I didn’t think her power would run that far; I didn’t think she thought so herself; and I don’t believe she wanted any harm to come to Bray. It was his new serenity that enraged her. As far as he was concerned, he behaved as though there were no quarrels at home. And perhaps there were none; perhaps Mrs. Bray’s rages were for people like me, who might have known about Bray’s other life. But it was only from Mrs. Bray that I heard about the woman. From Bray I heard only about the healing and the meetings. His meetings took up more of his time. There were certain afternoons and evenings now when he was not free; but apart from that his taxi-driving, car-hire life continued as before.
He said to me one day in the car, after a silence which he had allowed to happen, perhaps to give greater effect to his words: “I’ve taken up tithing.”
He spoke the words with pride, boastfulness, pleasure. It was like the time he had spoken from the corner of his mouth about Pitton’s departure and from the dashboard shelf had handed me, with an air of mystery and favor, the book my landlord had published in the 1920s.
Tithing! Such an old word. The tenth of one’s produce for the church. Such a subject for radical protest. Perhaps even in the Middle Ages, when men lived in the world of the St. Thomas’s Doomsday painting, it had been resisted. But now Bray, a hater of privilege and taxation, boasted of offering his tithe to his healer — spoke of tithing as though he had toiled up to the top of the hill and seen the fine view.
He said, “And that has to be before tax, you understand. I give a tenth of my gross. It hurts. Of course it hurts. It’s meant to hurt. You have to make the sacrifice.” And then, not knowing that from his wife I had been given an idea of the person he was talking about, he said, “There’s someone I know. Started a little secondhand business. Didn’t do well. Began taking in foreign students. French, German. We get a lot of those here. But that didn’t do well either. The agencies wanted the students to stay with families. He was ready to put his head in the oven. Then he began tithing. It hurt. It was like the last straw. But he kept at it. And you know what? In the last two months the social security have been sending him people. For the first time for a couple of years he’s making regular money. As Churchill said during the war, there’s a tide in the affairs of men. It goes out. But it also comes back in. It’s the same with tithing. You get back only what you put in. It has to hurt. Then you get double.”
So, beneath the noisy rooks — whose arrival portended death or money, according to the old wise tales, as Mr. Phillips’s father said — serenity came to Bray. He still took down engines in the mess of his paved yard (but he was more circumspect with his surveyor neighbor than he had been with Pitton); he still wore his formal-informal uniform of peaked cap and cardigan; he still talked a lot in the car. But his old readiness to snap and cavil and rant was abated or, rather, it ran into, meshed in with, his religious talk. He was a man at ease with himself, a man with a secret, an inner vision.
He was indifferent to the frenzies of Mrs. Bray. But perhaps, as I suspected, that frenzy was for outsiders: an act, a character, that made it easier for her (for so long living hidden away in her house) to go out among people. And because there was no change in this public character of Mrs. Bray’s, because I could see always what her talk would lead up to, I dreaded meeting her (once no more than a gentle old voice on the telephone) just as some time before I had dreaded meeting Pitton, whose early gardening rituals it had enchanted me to observe.
A BIG car stopped for me at the bus stop one day. It was a new neighbor. Newer than the surveyor. And this stopping, this offer of a lift to Salisbury, was his way of introducing himself. A big car, a middle-aged man, perhaps in his late fifties; a big house (I had heard it had been put up for sale, but hadn’t heard who had bought it, didn’t even know until now that it had been sold). The accent of the neighbor was still a country accent; he wanted me to know that he was a local man, that he had known the valley a long time, and that he was already (though new in the house) familiar with the people.
He said, “I gave Mrs. Bray a lift last week. She’s very fierce these days. Do you know John Bray? Why does he charge so little? He’ll have to work till he dies. He provides a good service. He’s dependable; he has a lot of regulars; people like him. I’ve often told him that as a car-hire man he should charge as much as the market will bear. But he goes his own way.”
We passed an old farm, ruined old walls, muddy yard.
My new neighbor said, “My mother grew up in that house. Different people now, of course.”
It was his way, not an unpleasant way, of claiming the valley, claiming kinship with the people of the valley. I thought of Mr. Phillips’s father, going watery-eyed at the thought of his early days, the beginning of the century, in the valley, and his first job as a carrier’s boy; his boy’s adventure of hiding in “a bed of withies” when the motorcar had knocked down his cousin. There was, in my neighbor’s talk, a wish to be linked to that kind of past, the past contained as well in Bray’s memories of harvesttime and children taking tea to their grandfathers in the fields. But at the same time there was an element in my neighbor — his big quiet car, being driven without hurry beside the river — of the rich man unbending.
“How’s Mrs. Phillips?”
I didn’t know there had been anything particularly wrong with her. I was aware only that, like my landlord after his two glorious outgoing summers, Mrs. Phillips had retreated, was less in evidence. But I hadn’t inquired why.
My neighbor said, “I believe her nerves are getting the better of her.”
Mrs. Bray’s rages, Bray’s fares, Mrs. Phillips’s increased nerves — I was impressed by the minuteness of my new neighbor’s knowledge; and I believe he intended me to be impressed. In my mind — with the speeding up of the years, consequent on my own aging as well as on my repeating experience of the seasons in the valley (less and less new knowledge added every year), and with the dislocation of memory caused by recent events (like the departure of Pitton) — in my mind, he, my neighbor, had only just arrived in the valley.
We came to the village with the bridge over the river. My neighbor turned off the main valley road and steered his big car gently over the narrow railed bridge.
He said, “I often take this road. There are some pretty little bits.” He was at once proprietorial and celebratory, as celebratory of the valley and the river as I had been in my early years. For me, though, the years had begun to stack away, the seasons had begun to repeat. Not so for him. Yet he was an older man and had deep roots here. Perhaps it was that depth of knowledge, added to proprietorship, the ownership of the big house, that had given him his special, almost reverential, view.
The bridge was the only one over the river in the valley. The site of both bridge and village would have been old; and though there were no barrows or tumuli here, and the village buildings were mostly of this century, there was a feeling here of the past, not of temples or mysteries, but of human habitation, agriculture, fields or pasture existing over the centuries within the limits of the wet meadows.
The feeling was especially strong in the large field beside which we were now driving. I had never seen this field plowed. Its roadside hedge was marked with enormous oaks, thick straight trunks widely and evenly spaced, these oaks (which might have been allowed to grow out of the hedge) suggesting a planting done more than a hundred years before (and with what security, what a conviction that this corner of the earth would continue to be as the planter of the hedge and the oaks had known it).