Miss Hargreaves (19 page)

The practice was misery. I generally never make mistakes (I’m an utter fool, but I’m not an utter fool at music), but that evening there were two tricky bars in Boyce’s anthem which for the life of me I could not get right. Carless kept running along the loft like a trapped and angry beast, shouting down at me: ‘Whatever is wrong with you, Huntley? Take it again.’ I would take it again, and again take it the wrong way. ‘Stop! Stop!’ The Doctor clapped. And when the Doctor clapped it didn’t mean applause either. For the sixth time he jammed his white face through the brick-coloured curtains.

‘Wadge, you take it!’ he snapped.

It was dreadful. I had never been disgraced like this before. The boys, heartless creatures, turned and looked at me with a new sort of interest. Baker wrote something on a bit of paper and passed it down to that lout Tonkin at the bottom of decani; Tonkin burst into laughter. ‘Silence, boys!’ cried Carless. I looked down the darkening nave as Wadge went on with the solo I ought to have been singing. One lonely, forlorn-looking figure was sitting in the front seats, apparently writing something in a note-book. The practice dragged endlessly on; still that lonely figure sat in the empty nave.

The Precentor said the Grace; the boys rushed from their stalls as though unchained from a prison. The men went out. Slowly I wandered towards the gates with Archie.

‘Now, Norman,’ said Archie, ‘take a pinch of snuff and go to it.’ He offered me his little black box, but I pushed it aside. What’s the use of snuff when you’re in trouble?

‘I can’t face her,’ I groaned. For she had risen now and was slowly coming up the dais steps. ‘Archie,’ I begged, ‘tell her I’ve got an appointment. Say I’m ill. Anything. I shall slip out by the north door.’

Quickly I went up towards the reredos and thus out into the retrochoir. But luck was against me that evening. I saw Meakins disappearing along the south aisle, jingling his keys; he had locked the north door, the little door near the Lady Chapel. To run after him now would probably mean meeting Miss Hargreaves and Archie in the transept. Yet if I stayed up here, I might be locked in for the night.

Unable to make up my mind about anything, I sat down on a seat near Cardinal Beauvais’ Chantry. My eyes wandered to his opulent figure, lying stretched out in his magnificent red hat, a green ring, like an eye that sees all things, watching me from his finger. He’d have sent her to hell-fire, that’s what he’d have done; sent her to hell-fire as a witch and thought nothing more about it. Nowadays one couldn’t even arrest her. She could wear a hat like a wedding-cake, lounge about in the Bishop’s Throne, and there was nothing you could do about it. If that throne had been the Cardinal’s, she wouldn’t get away with it so easily.

It was getting dark. One by one I heard the boys and the lay-clerks slam the south door. In a few minutes Meakins would be locking up. I couldn’t stay here all night. Already that damned Cardinal was beginning to make me twitch. They said he came out from his chantry at night. I could believe it. I could fancy he was studying me, knowing that I was caught up in some vast spiritual problem utterly beyond me, and amusedly wondering what I would make of it.

I went to the aisle gate, peering down the steps to see if anyone were there. Not a soul. Except for the footsteps of Meakins far away at the end of the nave, all was quiet. Perhaps Archie had been able to get rid of her. Slowly I walked down the steps, pausing and listening and looking. I passed the Saxon kings; the tomb of Thomas Weelkes. I was in the south transept. I had only to skim round Bishop Creighton’s tomb and I should be out by the little south door.

Suddenly I remembered my hat in the vestry. It was rather a special hat: green, with a nice tilt to it, a Bing Boys air and a feather in the band. I was going round to see Marjorie that evening. I knew I wasn’t in her good books and that hat would help me. The sort of hat Churchill wouldn’t mind having.

Well–all I can say, vanity gets its right reward.

Miss Hargreaves was kneeling on the floor in the vestry, studying the lettering on the tomb of Jacob Burton, the fisherman and naturalist.

She rose slowly to her feet.

‘Fishing,’ she observed, ‘must, in those days, have been such a noble pastime.’

There was a long and awful silence. I breathed heavily. I knew we were heading for a crisis.

‘Grosvenor,’ she added, ‘was fond of trout. Cooked with a little orange-juice, it was his opinion that no fish could be more succulent.’

‘This is no time for talking of fishes,’ I said.

She sighed. ‘They are very soothing creatures,’ she remarked. ‘Very bloodless.’ She sat down by the table and toyed with a pencil hanging on the chain round her neck. ‘I once wrote a few lines that would seem to be appropriate to this moment.’

‘I haven’t time for poetry,’ I warned her. Neither I had.

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I would not pretend that my poor lines were poetry. Mere verse. Nothing more. They ran like this:

‘I talk to them of candlesticks and pears,

Of clothes lines, postal orders, wheelback chairs,

Of plants (in pots), of pans, e’en polar bears–

        To hide my woe.’

‘Yes, very nice,’ I began. ‘But–’

She held up her hand. ‘Wait. There is more.

‘They talk to me of coal and china tea,

Of politicians, fonts and kedgeree,

Of saucers, sheets, hemp and the honey-bee–

       ’Tis better so.’

‘That’s all very well,’ I said.

Suddenly this pensive manner changed. She rose and wrung her hands. She started to talk passionately.

‘I come back after having buried poor Agatha. I look forward to meeting my dearest, my oldest friend again. What does he
do
?
What
does he do? He ignores me. Nay–more! He is actually rude to me! Norman–I can bear much. But not this–not this!’

‘The time has come,’ I said sternly, ‘to get things straight.’

‘Explain, I beg you!’

‘Why’–I burst out the words–‘do you follow me about like this? I don’t know you. I never did know you. I never met you before in my life.’

‘Stop! Stop!’ She tottered forward and clutched on to a chair for support. ‘Not know me–never met me–how can you, how
can
you say these wicked, wicked things? Much have I travelled in the realms of gold but never suffered such a bruise as this!’

Her voice rose and echoed in the silent building. Far away I heard Meakins locking the west doors; then his footsteps along the nave.

‘Do you’–she tapped her stick menacingly on Burton’s grave–‘do you deny that you wrote to me while I was at Hereford? Dare you deny that?’

I gulped. ‘No. I can’t deny that. But all I can tell you is that I never knew of your existence before I wrote. I wish you’d put that whistle down.’ She was shaking a little silver whistle at me; it lived on her chain with the pencil and the lorgnettes.

She stared at me. ‘Tell me frankly. Is your mind wandering, my dear boy? Or perhaps I have offended you in some way. Tell me quite frankly. Is it my–hat?’

‘Well, it is pretty awful!’ I mumbled.

‘I wore it for you, too!’ Tears came into her eyes. ‘I thought that you, with your love of the bizarre, would appreciate it.’

‘Don’t cry. For heaven’s sake, don’t cry!’

‘I did not
know
it was a bishop’s throne! There is no notice. I went to the first seat I saw. Heaven forbid,
Heaven
forbid, Norman, that I should in any way make myself conspicuous.’

This wouldn’t do. We were getting away from the point. I was determined, once and for all, to make her see the truth.

‘I don’t care about your hat,’ I cried untruthfully, ‘or your sitting in the Bishop’s Throne. I don’t care
what
you do–so long as you don’t drag me into it. That letter I wrote to you from Lusk–it was a joke, Miss Hargreaves; nothing more than a joke. It may have been a mean joke, and I’m sorry for it. We’ve never met before. You know perfectly well that–’

Her sticks clattered to the floor. I stopped, suddenly appalled at the effect my words had had on her. She had almost collapsed. Clutching the table for support, her head was lolling from side to side, her mouth open as though she wanted to speak and had no power to do so. It was terrible to see her like that. I rushed towards her and helped her gently into a chair. Weakly, she sat down, her fingers fumbling at a service list on the table and twisting it up into a ball.

‘A joke,’ she muttered, ‘a
joke
–’

Shrilly, almost hysterically, she laughed. It was a laugh that made me go dead inside so contemptuous, so ironical, yet so pitifully forced.

‘Don’t–don’t, Miss Hargreaves!’ I begged. ‘I’m sorry for what I said. Awfully sorry.’

A deathly silence fell over us. She sat there with a fixed stare, looking at the crumpled-up service paper in her hand.

Meakins would, of course, choose that particular moment to come into the vestry. ‘Well, I never!’ he said. ‘Her again!’

‘You shut up!’ I hissed. ‘Can’t you see she’s ill?’

Still she said nothing at all; did not move an inch.

‘Well, I’m just locking up,’ said Meakins, taking off his gown.

‘Miss Hargreaves,’ I said gently, ‘we must go.’

‘Water water’she whispered in a funny, sad, faraway little voice.

I filled a glass from the carafe on the table and handed it to her. For the first time she saw Meakins. A slow, bewildered smile broke over her face.