1977 (31 page)

she remembered was the horse with Ingrid Bergman being carried off on it. Descending she

paid the tonga wallah off. There were still a number of people arriving. Next week, perhaps

on Thursday, she would be here with Mr Turner. She hoped he wouldn’t be too much of an

intellectual. It would be nice to talk to him about the common or garden things that had

always interested her: films and plays and popular music. “I am an indoor person, I suppose,

Mr Turner,” she would tell him. “It was impossible to enthuse about such things in India in

my day, because they weren’t recognized as proper subjects for enthusiasm, precisely

because they were indoor things. That makes me very middle-class, doesn’t it? The upper-

classes and all the people who like to think of themselves as upper-class, are never happy

unless they are competing at something in the open air, living what they call a full life. But in

these indoor things I can recognize my own life and through them project and live so many

lives, not just the one I have.”

She smiled and nodded at the Singhs, went in and this time chose a pew near the back and

knelt and prayed.

She could be anything and anyone she wished. Within the darkness of her closed eyes and

enfolding palms she was suddenly—how strange—Renée Adorée running after the truck

taking Jack Gilbert away to the front in
The Big Parade
, one of the few old silents she had

seen. Another was
Seventh Heaven
, which the girl like Clara Bow had taken her to. The twins

took her to
The Big Parade
because it sounded a manly film and, she supposed, they had never

got over what they called the disappointment of just missing the Great War and were

compensating for the missed opportunity to have shown themselves fine fellows. They

teased her afterwards for crying when Renée Adorée clung on to Jack Gilbert’s hands and

then his boots as the truck carried him and his comrades away, and then had to let go

because she couldn’t keep up, and there had been that lovely shot from the back of the lorry

showing her receding into the distance, alone and forlorn on the muddy road. She hated the

twins for teasing her and she’d hated them for sniggering during the scene in the shellhole

when Jack Gilbert didn’t shoot the wounded German soldier but was good to him and then

started raving about the horror and brutality of war. “The poor mutt’s only been at the front

five seconds,” David had said in a voice loud enough for people to say Shh! She’d hated

them for laughing at Jack Gilbert, not because of Jack Gilbert but because of Toole and the

fact that Jack Gilbert’s doughboy uniform had electrified her with a recollection of Toole.

She uncovered her eyes and resumed her seat, waiting for the service to begin.

Toole had been her first sexual object. She had woken to him, been woken by him, simply

by sitting in the back of the Rolls which took them from the Hall to the Church at Piers

Cooney each Sunday in those glorious summer holidays of 1919, 1920 and 1921, when she

was 14, 15 and 16, and the boys nearly three years older. She had become aware of the back

of Toole’s neck as she’d never been aware of anything before in quite the same disturbing

way. And she hadn’t been able to understand why the twins made such a joke of Toole’s

name: such a secret private joke; but every time they addressed him as Toole she knew the

joke was being shared again between them.

In the old days at St John’s in Pankot, leaving with Tusker and other officers and wives in

strict order of precedence, while the rank and file of British soldiers on station, enduring

church parade, had kept their seats to let the gentry leave, she had seen, sometimes, a Toole

among them, and carried him away with her in her imagination, as she had without quite

knowing why carried away Toole or been carried away by him all those years before.

Toole had been Sir Perceval Large’s batman-driver in the war. The twins said it must have

been a cushy billet because Uncle Percy (as they called him) had never been to the front. In

her heart Lucy disagreed about the cushy billet. She was sure Toole had fought and suffered

before becoming Uncle Percy’s servant and resented not being sent back to the trenches but

instead forced to drive Uncle Percy’s staff car and clean his boots until the Armistice

brought them both back to Piers Cooney.

Toole was a local man, the son of a ploughman on one of Uncle Percy’s farms. She sensed

from the back of his neck that he was also resentful of the fact that the war had not changed

his condition of servitude much, but that driving was better than ploughing or labouring and

that he was glad of a job that gave him the chance to exercise a skill acquired as a soldier and

at a time when jobs were scarce anyway.

He drove with immense care and assurance. So it seemed to her. When he was not driving

he could be seen in his shirt-sleeves in the stable-garage, under the car or bent over its open

bonnet, endlessly cleaning and polishing. In the August sunshine the gleaming coach-work

of the motor dazzled her. Inside there was never a speck of dust or a stain on the buff

corduroy-covered upholstery. The windows were as clear as if there were no glass. These

things she noticed, but mostly she noticed Toole, up front, clad in a brown uniform that had

a high tight collar with buttons at the front and seams at the back that spread and broadened

from waist to shoulder; a uniform that fitted him so closely that it struck her that he must

find it unbearably hot and uncomfortable because his neck and his gloved hands, which she

knew were brown, suggested a preference for exposure to sun and weather.

He seldom spoke. The twins asked technical questions about the car which she didn’t

understand and which he answered briefly in words equally unintelligible to her but

obviously to the twins’ satisfaction although they laughed at his accent too, and were always

trying to get him to pronounce the word cylinders. They spoke to him in that haughty young

gentleman’s way which was a combination of the carefree and easy-going and the arrogant.

She believed he guessed that for them the word cylinders, pronounced with a Somerset

richness, was as much a joke between them as his name, which they were always using.

Occasionally he found ways of avoiding the word. Toole was no fool. She sometimes felt

coming from him, too, a controlled contempt—not for her, to whom he was always gracious

and courteous (opening the door for her and leaving the boys to make their own way out)—

but for the twins, and at a different level for the three of them who were, he must have

known, only the children of a poor relation who had been employed at The Hall to try to put

some ginger into the sickly son, to train him to withstand the rigours of Eton during the

illnesses that sent him and brought him back from one preparatory school to another, so

that apart from the holidays he was often at home during term, in their mother’s care. Toole

was old enough to know the Little children’s history, aware and alert enough to realize that

the summer holiday for the three of them was his master’s charity towards a distant female

cousin who had lived under his roof and then, her task completed, made a respectable

marriage with the curate and who if subsequently unblessed by fortune had at least produced

two strapping sons of her own and, as an afterthought, a dainty little girl, all three of whom

would benefit from the kind of summer holiday their father could not easily afford and

which perhaps was granted by Uncle Percy as a memorial offering to the sickly son who had

been their mother’s charge and who had endured Eton, done well at Oxford, and died in the

trenches.

The writing of Christmas and birthday letters to Uncle Percy had been one of her earliest

disciplines. Presumably Mumsie hoped for some lasting advantage from the connexion, but

there was none, and 1921 was the last holiday in Somerset. Uncle Percy, long widowered,

died the following Spring and the estate went to a nephew who was not interested in the

Little side of the family. Lucy did not regret it. She was almost glad. The 1921 holiday had

begun beautifully but ended horribly. Midway through it Toole was suddenly no longer

there. An older man took his place—a nasty common little man, smarmy, obsequious but

also insolent. Toole’s disappearance was a mystery because it was not discussed, but she

overheard the twins talk.

There had been a girl, a local girl. Toole and she had been what the twins, shying from the

word love, called soft on one another. But the girl was “a cut above him”, a farmer’s

daughter, promised by her father to the son of another. The girl had wanted to marry Toole

and Toole wanted to marry her. They had both disappeared, although not together. Years

later, the kinder of the twins, Mark, whom she found one day mooning in the orchard over

the loss of the latest girl he and David had vied with each other for but who had been seen

off by Mumsie who thought no girl good enough for either of them, said, “Remember

Toole?” and told her how Toole had got his girl into troublé (“Sorry, Luce, but you’re old

enough to know what I mean”) and promised to marry her. Toole had a little flat above the

stable-garage, a decent wage, a decent job, a decent employer. They could have been happy,

perhaps moved on to better things because the motor business was booming and there was

nothing Toole didn’t seem to know about motors.

He had gone one evening to face the family but the girl wasn’t there. She’d been packed off

to a relation in Cornwall. The father and the father of the man she was promised to, and the

man himself, had set on Toole, beaten him up and dumped him unconscious in a ditch a

mile from the village. He’d probably lain there for hours. When he got back to the Hall he

packed all his things and in the morning faced Uncle Percy. It was mid-month but he

wouldn’t take a penny of the money owing him because he was letting his employer down by

going at once and not giving notice. He was going to Cornwall to look for his girl. Then he

just went and that was the last anyone ever saw or heard of him.

“I hope he jolly well found her,” Mark said. “I hope they went off together. I’ve often

wished I had his guts.” She said; “How did you find out all this, Mark?” He said, “That

rotter who took his place told us. And what a rotter he was. Grinning and putting his hand

on your knee and telling you not to get involved with girls. Oh, Lord. Sorry, Sis.”

And he got up and went; went, went, as Toole had gone, gone. It was the last of the few

intimate conversations she had with Mark, who was in Insurance, but spending his weekends

with David (who was an accountant) bent over the open bonnets or under the chassis of

what they called flivvers acquired on the cheap from richer friends and which they were

making good for Sundays when they roared out of the vicarage, two hulking young men of

nearly thirty, on their way to keep appointments with the girls Mumsie always disapproved

of and made unwelcome; and roared out one Sunday too often, never to return, finding their

own Passchendaele in a pile-up between their flivver and another.

“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy

Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen.”

“Amen,” Lucy said. The service was over. It had passed her by. She had gone through it

automatically, rising, kneeling, singing, or just sitting quiet remembering Piers Cooney. After

the blessing Father Sebastian held his position. His arms were folded across his chest. No

one dared move until he moved. The silence was intense. Suddenly there was a strange

sound. Father Sebastian smiled, held up one hand, and as he did so a note blared, a true and

singular note, an authentic note that took her breath away because it was by her so long

forgotten. A wind seemed to stir through the congregation.

The organ was playing. It was playing music she recalled but couldn’t name. An anthem, a

voluntary, pealing and pealing away. There were falterings. The organ hadn’t played for a

long time. But it played. She peered. The piano was abandoned. So it must be Susy who was

up there in the old organ loft.

When the music reached a climax Father Sebastian took up the great cross and, holding it

high came down from the sanctuary and paced slowly down the aisle to the sound of the

organ and the murmurs of the amazed congregation who bowed and bobbed and dipped as

he went past them on his way to the West door.

He stood in the porch, holding the cross in his left hand, shaking each hand with his right.

The organ still played. It took her a long time to get out of the church.