Judgment Day (5 page)

Nearly everyone worked in Spelbury, the thriving town of which Laddenham and other expanded villages were satellites. Spelbury made the internal organs of radios and televisions, a few selected car components, women's tights and stockings, and processed frozen foods. It was a place that had been designated for prosperity immediately after the war, a London overspill town, and had flourished accordingly: industry had come, people had come, houses had been built, and Spelbury had tripled, quadrupled in size. Only the street plan of the town center, an elongated triangle enclosing an open space, and the Friday cattle market remembered its ancestral function. It was still in trade, of course, but no longer trade of a local nature: pigs and sheep and cows. Nowadays, the container lorries feeding Spelbury's factories might come from Scotland, from the east coast, from the continent.

Ten miles away, R.A.F. Willerton sprawled runways and silver hangars and several acres of red brick housing for personnel across the landscape, and provided considerable extra purchasing power for the Spelbury shops, and clientele for the Saturday-night discos, the pubs, and the two cinemas.

Aircraft noise split the skies, periodically. Laddenham could congratulate itself on not being beneath one of the main flight paths. On the whole, the aircraft swept north up the river valley before turning right for Europe and the Middle and Far East, or left for elsewhere. The gleaming, backswept planes were alleged by knowledgeable locals to carry hydrogen bombs; others disputed this. The less sinister transport aircraft, low slung and erect-tailed, lumbered about the horizon all day long, so much a part of the scenery that a landscape painter, seeking local exactitude, would need to incorporate one, pottering above the low hills, the hedge-striped valleys, the greens and golds and fawns of the agricultural midlands.

The R.A.F. display team, the Red Devils, was based at Willerton.

The first time Clare Paling saw them was on the morning after her conversation with Peter about her occupation—or lack of it—and three days after her exchange with George Radwell in the church. She had dropped the children at school, been to Spelbury to do the week's shopping at Sainsbury's, and then, on a whim, driven straight out of the town in the opposite direction to Laddenham. She had stopped the mini, presently, on the side road, at a point where the road crossed a small stream by way of an old stone bridge; a delectable riverine landscape of willows
and watermeadows and buttercups. She sat on the wall of the bridge and saw flowing weed, like green hair, with little white flowers blooming just above the water, dragged this way and that by the current. It was early summer. The grass was thick, the trees in full leaf; the willows along the stream bank were a sharp yellow-green against the steel gray of a rain-cloud behind them, a miraculous effect of light and texture. And then suddenly there was a disturbance of air; a wind that sprang up from nowhere; a blackbird shrieked; a bullock cantered off with its tail up. Across the skyline, above the willows, across that pewter backcloth there swept a scarlet aeroplane, not a hundred yards away, not, it seemed, a hundred yards above the ground, a huge scarlet steel dart, quite soundless. It was there above the trees—and then gone so quickly it could have been a hallucination.

There came another, and another, and another, with only yards between them. She stood up, her hand to her mouth, amazed. And then the sound arrived: a great tearing roar, rising and falling, once, twice, three, four, five times—once for each plane.

It was astonishing. She was filled with wild exhilaration. The shock of it. The beauty of those shapes fleeing across the dark sky, the brilliance of the color; the sudden intrusion, the sense of something quite merciless and irresistible blasting its way across the tranquil countryside. There was a hot metallic smell in the air now. And, looking away and upwards, she saw them again, but high, high up, thousands of feet up, tiny scarlet gnats flying in tight formation, making an arrow that vanished into a gray heap of cloud.

She found the whole thing intensely stimulating and
drove home too fast, narrowly missing an accident, the sight of the red aeroplanes still printed on her eyeballs.

*  *  *

Sydney Porter was erecting runner bean poles when the Red Devils came over Laddenham. He did not see them but was assaulted by the noise, seconds after they had passed; it was as though the whole sky raged, and he thought at first of thunder, but it was clear and bright now, with just a distant cloud bank piled up away beyond Spelbury. He stood there, looking up at the sky, and then the girl called over the fence, Shirley Bryan next door, “Hey—did you see, Mr. Porter? Those formation fliers from the R.A.F.—fantastic!” He shook his head.

She was hanging up washing, inefficiently, dropping things into the dirt and then giving them just a quick shake before pinning them up. Now she came and leaned up against the fence, chatting on about how she'd never have the patience to grow all those veg, but it must be nice, not having to go to the shops so much. “But you're ever so methodical, aren't you? I've seen you in Tesco, with your list, ticking things off.” She giggled. “Don't think I was spying—just I caught sight of you across the aisle. Wish I could be so organized. Keith's always on at me for the lousy housekeeper I am. Well, he could have guessed as much when he married me, frankly.” She laughed again, a laugh that Sydney found irritating, a mannerism merely. She yawned, a huge uncovered yawn so that he looked away quickly, back to the runner beans, a more engaging sight altogether. Now she was on about her husband, embarrassingly, personal comments that one would prefer not to hear; Sydney bound poles together with string and tried
to think about something else. The church, this appeal, now that was a thing they'd have to give their minds to, over the next month. Fund-raising. Letters to important people, the big folk round about, the Chamber of Commerce and that. “Toothpaste,” said Shirley Bryan. “All over the basin. When he's spat. I tell you, I could scream sometimes. Oh well, that's marriage. You should be thankful you stayed a bachelor, Mr. Porter.”

He clamped the last two poles together, wound the string and clipped off the end with his knife. Tested the line for strength: firm enough. “I'm not a bachelor” he said to the bean poles “Not me. My wife died. Long time ago.” And heard her noises of surprise and regret and interest.

He picked his things up, the string and the knife and the spade, and stumped back toward the house, not looking at her again. Angry at being jumped into that much self-exposure. But he couldn't tell a lie, not even a lie by omission, never had been able to.

*  *  *

George Radwell was on the telephone to the secretary of the Parish Council about the booking of the village hall when the Red Devils went over. The noise blotted out all; he sat there mouthing, saying into the roaring air, “Not a Saturday, we thought, a weekday we'd be likely to get more people, would next Thursday be …” And then the row receded and gradually Charlie Webb came through saying “Eh? What's that, Vicar? Can't hear you, terrible line. Just say that again, would you.”

The date fixed, he put the receiver down. Agenda. Speakers. Me, I suppose. The Diocesan Architect, if he'll
come, or at least send someone. Ring the Diocesan Architect's office. Posters. Nice big bright posters, to be lettered by Miss Bellingham's friend who was an artist, summoning Laddenham residents to a Public Meeting to launch the Save Our Church Appeal, for display in the public library, at the bus stop, in the newsagent's window, outside the vicarage…

*  *  *

The primary school playground was full, it being the mid-morning break, as the aeroplanes swept across the sky, and the whole place broke into cheers and an excited rushing about. Thereafter, for a while, groups of small boys zoomed around in formation until the interest subsided, the impression left by the incident faded, and anyway the bell went and everyone beat it for the school entrance and another hour of enlightened instruction.

*  *  *

Martin Bryan, coming home, couldn't remember what day it was. He stopped dead, outside the butcher's (the one with the sign he liked: Meat to Please You, Pleased to Meet You} and didn't know if it was Tuesday or Thursday or what. His head whirled. You needed to know things like that, it was like knowing who you were yourself: Martin Paul Bryan, aged 10, 3 The Green, Laddenham, nr. Spelbury, Oxfordshire, England, Europe, the World, the Universe. And knowing how many people you knew—their names and what they looked like, which was sixty-five he thought, not counting everyone at school which would have brought it up to two hundred and twelve.

What had it been yesterday? It had been a school day, so not a Saturday or Sunday. And the day before had been school but the day before … the day before
was
Sunday, so now was Wednesday.

Once more placed in time, he was able to start walking again. He wondered if she'd be at home, if she'd have remembered to get anything for tea. There might be beefburgers. Now, he thought, now at this moment, walking along the High Street, past the White Lion, past the corner where there was sometimes that Alsatian dog he didn't like, now he didn't know at all, it was all emptiness ahead, you couldn't know what there was, it was like looking into a fog. But quite soon, just in minutes, as long as it took the hand on his watch to get from there to there, he'd know, it would all be things that had happened, as though the fog turned into color, as though shape came from blankness, like Dad's expensive camera that he lost in Jersey last year made pictures come swimming onto squares of paper, just like that, in seconds.

He'd been thinking of that on Sunday, when they'd been driving to see Auntie Judy, Mum and Dad arguing because Dad didn't want to go. He'd sat in the back and seen between their shoulders the dashboard clock saying twelve. When we come back, he'd thought, it'll be saying six, or something like that. I'll be sitting here, like I am now, only then I'll know what happened in between, I'll know things I don't know now, things will have happened that haven't happened yet. He stared over the clock out of the windscreen, at the road advancing and then vanishing. It will actually be like that: I shall sit here and it will be six o'clock. The thought amazed him. And later, when it was
so, and he remembered, deliberately, he felt a curious wisdom. He felt older, more than six hours older.

*  *  *

Clare Paling, at her kitchen window, saw the child opposite, that wan-looking little boy, come round the corner followed by, at seven and twelve second intervals, her own son and daughter. All three had the disintegrating look of children at the end of a day's school—jerseys and satchels hung precariously about them, Thomas trailed the sleeve of an anorak in the gutter, the Bryan boy's shirt hung out of his belt at the back. Like swimmers nearing shore, they headed blindly for home, eyes down. Clare watched with detachment, peeling vegetables.

She saw behind the palimpsest faces of her children their own previous selves, their infancy, a fleeting succession of Annas and Thomases slipping through her fingers, gone as soon as they had come. She saw the mobile features of babies settle to individuality; she saw the whole evolutionary process of growth, the curled fetus to the erect child; she heard the amazing flood of language—each precarious second heading for now, this June day, this light pouring through leaves to dapple their unknowing heads. Children live in the moment; the rest of us are saddled with the processes of time.

Thomas, at the lych-gate, looks furtively round to see who may be watching (houses, alas, have eyes, which he has forgotten} and climbs upon the churchyard wall He balances his way along it, teetering once so that Clare's stomach lurches with him. He flaps his outstretched arms; he is fifty feet high; he towers above the Green majestic in daring and in panic. He is there forever, suspended at
seven years old with the warm stone under his feet and the rolling clouds above his head, while his sister stares in disapproval and intended treachery and his mother goes to the door to call out, to jolt him back into the unyielding present, to bring him sliding down, protesting, denying.

“I
wasn't
going to fall off. And anyway you never said…”

And the moment has gone; the clouds have rolled on; the warmth is draining from the stone.

“And anyway,” said Anna piously, “the vicar wouldn't like it. It's his wall.”

Thomas, in triumph, retaliated. “It is not. It's God's wall. The church belongs to God, not the vicar, doesn't it Mum?”

“Well,” said Clare, “technically … Never mind. Tea-time. Milk shakes?”

In the early evening the front doorbell rang. Clare, reading in the sitting room, heard Thomas thump down the hall. Voices. Thomas bounced in to say Mrs. Coggan was there.

Sue Coggan stood on the step flanked by her daughters. She contrived, interestingly, to look both neat and distraught at the same time. One child appeared tearful, the other excited. It was at once apparent that this was no routine social call. Sue had already burst into explanations. “… ever so sorry to bother you, but I just couldn't think what else to do, and I knew you've got your car, the mini, you can't help noticing being just opposite. I rang the surgery and they said if it's gone that far it's best to take her straight to the Casualty at Spelbury, because they'd have the right instruments there, the doctor wouldn't be able to do anything really.” She stared down at the smallest child;
exasperation and embarrassment fought with concern. “Oh dear, what a silly girl! There we were, all ready for the baths, the water run and everything, and then this! I
am
sorry to bother you, but…”

Clare said, “What's she done?”

“She pushed a button up her nose.”

Anna and Thomas had now gathered to stare. Anna said, “What kind of button?”

“A pearl button actually. One of John's shirt buttons. Honestly, you wouldn't believe it, would you, I thought at first they were having me on, and then she started crying and…”