A Particular Place Read online

  Valentine, who had come out to work in the vicarage garden, had for some minutes been conscious of people talking quietly in the graveyard. As her weeding brought her nearer to the high dividing wall, she had recognized Michael’s voice although she could not hear what he was saying. The other voice was much softer but she knew that it was a woman speaking. He really should be more careful, she thought, amused rather than displeased, because she liked this carelessness in him and would not have wished him a more cautious person. She moved away to caress the cat, who was stretched out beneath the hawthorn tree.

  Michael said to Norah, ‘The way I look upon it is that if we insist on taking a wrong turning it doesn’t mean we can simply break away and go back once the path becomes thorny, because by then we have begun to grow in that direction – and, of course, we involve others in our mistakes, drag them along with us, and we can’t just walk away, abandoning them. As I see it, we have to live with our wrong turnings and make them into another, longer, more tortuous way to God. The interminable “short-cut” that adds weary time to a journey but brings one home at last.’ He was thinking of his own experience and could therefore say these things to her without any suggestion of judging her. They were in a shared situation and they were both aware of it; if what they said seemed harsh, the harshness, too, was shared.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I have learnt that we have to do what we can in the particular place where we find ourselves. It’s a comfort to me. I say to myself, “Here is where you are, Norah Kendall, and all that is asked is that you make your best of it.” But there are times when I wish I wasn’t Norah Kendall.’

  ‘Ah yes! My dreams and hopes for Michael Hoath have heroic proportions, but the actual achievement is pitifully small.’

  As they talked, acknowledging hopes bright and trite, needs urgent and unreasonable, a gentle sympathy began to temper stoicism. At some stage, without their being aware of it, their hands met and now they sat, fingers intertwined, and were silent. A weight seemed to have been lifted and Norah, closing her eyes, felt momentarily giddy with nothing against which to brace herself. The traffic in the high street was sporadic now and during the long intervals of silence there was that sense that a summer evening can give of time having run its course. It came to Michael, ‘I am happy.’ He turned to her and saw that she was looking at him, astonished by the same awareness. In that moment they were one person. They embraced and many years’ longings were gathered into a wave of oblivious joy. After the joy came the awareness of thirst. They tumbled onto the earth and knelt there, touching and tasting with the desperate, intent application of parched travellers at a wayside spring.

  As she played with the cat Valentine had been trying to identify the woman’s voice. Her inability to do so was a tiresome itch – nothing more – preventing her from enjoying her time in the garden. She decided she must try to settle the matter and dismiss it from her mind. As she approached the graveyard wall she was greeted by silence. She stood, straining her ears. Movements came, but whether to her ears or her imagination she could not have said. They could have returned to the church, of course; but every nerve told her that they were there, silent on the other side of the wall. And people who do not know each other well do not spend so long either in prayer or contemplation.

  Norah and Michael knelt, holding each other, quite still now. Their faces had the slightly idiotic look of people dazzled by bright light. There was a sensation that the body had been caught out with the mind away somewhere. Michael was aware of light in concentric circles whose outer circumference seemed to be extending further and further, bearing mind spinning away into some unimaginable realm from which no return could be expected.

  Valentine dropped the hoe on the gravel path – and the trowel, too, for good measure. She was rewarded by a corresponding disturbance of stones and earth on the far side of the wall. Light footsteps went down the steps leading into the church. A few moments later, she saw Michael in the distance by the gate leading out of the graveyard. He will come in for supper now, she thought; but he turned away from the vicarage. Although it was a still evening he walked as if he was heading into a wind.

  Much later, when he had returned and they sat at the dining table, neither looking at the other, he said, ‘I must lock the church. I quite forgot about it.’

  ‘Thieves may have taken what they want by now,’ she replied. ‘I thought I heard someone in the graveyard earlier this evening.’

  ‘There was no one there when I left.’ The half-truth came to his lips without apparent effort. His mind seemed to have no part in what was happening.

  ‘Who kept you so long?’ she asked, dry-mouthed.

  ‘Norah Kendall. She has a lot of problems.’

  ‘Norah Kendall!’

  For different reasons neither could take the conversation any further.

  When he left to lock up the church, she called out, ‘I shan’t be here when you return.’

  He came back into the dining-room. She was piling crockery on a tray. ‘I have to go for a fitting of my costume. Though why I am still playing this part, I can’t imagine. She should have had an affair; don’t you think that would have been much more sensible than killing herself?’ She was speaking fast but with clarity. ‘Those exchanges with Loevborg are so unlikely. They should have had an affair. I am sure that’s what Ibsen really had in mind when he made Tesman say, “But good God. One doesn’t do that sort of thing.” An affair, not suicide. But I expect Ibsen was too inhibited to envisage such a scene. In those days men thought they had the monopoly in such matters.’ She picked up the tray and went into the kitchen.

  Chapter Seven

  Desmond waited on the station platform. The green light showed but it had been like that for three-quarters of an hour. People were getting restive. But Desmond welcomed the downfall of timetabling as a happening to be expected, and not only where British Rail was concerned.

  Tomorrow was his birthday. His mother would have bought him a more expensive gift than she could afford and she would have loaned Tracy money to ‘get something special’. From his grandparents in Truro he could rely on receiving a book about one of the B.B.C.’s wild life programmes with a cheery note from his grandmother saying she had picked it up at a book sale because she realized that it was just the sort of thing he was interested in, and telling him yet again how she and Grandpa would never forget ‘The Flight of the Condor’. There would be cards from some of the people for whom he did gardening and one from his only school friend, now at Durham University. Ever since his father left home his mother had worked herself and everyone else into a frenzy about his birthday. If his father had remembered to send a card it would have spoilt the whole effect. This had been going on for over six years and he considered he had been pretty tolerant of it. Now he had earned the right to choose the way he spent his birthday. He hoped his mother would not be too hurt by his absence, but he had noted she got quite a bit of mileage out of being hurt. In fact, she was creative about it. His mother put everything which came to her to good use.

  ‘Work on the line,’ a woman said resignedly.

  ‘Points failure,’ her companion countered. ‘It’s always points failure.’

  A child in a pushchair pointed a finger at Desmond and said, ‘Dada!’

  ‘Dada’s going to meet us at Exeter.’ His mother sounded indifferent as though the arrival of the train and the waiting father were in the hands of capricious gods.

  The tannoy made a noise like someone returned from the dead and still in a bad condition. A voice communicated a message in a language perhaps familiar to the unknown territory in which the train was in travail – Desmond visualized it stranded in one of those moonlike regions over which the condor cast its shadow.

  ‘Whatever that may have been, it wasn’t “the train now approaching platform three”,’ the advocate of points failure said. She and her companion walked away in the direction of the station buffet.

  The child began to cry ‘Dada! Dad
a!’, eyes and mouth gaping holes of misery. Desmond was convinced that the child’s father would not be waiting on the platform at Exeter. This conviction owed little to anything as insubstantial as reason, it was a flutter in the stomach as portentous as the signs on the breastbone of a goose which warn the primitive – who know about such things – of bad weather to come.

  ‘That’s not Dada.’ The young woman’s voice was sharp. Desmond’s face as he stared at the child had something of the primitive about it. The eyes were clear as glass in the folds above the flat planes of the cheekbones, and this gave the face the look of one of those plundered antique figures from which the jewelled eyes have been removed. The young woman pushed the child further up the platform.

  Desmond sat on a seat and began to reread The Star Thrower, which he had brought with him because at one time Eiseley had ridden the rails and Desmond thought him a good companion, this man so wise to human fallacies, who knew that ‘one step does not lead rationally to another.’ He was particularly impressed by the idea of the trickster element in Nature which looms suddenly out of a clear sky and which has to be accepted because it leaves behind tangible evidence of its demonic presence. What he had not found before was the acknowledgement of the presence of the trickster in the life of man. It was an idea with which he felt strangely secure, not because it offered safety but because it assured him that he was not alone, that someone else had seen the demon joker looking over his shoulder, had heard the same derisive laughter amid the solemn platitudes of everyday speech. Desmond was glad that the train had not arrived. Its absence justified him.

  The woman with the child walked past. Desmond pulled his Quasimodo face at the child, tongue bunched in cheek, eyes askew; the child applauded and shouted, ‘Dada! Dada! Dada!’

  The voice over the tannoy, now perfectly in command of itself, announced that the train would arrive in five minutes and that British Rail apologized for the inconvenience and for the fact that the dining-car had been taken off.

  When the train arrived Desmond got into the guard’s van where he was warmly received by a despondent Labrador. The guard, a middle-aged Asian with eyes as dark and sad as the dog’s, looked Desmond up and down, from tattered pants with the regulation tear above one knee to paint-splashed vest, and came to a conclusion which caused him no joy. Desmond squatted beside the dog, careful to let it carry out its own investigations before he touched it. The guard said, ‘You like dogs? You look after this one, then.’ He refrained from asking Desmond whether he had a ticket, which was unusual since most Asians whom Desmond had met had been more law-abiding than the English. It seemed, however, that this man had a son who was in trouble with the police who had dealt with him very unfairly. He was disposed to be sympathetic to Desmond.

  ‘The police don’t like Pakis,’ he said. ‘I do not like them, either. I am Indian. But it makes no difference, they do not listen. Even when my son-in-law’s grocery shop has petrol bomb thrown through the window, they do nothing.’

  Desmond listened attentively to the guard’s grievances while he stroked the dog’s head. He felt an interest – which was as near as he ever came to sympathy – in people who are accident-prone, and the coloured community was more accident-prone than most. He could see, however, that while the guard was resigned to the precariousness of life he was by no means reconciled to it. He saw himself as a victim, not the prototype of human kind.

  ‘I tell my MP but that man is just puffed out with promises like a hot-air balloon.’

  Desmond, who found politics boring and depressing, asked when the train got into Exeter.

  ‘What do you want to go to Exeter for?’

  ‘There’s a man I want to talk to. He is attending a conference on anthropology.’ Desmond said this as nonchalantly as if he were a fellow academic and, indeed, in his own mind there was no substantial distinction between himself and Sir Arnold Bassett, merely a matter of age in which he had the advantage. ‘I read about it in The Times in the library.’ He did not add that this meeting with Sir Arnold Bassett was his birthday present to himself.

  ‘But he will not see you, not without you having an appointment.’ It might have been his mother speaking, Desmond thought. There would have been no way he could have convinced her that if only he could see Sir Arnold Bassett (and, more important, if Sir Arnold Bassett could only see him) nothing but good, in the form of interesting field work, could follow. Desmond did not expect to be liked, or loved, but he assumed an immediate awareness of his intellectual ability.

  ‘We have corresponded,’ he said. ‘At least, I wrote to him. There was some rather sloppy thinking in a paper he gave on Darwin and I sent him a few notes. Unfortunately I think they may have gone astray because he didn’t reply. I’ve brought a copy with me, just in case.’

  The guard shook his grizzled head sorrowfully. ‘You make that man very angry.’

  ‘A man like that has nothing to fear from controversy.’ Desmond’s harsh bray of laughter betrayed anger as well as contempt and the dog’s ears twitched nervously. ‘It’s only men with little minds who are vain.’

  ‘No, no, the bigger the man, the bigger the appetite. You better go home, you get yourself into trouble otherwise, upsetting this man. You go home and write to him. You get out at the next stop.’ He pleaded earnestly as if Desmond were his own son and the Labrador, agitated by the tone, turned his head and looked imploringly at Desmond.

  The ticket inspector had reached the adjacent carriage. The guard said to Desmond, ‘You go in toilet, otherwise you get me in trouble.’ The Labrador put his head back and howled assent.

  When the ticket inspector had passed by Desmond made his way to the rear of the train because he did not think it fair to place so heavy a burden on the guard and the dog.

  At Exeter he hung about on the platform. On previous excursions he had observed that there is usually a passenger in trouble or out to make trouble at the end of a long journey. He was not disappointed this time. Soon a wiry little foreign woman set up camp at the ticket barrier, surrounded by suitcases held together by string and numerous parcels wrapped in brown paper. Desmond paused to study the method of the woman who had the staring, resentful eyes of one who is an expert at creating chaos around her.

  ‘I can’t help what they told you at Bodmin, madam,’ the man at the barrier said. ‘This is Exeter.’

  She protested volubly and he said, ‘No, no, no! The train doesn’t go any further and if it did you still wouldn’t get to Truro. You have come the wrong way. You understand? Wrong way!’ He stabbed his finger in the general direction of right way. But, of course, she did not understand, even if she had had perfect command of English she would not have understood; incomprehension was the tripwire with which she brought authority down. Several people pushed past waving tickets in the air. ‘You are blocking the exit, madam.’ The foolish man toed one of the brown paper bags which turned on its side and split open. The woman fell on her knees, scrabbling in the dust and threatening litigation while the ticket collector maintained his innocence in a vigorous baritone and several passengers skidded on ripe cherries. Desmond, sorry to leave the circus behind, slipped past waving his library ticket in the air.

  The woman with the pushchair was waiting blank-faced in the middle of the concourse and the child was addressing each oncoming male as Dada. Desmond went in search of tourist information.

  ‘I want the conference centre,’ he said and handed the young woman with the haughty eyebrows the pieces which he had cut out of the library’s copy of The Times. She looked at him sceptically as if she would not let him into any building of which she had charge, but produced a map of the town and marked a building with a cross.

  Desmond got a bar of chocolate from a machine and bought a banana at a stall. The conference was on from Saturday until Monday. It was now Friday evening. He was prepared to extend his birthday celebration until Monday if necessary. He would find a park in which to sleep. The life which he planned for himself would invol
ve sleeping in places more hostile to man than a park in Exeter in June.

  Hester sometimes wondered why she hadn’t joined the Society of Friends. Even allowing for the fact that they were occasionally moved to speak, ministering Quakers could not possibly be as distracting as the modern child. The baby at the back of the church had been provided – to help it through the tedium of worship – with toys, all of which must surely be made of cast iron. Soft toys, no doubt, had also been lavished upon the infant, but these, it seemed, were reserved for the peace and quiet of its own home. Older children with the instincts of storm-troopers, and equipped with hobnailed boots, marched up and down the aisle. Young parents, ears attuned to such noises, appeared to have no difficulty in ignoring the racket. It was very hot and this youthful activity brought beads of perspiration to Hester’s brow. She reflected gloomily on the injunction ‘Suffer the little ones to come unto me’, contrasting it with her own desire, growing more imperative with the years, to ensure peace, if necessary with a hatchet.