I looked over my shoulder. It was only a bombing plane which had flown between me and the sun. The place seemed to be creeping with them.
I strolled into the church. For almost the first time since I got back to Lower Binfield I didn’t have the ghostly feeling, or rather I had it in a different form. Because nothing had changed. Nothing, except that all the people were gone. Even the hassocks looked the same. The same dusty, sweetish corpse-smell. And by God! the same hole in the window, though, as it was evening and the sun was round the other side, the spot of light wasn’t creeping up the aisle. They’d still got pews–hadn’t changed over to chairs. There was our pew, and there was the one in front where Wetherall used to bellow against Shooter. Sihon king of the Amorites and Og the king of Bashan! And the worn stones in the aisle where you could still half-read the epitaphs of the blokes who lay beneath them. I squatted down to have a look at the one opposite our pew. I still knew the readable bits of it by heart. Even the pattern they made seemed to have stuck in my memory. Lord knows how often I’d read them during the sermon.
Here fon, Gent.,
of this parif h his juft &
upright
To his manifold private bene
volences he added a dilignet
beloved wifeAmelia, by iffue feven
daughters
I remembered how the long S’s used to puzzle me as a kid. Used to wonder whether in the old days they pronounced their S’s as F’s, and if so, why.
There was a step behind me. I looked up. A chap in a cassock was standing over me. It was the vicar.
But I mean the vicar! It was old Betterton, who’d been vicar in the old days–not, as a matter of fact, ever since I could remember, but since 1904 or thereabouts. I recognized him at once, though his hair was quite white.
He didn’t recognize me. I was only a fat tripper in a blue suit doing a bit of sightseeing. He said good evening and promptly started on the usual line of talk–was I interested in architecture, remarkable old building this, foundations go back to Saxon times and so on and so forth. And soon he was doddering round, showing me the sights, such as they were–Norman arch leading into the vestry, brass effigy of Sir Roderick Bone who was killed at the Battle of Newbury. And I followed him with the kind of whipped-dog air that middle-aged businessmen always have when they’re being shown round a church or a picture-gallery. But did I tell him that I knew it all already? Did I tell him that I was Georgie Bowling, son of Samuel Bowling–he’d have remembered my father even if he didn’t remember me–and that I’d not only listened to his sermons for ten years and gone to his Confirmation classes, but even belonged to the Lower Binfield Reading Circle and had a go at Sesame and Lilies just to please him? No, I didn’t. I merely followed him round, making the kind of mumble that you make when somebody tells you that this or that is five hundred years old and you can’t think what the hell to say except that it doesn’t look it. From the moment that I set eyes on him I’d decided to let him think I was a stranger. As soon as I decently could I dropped sixpence in the Church Expenses box and bunked.
But why? Why not make contact, now that at last I’d found somebody I knew?
Because the change in his appearance after twenty years had actually frightened me. I suppose you think I mean that he looked older. But he didn’t! He looked younger. And it suddenly taught me something about the passage of time.
I suppose old Betterton would be about sixty-five now, so that when I last saw him he’d have been about forty-five–my own present age. His hair was white now, and the day he buried Mother it was a kind of streaky grey, like a shaving-brush. And yet as soon as I saw him the first thing that struck me was that he looked younger. I’d thought of him as an old, old man, and after all he wasn’t so very old. As a boy, it occurred to me, all people over forty had seemed to me just worn-out old wrecks, so old that there was hardly any difference between them. A man of forty-five had seemed to me older than this old dodderer of sixty-five seemed now. And Christ! I was forty-five myself. It frightened me.
So that’s what I look like to chaps of twenty, I thought as I made off between the graves. Just a poor old hulk. Finished. It was curious. As a rule I don’t care a damn about my age. Why should I? I’m fat, but I’m strong and healthy. I can do everything I want to do. A rose smells the same to me now as it did when I was twenty. Ah, but do I smell the same to the rose? Like an answer a girl, might have been eighteen, came up the churchyard lane. She had to pass within a yard or two of me. I saw the look she gave me, just a tiny momentary look. No, not frightened, not hostile. Only kind of wild, remote, like a wild animal when you catch its eye. She’d been born and grown up in those twenty years while I was away from Lower Binfield. All my memories would have been meaningless to her. Living in a different world from me, like an animal.
I went back to the George. I wanted a drink, but the bar didn’t open for another half-hour. I hung about for a bit, reading a Sporting and Dramatic of the year before, and presently the fair-haired dame, the one I thought might be a widow, came in. I had a sudden desperate yearning to get off with her. Wanted to show myself that there’s life in the old dog yet, even if the old dog does have to wear false teeth. After all, I thought, if she’s thirty and I’m forty-five, that’s fair enough. I was standing in front of the empty fireplace, making believe to warm my bum, the way you do on a summer day. In my blue suit I didn’t look so bad. A bit fat, no doubt, but distingué. A man of the world. I could pass for a stockbroker. I put on my toniest accent and said casually:
‘Wonderful June weather we’re having.’
It was a pretty harmless remark, wasn’t it? Not in the same class as ‘Haven’t I met you somewhere before?’
But it wasn’t a success. She didn’t answer, merely lowered for about half a second the paper she was reading and gave me a look that would have cracked a window. It was awful. She had one of those blue eyes that go into you like a bullet. In that split second I saw how hopelessly I’d got her wrong. She wasn’t the kind of widow with dyed hair who likes being taken out to dance-halls. She was upper-middle-class, probably an admiral’s daughter, and been to one of those good schools where they play hockey. And I’d got myself wrong too. New suit or no new suit, I couldn’t pass for a stockbroker. Merely looked like a commercial traveller who’d happened to get hold of a bit of dough. I sneaked off to the private bar to have a pint or two before dinner.
The beer wasn’t the same. I remember the old beer, the good Thames Valley beer that used to have a bit of taste in it because it was made out of chalky water. I asked the barmaid:
‘Have Bessemers’ still got the brewery?’
‘Bessemers? Oo, no, sir! They’ve gorn. Oo, years ago–long before we come ’ere.’
She was a friendly sort, what I call the elder-sister type of barmaid, thirty-fivish, with a mild kind of face and the fat arms they develop from working the beer-handle. She told me the name of the combine that had taken over the brewery. I could have guessed it from the taste, as a matter of fact. The different bars ran round in a circle with compartments in between. Across in the public bar two chaps were playing a game of darts, and in the Jug and Bottle there was a chap I couldn’t see who occasionally put in a remark in a sepulchral kind of voice. The barmaid leaned her
