Authors: dorin
she remembered was the horse with Ingrid Bergman being carried off on it. Descending she
paid the tonga wallah off. There were still a number of people arriving. Next week, perhaps
on Thursday, she would be here with Mr Turner. She hoped he wouldn’t be too much of an
intellectual. It would be nice to talk to him about the common or garden things that had
always interested her: films and plays and popular music. “I am an indoor person, I suppose,
Mr Turner,” she would tell him. “It was impossible to enthuse about such things in India in
my day, because they weren’t recognized as proper subjects for enthusiasm, precisely
because they were indoor things. That makes me very middle-class, doesn’t it? The upper-
classes and all the people who like to think of themselves as upper-class, are never happy
unless they are competing at something in the open air, living what they call a full life. But in
these indoor things I can recognize my own life and through them project and live so many
lives, not just the one I have.”
She smiled and nodded at the Singhs, went in and this time chose a pew near the back and
knelt and prayed.
She could be anything and anyone she wished. Within the darkness of her closed eyes and
enfolding palms she was suddenly—how strange—Renée Adorée running after the truck
taking Jack Gilbert away to the front in
The Big Parade
, one of the few old silents she had
seen. Another was
Seventh Heaven
, which the girl like Clara Bow had taken her to. The twins
took her to
The Big Parade
because it sounded a manly film and, she supposed, they had never
got over what they called the disappointment of just missing the Great War and were
compensating for the missed opportunity to have shown themselves fine fellows. They
teased her afterwards for crying when Renée Adorée clung on to Jack Gilbert’s hands and
then his boots as the truck carried him and his comrades away, and then had to let go
because she couldn’t keep up, and there had been that lovely shot from the back of the lorry
showing her receding into the distance, alone and forlorn on the muddy road. She hated the
twins for teasing her and she’d hated them for sniggering during the scene in the shellhole
when Jack Gilbert didn’t shoot the wounded German soldier but was good to him and then
started raving about the horror and brutality of war. “The poor mutt’s only been at the front
five seconds,” David had said in a voice loud enough for people to say Shh! She’d hated
them for laughing at Jack Gilbert, not because of Jack Gilbert but because of Toole and the
fact that Jack Gilbert’s doughboy uniform had electrified her with a recollection of Toole.
She uncovered her eyes and resumed her seat, waiting for the service to begin.
Toole had been her first sexual object. She had woken to him, been woken by him, simply
by sitting in the back of the Rolls which took them from the Hall to the Church at Piers
Cooney each Sunday in those glorious summer holidays of 1919, 1920 and 1921, when she
was 14, 15 and 16, and the boys nearly three years older. She had become aware of the back
of Toole’s neck as she’d never been aware of anything before in quite the same disturbing
way. And she hadn’t been able to understand why the twins made such a joke of Toole’s
name: such a secret private joke; but every time they addressed him as Toole she knew the
joke was being shared again between them.
In the old days at St John’s in Pankot, leaving with Tusker and other officers and wives in
strict order of precedence, while the rank and file of British soldiers on station, enduring
church parade, had kept their seats to let the gentry leave, she had seen, sometimes, a Toole
among them, and carried him away with her in her imagination, as she had without quite
knowing why carried away Toole or been carried away by him all those years before.
Toole had been Sir Perceval Large’s batman-driver in the war. The twins said it must have
been a cushy billet because Uncle Percy (as they called him) had never been to the front. In
her heart Lucy disagreed about the cushy billet. She was sure Toole had fought and suffered
before becoming Uncle Percy’s servant and resented not being sent back to the trenches but
instead forced to drive Uncle Percy’s staff car and clean his boots until the Armistice
brought them both back to Piers Cooney.
Toole was a local man, the son of a ploughman on one of Uncle Percy’s farms. She sensed
from the back of his neck that he was also resentful of the fact that the war had not changed
his condition of servitude much, but that driving was better than ploughing or labouring and
that he was glad of a job that gave him the chance to exercise a skill acquired as a soldier and
at a time when jobs were scarce anyway.
He drove with immense care and assurance. So it seemed to her. When he was not driving
he could be seen in his shirt-sleeves in the stable-garage, under the car or bent over its open
bonnet, endlessly cleaning and polishing. In the August sunshine the gleaming coach-work
of the motor dazzled her. Inside there was never a speck of dust or a stain on the buff
corduroy-covered upholstery. The windows were as clear as if there were no glass. These
things she noticed, but mostly she noticed Toole, up front, clad in a brown uniform that had
a high tight collar with buttons at the front and seams at the back that spread and broadened
from waist to shoulder; a uniform that fitted him so closely that it struck her that he must
find it unbearably hot and uncomfortable because his neck and his gloved hands, which she
knew were brown, suggested a preference for exposure to sun and weather.
He seldom spoke. The twins asked technical questions about the car which she didn’t
understand and which he answered briefly in words equally unintelligible to her but
obviously to the twins’ satisfaction although they laughed at his accent too, and were always
trying to get him to pronounce the word cylinders. They spoke to him in that haughty young
gentleman’s way which was a combination of the carefree and easy-going and the arrogant.
She believed he guessed that for them the word cylinders, pronounced with a Somerset
richness, was as much a joke between them as his name, which they were always using.
Occasionally he found ways of avoiding the word. Toole was no fool. She sometimes felt
coming from him, too, a controlled contempt—not for her, to whom he was always gracious
and courteous (opening the door for her and leaving the boys to make their own way out)—
but for the twins, and at a different level for the three of them who were, he must have
known, only the children of a poor relation who had been employed at The Hall to try to put
some ginger into the sickly son, to train him to withstand the rigours of Eton during the
illnesses that sent him and brought him back from one preparatory school to another, so
that apart from the holidays he was often at home during term, in their mother’s care. Toole
was old enough to know the Little children’s history, aware and alert enough to realize that
the summer holiday for the three of them was his master’s charity towards a distant female
cousin who had lived under his roof and then, her task completed, made a respectable
marriage with the curate and who if subsequently unblessed by fortune had at least produced
two strapping sons of her own and, as an afterthought, a dainty little girl, all three of whom
would benefit from the kind of summer holiday their father could not easily afford and
which perhaps was granted by Uncle Percy as a memorial offering to the sickly son who had
been their mother’s charge and who had endured Eton, done well at Oxford, and died in the
trenches.
The writing of Christmas and birthday letters to Uncle Percy had been one of her earliest
disciplines. Presumably Mumsie hoped for some lasting advantage from the connexion, but
there was none, and 1921 was the last holiday in Somerset. Uncle Percy, long widowered,
died the following Spring and the estate went to a nephew who was not interested in the
Little side of the family. Lucy did not regret it. She was almost glad. The 1921 holiday had
begun beautifully but ended horribly. Midway through it Toole was suddenly no longer
there. An older man took his place—a nasty common little man, smarmy, obsequious but
also insolent. Toole’s disappearance was a mystery because it was not discussed, but she
overheard the twins talk.
There had been a girl, a local girl. Toole and she had been what the twins, shying from the
word love, called soft on one another. But the girl was “a cut above him”, a farmer’s
daughter, promised by her father to the son of another. The girl had wanted to marry Toole
and Toole wanted to marry her. They had both disappeared, although not together. Years
later, the kinder of the twins, Mark, whom she found one day mooning in the orchard over
the loss of the latest girl he and David had vied with each other for but who had been seen
off by Mumsie who thought no girl good enough for either of them, said, “Remember
Toole?” and told her how Toole had got his girl into troublé (“Sorry, Luce, but you’re old
enough to know what I mean”) and promised to marry her. Toole had a little flat above the
stable-garage, a decent wage, a decent job, a decent employer. They could have been happy,
perhaps moved on to better things because the motor business was booming and there was
nothing Toole didn’t seem to know about motors.
He had gone one evening to face the family but the girl wasn’t there. She’d been packed off
to a relation in Cornwall. The father and the father of the man she was promised to, and the
man himself, had set on Toole, beaten him up and dumped him unconscious in a ditch a
mile from the village. He’d probably lain there for hours. When he got back to the Hall he
packed all his things and in the morning faced Uncle Percy. It was mid-month but he
wouldn’t take a penny of the money owing him because he was letting his employer down by
going at once and not giving notice. He was going to Cornwall to look for his girl. Then he
just went and that was the last anyone ever saw or heard of him.
“I hope he jolly well found her,” Mark said. “I hope they went off together. I’ve often
wished I had his guts.” She said; “How did you find out all this, Mark?” He said, “That
rotter who took his place told us. And what a rotter he was. Grinning and putting his hand
on your knee and telling you not to get involved with girls. Oh, Lord. Sorry, Sis.”
And he got up and went; went, went, as Toole had gone, gone. It was the last of the few
intimate conversations she had with Mark, who was in Insurance, but spending his weekends
with David (who was an accountant) bent over the open bonnets or under the chassis of
what they called flivvers acquired on the cheap from richer friends and which they were
making good for Sundays when they roared out of the vicarage, two hulking young men of
nearly thirty, on their way to keep appointments with the girls Mumsie always disapproved
of and made unwelcome; and roared out one Sunday too often, never to return, finding their
own Passchendaele in a pile-up between their flivver and another.
“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy
Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen.”
“Amen,” Lucy said. The service was over. It had passed her by. She had gone through it
automatically, rising, kneeling, singing, or just sitting quiet remembering Piers Cooney. After
the blessing Father Sebastian held his position. His arms were folded across his chest. No
one dared move until he moved. The silence was intense. Suddenly there was a strange
sound. Father Sebastian smiled, held up one hand, and as he did so a note blared, a true and
singular note, an authentic note that took her breath away because it was by her so long
forgotten. A wind seemed to stir through the congregation.
The organ was playing. It was playing music she recalled but couldn’t name. An anthem, a
voluntary, pealing and pealing away. There were falterings. The organ hadn’t played for a
long time. But it played. She peered. The piano was abandoned. So it must be Susy who was
up there in the old organ loft.
When the music reached a climax Father Sebastian took up the great cross and, holding it
high came down from the sanctuary and paced slowly down the aisle to the sound of the
organ and the murmurs of the amazed congregation who bowed and bobbed and dipped as
he went past them on his way to the West door.
He stood in the porch, holding the cross in his left hand, shaking each hand with his right.
The organ still played. It took her a long time to get out of the church.