FATHER KIPLING SLOWLY mounted the shaking wooden steps and placed the monstrance containing the Host above the tabernacle, in the sight of all. As he stepped down and turned to kneel before the altar, he directed a swift, appraising glance at the ‘all’. About twelve worshippers dotted the empty, evenly-spaced pews, like lonely beads on a child’s abacus.
O salutaris hostiaQuae coeli pants hostium,
they sang, without conviction. O saving victim, opening wide the gates of heaven … A motor-cycle roared past the church, tyres hissing on the wet road, insolently drowning the feeble chant. The Saturday Benediction was slowly dying of indifference. Barely twelve people, and those good pious souls who never went to the cinema anyway.
The crusade against the cinema had never caught the imagination of the parish since he had launched it with such lofty aspirations five—or was it six?—months ago. Nevertheless he had persisted with the Saturday Benediction, and Lent had impelled a respectable number to attend. But now, a week after Easter, his failure stared at him from the empty pews. A pitiful dozen worshippers. Where were the other two thousand souls in his parish? Slumped in their cinema seats no doubt. Failure was embarrassing when one had committed the success of one’s mission into God’s hands. It was almost as if God had failed. Surely He didn’t want people to go to the cinema? Yet nothing had gone right for the crusade. There had been that unfortunate controversy in the local Press with the manager of the Palladium, when he had been compelled, under pressure from his bishop, to issue a statement to the effect that all films were not necessarily harmful in the eyes of the Church. The parishioners had required no further encouragement to flock back to the picture-palace. They really didn’t seem to see anything harmful in it. Mr Mallory had said to him once, ‘With all due respect, Father, I think you’ve got to be more broadminded these days. What shocks you now—and would have shocked me when I was a lad—it just rolls off these kids like rain off a duck’s back.’ ‘Broadminded’ was a popular word, a word he just couldn’t understand. The context was always a plea for tolerance of something which he had been taught to regard as sinful.
Mr Mallory had advocated switching Benediction back to Thursday night. He said more people would come to Benediction then. He said everybody liked to go out and amuse themselves on Saturday night. He said everyone had to have some relaxation. He was a good man, but typical of his fellow-parishioners. Like converted pagans, they were reluctant to give up their old gods. But did they not realize that the God of Israel was a jealous God? Apparently his wife did, for she was in the church this evening. But their children were not. The Church of Christ was rapidly becoming the Church of middle-aged women. Soon it would be said in England as it was said on the Continent, that a good Catholic is a man whose wife goes to church.
The Tantum Ergo quavered to its conclusion. Emptying his mind of everything except an awareness of the Presence of his Creator, Father Kipling enfolded the stem of the monstrance in the ends of his humeral veil, and held it high, and made with it the Sign of the Cross in the air.
Damien shook the bell as he adored the Sacred Host, with faith, piety and love, saying inwardly, ‘My Lord and my God!’ and mentally deposited another seven years in his bank of indulgences.
It was 7.15. Dismally Mr Berkley haunted the foyer of the Palladium, confirming, from the overheard remarks of his patrons as they left the cinema, that his experiment had not been a success.
‘Queer sort of ending.’
‘Well, I thought he would get his bike back after all that performance.’
‘Sort of left you in the air. You know.’
‘Not bad I s’pose, but it brought you down a bit.’
‘All those foreign voices, it got on my nerves.’
‘Bloody wops.’
Mr Berkley hovered by the box-office.
‘How’s business, Miss Gray?’
‘Quiet, Mr Berkley,’ answered the girl, without interest.
He wandered towards the doors that opened on to the wet street, and stared out at the people hurrying along the pavements, feet splashing in puddles, sodden raincoats, barging umbrellas, gleaming cycle capes. Despite the low rain-clouds, it was still light. The hour had gone forward last Sunday. Soon the long, light evenings would be luring yet more customers away from the stuffy cinema.
Bill, in his faded Ruritanian sergeant’s uniform, edged over to him.
‘Not so good, is it, Mr Berkley?’
He shook his head.
‘If we don’t pack ’em in this weather, we never will pack ’em in, that’s what I always say.’
‘Yes, always, Bill,’ replied Mr Berkley unkindly. He was fond of old Bill—one felt affection for anything that was sufficiently old—but really he was too much of a prophet of woe. Mr Berkley turned aside and began to study the stills of Bicycle Thieves in the portico.
It seemed particularly appropriate to him that Antonio was sticking up a poster depicting Rita Hayworth when his bicycle was stolen—a subtle juxtaposition of artificiality and realism in the cinema. But it was artificiality the public wanted—swollen busts and happy endings. His idea of introducing foreign film classics had misfired. Receipts had slumped alarmingly that week.
Of course there were plenty of foreign films that peddled sex much more effectively than Hollywood, but it was risky to resort to the Continental X-port market. He had learned to his cost, when the ‘Empire’ had staged nude reviews in a desperate attempt to keep going, that using sex quite frankly as the basic attraction meant losing the reliable, come-every-week family audience to gain the dubious favours of a fickle, rowdy mob of hooligans. Besides, he didn’t want to awaken the wrath of that turbulent priest again. He had won the last contest on points, thank God, but he knew that a series of ‘X’ films, and the suggestive posters that were essential to their promotion, would give Father Whatsisname just the chance he wanted to point the accusing finger. That would knock the bottom out of his own defence of the cinema as the clean, healthy family entertainment.
He had seen Father … Kipling, that was it, one day. A Catholic friend had pointed him out as he hurried through the streets with a small boy at his side, clutching a worn black leather bag—probably answering a sick call, his friend had suggested. Grey-haired, stooping, shabbily dressed. Mr Berkley had almost felt pity for him, and genuinely regretted that they should be at war. They were both, after all, in show-business of a kind, both presiding over a declining form of entertainment, both desperately concerned to pull in the customers. They should be allies, not rivals.
With an effort he redirected his thoughts to the problem of what films the Palladium should show in the near future. Something new, something up to date was needed. Something that was associated with youth. Everyone was mad about youth nowadays. Youth set the fashion, and the old followed. Of course that had always been the case, the young always did set the fashion; but never before did it change so rapidly, never before were the older generation so pathetically afraid of being left behind.
Mr Mallory was not at all enjoying his Saturday evening at the cinema. An uneasy conscience chafed him like his new, scratchy tweed suit, caused him the same persistent discomfort as the broken spring he was hatching out beneath his buttocks. And it was not the film to soothe and smother a disturbed conscience. A worthy, well-made film in its way, no doubt, but rather depressing. Not his idea of a Saturday night’s entertainment. When you went to the pictures you didn’t want to be reminded of the problems that dogged you outside the cinema: jobs, children, money and so forth. Particularly if you had just had a row with your wife, and rather suspected that you were in the wrong.
But then, damn it, was he so obviously in the wrong? After all, there was no necessity to go to Benediction on a Saturday evening. It was making a fetish of religion. Of course Bett was still a superstitious, God-fearing Irish-woman; you couldn’t expect her to appreciate that a person could have too much of a good thing—even religion. It was a question of religious capacity. Some had more than others. He knew his own religious capacity. He knew whether or not he would benefit from going to church. And tonight he would not have. Bett was not bound to go. It was not as though she had been slack in her church attendance in the past. In fact, she was so far ahead of the majority on points that she could afford to let up a bit. Her religious capacity might be greater than his. In fact, he was willing to admit that it was. But it was a wife’s duty to obey her husband in all that was not sin. That was the teaching of her own Church. It was ridiculous to pretend that there was anything immoral about the cinema. That old fallacy of Father Kipling’s had been exploded long ago, and should never have been taken seriously in any case. In fact, he had forced Bett to admit as much, but she had countered by claiming that nevertheless they should set the children a good example. At this transparent piece of blackmail, he had walked out of the house.
He had roved the district in search of cinematic distraction, of some foolish, enjoyable, Hollywood farrago, preferably set in the ancient world, with all-Americans dressed in togas, and luscious drug-store dames in tailored slave-rags. He had rejected a British war-film, The Sea Shall Not Have Them (And They Shall Not Have Me Either he had vowed as he passed by), and a jolly double bill comprised of The Return Of Frankenstein and The Monster, before turning into the Palladium as a last resort. Bicycle Thieves did not sound very promising, but he could not return home now. How typically vexing that there should be a rotten crop of films on, just when he really wanted a good one.
His worst fears had been realized. It was a depressing film. Perhaps on another occasion, in another mood, he would have been more sympathetically disposed towards it, but at the moment it seemed merely the repetition, however well-prepared, of a diet he knew only too well. Not that he had ever been as poverty-stricken as the poor fellow in the film. But the dreariness, the frightful struggle of life, the indifference of people, the troublesomeness of children—he did not want to be reminded of them at that moment. He had made up his mind to be morally irresponsible this evening. Where were the luscious slave-girls with swelling breast and buttocks like ripe fruit, on which he could feed his harmless, middle-aged lechery? He felt cheated. He felt only too conscious of being in a cinema, on a seat with a broken spring, inhaling rank, second-hand air, his eyes smarting from cigarette-smoke, and his head throbbing with the heat. An ice-cream girl lurched slowly backwards down the aisle. Stretching out a hand, he purchased a choc-ice. It was thickly covered with milk chocolate, which increased the sickly sweetness of the ice-cream to a nauseous intensity. Why couldn’t those concerned realize that plain chocolate combined best with ice-cream? War-time restriction on milk-chocolate seemed to have given confectionery manufacturers a fanatical devotion to the stuff. Plain chocolate was becoming quite absurdly rare. It would soon be necessary to organize a National Society for the Protection of Plain Chocolate. The N.S.P.P.C.
Mr Mallory perceived that his ice was warm and half melted inside its chocolate coating, and that it was dripping on to his new suit. He deposited the sticky, oozing mess under his seat with a nasty feeling of satisfaction at the inconvenience it would cause the cleaners the next morning.
Patricia sensed, with some satisfaction, that she was an object of curiosity to the cinema attendants. A young, unescorted girl in a grubby man’s raincoat, taking a 3s. 6d. seat when the last programme was half-over, upset, for them, the natural order of things. As she was shown to her seat, she noted that trailers were being shown, which indicated that the last, and principal film had not yet started. She took advantage with both elbows of the luxury of padded arms, and felt soothed by the warm, impersonal darkness, the bovine torpor of those around her, and her own pleased consciousness of wasting time and money when she should have been studying. Why did she feel so much more a person when she was not being virtuous?
A few hours earlier she had been grinding wearily at Latin prose composition, when she had caught a shocked glimpse of her pinched, haggard face in the mirror. The words of A Grammarian’s Funeral came into her head:
Snatching an old raincoat from the hallstand she had plunged out into the rain. ‘Where are you going at this hour?’ Mummy from the kitchen. ‘Out.’ A pleasingly curt, truthful and enigmatic reply.
They would probably worry like anything. Not that there was any need. After all, she was seventeen, and capable of looking after herself. But they insisted on treating her like a child—or, what was worse, like an adolescent. You could almost hear their good intentions creaking as they made allowances for ‘the difficult age’. Even Daddy, wisest and kindest of men, seemed to suffer from the same delusion. ‘We’ve got to treat Patricia carefully,’ she had overheard him say to her mother one night. ‘After all, she’s at a difficult age.’ Good heavens, did they think her ‘moods’ were due to a mere period, or to a growing bust measurement? When she was fourteen perhaps; but now? Didn’t they think her capable of adult emotions, of real suffering, genuine worry? The younger you were in a family, it seemed to her, the harder it was to convince your parents that you were growing up. If only people would realize that all she wanted was freedom: freedom to think and act for herself, freedom to let life happen to her, instead of having to shape it to her parent’s expectations. If only they realized that she was under strain. Only Mark seemed to have an inkling of this strain; but he (thank heaven) didn’t seem to realize that he was part of it.
She ignored the flickering screen, and let her thoughts drift on, because it was one of those rare times when she was thinking well, when striking and truthful ideas seemed to occur to her effortlessly, rising fully articulated into the mind, when it seemed possible that one day she might write poetry.
She had gulped in this exciting sense of heightened perception with the wind and rain, as soon as she found herself on the pavement outside the house. While everybody else hurried to their destinations, she had walked slowly and aimlessly through the streets, lifting her face to the stinging rain, and watching the low rain clouds driven across the sky like waves seen from under the sea.
It grew dark. She took advantage of the last half-hour before the grimy little park closed to wander round it. Fingers touching across her stomach in the pockets of her raincoat, she watched with agreeable melancholy the duck-pond tirelessly forming circles under the ceaseless battery of the rain. Scuffling and tittering emanated from a round shelter sliced into four sections like a cake. It harboured a girl and two boys, about fifteen. They chased each other from one section to another. Their mean, human activity was discordant, and she moved on, until she could hear only the swish of the trees in the wind, and the patter of falling rain.
Idly she unravelled the muddle of paths, wandering past low, stunted railings, and dwarf ‘Keep off the grass’ signs sprouting from the balding turf; past desolate putting greens; past tightly-shuttered refreshment kiosks; past the narrow lanes marked ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ that commenced at a modest distance from each other and wound through dark shrubbery to merge in a single, dripping tomb, divided by a wall. Affection, melancholy, and other emotions that eluded classification, surged and slopped inside her as she noted each detail as if for the first time—or as if for the last. For slowly, half-consciously, but inexorably, there was growing in her mind the conviction that she would have to leave home.
She followed a path into a wide macadam clearing, in the centre of which stood a bandstand, gaunt, skeletel, deserted, like some abandoned pagan temple. In her early childhood, in the war, the puzzling structure had symbolized for her mythical pre-war delights—like talking-dolls, pineapples, and sea-side rock. The disused bandstand had been a useful playground in wet weather—useful, but limited, because there was very little you could do in a bare, empty bandstand once you had played tag in its confined area, and walked round the parapet. Always you felt it was holding something back, waiting.
It still retained its mystery. It had been repainted since the war, but, as far as she knew, it had never given forth music. Despite its new coat of paint it was still something of a relic, something of an enigma, resembling, in its apparently purposeless massiveness, some strange arrangement of stones on the site of a vanished civilization.
Leaving the bandstand, and heading for the gate at the summons of the park-keeper’s doleful bell, she decided that like the rest of Brickley, it exuded the odour of decay, hopelessness, regret Decay had a certain undeniable pathos and character, but it meant death—death to the heart, death to the mind, death to the spirit. The family were kind and well-meaning, but they could not help, they had been-too long in Brickley. The Church—she had had more than enough of Brickley parochial Catholicism. Brickley: its very name choked and stifled. Mark had blown in like a fresh breeze, hinting, with wild scents, of other delightful worlds where the air was free, pure, invigorating. Experience that she had once accepted as belonging only to the dream-world of the cinema screen, really existed, was to be grasped at the cost of a little determination. A Bohemian student life in Paris, the beaches of the Mediterranean, travel, talk, people—Life in a word. She thirsted for it.
And then there was Mark himself. It was him above all she would be trying to impress by her break with convention—impress in a quite futile way, because it was obvious that he and Clare were permanently attached. But still, it would be satisfying if he ever experienced in future years a tinge of regret that he had not appreciated the potentialities of the young schoolgirl he had coached with such distressing kindness. Distressing, precisely because it was so genuine, so guileless. As soon as she had realized that he was making no attempt to disguise his liking for her, she had known that there was no hope. She was sentenced for life to be Clare’s younger sister in his eyes. If somehow she could have been given a meagre share in their relationship, if one or the other had treated her as a confidante, it might have been more bearable. But Clare was always inscrutable and uninformative, and Mark (it was the only flaw in his sensibility) plainly thought her either blind or indifferent to their relationship. Their love was like a bonfire behind someone else’s high fence. You stood in the dark watching the glow and the flare of fireworks, and it never occurred to the other people to invite you in, and you couldn’t ask.
As she walked along the High Street, these thoughts had infiltrated her mind like the scouts of an advancing army of depression and self-pity. The hour of acute awareness was running out into the usual hopeless analysis of a hopeless situation, the usual emotional slush. A cinema offered a refuge, and she had clutched at it. She couldn’t afford it, but no matter; she would make do with her appallingly riddled stockings for another month. Besides, it was a good film, a continental film, part of the more abundant life she sought.
The impulsive and irresponsible gesture had the effect of recovering her sense of identity, and now she sat waiting expectantly for Bicycle Thieves to begin. It was important to concentrate so as to be able to discuss the film intelligently with Mark.
Patrick held his cigarette in one gloved hand. It was uncomfortably warm, but it kept the nicotine off your fingers. He pushed back a long, greasy spike of hair that kept slipping down and pricking his ear. The hair which his mother said was too long, and the grease which his father said was too much. It seemed that they were probably right.
But at least they restricted themselves to saying now. He would wait a few days before having his hair cut, so that they could not think that they had made him. That was the main thing.
He could do more or less as he pleased now. Within reason. He could go to the pictures on his own. It so happened that Clare and Mark were here tonight, but that was just chance. They didn’t know he was here. Just as well, as he wasn’t allowed to smoke. Not that they would tell. Patricia would, though, if she saw him. She would like to get her own back for that row she had got into last October.
This was rather a dull film. He didn’t really care whether the man got his bike back or not. He was rather soft, Patrick thought. Him and his little boy.
Patrick professed to scoff at ‘soppy love stuff’ in films; but he suspected that he was disappointed by its absence from this film. He hesitated over recognizing or dismissing this thought. It was rather important. After all, it was expected that he would become a priest, like James. But a priest must give up all that. It was a difficult problem—were you spoiling your vocation, or didn’t you have a real vocation anyway? It was rather worrying.
His attention was captured by the appearance of a young woman on the screen. Not very big. He had slipped into a rather alarming habit lately of looking at every girl or woman he encountered to see how big her bust was. Bust. That was a word he had just discovered. There were several words that meant the same thing. Bust, bosom, breasts. Bust was a funny word. Sometimes they called statues of people’s heads busts. It was probably wrong to look at women’s busts, but he couldn’t bring himself to mention it in confession, not until he had decided about his vocation, one way or the other. It was part of the evidence he was collecting against himself: he looked at Blighty furtively in the barber’s; he tried drawing women, sometimes in the nude, always with big busts, in a drawing-book he kept hidden at home; he desperately wanted to kiss a girl to find out what it was like.
He inhaled a slight whiff of smouldering wool, and hastily stubbed out his cigarette.
It was funny he should have remembered the row that week-end, when Patricia had left him in the cinema, and the per … pervert had touched his leg, because that was when all this had really started. All that Sunday he had brooded on the episode in the cinema. He had wanted to tell his father, but for some inexplicable reason, felt shy and slightly ashamed. In the end, coming home from Benediction, he had blurted it out, rather boastfully, since he had felt that a brush with a real pick-pocket had a certain adventurous quality about it. His father had asked a few questions, and looked grave. He had been frightened, wished he had kept quiet. When they got home, he was told to go to bed, and meekly obeyed. Patricia was rowed for leaving him behind in the cinema. As he slowly undressed in his room, he heard her come snivelling up the stairs. Then his father had come in. ‘Son, I want to have a word with you about this man in the pictures, so that you’ll know what to do in future. Get into bed now, or you’ll catch cold. Never mind about your prayers—you can say them in bed. Now listen, son. You don’t know what a pervert is, I suppose. No, not a kleptomaniac. Heavens, what a word! No, this man was no pick-pocket. To explain what he was I’ll have to explain a few other things. Now, you’ve probably heard the lads at school talk of certain things …’
Yes, he had heard them. And it had been easy to ignore them, not to listen, to walk away, when he believed them to be just dirt. But when they were made respectable, vouched for by his own father, when they were associated with his own parents, and with his own existence … it was quite different.
Many things had fallen into place as a result of his father’s explanation: drawings on lavatory walls, the shape of girl babies, the strange scufflings in Jimmy Thompson’s rabbit hutch when they put the black buck Jumbo in with Snow White … He had lain awake for hours that night, as a whole new world of discovery and excitement and evil unrolled before him. Never had he learned and understood so many new things at once. Never had his mind worked so fast or so clearly, leaping on from one conclusion to the next, some exhilarating, some appalling. It changed everything.
He had to know, of course. A priest had to know. But perhaps one day he would want more than just to know. That would not be all right for a priest.
Harry brooded, frowning terribly as he toyed with his knife. He was bored, and Harry didn’t like to be bored. It was usually necessary for someone to suffer when Harry was bored. Christ, what a film. The only reason he was here was that he had seen every other programme on locally. He didn’t like foreign films at the best of times: you couldn’t understand what they were saying. It was too much trouble to spell out the sub-titles. But at least you usually saw some hot stuff in foreign films, to make up for it—tarts in bed with blokes and that sort of thing—which you didn’t see anywhere else. But this film was dead tame. Not a good-looking tart in the whole picture. And a putrid story. Bicycle Thieves! You might have thought from the title that it would be a good gangster. He should have guessed. Who would want to knock off bloody bicycles? There was only one good bit in the film—when they showed you the little bastard pissing up a wall. Harry smiled his thin smile as he recollected the scene. But soon he relapsed into his dangerous black mood, fingering the razor-sharp edge of his knife, open in his pocket.
An ice-cream girl sauntered slowly up the aisle with a loaded tray, up to her tits in choc-ices and orange drinks. Sullenly Harry stood up to allow someone to push past into the aisle. Bloody people were always eating. The youth stumbled and trod heavily on Harry’s black suède shoes. A flame of pain and anger enveloped him. A blade glinted, and as if by magic a crescent appeared on the man’s cheek, with little heads of blood seeping out like juice from an orange.
‘Sorry, mate,’ said the youth.
Harry sat back in his seat without answering. Dwelling on the sentence, memorized from a paper-covered novel he kept at home, he felt revenged. He wanted the youth to go away, for in his mind he saw him fall back with a suppressed scream of terror and pain, holding a handkerchief to his face. He wiped the blade of his knife on the plush cinema seat, as if to clean it.
Loosening his shoulders inside his jacket, and smiling his thin triumphant smile, Harry turned to appraise the bloke’s tart, who was now separated from him only by an empty seat. She blushed under his scrutiny, and anxiously looked towards the aisle. Her face seemed familiar, but it was some time before he realized that she was the curly-haired bint who had given him the slip some months back. Lived in Barn Street. Quite a doll—good shape, good teeth, nice skin, and most likely a virgin, to judge from the wet bloke she knocked around with. And here was the bastard back again with his bloody ice-creams. Harry felt physically sick as he pushed past again, the short, flat hair, red, boil-pitted neck, corny blue sports jacket—inches from his face.
‘Sorry about treading on your feet.’
The repeated apology only added to Harry’s rage and humiliation. He closed his eyes and went through in detail what he would like to do to the curly-haired tart. And then he began to think, why not do it, why not? It was time.
It was tricky, eating ice-cream with your arms linked, and she didn’t want to get a stain on her new frock. That was the worst of the cinema, it was so dark you didn’t notice till you got outside. But she had linked arms with Len because she was so glad that he was next to her, between her and that boy who had looked at her as if, well as if she was indecently dressed or something. Some men were like that, as if they had X-ray eyes. There was Raymond at the cafeteria. Like Gladys said, you felt your clothes falling off every time he looked at you. Not that there was any harm in him, it was his nature Gladys said. She had been to Italy on a coach tour, and the Italian men couldn’t control themselves she said. She said if you went out alone in a tight skirt you were black and blue before you’d gone a hundred yards. But that boy was different; there was something nasty about the way he looked at you. He wanted to do more than pinch …
She was so glad that Len was back by her side, and yet she dared not tell him why, because he would only be angry and perhaps start a fight and worry afterwards anyway. Like that time she had been followed, last October. After she had told him, they hadn’t gone to the pictures for a month, so that he could see her home. And as Old Mother Potts wouldn’t allow men visitors, and Len didn’t like dancing, it had been pretty dreary just walking about the wintry streets together.
Still, now the lighter evenings were coming on they wouldn’t depend on the pictures so much; there would be walks in the park, kissing on the benches in the shadows, lying on the warm, grassy banks … Her train of thought halted with a sickening jolt as she remembered that this summer there wouldn’t be many evenings like that. Len was going into the Army next Thursday. She put her ice-cream, half-eaten, on the floor under her seat.
‘All right?’ he asked.
‘Mmm. Lovely.’
Len scraped his cup, licked the spoon, and deposited both on the floor. As he straightened up he seemed to have left his heart on the floor with the empty ice-cream carton. Already he could feel depression and worry creeping over him like a periodic fever. Already he was beginning to steal glances at the clock, comparing it needlessly with his own watch, missing bits of the film while he made rapid calculations as to whether he might conceivably be able to see Bridget home, and, when this had become out of the question, as to how long they would have to say good night at the hated corner.
When the film ended with an unexpected FINE, Clare stood up and shook the folds of her coat. Then, noticing that Mark was still seated, gazing abstractedly at the screen, she sat down again. Almost at once the National Anthem summoned them both to their feet, but Mark responded sluggishly.
‘Brilliant, wasn’t it,’ he remarked, as he clumsily helped her on with her coat.
‘Yes, it was good,’ she replied, rather vexed in case she had betrayed a lack of appreciation by standing up too quickly. ‘Strange sort of ending though.’
‘Ah, but that’s just the point, that’s just the brilliance of it. No American or English director would have dared to end it there.’
They were wedged in with the patient herd of people who were shuffling slowly and quietly up the stairs to the foyer, but Mark talked in a clear, excited voice, as if oblivious of their presence.
‘The point of the film, you see, is in the plural in the title: Bicycle Thieves. The man himself becomes a thief out of sheer desperation, and a sense of injustice, and, ironically, accepts the pardon which he is not willing to accord to the person who stole his bike. On another level of course, the whole film is an indictment of the society …’
Clare found it difficult to concentrate on what he was saying. They were in the foyer now, and the procession fanned out towards the doors, only to jam there once more, hesitating to plunge into the rain, adjusting macs and umbrellas.
‘Oh drat!’ said Clare. ‘I left my umbrella under the seat.’
‘O.K. I’ll fetch it,’ said Mark. ‘Wait here.’
Tired of being buffeted by the eddying crowd, she moved over to the wall, where a sofa seemed to dare her to sit on it. She sat down defiantly, and rummaged in her handbag. Opening her compact, she checked her appearance, and dabbed at her hair. Did Mark like the new style? It was difficult to tell. He seemed uninterested rather than disapproving. The crowd had almost disappeared, and the attendants were giving her ‘looks’. At last Mark appeared with the umbrella.
‘Thanks, darling,’ she said, as she took it from him.
‘Couldn’t find the seat for some time,’ he explained. ‘You know, I think you may be partly right about that ending.’
She paused at the brink of the wet, shiny pavement.
‘Which way?’ she asked, hoisting her umbrella.
He peered into the rain.
‘Well, there’s a hell of a queue at the bus stop. We might as well walk. We’ll get just as wet standing there. D’you mind?’
‘No, of course not. I know how you love to walk about in the rain.’
‘Yes, I always get a kick out of it. Especially when there’s some wind. I feel I’m battling against the elements. Defying them anyway.’
‘I know.’
She listened with a kind of exultation to the rain battering the taut umbrella, trying to get in, trying to squeeze between their tightly welded bodies, as they forced their way on.
‘About that ending,’ Mark continued. ‘It’s something I’ve always had doubts about. I mean, whether the cruelly realistic medium of the cinema is entitled to tragic endings like that.’
‘Well, things happen like that. I remember when I lost a fountain-pen Mummy and Daddy gave me for Christmas: I prayed and prayed, and I never found it.’
‘Yes, but because a thing could happen in life, that doesn’t make it good art. You see what I mean.’
‘Yes,’ she lied.
‘What I mean is, that whereas poetry—Shakespeare, for example—can have tragic themes without merely upsetting the audience—because it is poetry, a higher plane of existence than normal life … And it follows the action to its logical conclusion, death, so that you don’t worry about the characters any more. But one does feel sometimes—is a film entitled to sweep you so compellingly into someone else’s life so completely that for an hour and a half you are them—is it then entitled to drop you just when this character is in a perfectly hopeless situation?’
‘I know,’ she replied, ‘I shall be thinking of that poor man and his little boy all night.’ Liar!
‘Yes, there you are. I feel the same way. I keep reminding myself that this was a film, a work of art, a dramatic illusion, but it’s not easy to detach yourself from a film, as you can from a play.’
For a time they trudged on in a silence punctuated by occasional reminiscences of the film.
‘I liked the way he composed his pictures, like those continual shots of long, depressing concrete vistas.’
‘It was good when they were on the bridge in the rain, and bicycles kept criss-crossing behind them.’
‘Yes, that was good,’ he replied in answer to this, and she glowed with pleasure at having said the right thing. She always felt rather uneasy when he became absorbed in anything like this. Pretending to be deeply interested was rather a strain. When she was first going out with Mark—and it wasn’t so long ago, she was really moved by films, even bad films. But now nothing seemed to matter except Mark. There was nothing of interest to her in the present conversation except as a means of promoting their intimacy and retaining his arm around her waist.
Now they left the main road for the quieter, dimmer back streets. They turned into the bottom of High Hill, and began to ascend it, leaning forward against the incline, and against the rain that drove down upon the umbrella. Clare began to feel a foolish kind of affection for the umbrella that was doing them both such sterling service.
At the top of the hill they paused. It was always a slight, pleasant shock to realize how high you were. It was impossible to walk across the top and ignore the great panorama of London, even if its lights were obscured by the rain, even if the downpour was steadily soaking you. By common consent they sat down on the wet seat of ‘Traveller’s Rest’, huddled under the umbrella, and stared out across the city.
‘We always seem to end up here, somehow or other,’ said Mark.
‘Yes. D’you remember the first time?’
‘When was that?’
‘Don’t you remember?’ She was disappointed. That evening, its precious intimacies, belonged to her most treasured memories.
‘You remember. I think it was the first time you really spoke to me. Told me your real feeling about … oh, about life and writing and things.’
‘Oh, yes. I talked a lot of nonsense, I remember.’
‘Well, I’ll never forget it anyway.’
‘You’ve got a fearsomely retentive memory, haven’t you, darling?’
Darling. It always kindled a glow of security and peace when he called her that, however casually. It had marked a crucial phase in their love—it had in fact signalled his recognition that they were in love. That was how he had greeted her at Euston on her return from Ireland after the New Year. ‘Hallo, darling, good to see you.’ Now she listened eagerly for the word, and felt a twinge of disappointment whenever she heard ‘dear’ or ‘Clare’ instead, fearing that he had fallen out of love since the last ‘darling’.
‘Well, perhaps it wasn’t all nonsense. But I get a different feeling now when I look out over London. Not completely different perhaps. It’s still the sense of multiplicity that’s oppressive. But not in the same way.’
‘What way, then, darling?’
‘Well … religion, I suppose. The enormous indifference. The millions and millions of people in London and beyond who don’t know about God, and don’t want to know. Or who know about a different God to mine. It’s like looking at those maps that colour in the World’s Religions. It’s demoralizing to see what a small area the Universal Church commands. You begin to wonder whether you’re right after all.’
‘But, Mark, that’s all beside the point. The Church would still be the True Church, even if there was only one Catholic in the world.’ The answer came out pat, like a bar of chocolate from an automatic machine, stale and predictable. It wasn’t easy to lose the mental habits of the convent. Sometimes she hankered after the luxury of doubt; often she envied Mark the bouyancy of his newfound faith.
‘I acknowledge that intellectually, of course,’ he replied, ‘but statistics are horribly insidious. Don’t worry though, it doesn’t seriously disturb me.’
‘And this multiplicity business?’
‘Well that’s interesting really. I don’t get the same feeling of despair and helplessness any more …’
Now he was scarcely talking to her, but more to himself, analysing and defining as always. A woman with a dog stared at them curiously as she passed. Indeed, they must have looked pretty mad, sitting on the sodden bench in the pouring rain. Mark talked on.
‘I think it was because I had nothing, no idea or concept which would contain the appalling multiplicity. But now I see that, quite simply, God contains the multiplicity. You see, what troubled me most I think, was the apparently vast, shapeless extent of it. It’s reassuring to get things into some kind of cosmic perspective, to realize that the total of man’s activity is no more than a faint line on the infinite creativity of God’s hand.’
Guiltily, Clare became conscious of a feeling of boredom. Six months ago it had been her dearest wish that one day he would discuss the great truths of their shared religion with her. By some miracle this had happened. But she felt none of the joy she had anticipated. To be honest, she almost regretted his conversion. This was no credit to her own piety—but what was the use of pretending that she had any piety left? She felt towards her religion as she imagined some women felt towards their dreary, loveless marriages: something trying, but inescapable; cluttered with apparently futile chores, yet from which there was no question of escaping. Would her own marriage be like that? No, it was too hellish a prospect even to consider. Marriage had now come to occupy the same central position in her mind as religion had formerly: on it all her hopes were based. She looked back on the transformation in herself with a kind of helpless resignation. She couldn’t help thinking that it was Mark himself who was largely responsible for the change. But it hadn’t brought him any closer to her. Like a see-saw, her drop had sent him soaring into religiosity. Once they must have been dead level, but not for long. It was Student Cross that had really swept him out of her reach.
Even now it seemed incredible that Mark—cynical, idle, sophisticated Mark, had actually joined that file of Catholic students who, during Holy Week, carried a heavy wooden Cross through the public streets and along the open road between London and Our Lady’s shrine at Walsingham. He had not completed the pilgrimage. After three days he had limped home, crippled by blisters. To her he had seemed a hero: all she wanted was to kneel at his feet, kiss them and bandage them. But he had blocked all her attempts to anoint him with love and sympathy. He wouldn’t talk about the pilgrimage, except to say that he was disappointed at having had to abandon it. He seemed far from exalted. Rather, it was as if he was having an affair with another girl, and had quarrelled with her. Absurdly, she felt jealous of Student Cross as of some unknown quantity, some hidden source of fascination, whose attraction she could neither understand nor compete with. Oh, Lord! Now he was talking about eternity.
‘ … eternal life doesn’t put earthly life in the shade simply because it’s longer. That’s the point where we go wrong—I mean in the way we think about eternity. Tell me, Clare, how did you give an idea of eternity to your kids at the convent?’
‘Oh, I used the old illustration: a ball of steel as large as the world, a fly alighting on it once every million years. When the ball of steel is rubbed away by the friction, eternity will not even have begun.’
‘Precisely. You build up a frightening picture of an immensely long, empty passage of time, only to cancel it out with your last breath, leaving your audience thoroughly confused, but clinging to the idea that eternity is “like” a great length of tune.’
‘Well, what else can you do?’
‘Say simply and honestly that eternity is as much like an instant as like a million years, because it’s equally unlike either. It’s not like a length of time, it’s just different. Eternity should be visualized as a blessed state of being without past or future. Instead the word always has an unpleasant connotation when used colloquially—“I waited an eternity for a bus”.’
‘I’d like to see you explain all that to a first form,’ said Clare, exasperated.
‘Well they take far more difficult things without turning a hair: transubstantiation for instance.’
She sighed.
‘Darling, my bottom’s getting awfully cold and damp. Could we go?’
‘All right,’ he replied flatly, unresponsive to her invitation to some facetious joking about bottoms, which might have jolted him out of his philosophical mood. Clare felt chastened and annoyed. What was the matter with him? They plodded through the rain in an unhappy silence. He offered her his arm, instead of putting it round her waist. Then he said suddenly:
‘Clare, you never told me why you left the convent.’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘I didn’t particularly want to think about it.’
‘No, I mean, why did you leave the convent. What made you decide that you didn’t have a vocation?’
Clare hesitated. Of course she had thought of it. It was with her always, like some unforgettable sight or sound, like the cry of a drowning man, always echoing in the back of the mind. But she had never discussed it with anyone, and the idea of doing so now, with Mark, made her tremble. But perhaps, by telling him of it she might break through the shell of quiet self-sufficiency and recollection that had kept her at bay since his return from Student Cross. Still she hesitated, wanting him to appreciate the gravity of such a revelation and the trust it revealed in her if she chose to make it.
‘Why do you want to know? Some more fodder for your stories I suppose,’ she grumbled.
‘You know I haven’t written anything for months, darling. No, I’m interested to know, that’s all.’
Darling again. So everything was all right. Perhaps she could seal their reconciliation by divulging her secret. Love was like childhood friendship. The development of the relationship depended on shared secrets, on entrusting the other person with more and more important parts of yourself. She had found it so with Mark. He had been, particularly in the early days, insatiable in probing after facts about her private, secret life, her thoughts and feelings in childhood and adolescence. At first she had been shy and reluctant—until she discovered the power over him this could give her—that she could always command his interest and attention by resurrecting some memory long buried by forgetfulness and, sometimes, shame. She came to know instinctively the kind of candid, vivid anecdote that found favour with him, the sort of thing that made him chuckle with delight, and sometimes scribble it down in a note-book. But now she was beginning to regret her prodigal outpourings: he had almost sucked her dry, and she was afraid, afraid that when there was no more mystery about her, he would cast her aside like an empty container.
She thrust this thought away, despising her own lack of confidence. She looked at him. He was walking outside the shelter of the umbrella now, braced against the driving wind and rain, his head thrown back, and lips slightly parted. His hair was a damp, matted tangle. His raincoat was turned up at the collar, but not to protect him against the rain, for he always wore it that way. He had a boyish, slightly abstracted look, that was his most endearing expression. He glanced at her, and must have recognized the feelings that were laid out frankly on her own face, for he slipped his arm round her and kissed her. She clung to him, and they stopped in the middle of the pavement, with the rain falling all round, its liquid percussion in drains, in gutters, on trees, on the umbrella, the only sounds. Then the noise of a car grinding up the other side of the hill broke in upon the blessed peace of their embrace, and separated them.
‘What’s the matter, Clare?’ Mark asked gently, noticing her tears.
‘Nothing,’ she replied, leaning heavily against him as they moved on.
‘If I’ve done anything …’
‘No, honestly, darling, I’m not upset. It just does things to me when we kiss. I don’t think you realize.’
‘Perhaps I don’t,’ he said quietly.
After a little while Clare said:
‘I didn’t leave the convent of my own accord. I was asked to leave.’
It seemed to shake him more than she had anticipated.
‘I—I’m sorry, Clare,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I shouldn’t have been so inquisitive. If you’d rather not tell me—’
‘No, I want you to know, Mark. I’d have told you one day. There mustn’t be any secrets between us, must there?’
‘No, I suppose not.’
She drew breath to begin.
‘Well—’
She exhaled suddenly with a strained laugh.
‘Well, after making such a song and dance about it, there’s very little to tell. I’ve never really understood it. In fact, at the time, I thought I was a real martyr. One of the girls at the convent was called Hilda Syms …’
She paused, surprised by the wave of pain and nostalgia that passed through her at the mention of the name, leaving her weak and trembling; as if the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, sufferings of years could be experienced again in a single spasm of sickening intensity: the cold cubicle, the rustle of habits and the squeaking of boots as the nuns filed into the chapel, the stink of stew in the refectory; her first lesson, the children shaking their up-stretched hands, eager to please the new sister; Hilda, dew-fresh in her white blouse and neatly-pressed gym-slip, shy and ardent in the back row; Hilda and herself together in the copse, in the chapel, in the cloisters, praying, talking, joking, sharing secrets, confidences …
‘Yes?’ prompted Mark.
‘Well, as you know, when I was a novice I used to do quite a lot of teaching, because the nuns were short-handed, and it was useful practice. One of the girls I taught was this girl Hilda Syms, and she got a crush on me. Well, there’s nothing unusual in that. You know what girls’ schools are like.’
‘No—but go on,’ said Mark, smiling.
‘Well, they’re like that, believe me. Lots of girls had crushes on me—it was inevitable. I was young, you see, and—’
‘Beautiful,’ interposed Mark.
Clare smiled.
‘Well, the other nuns were rather grim and ancient. Anyway, most of these girls grew out of these crushes—soon the great problem was to keep them away from the Grammar School boys at the other end of the road. But Hilda was different. Hilda didn’t grow out of it.’
She paused again, struggling for words to convey the innocence and intimacy of that friendship, words that had to be like a spider’s web, strong yet delicate, if she was to communicate to Mark’s coarse masculine intelligence some inkling of what that friendship had meant to her and Hilda.
‘Hilda wasn’t interested in the Grammar School boys?’ he prompted.
‘No, she wasn’t. But you mustn’t misunderstand. Look, you know that queer book you lent me, about a girls’ college in France?’
‘I remember it.’
‘Well, there was nothing like that between— Our relationship was quite different.’
‘What was your relationship exactly?’
‘Well, it’s difficult to explain to a boy. You’ll probably laugh, but, well, we thought we could help each other to be good—in a spiritual way I mean. When I realized that Hilda’s was more than a normal crush, I should have stopped it I suppose. But I hadn’t the heart. It would have been like stamping on a little bird you watch learning to fly. And besides, I liked Hilda. I suppose that was where I went wrong—I was selfish. The other sisters were very severe; I liked Hilda’s admiration. She was gay and trusting. I thought I could help her spiritually, perhaps show her that she had a vocation too. You see, she was a convert. Her parents had sent her to the convent, and she begged them to let her become a Catholic after she’d been there only a year. They agreed, but they weren’t very keen, and she didn’t get much encouragement in her religious life at home. I thought that she deserved a little special attention.
‘Then gradually it began to get out of control. I kissed her once when she came out of the chapel on a First Friday. She had just received Holy Communion, of course, and her face was radiant and pure—I can’t explain why I did it, but I couldn’t help kissing her. After that she came to expect a kiss whenever we met or parted—if we were alone, of course. However, I think we must have been observed, for I sensed an undercurrent of resentment among the other girls, and Hilda was persecuted by some of them. This threw her more passionately on to me for solace and support, but I was losing patience—I didn’t know how to cope. We had quarrels, reconciliations—it was a love affair really. These storms usually blew over quickly, but they got more frequent. Then one day—’
She faltered at the memory of that day. A blistering July day, her thick woollen underwear sodden with perspiration under the hot black habit, a throbbing headache, Hilda more insistent than ever; a scene in the playground, only a few words exchanged because other girls were watching, but a few words that shrieked under the stress of the emotion that they bore; an impatient phrase, more cutting than she had intended; Hilda turning away with a passionate sob, running, running …
‘There was a scene. Hilda got hysterical and tried to kill herself with aspirins. She wasn’t in any real danger, but it was very serious of course. It all came out. I was asked to leave. No recriminations, no sermons. But there was no appeal. I was simply told that I had no vocation. I left.’
She noticed for the first time that they had stopped, and looking round, discovered that they were outside the house.
‘Goodness! I didn’t realize that we were home.’
The rain was still streaming down, swept into folds by occasional gusts of wind. Wearily they climbed the steps to the porch. Mark collapsed the umbrella.
‘We’re both sopping wet. We’d better go straight in,’ said Mark.
‘Can we wait just a minute?’
She felt limp and exhausted, but there might be someone in the kitchen, and she couldn’t face anyone else at the moment. More than anything in the world she longed for Mark to take her into his arms and comfort her like a baby. As though humouring her, he put out his arms and held her loosely round the waist smiling at her in a sympathetic way, as one does to an invalid.
‘Well, now you know my awful secret,’ she said. ‘I didn’t leap over the wall. I was shown to the door.’
‘Poor Clare.’
‘Poor Mark, to have a neurotic ex-nun for a girl-friend.’
‘I’m not complaining,’ he said, drawing her into his embrace.
Without warning, something gave inside her, like some part of a dam long under unsuspected strain. Emotion seemed to gush out of her eyes, nose, mouth, as she sighed, wept, mumbled between kisses, covering his face with spit, tears, lipstick and rain, clinging to him with the frantic strength of a drowning swimmer. But even in this tumult she felt that Mark was the sane, controlled life-guard, trying to calm her. She wanted to pull him down with her. She was seized with a desire to feel his hand on her breast again, as she had felt it for a fleeting second months ago. Seizing his hand, she kissed it, and thrust it under her raincoat and pressed it to her bosom. For a moment she felt his fingers cup her breast, then he snatched his hand away.
‘No, Clare.’
She was stunned by the rebuff. It wasn’t until they were inside the dark hall, and Mark had taken off her coat and carefully hung it up, that shame and humiliation began to return to her numbed consciousness like the blood to her face. Then she ran soundlessly to her room. She heard his low, troubled call, ‘Clare’, as she turned at the top of the stairs. But there was hesitation and doubt in his voice, and she did not turn back.
Damien writhed in anger as he stood penned in the bus shelter like an animal, with this herd of obnoxious Cockneys. The meeting at the Presbytery after Benediction had dragged on far too long, but he had caught his bus, and was congratulating himself on being out of the rain, when the conductor had bawled ‘All change!’ and he had been ejected, despite his protests, on to the streaming pavements, with less than half his journey completed. The ‘shelter’ was a ridiculously inadequate affair, consisting only of a tubular metal frame with a narrow roof, thus allowing one to be squashed by the crowd packed into its small area, and soaked by the rain that swept in through its open sides. Moreover, he was so near to the kerb that heavy vehicles passing close by spattered his shoes and trousers with filth. He had apparently had the misfortune to be dumped at the end of this bus-queue at the very moment when cinemas, dance-halls and public-houses were spewing forth their patrons on to the pavements. The indignity of the situation infuriated him: that he, straight from church, should be swamped by this ribald, vulgar, beer-reeking mob reeling out from their godless pleasures. Swearing, grumbling, joking in loud voices, they heaved in a damp, excited mass, struggling for a place on each bus, as it drew up, already full. A fat, smelly old harridan with a stick became quite offensive when Damien attempted to thrust his way to his rightful position at the front of the queue.
‘’Ere! Where d’you think you’re goin’? You orter be ashamed of yourself. Sum people can’t wait patient. There’s others was ’ere before you, yer know.’
She continued to mutter threateningly to herself and to anyone who might listen. ‘Sauce! Some people got no manners at all …’
Damien, sickened, and a little frightened, turned his back on the crowd, and stared sulkily across the street.
Suddenly he caught sight of Clare and Underwood walking arm in arm along the opposite pavement. They were half-hidden beneath an umbrella, and had evidently not seen him. A sudden rush of emotions—jealousy and envy, mingled with satisfaction at observing them unbeknown—made him forget his uncomfortable situation for a moment. Then, acting on an impulse, he drove his hip viciously into the side of the old woman, and taking advantage of the space momentarily gained by this manœuvre, ducked under the rail, and crossed the road. A stream of foul language issued from the old woman’s lips, but Damien ignored her.
In fact, he scarcely heard her. His thoughts were with the two figures ahead, so tightly linked beneath the sheltering dome of the umbrella. Too tightly. It was quite unnecessary that Underwood should clasp her waist like that. For all his much-vaunted ‘conversion’, it seemed that he still lusted after the pleasures of the flesh, still itched to finger the curve of Clare’s side, to feel her thigh brush against his. Conversion! One had to admire his cunning. Clare was a gullible girl, and a show of religious fervour had been all that was needed to make her quite infatuated with Underwood. She probably believed that she had converted him. He had bewitched her. Not nine months out of the convent, and she was behaving like a trollop, encouraging him to hold her tightly round the waist, tossing back her head to laugh, looking into his face with a silly, fatuous smile. Yet when he himself had offered to kiss her …
He stiffened suddenly as if in sudden pain, as he recollected the incident. It was the dark hall of the Mallorys’ house on Christmas afternoon. Clare was in the bathroom, and he waited for her at the bottom of the stairs. He tried to suggest it was a casual encounter as he stepped from the shadows, but realized at once that his subterfuge was painfully obvious. Doggedly, however, he went through with his rehearsed speech: ‘Ah, well met, Clare! Won’t you salute your cousin in the spirit of the season?’ He was conscious that his words creaked and grated like machinery in the wrong hands, and that his smiling glance upwards at the bunch of mistletoe was more of a leer, a leer that stayed, unnaturally fixed by confusion and rage, as he observed Clare’s hesitation. Then she forced a smile, and said, ‘Of course, Damien,’ and proffered a cheek, averted as though she was expecting a blow. It was so insultingly different from the embrace he had seen her allow Underwood earlier in the day, that on a mad impulse he made a clumsy grab at her, and pulled her towards him, with a hollow imitation of a roguish laugh. And she had broken free with a scandalized exclamation: ‘Damien!’ And he had stood for several minutes in the passage, paralysed with embarrassment, and shame and chagrin. For the first time he had been unable to recover his self-possession, to escape from his humiliation.
He suddenly realized that the impact of this too-vivid memory had slowed him down and finally arrested him in the middle of the wet pavement. Two girls in a shop-doorway were staring at him and giggling. They could not have been more than fifteen, but their faces were heavily coated with cosmetics, and they were dressed with a tawdry precociousness which allowed no illusions as to their innocence. He glared at them, incensed by the immorality they carried so lightly, their ignorance of sin, and his own too exact awareness of it. He hurried on, sighting Clare and Underwood in the distance just turning off the main road up the hill.
They stopped at the top of the hill and sat down. Quite extraordinary behaviour—the rain was pouring down. It was awkward too, as he could hardly walk past them without being recognized. So he hung back for what seemed an interminable length of time, in the shadow of a dripping tree, waiting for them to move on. He thought about the two girls in the shop doorway, surprised by the detailed impression they had left on his memory. Immorality in a man was, regrettably, normal. Immorality, or even immodesty, in a woman, was far more disturbing. It was as if a woman who thus lowered herself disowned her right to be considered a person, a soul; as if it would be no sin to take advantage of her lust because one could not possibly soil her any further.
Another spectre of his too-vivid memory rose up to tempt him. One day he had taken a walk in the country, and had surprised two lovers in a wood. He had caught a glimpse of two bare legs, an exposed breast, a man with his trousers about his knees, before they had seen him, and he had run off, blundering panic-stricken through the undergrowth. Even now the recollection seized him in the abdomen, and a kind of sick longing made him tremble. Curiosity. That was the terrible thing about concupiscence. The Devil and the World were easily dealt with: one could appraise coolly what they offered, balance it against eternal damnation, and draw the obvious conclusion. But the temptations of the Flesh were different: they could not be dealt with in cold blood. You could not hear the voice of reason, only the terrible curiosity, insisting that it be satisfied.
Underwood had satisfied it of course. There was no doubt about that. Clare, if she had any sense (which seemed questionable), must realize that a person of his background and way of life would scarcely have remained pure. Yet there had never been any reserve in her bearing towards him on that account. There was a kind of bias in Christianity in favour of the loose-liver who was converted. One accepted the parable of the Prodigal Son of course; salvation was possible for all. But the libertine who turned to religion in maturity seemed to get undue credit. There was nothing particularly creditable in giving up an immoral life when you had fully satisfied that nagging curiosity. Yet Augustine was more honoured than St Aloysius Gonzaga. The really heroic man was the one who practised chastity as a young man. But what was his reward? If the grace of repentance was so easily obtained, why worry about holy purity? He was not a fool; he knew what went on in the fields about his home in summer; he was not himself without desires, desires and curiosity. Yet he had kept himself apart, uncontaminated. To what end? Rejected by the priesthood, he found himself unfitted in some way for normal life. For whatever it was in Underwood that attracted Clare, and that he himself lacked, seemed to derive from what she would call Underwood’s ‘experience’, his ‘maturity’—which meant quite simply, his sin. In Ireland he was called ‘a shpiled priesht’. Was he not also a spoiled man?
At last Clare and Underwood moved on, but he was compelled to halt again, as they kissed, passionately, in the middle of the pavement.
For Damien it was the final condemnation of Clare. She had soiled herself to the point of revulsion by submitting to his pawing in the public street—as shameless as the casual coupling of two dogs. He would never be able to wipe out completely the pain of his hurt pride, but henceforward he would never be able to think of Clare in any honourable way. He looked back contemptuously at his dream of an ideal Christian marriage with this … this renegade nun on heat.
It afforded him a measure of satisfaction to insult her, and to document her improper behaviour with Underwood. He followed them home with something of the elation of a successful spy, and when he eagerly observed Clare’s final self-abandonment in the porch it seemed to him that he had obtained some immensely pleasurable secret. He hurried up to his room, and warmed himself with it. That night he prayed devoutly that he might be upheld in the purity which he had so far maintained, in spite of the temptations and evil example which encompassed him on all sides. And with great generosity, he prayed that Clare would not be led into mortal sin—if indeed she had not already fallen.
Harry shivered slightly in the shadow of the sagging wooden hut that had once been somebody’s garden shed—some poor bugger that was blown to bits by a buzz-bomb most likely. Beyond him was the blank, windowless side of the house, smooth and flat, as if the row of houses had been sliced with a cheese-cutter. He had played here as a kid just after the war, when it was a bomb-site, with tottering, gutted houses, uncovered cellars, bits of furniture, twisted pipes, water tanks. They’d had a good time. And tonight he was going to have a good time. A bloody good time.
The rubble had been cleared away long ago, and a line drawn between houses that were lived in, and blank space. Soon they would be filling in the space with houses again. And the curly-haired bint would not be walking across it on her way home from the pictures. But tonight she was walking towards the bomb-site, towards one hell of a surprise. She was going to find out shortly that she couldn’t get on the wrong side of Harry without paying for it. It was a long time since he had decided to have her. But he would have her, in the end. There was no escaping from Harry. In the end.
He had it all worked out: the hand over her mouth, the knife under her eyes, and drag her into the dark shed. Probably she would lap it up. They usually did. Underneath all the skirts and the modesty and the ‘Who me? The idea!’ was the same dirty pleasure.
He shivered again, and began to tremble violently. Cursing under his breath, he struggled to control his body. Then he heard the tip-tap of her high heels approaching, and something gripped him hard, and squeezed out all the shivers. Breathing in quick, noiseless gasps, he eased the knife from his pocket, and thumbed the press-button that released the blade.
The tip-tap of her own heels on the pavement was Bridget’s only company during the long walk through the bleak back-doubles. The vile weather had emptied the streets, and made them particularly frightening. She tried to forget her fears of the unknown in hearty cursing of the rain. There was a girl at work who said she loved the rain—she would dress up in a mac and goloshes and tramp around in the rain just for pleasure. She must be mad. Personally she hated the rain—spoiling shoes, spattering stockings, making her clothes look like rags, and her hair go frizzy. She would really have to get an umbrella, she decided, not for the first time. Her headscarf was already soaked through. She shivered as a gust of wind dashed the rain rudely in her face. How she longed to be indoors, snuggled up in bed, driving out of her system the damp cold, and the misery of parting from Len, with a hot-water bottle and impossible dreams of their future life together.
It hadn’t been much of a picture for dreaming on. She didn’t see how she could fit Len and herself in anywhere. Or rather, they would fit in just too well … It was just the wretched sort of life that might so easily be theirs: the cramped lodgings, the worry, the sense of wearing yourself out against life … But it was fatal to think on those lines. Almost desperately she sought solace in her own private ‘pictures’, the programme she never tired of, which she had projected on to her drowsy mind countless times as she lay in bed before dropping off to sleep, or half-awake on Sunday mornings. Just a normal day of married life, nothing that thousands of other people didn’t take for granted—but what heaven if ever that was normality for herself and Len!
The basic pattern of her dream did not vary. It began with the morning sun shining through the curtains of their bedroom, dappling the wall over Len’s still, sleeping form. She thought she would probably always wake before him, and lie quiet for a while, just being happy. The rest of the day followed predictably—Len’s breakfast, seeing him off to work, cleaning the small, semi-detached house they were steadily paying for, looking after the baby, making Len’s evening meal, sitting by the fire in the evening watching the telly, before they went to bed … The basic pattern was always the same, but Bridget liked to make minute adjustments each time she reviewed it. She would change the furnishings of the bedroom, for instance. Tonight the sun shone through elegant Regency stripes of red and cream instead of through the chintz which had hung at the window for the past month. She was tiring of the steak and chips which she regularly served up for Len’s evening meal. Although he doted on steak, she decided she would study continental cooking, and produce something to surprise him. ‘What’s this queer stuff?’ he would say, as he sat down at the table; then: ‘Hum. Not bad, I must admit.’
She clutched the warm, glowing vision to herself like a hot-water bottle to keep out the cold and loneliness of the night. But it was easier to believe in the impossible when you were tucked up in bed and half-asleep, than when you were walking the wet, comfortless streets, and the bloke you loved was on a bus going in the opposite direction, staring hopelessly out of the window, and wondering how on earth he was ever going to marry you, with no savings and going into the Army next week and a widowed mother who imagined herself an invalid and hated you for taking away her son. She wished she hadn’t started to dream so early. Now each absurdly impossible picture returned to her with a sardonic caption attached: Oh, yeah? You’ll be lucky! You don’t say? wrecking one cherished wish after another, until she was reduced to longing desperately for just an end to the regular death of the street-corner parting, the fear and loneliness of the long walk home.
Tonight she was particularly nervous, after the encounter with that boy at the pictures. She hated the way boys looked at you, as if they were giving marks at a cattle show. Not only boys either, men too, married men, old enough to know better. Len was different; she had never seen him look at another girl like that. He wasn’t abnormal, just good. One evening in the park the previous summer he had made a frank gesture that was like a question, and one side of her had wanted to say ‘Yes’, but she had said ‘No, Len,’ and he had taken his hand away, and kissed her, and quietly accepted her decision. And that was ever so good of him really, because he didn’t believe in religion or anything, and if ever two people were entitled to belong to each other before they were married, she and Len were those people. But they mustn’t. She wasn’t what you might call strict either, but she knew it wouldn’t be right, that their last chance was to hold on until they were married, so that however mean and poor it was, their marriage would have that at least to make it special.
She hesitated before the dark, muddy bomb-site, particularly reluctant that evening to cross it. But to avoid it meant a long detour to get into Barn Street, and she was shivering with wet and cold. She stepped on to the bomb-site, and began to pick her way along the slippery path worn between the piles of overgrown rabble. Soon she was in the shadows.
Having checked that all the doors were secure, Mr Berkley toiled wearily up the stairs to his office. Doreen had pulled out the studio couch, and was briskly undressing. She did not look up when he came in. Already their affair was like marriage, with its own dispiriting routine, this shabby coming together for a few hours in the shabby office. There was still pleasure in it somewhere, but it was choked by exasperating routine: waiting for the staff to go, getting undressed, making up the bed, before the fleeting moment of physical relief was attained. And then to lie there, the flesh warm and satisfied, but the mind calculating that soon one would have to get up, dress again, and drive Doreen home; worry and responsibility rapidly replacing the excitement of pursuit and conquest.
Doreen stepped out of her slip, and draped it over a chair. He stared.
‘Good God!’
Doreen glanced down, and blushed for the first time in a long while.
‘I know. Aren’t they awful.’
‘But they’ve got finger-prints all over them!’
‘Yes, they’re Laurie Landsdowne’s. I was crazy about him once. They were all I had clean.’
She peeled off the pants, and tossed them on to the chair. Then she got into the bed and waited for him. A few crumbs from the biscuits they had eaten the night before, pricked her skin. Her eyes fell upon the finger-printed pants again They were an oddly disturbing relic of her youth and innocence. It was only a few months ago, but it seemed like years, since the young girl, who kept herself to herself, and thought she knew what she wanted from life, unpacked them with secret glee. God, but she had grown up a lot since then.
‘Come on, Maurice,’ she said. ‘I want it tonight.’
Her coarseness almost shocked him. Not I want you, but I want it. Love had already become an impersonal sport, an itch to be satisfied. It wasn’t long before the butterfly dust of innocence and romance brushed off a girl nowadays. Then he caught sight of Doreen’s pale, tired face, the tiny, delicate Cockney features set in a characteristic expression of grave determination, and he regretted the unkind thought. By her coarseness she sought to make things easier for him—she committed herself to the relationship, to this way of life, which, God knew, wasn’t much fun for her.
Doreen fidgeted between the sheets. The vision of the vain, silly girl she had been seemed to accuse her in some obscure way. But she hadn’t known anything about life in those days. This was life: going to bed with a man twice as old as yourself who was married to someone who wouldn’t divorce him. The sort of thing you read about for a cheap thrill in the advice column of a woman’s magazine—it really happens, it happens to you. And when it does, you’re proud of it, because it’s life.
‘Damn!’
‘What’s the matter, Maurice?’
He was staring into the drawer where he kept the doings.
Harry shut the front door, and leaned back on it, closing his eyes. His mouth ached, and his heart thudded painfully from exertion and fear. He lurched forward and groped his way up the staircase, gasping and retching in the stale air. In his room he fell on his bed, and buried his head in the pillow. But her screams still echoed in his ears, ringing out into the night, summoning all his enemies, the whole world, who only wanted this opportunity to hound him, to tear him. Again and again the nightmare rose into his mind like bile into the mouth; he threshed about in a desperate attempt to shut it out, but again and again he suffered the humiliation, the panic, the pain. Again he tore his bleeding fingers from her mouth, and gaped in horror as she screamed, and went on screaming. He heard again the noise of doors opening, voices, saw a light streaming across the street, and he was scrambling frantically over the bomb-site, tripping over a pile of rubble, tearing his coat on a fence, and running down the shockingly open street, running for his life.
Gradually rage began to absorb fear. Jesus Christ! Had he allowed her to make a fool of him again? He sucked at his hand. The bitch had teeth like knives. Right to the bone. And all for nothing. Her virginity still taunted him. If he’d had his hands on her for one minute, he could have given her something to remember him by; if only he’d spat a single obscenity into her ear before running off, it would have been something. But he had been utterly routed.
He put a hand down to his groin, and began to mouth into the pillow all the obscenities he knew, repeating them in a kind of chant. In his imagination he subjected her body to every abomination he could think of, until the blankets twisted round his legs were damp and sticky. But it gave him no comfort. Finally he lay prone, still, exhausted; and bitter tears oozed out between his eyelids. He buckled under the final, inescapable realization that he had failed, and would always fail; that the jeering kids, the mocking men, the scornful tarts, were right; that he was nothing but a turd in the gutter.
Frowning, Mark went into the kitchen for his customary cup of cocoa. It was late, but Mrs Mallory was still ironing, the line of her mouth grim and purposeful in a face that was unusually tired and unhappy. Mr Mallory was smoking behind a newspaper, sunk in the depths of his arm-chair. Patricia was at the table in her dressing-gown, eating corn-flakes—her favourite food. The creaking of the ironing board, the crackle of corn-flakes and the occasional rustle of the newspaper were the only sounds. Mark sensed a tension that was like static electricity in the air.
‘Hallo, Pat,’ he said. ‘Been working late?’
Patricia pulled a face behind her mother’s back.
‘No she hasn’t, the more’s the pity,’ rapped out Mrs Mallory. ‘She’s been roaming the streets, worrying the life out of her father and mother.’
‘I told you I went to the pictures,’ said Patricia into her corn-flakes.
‘I suppose you think that your father and I have scrimped and saved to give you children a good education so that you can waste your time and money at the pictures,’ said Mrs Mallory, pressing down fiercely on a handkerchief.
Patricia’s spoon dropped into her bowl with a clang, and she left the room.
Mr Mallory flipped down the top half of his newspaper:
‘You shouldn’t have said that.’
His wife put down her iron with a thump.
‘Now don’t you start. I’ve had quite enough.’ She stopped abruptly, remembering Mark’s presence. He shuffled awkwardly towards the door.
‘Well it’s getting late. I’ll be pushing off to bed I think,’ he said, glancing at the clock and his watch. ‘Clare’s gone already. She was feeling tired I think. Good night, Mrs Mallory. Good night, Mr Mallory.’
‘Wait till I get you a cup of cocoa, Mark,’ said Mrs Mallory.
‘No thank you, really.’
‘But you always have a cup of cocoa.’
‘Thanks, but I don’t really feel like one tonight. Thanks very much.’ And he managed to make good his escape.
He climbed the dark, tortuous stairs heavily. A roar of falling water as a door opened and closed indicated that someone had just emerged from the lavatory. He hung back in case it was Clare. But it was one of the twins, in fluffy pyjamas, who flitted across the landing like a moth, eyes half-shut under the electric light.
He had scarcely closed the door of his room when there was a tap on it.
‘Come in,’ he called in a low voice, expecting Clare, and steeling himself for a long and exhausting reconciliation. But to his surprise Patricia slipped into the room.
‘I hope you don’t mind me coming in like this, Mark. It’s an awful cheek I know.’
‘S’alright, Pat. Er, sit down, won’t you?’
He gestured to the divan bed, and turned his chair to face her.
‘I want some advice, Mark,’ said Patricia, fiddling with her dressing-gown cord.
‘Well, anything I can do to help … By the way, I’m sorry if I dropped you in the soup just now.’
‘Oh, it’s all right. Mummy only wanted an excuse to get at me anyway.’
He did not take up the point.
‘Well—shoot!’
It was a sweet sensation to give sympathetic audience to Patricia. There was no offering more gratifying to him than the trust of adolescents. For one thing it was not as easily won as the trust of adults, or children or animals. For another—well, there was something peculiarly touching about adolescent suffering; and their sins and neuroses, like babies’ excrement, gave no offence. As decisions became for oneself increasingly final and far-reaching in their implications, it was refreshing to deal with problems that would be solved by the mere passage of time. It was with a certain self-indulgence that he adopted a pose of relaxed attentiveness, and put Patricia at her ease by casually offering her a cigarette. She accepted, and the picture of precocious, and faintly absurd depravity she presented, in her old, handed-down dressing-gown, with her feet tucked up under her, her lank auburn hair about her face, and the cigarette cocked flamboyantly between the fingers of her left hand, gave him the keenest pleasure. However, he was somewhat startled by the sober determination with which she spoke of leaving home.
‘You see, I want to do something worth while. I mean, there wouldn’t be much point in my leaving home unless I did. You’ve travelled, Mark, and done lots of odd jobs and things. But it’s so much easier for a boy. So what can I do?’
‘Why exactly do you want to leave home so badly?’
‘Don’t you see? Didn’t you see tonight? Mummy and I—we love each other of course, but we just can’t go on living like this any longer. I’m making everybody miserable. I heard Daddy and Mummy after I left the room just now. I don’t mind being miserable, but I’m not going to let Daddy and Mummy quarrel because of me.’
Mark leaned forward and took her hand. To his surprise she was trembling.
‘You’re a good girl Pat,’ he said.
‘Better for everyone if I went ’way,’ she mumbled, hanging her head.
‘The first thing you must get out of your head is that you’re the predestined black sheep of the family, that you and they are necessarily opposed.’
‘It’s true.’
‘It’s not a bit true.’
‘You don’t know.’
‘Yes I do. Look, you trust me, don’t you, Pat?’
She looked at him with tears brimming in her eyes. The whole thing had suddenly become disconcertingly serious.
‘Well, listen then. I’ve travelled a bit, done things as you put it, but that doesn’t mean a thing. Believe me it doesn’t. There are too many people nowadays who think they are achieving something by changing the scenery as often as possible: hitch-hiking through Europe, peddling across Asia, rowing across the Atlantic and so forth. But so what? When you’ve done it you’re still left with the same vacuum inside you waiting to be filled. Your memory is a confusion of too many faces and places encountered too rapidly. Much better to dig your roots in somewhere—anywhere—and dig deep. Mark out some small area and cultivate it really well. I’ve knocked about a bit in the last few years I suppose, but I was always restless until I came to a very ordinary house in a rather dingy London suburb, where there was a large and interesting family who had been in the same place for a long time. It was good to feel I belonged somewhere—if only by adoption. It’s difficult for you to appreciate that feeling. But don’t throw it away lightly.’
Patricia wasn’t going to cry after all. She stood up, pulling the lapels of her dressing-gown together across her neck. Beneath the faded material was a figure full of promise.
‘Thank you, Mark, you’ve been very kind.’
‘But no help?’
‘I didn’t mean that. But I don’t think you could ever quite understand.’
‘Why?’
‘About a large family I mean. How it sort of suffocates and devours you. Sometimes I think I was intended to be an only child, and got born into a large family by a mistake. Perhaps with you it was the other way round. I don’t know. But I like being lonely.’
She paused, as the noises of going to bed reached them from downstairs—the snick of the light switch, the clang of the damper on the boiler, the sharp reports of bolts being shot home.
‘I must go. It was lovely of you to listen.’
The door closed silently behind her.
Mark sat on the edge of his bed, one palm in the warm depression left by Patricia, troubled by a sense of failure, almost of humiliation. Was it true, what he had said to her about the value of this family life? Or did his advice derive from the crooked workings of a twisted kind of covetousness—perhaps the kind prohibited by the Ninth Commandment, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, which had always seemed superfluous after the Sixth. True, Patricia was no one’s wife—yet. But she would make some man happy some day. Did he subconsciously wish to deprive that man? Had Patricia, with her flattering attention, touching gratitude, and diverting problems, become a necessary part of the furniture in his mind? It was true. It was terrible. He really wished to prevent her from discovering life. He was trying, insanely, to preserve everyone in this family in just the state in which he had first encountered them, when they had given him that delightful sense of secure, harmonious, integrated living. As if he could arrest their development at that stage, and set them working like articulated models in a shop window, mechanically repeating the same gestures—Mrs Mallory always pouring out a cup of tea with a warm, motherly smile; Mr Mallory always easing himself blissfully into his chair; Patricia always reaching for the aspirins with womanly resignation, Clare always shyly yielding to the one good-night embrace …
Shy wasn’t exactly the mot juste now. It wasn’t many months ago that she had been offended by his exploring fingers, but tonight she had given her breast to his hand as if to a baby. It had been an unsettling evening. People were not behaving as he had ordained they should behave. First Clare, then Mr and Mrs Mallory, then Patricia …
Restlessly he moved to his desk and focused the reading lamp on a book, some potted critical work on Marlowe. He only had time to read potted critical works now, with Finals a few weeks off.
Marlowe was a puzzling character. A notorious atheist, yet capable of dramatizing the interpenetration of the natural and the supernatural more effectively than any other playwright. Why this is hell nor am I out of it. It is the man who will not submit to God who is most compulsively aware of his reality. The more violently you abuse God, the more completely you affirm his existence. You can’t win in the end, whichever way you play it.
That the angel Gabriel was bawd to the Holy Ghost, became he brought the salutation to Mary.
The sort of thing that would have delighted him a few months ago—he would have chuckled over its witty irreverence, and imagined with pleasure Clare’s shock and embarrassment had she come across it. It was difficult not to be ashamed of his behaviour at that time. Shocking and embarrassing Clare had been a kind of sexual indulgence. To lend her, under the pretence of ‘educating’ her, a book which contained frank or scurrilous passages, was a kind of vicarious rape. And perhaps, indeed, he had succeeded in corrupting her. Perhaps this explained her behaviour tonight, and the gradual change that had come over her lately. There was a change, though it was difficult to define it, except by reference to a few trivial details of behaviour. She was longer in the bath and quicker out of church than when he had first known her. She didn’t blush any more at jokes about somebody’s bust—but this was his fault for teasing her about being narrow-minded. Now she wasn’t narrow-minded any more, he didn’t feel inclined to make the jokes. She had learned all about dress and make-up. She looked desirable all right. But did he desire the well-groomed young woman in high-heels and with figure held firmly in place by a good foundation garment, as much as the callow, untidy girl, so soft to touch and hold, he had first known?
Tonight, as she spoke of the convent, that frightened, insecure schoolgirl-woman had broken through the shell of sophistication and touched him again, moved him to be tender. But not tenderness she wanted now. Passion now.
If dishonoured her, must then make an honest woman of her? Marriage with Clare. Nothing said, but it was expected. Suppose could do worse. Logical really, after what he had said to Pat. Merge with the Mallorys; marry a Mallory. Name the day, bride in white, radiant, nuptial Mass. Our Lady of Perpetual Sucker, till death do us, special graces, Mendelsohn, the happy couple, pause for photo, confetti, into the car, what to say, what the hell does one say—roll on bed? The reception, a buffet, so glad you could come, yes didn’t she, yes I am, O ha ha Uncle Tom’s sozzled ha ha good old Uncle Tom, accustomed as I am to public speaking, a glass of champagne cider each, I give you the Bride’s parents! My own parents looking a bit sick of all the tipsy Irish. Thank God we’re going, kippers in the car, confetti, small hotel, double bed, a baby started, could do worse …
Mark sagged forward on to his desk, straightened up, and dragged himself from the brink of sleep. No good; must get some work done tonight.
He lit a cigarette and gazed at the page of his book until the printed words ceased to dance about. Where was he? Oh yes.
That the angel Gabriel was bawd to the Holy Ghost, because he brought the salutation to Mary.
Strictly speaking, it was quite true. The irreverence was verbal, not conceptual. Annunciation—assignation: only the associations differed. Marlowe had been tricked into vividly illuminating the miracle of the Incarnation.
That if there be any God or any true religion, then it is in the Papists, because the service of God is performed with more ceremonies, as elevation of the Mass, organs, singing men, shaven crowns, etc. That all Protestants are hypocritical asses.
The common mistake of outsiders, that Catholicism was a beautiful, solemn, dignified, aesthetic religion. But when you got inside you found it was ugly, crude, bourgeois. Typical Catholicism wasn’t to be found in St Peter’s, or Chartres, but in some mean, low-roofed parish church, where hideous plaster saints simpered along the wall, and the bored congregation, pressed perspiration tight into the pews, rested their fat arses on the seats, rattled their beads, fumbled for their smallest change, and scolded their children. Yet in their presence God was made and eaten all day long, and for that reason those people could never be quite like other people, and that was Catholicism.
Again his mind had wandered from the text before him. It was hopeless. For effective study one required emotional calm, self-satisfaction, routine, the minimum of distractions and discomforts, mental or physical. The troubled conscience, the tortured mind, compelling one to come to terms with life, made one impatient of the mere accummulation of facts.
But after all, he had come far in the last few months. Should he not have acquired a deep mental calm and certainty? But there was the rub. One could never say ‘I have reached the limit of my religious development; it is time to return to the secular plane and develop there correspondingly.’ One was never finished. Just when one had decided to go no farther, one caught a glimpse of something ahead, challenging, enigmatic, and one wearily set off again.
The Christian life, as exemplified by Christ and the saints, offered countless possibilities for self-perfection; but you couldn’t do everything. Or could you? It occurred to you that you might say the Rosary every day. There seemed to be no reason why you shouldn’t, and to decide not to, after having had the thought, seemed to indicate a lack of real caritas. So you did, and used up a little more time. What about one Mass on a weekday? Well all right. Well then, why not every day? Well that’s a bit much, it means getting up every morning at— But what about the Passion, the sufferings of the saints? O.K. So you flogged yourself a little more. But there seemed to be no valid reason for not devoting one’s whole life to religion. Excuses, but no reasons. Yet there must be a reason somewhere, if life was to go on: life, that is, work and play, eating and drinking, copulation and birth. The whole structure seemed to be based on the indifference of the majority. It was Original Sin and not love that made the world go round. Perhaps nothing would embarrass God more than if every one of His creatures took His Word literally and to heart. But for those who tried to do so, there seemed to be only a progressive involvement in guilt. Take Student Cross for example. If he had never seen that leaflet pinned up on the Catholic Society notice-board at college, he would never have dreamt of participating in the pilgrimage. But God had made bloody sure he did see it—and He had safely left the rest to the inevitable reflex of challenge-acceptance. For why, having seen the leaflet, had he been unable to dismiss the idea? It was preposterous enough, a medieval demonstration grotesquely out of place in modern England. Its purpose Augean—no less than to perform an act of reparation for the sins of students everywhere. It had immediately struck him, of course, that the latter, had they been aware of it, would have strongly resented the interference of spiritual sanitary workers. Yes, you could mock at the idea, but that wasn’t enough to rid yourself of its insidious appeal, politely, persistently tugging at your soul. No doubt his motives for going on the pilgrimage were varied. No decision of his was unmixed with egotism, and an agreeable consciousness of impressing Clare and the rest of the family had made his decision easier. Again, he always savoured the bizarre, eccentric experience—it would be useful material. But these motives would not have been sufficient in themselves. After all, he detested physical pain and discomfort—and this excursion had promised both. So what was it that had made him go, but a furtive, half-acknowledged sense that not to have done so would have been like turning one’s back on the Crucifixion, that here perhaps at last was the litmus which might determine the validity of his readopted faith?
At that time he had been a practising Catholic for two or three months. The experience had been undramatic. He was, in the eyes of the Church, already a Catholic, since he had been baptized into the Church, and had received the sacraments of Penance, Communion and Confirmation before leaving the convent. To the Church he was not a convert at all, but merely a lapsed Catholic who had returned to the practice of his Faith. Not for him was the formal ceremony of admission, with its conditional baptism and its awesome recital of categorical promises. He had undergone a course of instruction with Father Kipling: the evidences for the truth of the Catholic Faith were acceptable if one was disposed to accept them, and he was so disposed. He could have raised objections to Father Kipling’s arguments—but then he could have raised objections to his objections. Catholicism was a reasonable Faith, but like any other, it could not be justified by reason alone. He had returned to the sacraments, become a dutiful practising Catholic. But he had felt that he was still the same Mark Underwood, drearily going through the motions of belief instead of drearily going through the motions of disbelief; that the searing, galvanic experience men called conversion was like an unexploded bomb ticking away inside him. Perhaps Student Cross would provide the detonator. In a sense it had. He flipped back the pages of his note-book, and found the scrappy diary of those few days.
Saturday: evening
Today we started, from the University Church in the City. First there was Mass in the crypt, with the Cross standing before the altar. A plain wooden cross, about twelve feet tall, and six feet from arm to arm. It weighs, I believe, about 120 pounds. It is grubby from the sweat and dirt of several pilgrimages. We walk in a column, line of three. The Cross leads, carried horizontally on the shoulders of three students, one to each arm, and the other at the foot. You carry it for the duration of five decades of the Rosary (about ten minutes), recited by the trio immediately behind. Then they move up to take the Cross, and you drop back to the end of the file. The body of the column sing hymns now and again, led by the Dominican chaplain Fr Courtney. Otherwise, we talk quite freely.
The students are a curious lot. A good proportion of hearties, well-equipped with rucksacks, sleeping bags, and studded boots: for them the pilgrimage is a kind of spiritual hike. They probably do the same thing for pleasure in the Lake District every summer. There are a few like myself, who look as if they wished they weren’t there, and would like to get the whole thing over as quickly as possible. Then there are some pathetic, weedy-looking swots, inadequately equipped and unsuitably dressed, in gaberdine raincoats and Oxford shoes, unwieldy packs all done up with string, who look as if they have never walked farther than a hundred yards at any time in their lives. But appearances are deceiving. You can’t categorize in this neat fashion. You find that some of the hearties are doing the pilgrimage for the first time, and begin to limp quite early on; that some of the weeds have been on the pilgrimage once or even twice before—and finished. There is a lot of humorous reminiscing by the veterans about previous pilgrimages, about blisters, about the student who was cautioned for cooling his feet in a public reservoir, about the crippling last mile of the pilgrimage which, apparently (who says we’re not living in the Middle Ages?), we walk barefoot.
All this chaff makes me feel uneasy and isolated—or rather, did make me. For I am writing this on Saturday evening, and already I have been blooded. I have pricked my first blister, squeezed out the fluid, and dabbed it with surgical spirit. Already I feel I belong. On the whole I have enjoyed the day. It certainly was a curious experience to flaunt one’s religion in the face of London. First, through the City with a policeman holding up the traffic with an impassive countenance which implied that he would do the same for the Seventh Day Adventists, the Anti-Vivisection Society or the Paddington Communist Party. The City streets were fairly quiet of course, but as we passed into the suburbs we found ourselves in the midst of the Saturday morning shopping rush. It is such a bizarre situation, that it is difficult to believe that one is really there, really carrying a wooden cross through bustling, irreligious, unreflective suburbia. The reaction of spectators was less marked than I had expected. Plenty of curious stares of course, but quite as many people would look hastily away, more embarrassed than we were. There were no jeers or cat-calls. Children seemed to find us particularly intriguing, and would gaze unselfconsciously, with the characteristically grave, uncommitted regard of the young, before being yanked away from the kerb by their mothers.
At Enfield, the destination of our first day’s march, we were met and accompanied for the last mile by a procession of Catholic parishioners. This part of Enfield has those yellow sodium lamps that have that delicate rosy glow for the first few minutes after they are switched on. It was a beautiful evening. Even when the sun had disappeared, the night sky was like a dark blue glass globe, lit by a faint glow from within. Against this background the rosy-tipped lamp standards seemed like fabulous lantern plants in a land of faerie. This transformation of a suburban arterial road was assisted by the historic chant of the Credo which rose impressively from the throats of the pilgrims and parishioners.
Altogether, I have enjoyed the first day more than I anticipated.
Palm Sunday: evening
This, then, is the real thing. The pain, the exhaustion, the monotony of one’s own thoughts (I was too tired to talk for most of the day): how many miles to go? how many miles have we covered? can I keep going? When is the next break? when will we get to the top of this hill? Will there be more hills like this one? Is it my turn with the Cross already? How many more minutes must I carry it? What mystery are they saying? only the third sorrowful mystery? When is the next break? How many miles to go? Can I keep going?
Yesterday was a deceiving dream. I encountered the reality of a penitential pilgrimage the moment I woke and levered my stiff limbs off the hard school-room floor where we slept last night, and winced as my blister contacted the floor. Blister? That one blister I was rather proud of, is now lost in a rich crop of blisters, bloated, white, obscene—a big blister on each heel and sole, and small blisters disposed neatly on the underside of each toe. Tonight we are staying at St Peter’s seminary, and mercifully there are baths, and mattresses spread upon the floors, and nursing sisters in grey habits with gentle fingers and sympathetic cluckings and sterilized needles and soothing ointments and bandages. Even so, it was agony to shuffle in slippers into the chapel for Compline. And this is only the second day! Five days and God knows how many miles to go. Eighteen miles today, and tomorrow, the worst leg of all, twenty-six miles to Cambridge that can’t be broken because there is nowhere to stop overnight. How can I go on tomorrow? For that matter, how did I keep going today?
Again and again you tell yourself, as you place each throbbing foot before the other on the hard tarmac, that the whole thing is monstrous, insane, self-inflicted torture. If only you could believe that! But you can’t. Something forces you to stumble on, and that is the conviction that what you are doing has a meaning. That meaning is in front of you—the Cross, like a magnet, dragging you up hill and down dale, a magnet that attracts not iron and steel, but suffering flesh and bone. I think …
I was interrupted, and am too tired to remember what I thought. A seminarist has brought me a blanket off his own bed. Absurdly, my eyes almost filled with tears of gratitude. One of the things this experience does is to make one appreciate small mercies and small acts of kindness. While the sisters were tending my blisters, I felt an inexpressible love choking me, I regretted all the uncharitable things I had thought or said about nuns, I felt as if I were the Magdalene, and Christ were anointing my feet.
Monday: evening
Well, it’s all over already. I have given up. I am writing this on the train to London, carrying me on smooth, oiled wheels away from the pain, the exhaustion, and, above all, the one worth-while thing I ever did—or tried to do—in my life. This morning was hell. I decided early in the morning that I would struggle somehow to Cambridge, and then go back home. In the end I didn’t even walk to Cambridge, but went ignominiously by bus from Royston, where we stopped for lunch. As soon as you set a limit to your endurance, you are lost. As soon as I decided not to go farther than Cambridge, I wanted to stop dead in the middle of the road. Somehow I got to Royston—somehow? I know how. There was one tremendous hill before Royston. My heart sank as I looked at it. On top of everything else, my line had to take over the Cross at the foot of the hill.
We took that hill at a cracking pace, and as we handed over at the crest, and dropped back to the end of the column, Fr Courtney called out ‘Well done! ’ to us. I know it was only the extra weight of the Cross that got me up that hill. Walking alone I would never have made it. It was an extraordinary experience. But as we stumbled down the other side of the hill, and into the dark, dingy pub where we ate our sandwich lunch, the exaltation of that moment passed. I sat silently in a chair by the fire, not moving, getting stiffer and stiffer, and yet not moving. I couldn’t go on. I knew that several of the others were in as bad shape as myself—probably worse. I knew that the Cross would drag me to Cambridge if I allowed myself to be dragged, but I refused.
I feel the onus of that refusal now. To shake off my depression I thought I would get myself something light to read on the train. I addressed myself thus: ‘All right, you have given up; but you tried, you did your best (hollow laughter), you are in a mood of religious melancholia. Shake it off. You’ve absorbed too much religion too rapidly. Try an antidote.’ So I bought a glossy, frivolous ‘man’s magazine’. But something has happened to me. These breasty pin-ups, these laboured mutations of suggestive posture, these roguish captions, fail to arouse even a flicker of my usual amused interest. My thoughts are with that pitiful, struggling file, stumbling through the dusk into Cambridge, bowed under their packs and the Cross.
Yes, something has happened to me.
Something had happened to him all right. The detonator had worked, his ‘conversion’ had gone off bang, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never put the old Mark Underwood together again. But the task of rebuilding was a daunting one. The foundations might have been securely laid if he had got to Walsingham. But he had brought back with him from the pilgrimage no feeling of achievement or merit, only a sense of failure with which he was already too familiar. It was no use comparing yourself with those who never started; you had to compare yourself to those who went on.
He was beginning to understand the appeal of the religious life, particularly of the life governed by a religious Rule, with its vows of Poverty, Chastity and Obedience. First, it brought the body into subjection. One wasted so much time arguing with the body, urging it through the laborious and uncomfortable routine of physical existence—getting up, washing, shaving, even moving. Little acts of kindness which required the body’s co-operation, such as helping with the washing-up after a good meal, demanded a prodigious amount of persuasion; while a really big thing, like finishing Student Cross, just met with stubborn resistance. The body was like the surly, recalcitrant electorate of a democratic state, with the mind a nervous, impatient, and ultimately helpless executive. The body required autocratic government. It had been his mind, not his feet, that had given up at Royston—the mind which foolishly recognized the right of the feet to protest.
He was tired of his body, tired of dragging it after him everywhere like a petulant child. Part of his admiration for the Mallorys derived from the cheerful, uncomplaining way in which they put up with discomforts and performed small acts of self-denial. Or was this part of the Mallory myth he had been constructing? In any case, self-denial was a habit with them. His own lazy, selfish body might require a more drastic discipline. Then, with the body subdued, one might at last grapple with the real problems.
He began to reread his account of the pilgrimage, and became suddenly impatient of its posturing, self-dramatizing artificiality. He ripped the pages from the note-book, screwed them up, and hurled them at the waste-paper basket. The ball of paper hit the lip of the basket and fell to the floor. He picked it up and smoothed it out. Then he clipped the pages together and slipped them into a file. There was still enough of the egotistical writer in him to protest at its destruction.
Mr Berkley hurried through the early Sunday-morning streets, empty but for Catholics, car-cleaners and cats, wincing under the glare of the sun which shone with a brutal cheerfulness into his eyes. It would have been more in keeping with his mood if yesterday’s rain had persisted. Mr Berkley was worried. Last night he had forgotten the necessary, but Doreen had insisted on going through with it. For the first time no thin rubber insulation had kept them ultimately apart, and Mr Berkley had found the experience oddly moving and disturbing. Physically he had been just one millimetre closer to Doreen than ever before, but emotionally he had crossed a frontier. Afterwards he had felt absurdly near to tears. Doreen, loyal to her role of concubine, had tried to cheer him up by saying that it had never been so good. But, for once, he had not been concerned with his own pleasure. Instead he had been overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude and a sense of responsibility. Gratitude because of the unhesitating generosity with which Doreen gave him the hospitality of her body; responsibility because he had ceased to be a passing visitor to that body, taking what he could get, and had become a guest, leaving behind something as a token of their intimacy. That was what was worrying Mr Berkley this morning. The tender emotions of the night had evaporated, to leave only a bitter sediment of anxiety as to whether he had fathered a bastard on Doreen.
Mr Berkley slipped into the Palladium by a side-exit, and burrowed gratefully into the darkness. The thought that Doreen might be pregnant, that the processes of gestation might be irretrievably in motion at that very moment, returned at regular intervals with more and more force, pumping worry into his heart as if it were a balloon. His chest felt intolerably tight, and he leant against the passage wall to allow the tension to subside. Half-consciously he listened to the murmur of Dolly and Gertrude talking in the auditorium, their voices carrying through the curtain which screened him.
‘Just look at this—i’n it disgusting?’
‘What?’
‘Why somebody’s left an ’ole choc-ice on the floor, and it’s run all over the place. What did ’e buy it for if ’e didn’t want it? That’s what I’d like to know.’
‘St! Terrible i’n it?’
‘One of them young teds, I ’spect.’
There was silence for a moment, punctuated only by the grunts and wheezes of the two ancient dames, until Gertrude said:
‘’Ow’s the family, Doll?’
‘Oh, mustn’t grumble, y’know. My Stan’s been very bad with ’is bladder again.’
‘St!’
‘’E’s overworked it. That’s what I tell ’im: three or four pints every weekday, and Gawd knows ’ow many on Saturday night. Now ’e’s payin’ for it. ’Ow’re all yours, Gert?’
‘Well Alf’s much better. They bin’ givin’ ’im ’lectrical treatment at the ’ospital. Done ’im a world of good it ’as. Says ’e feels like a young man again.’ She cackled. ‘I told ’im not to be so silly, or e’d strain ’imself, and oo’d ’ave to look after ’im then, I’d like to know? … No, Alf’s all right, but our Else is drivin’ us all barmy.’
‘Oh?’ said Dolly with sympathetic interest.
‘Would you believe it, she’s gone and got religious.’
‘No!’
‘Yerse. I never thought it would ’appen to one of me own children, the youngest too, what I was always most fond of.’
‘Well I never. It just goes to show, don’t it?’
‘You’re right there, Dolly. I was never so upset in me life as when me own daughter called me a sinner.’
‘Well!’
‘If she was younger I’d ’ave smacked ’er arse. But you can’t if she’s twenty-five and a married woman, can you?’
‘’Ow did it ’appen then?’
‘Well, she went up with ’er friend from work, Mabel, to this Billy Graham at ’Arringay—you know, where they ’ave the circus.’
‘Yerse.’
‘Well, she went just for a lark, y’know, but this Mabel, she’s very serious, never got married, y’know—not surprisin’ either when you see ’er in a strong light. If you ask me she ’as a kind of influence over Else.’
‘I know the type. In the old days she would ’ave joined the Salvation Army.’
‘That’s right-the ’ole thing sounds just like the Salvation Army, only posher. Y’know, at ’Arringay they ’ave choirs and a blooming great organ and flowers—masses of white lillies, Else said.’ A note of involuntary admiration crept into Gertrude’s voice for a moment. ‘Well, as I said, Else went along more for a night out than anything. So she sat there for about ’arf an ’our, listenin’ to the singin’ and so forth, and then, just as she was beginnin’ to get a bit bored, this Billy Graham comes on to the platform. ’E just looked at all the people for a minute without saying anythink. Else says a shiver went up ’er spine, and she knew she ’ad been called.’
‘Called?’
‘Called to testify ’er faith in Jesus Christ or somethink. Anyway, ’e spoke for about an ’our and at the end of it ’e asked for people to come forward and testify that they were saved. Well, for a little while there wasn’t a movement, until a man in the third row from the front stepped forward. Alf says ’e was planted, but Else says it was genuine, because she went up and she wasn’t planted.’
‘Else went up?’
‘Yerse, would you believe it? In front of all them people. Makes me go ’ot and cold just to think of it. Says she couldn’t stop ’erself, she was so sure she’d been saved.’
‘It don’ arf sound like the Salvation Army.’
‘Salvation Army plus sex, if you ask me. You seen this Billy Graham? ’Andsome ain’t the word. Soon as I saw ’is picture I knew what ’ad “saved” Else. Now Sidney, ’er ’usband, ’e’s a decent bloke, but ’e’s no oil paintin’.’
‘’Ow’s ’e takin’ it—Sidney?’
‘Badly. Well, it ain’t surprisin’, with ’is own wife callin’ ’im a sinner, and tellin’ ’im ’e ought to wash more … I ask you.’
‘What’s washin’ got to do with it?’
‘Well Else read out this bit from a book by Billy Graham, The Secret of ’Appinness it’s called, where ’e says that a man told ’im ’e only took a bath once a week, and Billy Graham told ’im there was something wrong with ’is purity of heart.’
‘Once a week! Why, I don’t think Stan ’as a bath once a year, unless ’e goes into ’ospital.’
‘Well, y’know, Else always was one for washing, she gets it from me, but Sidney, ’e don’t go in for baths much, well men don’t, do they? So when Else read this out ’e said that some of the ’oly men in the olden days never washed at all, and were crawling with lice. Else told ’im not to be disgustin’, and now every night there’s a terrible row before they go to bed—our bedroom’s right underneath theirs—and Else says she won’t sleep in the same bed with ’im until ’e washes ’imself.’
‘Poor Sidney.’
‘That ain’t all. The other night …’ Gertrude lowered her voice as she yielded up the spiciest morsel of her story.
As for Mr Berkley, the conversation seemed to him like the macabre chorus of some drama in which he was eventually to appear, by some unexpected twist of the plot, as the despicable villain. Images of sin, of unwashed bodies locked together in obscene attitudes, apocalyptic denunciations of lust, visions of Else scrubbing herself fiercely in a tin bath, disconnected Bible phrases from his chapel-going youth, coursed through his distracted mind. With a tremendous effort of will, he straightened up and stood against the wall. Adjusting his tie and smoothing down his hair, he tottered into the auditorium, greeted Dolly and Gertrude, and proceeded slowly towards his office.
It was a strange pilgrimage she was making this Sunday afternoon. Hilda’s home was near the convent, and the tube train seemed to be boring a hole into the past, bearing her inexorably back to the source of her purest happiness and pain. Weary of staring at the advertisements opposite her, Clare took Mrs Syms’s letter from her handbag, and read it once more.
Dear Miss Mallory,
I hope that is your surname, if I have made a mistake, you will probably understand why I’m sure. It is probably a surprise to you to receive a letter from me. At the convent a year ago I think I probably said many things which I wish now I had kept silent. But you will understand that I was very upset.
Now I am writing to you to ask for your help, and I can’t blame you if you don’t come. At the time it seemed to us that Hilda was not the happy, carefree girl her father and I wished her to be. But since we took her away from the convent she has worried us both to death. She’s not like other girls of her age, I just don’t understand her. In fact, looking back, I can’t think of anyone who ever understood her, except you, and I wish you would come and see her and take her out of herself. She hasn’t any friends, except one who is bad for her, and she won’t mix with other young people. The doctor says there is nothing he can do. Mr Syms and I would be most grateful if you could come and visit us, perhaps on a Sunday.
Yours sincerely,
Margaret Syms
By a coincidence the letter had been waiting for her on her dressing-table when she had got in from the pictures the previous night, just after she had been thinking and talking of Hilda. The reticence which had surrounded the subject for so long had suddenly collapsed on all sides. It was undeniably a relief. A few weeks before it would have seemed inconceivable that she should ever see Hilda again, but now she almost looked forward to the meeting. She had to admit, however, that the main reason that she had phoned the Symses and answered their appeal so promptly was that it took her out of the house, and away from the strain of being with Mark in public while the incident of the night before still divided them.
Now the rattle and roar of the tube faded abruptly as it surfaced into bright sunlight. They passed some sidings full of tube trains, looking lost and blind above ground, like worms. The train pulled into Woodburn, and Clare stepped up out of the carriage. Before leaving the station she went to the Ladies’ to check up on her appearance. She wanted to make an impression, to show Hilda quite clearly from the start how much she herself had changed, what their relationship must be now. Looking in the long mirror, she was satisfied with the tailored, dark-grey worsted suit and simple white blouse, the black suède courts, white gloves, and sleek, long black umbrella. After some reflection she removed the brooch, but retained the small, black stud ear-rings.
She walked out of the station into the spotless, tree-lined, Sunday-afternoon streets of Woodburn. But somehow it was always Sunday afternoon in Woodburn, as she remembered it. The people on the pavements were always sprucely dressed, they pushed their prams or followed their dogs at a leisurely, unhurried pace; the cars purred quietly on the smooth roads; there was always somebody playing at the Tennis Club. It would be nice to live here, to leave smoky, dirty Brickley, and come and live here, with Mark, in one of these elegant, attractive houses.
Her heart thumped a little as she approached Hilda’s house. But she pushed open the low, wrought-iron gate without hesitating, and walked carefully up the narrow path to the door. She pushed the bell-button, and two chimes politely intimated her arrival.
Mrs Syms’s astonishment at her appearance was almost comical. She could see the older woman’s eyes darting incredulously over her, swiftly assessing style, quality, cost, as she stumbled through vague expressions of welcome and gratitude.
‘Would you like to wash your hands? No? Well, I’ll take you straight up to Hilda’s room, and then I’ll make you a nice cup of tea. Did you have a reasonable journey?’
Before Clare had finished her reply, Mrs Syms had continued in an undertone: ‘I told Hilda to change into something nice for your visit, but she wouldn’t. She won’t wear any of her pretty clothes nowadays.’
She led her upstairs, and opened the door of Hilda’s room; the sound of music from a gramophone flooded the landing.
‘Get up, Hilda. Here’s someone to see you,’ said Mrs Syms brightly. Hilda was lying on the floor. She opened her eyes and said, ‘Wait till the record’s finished.’
Her mother’s patience was brittle.
‘Get up at once, Hilda! and don’t be so rude.’
Hilda closed her eyes.
‘It’s all rights, Mrs Syms,’ said Clare, sitting down.
‘I’ll get you some tea,’ said Mrs Syms, as she withdrew, angry and impotent.
The record seemed to be of some unremarkable string music. While it spun away, Clare had time to take in the appearance of the room. Cheerfully and expensively furnished, it was littered with photographs of men—no, of one man. They were large and glossy. On one she deciphered the signature ‘James Dreme’, and recognized it as the name of a film star. Finned to one wall was a large poster advertising one of his films: The Young Can Suffer.
The record came to an end; but Hilda stayed prone with her eyes closed for two long minutes. Then she opened her eyes, and rose to her feet. She was wearing a black shirt outside black jeans, with black ballet shoes. Her hair was scraped back into a bun. She wore no make-up.
‘Hallo,’ she said. “What should I call you?’
‘Hallo, Hilda,’ replied Clare, smiling. ‘It’s nice to see you again. Clare.’
‘Clare. Sounds funny after “Sister Agnes”.’
‘Yes. What was that music you were playing?’
‘Theme from This Side of Paradise. Didn’t you see it?’
‘What was it—a film? No, I don’t think I’ve seen that.’
‘Of course, you wouldn’t have …’
‘Oh, I often go to the cinema now. But I must have missed that film. Was it good?’
Hilda leaned against the window frame, and stared out.
‘It was the greatest movie ever made.’
‘Oh? I must try and see it then,’ said Clare politely. But Hilda seemed scarcely to hear her.
‘Yet in a way I still prefer The Young Can Suffer. Because it was the first I saw, I suppose. Mammoth’s not half so good as either.’
She turned, and Clare looked into the eyes of a fanatic.
‘I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but I wish sometimes Jimmie had died before he made Mammoth. It would have been more poetic. Just the two masterpieces.’
Clare felt her grip on the situation slipping.
‘Er, I’m sorry, but who is it that has died? Not someone …?’
Hilda stared.
‘You mean you don’t know. Surely even you must have read about it somewhere? About James Dreme. The greatest actor in the history of the cinema. Killed last year in an automobile accident. He loved driving fast automobiles. It was a white Porsch …’
‘You liked him very much?’
Hilda’s reply was flat and quiet.
‘I love him.’
The door opened, and Mrs Syms steered a tray into the room.
‘How about a nice cup of tea?’
‘How lovely,’ said Clare, rising from her chair. ‘Can I help you with the tray?’
‘Thank you, dear, I can manage, if you’d just clear that table. Hilda, will you take your books off the table?’
Her daughter, who had turned back to the window on her mother’s entry, sulkily moved a pile of film magazines and dropped them on the floor. When she had spread out the tea-things, Mrs Syms said:
‘Well, I won’t interrupt your chat any longer. I expect you’ve got a lot to talk about.’
Hilda maintained a sullen silence. Clare decided that normal, polite behaviour would get her nowhere.
‘Why are you so rude to your mother?’ she asked bluntly, as Mrs Sym’s footsteps receded down the stairs. For the first time the girl seemd to lose her self-possession.
‘I don’t see that it’s any of your business. You’re not my teacher now, you know.’
‘Nor your friend apparently,’ said Clare, rising. ‘So I might as well leave.’
‘No, don’t go,’ said Hilda anxiously. ‘It’s because she doesn’t understand me. She won’t let me lead my own life.’
Clare sat down.
‘Well, after all she is your mother. She’s entitled to some say in what you do. And she’s very kind to you. This lovely room …’
Hilda shrugged her shoulders.
‘You don’t understand. Go and see The Young Can Suffer. Then you might understand that nice rooms aren’t enough.’
Clare thought of telling her what it would have meant to her as a young girl to have a nicely furnished room to herself—what it would mean to her now for that matter—but sensed that such remarks would serve no useful purpose.
‘You seem to think of nothing but this James Dreme.’
‘I told you—I love him.’
‘You mean you loved him when he was alive.’
‘I didn’t know anything about him when he was alive. I didn’t see The Young Can Suffer until three weeks after he was killed.’
‘I just don’t understand, Hilda. If he was alive, yes. But it’s so hopeless, pointless!’
‘If he was alive it would be just as hopeless. More, probably, as some flashy film-star would have grabbed him before long. As it is there are thousands of girls like me, and at least we have the comfort of knowing that he belonged to no one, and can belong to no one. It’s enough for us to be able to mourn him.’
The significance of Hilda’s black clothes struck Clare suddenly with a little spasm of horror.
‘But this is terrible! You mean to say that you sit in this room all day, brooding on the memory of a dead film-star? It’s not natural.’
Hilda’s eyes flashed.
‘Nuns aren’t natural then. They sit in their cells, brooding over Jesus, don’t they? He’s dead, isn’t he? And they love Him, don’t they?’
‘Hilda! How can you say such things?’
Hilda collapsed slackly on to the divan bed.
‘Anyway, I don’t stay here all day. I have to go to secretarial school, worse luck. But there’s another girl the same there. We go to see Jimmie’s pictures together. I’ve seen The Young Can Suffer forty-one times and This Side of Paradise thirty. Sometimes we travel miles to see them. Then we play the theme music of his films here, and meditate. We don’t talk for hours.’
‘D’you still practise your religion, Hilda?’
‘No.’
Clare passed a hand over her face. She had a bad headache. Realizing that her tea was getting cold, she gulped down half of it.
‘Why, Hilda?’
‘I don’t believe in it.’
‘You did once.’
‘I thought I did. It’s easy enough to make a little girl believe in religion when she’s in a convent. When you grow up you realize that it’s like the icing on a cake. Religion is a kids’ party for adults.’
‘You didn’t think that up for yourself.’
‘I did, so there! Well, what if I didn’t? It’s true.’
‘Do you call this James Dreme business adult?’
‘Oh, you wouldn’t understand. Why won’t people understand? We just want to be left alone.’
Clare was silent. Then she asked hesitantly:
‘Hilda, was it anything to do with me—with us?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘This cult of James Dreme … I’d hate to think it was because of what happened at the convent. I know you suffered a lot. So did I. I’m sorry, because it was mainly my fault for letting things go that far. But if that was unhealthy, this is … diseased. You must see that it isn’t natural. Your parents are desperately worried, and no wonder. You’ve got to shake yourself out of this dream.’
‘Dream? You seem to think that it’s all a game, a make-believe. D’you know that I cry myself to sleep every night? Veronica and I don’t have much fun, you know. We don’t dress up and go out dancing. We’ve vowed never to get married. But it’s our life, to do what we like with it, what we feel is right. We have a duty to Jimmie’s memory which comes before everything else.’
Clare shook her head dumbly. Hilda seemed to be getting more animated as her own bafflement and distress increased.
‘You must do what you feel must be done. That’s Jimmie’s great message. No matter how people misunderstand you—and they usually do, you’ve got to act as you feel is right.’
There was a flush of excitement discernible in the pale, slightly puffy face.
‘I’ll show you something,’ she said, ‘if you’ll promise not to tell Mummy.’
From a drawer she took out a cardboard box, and laid it on the table. She began to untie the string around it.
‘I got it from America. You can’t get them in England.’
She opened the box, and reverently extracted a white plastic object.
‘His death-mask,’ she explained, and kissed it.