The Shift Key (2 page)

Victor remembered his coffee, took a sip and found it cold and nasty, set it by and carried on, fingers flying.

‘Vic!
Vic!
’

It was Carol shouting at the top of her voice from the landing below.

‘Vic, don’t you know what time it is? Tommy will be late for school, and so will you!’

‘Coming!’ Victor answered with a sigh.

He would have liked to add his point about how Odo, a devout Christian, must have steered clear of Weyharrow thanks to its pagan associations, but it didn’t really matter. Albeit a trifle long, what he had written was good, and he knew it. And even though he hadn’t had time to print it out or even make a backup copy, it would be safe on the disc.

‘
VIC
!’

‘Coming!’ he called again, and entered the ‘store’ and ‘shut-down’ commands as he had done already countless times. The screen blanked, and he reached for the power-switch.

And froze.

The
VDU
had lit again. Now it was displaying the bland message:

TEXT DELETED.

What?

But he had hit – he
knew
he had hit – precisely the commands he always used!

He sat with jaw agape, confronted with the need to reconstruct everything he had written from scratch … but his inspiration was fading even as he thought about it, fading like dew in morning sunshine, fading as completely as a dream, as the words he had consigned to his machine.

From below came the sound of Tommy squalling at the top of his lungs, and another, now despairing, shriek from Carol. Slowly, fighting the grip of paralysing disbelief, Victor rose from his chair and turned towards the ladder.

But I know I used the right command, I know I did. I know!

In most respects, apart from the unseasonable brightness of the sunshine, Weyharrow Goodsir’s day had begun quite normally, to the accompaniment of crowing cocks and barking dogs and growling tractors.

What had happened to Vic Draycock was merely the first of many signs that that was not how it was due to end.

Stick – his name was Simon Bember but everyone had called him Stick for so long he’d forgotten why – yawned and rubbed his eyes and found he was asleep on the living-room couch. Eventually he decided he was wrong. Actually he was awake on the living-room couch, and cold because the window was ajar. He looked at his watch. It had stopped. The hi-fi was on, though – had been all night, since he dozed off listening to his much-worn copy of Terry Riley’s
In C.
He switched to radio and twisted the tuning knob until he hit a station which was giving a time-check.

Early, thank goodness. Sheila was never in the sweetest of moods when he overslept.

He swung his legs to the floor, yawning hugely, and ran his fingers through his gingery beard and hair. His jeans and T-shirt looked none the worse for being slept in. But then, they never looked otherwise than as if they had been.

All the doors in the flat were open, as usual. Still yawning as though the top of his head wanted to detach itself and fly away, he made for the loo, passing the bedroom where Sheila lay asleep. Having tossed her covers aside in the night, she was bare to the waist, her pale back stranded with her long dark hair. He blew her a kiss. He liked Sheila Surrean, with whom he had now lived for nearly half a year – had known he would the moment he saw the hand-written sign she’d taped to the door of her riverside flat above what had formerly been a boat-store, converted now into rented garages. It read
Wearystale.

‘Because it’s unprofitable?’ he had suggested. He had met her that evening in the Marriage, and although she had
agreed to let him see her home he had been expecting at best a kiss and cuddle at her door. Weyharrow was, after all, a village chanced on a long way from the London that he wanted to escape.

‘Nobody in this damned place ever got the point before!’ was her reply. ‘Come in!’

He’d stayed …

Much to the annoyance of sundry local folk, both old and young.

And found a job into the bargain, though luckily one they didn’t envy. Tending the village green and cemetery, raking dead leaves and trimming hedges, and generally tidying up, might not appeal to everyone, but it suited Stick to perfection, especially since it meant he had access to a patch of land where the old war memorial had stood until they moved it in 1946, neglected ever since. He wasn’t much of a gardener, but there was one thing he was very good at growing and it flourished there.

Moreover it had broken down some barriers. Even certain young men – married and unmarried – who had set their sights on Sheila now talked to him politely.

And this year’s crop, as he had proved last night, was quite exceptional …

Opposite Sheila’s room, which had become his as well, was the one where her children slept in twin bunk-beds. It was time to wake them.

No, let them wait a minute longer, while he attended to an urgent problem in the minuscule bathroom adjacent to the equally exiguous kitchen.

Emerging, he called over his shoulder as he headed for the electric kettle, ‘Sam! Hilary! Time to get up!’

Water run, flex plugged in … no sign of movement.

‘Hilary! Sam! Didn’t you hear me?’

Teapot rinsed and tea spooned into it, still nothing. Time to come the heavy non-father. He marched into the kids’
room, tramp-tramp as loudly as feet in socks permitted, and whisked the covers off them both.

Aged eight and ten, they slept in T-shirts, baggy from repeated washing. Blinking, he stared down.

He’d got the names right – crayoned signs at the head of each bunk said
HILARY
and
SAM,
though to the second one was appended a footnote he did not recall: ‘
PLEASE DONT ADD THE ANTHA I DONT LIKE IT.
’

Funny! I could have sworn that Sheila’s kids were boys.

But what the hell? He’d always liked girls better.

Having made sure they were awake, he returned to the kitchen just before the kettle boiled in search of milk and cereal and bowls and spoons.

After smoking grass like what he’d raised this year, one never knew quite where one’s head was likely to be at.

The Reverend Patrick Phibson entered the vestry of St Matthew’s Church and prepared to don his surplice for the morning service. His eyes were sore and his belly was rumbling; he had been out until midnight comforting Mrs Lapsey who – not for the first time – had been convinced she was at death’s door, but had only called the doctor at his insistence. He had missed supper, and the sandwich he had forced down on his return still lay heavy.

He looked with jaundiced gaze on the church, as usual. Ever since his appointment to this living, which would be his last before retirement, he had felt that in spite of its respectable antiquity there was something tainted about any such edifice that had been re-named owing to the vanity of its incumbent. Precisely that had happened at Weyharrow. Before Matthew Goodsir moved in and imposed his own name, it had been dedicated – ecumenically, as one might say, and very sensibly in a period of wars of religious intolerance – to All Saints.

But, of course, as he was always forced to admit to himself,
albeit with a sigh, there had been times when one must distinguish between saints and ‘saints’, that was to say the heretics who held that once received into the community of the elect whatever they did must necessarily be right, for they were permanently cleansed of any taint of sin …

Much of this church dated back past the days of the Great Plague to those of the Black Death, when such notions had been rife. Part, some people claimed, especially of the crypt, must be far older – relics of the age when this had been not a Christian but a pagan centre of worship …

Enough! Enough! Much more of this and he was likely to find himself agreeing with that awful Victor Draycock who argued that the dirty amoral mob who nowadays invaded Weyharrow each summer were heirs to a spiritual tradition with deeper roots than his own creed –

Stop!

Garbed in the prescribed manner, having recited by pure reflex the appropriate prayers, Mr Phibson realized it was more than long enough since the morning bell tolled from the tower. He drew a deep breath and thrust aside the vestry door.

As usual at this hour of seven-thirty, the congregation was negligible: seven people, five of them women and one of those his housekeeper. There was no organist on weekdays. How much more impressive it would have been had a swelling voluntary rung out …

Yet and still, it was a service to the Almighty. He composed his features into a suitably cheerful expression and went forth to utter the customary comforting phrases that – as he had known for years – properly began each daily act of worship.

‘I, Patrick, a servant of the Father, bid you welcome in His holy name, and that of the Mother, and the Child!’

With the assurance due to having performed the same rite countless times, he turned his back on the altar (had someone been meddling with it? It didn’t look the way it should
according to his own recollection of the calendar, but he had barely glimpsed it and in all humility one must admit the possibility of being wrong) and spread his arms.

‘Come hither and embrace me, as the Mother once embraced Her Child! Let us exchange the Kiss of Peace as the apostles did, passing from lip to lip the touch of our immortal Parent!’

Abruptly he realized that all the faces gazing at him were locked into the same expression: stony, appalled.

Had heresy taken root in Weyharrow again? The triune He and She and It forfend!

He tried again, this time wheedling. On average, his listeners must be fifty or sixty, but of course a sense of frustration was apt to strike at just about that age – as he himself had been made only too aware when Maud died.

‘Beloved, I know there are some who resent the fact that contact of a more intimate kind with skin that touched the skin that touched the skin – and so back and back to Intercourse with the Blessed Child, Man and Woman blended in one sacred Flesh – should be reserved to those in holy orders. But our wise and patient guide, the Church, has so decreed because above the waist the brain, the seat of judgment and intelligence, is sovereign. Below the waist, only faith may transmute the blind operation of instinct into a holy act of worship, and it is given to few to …’

His words died away. The members of the congregation were rising, but not to exchange the Kiss of Peace with him or one another. They were shouting at him, trembling with fury – or maybe horror. He stood bewildered. How could they possibly object to such an orthodox exposition of their common creed?

It hadn’t been like this yesterday morning, he was sure of that.

Ursula Ellerford caught sight of her reflection in the window
above the kitchen sink, and reflexively tidied back a strand of her brown hair. There was more grey in it than there had been a week ago, she thought. No doubt there were also more wrinkles on her face and neck. Coping by herself with two demanding teenage sons was proving more than she could bear. Last night Paul and Harold had been out God knew where until God knew what time, and she’d waited up for them as usual, terrified of the phone call that might tell her they had had an accident, or got in a fight and been arrested.

But she hadn’t wanted them to know what a watch she kept. Though she had wandered round and round the garden in the midnight mist, she had darted up to her bedroom as soon as she heard their cheerful voices on the street.

She hadn’t even left them a reproving note.

If only Ted had been spared … But he’d developed cancer, taken enforced retirement, died a lingering death. If, equally, he had left enough for something better than this cramped house – best of all, enough for a servant of the kind they had enjoyed when working in Hong Kong …

All the time she was rehearsing her pointless private litany of might-have-beens, she was boiling a pan of water, throwing in a handful of rice, laying out rice-ware bowls and matching handleless cups and hunting for the tea she was sure ought to be in
this
cupboard. No. That one?

She remembered to shout at the boys to hurry up or they would miss the school bus. Older than eleven, children in Weyharrow had to go to Powte, near Chapminster. If only Ted had left enough for them to board at his old school, as he had always dreamed …

Her sons came clattering into the kitchen and sat down. She set the steaming pan before them.

‘What’s this?’ they demanded as one.

‘Breakfast, what else?’ she snapped.

‘It looks like yucky muck to me!’ countered Harold, and his brother said the same, adding obscenities.

Ursula stood there blankly. She said in a faint voice, ‘You never said you didn’t like it before.’

‘That’s because we never had it before!’ – from Paul.

But it’s congee
–
rice soup! Like in Hong Kong
…

The words died unspoken. Sometimes it seemed they were determined to torment her every waking moment. Dully she turned away, while they exchanged shrugs and helped themselves to packet cereal. After all her trouble …!

But she managed not to cry until they’d gone.

Tom Fidger rolled the smoking ancient bus out of the forecourt of the garage that he ran in partnership with his brother Fred. It was a family business; their grandfather had founded it, and their father Jack still helped out in the office now and then.