âBrodie!' growled Deacon, scarce able to believe what he was hearing. He
knew
how Brodie felt about Daniel Hood. It had irritated him almost beyond bearing for four years. Though he understood that she had more pressing matters on her mind right now, still he was sickened at the way she'd turned on her friend.
And he knew that tomorrow she'd be sorry. By tomorrow, though, it would be too late. You kick a dog once too often and it runs away. Daniel was hard up against the limit of what even his devotion could take. Deacon saw it in the ashy pallor of his cheek, the glassy stretch of his eyes. She'd pushed him before now, pushed hard â an unthinking cruelty, or because she was hurting and needed to unload some of it. And he'd loved her enough to take it. But Deacon didn't think anyone could love anyone enough to take this.
There's nothing intrinsically impressive about a grown man drawing himself up to his full five foot seven. But it isn't always the biggest volcanoes that erupt. Daniel stood still, utterly still except for a fine trembling, his face as white as bone, his jaw clenched. Behind the thick glasses a steely resolution had replaced the pain. He felt in his pocket, put her office keys on the coffee table â not violently but with a rigid control that was much more awesome.
His voice was quiet but every word was clearly audible. âYou'll find everything in order. If there's anything you don't understand, call me.' He headed for the door.
And it seemed that only then did Brodie realise what she was doing, how profoundly she'd hurt him. She reached out a hand â but not far enough to touch him, as if even
then she baulked at admitting the enormity of her offence. âDaniel! Don't go off in a huff. Talk to me.'
He didn't look at her, just paused in the doorway. âI don't think we've anything left to say to one another.' Then he was gone.
Deacon was looking at her in appalled incredulity. When she felt his gaze Brodie sniffed and gave a little shrug. âI knew he'd get out of the praying thing somehow.' Then she went into the kitchen to turn down the oven.
A minute later the doorbell rang. Deacon stayed where he was because he wanted to see what Brodie would do.
She didn't run. She walked out into the hall and opened the front door. If she had an apology ready it didn't show in the set of her shoulders.
But it wasn't Daniel. It was Hester Dale and two of her friends. When Brodie looked past them, there was no one else in the drive.
The house on the shore was in darkness by the time he returned. Daniel climbed the iron steps on automatic pilot and let himself in without turning on the lights. It was as if he was afraid what he might see. Not the end of the world, but perhaps the end of his.
It had taken him two hours to get home. Normally he could walk down the hill from Chiffney Road in twenty minutes. This evening he'd taken a detour that took in the park, Fisher Hill, the undercliff and other places he didn't actually remember being. He'd always walked a lot. He did much of his thinking on his feet, but not tonight. His brain was paralysed by the turn events had taken. He wasn't distraught so much as numb â the kind of numbness you get if you lose a limb in an accident. For just a few seconds, before the nerves recover enough to start screaming.
It wasn't a big living room. There was a sofa and a chair. He sat in the chair. He hadn't drawn the curtains as he came in so he could see down the stony beach to the faint line of luminescence where the Channel began. It was a calm night, everywhere but inside him, so the glassy swells reflecting the
sinking moon made a silver highway to France. Pinpoints of light miles away marked the passage of ships. Higher and brighter were the stars, light years away, swinging above the horizon in an endless silent carousel.
As always, the sheer timeless scale of it amazed him. For all he knew, any one of those distant blazing suns was history now, exploded or cold and shrunken, news of its demise patiently trudging across the void at a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. It made his problems seem paltry by comparison. Except for one of them, which was immediate and unavoidable.
After a while he got up and went outside, onto the gallery. The telescope â the ugly love child of a tin bucket and a bit of garden trellis â was tucked away in its corner. He let it be, instead pulled up a deckchair and leant back, gazing and gazing.
If the psalmist had spoken of lifting up his eyes unto the
skies
, he might have made a convert. Or perhaps not. Daniel had spent his life trying to make sense of things. He was a mathematician because numbers are quintessentially logical, not open to interpretation. He was an astronomer because the cosmos is maths' grandest stage. So much, and yet still measurable; so far, and yet still in some measure knowable. Studying the stars had taught him two remarkable truths. That there is so much more out there, and much of it so much stranger, than anyone could have imagined for most of human history. And that people in his generation and the couple preceding it had been smart enough to find out
.
People. Extraordinary people perhaps, giants standing on the shoulders of giants,
thinking brilliant thoughts and devising ways to test them, but people nonetheless.
And if people could work out what was happening on the furthest edge of the universe, which is in any event receding so fast that it's vastly further away now than when you started reading this sentence, Daniel simply couldn't see what need there was, what room was left, for a god. It seemed to him that all the attributes believers used to define deity were being steadily assumed by people who were curious enough to ask questions and clever enough to find the answers.
But still not clever enough to save one small boy from the ravages of a disease he was born with.
He'd promised to do something to try to help. He'd made the promise most unwillingly, feeling foolish and sure it would accomplish nothing, before the child's mother had made him the butt of her anger and frustration. Before she'd pulled out every stop she could reach to humiliate him. Before he'd left her house bleeding invisible rivers from the wounds she'd inflicted, knowing that a place where he'd found ease in his own hopelessness was somewhere he could not now return, and would not be welcome if he did.
It altered nothing. He'd given his word. Nothing that had happened since could erase the promise. He'd said he'd pray for Jonathan's recovery, and pray he was going to have to. Not because he thought it would help, and not because he thought Brodie would check, but because he'd promised and he'd rather break his right arm than a promise.
Well, the night sky was Daniel's cathedral. Anything he could achieve with a bunch of earnest devotees in a suburban sitting room, with wine waiting in the kitchen in case it might cause offence, he could certainly achieve here, alone, under the spangled dome of the cosmos. He gave his yellow head a fractional shake, incredulous at where events had brought him. Then he made a start.
Briefly he considered, and dismissed, the agnostic's prayer:
Oh God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul.
He wasn't an agnostic. He'd never sat on a fence in his life. If he was going to do this he was going to do it honestly. Alone on the iron gallery above the beach, the only sound the whisper and chink of the tide among the stones, the nearest human activity a hundred metres away on the Promenade, his lips moved on words he'd never thought to utter.
âIf I'm wrong about this,' he murmured, âand there's somebody out there listening, I suppose what I want to say is, Please can you help?'
It seemed only polite to wait for a response. But no comets flashed across the sky so he continued. âI wouldn't ask â I don't have any right to ask â but there's a little boy who's going to die if you don't. Maybe that doesn't mean much to you. Children die all the time for want of a miracle. And a miracle's what we need. If there was a medical treatment that would save his life, his mother would have found it. She's good at finding things.'
The problem was, he had no frame of reference. He wasn't sure how you were supposed to do it, and whether how you did it was supposed to matter. He vaguely
remembered RE lessons at school, the general import of which was that there was a beard in the sky watching everything that little boys did but not usually stopping them, or at least not in time. All the same, the beard gave him an idea. The grandfather who raised him did not in fact have a beard, but he was a kind, gentle, thoughtful individual who had given Daniel much of his moral code and to whom Daniel had continued turning for advice until his death six years before. He could do worse than talk to God as if he was his grandfather.
âShe thinks this is his last chance. Brodie â the child's mother. She's a friend of mine. More than a friend, actually.' He gave a wry little snort. âBeing omniscient I guess you know that. And she thinks that getting the two of us talking about it might somehow help. I wasn't keen. Butâ¦
âDo you remember a man called Cromwell?' he asked, apparently changing the subject. âHe killed a king and overturned an order that had been established for a thousand years â so long that most people considered it an expression of divine will â because he thought it was the right thing to do. Not a terribly attractive man in many ways, but he said one thing I've never forgotten. He said: “In the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”'
He flicked an uncertain little grin into the darkness. âI'm guessing the oath isn't one of your favourites, but for what it's worth, that's what I'm trying to do now. To consider the possibility that I've been wrong. That everything I've reckoned to know for the last twenty years was based on a fallacy. That it was arrogant, conceited and wrong. That
those who've clung to essentially the same belief for the last four thousand years, whose faith is stronger than sense, stronger than science, were right â you were there all along. You don't show yourself openly because you choose not to, and you make the rules. Absence of evidence, as someone reminded me recently, is not evidence of absence. Oh⦠sorry. I guess you were there when she said it.'
He hesitated. He rather suspected this wasn't how prayers normally proceeded. He just had to hope that the form was less important than the content and that sincerity counted for something. He was doing his honest best.
âI don't suppose this is the first time someone's tried to strike a deal with you. “Please, Lord, save my child and I'll⦔ â whatever. I imagine it happens a lot. You'd think that if it worked nobody's child would ever die. But maybe it works sometimes. And if it works sometimes, maybe it can work for Jonathan.
âI hope it doesn't come down to what the supplicant can offer. “Save my child and I'll build a church.”
Yeah, OK
. “Save my child and I'll plant a tree.”
No, sorry, got loads already.
I hope it's the value of the sacrifice to the person offering it that counts. If it is, maybe I'm not wasting your time. Because there's something I can offer that you won't get every day.'
He paused a moment, aware of what he was doing. He was about to make a commitment to do something he absolutely didn't want to do. And in a way it hardly mattered if there was someone listening or not â if Daniel made a promise he was going to keep it. If Jonathan lived, he was going to have to find a way of keeping this one.
If Jonathan lived. That was the prize, and it was worth any effort to win it. All he had to do was hold on to that thought. He took a deep breath and jumped in.
âI need you to believe that atheism matters as much to me as faith does to worshippers. I don't know if I could die for it, but I've lived by it since I was old enough to make a rational choice and it's reflected in every aspect of my life, of who I am. So this is the deal. Save Jonathan and you get me too.' He gave an unsteady little chuckle. âI don't know if that seems much of a bargain to you but it's the best I can do. I don't have anything else to offer. If you accept, I won't be the best-schooled believer you have but I will be trying hard. I won't just go through the motions. I'll give it everything I've got.'
Again he waited. Somewhere along the Promenade a dog barked. He didn't think it was a sign of anything, unless the proximity of a cat. He couldn't think of anything else to say, anyway, to sweeten the pot. âOK. Well, that's about it. I look forward to hearing from you. Ohâ¦and, give my love to Grandad.'
Though he'd gone along with it in a spirit of
anything's worth trying
, the prayer meeting left Deacon vaguely disappointed. If the intercessors had stripped naked and daubed themselves with woad he'd have been the first to mock, but at least he'd have felt they were giving it a bit of welly. But a bunch of middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income people sitting in a suburban living room sipping wine were somehow less convincing than the zealots he was expecting.
Brodie produced a small buffet and the wine â which proved entirely acceptable â and they sat making polite conversation for half an hour. Marta brought Paddy down from upstairs. Then Hester Dale suggested they make a start.
Brodie asked if she should bring Jonathan in. It didn't seem to be necessary, but the intercessors were generous enough to say they'd love to see him anyway. Jonathan was wan and barely stirred, and after the visitors had made the requisite admiring noises â Brodie appreciated their kindness though in truth there wasn't much to admire â he settled on his mother's lap and made no further contribution to the proceedings.
They didn't form a circle. They didn't chant, or touch the child. They didn't stand, or kneel, or even hold hands. They sat quietly, eyes lowered, and Hester Dale said softly, âLord, this is Jonathan, who needs your help. This is his mother, and his father, and his sister, and they love him dearly. And we are their friends, and we ask a blessing for them all. We ask that you make him well again, to enjoy the life you gave him. But whatever your plan for him, we accept your will.'
A man called Steven spoke in a similar vein; others just sat, eyes lowered, occasionally murmuring, âAmen.' When Hester asked if Brodie wanted to say something she started but then choked up. Hester patted her hand reassuringly. âIt's all right. He knows what you wanted to say.'
âI'd do
anything
,' mumbled Brodie, her voice cracking.
âHe knows that too. Mr Deacon?'
Deacon cleared his throat like a bullfrog preparing to
sing. Deeply embarrassed, he kept his eyes on his son. âThis is my only child. I don't want to lose him. Down the years I've done some good things. I've helped other people's children â I've even saved a few. I'd like to think it's my turn.' He trailed off, afraid â for possibly the first time in his life â he might be causing offence. But Hester only smiled encouragingly.
She turned to Paddy. âWhat about you, honey? Do you want to speak to God?'
Paddy nodded solemnly.
âWhat do you want to say?'
âI want Jonathan to get better,' she whispered, shy in front of the strange adults. âI could give up ridingâ¦'
âI'm sure God appreciates the offer,' said Hester gently. âBut then, who'd look after His ponies? I think you should keep riding unless He tells you to stop.'
After they'd gone, after Brodie had put Paddy to bed, Deacon helped her to tidy up. âHow do you think it went?'
Brodie shrugged tiredly. âNo idea. We're not going to know until either he dies or he doesn't.'
âYou think, if he dies that means we did it wrong?'