I worked hard, for there was plenty to do. Cathcart had relied on the congregation renewing itself, and this, as at Ochtermill, was no longer good enough. Like other places up and down the country, Monimaskit was in the throes of change. The economic developments of the 1980s were uprooting many people, sending some in search of new work and bringing others in from outside. I had to reach out to the general populace, but it seemed futile to try to persuade non-churchgoing people to become churchgoers in an increasingly irreligious age. Instead I set out to persuade them that what the church and its minister did might have some relevance to their everyday lives. I was not going to manage this by force-feeding them God, but by doing things which their better instincts approved of. I believed that most people approved of helping those less fortunate than themselves, and it was therefore to charity that I decided to devote my energies.
But I must explain myself more fully. The fact that I did my job under false pretences, that I lived a lie on a daily basis simply by donning a clerical collar, that I, who was without faith, took God’s name in vain week in and week out by invoking it at Sunday services, christenings, weddings and funerals – none of this meant that I intended to be idle. My time in Leith had taught me that it was possible to be a Christian without involving Christ very much. People with problems generally welcomed any support that was offered, and if they were at first sceptical, fearing perhaps that my help would be conditional on them coming to church or professing religious faith, I soon made it clear that there were no such conditions. I simply did not discuss religion, and if they raised the subject I changed it as soon as possible. If anybody was particularly insistent, I would make an apology for all the mistakes and miseries perpetrated in Christianity’s name. The great age of religion had passed, I said, and if there was to be a role for religion in Scotland’s future those of us who were the messengers of God would have to earn our right to be taken seriously by showing that we were, first and foremost, human beings.
Even if I’d believed my own argument, I was, theologically speaking, skating on thin ice, which was what earned me the rebukes of folk like Peter Macmurray. There are some, in the Kirk and out of it, who have always been suspicious of skating ministers. Macmurray thought I was undoing the work of 450 years, by opening up that old debate between justification by faith and justification by good works. ‘Without faith,’ he said once, when the Session was discussing my latest plans for fund-raising for this or that cause, and he felt that too long had gone by without God getting a mention, ‘without faith, we are nothing. I think we need to remember that.’ ‘Faith, hope and charity, Peter,’ I replied. ‘We need all three, according to Paul. But the greatest of them is charity.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but you know perfectly well it doesn’t mean charity in Corinthians, not in the way we use that word. That’s your Authorised Version again, old-fashioned, misleading. It should really say love.’ ‘I don’t think we need worry about the semantics too much,’ I replied. ‘Charity, love, what difference does it make what we call it?’ ‘What I’m saying,’ Macmurray insisted, ‘is that charity for the sake of charity is not enough. It must come from faith.’ ‘It does,’ I lied, quietly and firmly. Others in the room looked embarrassed at the implied criticism of their minister’s motives. My cheating heart did not miss a beat. Macmurray had no option but to drop the argument, but I could see that he saw through me, and that he was my enemy.
Fortunately Macmurray was only an elder. Had he been, say, Session Clerk, life would have been intolerable for both of us. The Clerk was a man then in his mid-sixties, John Gless. Quiet but determined, his first loyalty was always to Monimaskit Old Kirk, and he accepted me as his minister on the basis that so long as I was working in the Old Kirk’s interest he would stand by me. And he did, until very recently. A minister cannot operate without a good Session Clerk, and John Gless was, and remains, an excellent one. He is now eighty, and still in post: an onerous task, as he is also Treasurer, but he does not want to relinquish his role and nobody else appears to want to take it from him.
There were only twelve elders at the time of my induction, all of them men, even though women have had the right to be elders since 1966. The Session needed new blood, and I made it a priority to persuade several members of the congregation to become elders. In particular, I sought out younger candidates, especially women – people I believed would be willing to change the old ways of doing things. Within a couple of years the eldership was up to twenty-five, and included ten women. Most of these already knew each other: one, Nancy Croy, was an English teacher at Monimaskit Academy, who taught the children of some of the others and ran a reading group in the library to which a couple more belonged. Once I had Nancy on board, the others followed easily. The Session became livelier, lighter of mood and much more energised. The women met in each other’s houses and organised events and the division of tasks with consummate ease. Once, when they came up with a scheme for a series of summer barbecues in different parts of the parish, to which every child (and their families) would be invited, I jokingly referred to them as a coven, a term which did not offend them but deeply shocked Macmurray and his allies. I used it quite a lot thereafter. The other new elders were family men who smiled often but said little and were usually content to follow my lead.
I threw myself into raising money for charity, and so did Jenny. She’d made it clear that she would support me in her role as minister’s wife, participate in what she felt she could and do nothing to jeopardise my position – ‘So long as I don’t have to go to church,’ she said, ‘or join the Women’s Guild.’ We talked about whether she should attend church at all, and decided, since she had no wish to, that she shouldn’t. Coming and going, appearing one week and not the next, would merely get the tongues clacking faster. ‘A matter of conscience,’ I said. ‘We’ll call it a matter of conscience, and anybody who wants to make an issue of it can just bugger off.’
We were lucky to be of the generation we were: it would have been unthinkable for my mother not to have attended church. But Jenny stayed away, and very soon the fact that I had an irreligious wife was seen as a quirk of my nature. The Macmurray faction disapproved, but that was only to be expected.
Meanwhile Jenny joined with me in getting that first charity campaign off the ground. We talked to the schools, to shopkeepers and publicans, to the Roman Catholic and Episcopalian Churches, to all the local organisations, from the Women’s Institute to the local football club, asking them to join with us in putting Monimaskit on the map as one of the most generous places in the land. At first the responses were muted. The other churches were happy to work with us in principle, but in practice they already had their own strategies and ways of doing things. Among the secular groups there was much debate about what causes should be supported, and some resistance based around the fact that they needed to raise money for themselves. I argued that if they ran events – coffee mornings, bring-and-buy sales, dances, fêtes, whatever – with the proceeds being divided between themselves and some other cause, they would widen the appeal, increase the turn-out, raise their own profile, attract more members and, in the long term, make themselves more viable.
I suggested that a number of organisations, including the Old Kirk, agree to fund-raise for one ‘outside’ cause for a period of six months, then choose another, then another, each time extracting the maximum publicity by pooling our resources. We managed to get eight organisations to sign up for an experimental run in the spring and summer of 1990, with cancer research as our first designated cause. Nobody, I thought, could argue against that. We laid down a plan of action, making sure that activities and events didn’t clash or duplicate, and we set ourselves a target figure of £40,000, half of which would go to the selected cancer charity. I told the charity of our plans and they responded enthusiastically, providing publicity material and spreading the word to places we could never have reached. I promised to run in two marathons, London near the start of the six-month period and Moray near the end,
to demonstrate the Church’s commitment.
The whole thing could have fizzled out for any number of reasons, but it didn’t. The target seemed so vast and unattainable – we needed to raise nearly £9 for every man, woman and child in Monimaskit – that everybody pulled the stops out to try to get close to it. We seemed to catch the imagination of people not just in Monimaskit but further afield. I put sponsorship sheets for my marathons in the kirk and took them everywhere I went. It is amazing how two-, three- and five- pound pledges mount up when almost everybody makes one. I became so focused on raising money that other events – poll tax riots in Trafalgar Square, a government minister feeding his five-year-old daughter a hamburger to show that he wasn’t afraid of mad cow disease, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait – almost passed me by. I felt as I did when I went running in the woods: immune to the world and its problems.
I’d never run an official marathon before, although I had covered distances approaching twenty-six miles several times for the pleasure of it. I put in some extra long runs in the weeks leading up to the big London event, but I never had any doubts about not being able to complete the course. I wasn’t even that bothered about what time I achieved. Under three and a half hours would be good, I thought, but I didn’t want to do too well as I intended to improve at the Moray marathon in Elgin.
I took the train down to London on the Saturday, having arranged for a Reader to take the Old Kirk service in my absence. I should have been prepared for the hordes of competitors milling about at Blackheath for the start – I was designated runner number sixteen thousand and something – but you never really get used to the vastness of such events. Every conceivable size, shape and age of runner was present: there were men in dinner jackets, women in nurses’ uniforms, even a man dressed as a carrot. There were a few vicars too, who turned out, when I asked them, not to be vicars. I made a mental note to wear my clerical shirt and collar in future runs. (I did too: it chafed my neck, but it was good publicity.) It rained most of the way, and the first two or three miles were hard work until the crowd thinned out a bit, but after that I settled into a good rhythm, and found myself steadily working my way past other runners. I surprised myself by knocking half an hour off my anticipated time when, tired but exhilarated, I crossed the finishing-line.
I caught the train to Edinburgh at five o’clock and was back at the manse by midnight. Jenny had stayed up for me, although she’d had a bath and was in her dressing-gown. I never saw her looking as happy as she did that night. She was pleased that I’d run the race in a good time and glad that I was home. She’d put a bottle of champagne in the fridge and she cracked it open, and we drank it sitting holding hands across the kitchen table while I told her about the day. I, too, was happy. We went to bed and made love, and settled into our spoons position, me slotted against her back. I thought from her breathing that she had gone straight to sleep, but a few minutes passed and then she said drowsily, ‘It would be good, wouldn’t it, if it could be like this.’
‘If what could?’ I said. Her shoulder was warm against my mouth.
‘Being dead,’ she said. ‘If being dead could be like this. For ever and ever.’
I kissed her shoulder. ‘It would be great,’ I said. She wasn’t being morbid. I knew exactly what she meant.
She fell asleep and I must have drifted off too, but I woke an hour later with my left arm twitching furiously, trapped between our bodies. I turned away from her and lay on my back. There was not a sound outside. I listened to Jenny’s regular breaths, while my arm jerked and shuddered of its own accord, as if it was jealous and wanted my attention. I lay there for ages – not worried, for I was used to it by then – but wondering what it meant. When I think back, I see that we were at a peak of happiness then, from which we began, imperceptibly but steadily, to descend. Whether this proves that my mother was right – that happiness does not matter in the greater scheme of things – I cannot say. Nor can I say that it was mostly my fault, or mostly hers, that we made our way down from that peak, but the sad truth is that we did not see what was happening, that it happened almost as if to two other people who were not us, who had nothing to do with us.
XIX
I raised £800 in sponsorship from the London marathon, and I learned a simple truth about campaigning over that summer: once something begins to roll, everybody wants to jump on board. Local businessmen competed with each other, donating cases of wine, televisions, washing-machines and foreign holidays as raffle prizes at different events, or writing cheques for £50, £100, £200. I did my best to make sure all these donations were recorded in the local paper, pour encourager les autres. The football club ran a disco, persuaded the bar staff and DJ to work for nothing and charged £5 a ticket and an extra fifty pence on every drink – the money raised came to an astonishing £3,200, half for the club and half for cancer research. This was a wonderful effort, but someone in the Macmurray clique complained at the next Session meeting that the Kirk was being associated, albeit indirectly, with a scheme to relieve people of their money while they were under the influence of alcohol. It is too tedious to detail how we countered this petty-mindedness. We won the argument, but Macmurray insisted on the objection being minuted.
As September and the Moray marathon approached, it became clear that we would exceed our £40,000 target. I wanted to do it in style. I wrote to NessTrek, the outdoor activities retailers, and followed up the letter with a series of phone-calls to their head office in Inverness. I talked to a secretary, a marketing assistant and the marketing assistant’s boss before finally someone calling himself an operations manager called me back. He’d read my letter, he said. He thought he might be able to arrange a meeting with the company’s founder and managing director, Iain MacInnes. Was I likely to be in Inverness in the near future? I said that that could be arranged. He booked me in for an appointment in a couple of weeks’ time.
The operations manager’s name was Douglas Sim. He was pleasant enough, but a kind of smirk appeared at his mouth whenever he thought I wasn’t watching. There was something I wasn’t being told. We were making polite conversation in a reception area while Mr MacInnes finished another meeting. The next time the smirk happened I decided not to let it go.
‘Is there something funny?’ I asked.
He blushed. ‘No, no,’ he said.
‘You probably don’t get many ministers in here,’ I said.
‘No, we don’t. That should be him now,’ he added. The sound of voices and laughter came through the door.
‘Sounds promising,’ I said. ‘He’s in a good mood.’
‘Don’t be fooled by that,’ Sim said. ‘He’s a businessman first and foremost. But he’s very generous to charities he likes. A word of warning. He likes your cause, but he might give you a hard time. You personally, I mean.’
‘Oh? Why’s that?’ I asked, and the door opened and a large, red-bearded man in an open-necked checked shirt filled the space.
‘Iain,’ Sim said. ‘This is your next appointment. The Reverend Gideon Mack, from Monimaskit.’
MacInnes took three strides and stood in front of me. He was very tall and very wide, and any remnant of laughter was gone from his face. I held out my hand. He took it for half a second. ‘You’d better come through,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Douglas.’
MacInnes turned around and headed back through the door. I looked at Sim, who stretched out his hand to indicate that I should follow. Then with the same hand he briefly grasped his throat as if to throttle himself, and the smirk turned into a full, unpleasant smile. He was, I realised, referring to my collar.
I followed MacInnes down a corridor, and we went into his office, a big airy room with a window looking out on to the river. He shut the door behind me. ‘Take a seat,’ he said. ‘I’ve read your letter. Talk to me.’
I told him about our activities, the people we’d involved, the way it had snowballed. He seemed to be listening, but he didn’t look at me. He doodled on a sheet of paper, swivelled
in his chair, glanced out of the window. I came to the crux of the matter.
‘Have you ever been to Monimaskit?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said.
‘It’s not a big place,’ I explained. ‘Population four and a half thousand, rural, quiet, unassuming. But in six months we’ve managed to raise £40,000 – half of it for cancer research. To wrap the campaign up I’m running in the Moray marathon and I’m going to do it in my dog-collar. I want to buy a pair of running shoes from NessTrek, and at the end of the race I want NessTrek to buy the dog-collar from me.’
‘Why?’ MacInnes asked. ‘What’s in it for us?’
‘Masses of press coverage,’ I said. ‘TV too – Reporting Scotland are interested. So are Grampian Television. Association with a cheque for at least £25,000 going to cancer research. It certainly won’t do you any harm.’
‘And what kind of time do you anticipate finishing in?’ he asked. ‘We wouldn’t want to be associated with a five-hour hirpler. Or a non-finisher.’
‘I did London in just under three hours,’ I said. MacInnes looked impressed. ‘I’ll be quicker this time. The scenery’s better, and so is the air.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘How much do you expect to get for your efforts?’
‘Five thousand pounds,’ I said. ‘That’s why the cheque for cancer research will be at least £25,000. I’m counting on one last big donation, to be made at the end of the marathon.’
‘That’s a lot of money for a dog-collar,’ he said.
‘Yes, it is,’ I said. ‘But that’s the price.’
‘And you’re the Church of Scotland minister in Monimaskit?’
‘Yes, I am.’
Something passed over his eyes, like an icy breeze over a loch. I tried, and failed, to anticipate what was coming.
‘I hate the Church of fucking Scotland,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ I said.
The Testament of Gideon Mack Page 16