I vaguely remember Moholy making a call on a mobile. And then a little while later Rifka, blonde Rifka with the two-stage nose, kneeling in front of me and offering me a glass of water. The light from the tall window behind her head darkened her features, surrounding her with a luminescent glow.
‘He was probably a bit brusque,’ Rifka said, ‘was he? That’s the way he sometimes is.’
Moholy appeared behind Rifka’s shoulder, and said that if it made me feel any better he apologised, though he didn’t look very sorry. He put his hand flat on his throat, then exercised his jaw. ‘I didn’t mean to rush you, it must be something I ate. But think about what I said, Jay. Phone me from the apartment. From my apartment.’
‘What shall I do with him until then?’ Rifka asked, fractionally turning her head. ‘He seems to be in shock.’
‘Fix a date to show him the ropes. Then get him out of here.’
I tried to wave down a taxi, as befitted my station as a knight of the realm, but my heart wasn’t in it. Also, taxis were forbidden by Geneva law from stopping on dual carriageways for Alpine walkers in shorts and tartan shirts and skew-whiff ties.
At the bus-stop, I watched the traffic, and then the clouds turning blue-black in the distance over the city. I was sitting on a plastic flip-down seat, and I had my forearms pressed together between my thighs, and I was rocking forwards and backwards, backwards and forwards, barely holding myself together.
I was waiting for a bus. I was wearing climbing boots and a shirt and tie. I had with me a gold eighteenth-century locket, and a section of bone from Sir Humphry Davy’s foot. Events may have passed me by, and I may have seen a world I was never meant to see, and I ought very urgently to have been back in England attending to earlier responsibilities, but I was still recognisably waiting for a bus, which was a great if fragile comfort.
In 1826, Davy had a total nervous breakdown. Numb with opium and acetate of cocaine, escaping his work, he came to a halt in Geneva, banging up hard against the limits of reasonable thinking. Davy the scientist wanted the secret of existence, and found himself a stranded self, without any answers. Science had no more access to certainty than religion, and he’d tried both, looking always beyond the simplistic defeatism of we are born, we live, we die. He couldn’t leave well alone, and now he was paying heavily for all that inhaling, combusting, fusing and combining, poking and scrubbing at elements and alloys and crystals, and sundry ethereal substances.
Davy would have resurrected the dead, if necessary. I was fairly sure of that, and it frightened me. He wasted his final years in pursuit of a theory of unification, hoping for a principle of connection like an amalgam of everything he’d ever learnt, and ever known. Science would cohere with theology, with imagination and emotion, with poetry and the absolute everything. Understanding would be all.
Relics appealed to the same weakness. They seemed to offer a unique point of contact between man and God. They could join heaven and earth, the immaterial and the material, the living and the dead.
Davy would have dug up James Joyce, as proposed by Moholy, and I craved all Davy’s early success. His triumphant discoveries and promotions, his curiously modern career, cut off from early friends and family by his meteoric rise, rootless and free. But I envied him less his lonely death in a Geneva hotel-room, correcting the proofs of Salmonia, a series of dialogues told in different voices which were really all his own, confused at the end by the sense that there was so much more to say than he could ever have said by himself.
Perhaps if he and Lady Davy had succeeded in having children. It might have made all the difference. Davy might never have broken down, his reputation cracking and scattering as he shook at the meaning of life in a laboratory, seeking by clinical experiment to establish the existence and wisdom of God.
A horn was sounding. I looked up, and a silver Mercedes was stopped in the lay-by of the bus-stop, engine running, and in the driver’s seat was Rifka. The near-side window slid down, by electricity, and she leant over the passenger seat to speak with me.
‘Everything alright?’
I needed opium, or acetate of cocaine, but all I had was Davy’s impossible foot, and its increasingly familiar influence: investigate, ask questions, receive incomplete answers, despair.
‘I’m waiting for the bus.’
‘I can see that. Do you want a lift?’
‘No.’
The car was gently idling.
‘Jay?’
‘What.’
‘Sir Humphry Davy. You forgot to give him back.’
I opened up my hands, and there he was. I could have kept him, if I’d wanted, but Davy had made so many mistakes. In the very last days, almost at the end, he instructed his travelling companion John Tobin Junior to delay his burial, should he die in Geneva. And he withheld permission for an autopsy, just in case he should merely be sleeping, and presently about to awake.
The Geneva city laws made no allowances for delusions such as these, and anyway, decay was already setting in. There were no miracles, and two centuries later Davy’s foot-bone was yet to exhibit unquestionable evidence of Davy’s revival. Its influence was purely subjective. In lab tests, the bone had stained in fire, and although conditions were only approximate to the standards of the day, initial results suggested elixir of Davy was limited at best in its effectiveness.
‘Where’s the box?’ Rifka asked, smiling nicely. I didn’t have the plastic box.
‘Just put it on the seat, then.’
I put Davy’s foot on the leather seat of the Mercedes, and the relief was immediate. It was suddenly just a dry piece of old bone, human matter without a soul.
Rifka slipped the car into drive. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘And don’t forget our appointment tomorrow.’
The Mason Family Ankle
‘In any true life you must go and be exposed outside the small circle that encompasses two or three heads in the same history of love. Try and stay, though, inside. See how long you can.’
Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
I WOKE UP the next morning feeling neutral to good. Then I remembered that I’d been under severe pressure, cracking up, falling apart. I’d had a bad couple of days, but I could now put the bones behind me, and pull myself together. Be normal. Remember who you are.
I am deacon Jay James Mason, Mason Minor, younger brother of Tom Mason, second son of the late Timothy Thomas James Mason, MA, and Mrs Angharad Bethany Mason, adventurer and exile, currently of Almuñécar near Granada, on the coast of southern Spain. Submitting to the influence of relics was a dangerous kind of evasion. I had my own identity, my history, my life.
I had a girlfriend, Helena Byczynski, who was three months pregnant. At this stage, no one but us was allowed to know, what with nature being so unpredictably dangerous and corrective. The baby was a secret. And Helena and I were living in separate countries.
It was therefore quite possible that I was not coping well with the situation in which I found myself.
What would Mum and Dad have done? They’d have married and had the baby and started a refreshing new family of Masons. That’s what they actually did. I wondered how they’d gone through with it, but already I knew the answer. It was a life’s work. Instead of discovering potassium, or saving the English Church, they did the decent thing.
It was Sunday morning in Geneva, a city until recently home to an outpost of the Anglican Church, and a compassionate short-term assignment for a clerical underachiever without other commitments. The Appointments Board didn’t know about Helena. But they knew about Dad, were sympathetic, and as one they’d agreed that a short trip abroad might help me reflect on my ongoing stumble between deacon and priest.
I went to the bathroom, stepping barefoot between coloured shapes projected across the parquet by the glass panels in the doors. On a shelf within reach of the toilet was an old edition of Crockford’s Clerical Directory. These books are annual lists of decent people who in any given year sacrifice
themselves for the benefit of the nation. I looked up Dad, Mason Senior, in 1993:
Mason, Timothy Thomas James
b 40 Nottm Univ BA 61 St Jo Coll Dur MA 66 Ridley Hall Cam 66 d 67 p 68 C St Nic w St Jo Newport Linc 67–69; Mil Ch C/Coy Para 3 69–73; V Mydroilyn w Dihewyd St D 73–77; V Sewerby cum Merton and Grindale Ripon 77–83; V Limber Magna w Somersby Chich 83–88; P-in-C Penzance w Stonegrave, Nunnington and Stockly Truro 88–90; P-in-C Wallsend St Luke Newc from 90
In religious code, this was the geography of my childhood; chopping, changing, learning to adapt, adapting. Fatally for a career in the Anglican Church, Mason Senior had never developed the required comedy of kindness, indignation and mild buffoonery. He had all the right qualities, but in the wrong proportions, and was shunted from one humble parish to another, God’s envoy among the schizophrenia of provincial England, watching it lurch without warning from drug-induced ram-raids to asphyxia of the soul by embroidered cushion.
At its worst (V Sewerby cum Merton and Grindale Ripon 77–83) it was unstoppable poverty and indignity and death, with mental no-hopers gurning at all hours at an open unlockable door. At its best (V Limber Magna w Somersby Chich 83–88) it was a glazed outskirt parish where much golf was played, and unhappiness was mostly gossip. The locals had the courtesy to die on time, and effective or not, underpaid or not, whatever the horror of his handicap, Mason Senior was genuinely esteemed for his unique entitlement to redeem his four-ball from sin.
Dad was in a rut of doing the decent thing. He obstinately stood up for goodness, at whatever cost to himself, and in Dad I saw that the essence of ministerial life was putting others first. At home, he was often on the telephone. It was usually parishioners calling in their cries for help, and when he was out we had our rote-learnt answer off by heart.
‘Sorry, I am unable to help you. But my dad will be back in a minute.’
For the first ten years of my life, I assumed there was no problem on earth that Dad couldn’t solve. He’ll be back in a minute. He’ll be able to help.
Dad had been in a war, in Ireland, as chaplain to a parachute battalion (Mil Ch C/Coy Para 3 69–73). He’d patrolled the streets of Crossmaglen, with a Bible and medikit instead of a gun, which was foolhardy and incredibly brave and a great disappointment. He still had the faded red beret and a stencilled khaki kit-bag, and I thought of him not as a vicar, but as a soldier in clerical disguise, undercover on some vitally important mission to save the world as we knew it.
He believed in fresh air. And Snakes and Ladders. Red phoneboxes, and waitresses in white blouses in country-house hotels. It was all part of his undeviating creed of England, and he frequently braced his spirituality with wet weekends under canvas on the Brecon Beacons, and unsupported kayak-trips across the Bristol Channel. By the Sunday, after battling nature and winning, he’d also believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. He acknowledged one baptism for the forgiveness of sins, and he looked for the resurrection of the dead.
Dad’s dad was also a vicar, but the strongest memory I had of him was his funeral. It had gathered us all together: Grandfather Mason (deceased), Mason Senior, Mother Mason, Thomas Mason Major, and James Mason Minor. Tom, wearing Dad’s regimental beret to keep him brave, sat near the end of our row at the front, giggling about Granddad’s leg. As part of dying from a lifetime on his feet, and some metal in his thigh from a Stop sign in Normandy, Grandfather Mason had developed a blood-clot in his ankle. At the hospital, they decided to amputate, thinking the old man’s famous reserves of faith would allow him to cope, at the age of eighty, with only one foot.
Dad was standing beside the coffin. Tom giggled, and hunched his head forward and covered his ears with his arms. That week, Dad’s chasuble and stole were violet, and that week, like every other, it was my dad who was God’s agent on earth. I was crying, and so was Mum. But it was alright, because Dad could help. Dad could always help. He was about to offer explanations, starting with proof of God’s existence, and evidence of life after death. He would then justify old age and blood-clots and bereavement, before taking questions on specific conundrums of luck. These were the things I expected him to know. He must do, or why was he always on the phone? And why else was it my dad and not the other dads standing there in black and white and violet, in a direct line of descent from the Apostles, leading the most solemn rituals of England?
There were a few coughs, wondering why Mason Senior hadn’t started.
He started.
There are many rooms in my father’s house. If there were not, I would have told you.
By the psalm, or at the latest by the New Testament reading, it became evident that Dad wasn’t the police. He wasn’t going to investigate Granddad’s death, or patch together reasons from clues a trained mind would always uncover. He wasn’t a rogue cop, incensed but logical, on a fierce personal and professional quest to find out why, and who, and what on earth for.
And how best to take revenge.
Dad was resigned. He lit a candle, and holding it aloft above the coffin, he ended the service by commending the life of Grandfather Mason to God. I started singing Happy Birthday. Tom lifted his feet from the floor, and squinnied out loud.
It was a difficult time. I was about ten, and had recently learnt at my private boarding school that all men were born equal.
‘Except Jesus,’ Dad reminded me.
We’d been given several days leave-out for the funeral, and at the end of a very long day Mum was putting us to bed.
‘Never mind Jesus,’ Mum said, on this occasion in her Yorkshire voice, somewhere between Kes and rugby league. My mum was very special. Like every boy’s mother, she wasn’t like the other mothers: she could do all the voices. ‘Eh oop,’ she said, ‘never mind ’im upstairs. You lads be whatever you blinking well want.’
That evening, after vigorous teeth-cleaning, Mum read us a story which ended happily. She loved doing the dialogue, trying out different accents as the flickering night-light found the hidden silver grain of her hair. Last thing, before going downstairs, she turned in the half-open doorway and told us she meant it, and we really could be whatever we wanted. And even though Dad was already out again, at Parish Council, or a hospital visit, she sealed our conspiracy by whispering, with no accent at all: ‘but not a vicar, I beg of you both, please’.
In the top bunk, Tom was already snoring with his nose squashed to the wall. I was only pretending to sleep, and Mum suddenly came back and whispered in my ear that I was a very special little boy, oh my little baby. I opened my eyes. Mum smiled uncertainly, but I was still worried about Granddad. I asked how long before he changed into a skeleton.
‘I don’t know,’ Mum said, in her kindest, most compassionate voice. Her normal voice. ‘Not straight away. It takes a little while.’
‘I saw a skeleton once, in a museum.’
‘Was it interesting?’
‘It was dead.’
Mum kissed me and pressed her cheek against my forehead. She told me how wonderful I was, but even then she ought to have taken more care. I was the last in a long line of cosseted English clerics, of discounts at private choir-schools, and therefore a long history of shelter, in which the craziest ambition can bud and breed.
Choir-school, which was free to the children of vicars, taught me that life was hard and boys have more than one identity. It might be the same for girls, but we were all boys, so I’d no way of knowing. At boarding school, there was no Mum and Dad, so we picked our own alternative influences. As parental substitutes, I had Buck Rogers of the twenty-fifth century, Wonderwoman and Geoffrey Boycott, a random greatest and latest. That was the way to live. Tom had his own heroes, but I always collected more posters and more commemorative stickers, and bought more plastic models with my hoarded birthday postal orders.
Dad couldn’t understand it. Most mornings in the holidays we’d ask for ninety-nine pence, for whatever was newest and most improved. Dad would say no, because none of the collectable cards or feti
shes did anything reliably useful, like placating fate. They failed to block even the smallest acts of God, like a broken saucer in the washing-up, or how frequently he lost his glasses.
In Geneva, if it wasn’t already too late, I was hoping that memories such as these could save me. Dad’s bones were in the ground, and I could still hear my mother’s voice in anger demanding to know if I actually believed in God (well, James, do you?).Trapped, under pressure, I’d been forced to admit that the only thing I’d ever believed unconditionally, was that I believed, yes Mum I did believe, unconditionally in my family’s love.
That’s where I should look for help. I went to the kitchen, and started tidying up. Mum had never been a great tidier, modelling herself on her own mum, who one summer in Swansea had fallen in love with an acrobat, but failed to run off with the circus. After that, housework was always a defeat. So, like Dad, I put packets back in cupboards, wiped surfaces, and was about to start on the washing-up when I saw Moholy’s golden locket on the table. I took it to the swing-bin under the sink, and emptied out the contents. This was how to be sane, and not to fall apart. Remember what holds you together, your roots.
In the bedroom, I meant to tidy away Dad’s red chasuble. It was Sunday, and by this time every Sunday Dad would have finished Morning Prayer and be readying himself for Family Communion. Without worrying too hard at the reasons, sensing my father’s gentle influence, I folded the chasuble into a carrying bag. Then I dressed, putting on a dark lambswool cardigan of the type modelled by vicars for a hundred years. Then my black zip-up jacket, which I only ever wore to work.
On a Sunday, with the banks closed and so many people not going to church, Geneva was a ghost-town. The city’s symbol, the Jet d’Eau, was a high-rise, high-pressure geyser in the harbour, which could push seven tons of water 140 metres into the air. Often, it was turned off, and today, on my way to the Church of All Saints, there was no sign of it. In Geneva, even the landmarks were ghostly, making the place seem unfixed, just right for its population always coming and going, constantly changing the city’s character.
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