He saw the nurse's face change: she bent over the old man, and Jack took a long step and was beside her. In the bruised flesh the eyes were open and stared straight up. This was not the human gaze he had been wanting to meet, but a dull glare from chinks in damaged flesh.
‘Ann,’ said the old man. ‘Is Ann here?’
From the owner of those sullen eyes Jack might expect nothing; as an excuse to leave the room, he said to the nurse, ‘I'll tell Ann's father.’
In the living-room sunlight had left the sills. Cedric was not there. 'It's Ann he wants,' Jack said. 'He has asked again.'
'She is coming. She has to come from Edinburgh. She is with Maureen.'
Ellen said this as if he was bound to know who Maureen was. She was probably one of Cedric's ghastly wife's ghastly relations. Thinking of the awfulness of Cedric's wife made him feel kindly towards Ellen. Ellen wasn't really so bad. There she sat, knitting, tired and sad but not showing it. When you came down to it she didn't look all that different from Rosemary — unbelievably also a middle-aged woman. But at this thought Jack’s loyalty to the past rebelled. Rosemary, though a large fresh-faced, greying woman, would never wear a suit which looked as if its edges might cut, or have her hair set in a helmet of ridges and frills. She wore soft pretty clothes, and her hair was combed straight and long, as she had always worn it: he had begged her to keep it like that. But if you came to think of if, probably the lives the two women led were similar. Probably they were all more alike than any one of them would care to admit. Including Cedric’s awful wife.
He looked at Ellen's lids, lowered while she counted stitches. They were her father's eyes and lids. When she lay dying probably her lids would bruise and puff.
Cedric came in. He was very like the old man — more like than any of them. He, Jack, was more like their mother, but when he was dying perhaps his own lids... Ellen looked up, smiled at Cedric, then at Jack, they were all smiling at each other. Ellen laid down her knitting, and lit herself a cigarette. The brothers could see that this was the point when she might cry. But Mrs Markham came in, followed by a well-brushed man all white cuffs and collar and pink fresh skin.
'The Dean,' she breathed, with the smile of a girl.
The Dean said: 'No, don't get up. I dropped in. I am an old friend of your father's, you know. Many and many a game of chess have we played in this room...' and he had followed Mrs Markham into the bedroom.
'He Had Extreme Unction yesterday,' said Ellen.
'Oh,' said Jack. 'I didn't realize that Extreme Unction was part of his...' He stopped, not wanting to hurt feelings. He believed both Ellen and Cedric to be religious.
'He got very High in the end,' said Cedric.
Ellen giggled. Jack and Cedric looked inquiry. 'It sounded funny,' she said. 'You know, the young ones talk about getting high.'
Cedric's smile was wry; and Jack remembered there had been talk about his elder son, who had threatened to become addicted. What to? Jack could not remember: he would have to ask the girls.
'I suppose he wants a church service and to be buried?' asked Jack.
'Oh yes,' said Cedric. 'I have got his will.'
'Of course, you would have.'
'Well, we'll just have to get through it all,' said Ellen. It occurred to Jack that this was what she probably said, or thought, about her own life. Well, I've just got to get through it. The thought surprised him: Ellen was pleasantly surprising him. Now he heard her say: Well, I suppose some people have to have religion.'
And now Jack looked at her in disbelief.
'Yes,' said Cedric, equally improbably, 'it must be a comfort for them, one can see that.' He laid small strong hands around his crossed knees and made the knuckles crack.
'Oh Cedric,' complained Ellen, as she had as a girclass="underline" this knuckle-cracking had been Cedric's way of expressing tension since he had been a small boy.
'Sorry,' said Cedric. He went on, letting his hands fall to his sides, and swing there, in a conscious effort towards relaxing himself. 'From time to time I take my pulse — as it were. Now that I am getting on for sixty one can expect the symptoms. Am I getting God? Am I still myself? Yes, no, doubtful? But so far, I can report an even keel, I am happy to say.'
'Oh, one can understand it,' said Ellen. 'God knows, one can understand it only too well. But I really would be ashamed...'
Both Ellen and Cedric were looking at him, to add his agreement — of which they were sure, of course. But he could not speak. He had made precisely the same joke a month ago, in a group of 'the Old Guard', about taking his pulse to find out if he had caught religion. And everyone had confessed to the same practice. To get God, after a lifetime of enlightened rationalism, would be the most shameful of capitulations.
Now his feelings were the same as those of members of a particularly exclusive Club on being forced to admit the lower classes; or the same as that Victorian bishop's who, travelling to some cannibal-land to baptize the converted, had been heard to say that he could wish that his Church admitted degrees of excellence in its materiaclass="underline" he could not believe that this lifetime of impeccable service would weight the same as that of these so recently benighted ones.
Besides, Jack was shocked: to hear these sentiments from Ellen, looking as she did, leading the life she did — she had no right to them! She sounded vulgar.
She was saying: 'Of course I do go to church sometimes to please Freddy.' Her husband. 'But he seems to be losing fervour rather than gaining it, I am glad to say.'
'Yes,' said Cedric. 'I am afraid I have rather the same thing with Muriel. We have compromised on Christmas and Easter. She says it is bad for my image not to be a churchgoer. Petersbank is a small place you know, and the good people do like their lawyers and doctors to be pillars of society. But I find that sort of trimming repulsive and I tell her so.'
Again they waited for Jack; again he had to be silent. But surely by now they would take his opinions for granted? Why should they? If they could become atheist, then what might he not become? The next thin, they'll turn out to be socialists, he thought. Surely all this godlessness must be a new development? He could have sworn that Ellen had been devout and Cedric correct towards a Church which — as far as Jack had been concerned — had been irritation, humiliation, tedium, throughout his childhood. Even now he could not think of the meaningless services, the Sunday school, the fatuity of the parsons, the social conformity that was associated with the Church, without feeling as if he had escaped from a sticky trap.
Ellen was saying: ‘As for me. I am afraid I find it harder to believe as I get older. I mean, God, in this terrible world, with new horrors every minute. No, I am afraid it is all too much.'
'I quite agree,' said Cedric. The devil's more like it.'
'Yes,' said Jack, able to speak at last. 'Yes, that's about it, I'm afraid.' It was the best he could do. The room was now full of good feeling, and they would have begun to talk about their childhood if the bedroom door had not opened, and the Dean come out. The smile he had shed on the nurse was still on his healthy lips, and he now let it benefit the three, while he raised his hand in what looked like a benediction. 'No, don't get up!' He was almost at once out of the other door, followed close by Mrs Markham.
The look the three now shared repudiated the Dean and all his works. Ellen smiled at her brother exactly as — he realized in capitulation to a totally unforeseen situation — his own wife would have done. Cedric nodded private comment on the stupidities of mankind.
Soon Cedric went to the bedroom, to return with the report that the old man looked pretty deep in. Then Ellen went, and came back saying that she didn't know how the nurse could bear it in that hot dark room. But as she sat down, she said: 'In the old days, one of us would have been in there all the time?'