The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

by William Nicholson

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Then surely you must say so.’

  ‘Yes. Indeed.’

  ‘When will you say so?’

  ‘Well, you see, in a way I’m saying so now.’

  Mrs Huxtable smiles. She has extracted from the rector an implied disagreement. She knows from her long experience of committees how important it is to provoke the opposition into revealing its true colours. The reason so little ever gets done is that the English middle classes are crippled by politeness. Face to face, they will not confront each other, and so their conflicts are rarely resolved. Of course once a disagreement is flushed like a frightened pheasant into open view, a less aggressive strategy becomes appropriate. Careful handling is called for. The pheasant must be chivvied into the path of the guns.

  ‘Miles, I do understand your position. You don’t want to appear a killjoy. You don’t want Christians to be seen as killjoys.’

  ‘Just so. There you are, you see.’

  ‘But you must say something.’

  She smiles again. It’s her duty to give him some of the super-abundance of her own strength, so that he can do the right thing. Duty and strength. And love, of course.

  ‘From the pulpit, Miles.’

  ‘Ah, yes. You think so?’

  ‘This Sunday. Halloween is six months away. I doubt if anyone will be thinking much about it, one way or the other. But once stated, clearly and unequivocally, the ruling, as it were, will be on the statute book. Then Oliver and I and Margaret and the others can spread the word.’

  This is Mrs Huxtable’s plan. She is fully aware of the rector’s shortcomings. All she requires is his statement from the pulpit, to which she can then refer. It wouldn’t do for people to say that the ban on Trick or Treat originated from her herself. She is to be no more than the agent of enforcement.

  ‘Good,’ says the rector, seeing her turn to leave. ‘That’s settled, then.’

  ‘Thank you, Miles. I’m sorry to bother you over this.’

  In the church door, just before passing from view, and following another of her precepts learned in the committee room, she pauses to summarize the meeting’s conclusion.

  ‘Just so there’s no confusion. You have agreed to speak against Trick or Treat from the pulpit this Sunday.’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ says the rector.

  With this, Joan Huxtable decides to be satisfied.

  Miles Salmon, left alone in the chilly church, moves slowly down the aisle making sure that all is as it should be. The church is not beautiful. It was over-restored in the late nineteenth century, and the dark oak with which it was then lined and decorated is ornate without being delicate, lending to the long shadowy tunnel of the nave the saddened air of a guildhall built for some long-declined trade. A colourful banner, stitched by the members of the Mothers Union for the millennium, proclaims JOY TO THE WORLD in irregular scarlet letters on a yellow ground. The joy makes little headway against the gloom. The church is not listed in the guidebooks, and is of no special interest to anyone, except perhaps to the local families whose many generations are remembered on wall plaques and brasses, and in the undistinguished nineteenth-century stained glass windows.

  Nevertheless, St Mary’s Edenfield does receive occasional visitors, and these visitors do not always respect its dignity. The rector has found sweet wrappers, empty cider bottles, even used condoms between the pews. For himself, he takes no offence at this. If people come to his empty church to eat sweets, drink cider, and make love, he’s happy that the building is proving useful. But there is a view in the parish that the church should be locked except when in use, and he doesn’t want to supply evidence for this case. All four church wardens, whose job it is to clean the church, and who therefore resent any activity that disturbs the dark and polished silence, are stalwart door-lockers. So every evening the Reverend Salmon cleans the pews himself.

  He is a small slight man with prominent eyes and ears that stick out like mug handles; now entering his sixty-eighth year; mild of manner, and without an enemy in the village. There are those who complain that he is spineless, but even they criticize him without animus. Those that speak highly of him use terms more commonly associated with pets. He is ‘a dear sweet man’, he ‘understands every word you say’, he is ‘a comfort’.

  The rector switches off the lights, and emerging into the small porch, draws the door shut after him. In the dusk of the churchyard he sees one of his parishioners, old Dick Waller, tending his son’s grave. Dick’s boy was killed in a head-on collision on the notorious straight stretch of the A27 that runs from Edenfield roundabout to Middle Farm. He was seventeen.

  ‘Best kept grave in the churchyard, Dick.’

  ‘So it should be, vicar.’ Dick Waller is the head gardener at Edenfield Place.

  He straightens up, brushes the soil from his knees, and eyes the orderly display of pelargoniums.

  ‘I like to think he knows I’ve not forgotten.’

  ‘Oh, he does, he does. He watches you as you plant the flowers for him, and he smiles, I’m sure he smiles. He knows that where he is now the flowers never fade. He’s waiting for the day when you can join him, and he can show you his garden, and say to you, Nothing for you to do here, Dad.’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t like that. I like to be busy.’

  ‘He smiles when he hears you say that, too.’

  ‘I wish I could believe it, vicar.’

  ‘You don’t have to believe it, Dick. Just tell yourself it might be so. And when your time comes, well, start thinking what you might say to him, if he were to be there, waiting for you.’

  ‘I should tell him he was a damn fool on that road.’

  ‘So he was, Dick.’

  ‘But I should like to see him again. I don’t deny that.’

  So they part, the rector and the gardener, both much of an age. It’s over twenty years since Dick Waller’s boy was killed, but as he leaves the churchyard and climbs into his pick-up, his eyes are blurring. Unable to see to drive, he sits in the cab without turning on the engine and thinks of nothing much, and is comforted.

  The rector continues on his way, passing just beyond the yew trees the handsome Georgian house that would once have been his home. The old rectory was sold long ago. These days Judge Huxtable lives there, second in social standing only to Lord Edenfield himself. The rector is housed in a terraced Victorian cottage on the village high street, built originally for the estate carpenter. Miles Salmon has enjoyed the use of this cottage for thirty-seven years, all by himself, and he has made it fit his habits and needs so precisely that he couldn’t conceive of living anywhere else.

  In the street near his gate he meets old Mrs Willis, hunched in her electric buggy, also on her way home. Because she is deaf, and her head is bent down so that she sees only the road before her, he touches her on the shoulder as she goes by and speaks to her in a loud clear voice.

  ‘Almost home, Gwen.’

  She brings her buggy to a stop with a jerk that causes her to rock forward.

  ‘That you, vicar?’

  ‘Of course it is. How are you today, my dear?’

  The rector shouts. The old lady whispers.

  ‘I’ve had another one, vicar.’

  ‘Another one, eh? And what is it this time?’

  Mrs Willis has visitations from the spirit world. Her most frequent contact is a Native American chief’s daughter called Standing Holy.

  ‘There’s to be a surprise visitor, vicar. I must be true to my heart.’

  ‘True to your heart, Gwen? Do you have a secret lover?’

  ‘No, vicar, no.’ She laughs a small tinkling laugh.

  ‘You take care, Gwen. Don’t go letting strange men into the house.’

  ‘No need to worry about me, vicar. All is to be destroyed in the coming whirlwind.’

  Gwen Willis’s spirit contact has told her that a great whirlwind is to sweep over the face of the earth, causing lamentation and destroying property.

/>   ‘The whirlwind, yes,’ says the rector. ‘I remember.’

  ‘You must tell people, vicar. They don’t listen to me.’

  ‘I’ll do my best, Gwen.’

  The electric buggy jerks into motion once more. Miles Salmon heads on through the gate into his own house, walking with the unhurried step and slightly bowed head he adopted long ago, as the demeanour proper to a parish priest. But as soon as his front door closes behind him, unaware that he is doing this, he unfolds like a music stand and becomes a different man. He unbuttons his clerical collar and shrugs off his black jacket. He exchanges his black lace-up shoes for a pair of rope-soled slippers. He mixes himself a small but potent vodka martini. Then he sits down with his untouched copy of The Times, and opens the paper to the Court and Social page. This is the only page he ever reads. He gave up all other forms of the news long ago.

  The High Sheriff has given a breakfast at the Ritz Hotel, London W1. The 346th Annual Festival Service of the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy has been held in St Paul’s Cathedral, the sermon preached by the Bishop of London with twelve other bishops in attendance. On this day, Mafeking was relieved and the Daylight Saving Act passed, though in different years. As he reads there steals over him a state of mind and body to which he looks forward all day, a gentle floating sensation, an elevated perspective on the world, not unlike, he imagines, that of God the Creator himself. From this furry cloud he gazes down on the doings of men with keen amusement. Their grandeurs and follies, and ultimately their futility, of which they are so childishly unaware, parade themselves before his unjudging eyes as a kind of pre-prandial cabaret. In all this, Miles Salmon makes no presumption of superiority himself. He may see as the Creator sees, but he too is a creature. He too, with his failed ambitions and lost dreams, is a joke.

  Only now, fortified by alcohol and irony, does he turn to his phone messages. Dutifully he writes down the calls to be returned in the morning. One requires immediate action. Peter Ansell, the Diocesan Secretary, would like an urgent word. This charming young man with the lowly title is in fact the most powerful official in the diocese, the aging bishop not excepted.

  ‘Oh, Miles. What have you been saying now?’

  Ansell’s voice contains no accusation. He runs the diocese through a complex process of collusion.

  ‘What am I said to be saying?’ responds Miles.

  ‘Apparently you’ve been alleging that the Church of England deals in drugs.’

  ‘Have I? When?’

  ‘A charity event. St James’s Hospice.’

  Of course, the silent auction to raise money for the local hospice.

  ‘Yes, yes. I was asked to say a few words. I think I was making a point about the comforts of faith, you know. Faith versus morphine. Faith allied with morphine. I’m sorry, I’m not making myself clear.’

  ‘I think I get the picture. I’m afraid the stoats and the weasels are everywhere these days. Do be more careful.’

  ‘Yes. I will.’

  ‘The bishop has had a phone call. I’ll respond on his behalf. Confusion caused by use of imagery. Bang this one on the head.’

  ‘Thank you, Peter.’

  Miles sighs as he hangs up, and sets about cooking his evening meal. There’s rarely any trouble within the parish. It’s the outer world, the non-churchgoing spectators, who insist upon high moral standards and doctrinal orthodoxy. Fortunately the only sins that attract attention are sexual, whereas Miles’s failure is entirely theological. To be specific, some years ago he stopped believing in the divinity of Jesus. After that more and more of the tenets of Christianity dropped away; until the day came when he stopped believing in God altogether. For a time he had supposed this was a crisis, and that he would be obliged to resign his living; but before he could summon up the courage to leave his beloved house, and rather to his surprise, he found that having no faith made him a much better parish priest. Lacking any certainty of his own, he took to responding, humbly and lovingly, to the needs of those who came to him in trouble. His job, it was plain, was to give comfort; so he told each sufferer whatever it was he or she wanted to hear.

  His loss of faith has not turned to anger or bitterness against Christianity, he has simply come to read the Gospels as he reads Bunyan or Milton or Blake. There are profound values there, and wisdom, and poetry. But if one of his parishioners becomes convinced she’s in contact with Sitting Bull’s daughter, a spirit who reveals to her that a whirlwind is coming to destroy the world, well, who is he to tell her it’s nonsense?

  Miles Salmon has concluded that God does not exist, but that religion is both real and necessary. He does sometimes worry that he must contradict himself daily, but his experience over the years has taught him that people are less interested in consistency, or even in truth, than one might suppose. What they care about is being right. And when viewed from the privileged vantage point of his vodka-induced cloud, they can all be said to be right, in their own terms.

  For his supper this evening he has a tinned steak-and-kidney pudding from Marks & Spencer. Its instructions call for half-an-hour in a pan of boiling water. He puts the water on to boil, pours himself a second drink, and takes it out through the back door into his small back garden. It’s not much more than a patch of lawn, a flower bed beneath a south-facing wall, but he’s been tending it for so long now that it feels like an extension of himself.

  A single wicker chair stands on the raised paving to the left of the door, too small an area to call a terrace, but here each evening when the weather permits he sits and sips his second drink. He has no newspaper, no book. His eyes read the ever-changing story of his miniature realm.

  The prunus in the far corner is shedding the last of its blossom, the litter of white petals now curling on the grass, discolouring to the tones of the earth. The daffodils and the tulips are long over. A few purple irises are still in bloom, standing proudly apart from each other. The roses are coming into bud, another month at least before they flower, the Empereur du Maroc first, its clustered fists swelling to such an impossible size before they unleash the great maroon flowers. He has trained a climber up the wall, a Zéphirine Drouhin, and nearer the house spreads his beloved Cristata with its bearded buds. June is not far off now, the time of glory, when his garden will glow with crimsons and pinks, and the water meadows beyond the wall will be sweet with the scent of summer all the way to the river.

  The phone rings, summoning him back into the house.

  ‘I hope I’m not getting you at a bad time.’ The voice of Laura Broad. He calls her image to mind. Not a churchgoer, but Miles Salmon prides himself on knowing everyone in the village, by name at least.

  ‘Not at all. How can I help?’

  ‘I’ve been working in the library at Edenfield Place, and come on a reference to someone who would have lived in the village in the fifties. The only name I have is Doll. I’m trying to trace her.’

  ‘Doll? No, I don’t know of any Doll. But I only go back to 1963, I’m afraid.’

  Later, eating his supper, reading Mansfield Park, he is nagged by the ghost of a memory. He knows he has heard or seen this name before.

  Who do I know called Doll?

  18

  The headmaster finds Alan Strachan alone in his classroom.

  ‘Oh, Alan. Thought you were long gone. What’s this about Alice Dickinson?’

  Long gone certainly. Only my outer form remains, taking refuge in routine work from the heart-sucker, the vacuum-cleaner of joy, the waiting void.

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Crying in the changing rooms for no reason.’

  Holy smoke, the man’s a philosopher! The authentic wail of humanity: crying in the changing rooms for no reason. Dear Alastair seems all unaware of the depths he plumbs.

  ‘I wasn’t told.’

  ‘She’s one of yours. Look into it, will you?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Single parent, you know.’

  ‘I’ll have a word tomorrow
.’

  Why am I colluding with this meeting of the eyes, this imperceptible lift of the shoulders? Is the pain of existence reserved for the children of single parents? Enter the Two Hypocrites. First Hypocrite: I believe what I say because I am stupid. Second Hypocrite: I say what I don’t believe because I am afraid.

  ‘If you’re likely to be around for the next half hour, I wonder—’

  ‘Just off, actually.’

  I’m not supervising boarders’ prep, no sirree. I swear they think round here that a man without a wife is a man without a life. How laughably far from the mark that is. So it’s home to my full and frank existence to unpack the cargo of my loaded hours.

  Just get up and go.

  Five minutes from door to door if the lidless Beetle does the only thing it was created to do. What does a car feel when it fails to start? Failure. Go with that feeling, brother, use it, find its force, turn it to positive energy. Depression is displaced anger, anger is displaced love. There’s a through-line from what you’re feeling now to the greatest power in creation, which is love. So just fucking ignite your mixture, okay?

  Frum-frum-frumble-frumble. Five minutes. Time enough to make a plan. There’s a room waiting where old friends have turned traitor and are in league to hurt me. I refer to item, one desk, upon whose surface lie Post-It notes bearing brief creative exudations; item, one keyboard, much caressed by my own heated fingertips; item, one swivel chair upon which I have swivelled with the masters. All now have joined the conspiracy. A great betrayal has taken place. From a faraway command post the sinister unseen leader of the coup, Lorraine Jones, Script Editor, has suborned my former allies and equipped them with knives with which to stab me.

  Lorraine, you underestimate me. You think because my play lacks the dramatic quality necessary for compulsive radio listening that I am made of milk and water. But I will not be tipped over and left to drain into the long grass. You think I am crushable. See me unfold. Am I downhearted? See me celebrate. This evening not an end but a beginning. This evening I please myself.