He stood with Simon for a minute on the stairs outside the flat.
“I meant that. A knight-errant in shining armour, riding into battle on a milk-white charger. ‘A verray parfit gentil knight.’”
Simon pulled a face. “Heaven forbid!”
“Heaven forbid what? That people should regard you in that light?”
“That I should regard me in that light.”
“Oh, but, surely…an occupational hazard? One of the perks of the profession?”
“No, I don’t think so. Not if you know yourself even half as well as you ought to.” In trying to escape one aspect of smugness, however, he had merely ended up with another.
“Anyway, at least you haven’t made any serious effort to convert me, for which I’m duly grateful.”
Simon was by now at the bottom of the flight of stairs immediately below the flat; the Heaths lived on the first floor. He raised a hand in casual valediction. “Not much of one, I agree. You see, I recognize my limitations.”
As he turned the corner and went swiftly down the remainder of the stairs it occurred to him that this was hardly a characteristic for a vicar, or indeed for anyone, to boast about.
8
“Oh, hell,” said Mrs Plummer. “What an anticlimax!” The table in the window was unoccupied. Except for condiments, the cloth was bare. “But why bother to leave your name, and where you come from, if you’re only passing through?”
“Shall we puzzle it out later,” suggested Ginny, “while we seek to drown our sorrows at the bar?”
Shortly afterwards the manageress moved amongst the diners with her usual bright inquiries.
“Oh, Miss Bryanston. If that table over there happens to be free again…?”
But it appeared that the Madisons had merely asked for an early dinner because they had needed to take care of something in the town and then wanted to see the summer variety show.
“Darling, shall we go to that ourselves?” Miss Bryanston had barely moved away before Mrs Plummer was energetically peering at her watch.
“Tonight? But why? We didn’t have an early dinner, so we’ll have missed the beginning. You’ll also be missing Daddy’s call.”
“But I suddenly feel in the mood for a little entertainment.”
“No, you don’t. All you feel in the mood for is a manhunt. Well, count me out.”
Yet on the other hand the prospect of spending the evening listening to the residents in the lounge, who switched on the television and then unfailingly chattered above it, wasn’t enormously enticing, either. And it had been a long day of dragging pains, resentment and frustration—they arrived at the theatre some half-hour after the curtain had gone up.
In the interval Mrs Plummer looked about her with animation.
“I think I’d like to stretch my legs.”
“Okay. You won’t mind if I stay put?”
“I’d rather have your company.”
With some difficulty (again) they squeezed past the three old ladies who were the only people now left sitting in their row.
“Oh, look, darling.”
It seemed that most of the audience was already congregated, shuffling, in the aisle but Ginny could easily see, over the heads of everybody else, the one Nordic head her mother was drawing her attention to. At that point it happened to be lit from above and she was struck by the gleaming arrowtip the thick hair formed upon the neck.
When Mrs Plummer finally tracked them down, the Madisons weren’t at the bar but standing just outside the theatre, enjoying the night air. They had turned to face the sea and in the darkness the waves were rhythmically pulling themselves up the shingle, then slipping back with a slackening, gravelly sigh. The moon’s path lay brilliant on the water.
“Oh, do excuse me, but didn’t I see you at lunchtime in the dining room of Sea View?”
By then Ginny had caught up. Introductions were made; comments—mostly favourable—passed on the songs and sketches. “But what a relief to be able to get out into the fresh air!”
“I can’t think,” agreed Mrs Madison, “why everyone chooses to crowd about the bar on a stifling night like this.”
“Poor lost souls. It must be the demon drink that drives them on.”
“Oh, please, Simon, smile when you say a thing like that in front of people whom you’ve only just met.”
“Well, if you ask me,” said Mrs Plummer, “they’re simply a lot of sheep.”
“Poor lost sheep.”
Simon and Ginny laughed delightedly. The two of them had said it in the same instant.
By the time they all returned inside, Mrs Plummer had arranged that she and Simon Madison should exchange seats. The second half began nearly as soon as he and Ginny had negotiated the knees, the walking sticks and handbags; but even so the tactic wasn’t wasted. Ginny was impressed by the kindness of his apologies to the three old ladies and by the patience with which he hunted for the programme one of them had dropped. Also, throughout the rest of the performance, she was very conscious of his being beside her: of the white pullover sleeve sharing her armrest, of the occasional deep laugh, the almost continual half-smile, the infectious and unstinting quality of his applause. The clean-cut profile.
No.
The tactic was not wasted.
9
He went straight from the Heaths’ to one of the shabbier of the small terraced houses in Dale Street. The narrow area between the gate and the front door—concreted; he couldn’t think of it as a garden—was filled with rubbish that the wind had blown in or that people must have tossed over the low wall: sheets of newspaper, an empty beer can, a small polystyrene tray that had once held fish and chips and mushy peas (even the tiny wooden fork was still imprisoned in its remnants), a cloudy milk bottle, a claret-and-blue rosette. When he rapped on the frosted glass—there was no bell—he was a little surprised that the person who opened the door was Sharon Turner herself. “Hello,” he said. “I hoped you’d be in bed.”
She stared at him, with sullen incomprehension. He suddenly remembered that he wasn’t wearing his dog collar. “I didn’t recognize who you was,” she told him, frankly. “What you said…it took me back.”
“I’ll bet it did. I should have realized.” He bit his lip. “I thought your mother would be here.”
“She was for a bit, earlier. You mean Jerry’s mum, don’t you?”
His irritation with himself deepened. He knew perfectly well that her own mother was dead. Her father had married again and moved to Ireland.
“And she doesn’t know yet if she’s coming or going and keeps crying all over the place; so she’s not much good. But anyhow she means well. Do you want to come in?”
“I…Well, not if I’d be in the way.”
She shrugged. “It’s a real awful mess but at least the kids are settled. I hope to God they sleep through.”
There was some western from the fifties showing on TV. Virginia Mayo, with her shiny Technicolored mouth, seemed a coyly mocking incongruity: best peaches and cream served in a grubby-looking bowl. Sharon neither switched the picture off, however, nor turned the volume down.
“It’s partly about the children that I’ve come to see you. I meant to call round earlier.”
She said: “I know I ought to have them done. We’d been talking about getting them done for months; honest we had. But I couldn’t face it now, not for a bit, not without him…” She started to cry.
“I wasn’t speaking about baptism,” Simon told her. But at first he wasn’t sure she could have heard him over Robert Stack. She was fumbling in the pockets of her dress. He offered her his Kleenex.
“What, then?” she asked, having wiped her eyes and blown her nose and palmed the crumpled tissue. She sat very much on the edge of an orange-painted kitchen chair, although the fireside chair in which he himself sat had its equally dilapidated counterpart.
“Well, my mother was wondering if she could take them off your hands a bit. Also, a couple of other women were as
king only last night if they could be of any use—shopping, cooking, cleaning, all that kind of thing.” He had told the group about the Turner situation almost as an epilogue to the main business of the evening; perhaps it should have been the prologue. In any case it had certainly achieved the right results. Alison and Dulcie had practically offered to move in.
“No thanks,” she said. “That’s very kind, I’m sure. But I can manage. Even if right now it don’t look like it.”
“Grief, you only came out of hospital yesterday!”
“The day before.”
“Not till the evening,” he said.
“Besides, I’ve got good neighbours.” Perhaps he looked doubtful. “The lady three doors down took in the kids while I was ill.”
“But will she do so now you’re back?”
“I’ll be all right.” She caught him glancing at her stomach. The bulge was not pronounced. “And so will he,” she added. “It was very nice of you to come round, I’m sure.”
Reluctantly, he stood up.
“What about your father, Sharon? I reckon we could take care of your fares, you know, if there were any chance that a change of scenery—”
“That pig?” she said. “I wouldn’t go within a hundred miles of him. Nor the slaggy bitch he married.” She sounded more bored, though, than aggressive.
“Well, it was just a thought. If there’s ever anything that any of us can do…You won’t mind if I keep in touch?”
“Please yourself.”
“Have you had some supper?”
Unaccountably, her eyes began to fill again. She turned away abruptly, switched off the set. Those Technicolored lips had just been lifted for a kiss. The room seemed darker without them but Sharon immediately looked less scrawny, less pallid. Simon wondered, fleetingly, if they ever showed such pictures in the Third World.
“Do you like Chinese food?”
“Never had it.”
“Like to try some now?”
“Up to you.”
He chose Chinese because he believed it would be more nutritious; he also bought some wine. When he arrived back at the house, she had tidied up a bit, removing plastic toys and bricks, colouring books and crayons, clothes, a cast-off nappy. He thought she might have combed her hair too.
She ate the food totally without remark, except when he said, “Is this all right?” and she told him, “Fine.” She finished everything he’d put on her plate but rather as though she didn’t notice and would have eaten less or more with equal compliance and equal satisfaction. It was similar with the wine: she drank what he poured into her tumbler, yet he felt it could as easily have been water. He’d been the one to find the corkscrew in her kitchen drawer—and also the piles of things that needed washing up. She was obviously quite incapable of looking after herself, let alone two small children; and he could only suppose her condition had deteriorated since the hospital discharged her.
It was the box of chocolates which drew the first real comment.
“Jerry used to get me things like that.”
In the paper shop next to the takeaway, Simon had wondered about the wisdom of buying it. “But there wasn’t much else,” he explained, “that would have done for a pudding.”
“When we were courting,” she went on.
He said nothing.
“And after we got married, too. He was never mean with money, not like some. Right up to when he lost his job.”
He hesitated. “Did it get him down—that—from the very start?”
“Well, what do you think?” Her tone still wasn’t aggressive, yet the mere phrasing of her retort made him conscious of what he so often tried to ignore: the possibly uncrossable gulf between himself and the bulk of his parishioners; the haves and the have-nots; the respected, the dismissed. “Oh, it wasn’t too bad to begin with…” (He sensed a part-apology.) “He had a bit of redundancy pay, which we had to spend quick, else there wouldn’t have been no dole. Well, he’d been trying to save up for a car ever since we got married. It was only secondhand; Jerry ‘n’ Sharon, it said, right there on the windscreen. And then he bought me a decent coat, too, lovely red wool it was. He was just so sure he was going to get something quite quick, you see. Other people might be out of work. Not him.”
“Because he was bouncy, you mean, had plenty of go?”
“On his good days he half thought he’d be Mayor by evening.”
She was almost smiling when she said that; almost pretty. You remembered that she was nineteen, roughly half the age of Miss Mayo in that shiny western. Simultaneously, he felt the urge to comfort her and to shake his fist at God. At God and the government and everybody who supported it, oblivious to all the harm it was causing—the stress, the breakdown, the suicide—either oblivious to it or more or less self-absorbed and condoning. And all (of course) rationalized in the name of the omnipotent economy, this steady withdrawal of hope from millions of apparently expendable lives, each one as blessed well important as…well, as any other in this land, or world. He remained silent, however: rapidly apologizing for his moment of blasphemy and for that feeling—bordering well-nigh on hatred—which he had come reluctantly to recognize in himself with increasing frequency over the past five years. Its seeds had been there for the past fourteen.
“His neck was broken,” she said suddenly. “Did you know that?”
“Yes.” The inquest had been lengthily reported.
“He’d been hanging in that wood a week.” She looked towards him now with eyes which seemed enlarged by bewilderment; but at a time when one might have expected tears they remained dry, and slightly out of focus. It appeared she had to justify herself. “He’d been depressed, you see. I thought he’d just gone off again without saying nothing. He’d done it before.”
This he knew as well.
“Once he walked to London and back—well, anyhow, walked most of the way there, because people don’t like giving lifts and by then he’d had to sell the car. But he didn’t find no job.”
To his consternation Simon found his own eyes growing moist.
“I used to talk to him quite spiteful,” she said.
“You can’t blame yourself for that, Sharon.”
“How do you know?”
“Listen. When anybody dies, even in the most ordinary of circumstances, those closest to them always feel a lot of guilt. But people are people; very few of us are saints. You were both under great pressure.”
“Well, even if that’s true…,” she said. (Surreptitiously, he wiped his nose on the back of his hand, thought of the box of tissues in his glove compartment.) “I could still have been a lot nicer.”
“We could all have been a lot nicer.”
“And I was mean about his pictures.”
“Pictures?”
“He and the son of that neighbour I told you about. He was teaching Imran to draw: animals and things. Jerry had a knack for doing pictures. He often joked about someday being a famous artist. But they used to go off all the time, you see: into the parks and the warren and suchlike. I got jealous of them having fun…”
“Sharon, there’s nothing you could have said that didn’t arise out of your situation and out of the kind of people you both were. Honest.”
“Meaning, I suppose, that everything, bloody well everything, is forgiven? Just like that? I think that’s daft.”
He tried to make her see the truth of it, as far as he was capable of seeing the truth of it himself. (Hitler forgiven? Stalin forgiven? Pol Pot?) After little more than three minutes, though, he cut his fumbling explanations short, aware that he’d said enough, probably too much, for the time being. But he was pleased to have seen evidence of anger. It offered up some hope.
He asked after an appropriate pause:
“Have you any of Jerry’s pictures that I could look at?”
“I suppose so.” She gave a shrug. “Sometime.”
“Would you like me to go now?”
“I just want to get some sleep. I wis
h I never had to wake up, neither.”
“Yes, I can believe that.”
“Jerry’s well out of it, if you ask me.”
“But it will get better. It may be impossible to imagine, but it will.”
“How do you know?” she asked again.
Because it has to, he thought, with some vehemence; if there’s a God, it has to. And because I do know. I’ve been through it all myself.
Oh, yes, indeed. Simon the Self-Pitier. Simon the Competitive.
And sometimes, too, at moments such as these, he really had to wonder.
Simon the Hypocrite?
10
On his way home he called in on both Alison and Dulcie.
“You shouldn’t have left her,” said Alison.
“What choice did I have? I could hardly have put her to bed. And she hasn’t got a phone. Well, even if she had, I couldn’t have used it in front of her.” He was edgy.
“She’ll be okay until morning,” said Alison’s husband, who was short and fat and smoking a cigar, his slippered feet at ease upon a pouffe. “That is, unless those kids wake up in the small hours and start to bawl.”
“You’re not either of you a lot of comfort. Should I get in touch with the hospital or something?”
“No,” said Alison, reassuringly decisive. “Robert’s right. Tonight what can one do? In the morning I’ll get round there good and early.”
“Not too early,” warned her husband, dropping cigar ash. Simon jaundicedly assumed that he was thinking of a lie-in. “Or, anyhow, you’d better wait outside until you hear the first whimper.”
“I suppose,” said Alison, “that the social services have been alerted about all of this?”
Simon groaned. “Oh, it didn’t occur to me! How stupid can I get? And surely Sharon would have told me if she were expecting a home help.”
But all the same he was feeling a little more optimistic by the time he got to Jack and Dulcie’s.
Such Men Are Dangerous Page 5