Passing On (11 page)

Giles returned. There was a bottle of brandy on the tray as well as the coffee. ‘You will, won’t you? We need warming up — that hall is arctic, I perish every Monday evening.’ He poured out, sat back at the other end of the sofa, looked at her. ‘Thank you so much for coming, Helen. Did you enjoy it? I kept taking quick glances but you always looked inscrutable. It went quite well, I thought — a bit shaky at points in the Britten. Good fun, anyway — but oh dear, people do nobble one, don’t they? It was wonderful having you as a defence. Provincial life is very demanding, don’t you find? All these nice people wanting you to join things. But of course you’ve known Spaxton for so long.’

‘Yes,’ said Helen. ‘I’m generally regarded as a lost cause by now.’

He laughed. ‘I wish I were! Anyway, you have your village to cope with — that must be quite enough. Except that you’re regarded as eccentric — is that right? You and your brother — I do want to meet your brother, by the way. I think I must cultivate eccentricity — would I make an eccentric?’ He beamed at her.

Charmingly. Helen gazed at him. The room lurked at the edges of her vision — chintz, pictures of woodlana or roses, that paperknife. No, she thought. Something else brooded, indefinable, padding doggily around; she tried to ignore it.

They drank the coffee, the brandy. Giles talked of Spaxton acquaintances, of a visit to the opera, of an entertaining incident in his office: bland impersonal discourse, given somehow an edge of intimacy. It seemed to Helen that the room became very warm and enclosed: she basked, as she later thought of it. And then suddenly it was midnight, a clock delicately chiming outside in the hall, and she was getting up, with him protesting — really quite fervently protesting. ‘No, I must,’ she said. ‘Edward will wonder where on earth . .

‘Then if you must, you must. Please drive carefully. I’m inclined to ring in half an hour to see you’ve got there safely, but I suppose I’d have your brother hopping out of bed.’ He helped her into her coat; again, his arm lay on her shoulders after he had done so. He escorted her out into the street, held the car door open for her, leaning in the window as she started the engine, exhorting caution. His hand closed on hers as it rested on the wheel: ‘Thank you again, my dear, God bless.’ And he turned and was gone, briskly, into the house.

Greystones, when she reached it, seemed even colder than usual. The lights were all out and Edward in bed. Helen, climbing the stairs, burned with a curious mixture of exaltation and foreboding.

‘You were very late last night. I didn’t even hear you come in.’

‘It was only about half past twelve. I went to that concert in Spaxton.’

‘Oh yes — with the lawyer. What on earth for?’ Edward added after a moment. ‘I mean, one pays lawyers, surely. There’s no need to go and hear them sing as well.’

Helen appeared to be distracted by the back of the cereal packet.

‘Well, it was very charitable of you,’ said Edward. ‘By the way, we’re out of bread. Is it my turn to shop or yours?’

‘Mine. Edward, if people phone when I’m not here do please remember to tell me.’

Edward looked across the table at her in mild surprise. ‘Of course. I thought I did. You always say you’re glad they didn’t catch you.’

Helen was now bent sternly over a shopping list. She had written ‘bread’ three times, Edward saw.

‘I never realised you felt like this, Edward,’ said Mrs Fitton petulantly. ‘It really is the most awful nuisance. Parents just don’t like it, you know — quite a lot of parents.’ From outside the window came the shrill piping sound of the juniors playing netball. The school secretary put her head round the door; ‘No!’ snapped the headmistress, ‘I’m in a meeting.’ She was a small round woman, puffed out with frilly blouses and an energetic hairstyle. When crises arose she went into a condition of sustained fizz; you almost expected bubbles to come popping out of her head. She was in this state now.

‘I mean, Mrs Willmot won’t be the only one — or rather, Mrs Willmot will see to it that she isn’t the only one. I wish you’d told me before, Edward, I mean, it’s entirely your own affair of course but if I’d known forewarned would have been forearmed and we could have avoided this sort of thing.’

‘You never asked me,’ said Edward reasonably.

‘Well, I suppose not … One just assumed … I mean, we are a C. of E. school. Oh dear — what a bother. And most other parents one could have calmed down — smoothed things over somehow — but Mrs Willmot, well, we know Mrs Willmot, don’t we? On the phone to all her cronies at this moment, I don’t doubt, and this is the year we hoped to get the swimming pool appeal off the ground.’

‘Sorry,’ said Edward.

‘What I can’t understand is why God had to be dragged into it in the first place. Can’t you simply leave that sort of thing out? I mean, tell them about natural selection and all that and don’t mention God. After all, it was biology, not Religious Education.

Charlotte Havering does R. E. She expects to cope with that side and she’s C. of E.’

‘I was leaving God out,’ said Edward. ‘The children brought Him in. Sandra Willmot, to be precise.’

‘Tiresome child. Well, the damage is done now. All we can do is hope that Mrs W. will cool off and in the meantime, Edward, I’m sorry but honestly I think Mary or Janice had better take over Junior Biology.’

There was a silence. Mrs Fitton began tetchily shuffling a pile of letters. Edward looked out of the window, where rooks beat across a turbulent sky. At last he said ‘I suppose really I should resign.’

Mrs Fitton bucked in her chair. ‘What nonsense, Edward.

What absolute nonsense. Of course you don’t even have to think of resigning. All right, we’re a C. of E. school but that doesn’t mean every single one of the staff has to be a signed up communicant. In fact come to that I myself… What I mean is, it’s a personal matter except in so far as it affects the syllabus. If you stick to English and History like you used to and … well, just avoid the issue … then we shan’t have any more problems.’

‘I don’t mean resign because I don’t believe in God,’ said Edward. ‘I mean resign because you won’t let me teach biology because I don’t believe in God.’

Mrs Fitton gazed at him. Her hands twitched on the letters; she blinked once or twice. ‘Well, that I simply wouldn’t have thought of. I don’t know what’s got into you, Edward, you don’t seem to be quite yourself. You can’t possibly resign. I won’t hear of it.’

‘Then can I teach biology?’

‘No!’ cried Mrs Fitton. ‘Edward, be reasonable!’

They stared at each other; Mrs Fitton crackling with emotion, Edward apparently tranquil. Behind Mrs Fitton’s head the rooks were now tossing and tumbling like blown leaves. It occurred to Edward that he knew little or nothing about rook behaviour.

‘You’re not serious?’ demanded Mrs Fitton wildly. ‘You’re not really going to resign?’

‘No,’ said Edward with a sigh. ‘I don’t suppose so.’

It was Helen who pointed out that Mrs Fitton would have been concerned about the newspapers, as well as with her regard for Edward and for Edward’s welfare.

Edward looked incredulous. ‘Would there really have been a fuss?’

‘Of course,’ said Helen. ‘Properly handled.’

‘It would almost have been worth it. Perhaps I’ll change my mind. I’d have been a martyr, wouldn’t I? Victimised for my beliefs. But that wretched Sandra would have had a field day too — her picture in the local rag in her best dress. No, it’s not worth it, on reflection.’

Helen made no comment.

‘You think I should have done, don’t you?’

‘Most people would have, I suppose.’

‘But not me,’ said Edward with sudden bitterness. ‘Oh, I know, I know. The thought of finding another job… And it all seemed so silly. And I know perfectly well Croxford is a crummy school, but it suits me and I suit it, which doesn’t say a lot for either of us.’ He was pulling on his anorak now, no longer even apparently tranquil. ‘I’m going out for a bit.’

He drove to a favourite spot and walked, in the late afternoon, up the long flank of a hillside, in the lea of an old hedgebank. On one side of him was the complex inhabited thicket of the hedge in which flocks of bullfinches competed for fodder and invisibly singing warblers were stationed at thirty-yard intervals; on the other was a great sloping reach of field, the earth a reddish copper colour and patterned like a Japanese garden with the swirls and furrows left by machinery. The sun, a scarlet disc, was perched just above the horizon. The land folded in on itself as far as you could see — green and brown hillsides sinking down in repetition, marked by the dark masses of trees and hedges.

Here and there a grey farmhouse or cottage was tucked into a hollow. In the far distance was the blue outline of yet further hills. The impression was of some sparsely populated, unchanging landscape; it was hard to realise that Birmingham was less than thirty miles away.

At the top of the hill the bridle-path entered a small copse.

Immediately, the sense of distance gave way to intimacy and detail. Edward stood still; he had once seen a whole flock of long tailed tits here, swinging like pink jewels among the flickering leaves of a silver birch. He told himself that this was what he was now searching for again.

In fact he was waiting for the place, its calm and its unconcern, to make him feel better. To make him feel less alone, less disturbed, less hungry. He was howling once more, within. And the place did nothing, nothing at all. It simply went about its business. And its business, of course, at this fecund point of the year, was that of survival — survival and reproduction. As Edward looked around he saw everything determinedly perpetuating itself — buds forming, leaves unfurling, seeds setting, the whole place off again on the same mindless uncaring cycle, while Edward stood there in the midst of it, quite alone.

SIX

‘I been having a little think,’ said Ron Paget. ‘About your patch of waste ground.’

Edward and Helen gazed at him without expression, a practised process. They were all three standing in the lane outside Greystones. Ron had pounced from his car, screeching to a halt ten yards ahead of them. He had opened with a solicitous enquiry as to whether young Gary was giving satisfaction.

‘I mean,’ he continued, ‘it’s a bit of an albatross, isn’t it? The upkeep and that. What I was thinking was . .

‘We don’t keep it up,’ said Edward. ‘It keeps itself up.’

Ron shook his head censoriously. ‘That’s just the point, Mr Glover, if I may say so. There’s a lot of work needs doing in there. You’ve got dead and diseased trees need felling, you’ve got bramble and stuff needs clearing out. It’s not healthy, the way it is. But with a bit of money spent you could have a nice little spinney there — be pretty in the spring. You could do a bit of landscape planting, azaleas and rhododendrons and that, camellias maybe — you know, like your National Trust sort of place.’

‘Those things don’t grow on limestone soil,’ said Helen.

Ron opened his mouth and then closed it again. Behind him the engine of his new red Rover was still running — a barely audible hum. Ron stepped aside, opened the door and turned the Ignition. ‘Point is, to do something about the place you need finance, right? I know what it’s like these days — we’re all stretched as far as we can go’ — he sighed — ‘but I’ve had a little think and I see a way round it for you. Now you’ve got quite an area there — two acres, is it, two and a half? What you do is you make one half of it finance the other. You do a little development on the far side — three, four nice houses, something along those

lines. I can see to all the nitty-gritty for you — I know you’re not a family for bothering your heads with that sort of thing, you’ve got better things to do. I can handle it for you and see you clear enough to lay yourselves out something really nice with what’s left, really classy bit of landscaping. And a fair bit left over to put away for a rainy day, I daresay.’

‘No,’ said Edward.

Ron looked sadly at him. ‘You’re saying that off the top of your head, Mr Glover. Think it over. There’s the question of what’s good for the community, too. You’d be doing the community a favour. Desperate shortage of housing these days.’

‘Was it council houses you had in mind?’ asked Helen.

‘Well, no,’ said Ron. ‘I mean, what’s needed in the village is more by way of quality housing, isn’t it? Another nice little executive estate, like the Barratt.’

‘I don’t see that as fulfilling a social need,’ said Helen.

Ron gave her a bad-tempered look. There was a sense of time and patience running out. He opened the car door and got in.

The engine purred again. The driver’s window slid down; ‘Well, think about it, anyway. It would be in your own best interests, believe me.’

The Rover accelerated round the bend. Edward, who had seemed despondent hitherto that morning, laughed. ‘You have to hand it to him, he’s never short of a new idea.’

They were on their way to the churchyard. The firm from whom the gravestone had been commissioned had telephoned about dimensions and other details. Having reached the initial, simple decision about lettering (plain, unadorned and to the point) and material (unpolished limestone slab) they were now floored over questions of layout and surroundings. Did they want chippings? Did they want a flower container?

They walked slowly up the church path, past the old graves, those so seared by time and weather that they stood as grey shapes furred with lichen, names and dates no longer legible, uniform in obscurity. Where the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave way to the nineteenth, things became crisper: you read of a profusion of Elizas and Thomases, of beloved wives and lamented parents: white marble crept in with the grey limestone.

It was round the back of the church, though, where the more recent graves reached away to an expectant area of bare grass ending at the village allotments, that variety and self-expression were rampant.

‘I realise what chippings are now,’ said Edward. ‘No. Definitely not.’

Most of the newer gravestones presided over a neat granite edged rectangle packed with green crystal chips. The effect, from a distance, was disconcertingly like a series of little swimming-pools.