A Particular Place

by MARY HOCKING

  Andy Possett took off his jacket and began to unbutton his shirt. Laura hissed at the old churchwarden, Walter Ellery, who was sitting across the aisle, ‘I’m not sure we should have let him come.’

  The old man smiled. ‘Of such are the Kingdom.’

  Norah said, ‘There’s a strong through draught, Andy; I think I should keep my shirt on if I were you.’ She took a bottle of barley water from her basket. ‘What about a drink? And you promised Mrs Hardacre to take this tablet as soon as we set off, didn’t you? I’ve got one of the dratted things to take, too.’ She produced a bottle of Vitamin C tablets. Andy accepted the cup of barley water and, after watching Norah swallow her vitamin tablet, solemnly consented to swallow his rather different tablet.

  Valentine took out a copy of Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant and began to read. Alan, who was sitting across the aisle from her, had recovered sufficient breath to announce that personally he did not care for birds’ nest kind of food.

  They had lunch and were well on their way to the convent which was to be their overnight stop before Alan started to entertain them on his guitar.

  ‘ “Wherever you travel, I’ll be there. And the creed and the colour and the name won’t matter, I’ll be there,” ’ they roared as the coach went through the convent gates.

  Hester had wondered how Norah would behave towards her after their last encounter. She was ashamed of her outburst and hoped it could be forgotten. To her relief, Norah behaved as if nothing had happened. It was only when they returned from Compline and were bedding down for the night that she said, as if continuing a briefly interrupted conversation, ‘I can settle for very little, Hester.’

  ‘But for how long?’ Hester replied, caught unawares and not best pleased.

  ‘We have walked and talked and held hands . . .’ Hester could see it was going to be one of those conversations when responses are not relevant to the questions posed. ‘And kissed, that, too. Kissed and embraced. Nothing more. So little. Why should we be held to account for so little?’

  ‘Who is holding you to account?’

  ‘I just want to see him, to be with him occasionally, to share thoughts and feelings. That’s not much to ask, is it? Some people have had relationships like that which have lasted years and years. It couldn’t possibly hurt Hesketh.’

  ‘And Michael’s relationship with Valentine? That is to remain stagnant, I take it.’

  Norah was silent. Whatever she might think of Valentine she kept to herself. Hester, who had said hard things about Harry’s wife, felt herself reproached, and the fact that Norah could not have done this knowingly in no way mitigated the offence.

  Norah said, ‘To live with nothing – it’s not possible; it couldn’t be borne . . .’

  This is no justification, this is the end, Hester realized, knowing only too well the dying fall of hope. Finished – and so late begun!

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Norah. ‘Believe me, I am truly sorry.’

  In the dim light Norah’s blanched face looked like that of a much older person. ‘All this freedom we hear so much about,’ she said. ‘All this freedom, and yet . . .’

  There are no words for the pain you feel, Hester thought. Sex has been set free and the freedom can be exercised in pornographic detail. The thing not much mentioned is love, that slow, benign growth. Perhaps the deep will always keep its secrets from the market place.

  To Hester’s surprise Norah slept heavily and Hester had some difficulty in waking her for the early start the following morning.

  They had an uneventful journey and arrived at Walsingham early enough to visit the Roman Catholic Slipper Chapel before driving on to the village.

  ‘It is a walk of about a mile,’ Michael said. ‘Pilgrims used to walk from here to the Shrine, some without slippers, but I don’t think anyone need feel they have to do likewise. So when we have looked at the chapel the coach will be here for those of us who decide not to walk.’ Valentine had counselled him that he should take the coach if he wanted to deter the elderly from attempting more than was wise and he had reluctantly accepted this advice.

  After they had visited the Slipper Chapel and been pleasantly surprised by its simplicity, Michael and Valentine and the older members of the party, with the exception of Hester, climbed into the coach. ‘You have done this before,’ Hester said to Laura, ‘so you have earned your rest.’

  ‘I know you like walking.’ Laura’s reply was merited since it was the need for exercise rather than piety which motivated Hester.

  The walk to the village along what was still a country lane proceeded enjoyably until Alan Judge, who had elected to walk barefoot, trod on a sharp stone. For the rest of the way, wound wrapped in bloody handkerchief, he hopped, arms around the shoulders of Mr Pettifer and Ewan Hughes, neither of whom was built for the supporting role. They arrived too late to refresh themselves before joining the coach party who had already peeped into the Shrine Church and been unpleasantly surprised by its extravagance.

  The party from St Hilary’s stood in the nave looking about them, bewildered by the many altars and chapels – chapels of the Resurrection, of All Souls, of Our Lady of Sorrows and above, on a balcony, the Orthodox Chapel where they could see several icons and had a general impression of brilliance and richness, foreign to the pale primrose image of God’s light engendered by the English climate. As they went from chapel to chapel, the divorcee whispered to Hester that she was reminded of a visit to the Alhambra where groups of tourists of various nationalities vied for admission to the bathing rooms, the room where the Sultan’s women perfumed themselves, the room where the Sultan’s women slept . . .

  Special times had been set aside for each party to pray on arrival in the Holy House at the feet of Our Lady of Walsingham and they had been led to expect that this would be a very moving moment. In fact, the party ahead of them over-stayed their allotted period, behaviour lamentably unChristian and particularly unacceptable in English Christians. Michael said, ‘Of course, we mustn’t behave selfishly and keep the people following us waiting,’ and they virtuously agreed to renounce the precious minutes lost. But when they eventually entered the Holy House many were unable to resist the temptation to glare balefully at the departing culprits in the hope of shaming them. Pulses pounding, angry thoughts bubbling just below the surface of their minds, hungry and travel sick, they bowed their heads and tried to compose themselves to the act of veneration to which they had so looked forward. ‘Oh Blessed Mary, Mother of God, Our Lady of Walsingham, intercede for us,’ they chanted, chastened and confused.

  At the first Mass it was little better. Here all the groups of pilgrims gathered together, filling the church. Most had travelled long distances and people were weary, agitated and fractious. Fretful children cried and stamped their feet, wrestling to free themselves from restraining hands, prayer books were dropped, dry throats required constant clearing, chairs scraped; old people whispered loud complaints that they could not hear and hardly anyone could follow the unfamiliar service. Those who had not lost their place early on, repeated hopefully on behalf of them all ‘. . . and happy the pilgrim inspired by you with courage to make the ascents . . .’

  Hester, as disturbed as anyone, reminded herself that this was pilgrimage, not retreat, and that no doubt all this unrest went with pilgrimage.

  She and Norah had a room in a house near the hospice. When they returned there after Mass, Norah took a tablet which Hester suspected was not Vitamin C. She saw Hester looking at her and made a wry face. ‘It can only get better, can’t it?’

  Hester, whose spirit responded more readily to candour than any amount of spiritual uplift, said, ‘It’s a way of looking at things. We are being altogether too serious about what is a festive occasion.’

  Festivity was not hard to come by. When they went out they found the street lined with people, all looking excitedly in the direction of the Slipper Chapel.

  ‘What is it?’ Hester asked. From the expression on their faces,
one might have thought them Roman Catholics awaiting the Holy Father.

  ‘It’s the West Indians,’ a man told her. ‘They are coming with a steel band.’

  Children hopped up and down impatiently while adults assured them ‘They are marching all the way from the Slipper Chapel.’ Hester was so swept up in this excitement that she understood how Jessie Brown must have felt when she heard the pipes of Havelock sound at the relief of Lucknow. But the West Indians marched without their band. They sang, however, loudly and joyously and the watchers clapped hands and wriggled unaccustomed joints to the rhythm.

  At supper there was considerable discussion on the extent of the veneration of Mary – ‘Rose of Jericho’ and ‘Star of Bethlehem’; the Chapel of All Souls where prayers were said for the departed; the relic of the True Cross; and the attitude to be adopted by the non-Orthodox to the icons. It was apparent to Michael as he listened that most people were unsure what they personally believed and he did not think this was a bad thing – certainty closed an awful lot of doors. What was unfortunate was that there was even greater uncertainty as to what the Anglican Church believed. Surprise and bewilderment might well have given place to consternation by the time they had experienced the gamut of what was on offer here. He could see that some kind of course might need to be devised on their return.

  He was glad when a diversion was created by the arrival of Alan Judge who had had to have a tetanus injection, thereby missing Mass. He had consoled himself by piling his plate with chipolatas and beans. ‘I thought you were trying to lose weight, Alan,’ Laura said reprovingly. The conversation turned to matters of diet. Valentine picked fastidiously at a cheese salad. Michael could see that she was not going to come to terms with pilgrimage in whatever guise it was served up to her. Unexpectedly, however, she was making a genuine effort to be amiable and to look after those of the party who were least at ease. In this respect, her performance compared favourably with that of other vicars’ wives present.

  It was a rather sultry evening and the party from St Hilary’s sat on benches outside one of the pubs, drinking beer with a feeling of well-being and righteous in the knowledge that this was all part of being a pilgrim. Travellers’ tales were exchanged, the more elaborately embellished the better received. Ewan Hughes was particularly amusing, shrewdly judging what this audience would find acceptably outrageous. The divorcee contributed a quite restrained account of an adventure in the Kasbah.

  Michael Hoath was not good at this sort of conviviality, and he could not pretend. He sat among them looking rather bewildered, like a serious, intelligent Viking with a limited knowledge of the language who finds that the natives speak too fast. Every now and then he got the drift of a story but always missed the crucial point. After a time, he gave up and studied the low wall of stone and brick in whose sheltering arm they sat as if it might hold some clue he had failed to find in the conversation of his companions.

  Norah, pretending to shield her eyes against the slanting evening sunlight, watched his face, intent and strained as a look-out tracing the line of a distant shore.

  Hester, sitting beside Norah, felt longing overwhelm her like a tide. She saw its deep blue waters and the creamy froth on the ridges of the waves and if she bent forward she would see her own broken reflection and that of Harry. Three days they had snatched in County Galway, he on a course in Dublin and she on her way to meet Veronica in Sligo. And each of those days they had looked across the bay to the low green hills of Clare which seemed to belong to an Irish fairy story, a place that beckoned yet remained always out of reach; for the only bus which went to Clare arrived, for some peculiarly Irish reason, ten minutes after the departure of the only bus which would bring them back. Each day their longing for the hills of Clare had increased. Yet we could have gone, she thought. It was only that we couldn’t get back. She looked at Michael and then at Norah and saw that for them also the distance was now too great, infinitely greater than the troubled waters of Galway Bay.

  ‘Hester is looking like a despondent garden gnome,’ Ewan Hughes said affectionately. Hester thought that she must hold their attention lest it occur to them that she was not the source of desolation; but then she saw that they were not in the least aware of desolation and wanted little in the way of explanation.

  ‘I was contemplating matters of great moment,’ she said. ‘Like whether I wanted another beer.’ She stood up and insisted on buying the next round.

  Mr Pettifer came with her to help with porterage, and when they returned Ewan Hughes and Michael were talking about the art of dry stone walling and Norah was advising Alan Judge that he should rest his foot. Valentine was engaged in disjointed conversation with Andy Possett and Laura Addison.

  Later Hester and Valentine walked round the village in the grey of evening and Valentine marvelled that a place so much frequented could have retained such simplicity, the straight-faced stone houses showing little evidence of the signs of improvement which turned so many villages into mirrors of suburban life. ‘If they could just take away that awful extravagance I could live here,’ she said.

  ‘You’d find it a cultural desert.’

  ‘My life is a desert anyway, so that would be nothing new.’ She turned to Hester and said sharply, ‘It’s all right for you. Somehow or other you will do something with all this, even if it is only turning the wine back into water.’

  Hester was unprepared for the savagery of this attack – Valentine’s more severe criticisms were usually reserved for herself. She walked slowly back to her lodging house, meditating the rebuke which on the whole she thought justified. By the time she arrived she had resolved to leave her notebook behind tomorrow. Norah was already fast asleep.

  The next day began with a pilgrimage Mass. At breakfast they were given information as to the various ways in which they might occupy themselves during the morning – Stations of the Cross, a healing service, attendance at the Orthodox liturgy in the converted railway station, or, for those already glutted with unaccustomed rich fare, matins at the parish church. Hester decided to attend the Orthodox liturgy, after being assured by Michael that she would not be expected to stay the entire length of the course. ‘It won’t worry them if you go out, they are used to that,’ he said. ‘They don’t expect us to have the same stamina.’ Norah decided to go to the Stations of the Cross.

  The only other members of the party to opt for the Orthodox liturgy were Alan Judge and Andy Possett. Alan, leaning heavily on a stick, talked all the way up the hill to the church.

  ‘This is very important to me. I started off as a Baptist; but it’s all so cut and dried with them. You feel there will be nothing more to find out for the rest of your life. I haven’t quite made up my mind where I belong. I mean, I don’t think I could go over to Rome, it would kill my mother. But I don’t think she’d mind so much about Orthodoxy. I mean, people don’t know enough about it to mind, do they?’

  ‘What about staying where you are?’ Hester asked.

  ‘It’s awfully hard to know where that is, isn’t it? I mean, there’s Don Cupitt on the one hand and All Saints’ Margaret Street on the other and nothing much going on in between. I want to belong to a church that cares, not one where some of the people have decided that God doesn’t exist and some are just “don’t knows”.’

  ‘What about the Quakers? I’m not sure where they stand vis-à-vis God, but they do seem to care.’

  ‘I tried that. But I wasn’t keen on so much silence and when they did talk it was like hearing someone give a report to a Committee at the U.N.’

  Andy Possett said, ‘God will tell you where to go.’

  This effectively silenced Alan.

  The liturgy was already in progress when they arrived. In contrast to the chapel in the Shrine, the church was quite homely, rather like a suburban sitting-room containing furniture both Orthodox and unorthodox, sacred and secular. A few other visitors were present, some sitting on chairs, others on the carpet. Alan lowered himself carefully, st
retching one leg straight and laying the stick beside it. Andy Possett stood above him, erect as if on sentry guard. Hester sat back on her heels. She could not make much of the liturgy but was fascinated by the participants who included a very tall man in a red kilt; an ancient woman dressed from head to foot in a grey robe which might have covered the body of woman in any century since Abraham and his family migrated from Ur of the Chaldeans; and a small, ebony boy in an embroidered tunic, his glistening face brimming with mischief. As those communicating approached what Hester assumed to be the altar, the boy put a hand flat on his woolly head and measured his height against what was obviously a fixed point on the kilt of the tall man in front of him.

  After three-quarters of an hour Hester decided to leave. She touched Alan on the shoulder and was amused when he gave a convulsive start. Ashamed, he indicated that he intended to stay. Andy took no notice of her.

  It was warm and sunny in the street and she decided not to go to another service. She walked slowly round the village, meeting several other pilgrims also slothfully unoccupied. The notes which Michael had provided had said that pilgrimage was the coming with some difficulty and cost to a holy place and the odd thing was that Hester did feel that it was costing her, though exactly what she could not have said. She had expected to remain outside the experience, not from any belief in her own separateness but simply because this was usually what happened to her; but, in fact, whatever else she might feel about it, there was no doubt that she was a part of this experience.

  Large assemblies in places like the Central Hall and, worse still, the Albert Hall, had the effect of putting her out of sympathy with her own species. Even the more modest comings together in her own town gave her a feeling of exclusion. But here, where a village and its surrounding fields were the meeting place, where one could walk about on one’s own or join a group in a pub as the whim took one, she was surprised by the realisation that she was actually a part of this community. She had that same sense of taking for granted which family life at its best can give, the knowledge that you have all started from the same place. There was a certain kind of acceptance which was a combination of freedom and shared experience. She decided that, although it was all a dreadful mishmash, pilgrimage had beneficial side effects.