The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (retail) (epub)

  Well, Miss Pulkinhorn disapproved of his habits publicly. I’m sure that privately she hated him. She came to hang all her feelings on his alleged superstition; and I think she was jealous – jealous of his simplicity and fervour; jealous of his devotion with all the dreadful energy of childless and ignorant women. She’d have called him an exhibitionist if she’d known the world, and perhaps in an innocent way he was. You see he could have got that gesture from Abraham. That was why I checked up on the rumour of his shining face. Like all people who don’t believe in miracles, I was very ready to accept one. But he remained as he was, time drifted past, and the tree of their relationship grew.

  One foggy December night I let myself out of my house and walked briskly across the close to the cathedral. Nobody was about except the precentor who passed me by Saint Swithin’s Gate, and I felt chilly and lonely as I let myself in. The office had been said, as is usual on a Monday, and not sung. But Canon Blake was about as ill as he could be and next morning we were to have a special service of intercession for him. He was a great benefactor of the school and the hospital and a good friend to me, but Tuesday is my day in London, so our organ being what it is I was going to set the pistons for my new assistant and leave a note. Now I remember I wanted to try over an old prelude of mine that I’d turned up – yes, of course, otherwise I should never have warmed my hands as I did. I let myself in by the organist’s door and walked gratefully into the warmth. We’ve got eight great stoves in the cathedral and one stands just where the Norman work ends and the fifteenth-century addition begins. It’s by the chapel of the Sacrament and the flue goes straight up through the vaulting. I tucked my music under one arm, pulled off my gloves, and felt the stove gingerly. They’re pretty nearly red hot sometimes but this one had been shut down for the night and was only a very little too warm. The light was flickering away in the chapel and someone was moving in there at the back. It was Miss Pulkinhorn. She came out of the shadows and walked quickly towards the light. Then she saw me and stopped. We were almost alone in the cathedral, for it shuts at seven. Only old Rekeby was prowling round somewhere, moving chairs, shutting doors, and shining his electric torch into corners. Miss Pulkinhorn turned and walked out of the chapel, passing me without a word, and vanished into the shadows of the east end. She held her stick away from the pavement too. It didn’t click. Less than half a minute later the north-west door bumped and he came in, though it was long past his usual time. He fairly cantered up the aisle, talking to himself and fumbling with the buttons of his overcoat. He rushed past me into the chapel and slumped on his knees. Then and there with no preliminary cough or shuffle or settling down he went straight into that position, for all the world like Abraham in the window.

  I stayed where I was, thinking less of music and more of what extraordinary things we are. And I was vaguely worried. Do you know those days of discomfort when you expect the worst without reason? Standing there, still mechanically caressing the stove, I felt a kind of expanding worry that I was unable to pin down. Usually when I saw him so, even when I took Abraham into account, I maintained a kind of interior respect for something I couldn’t understand. What was different now? I walked away across the chancel towards the steps that lead up to the organ loft, but my unformed worry went with me. I felt let down and didn’t know why. Something was cheapened. That was it. Something was cheapened and diminished. Then as I reached the top step, I remembered the precentor pacing through the close, going to visit Canon Blake on his death-bed, pacing along, a bell-shaped figure in his black cloak, and under the cloak the silvery pyx; and in the silver pyx the Reserved Sacrament.

  At that moment I was pulling my hind foot a little breathlessly on to the top step. I’m a ruminative character and lack presence of mind, but I understood the situation in a black flash. There was Miss Pulkinhorn swallowed up in the shadows of the east end. Old Rekeby had locked all doors but the north-west one where he would let himself out and was trotting across the chancel, flicking his torch here and there, going towards the chapel of the Sacrament – and there he was on the pinnacle of his secret happiness, hands lifted, face tilted towards the light.

  I turned back and pretty well hurled myself down the wooden stairs. As I came out of the chancel Rekeby was standing in the doorway by the stove. He never noticed him there at the back – it was past half past six you see. He bustled forward, bobbed to the altar, went up to the aumbry and bobbed again a bit doubtfully. He fumbled for his keys, opened the door, peered into the empty cupboard, and said in a vexed voice: ‘I thought so!’

  He shut the door carefully. Completely unaware of the ecstatic at the back of the chapel he leaned forward and blew out the light.

  I could have done something, I suppose, shouted ‘Stop!’ or ‘One moment, Rekeby!’ or thrown a fit. But while I was standing there, appalled and useless, Rekeby came out, said ‘Good night, Sir Edward’, and went back across the chancel, his torch flicking over the patterned stones. I suppose the chapel was silent for ten seconds. Then a voice laughed and choked and laughed and a shadow cannoned into the stove and reeled past me down the north aisle, laughing and crying till all the echoes got under way and answered. I groped after him, and Rekeby was shambling down the south aisle flashing his torch from the pavement to the roof and shouting, ‘What is it? What is it?’

  I found him inside the west door sitting on the step. I put my arm across his shoulders and Rekeby shone the quivering circle over his feet. After a while he stopped crying, but he was quite infantile, and his fingers were moving about. We got him outside between us. I remember a great red moon was detaching itself from the fog and gave next to no light. Rekeby locked the door behind him and we carried him like a long sack to the verger’s cottage where we stretched him out on an old horse-hair sofa. Rekeby went to telephone the hospital so I myself had the job of getting the overcoat off him. He was nearly naked under it. All he had on was that pair of broken boots and his trousers and a cruel leather belt. And he knew nothing at all. The ambulance men were brisk and efficient – service couldn’t have been better. At the hospital he was put to bed, bathed, and tucked up. I went with him but he noticed nobody. I visited him a couple of times after that but I don’t suppose he noticed me. A month later he just guttered out.

  When I got home from the hospital that first night I went to bed but I couldn’t sleep. I went over and over the years and what I knew of them both till my throat was dry and my brain as useless as a pumpkin. I’ve told you I’m a fairly slow sort of fellow. Do you know, two o’clock struck before it dawned on me that she was still locked in the cathedral? I shot out of bed then and ran to the window. There the cathedral was, huge and squat, with the moonlight glistening icily on the windows. She was inside somewhere, a tiny upright figure in that vast darkness: and by the time I’d got my clothes on I’d come to see that I couldn’t let her out.

  I wonder how she did it? I suppose she nipped in when the Precentor left, lit the light, and sat right at the back waiting for him to come in. She’d have let him pray to it, I think, and then broken to him gently and lovingly that he was a superstitious fool for his pains and the cupboard was bare. But things went wrong for both of them – he didn’t come, you see, so when she thought he was stopping away she went forward to blow out the light – and saw me. If her little wit had been quick enough she could have trumped up some excuse and still put it out – but she lacked presence of mind. She hurried past me not knowing what to say and hid in the east end, trying to think. Then he came after all – late but divinely happy with the one possible excuse for lateness at that appointment. Can you see? Imagine the tramp or labourer stopping him in the foggy back street, asking for the price of a bed, and backing away from the gift of a jacket and grubby shirt pulled off then and there, thrust upon him! So he was late – but think of the tidal wave of joy and triumph that hurried him up the aisle into the chapel and flung him on his knees!

  I wonder what she thought standing there in the darkness listening to t
he end of his humanity? From where I stood in my bedroom I could see the east end and the chapel of the Sacrament. Of course, I thought, in sober fact she could get out whenever she wanted to – switch on the light or ring the five-minute bell. But no. How could so much warped respectability run the slightest risk of being connected with a scandal like that? And I could do nothing without letting her know that I was on to her game. I had to pretend ignorance. She must sit there, a tiny upright figure, while the moon moved down the walls and the effigies crept into the light.

  I made tea and sat smoking. There is a kind of justice, isn’t there? But I’ve never known it so apt to the occasion. So she kept her vigil and I kept it with her, so to speak, parallel, till the moon faded and you could see that roofs were red.

  My assistant was surprised to see me next day. I’d forgotten the note and the pistons and in the end I put off the academy and played for the service myself. That wasn’t entirely on Canon Blake’s behalf either. I was too interested in Miss Pulkinhorn. I wanted to see if she would have the nerve to come, and what the night had done to her. And what effect was apparent, should you say? None. Absolutely none. Brave, blind, indomitable woman! She sat, stood, knelt, opened and closed her mouth exactly as she’d done for twenty years back – a timeless woman. Really I began to think I’d imagined the whole thing, and of course his death made no more stir than the fall of a sparrow. The shadows were much the same, the light burned peacefully in his chapel that was so often empty now.

  A few months later the effect broke in Miss Pulkinhorn. I was coming up the north aisle, hurrying because I was near enough late for Evensong. I caught my heel on the step up to the ambulatory and the confounded thing came off and wrenched my ankle. I picked the heel up and went limping and muttering past his chapel, and I heard a little shriek inside and a chair fell over. Miss Pulkinhorn came out with great dignity and her usual lapidary expression. But the topaz brooch shivered and jumped and would not be still. I stood back to let her pass and we stopped for a moment, eye meeting eye. Nothing passed between us and everything; an awareness, almost a mutual flinch; and over us both the knowledge that I knew the whole dreadful story from beginning to end. Miss Pulkinhorn in that chapel; Miss Pulkinhorn kneeling before that light; Miss Pulkinhorn watching her defences broken down, abandoning her one by one! Even a rock crumbles. Little by little, day by day, the stick began to shake, and the head. The dress was the same but the woman inside it was destroyed piece by piece. I avoided her from a kind of shame at knowing so much. Going about my business in the cathedral I took to circling and keeping an eye lifted to see if she was in my path. But she made a meeting for us.

  One night after I’d kept the choir back to run through the anthem for Sunday morning I tried that prelude of mine over again; so the choir had gone and the congregation when I had finished, and I thought the way was safe. But when I came down the stairs from the organ loft Miss Pulkinhorn was sitting on one of the rush-bottom chairs, waiting. She lifted her chin and fastened her eyes on my face and we stood so for – well, it seemed a long time even in a cathedral. There was a little water on her chin which fell when she spoke.

  Her words were very slow and distinct.

  ‘Sir Edward. My conscience is perfectly clear.’

  She turned to go, leaving me as still as the carven figures round us. As she tapped shakily away over the stones I heard her repeating the words to herself.

  ‘– perfectly clear.’

  A week later she was dead.

  * * *

  KINGSLEY AMIS

  * * *

  MY ENEMY’S ENEMY

  I

  ‘Yes, I know all about that, Tom,’ the Adjutant said through a mouthful of stew. ‘But technical qualifications aren’t everything. There’s other sides to a Signals officer’s job, you know, especially while we’re still pretty well static. The communications are running themselves and we don’t want to start getting complacent. My personal view is and has been from the word go that your friend Dally’s a standing bloody reproach to this unit, never mind how much he knows about the six-channel and the other boxes of tricks. That’s a lineman-mechanic’s job, anyway, not an officer’s. And I can tell you for a fact I mean to do something about it, do you see?’ He laid down his knife, though not his fork, and took three or four swallows of wine.

  ‘Well, your boy Cleaver doesn’t impress me all that much, Bill,’ Thurston, who hated the Adjutant, said to him. ‘The only time we’ve tried him on duty he flapped.’

  ‘Just inexperience, Tom,’ the Adjutant said. ‘He’d soon snap out of that if we gave him command of the section. Sergeant Beech would carry him until he found his feet.’

  ‘Mm, I’d like to see that, I must say. The line duty-officer getting his sergeant out of bed to hold his hand while he changes a valve.’

  ‘Now look here, old boy.’ The Adjutant levered a piece of meat out from between two teeth and ate it. ‘You know as well as I do that young Cleaver’s got the best technical qualifications of anyone in the whole unit. It’s not his fault he’s been stuck on office work ever since he came to us. There’s a fellow that’d smarten up that bunch of goons and long-haired bloody mathematical wizards they call a line-maintenance section. As it is, the NCOs don’t chase the blokes and Dally isn’t interested in chasing the NCOs. Isn’t interested in anything but his bloody circuit diagrams and test-frames and what-have-you.’

  To cover his irritation, Thurston summoned the Mess corporal, who stood by the wall in a posture that compromised between that of an attendant waiter and the regulation stand-at-ease position. The Adjutant had schooled him in Mess procedure, though not in Mess etiquette. ‘Gin and lime, please, Gordon… Just as well in a way he is interested in line apparatus, isn’t it, Bill? We’d have looked pretty silly without him during the move out of Normandy and across France. He worked as hard as any two of the rest of us. And as well.’

  ‘He got his bouquet from the Colonel, didn’t he? I don’t grudge him that, I admit he did good work then. Not as good as some of his chaps, probably, but still, he served his turn. Yes, that’s exactly it, Tom, he’s served his –’

  ‘According to Major Rylands he was the linchpin of the whole issue,’ Thurston said, lighting a cigarette with fingers that were starting to tremble. ‘And I’m prepared to take his word for it. The war isn’t over yet, you know. Christ knows what may happen in the spring. If Dally isn’t around to hold the line-maintenance end up for Rylands, the whole unit might end up in the shit with the Staff jumping on its back. Cleaver might be all right, I agree. We just can’t afford to take the risk.’

  This was an unusually long speech for anyone below the rank of major to make in the Adjutant’s presence. Temporarily gagged by a mouthful of stew, that officer was eating as fast as he could and shaking his forefinger to indicate that he would as soon as possible propose some decisive amendment to what he had just been told. With his other hand he scratched the crown of his glossy black head, looking momentarily like a tick-tack man working through his lunch-break. He said indistinctly: ‘You’re on to the crux of the whole thing, old boy. Rylands is the root of all the trouble. Bad example at the top, do you see?’ Swallowing, he went on: ‘If the second-in-command goes round looking like a shithouse detail and calling the blokes by their Christian names, what can you expect? You can’t get away from it, familiarity breeds contempt. Trouble with him is he thinks he’s still working in the Post Office.’

  A hot foam of anger seemed to fizz up in Thurston’s chest. ‘Major Rylands is the only field officer in this entire unit who knows his job. It is due to him and Dally, plus Sergeant Beech and the lineman-mechs, that our line communications have worked so smoothly during this campaign. To them and to no one else. If they can go on doing that they can walk about with bare arses for all I care.’

  The Adjutant frowned at Thurston. After running his tongue round his upper teeth, he said: ‘You seem to forget, Tom, that I’m responsible for the discipline of officers in this unit.�
�� He paused to let the other reflect on the personal implications of this, then nodded to where Corporal Gordon was approaching with Thurston’s drink.

  As he signed the chit, Thurston was thinking that Gordon had probably been listening to the conversation from the passage. If so, he would probably discuss it with Hill, the Colonel’s batman, who would probably report it to his master. It was often said, especially by Lieutenant Dalessio, the ‘Dally’ now under discussion, that the Colonel’s chief contact with his unit was through the rumours and allegations Hill and, to a less extent, the Adjutant took to him. A tweak of disquiet made Thurston drink deeply and resolve to say no more for a bit.

  The Adjutant was brushing crumbs off his battledress, which was of the greenish hue current in the Canadian Army. This little affectation, like the gamboge gloves and the bamboo walking-stick, perhaps suited a man who had helped to advertise men’s clothes in civilian life. He went on to say in his rapid quacking monotone: ‘I’d advise you, Tom, not to stick your neck out too far in supporting a man who’s going to be out of this unit on his ear before very long.’