by Melvyn Bragg
Alan, with his soft voice, the books, his poetry, the promise of a new unknown life together, his passion, made her feel that he had to be the one she could live with. It was destined. The poetry confirmed it. However hard it was on Frank, and however hard it seemed to her, it had to be done. They stood, a few feet apart, in the darkening lane, waiting as if for a miracle to give each one what they wanted without hurting the other. The bonds between them had never been so strong. Just to move seemed impossible. But it had to be done, Grace knew that, and she reached out and touched his shoulder and turned and walked back to the farm in a turmoil of grief, fear and hope.
Alan liked to speak the poetry aloud but he hated to do it when others were nearby. Beyond the formal gardens, they found a small, thickly wooded copse. A gentle snaking path steered you down to the stream. If you turned left then, after a few yards, you would be in an area of barely visible tracks and safe, dark concealment. They found their own glade and went there after Grace had finished her work, in the still-warm evening of the day.
Alan, who was more aware than Grace of what was to happen, was by now in a condition of desperate longing. He was convinced that he loved Grace as no one had ever loved a woman before. It was worship. He let her long black hair trail through his fingers as if it were a waterfall of pleasure. He looked at her blue eyes so intently that he might have been attempting to hypnotise her. Her body, lean, firm, made to make love, he thought, white as marble, untouched, intact, was the aching temptation to hands that could not bear to touch her, and could not bear not to touch her . . . but he could speak poetry to her.
‘Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’
The words wove into her soul.
They found a place, near a beech tree, the ground lush from the heat. He undressed her slowly as she lay, looking at him so trustfully – And so you can! he thought. And so you must! ‘This is pure love,’ he said, ‘this is the union of all we can bring.’
And for both of them, physical love, though at first painful and awkward, soon felt theirs alone: no one else could have known this. Alan, whose survival and healing had moved him towards a spiritual conviction of an underlying meaning to life, and Grace, whose new poetic love had brought her to an unanticipated quality of happiness, felt that they were destined for each other. The kisses were deep. Alan’s passion and the full arousal of Grace made them believe for these moments that they had in truth spread their dreams under the other’s feet, and they would tread softly.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
John and the vicar shared an old pleasure that had become a new vice. They indulged it on the beach. It was late afternoon, early autumn, a weekday, unlikely that anyone would spot the vicar and, besides, he was in civvies. To the west along the flat, sand-ribbed shore a man was speeding backwards and forwards on a motorbike between two sticks. The distance made its buzz bearable. John was gradually becoming an enemy of noise. It was a battle he lost every day. Beyond him on the shore there was a dog-walker, and a man standing stock still looking out to sea. In effect they had the beach to themselves. Hands cupped, backs to the warm west wind, they lit up and drew in deeply.
‘First of the day,’ the vicar said, happy to boast.
‘Good going. I’m about . . . six down.’ John took another extravagant puff.
‘She seems settled.’
‘So they say. Only lost three pounds since she came in about three years ago.’
They were walking now or, rather, sauntering not to allow mere motion to interfere with the appreciation of the cigarettes.
‘They’re very good there,’ John added. ‘I walk through the door and hear the voices of the nurses and there’s something . . . so hopeful and reliable about them. They’re the real unsung England – they make me think about this country in ways that I thought had been buried for ever. Sorry!’ He smiled. ‘And it’s the accent. Mine was like that once. And one or two of them have that sweet high tone that the older women used to have around here, I remember, when I was young. A singing voice.’
‘Your mother still has a fine singing voice,’ said the vicar. ‘I’ve heard her singing in church. Sometimes here, they say, she’ll just start it up, in that sitting room, and they’ll all have a sing-song. “Come on, Mary, get us started.”?’ The vicar enjoyed the congregational aspect of it.
‘And she will,’ said John. ‘She’ll start up. For a reserved woman she’s very unselfconscious about singing. They’ve always sung together, that generation. I’ve seen the women coming out of the factory at dinnertime linking arms and singing as they walked up Station Road. You would get on a bus for a mystery trip to Silloth or Allonby or Morecambe and the singing would begin the moment the bus set off. I feel as if I’m talking to you about Merrie England and the maypole, but it happened and it happened when I was alive. Even us boys would sing on the bus when we went to play away games for the school. Rock ’n’ roll, of course. Pubs had a designated room called the Singing Room then.’
‘The women seem to know all the words of the old songs.’
‘They’ll know all the words of the old hymns as well,’ said John. ‘God help us, so do I.’
The mention of God seemed tactless.
The vicar fielded the problem. ‘Your generation was probably the last substantial lot to go through the religious treadmill,’ he said. ‘School assemblies, Sunday church . . .’
‘Sunday school, choir.’
‘You got the full treatment. It’s different now. The schools are multi-faith or secular, Sunday school strictly for minors, choirs get few boys.’
‘Cathedral choirs?’
‘Niche!’ said the vicar. ‘We’re quite good at niche. More cathedral choirs than the rest of Europe combined, my son tells me – he’s a deacon down in Salisbury – and they seem to be pretty good. Nobody turns up to hear them, of course. The choir can outnumber the congregation.’ His heel stubbed out the cigarette in the sand as if the evidence needed to be buried.
‘Choral Evensong could convert a pagan,’ John said.
‘But to what?’ said the vicar. ‘Sorry. The day job.’
‘Why be sorry? You believe in all that, don’t you?’
‘Yep.’
‘The whole box of tricks?’
‘The lot.’
John took out his cigarette packet and offered one. The vicar hesitated, looked at his watch, grimaced and took one.
‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’ said John.
‘He’s always in front.’
‘As a boy I was a Christian fundamentalist,’ said John, ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Virgin birth. Resurrection. Ascension. Miracles. Eternity. The Immortal Invisible. Angels and archangels. Seraphim and cherubim. Saints and martyrs. I was a zealot. I was even a crusader. Like those Islamic kids you see on television.’
‘And then it drifted away.’
‘Yes. All of it – it just seemed less and less credible.’
‘Has anything stayed with you?’
‘Well, there’s a loyalty and the memory of an obsession. That’s something! And, as a matter of fact, I’m back at the beginning of it. I’m tackling the first ever translation of the Bible into English for my next book. You know all this. People then believed that the Bible told them the history of this world and revealed the next. So how can’t we respect it just as a body of knowledge for so many people for such a long time? And then look at the side effects. The art, the music, the cathedrals, the churches, the language, the literature, all the social good now dismissed or derided . . .’
‘Music to my ears,’ said the vicar.
‘You’re a believer! Rar
e bird. Could I ask you why?’
‘There’s been a church of sorts in Wigton for more than nine hundred years and it’s not shutting down on my watch. We’ve done the roof – thanks for the help. It all counts. We’ve done the pointing. The redecoration is under way. Now for the organ.’
‘And the Word of the Lord?’
‘Still there,’ the vicar said. ‘If you’re listening. And there can be something bracing about a small band of loyalists. Christians have been few before. Who knows?’
‘God?’
‘You could always enquire. And maybe ye shall be answered. Ask your mother,’ the vicar said. ‘She could have answers. She could be in a position now to pick up some of your intimations.’
‘She was christened, confirmed and married in that church.’ And the unspoken sentence was: she will have her funeral there.
‘They don’t make them like that any more.’ The vicar smiled.
‘I have to go now. Carrying the torch for the death promise this afternoon. “I was dead for millions of years before I was born.” Mark Twain, wasn’t it? And I think he said, “And it didn’t hurt a bit.”?’
They walked back and stopped outside the home.
‘What’s going to happen when everyone starts to live to be a hundred?’ John asked.
‘It’s started already.’
‘And?’
‘The world will have to change. I think it might be for the better. Look what a mess the under-forties have made of it over the last few thousand years. Time for older voices who have less to gain.’
He got into his car.
‘Your mother’s a marvel,’ he said, and then he laughed. ‘She doesn’t like seeing me! But she’s very polite about it. So long!’
A neat three-point turn took him on to the ash track and on his way. John watched him for a while. It was remarkable that men like him were still around. A pity they were in the Church? Not really. Good was welcome wherever it turned up. He took out his cigarettes and made a note on the pack. ‘Church organ – £250?’
‘Hello!’ she said, in a voice that made it plain she had not seen him for months but was still glad he had come to see her. He had been away for about half an hour.
‘You haven’t eaten much of that.’
‘I’ve had enough.’
He assumed his usual feeder seat.
‘No.’ She turned her face away. ‘I can’t eat another thing.’
‘You’ve scarcely touched it. Just one spoonful.’ He scooped up the scrambled egg. Again she turned her face away. ‘Now, no! I mean no.’
‘What about a chocolate?’
‘What sort?’
He picked up the box she particularly liked – a tray of large milk chocolates, elaborately packaged. She loved them. She peered at the handsome assortment. ‘There’s so many,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen so many beautiful chocolates.’
John took one while she made up her mind. When she did, she consumed it in mini-nibbles. ‘Aren’t they beautiful? They’re beautiful.’
At this time of day there was a space of silence in the home. Tea had finished and the nurses would be busy in the kitchen and the sitting room at the other end. John studied his mother. There were a few patches of brown on her face, a rather large one on the right side of her strong nose, and her hands were a quilt of dark stains on silken, thin skin, but when she smiled or when she was merely alert, there remained that unobtrusive loveliness, he thought.
‘What are we going to do, then?’ She had finished the chocolate.
‘You decide.’
‘We could go for a walk.’
‘It’s a bit too dark.’
She shook her forefinger at him. ‘You’re right. Too dark . . . We could go home.’
‘Not today. Maybe soon.’
‘Why not today?’
‘You can’t walk properly.’
Again the wagging finger. ‘That’s true.’
‘We could sing,’ he suggested.
‘We could,’ she said. ‘Nobody’ll stop us.’
‘What’ll it be?’
She began:
‘If I were the only girl in the world
And you were the only boy
Nothing else would matter . . .’
‘Not that.’
‘Why not that?’
‘It can make me a bit weepy,’ said John.
‘You’re soft,’ she said. ‘Soft.’
‘What about “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”?’
‘That has a good tune,’ she said, and immediately began:
‘My bonnie lies over the ocean.
My bonnie lies over the sea.
My bonnie lies over the ocean.
Oh bring back my bonnie to me.’
He joined in:
‘Bring back, bring back,
Oh bring back my bonnie to me,
To me.
Bring back, bring back,
Oh bring back my bonnie to me.’
This was the way the world should end, he thought. This was the way the world should end, not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a song.
‘Oh bring back my bonnie to me.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He wrote the day he arrived home and his second letter was inside a package in which were two books: there was a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets with the line ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ specially marked out, and there was a slim collection of W. B. Yeats with a whole poem outlined in black ink and the last line underscored in red: ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’
Grace was a little self-conscious of her own letters but Alan’s compliments reassured her. Miss Errington had picked her out for composition. She kept him up to date with notes on life in Prospects. Miss Birkett had tightened discipline and three of the men had been given a dressing-down. Prospects might close now that the war was coming towards its end, now that the Americans had joined in. She often went down the path to ‘their’ place. She missed him and (after rejecting ‘best wishes’ and ‘kindest regards’) managed, at first with some difficulty, to write ‘Much love, Grace’.
Alan’s letters flamed like his talk. His handwriting was as loose as hers was steady. His sloped from left to right and at the bottom part of the page was almost crammed into the corner. She could always rely on a few lines of poetry. He wrote little about his family but then neither did Grace. He’d had to go into a local military hospital for a final check-up but he would soon be out and fit as a fiddle.
And so they batted their feelings backwards and forwards for a few weeks. Sarah was impressed by the regularity of the letters. Wilson had withdrawn from all participation in the matter. He was disturbed by the ending of what for him had been a very public though informal engagement with Frank. He did not know this other man and he was perturbed that the soldier had not managed to come to the farm to make himself known. What sort of a man was that? And Grace had altered in a way he did not like. What sort of a woman just changed her mind for a stranger and one who showed no respect or any sense of honour? She was somehow off the ground, head in the air, in danger of losing herself.
Sarah encouraged Grace to talk about Alan but it did not add up to very much. It was all a bit sudden, Sarah thought, and ‘all a bit sudden’ meant not good. Sudden was danger. Sudden was unprepared. Sudden was to be avoided. ‘All a bit sudden’ was worrying, although it was better not to say so.
Grace was a little puzzled that Alan had proposed no plan. She thought he might have invited her to go and stay with his parents. She had already imagined the train journeys through half of England. The soldiers, she had heard, were crowded on to the trains; the uniforms and talk of war, the smoke and the noise, this was the real world. She knew it was a time of unhappiness and horror for so many and she tried to sympathise with that and, faced with an example of it, she would have helped in any way she could. But in the exhilaration of this new kind of love and in the new feeling of being unbound, she saw the opportunity to
leave Oulton and go deep into the heart of England as a chance for freedom. He would summon her in good time, she was sure of that. But she began to sicken for him.
Then came the letter that devastated her.
Dear Grace,
I am Alan’s father. He’s told me a lot about you, all of it good. You sound like a fine girl and I know he is fond of you. I write to tell you that when he went away for a final check-up they found that the shrapnel in his head had not been removed, that is to say not all of it, and complications have set in. He has to be kept in a restful state with no excitement. It is not touch and go as they say but it does not look too bright on the horizon.
Added to the above, I am sure you know that Alan is a lad with his head in the clouds. He has always been a bit of a romancer. He was always inclined for that sort of thing. My wife (Elsie) has taken the liberty (given the circumstances and wanting all the information we could get to help him) of looking at one or two of your lovely letters and as we suspected he seems to have made promises he just can’t keep. He is in no condition to do so and the doctors say he likely never will be.
This is a hard letter to write but both Elsie and myself agree it will be an even harder letter to read. Of course we cannot force you not to write to him but this is just to say that we won’t be sending on the letters to him for a while unless he asks about you. But he is in a world of his own at the moment, Grace, and that’s the truth of it.
If you would allow Alan’s father and mother to give you some helpful advice, it would be to try to get over him and find somebody else worthy of all the good things he said about you.
I am very sorry to be the bearer of this news.
Yours sincerely,
Alfred Marshall
She remembered Alan’s moments of desperation and wanted to rush to his bedside, just to be there for him. Yet his parents had all but banned it. She wanted to write a letter every day, but would he ever read it? Instead, after two days of crushing indecision, she wrote a brief, affectionate, but essentially passionless letter to his parents who would, she thought, be worried enough without having her worries to cope with as well. At times through those days she felt that she was being choked and had to stop whatever she was doing and order herself to be calm and breathe deeply and regularly and avoid the piercing glance of Miss Birkett and the enveloping concern of Sarah, who knew that something bad had happened and was certain it had been in that last letter. The handwriting was unknown to her, which made it even more upsetting.