The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
‘We’d better be on our way to Richmond,’ Felix said.
‘We’re awfully proud of Joanna,’ said Greggie.
‘A fine reader.’
‘No, she recites from memory. But her pupils read, of course. It’s elocution.’
Selina gracefully knocked some garden mud off her wedge shoes on the stone step, and the party moved inside.
The girls went to get ready. The men disappeared in the dark little downstairs cloakroom.
‘That is a fine poem,’ said Felix, for Joanna’s voices were here, too, and the lesson had moved to Kubla Khan.
Nicholas almost said, ‘She is orgiastical in her feeling for poetry. I can hear it in her voice,’ but refrained in case the Colonel should say ‘Really?’ and he should go on to say, ‘Poetry takes the place of sex for her, I think.’
‘Really? She looked sexually fine to me.’ Which conversation did not take place, and Nicholas kept it for his notebooks.
They waited in the hall till the girls came down. Nicholas read the notice-board, advertising second-hand clothes for sale, or in exchange for clothing coupons. Felix stood back, a refrainer from such intrusions on the girls’ private business, but tolerant of the other man’s curiosity. He said, ‘Here they come.’
The number and variety of muted noises-off were considerable. Laughter went on behind the folded doors of the first-floor dormitory. Someone was shovelling coal in the cellar, having left open the green baize door which led to those quarters. The telephone desk within the office rang distantly shrill with boy-friends, and various corresponding buzzes on the landings summoned the girds to talk. The sun broke through as the forecast had promised.
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
6
‘Dear Dylan Thomas,’ wrote Jane.
Downstairs, Nancy Riddle, who had finished her elocution lesson, was attempting to discuss with Joanna Childe the common eventualities arising from being a clergyman’s daughter.
‘My father’s always in a filthy temper on Sundays. Is yours?’
‘No, he’s rather too occupied.’
‘Father goes on about the Prayer Book. I must say, I agree with him there. It’s out of date.’
‘Oh, I think the Prayer Book’s wonderful,’ said Joanna. She had the Book of Common Prayer practically by heart, including the Psalms — especially the Psalms — which her father repeated daily at Matins and Evensong in the frequently empty church. In former years at the rectory Joanna had attended these services every day, and had made the responses from her pew, as it might be on ‘Day 13’, when her father would stand in his lofty meekness, robed in white over black, to read:
Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered:
whereupon without waiting for pause Joanna would respond:
let them also that hate him flee before him.
The father continued:
Like as the smoke vanisheth, so shalt thou drive them away:
And Joanna came in swiftly:
and like as wax melteth at the fire, so let the ungodly perish at the presence of God.
And so on had circled the Psalms, from Day 1 to Day 31 of the months, morning and evening, in peace and war; and often the first curate, and then the second curate, took over the office, uttering as it seemed to the empty pews, but by faith to the congregations of the angels, the Englishly rendered intentions of the sweet singer of Israel.
Joanna lit the gas-ring in her room in the May of Teck Club and put on the kettle. She said to Nancy Riddle:
‘The Prayer Book is wonderful. There was a new version got up in 1928, but Parliament put it out. Just as well, as it happened.’
‘What’s the Prayer Book got to do with them?’
‘It’s within their jurisdiction funnily enough.’
‘I believe in divorce,’ Nancy said.
‘What’s that got to do with the Prayer Book?’
‘Well, it’s all connected with the C. of E. and all the arguing.’
Joanna mixed some powdered milk carefully with water from the tap and poured the mixture upon two cups of tea. She passed a cup to Nancy and offered saccharine tablets from a small tin box.
Nancy took one tablet, dropped it in her tea, and stirred it. She had recently got involved with a married man who talked of leaving his wife.
Joanna said, ‘My father had to buy a new cloak to wear over his cassock at funerals, he always catches cold at funerals. That means no spare coupons for me this year.’
Nancy said, ‘Does he wear a cloak? He must be High. My father wears an overcoat; he’s Low to Middle, of course.’
*
All through the first three weeks of July Nicholas wooed Selina and at the same time cultivated Jane and others of the May of Teck Club.
The sounds and sights impinging on him from the hall of the club intensified themselves, whenever he called, into one sensation, as if with a will of their own. He thought of the lines:
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness up into one ball;
And I would like, he thought, to teach Joanna that poem or rather demonstrate it; and he made spasmodic notes of all this on the back pages of his Sabbath manuscript.
Jane told him everything that went on in the club. ‘Tell me more,’ he said. She told him things, in her clever way of intuition, which fitted his ideal of the place. In fact, it was not an unjust notion, that it was a miniature expression of a free society, that it was a community held together by the graceful attributes of a common poverty. He observed that at no point did poverty arrest the vitality of its members but rather nourished it. Poverty differs vastly from want, he thought.
*
‘Hallo, Pauline?’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Jane.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve got something to tell you. What’s the matter?’
‘I was resting.’
‘Sleeping?’
‘No, resting. I’ve just got back from the psychiatrist, he makes me rest after every session. I’ve got to lie down.’
‘I thought you were finished with the psychiatrist. Are you not very well again?’
‘This is a new one.. Mummy found him, he’s marvellous.’
‘Well, I just wanted to tell you something, can you listen? Do you remember Nicholas Farringdon?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Who’s he?’
‘Nicholas … remember that last time on the roof at the May of Teck … Haiti, in a hut … among some palms, it was market day, everyone had gone to the market centre. Are you listening?’
*
We are in the summer of 1945 when he was not only enamoured of the May of Teck Club as an aesthetic and ethical conception of it, lovely frozen image that it was, but he presently slept with Selina on the roof.
The mountains look on Marathon
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream’d that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.
Joanna needs to know more life, thought Nicholas, as he loitered in the hall on one specific evening, but if she knew life she would not be proclaiming these words so sexually and matriarchally as if in the ecstatic act of suckling a divine child.
At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows.
She continued to recite as he loitered in the hall. No one was about. Everyone was gathered somewhere else, in the drawing-room or in the bedrooms, sitting round wireless sets, tuning in to some special programme. Then one wireless, and another, roared forth louder by far than usual from the upper floors; others tuned in to the chorus, justified in the din by the voice of Winston Churchill. Joanna ceased. The wirelesses spoke forth their simultaneous Sinaitic predictions of what fate would befall the freedom-loving electorate should it vote for Labour in the forthcoming elections. The wirelesses suddenly started to reason humbly: