It was at the request of the police (or a policeman), then, that Bray (the fair, the reliable, and ready for a job at any time of day or night) had gone to the railway station and taken the woman to the bed-and-breakfast place. That must have made an impression on him — the bright lights of the station, its near-emptiness, the solitude of the woman.
But it was the next day that his feelings were engaged, when in the morning he had gone to the place to take the woman to the police station. As she came down the short paved path from the front door he saw (as he had told Mrs. Bray) the rotten, spotty complexion of the woman, the over-big tweed overcoat (clearly somebody else’s) she had on, the general manner of the dropouts or “traveling people” of the neighborhood whom he so disliked. But then suddenly (as he had told Mrs. Bray), when she had come out past the wicket gate onto the pavement, she had turned on him with anger, sarcasm, scorn. And she — narrow, close-set eyes — had said, almost shouted, to him: “But I have no money, you know.”
Mrs. Bray reported the woman’s sarcasm with a sarcasm of her own. But it was possible, even with this, to see how Bray would have been taken aback and to see how, in the very aggression of the woman, the spirit she showed at that particular moment, he would have found an attraction, would have fallen for her weakness, her need, her dependence on him at that moment. She had then said to him with a continuation of her hostility and pride (which clearly at the same time contained an appeal to someone she had seen faltering): “You know where they’ll be sending me back to, don’t you?” Not jail; if it had been, Bray wouldn’t have responded. It was a kind of county home for people with nervous disorders. And in that grown woman there was something of the child who still expected its pleas to move adults, to move others.
That was what Bray had told Mrs. Bray. There his direct, early story stopped. And the reason was that for that wounded, appealing child in that woman’s body, for that soul imprisoned behind those eyes, Bray had felt an immense passion, and all the protectiveness of his nature. Whenever I thought of the woman and Bray, I thought of those sentences. Mrs. Bray spoke them often: the only intimacy of the couple to which she had been admitted. “But I have no money, you know.” “You know where they’ll be sending me back to, don’t you?”
He didn’t take her to the police station, didn’t get her involved in any paperwork there. He offered to keep her at the bed-and-breakfast place. He knew the man, the junkshop man who had begun his business as a picture framer and called his shop a gallery.
This man had been like so many others, shopkeepers or would-be shopkeepers, who had been attracted to Salisbury for the sake of its civility and wealth and countryside, but hadn’t sufficiently studied the pattern of its traffic, the location of the car parks, the very roundabout one-way-street system, or understood the way shoppers moved about the town center.
A shop might be just two or three minutes’ walk from the market square, but could be off the main shopping track. Many little businesses failed — quickly, visibly. Especially pathetic were the shops that — not understanding that people with important shopping to do usually did it in London — aimed at style. How dismal those boutiques and women’s dress shops quickly became, the hysteria of their owners showing in their windows! Not in the turbulence or disorder of their display but in the opposite, a melancholy unassertiveness, not the un-assertiveness of good taste or old-fashionedness, but something more like a nervous condition, as though the window wished it didn’t have to be seen, this unassertiveness of the window like an expression of the owner’s wish to abandon the project, run away.
No longer the swag of the fisherman’s net with plastic starfish or painted wooden fish or real shells; or the bits of driftwood; or the autumn leaves. Nothing like that now; more like a laundry sale, a sale of unreclaimed items: just the garments, the skirts and the blouses, things unloved, even by the keeper of the shop — who could be glimpsed sometimes, when the light was right and the window did not reflect the street, in the middle of her dwindling, much-handled stock: vacant, grumpy, unwelcoming, she who at the beginning had been all charm and a wish to please, offering civilities (a cup of coffee, perhaps, or classical music) over and above the civilities of simple trade, now seemingly anxious to drive everyone away, to fail utterly, to have no possible encouragement or excuse for reopening her shop. All just a few yards away from boom and success and the tramp of tourist feet.
It was above a shop like this, a picture framer’s, a “gallery,” that Bray’s woman stayed. There wasn’t the demand in Salisbury for the amount of picture framing the shop needed; and the shop didn’t have the stock of frames or mounts to attract such business as was going. Brackets of ten or twelve picture-frame styles, elegantly sliced off at the diagonal, hung over pegs: like little decorated gallows, those picture-frame samples, quickly lost amid the secondhand furniture and household goods, the junk-or-antique trade, to which the shop had turned, until even this had been subsumed in the bed-and-breakfast business that the hard-pressed owner had started on the two upper floors.
It was here, through the woman or girl, or through the bed-and-breakfast man, that Bray had got to find out about the healer and the meetings. And as fast as he had learned about the healing, so he had talked to me about what he had learned. In the beginning he hadn’t talked with great knowledge. That was one reason why I took some time to understand that he was talking seriously.
Gradually then there came out an account of his new religious life: the healing sessions, the “good book” opened at random for each one in turn, and its words interpreted. Gradually there came out too the new idea of community he had found and surrendered to: the discovery of people wounded in their minds and hearts, for whom the material world had proved too much, had passed out of control. Not the arbitrary medieval world of the Doomsday painting in St. Thomas’s: that was a world men had never understood or thought they could control. In that world men could get by only by appeasing, making sacrifice, performing rituals. In this healing world of Bray’s it was different: as in the ancient Roman world at the very beginning of Christianity, the grief and the communion came from the feeling that the world had once been under control, but was so no longer.
And at the center of this tenderness and compassion was the woman he had seen at the railway station, who had the very next day thrown herself on his mercy, the woman who was totally dependent on him. Of her appearance I gathered nothing more than I had already heard: the over-big tweed coat, the lank hair, the unhappy, close-set eyes, the bad skin. This was what Bray had reported to Mrs. Bray the first day and the next; that was all Mrs. Bray had to go by; that was all she had to embroider on.
I thought that part of the woman’s attraction for Bray would have been the absence of an overt allure. Allure in the woman might have made Bray uneasy, might have made him feel he was being used; it might have given him the idea that there were or could have been other men in the picture. In the woman he had found there was only a child’s need in a cruel world; and to that need Bray would have thought that he alone was responsive. And from time to time in those aggressive, unhappy eyes there might have been an acknowledgment of Bray’s ability to protect.
Mrs. Bray said of Bray, “If I told the taxi union or the council where he got his fancy woman from, I suppose they would take away his license.”