A Disturbing Influence Read online

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid I must ignore what your senses tell you, Miss Spurgeon. It is my duty to guard the morals of my parishioners, you know, not to encourage tittle-tattle.’

  ‘You are the best judge of that,’ said Miss Spurgeon. ‘But I know what I’m saying, Mr Henderson, and if you really wish to guard the morals of the parish you will listen when you are warned of goings on.’ She walked away with great dignity, leaning on an elegant black stick. All conversations with Miss Spurgeon tended to end like that. Both of us thought we had authority: I as vicar, she by virtue of her age. We sharpened each other, I think. But as a gossip she lacked consistent accuracy, being correct only about once in ten times, and even when I thought she might be on to something I made a point of telling her that I would ignore whatever it was she had newly ‘sensed’.

  And this time I did ignore her. I glanced once or twice at Lindy during Evensong, and she seemed as demure as ever, sitting placidly in her choir-stall with her normal expression of contented blankness. With her scar and her ugliness and her glasses it was difficult to know what she might or might not be thinking, but I felt sure that she was not lusting in her heart after Mr Johnson while she listened to my brief sermon on the Wise and the Unwise Virgins.

  Some days later my wife, who was now a little better and came down after lunch every day, entered my study and said: ‘Raymond, I think you should have a word with Lindy.’

  Lindy, I should have said, worked for us, coming in every morning to help Isobel clean the house and get the lunch. Since Isobel’s illness we had come to depend very heavily upon her.

  ‘What is it, Isobel?’

  ‘She’s been late every morning this week. She’s never done it before. I wonder if you would mind having a word with her. I really don’t feel up to speaking to her myself.’

  ‘Of course. I’ll see her tomorrow.’

  Isobel went and sat by the window. ‘Thank God the winter is nearly over,’ she said.

  ‘I hope we’ll have you out and about by the middle of May,’ I said.

  ‘So do I.’

  Isobel looked wan. Her illness had been obscure and dangerous, one of those slowly wasting diseases that doctors don’t like to talk about, since their tests fail to show anything actually wrong. Yet the patient grows sicker and sicker. In spite of specialists—who had been extremely expensive—we still didn’t know what was really the matter with her, though both of us feared, without ever saying so, that it might be cancer. But she had picked up a little, and we hoped that a warm summer might put her right again.

  ‘If you’re not better by July,’ I said, ‘I’ll send you off to your sisters. There’s no telling what a change of air might do.’

  ‘I don’t expect Farnham’s air is very different from this,’ she said. ‘I should love to go abroad again. To Switzerland, say, to see the flowers.’

  ‘You know we can’t afford that.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But there’s no harm in thinking about it, is there?’ She thought for a moment, then got up and said: ‘But perhaps there is. I thought it might be nice to go and post the letters, Raymond. Do you have any?’

  ‘You’re not supposed to go out yet.’

  ‘I know. But I hate being cooped up like this, day after day. It’s not very far.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  We wrapped up well, for though it was fine, it was cold and crisp, nearly April, but with a threat of frost in the air. The post-box was only a few hundred yards away, but even that distance was an expedition for Isobel.

  On the way we met Evangeline Hobson, who stopped us to complain about the by-pass tearing up one of their fields. We expressed our sympathy, though we did not really feel it, delighted as we were at the prospect of living without the thunder and danger of lorries day and night. Then she said: ‘I don’t want to seem nosy, Raymond, but all these labourers do represent something of a threat, don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t even know what you mean, Evangeline. Just because many of them seem to be Irish there is no danger of my parish turning Catholic.’

  She laughed. ‘I didn’t mean that. I was thinking, frankly, of the parish’s morals rather than of its denomination. The girls have never been so popular, it seems. What with all these men with nowhere to go in the evenings.’

  ‘I’m sure the local youths can handle that,’ I said.

  ‘Mrs Badham has been telling me that they’re furious. The labourers are getting too much attention.’

  ‘A change of faces can’t harm anyone,’ I said.

  ‘Mrs Badham seemed to think it was funny, I don’t know why.’

  ‘I agree with her,’ said Isobel. ‘It is quite funny. It should put all the boys on their mettle.’ Then she added: ‘I wish I could see a few new faces sometimes.’

  The two women discussed Isobel’s illness and convalescence. I wondered briefly whether Mrs Hobson might not have a point, but soon dismissed the idea. It wasn’t as though the labourers were an invading army, after all.

  When we got back to the vicarage Isobel felt tired and I helped her to bed.

  ‘It’s so silly,’ she said, when she was settled with a hot-water bottle. ‘Here I’ve been lying all this time, listening to the radio for months and months, and I can tell you exactly what’s being talked about in Mrs Dale’s Diary, but I seem to have lost all touch with Cartersfield.’

  ‘I’m a little out of touch with it myself.’

  ‘Mrs Badham,’ said Isobel, and laughed. ‘What a splendid woman she is. She could scrub kitchens all day and still be ready for a little weight-lifting.’

  This was hardly fair. Mrs Badham was big and strong, certainly, but hardly a giantess. I said as much.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean it literally,’ said Isobel. ‘I just meant that she gives the impression of being huge. Morally huge. Can you imagine anyone tweaking her bottom?’

  Indeed I could not. Mrs Badham was the sort of woman whose bottom by its very majesty forbade any levity of that kind. Thinking of that, and of what Miss Spurgeon had hinted, I felt sure that Lindy would never dare to misbehave beneath her mother’s roof. I told Isobel about the gossip, and she agreed with me.

  ‘It’s unthinkable,’ she said. ‘What is the man like?’

  ‘I’ve only seen him a couple of times. He doesn’t come to church. He’s quite good-looking, in a burly sort of way, but too old for a girl of Lindy’s age to be interested in him. Besides, he has a wife and family, I’m told.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  At first I couldn’t remember. Then it occurred to me that it was Lindy herself. After my talk with Miss Spurgeon I had mentioned casually to Lindy that I’d heard the Badhams had a lodger, and she had given me the information quite without hesitation. It was yet another reason to refuse to credit the gossip.

  I forgot about the whole thing for several weeks, being extremely busy with Easter and the Burmese flood relief. The Christian festival seemed to unleash a great deal of Christian charity, in a satisfactory way, and contributions suddenly began to pour in. It was not, in fact, till the middle of April that I thought about Lindy Badham again, though I saw her often enough at the vicarage and in church, and had chided her about being tardy. When I did so she hung her head and said she was sorry, and that it wouldn’t happen again. According to Isobel, it hadn’t.

  One morning, as I was on my way to the station, I saw Mrs Badham bicycling down the road. Like an elephant in a circus, I thought to myself, so comic did a woman of her bulk look on a bicycle. She wore a black hat over her greying hair, and a shortish skirt, her bare legs pedalling in stately fashion. She waved as she passed me, but did not stop.

  While waiting for the train I chatted with Bob Ransome, a porter. He leaned against a pillar, drinking tea from a large tin mug, looking, from time to time, at the signals.

  ‘How is your father?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s pretty well, thank you,’ he said.

  ‘I think he’s a marvel at his age
.’

  ‘He does pretty well,’ said Ransome. ‘There’s many younger with not half the strength.’

  ‘I wish I was younger,’ I said. ‘I’m getting to the age when a bad winter is a real hardship.’

  ‘It’s been bad,’ he said. Then he turned to someone standing a few yards up the platform and said: ‘’Morning, Bill.’

  It was William Johnson. ‘’Morning,’ he replied. He was burly, as I have suggested, and had grey eyes and straight black hair, with just a brush of silver in it. If he had dressed himself up he might easily have passed as a business man. But he was wearing overalls.

  ‘Mr Johnson,’ I said, going up to him, ‘I don’t think we’ve ever met properly. My name’s Henderson. I’m the vicar here.’

  ‘How d’you do?’ he said, giving my hand a gentle shake. Somehow this surprised me. I was expecting one of those bone-crushing grips which labouring men seem to enjoy imposing on those in sedentary occupations.

  ‘I believe you’re staying with Mrs Badham.’

  ‘I am that,’ he said. He had a distinctly northern accent.

  ‘I hope you’re enjoying your stay in Cartersfield.’

  ‘It’s a nice little place, sir.’

  ‘Good, good.’ I couldn’t think of anything further to say.

  We stood smiling at each other for a moment, then I asked some trivial question about how long the by-pass would take to finish, and he answered it politely. Then the train came in, and he excused himself, explaining that he had come to collect something of urgent importance being sent in the luggage van. As I settled into my seat I decided that he was a thoroughly nice man, and that I did not need to concern myself any more with the problem of Lindy and the lodger. He seemed, I thought, almost too gentle to be a labourer, and certainly highly respectable. And so I forgot about the whole thing again. Miss Spurgeon, though she questioned various other people’s behaviour, never raised the matter after that first time. Lindy was, if anything, early for work at the vicarage. Isobel began to get about more. Soon it was summer.

  If the winter had been foul, the summer was almost worse. One expects winter to be awful, but one feels cheated by a wet June and July. People become morose, the atmosphere is one of continual disappointment. ‘Praying for rain, are you, Vicar?’ people would say to me, jokingly, but the joke sounded rather laboured. One can ask God to bless the crops, but one can’t rationally expect Him to answer. Prayers for good weather seem to me an obvious example of that paganism incorporated into Christianity in the early years of the Church. Yet I offered them up Sunday after Sunday, and no doubt vicars did so in every other parish church in the country, but all to no avail. Gloom became widespread. Archie Ransome, a man no one thought would ever die, was buried in May. Towards the end of June there was to be a fête in the Hobsons’ garden, but it was reduced to a huddle of bedraggled women in a barn, on account of rain. Dispirited members of the cricket club could be seen about their ramshackle pavilion, drinking beer with equally dispirited opponents. ‘Even the ducks are getting fed up with it,’ someone said to me one day, and there was an edge of real bitterness in his voice. Work was held up on the by-pass. Originally we had hoped to see it opened by the Lord Lieutenant in time for the August Bank Holiday, but now it seemed that we would be lucky to have it by the middle of September.

  On one of the very few fine days we had, at the beginning of July, I went for a walk along the canal and across some fields by an old bridle path. Isobel wasn’t feeling too bright, so I walked alone. As I got away from the town, I looked back at it from the small rise of Long Acre, an old, still open, field, belonging to Ponting. The church spire looked strong enough from there, though I knew how soon it would require repair if it wasn’t going to fall down. There were a few clouds about, but the sun shone quite bravely. It was Saturday afternoon, and I was thinking about the sermon I would write that night. I gazed at the town, and thought how it hardly deserved the name, how it was little more than a large village. Our population is slightly over five thousand. We are not growing at all. We have no industry, no factory, no newspaper. As a market town we have lost custom steadily to bigger and better-equipped towns near by. In fifty years, I dare say, we shall have become completely forgotten by the rest of the world, particularly now that the main road has left us on one side. I cannot help regretting this. Cartersfield’s history has been quiet but not ignoble. There was a skirmish here during the Wars of the Roses. The Civil War saw Cromwell stabling his horses in the church. We welcomed William of Orange. As a rotten borough in the eighteenth century we had the honour of being represented by a distinguished member of Pitt’s Cabinet. There were some Luddite demonstrations here in the 1830s. In a small way we have seen the history of England pass through our streets. And now we seem to be sinking out of sight.

  I pondered a little on these things. I thought about the qualities that had made England great, how much they sprang from the solidity, the certainty, of life in such places as Cartersfield. If we are now in our dotage as a great power, Cartersfield, and the thousands of towns and villages like it throughout England, do not care. From the same sources a new greatness will spring, in the course of time, and with God’s will. I was only one in a long succession of vicars of Cartersfield: it was my duty, I felt, in a very real sense to keep things going, not to be distracted by the superficial changes, to hold fast to those things which endure in the English spirit, and to nurture them. It was a good theme for a sermon.

  I was meditating on all this as I continued my walk, and was turning over various possible texts in my mind. My head was down, my eyes on the path. The ground was still very damp. There were buttercups among the rain-spoiled hay. When I came to the stile I decided to pause a while, to sit on it and survey the view. I manoeuvred myself into a comfortable position, still ruminating on history and the English spirit, my eyes on the roof-tops of Cartersfield.

  I don’t know what it was that attracted my attention, but I suddenly noticed something in the grass just a few yards away. For two or three terrible seconds visions of murders too horrible to mention passed through my mind. For what I saw looked very like a human foot. I sprang from the stile and went to see. It was indeed a foot. In the hay, beaten down by wind and rain, lay Lindy Badham and William Johnson, both stark naked, on a mackintosh. Johnson lay on his back, one foot on top of the other, which is why I saw it. She lay with her arms about him, apparently asleep. His eyes, too, were closed, but one of his hands suddenly moved to brush a fly off his thigh.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, too shocked to move. But at last I summoned my feet to move back. I walked on tiptoe till I could no longer see them. Then I hurried away. I don’t think they ever guessed how I knew about their sinning together. I went straight home, and at once told Isobel what I had seen. Isobel was usually a great comfort to me on such occasions.

  She was as astonished as I. ‘How could they!’ she kept repeating. ‘How could they!’

  ‘It’s appalling,’ I said. ‘And to show such a lack of shame. Such a lack of elementary prudence.’

  ‘Prudence! We can thank God, Raymond, that they were not prudent or we might never have known.’

  We looked at each other in silence. Isobel, I noticed, was not looking at all well. She was very pale, and her breathing seemed too shallow and fast. ‘Are you feeling all right?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. I am so shocked that Lindy of all people should do such a thing.’

  ‘What are we to do?’

  ‘I really don’t know. It is simply appalling.’

  ‘I think Mrs Badham should be told at once, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  The prospect filled me with alarm. Mrs Badham did have, as Isobel had said, great moral authority. She expressed opinions with great force and confidence.

  ‘I hope she won’t turn Lindy out of the house.’

  ‘Well, we shall certainly have to turn her out of ours. I shall speak to her first thing in the mor
ning. Then I shall send her to you, Raymond. You must read her a very stern lecture. And we shall have to look for another girl to do the housework.’

  ‘What will the poor girl do for a living?’

  ‘That’s no concern of ours, Raymond. I expect she will go on the streets.’

  ‘Really, Isobel. Besides, she’s not pretty enough.’

  ‘Raymond, we simply cannot have her here. You are the vicar. You have a standard to set. And I won’t have the girl in the house after this disgraceful conduct.’

  Isobel looked iller and iller. Her cheeks were grey, her eyes very dull. I wondered whether I had been unwise to tell her.

  ‘I shall have to dismiss her from the choir,’ I said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But don’t you think it would be better if we kept her on here—where we could keep an eye on her?’

  Isobel got out of her chair and spoke with great vehemence. ‘No, I do not. I don’t ever want to see the creature again after tomorrow morning. I shall tell her things then that she’ll never forget.’ She looked more and more ill. ‘The idea of having that whore in my house, Raymond! That Lindy should do such a thing!’ She put one hand out to support herself against the wall, but continued more and more hysterically: ‘A girl I have looked after myself. I have done everything to help her to lead some kind of normal life! With her hideous face. That she should turn against us now!’

  She began to sob, great gulpings for air. I tried to calm her. I led her to a chair, but she wouldn’t sit down. She became more and more excited, she began to scream, to shout obscenities against Lindy. Then she collapsed completely. I got her to bed and gave her a tranquillizing pill. Briefly I wondered if I shouldn’t take one myself. Isobel’s sickness had never taken a course like this before. Lindy’s behaviour couldn’t possibly be the only cause. As I have said, fornication was not uncommon in Cartersfield, and we were both used to disappointments such as this. Sometimes we had been still more gravely disappointed. Five years before a young man who had notions of becoming a member of the clergy had to be sent away in a great hurry. And however angelic their appearance on Sundays, we both knew that few choirboys or choirgirls were actually angels on weekdays. Isobel’s hysterics must be due to something much more serious.