LOOK, STRANGER Read online

  Two boys went by, one carrying a guitar. The one with the guitar called out to Tudor, ‘Are you better?’ Tudor joined the boys and they walked together down the lane. Vereker waited until their voices had died away and then he walked towards the solitary figure in the cloisters. The crowd had dissolved and the priory grounds were as he had first seen them, a pastoral scene cluttered with the leavings of the past; and because the past here had been broken into unrelated pieces there was the sense of something more than ancient, of archaic structures to whose identity modern man did not have the key. Vereker walked cautiously between the broken stones, while Zoe waited for him looking composed as though for her past, present and future were held in this moment. When he came to her, she said, ‘I saw you,’ explaining her presence here.

  Vereker looked around him, seeming unprepared for being alone with her in spite of having sought it.

  ‘I’ve been talking to Tudor,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, Tudor. . . .’ She turned her head away indifferently.

  ‘He has stirred up a lot of trouble with all his inflammatory propaganda; but while I was talking to him just now I got to wondering whether something else isn’t at the bottom of it all.’

  She put her head down on the stone and watched an insect crawl between her fingers.

  ‘There is something here,’ Vereker dug his heel in the ground ‘that is destroying him, although he thinks that he is the destroyer.’

  She said, ‘Possibly,’ still watching the insect. Then, without looking up, ‘Did you realize that it was he who damaged the altar and the church window?’

  They were silent. Vereker looked at her face, familiar and yet mysterious. The questions posed by Tudor seemed no longer important and he did not pursue her statement. At last he asked, ‘Do you still see the nuns?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t look for them any more.’

  He took her hand and said, ‘Well, now, let’s just stroll over to the field’s edge, shall we? I’ve never been that far since I came here and I think the light will hold.’

  They began to walk across the grass. The mist was patchy and late sunlight fell on the broken stone pillars in which specks glinted like black diamonds. A seagull glided beneath one of the arches.

  On the other side of the hedge lay the marshland: behind them, the layers of history; ahead a place that seemed as yet untouched. It was like looking into the future, full of possibility and promise, but giving nothing away, offering no assurance of good or ill.

  Vereker said, ‘I’ll be going home soon, but I won’t belong there the way I did before. Things will never be the same again.’

  The sun was low now and in the level light the marshes merged into the sea, a grey-green expanse with no clutter of houses, fields or hedgerows to distract mind or eye.

  ‘Why won’t things ever be the same again?’ Zoe asked.

  ‘For one thing, I won’t be the same. For another, I suppose you never really see a place clearly until you’ve been some place else.’

  They looked across the marshes for a time in silence, standing close, Zoe leaning against Matthew’s shoulder. Soon, the flowers of the marshes would bloom, there would be the rich gold of marsh marigold, the pale lilac of Lady’s Smock, the scarlet Ragged Robin and the wild rosemary; the grass would be greener than it was now, and thicker, so that, although there were paths through the marshes, they would not be discernible and there would be nothing to indicate where the ground was firm, where it was treacherous: a beautiful and dangerous place in which every step would involve a risk.

  Matthew sighed. ‘It’s just that I’m afraid you’ll find Coopers Town very dull.’

  ‘That’s for me to worry about. All you have to decide is what you want.’

  ‘I know what I want,’ he said cautiously.

  She pressed her fingers in the palm of his hand. ‘That will be enough to begin with.’

  She sounded quietly confident, as indeed she was. Life was just beginning, she could feel it moving in her body; it was slow and gentle, but it had a rhythm and the rhythm was insistent. Later, as they walked back across the dark field, she marvelled at the great force that was within her. I am alive, she thought; I, Zoe Lindsay, am alive and dangerous. Is that what you want, Matthew? Oh, I do hope it is what you want.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The news that Zoe Lindsay was to marry Matthew Vereker added spice to the Christmas fare. It was received charitably enough on Christmas Day, but after Boxing Day, when turkey and goodwill were pared to the bone, and the wine had turned sour in their stomachs, most of the islanders agreed that it was at best a ludicrous, at worst, a disastrous match.

  ‘I suppose she had to find a priest to keep all those nuns in their place,’ Donald Jarman observed. A smile creased the flesh around the triangular eyes, but whereas usually one had the impression of laughter bubbling up from deep inside him, this time the merriment was all on the surface.

  ‘Poor Donald!’ Gwynneth commiserated. ‘Did you think you were the only love of her life?’

  ‘I think she could have done better for herself than marry Matthew Vereker.’

  Colonel Maitland, on the other hand, thought that she was not good enough for Matthew Vereker, a sentiment which aroused resentment in his wife.

  ‘Are you aware, Herbert, that your habitual reaction to holy matrimony is that the man is throwing himself away?’ The Colonel busied himself folding his copy of The Times.

  Mrs. Hooper said, ‘And his wife not two years in her grave.’ She spoke as though the late Mrs. Vereker had been a personal friend whose betrayal she had long anticipated.

  The one person about whom Matthew and Zoe were concerned was Nancy; and it was, therefore, a great joy to them that she expressed unreserved approval.

  Nancy was indeed pleased. At a time when she intended to relinquish her charge of her father, a replacement had been found, and she was genuinely delighted that the replacement was Zoe. But in spite of the fact that he was now in good hands, she still put off the moment when she would tell him that she would not be returning to Coopers Town. ‘It’s the words,’ she told herself, ‘I haven’t found the right words yet.’ But really, it was the heart that was not ready.

  The heart was still in a good deal of trouble although Tudor was less at the centre of the trouble than he had been. Gradually, some instinct of self-preservation fastened on those weaknesses in him of which she had always been aware and began relentlessly to destroy his image. She saw that he was neither child nor adult, so he could neither accept a woman’s loving protection, nor sustain the man’s role. This was her salvation and his damnation.

  Yet although Tudor’s importance gradually diminished, the hunger for something in life which seemed to be denied her increased. What was life about? She wanted there to be a purpose, and to find her particular purpose; not a worthy purpose, not something she had to grub away at to make the world a better place, but the thing which would fire her into life. She had wanted to arrive in the adult world like a rocket; but she had no propelling power and sometimes, in the drab anti-climax of January, it was hard to fight the fear that Nancy Vereker was a very ordinary person with an ordinary person’s potentialities, and it was true, what all the clever people said, that you had to accept this and adjust your vision accordingly.

  She made a few minor adjustments. She had discovered that provided she was doing something constructive, she got along very well with people; it was when she was just being social that the difficulties arose. She increased the amount of time that she spent helping Meg Jacobs.

  Meg had acquired another helper in Miss Draisey. In the realm of the underprivileged and the unfortunate. Miss Draisey would never make a good field worker. She was, however, an excellent organiser and, where fund-raising was concerned, she had formidable qualities of initiative and what Meg described as ‘sheer bloody cheek!’ Meg said to Nancy, ‘When you are giving out like I have to every day, there isn’t anything left for the bookwork. But dear old Geneviev
e responds to the profit and loss on an account sheet as if she is reconciling a broken marriage.’ The fact that she had a sympathetic and uncritical listener in Nancy made it easier for Meg to accept Miss Draisey’s efficiency.

  The weather in January was mild and the meetings on the priory site continued. It was a wet month, however, and because of this people parked their cars as near to the site as possible instead of using the official car parks. Residents complained that their driveways were frequently blocked, that their normally quiet neighbourhood reverberated with the banging of car doors, that people threw litter into their gardens and lowered the tone of the area by standing around gossiping after the meetings. ‘What will it be like in the summer if this goes on?’ they asked.

  Worse was to come. The trolls camped out on the island and their numbers increased. They lit fires on the beach and roamed up and down the seafront shouting obscenities, so that residents were afraid to allow their children to go anywhere near the sea. When the police turned the trolls off the beach, they took over some of the derelict property in the fairground area and even the squatters were afraid of them. During the day, they trailed around the shopping centre or draped themselves on the pavement. Mrs. Peters, and those who were homeless because they hadn’t got a place to live as distinct from not wanting one, resented the trolls bitterly. There were several angry exchanges in the shopping arcade and on one occasion windows were broken and the police had to be called in. When the miscreants came up before the magistrates, one of the trolls stood up in the gallery and said that England was a Fascist state and the chairman of the magistrates was acting under instructions from the Special Branch. When the police (who had rather enjoyed the remark about the chairman of the magistrates) came to restrain him, he climbed onto the balcony rail. No one believed he would jump, but in fact he did; he stepped out into space quite nonchalantly as if it was of no concern to him whether he broke his own or another person’s neck. It was not a high balcony and he did not hurt himself, but he created panic among the people sitting below and heightened the feeling of insecurity which had gripped the islanders.

  The crusade which Tudor had started was taking an ugly turn, but he refused to condemn the growing violence. When Vereker spoke to him about it, he said with quiet bitterness, ‘My days of speaking out are finished. It gets you nowhere; I’ve learnt my lesson.’

  ‘What kind of a lesson is that?’ Vereker was angry. ‘You are letting other people do your fighting for you.’

  But Tudor could no longer summon the passion for a fight; direct confrontation must be left to others now. He shrugged his shoulders and said bitterly, ‘I should lose my job if I got in a fight; jobs aren’t easy to come by these days.’

  Surprisingly, one person who persisted with peaceful protest was Mrs. Peters. Day after day she paraded through the market and the shopping arcade, causing considerable embarrassment to shoppers but keeping always on the move and restraining her language so that it was difficult to decide what law she was breaking. A person can’t be arrested for talking out loud, even if people don’t like what she is saying. Certainly, the shoppers did not like it when Mrs. Peters shouted, ‘That’s a nice little girl you have there. Madam-you. Madam with the purple hair. Have you got a nice house. Madam, a nice house to live in with your little girl?’ She would walk on past several stalls, so that she could not be accused of harassing the Madam with the purple hair, before she continued. ‘Keep an eye on your little girl. Missus with the smarty pants. Don’t let her out of your sight. If anything happens to her, they’ll take your little boy away from you as well.’ Then on briskly to the secondhand clothing stall where she inspected the items, shouting as she did so, ‘Once you’re on a losing number, it’s all up with you. “From those that hath not, even that which they have shall be taken away from them.” That’s what the Bible says, and it’s true. God doesn’t forgive the losers. Don’t look so shocked. Admiral,’ shaking a finger at an elderly man in a navy blazer, ‘I’m only witnessing to the truth of the Bible.’

  ‘Drat the woman!’ Colonel Maitland’s wife said to Zoe when they met in the market. ‘If we all handed our houses over to her kind tomorrow, in five years’ time they would be homeless and we should have found somewhere to live.’ She beckoned to the owner of the fish stall and pointed to a piece of haddock. ‘Where was that fish caught?’

  ‘Beautiful fish,’ he said. ‘Fresh and. . . .’

  ‘I daresay; but I don’t want any fish that’s been caught off the West Point where the sewage pipe comes up.’

  ‘It troubles me when I think how fortunate I have been, living all my life at Carrick Farm,’ Zoe said.

  ‘I don’t know about fortunate; I expect you’ve paid for it ten times over in taxes.’

  They parted soon after this and Zoe went to the estate agent and told him that she had decided to take Carrick Farm off the market.

  ‘I think I should leave the house to Tudor,’ she told Matthew. ‘He can use it to try out his ideas about a commune for problem families.’

  Vereker only half-listened to what she was saying. He was concerned about an article in the local paper. The writer of the article said that during the last year life on the island had changed in such a way that unless drastic action was taken “we may find that we have seen the last of life as we have known it here – quiet, peaceful, some might say dull, but a life free from the violent excesses which are part of the life of many of the large towns on the mainland.”

  Vereker went to a group discussion in the house of his parishioners, Mr. and Mrs. Hanley. There were several young people there, including Milo. To Vereker’s surprise, the man who was a member of the National Front was there, too; Mrs. Hanley whispered to Vereker that her son had invited him. ‘We don’t really approve.’

  Someone mentioned the article in the local paper and Mrs. Hanley, avoiding her son’s eye, said that perhaps the meetings on the priory site had contributed to the increased violence.

  ‘How can that be?’ The National Front man had a high-pitched, staccato voice which although not pleasant had a hypnotic quality. ‘People come with their kids. Our movement starts with the family, right where Jesus started. True, it has attracted trash; but we shall get rid of the trash.’

  ‘We shouldn’t try to convert them?’ an earnest girl suggested. ‘We have to begin in a small way. Helmsley Island is our immediate family. The English people are our extended family. You have to get things right in your own family before you can take on anything else. Jesus came for the Jews, they were His family. When the Canaan woman wanted a portion of what He had to give the Jews, He said, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” ’

  ‘The Canaan woman did not go away unanswered,’ Vereker said.

  ‘He said, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” ‘ The man held up a stiff cautionary finger. ‘That is the important thing. We shouldn’t wince from the things He said which seem harsh to us. There are times when it is right to take a line which seems harsh. We shouldn’t flinch from it.’

  ‘What in particular shouldn’t we flinch from?’ Vereker persisted.

  ‘There are words we’ve allowed ourselves to be brainwashed into being ashamed of using – morality, standards of conduct, values.’ The lips moved faster but the expression did not change, it was like watching a puppet speak. ‘The Church has been very weak, meddling with things it doesn’t understand, whoring after Marx, canvassing the immigrant vote, and failing to assert its authority over things which really matter.’

  ‘Such as morality, standards of conduct, and values?’

  ‘You see, you can’t bring yourself to speak the words without a sneer. No, no, don’t try to justify yourself, my friend, you sneered! And so do they all, the arrogant intellectuals, the trendy bishops, they all sneer. But that’s not how the people feel, the real people of this country who have been stifled for so long want morality, standards of conduct, and values; they want
to be masters in their own house.’ He gazed at Mr. Hanley who looked uncomfortable. ‘So, we start with the family and work outwards. When you have a united family, you have a disciplined society, a society that wants law and order so that people can walk in the street without fear, day or night.’

  There seemed to be signs of disunity in this particular family and Vereker felt that he was increasing the tension by his presence. He left the meeting early. To his surprise, Milo, who had been very quiet, decided to leave with him. There was no reason why they should have taken the long way home across the priory fields, but Milo turned in this direction and Vereker fell into step beside him. They walked in silence for a few minutes, then Milo said, ‘All right, then; I admit things aren’t turning out the way I hoped.’

  ‘What did you hope for, Milo?’

  ‘You said in one of your sermons that our world is a dim reflection of God’s Kingdom, that we ourselves are dim reflections of the complete person He will have us be. I wanted people to get that message, to see that we had a whole new continent to explore within ourselves.’

  Vereker kicked a stone out of the way, not best pleased to have his sermon quoted back at him out of context.

  Milo said, ‘When I came down here that night I had such an extraordinary feeling as though a misted glass had cleared and the world was radiant. It was something outside time and I knew that I was outside time, too. There was such joy, such unimaginable joy!’

  Vereker said drily, ‘And now?’

  ‘Now!’ Milo stopped close to the great hooked pillar. ‘It’s all gone dark again. So what do I do? I started this; am I supposed to call it off at the first sign that it’s going sour? Is that what you do when people misunderstand what you are saying to them?’

  There was a deep regret in Milo’s voice; but whether it was for a lost pagan delight or for a spiritual experience he had had in this place, Vereker did not know. But whatever had happened to Milo, and whatever he might do from now on, Vereker was convinced that some change had taken place in the boy and that Milo was frightened by it.