Life: An Exploded Diagram (27 page)

He thought, Is this it? Like this, standing up? Is this what she wants?

Then her mouth was smearing away from his, and she was somehow laughing and gasping, “No,” at the same time. She pulled away from him, shrugging her coat off. She spread it on the sand and sat on it, leaning forward, her arms wrapped around her knees. Not looking at him. Distant, as though he weren’t even there and she was lost in a private moment. He felt something that was the comfortable opposite of hope. Then, as if she were alone and getting ready for bed, Frankie flipped her shoes off and reached up under her skirt. She unfastened her stockings and peeled them from her legs. Such outrageously beautiful legs. She stretched them out and fingered the sand with her toes. She felt under her skirt again and fiddled with something. Produced, like a magician, her garter belt, a flimsy-looking thing like the skin of a small black reptile, and . . .

And looked up at him.

“?” her eyes said.

?

So he took his shoes and socks off, awkward, leaning against the slanting wall of the pillbox.

With her eyes on his, she undid her skirt and cast it aside. Her knickers were pink with a white lace waistband. Her belly curved like a question mark up toward the edge of her sweater.

With unsteady hands, he unbelted and dropped his jeans. He somehow got his right foot stuck and had to hop around to keep his balance. She laughed, and he tried to. While he was still struggling, she stood up and ran down to the slow surf and walked into it.

He didn’t know whether to lie on the coat and adopt some sort of seductive position until she came back or to follow her. From this distance, she looked so like a child, in her sweater and pink knickers and her arms held out and the cold, lazy foam separating and regathering around her shins. She turned and called something, words shredded by sea sound and gulls.

So he went to her, his shirttails flapping below his sleeveless sweater, his feet wincing on the stones and broken shells. The coldness of the water was withering at first, then an almost pleasant numbness. Frankie’s arms were folded under her breasts now, and she was gazing out at where the blue-gray horizon was silvered by slants of light.

“Frankie?”

It was like waking her up.

She said, “I don’t believe all this is going to come to an end, actually. It just can’t.”

“Yes, it could,” he said stoutly. “Right this minute some Russian or some American could be pressing a button, and we wunt know anything about it until . . . well, you know.”

She turned her head and looked at him.

“It’s not going to happen.” She said it brightly and firmly, with tears in her eyes.

His heart went as dead as his feet.

“Ent it?”

“No.” Then she smiled. “I love it when you go all pouty. It makes you look ever so young.”

She put her arms around his neck and kissed him, the cold gray water sloshing at their legs.

“Come on, then,” she said, and took him by the hand and led him away from the sea.

“Mr. Hoseason!”

Enoch seemed oblivious to the vicar’s presence. He carried on declaiming the words of Saint John the Divine.

“Mr. Hoseason, sir! What is the meaning of this, this unseemly . . .
exhibition
?”

At last Enoch lifted his eyes and fixed them on Underwood’s. The dark ecstasy in his glare made the clergyman flinch.

“‘I know thy works,’” Enoch recited, his voice grimmer than before, “‘that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.

“‘So because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth.

“‘Because thou sayest, I am rich and have gotten riches, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art the wretched one and miserable and poor and blind and naked . . .’”

Good grief, Underwood thought. He knows the damned thing by heart!

It was clear that he wasn’t going to get any sense out of the blacksmith, so Underwood looked around the circle of Brethren until he caught the eye of Jonathan Eldon, whose denuded head was specked with razor cuts.

“Jonathan, for the love of God! What are you doing?”

“Awaiting deliverance,” Eldon said placidly.

“Deliverance? Deliverance from what?”

“Death.”

Underwood glanced around the square, uneasily. The crowd, though still small, had increased in number. The expressions on its faces ranged from scandalized outrage to coarse glee. There was, unmistakably, ugliness, or the promise of it, in the Sunday-morning air.

Someone called out from the crowd, “They’re waitun fer the Bomb to drop, Vicar!”

There was the kind of pause that precedes laughter, but no one laughed.

Ruth had her hands in the sink, peeling potatoes, when the phone startled her. She peered out of the kitchen window and called George but got no reply. No doubt he was in that bleddy shed of his, with the transistor radio on. She wiped her hands on a tea towel, hurriedly.

“Hello?”

She heard
pip-pip-pip
and the clunk of a coin.

“Ruth? Thas Chrissie.”

Which made Ruth uneasy straightaway. Chrissie Slender was a regular visitor, Wednesday afternoons, sometimes Saturdays, but had hardly ever phoned.

“Chrissie? Whassup, then?”

“Ruth, you better come downtown. Thas Win.”

“Mother? Whatever d’yer mean? Hev somethun happened to her?”

“I dunt rightly know howter tell yer, Ruth. She’re in the square with Hoseason and that lot.”

Ruth felt a chill run through her. The hair on the bedroom floor. Oh, my God.

“Whas she doin in the square, Chrissie?”

“She’re makin an exhibition of herself, Ruth. They all are. I dunt like to be the one that tell yer.”

“Oh, Chrissie!”

“Get you down here, Ruth. An if yer got a spare coat, you bring that an all. Or a blanket or somethun.”

“Whatever for, Chrissie?”

She heard Chrissie hesitate.

“Win hent got hardly nothun on,” Chrissie said. “I’m worried she might catch her death.”

Ruth sat down heavily on the little chair beside the telephone. One of those hot, distancing spasms ran through her, and she clasped her hands on her plump knees until it was over.

When she came back to herself, she thought about Clem. Why hadn’t he come back to tell her what was going on?

She felt an inrush of incomprehension, of being excluded from events. She got to her feet and took off her pinafore and went outside to find George.

Frankie and Clem lay down on her coat in the soft shadow of the World War II gun emplacement. Their wet feet had gathered sand, so that they wore gritty pairs of ankle socks. They kissed, lengthily. She pulled him tight to her but kept her legs together. He pushed her away a little so that he could put a hand to her breasts. They murmured each other’s names when they paused for breath. After a while he thought she might be expecting him to force her, so he slid his hand down between her legs. This did not have the effect he’d desired. She levered herself into a sitting position.

“Oh, God,” she said.

“What?” Clem asked thickly.

Frankie groped under the coat and produced from its pocket a small flat bottle. She twisted the top off it.

“Brandy,” she said. “For Dutch courage. Strictly speaking, Dutch courage should be gin, I suppose. Do you like brandy?”

He was fixated on the little display of flesh between her knickers and the rucked-up edge of her sweater, and the two dimples above her bum.

“I dunno. Never had any.”

Frankie took a swig and inhaled through her nose while swallowing, like someone in pain. She held the bottle out toward him. He sat up and drank. His throat and then his chest caught fire, and he coughed, spluttering spit and spirit into the palm of his hand. She laughed and took the little bottle back.

“Do you have any ciggies? I’d like one. The Condemned Woman Smoked a Last Cigarette sort of thing.”

“Frankie . . .”

“Please, Clem.”

He crawled over to his jeans and fumbled the cigarettes and matches from the pocket. They lit up and smoked in silence for a while. Then she took another swig from the bottle and passed it to him, shuddering.

“No, thanks.”

“You must. You have to have the same as me.”

“Why?”

“You just do.”

He drank, this time keeping the brandy down, and felt a shelf of heat form itself at his diaphragm. When he turned to her, she was smiling and serious. She threw her ciggie away and then plucked his from his fingers and threw it away also. Before he could get on top of her she rolled away, then back to him. Like a conjurer, she displayed something in her fingers that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. A little packet.

“Ta-daa!” she said.

Clem frowned at it. “What’s that?”

“A johnny.” She bit her lip. “Just in case the end of the world doesn’t happen.”

He lifted his gaze to her face. His mouth was hot and dry.

“Where’d you get it?”

“Does it matter?”

“You didn’t get it from Griffin’s, did you?”

“Lord, no. Are you nuts?”

When he continued to goggle at her, she put the thing in his hand and lay back on the coat sacrificially, closing her eyes.

“I pinched it from Daddy’s bedside cabinet, if you really must know.”

She pulled him down onto her.

“If you like, I’ll close my eyes when you’re ready to pop it on.”

We were hopeless, of course. Inept, frantic, silent, shamefully quick. How could we not be?

It’s one of life’s countless little cruelties that you never forget your first time. So instead of forgetting, we have to forgive ourselves, which is a far more difficult thing to do. I’ve never achieved it. But I guess that in my case there were special circumstances.

Anyway, we managed it, Frankie and I. She helped me, showed me what to do. And my response was to suspect her: how come she knew?

But what nearly ended it before it had begun, what almost deflated and unmanned me, was the grotesque fact that we were using one of Gerard Mortimer’s condoms. Even as her marvelous body gave way to me and let me in, I couldn’t help picturing her furious father’s moist mustache.

“Dunt drive into the square,” Ruth said. “Park round the back of the church.”

“I was going to,” George said.

He was tense with the anticipation of shame. He parked the Land Rover on Vicarage Street and followed Ruth through the kissing gate into the churchyard. She hurried past the gravestones and the church porch and out into the square, where she stopped, speechless, and put a hand to her bosom.

“Ruddy
hell,
” George said.

All sides of the square were now lined with people. It was quiet but not silent. A murmuration of onlookers. A voice rising and falling but not pausing. Ruth recognized her almost unrecognizable mother among the circle of robed figures and almost fainted.

“Oh, George,” she cried, and hid her flushed face against his shoulder.

Win’s slumped old breasts and belly and buttocks were clearly discernible through the thin white cotton. Her cropped gray head was lifted, and she was smiling bitterly at the sky with her eyes closed. Her mouth was working silently.

“Christ on a bike,” George said, and, as if in response, Police Constable Neville Newby cycled slowly into view.

P.C. Newby was a large man who believed his physique represented the weight of the law and therefore ate to sustain it. His uniform was not quite correctly buttoned, and he had the look of a man whose lengthy Sunday breakfast had been rudely interrupted. He dismounted, laboriously, outside Cubitt and Lark’s and propped his bicycle against a lamppost. He assessed the situation while removing his bicycle clips, then advanced upon the Brethren, who paid him no attention. He surveyed the circle slowly, nodding to announce that he recognized each of its members. He came full circle back to Hoseason.

“Enoch,” he said loudly. “Enoch, what in God’s name do yer think yer doin?”

Hoseason continued to read from the book.

“‘And he opened the pit of the abyss; and there went up a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.’”

“This wunt do at all, Enoch. Come along, man. I dunt want to hev to arrest you all.”

“‘And out of the smoke came forth locusts upon the earth; and power was given them, as the scorpions of the earth have power.’”

“Dunt you push yer luck, Enoch,” Newby barked, adjusting his helmet, “and dunt call me a scorpion. You take yer people away nice and decent and get yer clothes back on, and I wunt hev to call Norwich for a van to take yer all away. ’Cos I can do that, you know.”

“‘And it was said unto them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth . . .’”

Newby hissed his impatience and turned to Enoch’s brother.

“Amos, what in hell is all this about?”

“The hour is at hand, Neville.”

“Don’t you bleddy Neville me,” Newby said fiercely. “Thas Constable Newby to you, Amos.”

“All office is cleansed away,” Amos said beatifically.

“What?”

Amos said (while his brother announced, “‘And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared for war’”), “We’re doing nothun illegal. Is it against the law to declare our love of the Lord? Or to surrender ourself to his unimaginable mercy? Strip off the trappuns of earthly power, Neville Newby. Take off thy helmut and stand with us. Even at this moment it ent too late.”

By now the constable was so hot with anger that it seemed his abundant nostril hair might spontaneously ignite.

“You ent right in the head.” He glared around the circle of saints. “None of yer is.”

“‘And they had breastplates,’” Enoch declared, his voice rising, “‘as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses rushing to war.’”

“I’ll give yer bleddy chariots,” Newby declared. “I’m off to phone Norwich. If yer still here when they come, be that on yer own head.”

He strode back to his bicycle, but didn’t risk the ungainly act of mounting it in the full gaze of the public. Instead, he marched it back through the square, as if it were a young vandal he’d nabbed by the collar. At the church gates, he caught sight of Ruth’s stricken face, and halted.