“An accident can’t be helped. War is deliberate.”
“Yes, of course … So you haven’t ever found anyone to tell?”
He shook his head.
“Then what about me?” She reached for his hand and drew him unresisting to a seat. “I know you think of India as an old unchanging land, but there are more things in England that haven’t changed than most people are prepared to admit. Under the veneer of ‘tradition’ and ‘ancient custom’ there remain the superstitions that were once a religious faith. Isn’t the central mystery of Christianity a human sacrifice? And, come to that, communion involves symbolic cannibalism!”
“What would your grandfather say if—?”
“If he heard me talking like this? He’d accuse me of plagiarism.”
“You mean it was he who—?”
“He’s a very broad-minded person. Hadn’t you noticed? Why do you think I can spend so much time unchaperoned?”
Ernest looked a desperate question that he did not dare to formulate in words.
“I can read your thoughts from your face,” Alice murmured. “Did he know about me and Gerald? I don’t know. I never asked. I never shall. He very likely guessed, but he never behaved any differently towards me, and when the bad news came”—a quiver in her voice—“he was wonderful … Are you jealous of Gerald?”
“No. Sometimes I wonder why not. But I can’t be. I find myself wishing that I’d met him. I think we’d have been friends.”
“I think so, too.” She squeezed his hand. “Now tell me what you couldn’t say to anyone before.”
“I’ll try,” he whispered. “I will try …”
And out it came, like pus from a boiclass="underline" the remembered and the imaginary horrors, the images from a borderland between nightmare come alive and reality become nightmare; what it was like to realise you were obeying the orders of a crazy man, and had no escape from them; how it felt to choke one’s guts up in a gale of poison gas, to watch one’s comrades’ very bodies rotting in the putrefaction of the sodden trenches, to shake a man’s hand knowing it must be for the last time, for impersonal odds decreed that one or the other of you would be dead by sundown; taking aim at an enemy sniper spotted in a treetop or a belfry, as coolly as at a sitting rabbit, and not remembering until the flailing arms had vanished that the target was a human being like oneself …
And endlessly the howling-crashing of the shells, the chatter of machine guns, the racket, the hell-spawned racket that had silenced the very songbirds in the man-made desolation all around.
She sat very still, face pale in the dim light, without expression, never letting go his hand no matter how he cramped her fingers. When he finished he was crying, tears creeping down his cheeks like insects.
But he felt purged. And what she said, as she drew him close and kissed his tears away, was this:
“I met a woman from London who visited the Hall during the war. She called on us and boasted about her ‘war work.’ It consisted in handing out white feathers to men who weren’t in uniform. I remember how I wished I could have kidnapped her and sent her to the Front with the VAD’s.”
He said, completely unexpectedly, “I love you.”
“Yes. I know,” was her reply. “I’m glad.”
“You—knew?”
“Oh, my dear!” She let go his hand at last and leaned back, laughing aloud. “That’s something that you’ve never learned to hide! The talk in the servants’ hall has been of nothing else all week, and all around the village, I imagine. Your aunt, I hear, is absolutely scandalised, but since her setback vis-à-vis the bishop—”
“Stop, for pity’s sake! You’re making my head spin!”
At once she was contrite.
“Yes, of course. It was a dreadful thing to pour your heart out as you did, and I should have left you in peace immediately. But”—she was rising and withdrawing—“if anyone has bad dreams tonight, let it be me who wasn’t there and wished she could have been, to help.”
And she was gone, as instantly as the embodiment of …
Suddenly I know who She is, that Gaffer Tatton spoke of. The thought came unbidden. It seemed to echo from the waters that underlay the hill, and phrases from childhood crowded his mind: the waters beneath the earth …
Also he remembered Kali, garlanded with human skulls, and could not stop himself from shuddering.
“Well, Mr. Ernest!” Hiram Stoddard said. “What do you think of what we’ve made out of your sketches? Have we done them justice?”
Ernest stared at the three great boards on which his designs had been interpreted by pressing odds and ends, all natural, into white soft clay. Half his mind wanted to say that this wasn’t what he had envisaged, this transformation into bones and leaves and cones and feathers—yet the other, perhaps the older and the wiser half, approved at once. How ingeniously, for example, in every case, they had caught the implication of another, older woman’s half-turned back as she spurned the central figure, calling her a sinner justifiably due for punishment! Indeed, they had added something by taking something away. His detestation of his aunt had led him, as he abruptly recognised, to give too much emphasis to her effigy. Now, as he studied the pictures ranked before him, he noticed that the villagers had left her prominent in the first that would be blessed tomorrow, reduced her in the second, left her isolated in a corner of the third which would be set in Old Well Road …
Primitive it may be, he thought. But many of the major French artists, and not a few of our own, have turned to the art not just of primitives but of savages in recent years. Maybe it’s because of the savagery we so-called civilised nations have proved capable of … Yes, they’re right. Their changes are correct.
He said as much aloud, and those who had been anxiously standing by relaxed and set off to install the boards at their appointed places, ready for tomorrow morning’s ceremony. Only at the last moment did it occur to him that he must take one final glance.
Checking in dismay as he called them back, they waited for his ultimate verdict.
But it was all right after all. He already knew that the resemblance between the main female figures and Alice had been efficiently disguised by its interpretation into whatever could be pressed into the clay, with pebbles for eyes and twigs and leaves for hair. For a moment, though, he had been afraid that he might have put too much of himself into the other major figure, who was Jesus …
“Don’t you fret, sir,” muttered Gaffer Tatton at his side, arriving heralded by the stump-stump of his stick. “You do understand. Didn’t need me to tell ’ee.”
And he was gone again before Ernest could reply, and the board-carriers, escorted by a gang of cheering children and Miss Hicks the teacher, seizing the chance for an open-air history lecture, were on their way to the wells.
He lay long awake that night, as though on the eve of his first one-man show, the kind of thing he had dreamed of when as a boy in India he had marvelled at the images contrived from ghee and leaves and petals to celebrate a Hindu festival. Why had he not noticed the connection sooner? Perhaps the iron curtain of the War had shut it out. But tonight he could sense a pulsing in the very landscape, as though an aboriginal power were heaving underground.
The waters beneath the earth …
Waking afraid in darkness, feeling as though the old and solid house were rocking back and forth like Noah’s Ark, he groped for matches on the bedside table. There was an electric generator at the Hall, but the vicarage was still lit by lamps and candles. When he could see, he forced out faintly, “Alice!”