A Particular Place Page 3

  ‘What is troubling you, Mrs Flack?’

  ‘I lost my man in the war.’

  The sharpness of grief was long past and Michael groped in vain in his rag-bag of comforts for an appropriate response. He watched the branches of a tree moving unconcernedly outside the lady chapel window. Mrs Flack went on, ‘Reported missing over Germany. I waited and prayed to God to bring him back to me, but He never did. And Mr Messer that was here then said I ought to be proud because Ted had laid down his life. And I was proud. But now the young ones, they laugh about the war when they see the films on telly.’ She sucked in her breath.

  Michael said, ‘Young people will always mock the sacrifices of the older generation, Mrs Flack. The student rebels of today will be the butts for tomorrow’s wits.’

  This epigrammatic reflection failed to speak to Mrs Flack’s condition. ‘It is not just the young ones, is it, Vicar? Their teachers encourage them. And then you have people like Mr Hughes who doesn’t care about what happens to his country and he goes on playing the organ in this church.’

  ‘But I think Mr Hughes would say that it is because he does care about his country that he collected signatures for that petition.’

  ‘In front of the war memorial, with all those people wearing funny clothes and carrying skulls. It upset me, Vicar. And I’m not the only one who feels it. Mrs Mallory said she was amazed to see it was that communist at the organ; she said she could hardly believe her eyes.’ If Michael’s memory served him aright, Mrs Mallory’s eyes were so dim she could not have identified Joseph Stalin at the organ. He said, ‘It is very wrong of Mrs Mallory to say that Mr Hughes is a communist just because he has certain views on nuclear disarmament.’

  Mrs Flack turned her head away. ‘I knew it would be no good speaking to you.’

  Michael felt pity for the old woman. He could understand how shocked she had been to discover that the enemy had invaded the one place where she might reasonably have expected to find herself in the company of people who shared her values. But what could he say? He was very much of Mr Hughes’s mind.

  Outside, traffic snuffled, waiting while a police car, banshee siren wailing, weaved its way down the high street. Mrs Flack gathered herself for departure. ‘I don’t know what the world is coming to. But I’m glad I won’t live to see it.’

  ‘Perhaps I could come and talk to you sometime?’ he suggested. ‘It doesn’t matter, Vicar. I know you’re busy, settling in, altering all the services.’

  ‘Not too many alterations, I hope, Mrs Flack?’

  ‘Well, we’ve Benediction now, haven’t we? But I expect I’ll get used to it.’ She had nerved herself to speak to him, but had anticipated defeat.

  ‘It was very sad,’ he said when he recounted the incident to Valentine when they ate their sandwich lunch. ‘No one has ever regarded her opinions as of much importance and I suspect her feelings have been dismissed along with her opinions.’

  ‘What could you have done? Even I can tell that it would be a blasphemy to reject a man who plays Bach so superlatively just because his politics offend a few people.’

  ‘Even so, I think we should bear in mind that while we may regard vigils at war memorials as a means of protesting about the waste of life in war, to people like Mrs Flack they may seem to be the desecration of a grave.’

  ‘You may be right. So, you stop people from using the war memorial for protest – are you then going to object to all the glorification that goes on on Armistice Day? I don’t think the Rector would go along with that. I can imagine him standing there weighed down with medals.’

  ‘Mmmh.’ He rapped the table with his knuckles, contemplating the war of attrition which might lie ahead of him.

  Valentine said, ‘Might it be an answer to tell Mr Hughes? After all, he did complain that the death masks and skulls were more appropriate to a Hallowe’en party than a vigil. He might be able to mollify Mrs Flack.’

  ‘How sensible.’ He pushed his chair back from the table, ready for the immediate demands of the afternoon. ‘By the way, Mrs Flack rather suggested I had made too many changes.’

  ‘You have made quite a few.’

  He looked surprised. In some ways he was very obstinate. If he saw things which he felt needed to be done he did not regard them as changes. Now he said, ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. She mentioned Benediction. If she doesn’t want to come she needn’t . . .’

  ‘She thinks you are heading them all towards Rome.’

  ‘They have had the Angelus for as long as Mrs Flack can remember. If that hasn’t tipped them over to Rome, Benediction won’t.’

  ‘It’s another step on the road.’

  ‘What nonsense. Whenever anyone suggests something they don’t want to do Anglicans cry “Rome!” just as Labour diehards shriek “Thatcherism”.’ He got up. ‘I must be off . . .’ He checked himself. ‘I quite forgot. I parked the car in that cul-de-sac at the back of the builder’s yard.’

  The cul-de-sac was deserted, but the Vicar’s approach was observed by a youth in one of the town houses. He put his head to one side and mouthed words, affecting a clownish imbecility as he pantomimed a response to clerical do-gooding. As the Vicar walked past the front door, his expression changed first to incomprehension, then to incredulous delight. He turned towards the room, clenched fist pressed, knuckles outwards, to his brow in a pose of exaggerated penitence.

  After a few moments the front door of the house opened and a woman emerged. In face and figure she epitomized the plump, good-natured matron who arrives on the scene of an accident knowing exactly what has to be done. It was apparent from her conspiratorial manner, however, that on this occasion she was less sure of her role. She approached Michael Hoath with all the trepidation of a producer about to suggest yet another rerun of a badly performed scene.

  ‘This isn’t your car?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is.’ They stood side by side regarding the windscreen on which had been scrawled ‘Balls to you – you illiterate oaf!’

  The woman said, ‘Oh God! I should have looked at the number plate.’ Her body was convulsed by a tremor which was rigidly suppressed before it found facial expression. She gnawed her lip, round face crimson. The youth was by now hanging out of the window, hand cupped to ear.

  ‘Why?’ Michael Hoath asked.

  She essayed an explanation accompanied by gestures which showed her to be no mean pantomimist. ‘It’s the man from the Do It Yourself Shop. You know who I mean – him with the rolling gait and roving eye. He parks outside the garage so I can’t get my car out. When I put up a “no parking” notice, he wrote “Balls” on the garage door – in purple.’

  ‘People like that are annoying.’

  She nodded her head emphatically. ‘They are more than annoying. I could cut off his balls and fry them for breakfast.’

  ‘Oh dear, yes, I do see.’ He was beginning to sound the more harassed of the two. The youth at the window swayed from side to side in an ecstasy of mirth. ‘I don’t think I can drive it home like this, do you?’

  She gnawed her lip some more, then said reassuringly, ‘Wait here a moment.’ She went indoors where her voice could be heard saying, ‘And if all you can do is make those horrible faces, just go away. GO AWAY!’ She returned with a bottle of methylated spirits and a roll of kitchen paper. ‘I feel so awful.’

  ‘No, no, really . . . Here, let me . . .’

  They dabbed at the windscreen, apologising to each other. Later, she asked him in for a cup of tea.

  ‘I don’t usually entertain in the kitchen,’ she assured him.

  The sitting-room, through which she led him, gave little evidence of facilities for entertaining. It was a sparsely furnished room in which he noted a television in one corner and a tape recorder on the one armchair. There was no bookcase and a calendar hung askew was the only wall adornment. An ironing board was set up on the rug by the fireplace and clothes, sheets and towels were strewn on every flat surface except the floor which was given
over to a collection of flints and fossils.

  ‘I insist on some sort of order,’ she said. ‘We keep our obsessions for our bedrooms; at least –’ she kicked at a flint – ‘that’s the idea.’ In the kitchen a small shelf had been erected perilously close to the electric stove and glancing at its contents Michael was surprised to see, instead of the cookery books he had anticipated, volumes by Tolstoy, Willa Gather, D.H. Lawrence and Edith Wharton.

  She said, ‘My father was a librarian. I don’t know what he’d make of things nowadays. There’s nothing in our library worth reading. It’s got to the stage where you have to buy books.’ Michael supposed she felt a need to justify this extravagance – in his experience the books on the kitchen shelf were the very ones which most libraries did have; it was the better modern fiction which was usually in short supply.

  While she was talking and making the tea, a youth appeared in the doorway. He was tall, but bent at the shoulders, and with hands that hung as if they didn’t know where to put themselves. The face had the look of having just come to the surface of a pool, still blurred by water, the features contorted with the effort of holding breath. He looked from his mother to the Vicar. It was difficult to tell whether his attitude was protective of his mother or dependent upon her. Michael thought he was possibly subnormal and his heart sank – this was not an affliction with which he had ever been able to cope very well.

  ‘He’s going to be an anthropologist,’ the mother said with complete lack of conviction. ‘So we all have to live with Neanderthal man and such of his artefacts as Desmond can lay his hands on.’

  ‘Palaeolithic, in fact.’ The voice, although hoarse and rather strained, was unexpectedly incisive. Michael was aware of his vision making those adjustments which take place – accommodating eccentricities of appearance and behaviour – once evidence is received that a brain is well in charge. The boy’s face, now focused more sharply, was seen as slablike, with long, flat bones; the eyes were heavy-lidded and the big mouth exposed the fleshy underside of the lips. It was a face both sensitive and sensual, presenting Michael not only with a personality full of contradictions, but a certain rawness which always made his old scars itch. ‘Neanderthal man,’ the youth was saying, ‘is only one species who was around for some one-hundred thousand years. But Mother likes the word.’

  ‘I liked William Golding’s The Inheritors,’ she said, pouring tea.

  ‘And she liked William Golding’s The Inheritors.’ A wry grimace accompanied the dry repetition which had no need of this embroidery.

  ‘Did you like it?’ Michael asked.

  Desmond sat down at the table and hoisted one foot across his thigh, picking at the sole of his shoe while he considered this. He was, in every way, centre stage. The room was not large enough to accommodate three people with comfort and Michael was wedged into the space between the sink and the refrigerator. He rested one elbow on the top of the refrigerator and tried to appear at ease. Desmond said, ‘I thought the picture imagery was clever enough. But there’s one moment in that book about New Mexico . . .’

  ‘Death Comes for the Archbishop,’ his mother said.

  ‘. . . when this bishop gets caught in a storm in the mountains and his Indian guide takes him into a hidden cave that only the Indians are supposed to know about. And he puts his ear to a cleft in the rock and hears the roar of a great underground river no living man has ever seen. I thought that got closer to the primitive than Golding got in the whole of The Inheritors.’ He spoke with resentment of Golding, as though he had trespassed on forbidden territory.

  Michael, having failed on Golding and not having read Death Comes for the Archbishop, said, ‘I remember enjoying those programmes – on Troy, wasn’t it – with Michael Wood?’

  ‘He was talking about civilizations.’ Desmond picked him up sharply. ‘It’s all right, I suppose, if you like that sort of thing. Although all that throwing his arms about distracts the viewer from what he is actually saying, if anything.’ At this point he hitched up one shoulder, seeming to scratch his ear against it. ‘I tell you what I did enjoy, though – Peter Ackroyd referring to one of those TV gurus fumbling through the centuries like a mad bingo caller.’ He clasped his hands under his knees and rocked to and fro in delight. The performance was not only embarrassingly gauche but ill-executed, and he nearly overturned the chair.

  Michael got the impression that the sharpness of mind served as a blade to parry any attempt at penetration. He was not so sure that the grimaces and gestures were a conscious device. They added nothing to the effectiveness of the comments and he had an uneasy suspicion that they were involuntary.

  ‘It must be an absorbing study, anthropology,’ he said tentatively when, having righted himself, Desmond had slouched out of the room.

  ‘For him, perhaps. But it’s not much joy living with someone who doesn’t seem able to take an interest in anything post stone age.’

  When he returned to the vicarage in the early evening Michael re-enacted some of these exchanges for Valentine’s benefit and they laughed together as they had not done for a long time.

  ‘She was rather a jolly young woman,’ he said. ‘It seems her husband left her to go to Canada and she and the children were to follow. There was some sort of trouble between them and they were hoping to make a new start. Then she discovered he had settled there with someone else. The boy, Desmond, is going to university next year; so he has rather too much time on his hands. There is a girl of thirteen.’ Yet he describes this woman as young, Valentine noted, and was the less amused.

  He said, ‘It was obviously very disturbing for the boy – the father’s desertion. Apparently they were very close. She said he was such an open, trusting little boy . . .’

  Valentine saw that there were tears in Michael’s eyes. She sighed, ‘Oh Michael, not another case of rejection!’ He turned his head away and Valentine reflected crossly on how people do nourish the little wounds of childhood. Hester had once told her that Michael’s father had been rather remote with his son so that the death of the adored mother had come as a great blow. In Valentine’s opinion, adoring anyone was a mistake; it was unwise to make such a costly investment. But Michael would never understand that. She said, ‘Well, I trust you are not going to involve yourself with this family.’

  ‘I got on rather well with the woman. She said she would come to church.’

  ‘As a penance for besmirching the car windscreen?’

  ‘No, she said she was always meaning to come but never got round to it.’

  Valentine looked at her husband speculatively. A foot shorter and I shouldn’t have married him, she thought. And what a fool I should have been – he has weathered so much better than the other possibles. Her eyes followed him as he went over to the telephone pad, bending his head to read the messages she had scribbled on it. ‘Why phone me because the church hall is double booked? Laura Addison is supposed to handle bookings.’ She saw how wirily the fading brown hair still sprang from the crown of his head and was surprised by an itching in her fingers. She clenched her hands. Weathering suited Michael; it was quite possible that he would attract a much younger woman. Despite the son of university age, the creature could still be the right side of forty.

  ‘We have this women’s discussion group tonight,’ he was saying. ‘I hope you will come. You know how I value your comments.’ ‘My comments are invariably negative, often unkind, and they usually upset you.’ She wondered whether he had invited the creature to join the group.

  ‘Darling, anything you say is for my own good. I am eager for myself, not sufficiently aware of other people’s feelings. You act as a necessary brake.’

  ‘No, not a brake, Michael. When I told you that people don’t like too many changes in the services, you didn’t seem to hear, let alone change gear.’

  He was no longer listening. He was making a performance of going through his pockets for some mislaid notes. ‘I know I jotted a few things down on the back of something . . .’


  She looked out of the window, considering the wistaria which darkened the room and reflecting that it was not unknown for a sensitive man to make a fool of himself over some rustic Marilyn or Marlene.

  ‘I’ll come and see what goes on,’ she said.

  When he left to read the evening Office she went into the garden. It was a bright evening and the few wraithlike flecks of cloud vanished as one looked at them like ghosts disappearing with the sunlight. The garden had been much neglected recently but some unknown incumbent, years ago, had cared for it and a few interesting shrubs had withstood subsequent deprivation. The wistaria against the side of the house needed to be cut back and along the garden walls clematis and winter jasmine fought for possession with honeysuckle. It would take time to restore order, but she had a picture in her mind of what she hoped to achieve and she was prepared to work hard.

  She forgot the time and it was late when Michael returned having remained overlong in the church. Valentine was annoyed. They usually had their main meal in the evening and she disliked having to rush her preparations.

  In the sitting-room of Hester Pascoe’s house the tabby cat looked reproachfully at the empty grate. Hester said, ‘You’re not the only one to be inconvenienced. I could do without this meeting.’

  The truth of it was that she could have done without her nephew. Had Michael Hoath not been the vicar there would have been no question of her giving up the precious hour which was set aside for reading through the morning’s output. She had lived all her life in this town and had fought a long, dour battle to order her days to suit her needs. A single woman, working at home, she must keep a firm hand on the reins of her life. It was particularly annoying that, at a time when she was trying to come to terms with old age, her nephew, Michael, should arrive here. At a distance, she had always been sympathetic about his problems but she had not wanted him to bring them to her doorstep. ‘It’s for you I am doing this,’ she said to the photograph of her sister which stood on the top of the piano.