The Missionaries (v1.0), page 20
This time Janey couldn’t help it, and the snivel was genuine. Sylvia pretended not to notice. “It’s going to be difficult to explain,” she said. “Some people mightn’t understand.” She didn’t understand herself, though the subject had a certain fascination for her. She waited till Janey had wiped her eyes on a comer of curtain. “Not Dacre, then?” she said.
All that really worried Janey was what she was going to tell her mum. She shook her head dutifully. “Not Dacre,” she said.
Sylvia leaned back, crossed her legs, and let the crockery settle. “I want you to know, child, how extremely brave I think you’re being. These are important men— perhaps you think of them as holy men—and a story like yours would do them no good at all. It’s very brave of you to keep silent.”
“Brave?”
Sylvia frowned. She wouldn’t be hurried. “Many people, my dear, think that witchcraft is dead. You and I know different. The practices of witchcraft are vile and horrible, and they occur tp this very day.”
“You bet your life they do.” Janey’s eyes were shining, her lips wet. “My mum says you never—”
“You read of satanic rites, Janey. Of girls, young, innocent girls—” she dodged the word virgins “—of young, innocent girls borne away up onto the moors. There they are raped, not once, not twice, but seven times, and seventy times seven.”
She paused, feeling that she was letting the subject run away with her. “They say the devil is seen at these places, but I don’t believe it. It’s men who do the deed, Janey. Men with the devil in their hearts.”
She leaned across and put a hand on Janey’s quivering, spellbound knee. “Remember, my dear, that men who have raped will rape again. It’s an ugly word for an ugly thing. I understand your shame. But is it fair, Janey, to let them go free? Don’t you have a duty to other girls, girls who may go to them innocently, thinking them holy? Girls who may not be as brave as you?”
She watched Janey’s face, waiting for the message to penetrate. It didn’t. “But it wasn’t like that, Mrs. Wordsworth. Honest it wasn’t.”
Sylvia was patient. The scene on the moors was vivid in her mind, so vivid that it must have happened. Poor Janey. Poor, poor Janey.
“They made you think they were Russian spies, my dear. They made you think you were being interrogated. You know now that this wasn’t true. They bewitched you, Janey. Your memory of what happened is foggy. But it will dear, child. It will dear.”
A wind blew down from the moors, rocking the caravan, loosing its cupboard doors, lifting its rug. Sylvia waited again, trying not to smell the milk that had gone sour somewhere out of sight.
“Janey my dear, you haven’t yet told your mother, have you? About the baby, I mean?” Janey shook her head. “Then don’t, my dear. Not till you’re clearer in your mind about what happened. A terrible thing was done to you, Janey.” She paused significantly. “No one could possibly blame you. Not possibly blame you.”
Janey stared at her, understanding at last. “They raped me,” she said. “Held me down and raped me. Them two hulking great men, they held me down and…”
The horror of it bereft her of words. “There now, child, don’t let it prey on your mind.” Sylvia got up. “Don’t let one night on the lonely moors ruin your whole life. Society has ways of dealing with such people.” She moved to the door. Outside in the soggy field it had begun to rain a little. “I want you to think of us as your friends, Janey. Dacre and I. Terrible things were done to him too. Things it would be better for you not to know about.” Momentarily Janey was diverted from the agonies of her rape. She wondered if she dared insist on details. Then another thought occurred to her, and she brightened.
“If it was rape,” she said, “then “I’d be sure to get an abo.”
“An abo, child?” Gracious, what could she mean? “Surely not a little Australian native?”
Janey laughed, a coarse, Devonshire sound. “An abo, Mrs. W. A nice, safe, comfy abortion.”
Sylvia, who could contemplate multiple rape—of another—with equanimity, blanched in the face of Janey’s agricultural realism. The girl was a monster, and God in His own good time would punish her. But not, Sylvia hoped, before she had done her part in confounding His enemies.
She retired with no further comment—was any possible?—opening the caravan door and lowering herself carefully, backwards, down the three little steps to the little concrete path. The wind increased, and somewhere among the other caravans a little shed blew over and a bucket rolled about noisily. Sylvia bent her head and hurried through the rain to the warmth and leather smells of her motor car.
The seed was sown. In the rich rural compost of superstition and fear and moral rectitude it would quickly bear fruit. She smiled, imagining Janey’s mother avid for the details that Janey would, in self-defence, supply. She smiled, then laughed aloud, hugging herself. She would go and visit O’Hara in his hotel. She had found that, away from the inhibiting presence of Mr. Dunbarton, she and O’Hara surprisingly often saw eye to eye.
In the days that followed Dacre knew perfectly well that his mother had something brewing. She went out on her own now, without O’Hara, and the one day he had gone after her on his motorbike he had found her, only after a long search, parked outside the Whit Hart Hotel and innocently reading a newspaper. She’d been visiting friends, she said. Dacre wondered, incredulously, if that meant Rocky and Crud. They’d been avoiding him ever since the night of the Albert Hall rally.
About the farm his mother was newly cheerful, twitchily so, and much inclined to take him into what she pretended was her confidence. “I hope you don’t blame your father for anything,” she said one morning, suddenly appearing in the woodshed door while he was chopping sticks. “He had to do what he thought was right. You know, we had some very interesting talks. Though it*s not at all the thing for you and me, I can well understand its appeal to a man of the brigadier’s temperament.”
Dacre was not good at being a mental nurse. He still tried to find pattern in what was said to him. He decided that his mother was waiting to enlist him on her side, and subtle enough to know she must appear to forgive his father first. He hated the reasons he tried to find for everything. He hated his life, and he wasn’t even very good at it. He couldn’t understand how it had ever come about He’d have said he was the last person willingly to bury himself in the country with a not particularly amiable lunatic. Even if—especially if—the lunatic was his mother.
If this was the fortitude he found to match his father’s, then it was a pretty poor, unwilling thing.
Mercifully, just when he needed it most, just when the prospect of even one more day spent warily circling his mother was unbearable, he received a letter from Gordon. It was a short letter, the handwriting shakey.
“My dear Dacre,
I wouldn’t want you to think that what you told me about your mother has not been on my mind. But, as you saw for yourself, things at this end are not easy. To be frank, they’re a bloody mess.
The immediate future, however, is now a bit brighter. George has decided, with the full approval of the council, to get out for a bit. Out of London, I mean. Out of this madhouse and let things cool off. I’ve suggested they all come down to the farm, back to grass roots, so to speak. No fuss, no meetings, nothing. Just let things cool off.
I see I’m repeating myself. It’s been quite a day but I won’t bore you with the details. Tell Sylvia not to make any special preparations. Not if she’s not well. We can see to the rooms when he get there.
Give your mother my love. Tell her I’d have written to her myself, only…no, just tell her I’m looking forward to seeing her. It’s been too long.
Your affectionate
Father.”
Dacre stared at the letter, reading into it everything that was there, and much more. He remembered his father in the spotlight. He wanted to write at once, to telephone—but the telephone had been disconnected—telling his father above all not to come. For his own sake. If London was a madhouse, then what was the farm? He’d hoped ustiliath would give his father peace. That was his excuse for the line of decisions, non decisions, that stretched behind him, that had brought him, without self-respect, to where he was now. His father must stay away, must look for his peace somewhere else, anywhere so long as it was far from the shifting, twittering silences of the farm. There was no peace here, no retreat. Only another trouble and another pain.
He saw writing on the bade of the sheet of paper and, turning it over, found a postscript.
“I see I’ve not said when we’re coming. Bring the car to the station Monday next, 3.15. I expect we can all squash in. I never thought I’d long for the farm, but I do.
Love,
Gordon.”
The Christian name might be carelessness, but it might be friendship offered, help needed. Either way, rejection had always been impossible. His father had to come. For Dacre’s own sake, his father had to come.
He went upstairs to see what needed to be done in the bedrooms. Gordon hadn’t said how many would be coming, but he doubted if the group would include Mr. Wilcox. Seven of them would never possibly fit into the Wolseley, not together with luggage and Mr. Wilcox’s wheelchair. He chose rooms for the missionaries, the boys in one, the girls in the other. Not that the distinction was necessary. He remembered the extraordinary, the sad sexlessness of the missionaries. How could they ever understand the human mind, he thought, knowing nothing of sex? His pass at Sally seemed incredibly distant, part of another existence. His energies were tied to his mother now, to watching her, forestalling her, even to seeing that her clothes were properly buttoned. He wondered, magnificently, if he would ever make a pass at a girl again.
Sylvia caught him at the airing cupboard, counting the sheets and blankets. She moved so quickly and unpredictably; last time he’d seen her she’d seemed to be on her way down to die orchard. Instinctively he’d wanted to keep his father’s visit a secret for as long as possible. He wondered, briefly, who was really watching whom.
“Don’t tell me,” she said. “You’ve had a letter. Your father’s coming to stay. And bringing his friends. I’m so glad.” She leaned on the airing cupboard door and looked at him winsomely. “This old house is far too big for just you and me. And I’m sure you’d like to have your father here for a bit…May I know—” she said it so humbly “—may I know when they’re expected?”
No lie came quickly enough. “Monday. I’m going to Exeter to meet the 3.15.”
“How nice. That gives us four days to get ready in. You know, I’m really quite excited. We may not always see eye to eye, but I’ve never met a man I liked better.”
Item from the Missionaries’ I. G. Handbook.
Life—no matter how unappealing the particular manifestation of it may seem—is a precious experience. A faith that is true to its beginnings will encourage a wide-ranging appreciation of that life. Missionaries should not blind themselves with mechanisms. They must at all times retain their clarity of intent. If life were not precious, then religion of any kind would be neither necessary nor desirable.
On the drive back from Exeter there was little enthusiasm for talk. The six of them sat, jammed in three abreast, and stared silently out at the leafless hedgerows and the wet autumn fields beyond. George sat in front with Sally, Dacre driving. As they passed through Crediton, along its single main street, something about the town—possibly the fact that it seemed, in its West Country insularity, totally untouched by ustiliath—caused Cora to lean forward and tap George on the shoulder.
“It can be pulled together,” she said. “We can make it work.”
George moved his head from side to side, as if trying not to hear. “No,” he said. “No…”
Dacre drove on. He had been shocked by the change he saw in them, especially in his father, but put it down, optimistically, to tiredness. A few weeks at the farm, he had thought, would work wonders. But now he wasn’t so sure. It seemed less a tiredness of the body than of the spirit. It showed itself particularly in a sense of isolation, each member of the party from the others, George isolated most of all. The communality had been lost Dacre wondered if that too could be regained simply by a few weeks at the farm.
For himself, he didn’t care very much either way. Very little touched him, certainly not the fate of the Mission, the fate of irrelevancies like the world or humanity. But for his father…he glanced up at Gordon’s face in the car mirror. Was it the effect of seeing the face reversed, or was the unbalanced, crooked look new? And weren’t the eyes painfully deeper? And hadn’t his father dragged his feet as he crossed the station foyer, dragged his feet and seemed so very much more than simply tired?
Nobody spoke again till they were approaching South Molton. Then Gordon cleared his throat and pushed words out into the oppressive silence.
“Posters, Dacre. As you were coming through town on the way to meet us, did you see posters?”
“What sort of posters?”
“About this evening’s meeting.”
The missionaries shifted, as if released from immobility by the memory of, the prospect of, conflict “I didn’t see any,” Dacre said. “But I wasn’t really looking. You know what the traffic’s like around lunchtime.”
Silence returned, but of a different nature: the sort of silence that arises when nobody wants to open an old argument. Dacre, irritated, lacked such delicacy.
“In your letter you said you were coming down here to get away from meetings.”
“I know, boy.” Gordon cleared his throat again. “But George thought that—”
“I thought a meeting was necessary. We don’t want it to look as if were running away, as if were afraid.” “Aren’t we?” said William, “I mean, aren’t you?”
“If I were I wouldn’t be holding this meeting.”
“In a cruddy little Devon town? What does that prove?”
Dacre had seen this confrontation before. He waited for one of the others to come to George’s defence. Nobody said a word. In the end, because he was cooped up in the car with them and there was another half-hour’s drive ahead, he smoothed things over himself.
“I shouldn’t underestimate this particular cruddy little town,” he said. “You’ll find a great deal of opposition in these parts. And it’s concentrated; in a small town like South Molton, everybody is involved, and everybody takes sides…and just about everybody at this moment is against you. If I were you, I’d cancel. Let things simmer down.”
A further silence.
“Not our leader,” William said. “There’s a principle involved. He can’t see past it to the other side. And he despises expediency.”
Dacre let it rest. It was none of his business. Changing down, he crawled behind a tractor through the outskirts of South Molton, and turned onto the main street. He spotted an ustiliath poster on the hoarding outside the town hall, and pointed it out to the missionaries. And then—though why he should care he really didn’t know— he wished he hadn’t.
As they approached it they saw that it was heavily defaced. Mud had been thrown at it, and thick black letters scrawled across it: BLOODY RAPISTS. Further down the street another had received similar treatment, only in this case suffered from Devonshire intellect: RAPISTS GET OUT.
George laughed, falsely. “I wonder why they’re calling us rapists,” he said.
Nobody answered him, and for the rest of the journey up to the farm nothing further was said.
Dacre turned right and drove past the railway station, up the valley and through the little clustered houses of North Molton. He drove slowly, childishly seeking to put off the moment he dreaded, the moment of his father’s and mother’s meeting. He had no idea what to expect, no idea how either of them would react. Would she give his father the welcome he needed? She had, after all, never met a man she liked better. Or would she rant at him, shock him with her madness? And what would he say, how would he deal with her if she did?
Finally, inevitably, they reached the farm. He got out, ran to the door, called his mother, and knew at once from the quality of the silence that the house was empty. He went through the hall and the kitchen and out into the stable yard and called, his voice cutting off sharply as he saw the cat It lay, oddly still and awkwardly, in the middle of the cobbles.
There was blood on the stones, and as he approached he saw the round head of a meat skewer projecting from the cat’s upper eye. He turned away and leaned against the water butt his stomach heaving. Behind him he heard sounds of activity as the missionaries began to unload their luggage and bring it into the house. His mother was not there. She had gone, leaving for her visitors this little message of hatred.
He might not recognise the biblical allusion, but he recognised the mind behind such a perverse invention. And he recognised that the cat—at least nominally—had belonged to his father.
Steeling himself, he fetched a spade from the stable. He had to hide the thing before his father could see it He had to make it not have happened. He fetched the spade, and his mother’s gardening gloves, for he could not bring himself to touch the flattened black fur, the stiff, terribly dead little body. But what proved now to be necessary was worse. When he had slid the spade under the cat and tried to move it he found that it was pinned down. The skewer had been hammered deeply in between the cobbles. And behind him in the house the noises grew louder. At any moment his father would come through into the kitchen to see what he was doing.
He struggled with the skewer.
Finally it came loose, squeaked its way out past stone and then bone. He shovelled up the dead cat and threw it savagely into the nettles behind the garage, hating it for its agony. Then he tossed earth on the bloodstained cobbles and scuffed it in. As he was finishing he looked up and saw his father at the kitchen doorway. It was already nearly dark, there in the shadowed stable yard.
