The Haunted Storm (12 page)

“I know what it means to be demonic, and angelic – yes, yes, let’s go into the desert, Elizabeth! Or at least let’s make a start now, today. God! I didn’t know when I came to Barton that I’d find love and Puritanism – sex and morality – all on the same day, all mixed up together, like this… Ah,” he sighed, leaning on the gate and staring sightlessly down the road, “now we’ve… cleared the air, we can start our life. Yes? What shall we say first? What shall we find out about each other?”

“I’m not married,” she said – almost defiantly, he thought, and it puzzled him for a second until he remembered what he’d said a few minutes before. They looked at each other and smiled, and slowly began to feel, as they went out into the road and wandered along up the slope of the hill with their hands firmly locked together, not more confident, not more at ease: but somehow, slowly and imperceptibly, more
at one
than either of them had ever felt in their lives before.

And so, gradually, they learnt the obvious little facts about each other that afternoon, the surface facts, the trivia. She at first wanted to know nothing, or very little, but he pestered her gently with an almost feminine regard for what she had done, where she had been to school, what her parents were like, and so on. He learned that she’d read English at the University of London, and that she now worked in a second-hand bookshop in Silminster, and that she’d thought of training to be a pianist, and that her mother was Welsh; and he told her in return that he’d read Spanish and French at Oxford, and that out of desperation when he came down he had nearly followed the tradition of his father’s family and entered the Army; and she laughed wholeheartedly at this, and teased him.

“But Elizabeth,” he said later, when they were nearly back in the village again: he stopped, and turned to her, and she saw that he was serious: “we won’t forget, will we? It won’t just wash over us and disappear and leave us empty-handed again, will it?”

“Oh, Matthew,” she said, “don’t ever dream that I’d be faithless. Not now! You might forget and fail, but I won’t. No, dear, don’t misunderstand; I don’t think you will, I wasn’t saying that. But you didn’t have to ask, that’s all I meant.”

“I’m sorry,” he said foolishly, “I didn’t think… I swear – I swear I’ll be faithful to everything, to our brother-and sisterhood, for ever. Now let’s kiss again.”

They kissed; and as they came back into the village the rain thickened and began to fall steadily. The light was now; the afternoon was nearly over. A police car passed them on the way up the hill.

Chapter 6

Canon Thomas Cole arrived back at the rectory at half-past five. He had been visiting one of his parishioners, an old spinster who was ill; normally, for some unfathomable reason, he liked her and enjoyed her company, but he resented having to go to her this afternoon, because he had meant to spend some time at the well in Ditton Wood. Just as he was setting out, however, his wife remembered Miss Harrison; and, annoyed, he put the car back in the garage and set out on foot.

He was speedily roused to anger – or petulance, as it often seemed to his wife – but he was not vindictive, except when he was afraid, and he was certainly not afraid of Miss Harrison. Consequently he had almost forgotten his annoyance with her and her niece. When he was with women – particularly old unmarried women – he tended quite unconsciously to drop the rather mannered theatricality which had so surprised Matthew in him, and to put on instead the affectations, and even to a small degree the appearance, of an old woman himself. He did not flirt with them, as some parsons did; he imitated them, without knowing it, subtly and sincerely; and, also without knowing it, they were flattered, and enjoyed his company.

He had tea with them, and then left, having become Canon Cole again and resumed something of his annoyance. He could not quite place it: perhaps it was a belated frustration about his plans for the afternoon, perhaps something more deep-seated. He did not enquire very closely into his own feelings, as a rule, because he exteriorised them so thoroughly and successfully. The world, to him, was very vivid. But as he turned in to the rectory drive he realised suddenly what it was, and his annoyance gave way to apprehension. It was only that he had made an appointment with that boy, Matthew Cortez, for the evening. He wondered what he would find to say. As a priest he was used to receiving strangers in his house and being engaged in wearisome neurotic chatter. When he was younger he had done his best to get used to it, but he never liked it. He realised that people needed help, and that it was his duty to provide it; but only a duty, and not an inclination. He had only joined the church because of the opportunity it seemed to offer for the pursuit of scholarship. A university would not do; his scholarship was of a particularly fastidious, obsessive, even crazy kind which was best, perhaps, kept private and obscure. In another century he would have been an alchemist.

He would not have become a priest at all if he had not had some money of his own; for to concern himself with a hundred necessary petty economies and to witness the slow encroachment of shabbiness and dinginess into his life would have been an agony for him.

But Cortez; he would be a sounding-board, at least, if he did not fuss and fret about things. The Canon was embarrassed to find that he hoped Cortez would like him, that they’d get on together. Elizabeth these days was so hard, so hard to approach; and as for Gwen, his wife, she was – she could be very cruel. The air, the atmosphere between them had been silent for a long time.

He opened the front door of the rectory and heard Gwen call out “Is that you, Elizabeth?” He shut it quietly behind him and took his coat off before answering.

“It’s me,” he said loudly. “Where is she?”

“She said she’d be back at four o’clock to help me with the W.I.,” said Gwen, coming into the hall. “I had to do it all by myself.”

“Where did she go?”

“Gracious, I don’t know. Do you want a cup of tea now or will you wait for supper?”

“No, no, I’ll wait. What – oh, no, it doesn’t matter. I’m worried, with all these policemen about; I suppose they’re necessary. It’1l be dark before long.”

“It’s not the policemen you ought to worry about…” she began, but he had already gone into the sitting-room.

“Yes, I’m aware of that,” he called back to her.

She said nothing else; he imagined she had gone back into the kitchen, and felt secretly and absurdly guilty for a second; but then immediately he was worried again. Supposing Elizabeth had wandered too far over the moors and had met the murderer? They hadn’t caught him yet, they hadn’t even got any clues; he could be anywhere. It might be one of the men from the village – there was that half-wit – what was his name – Archer. They could never tell, in cases like this, he’d read, sex-murders… he grimaced in voluntarily, and felt a rush of compassion both for the murdered girl and for her family, mingled with an intense, biting curiosity about the murderer and a fear for Elizabeth; and he sat quite still, stiff in his armchair for over a minute, while his eyes darted this way and that in the confusion of his feelings. Then he relaxed and sat back.

He could not sit still for long. He did not know whether he was glad to be alone for a while or tormented by the absence of others; he felt now one thing, now the other, and after a few minutes the second feeling prevailed. Gwen was deliberately ignoring him. It was plain that she would have preferred it to have been Elizabeth coming in a few minutes before; she took little trouble to hide her dislike of him. Unhappily he got up and wandered about the room, staring out into the gathering darkness but seeing only his own re flection looking back at him. “Oh Gwen,” he muttered, and turned abruptly to go into the kitchen.

She was drying her hands on a towel; she started with alarm when he appeared in the doorway.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“You startled me; isn’t it obvious?”

“Why should it startle you to see your husband in the doorway?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

She hung the towel over the line, straightening it methodically until it was absolutely in the centre. He stood and watched her as she opened the door of the larder and took out a basket of eggs; she put it slowly on the table and then turned to face him.

“What is it you want?”

“Where is she?” he said. “Do you know, honestly, or don’t you?”

“Don’t be absurd, Thomas. Of course I don’t know where she is. If you want me to be angry with you, I can’t; I’m too tired, I’m not interested, and I’ve given it up. Why, in heaven’s name… no, I’m not going to ask questions either. It’s a stupid way of carrying on, answering one question with another, questions, questions the whole time, irritable questions; and they don’t mean anything, either.”

“Gwen, Gwen, my love! It’s not
my
doing! I was worried, I was frightened. You
know
I get frightened more easily than you do. There are so many things that can go wrong. Look, look at that darkness out there!”

He pointed at the kitchen window, and again saw nothing but himself, suspended in the brightly-lit kitchen like a ghost over the blackness.

“You’re acting like a stupid child. You
are
a child, with your endless posturing and acting in front of mirrors,” she said bitterly. “You like to annoy me, it makes you think you’re real, doesn’t it. You can pretend it’s important if you get a reaction out of me, and that’s the only reason you do it for, I know, after all; but you’re hollow, you’re completely empty. Don’t try and start an argument now, I’ve had enough.”

“Well, you know, that’s typical; I mean to say you insult me and you hurt me and then you don’t allow me to begin to defend myself – you accuse me of trying to start an argument before I’d even opened my mouth to protest- Gwen, it makes my blood boil, it really does.”

He leant forward with his clenched fists resting on the table. She looked at him coldly. He went on as if he had just thought of something else:

“But no – no, let’s be accurate about it: I’m angry with you now, yes, but we were talking about Elizabeth, weren’t we? Now if you can forget your temper for a few minutes, hadn’t we better try and find her?”

She said nothing. He stared at her for a second, and then banged his fist on the table.

“Come along, woman! What are you going to do?”

She shrugged, “Nothing at all, I suppose. What is there to be done? It was your idea. I can’t do your thinking for you, Thomas. Not as well as everything else I do. All right, I know you’re afraid; I’m sorry for you, being such a coward. But I’m not going to join in your cowardice, I’m not going to share it, I’m not going to join in your charades; not any more. A hundred times, a thousand times I’ve told you, no, I will not go mad with you; do you hear me? You’d like me to, though, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you like me to come with you into your obscurities, into your coldness, and sleep with you there? Wouldn’t you like to make love to me, with me disguised as someone else? That’s at the bottom of it, I know it is.”

He stared at her, fascinated despite his disgust… Gwen moved habitually in the centre of a sexual-maternal field of emotion that repelled him, that stifled him, that had done ever since he had married her, but which he had never entirely thrown off, or dared to; she, for her part, was only too aware of her husband’s Manichaean loathing for the flesh and for fleshly emotions, and she had tried time and time again, with a bewildering variety of stratagems born out of desperation, to engage him once and for all in a love relationship that was entirely human. She had always failed, and so had tried, after years and years of it, to live through Elizabeth’s emotions instead, encouraging her to make friends and, as far as she could, to fall in love; but in recent months she had been haunted by the fear that Elizabeth was cast in her father’s mould and that she would fail there too, and this fear drove her back with a passionate intentness to her first struggle, the struggle for the soul of her husband. She feared and hated the God he worshipped. She would have destroyed Him, if she could; she had no compunction about that. He was not the God she had believed in, but another darker colder one, who had usurped her and who mocked her daily from her husband’s eyes, and lately from the eyes of her daughter.

Canon Cole was only aware of the feeling of suffocation that the thoughts of love and warmth aroused in him, the feelings that his wife embodied and seemed to demand. And yet, all the same, he was fond of her, he was used to her, and in a way it could be said that his will lived off the tension between them over this question, that it fuelled him and spurred him on. There were occasions when the warm sexual field centred around her hypnotised him and drew him in despite himself, times when his mind ran riot in extreme sensuality, and each time it happened she thought she had won him forever; but each time she was disappointed.

They stood facing each other now, and their quarrel might have taken any of a dozen different courses. But just then, quite suddenly and calmly, the kitchen door opened and Elizabeth came in, her raincoat slung over her shoulder. There was a little frown on her face as if she were expecting to have to deal with two children who were fighting. “Hello,” she said. “I’m sorry I forgot the W.I., mummy. I hope you weren’t too busy.”

“Busier than I might have been,” said Gwen.

“Where on earth have you been?” said Canon Cole.

“Walking,” she said. “Why? Has anything happened? What’s the matter?”

“Really, Elizabeth, I was worried! What with this dreadful business –” he said. “You must be careful not to be out at night. You must promise, now, until they’ve caught this man, you can’t take risks, it’s absurd.”

Gwen stood up and took some eggs out of the basket and began to busy herself with preparing supper.

“Of course I’m careful,” said Elizabeth “But heaven knows there are enough policemen about. They’re like a plague of cockroaches. You can’t move without stepping on them.”

“Even so, I do not like to think of you wandering about in the darkness – no, I won’t go on about it. Just please be careful, or let us know where you’re going, at least.”