I awoke to the knowledge that something was horribly wrong and trying to lift my head off the pillow remembered what it was. The bed had stopped tipping about. The dawn was breaking, the light outside had been put out as the winter sky lightened faintly, yellowly over Middlesbrough. Beyond the balcony I saw the noble face of Paula and the bewildered face of father gazing at me from the clouds and I felt saturated in most terrible guilt. Then all went blank again and when I next opened my eyes, carefully, one at a time, it was daylight.
I felt better and got up and went creeping out onto the landing to find a bathroom. There was a shell pink one with a pink, hairy fitted carpet made of loops and a battery of gilded taps and showers. I took off my pyjamas and had a steaming noisy and gigantic bath. Then back in the pyjamas I marched and climbed into bed and slept a bit more.
When I woke up for the third time I felt quite different and sprang out of bed, brushed my hair like mad, got into my clothes and pranced down the stairs. The clock in the hall said ten forty-five, but there was silence on every side. I went on downstairs to look for the dining room where there was a smell rather like in the foyer of the pier ballroom, but the table was laid for breakfast and had a packet of cornflakes on it. I helped myself to a large bowlful of them and, still feeling pretty good, looked round for what to do next. There was some bread on the bulbous sideboard and I ate several slices of it and a lot of butter and marmalade that were on the table. Then I looked through the hatch into the kitchen but the serf person didn’t seem to be there. There was an electric kettle however and a jar of instant coffee and I felt that more than anything in the world this was what I wanted.
But how could I get at it? I went out to the passage and couldn’t seem to see any kitchen door. I went back to the dining room and could only see a door into a cupboard. There was still a very thick and oppressive silence everywhere and the hatch was large, so, carefully moving a magnificent electric hot-plate to one side, I began to climb slowly and cautiously head-first through the hatch.
There was nothing to it. It was not high. It only needed the smallest upward jump, and yanking myself on to the sill I caught hold of the shelf on the other side to drag myself through, expecting at any horrible moment to hear the door behind me open and Mr. or Mrs. Rose cry out with embarrassment or amusement at my receding knickers. I will never drink again, I thought.
I fastened my eyes steadfastly on the coffee and the distant draining board: and then beyond me in the kitchen which was very untidy and messy I saw Jack and Grace rolling about together in silence on the floor.
They didn’t see me.
I went to church.
Father and I have always gone to church on Sunday and Paula to her chapel. Father and I don’t go to the school service at the parish church where the boarders go, but to a church labelled “High” at the end of the town where there is the Sung Eucharist every week at eleven o’clock with a difficult sermon, the Kyrie in Greek, and a good long row of lovely candles on the altar which has a cloth of gold altar-frontal at festivals.
It has never occurred to me not to go to church and I was confirmed with almost no instruction, the priest being a friend of father’s who said I was a safe bet for a Christian, being father’s daughter. It has worked well. I haven’t been to many churches—Scarborough, Whitby, a bleak tin-hut place at Hinderwell one week-end when we tried to have a holiday but didn’t stay long. Mathematics has not got in the way of faith.
But I suppose father or someone might have mentioned the fact, reminded me that this, almost the first week-end away from him in my life, would include a Sunday and Church, and what had I thought of doing about it. It had not even remotely occurred to me, for while mathematics had not got in the way of faith, Jack Rose had.
Yet upon seeing Jack Rose and Grace’s great big bodies all wrapped round each other on his parents’ kitchen floor as I balanced on the serving hatch, something took hold of me tightly which I suppose a mediaevalist would call a Discipline. Forgetting the coffee I wriggled myself backwards, went upstairs, put on my coat, found a ten p. piece and made for the front door. I had not the faintest idea where the church was in Ironstoneside but I set out. There was a pad and pencil beside the box for the Dentists’ Benevolent and on the pad I kindly wrote “Gone to church. M. Green,” before I stepped out into the street.
The Roses’ terrace was on the edge of a block of terraces all Victorian and quiet, with linings to the curtains and edges kept very straight around the lawns. I tramped about these terraces a while then down the hill into red-brick country, a black railway bridge, a terrible dingy hospital with iron gates, and up a rise again towards the clanging of a deadened bell to a massive church whose grimy west door built about 1840 might have let through a double decker bus.
A vast and vaulted icy cave smelling strongly of paraffin was within. Red-roped, all the pews until you got to within ten pews of the fumed oak rood screen were looped off. In these ten long pews about fifteen old ladies sat and inside the rood screen were about seven more dressed in black cassocks and mortar boards like Uncle Edmund’s. These, with belligerent faces all turned in my direction (because I was late—it was quite ten past eleven), were informing the Lord of their regret at having sinned in thought word and deed and in what they had left undone.
The church was freezing. The two paraffin heaters wilted and waned beneath the might of the thirty-foot pillars. There were a few electric lights on long strings, two candles on the altar unlit, and an organ which, when it at length drew difficult breath, was like a sigh upon a cold east wind. I knelt down for a minute on a hassock that crackled and had a tuft growing out of a corner. The other members of the congregation were leaning deeply over the pews and did not stir. The vicar as he approached the lectern for the epistle looked briefly and without interest at me and his voice was small and faded away quickly into the spent spaces above his head.
The Gospel and the sermon must have come and gone, the Prayer of Humble Access, the Comfortable Words. I sat on unnoticing. The fifteen old ladies and I tottered to the altar and took Communion and tottered down again. I felt that great wafts of alcohol from the night before still surrounded me and when one of the old ladies staggered on the chancel steps I thought for a moment that she had been overcome by them. At the Gloria I thought the vicar eyed me. He had spotted an alcoholic and he planned to speak to me later at the church door.
Yet all these surface anxieties flowed and floated along, hardly touching the immense preoccupation that swam beneath the wave. All the time, oblivious to the words on my lips which kept them I suppose somehow on the move, I was thinking of Grace and Jack. I was remembering Grace at the pier, and Jack in the park. I was thinking how easy it would have been for Grace to have told me she had been invited, too—how easy for her, knowing—because I was sure that she knew somehow what I felt about Jack—how easy for her with all her conquests, legendary in the past and their absolute certainty in the future, to have left me Jack for just this one week-end. Jack whom I had known and loved so long.
And remembering her dreamy face, I knew that I had been a fool from the start not to see in it the necessity for its universal victory, its thrust for homage and conquest. When we got at last to the Blessing I began to see Grace not even as a human being at all. She was a siren. A water-sprite, Ondine the enemy, cold, uncaring, much beloved.
The choir had filed out, the fifteen old ladies limped off, nodding, depositing hymn books on the font and the organ had fallen into the wheeze that precedes sleep when the vicar emerged from the priest’s vestry in a dreary fawn overcoat and clattered towards the chancel steps to turn down the paraffin heaters: but still I sat on.
The paraffin heaters squeaked a bit as he turned the wheel first of one and then the other, and straightening up he said, “Ah. Hullo? Want to see me? Cold day.”
I glowered across.
“No good putting them right out yet. Not till after Evensong. Though we might all go into the chancel for Evensong. Never more than six.”
His voice echoed round the enormous empty church. He came up to me and stood looking down. “New here?” he said. “Afraid there’s not much here for the young. Very few young people.”
I still said nothing.
“Are you in some sort of trouble?”
I said no, in a funny voice. I hadn’t spoken since last night and I wondered if it sounded ginny. I wondered if he’d think—he might spot that I was—
“I’ve just got a hang-over,” I said.
“Oh dear,” he said, “what did you drink?”
“A lot of gin and wine. About half a pint of gin.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“No. At least—”
“Why not come back to the vicarage. There’s not much. My housekeeper’s hopeless but there’ll be some beefburgers or something. Plastic frozen peas. And beer,” he said, “I like beer. Beer might cheer you up.”
“I don’t think it would,” I said.
“You far from home?”
“Yes. Very far,” I said, “I’d better go now though. I’m supposed not to be here. I’m staying with some people. But thank you. Thank you very much indeed.”
“Don’t mention it. I’m sorry. We like a bit of company. I rather seem to waste Sunday afternoons. Big trial of faith this place.”
I looked at him for the first time. His weary face had kind eyes. His hair was white and thin. He was wearing grey woollen gloves like a small schoolboy’s. “Never mind,” he said, “Christmas is coming. Are you staying with these people long? Are they nice people?”
“No I’m not,” I said, “and they’re not. They’re not nice people at all. They are probably the most awful people I have ever met.”
“Well pray for them,” he said. “And so shall I. And for you,” he said, waddling off.
I walked slowly, slowly up the road again, under the railway, past the hospital, slowly away from the grit and the grime of the old town and up the hill towards the Roses’ house again. A fat lot of use that’ll be, I thought. You can’t pray for my trouble. Infatuation, it’s called. Being in love. Christianity is supposed to be all about love but it’s utterly useless when you’re in love. There’s not a blind thing you can do about being in love it seems to me except sit it out. Jesus said love one another. He said the only commandments that matter are to love God and each other. He didn’t say that loving, especially each other, tears you to pieces. Might have been better if he had said Don’t love one another. Just try and get along with each other and if you feel love coming on go far a long brisk walk like father tells Uncle Edmund.
The trouble with me is, I thought staring again at the pitiless mirror-front of the double-dental villas, “The trouble with me is,” I snarled, thinking of the horrors within and how I detested them all, “is that I’ve loved people far too much. But not any more. I’m finished with love. I’ve finished with men. And I’ve finished with friends.”