The Bell

CHAPTER 26

MORE than four weeks had passed and there was no one left now at Imber except Michael and Dora. It was late in October. Great sheets of various coloured cloud trailed endlessly across the sky, and the sun blazed intermittently upon the thick masses of yellow and copper trees. The days were colder, beginning usually with fog, and a perpetual haze lay upon the surface of the lake.

James and the Abbess between them had acted quickly. It had been decided to dissolve the community. James had departed back to the East End of London. The Straffords had decided to throw in their lot with a community of craftsmen who were attached to a monastery in Cumberland. Peter Topglass, urged and implored by Michael, had joined a party of naturalists who were just setting out for the Faroe islands. Patchway had returned laconically to farm-labouring on a nearby estate. Michael stayed on to wind up the affairs of the market-garden and Dora stayed on with him.

Margaret Strafford was still in London with Catherine. Catherine had been having insulin treatment and was continually under the influence of drugs. She had not yet been told of her brother’s death. Margaret wrote that there was no point in visiting her at present. She would let Michael know when there was some improvement and when a visit might be welcome. Meanwhile, Catherine was as well as could be expected. The doctors were not unhopeful of a complete recovery. The insulin was making her fat.

Dora, after appearing for some time to be about to go, announced, with a dignity and resolution which seemed new to her, that she would stay as long as she could be of any use. She seemed unperturbed by a large though diminishing number of long distance telephone calls. At first, everyone was far too upset and preoccupied to think of suggesting that she should depart; later, she made herself indispensable. She fetched and carried, did errands by bicycle in the village, and washed and dusted and tidied unobtrusively in the house. The time came when, with the gradual departure of the others, she did more than this. By the time she and Michael were left alone Dora was doing the cooking and catering, as well as full time secretarial duties. It turned out that she could type moderately well, and in the end she dealt entirely with the more routine correspondence, composing letters out of various formulae suggested by Michael.

They had been alone now for nearly a fortnight. Peter was the last to go; and even his departure was to Michael a relief. As for the others, his relations with them had become irrevocably wrenched and painful. Mark treated him with a clumsy kindness, but could not help being both curious and patronizing. While James followed him about with a look of such desperate compassion that he was quite glad for James’s own sake when the latter departed to London. Although neither James nor Mark knew the details of Michael’s history their imagination had been set in motion, and he had been unable to conceal from them his violent excesses of grief during the days following Nick’s death. Their strange looks showed that they had drawn some conclusions of their own, and by the time they left their presence at Imber had become a torture to Michael. Dora’s being there, on the other hand, did not trouble him at all. She was useful, she knew nothing, she guessed nothing, and she did not judge.

Dora, once she had made up her mind to stay, created her own role with energy; though even then there were one or two minor escapades. The beginning of October brought a spell of hot weather, and Dora announced that she proposed to learn to swim. By the time that anyone got around to telling her not to, since no one had time to supervise her and she must not go out alone, she had practically taught herself. She turned out, when put to it, to be a natural swimmer, buoyant and fearless in the water. Peter, and later Michael, went along occasionally to view her efforts and give some advice, and before the warm weather ended she had mastered the art quite adequately.

On Margaret’s departure, Mark Strafford had taken over the cooking. Dora soon ousted him, however, and made up in zeal for what she lacked in talent. Her efforts were appreciated and she obviously enjoyed what she was doing. But the halcyon days for Dora came after the others had all gone, when she reigned undisputed over Imber. She took especial pleasure in Michael’s domestic helplessness, and told him that she was delighted to cook for a man who didn’t think he could cook better than she could. She kept the house reasonably clean and the office orderly and searched the gardens to find, in forgotten and uncultivated corners, autumn flowers that had been left there growing wild, and filled the hall and common-room with great bunches of dewy michaelmas daisies and aromatic chrysanthemums which brought back to Michael memories of childhood holidays spent at Imber.

Gradually the place was stripped. The market-garden was sold as it stood to a neighbouring farmer, and a good deal of the produce was lifted and removed at once. Bit by bit the furniture disappeared from the house, some of it returned by removal van to people who had lent it, some of it trundled vigorously away by Sister Ursula on a handcart to be taken into the Abbey. The causeway had been mended. The new bell had been lifted by crane out of the lake and unceremoniously bundled into the enclosure. It had by now been erected in the old tower, and announced its elevation in clear tones which reached Michael and Dora one morning as they were sitting at breakfast.

A curious dream-like peace descended on Imber. The distinction of days was unclear. Meals were served at odd times and often sat over lengthily. When the sun shone the doors were opened and the heavy table pulled out onto the gravel. The mornings were hazy, the afternoons damp and mellow, and the garden, with its dark lines of upturned earth, was oppressively silent. At night it was cold and the sky was clear and wintry with premonitions of frost. The owls hooted closer to the house. The sedge warblers were gone. And returning late from the chapel Michael would see the light blazing on the balcony and hear across the water the music of Mozart, played upon the gramophone by Dora who was showing a sudden new enthusiasm for classical music.

During this time a curious relationship grew up between Michael and Dora, something undefined and wistful which had for Michael a certain ease and douceur. Perhaps this was possible only because they both knew that the time was short. Amid many subjects of reflection Michael managed to wonder about Dora’s future; and after a little time had passed he raised with her the subject of whether she oughtn’t to go back to London.

Dora, when questioned, showed herself but too eager to discuss the whole matter with him, and so they discussed it. She told him that she had decided that there was no point in her returning to Paul, at any rate at present. She would only run away again. It was inevitable that Paul should bully her and that she should vacillate between submitting through fear and resisting through resentment. She was plain that things were mostly her fault and that she should never have married Paul at all. As things were, she felt that she would never manage to live with Paul until she could treat with him, in some sense, as an equal; and she had no taste for trying to improve her status by becoming precipitately and in her present state of mind the mother of his children. She felt intensely the need and somehow now the capacity to live and work on her own and become, what she had never been, an independent grown-up person. These views she uttered to Michael rather anxiously and apologetically, clearly expecting him to tell her that she ought to go back to her husband.

Occupying his mind as best he could with the problem of Dora, Michael felt no inclination to recall her sharply to her duties as a wife. He realized that his present views were perhaps heterodox, his vision distorted and his powers of judgement diseased. But he reflected again, and the picture seemed the same. When Dora said to him, her voice shaking with emotion, that“everything to do with Paul was just the kiss of death”, Michael saw with a dreary clarity what things would be like if she did return. Paul was much to be pitied, but he was a violent and bullying man, and although it was true that Dora ought never to have married him it was equally true that he ought never to have married Dora. Michael confined himself to pointing out to Dora that she did, after all, in some sense love Paul, and that her being married to him was a very important fact. It was also important that Paul loved her and needed her. Whatever plans she made for the immediate future she should keep alive the hope that she might return to Paul later if he should still wish it. Running away was worthless unless she could find herself a way of life which had dignity and independence, and in which she could win the strength needed to make her able to treat with Paul equally and stop being afraid of him.

What that way of life could be they discussed in the most practical terms. Dora had told Michael in a half amused way about her mystical experience in the National Gallery. Michael suggested that she should return to her painting; and Dora agreed, while insisting, as Michael indeed suspected, that she had a very meagre talent. Perhaps she could find a teaching job which would leave her time to go to an art school? Perhaps she could get back the scholarship which she had relinquished when she married Paul. The problem of where and how she could live arose too. Michael advised her to leave London. Dora at first declared that life out of London was impossible, but later saw the point of the idea and even found it rather exciting. When the discussion had reached this stage a providential letter arrived from Dora’s friend Sally, to say that Sally had got a good job as an art teacher at a school in Bath, and had got her hands on quite a decent flat, and did Dora know anyone in Bath who might help her to find someone to share the flat? It then became obvious that Dora must go to Bath, and Michael conducted some correspondence for her to see if she could get a grant to help her to complete her studies in that city. A very small grant was forthcoming, together with some suggestions about primary school-teaching. This suited Dora excellently and ecstatic telephone calls passed between her and Sally.

Michael, reflecting later, was surprised at the efficiency with which he had helped Dora to organize her unorthodox future, considering how little thought he really gave to the matter. Perhaps bis complete detachment from Dora, and a curious broken freedom brought about by his own state of mind, enabled him to act in a situation in which he would normally have hesitated or acted differently. He wondered if his counsels were wise; perhaps not even time would show. But he believed that he now knew Dora a little. She had talked a great deal about herself, and Michael glimpsed, in the stories which she told without bitterness of her unwanted childhood, some of the roots of her present being. No one had inspired her to place the least value on herself; she still felt herself to be a socially unacceptable waif, and what made her unpretentious also made her irresponsible and unreliable. Paul, with his absolute demands and his annihilating contempts and angers, was the worst partner she could have chosen. Dora was not altogether without hope of returning to Paul, and Michael hoped with her, although he was well aware that James had been right in calling her a bitch and that it was unlikely that her career of crime was at an end.

Dora of her own accord suggested that she might now have some talks with Mother Clare. She saw Mother Clare three times, and seemed pleased to have done so, though she was reticent about what had been said. They talked, of course, about their adventure in the lake, since which Dora had conceived a great admiration for the intrepid and amphibious nun; but they spoke too, Michael gathered, about Dora’s future. He was glad to be able to conclude that the Abbey was putting no spanners in the wheel of his own plans for Dora, and had evidently not told her bluntly to return at once to her husband. He felt, in the case of Dora too, that there was little point in forcing her willy-nilly into a machine of sin and repentance which was alien to her nature. Perhaps Dora would repent after her own fashion; perhaps she would be saved after her own fashion.

It was after they had been alone together for a while that Michael began to guess that Dora was a little in love with him. Something in her looks, her questioning, her manner of serving him, suggested this. Michael was touched, a little irritated, but in no way alarmed or repelled. He was grateful to Dora because he felt that she was a person to whom he could do no harm. There was something subdued and hopeless about her love which was perhaps new to her. Michael observed it, almost with tenderness, and did nothing to reduce the distance between them. He made her talk about herself, and quietly circumvented her clumsy efforts to make him talk about himself. Her unsuspicious and unsophisticated mind harboured of course no conception of his being a homosexual; and although Michael guessed Dora to be one of those women who regard homosexuals with interested sympathy he had no intention of instructing her. A little later he began to realize that she imagined him to be in love with Catherine. This was more upsetting. Michael was annoyed and distressed by Dora’s continual probing references to Catherine, and her assumption that he was yearning to be summoned to Catherine’s bedside. But again, he thought it better to leave her with that illusion. So they continued side by side, Michael knowing that he was causing Dora some unhappiness, but feeling that it was, for her, perhaps a novel and certainly a harmless variety.

For all that, perhaps partly because of it, Dora grew and flourished remarkably during those days. Michael felt this especially in the later time when there was a little less to do in the office, and he often found her out beside the lake, using as easel the old music stand from the Long Room, making water-colour sketches of the Court, of which she must have done, before she left, some three or four dozen. The weather was colder now, and though still cloudy yet often bright. Skies of dappled dove grey, streaky lemon yellow, menacing purple and limpid green appeared in Dora’s pictures behind the silvery pediment of the Court. How wonderfully, Michael thought, Dora had survived. She had fed like a glutton upon the catastrophes at Imber and they had increased her substance. Because of all the dreadful things that had passed there was more of her. Michael looked with a slightly contemptuous envy upon this simple and robust nature until he remembered the last morning when he had been about to visit Nick and how well he too had thriven upon disaster up to the moment when he was vitally hurt.

One day a letter arrived from Toby. He was by now well installed at Oxford. Michael read bis letter with relief. In awkward terms, Toby apologized for his hasty departure, and for his indiscretions, which he hoped had not caused too much trouble. He thanked Michael for his kindness, said how much it had meant to him being at Imber, said he was sorry to see from the papers that they were all moving, but hoped it would be just as good somewhere else. What mainly emerged, however, from the letter, and set Michael’s mind at rest, was that for Toby the whole business was closed indeed. There was no sign of tormented guilt, no anxious brooding, no speculation about Michael’s state of mind. The full significance of the happenings at Imber had happily escaped Toby, and he had no retrospective curiosity about them now. He was in a new and wonderful world, and already Imber had become a story. He had a marvellous old panelled room in Corpus, he told Michael. He had decorated it with pictures of the medieval bell taken from the“Illustrated London News”. His tutor was terribly impressed when he told him how he had discovered the bell! Murphy was very well, by the way, and settling down splendidly with his parents. He wasn’t fretting any more. Hadn’t it been a good idea of Peter’s that he should take over Murphy? How terribly sad and shocking about Nick, he could hardly believe even now that it was true. Michael must come and see him at Corpus if ever he was going through Oxford and take a glass of sherry. Michael smiled a little over the letter and was glad of it. Perhaps he would go one day to see Toby, and to give Toby the pleasure of patronizing him a little, and of telling his friends afterwards that that was the odd chap he had told them of who once made a pass at him down at that place where he found the bell.

All these thoughts of Dora and Toby fluttered intermittently at the surface of Michael’s mind. More deeply and continually he was concerned with other matters. The pain he had felt when he knew that Nick was dead was so extreme that he had thought at first that he could not survive it. During the first days he had been consoled only by the knowledge that he could still kill himself. Such pain did not have to continue. He could occupy himself only in things which concerned Nick, could only speak of Nick when he spoke at all. He searched the Lodge from end to end several times, searching for something, a letter, a diary, which he could construe as a message to himself. He could not believe that Nick had gone without leaving him a word. But there was nothing to be found. The stove contained charred paper, the remains perhaps of a final holocaust of Nick’s correspondence, but it had all been thoroughly burnt and was beyond salvage. The house revealed nothing to Michael as, desperately and blinded by the tears which now started intermittently and without warning to his eyes, he ransacked Nick’s cupboard and suitcases and went through the pockets of his coats.

During this time his love for Nick seemed to grow, in an almost devilish way, to the most colossal dimensions. At moments this love felt to Michael like a great tree that was growing out of him, and he was tormented by strange dreams of cancerous growths. He had the image of Nick continually now before his eyes, seeing him often as he was when a boy, seeing him in flight across a tennis court, agile and strong and swift, conscious of Michael’s glance; and sometimes it seemed to him as if Nick had died in childhood. With these visions there came too an agony of physical desire, to be succeeded by a longing, so complete that it seemed to come from all the levels of his being, to hold Nick again in his arms.

Michael went to see the Abbess several times. Now, when it was too late, he told her everything. But there was nothing, at present, which she could do for him, and they both knew it. Michael felt himself responsible for Nick’s death, as much as if he had deliberately run him over with the lorry. The Abbess did not try to take this responsibility from him; but she could not, either, help him to live with it. He went away, bent double with the pains of remorse and regret and the inward biting of a love which had now no means of expression. He remembered now when it was useless how the Abbess had told him that the way was always forward. Nick had needed love, and he ought to have given him what he had to offer, without fears about its imperfection. If he had had more faith he would have done so, not calculating either Nick’s faults or his own. Michael recalled too how, with Toby, he had acted with more daring, and had probably acted wrong. Yet no serious harm had come to Toby; besides he had not loved Toby as he loved Nick, was not responsible for Toby as he had been for Nick. So great a love must have contained some grain of good, something at least which might have attached Nick to this world, given him some glimpse of hope. Wretchedly Michael forced himself to remember the occasions on which Nick had appealed to him since he came to Imber, and how on every occasion Michael had denied him. Michael had concerned himself with keeping his own hands clean, his own future secure, when instead he should have opened his heart: should impetuously and devotedly and beyond all reason have broken the alabaster cruse of very costly ointment.

As time went on Michael tried too to think of Catherine: poor Catherine, lying there drugged in London, with a terrible awakening ahead of her. He thought of her with great pity but could not purge from his mind the aversion which the idea of her still inspired. He dreaded the arrival of the letter which should summon him to see her. Perhaps he had found her existence, from the start, something of a scandal. Perhaps when Nick had first spoken of her he had felt jealous. He tried to remember. He found himself suddenly full of violent thoughts, wishing that it was Catherine that was dead instead of Nick, and strangely imagining that in some way she had destroyed her brother. Yet he pitied her, and knew in a cold sad way that till the end of his life he would be concerned with her and responsible for her welfare. Nick was gone; and to perfect his suffering Catherine remained.

The first agony passed and Michael found himself still living and thinking. Having at first feared to suffer too much, he later feared to suffer too little, or not in the right way. With strong magnetic force the human heart is drawn to consolation; and even grieving becomes consolation in the end. Michael told himself that he did not want to survive, he did not want to feed upon Nick’s death. He wanted to die too. But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it. He cast about in his mind for a way of thinking about what had happened which left him finally without refuge or relief. He did not want for a single moment to forget what had happened. He wanted to use his intelligence about it. He remembered the souls in Dante who deliberately remained within the purifying fire. Repentance: to think about sin without making the thought into a consolation.

After Nick’s death he was for a long time quite unable to pray. He felt indeed as if his belief in God had been broken at a single blow, or as if he had discovered that he had never believed. He absorbed himself so utterly, so desperately, in the thought of Nick that even to think about God seemed an intrusion, an absurdity. Gradually he became more detached but there was no sense of his faith being renewed. He thought of religion as something far away, something into which he had never really penetrated at all. He vaguely remembered that he had had emotions, experiences, hopes; but real faith in God was something utterly remote from all that. He understood that at last, and felt, almost coldly, the remoteness. The pattern which he had seen in his life had existed only in his own romantic imagination. At the human level there was no pattern. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” And as he felt, bitterly, the grimness of these words, he put it to himself: there is a God, but I do not believe in Him.

Eventually a kind of quietness came over him, as of a hunted animal that crouches in hiding for a long while until it is lulled into a kind of peace. The silent days passed like a dream. After his work he sat in the refectory with Dora, drinking innumerable cups of tea, while the petals of fading roses fell upon the table, diffusing a sweet weary smell of potpourri, and they talked of Dora’s plans. He watched Dora, turning towards life and happiness like a strong plant towards the sun, assimilating all that lay in her way. And all the time he thought about Nick until it was as if he spoke to him endlessly in his thought, a continual beseeching wordless speech like a prayer.

Very slowly a sense of his own personality returned to him. The annihilating sense of a total guilt gave way to a more reflective and discriminating remembrance. It was indeed as if there was very little of him left now. He need not have feared to grow, to thrive upon disaster. He was diminished. Reflection, which justifies, which fabricates hopes, could not do so now for him. He pondered without intensity on what he was: his general grievance against nature, his particular wrong choices. One day no doubt all this would seem charged again with a vast significance, and he would try once more to find out the truth. One day too he would experience again, responding with his heart, that indefinitely extended requirement that one human being makes upon another. He knew this abstractly, and wondered if he would, in that time, do better. It seemed to matter very little. Nothing could mend the past.

No sharp sense of his own needs drove him to make supplication. He looked about him with the calmness of the ruined man. But what did, from his former life, remain to him was the Mass. After the first weeks he went back to it, crossing the causeway in the early morning through the white fog, placing his feet carefully on the bricks which seemed to glow beneath him in some light from the hidden sun, answering the summons of the bell. The Mass remained, not consoling, not uplifting, but in some way factual. It contained for him no assurance that all would be made well that was not well. It simply existed as a kind of pure reality separate from the weaving of his own thoughts. He attended it almost as a spectator, and remembered with surprise the time when he had thought that one day he would celebrate the Mass himself, and how it had seemed to him that on that day he would die of joy. That day would never come, and those emotions were old and dead. Yet whoever celebrated it, the Mass existed and Michael existed beside it. He made no movement now, reached out no hand. He would have to be found and fetched or else he was beyond help. Perhaps ke was beyond help. He thought of those against whom he had offended, and gathered them about him in this perhaps endless and perhaps meaningless attention. And next door, as it were, to total unbelief there recurred to him the egotistical and helpless cry of theDies Irae.

Quaerens me, sedisti lassus;

Redemisti, Crucem passus;

Tantus labor non sit cassus.

They got out of the taxi. Michael paid the taxi-driver for the double journey and asked him to wait to take Dora back to the Court. They went into the station.

It was yesterday morning that the letter had arrived for which Michael had been waiting. Mrs Mark informed him that Catherine was a great deal better. She seemed, in fact, to be more or less normal, though at this stage one could never say. Of course he must expect to find her much changed. She had not yet asked after her brother; it had been judged wise that Michael should be the one to tell her about Nick’s death. His presence was therefore urgently requested in London.

Michael was at once eager to be off. His work was done now at the Court. Nothing detained him. He spent the day packing and making telephone calls and arranged to leave next day on the early train. Dora was to leave by a later train which would take her, with only one change, to Bath. She telephoned Sally to expect her late the following evening.

Dora, who had watched with anxiety the arrival of any letter from Mrs Mark, knew by Michael’s excited agitation, even before he told her, that this must be the one. She had waited sadly, but with a sense of the inevitable, for the ending of her time with Michael. She loved him with a quiet undemanding hopelessness. After so much pain and violence his very inaccessibility was consoling. And she could not bring herself to be jealous of a being so rare and so unfortunate as Catherine.

She had not regretted her decision not to return to Paul. With immense relief, and the sense of a load taken off her, she welcomed Michael’s support. She wrote long explanatory letters to Paul. Paul replied with angry screeds, telegram ultimatums, and telephone calls which always ended abruptly with one or other of them banging down the receiver. Paul had, for some reason perhaps connected with Michael, spared her his arrival in person. He announced to her, more clearly than ever before, his philosophy. There were no two ways about it. She was the type of woman who was made to vacillate between teasing and submitting. He had had enough of her teasing. It was time for her to submit. This was in fact what she really wanted to do, and she would find that this was where her true happiness lay. Independence was a chimera. All that would happen would be that she would be drawn into a new love affair. And was it right, because she knew that he would wait for her indefinitely, that she should inflict upon him, indeed upon both of them, these continual and pointless sufferings? He was aware that when she had some new fantasy in her head she was cold and ruthless, but he appealed to her common sense and to any remembrance that she still had of how much she had loved him. And by the way, could he now have back those two letters he had given her?

Dora was moved but not profoundly shaken by these communications. She pondered over them and answered them with clumsy attempts at argument. She also replied at length to a letter from Noel. Noel apologized for having bothered her by appearing at Imber. He realized now that it had been unwise. He was sorry, if she was sorry, that the place had been made to look so ludicrous in the press. But there it is, facts will speak. His own article had been fairly moderate. He was sorry too, subject to the same proviso, to hear that Imber was folding up. However, it was also good news since it meant that Dora would soon be back in London, and when, oh when, should they meet? She owed him a lunch. He had meant it when he said he missed her. He was missing her at this moment.

Dora replied that she was not coming to London. She would see him at some later time. For the present she wanted to be left alone. She felt a nostalgia for the ease of his company; but she no longer had the feverish urge to escape into his world. She attempted to turn her thoughts away from Paul, away from Noel, away even from Michael. It was not easy. She packed her things and collected together the paintings she had made in the last few weeks. She went to bed exhausted. She imagined, as she imagined every night, Paul sitting alone in his beautiful Knightsbridge room, beside the white telephone, wanting her back. But her last remembrance was that on the morrow Michael would be leaving her, and when they met again he would perhaps be married to Catherine. She wept herself to sleep, but they were quiet and comforting tears.

The morning was foggy as usual. They walked along the platform and sat down on the seat. The fog curled in slow tall breakers across the track and the fields opposite were invisible. The air was damp and cold.

“Have you got a winter coat?” said Michael.

“No. Well, it’s at Knightsbridge,” said Dora. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not a cold person.”

“You’d better buy one, you know,” said Michael. “You can’t get through the winter in that mackintosh. Do let me lend you some money, Dora. I’m not short.”

“No, of course not!” said Dora. “I shall make out very well on the grant, now I’ve got that part-time teaching job as well. Oh dear, I wish you weren’t going. Anyway, your train’s sure to be late with this fog.”

“I hope it won’t be too late,” said Michael.“Margaret’s meeting me at Paddington.” He sighed deeply.

Dora sighed too. She said, “You packed my pictures all right?” She had given him three of her sketches of Imber.

“They’re flat on the bottom of my case,” said Michael. “I do like them so much. I’ll have them framed in London.”

“They’re not worth it,” said Dora, “but I’m glad you like them. I can’t really paint.”

Michael did not contradict her. They sat silently for a while, looking into the fog and listening for the train. The day was blanketed and still.

“Don’t forget to give the key to Sister Ursula when you go,” said Michael.

“What will happen to Imber, anyway?” said Dora. “Who does it belong to? Funny, I never wondered this before. It seemed as if it just belonged to us.”

“Well, in fact, it belongs to me,” said Michael.

“To you?” said Dora, turning to him. She was amazed. And in the instant her quick imagination had seen it changed, the garden radiant with flowers, the Long Room decked and carpeted, the house filled and warmed and peopled, made into a home for Michael and Catherine and for their children. It was a painful vision.

“It’s the old home of my family,” said Michael,“although we haven’t been able to live there for a good many years. What will happen to it? It’s going to be leased indefinitely to the Abbey.”

“To the Abbey?” said Dora. She drew a small sigh of relief. “And what will they do with it?”

“Live in it,” said Michael. “They’ve needed more space for a long time.”

“So it’ll actually be inside the enclosure, the whole thing, the house, the lake, everything?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“How perfectly dreadful!” said Dora.

Michael laughed. “It’s a just reversal of roles,” he said. “In the old days the Abbey used to be a curiosity in the grounds of the Court. Now the Court will be a curiosity in the grounds of the Abbey.”

Dora shook her head. She could not think how Michael could bear not to live there even if the place fell down about his ears. The distant sound of the train was heard booming through the fog. “Oh dear,” she said, “here’s your train.”

They got up. The train came into the station.

Not many people were travelling, and Michael soon found an empty carriage. He stowed his suitcases and opened the window, leaning out and looking down on Dora. She seemed ready to burst into tears.

“Come, come,” said Michael, “cheer up!”

“I know I’m silly,” said Dora, “but I’ll miss you so much. You will write, won’t you, and let me know your address?”

“Of course I will,” said Michael. “I’ll be in London till January, and then in Norwich rill the summer. Anyhow, I’ll let you know where I am.” He had taken a temporary job at a Secondary Modern school for the spring and summer terms.

“I’ll write,” said Dora. “I may write, mayn’t I?”

“Of course,” said Michael.

“Do give my love to Catherine,” said Dora. “I do hope she’ll be all right.”

“Surely I will,” said Michael.

They remained looking at each other, trying to think of something to say. Dora was aware of his hand on the edge of the window. She wanted very much to cover it with her own hand, but did not do so. She wondered if she would dare to kiss him when the train was leaving.

“I never thanked you properly about Bath,” she said.“I couldn’t have managed it without you.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Michael. “I’m so glad it worked out. Give my greetings to Sally!”

“I will!” said Dora. “You know, I quite look forward to it. I’ve never been in the West Country. I wonder how I shall get on. What does one drink there?”

Michael made a wry face. “West Country cider,” he said.

“Isn’t it nice?” said Dora.

“It’s nice,” said Michael, “but very strong. I shouldn’t take too much of it, if I were you.”

“I shall telephone Sally to get in a large jug,”said Dora, “and tonight we shall be drinking your health in West Country cider!”

The whistle blew;, and the train gave a preliminary jolt. Blushing violently, Dora stood on tiptoe, drew Michael’s head down gently, and kissed him on the cheek. He looked surprised. Then he kissed her forehead in return. The train began to move, and in a moment he had disappeared, still waving to her, into the fog.

Dora drew out her handkerchief and walked slowly back to the taxi. She shed some tears and a sweet sadness pierced her heart. Anyway, the kiss had gone off all right. She got into the taxi and told the taxi-man to drop her at the entrance gates.

As she walked down the avenue of trees the fog was clearing, and the Court became visible opposite to her, its pillars and copper dome clear-cut and majestic in the sunshine, a light radiant grey against a sky of darker moving clouds, rising above the still misty levels of the lake. Only the windows seemed to Dora a little dark and blank, like the eyes of one who will soon be dead.

When she got to the ferry, the boat was still on the other side and invisible in the fog. She drew upon the line and felt it coming heavily and sluggishly towards her. It emerged into view and came bumping up against the landing-stage. Dora got in and was about to propel herself across. Michael had taught her how to use the single oar. Then a new idea occurred to her. A second oar was always kept for emergencies, upon the landing-stage. Dora picked it up. She fitted the two oars into the rowlocks, and then undid the painter that joined the boat to the two sides of the ferry. No one would be coming across that way now.

She got in and sat down, trying the oars gingerly. She used to know how to row. After a certain amount of splashing she found that she still knew. The oars dipped and the boat moved away slowly over the surface of the water. Delighted, Dora released her breath and sat enjoying the gliding motion and the silence of the misty lake, broken only by the dripping of water from the blades. The mist was becoming golden. Now it began to clear away, and she saw the Court and the high walls of the Abbey toward which she was drifting. Behind the Court the clouds were in perpetual motion, but the sky was clear at the zenith and the sunshine began to warm her. She kicked off her sandals and trailed one foot in the water over the edge of the boat. The depths below affrighted her no longer.

She looked at the Court. She could not help being glad that Michael and Catherine would not live there, and their children and their children’s children. Soon all this would be inside the enclosure and no one would see it any more. These green reeds, this glassy water, these quiet reflections of pillar and dome would be gone forever. It was indeed as if, and there was comfort in the thought, when she herself left it Imber would cease to be. But in this moment, and it was its last moment, it belonged to her. She had survived.

She drew in her foot and began to row slowly along the lake. From the tower above her the bell began to ring for Nones. She scarcely heard it. Already for her it rang from another world. Tonight she would be telling the whole story to Sally.