Silver Birches

by Adrian Plass

  After that the drinks came out. Graham finally got his whisky, Angela, Jenny, Mike, and I took enormous pleasure in consuming two bottles of quite exceptional white Burgundy that Alan had lovingly put aside for a really important occasion, and Peter was more than happy to be presented with his customary chemical cocktail. From then until bedtime there was a lot of laughter, a lot of relief. Toast done over the open fire on the end of long forks. Jenny sang to us in Welsh. Mike fell asleep in the corner of the sofa. Graham rang his wife.

  Saturday night. We had traveled. We had explored. We hadn’t solved much, but we were looking more like human beings, and we had survived.

  I was quite unprepared for the wave of unhappiness that swept over me when I finally got up to my bedroom on that Saturday night. My general sense of depression on the previous night had been predictable, but I had hoped against hope that the extraordinary events of the day that had just passed might form a hinge on which my life could at least begin to turn. Whether this was ultimately to be the case or not, as I turned back my covers and climbed into bed, all I could feel was misery and guilt. I had gone walkabout, away from that inner place where, for the last eight months, I had lived with images and memories of Jessica, and made damn sure that the door was rigorously barred against people, things, events, ideas that had no place with us. I felt treacherous. Wretched. I had betrayed our little world, our tiny capsule. Better, surely, if I had ridden my bike straight into the path of the traffic on that day up at Grafton all those months ago.

  How could light have turned so quickly to darkness?

  After reaching across to switch off my bedside lamp, I let my head fall back on the pillows and stretched an open hand out into the darkness of the room. It was something I had been doing ever since I was a small child, long before I became a Christian. The idea was that, one day, God would take my hand in his, and all would be well forever. He never had taken my hand yet, but I still lived in hope. It was a sort of prayer, I suppose. Tonight, though, I didn’t want it to be God who clasped my hand in the darkness. I wanted it to be Jessica. I wanted it to be Jessica!

  I dream that I am at the top of the stairs, looking down.

  For one glorious beat of my heart I am filled with relief and joy and wonder. For there, standing on the little landing at the bend of the stairs and smiling up at me, is Jessica! It is my Jessica! She is not dead after all. She is alive and smiling. She extends her arms lovingly and begins to climb the stairs toward me. I raise my own arms in welcome, but even as she starts to ascend, troubling thoughts begin to form, unbidden, in my mind.

  How could this be my Jessica? Jessica is not alive. Jessica is long dead. Whatever this is coming up the stairs toward me, it is not my wife. This is not real. Oh, but if only I could reach out to touch her, make her real!

  It is as if the thing that is making itself look like Jessica has read my thoughts. Just as Jessica is about to reach me, the face that I knew so well and loved so dearly seems to dissolve and melt away to nothing. Jessica is truly gone.

  I closed my eyes on my worst nightmare and speak out into the blackness.

  “Jesus — Jesus — Jesus — Jesus — Jesus!”

  Over and over again I cry out the name of the one who has conquered death and evil. I try to fill my whole being with nothing but his name and his victory and his love. And he hears me. He answers my call on him. His name and his presence work on darkness as liniment works on pain. There is a deep, slow easing of tension and sorrow, until I wake, panting and exhausted, in my room.

  I heard you call out, David. Are you okay?”

  Such a relief. Oh, such a relief. It was Angela sitting on my bed. I pulled my arms out from under the covers and plonked them down on top of the duvet. Angela was here to comfort me. To make sure I was all right, just as my mother had been there on one isolated, memorable occasion, when, as a nervous small boy, I had cried out at night on waking from a nightmare.

  Only I couldn’t remember my mother ever looking anything like Angela. In the subdued light from my little bedside lamp, and in my weakened, vulnerable state, she looked so wonderful that it made me feel quite weepy. She was dressed in a purple silk dressing gown with some kind of Chinese design, very loosely tied at the waist, worn over a long, old-fashioned, cream-colored nightdress made out of very thin material, the kind that is at least as alluring as nakedness on the right woman. With her streaked blonde hair in disarray and not a trace of makeup on her face, energy and kindness and confidence seemed to glow inside and through her like a living flame. Still trembling like a frightened bird from the fear of my nightmare, everything in me wanted to reach out and bury myself and my fears and my loss in the warmth of her face and her body. I had almost forgotten what it meant to really want someone, not only for sex, but for the sensation of being deeply bound up in all that the other person is, weak and strong, adult and child, inside and outside.

  I blinked in confusion, licked my dry lips, and decided to lie still.

  “I had . . . I had an awful nightmare, Angela. Dreadful. Did I really make a loud enough noise for you to hear? I can’t believe I did that.”

  Angela smoothed a loose wisp of hair away from the corner of her mouth and smiled. “Well, it was something between a scream and a groan. A scroan or a gream, perhaps. I thought one of my ghosts must have got you.”

  “Hm! No, just a dream, but . . . well, you know . . . one of those nasty, nasty ones.”

  I turned my head toward the bedside table. “Did you turn my light on, by the way?”

  “Yes, when I came in. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing . . . .” I screwed my eyes up and gave my head a little shake, trying to separate strands of nightmare and reality.”

  Angela stopped smiling and moved closer to me. Lifting my closed right hand from the bed, she held it inside the silk dressing gown against her breasts. With her other hand she stroked my forehead softly. I really did wonder if I might be about to faint. Everything — the room, the bed, Angela and I — seemed to tilt and buzz with repressed energy.

  “That really was some nightmare, wasn’t it, David?”

  “Yes . . . yes, it was.” I could feel my mouth continuing to move but no more words came.

  “I’ll stay if you want.”

  “You’ll stay.”

  Her eyes filled with tears.

  “Let’s be together, David. We’ve both lost so much. And I need to be close to someone. Just for a little while. I don’t . . . I don’t do this, you know.”

  I knew that if I were to open the hand that Angela was holding so very, very lightly against the softness of her body, I would be lost. My lips felt drier than ever. Nevertheless, the madman must speak.

  “Angela — oh, Angela! I’m afraid there’s only a tiny part of me that’s strong enough to say this, and if you stay much longer I won’t be able to, but — look, it would make a mockery of everything. It would mean — I don’t know — it would mean Jenny was talking nonsense earlier. It would mean you and I had given in. It would mean Peter’s giving half his life away for nothing. I believe it all, Angela. I really do. And I know you do as well. I know I’m going to want you to come back the instant you go out of that door, but — please — please, for both our sakes, please won’t you just go.”

  Angela smiles a watery smile and nods. Lifting my hand in both of hers she kisses it once before releasing it. She stands, secures her dressing gown by its red and blue cord, and leaves, closing the door behind her as she goes.

  After she has gone the anger and the relief roll and wrestle violently around the floor and the walls and the ceiling of this room that I have not coolly but quite deliberately made into a dungeon.

  I am angry. I am angry because I have refused an opportunity to feel the warm body and mind of a beautiful person against my body and mind when it is what I need and yearn for. I weep. I have given away the chance to hold and be held, awake and asleep. I have surrendered touch and tongues and caresses and kisses and murmurs and sighs and ri
pples of laughter. Those smiling eyes and that soft mouth might have been mine for the space of a night. My heart, my skin, my loneliness cry out for the solace that I have rejected. Oh, Jesus!

  I am relieved. I am relieved because I know that the morning will follow the night, and morning will bring a white light flooding into dark places. It will reveal those things that we knew full well were there but chose to ignore because they threatened to thwart us. I am relieved. I am relieved because I love him. Yes, beneath the anger and the grief and the disappointment and the fear and the foreboding I love him as I have loved him for so many years. He is my Lord. I am his servant — and his friend if I obey him. I so long to be angry with him like a child for allowing all those nights and this night to come upon me, but I know he would do more — has done immeasurably more for me than I shall ever do for him. Oh, Jesus!

  Let me hear Jessica’s voice and hold her hand once more, I pray. But let your will be done. And forgive this, my silly prayer.

  Anger and relief. The night rages on. But it is hardly Gethsemane.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sunday

  White light, relief, and rain. In the morning the anger had gone, but these three remained. Outside my window a steady drizzle had set in, creating the sort of atmosphere that is cosily dramatic and delicious, or dismally dull and dreary, depending on your relationship with weather. Today, I loved it. After getting dressed I settled down by the window to plan my talk for the service.

  Coming down for breakfast later, I met Angela at the bottom of the stairs, looking as miraculously full of energy and inner light as ever. She was wearing light-blue jeans, a big, soft, off-white man’s jumper and a dark-blue bandanna tied around her head. She was made for hugging. I hugged her. She held on to me for a moment, drawing her head back so that she could look me in the eye.

  “By the way, I was only kidding last night, you know. I didn’t really want to stay.”

  I nodded seriously. “Oh, I know. So was I. I didn’t really want you to stay either.”

  She put her face next to mine again and whispered, “Thank you, David.”

  Graham said the obvious but perennially true thing at breakfast.

  “It seems a shame, doesn’t it? Just as we’re really getting to know each other and starting to relax, it’s time to go home.”

  A comfortable position to be in if home is a place you love. It could be a good feeling to be cushioned between the two soft places of what is to be and what has just been. I had known that feeling in the past. I was glad for him. It wasn’t quite like that for me nor, I strongly suspected, for Jenny and Peter. I wasn’t sure about Mike. A lonely man. Interestingly, I felt that, of all the others, Mike was the one I knew less about now than I had at the beginning of the weekend. It was probably something to do with his readiness to change shape. Social chameleons with a tendency toward flippancy are an elusive breed. And they weary people. Perhaps I would have a chance to chat with him just before leaving, after the communion.

  By ten o’clock all our bags had been piled in the hall ready for “the off,” as Jessica so hated it being called, and we were gathered around the dining room table in exactly the positions that we had occupied on Saturday night, except that Angela made me swap places with her so that I could sit at the end, facing Mike. A plate with part of a French bread lying on it and an earthenware goblet filled with wine waited in the center of the table.

  Today the fire was dead, and the rain continued unabated, battering away at the long grass outside the old leaded windows, but there was definitely a hint of a glow around us on that Sunday morning.

  Jenny and Graham had spent part of Saturday afternoon putting together the service that was to provide the context in which we broke bread together. It was a very simple one, mostly drawn from the prayer book, but one strange thing happened during a lingering silence after the prayer of confession. An infectious ripple of laughter ran around the table, and then was gone as if it had never happened. Strange. Interesting. Good.

  Suddenly it was time for the address that Angela had asked me to deliver, my first talk to any group of people since before Jessica’s death. Right up to the moment of waking that morning, I had entertained the gravest doubts about my ability to go through with this. Now I was nervous but calm. I looked round at the faces of my five companions and began.

  Right, well, it’s generous and brave of you to ask me to be the one to speak this morning. I haven’t done anything like this since February, so I’m probably a bit rusty.

  “Er, I was just thinking that some prayers can’t be answered. In the early hours of this morning, for instance, I told God how much I would love to be with Jessica and hold her hand one last time. That’s not going to happen, of course, but fortunately it’s not my only prayer. My other prayer, and it’s only really come to life this weekend, is that I should survive and be of some use. The things I thought I’d say to you and myself this morning are the beginnings of an answer to that prayer, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been under strict orders from— well, from lots of people when I think about it, my father when I was a child, my wife when I became a man, and God since I was sixteen years old, to share the things that I’ve been given. So that’s what I’m going to do. I hope it’s all right. And, you’ll be pleased to hear, I’ve got a text! That’s a relief, isn’t it?”

  Cheers and applause from around the table.

  “I don’t know if your experience has been the same as mine — but have you noticed how some bits of the Bible stay more or less invisible for years? And then, for no apparent reason, it’s as though some unseen hand reaches down and places that special little group of words in front of your eyes in such a clear, graphic way that you simply have to take notice of them. A sort of heavenly Braille, in a way, I suppose, especially when you think that spiritual blindness can only ever be removed by the grace of God. Well, that’s what happened to me early this morning when I was sitting in my bedroom trying to think what on earth I was going to say to you lot.

  “I was thumbing through the New Testament when I came across the bit in chapter seven of Matthew’s gospel where Jesus says that we mustn’t cast our pearls before swine. I suddenly really, really wanted to understand what he meant when he said that. It felt terribly important. In fact, and you’re going to think this is incredibly stupid, I got so wrapped up in the whole issue that, in the end, I told myself off. Forget all that, I said. Put the pearls and swine thing on one side until you’ve come up with something to speak about at the communion. Well then, thank God, sanity set in, and I took the hint, if that’s what it was. So, when I’d finally given myself permission to think about it, these were the questions that went rolling round my head.

  “What pearls?

  “What swine?

  “What’s the problem with feeding the poor old latter with the useless old former?

  “So, as I thought about all this a kind of understanding began to form in my mind. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for one minute pretending I’ve got the one and only true answer to those questions. My interpretation of what Jesus said is bound to be more or less subjective, especially at the present time, I suppose. But what I did find is that this verse might have something very important to say about the things that have happened to me this weekend, and I’m hoping you’ll sort through my rubbish and find something helpful for you as well. At the very least I hope you’ll find something to send your thinking off into all sorts of other areas, ones that are just as useful as mine, or more so.

  “Right— enough of the defensive stuff. First of all, I thought I’d better make sure I knew what pearls actually were. So I nipped downstairs and looked them up in the ‘P’ section of that set of massive brown encyclopaedias in Angela’s library that probably haven’t been read since they were bought and are going to break the shelf they’re sitting on any decade now, Angela.

  “Apparently pearls are formed by oysters as a reaction or defense against a foreign body or irritant, usually
a piece of sand or grit, getting into the soft tissues. Bluish-gray layers form round the unwanted invader, and the final product of all these repeated accretions is a hard, translucent gem that’s always been regarded, by us human beings at least, as a thing of great beauty and high monetary value. End of pearl lecture.

  “Interesting, though, because I think something very similar has happened in my own life — and yours. There’ve been troubles and weaknesses and negative influences that haven’t just threatened but come very close to moving in and ruining parts of my life. I guess most of these — irritants or whatever you like to call them, go back to childhood, but as you know, their effect is timeless. Not very long ago, for instance, I was walking along one of the big London shopping streets, and I just caught a glimpse of a particular pattern of material in a shop window. Believe it or not, it was enough to trigger a few seconds of real misery — no, let’s face it — anguish and rage, about something my mother did or said thirty-odd years ago, when I was four or five years old. Sometimes it could be the tone in a person’s voice or just a pattern of clouds in the sky. It only lasts for seconds, but the effect is as dramatic and momentarily blinding as the flash going off on a camera. I know how absurd all that must sound to those who’ve never been through it, but for some people it’s simply a fact of life.

  “For me, of course, the most recent and easily the most negative influence has been the death of my wife. As you all know, losing Jessica introduced me to experiences that were . . . well, they were completely new. In the past I’d heard people talk about losing the will to live, but it wasn’t until the moment I walked through the front door of our — my house after leaving the hospital on the day she died, that I came anywhere near understanding what they were on about. Facing the pain every single day is such a terrible thing, and the nights have brought some terrible dreams.