Early on Saturday morning, Stella and Rufus Morrison drove down from Battersea to their house in his constituency. Stella packed food for the weekend in a cool box; there would be no time for shopping. Rufus had his surgery to take, meetings with his agent, with the Master of the local hunt who was campaigning for the repeal of unpopular legislation, and with the chairman of the parish council; there was also a fund-raising dinner to attend that night. Some kind of competition—she had forgotten what—to adjudicate on Sunday morning, and then they would have to drive back to London so that the whole week’s round could begin again—Shadow Cabinet meetings, off-the-record briefings, debates and argument, Select Committees, jostlings for airtime—Rufus’s round, all underpinned by Stella.
There was one small break in Saturday’s program that Stella was anticipating with the pleasure she had known when she first met Rufus. He had been married to someone else then, his secret hours with Stella stolen out of a shared and busy life. They used to meet in the back room of a pub in Dean Street, and Stella remembered the ardor she felt as she hurried toward it, the ecstasy of being sure that in a moment she would be with the man who filled her waking thoughts and her better dreams. That ecstasy must have been visible in some way, she later thought; strangers stopped what they were doing and turned to look at her rushing past them on Shaftesbury Avenue; men, with hungry eyes.
So many years ago, and now Stella was longing for a meeting not with a lover but with her youngest child. It would be too brief—these meetings always were—and she’d pay for it with an hour of cold on a soggy sports pitch, but he’d be there, his aliform shoulder blades, his muddy knees, the ravishment of his smile. How was it possible, she thought, to miss anyone as painfully as she missed him? Even in the most fervid time of her affair with Rufus, when every parting felt as if a layer were being cruelly torn from her vulnerable heart, she had known that she could bear the hours that followed. But this? This was sorrow of a different kind. A dull but unremitting throb that was the pulse of every day in term time.
Rufus drove. He always drove, except after dinner parties. He did not want to talk; he was listening to a disc his secretary had recorded of an important speech made at the Confederation of British Industries. Stella contemplated his hands, resting on the steering wheel; long fingers with protuberant knucklebones, a feathering of light brown hair over the outer metacarpals. An edge of tattered check cuff showing beneath his navy sweater; his tweed jacket on the backseat; a weekend shirt, working weekend clothes. Hands were so strangely intimate, she thought, and yet they were the one part of the human body that was always on display. Even where women have their faces covered, they are allowed to bare their hands. Hands that have known the inner places of the body; their own, their children’s and their lovers’. She had looked at the hands of men holding knives and forks at a dinner table—fat hands and slim ones, stubby-fingered, hairy—and envisaged their profound acquaintance with the bodies of their wives, who sat a conventional distance away round the same table. Rufus’s hand recognized the contours of her breasts so easily, he’d probably ceased to register them as things apart. Stella’s body had become his property through the rights of ownership accumulated over years of marriage.
The M3, the A303, past Andover, through Sherborne. A route so tediously familiar she barely noticed the landmarks. But she did notice the changes every week in the hedgerows and the waysides, those reminders of the fields and hills that had been there before the roads tore strips from them and left their green flanks scarred. That Saturday morning, in late March, winter skeletons were beginning to be touched by green, pale sunlight flickered throughout translucent leaves. Wild cherry flowering everywhere, cherry like drifting snow. On the blackthorn, tender and beautiful white blossom, as delicate as a bride’s veil, and as hopeful. The bravery of these ancient trees, opening the paths to new sap every year, putting forth their youthful flowers. The white flowers of the thorn. The green of infant leaves so tentative they looked like mist on the bare branches, not solid form.
Saturday was Kiti’s day off. She slept late, then called her friend Melinda. She mentioned the woman on the ward who believed she had reopened Our Lord’s wounds. Kiti knew the church she had been talking about, on the corner of Riverside Crescent. Melinda said that was a little bit interesting; they should go and take a look. What else was there to do on a rainy Saturday in London, when you were trying to save money? Both girls were very homesick.
The Sacred Heart was open, as it was every day from eight till six. It was a point of pride and of principle to Father Diamond and his Superior, Father O’Connor, to allow unfettered access to the church. You could never tell when a soul in need might seek the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, Father O’Connor always said, even though it meant the devil to pay in insurance premiums. True, there were more often homeless people escaping from the rain in there than bona fide prayers, but they too were souls in need, of course, and who knows if they might find the Lord even though they were only seeking shelter?
There was no one in the church that Saturday afternoon. Kiti and Melinda crossed themselves with Holy Water from the stoup, genuflected and set off to find the cross that the fat woman had talked about. There were all the old familiar figures in the church: St. Joseph in his brown cloak, the Virgin in her blue dress, Jesus with his heart exposed. The cross hanging from the ceiling in front of the altar had no body on it, so clearly it was not the one they wanted. Eventually they located it in one of the two side chapels. A crucifix nailed to the wall above a narrow altar; Jesus in colored plaster.
With no natural light, the little chapel was very dim. Kiti and Melinda felt around for a light switch but they couldn’t find one. Melinda suggested taking one of the candles from the wooden tray in front of the statue of Our Lady; Kiti put a 5p coin in the collection tin. A box of matches had been thoughtfully provided. Kiti struck one and held it to the candlewick while Melinda screened the new flame with her hand. Melinda carried the candle to the chapel and raised it to the crucifix. It flickered in the darkness, throwing the shadows of the two girls across the wall. They could just make out the silver reliquaries behind locked bars in niches in the wall, a painting to one side of a figure they could not identify. The pink legs and feet of God. But there was no blood. Kiti and Melinda were disappointed. Although what more could one expect from a silly Englishwoman who had given herself a big blow on the head? Then Kiti screamed. And Melinda too. Oh God, they screamed together. Did you see that? It was far too frightening. Melinda dropped the candle and they both fled from the church.
Felix Morrison spotted his mother hurrying across the pitch and felt a small constriction in his heart. She was late and the under-elevens were already being thrashed, as usual, having missed their first conversion and a penalty kick. But that wouldn’t worry his mother, she never seemed to mind whether the team won or lost. In fact, she never even seemed to know which side was winning or losing until the match ended and the victors cheered. Felix had tried to explain the rules to her a hundred times but she still got them muddled up. The important thing is that you enjoy yourself and do your best, she had told him once, and he had not wanted to upset her with the truth, which was that winning really mattered. In the harsh world of his boarding school no amount of motherly solace could save a boy from being a loser.
In keeping with custom, Felix only nodded curtly to his mother when she reached the touchline, and ran past her after a disappearing ball. She gave him a little wave. That she was there, though, that she’d made it when he hadn’t been sure she’d be able to, gave Felix a rush of strength, as if the sluggish blood in his veins had all of a sudden been displaced by something warmer and more pure. Ichor, he said to himself under his breath. The clear fluid that flowed in the veins of gods. The horrible hard ball was now cannoning toward him and could not be evaded unless Felix were to turn tail and head in the opposite direction. With the strength of heroes flooding through him, Felix lunged for it, grabbed it and ran for the tr
yline.
Stella kept her eyes trained on her child as he was tackled, stopped breathing as he disappeared beneath the ruck, breathed again when he emerged, without the ball but with his nose unbloodied. This barbarous pursuit, she thought, why do we do such terrible things to our sons? Rufus had been a rugger Blue at Oxford.
Some of the under-elevens, who could, apparently, be almost twelve, were nearly as tall as men and growing bulky. Felix was by far the smallest of the team, a child so thin you might think you saw the gleam of bone through his white skin. A child made of lines and angles, the nape of his neck heartbreaking, his new front teeth like trespassers in his mouth. When the game was over he ran across to Stella. She looked beautiful, he noted, as she always did, much nicer-looking than the other mothers. She knew not to kiss him. Match tea, he said, I’m sorry, Mum. We have to have it with the visiting team. That’s fine, she said. I hope it’s good. You must be starving after all that brilliant playing.
I am, said Felix. It’s a bit less than two weeks, I think, to the end of term?
That’s right. About ten days, she said. I’ll see you then. He nodded quickly and turned back to his team, now streaming off toward the changing rooms. She watched him go, yearning after him, the mud-stained hollows behind his fragile knees.
Father Diamond, readying the church for Saturday’s vigil mass, saw the candle lying on the floor outside the Chapel of the Holy Souls. People can be so careless, he said to himself. The candle was no longer burning but it had evidently been lit; it could have caused a fire. He picked it up and stuck it in the stand.
There were eleven worshipers that evening, not bad for a Saturday in London, and Seamus was there to serve. Afterward, Father Diamond asked him to help with the Lenten veils. They were difficult to manage on one’s own. Seamus, who also served on weekdays, was too shaky to be really helpful, but it was good to have an extra pair of hands.
Together the two men fetched the stepladder from the garage behind the house. Father Diamond had already taken the shrouds out of the cardboard boxes in which they were stored for the rest of the year and had heaped them in the sacristy. Heavy, thick material, a little faded at the folds, a little dusty; redolent of charity shops with their scent of mildew.
He and Seamus worked systematically, carrying the ladder between them. Our Lady and St. Joseph; the Sacred Heart, which was a statue Father Diamond disliked intensely but dared not upset his congregation by discarding; the crucifix in the Holy Souls. The cross that hung from the ceiling above the sanctuary was always the hardest to cover; too high for Father Diamond to reach with ease, and the material would keep slipping off. Eventually he managed to secure it with safety pins.
It was dark now, and the violet coverings made it seem darker still. Always such a bleak time for Father Diamond, the flowers gone, the statues shrouded like corpses in their cerements, like possessions under dust sheets in an abandoned house. His foot was on the top rung of depression; if he did not hold on fast he would slip down so far it would take enormous strength to clamber up. He was not sure that he could find the strength again. Before him stretched the final weeks of Lent: Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, the terror of Good Friday, agony and passion, tallow candles and the altar bare.
I don’t know what I’d do without you, Seamus, he said truthfully. How about a drink, or are you rushing off this evening? Seamus made the sideways movement of his head that expressed regret more courteously than a straight refusal. Thanks a million, Father, but there’s things I should be doing. Fine, said Father Diamond, bless you.
Stella did not stay for tea with the other parents after Felix’s match but sped off to get herself ready for the evening. It was desolating to drive away from the school and out through its iron gates, leaving her child behind. Stella had heard other women tell of times when they had forgotten their children in playgrounds and shopping centers; there had been a family recently in the news who were halfway across the Atlantic on a plane before they realized their four-year-old was missing. Stella had laughed in the approved manner at these comic instances of the softening effect of motherhood on the brain but was privately appalled. When her children were small she had felt as if the cords that once connected them to her were still in place; she was as aware of them as her own heartbeat, her own breath.
Barnaby and Camilla had made their own graceful adjustments to the umbilical ties; stretching them to encompass nights away at first, and later weeks, then holidays with friends, and finally the long intervals of their gap years and university. Camilla at that very moment was in the north of Thailand, near the Burmese border, teaching English to the children of Karen refugees. Barney had spent a year traveling in South America and was now at Cambridge. It had been agony, of course, to let them go. When she waved Barney good-bye at Heathrow Airport, she had felt terribly afraid that it would be forever. At the back of her wardrobe was Camilla’s nightdress, discarded on her bed when she went to Thailand. A faded gray thing, an old favorite, it had reached Camilla’s ankles when it was new and now it skimmed her thighs. Like a frugal addict, Stella allowed herself to bury her face in it, to breathe in its scent, only at the times when she most acutely missed her daughter. As the months went by, the scent was getting fainter. Stella worried a little, and knew she was quite mad for doing so, about its laundering. To wash it before Camilla came home safely would be to court disaster. But if she waited, Camilla would know, and think her mother sentimental.
Rufus was at the front door of the house when she got there, leaning against the jamb, listening to an elderly man in tweed whom Stella did not recognize. You know my wife, of course? said Rufus, and the man said that he did. Won’t you come in for a cup of tea? Stella asked him, and then caught Rufus’s warning look. Luckily the visitor said he must get home, he still had to wash the dogs.
Thank God for that, Rufus said, when the man had finally taken his leave. He’s got to be the biggest bore in Christendom. What were you doing, asking him in for tea? Anyway, I still have calls to make—what time are we on parade?
Seven for 7:30, Stella said, wondering if there was enough time for her to prune the ceanothus that grew along one wall of the garden. Toward the end of spring its fallen flowers would drift like flakes of dark blue paint, of lapis lazuli, across the paving stones. If she were not there at the right time, Stella would miss them—their intense blue against the gray stone, the white clouds of bridal wreath still flowering about them. Too often she missed the ephemeral events of this garden which she saw only at weekends, and felt that she neglected. There was a climbing rose for instance, so briefly in bloom that it was like Bishop Berkeley’s tree: if it flowered unseen, could it be said to flower at all?
This was the house that Rufus had bought when he knew he had been selected to stand for the safe seat of Central Dorset. Nothing ostentatious, he had stipulated beforehand. Something comfortable, in a village, something that would put him at the heart of the community.
And so this rather beautiful old house with its walled garden and a mulberry tree. A passage led straight from the front door to the back; when both doors were open on a bright day it became a corridor of light. The roof beams were hundreds of years old. In one room, now converted to a kitchen, were the remains of an ancient anvil; when Rufus bought it the house was called Ye Olde Forge. He had officially renamed it 32 Middle Street, but the children still called it the Forgery. Their possession of it was a little fraudulent, Stella sometimes felt. For the generations who had lived there it had represented permanence, a place of work, a settled place in life. The house next door had been a bakery, the one beyond, built a little later, was still called the Old Bank. Now there was nowhere in the village where a person could earn a living except as a cleaner or an odd-job man. Or, of course, as an MP. Rufus’s office was in the house; during surgery hours on Saturdays his constituents straggled up the path with their anxieties and complaints, their health and housing problems. Or simply because they needed proof that he was there in person. Rufus was
good at what he did.
Darkness was falling too fast to allow for any pruning, Stella realized. Tomorrow the clocks would go forward and there would be a precious extra hour of light that evening, the start of a gentle progress toward nights when it would not be necessary to draw the curtains and light the lamps against the dark. Today, though, Stella could still feel the touch of winter in the damp stone walls and in the silence of the birds that were also waiting for renewed light, and the morning.
An unsettling aspect of life in this old house was that there was seldom anything in it for Stella to do, except the gardening. That, she had chosen—it was not a difficult garden to look after, being small and stone-flagged and containing nothing delicate or rare. But Linda from the other end of the village came in twice a week to keep things clean, and any other routine jobs were dealt with by Rufus’s constituency secretary, who summoned plumbers and electricians as required, and sent their bills on to the House of Commons. Stella had never even needed to change a lightbulb. It was, she thought, like living in the sort of hotel whose barely visible management pretended it was an ordinary home.
Now she wandered through the sitting room and the kitchen, wanting something, but not knowing what that was. She picked up the book that she had been reading—Elizabeth Taylor’s first novel—and put it down again. She wondered about telephoning a friend. By then it was after six; she could legitimately suppose that it was time to change for dinner.
Almost all of Stella knew exactly what that evening had in store. But a fraction of her could still feel faintly hopeful. Interesting people turned up in the least likely of places, even at a dinner in a nearby country house held in support of an appeal to raise money for the local staghounds. She and Rufus had to be there; he was a great friend of the host’s and, besides, he was in favor of the Countryside Alliance.
The Translation of the Bones Page 3
