Pudding
On the Wednesday afternoon the vicar came to send me to hell from the lane, because he would not come through the gate.
The drove had gone down in the day. By two o'clock it was a brown skin of water over the ruts, ankle deep, with the reeds lying flat on both sides where the night had combed them, and an eel stranded in the middle of the road, which I did not approach, and which I wish to make no further remarks about. Down this, at a quarter past two, came the Reverend Clement Noakes, in wellingtons, pushing his bicycle.
He has a bicycle that is always in the lane. It leans on things. It leans on the churchyard wall and on the Lamb and on the war memorial and on Mo's fence, tall and black and thin and patient, and wherever it is leaning, he is not far away, and wherever he is, the air smells of pear drops.
Strapped to the back of it, that afternoon, there was a wicker basket with a lid.
I was on the wall. The blood was in the kitchen doorway with a mug of tea, in a man's old gardening coat she had found on the peg, with her face puffed up like a scone. She had slept in her car again. She had sneezed on me twice already that day and apologised to me once, by mistake, and then taken it back.
The vicar stopped in the lane, on the far side of the gate, about four feet from me. He leaned the bicycle on Mo's fence. He took out of the basket a brass bell, a small black book with ribbons in it, and a thing on a chain like a lantern with holes in, and a paper bag. He put a sweet from the bag in his mouth. Then he looked over the gate at the blood, and not at me, and said:
"Miss Crowle. I'm so sorry about your aunt. Would you mind very much standing back a bit?"
"Why?" said the blood.
"I'm going to do an exorcism."
"Of what?"
He pointed at me with the book. He did not look at me while he did it.
"Of that."
"Madam," I said, "you will not find a man in this parish with less of a gift for it," and the vicar heard a miaow, and took a step backward.
"He doesn't like me," he said.
"Nope," said the blood.
He lit the lantern. It was a thurible, the kind they swing in the cathedral at Ely when the bishop is about, and he had filled it with something from a jar that smelled of church and cinnamon and burning, and he got it going with three matches and a good deal of blowing, and then he held it up on its chain over the gate and swung it at me. The smoke came across the wall in a sweet grey rope. The blood, in the doorway, sneezed.
"I'd like it to go back where it came from," the vicar said to her. "Today, if possible. I've brought a form of words."
"Where'd it come from?" said the blood.
He looked at her as if she had asked him which way was up. Then he crunched his sweet, opened his book, and began.
I will be fair to him, as I am fair to everybody. He read it the way a man reads a menu in a restaurant he cannot afford, too fast in the parts he understands and very slowly in the parts with prices on. He had an ablative in the third line that would have made a Jesuit weep and a Benedictine resign. His ablatives were a disgrace to the Church of England, and I have met the Church of England. I said so, at some length, to the blood.
And it stung.
I shall tell you that, because I cannot tell you otherwise. Under the bad grammar there were some words in that book that were older than he was, older than the church he had got them from, and when he came to them, they went into my ears like a draught under a door, cold, and found the place at the back of me where the floor had opened, and pressed on it. I kept my face. I sat on the wall with my tail round my feet and looked at him as one looks at a man who has come to read the meter. Inside I felt like a candle in a church porch.
He rang the bell. He crunched another sweet. He went on.
"Do you know," I said to the blood, "that on Sunday evening this man stood at this gate until she threw a slipper at him? He wanted me gone then, too."
"Did he," said the blood.
"He did. It was the left slipper. It hit his bicycle."
The vicar stopped reading.
"I'm so sorry," he said, "but is it talking to you? Only it seems to be, the way it's going. Is it saying anything? About me?"
"He says your Latin's rubbish," said the blood.
The vicar went pink. He put his finger in the book to keep his place.
"I need his name," he said. "That's the trouble. I've got to put a name in. Here, look, there's a gap. It's no good saying it, or the beast, it has to be, what's he called? What did she call him?"
"Pudding," said the blood.
He wrote it in the gap with a pencil. Then he read the line again from the top, in his best voice, swinging the thurible, and at the end of it he said "Pudding" in a firm, loud, clerical voice, as one names a ship.
Nothing happened. Something might have happened, in a better parish. In this one, a moorhen got up out of the dyke behind him and flew off complaining.
I yawned. I let him see all my teeth.
The vicar looked at his book. He looked at me. He took his glasses off and put them on again.
"It's no good without his name," he said, to the blood. "His whole name. Your aunt had it written down, everyone knows she did. She kept it in a book. It'll be in the house somewhere. If you could find it for me, Miss Crowle, if you'd be so kind, I could have this done by Sunday. I've brought a basket."
"Do not give him the other," I said to the blood. "The one I told you."
"I can't remember the other," said the blood. "I was sneezing."
That was the end of me being careful.
I stood up on the wall. I stood up all the way, which is a long way, and I put my back up in the middle like a bridge, and my fur went out all over me like a chimney sweep's brush, and I opened my mouth and made at the Reverend Clement Noakes the noise that cats in this parish have made at clergymen since the Reformation, from low in the chest, a noise like a kettle full of wasps, and I went along the wall at him, one step, two, to the gatepost, so that my face was a foot from his.
He made a noise as well. It was higher than mine.
He went backward into his bicycle, and got onto it somehow, all wrong, with the book still in his hand and his wellingtons slapping, and went off up the drove standing on the pedals, through the water, throwing up two brown wings of it, with the empty basket bouncing on the back. He did not look round. He left the thurible behind him on its chain over the gatepost, swinging, and smoking, like a little church on fire.
I sat down on the wall and washed my shoulder. I felt magnificent. I felt as the Duke of Wellington must have felt at about eight o'clock in the evening on the day in question.
Then I turned round, and the blood was not in the doorway.
She was on the kitchen step, sitting down, with her mug on its side next to her and her hands over her face. Her breath was going in and out with a whistle on it, high, like wind in a keyhole. She took her hands away. Her left eye had gone. Not shut. Gone. The whole side of her face from the cheekbone to the hair had come up in one hard, shining, red cushion, and the eye was somewhere inside it, and she was looking at me with the other one.
"It's the smoke," she said. "And you. Both."
I went down off the wall. I went up the path. I stopped two feet from her, which is as near as I could go without making it worse.
"You will go to the doctor," I said.
"I'm all right."
"You are not all right. You sound like a bellows with a hole in. Go. Go now."
"It's a mile. In that." She lifted her chin at the drove.
"Go. If not for you, for the house. You are making the house damp."
She looked at me with the eye.
"Is there a doctor?"
"There is a Doctor Pedley. Above the chemist's. Evening surgery at five. She has the bedside manner of a pike. Go."
She went in and got the boots off the back step, Agatha's spare boots, which are too small for her, and put them on anyway, and went down the path and out of the gate and up the drove into the water with her hand over her face. She did not take the car. It had water in its doors.
I went with her.
I do not go in water. I have not been in water by choice since 1725, and I did not choose this. I walked along the top of the bank of the dyke beside her, in the wet grass, with the reeds slapping my face, and when the bank ran out I walked in the drove, in the brown water, up to my elbows, with my tail held up out of it like a flag, and I did not say anything about the cold, or about the eel, which had moved, and nor did she. We went like that as far as the sluice, halfway, where the drove comes up a little and the water goes down to a skin. There she stopped and looked down at me.
"Go home," she said. "You're making me worse."
I went home through the water, alone, and got up onto the wall, soaked to the shoulders, with my fur in points, and sat there in the last of the afternoon in a state of indignity, watching the drove until I could not see her.
The vicar's thurible had gone out. It hung on the gatepost, cold, smelling of church. I left it there.
She came back in the dark, at about nine, walking slowly down the middle of the drove with a paper bag from the chemist's in her hand. She did not come in. She got into the car, and I heard the door shut, and the locks go, and after that I heard nothing.
I sat on the wall. Mo put the light on next door, and then put it off. The pumps hummed. There was a smell of rain coming in off the marsh, and under it the smell of the town, wet bread and diesel and sandbags, and under that, pear drops, faintly, from the far end of the lane.
At eleven the church clock struck, late, and something went.
My teeth. At the front, this time, on the right: a cold crack, the taste of old pennies, and my whole head ringing like a bell struck by somebody who does not know how to ring.
It came from the church.
I got down off the wall, and I did not go to the car. I went up the drove on the top of the bank, in the dark, and along the back lane behind the high street, behind the Lamb and the chip shop and the yards, where the bins are, toward the rise. The church stood up on its hill against the sky with no lights in it. The back lane runs round the foot of the rise to the low corner of the churchyard, where the old graves are, the ones with the names worn off them, by the wall.
And the water was going round.
I could see it in the light from the one street lamp at the end of the lane. It came from the bottom of the high street, from the far side of the wall of sandbags the town had built on Monday night. Held there, it had not stopped. It had turned. It was coming round the back of the wall and along the back lane in a long quiet sheet, past the bins, past my feet, round the foot of the rise and over the low churchyard wall, slow, black, finding its way in among the stones as if it had been told where to go.
It was standing in the low corner. It was standing among the graves, round the stones, up to their shoulders, with the lamp in it.
And the ground under the stones, all along the bottom of the slope, was beginning to move.