Spikings called the table to order and offered thanks to the attendees, who nodded sagely in approval of themselves. Then hasty footfalls emanated from outside and a latecomer ploughed into the room, dressed in clerical suit, barking some last remarks into a phone clamped to his ear. He grasped a free chair, made his phone to vanish, and smiled broadly at the assembled. The man from Findus tapped his watch. Spikings cut in. ‘Simon Barlow, everybody. Simon has his own eventide to be ready for, but he’s come across town tonight to help us out.’
‘Not a problem,’ Barlow chirped. ‘Happy to. Really sorry, everyone. John.’ And he waved to Gore down the length of the table. Gore nodded coolly in return.
‘John, you and Simon, uh, know each other, right?’
‘Yes,’ said Gore, ‘from Grey College. We’re maybe older and wiser now.’
‘Bound to be, mate. That’s the real world, isn’t it? Lessons, all the time.’
Gore was curious to see what a few years out in the field had done for his old classmate. For sure, he had grown out the rather Hitlerjugend grade-two crop formerly favoured, but he retained a bristly and fastidious goatee. Still familiar, too, the sleepy, hooded hazel eyes, the glottal stops that were his Essex birthright, and the skewed grin that seemed to shoot up one side of his face. Gore glanced around the gathering: anyone who appeared cosy with the latecomer, either verbally or in body language, had to be suspected for a suburban crusader of Barlow’s evangelical stripe. But for the moment the apostle Simon sat alone, generally resented.
Spikings pressed his palms flat on the table. ‘Okay, now everybody’s finally, uh, bothered to show up, I think we should kick off by talking timetables. The schedule for John’s mission in Hoxheath. John, how long do you say – actually, how much time do we all think John should set aside for the groundwork? The prep and canvassing and so forth, before he calls a date for his first service?’
The ex-hairdresser had raised a troubled hand.
‘Yes, Susan?’
‘Sorry, Bob, but can we not start and say what sort of a service we’re talking about?’
‘What sort?’ Spikings chuckled uneasily. ‘That’ll be up to John – I mean, within the usual, uh, parameters, of course.’
‘Yes, but, we don’t know who he is, see.’
Gore glanced at Spikings so as to assume the speaker’s role. ‘It will be the sort of service I’m sure you’re used to, Susan. Reverent and seemly. I should say, though – as you all know, this is a low-budget production. And we’ve no idea yet who is our congregation, right? So I’ll have to use a bit of imagination. I’m sure you can all trust me on that.’
Spikings was nodding emphatically. ‘It’s your show, John.’
‘It’s not ideal, but, is it?’ muttered the bus driver. ‘Having it in a school?’
Monica twitched. ‘What’s wrong with my school?’
Gore countered. ‘Well, firstly, I don’t have any choice, not as far as I know. Second, I can see this is a fine building you’ve got here. I’m sure we all think our older churches are very handsome, but these days I’m not sure they’re wholly appropriate for who it is we need to reach.’
‘He’s right, you know.’ It was Barlow, to Gore’s surprise. ‘No use droning on about lovely old buildings if they’re crumbling down on all sides and there’s no one in ’em but two old dears and a dog. That’s not a living church.’ Barlow leaned forward, clenching his fists in emphasis, a debating trick Gore knew of old.
Susan was riled. ‘Well, Mr Barlow, we get more than two old dears, I can –’
‘I bet you do. No, but look, I don’t want to get us off on an edgy one, but – is this council just a talking shop? Are we just gonna sit here carping on at John about what he should do before he’s done it? Or are we gonna try and give him some practical advice? Something he can work with?’
A kindly effort, thought Gore. Though it didn’t sound entirely spontaneous.
‘Fair enough, John’s not done this before and you don’t know him. But I do. Don’t you worry, he knows his onions. Guys like John and me, we’re trained, this is what we’re for. But what we’re talking here, surely, is nuts and bolts. Spadework.’
The manager nodded. ‘Aye, getting round the doors, leafleting people and that.’
‘Agreed. John needs volunteers, right?’
‘Yes.’ Spikings seemed anxious to recover his chairmanship. ‘Yes, of course, we need a list of people ready to help John with the, uh, spadework.’
‘Exactly,’ said Barlow. ‘John will give the orders. But we find him the troops.’
Spikings gestured to his wife, scribbling diligently on a pad. ‘Okay. How?’
‘Well, we should have a proper coffee morning,’ said Susan.
Of course, thought Gore, all things in the Church get done over hot beverages.
‘Then,’ said Barlow, ‘as our friend says, John needs to start pounding them streets.’
‘Aye, you’ll have to get on your bike,’ Mr Findus chortled.
‘Well, I’ve got rather a good one, as it happens,’ said Gore.
‘Can I just say?’ The journalist spoke up. ‘That might be something I could get in the paper. You know, “the cycling parson”? Bit of publicity.’
‘Right. Minute that one, Rose. Action point, Phil to talk to the Journal.’
‘Okay,’ said Barlow. ‘Now, not to usurp your role, Bob, but I suggest we get down to brass tacks. Targets. What do we practically hope for John in terms of turnout?’
The subsequent silence was awkward. Gore was himself curious.
‘I find,’ Spikings hazarded, ‘that … thirty people? Is a, uh, perfectly good congregation. I mean, not too shabby.’
‘Thirty,’ Barlow repeated. ‘That sound okay by you, John?’ Gore nodded. Such a target would cause him no pain, at least for now. ‘Okay, now we’re moving. But let’s not put a cap on the ambition. See, at my church in Gosforth right now we get about two hundred and fifty.’
Liar. How on earth …? thought Gore.
‘Not so long ago, but – yeah, we were about thirty. Then, bit by bit, more people started coming along more regular. Why was that, eh?’ The table was Barlow’s audience now, in his hand. ‘Because they were invited. By someone they knew. It’s all about building networks, see?’
‘A lot depends on where you’re starting from, Simon.’ Spikings too, Gore could see, was feeling a needle’s prick in Barlow’s veiled boast. ‘You have more of a, uh, middle-class catchment.’
‘It’s not a class thing, Bob. That’s not the attraction. It’s about friends telling friends there’s a place they can go and make new friends.’
‘I take Simon’s point,’ said Gore, deciding to be generous. ‘It’s obvious people on the estates I’ll be dealing with can lead quite isolated lives. We have a chance to get them together into a group, however small. Make them welcome. Treat them well.’
‘Now of course you need a bit more muscle,’ said Barlow, ‘if you want to pull in two hundred. At mine we’ve got the live music, the crèche, the youth leaders –’
‘Your success precedes you, Simon,’ muttered Spikings.
‘Well, but I do like to think it’s something to do with the preaching. Bringing the gospel to people every day. Don’t forget that either, John.’
‘I’ll preach the gospel, Simon.’ Gore held his fire. ‘Once there’s people to preach to. Once they’re sitting comfortable. First, they need a place to sit.’
Silence, and a few sharp looks exchanged. Susan raised a hand once more. ‘Are you going to have a Sunday School?’
‘Right!’ said Barlow cheerily. ‘Whatever happened to Sunday School, eh?’
‘In due course, perhaps. If I can raise these volunteers.’
‘Well, you want young people, I’ve got ’em, John. So I’ve got a few tips for you in that department.’
Jack Ridley cleared his throat fiercely at Gore’s side. All looked to him. ‘It’s worth saying, Mr Barlow, they’re having maybe a dim
view of the “old dears”, but I see a lot of the older folk round Hoxheath, they’re not happy making the trip to Fenham of a Sunday because the buses divvint run in this direction. So they have to cadge lifts off their children. Their grandchildren even.’
Spikings nodded fiercely. ‘Well, there you go. There’s a, uh, demographic that needs targeting.’
Gore nodded. ‘I was wondering too about diversity?’ He assessed the blank faces and ventured afresh. ‘Thinking laterally, are there other kinds of partnership possible? In the community? A youth club, a woman’s centre? Is there a Muslim association?’
Mr Findus scowled. ‘Try the health centre. The doctors are all Bengali.’
‘Don’t run before you can walk, John,’ said Barlow smilingly, reclining in his seat.
Spikings intervened. ‘John, you have a limited budget, remember. There’s the Urban Fund, there’s contributions, and that’s about it. Oh! There’s a thing we need to talk about, fundraising, minute that if you would, Rose.’
Barlow waved a hand. ‘Honest, John, whatever money you’ve got, you want to spend it like it’s the last you’ll ever have. And not on half-baked social services that aren’t in our remit. Not before you’ve got a single volunteer.’
Okay, Gore thought, another time then.
‘I think,’ said Spikings, ‘we need to get that coffee morning in the diary without delay. It should be an early evening, really, shouldn’t it? Where do we have it?’
‘I would be glad,’ said Gore, ‘if we could have it at St Luke’s. Get started, break the place in.’
‘Not a problem,’ said Monica.
Spikings looked to his wife. ‘So. Tea and biscuits for parents, pensioners and all interested parties at St Luke’s School. Lovely.’
*
As Gore followed Ridley out into chillier evening air, Barlow was climbing into the seat of his octane-blue Ford Mondeo, but on seeing them both he re-emerged hastily and strode toward Gore, arms thrown out alarmingly wide.
‘John, what am I thinking, eh? Proper hello?’
Gore was yanked into a clumsy embrace that he suffered for the sake of form, until Barlow stepped back and beamed at him. ‘Well, that was scintillating stuff, eh?’
‘Thank you for contributing.’
‘Oh, you couldn’t have kept me away. No way, not when I heard about this number. “John Gore evangelizes Hoxheath.” Whatever next?’
‘I didn’t think urban mission was your thing, Simon.’
‘Wouldn’t have thought it was yours, John. No, the whole planting thing I’m fascinated by. I envy you. It’s a real test, though. Good luck to you, mate.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Oh, you’ll need it, you know that?’ He dropped into a conspiratorial mode. ‘In terms of driving things forward round here? You’ve got a lukewarm engine under you.’ He had taken Gore’s arm, freshly touchy-feely. ‘You still in touch with old Lockhart?’
‘Not so much. He wasn’t keen on my coming here. Leaving where I was in Dorset.’
‘Dear me. Never thought the master and his blue-eyed boy would come to blows.’ Barlow was making a most regretful face. Gore ignored the easy scurrility.
‘I didn’t know you’d come north, Simon. How did that happen?’
‘Oh, I just fancied getting my hands good and dirty. Out in the field. Like you.’
‘Not so much dirt about where you are in Gosforth, if I remember.’
‘It’s not as leafy as you think, mate. Nowhere is in Newcastle.’ Barlow’s estuarine emphasis – ‘Noo-carsel’ – was violence to Gore’s ear. ‘Anyway, but. Now I’m here I can’t imagine being anywhere else. No, you’ll be seeing a lot more of me, John. “I will tarry at Ephesus until Pentecost, for a great door and effectual has opened unto me, and I have many adversaries.” Let’s you and me have a pint sometime, eh?’
That corkscrew grin vaulted and curled up the right side of Barlow’s face once again, rolling back the years. He turned, waved a hand over his shoulder, and strode back to the Mondeo.
Chapter VIII
APOSTLES
18 September 1992
‘What do we have here?’ So asked Canon Burn, babyishly fair of hair if sadly scant of same. The question was rhetorical. ‘A document dating from 1563. Eight years later it’s appended to the Prayer Book. Today it’s commended to us by section five of the Worship and Doctrine Measure …’
Gore sat in the Grey College seminar room, sucking a pencil, contemplating the morning light across a classmate’s broad dark back. Before him, as before all ten of them, a facsimile of the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church. All these years, he thought, and I’m still at school, behind a desk, scribbling.
‘These Articles, then, are a statement of our belief. But they don’t govern us. They are parameters. We just agree that what they say is broadly compatible with scripture.’
‘What a load of mush.’
Barlow, of course, rocking in his chair, arms folded like a full stop. Gore thought the barrow-boy manner an affectation, no less irksome than the jeering hazel-eyed gaze or the convict’s starkness of cropped hair and beard.
‘If they’ve not got authority, why do we bother with them?’
Burn’s smile was thin. ‘For the purpose of study, Simon. A value in itself. At the same time I should say I know clergy who’ve never read them.’
‘Oh, I bet you do.’
Burn lifted his nose clear of the taunt. ‘If we just consider Article Twenty-Eight …’
Gore glanced to the page. Transubstantiation, or the change in the substance of bread and wine, is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture.
Barlow stirred first. ‘Yeah, right. Exactly.’
‘Yes, and yet,’ purred Burn, ‘as we know, there are some in our communion who take just this view. Believing in the real bodily presence in the Eucharist.’
Barlow rubbed at his face. ‘Why can’t we just take one line and stick to it? Eh? Look there, see, number six? “Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation.” Nothing half-baked about that, is there? Can’t quarrel with it, can you? Anyone?’
Gore knew what had to follow, sure as the earth turned. It seemed a hollow laugh now, yet in their first term Barlow, son of a salesman of cleaning products, had seized on him as a kindred spirit – perhaps the one other ordinand who had not come from the home counties via Oxford or Cambridge. ‘You and me are the hardcore men here,’ Barlow had bashed at his ear. ‘Let’s get hammered some night, thrash out a few things.’ This as if they were affable fans of the same football team. Over time it had grown clear that they took rival sides.
‘Simon,’ Gore now weighed in, ‘the Bible forbids usury, doesn’t it? When you go into Barclays to discuss your overdraft, do you kick over their tables? Come on, this is a pre-Enlightenment document. It would be backward to endorse all of it.’
‘Who are you to tell me that?’ Barlow spat, then sharply directed his shorn scalp at Burn. ‘And you, you stand there nodding your head? Call yourself an instructor?’
Burn seemed to flinch – the room merely to roll its collective eyes, as ever when Messrs Gore and Barlow got into one of their little furies, for hours had been lost to the same bitter end over the last twelve months.
‘Simon, the fact is there aren’t two of us in this room who’d agree on every one of these Articles. Never mind outside of it. But the argument, the complexity of it – that’s what we’re about.’
Barlow’s gaze was baleful. ‘What planet are you from, son? You are dead wrong, it is exactly what we’re not about. I mean, what about when you’ve gotta actually stand up in a pulpit, John? Are you gonna say the cross is the way to salvation? Or are you gonna say to people, “Oh, mercy, I tell you, this ‘believing’ lark, it ain’t half complex …”? How’s your ordinary churchgoer supposed to make sense of that?’
Gore took his pause, let Barlow’s fine spittle settle. ‘I won’t have any problem telling people that the faith can mean something quite different to a
ny one of them.’
‘Oh will you? Nice, John. But you know what? You’ll be preaching to an empty church. Empty, mate. You know why? Because people who like that sort of guff, they don’t go to church. They don’t read the Bible. They go to the theatre. And they read the Guardian. People who go to church on a Sunday want to hear a sound man. Someone who believes what he’s saying when he baptises their kids.’
‘I think,’ said Burn distantly, ‘we’ve strayed far enough –’
‘No, look, John, just tell me straight. No one’s listening anyway. Do you believe Christ was born of a virgin? Do you believe His tomb was empty? I know it only says so, in all the gospels, but I just want your personal view.’
‘Whatever I say I believe, Simon, it yields no proof anyway.’
Barlow snatched up the Articles, waved them aloft. ‘I mean, what’s sacred, eh? What’s left? Next you’ll be saying we don’t have to believe in God, not really …’
There was a silence of mere moments, yet sufficient for Barlow to scan the room, before – with a timing that Gore thought risible, theatrical – raising his palms aloft, as if beset by enemies on all sides. ‘Oh, come on. Don’t be scaring me now. Somebody say they believe in God.’
*
Lunch hour in the common room, a dozen ordinands congregated. The humbly worn seating area projected out to a generous terrace, ideal in summer, but today was colder and the French windows were closed. Scattered side tables offered newspapers and makings for tea, and Gore had got himself nicely settled for both when he sensed a presence over him.
‘Hullo, Gavin.’
‘John. Mind if I sit? I wondered if we might chat about the Augustine essay?’
‘Sure.’ Gore nodded and made room for Gavin Knott – slight, of nondescript height, his dark curls cut close, a hangdog aspect to his gaze. His ‘casual’ wardrobe was yet fastidious, black jeans ironed, grey chambray shirt buttoned to his throat. He appeared self-contained, sufficient unto himself, if not hugely cheered by the fact. He and Gore were partners in a weekly visit to the local hospital, where Knott was rather enviably effective in consoling elderly patients on the wards. Gore, at best, had achieved a shallow rapport with a Nigerian cleaning woman.
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