said. “Or she’ll feel my hand across it.”
“Out,” Ralph said.
It is the word you use to a dog, and only then if it is a dog of bad character. But van Zyl would not hesitate to use it, to a man of inferior race; Ralph believed now that there were inferior races, distinguished not by culture or genes, but by some missing faculty of pity.
Sergeant van Zyl knew he should not fight; he had received warnings about his excess of zeal. He attempted some sort of lumbering side step—so when Ralph did push him, he was not truly on course for the door. “You must be a stinking Jew,” the policeman told Ralph. “In my opinion, Hitler was right.” Ralph’s fists against his belly, he careered backward. His right arm flailed out, swept to the floor the papers from Anna’s temporary desk. He backed his calves into the wastepaper basket, overturned it, and, attempting to regain his balance, trod in it. Ralph would never forget the feeling of his hands sinking into the sergeant’s flesh. It gave him a shock, how easy it was to topple that great bulk.
The Special Branch came at three the following morning, and took them both away.
FIVE
Anna heard Ralph talking on the telephone. “… I do grasp,” he was saying, “that you raised ?132 from the harvest supper and gave the same amount to the Mission to Seamen, but I’m afraid you will confuse the auditor if you don’t show them in separate columns. Leave aside for the moment the question of the rector’s expenses …”
Anna swore mildly under her breath as she sidestepped through the bales of newspapers stacked up in the hall. When Ralph came out of his office she said, “There are more papers here than when I went out. People are delivering these bundles at all hours of the day and night.”
“Not quite,” Ralph said, frowning.
“Couldn’t you ask them to call between set hours?”
“It might put people off. I’m relying on their goodwill. Why don’t you get the boys to carry them up to the attics?”
“What’s the point? They’ll only have to come down again. And when you try to move them the bundles fall apart and the damn things are all over the place.”
“It’s true,” Ralph said. “People don’t seem to know how to tie up bundles.”
“Perhaps it’s a lost art,” Anna said, “like broadcast sowing. Can’t they go in the bike shed?”
“No, nor in any other shed. They might get damp.”
Anna sighed. The newspapers benefited the parish church’s restoration fund in some way: clearly only if they were dry, not if they were damp.
“I have to go out,” Ralph said.
“But Kit will be here soon. I was hoping—”
“It’s the new committee. For the homeless in Norwich.”
“I hardly knew there were homeless in Norwich,” Anna said. “There seem to be enough council estates.” Ralph vanished back into his office. Anna was left with her bad mood. “Perhaps,” she muttered, “some of them could come and live in our hallstand.”
Ralph had almost finished his letters for the day. He had been interrupted by several telephone calls from elderly people within a ten-mile radius, all of them complaining about their Meals-on-Wheels; he had nothing to do with this service, but found it hard to convince them of that. Mobile libraries, too, had been much on his mind. He had received a request for the Trust to support a Good News Van, which planned to jolt around the countryside taking the latest Christian paperbacks to the housebound. “We have known people who have not read a book in years,” the letter told him, “but whose lives have been transformed by thrilling new stories of what God is doing all over the world.” Ralph gave the letter a file number, and scribbled on it, “I suggest we turn this one down. The housebound have enough to put up with.” He dropped it in the box for the next meeting of the Trust committee.
The Trust was not rich anymore, and it was necessary to be selective; need seemed always to increase. He had his procedures: he tried to avoid subsidizing anything too doctrinaire, or anything involving volunteers playing the guitar. Initiatives for the young attracted his interest, but he rejected applications from any group with “Kids” in the title.
The hostel in the East End had changed its character now. Some time in the sixties it had stopped being St. Walstan’s and become Crucible House. In those far-off days when Ralph had reported each weekend to count the laundry out and returned midweek to count it back in, the task had been shoveling old men up off the street and drying them out and sending them on their way a week or two later with a new overcoat and a hot breakfast inside them. Or finding a bed for an old lag who was between prison sentences; or a quiet corner for somebody who’d gone berserk and smashed all the crockery in the Salvation Army canteen. But nowadays the clients were young. They were runaways, some of them, who had fetched up at a railway terminus with a few pounds in their pockets, played in the amusement arcades till their money ran out, and then slept on the streets. Some of them had been “in care”—you would think that was a complete misnomer, Ralph would say, if you could see the state of them.
These young people, boys and girls, had something in common, a certain look about them: hard to define but, after a little experience, easy to spot. They were often unhealthily fat: puffed up with cheap carbohydrates, with the salt from bags of crisps. When they were spoken to they answered slowly, if at all; they focused their eyes at some point in the middle distance, beyond their questioner’s shoulder. Large bottles of prescription drugs clanked in their pitiful luggage, which was often made up of Tesco bags—though Ralph always wondered where they got the means to go to Tesco.
The volunteers who staffed the hostel had changed too. The present director, Richard, was an intense young man with a higher degree. Before his time, in the days when the last of the old men used to shuffle in and out, the volunteers had been clean-cut young men in crewneck sweaters, and girls with good accents, who had a way of talking to the clients as if they were recalcitrant beagles or pointers. But now it was hard to tell the workers and the clients apart. They had a lost air, these modern volunteers: children filling in a year before university, lured by the promise of pocket money and full board in a room of their own in London. They wore clothes from charity shops. They read no books. They seldom spoke, except to each other.
