Saxon took his wife’s hand. ‘We’re lucky, Vivien, in so many ways.’
She didn’t reply, but briefly squeezed his hand before releasing it. He wondered if she had understood him correctly or whether she suspected his remark to have pointed up, by leaving deliberately unspoken, the ways in which they were not lucky. Women were prone to such misunderstandings.
‘Evening Reverend! Mrs Mariner.’
Mr Trodd, flag in hand, came down the platform. ‘How was the big city?’
‘Noisy and dirty as ever,’ said Saxon. He took their tickets from his pocket and handed them over. ‘It’s nice to be back.’
‘East west home’s best,’ said Mr Trodd, unlike Saxon no stranger to the comforting cliché. ‘You wait till you see your car, Reverend.’
‘Why is that?’
‘You just wait.’
Saxon, who didn’t care for surprises, walked if anything more slowly; Vivien, who did, hurried ahead of him through the gate into the station yard.
‘Oh my goodness!’
To say that Saxon’s car had been cleaned would have been a sorry understatement. It was gleaming, burnished, coruscating in the evening sun.
Vivien, her old self again, laughed delightedly, running her hand over the car’s satiny surfaces. ‘It’s a chariot of fire!’
Saxon surveyed the car from a safe distance, and turned to Mr Trodd.
‘Who’s responsible for this?’ He heard how this sounded, and added more emolliently: ‘Whoever it was made an excellent job of it.’
‘You can tell him yourself, Reverend.’
Saxon looked in the direction of Trodd’s nodding head. A dark-haired man was tinkering beneath the bonnet of the station van, parked in the far corner of the yard. Aware perhaps of being the focus of attention he looked up. His face wore an odd, grinning expression.
‘It’s Mr Ashe,’ said Vivien. ‘Saxon, do you remember, he came round looking for work.’
‘And appears to have found it.’
Mr Trodd leaned confidingly towards Saxon and spoke sotto voce. ‘He may be no daisy but he’s a good worker, and a wonder with motors.’
‘Well I should certainly have a word with him.’
Saxon set off across the yard. At least on this occasion Vivien didn’t rush ahead but observed the proprieties and stayed at his side. The man came round the bonnet of the van, wiping his hands on an oily cloth. Saxon had prepared himself, and flattered himself that he betrayed not a hint of shock.
‘Mr Ashe?’
‘Mr Mariner.’
Saxon told himself that he should not be put out by a form of words. ‘Mr Trodd tells me you were kind enough to polish my car.’
‘She’s a beautiful machine.’
‘Even better now, thanks to all your hard work.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Saxon felt in his pocket. ‘You must let me give you something . . .’
‘No need.’
‘But I must. For your time.’
‘It’s my own. Once I’ve done what needs doing.’
The two men stared at each other. Saxon felt that he was being challenged to accept, and be grateful for, the favour. Irritating though this was, he decided it wasn’t worth making an issue over.
‘Very well. Thank you. The car looks splendid.’
Ashe inclined his head in acknowledgement, a gesture which Saxon could not be sure wasn’t impertinent.
Vivien, however, was unreservedly enthusiastic, ‘Such a lovely surprise. It quite restores our faith in human nature. Mr Ashe.’
‘Thought you’d be pleased, Mrs Mariner,’ said Trodd, anxious to identify himself with any credit that was going, especially from the reverend’s wife.
‘Best get back, next train’s due. Good night, Reverend.’
‘Good night.’
They moved to get into the car. Ashe was quicker than Saxon, and held the door open for Vivien. He then watched as Saxon fitted the crank-start, and just as he was about to turn it, said:
‘I tuned her up a bit as well. She should start like a bird.’
‘Thank you.’
The engine caught on the second turn, and Saxon dropped the crank-start in the driver’s footwell and took his place behind the wheel. He found his audience of one irksome but could think of no way to tell Ashe not to watch that would not sound simply petulant. He was enormously relieved when they were out of the station yard and bowling down the lane towards the village.
‘The car’s positively gliding along,’ said Vivien. ‘Wasn’t that nice of him?’
Saxon took the question to be rhetorical, and didn’t answer.
At the vicarage Hilda, as instructed, had left a cold supper under covers on the dining-room sideboard. As soon as they got in Saxon went over to the church to say evensong, and Vivien walked out into the garden. There was no ill-feeling behind this separation, but still each of them breathed a little more freely. It was not often that they spent long hours together, especially in company, and afterwards it was their habit to go in different directions, as if they needed a space apart to restore the delicate balance of their shared life. So much of that life depended on if not exactly secrecy, then at least a sort of mutual discretion; an allowance made on the part of each for the other’s privacy and distinctness.
The dew was beginning to fall and the grass, still in its lush, uncut spurt of springtime growth, was damp. An early honeysuckle, tempted into flower by the fine weather, crawled up the side of the garden shed and over the roof, its fine tendrils like wayward curls of hair. The few small, freckled flowers, like cupped hands, gave off a wave of sweetness as Vivien tugged opened the warped wooden door.
The smell inside the shed was dank and musty. She sensed the scuttle of spiders, and something larger, a mouse perhaps, as she stepped inside. Earthenware pots of all sizes, the smaller ones stacked in uneven towers, stood on a trestle table. Facing her against the back wall, slumbering beneath its mould- and oil-spotted green tarpaulin, was the mighty lawnmower. On the wall opposite the trestle hung garden tools: a rake for soil and another for leaves; a hoe; spades of different lengths; a trowel and small fork; long-handled secateurs for pruning. Beneath these, on the ground, was a cluster of buckets and watering cans, a trug full of desiccated bulbs and a black hose coiled in a heap like a sleeping snake. In the far corner between the cans and the mower were the apple boxes. Every year Vivien picked the apples from the vicarage’s two ancient trees, wrapping each one separately and laying them carefully in rows in slatted wooden boxes; and every year the apples, an almost luminous golden-brown local variety whose name was lost to history, turned woolly and soft. The windfalls, though, and any that she picked and put directly into the fruit bowl, were fragrant and crisp with a distinctive sharp flavour. She’d come to think of them as wild apples, not suited to domesticity, but they were so good that she continued to squirrel away a few boxfuls in the increasingly forlorn hope that some would survive.
She took one now from the top box and unwrapped it. On the piece of paper the words ‘England rejoices’ in large letters appeared dimly through the grey wrinkles of newsprint. The apple in her hand was also wrinkled, and felt slightly spongy. A rank, cidery odour rose from the boxes. Vivien told herself she really had to stop engaging in what was a futile exercise.
There was a sudden explosive scrabbling behind the mower and a large rat darted from under the tarpaulin and scampered across the floor and out of the door, its naked whip of tail wriggling behind it. Vivien felt a prickle of shock, but the incident was so brief—barely two seconds—that she neither moved nor screamed.
The unpleasant realisation that the rat had been there all along and that its quick, furtive footsteps were what she’d heard on entering made her disinclined to linger. She left the useless apples to him and his kind, and for another day, collected what she’d come for, and left hurriedly, shooting the bolt behind her.
‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend
us from all perils and dangers of this night . . .’
Saxon did not, as a rule, take this prayer literally. Night in Eadenford was not perilous, and those dangers against which he needed defending were largely within himself. This evening, his conscience was troubled and he did not need to search it very far to find the cause. On this of all days, he had not behaved as he would have liked. The composure and dignity he sought had eluded him, he had been tetchy and awkward with George Lownes, grumpy with Vivien, and downright uncharitable towards the man Ashe.
He thought about Ashe. A terrifying appearance, the sort to give children nightmares. Saxon had needed all his self-control not to recoil, but the man himself conveyed neither shame nor self-consciousness. Indeed—Saxon’s shoulders twitched uncomfortably—he had been all composure, a very model of self-possession.
‘Almighty God, who hast given us grace at this time with one accord to make our common supplication unto thee . . . Fulfil now, O Lord, the desires and petitions of thy servant, as may be most expedient for them . . .’
Saxon clenched his clasped hands until the knuckles whitened. What would be expedient?
MESOPOTAMIA
Jarvis tells me Qurna’s the site of the Garden of Eden. All I can say is, I’m prepared to take his word for it, but a lot can happen in a few thousand years. This may have been a nice area then, but it’s gone downhill.
This is what I’m thinking on church parade. It’s eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, and already hotter than hell. We’re at morning prayer, those of us who aren’t Sikhs or Muslims. I wouldn’t go so far as to call us Christians, we’re just a bunch of so-called C of E’s with something serious to pray for at last.
‘Dear God, let me get out of here alive. Don’t let this stinking swamp be the last place I see on earth. Let me get back to—’ Where? Lewisham, Barnsley, Ipswich, Yeovil, Hull? I bet the daggy provincial towns of old England never looked so appealing as they do now, inside these men’s heads, bathed in a rosy glow of homesickness and last-minute religiosity.
Anyway, ‘Dear God, just let me get back and I’ll lead a good and blameless life, work hard, support the wife and children and be a pillar of the community!’ As if you could do a deal with God—as if you’d want the sort of God who’d do a deal with you. Even I can see that if it were that easy it wouldn’t be worth bothering with. And if it was worth the paper it’s written on we wouldn’t be here anyway, hats off in the heat, being bitten to bits in the name of the Lord. I’m only here to please Jarvis.
Now it’s time to sing, God help us (and I mean that). Dog-eared hymn sheets at the ready. They’ve gone all spotty in this climate, I wonder how far they’ve travelled in their time. Ah, here we go, Padre’s striking up:
‘Christian, dost thou see them, on the holy ground.
How the hosts of Mideon prowl and prowl around?’
An old favourite, and very apt. Chosen to make us feel we’re part of a crusade. Plenty of prowling going on, Buddhoos on one side and Turks just across the river. Us in the middle, in the Garden of Eden.
‘Christian, up and smite them!’ Well, we can but try. Let’s get there first.
I don’t sing. It’s madness. A couple of hundred lost souls in the middle of a desert, surrounded by the enemy, advertising their whereabouts by bellowing platitudes.
’. . . counting gain but loss’. I beg your pardon? It’s bad to win, then? And anyway, I thought it was the other way round, a good thing to die because then you were up there at His right hand, snug as you like. They get you coming and going.
The padre, Mills, is off his rocker. No joke. He’s got a little white scar below his right eye from duelling when he was in Heidelberg in the eighteen-nineties. His eyes are pale china-blue like a doll’s and just about as friendly. Mouth like a parrot—beaky, turned down. When he speaks it’s like he’s pecking at you, sharp, tap-tap. There’s no shortage of material for sermons here, the trouble being that this is the land of the Old Testament, all blood and guts and vengeance and an eye for an eye. There’s a devil of a lot of contradiction in the good book. This place was tearing itself apart before gentle Jesus was even a twinkle in God’s eye.
There’s a bush that grows around here called Eve’s Tears. The flowers are supposed to look like the tears she shed when they were thrown out, her and Adam. And about half a mile inland, to the east of the river, there’s a strip of land that’s all green and fertile: date palms, and flowers and grass underfoot, good soil you can grow things in. It’s not Kent or anything, but in a desert, every oasis is paradise. Perhaps that’s where the idea came from.
Ted Wellbeloved and me went to walk over there one evening when it was quiet, hoped to pick some fruit, perhaps do some trading with the locals. But it was further away than we thought; we were bitten to bits by the mozzies, and then he nearly trod on a snake. A serpent, I said, there you are! It was only a littl’un, it would have broken its fangs on our puttees, but he was still shaken up. He said some snakes can jump for your throat, like rats.
On the way back we met this young girl. Well, I say met—she’d been doing her business in the ditch by the side of the path, no doubt about it, and came scrambling out pulling down her skirt, uncovered. A brunette, all over, what a surprise. What did surprise me was what she did next. Catching us looking at her, two soldiers of a foreign army, you’d have thought she’d have been embarrassed; scared, even. Not a bit of it. Instead of covering herself and clearing off double quick, she pulled the skirt right up and pushed her hips forward, with her legs bent. With the other hand she’s pulling open her fanny. I don’t know about the snake, but for two pins this young lady would have jumped for our throats.
‘Is she trying to tell us something?’ asked Wellbeloved. Poor chap, he thought this was an invitation.
‘Look at her face,’ I said, keeping my voice down in case she understood.
‘That’s a pretty tall order under the circumstances.’
‘Try.’
She might have been pretty, it was hard to tell. This was no invitation, this was contempt and hatred, pure and simple, like a cat putting its back up at a couple of big dogs. She hissed something at us, spat at our feet, and then she was off—running, but not hurriedly, her long clothes rippling and flapping, disappearing into a mirage. Back to the burned-out village of Muzareh.
‘Well!’ said Wellbeloved. ‘Bugger me. What are we supposed to make of that?’
‘We should be insulted,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t like us.’
There was a pause. We began walking again. I could feel the sweat crawling grittily over my skin, in fact I could suddenly feel every inch of my sweating, sore, stinking body and it was like carting an extra load that I didn’t want and had no use for. That girl had reminded me of a whole pile of things I was never going to forget. I wanted to be sick.
‘Blimey . . .’ Wellbeloved was still disappointed.
‘She had a funny way of showing it.’
Now we’re on about being lost sheep. Apparently we’ve ‘followed too much the devices’ and desires of our own hearts’. Oh, really? At this moment I can’t think of a single man with the opportunity for that around here; apart from the odd spot of self-abuse, excusable under the circumstances.
We’re all standing with heads bent, droning away, our hands folded over our private parts, but with the dog-eared bits of paper sticking up so we can follow what the hell’s going on and what we’re supposed to be saying. We’re standing in a box shape, with the officers along the side. I sneak a look at Jarvis. His eyes are closed, he knows all the words and he means them. He looks handsome and smart. Looking at him you get an inkling, just a glimpse, of why some people think soldiering is a noble profession. Jarvis would have signed up for the Round Table before you could say knife. Dragon-slaying, maiden-saving, right up his alley. Whatever he says, he believes we’re doing the right thing. I’m not saying he thinks about it all that much. He just believes it, like he believes in all this God guff. I don’t know whether t
o envy him or feel sorry for him. In one way it must make life a lot easier if you’re not kicking at the traces. But he’s not stupid, far from it, so what’s going on in that head of his?
Neither of us minds being here. But our reasons aren’t the same.
He’s got his own Bible, don’t suppose he’d leave home without it. When we get back from the service I get out the regulation issue.
‘Undergone a road to Damascus, Ashe?’ he says, twinkle in his eye. ‘I must tell the padre.’
‘Just want to look up a couple of things, sir.’
‘I shall leave you in peace, then.’
I want to see what it says about the Garden of Eden. Here it is . . . Our ancestors got their marching orders from a flaming sword. Yes—I can feel it now, burning my arm where it’s out of the shade, uncovered. I shift a bit to avoid it. My skin’s pale, I burn in seconds. There’s no mention of a river, though. Where we are now, there’s rivers on two sides—the one I can see from here is the Euphrates, about the size of the Thames, choppy and swollen at the moment and yellow as mustard. If you watch for long enough you’ll see the odd dead animal bobbing down, on its way to the Shatt. Over to the left it’s the River Tigris. That’s not so wide and a lot more sluggish. On the far side there’s a big plantation of date palms, and beyond that Muzarch. The smoke’s still rising. Maybe Eve was like that angry Arab girl.
Jarvis comes along. ‘How’s the Good Book going?’
‘Interesting, sir.’
‘Bit hard to imagine, isn’t it?’
‘Sir.’
I wait, with my finger on the page. Sometimes I get the impression that given half a chance Jarvis would unburden himself to me but I don’t want that. I like things just the way they are, with us both playing our parts.
A Spell of Swallows Page 10