The Four Last Things (2 page)

She stopped and stared down the church. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what to say next, nor that she was afraid: but time itself was suddenly paralysed. As time could not move, all time was present.

She had had these attacks since childhood, though less frequently since she had left adolescence behind; often they occurred near the start of an emotional upheaval. They were characterized by a dreamlike sense of inevitability – similar, Sally suspected, to the preliminaries to an epileptic fit. The faculty might conceivably be a spiritual gift, but it was a very uncomfortable one which appeared to serve no purpose.

Her nervousness had vanished. The silence was total, which was characteristic. No one coughed, the babies were asleep and the children were quiet. Even the traffic had faded away. August sunshine streamed in an arrested waterfall of light through the windows of the south-nave aisle and the south windows of the clerestory. She knew beyond any doubt that something terrible was going to happen.

The two people Sally loved best in the world were sitting in the second pew from the front, almost directly beneath her. Lucy was sitting on Michael’s lap, frowning up at her mother. On the seat beside her was a book and a small cloth doll named Jimmy. Michael’s head was just above Lucy’s. When you saw their heads so close together, it was impossible to doubt the relationship between them: the resemblance was easy to see and impossible to analyse. Michael had his arms locked around Lucy. He was staring past the pulpit and the nave altar, up the chancel to the old high altar. His face was sad, she thought: why had she not noticed that before?

Sally could not see Derek without turning her head. But she knew he would be staring at her with his light-blue eyes fringed with long sandy lashes. Derek disturbed her because she did not like him. Derek was the vicar, a thin and enviably articulate man with a very pink skin and hair so blond it was almost white.

Most of the other faces were strange to her. They must be wondering why I’m just standing here, Sally thought, though she knew from experience that these moments existed outside time. In a sense, they were all asleep: only she was awake.

The pressure was building up. She wasn’t sure whether it was inside her or outside her; it didn’t matter. She was sweating and the neatly printed notes for her sermon clung to her damp fingers.

As always in these moments, she felt guilty. She stared down at her husband and daughter and thought: if I were spiritually strong enough, I should be able to stop this or to make something constructive out of it. Despair flooded through her.

‘Your will be done,’ she said, or thought she said. ‘Not mine.’

As if the words were a signal, time began to flow once more. A woman stood up towards the back of the church. Sally Appleyard braced herself. Now it was coming, whatever it was, she felt better. Anything was an improvement on waiting.

She stared down the nave. The woman was in her sixties or seventies, small, slight and wearing a grubby beige raincoat which was much too large for her. She clutched a plastic bag in her arms, hugging it against her chest as if it were a baby. On her head was a black beret pulled down over her ears. A ragged fringe of grey, greasy hair stuck out under the rim of the beret. It was a warm day but she looked pinched, grey and cold.

‘She-devil. Blasphemer against Christ. Apostate.’ As she spoke, the woman stared straight at Sally and spittle, visible even at a distance, sprayed from her mouth. The voice was low, monotonous and cultivated. ‘Impious bitch. Whore of Babylon. Daughter of Satan. May God damn you and yours.’

Sally said nothing. She stared at the woman and tried to pray for her. Even those who did not believe in God were willing to blame the shortcomings of their lives on him. God was hard to find so his ministers made convenient substitutes.

The woman’s lips were still moving. Sally tried to blot out the stream of increasingly obscene curses. In the congregation, more and more heads craned towards the back of the church. Some of them belonged to children. It wasn’t right that children should hear this.

She was aware of Michael standing up, passing Lucy to Derek’s wife in the pew in front, and stepping into the aisle. She was aware, too, of Stella walking westwards down the nave towards the woman in the raincoat. Stella was one of the churchwardens, a tall, stately black woman who appeared never to be in a hurry.

Everything Sally saw, even Lucy and Michael, seemed both physically remote and to belong to a lesser order of importance. It impinged on her no more than the flickering images on a television set with the sound turned down. Her mind was focused on the woman in the beret and raincoat, not on her appearance or what she was saying but on the deeper reality beneath. Sally tried with all her might to get through to her. She found herself visualizing a stone wall topped with strands of barbed wire.

Michael and Stella had reached the woman now. Like an obliging child confronted by her parents, she held out her arms, giving one hand to Michael and one to Stella; she closed her mouth at last but her eyes were still on Sally. For an instant Michael, Stella and the woman made a strangely familiar tableau: a scene from a Renaissance painting, perhaps, showing a martyr about to be dragged uncomplainingly to the stake, with her eyes staring past the invisible face of the artist, standing where her accuser would be, to the equally invisible heavenly radiance beyond.

The tableau destroyed itself. Stella scooped up the carrier bag with her free hand. She and Michael drew the woman along the pew and walked with her towards the west door. Their shoes clattered on the bright Victorian tiles and rang on the central-heating gratings. The woman did not struggle but she twisted herself round until she was walking sideways. This allowed her to turn her head as far as she could and continue to stare at Sally.

The heavy oak door opened. The sound of traffic poured into the church. Sally glimpsed sunlit buildings, black railings and a blue sky. The door closed with a dull, rolling boom. For an instant the boom didn’t sound like a closing door at all: it was more like the whirr of great wings beating the air.

Sally took a deep breath. As she exhaled, a picture filled her mind: an angel, stern and heavily feathered, the detail hard and glittering, the wings flexing and rippling. She pushed the picture away.

‘God does not change,’ she said again, her voice grim. ‘But we do.’

Afterwards Derek said, ‘These days we need bouncers, not churchwardens.’

Sally turned to look at him combing his thinning hair in the vestry mirror. ‘Seriously?’

‘We wouldn’t be the first.’ His reflection gave her one of his pastoral smiles. ‘I don’t mean it, of course. But you’ll have to get used to these interruptions. We get all sorts in Kensal Vale. It’s not some snug little suburb.’

This was a dig at Sally’s last parish, a predominantly middle-class enclave in the diocese of St Albans. Derek took a perverse pride in the statistics of Kensal Vale’s suffering.

‘She needs help,’ Sally said.

‘Perhaps. I suspect she’s done this before. There have been similar reports elsewhere in the diocese. Someone with a bee in her bonnet about women in holy orders.’ He slipped the comb into his pocket and turned to face her. ‘Plenty of them around, I’m afraid. We just have to grin and bear it. Or rather them. We get worse interruptions than dotty old ladies, after all – drunks, drug addicts and nutters in all shapes and sizes.’ He smiled, pulling back his lips to reveal teeth so perfect they looked false. ‘Maybe bouncers aren’t such a bad idea after all.’

Sally bit back a reply to the effect that it was a shame they couldn’t do something more constructive. It was early days yet. She had only just started her curacy at St George’s, Kensal Vale. Salaried parish jobs for women deacons were scarce, and she would be a fool to antagonize Derek before her first Sunday was over. Perhaps, too, she was being unfair to him.

She checked her appearance in the mirror. After all this time the dog collar still felt unnatural against her neck. She had wanted what the collar symbolized for so long. Now she wasn’t sure.

Derek was too shrewd a manager to let dislike fester unnecessarily. ‘I liked your sermon. A splendid beginning to your work here. Do you think we should make more of the parallels between feminism and the antislavery movement?’

A few minutes later Sally followed him through the church to the Parish Room, which occupied what had once been the Lady Chapel. Its conversion last year had been largely due to Derek’s gift for indefatigable fund-raising. About thirty people had lingered after the service to drink grey, watery coffee and meet their new curate.

Lucy saw her mother first. She ran across the floor and flung her arms around Sally’s thighs.

‘I wanted you,’ Lucy muttered in an accusing whisper. She was holding her doll Jimmy clamped to her nose, a sign of either tiredness or stress. ‘I wanted you. I didn’t like that nasty old woman.’

Sally patted Lucy’s back. ‘I’m here, darling, I’m here.’

Stella towed Michael towards them. She was in her forties, a good woman, Sally suspected, but one who dealt in certainties and liked the sound of her own voice and the authority her position gave her in the affairs of the parish. Michael looked dazed.

‘We were just talking about you,’ Stella announced with pride, as though the circumstance conferred merit on all concerned. ‘Great sermon.’ She dug a long forefinger into Michael’s ribcage. ‘I hope you’re cooking the Sunday lunch after all that.’

Sally took the coffee which Michael held out to her. ‘What happened to the old woman?’ she asked. ‘Did you find out where she lives?’

Stella shook her head. ‘She just kept telling us to go away and leave her in peace.’

‘Ironic, when you think about it,’ Michael said, apparently addressing his cup.

‘And then a bus came along,’ Stella continued, ‘and she hopped on. Short of putting an armlock on her, there wasn’t much we could do.’

‘She’s not a regular, then?’

‘Never seen her before. Don’t take it to heart. Nothing personal.’

Lucy tugged Sally’s arm, and coffee slopped into the saucer. ‘She should go to prison. She’s a witch.’

‘She’s done nothing bad,’ Sally said. ‘She’s just unhappy. You don’t send people to prison for being unhappy, do you?’

‘Unhappy? Why?’

‘Unhappy?’ Derek Cutter appeared beside Stella and ruffled Lucy’s hair. ‘A young lady like you shouldn’t be unhappy. It’s not allowed.’

Pink and horrified, Lucy squirmed behind her mother.

‘Sally tells me this was once the Lady Chapel,’ Michael said, diverting Derek’s attention from Lucy. ‘Times change.’

‘We were lucky to be able to use the space so constructively. And in keeping with the spirit of the place, too.’ Derek beckoned a middle-aged man, small and sharp-eyed, a balding cherub. ‘Sally, I’d like you to meet Frank Howell. Frank, this is Sally Appleyard, our new curate, and her husband Michael.’

‘Detective Sergeant, isn’t it?’ Howell’s eyes were red-rimmed.

Michael nodded.

‘There’s a piece about your lady wife in the local rag. They mentioned it there.’

Derek coughed. ‘I suppose you could say all of us are professionally nosy in our different ways. Frank’s a freelance journalist.’

Howell was shaking hands with Stella. ‘For my sins, eh?’

‘In fact, Frank was telling me he was wondering whether we at St George’s might form the basis of a feature. The Church of England at work in modern London.’ Derek’s nose twitched. ‘Old wine in new bottles, one might say.’

‘Amazing, when you think about it.’ Howell grinned at them. ‘Here we are, in an increasingly godless society, but Joe Public just can’t get enough of the good old C of E.’

‘I don’t know if I’d agree with you there, Frank.’ Derek flashed his teeth in a conciliatory smile. ‘Sometimes I think we are not as godless as some of us like to think. Attendance figures are actually increasing – I can find you the statistic, if you want. You have to hand it to the Evangelicals, they have turned the tide. Of course, at St George’s we try to have something for everyone – a broad, non-sectarian approach. We see ourselves as –’

‘You’re doing a fine job, all right.’ Howell kept his eyes on Sally. ‘But at the end of the day, what sells a feature is human interest. It’s the people who count, eh? So maybe we could have a chat sometime.’ He glanced round the little circle of faces. ‘With all of you, that is.’

‘Delighted,’ Derek replied for them all. ‘I –’

‘Good. I’ll give you a ring then, set something up.’ Howell glanced at his watch. ‘Good Lord – is that the time? Must love you and leave you.’

Derek watched him go. ‘Frank was very helpful over the conversion of the Lady Chapel,’ he murmured to Sally, patting her arm. ‘He did a piece on the opening ceremony. We had the bishop, you know.’ Suddenly he stood on tiptoe, and waved vigorously at his wife. ‘There’s Margaret – I know she wanted a word with you, Sally. I think she may have found you a baby-sitter. She’s not one of ours, but a lovely woman, all the same. Utterly reliable, too. Her name’s Carla Vaughan.’

On the way home to Hercules Road, Michael and Sally conducted an argument in whispers in the front of the car while Lucy, strapped into the back seat, sang along with ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ on the stereo. It was not so much an argument as a quarrel with gloves on.

‘Aren’t we going rather fast?’ Sally asked.