Marion's Angels

by K. M. Peyton

  ‘Mostly. The man who carved the angels was called Swithin. He was quite famous in his day. He did work for other churches, but I’ve never seen any. It might not still be there. In my mother’s notes it says, ‘He lived for his werke, and took no wyf.’ When you get to know the angels very well, you think—a bit—you think you—almost—know him.’

  She had never said this to anyone else, not even her father.

  ‘I was thinking that, in the concert. It made me think, watching Mr. Pennington when he was playing, that it was—perhaps—the same thing, in a sort of way . . . the way he looked, playing—it made me think it was like Swithin carving the angels, how he would have looked . . . both of them, making something very beautiful—it made me think of Swithin—I thought—’ But it was beyond her, to put in words the wraiths and confusions in her mind. Strangely, with Ruth, these confessions did not embarrass her. There was nobody else she would have spoken to in this way, not even her father. Ruth, like her husband, was special. She could not say how. Like her husband, she accepted what Marion was saying without amusement, without patronage. Her face was understanding.

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘He has a face like a workman, not an artist, but when he plays it looks quite different. And I thought that is how Swithin is—was. It fitted exactly. It was like them—being—the same person. I thought it was like watching Swithin.’

  Ruth didn’t say anything, and they both sat in silence, watching the child digging. Marion had no more to say, slightly exhausted by the effort of making articulate her difficult feelings but—somehow—lightened in a curious way by having done so. Or, perhaps, by not having been ridiculed. Perhaps she wasn’t as mad as they thought. Ruth evidently didn’t think so, for after, an interval she said again, ‘I know what you mean.’ And then, ‘He lives for his work too, and whether he needs a wife or not I sometimes wonder.’

  This was deeper water than Marion could cope with, but the words were calmly spoken, not bitter. Perhaps, Marion thought, it could be as difficult actually having somebody as not having anybody at all.

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, perfectly companionable, and then Marion, remembering her manners, said, ‘Would you like to come home and have a cup of tea?’

  ‘That would be very nice,’ Ruth said.

  They put the grave back tidily, and Ruth took Lud’s hand and they went back to the cottage. Lud was a doer, and started to fill one of Geoff’s gumboots with potatoes out of a paper sack by the kitchen, door, which seemed to both Ruth and Marion a reasonable way to spend the time. Marion put the kettle on and said, ‘Do sit down. I’ll make one for Daddy and Mr. Pennington as well.’

  ‘He’s called Pat,’ Ruth said. ‘Not Mr. Pennington.’

  ‘Does he want to build a boat?’

  ‘No. He’d never have the time. But he likes sailing. He used to sail. It would be good for him to have something apart from music, for a relaxation.’

  ‘Isn’t music a relaxation?’

  Ruth laughed. ‘No. Not if you’re a professional.’

  Marion was puzzled. ‘But he only plays concerts sometimes. Not every night?’

  ‘He plays two or three a week.’

  ‘He has lots of spare time then?’

  ‘No. All the rest of the time he’s either travelling, or practising.’

  ‘Practising?’ Marion didn’t think he needed it.

  ‘Yes. All the time he’s at home. Now we’re here, he comes on the beach for an hour, has a swim perhaps. That’s not much time off.’

  Marion had imagined a very carefree life, sight-seeing in the fast car, sun-bathing, playing with Lud, tossing off the occasional concert. She had assumed he wanted to build a boat to fill in all his spare time. She had to readjust. There was more to piano playing than she had thought.

  ‘I thought it was something he could just do—a gift.’

  Ruth smiled. ‘He can only do it so well because he has spent so much time learning how.’

  It was fairly obvious when pointed out, and Marion felt ashamed. She blushed.

  Ruth said, ‘Nearly everybody thinks the same. Even people like my mother. It’s only when you live with it, you see how it is. I didn’t know, before I met him. He told me he was studying zoology. He said afterwards I would have thought he was just a layabout if he’d said music.’

  ‘Zoology?’

  Ruth laughed. ‘It was a misunderstanding. I was very dim. He let me think it. Sometimes now I wish it was true.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s away so much. And when he’s home he works all the time. And I can’t join in, I can’t even talk music very much. His agent, Mick, comes over and they talk—they talk about a European tour, and an American one. They are dying to go to America. If they go to America. . . .’ She sighed.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to go to America?’

  ‘Not like that. Living in hotels, travelling with Lud, waiting, meeting all those people I can’t talk to.’

  Ruth stopped and looked at Marion curiously. ‘I don’t know why I am saying this to you. I’ve never said it to anybody before. I wouldn’t say it to anyone else.’

  Marion thought, I said all that to her too, in the churchyard, which I wouldn’t have said to anyone else.

  Ruth said, ‘I suppose it follows on, from what you said about Swithin, living for his work.’ She smiled. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  It did, Marion knew.

  ‘The tea’s ready,’ she said. ‘I’ll give Daddy a shout.’

  Geoff came up the garden with Pat and they came in, the kitchen darkening to their figures in the doorway. Geoff was surprised by Ruth, stopping abruptly when he saw her sitting at the table. Marion, watching him, wondered if he saw in her what she had seen, the remembrance of Liz. She could not tell. Her father didn’t reveal very much, as a rule. Ruth got up and they shook hands. The little kitchen seemed very full, and the mugs were all chipped, Marion noticed. She poured the milk in a jug, but the sugar in the sugarbowl was all lumpy and stuck to the sides. The teapot had a rubber spout, after she had dropped it. It wasn’t very smart. Nobody seemed to notice.

  ‘You’re staying here for the summer?’ Geoff said to Ruth. ‘You’ve got a cottage at Oldbridge, Pat tells me.’

  ‘Yes, almost on the beach. It’s lovely. You must come over, with Marion.’

  ‘It’s a right old beehive, Oldbridge, at Festival time,’ Geoff said. ‘All those music buffs. When does the Festival start? On Saturday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s why you’re here? To play?’

  ‘I’ve got three concerts,’ Pat said.

  ‘In the Festival Hall?’ Marion asked, awed.

  ‘Yes.’

  Marion was impressed by such stature. ‘Can I—we—come? I’d love to—’

  ‘God forbid!’ Pat said. ‘I’ll have you locked out.’

  Geoff laughed.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t—I promise! Not in the hall. I wouldn’t.’

  ‘No guarantee,’ Geoff said. ‘You know it isn’t.’

  ‘Truly—’

  ‘Absolutely no.’

  Pat, seeing her face, said, ‘Come over to the cottage and I’ll play you a private concert, all to yourself, and you can scream and jump about to your heart’s delight, and I promise I won’t stop. I’ll go right on to the end, regardless.’

  ‘Really? Would you?’

  ‘If you’d like it.’

  ‘You could both come over to supper one evening,’ Ruth said. ‘After the Festival would be best though. Pat will be nicer then.’

  ‘Isn’t he now?’ Marion asked dubiously.

  ‘Not very.’

  Pat did not disagree, stirring sugar into his tea. Perhaps to change the subject, he said, ‘How are the angels? Going to get a refit with all that lovely money?’

  ‘The Church Commissioners are sending an inspector next week,’ Geoff said. ‘To examine the fabric, they say. Estimate costs. I can’t see it being on, myself. Its day is
over.’

  Marion could not bear to hear her father talk like this.

  ‘They will fix the angels, surely? And the roof? That wouldn’t be terribly expensive.’

  ‘The roof would. Before long it’s only going to need a real gale—the tower is suspect. I think they might have to close it.’

  ‘I would still go in,’ Marion said.

  ‘Yes, and I wish you wouldn’t,’ her father said. ‘But I reckon anyone’d have a job to keep you out of where you want to go.’

  ‘They can’t,’ Marion said, agonized by the thought.

  Her father said, gently, ‘You can’t shut your eyes to it, Marion. They can’t just let it fall down on a posse of unsuspecting tourists. Very bad for the reputation. Not to mention the tourists.’

  Having lived with the possibility so long, Marion couldn’t face the thought of the church being shuttered up, demolished. If the inspectors were coming next week, it would be decided quite soon, one way or the other.

  ‘Don’t think about it,’ Ruth said gently. ‘The things you worry about most, often never happen.’

  ‘Don’t they?’ said Pat.

  ‘Oh, you’re different. You chose it that way.’

  When they had gone, her father went down to the boat and tidied up and came back to the kitchen. Marion made some cheese sandwiches—they had had their tea earlier—and Geoff fetched a can of beer from the dresser. It was going dark. They sat by the empty fireplace. The back door was still open, and a few bats whirled about in the square of darkening sky, and the smell of roses came with the evening dew.

  Geoff said, ‘That girl, Ruth—she reminds me—’ He stopped.

  Marion waited, but he didn’t say any more, only, ‘Your bedtime, tiddly-wink.’

  Marion brushed the crumbs off the plates and put them away. She went to the staircase that led out of the kitchen.

  ‘She reminded me, too,’ she said. And went upstairs.

  Chapter Three

  THE EXAMINATION OF the church structure took place a few days later, with much coming and going and measuring and chin-stroking, gouging and scraping and hammering and muttering. Marion, mostly at school, watched as best she could, and spent a lot of time polishing the brass and doing the flowers and pretending she wasn’t interested if they were still there when she came home. On the third day they got Colin Pewsey the local builder in, with his ladders and a bit more scaffolding, and Marion was able to inquire of him. He had been in the same class as Geoff at school.

  ‘Well, it’s all possible, if the money’s available,’ he reported. ‘It’s the roof timbers, mainly. The beetle’s got in ’em. They need replacing, and you don’t find those sort of timbers so easy these days. The rest of it—well, it’s deteriorating, but it’s not dangerous, apart from the tower. The top of the tower’s bad. That’d best be taken down, then there’d be no worries when the wind blows hard. It’s all possible if they can produce the money. But my guess is, they won’t. They’ll make an estimate for making it safe, like, and it’ll be too hefty to raise, and they’ll board it all up.’

  Alfred came down later and confirmed Colin’s guess.

  ‘They say a quarter of a million, just for the roof. I think they expect to make some sort of an appeal, but not with any hope of getting enough. It’s a very sad position, but it doesn’t come as a surprise.’

  ‘And if they don’t get it—?’

  ‘Well, who knows? If it’s not repaired they will have to stop people entering, for their own safety, and I suppose the tower will have to come down if it’s dangerous, and then . . .’ he glanced at Marion, somewhat anxiously. ‘But what does a church matter to a child like you? It’s not right to care so much, Marion. It’s not—’ He paused. He was going to say ‘natural’, but let the phrase die. ‘You will get used to the idea. It’s in the nature of things. Nothing material lasts for ever. Can you not accept it?’

  ‘I couldn’t watch, if they knock it down.’ Her face was as white as chalk. ‘What about the angels?’ she asked.

  ‘The angels, strangely, are in remarkably fine condition. Only their fastenings need replacing.’

  ‘What will happen to them if the church is closed?’

  ‘I expect they will go to a museum.’

  ‘But they need—’

  Marion couldn’t say it. They needed space, they needed the great barn of St. Michael’s about them and the sky through the unstained clerestory windows and the seagulls outside, as they were used to. A dusty museum, with neon lighting, and grubby school-parties staring into Sebastian’s heavenly, far-fixed eyes; it just wasn’t something she could accept.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong in what’s happening, Marion. Only sad. Think how many of our treasures never survived the Reformation.’

  Marion didn’t know what he was talking about. It was just that she belonged to St. Michael’s, and St. Michael’s to her, by virtue of having been born by its gates and lived with its angels and her mother’s love for it ever since she could remember. Whatever Alfred had to say, nothing could reconcile her to the thought of looking out of the window and there being no church there. It was in the same vein as a sea drying up or a mountain falling through the ground. It had never been, until now, a possibility.

  ‘Not to—knock it down,’ she said bleakly.

  To decay, moulder, crumble, over another century or so . . . perhaps; even to be snatched into a rampaging sea like St. James, but to be demolished . . . she had seen them, in Ipswich once, bludgeoning defenceless cottages with empty windows, like blind eyes, young men with bulldozers, rolling cigarettes between-times and reading the Sun with their sandwiches in their lunch-hour. The tears welled up.

  Alfred said briskly: ‘You must be sensible, girl. What if the roof fell on you and killed you? The Church is reponsible for the safety of its congregations. It is something you will have to accept. You will get used to the idea.’

  ‘It would not kill me,’ she said, certain.

  Colin had left his ladders and scaffolding, and she went in when home to lunch and climbed up into the roof and on to the walkway. She knew it was strictly forbidden by everybody, but she had done it before, and knew no one would come in until Colin came back. It was very high and very impressive and slightly breathtaking, not because of the height, but because of being actually face to face with Herbert and Ted, close enough to see Swithin’s chisel marks and the incised patterns, very formal, on their outstretched wings, and the lines on their sardonic faces. She could stroke the wood, as Swithin must have stroked it. She found it very moving.

  There was nothing medieval in the faces; they were village people, as there were village people now, the same: the cautious, slightly sceptical expression of the middle-aged countryman. The other pairs of angels were less earthy, mostly quite a lot more angelic-looking, culminating in the very pious pair over the altar, Sebastian and Arthur. Marion’s guess was that Swithin had started with them, and made them according to the book, proper churchy angels, but as he had progressed he had got more and more interested in carving faces of character—knowing, after all, that nobody in the congregation was ever going to come close enough to recognize their grandfather or mother-in-law in his portraits; he was pretty safe, some seventy feet up, to indulge his acute perception of character. After Sebastian and Arthur there were two rather pretty youths, Humphrey and Percy, in the angelic mould but with rather more than a suspicion of spotty adolescence about them, in the pouting underlip and roving eye; Tom and Jed, a devil-may-care couple, very happy-looking, were followed by two old cross-patches, the Sourapples; and the Farmer pair, a touch cross-eyed, squinted towards the windows over the river as if looking for rain-clouds. Marion’s favourite pair were Herbert and Ted, with their lively, watchful eyes, firmly on the congregation below. Picking out the fidgets, Marion thought. She touched the smooth, rounded serpentines of their twisting locks, leaving fingermarks in the thin dust.

  She could see the church as they saw it from the rafters, very austere and empt
y . . . neglected . . . ‘Useless,’ she thought, almost out loud. Alfred said that early on, before the Reformation (whatever that was) the church had had dark, coloured windows and had been very ornate, with a painted rood-screen and painted walls, and a gilded canopy over the altar, covered with carvings and statues. ‘It would have been dark and mysterious, with candles burning, and full of the smell of incense.’ How very peculiar, Marion thought, looking down on its paleness, the clear, white stone pillars, the bleached pinkish flagstones. Herbert and Ted had seen all manner of changes. Another wouldn’t hurt them, perhaps. They had been around sixty times longer than she had, and knew a whole lot of things she didn’t know.

  A figure had been decided by the end of the week, the figure that would enable the church to stay open without endangering its visitors.

  Colin told her what it was.

  ‘Seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds. That’s three quarters of a million.’

  It sounded a lot, somehow.

  Geoff agreed. ‘Crazy. You could build a hospital for that. Well—you could have, once. It’s a terrible lot of money. For nothing.’

  ‘No. Not for nothing.’

  ‘A matter of opinion.’

  Patrick agreed too. Marion met him in the church, by chance, just after dinner on Sunday. She had gone across with a bunch of slightly caterpillar-riddled roses to put on the altar, to show that somebody cared, and as she passed up the aisle a voice from the front pew startled her.

  ‘Hi.’

  He was lying stretched out on his back, his hands linked behind his head. He looked extremely smart and for a moment she didn’t recognize him. She stopped and studied him, and a wide smile of pleasure spread across her face. ‘It’s you,’ she said stupidly.

  He sat up, in no great hurry, and glanced at his watch.

  ‘Are you going somewhere?’ Marion asked.

  ‘You could say that, yes. Shortly.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To the Festival Hall.’

  ‘Oh! It’s today? This afternoon! Your concert?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, how I wish I could come!’