He pandered to the fragmentation of his mental state by strolling among the traffic islands around Victoria Station. The day felt so heavy after a sleepless night that even the onset of afternoon didn’t bring the usual sharpening of his faculties.
The widespread brick warrens of south London looked squalid and cosy. Would the towers of flat-dwellings blow over in a wind? The train cut through rows of small houses rubbed with the burnt cork of industrialism. Food and fruit and gaudy clothes made a patchwork snake in the street-market below. Backyards and slanting chimneys went on forever.
This, he thought, unable to leave the window and read his Times, is where the English would have stopped the Germans in 1940. Twenty Stalingrads. Even Hitler hadn’t got such nerve or stomach so early on. Patriotism would have caught on like television. Cunning forms of self-immolation would have enabled them to ‘take one with you — even two’. The good old expendable working class would, in its generosity, have bled itself to death — at least so my father asserts, though he’s a bit old-fashioned where history is concerned.
Better to save their souls by the God of Heaven than smash their bodies by the God of War. The train ran over a putrid stream, a factory near by, then a sports stadium, then modern factories and fewer but neater houses, a football field, rubbish tips, factories, more backyards, a mildewed shed, a patch of earth, cuttings and tunnels, birch trees, barbed wire, huts, swamps, squalor again. Orpington. A fire blazed on the banks of a cutting. Hop poles. Thank God we’re out of it. Smoke in the sky.
He enjoyed the slight burn of sun on a far-off patch of field. It brought the dazzling emerald closer than the dull hedges broken now and again by blades of scruffy chalk. If he opened the window he’d throw his dregs of tea on to it, but drank it instead, and went back to his first-class carriage, empty because he’d scattered newspapers over the seat space, and the sunlight came right across. He was glad to be alone, hating to wonder why people on English railways didn’t talk to each other.
Being away from the family, he felt a man of the world: Handley had put enough cash in his pocket for him not to appear mean and give the community a bad name to Maricarmen. Tall, fair-haired, chisel-nosed Cuthbert with the sardonic mouth and pale forehead had faint lines around his light blue eyes that gave an impression of uncertainty to anyone who got a close look. He’d noticed this defect while shaving, but his physical presence and quick speech rarely allowed anyone to see it. He wore an old grey suit, a black shirt and his clergyman’s collar.
People in England made way for a parson. Even the most noxious middle-class atheists were finally deferential if you looked at them with the authority of ruthless and magnanimous sympathy. People might nail you with their sordid problems, but he had learned to deal with them in such a way that his victim would never again confide his or her troubles to a parson. He twitched his nostrils so that they moved more than his lips, and while this alarmed those who were timid, it enraged others who had more spirit. It separated the goats from the sheep.
‘My dear fellow,’ he intoned, ‘I’m sad to hear your mother died today. Or was it yesterday? Well, you really should know, shouldn’t you? It is a trying time. My own father died last week, and I’ll never forget it. Or was it the week before? Have a cigarette, and don’t think about it. What? You can’t smoke at such a time? They’re very good. Not at all expensive. Anyway, it’s on the Church. You might as well get something out of it. Just back from the funeral? How shattering. I can’t tell you how moved I am that you should turn to me at such a time. I shall do all I can to help. It’s my job. Sure you won’t have one? It’s an unusual kind. Do you listen to religious broadcasting on the BBC? You should. A great lift in the early morning, though not, I might say, as great as you might get from these innocent-looking cigarettes. Calm yourself. If you don’t smoke, you don’t smoke. Far be it from me to force you. Hope you don’t mind if I have one? Your mother was ninety-seven! They say that those who die of old age become flowers in God’s garden. Isn’t that a beautiful thought? It is for me, anyhow, though I haven’t just lost my mother. Am I drunk, did you say? You should be ashamed of yourself, bursting into tears like that just because your vile old mother cracked out and you can’t bear to live alone at sixty. You’re a disgrace to the human race. Hey, don’t get rough. I may wear a dog-collar but I’ve still got enough muscle to bash your face in. Get your hands off me or I’ll call the police and tell them you’re soliciting, you queer-eyed gett. For Christ’s sake let me get away from this raving maniac!’
The ticket-collector looked in, heard his melodious bawling and dragged the door to because you can’t disturb a parson rehearsing his sermon. It sounded so fiery that the bloody fool might turn like a holy lion and rend him if he insisted on bothering about such earthbound items as tickets. Just as well, thought Cuthbert, who only paid second-class when wearing his dog-collar.
‘Oh yes,’ he would say, ‘you’re quite right. I’m so absent-minded these days, with parish affairs in such a tangle. I’ll have to find the right compartment. Wouldn’t do to spend too much of the parish funds on a business visit to raise money for the new scouts hall. I may stay? How very kind of you. It’s a delight to find some goodness in the world. Only five minutes before we get in? Oh dear, I simply must finish this report on juvenile delinquency.’
Once nearly a priest, always a priest. A woman gave him five pounds when in a similar quandary: ‘Please take it,’ she said, ‘for your church.’ Such a nice young curate. While discussing the ethics of his possible acceptance the ticket-collector quietly withdrew. That train, unique in his memory, had been on the Norfolk run, and with an hour of the afternoon still left, the rhythmical convenient clack of the wheels hid the rustlings and whispered nothings of the forty-year-old woman whose half-buried dreams took her by merciless surprise and guilt and pleasure. Later at her house (husband on business and kiddies at boarding-school) he discarded his priestly habit entirely, and passed two days with his partner that she ought not to forget either.
He paced the platform at Dover Marine, and took out the photo of Maricarmen — who didn’t look the type for anything of that sort. The way to the quayside was marked by an enormous composite war memorial, of a soldier with a rifle and bayonet pointing his deadly gear towards any tourists (especially German) who might come to this country with anything but goodwill in their hearts and hard currency in their pockets. The forlorn figures had been erected and left there as a warning to the incoming hordes whose forefathers had shot and blown to bits them and a million others.
There was time to spare for a quick look around the group. With those sharp eyes inherited from Handley he saw that such statuary was, in truth, fit only for the rubbish tip. The soldier (to the right of the sailor) was in full Great War rig of helmet and rifle, pouches and boots, looked daxed or drunk. The two were held or half sheltered by a bare-breasted woman who seemed to represent Mother England or some such tosh. She’d got wings as if to fly (should it be necessary) from the common warriors if they got funny ideas. The soldier looked undersized, as if he belonged to one of those battalions of runts and midgets nicknamed Bantams by taller specimens, the fierce scouring of the slums let loose at the Germans when all else had failed and something — whatever it was — still needed to be done. Mostly, of course, it ended in several hundred poor wretches dead or howling in the mud — which was considered better than having them stay on the streets at home getting their hands on the property of the better-off. Cuthbert wondered what the young Germans thought of it when they came through. Trust the old country to be so welcoming.