Such Men Are Dangerous (13 page)

Another thing that did nothing much to help, yet which, despite his mood, he discovered that he couldn’t simply sneer at, was the spectacle of two men on a motorbike roaring along Frodingham Road. The one behind had his arms around the driver’s waist—well, naturally—but while Josh was waiting to cross he saw this fellow lay his cheek against the back of the other’s leather jacket. He straightened up again after several seconds but the quality of pure affection contained in that trusting and spontaneous gesture was unmistakable. Josh found himself gazing down the road long after the machine had gone.

Still he didn’t go home. He strode past the turnoff to the flats and on towards the library. There he said to an assistant, “What have you got on miracles?” She walked him across to the religious section. “I mean,” he amended, “on
alleged
miracles.” He gave a twisted smile.

He spent over an hour there, but more because he was reluctant to heave himself out of the low chair than because anything he read proved so engrossing, or, after a while, even mildly interesting. His brain felt stale, sick, unable to absorb. If he could have pressed some button and thereby been wafted, painlessly, into an eternal sleep, he was nearly sure he would have done so.

Instead, he finally returned to the flat. Lunch was over, the boys were watching sport, Dawn had gone shopping. “Your dinner’s in the oven, Dad. Mum says she hopes it won’t be dried up.”

“Your mother’s probably an optimist,” he answered grimly, suddenly realizing how hungry he felt. “In fact, I know she is.”

He paused in the sitting-room doorway.

“How can you just sit and gawp at wrestling, Billy, when on Wednesday you saw an angel and on Friday your spots fell off?”

William shrugged.

“Life has to go on, Dad.”

“My God, how old are you? Already to have learned the whole tragedy of existence!”

The meal was sausages, mashed potato, carrots and broccoli, with onion sauce as well as gravy. It wasn’t particularly dried up; it both looked okay and it smelt good. Careful to wear an oven glove on one hand but with the warmth of a kind of spontaneous premeditation swiftly spreading up his trunk he passed the plate into the other hand; made himself endure the pain; scraped the food into the pedal bin. Some of it spattered onto his sneakers, cleaned thoroughly the night before. An embossed brown ring was left around the edge of the white porcelain. He worked at it with the side of a fork. In the pedal bin the meal continued to steam. He made no attempt to cover it over, other than with the congealing but still fluid contents of his bowl of banana custard, for it mattered that Dawn should find it there.

A little later, however, he retrieved and ate one of the sausages, and then the other two. He did it further to punish himself, further to punish Dawn too, in the event of his becoming ill. But unexpectedly this made him feel better: sufficiently so to cause him to eat an apple and some cheese, and even wash the apple.

Before Dawn returned from her shopping he had emptied and cleaned the pedal bin.

He had also fetched his dog-eared manuscript pad and composed another exercise for his projected textbook.

Soon there were smears on it from the antiseptic cream he’d rubbed onto his thumb and index and middle fingers; under the cream, his skin had grown all red and blistered.

However, he’d unexpectedly managed a tight smile. Near the foot of his current page he wrote
How to be the Perfect Clergyman
, paragraph 459, and thickly ringed it round, then bordered it with crenellations. He went on to draw a figure on horseback. But for all his pretensions to artistic flair and frustrated hopes of a youthful course of study in Paris, no one would have recognized it, quite, for what it was meant to be. ‘Behold a white horse,’ he scribbled underneath.

18

On their last night at
Sea View
Simon asked her to marry him and she said yes. They had known each other for less than a week but neither felt nervous about having done something foolish.

Certainly nobody could have claimed they’d been carried away by a romantic setting: moonlight on the sea, the distant strains of a lilting waltz from the bandstand, a gently caressing breeze laden with the scent of summer roses. It was raining; not just a soft refreshing shower into which you could stride out laughingly with heads held back and Pakamac-ed arms securely linked—stopping occasionally to kiss the drops off one another’s face. The rain was hurling itself down as if with an intent to penetrate and scar and shatter: rebounding off the pavements, forming fiercely bubbling rivulets along the sides of the promenade, turning the sea into a raging entity that would have been fascinating to watch; except that the sky had grown so dark that even from the windows across the road almost nothing of it could be seen.

In the lounge of
Sea View
there was of course no other topic; it looked as though everyone had congregated with the sole purpose of airing their views on such freak climactic conditions, those residents who normally retired to their bedrooms after dinner obviously needing further contact with their fellow beings: possibly worried that when the rowing boats arrived (or else the marshalling two-by-two began) they might not hear the summons from the upper floors.

“Oh, who remembers that dreadful Lynmouth flood, in 1953?”

Well, everybody did, apart from Simon and Ginny and a very bored brother and sister of about twelve; but there was much animated discussion as to whether the year was right—in the middle of which, Mrs Bates tried to steal unconcernedly across the room with a supposedly reassuring array of nods and smiles and a most urgently whispered warning to deliver.

“I don’t wish to start a panic, dears, but should you two
really
be sitting in front of the window like that? Supposing that the glass were suddenly to cave in under all this stress?”

She turned fleetingly, for the benefit of everybody else, to give what she meant to be a jaunty little whistle but although her lips were nobly puckered her whistle proved less jaunty than inaudible.

“The glass cave in?” repeated Simon, also in a whisper, after he’d stood up. “Oh, I don’t think that’s very likely, Mrs Bates.”

Their whispers were only whispers in a relative sense but even so he had to repeat what he had said; twice, and rather loudly.

“Well, I don’t know, dear. I don’t know.”

“Then perhaps we
had
better move. Thank you for telling us about it.”

When they were resettled and Mrs Bates had again nodded at them several times, wisely and approvingly, and they had nodded back with many smiles of gratitude, Ginny observed drily:

“For your own sake, Simon, it’s probably for the best you’re leaving here tomorrow. I think I detect a sympathetic softening of the brain.”

“Well, what would you have had us do?”

“You’re very good with old people, aren’t you?”

“It’s just that I like…” Suddenly he stopped. “I was about to make a very stupid comment. Some old people in fact, the same as children and people of every other age, are exceedingly difficult to like and only a halfwit could do it.”

“Or a saint.”

“No. A saint would love them but he, too, would be a halfwit if he liked them.”

“Can’t you have a saint, then, who’s a halfwit?”

“I’m not sure. You might have to check with theologians. It could be just a natural state of innocence involving no effort.”

“You mean, like a pussycat?”

“You took the words out of my mouth.
You’re
like a pussycat!”

“Oh, good, if that lets me off the hook about trying to be a saint. Do you realize that no one’s put the television on?”

“You feel you could be missing all the action?”

“No more than I do in this place when it’s actually switched on and going at full blast.”

“Maybe you’d like to pop into the next room and watch our respected mums play bridge? If you’re looking for excitement.”

“Believe it or not I’m honestly quite happy here with you.”

“That’s good. Because I’m honestly quite happy here with you.”

“And all the old folk.”

“There’s a difference, I think. Subtle, indefinable, but
there
.”

“Will you miss me a little tomorrow?” She was cross with herself for asking that. She tried to mitigate the offence. “Or have you plenty of nice almshouses back in Basingstoke?”

“Innumerable,” he said. He took her hand, right there in front of Mrs Bates and Miss Retford and Major Blackburn
et al
. “I tried to count them once but I got helplessly distracted by all those dizzying geriatric charms waving to me from the windows. Oh, hell!” Bobby and Sandra had just thrown themselves lackadaisically onto the nearby couch where Ginny and he had recently been sitting. “We’d better lead them off and have another draughts session or snakes-and-ladders or ludo or something. What if the glass were suddenly to cave in?”

“Under all this stress?”

“Under all this stress,” he affirmed, solemnly.

“Under all this stress you could turn just as batty as any of them,” she prophesied.

“More than likely,” he agreed. “But in the meantime, Ginny, I’d like to put to you a question. Would you ever consider, do you suppose…?”

“What?”

“Well. Would you marry me?” he asked.

19

That same evening her mother was making matzo. Her father was tending a sick sheep. Mary said suddenly:

“When we go to Jerusalem next week shall we see Elizabeth?”

“Don’t we always?” Her mother didn’t even look up.

“She’s pregnant,” said Mary.

A short silence. Then:

“Don’t talk so daft!” Her father wasn’t angry; he seemed to consider it some kind of joke. “Your cousin’s sixty-five if she’s a day.”

“In the scriptures Sarah was over ninety.”

But by now her mother had certainly looked up.
She
didn’t treat the matter as a joke.

“Has the girl taken leave of her senses?” She addressed the house at large: husband, daughter, animals and all. “I never heard such disrespect!”

“But it’s the truth, Mum. It’s the truth.”

“Oh, stop it! Not another word! And how do you mean, the truth? Something so downright ungodly. Yes, my girl,
ungodly
! Who ever put it in your head?”

“God did.”

She didn’t want it to sound flippant. That was the last thing she’d have wanted. Yet she could see it had its funny side.

“God did,” she repeated.

Her parents looked at one another in horrified dismay. Now her father no longer seemed amused.

“I think he felt the message would bring me comfort. He told me through an angel.” But he must have
seen
what would happen, she reflected.

“An angel?” exclaimed her father. He might have been saying a
dragon
, or a
flying horse
.

“His name is Gabriel. He’s the one who spoke to Daniel.”

Her mother started to cry. She ran across to kneel at the stool where Mary sat, to cradle her determinedly, press her head against her bosom and rock her gently to and fro. “Oh, my lass, my lass, my poor demented lass, is it a fever you’ve caught? Have you had a fall? Quickly!” she urged her husband. “For Pete’s sake run for the doctor!” Her husband appeared incapable of stirring, let alone running.

“No, Mum, I don’t need a doctor.” The words came out muffled yet intelligible.

“There, there, love, of course you don’t! Now you just rest a little and don’t you fret about a thing!” She gave a series of mute and frenzied jerks designed to move her husband faster through the door—and this time, indeed, he did take a step towards it. The abandoned sheep bleated forlornly.

Mary continued mentally to pray. “There’s perhaps one other thing you ought to know.”

“Hush, hush, my precious.”

Her father was more curious.

“Well, lass?”

“I’m pregnant, too.”

The sheep bleated again; as if in fellow feeling.

This time it came more easily. He had finished in an hour. He began to feel it was something he was being inspired to go on with; more than that, something he had a duty to go on with. It would have been too great a coincidence, he thought: the eruption of Gabriel into the lives of the two Heath boys—and indirectly, of course, into his own—and then, last night, Mr Benson reminding him of Paula’s six-month-old suggestion: one which had assumed implicitly, as its starting point, the eruption of Gabriel into Mary’s life.

Simon couldn’t believe it was coincidence.

Also, he had once written a short story he now saw he could incorporate quite seamlessly. It had to do with the return of the apostles, after Jesus had sent them out on a journey to win converts and supporters and to spread the word.

That was only a small thing, obviously, but he asked himself whether it would be wrong to regard this, too, as a sign; and to wonder whether a mass of loose threads was now being pulled cohesively tighter.

To wonder if he were being allowed a few piecemeal glimpses.

Of the pattern in the carpet.

20

The next day’s lunch didn’t get scraped into the pedal bin but in its own way it proved more traumatic.

Janice, he thought, looked prettier than ever, with her bright blue eyes and silky honey-coloured hair; yet this time he could only partly ascribe it to the fact he hadn’t seen her for several weeks. (Indeed, often it worked the other way: she was at first
less
pretty than he remembered her.) Usually vivacious, her vivacity today was so much more pronounced that it was almost a little…well, yucky? Her solicitude for everybody’s comfort and enjoyment might be sincere but it was overdone. The flat seemed smaller on account of it, smaller and drabber.

The fact that the walls had drawn in, the ceiling had come down, was also due to the presence of this hulk she had brought with her. The incredible hulk. He wasn’t a doctor. He was a swimming instructor. They had met at the Sheffield baths.

Don. He was six-foot-three, she had informed her family proudly; the two of them were scarcely through the door. “And a half,” he had added, with a deep, self-disregarding laugh. He weighed fourteen stone and five pounds, she told them. “Stripped,” he made it clear, with an extension of that rich, embarrassed chuckle; and even Dawn, Josh coldly saw, seemed to signify amazed approval. “And not one ounce of…But, Billy!” Janice said. “What ever’s happened to your spots?”