But at breakfast she betrayed that she had known he had not been beside her: she started to talk about the job in Nigeria. He knew that she did not want to go away for two years, leaving all her new interests, new friends, new freedom. There, she would be back inside duties she had escaped from. There would be entertaining of a formal kind, there would be much social life. Yet it sounded as if she was trying to bring herself to believe she wanted to go if he did: she was worried about him.
He said, instead of replying about Nigeria, that he would like to go to church, just to see what it was like these days. She took in a puzzled but patient breath, let it sigh out of her, and looked at him with loving and respectful eyes — just like, he thought the way Norah looked at Walter. She said: 'Oh, I can understand why. You mean, you missed the funeral service?'
Perhaps it was because he had missed the funeral service. He put on a suit and she a dress, and they went to church together, for the first time, except for weddings. Carrie and Elizabeth went with them, Carrie because God was everywhere, Elizabeth because he was particularly in churches. Ann would not come; she had Jesus by the hand as she sat on the floor reading the Sunday newspapers.
He sat through the service in a rage; perhaps it was a retrospective rage; certainly this was what he had felt throughout years of compulsory attendance at Evensong and Matins, and Services Early and Late, at his public school. He did not mind that it was mumbo-jumbo: it was bound to be! What he minded was that people voluntarily submitted themselves to the ministry of men palpably no better than themselves, men whose characters were written on their faces. This was perhaps what had first directed him towards socialism? He had not been able to stand that people submitted to being lied to, cheated, dominated, by their equals? He was again afflicted by yesterday's disability: a film rolled away from what he looked at. That man, wearing black and white lace and embroidery, and dangling strips of this and that colour — the sort of attractive nonsense that Carrie and Liz might wear — that man intoning and dancing and posturing through the service, had a face like Walter's. They were both public men, performers. Their features were permanently twisted by vanity and self-importance. Jack kept passing his hand across his own face, feeling the ugliness of the love of power on it. And Rosemary put her arm in his asking if he felt well, if he had toothache? He replied with violence that he must have been mad to want to come: he apologized for inflicting it on her.
'Oh, it doesn't matter for once,' she said, with mildness, but glanced over her shoulder to see if Carrie and Elizabeth had heard: it was extraordinary how they all kowtowed to their children, as if they feared to offend them.
After the midday meal he felt as if he could sleep at last, and did so.
The dream pulled him down into itself as he rolled on to his bed in the sultry yellow afternoon light — and passed out. This time, as he sank down beside his father, who was very cold — he could feel the cold coming out and claiming him — the weight pressed them both down, right through the earth that was below the tight box. His father disappeared, and he, Jack, quite alone, was rocking on a light-blue sea. This too dissolved into air, but not before he had been pierced through and through with an extraordinary pain that was also a sweetness. He had not known anything like this before; in the dream he was saying to himself: That's a new thing, this sweetness. It was quickly gone, but astonishing, so that he woke up, pleased to wake up, as if out of a nightmare, yet what he had been happy to wake from was that high, piercing sweetness. Unhealthy, he judged it. It was not yet tea-time; he had slept an hour and not been refreshed. He went down to be told as a joke by his wife that a journalist had rung that morning to find out his views on the Twenty-Four-Hour Fast: did his not having been there mean that he was against it? Ann had answered, and had said that Mr Orkney was at church. The journalist seemed surprised, Ann said. She had had to repeat it more than once. Had she meant that Jack Orkney was at a wedding? At a christening? No, no, at church, at Sunday morning service.
Jack knew the journalist; they had been in several foreign fields together. Jack was now seriously worried, as a man is when faced with the loss of reputation. He said to himself: I was not worried what people thought of me when I was young. He was answered: You mean, you were not worried by what people said who were not your side. He said: Well, but now it is not a personal thing, criticism of me is a criticism of my side, surely it is right to worry about letting my own side down?
There was no answer to this, except a knowledge he was dishonest.
Rosemary suggested a long walk. He could see she had been thinking how to make him whole again — how to protect her own happiness, he could not prevent himself thinking. He was more than ready to walk as many miles away as they could before dark; when they had first met, before they married, one of their things had been to walk miles, sometimes for days on end. Now they walked until it was dark, at eleven o'clock: they worked out it was over fifteen miles, and were pleased that this was still so easy for them, at their age and in the middle of their undemanding life. But the night now confronted Jack, a narrow tunnel at the end of which waited a white-robed figure, pointing him into annihilation.
That night he did not sleep. The windows were open, the curtains drawn back, the room full of light from the sky. He pretended to sleep, so as to protect his wife from anxiety, but she lay alert beside him, also pretending sleep.
Next morning it was a week since Mrs Markham's wire, and he became concerned for his health. He knew that not to sleep for night after night, as he was doing, was simply not possible. During the following days he went further into this heightened, over-sensitized state, like a country of which he had heard rumours but had not believed in. On its edges his wife and daughters smiled and were worried about him. He slept little, and when he did he was monitored by the female figure in white, now a composite of his mother, his wife and his daughters, but quite impersonaclass="underline" she used their features but was an impostor. This figure had become like an angel on a wedding cake, or on a tomb, full of false sentiment; its appearance was accompanied, like a strain of particularly nauseating and banal music, by the sweetly piercing emotion, only it was much worse now; it was the essence of banality, of mawkishness, like being rolled in powdered sugar and swallowed into an insipid smile. The horror of this clinging sickliness was worse even than the nightmare — he could no longer remember the quality of that, only that it had occurred — of the night in the hotel. His bed, the bedroom, soon the entire house, were tainted by this emotion, which was more a sensation, even like nausea, as if he could never rid himself of the taste of a concentration of saccharine which he had accidentally swallowed. He was all day in a state of astonishment, and self-distrust: he made excuses not to go to bed.
Walter came to see him. Unannounced. As soon as Jack saw him getting out of his car, he remembered something which told him why Walter had come. About four years before, Mona had reviewed a religious book, the memoirs of some sort of mystic, in a way which surprised them all. They would have expected a certain tone — light, carefully non-solemn, for it did not do to give importance to something which did not deserve it — not mocking of course, which would have had the same result, but the tone you use to indicate to children that while you may be talking about, let's say, ghosts, or telling a story about a witch, the subject is not one to be taken seriously. But Mona had not used this subtly denigrating tone. Various of the old Guard had commented on this. Then she had reviewed a book of religious poetry, which of course could not be dismissed in the light disinfecting tone, since poetry was obviously in a different category — but the point was that none of them would have reviewed it at all. For one thing no editor would think of asking them to. It was all very upsetting. There had been a party at Bill's house and Mona was not there, she had been discussed: she was at the age when women 'get' religion. Jack, fond of Mona, offered to go and see her. His visit was to find out, as he put it to himself, if she was 'still with us'. He found her amiable, and her usual self, helping to organize a conference for the coming week. He had probed — oh, tactfully, of course. He mentioned an article in one of the Sundays about a certain well-known religious figure, and said he found the man a nauseating self-seeker. Mona had said that she was inclined to agree. He had said casually, 'Of course I am only too ready to forgive somebody who can't face old age and all that without being cushioned by God.' Mona had remarked that for her part she could not believe in personal survival after death. Well, of course not, but for years that she could not would have been taken for granted. He remembered feeling protective affection for her: as if he were helping to save her from a danger. Seeing Walter at a meeting to do with the Crisis in Our Communications a week later, he had said that he had made a point of visiting Mona and that she had seemed quite sound to him.