“I’ve been looking at some of those tourist leaflets,” Phrynne said over breakfast. It was a good breakfast—scrambled eggs, with locally cured bacon and coffee so strong and so hot it reminded me of the various trips Freddy and I had made to Paris over the years, the small cafe close to Montmartre that we thought of as ours. I had not slept well, and so drank more of the coffee than I might have done normally. “There’s a walk we can do, along the coast path. The views are supposed to be wonderful. And there’s a church with some famous murals, or something. What do you think?”
“I thought you weren’t keen on churches.”
“We might as well though, seeing as it’s there. If you really don’t fancy it we can always go into Sheringham on the train.”
“No,” I said. “We can do Sheringham tomorrow. I’d rather see the murals.”
I did not particularly want to see the murals, or at least not with Phrynne, who I knew was only interested because a tourist leaflet had told her that she should be. Still, we had to fill the day up with something. When we returned briefly to our rooms after breakfast to put on outdoor clothing I looked for and found the leaflet Phrynne had been talking about. It included a simplified map, showing how the coastal path branched off from the end of the promenade and then, after about two miles or so, intersected with another footpath that led back inland. The church of St Barnabus, where the murals were, stood at the juncture of the two footpaths, overlooking the sea. The leaflet described St Barnabus as ‘a gem of early Norman church architecture’ and ‘uniquely situated’. The murals, created in the early eighteen-twenties by a local artist named Jeb Sudworth, were said to depict the town of Holyhaven and its seasonal customs in ‘scintillating detail’.
I was immediately fascinated, and felt bad for accepting Phrynne’s perfectly fine suggestion with such ill grace. I put my bad night down to sleeping in a strange bed. I had awoken suddenly at around two in the morning, convinced I could hear church bells ringing. Only once I was properly awake was I able to understand that the pub and the street outside were completely silent. Although I fell asleep again quite quickly I still had that muzzy-headed feeling, as if I had lain awake for most of the night. None of this was Phrynne’s fault, and I resolved to make it up to her during our walk.
I swapped my ordinary outdoor shoes for walking boots, and transferred my purse and my reading glasses from my handbag to the small backpack I had brought with me for precisely this kind of outing. I put the tourist leaflet in too—I thought it might be useful to have a copy of the map.
I joined Phrynne outside in the lane. She had changed into corduroys and an expensive-looking pair of brogues. We set off down the hill towards the town. Ten minutes later we were on the cliff path. The sun was out, but there was a stiff breeze blowing, and I felt glad of my fleece-lined walking jacket. I glanced at Phrynne. Her camel-coloured belted mackintosh appeared more suitable for Richmond Park than the North Norfolk coast, but if she was feeling the cold at all she gave no sign of it.
“Isn’t this splendid?” she said. “I feel I could walk for miles.”
I would never have put Phrynne down as an outdoor type, but the wind had brought a bloom to her cheeks and with her hair blown back off her face she looked not just younger but more alive, radiating good health and high spirits in a way—I realised this now—that she had not done for some years.
As so often in the past, I felt stodgy and dour by comparison.
Was it any wonder, in the end, that Gerald had preferred Phrynne to me?
I brushed the thought aside. It was all so long ago now. What could it matter?
“Did you visit this church when you were here before?” I said, meaning St Barnabus.
“I really don’t remember. You know how it is with churches, they all blend into one.” She paused. “I think it’s this way.” She waved a hand to where a muddy-looking path cut a course across fields on its way inland. A cluster of greyish farm buildings jutted out from the horizon.
“Are you sure? The map says we should follow the cliff path.”
“This must be a short cut, then. Look.” Phrynne pointed to something at the head of the path, a knee-high triangle of grey granite, roughly carved with a cross and beside it three capital letters: STB.
We struck out across the field. Away from the cliff top the wind dropped almost immediately. The air felt almost unnaturally still, clammy with the scents of wet grass and cow manure. As we drew closer to the farm buildings I realised with a shock that most of them—three large barns, a row of loose boxes, a long, low building I thought was probably a pigsty—were derelict, their gaunt skeletons entirely open to the elements. Only the farmhouse itself seemed in any way cared for.
An ancient Morris stood aslant in the drive. A faded curtain billowed from an upstairs window.
“Talk about bleak,” Phrynne said. The path led us directly across the entrance to the farmyard before widening into a rutted lane. To me, the derelict farm seemed more than just bleak, it seemed sinister, the bricks and mortar embodiment of a life that had failed. I remembered a film I had seen once—alone, not with Freddy—in which a woman turns the pages of an old photograph album and suddenly comes upon a picture of her sister, taken on the evening before she died. The sight of those rotting buildings made me feel as I imagined the woman in the film might have felt. I know how foolish that sounds, but that’s how it was.
After skirting the farm, the lane pottered gently downhill past a trio of whitewashed cottages. The cottages appeared more prosperous than the farm, more welcoming, certainly. A youngish woman, her hair covered by a striped kerchief, was hanging washing on a line in one of the gardens. She waved to us as we passed, and I wondered about asking her if we were heading in the right direction for St Barnabus, but then Phrynne, who was walking ahead of me, called back over her shoulder that she could see the church.
“Hurry up,” she said. “The view is incredible.”
I hastened my step, glancing back only briefly at the woman in the striped kerchief, who had gone back to hanging out her washing. A child’s things, I noticed—a miniature pair of denim dungarees, some little cotton shirts. Did the woman and the child live here alone, I wondered, or was there a husband and father somewhere about?
I could not imagine how I might have coped, bringing up Ian by myself in a place like this.
I wondered if Phrynne had ever thought of having children. The idea was ludicrous somehow, almost mad. Perhaps she’d been unable to have any. Certainly it was not something she had expressed regret about.
The road plunged into the undergrowth, narrowing until the branches of the trees—some rather windblown-looking pines—became intertwined into a single dark mass overhead. Then, so suddenly it was like falling, the path erupted into the daylight. We found ourselves on a sandy outcrop of land, high above the water and with the waves churning away at its base like a pack of wild dogs.
It was as if the land were sticking its tongue out at the sea. At the farthest end of the spit, ringed about by beach stones and yellowed grass, stood the church of St Barnabus.
As Phrynne had said, the view was incredible. I was just uncertain whether, in its stark severity, it was a view that anyone would want to look at for very long.
“I suppose we’d better go in, seeing as we’re here” Phrynne said. She drew her mackintosh around her, as if it had only now occurred to her that the garment really was too insubstantial for the Norfolk climate. She walked towards the church, and as I moved to join her I couldn’t help feeling relieved that we had, after all, ignored the map’s directions and chosen the short cut past the farm instead. The cliff path still existed, but I could see now that parts of it had become eroded, leaving only a thin strip of solid ground between the brambly undergrowth on one side and the near-vertical drop to the sea on the other.
The church itself was long and low, with the tall square tower so typical of many of the churches in East Anglia. Like a pointing, accusatory finger, it seemed to be
rate the sky.
“They don’t still hold services here, surely?” Phrynne said. “The place must freeze solid in winter.”
Similar thoughts had occurred to me, and I was half expecting to find the church shut up, the famous murals, if they existed, under lock and key. In fact the door opened easily. Phrynne took a step backwards, as if in surprise.
“God,” she said. “I hope it’s safe.”
There were no pews, no pulpit or altar either. Instead, rows of wooden chairs faced a simple wooden lectern, giving the atmosphere of a schoolroom from which both teacher and pupils had been mysteriously spirited away. Otherwise it was as if the interior of the church had been systematically stripped, wiped clean of anything that might draw attention away from the hordes of painted images that lined the walls.
I had expected the frescoes to be faded: delicate, subtly tinted antiquities of the kind you see in museums, the Renaissance nativities and epiphanies that Gerald would stand before for hours in the National Gallery. In fact, Sudworth’s murals were a cacophony of colour, a maelstrom of brightness that was close to shocking in its intensity. Beneath the artfully positioned alcove lighting and the two vast skylights, the ochres and greens, the ultramarines and vermilions jostled and jousted for prominence as fiercely and with as much abandon as if they had been laid down merely months ago instead of centuries.
Just inside the church door, a laminated square of text had been fixed to the wall.
The Sudworth Murals
A cycle of visionary works by the artist Jeb Sudworth, depicting the ancient ceremonial performed annually in the town of Holyhaven to celebrate the Feast of All Hallows. The bells of the seven churches were rung throughout the hours of darkness in order to enliven and propitiate the dead. A re-enactment of this service is still performed each year on October 31st by the town’s bell ringers. Jeb Sudworth was born in Holyhaven in 1796. He underwent no formal training as an artist, and was entirely self-taught. Some have compared his talent and later insanity to that of the ‘peasant poet’ John Clare.
For some moments I stood immobile, trying to concentrate on the words yet finding my eyes constantly drawn back, with an almost physical compunction, to the capering, leaping hordes that seemed the sole and rightful occupants of St Barnabus church.
There were nine tableaux in all. Each showed a different view of the town—the promenade was there of course, also the squashed-together fishermen’s cottages in the alleyways behind the harbour, the long walk uphill past the twin churches of Mary Magdalene and St Oliphant. I was even able to make out The Bell, in its familiar setting halfway up Wrack Lane. Beside it stood some kind of barn, a sagging, timber-framed building that no longer existed. I supposed it must have been demolished sometime in the last century.
And the streets of this painted town were filled with people. At first sight, it looked as if a festival was in progress—the sheer number of participants, and the brightness of their apparel, made this seem obvious. It was only as I examined the panels more closely—my eyes mere inches from the painted plasterwork, drinking in the detail—that I realised that the clothes of the dancers and revellers—men, women and children—were torn to tatters. Shreds of bright cloth flapped in an imaginary wind. Wildly expansive hand gestures ripped waistcoats and bodices wide open. Writhing bodies and pumping feet trampled shoes and jerkins and dresses into the dust.
It was not a festival at all, but a bacchanal, an unholy feast, a Dionysian orgy. I recoiled from what I saw, not so much from what could only be described as the lewd vigour of the cavorting townspeople as from the fact that I had not understood sooner what the murals depicted.
I had imagined a pastoral by Rubens or Claude. What filled my eyes instead was a scene that more properly belonged inside the mind of Goya or Hieronymus Bosch.
I turned away, dismayed. It was only then that I remembered Phrynne. In my strange dalliance with Sudworth’s paintings I had forgotten a creature called Phrynne even existed. Now I became aware that she was spinning in circles—dancing, really—beneath one of the skylights, the contours of her upturned face softened and blurred by the mist-coloured light of the outside. Her mackintosh had come open. Its loosened belt whipped like a strand of mud-coloured seaweed about her legs.
“They’re all dead, Iris,” she crooned. “Can’t you see that? Can’t you see?”
She darted forward, seizing my wrists and swinging me around, laughing in a high, unearthly voice as she tried—or so it seemed—to encourage me to dance, to join with her in whatever perverted ecstasy she was experiencing.
And the terrible thing is, I wanted to. Join her, I mean. For more than a moment and through our linked hands I felt or imagined I felt a shadowy, threadlike echo of the rhythm she was feeling, that they were all feeling, the beat of the drum that called them, that said on! On! A fusillade of satanic timpani, a threnody of mischief, a marmoreal rat-tat-tat of encroaching doom.
But then she flung my hands away as if they repulsed her, as if they were toads. She grabbed me fiercely by the hair, forcing my head around so that I once more faced Sudworth’s paintings, the long, central tableau that showed the clock tower of St Agnes, the gleaming, tooth-like houses, running away down the street to either side.
“Look, look,” Phrynne commanded, groaned really, as if she were in the grip of a sexual release so powerful it threatened to break her. I had to look—with my face pressed almost into the plasterwork how could I do otherwise?—and then at last I comprehended what Sudworth had painted.
The dancers were corpses. The creeping, sagging discolorations of their rotting flesh had been represented by the artist’s brush as a jester’s motley, the teeth rattling in the caves of their skulls as agates and pearls.
And could the woman in the red hat—a balding, raddled fishwife, her dead child still clamped to her breast—really be Phrynne? How was it possible that in the humpbacked, grovelling figure of the grocer outside his shop I recognised my husband Freddy? In the embittered wraith of a schoolmaster my beloved Gerald?
My human mind, the wise companion that greets me when I wake and counts me down through the sometimes-anxious moments that precede sleep, insisted it could not be so, that what I saw was a fantasy, brought on by my restless night and my friend’s strange behaviour. Yet another part of me—the impassioned daemon that had answered the drum—leapt up again to dance, whispering to me that Phrynne’s wedding night here in Holyhaven had been an awakening to much more than love, that she had passed beyond the realm of the known and into the abyss.
I wanted to run, then. To leave the church without looking back and never return.
I could not do it, though. Phrynne was my closest friend, and I could not forsake her.
I wrenched myself from her grasp. “Phrynne!” I cried. “We’ve seen enough. Let’s go.”
I reached out to take her hand. Her brittle fingers gripped mine. They were icy cold.
“Don’t you like them?” she said. “Don’t you like the pictures?” She spoke more slowly than usual, as if she had been drugged, or had just awoken from a deep sleep.
“No, I don’t,” I said. I tugged at her hand, encouraging her to follow me, and in the end she did, the belt of her loosened mackintosh trailing after her across the flagstones. Her eyes were big and shiny, like glass marbles. I leaned my shoulder against the church door and heaved it open, still clutching on to Phrynne with my other hand. It was only as we emerged into the open air that she seemed to come properly awake. She shook her head and looked about herself. She seemed confused, as if she had forgotten for a moment where we were.
“It was close in there, wasn’t it?” she said. “Really muggy. I thought I was going to faint.”
“Are you all right, Phrynne?” I said. I felt dazed, overwhelmed by the sense that something terrible had happened, or almost happened, but without the words or the experience to know what it was. All I knew was that I had glimpsed something—the corner of a world—that bore little or no relation to the wor
ld I was accustomed to living in.
Had Sudworth’s murals even been real? Was it possible to dream while you were awake? I had heard of such things, read of them, perhaps, but never paid them much heed. Now my mind was filled with such questions, buzzing around my head like pernicious insects. I wanted to take Phrynne by the shoulders and shake her, to demand that she tell me what she had seen and felt, above all what she knew.
I didn’t, though. I remained what I now saw I had been my whole life: a coward.
Phrynne blinked at me sleepily, then grinned.
“You know it’s our bed you’re sleeping in, don’t you?” she said. “Mine and Gerald’s? That awful four-poster? The bed where we fucked?”
She gave me a sidelong look, an awful look, like a scientist gauging the outcome of a risky experiment. “Don’t tell me—you’d rather not know. That’s the thing with you though, isn’t it, Iris? You’d always rather not know. You asked me on the train how I came to fall for Gerald, but even then you didn’t want to know, not really. I fell for him, dear Iris, because I could see from the moment I walked into your living room that you were itching to fuck him, and he you. I couldn’t understand why you didn’t just get on with it, to be honest. Freddy wouldn’t have divorced you even if he’d found out, which he wouldn’t have. About as perceptive as a block of wood, our Freddy. But of course you and Gerald were both insisting on playing out some kind of low-rent Greek tragedy, and I was turned on by the thought of ruining your little romance, I suppose, God knows why. Gerald Banstead turned out to be as boring in bed as Freddy was in conversation. She smiled. “You really weren’t missing much. Do you honestly think a real man would have put up with all that lady in the tower stuff? He was probably more interested in Freddy than he was in you.” She paused. “Or Ian. Ian was beautiful when he was younger, wasn’t he? Quite the Ganymede.”
I gaped at her, appalled. She had to be mad. My mind filled with confusion—was it possible for someone to be driven insane simply by looking at a picture?—and then I screamed at her, really screamed, as I had not done since my girlhood, when all things seemed possible, at least for a while. Even rage.
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