What united us wasn’t conformity, or even faith. It was courage.
Of course, at any of the nation’s fourteen Anglican theology colleges, at any given time, in among all the Jesus-freaks and heavenly rebels, there were also trainee ordinands full of sanity, joy and hard-won tranquillity.
I was never attracted to any of these people.
The work was tougher than I’d expected, and despite the exemplary heroics of the Bible, more than a quarter of the year dropped out. I buckled down, potted my apologetics, swallowed my doctrine, and at the end of the first year, as a reward for good behaviour, they allowed me back for another.
At the beginning of the second year, at last learning to be honest with myself, I had to admit that something strange was happening which I found unnerving. Whenever I set out in search of God, however reluctantly, I always found him, because God was always there. He was like everything displayed in an art gallery is always art, even Break Glass in Case of Fire, because that’s the way we prepare ourselves to look at it.
He was everywhere. In the daily weather, in my own miraculous existence, in the shapely legs and round buttocks of Helena Byczynski, a twenty-five-year-old new arrival in what was now the year below me.
Whenever I caught sight of her (or the weather, or the miracle of my own existence), all my pretensions and silly little hopes drained away. I was suddenly prepared to renounce everything, my ambition and my distinctness, all that foolishness.
It was a spiritual awakening.
It was a warning I was losing my grip, loneliness an unfair opportunity for God. It had to be resisted along with grief, fatigue, failure and surprise moments of natural beauty, like windless winter mornings, or sudden storms in summer after dark. The secret was to keep a clear head. Identify which of these impostors was leading me astray. Then take appropriate action, so as not to lose my grip, and not to spiritually awaken.
I took up cricket. In the spring, in the absence of other volunteers, Helena Byczynski was elected captain of the college cricket club. Women were encouraged to join, and, abandoning the Anglican tradition of a slow afternoon at mid-on, Helena promised everyone a bat and a bowl. The college suffered some horrendous defeats, and I loved every minute of it. I did sometimes worry that I was turning into Dad, but in fact I was playing because I liked it, and I discovered that God was in the game of cricket, too.
Helena hated my earrings. She told me I was trying to be something I wasn’t. I took them out, first one a week, then more quickly than that. On her cheekbones she wore gold-flecked moisturiser, and sometimes, in shorts or a skirt, she taunted me with flashes of the backs of her knees. The more time we spent together, the nastier we became, each of us wanting the other to know that our relationship went beyond the purely professional. It wasn’t pity, or duty, or Christian fellow-feeling. It wasn’t out of niceness that we loitered after classes, hoping from detailed inspection of the time-table that the other might chance to happen by.
In the refectory, she’d hold my eye while crushing the spine and skull of a wasp beneath the rim of her side-plate. I’d question her choice of make-up, or judgement on the Book of Daniel, as our conversations adopted a homely shape, usually disagreements in which Helena turned out to be right. She reminded me of Alice, my first real girlfriend, and in her school days Helena had also stood as a sidesperson. She’d never entirely lost the taste for its strangeness, and after a few post-University years working abroad, and then for a care charity, she’d wanted to be less conformist. These days, and even more so than when we were teenagers, Church was definitely not the done thing to do.
The first time we slept together, I asked her if she’d ever prayed about sex.
‘Never needed to,’ she said, rolling away from me, falling into sleep.
I lay there with my unringed ear crushed on my arm, enthralled by the back of her head. I already believed there was nothing we wouldn’t do together, nowhere we wouldn’t go. Helena was everything I’d been waiting for, though not very patiently, and at last, falling in love, I was stunned by its selfishness. It made me feel alive, and glad of what I was, because it had led to this. It was self-discovery, and it was exhilarating: I’d never felt more like myself. I felt frightened, I felt blessed.
At that time, through one summer and into the next, I could almost believe, almost, that I was Jay Mason, neither more nor less, a unique thought in the providential mind of God.
Alone in Geneva, far from home and prying eyes, I could basically be anyone I liked, at any hour of the day. But I didn’t want to be alone and anyone, and I needed to be taken by the hand. I pulled a chair to the phone, and called Helena at the hotel. I was a suggestible person, an impressionable one, but there was nothing wrong with being influenced. As long as I picked the right people. While waiting for Reception to put me through, I kept reaching up to my ear, reminding myself who I was. Each time I touched it, it stung like crazy.
Helena needed persuading that we ought to meet. She kept asking if it was worth it, and whether I’d disposed of the bones. Have you decided to be normal? I told her I’d decided to be myself.
‘Promise me you won’t dig up any more bones. This is the most basic of things, Jay. You have to promise.’
‘I promise.’
‘Cross your heart.’
‘It’s crossed.’
After that, I sensed I was winning. She was still shocked by the bones, but did concede that it wasn’t as if I’d hurt or killed anybody. She agreed, eventually, to see me, though she didn’t want to rush it. She suggested we try and do something normal, like normal people do.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Or at least, whatever’s normal for people like us.’
‘Jay. Stop it now.’
I didn’t want to be difficult, but I had to be sure I was the kind of person who’d make a normal kind of apology by inviting her out to lunch. Was that really me? Or was it just what people did in films? Is that what made it normal? The Beau Rivage. On the terrace. She’d be impressed by the quality of tablecloth, and the panoramic view of the lake. But it didn’t feel like me. McDonald’s, then, but I hated McDonald’s. What did I like?
I was the kind of person who’d invite her out to lunch, but still be aware of the cost. At the same time, I’d want it to be somewhere original. I therefore asked her out to lunch at the Hôtel du Paix, a hotel-training school near the Palace of Nations. For twelve o’clock, as soon as it opened, because it was never too early to make amends.
*
As myself, I felt clumsy and vulnerable. Especially as I was the day’s very first customer in the training restaurant of the Hôtel du Paix. It had taken me most of the morning to get ready, mixing and matching clothes from the closet, never entirely convinced I’d found my own true look. Between each combination, I stood at the window checking the rain, because in weather like this, not even Moholy could expect me to fetch John Calvin. It was like a sign, a minor concession from the heavens.
Eventually, instead of a sweater, I decided on two shirts, one on top of the other. I could button them without risking contact with my ear. Apart from that, I didn’t want my appearance to matter. My clothes said nothing about me. As for the problem of my recent wound, which actually didn’t look too bad, I solved that with the Chaplain’s Burberry scarf. The ear ached, but the cut from the razor-blade had dried beneath the stitches in a clean black line. I wound the scarf twice round my neck, as if I had a sore throat, and it was broad enough and therefore high enough to cover the day-old damage.
In the empty restaurant, one of my legs was twitching the underside of the table. I changed tables. My back was now in the angle of the corner furthest from the door, but it didn’t seem to help. The scarf made me self-conscious. A plain one would have been better, in a dark or neutral colour, and I worried that Helena had changed her mind. She’d correctly sensed that I was not my own man. Even my leg had a life of its own.
I watched the trainee waiters as they stretched and dipped to lay the tables. T
hey wore black waistcoats and starched white aprons as far as their feet, their deft movements reflected in the polished mirrors of the spacious room, all wood counters and brass rails and old-world excellence, except for the napkins and tablecloths, which were paper, ready for trainee mistakes. Lunch at the Hôtel du Paix was offered at a discount, because everything from the kitchen to the final table-side flambé was always an experiment, and therefore usually wonderful.
Helena was there in the doorway. Needlessly, I raised my hand, but a waiter was already beside her, bringing his heels together and elegantly taking her coat, her green outdoors puffa. He handed it to a colleague, and then escorted her to the table. He pulled out a chair, but an older man in a dark suit appeared behind him, whispering in his ear.
‘Not yet,’ he was saying. ‘You must always give a lady and her host the opportunity to embrace.’
It was a continental thing. Helena waited, the chair was offered again, and she sat. She was so self-possessed. It was one of the things I loved about her. I saw now that she was dressed for travelling, for flying, in an old polo-shirt loose outside her jeans.
‘I tried to leave yesterday,’ she said, resetting the cutlery, ‘but I couldn’t get a ticket.’
‘Fate,’ I said.
‘Overbooking. Everyone’s getting out before the weekend protest.’
She shook out her hair, then crumpled it with her fingers, and I instantly regretted all the time we’d ever spent apart. I’d been so lonely without her, so lost.
‘What happened to your ear?’
‘Nothing.’
Damn. The scarf must have slipped down. This wasn’t how I’d planned it. I unwound the scarf and bunched it in my fists, in my lap. A waiter came, and after a brief struggle, took it away. Helena leant forward over the table, looking right past my face at my ear, giving all her attention to my injury.
‘I’m sorry about yesterday,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about the bones. Everything’s wrong. I love you.’
I reached into the top pocket of my outer shirt for Moholy’s golden locket, which I placed with some solemnity flat on the paper tablecloth, keeping it covered with my palm. I pushed it into the centre of the table, slewing aside an ashtray and a small vase, which wobbled, alerting a waiter. Helena put it to one side. The waiter removed it.
The twitch in my thigh was in full fast-forward as I ceremoniously raised my hand. The locket’s gold chain lay coiled to one side, like a model anchor-chain, on deck.
‘Don’t give me things,’ Helena said. ‘Just tell me.’
‘Some things I find difficult to say.’
Obviously, or it would never have come to this, not if I could say it straight. ‘It’s for you. It opens. There’s a catch on the top.’
Helena put the tip of her index finger on the coiled chain, and dragged the locket towards her across the table-top. She picked it up and held it in one hand, like a cigarette lighter, with her thumb on the catch. She needed both thumbs. She sprang it open. Stared inside, her eyes wide and unblinking. Then closed it again, and blinked. She glanced over her shoulder, but the restaurant was empty. Then over the other shoulder. She lowered her head, the closed locket in both clutched hands.
‘What,’ she whispered, looking up, ‘is that?’
‘I love you.’
The language of love was surprisingly uniform, with most people loyal to the well-worn formulas. This could make love seem banal, almost collective. My own gesture had more character than that. It was evidence of my unique devotion. I was offering Helena a real bit of the real me, and there were no substitutes, no stand-ins. And it was all my own idea.
‘They have no known practical function,’ I said. ‘It’s like a piercing.’
‘Is it?’
‘Well, no, actually. It hurts a bit more than that.’
I flinched my fingers up towards my ear, as if about to make the sign of the sound of money, or magic the appearance of a silver dollar, which in fact, on this particular occasion, didn’t magically appear.
‘Don’t leave,’ I said. ‘I need you. I love you.’
There were tears in her eyes, and she was suddenly up and moving, hauling her chair round next to mine, causing several student waiters to leap attentively, arrive too late, fluster, then melt away. She grabbed both my hands, and crushed them in hers, lifting them up close in front of her lips.
‘Now,’ she said, definitely tearful, squeezing my fists as hard as she physically could, ‘now I’m worried about you, you dolt. What the hell were you thinking?’
‘It’s symbolic’
‘You’ve cut off your earlobe. Your own earlobe, Jay. You’ve cut it off and given it to me. This is not good. Completely not a good way to do things.’
Strangely, in the rush of emotional blood to my head, the blood pulsed and throbbed with particular insistence through the absence of my earlobe, as if the blood there was circulating through air in an invisible loop, making brief contact with the outside world, then coming back again, returning with a slight chill to my heart. What had I done?
I suddenly wanted to cry. ‘I love you.’
‘And I love you back, you great lummox. Always have. Why else would I be here? It’s not for fun. Not for the scenic tour of Switzerland’s quaintest cemeteries. I cannot conceive of life without you. If you’re deciding otherwise, it’s a wrong decision, and I’m not accepting it. In fact, you’re always making wrong decisions, but at least you’re decisive. You really do try, don’t you, Jay? You genuinely want to know what it’s all about. That’s not as common as you might think.’
‘I’m a deacon. You’re not even a believer.’
‘That doesn’t mean I stopped loving you. In fact I loved you more. You weren’t satisfied with boy meets girl. You had the courage to attempt a different story, man and God, fruit and forbidden trees, all our woe.’
‘What a dummy.’
‘Well, you got it wrong. But at least you’re brave. Looking for salvation in accountancy is also wrong, but it isn’t even brave.’
By now we had our hands joined more comfortably, resting on the table, and I’d managed to recover some composure. ‘What else?’
‘What else what?’
‘What else do you like about me?’
‘Well, since you’re asking, you can be genuinely altruistic, you really empathise. When you want to.’
Was I? Did I? I failed to contain a smile. We were having a minor disagreement in which Helena turned out to be right, just like the old days. She was also being so very nice to me, and not as a remnant of her interrupted professional training. Recognisably, she was saving me. And that had always been the pattern, whenever I’d allowed myself to be saved.
She sat back, and with both thumbs sprang open the locket for another look.
‘My first earlobe,’ she said. ‘My first lobe. I’ve never been given a lobe before.’
‘They’re completely senseless,’ I said, fingering the one which was still there. ‘Serve no purpose whatsoever.’
‘Well, thanks a bunch. Next time give me something you actually need. Like a finger, maybe, or a whole hand.’
‘Except for earrings,’ I said. ‘Earlobes are good for that, and you never liked my earrings.’
‘I know. I saved you then as well.’
‘You did. God I’ve been lucky.’
‘So are we going to give it a go?’
‘Yes. I think we should.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘No posing, no posturing. I’m sure.’
‘I’m still pregnant, you know. It’s not a future which is going away.’
‘I know. I know that. It’s just there were so many different ways I could see it going. I was worried I wasn’t up to it. I overreacted.’
‘I think you probably did. And your dad and all that. Can’t have helped.’
‘No. I’m sorry.’
I’d lost sight of what I wanted, and what I wanted defined who I was. I wanted a happy ending, I realised that
now. This was the real me. This was my chance at a happy ending.
‘But the bones, Jay. That was off the wall. Did you manage to get rid of the bones?’
At the Hôtel du Paix, the waiters were so perfectly trained in discretion that they’d delayed bringing us a menu. I raised my hand, and someone was with us before I could even think of clicking my fingers. Although I never clicked my fingers, and that wasn’t what I was thinking.
In Lent of her second year, Helena packed it in. There was so much to learn: the apologetics, the ascetic theology, the biblical studies, the Church history. It was both too much and not enough. However deeply we explored the doctrine, the liturgy, the moral theology and the Old and New Testaments, it was never entirely convincing, so why not skip the reading and leap straight to the faith and feeling?
We feel it to be true. We just do.
The Anglican God was such an implausible mix of infinite power and diffidence. And at that time the Church itself was like the opposite of miracles. Every month brought some new and unimaginable calamity, making organised religion seem inadequate, and stupid. The Commissioners were incompetent, the clergy adulterous, the liturgy infinitely flexible. The once virile Anglican tradition, which Mason Senior would have recognised, was gradually being enfeebled, the priesthood reduced to a roadshow of religious disc-jockeys, sunny intermediaries between the laity and the heavenly music. This one’s for all you kids out there. Whoo whoo.
Helena wanted reform. Change was necessary, but not in the slow gradations commended by the Synod. She wanted a second reformation, a revolution. In the meantime, she dropped out of college and went to the aid of refugees in Calais. It wasn’t that she disbelieved in prayer, but she preferred to plan, and to help. It seemed fairer. She dared me to follow, but I dodged the great rolling ball of her love, rolling on, hideously impressive. I told myself that by staying I was standing alone and strong, and that other things before now must have gone very wrong to make me ready for God. I couldn’t now afford for this to go wrong too.
Dry Bones Page 17