‘Which I might advise you, Mr Allington, to think over at some more favourable time. It’s never pleasant to have one’s unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.’
‘What would you say if I were to tell you that I had evidence seeming to show that an individual had actually survived death in some form or other?’
‘I’d say you were off your …‘ On the Rev. Tom’s unworn face, the inbuilt look of petulance gave momentary place to a kind of wariness; over the last few days, I had seen something like it on most of the faces I knew well. ‘Uh, you’re talking about ghosts and so on, are you?’
‘Yes. Specifically, a ghost that gave me information, accurate information, that I couldn’t otherwise have known.’
‘Mm. I see. Well, off the top of the head I’d say that was a matter for your medical adviser rather than someone in my position. Uh, where is Jack? I don’t see him—’
‘He’s gone off to a patient. You mean I must be mad if that’s what I think has happened?’
‘Mm—no. But we are talking about, let’s say non-normal states of consciousness, aren’t we, by definition?’
‘Because by definition people don’t survive death. Of course.’
‘I say, do you think you could possibly get me another drink? I mustn’t get too pissed because I’m going to a rather exciting barbecue tonight in Newnham garden, but I think perhaps just one more shot, if I may.’
‘What are you drinking?’
‘Bacardi and Pernod.’ He got a tacit ‘you fool’ into the intonation.
‘Anything in it?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Tomato juice or Coca-Cola or—’
‘Good God, no. Just ice.’
I passed the order to Fred, who closed his eyes for a moment or two before setting about it. He was having a deservedly unstrenuous time for once, the house being shut until the evening and the present party confined to Diana, David, three or four neighbours and my own family group, plus the rector, now staring into his glass and rotating it furiously before he risked a sip.
‘Is that all right?’
‘Sure. You mentioned God’s purpose just now,’ he said, showing a power of recall I disliked having to attribute to him. ‘Interesting point, in its way. I’m going to tell you that there’s more fantasy-building about God’s purpose, in the sense of people letting their unconscious drives come out into the open in a socially accepted way, than in any other belief area, except martyrdom, of course, which is more blatantly sexual. God’s purpose. Huh. I’m no more qualified than the next man to tell you what that is, or even if there is such a thing, which a lot of the younger people in the Church today would put a big bloody question-mark to. The trend undoubtedly is for a committed God to go the same way as the immortality of the soul, with a twenty- or perhaps a twenty-five-year consciousness-lag. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go and have a word with those two smashing-looking dollies over there. It’s been a most—’
‘I’ll come with you.’
By chance (presumably), Joyce and Diana had put on virtually identical outfits for the funeral: black barathea suit, white broderie anglaise shirt, black fish-net stockings, black straw hat. This made them look more than ever like sisters, even fraternal twins. While the rector dismantled Christianity for my benefit, or just as likely for his own, I had been observing them as they sat and talked together on the window-seat, and wondering if one or the other of them had brought up the impending orgy. It occurred to me now that I had forgotten to tell Diana that I had told Joyce that the idea had come from Diana in the first place, but I had hardly begun to move over to them, the rector slouching surlily at my side, before I saw that all was well. Well and to spare: their shoulders and knees were touching, each was slightly flushed in the face, and, in their different fashions, each gave me a glance of complicity, Joyce’s straight and serious, Diana’s with a little pretended shock and shame round the edges.
‘Mr Sonnenschein has been explaining to me about God’s purpose,’ I said.
The rector gave a quick wriggle of one hip and the opposite shoulder. He said deprecatingly, ‘Oh well, you know, that sort of thing’s bound to come up from time to time in my field.’
‘What is God’s purpose?’ asked Joyce, using the interested, far from unfriendly, wholly reasonable tone that I had learnt to recognize as a warning.
‘Well, I suppose one might start to answer that by saying what it isn’t. For instance, it’s nothing to do with getting hot and bothered about the state of one’s soul, or the resurrection of the body, or the community of saints, or sin and repentance, or doing one’s duty in that state of life into which it has pleased—’
I had been looking forward to an exhaustive list of what God’s purpose was not; Joyce, however, cut in. ‘But what is His purpose?’
‘I should say, I would say that what … God wants us to do’ —there were sneer-marks round the last phrase—’is to fight injustice and oppression wherever they are, whether they’re in Greece or Rhodesia or America or Ulster or Mozambique-and-Angola or Spain or—’
‘But that’s all politics. What about religion?’
‘To me, this is … religion, in the truest sense. Of course, I may be wrong about the whole thing. It isn’t up to me to tell people what to think or how they ought to—’
‘But you’re a parson,’ said Joyce, still reasonably. ‘You’re paid to tell people what to think.’
‘To me, I’m sorry, but that’s a rather outmoded—’
‘Mr Sonnenschein,’ put in Diana, chopping it up so sharply that it sounded a bit like one of those three-monosyllable Oriental names.
The rector waited quite a creditable length of time before saying, ‘Yes, Mrs Maybury?’
‘Mr Sonnenschein … Would you mind frightfully if I were to ask you a rather impertinent question?’
‘No. No, of course not. It’s a—’
‘What- … ‘s-the-point of somebody like you being a parson when you say you don’t care about things like duty and people’s souls and sin? Isn’t that just exactly what parsons are supposed to care about?’
‘Well, it’s true that the traditional—’
‘I mean, of course I agree with you about Greece and all these places, it’s absolutely ghastly, but everybody knows that already. You must simply not take offence, please not, but lots of us would say it’s not up to you in your position to start sounding like, well …‘
‘One of those chaps on television doing a lecture on the problems of today and freedom and democracy,’ said Joyce, even more reasonably than before.
‘We don’t need you for that, you see. Mr Sonnenschein …‘
‘… Yes, Mrs Maybury?’
‘Mr Sonnenschein, don’t you perhaps think that when everybody’s so tremendously, you know, ahead of everything and knowing it all and everything, then it’s a bit up to you to be jolly crusty and jolly full of hell-fire and sin and damnation and jolly hard on everybody, instead of, you know…?’
‘Not really minding anything like everybody else,’ said Joyce. She drained her sherry, looking at me over the top of the glass.
‘But surely one must tell the truth as one sees it, otherwise one—’
‘Oh, do you really think so? Don’t you think that’s just about the riskiest thing one can possibly do?’
‘You can only think you know it, probably,’ finished Joyce. ‘Yes. Well. There we are. I must go and see the major,’ said the man of God, so rapidly and decisively and so immediately before his actual departure that seeing the major (even though there was a retired one actually present) might have been a Sonnenschein family euphemism for excretion.
I turned back to the two girls. I had never seen them behave in concert like this before. ‘Well, that was a marvellous seeing-off, and no mistake. I wish I’d said all that. Can I get you both a drink?’
As I spoke, they looked at each other in a brief thought-exchanging way, then at me
without much warmth. Diana, wide-eyed, leaned forward.
‘Maurice, why did you bring that ghastly little dog-collared drip over here like that?’
‘I didn’t bring him over; he insisted on coming to chat the two of you up, and I thought it would be less painful if I—’
‘Couldn’t you have stopped him?’ asked Joyce.
‘I suppose I could have, yes, if I’d realized it was so important.’
‘Surely, Maurice, you could see we were having a chat.’
‘Sorry. Anyway, talking of having a chat …‘
‘You mean about us and you going to bed together,’ said Joyce, not dropping her voice much, and speaking as if we had turned to a less stimulating and sufficiently familiar topic.
‘Ssshh … Yes. Well, what do you—?’
‘We thought four o’clock this afternoon would be a good time,’ said Diana.
‘Splendid. We might—’
‘Where?’ asked Joyce.
‘I thought we could use number eight in the annexe. No booking there until Monday. I’ll mention it to David and hell see we’re not disturbed.’
‘What will you say to him?’
‘Leave that to me.’
Mention it to David I did, in the same fashion as several times before when about to entertain a lady in my house, though without asking him, as several times before, to have a bottle of champagne and an ice-bucket and glasses ready in the room, an omission made less out of economy than inability to think what to say about the number of glasses required. This brief exchange came just after an unenjoyable luncheon in the main dining-room. The rector was in attendance, fully recovered from his drubbing at the hands of the girls, in fact quite exuberant, making an untentative verbal pass at Nick over coffee (as Nick told me later) and going off last and adequately pissed with three glasses of my Taylor 1955 inside him. I wished him ill for his Newnham garden barbecue. When he had finally departed, I went to the office, locked myself in, turned off the telephone and tried to think about my father.
It was a case of trying, more than succeeding, because it had been so hard to connect anything about his burial with anything about him, or because I had four o’clock on my mind (though it did not feel like that), or because the recently living take so long to start seeming really dead, or because of something to do with Jack’s pills. Cold and unmeaningful phrases circled in my brain: he had gone off easy, he had given me life, he had been a good age, he was at peace, he had done his best for me, he had seen his son and grandson settled, he must have known it would come (as if that were a comfort). And he had gone to a better place, he was dead in the body but not in the spirit—not easy to find more of the same to add, nor even to try to find a meaning in anything of the sort, not nowadays. It sounded as if, it felt as if, for every imaginable wrong reason, that fool of a rector had been right. And yet I had meant what I had said to him about evidence of survival in Underhill’s case. A different case, then, a far-off one, concerning a man who was not a man at all, only a name and words and bones and perhaps, no, certainly, an apparition. Immortality seemed either too exotic or too crude a concept to be fitted into somebody one had known for so long in the flesh. It might be possible to work on this from the other end, so to speak—try to make Underhill more real to myself, more of a person, more of a presence, however remote, in the same kind of way as my father was a presence.
I unlocked a drawer in the desk and, from under a pile of bank statements and cleared cheques, pulled out the casket containing the silver figure and the manuscript. I had been too tired to examine these the previous night, and had had no time, nor much inclination, so far that day. Now I was eager to do so. I took the figure to the window and turned it over in the strong sunlight there. Except round the neck and crotch, it was not much corroded, but other parts of it appeared to have been worn smooth. Both trunk and limbs were roughly cylindrical, with little representation of waist, elbow or knee, and the surviving hand, although disproportionately large, showed no knuckles or finger-joints. In the same fashion, the head did not taper appreciably towards the chin, the top of the skull was almost flat and the features were to a large extent matters of token; only the mouth, set in a wide straight grin that revealed a dozen or more teeth of roughly equal size, had been treated in any detail. I was certain the thing had not come from anywhere in western Europe, and felt strongly that east was the wrong direction to consider. Africa, possibly, though very unlikely, I thought, in view of Underhill’s date, if nothing else. The New World, the pre-Columbian cultures—yes: I had seen just that kind of joyful, greedy ferocity on the faces of Aztec sculptures. There would have been plenty of time—a century and a half, in fact—for such an object to make its way from conquered Mexico to the England of Underhill’s day, however hard it might be to imagine a plausible route; the capture of a Spanish treasure-ship was one obvious and not too unlikely piece of guesswork. But from whatever source and by whatever way it had reached Fareham, it was by far the most disagreeable work of human hands I have ever seen, as I had been aware the moment I looked at it closely. It was also unpleasant to the touch, being hardly less cold, or clammy, than when I had first handled it, twelve hours or so previously, and not being appreciably warmed now by several minutes’ contact with my fingers; no doubt the result of some impurity in the metal. All in all, it seemed just what Underhill would have chosen, probably from a collection of such images of man’s beastliness, to have buried with him and to serve as proof of his survival.
I put the figure down on the desk and picked up the journal, which turned out at the first glance to be written on the same kind of paper as the notebook I had inspected in the Hobson Room at All Saints’; it had perhaps lain originally between the same covers. The writing on these sheets had faded very markedly, to a kind of washed-out mid-brown, but was still quite readable. It was a thin sheaf of papers, no more than fourteen or fifteen in all, and the first dozen carried nothing but agonizingly vague injunctions to the unearther of the manuscript; stuff like
‘Bee not impacient: all things shall be deliver’d to thee in time. Put thyself under my Will, & thou shalt see a great Wonder. Prepare; abstain from all spirituous Liquors & Cordials (here at least I had already started to do my best to cooperate), takg only such Wine & small Beer as may conduce to health. Bethink thee, that altho’ Philosophy be amiable in herself, her Aspect is upon occasion full strange & stern …‘
And so on. The only entry that stood out in any way from this kind of thing, inset from the margin as though to differentiate it, to mark it perhaps as a note from Underhill to himself (a type of communication I have shown I understand) rather than a memorandum to me, ran as follows:
‘The name, Fareham village. Cf. Fareham Haven in Southhamptonshire. No knowledge of this. Quasi, far Home, sc. distant habitation, or, fair Home. Or, from the Saxon & Gothick, feor, sc. fear. So, feorhame, quasi, the Place of Fear.’
Whatever the rightness or wrongness of Underhill’s etymology, I found this making a kind of sense, the same kind as my conjecture about the derivation of the name of my house. But such theorizing belonged to an impossibly vast and remote field of thought; I put it by and went dispiritedly on through the journal. On its last leaf were half a dozen lines of writing, in a tumbling, scribbled hand barely recognizable as Underhill’s.
‘My time is nearer than I had thought. Dismiss thy Servants at once; send all from home save thine own Family. Go not abroad thyself; see no one & keep thy chamber, that I may find thee alone when I come to thee. Have our small Freind of Silver by thee AT ALL TIMES—or everything will be in vain, Now, fare well, until I shall return.’
There was only one of these instructions that it would not be difficult to obey, but that one was evidently the most important. Unhesitatingly, unreasoningly and with revulsion, I picked up the figure and placed it in my left side coat pocket, where it made an ugly bulge. That was that; what now? Preparatory to gathering the papers together, I turned the last one over and laid it on top
of the others, noticing as I did so that it bore a couple of lines of writing. They were in the firm, unhurried hand of the earlier pages, and read:
‘I will wait upon thee in my Parlour at twelve of the clock, the night following thy Discovery. See thou art alone.’
What made me stare and rise to my feet and start trembling was not the content of this message, but the quality of the ink: dark blue or black, not faded at all, as if it had been put on paper that day. But how could that be?
A powerful but (again) unreasoning sense of urgency came upon me. I must find Lucy at once. I had heard her say that she was going to spend the afternoon … how? Where? Yes— reading, sunbathing, in the garden. I snatched up the paper and rushed from the office, across the hall, out of the front door and along to the south-east corner of the house. Lucy, with Nick near her, was sitting on an outdoors chair in the middle of the lawn. Slipping clumsily about on the thick dry grass, and with the silver figure bumping against my hip, I ran over to her.
‘Lucy, look at this. The ink.’
‘What is it?’
‘Look at the colour of the ink. New, fresh. Isn’t it?’
‘I don’t see—’
‘No no, the other side, that one. That’s fresh ink, isn’t it?’
She hesitated, finally saying, ‘It doesn’t look fresh to me,’ and handing the paper back.
Of course she was right. The writing on both sides was brown and faded. No amount of hurrying, presumably, would have made any difference. He had caused it to fade, or, more likely, he had caused it to look unfaded a minute ago. I noticed that Lucy was wearing a navy-blue bathing-dress with the shoulder-straps pulled down, and had a brightly-jacketed book on her lap, and was looking slightly dazed with sun. Nick took the paper from me, glanced at it, then started to read it. He was just wearing trunks and sandals.
‘No, it doesn’t,’ I said, ‘now I look at it again. I don’t know what made me … It must have been the light. It’s not very good in the office. The light. Unless you have the light on.’