Sunday Best by Bernice Rubens Read Free Book Online

with as much dignity as I could muster. I felt like an aristocrat of the French Revolution, who, not wanting to cause a delay, stood waiting for the arrival of the tumbril.

Chapter Four
    They arrived in groups, or singly, with Mr Hood, the musicmaster, absentmindedly whistling in the rear. The Reverend glowered at him, but Mr Hood, a man after my own heart, stared right through him, and not only finished whistling his air, but added a coda for good measure. The Reverend Richard Baines, to whom a perfect and imperfect cadence sounded exactly the same, and on whom the finesse of a coda was completely lost, felt his authority questioned.
    â€˜That’s enough, Hood,’ he thundered.
    â€˜It’s finished,’ Hood said with satisfaction, and he smiled with an innocence that I envied.
    Miss Price took her seat beside the Cloth, with a smug ‘I’m-in-the-know’ look smeared on her face. Mr White placed himself in front of me, and I was glad because I could steady my foot on the back of his chair to stop my leg from trembling. During the course of the day, I had half-heartedly composed a speech in my defence, half-heartedly, not because I was unaware of the urgency of my case, but because I was unsure of the charge. So I was obliged to fashion a defence that would answer to the charge of Adultery and Eonism, no mean assignment, I can tell you. I had in the end decided on a flat denial of both, and if my wardrobe were called into question, it was the overflow of my wife’s, and as for Tommy’s story, he was a bloody liar, and what his motive was I couldn’t imagine. In fact, my whole speech was one of righteous indignation at their suspicions. How dare they cast such aspersions on a God-fearing upright citizen like myself. By the time the Reverend Richard Baines was ready to open the meeting, I had worked myself up into such a state of hostility, that I had to fumble at nothings in my brief-case to hide my rage. Mr Gardiner, sitting next to me, remarked on my sudden sweating and hoped I didn’t have a cold coming. I coughed to oblige him, and hoped the same of myself, while the Reverend waiteduntil my feeble wheezing had subsided.
    â€˜Ladies and Gentlemen,’ he began. He always pluralized Miss Price, tho’ she had hardly enough about her to indicate even one of her kind; flat-chested and overall hirsute, it was difficult to determine her gender except perhaps by touch, if anyone could bring himself to do it. She tut-tutted at her chief’s incorrigible sense of humour and waited agog for him to launch the tidings she had already juicedly savoured.
    â€˜I would like to apologize to Miss Price beforehand,’ the Cloth continued, ‘for having to discuss what you will agree is an unsavoury subject in her presence.’ I hung on to my chair, and I felt my bowels melting. All memory of my speech had evaporated, and I felt myself swaying.
    â€˜But I thought it best,’ he went on, ‘to confide in her the matter of this meeting, so that she would be well prepared to withstand whatever embarrassment would ensue. I apologize to her once again.’
    Miss Price smiled. ‘I hope I am broad-minded enough,’ she said, ‘to overcome the delicacy of the situation. But a trespass is a trespass, and must be dealt with.’
    A nodded approval from the Cloth. ‘Let us pray,’ I expected him to say, and I myself at that juncture felt in need of a prayer, a good solid, infallible invocation that the Reverend and Miss Price would lose no time in dropping dead. I inadvertently lifted my leg from Mr White’s seat and set up such a vibration throughout the row that Mr Gardiner was convinced that my cold had burgeoned into pneumonia. This time there was less sympathy, and he shifted his seat to avoid contact. I wanted very much to cry.
    The headmaster smiled at Miss Price, and I wished to God they’d get their wretched bonhomie over and done with. He