To the Pastor, the popular and widespread denials of the truth upon which atheists and agnostics depend on so heavily were themselves just as easy to deny or refute. People don’t or can’t believe the miracles of the Bible and yet they are surrounded everyday by miraculous happenings, e.g. in the field of electronics etc. and they don’t doubt any of them for a minute. They disbelieve that their every word and deed can be recorded and that the consequences of their actions can be held against them on the Day of Judgement, and yet their medical records, present whereabouts, and very much else about them is presently being recorded electronically, with ease and precision, by mere men.
As often happened, I felt I could almost go along with this assertion for not so long ago the awe inspiring sight of Emperor Ming and Flash Gordon, conversing face to face on a ‘visual telephone’ had been thought of as a miracle by cinema audiences. They weren’t just conversing on the telephone, which audiences at that time had thought to be clever enough, not everyone had a telephone, they could actually see each other, too.
But going along with some of the things the Pastor taught wouldn’t be enough, I knew. Not nearly enough.
It’s just that Dad thinks I should only get involved with people who more or less believe what we believe Linda said, as if reading my mind, and you know how he can support everything with Scripture,” she added, frowning at me gently.
“His interpretation of Scripture, you mean,” I commented boldly, but without conviction.
“You definitely don’t go along with Dad all the way, John, do you?” she said, in what I realised was to her a very serious challenge.
“In most things I do, Linda. I just have problems here and there.”
“Well I don’t always agree with him either,” she said, still in a conciliatory tone. “But with sixty six books in the Bible, written in a variety of literary forms, I suppose there’s bound to be differences of opinion somewhere, isn’t there?”
“Of course there is,” I hastily agreed, guiltily aware that my thoughts were pulling me in another direction.
As I looked across at her, sitting with poise on a rock she made look like a piece of furniture, I tried to put out of my mind the great promise contained in the view I had of her ankles, and to resist the temptation to let my thoughts wander up beyond her knees.
“There’s a lot of truth in what you say, Linda, but give me an example of where we might be at complete loggerheads?” I asked, giving her something to occupy her mind, while I tried to suppress thoughts of what I imagined would be soft, ample thighs enclosing those parts of her body that I felt ashamed to be thinking about during a conversation like this.
“The Scriptures say, ‘Be ye not unequally yoked’,” she stated, instantly lowering my temperature. She had gone right to the point, again.
“Could you put that another way?” I asked, finally realising I would have to concentrate my attention on what she thought was the right subject, not on the one I wished it was.
True believers should not get too involved, or whatever else, with unbelievers, or people with funny ideas.”
“Funny ideas? You mean me?” I asked uneasily.
“Not quite – they’re people who say they believe in the Bible but really have another Bible, specially rewritten to suit them, concealed behind their back. Like some of the sects, for instance.”
“That’s definitely not me.”
“It’s not,” she agreed. “I didn’t quite mean that.”
Her face wore a sympathetic look which I wasn’t happy with. Was she being patronising without meaning to be, I wondered.
If she was, maybe she was entitled to be. I believed everything and yet nothing while she knew exactly where she stood on this subject. Her eyes and her lips were her most noticeable features, now that I had abandoned the others, and I was making the most of them. I thought of pressing my lips against hers and of her large brown eyes closing in surrender. If I could harbour such thoughts during a conversation of this kind, wasn’t she entitled to feel superior? I asked myself despairingly.
“I envy you, Linda,” I heard myself say.
“Envy?”
“Yes. You’re so sure about what you believe. With me, so many things are controversial.”
“Controversy can sometimes be challenging,” she commented.
I thought of taking her in my arms, and again of pressing my lips against hers. This would be controversial, and challenging, I told myself, feeling even more ashamed than ever of my ability to put what in the circumstances were debasing, even adolescent thoughts, out of my mind.
“Controversy can be confusing, just as often as it is challenging, Linda,” I replied, making a further effort to justify my thoughts on the subject.
“Give me an example then,” she asked.
I almost gave up at that point. In spite of all my efforts to the contrary I could see that our opinions would just have to differ which would be better than merely lusting after her, as I had been doing, I told myself.
“I’m a British soldier fighting the Japanese in the jungle, in the Second World War,” I began, falling back as usual on something from the Book Collection.
“Okay”.
“You’ll know of course, what the Japanese soldiers were like at that time.”
“I do, and you’re going to say something about turning the other cheek, and loving your enemy, etc,” she said, wrongly anticipating my line of thought.
“Far from it.”
Although she looked unpleasantly surprised at this, I felt I had to go on.
“I’m going to say that dropping the atom bomb was a very good idea.”
“You mean they were right to drop the atom bomb and kill thousands of defenceless civilians?”
How many times had I heard this? How could killing defenceless civilians ever sound right? Did she think I was stupid?
“I can’t quite say that, Linda.”
“Well?”
“Well. That’s the problem. The British soldier is a civilian too, isn’t he? He didn’t volunteer. He was called up.”
“Weren’t the Japanese going to surrender anyway?”
“After that soldier got killed, and maybe a few hundred thousand others, even far more than that probably.”
“And what about the children incinerated in the blast?” she asked, dismissive of my assertion.
“And what about the soldier’s children? I countered. The ones who won’t be born at all, if the bomb isn’t dropped.”
Could I blame her for thinking like this, for not seeing my difficulty? How could she identify with a soldier facing death in the jungle? But was I any better? How could I identify with people like her, people who had been brought up in the Church and whose whole way of life revolved around it? As had become the practice these days, point of view, hers in this case, was going to gain the advantage and be taken for the absolute truth. The atom bomb would have to be bad.
“Principle and practice are further apart for me than they are for you, Linda. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Okay, we’re equal. You don’t understand me and I don’t understand you,” she said, in a playful tone that sounded forced, indicating as I had feared, that I had made my point unwisely from an overall point of view.
“Well if dropping the bomb was all that bad then the people behind it won’t go unpunished will they, at least not according to your father they won’t?”
“You don’t believe that either do you?” she said accusingly.
“Believe what?”
“In the absolute sovereignty of God.”
“That God is still on the throne you mean.”
“There’s no need to be flippant”, she chided.
The look on her face confirmed that what I had feared all along had actually happened. Once I started to contradict her in any serious way and
appear to cast doubt on what she believed then our relationship would suffer.
“You’ve misunderstood me”, I lied. “Of course I believe in the sovereignty of God.”
“But not that God still deals with people and nations in the same way as he did in The Old Testament?”
If this was anything like a lover’s tiff then it was too much for me, I thought. She was deadly serious about all this, just like her father. I was on dangerous ground. I had to very quickly get things back to where I felt they had been before we got out of the car.
“You’re taking me the wrong way Linda”, I pleaded. “I’m not really disagreeing with you. It’s just that I’m not so well read on the subject as you are.”
“Well what don’t you know?”
She was definitely being patronising now, I could see. I wasn’t sure if I liked her more, or less, for this but it didn’t effect how I felt about her, which was more important right then.
“That’s maybe a bit too much to discuss right now”, I said meekly.
“What about a walk?” I added as a means of escape, looking along the shore to where I could see a path that had been trodden into the grassy verge which sloped down to the sheltered spot in which we were sitting.
We had to make our way over the rocks to get there and she reached out to me several times to steady herself, always taking her arm away when she had regained her balance. I managed to grip her arm as we negotiated the final rock, and we reached the pathway hand in hand.
We walked for a while, the strong wind coming in from the sea making conversation difficult. My thoughts flitted over what we had been discussing, as if reliving a job interview. Would the opposing views I had expressed during my attempts to escape from my lewd thoughts bring about my downfall.
The pathway led us away from the shore and out of the wind where I noticed her hair was rich enough in texture to have withstood the onslaught of the weather and the colour had risen in her cheeks.
That she continued to hold my hand I hoped might signify that no serious harm had been done, here at least, by the dropping of the atom bomb, or by our brief reference to God’s intervention in human affairs. Encouraged by this, I slipped my arm around her waist, gently pulling her closer to me, as we walked.
Pleased at the progress indicated by her lack of resistance, I felt I had to make the most of it before we reached the end of the pathway. I stopped and, when she turned to look up at me, I placed my other arm on her shoulder and pulled her round to face me. I felt her thighs press against mine.
I knew it wouldn’t be easy to get past her anorak and jeans. I would have as much chance as the weather had. I was glad that the idea of doing so was a desire rather than an intention and was at first content to press my cheek against hers, feeling her warm breath on my ear.
But before long I felt like kissing her on the lips and was even having thoughts about what might lie ahead if I attempted to reach the universal destination by negotiating the breasts, thighs and panties likely to be met, in that order, along the way. Would some people never learn.
Compared to some of the other thoughts that had been running through my mind kissing her didn’t seem much but now I couldn’t bring myself to do even this. Behaving towards her in this way in this place didn’t seem right. But I drew her in closer to me, nevertheless.
“Someone will see us,” she said, pulling away from me, looking up and down the pathway.
She didn’t seem too put out by what I had actually done, only by the risk we ran of being seen.
Since I had only pressed against her, and she couldn’t have known of the other more ambitious thoughts she had inspired in me, I realised I was missing the point. It wasn’t her response, the fact that she was a woman in spite of her beliefs, which was the issue here, it was my attitude. I didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of pushing her off the pathway into the bushes where no-one might see us, and where the objects of desire hidden under her anorak and jeans might be revealed to me. From the event in the ante room at the Annual Staff Dance, surely I had learned something, that behaviour of this kind could have unfortunate, long-term consequences. On this occasion I was going to pay heed to the particular ‘Keep off the Grass’ sign that I felt had been put up by the fact she was the Pastor’s daughter. But at least I could look forward to my next move, whatever that was going to be, without feeling that I had spoiled anything.
The fact that my relationship with her was a bit like fighting a war on two fronts was something that didn’t occur to me until very much later which, in view of that great devastating example cited in the Book Collection of Germany attacking Russia in 1941 before it had beaten Britain, was just as well.
chapter seventeen
As I drove along the dual carriageway on the second run, I calculated that I would be at my destination in under an hour, and that I would be there for about ten minutes. Allowing for unexpected delays and the fact that some of the journeys would be at the far end of the fifty mile radius I was at this point expected to work within, the cash payment plus petrol allowance was generous, to say the least. I would have to sell at least ten extinguishers to earn that much in commission. I didn’t have to remind myself that it would take a lot more than a few hours to do that, and a lot more effort too. If I could do these deliveries once or twice a week, it wouldn’t be long before I could take a wad of banknotes out of a long brown envelope with as much ease as Andy had.
But this work had its difficulties too. On one occasion there were three cars behind me, keeping pace with me, and I had had to pull off the road to let them go past. I hadn’t been sure if had been doing the right thing or if I had just been letting my nerves get the better of me again?
Soon I was on a coast road where the many bends reduced my field of vision. Although I had to give a little more attention to my driving I was enjoying the pleasant view I had of the sea, but the occasional glimpse I got of some car or other travelling at what appeared to be a fixed distance behind me, kept reminding me that I was only being paid so much because I was doing something I shouldn’t be, and that there was bound to be a risk of some sort attached to it.
When I reached the town I hadn’t gone far along the main road when I saw, in the rear view mirror, a car that had been coming along behind me, turn off into a side street, leaving me with a clear view of the empty approach road I had just come down. Everything was going to be all right, I told myself, feeling greatly relieved.
The black Rover with the right registration plate was easy to spot, too. Taking out the keys Andy had given me, I laid them on the passenger seat, drawing into the side of the road about twenty yards or so beyond the vehicle, and calmly got out.
There were several people on both sides of the street, none of whom gave me the enquiring or challenging look that residents would usually give to newcomers. They would be passers-by, I supposed, certainly not people lying in wait for me.
I laid the package on the back seat of the Rover and took out the one that was already there, putting it on the roof as I re-locked the door, resisting a strong impulse to look up an down the street as I strolled back to my car.
As I headed towards the outskirts of the town I felt pleased with myself. My nerves hadn’t let me down, after all. Once more I had done what had been expected of me. But as soon as I reached the dual carriageway my nervousness returned. The success or failure of what I was doing, I grimly reflected, wouldn’t depend on how reliable I was but on whether or not I actually was being followed. And what if I was? And who by? Andy had never even brought this up. Should he have? I was definitely out of my depth in all this.
But I wasn’t being followed. Every vehicle that came up behind me eventually overtook me until at last there was nothing but the empty road stretching endlessly behind me. I felt annoyed that the job was taking so much out of me. If I wasn’t being followed, then what was I worrying about? I didn’t even know i
f there was anything harmful in the package, for that matter.
But using my ignorance of its contents to lessen my anxiety didn’t work for long. I had it in my possession and that alone could probably get me in to serious trouble. And it wasn’t only that. There was something else. As I looked again in the rear view mirror, I knew that the strong feeling of relief I felt at once more seeing an empty road wasn’t going to be enough to make me feel really happy at what I was doing.
It wasn’t the actual nature of the crime which was bothering me. After all, I wasn’t a murderer, or a kidnapper. Their souls definitely belonged on the other side of that great divide which separates absolute evil from mere breaking of the law. Mine didn’t.
As I glanced over my shoulder at the package lying on the back set it dawned on me that what was really bothering me was quite simple. It was the fact that I wasn’t just involved with criminals, I actually was one now. It was no use pleading that I hadn’t thought the crime up, or set it in motion, for how many crimes had only became possible because of the help given by accomplices? And didn’t they always downplay their role just like I was doing?
Hadn’t the Book Collection drawn my attention to the professed innocence of the drivers of the trains which had pulled cattle trucks crammed full of suffocating people to the Nazi death camps? Or the guards in other camps, only obeying orders, when they had forced prisoners to go to their deaths hauling heavy stones up a hill? Didn’t evil always fully reproduce itself in the hearts of its helpers? And didn’t they always plead otherwise on the day of reckoning?
But was I being fair to myself? All things considered, I wasn’t merely acquiescing in Andy’s offer of a job, like someone giving in to temptation, I was desperate.
If I didn’t get money from somewhere then not only would I lose the flat, with all that that entailed but, even worse, I would have to stand by helplessly as Aunt Grace was moved out of the private nursing home to join me on my way down the ladder. I had to do something to stop these things happening. Surely my conscience shouldn’t be bothering me too much.
Am I Being Followed? Page 13