‘Father Zak,’ she said. ‘Hello, I’m intruding on you.’
‘Alice,’ he said. ‘Come on. Intrude.’ He held up his hands by way of apology for appearing standoffish in the manner of his greeting. ‘How are you?’ he said.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Gosh, this is really some shop. I’d call this my kind of pornography.’
‘Mine too,’ he said. ‘But, Alice dear, you manage to keep your figure.’ He crossed, then, to a large stone sink where he vigorously washed his hands.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Don’t stop. You mustn’t. I’m sorry to barge in like this. I felt that I needed to talk to you. I have things to confess – not “confess” confess, you understand, I always found that horrendously difficult. Truth to tell, it goes against my nature and I gave it up over four years ago. I gave up the whole bang shoot.’ She turned and stared out of the window at a yard of wintry shrubs and trees. Then, once again, she faced him. ‘Are you shocked?’ she said.
‘Alice,’ he said. ‘I spend my life these days with cut-throats and diseased prostitutes.’ He paused. ‘So yes,’ he said, ‘I’m a bit shocked. Carry on.’
‘I fell in love with religion when I fell in love with Joe,’ she said. ‘And then I fell out of love with Joe. I woke up one morning and the magic wasn’t there. Does this sound as though I should be writing to the agony aunt? I’ve been feeling cheap ever since. I’m troubled – have been for years now – by the idea that neither was ever genuine – neither of my loves.’
‘That,’ Zak said, ‘is exactly when you most need to hang on and wait. Wait for the higher thing. When it comes, you will have shed all the dross. You will be left with something more durable. Perhaps it will be something like the difference between Absolute and Historic truth.’
‘I thought that was Karl Marx,’ Alice said.
‘And so it may be,’ Zak said. ‘I grew up with Marxist parents.’
‘But,’ Alice said, ‘what if the reality is that twenty years of my life has been completely bogus? A delusion. A dream. And now I’ve woken up? Well, let us suppose that some malignant demon has been deliberately confusing my sight, etcetera.’
‘I think that is highly probable,’ Zak said.
‘What?’ she said.
‘The malignant demon,’ he said. ‘But maybe it is precisely now that the demon is doing his worst.’
‘I simply find that kind of talk embarrassing,’ she said. ‘Any minute now you will start to tell me that my daughter was raped by malignant demons.’ She shrugged. ‘Schoolboys in fancy dress,’ she said. ‘I believe that we make our own demons.’
Zak simply indicated a stool, where she sat down.
‘I suppose I want to “unpack”, as they say,’ she said. ‘You might say that I need a psychiatrist. I will tell you that I’ve tried that already, but I find on the whole they are rather lacking in depth and complexity. They have these checklists for human behaviour. I find them like the cruder sort of literary critic. The finer nuance of character evades them. Perhaps we could go to a café? That’s if your fish can really wait.’
‘Sure,’ he said, ‘I’ll get dressed.’
When she emerged into the street with him, Alice felt that Father Zak was like a ship in full sail. She felt like Scuffy the Tugboat alongside him.
‘They’re rather good, those Jesuit sleeves,’ she said. ‘Do people ever join up just for the uniform?’
‘The sleeves are okay,’ Father Zak said. ‘But the shoulders show up dandruff.’ Then he said, ‘As to the joining, well, after what the Marist brothers did to me at school, I suppose I was not very likely to sign up with them.’
In a café they ordered tea and toast. ‘What happened to me was like this,’ Alice said. ‘It was like a drug wearing off. Like a midsummer dream. Like Titania waking to find that she was in bed with an ass. Excuse me, I do know that my husband is not an ass.’
‘No,’ Zak said. ‘No, he isn’t.’
‘My life was changed for me overnight,’ she said. ‘Everything was suddenly a hollow sham – that is, except for my violent love for my stroppy little Chrissie. Then my father-in-law died. That was exactly when I ought to have been supportive.’ She paused. ‘I believe it’s the reason why Joe was so determined to send the girls away to school. He has always wanted them in fairyland. Nothing but the best and most pure. That was yet another thing that began to deter me about him. The way that he believes you simply throw money at any problem. Basically, he’s a fixer. I think he dazzled me in the first place by his techniques of manipulation and his bizarre extravagance. Take that crazy bike trip we went on. Those millionaire bicycles. That was merely one of his schemes. Of course, it has to be admitted, he looks mighty good in black skin-fit lycra.’
Zak Levine said nothing. He sipped his coffee and let her talk. She went on to explain Joe’s courtship to him. She talked about her dear, dead friend and the newborn, orphaned baby. She told him about that first year of intermittent separation while she was at university in Oxford and Joe ran a business in America. She described for him how her new involvement with Joe’s Church had been like being in love twice over; how she had not only been dazzled by Joe, she had been dazzled by his Church. How she had counted the days until she could go again to Mass, to fulfil her Sunday obligation. It had seemed to her really strange that such a thing should be called an ‘obligation’ when it had beckoned to her so seductively. Everything had delighted her.
For a start, the Church had been so full of people. There was standing-room only if you were more than one minute late. That had been the first surprise. She had expected churches in these days to contain three old ladies and a vicar. Or she had expected that the churches would have all been turned into cafés with piped Vivaldi and William Morris wallpaper, selling chocolate brownies from the high altar.
She had expected that she would go along and be subjected to the embarrassment of having to say the responses on her own. But not there. Not in Joe’s Church, where the congregation was not only sizeable but was also, roughly speaking, half male. And it had cut effectively across age. There were not only the greybeards looking towards heaven, but the young men too. Hunky young men in leather jackets with girlfriends in tow. There were the gum-chewing teenagers examining their fingernails, along with the lady dons in tweed, and the pale, pious undergraduates, and the phlegmy, homeless old men, and the children colouring in their pictures of Jesus and dropping their fibre pens. Alice, as she spied out the family from the doner kebab van and the lady from the launderette, had decided firmly that Joe’s Church was the only institution left in England that effectively crossed the barriers of social class.
And the ritual, of course, had been so dazzling – the incense and the vestments; the litanies and the Eucharistic prayers. She had adored the way people would shuffle up to the altar, just as though they were in a self-service tea-shop in the rush hour. Such an ordinary miracle; an ordinary nosh-up; the Lord’s feast. The shared cup, so levelling. And then afterwards, Alice had watched fixedly as the priests had wiped the vessels and had put them away in a cupboard.
‘It was the first time I had ever seen men washing up,’ Alice told Zak. ‘And, of course, they were doing it in public.’
It had bothered her at first, she told him, that the whole thing had not been a bit more foodie. Because Joe himself was so divinely foodie. She had felt impelled to offer her services to the clergy – to make fancier lace tablecloths and nicer bread; bread made with olive oil; bread to munch, like the sort one munched with falafel and kofta. ‘Ask me,’ she had wanted to say, eager-beaver convert. Teacher’s pet. ‘Ask me, Father. Ask me.’
Zak’s laugh was most satisfactory. It had a nice, deep bass pitch.
‘I remember Joe telling me that the wafery stuff was made by Carmelite nuns and that it was their livelihood,’ she said. ‘And that it wasn’t for me to rush in and try to replace it with the likes of what I could buy in the baker’s shop next to the halal butchery up the Cowley Road.’
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‘Bloody converts,’ Zak said.
‘Excuse me?’ Alice said.
‘Bloody nuisance,’ he said. ‘People like you and me. Swing high; swing low. It’s people like your Joe are the lucky ones.’
‘He’s not “my Joe”,’ Alice said. ‘That’s the point. You do know that we no longer live together?’
‘Yes I know that,’ Zak said. ‘I have the ear of both your husband and my sister.’
Alice looked at him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But once I’d woken up, then I suddenly saw the whole of Joe’s Weltanschauung as a trick to rob me of myself. And all that dazzling Catholic stuff had to do with men claiming a monopoly on the best in tabards and hats. I have become very nostalgic. I long again for my girlhood and for the company of Pam’s brilliant mother – my first love, I suppose. What a good thing that priests don’t go prescribing HRT.’
Zak was now frowning into the table top and refusing to be entertained. ‘You talk a lot, not only about “waking up”, but about being being “dazzled”,’ he said. ‘Pam’s mother was “dazzling”, Joe was “dazzling”, the Church was “dazzling”.’ He paused. ‘My sister is also “dazzling”. May I suggest that you start to wear dark glasses? You seem to me not so much awake, Alice, as seriously hung over.’
Alice pulled a wry face. ‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘Point taken.’
‘I too adore my sister,’ Zak said. ‘But my advice there is to fear Greeks bearing gifts.’
When Alice finally turned to call for the bill, she saw that the waitress was marvellously tall and black. She wore skin-fit blue jeans and high-heeled shoes and a plum-coloured lip gloss. She crossed the floor to them immediately and stood alongside the table.
‘Blimey,’ she said as she ripped the bill from her pad. ‘Excuse me, but you don’t half remind me of someone.’
‘Me?’ Alice said.
‘Yeah,’ said the waitress. ‘I reckon there’s no one else you could be. You’ve got to be Chris’s muvver.’
Orphans, Jugglers and Tall Hats
It was evident when Papa entered the general ward that he had acquired a slight stiffness in the gait. But, for all that, he was wearing a soft wool jacket the colour of mango ice-cream and he was carrying a bunch of orangey freesias. Christina, as she watched him, found that she had forgotten quite how effectively he could always cut a dash.
She was all ready and waiting for him. She had her crutch within easy reach.
‘Before you utter a word to me,’ she said, ‘I’d like to point out that you limp. I expect that’s on account of the gout.’ Then, without pausing for long enough to allow him opportunity for reply, she said, ‘And I got myself into this condition through watching your wife who was being sexually active with another woman at the time.’
Papa stopped three feet in front of her. He fixed her with a straight look. He threw the bunch of freesias so that it landed in her lap. Then he folded his arms and uttered one brief, sardonic laugh.
‘Congratulations, Chrissie,’ he said. ‘I’m delighted to see that you are in shape.’
‘If you call this being in shape,’ she said.
Papa came forward. He bent and kissed the top of her head. Then he straightened up. He held a hand flat against his lumbar region as he did so.
‘So what were you doing on a fire-escape staircase forty feet in the air?’ he said.
‘Me?’ she said. ‘Well, I suppose I was escaping the stench of sinful humanity. You may carry my bag, if you like.’
Then, refusing any further assistance, she struggled to her feet. ‘If you’re planning on taking me out to lunch,’ she said, ‘it better be pretty damn good.’
Papa said that lunch would be his pleasure, so long as they could go some place where the food came low both in salt and in saturated animal fat.
‘Hah!’ she said. ‘You? If you prefer we can go to the supermarket and grab a few cans of lima beans off the shelf and maybe a jar or two of green tomato relish.’
Over the low-fat, purplish Venetian artichoke salad, Papa diplomatically kept off the subject of Pam’s beautiful baby and of Pam’s recent annexing of the beautiful and brilliant Jago Rutherford. Instead, he offered to buy Christina the juggling balls for Dulcie’s Christmas present. Over the low-fat sea bass and the red and yellow pimentos, he avoided the anticipated post-mortem quiz and offered instead to buy her a house. She had mentioned the need to find herself digs for the following year. She wanted somewhere where she would be able, intermittently, to house Peter’s dog, since Peter himself would be forever flitting to France when vacations came along.
‘But, crumbs, Papa,’ Christina said. ‘You don’t have to do this, you know. I mean it’s not as though you were my father.’
Papa merely nodded his acknowledgement of the jibe and observed, pleasantly, that her ‘edge’ was alive and well. He ordered, when the waiter came, ‘Just two small espressos, please.’ Then he caught Christina’s eye and he said, ‘Oh, what the hell’, and he ordered – after some consultation – almond cakes and chestnuts simmered in marsala.
Christina rolled her eyes in reproach. ‘Trust you to have the gout,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it just a shade picturesque? I mean, didn’t it go out with Samuel Pepys and Doctor Johnson? I mean, couldn’t you just have contented yourself with arthritis? Or are you too much of a show-off?’
It was the nicest day that Christina could remember for quite a long time. Papa, because he was impulsive and ridiculous and he believed in striking with hot irons, was all in favour of tackling the real estate question without further delay.
‘If you’re okay to hobble, Chrissie,’ he said, ‘then I’m okay to limp.’
They flew, dot-and-carry-one, shrieking and laughing from A to B all afternoon. She had forgotten how funny he could be.
‘If you don’t stop this,’ she said, ‘I’m going to piddle in my undies.’ She marvelled to discover that he could even be funny about Mama and Judith.
‘The girlfriend is a great lady,’ he said. ‘I have a little thing for her myself.’
‘And me,’ Christina said. ‘Me too.’
They decided, within the space of two hours, on a tiny renovated terrace house that overlooked Fenner’s Cricket Ground. The idea was that she could share the house with two undergraduate lodgers and that way recoup on the running costs. Christina stood in the empty back bedroom and stared out at the wintry pitch and at the little pavilion beyond.
‘I hope you’re not planning to buy me,’ she said. ‘I mean, along with the house. I hope you’re not planning to move yourself and your gout in with me?’
‘For sure,’ Papa said. ‘And especially for all that cricket in the summer months. Now there’s an exciting game, Chrissie. That’s the real big draw for me.’ Then he said, ‘We’ll buy it – what do you think? Would you like it gift-wrapped?’
In the car, after a rare, pensive silence, she said, ‘There’s that poster you can get – you know – of Stalin with that little girl. She’s telling him, “Thank you for my Happy Childhood.” I might buy you that for Christmas. Or maybe I’ll get you a Madeline book.’ After another silence, she went on, ‘I read Robert Louis Stevenson. He says the children of lovers are orphans. Papa – Pam and me – we would have felt like that whatever.’
‘Speaking of Christmas,’ Papa said. ‘Tell me. Do you have plans?’
‘I have a prior commitment,’ she said. ‘I’m committed to Peter’s dog.’
When evening had almost fallen, she got Papa to drop her off at the college lodge. He got out of the car and came round and opened the door and helped her to her feet. He handed her the crutch.
‘I ought to come in with you,’ he said. ‘You can’t manage with the bag.’
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Don’t come. I need to do this on my own.’
Then she allowed him to kiss her. ‘So long, Papa,’ she said. ‘I wish I could’ve seen more of you.’
He laughed. ‘Don’t capitulate, Chrissie,’ he said. ‘Just you k
eep on sharpening that edge.’
‘I will,’ she said. ‘Now, shove off. I don’t want you to watch me.’ Then she turned and hobbled down the path.
She had wanted so much to reveal herself in triumph to her friend the porter and to call out, ‘Look! See! I’ve broken my leg for real.’ But the porter was talking busily to a man in a pin-striped suit. In his hand the man carried a briefcase. It was not one of the bashed-up leather variety, but a rigid black fibre-glass item for containing product promotions and conference presentations. Reluctantly, she hobbled past them and on into the court.
It was all shimmering with a delicate mist, and there, incredibly, standing on the stepped stone base of the sundial, silhouetted grey in the winter twilight, stood the juggler, her juggler. He stood as lofty perpendicular as ever in his tall witch’s hat, his long unbuttoned overcoat hanging down to the floor. He was making balls turn in circles through the air so that they surrounded his head like the stars around the head of the Queen of Heaven.
Christina drew in her breath. She blinked and stared. Then, dropping her bag where she stood, she hobbled towards the juggler as fast as she could across the grass. The foot of the crutch made small tell-tale bore-holes as she went.
‘Hello, Chris,’ said the juggler, who kept on juggling. ‘I’ve been waiting for you for ages. But aren’t you supposed to be Keeping Off of that Grass what you’re standing on right now?’
‘Dulce!’ Christina said. ‘God in heaven. It’s you. But what are you doing here – juggling on the grass?’
‘Well, I’m not actually on the grass,’ Dulcie said, and all the while she kept on juggling. ‘I’m on the steps, then, aren’t I? So why don’t you come up and join me?’
By the time that Christina had hobbled up alongside, she had taken note that Dulcie’s hat was no more than a red and white plastic traffic cone.
‘If it’s only your leg that’s broke,’ Dulcie said, ‘if it’s not your fuckin arms as well – then catch.’
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