God on the Rocks

by Jane Gardam

  It was a grand square platform, the pier’s end—she’d not seen it before from the sea—or where the sea should be. Its little box theatre was perched on the end of it. Nobody stood around the fishermen with the sea and the fish had all gone away. Though there was a gleam now about the foot of the pier—a luminous hazy look and the humps of cement seemed to be smaller.

  She turned and went on—sploshing down into a pool. When one pool was deep and reached up over her thighs she gave a gasp of delight, for she was very wet now. She stumbled and fell forward and saved herself on a rock, grazing her hand. She sat on a rock and looked at the hand, wishing that it had been hurt more badly.

  Why?

  And why was it not all right for white hands to be moving over a back? Why should not her father love Lydia?

  Why did it make her feel sick? Like she felt sick when her mother crooned and moaned over the baby? She had felt sick when her mother cried over the brawn. She had felt a bit sick—a bit excited but a bit sick—watching all those dogs. I wish—she thought, and wondered what.

  To talk, she thought. Someone to talk to.

  She got up and walked still further out among the rocks and watched how the water had begun to move in over them not very far away in front of her, how it came in from two directions and sometimes fast. Faster all the time.

  As she watched, it began to hit the rocks with slaps. It spilled over the rock she stood on. Over her shoulder too she could see that it was running behind her, with a determined, throaty noise, a rumble almost, then a splash and then a pause.

  A white frill appeared along each rock about her feet and still further out it seemed to have got beyond the stage of frills. Each hard edge was backed by a definite lacy flounce, and there—goodness!—there was a frill of white at the top of a flounce. A spray, almost a fountain. The water curled and had become here and there bulging, ragged and awry—it had become almost waves. Behind her she saw to her surprise that the rocks she had hop-scotched over even a minute ago had quite disappeared and she was looking out over a wet, foamy muddle of shallow water. ‘Better get back,’ she thought, but felt tired suddenly.

  All the soft chestnut serpents were disentangling beneath the water, all the barnacles whistling with relief, launching themselves from the dark anchorages, safe and swimming free, far from plucking claws. ‘A hiding place is not a home,’ said Mr Drinkwater. She thought longingly of the dry hot garden and the dry earth beneath his gigantic wellington boots. Of a distant time and place—of peace.

  (‘Were you ever bored?’

  ‘Never, never, never.’)

  Then she thought for some reason of the huge liquid eyes of the wooden woman.

  ‘But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?’ Job twenty-eight twelve. ‘Not,’ she thought, ‘not there’—looking for the gables of Seaview Villas.

  But the weather had changed and darkened and home was nowhere to be seen. She turned her face out to the incoming sea and splashed on.

  18.

  Charles thought, Lord, she’s fat! How fat she is. Large and sleepy and fat. Beautiful though. She was always beautiful. It’s over twelve years—I’ve scarcely thought of her. And she’s in my bed.

  And without her clothes.

  There was always something silly about her. She was always losing things, dreaming about, large-eyed and adoring, rather bigger than he was which had begun to be slightly foolish very early on. Loving her was there of course, secure beneath the embarrassment and the uncertainty of how she would measure up.

  He could not remember a time before he had loved Ellie. He had been a scrap of a child dominated by the elder sister, almost invisible beside the beauty of the tall mother and the distinguished father whom he seemed in no way to resemble. Ellie’s adoration had been a joke but it gave a glow of life when his family were not about and made him expand and parade. As they grew and she changed to a painfully self-effacing girl who sat too quietly with a book, and he passed from hoops and scooters to a bike and lead soldiers, her love had been a background fact he recognised like the sun on the garden wall in summer or the great spread of the gold elms. Still and quiet and almost looking flimsily aged at ten years old she had loved him and he had the blessing of having someone it was quite safe to hurt.

  Ellie’s love had borne him along on the first terrible journey to his prep school and the holidays from this establishment had seen little change between them. At Rossall the horrors of his gruesome thinness and inability to play games had been endurable the first term because of Ellie’s securely waiting at home for the glory of his return. He had not much memory of this when he came to think about it. He had spent holidays away with people and much less time at home. When he tried to see her in the years after prep school he couldn’t—only some tea-party of his mother’s which he knew had been in some way important—but, with the war and the house being made into a nursing home, Ellie must have not been about so much.

  Then Cambridge had knocked the whole thing on the head. It was not just the distance, he thought now, holding Ellie heavy and limp and partly-camisoled in his cardiganed arms; it was the new friends flying his own colours to whom his home and the North and the past meant nothing, who did not even particularly want to come to stay, who knew nothing and did not particularly care to hear about the beautiful mother with her long, meaning looks and liquid dresses and distant smile. Ellie, like the elms and the lawn and the bright green drawing-room and the marble boy on the terrace, became stage properties from another play and his independence of her no more tinged with guilt than if she had been a figure in a painting.

  His vacations had mostly been spent on reading parties—Greek of a morning, stout boots in the afternoon—hearty times.

  Bloomsbury and its wreaths of roses in the meadows had been over, the Somme survivors had either crept into corners or made a lot of noise throwing each other into the river rather more often than was necessary or enjoyed. Undergraduates were old young men or babies like Charles, finding only if they were lucky that Cambridge could still assert itself as important, that May Week and madrigals and saxophone music and hot nights in punts could turn one weak with pleasure on the unchanged river.

  But 1919 Cambridge had not been made for love. Ladies had of course been present but the sculpted brisk creatures with straw hats and then no hats and shorn hair did not stir Charles’s desire. He had grown a soft moustache. Excitement had come from apses, fan vaulting, plainsong by candlelight, surplices shining against glossy black oak. Binkie had renounced even this for the gnash of the Leavisites and the garrulity of the healthy Mr Bernard Shaw while Charles had pursued buttered toast and crumpets, claret and conversation in Fellows’ rooms—leisure and freedom and books. There had been tremulous Forsterian breakfasts—hot muffins. Petals had fallen outside the window, floating from an old tree against a breathtaking dark April sky.

  Scarlet beadles for his graduation—an excitement about the streets, white fur hoods, processions, young men laughing, champagne for breakfast. The wide green of the Backs with King’s Chapel afloat in them made him think at last of home and Ellie.

  He wrote to his mother to tell her to bring Ellie to his graduation too and enclosed a note to be sent her at once. The note, brought down from the Hall to the post office where Ellie worked, made her blink like an owl behind the sweet bottles—the post office was diversified—and the note so longed for, now that it was here, filled her of course with terror and dismay.

  Throughout the day she had looked at it. ‘You’ll come to my graduation, Ellie? Mother and B will contact with all arrangements. My day is Wednesday. Wear a hat, love Charles.’

  She had liked it less and less.

  By tea-time it had the appearance of a sop, and by suppertime it was an insult. ‘I shall not go,’ she decided and threw it on the fire.

  The post office ’phone rang and she heard Binkie.

  ‘But of course you must. He’s sent special instructions.’

&n
bsp; ‘But I can’t leave work, Binkie.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense. There’s somebody else. I’ll see to it. Mother will.’ (For the village post office was still the Frayling Post Office, with the day’s letters from the Hall gathered up from the silver tray.) ‘After all these years! You can’t let him down. And you’ve never seen Cambridge.’

  ‘No. I can’t go. It’s . . . too long ago, Binkie,’ and it was only Mrs Frayling’s arrival in a pony and trap the next morning that changed her mind. The bell had jingled on the shop door and Ellie had looked up from behind the metal trellis and seen, beside the sweets and the big bulging metal plates nailed to the wall saying Oxo and Mazawattee Tea, Mrs Frayling carefully examining bars of white milk chocolate and peppermints. She turned slowly—she was dressed in tussore and a dolman. There was fine piping on the long skirt and her hat rustled with roses and ribbons above her serious face.

  ‘My son expects you at Queen’s,’ she had said, buying a penny and a penny-halfpenny stamp. ‘We shall call at eight o’clock on Tuesday. I can help you with the correct clothes.’

  Had she not added the last words several people’s lives would have been otherwise: Ellie would have pushed the two stamps across the counter, thanked Mrs Frayling for saying she would take her to Cambridge, refused the invitation firmly and not needed to see any of the family again. Mrs Frayling’s brooding, almost pulsating anxiety would have been at an end, the roses in the hat would have ceased to vibrate—and many words not been spoken between her and her son. A house would have been conventionally inherited and a number of lunatics less delectably housed. ‘I will help you if you wish with the correct clothes,’ said Mrs Frayling, and a family was scattered and another made possible.

  ‘Thank you, that will be unnecessary. I have clothes,’ Ellie had replied and had been ready for the railway station on Tuesday with hat, gloves, and travelling costume which had taken all her savings but been carefully calculated to appear nothing more than adequate and in no way pretty. She held a small suitcase borrowed from the vicar’s daughter, her head high and her plump face for the first time in her life carrying an expression of coldness and distaste. Binkie, returning to Cambridge apparently stolidly for the first time since her own graduation a year before, read the works of Sidney Webb all the way to Peterborough. Mrs Frayling in their first class carriage with its silky pillows and buttoned backs leant to the landscape and let the drab Plain of York pass by, trying not to detest the chilly composure of the village post-mistress who was passing the journey engrossed in a small volume which looked pathetically like Shakespeare.

  Of course all the nonsense had been years ago—a childhood friendship. Ellie was receiving no more than the same kindness held out to her as a little girl when they had let her, in a traditional old English way, share the Hall governess.

  She was a wisp. A girl they had all been good to. But in spite of Charles, was it not being cruel? Should they have let her come at all with them? Stay in their hotel? Wouldn’t it make the poor child have hopes? How she would cope with Cambridge one could hardly conceive. One must simply pray that Charles would be of some assistance.

  And of course dear Charles had been splendid—jocular almost. At lunch at the University Arms he had teased Ellie like a brother. Resplendent in royal blue and white fur hood, he introduced her to others in the same disguise. ‘Our little friend,’ he had said, ‘from the village.’

  Ellie had sat still as a stone through the degree ceremony, dazed by the scarlet of the Vice-Chancellor, the hat-doffing, the quaint holding of fingers, the Latin chant, the kneeling and pressing together of hands. When it was Charles’s turn—so tall and controlled, almost as tall and controlled as the Vice-Chancellor although he had only got a Third—Ellie had sat very still indeed. Had thought, ‘We are one person.’

  How unimportant that at the tea-party afterwards he had seemed to ignore her, left her standing in a crowd of strangers as he hunted out the strawberries and cream—and how like him that he had found only tea enough for his mother and Binkie—for he had forgotten to get some for himself as well. And they were one person.

  In the late afternoon in King’s College Chapel heads had turned towards the mother in a toque of pale net and a muslin dress, leaning on a parasol of the same material (is it the Queen?), saying good-bye to Binkie who was going to look up old friends at Girton. Charles spotted some old family friends too across the nave who came up laughing and everyone had gathered into a group. Ellie had walked away then up into the chancel and stood a moment at the altar rail looking at the great East window. Blue and gold and red it shone in the dark. Christ shown to the people. Ecce Homo.

  A man was standing looking at the picture intently but without much apparent pleasure and she saw it was Kenneth Marsh from home.

  ‘You’re from home!’ she said and felt thoroughly delighted. ‘We were at school. Don’t you remember? I didn’t know you were at Cambridge.’

  She remembered a wormish withdrawn little boy who had been hard-working but nothing more and whose father had a funny religion.

  ‘I thought you were Chapel,’ she said and laughed. ‘I mean chapel like the one in Turner Street, not this one. Did you get invited by someone? I did—I came to see Charles Frayling.’

  He said, ‘I was invited by Jack Nattress. He hadn’t got anybody. He was in our class at elementary.’

  ‘Jack Nattress in standard six?’

  ‘Yes. He got a scholarship.’

  The two of them turned round and looked down the church to the jolly crowd of Fraylings in the middle of the centre aisle. Rosalie with sun falling on her astounding hair under the toque was saying something amusing. The others—and Charles in particular—stood about looking proud to be seen with her. The group looked self-sufficient, complete, as perfectly balanced as the coloured window.

  I don’t belong, Ellie thought, I shall never belong there. I am unnecessary to them, even to Charles. I am brought here for my education and they will say in years to come, ‘Do you remember Charles’s graduation? Wasn’t that a beautiful day? D’you remember we took little Ellie from the post office—didn’t she love it? She was helplessly in love with Charles, poor child, but she really behaved very nicely indeed. She shared our governess, you know . . . ’

  ‘God bless you,’ said Kenneth Marsh quaintly, shaking hands. He went off down the chancel, passed the Fraylings without a glance, and was out of sight. ‘What an elderly little man,’ she had thought. ‘What a sober person.’ But what she had really felt important were his friendliness and the comfort of meeting a familiar face on unfamiliar ground.

  Charles thought now in bed at Dene Close of Ellie’s tender face so many years ago as she stood, far off as India, on the chancel steps of King’s Chapel. That was the moment, he thought, when I knew I’d ask her to marry me. After that terrible shrieking strawberry tea. In King’s Chapel—with Mother holding forth to Cousin Dossie and ignoring Ellie like a servant—Ellie all alone up there and looking at the sights with the tourists.

  I decided then. But not because I loved her—that was the mistake. It was because I panicked.

  I hadn’t known how little I cared about women until I left home. I had never touched a woman in my life, or thought very much about them. I was uneasy—not more—that I never seemed able to joke about women, or even see the jokes about women. I suppose I was a cold fish, but I didn’t let it trouble me much.

  I was romantic, I thought, not sensual! There was always the knowledge that Ellie loved me when I felt perhaps that something was a bit awry.

  I didn’t love Ellie though—I did know that. Not now.

  And then the day I saw myself with Mother—all my life with Mother, laughing at her jokes, arming her along in a group of her admirers, driving her about, more often as the years passed and her arthritis or whatever it was got worse. I saw myself smooth and fattish and forty and people saying, ‘Oh, Charles is so good to his mother.’ Ellie—it was perfectly clear—was the inevitable, the only possibil
ity; familiar as my own hands and feet, and ready and waiting. She was like an old pair of shoes to be put on.

  ‘We are one person,’ I used to say when we were children, and I asked her to marry me before breakfast next morning in the foyer of the University Arms Hotel, before the others came down.

  We had all the luggage packed for the journey home. It stood about the foyer. It was a sweet blowy warm June morning.

  She said yes at once, looking astonished at herself and holding tight to the back of a high chair and we went out and walked down to the river and along the Backs in the green morning—few people about yet but the sun hot. Roses tumbled in heaps over Queen’s walls. Long trestle tables from the night before stood about in cloisters. Empty champagne bottles leaned up in niches and fountains and at tipsy angles in gutters. King’s Chapel stood high like an empty ship, becalmed, balanced on the grass. Through Clifford’s Court of Trinity we walked in ethereal light. Cambridge was nearly empty, most people had already gone down, but from some room somewhere about someone played a flute.

  ‘Don’t . . . tell anyone yet,’ she had said.

  ‘I shall tell them at once. Everyone.’

  A weary-looking merrymaker in evening dress tottered from a doorway and blinked at the light. Charles said, ‘Willie, I am about to be married.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said the reveller. He swung a champagne bottle by the neck, hands like a monkey, a glass in the other hand. ‘Who’s playing the bloody flute?’

  ‘Listen—I am about to be married. May I introduce . . . ’ but Ellie had gone on round the corner.

  At breakfast before they went to the station his mother had been particularly charming to Ellie, seeing in her peaceful eyes gratitude for a lovely time. ‘You will remember this all your life, my dear Ellie.’ And Ellie had said yes. Oh yes. She would.

  It was the next day in the green drawing-room of the Hall, when Charles and his mother were alone as she sat at her desk, that Charles had broken the news of his proposed future and all hell had broken loose.