Judgment Day (22 page)
Authors: Penelope Lively
“I wondered—I just wondered if you were all right.”
He stared. The shuttered stare of an old man; mistrustful, parrying interference.
“If,” she said desperately, “there's anything you need…”
“Nothing. Very kind.”
“A bit of company. Later, maybe. Do please, just, you know—say.”
“Company?” Bitterness, now, not mistrust. “I'm accustomed to being on my own. Quite accustomed. Been on my own thirty-five years.” He began to close the door.
“If you'd like me to take Martin's things,” she went on, deliberate, insisting, “keep them till his mother…”
Expressionless, his old face; just the eyes flickering, at the name, suffering. “All in hand already. Thanks all the same. Very kind.” The door closed. She turned away.
On the Green, men were dismantling the floodlighting apparatus. George Radwell came toward her. “Sydney Porter. I remembered of course the boy had been staying with him. But you've already been. Is he all right?”
“I don't think so,” said Clare. “But there isn't anything he'll let anyone do.”
George nodded. He looked, she thought, knocked out, drained. He nodded again, barely glancing at her, and turned to go to the church. It came to her as extraordinary that they had moved together, she and this man, through the previous day; like being trapped with a stranger in a lift. But he was not, now, a stranger. We are in the world with other people, she thought, like it or not. I don't dislike George Radwell any more; now why is that? She said, with diffidence, so that he looked at her in perplexity as though perhaps he had not quite heard, “I've got this stew we never got around to last night—come and help me eat it now if you're not too busy.”
* * *
He sat on a sofa in a room that mirrored the vicarage study in dimensions and outlook. In every other way it was so unlike as to induce a sense of cultural shock: there were bare polished boards instead of worn carpeting and many pictures and books rampant in the alcoves beside the fireplace. The sofa was covered in some striped material
and had no broken spring. The room smelled of flowers, not damp: there was a bowl of branches from some flowering bush on the table.
Clare Paling squatted at a cupboard. “Sherry? Vermouth? Or vodka if you like the stuff, or whiskey or Pernod or God knows what. You name it, we have it. Duty free, of course. Peter goes to Brussels every other week, I think I'm going to have a gin, which is not normal for me at this time of day but I feel pretty awful.”
He said, “The children…?”
“They're as all right as can be expected. They didn't go to sleep for a long time.”
She went to the kitchen. He sat looking at a picture above the mantelpiece, a bright, rather childish painting of red and blue flowers in a pot; he supposed the childish quality to be deliberate, an inverted sophistry. He didn't know anything about pictures.
Dear Mother, Yesterday vandals smashed up the church and a child was lolled by a lorry outside the vicarage door. I have been lunching with my neighbor, Clare Paling, You will remember my mentioning her before. One was glad to be able to lend a bit of moral support, her husband being away at the time. It is a refreshing change after some of my parishioners to come across a woman who…
Dear Mother, Last night I saw a child dying and now I can think of nothing else. I have sat in Mrs. Paling's house which I have many times visited in the imagination, and the experience meant nothing at all.
Clare came back into the room and sat down in the armchair. She took a gulp of her drink.
“You thought,” he said, “at first, that it was…”
“Thomas. Yes.”
They sat in silence. She finished her drink and poured another. “More?” He shook his head.
“Have you ever played roulette?” said Clare.
He looked at her, startled.
“We did once, on some French holiday. I've never been so bored in my life. The only game I've ever found of any interest is chess, and even that palled after a bit.”
He saw, he supposed, what she was on about. He nodded. She said, “Don't you find it pretty difficult to live with?”
He licked his lips. “It?”
“Blind fate. The blindness of fate. Or whatever.”
“I suppose,” he began cautiously, “one has always hoped somehow to come to terms…”
“Come to terms is what one never does. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snap. That's just what I didn't mean to do. I feel a bit unhinged today.”
He stared at the floor. Boards. Grainy, nicely polished. “And of course with faith …” He stopped. Faith?
“Does it,” she said, “actually, really, practically—help?”
He scanned the boards; there was a blue thread caught on a splinter. She was asking him a question; she wanted an answer, genuinely wanted. If he looked up she would be staring at him with those greenish, rather cold eyes. Yesterday he had seen stark terror in those eyes.
He had wondered, sometimes, about children; looking at the faces of those who have them. Love, the other love, you saw at the cinema, or walking the streets, aged twenty, arm in arm. There wasn't anybody in the world, including his mother, whose death would have caused him more than a momentary regret.
Yet last night he had roved from sleeplessness to nightmare.
The floorboards were offering no help. He looked up. “I've seen people, occasionally, sometimes the very old, a sort of calm …”
“What,” she said, “about you?”
And of course, his mother used to say, it's a wonderful thing, it'll always be a comfort to you, you'll have something to fall back on that others don't. The stipend's not much, but there it is.
He searched. He traveled from one gray moment to another, examining. Gray, though, they had been, rather than black. Disappointment, disillusion, disenchantment. Eventually he began, cautiously. “When I was at school I used to want to be Manners, the Captain of Cricket.” At this point, normally, there would come that snorty laugh; it didn't, for some reason; she was listening to him, not bored—attentive. “I used to lie in bed at night and will myself to turn into Manners. I used to tell myself stories in which I was Manners. He was tall, that kind of hair that goes over one eye, I don't remember ever speaking to him, even the masters used to kowtow to him, the younger ones. I knew I wasn't ever going to be Manners, not really, or even anyone like Manners, but it made it more possible to put up with not being him, or like him, to go on thinking like that. At night.” He paused. The glass of sherry was almost empty; he finished it.
“Yes?” said Clare Paling. “And later?”
He studied the flower picture above the mantelpiece; the flowers became the faces of various girls, girls until this moment almost forgotten, girls quite unlike Mrs. Paling,
girls who had not, at one time or another … Girls who also, at night, had been quite otherwise.
No, he could not go into that.
“I have never,” he went on, “been ill. Or in any danger. It has been a question more of what hasn't happened. I suppose going on believing it might sometime be different has helped.”
“That's not faith,” said Clare. “That's hope.”
He had never had a conversation like this before; he was filled with unease.
“‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three,' “she said; “‘but the greatest of these …' Only you will insist on calling it love, which is not the same.”
“I…?”
“Not you personally, sorry. That repellent new Bible. Charity,” she went on, “is what I'm a bit short on.” She was silent for a moment. “Tolerance and generosity and understanding.”
He did not hear her. He thought about words. Hope? There was an old woman in his congregation, a woman in always the same dun-colored coat and hat, always in the same seat, always present; dour, unapproachable. Was it for words that she was there? He looked up at Clare Paling, sitting in her light, bright sitting room with books all over her walls and a glass in her hand; he felt a stir of that old confused hostility, a little rush of bile. He said, “Oh, it's all so simple for people like you, you've got an answer to everything. You don't believe in God and you know exactly why you don't believe. The sort of people I know, just ordinary people who come to church, mostly they haven't much idea of why they do believe and I've never been able
to tell them because to begin with I wasn't all that clear myself and then …” He paused and looked away. “But you—you go into the church and all you see is carvings and different kinds of windows, you might as well be in an art gallery. Or a museum. There's more to it than that.”
“I know,” she said.
The bile had subsided. Why wasn't she answering back? She sat there, instead, staring into her glass.
“And words…”
She looked up. “Words I must insist on. Sorry, I didn't want to do battle, though. Not today.”
There was a smell of food. Nice food. He wasn't at all hungry. He had a curious sense of displacement, as though none of this were real. The first time he went abroad, as a young man, he had felt that, continuously.
Clare said, “The trouble with people like me, one of the many troubles, is not so much that we've got all the answers as that we are incapable of suspending disbelief. Not just religious disbelief, either. It's not entirely comfortable, I promise you. In fact often it isn't comfortable at all. This probably isn't very coherent—I shouldn't drink gin in the middle of the day. We try to make sense of the world, and it doesn't make sense, so we take it out on all those other explanations that we find unsatisfactory. And we pile up guilt. Guilt for not having suffered and guilt for being intemperate and uncharitable and”—she looked out of the window at the Green, aqueous in misty rain—”guilt today because my child is alive and someone else's isn't.”
She stared across the room at him, across the polished floor and the oblong of hairy brightly-colored rug. “I must have seemed pretty nasty sometimes. To you. I'm sorry.”
George considered. In his present state of unreality such
a remark could only be taken on its merits. He said, “Not particularly. You made me feel stupid.” He waited for his spluttering laugh; again it didn't come. “Not all that many go out of their way to be nice, anyway.”
Clare blinked. There was an odd look about her, he thought, slightly dilated, as though for her too the occasion was in some way detached from ordinary existence. She got up. “Would you like another sherry?”
He nodded. She brought the bottle across, poured into his glass. A little spilled onto the floor. She knelt down beside him, mopping with a tissue. She tilted against his legs: her flat bony thighs, the pointed breasts under the thin jersey, the fingers with long clean nails. She sat back, screwing the tissue into a ball. She turned and looked straight at him. “If there's anything you would like,” she said, “if there's anything I can do, I think just at this moment I'd rather like you to say. It would be all right.”
He stared at her. A grinning face in the east window of the church; nights of promise, of conjecture. He waited for someone he was not to reply, to act.
“No, thank you,” he said sadly.
He got up. “I think if you don't mind I'll get back. I'm not that hungry, and there's someone due to telephone about moving the screen for restoration. I hope you don't think I'm being rude.”
Clare Paling rose. She stood with her back to the mantelpiece. “I don't think you're being rude in the least.”
George went out of her front gate and round into his own. He walked up the patchy grass-invaded gravel of the vicarage path and in at the front door. There were five circulars on the mat and a letter from his mother. He picked them up and went into the study. He sat at the desk and
entered two christenings and a wedding in the church diary. He made a list of people to be thanked for their endeavors of the previous day.
He looked up. It had stopped raining. The plastic bunting along the forecourt of the Amoco garage dripped onto the tarmac. The road gleamed with puddles, a trembling reflection of sky and leaves. The church, the gold of its stone all darkened by damp, sat hunched among the churchyard trees. George picked up the report of the church restoration expert and began to read his proposal to include cleaning of the Doom painting in the general reparations, an expensive and tricky job, evidently, but one which, the expert felt, would bring out the colors and greatly enhance the effect.
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