Gentleman's Relish (11 page)

The idea was to make a full day of it rather than have the demonstration as the be-all and end-all. The minibus collected them from outside the church at ten-thirty. Gwen and Bernie bagged three seats at the back so she could sit with them.

They were like that, Eileen had realized. Forceful.

People who escaped from inside aeroplanes seconds before they turned to fireballs did so because for a few moments something in their genetic make-up enabled them to override all inculcated sense of decency to trample on the hands and faces of other passengers in a single-minded rush for life. Afterwards they would say how guilty they felt and people assumed this reflected a becoming sense of un-worthiness at being spared. Actually what they spoke of was uncomplicated guilt at their memories
of elbowing an air steward in the face or punching a dithering child aside from the escape chute.

Gwen and Bernie were such people and Eileen was not. They bagged her a seat because they wanted her with them but if the minibus were balanced on a cliff, they'd jump out without a backward glance at her.

They were big-boned, wet-lipped, hot-palmed meat-eaters; more like brother and sister than husband and wife. She preferred not to imagine them naked.

It was not far. A forty-minute run on the motorway then half that again dawdling in queues through the city's outskirts and system of roundabouts. Someone had a daughter-in-law in the police who had tipped them off so they knew exactly where to meet up and when. There were two hours to kill so they tried on shoes in Marks – Gwen was a martyr to corns, apparently – before enjoying a sort of package-deal OAP lunch in the café at the top of Dingles.

She had not known them long. They had met through church. Eileen had attended the same church most of her life. She believed in Father and Son and – if not pressed for specifics – Holy Ghost. She accepted the probable truth of much of the Bible and found a recital of the Lord's Prayer a great comfort at times of stress. She disengaged her intellect when joining in the Creed but she would unhesitatingly have ticked any box marked Christian.
She worshipped at the church her mother had preferred, which embraced an undemonstrative, tasteful brand of Anglicanism, a church for women like herself who were happy enough to lend a hand at a fundraising bazaar but preferred their religion undiscussed and uninvolving.

At least she thought that was the sort of woman she was. Then Gwen and Bernie turned up in the congregation one Sunday – the numbers were never spectacular so one could always spot new faces – and sat beside her. It was one of the few churches in the diocese that persisted in holding out against doing the Peace but they startled her by clasping her hands in theirs at the moment in the service where other priests might have intoned
let us offer one another a sign of peace
and murmuring, ‘Peace be with you,' with such urgency she spent the rest of the service worried that hers was not so tranquil a soul as she had thought.

They sought her out during coffee and biscuits afterwards and introduced themselves.

‘We can tell you're not happy here,' Gwen said. ‘Can't we, Bernie? I mean, it's not right. Not right for you. I'm sure he's a lovely man but you have to go back to first principles, sometimes.'

‘I'm sorry?' Eileen said, confused.

By way of explanation, Bernie nodded towards Reverend Girouard, who had not long been with them. ‘
Homosexual
,' he hissed.

‘Shame,' said Gwen. ‘It's a lovely church otherwise. Old.'

‘He even wants to bless their unions,' Bernie added. ‘He asked the bishop.'

Eileen had already gathered from the flower arrangers that there was no likelihood of a Mrs Girouard and that Mr Clancy, who had been giving organ recitals for a while now, was possibly rather more than a lodger at the vicarage. The two men were exceptionally polite and good-looking and, after her initial surprise, she had begun to decide that their domestic arrangement made a pleasant change from the previous incumbent who had one of those resentful, difficult wives who seemed almost standard C of E issue these days and played Divide and Rule with the ladies on the flower rota. She had not analysed her response very deeply but a small part of her pleasure stemmed from the sense that she was not reacting as her parents would have done. Her unvoiced welcome of the two men was a timid rebellion against the norm. Now she found she lacked the courage to give it voice, however, and felt shamed into agreeing with Gwen and Bernie.

‘I know,' she heard herself sigh. ‘It probably isn't right. I mean, not ideal. But what can one do? We're lucky to have a priest at all, as far as I can see.'

‘One that's white, you mean,' sighed Bernie.

‘That's not what I…' Eileen began.

‘Vote with your feet,' Gwen cut in. ‘Next week you're coming to us at St Mungo's.'

She could have laid low, perhaps, pleaded sickness or lain out of sight on the kitchen floor when Gwen came tapping on the window with her wedding ring. She had gone with them, however, meek as a lamb.

St Mungo's was not at all the sort of church her mother would have liked, so initially there was a tacit satisfaction in changing allegiances. The hymns were happy and unfamiliar, their words projected onto a big screen so that everyone's hands were left unencumbered for waving in the air or clapping. The priest was a muscular, short-haired man – like a soldier or PE instructor – who wore a plain suit instead of robes and kept walking among them and making eye contact so that everything in the service felt tremendously personal. The Peace was no mere embarrassed handshake but a heartfelt festival of greeting in which people actually left their pews to meet strangers across the aisle. The priest tracked her down. There was no escaping him. Offset by his short silver hair, his eyes were chips of sapphire.

‘I'm Paul,' he said, offering a hand both large and warm.

‘Eileen,' she told him. ‘I'm Eileen Roberts.'

‘Peace be with you, Eileen,' he said, bringing his other hand into play so that both of hers were trapped. ‘Welcome to St Mungo's. I mean that. Truly.'

And she felt so hot behind her eyes she thought she might faint.

His handshake was so firm and his welcome so compelling that she proved unswervingly disloyal and came back to St Mungo's week after week. Reverend Girouard was undoubtedly better bred but there was no denying that his twinkly charm was effete by comparison, weak even, and she reminded herself – and her mother's disapproving shade – that some of the disciples had been rough-edged working men, men her father would have dismissed as
common
.

Gwen and Bernie did not come every week. She soon realized this was because they worked as covert missionaries, targeting churches where the priests were unmarried or unorthodox, to lure away to St Mungo's discontented worshippers who might otherwise have left the church entirely.

‘I suppose it's all the same God, though,' Eileen let slip in a weak moment and Bernie corrected her.

‘Yes, but some vessels are unworthy, Eileen. You wouldn't serve your guest on unclean china.'

She had since seen Reverend Girouard's good-looking friend Mr Clancy on the High Street a couple of times and crossed the street quickly to avoid any awkwardness. Reverend Girouard himself had come round once and actually called her name through the letterbox when she failed to answer the bell. She hid from him in the broom cupboard in case he peered
through a window and saw her. She felt ill afterwards from the excitement and had to lie down.

There was already a small crowd outside the law courts but, tipped off by the policewoman daughter-in-law, they knew to stand in a less obvious position down a side street where the authorities thought the van could emerge unimpeded.

They had all enjoyed a glass of wine with lunch and, as they waited, Gwen expounded on the accused's crimes with something approaching relish. Eileen did not take a newspaper as a rule because the photographs upset and haunted her. She preferred the radio, whose rare horrors one could always switch off. But Gwen talked horrors now, how the victims had been young men, little more than boys really, how they had been drugged and sexually preyed upon, how there were signs for those who knew how to read them that his purposes had been Satanic. He had shown no remorse and had even laughed to himself as the judge read out the charges.

What they told her fired her up with disgusted indignation but still she was not the sort of woman to make a spectacle of herself in public. As the time grew ever nearer she became increasingly tense, not wanting to be singled out for holding back, but not wanting either to behave in a way that was extreme. But just as the gate was swinging open and the unmarked van emerging, Gwen thrust a box of
eggs into her hand from the collection she had picked up cheaply in Poundstretcher.

‘He laughed to himself as the judge read out the charges,' she said. ‘Just think of that. He laughed, Eileen!'

The crowd surged out into the road and Eileen was swept along with it. She knew she'd have to join in, she knew she'd have to throw an egg at least if only to do what was expected of her. But as the van drew near and the people around her started to shout, ‘Filth! Filth!', and to throw things she shouted the first thing that came into her head.

‘Satan!' she shouted. ‘Murdering Satan!'

A sort of heat rose up behind her eyes, as rapidly as boiling-over milk, and her head was suddenly full of the poor boys, of lads she had known who might have been the killer's victims.

The rear of the van was blanked out, of course, and she found she directed all her uprush of hate at the startled man who was driving, not quite hidden by the grilles over the van's windows. She fancied there was fear in the look he gave her before the police came to his rescue and made the crowd stand back to let him pass.

It was over in seconds. She felt her cheeks on fire and found she was laughing, almost hysterical with embarrassment, by the time the van was rounding the corner. Bernie looked at her with respect.

‘It's the Spirit,' he said. ‘The Spirit is on you!'

But it wasn't, she knew. Gwen knew it too, glancing at her with a woman's sharper instinct. Eileen had tasted something more like ecstasy and her flesh was alight in a way that made her want to hide herself. She was disgusted with herself too. She had only meant to join in a little. It was quite unlike her to be so carried away and hatred was an emotion of which she had little experience.

On the minibus home everyone was chattering and excited, as though they had been abseiling or done a bungee jump at an age when no one would have expected it of them. Eileen pretended to join in but she was thoughtful, disturbed at the emotional roiling their messy little demonstration had set off in her.

By the time they were being dropped outside the church again, her old mute passivity had fallen on her however and she was easily persuaded back to Gwen and Bernie's for a restorative cup of tea.

It was an unremarkable house, over-furnished with unremarkable things; a house in a gravy advertisement. She donated a box of fondant fancies she had bought in Marks and was saving for later. Gwen sliced up a Battenberg and passed it round. The pieces were far bigger than Eileen would have allowed herself. She normally made a Battenberg feed eight, not three. She broke her slice into more manageable blocks of sponge and icing.

‘Hey,' Gwen said. ‘Show Eileen the tape.'

‘Are you sure?' Bernie asked.

‘Oh, she's one of us, now,' Gwen said, dabbing a pink crumb from the corner of her lips. ‘Aren't you, Eileen?' She had not finished her mouthful properly. Eileen saw mashed cake on her tongue. ‘After this afternoon's display,' Gwen chuckled. ‘Eh, Eileen, who'd have thought you had it in you!'

So Eileen sat on in a vast Parker Knoll recliner like an imprisoning dentist's chair – Bernie had yanked up the footrest because they knew she had vein trouble – and watched a video with them.

It was a home-made affair, crudely shot by their son who worked in the Middle East as an engineer with an oil company. Because of the crowds, the passing cars, the glimpses of women, children, people on mobile phones, it took her a while to decipher what she was supposed to be focusing on. Then she saw the diminutive figures beyond the bustling foreground, figures in a clearing of bloodstained sand. It was, she understood as Gwen began her fascinated commentary, footage of punishments and executions, shot by the son with a hidden camera. It was not all shot on the same occasion or even in the same place. He was an ever-ready collector, like a trainspotter; a connoisseur of extreme justice.

She glanced away from the screen long enough to take in again the photograph on the mantelpiece her eyes had skated over earlier in a restless search for something beautiful. There he was. A mixture of Gwen and Bernie. Big-boned. Cheerful. Smirking in
his mortarboard. Her eyes were drawn back to the screen.

There were floggings for adultery and lechery and removal of hands for theft. There were stonings and, astonishingly, beheadings. The shootings were shockingly banal by comparison, because they were so familiar from films yet quieter and less dramatic than anything faked. (Gwen and Bernie afforded these their slightest respect and talked across them, ordinary talk about food plans, neighbours, fish-food pellets.) Then there was a scene so specific yet so odd that she could not quite believe what she was seeing and, reading her mind, Bernie rewound the tape to show her again.

Two men were pushed to their knees then tied to a stake. Then everyone backed away to allow a bulldozer to cause a sizeable wall to topple onto them, hiding them from view in dust and rubble. There was a cheer from the crowd on the video and an answering murmur of assent from Bernie.

‘Homosexuals,' Gwen said. ‘They used to stone them apparently until someone decided that was spiritually unclean for the executioners.'