or just as likely for his own, I had been observing them as they sat and talked together on the window-seat, and wondering if one or the other of them had brought up the impending orgy. It occurred to me now that I had forgotten to tell Diana that I had told Joyce that the idea had come from Diana in the first place, but I had hardly begun to move over to them, the rector slouching surlily at my side, before I saw that all was well. Well and to spare: their shoulders and knees were touching, each was slightly flushed in the face, and, in their different fashions, each gave me a glance of complicity, Joyce’s straight and serious, Diana’s with a little pretended shock and shame round the edges.
‘Mr Sonnenschein has been explaining to me about God’s purpose,’ I said.
The rector gave a quick wriggle of one hip and the opposite shoulder. He said deprecatingly, ‘Oh well, you know, that sort of thing’s bound to come up from time to time in my field.’
‘What is God’s purpose?’ asked Joyce, using the interested, far from unfriendly, wholly reasonable tone that I had learnt to recognize as a warning.
‘Well, I suppose one might start to answer that by saying what it isn’t. For instance, it’s nothing to do with getting hot and bothered about the state of one’s soul, or the resurrection of the body, or the community of saints, or sin and repentance, or doing one’s duty in that state of life into which it has pleased—’
I had been looking forward to an exhaustive list of what God’s purpose was not; Joyce, however, cut in. ‘But what is His purpose?’
‘But that’s all politics. What about religion?’
‘To me, this is … religion, in the truest sense. Of course, I may be wrong about the whole thing. It isn’t up to me to tell people what to think or how they ought to—’
‘But you’re a parson,’ said Joyce, still reasonably. ‘You’re paid to tell people what to think.’
‘To me, I’m sorry, but that’s a rather outmoded—’
‘Mr Sonnenschein,’ put in Diana, chopping it up so sharply that it sounded a bit like one of those three- monosyllable Oriental names.
The rector waited quite a creditable length of time before saying, ‘Yes, Mrs Maybury?’
‘Mr Sonnenschein … Would you mind frightfully if I were to ask you a rather impertinent question?’
‘No. No, of course not. It’s a—’
‘What- … ‘s-the-point of somebody like you being a parson when you say you don’t care about things like duty and people’s souls and sin? Isn’t that just exactly what parsons are supposed to care about?’
‘Well, it’s true that the traditional—’
‘I mean, of course I agree with you about Greece and all these places, it’s absolutely ghastly, but everybody knows that already. You must simply not take offence, please not, but lots of us would say it’s not up to you in your position to start sounding like, well …‘
‘One of those chaps on television doing a lecture on the problems of today and freedom and democracy,’ said Joyce, even more reasonably than before.
‘We don’t need you for that, you see. Mr Sonnenschein …‘
‘… Yes, Mrs Maybury?’
‘Mr Sonnenschein, don’t you perhaps think that when everybody’s so tremendously, you know, ahead of everything and knowing it all and everything, then it’s a
‘Not really minding anything like everybody else,’ said Joyce. She drained her sherry, looking at me over the top of the glass.
‘But surely one must tell the truth as one sees it, otherwise one—’
‘Oh, do you really think so? Don’t you think that’s just about the riskiest thing one can possibly do?’
‘You can only think you know it, probably,’ finished Joyce. ‘Yes. Well. There we are. I must go and see the major,’ said the man of God, so rapidly and decisively and so immediately before his actual departure that seeing the major (even though there was a retired one actually present) might have been a Sonnenschein family euphemism for excretion.
I turned back to the two girls. I had never seen them behave in concert like this before. ‘Well, that was a marvellous seeing-off, and no mistake. I wish I’d said all that. Can I get you both a drink?’
As I spoke, they looked at each other in a brief thought-exchanging way, then at me without much warmth. Diana, wide-eyed, leaned forward.
‘Maurice, why did you bring that ghastly little dog-collared drip over here like that?’
‘I didn’t bring him over; he insisted on coming to chat the two of you up, and I thought it would be less painful if I—’
‘Couldn’t you have stopped him?’ asked Joyce.
‘I suppose I could have, yes, if I’d realized it was so important.’
‘Surely, Maurice, you could see we were having a chat.’
‘Sorry. Anyway, talking of having a chat …‘
‘You mean about us and you going to bed together,’ said Joyce, not dropping her voice much, and speaking as if we had turned to a less stimulating and sufficiently familiar topic.
‘Ssshh … Yes. Well, what do you—?’
‘We thought four o’clock this afternoon would be a good time,’ said Diana.
‘Splendid. We might—’
‘Where?’ asked Joyce.
‘I thought we could use number eight in the annexe. No booking there until Monday. I’ll mention it to David and hell see we’re not disturbed.’
‘What will you say to him?’
‘Leave that to me.’
Mention it to David I did, in the same fashion as several times before when about to entertain a lady in my house, though without asking him, as several times before, to have a bottle of champagne and an ice-bucket and glasses ready in the room, an omission made less out of economy than inability to think what to say about the number of glasses required. This brief exchange came just after an unenjoyable luncheon in the main dining-room. The rector was in attendance, fully recovered from his drubbing at the hands of the girls, in fact quite exuberant, making an untentative verbal pass at Nick over coffee (as Nick told me later) and going off last and adequately pissed with three glasses of my Taylor
It was a case of trying, more than succeeding, because it had been so hard to connect anything about his burial with anything about him, or because I had four o’clock on my mind (though it did not feel like that), or because the recently living take so long to start seeming really dead, or because of something to do with Jack’s pills. Cold and unmeaningful phrases circled in my brain: he had gone off easy, he had given me life, he had been a good age, he was at peace, he had done his best for me, he had seen his son and grandson settled, he must have known it would come (as if that were a comfort). And he had gone to a better place, he was dead in the body but not in the spirit—not easy to find more of the same to add, nor even to try to find a meaning in anything of the sort, not nowadays. It sounded as if, it felt as if, for every imaginable wrong reason, that fool of a rector had been right. And yet I had meant what I had said to him about evidence of survival in Underhill’s case. A different case, then, a far-off one, concerning a man who was not a man at all, only a name and words and bones and perhaps, no, certainly, an apparition. Immortality seemed either too exotic or too crude a concept to be fitted into somebody one had known for so long in the flesh. It might be possible to work on this from the other end, so to speak—try to make Underhill more real to myself, more of a person, more of a presence, however remote, in the same kind of way as my father was a presence.
I unlocked a drawer in the desk and, from under a pile of bank statements and cleared cheques, pulled out the casket containing the silver figure and the manuscript. I had been too tired to examine these the previous night, and had had no time, nor much inclination, so far that day. Now I was eager to do so. I took the figure to the
