Kelly drove to the Phoenix Inn and collected Dexter. The itinerary he’d worked out for that first day was undemanding to the point of stupor. Kelly was to drive him to Southwold, then to Aldeburgh, a simple round trip up and down the coast, not more than forty miles all told. She was aware that lots of people thought these places were fascinating little towns, wonderful holiday spots. They said how clean and neat and well-ordered and English they were. She wouldn’t have argued with that, but she’d known them, hung around in them, been bored in them, for most of her life, and the magic had long since worn off.
Still, a job was a job. In Southwold she could show Dexter the lighthouse, the cannons that pointed out to sea ready to repel Dutch invaders, the open greens created by historic fires in the town, the sailors’ reading room. In Aldeburgh she could show him the harbour, the new lifeboat station, the Martello Tower. She knew these were acceptable as ‘sights’ but they didn’t exactly excite her, and unless Dexter was a very cold fish indeed she couldn’t see that they were likely to excite him either.
He was waiting for her in the car park. He was overdressed, as though he was setting off on a major expedition. He wore a down-filled jacket, carried a rucksack, had state-of-the-art walking boots. Someone must have told him how bad the English weather was. In fact, the day was mild and bright, a good October day.
He arranged himself, his bad leg and his walking stick in the car and looked around it as though still inspecting for faults. Kelly always kept the car neat and clean, so she hadn’t had to make any special effort in Dexter’s honour, but his perusal was so fussy, so imperious, she rather wished she’d arranged some mess or litter especially to irritate him.
When he’d completed the visual inspection, he said approvingly, ‘It’s a nice clean cab. I could tell right away you weren’t a smoker, and I’m really pleased you don’t use any of those synthetic air fresheners.’
‘Good morning,’ Kelly said. ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’
Then Dexter seemed to remember that people didn’t always begin their conversations with remarks about the neatness of cars.
‘Oh, OK,’ he said. ‘I was forgetting I’m in England. We have to discuss the weather, right?’
Kelly was about to say that they didn’t have to talk about anything at all as far as she was concerned, but before she could speak, his eyes fell on the stack of cassettes she kept in the car. They too were neat and clean and kept in a snug little rack between the gear lever and the hand brake. Dexter looked at them dubiously, read the titles and grimaced. Kelly couldn’t see what he was looking offended about. She never forced her musical preferences on her passengers. She knew that Lydia Lunch was an acquired taste, that Seven Year Bitch weren’t for everyone. She only ever played them when she was alone in the cab before or after she’d had a fare. But just the appearance, the mere existence of her tape collection seemed to disturb Dexter.
‘Don’t you like classical music?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know much about it.’
‘Me neither,’ he admitted, ‘but I’m trying to learn.’
He reached in through the layers that encased his body and pulled out a cassette. She could read the name Bach on the box.
‘Perhaps this week could be an education for both of us,’ he said. ‘Johann Sebastian Bach, born Eisenach, Germany, sixteen eighty-five.’
He proceeded to give her a brief rundown on the life and times of J. S. Bach, and although she wasn’t really listening she caught something about ‘polyphonic baroque’. It sounded as though he was quoting liner notes. Then, without asking, he put his tape into the car’s cassette player. Kelly was annoyed, but the music that came out was inoffensive enough.
‘Is this your first time in England?’ she asked.
‘No, my fifth.’
‘You must like it.’
‘Yes, I suppose I must.’
‘Where in America do you come from?’
‘California. Los Angeles.’
‘Really? You’re not my idea of a Californian.’
‘You think I should be riding a skateboard?’
‘I suppose I thought you’d be more laidback.’
‘I work very hard not to be laidback. I work pretty hard at trying not to appear Californian.’
‘I think Suffolk might seem a little bit tame after Los Angeles.’
‘I can see why you might think that,’ Dexter agreed. ‘But frankly, any damn fool can be impressed by Los Angeles. Just like anyone can be impressed by New York or Chicago or Niagara Falls. To appreciate the pleasures of England takes more subtlety. I’m quite into subtlety.’
Yes, I bet you are, Kelly thought.
He wound down the window as they drove, and he pressed his face into the wind like a dog. He seemed quite happy for a moment. They got to Southwold, the sort of place any sightseer would need to view on foot, but Dexter was obviously in no condition to tramp the streets. Kelly did her best to show him the town by car but it was a partial and unsatisfactory tour. This was not a town laid out for cruising. After she’d done her best she drove to the seafront, parked, got Dexter out of the car and escorted him to a bench where he could sit and gaze down at the sea and the beach huts some way below. Wild times, indeed.
It was then that Kelly realized she was treating him like an old, infirm relative, one possibly not long for this world, and she saw how absurd this was. Dexter was a strong, healthy-looking man, not much older than she, who happened to have a bad leg. His infirmity was both localized and temporary.
‘How’s your leg?’ she asked.
‘Kind of irritating,’ he replied, as he settled himself sideways into the corner of the bench and extended his leg out in front of him.
‘Is it very painful?’
‘Yes, sometimes it is. Which is in itself irritating.’
She sat at the other end of the bench and looked out over the water. The sea and sky were unseasonably blue. An oil tanker moved ponderously across the horizon and in the sea, much nearer, someone in an inflatable dinghy with an outboard motor was turning figures of eight. A tawny cat was climbing painstakingly over the roofs of the beach huts.
‘What are those things?’
‘Beach huts,’ said Kelly. ‘They’re little places where you change in and out of your swimming costume, where you make cups of tea, where you sit and eat cucumber sandwiches and read Agatha Christie novels.’
‘Simple English pleasures,’ said Dexter.
‘Yes,’ Kelly said, feeling some need to defend them. ‘I like their simplicity, their colours, their names.’
‘They have names?’
‘Yes. People call them things like “Avocets” or “Klondike” or “Sleepy Hollow”.’
‘You can sleep in them?’
‘Only in the day time. Not at night. You’re not allowed to spend the night there. I think they’re afraid hippies might move in and set up some sort of immoral commune. This way you can be immoral but only when it’s light outside.’
Dexter gave her a look that she couldn’t read. She wondered if he was offended by her casual talk of immorality. It didn’t seem very likely, but either way she didn’t feel repentant. If he was offended that easily the world must be a very hurtful place indeed. She talked a little more about beach huts, how expensive they were to buy, how they couldn’t be used for one month of each year because of some legal requirement, and how, even in a place as civilized and well-ordered as Southwold, a few bad youths would occasionally go crazy and burn one of them down.
Dexter showed polite interest but it seemed to her he was faking. The conversation petered out and they sat in silence. It was the sort of mild, comfortable day when two people might well sit on a bench in silence and be quite content, but that wasn’t how it felt to. Kelly, and apparently it didn’t feel that way to Dexter either, since he said suddenly, ‘You could leave me alone here for a while. I have a book with me, Don Quixote, as a matter of fact. You don’t have to be my constant companion, you know.”
It could have been said generously and considerately but in fact it sounded like an insult, a complaint. Kelly was happy to go. She went down to the seafront and walked past the huts, but as she wandered along, an unfamiliar guilt came over her. She knew that feeling sorry for someone wasn’t the most noble of emotions but she tried to put herself in Dexter’s place; in a strange country, broken up from his wife, injured, immobile, with nobody except a taxi driver to talk to, and she thought he had every reason to be thoroughly, hopeledssly miserable. She in turn decided to be charitable and make that an excusable cause of his tetchy, awkward behaviour, and she resolved to try harder. She didn’t stay away for very long, and when she got back to the bench she attempted to make conversation.
‘Is Bach your favourite composer?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘He was my wife’s favourite. Well, I suppose he still is.’
Kelly tried to imagine what his wife might be like, and could only come up with a mental picture of some sort of standard-issue, blonde California beach babe.
‘No girlfriend?’ she asked.
She didn’t think it was too personal a question, given how free Dexter had been with information, but he reacted as though she had demanded to know something indecently intimate.
‘I don’t have anyone who was prepared to come on vacation with me to England if that’s what you’re asking,’ he said.
She hadn’t been aware she was asking that at all, but now it did seem to be a significant piece of information, the more so since Dexter said it as though it were a terrible admission of failure and inadequacy.
‘Besides,’ he said, now attempting to smooth over this little ripple of self-revelation, ‘travelling’s more interesting alone. You see things differently. You put yourself at risk. Things happen to you that wouldn’t happen if you were with somebody else.’
Kelly nodded. She took the point, though she didn’t see what kind of adventure was likely to happen to a person sitting on a bench in Southwold reading Don Quixote. Dexter looked around him at the perfectly calm, uneventful English seascape, at the old people walking by, at the cafe offering ‘beach trays’ and he said with finality, ‘This place isn’t so bad.’
‘It’s fine,’ Kelly agreed.
‘But I think I’m ready to move on.’.
So they drove to Aldeburgh, some fifteen miles down the coast, where it was more of the same. Kelly drove through the town, pointing out the landmarks such as they were, and when that was accomplished she drove to a spot where Dexter could sit on the sea wall and stay out of harm’s way. She did her best to be chatty without being intrusive, but it was hard work and she felt she was the one making most of the effort. Then Dexter decided he was hungry.
‘I like to have fish and chips at least once while I’m in England,’ he said.
Feeling only somewhat like a drudge, Kelly went and queued up for fish and chips and brought them back. Dexter said they were fine but he behaved as though he were eating some dangerous and exotic delicacy dredged up from the darkest corner of the known world. Time was passing. The day was gradually being worn away, but for Kelly the slowness of the process was an ordeal. She felt she was really earning her money.
‘You English,’ said Dexter, ‘with your batter and your chips and your malt vinegar; very, very inscrutable.’
Kelly didn’t react to that one. When they’d finished eating she was commanded to leave him again, and as she walked away Dexter said, ‘Perhaps while you’re gone you might buy something for me?’
‘All right.’
‘What kind of souvenir?’
‘Anything you like. Just a little something that will remind me of this day.’
Kelly frowned. Who would want reminding? Besides, she suspected he would dislike anything she chose. With that in mind, and with no emotional investment in the purchase, she went to a craftshop in the high street and bought him a little model of a beach hut. It was wooden, painted in bright colours, big enough to sit in the palm of the hand.
She took her time returning. She could see Dexter from a long way off. He’d stopped reading his book and was sitting dejectedly, head down, arms folded. And as she watched, he took a silver hip flask out of his pocket and took a long, eager swig from it. She found that touchingly human. She made sure he had time to put the flask away before she got close, and when he saw her he smiled with an unexpectedly open and boyish expression and she found it quite beguiling. She handed him the paper bag containing the model beach hut. He opened the bag, looked inside, and his smile was gone. His face showed nothing she could understand, not amusement, not surprise, certainly not appreciation.
‘How much did it cost?’ he asked.
‘Don’t worry,’ Kelly said. ‘It’s on the house.’
‘Really, I have to pay you.’
‘You really don’t.’
‘No, I couldn’t take a gift from you.’
‘Keep it, for God’s sake,’ Kelly said.
This was a brand-new form of irritation. His capacity for gracelessness knew no bounds. He could turn a simple, friendly gesture into a source of conflict.
‘Forget it,’ Kelly said. ‘Just forget it. In fact why don’t we both forget the whole thing. This has been a bad day for both of us. We don’t need this. You could find yourself a much more sympathetic tour guide than me, I’m sure.’
Dexter was silent and he looked at her with big, vacant, wounded eyes.
‘This hasn’t been a bad day for me,’ he said. ‘I’ve enjoyed it a lot. I’ve really enjoyed your company.’
That made her feel even worse, though she suspected he wanted her to feel that way.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kelly said.
‘And I’m sorry too, sorry if I’ve bored you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you should have taken me somewhere you wanted to go.’
Kelly tried to apologize again.
‘No really,’ said Dexter, ‘I mean it. How about this for a deal? Before the day ends, take me somewhere that isn’t in the guide books.’
‘I don’t know you,’ Kelly said. ‘I don’t know what sort of thing you like.’
‘It doesn’t matter what I like. Take me somewhere you like.’
Kelly considered this for a moment and then said OK. She thought she had nothing to lose. She loaded Dexter back into the car and began to drive.
Most people were surprised when Kelly said she loved visiting parish churches. They had to be small, human in scale, perhaps a bit eccentric. At their best they stirred something profound in her; not a belief in God, but a belief in humanity. The knowledge that she was standing in a spot where people had congregated for centuries, surrounded by stonework that still bore the marks of medieval craftsmen was somehow very moving. There was a sense of continuity, connectedness, the living with the dead. She knew it was out of character. She knew that a taxi driver who liked ear-bleed music wasn’t expected to have these feelings, but she did, and they wouldn’t go away.
She knew it had a lot to do with her father. His idea of a good day out was getting into the car, handing her a volume of Pevsner and having her read out architectural descriptions until they came to some particularly choice round-towered church or leper chapel. From the earliest age she remembered him teaching her the names of architectural features. Perhaps she wasn’t the only ten-year-old whose vocabulary included words like corbel, piscina, misericord, flushwork, clerestory, but she had never met another.
She took Dexter to the church of St Margaret at Dunstan. She’d taken a lot of people there and, no doubt unjustly, she tended to judge them by their reaction to the place. The church was small, and the outside a bit of a mess; a patchwork of replastering and rendering in all sorts of unmatching colours, blistering greys and curdled oranges. It had thick buttresses, big, crude functional triangles of stone that kept the walls up. The church was simple inside, a nave and one aisle and that was pretty much it. It was cool, had a high wooden ceiling, plain pews, a square stone font. But her reason for taking people there was not so much the architecture as the decoration.
Kelly and Dexter walked down the nave, between the rows of pews with their home-crocheted kneelers, until they came to the rood screen. At its base were painted panels showing the figures of saints. Their bodies were still intact but their faces had been savagely attacked with some sharp, pointed device, and yet there had obviously been something peremptory about these attacks, and in a couple of cases only the eyes had been scratched out, so that you couldn’t see the saint looking back at you.
‘See what happens if you leave your churches unlocked,’ Kelly said drily.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Dexter. ‘Is it vandals?’
‘Sort of. But we know the name of the chief vandal,’ Kelly said. ‘William Dowsing. A Puritan. An iconoclast. He and his men swept through East Anglia destroying graven images wherever they found them, and they found them just about everywhere. Stained glass, carved angels, paintings, brasses, the lot; anything with an image – it all had to go.’
‘When was this?’ Dexter asked. ‘Recently?’
‘April sixteen sixty-three. The Reformation. You remember the Reformation, right?’
‘Right,’ he said, but he sounded unconvincing. Kelly took it as an example of American indifference to what went on in England.
‘Dowsing kept a diary,’ Kelly went on. ‘He enjoyed his work, took pride in it. He listed everything he destroyed.’ ‘Religion, huh,’ said Dexter.
‘Dowsing was in his forties,’ said Kelly. ‘You always think of religious zealots as being substantial and ancient with long white beards, but my guess is that most of his men were more like football fans than men of God: young, stupid, too much testosterone.’
On the south wall of the nave there was a length of red curtain and a cord for pulling it back. Kelly slowly operated the cord and the curtain opened to reveal a mural, a medieval painting of the Day of Judgment. The colours were faded to pale terracotta and powder blue, yet it was still clear and detailed. At the top was a depiction of heaven with the holy trinity in residence. There was Saint Peter at the gate acting as a kind of divine bouncer.
‘It’s what we English call a doom painting,’ Kelly said.
Her favourite characters were four souls hoping to be allowed in the gates. They were naked, very white: three men and one woman, distinguished and defined by their head gear; a king and a queen, a bishop and a cardinal. Each had a little round pot belly. They looked vulnerable and fearful but they seemed to be doing rather better for themselves than the poor souls elsewhere in the painting, who were no less naked but were writhing in agony and falling into the jaws of hell where devils and monsters were ready to torture them with tongs, spears and flame.
Dexter looked at the painting for a long time and he appeared to be fascinated by it. He moved from one spot to another staring into the faces of the saints and devils. Finally he took a couple of limping steps back and said, ‘It’s fantastic.’
‘Yes,’ Kelly agreed. ‘The story is that when the vicar of the church heard that William Dowsing was on his way he whitewashed over the painting so it wouldn’t be destroyed. But something went wrong. The vicar died or went away, and everybody seems to have forgotten that the doom was ever there. For the next two hundred and fifty years people kept painting over it. And then in the late nineteenth century somebody chipped away a bit of paint and found it was still there. It was quite a restoration job to get the paint off and leave the doom intact.’
Dexter continued to give the painting his full attention, and finally he said, ‘And have you noticed, the souls who are in hell have genitalia while the ones who’ve been saved don’t?’
Kelly smiled. It was one of the first things she’d ever spotted in the painting, and although she felt this ought to be a hideous demonstration of the hypocrisy and repressive nature of religion, in fact she found it rather touching.
‘And what do you think the artist is trying to tell us?’ she said archly.
Dexter laughed. Kelly felt she’d made some sort of a breakthrough. After they’d looked at the rest of the church she drove Dexter back to the Phoenix Inn. She couldn’t pretend anything very much had changed. Conversation didn’t suddenly flow, and Dexter insisted on hearing the Bach tape again, yet she felt a lot more comfortable. The man had proved that he had at least some small vestiges of soul. She didn’t think this was enough to guarantee that the second day was going to be wholly easier than the first, but at least she no longer felt compelled to abandon the arrangement. Dexter asked her if she wanted to come in for a drink, but she declined. As they parted he said he wanted to go to Thorpeness the following day.