Judgment Day (9 page)

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Clare, circling the Green on her way back from the school, stopped the car and wound down the window. “Morning, Mr. Porter.” Oh God, now she'd made the poor man jump out of his skin.

“Good morning, er…”

“We'd better put our heads together at some point.”

“Heads…?”

“This stuff we're going to do on the history of the church—the Civil War thing and the other.”

“Oh. Oh, yes.”

“Where did you find out about it—what book?”

“There's that booklet in the library, the village library—
History of Spelbury
. It mentions Laddenham and the other villages.”

“Would it be an idea,” said Clare, “if I went further afield, to one of the bigger county libraries, to see if I could lay hands on a few more books, and then we can go through them together and see what we can come up with?”

“Fair enough.”

Not the most forthcoming person in the world. Or is it just my genius for alienation?

“If you've the time,” he added.

That's better; we'll win him over yet. Big smile. “Oh, I've plenty of time, Mr. Porter. Well, I'll be seeing you, then.”

All the time in the world. And for a book-junkie like me a trip to the county library is right in the line of business. In fact, come to think of it, there's no time like the present. Quick sprint home to make the beds and then off. Not a bad prospect at all, the day looks more promising already. So wave nicely to the vicar since we're feeling genial, and away.

The days are not unpromising, it's not that; Peter is wrong in his diagnosis of bored housewife. Peter, of course, has been trained to spot problems and then apply his considerable talents to solving them. Which is all very well where assembly lines and productivity targets and technical innovations are concerned but not always so effective when it comes to people. No, I am not bored.

Children are bored, because they live in a continuous present and want to escape. The old are bored, for other reasons. When I was a child I never believed I would grow
up. Now I am grown I watch my own survival with disbelief. And the survival of those I love. I can look at a fourteenth-century wall painting of Judgment Day with the understanding and apprehension of a fourteenth-century peasant. Unlike the twentieth-century priest next door, who is in other respects more ignorant and less worldly than I take myself to be. So much for sophistication.

It's a crude threat, that division into the damned and the saved; as crude as the weighing of souls. All to induce guilt—guilt and therefore compliance. Do as I say, or else. Nowadays we are less gullible, but we still feel guilt: different guilts. When I contemplate the day of judgment it is not the possibility of salvation I have in mind.

When I was a child I tried to be good—to begin with because people were pleased if you were good and later because I had developed theories about the nature of goodness. I thought it was wrong to be cruel to animals or those weaker than yourself; I reckoned you should be polite, up to a point; I tried to treat others as I should like them to treat me, though I suspected a flaw somewhere in that argument. Later, I went through the Ten Commandments; most of them were straightforward enough, but some didn't seem to apply to me and there was a hectoring note that I found distasteful. And later still my unbelief blossomed and I ceased to accompany my parents to church on Sundays and my mother was upset. I explained to her that I probably shared her every opinion on what was right and what was wrong, but I could not believe in God. I said I believed in love and she said God is love and I said, no. And after that we avoided the subject.

No, my days are not empty; in fact, I find them miraculous
The legacy, I think, of telling people for a thousand years that they will have to pay for their sins is that you end up with someone like me. I wait for payment to be exacted anyway. I feel guilty because it has not.

She made the beds, went downstairs and out again. Back in the mini, she sped between fleeing fields, hills, villages. Driving too fast, reproved once by an overtaking lorry, the driver in his cab towering above her, cutting in front and forcing her to slow down. Peter scolded her sometimes about her driving. Once he'd been really angry after a near accident. Tempting providence, he called it. Providence doesn't need tempting, she'd snapped, that's the problem, as far as I'm concerned. But the incident had rattled her (accounting for the ill temper}, as now she was rattled by the thunderous pressure of the lorry alongside. She drove more decorously, paying attention to the charms of the landscape.

I love my husband, she thought. I look around at other people's husbands, at other men generally, and heave a sigh of relief. His deficiencies, if one can call them that, are that he is too busy and too successful and I am no longer the only or indeed the principal person with a claim on him. I love my husband and therefore I will try to do as he would wish and not drive too fast.

There were huge clouds piled around the horizon, the cumulus clouds of early summer, opalescent shifting shapes, themselves a source of light so that the whole sky was brilliant. On such a day as this, she remembered, on such a day of sun and shadow and high running wind, she had climbed a hill somewhere, almost ten years ago, and at the top had flung herself down breathless on her back and stared up into just such clouds and as she did so had felt
the first flutter of the child in her womb. A moment of amazement and delight and incredulity. Thus are the heightened moments of our lives tethered to the physical world, and brought back by it. Well, that interesting flutter was now Anna—screaming and whooping in Laddenham primary school playground—but the joyous instant on the hilltop one carried around yet, as something else.

The town, with which she was not familiar, although it was only fifteen miles from Spelbury, had a stern attitude toward on-street parking and the municipal car parks were all full. Eventually she found a space in the far corner of a cindery, rubbish-strewn overflow car park, tucked away the mini, and set off for the public library.

The library, plate glass without and sleekly carpeted within, was a new building. The shelves were well stocked, the catalog abundant, the squashy black chairs and individual desks invited repose or study. Clare, well pleased, browsed and dipped and selected for an hour or so. In the local history section, an agreeable and obliging young man answered her queries and provided references and information. Waiting for him to bring some books, she noted with approval that the reading desks were almost all occupied by teenagers, in refuge perhaps from inadequate school facilities, heads bowed tranquilly over their work.

Going into the ladies' lavatory on the way out, she found herself in a cubicle the walls of which were covered with graffiti of startling sexual crudity. Long masturbatory fantasies involving carrots or sausages were interspersed with drawings of male and female genitals, separately and in conjunction, and clinical accounts of the writers' own
sexual exploits. Clare sat reading, in interest and amazement. One could fancy oneself in the latrines of some army barracks, not the ladies' lavatory of the public library in a midland market town. The handwriting, in tempo pen, ball-point, and occasionally aerosol paint, was almost exclusively the unformed script of, it seemed to her, children. Or adolescents at the most. She thought again, a little perturbed, of the docile studious figures at the desks overhead. Surely not? She came out, washed her hands, gathered up her armful of books, and set off once more for the car park.

Heading for the corner in which she had left the car she could not at first see it. Where it had been—where she thought it had been—was a red Ford Capri. Then, as she got nearer, she saw that the Capri had been parked in front of the mini, boxing it in. The mini was at the end of a line of cars, up against a wall; the Capri sat blandly eighteen inches ahead of its front bumper.

She tried the door handles. Locked, of course. Similarly the legitimately parked car alongside the mini; no possibility of a maneuver there. Fuming, she noted the car park ticket pasted to the Capri's windscreen: three hours yet to run.

She sat in the mini for fifteen minutes. Then, for a further thirty, searched the car park, surrounding streets, and adjacent car park for a traffic warden or attendant. None to be seen. Nor yet a policeman.

She returned to the car. Sat, another fifteen minutes. Paced the car park, another fifteen. Received the commiserations of the driver of a departing Morris, three cars down the line. Contemplated an act of aggression against
the Capri, made a note of its number (which one was not likely to forget, in any case.} Smoked a fifth cigarette. Read three pages of a book. Sat. Paced. Sat.

A man and a woman approached. He, suede jacketed, with droopy moustache, sideburns, round shouldered, early thirties. She, tight-legged white canvas trousers, high-heeled boots, strawberry blond hairdo glinting with lacquer, pushing forty. The man had his key in the Capri's door as Clare rose from the mini.

“Just a minute.”

“Eh?”

“I have been sitting here now for an hour and a half.”

A silence. The woman, patting her hair, embarrassed. The man, car door open now, throwing a pile of order books into the back: “Well, then?”

Monumental stupidity may of course be indistinguishable from massive indifference to the convenience of others. “Because,” said Clare, “you parked your car in such a way as to make it impossible for me to get out.”

He took his jacket off, hung it with care on a hook fixed to the interior of the car, began to get in.

“Oh no,” she said, loudly now, some passersby turning to stare, “oh no. This won't do. What about it?”

“What about what?”

“The fact that you have considerably inconvenienced me.”

He straightened, looked at her. The woman said, “Let's go, Keith.”

“It happens,” he said. “It's one of those things, I'm afraid. Could happen to anyone.”

A few people were hovering now, interested. Clare
closed the door of the mini, slowly, and took a couple of steps forward. “Really? You astonish me. Could it, indeed?”

“That's right.”

“It doesn't bother you—disturb you just in the very slightest—that you've made a nuisance of yourself to someone else?”

“Oh look,” the woman began. “Let's forget it. I've got to be…”

“I can't say it does, lady,” he said.

Clare stood now immediately beside the right headlamp of the Capri. “Ah. And are you thinking of making me an apology?” It came to her, with a pleasurably heady sensation that it might be possible to kick in the headlamp.

“No. I can't say I am.”

Damn it to hell, she had sandals on, not her good clumpy shoes.

“You're not?”

He was getting into the car now, had reached across to unlock the door for the woman. “Ah,” said Clare. She stood over him now, and went on in a conversational tone, but loudly enough to retain the interest of the few bystanders. “Then listen to me. One comes across some fairly disagreeable outlooks on life but for sheer blatant gall yours just about takes the biscuit. Your wife there must be proud of you. A fine display of sticking to one's principles that was.” He was trying to shut the door. Clare tugged at the handle and went on. “It would be interesting to see a real three-star performance, for private consumption. I take it that was just the economy model, for dealing with stray members of the public. By the way, you've got some
of the prawn cocktail you had for lunch on your tie.” She slammed the door at the same moment as the Capri's engine spat into life, and the car shot forward.

She got back into the mini. The bystanders were all departing hastily, like people determined not to have witnessed a street accident. Clare, breathing a little heavily, tidied her hair, checked on purse, library books, keys, and drove off.

On the way home she began to laugh. Well, well. I quite enjoyed that. A spell of rage is oddly stimulating. Pity it never came to physical violence. I'm bigger than he is.

Chapter Six

Sydney Porter couldn't think where Tasmania was. It had bothered him last night, when he went to bed, late, much later than his usual time. He had sat reading so long that when he looked out of the front door, before locking up, to see what the weather was doing, all the lights were out round the Green. And then he'd lain awake, bothered about Tasmania.

After breakfast, he went to the bookcase and got out the atlas. His school atlas, it had been. Bartholemew's. But not right now, a lot of it, too much pink—all those places belonging to us then, that no longer do.

Tasmania was an intermediate color: lilac, for Commonwealth.
He stared at the double-page spread. It would have taken the devil of a long time to get down there, in those days. Months. He should know—the long weeks to Bombay, in 1944, round the Cape, in the old
Reliant
, escorting convoys. Weeks of tedium, broken by the tension of an attack. You came almost to hope for a bit of action, in madder moments. Weeks of heat and discomfort and the cramped mess deck.

He thought of those villagers, those men who'd been convicted after the business in the church. Podd and Lacy and Binns and the rest. Battened down in stinking holds. Seasick and wretched. Knowing they'd never see their homes and families again. Poor devils. And all for talking out of turn, for getting a bit het up, for wanting a fair wage. Well, it wasn't like that now, and a good thing too, not that he'd ever been that much of a socialist himself, but it made you think, reading this kind of thing. Poor sods.