Desmond waited on the station platform. The green light showed but it had been like that for three-quarters of an hour. People were getting restive. But Desmond welcomed the downfall of timetabling as a happening to be expected, and not only where British Rail was concerned.
Tomorrow was his birthday. His mother would have bought him a more expensive gift than she could afford and she would have loaned Tracy money to ‘get something special’. From his grandparents in Truro he could rely on receiving a book about one of the B.B.C.’s wild life programmes with a cheery note from his grandmother saying she had picked it up at a book sale because she realized that it was just the sort of thing he was interested in, and telling him yet again how she and Grandpa would never forget ‘The Flight of the Condor’. There would be cards from some of the people for whom he did gardening and one from his only school friend, now at Durham University. Ever since his father left home his mother had worked herself and everyone else into a frenzy about his birthday. If his father had remembered to send a card it would have spoilt the whole effect. This had been going on for over six years and he considered he had been pretty tolerant of it. Now he had earned the right to choose the way he spent his birthday. He hoped his mother would not be too hurt by his absence, but he had noted she got quite a bit of mileage out of being hurt. In fact, she was creative about it. His mother put everything which came to her to good use.
‘Work on the line,’ a woman said resignedly.
‘Points failure,’ her companion countered. ‘It’s always points failure.’
A child in a pushchair pointed a finger at Desmond and said, ‘Dada!’
‘Dada’s going to meet us at Exeter.’ His mother sounded indifferent as though the arrival of the train and the waiting father were in the hands of capricious gods.
The tannoy made a noise like someone returned from the dead and still in a bad condition. A voice communicated a message in a language perhaps familiar to the unknown territory in which the train was in travail – Desmond visualized it stranded in one of those moonlike regions over which the condor cast its shadow.
‘Whatever that may have been, it wasn’t “the train now approaching platform three”,’ the advocate of points failure said. She and her companion walked away in the direction of the station buffet.
The child began to cry ‘Dada! Dada!’, eyes and mouth gaping holes of misery. Desmond was convinced that the child’s father would not be waiting on the platform at Exeter. This conviction owed little to anything as insubstantial as reason, it was a flutter in the stomach as portentous as the signs on the breastbone of a goose which warn the primitive – who know about such things – of bad weather to come.
‘That’s not Dada.’ The young woman’s voice was sharp. Desmond’s face as he stared at the child had something of the primitive about it. The eyes were clear as glass in the folds above the flat planes of the cheekbones, and this gave the face the look of one of those plundered antique figures from which the jewelled eyes have been removed. The young woman pushed the child further up the platform.
Desmond sat on a seat and began to reread The Star Thrower, which he had brought with him because at one time Eiseley had ridden the rails and Desmond thought him a good companion, this man so wise to human fallacies, who knew that ‘one step does not lead rationally to another.’ He was particularly impressed by the idea of the trickster element in Nature which looms suddenly out of a clear sky and which has to be accepted because it leaves behind tangible evidence of its demonic presence. What he had not found before was the acknowledgement of the presence of the trickster in the life of man. It was an idea with which he felt strangely secure, not because it offered safety but because it assured him that he was not alone, that someone else had seen the demon joker looking over his shoulder, had heard the same derisive laughter amid the solemn platitudes of everyday speech. Desmond was glad that the train had not arrived. Its absence justified him.
The woman with the child walked past. Desmond pulled his Quasimodo face at the child, tongue bunched in cheek, eyes askew; the child applauded and shouted, ‘Dada! Dada! Dada!’
The voice over the tannoy, now perfectly in command of itself, announced that the train would arrive in five minutes and that British Rail apologized for the inconvenience and for the fact that the dining-car had been taken off.
When the train arrived Desmond got into the guard’s van where he was warmly received by a despondent Labrador. The guard, a middle-aged Asian with eyes as dark and sad as the dog’s, looked Desmond up and down, from tattered pants with the regulation tear above one knee to paint-splashed vest, and came to a conclusion which caused him no joy. Desmond squatted beside the dog, careful to let it carry out its own investigations before he touched it. The guard said, ‘You like dogs? You look after this one, then.’ He refrained from asking Desmond whether he had a ticket, which was unusual since most Asians whom Desmond had met had been more law-abiding than the English. It seemed, however, that this man had a son who was in trouble with the police who had dealt with him very unfairly. He was disposed to be sympathetic to Desmond.
‘The police don’t like Pakis,’ he said. ‘I do not like them, either. I am Indian. But it makes no difference, they do not listen. Even when my son-in-law’s grocery shop has petrol bomb thrown through the window, they do nothing.’
Desmond listened attentively to the guard’s grievances while he stroked the dog’s head. He felt an interest – which was as near as he ever came to sympathy – in people who are accident-prone, and the coloured community was more accident-prone than most. He could see, however, that while the guard was resigned to the precariousness of life he was by no means reconciled to it. He saw himself as a victim, not the prototype of human kind.
‘I tell my MP but that man is just puffed out with promises like a hot-air balloon.’
Desmond, who found politics boring and depressing, asked when the train got into Exeter.
‘What do you want to go to Exeter for?’
‘There’s a man I want to talk to. He is attending a conference on anthropology.’ Desmond said this as nonchalantly as if he were a fellow academic and, indeed, in his own mind there was no substantial distinction between himself and Sir Arnold Bassett, merely a matter of age in which he had the advantage. ‘I read about it in The Times in the library.’ He did not add that this meeting with Sir Arnold Bassett was his birthday present to himself.
‘But he will not see you, not without you having an appointment.’ It might have been his mother speaking, Desmond thought. There would have been no way he could have convinced her that if only he could see Sir Arnold Bassett (and, more important, if Sir Arnold Bassett could only see him) nothing but good, in the form of interesting field work, could follow. Desmond did not expect to be liked, or loved, but he assumed an immediate awareness of his intellectual ability.
‘We have corresponded,’ he said. ‘At least, I wrote to him. There was some rather sloppy thinking in a paper he gave on Darwin and I sent him a few notes. Unfortunately I think they may have gone astray because he didn’t reply. I’ve brought a copy with me, just in case.’
The guard shook his grizzled head sorrowfully. ‘You make that man very angry.’
‘A man like that has nothing to fear from controversy.’ Desmond’s harsh bray of laughter betrayed anger as well as contempt and the dog’s ears twitched nervously. ‘It’s only men with little minds who are vain.’
‘No, no, the bigger the man, the bigger the appetite. You better go home, you get yourself into trouble otherwise, upsetting this man. You go home and write to him. You get out at the next stop.’ He pleaded earnestly as if Desmond were his own son and the Labrador, agitated by the tone, turned his head and looked imploringly at Desmond.
The ticket inspector had reached the adjacent carriage. The guard said to Desmond, ‘You go in toilet, otherwise you get me in trouble.’ The Labrador put his head back and howled assent.
When the ticket inspector had passed by Desmond made his way to the rear of the train because he did not think it fair to place so heavy a burden on the guard and the dog.
At Exeter he hung about on the platform. On previous excursions he had observed that there is usually a passenger in trouble or out to make trouble at the end of a long journey. He was not disappointed this time. Soon a wiry little foreign woman set up camp at the ticket barrier, surrounded by suitcases held together by string and numerous parcels wrapped in brown paper. Desmond paused to study the method of the woman who had the staring, resentful eyes of one who is an expert at creating chaos around her.
‘I can’t help what they told you at Bodmin, madam,’ the man at the barrier said. ‘This is Exeter.’
She protested volubly and he said, ‘No, no, no! The train doesn’t go any further and if it did you still wouldn’t get to Truro. You have come the wrong way. You understand? Wrong way!’ He stabbed his finger in the general direction of right way. But, of course, she did not understand, even if she had had perfect command of English she would not have understood; incomprehension was the tripwire with which she brought authority down. Several people pushed past waving tickets in the air. ‘You are blocking the exit, madam.’ The foolish man toed one of the brown paper bags which turned on its side and split open. The woman fell on her knees, scrabbling in the dust and threatening litigation while the ticket collector maintained his innocence in a vigorous baritone and several passengers skidded on ripe cherries. Desmond, sorry to leave the circus behind, slipped past waving his library ticket in the air.
The woman with the pushchair was waiting blank-faced in the middle of the concourse and the child was addressing each oncoming male as Dada. Desmond went in search of tourist information.
‘I want the conference centre,’ he said and handed the young woman with the haughty eyebrows the pieces which he had cut out of the library’s copy of The Times. She looked at him sceptically as if she would not let him into any building of which she had charge, but produced a map of the town and marked a building with a cross.
Desmond got a bar of chocolate from a machine and bought a banana at a stall. The conference was on from Saturday until Monday. It was now Friday evening. He was prepared to extend his birthday celebration until Monday if necessary. He would find a park in which to sleep. The life which he planned for himself would involve sleeping in places more hostile to man than a park in Exeter in June.
Hester sometimes wondered why she hadn’t joined the Society of Friends. Even allowing for the fact that they were occasionally moved to speak, ministering Quakers could not possibly be as distracting as the modern child. The baby at the back of the church had been provided – to help it through the tedium of worship – with toys, all of which must surely be made of cast iron. Soft toys, no doubt, had also been lavished upon the infant, but these, it seemed, were reserved for the peace and quiet of its own home. Older children with the instincts of storm-troopers, and equipped with hobnailed boots, marched up and down the aisle. Young parents, ears attuned to such noises, appeared to have no difficulty in ignoring the racket. It was very hot and this youthful activity brought beads of perspiration to Hester’s brow. She reflected gloomily on the injunction ‘Suffer the little ones to come unto me’, contrasting it with her own desire, growing more imperative with the years, to ensure peace, if necessary with a hatchet.
The congregation sang. The baby, incipiently musical, listened in silent wonder, but grew restive during the readings. What it really seemed to hate was the sermon during which it gave tongue while heaving about all the weights with which it had been thoughtfully provided. All this, Hester thought, and Valentine to follow! It was most unlike Valentine to invite herself for sherry on a Sunday morning. ‘I simply have to see you,’ she had said. ‘I am sorry, but it can’t wait.’ Hester had looked forward to the rare treat of sitting out in her garden.
Why is it that people can’t come to terms with the facts of their lives? she lamented as she waited to make her communion. All this discontent, the fretting for distant places – if only they could live in Australia, Italy, even the other side of England, they would find fulfilment. Fulfilment was there, waiting, wherever they were not. And then there was the obsession with the wrongs of distant places – Africa, South America, Soviet Russia. So much energy spent on situations which they did not fully understand and could do little to change. And so, she thought, edging forward up the aisle, the particular life they have to live in the place where they find themselves, is neglected, its joys unlooked for, its challenges not confronted, its sorrow building up through the years as steadily and stealthily as an undiagnosed disease. ‘Oh God, forgive me that even here, at your altar, I am unable to compose my mind! I am so worried about what Valentine is up to now. I don’t want to be involved. I am too old for all this. Please, please help me to make her see that if she wants to move yet again there is no way in which I can become involved in persuading Michael.’
Matins followed the family Eucharist so Michael would not be back at the vicarage until just before one o’clock. This would leave Valentine the best part of two hours in which to unburden herself.
‘I am sorry you have to put up with me,’ she said on arrival. ‘If Michael’s mother were alive, I could talk to her.’ She looked very much offended, as though Sylvia had been guilty of a deliberate discourtesy in quitting life’s party prematurely.
The invoking of Sylvia was ominous, not only because she had been much in Hester’s thoughts recently, but because Valentine rarely mentioned her and when she did it was usually a danger signal. Hester had no idea why this should be so since Sylvia had died seven years before Valentine met Michael.
The sunlight glared into the room but, in the hope that Valentine might be persuaded to sit in a shady part of the garden, Hester had not drawn the curtains. Confidences in a garden would be diffused over a wider area, their concentration diminished by the threatening activities of insects, the smell of the compost heap, the blare of other people’s radios and all the other distractions of a summer day. It was apparent, however, that Valentine regarded the open French window not as an invitation but an insensitivity. Hester poured sherry and prayed for the influence of her sister’s more tender spirit. She could smell the meat cooking and hoped she had remembered to turn the gas down to Mark 2. She tried to visualize herself doing this and while she was thus occupied Valentine said, ‘As his nearest relative I suppose you are entitled to learn, before it becomes general knowledge, that Michael is having an affair with Norah Kendall.’
Hester walked across the room, keeping a careful eye on the sherry glass which she had filled generously. When she had placed it on the table beside Valentine, she said, ‘I don’t think I heard you aright.’
‘It’s hardly something I want to repeat.’ Valentine’s features looked brittle as cut glass.
Hester said stupidly, warming her sherry glass in her hands as if it contained the brandy which she now wished she had offered, ‘Norah Kendall! I don’t believe it.’
‘Not very flattering, certainly. So unlikely a love. You can imagine how I feel.’
Hester, who could not imagine it, said, to gain time, ‘But he adores you. Michael has always adored you.’
‘He needs someone to adore and has made do with me.’ Valentine spoke in a high, clear voice which was not at all to Hester’s liking.
‘What nonsense!’
‘Yes, really. He is the kind of man who expects to fall madly in love once in his life.’ Oh yes, yes, Hester thought, seeing Michael’s face sketched in her mind’s eye, the ludicrously vulnerable mouth and exposed chin, he certainly is that. Valentine went on, as though wound up to speak at a certain pace, ‘I am not a passionate person. He made a bad mistake; but it would be unthinkable to admit it. So he set himself to adoring me, much as he would set out to go rock-climbing. There was always the possibility, of course, that one day he would fall madly in love. He hasn’t closed any doors on himself.’ The words made good sense but the unvarying delivery was unnerving.
Hester could see that if she was not careful she was going to respond like those people who, confronted with an unpleasant prospect, keep repeating, ‘What nonsense!’ in the hope that it will see that it is not wanted and go away. She drained her glass and fetched the decanter. ‘Come on. Drink up.’
‘I am in no need of stimulants, I can assure you.’ But Valentine allowed Hester to refill her glass.
‘Now, tell me how you came to this surprising conclusion.’
Valentine recounted without elaboration what she had seen, heard and not heard, in and around the graveyard. Hester did not think there was much to it but was not as relieved as she might have expected. The sunlight sparked from the stones on the patio and combined with the sherry to produce spots before her eyes. She drew the curtain across the side window. ‘Aren’t you making a great deal out of very little?’
Valentine said, staring ahead, eyes unblinking, ‘It’s my own fault. Of course I know that. I should have been someone’s mistress, kept in a back street.’ The violet-grey eyes seemed to consume the pale face; seeing her like this Hester could almost believe that Marguerite Gauthier was within her range. ‘I should have been happy with a man who only came to me once a week. I haven’t the stamina to be a wife.’
‘But Norah Kendall . . . No, it’s not possible.’
‘A woman neither young nor beautiful,’ Valentine said tonelessly. Hester wished she would begin to act a little more, then she herself could play the role to which she was best suited, that of the person who turns the emotional current down to an acceptable level. She had never before realized how much she was dependent on the emotions of others for the exercise of this skill. Valentine was saying, ‘It didn’t matter that I couldn’t love him as he needed to be loved, so long as there was no one else who could. But I feel so diminished, so humiliated. Some of those old tabbies will have the temerity to pity me.’
Hester pounced. ‘Valentine, you are talking as if this affair were common knowledge. And it very soon will be if you behave like this.’
‘It will very soon become known if Michael continues to be so indiscreet.’ There was a tart commonsense in this rejoinder from which Hester took some comfort.
‘Although it seems rather unconvincing to me, I take your word for it that there was a bit of silliness in the graveyard.’ Hester put down her glass. One sherry made her feel liverish, two turned the whole world bilious. Valentine had affected jealousy before, but usually it was the possible affront to her dignity which roused her, rather than any serious prospect of infidelity. Something must have happened to put her in a state of shock. And it wasn’t just shock; the eyes were not so much glazed as splintered by fear. Hester wondered if the fear had always been there, it seemed so natural a part of the face now. It gave her a queasy feeling, an awareness of fear within herself. This was Michael of whom they were speaking, her beloved sister’s beloved son. Sylvia had sat in this very room speaking of her hopes for him, and of her fears, too. Hester addressed herself to the fear. ‘This doesn’t have to be taken too seriously, does it? Our dear Michael is easily moved and Norah is unhappy and overburdened. Give a little thought to what probably happened. At the worst, he tried to comfort her in a way that was unwise.’
‘Why did he go into the graveyard with her in the first place?’
‘Hardly in order to commit an indiscretion.’
‘And then, afterwards, to go rushing off like that.’
‘Where did he go, do you know?’
‘No, and I doubt that he does either. He is quite beside himself.
His whole body is singing, Hester. I feel it whenever he is near me.’
Hester could smell the apples cooking on the bottom shelf. She was ashamed that she should be preoccupied with food at such a time. Then, standing there smelling the apples, words came into her mind as they sometimes did when she had lost the thread of a story. The words were often seemingly unconnected, referring her back to an earlier incident which she had failed to give its full value. She said, ‘You implied earlier that you had not been a very satisfactory wife to Michael. I think you are not wholly fair to yourself in that.’ Up to this moment she had thought the criticism entirely fair. ‘You didn’t know my sister Sylvia. She was one of those generous women who seem to have so much room in their hearts that they can accommodate the demands of all those who have need of them. She died of kidney failure before any of us could afford to lose her.’
‘I am quite aware that she died of kidney failure. As for her astonishing goodness – if that is meant as some kind of rebuke, I am in no need of such comparisons.’
‘I am saying this because it may be something you need to know. Her loss inflicted a great wound on her family which has never properly healed.’ That was a fact, though it wasn’t given an airing very often. ‘Michael was only seventeen at the time and he was emotionally dependent on her. His father was one of those men who resent sharing his wife’s affections with a child and he always distanced himself from Michael. This disappointment of which you are so conscious in Michael may not be attributable to a failure in you so much as to the fact that he couldn’t come to terms with the loss of his mother. He has probably always asked rather too much of you.’
Valentine shook her head and put her fingers to her temples, the first really theatrical gesture she had made. ‘I’m sure that is very well-intentioned, but it is all too Freudian for me to take in.’
‘Does he often speak to you of Sylvia?’ Hester persisted, aware of some need to pursue this matter which was not entirely altruistic.
‘You know he doesn’t. Neither do you. It is something from which I have always been excluded. No, no, I am not making this up on the spur of the moment, Hester. It happens. I can remember incidents – one in particular – coming into a room at dusk and seeing you and Michael sitting silent in front of the fire. I had the feeling that a third person was present whom I could not see.’
For a moment neither of them spoke. Fat sizzled in the oven. Valentine said, ‘But I fail to see how this is supposed to be of any help to me.’
Hester, who had been upset by what Valentine had said, lost her patience. ‘Very well, then. Blame yourself. It is a convenient way out and goodness knows you have taken it often enough.’
‘What do you mean “convenient way out”?’ Valentine was startled and angry.
‘One simply says – “I am as I am and so there is no point in trying”. One . . .’
‘Could you put this in your own words instead of talking like the Queen?’
‘All right. You accept the idea of some kind of lack in yourself because it absolves you from making any further effort.’
‘Thank you very much.’ Valentine got to her feet in time to see Charles Venables and Shirley Treglowan coming in at Hester’s garden gate. ‘I must say I have gained little comfort from this morning’s talk.’
‘I’m sorry. I apologize . . .’
‘And as I perceive you have visitors, I will take my leave.’
‘Visitors?’ Hester swung round towards the window. ‘Really, this is too much!’
‘I can see you are having a very trying Sunday morning.’ Valentine swept into the hall and opened the front door. ‘Do come in. I am just on my way.’ She walked down the path, ignoring their protests and leaving her handbag behind.
‘Is this urgent?’ Hester disposed of good manners.
‘Yes.’ Charles could do the same when it suited his purpose.
Hester offered brandy in the interests of dulling her temper and they both accepted. They sat side by side on the sofa, Charles natty in dark blue shirt and pale blue slacks, Shirley in a bright green tentlike structure the hem of which billowed across Charles’s knees. The sun had caught her cheekbones and two livid crescents glowed fierce as war paint on her plump face. She was sweating pungently.
‘Desmond has gone missing,’ Charles explained. ‘Shirley wondered if either of us had seen him.’ Hester detected a rather surprising intimacy in the way he spoke for Shirley. ‘Or if he mentioned anything when last he did our gardens.’
‘I was out when last he did our gardens.’
Shirley said, ‘I had the most bizarre dream.’ She looked at Charles, asking permission to repeat the story. He smiled indulgently into his glass. ‘There was a man on TV talking about the Church and Aids; he said the Archbishop of Canterbury should nail his colours to the mast. And I went to bed and dreamt of the Archbishop on this boat, with a handkerchief knotted on his head and a black patch over one eye, singing “Once aboard the lugger and the girl is mine”. There was something obscene about it. I woke up shouting “Desmond, what have you done?” ’
Charles smiled covertly at Hester.
‘He has taken himself off once or twice before, hasn’t he?’ Hester was neither impressed nor amused. ‘Did he leave a note?’
‘Yes. He said it was something important. What does that mean? I’m afraid of what Desmond may think important.’
‘Whatever it may be, I don’t suppose it is abducting girls and taking them to sea,’ Charles said comfortably, revolving brandy in his glass.
‘It was just the Archbishop being like that that made it seem . . . well . . . you could interpret it that the moral universe has gone awry.’
‘I think it undoubtedly has,’ Hester said crisply. ‘But I doubt if Desmond is materially involved.’
‘He probably thinks he is going to land a job,’ Charles said. ‘I expect he didn’t want to raise your hopes until he knew the outcome.’ This seemed eminently sensible as well as being reassuring and Hester wondered why he had not said it in the first place and packed Shirley off home.
‘My hopes aren’t raised that easily,’ Shirley said wanly.
Charles said, ‘Oh, come!’
He is enjoying this, Hester thought, but he has no idea how to bring it to an end. ‘Would you like to stay for lunch?’ she asked. There seemed no alternative if she herself was to eat. Shirley said she must get back to Tracy, but Charles, who was quite shameless about scrounging meals, accepted. ‘I shall be seeing Hoaths tomorrow about Desmond’s obsession with anthropology, so I can take Valentine’s handbag,’ he said, as though the handbag and Hester’s lunch were inextricably connected.
Charles had expected to talk to Michael on his own, but Valentine was on this occasion behaving like a vicar’s wife. Charles had always thought it so admirable in her that she distanced herself from the affairs of her husband and his parish work, her manner conveying that she had matters of greater moment to occupy her. It was a surprise, therefore, to find her presiding over the tea not in the least distantly but as if she expected not only to be privy to whatever disclosures might be made, but an active participant in any subsequent discussion.
Earlier she had surprised Michael when he said that Charles might wish to talk to him privately. ‘Charles cannot have anything to say to you privately,’ she had retorted. ‘He is not a Christian.’
‘I expect atheists have private problems.’
‘But not ones that can’t be discussed with man and wife. We are man and wife and Charles should not expect to come here and be served tea by me as if I were the housekeeper who would meekly withdraw after setting out the contents of the laden tray.’
There had been a faint flush on her face and neck. Although he chose to put her evident distress down to incipient ’flu, Michael nevertheless felt obscurely guilty. He therefore addressed Charles. ‘You mentioned a problem. We have been quite at a loss to imagine what kind of problem it is on which you could possibly find it of help to turn to the vicarage.’ The awful facetiousness was as foreign to him as the use of the connubial ‘we’. It was very, very seldom that the Hoaths thought or spoke of themselves as first person plural.
It occurred to Charles that at some time or other he must have said something which had given grave offence. He acknowledged that there might have been occasions when he had spoken unwisely to Hoath on matters religious, or to Valentine on the question of her portrayal of Hedda Gabler. But he could not imagine what subject was peculiarly sensitive to them both. He decided that it was Michael Hoath whom he had upset. Of the two, Hoath seemed to him the more stable and if he was behaving oddly then there must be a reason for it. In Charles’s view, unbalanced behaviour was to be expected in women.
He decided to reply to Hoath in the same vein and succeeded in sounding rather coy. ‘I hope nothing I have said has ever given the impression that I would not value your advice on . . . er . . . indeed on any subject.’
Michael Hoath gazed about him. Charles had noted him doing this several times, his eyes resting on objects which must surely be quite familiar to him yet which seemed to occasion him something which Charles could only describe as astonishment. Had Valentine rearranged the furniture? It seemed unlikely and even more unlikely that Hoath should be disorientated by a change in the relationship of tables and chairs.
During this pause Valentine decided that the two men were waiting for her to leave them alone. She turned angry eyes on Charles. ‘Are we to know this problem?’
Charles, who was by this time feeling extremely foolish, said, ‘I think perhaps I may have made too much of this on the phone. It isn’t really my problem at all.’
Far from clearing the atmosphere, this appeared to make matters worse. Valentine became still as a statue of a particularly breakable kind and Hoath seemed to be holding his breath as he looked into the dregs of his cup.
Charles hurried on, ‘It’s about Desmond Treglowan.’
The Hoaths spoke simultaneously. Michael said, ‘Oh, Desmond!’ and Valentine said, ‘Charles, your cup is empty.’ There was a pause while she replenished all the cups and was as fussy with milk and sugar as if Charles were playing Gwendolen to her Cecily. Eventually, Michael Hoath said, ‘Now, Charles, what is this about Desmond? The lad returned home, I gather.’
Charles settled back in his chair, confident in the knowledge that he had a good tale to tell. ‘It seems he went to Exeter in the hope of meeting Sir Arnold Bassett, of all people, who was attending a conference there. Not a realistic aim, one would have thought. But as it transpired, as well as the main conference there was a meeting meant to awaken the interest of what I suppose was once the-man- in-the-street but which has become the-man-in-front-of-the-television-screen. Old Bassett was wheeled forward to do his bit.’
‘Who is this Bassett?’ Valentine’s expression was one of quite inappropriate betrayal, as though a late suspect had been introduced by Hercule Poirot of whose existence she could not possibly have been aware.
‘An anthropologist of some repute – but not so well thought-of nowadays.’ Charles was fussed at being interrupted when he thought he was doing his best to lighten the atmosphere. He went on, ‘Desmond managed to get into this meeting which was rather poorly attended, I gather from a report in The Times. It seems that when questions were invited, Desmond took the opportunity to inform Bassett that he had made one or two mistakes regarding Darwin.’ Charles thought this very funny but neither of the Hoaths did. ‘And he hung on pertinaciously throughout question time, thus earning himself a couple of witty lines in the Guardian and no doubt the undying hatred of the great man.’
Charles chuckled. The other two were silent. Valentine sat with bowed head – the better, thought Charles, who was beginning to get rather cross, to look superb when she finally raised her chin. ‘And that is all?’
‘By no means. The chairman was a younger man who probably hated old Bassett’s guts. It seems that after the meeting he came across Desmond who was hanging about in the hope of further exhilarating exchanges with Bassett. The outcome was that this fellow offered Desmond the chance to go on a dig in Turkey early next year. At his own expense. As he doesn’t go to university until the autumn it would be a possibility provided he can raise the money.’
‘And I suppose it is a matter of getting a grant?’ Valentine said crisply. ‘Really, Charles, I can’t see why you have come to us. As a schoolmaster you must know more than we do about such things. And why, by the way, aren’t you in school now?’
‘This is the games afternoon.’ Charles felt as if he were explaining his absence to the head master. ‘And it’s not the money which disturbs Desmond’s mother.’ Somehow he could not bring himself to say Shirley. ‘She is afraid the grandparents will fund him on the principle that “it was coming to you anyway so you might as well have it now”. What worries her is that the expedition may compound Desmond’s problem, not solve it; that he will just go to pieces in some lonely place with no one noticing what is happening.’
Valentine said, ‘Perhaps he just knows what he wants. It was enterprising to go off to Exeter like that.’
‘But unrealistic to imagine he could impress old Bassett by a display of adolescent cleverness.’
Michael Hoath said, ‘A display of adolescent cleverness is not peculiar to Desmond. And he does seem to have impressed the other fellow.’
‘But why anthropology? Anthropologists don’t exactly grow on trees. Personally, I think it’s some kind of therapy and she should be glad it isn’t psychology he’s taken up. But she is afraid this is the call of the wild; that he will go off into a desert place and become a recluse. That sort of thing.’
‘And what am I supposed to do about it?’ Hoath asked.
‘She seemed to think you had an alternative life on offer – the loving Christian community.’
Michael Hoath looked as if he had been stung and Charles regretted the flippancy of his tone. Hoath said, ‘The desert has always been an alternative way.’
There was another dreadful silence. The idea recurred to Charles that at some time he must have offended Hoath. Certainly a great air of offence hung over the sitting-room. He said, ‘Anyway, perhaps you might care to have a word with Desmond. I leave it to you. But before I go – and I have taken up far too much of your time as it is.’ Things were so bad he almost said, ‘and that of your good lady.’ He pulled himself together and tried to inject genuine feeling into his voice, which was always a mistake as it made him sound odiously insincere. ‘Before I go may I say how much I, as an outsider, have appreciated the masterly way in which you have transformed the church services?’ He hoped this was not going at it a bit too strongly, but Hoath’s reaction was to look at him so tragically that he thought, dear me, perhaps the man is losing heart? Silence threatened again and Charles found himself forced to drum up more praise. ‘Speaking as one who has never been able to take what your predecessor was pleased to call “the leap of faith” I nevertheless need the enrichment of the language and the ritual . . .’ He went on to praise the music, the art of which the Church had been both inspiration and custodian, and even acknowledged his own debt to the Christian culture in which he had been reared.
The words “leap of faith” sounded like a cry in Michael Hoath’s ears, a cry which he had heard all his adult life and about which he had been able to do nothing. Many unbelievers seemed to him like lapsed fundamentalists, people for whom every statement, doctrine, miracle must be examined in detail and proved irrefutably. Once doubt entered in they were finished because above all else they needed absolute certainty. And he could not answer them. They had cried out and he had been dumb, unable to deal with their arguments or adequately to explain his own belief. The great mysteries were not for him a matter for argument, they were jewels cast about his life’s landscape, some of which he seemed to hold in the palm of his hand, others which his fingers would never touch; he watched and meditated on their richness and radiance and felt them sometimes closer than hand to face, at others remote as a star. Now, at a time when his emotions were so charged, he felt the agony of the tension between himself and Charles to be quite unbearable.
Charles had the feeling that Hoath was listening to very little of what he said. When finally praise petered out, Hoath got abruptly to his feet, muttered, ‘Well, thank you for telling me about Desmond. I will speak to him,’ and left the room.
‘I do hope he believed me,’ Charles said weakly.
‘You were very patronizing,’ Valentine said.
A faint colour tipped Charles’s cheeks; it was not a description he liked. ‘I trust not.’
‘Surely you can’t be so unaware when you mock.’
‘No, no,’ he protested. ‘It means a great deal to me, I do assure you . . .’
‘The music and the fan-vaulting and the language of the prayer book, but not, of course, the unambiguity of the crucifix which you probably think is in rather bad taste and which my poor benighted husband has tormented himself trying to preach, to live . . .’
Involuntarily Charles’s lips moved in the slightest pucker of distaste. She said acidly, ‘Exactly.’
She was angry that he had patronized Michael and even more angry that she herself had been included in his patronage. She saw herself as the outsider in all matters including her religion.
Charles was enchanted that anger so became her, a phenomenon much noted in fiction but rare in his experience. He would pay no heed to her words, but would treasure the memory of the impeccable line of the jaw, the icy fire in the eyes.
‘You are most handsome,’ he said.
‘Are you never concerned with the guts of the matter?’ Valentine surprised herself by the use of the word guts which was not a word she would normally have applied to religion let alone to anything pertaining to herself.
Charles raised his eyebrows, distressed by the realization that she meant him to take her anger seriously. Did he sense a whiff of feminism here? he wondered.
‘You are so civilized you have become quite unrooted.’
Nothing he had said justified the way in which she was behaving and she was aware of this. She was angry with him because she saw something of herself in him. She, too, had a revulsion for the guts of life. But she was not a natural aesthete. He at least genuinely cared about the music of Bach. In a sense perhaps he did know where his roots were buried and searched for them in the hidden streams beside which Langland’s peasants had ploughed their half-acre.
Charles left soon after this exchange. He was less at ease in his attitude to feminism than to Christianity, which he regarded as a spent force. Feminism was a force to be reckoned with. The liberation of women seemed to Charles something akin to the release of one of those deadly germs said to be immobilized in the frozen waters of the Arctic. On his way home he called at the florist’s and ordered flowers for Valentine, writing a brief note of apology to accompany them. It was not a gesture which would normally have occurred to him, but he had heard that men sometimes did this at the end of an affair. For some reason, this seemed appropriate.
‘To think I prided myself on being the one who introduced them,’ Lois Drury said to Hester. She was looking through the sitting- room window on to the lawn where Hesketh was engaged in maniacal struggle to dismantle a maypole-like device for drying clothes. Her husband Jack was in the front drive changing a tyre. It seemed not to have occurred to either man to co-ordinate their labours. Lois said, ‘It’s going to be a very bad-tempered lunch.’
Lois was a dark, angular woman, comfortably lacking in charm. Hester thought that she could be relied on not to make matters worse by a flow of idle chatter. She looked at her wrist watch and said, ‘And a late one.’ She sipped her drink. The glass bore the floured imprints of Norah’s fingers. ‘Do you think we should offer to help in the kitchen? I was left in little doubt that that was why I was invited.’
Lois shook her head decidedly. ‘She’s not doing at all badly and we should only fluster her – or, worse still, she would opt out and we should have to prepare the meal. Norah can’t work in tandem. Once someone starts to help, she sits back, as you must know.’
A young woman attired in a G-string strolled past the window. They watched as Hesketh desisted from his battle with the maypole and turned in slow motion to watch his daughter’s progress across the lawn. She threw down a bathing towel and stretched out on it, her body smooth as marzipan save for two little eminences topped by glace cherries. Hesketh came and stood over her, looking as if he might take a bite at any minute.
‘Do you propose to join us at lunch in that condition?’
Her voice was not as resonant as his and the reply was inaudible. Hesketh conveyed its substance to them. ‘Of course we are having lunch, that is why we have guests.’ And after another inaudible remark, ‘I don’t want to hear you speak like that about your stepmother.’
‘How has Norah taken her arrival?’ Hester asked Lois.
‘I have only had a few minutes with her, but she seemed in a surprisingly buoyant mood. Perhaps that is how people respond when something they dread actually happens.’ Lois did not sound convinced of this.
Hester was doubtful, too. ‘I can’t see Samantha’s arrival being a relief to Norah in any sense.’
‘I wouldn’t have said it was relief. She just seemed dissociated – as if she had been swigging the cooking sherry.’
At this point Hesketh broke away from Samantha and strode over to the maypole which he grasped by the stem and shook as if to throttle it. One of the wire spokes came adrift and hit him on the side of the head. He gave a roar of fury and rushing to the bank hurled the contraption into the river. Samantha got up, folded the towel and walked into the sitting-room.
‘Do you mind about this?’ she asked, presenting a honey-brown torso for Hester’s inspection. ‘My father thinks you will be affronted.’
‘I’m not all that keen, since you ask.’ Hester refused to be shamed into acceptance. ‘You’re shocked,’ Samantha said disdainfully.
‘Being shockproof isn’t high on my list of priorities.’
‘No?’
‘Now you are shocked.’
‘You’re quite formidable, aren’t you?’ Samantha drew the towel around her shoulders. ‘You make me feel self-conscious.’
Hester doubted that she ever felt anything else. Then she became guilty. The young often made her feel guilty – her own youth was so far away. Perhaps Samantha had really hoped that she might regain lost Eden in the secluded garden. Many pitfalls opened up when one tried to identify with the young, sentimentality not least among them.
Lois said practically, ‘Anyway, what really matters is that your father is shocked.’
‘My father is like all men, he sees women as dolls for him to dress up.’ Samantha went out of the room and returned shortly in a tangerine shift which subtly outlined erogenous zones.
Hester, who had only met her once before, studied her with a writer’s eye. She had coppery hair shaped to an elfin face, a tip-tilted nose and slanting eyes which never seemed to look straight at anything. She poured herself a glass of Perrier water and stood looking into the garden where her father, anger now a little abated, was trying to rescue the maypole without getting his trousers wet.
‘What has come over him?’ There was genuine dismay in her voice. ‘He never used to be clumsy.’ She turned to look at Lois and Hester noted a slight cast in one of the blue eyes which gave a permanently bad-tempered look to the face and reminded one that not all elfin mischief is harmless. ‘Do you think he’s got Parkinson’s or something? He doesn’t seem to co-ordinate properly. You saw how he was with that clothes thing. It’s the same with door handles. You’d think he’d no idea of how they operate – he goes to work on them as if they were a new version of the Rubik cube and he couldn’t get the combination.’
Hesketh came past the window, trousers clinging to his legs, the maypole trailing behind him. One felt he would have liked it to be a bull so that he could have been awarded its ears. He went into the kitchen and they could hear him shouting ‘that infernal thing fell in the river.’ The kitchen door slammed.
It did seem that Samantha had a point, Hester thought. Surely stairs must be unfamiliar to him, why else would he make such a foundation-shaking business of ascending them? A few minutes later, however, he had recovered himself. Urbane and in his right mind, he came into the sitting-room and immediately took control. ‘I’m sorry you find us in such disarray,’ he said, replenishing glasses and, in Hester’s case, deflouring the glass itself.
Samantha walked out on to the lawn. Hesketh shrugged his shoulders in huge bewilderment and looked at Lois. She patted the seat beside her. He took her hand and lowered himself slowly as if his limbs were stiff. ‘I’m making a pretty poor fist of this, old dear.’
Hester said, ‘I think perhaps, if you don’t mind . . .’ and contrived to leave the room without drawing undue attention to her departure.
She sat on the stairs for a few minutes, watching Jack putting his tools away very slowly and methodically. Something about that narrow, impatient face suggested he was not usually so careful. He noticed her and came to the window. ‘How are things in there?’
‘I think your wife is exerting a soothing influence on Hesketh at this moment.’
‘God, but it’s needed! We arrived before you. It was terrible. I’ve never been so grateful for a puncture. He and Samantha were having the most almighty row because he had decided he must have a study on the ground floor and the only room which suited him – light and sunny – was the one which leads into the conservatory. So no one would be able to use the conservatory without disturbing him which, as Samantha pointed out, would mean asking his permission to come within a mile of it.’
‘Does that mean that Samantha was trying to support Norah?’
‘No. It meant she wanted it for her bedroom because it is light and sunny.’ He wiped his fingers on a rag. ‘I wouldn’t believe it could happen. When I first knew Hesketh he always seemed to be on top of things. Never a hint of strain or effort. He used to ridicule people who “make a meal of life”. As far as he was concerned it was a banquet and he was the guest of honour.’ He squinted through the window at the half-open door of the dining-room. ‘Look, I don’t want to interrupt what good work Lois may be doing, but I am in great need of alcohol of any kind.’
‘I’ll make enquiries.’ Hester disappeared into the kitchen and after some delay Norah came out.
‘I think there’s whisky in the dining-room. Will that do?’
‘It will indeed.’
She was unfamiliar with spirits and poured as if it were vermouth. He looked at the glass reverently when she handed it to him. ‘I’ll sit out here for a while if no one minds.’
Hester followed Norah into the kitchen. She had stipulated that she could not leave her work until one o’clock and Norah had said, ‘Come at one-fifteen, then. We’ll eat about one-thirty and you can help with final preparations when everything comes to the boil at the same time.’ It was now two-fifteen. Hester was glad to note that order had been restored since she last glimpsed the kitchen and encouraging smells were coming from all the right utensils.
‘Gravy?’ she suggested.
‘Bless you.’ Norah, who was sitting on a stool, made no move. Hester thought she looked very tired but not so strained as might have been expected. ‘It’s the first time I have ever cooked for so many.’ She sounded satisfied, as though now that Hester had arrived her part was concluded.
Hester said, ‘Shall I make the gravy?’
While she did this Norah sat on the stool, head bent over the kitchen table, tracing some design of her fancy with a finger. From time to time an involuntary smile lit up her face and Hester, looking at her, experienced a sudden fugitive joy, a shaft lodged long ago within her own being whose sharpness she had not felt for many years.
She had meant to suggest that Norah should take the opportunity to tidy herself before lunch. Her face was flushed from the heat of the stove and her hair was more wispy than ever. The apron had not entirely protected the tailored navy dress during pastry-making. Hester had wanted this occasion to be a success for Norah, but this no longer seemed important.
At lunch Hesketh sat at the head of the table looking like one of the more dissolute Roman emperors. Lois said to Hester afterwards that she was never quite sure whether he would pour more wine or hurl a glass against the wall. At first, he talked easily and wittily, mostly to Jack and Lois, but making occasional attempts to draw Hester into discussion. ‘Now, as a writer this will interest you.’ As this was high on Hester’s list of boring remarks to address to a writer, she took little part in the conversation. Once, when pressed, she made her standard response. ‘It has obviously roused your imagination. You write it.’
She was soon to regret having given him this opening.
‘Oh, I mean to,’ he assured her. ‘When I have more time I mean to get down to some writing.’ In a minute, she thought, he will ask me whether my characters take control. But she underestimated his self-concern. ‘That is why I want to make plans for the study.’ He deferred to her with hypnotic charm. ‘You, of course, will understand the importance of having the right room in which to work.’
‘Any room will do for me so long as there is plenty of paper and somewhere to put a typewriter.’
‘Ah well, for your sort of writing perhaps.’ She could almost feel the withdrawal of warmth. ‘I don’t suppose you do much research. I shall need a lot of reference books. But what about a word- processor? You would have to find room for that.’
‘God defend me from word-processors.’
‘Really? You do surprise me.’
Hester made no attempt to defend her attitude. She was resigned to the fact that nowadays people were not interested in the substance of books, only in the technicalities. Hesketh pursued the matter. ‘Of course, I know some people find it hard to come to terms with technology, but I would have expected that you would be able to master a word-processor.’
Norah made her first contribution to the discussion. ‘Hester is a creative writer.’
Samantha looked delighted to discover that her stepmother possessed that innate ability of wives to say in all innocence the one thing most likely to infuriate their husbands.
Hesketh said, ‘Creative? Mmh, I see. Creative.’ He rolled it around on his tongue like a wine-taster suspicious of a particular vintage. ‘We are saying, are we, that Jane Austen is creative, Boswell not? We would admit Mrs Gaskell on to the lower slopes of Olympus but Pepys must not set foot on the sacred mountain. Is that what we are saying?’
‘Some people, I suppose, would argue that there are no steps on Olympus.’ Jack deftly diverted the main thrust of discussion. Hester wished him well in his chosen profession. If she had anything to do with it, he would be made an Appeal Court judge without more delay. ‘They would say that you are either on the heights with Shakespeare and Homer or down on the plain with the Gaskells and Trollopes, Pepys and Boswell.’
Hesketh debated this with a lot of skill and a cavalier disrespect of literature until the cheese was brought in.
‘That was a most satisfying meal,’ Hester said to Norah.
‘I’m a good plain cook,’ Norah acknowledged.
Jack, who had been relieved to find that the meal when eventually served was indeed satisfying, said, ‘Learnt at your mother’s knee. What could be better?’
‘A clip on the ear was all I learnt there,’ Norah said in an aside to Hester. She looked amused and continued to seem amused when Samantha brought the discussion down from Olympus by saying, ‘If you’re going to write your memoirs you’ll have John Mortimer to contend with.’
‘John Mortimer? I don’t fancy I would be greatly concerned about the result of any contention between myself and the repetitious Rumpole.’
‘You have to admit he’s very witty.’
‘And you, my dear, need to beware of this tendency to begin sentences with the phrase “you have to . . .” As far as I am aware no law has yet been passed, no doctrine has been promulgated which compels . . .’
‘Oh, fuck you! It’s like arguing with Bernard Levin.’
Samantha and Hesketh rose from the table simultaneously. His command of invective relied less on the four-letter word and his voice was the more powerful organ. Samantha saw no choice but to have recourse to hysterics. Lois, whom Hester thought the more admirable the more she saw of her, took her by the shoulders and propelled her from the room. Hesketh said to Norah, ‘She is your responsibility now. It would have been nice to have had a word from you.’
Jack said, ‘Oh come, that’s hardly fair.’
Norah looked steadily at the beam of light falling across the silver on the sideboard. Hester, visited by one of those flashes of intuition which are both inspiration and agony, thought: she is thinking of Michael. How else could it be that at this moment this troubled woman could look as if Olympus was for the climbing. After a few moments’ contemplation, Norah said quietly, ‘Yes, of course, you are right. What would you like me to do?’
Hesketh was completely taken aback. If she had deliberately set out to shame him she could not have succeeded more completely. But there was nothing pious in her humility and as she collected the plates she might have been meditating some matter in which Hesketh had no part. The current between them had been switched off at her end of the table.
Samantha was sitting on the stairs crying dismally when Hester and Norah went into the hall. Lois was crouched beside her, a comforting arm around her shoulders. Samantha looked like any other unhappy child.
Norah said, ‘Come into the kitchen and help us wash up.’
Lois and Hester did the washing up while Norah talked to Samantha and Samantha alternately cried and dredged up fresh epithets to describe her father. When inspiration finally failed she said without much spirit, ‘Things were all right before you married him.’
‘What does that mean? Do you want me to go away so that you can look after him?’ Norah made the suggestion as though it were a reasonable proposition.
‘You think you’re bloody clever, don’t you?’
‘Do you really think it was cleverness got me into this?’ The good humour was holding out longer than Hester would have believed possible.
‘You just wanted a man, marriage, home – all the things most of your generation are beginning to find they can do without. It’s pathetic. Can’t you see how pathetic you are?’
Lois paused by the table, a saucepan in her hand. She turned it over, seeming to wonder whether she should use it or not.
Norah said sharply, ‘You don’t look any too good from where I’m sitting.’ She turned her head away and screwed up her eyes. The impression was not of a person suppressing anger, rather, she seemed to be trying to bring some relevant image to mind. One could almost see light penetrating the eyelids. Her face was composed when she spoke again. ‘I don’t think we can come to terms, do you? I’m prepared to try, but I don’t think we can do it. In a little while, perhaps, if we don’t get too much on top of each other in the meantime, but not now.’
Samantha got up. ‘If you think I’m going to come to terms with seeing my father getting more senile every day, you’re even more stupid than I thought.’
‘He wasn’t in the least senile when you failed to come to terms with him just now,’ Norah retorted. ‘He was on top form.’
Samantha said shrilly, ‘I’m getting out of here even if I have to sleep in a ditch.’
‘There’s no need for that,’ Lois said cheerfully. ‘Jack will be going back to London on Tuesday, so if you can hold out until then, you can come to stay with me for a few days.’
Samantha was patently torn between the desire to make as much trouble as possible and a healthy sense of her own well-being. Eventually she said grudgingly, ‘How do I get to you? I haven’t got a car.’
‘Neither have I. I can’t drive. But there are buses, three, in fact . . .’
‘Three buses!’
Hester, foreseeing the imminent breakdown of this sensible scheme, said, ‘If all else fails, I will take you.’
‘What about your work?’ Norah said when Samantha had departed, swearing defiantly to cover her retreat.
‘You may well ask.’
‘You’re a good woman.’
‘Just weak-minded.’
The kitchen door opened and Hesketh appeared, looking apologetic. ‘Coffee?’ he said. ‘Should I . . . perhaps?’
They left him to make coffee and strolled out on to the lawn where Lois joined Jack who was pretending to admire the river.
‘You have managed very well today,’ Hester said to Norah. She was suspicious rather than congratulatory, like the member of the audience who is not entirely convinced by a conjuring trick.
Norah said vaguely, ‘Yes, I suppose I have.’ She sounded as if her recall of what had actually taken place was fragmented.
‘It is all a matter of caring,’ Lois said when Hester came down to the river bank. ‘Sometimes the less you care, the better you cope.’ They watched Norah poking about idly among the roses. ‘And for some reason she wasn’t really caring at lunch, was she? Once or twice, I felt she wasn’t with us at all.’
Hester said unhappily, ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’
‘I hope she’s not ill.’
Hesketh came out to announce that coffee was served. He had put a napkin over one arm and was making quite a performance of it. They all indulged him, Jack even going so far as to mention Jeeves.