by MARY HOCKING
After several days of particularly morose behaviour, she tackled him on the subject. He had time off that morning and he was working with her in the kitchen, helping to wash down the paintwork. He looked very unapproachable, rubbing away at the larder door. She felt angry with him, as though his misery were a personal reflection on her; she cast around in her mind for something to say that would attract his attention.
‘You’re not getting into trouble in your job, are you?’
He swung round, as startled as though she had spoken his thoughts out loud. She was not really interested in his job; but apparently he wanted to unburden himself and after a few moments’ silence, during which he punished the larder door rather severely, he said:
‘I think I’m being watched.’
‘Who finds you so interesting?’ she teased.
He said that he had gone into the office one morning recently to find the editor talking to a police sergeant who had come in with an item for insertion in the paper warning people about the activities of pickpockets in the market. The sergeant had glanced at him sharply and Wilson was sure that the man knew something about him. Since then he had become convinced that there had been a change in the attitude of the office staff.
‘Yes?’
It was a dull tale; she was bored by it.
All this had worried him, he said. But it was plain from his manner that, having talked about it, he was now less troubled; he was prepared to dismiss the subject, and she would, be dismissed with it. Already he was turning back to that damned larder door. She threw her cloth down on the window sill and said sharply:
‘You know what that police sergeant was probably thinking?’
His head jerked round; like a puppet, she thought exultantly, just like a puppet when the right string is pulled. She had scarcely any idea of what she was going to say, but the words came without her giving much heed to them.
‘He was saying to himself, “Here’s a difficult young man; sullen, wrapped up in himself, chip on his shoulder . . . the lot, in fact”.’ He stared at her in surprise: but she wanted more than surprise from him.
‘And that’s how you’ve been for the last few days. No wonder you imagine people are shunning you! They’re not going to offer you friendship if they get nothing but scowls in return. You mustn’t expect to be treated as a privileged person for the rest of your life.’
‘Privileged person! Don’t be absurd.’
She liked the flash of spirit; it acted as a spur to her.
‘Yes, privileged person! Ex-con. Lack of manners, no consideration for others, inability to give—all to be excused because he’s the undermost of underdogs.’
He was dismayed now; but his eyes told her that he was dismayed not so much by her words as by something she had revealed in herself. He had the look of a person who knows he has seen too much: in future, he would not be indifferent to her. He turned away and began to punish the larder door again.
He kept out of her way for a little while after that; so she amused herself by studying the odd item by him which appeared in the paper. He wrote with an angry vehemence which would probably tone down in time; he would be more impressive when his work was less raw. Nevertheless, his observations were acute and he had the gift of making the drab routine of life seem interesting. But it was not his potential as a journalist with which she was concerned. The thing which intrigued her was the way in which personal weakness betrayed itself in his writing. In spite of the spurts of anger, he tended to pull his punches; his criticisms sometimes lost their bite because he qualified too much. While this might be due to a wholly admirable desire to avoid destructiveness, she suspected that a deep inner uncertainty was the more likely explanation.
She found, as the days passed, that she was gradually discovering the things about which he was particularly sensitive and every now and again she took the opportunity to probe these weaknesses. The youth club was an example of this.
‘You seem to be doing most of the painting of that hall,’ she said. ‘I thought the idea was that the youth club kids were doing it for the good of their souls.’
‘It gets a bit out of hand when there’s a crowd,’ he answered brusquely.
‘Would you like me to tell Ralph that the youth club is too much for you?’
‘Of course not.’
But she knew that he would have liked it. Yet she would not do it for him because that would mean relinquishing a part of her power to torment him. And so it went on.
One evening when she went up to his room on a trivial errand, she found that his door was open. She watched him from the stairs. He was standing in front of the mirror buttoning up his shirt. The shirt, a present from Ralph, was the first new one he had had since he came out of prison; as he stood, his dark head lowered, slightly adjusting the cuff, he looked handsome in his rather nerve-racked way. She could tell that he was pleased with himself and she found that she was searching in her mind for something to say that would deflate him. The senseless brutality of the impulse shocked her. She turned and ran quietly down the stairs to her bedroom where she flung herself on the bed, too shaken for tears.
What evil had taken hold of her? It was such an innocent thing, this small pleasure in a new shirt; yet she had wanted to destroy even this for him. Had love turned sour within her? She tried to pray for strength to turn back before irreparable harm was done. But prayer had never come to her easily because she felt self¬conscious when addressing herself to God.
After a time, she got up and went down to her husband’s study. She searched among his books, hoping that she might find something which would help her to fight the beastliness within herself. She flicked through the pages of Le Milieu Divin, remembering the resentment she had felt when Ralph presented it to her; she still found it largely incomprehensible, although she liked the wise face in the picture in the front of the book and felt that it might have been a help to talk to him. She picked up Four Quartets. It fell open, as it always did, at the middle with the description of the world as a gigantic hospital which Ralph always found so dreary. According to Ralph, Eliot’s God was very drab; a small, contracted, withered God. So there would be no help there. She put the book down and was fingering through the Confessions of Saint Augustine when Ralph came in.
‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’ he enquired politely.
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘God.’
‘Have you lost Him?’
The answer, she felt, came a little too pat; he might have been humouring a petulant child. She put the Confessions down on the edge of his desk and turned to face him. After all, he was God’s priest: who better to receive her confession?
‘I believe,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t make any impact on my life any more. It doesn’t help me to be good, or give me a glow of inner satisfaction or any of the other comforting things which should go with belief. So perhaps mine is a rather dead belief, do you think? Something lodged too deep in me to be completely eradicated, but no longer serving any very useful purpose.’
He hadn’t expected this. He said, ‘Why do you believe?’ more to give himself time, she suspected, than because he wanted to know. Nevertheless, she thought carefully before she answered.
‘It makes sense of personal experience. All the slow maturing over the years, the private decisions taken, the lessons learnt—or mostly unlearnt—which affect me and no one else. This inner personal experience seems wasteful, pointless, unless I am myself of some experimental importance. And as I don’t believe in this particular kind of waste, I believe there must be some point in the experiment and that behind it all there is God.’
He was on surer ground here.
‘And yet you say you have lost Him?’
‘I have lost my God—the one that I was brought up to believe in, gentle and loving, up above the clear blue sky. And interested in each one of us. The God who sees the sparrow fall.’
Ralph, who was himself more concerned with the universe than with spar
rows, interrupted eagerly:
‘But surely, as we grow older, so our idea of God expands. You believe that there is a meaning and a purpose which directs the universe. Doesn’t this belief comfort you?’
‘Comfort?’
She smiled suddenly, surprised by an unexpected feeling of tenderness towards him because at this moment he had betrayed his weakness: he was an indifferent personal priest, lacking the surgeon’s probing, intuitive curiosity. As he sat there looking up at her, anxious, inadequate, she knew that he could not help her and for some strange reason she felt more sorry for him than for herself.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said gently.
‘But it does matter!’ he expostulated.
‘Well then, let me try to explain.’ She was still speaking gently, while he had become defensive. ‘Our knowledge expands; but the vaster the scale, the more remote God becomes until in the end it doesn’t seem to matter much to me, as an individual, whether He is or is not. I feel lost; caught up in something that overwhelms me, as though the design envisaged were beyond me. Only occasionally, the little individual pains remind me that I must somehow matter.’
He said, ‘Of course you matter,’ but his lips moved stiffly.
‘To whom do I matter, though? To God? That isn’t enough. If I am ever to be convinced that I matter to Him, I must matter to someone here on earth. That is the only way I can learn.’
He said, ‘You matter to me’, but he was looking at her in hurt astonishment, as though she had set a trap for him.
‘But how much. Ralph, how much?’
He must have expected that, but even so he gritted his teeth and tight lines appeared at the sides of his mouth. She had never noticed those lines before; it was as though she herself had etched them there at that moment.
Down in the hall, the telephone began to ring. He made no movement; courage—or pride—prevented him from running away. The insistent ringing jangled on her nerves. She said, ‘Answer it, Ralph.’ And then, as he went out of the door, she could no longer control her bitterness, and she added: ‘It might be something important.’
II
‘That was Jill on the telephone,’ Ralph said to Wilson. ‘She rang to say that she would be coming to the youth club tonight.’
Wilson was not pleased.
‘I shan’t be coming,’ Ralph went on. ‘I have to attend a meeting at Frank Godfrey’s.’
‘Who’s going to be there, then?’
‘It will be just you, I’m afraid. Harris is down with ’flu.’
The vicar looked sick enough to be going down with ’flu himself, Wilson thought. He stifled his annoyance and said:
‘I expect I shall manage.’
The assertion lacked confidence; but the vicar did not notice, he merely said:
‘And you will have Jill to help you.’
Wilson thought about Jill as he walked down the drive. He had not seen her for over a week and she had not visited the house recently. He had begun to wonder whether she was avoiding him. But why come to the youth club if she wanted to avoid him? Was this a follow-up, a final check before the case of Keith Wilson was closed? Was she just satisfying herself that he was making profitable use of those dangerous leisure hours? He kicked a stone into the long grass of the graveyard as he walked slowly up the church path. To the far side of the church he could see a few bicycle lamps bobbing about outside the hall. A voice called:
‘We’re locked out.’
He turned back and went across the road to Spencer’s cottage. Spencer peered out from a haze of fried onion and did not ask him in. It was not often that these two met and Wilson took the opportunity to mention the heating of the hall.
‘It’s been rather cold down there these last few weeks,’ he said as Spencer handed him the keys.
‘Cold?’
The old man’s eyes narrowed as though something particularly subtle had been said and he was not committing himself until the meaning was clear. He put his head on one side and said:
‘What do you mean—cold?’
‘I mean it hasn’t been warm enough in the hall during the youth club meetings.’
‘Warm enough?’ Spencer was tremendously surprised. ‘They’re warm enough! Jazzing around like that all the time.’
‘They aren’t all jazzing around at the same time.’ Wilson curbed an impulse to set the old man smartly about his business and explained: ‘They have to wait their turn to play table tennis and one or two of them are learning chess.’
‘Chess! They haven’t the brains for tiddly-winks.’
‘Are you damping down the boiler too early, do you think?’
There was, in spite of himself, a faint echo of the potential commission candidate in Wilson’s tone. Spencer quivered and his voice blared out stridently:
‘I’m not opening up that boiler every time the youth club meets. It’s all I can do to get the thing to heat the church on a Sunday; when the new one comes, if it comes . . .’
‘I don’t want to put you to a lot of extra trouble.’
‘And what with Mr. Rutledge counting every penny . . .’
There were distant shrieks and a bicycle lamp bobbed up and down between the gravestones. Wilson dismissed Spencer summarily: ‘I’ll attend to the boiler myself next time.’
Spencer stared after his hurrying form. First the painting of the hall, now a threat to take over the stoking of the boiler. He went back to the kitchen and brooded over possible lines of defensive action. After a while, he settled down in the sitting-room with a pencil and a piece of paper.
Wilson, in the meantime, had opened up the church hall to find, as he had anticipated, that it was cold and damp. The hall had been hired for a winter flower display the night before and although the stalls had been cleared. Spencer had not prepared the hall for the youth club. The youngsters huddled in groups complaining about the cold but showing no desire to improve their circulation by furniture shifting. They were an impoverished crowd, the vicar having skimmed the cream for the nuclear disarmament campaign. These were the aimless drifters, skittering before every breath of trouble, sent along each week by parents who wanted to watch television in peace and hoped that they would be out of mischief at the church youth club. In the navy, backed by a strong tradition of discipline, Wilson might have made something of them, but here he had to establish his own code of discipline and this he was not prepared to do. It had become his habit to let them get on with it and hope that nothing very bad would happen. Usually the vicar or one of the wardens came along and their presence ensured order of a kind. But tonight there would only be Mr. Slieman who taught chess and who hardly counted as a presence because he seemed quite unaware of what was happening around him. Mr. Slieman and, of course, Jill. Jill had not yet arrived. As he put out the table tennis tables with the help of one or two of the more amenable members of the group, Wilson was miserably aware that she would not think much of the set-up.
Mr. Slieman had come in and was making for the corner where the chess players awaited him. Why they wanted to learn chess, Wilson had no idea. They were the slower-witted and more pleasant- natured of the youngsters; perhaps they just enjoyed the long silences during which they could ruminate undisturbed.
Someone had turned the record player on very loud. The tone was bad and the music screeched and vibrated as though a handful of pins had been thrown into the sound-box. Wilson went over to the record player and turned the volume down; they flicked it up again as soon as his back was turned The table tennis players were arguing as to who should play first. He went across to sort them out. While he was arguing with them, a girl who wanted to produce a play came and stood by his side with a pile of books borrowed from French’s clutched at her breast. ‘Where can we go?’ she was screeching. ‘We can’t read with all this going on.’
‘They were playing the last half-hour last week,’ Sid Price, one of the table tennis players, said, stabbing his finger towards two giggling girls. Over the boy’s shoulder,
Wilson saw the door open. Jill came in. He told the boys that they could play first because he thought it would cause less trouble.
‘Let’s have a look at these plays.’
He took the books from the girl and nodded briefly to Jill. Behind him he heard a strident clamour which indicated that he had probably made a mistake about the table tennis order of play.
‘You’ll need to do a bit of sorting out in the first place,’ he said to the girl. ‘Why don’t you get the others who are interested together and start going through these? When you’ve got one or two to choose from, perhaps we can get the use of the hall on another evening for a reading.’
Jill had wandered across to the chess corner.
‘You get quite good numbers, don’t you?’ she said as he joined her.
He glanced round unhappily; viewed from the one quiet corner it was like a picture without a focal point, a splintered confusion of scenes stridently vying for attention. There was a row developing because the girls were getting in the way of the table tennis players; Sid Price had flushed an angry salmon colour. Near by, a girl who had been jiving had joined the play-reading group and several of the jivers were trying to drag her away.
‘They come here to let off steam,’ he said to Jill.
‘I can see that.’
He glanced at the clock. A quarter past eight. He hoped that the next hour and three-quarters would pass without a major crisis.
‘I might as well work now that I’m here,’ she said.
He searched round for an area of comparative calm.