A Particular Place

by MARY HOCKING

  It became apparent during lunch that she had missed the main events of the morning. Andy Possett had begun to undress during the service at the Orthodox church. His hosts had at first thought that he was over-hot and had politely ignored what was happening until Andy got to the point of no recall. ‘It was dreadful.’ Alan Judge became scarlet at the memory. ‘He went quite rigid and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Someone put a sheet around him.’ Hester had a picture of Andy looking like one of the more inflexible prophets standing in tableau with the man in the red kilt and the delighted ebony boy. Michael had gone up to the church to explain – which was hardly necessary – and to see what could be done, apart from waiting.

  Norah, who might have been helpful on such an occasion, had fallen during the Stations of the Cross.

  ‘If you can call it falling,’ Valentine said contemptuously to Hester. ‘She didn’t trip. She went neatly backwards and created a lot of attention without putting herself to much risk.’

  ‘Norah wouldn’t do that,’ Hester protested. ‘And even supposing, she wouldn’t do it during a service.’

  ‘She has done it before. At the first Mass of Easter, in the graveyard. She is that sort of woman.’

  Laura Addison said, ‘And though I don’t like to say it, she does tend to have a sick headache whenever she is faced with anything she doesn’t want to do.’

  Hester went back to their lodgings and found Norah lying on the bed. ‘All those disbelieving faces staring down at me,’ she said wanly. ‘Even Michael felt I’d let him down, I could see that.’

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have come at all if you didn’t feel well.’ Hester felt a necessity to be unsympathetic to both Valentine and Norah in some attempt to keep them in balance.

  ‘I’m not unwell,’ Norah said tetchily. ‘When I’m upset this is the way it takes me.’ She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat for a moment looking down at her feet.

  ‘I should stay here and rest if I were you,’ Hester said. ‘We’ve got a long journey ahead of us.’

  But Norah insisted on coming to the ceremony of the sprinkling at the holy well. Hester said grudgingly, ‘So long as you don’t trip down the well.’ She hoped Norah was not going to take part in the final service if there was any risk of her being ‘upset’ again.

  They assembled as required in the nave of the Shrine Church where Michael reminded them that, almost a thousand years ago, a spring of water was the sign given to mark the place where the Holy House should be built. At the time of Cromwell, Walsingham was so devastated that the site of the Holy House was lost. The well had been discovered when the work of restoring the Shrine began in 1922 and when it was unblocked water had sprung forth again.

  They went in twos to the well, were sprinkled and received the sign of the cross on their foreheads, then made a cup with their hands into which water was poured. Hester found the ceremony surprising, exotic, comic and, as she stretched out cupped hands to receive the water, inexplicably familiar, the return of the traveller to a place long lost. Later, as they packed their cases in their lodgings, she said to Norah, ‘I was unprepared for that little ceremony.’ She looked down at her hands which felt cool as if water still ran between the fingers.

  Norah said, sounding really troubled, ‘How could we ask for a miracle of healing for ourselves when we look at someone like Andy Possett?’

  Hester, having no ailment other than the years, thought this too hypothetical a question to demand a reply.

  Their pilgrimage now drawing to a close, they assembled in the garden, all those who had shared this confused weekend. Each holding a lighted candle in a carton like an upturned lantern, they processed slowly towards the Shrine singing the pilgrim hymn which Norah had said made up in length what it lacked in musicality. She was singing now in a voice clear and sure, but she watched her movements, placing her feet with what Hester thought was rather exaggerated concern. There were so many of them that the long hymn had been sung twice by the time Hester reached the building. She paused on the threshold to look back at the garden, storing the moment in her mind, knowing that the jumble of experiences could only be assimilated later; that only in retrospect would the fragmentary images come together and be made into a whole. The voices sang calmly, releasing the words without effort or thought. The grass was dappled in shadow, the candles flickered among shrubs and roses, not glowing theatrically as they would have done at night, but taking their place among the living things around them. In the faces of the people moving towards her she saw nothing to suggest ecstasy or wonder, none of the drama of a great rally, instead – the reverse of such upheavals – a settling down seemed to have taken place. None of the singers looked as if they were entering a Pilgrim of the Year contest. Women with bags over arms consulted the words as they might a shopping list. Fathers held skipping children by the hand. A few walked with heads turned, looking their last, taking a gardener’s pride and pleasure in the order of things in bed and border. And so, quietly, they came to the Shrine.

  Here they knelt for Benediction, these people who had come together the day before, nerves jangling, fractious, unrested, who had junketed about in pubs and jostled one another in the refectory. They had spent their time in activities calculated to make this final service even more hectic than the first one had been. Yet now as they knelt together at the end of their pilgrimage there was complete stillness. Hester, sitting with bowed head, had no words of her own for this moment, no explanation of this random gift, only acceptance of a peace neither anticipated nor earned.

  On their journey to the convent where they would again spend the night, Alan Judge entertained the party with songs. The divorcee told Valentine that she had been called to minister. Valentine thought she was the kind of woman to involve the maximum contention in any call she might have. But, no, this was to misjudge her, for it transpired it was the mission field to which she felt she had been called. Valentine had not the heart to tell her there was scarcely a corner of this particular field where a white face would now be welcome.

  In their room at the convent guest house Michael and Valentine talked over this and other events of the day. The one subject which was not touched on was Norah’s fall.

  ‘Do you know what Andy Possett said when he came out of his trance? He said he wanted to be received into the Orthodox Church.’

  As he said this Michael looked apologetically at Valentine, his eyes screwed up as if he winced at the pain he must be giving her. It was not so much Andy’s defection which troubled him as his own attitude to religious belief. He believed with his whole heart that Christ was the Way, the Truth and the Life, but he was unable to be whole-hearted in claiming that the way was exclusively Christian. He saw the risen Christ as standing where all roads cross and whatever road the traveller came, He was the way. This had once led him to tell a parishioner, ‘If you really feel that Buddhism is your way, then you must take it.’ He thought it a poor exchange but that had not seemed relevant to the other man’s condition. It was not in his nature, however, to be relaxed in belief or feeling and so he was tormented by the knowledge that tolerance can only too often be a form of indifference.

  Valentine, who saw no necessity for soul-searching in this matter of Andy Possett’s churchmanship, said, ‘And how did members of the Orthodox Church there present receive that?’

  ‘I’m afraid they thought he had been seized by the Holy Spirit.’ She chuckled and he frowned. ‘I don’t know what to do. Should I warn them that these seizures occur rather frequently?’

  ‘You mean that the frequency renders the intervention of the Holy Spirit inoperative?’

  ‘Put like that . . .’ He rested his fingers on the bridge of his nose, plucking at the scant flesh. ‘But what should I do?’

  ‘Do?’ She twitched her shoulders irritably. ‘Why must you do anything? Surely after all these years the Orthodox Church must have devised quite an adequate system for examining those who knock on its doors?’


  ‘But suppose Andy is making a mistake?’ He turned to her, his face grave.

  ‘How can one tell?’ She made a little throwaway gesture with her hands. ‘It is difficult enough to identify one’s own mistakes.’

  ‘If I really believed in my own Church it would sear me, this defection . . .’

  ‘Oh Michael! Tend the wounds you have, they are enough.’

  She turned on one side, placing a hand between cheek and pillow. Now, even if she did not sleep, she would be lost to him. He wanted to cry out like a child afraid of silence and the dark, ‘Don’t leave me!’

  They had not made love since that excursion to the moors, but at night he had begun to talk over the problems of the day with her, something which in the past he had not done and which she would probably not have permitted. It came to him, lying sleepless in this unfamiliar room, that without understanding what he was doing, he had been holding on to her. Hester’s anger had shaken him and presented him with a moral dilemma; but this realization, this knowledge that he had not been true to either woman, pierced to the very heart.

  What am I? he thought, what manner of man am I that I can long for the wild freedom of moors, for water gushing from hidden streams, while another part of me tries all the while to strengthen my hold on this imperfect, compromised relationship which frustrates and hinders me at every turn?

  The party was not due to leave the convent until after lunch. Michael spent most of the morning in the chapel. Other pilgrims, perhaps feeling they had spent long enough on their knees, opted for a little pagan worship in the convent’s rose garden.

  He had stayed at this convent on previous occasions, on his way to London or to his home county of Sussex. The chapel was bare and simple, its harshness only redeemed by a certain warmth in the pinkish stone. On the windowless East wall, beyond the altar, hung the great crucifix. He knew of another, more homely chapel, where the empty cross hung, seeming to be part of the natural world of trees and passing birds. This symbolism he had found congenial. Here, in the gaunt chapel, he had tended to avoid looking straight at the crucifix; his eye had glanced around it, as though its dominance were a piece of bad taste on the part of the architect.

  Now it stood before him, uncompromising in its very ambiguity. Here, too, birds sang and their shadows flickered briefly across the walls; beyond the long south windows, honeysuckle nodded in the breeze. But all that was outside, just as the resurrection was outside life. Here there was the polarity of the cross. The body, pulled by different forces, offered no immediate promise of release; this suspended figure was the true symbol of man’s being, incomplete, not perfectible or homogenous, always in conflict, torn by the opposites in his nature, in a state of contradiction never on earth to be reconciled.

  For hours he stared at the crucifix nailed to that implacable stone wall. Then, some minutes before the bell was rung for Sext, the sun shone through the long south window. The wall lit up with a rosy glow and blood ran in the cracks of the stone blocks and between the legs of the torn figure, across the ribs, down the outstretched arms and God said, ‘This is my beloved Son.’

  At last he understood that desire, pain and joy, the need for certainty and the insistence of doubt, cannot and will not be resolved; they can only be lived. He understood, too, at that moment, though he knew how fleeting would be his hold on it, that this tension within him which sometimes seemed unbearable was life. And the greatest paradox of all was that only by accepting this would he make some progress in his pilgrimage and find that peace which is not of this world.

  When other pilgrims came in they found him kneeling with unbowed head. His face looked primitive, antique; no individuality in the slashed mouth and gaping eyes.

  Valentine did not come to Sext, but Norah came. When the service was over she passed him on her way out without seeming to be aware of him. He watched the sunlight fall on her abstracted face as she crossed the threshold, his new-found understanding already threatened by a passionate longing for all that lay beyond his boundaries.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘What’s this all about, then?’ Mrs Quince, arms akimbo, faced Charles across the broken bed. She was wearing a shapeless purple garment which seemed to Charles to be neither dress nor overall but a representational robe designed to suggest majesty and power. Androgynous, she might have been Boadicea or the Inquisitor.

  He said, ‘I was trying to fix a light bulb.’ He had spent some time trying to think of an excuse and this was the best he had been able to contrive.

  It did not serve. ‘I’d ’ave said yer bin jumping on it.’

  Charles felt his entrails turning to burning liquid; any moment he might confess. ‘It’s very old,’ he croaked, leaning a hand on the brass head-rest.

  ‘Putting it out for scrap, be yer? It might do for my Jennifer.’

  ‘No, no. It can be mended, I am sure.’ Whatever happened the bed should not go to Mrs Quince’s Jennifer.

  Mrs Quince walked round the bed, inspecting its injuries. Charles was still as a marionette hanging from a string, but his eyes darted nervously about, bulbous with terror lest some evidence of Shirley’s occupation should be found. I should die, he thought, quite seriously. I should die on the spot. People laughed at bedroom farces, but this was a way of exorcising terror not presently open to him.

  ‘I’ll leave you to get on with it,’ he said, when agreement had eventually been reached that Mrs Quince should not attempt to move the bed, but dust and vacuum around its fallen splendour.

  He ran down the stairs, rubber-kneed, and fled to the security of Hester’s house. Hester would not be back until the evening, so if necessary he could spend the whole morning there. Or he could go to the school. The caretaker would think it odd, since he was not a master who usually went near the building during the holidays; but the caretaker was no Mrs Quince, and Charles did not mind what he thought.

  He stood in Hester’s kitchen. In the garden he could see Tabby sitting on the wall, pretending to be unaware of him, tail switching lightly from side to side. ‘A good job you can’t speak, my girl,’ he said. A real trouble-maker that, if ever there was one!

  This morning when he woke after a troubled sleep on the broken bed he had wondered if he was making a mistake. Mrs Quince had put a stop to that line of thinking. He was in his late forties and he could not advance towards old age at the mercy of such as Mrs Quince.

  Charles’s aunt, who had little liking for him, had once told him he was a man much motivated by short-term needs. This being so – and he was not inclined to quarrel with the judgement – he should surely be doing better for himself in an age given to the gratification of needs both long- and short-term. In the past his sexual encounters had been brief and unsatisfactory. Since his physical needs were somewhat at variance with his intellectual requirements, the women of his choice had proved deplorably unable to share his day-to-day life.

  He meditated on this while he prowled Hester’s garden, playing the game essential to some need in Tabby which required the stimulus of hide-and-seek as a preliminary to both bed and board. ‘Tabby, nice puss,’ he chanted insincerely, circling the rose bushes and remembering how he and Shirley had chased each other round the house. ‘The things one did not do in one’s youth still wait to be done,’ he told Tabby, to whom this scarcely applied. Charles felt that he and Shirley had played their games in the spirit of youth – innocent and exhilarated; but he could see that this was not how it would have seemed to Hester, overhearing, as she must have done had she been at home, the noisier moments of their transport of delight.

  ‘Good Tabby, nice fish!’ he said, pouncing successfully and hauling her up to shoulder level. She looked at him, ears back, amber eyes wild with excitement. Her claws dug in his shirt, her tail lashed to and fro and she purred and dribbled copiously. ‘Altogether beside yourself, madam.’ He put her down on the kitchen floor in front of the fish and she leapt on to the window sill, upsetting a pot of primulas. Whenever Hester went away Tabby contri
ved to leave a trail of wreckage about the house although normally she was careful where her paws landed. Charles said, ‘Naughty pussy’ and she spat at him.

  He went to the window, ignoring Tabby’s attempts at rapprochement. How pleasant the two gardens were. He was dismayed at the thought that he must leave. Some kind of compromise – separate houses, perhaps? This was becoming quite acceptable, though not yet in the West Country. In any case, they could not get married until Tracy left home. Desmond did not present a problem, since he would be abroad in Turkey next spring and later at university. Tracy, however, had made it quite clear that she was not going to university ‘just so as to get me out of the house’. There was no possibility that he could inhabit the house with Tracy in it. No doubt something would happen to sort out these complications. The immediate need was to find a place where they could pursue the excitements of recaptured youth uninterrupted. One of his fellow masters had a cottage on the edge of the moors which he was happy to let to friends at a peppercorn rent. The original idea had been to let it for profit to holiday-makers, but this had not proved a success because those who were prepared to overlook the lack of amenities – such as running water and cooking facilities – were not prepared to pay what the owner referred to as the ‘going rate for country cottages’. Charles thought, I could hire it for a month or so. There could be no question of living there, of course; but we should have a few gypsy hours. He had an enjoyable picture of the games they might play on bright starlit nights, becoming one with Robin Goodfellow and his cohorts. He was astounded at his daring in actually living his fantasies.

  It wasn’t all fantasy, of course, he thought, stroking Tabby who bit his hand. That would be unhealthy. There was the other side.