Grace and Mary

by Melvyn Bragg

  And yet, John thought, despite this new supreme being of reason, John felt there was a lingering. Perhaps only a tribal lingering in the silence of an empty parish church or in Choral Evensong and even in the arcane practices of Christian services with the bowings and vowings, the Holy Spirit and the miracles. So weird and yet so passionate and complex, he thought, and perhaps – who knows? – pointing light into that mass of dark matter in our minds and in the universe itself.

  Could faith not stand for, not mean, but represent, something that might later in the human story be uncovered? Might its almost bizarre claims not hint at intimations outside our present ability to know, worlds that might exist when we knew more? Or perhaps we were on the way to creating new ‘humans’ who would be the children of a physics that would know what we could never understand.

  Could religion’s purpose have been to attempt to locate the inexplicable, of what we could never really know but only feel in pulses, hints, fleeting, speechless patches of thought?

  Besides, was reason the only instrument of understanding? David Hume, a philosopher John thought superior to all the current atheistic rationalists, had written that reason responded to and ordered the passions in ourselves, the sensations, the feelings, the thoughts that lay too deep for tears, the heart with its reasons reason did not know. Reason was not a primary but a secondary organ of understanding. Was that right? If so, what followed?

  For if there was that ‘other’, did this all but inert small body tucked up in bed in front of him know about that? She had been transported by the daffodils; others were by music, by painting, by art, by sex, by the power of sensations . . . Was that accounted for in the rational mechanical scheme of things? Perhaps, soon, it would be. And the magic of a real nightingale would then be seen by all as in a higher league than the magic of any imagined nightingale.

  Yet it was imagination that was at the crux of it, of what we are, he thought. An imagination that could contain a God but was not a God: an imagination that could conjure goodness and yet not be good, see and even provoke evil but not itself be evil, entertain the brutality and the beauty of every religion and know that the wickedness that came from religion was not in the idea of religion itself but in the primal lust, which is for power. Maybe imagination was religion. Religion was neither good nor bad but people made it so. Yet what did we know of the imagination, which could take us back to the Big Bang faster than the speed of light, which meant one could ‘be’ other people in the empathy of life or theatre or fiction, which it seemed could do the most impossible thing of all: make something out of nothing.

  When asked what was most important for his work, Einstein had answered, ‘Imagination, above all, Imagination.’ And Shakespeare wrote that poets conjured words out of ‘the thin air’ and gave them ‘a local habitation and a name’.

  Their words had inspired and reassured John in his own work as a biographer. Now, before him, was someone whose life was present but whose life history appeared to be crumbling and fading away. Was there life and identity without a history? Was her plunge away from the world he lived in a dying? Or could it possibly be a plunge back down into the black seabed where the oldest creatures still lived and had lived for millions of years without light, without heat, without changing? Or was he watching a complex of particles about to turn back to other particles – of dust? But, then, might not those particles reassemble in time, not as her, not as this all around them, but as another expression of life?

  Almost calmly he found he wanted that. He wanted there to be an ending for her better than just a finish. Or was that merely love?

  He took up his book and waited to see if she would wake while he had time.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Wilson watched her. He could not help himself. Grace had come in towards the end of his unwinding life like a blessing. But even as he thought that, he smiled, for she was as much an imp as an angel and he was not sure that it was not the dangerous imp that beguiled him.

  He watched her. She needed watching. He watched over her. And she knew, the imp, that she had his eye and now and then she would flick him a glance or a special smile and he would find himself smiling back at her for no reason but that she was so alive to him. And she learned, the angel in her, that she had to take care of his feelings towards her, not to trespass too far, not to worry him too much, to watch herself.

  Yet he went about his work, dawn to dusk, as gravely as ever, leaving nothing half done, nothing unchecked, nothing to chance. He had two hired men, in their twenties; one lived in the attic, the other went back to his neighbouring home. They went about their tasks under Wilson’s ordering. They considered themselves fortunate, though the work was hard, the hours long, the weather often punishing, strength-sapping even for young men. But the food was plentiful and even varied. The house was kept warm. Sarah Carrick made sure their clothes were dried out. The religion was present but not oppressive. It was a calm, rather quiet place, which emphasised all the more the sweet outpourings of the little songbird that was Grace.

  Belle was spellbound by her younger sister. The doctor could find ‘nothing wrong’ with Belle, he said. The understanding of thyroid deficiency was some distance in the future. And so there was a tendency to think that Belle’s size, her calf-yearning brown eyes, her slowness, her rather simpleness was her own fault. Or, if you were as dyed in the Lord as Sarah Carrick, an act of God that could not be fathomed by poor human guesswork. Sarah had decided that Belle was blessed. Grace, she thought, had been allocated many gifts. The blessing was on Belle. In her simplicity Belle saw all life as good. In her slowness she was reluctant to cast blame on another; in her obedient harmlessness she was a lesson in sweetness. And so Sarah protected Belle and saw that she was helped. And she feared for her. What would she do, she often thought, after my time?

  But the Carricks showed no sign of yielding to the biblical injunction that three score years and ten was the span of life. They went on going on, through their sixties, into their seventies, with little obvious yielding to time. Wilson’s fingers were bending over more stiffly to the force of arthritis. Sarah was just beginning to forget things – but by faith and by work they prospered.

  They were among the elders in their chapel, and the minister visited them at least once a week. Mr Walker chose his time carefully. At high tea on a Saturday when the work day ended earlier, there was a sense of ease, time for talk and, as the young man openly admitted, it was the best time to have ‘a good feed’. Sarah made sure of that. Mr Walker was too thin, she thought, failed to take proper care of himself in the dismal, damp little cottage the congregation provided for him and, as a bachelor, would have no knowledge of or aptitude for cooking. Great Saturday helpings assaulted his bony frame and it shuddered at the impact of the meats, the cold potatoes, the bread, the cakes, the cheese. Nor could he set off home without a parcel ‘for tomorrow’. His lean salary was fattened by such gifts in kind around the village.

  When the tea was done and the table cleared, Wilson liked to cut off a slice of black twist, invite Mr Walker to take the chair opposite his own across the fire, and talk. Wilson was firm in what he knew and just as certain about what he did not know. He regarded Mr Walker as his weekly education.

  Mr Walker took The Times and read it carefully. He excused the expense on the grounds that he found it useful for his sermons. It was also, he thought, important for his congregation, which could be wholly immersed in a world easily boundaried by an afternoon’s stroll. And when he spoke of foreign wars and foreign continents, of the House of Lords and the Parliament at Westminster, of Great Debates and Great Issues of the day, he was bringing them news of their day on the back of which he could more tellingly bring the eternal Good News itself.

  Wilson Carrick wanted more. He had a taste for abstract discussion. He wanted to know how the world had become as it was and why and in all particulars, and both he and the minister would manoeuvre the conversation in that direction. On this Saturday, after some
unproductive passes, Mr Walker brought up a subject that he knew would hook the interest of his host.

  ‘Grace is quite outstanding in the Sunday school,’ he said.

  Wilson fought down his pride just as he checked any sign of it in Grace herself. But this was milk and honey. This was manna. So he said nothing.

  ‘What is she now, ten?’ the minister continued. ‘Yet she’ll pull me up if she thinks I’m wrong.’

  Wilson glowed but a deep pull on the black twist would have to do for his reaction.

  ‘Miss Errington says it’s much the same at school. She’s had to put her up one class above her age already and she could go further.’

  ‘She mustn’t be let do that,’ said Wilson. ‘It will do her no good. One class higher than she should be is more than enough.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I agree. Remember how Christ himself was praised by the elders in the Temple when he was only a boy.’

  Wilson shook his head. He knew the passage but the suggestion of a comparison was not comfortable.

  ‘I only say that when we see a gift we should be glad and encourage that gift.’

  ‘Not if it means she gets above herself,’ said Wilson, and blew out a plume of black smoke.

  ‘Should we not aspire to be above ourselves? Is that not the burden of the Message? To cast aside what keeps us low and full of sin and look up, reach up . . . ?’

  ‘Not,’ said Wilson, unsure of himself, ‘if we lose ourselves.’

  ‘But isn’t losing yourself, the Self, and becoming part of the body of Jesus Christ, what we are instructed to do? Don’t we see a Oneness in all things, that all things were made by Him and everything comes from the same seed, all that lives and breathes and exists comes from the One origin? And do we not seek to understand that mission in our own lives and join it in our second death?’

  ‘You’re a bit beyond me there, Mr Walker. I was talking about Grace, a child that needs to be watched.’ He paused. ‘What second death?’

  ‘We are dead before we are born,’ said the young man, who could find in his sermons and even in such a conversation as this an outlet for the passion that had as yet found no expression or fulfilment in love. ‘We need to remember that.’

  ‘What good would it do us? If you don’t mind me asking.’

  ‘All knowledge is good.’

  ‘Is it?’ Wilson leaped in. ‘Didn’t the Knowledge of Good and Evil set off the whole business on the wrong track in the first place? Doesn’t that mean there’s things better left alone?’

  ‘I don’t believe so . . . It is too important a question to answer lightly, Mr Carrick. I’ll think about it and perhaps I’ll preach on it when I have found an answer . . .’

  Wilson felt relieved, though he was not clear why.

  He waited for more.

  Grace was expected to help in the house and by example learn how to run a careful household. Her accomplishments were a cross between those of a medieval princess and a domestic servant. She could sew with a fine skill; she could knit in wool and make lace; she could embroider. She liked to sing and was encouraged, to draw and she was admired. In the kitchen she peeled potatoes, scraped carrots, chopped up cauliflower, boiled beetroots, cooked, baked and had no squeamish feelings when she helped her grandmother skin and gut a rabbit. She laid the table and served at it, helped wash up the dishes and scrub the pans.

  On the farm itself she was given a more marginal role, which she regretted. She liked to see the slow walk of the dreamy cows to the byre for milking and was sure she could have milked if they had let her but her grandfather forbade it. He would sit her on one of the shire horses now and then for a treat but there was no suggestion of a pony. Belle and herself were given half a dozen banty hens each and they fenced in the cheeky miniatures and scattered food for them in the morning and evening and collected the tiny eggs. When they were older he gave them each a lamb every spring, and they would lie in bed after saying their prayers, sunk in the goosefeather mattress in that opulent drowsing of the moment before sleep, primed with cosiness and the warmth of each other and the thought of their worldly treasures, the lambs and the banty hens.

  With her fourteenth birthday and the end of her school days in view, Grace had become Miss Errington’s assistant in everything but official recognition. In the two-roomed school, which housed just over forty pupils between the ages of five and fourteen, she helped to teach the youngest to read, sometimes read stories to Class One and took the singing lessons.

  Miss Errington had slowed down quite noticeably and there was concern about her in the village. She dismissed any talk of illness or retirement and let it be known that she was determined to soldier on. But would she be allowed to? The whisper went around until it reached the schoolmistress herself and she was afraid. If only Grace could be trained up as a pupil-teacher, that would give her more time. Time to prepare herself, to look around, to see how she could stretch her small savings and the mean pension to be paid to her only when she reached retirement age, still six years on.

  Scheming was foreign to Miss Errington. She had many qualities and skills but cunning plotting to secure something for herself was not one of them. She called on Sarah and Wilson on a Sunday afternoon. She had told Grace what she intended to say to her grandparents. Grace, doubtful and confused by the flattery it implied, said she would take good care to be out.

  That was the first time Miss Errington had been inside the farm and she felt enwombed by its warmth, its devotion to hard work, its oak-beamed, polished welcome. It was difficult for her to be the person they so much respected when she felt rather minimalised by the rooted couple sat side by side across from her, expectant.

  But first there was the tea with scones; the cake could await the outcome. Miss Errington had prepared her case.

  ‘I’m sure you know from her marks that Grace is doing exceptionally well at school.’ Sarah smiled but more to help the schoolteacher along than to join in any praise. Wilson waited and merely nodded when she concluded her report.

  ‘I think she has potential,’ she said. ‘I point her to books, to Jane Eyre and Silas Marner and The Mill on the Floss, which I thought might be a little beyond her, but she gobbled them up and more, even Wuthering Heights and the whole of Oliver Twist. They are only novels, I know, but there is poetry too, Lord Tennyson and Sir Walter Scott and some Wordsworth. They are all full of information and fine observations and she races through them – and others – and when there is nothing new available, she reads them over again. It has given her a broad mind, I think. It has given her influence on other minds. And the teaching help she gives me has proved she has a knack for it . . .’ Both Sarah and Wilson were intent now, caught in the force of this wholly unforeseen development. ‘If you would be willing, I would like to try to arrange for her to stay on at the school and become a pupil-teacher. I would supervise her for the duration of the apprenticeship, for that is what it would be. And after that, who knows where it could take her?’

  ‘Have you talked to Grace about this?’ Wilson asked.

  ‘I raised it with her.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said I would have to talk to you.’

  ‘Did she take to the idea?’

  ‘I think so. But she can speak better for herself.’

  ‘Would it be costly?’ Sarah asked the question she knew that Wilson wanted answering.

  ‘I thought – if it proceeds – to ask Mr Walker about that.’

  ‘But we can’t expect it to be done for nothing,’ said Wilson.

  ‘I doubt it.’ Miss Errington was firm as she always was when answering difficult questions.

  ‘It’ll take some thinking about,’ Sarah said, ‘that’s for sure.’

  ‘I appreciate your faith in the girl and your care for her best interests,’ said Wilson.

  The farmhouse kitchen was silent. The dwindling winter afternoon gave up the struggle and slid towards the dark. For a few minutes the three of them sat in
silence, wondering.

  The compound of excitement and dread on her visits was uncomfortable and Grace never got used to it. But as the train drew into Whitehaven Station after its trek through the severe industrial coastline, with the slagheaps, the pit heads, the clank and hiss of machinery, and the sea frothing black coal dust on to the shore, she found it was the excitement that triumphed.

  She would see her father! They managed once every three weeks, sometimes only once a month because of his shifts, but she would be with him for a couple of hours and talk to him, and maybe she could get him to tell her a little more about her mother; a little would do, she could live on a little. Then her brother might be in the house – and the four girls, two of them her stepsisters, the younger two her half-sisters. And Martha her stepmother. If only there were no Martha.

  A child is helpless against the taunts of a fierce adult, and for as long as she could remember, Martha had ‘got at her’. Her father intervened and sent Grace a sympathetic eye message from time to time but mostly he stayed out of it. ‘Anything for a quiet life’ was his excuse, his way of surviving. The work down the mines was hard. They ran under the sea and just to get to the coal face meant a back-bent walk of more than a mile. He was a willing provider and would always volunteer for extra shifts. He had never caught the habit of long stretches of quiet sleep. But at least Grace would see him, and the girls. She had bought sweets for them.

  The town keyed up her exhilaration. It was barely believable that this coal and steel and steam town and her horse-powered village were on the same earth, let alone a few miles apart in the same county. The drama of the town seemed to prickle her skin into a full life-alert she felt rarely. So many men going to their work with such concentration; so many coal-smeared men returning from it with relief in their step, in the ease of tired shoulders. And the women, strong too, Grace thought, about their business.