Temples of Delight Read online

  ‘I love your writing,’ Alice said. ‘I’ve never seen brown ink like that.’

  ‘It’s called “Burnt Sienna”,’ Jem said. ‘I learned the writing from an old copy book I found in the convent stockroom.’ Jem meant her previous school which she had evidently left somewhat precipitously. ‘You had to copy out these discouraging little homilies,’ she said. ‘ “ ’Tis better to Die than to Lie”. That was the first one. I sometimes wonder if it’s true.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Alice said, who was a scrupulously truthful child. ‘It’s much too drastic. It couldn’t be.’

  ‘Speaking of flatworms and liver flukes,’ Jem said. ‘Why do you suppose Miss Aldridge is so passionate about Oliver Cromwell?’

  Alice searched her mind for all those reasonable, laudable things which had caused the deposition of the King to be a necessary and progressive act. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Democracy and parliament. You know.’

  Jem shook her head. ‘Fellow-feeling in the matter of facial warts,’ she said.

  ‘But Miss Aldridge hasn’t exactly got warts,’ Alice said in fairness. ‘They’re more moles, really.’ Jem looked Alice squarely in the eye. ‘Well,’ Alice said, capitulating, ‘I suppose that they are quite warty – for moles, I mean.’

  ‘They’re warts,’ Jem said firmly. ‘And they’ll get wartier. You mark my words.’ Jem had turned aside from the liver flukes and had begun idly to entertain herself with an ornate frontispiece in her Science folder. A sort of family tree. The top branch, suitably embellished with calligraphic flourishes, read ‘Sharon and Trevor Cromwell, 1436’. This was followed by several subsidiary branches under which Jem was freely improvising Cromwell spouses and numerous Cromwell progeny.

  ‘But what are you doing?’ Alice asked. She noticed that Dawn and Kevin Cromwell had already spawned Gary and Donna. Alice laughed. ‘Do you think she believed you?’ she said. ‘I mean, all that about the ancient King of Cornwall?’

  ‘Don’t suppose so,’ Jem said, ‘I detected a degree of suspicion. She’ll have her nose buried in a Cornish genealogy at this very moment.’

  ‘Or in a Cornish pasty,’ Alice said. It gave them a fit of the giggles. The thought of poor Miss Aldridge rooting in a pasty …

  ‘I oughtn’t to be made to read books about Cromwell,’ Jem said suddenly. ‘It’s a violation of my spiritual integrity.’

  Alice was never altogether sure from then on whether Miss Aldridge’s moles did get wartier, or whether she merely imagined it. But one thing was certain. Jem’s espousal of the spiritual seemed ever more rich and strange to Alice whose own family had no use for religion and went to church only at weddings and funerals. Alice’s maternal great-grandmother had begun life as an Ulster Protestant and had succeeded in transmitting unreviewed but much diluted remnants of anti-Catholic bigotry, both to Alice’s grandmother and to Alice’s mother, but that was absolutely all.

  ‘My father,’ Jem said one day, ‘is a devotee of the unrevised Eucharistic Fast.’

  ‘Gosh,’ Alice said, who had no idea what Jem was talking about.

  ‘He’s against ecumenical concessions,’ Jem said. ‘And he drives us absolutely miles to Mass – to get us away from all that guitars-and-footwashing in the house of God.’

  ‘Oh,’ Alice said, who had never heard the word ‘ecumenical’ before and who had never even been baptized.

  ‘Is your father very religious then?’ she asked.

  Jem laughed. ‘He shaves to Gregorian Chant,’ she said. ‘If you call that religious.’

  For Alice, until that moment, Catholicism had always seemed a pretty dreary affair, having something to do with barricades on vandalized Belfast housing estates and those horrid little shrines with plaster statuettes of Mary that had been made in moulds such as you could get at Hamley’s for making Peter Rabbit.

  ‘He’s a dear old thing,’ Jem said indulgently. ‘He will insist on starving himself from midnight every Saturday and before all Holydays of Obligation. I expect it’s heretical – now that even the Pope is into his second bowl of Shreddies by dawn on Sunday morning.’

  ‘He does sound terribly strict,’ Alice said.

  ‘Oh no,’ Jem said. ‘He’s a romantic, that’s all. He’s a convert. He converted for my mother. All that nausea amid the stink of incense is like the first bloom of his connubial passion.’ Alice wasn’t at all sure that this wasn’t sacrilegious, but she didn’t venture to say so. ‘Afterwards he always carts us off to the French pâtisserie,’ Jem said. ‘And he buys us great mountains of brioches and pains au chocolat.’

  Alice considered this to be quite the pinnacle of glamour. Sunday breakfasts in her own house had always been so thoroughly late, so thoroughly English, so thoroughly secular. A mere rising around ten to Rice Crispies and boiled eggs, while her father read the Sunday Telegraph and her mother caught the week’s re-run of The Archers on Radio 4.

  ‘Well, you are lucky, Jem,’ she said, ‘to have such a difficult religion.’

  Chapter 3

  Alice believed that she knew what all her classmates’ fathers did. They owned supermarkets or they made money in Abu Dhabi. They were solicitors, or proprietors of carpet warehouses. They managed high street banks or they commuted to work in the City.

  Everybody knew that Alice’s father built and renovated houses, because his name was always on hoardings all over the neighbourhood. Sometimes he bought houses and renovated them and sold them again to make money. He picked up others here and there which he modified and let. These began as ‘improvement properties’, and turned into ‘superior executive units’. Sometimes he sold off the executive units when the executives left, in order to liberate money. He used the money then to acquire more ambitious units, to finance speculative building projects and generally to diversify.

  Alice was very fond of her father, who was a gentle unaffected man, still insecure enough about his spelling to have her mother check his invoices. It seemed to her that what he really loved was bricks; that, just as a poet might extol the romance of the empty page, so her father still liked bricks better than buildings. Bricks were his symphonies of mud and straw. Bricks were his arias. That was why he never accompanied her mother to the local Amateur Operatic Society’s productions of Carmen or The Merry Wives of Windsor. He had no need of them. Nor of Gregorian Chant.

  But Alice found it very difficult to envisage what Jem’s father did. She knew all about his rigour with regard to the Eucharistic Fast. And she knew that Alice Liddell, child friend of Lewis Carroll, had been godmother to one of his mother’s great-aunts. Indeed, she had deemed this latter intelligence sufficiently elegant to have honoured it with a small untruth. She had allowed Jem to believe that she had been named after Alice in ‘Wonderland’ when in truth she had been named after Alice Springs in Australia. Her mother had been reading A Town Like Alice in the labour ward before she was born.

  ‘But what exactly does your father do?’ Alice finally asked her new friend. It was just after lunch one school day, where Alice had watched Jem twist long skeins of overcooked spaghetti deftly on to a fork instead of chopping it into half-inch maggots along with the general throng.

  ‘Pasta,’ Jem said, ‘ought to be al dente. As in having “bite”. My father is a man of letters.’

  Alice envisaged, uncertainly, a person somewhat in the mould of Bob Cratchit who transcribed business correspondence in longhand with an antique pen. Perhaps he also used brown ink and had looped, copperplate writing.

  ‘Do you mean that he writes letters?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh no,’ Jem said. ‘Not really. He reads manuscripts. And he scribbles a bit. He busies himself in the summerhouse all day.’

  ‘But what’s his job?’ Alice said.

  ‘Oh,’ Jem said. ‘You know. Reading manuscripts. And scribbling a bit in the summerhouse.’

  Alice duly adjusted her image of Jem’s father until she envisaged a person, taller and rather grander than Bob Cratchit, leaning elegantly on a rake in a potting shed with
a monocle screwed into his right eye. Behind him, as he scrutinized ancient and powdery fragments of parchment, seedlings quietly germinated against pointed, ecclesiastical windows.

  ‘Frankly, he’d be completely useless at an ordinary sort of job,’ Jem said. ‘He’s far too other-worldly. But he can tell you all about eighteenth-century gardens, or the history of tatting.’

  ‘Tatting?’ Alice said.

  ‘It’s to do with tying knots,’ Jem said.

  ‘Sailors tie knots,’ Alice said. ‘And scoutmasters. Your father could be a scoutmaster.’

  ‘Scoutmasters swear to serve the Queen,’ Jem said grandly. ‘Catholics are sworn to restore the Catholic Ascendancy. That makes us all potential traitors.’

  ‘Gosh,’ Alice said.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jem said, ‘tatting is really more like needle-work. It’s a sort of crochet.’

  ‘Crochet?’ Alice said.

  ‘If you were to ask him to mend a bicycle puncture, he couldn’t do it,’ Jem said. ‘Nor could he tell you who the Prime Minister is. And he still can’t understand why currencies come in baskets. One day he saw a news hoarding that said “POUND WEAK” and he thought it meant Ezra.’

  ‘Ezra?’ Alice said.

  ‘Ezra Pound,’ Jem said. ‘He’s a poet, of course. My father thought that the poet had taken a turn for the worse.’

  ‘But if he works in a summerhouse, your father,’ Alice asked respectfully, ‘doesn’t he suffer a bit from condensation?’

  ‘I expect you’re thinking of a greenhouse,’ Jem said. ‘A summerhouse is really quite different.’

  Jem told Alice that her mother came from Normandy but, unlike Claire Crouchley’s Normans, Mrs McCrail had not been anglicized gradually. She had been abruptly dispatched from her home at the age of fifteen to an English convent boarding school. Her father, a stern, widowed farmer, had resorted to this extremity, Jem explained, after finding his daughter prostrated in the bluebell wood under a handsome young chef from the neighbouring village.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ Jem said, ‘the handsome young chef was wearing an embroidered yellow waistcoat with shiny brass buttons. It meant that he was all too visible to mon grandpère as he pressed his sylvan suit.’

  Alice giggled. ‘Silver suit?’ she said. ‘You make him sound like the Pearly King.’

  ‘Sylvan,’ Jem said, running the word over her tongue like water to taste its cool grace. ‘Not silver, Alice. “Sylvan”, as in “the change of Philomel, by the barbarous king so rudely forced”.’

  ‘What?’ Alice said.

  ‘Sylvan, as in woodland,’ Jem said. ‘Have you ever wondered what it’s like – being “rudely forced”. You know. Raped.’

  ‘Oh!’ Alice said. ‘Was your mother being raped?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Jem said, with equanimity. ‘But it didn’t matter, because she was very much in love with the handsome chef. Only then mon grandpère came along and thwarted her passion. He marched up like a country roughneck and prised them apart like squabbling puppies.’ Alice winced as she envisaged the embarrassment of the business. ‘He promptly ordered the chef off his land tout de suite,’ Jem said. ‘Yellow waistcoat and all. Then he bundled my mother home with her stockings all spiralled round her knees and her cheeks aflame with lust.’

  ‘And then what happened?’ Alice asked anxiously.

  ‘Oh,’ Jem said. ‘He called in my three uncles from the fields as witnesses to her dishevelled state and he thrashed her with his razor strap.’

  ‘Oh, but he didn’t really?’ Alice said.

  Jem laughed. ‘ ‘Course he did,’ she said. ‘Then he made her pray that her poor, dead, sainted mother hadn’t been looking down from heaven that afternoon. You know. Casting an eye over her favourite bluebell wood.’

  ‘Gosh!’ Alice said. She tried to imagine how her own maternal grandfather would have reacted. She was fairly sure that he would have crept away on tiptoes at the first sign of the lovers couched half-clad upon a bank of leaf mould. He would have tried his best not to cough or sneeze.

  ‘Well, you know what the French are like,’ Jem was saying. ‘They’re all dead nuts on the Pre-Raphaelites. My grandfather likes to think his dead wife is up there warming the gold bar of heaven for him with her bosom.’ Alice was too concerned for the plight of Mrs McCrail to give much thought to the gold bar of heaven.

  ‘So then what happened to her?’ Alice asked.

  ‘She died in childbirth,’ Jem said.

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Jem said. ‘My grandmother. My mother got sent off to the yard to pluck a goose while my grandfather telephoned an English convent boarding school. He had a whiskery old cousin there who taught French and Calligraphy. That’s how she got to England.’

  Alice was deeply impressed with the injustice. It sounded to her like Jane Eyre, which she had read in the junior school in an abridged edition for Younger Readers.

  ‘Suddenly there she was, poor thing,’ Jem said. ‘Stuck in a dorm with hockey fiends and rows of lumpy mattresses. Bit like this place, really.’ Alice wondered idly if Jem’s mother had appeared in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, dragging a canvas toolbag.

  ‘She’d never so much as seen cauliflower cheese before,’ Jem said. ‘Or Bisto. And suddenly there she was, watching les anglaises elbowing each other for second helpings of reconstituted custard. She thought she was in hell until she met my father. Have you ever tried to read Dante, Alice?’

  Alice sat up at this point with increased excitement. ‘But she never met your father while she was still at school?’ she said incredulously.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Jem said. ‘One snowy day before Christmas. She had just led a small party of schoolgirls to the boundary wall to throw snowballs. It was way beyond the playing fields and all strictly verboten, because it overlooked a village pub where undergraduates came at weekends. My father and his friends just happened to pull up while the girls were all peering over the wall. Most of the girls were such ninnies, of course, they were already nearly wetting themselves because they were breaking the school rules, but my mother was delighted. She’s always liked men a lot better than women and these ones were all wrapped in jolly college scarves and stamping and laughing. In fact they were the first English people she’d ever seen looking happy.’

  Alice hadn’t got round to thinking much about men as yet. It seemed to her only girls like Lenora Gripe were interested in men. But when they came filtered through Jem’s transforming power, men did sound rather jolly. She suddenly envisaged that things might be rather different if a clutch of brightly scarved undergraduates were to tumble out of a car just beyond the wall of the playing field. She imagined them singing, like Mario Lanza in The Student Prince, of which operetta her mother possessed a treasured recording.

  ‘My mother picked out my father at once,’ Jem said, ‘because he was the tallest and by far the best looking. She threw a snowball at him which hit him right between the eyes and knocked his glasses off. She was very accurate, you see, because she’d grown up shooting hares.’

  ‘And then?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Well,’ Jem said. ‘The other girls were so unnerved by her success that they all ran away in panic. Meanwhile my mother just waited and watched my father pick up his glasses and pack a snowball very slowly and deliberately. He’d heard all the giggling behind the wall, you see, so he marched up meaning to ram it down some horrid little schoolgirl’s gabardine. But there was only my mother, straining to lean her chin on the wall. She’s five foot two in her shoes, you see. She’s about the same size as you. She’s sort of pretty and fair and blue-eyed, like you, with the same little pointed chin.’ Alice glowed with the compliment. Not that she was vain, or even dressy. In fact she quite disliked the way her mother tried to coax her into boutiques. But a compliment from Jem was rather different. ‘I must get my height from my father,’ Jem said. ‘Unless it’s from the growth hormones they put in the school soya mince. Anyway, then my mother began
to explain to him why she’d done it.’

  Jem assumed an enviably convincing French accent. ‘ “Pardon, monsieur,” she said, “but I ’ave threw hat you la boule de neige for that you are, of all your friend, le plus beau.” ’ Alice felt a tingle of joy pass over the surface of her skin.

  ‘Well,’ Jem said. ‘As you can imagine, my pater thought she was an absolute knockout. He dropped the snowball immediately and kissed his fingers to her. “Mademoiselle,” he said, in his very best French – which isn’t too bad, really – “le mur est assez baut, mais le pub ici est très agréable. Vous étes forte à l’escalade?”’

  ‘What’s “escalade”?’ Alice asked.

  ‘It means to climb,’ Jem said.

  ‘Oh, but she never climbed over the wall?’ Alice said in disbelief. ‘Oh Jem! Did she really? How romantic!’

  ‘Well, she was a bit taken with him,’ Jem confided. ‘After all, he was the only person, other than the whiskery cousin, who had spoken French to her in three months. Anyway, it was a Saturday and the others had all run away. Nobody was going to miss her until teatime.’

  ‘And I’ll bet the pub food was a lot better than the school tea,’ Alice observed with feeling.

  ‘Well yes,’ Jem said. ‘Food can be quite sexy, can’t it? And so was the company. After that she kept leaping over the wall every Saturday for the next six months. By the time the whiskery cousin found out and told mon grandpère … well, all I can say is it was much too late for the razor strap.’

  ‘You don’t mean she was—?’

  ‘Pregnant,’ Jem said amiably. ‘Oh yes. With my oldest sister. It didn’t really matter, because my father took instruction and they got married.’

  Alice balked a bit at the thought of him taking instruction. ‘I don’t see why he needed any instruction if he’d already got her pregnant,’ she said.