Judgment Day (12 page)

Soon after Thomas's birth the world had entered one of those phases of teetering instability when, for a matter of days or weeks, it seems as though catastrophe might well be the outcome. For others, albeit in far-away places, catastrophe was already there: nightly, on the television screen, rockets split the sky, people ran howling at the camera. Clare, sitting up in bed, the baby clamped to her breast, felt a sinking in her stomach; she looked down at Thomas's blue, milky, unseeing eyes and knew the awful responsibility of those who have created another being. And the awful apprehensions. Reading the newspaper, she said to Peter, “What do you think?” “What do I think about what?” “About—the news. What will happen?” “It'll be all right,” he said, and held out his cup for more coffee.

And it was. That time. For us, she thought, who have the luck to live where we do, to be what we are. Other places, other times—not so good. But for Peter, she saw, these spectral thoughts—guilts—had no place. And, seeing this, she realized one of the larger differences between people.

“I'm not detached,” she said. “Not in any way that matters, at least. Do you want to hear about my committee meeting? Not the most stirring occasion, but it had its moments.”

*  *  *

George, hastily tidying the vicarage dining room in preparation for the committee, looked out of the window and saw Mrs. Paling come up the garden path. Surprised
and disconcerted, he glanced at the clock: three-fifteen. The doorbell rang. He pushed the dustpan under the sofa and went to answer it.

Clare, following him into the empty room, said, “Gracious—am I the first? That's a change.” And then: “It was for quarter past, wasn't it? Three-thirty? No wonder, then—sorry, how stupid, I can't have looked at the note properly. I'll come back.” She turned for the door.

“Don't. No need. Not worth it. Do sit.” He fussed round the sofa, patting it. As though, she thought, one were a dog.

“Oh, all right. But don't let me be in the way. Do get on with whatever you were doing.

He hovered, interfering with rugs and cushions.

“I saw you,” he said. “On Sunday. In church.”

“I saw you too,” she replied, amiably enough.

There was a silence.

“Hope you enjoyed the service,” he managed, at last.

She stared at him, incredulous. “Enjoyed?”

“The flowers”—he rushed on—“the altar flowers, I don't know if you noticed, the altar arrangement was done by Mrs. Bradley, I wonder if you and your husband have met—Jennifer Bradley who lives at the Cedars. Miss Bellingham of course does the pulpit.”

“The flowers I didn't notice, I'm afraid,” said Clare. “Sorry. I was more concerned with language.”

“Language?” His turn now to be taken aback.

“There seems to have been a clean sweep. The Authorized Version. The Book of Common Prayer. Out, I see. Superseded.”

“Ah. The new texts, you mean. The alternative services.”

“Those.”

He sensed danger. “Younger people find them—um-find them more accessible. The old forms—all those long words, you know”—a laugh (you and I, of course, can cope with long words}. “It's made it all more meaningful, putting things in a straightforward modern style.”

“Has it?” she said. “Meaningful,” she went on, more to herself, he felt, than to him. “Accessible.”

“Don't you think so?”

“Frankly, no.”

Gray eyes, looking at him: cool, dismissive. Small, neat breasts pushing against a red cotton shirt thing. Untouchable; poles apart; not for the likes of you. Fury swept him, all of a sudden. Fury and recklessness.

“I shouldn't have thought it would matter to you all that much,” he said, “as a non-believer.”

She grinned, after a moment. “Touché.”

He crashed on, emboldened. “It's only words, after all.”

“Only words?
Only
words! Oh, dear. But you see, words are what I do believe in. They're all we've got.”

He stared at her. Very thin bony wrists; golden hairs on her arms; flat, narrow thighs.

“And there are you people,” she went on, “chucking out some of the finest words in the language. If you aren't to be trusted with that, what are you to be trusted with?”

George snorted; he had intended a laugh, a sardonic laugh—what came out she could interpret any way she liked. “What? It's just a question of modernizing, after all. There was a great deal that's not relevant to here and now and…”

“Oh, quite.” She was bored, suddenly: you could see that. Teeth flashed at him. “Oh, I daresay, and I'm an intruder,
in a sense, you've got a point there. Sorry, Mr. Radwell.”

“George,” he began. “Do call me …” and the door-bell rang, swamping him. Clare Paling got up, hitched a tight skirt down over that small behind, went to the table; outside, Miss Bellingham trundled up the path, peering toward the window, hung about with shopping bags and cardigans.

At about four o'clock, the committee ran into trouble.

“All so
gloomy
,” accused Miss Bellingham. “My goodness, people need cheering up these days, I would have thought—not harping on this kind of thing.” The account of the Swing riots and the shooting of the Levellers drawn up by Clare and Sydney Porter lay in front of her.

“I'm sorry,” said Clare. “Mr. Porter and I couldn't find a hilarious historic episode. They're a bit thin on the ground.”

Miss Bellingham sniffed. Once upon a time, thirty years ago, in Laddenham, you knew what to expect of a person by how they spoke and what they were; a woman like Mrs. Paling would have been involved in certain proper activities and you could have relied on her responses. For a long time now, things had been all anyhow; no wonder you got vandalism and illegitimacy.

“I fail to see how you're going to make a pleasant afternoon's entertainment out of this.”

Clare murmured something about the Tower of London.

“We took the boys there,” said Harry Taylor. “Year or so ago. Shocking entrance fees and queues halfway down the road.”

Clare said she had meant it ironically. That the sufferings
of others—especially if comfortably in the past—had proven drawing power.

“Well, I think that's a very cynical attitude,” said Miss Bellingham. “If you don't mind my saying.”

John Coggan intervened to point out that the format they were thinking of was not so much straight entertainment as some kind of broad-based event including several different things: a pageant, yes, probably, but exhibitions and displays as well. On the general theme of the church's history. A responsible, instructive program.

Miss Bellingham, a little mollified, agreed that people like to feel they've learned something. “I do myself. I don't think we should any of us feel complacent about what we know. I'm studying Italian at the moment. And of course I'm very systematic about my reading.” Unlike, she thought, some. Only last week she had run into Mrs. Paling in the public library with a pile of glossy-jacketed novels quite blatantly displayed in her shopping basket. It told you a lot about a person, that sort of thing. One might well, of course, pick up the odd thriller oneself occasionally, but at least it would be discreetly popped underneath the travel and biography.

Silly old bag, thought Sydney Porter. He was surprised at the vehemence of his own irritation; he had, after all, endured Miss Bellingham, week in, week out, for many years now. The period when she had been People's Warden was particularly trying. It had been a great relief to see her unseated and her place taken by Jim Squires. He himself remained Vicar's Warden, and Squires was a great deal easier to work with. Miss Bellingham gave herself airs but when it came down to it she couldn't follow the basic rules of bookkeeping. And she didn't know how to do
decimal multiplication or division; he had noted that, at the time, with interest and silent contempt.

He leaned over to remind Mrs. Paling of the plan they'd drawn up. Let her do the talking, she'd put it better.

George had spent the first half hour of the committee simmering down. He had very deliberately not looked at Clare Paling and concentrated on getting his color back to normal and reducing his heart beat; you could do that, by sitting still and trying to think about nothing. Consequently, he had missed a lot of the proceedings. He became aware, suddenly, that Clare Paling was talking at some length, and he would have to listen. She seemed to have got it all worked out, this pageant business, or nine hundredth centenary celebration or whatever it was they ended up calling it.

“Nine hundred happy returns, eh?” said Harry Taylor. “How about that, then?”

Mrs. Paling thought not, on the whole.

Miss Bellingham was silent. The idea of the costumes attracted her. If everybody was doing it you wouldn't feel silly, and that Quaker sort of dress, with those white caps, was very becoming.

“You won't get me into knee breeches and a funny hat,” Harry Taylor went on heartily. “Fancy yourself in a frock coat, Vicar?”

George said that it seemed an ambitious scheme, lot of work involved, not the sort of thing Laddenham was used to, bound to go down well though, he felt. He searched wildly for a telling contribution and came up, just in time, with some ideas about contacting the Tourist Boards and maybe the travel agents. Coachloads of Americans, that sort of thing. All the while he was talking there hovered
before his eyes, ineradicable and exasperating, an image of Mrs. Paling in one of those eighteenth-century dresses out of which the bosom so engagingly spills. Except that Mrs. Paling's wasn't the land of bosom that spills. He substituted a sort of medieval page-boy get-up, very tight around the thighs; that was better.

“Had you finished, Vicar?” said John Coggan politely.

George jumped. They were all looking at him. Yes, he said, that was all, just thought he'd mention about the tourist possibilities, very good scheme, bound to pull in a lot of cash.

I am always maddened, Clare thought, by people whose speech is so inconclusive that nobody knows when they have finished what they have to say, least of all themselves. You'd think a man with the reassurance of the pulpit behind him could do better, instead of going off, apparently, into a trance. Visions of what? Not apocalyptic anyway, a more mundane bloke I never met.

“This re-enactment of the rioting business,” asked Harry Taylor. “I take it we're not going to have them really chopping down the screen? Or jumping on the altar?”

Clare explained the scheme for spot lighting different parts of the church, so that the action would seem to flit from one part to another, probably with backcloths and sound effects to replace actual destruction.

“I still think,” said Miss Bellingham, “we should have maypole dancing,”

*  *  *

Sydney Porter slept badly, the night after the committee meeting. He lay long awake, and then sank into a lurid dream-racked sleep, one fantastic crazed sequence sliding
into another. At one time there was a great noise in his ears, a crashing and a shattering, and he was in Mansell Road, a Mansell Road that crunched underfoot, that tinkled and sparkled as though strewn with Christmas decorations, and there was The Warden sweeping up broken glass—glass in splinters and glass in chunks and glass in a fine dust that frosted the pavements and the front gardens. And he stood outside number forty-nine, where the windows gaped black and empty, and heard, as Mary and Jennifer must have heard, the crash of the glass blown in, and a roar, an awful irresistible roar—the one meant for them, the one with their name on it, nothing to be done, no way of escape, their number up. And he screamed in his sleep, soundlessly, his mouth open in the dark room, engines thundering outside along the Green.

In the morning, coming downstairs, he saw the broken fanlight above the front door with amazement. When he had fetched the dustpan and brush and carefully swept up the mess, he stood staring uneasily at the hole, through which a draft howled. The wind? A burglar? Neither made sense. He opened the door and saw, now, a further trail of destruction. Nearly all the newly planted young trees on the Green—some willows, a copper beech, chestnuts to replace the aging ones—had been snapped off half-way down the stems. John Coggan was there.

“Did you hear them? Three or four in the morning, it must have been. That motorbike gang. My God, if I'd known what they were up to I'd have been out like a shot.”

Sydney felt a curious lift of relief. The thing ceased to be personal; it wasn't meant particularly for him, it could
have been anyone else. That mattered less, somehow. He indicated his broken window.

Later in the morning, the police came. “Heaved a stone through it, did they?” said the young man cheerfully. “Bad luck.” Sydney, stolidly, gave such information as could be given. “Do you know who they are?” The policeman shrugged. “From Spelbury, probably, we'll have a look around.”

*  *  *

In the vicarage, Mrs. Tanner stood at the window and surveyed the Green with relish. “Now why do you think they'd want to do a thing like that, Vicar?”

George replied that he didn't know.

“On our estate, last year, there was some got a cat and put petrol on it and set light to it. Shocking, isn't it? Running about, it was, screeching, half-mad with the pain. I said to my husband, I think that's shocking. Shocking. And I don't care for animals, personally.”

The irritation that she set up in him was a tangible physical discomfort, like nettle rash, or pins and needles. He felt it in the groin, at the back of his neck. He felt it as soon as she set foot in the house and it lasted until she departed again. At moments such as this it reached crisis proportions; he would have left the room, but it was his study, and he had a mountain of paper work to get through and it was she who should be elsewhere in the house, not him. He said, “Don't bother with this room, Mrs. Tanner—it'll do till next time.”

She gave the windowsill a perfunctory swipe with a duster. “I don't mind. I'll give it a go-over all the same.
You get on with whatever it is you're doing. Of course they won't get them, those boys, they'll never find out which lot it was.”

“I daresay not.”

“Dangerous, too, motorbikes. My sister's boy came off his and broke his leg in two places, there was splinters of bone sticking through the skin, they say it'll never be quite right, only eighteen he is…”