"Quite like Reformation times," Hortense said. "The mass in secret. Is there a priest's hole there or whatever it's called?"
"I thought you might be interested to know. I'll be turning up myself I think now and again. Though it makes Sunday a very long day for me."
"We're quite happy," I said, "with the monarch's brand of Christianity. When in England and so forth. Still, exciting to think there's a touch of criminality in it. We must go, Hortense. We can even confess in French, I suppose, in the foredawn candles. One's sins always sound more dignified in French."
"Yes," the rector said, "like Baudelaire. Pleasant to think you don't have to cut yourself off from one communion in order to belong to another. That's a Gregorian reform we all have to approve of. Good morning, Mr. Amos, Mr. Catt, Mr. Willard."
"Aaaargh, rector."
"Do you know," the rector asked Hortense, "anything about medicinal plants?"
"I know the names of some of them. Argimony, bistort, butcher's broom, loosestrife, herb Paris, meadowsweet, hemlock--" She trembled a little on that.
"Figwort," I suggested, "wood sorrel, tansy, pasqueflower, avens, self-healWhy do you ask?" It was as though we were being tested for the right to enter English rural life.
"I just wondered. The rural dean's coming to dinner. He has an obsession about these things. I'm quite ignorant. I wonder if you could both come. Thursday."
"Thank you, yes, we've nothing else on."
For luncheon that day Mrs. Hill gave us roast leg of lamb with mint sauce. "Funny," I said, "how France regards this as a barbarism. Mother, I remember, dutifully mixed chopped mint and sugar and vinegar for the rest of us but exclaimed on it as an Anglican heresy. These new French structuralists deny synchronic sweet and savoury to the cuisine, no part of Western culture they say. How about the British, somebody asked. Roast pork and apple sauce and so on. I think it's Levi-Strauss himself who says that the British don't belong to Western culture."
"Here's the song about Paris," Hortense said.
Tommy Toomey excavated from the past and singing and talking on LP to a new generation. That clear voice gave out my ancient words over the apple tart and cream:
When you have dined
You'll find
Some boite
Whereat
They're inclined
To l'erotique
Keep her close entwined
Till your mind
Grows weak
"All made," I said humbly, "out of my young imagination."
"Hush."
When you have danced
Chance takes you where
The air
Is entranced
With Paris spring...
We took coffee in our armchairs and heard the other side of the record, Tom monologuizing. It was a matter of unhooking the loudspeaker from the wall of the dining room and bringing it, on its long lead, here into the living room. "I've never heard any of these," I said.
"Nor I. We were away. We weren't home."
Tom, though dead before the Nazi invasion of Europe, had imagined an occupied England with the youth of a rural school, like the one here just down the road, being indoctrinated by an Erziehungsfeldwebel. Here was the sergeant's voice: "Ja, mine kids, dere is vun ting ye learn before ye beginnen, and dat is very how do you say it gross. You see de Himmel, de sky up aluft? Dat is high. And you are little, yes? You are littler dan de sky, yes? So you point up at de sky and you say vile you pointing are high littler high littler. Is dat not gut? And ye have a leetle aitch in it so it become highl hittler. Is dat not beautiful?"
"Oh my God," I said, "that's just how it would have been."
"I've never heard this one either."
It was Tom as a kind but irascible mother with two children. They had moved to a new house and the children, during the removal, had been staying with an aunt somewhere. Now they were introduced to the new house and new furnishings. "Children, we will start as we mean to go on. You will not touch anything, do you hear? Underneath that cushion there is a five-legged animal that likes to live undisturbed. Disturb that cushion and it bites. There, what did I tell you? All right, suck it better, but now you know. Behind that picture called Faithful Unto Death there is a large square hole, and in it dwells a whole colony of creepy crawlies that sting. And in the lavatory cistern, children, there is a huge multicolored spider just longing for the opportunity to lash out. Leave well alone, do you hear, Hortense, Kenneth--"
"Oh my God," I said again.
"Leave well alone," Tom's maternal voice went, and then it coughed. It went into a spasm of coughing. "There, children, I should have left the cigarettes well alone, shouldn't I? Wugh wugh wugh, oh dear." The record had come to a stop.
"Poor Tom," I said.
"What do you mean, poor Tom?" Hortense said. "Tom was never to be pitied. Tom was the only truly good man I ever knew. If I believed in saints I'd pray to Tom."
That evening, as we nearly always did, we watched television. Our long lives were often refracted from the screen--a reference in an interview with the Archbishop of York to Neo-Gregorianism; a man with a microphone in an art gallery in Birmingham, with a small metal sculpture by Hortense glowing dully and disregarded in the background while he talked of the excellence of Ahmar or Kokinos or Vermeiho; a contemptuous snort for Maugham or Toomey in a program called Paperback Stand; as tonight, an old movie with score by Domenico Campanati. "He wasn't bad," Hortense would say grudgingly as his muted trumpets signalled dawn at sea or his massed strings were a bed for physical passion. "I don't suppose any of us was really bad. We meant well, anyway."
The days and nights of calm and warmth dissolved that evening in violent rain and thunder and cryptic brief messages in lightning over the Channel. "He plants his footsteps in the sea," I quoted from Sunday's service while I looked out from the lashed french windows, "and rides upon the storm. The old bastard. Will he let us sleep?"
"He'll be persuaded to let us. That's my one article of faith."
The sky was still emptying as we went to bed. The thunder trundled over our roof and, in the very instant of a blue flash, I heard the crack and soaked leafy multitudinous tumble of, surely, that oak in Penney's field opposite. I waited, as I always did, for my sister to settle to calm breathing after her single barbiturate. Then I turned, old bag of bones as I was, onto my left side and addressed myself to the brief slumber which would, I knew, terminate with an hour's wait for the dawn chorus. I contrived, you will perhaps remember, an adequate beginning. I have always, all through my literary career, found endings excruciatingly hard. Thank God, or something, the last words were not for my pen and, thank that same something, their scratching or sounding could not, in the nature of things, be very much longer delayed. I hoped there would be no dreams.
Monaco, 1980
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anthony Burgess was an English author, poet, playwright, composor, linguist, translator, and critic, best known for his dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange. In 2008, The Times placed Burgess number seventeen on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945."
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