by John Brunner
‘Nobody in this damned place ever got the point before!’ was her reply. ‘Come in!’
He’d stayed …
Much to the annoyance of sundry local folk, both old and young.
And found a job into the bargain, though luckily one they didn’t envy. Tending the village green and cemetery, raking dead leaves and trimming hedges, and generally tidying up, might not appeal to everyone, but it suited Stick to perfection, especially since it meant he had access to a patch of land where the old war memorial had stood until they moved it in 1946, neglected ever since. He wasn’t much of a gardener, but there was one thing he was very good at growing and it flourished there.
Moreover it had broken down some barriers. Even certain young men – married and unmarried – who had set their sights on Sheila now talked to him politely.
And this year’s crop, as he had proved last night, was quite exceptional …
Opposite Sheila’s room, which had become his as well, was the one where her children slept in twin bunk-beds. It was time to wake them.
No, let them wait a minute longer, while he attended to an urgent problem in the minuscule bathroom adjacent to the equally exiguous kitchen.
Emerging, he called over his shoulder as he headed for the electric kettle, ‘Sam! Hilary! Time to get up!’
Water run, flex plugged in … no sign of movement.
‘Hilary! Sam! Didn’t you hear me?’
Teapot rinsed and tea spooned into it, still nothing. Time to come the heavy non-father. He marched into the kids’ room, tramp-tramp as loudly as feet in socks permitted, and whisked the covers off them both.
Aged eight and ten, they slept in T-shirts, baggy from repeated washing. Blinking, he stared down.
He’d got the names right – crayoned signs at the head of each bunk said HILARY and SAM, though to the second one was appended a footnote he did not recall: ‘PLEASE DONT ADD THE ANTHA I DONT LIKE IT.’
Funny! I could have sworn that Sheila’s kids were boys.
But what the hell? He’d always liked girls better.
Having made sure they were awake, he returned to the kitchen just before the kettle boiled in search of milk and cereal and bowls and spoons.
After smoking grass like what he’d raised this year, one never knew quite where one’s head was likely to be at.
The Reverend Patrick Phibson entered the vestry of St Matthew’s Church and prepared to don his surplice for the morning service. His eyes were sore and his belly was rumbling; he had been out until midnight comforting Mrs Lapsey who – not for the first time – had been convinced she was at death’s door, but had only called the doctor at his insistence. He had missed supper, and the sandwich he had forced down on his return still lay heavy.
He looked with jaundiced gaze on the church, as usual. Ever since his appointment to this living, which would be his last before retirement, he had felt that in spite of its respectable antiquity there was something tainted about any such edifice that had been re-named owing to the vanity of its incumbent. Precisely that had happened at Weyharrow. Before Matthew Goodsir moved in and imposed his own name, it had been dedicated – ecumenically, as one might say, and very sensibly in a period of wars of religious intolerance – to All Saints.
But, of course, as he was always forced to admit to himself, albeit with a sigh, there had been times when one must distinguish between saints and ‘saints’, that was to say the heretics who held that once received into the community of the elect whatever they did must necessarily be right, for they were permanently cleansed of any taint of sin …
Much of this church dated back past the days of the Great Plague to those of the Black Death, when such notions had been rife. Part, some people claimed, especially of the crypt, must be far older – relics of the age when this had been not a Christian but a pagan centre of worship …
Enough! Enough! Much more of this and he was likely to find himself agreeing with that awful Victor Draycock who argued that the dirty amoral mob who nowadays invaded Weyharrow each summer were heirs to a spiritual tradition with deeper roots than his own creed –
Stop!
Garbed in the prescribed manner, having recited by pure reflex the appropriate prayers, Mr Phibson realized it was more than long enough since the morning bell tolled from the tower. He drew a deep breath and thrust aside the vestry door.
As usual at this hour of seven-thirty, the congregation was negligible: seven people, five of them women and one of those his housekeeper. There was no organist on weekdays. How much more impressive it would have been had a swelling voluntary rung out …
Yet and still, it was a service to the Almighty. He composed his features into a suitably cheerful expression and went forth to utter the customary comforting phrases that – as he had known for years – properly began each daily act of worship.
‘I, Patrick, a servant of the Father, bid you welcome in His holy name, and that of the Mother, and the Child!’
With the assurance due to having performed the same rite countless times, he turned his back on the altar (had someone been meddling with it? It didn’t look the way it should according to his own recollection of the calendar, but he had barely glimpsed it and in all humility one must admit the possibility of being wrong) and spread his arms.
‘Come hither and embrace me, as the Mother once embraced Her Child! Let us exchange the Kiss of Peace as the apostles did, passing from lip to lip the touch of our immortal Parent!’
Abruptly he realized that all the faces gazing at him were locked into the same expression: stony, appalled.
Had heresy taken root in Weyharrow again? The triune He and She and It forfend!
He tried again, this time wheedling. On average, his listeners must be fifty or sixty, but of course a sense of frustration was apt to strike at just about that age – as he himself had been made only too aware when Maud died.
‘Beloved, I know there are some who resent the fact that contact of a more intimate kind with skin that touched the skin that touched the skin – and so back and back to Intercourse with the Blessed Child, Man and Woman blended in one sacred Flesh – should be reserved to those in holy orders. But our wise and patient guide, the Church, has so decreed because above the waist the brain, the seat of judgment and intelligence, is sovereign. Below the waist, only faith may transmute the blind operation of instinct into a holy act of worship, and it is given to few to …’
His words died away. The members of the congregation were rising, but not to exchange the Kiss of Peace with him or one another. They were shouting at him, trembling with fury – or maybe horror. He stood bewildered. How could they possibly object to such an orthodox exposition of their common creed?
It hadn’t been like this yesterday morning, he was sure of that.
Ursula Ellerford caught sight of her reflection in the window above the kitchen sink, and reflexively tidied back a strand of her brown hair. There was more grey in it than there had been a week ago, she thought. No doubt there were also more wrinkles on her face and neck. Coping by herself with two demanding teenage sons was proving more than she could bear. Last night Paul and Harold had been out God knew where until God knew what time, and she’d waited up for them as usual, terrified of the phone call that might tell her they had had an accident, or got in a fight and been arrested.
But she hadn’t wanted them to know what a watch she kept. Though she had wandered round and round the garden in the midnight mist, she had darted up to her bedroom as soon as she heard their cheerful voices on the street.
She hadn’t even left them a reproving note.
If only Ted had been spared … But he’d developed cancer, taken enforced retirement, died a lingering death. If, equally, he had left enough for something better than this cramped house – best of all, enough for a servant of the kind they had enjoyed when working in Hong Kong …
All the time she was rehearsing her pointless private litany of might-have-beens, she was boiling a pan of water, t
hrowing in a handful of rice, laying out rice-ware bowls and matching handleless cups and hunting for the tea she was sure ought to be in this cupboard. No. That one?
She remembered to shout at the boys to hurry up or they would miss the school bus. Older than eleven, children in Weyharrow had to go to Powte, near Chapminster. If only Ted had left enough for them to board at his old school, as he had always dreamed …
Her sons came clattering into the kitchen and sat down. She set the steaming pan before them.
‘What’s this?’ they demanded as one.
‘Breakfast, what else?’ she snapped.
‘It looks like yucky muck to me!’ countered Harold, and his brother said the same, adding obscenities.
Ursula stood there blankly. She said in a faint voice, ‘You never said you didn’t like it before.’
‘That’s because we never had it before!’ – from Paul.
But it’s congee – rice soup! Like in Hong Kong …
The words died unspoken. Sometimes it seemed they were determined to torment her every waking moment. Dully she turned away, while they exchanged shrugs and helped themselves to packet cereal. After all her trouble …!
But she managed not to cry until they’d gone.
Tom Fidger rolled the smoking ancient bus out of the forecourt of the garage that he ran in partnership with his brother Fred. It was a family business; their grandfather had founded it, and their father Jack still helped out in the office now and then.
He turned around the green to the bus shelter beside the churchyard gate, where his usual passengers were waiting: boys and girls in blue and grey school uniform. Thursday was never a busy morning. It was pension day, and the older folk must collect their money from the post office before they could go shopping away from the village.
He thought wistfully of times past, when Fidger’s had run a proper service with three buses and hired drivers. Back then, they hadn’t just ferried shoppers and schoolkids, but all sorts of passengers. Every morning they’d taken a dozen people to work at the pharmaceutical factory up the valley in Trimborne, and brought them back in the evening. Then, though, the managers had introduced automatic machinery, and the few staff they kept on became able to afford cars, and the demand dwindled. Now literally no one from Weyharrow worked at the factory any more, and even this rump of a service barely broke even except during the school term, despite weekend holiday excursions …
Still, there were people who without it would never be able to get out of Weyharrow at all. It was a public good, and worth preserving for as long as possible.
Braking, opening the door, he called good morning to those waiting. He felt fine, despite having been up late. A tourist coach had broken down on the main road, and it had been his turn rather than his brother’s to go and help. He hadn’t got to bed until nearly midnight.
Everybody was aboard. Shutting the door, he engaged gear. And hesitated with his foot on the clutch.
Something really ought to be done about the siting of this stop! Why in the world was it on the wrong side of the road? And there was a car coming!
He waited until it had gone by, then swung over to the right and set off for Powte. Three near-collisions later, his screaming passengers finally made him believe that in Britain one drives on the left.
Shaking and sweating, he obeyed, and delivered them to their destination with no further mishap.
But he had been so sure! He’d known! And in his heart of hearts still felt it wrong!
Leaving his boots at the back door, Harry Vikes crossed the stone-flagged floor of the farm kitchen and sat down gloomily at the big scrubbed wooden table.
His wife Joyce bustled over from the solid-fuel range with a mug of tea in her red-knuckled hands. ‘Here you are!’ she said. ‘I’ll get your breakfast directly.’
Harry had been out late last night tending a sick calf, and up again at six as usual for the early milking and to drive the cows to pasture.
His only response was a grunt.
‘What’s amiss now?’ Joyce demanded. ‘Did the calf die?’
‘No.’ Not looking at her, he spooned sugar into his tea.
‘What then?’ And added suddenly: ‘Where’s Chief?’
The door was wide open, but there was no sign of Harry’s constant companion, his black and white collie cross.
‘By the gate, looking like a hundred devils got at him.’
Indeed he was. Joyce spotted him through the window, hunched down to the ground, tail low, eyes wide.
‘What did you do to him?’
‘It’s more what he did to me,’ Harry grunted. ‘And ’tis all the fault of they damned Pecklows!’
The Vikeses and the Pecklows had long been neighbours, but propinquity had never made them friends.
‘Know what they done this time?’ Harry went on.’ Put the piece I rent from Nigel Mender down to turnips – in the night, just like that! ’Course I drove the cows in anyway, but Chief went mad. I had to kick him ’fore he’d leave off snapping at me.’
Joyce sat down very slowly. She said, ‘What piece that you rent from Mr Mender?’
‘The one in Fooksey Lane, o’ course!’
‘Harry,’ Joyce said in a faint voice, ‘that was last year. This year Ken Pecklow has it. He outbid you. And it is down to turnips.’
‘That’s what I said!’ he burst out. ‘And it warn’t yesterday! I remember clear as I see you now!’
‘And you drove our herd into it … No wonder the dog tried to stop you! Seemingly he has more sense than you!’
The phone rang. She forced her heavy body to her feet.
‘That’ll be Ken, I reckon,’ she said in a dull tone. ‘And after we get this lot sorted out, you better go and see the doctor.’
‘What are you rattling on about, woman? It’s the calf that’s sick, not me!’
‘You think you’re not sick?’ she flared. ‘When you’re saying that Ken spent all night setting full-grown turnips in a field you grazed our cows on yesterday?’
‘I told you! I remember clear as I see you now …’
But the words trailed away. He turned his leather-brown face to her, and it grew pale. Beads of sweat started to run down his forehead, and his hand shook so much that tea slopped from his mug.
The phone was still ringing. Wearily Joyce moved to answer it.
Dr Steven Gloze did his best to look cheerful as he came downstairs for morning surgery, but Mrs Weaper the receptionist was doing the opposite, as though the name she had married into had permanently conditioned her expression. She informed him tartly that there were patients waiting, as though that were somehow his fault. But the first appointment was at nine, and only now was that hour clanging from the church clock.
Steven sighed as he collected the patient records. He had undertaken not a few engagements as a locum since his graduation, but they had mostly been in or around London. The idea of spending a month in a West Country village, especially in a practice where rumour hinted that Dr Tripkin, the incumbent – currently on holiday in Spain – was seriously considering retirement, had greatly appealed to him.
However, he was being made to feel distinctly unwelcome. Last night, when the parson had called him to attend Mrs Lapsey, the old bag had snapped at him as though he were some kind of unreliable quack.
Still, he had only been here since Monday. More than three weeks remained.
Riffling through the documents he had been handed, he discovered that the first patient was one William Cashcart, whom he had not previously met. An intercom linked the consulting-room with the waiting-room; he pressed the button and called him in.
Mr Cashcart, who was forty, said he was employed by Wenstowe’s the builders and that his right wrist was hurting even though he’d bought a navvy’s bracer to put round it. A brief examination revealed he was most likely suffering from chronic but as yet low-grade arthritis. Well, that meant a good plain start to the day. It didn’t seem worth sending him for an X-ray. Steven wrot
e out a prescription, told him to take it across the green to the chemist’s, and called for the next patient.
She was just leaving when the phone rang. He picked it up. It was Mrs Weaper.
‘Mr Ratch wants you!’ she said sharply.
Steven’s heart sank. Mr Ratch was the pharmacist, and he seemed as suspicious as anybody of this intrusive young stranger to whom the health of Weyharrow had been entrusted.
‘Put him on,’ he sighed.
‘Dr Gloze? Lawrence Ratch here. Since when have newly-slaughtered chickens been available on the Health Service?’
‘What? But it’s standard treatment – has been since Lord knows when!’
‘I have no idea’ – frostily – ‘what in the world you’re talking about.’
‘But surely …’ Steven sought words through a haze of incomprehension. ‘All he has to do is plunge his hand into the chicken while it’s still warm, and keep it there until it’s cold. The vital forces –’
Then, slowly, a vision of Mr Ratch’s shop, which he had visited on Monday morning, took form in his mind. Indeed, it was not the sort of place where one would find live chickens. But why not, when their use was a commonplace? In town perhaps one might not obtain them so easily, but in the country …?
He forced himself to say politely, ‘Don’t you have an arrangement with a local butcher? Or a farmer?’
‘Dr Gloze! If this is a joke, it’s in very poor taste! Mr Cashcart obviously has arthritis. I’m taking it upon myself to let him have something suitable, and I trust you’ll sign a revised prescription straight away! Be so good as not to play such pranks again!’
The phone slammed down, leaving Steven in a state of indescribable bewilderment. There was a rack of medical texts above his borrowed desk; he snatched at each in turn, searching for the treatment he was so sure he had been taught to use.
It wasn’t there. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t there …
