on courses. I’ll be glad when the environment is confined to the textbooks.

  ‘Ah well,’ said the headmaster. ‘It can’t be helped.’ He had never understood the fuss people made about their parents. ‘Both of mine were despatched years ago. A flying bomb.’ He made it sound like a victory for common sense.

  ‘He must have fallen and no
t been able to get up,’ said Midgley. ‘He was lying there two days.’

  ‘An all too familiar scenario these days,’ said the headmaster. ‘Isolated within the community. Alone in the crowd. You must not feel guilty.’

  ‘I generally go over at weekends,’ said Midgley.

  ‘It will give Tomlinson an opportunity to do some of his weird and wonderful permutations with the timetable. Though I fear this one will tax even Tomlinson’s talents.’

  The headmaster opened the door.

  ‘One must hope it is not as grave as it appears. One must hope he turns the corner. Corners seem to have gone out of medicine nowadays. In the old days the sick were always turning them. Illness is now much more of a straight road. Why is that?’

  It was not a question he wanted answering.

  ‘Antibiotics?’ said Midgley, lingering.

  ‘Sometimes one has the impression modern medicine encourages patients to loiter.’ It was Midgley who was taking his time.

  ‘Mistakenly, one feels. Godspeed.’

  Miss Tunstall had finished the notice about acting the goat in the swimming baths and the headmaster now glanced through it, taking out his pen. She made a start on another notice about the bringing of pupils’ cars to school, one of the head’s ‘privilege not a right’ notices. Midgley still hesitated.

  ‘I’m not sure if we’ve couched this in strong enough terms, Daphne.’

  ‘It’s as you dictated it.’

  ‘I have no doubt. But I feel more strongly about it now. Nothing else is there, Midgley?’

  Midgley shook his head and went out.

  ‘A boy slips. Is pushed and we are talking about concussion. A broken neck. A fatality, Daphne. I intend to nail the culprits. I want them to know they will be crucified.’

  ‘Shall I put that?’