It was not only that he was out of breath and sweaty (he’d gone first to the church, then had to double back); he also seemed a little shy.
“Where is everyone?”
“Here.”
“Everyone is you and Geraldine?”
“Looks like it.”
Josh hesitated. “Then,” he said. “then…? Then would you mind…?”
Simon said: “Mind? I tell you, Josh, there’s nothing that could give us greater pleasure.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
There followed a moment’s silence. Geraldine broke it by asking after Billy.
“And I’ve got some money with me,” added Josh quickly, as though this were a natural consequence of his son having got off so very lightly (despite the damage inflicted on the car’s bonnet) and as though this too might make his presence more acceptable. “Or at any rate a cashpoint card. Ill-gotten gains, as of course you’d both agree. And I ought to say this, as well—make it clear from the beginning. I’m probably not here for any of the right reasons.”
“Oh, reasons!” shrugged Simon. “Who’s qualified to talk of reasons?”
“You are, I’d have said.”
“Listen. Who knows but that even Peter didn’t really tag along in the first place because his mother-in-law was driving him crazier than mosquito-bites? Yet look at what happened to Peter. So maybe the mother-in-law was purely a put-up job.”
“I thought you people believed in free will?”
“We do. He could have bashed her.”
There was a rider attached to this. “In fact, I’m inclined to think of you as a bit of a put-up job,” said Simon.
Josh had by now taken over Geraldine’s end of the banner. “Oh, good!” he exclaimed. “How very lovely!”
“No. You don’t realize. It’s an honour.”
“My alter ego: Simon-Peter’s mother-in-law. Do I merely revel in that accolade or am I permitted to ask why?”
“Well, yes. Sometime ago—I think it was during my first few months in Scunthorpe—I heard a bit of gossip which obviously I shouldn’t have listened to and which obviously I’m not condoning. Yet I believe that if it hadn’t been for that bit of gossip—or, rather, the incident that underlay it—then Scunthorpe might never have been chosen for this recent revelation, for the miracle which is driving us forward this morning.”
“Cryptic allusions…,” murmured Geraldine a little drily. “No key, I suppose, to be handed round to the uninitiated?”
“I don’t know. That’s up to Josh.”
“Oh hell!” said Josh. “You simply don’t care what you come out with, do you?”
There followed a minute of indecision.
Josh gave Geraldine a quick look.
“I didn’t go to Germany,” he said brusquely. “I fucked one of my older pupils. Obviously I got the sack.”
Simon said: “And Dawn got religion. So did her sons.”
“Incidentally, there’s no book, either. That was just a story.” In spite of that small, irresistible joke, he still sounded brusque. “Where were you,” he said to Simon, “four-and-a-half years ago?”
“Bournemouth.”
“But contemplating making a move.” It wasn’t a question.
“Madison for Pope? Yes—as a matter of fact.”
“I suppose that’s the wording you’ve got on one of the other banners?”
“Look, Josh. Even for you it would be dangerous to underestimate me. All of the other banners.”
Geraldine was scarcely listening.
“I wonder what’s happened to the girl?” she said. “And I wonder what effect it had on the girl’s family, come to that, and on everybody else who knew about it?” She felt appalled.
But neither of them answered. Indeed, for at least a minute, possibly longer, all of them stayed quiet. But then:
“Good God!” said Josh. “Am I imagining things?”
“No,” said Simon. “No, you’re not. Here comes the sun!”
“Is it a sign?” asked Geraldine. “And look…! Over there! Isn’t that the start of a rainbow?”
The power of association.
As a child, Ginny had been taken to see Where the Rainbow Ends.
“I’d never been to the theatre before, not even to a pantomime. Simeon, you’ve no idea what a revelation it was!”
He could still see the expression in her eyes.
“And never again,” she said, “have I felt more utterly convinced of anything.”
He remembered, even, the apologetic American accent, along with the joyful confidence of her smile: “I guess you kinda know things at the age of six!”
“Well, out of the mouth of very babes and sucklings,” he’d agreed. “Convinced of what, though?”
“No, you mustn’t laugh at me. You see, it was the first time I knew, really knew, that the world was magical—and good—and that dragons would always be slain,” she said.
40
The month of Nisan came—hardly quick enough for some. The apostles returned. Stragglingly. Simon-Peter, who’d been paired with Lebbaeus (“I hadn’t even liked him before; now I grew to love him!”) gave a lengthy account of what had happened.
“It was fine to begin with. The two of us were just so eager; stopped nearly everyone we passed; planned to win a thousand converts.” He smiled, ruefully. “Yes, a thousand converts almost on the first day!”
He shrugged. “We couldn’t quite decide, though, where to start. I was all for going into the hills. My territory, of course: Zealot country. Lebbaeus demurred at first but then agreed; it seemed such a wonderful challenge, taking pacifism to the terrorists. And I was so sure they’d listen to me—at least listen. I used to be quite a key figure…nationalism personified!
“But they only scoffed at us. ‘Repentance? Tell those bloody Romans to repent, tell them about your Kingdom! And if they come to us with messages of love and friendship—and messages of farewell—then, yes, you’re right, we might really sit up and take notice.’
“Well, we persevered. We truly did persevere. But so unavailingly. We were hooted and jeered down that mountain track as though we were, I don’t know, jugglers from Tiberias—indeed, I think we were lucky to escape a roughing-up. ‘Might knock a little sense into ’em,’ they said. We scarpered.
“But we weren’t too downhearted, not for long. We could still laugh about it. ‘Oh, they’ll soon eat their words! Won’t they, just! All we have to do is to press on and smile.’
“Then Lebbaeus wanted to return to his own village. Didn’t you? Which was where you’d wanted to go in the first place before I overruled you. But it wasn’t till some five weeks later that we finally arrived. And in the meantime our success had been patchy to say the least. It was astonishing how seldom people wanted to listen. I think, Master, as you said to Thomas, we must have been doing the job badly, even when it seemed to us we were being quite powerful and inspired: we went hungry for days on end and more often than not, far more often than not, had to sleep rough. Even when villagers brought their sick to be healed, initially as an experiment, almost as a joke, but then as a surefire thing—even when we drove out demons and anointed people with olive oil and thought, ‘This is it, brother, there’s no stopping us now, tonight we eat!’: even after all of that…well, it’s hard to credit people’s ingratitude. They’d got from us what they wanted and, oh yes, they’d feed us all right and slap us on the back, but that was absolutely it: the talk-part was just a nuisance and as for giving us shelter for more than one night…well, we began to think it something of a myth, the reputation we Jews enjoy for hospitality. Oh, it’s true that twice we were offered a roof for as long as we wanted, and in fact found it hard to get away, yet in each case it wasn’t for what we had to say but for what they had to say, our hosts. In each case they were lonely and neurotic and…leechlike. Naturally, we prayed for them and laid hands on them but they seemed oddly resistant and perhaps we didn’t have enough faith.”
Again, he shrugged and looked apologetic. The others round the fire, except for Lebbaeus and Jesus, all smiled their sympathy and understanding. Jesus’s expression was more difficult to read. Simon-Peter felt abashed. He continued rather hurriedly.
“Then another time, when we were welcomed into a home with so much warmth and cordiality that we looked at one another and said, ‘At last! We’ve cracked it! This is what it’s all about!’ we were awoken in the middle of the night and the woman of the household smiled at us and lowered her lamp and she was naked. And yet another time, when once more we supposed we might be making headway, in a house where the only woman was very old and wrinkled, her two sons, who were themselves in middle age, came to us shortly after we’d retired and…That night we again slept underneath the stars.
“In short, we sometimes felt, both Lebbaeus and I, it was a tougher assignment than anyone could possibly have imagined…this whole business of trying to change our world for the better…”
Actually he had reread this chapter recently. It amused him to think what Paula might have made of that penultimate paragraph and of how she would have tried to explain it to any of her Sunday School charges who might have come into possession of the book.
But, anyway, he had long since realized it wouldn’t have been something for the under-tens—he hadn’t got the proper gift—and that even Benson at High Ridge might have had to cope with frequent bursts of unruliness. “Sir? Sir? What do you think it means, when it says here…?” Simon wouldn’t have wanted that.
Besides, he thought those few lines could well lack authenticity. In a country where the authorities were prepared to stone a young woman for adultery—and, as to that, there was ample evidence—would such goings-on as he’d implied have been exempted from similar retribution? And, in that case, would anyone have been likely to attempt them?
He wouldn’t have meant for anything to be included which couldn’t have been vouched for by scholars.
But he could still imagine Paula’s blush—and it was cruel, of course, but it did amuse him. (He would have to put a lot more vigour into the singing of the hymns that she had chosen!)
On the other hand, she might not have blushed in the least. She might merely have given a little giggle. He knew that at times he could be appallingly patronizing.
And people were constantly surprising you.
“Dragons would always be slain,” Ginny had said.
But there weren’t any dragon-slayers in Doncaster. Nor in Newark, Grantham, Peterborough or Stevenage. And the three of them didn’t merely keep to any straight line: they made literally dozens of small diversions. Stamford, Leicester, Bishops Stortford, Cambridge. You might at least have expected to find dragon-slayers in an old, much venerated university. Yet it wasn’t to be. The term had started by the time they arrived in Cambridge and although there were certainly any number of undergrads who came to wish them luck and offer them not only encouragement but even overnight accommodation (blankets to provide extra cushioning for their sleeping bags) as well as food and beer and often fairly heated debate—and opportunities to wash—at the same time they’d gradually been made to realize they were now regarded, if not precisely as freaks, then perhaps as performers in a type of travelling show which was undoubtedly topical and shouldn’t be missed but couldn’t in fact be taken that seriously. And this wasn’t because the remedies they advocated were disagreed with—they weren’t, not in theory—but somehow, even before the handing out of the prescriptions, these indispensable cures seemed to have garnered a certain air of quackery. The angel Gabriel had turned into a sort of superior Billy Smart. The travellers were only vaguely aware of this and for a long time they fought against believing it, but Simon in particular flared up at the facetious comments repeatedly and persistently made, especially when he considered them disparaging of God.
He spoke to his mother every second day, and at more specific times Josh did the same to Dawn and the boys, gathered in a neighbour’s flat, but it was hard for either of them to sound continuously positive. Admittedly, they minimized the hardships and the failure to recruit followers other than weirdoes and winos, who almost invariably dropped out after little more than a mile. Yet it would have required practically superhuman strength to remain constantly, persuasively, upbeat. Naturally, Dawn was always easier to convince of the rightness of things than Sally Madison.
And Simon realized he was getting tired and confused and subject to a lot of strain. Yet he was frightened, too, that his duty now lay in a direction which—certainly in one sense—took him well away from Firebrand and might indeed prove inescapable. Over the years, he had suffered two nervous breakdowns—the second being after Ginny had died and he thought that surely then he must have drawn close to madness. Although he often wondered if a third could now be imminent, he felt determined that if such were the case he would this time say what he hadn’t said on either of those previous occasions.
Thy will be done.
Not my will, but thine.
41
They reached London on the last day of November. The closer they’d got to it, the slower had become their progress: the more detours Simon had suggested. Also, Josh thought, he spent a lot more time in prayer, even apart from those occasions when he was actually down on his knees. But his praying didn’t seem to refresh him. He was clearly very tired despite the fact that they were frequently in their sleeping bags by nine and often spent the night in some seedy guesthouse or other and he looked haggard; sometimes appeared to have aged enormously. He didn’t make jokes any longer. Added to which, Geraldine or Josh would regularly address some remark to him—it might be as they were walking or it might be as they were sitting over supper, maybe in a Macdonald’s or a Kentucky Fried Chicken—and Simon simply wouldn’t hear; at such moments he was preternaturally withdrawn. He’d lost his appetite as well, and Josh—reminded of when his children were young—had to try to coax him into eating…he was better at this than Geraldine. Simon was either ill or shortly about to be.
And, possibly most telling of all, he had to be nagged into telephoning his mother. On one occasion it was a long time before he came out of the box although the others had seen him terminate the call some minutes earlier. They had assumed he’d been praying but whether this was so or not it soon became clear he’d been crying. Geraldine had taken him in her arms and Simon had seemed to welcome it. Josh had looked on with exceedingly mixed feelings.
That same evening they’d come across a little inn so utterly unlike the cheap and soulless places at which they normally put up that Geraldine hadn’t given it any proper attention. Josh, however, saw the initial wistfulness of her expression and correctly interpreted it as a longing for hot water and soft pillows and the sort of comfort pilgrims had no right to expect—saw such an investment, moreover, as something which didn’t need to be paid for by lengthy hours of conversation, either serious and challenging or, at the very least, entertaining. “Yes, we can! We can afford it!” Josh was in charge of their finances. “There are times when we all have a need to splurge!”
Geraldine looked at him gratefully but Simon, who had seemed strangely disorientated by his surroundings even before Josh had made this statement and hadn’t up till then appeared to concern himself greatly with their expenses, was at first inexplicably resistant. The inn overlooked a village green and was indeed—after Simon had finally, but suddenly, caved in—found to be an oasis of comfort.
Now they were each drinking a late-night whisky in its chintzy, inglenooked lounge, at present its sole occupants and sitting in a companionable if sleepy silence. Had she been able Geraldine would have stopped Josh from ending that silence, although she couldn’t feel in any way hostile to what he was saying, only worried about its effect on someone she had grown to love.
“Look, Simon,” Josh said, “we’ve got to face facts. This has been going on for weeks!” In fact, it had been going on for only about five, yet because of the unremitting pressure it h
ad seemed more like twice that figure, not simply to Josh but to all of them. “And we’re just not getting anywhere, are we? We’re all utterly worn out. Wouldn’t this be a good time, maybe, to admit defeat?”
“Defeat?” It might have been theft—murder—betrayal that Josh was wanting to admit to. And in Simon’s eyes, of course, that’s precisely what it was. Betrayal. “When Gabriel himself pointed us the way to victory?”
“Simon, perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps my sons were hallucinating.”
“That’s nonsense and you know it.”
“Then why is God now making it so difficult? I’m aware you’ll probably talk about free will but free will hasn’t stopped his intervention in the past.”
“What intervention?”
“Miracles.”
“In other words you’re hoping he’ll suddenly provide a great tidal wave of humanity”—Simon clearly liked that metaphor, he used it fairly often—“to crash against the walls of No 10 and sweep away all opposition? Beat it to smithereens?”
“Well, yes, if that’s on offer. It would help.”
“A tidal wave composed of puppets?”
They had up to now collected over ten thousand signatures but relatively few actual marchers: at the period of their greatest success (numerically) they had had a hundred-and-eighty-seven walking with them—men, women, children—yet all of them had eventually fallen away; even the record-holder had lasted only thirteen days. Nevertheless, there’d been a moment when Simon had grown practically euphoric. “A hundred-and-eighty-seven!” he’d declared. “Dear Lord! We really are going to end up with a million!” Josh, touched by what he thought of as appealingly delusional, had merely said, “These country lanes are going to get a mite congestedin that case, but no doubt we’ll be happy to keep to the motorways.”
He thought it might have been the last time he’d seen Simon laugh. Simon’s optimism was by then at its zenith and he was possibly visualizing a small army, even a large one, bringing gridlock, mayhem and salvation, with every few minutes another driver deciding to fall into step with the marchers and cheerfully abandoning his car as a first flamboyant gesture.
Such Men Are Dangerous Page 24