Temples of Delight Read online

  ‘Oh, but this is wonderful!’ she said. ‘I must say that I think you’re wonderful. I’ve never seen anyone do anything like this before.’

  ‘Jem’s father can’t fix bikes,’ Alice said, by way of explanation. ‘He can’t even mend a puncture.’

  Mr Pilling chuckled pleasantly. To him the notion of a man unfamiliar with the workings of a cog wheel and an inner tube was so beyond credibility that he considered Alice’s remarks to be in the nature of jest.

  ‘What do we have our daughters for eh?’ he said. ‘If not so they can slander us in public?’

  ‘No, really,’ Alice said. ‘He can’t. Can he, Jem? Jem’s father can’t even tell you who the Prime Minister is. But he knows all about eighteenth-century gardens.’

  ‘Oh aye,’ said Harry Pilling.

  ‘And all about tatting,’ Alice said.

  Mr Pilling had by now replaced the chain and had tightened it. ‘Come again, flower?’ he said.

  ‘Tatting,’ Alice said. ‘It’s a kind of crochet work.’ Mr Pilling promptly dropped his small screwdriver on to the grass. Jem returned it to him with a dazzling smile. ‘Once Jem’s father saw a news hoarding that said “POUND WEAK”,’ Alice said eagerly. ‘He thought it meant Ezra was poorly.’

  ‘Ezra?’ said her father, without looking up. ‘Are you talking to me in riddles today, my pet?’ He was holding the back wheel of the bicycle aloft and was test-turning the pedals with his foot. The action had activated the gear ratchet which was responding with a satisfying, rhythmic whirr-click.

  ‘Ezra Pound is a poet,’ Alice said. ‘Jem’s father reads him in the summerhouse.’

  ‘Oh aye,’ her father said absently, but he was not really listening to her. Neither, it seemed, was Jem. She was staring at the gear ratchet with a fascination which Alice found perplexing.

  ‘But it’s so beautiful!’ Jem said. ‘Mr Pilling, it’s so lovely.’

  Alice’s father raised an eyebrow, suspecting her of affectation. ‘It’s a bicycle, bonny lass,’ he said. ‘Five gears, two wheels and four brake blocks.’ Then he offered Jem the handlebars. She took them as if she were being offered the golden bough. ‘There you go, girls,’ he said. ‘Enjoy your picnic now.’

  ‘Oh thank you, Mr Pilling,’ Jem said. ‘We will!’

  Alice and Jem, having gorged themselves on carrot cake, lay side by side on the river bank with the saddlebag between them. They were blinking upwards into the dappled light which came to them filtered through a row of feathery trees.

  ‘Who’s Flora?’ Jem said.

  ‘A friend,’ Alice said. ‘Her father died three weeks ago.’ She sounded more than a little uneasy. Flora had been away from school ever since the funeral. Flora, who had never been absent in her whole school life before. Flora, who had regularly reaped praises in the assembly hall for her inspiring attendance record.

  ‘Do you like her?’ Jem said. Alice was thrown by the question. She had never consciously considered Flora in these terms before. Flora was a fact of life. A friend of very long standing rather than of passionate attachment. Not like Jem.

  ‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Do you like her more than me?’ Jem said.

  ‘No,’ Alice said. ‘Of course I don’t.’

  ‘Do you like us both the same?’ Jem said.

  ‘No,’ Alice said. ‘I like you better.’ Jem let go a contented sigh and stretched her arms expansively.

  ‘Oh voom, oh vam,’ she said happily. ‘Oh me and my. What do you think of “Oh”, then, Alice? The great, poetical “O”? Quote me a line beginning with “O”.’

  ‘ “Oh, to be in England Now that April’s there”,’ Alice said. Jem sat up, eager to play along.

  ‘ “O! what a fall was there, my countrymen”,’ she said.

  ‘ “O God, our help in ages past”,’ Alice said.

  ‘ “O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer”,’ Jem said.

  ‘ “Oh sun-flower! weary of time”,’ Alice said. Jem laughed. She stood up, shaking bits of grass from her hair.

  ‘That’s not “Oh”. That’s “Ah”,’ she said. ‘Funny how different they are.’ She paused, then quoted almost roughly, ‘ “But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock?” ‘

  Alice felt herself jolted by the curious, abrasive rhythm of the lines. ‘What’s that?’ she said.

  ‘Hopkins on God,’ Jem said, making a small, ironic bow. ‘Father Gerard Hopkins S.J.’

  ‘What’s “S.J.”?’ Alice said.

  ‘Subtle Jesuit,’ Jem said. ‘Isn’t it lovely here? Can I please come again?’

  Mrs Pilling passed her daughter’s friend a bowl of whipped cream across the dining table. ‘And are your sisters married?’ she asked.

  Jem took up the cream spoon. It was like a miniature soup ladle. The cream fell in a generous plop on to the summit of her chocolate mousse. Largesse impelled her to give of herself with an equivalent generosity.

  ‘Not yet, Mrs Pilling,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid that Patch cohabits with a heathen in a state of sin. And Maddie—’ she paused and gouged decisively into the dark riches within her bowl. ‘Well, Maddie, for the moment, has an active but accident-prone love life.’ Mr and Mrs Pilling glanced quickly at each other and then back again at their daughter’s new friend. ‘Maddie has a penchant for suicide cases,’ Jem said.

  ‘Suicide cases?’ Mrs Pilling said. ‘You don’t mean to say that her young men kill themselves?’

  Jem smiled. ‘They fail,’ she said. ‘But only just, Mrs Pilling. Maddie works in the accident unit, you see. She’s a medical student.’

  ‘What a difficult environment,’ Mrs Pilling said politely, ‘for a young girl.’

  ‘Oh, not for Maddie,’ Jem said. ‘As far as she’s concerned, the place is an ideal dating agency. I do think that, in her case, job satisfaction has begun to addle the brain.’ She settled expansively to her theme, offering chapter and verse. ‘Take last Sunday,’ she said. ‘There was Daddy, happily driving us back from Mass when we passed a crashed-out Fiat. Maddie absolutely insisted that he stop so that she could collect spare parts. Well naturally, Daddy thought she meant the gear box and the hub caps, but not so Maddie. She meant the liver and the kidneys of whoever was expiring in the wreckage.’ Alice’s parents gave no answer to this at all. ‘Maddie leans towards the macabre,’ Jem said, perhaps a little extraneously. ‘Take last hols, for example. She secreted one of her resurrected Melancholicks in her bedroom for the night. Well, didn’t the poor creature of course start slitting his wrists in the small hours – with my sister’s Swiss Army knife.’

  ‘B’ye,’ said Alice’s father. ‘Whatever next?’

  ‘Well,’ Jem said. ‘Tourniquets and things. There he was, poor man. Groaning his last and decanting absolutely quarts of blood all over Mummy’s new wallpaper. She’s just done up Maddie’s bedroom, you see. She’s used that quilted tapestry stuff which the French like stapling to their walls.’

  ‘Jem’s mother comes from Normandy,’ Alice said.

  ‘Oh aye,’ said Alice’s father.

  ‘Unfortunately, it was most terribly expensive,’ Jem said. ‘The wallpaper I mean. Mummy had had it sent specially – from a shop in the Place des Victoires.’

  ‘Eat up, Alice,’ Mrs Pilling said.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jem said. ‘I’m glad to say that Maddie has given him up for un autre. A musician this time. He keeps on trying to hang himself with a cello string and a block of ice.’

  ‘Oh aye,’ Mr Pilling said again. ‘And what does he do with the block of ice then?’ Jem paused to endow Alice’s father with her most enchanting smile. He coughed a little shyly into his pudding.

  ‘He stands on it and he waits for it to melt,’ she said. ‘With the cello string round his throat. Maddie, of course, keeps having to treat him for chilblains.’ She paused to make further inroads into her chocolate mousse. ‘Marvellous pudding, Mrs Pilling,’ she said. ‘Is it rum I ca
n taste? Or is it curaçao?’ Mrs Pilling composed herself for speech, but Jem went on. ‘I have to say that Patch has been wallpapering too,’ she said. ‘But rather more modestly. Patch has stuck brown wrapping paper to her walls. It’s wonderfully cheap and it has such an elegant pinstripe. Patch is an art student, you see.’

  Patch was Jem’s favourite sister. Jem made that very clear to Alice as they sat up eating toffees in bed that night. She lived in London, Jem said, with her boyfriend and her baby son Teddy. Patch was not married to her boyfriend, Jem explained, because he was Jewish and, unlike Mr McCrail, he had been unwilling to ‘take instruction’. He was what Jem called ‘a proper Jew’. He had a prayer shawl and a yamulka, she said.

  ‘What’s a yamulka?’ Alice said.

  ‘You know,’ Jem said. ‘It’s one of those skull cap things that Jews wear. He has to wear his all the time, even in bed. He keeps it on with a hair slide. Gosh, aren’t your parents lovely?’

  ‘You don’t mean he’s got those horrid sort of hairy cork-screw bits by his ears?’ Alice said anxiously. She had seen such people at Heathrow Airport on her way to her parents’ holiday house in Spain and she had found them unattractive. She did so terribly want Patch’s man to be attractive.

  ‘Oh no,’ Jem said. ‘He’s very clean-shaven. He’s like a tennis coach. Only he does read the scriptures rather a lot. And he does have this terribly Orthodox family way back in darkest Manchester. They run a Gentleman’s Outfitters which they have to keep closed all of Saturday.’

  ‘Why?’ Alice said.

  ‘Because it’s the Sabbath of course,’ Jem said.

  ‘But what does Patch do about the baby?’ Alice asked. ‘I mean, is he Catholic or is he Jewish?’

  ‘Oh he’s both,’ Jem said at once. ‘But that’s not a problem at all. Teddy’s been circumcised and baptized – like Jesus.’

  The Talmudic scholar had frequently expressed an eagerness to marry Patch, Jem said, but he would not marry her in the Catholic Church. ‘She wouldn’t at all mind marrying a Jew,’ Jem said. ‘Just so long as she could have her wedding in the Catholic Church. Then she wouldn’t be for ever doing penance for her carnal sins. After all, even the first Pope had a Jewish mother-in-law.’

  Alice laughed. ‘But how can the Pope have a mother-in-law?’ she said. ‘You’d have to be married to have a mother-in-law.’

  ‘He was,’ Jem said. ‘The first Pope was married. It says so in St Mark.’

  ‘Did they have Popes in St Mark?’ Alice said.

  ‘The first Pope was St Peter,’ Jem said. ‘It says in St Mark that his mother-in-law was sick. What Patch says is, trust a Jew to have a sick mother-in-law.’

  Alice turned her attention from St Peter to the lovers, willing Jem further to beguile her with narrative. ‘How did they meet?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, they met while Patch was out sketching in the V and A with the art school,’ Jem said. She reached her hand into the bag of toffees. ‘They fell in love immediately. Patch thought he looked exactly like Modigliani, and so he does.’

  One of the joys of Jem’s family, Alice reflected, was that they all fell in love at first sight. They had no sooner met than they ‘changed eyes’. They felt the instant pang of Cupid’s fiery, poisoned dart. A dizzying speed had so far characterized all their courtships. They were like people in story books.

  ‘To tell you the truth, it was all most terribly embarrassing for Patch,’ Jem was saying, ‘because Modigliani came up behind her just as she was sketching Michelangelo’s David. She was right in the middle of drawing the curls around David’s beautiful, foliated penis.’

  Alice found that the word ‘penis’ caused the hair follicles on her forearms to contract with shock. She couldn’t remember having heard anyone utter it before. It was a word one tried not to dwell on in Biology textbooks.

  ‘I don’t know if you’ve ever really scrutinized David’s penis,’ Jem said, ‘but he looks as though he’s just had his pubic hair styled by Vidal Sassoon.’

  Alice couldn’t remember ever having looked at David’s penis. She would probably have predicted that it was broken off, like nearly all the male appendages on old statues. In general, leafing through art books could leave one with the disturbing impression that male parts were not only bizarre to the point of being unbelievable, but they were quite immoderately hazard-prone.

  ‘Of course, quite the worst of it,’Jem continued, ‘is that David has a foreskin. It hadn’t occurred to Patch as at all incongruous before, but once there was this gorgeous Talmudic scholar breathing into the nape of her neck – well, it made her blush.’

  ‘Oh golly!’ Alice said. ‘Oh cringe!’

  ‘Anyway,’ Jem said. ‘Modigliani just stood there and smirked his dimpled smirk. He said, all sotto voce into her ear, “Who is this very fine man, can you tell me?” Well, Patch said shyly that it was David, from the Bible. “You mean the same David who won King Saul’s beautiful daughter with the gift of an hundred Philistine foreskins?” he said. Naturally, Patch’s neck went absolutely scarlet. She dropped her pencil with a clatter. Modigliani picked it up and gave it back to her. A pencil is very significant at such moments.’

  Alice downed the last of her toffee. ‘A pencil?’ she said.

  ‘Oh definitely,’ Jem said. ‘ “Pencil”, “penis”. It’s obviously the same word. Did you know that David had auburn hair? It says so in the Bible.’

  ‘You are lucky, Jem,’ Alice said. ‘To be so brainy.’

  During the hour that Jem was at Mass, Alice put her clothes on and went down the road to Flora’s house. She had not seen Flora since the funeral where Flora had avoided her eye. She reached the threshold of Flora’s front garden and paused. The draggy, unlined curtains still hung drawn at the lofty windows and the crop of dandelions, ever present on the unkempt lawn, were rather more profuse. Alice walked down the path with her heart in her mouth. She entered the porch and rang. There was a faint scuffle from within and then silence. Nobody came to admit her. After a while she retreated, shaking slightly, to the road.

  ‘Hello,’ Jem said. ‘You should have come with me. The priest was lovely. He had auburn hair. Like David.’ Alice blinked away a tear. ‘Who lives there?’ Jem said.

  ‘Flora,’ Alice said. She added quickly, ‘But tell me some more about Patch. Is her boyfriend an artist?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Jem said. ‘He’s an accountant.’ Jem had never as yet disappointed her, but Alice found this disappointing. And just when she most needed buoying up. She did so want the best for Patch and she could not help thinking that being an accountant was not very different from buying and selling executive units. She wondered, was accountancy romantic? Saul was an accountant in the City, Jem said, with a plate-glass office and two secretaries. That was his name. Saul Gluckman.

  ‘Oh, she wouldn’t want an art student,’ Jem said confidently. ‘Oh no. One can get pretty sick of all those unwashed, pansified junkies in the art school. Saul is such a divinely fastidious man and art students all smell of clay. They have printer’s ink under their fingernails. No. Saul is not only as beautiful as an angel, he’s also a little bit rich. That’s fun for Patch, you’d have to admit.’ Put like that, Alice conceded that, yes, perhaps accountancy could have its attractions.

  ‘Patch is not a manager,’ Jem said. ‘She was crying out for a man with managerial skills. Now she and Saul have gone into business together – well, in their spare time, that is.’

  ‘What do they sell?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Gnomes,’ Jem said.

  ‘Oh, not gnomes!’ Alice wailed, but Jem overrode her anguish.

  ‘They’re very good gnomes,’ she said. ‘Not those crass red plaster things you get in gardening shops.’

  ‘Still …’ Alice said. ‘I mean, gnomes—’

  ‘ “Quality Gnomes of Knightsbridge”,’ Jem said. ‘That’s what they’re called. Patch designs and makes all the gnomes individually, out of high-glazed bone china. Then she sells them for absolutely pots
of money. Saul keeps the books and sends in lists of figures to the taxman which gets her huge deductions.’

  ‘But nobody buys gnomes,’ Alice said. She knew that her own mother, who was one of life’s great consumers, would sooner have owned a lilac shag-pile lavatory seat cover than consider lowering the tone of her garden with a gnome.

  ‘Oh, heaps of people do,’ Jem said. ‘Just so long as they’re expensive enough, people think it’s wildly avant-garde to have a gnome or two in the garden. Especially if he’s winking or flashing.’

  The visit to Flora’s had left Alice prickly. ‘Gnomes don’t flash,’ she said. ‘I admit they wink.’

  ‘They flash,’ Jem said. ‘They always have those bulging paunches with their fly buttons about to burst off. I would say that gnomes were definitely bacchanalian.’ Patch, Jem said, had just been commissioned by a descendant of Kaiser Wilhelm’s to conjure a whole gaggle of gnomes to inhabit the recesses of the conservatory. ‘So, you see,’ she said, ‘Patch is doing gnomes By Appointment to Foreign Royalty.’ Alice had no immediate answer to this. ‘Gnomes are alternative,’ Jem said. ‘They have a sort of “inglenook” chic.’ Alice laughed. Her mind shed Flora. Jem was wonderful. And one of the greatest things about her was the way she turned all your cherished assumptions upside-down.

  ‘Jem?’ she said, because there was something puzzling her about Patch and the Talmudic scholar. ‘If Patch is always going to confession – and then she must go straight back home and – and …’ She meant that Patch would be forever seeking absolution for the same frequently recurring sin of the flesh.

  ‘Oh,’ Jem said casually. ‘But only Protestants care about such trivial little sins. People like Oliver Cromwell and Miss Aldridge. Catholics don’t get that fussed about a bit of fornication.’

  ‘Don’t they?’ Alice said.

  ‘Jews mind terribly, of course,’ Jem said. ‘You’re supposed to be taken outside the city walls and stoned to death.’ Alice blinked at her. Jem laughed. ‘Just as well that Manchester hasn’t got walls,’ she said.