Kindergarten by Peter Rushforth Page B

audacity of the semicolons.”
    “And the enormous bosoms.”
    “And the enormous bosoms.” Jo giggled. “If it did have those, it might explain why people are so,
rude
about Sal’s books.”
    “Never a week goes by without some headmaster having heart failure.”
    “This book…This book…”—Jo began to keel over in slow motion, an expression of apoplectic horror on his face—“contains scenes of…
masturbation
!”
    “Whatever that might be.”
    “Whatever that might be.”
    Corrie looked at his watch. “The carol service will be starting soon.”
    Jo searched for his wellington boots under the table.
    “I expect we’ll be the only people there. When they tell you that you’re singing a solo”—his voice became suddenly effete—“one does tend to imagine that one’s not completely solo, and that there will be people there to listen to one.”
    “One does.”
    “I’m the vicar in the empty church.”
    “Verily.”
    Jo stood up and put the wellington boots on.
    “I’m going to sing whether anyone’s there or not.”
    He looked at the wooden weather-house on the dresser. Both figures, the man and the woman, were inside the house, their backs turned on the outside world.
    “I know just how you feel,” he said.
    The telephone began to ring in the hall.
    “I bet I know what that’s about,” Jo said, and went out.
    He came back in a few minutes later, nodding his head.
    “Cancelled? “
    “Cancelled. I’ll just go and tell Lillie”
    When he came back in, Jo pulled on his anorak and took down Dad’s umbrella.
    “I said I was going to sing whether anyone was there or not.”
    Corrie made a move towards the hallway, to go out to the Green from the front door, but Jo went through the sun lounge and opened the door into the garden at the back.
    “Come on,” he said to Corrie. “Quick, before Baskerville makes a break for it.”
    Corrie had to bend down, sharing the umbrella with his brother, bumping into him, standing on his heels, until he took it from him and held it over both of them. Jo led him out on to the path which ran alongside the end of the garden, along the top of the low cliff above the beach. He turned left towards Gun Hill, and some time later, wet and breathless, they were walking into St. Edmund’s churchyard.
    He followed Jo, to stand in front of Mum’s grave.
    Jo took a torch out of his anorak pocket, and they looked at the writing on the gravestone.
    There was a bunch of copper-coloured chrysanthemums on the grave, their petals separated and scattered about.
    “They didn’t last long in the rain,” Jo said.
    Then, just as he had done in Lilli’s dining-room, he began to sing, naturally and unself-consciously, his head back, his hands thrust into his anorak pockets, his voice perfectly distinct above the sound of the rain on the umbrella.
    “In the bleak mid-winter
          Frosty wind made moan;
Earth stood hard as iron,
          Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
          Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter,
Long ago…”
    As Jo sang, Corrie felt again the mood he had entered looking at the
Wind in the Willows
calendar in the kitchen, and hearing the words of the nativity at Lilli’s: the sense of time passing, of things slipping away. It was the dying fall of “Long ago.”
    While Jo was singing at Lilli’s, Corrie had thought of Mum’s funeral service, of sitting there with his whole attention concentrated on the daffodils in the vase on the table at the front of the church, shutting out everything else around him, thinking of Rousseau, falling waters, unpopulated greenness.
    He was known to be a polite boy, respectful, well-mannered, shy. When people smiled at him, he smiled back, as though he were happy.
    “He seems to be taking his mother’s death very well,” they said. “He’s been so mature about the whole thing. Wonderful with Jo and Matthias.”
    How easily people can be fooled, he thought, not