God on the Rocks

by Jane Gardam

  The light had nearly gone. It faded slowly, running down the right-hand side of the water glass and the other flank of the belly of the water jug. Outside a bird twittered now and then and at length was quiet. The door opened and Effie came in with a lamp. Then Effie—the bed pan, the talcum, the horror. Pills. Effie passed her the prayer book while she went away behind the screen, to swish about with buckets, and took the book away again—it had stayed unopened—and put it on the bedside table and the lamp beside it.

  ‘Anything you want, dear?’

  Rosalie said nothing.

  ‘All right then, duckie?’

  ‘I am Mrs Frayling.’

  ‘Sorry. All right then, Mrs Frayling?’ (There’ll be a stop to all this one day, you wait. It’s another war we want.)

  ‘No thank you, nurse. Yes—take the light. Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight, Mrs Frayling’ (unappeased).

  The light gone, in the half-dark, Rosalie Frayling lay and waited for the call of the first bird.

  11.

  As Charles opened the sun-ray door there was an outlandish crash and Binkie dropped all the scones out of the oven. The tray they were on and the iron grid the tray had been on and the scones and massive Binkie went rolling about the shiny linoleum and Binkie moaned and yelled. The big body and the scattered food and metal made queer groups in the breezy cheerful kitchen and Margaret looked down at Binkie’s face with round eyes.

  ‘Dear me,’ said Charles. ‘Too hot.’

  ‘I slipped.’ Binkie the steady instructress of the other tea time glared furiously at Margaret from under the kitchen table. ‘Why don’t you laugh?’ she said, hauling herself up. ‘It’s comic. That’s all it is. Comic. Don’t you read the Comic Cuts? Don’t look so disappointed. Go into the garden.’

  Charles and Margaret went out of the back door and sat on a bench in the garden silently, with a sense of shame.

  ‘I think I’ll go home now,’ said Margaret in a minute.

  ‘No—no,’ said Charles. ‘Wait. It’ll be all right. You’ll see.’

  Binkie marched out bearing a jug.

  ‘Good,’ said Charles. ‘Lemonade.’

  Binkie threw the contents of the jug over some crackling dry azaleas and went back into the house.

  ‘Apparently not,’ he said.

  They sat on and at length a kitchen window opened and Binkie could be heard splashing about.

  ‘Margaret has had mumps,’ Charles called. ‘Could we have a scone?’

  The tiny garden was one of a crescent of little gardens divided from one another by cheap chestnut fencing. The grass patch and flower border in it were weedless, trimmed at the edges like cloth. The flowers stood at measured intervals unlike the gardens on either side where there seemed to be things untidy on trellises and sheds with pigeons, washing lines and brittle plate-headed sunflowers looking like hanged men in the heat. In the middle of Charles’s and Binkie’s grass plot stood a small plinth with a marble boy on it eating grapes. The marble looked silky, creamy, more alive than the flowers and as odd standing on the square of grass as Binkie had done rolling so curiously on the linoleum. Charles said, ‘You look worried. Shall I get a book and read to you?’

  ‘No. I think I’ll go now. I’d better.’

  ‘Binkie’s knee had given way, that’s all. She thinks she’s got something wrong with her. It’s in the family—a thing you don’t mention. She hates to show fright. She’s upset that we saw her. She’ll be all right soon—look.’

  And Binkie now came out on the lawn with a plate of buttered scones and a tea-pot. She put them on a garden table and went back for cups and milk jug and jam. She pulled up a deck chair for herself, sat down and poured the tea.

  ‘So—mumps?’ she said ferociously.

  ‘Yes. I was getting it last time I was here.’

  ‘Just as well we’d all had it.’

  ‘I was feeling a bit funny that day.’

  ‘Funny?’ She digested the information while demolishing scones heavy with gouts of jam and began to look more cheerful. ‘Home made,’ she said of the jam. ‘Have some. Don’t look so disappointed.’

  ‘I’m not . . . ’ But Margaret realised that she was. And shaken up. Binkie at the first meeting had filled her with strength—someone who knew exactly what she was about and caring for nobody’s opinion in heaven or earth. Popes and potentates would watch their step just like with Father and the Saints. Binkie had told you what to do, but you felt that she told you things for their own sake and not because you would get some prize for it one day in the hereafter. You had felt that Binkie had only the faintest picture of the Holy City and perhaps no great opinion of it anyway, with its ornate gates and angels Revelation twenty-one twelve. She would think about truth very coolly and in her own time.

  Yet Binkie today had been in rout, collapsed and discountenanced and not special at all. Margaret had not known that her admiration for Binkie had been so comforting until it was gone.

  There was something else the matter, too. Eating a jammy scone Margaret thought, ‘He might have helped with the tea things and to pick her up off the floor. Even Father would have carried the deck chair for her.’

  Looking up at the peaceful face of Charles she thought, ‘I don’t like him very much. He’s soppy.’

  ‘How’s your mother?’ asked Binkie.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Has the baby had mumps?’

  ‘No. He’s breast-fed.’

  There was a bit of a silence. ‘I hope nobody else at home gets them,’ Charles said.

  ‘Well, Elinor won’t,’ said Binkie. ‘She had them when she was four. When you did.’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘Yes—don’t you remember? With Miss Pannell. We all did.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Well, you were only four.’

  ‘What’s Miss-panel?’ asked Margaret.

  ‘She was our governess,’ said Charles. ‘We three shared a governess.’

  ‘What’s a governess?’

  ‘A private teacher.’

  ‘Just for three?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What a tiny little school.’

  ‘Miss Pannell lived in our house. Your mother lived near us—we all lived in Eastkirk then and we shared her. Shared Miss Pannell.’

  ‘Was it very tiny?’

  ‘The little school?’

  She had a picture of a doll’s house and of Charles and Binkie and her mother all crammed in with a witch, as large as they were now but with funny unlined faces.

  ‘It was big,’ said Charles laughing: ‘Immense.’

  The doll’s house spread, the figures shrank to pins.

  ‘It had miles of sloping grass all round it,’ said Charles, ‘and woods and huge kitchen gardens, with rows of fresh vegetables, and eight gardeners all in the same coloured overalls. Sandy overalls.’

  ‘There was a terrace,’ said Binkie suddenly, ‘with stone jars. That boy used to stand on it.’ She pointed to the marble figure. ‘We used to have our lessons on the terrace sometimes. And sometimes in the conservatory.’

  ‘What’s a conservatory?’

  ‘A huge greenhouse. It had a vine in it—with hundreds and hundreds of bunches of grapes. It was heated by a massive stone stove. Like a steam-engine. There was a man who did nothing in the winter but shovel. I wonder what he did in the summer?’

  ‘Kept the post office,’ said Charles, ‘or wait a minute—no. It was his wife who kept the post office and he did some sort of public—yes that’s it, he took on the council dust carts in summer. Always kept the lamps and brasses shining on the dust cart—d’you remember. Well—wasn’t it Ellie’s—?’

  ‘And in the conservatory for lessons,’ said Binkie. ‘We all used to sit in big basket chairs.’

  ‘With holes woven in the arms to take a glass. You could drop sweets in.’

  ‘It got hot in there,’ said Binkie. ‘Sometimes Miss Pannell fell asleep. She had a feathe
r fan.’

  ‘Was Mother—what was Mother like then?’

  Binkie said, ‘Quiet.’

  Charles said, ‘Exactly the same.’

  ‘As now? She couldn’t be. She’d be lower down. Nearer the ground.’

  ‘Well so were we.’

  The brother and sister sat slowly munching. Charles pressed a finger into first one and then another crumb on his plate and put the collection in his mouth when it threatened to scatter again. Binkie stared hard at the azalea with its dwarf burnt-up leaves and undersized withered flowers. It occurred to Margaret that it wasn’t being much fun today, and no jokes at all. Miserable really. She began to think of Lydia then, remembering that Lydia was so moody these days, thought instead of the painter at the mansion.

  ‘I saw a lot of people like flowers. Walking in a crocodile,’ she said in the sleepy silence.

  ‘Flowers in a crocodile?’ Charles’s attempt to revive the jocular tea-party of the week before was like an invalid heaving bricks. The hope of nonsense hung very slightly in the air and then departed. They sat on.

  You could say anything today, Margaret thought. About Jesus and broken hearts. About Lydia. About Lydia’s corsets. About Lydia’s man, even. They wouldn’t notice. They are a funny pair.

  ‘Did my mother like you very much when she was young?’ she asked.

  It was amazing how it woke them up.

  They both turned and stared at her astounded. She thought, well then. I’ve done it. Even more than with Jesus’s heart. I’ve really shattered them. I wonder whatever I’ve said.

  ‘Well I . . . ’ Binkie looked hard at the marble statue.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ Charles had a wonderfully compassionate look.

  ‘Well—I just can’t see her . . . ’

  Binkie said haughtily in the direction of the grape-eating boy, ‘I think they were very grateful . . . ’ Charles frowned.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Her people. Your mother’s people.’

  ‘Her people? Was she a queen?’ She knew at once that this was silly. Of course her mother hadn’t been a queen. Her mother’s father had been ‘Something to Do with the Council.’ Queens and Councils though—perhaps a Council was something she didn’t understand and her mother had in fact been regal in some way. She did always look very stately and sweet. She was different—you could see in Turner Street—from the others there. It was something about her clothes. They were loose and traily. She never looked a lump like—well even this Binkie. How very kind of her it had been to share Miss Pannell with the brother and sister and visit them at their home and sit with them in the greenhouse. Her people must have been glad that she had got to know some ordinary children.

  ‘It must have been lovely for you to know my mother,’ she said. The two faces looked stony.

  At last Binkie said they had all been very good friends and it was time Margaret went home.

  ‘I’ll take you to the end of your road,’ said Charles and they walked in silence. As they parted she shook hands with him and curtsied as her mother liked her to do, though nobody else at school or Turner Street did. Charles from his great height drooped down and said, ‘A great pleasure to see you again.’ Yet there was still something non-plussed about him.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘it was, of course.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lovely for us. To know your mother. Have her about.’

  ‘Oh I’m sure,’ said Margaret kindly.

  Doing the pavement crack game down Seaview Villas she thought, ‘I seem to have absolutely knocked them over. Binkie was knocked over from the start. Bowling about on the lino. Bowled over. I wonder why? I wonder why I feel I’ve won something?

  ‘Victorious,’ she thought, ‘I feel victorious.’

  12.

  It was brawn and shape for high tea. The brawn was glossy and the shape was matt. Otherwise there was little between them and they were both pale brown. There were three tomatoes, bread and butter, a flabby lettuce and two bottles of HP and Heinz tomato sauce, tea and a plate of cream crackers. The dining room was nearly filled by the table which had legs like black barley sugar as thick as four thighs. There were of course no pictures on the cream walls, a sideboard had only a fruit bowl on it containing two black bananas. Outside the window was a yard with a grey mop upended leaning against a wall and beyond this the vegetable patch. A big varnished clock ticked like mad on the mantelpiece and a huge cartwheel of metal hung down from above the table, a light bulb suspended within and a no-coloured silk shade hugely draping it all with hideous pleats. The brawn was slithery on the tongue. Elinor Marsh chased it abstractedly about her plate and Marsh munched it loosely at the other end of the table, looking out over her head at the drooped head of the yard mop.

  Next he chewed lettuce. Margaret slipped into her place.

  ‘You are very late.’

  ‘I’ve been out to tea.’

  ‘Without asking!’ Elinor came to life in a moment. ‘To tea? Where? Darling?’

  ‘To the brother and the sister’s.’

  Her father stopped eating and said, ‘The Saints?’

  ‘No. To Mummy’s friends. The brother and the sister.’

  ‘Did your mother know? Did you know this, Elinor? Who are these—?’

  ‘They’re just where Margaret and I went the other day.’

  ‘I thought you went to old Mrs . . . ?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who is this brother and sister?’

  ‘Well—the Fraylings. Binkie. The ones who came back . . . ’

  There was a heavy silence while Margaret tried to eat brawn. The noise of her fork vied with the clatter of the clock.

  ‘We shall go on to the shape,’ said Marsh. ‘You will have to catch up.’

  Margaret considered going on to the shape and thought blindingly this time of Drinkwater. What sort of shape? Remembering the first lovely tea-party which she had ruined she remembered the spring in the atmosphere at its beginning, and how her mother’s face had lit up, and Charles’s. They would both have been whizzing now, she thought. All kinds of ideas whizzing. ‘What kind of shape would you care to take, Elinor?’

  ‘I always change in the afternoon.’

  ‘I have stopped changing and I have given up maids.’

  ‘What is your opinion of giving up maids?’

  ‘What do you think of giving up maids, Mr Drinkwater?’

  ‘Oh many a maid, my dear Margaret, many a mop.’

  ‘Many a mop,’ said Charles, ‘and many a mow.’

  ‘But what is a mow?’ asked Mother.

  ‘A barley mow,’ said Charles.

  ‘A Charley mow,’ said Binkie.

  ‘Chase me Charley,’ sang Lydia.

  ‘Chase me Charley.’

  ‘Find the barley . . . ’

  ‘Up the leg of me drawers,’ sang Mr Marsh.

  ‘The leg of me DRAWERS,’ sang Lydia resoundingly to the accompaniment of brass and the ladies with sheet music and the soft sigh of the sea and the jingle of the bag and the rocking of the big black pram with the sleeping child in it—lucky as in a manger just breathing and sleeping and being fed and everyone adoring, adoring Matthew two two—

  ‘Bringing in the sheaves,’ sang Lydia.

  ‘Bringing in the sheaves,

  We shall find the barley

  Bringing in the sheaves.’

  Margaret blinked herself back into the dining room, splattered brown sauce all over her lettuce, looked at it with revulsion and said, ‘We had scones with jam—home-made.’ She looked at her mother and was astonished to find that she was crying. While she, Margaret, had been thinking of shapes, a quarrel had sprung up.

  ‘It was the best time of my life. That’s what it was if you want to know.’

  ‘Before the child!’ her father shouted.

  ‘I don’t care. I had a better time when I was eight than Margaret has ever had. She shall hear if I want. She shall hear.’

  ‘You were in sin.’


  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘Champagne. Vice. People you should have had nothing to do with. As if life was to do—education of the soul—to do with having a good time. Parties! Screaming and frolicking! Garden parties. Psalm seventy-eight nineteen. A table in the wilderness.’

  ‘They were my friends.’

  ‘They were not—and are not if I know anything—serious people. I forbid you to see them. And I forbid Margaret.’

  ‘You can’t forbid me, Kenneth.’

  ‘Esphesians five twenty-two.’

  ‘Oh for goodness sake!’

  ‘It is goodness I am talking about.’

  ‘I’m sick of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of goodness. I’m sick of you.’ She ran out and slammed the door, then came back and held it very wide so that she could be heard along in the kitchen as well.

  ‘And what about Lydia?’

  ‘Whatever has Lydia to do with your Fraylings? I got you away from the works of the devil and I will get her away too, God willing. They could ruin you still as Lydia will be ruined without help. That is the only connection between you and Lydia. Lydia was sent me.’

  ‘Why weren’t the Fraylings sent then? Sent to me? When I was five.’

  ‘They were. They were sent to be withstood.’

  ‘At five! For heaven’s sake, Kenneth. That happy place. If you’d known it. If only you had been sent the Fraylings. If you’d had the luck to be with easy-going . . . oh, instead of all this . . . ’

  ‘This what?’

  ‘This hell-fire rubbish.’

  She fled. Margaret, forgetting shape, went after her up the stairs but then grew shy and ran into her own bedroom where she bumped about trying not to hear the sobs from her mother’s room across the landing. She opened and shut drawers noisily instead of calling out, and soon her mother appeared clutching and rocking the baby. She squeezed it up to her and kissed it and gulped and like a heavy pea-pod or a feather-tailed fish in its long shawl it slept unconcernedly on.

  Margaret said, ‘I heard about Miss Pannell.’

  Elinor rocked about. ‘Miss Pannell,’ she said, ‘Miss Pannell. They’ve just come back to live here, Margaret. After years. I knew them when I was five.’