Late Call

by Angus Wilson

  Sylvia said, “I’ll get you some tea.” When she came back with the tray, Miss Bulmer was leafing through Queen or Duchess.

  “It’s rather good. About a girl who is maid of honour to Queen Anne.”

  “Queen Anne!” Miss Bulmer laughed dramatically, “Queen Anne’s dead, woman! But Carshall isn’t! It’s full of life and people and things to do. And problems, as I know. Come out and meet us! Some of us are bores at times, but you’ll have lots of fun.”

  “I’m not a girl, Miss Bulmer.”

  “I know that. But I’ll tell you what-you are. You’re a bit of a juggins.” Miss Bulmer laughed, then looked more serious. “Why are you living in other people’s lives all the time, Mrs. Calvert? And what people! Queen Anne who’s been dead for centuries, and all that nonsense on television—unreal people, talking unreal twaddle! You know that. You’re frightened of something, frightened of bogies, frightened of the dark. Well, you won’t get away from it with all that rubbishy pretence. Doing things, meeting people, getting on with the job. That’s the answer.” She put down her cup and stood up. “Well! It’s shock treatment. It may or may not work. That’s up to you. And I’ve made myself disagreeable, but somebody had to do it. Goodbye. Sorry for interrupting the tele.” With a peal of laughter she was gone as suddenly as she had arrived.

  Sylvia went up to bed. Through the window, in the moonlight, the first sprinkling of green shoots showed on the surface of the miles and miles of ridged earth. The hedges that at intervals cut irregular shapes out of the endless plain were green, and, here and there, white with thorn blossom. Something moving caught Sylvia’s eye. Somebody was sidling along by the edge of one of the hedges, keeping close, walking no doubt on a narrow balk— but going so slowly, what was the word? ambling, yet the night air must be cruelly cold. Impossible to tell what kind of person-gipsy? Sylvia drew back from the window at the thought of the gypsy’s all-seeing powers. Tramps—who saw them now, or drunkards for that matter either? It looked from the room like a little thin humpbacked old woman. Sylvia made herself watch—superstition would do no good—and the figure crept on, now turning at right angles by another hedge along another field, and so on, until after a quarter of an hour Sylvia could see it no more, for it was swallowed up into the black, empty distances.

  She finished the last chapter of Queen or Duchess in bed. The Duchess sent for Deborah Forrester and told her that she must stay with the Queen. “We are bound by a strange bond, the Queen and I. Stronger than you can understand, Mistress Forrester, it will ease my haughty spirit to know that my pretty little Deborah is in attendance on my old friend in all her royal loneliness at Kensington.” And the Queen and Deborah lived out a peaceful and happy time at Kensington, walking in the Orangery or playing a hand of cards. As for the Duchess, Deborah on her visits always found her busy like a child with some new toy— building Blenheim, inspiring poets, teasing Vanbrugh, making her devoted family laugh with her endless witticisms.

  Sylvia closed the book with a real bitterness against Sally Bulmer. Because of course it was worse even than that interfering woman had said. Not only was Queen Anne dead, but it had never even been like that. She knew from other books that the Queen had died, with her fourteen children dead before her, surrounded by intrigue, swollen with dropsy, broken by remorse for her treatment of her father; and, as for Sarah, she had ended her days a spendthrift, quarrelsome, crazy bitter old woman whose family hated her and longed to see her dead.

  And now Good Friday was here with its hot cross buns and all the shops closed. It rained all day, which was such a shame, for nobody could get out and enjoy themselves. Ray lay late in bed. Mark had gone off on a demonstration march—what weather for it, poor things, even if you didn’t agree with them. Judy buried herself in her studies; she was upset because she had wanted Caroline to go to morning service with her at a little old country parish church, but Mrs. Ogilvie didn’t believe in the three hour service for girls and wouldn’t let her daughter attend. Harold’s golf was off—he was all too seldom persuaded to take a real holiday out of doors!—so he spent the day with Sally Bulmer, talking over the survey; they were going to make a book out of it. With Geoff Hartley at home, Arthur was able to spend the whole day at “Sorbetts” playing poker—he seemed never to go to the Cranstons now. Sylvia had finished her library book—some story about divorce and the South of France, not much good; there was nothing worth looking at on tele. But then Good Friday always had been a gloomy day as long as she could remember. Even her mother, who’d been as narrow about religion as they came, never approved of Gopd Friday—there’d been no service or anything at the Bethesda Chapel. On this wet Good Friday Sylvia had felt so low that she almost picked up the breadknife and made an end of it.

  Luckily the weather changed on Easter Saturday. But then Easter was always a cheerful time—something new and something blue! In the old days the children used to have their breakfast eggs on Easter Sundays coloured to their choice—Harold liked pink, Len yellow and Iris always chose violet. On this Easter Saturday evening there was such a cheerful look in Harold’s eye that Sylvia, buoyed up by her own post-Good Friday rise of spirits, dared to try to break through the near-silence that had prevailed between them since she had refused to continue her “little job”. She recalled the coloured eggs of childhood to him, and, in no time, he and she and Arthur were all laughing and sighing over the old days together as they hardly had done in their lives before.

  And even when Harold’s voice suddenly sounded serious, it was in a warm, friendly tone. “I don’t know whether you’d care to come to church tomorrow. I know we’re not a churchgoing family. But I always think Easter is a time when we can all do with a church service, however little we believe. Far more than the conventional Christmas really.”

  Sylvia wanted to ask why he thought that, but she decided not to interrupt.

  “I don’t go to St. John’s here in Melling. I don’t altogether care for the Rector. But I think I can promise you something worth hearing at St. Saviour’s in Town Centre. Marchant, the vicar there, is quite an unusual man. Rather a controversial figure. You never get any of this dry-as-dust theological stuff from him that’s done so much to keep people out of the churches. Quite the contrary. Last Easter he gave a sermon on the eleven plus. A very fair statement of the situation, too; although it put some of the grammar school people’s backs up. Anyhow, if you’d care to come I shall be going, and probably Judy too.” Holding his hornrimmed glasses in his hand he looked at each of his parents in frank appeal.

  Arthur was as frank in his responding look. He shook his head. “No, old boy. I thoroughly respect your views, of course. But I had quite enough of church when I was a kid. I haven’t led the life of a plaster cast saint, but going to church wouldn’t have improved matters. That I do know. No, I don’t know whether I believe that there’s anything for us after we’ve had it in this world, but if there is ... I say ‘if’, mark you ... I can’t believe the Almighty won’t turn out to be a bit of a sportsman. Whatever my vices, they have been a man’s vices. ‘Arthur Calvert’, he’ll say . ..”

  Harold had been growing more impatient as his father talked. Now he interrupted. “Yes. Well, you may be right, Dad. What about you, Mother?” His voice expressed little hope.

  “I should like to come very much, dear.”

  The effect on her son was electric. “I’m very glad indeed. We’ve got off rather on the wrong foot recently, but perhaps on this Easter Sunday we shall be able to make a new start.” He beamed at Sylvia. It’s as though I were a prodigal daughter coming back, she thought, and then was both surprised and shocked at the tone of such a thought when Harold was being so genuine.

  St. Saviour’s, crowded with women in smart hats and men in their best lounge suits, looked more than ever like a meeting hall. The blues and violets of the windows seemed less happy to Sylvia now as they cast unearthy, livid lights here and there on the faces of the congregation. Everyone was dressed to the nines. Sylvia alm
ost wished that it had been colder so that she could have worn her leopard hat, but the ruched red ribbon turban looked quite nice.

  She found it difficult to concentrate or to feel as though she were in church. Lowering her heavy weight on to one knee and cupping her eyes with her hand in silent prayer as they settled in their seats, she felt quite silly. But the first verse of the hymn for some reason carried her away, although Harold bellowed terribly and Lorna Milton two rows away was quite embarrassing in her descant.

  “Immortal, Invisible

  God only Wise.

  To Light Inaccessible,

  Hid from our eyes.

  Of all thy great mercies,

  This Grace, Lord, impart;

  Take the Veil from our Faces

  The Veil from our Hearts.”

  Already, however, she could feel the congregation rustling and murmuring, Judy whispered “That’s not the vicar, Gran.” And a moment later Harold’s voice came more loudly on her other side, “I’m sorry about this, Mother. I can’t think why Marchant should be away at Easter.” Sylvia didn’t know the vicar so that she could not sincerely regret his absence. She feared all this murmuring of disappointment must be most hurtful to the feelings of the substituting clergyman. When he made his way to the pulpit, she tried to look up at him sympathetically to help him out.

  The preacher was probably not the sort of man to be much affected by atmosphere. He was a very old man with a very long red nose and a rather dirty-looking beard of the kind old King Edward VII had worn. He spoke in a strange, trembling voice, dragging out many of the words with broad Scots vowels as though at any minute he might change from speech to chant. Sylvia could feel the unfavourable effect he produced on the congregation in the rustling and coughing that broke out. Two rows ahead a young couple had been seized with a fit of giggles as soon as he spoke, and their giggling might well prove infectious. Sylvia felt with surprise a bond of sympathy with the grotesque old man; like him, she had no ties with this dressed-up, united congregation of Carshallites. As he spoke on, she was increasingly held by his words.

  “Christ is risen. In order that we may know eternal life. In order that we may save our souls alive. . . . It’s an awful difficult thing with some of us to tell whether we’re alive or no. For being a bustling, hustling busybody—that’s not life or no more life than the frugal ant or the hoppitty flea. No, nor building up businesses or rushing to our neighbours with gossip, nor being house proud, nor family proud. You can be all these and your soul may be still no but a wisp of straw. ...” After five minutes or so of this the congregation around Sylvia became either torpid or distracted— Harold made notes on the back of an envelope, Sally Bulmer lolled and looked back over her chair as though in a box at the theatre, Lorna Milton was reading in the hymn book. Then a sudden comical change in the old clergyman’s voice roused them all to attention; the giggles were set off again. An adolescent girl after uselessly trying to suppress her laughter, got up and left the church with her handkerchief to her mouth. “Aye, but what aboot me, guid Lord”—the voice was the refined squeak of an Edinburgh Judy in a Punch and Judy show—”I’ve been awfu’ busy all my life, clicketing among my neighbours, doing a muckle lot of guid for others. Aye, and we all know what happened to her—the Guid Lord looked down and never a creature could he see but a wee, wee body bustling hither and yon to nae purpose, wi’ a soul like a wisp of straw that was quickly gathered up into the flame and burned. No! Good works’ll not save your soul alive. . . . This Grace, Lord, impart! So we ask for Grace to be given to us, for we’ll not get it by shouting or fussing and fretting away our souls. No, not all the charity, the social work, as they call it now, can save your soul alive if there’s no soul left to save.” Harold was drumming on the chair in front of him now; Sally Bulmer her face turned to those behind, had assumed a look of patient amusement; Lorna and Chris Milton were whispering to one another. Then once again the old man’s strange powers of mimicry startled them back to attention. “Said the one carlinwife to the other, ‘Aye, Annie,’ says she, ‘I’ve been aye doing so muckle guid, I’ve noe had time to set me down and mind who I am.’ Ah! And she can sit on her buttie to all eternity, for buttie’s all she’ll have—there’ll be no living soul to save. Is there nothing we can do to help us to God’s Grace? Indeed there is. The Lord forbid that I should preach to you folks any strait-jacketed Calvinistic doctrine. There’s a great deal you can do. You can be toward. You can go out to meet God’s Grace. Go out to mind who you are. Go out, not into the busy clamour of getting and spending, nor even into the soothing clamour of good works. No, go out into the dreadful silence, into the dark nothingness. Maybe ye are no but a wisp of straw, but if you go out to face the fire, out through the desert and the night, then indeed may the Lord send the light of his face to shine upon you then indeed may you be visited by that Grace which will save your soul alive. And now to God the Father . . .”

  Mrs. Marchant, the vicar’s wife, a dowdy cheerful-looking woman, was in the atrium among the unvarnished wooden tables and book racks all stacked up with pamphlets each with a clever, eye-catching photograph on its cover. “I’m so terribly sorry,” she said to everyone, “Kenneth’s slipped a disc. And we had to take what the archdeacon could send us at the last moment.” She repeated her apology like a faulty gramophone, until someone nudged her elbow and made her aware that the old clergyman was standing beside the door like some bedraggled, mangy old goat. “Oh, Mr. Carpenter, so fascinating, so fascinating. May I introduce Miss Bulmer, our welfare officer? And Mr. Calvert, the headmaster of Melling School. And . . .” But the old man did no more than bow his head and rub his dirty old beard against his surplice, so that the poor woman gave up in perplexity. As the little knots of people chattered and flashed smiles in the Easter sunshine, Sylvia knew an entirely unfamiliar urge to action. She went over to the old man. “Thank you very much. I shan’t forget what you said.” His rheumy eyes looked at her quizzically for a moment, as though he were estimating her probable weight. “Ah! Good! It’s all old stuff, I’m afraid.” He shut his eyes against the sun and her talk.

  Harold was fiercely outspoken on their way home. “It’s perfectly disgraceful. I know their pay and pensions are ludicrous. But still there are plenty of eventide homes especially for the clergy where old creatures like that can go. I blame the archdeacon. . . . This is, of course, exactly where organised religion has failed. Though I will say for the Roman Catholics that their discipline simply wouldn’t allow a thing like this to happen. There were a number of my boys in the congregation and, whether the authorities like it or not, I shall make it quite clear what I thought. How could they respect me if I appeared to condone that sort of nonsense? And vicious nonsense! I suppose few more barbaric doctrines have disgraced humanity than all this rubbish about Grace . . .”

  “I found some of what he said rather helpful, Harold. . . .”

  “Oh, Gran! That awful voice! And it was so embarrassing. Daddy, I do wish we could go to one of the little country parish churches. There’s such a real sense of order and tradition in the worship there.” Harold ignored Judy’s plea, but he smiled at Sylvia. “You don’t have to be polite, Mother. As a matter of fact I was thinking of you a lot of the time. Here you are, brought up in that ghastly Calvinistic chapel atmosphere which must have completely scared you away from all religion. Then one Easter you come by chance to church here and you have this sort of stuff served up to you.”

  “It doesn’t seem quite the same, Harold. With mother’s minister it was all damnation and that. But the old man here was trying to be helpful, surely.”

  “Helpful! ‘A wisp of straw gathered up into the flame!’“ Harold’s Scots accent was not good, but his rising annoyance was clear.

  “I don’t think I understood the religious part much, dear. It was more the teaching that appealed to me.” She smiled at her son, and he too tried to repair the now so often mended breach.

  “You’re too forgiving, Mother, that’s the
trouble. I suppose a lot of my antipathy to that sort of thing comes from my resentment of the way you were treated as a child. I never knew my grandmother, but I can’t forgive her for refusing to see you after you married Dad.”

  “We certainly didn’t get on very well. But there it is. It’s all old stuff, now I’m afraid.”

  Arthur was waiting for them at the front door. “Quick march, the holy brigade.”

  “As usual, Dad, you chose the more comfortable and the wiser part.”

  It had been their original idea to motor out to a nearby tea-garden on Bank Holiday afternoon. There was a charming old millstream there, it seemed, and a little private zoo—really more of an aviary plus a few monkeys—that was well worth seeing. First, however, both Ray and Judy cried off—as Harold said, “There’s a surfeit of pleasures for the young nowadays.” Then Arthur decided to toddle down to the Sports Ground and support the Melling Cricket XI in their opening match of the season— “The Melling lads will wipe the floor with the Carshall louts.”

  “You mustn’t let your sympathies get too parochial, Dad,” Harold teased, but he was delighted. In the end, what with the accident figures on tele and the unexpectedly hot weather, Harold and Sylvia decided to make it a holiday at home. They sat out on the lawn in deck chairs. Harold corrected the proofs of his new Reader and talked now and again to passing friends. Sylvia dozed off over her other book—she always borrowed two over the holiday periods, one fiction and one non-fiction, this one was Lady Violet Clanpatrick’s book Within an Ace, that had been talked about so much. . . . “Neither of the Clanpatrick houses was what I would call really beautiful, not like beloved Gaydon where I had been brought up. Hinton Polcourt we used to say was huge and hideous, and Laoirghmile was little and laide. However they were Duncan’s homes and it was soon clear to me that I should have to learn to love them. After all I was to be mistress of both. . . .” It was not an easy book to get into. When Sylvia woke to the sound of Harold’s hailing a friend, she skipped a few pages. . . . “They called my generation a golden one and I truly think that we were in love with life. Even when years later the big break-up came between Duncan and me and we knew that we were not really suited to one another, we romped through the months of separation and finally of divorce as we had through three fortunes and a thousand parties. On the night the decree was made absolute we had a dinner à deux (quails with grapes and brown bread ices) at Quaglino’s, and dear Quaggie (what a terrible waste of human life—but war means just that!) thought we looked so happy that he asked if we’d been remarried that day! A month later Duncan’s rather enchanting old father died. I had been “within an ace” again. This time of being a duchess. I can’t say that I gave it a thought at the time. There were so many much more exciting things to be. For instance, the first Englishwoman to snub Ribbentrop. This is how it happened. . . .”