by K. M. Peyton
‘And the pianist.’
‘Yes, poor boy. I have a feeling we might see him again, about the boat. He probably won’t hold it against you.’
Marion wasn’t so sure, remembering the intense involvement that had—partly—set her off, getting him mixed up with Swithin and the angels. She had a deep, painful guilt feeling towards the pianist. He had been nice. Her sort of person. Not a bit as stuffy as she thought professional pianists ought to be.
Geoff said, ‘I think I’ll change and go back on the boat, do a bit of work. I don’t fancy showing my face here for a bit. Want to come?’
‘I’ll stay here, where no one can see me. Just lie in the grass.’
‘You’re sure it’s O.K. now? All quiet on the western front?’ That was one of his expressions, an old book title, which he used for such times. Marion smiled.
‘Yes.’
‘You know where I am then. Don’t brood about it.’
‘No.’
That was nice about Geoff, that he didn’t fuss, Marion thought, after he had gone away. Always there if you wanted, but aware of a person’s need for being alone. He was a lonely person too, but happy with it. How awful if he had listened to those busybody women saying she needed treatment . . . if he had said she was . . . well, how did they describe it? ‘Disturbed’ . . . was the word they used. Flint, the boy at the Post Office, the nearest she had to a best friend, called it ‘mad’ in the old-fashioned way, perfectly cheerful about it . . . ‘my mad friend Marion,’ he said . . . but her father said it was the working of an over-active imagination. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but it sounded as if one might conceivably be proud of it. He said she would grow out of it, or learn to cope. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he said to her. So she didn’t. Only sometimes, like now, it was a bit of an embarrassment, and she felt really bad about the pianist.
She went to the bottom of the churchyard and lay behind a mossy tomb, an elder tree making a cave from the strong evening sunlight. The sun was low and very warm, the shadows long. A moorhen was making noises below her, on the mud. The smell of grass cuttings rose heavily from the compost heap behind the wall: all very familiar and homely and comforting. The church was like a great white ship in her vision, breasting her horizon, a vast mother hen to the tombstone chicks. It matters more than all the other things, Marion thought.
Presumably the interval had arrived, for a great many of the audience came out into the churchyard and started walking about and standing in small groups talking. Some of them came down to look at the river, and stood quite close to where Marion lay. She knew they wouldn’t see her. She was curled in the nest of the elder tree, her cheek against lichened stone, invisible. She could see spiky-heeled patent-leather shoes pecking into the turf like a green woodpecker’s beak, fat nylon legs. . . .
‘What an embarrassment for her poor father! Although, naturally, I blame him—letting her run wild the way he does. She’s like a little scarecrow—’
‘Well, it’s in the blood. Her mother was none too stable, as I remember.’
Marion thought of Liz as non-too-stable. She saw the word all run into one: nontoostable. They were a nontoostable family. The woman meant it in a derogatory sense but Marion, seeing the word like that, thought it was a nice word; they had been a nice family, the three of them, happy and hard-working and careless; Marion would rather have had a mother like Liz for seven years, than one like fat-nylon-legs for ever.
After a while they all dribbled back into the church. Marion lay watching, her chin propped on her hands. The east door opened suddenly, and a figure came out alone. Everyone else was back in, the churchyard silent and golden in the last of the sun. The figure came slowly down towards the river, picked one of the more comfortable tombstones with its slab nicely warmed by the setting sun, and sat down on the grass, leaning back wearily. It was the pianist. Marion, trapped in her hiding-place, watched him with a worried expression. She felt very bad about the pianist. It struck her that God was presenting her with the opportunity to apologize. But the thought of it made her heart thump uncomfortably. He looked formidable in his concert clothes, his face very grim, his attitude dejected. She realized that she was spying on him, which made it worse. He thought he was alone but she could watch his every movement. It was the awful, guilty embarrassment of her situation that spurred her to get up and drag herself reluctantly across the grass to where he sat. Her throat was too tight to let any words out. She stood with her head down, not wanting to look.
She heard him give a grunt of recognition.
‘What was it about my playing that made you scream and run? Tell me.’
She could not answer.
He wasn’t smiling. He was chewing a piece of grass, scowling. He didn’t look like the same person who had been playing the Mozart, like Swithin carving the angels. More like Swithin having a row with his wife. How to explain?
‘It was because . . .’ Impossible. ‘The angels—’ Geoff had understood. He always did. But Mr. Pennington was a stranger.
And yet, daring to look at him again, Marion had this odd feeling once more that she knew him very well, had known him all her life. There was something about him which stirred a core in her bones, way back. Something to do with her over-active imagination? A feeling, a cobweb, groping . . . how could it be?
‘I was watching the angels in the roof, and the music was so beautiful that I thought they were real, and they started to fly, and I thought the roof would open up and they would fly away, and I couldn’t bear it, so I shouted, “No!”’
He looked up at her, taking the grass out of his mouth. His eyes, under drawn-down brows, were very sharp, rather frightening.
‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘You might not believe me, but it’s true.’
‘I believe you,’ he said.
He put the grass back and sighed.
‘It wasn’t nice for me, but—perhaps—a compliment of a sort.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be.’
She sat down on the grass beside him, relieved by his understanding.
‘That concert, you see, it was for the roof, and the angels first—you know that—to fix them so that they won’t fall. Perhaps I was thinking that, thinking about them falling, and it made me see them flying. I was thinking about the man who made them, and watching you and your expression was like the man’s when he carved the angels.’
Pennington turned his head and looked at her again, curiously. From experience Marion knew that most people laughed at her if she what they called ‘carried on in that way’, but he didn’t laugh.
‘I looked at those angels for a long time,’ he said, ‘after the rehearsal, and I felt they could well fly away.’
Marion remembered him lying in the pew when everyone else went to the W.I. tea, hands behind his head.
‘It was the music,’ she said.
‘You don’t want to get seats for the Festival Hall then. Not without your daddy there to field you.’
‘I’m sorry.’
They sat for a long time in silence. They were in the last of the sun which came slanting sideways between a gap in the elms and the alder. The trees fringed the churchyard before the land fell away down banks of nettles and meadowsweet to the river. Beyond the river the cows were grazing on golden pasture, casting long thin shadows. The road was quiet.
Eventually Pennington sighed and said, ‘It’s nice here. Makes you think.’
‘What about?’
‘Things you don’t have time to think about usually. Someone carving those angels, for instance.’
‘Swithin,’ Marion said.
‘Was that his name?’
‘It’s in the records. Fourteen twenty to fourteen fifty-three. He died of a broken leg.’
‘What a waste.’
‘But he did that first. It’s more important, doing that, and dying at thirty-three, than dying at seventy having done nothing.’
‘I agree.’
‘I t
hought, when you were playing, that he could have been a bit like you. I imagine him like you. The way you look when you play.’
‘How do I look when I play?’
‘Beautiful. But when you’re not playing you’re just ordinary.’
The sharp, ordinary eyes looked at her with a suggestion of astonishment.
‘Do people ever tell you you’re mad?’
‘No. “Disturbed”, they say.’
‘Yes, of course. They said that about me once.’
‘Did they?’ Marion was enchanted.
‘Disturbed. Aggressively motivated. Emotionally deprived. All the jargon.’
‘Really? Why? What did you do?’
‘I used to hit people if they annoyed me.’
‘Badly? I mean, hard?’
‘Hard enough to get me locked up. “Grievous bodily harm” it’s called.’
‘Locked up? You mean in prison?’
‘Yes.’
‘Really?’ Marion was enormously impressed.
‘Twice.’
‘Do you do it now?’
‘No. I’ve grown out of it.’
‘Daddy says I’ll grow out of it.’
‘Yes, it’s the same thing. Feelings you can’t control. But I dare say you won’t go to prison for yours.’
‘A mental home.’
‘Perhaps. But it doesn’t seem that bad to me. What you did, in the church, is . . . to me . . . more natural, if the music is good enough, than—well . . . some people read their programmes, or go to sleep.’
‘Truly?’
‘Yes. I’ve seen them.’
‘You don’t mind about me then?’
‘Well, it’s perhaps a rather inconvenient way to react, stopping us all in our tracks. But what I’m saying is that I understand. Some might not.’
‘No. It’s going to be awful—the church ladies will say things. Alfred—the vicar—he might be a bit cross too.’
‘Tell them, from me, that it’s all right.’
‘Thank you, I will.’
‘I’d better go. I’ve got to go and play Chopin in the Festival Pavilion. And call home for some dry trousers first.’
‘Truly, I’m sorry.’
He smiled, for the first time. He had an essentially serious expression, and did not smile often.
‘It was an interesting evening. Thank you. I’ll come and call on you soon to see your father’s boat, if he won’t mind.’
‘No. He loves showing people his boat.’
They got up and walked down the path to the lane where the green sports car was parked. Pennington got in and started the engine.
‘Good-bye, little idiot.’
‘Thank you,’ Marion said.
Chapter Two
MR. PENNINGTON CAME round to the cottage four days later, in the evening, to look at Geoff’s boat. Geoff was working on it, and Marion was sitting on a saw-bench, having brought him a cup of tea. The back garden was long and narrow, neglected since Liz had died, and overgrown with old roses and mint and golden rod. It sloped quite steeply down to the river and petered out at the bottom into salty grass and sea-lavender, for the river was tidal and the banks were seamed with mud-channels. At low tide there was no river, only mud-banks. But at high-water springs the river came right up over the saltings and lipped at the golden rod, and sent scummy fingers up the garden path as if it would explore the back kitchen, given encouragement.
Geoff’s boat stood just clear of the high water mark, propped up with old sleepers, a sleek grey hull which Marion always thought looked like a sea-lion hoping for. titbits. The metal-framed hull had already been plastered and the deck was on, and Geoff was doing the inside joinery. So far it had taken him two years. He didn’t think about very much else. He had a friend in the village called Horry who helped him quite often, steaming and laminating and bolting through and offering up . . . Marion took it as a way of life, and couldn’t foresee the day when the boat might be launched.
When Pennington arrived to have a look, Marion took him down the garden and left them talking about four layers of half-inch mesh, to make a five-eighths shell—much in the same way, she thought, as the musicians had talked about the rallentando leading to the second subject with a modulation into the minor key . . . everything could be given a name and place, if you knew, she thought, save in her own cloudy world of feelings and intuitions . . . she would learn, she supposed, given time. She wanted to talk some more with Pennington, but not particularly about boats. Perhaps he would come back to the house afterwards, for a cup of tea. But it didn’t get dark till about ten. The evenings were long and warm and still. Marion went across the lane towards the church, wondering if Flint would come up to play with the trains. They had made a new siding into the choir stalls, but hadn’t tried it out yet. She went into the churchyard, and saw a woman she didn’t know sitting on the grass looking out across the valley. She had a child with her of about three or four, who was digging a hole in the gravel chippings on the old vicar’s grave with a piece of stick. As the vicar had had eleven children of his own, Marion didn’t think he would mind. She knew the couple were Pennington’s wife and son and stopped to consider them, intensely curious.
The wife was only a girl; if she was even as old as twenty, Marion thought, she didn’t look it. She was thin, dark, with a very grave, gentle face. She was dressed in a long flowery cotton skirt and a thin white shirt, sleeves rolled up to show brown, bony elbows, a plain gold bracelet on one wrist. For the first time in two or three years, Marion was reminded very vividly, painfully, of her own mother. It wasn’t particularly the looks, but something in the manner that touched an extremely vulnerable chord: the seriousness, perhaps, of someone absorbing a landscape, the sense of someone actively enjoying the summer-evening tranquility, the body in complete repose yet the spirit aware, alight. Marion could remember this in her mother, sitting on the sand-dunes watching the sea sometimes, while she had played, or wandering round a village churchyard to garner something for her sheaves of notes. It came back with a quite dreadful, sudden sense of loss. She stopped and stared, knowing it was rude, as bad almost as busting up the concert, but unable—as then—to do the right thing; hardly able, in fact, to keep from bursting into tears.
The girl looked up and stared back.
Marion, trying desperately hard, said, ‘Are you Mrs. Pennington?’ Her voice sounded very queer.
‘Yes. Ruth. Are you Marion?’
‘Yes.’
She smiled. ‘I’ve heard about you.’
‘Oh. Yes.’ Marion could guess. She felt her cheeks going bright red. But embarrassment was far better than grief. It was almost a relief.
‘Awful—’ she muttered. ‘I—’ What to be said? Nothing. She stopped trying. Looked at her feet. Why was she so bad at everything?
Ruth said, ‘He told me, about the angels wanting to burst out. I’ve been looking at them. I can imagine . . . I think it was a great compliment to the players, that they moved you so much.’
‘He—sort of—said that.’ But only Geoff knew with what fatal ease it happened.
‘It’s much better, for him, than your falling asleep.’
‘Yes. He said.’
‘Good. He said the right things. Sometimes he’s rather rude.’
‘Oh.’ Like her. She was in good company.
‘You’ve looked in the church?’
‘Yes. I would have stayed, but Lud likes the graves best. He’s not doing any harm, I don’t think—’ She checked up, turning to regard the oblivious child burrowing like a terrier—‘The angels are fantastic. I’ve never seen any like that before.’
‘No. There aren’t any.’
‘What’s their history? When was the church built?’
Marion, encouraged and grateful, told her the story of the great church’s ambitious beginning, lording it over the surrounding countryside with the ships coming in and out to load at its feet and the big road winding inland to connect up with market towns and village
s all the way to London.
‘Until the marshes started to silt up and big storms altered the river mouth so that the ships couldn’t use it, and it all started to go into a decline. You can still see the remains of the old quays. There’s one at the bottom of our garden, where Daddy’s building the boat.’
‘So the poor church has been virtually unused for centuries, not just the last few years . . . that’s why it’s so far gone.’
‘Yes. It’s been used for a barn sometimes.’
‘It’s all ghosts, this part,’ Ruth said. ‘Up the coast there, where the whole town has fallen in the sea, and this . . . it’s very creepy. There’s a grave, right on the edge of the cliff—’
‘I know. It will go this winter, Daddy says. It’s very old. Have you looked at it?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s fifteenth century. It used to be in the north-west corner of the churchyard of St. James. The church went in eighteen eighty something. Then all the rest of the churchyard, right to the wall. Daddy said you could pick up bones all over the place after a big storm. He’s got some in the shed.’
‘And just one left . . . I wonder who he was? When he goes. . . .’
Marion had never had a more absorbed audience. Ruth’s face was stark, thinking about it. Marion said, very tentatively: ‘Sometimes—that grave—I think it might—it just might—be the grave—of—’ She stared at the grass very intently, a little afraid of revealing her painful theory. ‘It might be the man who carved the angels.’
‘Why? Do people say it’s his grave? Do they know?’
‘No. I’ve never heard anyone else say. But he died in fourteen fifty-three, and he was buried in the north-west corner of the graveyard.’
‘How do you know?’
‘My mother knew. It’s all in her notes. She studied it for her thesis. She knew an old man who said. He had notes too, masses of them. But he died and his wife burned them all, and my mother cried. Then she died. But I’ve still got her notes.’
‘All about the church?’