God on the Rocks

by Jane Gardam

  Someone in dark clothes appeared from somewhere with outstretched arms and the troop of people trotted away across the grass again. Heads nodded as the procession was shepherded round the flank of the house to another door and out of sight. When they had gone it was as if a breeze had dropped.

  She wondered whether to go on round behind the man, like last time. She was beginning to want to get nearer to him and look at the picture. She did not at all want to get nearer to the kitchen garden and turned her mind away from it and the awful thing inside it; but the man seemed to have a comfortable and accepting look as if perhaps he knew that she was there.

  Then he slowly bent down and began to pack up his paints, clean up his palette. Very slowly he loosened the picture in the easel, let the easel down and packed it, together with the box and his camp stool. Holding the painting from below on a spread hand he moved off across the grass. He moved lightly for such a stout man, his short fat trousers fining down to points at the feet.

  The door of the conservatory shut behind him and the scene was over.

  Lydia, whose foot no longer twirled, she found grumpy and ready to go. ‘Pull us up,’ she said. ‘Eeeh, we’re that daft. There’ll be merry’ell.’ Marsh, when they looked for him over the promenade railings, was no longer on the beach, and the beach was gone, too. The tide sloshed at the sea wall. The pier was empty, the ice cream kiosk all barred up. It was clearly very late indeed. There was no sign of Marsh at the station either and they approached Seaview Villas anxiously.

  But all was calm. Mrs Marsh was making the tea. She kissed Margaret. ‘Somehow or another your father missed you, dear. He came back alone. I hope you didn’t worry, Lydia! He’s had to go out again. He’s so pleased, so pleased, dear! He preached on the sands at Eastkirk and gathered quite a crowd. He says he is going to start something there every week. “Hang the Bank”, he said.

  “Hang the Bank!” He’s just gone round to Turner Street to arrange for hymn sheets and the megaphone.’

  Margaret ate her baked beans.

  ‘Did you have a lovely time? Was it a lovely treat? Father said be allowed you to see the pierrots—wasn’t that marvellous? Wasn’t it lovely of him? Were they wonderful?’

  Margaret thought of the hydrangea people on the yellow lawn. ‘I’d nearly forgotten the pierrots,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said her mother boiling groats for the baby, busy at the stove.

  ‘I suppose it is,’ said Margaret.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Filthy groats. They do smell. Baby smell.’

  ‘Here,’ said Ms Marsh and slid a fried egg on to the baked beans. ‘Margaret’s favourite. Treat for a good girl.’

  Margaret looked at it, shiny, slippery, a frilly sea-weed edge, the frothy curly mark the waves leave behind them, but hot and luscious. She touched it with her fork and it dented in like a breast. ‘What are you thinking, sweet Margaret!’ Mrs Marsh, riding along on her husband’s recent benignity, swept down and enveloped her.

  ‘That everyone’s mad!’ Margaret shouted. She pushed first her mother, then the egg and beans away and ran from the room. She sat on the hall chair kicking at the hallstand in the gloom. She thought about the mansion and its flood of light and happy people. She wondered two Corinthians five one whether she had seen a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

  ‘I’m not coming after you, Margaret,’ came from the kitchen and from pursed and insulted lips.

  7.

  She walked right up to the painter this time, no nonsense. She walked right up over the grass in the blaze of the day, and stood looking at him. His brush tap-tapped at the canvas and he creased his eyes and paid her not the slightest attention and she walked nearer and at last even put out a finger to the edge of the canvas, standing alongside, not looking at it but at his face.

  ‘Drinkwater,’ he said at last. He painted on.

  ‘I’m Margaret.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I’m Margaret Marsh, I’m eight.’

  ‘Seen you about. Wondered if you’d be dropping over.’

  ‘Not exactly dropping . . . ’

  ‘No. Skulking about in the fronds.’

  ‘Fronds?’

  ‘The edge of the forest.’

  Margaret sat down on the grass and began to pull up blades of it. They were short and dusty. She thought about fronds and the forest. They were funny sorts of words.

  ‘Skulking about,’ he said, ‘and off to the kitchen gardens. Not much joy there.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not much joy,’ he said and laughed. His face was fat with round red pads for cheeks above the beard. The panama hat was old and limp but clean. His eyes were blue and simple and clear like a baby’s. ‘Not much joy,’ he repeated. ‘Tell me, d’you find that?’

  ‘What?’

  He stopped painting and looked at her for a long while. ‘How d’you do,’ he said again. ‘Name’s Drinkwater.’

  ‘I’m Margaret.’

  ‘Ah.’

  He went back to the painting with a detachment so complete that she felt physically dismissed, wiped off the grass like a colour, but there was such peace in his presence that she put up no fight against this and sat on, pulling grass, and eventually lay down on it, rolling about rather, spreading her arms. She looked at the sky, then back over at the edge of the wood. Beyond seemed impossible. Lydia seemed impossible. Home seemed impossible. It didn’t exist.

  And it was so very hot. ‘I am beyond myself,’ thought Margaret.

  ‘D’you know . . . ’ she began to talk to Mr Drinkwater, ‘how they say you get beyond yourself? It’s a funny thing to say. Go to bed at once they say, you’re beyond yourself. They don’t want to know anything about it. D’you know why? It’s because they’re frightened. They’re frightened of you. They don’t know how to deal with you. Deal with you. The way they talk to children—they get angry because they’re frightened. Of children.’

  ‘They’ve stopped being frightened here,’ said Mr Drinkwater.

  ‘Why do they get so angry though?’ Margaret ruminated on.

  ‘Firm,’ said Drinkwater. ‘It’s more firm than angry. Here. They’ve got their little ways. They’ve got their special voices.’

  ‘My mother’s got a special voice.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘It’s her teaching voice. It’s her voice for improving me. Why can’t she just—not?’

  ‘Just not,’ said Drinkwater. ‘Exactly. Exactly.’

  He stopped painting and put a hand on each knee, the brush in one hand and the palette in the other. He looked long and excitedly at Margaret widening his bright eyes. He nodded his head and looked at her rolling on the grass as if she were a new country he had just come upon over an unpromising horizon—a country of great wonder and satisfaction. ‘My dear young lady,’ he said, ‘why can’t they just not?’

  ‘I’ve got a brother,’ she said, ‘a baby. He wasn’t born all that long ago. About eight weeks. He’s all slobbery and wobbly. His head lolls about. There’s a soft bit in the top of it with a pulse beating. All he does is suck and cry and sleep. They’re calling him Terence. I don’t like that, do you? I think that Terence is an awful name. And they go on and on, how do you like Terence, Margaret? No? Then what name would you like him to have? As if they’d change it! And then my mother moons at me with one of those looks. You know.’

  ‘Oh, I know.’

  ‘I’d like Scummy,’ she said, ‘Scummy, Scummy, Scummy.’

  ‘Don’t care much for that.’

  ‘I don’t care for the baby.’

  ‘Pooh,’ he said. ‘Babies. I’ve seen very few of them lately.’

  ‘You can see in her eyes,’ said Margaret, ‘she thinks “I’m being very, very kind to Margaret in case she’s jealous of the BABY”.’

  ‘Kind though,’ said Drinkwater. ‘You’ve got to admit that. They’re very kind. They do it here. Oh, a great deal of the time. Most of the day. And in the evenings.’


  ‘At night, too,’ said Margaret. ‘My mother comes to say goodnight. Usually with the baby. Patting it. Its head rolls around. And then my father comes in for prayers.’

  ‘Ah, that might be better.’

  ‘Do you have prayers?’

  A look of immense sadness flooded over Mr Drinkwater and seemed to shrink him. He sank down into his linen suit and his stomach jutted forward more than before and his beard lay on his chest. He sat brooding on his feet and Margaret noticed for the first time that he was wearing large wellington boots.

  ‘There are no prayers here,’ he said, ‘at least not public ones. We have a Chaplain. Welshman. Very Low. No good at all. Trouble of course with these places is that the staff get as bad as the inmates. Have you ever noticed that? Everyone’s the same in six months—maids, cooks, bottle washers. Not many bottle washers mind. Don’t know when I’ve seen a feller washing a single bottle. Can’t talk to the Chaplain—lives in the lodge with a mouse.’

  ‘With a mouse?’

  ‘Called a wife. Holy lot.’

  ‘Oh—is he a Primal Saint?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure he is.’

  ‘A Primal Saint? Is he? We are. At home. But it’s very rare, my father says. He says we are God’s Elect.’

  ‘A good deal of praying there then, I dare say? A good fat portion of that sort of thing?’

  ‘Yes. Well, there has to be.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Being rare.’

  ‘God’s Elect.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say the Chaplain was God’s elect.’

  ‘Well, p’raps you’re wrong then. Perhaps he’s not a Primal Saint?’

  ‘He’s a fucking fool,’ said Mr Drinkwater, and shook himself. Emerging from the depths of his linen jacket he began to paint again very vigorously with enormous swashes, leaning about on the stool, swinging about masterfully.

  ‘Can I look at the picture?’ Margaret asked after a pause while she tried to get used to the shock. Drinkwater did not reply. ‘If my father had heard you say that,’ she said . . .

  Drinkwater flung a gout of cobalt blue at the canvas and began to whistle with little puffing noises through fat lips.

  ‘My father,’ said Margaret briskly and sitting up, dusting herself, regarding him sternly, ‘would say you need prayers. That was an awful thing to say.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘About the Chaplain. Just awful. It’s the sort of thing that Lydia says—p’raps not even Lydia. And she can’t help it. She comes from Bishop Auckland. It’s very terrible at Bishop Auckland. She can’t help it. But you . . . ’

  ‘You oughtn’t,’ she said again and heard her voice accusing. ‘I mean, I know I sound like them, saying it . . . ’

  ‘Like them?’

  ‘Yes, people. When they send you to bed and say you’re beyond yourself.’

  ‘Beautiful phrase, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, that’s what I said. That’s how we started. We said at the beginning. Don’t you remember?’

  He looked at her.

  ‘We said. You agreed. They go all kind and firm and say you’ve got beyond yourself—you must remember. It’s what we . . . ’

  His face became suddenly happy as could be and he nodded in welcome. ‘Name’s Drinkwater,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I think you’re mad,’ she said and stamped round the easel and stood behind him to see what he had made of the house.

  The big yellow monster slept in the sun, its red leaves creeping, its fine strong chimney bricks and its deep old roof and grey-green leads and gutter pipes all scrolled with coats of arms—a lovely house across the grass and all very quiet.

  She looked at the painting. It was a tangled nest of snakes, fat lipped and over-lapped with scales, glutinous eyes, pink-mouthed, thickly coiled like a boiling of limbs for cannibals. The last strokes of cobalt were daubed anywhere, disfiguring but not hiding the careful brushwork of the reptiles which, as Margaret looked at them, seemed to multiply, denser and denser, into circles diminishing in the distance until they were too far off to be seen.

  8.

  Mr Marsh’s success at the first of his prayer meetings on the sands so delighted him that the next week, when Margaret had met Mr Drinkwater, he had been more ambitious. Although Wednesday was a weekday it was early-closing and he was able to muster several Saints who were shopkeepers. One Saint who manned the lifeboat on occasions was also available and of great help in noting the tides to ensure that Marsh and his disciples could establish themselves on a patch of sand which would not disappear during the course of the service. Five ladies of sombre appearance all wearing hats and carrying sheet music mustered here too, with the shopkeepers. A Saint with an interesting large head held the bag. He was fiftyish and appeared rather simple as a result of the Somme, but was of invaluable use wherever he went because of the huge spread of his smile. He looked perfectly normal from a distance and could sing in tune. Had he been mentally damaged before and not after the war he might have put the whole thing to an end in no time. The great waves of his benignity made disagreements cease.

  When Marsh had got going on the megaphone and the ladies in hats had struck up the hymn and the simple Saint had began to clink the bag up and down and grin, a very amiable feeling spread about. Sandcastles were left half-moated, newspapers lowered and laid aside and people sucking peppermint rock or mooning about wondering whether to paddle or not began to gather round. Some people even splodged out of the sea landwards, skirts held up above purplish knees, trousers rolled above ropish veins. Several men in caps who stood all day long like war memorials by the fishing boats, with deep lines on their faces and shiny, desperately maintained suits—the unemployed—turned to see what the old geezer was up to, and a pale boy, a butcher’s messenger Marsh was said to have been good to, suddenly struck up on the trumpet like the rip of doom.

  ‘Bringing in the sheaves,’ announced Marsh. Heads nodded and tambourines jingled and ten voices cried out nearly together:

  ‘Bringing in the sheaves

  Bringing in the sheaves

  We shall come rejoicing

  Bringing in the sheaves.’

  A pause. Deep breathing. More nods. A moment’s silence through which the pale jingling of the pierrots blew like a ghost. Then WHAM! Two trumpets, three megaphones, ten lungs of the ladies in hats, tambourines, the accurate and surprisingly strong baritone of Marsh and the formidable bass of the simple one declared furiously to the ocean and everything near it that they were bringing in corn for harvest. It was really rather fine. Even the people on the pier clustered to the rail with their backs to the paid entertainment.

  The next week it was even better but different. It was not at Eastkirk but on the sands outside Marsh’s own door and the group was embellished by the presence of Lydia—Lydia sitting at Marsh’s feet on a kitchen chair brought down from the house. Marsh behind her had climbed a little rostrum taken from Turner Street and was smart as paint in his best suit. Lydia in the blue sateen, huge and beautiful, sat with a perplexed and rather sullen look not at all like herself, and beside her the baby’s big black pram, leathery as a hansom cab, harsh as an old beetle. On her knee lay the baby itself, spread out sleeping, its purple crescent eye-lids shut and every other bit of it wrapped up in shawls and bonnets and mitts and bootees according to the custom of the time. Lydia held it loosely—yet safely. Her hands knew perfectly that they must not fall away from it, yet her deepest attention was certainly somewhere else. She gazed flatly out into the gathering crowd like a huge over-painted Memlinc madonna.

  ‘Bringing in the sheaves,’ cried the Saints with not too bad a beat, and slowly the crowd joined in. The bag began to clink. The Westkirk dole men by the boats turned their heads, ladies surprised themselves with forgotten sopranos, and God was set going like mad against the withdrawing tide.

  A success—and because of it Margaret and her mother found themselves this Wednesday alone together.
Mrs Marsh could never quite bring herself to appear on the beaches. Also her milk was beginning to dry up and a visit to her doctor had suggested that perhaps some underlying anxiety was the cause. He suggested rest and some relaxation.

  ‘There is of course no need to breast feed any more,’ he said. ‘You have done nearly three months. The child is very well.’

  ‘I believe in breast feeding. I fed Margaret for ten months.’

  ‘In the jungle they breast feed for two years. I suppose if you wish you could go on for ten. Socially however . . . ’

  Mrs Marsh did not speak but flushed. There was something indelicate. Also trivial. The Saints did not take account of social matters.

  ‘Mrs Marsh,’ he said, ‘I suggest some bottles of milk for the baby and some social life for yourself. Go out with your daughter. You must not neg . . . ’

  ‘Oh, I am very careful,’ she said. ‘I am not a fool, doctor. I have been very careful of that. Margaret and I are very close. We have no secrets. She has never been neglected.’

  ‘She needs,’ said the doctor who knew about the Primal Saints, ‘a little fun, you know.’

  ‘She goes out every Wednesday with our maid—hardly more than a child herself. Not eighteen. They are great friends.’

  ‘Couldn’t you take her out? The two of you ought to be free of the baby sometimes. Isn’t there some friend . . . ?’

  So the Wednesday when the rest of the family established itself on the sands Mrs Marsh and Margaret set out to tea with the Fraylings in Dene Close.

  Margaret was in the dress with pretty smocking and Mrs Marsh in an old loose crêpe-de-chine two-piece with a long scarf to match which she had had on her honeymoon twelve years ago and scarcely worn. They locked and left the house with a feeling of uncertainty, not so much at what they were doing but because of the clothes, and Mrs Marsh looked at herself several times in the big ugly windows of Seaview Villas as they went along.