and sound, a huge explosion far away. Three times it was repeated, with intervals of great solemnity; and while Richard Temple was still poised up on the echo of the third there was a burst of fire much closer to – not quite so close as the usual firing-squad perhaps, but he put it down to that until it grew ragged, no longer volleys but an almost continuous firing that went on for several minutes. Nothing but percussive noises ever came down here from the outside and when the firing stopped it stopped without any explanatory shouting or the stamp of troops: the rare intrusions from the other world were generally inexplicable and as they were always irrelevant to Temple’s own battle in principle he did not try to account for them – he had little more curiosity left than he had humour, and what curiosity he had he dared not indulge: a dispersion of energy. But today the case was altered: he wondered, surmised, brought up ingenious explanations; but if he had hit upon the truth he would have run mad with mingled joy and even greater apprehension.
The Allied armies were deep in France: the French forces of the interior had risen and they were attacking from within, disrupting the Germans’ communications and harassing their retreat. In this region their initial attack had been very successful and the Germans were in a state of confusion: in some places they were withdrawing without a shot, abandoning everything; in others they were systematically destroying their fortifications, stores and records and killing their prisoners before pulling out; in others they retreated with lorry-loads of paper and as many hostages as they could lay their hands on; and in others again the different commands acted without any attempt at co-ordination, some following one policy and some another. The situation was worst wherever there were large numbers of those armed French collaborators called Miliciens; they were vicious, stupid people in any case, and now they were quite desperate, out of hand, panic-stricken, and dangerous. Here in Villefranche, a strategically unimportant town, the garrison was largely made up of these creatures, together with a half-company of Vlassov’s Russians and a few Mongols; they were in a state of frantic disorder; for a small local group of maquisards, over-excited by the blowing-up of the ammunition-dump at Combray, had begun a totally unexpected attack. Even the Germans were infected by this feeling of being trapped: only half an hour earlier they had been at peace, at a sort of back-line peace; the war had been a hundred and seventy kilometres away and even if the worst should happen the road to the north was perfectly secure: now everything was turned upside down. There was no order any more.
Richard did not divine this, however; his final answer was army exercises, and some time after the noise had died away he returned. That is to say, he sank back to the edge of the place where he had been interrupted; but he stayed for a long time on this edge alone, without advancing. For although in this course of identification, or re-identification, he was dealing only with the truth, not with apology nor scarcely with comment even, and although he was no longer moved by old shame and humiliation (the last things to die in recollection) being so far removed, yet still there was this unbearably painful area. With him remembrance was largely a matter of images which followed one another with a logic of their own (not unlike dreams) and although many of them were vague enough, filled out with words and exposition, some were extraordinarily brilliant – the sudden sight, from a darkened place, of a person, or a head, or a whole series of incidents that would go on, outside his control and in a wonderfully vivid light, so that every colour and detail was there unblurred; and in the case of his mother he could not permit this undisciplined recall. The most he could do, even now, with all his removal and all his adult experience and nearer comprehension, was to state the facts, in an impersonal, almost statistical manner, with no dwelling upon them and above all no seeing the things he talked about – no true recall, indeed.
It had been an unsavoury nine days’ wonder in Easton Colborough and it had caused a great deal of talk; but it was not really very rare or extraordinary and if Mrs Temple had not been a clergyman’s widow she would have been quietly shut up with very little of the noise that in fact occurred. Briefly, when she reached her critical years she took to drunkenness, and from drunkenness to promiscuity: her mind, her nature, even her heart became estranged.
Everything had been against poor Mrs Temple; everything, her frustrated married years and her restless widowhood; and she had retired from life too young. The cottage that her brother-in-law had found for her was dark, poky and damp, and it did not have a single one of the amenities of civilised life – but Canon Harler had not been concerned with her convenience: only with getting her firmly anchored at such a distance from his own home that she could not be a burden nor her poverty a reproach to him. (On the same reasoning he had refused to let her touch the capital of her little trustfund to send Richard to a better school: besides, he had never approved of her marriage and would lend its results no countenance.) It is ludicrous to cite earth-closets, well-water and paraffin-lamps; but they were not without their effect, particularly as Mrs Temple was a pretty woman. She felt that this incessant, ineffectual charring (for however she worked the place could never be anything but a rural slum) was adding, as indeed it was, to the irreparable insults of time; and this caused one resentment more.
And she was unfortunate in her neighbours. She and Richard now lived on the other side of Easton Colborough, nearly twenty miles from Plimpton, and in a sparsely inhabited region. The big house belonged to a man who only came down for the shooting, with expensive parties of City friends; and the distant parsonage contained a hard-faced celibate who trailed incense and the smell of candles and required her to call him Father. Otherwise, there was only the one very large farm, run by a sharp, efficient businessman, and the labourers’ cottages, in the immediate vicinity. The hearse-like Daimler from Plimpton Hall came winding through the narrow lanes from time to time, and a few women came to see her from Easton Colborough, but on the whole she was very lonely and when Richard began to spend all his free time at the studio she felt that she was giving away her last beautiful years for nothing. She suffered much from his preoccupation with Mr Atherton, and in her moments of depression Richard seemed to her a selfish boy, taking with both hands and giving nothing.
He had of course no conception of the extent or even the nature of her sacrifices: but equally she had no idea of the degree to which she was the centre of his universe. You do not praise the daily sun nor say thank you for your daily bread, unless they seem precarious. She did not know how he regarded her as a fixed principle (although in fact she was changing almost as much as himself, even before the disaster occurred), nor that almost his whole way of life was an attempt to come over so firmly, so recognisably on to her side that she could never throw him off as she had thrown off his father.
Laura Temple was a woman who really needed a husband, a proper husband; and when the people of Easton Colborough had said she would marry again it was their way of saying that she was an eminently feminine woman, that in no bad sense she was particularly fitted for marriage (being incomplete alone), and that she was likely to attract a husband. The most censorious mind could not at that time have accused her of the least impropriety, but a naturally warm temperament is clearly different from a flaccid indifference, and they said, ‘Mrs Temple will marry again.’
Later it was, ‘It would be nice if she were to marry again and settle down,’ or even, ‘Somebody ought to find a husband for Mrs Temple.’ Then there was a silence about her, the significant silence of the high-principled, which was soon broken, however, by whisperings, at first indignant and incredulous, then stern and angry and more and more medical in their nature.
She was terribly open to her body’s betrayal: she suffered very much from headaches and turmoil of spirits whose nature she could not determine, and once casting about for some relief from her migraine and depression she tried a glass of cooking-sherry. It was not very good to taste, but it worked. She had no head for alcohol, and she never acquired much of a tolerance, so that even on her income she was able to become an alcoholic – rows and rows of South African sherry (it was two shillings a bottle then) hidden in cupboards, behind bushes, clanking on the outhouse shelves. Her progress was unbelievably rapid, and the dissolution of her personality was a matter of weeks, not of years. Sometimes it was replaced by an extraordinary ‘modern’ substitute, hard, brassy and confident; sometimes it was replaced by nothing but a fog with no one behind it, an impersonal body of suffering;
