At first I thought the church to be empty, but as my eyes grew accustomed to the shadows I found figures looming everywhere. Apostles stood sentry high in the walls and angels watched from their perches in pillars. They gazed down upon our intrusion with dark expressions made from granite. The long windows were filled with the heavenly host, a thousand of them blowing trumpets and banging the daylights from tambourines. We brushed against the tombs of priests and trod on the graves of squires and crusaders. We were crowded by the good and the dead, their statues and monuments.
‘Beautiful!’ Dorothy whispered.
She walked me down the nave and into the south transept where she paused at the gates to a small chapel and introduced me to a marble woman. The woman was chained by the wrists to a rock. She was languid and lovely. Her opalescent hair tumbled as far as her waist and her robes were so finely polished and draped they might have been moulded from ice. Her trusting eyes were turned to Heaven. The shaft of a great sword had been planted in the pale divide of her pudding-basin breasts. A dove sat and preened itself on her shoulder.
‘Saint Febronia,’ Dorothy smiled.
‘Is she buried here?’
‘No. This is merely her monument.’
‘Was she famous?’
‘She was a young and beautiful maiden who lived in Mesopotamia during the time of the persecutions. And she was a Christian. But, although she was a Christian and should have been martyred, the prefect Selenus offered to grant her freedom if she renounced her faith and married his nephew.’
‘And what happened?’ I whispered. It sounded like a fair bargain, depending on the nephew having rugged good looks and a decent villa in the country.
‘Febronia refused,’ Dorothy said proudly. ‘So Selenus ordered her to be seized and taken away to be mocked and humiliated and tortured and horribly mutilated and finally battered to death.’
‘Terrible.’
‘Yes,’ said Dorothy breathlessly. ‘And shortly afterwards, Selenus went mad with remorse and killed himself.’
‘Dreadful.’
‘But there’s a happy ending,’ she said, summoning the ghost of a smile, and as she spoke she reached out to stroke Febronia’s stricken face with fluttering fingertips. The nose of the saint, her toes and her nipples had been burnished black by the fingers of pilgrims.
‘How’s that?’
‘The nephew became a Christian!’ Dorothy said happily.
‘God works in mysterious ways,’ I said.
We went from the Church of St Febronia the Martyr to the Church of St Rock the Healer and hence to the Church of St Gregory the Wonderworker. I was worried at first that we might have to pray and I should be seen to disgrace myself by demonstrating an ignorance of verse and chapter, sudden curtsies and genuflections. But nothing was expected of me. I fancy now that Dorothy had gone that day to worship the buildings themselves, the majesty of their buttressed walls and their sombre interiors. We gawped at the stone memorials, peered into pulpits, choir stalls and vaults. We lit candles wherever we happened to find them for sale and Dorothy wrote her name in St Gregory’s visitors’ book. We were privileged to ponder your rood screen, she scrawled in her spidery hand. May the Lord keep you and bring you his blessings. Very best wishes. Dorothy Clark.
I discovered later that she took instruction from no church in particular but sought inspiration from the Glad Tidings Bible Tract Company of New York, an organisation with liberal views and a full colour mail-order catalogue.
We had lunch in the little church of St Godfrey the Convert, between a cinema and an office block. Dorothy had packed a modest picnic of fruit and biscuits in her satchel. We strolled through the empty church and sat down to eat before Godfrey’s Finger. The relic sat on a blue, braided, velvet cushion in a glass box with a gold frame on an ivory stool in an iron cage on a stone shelf in the wall. It was small and shrivelled and a rather peculiar shade of brown. It looked for all the world like something I might have found beneath the privet hedge.
Dorothy fed me chocolate biscuits and recalled how I had once shown a great fondness for chocolate eggs. I must have been five or six years old and had often glued myself to my chair, which reminded her again of the time when she’d played with me in the bath, making me squirm with embarrassment to know that the woman who sat beside me had once been given the freedom to strip me down and bully my buttocks in her soapy hands.
‘You were such a little scallywag!’ she said, plucking an apple from her satchel. ‘You wanted to be a Robot Commando.’
‘I don’t remember that.’
‘Robot Commando. I think that’s what they were called. It was quite the rage at the time. They were little plastic dolls in all sorts of different colours. You must have had the whole collection.’
‘I’ve forgotten.’
‘You’ve grown,’ she said, as if that would account for my memory loss. ‘You must have found other interests.’
‘Housework,’ I said. ‘I like housework.’
She turned the apple from hand to hand and gave me a look that suggested she didn’t believe me. ‘There must be something else,’ she said. No one could believe that I found satisfaction in household chores.
‘There’s no time,’ I said. Housework is a task without purpose, a labour without reward. Dust settles as soon as you’ve whacked it. But chasing the dust brings a chance to dream.
‘You’ll have a sport!’ she said confidently. ‘A healthy young man will always play sport.’
‘Well, yes, I like professional wrestling,’ I said helpfully. ‘I like watching the TV tournaments.’ I might have mentioned that I also enjoyed the spangled world of synchronised swimming, but I didn’t want to cause any trouble.
‘And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. Genesis 32. Verse 24,’ she said peacefully, rolling the fruit against her thigh with the palm of one hand.
‘Is it true that you were a dancer?’ I ventured, watching the apple begin to blush as it nuzzled into her leg.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘A long time ago. I belonged to the Big Boy Bad Boy Company. It was an experimental dance and music workshop. It had quite a reputation. Did you ever happen to hear of it?’
I shook my head.
‘Well, it wasn’t the Kirov. We once did a modern interpretation of Swan Lake dressed as a striptease tap-dance troupe with a cappella singers.’
‘I suppose it was symbolic,’ I said.
‘I don’t know. The choreographer was a Swede.’
‘Why did you stop?’ I inquired, half-expecting to be told that the Lord had appeared in the orchestra pit and told her to cover herself with a towel.
‘I fell off the stage dancing Cinderella on stilts,’ she said.
And so we talked.
I asked her questions about her dancing years and she did her best to describe them to me. She asked questions about Franklin and Janet and Mr Marvel and I told her what I knew of them. It was good to be sitting with Dorothy in the twilight of that empty place, sharing her picnic in full view of Godfrey’s holy digit. She had a simple view of the world that made her shine with confidence. Nothing could tarnish her optimism. She was strong. She felt invincible. She had faith that passeth all understanding. And as I sat beside her I began to feel a strange attraction. I was fascinated by the lazy movements of her slender hands, and the tidy way that she crossed her ankles, and the way that her long, heavy hair looked so polished, and the way that the cords stood out on her neck when she sank her teeth in the flesh of the apple. And her eyes, behind the black wire spectacles, were so bright and friendly and her eyebrows so dark and luxuriant. And she had a good, sweet smell of sandalwood soap and orangeblossom shampoo and a perfume called Pandemonium with which she liked to anoint her wrists. And she was elegant, yes, and well-made and retained the grace of her dancer’s limbs that the drab, yellow dress couldn’t quite disguise.
‘It’s time to go home,’ she said at last, wrapping her apple core i
n a Kleenex and dropping it into the satchel. ‘I’ve kept you far too long. Your mother will think that I’ve kidnapped you.’
I was disappointed. ‘We can do it again,’ I said, brushing biscuit crumbs from my sleeve. ‘I mean, if you’d like the company. I can always find the time and there must be a lot of churches to visit.’
It hadn’t been too bad. Considering. It was cold and dark and the pews were hard but Dorothy’s obvious enthusiasm for these sacred piles was reward enough for such small discomforts. And I fancied a sort of conspiracy, a pleasant intimacy, in our whispered conversations as we’d tiptoed around the marble tombs.
Dorothy buckled the satchel and raised the strap to her shoulder. ‘I’d like that,’ she said with a smile and took my hand as we walked back towards the sunlight.
18
I was first introduced to God at around the time I was told about Death. The two spectres arrived holding hands. Until that moment I had crawled and dribbled a path through the world believing myself to be immortal. My universe was a small bed in a wooden cage, a blue plastic chair and the carpet. I was new and resilient. I would eat anything that reached my mouth. I could fall asleep hanging upside down. I laughed when you squeezed me, bounced if you dropped me. My eyes were blue and my bones were made from rubber. The news that Death brought an end to life was impossible to imagine. I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t existed. How could I confront such a time in the future? And this moment after life, this darkness called Death, intrigued and frightened me. It made a nonsense of being born. It made a mockery of life.
God followed hard on the heels of Death, introduced, I suspect, in a bid to soothe and diminish my fears. It didn’t work. It was hard enough to live with Death without living in the knowledge that after Death you might have to make your way to Heaven. And Heaven remained a doubtful prospect. Invisible and unexplored. A lost continent in the clouds. The end of the rainbow. The silent land of no return. There were so many practical questions with no satisfactory answers.
‘Does anything happen in Heaven?’ I would ask of my mother, still strong in my simple belief that this woman must know everything.
‘Nothing,’ she would say, wearily. ‘People go there to rest.’ It was usually at breakfast when these questions came into my head and they never seemed to find her in the mood for spiritual inquiry.
‘How old are we in Heaven?’
‘It depends on your age when you get there.’
‘How?’
‘It depends.’
‘But if a baby dies on earth will it remain a baby in Heaven?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘And if you die when you’re very old, will Heaven help to make you grow younger? I mean, if you’ve lost all your teeth, will they grow back again?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How do they measure the time? Are there any clocks in Heaven?’
‘I don’t know!’ she would shout at me, suddenly losing her patience. ‘Shut up and eat your breakfast!’
Father couldn’t answer my questions, although he often made half-hearted efforts. His own view of the afterlife was even more obscure than my own. He saw it as some sort of beautiful white stage-set filled with actors like Roger Livesey and David Niven, drifting around in period costume. He added a lot to the general confusion. But as soon as I began to read, God in His Heaven was promptly retired and in His place came the books about Jesus.
They were large, improving storybooks, written in a gushing prose and filled with sentimental pictures. I remember very little about these books but for some black-and-white illustrations by a woman called Emily Bagley, in which all the characters seemed to be wearing striped towels and fake beards.
And it came to pass that in those days Jesus came in several disguises.
There was Jesus the Pied Piper, stealing children from their mothers and leading them away to the Father. I didn’t want to go with Him. I didn’t want to follow.
There was Jesus the Watcher, the bogeyman, the magic eye at the keyhole that never stopped staring and staring at you, even when you needed to be alone to pick your nose or sit at peace on the lavatory.
There was Jesus the Tyrannical Uncle, who was always right, who was never wrong, who argued with everybody and had an answer for everything.
There was Jesus the Ghost, appearing and disappearing, with a polished gold plate behind His head and His arms outstretched and holes in His hands and His sad eyes rolled towards Heaven.
The crucifixion troubled me — God who sacrificed Himself in the flesh. And some little time later, although we weren’t Catholics, the news that Mary, mother of Jesus, was also the mother of God created another confounding puzzle for a boy intent on bringing some organisation into a disordered world. If Mary was the mother of God then it followed that Mary’s mother was the mother of the mother of God and this thread, by a child’s logic, would lead directly back to Eve who would, by the same logic, be the mother of all the mothers of God; and God, who had created Eve, would also be Eve’s creation. It was very hard to imagine.
Despite such serious doubts, I tried to reach God in my prayers. I prayed, of course, to be spared from Death and be granted certain advantages, such as X-ray vision, the power of flight and the cloak of invisibility. These small gifts — the fantastic dreams of boys — would be nothing for the Almighty. He never replied to my pleading and even when I became less ambitious and begged for more humble favours — a proper penknife, a gas-propelled rocket — he didn’t appear to show any interest. I tried to strike bargains. A lifetime’s obedience in return for saving me from the dentist. A promise to become a monk in return for a bicycle. He didn’t listen. The last time I’d turned to the power of prayer I was trying to manipulate Jessica Proud into acts of gross indecency, but they were such disgraceful requests I didn’t deserve an answer.
19
‘So you’ve found a friend in Jesus,’ Mr Marvel said that evening, when I smuggled supper to his room. I think he knew that Dorothy had been introduced to the house for some particular purpose and now he supposed that I was the target. He grinned as he took the tray and found a place for it on the table. It must have been his first meal of the day.
‘We went to look at the sights,’ I said. ‘It’s a long time since she saw the city. She wanted someone to show her around.’
He peered at the fat slice of pie on his plate and knotted a napkin under his chin. ‘Pork pie!’ he declared, as he broke through the pastry crust with his spoon.
‘Home-made,’ I said. Hacked from the freezer the previous night by a mad woman with a hunting knife.
‘Apples!’ he said, trawling his nose through the steam. ‘I smell a tumour of apple and onion.’
‘For the sake of the pork,’ I explained.
‘Allspice?’
‘And nutmeg.’
‘Cider!’ he announced.
‘Cider!’ I agreed.
He smiled and, having identified the principal ingredients to his own satisfaction, set to work with confidence.
‘Oh, my, but it’s good!’ he said, blowing steam through his teeth.
He was wearing his pyjamas beneath a faded, blue dressing gown. Despite the fair weather he’d not found a reason to leave his room. Yet how did he keep himself amused? As he tackled the pie I took time to survey the surroundings. It was a bleak prospect. The room itself was comfortable after the Wandsworth fashion, but there was nothing to occupy his time beyond the radio. He must have spent hours surveying the walls like some forgotten prisoner. It was remarkable. How did he manage to keep from screaming? He must have the patience of a stone.
‘Where did she take you?’ he asked, having taken care to demolish the greater part of the pie.
‘We went to visit some old churches,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t so bad. Considering. She has a real interest in architecture.’
‘Architecture is it?’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ I demanded.
‘Nothing!’ he said. ‘
Entirely innocent.’
‘But you have your doubts.’
‘It’s a doubtful world, Skipper,’ he said, tilting his plate to scoop up the last of the gravy. ‘Beware of having the world explained before you’ve fashioned a view of it. It’s important to know your own mind. And Christians are such a happy breed they can never resist interfering and making your life a misery. Naturally, I don’t expect you to heed this advice and, by the same token, I trust you’ll ignore any other advice that people may try to thrust upon you. Know your own mind and follow your bliss. Believe in your secret destiny.’ He smiled and belched and wiped his mouth in the napkin.
Despite her cheerful disposition, it seemed Dorothy threatened everyone. We were all afraid of a bible-bashing. We dreaded the prospect of finding ourselves trapped in a scripture class.
Mother attempted to keep her amused by letting her work in the kitchen. She wasn’t a bad cook if you didn’t mind eating party food. She had a secret for guacamole and a dozen ways to stuff a pepper. We ate whatever she cared to prepare and there were evenings when mother’s hot beef stews were served with cheese and pineapple cubes on plastic cocktail sticks.
Janet tried to pacify her with small gifts of eau de cologne and several expensive red lipsticks. But this encouraged Dorothy to return the kindness in comic books and Janet quickly learned her lesson.
Marvel stayed in his room and even father kept his distance, as if it had now been agreed that keeping his guest entertained was work for a much younger man. He gave his blessing by offering to pay my expenses.
Franklin alone tested her patience with his relentless sarcasm and quoted as freely from the bible as he might from Goethe or the Marquis de Sade, supporting his claim that he could absorb any book by sleeping with it beneath his pillow.
‘What do you make of our guest?’ he demanded of me, during one of his friendlier moments.
‘Dorothy?’
‘The same.’
Mr Romance Page 10