The Blasphemer

by Nigel Farndale

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Twenty-eight. Does that surprise you?’

  ‘Don’t know, sir.’

  ‘Kennedy is twenty-two. It was on his birth certificate.’ He picks up the decanter of whisky and hands it to Cooper. ‘Would you do me a favour and take this to his cell. Best not to mention where it came from.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Ypres. Present day. Five and a half months after the crash

  DANIEL STUDIED HIS REFLECTION IN THE HOTEL SHAVING MIRROR as he applied his moisturizer. He could not see his father’s features staring back at him, as men approaching middle age are said to do. But there was a shadow of ancestral recognition. The double helix was performing its trick. He had been genetically encoded with his great-grandfather’s cast of eye and delicate features. They were haunting his face.

  He read for barely a minute before turning out his bedside light and slipping into a peripheral sleep that soon deepened into a dream about Nancy and Martha walking ahead of him down Clapham High Street. He couldn’t catch up with them. People kept getting in his way. When he saw them walking through the gates of a vast cemetery he followed them in, but he could not see them among the rows of headstones. He began running and calling their names. Now he saw them over in the farthest corner, kneeling under a tree. They stood up and were walking away again. He was shouting but they did not hear him. He wanted to see the gravestone they had been visiting but the closer he got to it, the farther away it became. Nancy and Martha were miles away now, back at the entrance gate. He was shouting after them.Trying to shout. Someone was telling him not to worry.

  Feeling the touch of cold lips on his brow, he opened his eyes. There was no one in the room. He remembered where he was. Ypres. In a hotel. His father was next door. Everything was all right because that human rock, that anchor, was next door. He checked his watch with a double tap and heard a commotion downstairs. A drunken guest was trying to get back into the hotel. Perhaps that was what had woken him. The night porter had clearly gone off duty and the guest didn’t realize that his room key was also the key that opened the door to the hotel. He was shaking the handle of the front door so violently it was vibrating the thin walls of the building. Daniel, feeling dehydrated and hungover, muttered to himself: ‘Use your key. Use your key.’ When he put a pillow over his head and turned over, he found it was cold and damp from his own sweat.

  The guest, an Australian judging by his accent, was becoming more and more frustrated and was ramming the door with his shoulder, as well as kicking it. He was also shouting: ‘Fucking country! Open the fucking door!’ He walked away, returned five minutes later and started shouting and rattling the door again. Daniel got out of bed and looked out of the window.The man was urinating in front of the Cloth Hall now. He looked to be in his mid-forties. Presumably he had come to visit his great-grandfather’s grave, too. Daniel tried ringing reception but there was no answer. He considered walking down and letting the Australian in, but worried the man might attack him, thinking he was the porter. Cowardice again. Be a man. He was about to phone the police when the drunk went away. Daniel couldn’t get back to sleep, gave up trying and stared at the stained square of polystyrene above him. It was orange in the street lighting.

  At 5.30am, when lorries began trundling past outside, the sound of their tyres amplified on the cobbles, he turned on his light. At 7am, when the sky became slate grey, low and heavy with the promise of rain, Daniel went down to breakfast. His father was already seated, immaculate in a tattersall check shirt, a regimental tie and neatly pressed cavalry twills.

  ‘There was shouting in the night,’ Philip said.

  Daniel helped himself to a glass of orange, a baguette and four slices of cheese. ‘I heard it, too.’

  ‘No, before that. It was coming from your room.’

  ‘I was shouting?’ Daniel shook his head. ‘Nancy says I do that sometimes, since the crash. Night terrors. I wake up sweating and delirious.’

  ‘Have you seen a doctor?’

  ‘Bruce gives me beta blockers. I take them when I’m feeling panicky.’

  ‘I used to prescribe them for men suffering from post-traumatic stress.’

  ‘Did you ever need them?’

  Philip shook his head. ‘Some men don’t. It’s not about bravery, it’s about luck.’

  ‘I imagine your father was the same … Funny, I always think of him as your father rather than my grandfather. Because I never met him, I suppose.’

  ‘I never met him either.’

  ‘Must have been weird not knowing him. I mean, you know about his VC and all that, and there’s that passage about him in that war memoir, but you don’t know whether he preferred tea or coffee, whether he was left- or right-handed, what he sounded like.’

  ‘Weird is one way of putting it.’

  ‘Did you ever talk to men who served with him?’

  ‘Met a couple, but their generation never talked much about the war.’

  ‘Thought that was all they ever talked about.’

  ‘They talked about it, but not to people who weren’t there. A lot of soldiers are like that.’ Philip buttered some bread. ‘Clearly he was brave, my father, but I don’t think he ever felt fear.To be truly brave you have to know fear. It’s much worse for men who are afraid. “The coward dies a thousand times, the brave man only once.” ’

  ‘How about you, Dad? Did you feel afraid?’

  Philip tilted his head to one side. Made as if to speak. Checked himself. He began tapping his fingers on the table. ‘In the Gulf ? I was going to say that of course I was afraid but that isn’t true. I don’t think I did feel fear. Not in the way some men do. I have seen men crying before going into battle. But some men felt immune from death, as if they had an antenna on their heads that was warning them of impending danger, keeping them safe.’

  ‘That’s what I felt when … That’s what I was trying to explain last night about …’ He searched for the name but could not recall it. ‘Martha’s teacher. The Muslim guy. After the plane went down I was swimming for help and he appeared out of nowhere in the water and I felt like … like he was keeping me safe. Like he was leading me to safety, pointing me in the right direction, towards the islands. I was hallucinating, of course. Had sunstroke and hypothermia. And I was dehydrated. All the symptoms. But … Am I making sense?’ Daniel felt in his jacket for the news cutting from the Trinity College student newspaper, the one with the photograph of himself and Hamdi sitting together in the refectory. ‘Thought I had a picture of him. Must have left it upstairs.’

  ‘You felt he was your guardian angel?’

  Daniel wafted his hand and gave a dismissive laugh. ‘For the … No! Course not. I told you, I was hallucinating. I’ve been through it all with Bruce. I’d had a knock on the head during the crash and that might have caused temporal lobe epilepsy. There’s this small shadow on my brain.’

  Philip looked concerned. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Bruce has it in hand. Didn’t want to worry you about it.’

  ‘I’ve had some experience of temporal lobe epilepsy. Did you have convulsions?’

  ‘Not really. It was more like migraine. A blinding light.’

  ‘And you haven’t had that since?’

  ‘I’ve had headaches. That’s all.’

  ‘You should have told me. I know some excellent neurosurgeons. It’s associated with out-of-body experiences and quasi-religious visions, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  Philip hesitated. ‘Have you considered that it might have been a genuine vision?’

  ‘No such thing.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’m a scientist, Dad. I know.’

  ‘Yes but how do you know?’

  Daniel took a sip of coffee. ‘Never been any proof of them.’

  ‘Science cannot disprove them either.’

  ‘Well, it can actually. If they are not testable according to the known laws of physics and biology
then—’

  ‘Perhaps that is why God chose you.’

  ‘Chose me!’ Daniel laughed again, more edgily than before.

  ‘Someone who knew the meaning of scientific proof. A Darwinist. A Darwinist in the Galápagos Islands.’

  ‘You saying the Big Fella likes a challenge? Hadn’t thought of it like that. I suppose life must get quite boring if you’re a supreme being who can do anything he wants whenever he wants. Short of challenges. I suppose that’s why he became so jealous and insecure. Demanding people worship him and no other. Smiting those who take his name in vain.’

  Philip smiled with his eyes, a rare event. ‘Careful, Daniel, you’re talking about Him as if He exists.’

  Daniel looked up at the sky. ‘OK, Allah, Yahweh, whatever you like to be called, if you exist, give me a sign. Just one. Doesn’t have to be an angel … I promise, if you give me a sign right now I’ll sacrifice my first born on the altar, as that seems to be what you get off on …’ He cocked his head. ‘Nothing. No bolt of lighting. Not even a shooting star.’

  ‘ “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” ’

  ‘That’s from Hebrews, isn’t it … Surprised I know that? I read the Bible cover to cover when I was a student. Have to know your enemy.You taught me that.’

  ‘Perhaps the evidence you seek has been with you all along and you can’t see it, or you won’t allow yourself to see it. Sometimes believing is seeing.’

  ‘That’s called superstition.’

  ‘It’s called faith.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad, but faith isn’t enough. I know this table exists.’ Daniel lowered his head to the table and mimed banging it repeatedly. ‘I

  don’t have to believe it exists as an act of faith.’

  ‘You always say religion is for closed minds, but I think the opposite. I think it’s for open minds. Minds that are open to the possibility of there being something more, something we can’t explain.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad, but it’s just not true. We know how a child is conceived, to take an obvious example, and that knowledge allows us to dismiss the idea of a virgin birth.’

  ‘What about IVF?’

  Daniel gave a forced grin. ‘OK. You got me there. The Resurrection then. We know that didn’t happen because we know how life and death work. If Jesus was alive three days after coming down off the cross it was because he was still alive. He never died. He slipped into a coma. I don’t suppose there were too many trained medics on hand with thermometers, sphygmomanometers and watches to check for vital signs. Look, we know he didn’t come back to life because coming back to life is a biological impossibility.’

  ‘Perhaps that was the point. Perhaps it had to be something impossible, something that mankind would take notice of and still be talking about two thousand years after it happened.’

  There was a loud clink as Daniel slammed his coffee cup down in its saucer. ‘Dad! You’re a doctor! How can you say that?’

  ‘I can say it because I believe in God.’

  Daniel sighed. ‘Scientists are open to belief, but only if it’s supported by hard evidence.That’s what people don’t get about us. We are open. We are prepared to change our views, but only when some proof is offered. Proof you can hold in your hand.’ He shook his head. ‘How long have men been believing in gods? Since the beginning of recorded history.What’s that? Five, six thousand years? And probably for thousands of years before that. In all that time there has not been one trace of evidence. Not one shred. Nothing you could hold in your hand and say, “Look! Here it is! Proof! “’

  Philip caught his breath and swivelled around in his chair, as if an electrical current had passed down his back. He was clenching and unclenching his fists.

  *

  The dig was a ten-minute drive from Ypres and, for the duration of the journey, the windscreen wipers thrashed against a downpour. Daniel dipped his head whenever the screen came clear to look for signs to Passchendaele – there weren’t any, the village that gave the battle its name having been wiped off the map by British artillery during the First World War. In its place were pastureland and fields of maize, as well as warehouses and a sewage treatment plant.There were also poppies in bloom, but only in the ditches where the weedkiller hadn’t reached them. As they came to a fork that took them on to a lane that followed the Passchendaele Ridge – not so much a ridge as an undulation in the otherwise flat landscape – they saw the verge was littered with piles of rusting ordnance, some of the several hundred tons of shells ploughed up by farmers each year. Those that were clearly unexploded had been left in the gaps of the concrete telegraph poles for Belgian bomb disposal experts to take away on their weekly collections.

  As they drove, Daniel noticed that the rushing air was dragging the beads of rain on the driver’s side window, making them look like spermatozoa swimming across a Petri dish under a microscope. He was so distracted by this he did not see the orange backhoe loader on an articulated arm that was biting into the ground ahead of him.

  Philip tapped him on the shoulder and pointed in its direction. It was trailing mud as it excavated the earth, and next to it was a small bulldozer with caterpillar tracks. Beyond that was a large white tent around which stood a team of half a dozen men and women in luminous jackets, hard hats and wellington boots. One was wearing headphones and sweeping a metal detector back and forth across the ground.

  Father and son parked and found two umbrellas in the boot of the car. A short and jowly man was jogging towards them, grinning broadly and pushing his spectacles further up the bridge of his nose. He was wearing a lumberjack hat with earflaps hanging down loosely and a cagoule over a pink shirt that was flecked with mud. ‘This is Clive,’ Philip whispered. ‘Bit of a chatterbox but don’t let that put you off him. He’s a good man.’

  ‘Philip, Philip, how are you?’ Clive said breathlessly as he shook hands. His glasses had steamed up. His mottled cheeks were pouched at the bottom. He turned to Daniel. ‘Good to see you again, Professor Kennedy …’

  Daniel blinked twice. ‘Actually I’m not a …’ He held out his hand, a look of bemusement playing across his face. ‘Hello … again … I’m trying to think …’

  ‘Trinity College. I was the porter there until … well, we don’t need to go into that. It was a job to pay the bills. This is my real passion. I do battlefield tours. I’m also an amateur archaeologist.’

  ‘One of the most professional I’ve come across,’ Philip corrected.

  Clive beamed. ‘Very exciting. This morning. Two more bodies. Germans, we think. Thank goodness we got to them first. Local farmers tend not to report Germans. I’ve heard of them spitting on the bones.We have to inform the local police in case the bodies are murder victims. Do you have wellies?’

  Daniel and Philip shook their heads.

  ‘Never mind.You might be OK without them.You will have to wear hard hats though. There’s a couple in the tent over there. Careful how you go. It’s slippy.’ The archaeologist led the way to the tent, where he swapped his own lumberjack hat for a hard hat and handed out one each for Daniel and Philip. All three made their way to a muddy hole in the ground, their footwear sucking in the orange mud. Rain was splashing in the pools at the bottom of the hole.The remains of duckboards and rotting A-frames could be seen in the sodden ground. ‘When we uncover bodies we have to be certain of the identification before we can give them a formal burial,’ Clive shouted above the sluicing of the rain, scarcely pausing for breath. ‘Only then can we take them off the missing list.Things like watches and cigarette cases engraved with initials are not enough on their own because bones often got melded together. You know, if one man was carrying another when a shell hit them. Couldn’t tell which was which. Identification is usually impossible because dog tags were made from cardboard and leather and so have rotted away. We found this yesterday.’ Clive held up a rusting entrenching tool. ‘We usually find human remains nearby. That’s why this place is known as “the bon
eyard of Belgium”. And come and have a look over here.’ He pointed to a cross-section of earth ten feet deep where layers of rusting metal could be seen at intervals below the turf and the clay. ‘There was so much lead falling from the skies here, over such a long period of time, it has settled into its very own geological formation. Look! A solid mass of rusty matter. Isn’t that amazing?’

  Daniel nodded under his umbrella.

  ‘This whole area was a maze of tunnels and bunkers. Cows sometimes disappear down the shafts when a shelf of soil gives way. Even tractors disappear sometimes. The ground opens up and swallows them.’

  ‘The present collapsing into the past,’ Daniel said.

  ‘Or the past rising up into the present.We’ve got one over here.’ Clive led the way to a fenced-off hole. ‘Look down there.’

  Daniel peered over the edge and immediately staggered back. ‘Sorry. Not good with heights.’

  Clive was shining a torch down the hole. ‘You can’t see the bottom. Must be fifty feet straight down.The entrance to a tunnel. Unexploded mines go off sometimes, especially when there’s lightning. They throw up soil that hasn’t been in contact with air since the First World War. Look at this.’ He held up a dirty bottle. ‘HP sauce. That has to be British. Would you like to keep it as a souvenir?’

  Daniel glanced at his father as if asking for permission.

  ‘Now,’ Clive said, handing over the bottle. ‘Am I right in thinking your great-grandfather fought at Passchendaele?’

  Feeling delirious from lack of sleep and not in the mood for such enthusiasm, Daniel said: ‘Went over on the first day.’ He glanced at his father again. It wasn’t a lie.

  ‘And he was with the Shropshire Fusiliers, wasn’t he? Well, where we are standing now was the front line on the eve of the attack.’ He pointed to the remains of a concrete bunker a few yards away. ‘The Germans were only that far away on the higher ground.They could hear them talking. They could smell the bacon they cooked for breakfast. I’d have to check, but I’m pretty sure the Shropshire Fusiliers were in this sector. They went over in the third wave. According to our maps we are above a trench they named Clapham Common.’