God on the Rocks

by Jane Gardam

  ‘Charles was four. Four when he got mumps.’

  ‘Yes.’ She sobbed and then said, ‘Miss Pannell used to go to sleep.’

  ‘Yes—in the observatory.’

  ‘Conservatory.’

  ‘In the basket chair. With holes woven in the arms for glasses of lemonade.’

  Grateful and surprised Elinor looked up. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I’d forgotten the holes.’ She fumbled about under the baby and brought out a handkerchief from somewhere. Margaret thought I wish she weren’t a heap of boneless clothes. She needn’t sit like a potato. She’s wearing those awful green stockings again. Then in guilt she put her arm round her mother on the bed and rested her head against her. After a while her mother said in the queer Frayling way, ‘Can one weave holes?,’ and Margaret said at once, ‘Yes. If you can nets. Nets are just holes.’ They looked at each other and Mrs Marsh’s face edged towards a smile.

  ‘They put sweets in them,’ said Margaret.

  ‘Charles put sweets in them,’ Elinor corrected. ‘He put caterpillars in them too. And worms. There were yells when she woke up. He was very naughty.’

  ‘Did you love him?’

  Mrs Marsh had grown deaf and rocked away at Terence. ‘Mrs Frayling used to come sweeping in,’ she said. ‘Like a tall angel. Wonderful. Oh, her hair! So beautiful. I adored her. Her dresses!’

  ‘What sort of dresses?’ She squirmed with wickedness Peter three three.

  ‘Muslin. Muslin. Sometimes crêpe—but lovely muslin in the mornings. She was very slender. She had lovely long fingers all rings—pale rings. And pearls. Pearly things. She collected pictures. She used to make us look at them for hours. Charles and Binkie were bored stiff.’

  ‘Were you bored stiff?’

  ‘Never. Never. Never.’

  ‘Where did all of it go? The place and everything?’

  ‘Nowhere. It’s all still there. I am not, that’s all. Mrs Frayling may be dead by now of course—I heard that she became very ill oh, years ago. She seemed much older than she was—always walked with a stick. Charles and Binkie went away over ten years ago—they’ve only just come back.’

  ‘Why did they come back?’

  ‘I don’t know. I only heard a little while ago they had come back and were living in that . . . It was a shock, that house. You see, Charles and Binkie . . . ’

  ‘They’re all right.’ Margaret felt very bossy and in control as her mother started to weep again. ‘They’re all right. They’re fine. But that’s all. They’re a bit boring though, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Elinor. ‘Yes. That’s right. You’re quite right. That’s just what they are. They’re so changed they’ve nearly gone. It’s very silly to get haunted by the past and I think, darling—’ and her voice became tender and self-conscious and the real coversation, the first ever, had passed. ‘I think, darling, that we won’t bother with the silly Fraylings any more.’

  ‘Run off, dear,’ she pushed Margaret gently away. ‘Run down and say a nice goodnight to your father.’

  Downstairs, directly beneath them, Marsh scraped his shape plate absolutely clean and then ate three cream crackers, hardly taking his glance for a moment off the back yard. He sat very quiet after the cream crackers, so that Lydia coming in to take the dirty plates was surprised to see anybody still there. ‘’Ullo,’ she said. ‘Well I never!’ and then waited to be told that this was not the way she should speak.

  But he said nothing and when she came close to the table and stretched near him to take the over-ripe bananas out of the sideboard dish behind his shoulder he did not shrink. ‘Best get rid of these nasty things,’ she said. When she leaned in front of him with the other hand to take his plate he took hold of her wrist.

  She looked down at him. He still looked out of the window, steadily at the grizzled mop, and the clock ticked. Along the corridor she could hear the kitchen tap running for she had not shut the door behind her and had expected to be going straight back to the sink.

  ‘What’s this then?’ she said. Looking at the top of his head she took a step nearer so that her round hip touched his shoulder.

  He let go her wrist and slid his hand up her arm, up under the sleeve of her shiny dress. His fingers began to squeeze her arm hard. She looked down at the soft rather thin hair and the other hand, white and precise, which was lying on a dinner napkin.

  The nails were pink and neat and clean. He held the napkin ring very tight. He looked up. She thought, ‘False teeth, poor sod,’ but tears came into her eyes and she leaned up closer. ‘Eh?’ she said.

  ‘I want you,’ he said.

  Margaret when she passed the open door on her way down from upstairs saw her father’s small, irreproachable, bank manager’s hands moving desperately, quickly, darting, rubbing about over Lydia’s big silk back.

  13.

  I can’t go round there.

  That’s the misery.

  When I was five, or ten, or fifteen, or eighteen I would have run round to them any time. Without warning. I ran out of the house—through the shop perhaps to tell my mother, down the road and then down the lane and in through the lodge gates. I waved to them in the lodge and then I walked down the drive and round the side of the conservatory and put my head round and if he wasn’t there I just wandered into the gardens or down in the wood or back into the house through the side door and up the back stairs and into the attics or the library or the kitchens.

  Anyone who saw me said, ‘Hello, Ellie, looking for Charles?’ They never said, ‘Looking for Binkie?’ From the beginning it was Charles and Ellie. Sometimes when I seemed to have looked everywhere and started home again I’d meet him coming back because he’d been down to the village looking for me. We’d sit down in the drive by the rhododendrons. In spring there was about a mile of daffodils—all down the drive and in little drifts across the park. He was so thin—so thin. ‘They’ll never rear him,’ they used to say in the kitchen. ‘No marrer in ’im.’ At first I was plump as a plum. On wet days we went together into the library and sat on the window seat. I read a lot more than he did. He played. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers because he wanted to command empires. His empires always won. But I didn’t care. He commanded. ‘Remove your troops,’ he used to shout—his voice was very queer and high and stuttery and the words fell out like explosions. ‘Pay me tribute. Five thousand gazoos.’ I grew thin.

  Binkie was never there. Goodness knows where Binkie was those afternoons. Tennis and piano and elocution and all the right things. Dancing class. She was terrible on the piano. Great thunderous bangs. Charles knew how awful she was as well as I did but we never spoke of it. I read the big leather books on the shelves in the library and he moved the troops across the floor.

  ‘Leave that book, Ellie. You have to retreat.’

  ‘Just a minute.’

  ‘If you don’t retreat I’ll massacre you.’

  ‘Oh, all right, but wait a bit.’

  ‘You can’t wait a bit if there’s a war.’

  ‘I’m reading something lovely.’

  ‘Right. You’ll be massacred. I’m coming. Over the top.’

  She had always put down the book, but open and ready to go back to it, and sat dutifully down beside the soldiers. Charles had begun to talk in a clipped and military voice. A sweep of his arm had flattened multitudes.

  ‘Surrender!’

  ‘I always have to. All right. I do.’

  ‘You’re not much fun, Ellie. You put up no fight at all. I’m sick of you.’

  ‘Play with Binkie then.’

  ‘She says it’s silly.’

  ‘You mean she doesn’t like losing.’

  ‘She doesn’t lose. She doesn’t like the way I play. She hates me.’

  ‘Well, you don’t want me to hate you.’

  ‘No. But I want you to fight.’

  ‘I hate fighting. I’m reading.’

  ‘Reading!’

  ‘We’re different, Charles.’

  ‘We’r
e not different. We’ re not different. We’ve always been the same.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  The sun had shone in on the fallen troops and the Afghan carpet. The carpet had glowed like dark raspberries.

  ‘You don’t like fighting either really,’ she’d said.

  ‘Well, I won’t ever have to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘This war will end all wars. It’ll be over by Christmas. They say it all the time. There’ll be great hurrahs at Christmas. Mama says we’ll have the biggest tree to celebrate. The War won’t last three months. When I get back from school.’

  ‘When do you go?’

  ‘September.’

  ‘It’s soon?’

  ‘Two weeks.’

  ‘Will you write?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘A lot?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She walked to pick up the book from the window seat and saw a servant putting tea-things on the terrace and people sitting there in careful attitudes. Mrs Frayling, statuesque herself, touched a carved boy eating grapes and twirled around a little silk parasol. She looked more old-fashioned than the rest but more beautiful. A man-servant came out with a massive silver tray. ‘A tea-party first class,’ she said to Charles. ‘You’ll have to go.’

  ‘No. We’ll be in the nursery with poor old dozy Pannell.’

  ‘At a guess,’ she said, ‘at a guess, and the numbers of cups, you’ll be wanted on the terrace.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘There are unclish men with monocles and bored women with skirts too tight and floppety hats and nothing to say. It’s being a terrible tea-party. Your mother is looking like Sainte Marie Madeleine peinte et dorée Souabe. Very ennuiée. She needs help.’

  ‘What an awful lot you do know, Ellie.’

  ‘Your mother taught me.’

  ‘You like her, don ‘t you?’

  She said, very surprised, ‘Of course.’

  ‘I don’t,’ he said. A flurry of starch and long ribbons ran in and said that Charles was to go to tea. ‘On the terrace,’ the maid added.

  ‘C’mon,’ he said.

  ‘Not Ellie,’ said the maid. ‘Where’s Miss Binkie? She’s to go.’

  ‘I’m not going without Ellie.’

  ‘It’s all right. I’m going home.’

  ‘Say I’m not coming out without Ellie.’

  ‘I’ll do no such thing,’ said the maid.

  ‘Ellie and I are one person,’ said Charles. The maid smiled and patted his brown hair. Ellie slid off the window seat and stepped through the soldiers: ‘Keep my place,’ she called, ‘in the book,’ and went off down the front stairs for once, since everyone was outside at the back of the house. She let herself out through the front door where a chauffeur of one of the guests leaned on a shining open car glittering with brasses like a coach. He jumped and looked guilty and ground out a cigarette under his heel when the door opened, then seeing only Ellie turned sulkily away and lit another. She passed him by and went down past the lodge, the drive and down the lane and through the village. It was half-day closing and her father’s day off. Her father watered chrysanthemums. Her mother was cutting out a dress on the sitting room floor, her mouth spiked with pins. The dress was what Charles would have called headache pink and she mumbled through the pins that Ellie hadn’t been expected back for tea. The house smelled of frying. The windows were shut.

  It was the end that day, Elinor thought now, putting Terence into his crib. Even though I went back again, that day was the end. I was fourteen. Now I’m thirty-six. Yet it has never changed for me.

  The deep silence from the rest of number three Seaview Villas seemed to suggest that there was a formidable audience somewhere in the house considering Ellie. In fact all grew so still that she became afraid and walked out on to the landing. Her husband, her daughter and Lydia were all downstairs in the tiny house, yet there was not a sound. Even the baby slept. Pressing about her alertly were a dozen sad ghosts.

  Mother and Father knew, she thought. They knew how I loved being at the Hall but they never asked about it. I suppose they thought it was charity. It was a different age. It was mediaeval. The War was supposed to change it all. I wonder if it was the first real revolution. All wars are meant to change it all.

  What a very odd thing to have thought, she said to the staircase wall and walked back into her bedroom. That’s what the book was—the one I was reading that day. It was War and Peace and I’ve just remembered. I never did finish it. But it’s what it was about—war not changing anything.

  There was a long hollow crumpling noise from far away across the sand dunes which might have been a storm if it had not been such a balmy evening. ‘Nothing changes anything,’ she said.

  Not that Charles ever found out. He never did fight in a war in the end. He was eighteen when it was over and he went up to Cambridge. Binkie was there already and me in the post office helping Mother.

  Yet I was on the Czar’s side and they were Socialists. ‘Not Bolsheviks of course,’ Binkie used to say. I’d always have been on the aristocrats’ side because of their hair. I don’t think I could have been a Roundhead. I can’t bear their house now. Dene Close. Awful. Self-conscious. ‘I’m just the same as you.’ Plain man. Fabian stuff. I should never have gone there.

  I should never have written the note when the doctor said I should see old friends again. I should never have gone. Especially with Margaret.

  But, oh my, how she dealt with them.

  She dealt with them. Suddenly Ellie was flooded with tremendous love for Margaret.

  The full wonder of Margaret—so good and true and untroubling—brought tears into Ellie’s eyes. She has a better brain than all of them, she thought. And she sees straight and clear. She’s strong as a lion. The best thing in my life. The best thing in the world.

  Margaret will trample his whole army down, thought Ellie. She’ll rout him. She’ll annihilate him. She’s proud and good and strong. She’s above the lot of them. He’s a poor weed teaching at a council school—that’s what’s become of him—with his spinster sister keeping house. Margaret will show them! She’ll end better than that. They’ll see. She’s the child his mother should have had, poor feeble Charles.

  But I love him so, she thought looking out of the window out to sea. It hasn’t changed.

  Far across the pale light shiny water and the luminous sands she thought she saw Margaret picking her way out along the rocks to Eastkirk; then realised that this would be impossible.

  But it’s time she came in wherever she is, thought Ellie.

  There was another queer flapping rolling uneasy noise like guns far away. Surely not thunder? ‘It’s getting late,’ Ellie thought, ‘and she’s hardly over the mumps.’

  14.

  As Margaret followed her mother up to her bedroom, Binkie in Dene Close was making ready to go to Confession, for Elinor was a long way out of date talking about Fabians.

  Binkie had cleared the tea-things and pegged the tea-cloth out to dry, washed her face and hands and changed her blouse for another of identical pattern but in which she had not rolled on the floor. ‘I’ll be an hour,’ she called.

  ‘Good heavens!’ Charles called back. He was less close to Father Carter.

  ‘Because,’ said Binkie, ‘I’m doing the flowers, too.’

  ‘Do you do the flowers before or after?’

  ‘It depends on the queue.’

  ‘You can’t do the flowers while you’re in the queue.’

  ‘Yes I can,’ said Binkie, not adding that her confessor had vaguely suggested the unorthodoxy of this procedure, too. Binkie’s flower-arranging in church involved a considerable banging of doors, vase-swilling in the vestry and tramping about flourishing branches. The confessional box backed on to the vestry and her vigorous feet.

  ‘Doesn’t it put people off?’ asked Charles.

  ‘Not at all. You take it too seriously, Charles. There’s no need to be self-conscio
us about confession. It’s a perfectly straightforward sacrament. Nothing to get het up about. Don’t be such a Protestant.’

  ‘I’m not. You don’t have to be a Protestant to want to have a chance to concentrate now and then. I thought you were supposed to be quiet beforehand. Before you started the long lament.’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t lament,’ said Binkie, ‘and I’m sure I have never in my life prevented anyone from being quiet.’ She crashed across the hall and picked up a pair of massive secateurs which she dropped. ‘One doesn’t have to be so quiet, it seems to me. Look at the Catholics. They still have a lot to teach us, mistaken though they are about the Pope. Look at the churches of Italy.’

  ‘I’ve never seen anyone like you, Binks, in the churches of Italy.’

  ‘Well, of course not. We do not fear our priests.’

  ‘I rather fear Father Carter. Or fear for him. He has a look of a man rushing towards a precipice.’

  ‘Nonsense.’

  ‘You are the pure Anglo-Catholic type, Binks.’

  ‘I make no claims.’

  ‘A washer-out of incense boats!’

  ‘The acolytes do that. All that I am saying is that it is affected to try to be too quiet in church. One should be open and natural. In Africa all the little black babies run about the aisles.’

  ‘You’d not catch Father Carter there.’

  ‘Religion should be open. Out in the open.’

  ‘Maybe you should be out on the sands with Ellie’s husband.’

  The slam of the sun-ray door reassured him that he had upset her and he felt affectionate towards her again. ‘Old Binkie,’ he thought, ‘who’d have thought it. An Upper Second in Economics. Who’d have thought she’d have gone overboard for God. Or for Father Carter?’

  But, too intricate a man to allow himself the common explanation, he dismissed this vulgarity at once and tried to think of Binkie’s confrontations with her Maker. He tried to think for example of the impossible image of her at confession. What in the world did she confess? A stalwart campaigner for her own humility and ordinariness, her meticulous life, her steady kindness—unsmiling, steady kindness certainly, but then—you don’t know that you’re unsmiling. You shouldn’t be blamed for it. Unsmilingness is not necessarily blameworthy.