Judgment Day (18 page)

“There's sea,” said George savagely, “at Weston-super-Mare and Bournemouth.”

Mrs. Tanner looked at him with dignity. “They think at the clinic I'm doing so nicely I can probably take it. It'll be a challenge, the doctor says. It's tackling things little by little, that's the secret. Made any plans for your holidays yet, Vicar?”

George muttered that he'd probably go up to Scarborough for a week or so to see his mother.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Tanner. “Well, that's quite pleasant I should imagine if you've nothing special arranged. I'll get going on the kitchen, then.”

He would, as for the last five years, since Frank Brim-low with whom he was at college had married a fifty-year-old widow and ceased to be available for walking tours of the Lakes, spend a week in Scarborough and a weekend in Leeds. In Scarborough he would shuffle the length of the sea-front with his mother, watch the Test on television, and put new washers on her taps. In Leeds he would stay two nights with his other college friend, in a house rowdy with children, and wonder if his visits were indeed as welcome as they were made out to be.

Last year, his mother had been in the hospital at the time of his visit. Gastric trouble. He went to see her daily, walking the length of the ward to the bed at the end in which she sat, wearing a salmon-colored nightdress. He found these walks excruciating, past the rows of swiveling eyes, the coveys of pretty, busy, confident nurses, the patients from whom sprouted disconcerting arrangements of tubes and colored plastic bags, at which he carefully did not look. His mother would inspect his daily offerings of grapes or flowers and take up the theme of complaint, criticism, and erosion of any signs of complacency. “That's a nice bunch of grapes. I wonder there aren't peaches in the shops yet. You'd do well to keep out of the sun, with your skin. I can see you've been out too long, you're shining like a beacon. It was the same when you were a child—no good letting you play hours on the beach like all the others, red and raw you'd be, and I'd be up all night with
the calamine lotion.” Lowering her voice a little, she would embark on a rundown of her neighbors by social status and medical condition. “The one in the next bed's got a husband who's a racing driver. You meet all kinds, in hospital, it's interesting, I'll say that. I've not had an interesting life, your father was a stay-at-home sort of man, not ambitious either, he could have made more of himself, but he wouldn't set about it. And then with just the one child, and you were a quiet sort of boy, you kept to yourself a lot. I've not been extended. And with no grandchildren to take me out of myself.”

George would sit, mainly silent. Visiting hours two-thirty to four.

“The chaplain's very nice. He's a real live wire. He has the nurses in fits sometimes. He's young, of course, nice-looking fellow.”

Dear Mother, he wrote, unfortunately I shan't be able to fit in my visit to you this summer. My new next-door neighbors, some people called Paling—I don't know if I mentioned them, he's an executive with United Electronics and she is an intelligent sort of woman, turning out a valuable helping hand over church matters—anyway, they've asked me to come along with them for a fortnight or so to this cottage they have in Wales. Peter may have to go off for a while on business and I daresay he feels he'd like to have someone around as company for Clare and the children. So, as I say, I'm afraid…

Dear Mother, I will be up on Friday 27 th as planned, arriving Scarborough on the two-thirty train.

*  *  *

Martin sat in the place at the end of the garden, his old hiding place in the bushes from when he was young, and
thought about it. Thought about what she'd said. Did he want to or didn't he? Did he want to go to Spain with her and Auntie Judy and some other people, or didn't he? Mr. Porter had said he could stay here with him if he liked.

There would be a beach in Spain, and a swimming pool. Spain was abroad. You'd go in an aeroplane. Auntie Judy would be there. He didn't really like Auntie Judy very much: she giggled a lot and whispered things to Mum and she smelled of scent all the time. And Dad wasn't going to come, Mum said. When Martin had said, “Why? Why isn't he coming?” she'd said sharply, “Maybe we don't want him.” So he wasn't coming but these other people were.

If he stayed here he could sleep in Mr. Porter's spare room and it would be all right. Mr. Porter didn't bother you, he just got on with things, but he knew good card tricks and he liked playing Halma and Attack! And he cooked good dinners, better than Mum actually; he'd stand at the stove with everything arranged round him just so, the fat and the salt and milk, frowning a bit and tutting if things weren't going right.

He wanted to be with Mum, and yet at the same time he didn't. It made him feel funny, the way she was nowadays, the things she said; he was getting his stomachaches again.

He thought he'd say he didn't want to go to Spain. He'd stay here and play cards with Mr. Porter and go over to Tom's house and ride the new bike round the Green. He'd got the new bike, anyway. The red bike. The bike Dad sent.

Chapter Eleven

“You're mincing,” said the lady from the drama group. She sprang athletically from her perch on the back of a pew and advanced on Ray Turnbull, the hairdresser, black-sideburned and tight-waistcoated as the Georgian squire. “You're behaving as though you were in drag. Give him a bit of
machismo
.” She strode down the nave, miming the virility of status. The Swing rioters slouched on the chancel steps.

Miss Bellingham, in Puritan costume, voiced misgivings from the back of the church. “In York they used to do these mystery plays for the Festival. All very charming
and medieval. I suggested something along those lines for us but of course no one else would hear of it.”

“In the Middle Ages,” said Clare, “they boiled people in oil. They also dropped them off castles, impaled them, and flayed them alive. It wasn't universally charming.”

Miss Bellingham, smoothing the crisp white Dacron of a cuff, remarked that some people had a passion for looking on the gloomy side of things.

It was hot. Outside, the Green baked in torrid sunshine, the trees sagging in the still air, the tarmac sticky underfoot. Even the church had lost its stony coolness and felt clammy; its smell was different, too—no longer that universal church aroma of brass polish, damp hymnals, and dusty hassocks but a more pungent human smell of sweat and hair lacquer.

Sydney Porter, coming in, was taken aback. Until this moment, the first costume rehearsal on the spot, with lighting and so forth, he hadn't quite reckoned what it would be like. He was reminded of concert parties at Portsmouth in the war: people in the mess done up in fancy dress for a song and dance routine. He joined Mrs. Paling, standing by a pillar at the door, and watched Ray Turnbull stride up the nave once more and confront the rioters, strung out now behind the altar rail in attitudes of belligerence. He said doubtfully, “You can't help wondering if it's anything like it was—I mean, the actual time.”

“Quite. Never mind. That's not the point, really.”

Ray Turnbull muffed a line and there was general laughter. Sydney looked away and muttered something.

“Sorry?”

“I said you can't help feeling a bit it's not quite right, this sort of thing. Not respectful. After all it actually happened
to those blokes, them that were shot, the ones that were sent to Tasmania.”

“That's the awful thing about the past. It's true.”

“You think,” Sydney went on after a moment, “about how it might have been you or me.”

“Exactly.” They watched, together, as Ray Turnbull harangued the rioters. “Hold it,” said the lady from the drama group. “I'm not happy about the grouping. Can you shift left a bit, darling?”

“But the thing is,” Clare continued, “that it's not much more of a manipulation or distortion than lots of other things. The past is always our own projection—in a sense it's quite unreal anyway.”

Sydney grunted, non-committal.

“Up to a point, we always invent it. I mean, the real past is no longer accessible, because you can never divest it of our own wisdoms and misconceptions. Like Miss Bellingham probably has Marks & Spencer's knickers on under her costume, and Ray Turnbul's forgotten to take his digital watch off.”

Sydney shuffled awkwardly. He didn't know about Miss Bellingham's knickers, nor want to, and Mrs. Paling was getting a bit involved for his taste. “Well,” he said, “I'd better have a word with Mr. Radwell. This stuff should be through from the printers for the programs.” He moved away and stood waiting for the vicar to finish talking to one of the electricians, a boy in jeans and a purple T-shirt who squatted on the floor, unreeling flex and whistling through his teeth.

Sunshine, streaking slantwise through the clerestory windows, fell like spot lighting on the Doom wall painting so that Sydney saw its details more sharply than ever before:
the gray spectral figures, the spry, grinning red devils. He didn't believe in hell himself, nor heaven either, not put like that. But, looking at the painting, he heard again the whine of bombs in Portsmouth harbor, the rattle of gunfire at sea, saw the smoking shell of Mansell Road. Beneath the crossing arch, Ray Turnbull and the Swing rioters played out their charade. Sydney wondered if this pageant had been all that good an idea after all. Well, they were into it now, and if it brought in the money, there was no harm done.

George could only follow one word in three of what the electrician said. Technicalities were compounded with colloquialisms. “The thing is,” said George, “we'd rather not have all these wires showing above the pulpit.” The boy nodded, intent on something else. “O.K., squire, not to worry.”

The church, draped in flex, resembled the wings of a stage; spotlights clustered like exotic fruit around the capitals and at the apex of windows. From time to time, as they were tested, one section or another of the building would leap into brilliant relief, even amid the hazy sunshine: pulpit, font, altar, or doorway. The whole place, George realized, had been skillfully transformed; it had become a setting, the backdrop for events. Uneasily, he wandered into the nave, noticing the changed smell and the unfamiliar noises; were it not that this kind of thing was a commonplace nowadays, and well thought of, he would have had qualms about the wisdom of it all. At St. Mary's in Spelbury they had concerts every first Saturday of the month, and St. Damian's at Tamerton had been given over for a fortnight last summer to that art exhibition for the festival: orange and scarlet plastic sculptures
all down the aisle and the chancel hung with pictures made of raffia and bits of cut-up clothing. He stood staring at the lady from the drama group, who wore a long flowery skirt and what seemed to George to be the top half of a bathing costume. Beside him, Sydney Porter was saying something about programs.

*  *  *

The children, Thomas, Anna, and Martin, squatted behind the big stone tomb at the end of the churchyard and argued, halfheartedly, about what to do next.

Thomas said, “We could watch them playing dressing-up in the church.”

“It's not playing, you stupid. It's acting. They're acting real things that happened.”

Thomas, rolling on his back, sucked a grass stem. “Stupid yourself. That's a play. A thing people act is a play. So they're playing. So ha ha.”

“I'm thirsty,” said Anna.

“So am I thirsty.”

“We could go back to the house and get iced drinks from the fridge. She's in the church with the others, I saw her go in.”

“We could have a go on Martin's bike.”

“Can I have first go on your bike, Martin?”

And Martin, a person of subtly enhanced status, exercised carefully and fairly his powers of patronage. Presently, in the endless sultry evening, the children speed round and round the Green, in turn, on the red bike with a racing saddle and dynamo lights, while, within the church, their elders simulate emotion and involvement and tempers grow short.

*  *  *

Sydney had drawn up a menu for the fortnight. He would know where he was then, with the shopping, and the boy would get things in the right order, not too much of anything, a bit of fish for midweek, a small roast at the weekend, stews and the odd fry-up in between. The menu, in Sydney's neat script, hung above the kitchen dresser: “Tuesday dinner—chops & veg. Tea—ham & salad, treacle tart.” Against this, in a childish hand, was penciled, “Chips too?” Sydney grinned, unloading groceries. There was an unfamiliar sound in the house; it was a moment or two before he realized it was himself, humming. It was a beautiful day, sun pouring into the room, the world outside a pleasure to behold, bright and fresh and clean.

*  *  *

It was going to be too hot again. George, getting up with a headache, looked out onto the Green and saw the trees standing already in pools of shade and a heat-haze shimmering above the road. The headache was the product of a restless night, which had in turn arisen from the rehearsal, continuing too late and with gathering acrimony. The younger members of the cast, the various extras and helpers, had got bored and started larking about. The lady from the drama group fell out with Ray Turnbull and others, pitching standards over and beyond what was thought appropriate. “It's not bloody Stratford, you know,” someone said, not
sotto voce
enough. The lady from the drama group threatened resignation; John Coggan and Harry Taylor succeeded in persuading her not to.
Mrs. Paling, throughout, leaned against a pillar at the back of the church, looking amused.