The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [8]
‘Nice girls don’t walk out with soldiers,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘They don’t.’
‘Who says not?’
‘Everybody says not.’
‘But why not?’
‘Ask anybody.’
‘Not even the Life Guards?’
‘No.’
‘Nor the Blues?’
‘Tommies are all the same.’
That seemed to settle matters finally so far as Bracey was concerned. There appeared to be no hope. There was Mercy, the housemaid, but even my own reckless projects for adjusting everyone else’s personal affairs according to my whim did not include such a fate for Bracey. I could see that was not a rational proposition. In fact, it was out of the question. There were several reasons. In the first place, Mercy herself played little or no part in the complex of personalities who inhabited the Stonehurst kitchen – no emotional part, at least. Certainly Mercy herself had no desire to do so. She was a quite young girl from one of the villages in the neighbourhood, found for my mother by Mrs Gullick. Together with her parents, Mercy belonged to a local religious sect, so small that it embraced only about twenty individuals, all related to one another.
‘They don’t believe anyone else is going to Heaven,’ Edith said of this communion.
‘No one at all?’
‘Not a single soul.’
‘Why not?’
‘They say they’re the only ones saved.’
‘Why?’
‘Call themselves the Elect.’
‘They aren’t the only people going to Heaven.’
‘I should just about think not.’
‘They are silly to say that.’
‘Silly, no error.’
Billson went still further than Edith on the same theological issue.
‘That girl won’t be saved herself,’ she said. ‘Not if she goes about repeating such things of her neighbours. God won’t want her.’
The positivist character of Mercy’s religious beliefs, more especially in relation to the categorical damnation of the rest of mankind, was expressed outwardly in a taciturn demeanour, defined by Edith as ‘downright disobliging’, her creed no doubt discouraging frivolous graces of manner. In personal appearance, she was equally severe, almost deliberately unprepossessing.
‘Her face will never be her fortune,’ Albert once remarked, when Mercy had left the kitchen in a huff after some difference about washing up.
Even Bracey, with all his unvoiced disapproval of Albert, was forced to laugh at the wit, the aptness of this observation. Bracey was, in any case, cheerful enough between his ‘funny days’. If his spirits, at the lowest, were very low indeed, they also rose, at other moments, to heights never attained by Albert’s. On such occasions, when he felt all comparatively well with the world, Bracey would softly hum under his breath:
‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
May be merry and bright.
But I’m going to be married on Sunday;
Oh, I wish it was Sunday night.’
Earlier in the year, during one of these bursts of cheerfulness, Bracey had offered to take me to see a football match. This was an unexpected, a highly acceptable invitation. It always seemed to me a matter of complaint that, although my father was a soldier, we saw at Stonehurst, in practice, little or nothing of the army, that is to say, the army as such. We lived on this distant hilltop, miles away from the daily activities of troops, who were to be sighted only very occasionally on some local exercise to which summer manoeuvres had fortunately brought them. Even so much as the solitary outline of a Military Policeman was rare, jogging his horse across the heather, a heavy brushstroke of dark blue, surmounted by a tiny blob of crimson, moving in the sun through a Vuillard landscape of pinkish greys streaked with yellow and silver. I had mentioned to Bracey the sight of one of these lonely riders. He showed no warmth.
‘Them Redcaps ain’t loved all that.’
‘Aren