They had left it there. Only now, as Teresa leaves the room, is there any need to think about the matter and recall how difficult the early part of the evening has been.
‘Right,’ says Julian brightly, to show that he isn’t upset by Teresa’s departure. ‘The presents.’
He picks up Timothy’s misshapen offering and carries it over to Naomi as if it might explode.
She begins to tear at the paper, but the parcel proves almost as difficult to unwrap as it was to wrap.
If you have a dead curlew handy, try wrapping it and then unwrapping it bit by bit. It will not reveal the secret of its identity easily. For quite a while nobody can tell what on earth it is. Everybody feels the tension, but nobody more than Timothy.
At last the curlew is fully revealed, its magnificent curved beak, its barred grey-brown plumage, and its eyes. Its eyes look out at the group, sharp, inquisitive, dead. Naomi holds the dead curlew in her hands. She goes cold all over. She is in shock. She hates the lifeless feel of its feathers in her fingers. She heard a curlew trill one morning on the moors and thought that she had never heard a more beautiful sound. She hates it dead. Hates it.
She cannot tell Timothy this.
There is silence in the room.
‘It’s a curlew,’ explains Timothy.
‘Yes, I know,’ says Naomi. ‘I’ve seen them. But not dead.’
‘We didn’t kill it,’ says Timothy. ‘It crashed into a greenhouse up beyond Tangley Ghyll. It’s mine. My very first effort. I did it for you. Dad let me.’
‘I didn’t realise,’ says Naomi.
She is staring at Timothy. He doesn’t know why. He wishes she wouldn’t stare at him. But she has to, for fear that she will catch someone else’s eye. Anyone’s eye. If she does, she’ll succumb to hysterics.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Thank you, darling.’ Saying ‘darling’ makes her feel about eighty, but she doesn’t know what else to call him. ‘It’s…it’s lovely, Timothy.’
She puts the curlew down on an occasional table. She feels so much better now that she’s no longer holding it. She moves back and surveys it.
‘Really lovely,’ she says. ‘Oh, Timothy. You did all that for me.’
She goes over to him and hugs him.
He beams.
‘Was it dreadfully horrid, doing it? You know, putting your fingers up it and…whatever it is you do. Was it awful?’
‘You don’t put your fingers up it. There is no up to put your fingers up. You build a form, with papier mâché, and wire to hold the legs and beak and stuff. It’s like sculpture. You don’t stuff a bird, because you put the skin on at the end, over what you’ve built. It’s an art. It’s what I do. It’s what I’m going to do with my life. It’s my job. Of course it wasn’t horrid.’
‘I didn’t realise,’ she says again, weakly. ‘Well, thank you.’ And she kisses him on the cheek.
‘Well…follow that,’ says Julian, strolling over to the pile of presents.
‘A most original present and a most personal gift,’ says Antoine firmly to Naomi. ‘And Timothy, as a fellow artist I would love to come and see your father’s workshop.’ He looks at the curlew critically. ‘Not at all a bad first effort, Timothy.’
‘Thank you,’ says Timothy. ‘My dad says if you’ve done it really well its eye will follow you wherever you move.’
Naomi tries to hide her horror at this prospect.
Naomi and Timothy are only a few feet away from each other in the great, dark, solemn church. Only Darren Pont, Lindsay East and Sally Lever are between them. All the others in the class, except for Sally Lever, are younger than Naomi and Timothy, who have both rather enjoyed setting an example, and pretending to be mature.
With its fine hammer roof and fifteenth-century font cover, the church is one of only two buildings in Coningsfield to merit a complimentary mention in Pevsner, and the other has now gone to make room for a monstrously ugly multistorey car park whose entrances and exits snake so sharply that few motorists venture into it. The Poles have rebuilt their major cities in all their historical glory, but this is England.
Naomi is not thinking about Poles or the hammer roof. She is thinking of the hammering of her heart. Why does it hammer so? Could it be because she has realised that she and Timothy are poles apart?
She has a pit in her stomach and several moths are flying round there, trying to escape. She is uncomfortably aware of Timothy. She loves him, of course. She is supposed to be going to marry him. But…there is that distance between them.
It’s the curlew. How could he give her such a dreadful thing? How could there be such a chasm between their sensibilities? She keeps it in a cupboard, so that she never has to look at its reproachful eye following her round the room saying, ‘Why did you humiliate me in this way?’ but she is still aware that it is there, in her home, polluting it. She tells Timothy that she keeps it in her bedroom beside her photograph of him. This means that, when he calls round, she has to bring it out in her gloved hands and put it there, in case he pops upstairs and peeps, to see how his proud creation sits, how fine it looks, how happy Naomi must be to wake up from her beauty sleep and see it there, reminding her of him.
It isn’t just the curlew. It’s God. Timothy looks so fervent, so exalted. She cannot feel either fervent or exalted. Why is she here? Because her parents are Christians, her father is an elder, her mother teaches at Sunday School, she sings hymns in school assembly, she prays in school assembly, she writes ‘C of E’ on forms, she tells the careers officer she is C of E. To write ‘agnostic’, to keep her lips clamped during hymns, to keep her head defiantly unbowed during prayers, to upset her parents, what a burden that would be. No, when it comes to religion, the playing field is not level. Oh, there is so much more than just Darren Pont, Lindsay East and Sally Lever between them. Will today bring them closer together? Once they have eaten the body of Christ and drunk the blood of Christ, will they be able to reignite their love?
She recalls the last time he had visited L’Ancresse, a week or so ago. She had felt obliged to take him up to her room, to show him the curlew that she had taken out of the cupboard that morning.
‘There it is,’ she had said, hating herself. ‘In pride of place.’
‘Who’s that?’
His eye had fallen on a sepia photograph, beautifully framed, sitting in the centre of her dressing table. It showed a very handsome young man, with perfect features and a trim moustache. She had found that she didn’t want to tell him, which had surprised her. He was her secret, her harmless secret.
‘Just…a family friend,’ she had said evasively.
She thinks about her evasion now. Her desire to evade seems significant to her. She tries to concentrate on the Bishop’s words, spoken with such uninspired solemnity.
‘To the end that Confirmation may be ministered to the more edifying of such as shall receive it…’
What a strange way to put it. Nice to be thought of among the more edifying, but still…odd.
More words, but she isn’t listening. A dreadful truth has assailed her. It isn’t just God and the curlew. It’s Steven Venables. He’s asked her out. She finds him attractive. He’s so self-contained, so confident, so sure of himself. If she went out with him, he would tell her where he was taking her. Timothy asks her where she wants to go. And then says, ‘Are you sure?’ and they fuss about it till she doesn’t know where she wants to go any more.
‘…which order is very convenient to be observed; to the end, that children, being now come to the years