J-, CH-, and other impediments
 
Visiting Mrs Tidmore

J-, CH-, and other impediments

In the system of English pronunciation there are two particular phonemes, or sounds, that I cannot say properly. I know there are worse speech impediments than mine, but at fourteen I was in love with two people, and I couldn't say their names. Give me a lisp any day. Give me a stutter.
They're called the fricative consonants because the lips create them with a sort of drawstring-bag effect, the cheeks tightening against the tongue, and the mouth pinching off the sound. So there's a rubbing of skin on skin, there's oral friction, and if you are stuck with a lazy tongue, as I am, apparently, what should issue forth neatly and delicately appears as clumsy, gross, and inept, as though you are speaking with your mouth full.

Jesus.
Cheryl.

Yes, with the passing of time I have got some sort of control there; the 'j' and 'ch' sounds aren't the hurdles they used to be, so long as I take a good long run-up, and jump them with a dry mouth.
Cheryl Falconer had joined the sixth form as I entered the fourth. With three A levels and six hundred boys to consider, it's not surprising she didn't know of my existence, and I was happy to worship her across the light years that seemed to divide us. If she had got converted it might have been a different story, but though we were all praying for them, none of the girls in the sixth form came anywhere near the Christian Union.

Her name, therefore, presented no immediate problem; I had never addressed her and probably never would. Nor had I given the slightest hint of my feelings for her when the names of favourite football teams, rock bands and sixth form girls were traded after lights out. It wasn't so much that I feared the hoot of laughter that might follow my attempted enunciation of
Cheryl
in the fetid dormitory air; it was more my desire to keep her to myself.

Jesus
was a different matter. I spoke his name boldly but badly, expecting to be mocked not only for my faith but also for my fricative phonemes. Mockery for his sake I could take, though generally speaking I got off lightly among my peers - from the first night of the previous term when, still reeling from my conversion experience, I had knelt in my pyjamas against the metal bed frame, my elbows on the lumpy mattress, and they had been too surprised to laugh or jeer - but Cheryl was private. I suppose I venerated her in much the same way as others venerate God, while my view of the almighty was much more workaday. He needed to be talked about, that was what evangelism was all about. His name had to be heard every day: in the common rooms, in the classrooms, in the cafeteria, in the changing rooms, and especially in the dormitory.

As the light filtering through the curtains faded to brown and the more raucous voices were stilled, I would call over to Mike Ashton, three beds away, "Have you thought any more about Jesus' resurrection?" with a directness that shocks me, recalling it now. "No, what were you saying?" Mike might reply, his voice slurred with the onset of sleep. "You just have to consider the facts, Mike. If Jesus hadn't risen from the dead the disciples would hardly have ..." Off I would go with the evidence of the resurrection without which, according to St Paul, my faith was in vain. There might be a few dissenting voices, or Mike would pretend to be asleep, but if it didn't feel right, I shut up. Besides, I didn't witness in the dormitory every night. More often I fell asleep in the middle of praying for all the people I could think of, like counting sheep.
 
We had our meetings in Trevor Simmonds' house. He'd just got married, and the root of my dislike for him was that I was attracted to Sue. She said something to some seniors once about how surprisingly hot it was under the duvet. She brushed Trevor's shoes for him I bet, till she could see her face in them. They shone as he marched up for Communion on Sunday mornings, CLICK, CLACK, CLICKETY CLACK, the steel caps striking sparks off the ancient stone floor and making people turn in the pews. I hated the military way he went up, cracking the near silence, so full of confidence in Christ, soft-footed Christ and his apostles traipsing for miles in sandals.
 
He reprimanded me once for cycling without lights. I argued that it was hardly dark, which was a bare-faced lie - I probably saw him coming, from the sparks, before I heard his zealous tread - then I quibbled that as I was within the grounds it was only a school rule I was breaking and not a law of the land. That finished him: I remember the fierce upbraiding in the darkness, and then I cycled off in defiance, my cheeks on fire, thinking how arrogant he was, with his athletic build and his earnest Oxbridge supplications in the meetings, the successful I'm-so-bloody-wonderful Christian man, hot-blooded master of the matrimonial duvet. But after a hundred yards I stopped with a squeal of brakes, hopped off my bicycle and trotted humbly back up the road to him. Jesus had told me to go back to him to apologise and so I did, not that that made me like him any more or envy him any less.
 
Cheryl's father taught physics. What he actually did was to copy his notes out of an old ring-binder onto sheet after sheet of fresh acetate on the OHP. Neat italic script, tidy diagrams, the squiggles of circuitry, hour upon hour in the darkened room. Short as a child he would come into the laboratory briskly, to make up in velocity for what he lacked in height, put on his lab coat, open his file on the front desk, switch on, blink in the fiece light as he adjusted the focus - and always, before he started, he would flex his elbows out and hitch up his foot on a low stool, before leaning over the OHP, his face lit up. "Well, gentlemen ..." He used to intone the notes as he wrote them, in a slow liturgical drawl. He did this every year, we were told by those who had buffed the metal chairs and initialled the desks before us, and undoubtedly it could have been improved on as a teaching method, but I was happy enough to kick off my shoes and write. I preferred lessons that left me relatively undisturbed to think my own thoughts or to pray about things that were bothering me. I liked French for the same reason, though the teacher's bad breath left us gasping for air by the end of the lesson, and English, though anyone in the front three rows of desks was in range of the teacher's spittle.
 
The only real event that stands out in the featureless twilight of my experience of Physics is the day Mr Falconer picked up my shoes. He was doing one of his periodic tours of the desks to check our books, and he picked up my shoes and brandished them aloft. There were holes in both soles and he waved them in the air. 'Holy shoes!' he exclaimed. I don't think anyone had ever seen him so animated about anything, though why it bothered him so much I have never understood. But everyone laughed at me standing over him in my socks and so I laughed too, then he made a gruff bark that was as close to a laugh as he could go, and handed them back with smile.
 
Sometimes I prayed for Mr Falconer's conversion, disingenuously dreaming up the introduction to Cheryl that would follow. He would ask me to stay behind after the lesson. I've heard you're a Christian, he would say. Can you tell me how to receive Jesus into my heart? Perhaps you would come over to our house this evening? My daughter, also, is interested - Cheryl, do you know her? No? Well, she's heard of you ... In my fantasy world I was some kind of shining knight bringing the gospel of salvation to this unconverted maiden.
 
In reality, though I had not told anyone about it, I was beginning to have doubts about the whole business, and especially about prayer: did intercession really make any difference? When did a thought become a prayer? It was so hard to tell where I ended and Jesus began. As for Cheryl, in my sixteenth summer she was displaced by a girl with the same troublesome consonant cluster, though it had shifted to the middle of the beloved's name.
 
Rachel.
 
We met at a meeting in the local church. She was praying for her sick father and runaway mother while I admired her across the circle of bowed heads. Was it Jesus who prompted me to offer to lend a hand with their garden, or was it me? We started off well enough, stopping on our long walks through lush countryside to pray on our knees for her father and for our driving tests and interviews, or for the thousands of people dying in the civil war in West Africa. But my attention would wander; opening my eyes I would study her rapt face, her lips moving, her white neck, and all I could think about was kissing her. Closing my eyes again I would be distracted by thoughts of the silver-haired deity passing on from our trivial petitions to the genoicidal affairs of another country, working his way through pile after pile of intercessions with a fixed frown, making his inscrutable decisions before dispatching angels on their innumerable errands.
 
If Rachel thought that by praying together in the intimacy of her untidy bedroom or on sunlit hillsides we would stay pure, she was mistaken. We made rules for ourselves, only to break them: we could embrace standing but not lying down; shirts couldn't be untucked, then they could be removed altogether; her breasts were out of bounds, then they were not; the borders moved as rapidly as on a map of political geography.
 
Retreating to school with my virginity in tatters I felt out of place in the Christian Union. Trevor Simmonds asked us straight off how many people we had talked to about Jesus.
 
Rachel ...
 
Her name came clumsily to my lips, and when I mentioned her father's recovery after our prayers I felt even more fraudulent. True, he seemed to have become healthier with each sinful step we took together, but I could hardly have admitted to that. Perhaps God's back had been turned. It didn't help when Timothy Blayne declared that his younger sister had gone to be with Jesus; the kindest interpretation of his manner when he announced it, as if sharing a piece of good news, was that he was distracted with grief. We had been praying for her throughout the previous term, Timothy repeatedly claiming victory over her cancer, 'in Jesus' name'. Then Trevor Simmonds started praying for our success in the exam room and on the rugby field, and I imagined the old greybeard in the heavens pushing back his chair and stomping out of his room in disgust. Was anyone listening as we prayed so enthusiastically for the First Eleven? Was there anyone there?
 
Jesus?
 
Once it had seemed so watertight; now it hardly made any sense to me at all.
 
The year after I left the school I heard that Mr Falconer's wife had run away with the Deputy headteacher, who was a stickler for discipline and regularly used the cane for misdemeanors. Stranger news followed: Mr Falconer had been converted to Christianity, and later still, he had married a wonderful Christian woman from the village. Finally I heard that she had fleeced him and disappeared. After that he took a last tour of the school buildings in his soft-soled shoes - he was seen in the gymnasium, the dining hall, the library - then he went to the lab and gassed himself.
 
If I'd been Trevor Simmonds I'd have dug the steel caps out of my shoes after that; I'd have gone up the aisle quietly, gingerly, if I'd gone to church at all.

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 Visiting Mrs Tidmore.
 

'I've written to the B.B.C.' she wailed.
Bee, bee, see - the broadcaster's voice of the 'fifties, those vowels as long as one could have made them without sounding idiotic.
'I've written to them, Charles, one hundred times.'
A slight shake of the head tripped the tears over her grey lashes into the small furrows at the top of her cheeks, where the skin was mottled with broken veins.
'Not really, surely?' the young man murmured.
'At least.' She pursed her lips more tightly.
He looked down and sipped the filmy lukewarm tea. 'Still, the days are getting longer now,' he said.
She leant forward and put her cold hand on his knee.
'You write to them, Charles. Please!  That will make them pay attention.'
'Connie,' he said, 'You're not right, you know.'
'What?'
'How do you say the word?'
'Why, "one", of course.'
There it was, the fossil bone of contention, pronounced impeccably, with that pleasing "wh" sound at the start.
'Not "wan!"' she almost shouted. 'Wan! Wan! Wan!'
He shook his head.
'There're other ways of speaking, you know, regional accents that are just as correct.  We use R.P., Received Pronunciation.  The point is, it's not received any more.'
She looked bleakly, stonily past him, out of the window.  She could not accept that.  She had a faculty which prevented unwelcome notions from even impinging on her, like a door slamming shut in her brain.  Tears welled up again in her red-rimmed eyes.
'Look at the weather, dearie.  Just look at it.'

She had a small bronze statue of Aphrodite on the sill around the bay window, and when Charles felt he could listen to her no longer he looked past her, over her left shoulder, at the goddess.  Perhaps affected in some way by its dark burnished nakedness, Mrs Tidmore never paid it much attention; it was always covered in a thin mantle of dust when he came. Left alone in the drawing room while she made the tea, a fire crackling in the grate, and one of her large-print romances put out for him to inspect, he used to go over to the window, carefully pick up the statue and dust it with his handkerchief.  After that there was nothing for him to do but sit and listen to her, and watch the hands of the mantelpiece clock as the room slowly darkened.  She often forgot the tea in the effort of explaining her way systematically, laboriously through the days that had passed since his last visit, worrying about the bills and the telephone and the worn curtains, how she was always burning pans, and what would happen when Audrey stopped coming in September?  Should she go into a home?  Everyone said that she should.
'But they don't know, do they dear,' she remonstrated, looking bleakly into the fire with stormy, watery eyes.  Then she remembered the tea and went out into the kitchen with a hand on her back, switching on some lights as she returned with the tray.  When he rose to go her eyebrows met and she compressed her lips a fraction; in the hallway she said again how lonely she was, and clutched his wrist.  Only at the door did she muster a smile and laugh unhappily.
'You will come again, won't you dearie?  Next Friday?'
'Not next Friday, I'm afraid, Connie, the one after.'
'Oh, it seems so long,' she fretted.

She had been widowed five years.  Henry Tidmore stood handsomely over the fireplace wearing an officer's uniform, in the sepia tones of 1912, and across the room in a black suit and tie, with a fatter face and almost bald, in a large glossy retirement photograph.  If Connie  could be directed to the past, she was happier, recalling the house which they shared for so long on the banks of the Stour, their caravanning holidays, their dogs.  In the confused pool of her memory, anecdotes surfaced, of how he had told her in their sixties, one lunchtime, that she was beautiful, quite suddenly, out of the blue.   Or how, when she was nursing him on the sofa where Charles would be sitting, through a day and two nights till he died, he had mumbled, 'What will happen to my darling?'  Charles remembered that when he was out of patience with her, and determined to try harder, with Henry mutely appraising him from the photos.

Gradually she had put him in Henry's place. She asked for his photograph, the first year, before he went away on holiday, and on his next visit he saw the print framed next to Henry's on the mantelpiece, with the postcard he had sent her.  One afternoon she unpacked the travelling case with which Henry had set out on his last trip; he had turned back at the station and it had lain unopened ever since.  There was a jacket which was serviceable, though rather short, and Charles went away wearing it, with a few pairs of socks stuffed in the pockets, and a short scarf of Henry's around his neck.
'You're my boyfriend, aren't you,' Mrs Tidmore crooned, putting her face against his chest.  Then she said, 'I do love you so. I hope you don't mind.  You're all I have in the world.'
In due course Charles had to leave the district.  Connie looked miserable when he told her; he knew it had been on the tip of her tongue for many weeks to suggest he came and lived in her house.  On his final visit she said she had a present for him, and his heart leaped when he glanced across the room and saw that the windowsill was bare.  How he would treasure the Aphrodite!  But she handed him a small chocolate box.  At her insistence he opened it on the spot, swallowing his disappointment, parted the tissue paper and took out a wooden pipe with a crooked stem.  She was delighted when he filled it from his pouch and lit it.  Henry had bought it on one of their trips to the continent, she said.

Before he left, he asked after the statue: had she sold it?  No, she looked fretful and pointed to a plastic bag behind the chair; she thought intruders in the garden might see it and rob the house.  She began to worry about the house again as, suddenly despising her, he put the gift away and fetched his coat.  He promised to write to her and to come to see her as often as he could, but he did not write very often, and it was two years before he managed to visit Mrs Tidmore again.

The bell in the hall clanked tonelessly.  In the driveway the car Charles had arrived in clicked as it cooled in the steady rain.  The door opened a fraction on its security chain.
'Who is it?' she challenged.
Then she recognised him and opened the door, visibly overcome with emotion.
She was older, smaller; her voice was more tremulous and her body had shrunk around her frame.  Her hair, almost white, was sparser, and there was a bandage on her calf.  Yet she hugged him tightly and, tugging his arm, led him into the drawing room.  Aphrodite was in her place in the window bay, in need of a good dusting.

Connie sat down, stretched out her thin bony legs, then flinched as if in pain.
'I'm sorry to see you've hurt yourself,' Charles began.
'Yes, I had a bad fall. I was just going out to get some roses and I tripped on the step.'
'When was that?'
'Oh, two months ago, at least.  It doesn't seem to be getting any better.'
She hesitated, and gave a deep sigh, as if unsure of where to begin her tale of misery.  Charles tried to distract her attention by describing the interview he had just attended; if he was successful he would be moving back to the district.  But Connie was not listening, and as soon as he paused she broke in.
'I caught a bug last week, and I'm still poorly, and my hands hurt, dear, they hurt.'
She held out her hands as a younger girl would to show off a ring. They were all knuckle and bone.
'The doctor says there's nothing he can do, nothing, and my dentist refuses to do anything about my teeth.'  She looked into the fireplace and her eyes became moist.  Then she lit a cigarette which she held inexpertly between her lips, and looked furtively at him.
'I know I shouldn't, with my cough.  I've smoked hundreds, dearie, since you 'phoned last week.  I began to think you weren't coming.'
'Yes, I'm sorry, there was a bit of a mix up,' he said.  'But I'm here now.  Let's make some tea, shall we, and tomorrow, I was thinking, we could go for a drive.'
'Then you will stay for a few days!' Connie exclaimed.  'I was afraid to ask'.  She reached across and gripped his forearm, and gazed into his face, then leant back surveying him.  'Three whole days?'
Charles nodded.  He had meant to only stay the night and leave before lunch.
'We shall do so many exciting things', she went on.  'Why, there's Scrabble and Pitt and Mahjong - but first of all I shall show you my snaps!'

That's better, Charles said to himself, as she crossed the room purposefully.  She came back with half a dozen albums tied with ribbon and sat beside him on the sofa.  They looked through the pages of small prints with pinked edges, depicting her life with Henry, and her features seemed to grow younger as she gave names to the shadowy figures and places in the albums, assembling fragments of her history at his prompting.
'You've got all this in front of you, dearie', she said when she got up from the sofa to make the tea.  'You must make the most of it.  It goes so fast.'

She had put him in Henry's room.  When he went up he asked if he might take the photographs to look over.  He put them beside the bed and undressed, listening to Connie talking quietly to herself in the kitchen.  Then he heard her running a bath.  Springing down onto the carpet to do his exercises he marvelled at the difference between them, how he could ask anything of his body, punish or spoil it as he pleased, while she had always to appease hers, and go carefully to her bath in case she slipped.  Perhaps that was why she had spurned the statue; once she had stood like the Aphrodite, knowing she was able to leap, dance, swim, do whatever she wanted to fulfil herself; once her flesh had seemed immortal.  He listened to the faint feeble splashings from the bathroom as Connie rinsed round the bath with her sponge, straightening up with a sigh and going slowly down the corridor to her bedroom.

Charles was sitting on the edge of the bed when she came in.  Instinctively he pulled the covers over him and swung his legs into the bed.
'But you haven't any pyjamas!' she cried.
'Don't worry, I never wear the things', he called out.  But she was already rummaging for a pair in one of Henry's drawers.  She handed them to him. The dead man's pyjamas were heavy and cold.
'I'll put them on in a minute', Charles said.
'Promise?'
'Promise.''
'I don't want you to catch a chill.'
'I'll be okay.'
'I see you've got my snaps', she said brightly.
'Yes. I'm just going to look at them again before I turn in.'
'I don't expect I'll sleep a wink, dearie', she said.  She shivered and pulled her gown tightly around her with bony blotchy hands.  Charles felt momentarily guilty at the glowing spectacle of fitness he presented, and the deep sleep that he could draw upon himself when he chose.
'I shall just lie there and fret, and the nights do go on for so long when you can't sleep, don't they dearie?  Then I'll hear the birds start to peep in the garden, long before it's light, and perhaps then I'll manage it for an hour or two.'  Her voice trailed off and again she shivered but this time she collected herself and went forward to tuck in the covers.
'You've got our drive to look forward to', Charles said.
'I have, haven't I' she said. 'Sleep well'.  She fondly pressed her cold damp cheek against his before going out.

Charles untied the old ribbon around the album they had not looked at earlier: these were the oldest pictures, from the years before the Great War, dozens of dainty brown photographs neatly titled in italics.  The Sandpipers, they called themselves, her group of friends at the end of their schooldays and the beginning of their careers.  There was a newsletter in the album, its pages coming away from the rusted staples, with descriptions of their outings and cycle rides, whimsical speeches, cartoons; in the photos they were in the sea, in their absurd swimming costumes, or they were sitting on the dunes with picnic hampers, a dog and a ball, a cap on a stick, the young women with short wavy hair, in long skirts and white blouses with high lace collars, and the young men fooling about, standing mock-seriously to attention. or sitting cross-legged between the tussocks in their awkward clothes.

Charles stared for a long time at the photos. He was the friend under the back cloth of the box camera in front of them, grinning as he took the pictures and the next instant among them.  Then he came across a small photograph of Connie at twenty-three, his own age, and a jolt passed through him.  She was more beautiful than he had imagined.  The caption said the photo had been pinned up in Henry's billet in France while she was teaching evacuees in Bournemouth.  She wore a long dress and baggy shirt, with her hair, slightly unkempt, pinned up, and she had a mischievous expression that carried a faint suggestion of wantonness.  How attractive she was!  If he had visited her then, he thought to himself, he would have fallen in love with her.

Charles wanted to share this discovery with Mrs Tidmore, and at once.  He would tell her how far he had defaulted in sympathy, he would confess his impatience, his scorn, and look through the mask of years at a young woman in wartime, sitting in a deckchair on Bournemouth promenade.  Yet he was very tired from his journey: declarations could wait until morning.  He pushed the album across the bed and turned out the light with his other hand.  By the time Connie left the bathroom and the bath water gurgled noisily away, he was fast asleep.

He woke early, with the first birdsong, and found he could not move his legs.  He must have slept awkwardly and given himself pins and needles.  And his arms ached; he scarcely had the strength to turn back the covers.  Perhaps he was sickening for something.  Even his neck was stiff.  He turned his head and looked out of the window: the Aphrodite stood on the sill, glimmering in the half light.  He smiled.  Connie must have come in and put it there.  He dozed for a time, until the statue was brilliant in the morning sun.
Downstairs a door closed; he heard the jingle of cutlery and crockery - a tray was being brought upstairs.  There was a footfall in the corridor and a soft tap on the door.

'Come in.'  He spoke in a hoarse whisper which he didn't recognise as his own, more of a rattle than a voice.  He really was ill, and panicking he tried to get out of bed.
'I've brought your breakfast, Charles'.
As the young woman came into the room Charles fell clumsily out of bed.  She gave a little squeal and banged the tray down on the ottoman.
'Oh dear, I do hope you haven't broken anything!'
'I'm all right,' he said thickly, hoarsely, though he was seeing stars, the side of his face ached and there was a searing pain in his hip.
'Upsadaisy.'  She picked him up like a bundle of twigs.
'Connie?'
She had a pretty face, blonde hair cut quite short, smooth brows now creased a little with concern.
'Now look, what a mess you've made me make with this tray!'  she scolded, walking to the foot of the bed.
'Aphrodite.'
'I beg your pardon?'
Charles slowly lifted his hand and pointed to the window.  His finger would not point, but only curled, and the hand he saw was gnarled like an oak branch.
'You've moved the Aphrodite.'
'Oh that. Yes, I have.  I know how much you like to look at it.  Seemed daft to leave it downstairs, don't you think?'
'Thank you.'  He wanted to say more but was overcome by weariness.  He wondered how he would ever find the energy to drink his cup of tea.  He watched the girl moving swiftly and gracefully about the room, opening the curtains, putting away some clothes.  Then she picked up the tray and went out.