by Patrick Gale
When he told them he was a childless widower, the nurses insisted on keeping him in overnight for observation. He needed stitches to the back of his head. A nurse laid a deliciously cold dressing across his nose and eyes to reduce the swelling but even so, when he could see again properly come morning, he found that his fat face now looked monstrously swollen.
A consultation of the section on stains in the Reader’s Digest Household Manual – a book which, like the New Testament, he had impulsively removed from stock for his own uses – told him the trick with bloodstained linen was to soak it in brine. He was not particularly interested in hygiene, beyond the preservation of books, but he was due to take a wash to the launderette and salt happened to be one of the few cooking ingredients he had in his possession.
There was something satisfactorily symbolic, too, in redeeming his shirt from the previous night’s outrage and in being able to watch the blood slowly lift away as though any lasting wound went with it down the plughole. The next day he bundled shirt and handkerchief, still wet, into the holdall with his rather smelly laundry. When he retrieved it that evening from the pursy-lipped launderette attendant, who resented him for not paying extra to have things ironed, the handkerchief was revealed as sporting a dark blue embroidered B on one corner. He had an M one just like it, a long-ago Christmas present from his daughter, Lily, which miraculously had been waiting for him in the pocket of his court-case suit when it was handed back to him on his release.
He was tempted to keep it, naturally, but the Jesus dreams began to trouble him again and he sensed the two things were connected. ‘I gave you my hanky,’ the honey-voiced Jew kept saying. ‘I died for Queen and Country and you gave me nothing in return. Thy paths drop fatness.’ On and on until Modest began to punch and kick him.
Eventually he began investigating churches around Paulsgrove and then further afield, in Cosham and Portchester, rarely far from the dreary thunder of the M27. He held a picture of the priest in his head, of course, but all he actually had to go on was his distinctive voice and the feel of his hands. And the letter B. He knew this was foolish behaviour, erratic even, but the challenge of it diverted him from his aching face and he was obsessive by design, one of nature’s librarians, he had come to realize, systematic and relentless in seeing a task through to its conclusion.
And then he felt inhibited about simply showing up and asking questions, so he attended services as a cover for his research, one church, one Sunday, at a time. In a few weeks he was forgetting even to take the handkerchief with him to hand over should he find the right priest. The Anglican cathedral was too pale and impersonal, the Catholic one, too full of trinkets, like a common Christmas tree. The Methodists felt too low, the happy-clappy brigade friendly in a worrying way, the Christian Scientists felt insufficiently like a church, the United Reformed too like a bank. The Jehovah’s Witness’ literature was so full of judgement and righteousness that he came no closer than the Kingdom Hall’s car park, then he lost nerve and went to the Society of Friends on Northwood Road instead. But the Quakers met in a place that didn’t even pretend to be a church and he grew so bored by the hour’s silence that he fell asleep, and then was so irritated by the kind smiles they gave him at the hour’s end that he left with gratifying rudeness, spurning with a wordless sneer their offer of coffee and biscuits.
Then he found the perfect fit. It wasn’t even a Sunday but he was passing and the doors were open. It was a piece of shabby, sidestreet Victoriana, all pitch pine and brass memorials; the sort of place that in a wealthier city might have become a cinema or carpet warehouse by now but in Portsmouth was simply limping on towards dereliction and redundancy.
An old woman was arranging brutish chrysanthemums on a hideous brass pillar. The spicy scent of their discarded foliage piled on a sheet beside her reached him as he passed and she offered her muted greeting. The building’s Blitz-broken glass had been crudely replaced with not quite matching panes that were mainly a nasty, watery green. With its unplastered brickwork and humble, stunted proportions, the place felt like the ecclesiastical equivalent of his shop in Paulsgrove – unloved, undervisited.
‘Can I help you?’ The woman had followed him and timidly apologized for making him jump. ‘The next service isn’t until Sunday,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid our congregation’s so small now that there’s only one evensong a week and that was yesterday. And it’s only spoken now.’
‘I’ll come back on Sunday, then,’ he told her. ‘What’s the vicar here like, by the way?’
‘Oh. Young Mr Johnson,’ she said and her unremarkable face briefly lit up. ‘He’s lovely. We were terribly lucky to get him. We’d been making do with all sorts of people, some of them not suitable at all.’ As if feeling she had said quite enough, she returned to her flowers.
When he returned on the following Sunday morning, there were barely twenty people present. The same woman handed him his prayer book and hymnal as he entered. He sat well apart before he noticed that everyone else seemed to have done much the same. This was a church for the private and single, apparently.
The priest was by some way the youngest person in the room, so even had he not been good-looking, his presence would have carried a certain charge. Modest was immune to male beauty. What he found compelling was vulnerability. From the moment he began to give out suitably thread-bare parish notices, young Mr Johnson was laying himself wide open to mockery. The other priests Modest had been studying on Sundays past were absurd sometimes, often even, with their robes and posturing and portentousness. Most drew a defensive haughtiness about them, as though judging before they be judged. This man, by contrast, gave the impression of having no such defensive layer but radiated an innocent certainty. His was the unquestioning belief of a child, like belief in Father Christmas, or fairies, or a mother’s beauty or a father’s love. This was belief that compelled one to fall in with it and follow because to do otherwise would be a kind of cruelty.
As the service began in earnest with a hymn and the priest processed in, fully robed, with one elderly acolyte carrying a cross before him and another bringing up the rear, Modest glanced around and saw that the people there loved their vicar. Man and woman alike stole shy glances at Mr Johnson as he passed them and stared boldly at him once he was before them. With his robes he had not assumed pomposity, like the prison chaplain, or the priest in the hideous council-estate church Modest had attended the previous week. He merely assumed an utterly sincere solemnity. He was, Modest decided, like a considerate child who had begun performing a magic trick only to discover that the magic was real and possibly dangerous. One could imagine him, resolute yet terrified, conducting an exorcism. His voice – unquestionably the same he had heard from the gutter that terrible night – filled him with an unsettling desire to confess all and be absolved.
His sermon, all the more effective for being barely five minutes long, was on the subject of righteous violence, inspired by a nasty outbreak of vigilantism on one of the city’s estates that week. He cited the texts of the woman taken in adultery and the striking off of the high priest’s servant’s ear and he pointed out the curious fact that the registering of feelings of disgust, however righteous, invariably made the human face temporarily less attractive, as though God had left it.
When they made their general confession and he granted them absolution, he did it after a short hesitation and in a thoughtful tone, as though the process were not glibly automatic but required communal effort. When the time came to receive communion, Modest was slow to leave his pew and found himself at the back of the short queue. Then, by an accident of maths, he found himself kneeling at the beginning of a new row, a second sitting, as it were, so all alone at the altar rail.
Those merely asking for blessings were supposed to carry their service booklets before them as a sign. Modest saw no reason why he shouldn’t receive communion since he had read the Bible and come to church so often in recent weeks. It wasn’t as though his being unconfirmed showed i
n any way, and the small thrill of transgression was a compensation for the tedium he had been enduring, and all the troubling dreams.
When the priest came to give him the wine, he paused for a second or two, so that Modest instinctively looked up. He found the priest’s bright grey eyes looking directly into his as he said, ‘Christ died for you,’ with just the hint of a smile.
Did he know, somehow, the deception being practised against him? Modest was so startled he had tucked the wafer into the roof of his mouth before he remembered he should have replied with an Amen first.
As they were all filing out and handing back their prayer books and hymnals, the flower arranger greeted him again.
‘That was a very good service,’ he told her.
‘We’re lucky to have him,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry. What was your vicar’s first name again?’ he asked, although she hadn’t said.
‘Barnaby,’ she said. ‘Barnaby Johnson. I hope we’ll see you again.’
As at the altar rail, he managed to be the last in line at the door. Before he shook Johnson’s hand, he handed him back the handkerchief. It was immediately evident that Johnson remembered the incident but not the face that went with it.
‘How are you?’ he asked, concerned, ‘I should have recognized you straight away.’
‘Perhaps with a bloody nose I’d have looked more familiar,’ Modest said and they shared a laugh.
‘Let me introduce you,’ the priest said. ‘This is Patience, who’s attended this church all her life so can always tell me who people are or where things belong.’
‘How do you do?’ said an elegant old woman in a purple summer coat. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Modest,’ he told her. ‘Modest Carlsson.’
‘Of course it is,’ Mr Johnson said. ‘I remember now. You had a Swedish father and a Russian mother.’
‘Full marks,’ Modest said and they laughed again.
‘Well I do hope you come back,’ Mr Johnson added. ‘Now that you know where we are. Patience will show you the ropes. She knows everything about everybody.’
The old woman clucked to herself and batted a hand at him so it was plain she was as deeply in love as the rest of them. Mr Johnson had slipped away, clearly adept at parishioner evasion.
The old woman had fixed on Barnaby a gaze of comfortless enquiry. ‘Would you care for a sherry?’ she asked.
Modest noticed her magnificent amethyst brooch and accepted.
Patience – Miss Boyle – lived in a house that would easily have accommodated a family of six. She lived alone, curator to what was in effect a museum to her parents. Born to expect more out of life than Portsmouth, her mother had married a dashing naval officer and somehow become stranded there on his death. She had left their sole child not only the guardian of a houseful of treasures and memories but the sole repository of a lifetime of prejudice and suspicion. Bitter in outlook and acid of tongue, Patience Boyle had not been granted even the compensation of a husband and children and, now, had no friends.
‘We have a friend in Jesus,’ she told Modest with startlingly naked cynicism.
She appeared to accept him entirely at face value. It also seemed that, for all his carefulness, she recognized in him a kindred spirit: another lost soul. He grew pleasantly dizzy on her excellent Wine Society sherry while she regaled him with unflattering portraits of every member of the congregation. All were found to be hypocrites in some way or other, neither as sweet nor as pious as they appeared.
‘It’s a good thing you found me first,’ she said. ‘Saved you so much time and effort.’ Only young Mr Johnson was spared her judgement. ‘Anyone can see he’s the real thing. Far too good for us to hold on to him for long. Not like Mr Xavier.’ She made a face.
‘Who was he?’ he prompted.
‘Oh. Another priest. Ghastly little man. Quite ghastly. You’ll meet him before too long. Breath that would bring down a bustard.’
She made him share a tin of the better quality chicken soup, to which she added yet more sherry and a carton of cream, then sent him on his way with the odd sensation that, although she had asked him not one question, he had just made a friend.
It was no Road to Damascus moment; he did not change perceptibly. He continued to run the shop, making his best money from selling pornography snatched from the shamefaced and first editions tricked from the innocent. He continued to drink heavily and to lead a life of barely concealed squalor. All that had altered was that he now attended church and, with the minimum of effort it seemed to him, sustained a friendship.
He attended on Sundays, sitting within glancing distance of Patience but not with her, but he soon began also to attend occasional morning or evening services, the stripped-down ones without time-consuming music, at which he was frequently the only person present besides the young priest. If Mr Johnson was surprised to see him, he didn’t show it, which gave Modest a powerful sense of these morning and evening offices being observed for their own sake, inexorable as the motions of sun and moon, regardless of who watched them. It was as though, assisted by the priest, the dour, undistinguished building were praying to itself. He took the opportunities these services afforded to watch Barnaby Johnson openly, to notice his very clean nails and clumsily cut hair. The way there was often a catch in his voice when he said the Grace. There was nearly always a small red book about him, either in his hands or on his prayer stall or, when he was in his civilian clothes, jutting out of his jacket pocket. Modest itched to ask him what it was or even to pick it up and hold it for himself. It was not a Bible or a psalter and he had never seen him read from it, yet it was plainly important to him.
Sometimes Johnson spoke with him briefly afterwards. More often he hurried off about his work.
‘I’m glad Patience has found you,’ he confided one morning. ‘You’re doing her good.’ This made Modest realize she was a parish burden; prickly, difficult, a source of guilt to the kinder souls who failed to love her. And that in turn led him to see how effortlessly he might become such a burden too, unloved, unlovable, yet ineluctably among them, like a moist, secretive toad. And how all around might continue to be repelled and to turn aside yet God and this young man, his vulnerable avatar, were compelled repeatedly to forgive and welcome him.
It didn’t work, of course, this difficult magic, lovely though the idea was. He became no better. He regarded his fellow men with no more forgiveness and accorded the women around him no more respect. The wand of loving-kindness was waved and he was no different for it. Like Patience, who remained nasty Patience, with her brutal system of checks and balances in which all were found wanting and the pleasures of life were sherry and spite. He still had disquieting dreams about the pale, beseeching God who by now had acquired the face and voice of his priest. It wasn’t sexual but it was, perhaps, a kind of fixation, and he sensed that turning his back would bring no resolution.
He regretted, too late, his fraudulence in pretending to have been baptized and confirmed, once he saw the opportunity confirmation classes would have given for regular, private access to the man.
Besides, the church had found a use for him. Patience wished to retire as secretary of the PCC and saw to it that he was chosen in her stead. He became a regular reader of lessons and taker of collections. No children or parents came near the church, as it had no Sunday school, so there was no risk of him having his background investigated. In less than a year, he found he had become quite drawn in. Patience had some of her late father’s suits let out and turned up to fit him. With these and a selection of the dead man’s shirts and ties he was almost respectable again. Outwardly, at least.
Then Barnaby Johnson left them. Modest had often wondered why his name and phone number were not displayed on the painted board beside the church door, as it seemed the one area in which he did not lay himself entirely at the parish’s disposal. He had not grasped it was because Johnson had only ever been an interim appointment, a stop-gap, like ghastly Mr Xavier, during
the necessary interregnum between full incumbents. He could have applied for the job formally, of course, but had been drawn back to his curacy parish in the far west instead.
While Mr Xavier resumed the reins for a while, and proved just as ghastly as Patience had promised, Modest sat with the other PCC members to interview the few priests from whom they would be obliged to make a selection. They were uniformly of the long married, long-serving variety, diplomatic, hard-skinned and uninspiring but then, one could hardly list ‘worryingly trusting’ in the Parish Statement of Wishes.
‘I believe you were slightly in love with him,’ Patience said when they were, yet again, picking over his doughty replacement.
‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘You’re wrong. It was nothing like that.’
She turned her cold blue eyes on him, arrested by his tone and took a thoughtful sip. ‘So? What was it like?’
‘It was like …’ he began. He remembered the monogrammed handkerchief staining brine with blood, remembered that voice murmuring, ‘God watches you, Modest. All will be well.’ ‘I feel we have unfinished business,’ he said at last and enjoyed the sensation of holding something back from her. ‘What do you make of the wife?’ he asked, easily diverting her.
‘Can you stay to lunch?’ she asked. ‘It’s only soup, mind you.’
‘Soup would be lovely,’ he told her. ‘And what about those hulking children? That girl’s head is disturbingly large.’
BARNABY AT 52
They hardly saw Jim in his first year at university. They all dropped him off initially, including Carrie, with a great heap of books and belongings he claimed he couldn’t do without, his clothes all crammed into the much-decorated rucksack he had taken on his travels. And he emailed them once or twice in his first weeks. Barnaby attended a church conference and took him out for lunch near the end of term at a grown-up wine bar Jim recommended. He seemed fine, almost chatty. But then he dropped the bombshell that he was unlikely to come home for Christmas. He needed money and he could make easy overtime by agreeing to work on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. And if he did come home, it would be with his restored Vietnamese name, Phuc, not as Jim.