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remember.’ But her tone was slightly defiant and Tom knew that by ‘the past’ she did not mean quite what he did. Still, it was a beginning.
    He looked around him to say something to Miss Howick – Emma, as he was beginning to think of her –but she had gone. He prepared to spend an evening with his sister, who had not been at the party, and to tell her ‘all about it’.

9

    One morning Tom went into the church, as he often did, to spend half an hour or so, not exactly to meditate or pray but to wander in a random fashion round the aisles, letting his thoughts dwell on various people in the village. This was in its way a kind of prayer, like bringing them into the church which so few of them actually visited, or never darkened its doors, as a more dramatic phrase had it. He studied the monuments and wall tablets, noticing repairs that were needed, brass that was tarnished (whose turn had it been last week?), and sometimes regretting Victorian additions to what had originally been a simple building.
    The family at the manor had the largest and most interesting memorials, with florid inscriptions that taxed the memory of one’s Latin. It was perhaps a pity that we no longer commemorated our dead in such terms, Tom felt, remembering the barer records of the twentieth century. Now a memorial more often took the form of an extension to the communion rails – a godsend indeed to old stiff knees – or a very plain tablet in chillingly good taste. We were more embarrassed nowadays or less insincere, he would not have liked to say which, for ‘sincerity’ was disproportionately valued today. It would be impossible, for example, to imagine anything like the de Tankerville mausoleum being erected now. It had been put up outside the church in the early nineteenth century and later members of the family had been buried in it. Now, when they no longer lived at the manor, it seemed an awkward anachronism in such a small and humble parish.
    Tom was thinking along these lines when he heard a movement at the back of the church. Somebody had come in, though whether visitor, parishioner or brass-cleaning lady he was unable to see. The ‘person’ – and in these days of sex equality and uniform dress and hairstyle the visitor could surely be so described – had moved into the de Tankerville chapel, as it was called, and appeared to be examining the monument of the recumbent crusader. As he came nearer, Tom saw that it was a young man with golden bobbed hair, dressed in the usual T-shirt and jeans and wearing pink rubber gloves, an unusual and slightly disturbing note.
    Can I help you? Tom thought, without in fact uttering the words, for it seemed at once too trivial and too profound an enquiry. An offer to ‘help’ might “be taken literally when all that Tom felt himself capable of offering on this occasion was a brief history of the church and village with perhaps more detailed comments on some of the monuments, and he was about to start on his usual account when the young man forestalled him by speaking first.
    ‘You must be the rector,’ he said, rather too effusively, almost as if he were congratulating Tom on having got the job. ‘I’m Terry Skate – I’ve come to see your mausoleum. I thought I’d just nip into the church first, to put me in the picture – if you see what I mean – get to know the general set-up, what was involved and all that.’
    The two of them were standing looking down at the effigy of Sir Hubert de Tankerville. Tom felt that it might almost have been his fault, as if Mr Skate might blame him in some way, that the head of one of the little dogs reposing at the crusader’s feet was broken off. Contemplating the headless animal, he thought of the Puritans and the Civil War, but again the visitor got in first with a comment about vandalism, ‘even in olden times’.
    ‘You haven’t been here before?’ Tom said, trying to remember the others who had come periodically to ‘see to’ the