The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon (35 page)

^{"Oh, you're absolutely priceless!" said Rachel merrily. "What makes you think you took advantage of her? You really aren't fit to be out alone!"}

^{He supposed that some men might have resented this but he did not although he said, guardedly; "I'm not going to discuss this kind of thing in a crowded cafe."}

^{"All right," she said cheerfully, "let's continue it this afternoon.}

²¹⁹

^{It's Saturday isn't it and you'll be coming over to school, won't you?"}

^{"There's not much point in my coming, your father's got a Governors' meeting and won't be free until after seven."}

^{"Well, that's fine," she said, "you and I will go up the Dene and have tea at the 'White Rabbit", under Barrow Tor. I could do with stretching my legs a bit, so long as you don't expect me to scramble over rocks and through gorse thickets. Then we can take it easy on the way back and Father can put you up in the Old Boys' dorm for the night."}

^{He was tempted but remembered his arrangement with Tapper}

^{Su
p "I have to open the shop on Sunday. Would you lend me the car}

^{to drive back early in the morning ?"}

^{"Sure, providing you run over and pick me up for Monday."}

^{He accepted the invitation gratefully. Not only did he enjoy her company but the prospect of forty-eight hours at Barrowdene lightened his spirits. There was a serenity about the place that soothed him and it even occurred to him that he might discuss certain of his problems with her father, whose judgement he respected.}

^{They finished their lunch and walked back to the zoo, where Rachel issued instructions to her deputy and collected the old Morris from the garage where it seemed to spend most of its time.}

^{She seemed thoughtful during the journey, concentrating on driving but looking at him from time to time with a sidelong smile and he thought what a relaxing person she was, for all her shiftless-ness and sudden spurts of enthusiasm that spent themselves without achieving anything in particular. What she lacked, he felt, was her father's steadiness of vision but at least she was aware of this and in this respect differed from all the women he had known, Sybil and all Sybil's friends for instance, who were unable at any time to say to themselves: 'This is worth having and that is not, this is genuine and that is phoney.'}

^{As they turned in at the east drive she suddenly gave expression to a thought that showed him some of her father's love of the place had rubbed off on her over the years. She said: "I believe I understand what you and my father find here, Martin. It's a kind of refuge, like a}

²²⁰

^{faith in a world stampeding towards nothingness. I wish I could believe in something like that, something that had a chance of surviving the sputniks and the bomb, but to have such a faith one would have to be born before the First World War and remember the little that was left of the old world after nineteen-eighteen!"}

^{She stopped the car near the chapel and turned off the ignition. "Listen, Martin. It's a kind of litany, isn't it ?" and they sat there for a moment listening to the snick-snack of balls at the nets across the field and the muted shouts of boys in the quad behind the chapel. Then, as always, the pensive mood left her and she bounced out of the car and pulled him by the hand. "Come on, let's get started! I know what! I'll take you to a place I used to go to when I was a kid growing up here. I'd go out there and read on summer afternoons when I wanted to escape from the spots and blushes of all these half-grown males. I remember I took Withering Heights up there and Westward Ho, and even dear old East Lynne or Dead-Dead-And-Never-Called-Me-Mother!"}

^{They went across the rugby pitch and through a gap in the hedge that led to the birchwood bordering the shallow river. The sun was high overhead but it was cooler down here, with blackbirds rustling in the undergrowth and a persistent kingfisher flashing and dipping along the curves of the stream. There was an overgrown footpath where the trees thinned put and she led him to where it wound over the lower slope of the bracken-crowned tor and in and out of vast stretches of briar and wild rose and foxglove clumps, so that he thought of Tennyson's 'brambly wildernesses" and wondered at her obvious familiarity with the ground. He had never thought of her as a person with his kind of appreciation of the countryside although she had lived hereabouts since she was a child. Presently they left the woods and began to climb towards an outcrop of granite on the steepest side of the tor and it was here, scrambling after her up the pebble-strewn path, that he noticed a breathless eagerness in the way she pressed on as though she had an overdue appointment with her youth and had forgotten that he was stumbling in pursuit. Then the path levelled out at an almost rectangular slab of stone as big as a cromlech and behind the stone was a dell that was half a cave, roofed by an overhang of boulders but affording a view of the}

²²¹

^{countryside for miles around. It had a floor of soft turf and she threw herself down, out of breath, leaving him to look out beyond the low entrance rocks to the ribbon of the Dene moving in and out of the plum-coloured woods to the gorge where the 'White Rabbit* lay like a toy farm two hundred feet below. To the left, beyond the shoulder of the hill, he could just see the school and playing fields and the dark green lines of beeches marking the drives but the heat haze in the valley shut out all but a general outline of green field and grey stone, with the top of the chapel steeple silhouetted against the sky.}

^{"This is a wonderful place," he said, "and I don't wonder you've kept it in your heart all these years!" and then, with a touch of pride, "Have you ever brought anyone here before, Rachel ?"}

^{"Never a soul," she said, "not even the man I married!" and there was a harshness in her voice that he had never previously noticed. He thought little of it, however, turning back to the view and noting that up here, high above the valley, they were beyond the range of the hum and rustle in the thickets or the murmur of the river, and the loneliness of the place was almost tangible. He said, half to himself, "It's beautiful but sad somehow, as though it was cut off from the familiar and the remembered," but she made no answer and when he turned round he experienced a sharp, physical shock.}

^{She was lying flat on her back with her eyes closed, her hands outstretched and her fingers gripping the short, tough grass. One long leg was fully stretched but the other was bent at the knee so that her stained grey skirt had slipped back revealing the top of her stocking and a generous expanse of thigh. He realised at once that the gesture was deliberately provocative, a plain invitation to him to make love to her, here in this secret hideout of hers that she had never shared with anyone. She looked, he thought, almost unbearably desirable and this surprised him for he had never thought of her as anything more than a big, healthy adolescent, impulsively affectionate perhaps but with a child's impatience for everything not directly concerned with the present.}

^{He thought, with a mixture of wonder and distress, 'Why should she do this? What on earth prompts her to make such a primitive gesture ? It isn't me she wants! If it was I should have known long}

²²²

^{before this, during the times we have been alone during the last weeks.' And then it occurred to him that she might be testing him in some way but he rejected this as improbable. She was not that kind of girl, the kind young men had had an abusive term for when he was young. 'Well,' he decided, 'I'm not going to oblige! If my guess is right, I should be rebuffed and be made to look damned ridiculous, and if it wasn't things would never be quite the same again, not between us or between me and her father!' and he sat down, looking across the valley, very troubled and uncertain.}

^{But it was impossible to ignore her and soon he found that he was sweating and trembling and, turning his head once more, noted that she had not moved a muscle but that her eyes were now wide open and looking directly at him. Her glance did not match her posture for her eyes were troubled and she looked more adolescent than ever, almost as though someone had demanded this performance of her and that she was aware that he was finding it both ridiculous and embarrassing. Yet even then she did not sit up or withdraw the invitation in any way but lay quite still, looking at him and waiting.}

^{He made a feeble attempt to speak but his mouth and throat were dry. She was so shamelessly exposed that the temptation to exploit the situation was almost irresistible, yet he continued to resist it and at that precise moment he could not have said why except that in some remote way his decision was bound up with the future, his and her future, and the future of all the other people in their lives. It needed a great deal of will-power on his part to remain there pressed against the rock, and resentment burned in him so fiercely that for a moment or so he almost hated her for her clumsy challenge.}

^{At last he forced himself to speak, his voice shrill with exasperation.}

^{"Don't do that, Rachel, don't!"}

^{She made a little grimace, turning her head to one side and a minute passed before she said, "You don't have to talk like a schoolmaster. You haven't caught me cribbing or throwing a paper dart!" but she flung out her arched leg with a kind of defiance and her skirt fell back across her knees.}

^{She had replied to him, he realised, without a trace of her characteristic humour but the rebuke snapped the tension inside him and he flung himself down beside her, reaching out his hand}

²²³

^{tentatively and letting it pass over her hair and down her cheek. It was a simple, tender caress, expressive and renunciatory and it must have touched her for she shuddered and then, twisting round violently she threw her arms around his neck and crushed her cheek to his, holding him awkwardly and convulsively, less like a woman demanding a lover than a child frightened of the dark.}

^{"Is it Sybil or Olga or both?" she said, when something of the urgency had gone from her first embrace.}

^{"It's nothing to do with Sybil or Olga," he said gently. "I want you to believe that, Rachel."}

^{"Then, why? Why don't you want to touch me even?"}

^{"I do want to touch you! I want to most dreadfully but I don't know how I could make you understand. You're so different from me, so much more free and less complicated. Dear God, I'm flesh and blood, do you think it's easy for me?"}

^{She seemed strangely comforted by his vehemence and some of the tension left her.}

^{"All right, Martin, you don't have to explain. Keep your privacy! I wish to God I could share it with you!"}

^{She detached herself, turned her head slightly and kissed him softly on the cheek as the moment passed. "All right, you don't owe me an explanation, it's I who owe you one!" and she smiled ruefully so that he recognised the Rachel Grey of their earlier association and welcomed her return.}

^{"You don't owe me a thing," he said, "whereas I owe you a great deal. And don't go away from here with the idea that I don't find your need of me a source of pride. I know very well that I shall look back on this moment with the kind of regret most men have about lost opportunities but that doesn't make it right, right for us, that is."}

^{"That bloody fool Sybil doesn't know you at all!" she burst out.}

^{"I didn't know myself for almost half a century," he said simply.}

^{"It's time you did!" she said, leaning back against the smooth upright of the granite wall. "You have a kind of strength that makes muscularity look i ' nificant. You'll win out in the end, Martin, because of that strength and balance. I wanted you just now, more than I ever wanted any man, but it wasn't good old-fashioned lust or even a whim of the moment, it was something bigger than that.}

²²⁴

^{Close contact with you has helped me a great deal and I suppose I wanted the very closest contact, a kind of... of blessing. Does that sound so silly?"}

^{It did not sound in the least silly, for her words brought him far more pride than he would have derived from possession of her. They did as much or more for him as had the incident with Olga, the driving of the 'bus, the rescue of the child, all the steps that had advanced his emancipation up to the moment that Sybil had halted and reversed it. Now it was moving forward again and once more he felt himself growing, sensing the growth in an almost physical way, for here was one more human being who found in him the succour that the lonely sought in the strong. All the resentment he had felt for her when she was lying on her back with her thighs exposed in that childishly provocative manner left him and he felt for her nothing but affection and gratitude. He said: "If I took advantage of you, Rachel, it wouldn't be 'a matter of bestowing a benediction. I'm certainly no wiser than you and I find it a matter for pride that someone as young and as pretty as you should even want me as a potential lover. When I made up my mind to start afresh, however, it wasn't with the idea of satisfying the sexual panic men get at my age, but rather to find whatever purpose there was in life and fulfil myself in some way. I haven't found the whole answer yet, only part of it and an involvement of this sort would only complicate things, particularly as I've grown so fond of you and your father." He paused a moment, then went on, "There is one thing, however, I'd like very much to kiss you, to ... to hold you for a moment." She seemed surprised by this request. "Why, Martin? If you won't have all of me why should you want to kiss me?"}