Chorus Endings

by David Warwick

  * * *

  There never was a conscious decision as to his future. Derek did not tell the American what had passed between them nor, as far as he could tell, had Ronnie warned Soroyan that his secret was out. Life at Pendarrell continued very much as before, although now he took extra care in perusing the local press, was especially on the look-out for strangers crossing his path. Till gradually the novelty of the situation wore off; Old Testament Mythology became a distant memory.

  Until the arrival of Veronica’s letters: ten of them altogether, addressed to Derek, written at regular intervals, dating back to his first week at Pendarrell. They’d been intercepted by Brother Arun who, responsible for checking all incoming mail and fearing worldly distractions, had failed to pass them on.

  She’d made her feelings clear. Nor did she disguise her disappointment at Derek’s failure to reply, begging a response of some kind, promising – to the goggle-eyed Brother Arun’s acute embarrassment – to do anything he wished. Finally, the threat. Life without him was not worth living; if he cared that little, she would bring it to an end. At which point Soroyan had been consulted. He’d written personally to the girl, apologising for the situation and explaining that distraction of any kind was forbidden during the probationary period. Her letters would be kept and given to the recipient once he was permitted to read them. Fury on Veronica’s part had given way to resignation but now, with the fictitious ‘probationary period’ at an end, she’d written demanding an answer of some kind, and this time directly from the object of her affection.

  The outcome was disastrous. A few lines of the most vapid prose were all Derek could muster, nor did further attempts prove any more successful. Till Soroyan sat the boy down at the desk and, gyrating about the room, dictated precisely what should be written. How he – Derek – had settled down at the college; his gratitude for all that had been done for him; his delight at receiving her letters; that she’d been persuaded not to carry out her threat. How he thought about her often, looked forward to the time when they could meet again. No more than a stop-gap, the tutor assured him; by the time Derek left Pendarrell she’d have forgotten about him.

  But Veronica’s reply came by return of post, as frank and amorous as the original. Bringing old memories unexpectedly to mind: the sound of her voice, the excuses she’d made to be near him, her delight at the smallest of favours. Derek found himself strangely moved, made several clandestine attempts to reply, was forced eventually to creep disconcertedly back for his tutor’s advice. There’d been an initial show of reluctance, following which the American rose eloquently to the occasion. And so the pattern was set, with Derek eagerly awaiting her replies, reading and rereading them till he had each one off by heart, guessing and reguessing what form his responses might take. Always he was mistaken, whilst Soroyan – as ever – came up with the exact sentiments he wished so badly to convey, together with nuances he would never have guessed were his.

  Less than a year, Veronica had written, and they’d be together. More like a century it seemed, but the months became weeks, weeks dissolved into days until, three years after his first arrival, the time of departure came. The whole college assembled in the chapel to hear the few sentences that Brother Trent had cobbled together. Prayers were said for the well-being of his soul. There was a valedictory blessing, and the few possessions he’d brought with him were returned to his room. Ronnie’s hands fluttered emotionally as they said goodbye, and now it only remained for Soroyan to make his farewells. Derek waited in the study where they’d spent so much time together, rehearsing and rerehearsing the thanks he’d planned. Inadequate now the moment had arrived. Nor did his mentor appear to have any final words of wisdom. Instead, curt good wishes and a package placed in his hands. Thin and oblong, one side hard and flat – glass he realised – ridged along the edges with sharp corners. No need to guess at the contents: The Night Watch.

  But, before he’d opened it, proffered his thanks, the American had wheeled himself from the room.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Stained Glass Conscience

  ‘It was a very different Derek that returned home from Pendarrell’

  Our second day at Willow Lane, Peter’s accusations seemingly forgotten, with Geraldine well into her stride. A window stood open, curtains billowed out in the breeze and I remember hearing the rest of her reminiscences to the accompaniment of bird song from the garden.

  ‘Every bit as shy and reserved, liking to keep himself to himself, but eager for my company now.’ A complete change of tone, as well. Geraldine – Veronica a she’d been then – no longer the bystander, reporting dispassionately on what she’d picked up over the years. Reliving her time with Derek – or should that be Jimmy? – told first-hand in a direct, very personal manner. ‘Meeting me each night after work, taking me for walks in the countryside, bringing presents, forever knocking on the door or finding ways of pleasing me. Mum disapproved from the start. I’d been apprenticed to a dressmaker for several months by then and she’d got it into her head I could do better. Threats, emotional blackmail, Dad turning in his grave; God knows what would have happened if she’d known the content of those letters. Copied out from magazines most of them, or films I’d seen. But much more explicit. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, Derek was in trouble with the church. They’d given him back his old job at the Sunday School, but he’d returned with his head full of the weirdest ideas. Comparing Abraham’s devotion to God with heathen practices, teaching the flood was not from the Scriptures but barbaric writings, reading pagan sacrifices into the way we worship God. “Confusing the sacred with the profane”, according to the rector.’

  ‘Quite normal in university circles.’ Mildred’s disapproval was quite obviously aimed at Peter.

  Geraldine glared across at her. ‘Be that as it may, it earned Derek the sack. After which there was little chance of further employment. My own work suffered as well; treasuring every moment we had together, concentrating on little else. All of which he took in his stride, quite unperturbed by what was going on around him. He’d become pedestrian in his wooing as well. I’d remind him of the letters, read them back to him, suggest he put his thoughts down on paper if that’s what turned him on. Till eventually he confessed how they’d come to be written. In the end there was only one thing for it. I reminded him of just what I had to offer, hinted as to how far I’d go to please him. But no. Derek was as deaf to subtlety as I was to Mum and the rest, all of them counselling caution. Caution? Try telling that to a eighteen-year-old with only one thought on her mind. Or a fifteen-year-old grammar school boy in a St Hugh’s blazer at the bus stop, eh, Peter?’

  He tensed, seemed about to enter the fray. ‘Don’t you dare,’ I mouthed. Here, at last, was part of the background he’d always withheld and I was not to be deprived of it. I nodded across at the old lady to continue.

  Which she did almost without pause. ‘Reading those old letters brought the suicide ruse to mind. The ploy had worked once, brought Derek to his senses, so how much more effective when operated at close quarters? Dramatic, as well: two empty pill bottles at the bedside, some scribbled last words and my loved one’s picture clutched in my hand. A cliché, I know, but tell me a suicide that isn’t. And I signalled my intentions: that last desperate ‘phone call to the doctor. Timing as well, with Mum due home within the hour. And it worked, better than I’d expected. Derek and I were engaged within a fortnight; married once I’d turned twenty-one. Made my bed, so then I had to lie in it. There’s another cliché for you. Mum quoted it back at me often enough. Together with that other one: about marrying in haste, repenting at leisure. Except it wasn’t really in haste and I never did repent. No matter what she or the others had to say. And I’d clichés of my own. Going into the marriage with my eyes open, for instance, believing that love conquers all. What’s it they always trot out at wedding ceremonies, Mildred, about Christian longsuffering and forbearance?�
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  ‘“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things?”’

  ‘That’s it. Fine. Except the part they leave out. How love takes different forms, means different things to different people. That what you most admire in a man can become the thing that drives you apart. Constancy, for example. The thing all of us look for in a husband. Derek had it in spades. Continual, undemonstrative devotion, forever willing to please. Disguising his distaste at my reading habits, the films I liked best, the radio programmes I enjoyed. Taking care to explain his own interests, the ones I failed to understand. Our walks seasoned with historic detail or botanical curiosities. His refusal to respond in kind if ever I lost my patience. Even found myself picking quarrels, over the smallest of things, just to get some response.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to share this with us, Geraldine?’ My turn to break into her narrative. ‘We didn’t come here to pry.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be hearing about it if that’s what I thought, dear. Truth is, I’ve been nursing it to myself all these years; rehearsing what it might sound like if ever I got round to telling it.’ She beamed across at me. ‘So, don’t go stopping me now, just when I’m about to find out!’

  ‘Nor you, Peter. I know you idolised the man. Which is something we have in common. Difference is, it wasn’t you that married him. Not so romantic, all that determination, the self-reliance when you live with it twenty-four hours a day. Suppose I thought it would be different once we were together, when I had him all to myself. But no. He made no distinctions. As determined to retain his independence inside the home as he had been out of it. Willing to share in the household chores, as long as he was not asked to do so. Turning his hand to any number of tasks, yet grudging any suggestion I made. Not that he’d argue. Just the pursed lips, a shaking of the head, or the sudden recollection of odd jobs requiring instant attention elsewhere. That, and the silences. Used to great effect if ever I crossed him. World champion in that department was Derek. Come to think of it, he did have some crazy notion about it. Silences, I mean. Each one of them different and far more than merely the absence of sound. The split second pause in an argument, the air charged with malice; the moment a trigger is squeezed; a dying breath; those precious seconds that precede a kiss. Shot through with emotion; tangible almost…’

  ‘That crazy notion? He tried it out on us kids once. Thought they might be caught on tape, or whatever recording device the BBC used. An anthology maybe.’ Peter interrupted, his embarrassment forgotten.

  ‘One of his “magpie moments” more like.’ Mildred tossed the comment, grenade-like, into the discussion before turning her attention once more to what her companion was saying.

  ‘Wasted his time on matters such as that, with things going from bad to worse on the employment front,’ Geraldine continued. ‘Folk knew how matters stood between us, were sympathetic. Several jobs were his for the taking, but he couldn’t hold them down. He’d stand it for a time. Till someone got obstreperous, or he’d make a mistake and have to be corrected. Often enough just thought his own way was best. Then, rather than listen, he’d up and off. Time after time it happened until the goodwill ran out and I was left making excuses for him: he’d been brought up in an orphanage; educated by strangers; fended for himself all these years. Hiding the fact it made no more sense to me than it did to them. Not realising that you don’t have to like someone to be in love with them. The attraction of opposites, I suppose. Hating them almost, yet adoring them at the same time. Anyway, Derek’s patience was wearing thin as well as mine. Instead of the silences or excuses to be somewhere else within the house, he took to solitary walks in the countryside. Which was where he really wanted to be, had we been able to afford it.’

  By now the room had darkened. Not that any of us noticed, nor how cold it was getting. We blinked as she switched on a lamp behind her and I found myself shivering. The chill air, or was the story affecting me more than I’d imagined? The ‘attraction of opposites’, just as it’d been with myself and Peter; ‘picking quarrels just to get some response’ the way our relationship could have gone, but for the ‘living in’ sin. Veronica might have realised her mistake if only she and Derek had followed our example. Not that such options would have been open to them in the 1930s, any more than they’d been to Enid Quintock and her ‘Reg’ some twenty years earlier. Veronica at least had grasped the inconsistencies in Jimmy’s character. Unlike Peter, who’d idolised the man – unconditionally – then betrayed him. Or thought that he had. I reached for his hand as our host switched on the electric fire, assuring us yet again she felt no embarrassment. Mildred closed the window, and she resumed her narrative…

  War was very much in the air by then and, with it, the matter of conscription. Veronica had prepared herself for the worst, dreading the thought of separation, never suspecting that Derek would refuse the draft. As he did, giving neither reason, nor permitting discussion. Others did not hold back. Accusations began the moment he took himself down to the labour exchange, where separate booths had been set up, conscientious objectors lined up on one side of the room, four or five of them only, far outnumbered by conscripts on the other. There’d been angry mutterings. Some of the would-be soldiers turned their backs, waved their papers, called out the names of brothers who’d answered the call; fathers who’d died in the trenches. One man detached himself from the group, strode across the room and began haranguing them on their patriotic duty – the defence of King and Country. ‘Conchies!’ He spat out the name.

  It was not the first time Veronica had heard the term, nor was it to be the last: conscientious objectors denounced from the pulpit; council employees – office workers, teachers, Sunday School helpers and the like – dismissed from their post; biblical texts legitimising the ‘righteous war’ pushed through their letterbox. As were items of an even more repugnant nature. There’d been the neighbours who passed them by in the street, shopkeepers who refused to serve them. Worst of all the commiseration of her friends, on hand as they always were when her husband proved difficult. ‘As if there was a bereavement in the family,’ she told us. ‘The tribunal to which Derek was summoned came almost as a relief.’

  The room had been stripped of all furniture save only for a trestle table covered with a green baise cloth. Behind this sat the four members of the panel. At the centre an imposing figure: the chairman, a judge. He was flanked on his left by the town clerk: dark suit, balding and bespectacled, determined that correct records were kept and procedures ran on time. On the right sat the ‘union representative’: intent, angular, about Derek’s age; dusty both in appearance and opinion. The fourth member of the group was noticeably younger. Withdrawn slightly to the clerk’s left and introduced as ‘Sir John’ but Derek was unable to remember the rest of the man’s title.

  Geraldine recounted as much of the proceedings as she could remember, and I’m sure she dressed it up, giving Derek all the best lines. ‘Jimmy,’ insisted Peter, ‘and he’d never have spoken in such a pompous manner.’

  Be this as it may, from what we could gather the hearing seems to have proceeded somewhat as follows:

  TU Rep: The note from your current employer seems fine enough, but he’s only known you for, let’s see now, four months. Tell us about your previous work.

  Derek:Varied really. I tried my hand at a number of skills.

  TU Rep: But master at none. A drifter, in fact. Does loyalty mean nothing to you?

  Derek: Certainly. To myself; to my family.

  Judge: And your country?

  Derek: As I’ve said, a man’s prime loyalty is to his own.

  Judge: Nothing beyond this? It says here you were once a Sunday School teacher.

  Derek: Where I taught the children to love their enemies; do good to those who hated them.

  TU Rep: It also says you were sacked.

  Derek: As was the person who said those word
s. Got Him thrown out of the building, too.

  Clerk: That’s not what it says in my Bible.

  Derek: Mine has Him teaching out in the open, by the roadside, in the hills, from a boat. Why else would He have done that?

  Judge: Forget the theology for a moment. Don’t you recognise the rule of law? The necessity for each one of us, as citizens, to follow it. Regardless of our feelings?

  Derek: I was created human before it was decided I was a citizen. Born free before anyone claimed my obedience. A man’s conscience is not democratic. It belongs to him and him alone.

  Clerk: (clapping his hands) You’ve got the gift of the gab, I’ll give you that. I never in my whole life heard cowardice so eloquently described!

  TU Rep: Convenient as well!! Supposing you explain just how you know what your ‘conscience’ is telling you? What proof is there you have one at all?

  Derek: How can I prove such a thing? Conscience is like a pane of glass: the clearer it is, the more difficult it is to see.

  Judge: See through more like! (General guffawing.)

  TU Rep: A stained glass conscience!

  Sir John: Church attendance might do, the Sunday School possibly. How about membership of one of the humanitarian organisations?

  Clerk: Vegetarianism, for example. You eat meat, don’t you? So it can’t be the thought of killing that deters you.

  Derek: Pork and beef perhaps, but not sentient creatures. Remarkable how you know every detail of a man’s life when it comes to taxation yet otherwise can’t tell them from cattle!

  TU Rep: Sentient creatures! Swallowed the dictionary have you? What…’