Music at Long Verney (10 page)

He worked on. She read. The alarm clock ticked. After an hour had passed he realised that it was two-thirty and that he was unfed.

“Are there any cases in your nice book about husbands who ate their wives? I'd like to know their sentences.”

“Oh, Willie, are you hungry?”

Her gaze rested on him, calmly attentive, as if this were another interesting social phenomenon. She put a marker in the book and closed it. He cleared his papers off the table and laid them on the floor. The dwelling they had rented for the summer vacation was advertised as “self-contained”. It was so self-contained that the only place for their bicycles was in the bathroom-kitchenette. Skirting the bicycles, Sally now opened a small refrigerator, and considered its contents: a heel of cheese, some rye biscuit, one tomato. She put these on a tray and after further consideration added salt.

The tomato was scrupulously shared between them. It seemed of an Oriental richness and succulence.

“I had a shopping list. But when I was halfway there this morning I remembered the bloody grocer shuts on Thursdays.”

“May Hell be hot for him,” said Willie, mildly. “Never mind, I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll cycle along the road towards Cowfold, and have an enormous tea at The Goat.”

“That inn we passed with the roses?”

“
And
the check curtains.”

“
And
the frogs.”

“
And
the milking stool.”

There was no such adventitious rusticity about the dacha they had rented from Miss Hobson, professor of Lit. Hum. at Willie's red-brick university. Plain as a packing case, with an air of having lost all interest in going further, it stood at the end of a long flinty track across flinty fields of sugar beet. “Wonderful views of the sky,” Miss Hobson had remarked.

With only one puncture, they reached the crossroads and turned towards Cowfold. The sun beat on their backs, midges stuck to their faces. Strong Indian tea and strawberries and cream, thought Sally. Strong Indian tea, plum cake, and ham sandwiches, thought Willie. The Goat appeared in the heavens, motionless on its signpost against a glaring blue sky. There were the roses, there was the lily pond, with concrete frogs. They dismounted. Swaying with hunger and heat-stroke, they walked up the crazy-paving path. On the doors was a notice: “
NO TEAS
”.

Sally moaned and sank down on the milking stool.

Willie looked at his watch. “Twenty to five,” he said. “They're legally bound to open at six. We'll kill time till then. Think of those poor wretches who go to the moon.”

“And there'll be a church somewhere. We haven't passed one, so we shall come to one. Churches are cool.”

When they had soaked their handkerchiefs in the lily pond and washed off the midges, they rode on, came to the church, went in, sat down. Its proportions were ideal: it was larger than Miss Hobson's packing case, not so large as the face of nature. And somewhere about it a bell was ringing in a calm liturgical way.

“I can't understand why people don't make more use of their churches.”

“Sectarianism,” said Willie. “I don't suppose anyone will come near this place till Harvest Festival.”

“Which is phallic, isn't it?”

At that moment an approaching voice remarked, “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

It was also certain that they could not escape; for a surpliced clergyman came in, preceding a coffin borne on the shoulders of six heated men in black cloth suits, and followed by a small group of partially blackened mourners. The coffin was
put down on trestles and its wreaths adjusted, the mourners, stumbling over hassocks, filed into the front pews, the clergyman glided into the reading desk and began: “I said, I will take heed to my ways: that I offend not in my tongue,” to which the clerk responded hastily, “I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle, while the ungodly is in my sight.”

It seemed to Sally that the clerk's glance aimed these words at her bare head and her blue slacks; in fact, Mr Hicks was scanning the congregation with a professional eye for mourners whose grief might get out of hand. The corpse had been bad enough. At no time did the Reverend favour long-departed parishioners being brought back to take up room that the churchyard could ill spare, to cause upheavals in family graves that the course of time had flattened into an easy surface for the grass-cutter, to bring nearer the dreaded day of an extension encroaching on the rectory kitchen garden. The least they could do was to be punctual; and Charles Joliffe was almost three hours overdue, the hearse breaking down and none of them rightly knowing the way.
I became dumb and opened not . . . When thou with rebukes dost chasten
. . . Me to the life, thought Mr Hicks – the responses snatched from his lips before he'd half finished them. He would have his work cut out to keep up with Reverend, crackling ahead like a gorse fire. And if Reverend was like this in a verse and verse psalm, what wouldn't he be in the Epistle, with the reins thrown over his neck and the smell of his stable, which in this case was his tea, not to say his dry martini, firing his heels through the Fifteenth Corinthians?

. . . forasmuch-as-ye-know-that-your-labour-is-not-in-vain-in-the-Lord.

The coffin was lifted; its direction was reversed in a peculiar dance by the bearers. Preceded by the clergyman, followed by the mourners, it loomed down the aisle, it went past. One of the mourners paused beside Sally and Willie. “Thank you so much
for coming,” she said. “It was so kind of you.” She hurried after the rest.

“That was a near thing,” said Willie. Sally nodded. He got up and began to read the pamphlets displayed on a table near the entrance. Presently he went to the door and peered out. “Still at it,” he mouthed; and wandered off to read mural tablets in the chancel. There was the sound of cars being started up. Running down the aisle where the coffin had gone so cumbrously, he whisked her into the porch just as the clergyman came in by a side door, pulling off his surplice.

“Do you think he's a vicar or a rector?” said Sally, averting her eyes from the raw earth, the tumbled wreaths. “They ought to wear some distinguishing badge, like pips in the Army. And, of course, there are curates.” Her brave conversational voice snapped like a fiddle string. “Oh Willie, Willie! It's so awful.” She burst into tears and clung to him. He patted her shoulder, smoothed her burrowing head, and started at a smart new headstone.
Helena, Beloved Wife of Hubert Wilkins. Aged 71. At Rest
.

It only left Sally fifty more.

“So awful. Why can't one just be cremated without having to die?”

It seemed a quite rational aspiration.

“The chances of a sudden death must be going up by leaps and bounds,” he said. “Come, my darling, let's get out of this blackmailing churchyard.”

They found a lane and wandered along it till they came to a gate into a meadow. In the meadow was a large sycamore. They lay down in its shade. Forgetting that they were mortal, forgetting that they were hungry, not noticing that they were lying above an ants' nest, they began to make love. He licked the delicious salt off her cheeks, she nibbled his nose. They fell asleep, and woke, vaguely wondering why they were there, and made love again. He cut an “S” and a “W” on the bole of the
tree and framed them in a heart and finished off the heart with an arrow; and when they had vowed to come back every year on the seventeenth of July, they bicycled to The Goat and drank dog's-nose and ate small porkpies of the meanest possible description with such abstracted greed that, as the barman said later to the waitress, it was plain to see what those two had been up to.

IN 1917 HOWARD
Wilkinson, at the age of ten, became his mother's only comfort. At first, he rather liked it: he wore a black armband and slept in her bed.

Before the third anniversary of his father's soldierly death, the moderate liking had waned to a dulled acceptance of being an adjunct to her daily life. Her life was extremely daily; she was as repetitive as the calendar. Waking on a Monday, as surely as he foresaw that Sunday's joint would be served cold with a salad, on Tuesday be a hash or a Lancashire hotpot, he knew that on May 12th, his Aunt Maud's birthday, he would hear how shockingly Maud's hair kept falling out; on July 19th, Reggie's wedding day, that Mrs Reggie had a touch of the tarbrush. Quarter days, bringing a statement from the bank, were accompanied by having every reason to be suspicious of the bank manager; the narrative of the final exposure of Basil's machinations with old Fladgate was told at Halloween. The year was embossed with regular surprises, at which he had to be surprised, and regular excursions: Lake Ullswater (honeymoon), Isle of Man (bluebells), Morecambe Bay (shrimps), and Bishops Totterby, where Mrs Wilkinson spent her happy, simple girlhood. For these, and for all other mercies, he had to be duly thankful.

Mrs Wilkinson was also thankful – thankful for her Howard's devotion, steadiness, pleasure in the simple things of life, sunny
disposition, clean mind, and the entire confidence between them. These were public thanksgivings – at home she was captious and demanding. They made him a laughing stock among his schoolfellows, who addressed him as Bed Socks and asked if his bowels had worked yet; for the public thanksgivings were qualified by regrets that Howard had inherited his father's cold feet and sluggish liver.

Shakespeareanly speaking, Howard's liver was cold, too. He took his education in sexuality, theoretical and applied, as listlessly as though it were in English history. Mrs Wilkinson, doing her part later, was rather more successful. She chose an excursion to Lake Ullswater (honeymoon) to explain how simply and beautifully he was begun there, stressing that he must always respect women, because, though marriage is a beautiful relationship, the woman's part in it is painful and uncongenial, and only put up with for the sake of the little life to come. This quite new idea animated Howard. One day, he would assert himself, and get a bit of his own back.

On second thoughts, he returned to his intention of being a monk. As a monk, he would be quit of responsibility, there would be no women to please or pain, no little lives to worry him, he would call his cell his own, pray and eat at regular hours, fast in Lent, wear sandals, and be respected by everyone. When the moment was ripe, he would break it to his mother. But not till he was twenty-one. Meanwhile, he took a course in metallurgy, and got a post with Joskins, a local firm.

At twenty-four, he was still living at home, where Mrs Wilkinson, who was beginning to feel her age, spent many interesting hours wondering whom she would leave him to. Hearing that on the whole he would be happiest with Myra Leadbetter, Howard felt he must take a hand in his own disposal, and selected a clerk in the accountancy department. She had no immediate relations, parted her hair in the middle, and was old
enough not to be in any romantic hurry. On a wet Sunday, she jilted him. To regain his self-esteem he visited a brothel, where he got on better than he expected. On a later visit he overstayed any credibility of his pretext of working overtime. His mother switched her gaze from the clockface. “Howard!” (When angry, she pronounced it “How-word,” like clods falling on a coffin.) “You smell of cheap scent.” They glared at each other like two confronting animals. No more was said. From that justifying moment he began to feel faintly affectionate towards her, took her to the cinema from time to time, tolerated her fuss, her praises, her fits of ill temper and her hats, and by dint of feeling superior to her came to think of her as a credit to him. She died, leaving him considerably more than he expected. She also left him an interest in life – his grandfather's stamp collection. It had been totally forgotten, and was rather a good one.

Joskins was now part of a combine. In 1938 he got himself transferred to headquarters and moved to London.

Two years later, he wished he had not done so. The Blitz was not his mother; he could not outglare it. He was continually afraid. But as he was totally lacking in adrenaline, he acquired the reputation of being imperturbable. As he had flat feet and was short-sighted, he was able to go on being indispensable. He was twice evicted from his lodgings by blast from a nearby hit, and resorted miserably to the cellarage beneath his place of work. Rats resorted there, too. When there was a lull, he came back to the surface and found a bedsitting room in Pimlico. After the lull came the flying bombs.

There was no knowing where they would drop, and conversation at the eating house where he had his supper that evening in August was dominated by two statisticians, one arguing that this diminished the risk of being killed, the other that it increased it. He was walking back through the natural dark of blacked-out London when he heard the noise, the summer-cockchafer
approach of a V-1, persisting above the clatter of people running to get into the street shelter. It dropped on the public house at the corner. The air was full of dust, bricks, earth, splintered wood, broken glass; he was thumped and jostled; a woman clung to him and screamed in his face. Her open, screaming mouth was bare as a baby's. Slates, chimney pots, bits of masonry dislodged by the blast were falling all round. A swaying housefront suddenly fell out, like a toy. There was a strong smell of gas. Wardens and police made their way through the crowd, saying, “Move away, please. Room for the ambulance.”

He wandered back to his lodging house. The door had been blown in; a bath blocked the hallway. A faint light powdered down from a gash in the roof. Enough of the bottom flight of stairs remained for him to mount partway up it. From there he got a sight of his room. It was recognisably his, and the legs of a piano – the second-floor piano he had execrated – projected into it. Somewhere there was a slow dripping of water. He went back and sat down on the doorstep. The dark throng of people that had seemed part of the explosion thinned away. “It
would
go and drop on a public,” said a voice. Another voice replied that there had been a delivery that same morning. By this date, loss of liquor was more significant than loss of life. Other voices complained of the way wardens bossed you into rest centres as if they were sweeping you under the mat. The water dripped on. An ambulance clanged its way out of hearing. He fell into a miserable drowse. His head dropped forward, and as it did so he became aware of a pain in his cheek. He put his hand to the place; his fingers stumbled on a splinter of glass. He pulled it out and was holding his handkerchief to the gush of blood that followed it when a small beam of light wandered over him.