All the Blood Within Me

KINGSLEY AMIS

I

'THAT morning Alec Mackenzie had been un- I able to eat even his usual small breakfast, so when, some minutes out of Euston, coffee and light refreshments were announced, he went along to the dining-car. He felt that, in view of what lay ahead, he should have something in- side him, however nasty it or the task of getting it down might prove. It was good, too, to quit the company of those sharing his compartment, a standard crew of secret agents for the bus companies: two sailors and a portable radio, an ever-toddling toddler, a man whose pipe whim- pered and grumbled, an old woman with a hat who moved her lips as she read her library book and wet her fingers thoroughly before turning each page.

The first person he saw on entering the dining- car was Bob Anthony, wearing a suit that looked like woven vegetable soup and reading a newspaper with awful concentration. Alec found it hard not to dive back the way he had come, let alone stand his ground, but he knew that the two of them must have caught the train for the same reason and would have to meet sooner or later. Hoping only that it would be later, he did not resist when the steward put him in a chair facing Bob's, but at the opposite end of the car.

For twenty-four hours now his brain had behaved as if some terminal had come loose, deactivating half of it and letting the rest work only at low efficiency. Perhaps this was what people meant when they talked about moving round in a trance. The half-rural landscape, wheeling past the window in average September sunshine, had a flat, pointless quality. Alec felt a slight amazement that things like keeping out of Bob's way for a few extra minutes should still matter to him, and again that he should find himself making his customary weak and futile appeal for a pot of tea instead of the donkey- coloured mixture now being served under the name of coffee. Habit persisted when other things broke down. He drank coffee and ate biscuits. The one look he had had at Bob had been quite enough to assure him that Bob's recent outbreak of affluence showed no sign of abat- ing. Alec was well enough resigned to his own failure—bowing uncomplainingly to the inevit- able was part of his code—but he had no in- tention of ceasing to be indignant at Bob's luck. A long period of floundering round the legal profession had been halted by two deaths. The first of these, brought on by an alcoholic seizure occurring slightly ahead of expectation, had had the effect of hauling Bob up a notch or two; the second, in which drink had played a more devious role as the agent of a fall downstairs, had made him virtual head of the firm, Bob having helped fate along, so to speak, by be- coming friendly with the faller's widow. The depth of this friendship remained obscure, but it was certain that the second dead man's half- share in the business had passed under Bob's control and stayed there.

An approaching disturbance—the sound of a hip striking the corner of a laden table, the clash of crockery on a tray abruptly snatched from collision—warned Alec that Bob was on his way to join him. He looked up and saw that, apart from some lateral distortion caused by the movement of the train, the old stooping gait was the same as ever, not in the least scholarly, the tread of someone closing in on bodily enjoyment or the means to buy some.

'Hallo, Mac,' Bob said in his curt tone and fake-genteel accent, then at once set about mak- ing people move so that he could sit where he wanted, opposite Alec. When he had done this he swept the cloth with the edge of his news- paper and they looked at each other in a way they often did, Bob unconcernedly claiming superior sophistication, Alec on the defensive, ready, if challenged, to stress the importance of moral fibre. Then both turned blank and grim. Alec found nothing to say; his attention was like a weight too heavy to move from where it had landed, on Bob's suit. Why was he wearing it? He must have others. Where were they? 'Well, Mac, words aren't much use at a timo like this, eh?'

'No. No, they're not.'

Bob signalled emphatically for more coffee. 'I'd have thought you'd have gone down there yesterday.'

'I didn't like to intrude.'

'Oh, but surely, I mean Jim would have been glad to have you there, old chap. After all, you're not exactly a stranger.'

'I worked it out that he'd sooner have been on his own. I know I would if it had been me.'

'That's where you go wrong, Mac, if I may say so. You're by way of being a reserved type, always have been. I'm not blaming you, heaven knows—you can't help the way you're made— but most people aren't like that, you see. They want their pals round them. I call that a normal human instinct. Tell me, are you still living at that place of yours in Ealing?'

'You asked me that the last time you saw me in the Lord Nelson. I haven't moved since then.'

'It would drive me crackers, quite frankly, being on my own twelve hours of the day. What do you do when you feel like nipping out and having a few?'

'I haven't got much cash for nipping out and having a few, so the question doesn't arise very often.'

'No, I see.' Bob seemed not to have noticed the bitterness which Alec had been unable to keep out of his voice. Not noticing things like that was no doubt useful to one who led Bob's kind of life. After gazing with apparent in- credulity at the coffee with which their cups were now being refilled, he went on: 'What do you do of an evening, then? You can't just . .

'Oh, I get a bit of bridge now and again, and there are one or two people I drop in, on. There's a colleague of mine in the export department living just ten minutes' walk away. I usually have some grub with him and his wife Sunday midday and occasionally in the week.'

'Still go to your concerts?'

'Not so much now.'

Bob shook his head and drew in his breath. 'It wouldn't do for me, I must say.'

'Well, we're not all built the same, are we?' 'No, I like being in company.'

Alec knew how true this was. The advent of the partner's widow had done nothing to curb Bob's habit of suddenly appearing in the Lord Nelson, the pub near the Temple both men were apt to use at lunch-time, and plying some woman with large gin-and-frenches while Alec sat up at the bar with his light ale and veal-and-ham pie and salad. Every few minutes the other two would burst out laughing at some trivial phrase, or go off into face-to-face mumbling that some- times led to more laughter, all eyes and teeth. He never knew how to behave during these interludes.

The train had stopped at a station. Bob glanced out of the window and dropped his voice slightly. 'I suppose it was another stroke, was it? Jim wasn't very clear on the phone.'

'Yes, it was a stroke all right. She died before they could get her to hospital.'

'Good way to go, I suppose. Better than poor old Harry. He was under drugs for almost a year, you know. It makes you wonder what sod of exit you'll have when it comes to your turn. Selfish, of course, but natural. Do yob ever think about that, Mac? How you'll go?'

`Yes.'

`Still, there's no use getting morbid. Actually, I should think of the two of us you'll last ' longest. You thin little wiry chaps take a devil of a lot of killing, in my experience. You're a bit younger than me anyway, aren't you?'

'I was sixty-four in June.'

'Not six months in it. We don't live to much of an age in our family. Harry was the same age as me when he snuffed it, and then poor Dora was barely fifty, and now here's Betty only sixty-seven; well, I say "only," that's not really old as things go nowadays, is it? Still, look at it another way and it's a lot of years. You must have known her since, what, 'thirty-two or -three?'

The . . . I'm not sure of the date, but it was August Bank Holiday, 1929.'

'Here, that's pretty good card-index work, Mac. Well I'm blowed. How on earth do you remember it so exactly?'

'It was the day of the mixed doubles tourna- ment at that tennis club near Balham we all used to belong to.' Alec began filling his pipe. 'I got brought in to run the show at the last minute. Until the Friday I didn't see how there could be a show, and what with the teas to arrange and one thing and another it'll be a long time before I forget that day, believe me.'

`Mm. It, er, turned out all right, did it?' 'Yes, Betty and Jim got into the semi-finals. Nobody knew if they were any good or not, with them just movjng into the district. But then they took the first set 6-1, and every- one could see . . . well, as soon as Betty had made her first couple of shots, really. Her back- hand was very strong, unusual in a woman. 1 didn't get a chance against them myself, be- cause . .

As clearly as if he had just seen a photo- graph of it, Alec recalled one moment of that first day. Jim, his bald head gleaming in the sun, was standing up at the net; Betty had stepped forward from the baseline and, with as much control as power, was sending one of her back- hand drives not more than an inch or two above the net and squarely between their two oppo- nents, who formed the only blurred patches in the image. Although the farthest away, Betty's figure was well defined, the dark hair in a loose bob, the sturdy forearms and calves, the straight nose that gave her face such distinction, even the thinning of the lips in concentration and effort. Some details were wrong—Betty's pleated white skirt belonged not to that afternoon, Alec knew, but was part of a summer dress she had worn on a day trip to Brighton just before the war, and Jim had not been so bald so early. There was nothing to be done about it, though: while a part of his mind fumbled left-handedly to correct it, the picture stayed as it was. Just as well, perhaps, that it had not been given to human beings to visualise things at will.

Long before Alec was finally silent, Bob was glancing fitfully about, extending and shorten- ing his body and neck like someone trying to see over a barrier that constantly varied in height. He was always having to have things: another round of drinks, the right time, a taxi, the menu, the bill, a word with old So-and-so before they settled down. While he twitched a nose rich in broken capillaries, he said inatten- tively: 'Of course, you were pretty attached to her, weren't you, Mac?'

`Yes, I was.'

'And so was she to you, old thing.' The dis- tance between Bob's waist and chin grew sharply, is if a taxi-driver or possibly a racing tipster had flung himself down full length behind Alec's seat. 'She was always on about you, you know. Talking about you.'

'Really?'

'Oh yes. You had a lot of brains, according to her. Looked up to you, so she said. I'd like a miniature of brandy, please,' he added over Alec's shoulder. 'Wait a minute. Better make it two.'

Alec began wondering how to decline the offer of a miniature of brandy. He need not have worried, because when they came Bob put them both carefully away in the pockets of the woven- soup suit. He then tried to pay for Alec's coffee, but Alec prevented him.

'Ali, we're just coming in,' Bob said : 'there's that pickle-factory place. Appalling stink when the wind's in the right direction, makes you wonder what they put in the blessed stuff. How are you feeling, old chap?'

'Me? Fm perfectly all right.' The barrier in Alec's head had given no sign of breaking down in the last five minutes, which meant it might just possibly stay in position for the next three hours, or however long it was going to be before he could decently leave. If he could hold out until then, the truth about him and Betty would never be known to any outsider, especially Bob. The thought of their secret being turned over by that parvenu mind, frivolous, hard-headed and puritanical in turn, and never the right one at the right time, was unendurable.

Bob had got up and was looking at his watch. 'Good for you, Mac. Mm, late as per usual. I think we'd better go straight to the church. It might be the best thing in some ways.'

II

'WILL you sit, please,' the clergyman directed. He was a bulky man of about fifty-five with white hair carefully combed and set. He had a thick voice, as if his throat were swollen. It went down a tone or two each time he told the congregation to change its posture. His way of doing this even when it was clearly unneces- sary, and of giving every such syllable its full value, made up a good substitute for quite a long sentence about the decline of church-going, the consequent uncertainty and uneasiness felt by many people on such occasions as did bring them into the house of God, his own determina- tion that there should be no confusion in his church about what some might think were small points of procedure, and the decline of church- going. Now, after making absolutely certain that everyone had done his bidding, he pronounced the dead woman's name in the manner of an operator beginning to read back a telegram.

`Elizabeth . . . Duerden,' he said, 'has brought us together here today by virtue of the fact that she has recently died. I need not tell you that the death of someone we love, or even the death of any human being, is the most serious and important event with which this life can con- front us. I want for a short time, if I may, to look into this business of death, to suggest a little of what it is, and of what it is not. I believe that the loss which her . . . family has suffered is not absolute, that that thing exists which we so frequently name and seek and offer, so rarely define and obtain and give, that there is consolation, if only we know where to look for it. Where, then, are we to look?'

By now the man sounded as if he had been going on for hours and had more hours ahead of him. Some of the thickness, however, had left his voice when he continued: 'In another age than ours, we should find it natural to look in the first place to the thought that to be separated from the ones we love by the death of the body is not final. We should derive our consolation from knowing that no parting is for ever, that all losses will, in God's good time, be restored. But that would hardly do today, would it, thinking along those lines? It wouldn't do much for most of us today.'

Something so close to vigour had entered the speaker's tone in the last couple of sentences that they were like an interruption, from which he himself took a moment to recover. Then he went on as thickly as ever: 'But God's mercy has seen to it that we need not depend for our consolation upon any such belief. We find this out as soon as we can put aside 'something of our agony and shock and begin to ask our- selves what has happened. What has happened is manifestly that somebody has been taken from us and nothing will ever be the same again. But what has not happened? That person has not been eradicated from our hearts and minds, that person's life has not been cancelled out like a row of figures in a sum, that person's identity is not lost, and can never be lost . . . Elizabeth Duerden lives in those who knew her and loved her. The fact that she lived, and was Elizabeth Duerden and no one else, had a profound effect upon a number of people, a considerable effect upon many more people, a slight but never im- perceptible effect upon innumerable people. There is nobody, there never has been anybody, of whom it can be said that the world would have been the same if they had never lived.'

He can string words together, Alec thought. Or whoever had written the stuff could. He looked round the church, anxious to impress on his memory this part, at least, of today. But it was a modern building, thirty years old at the most, with bright stained glass. a tiled floor, and woodwork that reminded him of the dining- room suites he saw in suburban shop windows: none of the air of antiquity that had always ap- pealed to Betty.

The Gioberti family occupied the pew in front. The farthest away from him was Annette Gioberti, who turned her head now and gave him a faint smile. The bearer of this exotic name looked like a soberly but becomingly dressed English housewife in her middle thirties, which, as the daughter of Jim and Betty, was much what might have been expected of her. Jim had been against the marriage at first, say- ing among other things that, while he had no objection to Italians or half-Italians as such, he did not fancy having his grandchildren brought up as Roman Catholics. But Betty had soon laughed him out of that by asking him when he had last had anything to do with the Church of England, and had added that Frank Gioberti was a decent hard-working lad who was ob- viously going to do everything in his power to make Annette happy—what more could they ask?

Alec had never know Betty to err in her judgments of people, and in this case she had turned out to be almost too literally accurate. From what she told Alec, whose direct contacts with the Giobertis were rare, there was plenty of money around in that household, and no shortage of affection, especially if you counted the more obvious kind of show of it—expensive presents on anniversaries as well as birthdays, and bunches of flowers being delivered unex- pectedly. But as regards the finer things of life (Alec always wanted to smile at this favourite phrase of Betty's, so characteristic of her in its naïve sincerity) there was a complete gap: no books apart from trashy thrillers, no music ex- cept what the wireless and gramophone churned out, and no pictures at all; in fact Betty had given them a Medici print of a mediaeval Virgin and Child one Christmas, thinking it would ap- peal to Frank, and had come across it months later in a drawer in one of the children's bed- rooms.

The part of Frank that could be seen above the back of the pew seemed to Alec to offer a good deal of information. The thick black hair was heavily" greased; the neck bulged in a way that promised a roll of fat there in due course; the snowily white shirt-collar and the charcoal- grey suit material did somehow or other manage to suggest, not lack of taste exactly, but the attitude that money was more interesting. Still, one had to be tolerant. A man who owned how- ever many laundries it was in the Deptford area could hardly be expected to have the time or the inclination to take up the French horn. It was only the children who might be the losers, especially since, in a materialistic age like the present one, the parent had a special responsi- bility for suggesting that there were some worth- while things which nobody could be seen eating or drinking or smoking or wearing or driving or washing dishes in on TV commercials. And then people wondered why there was all this. . . .

Alec pulled himself physically upright in his seat. It was almost frightening, the way the mind could so easily follow its well-worn tracks, even at times of unique stress. Habit again : nature's protection. He turned cold at the thought- that today might pass him by altogether, that he might in some way miss experiencing it or beginning to understand it. The most abject and revealing loss of composure would be better than that. He started doing what he could never have predicted : trying to feel. 'A human being,' the clergyman was saying, 'is the sum of many qualities, and it is from what we see of these that we form our ideas of what everything in life is, of what life itself is.' No help there. Alec glanced over to the front pew across the aisle, where Jim and Bob sat together. With the Giobertis, this was all the family there was. Jim's brother, who had emigrated to Canada getting on for thirty years ago, had not received Jim's cable, or had not answered it, and it was now nearly twenty years—yes, twenty next April —since young Charlie, Annette's brother, had been killed in a motor-cycle accident in Alex- andria, three weeks after getting his commission in the Royal Armoured Corps. Well, he had been spared all this.

Jim's face, half-turned towards the clergyman, looked quite relaxed, and he had seemed so in the brief moment at the church door when Alec had just had time to grasp his hand and murmur a few words, though his movements and reac- tions had been a little slower than usual. It had been the same, Alec remembered, the night the telegram about Charlie arrived. He had got there in the small hours—he had left his digs within a minute of getting Jim's phone call, but the train had been held up by an air alert—to find Betty in a state of collapse, naturally, and Jim simply being Jim, only more so: calm, solid, desperately hurt but not defeated, saying little as always, showing a degree of strength that even Alec, who admired him more than any other man he had ever met, had not expected.

Thank God that Jim, at least, was still here. Now that he was alone, Jim might well consider throwing in his lot with him, sharing some sort of household, even perhaps (Alec put this part of his thought aside for future reference) coming into the small glass-merchandising firm of Keith Mackenzie and Company in which Alec, upon his retirement next year, was planning to join his brother lain. If that appealed to Jim, it would be a kind of continuation of the Trio— the name Alec used in his own mind for the unit the Duerdens and he had comprised for over thirty years. And it would be a fine memorial to Betty.

'And so to have lived in vain,' Alec heard the clergyman say, 'is inconceivable.' Even the thickest and most preternaturally apathetic voices have a directional component, and Alec became half-aware that this one was being beamed to- wards him. When a pause followed, he looked up and saw that the clergyman was indeed staring angrily into his face. After another second or two of ocular reprimand, the man spoke again. He was plainly drawing to a close, and now the hint of a new tone was heard, the detached disgust of a schoolmaster reading out to his class some shameful confidential docu- ment he has snatched from the hot hand of one of their number.

'Whence do we derive our ideas of what is most precious and admirable and lovable in human nature? Not from any inborn knowledge, but from what we see in those around us. To know somebody, and even more to know them with love, is constantly to be made aware of what human nature is and can be. To have known somebody with love is to be permanently illuminated with the human capacity for tender- ness, for generosity, for gaiety, for disregard of self, for courage, for forgiveness, for intelli- gence, for compassion, for loyalty, for humility —and nobody has ever lived who has been unable to offer his fellow-creatures some one or other of these. And is this illumination an aspect of life, a side of life, a part of life? No, it is life itself, this learning what we are. And can death diminish that? No, death can do nothing with it, death even throws it into prominence, death is cheated. As death will always be cheated. Let us pray. Will you kneel, please.'

Alec knelt and tried to pray, but could not decide what to pray to. The principle for good he sometimes thought of as existing above and beyond everything, and which he had expected (wrongly) to become more real to him as he grew older, seemed to involve a way of looking at things that included a belief in Betty's having a future, and he could not see how she could have any. So he made some wishes about the past instead, that Betty had had a happy life and had not suffered when she was dying. He felt his mind slowing down and becoming a blank, and would have begun to forget where he was if it had not been for the diminishing footfalls that told him he was about to be left alone. He got quickly to his feet and hurried outside.

III

JIM was shaking hands with the last group of local people under the eye of the clergyman, whose manner now implied that he had been forced into his vestments as part of a practical joke and could see, for the moment, no dignified way of extricating himself. He looked bigger, too.

Alec felt impelled to speak to him: 'Thank you for your address, vicar, I thought it was most—' `Rector,' the other said, moving off.

`Right, let's get on, Mac,' Jim said. 'Who are you going up with?'

There were only two cars to be seen, one with Bob in it, the other full of Giobertis. 'Oh, don't worry about me,' Alec said rather wildly. 'I can walk. How do I get to the . . ?'

`Nonsense, hop in with me and Bob.'

'No, that's for the . I wouldn't want to . .

`Well then, go with Annette and Frank and the kids. These buses take five easily.'

'In here, Uncle Mac,' Annette called, and began making a place for him between herself and her husband. The two Gioberti girls occu- pied the folding seats : Sonia, a bespectacled blonde child of seven or eight with, so far as could be made out, a perfectly spherical head, and Elizabeth, a somewhat darker fourteen- year-old with a figure which, Alec supposed, many grown women would envy. As they moved off, she asked: 'Where did you leave the car, Pop?'

Frank answered in his strong cockney accent : `Outside that hotel where we're going to have lunch, the King's Head or whatever it's called. Tumbledown-looking joint.'

'Why couldn't we have gone up to the cemetery in our car?'

`Because we're going up in this one.'

`Why? Ours is much more comfortable.'

`I dare say it is, but we're going up in this one and that's an end of it, see?'

`What are we going up to the cemetery for?' Sonia asked.

'To see Gran being buried.'

`It won't hurt her,' Sonia stated.

'Of course it won't httrt her, she's dead.' 'What are we going up to see her buried for?' `Because that's what we do.'

`Sonia, take your shoes off there,' Annette said.

'And shut up,' Frank added.

`How's Christopher?' Alec asked. 'Let's see, he must be nearly—' 'He was four in June.'

'Really? It seems only the other—' 'Auntie Gina's looking after him today,' Elizabeth said with a hint of triumph. 'Over at Camberwell.'

To forestall another invitation to silence from Frank, Alec looked out of the window. His eyes immediately fell on the little coffee shop with green check curtains where, whenever he came down for the weekend, he and Betty would spend an hour or so on the Saturday morning before strolling along to the King's Head to meet Jim after his morning of local activities—work for the Ratepayers' Association or the Golf Club committee—and relaxing over a couple of pink gins in the saloon bar, followed by lunch under the low beamed ceiling of the dining-room. It was at times like that that the Trio had really come into its own again, and for days and weeks afterwards there would be a lifting of the shadow that had fallen over Alec's life since 1945. With the war over, the Duerdens had decided to stay on in this part of Buckinghamshire, where they had come in 1941 as a temporary measure to avoid the bombing, and not return after all to their house in Clapham. Since he could not reciprocate their hospitality, Alec had had to confine himself to staying with them only half a dozen times a year at the outside, and had seen them hardly more often for a meal or a theatre in London. He supposed he ought to be thankful that the Trio had survived as well as it had, that it had ever been able to recapture the spirit of its heyday, those twelve happiest years of his life between 1929 and 1941 when the Duerdens and he had occupied houses facing the Common, not four hundred yards apart.

Alec's face was still turned towards the win- dow, but he saw nothing of the neat residential area, its pavements decorated with a staked lime sapling every fifty feet, through which they were now passing. He was thinking of the moment when he had first named the Trio to himself. He and two or three other people (he forgot who) had taken their music round to the Duer- dens' one Sunday evening and, after the coffee and tomato sandwiches, Jim had asked him to have a shot at the accompaniment of a duet they had bought recently. He had sat down at the piano, which had an excellent tone for an upright, and played the thing for them at sight, something of a feat with such bold, dramatic writing, full of shifting trills in both hands. It was 'Onaway, Awake, Beloved,' a far more in- teresting setting than that in Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha, which he had always thought— secretly, for Betty delighted in it, and had met the composer once at a wedding in Croydon—a bit of a bore. Out of the corners of his eyes Alec had been able to see both Betty and Jim as they sang, and when, with his support, the two voices swept into

Does not all the blood withils me Leap to meet thee, leap to meet thee, As the springs to meet the sunshine, In the moon when nights are brightest?

be had felt his own blood leaping through him In a strange, painful rhythm, as if he had stumbled on a mysterious secret. And so he had; he had discovered that there could be a rela- tionship between three people for which none of the ordinary words—friendship, love, under- standing, intimacy—would quite do. When the song finished there had been enthusiastic ap- plause from the others, even from ten-year-old Charlie, who was staying up late as a special treat, and Alec's excitement had passed un- noticed.

The car stopped outside the cemetery. Although Alec had walked along most of the roads in the area many times in the last twenty years, the exterior of this place, and its whole location, were totally unfamiliar to him.

`Here we are,' Frank said. `Want any help, Uncle Mac?'

`No thank you.'

He got out and began walking towards the graveside, remembering that, outside his family and their circle, Betty was the only person who had ever called him `Alec,' and she only for a brief period, perhaps a year after their first = meeting. Then she had slipped into calling him `Mac' as everyone else did, or rather as Jim in particular did. With that fine tact of hers, the finer for being unselfconscious, she had made it clear that there was not to be even the slightest and most nominal acknowledgment of what she felt for Alec, just as he had never by a single word acknowledged what he felt for her. The idea that two people could fall in love instantly and irrevocably and never mention it, let alone do anything about it, would have seemed in- comprehensible or lunatic to anybody but them- selves, or rather, again, to anybody but them- selves and Jim. For Jim had somehow made it clear to Alec that he knew, but without hurt or resentment; he knew, but he understood and forgave, and so made it possible for Alec to go on seeing them without losing his sclf-respect. It was silently agreed between the three of them that while she loved Jim no less, she loved Alec too with a different—he recoiled from the mental impertinence of wondering if it were a deeper— kind of love. Few women would have been capable of that, but love had been Betty's gift.

Alec answered an imaginary question about what he had done with his life by saying to himself that he had loved a fine woman and known a true friend. The love came first, as love must. By repeating this slowly he succeeded for a time in shutting out the presence of those standing near him and all but the first phrase of the dreadful words the clergyman was saying. Then Alec started noticing the coffin lying in the grave. It had been lowered by means of green 'straps that recalled to him, in their colour and texture, the webbing belt Charlie Duerden had worn with his uniform when they lunched at Simpson's together during one of the boy's leaves. A handful of earth was thrown on to the coffin. Alec realised that he had been very afraid of the hollow noise this might make, but it was all right, the soil was dry and chalky, without noticeable clods, and when the spades got to work it could, from the sound, have been any- thing at all being buried. There were the begin. nings of movement away from the graveside; Alec sighed and raised his head, and the whole scene shone brightly in his eyes: the people with their varied complexions and hair, the grass, the privet hedges, the vases of red and blue flowers on the graves, the great pair of cypresses by the entrance, all slightly overcoloured like a picture postcard. In the middle of it all Alec saw the clergyman, looked squarely at him for the first time since leaving the church, and saw that the clergyman, as earlier, was looking at him.

The next moment after Alec felt he was going to cry he started crying; he could no more have prevented it than he could have prevented himself from gasping if a bucket of icy water had been thrown over him. How did it help the dead to have made the living aware of certain things? What good to anyone were ideas about lovable qualities? What use was it to learn about. tenderness? What could you do when you were illuminated about human possibilities, except go round telling yourself how illuminated you were? What was knowing in aid of? And what was it to have loved someone?

`Here we go, old chap,' Bob's voice said. `Just let's take a little stroll together. That's right, steady as she goes. I was wondering when you were going to crack. I was saying to my- self, I wonder when old Mac's going to crack. That's your trouble, if I may so, old stick : you keep things bottled up too much. Far better let 'em come out, like this. Well, you've picked the right time. Just a minute.'

Alec became aware of the curious hooting noise he was making, and pressed his hands over his mouth. 'Nuisance,' he said. `Sorry.' `Don't talk unmitigated piffle, old thing. Holler away for a couple of hours if you feel like it. Get rid of it. Emotion has got to come out. Sooner or later it's got to come out. That's human nature. Here. Go on, knock it back. Down in one. I'll join you if I may. I knew these little beggars would come in handy. Ex- pensive way of buying booze, but still.'

`Thirty years for nothing,' Alec said, cough- ing. 'Wasted my time.'

`Oh no you haven't, Mac. People who've really done that don't mind. Here's the gate.'

IV

No, pipe down, I'm doing this,, Frank said loudly. `Mrs. Allen—another grapefruit juice? Sure you don't want anything stronger? Mrs. Holmes, what about you? Are you quite sure? Mrs. Higginbotham? Ah, that's more like it. Another for you, darling? Right. Now, Rec- tor . . . large scotch . . . Bob . . . large brandy and soda . . . Mr. Walton?'

Mr. Walton, the undertaker, said he would have a pint of black-and-tan with Guinness and best bitter. A tall, vigorous young man in his middle thirties, he had the look of a woodcutter or hedger momentarily in town to get his im- plements sharpened. Part of this look derived from his heavy tan, which had been acquired, so he explained earlier, during a recent live- week holiday on the Costa Brava. Alec found he could imagine Mr. Walton paying for an extra lavish sea-food dinner with one-sixth, say, of the profit on a moderately lavish funeral.

The party, some fifteen strong, was sitting or standing about in the lounge of the King's Head. Alec had been relieved at this choice of venue, thinking that the saloon bar at the side of the building would have been too full of associa- tions, but a glance inside soon after arrival had shown him that, since his last visit here, the room had been so remodelled that he had been unable even to locate the nook by the vanished fire- place where he and Betty and Jim had drunk their pink gins not five Saturdays ago. All the horse-brasses and sporting prints, the uneven dark woodwork and frosted-glass panels that had given the bar its character had been swept away, and the new bright plastics made it bare and unwelcoming. Alec recognised this as part of a pattern of change. The things with which his life had been furnished—the tennis club, the Liberal Association and its strong social side, keeping up with the new plays, music in the sense he understood it, even such numerically unimportant occasions as George V's funeral and George VI's coronation—were no longer there.

The young waiter in the smart white jacket carried his tray over to where Alec was standing in silence with Jim. 'I wanted to say how sorry I am, sir. We shall all miss Mrs. Duerden coming in here. We all liked her very much.'

`Thank you, Fred, that's very nice of you. I think this is yours, Mac.'

Alec took the whisky and soda. He had asked Frank for a small one, but its quantity, com- bined with the darkness of its colour, suggested that it was not very small. This would be his third double, not counting the brandy at the cemetery. Taking a hearty swallow, he tried for a moment to work out how much it was going to cost him to buy a round, then gave up. He could manage it, but it was a good job he had had the foresight to cash that three-quid cheque east night at his local. Much more important was the question of saying something meaningful to Jim,,which he had not managed to do so far. He tried again : 'I know this must seem like the end of everything, but it isn't really, you must believe that.'

`Isn't it? Must I? I'm seventy years old, Mac. What am I supposed to start doing at my age? It's just a matter of waiting now.' `Well, of course, that's how it seems, but . . 'No, that's how it is. Probably in a few months, I don't know, it'll look different again, but how, I just can't ' 'You'll find so many things you want todo.'

`Look, you're not going to waffle about de- veloping new interests, are you? Spare me that. Did I tell you that part-time job of mine with those varnish and stain people packs up at Christ- mas? What do I take up then? Chess?'

`There's bound to be something.' Alec was disconcerted by the violence of Jim's tone and manner. He repressed an impulse to glance over his shoulder. Before he left he would mention to his friend the possibility of their joining forces in London, but now was clearly not the time.

'Oh yes, I'm sure,' Jim said bitterly. 'Wherever you look there's something. Oh, are you off, Rector? Haven't you got time for another one?'

`Unfortunately not.' The clergyman spoke with feeling so intense as to be unidentifiable. 'I have to be getting along.'

`Well, you've been very kind and I'm most grateful.' Jim turned aside to say goodbye to orie of the local couples.

The clergyman looked at Alec. 'Thank you, for saying you liked my address,' he said, blankly this time. 'It's the one I . . . You're not family, arc you?'

`No, just a friend.'

'It's the one I use for those who have become members of my flock retroactively, so to speak —a proportion that increases every year.'

'I see. It was you who . . . 7' The half-question hung in the air for a second or two while what was arguably a smile modi- fied parts of the clergyman's face. 'Yes,' he said, `alone and unaided I did it. But of course 1 was a much younger man then. Goodbye to you.'

Soon afterwards they went in to lunch, just the family and Alec, five adults and two children. They sat at the round table in the window, well away from the alcove favoured by the Trio : another relief. Further, Alec considered, it looked as if he were going to get away with not having to go up to the house at all. He wanted never to see it again, marked throughout as it was by Betty's personality—apart from such details as the oversized TV set Frank had had delivered on the Duerdens' fortieth wedding anniversary.

Their waiter offered his condolences, then the head waiter and the wine waiter; Frank caught the last-named by the sleeve before he could move away and ordered another round of drinks and two bottles of hock off him. The manager came over and chatted for a couple of minutes. He was a new man and had not known the Duerdens well, but, without pushing himself for- ward, he spoke the language of decent feeling. `I had hoped to get to the church this morning,' he said, 'but I just couldn't, with the Business Circle lunch and a christening party oat of the blue. But 1 was thinking about you.' Before departing he added : 'Mrs. Duerden'll be missed all over the town. It won't be the same place without her.'

This moved Alec in a gentle, unagonising way. Betty would never have wanted to be thought one of the important people in the district, but she had been a well-liked queen of her modest bits of castle. Such reflections occupied him for most of the meal, which soon began to acquire some sort of festive air. A couple of stories from Frank about the difficulties of bringing the laundry business up to date contributed little, Alec considered, apart from additional light on the fellow's character. When Bob got going, however, with what he called some unofficial law reports, it had to be admitted that he cheered everybody up. Even Jim had to laugh a few times, and the two Gioberti girls, each clutching a glass of pop, seemed spellbound.

While Alec ordered a round of liqueurs, Frank leaned back and lit a cigarette. 'Fantastic really,' he said. 'Here we are, the lot of us, all having a good time, and two hours ago we were all, well, overwhelmed by grief. It just shows you, don't it? I mean it's natural, see? The church, the graveyard, the pub. Whoever it was thought up how to run funerals knew his job. I reckoned the service was real nice, didn't you, Ann?'

Annette kept her eyes on the table. `Very nice,' she said.

'It was a bit, what shall I say? austere, that's the only criticism I got. Of course, you don't want to listen to us, we're Romans, we go for a bit of, you know, colour and ritual and cere- mony and incense and all that jazz. When you're used to that type of thing the other stuff's bound to come a bit drab, see what I mean?'

'Yes, I do,' Alec said. 'But you've got to re- member that's the way we run things.' He paused to pick up four of the half-dozen pieces of silver that remained of his two pound notes. 'We like our religion to be austere, as you call it.'

`Like 'I said, it's what you're used to.'

Alec's voice rose. 'And we don't like a lot of dressing-up and chanting and bowing and scraping and any tomfoolery of that kind. That's not what we want in this country. We'll do things the British way. . .

'Who's we, Uncle Mac? Okay, Ann.'

. . which means we're not going to take very kindly, necessarily anyway, to any religion that's . . . and a lot of other things for that matter, that aren't . .

`That are foreign, that what you mean?'

`Yes, if you want to put it like that.'

`Well, you want to put it like that, anyway, don't you? It's all right, Ann, honest. Yeah, the Pope does live in Rome, no getting away from that. There's no end of foreign things in this country when you get down to it, like the wine we just drunk, and that cigar you're smok- ing. And lots of foreign people, too, one sort and another. In fact I remember in my far- distant youth they were always going on at us about that—you know, how anyone could come here and carry on pretty well any way he liked, provided he behaved himself., They used to reckon it was one of the big--' `It's no use telling old Mac any of that,' Bob put in, swivelling his glance round the table: 'he thinks the, English are foreigners really, don't you, old chap? and the Welsh and the Irish too, of course, and the Highland Scotch, and he's not too happy about Edinburgh and Glasgow; in fact, unless you come from Peebles you're a black man as near as dammit, what?'

Everybody laughed loudly, including Elizabeth and Sonia. Alec joined in with the rest. He would not have wanted to withdraw anything he had said to Frank. There was far too much of this sentimentality about nowadays, the idea that -you had to be twice as nice to Negroes and Jews and Indians and so on whatever they were like, which the better types among them must surely resent. And he felt that a little opposition from time to time would not do Frank any harm. All the same, Alec realised, he had gone rather far. No need to have got hot under the collar like that—it must have looked . . . Suddenly overheated, he rubbed his hand across his fore- head. He had drunk too much whisky on an empty stomach, and he ought to have remem- bered that white wine never er agreed with him. The notion of a few minutes in the open ail- abruptly became irresistible.

V

walled yard, embellished with a few climb- ing plants, where people could sit and drink in the summer if they cared' to fetch their own orders from the saloon bar. The chairs and tables had been removed, no doubt to protect against his own folly anyone whom the sunshine might have lured into the treacherous autumnal outdoors. Alec perched himself on a low brick wall and was clasping his hands round one knee, pipe in mouth, when he was joined by Annette, who must have followed him more or less straight from the dining-room. She remained standing, a rather dumpy figure without trace of her mother's looks.

He took her expression for one of inquiry. `I'm all right,' he said. 'It was a bit stuffy in there, wasn't it?'

`I didn't like what you said to Frank just now.'

'I know, I'm sorry, Annette, I didn't think.'

`You knew he was in the army for six years and got captured in North Africa? That makes him as British as anyone else as far as I'm con- cerned. That and having a naturalised British father and a mother born British and being born in England himself. And who cares anyway? And do you know how many Catholics there are in England? And it was all Catholics here once, before they `Annette, I really. am sorry. I had no intention of—' `He's the best husband and father anyone could wish for. Never looks at another woman even though I know he gets plenty of chances. And then he runs into this kind of muck. He gets it in business all the time. "Mister who? How do you spell that? Oh." You can tell what they're thinking, that's when they don't come out and say it. I get it too, you see. "How long's your husband been over here?" It makes me mad. She was always going on about it. Fine Liberal she was.'

'But she wouldn't ever have dreamt of--' `You didn't know her. The way she used to go on about Elizabeth. That's a laugh, isn't it, "Elizabeth"? That was him—you don't think I'd have been the one who wanted to name . .

The sunlight suddenly grew more intense and Alec shaded his eyes with the hand that held the Pipe. 'What? I don't quite--' 'Never mind. She's well developed for her age, I know, but these days a lot of them are, with the diet or whatever it is. She'd never let me alone about it—I'd see her watching the kid, sort of fascinated, and then when we were by ourselves she'd say, "She's so big, isn't she?" as if it was • . nasty or disgusting or something. "She's so big," she'd say, as if I'd done it on purpose to spite her. And then she'd say, "Of course, these Italian girls, they're women at fourteen, aren't they? Like Jewesses." Her own granddaughter. Three-quarters English. I don't think she ever believed Frank isn't a Jew really and hadn't taken UP being a Catholic as a sort of extra. She never liked him and she didn't mind showing it, either:' 'But Annette, it was your father who was against Frank if either of them was; I remember them arguing about it. He said—L' You know what Dad's like, up in the air one minute and forgotten all about it the next, it's lust his way. No, she was the' one. It wasn't like her to come out and say anything; all smiles on the surface and needling away whenever she got the chance. She was the same with Sonia's eyesight and Chris crying too much according to her. I often say to myself the only grandchildren she'd really like would be if Charlie and 1 had got together and had some. She gave him a hell of a time, I don't know whether you knew, wanting to know where he was and who he was with all the time. He got away overseas as soon as he could, poor old Charlie.'

Annette stopped, not looking at Alec, who hugged his knees tighter to prevent them from trembling. 'I didn't realise you hated her,' he said.

'1 didn't hate her, Uncle Mac--been easier if I had, in a way. Oh, she was all right in lots of ways and she did enjoy a laugh. It was the way she wouldn't ever leave me and my marriage and my kids alone made me mad.' At the men- tion of anger, anger itself returned to her voice, which had softened in the last minute or so. `She liked baby-sitting when she came to stay because , that gave her a chance to snoop around. She kept you on a pretty good string, didn't she, too, all these years? I felt sorry for you. Dad told me about it once when they'd had one of their rows. He didn't really mind because it gave her a bit of a kick. Mind you, according to him she let it slip once she thought early on you were going to ask her to go off with you, but then you never did. Why not?'

It wasn't that sort of love,' Alec said.

'No, I know the sort. That's the best sort, the sort you don't have to do anything about or get to know the person, and it was fine for her. The way she used to put on a big tolerant act Sun- day mornings when we came back from Mass when we stayed with them. Tolerant.'

Alec thought he saw tears of rage and grief in her eyes. He got up and put his arm diffidently round her shoulders. She went on standing in the same position with her weight on both feet, not stiffening or drawing away, but not relaxing against him either. What she had said had affected him chiefly with apprehension that she might lose all self-control. Whether or not her view of her mother was true, or truer than his, he still felt as if he had spent thirty-two years' preparing a gift that had had, and could con- ceivably have had, no recipient. In return for his trouble lie retained, safe against total erosion, Betty's gift to him of a few ideas about what human nature was like; and the last two or three hours had taught him something of how envy and pride could appreciably distort his judgment of other people. All this amounted to more than a little, without being, of course, anywhere near enough. He dropped his arm to his side.

Annette said: `We'd better be getting back in. I'm sorry I came out with some of that. I didn't want to hurt your feelings—it was just that . .

`We've all been under a great strain.'

`You come back with us, Uncle Mac, and have some supper, there's plenty of stuff in. Frank'll run you home.'

`That's very kind of you, but it's right across LOndon, you know.'

`Doesn't matter. We ought to see more of you. Seems silly not to.'

it's a pity it's such a long way.'