LOOK, STRANGER Page 23

  Milo was late. Vereker sat at the desk in the library looking into the garden; it grew dark and he saw no sign of Milo. He was on edge and opened the window to listen for the sound of footsteps. It was still very cold but the wind had changed direction and he thought, ‘I can smell rain.’ It was quiet. The island was quiet in winter. The feeling of being in alien country came to him again as he stood by the window; it was not so much a sense of something hostile as of smells and sounds that were foreign to him. He had settled into the life of the island easily enough in the summer but now in winter he was more conscious of elements with which he was unfamiliar. In particular, he was aware that on this narrow island one was never more than five miles from the sea. Was it his imagination that he could hear the sea whispering up the pebble beach? This was the sound he had heard as a child when he held a shell to his ear, the sound that evoked images not part of a landlocked childhood; shipwrecks on the reef of Norman’s Woe and the Kentish Knock, and the more mysterious calm of Homer’s wine-dark sea. Tonight, the sea whispered, ‘your life will never be the same again, never the same, never again.’ He shivered and rubbed the back of his hand, it felt soft and smooth; he licked it and tasted salt.

  Another sound jerked him out of this preoccupation with the sea. Something stirred in the bushes. The hair on the back of his neck tingled. It would not be Nan, She was helping Meg Jacobs with whom she spent a lot of time. Milo? One of the sisters? There seemed no reason why they should be in the bushes. He switched off the light and peered into the garden. It was too dark to see anything. He decided to investigate. He went down to the kitchen and out of the back door.

  There was a light on in the basement and someone was standing looking down into the lighted room. The picture that was presented of the person always on the outside of life struck at his heart. Then he realised in dismay that it was Mrs. Peters. The particular was at once less heart-rending and more demanding. He was mortified by his failure with Mrs. Peters. She was one of the few people he had met with whom he could establish no contact whatsoever and the awareness of this failure inhibited him so much that each encounter was worse than the last. He said. ‘Mrs. Peters? Won’t you come into the house?’

  Mrs. Peters said, ‘Do you hear that, God? Are you listening?’

  ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you.’ This was near enough to the truth. Tommy had been taken into care and she had sent her husband packing, and Vereker had felt that he should try to do something for her. ‘Please come in.’

  She came close and thrust her thin face up at him; if there were witches still in England, surely this was one of them! She hissed, ‘If you say one word more, God will strike you where you stand because you are a liar and a hypocrite!’ She spoke with awesome certainty, and this, added to Vereker’s own sense of guilt, made him step back a pace so that he stumbled onto the flower bed. The scene was precariously balanced between the comic and the sinister. He had the feeling, as he pushed a branch of lilac away from his face, that this woman was in a highly volatile state and the slightest miscalculation on his part might precipitate an explosion.

  ‘I’m sorry you feel like this.’ He bent down and made a performance of kicking mud off his shoes on the gravel path. When he looked up She had gone, vanished as cleanly as the Cheshire Cat leaving behind a sense of unease if not an actual grin.

  He went down to the basement and asked Mrs. Anguilo if she would ask Milo to see him on his return. It sounded like a summons, but a summons might do no harm.

  Milo answered the summons readily enough. They talked of this and that for a few minutes and then Vereker said, ‘Mrs. Peters was standing outside the basement tonight. She strikes me as being in a rather unstable state.’

  ‘Oh, she is. She comes almost every night.’

  ‘Every night! Are you aware of what you may be doing to this unbalanced woman?’

  ‘I hope I’m doing something for her. She comes to me to confess.’

  ‘To confess?’

  ‘She shouts outside the window, repeating all the things people say about her; then she tells me how much it shocks me and what a wicked woman I must think her. Then she goes into details of her wickedness.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘When she begins to repeat herself, I go out and tell her that God loves her.’

  ‘And what does she say to that?’

  ‘Well, at present, it’s usually “piss off”,’ Milo admitted. ‘But that’s because she finds it so hard to accept the idea of forgiveness, let alone love. I can understand that, can’t you? There isn’t a lot of forgiveness around. One thing did startle me. She told me, in a roundabout way, that she is the person who digs up her daughter’s grave. I couldn’t understand that, but I knew I had to do something because it was obviously so important, so I told her she didn’t need to do it any more because her sins had been forgiven. The grave hasn’t been disturbed again.’

  Vereker thought that the grave had not been touched again because, for better or for worse, he had driven Mrs. Peters out of the graveyard. Perhaps it would have been better if he had told her her sins were forgiven. Milo, who had been watching his face, said, ‘You’re not surprised. Did you know?’

  ‘I guessed.’

  ‘You guessed.’ Milo was taken aback. ‘I would never have guessed.’

  ‘You must allow me a little more experience, in some matters, at least,’ Vereker said huffily. ‘And that,’ he went on before Milo could interrupt, ‘leads me to another matter.’ He told Milo about the visit of the police and his own misgivings about the meetings on the priory site.

  ‘What good reason is there for stopping?’ Milo demanded. ‘All right, so the site could be used for the homeless. When they are ready to build, that’s the time to stop; not now, just because people come and chant, “What about the homeless?” There are people who spend their time chanting, “What about South Africa, what about Chile, what about discharged prisoners, old-age pensioners, Rudolf Hess, Northern Ireland. . . .” It’s a way of stopping people caring.’

  ‘Are you making them care?’ Vereker asked.

  ‘It’s not me, it’s God.’

  Vereker decided he must form his own opinion on this. Accordingly, on the next Saturday he took the short cut across the field at the back of the church. He had been right about the change in the weather. There had been rain during the week but today it was bright and mild. Ahead of him in the next field he could see one or two people and by the time he reached the priory ruins there was quite a sizeable crowd. He had gone out day after day, making an effort to understand the problems of present-day life on the island, and trying to make some contribution, however small, to the betterment of conditions; as a result he had drawn a handfull of people into All Hallows. All that Milo and his companions had done was to address public meetings on Saturday afternoons and get people to sing a few hymns. Uncharitable though it mig’ht be, Vereker could not help but feel that their reward had been out of all proportion to their effort.

  Mrs. Peters was standing on a pair of steps near the public footpath to the seafront. She was shouting and waving pieces of paper: From the tone of her voice, it did not sound as though Milo could count her among his converts as yet.

  Vereker saw that he was not the only one who had come to hold a watching brief on behalf of his church; at the back of the crowd the Roman Catholic priest was standing shoulder to shoulder with the rural dean. As Vereker joined them, the crowd was singing Onward Christian Soldiers.

  ‘My intellectual, liberal-minded parishioners would think I was living back in the bad old days of muscular Christianity if I tried to get them to sing this one,’ the rural dean greeted Vereker gloomily.

  ‘Ah, but it has a lovely rhythm,’ the Roman Catholic priest said. ‘It’s the rhythm they’re liking, and why not?’ He looked around him and waved encouragingly at a woman with three small children. ‘Mustn’t let them think this worries you, that would never do,’ he said to the rural dean whose face fell into lines
of worry as naturally as a bloodhound’s.

  A girl with a fur coat trailing to her ankles was walking towards them. Her hair was long, too, and it was difficult to tell where the hair ended and the mangy fur began. She wove in and out of the crowd as if in a dream and floated down beside Vereker and his companions.

  ‘Say, can you explain this to me?’ She had a Southern drawl and Vereker hazarded a guess that she had originally hailed from Alabama but had travelled some way since. She gave them a bright, unfriendly smile and twisted a strand of hair between her fingers. She was not interested in answers; if by any mischance she found herself presented with a satisfactory answer she would shift the ground of her questioning. Disruption was her business and she had been at it so long she smelt of it. ‘About God,’ she said, pushing hair out of her eyes in a caressing movement as though the greasy strands were spun gold, ‘Can you tell me about God? Because I’d like to know just what this is all about.’ She let the sentences drop carelessly, she had no wish that anyone should think she was a serious seeker after knowledge; not being serious was much more provoking.

  The three men looked at her warily. The Roman Catholic priest said, ‘And what sort of idea do you have of Him?’

  ‘Me?’ She gave a high, gurgling laugh. ‘I don’t have any idea at all.”

  ‘But you must have thought about it. Do you think of Him as a person, an old man with a long white beard up there in the sky? Or as a spirit. . . .?’

  She muttered, ‘This is bloody silly!’ She looked around to see if she was attracting attention and noticed a man staring at her. She called out to him, ‘Do you know about God? Well, come on, join in. That’s what the gospels are all about, aren’t they? Joining, people getting together, two, or three, or four or more.’ There was an edge to her laughter now, the man had turned away and other people were ignoring her; the Roman Catholic priest had given her back question for question. She said to the priest, ‘Never talk to a pro.’ She turned away, repeating, ‘Never talk to a pro. I should have known better than talk to a pro about God.’ She began to make her way through the crowd, not weaving in and out now, but pushing and elbowing, laughing when people turned to protest.

  Mrs. Peters, leaning from her perch on the steps, watched the girl’s progress with as much pleasure as if a troll had suddenly emerged from the marshes and snatched her trade from her.

  ‘What’s this got to do with love?’ the girl was saying. ‘Doesn’t anyone here want to tell me? I’m just asking, that’s all. . . . I want to know what God’s doing about all the people that’s sleeping on the beaches, and under the arches. . . .’ Her voice was flat and monotonous, her statements calculated to provoke. By now she had clawed her way to the foot of the broad, broken pillar that was used as a platform. A man (identified by the rural dean as a lapsed Plymouth Brother now a member of the National Front) was standing there at the moment. She shouted at him, ‘Why don’t they listen to me? They listen to other people here, why don’t they listen to me? I want to tell them about the people who sleep on the beaches and under the arches. Why can’t I come up there beside you and tell them. . . .’

  The speaker took no notice of her. It was obvious from his reaction, and from the way the crowd behaved as though she was invisible, that this was not her first appearance. Vereker, looking around, saw that there were several other of her kind moving about in the crowd.

  ‘Anarchists,’ the rural dean said. ‘Probably from Brighton.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be an idea to give her the platform?’ Vereker asked.

  ‘They tried that.’ The rural dean winced at the memory. ‘She just went on about the people who sleep on the beaches, the people who take the hippie trail across Europe to the East; about people like us who think the hippies are degenerate when really it is we who are finished, but we don’t know it. She put it differently, of course.’

  The speaker who was a member of the National Front was saying, ‘People have come among us whom we find frightening. We ask “Where have they come from? What have we done to deserve this?” I will tell you. They were here a long time ago before the priory was built, in the dark days of barbarism, and we find their relics beneath the earth; but now they are above the earth moving among us. And why? Because for the first time in centuries it is SAFE for them to be out in the open. Yes, I’m talking about you!’ He pointed a dramatic finger at one of the trolls who had been shouting at him. ‘The nuns came and drove out the dark spirits, but a new barbarism destroyed the priory. Now, today, when barbarism threatens us again, the nuns have come back to warn us; to ask us to carry on the fight against the dark spirits. My friends, we cannot afford to ignore that call!’

  His words were greeted with loud cries of ‘Praise be to Cod’ and ‘Allelujah!’ The crowd then sang “Oh Happy Day” and, perhaps in the face of all this talk of barbarism, the three priests joined in with vigour.

  When the singing was finished, the member of the National Front said a short prayer, after which Milo took his place on the pillar. Milo spoke very quietly so that no one could hear what he was saying. Then, at the moment when Vereker thought the crowd would tire of this after the rousing stuff the member of the National Front had given them, Milo put his head back and the most inhuman but beautiful sounds came bubbling from his throat. He raised his arms and spread them wide in a gesture which combined abandon with the most delicate of control, every finger seeming to express a particular joy. The arms curved towards the crowd, holding and embracing them; then, the arms were raised as though making an offering of each and every one of the people gathered here. For a moment, the crowd seemed to hold its breath. Then the woman in front of Vereker flopped down on her knees; the man beside her began to sway from side to side; gradually, sounds rippled through the crowd until the air was filled with a wild, inarticulate babble of rapture and release. Milo turned from side to side, a slim, seemingly frail figure orchestrating this extraordinary doxology. There was nothing coarse, or even distasteful, in Milo’s performance; it was sensitive and delicate to the point of the exquisite. This was the quality for which Vereker could not account and which troubled him. Milo’s was not a “performance” which would normally appeal to a heterogeneous crowd such as this. So what was it that held them? He looked at the boy. The red hair flamed in the winter sun and it was possible to believe him to be one on whom the fire of the Spirit has descended. Yet Vereker himself felt absolutely nothing, he was stonily rooted to the ground while all around people flopped on their knees or held ecstatic arms to the skies.

  ‘It’s sweeping the north, you know,’ the rural dean said gloomily, hunching into his raincoat. He might have been speaking of the plague.

  ‘And can you wonder?’ the Roman Catholic priest asked. ‘Latin and Greek are banished from our services and in our daily speech we have dispensed with Thee and Thou. It’s a terrible mistake, so it is. I’ve told my bishop so many a time. If the people no longer have a special language for God, then they’ll invent one, and this is just what these people are doing.’

  The rural dean bit his knuckles, unimpressed.

  ‘A movement of the laity, that’s what it is. Next thing, they’ll be getting rid of the likes of you and me.’ The Roman Catholic priest dug his elbow in the rural dean’s ribs. He seemed much less concerned than the rural dean. Vereker supposed that the Roman Catholics had been having such a turbulent time lately that gatherings such as this were but a drop in the ocean of their grief.

  A discordant noise ripped through the air, parting the ecstatic exaltations. Someone was screaming in terror. Vereker, looking up, saw Milo standing on the pillar, his face a dripping mess of scarlet. People at the front were probably aware of what had happened, but to those further back it seemed that Milo’s face had been ripped open. Then another tomato was thrown and the spell was broken. The emotional pitch was high, however, and exaltation changed abruptly to a deep rumble of anger. The woman who had screamed was hysterical. Children were crying. A trumpet sounded the first notes
of “Amazing Grace” and gradually people began to sing. It had looked nasty for a moment, but now the danger was past.

  The Roman Catholic priest strolled over to one of his parishioners. Vereker, not wanting to keep the rural dean company, made a pretence of doing the same thing. In fact, the only person he could see whom he knew was Zoe and she was some distance away. He decided to wait for her near the path to Carrick Farm. But it was Tudor and not Zoe whom he encountered.

  ‘The stage has lost a great actor,’ Tudor said.

  The light was fading now and street lights were coming on in the distance. Vereker and Tudor stood together, looking back at the crowd. ‘That was an ugly little scene,’ Vereker said.

  ‘It’s an ugly little world.’

  ‘But something dreadful may happen.’

  ‘Something dreadful has to happen. How little you understand.’ People were peeling away now, but the tight knot at the centre held. Tudor took out a packet of cigarettes and made a gesture of offering one to Vereker. He was thinner than ever. ‘It doesn’t matter what happens on the priory site, or anywhere here on this island. We can’t go on. Our time has run out. Your God’s time has run out. Everything has to be scraped clean to the bone. Then there can be a fresh start. Not for us, of course. We’re finished here in the Western world. That’s the message those hippies on the Eastern trail are carrying.’

  The crowd was falling apart now. ‘Like a lot of maggots,’ Tudor said. A few villagers walked past them, but most of the people were heading in the other direction. Now that the centre of the site was deserted they could see the jagged walls of the cloisters. Vereker thought he could see Zoe walking between the walls. Tudor said ‘I wonder how she feels now that her nuns have been taken over.’