Mum would have defied the Swiss quietness, like a challenge. She’d even have hated the lake, a timid ocean, sedate in its reaction to every dramatic moon. Between the antiques galleries and the shops selling precious stones, she’d have made rude noises and done funny voices, and generally have acted oddly.
As for Dad, he’d have loved Geneva. In the Old Town the dismal Cathedral and bleak alleys made it feel acceptable to be uptight. The 500 banks were like clenched fists, and nobody was openly letting themselves go.
When I reached the church, I was surprised to see a small group waiting in the arched doorway. I recognised the burly figure of Mr Oti, who was something cultural in the Nigerian embassy, and a formerly dependable All Saints warden.
‘At last,’ he said. ‘We thought you weren’t coming.’
‘I wasn’t. I’m not. What do you mean?’
‘Mrs Meier told us all about it. You kept the key. You wouldn’t give up the church without a fight.’
The weather. I took immediate refuge in the weather. ‘Brrr,’ I said. ‘Not so warm. Let’s go inside.’
I unlocked the door, and everyone followed me in. Which wasn’t what I had in mind, not exactly, but there were more people than I’d originally thought, with others arriving all the time, expats, Africans, and representatives from all the cricket-playing nations. Helpfully, Mr Oti and Mr Dharmasena, another occasional church-warden, carried the two bin-bags of jumble out of harm’s way and down the aisle to the vestry. One man at each end, they then lifted the altar back to its customary position.
I peeked out at all this activity from behind the vestry door. The Geneva faithful were English enough to be filling up the empty space from the back. I didn’t know them well, but there was a family of Indians from a flooded village in Madhya Pradesh. There were two sisters from Sierra Leone, whose family owned cows made worthless by European dumping of surplus beef. And there were also the regular Sri Lankans.
Mr Dharmasena owned a bar by the station, and showed cricket on satellite to his many compatriots in Geneva who worked washing pots. He’d chaired the All Saints pledge fund for nearly a decade, ever since he and an earnest gathering of batsmen and bowlers had picked out this particular church for their prayers to the god of cricket. Three rows of Sri Lankans had knelt in mumbled silence, pleading for a miraculous victory in the Cricket World Cup.
In the final that year, Sri Lanka hammered Australia, who were unbeatable.
The Sri Lankans were among those most anguished by the sale of the Anglican church. Others in the congregation could seek spiritual comfort elsewhere, but what did the God of the Episcopalians or the Geneva Reformed Church know about cricket? And why would he even care?
‘Peace be with you,’ Mr Dharmasena said, rubbing his hands together, looking at me expectantly. Mr Oti joined us in the vestry and punctured the transparent plastic wrapper round the parcel of returned laundry. He pulled out a black server’s cassock and a blue choir surplice, so recently ironed and starched he could balance them across his forearms like a tray. He tried to be solemn, then smiled hugely.
‘I’m not really allowed,’ I said. ‘I don’t have the authority.’
‘God works in mysterious ways.’
‘Yes, Mr Dharmasena, I’ve heard that he does.’
‘So.’
‘There aren’t any chairs or anything.’
‘No one minds.’
‘The English church won’t let us down,’ Mr Oti said. ‘That’s what we were always promised.’
He transferred the robes from his forearms to mine, and winked. ‘See you in two shakes, and James Mason?’
‘That’s my name.’
‘Good luck.’
They left me alone, and Dad would have said that feeling trapped was much the same as feeling called. I put the cassock and surplice aside, and sorted through the laundry for a clerical shirt, and a slip-in collar. There was a head-and-shoulders mirror on a chain on the back of the door, and in the black shirt and white collar I looked serious and a little worried and very like my dad. His face was plainly visible in mine, and the clear sight I had of him instantly collapsed my sense of self. I’d always wanted to be an original, resisting my resemblance to Dad, who in turn resembled his dad. But dressed in the family way, challenged by a hopeful congregation, nothing in the world seemed so consequent as being what I was most expected to be. My father’s son. An Anglican minister. Human blancmange.
I flipped the mirror round to its hardboard backing. It didn’t work: I was still my dad, this realisation like the beginning of the end of ambition. I pulled Dad’s red chasuble over my head, and settled its cloak on my shoulders. I opened the door, walked out into the church, and stood at the front. Remembering many months of Sundays, I lifted up my hands.
Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s spirit dwells in you?
I had my doubts. Just for a moment, imitating Dad in front of all these expectant people, I felt like an impostor, with no real idea of what I was doing. And you know (the place and the occasion rousing an old family habit), life’s a bit like that.
No, that’s wrong. Life is that.
I summoned my best impression of my father, just as my dad had always made a stab at his dad, and maybe that’s all there was, each new Mason just an updated version of the Masons who’d gone before.
Jesus appeared to his disciples at the sea of Tiberius, after he had risen from the dead (Alleluia!).
It was the building itself which eventually helped me relax. A century and a half of sincere devotion had left a residue, and the vaulted roof still fluttered with prayers snagged between the beams. I settled myself, and concentrated on giving my people what they wanted. It was Sunday, and they were here out of hope and habit, English-speaking people who felt sentimental about trees. Warm weather made them nostalgic, and they had an appetite for words and music with a spiritual heft. Faith, love, forgiveness, the oldest mysteries of humanity. Come and get it, in English, at the English church.
I looked the length of the empty building along its strip of chequered aisle, and through trembling eyelashes I blurred a vision of God and his infinite English ministry. Beyond the coloured glare of the windows was a scorching summer’s day, and wicker baskets on the handlebars of heavy hand-held Raleighs, school-bands, and a tombola seasonally fixed on the village green.
I couldn’t hold it. Nobody could. For at least a generation, perhaps longer, nobody had been able to hold it. I needed more height. I climbed the stairs to the pulpit, my mind flicking through its Rolodex of sermons (Have you ever felt that life is pointless?). I set myself securely, then leant forward on one elbow.
‘Has anyone here recently felt that they wanted to be someone else?’
Nobody answered. It was a question I was supposed to answer myself (I know I have). But I didn’t know what came next, after the answer. I started again, with the glory of God. Heads dropped, disappointed, so I drew strength from the binding example of Mason Senior, and his enduring creed of England. We had a superior sense of justice and fair play. We were more tolerant than the French, and less corruptible than the Italians. We weren’t Americans. And standing defiant but ever cheerful, we the English alone had saved all other peoples from the evil of German fascism.
It was what my people wanted. I therefore found a moral in restored Alvis sports cars, and England as a pastoral version of God, of grass meadows and small copses near verdant Melton Mowbray. And this was my serious point, I concluded, wagging my finger for emphasis, this is my serious point: Melton Mowbray isn’t like that. It isn’t. Everyone knows that. But the surviving Anglican congregation in Melton Mowbray, from the ribbon developments to the enterprise parks, is praying this same prayer, to this same vision. That was my serious point.
We even had a communion, of sorts. I shared out a granary loaf which Mrs Meier had meant for a family of swans she’d seen on the lake. I tore off big Protestant mouthfuls, and some of the older Anglicans were still chewing as I
thanked them for coming, and shook their hands at the door.
It was all false, of course.
After the disappointment of Granddad’s funeral, I couldn’t see the use in having a dad as a vicar. For everyone else, the vicar was the vicar. It wasn’t even a disguise.
At the wake afterwards, I crept up on Dad, circling him, protecting myself from the evil eye with the mano cornuto held out rigidly in a line between our eyes. I insisted on knowing if Granddad had gone to heaven.
‘Just tell me. Nobody will tell me if he’s happy in heaven.’
‘Yes, my son, he is.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he was a good man.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he helped people and tried not to hurt them.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he thought that was the right thing to do.’
‘Why?’
‘You know, James, that’s a very good question.’
Which Dad couldn’t answer. For Granddad, the Church may have been a regular and even sensible career-choice, priests in that distant past as conformist and socially acceptable as lawyers were now, or accountants. If he’d wanted, he could probably have been anything. A generation later, it was inexcusable, and now Dad was stupidly going the way of his own father, vicaring, being good, dying.
Mum, obliged to move house every few years and work all week to supplement a vicar’s stipend, thought it an almighty mistake, a life lost. Tom, too ashamed to invite his first girlfriends back to a vicarage, couldn’t agree more. The three of us therefore invented passwords, and a secret handshake. With Mum’s encouragement, we gave our word of honour to do everything in our power to distract Mason Senior, the vicar, Dad, from the error of his Anglican ways.
At Christmas, in the first act of our conspiracy, Tom and I feigned astonishment as we unwrapped our present from Mum, from Mum’s own earnings as a temp. It was a chemistry set one down from the best you could get. It was also a weapon in the entrenched war between religion and science. The next day, fingers burnt and raw, with singed eyebrows and stubby eyelashes, we asked Dad to help us with a complicated set-up for transmuting water into wine, and then wine into blood, all in the one smooth sequence. Later, we tried out various corrosive reagents on invincible tins of pilchards, to see if five fish could be transformed by chemical reaction into a meal for all the family.
On this occasion, Dad allowed us our facetiousness. He was patient and good-humoured, but still a vicar who worked all hours and couldn’t afford a pair of decent US-spec skateboards. Science couldn’t shake him.
We therefore tried unsettling him with superstitions stronger and more potent than his own. Mason Senior would come back from Eucharist or Evensong, and his two sons would be waiting in the darkened lounge to offer him a palm-reading, or a consultation with the Tarot. We learnt the rituals and the occult routines, wrapping our cards in black silk, lighting incense sticks and intoning chants to the ibis-headed Egyptian god Thoth. We invoked the Cabbala, and the Holy Grail, and the Knights of the Rosy Cross, hoping Dad would think that this time we’d really lost it.
We tried everything. Using a T-square and the pointy end of a compass from the now neglected chemistry set, I pricked a tiny hole in the ankle of the skeleton on the Tarot death-card. Whatever dilemma Dad offered the ancient oracle, the reading from now on would always be Death.
He was supposed to ask questions about his career, about relationships, or about money, but he’d usually ruin it for everyone by asking the cards about the day of judgement. With a flourish I’d deal out Death anyway, to increasingly reduced effect.
Q. Is there a day of judgement?
A. Death
Q. Did Christ die on the cross and on the third day rise again?
A. Death
Q. Anyone see the score in the cricket?
A. Death
I’d get my hair ruffled, as Dad cheerfully adopted his own dad’s belief that English middle-class niceness was a manifestation of the divine, possessing a quiet force which had sustained an independent Christian sect for almost 500 years. His only regular excitement was shaving with an old safety-razor, which was never very safe. It was a little daily test of the Lord Our Shepherd. There was rarely any blood.
Most of the time Dad was genial, courteous and tolerant, all the qualities which gave the Church a bad name. He believed in pre-warmed pots of tea and a thriving cricket team as an ideal of living well, the middle-aged cleric crouched at mid-on, bowling some creaky off-spin, batting seven or eight, and serving beyond the call of duty behind the sticky clubhouse bar.
‘You should come along,’ he said. ‘Turn your arm over. You might even enjoy it.’
He had no idea how embarrassing it was, having a dad who was so unfailingly nice to people. It wasn’t normal. Once, when the disabled groundsman tried to throw me and Tom and Tom’s friend Rob and Rob’s dad off the outfield for using the sight-screen as a soccer goal, Rob’s dad told the limping old duffer to shut up and fuck off.
And he had.
‘How depressing,’ Mason Senior said.
We weren’t getting through to him. He was stuck in a backwater, pricked with twitchy boatmen and the perfect circles of breathing fish. He was content with his designated viewpoint, and the patient dedicated benches: In memory of the Reverend T. T. J. Mason, who liked to sit.
We used to slam our bedroom door and slouch down to the bridge over the motorway, the modern equivalent of the circus. Leaning over the barrier, we’d look down at all those cars and lorries, moving, speeding, heading somewhere, anywhere. We’d envy them all. And then gob on them.
Dad hardly noticed we’d gone. He’d come home at strange hours in the week of the Epiphany, raving about the splendour of the English language in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Tom would be in front of the television, flicking through the channels looking for role models: ‘That’s great, Dad. Fuckadelic.’
‘Tom, why do you have to be so provocative all the time?’
‘I don’t.’
‘You could even try to be nice,’ Dad suggested, as we sat down to eat, without Mum again who was usually out at work. ‘If you dared. Is it because you’re frightened?’
‘Lo,’ Tom said, looking up to heaven, his knife and fork planted squarely in his fists. He started without the Bible on one of the few biblical quotes he thought he actually knew, ‘Lo, though I walk through the shadow of the valley of the shadow of the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’
‘Why is that?’ Dad asked, showing genuine interest. ‘Why shouldn’t either of you boys be afraid? I am. Frequently.’
‘Because,’ Tom said, pushing his chin forward and trying not to blink, actually not wanting to hear that his own father was frequently afraid, ‘because I am the meanest motherfucker in the valley.’
Mason Senior slowly closed his eyes, put down his knife and fork, and coughed, not forgetting to put his hand politely in front of his mouth.
‘I don’t think that’s quite right, is it?’
‘Everyone knows that, Dad. It’s on T-shirts all over the planet, except maybe the one you come from.’
Religion reflected badly on all of us, as if the Masons had something to hide. Dad didn’t seem to realise that anyone who consistently launched conversations about God was probably unhinged. It made us seem like a family of extremists, suggesting that many other things must already privately have skewed, the taste for religion a last chance for chronic neurotics before the crystal-readings of Avalon, and the outer wastes of psychic space.
Wrong. All wrong.
Dad was an anchor. He was stable, and level-headed, exactly the influence I needed to keep myself together. I was a deacon and Dad was a priest; I was flaky and he was a rock. It was my own fault: I’d never worked hard enough on being like him, on simply being nice.
But it was never too late to start.
When the congregation finally dispersed, I pulled off Dad’s chasuble. In my clerical shirt and c
ollar, I jogged across the street to a Swiss Telecom phonebox. I felt energised, and full of purpose, only too happy to be failing at the miserable task of falling properly apart.
I looked up the UK code on a chart above the phone, then punched in Helena’s otherwise familiar number. I waited. It rang. It answered.
She wasn’t in. It was the answer-machine, and I put down the phone. I waved through the glass at the last stragglers from the church as they broke up their conversations and strolled away. With a spring in their step, I thought. Under the influence of Dad, and at thirty-four my dad had been a dad twice over, I dismissed any remnant of Davy. There was something indulgent and self-seeking in Davy’s voluntary exile and wilful search for difference. The romantic ideal of the solitary hero was limited and self-destructive: if Dad had thought like that, then where would I be now?
Today, it was self-evident to me that everyone should get married and have children.
I pressed redial, and breathed heavily through my nose while Helena’s voice worked calmly through to the beep. Like Dad, I intended to be accommodating, professionally sensitive to what people wanted. I therefore invested faith in my clerical training, and kept my voice almost under control as I apologised and explained. It was quite a long message. I hadn’t been myself lately, there was some truth in that. But I was on the mend, and now I was feeling, well not fine exactly, but better. I said several other things, in the interests of making peace. I said she should call me.
As I pushed out of the phonebox, I realised it was some time since I’d enjoyed the sensation of virtue. It was an underrated emotion. I checked my watch. In the interests of Anglican niceness and courtesy, I intended to stay rigorously true to my word, and even though I had no intention of digging up the bones of the writer James Joyce, I’d made a promise to meet with Rifka. I started to walk, then jog, in the general direction of the station. It was important to be punctual.
Dry Bones Page 7