by Ursula Bloom
‘It is beautiful,’ he said. ‘It has stood untouched for generations. It will remain untouched for generations yet unborn, I suppose.’
‘Modernity has left it behind?’ she suggested.
‘And a good thing in some ways.’
‘Yet if they started building, they would call it progress.’
‘Umph!’ He was a little contemptuous. ‘Progress seems to hide itself under asbestos tiles and corrugated iron sheets.’
‘They are starting round London in dreadful earnestness,’ she agreed; ‘houses are scarce. Mine is on a lease and the landlord does nothing to it. I can’t compel him, and I hardly like to do it myself for his benefit.’
‘You are lucky you don’t come under the Ecclesiastical Surveyors.’
‘I believe they’re dragons,’ she said, ‘but they don’t swoop on you till you die. That must simplify matters a little. Only your executors can come in for the argument.’
He laughed again and glanced at her a second time. At first it had been her youth and intelligence. The paying guests of the porter’s grandmother were usually wizened old maids with an artistic cult. Jill was fresh and spontaneous. She was of his age and she had appealed to him by similarity. But now he was attracted by her personality, by her frailly lovely face, and the loveliness of the soul of Jill herself.
‘If you want to move anywhere but to a churchyard they won’t permit it,’ he told her.
‘That’s awkward. Like that, you will be here for ever.’
‘For ever and ever, I suppose. Old Reddelman at Feltham has been there over twenty years. When he came he was a brilliant preacher, but he got shelved. Now he does not know his own ritual. His heart has been eaten out of him.’
‘Doesn’t the Bishop see?’ she enquired gently.
‘Bishops don’t come this way too often. Sometimes in a remote hamlet there is a confirmation. The Bishop arrives. He has lunch at the Rectory (boiled chicken and apple pie). He holds the service and burbles about the Church and one’s office. He tea’s with those of the congregation thought fitted to meet him. Penny cakes cut in half, and a fearful flutter in the dovecotes. That’s all he sees of these places.’
‘In other words, nothing.’
‘Nothing at all.’ His voice had grown wearily bitter. ‘He knows nothing at all. He never will know anything. He doesn’t realise that in the churches in the valley the floods come out and make Evensong impossible in winter. He doesn’t understand that Celebration means nothing to the villagers, and that old Jollyphant comes because he has a craving for drink.’
Jill drew a long green grass through her teeth. The sweet sap of it trickled into her mouth and was delicious. It seemed strange that the episode with Clive had already retreated into distance. She could be interested in Stephen’s anxieties and worries. He seemed older, more stable, she could lean on him. The tranquil peace of the country flowed about them. It lay like dew upon the thready grasses and about the lazy hills. It flowed in upon the parched desert of her heart.
‘It is a shame that clergy are so terribly underpaid,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘Surely the subject will be properly considered soon?’
‘Or the Church disestablished,’ he said. ‘Let’s discuss something pleasanter. How long are you staying?’
‘Only a day or so. I must get home. I have my brother keeping my house for me.’
‘No parents?’
‘No.’
‘That’s hard. Still, your brother must be a great help to you?’
‘Yes,’ she said half-heartedly, ‘he is.’
If only Twit had written to her! If only he had helped her in this crisis! But no one had helped her. She felt dismally alone, as she imagined some lighthouse must feel jagged up from a lonely sea, storm-tossed, beset on every side. Looking at Stephen’s arms, she found herself thinking how protective they would be about her. As she thought of it her lips quivered. If she allowed them to go on quivering she would cry. It would be unthinkable to cry here with him, yet she felt the imminence of tears and was afraid. She needed comfort. She needed something of which so far life had deprived her.
‘Being a widow is hard for any woman,’ he said; ‘you must find your faith a great comfort to you.’
She thought to herself, ‘Ah, if I had done!’ Unfortunately faith was one of those happinesses that she had missed. Jill had until now thought little about it. It had not entered into her sphere. She allied it with dull mornings at church and duller evenings when she had been forced to go by Isobel. She had never seen the kernel within the husk. Now suddenly it seemed as if again the beautiful star rose on her horizon, and stared at her with its one wide and reproachful eye. She glimpsed through the half-shuttered window of her perception the radiance of a Deity, not the Deity of tiring service and lack of comprehension, but the real God in the real star! Not the Jehovah of vengeance that Jew and Christian alike have cherished, but a mild, kind, forgiving God, Who understood.
‘I think,’ said Stephen gravely, ‘you would find every help in faith.’
She nodded. She believed that he was right, but she could not trust herself to speak.
‘I hope I shall see you at service in the morning?’
‘Yes.’
At that moment the Feltham bells pealed out upon the silence. First one tenor bell calling melodiously to the others. The fellows joining, then the complete eight pealing forth like water crystal clear into the early evening.
‘Dear me! I had no idea that it was so late.’ He brought out a watch and glanced at it. ‘I am due at the church for confessions. Nobody ever comes; still, it is part of my duty to be there.’ He scrambled up hurriedly, and swept off the pieces of dried grass and crumbly earth which clung to his black serge suit. ‘You must pardon my running off like this. Really there is not time. I had no idea.’
She was almost relieved to see him go. She saw him running in awkward jerks as though unused to it. Then she turned her face back to the broad sweet view beyond. Now she could cry in peace. At least she was thankful for that. The tears might be of self-pity, but that did not matter. She wept like a helpless child who has committed some venial sin, who has stolen the jam and has been discovered. She wept because she saw now the great forgiveness behind what she had believed to be a mortal sin. The enormity was slipping into its proper perspective. She saw faith for the first time in the white light of the luminous star, and she knew that if she could but retain her vision of that star, nothing could harm her. The sweet bells played their angelus. She listened forlornly, as a child who has fallen by the way and is struggling to its knees again, bruised but determined to continue. She felt homesick, lovesick, sick unto death. The bells went on and their very tenderness was disturbing. The echoes caught the sound and flung it vigorously to the hills; the hills received it with rapture and sent it back again. The whole of the valley rang with the cadence.
Twit had not replied. He might be very angry with her, despising her and hating her. She felt, as she sat there thinking, that anything would have been easier to bear than his silence. Here, on the hill with the valley dipping bluely beneath, her, cupped by the ring of Cotswolds, she ached to speak of her sin to someone. Stephen had said that her faith should help her. She thought of him sitting in the quiet coolness of the church, waiting in silence for penitents. Then suddenly she pictured herself relieving her soul of the immensity of sin. Approaching him up the path, entering the tranquil church and confessing the truth. She imagined confession washing out that sin helping her.
The bells died down. For a moment the glen quivered with the last resonant echo, then the silence reigned supreme. The greenness and the blueness merged.
But she felt as the pilgrims of old who had heard the angels singing. She was a pilgrim journeying towards the shrine of immortality. She got up. Her feet felt strangely weak, but she did not care. She turned and went the way that Stephen had gone.
VII
The sun was sinking as she appr
oached the church up the spick and span asphalt path with the irregular graves on either side and the square-cut headstones in upright slabs. She saw that the greyed oak of the porch door with its heavy black iron hinges was half open. Inside was the cool receiving darkness. She entered the porch, where notices fluttered like flags of truce on the dark boards. Her footsteps echoed and the sound was alarming to her sensitive ears. She hesitated and went forward on tiptoe. A wide step, worn thin by generations of feet, bordered the porch from the church beyond. The stone was green and yet gold, and even dun. It reminded her of river water which is no colour at all, but has all colours in its fluid. She thought of her sin as an accusation written in water and therefore leaving no accusation. All the while she knew that her heart yearned only to confess that sin. The red curtains were half drawn and between them she saw Stephen sitting in a chair of pale oak, reading out of a small book. It was the chair used by the Bishop at the few confirmations that he had held in the parish, and it seemed to Jill’s senses like a throne. Stephen wore his cassock and biretta and he looked to her fanciful imagination like some Pope sitting in majestic peace with all the world. Between them rose the font, cup-shaped, of yellowed stone, palely illuminated by a greenish light from the stained window above it. Behind it, set in painful reminder that, as birth brings us to the font, so shall death ultimately remove us, the hand-bier stood. On Sunday the men shovelled their hats and caps on to it. It carried them bravely, as ultimately it would bear their bodies to the grave. Now it was empty, gaping it seemed, ready to receive her very youth. The idea was repellent to her. The sight of the hand-bier frightened her, and she would have turned and gone, had not Stephen, suddenly sensing her presence, looked across to her.
‘You?’
‘I wanted to talk to you.’
She knew now that she had crossed the Rubicon. She trembled a little, for the very coolness of the church was frightening. It reminded her of flat lily leaves floating on rivers of water, its film unbroken by cup-like ripples. It had the faint cold smell of stone and disuse and of death itself. Clive and his gay impassioned youth seemed to have gone far away, and the star had for a moment veiled her white eye in a cloud of doubt.
‘Come into the vestry?’
She passed behind the red curtains and he gave her the pale wood chair that was the Bishop’s. It was a grim irony, she felt, and it made her feel additionally sinful. The atmosphere of the church seemed to magnify that sin. Before it had appeared almost trivial, in comparison with its sudden titanic proportions. Now it encumbered her. She gripped the arms of the chair with tense fingers. Stephen leant against the half-opened cupboard, his arms folded together. He was surveying her from beneath his biretta, and she saw that he had an inscrutable face, with kindly eyes set above fleshy cheeks and a loose mouth. From inside the cupboard there was the glitter of utensils stacked side by side, the dark lithe line of a bottle, the gleam of a silver chalice and paten. There were books grouped together, and a white stole folded and laid by. Her nostrils smelt the keen, live smell of new wood. The cupboard had been subscribed for recently by the parishioners, for the old one had become too ramshackle for use. This had been made by the village carpenter, who was in need of work. Undertaking was his most remunerative occupation, but the year had been a healthy one. The village had tried to compensate him by entrusting the new cupboard to his skill. The swift smell of pine was in Jill’s nostrils, and the accruing smell of moist coolness from the weeping stones that flagged the nave of the church.
‘I wanted to tell you something,’ she half whispered, for here it seemed one was afraid to speak aloud.
‘Certainly.’
‘I feel I can’t go on with it weighing me down. I must tell somebody. I can think of nobody better than you.’
‘I am used to confessions,’ he said, and then he flushed. For that was a lie. He was not used to confessions at all. He tried to pretend that his parishioners confessed and communicated regularly, but the truth of it was merely the ideal enshrined in his heart. One day he hoped that it might materialise.
‘I have done something dreadful.’
‘Possibly not so dreadful as you think?’
He was aware that he desired nothing more than to drop on to his knees and say, ‘You could do nothing dreadful, you are good and young, and pure and lovely, and sin is not of you.’ For the first time he became aware of the fact that he might be in love with her. In love with Lady Shane! Usually priests with titled wives got speedy preferment. He was angry with himself for allowing the idea to creep in upon his dreams, because he assured himself that he did love her. She attracted him. She held him and he had been so very lonely. It had happened with a suddenness that made him suspicious of it. You could not love like that, he felt. Also, the dry-rot of the place had set its fungus-hold on his heart. He was eager to get away and he believed that she could help him. The silence that he had once thought so lovely, the poor sheep-like people, the mantle of ignorance lying as a shroud over the place, they were all part of it, and, if he stayed, he would become part of it too. He assumed a tolerant attitude and smiled at her graciously.
‘It is the most dreadful thing possible,’ she urged pitifully, ‘and I know that there can be no excuse.’
‘God is ready to forgive.’
‘I’ve grown away from God,’ she said solemnly.
‘Only temporarily, I am sure.’
‘Perhaps. But it is difficult.’
They remained in silence for a moment and the clock in the tower heaved its giant bell laboriously and struck six. It wheezed like an asthmatical old woman, and the whole church seemed to throb with it and echoed the clash and the clang. Then it jerked itself back into normality for sixty more minutes.
‘Won’t you tell me?’ he urged.
‘I met a man. He wasn’t the right sort of man, I know now, but I was miserably lonely and he seemed so beautiful.’
‘I know the feeling. I have been lonely too. It eats the heart out of you.’
‘I had grown old before my time,’ she went on; ‘he made me young again. I fell in love.’
‘Not very wrong,’ he smiled tolerantly.
Oh, these little sins! These little, little sins, so magnified by youthful eyes. It would be almost amusing if he did not realise that she had suffered in it.
‘That is not all.’ Her fingers gripped the arms of the chair where the white transparent fingers of some Bishop had gripped. ‘That is not all. We became engaged.’
Stephen’s face fell. He resented the presence of the other man. He was of a jealous temperament and he did not like to think that she had had a lover. He scowled a little and did not try to help her.
‘One night, coming back from a dance, we stayed talking late.’ She hesitated, and then steeled herself for the admittance. She made her confession in cruelly cold language, deliberately sparing herself nothing. ‘I committed adultery.’
He made no sound.
She went on desperately. She had flinched at the look that for an instant flickered across his face, but she did not attempt to deny the fact.
‘It happened again. Lately I’ve seen ‒ I’ve understood. That is why I came away. I shall never marry him now. I had to tell someone, because I feel so awful about it, damned, done for.’
She relaxed every muscle and sagged in the chair, a huddle against the paleness of the oak. The wind blowing in from the open door fluttered the notices in long white ribbons, plucked at the soft grey material of her frock. The silence hurt her. She wanted him to reassure her, to tell her that it was not so terrible, but he did not speak. In truth he was stunned, shocked by it, so that he could not collect his scattered wits all in the moment. He stood there staring at her, his loose mouth dropping.
‘Won’t you help me?’ she asked at last.
‘You certainly ought never to see this man again.’
‘I never shall if I can help it.’
‘You ought to do some big work, some good work of atonement.’
‘Hasn’t my agony of mind atoned enough?’ she demanded. ‘I have suffered. You cannot think how I have suffered.’
‘But that has not made amends.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Sin of this sort is serious.’
‘Then you think that it was dreadful?’
She had so hoped that he would say something to reassure her, to make it easier to live the life which lay ahead of her. Something that would bear out her belief that her faith was the newly-risen star in the hemisphere of her perplexity. But Stephen was young and earnest and he could not hide his feelings.
‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘I do.’
‘I suppose I’m damned?’
‘Of course not. God always forgives.’
She pulled herself together with an effort and drew herself up in the chair wherein benign Bishops sat. Some of the old Jill asserted itself. ‘But I dislike that attitude. I don’t want to be forgiven like that.’
‘Lady Shane, believe me, the sinner has no right to question the mercy of the Omnipotent. Naturally you desire forgiveness.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then why did you confess?’
‘I don’t know,’ she repeated bemusedly, and she was near tears, for she knew now that the confession had been mere weakness.
He could have wept himself from sheer disappointment. A man could not marry a woman who did this sort of thing, and in all else she would have been such an admirable wife.
‘I think you are penitent,’ he suggested a little more kindly.
‘I know I am.’
‘Perhaps you would like to say a prayer with me?’
‘A prayer?’ Mr. Cushaw had suggested a prayer when Edward was killed, and the very idea had jarred in upon her senses. She glanced at Stephen timidly. No, she knew that it was not a Pope of whom he reminded her, but an inquisitor. Suddenly she saw it in a new light, the light of a thread of flame. She saw code and creed as the mere loom with faith the pattern. Individuality was the fabric woven. The help to go on must come from within, not from without. She was the only one who could assess her sin, who could proportion it, who could help herself. ‘I’m so sorry, but I don’t think I could bear that,’ she went on. ‘Don’t think me dreadful.’
