The Book Against God

by James Wood

  Outside the station was the usual line of shudderingly patient taxis. The driver looked oddly at me when I told him where I wanted to go. “That’s a long drive, mind,” he said. And that closed the conversation until, half an hour later, we entered Sundershall—barely more than a single corridor of low cottages opening out onto the green release of a lawn shaded by three or four unremarkable trees. It’s said that a cricket team once played every summer on this green, but I have never seen one, and I’m pretty sure that no one plays cricket in Sundershall. There are two pubs for every church in this valley, something of which I approve; one of them, The Stag’s Head, looks onto the green. In summer, the open door shows rows of wineglasses suspended by their bases from the ceiling. When I was fifteen or so, Max and I would nose around outside, keen to be let into this sour cave, while the publican, Paul Deddum, standing behind his row of tall, ornate ale-levers like a little boy behind toy soldiers, would yell at us to “get your nebs out of here”—and, once, looking at me, “or I’ll tell your da and he’ll tell God.”

  The cab went up a gravel drive, and on the right a simple Victorian church came into view, built from big, graceless blocks of grey local stone. The crowded graveyard in front of it looks with its grey slabs like the abandoned quarry that furnished the church.

  The vicarage is the same age as the church, but built of sandstone, with leaded, ecclesiastical windows in a gothic style, whose old glass is beginning to buckle with age. At the door is the brass bell-pull that so delighted me when I was young. It has always been marvellous to see the long cord, which stretches from the door right along the hall, moving so calmly while the sprung bell at its end convulsed. It seemed so easy to request something: a simple pulling of this wire, and people were summoned, came running. I opened the door: the familiar gloom and heaviness of wood as usual, the sparse pictures on the wall—engravings of the cathedral, an architectural drawing of Guy’s Hospital, the copy of a Russian icon with all the battered allure of its false gold—and the grandfather clock, still hypnotizing with a calm pendulum.

  My mother emerged from the dining room and characteristically wiped her mouth and pulled her blouse down in preparation for kissing me. I knew for certain that, on hearing the bell, she had lingered for a second to swallow, in one gulp, the remainder of a previously neglected lukewarm cup of tea.

  “Thomas dear!” she said. “Tommy. Are you all right?” She held me. Unfortunately this has been her question since I went away to university.

  “Yes, all in all, I am.” Her grip relaxed a little. “How’s Dad? Where’s Dad? It’s good that he’s out of the hospital, right?”

  “Look at you, you’re a terrible mess. And you’re dyeing your hair,” she accused.

  “I am not dyeing my hair. What colour?”

  “It’s darker than usual.”

  “It’s been getting darker for the last ten years. My hair is dying.”

  “Oh, I see, your hair is dying.” This was our usual happy routine.

  “Mum, how’s Dad?”

  “Tommy, are you … bathing?”

  “Bathing?”

  “Yes, bathing, washing.”

  “Oh, now and then.” I smiled, and disengaged myself from her small, strong grasp.

  “Tom, it’s not really something to make light of.”

  “Please tell me that I don’t smell.”

  “No, no, but you don’t look very clean, somehow.”

  “Well, I don’t feel very clean,” I said, smiling.

  I put my bags at the foot of the stairs. I could feel, as I bent down, my mother appraising me, and sensed the cling of her anxiety.

  “Daddy is feeling much better,” she said. “He’s in the study, I think he’s preparing a sermon. But come and give me all your news in the kitchen and we can bother him later.”

  But I wanted to see Father right away. I rarely found my father at work, and sure enough when I entered, Peter Bunting was sitting in his armchair reading a newspaper, held up in front of his face so that he looked as if he were a hearth and the newspaper being used to make the fire catch. The air was cool and still in the study, an invisible reprimand to the room’s material chaos. Papers were piled so extravagantly on the floor and desk that they no longer resembled paper; they now seemed like games, childish invitations to play and further mess the room. An old dog-basket had four or five large books piled in it, all of them wide open at a chosen page, and placed upwards on top of each other in a swift spasm of research, presumably abandoned long ago. Three drawers of the desk were sticking out, panting to spit their contents onto the floor. The only surfaces unmolested by anarchy were the books on the many bookshelves, whose clean rounded spines were as ordered as organ pipes. There was nothing hanging on the wall except a cheap, dove-coloured cross.

  Of course, Father knew that I had been in the house for several minutes. He put his paper down, raised his round, bald head with its small ears and said: “Everything all right?” Years ago my parents had decided that I should call them by their first names, Peter and Sarah, but I always found myself unable to call my dad Peter to his face. So I said nothing. He looked thinner to me, but otherwise utterly unchanged. All the old vigour.

  “How are you feeling, Dad?”

  “Look at this!” he said, and directed me to a photograph in the newspaper. There were three bespectacled bishops, pompous in their skirts. The long cassocks seemed to be designed to hide things. “One of these men is a fraud. Which one, do you think?”

  “How are you defining fraud?” I asked, feeling the familiar rise of irritation at my father’s genial confidence.

  “Intellectually vacant, crudely evangelical approach—‘my saviour in Christ’—has personally healed eighteen cripples and cast devils out of teenage girls—always setting up youth clubs everywhere—”

  “Okay, yes.” I looked again and selected the man on the left, for no better reason than that his spectacles were larger than the others’.

  “Wrong. It’s the one in the middle. Can’t you see him vibrating with zeal?”

  Peter stood up, rustled the newspaper to the floor, and again asked, “Everything all right?” He looked away as he asked. It was generally the first thing he said when meeting people. It gave him the air of one who had just woken up in a hurry. “By the way,” he said, “nothing wrong with me at all. Thus spake the good doctor. It’s medical writ. I am free from their captivity, and not even on parole!” My father was a great Christian optimist. He liked to joke that “unlike many people, I am searching for the secret of un-happiness.” He was very erudite, and rather prided himself on his worldly sense of humour, aware that this was rare in priests. For instance, he wrote book reviews for a journal of theology in London, which sent him advance copies of the books. He had removed a sticker from one of these and glued it to the favourite of his six different bibles. It read: “This is an advance copy sent in lieu of a proof.”

  This was pretty characteristic of his humour and of his faith. He was hospitable to all enemies. It was a family story that once a German plane was coming in to attack Peter and a group of soldiers who had become detached from their battalion. There was no time to hide. Young Peter had the idea of waving at the plane, in friendly fashion. It worked, or so he claimed, and who could dispute him? The German pilot, too high to see the uniforms, mistook the waving soldiers for Germans and flew by.

  As pleasant as ever, my father took my hand and shook it. “I’m so pleased to see you looking so well,” I said feebly, but meaning it. He waved my words aside, and I looked down at his shirt, which had two buttons open over his breast. His heart had obviously returned to its usual business; he liked to put his hand inside his shirt and palpate his chest, especially when involved in his favourite occupation, which was to sit in his armchair, legs immodestly splayed, and listen to Romantic music on his elderly record player. The reticent passion of Edward Elgar was the sound of my childhood, the sound of the Malvern hills in summer (though I’ve never seen them, in fac
t), the valleys as gentle as stomachs, fatherly oaks with their green brains. Peter had an old record from the 1930s, I remember, with a very young Yehudi Menuhin playing Elgar, the fifteen-year-old violinist ridiculously photographed in plus-four trousers, so that he seemed to have very long ankles, and Sir Edward Elgar, a stern, stiff old man, his white moustache a frozen waterfall over his lip. Menuhin, in a note written when he was much older, described this first encounter with the great English composer, how Elgar, at the piano, played a few bars of his Violin Concerto with the boy, and told him that he was quite happy with his playing, was sure the recording would be fine, and he was now going to the races. Peter Bunting loved that.

  Not only was Father rarely seen writing a sermon, he was rarely seen reading a book. Yet I had never discovered any ignorance on his part. Growing up, I feared him, for there was nothing he didn’t know. The stock of his knowledge was continually bubbling, and any novelty or spice could be added to it, without a fundamental change to the flavour. An extraordinarily sure mind, calmly enriching itself, very flexible and alert. He sat in his study, I now know for sure, and played puzzles and word games, and worked out in advance the puns and allusions and little jokes he loved to reveal in company. I remembered that he had made a teasing variant of the old English poem:

  Western wind, when will thou blow?

  The small rain down can rain.

  Christ, if my love were in my arms,

  And I in my bed again!

  Father’s version, the first line of which he murmured every so often when the television news showed long-haired Jews nodding their heads at the Western Wall, threw cold Anglican water on their absurd messianic hopes: “Western Wall, when will thou show?” And I would hear a contented little laugh from his high-backed chair.

  Yes, I was almost always surprised, in conversation or argument, by my father’s knowledge. When did he acquire it? And Peter, I suspect, knew that the mere display of that knowledge sufficed to subdue me. Once, in my early twenties, we were arguing in our usual way, by indirection, about some aspect of morality. I must have said something rash, for Peter calmly reprimanded: “That’s rather a postmodern idea, I think, this collapsing of all hierarchies.” The argument ended there, for suddenly he was describing my thought to me! Peter Bunting knew it instinctively, in a moment. He didn’t need to read any books of postmodernism; he just absorbed this information swiftly and mercilessly. It was rather the way he watched whodunnits on television. Invariably, he fell asleep after fifteen minutes, because, he said, he had already worked out who had done it and was “jolly bored by the rest.”

  Mother was at the door. Her small frame was fronted by an apron, whose strings she had not tied but stuffed into each pocket of her loose, dark-brown trousers. Peter and Sarah were both trim, almost dainty, physically quite elegant (Peter’s dishevelment existed only in his study). I was always struck by how closely they stood together. They had everything they needed. They had made a kind of joint-stock of each other’s mannerisms so that the originator was no longer identifiable. For instance, I don’t know which parent first began to purse his lips, but now they both did it. They communicated wordlessly. Sometimes, in the evenings, Sarah came into Peter’s study, and with one hand vertical and another placed horizontally across it, made a letter T, while looking quizzically at her husband: it was the sign for a cup of tea. And though they drank tea every night, from the same art deco cups and saucers, the event seemed to give them the same pleasure every night; there was no death by repetition in their marriage, quite the opposite, it was as if only by repetition they knew the exact weight of everything.

  Oh, if I could only have learned from this … I seem so incapable of repetition, so bad at sticking at anything, and I marvel now at this aspect of their lives, at their emotional resourcefulness. On one of the many dark days, as the general optimism was needlingly challenged by a northern rain (which quietly leaked through the window of the unheated bathroom, making a cold domestic silt in the corner of the window ledge), both parents sensed danger like animals, and said, seemingly simultaneously, “What about a fire? In the sitting room?” And that stopped the rain!

  Mother, with flour on her cheek, was beckoning us to the dinner table. As I walked by her, I smudged the flour off with my finger. “What was it?” she asked. I felt my parents look at each other, felt them walking behind me, close to each other. An irritation, a burst of jealousy went through me, and then Sarah said:

  “Dearest, how long will you be here?”

  “I don’t know, maybe a week. You know, I’m not teaching that UCL seminar this term, so I have lots of time. And Dad’s health—”

  “But next term you’re back at UCL, yes?” asked Father quickly, with shrewd eyes.

  “Yes, yes,” I lied.

  “Jane doesn’t mind losing her husband for a week?” asked Mother, looking very directly at me, but smiling. My parents probably never spent a night apart.

  “Well she’d rather I stayed, of course. But she’s worried about you, Dad, so she’s happy to let me come. She said she’d come up here next weekend. By the way, she played a very good recital last week for some of the students and also the general public. A lunchtime concert.”

  “Schumann?” asked Father, all-knowingly.

  “Umm, yes, in fact, she did play some Schumann, I think.”

  “Probably the Kinderszenen.”

  “Exactly right, Dad, yes. And some Beethoven and Mussorgs—”

  “Pictures?” asked Father.

  “Yes, Pictures. Yes. Yes.” I stopped for a moment, controlled my annoyance, and then went on.

  “About fifty people there, and only one of them seemed to be eating his lunch, so for once it wasn’t a picnic with Muzak. But there was a problem with an old man at the back—who started humming the tune quite loudly at the end of the Mussorgsky, and this same man came up at the end and bowed low and gave Jane a bunch of flowers he must have been hiding in his coat, because I had turned round several times to frown him down and hadn’t seen them.”

  “Jane is so very pretty, I do awfully understand the impulse,” said Peter, with an enthusiastic vagueness. “Who was he?”

  “No idea at all,” I said. Actually, it turned out, Dr. Wilkerson was an old piano teacher of Jane’s, but I felt I had been obliging enough and it gave me an immature pleasure to withhold from my parents, especially my father, sitting there so receptively, information that would only make them happier and more genial than they already were.

  “But tell me about the hospital, and everything else,” I said.

  “Oh no, let’s not talk about that,” said Sarah. Instead, she told one of her village stories.

  She is wonderful at imitating the voices of neighbours and friends, with a high-pitched, soft snort of pleasure that makes her nostrils dilate. She creeps into people’s accents like an aristocratic burglar going through someone’s bedroom. Often it takes several seconds for me to realize that Mother has “disappeared” and is inhabiting another voice. My father laughed at her story, and in far-flung amusement knocked over his wineglass. “Oh dash,” he said, as the wine bloodied the blue tablecloth. He left the room, was gone several minutes, but returned only with a packet of cigarettes.

  Father smoked every kind of tobacco; he passed that love on to me. At one notorious Harvest Festival dinner in the village hall Peter managed to smoke a pipe before sitting down, a cigarette between courses, and a small cigar with his coffee. Afterwards, Mother said that Peter was less like a smoker than a door-to-door salesman for tobacco, demonstrating its varied uses. I used to love watching him smoke when I was a little boy. When he exhaled, the cleaned, rare smoke took so long to emerge that his lungs seemed to be manufacturing it.

  Sarah appeared not to care that he didn’t choose to clean the stain on the tablecloth. She quietly left the room and returned with a cloth. But she reprimanded him for smoking in his current state of health. Peter ignored her and struck his match, holding the booming flame to the qu
ickly red end of the cigarette for too long, as if he were lighting a pipe, so that it burned fiercely. Charred streaks journeyed along the paper.

  “You know, Petie,” Sarah said, “it’s the cigarette that’s having a cigarette, not you. It’s half-gone already.”

  “Oh my dear, that’s perfect, then, since you don’t think I should have it anyway,” he smiled. “And why shouldn’t the poor old cigarette have a bit of a smoke? When I smoke my cigarette, am I smoking it or is it smoking me? Thomas knows who I am paraphrasing, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, irritated in spite of myself, and resisting the old family game by refusing to supply Montaigne’s name or the sentence that Peter was adapting.

  “One of the great Renaissance essayists,” Father continued. “Possibly Christian, but more likely an agnostic and sceptic, and sensibly hiding his heresy from the authorities. But, then ‘Que sais-je?’” he finished, self-mockingly.

  “I’ve always disliked that idea, of covert blasphemy,” I said, perhaps a bit hotly, “like concealing a gun. It seems untruthful, dishonest.” I said this, despite my own multiple dissimulations and deceits. I wasn’t at all sure why I was saying it, except to resist my father. I didn’t even believe what I was saying. My own “heresy,” after all, was covert for most of my adolescence. It was still essentially covert when I was with my parents.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Peter, in a sweet, singing tone. “After all, belief and unbelief are not absolutes, and not absolute opposites. What if they are rather close to each other, I mean belief shadowed by unbelief and vice versa”—he pronounced it “vicey-versa”—“so that one is not exactly sure where one begins and another ends? Then, ‘lying’ about belief is not like concealing a gun, is not really like lying at all, but more like telling your wife that you slept well when in fact you spent the night racked by insomnia.”