Sky High (2 page)

‘All right,’ said Tim.

‘You know there isn’t a key for the inner vestry—’

‘I’ve locked up this church at least twelve times,’ said Tim. ‘You go and get the coffee ready. And reverting to your last remark but three, I don’t expect I shall be joining you, but if I do I am capable of getting out another cup. And who’s taking Rupert home?’

‘He can come on the back of my motor-cycle,’ said Mrs. Artside. ‘Would you like that, Rupert?’

‘All right,’ said Rupert. Even the thought of riding pillion to Mrs. Artside did not seem to stir his remarkable soul.

Left to himself, Tim bolted the outside door of the vestry, fastened the window, and locked the anthem cupboard. He could hear the sounds of the choir dispersing; the dominant note was the squeal of the Hedges children, who seemed to recover full voice the moment they got outside the church. He grinned as he heard the eldest boy, Maurice, chanting ‘Kerr-rist, Kerr-rist, Kerr-rist’. The deep roar of his mother’s motor-cycle, rising as she changed gear for the corner, diminishing as she swung into the road, and muttering away into the distance. Heavy footsteps on the gravel – Jim Hedges, he judged – and the rattle of Lucy Mallory’s voice.

He stepped out into the body of the church, shut the heavy inner door of the vestry, and made his way slowly through the choir into the aisle. All around him, in the quiet dimness was the church smell of hassocks and coconut matting and lamp oil and holiness.

Out in the porch he could still hear voices. One was MacMorris. He would have recognised anywhere those amazingly gentlemanly cadences. The other was young Sue. She was laughing.

MacMorris said, ‘But you don’t do that sort of thing at Blackpool.’

She laughed again.

Tim stepped through, shut the wicket door, and turned the key. He could see Sue now, white against the dusk, perched on the railing of the porch. MacMorris was standing beside her.

‘Oh, hullo Artside,’ said MacMorris. ‘Turned cold hasn’t it?’

‘Seasonable for the time of year,’ said Tim. ‘You walking home, Sue?’

‘I promised Major MacMorris I’d go with him.’

‘You promised me first.’

‘Did I?’ said Sue. She sounded genuinely surprised.

‘Well, old boy,’ said MacMorris judicially, ‘why don’t we all go together.’

‘Because, old boy,’ said Tim, ‘I’ve got something I want to tell Miss Palling, and I don’t particularly want it broadcast over half of Brimberley.’

A brittle silence impended.

‘I may be wrong, but that sounded to me rather offensive.’

‘It wasn’t meant to be particularly offensive, or non-offensive, for that matter. It was just a thought. Are you coming, Sue?’

‘When you’ve apologised to Major MacMorris.’

‘Apologised,’ said Tim blandly. ‘But for what?’

‘For behaving like a silly little schoolboy.’

‘If I’m behaving like a silly little schoolboy, might I suggest that MacMorris – I beg his pardon,
Major
MacMorris – was behaving like a silly little grown-up.’

‘Really, Artside.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Possibly I misunderstood you. I thought he was offering to walk home in the gloaming with—’

‘Oh,’ said Sue. ‘What a stinking thing to say—I—really—’

She looked at MacMorris. There was a pause in the proceedings, broken only by Tim, who was whistling quietly through his teeth.

MacMorris seemed to appreciate that the next step was with him. He cleared his throat.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that we’re both behaving stupidly.’ He turned to Sue. ‘If my offer offended you—’

‘Of
course
it didn’t.’

‘Then I’m sorry it should have been misunderstood. Perhaps you’ll both excuse me. Good night.’

The dapper little figure swung away down the path. Tim and Sue watched in silence until the wicket gate clicked and he was gone.

‘Yellow, too, for all his high C’s,’ said Tim.

Sue said nothing.

‘Let’s get going.’

He saw that she was shaking.

‘You’re cold,’ he said. ‘If we walk quickly, you’ll get your circulation back.’

‘Don’t let me stop you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Walking quickly. In any direction you fancy.’

It was rage, not cold.

‘But look here,’ said Tim. ‘What’s up? I’m sorry if that little twerp upset you, but—’

‘Are you going? If not, I am.’

‘You’re not going home alone.’

‘It’s a free country,’ said Sue. ‘You’re bigger than me. I can’t stop you using the public roads, if you feel like it.’

She set off up the path and out into the road. Tim padded along beside her. Offended dignity kept him quiet for a hundred yards; then he said again, rather feebly, ‘What’s it all about?’

‘I think,’ said Sue clearly, ‘that that was about the most oafish performance I’ve ever listened to in my life.’

‘Why?’

‘Threatening a man who is half your size and twice your age, and then crowing like a silly little bully because he has enough gumption on you.’

‘He shouldn’t have—’

‘And of all excuses for forcing a quarrel on him, you had to pick on suggesting filthy things about him, because he offered to walk home with me – which he has done umpteen times before, without your permission – seeing that he lives in Melliker Lane only two houses away from us.’

‘I never—’

‘It was so silly it ought to have made me laugh – if it hadn’t made me sick. And now’—she swung round at the top of a dark lane leading off the main road, among the pine trees—’will you go home. I can actually see my front gate. Are you satisfied?’

‘It’s a bit dark,’ said Tim obstinately. ‘I’d better come down with you. Or are you afraid to trust me?’

‘Afraid of you?’ said Sue. She looked at him speculatively. ‘You great big war hero. I shouldn’t think that little girls are your strong point, are they? At least, I’ve never heard about it, and we hear so much about you, I feel sure anything like that would have cropped up by now. Prancing round with soot on your face – yes. Sticking knives into people, small people, I should imagine, on tonight’s form.’

‘Now you’re being silly,’ said Tim. ‘And anyway, I never stuck a knife into anyone.’

‘Wouldn’t they turn their backs on you?’ said Sue. ‘How tactless of them.’

‘You’re being stupid.’

‘If you don’t want to listen, you know what you can do with yourself.’

At this point both disputants realised, with embarrassment, that they were not alone.

Standing quietly in the shadow, under one of the trees, was a tall figure in cape and helmet.

‘Good night,’ said Sue with tremendous emphasis.

She stalked away up the road, and turned in at the white gate, visible at the far end. The gate swung shut with a click. The door opened, a light came on in the front room. Tim watched. The cloaked figure watched.

‘Turning cold,’ said Tim, at last.

‘Afraid it is, sir,’ said Constable Queen, stepping out on to the road. He was a big, blond, red-faced, serious young man.

Tim pulled out a cigarette, lit it and, after a moment’s thought, offered one to Constable Queen, who took it, said, ‘Thank you, sir,’ in a noncommittal way, and put it away in his top pocket.

‘Nice and quiet round here.’

‘It certainly is, sir.’

‘You wouldn’t describe Brimberley as a hot-bed of crime.’

Constable Queen laughed tolerantly. ‘Dogs without licences, and bicycles without lights,’ he said. ‘That’s our main excitement. Still and all, you never know.’

‘I hope you’re not expecting trouble.’

‘What I’ve found about trouble,’ said Constable Queen after a pause for thought, ‘is that you never do expect it – until after it’s happened – if you see what I mean.’

‘I couldn’t agree with you more,’ said Tim.

The constable seemed to be in no hurry to move on. Probably he would smoke the cigarette as soon as he was alone.

‘Well, good night.’

‘Good night, sir.’

Tim turned on his heel, and walked up to the corner. A right-hand turn would have taken him back along the main road, towards his mother’s house.

He turned to the left and strode off into the darkness.

General Sir Hubert Palling, G.C.B., G.C.M.G., D.S.O., T.D., a member of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen at Arms, Colonel Commandant of the Deeside Light Infantry, and grandfather of Sue, was over eighty, but hardly looked more than sixty. He had kept his figure and his wits and had every intention of living to ninety or beyond.

Longevity, in his view, belonged to a soldier as of right. There was no such thing as dying in middle age. You might die young, either in some operation of war or in one of those violent sports which are part of the preparation of an officer for war. Or you might survive this period of active service and still more active sport, in which case you were practically booked for a long and useful old age.

Despite the honour of knighthood and the gold braid on his ceremonial uniform, General Palling kept no car and no full-time servant, inside or outside his house. He drank little, and smoked not at all. And whilst he weeded his own flower-beds or helped with the washing-up in the evening, or walked in the rain to the bus stop, he did sometimes chuckle to himself over the comforting thought that he still had his wind and his waistline; whilst his contemporaries and his juniors, more opulent and more sedentary, had long since gone to their account – at seventy – at sixty – at fifty.

Why, good heavens, he had read in the papers of a business man of forty-five who had collapsed and died in his office, apparently as the result of walking up two flights of steps. At forty-five a man should be in the very prime of his life, ready to spend fifteen hours in the saddle and a night, in his greatcoat, under the stars.

Naturally he never voiced these opinions, even to a close friend, like Liz Artside, in whose drawing-room he was at the moment sitting. It would have sounded like complacency. But the thought was there.

Sad to say, as Mrs. Artside bustled in and out with her coffee making and the General sat perched in the wheel-back chair with padded arms beside the fire, they were bickering; about poetry.

The General could see no good thing beyond Tennyson. Mrs. Artside had more catholic tastes.

‘Well, then, what about Columbus?’

‘Did he write something called Columbus? Move the atlas and I’ll put the tray on the table beside you.’

‘Were you at Salamanca? No? We fronted there the learning of all Spain. All their cosmogonies, their astronomies. Guesswork, they guessed it; but the golden guess is morning-star to the full round of truth!
Isn’t that splendid. Browning and better.’

‘Browning and water.’

‘Trust a woman to be wise after the event. If I’d said it was Browning you’d have gone into ecstasies.’

‘I never go into ecstasies,’ said Mrs. Artside, standing a full coffee-pot carefully down on the Benares tray. ‘I agree that it sounds a little better than his usual drip. Birds in the high hall garden when twilight was falling, Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud crying and calling.’

‘I like that too,’ said the General loyally, ‘but this is scientific, if you follow me. “
The compass,
like an old friend, false at last”.
That’s terrifically true. Whenever you really get lost, the first thing you begin to blame is your compass. I remember once, in South Africa, leading a column of all arms. Don’t know why I was leading it. Probably the junior officer available – he usually got told off for that sort of job. I suddenly looked at my compass and—are you worried about something?’

‘No. Not really. Go on.’

‘Something on your mind. I’ll tell you the rest of that story another time. It’s rather a good one. What’s up?’

‘Lots of little things,’ said Mrs. Artside. ‘Tim, chiefly.’

‘Hmp,’ said the General. ‘Yes. Kittle cattle, grown-up sons.’

One of the pleasures of talking to Liz Artside was that there was no need for suppression or reticence. He could talk to her about grown-up sons without the fearful suspicion that she was being sorry for him because he had lost both of his own. The elder had died in France, in 1917, on the eve of his 21st birthday; the younger, having lost his own wife, Sue’s mother, in an air-raid in 1940, had pulled sufficient strings to get himself sent to North Africa where he had gone to his account in the messy fighting round Medjz-el-Bab, accompanied by a satisfactory number of Germans. Sue had been six at the time.

‘What’s Tim up to now?’

‘That’s one of the things I’d like to know,’ said Mrs. Artside. ‘He goes up to London every day, but I’ve no more idea than the man in the moon what he does when he gets there.’

‘What’s his job?’

‘That’s just it, I don’t know.’

The General looked surprised.

‘With a war record like his,’ he said at last, ‘I should have thought he ought to be able to step into almost any job.’

‘Do you really think that?’

‘Of course he ought.’

‘I mean, Hubert,’ said Mrs. Artside gently, ‘do you really mean that you think he had a good war record.’

‘Got two M.C.’s. What more do you want?’

‘You’re evading the question.’

If the General had had enough spare blood in his arteries, he would have blushed. He managed to look ruffled.

‘What a damned sharp woman you are. Did I sound sarcastic?’

‘A little.’

‘I must watch out for it. One of my prejudices. As you get older you collect prejudices. Like barnacles. Yes. All right. I have always been opposed to the idea of a corps d’élite. Special terms of service and special pay. That sort of thing. Of course, you can’t prevent some men being braver than others. Like dogs. It’s biological. But you don’t want to segregate the brave men and dress them up. Bad for them, and bad for the rest of the Army as well. You want to keep them in the regiment. In the Peninsula,’ (the General spoke exactly as if it had been one of his earlier campaigns), ‘we had picked men in every regiment. Light Companies, we called them – men who could be trusted out on their own to hold a strong point or make up a forlorn hope. You’d band them together, you see, for a job like that. But after it was over they went back to their regiments.’