Aftershocks

by A. N. Wilson

  —Oh, that’s terrible.

  —The thing is . . . oh LOR. There’s no easy way of saying this. Ever since . . . ever since the Quake . . .

  And I was, like, suddenly realizing she was about to say goodbye to me, like, goodbye FOREVER. And inside, I was wanting to say, Yes, ever since the Quake, when you must have realized I was IN LOVE WITH YOU . . .

  — . . . ever since the second Earthquake, something has happened to me.

  —Something’s happened to all of us, I said, hardly able to say the words.

  —I’ve wondered . . . I’ve felt . . . I’ve been homesick, without really knowing where home is. And Skyping Dad has been a real lifeline, actually.

  And I’m like, haven’t I been a lifeline? But I just sat there, hoping I wasn’t going to cry and then finding it was a bit late for that thought, as the tears splodged on to my stripy cotton dress.

  —Oh my dear. It’s awful. There’s no easy way of telling you.

  —But, I gasped . . . You’ll come back. Of course you have to go and see your dad, but you’ll come back?

  —It’s rather hopeless timing, isn’t it?

  She could not say much more after that. She seemed to be saying that she was going back to see her sick father, but that she had decided, whether he got better or not, to return to England permanently. The next day, she came out to Harrow (how? Bus or bike?) and slipped a note through the door. It ended – Saying goodbye to you will be the hardest thing I do this week. N

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TEN

  I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE . . .

  There were fewer people at Canon Digby’s funeral in the Cathedral than she would have expected. She had developed the clerical habit of counting heads, and including two vergers, and the cafeteria-women who were going to supply tea and sandwiches afterwards, there were twenty-nine in the congregation and rather more in the choir stalls, lay vicars, canons, as well as choristers. No Bishops. And the Dean had written a note to Nellie explaining the reason for his absence (the General Synod in York), a note so perfunctory that she considered it would have been kinder not to write at all. About ten clergy were gathered ‘robed and in the sanctuary’, as it used to say on invitations to inductions and similar ceremonies. The choir were there. The Master of Music has been solicitous, asked Nellie if there was any particular music she thought her father would have liked. Her equivocal reply had been ‘Duruflé’, because this was the Requiem setting which she herself liked the best; and as far as church music was concerned, there was no one on earth left to please but herself.

  The music, which is at the same time poignant and sharp – it has an almost citrous quality – brought comfort. They had asked her to robe and sit in the sanctuary, to take some part in the rites, but this was not where she wished to be. She sat in the front row, staring at the wicker coffin, unable to register the fact of his death. She had most definitely not wanted to attend this rite dressed as a priest. She wanted to go as his daughter. And, though he would not have recognized a designer label if it had been pasted on to his English Missal, and though he could not tell the difference between Gucci and a jumble sale, she wanted to do herself proud? No, not quite. She wanted, in clothes she could not quite afford, to register a protest at the expected Church dinginess. A good second-hand dealer – Vestiaire Collective – enabled her to buy a Chanel black suit with a skirt which verged on the outrageously short, and shoes from the same house. Beneath it, she wore an extremely good white silk shirt. Her father had loved Augustus Hare. One of the oft-repeated quotations had been the remark made, as far as she recalled, by one of Hare’s aunts, that the consciousness of being perfectly dressed brought an inner peace which religion was powerless to bestow.

  She was conscious of being well dressed. The shoes were especially good. The skirt, only an inch or so above the knee, reminded her of something she had forgotten – how very good her legs were. She had watched other people in this condition at funerals. To a certain extent, although Charles’s shoulders had heaved with grief at Josh’s funeral (by far the most harrowing she had ever attended), the Nicolsons had all been in this condition: not taking it in. With the dispassionate knowledge of a professional – like a medic self-diagnosing some particular condition such as malaria or the early stages of meningitis – she knew that grief would probably ‘catch up with’ or ‘hit’ her some time in the near or distant future, but it had not done so yet. Here she was back in England, and it was the impression of this, quite as much as the loss of her father, which made most impact.

  It was over three years since she had left. She had not forgotten any aspect of England, but she had very much ceased to be accustomed to it. The light itself was totally different. It was more subdued. Morning and evening skies had far less yellow in them. She was struck anew by the antiquity of the buildings. In Aberdeen, she had grown so used to nothing being older than a century. For all its cast-iron lamp-posts made in Birmingham, its students in straw boaters punting tourists on the Windrush, there was something patently and clearly non-European about Aberdeen, and, obviously, about the Island as a whole – its vegetation, its birdlife, the whole feel of the place. She had found that refreshing. Here, however, once again, the old stones of the Cathedral, the tombs of Bishops and barons who antedated the arrival of the Katanga in our Island, drew her back into that sense which never leaves you in England, of an older world; and these sensations had begun long before she saw the Cathedral itself. They had swept over her with the first glimpse of green turf, seen beyond the wing of the plane before it landed, and been prompted every few miles, if not yards, of the railway journey – the stock-brick backs of London houses as the train pulled out of Waterloo, the elms soughing on the border of bowls clubs and football pitches, unthreatened by earthquake, the cows munching inconsequentially in immemorial meadowland, the Georgian Corn Exchanges in small market towns, the far cooling towers, the sprawling housing estates, all still, still, safe and still. Here was land which could be relied upon not to erupt.

  Dad had died while she was in the air. She had reached the hospital merely to stare at the pale waxwork which both was and was not him, so unlike him, because so white, and so uncharacteristic without the spectacles. She had decided to stay in his flat, whatever the pain this caused. Apart from any other consideration, she deplored the idea of paying hotel bills, and, despite invitations to stay with some cousins who lived quite nearby, she wished to be alone. In the days before the funeral, she had time to sort the ‘things’. The task was completely simple, the ‘things’ falling into two easy categories – what she did and did not wish to keep. After Mum died, the canon had lived a life of the utmost simplicity. Three dark suits were taken to a charity shop. The smalls and the socks were recycled. There was not much clerical garb. He had not been one of those clergymen who had a personal collection of vestments. When asked to officiate in a church or cathedral, he wore what they gave him to wear. Two frayed soutanes on coat hangers she decided to keep. And it was touching to find his biretta in the wardrobe, alongside a broad-brimmed black fedora, which she could remember him wearing for parish visiting in the fogbound Midland towns. She could not quite bear to think of these obsolete and now almost comic items of attire appearing in a local charity shop, and it was obvious that no stranger would wish to finger them other than as some form of fancy dress. For the time being she retained them in the flat, torn between feeling she should destroy them, and wanting to take them to whatever the next destination would be. Otherwise, the black priest’s shirts, and the clerical collars, she offered to Lesley Mannock, who had driven over from Worcester, where he lived, and would preside at the funeral Eucharist, and who was staying for a while at the largest hotel in the town. Dear old Lesley, with his bald crown, tufts of white hair, his bushy eyebrows, his silences. This left the papers and the books, and – a surprise, this – an extensive collection of diaries. Something told her not to read the diaries, not yet.

  All the letters she had ever
written to her parents were arranged in order of date and tied up with rubber bands or pieces of string. She put these into a box, realizing that the time was not yet right for her to read these either. The I. Compton-Burnett novels, a complete set, were always worth reading again, so those were put into the pile to be retained. Some of the devotional volumes, especially The English Missal and a volume called The Monastic Diurnal – a rendering of the old Roman Breviary into ‘Prayer Booky’ English – came into the same category, as far as she could see, as the dusty biretta. They were survivors of a vanished world of piety. She could not quite bear to think of hands other than her own poring over them as ‘curiosities’ in a charity shop. She found a man who took away the television set and the trashier detective stories. The small Roberts radio she retained. With what she recognized as absurdity, she half felt that the programmes which it was transmitting, quiz games with roars of studio laughter, The Archers, even the News, had been preserved for her in the years she had been away.

  So, the work of clearing out the flat took little more than a day, and for much of the remaining time, she would sit quietly, utterly unable to think beyond this week, but realizing that, when the funeral was over, there would be decisions to make.

  She had not, it turned out, told anyone but me and Mum about her idea that she would probably not be returning to the Island. In idle moments in the flat, however, she wrote letters to Dionne, explaining the choice; letters which she did not post. She toyed with a return to Oxford – it seemed the obvious destination – and yet, could she be confident of recovering her fellowship? Getting another job? For some reason, she could not much concentrate upon reading for long, though when she returned to A House and Its Head, it was with quiet and deeply absorbed admiration. The simple formula which that wonderful novelist had evolved was to write plots which the Greeks would have used for tragedies and make them into comic melodramas. Sophocles rewritten in the manner of Mrs Henry Wood. No one could quite match the special atmosphere of those books.

  Her father had asked very specifically that there should be no panegyric. Nellie and he had always savoured the egoism of the clergy, and she wondered, as the funeral took its stately pace, whether this typically self-effacing request had been interpreted by some of the clergy as a comment on their inability to match the occasion; perhaps, even, whether it was the reason the Dean had stayed away.

  As the music spoke more eloquently than any clergy, she thought with deep affection of her father, and was back in the fogbound Midland towns, where, with such complete dedication and professionalism, he had cycled to sickbeds, attended school assemblies wearing his frayed cassocks, made by Wippell and Co. of Exeter, conducted weddings and christenings for people who never came to his church for any other purpose (‘It doesn’t MATTER. We are here for THEM, not the other way’), conducted funerals, nearly always more than one a week, either in church or at the crematorium, said Mass in the old people’s homes, visited the lonely and the housebound, prepared an ever-diminishing number of people for baptism and confirmation, helped the illiterate with their benefits forms, made a weekly round of the local hospital wards – in the days when there was a mental hospital as well as one for the physically sick, not to poach on the chaplains’ work but to see parishioners about to undergo surgery – visited the prisons, and, in latter days, given evidence on behalf of asylum-seekers and so-called illegals, and tried to teach some of the Asian neighbours English. These relentless parochial routines would be punctuated by the recitation of Morning and Evening Prayer (BCP) which he did, not privately in his study, but aloud in the church, even though it was unusual for anyone to join him – still he would say the words – ‘I pray and beseech you as many as are here present . . .’ And after the Morning Prayer, and Mass on Thursdays, he would return to the study in the Vicarage, fuggy with tobacco smoke, for everyone smoked in those days, for an hour or so of Greek – the New Testament, and the Fathers, above all the two brothers Basil and Gregory of Nyssa. It was in those rooms, her father’s studies in the three parishes of her childhood, that Nellie had learnt Greek . . . There was something wholly satisfactory about her father’s life. Her mother never complained about poverty or loneliness or boredom, though these three things were what she embraced when she left our Island and chose to be his wife. Not for the first time, Nellie found herself wondering why she was an only child.

  She had not been concentrating on the funeral Mass; perhaps it was impossible in such circumstances to concentrate. And what would one concentrate upon? On the thought of Dad, in that wicker basket, pale and alone, the thin lips no longer capable of the light laugh? Already – good heavens, she must have been daydreaming – most of the congregation were shuffling forward for Communion, distributed by old Lesley Mannock and a minor canon of the Cathedral. A sacristan came and led Eleanor so that she would be the first at the rail. When she turned to go back to her seat, she took in the congregation. There were some old faces from the sad Midland towns – that was nice. And then, to her horror, she saw Doug. Sitting there. Looking up at her, most inappropriately grinning and giving a little wave.

  *

  —Will you be coming back?

  She hoped, and then realized the vanity of the hope, that he did not mean what she feared he meant.

  —To Oxford, that is, he said, leaving once more open the chance that he spoke only of her travel arrangements, in England, over the next few days, not her plans for the future, with or without him.

  At last, they were alone together. There had been the service in the Cathedral – whose idea had it been to add two hymns on top of Duruflé? Not hers. There had been her journey to the cemetery on the border of the town, with Lesley Mannock, the few cousins, whom she seldom saw, and a gaggle of the former parishioners from the sad Midland towns. Lesley, dressed in a soutane and cotta, had pronounced a blessing over the coffin before it was consigned to the ground. Whenever possible, Lesley and her father had spent their days off together – Lesley’s parish, of a similar high-church West Midland dimness, being only ten miles or so away. Her dad had always said that Lesley was the most faithful priest he had known. Unmarried. (‘Very’ unmarried? One could not be sure.) Austere. Quietly humorous. Like Ronald, clever, bookish. He had read his entire way through Barth, Balthasar, Rahner. Always appeared to have read the latest Papal Encyclical.

  —So useful, Dad would say. Obviates the need for one to read them oneself.

  Lesley asked Nellie to stand beside the grave and throw in a handful of earth. She wondered if she would return to this spot to commune with her father? He and Lesley had been long agreed on the dignity of being buried in unmarked graves, so, if she wanted to come back, she would have to take careful note of where they were burying Dad.

  Perfect weather. Near the grave, an old copper beech soughing in sunshine and light breeze. The familiar words of the burial service. What would remain of her faith now he was dead? Tribal Anglican she would still be. But would anyone, anyone at all, in future, be Anglo-Catholics in the Lesley and Ronald mould, the faithful recitation of offices and Masses in almost empty churches, the maintenance of the Catholic faith in defiance of all the changes within the Church itself, the fasting communions, the monthly confessions, the almost Tractarian correctness of demeanour and belief?

  Tribal Anglican she might remain, but what was happening to the Church of England? She felt, as they stood by the red earth inadequately covered by the vivid Astroturf beside the gaping hole, that they were burying all that was good and decent about the Church of England by law established. Ever since she had landed in England, the papers had been full of an especially nauseating sexual scandal. Bishops and Archbishops had contrived to hush up the misdemeanours of one of their number. The guilty man had been sent to prison, but only after a string of his victims had been constrained, by the brutal silence of the authorities, to fight for justice. There had been at least one suicide among the victims, and the offences had been of a peculiarly creepy kind, involving nudity in
church, buggery, canings. The pervert himself – he was evidently a pathetic creep, perhaps in denial about the psychological damage he was causing the boys. Such figures would appear anywhere, especially – she could see that plainly – especially in church, which released so many strange demons and visited so many weird areas of the psyche. No, what worried her was the attitude of the Establishment – the Archbishop himself, sitting in Lambeth Palace taking advice from lawyers rather than asking every single one of the young men to accept his abject apology, his promise that all would be done in future to avoid such a thing being repeated. No – their attitude was not merely that the matter should be hushed up, that the Church should be spared ‘scandal’. It was worse than that. It was almost as if they were living on a different moral planet where such practices – now known to cause a lifetime’s harm – were somehow unserious, all part and parcel of the Church’s life. Any barrel has its rotten apple. This should not turn us away from the essence of the Church’s mission, which was, obviously enough, the appointments of ‘suitable’ – i.e. neo-liberal but not too liberal – men and women to deaneries and bishoprics; the smooth running of the Synods, local and General; the management of the Church’s finances; the pompous holding on to their seats in the House of Lords, even though fewer than seven per cent of the population were now even nominal Anglicans . . .

  She felt sick at the thought of her Church. As the earth was thrown in, and they buried it, she hated the Church of England, hated its cant, hated its buried sexual perversions, its delusional belief in its own virtue, its mindless wishy-washy political liberalism, its sheer lack of effectualness. She had said nothing of this to Lesley, as they had returned together to the much-dreaded (by her) funeral baked meats. The cafeteria of the Cathedral had been set aside for this rather gruesome part of the afternoon, and in order to reach it, she and Lesley had passed back through the Cathedral where her father had worshipped daily ever since she had been Down Under. Neither of them had planned to do so, but they had both by instinct paused by the grave of Jane Austen.