Brief Encounter

by Alec Waugh

  Graham who had no confessions to make, was puzzled by the question. He felt that it was up to him to say that confirmation had been of some help to him, in the same way that the uncle who has taken you to Macbeth would when he asked you afterwards which scenes you had liked the best, expect some positive response. It was one way of showing that you had appreciated his hospitality. It would be as ungracious to admit that confirmation had been of no help, as to say that no scene in Macbeth had particularly affected you. But in point of fact he could not think of any way in which confirmation had been of any help. He could not say that however. ‘I’ve tried not to swear as much as I did,’ he said.

  His housemaster was both interested and surprised.

  ‘I’ve never thought of you, Jesson, as someone who used bad language,’ he had said. Nor in fact had Graham used particularly bad language. He had, however, insisted that he had. The housemaster was anxious to know where he had learnt this language. He had, of course, learnt it in the dormitories at school. But he did not feel that he could very well say that. It would be a form of sneaking. He had maintained that he had learnt it during the holidays.

  His housemaster was very interested. ‘From whom did you learn it during the holidays?’ He had assumed that Graham’s father was careful to supervise the company that his son kept at home. ‘From what kind of people did you learn it?’ he had asked.

  Graham was by now beginning to feel out of his depth. He improvised as best he could. Every summer, he said, he visited his mother’s parents in Somerset. They lived near the Radstolk colleries. He played cricket in boys’ sides which usually contained some of the colliers. ‘That’s very interesting, very interesting indeed,’ his housemaster had said. Years later Graham learnt that his housemaster when he had charge of a school himself had made a very impressive speech at a headmasters’ conference on the necessity of warning parents about the danger of their children meeting unsuitable companions in the holidays. ‘A boy in my house who came from a good family played cricket with miners’ sons during the holidays and brought to school a regrettably lurid vocabulary.’

  ‘But surely confirmation must have had some effect on you,’ Anna had asked. ‘Didn’t it make you think more seriously about religion?’

  ‘Did yours?’ he had asked her.

  ‘It’s different in our case. We have our first communion so young. I remember that very well, of course: wearing my white frock. I felt very proud of myself. I wish I’d kept that photograph.’

  ‘Didn’t the service itself mean anything to you?’

  ‘I don’t think I understood it very well. It was all in Latin.’

  ‘Did you go to communion often?’

  ‘Not all that often. Two or three times a year. It became rather a chore, having to go to confession first. None of my friends went.’

  In their first months of marriage. Graham had been anxious that she should not be cut off from her church because she was married. There was a Catholic church within five miles. He could arrange to have her taken over to it. It would be no trouble. There were Catholics in the neighbourhood who would be only too happy to take it in turns to drive her. But she had shaken her head.

  ‘I shouldn’t go to church if I were in Italy. Why should I bother here.’

  ‘Somehow one feels that Catholics take these things more seriously than we do.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. But we always know it’s there. I daresay that that’s what makes the difference. We never doubt that it’s waiting for us. I don’t think that you feel quite that way. How much does the communion service really mean to you?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. I like the service itself. It has some of the most majestic prose in the language. “Who made there by that one oblation of himself once offered” and things like “all those who in this transitory life are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness or any other adversity!” The words roll off the tongue.’

  ‘But do you take them literally?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘When you say that the memory of your sins is grievous unto you, the burden of them is intolerable. You don’t really mean that, do you?’

  ‘One thinks of things like that in symbols.’

  ‘Perhaps I’m lucky, having my prayers in Latin, a language I scarcely understand. I couldn’t take that literally.’

  She was remembering that conversation four hours later as he sat beside her children in the village church. She could understand what Graham had meant by calling it a dreary service. The words were so much better than the tunes. Perhaps they would be more inspiring in a church with a better choir. But she liked the church itself: with its hatchments over the recumbent effigies, the stained glass windows that sent their kaleidoscope of colours across the altar, the commemorative brasses on the walls; its Norman arches. And she liked sitting beside the boys: they looked very smart in their clean white shirts, dark suits and striped school ties. They seemed to like coming here. Did the service mean anything to them. She had taught them their prayers in nursery days. She had read them stories from the bible: the heroes of the Old Testament were real to them; so was the story of the gospel; but were David and Saul, Samson and Goliath any more real to them than the heroes of Ancient Rome, Romulus and Remus and Horatius. The days of Ancient Rome were as actual to them as Genesis and Exodus. Did these services have any effect on their behaviour? When they did anything wrong, they would know in term time that it would annoy their schoolmasters, and in the holidays, that it would distress their parents, but did it ever occur to them that there was a trinity up in the clouds looking down on them with favour or disfavour. She did not think it did. She rather hoped it never would. She felt embarrassed when people talked about ‘finding Jesus’. It was fine for them, she thought. She did not expect that it would ever be for her. I’m an ordinary kind of woman, she told herself; and she did not see how religion, how any religion could help her in the particular confusion in which she found herself at the moment.

  The pre-sermon hymn achieved its ‘amen’. The rector stood in the pulpit. ‘May the words of my mouth and the thoughts of our hearts be ever acceptable in thy sight, Oh Lord our strength and our redeemer.’

  There was a shuffling of feet, a settling into places; an undercurrent of whispers then a silence. The episcopal voice intoned, ‘Oh Lord, remember David and all his trouble.’

  She smiled to herself. What a text for him to have chosen on such a day, ‘David and all his trouble.’ She looked up pensively at the worthy ecclesiastic; with how many of David’s troubles was he familiar? Had he ever looked down from an upper window and seen any equivalent of Bathsheba in the court below. Maybe he had: who knew. Perhaps it was the familiarity with some such experience that had led him to the ministry. Perhaps he had found in the church the solution of just such a problem as had troubled David.

  She allowed her thoughts to wander. What was her doctor doing now: had he a religious streak? She did not think he had. If he had children, he would no doubt at this very moment be sitting just as she was, looking up at a prosaic parson, who was doing his best to interpret contemporary problems in terms of a distant prophet’s teaching, distant in time and place. What had the other to say in consolation of the other. But her doctor had no children. Nothing was unlikelier than that he would be sitting in the family pew, beside a wife several years older than himself, whose father was a publisher, who occasionally reviewed books for The Globe. What would he be doing now? Was he thinking about last Wednesday, was he thinking about next Wednesday. Was he thinking about her; what was he thinking about her? What impression had she made on him? What kind of impression?

  They had only met four times. At the station when he had taken the grit out of her eye. Then at that seat in the Cathedral close, when his sense of duty had sent him back to that institutionally heavy lunch at the canteen. Their subsequent meeting at the station buffet: the bath bun evening, had been really part of that second meeting. You couldn’t call it a separate meeting. How long
had they been together: twenty minutes; it could not have been longer. And yet how much they had told each other; or rather how much she had told him about herself. About the times in Naples, about how she had watched the bombing and the scugnizzi.

  And then they had started talking about suicide. It was their talking about suicide that had given her the opening to tell him about Naples. Talking about suicide. You have got to know someone very well before you start talking about suicide.

  Then there had been that third meeting: their first real meeting, in a way; though it hadn’t seemed it at the time. They already knew each other well. It could not have been in a less comfortable place: those hard chairs and the drearily furnished room; it had lasted less than an hour, but how much they had told each other in the time. This time it was his telling her about himself, about his ambitions as a doctor. How his expression had changed when he had talked about himself. He had looked so young and lovable, like a little boy. Fancy her telling an important doctor who wrote articles for the British Medical Journal that he looked like a little boy. It had seemed so natural for her to say that to him. It was the kind of thing that you referred to quarter of a century later. ‘Do you remember that time, only the third time we’d met, that I told you you looked like a little boy when you talked seriously about your career.’ That was the kind of thing that lovers and married people reminded themselves of when they reminisced. Then she remembered with a quirk that she and her doctor were not married nor ever would be: that they weren’t lovers and never would be. They were never going to meet again.

  Ah, but that needn’t be true, she thought. They might well meet again. In many years time, twenty-five or thirty years, when they had reached the Sophoclean calm: to meet unexpectedly; out of England probably. Both would be very changed. Her hair would be white; the lustre gone. He might be bald: certainly he would have put on weight; yet they would recognize each other. They would feel that it was only yesterday that they had said goodbye in that station waiting room. She would have the same feeling of being with someone whom she had known all her life. She would pick up the threads where she had dropped them. They would exchange notes, comparing experiences, wondering how it would have all turned out if she had come into Winchester on that next Wednesday when it had rained and he had driven round in his borrowed car and they had lunched together at the George and Dragon; what might not that lunch have led to. Yes, that was how it might well turn out.

  There was a shuffle at her side, behind her and in front of her. The vicar had turned to face the altar, ‘and now to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost’. The congregation was rising to its feet. The final hymn had been announced. ‘Jerusalem, The Golden, with milk and honey blest.’

  Dominic pulled at her hand as they came out. ‘Don’t gossip, Mummy, please,’ he said. ‘We want to get back quickly.’ They had started a new game of soldiers, with a model aircraft. They had tanks and soldiers arranged under the garden wall. Alistair had a catapult. They had imaginary bombs to drop on to the assembled troops.

  ‘Please, please,’ Dominic insisted.

  ‘All right. All right.’

  As she had expected, Graham was in the TV room, with the Sunday papers scattered at his feet. At the sight of the Sunday Express Alistair forgot his absorption in the model aircraft.

  ‘I must see Giles,’ he said.

  ‘No, no,’ shouted Dominic, ‘let that wait. Back to our game.’

  As always Graham made peace between them.

  ‘Four minutes for Giles,’ he ruled. ‘Then out into the garden.’

  ‘No, four’s too much,’ Dominic objected. ‘I don’t need more than two myself.’

  ‘That’s because you miss all the finer points. You’re not up to Giles.’

  Again Graham established equilibrium.

  ‘Three minutes,’ he said. ‘That’s a fair compromise.’

  ‘But not a second more,’ said Dominic.

  ‘He shan’t. I promise you. I’ll time it. The second hand’s just getting to the sixty. One, two, three, go.’

  Graham himself was hard at work upon the crossword puzzle. Anna looked over his shoulder. He did not seem to have made much progress. But then she did not know how long he had been at work on it. She suspected that he had started the moment they had left for church.

  ‘I bet that when you married me,’ he said, ‘you never expected to spend your Sunday mornings watching your husband do crossword puzzles.’

  ‘I didn’t know such things existed.’

  ‘But you guessed that every husband is addicted to something. It might have been drink in my case. I guess you’re lucky.’

  From the kitchen, she heard him announce, ‘three minutes up, you two, out into the garden.’

  She was giving them a ‘boeuf stroganoff’ for lunch. She had made the preparations before she left for church. She had left the dessert to Use. In her German way Ilse wasn’t bad at puddings. Anna saw that the preparations were well in hand, and that the vegetables had been washed and cut.

  ‘That’s fine, Ilse,’ she said. ‘You can leave the rest to me. Is the table laid?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Good. Then I’d take a rest if I were you. Those boys should be quiet until lunchtime.’

  She liked having her kitchen to herself. She enjoyed cooking, and she enjoyed the company of her thoughts; particularly today: her reverie during the sermon had been interrupted. Those four meetings. Those four brief encounters. The epilogue to that third meeting. The bath buns in the station waiting room. Those silly jokes about getting fat and his teeth falling out if he didn’t take enough vitamins. They’d made silly talk, but that was the kind of talk that one did make when one could talk in shorthand, on the same wavelength.

  And then from that silly talk about vitamins, she had questioned him about his wife. No children: a wife five or six years older than himself; who didn’t like living in the country; who was a Bohemian at heart, who reviewed books for The Globe. It did not sound a very stable marriage. But perhaps it was the kind of marriage that survived. She must be about 40. In a bohemian set, she had almost certainly had affairs before she married. Perhaps she was content now to settle for a humdrum mateship. Perhaps he still had affairs. That wouldn’t be difficult for her to organize. She had to go up to London to see her editors. As likely as not she would spend the night there with her parents. She had all the alibis she wanted. She had an easy companionable husband: the kind of husband any woman could be proud of. Quite a number of women nowadays did not want to be bothered with having children. No, Melanie was probably well satisfied with her life. She wouldn’t want to change it.

  And her doctor, he was probably well enough contented. His work was what he really cared for. He was a dedicated man; dedicated to those conditions of the lung he had described to her.

  ‘Silicosis’ the word was suddenly shouted from the TV room. One of the names that he had used to her; it startled her. Like an evil omen: a presentiment. It was Graham who had shouted it. Why? Why? Why? She crossed to the TV room. ‘What on earth’s the matter.’

  Then she understood. He was at work on his crossword puzzle. Often when he had found a word at last, he would shout it out loud in triumph.

  ‘I’ve got it. Silicosis.’

  ‘The chest disease that you get from stone dust.’

  ‘How on earth do you know that?’

  ‘It’s the kind of thing one knows.’

  ‘Is it? It’s not the kind of thing that I know. Anyhow it gives me an S for the quotation. “Love bade me welcome yet my something drew back.” Four letters beginning with an “S”.’

  ‘Soul,’ she suggested.

  ‘Is it, why not. Yes, it must be. “Love bade me welcome yet my soul drew back,” a poem by George Herbert. Have you ever heard of George Herbert?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t.’

  ‘How did you guess it then?’

  ‘It couldn’t be anything else, could it?’

  ‘
You’re dead right, it couldn’t. All the same, I don’t know how you guessed. Now I come to think of it, I know that particular poem quite well. You’ve got strange sources of information. Silicosis. And then this poem, strange processes of divination, that’s what you’ve got.’

  ‘I missed my vocation. I should have been a medium, a hypnotist’s moll.’

  He laughed and she patted his cheek. ‘Perhaps it isn’t too late to start,’ she said.

  She returned to her strogonoff. Silicosis. What a coincidence. And then that poem. It might have been the motto for her doctor and herself. ‘Love bade me welcome but my soul drew back,’ how pertinent, how appropriate.

  The clock struck one. Already Ilse had come down. How punctual, how methodical these Germans were.

  ‘Shall I call the boys?’ she asked.

  ‘No, no, I’ll get them, you can serve the lunch.’

  The boys were on the wall, loudly cheering on their minions.

  ‘Come along,’ she called. ‘Don’t let your lunch get cold.’

  She held out her arms, for Alistair to jump into them.

  ‘I got all his tanks, Mummy, did you see?’ he shouted.

  ‘But he was using the catapult,’ said Dominic. ‘And it should be mine. I made it.’

  ‘Then next time you shall have it. Hurry up now and get your hands washed.’