The Sibyl in Her Grave (22 page)

24 High Street
Parsons Haver
West Sussex

Christmas Day

Dear Ragwort,

I write in some despondency, more for my own consolation than your entertainment. Maurice is quite ill, seriously enough to be in hospital, though not so close to death’s door, according to my aunt and the doctors, as Daphne seems determined to believe.

The first sign we had of anything seriously wrong was yesterday morning. I had returned from posting my letter to you and acquiring, at my aunt’s suggestion, some nice-smelling soap and bath oil for Daphne, and was being rewarded for my efforts with a largish gin and tonic as a prelude to our modest lunch. (Modest, that is to say, by Reg’s
standards, not by mine.) Then Daphne arrived, in a state of tears and agitation.

Discovering the cause of her distress, though it was immediately clear that it had something to do with Maurice, took some little time. Words and tears poured from her in more or less equal measure, but without actually explaining what was the matter. It eventually appeared, however, that Maurice had called at the Rectory as he said he would, on his way home on the previous evening; shocked to see him still out of doors on such a cold night, Daphne had gone into the kitchen to make him a hot drink, leaving him sitting in the drawing room; when she returned, she found that he had gone—simply left the house without saying good night, or in any other way signifying his intention to depart. Seeing that the lights were now on at the Vicarage, she had run across there and rung the doorbell, intending to ask him what was wrong; but though she rang several times, there was no answer. She had then returned to the Rectory and attempted to telephone him; the telephone remained equally unanswered.

Neither Reg nor I could suggest an explanation for behaviour on Maurice’s part so entirely uncharacteristic.

“I know sometimes he doesn’t answer the telephone,” said Daphne, sitting on the sofa looking forlorn and liquescent. “When he’s working hard on something very important and has to think a lot about it, he doesn’t answer the telephone or the front door. But he’d only just got home, and he must have known it was me.”

In the morning, after, she said, a sleepless
night, she renewed her efforts, but Maurice’s telephone and his front doorbell for some time continued to be unanswered. When at last she did obtain a response, it was a distressing one: he leaned out from an upstairs window and shouted to her to go away.”He said he didn’t want to see me,” said Daphne, many times and with many sobs. “He said he didn’t want to see me ever again. He sounded so angry, and I can’t bear it, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I’ve done—if I knew, I could say I was sorry, and it would all be all right, but how can I say I’m sorry when I don’t know what it is?”

Please do not imagine that she said this only once, or only twice, or only three times. She repeated the same phrases, with variations of order and emphasis, over and over again, like the heroine of a grand opera delivering the principal aria, and conveyed a similar impression of being willing to go on doing so more or less indefinitely.

“Daphne,” said my aunt, after the question “Why is he so angry with me?” had been repeated for the fourteenth or fifteenth time, and voicing a thought which had also occurred to me, but had seemed a little heartless to express, “Daphne dear, don’t you think he may just have been a little irritated by your ringing so often at his doorbell when perhaps he didn’t want to be disturbed? He has to take the midnight service tonight, you know.”

“But he must have known it was me,” said Daphne pitifully.

“Well, yes—” said my aunt, with a note of dubiety in her voice.

“And he must have known it was only because I cared about him, and wanted to make sure he was all right.”

“Even so—” said my aunt, causing Daphne to burst into further floods of tears.

Although we all knew how unlike him it was to be unkind to anyone, it did not, I think, occur to any of us that his outburst might be a symptom of any physical illness. Reg, I need hardly say, invited Daphne to join us for lunch, and afterwards at long last persuaded her to return home, without making any further attempt to get in touch with Maurice. She would see him, said Reg, in the normal course of events, at lunch here on Christmas Day; by which time, if she did nothing further to remind him of it, he might well entirely have forgotten his vexation with her.

Thereafter the day passed peacefully until about half past ten, when Griselda and Ricky came round to be fortified for the midnight service with mince pies and mulled wine. When we had all consumed enough of these to be sure that our strength did not fail us, we trooped out into the churchyard and walked across to St. Ethel’s, which was looking very much at its best, ethereal and almost luminous in the bright moonlight.

We saw Maurice for a few moments on the way into church, but with no time for any proper conversation. We were all, I think, rather worried about how ill he looked—grey and gaunt and hollow eyed, much worse than he had the day before. There was a medicinal sort of smell about him, as of mothballs—I suppose from whatever he was
taking for his cold—and he was trembling slightly as if he had a fever.

“Oh Maurice,” said my aunt, “you ought to be at home in bed.”

As a seasoned churchgoer, you will not wish me to describe the service in detail, save to the extent that it appeared in any way to depart from what is usual on such occasions. I would ask you to remember that St. Ethel’s, though small, is considered by the discerning to be an unusually fine example of early Norman architecture; that my aunt had been responsible for the decorations and the arrangement of the crib, which were therefore unusually charming; and that the choir, having practised the carols, I am reliably informed, with exceptional assiduity for the past six weeks, may be presumed to have sung them with unusual sweetness. Subject to that, I think I am safe in saying that everything proceeded in a perfectly usual manner until Maurice, in his long white robe, entered the pulpit to address the congregation.

He began by telling us that we had gathered to celebrate the birth of a child—a divine child, who would bring new hope to the world and salvation for our sins. This seemed to be thought an unexceptionable opening, and in accordance with what the congregation expected. From there he went on to speak of various references in pre-Christian writers which had from time to time been interpreted as prophecies of that event, with particular reference to the fourth Eclogue of Virgil, commonly known on that account as the
Messianic Eclogue. This too the congregation seemed to find not unreasonable, no doubt feeling that an event which has been foretold by prophets must be of much greater significance than one merely recorded by historians.

“But we must beware of false prophets,” said Maurice, with great solemnity, and the congregation seemed to become slightly uneasy.

He paused for a few moments, as if puzzled at what he had said and uncertain how to proceed further, but then began to explain, with wonderful lucidity, the historical background to the composition of the fourth Eclogue, establishing conclusively that it was intended to refer to the prospective first child of the marriage between Mark Anthony and Octavia, rather than to the Christian Saviour. It was a very learned explanation, but perhaps a little on the long side for so late an hour on an evening of festivity: I became aware of the rustlings and shufflings which are the sign of a dissatisfied audience.

Then he warned us again, with even greater fervour than before, to beware of false prophets, and the uneasiness became palpable. Ricky, in a rather too audible whisper, asked if my aunt thought that Maurice “had taken a drop too much.” She shook her head and shushed him, but looked more anxious than ever.

It evidently occurred to Maurice at this stage that he might be thought to be accusing Virgil of being a false prophet, and the idea seemed to cause him much agitation and anguish. He had not, he said, at all intended to suggest that Virgil was a
false prophet. There were false prophets and we must beware of them, but Virgil was not of their number—Virgil was a true prophet. If he had said anything to imply otherwise, then he was very sorry for it, and must ask us to excuse him for misleading us, as he had been rather ill. Virgil was a true prophet, and a great poet, perhaps the greatest who had ever lived, and we must never doubt that he was divinely inspired.

It became clear to me that this was not at all a usual way for the Vicar to address his congregation—not, at any rate, at St. Ethel’s. Several people had half risen from their places as if contemplating some kind of intervention.

And then, his arms raised high and spread wide in their loose white sleeves, Maurice began to read aloud from the fourth Eclogue—or rather to recite, since it was clear that he knew the lines by heart. His voice now lost all trace of hoarseness and the syllables rolled out clear and resonant into the church, filling the vaulted roof with their thunderous grandeur and reaching their majestic climax in the lines
“Aspice, venturo laetentur ut omnia saeclo
.

There was for a few moments an absolute silence. He stepped down from the pulpit; stood for a moment facing us, looking down the aisle towards the main doorway; seemed to stagger; and lay prostrate, his arms still spread wide, looking like a huge white bird that has been shot down in flight across the sky.

Someone must have done something very efficient; an ambulance arrived in less than five
minutes. To make sure that Maurice was promptly attended to when he arrived at the hospital, my aunt went with him in the ambulance.

It was the sound of the siren, I suppose, that made Daphne aware of something being wrong. Just as the ambulance was leaving she came running across the churchyard from the Rectory, already distraught and wild-eyed, wanting to know what had happened, and saying “It’s Maurice, isn’t it? Something awful has happened to Maurice.” It would have been prudent, or so it seemed to me, to describe what had occurred in the least dramatic terms possible. Others, however, evidently did not share this opinion: she received a number of answers calculated to confirm her in the impression that Maurice was not merely ill but dying, if not already dead. These, as you may imagine, did not have a soothing effect.

Since she was wearing only her nightdress and a slightly moth-eaten woollen cardigan, it seemed likely that if she stayed out for long the next catastrophe would be her catching pneumonia. Eventually, however, Griselda and I persuaded her to come back here and wait for news and have some hot soup to warm her up.

We did our best to calm her down, but with little success. She continued to moan and sob and pummel herself with her fists, saying how terrible it was that Maurice was ill and she was not with him. She seemed to feel that someone should have sent for her to go with him in the ambulance: we ought to have known, she said, that she would want to be with him.

Reg arrived home a little after one in the morning. Ricky had driven to the hospital to collect her, stopping on the way to pick up various things that he thought Maurice might need, such as a pair of pyjamas. Ricky being Ricky, the package of essentials had included a bottle of whiskey.

By now almost convinced by Daphne’s lamentations that Maurice was on the point of death, Griselda and I were disproportionately relieved to hear that the doctors did not agree. Although they were not quite sure what exactly was wrong with him—they said that it was probably some kind of virus—they thought that it would have been relatively harmless if his general health had been better. The real problem, they said, was that he was desperately malnourished: poor Maurice, I told you that he looked like a skeleton. They had attached him to some sort of plastic tube, designed to save him the trouble of eating, and hoped that he would soon show signs of improvement.

It was still some considerable time before any of us actually went to bed. Daphne apparently assumed that all other arrangements for Christmas Day were automatically cancelled and that my aunt would drive her over to the hospital first thing in the morning: when Reg explained to her that it would not be right to cancel a lunch for twelve guests on account of the illness of one, and that therefore she did not intend to visit Maurice again until the afternoon, there ensued a longer and more tearful argument than I have energy to relate. At long last, however, Daphne went home, with Griselda and me to escort her on her way and each other on the way back.

On my return, I found that Reg had poured herself a generous measure of whiskey and had laid out the cards for a rather complicated form of patience. These things indicated to me, on the basis of past experience, that there was some element in the situation which she found problematic.

“I think I ought to tell you,” she said, having poured me a similar quantity of whiskey, “that I am not going to drive Daphne to the hospital tomorrow. Neither in the morning nor in the afternoon nor at any other time. Maurice doesn’t want to see her—I don’t know why, but he doesn’t. And the doctors say he mustn’t be upset.”

I asked, rather foolishly, whether she was sure that she had understood him correctly.