I doubt whether she had ever read Hood’s poems: the pages were as clean as when the book was handed to her by the headmistress or the distinguished visitor. Indeed as I was about to put it back in the cupboard a leaf of print dropped on the floor - the programme probably of that very prize-giving. In a handwriting I could recognize (but even our handwriting begins young and takes on the tired arabesques of time) was a phrase: ‘What utter piffle’. I could imagine Sarah writing it down and showing it to her neighbour as the headmistress resumed her seat, applauded respectfully by parents. I don’t know why another line of hers came into my head when I saw that schoolgirl phrase with all its impatience, its incomprehension and its assurance: ‘I’m a phoney and a fake.’ Here under my hand was innocence. It seemed such a pity that she had lived another twenty years only to feel that about herself. A phoney and a fake. Was it a description I had used of her in a moment of anger? She always harboured my criticism: it was only praise that slid from her like the snow.
I turned the leaf over and read the programme of 23 July 1926: the Water Music of Handel played by Miss Duncan, R.C.M.: a recitation of ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ by Beatrice Collins: Tudor Ayres by the School Glee Society: Violin Recital of Chopin’s Waltz in A flat by Mary Pippitt. The long summer afternoon of twenty years ago stretched out its shadows towards me, and I hated life that so alters us for the worse. I thought, that summer I had just begun my first noveclass="underline" there was so much excitement, ambition, hope, when I sat down to work: I wasn’t bitter, I was happy. I put the leaf back in the unread book and thrust the volume to the back of the cupboard under the Golliwog and the Beatrix Potters. We were both happy with only ten years and a few counties between us, who were later to come together for no apparent purpose but to give each other so much pain. I took up Scott’s Last Expedition.
That had been one of my own favourite books. It seemed curiously dated now, this heroism with only the ice for enemy, self-sacrifice that involved no deaths beyond one’s own. Two wars stood between us and them. I looked at the photographs: the beards and goggles, the little cairns of snow, the Union Jack, the ponies with their long manes like outdated hairdressings among the striped rocks. Even the deaths were ‘period’, and ‘period’ too was the school girl who marked the pages with lines, exclamation marks, who wrote neatly in the margin of Scott’s last letter home: ‘And what comes next? Is it God? Robert Browning.’ Even then, I thought, He came into her mind. He was as underhand as a lover, taking advantage of a passing mood, like a hero seducing us with his improbabilities and his legends. I put the last book back and turned the key in the lock.
7
‘Where have you been, Henry?’ I asked. He was usually the first at breakfast and sometimes he had left the house before I came down, but this morning his plate had not been touched and I heard the front door close softly before he appeared.
‘Oh, just down the road,’ he said vaguely.
‘Been out all night?’ I asked.
‘No. Of course not.’ To clear himself of that charge he told me the truth. ‘Father Crompton said Mass today for Sarah.’
‘Is he still at it?’
‘Once a month. I thought it would be polite to look in.’
‘I don’t suppose he’d know you were there.’
‘I saw him afterwards to thank him. As a matter of fact I asked him to dinner.’
‘Then I shall go out.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t, Bendrix. After all, in his way, he was a friend of Sarah’s.’
‘You aren’t turning a believer too, are you, Henry?’
‘Of course I’m not. But they’ve as much right to then-views as we have.’
So he came to dinner. Ugly, haggard, graceless with the Torquemada nose, he was the man who had kept Sarah from me. He had supported her in the absurd vow which ought to have been forgotten in a week. It was to his church that she had walked in the rain seeking a refuge and ‘catching her death’ instead. It was hard for me to show even bare politeness and Henry had to shoulder the burden of the dinner. Father Crompton was not used to dining out. One had the impression that this was a duty on which he found it hard to keep his mind. He had very limited small talk, and his answers fell like trees across the road.
‘You have a good deal of poverty around here, I suppose?’ Henry said, rather tired, over the cheese. He had tried so many things - the influence of books, the cinema, a recent visit to France, the possibility of a third war.
‘That’s not a problem,’ Father Crompton replied.
Henry worked hard. ‘Immorality?’ he asked with the slightly false note we can’t avoid with such a word.
‘That’s never a problem,’ Father Crompton said.
‘I thought perhaps - the Common - one notices at night… ‘
‘You get it happening with any open space. And it’s winter now anyway.’ And that closed that.
‘Some more cheese, father?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘I suppose, in a district like this, you have a good deal of trouble raising money - for charity, I mean?’
‘People give what they can.’
‘Some brandy with your coffee?’
‘No thank you.’
‘You don’t mind if we…’
‘Of course I don’t. I can’t get to sleep on it, that’s all, and I have to get up at six.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘Prayer. You get used to it.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve never been able to pray much,’ Henry said, ‘since I was a boy. I used to pray to get into the second XV.’
‘And did you?’
‘I got into the third. I’m afraid that kind of prayer isn’t much good, is it, father?’
‘Any sort’s better than none. It’s a recognition of God’s power anyway, and that’s a kind of praise, I suppose.’ I hadn’t heard him talk so much since dinner had started.
‘I should have thought,’ I said, ‘it was more like touching wood or avoiding the lines on the pavement. At that age anyway.’
‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘I’m not against a bit of superstition. It gives people the idea that this world’s not everything.’ He scowled at me down his nose. ‘It could be the beginning of wisdom.’
‘Your church certainly goes in for superstition in a big way - St Januarius, bleeding statues, visions of the virgin -that sort of thing.’
‘We try to sort them out. And isn’t it more sensible to believe that anything may happen than…?’
The bell rang. Henry said, ‘I told the maid she could go to bed. Would you excuse me, father?’
‘I’ll go,’ I said. I was glad to get away from that oppressive presence. He had the answers too pat: the amateur could never hope to catch him out, he was like a conjuror who bores one by his very skill. I opened the front door and saw a stout woman in black holding a parcel. For a moment I thought it was our charwoman until she said, ‘Are you Mr Bendrix, sir?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was to give you this,’ and she thrust the parcel quickly into my hand as though it contained something explosive. ‘Who’s it from?’
‘Mr Parkis, sir.’ I turned it over in perplexity. It even occurred to me that he might have mislaid some evidence which now too late he was handing over to me. I wanted to forget Mr Parkis.