Miss Hargreaves (2 page)

‘Say Isaiah,’ suggested Henry. ‘All the bits people remember come from Isaiah.’

Well, apart from father suggesting it was queer to choose a text from Wordsworth, it went down like a lozenge. The queer thing is this. The following Sunday we went to Matins because it was raining and there didn’t seem anything else much to do. Believe me or not, but Canon Mercer–who was rather what they’d call a Modernist–did actually preach a sermon on that text. I don’t know which was the worse shock: hearing our yarn actually come true or realizing we’d credited the Bible with a line of Milton’s.

Later, partly because I wanted to point out that he’d been wrong about Wordsworth, I owned up to father. He said a very queer thing. ‘Always be careful, my boy, what you make up. Life’s more full of things made up on the Spur of the Moment than most people realize. Beware of the Spur of the Moment. It may turn and rend you.’

I often think father’s warning only spurred me on to fresh and more daring inventions. At any rate I got into the habit of making up stories, sometimes inventing people I’d never met or heard of, simply for the fun of doing it. Henry was generally my accomplice; he lacked initiative himself but he was always very good at developing my themes. One occasion I made up an ancestor called Dr Philip Hayes; he was, I said, the fattest organist at Oxford University who wrote anthems and kept does. Later on they did an anthem of his at the Cathedral. Funny thing is, I really can’t remember now whether the old boy is an ancestor of mine or not.

Call me a raging liar if you like, although it’s an actual fact that I’ve never lied in order to get
out
of things so much as to get
into
things. Sometimes I think all those books in father’s shop led me astray. Books
do
lead you on. I mean, look at father. If any man revels in the intoxication of the Spur more than he does, I should like to meet him. I shouldn’t like to say how many times I’ve heard him talking to customers about places he’s never visited, and he’s developed a really amazing flair for finding out first whether
they’ve
been there. I’ve heard him talking expansively about the West Indies, Mount Everest (
not
the top; he was careful to halt at about 15,000 feet), Finland, the Amazon and the Eiffel Tower. Actually, he was born in Cornford and never went farther east than London (I think he climbed the Monument), south than the Channel Islands, west than Plymouth. He never went north at all.

That’s father, and I suppose I inherit something from him.

Like me, Henry works in his father’s business, a big garage and motor mechanic in the High Street. He’s learning the business from the bottom, his father being a believer in not missing out any rungs in the ladder, and so on. ‘No royal road to success,’ he’s always saying.

Last August Henry asked me if I’d like to go to Ulster with him. A cousin of his had offered to lend him his house and car for a month.

‘There’s an old witch who keeps house for him, and of course it’s topping country, mountains and things. What do you say? The bus is a Hillman.’

Of course I said yes. We went.

Lusk, where Cousin Bill lives, is only a street, very wide, like most of those Irish villages, two rows of houses, four shops, a church and a pub–not open on Sundays unless you know the local password. We were really miles from anywhere.

The house lay in a valley with a river quite near and cornfields all round. There were white turkeys, a monkey-puzzle tree and quite a lot of gravel in the garden. Not much furniture in the house; it smelt rather of oil-lamps and dogs. Cousin Bill’s housekeeper had a room in the back somewhere; in bed when we arrived and didn’t seem to know who we were for some time. She was very old, with teeth that strayed about, and a high-pitched, fluty sort of voice. There was no food in the house except mustard-coloured bread, home-made, which tasted sour.

I’m not going to tell you much about the holiday except to say it was a grand month and we enjoyed every bit of it even though it rained much of the time. We went miles in the car, swam in the river, messed about in an old tub of a boat belonging to a farmer; and we spent a good many evenings in the hotel at Dungannon, drinking Irish whiskey and flirting with a cheeky girl Henry rather fell for. We climbed the Mourne Mountains and sang the right song on the top, though we couldn’t remember the words.

For some reason we hardly ever stopped to look at Lusk itself. Henry had dismissed it in a minute, ‘A one-eyed place.’ I must say, it did seem to look at you sideways. But on our last evening we suddenly decided we’d treated it rather unfairly.

For once, instead of using the car, we’d been walking all day. About seven in the evening we turned back into Lusk on our way home. We were just passing the church, an ugly flint building with a savage-looking square tower, when Henry said:

‘I think we ought to look into the church. There might be some brasses worth seeing.’

‘I hate brasses,’ I said, ‘but still, I see your point.’

‘We ought just to see what it’s like.’

‘I can see,’ I said.

‘There might be something interesting inside,’ said Henry obstinately.

The sky had blackened over and it was beginning to rain.

‘We might as well shelter there as anywhere else,’ added Henry. ‘Come on. Don’t look so gloomy.’

‘I hate Lusk,’ I complained. ‘I feel it’s got its knife into us somehow.’

And really, you know, I couldn’t help feeling it was haunted by something, particularly just then, with that great black cloud hanging over it, not one single person in the senselessly wide street, rows of slaty houses, a butcher’s shop with only a chopper in the window, and an immense oak tree bang in the middle of the road, penned in by iron railings as though to prevent it from straying. I couldn’t see what business it had there at all.

Well, before we could say any more, the rain began to pour down, so I ran after Henry up the gravel drive to the west porch.

‘Damn,’ said Henry. ‘Place is locked.’

‘Oh, well,’ I said happily, ‘that settles that.’ I don’t know why, but I was growing more and more reluctant to go into the church. ‘Let’s wait here,’ I suggested, ‘till the rain stops, then go home, take the car to Dungannon and have a last binge at the County Hotel.’

Here Henry’s obstinacy comes in.

‘One of the other doors might be open,’ he said. He darted round the tower and I heard him rattling the handle of the north door. ‘No good,’ he complained when he came back. ‘I reckon they ought to be ashamed of themselves, locking churches.’

‘Why shouldn’t they lock them?’

‘Well, look how inconvenient it is for people wanting to shelter from the rain. Besides, it’s bad for religion, definitely bad.’

Actually, the rain was easing off a bit by now.

‘Come on,’ I said, ‘we’d better get back before another shower.’

‘No,’ said Henry. ‘I don’t see why they should lock us out of this horrible building, I’m damned if I do.’

‘It’s not
your
church,’ I argued.

‘It’s everybody’s church,’ maintained Henry.

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s Ireland’s church. It says so on the board.’

‘Well, we’re in Ireland, aren’t we? I’m going to see if I can get the key.’

We were just brewing up to a proper row when a man came round the corner with a broom and a wheelbarrow. He looked disappointed, but perhaps it was only his squint. You felt he craved for admiration; very lonely face it was. He was wearing a green baize apron and he had a grave-digging manner. I mean, he gazed at you obviously relating you to the earth and wondering how you’d fit.

‘Are you the sexton?’ asked Henry.

Yes, he was. Did the gentlemen wish to see the church? There was a pleading quality in his voice. I don’t suppose that once in a century anybody had ever wanted to see anything more of Lusk church than they could see from the street.

‘That’s exactly what we are wanting,’ said Henry.

‘Speak for yourself,’ I muttered, looking gloomily at the dead leaves in the barrow. I felt disconsolate. There was a woebegone air over everything; end-of-holiday feeling.

‘My friend,’ remarked Henry, with disgusting brightness, ‘is very interested in old churches.’

It was amazing how quickly that sexton cheered up, smiling hideously at me as though he had discovered an old friend.

‘You have come,’ he said, ‘to the right place. For this is a
very
old church, dedicated by the Bishop of Armagh in 1863. Before I was born.’

From somewhere about him, under the apron, he produced a colossal key. Unlocking the door, he threw it open with a flourish of triumph. Inside the porch he almost feverishly dragged apart some heavy red curtains, alive with dust and sooty fleurs-de-lis. Hurling himself on an inner door, he flung out an arm and, like a conjurer producing a rabbit, invited our inspection and admiration.

We went inside.

‘My God!’ I said.

‘Kindly remember where you are, Norman,’ said Henry.

I will say this about Lusk church: it was bad enough to be reasonably funny, which was something.

Squint, before we could turn back, seized our arms and dragged us down the nave, rapturously commenting upon the treasures of which he was guardian.

‘We are very proud of our beautiful pews, very handsome pieces of wood, I will say.’

I touched one and shivered. They were made of fumed oak and they had doors with rusty bolts to them. Very tall they were; you felt there ought to be hay in them. I looked up to the galleries. Apart from the usual cleaner’s brooms and pails the only curiosity was a stack of card-tables piled in one corner. I turned to the chancel, hoping to find something–however slight–that I could praise. But it was worse up there. Seaweed-green altar frontal; dead flowers; lichenous-looking brass candlesticks; pitch-pine organ with a pyramid of dumb pipes soaring over a candle-greased console; ‘Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus’, splashed in chrome Gothic lettering over the choir walls; mural cherubim reminding you of cottonwool chicks from Easter eggs; very stained glass; tattered hymn-books, tattered hassocks–it was a horrible church. But there were, mercifully, two redeeming features: those were the dust-sheets spread over lectern and pulpit. Somehow you felt a little safer with those dust-sheets.

Meanwhile, Squint was rhapsodizing.

‘I beg you to observe the beautiful lettering and decoration on the chancel wall. “I saw the Lord sitting upon a Throne.” You like it?’

He had a habit of hissing like a goose, particularly when he was eager about something.

‘Very pretty indeed,’ I said.

‘Original,’ said Henry.

‘
Unusual
, in a sense.’

‘Full of feeling.’

‘Filthy,’ I said.

‘The font,’ said Henry hurriedly, glaring at me, ‘is superb.’

‘The choir screen,’ I added, ‘is definitely in a class by itself.’

‘We think,’ said Squint simply, folding his hands and looking modestly at the ground, ‘we think that the whole church is in a class by itself.’

We proceeded step by step up the nave towards the lectern. It grew darker; we could hear the rain pattering on the roof. My spirits sank. There was something so unutterably depressing about the place. The sexton was standing by the draped lectern, one hand on the corner of the sheet, waiting for us to approach so that he might unveil what I knew could only be a fresh horror.

‘Here,’ whispered Henry, ‘this place is awful. Let’s get out quickly.’

‘All very well for you to talk like that,’ I muttered, ‘but you started it. We’ve got to go through with it now.’

Patiently, Squint waited by the lectern. It’s hard to explain the awful sinking feeling that had come over Henry and me. ‘A day we shall never forget,’ I told myself. And as I said it, I thought, ‘Well, you might as well make it really memorable. Get some fun out of this while you’re about it.’

Some
fun
. Oh, God! If I had only
known
!

Suddenly the sexton whipped aside the dust-sheet and disclosed the lectern, obviously a favourite of his. We saw an avaricious-looking brass fowl with one eye cocked sideways as though it feared somebody were going to bag the Bible–or perhaps as though it hoped somebody were going to. You couldn’t quite tell; it had an ambiguous expression.