All at once, she was aware of tears streaming down her cheeks. Horrified, embarrassed, she hid her face in her hands and pretended to be praying. Yet her shoulders shook with sobs and she was tempted to leave the church – except that would mean drawing unwelcome attention to herself. Her hands were wet; the tears dripping onto her lap and making damp splodges on her coat. She had barely cried at all these last few years, despite the loss of Simon and the loss of her health and breasts. Yet that traumatic time of grief and loss had come surging back, prompted by the service. How much easier things would be if she could only share the bishop’s belief in a kindly, loving God, or share her mother’s confidence that she would be reunited in the life to come with her dear, departed father. Indeed, once she got to Heaven, even her breasts would be restored, according to her mother’s simple faith.
But it wasn’t just those certainties – or fantasies – she missed, but some fundamental meaning to existence. The beauty of the choirboys’ voices reminded her of all she’d lost: the whole spiritual dimension, once so precious and fulfilling, and those very treasures of the Church she now affected to despise. Just sitting here, surrounded by this splendour, this sense of the sublime, only served to emphasize the shallow mediocrity of her present paltry life; its lack of point and purpose.
‘Excuse me, madam, please.’
The man beside her was trying to squeeze past. Hastily jerking up to her feet, she realized that the rest of the sermon had completely passed her by, and even part of the service, since the anointing of the sick was now about to start. A whole bevy of priests was moving from the altar; some remaining at the front of the cathedral, while others proceeded along the aisle and transepts, and took up their positions further down. The congregation, too, were rising from their seats and forming orderly queues behind each priest. Stewards in red tabards had also made an appearance, and were marshalling the crowds or offering assistance to the priests.
Conscious of her tear-stained face, her first instinct was to bolt, yet she remained standing where she was, whilst the other people in the pew struggled past her and made their way towards the nearest priest. The organ was playing; the choirboys still singing with that pure, ethereal radiance, yet all she could do was agonize; torn three ways between a sense of duty, a fear of sacrilege and a strong wish to escape. This anointing was a sacrament, which meant she had no right to receive it in what the Church would call a persistent state of sin. Yet her mother was bound to question her about it: which priest had she approached; had he spoken to her personally, and had the experience affected her, either spiritually or physically? Had she felt more ease of movement in her arm, or some lessening of discomfort, or even a marked reduction in the swelling?
‘I felt nothing!’ she knew she’d want to shout – nothing but a sense of sham. Such brute honesty would be callous, though, so if her anointing would give pleasure to her mother, then clearly she had to overcome her scruples.
Venturing out of the pew, she dithered again about which queue to join. The nearest was also the longest, but she had no wish to go parading around the cathedral, so she took her place at the end. The priest looked far too young to have had any real experience of life. What did any celibate priest, for that matter, know of love, sex, coupledom, divorce?
Distracted by such thoughts, she almost bumped into the person in front of her; a thin, anxious looking woman, pushing a child in a buggy. Having stuttered her apologies, she stole a glance at the child, which seemed more dead than alive, with its drooling mouth, sunken eyes and greyish, waxen skin. It made no sense, of course, to blame a non-existent God for the sufferings of humanity, yet she still felt highly indignant at the concept of an omnipotent, all-merciful deity being responsible for such a flawed creation. It also riled her that all these stricken people should be so pathetically grateful for a mere dab of holy oil. Indeed, from what she could see by peering towards the front of the queue, the process smacked of a production-line; each person speedily dispatched, with no time for any personal exchange or individual counsel.
As she waited for her turn, her mind reverted to childhood again, when this rite was known as Extreme Unction and normally administered only to patients in extremis. She and Daphne had both hoped to die as young as their tubercular role-model, since the sooner they reached Heaven, the sooner they could work their mega-miracles. Thus, they’d assumed they hadn’t long to wait before they received this final sacrament. As for any fear of death, it never crossed their minds; they simply took it for granted that the anointing itself would give them the grace to endure their terminal sufferings. The word ‘grace’ had meant so much, then: that mysterious gift of God that descended on your soul, especially in the sacraments, and which she had always pictured like golden candyfloss: a sweet and special treat – gold, not pink, because it was sent direct from Heaven.
How smug they’d been, in those days, yet how enviably serene. And, of course, another good thing about Catholic schooling was that it extended one’s vocabulary. Phrases such as Extreme Unction and Viaticum tripped lightly off their tongues, and they hadn’t had the slightest trouble spelling tricky words like longanimity or transubstantiation.
She was suddenly aware that the woman with the sickly child had reached the head of the queue, which meant it was her turn next. She could now see the priest quite clearly: a stripling of a fellow, with limp brown hair and watery blue eyes, who didn’t exactly inspire great confidence. Yet she watched in surprise as he bent towards the pushchair with such reverence and respect, the child might have been Jesus Himself. Then taking each of its hands in turn, with the deepest of compassion, he anointed them with dignity and deference, as if imbuing the poor suffering scrap with a sense of the utmost worth. The toddler made no sound, perhaps already too far gone for help, yet the mother gave a radiant smile, as she, too, was anointed.
Once the woman had wheeled the pushchair away, she herself came face to face with the priest, who gazed into her eyes with a look of such sheer kindness and concern, she felt an uneasy mix of gratitude, misgiving and embarrassment.
‘My child …’ he said.
How could two short words have so profound an effect; stirring a fierce longing for her simple childhood faith; for that uncomplicated time when God had been as close as Daphne; an intimate friend who would listen, care, respond, at any hour of the day or night?
‘Do you remember what St Thérèse said when she entered the cloister?’ he asked, still looking at her with the same intense solemnity.
Flustered, she shook her head.
‘She said, “I will be love”,’ he continued, supplying the answer himself.
She flushed. Was he aware of her decidedly unloving feelings, not just towards the Church, but towards the obnoxious Felicia and her equally loathsome foetus? And why was he addressing her at all, when he hadn’t spoken personally to anybody else, not even that afflicted mother, with her shadow of a child? Merely because she was the last one in the queue? Or was he about to tell her that his conscience would prevent him from anointing her, because he could see into her mind and knew it would be sacrilege for him to go ahead with the ritual?
But, without the slightest hesitation, he dipped his thumb into the cup of holy oil and applied it to her forehead, and did so with great humility, as if, extraordinarily, the honour was all his. He was bringing to this rite a sense of genuine love – a true Christian love, like her mother’s, that extended to all humanity and that she could feel in his very touch.
‘May the Lord in His mercy help, through with the grace of….’
Grace. For a disorienting moment, a stream of celestial sweetness seemed to envelop her whole being; the sensation deepening as he proceeded to anoint her hands. She must be imagining things, or – appalling prospect – totally losing her grip. Perhaps she had finally cracked, as a result of too much stress, because all solidity and boundaries appeared to be shifting and dissolving, as if she were no longer tied to a bodily form but floating and adrift. Somewhere,
vaguely, she heard the words of the rite being solemnly recited and knew she ought to say ‘Amen’, but she had lost the power of speech. All sense of time and space was also disappearing, and she seemed to move into a different plane entirely, as gleaming marble and glittering mosaics became one with her and part of her, and seconds passed with the slow, majestic rhythm of eternity. Even bronze and alabaster were molten and ablaze now, and she, too, was only fire and light; suffused with radiant grace.
‘Madam, are you all right?’
With difficulty, she opened her eyes. The priest had gone – but where? A steward was standing over her; the shriek of his scarlet tabard slowly returning her to consciousness.
‘Madam, did you hear? I asked if you were all right.’
Uncertainly, she nodded; let him guide her back to her seat – a cautious, halting process, as she still felt strangely faint. Her arm was every bit as painful; her body still as weak; her doubts and disbelief just as deeply ingrained. Nothing had outwardly changed; no miraculous cure, or even reconversion; no Falling to her Knees and Seeing the Light. Yet, as she slumped into the pew, she was conscious of the fact that some inexplicable form of grace had indeed descended, together with a sense of peace – all the more extraordinary in light of her former anger and resentment. And it was a grace that would allow her to endure; to embrace her ‘little way’ and even see the worth in it, however unfathomable the whole thing seemed. All she knew was that the phrase, ‘I will be love’, had somehow elicited that dramatically transformative grace. Her mother’s own example of loving everyone, without exception – even those who had harmed her or betrayed her – had proved, of late, an impossible ideal. Not now. For some reason way beyond her grasp, she could now love Felicia – even love her child.
The congregation was rising for the final hymn, Lord of all Hopefulness, Lord of all Joy. This morning, she would have found the words ironic; mocked them with her usual bitter cynicism, since no gleam of joy or hopefulness had touched her life for months. But as she stumbled to her feet and, haltingly, began to sing, the first, weak stirrings of them both took flimsy, foetal root.
WORLD’S YOUR OYSTER
‘Is that Buckingham Palace?’ the big, blubbery American asked, in her lazy Southern drawl.
‘Er, no,’ Hayley muttered, trying to shift away from the mass of sweaty flesh pressing against her own thin thighs.
‘It’s the Foreign Office,’ her father, Kenneth, put in, swivelling round from the seat in front to deliver one of his lectures. ‘The building was begun in 1861 and originally housed four separate government departments: the Foreign Office, the India Office, the Colonial Office and—’
‘But where’s Buckingham Palace?’ the woman interrupted.
Hayley winced at the pronunciation. Emphasizing ‘ham’, like that, made the place sound like a pork factory.
‘If you want to see the Palace, I suggest you get off at the next stop – that’s Trafalgar Square. Walk through Admiralty Arch and go all along the Mall, which will bring you into….’
Her dad had moved from history to geography, but the woman had switched off the minute she heard the word ‘walk’.
‘Oh, no. I couldn’t walk. Not in this heat. I packed all the wrong things for the trip – raincoats and rubber boots. They told us it was always raining in London.’
‘That’s a myth,’ Kenneth stated pompously. ‘If you study the rainfall statistics, you’ll see that….’
Hayley suppressed a groan – although she should actually be grateful to the Yank for monopolizing her dad’s attention. Otherwise she would be the recipient of all this useless knowledge. The family usually sat together, on the two pairs of front seats on the upper deck; her parents side by side and she next to her brother. But, today, they’d been forced to split up, having lost their prime position when they got off the bus at Westminster – her father’s fault, as usual, since he’d insisted on yet another tour of the Abbey, with him as guide and lecturer. She found the place depressing, with all those gloomy tombs, and dead marble people lying on their backs, reminding you that nothing lasted long. And, of course, her father always gave his spiel about the different styles of architecture, which she had heard ad infinitum. Anyway, it meant they’d had to wait for another bus, along with scores of tourists, all pushing, jostling, fighting to get on, so, in fact, they were lucky to get seats at all. Her brother was standing actually – not that he objected. She envied Tim his easy-going temperament. He didn’t mind the Abbey; didn’t even mind this ludicrous idea of taking their annual holiday on a bus. Other people went abroad, or at least on proper holidays in England; hired caravans or canal boats, or even booked into hotels. She would bet her life they were the only family in the entire western world that spent the last week of August travelling the same boring route each year, then returning home every night to sleep in their own beds.
‘The 24 is the oldest bus route in London,’ her father informed his audience of one. ‘Dating back to 1910. Originally, it terminated in Victoria, but, two years later, they extended the run to Pimlico. That’s where we live,’ he added, ‘right near the start of the route – very handy, in fact, because it means we board the bus when it’s empty. And it really is the perfect way to see London, since it goes directly south to north, and passes many important landmarks on its way.’
Except you get sick and tired of those landmarks, Hayley reflected, especially after five whole summers repeating the same journey. And what made it worse was that she was forbidden to use her mobile – a totally pathetic rule, but typical of her schoolmaster dad, who was dead keen on self-improvement and couldn’t understand why she should want to text her friends, rather than listen to his words of wisdom.
‘Well, I’m heading for the end of the line,’ the woman volunteered. ‘My English aunt used to own a house in Hampstead, and I want to find exactly where she lived.’
‘In that case, do make sure you see the Heath. It’s one of the jewels of London – eight hundred acres of open woodland, with outstanding views over the city, especially from the higher ground by Jack Straw’s Castle.’
‘There’s a castle?’ the woman asked, now displaying genuine interest.
‘No, it’s actually an old coaching-inn, named after one of the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt – Jack Straw. He commanded a rebel band in 1381 and is best known for….’
Hayley sneaked a look at her magazine, as her dad embarked on yet another history lesson. Although it wasn’t easy to concentrate, especially when her mother, Maureen, joined in the conversation, having found an empty seat close by and moved up from four rows back.
‘The weather’s so glorious today,’ she told the fat American, ‘we thought we’d picnic on the Heath.’
More sweltering than glorious, Hayley thought. This top deck was like a sweat-box; the sun pounding through the glass and making her feel sticky-damp all over. The picnic food would probably have turned rancid by the time they got off – if they ever got off. The bus always took an eternity, crawling along at the pace of a hearse; diverted by road-works; held up in traffic; delayed by bumbling old ladies, who started pouring out their troubles to the driver, or by bolshie kids who had lost their Oyster-cards and refused to pay the fare. Oyster-card – weird name. According to her father, it was a variation on Octopus – the original travel-cards introduced in Hong Kong in 1997 – but it made her think of the phrase ‘the world’s your oyster’. If only. Unfortunately, the tatty piece of plastic was limited to London Transport, rather than being an open sesame to any destination on the globe.
She closed her eyes and, in less than twenty seconds, was winging her way to fantastic ports of call – Timbuktu, Antarctica, the Himalayas, Tristan da Cunha – and flying in her own private plane, with no member of her family in sight; no drunken louts, or doddery old ladies. Yes, she was zooming high, high up, above the traffic jams, the trees, the tallest of tall buildings; zipping along at supersonic speed. Any minute, the plane would land and she would step out int
o a rainforest, or onto shining snowfields, fringed with glaciers, or desert sands stretching to infinity and criss-crossed by camel-trains.
Only a violent lurch of the bus brought her down to earth again, as it resumed its jerky, stop-start motion, and she was back with a bump in suffocating London.
‘And, after lunch, we plan to swim in one of the Hampstead ponds,’ Maureen continued, clearly keen to share the family plans with anyone who’d listen. ‘We feel so close to nature there, although I must admit the ponds are terribly muddy. You can’t even see your feet! And in this sort of weather, you do get a lot of algae, which can sometimes make you itch.’
The American was looking deeply shocked. ‘But isn’t that unhygienic?’ she asked, shrinking back from Maureen, as if scared she might catch some bug.
Yes, utterly, Hayley didn’t say. Apart from mud and algae, the ponds were full of weed and slime, dead leaves, dead beetles, people’s sweat (and worse) and even rats’ piss, so she’d heard. She hadn’t brought her swimsuit – never did.
‘Well, you can always go to a proper indoor pool. We’re lucky here in London, with so many places to swim. Where we used to live, the nearest pool was twenty miles away.’
‘Yes, we moved five years ago,’ Kenneth said, taking up the story from his wife.
Hayley felt embarrassed for her parents, neither of whom had grasped the fact that they were no longer living in a friendly Yorkshire village, and that it wasn’t done in London to discuss your personal life-history with strangers. On every single bus trip, they would strike up conversations with whoever was in earshot; her father never missing a chance to enlighten the ignorant.
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