An Awfully Big Adventure - Beryl Bainbridge [24]
‘They all are,’ said George. ‘Apart from St Ives and that bloke Fairchild. I shouldn’t think he’s anything.’
Stella had been brought up to believe that Catholicism was a plague rather than a religion. Its contaminated followers were one step removed from the beasts of the field. Angels at the foot of the bed and the devil at their back, they drank like fishes and bred like rabbits. After midnight mass on Christmas Eve the street was desperate with maudlin men with bloodied noses and bruised knuckles singing ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’ as they urinated through the railings. Uncle Vernon had telephoned the police on more than one occasion. ‘I’m the proprietor of the Aber House Hotel,’ he protested. ‘I can’t have mayhem round my premises.’ Lily said he was wasting his money, and he was; they were all papists down at the Bridewell.
In summer, when the white trash Protestants from the rookeries of the Dock Road marched in honour of King Billy, the police put up barricades to stop the Catholic men from charging the procession. The women stood on the doorsteps with their rumps to the crowd, skirts lifted to flash tattered green knickers. When Uncle Vernon was a boy a Catholic had let off a firework in the path of the brewery dray-horse and it had lumbered sideways, the streamers of orange paper fluttering from its bridle rein and drifting to the kerb. The lad on its back, dolled up as King William, had been crushed to death against the wall. The rattle of the sword he had held aloft echoed across the cobblestones.
It came as a shock to Stella, learning that educated people like Dotty Blundell and Meredith adhered to such a faith. She asked Geoffrey whether he knew the exact meaning of the word ‘convert’.
‘I don’t know about exact,’ he said. ‘It’s to alter purpose, to change from one thing to another.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘In the religious sense,’ he said. ‘From sin to holiness.’
It wasn’t much help. All the same, when the cast assembled on stage and stood with bowed heads as Dr Parvin gabbled his blessing, fingers raised to sketch that insidious sign of the cross, she found herself shivering. She had the feeling she must either give in to that showy and heady beatification or run for her life. She couldn’t just stand by; it was all or nothing.
Uncle Vernon had waited up for her. He’d wanted to escort her home but she had threatened to commit arson if he came within a quarter of a mile of the theatre. He’d kept her supper warm in a pot in the oven.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t. It was thoughtful of you, but it would choke me.’
He switched off the gas with a bad-tempered flourish, though his heart wasn’t in it. If his own life had been as full he too could have dispensed with food.
‘It was wonderful,’ she said. ‘I wish I could explain. You’ve no idea . . .’
He had, but he stayed silent. She looked different since Lily had stopped curling her hair. It hung straight down, neglected, lank from the rain. It wasn’t altogether unbecoming.
‘When I came back across the square,’ she said, ‘and saw the trees swaying, I felt like Moley following Ratty through the Wild Wood, scenting his own little house on the wind.’
‘What trees?’ he asked. ‘What wood?’
He’d seen her like this before, when she had her nose in those poetry books, and once when he’d sneaked up the stairs and caught her using the telephone. It had been one of those mornings when the early sun striking the coloured glass of the landing window had tinted the dark hall with amber light. The girl’s red hair burned against the mildewed wallpaper. She’d replaced the receiver instantly and refused to tell him who she’d been speaking to, but then, as now, there was something challenging in her expression.
For a moment he saw her as someone outside of himself, another person, a stranger passing in the street with a face blazing with secrets. He felt uncomfortable; her eyes shone so.
The following day the dress rehearsal went so smoothly that after giving out his notes – the pause at the end of the third act, before Olwyn opened the cigarette box for the