Judgment Day

Also by Penelope Lively

Fiction

GOING BACK

THE ROAD TO LICHFIELD

NOTHING MISSING BUT THE SAMOVAR AND OTHER STORIES

TREASURES OF TIME

NEXT TO NATURE, ART

PERFECT HAPPINESS

CORRUPTION AND OTHER STORIES

ACCORDING TO MARK

PACK OF CARDS
:

COLLECTED SHORT STORIES 1978–1986

MOON TIGER

PASSING ON

CITY OF THE MIND

CLEOPATRA'S SISTER

HEAT WAVE

BEYOND THE BLUE MOUNTAINS

SPIDERWEB

Nonfiction

THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST
:

AN INTRODUCTION TO LANDSCAPE HISTORY

OLEANDER, JACARANDA
:

A CHILDHOOD PERCEIVED

A HOUSE UNLOCKED

Copyright © 1981 by Penelope Lively

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

First published in 1981 by

Doubleday and Company, Garden City, New York

Printed in the United States of America

All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Material on pages 91 and 92 from the
Good News Bible.

Old Testament: Copyright © American Bible Society 1976.

New Testament: Copyright © American Bible Society 1966, 1971, 1976.

Extracts from the Authorized Version of the Holy Bible, which is Crown Copyright, are with permission.

FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lively, Penelope, 1933–

    Judgment day / Penelope Lively.

       p. cm.

    ISBN 9780802197382

    1. Church architecture—Conservation and restoration—Fiction.

  2. Women—England—Fiction. 3. Pageants—Fiction.

  4. Villages—Fiction. 5. England—Fiction. I. Title.

    PR6062.I89J8 2003

    823'.914—dc21                                    2003041759

Grove Press

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

03  04  05  06  07  10    9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Chapter One

First of all, the place.

Laddenham. A village long detached from its origins, dormitory satellite of an expanding country town known for light engineering, London overspill, and an intractable traffic problem. Its name hitches it still to a past. That, and a few buildings lingering here and there amid Wates and McAlpine estates, bulbous thirties semis, Victorian terraced cottages and seventies “executive-style” developments. A muddled place—its associations incoherent, its strata confused. Ugly for the most part, but shot here and there with grace: an avenue of old limes, a Georgian house
in the High Street, a cottage-lined alley offering a slice of blue-distanced landscape. The church.

The church. St. Peter and St. Paul. Perilously sited, nowadays, beside the Amoco garage, its gray stone extinguished by lime green and tangerine plastic bunting flapping along the perimeter of the adjoining forecourt. On the other side, the George and Dragon's car park presses up tight against the churchyard wall. Cigarette packets and crumpled crisp bags twinkle in the long grass around the gravestones. The effect of this juxtaposition is that what must once have seemed so large, so solid, so impregnable, now squats small and a little apologetic: a pleasing anachronism, of architectural interest. Time has juggled the order of things.

The church's own chronological confusion, of course, is absolute. Airy Dec. east window, sterner Perp. to right and left, Victorian stained glass, Norman tympanum over the west door—uncouthly carved whale and Jonah from an age when symbolism came in pictures, not in words.

In a literate age, the symbolisms are more obscure. The Doom over the crossing arch, for instance, the fourteenth-century wall painting that is the church's glory and surprise, puzzles members of the congregation today. Those queerly bundled figures on one side, their form barely discernible (the plasterwork has not been restored}, those other gray statuesque forms sitting up in, apparently, bathtubs. Those red monkeyish things with—toasting forks, could it be? Angels to the left, sinister and spectral figures to the right; a rising or a falling; a golden glow (despite the faded pigments} or a dark writhing obscurity. In any case, the whole thing is very difficult to make out and perhaps uncomfortable if studied in detail.

George Radwell, the vicar, coming into the church on a June morning, was surprised to see a woman standing in the nave staring intently at the painting. A tall, bony young woman with stringy brown hair wearing jeans and a cotton jersey, a stranger, he thought, no one local, until she turned and glanced at him and he recognized the thin face and large mouth of the new woman next door, the one with the white mini and two children and a husband said to be something important at United Electronics. She stood there in a shaft of sunlight, bathed in gold like a stained-glass Virgin, bared her teeth at him in, apparently, greeting, and turned back at once to the painting.

He cleared his throat. “Ah,” he said. “You must be, er …” and she paid him no attention at all. He was dismissed.

Clare Paling saw a sandy-haired man hovering at the doorway, a man of forty odd with the papery red skin of the very fair, blinking and shuffling and somehow inspiring distaste even at that range and on a translucent summer morning. Oh lor, she thought, the vicar of course, him from next door, and sweetly beamed before returning to the painting.

George took four steps left to the font and fiddled with the cover. Mrs. Paling continued to study the Doom. He went over to the organ and shuffled the pile of sheet music. Then he marched down the nave and launched into conversation. Disastrous, as it was to turn out, conversation.

Ah, he said, you must be Mrs. Paling, my churchwarden mentioned, Sydney Porter, lives in the corner house, possibly you've come across, also I've noticed the car, nice to have children around, not that I've been twitching the lace curtains, don't think. He laughed; the silly, snorty laugh
that always came when he was least sure of himself. Settled in all right, I hope, he continued, very friendly place Laddenham, quite a bit going on one way and another, madrigal society meets at, er, flourishing adult whatsit classes I'm told, cricket if your husband plays, thought he looked as if possibly, anyway sure you'll find plenty, lot of redecorating I expect, these big Edwardian houses, vicarage badly in need of, know the area already perhaps?