by Tim Pears
Often her answers had nothing to do with the question. “How often is you s’posed to pray, grandma?” I asked her, hoping to learn something with which I could impress the Rector.
“Regularity,” she said, “that’s the answer. And not after breakfast neither, always before. Keep regular, girl, stay healthy.” More than anything else, it was grandmother’s recitation of these useless maxims that gradually made people oblivious to the sound of her voice. She only wanted to share the experience of her long lifetime, but without realizing it she was somehow being forced to pass on, along with her own wisdom, the advice she’d been given as a child. Strictures concerning personal cleanliness, a person’s duties both in the household and in the outside world, trite religious imperatives, these and many more would fall from her tongue on deaf ears, apart from mine. The trouble was that often I couldn’t tell the difference.
“I like the sound of your grandmother,” said Johnathan.
Blimey, I thought, next thing he’ll want to meet her, so I changed the subject quickly.
“Have you heard about all these unemployed?” I asked him. “Ian says they’re going to start riding out of the cities on their bikes and ask for their old jobs back.”
Johnathan stared at the surface of the quarry pool. “I wish Tolstoy was still alive,” he said gloomily. “He would have had an answer.” And then he jumped up and said: “Come on, race you to the middle!”
§
The Rector, though, was not only prepared to listen to my enquiries, he responded as if pleased to discover someone who shared his concerns.
I asked him why people fought against those they had most in common with, and he told me all about intolerance, about the war he’d fought in even though Jesus said to turn the other cheek, and he told a joke about a man stopped in a quiet lane in Northern Ireland in the middle of the night by masked gunmen.
“‘Are you Protestant or Catholic?’ they demanded.”
“The man trembled, but inspiration came to him: ‘I’m an atheist,’ he told them.”
“‘Yes, but are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?’ they asked,” said the Rector, roaring with laughter which turned into a fit of coughing that bent him double. But he came back up smiling and carried on talking, about Jews who believe that the Torah was with God before He created the world, it existed in heaven; about Sunni Muslims who not only maintain that the Koran existed before Creation, they emphasize that it was in Arabic. He couldn’t stop himself from laughing again, and I began to realize that he joked when he was most serious. “They had trouble getting Muslims to sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” he told me, “because they didn’t agree with freedom of worship, since there’s only one God: Allah. It’s as bad as the Christian Churches, who decided most of the world, not yet introduced to Christ’s teachings, lived and died in a state of sin.” He shook his head at things beyond his comprehension.
“Where is God, anyway?” I asked. “In the church? Do you have to go there to be with him?”
He lit a cigarette and looked at me. “You know very well that’s simplistic nonsense,” he replied. “The church is merely symbolic, a place to help us concentrate our thought and energy. Are you teasing me, Alison?”
“No,” I said, “I just don’t understand how God can be everywhere. I know if he exists he must be everywhere, but he can’t be inside things and inside people and in the air and…everywhere.”
“I know. It’s hard to grasp,” he agreed, unhelpfully. “It’s funny, Alison, you know,” he reflected, “you’re just a little boy asking questions—“What’s this mean? Why do people do that?” You grow up but inside you’re still just a little boy asking questions. Except that the next thing you know there’s a boy or girl beside you asking you the very same questions.”
§
The Rector told me that when he was young he was convinced that other people saw the point of life. He could not imagine that anyone else suffered from the same inability to find purpose as he did. He could find no fixed point inside himself, no sense of self beyond a vapid personality that sensations, experienced in the flow of time, blew into ever changing shapes. He knew he had no substance. Whereas others’ actions, speech, movement, their very physical being, spoke of purpose.
It was only gradually that he realized he was no more purposeless than others, that the inherent busyness of their being, as observed, was an illusion created by the fact of observation. As he lost his awe of other people, his expectations of them, he realized not only that truth would not be given him by others, but that he had to find it within himself.
I told him about an experiment we’d done at Primary School, dipping a piece of string into a beaker of blue liquid, and how a crystal formed on the end of the string, as if out of nothing.
“That’s why we’re here, Alison,” he said, seizing upon the metaphor with his eagerness of a preacher; “we’re simply souls dipped into time, in order to substantiate ourselves.”
And yet although he thought he’d lost his awe of other people, he still felt himself insubstantial, and thought he saw glimpses in others of their greater solidity. He never saw himself as others saw him, a tough, obstinate man of impractical ideals and unshakeable integrity.
Sometimes I saw him through his study window, bent over his desk, surrounded by twenty-six empty rooms. A lifetime of writing baptismal and funeral addresses, letters, articles, diaries, notebooks and parish magazines had given him arthritis, so that after completing a sermon his hand was like a claw: he had to extract the pen from between his fingers with his other hand and massage it back to normality. He thought it pleasingly ironic that as his sermons became a little more liable to be worth listening to, they gave him an increasing amount of pain to write.
At such times I thought he must be the loneliest man in the world. But he wasn’t really lonely, just alone. His mind was too intent upon the elusive truths he was pursuing to reflect on the futility of ever communicating them to other people.
He had no friends, but occasionally he went out to supper with one or other of the newcomer families who spoke the same as he did, without an accent. None of them came to church, and he felt at ease in their company, where he could argue freely.
The Rector knew that most of the villagers felt uncomfortable when he visited, even those he’d known for forty years. He remembered when he first arrived from Crewe with his wife and children, ‘to get the nits out of their hair and fresh air in their lungs’, he said.
In fact he’d nearly turned round and left before they’d even unpacked: at the first service he took the church was full, and he realized that he’d made the right choice, that country people hadn’t lost their spirituality as had happened to those forced to live in city slums and slave in factories. Half-way through his sermon, a complex dissertation based on the Gospel reading of Christ’s dictum that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, a red-faced farmer in one of the back pews stood up and heckled him:
“You don’t know what you’re bloody talking about, man! I had to work for my money!”
A woman near the front turned round and shouted back: “Leave him be, Gordon! Hear him out!” And the man sat down.
A couple of minutes later, though, another man stood up:
“You clergy’s hand in glove with the rich! You give everything away like Jesus and walk about in sandals and I might come back and listen to you,” he declared, and marched out.
He’d never been heckled in the pulpit before, and a cold sweat turned to ice on his back. He got to the end of his sermon in a blur.
Afterwards he was surprised to find a number of men outside, who had sat smoking in the graveyard while their wives were inside. He introduced himself, as he had to the congregation. “Don’t bother,” said one old man. “You’ll never get me into that there church. I ‘ad enough of bowing and scraping when I was a bay.”
“We idn’t afeared
of God no more,” another told him, as they walked away across the churchyard.
The following week’s congregation was half the size of his first, because, as Granny Sims told him, they’d only come to size him up. He discovered to his dismay that he’d taken over from the latest in a long line of priests overfriendly with the Viscounts, patrons of the living—with their family’s special pew, their crypt beneath the church, their founder’s portrait on the wall—conniving in their exploitation of the people of the village. They’d performed the difficult task of reading the scriptures and then interpreting their opposite meaning. No wonder he wasn’t trusted here. His predecessors had made themselves comfortable, taken pains not to disturb anyone, and enjoyed the old-fashioned life of a country parson: they took their tithes from tenant farmers far worse off than themselves; they employed two men to take care of their vegetable and flower gardens; and they sang lusty hymns, which helped keep people’s minds off the words in the Bible they ignored.
And more than any of these there was the fact that he came from a different social class. “I’m afraid there’s not much mention of this in the Gospels, Alison. Christ doesn’t seem to have allowed for the English class system. It’s not as simple a problem as the one faced by the inhabitants of Babel, because we appear on the surface to be speaking the same language.”
So he invited the 14th Viscount over for a drink. He was a short man with broken spectacles held together with elasto-plast; he wore thick corduroy trousers and a thin cardigan, with a spotted bow-tie. The Rector had expected an arrogant and empty-headed aristocrat, but instead found a charming and open-minded drinking companion. Even so, he declared that he was sorry, it was nothing personal, but things had to change, this priest was not going to be the Teignmouths’ lackey as others had, he was on the side of the oppressed, the downtrodden, as he was obliged to be by his collar and his conscience, and that was the plain and simple truth.
The Viscount accepted another gin and tonic and said yes, how true that is, and what a good idea it was to make a fresh start, a number of his ancestors had done that from time to time, it shook things up. He said he’d support the Rector in his efforts with all the means at his disposal, and how pleased he was he’d agreed to his induction.
The Rector tried to tell him that he was missing the point, there was a problem here that the Viscount couldn’t solve because he was it, but he got his words tangled up, since it wasn’t in his nature to declare war on a man he’d only just met and who, besides, he found agreeable.
“Don’t be so serious, old chap,” the Viscount told him. “You’re as outmoded as I am. People resent being subordinate to God as much as they resent being subordinate to another human being. One day this rectory will be converted to a different use, just as our estate will, sooner rather than later according to my accountant. A priest will drive in from far away to take services in a crumbling church for senile parishioners, living out the servile pattern of their childhood. And when they die, we’ll all be able to live in a world uncomplicated by notions of God and the afterlife, and other such nonsense.”
The Rector felt on firmer ground discussing religion, especially with an atheist: “It might be easier to live in a world uncomplicated by food; unfortunately we need it. That’s the way we are. And tell me this: why are you atheists as unhappy as we are?”
“Quite frankly I don’t care enough to call myself an atheist. The essential attraction of religion is to safeguard against extinction. But since the church has recanted the fearsome threat of Hell, and with it fear, why should I even bother with such an absurd preoccupation? I’m better off concerned with whether my wife still loves me.”
“Ideas change, of course. What used to be imagined as Hell we now perceive as non-advancement; we’re here to evolve spiritually; not to do so means you’ll start again in the same place, or drop back. You see, you’re just lazy; representative of this generation.”
“I don’t deny it,” he replied. “I try to enjoy life.”
“That’s the problem. We’ve adopted this notion that the goal of life is happiness. What a lovely idea! And how far from the truth!” And he launched into a lengthy exposition of the fallacies of this human foible, in the middle of which the Viscount, not used to the Rector’s drinking habits, promptly fell asleep.
§
The Rector also discovered, to his dismay, that his first sermon was to be the only one that anyone seemed to listen to: they had an ability to switch off and think of other things while he was presenting them with the challenge of the Gospel message, or else to take from his radical but complex arguments the simplest conclusion, from which they derived the comfort they were seeking. He longed for the hecklers to return, but they stayed away. Those who remained did so in order to petition a remote divinity for the health of their livestock and children, and to do their best to drown the efforts of a tone-deaf organist.
§
The Rector’s evenings always ended the same. It didn’t matter whether he’d been attending a meeting of the PCC or drinking two or three stiff gin and tonics before a TV dinner: he always returned to his study to work. Through the power of his formidable concentration he would draw together the resources of his mind, scattered by alcohol, and read and write and think into the early hours. He read voraciously and wrote so much they had to have a regular order of biros for him down at the shop, but mostly he leaned back in his chair and took upon himself the burden of thought, as he lit another cigarette. He always used matches: every summer the white elephant stall at the village fete included one or two lighters that someone had had the inspiration of giving the Rector for Christmas, having noticed the poor man get through a box of matches a day. He always gave them away because he figured that if he had a lighter it would make it more difficult to give up smoking, which was something he intended to do at the earliest opportunity. Every time it occurred to him, however, he put it off for a couple of days, in a constant see-saw struggle, and cursed his weakness.
The trouble was he needed to smoke to help him concentrate in his search for truth, even though he was coming increasingly to suspect the very notion. Truth was, for him, synonymous with the Absolute, with God, but he knew this assumption depended upon the accident of his birth at a particular time, in a particular culture. He lacked the humility of the mystics, and as for the Indian yogis and the Buddhist saints whose sweet lives he read in paperback, he could not believe that they were born with egos. His had tormented him all his life. He had tried to annihilate it with prayer and hunt it down through rational argument, but it had always eluded him, slinking into the shadows to lick its wounds and recuperate, its eyes, malicious, glinting in the darkness.
He could never fully relax and submit himself to the will of God, that was the problem. Perhaps, he conceded, he was secretly scared of laying the silent offering of his self at God’s door, in case it wasn’t answered. Even now, at his age, he found the idea of there being no God made him feel nauseous: it was as if some necessary precondition of life, like gravity or air, had vanished, and he felt dizzy.
Sometimes, he became so engrossed, so lost, in his nights of speculation, that dawn surprised him at his desk, and he would walk outside to be greeted by a cacophony of birds unaware of his contemplation, with bruised rings around his eyes.
And once, in the middle of the night he left his coffee to boil dry in the pan, confused by too much gin and too much thought, just to stretch his legs, and fell asleep. He was woken in the morning, in the field beyond his overgrown vegetable garden, by a cow’s warm breath on his face.
EIGHT
Ice-Cream
“Do you want to come to church Sunday?” I asked Johnathan, as we lay by the pool, tired and bored. It was Tuesday, 11 September. We should have been back at school a week now.
“You can walk round by grandfather’s back fields, no one’ll see you. And the congregation’s all senile anyway.”
Johnathan raised his left eyebrow and smirked. “Really, Alison,�
�� he said in his superior manner, “we are nearly at the end of the twentieth century, you know. We gave up p-p-primitive religion eons ago.” Then his eyebrow dropped and his eyes widened. “How about coming to visit? Father’s making jam. We picked tons of blackberries yesterday.”
§
When Johnathan’s father, the 15th Viscount Teignmouth, sold the estate to a property developer who then went bust, he moved his family into the old Lodge. When you looked at the estate from up at the beech tree the Lodge seemed like a little toy compared to the big boarded-up house, and I imagined Johnathan and his parents walking around inside it like giants in a doll’s house, having to bend over as they moved around, folding limbs into miniature furniture.
Now as Johnathan led me through the front door I saw what an illusion that had been: the Lodge was as large as our farmhouse and the rooms, although their ceilings weren’t that much higher than Johnathan’s crumpled mop of hair, were all wide and spacious. But what was even more surprising was the furniture: none of it looked real, because every wooden sideboard, bookcase, table, chair and chest of drawers was covered in intricate carved patterns or decorated with wandering strips of delicate beading. No single surface was left straight and simple but had been finished off in ridiculous, fanciful curls by a wandering jig-saw. It looked like make-believe furniture, from the set of one of the television series mother liked to watch about scandal and dignity among the aristocracy. I realized that the big house must have been full of such furniture on all five floors, in all the huge rooms and all along the wide corridors, a mind-boggling prospect. And Johnathan’s father just kept back a minimum amount, the most or, maybe, the least valuable.
The walls were covered in stacks of books, leather-bound like the few on grandmother’s mantelpiece, but here were hundreds, thousands, leaving space only for the sash-cord windows and here and there a narrow upright strip of wall jam-packed with dim portraits of Johnathan’s ancestors.