Read A Month in the Country for Free Online Page A

up and, as far as I recall, he did this for no-one else unless he happened to be standing already.
    Anyway, the Colonel stirred around a bit and unknowingly prodded his ancestor’s grave-designate with his foot. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Yes. Very interesting. Like having you chaps around. Makes a change. Stay as long as you like. Well, must be getting along. Getting in your way.’
    â€˜This is Mr Birkin, Colonel,’ Moon said. ‘He’s come to put us in the picture about what’s above the chancel arch.’
    The Colonel looked at my boots. ‘Jolly interesting,’ he said. ‘Stay as long as you like, Birkin. Care to umpire for us on Saturdays? Mossop says he can’t stand for too long at a time these days. Well, would have liked to have stayed longer. Another morning perhaps. Must be on my way. I’ll tell Mossop you’ll take over the umpiring. Very civil of you.’
    He dawdled off. Then he turned. ‘Found anything out of the ordinary, Moon? Artefacts? No gold bits and pieces I suppose?’
    Moon looked more mournful than ever but acknowledged the reasonableness of the enquiry by uttering a strangled sound.
    â€˜Mustn’t mind my asking. Just showing an interest. Stay as long as you like.’ And he shambled off.
    I never exchanged a word with the Colonel. He has no significance at all in what happened during my stay in Oxgodby. As far as I’m concerned he might just as well have gone round the corner and died. But that goes for most of us, doesn’t it? We look blankly at each other. Here I am, here you are. What are we doing here? What do you suppose it’s all about? Let’s dream on. Yes, that’s my Dad and Mum over there on the piano top. My eldest boy is on the mantelpiece. That cushioncover was embroidered by my cousin Sarah only a month before she passed on. I go to work at eight and come home at five-thirty. When I retire they’ll give me a clock – with my name engraved on the back. Now you know all about me. Go away: I’ve forgotten you already.
    That was a fairly typical beginning to most days – a mug of tea in Moon’s dug-out, usually not saying much, while he had a pipe. I’d ask him how things were going, who’d looked into his hole; then he’d ask me how things were going up my ladder, who’d wandered across to the church and, now and then, through pipe smoke, he would look speculatively at me. Now who are you? Who have you left behind in the kitchen? What befell you Over There to give you that God-awful twitch? Are you here to try to crawl back into the skin you had before they pushed you through the mincer?
    I saw his questions but didn’t answer them. Not because I lacked candour but because talking wouldn’t help. They’d told me that only time would clean me up, and I believed them. Anyway, all that was past and gone and, in those first days at Oxgodby, I was engrossed in my work. It was tremendously exciting: perhaps you can understand if I explain that, to begin with, I wasn’t sure what I was uncovering.
    Medieval wall-paintings keep to a well-thumbed catalogue. There are the three voluptuaries displayed in jolly dissipation, then racked in hellish torment; there is Christopher wading through fishes and mermaids with the Christ-child on his shoulder; there are those boring female saints stoically enduring wheel, rack and sword-slicing (these fitted conveniently along aisle walls or above the nave arcade). But the great spread of wall between chancel arch and roof timbers almost always got the Big Treatment – a Judgement.
    Well, it’s reasonable enough. Big casts need big stages and the tall wall around the great arch could be arranged very appropriately with Christ in Majesty at its apex, the falling curves nicely separating the smug souls of the Righteous trooping off-stage north to Paradise, from the Damned dropping (normally head-first) into the