‘I have,’ said Toby truthfully and glumly.
‘Now we’re all stuck out here,’ said the father sombrely. ‘That’s a bastard and no mistake.’
He scratched his head and the action seemed to summon an idea. Although he was swaying his mind and speech seemed clear. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘What we’ll do is to tell her that you’re here.’ He nodded at Toby who said: ‘Me? But she doesn’t know me.’
‘That’s just the point,’ said the man craftily. ‘We’ll say we found you stranded and you want a bed for the night.’
‘That’s right,’ said Dee vigorously nodding her head. ‘Appeal to the better side of her.’
‘If she’s got one,’ said her father doubtfully.
Toby was trapped. It was turning into a nightmare. ‘But … I’ll have to go home,’ he said.
‘How?’ challenged Dee folding her thin arms.
‘Somehow,’ he repeated miserably. ‘I have to go to work in the morning.’
‘You think of that now,’ she said with brusque meaning.
‘Once we’re inside you can be on your way,’ her father told Toby helpfully. He turned to his daughter. ‘But you’ll have to phone. She won’t answer to stones chucked at the window. She never does.’
Dee sulked in the shadows. ‘Oh, all right,’ she sighed. ‘I’ll phone.’ She turned to Toby. ‘You stay here with him.’ She nodded to her father as though there might be some doubt who she meant.
Confusion and depression filled Toby. His anticipation squelched, his body cold, he nodded. ‘Won’t be a minute,’ she said brightly. ‘It’s only down the road to the box.’ She strode away on her stem legs.
Toby found himself standing below the saggy porch with her father. ‘Play dominoes do you?’ inquired the man as though he wanted a game.
‘Dominoes? No …’
‘Good game,’ said Dee’s father solemnly. ‘Brings out the best in you.’
‘Yes, I expect so,’ muttered Toby meekly.
‘I work at the airport,’ continued the man. ‘Kitchen porter. Most important place at Heathrow, that is. More than Air Traffic Control. It would all stop, just like that, without us.’
They lapsed to moody silence. The telephone began to ring eerily in the cottage. Dee’s father stiffened. ‘Wake up, wake up,’ he muttered as it continued. Then it stopped. ‘She’s got out of bed,’ he said. ‘She won’t be pleased.’
From within the house came a woman’s angry voice. A window was opened above. The father left the porch and Toby followed him. ‘Watch out for yourself,’ the man warned.
They stood looking up at a face in the cottage window. ‘This lad,’ called out the man pleadingly. ‘He’s lost. Can’t get home. Let him in, Rose.’
The face vanished although the window remained open. They remained staring up hopefully. What, for a moment, Toby thought was the face then reappeared, round and pale, but the man let out a hollow half cry: ‘She’s got the pot!’
Gallantly he pulled Toby back, taking the full force of the contents himself. There was some left and the woman projected this from the window, hitting Toby on the chest. He cried out and sat backwards into the mud of the garden. ‘She’s done that trick before,’ mentioned the man.
‘I’m going,’ said Toby staggering away. ‘God … ugh …’
‘Don’t blame you,’ said the man philosophically. ‘It’s not a nice smell.’ He added: ‘Goodnight, son.’
‘Goodnight,’ sobbed Toby. He took off his coat and trailed it frantically through the grass. Dee appeared along the path. ‘Did it work?’ she asked in her bright way.
Toby stared at her and said deliberately: ‘She threw the chamber-pot over us.’
‘I wish she wouldn’t do that,’ sighed Dee. ‘Was it a lot?’
‘Plenty.’
‘I reckon she saves it up,’ said her father.
‘Yes,’ said Dee sombrely. ‘Hoards it.’ She turned to Toby. ‘Can’t you wear your coat?’
‘No, it stinks.’
‘You’ll be cold without it,’ she said. ‘Wait a bit. I’ll get you a blanket. It’s the dog’s, or was, he’s gone and died, but it will keep the chill off.’
She darted around the side of the house. Toby could not believe this was happening. He was tempted to run away, fast and far, but he still waited for her.
As though reading his thoughts when she reappeared, she kissed him, holding her nose at the smell of his coat, and said sadly. ‘It’s not as good as the bearskin. Sorry.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ muttered Toby. He put the blanket around his shoulders. It smelled only marginally less offensive than his coat, but it was dry. He turned and tramped away down the muddy path towards the road. ‘Goodbye,’ she called through the dark. Then romantically: ‘I suppose it is goodbye.’
‘I’ll say it bloody is,’ he muttered to himself. He had a faint hope that the bus might still be there but it was not. How far was Bedmansworth? Three or four miles at least.
Through the bare and ragged night he tramped. Not a vehicle passed him on the road. There were only rattling trees and moody cows in fields. The moon came out again, as though to get a clear view of him, but having done so hid itself in clouds. More than an hour later he was nearing Bedmansworth. He heard a clock chiming a distant three and groaned.
He decided to take a short cut over the hill where the Burridges had their tent. They kept a lantern outside set on a stone and he could see it flickering like a small lighthouse in a dark sea. He climbed a stile and puffed up the gentle hill and then down the other side. He was afraid he might disturb them and he wanted no one to witness his plight. Quietly he passed by. He could hear a snore and he felt a pang of envy, a man snoring peacefully alongside a warm woman. On the down slope, when he was halfway to the gate into the village, he heard a whinny from the raised ground behind and saw the outline of the old horse, Freebie, that hung around the Burridges’ tent. It stood challengingly against the sky. As though to give him a better view, the moon showed itself once more. The horse gave another whinny and began to trot towards him.
‘Oh God, oh no,’ he cried to himself. He turned: ‘Go on! Sod off! Get away!’ He waved his hands and Freebie swerved and trotted gamely up the slope. Toby began to run. The horse came cantering down the hill after him. He shouted as he ran and turned and waved his coat and the blanket. The animal pulled up short, snorted, and veered away. ‘Oh Jesus,’ said Toby like an exhausted prayer. He reached the gate and somehow got over it. The horse was just behind him and stood snorting at the barrier. ‘Sodding thing,’ sobbed Toby.
By now he was almost staggering but it was only ten minutes to home. He had almost reached there when the insect sound of Bernard Threadle’s patrol bike caught his ear. He had sworn more in the last two hours than he had in his entire life and now he swore again. He hid in a gateway while Bernard trundled by, did the circle at the head of the village, and went past the other way.
Toby reached his house. It was tranquilly dark. God, what a night. He left his coat and the blanket and his mud-caked shoes in the garage and, letting himself in silently and wearily, climbed to his room.
He washed his face and hands and cleaned his teeth, put on his pyjamas and fell aching into bed. He was still awake though and he lay thinking how disastrous his life had become. He took the bolster from beneath his pillow and tucked it between his legs. He stared at its blank white linen face in the darkness and kissed it. ‘I’m home, darling,’ he said hopelessly.
Eleven
Before the harvest festival service on the middle Sunday in October the Reverend Henry Prentice was standing in the church porch, his vestments blowing like banners, greeting each of the morning worshippers and wondering where he was going to dispose of the surplus fruit and vegetables before they went rotten.
The line was long, reaching down to the churchyard gate, for it was a popular service with always the same rousing hymns. He saw Pearl and Rona halfway along the queue and smiled to them. Pearl lingered
while Rona walked into the church conversing with Mrs Mangold from the Straw Man. ‘I want to read the lesson today,’ Pearl firmly told the vicar.
‘Today?’ The priest looked bewildered. ‘But we’ve already got two …’
‘Today,’ repeated Pearl. Her voice descended to a whisper. ‘If you don’t I’ll tell your wife about …’ She made the motion of puffing a cigarette. ‘You know what.’
‘First or second lesson?’ asked the vicar.
‘The first.’
‘Mr Dobson was going to read it. He can do it another day. I’ll have to tell him. He was looking forward to it too.’ A glance showed that she would not be shifted. ‘It’s marked in the Bible on the lectern,’ he said.
‘I know. I came in yesterday and practised it. The Book of Ruth …. Thank you, Henry.’
She moved on to join Rona inside the church. ‘The Reverend’s asked me to read the lesson,’ she said to her daughter.
‘That was short notice,’ said Rona.
‘An emergency,’ replied her mother. They sat in their pew.
Dobbie Dobson was coming along the aisle. ‘You can read it Mrs Collingwood,’ he said. ‘’Course you can.’ He looked doleful. ‘Except I’ve been rehearsing and I’ve had my suit cleaned. The vicar says I can do it Christmas.’
Produce was piled around the chancel steps; apples, pears, potatoes, kiwi fruit, and other goods in tins and packs, gone past their supermarket sell-by dates. The display was continued along the choir stalls and the pulpit was decorated with a sheaf of plastic corn used in the Christmas crib.
Rona, when she remembered it as she did many times over the ensuing years, could hear the choir singing down the aisle: ‘Fair waved the golden corn in Canaan’s pleasant land.’ As they reached the steps one of the footballing Latimer twins suddenly had a melon at his feet. It was passed to his brother and then back along the line, shoes poking from beneath white cassocks to touch it on.
The vicar preached a rousing sermon. ‘What plenty!’ he exclaimed throwing his hands wide over the unwanted fruit and vegetables. ‘What munificence! What plenty!’
But the moment Rona would never forget was when her mother, at a nod from the Reverend Prentice, stepped upright to the lectern and read the first lesson in her strong American voice. ‘The Book of Ruth,’ she announced.
Rona sat with tears scarcely held back and her mother recited. ‘“And she said, I pray you, let me glean and gather after the reapers among the sheaves; so she came, and hath continued even from the morning until now, that she tarried a little in the house …”’
Pearl’s voice was fine and clear. No one stirred in the church. It became stronger: ‘“ … whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; and thy people shall be my people …
‘“Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried …”’
Pearl Collingwood had borrowed a red, white and blue golf umbrella from Jim at the Swan and, feeling quietly grand beneath its striped shelter, she walked through Monday morning rain to the church.
It was raining only gently, scarcely weeping, but the Middlesex clouds were low, crouching as they came over the flattish land. The lights of the airport shimmered on the misty sky.
She whirled the umbrella below the dark lych-gate, striking the spokes on its wood as she did so, showering herself with drops of water. Then she manoeuvred it out into the churchyard and held it in front of her, for the rain had changed direction there. She made for the church door like a yacht with a coloured spinnaker pushing through heavy weather. In the porch she efficiently collapsed it and left it leaning against a bulky bicycle.
The vicar and his helpers were already there, three ladies already sizing up the piles of fruit and vegetables left from the harvest festival service. ‘It goes rotten quite quickly,’ said Henry Prentice when he had greeted her. ‘It’s often more than ripe when it gets here. Then all the wretched flies come in.’
‘I’m here to help,’ offered Pearl in her determined manner. ‘What do I do?’
He introduced her to the three other women. They all knew her by sight, or had heard about her, for she was now a figure in the local landscape. ‘Mrs Phillips, Mrs Batrick and Mrs Johns,’ he recited. Pearl shook hands with each one. ‘If you could sit in the front pew, dear,’ said Mrs Phillips, ‘and wrap the kiwi fruits and put them in the boxes.’
‘I can bend,’ Pearl told her stoutly. ‘I can touch my toes. I do every day. I don’t need to sit.’
‘No, no,’ insisted Mrs Phillips whose face was red from picking up the fruit. ‘You’ll be doing a useful job if you sit there.’
‘Imagine, kiwi fruits,’ sighed the vicar sitting beside her. He began to help her with the tissue-paper wrapping. ‘And Cape gooseberries … lychees. Harvest festivals aren’t what they were. We plough the fields but we don’t scatter. We have some difficulty in giving the produce away now. Soon, I imagine, we will be forbidden to do so unless it’s all hermetically sealed and stamped.’
‘Regulations,’ she nodded. ‘I heard.’
‘Lots of them. European regulations.’
Pearl looked reflective. ‘We needed a civil war before all the states joined together. Some still don’t consider they’ve joined.’ She continued wrapping the fruit. ‘Times change and change again. Maybe in San Francisco they put grass in the church at Thanksgiving.’
‘Grass?’
‘Like they smoke.’
He gave a short grimace. ‘Times, as you say, change. My father, who was a vicar of a parish in Hertfordshire, used to give the identical harvest festival sermon every year. It’s the same one as I used yesterday. “What plenty!” he used to bellow, waving his arms over the marrows. “What plenty!” The congregation would wait eagerly for it. And he never disappointed them. He also had the same sermon every year for Easter, Whitsuntide and Christmas. He never varied them. Mind you, these days you can buy a cassette and it not only tells you what to say, but how to say it.’
At the end of an hour the fruit and vegetables were packed into boxes and crates and Mrs Phillips and Mrs Johns began to sweep the chancel and the aisle. ‘At least it don’t make as much mess as the Christmas tree,’ philosophised Mrs Johns. Mrs Batrick, a farmer’s wife, was carrying boxes, one under each hammy arm, to the door. ‘Some of the produce goes to St Sepulchre’s,’ the vicar told Pearl. ‘But the old folks are very picky, I’m afraid. Few have any real teeth for a start.’
Pearl said: ‘I have the same teeth as when I was married. All mine.’
‘How long have you been a widow?’
‘Five years,’ she said without sadness. ‘Time goes by. I married during the War. Mike was a good man, a regular guy as they say.’ She looked up as though uncertain whether to tell him something, then said: ‘He was in the US Air Force in the war. We had only been wed for a year before he was sent over here to England.’
‘I remember you asking about the Americans when you had just arrived, when we first met in the churchyard.’
‘Still dragging?’ she asked slyly.
I’m afraid so.’ He glanced furtively at the women with their brooms. ‘On the quiet. Are you?’
‘You started me over again,’ accused Pearl.
He grinned. ‘Feel like one now?’
‘Sure thing. But it’s raining outside. Do we get behind the organ?’
‘No need. We’ll stroll over to the vicarage. Hilda has gone to Salisbury. Her sister runs an ecclesiastical tea room there. If we open the study window the smoke will waft away.’ He glanced at her artfully. ‘It usually does.’
Pearl agreed. ‘Monday is the vicar’s day off,’ he said as they walked along the dripping churchyard path. ‘If I’m lucky.’
Pearl had collected the golf umbrella and she twirled it in the grey-green churchyard, its colours like a whirligig. They went into the vicarage. A spaniel, asleep in the hall, woke and barked once, then returned to slumber. The vicar took the umbrella from her and stood it in the compartment in the
hallstand. He sat her in his study and went to make the coffee. She looked from the French window out onto the dripping green garden and to the tower of the church beyond with its jaunty arrow and golden ball. ‘I love that,’ she said pointing it out when he returned. ‘It looks so … so optimistic. When everything is grey like today, it still shines.’
He smiled agreement. ‘It’s only a weather vane, but it looks like the very panoply of God, doesn’t it. When it was brought to the church, just under a hundred years ago, to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, it was carried through the village street in a procession. Carriages, farm carts, bicycles, people on horseback.’ His smile broadened. ‘It was the very thing that made me want to come here in the first place. It seemed to be pointing the way.’
She accepted the cup of coffee and they each had a cigarette and puffed enjoyably. Then she said carefully: ‘Henry, are you familiar with a line of poetry that goes:
And we forget because we must,
And not because we will.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s not something I recognise,’ he said. ‘But it may be in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.’ He stood up and went to the bookcase, took down the heavy book and found the index. ‘Let’s see …’
‘And we forget because we must,’ the American woman prompted quietly.
‘Yes, let’s look under “forget”. That’s the key word.’ He riffled the pages. ‘Easy,’ he said. ‘… forget because we must. Here it is. ARN page …’ He turned the pages. She watched sharply.
‘Yes. Oh, it’s Matthew Arnold,’ said Henry. ‘He was from these parts. Buried in the church at Laleham. It just quotes those same two lines. They’re from a poem called “Absence”.’
‘I thought it might be something like that,’ she said thoughtfully. He was still studying the book. ‘And here’s something appropriate in another Matthew Arnold quotation: “the bolt is shot back …”’ He laughed. ‘We’re back to the church arrow.’
‘He was a famous English poet?’ she asked. He raised his head from the book.
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