The Loney (33 page)

But, the compulsion to go to the sea wouldn’t leave him. It felt as strong as any demand he had ever had from God. There was no option, then, but to put on his coat, take his notebook and go and answer Him. It was, he supposed, the mere fact that he had never been there before that made the call so powerful. For wasn’t it the responsibility of Christians to seek, to move forward, to be missionaries? Not to take God with them to new lands like a trading commodity, but to make Him manifest there. To raise Him out of the land. God was already everywhere. People needed only to notice Him.

He was sure that God would walk with him on the sand, give him His guidance and explain the lessons he needed to take back to Saint Jude’s. He would tell him what he needed to put into the spiritual alms boxes of those who hadn’t been able to come on the pilgrimage and had missed out on the special attention God had conferred upon those who had made the effort. Surely for the good of the parish, his fellow pilgrims wouldn’t begrudge him an hour alone. They would understand the importance.

He thought of himself as a shepherd in one of those pre-Raphaelite paintings, drowsing under the dapple of an ancient tree, his thoughts taken away by the flowers and the dancing insects to higher things or nothing. His sheep down the hillside out of his immediate protection but safe enough to roam the pastures for a time unattended. Yes, they would understand.

But if it was God’s will that he should go to the sea, what was that apprehension that still dogged him as he started off across the marsh road? It was the feeling that he had disturbed something. The growing unease that the marshes were somehow aware of his presence. It was, he wrote, a dark and watchful place that seemed to have become adept at keeping grim secrets; secrets that were half heard in the whispered shibboleths that passed from one bank of dry reeds to the other.

It reminded him of an illustration of the Styx in the book of Greek history and legend he had had as a boy—his only book, fatter than the family Bible on the mantelpiece. And what stories he had found between the pasteboard covers. Perseus, Theseus, Icarus. What about Xerxes the Persian king, who had tried to bridge the Hellespont in order to crush the Greeks? Or Narcissus kneeling by his woodland pool? Or Charon, the pilot of Hades? He would have felt at home here, old Charon. Drifting through the marshes in his coracle.

He inspected his feelings again—that was, after all, why he had come—and found that he was not actually afraid, nor was it really apprehension. It was more a nervous excitement. Whatever lay in wait here, watching him, was nothing so malevolent. It was evidence of God. He scribbled down a quote from Psalms that came to mind.

Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;

let the sea roar, and all that fills it.

There was nothing here that should make him wary, only glad. This corner of England was theirs, something they alone had discovered and had been blessed in the finding. In the springtime God was in the wheatfields and the pasturelands; He was in the rain and in the sunlight that followed and glossed every dripping leaf and branch. He was in the cry of the lambs and in the little cups of life the swifts built in the eaves of old barns. And down here on the beach, even though it was bleak and deserted, God was still at work. Here was the wild God who made nature heave and bellow. The violent shadow that followed Jesus through his tender ministry and could test men in an instant with water and wind. But if the weather should turn, there was nothing to be afraid of. There would be a goodness in His purging. A better world made from the wreck of the old.

Once he realised this, the marshes seemed to let down their guard. He noted the birds that he would not normally have seen up at Moorings, and never in London. Coots. Shelducks. An egret, brilliantly white dipping for the water snails he had seen clinging to the bullrushes.

Further out over the marsh, he saw a cuckoo being mobbed by a squabble of little brown birds. Reed buntings, most likely. He had read that cuckoos liked to use their nests most of all for their arch deception, secluded as they were and woven so beautifully into soft chalices that kept the eggs from the worst of the weather.

As it turned out, the road was not nearly so flooded as it had looked from the house. The water had only washed across the surface and it was clear and still, like a thin mirror reflecting the icy horseheads of cumulus above him, their edges crisp against the blue. If he stood still long enough, he observed, one had the sensation of looking down into the sky, with infinity under one’s feet. A strange sense of vertigo that he disturbed after a moment by breaking the puddle with his toe and moving on.

The shadow cast by the dunes was lengthening and he found himself walking in shade well before the tarmac give way to sand.

There must be something about sand that invites a person to put themselves directly into contact with it. To walk on it in boots or shoes seems a waste almost. He saw fit to make a note of the fact that he had taken off his shoes and turned up the bottoms of his trousers anyway.

Picking a route that wound through the sprouts of marram grass, he climbed up the slope, feeling the wonderful collapse of it under his feet. The burn it put into his thighs. The coldness of the sand when he broke the surface. He was seventy-three years old, but he felt like a child again.

When he reached the top, he was quite worn out with the effort and stood catching his breath and taking in the panorama. He recalled the instruction given to him years before by his tutor at Saint Edmund’s College—a keen amateur naturalist, like him.

‘Look first,’ he had told him. ‘And then see. Be patient and you will notice the workings of nature that most people miss.’

It was a piece of advice that he had taken as it was meant—as a metaphor for focusing on the interdependencies of God’s world, yes, but also one that he could apply practically in his role as a priest.

He had learnt to watch his parishioners closely, to monitor their progression through the sacraments so that he was better able to correct any deviation from the road that would lead them to heaven. It was his duty. It was the fulfilment of his calling. Their road was his road also. If they found peace at last, then so would he.

He watched and waited and began to see the way the grass moved in the wind, the way the wind came with all the subtleties of a voice. He started to see how the colours of the sea changed as light followed shadow across its vast surface. Turquoise, cobalt, slate, steel. It was quite beautiful. As was the natural geometry of the horizon as it bisected the sea and the sky and invited the eye to be drawn along its length—from the distant industry spiking out of the Fylde peninsula to the south, across to Coldbarrow with its empty heath and its empty house—across to the Furness shipyards faint and grey.

There were the genteel seaside towns full of white houses further away up the coast, and beyond them the Cumbrian mountains rose in severe crags that bared their teeth in the lowering sun.

It was the gulls that made him look back to the beach. He hadn’t noticed their noise before. In fact he hadn’t been aware of them at all. He had startled them away, perhaps, as he blundered up the sand dune and now that he had been standing there for a few minutes and they knew he was no threat they had returned to feed on the stuff that had rolled in with the seaweed and driftwood and marked the stretch of the tide. It was going out now. Little by little. With each break and foam and hiss it lost its grip on the land and slipped further back. It had been a high tide, he noticed. It had come as far as the old pillbox and left a skirt of wetness around its base.

They were stupid creatures, seagulls. There was something vile about them. As there was with brattish children. The way they screeched and fought over the same scraps, even though the place was an embarrassment of riches.

They were like the people who lived in that esurient underworld, from which he had separated Saint Jude’s and its congregation successfully enough for it to seem a place of vivid contrast. The people of that Other world were not the same. They walked in darkness. They were to be pitied. And shunned if they would not change.

He carried no guilt about such defensiveness. In Romans, Paul talked about associating with the lowly, but it seemed like idealistic nonsense now. Paul’s world had gone for good and had been replaced by a vacuum. The sinful no longer worried that they would be punished by God, because God to them did not exist. And how could they be punished by an absence? Wrath and fury, when they came, were no longer attributed to any kind of divine retribution but to natural freakishness and bad luck—and so it was up to him to interpret and judge the world as it truly was. Not to play God—never to do that—but to make it clear for his parishioners that God was still present and in authority by drawing divisions between their world and the Other.

In their world, cause and effect continued. If they sinned, they confessed and were absolved. If they performed good deeds they would be rewarded in heaven. In the Other world there was nothing but inconsequence. Oh, there were people jailed and so on—he had, in his younger days visited them all: rapists and murderers and incorrigible thieves—but for most it was only a temporary withdrawal of their liberty. They cared little, if at all, about their eternal freedom or incarceration. A manila file of forms in an office somewhere to be pulled out at the next offence was the only legacy of their sins. No heed did they pay to the entry that had been added to the greater book of reckoning.

It had been Paul’s decree that neighbour should love neighbour and this he stuck to—but only within the world he had created at Saint Jude’s. The people of the Other world would care little if he loved them or not, if he rejoiced with them or wept with them or pitied them. Paul had warned of the dangers of judging others—that only God was fit for the task—but those in the Other world needed to be shown up for what they were. And he felt qualified to judge them; they had made it easy for him to do so. Despite what Paul said, his sins—such as they were—were not like theirs. Their sins came from a greater depth entirely.

He had never left a child to die in its own filth as a mother had done in one of the high rise estates not long ago. He had never poured petrol through a pensioner’s letterbox and tossed in a match for fun. He had never come stumbling out of a vice club at four in the morning. He had never stolen anything, destroyed anything. Nor had any of his flock. He had never lusted after anything or anyone, as people in that Other world seemed to encourage and applaud.

He knew what such people would think of his relationship with Miss Bunce. She couldn’t be his housekeeper without being his lover also. It was impossible that he would have no carnal desire for her, she being so much younger than he and at his beck and call. He loved her, yes, but not in the way that the Other people understood it, for whom love could not be separated from intercourse.

Galatians, Ephesians, Peter and John. He could have picked a weapon from a vast arsenal to defend himself and show them that it was possible, an act of devotion in fact, to express God’s love in the loving of a brother or sister in Christ.

She was the most pious girl he knew. She was a beacon of light in the presbytery. She was untainted by the world that lay outside, and the proof that he had made a difference.

Indeed, all his parishioners deserved to feel like Miss Bunce. Different, loved, guided and judged. It was their reward for being held to ransom by a world that demanded the right to engage in moral brinkmanship whenever it pleased.

People talked about a permissive society, but, as he knew it, permission was something one asked for. No, this was what it was—an assault. They were being beaten into submission by morals that were the reverse of their own. He had lived a long time and had seen the world regressing. With each year that went by it seemed that people were no better than children in their petulant demands.

And children themselves were changing. Youth still had the natural rebelliousness that had been there since the time of Moses, but it seemed to have had something added to it, or forced into it—a fearlessness. No, more a detachment. He had seen it in the youngsters he had caught one evening smashing gravestones with bricks they had knocked out of the churchyard wall, a kind of emptiness in their eyes. They had looked at him as though he wasn’t quite real, or what he was saying wasn’t quite real. They had been no more than eight years old.

These weren’t just the jittery fears of an aging priest, it was a genuine feeling that all goodness and simple humility—for who on earth was humble nowadays?—had been excised from the hearts of men. He alone, it seemed, had noticed the apparent descent from depravity to depravity that had taken that Other world to a place that was unique and irreversible. There was no darkness now that couldn’t be explored or expressed.

Only a few weeks ago had he watched them all coming out of the Curzon at midnight from some horror film that the paper said involved jack hammers and acid. They were laughing. The girls with their hands in the back pockets of the men.

It had been the same night a homeless lady had been kicked to death under Waterloo Bridge. And while the two things weren’t connected in any literal sense, he felt certain that they occupied the same pool that had formed when the wall between sick imagination and the real world came down.

It was against this potent mixture that they protected themselves at Saint Jude’s and could, ironically, practise the very freedoms the Other people claimed to enjoy, the freedoms that were bandied around as being somehow the looked-for end result of millennia of social cultivation. At Saint Jude’s they were free to think; they were free to examine the meanings of love or happiness, unlike the Other people, for whom happiness was the accumulation of objects and experiences that satisfied the simplest of desires.

The Other world had equality now, they said, but what they meant was that everyone had the means to exhibit their own particular unpleasantness. There had been people shot dead in Londonderry and women blown to shreds in Aldershot in the name of equality. And they were always marching. He had seen men marching for the right to sleep with other men. He had seen women marching for the right to rid themselves of their unborn children without reproach. He had seen them marching to Trafalgar Square with their heavy boots and their Union Jacks. Oh, the black shirts might have been hidden under suits and donkey jackets but they were same men who had infected the place where he had grown up.