Judgment Day (4 page)

She had seen it coming. In the early days of their marriage, the delectable time in London and on the European tour, she had known that this wouldn't last. Promising young men, destined for ultimate stardom, must spend a period in the thick of things, not in air-conditioned city center offices but where the objects for distribution are actually made. Light industry is mainly situated well outside London, in expanding and usually—for that reason, no doubt—unappealing towns. The Laddenham job had come as no surprise.

He filled her glass.

“I thought we were only drinking half. We shall have hangovers.”

“A little dangerous living might be a good thing.”

“All living,” said Clare, “is dangerous.”

“You, my love, are a fatalist. You spend your life expecting the worst.”

“A hostage to fortune.”

“It's all this reading. You'll do your eyes in, apart from anything else. Are those the new glasses?”

“Do you like them?”

“They're sexy,” said Peter, “in a peculiar way.”

“Oh, good. You think books foster pessimism, then?”

“Well,” he said cautiously, “I've never gone in for them on your scale, so my judgment might lack bite, but on the whole I've always found real life a lot more prosaic.”

“Are we talking about fact or fiction?”

“Novels,” said Peter, “always pose situations which are either extreme or telescope time, as it were. Life mostly isn't like that.”

“True, up to a point. They are supposed to tell a story, of course.”

“History, on the other hand, which I find all over the house these days, is full of disaster, but large tracts of it, for many people, are really quite uneventful.”

“Oh quite. In fact most of us aren't even conscious that it's going on. By the way I wish you wouldn't keep moving
Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution
off the shelf by the cooker. It's there for when I'm involved with tedious stirring operations.”

“Ah,” he said, “I'm sorry. I quite like the glasses, but do you have to keep them on, I thought they were for reading?”

“I was looking at the wine bottle label. They can come off now.”

“It hardly bears that close inspection.”

“I was wondering what the picture of the man stamping was. Treading grapes I suppose. Not that one imagines these were ever trod. But to get back to what we started with—you think charitable enterprises would be a good idea?”

“There must be something that needs interfering with. The school?”

“I am not,” said Clare with dignity, “intending a career of interference. And in any case the Parent Teacher Association is in the hands of a cabal comprising that estate agent opposite and various cronies. They don't like me. I alarm their wives and they don't care for my tone of voice. No chance of a coup d'etat there. Besides, there'd be no joy in it. It's a perfectly good school, all one could do is raise money for the minibus fund. No standing at the gates with a placard demanding educational justice. Sorry—have to think again.”

“Perhaps it's not really a problem,” he suggested. “Since you say you're perfectly happy.”

“I never said any such thing. Who ever experienced perfect happiness? Certainly not me. Not with my temperament, but I'm as happy as I would ever expect to be, and grateful with it.”

“That's all right,” said Peter. “Don't mention it.”

“Not to you, you nit. To something altogether more metaphysical.”

“Nevertheless, I think local involvement might be no bad thing.”

“Putting down some roots?”

He began to grind coffee. “You've always rather dug yourself into places before. What about something else, then? A course at the local university?”

“No thanks. I've had quite enough education already, goodness knows what any more would lead to. No, that won't do. We shall have to give the matter some serious thought. You may well be right. And now tell me about this Brussels thing.”

*  *  *

Sydney Porter said good night to the other members of the Parochial Church Council outside the vicarage and crossed the Green to his house. Passing the church, he paused for a moment to look at it, thinking both of its ailments and its antiquity. He had been surprised to learn of its age. Sydney was not very strong on history, he knew; doing a sum in his head he reckoned the foundation of the church as not long after 1066, a date that was familiar. Well, given that it stood to reason that it wouldn't be in very good shape, structurally. Though only bits of it were from then, of course, most of it was much newer. Funny how you never really gave a lot of thought to how long a place had been there; you acted as sidesman, Sunday after Sunday, saw to the hymn books, locked up on alternate nights, without ever really thinking about that.

The church on the corner of Mansell Road had been big and black, not like this at all, a big black London church. It had dwarfed the houses, rather than the other way about. Coming back that morning in 1941 it had been the only solid thing left, standing foursquare alongside the row of blasted shells. Only later, going in, had he seen the wreckage within, the floor and seats white with fallen plaster,
the chancel open to the sky, the altar a mess of splintered wood and rubble. He had stood there a long time, alone; outside the rescue squads were working still, their boots crunching on broken glass.

They were going to be hard put to it to raise all that cash; and the vicar, not a go-ahead sort of man, either. A long haul, it would be. Not that there wasn't money about, you only had to look around you to see that. But not much of it would come the way of the restoration fund, Sydney suspected. He let himself into the house and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Tea and a biscuit, and the television news, and see what was on after, and an early night if it wasn't up to much. He stood at the window while the kettle boiled; dark now and lights at windows around the Green, discreet, glowing, curtained squares, except the big house by the vicarage where they were bright and bare so that you could see clean into the rooms, a man and woman in one, a kitchen, sitting at a table with glasses in their hands. Those new people. I've got good eyesight, Sydney thought, man of my age, good as when I was in the Navy, all but; he drew his own curtains and went through into the lounge.

He sat in the chintz-covered chair that had once been in the Mansell Road house while information was expertly and expensively conveyed to him: an assessment of the political situation in Namibia, a rundown on Britain's position vis-à-vis the European monetary fund, a consideration of an impending industrial dispute (opposing points of view discretely outlined}. Sydney drank tea and wondered about switching to round-pod french beans this year. On the screen, there was talk now of distresses in some far-off place; fleeing figures in a street, a man crouching with a
rifle. A child crying. Sydney watched and sighed, stirred by the recollection of feeling, rather than feeling itself. Poor wretches. His ghost walked among them, outraged by the world. But none of this could touch him now; lightning does not strike twice, and in any case there was nothing left for it to strike.

Football results rolled up, and the weather. Nothing worth watching after. Sydney switched off and prepared to go to bed.

*  *  *

Next door, Keith Bryan also watched the news. The row he'd had with Shirley about forgetting to phone the TV repairman had petered out when he discovered that in fact it was only the plug that was faulty. Just as well, in the event, or there'd have been a hefty charge for damn all. Now, he sprawled apathetic in front of the set. At one point he was aroused and annoyed by the discovery that power workers pull in over a hundred a week. He also noted the make of car used by the chairman of British Rail, and a sexy air hostess behind the right shoulder of a departing American politician. When the newsreader started talking about unemployment figures he went out to the kitchen for a beer. There, he caught sight of himself for an instant in the mirror by the door—a shortish fellow with round shoulders reaching into the fridge for a can of Pale Ale. And knew with a spurt of anger that there was some mistake. Keith Bryan was somewhere else—a bullish, bronzed black-haired chap in a cricket sweater, with a buttery blonde in tow, drinking shorts at a bar aglow with horse brasses and copper pans. He went back to the sitting room. “Don't ask me if I want one, will you?” said
Shirley. He flung himself back into his chair without looking at her. On the television screen, people shot each other in the streets of some American city; in fantasy, not fact, as he recognized from the excitable camera work and the nonchalance of the protagonists. “Shut up,” he said, “I'm following this series.”

Chapter Three

The school, Laddenham primary, was seven minutes adult walk from the Green and various distances where children were concerned, according to age. The Coggan girls, accompanied each way by their mother, took between eight and ten minutes. Martin Bryan, when late, could do it in four and a half, running, or anything up to an hour otherwise, going by the churchyard and through the gap in the car park wall and over the building site, or dawdling along the High Street with a stop off at the sweet shop. The Paling children, Anna and Thomas, could also extend the journey almost indefinitely, if unaccompanied; when
driven by their mother in the white mini it was three and a half minutes dead, door to door.

Martin Bryan and the Coggans went to the primary school because that was where children went to school. The Palings went there because Clare and Peter, who had opinions about education, and knew a thing or two, had observed that a good state primary school is as good as anything provided by the private sector and free into the bargain. The Coggan girls and Anna Paling did not consort out of school hours because Anna thought Tracy and Mandy silly. Thomas and Martin did not consort partly because Martin was two and a half years older than Thomas, thus laying on him the onus of any overtures that might be made, and partly because Thomas had once seen Martin crying in the school lavatory and had been intolerably embarrassed. In any case, Martin did not consort much with anyone. If they found themselves returning to the Green at the same time, they walked separately, or on opposite sides of the street. But then, so did the two Palings, who had proper ideas about indifference to one's sibling when released from the conventions of the home.

The school was bright and airy and a credit to the system. The walls were covered with eye-catching examples of child artwork; witches and dragons vied with the life-cycle of the frog and what people wore in Elizabethan times, in cheerful evidence that the life of the imagination was not despised in these parts. The teachers tended to be young; some were male and bearded. The children gave every indication of well-being; the place buzzed with activity and the early morning influx showed no sign of reluctance. The school dinners were ample and nutritious.

Not many of the children had a speech that could at
once be recognized as of the place: just a few. The Laddenham voice, subtly distinct from the Midlands but not yet opening out into the fullness of Gloucestershire and parts west, was confined to those few whose family names might have been found on the tombstones in the churchyard of St. Peter and St. Paul, and, in some cases, not even to them. Most children spoke the unplaceable and even classless English of radio and television performers; the language they used had the same ubiquity. Only occasionally (the Opies would have been gratified} did a childish code word surface that was entirely local in origin: a word for truce, the dialect of scatology, an insult. The Paling children, within a matter of weeks and barely conscious that they were doing so, had learned to temper their accents, slip into a more anonymous pronunciation, and call things by the right names. At home, they reverted to their usual style, so that for many months their parents were unaware of this chameleon dexterity, until one day Clare, waiting outside the school playground, heard with amazement her son shouting in an alien tongue. She had the tact not to comment, but thought about the matter. It struck her as curious that the ability—willingness, perhaps—to accept the requirements of a place should come so much more readily to children. One could look at it in two lights, of course: it could seem a sheep-like conformity, or alternatively a refreshing knack of discarding old habits. Either way, it was as though the spirit of place, nowadays, exerted its power only over the young.

The spirit of place was in any case hard to detect in Laddenham. There was no shop or other building, in the High Street, whose counterpart could not have been found elsewhere: Boots, Dewhurst, Tesco; a nineteenth-century
ironmonger's facade, a fifties brutalist bank, an Edwardian pub. The road signs, recently renewed and standardized, pointed you to outlying hamlets in lettering that suggested cities the size of Birmingham. The Midland Bank had a clock recording the time of day on the eastern and western coasts of the United States. Only the church and a few of the older houses were a reminder that this place lay on the limestone spine of England, and was built from its own bones. The new housing estates, rushed up to meet the boom of fifteen years ago, were in brick or a garish reconstituted stone of inflexible texture. They encircled the old village center, the High Street, the church and the Green, their street names quaintly rural and suggesting quite another ambiance: The Grove, Willow Way, Rivermead, Swan Lane.