LOOK, STRANGER Page 13

  She sat on the window seat and looked around in satisfaction at the bare tables and easels. All those pictures, she thought, all about me! Always me searching for myself! And then, quite suddenly, today, here in front of me, there is a human face. I can see it still. How lovely it is, this face with the eyes so bent to their task, the mouth so honestly wrestling with words to give to me. He has one hand to his brow and the fingers, resting lightly on the bridge of the nose, draw the whole man together, summoning, in spite of tiredness and disinclination, all his power of perception, penetration and compassion, to my service. How humble I should feel! But what I am really feeling is pure joy at the discovery of this marvel of creation. How far it exceeds the aesthetic pleasure of gazing at works of art shut away in museums! What work of art can produce so humorous and so serious a face, at once so errant and so dedicated, such a combination of weakness and strength, a face so still yet alive to its nerve ends? I don’t want to commit this face to paper, I don’t even want to listen to what he is saying. I simply want gratefully to accept this moment of actually seeing him.

  Chapter Eight

  Dandelions had taken over from daffodils on the vicarage lawn. The air was warm from early in the morning and the sun had shone for eight days in succession which seemed to be a record. Vereker had several calls to make. Old Miss Harmer who did housework for the Jarmans had had a heart attack, and there were other sick persons to visit. Nancy got up early and cooked him bacon and egg and fried bread. She was particularly tender to him because she had let him die again in her dreams.

  Soon after Vereker had gone, Tudor arrived. ‘I came to see Milo,’ he said to Nancy. ‘But he isn’t in the basement.’

  ‘He was half an hour ago. I asked him why he wasn’t at school and he said he was studying on his own.’

  Tudor looked annoyed.

  ‘He’s not very sociable lately,’ Nancy said. ‘In fact, he has hardly spoken to me since I said I saw him leaving the church. . . .’

  ‘Did you expect him to be grateful?’

  ‘I didn’t think he’d act as if I’d done him a mischief.’ She wondered if this was the time to confess; she had to confess to someone soon.

  ‘Let’s forget about Milo, shall we?’ He turned towards the gate. ‘What about coming with me? I’ve got to see several clients on the island today.’

  Miss Draisey had called at the vicarage earlier in the hope of seeing Vereker and, finding he was out, had remained to hinder Zoe. They were on the upstairs landing while Tudor and Nancy were talking in the garden. Miss Draisey was standing by the window and Zoe was polishing a pair of brass candlesticks.

  Miss Draisey was surprised at the difference a few weeks had made in Nancy Vereker. ‘That little creature is coming into bud,’ she said, ‘and when she flowers she’ll make her presence felt. So thrusting, like all young Americans.’ As Nancy talked to Tudor, gazing up at him one moment, the next turning her head away in a confusion of emotion. Miss Draisey could see her working out the mathematics of male-female equations. Miss Draisey had observed this in one or two of her girls. It had been a rarity, for Miss Draisey’s girls had not been encouraged to develop this particular facility quickly, if they developed it at all; but she remembered the few who had done so, and one in particular. She could imagine Nancy Vereker looking at herself in the mirror as day by day these things happened to her, thinking in wonder, ‘I am a woman!’ Miss Draisey wasn’t quite sure what things happened because there had never been a moment when she had said to herself, ‘I am a woman!’ She had always supposed it was the kind of thing that happened to only a few very emotional adolescents, like being saved: one could be a Christian without knowing the exact moment one was saved, and so, she had presumed, one could become a woman without actually being aware of it. She said to Zoe, ‘I hope your cousin can teach that young woman some sense, for her father’s sake, if not for her own.’

  Zoe watched Nancy and Tudor walking towards his car and made no comment.

  Miss Draisey sighed. ‘Most of the good men I’ve known have been quite intolerable. But Matthew Vereker really does restore my faith. I think it’s because he’s so droll that one can accept his goodness.’ Miss Draisey watched Nancy getting into Tudor’s car, wriggling about in her dress like a puppy who hasn’t yet filled out all the folds of skin. She wondered whether, if she married Matthew Vereker, she would be able to tolerate his daughter.

  Zoe, who had finished polishing the candlesticks, said, ‘The material of that dress she’s wearing reminds me of voile. You never see voile now, do you?’

  ‘Or shantung!’ Miss Draisey accepted this diversion with enthusiasm. ‘I used to love shantung, I thought the word was so seductive. Satin was better, of course, but I knew that satin was sinful and only women like Jean Harlow and Lillian Tashman, who were up to no good, could wear it. Films were so marvellous then, weren’t they? All those veiled moments when you hadn’t the slightest idea what was going on because you imagined that there were some really unspeakable sins and not just the dreary ones we all know about. It’s dreadfully dull now that it’s all so explicit.’

  Zoe nodded. ‘Mysteries should never be explained, should they?’

  Miss Draisey placed her hand on Zoe’s arm. ‘My dear, of course you are right!’ Zoe had always seemed to her to be a rather blurred person, but now she had moved sharply into focus. Miss Draisey ached with longing when she contemplated Zoe’s beauty. This always seemed to happen to her. No sooner did she find a man whom she could love than she was confronted by a woman with whom she could live (the thought of loving a woman was quite abhorrent to her). She had spent the best years of her life trying to decide whether to marry a man or live with a woman and soon it would be too late to do either.

  Zoe moved away from the window, uneasy as she often was in Miss Draisey’s company. The grandfather clock in the hall was wheezily gathering itself to strike eleven o’clock. Perhaps the best way of getting rid of Miss Draisey without hurting her feelings would be to have coffee. Mrs. Anguilo was using the washing machine in the kitchen, and Zoe knew that Miss Draisey would not stay long in Mrs. Anguilo’s company.

  As they turned towards the stairs. Miss Draisey exclaimed, ‘I think there is someone in the study. Has Matthew come back?’

  ‘No; that will be Milo.’

  ‘Milo!’ Miss Draisey’s surprised disapproval was worthy of Lady Bracknell; it was obvious that she thought Milo’s presence in the study about as appropriate as the infant John Worthing’s in a handbag.

  ‘He’s taking A-level religious knowledge and Matthew has said he can use the library.’

  ‘A-level! Even if he had the brains, he wouldn’t have the application.’

  ‘You mustn’t condemn him because of the past,’ Zoe said gently.

  ‘You have only to look at him!’

  ‘But you never do look at him.’

  Zoe led the way into the kitchen before Miss Draisey could answer. Mrs. Anguilo was taking her washing out of the spin dryer. Miss Draisey watched her smoothing the wrinkled arm of a shirt before folding it across the front in such a way as to make it more creased than ever. She did this without actually looking at Mrs. Anguilo herself. Mrs. Anguilo smiled ingratiatingly as she accepted Zoe’s offer of coffee; she was obviously acutely aware that she was not wanted and determined to stay. It was a relief when Milo came in; he had books under one arm and was heading purposefully for the back door when Miss Draisey challenged him. ‘Don’t you have religious instruction in school?’ She stared at him boldly, her eyes wide open. He had his back to the light and she saw him as a dark outline with no detail.

  ‘The Reverend Binns comes from Portsmouth especially to give us religious instruction.’ His tone implied a wasted journey on the Reverend Binns’ part. ‘We spend all our time discussing such issues as whether the Red Sea really parted for the Children of Israel.’

  ‘Of course it did!’ Mrs. Anguilo stopped smoothing a pair of pyjamas and directed an agonized glance at Miss Drai
sey.

  ‘When you go down there,’ Milo pointed out of the window in the general direction of the coast, ‘and look at the stretch of water between the island and the mainland, does it ever occur to you that the water might fold itself up on either side for you to walk through on dry land?’

  ‘Not for me, it wouldn’t.’

  ‘For anyone!’ Milo made a graceful gesture which embraced Zoe and Miss Diraisey. ‘Can you imagine it happening to anyone?’

  ‘It was a miracle,’ Mrs. Anguilo pointed out.

  ‘Shit!’

  Miss Draisey thought it time to intervene. ‘What, in particular, are you reading?’ she demanded.

  ‘I’m reading the Bible from cover to cover.’

  ‘And what do you expect to get out of it?’ Miss Draisey asked in the amused tone she would have adopted had she come across one of her girls searching for salacious passages in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Jesus wasn’t born then.’ Mrs. Anguilo was embarrassed. ‘Not at the time the Children of Israel crossed the Red Sea. That was hundreds of thousands of years before. I don’t know what they teach you at that school.’ She looked at Miss Draisey hoping for an indication that she had acquitted herself honourably as a parent. Miss Draisey ignored her.

  Milo held up the copy of the Bible and said, ‘This is all Jesus. Jesus was the Word made flesh.’

  Miss Draisey said, ‘I understand what that means, of course, but I very much doubt whether you do.’

  ‘The Word was there before Jesus was born and. . . .’

  ‘I think you should talk to the vicar about this.’ Miss Draisey was at her most magisterially dismissive.

  ‘Yes, I shall have to do that in the course of events.’ Milo departed with the air of one who has tarried too long in the presence of fools. Mrs. Anguilo began to cry.

  ‘What did he mean “in the course of events” in that apocalyptic tone?’ Miss Draisey demanded.

  Mrs. Anguilo folded the last garment. ‘God has told him to found his own church.’ She balanced the washing basket on her hip and went out weeping.

  ‘Well, I doubt if that need concern us!’ Miss Draisey said to Zoe. ‘What I really came to see Matthew about was the church fete. We really must do something different this year. . . .’

  Tudor and Nancy were by this time driving along the road that skirted the farming area which Vereker had visited several weeks earlier. Nancy was still anxious to confess. She had been trying for weeks to make her father accuse her, but without success. She could not carry the secret around on her own much longer.

  ‘There’s something I want to tell you,’ she began.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about the church affair, if that’s what you have in mind.’

  ‘It’s rather important. . . .’

  ‘To you and your father, perhaps; but it doesn’t affect me in the slightest. To me, the blasphemy is the Church itself. Can we leave it at that?’ He stopped the car at the gate of a large, ramshackle house. ‘You can meditate on your trouble while I visit mine.’

  ‘That looked like a goat at one of the windows,’ Nancy said when he returned.

  ‘It was a goat. Lady Piers Monceaux, who must be all of one-hundred-and-ten, lives in a caravan and the goats have the house. She won’t see me, but I pay a token visit whenever I come this way and we make faces at each other through the window.’

  ‘How awful to live like that!’

  ‘Pointless and unprofitable, certainly. If it was left to me, I’d have her put down along with her goats.’

  ‘She must have problems, poor old thing.’

  ‘You think so? For myself, I think that if the upper classes want to stick to their privileges they will have to relinquish the right to have problems.’

  Nancy liked the way he sounded when he said this kind of thing, so sharp-edged and hard. This was the way he looked, too. There was nothing to spare in face or body, he was lean and hard and driven. It was this quality of being driven which made him so compulsively attractive; he lived every moment as if it was crucial and this intensity harrowed his face in a way which was very exciting.

  Tudor stopped the car outside a row of dilapidated farm cottages.

  ‘Does one of your problem families live here?’ Nancy asked.

  ‘It’s the problem family your father turfed out. Remember? They came with the Anguilos.’

  ‘The dark, shrewish woman and the long-haired men?’ Memory brought the woman sharply to mind.

  ‘The same.’

  ‘And now they live here?’

  ‘One of the men, Mrs. Peters’ brother, is in prison. The rest of the family is squatting in the end cottage.’

  There was another car parked outside the last cottage and Meg Jacobs was standing at the front door talking to Mrs. Peters. Tudor said to Nancy, ‘You’d better stay in the car.’

  It was hot and Nancy had the window wound down, so she could hear Meg Jacobs quite clearly; she was telling Mrs. Peters that there had been reports that the children were left alone in the house at night without access to a telephone.

  ‘We don’t have a telephone and they’d only break it if we had,’ Mrs. Peters said as though this disposed of the matter.

  The front entrance led straight into the living-room and Nancy could see two small children grubbing about on the uncarpeted floor; neither looked old enough to make use of a telephone. There was a settee against the wall and a bearded man was sitting cross¬legged on it, the palms of his hands resting on the soles of his feet.

  ‘Who’s been on about them being left alone? That old tabby in Number Four? She’s probably listening now.’ Mrs. Peters thumped the wall and shouted, ‘Can you hear all right, Mrs. Nye?’

  A shower of crumbling plaster was the only response to this attack on the wall.

  ‘It’s not the noise they make,’ Meg Jacobs held to her course stoutly. ‘They’re a bit young to be left alone. . . .’

  One of the children crawled onto the doorstep. ‘I’ve got to go to the pub. How would I get another job these days?’ Mrs. Peters yanked the toddler up by the scruff of its neck and tossed it negligently, but without apparent malice, into the road, where Tudor fielded it. The other, a few years older, made its own way without maternal aid.

  While Meg Jacobs talked to Mrs. Peters, Tudor took the opportunity to examine the children. Tommy had a bruised arm and a scab on his nose, but neither seemed of recent origin; the toddler, Cylla, was filthy as usual but apparently without bruises, breaks or scars. Tudor called out to Nancy, ‘There’s something for them in the back of the car. Can you keep them occupied for a minute or two? I want to talk to Eddie Peters.’ Mrs. Peters was a sharp, manipulative woman, the kind who knows what she is doing even in her sleep; Tudor thought she probably thumped the children from time to time, but he didn’t think she ever lost control. It was the father he was not happy about.

  Meg Jacobs was leaving and Mrs. Peters accompanied her to her car in order to tell her the kind of accommodation which would be acceptable to the Peters family. Nancy watched the two women while Cylla and Tommy squabbled on the back seat of the car. Mrs. Peters, in spite of her misfortunes, seemed a very formidable person. Meg Jacobs, for all her pugnacity, would be much more easily put down; she would fight for others but had never learnt to fight for herself. Nancy liked Meg and thought that she was a good person.

  In the living-room, Eddie Peters was still sitting on the settee. He appeared not to register what was going on, but as soon as Tudor came into the room, he said in a soft unexpectedly cultured voice. ‘I kept my appointment with Dr. Leishner.’

  ‘Good.’

  Eddie reached up to smooth the long, dark hair on either side of its neat central parting. ‘I don’t seem able to establish a rapport with Dr. Leishner.’ He looked steadfastly at Tudor; he had eyes like brown lollipops with a slight glaze on them.

  ‘Psychiatrists vary,’ Tudor answered easily. ‘Dr. Leishner believes in a more formal approach than
some. It doesn’t mean he isn’t interested.’

  ‘Yes, I realize this is true.’ After contemplating this truth for a few moments, Peters went on, ‘It’s just that I need someone to warm to me. I don’t seem able to take in what people are saying if they’re not sympathetic to me.’

  ‘How are things going here?’ Tudor changed the subject, since he could not change Dr. Leishner.

  ‘Oh, fine,’ Peters nodded his head to emphasize this. ‘I really am surprised at the difference I see in myself. You know, I never really liked children, I can see that, looking back on my life. But now I find I do like them. I take their hands when we walk along the beach and I find the feel of their flesh pleasant. And when I see a woman with a baby in a pram I go and ask if I can look at it and I’m fascinated by its little fat hands and the pleats in the flesh at the wrist; and I notice how lovely the colouring is, not all pink, but with traces of blue, particularly under the eyes. I get a lot of pleasure from children now, visual and tactile.’ He might have been describing a shell he had picked up on the beach.

  ‘Do you play games with them in here?’ Tudor looked round the bare room.

  Something closed down behind the eyes. ‘I take them for walks on the beach, like I told you. I’m one of those people who ought to live in the open; I don’t like having things on top of me. I try to explain that to Dr. Leishner, but it’s very difficult to judge whether he gets the point.’

  The children came scrambling back and stopped in the open doorway. Tudor said, ‘Hullo, Tommy.’

  The child said, ‘ ’Lo’ and edged into the room, his eyes on Peters’ face; he put his hand in Tudor’s. Peters stared in front of him as though he had not noticed the arrival of the children. Mrs. Peters returned, full of complaints about the unsuitability of the accommodation.