Always facing was the text, which he sometimes looked at with his abstract, edge-of-the-eye apprehension of a page – the occasional chimneys that ran straight down between words, line after line, or climbed like diagonal flues across a long paragraph, the odd accidental poolings of ascenders, descenders and inverted commas into small abstract images, knots, mouths, sea anemones, and the teasing habit of glimpsed capitals to suggest and then withhold his own name – it happened all the time in the paper, July Sales, Junior Sports, he was abruptly famous, then not, and it seemed to lurk here, in the fabric of Cornwall, with its string of particular saints, St Just, St Piran, St Pinnock.
On the Thursday the Sparsholts escaped by themselves to see Pendennis Castle, just as Johnny wanted, and had lunch in Falmouth, Bastien begging a sip, and then another one, of his mother’s lager and lime, until his father bought him half a pint to shut him up. In the back of the Jensen afterwards Bastien fell asleep, Johnny looking out through his small side window as his parents’ talk moved cagily round a subject Johnny hadn’t detected starting. ‘Well, I don’t think he’s very nice to Norma’, ‘She has nice things, doesn’t she?’, ‘Things aren’t everything’, putting her hand as if absent-mindedly on her husband’s knee; he glanced in the mirror. ‘He’s certainly not a ladies’ man,’ his mother said. ‘No, he’s all right, though. There’s a good brain there.’ She said, ‘Well, he’s got the good sense to think well of my husband, anyway,’ rubbing his knee awkwardly before she took her hand away. And there was the sign, ‘Treterrian. 14th Century Church’ – it was pictured in brown and gold in Johnny’s book.
‘Oh, Dad!’ he said, and his father was oddly amenable – they were having fun by themselves after all; he braked hard, and took the turning. It was up and then down a long sequence of lanes and though marked three miles from the main road was what his mother called ‘psychologically much further’. ‘I’ll get out my psychological map in a minute,’ said his father, braking again and reversing very fast into a passing place for a van to go by. Johnny was excited but tense – his wish had been granted and now he was responsible for it being worthwhile. ‘There it is!’ he said. In a moment they had passed the church gate, and there was nowhere to park. ‘I’ll go in this field,’ said his father, which added another kind of worry as he swung in through an open gate on to rough grass. ‘We’ll only be a minute.’ When the boys were let out from the back, Johnny went ahead across the road, strangely aware he was acting out what he really felt, the pull – the fascination mixed up with fear – of an old building. He was obliged to like it, and if the others didn’t, he would have to like it even more.
In the churchyard there were lines of slate headstones, sliced an inch or two thin and with rich orange lichens spreading over the inscriptions. His mother always enjoyed reading gravestones, and they made out the lettering together, sharing the problem for once. He was a terrible reader but he loved lettering – at school last term they’d done tracings of epitaphs in the abbey churchyard, and followed the change of styles over time. Here each line was in a different font, cut into the hard grey surface, and drawn out in curlicues to fill the surrounding space. The later tombs were heavier and as his mother said ‘more preachy’. His father came and stood behind them: ‘“Most sincerely regretted by his family” – an unfortunate way of putting it!’ and chuckled, and Johnny laughed too, uneasy that he meant something more by it.
He raised the latch and held it for a second as he held his breath at the imminence of unknown space beyond. The church they stepped down into was primitive but well kept – in fact a lot of holiday-makers, scratching round for some point of interest inland from the beach, made their way here. There were welcome signs, enough flowers for a wedding, and a massive collection box made from an iron-bound chest. Even so, it was chilly on bare arms and legs, the old walls were thick and the nave windows small and dark with Victorian glass. Johnny saw in a minute it was the transepts that made the church, with their tall clear windows, and several old marble tablets on the walls, each with its own little commonplace quirk of design. Light from the south transept lay tall across the darker nave: the high pulpit with its rough oak panelling and brass candlesticks glowed, and the hymn-numbers stood out vividly above. His father studied them for a second, looked down at the floor, and told them the Highest Common Factor. Johnny wanted to sit and draw, but knew he would be trying his patience – it was out of the question. His mother went round with a distant smile, of having signed away an interest in these odd old things. His father wasn’t at all at home in a church, he took the building, like the hymn numbers, as a problem. ‘The obvious thing to do,’ he said, ‘would be to close off those two side bits.’
‘The transepts, Dad.’
‘They’re probably never used anyway, and you’d save a bomb on the heating.’
Johnny called them back to sign their names in the visitors’ book. His father always put ‘D. D. Sparsholt’ and underlined it, his mother wrote ‘Constance Sparsholt’ though the surname sort of gave out, and Johnny added the signature he had practised at school all last term, with the crossbar of the final t running on and swept downwards and back to cradle the two words in a stylish curve. He could draw curves and near-perfect circles freehand, but the biro gave out on the final upswing and he had to go over it again in small strokes which spoiled the line. Perhaps for different reasons none of the Sparsholt family wrote a comment in the column provided. They went out into the sunshine again, Johnny darting back to add ‘DFC’ after his father’s name, and then staring one last time at the great slant bar of light across the nave to fix it in his mind for ever before he closed the door. ‘Now, where’s Bastion?’ said his father, un-French as ever. They had left him to sit in the sun, but he was nowhere to be seen in the sunny south churchyard sloping down to the road.
‘Perhaps he’s round the back,’ said Johnny.
‘Run and find him, old lad?’ said his father.
‘We may just have to leave him,’ said his mother.
‘Well, we can’t hang around here all day.’
Johnny marched back up the path and cut off across the grass between the tall slate tombstones. With a phrase like that his father cut at the root of the pleasure he had just so unexpectedly allowed. Johnny glanced at the fanciful inscriptions, their circus-like mixture of lettering – he was never, ever given enough time to look at the things he liked. He came round the west end of the church into the shadowed and neglected far side of the graveyard, with the heaped grass cuttings and the ugly jutting vestry and a water butt. He needed a slash, and looking all around went into the corner where a downpipe from the roof ran into a drain. Before he’d finished he heard voices and hurried to be done. They were coming from round the east end of the church – Bastien, certainly, and some English people. Johnny found them, a middle-aged couple with a teenage daughter in a skirt pulled over a bathing suit. Her blonde hair down over her shoulders had darker matted streaks where it hadn’t quite dried from the beach. She had the look, which Johnny understood in a flash, of being fascinated by Bastien and unable to respond under the moronic supervision of her parents, though perhaps she wasn’t entirely sorry they were there.