In the Days of Rain

by Rebecca Stott

  During the summer holidays, left to make up our own games, we played with a trunk full of Barbie and Ken dolls, all missing limbs and hair. We stole whiskey from the enormous drinks cabinet in the sitting room, decked ourselves up in chiffon from the dressing-up trunk, and danced on the lawn under the stars, or played hide-and-seek in the woods. Helen and I moved into the rusty caravan in the garden, making our own food, and when her brother came out to join us, we told ghost stories into the night. On Sundays, after church, the whole family ate together around the enormous dining-room table, scarred from the dripping plastic of a melting Action Man who had been set afire as he abseiled from one side of the room to the other.

  We always Gave Thanks in our house, but the Marsdens didn’t, so I was never sure when we were supposed to start eating. My father usually went on for a long time when he Gave Thanks; his voice would go up and down, and you could hear him trying to remember all the things we should be grateful for – that the Lord had shown us the way through something or other, that he had delivered someone or other from danger, that someone else had seen the error of their ways – and I’d be squinting through half-closed eyelids to check that my brothers hadn’t been given bigger portions than me, or up at the painting of the milkmaid in her cobalt-blue apron to check that the milk was still pouring from her jug.

  Now that my father hardly ever came home for dinner, my mother asked my brothers to Give Thanks. And because they didn’t know what to say, they’d repeat something they learned at school which wasn’t right at all – something like, ‘For what we are about to receive may we be truly thankful.’ I’d see my mother wince, but she didn’t seem to know what to tell them to say instead. We were all embarrassed. I was glad that the Marsdens didn’t Give Thanks at all.

  7

  My father and I were both ‘adopted’ by Catholic families after we left the Brethren. I was nine, my father was thirty-four. I found the Marsdens, and at the Wick Theatre Company my father found the Joyces.

  ‘Your father came out of nowhere,’ Vincent Joyce said when I tracked him down and went to see him at his home in Hove a few years ago. ‘None of us had met anyone like him.’

  I wanted to tell Vincent what he had meant to me, that he was one of the first grown-up worldly people I’d ever met, but I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to explain why that was important, and how beautiful and dangerous he’d seemed to me back then. Instead I asked him what my father, who had only been out of the Brethren for a few months, had been like when they’d first met.

  ‘He acted as though he didn’t have much time left,’ Vincent said. ‘He wanted to stay up all night. He wanted everything now.’

  I remembered the feeling I had when I entered the school library for the first time and reached for that copy of The Secret Island, certain I was going to be caught. I could hear the sound of the clock ticking, the minute hand juddering towards the number twelve, when the bell would ring and I’d have to put the book down and go to my next class. I understood why my father might have wanted to stay up all night with these new friends of his. Later, I’d wanted to stay up all night with mine.

  ‘He was so tall,’ Vincent said. ‘He had a kind of spell. I mean, if you were at a party with him, you’d want to be in his part of the room.’

  Vincent had known that my father had been in a religious group, had known he’d been a preacher, but they hadn’t talked about that.

  ‘Your father wanted to talk about films,’ he said. ‘Film-making, the theatre. He’d read more books and poetry than any of us. We talked a lot about poetry. Oh, and Bergman. Often until the early hours of the morning.’

  I’d noticed the line of books about Ingmar Bergman on Vincent’s bookshelf as soon as I walked into his sitting room. Vincent had been twenty-three years old when he met my father. He’d just left film school. If he had shown my father a Bergman film or two, they would have been up all night talking, because my father would have had so many questions.

  Bergman knew about puritanism. His father had been a Lutheran preacher. All his life he’d been coming back to the metaphysical questions that had vexed him as a child. He’d made films about them. He wanted to know what it felt like for someone to lose their faith. What the silence was like that follows the disappearance of God. What it felt like if you kept on talking to God but he stopped answering.

  My father must have been amazed to discover that this Swedish film director understood some of what he himself was experiencing. I wondered if he’d cried in front of Vincent when they watched Bergman films together, just as he’d always cry when he watched them with me ten years later.

  As Vincent talked, my head flickered with Bergman stills: waves breaking against rocky outcrops, a tree bending in the wind, grey skies like gaping voids. Then I was back in a summer picnic that I’d forgotten. Vincent had been there, my mother and father and all of us children, others too. We were up on a hill above Devil’s Dyke. I was lying in the sun on a picnic blanket, my head against my father’s chest, listening to him practise his lines for The Night of the Iguana. Vincent was playing football with my brothers, my mother was in the distance with the twins. I could hear my father’s heart beating in his chest, woven in with the muffled lines from the play, and behind that a kind of distant whooshing, like the waves breaking on a pebble beach inside him. I’d fallen asleep. When I opened my eyes, my father had gone. Dark clouds were passing across the sun. I cried out with a sudden sense of terror, as if I would fall and fall down the steep sides of the dyke and be swallowed up by the void of land beneath and sky above. Then I’d seen my father standing a few hundred yards away – alone – looking down there too. He had turned and smiled and waved, and the world had turned right-side up again.

  My father auditioned for every play the Wick Theatre Company put on in the two years that he was a member, I reminded Vincent. And if he didn’t get a part he’d sign up to do the sound effects, or help Vincent build the sets.

  When I looked closely at the parts he played in those two years, it struck me that they reflected the different stages of my father’s Brethren years. He’d been the Crusader prince in The Lion in Winter in 1972, the ex-priest in The Night of the Iguana in March 1973, and the duped Cassio in Othello in July 1973.

  But as I listened to Vincent talk about the sets he’d built, and how they’d all dreaded the visits of the Fire and Safety Officer, and how good my father’s sound effects were, I realised how absurd it was to think that the parts my father had been given had somehow been chosen for him. If those plays had helped my father to understand some things for the first time, he’d been lucky. That was all it amounted to. It had been a fluke that he’d washed up there, with the Joyces at the Wick Theatre Company, just as it had been a fluke that Helen Marsden had been told to take the desk next to mine. The fact that both families had been Catholics was a coincidence too.

  My father playing the ex-priest T. Lawrence Shannon in Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana in 1973

  I still want to believe, however, that someone had designed and built decompression chambers for my father and for me. There are counsellors now who specialise in treating ex-cult members after they’ve experienced long periods of mind control. One of them told me it sometimes takes him years to get his clients to return to normal levels of scepticism. He has to keep on reminding them that there are many different ways of looking at things; he has to help them to think for themselves again. They used to call this process ‘deprogramming’. But when I think of dancing under the stars with the Marsden children, and the music tapes the Joyce siblings made for my father, I wouldn’t call it ‘deprogramming’, I’d call it ‘decompression’. We’d been a very long way down to the bottom of some kind of sea. There was no easy way back up without getting the bends.

  8

  I may have resolved my problems with Catholics, but my growing body posed other kinds of metaphysical questions. It both fascinated and tormented me, as of course it does for many teenage girls. I’d put o
n weight. The body I’d always taken for granted as continuous with myself, that had once run, climbed and jumped, entirely unconscious of its movement through space, had turned into a body that bled, fell, stumbled, and burned with embarrassment. I was ten, and my periods had started. I was shy. When strangers or teachers spoke to me, I’d blush so that my face throbbed with heat, my skin stretched taut as if it – as if I – might split open.

  But it was more complicated than that. In the Brethren we’d been told that flesh was blackened by sin, but also that flesh would be left behind, thrown off like an old coat, when the Rapture came. Brethren talked about sin all the time: how much we had, how much more the worldly people had, and how lucky we were that the Lord was going to take it all away. My periods, the blood and the abjection of those sanitary towels, only compounded my sense of my own sin. I wanted to throw my body off.

  I once watched one of my father’s beautiful Brethren cousins pass a strawberry from her mouth to that of her new husband as she sat at a table across from me at a family gathering. They thought no one had seen them. But I had. The passing of that strawberry between two mouths was one of the most shocking, daring and beautiful things I’d ever seen. That afternoon the cousin took me onto her knee and wrapped her warm arms about me, and told me there was no getting clean on this earth. My soul was black as black, and always would be. We had crucified the Lord, and only the Lord could undo that. I had to give myself up to him entirely if I wanted to be clean, if I wanted to be saved from all that sin. I had to welcome him into my heart.

  Though I had never believed I’d be good enough to go up in the Rapture, I’d always taken it for granted that my ‘me’ was merely ‘housed’ in the body that looked back at me from the mirror. I did not call this inside ‘me’ a soul. Brethren never talked much about souls. But it had pre-existed my body, and it would outlive it. Now that we’d left the Brethren, it seemed my ‘soul’ would be stuck here forever in this ungainly body of mine.

  Since leaving the Brethren, human bodies had come to seem especially strange to me. As I watched the twins sit and crawl, and then haul themselves up onto their legs and take their first steps, they often looked to me like monkeys. I started to notice eyebrows and nasal hair on grown-ups. My mother had one brown eye and one green one. Why would I never be able to grow a beard like my father? Why did humans have flat faces, and not pointy ones like dogs? Why did I have tiny hairs on the back of my middle finger and on my big toes?

  I’d often heard Brethren preachers talk about an especially wicked man who’d gone around saying that humans had once been monkeys. Charles Darwin had been sent to earth by Satan, they said, to lead men away from God by putting evil ideas in their heads. It had always seemed a strange and beautiful idea to me, one I couldn’t cast off. Though I’d been told it was heresy of the worst order, the idea that humans had once been monkeys seemed no stranger to me than some of the things that happened in the Bible: Lot’s wife getting turned into a pillar of salt, Ezekiel making people out of dry bones, or God making Eve from one of Adam’s ribs.

  I must have been about six when I first looked up Darwin in the Children’s Encyclopaedia. I wanted to know what the monkey man might actually have looked like. I didn’t want to get caught, so I waited until my parents were busy with Brethren guests in the dining room before I slipped into the empty sitting room. I climbed on a chair, eased down the volume marked with ‘D’ onto the table, and spread out the closely-printed pages with my palms.

  But there was no entry on Darwin in the D volume, just the sharp stubs of excised pages where it should have been. These were the volumes my father had described in his memoir, of course, which my grandfather had ordered and then censored with a razor blade.

  Four years later, at the age of ten or eleven and no longer under Brethren rules or scrutiny, I went looking for Darwin again, this time in the school library’s encyclopaedias. If this secret had been so carefully kept from me, I thought, it must be of unique importance. I was determined to find out for myself what this mouthpiece of Satan had really said. I found the entry and the photographs of the kindly-looking bearded man, who with all that eyebrow and beard hair looked more like a monkey than any man I’d ever seen. I read about natural selection, the survival of the fittest and evolution.

  This was no flash of light on the road to Damascus, no conversion to some new kind of religion. There was so much I didn’t fully understand. But strange images began to form in my daydreams. We’d been tiny water creatures once, Darwin had said, long before we were monkeys. We’d swum in a warm sea that had once covered the entire earth. Had we once been lizards and birds too?

  The idea that we were all animals, moving and changing infinitely slowly through time into ever more fantastic forms, seemed both astonishing and beautiful to me, whether it was true or not. I began to think about the strange mirrorings and differences between the shape of my fingernails and those of my brothers, the curves of our noses, the tiny flaps of skin between my outstretched fingers, my ghostly similarity to my wilful great-grandmother. I imagined my body with fur or scales, my mouth tentacled like a coral, my arms as feathered wings.

  Even if I didn’t properly understand how natural selection worked, the world of flowing and endless forms that Darwin described made a dazzling counterpoint to the rule-bound, black-and-white, Manichean, sin-obsessed, flesh-loathing world of the Brethren. Darwin’s version of a world in infinitely slow flux became a kind of poem that I’d keep coming back to for the next forty years. In this version of the world, nothing had purpose or design. Nothing drove or judged us. It was neither cruel nor kind, neither good nor bad. But it was a kind of miracle.

  I’d sometimes stop at the Booth Museum of Natural History now on my way to the sports field on Tuesday afternoons. I’d climb the stairs where I’d once sheltered from the rain and go inside. The museum was usually empty. Glass-fronted display cases, banked five or six high, stretched all the way to the ceiling on every side. Bare floorboards made my footsteps echo.

  Behind the glass, birds were pinioned amongst lifelike reconstructions of their natural habitats. Life looked both beautiful and bloody in those marshes, mountains and sand dunes: an eagle pulled out the innards of a lamb while the lamb’s mother looked on; a vulture pecked out the eyes of a still-living rabbit. There were slaughtered animals everywhere, throats ripped out, eyes open, gazing up at pitiless painted skies. It turned my stomach, but I also found it shudderingly beautiful.

  Notices around the museum walls explained that Edward Thomas Booth, a rich Victorian recluse, had set out to shoot, stuff and display a specimen of every bird in the British Isles. He died before he finished his project, but he’d still managed to collect hundreds of species. Once he realised he’d never be able to shoot one of every kind singlehanded, he recruited gamekeepers and game wardens all around the country to kill the birds he didn’t have, and to mail him the dead specimens.

  A sailor from the Newarp lightship in the North Sea had sent him wings taken from all the migrating birds that had collided with the light or got caught in the rigging. The list he sent Booth was a kind of poetry, I thought: Lark 520, Starling 348, Stormy Petrel 45, Brown Linnet 15, Greenfinch 21, Brambling 6, Fieldfare 2, Forktailed Petrel 1, Knot 2, Blackbird 20, Redwing 13, Chaffinch 15, Tree Sparrow 3, Rook 2, Snipe 1, Kittiwake 1. The parcel the postman delivered that day must have been enormous. I tried to imagine what 520 lark wings would have looked like: all those different shapes and colours and feather patterns, all those different birds.

  The blood and guts and empty eye sockets of Booth’s tableaux seemed to confirm something I already half-knew: that life was bloody, and that you had to watch your back or there’d be claws on you. But though Booth had tried to fix all those birds, lock them into his boxes, take them out of time, I now knew too, in a crude and stumbling kind of way, that everything was on the move, turning into something else, even if we couldn’t actually see it with our human eyes. Even Edward Thomas Booth couldn’t sto
p that.

  9

  Though we’d left the Brethren, my parents kept on hearing news about the bad things that were happening in ‘the Jims’, as they and my grandparents now called the Taylorite Brethren. The Taylor system hadn’t stopped with JT Junior’s death. Jim Symington, a pig farmer from North Dakota, had taken over as leader when JT Junior died. They called him ‘the Elect Vessel’ now, rather than the Man of God. Thousands of people were still in ‘the Jims’, including some of our aunts and uncles and cousins. From what I could tell, they were having unspeakable things done to them, and were doing unspeakable things to each other. People were still being forced to confess to terrible things; there’d been more suicides.

  ‘He has a sister who’s still in the Jims,’ I’d hear people say to my grandparents, and they’d all look sad and cross. My mother’s brother was still in the Jims, as was one of my father’s favourite cousins. Those families had just disappeared from the landscape of our daily lives, as if they’d been rubbed out.

  I was nine when I first heard my parents speak of the Andover Tragedy. We were in the car, coming back from somewhere. I’d been thinking about the clunky shoes my mother had just bought me for school. My father was driving erratically, talking fast to my mother with his voice raised and thumping the steering wheel from time to time. When I heard him talking about an axe, I leaned forward a little so I could hear better without drawing attention to myself. I’d read about axes in the fairy tales I’d borrowed from the school library. The woodcutter in ‘Red Riding Hood’ had an axe. He cut off the wolf’s head with it.

  People were dead, Brethren people. My parents knew them. But it was the axe I was interested in. And the feet. My father said the postman had seen Roger Panes’s feet through the letterbox. Did that mean he was hanging from something, his feet swinging in mid-air in the hallway? I imagined those feet with socks; then with polished boots. For weeks afterwards I thought about those feet and the axe and the postman with his forehead pressed against the letterbox, looking in, but I was unable to put the pieces of the puzzle together. And they were always mixed up with those clunky school shoes I hated.