I failed to find her. The grounds were extensive and the woods prevented me from seeing more than a few yards in any direction. Reaching the fallen tree by the lake for the second time that afternoon I wiped the sweat from my forehead, took off my jacket and told myself to calm down. Numerous opportunities to talk to Miss Fielding would undoubtedly arise in due course and meanwhile I was being given more time to consider my situation. I decided to write to Francis.
Yet again he replied by return of post. After the necessary paragraph in which he had marvelled at my clairvoyance he had written: ‘But be careful. The temptation to jump to conclusions will be very strong, but it’s possible that this bag has no connection with the chapel at all; you always said, remember, that it seemed superimposed on the chapel’s reality.
‘I’m relieved to hear that this mysterious woman is unattractive. That eliminates the risk of you being lured into some dangerous romantic fantasy, and personally I’m inclined to think that if she’s of any real significance here, that significance will be revealed to you without any effort on your part. I’m not suggesting that you do nothing until Miss Fielding sidles up to you like an espionage agent and enquires “sotto voce” if you’re interested in a chapel built in the style of Inigo Jones. Obviously you’ll wish to converse with her in order to give the mystery a chance to unravel, but walk delicately, like Agag, and be prepared for the solution to be more obscure than you’re at present inclined to suppose.’
I received this letter in the afternoon post on Monday. I had tried a couple of approaches to Miss Fielding on Sunday but had been rebuffed on each occasion; after matins I had said: ‘What did you think of the sermon?’ and she had replied: ‘I ceased to listen after the first five minutes,’ while during tea I had ventured to enquire: What are you reading?’ and she had retorted: ‘Shakespeare,’ before reburying her nose in a battered volume of the Bard’s complete works.
‘I know why Mr Darrow’s so intrigued by Miss Fielding,’ said the shrewd Mrs Digby after Miss Tarantino had again commented on my interest in the newcomer. ‘She’s the only person here who doesn’t pay the slightest attention to him.’
That, as Shakespeare himself might have phrased it, was ‘a palpable hit’. I began to wonder how far an affronted masculine vanity was exacerbating my curiosity and the speculation was not a pleasant one.
However when Miss Fielding appeared in chapel on Monday morning before breakfast my curiosity reached new heights and I forgot to worry about any unedifying masculine vanity. Holy Communion was celebrated only on Wednesdays and Sundays at Allington, but matins and evensong were recited daily and apart from one or two devout laymen it was the clergy who attended. I was most surprised when I entered the chapel and saw Miss Fielding already seated in a pew; I thought the Warden would have mentioned if she had been unusually devout in her
religious observances for it would have explained her regular patronage of a hotel such as Allington. Choosing a pew across the aisle from her I was aware of her turning her head as I sat down. However her glance was brief and throughout the service she gave no further hint that she was aware of me.
After the blessing I remained kneeling for some minutes, not to pray but to avoid any vapid conversation, and it was only when I judged my solitude to be guaranteed that I rose to my feet to leave.
She was waiting in the porch.
‘Is it my imagination,’ she said, ‘or are we bumping into each other abnormally often? I don’t usually attend weekday matins but I found I couldn’t resist the urge to discover if it would lead to yet another encounter – and here we are.’
‘But since you decided to lie in wait for me, wasn’t an encounter inevitable?’
‘Not at all. If you’d come out with the others you could have stalked by without a word. It’s all very odd – or maybe it’s simply that
you’re
odd, Mr Darrow. I suppose you do realize that you’re like a giant magnet? You enter a room and all the little pins start twinkling and twirling in your direction.’ I laughed but before I could comment she was musing: ‘First of all I thought people were fascinated merely because you’re an ex-monk, but then I became more aware of that very peculiar atmosphere you exude –’
‘Who told you I was an ex-monk?’
‘Everyone from the Warden to the waitress.’
‘How interesting,’ I said at once. ‘I was under the impression you talked neither to the Warden nor to the waitress nor to anyone else.’
‘Then at least you now know I’m capable of speech.’ Abruptly she turned away.
‘Yes, but what I still don’t know is why you’re so keen to remain silent,’ I said, following hard on her heels as she walked out. ‘Do you have to talk a great deal in your profession with the result that on holiday you promptly sink into an exhausted silence?’
As she swung to face me I saw the astonishment in her eyes. What makes you think I have a profession?’
‘Your self-confidence. You’re not shy; you simply have no wish to be sociable. And you have an air of authority too which makes me think you’re used to dealing with people on a business level. Ladies of leisure, who so often can define themselves only in relation to the men in their lives, tend to display more malleability and self-effacement when projecting their identity.’
‘In other words you think I’m just a bossy old spinster unredeemed by any conventional feminine grace!’
‘That’s what you want me to think, isn’t it? That’s what you want everyone to think. But why are you going to such lengths to create an identity which I suspect is a grossly exaggerated distortion of your true self?’
She stared at me incredulously. Then turning her back on me a second time she fled back to the house as if pursued by the Furies.
She succeeded in eluding me for some time after that, but on Wednesday morning we met, taking each other by surprise, in the remotest bay of the library, a corner at the far end of the gallery which flanked one side of the room. I was sitting on the window-seat with a copy of
Lux Mundi
in my hands and remembering how much Bishop Gore had influenced me in my youth. Miss Fielding, apparently also in search of seclusion before embarking on a nostalgic intellectual journey, entered the bay with her battered volume of Shakespeare’s complete works and before she could recoil in dismay I said swiftly: ‘Congratulations on finding the quietest spot in the house. May I offer you half my window-seat?’
‘Thank you, but I’d be too afraid of twinkling and twirling like one of your magnetized pins.’
‘What nonsense! Sit down and read your Shakespeare!’
‘A bit bossy, aren’t you?’ said Miss Fielding, but she sat down.
‘I can’t remember any bossy abbots in Shakespeare’s plays, but there are a couple of very wicked cardinals.’
‘Beaufort in
Henry VI
and Wolsey in
Henry VIII.’
As her eyes widened I knew the fish was hooked. Stealthily I began to reel in the line. ‘My father was a schoolmaster,’ I said smiling at her. ‘His volume of Shakespeare’s complete works was more precious to him than the Bible, and naturally some of his enthusiasm rubbed off on me.’
‘But surely nowadays you only read religious books?’
‘Not entirely. Last week I read a detective story by Miss Agatha Christie. I admired her grasp of the reality of evil but I’m afraid I found the plot improbable.’
‘Life
is
improbable,’ said Miss Fielding. ‘It’s improbable that you should have been so mesmerized by my bag when I arrived and it’s even more improbable that you should have been prowling along in my wake ever since. Will I spoil your fun if I now ask you frankly what on earth’s going on?’
Our voices had risen above the level of a murmur, and below us at one of the writing-tables someone hissed: ‘Shhh!’ Closing
Lux Mundi
I stood up. ‘Come into the garden,’ I whispered, ‘and all will be revealed.’
‘That sounds like a literary marriage between Agatha Christie and Lord Tennyson.’
Numerous heads swivelled to look at us as we left the library and to my surprise I noticed that Miss Fielding’s cheeks had become pink. Perhaps the shyness did exist after all beneath the outer layer of self-confidence. Reminding myself of the danger of rushing to conclusions I said to her as we left the house: ‘Let’s sit on that seat on the far side of the lawn.’
‘I’m not sure I want to bask in your peculiar limelight in full view of all the old dears on the terrace! I come to this place for a quiet life –’
‘An unusual aspiration for a young woman.’
‘What makes you think I’m so young?’
‘Your neck’s unlined. I doubt if you’re thirty.’
‘I’m thirty-two.’
‘Then why on earth are you trying to look forty-five?’
‘Why are you embarking on an interrogation? You’re supposed to be answering questions, not asking them!’
‘Getting impatient? As my superior said to me the other day: “Patience is one of the most difficult of all virtues and one which I think it would pay you to cultivate.”’
‘I shall hit you over the head with Shakespeare’s complete works in a minute,’ said Miss Fielding, and when I laughed she smiled at me.
Providing deep interest to all the guests languishing on the terrace we crossed the lawn and sat down a respectable two feet apart on the wooden seat.
‘Now,’ said Miss Fielding in the tone of one who is determined to stand no nonsense, ‘about my bag –’
‘I’d seen it before in a psychic experience.’
The inevitable silence fell. I waited for the equally inevitable amazement, scepticism, even fear – all those reactions which make the psychic shun the well-nigh impossible task of translating into words an experience which is ultimately beyond translation – but nothing happened. Miss Fielding meditated without expression on the statement which most people would have judged outrageous, and eventually said: I should have guessed you were psychic. For five years I’ve been coming here and everyone has accepted me at face value. Yet you take one look and see a mile farther than anyone else.’ She hesitated before asking: ‘In this psychic experience did you see me as well as the bag?’
‘No.’ I waited, but still no conventional reaction occurred. I was inflicted by no ill-judged questions, no banal comments, no torrent of feminine chatter. Miss Fielding’s face was grave as she stared at the book in her hands but at last she raised her head and said abruptly: ‘You don’t want to tell me any more, do you? It’s too private. But that’s all right, I understand. I’ve got a great respect for other people’s privacy because I value my own privacy so much.’ And without giving me the chance to reply she rose to her feet and walked away across the lawn.
At luncheon I declined pudding, excused myself from my fellow-guests and lurked in the hall until Miss Fielding had abandoned her solitary table.
‘At the risk of making a thorough nuisance of myself,’ I said, waylaying her, ‘may I ask when you can accompany me for another stroll in the grounds?’
‘When? Not if? Here comes the bossy abbot again!’
‘Before I was a bossy abbot I learnt how to be an obedient monk. Name the time and place and I’ll be there.’
‘Somehow I have trouble picturing you as meek and submissive – did you find life very difficult when you entered the Order?’
There was a long silence.
‘Sorry,’ said Miss Fielding rapidly at last. ‘I didn’t mean to give offence –’
‘You haven’t. I was merely surprised. Every layman I’ve ever met has always blithely assumed I took the monastic life in my stride.’
Silence fell again. Then Miss Fielding said abruptly: ‘Let’s meet by the lake. I hate all the old dears spying on us from the terrace.’
‘Five o’clock by the fallen tree?’
She nodded and we went our separate ways.
She arrived on time. That impressed me; women so often feel obliged to be late. She was wearing a floral-patterned dress which appeared to have been designed for a woman of fifty who had lost her figure, and I was wearing my clerical suit. I pictured us both looking irreproachably seemly as we seated ourselves well apart on the fallen tree, and I thought how odd
it was that we should be linked by the far from seemly fact of my clairvoyance.
‘I wanted to thank you for your extreme tact earlier,’ I said. ‘It would have been so easy for you to have made my confession an awkward one.’
‘By showing scepticism? Or resorting to ridicule? No, I leave that to the scientists – the ones who can’t bear to admit they don’t know all the answers.’
I smiled. Then I said: ‘It’s not only the scientists who find clairvoyance disconcerting. It raises questions about the nature of time which baffle even the philosophers and theologians.’
‘Does it?’ said Miss Fielding intrigued, and I knew that once again the fish was hooked. As her defences relaxed I tightened my grip on her psyche.
‘The crucial question,’ I said, ‘becomes this: how can one see the future unless there’s a reality beyond what is colloquially described as reality – an ultimate reality in which all time is eternally present?’
‘That’s the sort of question which makes my head spin. But go on.’
I continued to smooth away her defences as I gently stroked her psyche. ‘You remember, of course, that Plato said time was the moving image of eternity?’