The Book Against God

by James Wood

  “But it’s still untruthful,” I said, a little bewildered by my father’s rapid thinking, and somewhat amazed that I was speaking these words about truthfulness so brazenly.

  “Well, well,” said Father soothingly.

  One reason that he and I always found it so difficult to express our differences is that my father brought his immense capacity for evasion into our arguments. Peter, the supposed believer, the great parish priest, the former lecturer in theology, aerated his faith with so many little holes, so much flexibility and doubt and easygoing tolerance, that he simply disappeared down one of these holes.

  After their tea ritual, my parents prepared for bed. There was a scene, repeated throughout my childhood, in which they liked to debate who should first use the bathroom (the house’s other bathroom was unheated).

  “Would you object, my dear, if I went first?” said Peter.

  “Of course not, my love, but please do remember not to keep the hot tap running while you do whatever you do in there, or there’ll be none left for the rest of us.” Once, when asked more exactly “What is it that you do in there?” Father had replied that he read either the Gospel of St. Luke or seed catalogues, the kind sent by companies to gardeners for mail order. When Sarah laughed, he seemed not to understand, pursed his lips, and then burst out, mysteriously, “Yes yes, I see that the New Testament and a seed catalogue are essentially the same thing. But I’m telling the truth!”

  In fact, my mother went first, and Peter, backing more amply into his armchair, crossed his legs at the knees. Glancing at the raised shoe, I saw the pavement-coloured sole, unusually clean. “It’s,” Peter hesitated, “marvellous that you are with us, Tom. How is the … er, the … the thesis, the Ph.D.?”

  “It’s going very well, Dad. It’s nearly finished, actually.”

  “Oh, that is marvellous news, marvellous! You realize, don’t you, that everything will be easier once you have finished it? Obviously.” The last word was said matter-of-factly. Father used it a great deal, and it usually made me sad. But thinking of his recent frailty, his poor heart, the three days in hospital which he was refusing to talk about, I was grateful, and said, “Thank you, Dad.”

  Peter stirred, mended his legs, rose. “Well it’s Sunday tomorrow, and I have the seven-thirty communion before the big service, so I shall push off now.” Passing, he kissed me on the crown, keeping his hands in his pockets.

  Left alone, I thought of nothing for a moment. My father’s favourite word hung in the aftermath. Obviously. The obvious and the hidden. Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts. Am I hidden, and my parents obvious?, I thought. Well, here I was, back at home again, the garden where I played as a little boy … There was rain outside, I could hear the first falter of it on the grass and on the old path leading to the church.

  It was growing stronger now, tramping on the roof; a drop came down the chimney onto a log, and was hissed away. I climbed the stairs to my old bedroom, calling out “Goodnight” to my parents. Mother had turned on a light in the bedroom. I saw the familiar outlines of my childhood, confused by some of the furniture my parents had added in my absence. The single bed was innocently narrow, the white sheet turned down over the blanket like a Puritan collar.

  There were two shelves of children’s books, eagerly coloured. There was much heavy ugly furniture in the room. Really, my childhood was full of heavy, strange things. Father had always insisted on giving me “the best” available object for my birthday, despite my parents’ poor finances. Armed with an order from me, Father planned his mission around “the best.” As I opened it, the wrapping-paper crackled on the ground, and he used to say, “This is generally considered the best of its kind available,” in a rather stiff, unnatural way, an important look on his round face. But Father’s idea of luxury was never very luxurious.

  When I was little, adulthood seemed a regime of such solidity. Lonely, I used to wander through the house, turning over the ungainly possessions my parents had acquired. In their bedroom was a heavy oak wardrobe filled to the limit with clothes that hung like dead curtains; this morbid plenitude was shocking, since my own little wardrobe was rather empty; there was a heavy bed, a dressing table with wing-mirrors like those of a giant antique car; a “gentleman’s” clotheshorse, with a wooden arm that extended like a public sign, on which to hang trousers. For some reason this contraption reminded me of a scarecrow; it seemed to belong outside. In the bottom drawer of a large chest were rows of silver metal cylinders, each with an old, unsmokeable cigar in it. On the end of each cylinder was painted a rosy escutcheon, on which a knight on his horse gave a strange, shrunken smile. These had belonged to my father’s father; now the objects that had killed him were kept as relics of his existence.

  7

  I HAD A HAPPY CHILDHOOD, I’m sure of it. I loved the vicarage; even the church. It was painful to witness my widowed mother having to abandon the vicarage this summer for a bungalow in Durham. Now that little church is vacant, vicarless, while the idiot bishop decides who should fill the post. I suppose I should take the bishop’s tardiness as a compliment to my father’s irreplaceability. To those few who bothered to come, Peter was surely irreplaceable. He dispensed a Christianity that was inseparable from life. The rhythms of the village, and of the seasons, were also the rhythms of my father’s ministry: rising Easter, and sunfavoured summer, and census-gathering Christmas, when, as if in mimicry of the story of Caesar Augustus, all the villagers came to be counted and for once the church was truly full. When I was a boy, I enjoyed all the festivals except the most important, Easter. The brutality scared me, and when I was older, the unconvincing insistence of the hymns sounded like one of my own lies: “He has risen! He has risen!” Well, who says so? Don’t those words resemble a school report about a delinquent who has finally moved up the class, something neither parents nor teacher quite believe? Accordingly, the little church’s congregants intoned the words flatly, in mournful accents, without much joy.

  Father conducted a gentle service. Mother and I usually sat in the front row, and Peter, newly plump in his henlike clerical frocks, stood not at the altar but with the congregation, in the middle of the nave. His clean, soft, bald head was filmed in light from several stained-glass windows. On Sundays he wore shoes with rubber soles (no one was quite sure why), so that he had a soundless and pious tread. Yet there was nothing else pious about him. He acted as if his church had no roof, as if it were an open theatre on which life simply shone its sun: his church, like his head, was uncovered. Into his prayers he folded every human occurrence, triumph, disaster, and banality. It was a Bunting family joke that Peter’s prayers were like life, and, as Mother put it, “take almost as long.” He stood, hands clasped and eyes closed, pursing his lips, and enjoined his congregation to pray to God for—everything. For the wonderful weather, for the lunch we will soon go and eat, for Muriel’s swift recovery, and so on.

  Bowing my head to the pew so that I could smell the gist of the wood, my right hand caressing the old heating pipe that ran along one wall, I would listen to these prayers. “And we pray,” Peter intoned, “for the souls of the three priests murdered this week in El Salvador. Lord, hear our prayer. We pray also for the thousands made homeless by the recent flooding in Bangladesh, and ask you, Lord, to give them succour and shelter. Lord, hear our prayer. At this time, we also pray for Dr. Shields, whose cousin was involved in a car accident in Birmingham last Monday; and for Lance and Angela Menzies, whose son Austin died of leukemia on Friday. Lord, hear our prayer.”

  I always felt I was hearing a page of atrocious international news and a page of tragic local news, each ripped from the newspaper. When I was a teenager, I used to hear my father with a kind of vindictive horror, my mouth and eyes open with amazement, convinced that such a list of misfortune vandalized the very face of God. I’m more mature about these things now, I hope. Now I realize that, as far as Father was concerned, this catastrophe was God’s world, vandalized by man. It was because
there was so much evildoing and pain that God’s correction was needed. Pain was not an argument against but for God. To tell you the truth, this argument still irritates me. Why should we need correction from Him who made us? And why has He made us so very flawed, and then just disappeared? The most charitable image of this particular God I can produce is that of a father who breaks his son’s leg just so that he can watch his son learn how to appeal to his dad for help in mending it.

  At the end of the service, I used to greet the regulars: Terry Upsher (and, until two years ago, his deaf father), Susan Perez-Temple, Muriel Spedding. Terry did some gardening for my parents. He still lives on the main street in his father’s old house. When Terry’s dad was alive, they used to walk around together, Terry shouting at his unpleasant old dad, who walked always slightly ahead of him as if they were a Muslim husband and wife. Terry has never left the county, and has never been on a train. I am very fond of one of his verbal peculiarities. He says “the part of it is” when he means “the point is,” or “the thing is.” Sometimes, when I was little, we used to sit on the wall of the vicarage garden, and Terry might say, haltingly, “The part of it is … I don’t feel very champion at the moment,” or “The part of it is … that there bush is finished.” Then he would stand up and wander off.

  Muriel Spedding was always at church. She is a kindly widow who used to take hot meals to Terry and his father when old Mr. Upsher was still alive. Otherwise, people said, the Upshers would have lived off bread and butter and jam. Muriel is very trim, with tiny black lace-up shoes that seem, as is often the case with old ladies, to have become her feet. It is impossible to think of her ever taking them off. It is as if her feet are entombed in two little graves. Yet she is very alive and spry, and keeps her shape by dancing, and by playing an enormous electronic organ whose sound trembles. Muriel is worldly in an unworldly way, has travelled, and enjoys proving to me that she knows exactly where I live in London. “And how is Islington?” she would ask me conspiratorially, pulling girlishly at the buttons of her blouse.

  And pompous Mr. Norrington was a regular, and also the old lady, Miss Ogilvie, who, curiously, used three sticks, one for the left leg and two for the right.

  At the end of the service the fifteen or so worshippers clustered by the door and walked down the graveyard path very fast, with fugitive pleasure, as people always hurry the last room in an art gallery, eager to be done with all that observant piety. My mother used to say that this urgency had to do with their need to prepare Sunday lunch, but I’ve always disliked Sundays themselves—the awful calm of those afternoons—and I am sure that the sensible villagers felt exactly the same. Nietzsche, my old companion, wrote that only the industrious English could have invented the deep boredom of Sundays, the better to make us welcome a busy Victorian Monday.

  No, the only people who clearly enjoyed every aspect of Sunday were my parents. After the service, in the vicarage kitchen, as the Sunday roast—beef, lamb, pork, in strict rotation—was dying a second time in the oven, my parents used to talk through the service. On the Sunday of my return last September, Mother lightly rebuked Peter.

  “My dear, your sermon was a wee bit long and obscure today. I lost count of the number of literary allusions.”

  “There were seven, precisely,” said Peter, mockwoundedly. “A biblical number.” He lit a cigarette, and dropped it.

  “Twenty-five minutes is too long, my dear,” insisted Mother. “And I hope that cigarette stays on the floor.”

  “Is it, now?” asked Peter gently, fiddling on the floor for the white cylinder. He stood up and smiled. “When I was a young man I once went to a church up in the Scottish Highlands, terribly strict and austere, where the antique minister, who must have been at least eighty, spoke for fiftyfive minutes—fifty-five minutes!—on the text ‘And Moses and Aaron fell flat on their faces.’ Now that was a sermon! Not a dry eye in the house by the end.”

  “Nor an open one, I daresay,” laughed Sarah. “I thought that the church in the Highlands was the place where the minister was retiring and was giving his last sermon.”

  “No, my dear, that was in Cornwall. Dick Hooper’s old church in Truro. Yes, it was his last sermon before his retirement, and the vain blighter was feeling very loved by all and very sorry for himself, and certain he would be missed, so he chose for his text ‘And they fell upon Paul’s neck, and kissed him.’ The vanity of it!”

  Sunday always brought out my parents’ most ecclesiastical wit.

  8

  WHEN I WAS A LITTLE BOY, Sunday was a visiting day, and Saturday a marrying day. On Monday mornings, I often took a piece of wedding cake in my lunchbox to the village school: this was the spoil of my father’s work on Saturdays. It seemed to me then that my father was constantly marrying and burying people, joining and separating them. In my childish mind the dead and the affianced were equally half-alive; they all entered the vicarage as reputations. Each category was treated in the same easy, genial way. “I have to marry Clendennon’s son,” Peter might announce at the dining table, while I, wide-eyed, legs dangling from the slatted kitchen chair, trying to do my homework, looked on. “He’s gone and got Joanna—you know, Joanna in the pub—pregnant.” Or, once, as he came into the kitchen, with his overcoat on:

  “Bill Clemons has died. What on earth am I going to say about him? He only came to church at Christmas.”

  “Adele Clemons we know far too well,” said Sarah.

  “Oh yes, she is most peculiar. When I went round there just now to offer the usual ‘and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes,’ she gave me a cup of tea, and as I was sitting there I sensed a presence behind me just out of eyesight. I turned and there was Bill Clemons sitting upright in the armchair, the poor fig, utterly dead of course, but staring at me in a rather lively fashion, with a small photograph in his hand. I suppose Adele called me before calling the undertakers.”

  “A photograph? How odd. Adele probably called you both and you just beat them to it. That wouldn’t be very hard. The Pickerings are practically dead themselves.”

  “They are their own undertakers!” said Peter.

  “With Bill you can always do the Japanese angle,” said Sarah.

  “I’d thought of that. Three years as a prisoner of war did him in, that’s pretty obvious.”

  Death had no sting in the Bunting household, partly because Sarah and Peter sincerely believed in the resurrection of souls (or “lift-off,” as Peter called it), and partly because death was a technical matter which called for an immediate flurry of organization, and a swift obituary. Most of the villagers discussed were not members of the church, since hardly anyone came to church; the village was Peter’s real church, and had to be. For instance, the couples who came to the vicarage to arrange to be married were often strangers to Peter. I used to love opening the door to them. A young man and woman stood awkwardly. As if in preparation for their life of traditionally divided labour, it was always the young man’s task to say the first words: “Is … is the vicar in, then?”

  As shy as them, I asked them inside, and they stood in the hall, their heads bent as if it were raining, and looking around naively at the walls. Peter emerged, bustled them into his study. Then I heard that sound so familiar to me, of quiet conversation behind a door. The house vibrated solemnly as if a doctor were visiting. Behind that door, in father’s extraordinarily untidy study, these people discussed their weddings. I used to press my ear to the wood, once in delightful consort with Mother, who held my hand as we listened. “This one will be our little secret,” she said. A sentence or two could be heard occasionally: “No, we like the old service, with all them words,” or “A week in Edinburgh is good enough for the two of us.”

  The visitors, the visitors! They came up the gravel path, past the graveyard with its look of tidy ruin, to ask for healing of one kind or another. Religion barely entered into it. In that traditional place, the priest was socially elevated. Going to Peter was a modern version of visi
ting the landowner to collect wages. Peter gave the parishioners the salary of his words, and rich words they often were. With gentle, undogmatic faith, he fit himself around the lives of his flock. Peter believed that most of his petitioners were in search of friendship rather than God. Mr. Tattersall, now long dead, used to come every week on Sunday afternoon when I was a boy. He had a red birthmark like a wax letterseal across one cheek, and always carried a small umbrella, even when it was sunny. Father told me that Mr. Tattersall was “terribly alone.” Mother told me that Mr. Tattersall had driven a bus for many years, the cream-coloured 54 that went every day between the villages. He had had an accident in which he knocked down a pedestrian. There had been nobody on the bus at the time—there rarely was—and Mr. Tattersall had accelerated away. The pedestrian recovered, and Mr. Tattersall, whom no one liked, was not charged; perhaps it was felt that he was already punished by the now shameful symbolism of his birthmark.

  Terry Upsher was another regular Sunday visitor, always in the same clothes, as if, like a child, he had been dressed by a monotonous mother. There was the flat cap, with its dirty softness inside, a collarless shirt pulled tightly over a strongly mapped chest, and trousers that were too short, so that he seemed permanently excited. His face was grey; his high voice quavered loudly, and Mother and I could hear everything he said inside Peter’s study. When Terry’s father was alive, he was adamant that he never came for himself, only for his father.

  “The part of it is, Vicar, me da’s not been champion these last few days. He says nowt, never speaks to us except he says ‘good morning’ when he gets up. Rest of the day he’s dowie, he just watches TV like it was all the one fil’m.”

  “And how are you, Terry? How are you bearing up?”

  “Me? I’m okay, Vicar, it’s just me da. I’m past meself with worry.”