The Hawk and the Dove Page 10

  Mother’s face cleared and she began to laugh, ‘Oh, Mary! You mean lemon meringue pie!’

  The wave of our laughter shattered Mary’s fragile dignity, and she began to cry.

  ‘Mary, my love, of course you shall have it,’ said Mother, trying to compose her face. ‘Is there anything else you would like especially?’

  ‘Candles,’ whispered Mary, abashed, ‘on my cake.’

  ‘There will be candles!’ promised Mother. ‘And lemon meringue pie. Now make haste to school, girls, or you’ll be late.’

  Therese and I took Mary and Beth down as far as the county primary school, and stayed to wave goodbye to them as they went in at the gate. Mary was happy again when we left her, still wearing her best dress and a crown of marigolds. Her eyes shone like candles, and she held her head high as she walked down the path to the school building, clutching her bag which held her birthday treasures, ready to show the teacher. We watched them go, and then continued on our way to the high school for girls.

  The school motto which decorated our blazer pockets was the same as that of the Royal Air Force, Per ardua ad astra, exhorting us through hard work to reach for the stars. It was a school proud of its academic record, and all the lovely possibilities of that motto were ignored in favour of the one dry interpretation, ‘Pass your exams.’ The only stars we were encouraged to yearn for within those walls were the little gold, gummed-paper shapes that the younger pupils earned for good work.

  Since it was Monday, I was condemned to failure by the timetable before I even entered the gates: geography, chemistry, French, and a double lesson of mathematics. The day was redeemed marginally by an English lesson at the end of the afternoon. I struggled through a confusion of isobars, alkaline reaction, petits dialogues, and trigonometry, to collapse wearily into my chair for the English lesson, with a sigh of relief. We were spending the autumn term studying the English Romantic poets, and the present focus of our attention was Shelley. We had been reading his poetry for two weeks now—or rather listening to Mrs Freeman read it. We took up where we had left off the previous lesson, halfway through the romantic wallowings of the tragic tale ‘Rosalind and Helen’.

  Mrs Freeman ploughed on and on through stanza after stanza, and the self-indulgent, purple language at first annoyed me, then began to seem unbearable, and finally hilarious. Mrs Freeman’s voice shook with emotion as she flicked over to page 188, the class meekly following her progress in their dog-eared, ink-stained textbooks, yellowed with age.

  And first, I felt my fingers sweep

  The harp, and a long quivering cry

  Burst from my lips in symphony…

  Mrs Freeman declaimed in low and trembling tones.

  … The dusk and solid air was shaken

  As swift and swifter the notes came

  From my touch that wandered like quick flame,

  And from my bosom labouring

  With some unutterable thing.

  The awful sound of my own voice made

  My lips tremble—

  ‘Is something the matter, Melissa?’ Mrs Freeman stopped in mid-flow and fixed me with a look of withering contempt. I could no more control the broad grin on my face than I had been able to restrain the snort of laughter that had escaped from me.

  ‘Melissa? Something is amusing you? Perhaps you would explain to the class?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Freeman,’ I gasped, trying to conquer the waves of mirth that were still rising. ‘It’s nothing really. It’s just… it’s just… well, the poetry’s so silly!’

  Mrs Freeman looked at me in silence, and I felt the tension as she weighed up in her mind whether to approach the situation with an Enlightened Class Discussion, or to treat it as a Very Serious Matter. I was lucky. She plumped for the former.

  ‘What a very interesting comment, Melissa. Can you explain just what you mean? Shelley’s poetry has been loved and revered by the learned and the great, and yet you find it “silly”?’

  ‘It is silly,’ I said, with a sudden flash of reckless irritation. ‘He takes himself too seriously. It’s as though he’s forgotten how to laugh at himself, so that it’s not real any more, like when Beth, my little sister, is in a bad mood and goes off into Mother’s bedroom to practise making miserable faces in the mirror. And not only that; my mother says—’

  I stopped. There was a dangerous glint in Mrs Freeman’s eye. Maybe she wouldn’t want to hear what Mother had to say on the subject of Shelley’s poetry.

  ‘Yes?’ said Mrs Freeman, but her tone of voice was not all that encouraging, ‘And what does your mother say, Melissa?’

  ‘Mother says, that love is only true love when it shows itself in fidelity—um, faithfulness. She says if a person has the feeling of love, but no faithfulness, his love is just self-indulgent sentimentality. And that’s what Shelley was like, isn’t it? He wrote fine poems to his wife and his lovers, but he wasn’t a faithful man. So how can his poetry about love be worth anything if his love in real life wasn’t worth anything?’

  ‘Well, I understand what you’re trying to say, Melissa,’ said Mrs Freeman, kindly, ‘but you must realise, Shelley was a very great artist—a free spirit and a philosopher. He was not quite like other men. That was part of his greatness.’

  I could see she wanted that to be the end of it, but I had the light of battle in my eyes now. I wasn’t Mother’s daughter for nothing.

  ‘Does that mean if I can write poetry like this it doesn’t matter if I keep my promises then?’ I said.

  Mrs Freeman’s face wore a slight frown of irritation.

  ‘Melissa,’ she said patiently, ‘Shelley was a very young man, and you are very young. You still have a great deal to learn. Now, how about the rest of the class? What do you think of the poem we have just been reading? Shirley?’

  Shirley looked up from the complicated doodle she was perfecting in her notebook. She cleared her throat.

  ‘It’s… it’s… it’s got some good description in it…’ she ventured wildly.

  ‘Norma?’ said Mrs Freeman coldly.

  ‘I don’t know, really,’ said Norma helplessly. ‘It’s a bit long and complicated. Perhaps he would have been better to write a proper story.’

  Mrs Freeman drew a long, deep breath, and let it go in a sigh of discouragement. ‘Let’s leave it there for today,’ she said, in a flat sort of voice. ‘You can take down your homework in the last ten minutes. I will write the title for your essay on the board. Please have the plan ready for the next lesson. It may help you to read the introductory note to Lyrical Ballads, which starts after the foreword and the preface.’

  I felt mean, somehow, as though I had squashed something precious for her. She had been so absorbed in the poem. It was like Mary at the breakfast table, the sparkle in her eyes extinguished by our thoughtless laughter. I felt horrid inside, guilty. It must be rotten to be a teacher sometimes, to face a blank sea of faces, resisting you. It was as though we weren’t people for the teachers, and they weren’t people for us. Worse than enemies. Strangers. And yet… and yet the poem was silly, and dishonest too, somehow. A lot of words without truth or goodness behind them… I wrote down the homework, glad of the end of the day, but the lesson left a sour taste in my mouth. I wished I’d never said anything in the first place.

  I waited for Therese after school and we walked slowly up the hill together. There was something kind and sensible about Therese that always made life seem safe and normal again, when fear or questioning or trouble invaded me. Even Therese looked gloomy today, though.

  ‘Lilian did copy my essay,’ she said, as we plodded up the hill. ‘Mrs Freeman was cross about it, and told her off in class. Lilian won’t speak to me at all, now.’

  ‘She won’t speak to you! It ought to be the other way round!’ Therese shook her head. ‘She’s my friend,’ she said sadly, ‘but come on ‘lissa! Mary will be waiting for her birthday tea! Let’s hurry up.’

  It was a new idea to me that you could go on being so
meone’s friend even when they’d done something awful to you, even when you felt as though you didn’t like them any more. I quickened my pace to match Therese’s. Lilian didn’t seem worth it to me.

  As we reached the gate, the door flew open, and Mary’s eager, radiant face met us. ‘Come and see my cake!’ she cried. ‘It says “Mary” and there are flowers and candles!’

  It was a beautiful birthday cake, iced white with pink rosebuds. Six of the rose-buds on the top had little candles stuck in them, and Mary’s name was written across the middle in pale green icing.

  The birthday tea was wonderful, with crisps and tiny sausages, little cubes of cheese and grapes and three kinds of sandwiches, brandy-snaps filled with whipped cream, and a huge lemon meringue pie as well as the cake. There was a big jug of Mother’s homemade lemonade to wash it all down.

  We ate every crumb, and drank every drop, but before we cut up the cake we lit the candles and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to Mary, and she blew out all her candles in one go, with a bit of help from Cecily. After tea, the little ones went out to play in the garden, pink and sticky and content.

  Therese and I helped Mother clear away the tea things before we did our homework. As Therese went down the step into the kitchen, carrying the big blue and white jug that held the lemonade, she missed her footing, and the jug shot from her hands and smashed into a thousand pieces on the tiled floor. There was a horrified silence, and Therese looked at Mother with pink cheeks and shocked eyes full of tears.

  ‘It was an accident,’ said Mother resignedly. ‘Get the brush and dustpan, Therese, and sweep it up. Get every little bit, now, because Cecily runs about barefoot in this warm weather.’

  Therese swept up all the pieces, and took them, well wrapped in newspaper, to the dustbin.

  ‘It was my favourite jug,’ said Mother sadly, as Therese went out of earshot, round the corner of the house, ‘but there’s nothing to be gained by shouting at her. Things just fly out of her hands. I have to say to myself, “She’s like Brother Theo, she doesn’t do it on purpose, don’t be cross.”’

  My ears pricked up at this. ‘Like who? Is it a story? Who was Brother Theo?’

  ‘Yes, there’s a story. At bedtime I’ll tell you.’ Therese came in from the garden, looking miserable. ‘I am sorry, Mother. It was your favourite jug.’

  ‘Darling, it couldn’t be helped. Come on now and do your homework, while I wash up these things.’

  I hurried through my math homework, uneasily aware of having done some very shaky calculations, and did the reading and essay plan Mrs Freeman had asked for. The little ones came in from the garden for their baths as I was writing, and I could hear them in the bathroom, arguing about whose turn it was to sit on the plug, and Mother’s tired voice growing impatient. I finished off my work quickly, and went to help her towel them dry and shepherd them up to the bedroom.

  They played their game of trumpeting elephants and scuttling mice, and said their prayers, and then Mary and Beth wriggled into their beds while Cecily curled up on Mother’s lap, squeaking softly, ‘Weakness! Weakness!’ as Mother stroked her hair.

  At last the day was over. The sunset had blazed its last splendid banners and subsided to a dusky crimson afterglow. I drew the curtains on it, and lit the candle.

  ‘You said there was a story. Mother,’ I said, unable to contain myself any longer. ‘You said there was at teatime; about Brother Theo. Are you going to tell us now? Is it—’

  ‘Hush,’ said Mother. ‘You’re filling the air with excitement. It’s calm and quiet we need for a story. Yes, I’ll tell you about Brother Theo; when you’re ready to listen.’

  We all settled down and waited, and into the silence Cecily began to sing in her high reedy voice:

  Free blind mice, free blind mice,

  See how they run, see how they run,

  They all run after the farmer’s wife

  And cut her up with a carving knife…

  ‘Hush now,’ laughed Mother. ‘Listen to the story. Here, put your thumb in your mouth. That’s better.’ Cecily cuddled in close to Mother, and a vacant, drowsy look came into her eyes as she sucked her thumb, held warm and close in the candlelight. Beth yawned a huge yawn.

  ‘I am six now,’ said Mary. ‘I am a big girl. I have had a lovely day.’

  ‘Have you, Mary?’ said Mother, pleased. ‘I’m glad it was a nice birthday. Snuggle down now.’

  ‘Please, Mother,’ I ventured.

  ‘Ssh,’ she said.

  Brother Theodore was a novice at the Abbey of St Alcuin. He was always in trouble; he’d been in trouble all his life. It wasn’t really his fault. His father had been telling him to take that look off his face ever since he could remember, but try as he might, he’d never been able to reassemble his features to suit him, and he continually aggravated and disappointed his father in a thousand other ways, too. He was slow and dreamy and inattentive, a forgetter of messages and a bodger of errands. He wanted to join in the games that the other children played, but he couldn’t throw straight, and he couldn’t catch a ball, nor could he run without tripping on his own feet, which were large and clumsy like the rest of him. When he was seven years old, he went to learn his letters, along with the other lads of his village, under the tuition of Father Marcus, the parish priest, but he was a poor pupil, never knowing what he had been asked to do, though his work was good enough when he did it. Taken all round, he was a child born to get under the skin of authority and irritate, and whippings and scoldings were his daily fare. Things didn’t improve much when, on his thirteenth birthday, his father apprenticed him to the iron-fisted, sullen-faced village blacksmith, to learn a trade and make his way in the world. From his new master, as from his father and his teacher, he attracted nothing but beatings and derision, for the blacksmith was a surly and impatient man with neither imagination nor kindness to spare for his gangling and butter-fingered apprentice, whose incompetence was pushed to ridiculous lengths by his fear.

  The one source of comfort and loving-kindness in the poor boy’s life was his grandmother: a dear, wise, gentle old lady to whom he brought all his tears and his troubles from his babyhood until she died, when he was fifteen. She had been a devout woman, and from her he had learned in early childhood to love the Mass and to pray and to trust to God’s goodness in spite of adversity. Her death reverberated in shock waves through his loneliness, and having no one else now in whom to confide, he clung in prayer to Christ crucified, and began more and more to long for the monastic life of prayer and service lived to God’s glory.

  Just after his eighteenth birthday, already world-weary, sad and sporting a black eye which was his parting gift from his father— who bitterly resented the waste of the money he had laid out on his son’s apprenticeship—the young man entered the community of Benedictines at St Alcuin’s. He came as much in the mood of a man seeking sanctuary as anything else, though there burned somewhere within him a small flame of hope that here, if anywhere, he would find acceptance and brotherhood, a place to belong. His name had rung in his ears like a clap of thunder in the mouths of irate parents and teachers until he was glad to hear the last of it when he made his novitiate vows and was clothed in the habit of the order, and tonsured, and given his new name which was Brother Theodore. He began his new life churning with mixed emotions: lingering grief for his grandmother, a sense of shame at his inability to succeed at anything, all mixed with a passionate longing to serve God well and to be a good monk. But for all his good intentions, here, too, he was always in trouble.

  Father Matthew avowed that Theodore was the only novice who could slam a door opening it as well as shut ting it. He was almost always late for his lessons, and sometimes for the Office too, however hard he tried to be in the right place at the right time. His habit was stained, torn and patched, and his hair around the tonsure looked like a crow’s nest. He dreaded the days when it was his turn to wait on the brothers at table, in case a pewter plate should slip from his fingers and fall
with a crash, caus ing the reader to lose his place and the silent monks to smile or glare according to temperament; or lest the pitcher should slip in his hands and he should splash water into someone’s soup.

  Poor Brother Theo. He was a thorn in Father Matthew’s side; Father Matthew being neat and careful in all he did, and tidy and well-groomed to the point of suavity. Father Matthew found Theodore exasperating beyond what his patience could endure, and berated him daily for his carelessness and clumsiness. He was determined to mould even this unpromising specimen of a novice into the quiet, unobtrusive, recollected character which was the monastic ideal; by exhortation, by penance, and occasionally even by the rod.

  Theodore saw his hopes of a new beginning turn to ashes in the miserable discovery that even men who had given their whole lives to follow Christ could be irritable, sharp-tongued and hasty to one like himself.

  In spite of this sad realisation, life was not all misery, for amidst his habitual diet of failure and disgrace, Theo found in the monastery three places of refuge—sources of comfort and even of delight. The first was the scriptorium, for here, astonishingly, he proved to have an uncommon talent in the art of manuscript illumination, and a fair hand as a copyist, producing work of elegance and beauty.

  He also discovered that he was musically gifted and could express in composition the same exquisite harmony and balance that showed in his manuscript work but was so disastrously lacking in all other areas of his life. So his second place of refuge was with the precentor, Brother Gilbert, with whom he spent time working on new settings for the Mass and the psalms and canticles, harmonising his clear and pleasant tenor with Brother Gilbert’s baritone. Brother Gilbert treated him with friendship and respect—respect well-deserved too—and for this Theodore was grateful indeed. His family was one where there was neither interest nor pleasure in music or art, and these subjects were a new experience for him. Brother Gilbert and Brother Clement who oversaw the library and scriptorium noticed with interest that as Theodore was able to forget his self-consciousness and lose himself in the creative work he loved, so his clumsiness dropped away from him; and with ink and brush and pen and parchment he was deft and precise in all he did. They made no comment, but being artists themselves they understood, as Father Matthew did not, Brother Theodore’s temperament.