'You talk to the wrong tune again, mama. This time you try to make something very interesting sound silly and heavi-some. But I understand just the same: that's easy enough. You mean that what I shall miss by being altered is so important that it would be quite wrong to alter me.'
Hubert's mother burst into tears faster than he would have believed possible. He was not too agitated at this to notice Father Lyall laying his hand gently on her shoulder, nor to find something in the way she responded that, just for the moment, made him think she was used to being touched in that sort of way. But this was soon driven from his head by puzzlement and concern.
'Why do you cry, mama? Please stop.'
'I tried so hard not to tell you, but I couldn't help it. I wanted you to believe it was right that you should be altered, but then you asked me for the truth and I told it you, God forgive me. I tried to hide it...'
'Why must God forgive you for telling the truth?'
'There are some truths it can be better not to know. You would have been happier if I hadn't spoken.'
'I think not.' Hubert held out his hand and his mother grasped it. 'You mean I might never have known what I shall miss by being altered. But there would be so many other ways for me to hear of it, and other folk to tell me. And after all, mama, I shall never know, shall I?' Getting no answer, he went on, 'It is decided, is it? I must be altered?'
'Yes, Hubert,' said the priest at once. 'Your mother is against it, as you hear, but nothing can—'
'Are you against it, Father?'
'It's better that I don't answer that. But if I were against it ten times over, it would make no difference. Neither of us, nobody at all, has any power to resist what has been decided.'
'I understand.'
'Say nothing of this to your father.'
'I understand that too,' said Hubert, and went on directly, 'I think I should like to be alone now.'
'Pray to God, dearest, and to your saint.'
'Yes, mama, I want to, but I don't know what to pray for.'
'For God's favour.'
'I already have that, as papa said. It might be better to pray for His protection.'
Hubert turned and walked slowly back the way he had come. As soon as he was out of hearing, Lyall said, 'Don't blame yourself, Margaret. You could have done nothing else.'
'If only Tobias hadn't talked of love to the boy. Why did he? There was no need.'
'Your husband is a very fair-minded man in his way.'
'Yes, he is. You did better than I, my love, not to raise Hubert's hopes that we might still prevent this from happening.'
'His hopes? I wonder what they are.'
Margaret waited until Hubert had disappeared into the parlour; then, reaching furtively behind her, she took Lyall's hand. 'It was strange, his saying that he already had God's favour. Was that irony, do you think?'
'No. Only a man could be ironical in such a case, and Hubert is wise enough for his years, but he isn't a man yet. Now I must go and pray too.'
'For Hubert.'
'For Hubert first.'
Hubert's prayers were fairly brief, though they took him a little while to deliver. Even at the best of times, with his mind set on some simple objective like begging pardon for having blasphemed or petitioning to be made to grow tall, the words would slip away from him and become sounds, displaced most often by sounds of a different order, his own music or another's. There was no music in his head this afternoon, and as he felt at the moment there might never be again, but he could still offer real prayer only piece by piece. He asked God's guardianship against harm, then found himself deprecating the artifices of the Devil, who surely had no discoverable part in the matter in hand; he had no sooner pleaded for a stout heart than he began to solicit a serene conscience, not his most pressing requirement. He did rather better with St Hubert, who had been chosen for him out of a so far vain paternal hope that he would interest himself in hunting, but whom he had come to see quite clearly as a grey-bearded, good-hearted old man leading a horse with gentle eyes and a curly tail.
What did God's protection mean? It was not to be regarded (he had been taught) as any assurance against physical harm, though not to invoke it on the battlefield or in a region struck by plague would be the direst folly. The more important meaning, as always, had to do with the fortunes of the soul. God answered prayers of this sort in the same way as He rewarded pious meditations and virtuous deeds: by elevating the status of the soul concerned and preparing a place for it among the ranks of the blessed. Neglect of prayers, sinful thought or action, worked to the soul's eventual disadvantage. But, in the meantime, while it was on the way to its destination, its owner had no idea of what would happen to it, whether it was secure or in danger, what direction the various agencies bearing upon it had caused it to take. Anyone who knew where his soul was going must be a sort of god himself.
Hubert got up from his knees and wandered idly round the small room, gazing at and handling objects of past or present interest: his once-beloved dandle-monkey in real skin, a totum of carved bone that had belonged to his grandmother as a little girl in India, a pair of child's foils and masks, a tennis-racket, a model railtrack-tug and four cargo vans hand-painted in the black and crimson of the Coverley and North-England Line, a set of Turks and Christians in ebony and ivory (the gift of his rich second cousin, now Bailiff of Estates to the Bishop of Liverpool), an old-fashioned book-cupboard with sliding shelves. His eye passed over St Lemuel's Travels and The Wind in the Cloisters, slowed down at a collection of Father Bond stories, and rested finally on Lord of the Chalices. But instead of reaching for the volume he moved to the corner window, which looked out to the south and west and gave a view of the side entrance to the house.
From here, too, he could see the tops of the inn, the Cistercian hospice and the other buildings on the west side of Edgware Road. The road had been there many times as long as the buildings, since the days when the Romans had linked Dover with St Albans and Chester. This part of it ran along the firm ground between the valleys of the Tyburn—finally covered over from the Thames up to St Mary Bourne Parish in 1925—and the Westburn. Once, it had skirted the great Middlesex forest, of which little now remained except the hundred square miles or so between Harrow and the outskirts of Staines. There the wild boar was— at some trouble— preserved for the King to hunt.
What Hubert had been waiting for happened: the foreshortened figure of his brother Anthony came in at the side gate and passed out of view below. Hubert waited a little longer, until he heard a neighbouring door shut, then moved towards the sound.
The walls of Anthony's room were covered with pictures, mostly expensive facsimiles of works of the modern graphic school. Their subjects, or professed subjects, were orthodox in the extreme: scenes from Holy Writ or the lives of the saints, with here and there one of the more familiar mythological incidents. The treatment of these matters, on the other hand, often seemed inappropriate, even perverse, showing Salome in the back seat of an express-omnibus with the head of John the Baptist on her lap in a market-bag, filling two-thirds of the space with a caterpillar on one of the roses in St Elizabeth's apron. The case was different with the large, colourful and popular Adam and Eve by the illustrious Netherlander, de Kooning. Here the artist had plainly not tried to furnish anything that might be called a portrayal of our First Parents; what he had tried to do, with great success, could be seen in the relegation of Adam to a dim shape half-obscured by grasses and, more positively, in the treatment of Eve's flesh at the bosom and other parts. The band of hair above her crotch, or rather above the serviceable poppy that just hid her crotch, was said to have been decisive in inducing the Archbishop of Amsterdam to attach the original under a writ of non permit-timus. It was of course not known exactly why or how the writ had fallen, but the fact of that fall was enough to cause Master Tobias Anvil to content himself with glowering at the facsimile whenever he saw it instead of ordering its immediate destruction. Now, as always, Hubert looked at Eve with sly enjoyment and wonder, but that afternoon he quickly looked away again.