Joanna’s voice followed her pupil’s.
Greggie said, ‘This hollow shouldn’t be there. It’s where the bomb dropped. It just missed the house.’
‘Were you in the house at the time?’ said Felix. ‘I was,’ said Greggie, ‘I was in bed. Next moment I was on the floor. All the windows were broken. And it’s my suspicion there was a second bomb that didn’t go off. I’m almost sure I saw it drop as I picked myself up off the floor. But the disposal squad found only the one bomb and removed it. Anyway, if there’s a second it must have died a natural death by now. I’m talking about the year 1942.’
Felix said, with his curious irrelevancy, ‘My wife Gareth talks of coming over here with UNRRA. I wonder if she could put up at your club in transit for a week or two? I have to be back and forth, myself. She would be lonely in London.’
‘It would have been lying underneath the hydrangeas on the right if I was correct,’ Greggie said.
The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
‘We’d better be on our way to Richmond,’ Felix said.
‘We’re awfully proud of Joanna,’ said Greggie.
‘A fine reader.’
‘No, she recites from memory. But her pupils read, of course. It’s elocution.’
Selina gracefully knocked some garden mud off her wedge shoes on the stone step, and the party moved inside.
The girls went to get ready. The men disappeared in the dark little downstairs cloakroom.
‘That is a fine poem,’ said Felix, for Joanna’s voices were here, too, and the lesson had moved to
Nicholas almost said, ‘She is orgiastical in her feeling for poetry. I can hear it in her voice,’ but refrained in case the Colonel should say ‘Really?’ and he should go on to say, ‘Poetry takes the place of sex for her, I think.’
‘Really? She looked sexually fine to me.’ Which conversation did not take place, and Nicholas kept it for his notebooks.
They waited in the hall till the girls came down. Nicholas read the notice-board, advertising second-hand clothes for sale, or in exchange for clothing coupons. Felix stood back, a refrainer from such intrusions on the girls’ private business, but tolerant of the other man’s curiosity. He said, ‘Here they come.’
The number and variety of muted noises-off were considerable. Laughter went on behind the folded doors of the first-floor dormitory. Someone was shovelling coal in the cellar, having left open the green baize door which led to those quarters. The telephone desk within the office rang distantly shrill with boy-friends, and various corresponding buzzes on the landings summoned the girds to talk. The sun broke through as the forecast had promised.
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
6
‘Dear Dylan Thomas,’ wrote Jane.
Downstairs, Nancy Riddle, who had finished her elocution lesson, was attempting to discuss with Joanna Childe the common eventualities arising from being a clergyman’s daughter.
‘My father’s always in a filthy temper on Sundays. Is yours?’
‘No, he’s rather too occupied.’
‘Father goes on about the Prayer Book. I must say, I agree with him there. It’s out of date.’
‘Oh, I think the Prayer Book’s wonderful,’ said Joanna. She had the Book of Common Prayer practically by heart, including the Psalms — especially the Psalms — which her father repeated daily at Matins and Evensong in the frequently empty church. In former years at the rectory Joanna had attended these services every day, and had made the responses from her pew, as it might be on ‘Day 13’, when her father would stand in his lofty meekness, robed in white over black, to read:
Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered:
whereupon without waiting for pause Joanna would respond:
let them also that hate him flee before him.
The father continued:
Like as the smoke vanisheth, so shalt thou drive them away:
And Joanna came in swiftly:
