Bilgewater (17 page)

But I suppose father or someone might have mentioned the fact, reminded me that this, almost the first week-end away from him in my life, would include a Sunday and Church, and what had I thought of doing about it. It had not even remotely occurred to me, for while mathematics had not got in the way of faith, Jack Rose had.

Yet upon seeing Jack Rose and Grace's great big bodies all wrapped round each other on his parents' kitchen floor as I balanced on the serving hatch, something took hold of me tightly which I suppose a mediaevalist would call a Discipline. Forgetting the coffee I wriggled myself backwards, went upstairs, put on my coat, found a ten p. piece and made for the front door. I had not the faintest idea where the church was in Ironstoneside but I set out. There was a pad and pencil beside the box for the Dentists' Benevolent and on the pad I kindly wrote “Gone to church. M. Green,” before I stepped out into the street.

The Roses' terrace was on the edge of a block of terraces all Victorian and quiet, with linings to the curtains and edges kept very straight around the lawns. I tramped about these terraces a while then down the hill into red-brick country, a black railway bridge, a terrible dingy hospital with iron gates, and up a rise again towards the clanging of a deadened bell to a massive church whose grimy west door built about 1840 might have let through a double decker bus.

A vast and vaulted icy cave smelling strongly of paraffin was within. Red-roped, all the pews until you got to within ten pews of the fumed oak rood screen were looped off. In these ten long pews about fifteen old ladies sat and inside the rood screen were about seven more dressed in black cassocks and mortar boards like Uncle Edmund's. These, with belligerent faces all turned in my direction (because I was late—it was quite ten past eleven), were informing the Lord of their regret at having sinned in thought word and deed and in what they had left undone.

The church was freezing. The two paraffin heaters wilted and waned beneath the might of the thirty-foot pillars. There were a few electric lights on long strings, two candles on the altar unlit, and an organ which, when it at length drew difficult breath, was like a sigh upon a cold east wind. I knelt down for a minute on a hassock that crackled and had a tuft growing out of a corner. The other members of the congregation were leaning deeply over the pews and did not stir. The vicar as he approached the lectern for the epistle looked briefly and without interest at me and his voice was small and faded away quickly into the spent spaces above his head.

The Gospel and the sermon must have come and gone, the Prayer of Humble Access, the Comfortable Words. I sat on unnoticing. The fifteen old ladies and I tottered to the altar and took Communion and tottered down again. I felt that great wafts of alcohol from the night before still surrounded me and when one of the old ladies staggered on the chancel steps I thought for a moment that she had been overcome by them. At the Gloria I thought the vicar eyed me. He had spotted an alcoholic and he planned to speak to me later at the church door.

Yet all these surface anxieties flowed and floated along, hardly touching the immense preoccupation that swam beneath the wave. All the time, oblivious to the words on my lips which kept them I suppose somehow on the move, I was thinking of Grace and Jack. I was remembering Grace at the pier, and Jack in the park. I was thinking how easy it would have been for Grace to have told me she had been invited, too—how easy for her, knowing—because I was sure that she knew somehow what I felt about Jack—how easy for her with all her conquests, legendary in the past and their absolute certainty in the future, to have left me Jack for just this one week-end. Jack whom I had known and loved so long.

And remembering her dreamy face, I knew that I had been a fool from the start not to see in it the necessity for its universal victory, its thrust for homage and conquest. When we got at last to the Blessing I began to see Grace not even as a human being at all. She was a siren. A water-sprite, Ondine the enemy, cold, uncaring, much beloved.

The choir had filed out, the fifteen old ladies limped off, nodding, depositing hymn books on the font and the organ had fallen into the wheeze that precedes sleep when the vicar emerged from the priest's vestry in a dreary fawn overcoat and clattered towards the chancel steps to turn down the paraffin heaters: but still I sat on.

The paraffin heaters squeaked a bit as he turned the wheel first of one and then the other, and straightening up he said, “Ah. Hullo? Want to see me? Cold day.”

I glowered across.

“No good putting them right out yet. Not till after Evensong. Though we might all go into the chancel for Evensong. Never more than six.”

His voice echoed round the enormous empty church. He came up to me and stood looking down. “New here?” he said. “Afraid there's not much here for the young. Very few young people.”

I still said nothing.

“Are you in some sort of trouble?”

I said no, in a funny voice. I hadn't spoken since last night and I wondered if it sounded ginny. I wondered if he'd think—he might spot that I was—

“I've just got a hang-over,” I said.

“Oh dear,” he said, “what did you drink?”

“A lot of gin and wine. About half a pint of gin.”

“Are you in trouble?”

“No. At least—”

“Why not come back to the vicarage. There's not much. My housekeeper's hopeless but there'll be some beefburgers or something. Plastic frozen peas. And beer,” he said, “I like beer. Beer might cheer you up.”

“I don't think it would,” I said.

“You far from home?”

“Yes. Very far,” I said, “I'd better go now though. I'm supposed not to be here. I'm staying with some people. But thank you. Thank you very much indeed.”

“Don't mention it. I'm sorry. We like a bit of company. I rather seem to waste Sunday afternoons. Big trial of faith this place.”

I looked at him for the first time. His weary face had kind eyes. His hair was white and thin. He was wearing grey woollen gloves like a small schoolboy's. “Never mind,” he said, “Christmas is coming. Are you staying with these people long? Are they nice people?”

“No I'm not,” I said, “and they're not. They're not nice people at all. They are probably the most awful people I have ever met.”

“Well pray for them,” he said. “And so shall I. And for you,” he said, waddling off.

I walked slowly, slowly up the road again, under the railway, past the hospital, slowly away from the grit and the grime of the old town and up the hill towards the Roses' house again. A fat lot of use that'll be, I thought. You can't pray for my trouble. Infatuation, it's called. Being in love. Christianity is supposed to be all about love but it's utterly useless when you're
in
love. There's not a blind thing you can do about being in love it seems to me except sit it out. Jesus said love one another. He said the only commandments that matter are to love God and each other. He didn't say that loving, especially each other, tears you to pieces. Might have been better if he had said
Don't
love one another. Just try and get along with each other and if you feel love coming on go far a long brisk walk like father tells Uncle Edmund.

The trouble with me is, I thought staring again at the pitiless mirror-front of the double-dental villas, “The trouble with me is,” I snarled, thinking of the horrors within and how I detested them all, “is that I've loved people far too much. But not any more. I'm finished with love. I've finished with men. And I've finished with friends.”

A
great party was going on when I re-entered the house and the noise of it was all over the ground floor. You would not have believed that so much could have happened in an hour and a half. I had left a house of the dead, the morning after the night before, a house scarce able to lift its lids. I returned to shouts of laughter, a haze of cigarette smoke, the clink of glasses. Aboout fifteen to twenty people were in the living room—about the same number as had been at church—but these were painted and ear-ringed and collared and brilliant-tied and talking very loudly over each other's heads.

I slunk in among them and stood by the door unnoticed by anybody until Mrs. Rose materialised from somewhere in natural wool and high heels and said, “Oh good—there you are. Come and meet some people,” and I was presented to a man with very watery eyes talking about Harold Wilson and a man in a navy blue blazer and brass buttons talking about bringing back hanging. After a while I drifted elsewhere and someone put a glass of drink in my hand, which I looked at very thoughtfully, and listened to a woman with a high voice talking about the nationalities of the world. The Irish were dirty, the Spanish were lazy, the French were conceited, the Germans were hard-working bur you couldn't help
remembering
. The Swiss were greedy and the Swedes, Danes and Norwegians expected to go to bed with your husband.

“But not if they're
men
,” I couldn't help saying and the woman who was talking to another one very like her with the same hard, fortyish stare and little fine pencil lines in a row going downwards from the nose along her upper lip, though keeping it stiff—the two of them turned on me and took me in. “I don't know that there
are
any au pair men,” said one of them. The other one said, “I say what super beads,” (they were my mother's) and then they both turned away.

People began to shriek off about half past one, the last—the man bent on hanging—ho-hoing about the hall after all the rest.

The Roses and I and Jack eventually achieved the bulbous dining room where ham and salad and mayonnaise and a few of the left over chocolate things in gravy were on the sideboard at about two o'clock. “Hope this suits,” said Mrs. Rose. “It's always cold on Sundays.”

“I thought it always rained on Sundays,” said Jack and they all began to laugh uproariously. “It always rains on Sundays,” sang Mr. Rose. “It never rains but it pours,” sang Mrs. Rose. “Pussy, pussy paws,” said Mr. Rose making a gallant sort of lunge at his wife who gave a coquettish little squeak, curious in a useful three-quarter, and dabbed him with her mayonnaise.

“That'll do you two,” said Jack and gave me a wink. “Drunk out of their minds,” he said. “Are you shocked?”

“Now that'll do, Jack,” giggled his mother. “Don't be silly. We're just having a good time. Bilgewater's having a good time too, aren't you?”

“Where's Bilgewater's glass?” Mr. Rose approached with yet another bottle. “She's no puritan, I'll be bound. Knew her mother. Where's the other lovely? What you done with the pretty one, eh Jack?”

“Oh—she's fine.” He leaned back with a really vast breadth of face and his lip gave a funny curl. I had to look at him. An the time. I simply could not believe it was the same boy as the one who had carried home my books. “She's in bed,” he said. “Tired. Sent apols.”

“Bit of all right,” said Mr. Rose crashing his professional teeth on lettuce. “Quite a dish. Hey Janice, wasn't it her mother—?”

“No, Bilgie's,” said Mrs. Rose. “I knew her at school.”

“Did you?” I heard my voice break in, “Did you
really
?” I sounded considerably harsher and colder than I had expected—or perhaps it was just because of the general merry rout.

Mrs. Rose got up and started pushing plates and dishes through the serving hatch where they were seized by the mystic fingers but not successfully because there was the most almighty crash.

“What-hell?” gobbled Mr. Rose. “Hey Jan! Take it easy! You've had too much.”

“Oh shut up.” She looked red again like last night and flustered. She turned to me and said, “I did know her a bit. She was—” then stopped.

“Did you know her for long?” I said.

“She was—awfully shy,” said Mrs. Rose.

 

“Aw, come on now!” Mr. Rose had not been following. In fact he had not even started out. He was still mopping up the mayonnaise which was Heinz though in a silver dish, with his bread. “Come on folks. Time for some shut eye.”

Shouting and laughing they all made for the door. Mrs. Rose took a quick look at the post-drinks-party sitting room and said “Oh God! Leave it for Mac,” and one by one the three of them went off to their rooms: and I went off to mine.

Grace's room's door alongside was firmly shut. I opened and shut my own door and sat down upon my bed.

I sat there for two hours and I did not stir.

The winter day darkened and still I sat on until I was only a shadow of myself in the glass and the french window turned from grey to dark blue, and at length to black.

I had never seen people drunk before. Not in their homes. I didn't know there
were
houses like this—middle-aged and old people pouring glass after glass of alcohol down their throats till they got silly enough not to know what they were saying nor yet to care. Till they grew oblivious to the other people round them, deluded into thinking of them as eager receptacles of their wit and wisdom.

And Jack so drunk. And enjoying it. And such a fool. Looking such a fool with little spluttery bits of saliva coming out of his mouth like Miss Bex, and that look as if he was trying to control huge indigestion all the time. Parties.

So these were parties.

Though the gin had actually been very nice.

 

The light came on outside the window and stiffly I got up and drew the curtains and without doing my hair or anything I went downstairs and stood in the hall like a ship awash. Then I went into the sitting room where Mrs. Rose was down again and with only a hint of redness round the neck. The friend of my mother.

“Hullo,” she said. “Kills you doesn't it? These festivities! God knows how we all get through Christmas. Hardly December yet. Still—have to keep going.”