Sister Age by M.F.K. Fisher

Author:M.F.K. Fisher [Fisher, M.F.K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77920-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

The rest of Beddoes’ weekend passed in a pleasant blur. He helped clear the table after meals, at which he ate heartily of the bad food, and he never went into the kitchen, feeling shyly that Agatha and the others might not like it, but instead stacked dishes and cups with his customary neatness on the sideboard. They always disappeared soon after.

Saturday night, he played interminable darts in a crowded smoky saloon—pub, he should say. He drank an astonishing number of double Scotches, but none of them seemed to hit him, and afterward, in a solemnly clearheaded mood, he walked home through the sleeping village with Mac. He thought a long time and finally started to say that it was queer how well he understood the garbled accent of the village men, but Mac cut into his half-formed words. “Wait here, Beddoes, eh? I’ll be but a minute.” And, in his tweeds and round white collar, MacLaren hurried into the church through the unlocked door.

Beddoes waited, leaning against the cross by the sweetly dripping fountain. He knew Mac was right to leave him; he was drunk, even if he did not feel so in the least. “Tipsy souls must go to pray all by themselves, inside themselves, if they can find the door,” Beddoes said.

Mac came out in a few minutes, his face serene, and they went home to bed.

After morning services the next day (Beddoes did not go, feeling strangely shy about seeing his friend in vestments at the altar), they played golf a few miles from the village with a pair of fat tweedy old boys who scowled for eighteen holes and made Beddoes feel stiffly foreign and oafish, and then relaxed completely in the stuffy little clubhouse and told innumerable jokes so fast and mumblingly that he could only guess when to laugh.

He went to Evensong, rather to his surprise. The church was dim and musty, and two musty dim old women prayed alone on one side of the aisle, while he and Sarah sat, discreetly parted by an untidy pile of hymnals, in a pew across from them. At the back of the church, an ancient man—the sexton, perhaps—snuffled and creaked. Beddoes found himself following automatically the ritual that meant his childhood and then an occasional service with his wife back home. It was wonderful how some things never faded. And it was queer how little he felt at the sight of Mac up there, hunched like a great white quiet bird over the lectern. He had counted on being awed, and instead he felt only a desire to yawn. It was disappointing.

“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Mac was saying deeply, his voice echoing from the damp walls, “and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all, evermore.”

“Amen,” said Beddoes and Sarah and the two old dim shadows in the pew across the aisle. The invisible sexton at the back of the church cleared his throat sanctimoniously and threw open the doors as for a fine wedding.

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