LOOK, STRANGER

by MARY HOCKING

  The platform in the hall was not in use and the chairs had been staggered in a semi-circle facing the long wall. Vereker had wanted the atmosphere to be informal and undevotional. He was seated out front beside a small table on which there was a large vase of spring flowers which he hoped he would not knock over. Miss Genevieve Draisey’s golden retriever had elected to sit beside him and was surveying the assembly with the lofty benevolence of a high court judge.

  Miss Draisey had wanted to sit at the door to make a note of the names and addresses of non-churchgoers, but Vereker had discouraged this so she had put herself in charge of the refreshments. Vereker had, however, agreed with some reluctance that Colonel Maitland and Donald Jarman should usher people into their seats. ‘Left to themselves, they’ll all sit in tight little groups,’ Jarman had said. ‘Especially the Baptists.’ He had been right: to meet under the same roof appeared to be the limit to which even the most ecumenically-minded were prepared to go. Colonel Maitland, however, had been indefatigable, and as Vereker looked round the hall he could see the Baptist minister and two of his congregation penned in with giggling youngsters wearing jerseys with West Albion Football Club on their breasts and eating fish and chips from a carton. His own parishioners had shown no more inclination than the Baptists to spread themselves thinly, and Mrs. Hooper looked far from reconciled to her situation between a young man wearing a guitar as though it was an extra limb and a dishevelled old man with a severe list to port which continually brought his head down in the region of her bosom. A few people from the fairground area stood in the doorway sniffing the atmosphere. Colonel Maitland pounced on them before they could decide to turn away and nosed them firmly in the direction of the rector of St. Luke’s; he stayed to bark some kind of introduction and then nosed after a couple from Virginia Close. The Virginia Close people wore tasteful casual clothes and quietly amused expressions and Colonel Maitland penned them with three hairy young men who might have stepped out of one of the Bible illustrations which adorned the Sunday School noticeboard. The Virginia Close people quizzed the other occupants of the hall, recognized acquaintances and exchanged rueful, must-enter-into-village-life-sometimes grimaces.

  Mrs. Jarman came up to Vereker and said, ‘The press are here,’ as though she was announcing the arrival of the firing squad. She indicated a small, passive man sitting with hands folded docilely over a notebook. Behind him, the girl with frizzed brown hair was saying, ‘You’ve got to be joking!’ Her companion answered, ‘We used to go to meetings like this when I was a kid. Honest! We used to sing a lot of fucking choruses. “Wide, wide as the ocean. . . .” ’ Mrs. Hooper turned to glare at him and he leant forward to speak to her. ‘Do you sing that still, love? Do you still sing “Wide, wide as the ocean”? Christ!’ He went off into a paroxysm of laughter. Mrs. Hooper turned away and the frizzy-haired girl bit her thumbnail.

  Vereker looked at the clock which said five-past eight. Colonel Maitland, catching his eye, nodded. Vereker made a brief speech of welcome, apologized for sitting out front but said he thought that in a meeting of this size it was important to see that everyone had a chance to speak. Then he sat down and waited.

  The golden retriever settled himself, nose on paws, and gave a deep sigh. The girl with the frizzed hair said to Mrs. Hooper, ‘What’s bothering you, then? Smell something bad, can you?’

  Miss Draisey, who was now standing with her back to the kitchen door, said throatily, ‘I am reminded of the words of St. John of the Cross:

  "He Himself was the beginning

  So He had none, being one.

  What was born of the beginning

  Was the word we call the Son.

  Even so has God conceived Him

  And conceived Him always so,

  Ever giving Him the substance

  As He gave it long ago"

  I wonder how this strikes us today?’

  It struck this particular assembly dumb, although the golden retriever loyally thumped his tail on the floor. The girl with the frizzed hair said incredulously to her companion, ‘You’re not going to listen to this all the evening?’ Colonel Maitland moved quietly to the side of the hall and began a count of those present.

  A young man got up. He had lank hair and a pale, pinched face and he was trembling as if he had just come out of a high dive and found the water colder than he had expected. ‘Jesus is alive,’ he said. ‘He’s here in this room with us.’ People turned round, craning their necks to see the speaker; mostly, they looked anything but eager at his pronouncement. ‘I’m not a g . . . g . . . good speaker,’ the young man continued, miserable but undeterred by a snort from the chorus-singer, ‘Some of you h . . . have a l . . . lot to say in other p . . . places. Let Him speak in you, n . . . now!’ He sat down and there was a murmur of ‘Well done, Jimmy!’ ‘Good lad!’

  Jimmy had broken the ice. Old Miss Harmer, the Jarmans’ daily help, was on her feet saying that they had all been shamed. Why were they silent? She told how she had nursed her sick mother and at times when her spirit failed her she had felt Jesus taking over. This had made her wonder how many other times in her life He would have acted in her if only she had been ready. She was a sincere and humble woman and she was listened to with respect. After she sat down, one or two people recalled similar experiences, words of comfort to the dying which came at a time when they themselves had no idea what to say, a sudden uncharacteristic braveness in the face of hooligans, the sense of a companion on a lonely night journey.

  Then a bearded, middle-aged man got up and said he would like to know if Jesus had been Mary Magdalene’s lover; he said he didn’t want to give any offence because he personally would think all the more of Jesus if this was so. The Methodist minister raised his eyes to the ceiling with the almost insupportable weariness of one hearing a question for the hundredth time and Vereker reflected that life among the Methodists must be very different these days. One of the Baptist youths told the bearded man that Jesus was the man for all men. The bearded man said in that case why was St. John singled out as the disciple whom Jesus loved? Miss Draisey said that it was Lazarus, not St. John, who was the disciple whom Jesus loved, and the bearded man said, ‘Perhaps he loved them both?’

  After that, the companion of the girl with frizzy hair sang “, wide as the ocean”; but those around him had the sense to join in and he muttered, ‘Oh, piss off!’ and relapsed into silence. The golden retriever sat up and barked, then threw himself crossly under the table, endangering the stability of the vase of flowers. A young girl told how she went into pubs and asked people if they knew Jesus, and the landlords told her she was making a nuisance of herself, just as if she was a whore. A young man said that Jesus was in the factory, and the terraces at the football ground, and the parks where the meths drinkers slept. The bearded man shouted, ‘What’s He doing about it, then?’

  How far Christianity had moved from its Founder! Vereker thought as he listened. No one was more to blame for this than the clergy who were as eager as any politician to respond to popular demand. You want a revolutionary Jesus, sir? He’s yours. You’d like a comforter, grandma? We have him here; admittedly he wasn’t comfortable company while He was on earth, but we’ve smoothed out the sharp edges. And you, young lady, you want to be turned on? We’ve got a very special Jesus for you. You want Him homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, your local bishop can supply him: the all-purpose Jesus adapted to your particular preoccupation.

  ‘This makes me want to puke! Yes, you’d better move away, dear, I might even do it.’ Vereker looked up to see what spirit he had conjured up by his angry thoughts. It was Meg Jacobs. ‘I came here because I thought maybe something was really stirring in this dump. But I ought to have saved my petrol. If you really care, you should be out doing something; there’s plenty of work for you in this particular vineyard, every one of you, even the duchess in the pink hat. I’ll sit at the door and you can enlist as you go out!’

  She was well-known and people received her outbur
st with good-humour. Someone shouted, ‘Good old Meg!’ She hunched down in her chair, hands dangling loose between spread knees, head bent.

  People looked expectantly at Vereker. He could see that on the whole they felt they had come out of it rather well; they had been abused, ridiculed and threatened, and they had kept their cool. Miss Draisey, at the kitchen door, was about to make an announcement when she was unexpectedly forestalled. Zoe Lindsay was standing up. Probably no one else in the hall could have made such an impact simply by getting to their feet. The little buzz of conversation dwindled and for the first time Vereker was aware of a tremor of unease, a primitive fear of things unseen; darkness pressed against the window panes and just for a moment it was in all their thoughts. Mrs. Hooper glanced over her shoulder as if to reassure herself that the horrible chorus-singing man was indeed behind her.

  Zoe stood quite still, her hands resting lightly on the back of the chair in front of her; unlike Meg Jacobs, she was unaware of the attention centred on her and she looked at Vereker as if there was no one there but the two of them. Perhaps he was tired, or perhaps there was a voltage reduction, but it seemed to him that the lights in the hall had dimmed; he could see that there were a great many people in front of him, but they were blurred and formless, only Zoe stood out with a strange, frosty clarity. She said, ‘What is Jesus Christ to you?’ He had been given notice of this question: now he was called to account. But he was not ready and wished to be excused: whatever he said, he would say something different in a year’s time because this was the question which it takes a lifetime to answer.

  The relief in the hall was tangible. Now their patience would be rewarded with the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, and a cup of coffee. Miss Draisey already had the kitchen door open and the golden retriever padded round to be first in the queue.

  Vereker, lacking wisdom, could only speak out of his anger. ‘T. S. Eliot put it pretty well, I think.’

  They looked at him with polite unconcern as they fumbled for gloves and handbags. Someone, eager to get it in first, said, ‘ “The wounded surgeon. . . .” ’

  ‘No. “In the juvescence of the year came Christ the tiger. . . .” ’

  Blankness. Eyes strayed towards the kitchen door. Donald Jarman looked at his watch.

  ‘If you met a tiger in your path, you wouldn’t be able to take it or leave it, would you? Well, my picture of Christ isn’t a take- it-or-leave-it Christ.’ Vereker was determined they were not going to enjoy their coffee. ‘We have this enormous gift, this gift of Jesus Christ, and we’re so mealy-mouthed about it, almost as if it wasn’t quite decent. We tame Him, wrap Him up in jargon, make His teaching bland and easily assimilated, a pop-culture, media-image Christ with no sting left in Him. We’d be better off saying to ourselves, “Look, this isn’t all that important to me and if it isn’t all that important then I’m not really a Christian at all!” At least then we’d stand stripped of everything; we’d have to find something to clothe ourselves in, somewhere to go from there on. Perhaps that is when we really meet Him; when we’ve put aside all the comfortable, cosy, trivial things, including Him, if that’s the kind of picture we have of Him. The Jesus of the pop group and West Albion Football Club: He’s not much more than a mascot, is he? Throw him away. And gentle Jesus meek and mild, what about him? He doesn’t have much to offer us today, does gentle Jesus meek and mild. Cast him out! Or is he a suffering Christ, anaemic, tortured, dying? He’s even less use to us. Let him die!’

  ‘But a tiger is savage!’ an elderly lady protested.

  ‘Sure, a tiger tears you apart. And I reckon that is how it seemed to those fishermen He told to leave everything and follow Him. And He meant that. He meant that their whole lives would be changed, not that they would give a bit more of themselves, try a little harder, lead a slightly better life. He meant changed. If you stand face to face with a tiger, you don’t survive that encounter unchanged. Nor does your church. What is He saying to us today? Don’t you think He might be telling us to tear down that medieval structure over there and set about the business of replacing it with something more meaningful for twentieth century man? He is the Christ of the living, not of the twelfth century.’

  Zoe was still standing; she had a rapt expression on her face as though she had just heard an inspired rendering of the Hallelujah Chorus. This wasn’t what those around her seemed to have heard; they looked like people who have made a modest request for coffee and been given a dose of quinine. For a few moments they were too aggrieved to move; then Nancy pushed her way to the door. Others began to move, the meeting broke up.

  Nancy stumbled out into the cool darkness. It was dreadful! she thought. What had come over her father, bawling out like that? She was gooseflesh all over. She couldn’t bear to meet anyone, so she walked towards the church and made her way round the side of it to where a footpath led across a field and eventually joined the footpath to Carrick Farm. As she passed the church she noticed that the side door was open, but she was too taken up with her own thoughts to wonder why. She had lost sight of Tudor and thought that perhaps he hadn’t stayed until the end of the meeting. He would have gone home. She didn’t want to talk to him now, but she thought that perhaps there would be a light on in the sitting-room and she would catch a glimpse of him.

  Tudor, however, had remained in the hall. Much of the time he had found the proceedings vastly amusing. If only he had left before the end he would have felt unusually relaxed; but the end had spoilt it all. He turned into the graveyard, meaning to take the footpath across the fields. The moon was up and beyond the graveyard wall the flat fields and marshes were strange as a lunar landscape. The church hall with its lighted windows looked like some pathetic human capsule flung out into space. The sense of emptiness came to him when he was only half-way across the graveyard. There was something cold and hard in the pit of his stomach and he knew that one of his bad spells was coming on. He sat on the fiat-topped tomb of the lords of the manor, Zoe’s forebears. He had learnt a long time ago that it was better to put up no resistance to a bad spell, that way it was over quicker. It was the view beyond the graveyard wall that had brought this one on. He didn’t like long views and uncharted territory; his weak, acquiescent parents had left him to wander about in uncharted territory all his childhood. He didn’t like the words that went with this kind of territory, boundless, infinite, immeasurable . . . words that made him feel as if he was shrinking and shrinking until he was no bigger than a walnut. Why wasn’t Zoe here? She was the only person who had ever shown him any understanding and she had decided to go mad, had deliberately steered herself round the bend in order to avoid her responsibility towards him. He looked at the lights of the church hall and shuddered as he thought of her standing there tonight, looking at Vereker in that strange way. The terror sharpened. He put his head on his knees and visualized his diary for tomorrow, the clients he had to see; he selected one of them and began to go through the case history details, date of birth, address, name of G.P., referred by, members of household. . . . Gradually, his breathing grew easier and by the time he had got to “family alignments”, the terror had subsided. He rose shakily to his feet.

  It was then, as he stood wondering whether it would be better to take the long way back to the farm, thus avoiding the marshes, that he noticed that the side door of the church was open. He walked softly across the grass, keeping clear of the gravel path, and entered the church. A shaft of moonlight slanted through the big rose window and fell across the altar and the chancel, and in this silver light Milo performed a dance of his own devising. He was naked and he danced rather well. The moonlight helped, of course.

  Tudor moved slowly down the aisle until he had a good view. Milo’s gestures were obviously obscene, but in the context Tudor thought that this was obscenity raised to the beautiful. There was a buried, crippled part of oneself that demanded to be released; even as he watched Milo, his own body throbbed for that release.

  A breeze was ge
tting up. It came in through the open door like a presence and ruffled through the church guides and sent a news sheet about Christian Aid skittering along the stone floor to Tudor’s feet. Milo felt it. He stopped dancing and looked round, suddenly irresolute. Then he took one step and stood on the raised platform in front of the altar. He turned his head to one side and then to the other, looking at the heavy brass candlesticks, then he looked up at the cross. The breeze had passed and now all was quiet. The moon slanted its beam across the chancel. In the Lady Chapel a light burnt in a hanging lamp, the flame unflickering, still, eternal, perpetual. . . . The terror was coming back, only now it was worse than ever. Milo was standing still and it was coming down, folding itself around him, ineffable, undefinable, unimaginable, mind- bending evil, without form or dimension There was a big standing brass candlestick to Tudor’s right; it was heavy, but he lifted it and rushing forward smashed it across the altar, then swung it at the stained glass window above the altar. He shouted to Milo, ‘Get out of here! Get out!’

  The substance of the boy seemed to have gone; in the dim light only two enormous eyes stared up at Tudor. ‘It’s not me you have to fear,’ Tudor said. ‘I have saved you. Get out of this place.’

  The eyes vanished and bare feet scampered over the stone-flagged floor. Tudor put down the candlestick and walked to the door. The night air brought the smell of wet grass and a rabbit scurried across the path at his feet. There was no other movement in the graveyard. Milo must have run as though the Devil was at his heels.

  Chapter Six

  Dawn was full of false promise, that delicate rosy flush only too often was sweated out by rain within the hour. Dame Eleanor, who knew all about false promise, was awash already. She had one of the loveliest faces Zoe had ever seen, a little white oval on which the features had been lightly sketched, but to startling effect. The opal eyes solicited what the long nose with its prettily tilted tip and the light, frivolous mouth seemed already to have found; some slight irregularity – the eyes not quite level, the mouth a trifle lop-sided – set the seal of inconstancy. How blasphemous this little face must have seemed in this world of women! And how inexplicable that she should be condemned to live among them, a sad inconstant nymph with no place here where fidelity was at a premium. No wonder she cried! But would she have been happier in the world outside? She didn’t look as though she would ever learn much about loving, she was as unthinking as a moth always flying into the flame. Dame Eleanor went very slightly out of focus.