Miss Hargreaves (17 page)

I suppose now is the place to tell you something of the daily routine of my life. It centres round the Cathedral, of course. Matins every morning, except Mondays and Wednesdays; Evensong every afternoon, except Wednesdays, at four. ‘Plain day’, we call Wednesdays, which means that the services are said, not sung. On Sundays–Matins at eleven, when all the County big-wigs swarm up in their cars; Evensong, without sermon, at three-thirty, attended solely by people who come to hear the anthem; then an extra Evensong at six-thirty, which is what you might call a town service, when we have a lot of hymns, tubas from the organ and a straight-from-the-shoulder sermon.

I only had to go to the Sunday evening service every other week. It always bored me. What were called supernumeraries flowed into the choir stalls; dreadful people who hadn’t a note of music in them. As the Dean was hardly ever there, nobody cared how they behaved. The boys used to read bloods or play tip-up during the lessons and sermon. Once there was a craze for cards. A pack of cards came sliding down one evening from Rapley’s stall and lay scattered about on the ground in front of King John’s dark old tomb in the centre of the choir. Meakins was leading Canon Padge up to read the lesson. It was a dreadful moment. Old Padge looked stonily before him as though nothing had happened. I remember he trod on the ace of spades. Nobody had the courage to remove them or could even look at them directly while the lesson was being read. Meakins wisely waited till the
Magnificat
had started.

If I hated that Sunday evening service, I hated the stuffy Sunday morning service almost as much. The truth is, cathedrals aren’t meant for crowds. The less people you have in them, and the less chairs, the better. Even if you don’t find people and chairs, you find tombstones and monuments to old generals or bishops nobody has ever heard of. It’s all a great mistake. If I were a dean I’d do something about it. But deans aren’t what they were.

The times when I really loved the Cathedral were weekdays when you could look right down the great nave, seeing perhaps only one tripper creeping from pillar to pillar with a guidebook, a vigilant verger stalking him and ready to net him if he so much as sneezed. In winter you’d see nothing at all except the light from one gas-globe plunged smokily into the remote and vast darkness of the nave roof. Then you really felt that Evensong and the Cathedral
meant
something. Heralded by old Dyack and his pitch-pipe, Tallis in the Dorian Mode would float down the aisles; a motet by William Byrd weave its intricate pattern upon the dark silence. At such times I believe we all felt, even the boys, a relationship to the great roof that soared away above us and to the wonderful old monks and people who’d built it all, and wrote that glorious music, centuries ago.

The usual handful of queer people regularly haunted the Cathedral. Amongst them was Colonel Temperley, who had a very roving face and a very purple nose. The boys called him the Purple Emperor. He loved music, this old buffer; particularly jammy things like the oboe solo in Stanford’s
Nunc Dimittis
in A major. At such moments he would weep; you expected him to roll right down the nave in his ecstasy. Afterwards, he’d tip any of the boys who cared to dog his footsteps, a half-crown or two.

Then there was Miss Linkinghorne. I am told by a friend that you can find a Miss Linkinghorne in every cathedral in the United Kingdom. But I like her so much I am going to put her in. She was an elderly lady whose outstanding eccentricity was to dress always in the colours of the Church’s seasons. During Advent and Lent she would wear purple, which was very suitable; but then would occur Whitsun or a Martyr’s day, and lo–she would appear in scarlet. In the long Trinity period, from about June to November, she was decently garbed in shades of green; at Easter, Christmas, All Saints and such major festivals, she blossomed out in white or cream. At Easter, adorned also with primroses, actual and artificial (I believe she somehow connected Lord Beaconsfield with the Resurrection), this purity of costume did not appear incongruous. But I never thought the effect was so happy on Christmas Day when she contrived somehow to make herself look like a snowman. She was very thorough in all her colour schemes, carrying it down to such details as gloves, handbag, even handkerchief. In the hall-stand in her house were five parasols: white, purple, green, red and black (for Good Friday, not rain). She talked excessively of Jerusalem, and once a year had the choristers to a party which had become the season’s best joke.

Dear Miss Linkinghorne! My heart goes out to you–and to other persons, less noteworthy–canons, minor canons, choristers, vergers, bedesmen and lay-clerks–who almost daily were to be found in Beauvais’ ancient building. I could tell stories of all of them; stories that would not be believed. How old Canon Hepple, for example, wandered up to read the Litany with a mouse-trap trailing from his cassock. But this is the history of Miss Hargreaves, not of Cornford Cathedral.

One Saturday afternoon towards the end of September, I came out of a cinema with Henry, Marjorie and Jim. Marjorie and I had patched up our quarrel and I was in a very light-hearted mood. The film had been a comic, and we were all talking about an absurd hat which one of the female characters had worn.

‘Nowadays,’ I said jokingly, as we turned into Dumper’s for tea, ‘girls haven’t the courage to wear something out of the way like that. You’re all fettered by fashion.’

‘If we did wear such hats,’ said Marjorie, taking me seriously as usual, ‘you men wouldn’t be seen dead with us.’

‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘I’d be proud to be seen out with you in something really original for a change. Girls are all too much alike.’

I winked at Henry, who was ordering crumpets and tea.

‘That’s right,’ he agreed cheerily. ‘You want to learn to brighten things up a bit, you girls. That’s what you’re here for, anyway. Pity you didn’t study Miss Hargreaves more.’

There was an uncomfortable silence. I glared at Henry and studied the menu card. Connie’s name hadn’t once passed our lips in the last week or so. It was mad of him to revive her again just when people were beginning to forget her.

‘How about having some meringues,’ I began.

But Jim, who really never could get her knife out of Miss Hargreaves, said bitterly, ‘To hell with Miss Hargreaves!’

Of course that set me off. Certainly, to hell with her; but not at Jim’s behest.

‘There’s not the slightest need to be unkind about the poor old thing,’ I said.

The tea and crumpets came. In a few minutes the conversation had swept me along against my will and we were all arguing hotly. It was utterly maddening. I didn’t want to talk about Miss Hargreaves. But I never could bear to hear her attacked.

It broiled up to a proper row.

‘You’re absolutely potty about her,’ said Marjorie. ‘I call it rather indecent the way you went on. I was sorry for her.’

‘I don’t need you to be sorry for her!’ I snapped. ‘Anyway, I’m not a little bit potty about her.’

‘Oh, yes, you are! Just because you won’t talk about her that doesn’t mean to say you’re not always thinking of her. I know perfectly well when you’re thinking of her. A sort of soppy air comes over you.’

‘You screamed her name in your sleep last night,’ said Jim.

‘It’d be a good thing if you kept your ear away from my bedroom door.’

‘Of course,’ remarked Marjorie airily, ‘you’re really peeved to death because she’s gone away and not written to you.’

I laughed scornfully.

‘What piffle! Why, if I wanted her back, she’d come back. I don’t want her back. I’m glad she’s gone. I made her go, anyway. And as I did it solely for your benefit, I’d be grateful if you’d stop nagging.’

‘Oh, so I nag, do I?’

‘Nag! You’d nag the wool out of the woolsack.’

‘I wish you two would shut up,’ complained Jim. ‘Everybody’s looking at you.’

So they were. And listening. When we stopped talking the room was as quiet as the North Pole. Henry rose and went to the pay-desk to settle the bill. I followed him moodily.

‘You do get sizzled up about Connie,’ he said irritably.

‘It was mad of you to bring her name up like that,’ I told him.

‘It slipped out. Anyway, that was no reason for you to get so worked up. You just don’t seem able to keep calm where Connie is concerned. It’s ridiculous.’

‘I can’t help it, Henry. Somehow, I simply can’t bear her to be attacked. I believe I’d give anything to see her again. Just once so as I could know she was really real.’

‘Whistle and she’ll come to you, my lad,’ remarked Henry lightly.

We all went out into the street and stood watching a flame of sunset over the market buildings. It made me feel rather ashamed of myself. Sunsets always do.

‘I’m sorry, Marjorie,’ I said.

But she was chillily silent as we walked home. I tried to talk lightly; to pretend we hadn’t really quarrelled. I stuck my hands in my pockets and whistled casually in the way one does when trouble is near at hand. I sometimes think that that fellow who faced the fat bulls of Bashan closing in on him must have known a thing or two about whistling.

I shan’t forget Michaelmas Day that year. It was a beautiful afternoon, very warm. The great west doors were wide open at the bottom of the nave, and through them, firing the thousands of chipped colours in the mighty window that Cromwell had smashed, streamed the sun, dark gold and growing deeper as Evensong went on. I was feeling happy, loving the Cathedral, loving everything. From one of the little windows high up in the choir clerestory a ray of sun struck upon King John’s tomb. The Doctor started quietly to play the introduction to the
Magnificat
(it was Stanford in A), increasing his registration bar by bar until that thrilling moment came when we all crashed in at the words ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord’. Colonel Temperley clung to the wooden pillars of his Miserere seat, dabbing his eyes with a check handkerchief. Miss Linkinghorne, veiled in warm tones of red, gently waved her fingers to the beat of the music. A stray honorary canon tried to look over Archdeacon Cutler’s copy, but receiving no encouragement, turned aside petulantly. The Precentor, as usual, was writing something in his diary. Archie Tallents turned to Slesser, bowed and cooed sweetly. Meakins, always on time and never caring how long the
Gloria
was, approached the Dean’s door and, undoing it, waited with his wand over his shoulder. The Dean rather wearily snapped his horn glasses into their case, blew his nose with an enormous silk handkerchief, and followed Meakins up, past the pool of sunlight, to the lectern.

We sat down for the second lesson, and I studied my copy of the anthem.
And I saw another Angel ascending in the East,
having the sign of the living God
.