by A. N. Wilson
No, Peter had averred in an altogether more suave tone – so posh, Brad had laughed and thought it was like an act – no, he would teach Bradley all that was necessary. The younger boy and the older boy sat together at the front of the bus. Brad imitated the way that his brother – he was proud to call Peter his brother – pushed his large Reeboks up against the front window, treating the bus seat as if it were some exercise device at the gym. When the conductor came round for the fares, he’d asked for Peter’s proof that he was entitled to travel as a child. Peter had raised two fingers. The conductor guy had asked if Peter wanted to be thrown off the bus. And Peter, like, asked who was throwing who off the fucking bus, ‘cause if anyone threw anyone, it wasn’t going to be some ponce from fucking Jamaica throwing him, and the conductor had said he wasn’t from Jamaica, and that if they did not pay the fare, he’d throw them off the bus. Peter had then paid, and they’d both giggled and Brad had been proud to say, ‘Wicked’ as the conductor went round collecting fares from all the other nerds.
When they were alone together on top of the bus – as they were passing through Bermondsey – Peter asked if Brad knew how to fire a Tokarev.
Bradley did not know what a Tokarev was.
‘Semi-automatic,’ said Peter. ‘Lovely little shooter. Used them in the Red Army. Very handy in Yugoslavia for shooting Croat cunts.’
Very slowly, and with the full knowledge of all the excitement he was creating, Peter had then unzipped the front of his hooded sweatshirt and revealed the little Chinese pistol.
‘Neat?’
He laughed.
‘Where you get that?’ Bradley had asked, wide-eyed.
‘Two hundred quid, not bad.’
‘Two hundred?’
‘It was nothing, nigga. You think that’s a lot of dough, two hundred? One little watch, that’s all I had to steal, one little watch off a yid. She’d wrapped it in her knickers, stupid cunt. I took it out her knickers then shoved something else in – know whadda mean?’
‘You got two hundred pounds for a watch?’
‘I swapped it, didn’t I?’
That was the end of that. The exact processes by which he had managed to exchange a stolen watch for a pistol were either too arcane or too tedious to be entered into with so young a boy as Bradley.
‘Like to learn how to use it?’ Peter asked.
His half-brother looked at him with a flicker of fear, but a smile of adoration.
‘You betcha.’
FOURTEEN
‘Are you the lady who interviewed my grandson?’
‘I haven’t met your grandson.’
‘Peter.’
‘I haven’t met Peter.’
‘But you are from The Daily Legion? Father Vivyan promised me he’d send on the lady from The Daily Legion.’
‘I used to work for The Daily Legion.’
‘Do you know L. P. Watson?’
Rachel Pearl blushed at this directness. For an absurd moment she wondered whether Mrs d’Abo knew what she was asking.
‘It’s one big open-plan office. You meet them all.’
‘Even Peg Montgomery?’
‘Even Peg Montgomery.’
‘She’s wonderful, isn’t she?’
This was one way of putting it.
‘Her interviews are so’ – Mrs d’Abo paused for the right word – ‘sympathetic.’
‘Mrs d’Abo, I think we’re at cross-purposes. I used to work for The Daily Legion. I was arts editor.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I organized the reviews mainly – the reviews of films? Plays?’
Rachel felt herself smiling with condescension as though her perfectly intelligent interlocutor might not know what these were.
‘I never read those pages,’ said Lily d’Abo, evidently not one to indulge in false flattery. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘No need to be. I don’t do the job any more.’
‘What have they put you on to then? Reporter, is it?’
‘No – no, I’ve left my job at the paper. I’m not in journalism any more. I’ve come to live at the vicarage for a while till I’ve got myself sorted out … It’s just that Father Vivyan – I don’t know quite what’s happened, but he seemed to think I might be able to help you. Let me get this straight. The newspaper rang him up and made a number of frankly ridiculous suggestions about him and your grandson …’
‘Who’s saying they are ridiculous?’ asked Lily sharply.
‘Oh, come on, Mrs d’Abo – Father Vivyan …’
‘Haven’t you been reading these stories day after day in The Daily Legion? Priests who had been trusted by their people, by their faithful people …’
‘Yes, but Mrs d’Abo, you know Father Vivyan …’
‘I feel betrayed,’ said Lily calmly, but with very stiff lips. ‘It is a terrible betrayal, not just of Peter, not just of the boy, but of all of us, of the whole church, that he could behave like that. A man in his position.’
‘Yes, but Mrs d’Abo …’
‘Miss …’
‘Pearl. You can call me Rachel.’
‘Miss Pearl, I have heard what he said to my boy. The paper concealed a tape-recorder on Peter …’
‘You think that was a nice thing to do?’
‘They concealed a tape-recorder. They have the facts. They have it on the tapes – what he said to that boy. He said he was very, very sorry that he had done wrong to him, and he prayed for Peter’s forgiveness. Then there is Peter saying he hopes it doesn’t make him a homosexual. Miss Pearl …’
‘Mrs d’Abo, I …’
‘I’m a nurse. I’ve read the textbooks. Do you think I haven’t worried myself sick about that boy night and day for years? For years he has shown signs of being – strange …’
‘It doesn’t matter being gay, you know.’
When she heard herself saying this, Rachel realized that she sounded pert, metropolitan, chic; she hated herself for her tone.
‘I’m not talking about gay. I’m talking about being mentally disturbed. Peter wasn’t like other children. Quite early on, we saw the danger signals but we did not do anything about them, because we could not face up to the consequences. He heard voices, he saw visions. He was usually very charming, and of course when he was the centre of all our attentions, that was fine. But once his mother married Trevor, the trouble began. And when the other boys were born … They picked on Peter and they made him worse, and he developed, you know, all kinds of big behavioural problems. I don’t want to go into it all with you. But to exploit a boy like that, a vulnerable boy … Father Vivyan knew he was vulnerable. I have told him so much about Peter. Tuli, he calls him – it’s some African word, it means Legion – because we are many. You know?’
‘I don’t, I’m afraid …’
‘It’s a story in the Bible,’ said Lily, patiently, but with evident scorn. ‘You don’t know the Bible? About Jesus? It’s a story in the Gospel. Jesus comes upon a poor lunatic among the tombs, cutting himself and crying aloud. And when Jesus asks him his name, he replies, “My name is Legion, because we are many.” I thought Father Vivyan gave Peter that name because he understood, because he sympathized, because he wanted to help, and all the while, he really just wanted—’
‘Mrs d’Abo, think about it. You know what sort of a man Father Vivyan is. He is a good man, a transparently good person. If you think the same can be said of the people at the Legion, then you are very, very wrong.’
‘You worked there.’
‘I left there. Mrs d’Abo, don’t get mixed up with them. Whatever has happened, it won’t be made better by getting mixed up with journalists. Whatever is true, they will twist it into a falsehood. They’ll pretend they want to help you, but all they want is a story. Please.’
‘It’s all right for you. You’re rich,’ said Mrs d’Abo.
This much was true. Rachel had realized already that this otherwise reasonable, if troubled and mistaken person had been sucked into the Le
gion honeypot.
FIFTEEN
Mercy and Vivyan were walking in the rain. She had tried to put up her umbrella but the wind was too strong and in any case it made conversation impossible. She had a headscarf tied over her new hairdo, and the PVC mac, though short and tight, kept out some of the rain. Vivyan wore his long black monk’s cloak over his jeans, and when the downpour became heavy, he drew the hood over his head, giving him the appearance of something in Lord of the Rings, as they walked up the gradual incline of St Mary’s Road, past the Roman Catholic primary school (St John Bosco), past the Hindu temple and the cemetery to the gates of Furbelow Park. The children’s playground was empty. The deluge splattered sandpit and swings. Beyond it, a few budgies and canaries screeched their dismay from the pathetic little aviary. Mercy and Vivyan made for the covered bandstand at the brow of the hill, walking in silence, until they reached the spot.
The bandstand was strewn with pigeon shit, chip papers, condoms, used needles. Various cave artists had, with spray or brush, left their messages for posterity on the concrete walls, some in mysterious scripts which would puzzle the palaeographers of a future age; others, in versions of the common orthography, had put on record that CHARMAINE GIVES HEAD, and that WAYNE FUCKS. Still others, with Beckettian brevity, had conveyed their message by single words – SHIT, WANK, NIGGERS, NF. It was a sad place for a conversation, though in her girlhood Mercy could remember coming here for surreptitious moments of romance, punctuated by no less surreptitious intakes of nicotine. From afar, beyond the neglected graves of ten thousand forgotten south Londoners, could be glimpsed the high-rise blocks of Catford on the one side and the endless streets of Bromley on the other. These, punctuated here by railway track, there by spires and towers, could look almost cheering in sunshine. Today they suggested a limitless waste of life, a humanity which stretched sadly as far as the eye could see, indulging in its youth in the activities which so obsessed the graffiti-artists in the bandstand; scurrying, in middle age, to the bus stops and railway stations which, even in the heavy rain, the eye could discern, to go to work in London, to pay for the mean residences which stretched in endless terraces; lying, eventually, in the cemetery whose identical headstones made their cruel commentary on the rows of houses of those who were buried there.
‘I’m going to tell Mum about us,’ said Mercy.
‘Mercy, what would be the point? It would just make things even more painful.’
‘Don’t you see, it’s all been the most terrible mistake. Peter’s … Peter’s, well – you know what he’s like. You gave him that nickname, but actually it isn’t funny.’
‘I never thought it was funny. But …’
‘If I don’t tell Mum … about us … about you … and what I know about you, she’s going to carry on thinking that you are …’
‘I don’t care what people think,’ he said, looking away from her.
‘Oh, yes you do!’ she shouted back at him. ‘You care passionately. You know what I think, Vivyan? I think you care so bloody much that you’d rather they suspected you were a child molester than that they knew the truth – that you were a randy old goat who just LOVED sex … You’ve got such an idea of yourself as a saint, as a monk, as a holy man who can put the world to rights, and you can’t bear the truth about yourself. You can’t bear being human …’
‘I deserve that,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’m sorry I accused you of having a tape-recorder stuck to your …’
He turned and looked at her. Behind her, rain lashed across the park. Her lips were slightly parted to reveal her gap-teeth. The lips were moist with purplish-red gloss. Her throat was bare, her chest was half-bare, and her large breasts quivered beneath her jumper.
‘Oh, Vivyan …’
‘I don’t think that would solve anything.’
He said this to the top of her head. She had somehow come very close to him, and was holding him tightly. He wound his huge rain-sodden cloak around her.
Much later she said, ‘We’ve got to tell Mum that Peter is our son.’
SIXTEEN
Several weeks had passed. It was the time of the evening mass at the Shrine of Our Lady of Crickleden. Rachel Pearl sat on a chair at the back of the church. She sat in the main body of the church. The mass was being held in the shrine chapel which was on the left-hand side of the church. She preferred it, when she attended these evening rites (as she more and more did), not to sit too close to the other worshippers, nor to take any active part by kneeling or standing or saying the prayers.
A little bell rang, and Vivyan entered, with a server, from the robing room or sacristy, which was to the right of the high altar. She watched the pair cross the church. Outside, Vivyan strode with wide, swift paces. In church, he shuffled slowly, and tonight for some reason she had the macabre thought that this was the unwilling footstep of a man who was ascending the scaffold for his own execution. The server was Peter d’Abo, the boy who had caused all the trouble.
In the ensuing weeks, the trouble had got even worse. Peter’s mother and his grandmother had had some devastating quarrel. The parish gossips did their best to supply the details of this terrible dispute, but no one was as yet privy to the details. This was because Mercy had left the parish – returned to her husband and other two sons in Streatham – and Lily had not been near the church since the rumours began. There was talk of Father Vivyan being accused of improper conduct with boys, with women, with men, with all three.
So far, from the Legion, there had been an ominous silence, but one development had filled Rachel with foreboding. She had two or three times glimpsed Sinclo Manners in the parish. She had managed to hide, or avoid him on two of these occasions, but on another, with studied casualness, he had come up to her – in the very drive of the vicarage – and asked her how she was.
She had replied that she was well. It would have been more accurate to say that she was emotionally exhausted. Since this trouble over the boy had erupted, Vivyan had been distracted, and there was an atmosphere of great tension and sadness in the house. Vivyan’s temper was short and he had several times snapped at her when she had tried to say something helpful or sympathetic. The truthful answer to Sinclo’s question was that she was very, very definitely not the better for seeing him. She knew that his presence could only mean that the Legion was still pursuing Vivyan.
‘Couldn’t you think of something better to do?’ she had asked harshly.
‘I wondered if you’d …’
He had stared at her like the goof that he was.
‘Maybe you’d like a drink.’
‘It’s half past ten in the morning. I’m about to go and teach people some English …’
‘Excellent.’
‘How would you know?’
‘I mean … um … Look, Rachel. I’ve been missing you.’
‘You haven’t come all this way to tell me that.’
‘I have actually.’
‘Sorry, Sinclo, I’m busy.’
And she had left him standing there. If there was anything worse than his coming to snoop round the place for Diary stories about Vivyan to put into Worledge’s putrid Legion, it was his coming over sentimental.
Vivyan and the altar-boy, who were both robed for the part, had begun to say the words of the mass together, and the people were joining in.
‘Father eternal, giver of light and grace, we have sinned against you and against our neighbour, in what we have thought, in what we have said and done, through ignorance, through weakness, through our own deliberate fault. We have wounded your love and marred your image in us. We are sorry and ashamed …’
Rachel was sorry and ashamed, very, for the way she had lived life since university. She was as yet completely unable to see why invoking a supernatural being – either Jesus, or some Bronze Age deity worshipped by her Jewish forebears – could have any bearing on ethics. She had watched the women of the parish before the mass queuing up to confess their sins personally to Vivyan. Presumably they cam
e out of the confessional box convinced that God, or Jesus, had cleansed them of their sins, removed their responsibility for their own actions. She very much disliked this idea. It seemed to her a corrupting one.
Since running away from L.P. and coming to live in Crickleden, she had certainly formed the resolution to lead a better life. She wanted in the weeks or months she spent there to discover the possibilities of a new dignity, a new virtue; to find a life which would bear examination in the Socratic sense of the word. She very much did not want to pretend that she was not responsible for her own actions; nor did she believe that any process of ritual cleansing, or merely saying that she was sorry, would absolve her of responsibility for what had passed. In any event, it was not the supposed offence to God which mattered in what she had done: it was primarily a sin against herself. The years had coarsened her, and she had allowed them to do so. Then again, by allowing the affair with L.P. to go on so long, she had contributed to the corruption of him, and she had added to the miseries of his wife, even if Julia did not know about ‘them’. Now that Julia did know about the affair, and about all the others, there was no point in expecting God to take away that woman’s dreadful sense of anguish and betrayal.
If Vivyan had not been so distracted in recent weeks, she would have liked to discuss these matters with him. She found a strange contrast between his public Ethik and the words of his church’s liturgy. Bonhoeffer, whom he seemed to hero-worship, had struggled in his book with the practicalities of how to live out the Gospel in the world. It had led him to the belief that ‘pacifism’ in Nazi Germany was tantamount to allowing the evil of Nazism to persist. Bonhoeffer was eventually to join those who plotted to assassinate Hitler. He was hanged with piano wire by those who found out. ‘Not many professors of theology have been hanged,’ Vivyan liked to say. He had heavily scored, in his copy of Bonhoeffer’s book, that passage where he wrote, ‘If it is responsible action, if it is action which is concerned solely and entirely with the other man, if it arises from selfless love for the real man who is our brother, then, precisely because this is so, it cannot wish to shun the fellowship of human guilt.’ Humanity, by its very imperfection, is bound, in its pursuit of good ends, to do things which are not in themselves wholly good – such as shooting a man who happens to be Hitler. Bonhoeffer quoted one of Rachel’s favourite plays, where Goethe’s Iphigenia is the prig and Pylades is trying to persuade her that ‘An over-strict demand is secret pride’. In the temple, she can keep her purity, but outside ‘life teaches us to be less strict with ourselves and others’.