Avril, standing alone in the dark, realized that Luke would never have believed it had he gone to him at that moment and told him that all these pertinent facts had never become assembled in his mind before. Yet it was true. Until now, not one of them had occurred to him to have any bearing on the other. He was not usually so obtuse.
Avril accepted his stupidity as a mystery which would be explained. In his strange peacefulness, his own unprecedented intellectual shortcomings appeared to be only a part of something much greater and more important. He waited, and presently he found himself perceiving the reason for his visit to Mrs Cash that afternoon. Of course, by conveying to her, and through her to the man behind her, that Martin’s letter was not in the rectory, he had also conveyed to her he knew where it was.
Avril knew where the boy would look for it. Doubtless he was there now, rummaging through the old black folder which the Canon kept under the lectern in his pulpit. He must have felt he was safe in the small hours, but his torch had betrayed him and Avril had seen it.
Suddenly, his forward mind shrinking as it had been shrinking all the evening, Avril raised his head to see where the stream was carrying him, and he saw what he was about to do.
‘No,’ he said aloud in the darkness, ‘no, that is madness.’ Yet in that moment he had recognized the demand and knew that he would submit to it. All his human weakness, his casuistry and his common sense, rose up to betray him and turn him from his work.
It resolved into an argument between the two Avrils, conducted politely but vigorously, as though between two old brothers who had lived together for a long time.
‘My dear fellow,’ protested the wise prelate in him reasonably, ‘this is one of those cases when no single human being must interfere. If you go down and attempt to talk to that wretched boy alone tonight he will kill you as he has killed four other people, and it will be suicide on your part and murder on his. You are not particularly afraid of dying, but if you do, who will suffer? Everybody you love best – Meg, Sam and his missus, they will have to find a new home, for no incumbent is likely to put up with them. William and poor Mary Talisman and Emily, who will shelter them? Dot. Dear Dot. It would destroy Dot’s reason for living, and my sad over-confident soul, what good would it do?’
‘I do not know,’ replied the essential Avril, who was shrinking and mindless and without existence save in obedience. ‘I only know that events have so arranged themselves that I have no choice.’
‘Listen,’ said the practical man in him, ‘telephone the boy Luke. Do it now. He is the professional man whose job this is. Tell him all you know, commend your soul to the Almighty and go to bed. If you want to talk to the other boy, you can do it when he is in jail. That way you will protect him as well as yourself. Who are you to lead him into such monstrous temptation?’
‘Again I do not know,’ said the naked Avril. ‘I do not ask. But if that had been the way, I should have known what I know now tonight when I was talking to Luke.’
At that point his sense of humour, which was always hindering him, began to laugh. ‘You are standing here, talking like Launcelot Gobbo to his friend,’ it remarked. ‘Don’t be a fool, Avril. Telephone Luke.’
‘I will call him when I return.’
‘You won’t return,’ said his common sense. ‘Why on earth should he spare you, of all people? He hated and feared you in spite of everything you ever did for him, and that was when he was a child. Why on earth should he listen to you now? You are the last person to have any influence over him. Do you remember when you caught him alone in the church mocking the service, and how after you had watched and made certain it was not innocent naughtiness but intentional sacrilege, you put him across your knee? That boy is of Evil. He was of Evil as a babe. Deliver yourself from it while you can. There is a telephone in this room put there for your salvation. Use it. You don’t have to remember a number, even. Ask for the police and go on asking until you get Luke.’
As he still stood irresolute, his reason became cunning.
‘At least take a sensible precaution,’ it said. ‘Get hold of Luke and tell him to meet you in the church in half an hour. He may come sooner but that will not be your fault. Leave the rest to Providence, but do telephone now.’
Avril moved over to the telephone in the dark. It was an extension from the main instrument in the hall and had been put in during the war for A.R.P. purposes. He was greatly troubled and he took off the receiver unhappily.
The complete silence over the wire comforted him. He was, of course, the one person in the house whom Sam had forgotten to tell of his new arrangement, and he had no idea that downstairs the whole system was switched off.
He took the silence as confirmation. He dialled, but there was no answering buzz and he sighed and hung up.
‘There, you see,’ he said to himself, ‘I was quite right. I thought so.’
He went quietly out of the room and down the corridor.
Picot’s snores were loud in the hall, and the Canon let himself out quietly so that he should not wake the weary man. The fog was clearing rapidly and he could just discern the tulip tree in the square. No one was about. The detective on duty outside had only that moment entered the kitchen to call his opposite number, and for the first time that night the coast was clear.
Avril was unaware of all this. He walked like a child amid the pitfalls, climbed the stairs to the avenue, and passed round under the high wall to the church gate, crossed the paved yard without stumbling in absolute darkness, and made his way to the vestry door.
It was unlocked and it opened with the quietness of recently oiled hinges and let him into the blackness inside. He was physically frozen and his heart thumped in his breast, but deep within him he was still very quiet, very happy, very much at peace.
His long robe brushed against the woodwork of the vestry wall and he pushed open the inner door and stepped into the misty darkness of the great building, sweet with the dry scent of paper and flowers, and paused and looked round into the dusk.
‘Johnny Cash,’ he said in exactly the same voice which he had used so many years before, ‘come out.’
CHAPTER 17
On the Staircase
—
THE BEAM OF Havoc’s torch cut through the darkness like a blade and found Avril where he was standing in the side aisle. For an instant it trembled there, transfixed, and, recollecting his dressing-gown for once in his life, the old man pushed back his hood and let the light play on his face.
‘Come down, my boy,’ he said in the slightly schoolmasterish tone he always used when he wanted something done quickly. ‘There’s nothing there for you at all.’
The acoustics of St Peter’s of the Gate had always been a problem, and tonight, with the building empty, the echoes seized upon the voice and threw the sound ricocheting up to the roof and down again. ‘At all …’ they sang hollowly, ‘at all … at all … at all…’
As soon as he spoke and his voice was recognized, the beam shot away from him and sped to explore the entrances one after the other. It was a series of startled glances seeking out a trap, but the blank doors, baize-lined with red, stood steady and the silence was absolute.
Meanwhile, during one of the flashes, Avril had noticed a pew beside him and now he felt for it and seated himself, folding his hands in his lap. His body was afraid and its trembling embarrassed him a little, but his mind was peaceful, relieved, and extraordinarily content. He felt at home in the church, as he always did, and presently he cleared his throat with a loud pre-Litany ‘Hur-ump!’
‘Shut up!’ The whisper was the most violent sound the old building had ever heard within its walls. The torch beam died like a falling tape and in the darkness there was a scuffling, light foot steps on polished wood, and then silence again.
After it had lasted a fraction too long, the shaft of light reappeared to dart round the entrances again. It leapt from one to the other suspiciously, waiting, going out and reappearing in the same place, f
inding nothing. The building remained silent and deserted.
The soft laugh when it came at last had so much relief in it that it was almost gay. It astonished Avril because it was so close to him, but although there was sweat on his forehead he did not feel alarmed.
‘You’re alone.’ The whisper had incredulity in it as well as amusement.
‘Of course I am,’ said Avril testily and reaped the habitual truth-teller’s only reward.
‘You’ve telephoned, though. You’ve put out a warning.’ The man had ceased to whisper, although he spoke very softly. The voice was more mature than when Avril remembered it, but it still aroused the uneasiness in him which it had always done. It was a false voice, every true thing in it hidden rather cheaply.
‘No,’ he said, thanking his stars that he had been protected from making that mistake and so could answer. ‘No. No one knows that you and I are here.’
‘You – old fool.’ The monstrous adjective was so uncleanly that it passed over Avril’s head. Either his ears actually rejected it or he did not believe them. He made room beside him in the dark.
‘Come and sit down,’ he said.
There was no immediate reply, only light movement so soft that it could have been no more than the scurry of a rat over the tiles, and when the voice spoke again it was behind him.
‘This’ll do me best.’ And then, in the artificial wide-boy idiom which the Canon found so unpleasing, ‘What’s the big idea, Padre? Not Prodigal Son stuff, surely?’
All the worst in Avril rose up at the approach and he might have failed at that first hazard, but he kept his temper and his perceptions, and he smelled creeping to him, through the scent of the paper and the flowers, the one odour which every animal, human or otherwise, recognizes the first time it assails him. Avril smelt fear.
With it came a portrait of the boy as he remembered him at fifteen, and as he had half fancied he had just discerned him under the hard shadows and unrevealing highlights of the police photographs. He saw again the same disfiguring stamp of tragedy on the young face, with the short upper lip and the flat eyes, blue as gentians but with nothing behind them.
On the run. The horror of the reality shut out every other thought in his mind.
‘You must be so tired,’ he said.
The mutter in the blackness was too soft for him to catch. He became aware of astonishment and mistrust and rising anger, not in himself but behind him. The man was very close.
‘What exactly are you playing at?’
The question only just reached him, it was so quiet, but its menace was unmistakable. ‘Ma said you knew this afternoon when you came round to her, and she swore you’d never let on. We didn’t risk it. We made her get us another place. But I came back because I remembered you used to hide things in here …’
‘Not hide,’ protested Avril. ‘Keep.’
‘Quiet. Where do you think we are, in the middle of a wood? What are you up to, coming in here to find me alone?’
Avril made no answer because he had none. All the wordly intelligence he possessed, and it had never been very much, was asking him the same question. The loneliness and the danger were apparent to him, but he pushed them away and ceased to tremble. He was glad of that because he felt a hand brush over his shoulders, feeling for him, finding out exactly where he was.
‘Are you my father?’
The inquiry came out abruptly in the night. The enormity of all it implied was not lost on Avril, but it did not shock him. Human sin in any form, real or imagined, never did. It was his greatest strength. His entire attention was taken up with trying not to hurt.
‘No,’ he said, and he sounded matter-of-fact, regretful even, ‘not your parent. I am, or ought to be, your spiritual father, I suppose. I’m your parish priest. I don’t seem to have been very successful in that. The man who begot you died, poor fellow, fighting in a public-house. Your mother was left a widow, and after some little while my wife found her her present cottage to get her out of the district where the tragedy occurred.’
‘And she was paid for it later, I suppose?’ The sneer was very bitter. The boy was disappointed not only because he was convinced, Avril knew, but because he had been searching for a reason for the Canon’s charity towards him and it was not the shameful one he had chosen.
‘I suppose she was,’ Avril said sadly. ‘In those days respectability seemed to matter very much.’
‘Don’t I know it! Ma came within an ace of burying an empty coffin for the sake of respectability. She got one of her clients to fix it. Think of it, a whole funeral procession costing pounds, and all it did was to give me a hold on her. She didn’t think of that.’
‘I wonder. She held you, if only in that way.’
‘Cut it out. Look, time’s short. This is an unhealthy place for me and you’re wasting my time.’ A hand was biting into Avril’s shoulder now and the stink of terror was enveloping him.
‘Why are you here? You’re not trying to save my soul, by any chance?’
‘Oh no.’ Avril gave the little grunting laugh which showed that he was genuinely amused. ‘My dear boy, I couldn’t do that. The soul is one’s own affair from the beginning to the end. No one else can interfere with that.’ The idea interested him and in spite of himself he went off on a little intellectual digression, knowing quite well how absurd it was. ‘What is the soul?’ he inquired. ‘When I was a child I thought it was a little ghostly bean, kidney-shaped, I don’t know why. Now I think of it as the man I am with when I am alone. I don’t think either definition would satisfy the theologians.’
‘Then for God’s sake,’ said the agonized voice behind him, ‘why the hell did you come?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Avril, and struggled on, making the truth as clear as he could. ‘All I can tell you is, that greatly against my will I had to. All today every small thing has conspired to bring me here. I have known something like it to happen before, and I believe that if I have not been misled by some stupidity or weakness of my own I shall see why eventually.’
To his amazement, the explanation which to himself sounded utterly inadequate and unsatisfactory, appeared to be understood. Behind him he heard the man catch his breath.
‘That’s it,’ said Havoc, and his voice was natural. ‘That’s it. The same thing happened to me. Do you know what that is, you poor old bletherer? That’s the Science of Luck. It works every time.’
Now it was Avril’s turn to understand and he was frightened out of his wits.
‘The Science of Luck,’ he said cautiously. ‘You watch, do you? That takes a lot of self-discipline.’
‘Of course it does, but it’s worth it. I watch everything, all the time. I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve got the gift. I knew it when I was a kid but I didn’t grasp it.’ The murmur had intensified. ‘This last time, when I was alone so long, I got it right. I watch for every opportunity and I never do the soft thing. That’s why I succeed.’
Avril was silent for a long time. ‘It is the fashion,’ he said at last. ‘You’ve been reading the Frenchmen, I suppose? Or no, no, perhaps you haven’t. How absurd of me.’
‘Don’t blether.’ The voice, stripped of all its disguises, was harsh and naive. ‘You always blethered. You never said anything straight. What do you know about the Science of Luck? Go on, tell me. You’re the only one who’s understood at all. Have you ever heard of it before?’
‘Not under that name.’
‘I don’t suppose you have. That’s my name for it. What’s its real name?’
‘The Pursuit of Death.’
There was a pause. Curiosity, fear, impatience bristled behind Avril. He could feel them.
‘It’s a known thing, then?’
‘You did not discover it, my son.’
‘No, I suppose not.’ He was hesitating, a torn and wasted tiger but still inquisitive. ‘You’ve got it right, have you? You have to watch for your chances and then you must never go soft, not once, not for a minute. You mustn’t e
ven think soft. Once you’re soft you muck everything, lose your place, and everything goes against you. I’ve proved it. Keep realistic and you get places fast, everything falls right for you, everything’s easy. Is that it?’
‘That’s it,’ said Avril humbly. ‘It is easier to fall downstairs than to climb up. Facilis descensus averno. That was said a long time ago.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The Science of Luck.’ Avril bent his head. ‘The staircase has turns, the vine climbs a twisted path, the river runs a winding course. If a man watches he can see the trend and he can go either way.’
‘Then you know it? Why are you soft?’
‘Because I do not want to die. A man who pitches himself down a spiral staircase on which all his fellows are climbing up may injure some of them, but, my dear fellow, it’s nothing to the damage he does to himself, is it?’
‘You’re crazy! You’re on to a big thing, you can see what I see, and you won’t profit by it.’
Avril turned round in the dark. ‘Evil be thou my Good, that is what you have discovered. It is the only sin which cannot be forgiven because when it has finished with you you are not there to forgive. On your journey you certainly “get places”. Naturally; you have no opposition. But in the process you die. The man who is with you when you are alone is dying. Fewer things delight him every day. If you attain the world, you cannot give him anything that will please him. In the end there will be no one with you.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I can hear that you do,’ said Avril. ‘Suppose you had got to Sainte-Odile – ’
‘Where?’ The sudden eagerness did not warn the Canon and he went on steadily.
‘Sainte-Odile-sur-Mer. In English, Saint Odile on Sea. A little village to the west of Saint-Malo. Supposing you had got there and uncovered treasure worth a king’s ransom. Do you think that you would then become somebody else? Do you believe that this weary unsatisfied child who is with you when you are alone would not go with you then? What could you buy for him to make him happy?’
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