Pudding
At three o'clock on the Friday afternoon two men in waders were measuring my garden for a road, and I was sitting on their instrument.
It was a yellow box on three legs, with a glass eye in the front of it, set up on the path by the kitchen door. The tall one put his own eye to the back of it and looked down the garden at the short one, who stood at the foot of the eleven steps in the wet with a striped pole held up in front of him like a bishop's crook. They had come at two in a white van with the gilet's name on its side. They had not knocked. In my day a surveyor came with a chain and a boy and a stone bottle, and was drunk by noon. These two had a box that beeped.
The blood had signed for the gilet that morning, with a gold pen, three times. I had sat on the dresser and said nothing, and it had felt like the longest speech of my life.
"There's a cat on it," said the tall one.
"Move it, then," said the short one, from the bottom of the garden.
The tall one lifted me off with both hands under my arms, as one lifts a sack of coal one has been warned is a sack of coal, and set me on the path. I got back on. I did it slowly, so that he would see it was a decision.
"Sir," I said to him, "you will find that this garden is low. It was low in 1725, when I first sat on it, and it has not got up since. Write that in your book and go home."
The tall one got a cat. He lifted me again and carried me round the side of the house to the front wall, and put me on it, by the gate, and went back at a trot.
I did not follow him at once. I had seen, in passing, what the short one had been doing all afternoon while the tall one looked at him through the box. He had been pushing little wooden pegs into the lawn, each with a pink ribbon on its head, in a line from the kitchen door down the slope beside the steps to the dyke, which was, I took it, the line that the yellow road would take through my witch's garden on its way to forty hot tubs.
There were nine pegs. I took them out.
I took them in my teeth, one at a time, as a retriever takes a pheasant he does not approve of, and dropped each one over the front wall into the drove dyke. They went off toward the sea bank in a little pink procession, like a wedding that has taken a wrong turn. Neither of them saw me do it.
At a quarter to four the short one came up the garden to check his line, and stopped.
"Where's my pegs?"
"What pegs?"
"I've put nine pegs in."
They stood on the lawn together and looked at it. It was a lawn. When they came round the house to see if the van had been robbed, they found me on the wall, washing my face, slowly, behind both ears.
"It's the cat," said the short one.
"It's a cat," said the tall one. "Cats don't take pegs."
"That one does."
The tall one looked at me for a long time. Then he took a notebook out of his orange coat and wrote in it, and said what he was writing as he wrote it, as such men do. "Garden. Mostly dyke. One cat."
"He'll want more than that," said the short one.
"He's paid for an option," said the tall one, "not a miracle," and they put the box in the van and drove away up the drove, and behind them, down the dyke, a small pink wedding went the other way.
I had about four minutes in which to feel magnificent. Then Mo's car came down the drove the other way, with the blood in it, and stopped at the gate, and she leaned across and opened the passenger door without a word, and I got in.
"Christening," she said, to the windscreen. "Mo says I've to come. She says you've to come and all. She says it's luck."
I did not ask whose.
Saint Guthlac's stands on the only hill in the parish, which is twenty feet of clay with a church on it and the dead down one side. At four o'clock it was full of Pomfrets, which is to say about thirty people in good coats with wet hems, and the bells were going, and the vicar was in the porch in a white thing over his black thing, shaking hands. He had his eye on the door. I came in behind the blood's boots, flat, along the stones, and while he was telling a Pomfret aunt that it was a joyous day, I went up the north aisle under the pews and up the little stair into the pulpit.
The pulpit at Saint Guthlac's is a wooden tub on a stalk, carved all over with grapes, and it smells of beeswax and old sermons and the vicar's knees. There is a hole in the carving at the front the size of a plum. I sat behind it, with one eye to it, and I had the whole church.
The font is at the back, by the west door. It is stone, and squat, and old, and round it they gathered: Shannon Pomfret, who is perhaps twenty, in a coat with a fur collar; her mother, who cried; a young man in a suit made for a larger young man; Mo, in a hat with a feather and her handbag held to her chest; and, a little apart, in her waxed jacket, with her reading glasses on their cord, the doctor, who was a godmother because Shannon had asked her in front of witnesses and she had not been able to think of a reason quickly enough. The blood stood at the back, by a pillar, sneezing into her sleeve.
And the vicar took the baby.
The vicar did it well. He held the child along his arm as if he had been taught, and he did not crunch, or not where it could be heard, and he poured the water from a silver shell, three times, and said what is said.
"Agatha," he said. "I baptise you in the name of the Father."
I had heard that name said a great deal in twelve days, by the town, with steps after it. I had not heard it said as a thing that was beginning. It went into me low down, under the ribs, where the indigestion has been since the Monday, and it turned there, and I put my chin down on the floor of the pulpit and looked at the grapes for a time.
When I looked again the doctor had her. She held the child as one holds a parcel that may contain a clock, at arm's length, with her mouth set, and the child, over the doctor's shoulder, was looking up the length of the nave at the pulpit. At the hole in the carving. At me.
She had been in the world for less than a fortnight. She could not hold up her own head. She had a face like a dropped scone and a gown that smelled of a long time in a drawer, and a fist in her mouth, and she took the fist out, and looked up the church at the eye of a duke of the Ninth Furnace in a hole in a pulpit, and laughed.
Not a smile. Babies have wind. A laugh, all through her, with her legs going.
Was I to be undone by a Pomfret? By a thing that weighed less than a Christmas goose and had not yet learned which end of itself was which? I have been laughed at by two bishops and a Lord Lieutenant, and I took it very ill. I took my eye from the hole. I put it back. She was still looking. She laughed again, at nothing, at me, with her whole body, over the doctor's shoulder, and the doctor said, "Stand still," which she did not.
There was a noise in the pulpit then, low and steady, of the kind a kettle makes before it means anything. I shall not tell you where it came from.
Afterwards they had sandwiches at the back of the church on a trestle, which Mo and Shannon had made in quantity, and the Pomfrets stood about with paper plates, and the baby slept, and the blood came up the pulpit stair.
She had a tin in her hand. It was a flat tin, with gold on the lid, and a key, from the high shelf at the shop on the high street where they keep the things that cost three pounds. She had opened it already. She put it down on the floor of the pulpit in front of me, and did not look at me, and went down the stair again.
"Madam," I said to her back. "I accept this. I accept it on behalf of myself and of the Ninth Furnace, which has no other representative in the county. A duke does not ask what an offering is for. He asks what it is in, and I can see from here, madam, that it is in oil. It is received."
She stopped on the bottom step of the pulpit with her hand on the rail.
"Eat it," said the blood, and went to the trestle.
Four sardines, laid head to tail in a gold tin like four bishops in a vault, in an oil that smelled of somewhere hot. I ate all four with my eyes shut and licked the tin to the corners.
At seven the church clock struck and something went.
It was close. Low, at the back, on the left, a crack and a looseness and the taste of old pennies, so near that I put my head up out of the tin. Eel Row. The little houses at the bottom of the rise, in a row along the back lane, where the ground is lowest and the people are oldest and the water has always gone first.
The town came up the hill in the dusk with its duvets. They came in through the west door wet to the knees, carrying children and pillows and dogs and a parrot in a cage, and the bowls club carrying their trophies, and they put it all down in the pews and stood about saying, "It's in the front room," and, "It's come up through the floor," and, "We've never had it in Eel Row, not since fifty-three." The water that came in on their boots smelled of our dyke, of reed and garden clay and the bottom of the eleven steps, the water that had come along the back of the cottage since Thursday night and found the garden shut. I said nothing about it to the blood.
At eight it came under the west door. Not much. An inch, flat and brown, across the flags, round the feet of the font, as if it wished to be christened. Women lifted their bags onto the pews. The vicar stood and looked at it with his sleeves pushed up.
Then the pump man came through the vestry with a sack trolley. He was in his waders, wet to the chest, and he went down the nave to the font without hurry, and tipped it back, the whole squat stone tub of it, empty, onto the trolley's nose, with two Pomfrets steadying it, and wheeled it up the nave against the slope of the floor with his whole weight behind it, saying, "Mind your feet, mind, she's heavier than she looks, sorry, mind the step," all the way to the chancel, where he set it down on the dry with a noise like a door shutting in a cellar. Then he went out through the vestry again.
The water stopped at the second pillar from the back, and thought about it, and stayed there.
The vicar was jolly. It came over him all at once, as relief comes over a man who has been certain of disaster, and he went and stood by the font in its new place with one hand on its rim, and spoke to the whole church, which was most of the town, wet to the knees, with its duvets.
"Well," he said. "Well, there's a thing. Moved. I'm so sorry, everyone, for the inconvenience, but there's a thing. Do you know, it's a font that's been moved, and I've just baptised in it, and I'll tell you what, I've just baptised a little girl who came into the world on the worst night of the year. Fourteen minutes past ten, wasn't it, Shannon? On the Sunday. On Doctor Pedley's own boat at Thornbury Lock, with Doctor Pedley up to her elbows."
There was a laugh from the trestle. It was Shannon Pomfret, with the baby asleep on her.
"She swore the whole time," said Shannon. "My mum said walk it out, so I walked it out, I walked it all the way to the lock, and it come. And she come down that towpath on her bike in her slippers at ten past ten, four minutes to spare, and she never stopped swearing till it got light. She never left us."
"I was giving instructions," said the doctor, from a pew. "Loudly."
The church laughed. It was a good laugh, a whole church of it, and the vicar stood in it with his hand on the font and his face pink, and he opened his mouth to say the next thing, the thing a vicar says after a laugh, about light and dark and Sundays.
"And on the same night, of course, we lost—"
He stopped.
I was on the edge of the pulpit by then, for the view. I had come up out of the tub to see the water stop, and I had stayed up, on the carved rail, in the candlelight, in the full sight of the nave. I looked down the length of the church at the water, by the second pillar, standing still and brown and doing nothing.
Nobody was looking at the water.
They were looking at me. The Pomfrets with their plates. The bowls club with its trophies. The man with the parrot. Thirty people from Eel Row with their duvets round their shoulders, who had come up a hill in the dark because their front rooms were full of dyke. Tired, turned to me all at once, as sheep turn to a gate.
The vicar's hand came off the font.
"That animal," said the vicar. His voice had gone small and cold and certain, a voice I had not heard from him before. "That beast. In God's house."
Nobody answered him. Somewhere in the middle of the nave a dog began to growl, and was hushed.
And from a pew near the front, in her hat with the feather, with her handbag on her knees and her face gone to pieces under it, Mo Tebbutt began to cry, out loud, to nobody, to the pew in front.
"He never meant it," said Mo. "He never meant it. I know he never meant it, God love him, I know he never."