Oscar and Lucinda Page 5

  “Of course you know,” Theophilus said, “that witches eat this plant.”

  Oscar felt the new tor heavy in his pocket and held it hard with one ink-smudged hand. He wanted to scream at him: Your soul is in danger. You are wrong.

  His father was close and familiar, so familiar he could not have described his face to anyone. He was a shape, a feeling, that thing the child names “Pa.” He was serge, formaldehyde, a safe place.

  He was not a safe place. Not any more.

  “They drink the urine of someone who has eaten the plant.” Oscar did not look up. “They are in communication with the devil or, in their state of intoxication, imagine they are.”

  The stone in his pocket was heavy, too heavy. His hand locked around it so hard he could not let it go. The muscles around his neat little jaw reflected the spasm in his hand. His safety was in God.

  The beloved of the Lord shall dwell in safety by him; and the Lord shall cover him all the day long, and he shall dwell between his shoulders.

  “We have several witches in the area,” Theophilus said. He felt he was talking in a fog. His son would not look at him. “I think it is true, that there are witches nearby.”

  Oscar touched the edge of the cartridge paper his father was drawing on. It had a sharp edge but a soft velvety face.

  “Do you think this is true?”

  “Yes,” said Oscar. He looked up and was frightened by the eyes.

  Beware of prophets that come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

  “Yes, I think so myself.” There was a pause. Oscar heard his father sharpen his pencil. He smelt the sharp, metallic smell of pencil lead, the sweet, sappy smell of wood shavings.

  “There is evidence,” Theophilus said, “around the lanes, that the agaric eaters are out. You have seen the markings?”

  “Yes.”

  Theophilus then did something which was completely out of character—he described something he had not actually seen. In his desperate desire to have his son’s loving attention, to feel those amethyst eyes rest unanxiously upon his own face, he repeated something said to him by Smart Jack, the warrener who called at the cottage to sell his rabbits and discuss scripture.

  “There is a blank square at the top,” Theophilus said, “where they sacrifice a goat. They decapitate the poor creature and leave its head upon the square as a mocking image of Our Saviour.”

  And they shall turn away their ears from the truth and be turned into fables.

  Oscar saw his father raise the glass of cold black tea he always sipped at while working. The mouth moved open a fraction. The tip of his tongue showed. Oscar saw the father whom he loved, but he also saw that person most reviled by Theophilus Hopkins—an agent of false instruction.

  Oscar’s hand clenched round the stone. The tendons in his neck showed the strain of the grip.

  He pulled his hand out of his pocket and opened it in front of his father. There!

  Theophilus took the stone from the ink-stained palm. The stone was warm. He placed it on the cartridge paper and turned it over with his pencil.

  “Caput mortem,” he said.

  Oscar burst into tears.

  11

  Apostasy

  The Baptist boys made him eat dirt. They made him sing songs he was not allowed to sing. They showed him engravings of a pagan statue from the Crystal Palace. They put coarse mud on his skin because they could not bear it so soft and white.

  He was not from “here.” He was from “there.” He did not like the sound of his own voice. He tried to change it, to make it soft and leafy like Timmy Croucher. He said “fayther” for father, but not at home.

  How small his world was. He did not mind it small. He would have had it smaller still, have been a mole or a badger. He preferred the tangled forest of oak and elm which separated the high downs from the sea. Here he might stand still for hours, in a day-dreaming trance no wind could cut, examining dead leaf, leaf mould, spores, fungi, white indeterminate life—something without a soul that looked like spilt flour. He posted letters to his mother in a hole in a tree. Timmy Croucher, a large-boned, olive-skinned boy with soft hair on his lip, devised special prayers; they conducted their own services and argued about the nature of hell. In the bulging, spiky map which marked his territory, this was the larger part. The map did not include the village. He went there, but only when instructed, and with Mrs Williams for a guard if he could arrange it so. He had as firm a sense of territory as a dog, and when he moved across the terrain outside his map, across the Downs to Morely, for instance, he moved jerkily, running, his knees clicking, out of breath with a pain in his side.

  He did not wish to leave the shelter of his father’s home. He had no ambitions to see the world, to take part in the great adventures of Empire. This empire existed beyond the myopic mist. Somewhere there were “Disraeli” and “Lord Russell” and “Lord Elgin.” He could not imagine them. He knew Mrs Williams, Timmy Croucher, Smart Jack.

  He had seen the Anglican minister and his wife, but they had no place in his life. It is true, of course, that Hennacombe was built around the Anglican church of St Anne’s and its vicarage, but the hamlet was like a tree in which the heart wood has rotted out. There was no heart, only a place for dust and spiders. And yet this was where God wished him to go. When he would not listen to the stone, God repeated the message again and again. = Anglican.

  Thus, God said: “Go.” There was nothing attractive in this idea.

  He promised God he would go before Good Friday. He celebrated Easter, in bad faith, amidst the white-smocked Plymouth Brethren. He read them the lesson God said: “Thou hypocrite.”

  Easter came, but did not come. The flower buds of the wild cherry were still tightly sealed on Easter Sunday. This was on 24 April, almost as late as Easter can be. It had never happened before that there were no wild cherries on Easter Day. There was no pussy willow either. This was called “palm” in Hennacombe, and used as palms on Palm Sunday. So there were no palms for Palm Sunday. Nor were there primroses for Easter Day. There were not brimstone butterflies. The swifts did not arrive. This also was a sign.

  The weather frightened him. It was this that drove him to apostasy.

  He did not allow himself to know what he was doing. While the Brethren sang their long and doleful hymn—it was the second Sun day after Easter—he slipped quietly out of the meeting-house door. He had no more in his pocket than a threepenny bit and a soiled handkerchief. He walked beside his father’s house and heard the door slam as Mrs Williams came inside from the garden. He could see the square tower of St Anne’s below him, a little to the left. It was deep in shadows, hemmed in by leafless trees. It was not an attractive destination.

  He was fifteen years old, nearly sixteen. His feet were tight inside his boots. His pale wrists protruded from his sleeves—they looked a foot long. He took a path, but not the one that led most directly to St Anne’s. He tried not to think about what he was doing. He said a little prayer, but the words were like bricks—he placed them carefully, slowly, one after the other—to keep out the nightmare images that had leaked into his waking mind—his papa’s face burning in the hellfire.

  He could hear the Plymouth Brethren singing. They pulled out the words like taffy pull. “Dear Lord,” he prayed, “I am only fifteen.”

  The path forked. The left path ran down into the combe, and therefore led more or less directly to St Anne’s. He took the right fork which led to Man’s Nose and up on to the Downs.

  He looked down, watching his brown spit-and-polish boots, the red gravel, the dead margins of the path. He thought of summer, of hawthorn white with blossom, the sloe, the maple, the guelder-rose with its snowballs, the glossy, heart-shaped leaves of bryony. He was hurt and aching for bright evenings. He saw the gentle enquiring motion of his papa’s malacca cane as it blessed the pretty dog—violet, stitch—wort with its thousand white stars, dog mercury, rose campion.

  He thought: I will never b
e happy again.

  He blew his nose and looked briefly, but with curiosity, at what came out. He put his handkerchief back in his pocket. The path was almost at the sea. He did not like that part of the path. He turned, and began to run down the path in the direction he had come, towards St Anne’s. He took a new path. It went down through a dark coppice. There were blackbirds, like flutes, but he did not hear them. There was a thing like a dry pea rattling inside his head. The way was tangled and overgrown. He pushed through. He stamped down the thick stems of briars. His breath started to come with difficulty. He tripped and stumbled. And when he emerged on the high bank which looked down on the Reverend Mr Stratton’s vegetable garden, he did not even follow this path any longer, but slid down on his backside and landed, heel first, in the shallow ditch beneath it.

  He reached for the threepence in his pocket, intending to flip it. But the coin was lost. There was a tiny hole in the pocket. He stopped a second, looking at the overgrown stone wall, breathing hard.

  He was caught between bank and wall. He could have edged around and found the stile, although had he done so he might have hurt himself, for the stile was ancient, its timbers rotted with the damp, unused since the time of the previous incumbent. But Oscar was too impatient in any case, and he now flung himself at the wall as a fear-weak soldier may, in despair, go over the top of a trench, his body awash with urgent chemicals, teeth clenched, mouth already open in a yell.

  He clawed at the rock, scraping off both skin and lichen. He got a boot up, slipped, tore his trouser leg, then got a better purchase and was up on the ragged top looking down on tomato seedlings, brown soil, and brimstone butterflies. He was already launched when the Reverend Mr Stratton came running, a garden spade in his hand. The clergyman cleared the beds, one, two, three. He was fortunate his paths were wide and allowed for one long pace between. He had not run like this since sports day at Eton.

  The seedlings already had their stakes in place beside them. This made a barrier the clergyman could not easily cross. He was on one side, the young intruder on the other. They looked at each other, both breathing hard.

  “You, boy!” said Hugh Stratton.

  Oscar’s mouth was open. The seat of his breeches had been torn when he slid down the bank. He thought the clergyman looked like some sort of vegetable picked too long ago. He could smell the alien odour of what he knew must be alcohol. He assumed it was from the exotic ritual of the eucharist.

  The clergyman walked around the tomato bed. He should not have run like that. It had made his back hurt horribly. The sciatic nerve sent a pain like toothache up both his legs, pulsed through his aching testicles, took possession of his buttocks.

  “You, boy, go home to your father.”

  “I cannot,” said Oscar, taking a step back on top of the new lettuces.

  “Get off my lettuces,” said Hugh Stratton. He took a step forward. This was a mistake. It forced Oscar to take another step backwards, into one more lettuce.

  “I am called,” said Oscar.

  It was some time before he could make himself clear.

  12

  To Serve and to Rule

  Mrs Stratton was not a don. She could not have been, for while the constitution of the university would permit entry to a fourteen-year-old boy (with his pocket full of string and dried-out worms) it could on no account matriculate a woman. Yet Mrs Stratton had the walk for it. Her whole body expressed her calling. She had a walk you can see today in Magpie Lane and Merton Street. The dynamics of this walk are best appreciated if you place a three-foot-high stack of reference books in your imaginary walker’s extended arms. From here on it is all physics. You can resolve it with vectors—the vertical arrow indicating the mass of the books, the horizontal one the propulsive force of the moving body. It is obvious. You can see immediately why the body of such a person tilts forward at 60° to the horizontal. It is the books, or the propensity for books that does it. And when you see the height of the stack it is also clear why such people always lift their head so high. You thought it myopia, but no—it is the height of the imaginary books they must look over.

  Mrs Straton’s father had been a don (but only briefly—there was controversy). He, however, did not have this walk. Her mother, of course, had never been a don, but neither did she walk with her body on the incline. The daughter, it would seem, had made her walk to suit herself. To see her walk up the steep red lanes of Devon was to see a person out of her element. She was awkward, so awkward that no matter how much you liked her you would not invite her to play a set of tennis. She belonged in Oxford, not in Hennacombe, and yet she did not realize it. She carried with her, as she plodded in mud-caked boots up the lane, a combination of doggedness and well-meaningness, so that when she lifted her head and jutted her long jaw at you, you could not allow yourself to feel irritation or see anything as unpleasant as stubbornness; you saw, rather, the determination to succeed in spite of any handicaps.

  Her father had been a rector with a large glebe in Buckinghamshire which he had farmed himself. She had liked the farming life, all pitching in at harvest time—curate, parson (although not the dean), the tenantry and farm hands and all the young women, regardless of their rank, all with big white bonnets to protect their much-praised complexions from the sun. She liked this just as much as she liked life in the drawing room where her conversation was every bit as intellectual as was suggested by her walk. Her father was fond of saying that Betty would “make a useful wife.” And although his assessment of usefulness was quite correct—her husband might have starved without her—she was an old maid of twenty-eight before the future vicar of Hennacombe came to claim her.

  What had alarmed the previous young men was not her enthusiasm for the stooking at harvest, but her passion for discussion of the larger issues that beset the Anglican Church in the ever-widening wake left by the Oxford Tractarians and the Wesleyan schismatics. There were those who disliked her passion because they thought theology was not a woman’s business. And others still who thought her voice always a fraction too loud for the drawing room. Of these, of course, some rightly belonged in this first group, and one should also record that there were others who, whilst personally repelled, felt drawn to care for the owner and protect her, just as they might a blind person forever bruised by bumping into walls. But there were also young men who were fascinated by her conversation. They were not necessarily in the minority, although they tended to lack staying power, suffered a bright and fast attraction and an equally quick fatigue. These were the ones who called two or three times in quick succession, and then not at all. These were the young men who came to the conclusion that she was, although clever, quite spoiled by being argumentative and contrary, and whatever position they put up themselves Miss Cross would see it as an Aunt Sally she must quickly lay low. If her suitor took the Evangelical position she would feel herself drawn to the Latitudinarian; or she might just as easily come out in favour of Enthusiasm and the Evangelical, easily, that is, if her suitor revealed Puseyite tendencies. She was quite capable of putting a formidable argument in favour of the doubtful aspects of the Athanasian Creed and then, without bothering to trouble her friend with so large a difficulty, knock it down herself. Her father’s dean, a dry old man who did not like his botany to be disturbed, likened her behaviour to that of a large and enthusiastic child who will spend five hours on building a sand-castle simply in order to knock it down again. This was unfair, and not just because the dean’s mouth was prim and puckered when he told it (assuming the same drawstring pursing as when he recalled—this, always, on the third brandy—the pubic hairs a famous lady novelist had left behind in the deanery bath). It was unfair because Betty Cross had no position, belonged to no party, advocated no schism, and cared only to find out what the “truth” might be. She sought for an absolute and could not find it. She had no prejudice to anchor herself to and was as unaware of this as of her walk.

  Fortunately, that is, for Hugh Stratton who was doing his Gre
ats at Oriel in 1838. He came down to Buckinghamshire in Michaelmas terms to see his friend Downey who was playing curate to Betty Cross’s father while secretly translating the early gnostic gospels. Hugh was much taken with Betty Cross and did not tire of her.

  It was his opinion—and he was not shy of expressing it—that the dean’s eldest daughter had presented him with vistas, with possibilities that the distinguished Fellows of Oriel—good men, famous men—had not made him aware of. He whirled before the wind of her contrary mind, spinning like a top. He was not offended by her donnish walk, the loudness of her voice, the fact that she had large hands and that they had freckles on them already. She was large-boned, but this was not the sort of thing he noticed, either to desire or dislike. He had no eye for the physical at all and could meet you four times and still not recognize your face. It was this, a serious disability in a parson, which accounted for the uncertain smile he would bestow on total strangers, ready to broaden if responded to, snatched back if not. So he did not notice the freckles. He knew she had flaxen hair, but if he had been asked the colour of her eyes he would have had to guess. He saw her face, in memory, with that gentle formlessness, all the details made soft by feeling, with which a one-year-old is said to perceive its mother. He saw her ideas though, in profusion, like a garden. In a garden no one argues about which is the true flower, and so it was, he imagined, with her ideas and arguments. He did not see then (and did not see ever) that she would be a professional liability to him, that she would so distress succeeding deans and bishops, that the pair of them would be tucked away like two ghastly toby jugs given as a gift by a relation who may, someday, visit. The toby jugs cannot be thrown away. They must be retained, in view, but not quite in view. Hence: Hennacombe in the bishopric of Exeter.