and like as wax melteth at the fire, so let the ungodly perish at the presence of God.
And so on had circled the Psalms, from Day 1 to Day 31 of the months, morning and evening, in peace and war; and often the first curate, and then the second curate, took over the office, uttering as it seemed to the empty pews, but by faith to the congregations of the angels, the Englishly rendered intentions of the sweet singer of Israel.
Joanna lit the gas-ring in her room in the May of Teck Club and put on the kettle. She said to Nancy Riddle:
‘The Prayer Book is wonderful. There was a new version got up in 1928, but Parliament put it out. Just as well, as it happened.’
‘What’s the Prayer Book got to do with them?’
‘It’s within their jurisdiction funnily enough.’
‘I believe in divorce,’ Nancy said.
‘What’s that got to do with the Prayer Book?’
‘Well, it’s all connected with the C. of E. and all the arguing.’
Joanna mixed some powdered milk carefully with water from the tap and poured the mixture upon two cups of tea. She passed a cup to Nancy and offered saccharine tablets from a small tin box.
Nancy took one tablet, dropped it in her tea, and stirred it. She had recently got involved with a married man who talked of leaving his wife.
Joanna said, ‘My father had to buy a new cloak to wear over his cassock at funerals, he always catches cold at funerals. That means no spare coupons for me this year.’
Nancy said, ‘Does he wear a cloak? He must be High. My father wears an overcoat; he’s Low to Middle, of course.’
*
All through the first three weeks of July Nicholas wooed Selina and at the same time cultivated Jane and others of the May of Teck Club.
The sounds and sights impinging on him from the hall of the club intensified themselves, whenever he called, into one sensation, as if with a will of their own. He thought of the lines:
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness up into one ball;
And I would like, he thought, to teach Joanna that poem or rather demonstrate it; and he made spasmodic notes of all this on the back pages of his
Jane told him everything that went on in the club. ‘Tell me more,’ he said. She told him things, in her clever way of intuition, which fitted his ideal of the place. In fact, it was not an unjust notion, that it was a miniature expression of a free society, that it was a community held together by the graceful attributes of a common poverty. He observed that at no point did poverty arrest the vitality of its members but rather nourished it. Poverty differs vastly from want, he thought.
*
‘Hallo, Pauline?’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Jane.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve got something to tell you. What’s the matter?’
‘I was resting.’
‘Sleeping?’
‘No, resting. I’ve just got back from the psychiatrist, he makes me rest after every session. I’ve got to lie down.’
‘I thought you were finished with the psychiatrist. Are you not very well again?’
‘This is a new one.. Mummy found him, he’s marvellous.’
‘Well, I just wanted to tell you something, can you listen? Do you remember Nicholas Farringdon?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Who’s he?’
‘Nicholas … remember that last time on the roof at the May of Teck … Haiti, in a hut … among some palms, it was market day, everyone had gone to the market centre. Are you listening?’
*
We are in the summer of 1945 when he was not only enamoured of the May of Teck Club as an aesthetic and ethical conception of it, lovely frozen image that it was, but he presently slept with Selina on the roof.
The mountains look on Marathon
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream’d that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.
Joanna needs to know more life, thought Nicholas, as he loitered in the hall on one specific evening, but if she knew life she would not be proclaiming these words so sexually and matriarchally as if in the ecstatic act of suckling a divine child.
At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows.
