Judgment Day (21 page)

Mum would be back from Spain on Monday and he wouldn't stay with Mr. Porter any more. He'd be going there in the evenings, though, to play Halma and rummy, and they were thinking of making one of those model railway layouts, the ones you do yourself with plaster of paris and then you paint them. Mr. Porter said he'd always rather fancied trying his hand at one of those, and there was room enough in the box-room to set it out. There was
a model railway set, engine and six trucks and eighteen feet of rail, in Bland's in the High Street, marked down in the sale.

He'd have liked to tell Dad about the model railway layout and how they were going to make the trees out of bits of sponge painted green, but he didn't know how to write to him. There'd been another postcard from Mum but she hadn't said when he was coming back. There hadn't been any postcards from Dad; perhaps he was in a place where they didn't have interesting postcards. That was probably why.

*  *  *

The church, all day, is the center of attention. Even those who have never set foot within its doors gather at the gate to stare and cluck; offers of help come from all sides. A man from Spelbury Town Hall who is said to know much about removing graffiti from stonework arrives and inspects. By midday, the glazier is at work. The ruined costumes are piled into the back of a van and the vestry scoured. In the afternoon, an expert from the church restoration firm turns up to have a look at the screen; he squats in front of it, eyes screwed up, contemplating its scars. The police come and go all day. They scrutinize the churchyard and fill six plastic bags with litter. One thing less, Sydney thinks dryly, for me to do.

There will be a service on Sunday, as usual.

All day, Sydney, Clare, George, and Miss Bellingham work. They are joined by Mrs. Harrison and some ladies from the Mothers' Union; John Coggan and Harry Taylor have to go to their respective offices but will return in the evening. Miss Bellingham pops home for lunch and comes
back with more thermoses and a cake baked by her sister. She spends much of the afternoon sorting mangled hymnals and recalling experiences in Deptford during the war, when she and her sister worked twelve-hour shifts at the relief center and people were so marvelous, when there was no slacking and everyone was grateful for small mercies. Her eyes shine and there are red feverish spots on each cheek; she is a little high on calamity, Clare realizes.

Clare, for her part, has dirty marks all over her white trousers and her shirt is dark with sweat. The temperature is again in the seventies and she has gathered up and sorted all the slashed hassocks, some of which can be repaired by Mrs. Harrison and her cronies, meticulously swept the pews of broken glass, scrubbed a part of the nave, checked and disposed of the costumes. She drinks a mug of tea with Mrs. Harrison and finds that Mrs. Harrison's Sharon and her Anna are desk-mates at school; they agree in approval of the teacher but wish the children were doing more maths.

At four o'clock there is a flurry. The Archdeacon has come. George, shirt-sleeved at the altar, picking slivers of glass from between two boards, looks up to see the bustling dark-suited figure, hands outstretched in commiseration. “Ah, Radwell, I came the moment my secretary …” They tour the church together; the Archdeacon beams upon the workers, confers with the restoration expert, has a word with the police sergeant. In the porch, they pass Clare Paling, banging dusty hassocks. The Archdeacon beams again and says it is heartening for the vicar to have such wonderful support. Clare Paling bares her teeth at him but does not reply.

And later, in the still stagnant heat of early evening, it is
decided to put the floodlighting on again tonight, for one last time. A gesture, declares Miss Bellingham. Pity not to get the benefit, says Harry Taylor, while the gear's still all
in situ.

*  *  *

George, coming into the vicarage, was knocked out suddenly by weariness. He went into the study and sat down on the sofa without even putting the light on. His limbs ached. All day people had been asking him things and telling him things and his head was a jumble of what must be done: letters, phone calls, arrangements. What he could not understand was the neutrality of his feelings. Louts had done thousands of pounds worth of damage, some of it irreparable, dished the pageant and with it for the time being the Appeal Fund, and he could feel no rage, merely a shocked resignation. They had no faces, these people; what they had done was as elemental and impersonal as weather–a hurricane, a flood. You picked up the pieces.

He sat in the gathering dark and outside the floodlight went on and the church rose suddenly in the blank space of the window, a golden castle in the sky, turreted and glowing, untethered to time or place. A vision. He sat staring at it; it made him think of those banal illustrations in the children's Bible, angels appearing in a golden sunburst, incandescent Gabriels slung against a starry sky. Clare Paling smiling from the east window of the church, removing her blouse. Promises. Dreams. Today Mrs. Paling had stood talking to him in the chancel, with sympathy in her eyes, and he had heard only one word in ten of what she said and he had not wanted to put out his hand and touch her arm, her thigh.

He was unbearably tired.

“Vicar? You there?”

He must have left the front door open. Mrs. Tanner, monumental in the gloom, stood in the entrance. There was a smell of cooking.

“I said to my husband, I think I'll take Mr. Radwell around a dish of the steak and kidney, they've been in the church since breakfast, he'll have nothing in the house. Your electric hasn't gone, has it?” She snapped the hall switch on. George stood blinking.

“That's very land,” he said. “I must have…”

“Sat there in the dark like that …” She marched to the kitchen. “Ten minutes it'll want, on high, just to heat through again.” She looked at him curiously. “There's a rip in that jacket, did you know? I'd offer to mend it but it looks too far gone to me. Well, what a day. They say there was muck, as well as the damage.”

“Yes.”

“You wouldn't believe it, would you? Well, I'll be off. My husband's walking along to meet me at the corner.”

He put the pie in the oven, went back into the study, into the darkness. He stood at the window. Outside, the leaves of the chestnuts and the copper beech swam in the beams of the floodlighting, multi-colored dancing fish; the church glimmered; children swooped in the shadows, Anna and Thomas, Thomas leaping at the Bryan boy on his red bike, his red bike with the curving handles and high saddle, crying, “My turn! My go now!” And the bike hurtled off again, round the Green, into the darkness at the far side, back again into the floodlighting, past the church, past the vicarage, past Mrs. Tanner stepping massive into the road.

The lorry, coming from the High Street, must have masked the solitary motorbike behind, masked both sight and sound; the lorry, slowing to let Mrs. Tanner across so that the impatient cyclist pulls out, screams ahead, swerves wildly round the trundling figure of Mrs. Tanner, round her and into the bike, the red racing bike, which spins sideways onto the pavement flinging from it a rag-doll shape that goes tumbling into the wheels of the lorry.

Afterward, he could not remember going outside. He had been there at the window with it happening in front of him and then by some unsensed propulsion he was outside on the pavement and Clare Paling was coming out of her front gate. She was saying something: not to him, not to anyone, just to the air. She was saying, “No, no, no. Please God no. Please, please, no.” The driver of the lorry was getting down from his cab and Mrs. Tanner was standing on the far side of the road and someone else was running along the pavement and there was a man on a motorbike, a middle-aged man removing his crash helmet and staring backward.

And Anna and Thomas were standing at the edge of the Green. Anna and Thomas. Thomas and Anna.

Later, he remembered that they stood there for quite a long time. Nobody took any notice of them, after the first minute or two. George looked up and they were still there, frozen in the floodlighting, looking no longer themselves but smaller and more detached, the anonymous children at any scene of horror on a news film, in a newspaper photograph: shocked by the world. There they stood, and suddenly Anna's face turned red and ugly with tears and she ran into the house by herself, making a strange noise, neither a sob nor a scream.

Chapter Thirteen

“They're saying he didn't die quite straightaway. You don't like to think about it, do you? He was alive for quite a bit after. They said he was asking for his mother in the ambulance. It was his back, see, it got him across the back. They said if he'd lived he'd have been paralyzed. I saw the whole thing. I said to my sister, there I was stepping onto the pavement and I turned just in time and I saw the whole thing.”

It must be the morning, then. Somehow the night had gone, as they do, and it was the morning.

“You been on that sofa all night, Vicar?”

Presumably. And in a lot of other places too. He went through to the kitchen and put the kettle on.

“I don't mind a cup myself, if you're making a pot. It's a terrible shock, a thing like that. I've not slept well, not a bit well. My husband had to get up twice and get me an aspirin.”

He couldn't remember where the sugar was kept. He stood staring at the dresser, seeing many things, but not sugar. Wheels and Anna Paling's crumpled face and, for some reason, a part of the wall painting in the church. Not sugar.

“Were you still out there when that Mr. Porter from opposite was walking about the Green all by himself? After the ambulance had gone. Up and down, like that. You'd have thought he was gone a bit funny. Of course, it's not a nice thing to have happen, almost on your doorstep. That lady from down the road came and took him in her house, her with the two little girls. The kettle's on the boil.”

He must have fallen asleep, some time after midnight, and then had woken again and seen the church floodlighting still on and remembered that he had undertaken to switch it off. He went across the empty Green in the tranquil night and turned the switch in the church porch, the apparition was snapped off, the castle in the sky, the golden pile. He looked into the church for a moment, quiet and silent and smelling of detergent and polish, and walked back through balmy rustling darkness.

He attended death once a week or so; had done so for fifteen years. He received the coffin on the chancel steps and turned to the altar with the appropriate words. He stood at the graveside in sun or wind or rain and spoke
more words. He saw people putting on a brave face; or not. He performed necessary rites; the facts of the matter, by then, did not come into it. Once a woman had said bitterly, “Why him? Tell me that, why him?” She had had a little boy in tow, the husband was only thirty-five, George gathered. He'd had to mumble something and turn in relief to an old mother, talking of memorials.

The facts of the matter, this time, were with him all the night; sitting in darkness on the sofa or plunging into dream-racked feverish sleep. He saw the child, the bike, Clare Paling's face livid in the floodlighting, Anna and Thomas. He had never spoken to the other boy; for some reason this troubled him. But he never knew what to say to children.

At one point, when it was all over, he had found himself standing beside Mrs. Paling on the empty pavement. She had turned and they had bleakly looked at each other for a moment and then she had gone into her own house.

*  *  *

Peter said, “I could come back. I could get on a plane this afternoon.”

“No. Don't. Finish what you're doing. We'll see you on Friday.”

“You're sure you're all right?”

“I'm all right.”

“The children?”

“They went to school. It seemed the best thing.”

“Quite. Well, bye then, love. Take care of yourself.”

She put the phone down. It was raining. The day had begun, she had seen it begin, with a liverish yellow sky and thunder distantly rolling and now the rain had come. She
had a curious sensation, stemming presumably from shock and lack of sleep, that the floors were tipping; she walked gingerly about the house, like someone old, pausing to put her hand on pieces of furniture.

She wanted Peter badly, and yet did not. The strength of his presence would perhaps have seen her through, and he would have had the sensitivity to ask no questions, but at the same time she knew she was better alone. It had taken determination to send the children to school. She had longed to keep them by her, their bodies within sight and touch; had known that they must go, that it was essential they went. She watched them trudge off into the rain, wearing plastic macs, scarlet and orange, vivid as boiled sweets.

In the middle of the morning she thought of Sydney Porter and was horrified that she had not already done so. She threw on an anorak and walked across the sodden Green. For a long time there was no answer to her knock. Then at last a bolt rattled, the door opened. He looked at her as though he had never seen her before. “Yes?”