‘Perhaps you had better tell me what the trouble is,’ he said, and dislike made his musical Public School voice even colder than usual.
Thus sparsely encouraged, Gladys gave the following account.
‘Mrs Adams, got two houses up Archway Road way, well, I say houses, a row it is really, let out to all these men, a lot of railway workers, nasty dirty work, she slaved for him, years, it was, not really married they weren’t, excuse me mentioning such a thing but we’re all ’uman aren’t we, I said to her, slaving for him all those years well she didn’t get her reward. Left it to that Elsie. All of them. And the men wouldn’t stand the place going down. So off they went in the car. Brighton, it was, and owns our house too, and swore to me on the Bible only six months ago Gladys Barnes, she said, your home is as safe as mine and then leaves Jean, that’s the young woman in my house, you would have thought he’d have left it to her after all those years, and she’s very nervy, and said she wouldn’t marry him, not if he was hung with diamonds, and I suppose that led her up to sell it.’
Mr Corliss seized the pause, when Gladys broke off to refresh herself with more coffee, to say rather faintly, with a now gentle coldness:
‘Er … I’m afraid … it isn’t quite clear … a friend of yours is in trouble?’ He took a hold of himself, fighting off distaste. ‘She … isn’t married, I understand?’
‘Hasn’t been for years,’ Gladys said robustly, taking another biscuit. ‘No, it’s my home. She sold it.’ Her eyes, wide with suddenly remembered distress, stared at him grey-bluely through her glasses. ‘It’s me and my sister. She’s got this trouble, they don’t know what it is. In bed all day but Nurse comes twice a week, don’t like her much I must say, always on about something, and Jean said go to the Town ’All but I don’t trust them.’ She stopped abruptly, took off her glasses, and wiped her eyes on a piece of rag.
At least it was not something ugly. Mr Corliss’s distaste receded, and was replaced by a faint concern for his visitor. She was apparently threatened with losing her home. A picture of his own ancient home, set in the midst of humpy Wiltshire hills and their scarves of dark woods, rose before his inward eye:
Ah, shall I ever in after-time behold
My native bounds – see many a harvest hence
With ravished eyes the lowly turf-roofed cot
Where I was king?
he thought. O Virgil, serene master …
He read his newspapers, as a part of his training to be a priest in the modern world, and he had at least learned how serious, nowadays, was the loss of a home.
‘And she’s threatened to turn you out?’ he asked.
‘Never said a word,’ retorted Gladys, ‘told Jean to tell us and the old gentleman what lives up in our attic, well I say gentleman, though he does make these little straw dolls and totes them round, little figures and that, nothing but begging really but she needn’t be personal, worst of it is, she says he’s the rackman kind. You know, a really bad man.’
The last words, in their simplicity, set so many echoes ringing in a head not so long ago down from a theological college that again Mr Corliss had to pull himself together.
‘You mean … your new landlord is a thoroughly bad type?’
‘That’s what I’m saying, aren’t I?’ Gladys’s tone was impatient; she had lost her awe of Mr Corliss and was rapidly forming a low opinion of his intelligence. He didn’t seem to understand what she said.
The despised one was, in fact, silently praying for help. Even at twenty-seven, there were many humiliating years of self-knowledge behind him, and the briefest of prayers, launched with a kind of calm desperation, was a tried resource.
It seemed to him that this one was answered. He leant towards her.
‘Do nothing at all,’ he said firmly. ‘Just go home, and wait until you hear something more either from your old landlady or this new … chap … who has bought the house, and then decide what you will do. Er … how … about … er … funds?’
‘Eh? Money, do you mean?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. Are you … er … in immediate … want?’
‘Not immedit. I got my pension, see, and Annie has hers, and we get a bit off of the Assistants. And I got me cleaning work. Not that that’s much,’ she added hastily fearing to scare away any funds that might be available, ‘no, not immedit.’
‘Because I dare say we could … if you were …’
‘Now don’t you worry about me,’ said Gladys, fortified by coffee and biscuits and comforted by having been told to do exactly what she wanted to, namely, nothing at all, ‘I’ll be all right. Trust in One Above,’ she added, feeling it was high time something about God came into it; after all he was the curate.
‘Yes, exactly,’ he answered almost inaudibly, ‘if … that’s where … He is … but certainly … trust.’
Well that’s a nice thing to say to one of his own parishers, thought Gladys, marching away from the front door to which he had scrupulously escorted her. If that’s where He is, indeed. Where else should He be? and she glanced up at the heavy sky louring over the Fields. And never told me to come again or anything. Oh well. Better write him off, as they say. A washout. She went off towards the bus stop.
‘There was a caller for you this morning,’ Mr Corliss said to the Vicar over their lunch, ‘a Miss … Barnes.’
The Vicar, an elderly widower, shook his head. ‘Don’t know her. Is she a regular?’
‘Apparently. She said she was … a parishioner.’ He decided his ears must have misled him about Gladys’s version; there wasn’t such a word.
‘What did she want? Money? Was she collecting? or did she just drop in for a chat?’ Mr Geddes glanced, as if in search of something or someone, round the vast dining-room. ‘Some of them do do that. Margery – my wife used to keep them at bay. Everyone, or almost everyone’s, so lonely, that’s the trouble nowadays.’
‘She said she was threatened with eviction. Or so I gathered. She … her account was rather confused.’
‘Eviction – oh dear. Unless it’s very bad, young children and so forth, I don’t think we’d better get ourselves mixed up in that. The local Press would be better – or the Town Hall best of all. If there were young children I would consider letting them come here, the parents too, just until they were settled somewhere, there are those bedrooms standing empty upstairs and very much on my conscience. But an elderly woman – you did say she was elderly?’
‘Between sixty and seventy, I should say … only … it’s so difficult to judge. Unusually talkative,’ Gerald added, hoping his distaste did not sound in his voice.
‘Barnes – oh, Gladys Barnes. Of course I know Miss Barnes. Yes, she is unusually talkative. I don’t know her well, she’s a rather irregular attendant, has a sister with some mysterious ailment – nervous, I should think – that keeps her bedridden, so our Miss Barnes can’t always get away. Threatened with eviction, eh?’
‘So I … gathered. But it … wasn’t very clear.’
Mr Geddes laughed shortly and observed that he imagined it wasn’t. ‘Did she leave an address?’ he asked.
‘Yes, she did as a matter of fact. Rose Cottage, Rose Walk, N.W.5. I remembered it because … an unexpectedly charming name.’
If Mr Geddes thought this hardly the right reason for remembering a parishioner’s address, he said no more than a dry ‘H’m – it doesn’t look very charming,’ as they went out of the room. Mrs Hemmings, who came in every day allegedly to care for the comforts of the elderly widower and the young bachelor, was hovering, wanting to clear the table.
‘I’ll get along there to-morrow, if I can make time,’ the Vicar promised, as he went into his study. ‘I called there once, when I first came here, I remember now.’
But he was thinking more of how much he disliked poor Mrs Hemmings’s cooking and her sour face. Would it be shockingly selfish to bring his mother down from Harrogate to look after him? She had only been released from the tyranny of many stone-floored, rambli
ng, draughty, mousey vicarages three years ago, and the hotel was warm, pretty and comfortable.
Dammit, he thought suddenly, of course I’ll ask her. Don’t we both know, bless her, that she’s only dying to come?
4
It was well after dusk, the next evening, as he climbed determinedly up the short flight of stairs that led to the Barnes sisters’ rooms.
As usual, he had had a long day; up for the six forty-five; then another service at ten for those too old or frail to attend the earlier service; the tasteless lunch (a minor comfort now, with others oh how unbearably greater, lost to him, had been his wife’s cooking), hospital visiting, perhaps the dreariest task that falls to a parish priest, all the afternoon; then Evensong, read through with the curate in the dim, empty church; and now the visit to Miss Barnes. It was to be followed by the meeting of the Men’s Group, at eight, at the Vicarage.
At the top of the stairs he was confronted by darkness made just less impenetrable by a dim glow falling through a skylight. There was the musical dripping of a tap somewhere. He thought he could make out another flight of stairs, presumably leading to an attic. He was confronted by a shut door, with a dim light shining under it. He tapped.
A gaping child had opened the front door to him and nodded when he said ‘Miss Barnes?’ He had carefully moved aside the chair on which it had climbed to turn the latch, and had distinguished a murmur about ‘Glad’. He had smiled at it – pale, trousered, sticky and apparently hermaphrodite – and realised that, from this moment, he was on his own.
He repeated the tap.
At once came a distant squeak. ‘I’m all right, Jean, I don’t want nothing, Glad’ll be back any minute.’ The tone was full of quite unequivocal rejection. Mr Geddes cleared his throat.
‘It’s the Vicar, Mr Geddes. The Vicar. From Saint James’s Church.’
Stunned silence followed. Then – ‘I’m in bed. Bedridden. Can’t ’ardly move.’
‘I wanted to see the Miss Barnes who comes to Saint James’s,’ he called, feeling the strain on a sixty-year-old throat.
‘I can’t get out of bed. Very weak. It’s my sister you want. She’s just popped out.’
‘Now don’t disturb yourself,’ patiently bawled Mr Geddes through the twilight. ‘You stay comfortable, and I’ll wait here until she gets back. I don’t expect she’ll be long, will she?’
‘Just popped out. Ran out of bread. It’s only round the corner. Joneses.’
Silence fell. Mr Geddes wondered if he might venture to sit on the stairs. Better not, perhaps. He sighed.
‘Did I hear a male voice?’
Mr Geddes jumped nearly out of his skin. It was the hoarsest of near-whispers and it seemed to float down from the ceiling. Glancing rather wildly upwards he could make out a glow, of a faintness to match the eerie sound of the question, at the top of the attic stairs.
‘It’s Mr Geddes, the Reverend Robert Geddes. I’ve come to see Miss Barnes but she’s out.’ He launched his explanation hopefully into the gloom, upwards.
‘Ah …’ breathed the voice, as if satisfied. ‘I’ll come down.’ At the same instant there was a courteous squeak from Miss Barnes’s hidden sister. ‘If you’ll just open the door, sir, and come into the front room, you’d be more comfortable waiting there. You could switch the light on. It is just by the door.’
‘Thank you – I will. Thank you.’ The mild nightmare showed signs of dissolving.
But now slow, slapping footsteps were descending the attic stairs, with an effect of caution, as if the person coming down were feeling their way; old footsteps, conveying weakness, as had the bodiless voice.
Mr Geddes, not a romantic or imaginative type, had had enough. He was also hungry.
He opened Miss Barnes’s door with a jerk, fumbled against the wall, and crisply switched on the light. The room’s cosy poverty was revealed and also the further room, with Annie, sitting up muffled in some of the coats, nothing of her visible but her eyes, glaring out of the balaclava. She uttered an unintelligible sound conveying welcome, and Mr Geddes lowered himself thankfully into an armchair.
He turned his eyes towards the door.
Another moment and a little old man crept up and stood framed in it as if he were a picture, looking mildly in.
He wore clothes faded to barely distinguishable shades of dim brown, sage and stone colour, all toned down to one overriding hue; it was as if he were dressed in dead leaves. His long-nosed face suggested the mask of a horse or sheep. Intelligence, of a kind, looked out through milky-brown eyes.
‘When I heard you were a priest, I thought – an educated man,’ he observed, ‘and it’s many weeks since I talked with an educated man. There’s,’ the eyes moved to Annie and he interrupted himself to give a little bow and say, ‘Good-evening, Miss Annie,’ then went on in a lowered tone – ‘There’s so many women about, so very many, and none of them you might call educated.’
His voice sank to a confidential murmur, ‘… one educated man to another,’ he ended.
All Mr Geddes could find to say was, ‘Good-evening.’
He judged that the visitor must be nearer ninety than eighty; skin, hair, eyes, teeth, stance, voice all thinly proclaimed great age. He wore bedroom slippers worn almost down to their supporting sock on his little feet, embroidered in orange and flame and ruby but all faded to a near-whiteness.
‘My name this month is Lancelot Andrewes,’ he remarked, shuffling into the room, ‘I make a habit of taking a different name every month, sometimes that of a writer, sometimes a thinker, sometimes a prophet or a philosopher.’
‘But what’s your own name? The one your mother called you by?’ Mr Geddes asked, wondering, but not about that.
‘Ah. My real name. It really is Lancelot. Lancelot Fisher. I expect you have read Malory?’
‘Not since I was at Oxford.’
‘You were at Oxford. A great privilege. I never went to any University, my father was poor, very poor, poorer than what I am, you may say, because I have chosen to be poor, but he didn’t have no choice. That is the ’ardest way of being poor. It was my mother gave me the name, she used to read, poor soul. Poor soul.’
Mr Geddes was beginning to find the conversation soporific. Thoughts of the brief interlude due to him in his armchair, with the evening paper, would intrude, and he turned in relief to loud, stumbling, bumping sounds, accompanied by a voice offering excuses and explanations, which were now coming up the stairs. Lancelot Fisher advanced into the room and sat down collectedly in the other armchair, and also looked towards the door.
‘Well, fancy!’ cried Gladys, floundering in and flinging a sliced loaf on to the table, ‘sorry I was out, we just ran out, that Joneses they never ’ave any after six, you’d think there was another war, Jean’s, that’s the young woman downstairs, her Melinda, spoiled little madam she is, told me you was up here, and Mr Fisher too – what’s your name this evening, Mr Fisher? – ever so nice of you to come round,’ to the Vicar, with a flush rising to mist her glasses as she realized she still did not know his name, ‘I expect your curate told you I come but you was out.’
She began unwrapping cardigans, scarves and a thick coat from herself, the while glancing distractedly towards a cupboard on which stood a tea canister, with a portrait of Her Majesty on it smiling out across the room. ‘I’m sure you could drink a cup of tea. And you could, couldn’t you, Mr Fisher? Never say no to a cup of tea, do you?’
‘It’s very kind of you but I won’t, thank you,’ said Mr Geddes. ‘I just –’
‘Oh but you must,’ screamed Gladys, scrabbling on a shelf for the milk, ‘can’t let you go without a cup of tea, and you coming all this way, wonder you didn’t get lost –’
‘I will have a cup of tea; thank you,’ observed Mr Fisher, raising his eyes from his study of the carpet.
‘Oh we all know you never say no, Annie, we’re out of biscuits again –’
How long this struggle between disinclination and hospitality wou
ld have gone on Mr Geddes never knew, for at that moment a woman’s voice called urgently up the stairs – ‘Glad! Quick! ’E’s ’ere – the rackman. In a car!’
Silence fell, and, instantly, every eye was fixed upon Mr Geddes, as if he – the one who had been to college, the one who knew how things worked – would know what to do, while on every face there was an expression of terror. In another moment, the young woman’s eager face appeared at the door.
‘It’s ’im, Glad … ’ere … let’s …’
She pushed without apology past the seated men and, followed by the muttering and trembling Gladys, hurried into the bedroom and over to the window. She cautiously moved aside the curtain. Mr Geddes, forgetting everything but human curiosity, got up and followed, and next was made aware, by a sensation of mothlike pressure and eld, that Mr Fisher was at his side. Even Annie was leaning awkwardly sideways from her bed to stare down.
The street was only a short way below. Its paving, heaved into irregularities by the bombing of twenty years ago, gleamed greasily in the faint light of its one lamp, and, down at the end of the dark, boarded-up, double row of houses they saw the great car, its insolent snout pointing down the Walk as if threatening it.
‘Consul. Does ’imself well,’ breathed Jean Simms. ‘Shuvver, too – see ’im, Glad?’ But no-one answered her.
A man was standing there, hands in his pockets, a little beyond the rays of the lamp, staring up at the cottages. He was stout, and wore a soft hat, and that was all they could see of him.
‘Someone in the car …’ whispered Gladys, and instantly all their eyes turned to it.
They could just distinguish a figure sitting in the back, with head swathed in a voluminous, spirit-like whiteness that might be a scarf.
Transfixed, they stared. His inspection did not last longer than a few minutes but there was something chilling, something impersonal yet intent about it, that was frightening. The chauffeur did not move; the woman-like shape in the back of the car was leaning slightly forward as if to see the house, too, but it also was motionless.