Judgment Day (20 page)

She observes herself with a certain cynicism: a woman of thirty-five, handsome in her way, charged with undirected energy, a fatalist and insufficiently charitable. In another age, she thinks, there would have been a vocation for a woman like me; I could have been a saint, or a prostitute.

*  *  *

The banner, reaching almost the length of the churchyard wall, was slung from a lamppost to the branch of the big yew. It said, “Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Laddenham: Ninth Centenary.” At the lych-gate was a poster on a board, giving the times of the three performances of the pageant. The apparatus for floodlighting the church
was mounted on one of the telephone poles at the side of the Green. These three unfamiliar arrangements contrived to give the whole Green an air of carnival: everything was subtly changed. Attention was focused on the church so that instead of squatting apologetically behind the churchyard wall it appeared to have grown; the Amoco garage, in turn, seemed smaller and shabbier.

In the evening, the evening before the first performance, when the floodlighting was switched on for the first time, this effect became even more pronounced. Around the Green, the houses glimmered. The garage harshly shone. But the church was suspended golden in the night, a faery creation not of stone but the very stuff of dreams, detached from time and place, fabulous. The children, intoxicated with the unreality of it all, wheeled about the Green shrieking and yelling in the darkness. Anna, dashing into the house, cried, “Come and see, Mum! You must come and see. It's
beautiful!
It's the most beautiful thing I ever saw. It's as beautiful as the stage when we went to the ballet.”

Sydney, standing at his kitchen window, was reminded of the lights coming on in Piccadilly after the war. The cheering, the faces upturned to rippling red and green and gold electric bulbs. Then, too, a known landscape was transfigured, transmogrified. He looked now at St. Peter and St. Paul and saw it hang in the night like a ship against the black globe of the sea. He saw the children capering under the chestnuts on the Green and wondered about calling the boy in: it was gone half past nine. But then he saw Mrs. Paling come out of her garden gate and walk purposefully across the road, returning after a minute with two small dancing figures behind her. Moments later he
heard his own front door open, and he put a pan of milk on the stove.

From the window of George's study, the church appeared to be trapped in a great shaft of light, indeed to be, perhaps, itself some reflective trick of the light: a mirage. He found the effect both compelling and disturbing and sat for a long while at his desk unable to take his eyes off it, not knowing if he found it vulgar or ethereal. He was reminded of garish souvenirs at Catholic shrines: postcards of St. Bernadette at her cave, lit up like a Christmas tree. And at the same time there came the memory of fascinating childhood storybooks in which magic, glowing castles beckoned from misty landscapes, mysterious with promise.

“Isn't it beautiful!” cried Anna, turning at the door for a last look. “I wish it was always like that.”

And Clare, standing for a moment before closing the door, saw a building bathed in fiery light, lacking only a Blakean God to point an awful finger at them all.

*  *  *

At midnight George, who is operating on a rotation system with Sydney Porter and John Coggan, turns off the switch. The apparition vanishes and the Green settles down to sleep.

The church, dark and empty in the small hours, is poised for action. Cables hang like torpid serpents or are tucked away under pews; the spotlights, precisely adjusted, stare blindly down at the altar, at the pulpit, at the point in the nave from which the Cromwellian soldiers will drag the renegades out into the churchyard to their death. In the vestry, the men's costumes are hung where George's surplice and the choir's gear would normally be:
these have been temporarily put away. The women are to dress in the vicarage and make their way as unobtrusively as possible across the Green and in by the west door. There is a row of muskets propped against the hymn book cupboard and a top hat slung jauntily above a stack of nineteenth-century agricultural smocks: the muskets, of course, are mock-ups and the smocks made of a lightweight synthetic fiber guaranteed to minimize discomfort. The real thing would be heavy and constricting.

In the nave, the thirteenth-century foliate mask, which has seen a thing or two in its time, gazes stonily at the stereo and loudspeakers which will provide the music. The church is silent now, except for those creakings and saggings peculiar to an old building, as to an old body.

Presently, at about one-thirty, these stirrings are enlarged by other sounds: there is the tinkle of breaking glass and the click of a window latch being opened.

*  *  *

Sydney was in the nave, heading for the vestry, before he realized anything was wrong. There'd been nothing in the porch to tell you, nothing at all. He'd unlocked the door as usual, looking for nothing because expecting nothing, walked past the font and the central pews, turned to go toward the vestry, and stopped because there was wet under his feet; wet, and something else—brown, sticky. And then he looked up and saw.

Saw the aerosol paint on the pillars and all over the capitals and the foliate mask and the font. SHIT and WANKERS and things he couldn't read that trailed off into loops and blots. Saw the screen and the altar rails pitted with cigarette burns like old-fashioned poker work.
Saw the broken glass on the altar; the east window starred and cracked. Saw now what was on the floor. Saw the slashed hassocks spewing stuffing everywhere and the heaps of shredded hymn books and the smashed spotlights and the cables ripped from their fittings.

And then he smelled scorching. He went into the vestry and saw the pile of costumes on the floor, ripped and paint-spattered and faintly smoking. He saw the systematically broken muskets and the top hat trampled to fragments. He stepped through glass to close the window. He filled the big brass flower jug with water and poured it onto the smoldering heap of garments, turned them with his foot and poured on another jugfull. They'd made a bad job of that, the sods; it took a right charlie not even to be able to start a fire properly.

Then he went out into the churchyard and wiped his shoes on the grass, to and fro, to and fro. He was shaking all over, he realized.

*  *  *

Clare looked first for the Doom painting. No one had said anything about that. She wandered through the debris, the glass, and the mangled hassocks and the leaves from hymn books, and stared up at the crossing arch. Not touched, thank heaven. Heaven? Well, thank whatever or whoever is appropriate. Intact for another few hundred years, let us hope. Why didn't they have a go at it? Too high? Too dingy? Well, thanks be anyway.

She had stopped in the churchyard to talk to a policeman investigating the long grass at the foot of the wall.

“Will you catch them?”

“Hard to say. We'll do our damndest, but”—the man
shrugged—“they don't leave you much to go on. Could be from Spelbury; could not be.”

“Why on earth did none of us hear anything?”

“Because they left the bikes round in Pound Lane or somewhere like that, came over the wall, broke the vestry window, and in that way. Once inside—well, there'd have been a fair bit of racket but I daresay it wouldn't carry outside that much.”

“They've been here before, I suppose people have told you that?”

The policeman nodded. “If it's the same lot.”

“It's appalling,” said Clare. “It never occurred to any of us … I suppose we should have had someone guarding the place.”

The man prodded the grass, retrieved a cigarette package, put it in a plastic bag. “In the end, you're a bit helpless with this kind of thing. It's like fate, there's not too bloody much you can do about it.”

Harry Taylor, John Coggan, and George were moving about the shattered church, gingerly, shell-shocked, it seemed. Sydney Porter was swabbing down the floor with mop and bucket. Miss Bellingham, brisk and businesslike as some relief worker in the wake of calamity, was gathering litter into a pile. She said to Clare, “Ah, there you are, Mrs. Paling. Well, I suppose one could have seen this coming, in this day and age. I'm wondering if we couldn't salvage a few of these hymnals, if one of us got down to it with some Sellotape.”

The men were talking in hushed voices—a curious contrast to the stridencies of yesterday's rehearsal. Harry Taylor said, “I suppose conceivably if we all worked like the devil all day … And if the costumiers could…”

“They can't,” said Clare. “I've already rung them. Not a hope.”

“Then that's that, I suppose.”

“We shall have to refund people who've already bought tickets.”

They stared at the paint-daubed pillars. Clare thought of medieval churches, ablaze with color. John Coggan said, “It strikes me now, too late in the day, that there would have been insurance cover…”

“The policies are all up to date,” George interrupted. “I checked right away. The people we've always dealt with are…”

“I didn't mean the church's insurance. I meant insurance against cancellation of the pageant.”

“Ah. Well, of course that seemed such an outside contingency.”

“Nothing,” said Clare bitterly, “is an outside contingency.”

They were united in outrage, all incompatibilities shelved. Miss Bellingham came up. “Cup of tea. I filled a thermos as soon as I heard, to bring over. I thought, it's going to be all hands to the wheel, we shall need this. My sister and I did volunteer work at one of the London evacuation centers. Of course, none of you people are old enough to remember the war.”

George Radwell walked away into the chancel. After a moment Clare followed him, a steaming plastic mug in her hand. He seemed a man deflated; he had stood in silence through much of the discussion about what had immediately to be done. Now, he was staring at the glass-strewn altar. The embroidered cover had been efficiently and systematically
ripped with a knife; the wooden candlesticks lay on the floor, snapped in half.

Clare said, “How very Cromwellian.”

“Mmn.”

“It's hard to understand if this land of thing is deliberate venom, or just pure mindlessness.”

He had been thinking of Stoke Newington, where once disaffected members of the Youth Club had scrawled graffiti on tombstones and robbed the offertory box. You thought you were immune from that sort of thing in Laddenham. In Stoke Newington, the vicar had traced the culprits and talked earnestly to them for hours; a boyish, enthusiastic chap he'd been, a keen football supporter. His wife was a dark wiry girl who'd seen all the latest films and gave spaghetti suppers in the vicarage. “Do come, George,” she used to say, always as an afterthought. “The more the merrier.” She had the same long sinewy legs as Clare Paling. Mrs. Paling's legs, today, were shrouded in white cotton trousers. She was talking now about the aerosol paint on the stonework and the need for specialist advice on its removal. She handed him a mug of tea and he looked through the spiraling steam at the smashed window and noted that she had sought him out, that she had come deliberately to talk to him, that her voice had a different tone.

The tone of pity, he thought. She is sorry for me. He stood there drinking the tea in the midst of destruction and it struck him that never before had he known the church so filled with goodwill. Not at Christmas nor weddings nor christenings. Did it take so much to create that? Did you have to smash stained-glass windows and abuse ancient stone to make people well disposed toward one another?
He looked at Mrs. Paling, who was examining the candlesticks and asking to take them home to mend with some miraculous new glue; she had a flowered shirt above the white trousers and her face was screwed up in concentration as she tried to fit together the pieces of candlestick. Miss Bellingham and Sydney Porter were maneuvering a sheet filled with debris out through the porch; “Mind now, dear,” Miss Bellingham was saying. “Don't catch yourself on that nail–that's the way …” By the pulpit, Harry Taylor and John Coggan quietly conferred.

Clare looked up from the candlesticks at George Radwell. He is not, she thought, taking in a word I am saying. His slightly protuberant blue eyes gazed vacantly into the mug of tea; the hand that held it shook a little. She said, “It'll be all right, you know.”

“What?”

“It'll be put right, in no time at all.” She gestured toward the window, the altar, the nave. “It looks disastrous, but it'll be put right in no time. You see. The place is more resilient than that. It's infuriating about the pageant–the Appeal–but that too, it can be made up.”

He was trying to find somewhere to put the mug. She put out her hand. “Here, I'll give it back to Miss Bellingham.”

“Thank you.”

“I'll go and start on the vestry,” she said. “The costumiers want to know just what the losses are, for the insurance.”

“Ah. Yes. Good.”

She hesitated. “You're, er, all right?”

He looked at her. People were not usually solicitous about him; certainly not people like Clare Paling. She
must, he thought, be confusing him with the church itself. “I'm all right,” he said.

*  *  *

People had got into the church in the night and spoiled all the things for the pageant and smashed windows and written rude words on the walls. Nobody was allowed in. There was a policeman at the lych-gate and only the vicar and Mr. Coggan and people could go in. Thomas had got into the porch and seen through the door before someone told him to go away and he said there was fuck in big letters like on the fence by the school playground.

Mr. Porter had found it. He had come back all white and angry and Martin hadn't known what to do. He stood around feeling it was his fault, like he used to feel it was his fault when he heard them arguing downstairs, Mum and Dad. He felt as though really he had done it and presently policemen would come and say, “Martin Bryan …” And then Mr. Porter looked up and said, “Better get along to school, son.” Outside, there were policemen, but they weren't interested in Martin; he rode past on the bike and saw them hunting about in the churchyard and he knew it was nothing to do with him and it was silly to feel it was his fault.