How very sweet she was, with that gentle, self-contained dignity. He smiled and held out his hand to her.
'"Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, the Gods themselves throw incense." Well, shall we go?'
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
They trudged slowly side by side along the very edge of the tide where the firmer sand made the going easiest. The beach was narrow, cut by rotting breakwaters and bounded by a low stone wall beyond which rose the tree-covered, friable cliffs. Much of the bank must once have been planted. Between the beeches and the oaks were clumps of laurel, old rose bushes twined among the thicker foliage of rhododendrons, woody geraniums distorted by the wind, hydrangeas in their autumn shades of bronze, lime-yellow and purple, so much more subtle and interesting, thought Cordelia, than the gaudy heads of high summer. She felt at peace with her companion and wished for a moment that she could confide in him, that her job needn't impose such a weight of deception. For ten minutes they walked in undemanding silence. Then he said:
'This may be a stupid question. Gray isn't an uncommon name. But you're not by any chance related to Redvers Gray?'
'He was my father.'
'There's something about the eyes. I only met him once, but his was a face one didn't forget. He had a great influence on my generation at Cambridge. He had the gift of making rhetoric sound sincere. Now that the rhetoric and the dream are not only discredited, which is discouraging, but unfashionable, which is fatal, I suppose he is almost forgotten. But I should like to have known him.'
Cordelia said:
'So should I.'
He glanced down at her.
'It was like that, was it? The revolutionary idealist dedicated to mankind in the abstract but not much good at caring for his own child. Not that I can criticize. I haven't done too well with mine. Children need you to talk to them, play with them, give time to them when they're young. If you can't be bothered it isn't surprising if, when they're adolescents, you find that you don't much like each other. But then, by the time mine were adolescents I didn't much like their mother either.'
Cordelia said:
'I think I could have liked him if we'd had time. I did spend six months with him and the comrades in Germany and Italy. But then he died.'
'You make death sound like a betrayal. And so, of course, it is.'
Cordelia thought of those six months. Half a year of cooking for the comrades, shopping for the comrades, carrying messages, sometimes not without danger, finding rooms, propitiating landladies and shopkeepers, sewing for the comrades. They and her father believed implicitly in equality for women without troubling to acquire the basic domestic skills which would have made that equality possible. And it was for that precarious nomadic existence that he had taken her from the Convent, made it impossible for her to take up her place at Cambridge. She no longer felt any particular resentment. That period of her life was passed, finished. And she hoped that they had given something to each other, if only trust. She had early dropped Redvers from her name telling herself that it was an unnecessary piece of cabin luggage. She had been reading Browning at the time. Now she wondered if it had been a more significant rejection even a small revenge. The thought was unwelcome and she thrust it away. She heard him say:
'And what about your education? One was always seeing pictures of him being dragged off by the police. That's all very admirable in youth no doubt. In middle age it begins to look embarrassing and ridiculous. I don't remember hearing about a daughter, or of a wife for that matter.'
'My mother died when I was born.'
'And who looked after you?'
'I was placed with foster parents for most of the time. Then when I was eleven, I won a scholarship to the Convent of the Holy Child. That was a mistake, not the scholarship but the choice of school. They muddled my name with another C. Gray, who was a Roman Catholic. I don't think father much liked it, but by the time he bothered to reply to the Education Officer's letter I was settled and they didn't like to move me. And I wanted to stay.'
He laughed. 'Redvers Gray with a convent-educated daughter! And they didn't succeed in converting you? That would have taught Papa, dedicated atheist, to answer his letters more promptly.'
'No, they didn't convert me. But then they didn't try. I didn't believe but I was happy in my invincible ignorance. It's rather an enviable state. And I liked the Convent. I suppose it was the first time I felt secure. Life wasn't messy any more.'
She had never before spoken so freely of her time at the Convent, she who was so slow to confide. She wondered whether this unusual frankness was possible only because she knew he must be dying. The thought seemed to her ignoble and she tried to put it from her. He said:
'You agree with Yeats. "How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?" I can see that it must have been reassuring, even one's sins neatly categorized into venial and mortal. Mortal sin. I like the expression even if I reject the dogma. It has a note of splendid finality. It dignifies wrongdoing, almost gives it form and substance. One can imagine oneself saying, "What have I done with my mortal sin? I must have put it down somewhere." One could carry it around, neatly packaged.'
Suddenly he stumbled. Cordelia put out her hand to steady him. His palm in hers was cold, the dry skin sliding over the bones. She saw that he looked very tired. The walk over the shingle had not, after all, been easy. She said:
'Let's sit for a while.'
There was a kind of grotto above them cut out of the cliff, with a mosaic terrace, now fractured and almost overgrown, and a curved marble seat. She helped pull him up the slope, watching as his feet found convenient clumps of grass and half hidden stone steps. The back of the seat, warmed by the sun, still struck a little chill through her thin shirt. They sat side by side, untouching, and lifted their faces to the sun. Above them hung a beech tree. Its trunk and boughs had the tender luminosity of a girl's arm, its leaves, just beginning to turn with their autumn gold, were veined marvels of reflected light. The air was very still and quiet, the silence pierced only by the occasional cry of a gull, while below them the sea hissed and withdrew in its everlasting restlessness.
After a few minutes, his eyes still closed he said:
'I suppose a mortal sin has to be something special, something more original and momentous than the expedients, the meannesses, the small delinquencies which make up everyday living for most of us?'
Cordelia said:
'It's a grievous offence against the law of God, which puts the soul at risk of eternal damnation. There has to be full knowledge and consent. It's all laid down. Any RC will explain it to you.'
He said:
'Something evil, if the word means anything to – you, if you believe in the existence of evil.'
Cordelia thought of the Convent chapel, altar candles flickering fitfully, her own bowed lace-covered head among the ranks of muttering conformists. 'And deliver us from evil.' For six years she had repeated these words at least twice a day long before she had ever asked herself what it was from which she craved deliverance. It had taken her first case, after Bernie's death, to teach her that. She could still recall, in sleeping and waking dreams, the horror which she had not in fact actually seen; a white elongated neck, a boy's disfigured face drooping from the noose, the twisting feet pointing to the floor. It was when she had finally stared into the face of his murderer that she had known about evil. She said:
'Yes, I believe in the existence of evil.'
'Then Clarissa once did something which you might dignify as evil. I don't know whether the good sisters would designate it as mortal sin. But there was knowledge and consent. And I've a feeling that, for Clarissa, it could prove mortal.'
She didn't speak. She wouldn't make it easy for him. But there was no self-control in her silence. She knew he would go on.