A Judgement in Stone (10 page)

For the first sixteen years of her life Joan Smith, or Skinner as she then was, led an existence which any psychologist would have seen as promising to result in a well-adjusted, worthy, and responsible member of society. She was not beaten or neglected or deserted. On the contrary, she was loved, cherished, and encouraged. Her father was an insurance salesman, quite prosperous. The family lived in a house which they owned in the better part of Kilburn, the parents were happily married, and Joan had three brothers older than herself who were all fond of and kind to their little sister. Mr. and Mrs. Skinner had longed for a daughter and been ecstatic when they got one. Because she was
seldom left to her own devices but talked to and played with almost from birth, she learned to read when she was four, went happily off to school before she was five, and by the age of ten showed promise of being cleverer than any of her brothers. She passed the Scholarship and went to the high school where she later gained her School Certificate with the fairly unusual distinction, her results were so good, of an exemption from Matriculation.

The war was on and Joan, like Eunice Parchman, had gone away from London with her school. But to foster parents as kind and considerate as her own. For no apparent reason, suddenly and out of the blue, she walked into the local police station in Wiltshire where she accused her foster father of raping and beating her, and she showed bruises to support this charge. Joan was found not to be a virgin. The foster father was charged with rape but acquitted because of his sound and perfectly honest alibi. Joan was taken home by her parents, who naturally believed there had been a miscarriage of justice. But she only stayed a week before decamping to join the author of her injuries, a baker’s roundsman in Salisbury. He was a married man, but he left his wife and Joan stayed with him for five years. When he went to prison for defaulting on the maintenance payments to his wife and two children, she left him and returned to London. But not to her parents, whose letters she had steadfastly refused to answer.

Another couple of years went by, during which Joan worked as a barmaid, but she was dismissed for helping herself from the till, and she drifted into a kind of suburban prostitution. She and another girl shared a couple of rooms in Shepherds Bush where they entertained an artisan clientele who paid them unbelievably low rates for their services. From this life, when she was thirty, Joan was rescued by Norman Smith.

A weak and innocent creature, he met Joan when she was to a hairdresser’s in Harlesden for a tint and perm. One side of this establishment was for the ladies, the other a barber’s shop, but there was much coming and going on the part of the assistants, and Norman often stopped for a chat with Joan while she
was under the dryer. She was almost the first woman he had looked at, certainly the first he had asked out. But she was so kind and sweet and friendly, he didn’t feel at all intimidated. He fell violently in love with her and asked her to marry him the second time he found himself alone with her. Joan accepted with alacrity.

Norman had no idea how she had earned her living, believing her story that she had taken in typing and occasionally been a free-lance secretary. They lived with his mother. After a year or two of furious daily quarrels with old Mrs. Smith, Joan found the best way of keeping her quiet was to encourage her hitherto controlled fondness for the bottle. Gradually she got Mrs. Smith to the stage of spending her savings on half a bottle of whisky a day.

“It would kill Norman if he found out,” said Joan.

“Don’t you tell him, Joanie.”

“You’d better see you’re in bed then when he comes home. That poor man idolises you, he puts you on a pedestal. It’d break his heart to know you were boozing all day, and under his roof too.”

So old Mrs. Smith, with Joan’s encouragement, became a self-appointed invalid. For most of each day she was in bed with her whisky, and Joan helped matters along by crushing into the sugar in her tea three or four of the tranquillisers the doctor had prescribed for her own “nerves.” With her mother-in-law more or less comatose, Joan returned by day to the old life and the flat in Shepherds Bush. She made very little money at it, and her sexual encounters had become distasteful to her. A remarkable fact about Joan was that, though she had had sexual relations with hundreds of men as well as with her own husband, she had never made love for pleasure or had a “conventional” illicit affair except with the baker’s roundsman. It is hard to know why she continued as a prostitute. Out of perversity perhaps, or as a way of defying Norman’s extreme working-class respectability.

If so, it was a secret way, for he never found her out. It was she eventually who boldly and ostentatiously confessed it all to him.

And that came about as the result of her conversion. Since she was fourteen, and she was now nearly forty, she had never given a thought to religion. But all that was necessary to turn her into a raving Bible-thumper was a call at her front door by a man representing a sect called the Epiphany People.

“Not today, thanks,” said Joan, but having nothing better to do that afternoon, she glanced through the magazine, or tract, he had left on the doorstep. By one of those coincidences that are always happening, she found herself on the following day actually passing the Epiphany People’s temple. Of course it wasn’t really a coincidence. She had passed it a hundred times before but had never previously noticed what it was. A prayer meeting was beginning. Out of curiosity Joan went in—and was saved.

The Epiphany People were a sect founded in California in the 1920s by a retired-undertaker called Elroy Camps. Epiphany, of course, is January 6, the day on which the Magi are traditionally supposed to have arrived in Bethlehem to bear witness to the birth of Christ and to bring him gifts. Elroy Camps and his followers saw themselves as “Wise Men” to whom a special revelation had been granted: that is, they and only they had witnessed the divine manifestation, and hence only they and a select band of the chosen would find salvation. Indeed, Elroy Camps believed himself to be a reincarnation of one of the Magi and was known in the sect as Balthasar.

A strict morality was adhered to, members of the sect must attend the temple, pay a minimum of a hundred proselytising house calls a year, and hold to the belief that within a very short time there would be a second Epiphany in which they, the new wise men, would be chosen and the rest of the world cast into outer darkness. Their meetings were vociferous and dramatic, but merry too with tea and cakes and film shows. New members were called upon to confess their sins in public, after which the rest of the brethren would burst into spontaneous comment and end by singing hyms. Most of these had been written by Balthasar himself.

The following is an example:

At first it seems a mystery why all this should have made an appeal to Joan. But she had always loved drama, especially drama of a nature shocking to other people. She heard a woman confess her sins, loudly proclaiming such petty errors as bilking London Transport, fraudulent practice with regard to her housekeeping money, and visits to a theatre. How much better than that could she do! She was forty, and even she could see that, with her faded fair hair and fine pale skin, she hadn’t worn well. What next? A grim obscure domesticity in Harlesden with old Mrs. Smith, or the glorious publicity the Epiphany People could give her. Besides, it might all be true. Very soon she was to believe entirely in its truth.

She made the confession of the year. It all came out. The congregation were stunned by the revelation of Joan’s excesses, but she had been promised forgiveness and she got it, as much as the woman who had travelled on the tube without a ticket got it.

Joan, the faithless wife, opened her heart to a stunned and disillusioned Norman. Joan, the evangelist, went from house to house in Harlesden and Wood Lane and Shepherds Bush, not only distributing tracts but recounting to her listeners how, until the Lord called her, she had been a “harlot” and a scarlet woman.

“I was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour,” said Joan on the doorstep. “I had a golden cup in my hand full of the abominations and filthiness of my fornication. I was the hold of every unclean spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.”

It wasn’t long before some wit was making snide cracks while in the barber’s chair about unclean and hateful birds. In vain did Norman ask his wife to stop it. He had suffered enough in learning of her former mode of life without this. The street buzzed with it and the boys called after him as he went to work.

But how do you reproach a woman who has reformed, who
counters every reproof with a total agreement? “I know that, Norm, I know I was steeped in lowness and filth. I sinned against you and the Lord. I was a lost soul, plunged in the abominations of iniquity.”

“I just wish you wouldn’t tell everyone,” said Norman.

“Balthasar said there is no private atonement.”

Then old Mrs. Smith died. Joan was never at home and she was left all day in a cold and filthy house. She got out of bed, fell, and lay on the floor for seven hours in only a thin nightgown. That night, not long after Norman had found her, she died in hospital. Cause of death: hypothermia. In other words, she had died of exposure. Again the street buzzed, and it was not only schoolboys who called after Norman.

His mother had left him the house and a thousand pounds. Norman was one of those people—and they are legion—whose ambition is to keep a country pub or shop. He had never lived in the country or run a grocer’s, but that was what he wanted. He underwent training with the Post Office, and at about the same time as the Coverdales bought Lowfield Hall, he and Joan found themselves proprietors of Greeving Village Store. Greeving, because the only other Epiphany Temple in the country was in Nunchester.

The Smiths ran the store with disastrous inefficiency. Sometimes it opened at nine, sometimes at eleven. The post office was, of course, open during its prescribed hours, but Joan (for all her virtuous protestations to Eunice) left Norman in sole charge for hours and he couldn’t leave his cubbyhole behind the grille to serve other customers. Those who had been regulars drifted away. The rest, compelled through carlessness to allegiance, grumbled ferociously. Joan investigated the mails. It was her duty, she said, to find out the sinners who surrounded her. She steamed open envelopes and reglued them. Norman watched in misery and despair, longing for the courage to hit her and hoping against all odds and his own nature that he would one day find it.

They had no children and now Joan was passing through what she called an “early change.” Considering she was fifty, it might
have been thought that her menopause was neither early nor late but right on time.

“Norm and I always longed for kiddies,” she was in the habit of saying, “but they never came. The Lord knew best, no doubt, and it’s not for us to question His ways.”

No doubt He did. One wonders what Joan Smith would have done with children if she had had them. Eaten them, perhaps.

For a long time George Coverdale had suspected one of the Smiths of tampering with his post. Only a week before he went on holiday an envelope containing a letter from his son Peter showed a glue smear under the flap, and a parcel from the book club to which Jacqueline subscribed had obviously been opened and retied with string. But he hesitated to take action without positive proof.

He hadn’t set foot in the shop or used the post office since the day, some three years before, when, in front of an interested audience of farm labourers’ wives, Joan had gaily reproached him for living with a divorced woman and exhorted him to abandon his sinful life and come to God. After that he had posted his letters in Stantwich and given Joan no more than a stiff nod when he met her in the village. He would have been appalled had he known she had been in his bedroom, fingered his clothes, and toured his house.

But when he and his family returned from holiday there was no sign that Eunice had defected from her established ways.

“I don’t believe she’s been out of the house, darling,” said Jacqueline.

“Yes, she has.” Village gossip always reached them by way of Melinda. “Geoff told me. He got it from Mrs. Higgs, the Mrs. Higgs who rides the bike, she’s his grandma’s sister-in-law. She saw her out for a walk in Greeving.”

“Good,” said George. “If she’s happy pottering about the village, I won’t press her about the driving lessons. But if you
should get it via the bush telegraph that she’s got hankerings to learn, perhaps you’ll let me know.”

Late summer, early autumn, and the vegetation seemed to become too much for man and nature itself to control. The flowers grew too tall and too straggly, the hedges overbrimmed with leaves, with berries and tendrils of the bryony, and the wild clematis, the Old Man’s Beard, cast over all its filmy fluffy cloak. Melinda went blackberrying, Jacqueline made bramble jelly. Eunice had never before seen jam being made. As far as she had known, if it didn’t exactly descend like manna from heaven, at least it was only available in jars from a shop. Giles picked no blackberries, nor did he attend the Harvest Festival at St. Mary’s. On the cork wall he pinned a text of his own, a line that might have been written for him:
Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading
, and he went on struggling through the Upanishads.

Pheasant shooting began. Eunice saw George go into the gun room, take the shotguns down from the wall and, leaving the door to the kitchen open, clean and load them. She watched with interest but in innocence, having no idea of their being of future use to her.

George cleaned and loaded both guns, but not because he had any hope of Giles accompanying him on the shoot. He had bought the second gun for his stepson, just as he had bought the fishing tackle and the fat white horse, now eating its head off down in the meadow. Three autumns of apathy and then downright opposition on Giles’s part had taught George to abandon hope of making him a sportsman. So the second gun was lent to Francis Jameson-Kerr, stockbroker son of the brigadier.