There was a pause, and Sylvia’s attention wandered. A car had come down the drive and she heard the sound of voices. She got up. She’d listened to George and William for long enough—all their words are unnecessary beside the truth she had now seen. She had seen God. No—for God was a lie—she had seen something else. What was it they called it? She’d never been much good at foreign languages. But she’d seen it anyway. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, she’d seen it.

  Out in the sunlight Dacre was arguing with Mr. Wilcox, arrived for his little chat, and making predictably little progress. Sally had wisely stayed down on the lawn.

  “No, I’m afraid not. My father’s resting. He’s had other visitors this morning and he’s very tired.”

  “Don’t fart-arse around, boy. He’ll want to see me. This is one of my mornings. I always come Fridays. He’ll want to see me.”

  “Not this Friday, Mr. Wilcox. I told you, he’s had some surprise visitors. You know how people tire him.”

  “Show me the day when the brigadier’s too tired to see me, lad.” Like a pig snouting at a fence, never giving up. “Me and him served together all up Italy. And later, when Jerry—”

  “Not this morning, Mr. Wilcox.” Fences could be stubborn also. “I’m sorry, but not this morning.”

  “I must say you make a bloody good watchdog, lad. I shall tell the brigadier next time I see him. Tell him what a bloody good watchdog he got, keeping me away like this.”

  “You do that, Mr. Wilcox. Hell be glad to hear you approve.”

  Mr. Wilcox walked slowly bade to his car. He grunted, preparatory to folding his rigid, six-foot six person and getting in. But he wasn’t done yet.

  “This stuff in all the papers,” he said. “The brigadier’ll know what it’s all in aid of.”

  Dacre refused to be drawn. “My father’ll know nothing. The postman brings the papers around twelve.”

  “We made the news, boy.” Approaching for another snout. “South Molton has, in all the nationals…says in the paper a bloody great UFO came down on the moor last night, buggered off again before the army could get to it. And we’re expected to believe—”

  “I don’t see what my father could—”

  “Him and I’s been in the services, boy. We know what goes on. Some new weapon they’re testing and the War Department won’t tell. The brigadier’ll know what it’s all in aid of.”

  Dacre drew a deep breath. “The War Department ceased to exist in 1963, Mr. Wilcox. It’s called the Ministry of Defense now, which sounds prettier. Besides, my father’s been retired for three years now, so I doubt if he’ll be exactly an expert on the latest secret weapon. If he ever was, which seems unlikely, since he was only a brigadier, and never a very popular one at that.”

  “Now, that I don’t like, boy. Knocking your old man…that I don’t like.”

  Mr. Wilcox’s further invocation of the fourth commandment was interrupted by Dacre’s mother. She came down die steps from die front door, arms outstretched, radiant. Incredible as it might seem, that was the only way he could describe her: radiant. Boney, horselike, and…radiant

  His heart sank. It looked as if Mr. Wilcox was about to be embraced.

  “Sergeant Major—how nice to see you. Do come in. The brigadier’s asleep at the moment, but hell be waking up soon. He’ll be so glad you’ve come.”

  Mr. Wilcox stood to attention. Thus had he ordered thousands to their deaths. “Your son, Mrs. Wordsworth, told me the brigadier wasn’t to be disturbed. I was about to depart”

  “Dacre?” His mother laughed lightly, madly. “Oh, you mustn’t take any notice of him. He means well, but he does get things dreadfully muddled sometimes.”

  They went away together into the house, Sylvia talking, waving her arms about happily all the way. Sally joined Dacre—poor, well-meaning, muddled Dacre—on the edge of the drive.

  “George’s first convert,” she said. “I don’t like it.”

  Dacre stared up at the house. Starlings were pulling the thatch out in beakfuls. “What d’you mean?” he said.

  “She looks as if she’s got ustiliath. I reckon that’s the phrase. She’s no good to us if she has. George ought to know better.”

  “Who is this George? What is he?”

  “He’s the captain. The Mission captain. Which means he went over best back at Mission School. Which means he said all the right things. Perhaps he believed them.”

  “But you trust him. You wouldn’t have come with him if you hadn’t trusted him.”

  “It was either that or not come at all. We’re on the run, you see.” She checked. “You’ll understand as you get to know us better.”

  “Should you be talking to me like this?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I-levels over 147,” she said obscurely, “get a rather different treatment Even if they’re still unformed.”

  She walked away, following the other tow back into the house. He watched her. It had been a disturbing conversation. One sentence in particular stuck in his mind: ‘She’s no good to us if she has.’ No good to us …was that really the way an evangelist talked?

  Gordon knew he had been woken by the sound of Sergeant Major Wilcox. Not by his voice, for the sergeant major hadn’t spoken, but by his tiptoeing. Thirty years of parade grounds and barracks had given Wilcox the sort of tiptoe you had when you dreamed you were late for church. And his breathing, when on tiptoe, was louder than a bloody blacksmith’s bellows.

  His breathing…Gordon paused in his comfortable, amusing, half-asleep thoughts. His breathing. Gordon straightened himself in his chair and opened his eyes. That buffoon Wilcox was just righting a small table.

  “There, now he’s woken you,” Sylvia said. “I told him there wasn’t any particular need to be quiet, and now he’s woken you.”

  “I’m sure I’m very sorry, sir.”

  It was sad that a man as old as Wilcox should blush so vividly.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Gordon said. “I’d slept long enough. I was waking up anyway.” He noticed Sylvia had one of her special expressions. “What the hell are you looking at me like that for, woman? Are my flies undone or something?”

  He knew they weren’t, saw Cora, and made a champing sort of apology in her direction. “Come to that, everyone’s looking at me a bit boss-eyed. What are you all waiting for—me to do the cancan?”

  Sally, another odd one, dressed just like the first, both of them out of some TV newsreel demo, came in from the garden and stood watching him. And as he sat, staring from face to face round the chintzy, sun-patterned room, a chill began to spread upwards from the base of his skull. His breathing…he wasn’t like this. This was himself five years ago. This was a dream, a nightmare in which he was the only one dreaming, and everyone else stood around and watched. He dared not move. The chill ran cold through the nerves of his scalp. He no longer knew himself. He was outside, looking down at an old fool with soup stains down his front And the soup stains were comfortable and the old fool had a certain dignity. They were nice, known, acceptable, they were how he looked. But they were not how he was …And he remembered the breathing and dared not.

  “We’ll be on our way then,” William said. “You’ll both want to be on your own.”

  “Don’t go,” from Sylvia.

  “We’ll be back. But we must be off now. We’ve got a lot to do.”

  “Don’t go.” Pleading. “Please don’t go. I thought you could stay here with us. We’ve got spare rooms. If you don’t mind sharing. Please stay.”

  George looked at his companion. “We could do with a headquarters,” he said.

  “You’re the captain.”

  “Besides, conversion reinforcement is essential.”

  “Hardly needs all four of us.”

  “I don’t know. If we could once form a firm base with these three, then—”

  “They’re not all the right sort,” said Sally, from the door.

  “All the same—”

  William shrugged his shoulders. “You’re the captain,” he said again.

  Sylvia ran to the boys and took their hands. “I’m so glad,” she said. She was taller than they, just as she was taller than her son. “And you two mustn’t quarrel. Ustiliath wouldn’t like that.”

  She smiled. She’d got it right. She smiled down at than so that they should smile up at her. And Cordon, winning a private battle, dared breathe.

  The bindings round his chest were gone, and he was afraid. He held out his hand for her but she didn’t notice: it was Cora who took it. She had soft young fingers. He held her for reassurance that he was, that everything was, safely the same. But he breathed, and the strands that had been tightening each day were gone. He’d hated them: their obscene presence, their parasitic growth, the pain and fear and degradation they brought. But the pain could be lived with, and the fear became less, and the degradation no longer mattered. He lived his life in a certain way…he had arms and legs, a wife and a son, he had eyes that saw, bowels that moved, strands between his ribs that tightened. And soon he would die. His life was neat, a matter of immediate, rather than future, experience.

  And now all that was changed. Apart from his chest, apart from the differences in the tensions of his back and shoulders, apart from these he could feel in his whole body that all that was changed. He had gone to sleep trapped, he had woken free. He had gone to sleep old, he had woken young. He had gone to sleep safe, he had woken vulnerable.

  “What’s the matter with me?” he said, and didn’t hear their answers.

  “Have I gone mad?” he said, and rose from his chair, brushing away their cobweb hands.

  “Is this a trick? Am I drugged?” He crossed the room, aware of his wife’s and the sergeant major’s gaping.

  He walked slowly, for he was an old man with old legs and old arms. And his legs and arms had little patience with him. He stooped, for his back was tired and old. And his back denied this long-established truth.

  He reached the door and grasped the frame for familiarity, where his hand had worn the paint to undercoat. He left their gaping and went out, through the hall, to the front door standing open, his eyes on the safe, known sequence of rug…of polished slates…of door mat, door sill, door step. There he paused, for he was an old man, a dying man, pausing in the sun as old men do.

  The day burst in on him. He lifted his head, turned his palms to feel the adventurous warmth of the sun. He walked down the steps onto the drive. Dacre was there, watching him. A few straws drifted past him on the breeze. He looked up and saw starlings making a feast of his thatch. He knew Dacre was watching him and he was embarrassed to be free.

  “Bloody birds,” he said. “Don’t just stand there, lad. Do something.”

  Dacre flapped his arms and shouted, and his father picked up a handful of gravel from the drive and threw it. The stones pattered harmlessly on the thatch, and rolled down, and the starlings flew away.

  “There you are,” said Dacre.

  He had nothing to say.

  “You’ll be playing cricket again,” Dacre said, “come next season.”

  Gordon looked at his throwing arm, flexed it experimentally, and went away alone past the sergeant major’s car, down through the home paddock to die wise company of his bees.

  People, even his son, especially the difficult intrusions of his son, would have to wait

  PART II

  The gospel would not only prepare the people for a blessed immortality; but civilisation and legitimate commerce would assuredly follow. It would unfold to the native chiefs die vast resources of their own country, by which they might promote the real improvement of their people.

  Rev. William Moister. 1850

  Item from the Missionaries’ I.G. Handbook.

  It must be recognised that Mission motivation will be suspect. The use of missionary activity as a prelude to political infiltration is bound to have indiginous historical precedent, and any early Mission successes will only intensify such fears. Missionaries must be continually vigilant, therefore, against suggesting in word or deed that their interest is in anything other than spiritual matters. Even so, they must expect, sooner or later, to meet serious and even violent opposition—often from quarters where it is least expected.

  His father, Dacre supposed, had felt the need for something outside, something larger than himself, all his life; hence his alliegance to the ritual otherness of the army. The only other available god had been too distant, too cold, too intellectualised. He watched Gordon over lunch that afternoon, probing the matter. He would want to believe in what George was telling him, not out of sudden simple gratitude, but out of long-term need.

  “The power of the group mind, eh?” he said, looking up from his second helping of one of Sylvia’s emergency casseroles. “Sounds dangerous.”

  “You’re thinking of mob hysteria,” George answered. “Mob hysteria is the mind untranscended, seeing only itself, becoming unbalanced, evil. It feeds destructively on itself. Ustiliath gets its energy from outside, from the universe. It is the universe. Ustiliath can only be on the side of virtue, of good.”

  “Easy to say. Harder to prove.”

  “I don’t think so. Perhaps words like good and evil are misleading. Let’s try constructive versus destructive, enduring versus short-term, transcendental versus diminishing. Obviously the first has won, even if only just, otherwise there simply wouldn’t still be a universe for us to argue about.”

  Dacre was shocked. For the last few years he had found a perverse comfort in believing that evil was all-conquering. Yet George’s argument was persuasive.

  “This is the force that we commit ourselves to,” George went on. “This is the force that exists equally in us and you and everything that is.”

  Gordon grunted and reapplied himself to his wife’s appalling cooking. It was years since he had felt so hungry, which was constructive enough in all conscience.

  Polemics at the lunch table were obviously beyond Dacre’s mother. She ate her runny dumplings and remained steadfast in her new belief, even if her attempts at conversation showed that she was becoming—were that possible—even more muddled as to exactly what she was being steadfast about.

  “Now don’t be so silly,” she told her husband. “Ustiliath knows best.”

  It was Mr. Wilcox however, now returned to the Hunter’s Moon, who had astonished Dacre most.

  When Dacre had returned to the sitting room after his father wandered away down to the orchard, he found Mr. Wilcox down on his knees, crying, begging to be saved also. It was an embarrassing sight, but Mr. Wilcox was far beyond embarrassment.

  “Save me,” he moaned, “for I have sinned.”

  George pointed out that he brought no instant salvation. Also that sin was altogether too strong a word to be applied to any one individual. Sin was the group using its power to evil ends. Sin brought group destruction. Hell was on earth, and likewise heaven.

  “Save me,” moaned Mr. Wilcox, “for I have sinned.” George was about to begin again, but Sylvia pushed past him and went to the grovelling sergeant major.

  “We’ll save you,” she said. “Ustiliath will save you. There’s a little bit of ustiliath in all of us. That’s what saved the brigadier. It’ll save you too.”

  Dacre saw George about to protest at this gross distortion, and saw William hold him back. Sylvia stood beside the kneeling figure, her hand soothing its scraped grey hair, and looked across at them, composed in a charming, classical attitude of compassion.

  “It’s his head, you see. His poor head. He gets the most terrible headaches.”

  Dacre was unsurprised—it would have been a bloody miracle if someone as excessive as Mr. Wilcox did not suffer from headaches. Also, of course, he wanted to receive what the brigadier had received: if the brigadier had been cured of a dreadful affliction then he wanted to be cured of a dreadful affliction also. Otherwise it wouldn’t be fair.

  “I’m sure it’s because he uses his ustiliath all wrong,” Sylvia said. “If you’d only cure him I’m sure he’d never use it wrong again.”

  “Please,” said Mr. Wilcox. “Please.”

  Item, from the Missionaries’ I.G. Handbook.

  The working of individual ‘miracles’ is to be dis-’ couraged. As a means of obtaining converts its effects are very short-term. As a means of obtaining easy popularity it is cheap and unworthy. And as a means of genuinely alleviating suffering it is selective and inadequate. In the early stages of the Mission, however, circumstances may arise in which its use is justifiable. Integrity losses have to be balanced against strategy gains. The final decision rests at all times with the missionary captain.

  “Please. Please, oh please,” said Mr. Wilcox.

  George sighed, and moved forward.

  . “No lecture,” William said. “Just get on with it. We can dear up misapprehensions later on.”

  Dacre thought he detected an unspoken addendum: if it’s really worth bothering. If George noticed this too, he made no comment. Cora was enlisted, and the miracle was worked. Once again a short simple prayer, followed by a period of silence in which the four visitors closed their eyes and were very still.

  This time, however, Dacre retained his precious detachment. He listened to the silence, and set about analysing it. He noticed its peculiar solidity, the concentrated activity that it expressed. It wasn’t silence as Mr. Wilcox had used it down at the Hunter’s Moon, to suspend thought, to generate fear. It was a liberating silence, a silence that in some way—even Dacre, resisting, felt it—a silence that in some way freed the spirit. What a load of pretentious balls, he thought, even as his will was being drawn out of him, was being joined—while he fought the experience—even as his will was being drawn out of him and joined to…

 

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