LOOK, STRANGER Read online

  ‘You think all that time ago they were on to that crap about being unrealized, or unfulfilled or whatever? Now, I think only a very self-indulgent person could see them that way.’

  She appeared to think about this, then she said, ‘How ruthless you are, Milo. You’ll go far.’

  Vereker said uneasily, ‘It’s getting chilly. I think we should go.’

  ‘Yes, I’m late as it is. I promised to call on old Miss Harmer.’ She walked away without making her farewells to either of them. Vereker watched her disappearing in the twilight; he wondered whether he should go after her, but had the impression she might not want him cluttering up her exit.

  Milo, who had also been watching her, said, ‘She’s tougher than I thought.’

  ‘You meant to hurt, did you?’

  Milo said, ‘It’s unavoidable sometimes, surely?’

  Vereker looked at him thoughtfully. There wasn’t much humility in Milo’s face; but possibly there hadn’t been much of that in the face of Saul of Tarsus. Compassion was a different matter, though, and it was his lack of compassion which made Vereker uneasy about Milo.

  It was getting dark now; the hooked pillar was silhouetted against the sky like a letter in an unfamiliar alphabet. Vereker said brusquely to Milo, ‘Your mother will be wondering where you are.’

  They fell into step together. After a few moments, Milo said, ‘I had hoped for more.’

  ‘For more what?’ Vereker did not try to keep the asperity out of his voice. ‘One vision will probably have to suffice you a lifetime.’

  ‘More from you.’

  ‘You mean you wanted me to authenticate your experience? I can’t do that for you.’

  ‘But you don’t doubt it?’

  He sounded so hushed, as though doubt was the sin against the Holy Ghost, that Vereker laughed and gave his shoulder a shake. ‘Milo, the deepest things in our lives are the things we can’t be certain about. The things we don’t doubt, that the ground we are walking on is composed of certain chemicals, for example, are the things that don’t trouble our hearts and minds much anyway.’

  ‘What does all that mean?’

  ‘Sometimes I doubt God.’

  They did not say much after that, but when they parted, Milo said, ‘I’d like to talk to you about my vocation from time to time.’

  ‘I don’t know that I’ll be of much help to you.’

  ‘You’ll be more help than anyone else around here.’

  As soon as he was in the house Vereker went up to the study. He spent the rest of the evening browsing through the books, intending to tone up his intellectual muscle. Roberts’ choice of book tended towards the purely devotional, but a certain John Penn, who wrote his name on flyleaves with a bold young flourish, had contributed much of a more controversial nature to the library. It was not one of the names included on the list of vicars of the parish. A curate, perhaps?

  Nancy was not in by the time he was ready for bed; no doubt she was enjoying herself with the members of the youth club. He stood at the front door for a few minutes. What a strange evening it had been. Milo’s story was, of course, the strangest thing of all; yet it was not of Milo that he was thinking, but of Zoe. He strolled down the garden path. The breeze had whipped away the petrol fumes which so often pervaded the island in the summer and the air smelt of shrubs and cooling earth. Milo had been right about one thing: she was tougher than she had at first seemed.

  It was a bright night and he thought how wonderful the stars were, like pure, benign intelligences looking down on the human tangle. He thought of Alma, not as his wife, but as a person loved but imperfectly known as all our knowing is imperfect. When she had died, he had been freed of the responsibility for her; but it was only now that he knew that she was at last released from his demands. He left the front door unbolted and went to bed.

  Chapter Ten

  By mid-July there had been no rain for seven weeks. Water rationing was threatened if householders did not practise voluntary economies. The word “voluntary” aroused the dying embers of past greatness; all over the island bath water was scooped into buckets, or piped onto lawns by means of ingenious devices fixed to waste pipes; washing-up water was carried from kitchens, the contents of tooth mugs emptied over pot plants. The spirit of Dunkirk stirred in their bones.

  Alas, in spite of ingenuity and self-denial, the hills on the mainland daily grew browner, while the leaves of the hydrangeas in Virginia Close turned yellow and curled at the edges; roses bloomed prodigiously but did not last long; great cracks appeared in the parched fields, and it was rumoured that the island’s fruit crop had failed.

  Vereker grieved over the lawn. Nancy said there were more weeds than there was grass anyway, so what did it matter? But apparently watering an English clover lawn was something he had always wanted to do. The other thing he had always wanted to do was to have a real old English fire in a real old English hearth. ‘And what about the chimney?’ she asked.

  ‘Zoe Lindsay knows of a sweep.’

  ‘She does? That’s dandy, isn’t it? And logs?’

  ‘Zoe knows a place where we can go for logs in the autumn.’

  She suspected him of being a bit devious about Zoe; but as she liked Zoe and thought she could be trusted to deal gently with her father, she decided to let him go ahead and make a fool of himself. She had troubles of her own. Tudor was her lover now. Sometimes she wanted to shout it out loud, not so much for joy as to get a reaction which would make it real for her. She had gone swimming with Tudor and the youth club, and when the members of the youth club had gone home, she and Tudor had swum alone. It was all there, the warm June night, the moonlight, the hushed whisper of the waves on the sand, the little caressing breeze; there hadn’t seemed any choice but to make love afterwards, there wasn’t any other way to conclude the evening. If they had been playing tennis, they would have gone into the pavilion and downed beer; but as it was, they were alone on a moonlit beach, so they made love.

  Afterwards, she didn’t feel as though it had happened. Once again she had been through all the necessary motions, and she was still on the outside. She wondered if this happened to other women. One day when they were working on costumes for the fair, she blurted out to Zoe:

  ‘I’ve been reading John Donne.’ John Penn, the curate, had left something behind for her as well as for her father. ‘But I don’t feel that way about love.’ She was on the verge of tears.’

  ‘I never get to feeling the things other people feel.’

  ‘What do other people feel?’ Zoe asked. ‘Sexual achievement has become a standard measure of success, and it’s all so dishonest, because how many people are really successful?’

  ‘I don’t think I can bear it if it doesn’t come good for me.’ Nancy was in despair. Life was slipping out of her grasp; she felt it happening now, some process was taking place within her which if it wasn’t halted would soon become irrevocable. She would grow up like all those women in Coopers Town; adequate, busy, comfortable, but dulled.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be you that’s at fault,’ Zoe was saying. ‘It could be that whoever he is, he doesn’t have much to offer any woman. There are men like that.’

  But not Tudor! That was too hideous to contemplate because if it was true, it could not be changed; whereas she could and would and must change herself!

  Zoe watched her during these days, not knowing what to do for the best. She was sure that Matthew was unaware that Nancy was having an affair with Tudor and equally sure that no good would come of telling him about it. It was not the outcome of the affair that worried her, Tudor’s affairs never lasted long; what worried her was the fear that Nancy might drift from one unsatisfactory man to another. She recognized some aspects of herself in Nancy. There is a certain kind of woman who will only dare to love in a situation where, either because the man is married, or flawed, the future is blocked. It came as a surprise to Zoe to realize that up to now she had been afraid of marriage.

  About t
his time, the shadowy figures who had kept Zoe company for so long began to withdraw. Sometimes on her early morning walks in the priory fields she was aware that if she turned her head sharply she would glimpse Dame Alice or Dame Eleanor and she felt pity welling up within her. But she walked briskly through their poor shadows and concerned herself with the world of the living. She worked at the vicarage in the mornings and in the afternoons she supervized the preparation of costumes for the fair.

  In previous years the fete had been held in the vicarage garden at the beginning of June. Miss Draisey, however, had long been advocating a fair to be held in August, lasting for a week instead of one day. In medieval times, she insisted, the island had been famous for its August fair and she painted a vivid picture of the roads of southern England thronged with travellers and strolling players on their way to Helmsley Fair. The travellers, as she pointed out, were still coming, the exhaust fumes of their cars were there to prove it; local school children could take the place of the strolling players and perform miracle plays. After some hard bargaining with the teachers, many of whom, according to Miss Draisey, were as heathen as Hottentots, an agreed programme was drawn up. In addition to the performance of the miracle plays, stalls were to be set up in the vicarage garden and members of the congregation had offered to display their talents, which included Morris dancing, acrobatics, juggling and running a Punch and Judy show. Colonel Maitland, whose historical sense was keen, was arranging for some of the men to police the gathering and keep an eye on those thought most likely to practise the less acceptable activities of medieval fairs.

  Gwynneth Jarman had her doubts about the enterprize. ‘Have you been down to the beach to see the kind of traveller who comes to Helmsley Island during August?’ she asked Vereker. ‘The only people who will come to the miracle plays will be the kids’ parents and the teachers. And they won’t support the other activities.’

  ‘Perhaps if the youngsters put on something of a more secular nature, as well as the miracle plays. . . .’

  ‘If they performed fertility rites in the nude you wouldn’t drag people up from the beach in this weather.’

  ‘Yes, I do see that,’ Vereker mused. ‘Perhaps we should go down to the beach to perform?’

  ‘We’d have to get permission to hold a Punch and Judy show, and to put up my fortune teller’s booth. But it’s worth a try.’ She looked at him quizzically. ‘Are you going to preside over all this in your dog collar?’

  ‘I think that would spoil the carnival atmosphere, don’t you? I thought of myself as something quite humble-the juggler’s assistant, perhaps.’

  The fair project had attracted those members of the congregation with a taste for pageantry and they supported with enthusiasm Vereker’s suggestion that the fair should be taken to the people. Colonel Maitland, schooled in military parades and bush warfare, also lent his support, spurred on by his wife’s reproving, ‘You’re not in Burma now.’ Donald Jarman, however, was not happy about it.

  ‘You may be able to picket the vicarage garden,’ he said to Colonel Maitland, ‘but you can’t keep the whole island under surveillance. You haven’t got enough troops.’

  ‘We’ve had hymn singing on the beach before now,’ Colonel Maitland pointed out.

  ‘And one of the choir girls got into trouble then!’

  Colonel Maitland made a gesture with his hand that indicated that soldiers will be soldiers the world over and for all he knew this applied to choir girls as well. Jarman did not press the point, but he told his wife that he would offer up private prayers for rain.

  In fact, it grew hotter and hotter. The heat made Tudor irritable and demanding. He kept talking to Nancy about his attack on the altar and the stained glass window. ‘I can’t “confess”,’ he would explain. ‘If I were to confess it would mean that I was trying to come to terms with that great confidence trickster who demands that, in the hope of eternal life, we should live this life haunted by fear and guilt. You do see that, don’t you?’

  Nancy said, ‘Yes’; what she did not see was why he had confessed to her. It seemed that she was being burdened by fear and guilt even if he wasn’t.

  ‘I’m not making excuses,’ he assured her. ‘I am proud of what I did. I want you to understand that.’

  But he could not make her understand because what had happened was so very strange. He had confronted God with his rage and God had been forced to acknowledge him. At least, in the moments of release that followed, that was how it had seemed. But how could he possibly make such a claim when to do so was to admit God? He could only speak about the magnificence of his act, leaving it to Nancy to make the great leap for him.

  Nancy failed him miserably, there was a yawning gap between his expectation and her understanding of his need. No, fumbling, well-meaning response would do for him, no hint of condonation or justification would be tolerated, and the slightest suggestion of comfort was enough to make him threaten to break off their relationship. ‘You are too superficial to waste breath on!’ he told her in one agonized moment. She winced and bowed her head. But it was he who was the greatest sufferer. He could not hold on to the validity of that confrontation and gradually his expert mind set to work questioning, analysing, reducing; just as he had tried to diminish Zoe, so now he tried to diminish himself. She had found a way of escape: there was no escape for him.

  ‘You are totally insensitive and quite lacking in subtlety,’ he raged at Nancy.

  She accepted all this meekly and comforted herself with the knowledge that Tudor was one of those complex, tortured characters to whom only a Dostoevsky could do justice. How could homely Nancy Vereker ever hope to understand the intricate thought processes of the iconoclast, the outsider, the anti-Christ? But, at times, when she was half-awake in the morning and had not yet grappled with consciousness, the thought came to her mind, slovenly with sleep, that he was just a misguided man who had defaced an altar and taken a swipe at a stained-glass window.

  Life grew more feverish as the temperature rose daily. In the vicarage garden Morris dancers practised, tumblers tumbled, and Vereker, timing his mischances to a nicety, threatened to steal the act from the juggler. The vicarage was full of long wooden poles, cut-out cardboard monsters, half-painted wooden boxes, strips of material, shawls, old evening dresses, drums, cymbals, fans and cast-off jewellery. Even Nancy, who had started by being sceptical, became interested and agreed to help Zoe in the wardrobe department. Mrs. Anguilo was supposed to be doing the actual needlework, although in fact she delegated the greater part of this to her two daughters. Milo had not committed himself to taking part in any particular event: Vereker had the impression that Milo was waiting the chance (or inspiration as he no doubt would see it) to make a take-over bid for the fair. Miss Draisey unaware that she might be one who prepares the way for a greater yet to come, roamed the vicarage garden booming instructions through a loud- hailer.

  After the first week of preparations, they stopped saying they hoped it would not rain and began to take precautions against fire.

  Grass and bracken were tinder dry and there had been one or two bad fires in thatched cottages. On the beaches the sand was blistering to the feet and mid-day saw only the hardiest of sun-worshippers exposing their bodies. Dustbins and drains were smelling. Milk had turned sour before it was taken from the doorstep. Gases of sunstroke vied with sufferers from sickness and diarrhoea in doctors’ surgeries. In the evenings, the air was choked with exhaust fumes as the cars queued to get off the island.

  It was in this temper-testing weather that Mrs. Hooper awoke to the full evils of the fair. She was at a time in life when she was subject to bouts of depression which made her lethargic and deeply pessimistic. In this state, she had welcomed the fair as yet another proof that she lived in an age of wickedness – in fact, in that very age of wickedness which as a child she had been led by a zealous school mistress to believe would herald another divine intervention. During the period of her depression, she was sufficiently unbalan
ced to look forward each day to the Second Coming. But when one morning she found herself in better health she saw things connected with the fair rather differently. She saw a lot of people working very hard, and, worse still, enjoying themselves, in preparation for what she could only regard as a pagan festival; and she was not comforted by any sign that divine intervention was imminent. God, as He tended more and more to do as Mrs. Hooper grew older, was leaving the matter in the hands of the faithful here on earth. Mrs. Hooper, weary but indomitable, accordingly mustered her forces in the form of her dog, Billy, an assertive Jack Russell, and set out to do battle.

  The enemy, she saw clearly, was not Vereker, whom she regarded as morally weak and possibly weak in the head, too: the enemy was Genevieve Draisey. Mrs. Hooper disapproved of Miss Draisey because she was “one of those”, and she disliked her because she was vulgar, slovenly, sometimes uncouth in her speech, tactless, irreverent, and self-indulgent to a degree about such things as whisky and cream cakes. All Mrs. Hooper’s life people of Miss Draisey’s kind, eminently unsuited to have a place in the Kingdom, had nevertheless, by means of their social position in this world, exercised authority over Mrs. Hooper.

  The day that she decided to do battle with Miss Draisey was the first day the temperature on the island went up to ninety in the shade. In the basement at the vicarage, Miss Draisey was inspecting costumes with Zoe and Mrs. Anguilo. The Anguilo girls were winding wool. Vereker and Milo were examining cracks which had lately appeared in the wall and around the windows, and as Mrs. Hooper came in Vereker was saying, ‘You ought to get some of that stuff down.’ He indicated a wall cupboard, the shelves of which were so cluttered with Mrs. Anguilo’s bargain buys that she had had to range other items on top of the cupboard.

  Barbara and Jeremy Jarman and Nancy were making music with an assortment of instruments, tambourine, flute, penny-whistle and mouth organ, which had been donated by various parishioners. Jeremy said, ‘This is a good flute!’ and Barbara said sharply, ‘Don’t put it in your mouth! You don’t know where it’s been.’