Froomb!

by John Lymington

  They played awhile. He forgot his aches, and even that he was dead.

  They lay on their backs and looked at the ceiling, the old dry yellow beams like golden chocolate.

  “Is this still run like—well, like a pub?” he asked.

  “It’s an inn,” she said. Her fingers walked across the bedclothes and found his.

  The memory of the desolation outside this place made nonsense of the house still being an inn unless the country was still good to the west.

  ‘The bedrooms were all ready,” he said, curiously. “Who comes here?”

  “The government,” she said dreamily. “They come all the time. Nobody else.”

  “The government,” he said, surprised without knowing why. He could not—or had not—visualized a government of Heav

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  en, he had always thought of it as a dictatorship, with little for a government to do.

  “Mostly the men stay at the inn,” she said. “The women have the cottages. They cook, you see, love. Two or three have a cottage.”

  “What do they do here?” John thought this must represent some out of town seat of government, or a kind of Assize Court that came and stayed and judged the entrants for Heaven. “Do they interview people—people like me, I mean?”

  She squeezed his hand.

  “Oh no. They just eat, love.”

  “Eat?” He jerked his head round on the pillow and stared at her pretty, tranquil features. She looked toward him, the blue eyes warming.

  “Yes, love. Eat.”

  “Banquets, do you mean?”

  “No—eat!” She laughed with a faint trace of exasperation. “You’re surely not silly, are you, love? Eat!”

  He stared at the ceiling again and tried to make sense of the information. There was a small spider up on the beam, hurrying nowhere.

  “But they must do something besides eat?” he said.

  “Well, they drink as well, of course,” she admitted. “And sometimes they go and fish, but not many, or ride a horse, but they always fall off and have to go away from here. Sometimes they want a girl, but mostly a boy, but that doesn’t come to much, either. Usually ends up crying on your chest and telling you how they had things about their mothers.” She looked aside at him. “Did you ever have a thing about your mother?”

  “I didn’t like my mother.” The confession came as a bombshell. He had never realized it before, and changed the subject quickly, as if he could still hide the truth even in Paradise. “But these chaps can’t all be useless.”

  “They are. You don’t know, love. They want you to do things to them, but it doesn’t last. They can’t do what you do. I don’t know how you do. Why aren’t you like the others?” Her blue eyes were bright with puzzlement.

  “Because I’m dead,” he said earnestly.

  She laughed. He watched her big white breasts shivering jelly-like, and rolled half over toward her.

  “You’re funny,” she said. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you.”

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  “By the time you get downstairs again, you’ll get the

  sack.”

  “You can’t get the sack here,” she said. “Does your back hurt now?”

  “I haven’t noticed,” he said. “And that woman is the boss?” He wriggled his shoulders and noticed the sting again.

  “Yes. She’s got other girls, too. They all work here. The women who have the cottages usually do their own work. They think it’s good for them.” She started to giggle.

  “Isn’t it?”

  She put her arm round his neck.

  “They don’t know what is good for ’em,” she said, and laughed. “I didn’t either. I always used to think it was silly, trying and trying and then crying and crying. I didn’t know you could, like that.”

  “I just don’t understand,” he said. “But look, I want to dodge that woman.”

  “You can’t dodge her,” Helen said.

  “If she finds I’ve been here with you, she’ll be—”

  “She knows.” Helen sat up. “She told me to. But, love, don’t think I feel like that now, because I don’t. Really, it was something—real. I never knew anything like that before. Don’t be cross with me, love. I didn’t know till I did know, now did I?”

  “She made you—?” He sat up on the bed and stared at her. “But why?”

  “To find out about you,” Helen said. “But what I found out I won’t tell, love. 111 just say you’re like the others, and you don’t talk much.”

  “She sent you to find out,” he said, shaking his head. “Doesn’t this searching ever stop? Does everybody probe and poke and question and try and trick you?”

  “Not me, love. Not me, I promise.” She looked at him, and he could read her pretty blue eyes.

  “No, I know that,” he said, and touched her hand. “Thank goodness you’re here! It’s the first—it’s the only good thing that’s happened.” He laid down again and watched the spider up on the beams.

  “You can still get out the back of the yard here—the path to the church?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But it’s locked. The church, I mean.”

  Perhaps they don’t need churches in Heaven, he thought. Perhaps Heaven wasn’t ever anything to do with church.

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  Perhaps that was just all something made up over the centuries, because man had this idea something came after, and didn’t want it too frightening. Who started this idea of Heaven being a place of the angels and golden trumpets and harps and sitting doing nothing all day long? What happened if you sat on the Left Hand? Were you socially damned, like a contractor on the outs with a labor union?

  Suddenly he realized he could see every separate action of the spider’s legs, as if his eye had been an analytical camera. He watched fascinated. It was like a mechanical toy. The deliberate, separate movements frightened him suddenly.

  He sat up.

  “You going, love?” Helen said, and laughed again. “Come with me again. It was Heaven, love.” She sat up and swung her legs off the bed. He got off the other side.

  It was Heaven, he thought, putting on his shirt. Indeed, perhaps that was what it was. Things like this. Sudden happiness, the sudden spiritual and physical agreement of one with another.

  “What are you thinking about, love?” She was pulling the big loose dress up over her fat thighs, wriggling.

  “You,” he said. He kissed her nose and then turned and looked out of the window. He saw down over the gallery railing to the cobbled yard. Petra was walking across the cobbles, making a diagonal line for the foot of the stairs outside. “It’s that bitch,” he said, his heart quickening. “I’ll get out by the back stairs.”

  “All right,” she said, surprised. “Do you know the way, then?”

  “If it hasn’t been altered,” he said. “Bye, bye.”

  He blew a kiss and went through a small doorway on the far side of the bed. He came out on to a small open landing with steep wooden steps down into the hay store. Once more the feel of his boyhood returned, the quick beating of his heart at some kind of game, hiding from the enemy . . .

  She was the enemy. Petra.

  He was running away from her.

  He was frightened of her.

  Shame held him motionless at the top of the rough stairs, but fear moved him again. He went on down.

  “Coward, coward,” he kept saying.

  But he went all the same, out the back of the haystore to

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  the little path by the stone churchyard wall. He vaulted the wall and went in among the big weeds and the tottering, drowning tombstones. He went toward the church door, which stood a little ajar, as if the lock had long since rusted away, and let the way in to young boys in search of adventure.

  He came near to the door, and then looked to one side of it at a green-stained stone oblong lying on the ground. He had to part the tall weeds to read the crumbli
ng letters.

  Sacred to the Memory of—

  There were his great-grandparents, his grandfather, an uncle, two aunts and finally,

  “Oliver Brunt, beloved husband of Ethel and father of John. April 1968.”

  He wondered what had happened to his mother. It was his fault he did not know. He had let the correspondence lapse. He had failed to get in touch with her. He kept remembering guilt.

  Because he had not liked her, shame heated his face. He went on into the cool shadows of the church and sat down in a dusty pew. Some of the dust was gray from the fields, some white from the cracked plaster of the walls, some brown, warm-smelling of wood, fallen from the burrowing beetles in the great curved beams of the roof. He saw small sprays of it coming down from the rotting wood as some slight air movement disturbed it. He saw a man kneeling at the altar, far off, thin and bony, like a praying mantis. At first John thought he was praying, then he recognized the now familiar action of the old vicar scrubbing the stones there. He was chanting a psalm, his cracked, droning voice grinding in the peaceful quiet.

  The roof was high, the timbers vaulted like an upturned ship. It was as he had remembered it, as he had come with his prayer book and shining face, to join the other little boys at Children’s service, to be sent out of the way of busy parents getting Sunday dinner. The little, shining-faced, innocent boys and girls grouped round Miss Crayshaw with her very white billowy blouse that made her bosom look soft and mysterious and you wanted to put your hand down it. And the scraping of chairs and fidgeting in the pews, and finding the awkward bits in the Bible and piping quickly, nervously, challengingly, “Miss, what’s it mean his bowels

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  burst asunder?” Sniggers, sniggers and a sharp whisper, “It means he pooped himself,” and Miss Crayshaw’s soft face going pinker as she tried desperately to keep control of wild disobedience with gentleness.

  He felt shame for his unkindness and a warm affection for kind, soft, helpless, faithful Miss Crayshaw. Perhaps once she, in shining white and blue bows and tight, bright golden hair, had sat in the back pew and giggled and tickled the boy next to her?

  He remembered her calm, soft voice, reading an incredibly boring description of some altar or worshiping bed or something, of golden this, and jeweled that, and cubits long and high and more gold and silver and red velvet and pearls and it was all the biggest, richest bore he ever remembered. And there—was Jesus always having his feet washed and oil poured on his head and accepting the best wine in the house and telling them how blessed they were for giving it, and how they ought to give everything else away as well and get on the National Assistance like all the rest of the meek, the mild, the unambitious, and the stupid.

  He held his face. God! of all places to think like this! He would never get by. He had no more respect for the Bible now than he had giggling in the back pew, straining his eyeballs to find “shit” and then pulling Helen’s hair and making her look, holding his finger on it, while she nearly burst in her efforts to be free and not laugh before Miss Crayshaw looked up and saw her red face.

  Helen . . .

  He loved Helen. All the time of playing and romping in the fields and laughing and running by the river, and the night when suddenly it happened in the phone booth, and he hadn’t been ashamed or frightened, but big and excited. He had found something precious, for Helen was a good girl, and what she did was natural, not furtive or sly. But then her father had sent her away, and he had gone back to School for the Christmas term, and he never saw her again ...

  He felt young again, and small, and guilty and excited and prickling with the feelings of life, as if they filled him too much and tried to get out through his skin.

  The old man came up, dragging his kneeling pad on the floor, an apron tied round his middle, his black silk vest stained and dirty.

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  A sudden streak of cruelty rose in John Brunt as the old man halted and stared at him with weak eyes.

  “Don’t they come any more?” John said.

  “No,” the old man said. “I just keep it clean, what I can. It’s so difficult. The dust gets in everywhere in the dry summer, and the flies make it stick.”

  “When did they stop coming?”

  “A long time ago. It was when the people were dying. I was a young man. I got the living here. I think it was sixty years ago. It was a very cold winter. There was little to eat and the coal didn’t come. There was no electricity because there weren’t men to work on the lines . . .”

  “Do you remember my father? Edwin Brunt? He had the inn?”

  The old man stared blankly at a stained-glass window and the dusty multicolor reflected in the water in his eyes.

  “No,” he said. Clearly he had not even tried to remember.

  “Why weren’t there any men? Why were the people dying? Was it the bombs? A war?”

  The old man stayed staring at the window for almost a minute, then shook his head.

  “No. No war,” he said. “My wife died. It was very lonely. Nobody came to church. They all forgot.” He began to walk away to the doors, dragging his kneeling pad. “It was very cold that year . . .”

  John got up and watched him mumble out into the hot sunshine.

  “What was it then?” he asked the empty place. “What happened to the people?”

  He had to find out. Before he was asked any more questions by anybody he had to find out. What had happened? Why had the people died? Where did the rot come from? Why was this village cocooned when the rest of the country around was choked with decay?

  Whom could he ask? Who was there? Was there somebody in the village? Old Rumpers, the crammer who had toiled so long to force John through those hateful frightening exams? He would know—or Bassington, up at the Manor—

  But he wouldn’t be there. It was all so long ago. They would both be dead.

  He got up and went out of the church. He hesitated among the weeds and the tumbling stones and looked back

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  toward the roofs of the inn buildings. There was no decay there.

  He crossed the churchyard and vaulted the wall on to the path. A line of willows ran down to the river. It was called the Nun’s Walk, because so many people had seen a gray nun walking along there in the twilight, but John and his friends had known it wasn’t a nun, but Edna.

  He sat on a stone bench by the walk and felt the cool stone on his aching back.

  Rumpers would be dead. And Bassington. The vicar didn’t remember Father and he had been here sixty years. Who would remember? Who would tell him?

  He saw a woman coming toward him, walking slowly, sauntering. For a moment he felt a shock, for she wore a shawl over her head and for a moment looked like a nun.

  She came slowly by watching him, faintly curious.

  “I remember you,” she said, and stopped.

  She was pale with rich brown eyes.

  “I haven’t been here for a long time,” he said.

  “I remember you,” she repeated.

  “There may be somebody like me,” he said, thinking of his father and some of the girls they’d had in the kitchen then. Likeness strains can carry a long way. He remembered being taught about rats, black, white, black-and-white and how the pattern repeated every now and again.

  She pushed the shawl back off her head and tossed her chestnut brown hair. It shone in the sunlight with a reddish tinge. The pearl color of the wall behind him lit her brown eyes. There was a sadness in them.

  “No, it was you,” she said, as she looked away as if no longer needing to confirm her belief.

  “But—” A fearful, revolting shock ran through him, as if some giant skewer ran through his bowels. “My God! you’re Edna!”

  “You called me that.” She looked back at him and smiled.

  He got up, the chill in his vitals.

  “Let me—” he said, half choking. He reached out, took her hair in his fingers and let it fall. It ra
n through his open fingers like the finest silk, hushing on the fingertips. She smiled. Her brown eyes were understanding.

  He let his hand fall and just stood, motionless, staring at her.

  “I’ll never get back,” he said huskily.

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  “You have to wait,” she answered. “You must wait.”

  “You have waited all that time—since the night—your husband came?” He was cold with horror and compassion. “You have to wait,” she said. “There is no choice.”

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  -Three

  1

  The lights glared in the sky, blazed on the ground and the curl of the river glowed like a great white snake, lit by reflection within its vast mass of detergent bubbles.

  “There was a way of getting rid of that,” Packard said, staring down from his eyrie. “It had a side-effect and killed the fish.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep thinking about side-effects,” Ann said. “They don’t mean anything.”

  “Of course it means something, killing the fish!” he shouted in a sudden rage. “Once you start killing you go on. You can’t just stop and say, ‘Leave it there.’ It goes on. On and on. You can’t poison one ruddy insect without poisoning a man. He’s bigger. He lasts longer. But it goes on. Gradually you’ve committed mass murder. That’s what’s happened up in East Anglia. It was three thousand at three, it’s seven thousand at eight. How the hell can you stop it once it’s done?”

  “The local committee is dealing with it,” Ann said. ‘You can’t blame yourself for it.”

  “We’re all in this together,” he said. “You can’t back out and say you didn’t agree with it. Did you do anything to stop it? Or did you just slide along and use the bloody stuff yourself because it was the easiest way to kill a fly, or a mouse or a rabbit?” He sat down, his eyes on the river still. “Suppose John Brunt got there, and there is a Judgment Day, and they ask him not what he did, but what he didn’t do. What did he do to prevent murder, to make use of the world that was given him? How did he live with life that was put there for him? And he’ll have to say he murdered

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  it, tortured it, trod on it till it squirmed, rotted everything he was given to try and make something more for himself out of it, and found out too late that he was the Midas who turned everything into the uneatable figures on a paper bank account. Supposing he says that? What will they do to him, then?”