A Particular Place Read online

  Mary Hocking

  A PARTICULAR

  PLACE

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  To A. L. Barker

  Chapter One

  It was a still, grey evening. The smoke from the bonfire, watered down by thin mist, exuded a sour odour. Charles Venables, standing discreetly in the shelter of the yew, thought that if flames, labouring in such an uncongenial atmosphere, could sweat, this was how they would smell. Yet how charming these unrehearsed effects were! People feeling their way between tombstones, eagerly holding candles towards the flames – here was something so small and particular it might indeed have taken place in a garden. Oh, the many gardens of myth and antiquity, where are they today? It was good that this one, at least, should be cherished.

  St Hilary’s had a new vicar. An Anglican friend of Charles had once said bitterly, ‘The Parochial Church Council is asked for its particular requirements and proceeds to draw up a list of qualities the Archangel Gabriel would be hard pressed to meet.’ Perhaps St Hilary’s had been fortunate? At least the new vicar’s name was Michael: Michael Hoath. He it was who was responsible for this delightful performance. The Holy Saturday Vigil of Easter Eve was an innovation at St Hilary’s, something hitherto peculiar to the goings-on of the Romans further down the high street. It seemed to Charles that the congregation was happier with this sequestered event than with the more public Palm Sunday procession to which it was accustomed but not entirely reconciled. Anglicans, he had noted, didn’t much care for displaying their faith unequivocally. It was all right to join the Samaritans and to campaign for Shelter – activities which now enjoyed secular blessing – but praise was a distinguishing feature and they had been uneasy as they bore their palms into the high street. A pity. He had thought it all so endearing, with the tail of the procession a verse behind the middle, who were themselves extolling ‘all things bright and beautiful’ while the choir sang ‘the Lord God made them all’. He had great hopes of this evening.

  Behind, there was a rustling in the shrubbery and turning his head he saw that he was not the only observer. Three boys were sitting athwart the wall – Puck and fellow pagans come to see who had invaded their night-time domain?

  The candle flames which had been bobbing about like glowworms all over the graveyard now began to cluster as the Vicar blessed the New Fire. Charles was unable to catch the exact words because of a minor altercation between two women standing just in front of him.

  ‘You will have to put out your candle now, Mother.’ She sounded as if she were speaking to a child whose obedience was in some doubt. ‘I’m not sure you should have lit it in the first place.’

  ‘Then why was I given it?’ A reasonable question truculently put.

  ‘I only know that you have to light it as you go into the church and you can’t do that if it’s already alight.’

  ‘I shall fall.’ Definitely a statement of intent.

  ‘You can hold on to me.’

  The old woman grumbled, ‘We could all catch our deaths out here. Much more of this and I shall go to the Methodists.’

  There was a movement away from the fire and with murmurs of ‘Careful of the steps’ the congregation was led towards the dark interior of the church.

  Close by, with no warning stumble, someone fell. Charles Venables, stepping from his shelter, found himself a member of a concerned group. The Vicar hurried up. ‘Oh dear, have we a casualty already?’ Irritation only just concealed at this disaster striking before the performance had got under way.

  ‘Falling over my big feet!’ The woman got up too quickly for an elderly person. In the flickering light her hair was the colour of the flames. Her laughter vibrated – something not quite in control there, Charles noted, involuntarily stepping back. A man more chivalrous took her arm. ‘Can’t have you going head first down these steps, Norah.’

  At Charles Venables’s elbow a cool voice said, ‘Attention seeking!’ He looked round and saw Valentine Hoath, the Vicar’s wife, disdainful chin tilted, revealing to perfection the long neck and dark sculptured head of Nefertiti.

  ‘She did go down with quite a thump.’

  ‘Good.’ She passed on into the church, soberly followed by the two women who had disputed the extinguishing of the candle.

  ‘I don’t know what cause she’s got to be falling about.’ The old woman sounded aggrieved at being thus upstaged.

  ‘Maybe she should have thought before she fell?’

  Obscurely cheered, they went chuckling into the church.

  Charles Venables stood to one side while the believers filed slowly past him. The last among them was the Vicar’s aunt, Hester Pascoe, writer of short stories in some of which children turned the fairy stories round and the adults became lost in the wood. She loitered at the door, an ageing imp looking back to the graveyard.

  The children were coming from under the trees, two full-sized goblins followed by a smaller one, then a whole tribe, perhaps a dozen in all, capering noiselessly among the tombstones.

  ‘Children are the real fairies.’

  Charles Venables was not sure whether Hester Pascoe was speaking to herself or to him. ‘A nice sentiment,’ he murmured: he did not much care for sentiment.

  ‘Neither good nor bad,’ she corrected him crisply. ‘As natural as little animals, given to glee and malice, wonder and pure spite.’

  ‘I think perhaps you attribute too complex a capacity for enjoyment to animals. I always think of the woodland creatures as our night-time selves to whom we allow a licence not permitted to our day-time selves. Do you envy them?’

  ‘Writers aren’t in need of that kind of licence. If a little wickedness is all I want I can create it without going to the woodland. It’s the amorality I envy. I was a child during a period when one was required to respect one’s elders. Now I find myself elderly at a time when the old are not merely ignored but seen as so much rubbish to be swept out of the way.’ She turned to look at him. ‘You’re not coming in, surely? You belong out there with them.’

  As if the reference were to a similarity which extended beyond the question of belief, he ran a hand over the fine fluff powdering his pygmy skull. ‘Oh well, one likes to see how these things are done. We have little enough ritual today.’ He followed her into the church, feeling annoyed with himself because he had sounded like H.M. Inspector of Schools and she was sharp enough to be amused by it.

  ‘The light of Christ.’ The Vicar’s voice was strong and deep. Charles thought that with a splendid voice like that the man must have been either an actor or a priest. A certain seriousness had no doubt influenced the choice and, once made, the voice dictated Anglo-Catholicism, that last refuge of the Book of Common Prayer.

  The congregation, still uncertain what was expected of it, was not so splendid in the response, ‘Thanks be to God’. Charles guessed that quite a few had come with the intention of being unimpressed. The Vicar, whom he judged to be a man profoundly concerned with things which most people have learnt to disregard as they grow older, would not be pleased to think that his efforts were most appreciated by an agnostic prep school master.

  The great Paschal candle carried by the Vicar, who at least knew what he was about, was surrounded by four candles representing the four apostles who, appropriately enough, seemed less certain of their place in the scheme of things. And now, the candles of the people were relit from the Christ candle to signify the giving of the immortal spark from th
e one eternal source. Charles nodded approval: quite powerful stuff, as all light rituals are, dealing as they do with the illumination of the unconscious. Given that interpretation, he was quite willing to enter into the spirit of the performance. He went some way with Jung – not too far, of course, bad to go too far with anything.

  The choir was singing the Paschal Proclamation. On all sides candles created a flickering golden sea of light, while, in contrast, an unwavering light shone from the deep blue heart of the East window. Charles, a little uneasy at finding his eyes constantly drawn to that still light, was glad when, after the Exultet, the candles were blown out. A warm smell of melting wax mingled not unpleasantly with that of incense.

  There followed rather a lot of relighting and extinguishing of candles. The candles of the people were held in little frills of paper designed to prevent the spilling of wax. Unhappily, Charles’s frill was ill-made and during the next prayer he discovered a spot of wax tiresomely high up one trouser leg. He scratched at it furtively during the remainder of the service, which went on rather too long for someone who had come for an aesthetic and not a religious experience. The second reading, however, redeemed much. ‘My well-beloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill; and he fenced it and gathered out the stones thereof . . .’ He hoped the Vicar appreciated how fortunate he was in this day and age to have a captive audience for such incomparably marvellous material! But Charles had not reckoned with the Liturgy of Baptism and he was feeling distinctly fractious when the time came for the celebration of the Eucharist. He disliked the Eucharist intensely and only his sense of propriety prevented him from walking out. He had come to watch this as though it were a piece of theatre and must not now distract those whose interest was held to the end, however unsatisfactory he himself might find the conclusion. He sat still while his mind fidgeted irritably. What is someone like Hester doing with all this mumbo-jumbo? And what about the imperious Valentine, for that matter?

  It was late when at last the Vicar said, ‘Go in the peace of Christ, alleluia, alleluia.’

  The people said, ‘Thanks be to God’ and Charles joined silently in the ‘alleluia, alleluia’ which finally released him.

  ‘Too long for you?’ Hester asked as they walked down the path together.

  ‘By about an hour.’

  ‘That will teach you to go slumming.’

  He did not reply and she knew he was put out. In spite of his lightness of manner, he prided himself on the sophistication of his intellect. Because he was a neighbour, and one whom she liked, she said, ‘Come and be rewarded with coffee, or something stronger, if you prefer.’

  The grey little town was quiet at this hour. The high street, overlit because the Borough Engineer had recently found himself with money in hand at the close of the financial year, was deserted and shadowless as a prison yard. A web of mist formed on their faces as they walked downhill towards the river. The smell from the brewery was so strong one could taste the beer. At the bottom of the high street they crossed a bridge beneath which the water moved sluggishly, dark and heavy as stout on this dull night. Beyond, a road twisted up to a terrace of houses precariously huddled above the town.

  ‘Who was it that fell?’ Charles asked as they turned in at the gate of the first house. ‘She seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place her.’

  ‘Norah Kendall.’

  ‘Ah, the nurse who married the beastly barrister?’

  ‘Yes, more’s the pity.’

  ‘You like her?’ he asked and caution was justified when she replied firmly, ‘I am very fond of her.’

  Hester left Charles to occupy himself while she went into the kitchen. The sitting-room was pleasant enough, orderly, uncluttered, but a trifle bare to his taste – definitely a background to living and unlikely to feature in House and Garden. Charles, who had been in the room many times, still found it something of a puzzle. Simplicity was no bad thing, of course, but surely in the home of a writer one looked for evidence of a cultured mind? There were reproductions on the walls along with one or two quite decent prints and a competent still life. Reproductions were an offence to Charles, who was concerned with taste rather than his own preferences. He was not, he acknowledged as he stared at a sketch of a clown torn from a magazine and pasted on the wall above the piano, very sure of his preferences and this demanded a long and agonized process of decision to ensure that his judgement was never at fault. Nothing so ephemeral as a magazine sketch would ever be given space in his sitting-room. Meticulously neat from his small head to the soles of his unexceptional suede brogues, he seemed designed to fit into his surroundings rather than to impose a personality on them. ‘Ah well . . .’ He sighed at the clown, reminding himself that Hester had not been to university. ‘There was no money for that sort of thing in our family,’ she had once said. Her father had been a chemist. Charles, who had grown up in Plymouth, did not recall him but he remembered a colleague at his school saying with affection that Hester measured her words with considerably more care than her father had made up his prescriptions. Charles, brought up in an atmosphere of lower middle-class secular puritanism, had been a little shocked.

  He turned from the clown and took the opportunity, in Hester’s absence, to study the book shelves. Usually he avoided the subject of literature when they were together because although he had been assured that she was quite well thought of, had indeed won literary prizes, he had never read any of her short stories. Praise did not come readily to him and she would be shrewd enough to see through any dissembling. He could imagine her saying, in the same impulsive, ill-judged way which had resulted in the presence of the clown, ‘You didn’t really like it, did you?’ Even more than having to praise, he dreaded the demands of candour.

  ‘Milk, sugar?’ she called out.

  ‘Both, please.’

  ‘Damn!’ she muttered, reaching for bowl and sugar bag. The awareness of the co-ordination required in assembling even a modest tray at this time of night was a sign of age. She fumbled grudgingly for biscuits, thinking how nice it would be to have the homely qualities which enable aged crones in country cottages to turn out enticing displays of home cooking for the unexpected visitor. But perhaps such people never really existed outside the realm of folksy reminiscence? In reality, there they were in the kitchen, crying into their aprons, before emerging rosy-cheeked as an Olde English apple, bearing their burden of goodies! She pushed her behind against the door and entered the sitting-room backwards, giving Charles time to return The Country of the Pointed Firs to the shelf.

  ‘How is your nephew settling in here?’ Charles asked. ‘I thought he took the service very well.’

  ‘Ummm.’ Hester wrinkled her face into a rubbery mask.

  Charles saved her the trouble of threading her doubts together. ‘It must be a great change from Oxford.’

  ‘Brimming with intellectual rivalry and strident car workers?’

  That was not his picture of Oxford, judging from his pained expression. ‘The West Country is rather a stagnant pool, dearly though I love it. I don’t know much about these matters, of course, but this move can hardly have advanced his . . .’ he rejected ‘career’ in case it should sound too worldly and substituted ‘prospects’.

  ‘Valentine found Oxford rather trying.’

  He raised his eyebrows, but Hester did not elaborate. She had already said more than she had intended. She was not good at either end of the day; in the morning she was not fit to speak to anyone and at night tiredness made her too talkative.

  He said, ‘And there are no children?’

  ‘Yes, there are no children.’ She had no intention of talking about the removal of Valentine’s womb. Charles would certainly prefer her to speak of a hysterectomy because, like many people nowadays, he was content that such subjects should be veiled in scientific mystery. And quite apart from the choice of words, the attendant neurosis was a private, family concern. Or perhaps not attendant? Her mind picked over this as if Valentine were no more than
a character in a story not yet fully fleshed out.

  Charles said, ‘A most attractive woman.’

  Hester knew instinctively that this was something he had wanted to say, a little test, like putting one’s nose out of the window on an autumn morning. So, that was the way of it! Well, she would not be drawn into it. She had preoccupations enough of her own without lending a listening ear. Not that any harm would come, bearing in mind the personalities involved – Valentine untouchable and Charles with, she judged, little in the way of tactile intention.

  Charles was quite satisfied, even relieved, that his remark had occasioned no comment. He felt that he had essayed something rather daring and got away with it. The coffee was quite passable but regrettably the biscuit had not come from an air-tight tin.

  ‘When does term start?’ Hester asked.

  ‘Too soon. The Governors turned down my suggestion for early retirement. I would have thought they would have been only too pleased to embrace the opportunity to drop English as a subject altogether.’

  Hester had, after all, to turn a listening ear.

  Charles and Hester had long since parted company by the time the Vicar returned home. Valentine had prepared a light salad for him, feeling virtuous and wifely. His mind was still on the service.

  They made an odd contrast, seated one on either side of the unlit fire in the sitting-room, trays balanced on knees. They had never, in the whole of their marriage, managed to master the problem of lighting rooms satisfactorily and now the standard lamp cast a dim light in which Valentine’s dark, sculptured beauty lost its fine, sharp edge while Michael – in fact, a more benevolent figure – became a looming rough-hewn presence, the more likely of the two to be a disturber of the peace.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied to his enquiry. ‘I think it went off quite well.’

  ‘And that was all?’ Michael Hoath, despite his beautiful resonant voice, had difficulty with words. This made him seem something less than quick-witted in exchanges with his wife.