“Short?”
“It shows, I fear, a dangerous tendency to equality.”
St. Peter Perpendicular, in Westminster, was preferentially a church, of the High Anglican persuasion. A dark labyrinth of shale-coloured stone and traceried windows, doodled upon and saturated by centuries of rain, fog, and birdlime, into burnt black slabs of soot-caked realism, it seemed no less an irritant to the devil, if a boon to the tourist trade, for having been maintained over the years as a kind of damp mausoleum, an arsenal of arms and memorabilia: small unreadable tablets flaked to a smooth white; fat woodcuts of smiling bishops; old thumbed psalters; supine knights riddled in brass; clusters of shiny flintlocks and oiled knives; and draped high up near the arches, in front of the north and south ambulatories, old flags in faded tatters (“Jesus and No Quarter,” etc.), many of them said to have been used at the Battle of Marston Moor or captured from the dissident Covenanters in the Scottish bogs in 1644. The pulpit, as in most churches, was claimed to have been carved by Grinling Gibbons (or his eighth son’s nephew’s oldest niece), and below it hung a little board showing several series of numerals in direct correspondence, it would seem, to the appropriate matching numbers to be found on the pages in the Hymnal, where, if only at Evensong, logic impelled one to believe the diversion of the Almighty seemed to take some precedence over, but not necessarily any charm away from, that equal but perhaps more universal diversion called “bingo.” And yet, today, or on any given day, no matter how reverently those little figures are slipped into their slots by the minor canon, lives there a soul, possibly, who does not find himself sitting on the edge of anxiety, poised for that familiar disyllabic shout?
Now, however, one entered this church and immediately felt it a cenacle filled with the hebetude the Anglicans call peace.
The organist, invited from the Gabon Commission, soft-pedalled into the final bars of “O Sailor Infinite, My Lifeline’s Frayed and Ratty” as an indication, inapposite perhaps, that the bride was now at the rear of the church. The choir began a hymn. The Thedwastry Baptist Choir was totally black. Many of them had been friends of Cyril in Africa, and, whether Bongo or Shilluk, they shared each other’s friendships abroad. At the Bishop’s invitation—for he had, they frankly admitted, invited them—the group had come down from its small college, where, as Commonwealth students, they were studying for the ministry. They enjoyed road trips for the singing on the bus and, as well, for the little stipends they could pick up to send abroad later as scholarship grants for potential vocations in Chad, Tanzania, or Basutoland. A tea had been given before the wedding. All showed up wearing name tags and happy grins. Which, caught in a clutch of a circumstance that necessitated basic decency, had to be civil; and, trying to smuggle in some kind of plus-value here, spent a short time seine-hauling the lore of Anglo-African relations as far back as he could go: he asked them if London’s Zoological Gardens were as large as The Republic of Burundi’s; how popular Eugene Stratton had been in Africa; were they aware that Henry VIII’s falconer was black; and did they know that several Negroes ran out their trawlers and helped pilot the big boost when England packed it in at Dunkirk? But they merely stood around, shy, in mulberry-coloured blazers, sipping tea, while the bright teeth in their sun-fiercened complexions contrasted with their dark, boxlike bodies, which gave to them the effect, if one looked quickly, of buhl furniture. Distributing surplices to them that morning, Which knew he was in the presence of irreducible man when a heavy lad with a bullet-shaped head—cherubic, if fleshiness alone characterize the angel—shuffled onto his knees and worshipfully kissed the elbow of the priest’s sleeve.
A head bobbed up over the vestry door: Rev. Which Therefore peered out to the chancel and, for a fugitive moment, caught a glimpse of Cyril—dressed to the nines, rocking on the balls of his feet, and with the hair on his head pomaded and parted in so many places, it looked like a Scotch egg. There was an asymmetrical quality in two matters only: his left trouser leg sported a bicycle clip, and where should have been the carnation was pinned a “Hello, My Name Is—” tag, given to him by the visiting choir. The priest summoned the altar boys to his side and, with a sweep of impatience, brushed quickly past them toward the altar steps, where they then hinged together in a triptych—and waited.
The organ pipes suddenly thundered out in rich vibrations, joined quickly by the choir, the lovely hymn, “Lo! The Bride She Glideth Hie.”
A frail shadow: Anita, the bride, scrubbed to a golden clean, floated in ribbons and white silk up the capacious aisle with the grace of a slip of flame on a penny candle, her sweet face flushed and radiant above a raceme of lilies held to her breast with a tremor of modesty. (Who is paying for this? Which wondered. Her dress cost a packet!) Cyril gave a lucid bleat of recognition and shimmied to her side with an obsessive and lunatic energy which the priest noticed with observable distaste while, at the same time, wondering fearfully whether or not Cyril might try to culminate the public ceremony right then and there by cutting the bride’s stays with his eyeteeth and attempting to consummate the nuptials right on the chancel step. The moment of truth came—and was gone. They knelt down. Which shook a perfunctory sprinkle of holy water in the couple’s direction and, as an afterthought, flicked a backhand splash at the smug groom to signify sacramental disapproval. Cyril, amused, licked the drops from his nose. It had begun.
“I require,” Which read, “and charge you both, as you will answer at the dreadful day of judgement when the secret of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment why ye ...”
Impediment? thought Which as he droned on. Why, the only impediment, of course, was this little Miss-What’s-Her-Face, whose insatiate and imbecile fury had flung wide the doors of herself, only to shut tight again and imprison forever poor dumb Cyril, houseboy and commodious nigger, in her soft fleshy jail. Which, disabused of all wasted sentiment, x-rayed into her wiles and lack of scruple and accurately divined, he felt, a vicious scold in whom beat a heart black as jet, straight out of the unchaste jungle, and scored with a hundred dirty crimes against him, the frump.
The words, read through spleen, jumped into morris: “... and keep her in sickness and in health; and forsaking all others (that hurt, that hurt), keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?” Which Therefore paused and threw Anita a look that would have frozen a snowberry. Cyril, far away, staring affectionately, as he was, into the intricate porches of Anita’s ear, jerked to attention, remembered where he was, and quickly handed the priest his passport, alien registration card, and a smudged wallet-sized photograph he had once taken of himself in a machine at Gamage’s for 2/6. Which cooly handed them back.
“State ‘I will.’ ” Then he added in a whisper which sounded like a bit of advice, “Or ‘I’d rather not.’ Either way.”
“I want to,” declared Cyril.
“Now, you see,” said the priest, “that’s precisely where your wicket gets sticky. You want to? Or you will? A minor distinction, notice, but a distinction all the same.”
“I weel.”
“You verify it, then?”
“I weel.”
Rev. Which Therefore marked his prayerbook with a finger; he went unceremoniously slack, rubbed his sunglasses clear, and stood static, smiling all around, as if waiting in a doorway for a capricious afternoon cloudburst to subside. Then he decided to turn again to Cyril. He shook his miter’d locks and stern bespake.
“You’re dead firm on this, no second thoughts?”
“I have revolved it in my head,” he replied. “I weel”—as had apparently Anita, “revolved” it in her head, who gave a low, almost inaudible, but very affirmative answer as her turn came. The roll was up and counted.
Fugat Petrus: debate went voiceless, hope hopeless, and, dead to life-inducing surmise, the sheeted ghost of Retribution gibbered and flapped through his brain on its infernal errand to whip up anew a thousand devils and all the old mockeries, now pinched from their filthy slumbers to bill
ow up and wreak havoc, havoc, and more havoc in the furnace of his wilting soul. Man is a match, Which thought, and then an ash as quickly. And yet the inescapable premonition he had had of late still caused a buzz of intrigue within him. It was the suspicious twinge that someone had subsidized this wedding, a feeling especially concomitant with the formal letter he had received from the Bishop “suggesting” he proceed with the nuptials. (Genghis Khan, making “suggestions” from an episcopal seat, need be no less Genghis Khan.) A rebus of random events linked into order: a bishop’s intercession, expensive clothes, a rented organist, a large choir, a rushed church date, flowers, and, doubtless on the same tab, a sweaty spree into the Cotswolds where they would rut like ducks for a fortnight. Of worldly pennies are such things bought? No, there was a predestinative force shoving the whole show along, and Which was damned if he knew who it was. A patron? His absurd grandfather trying to hustle the gum catalogue into translation? Or had a kitty been taken up at the ballet? Who had assisted was the question; that Cyril was married was not.
“Yaaaaabooooool!” There: suddenly one wild boom of enthusiasm flew from within the large choir in distinct counterpoint to the wooing gale of song. Which winced with a twitch of dubiety and thought of St. Fiacre, whose intercession is invoked particularly by persons suffering from hemorrhoids.
Thrums, evidence of an echo, ceased. The choir was ranged in rows just off the north aisle between the columns that supported the vault behind which stood the Lady Chapel, famous not so much for having withstood the Blitz—there were still small piles of chips in view, kept visible by a die-hard and resolute sexton (one arm, Benghasi, 1941) who, with a cud of longing in his throat, nightly swept the transepts—but because it was said to be the domain of King David’s ghost who walked there every year on St. Swithin’s Day inveighing against bumptious and uncircumsized giants.
Next to one of those columns sat a small table where one could purchase, for a shilling each, leather bookmarks embossed in pinchbeck, shiny postcards of the Family Windsor, and small pamphlets which stapled together the church’s history: records of notable baptisms and deaths; mottled photographs of the old clerestory, sedilia, and cloister (the area, it was pointed out, where the locals queued up for gas masks during the War); and prose accounts of various legends more than willingly enlarged upon, as was usual in these churches all over London, by little old pie-faced but dedicated shawlies who sat lost in their mufflers, blueing in the cold, chatting with Japanese businessmen and troops of German girl scouts, and recommending this or that with chirps of delight and sad smiles—grumbling mercilessly only in the off chance they should be locked in overnight, a not infrequent hazard for the napping octogenarian placed in the same corner with long dead ladies and snipenosed, marmoreal queens.
Cyril faced Anita: two rings, woven from the hair of a giraffe’s tail, were exchanged, and then Cyril chewed through the Lord’s Prayer like a plum and spit out the Amen. “Bestow upon these thy servants (Which snorted ironically), if it be Thy will, the gift and heritage of children ...”—and he read on with that wooden severity and grey inexactitude of speech that ran the closing benedictions into a mere recitation of inconclusive parentheses, washed of every feeling and inflection.
“Yaaaaamaaaaak!” Without warning, one figure bounced into the aisle like a rubber ball, an elastic rebound whirring with song. The shout boomed the length of the nave.
A frightful vision rose up before Rev. Therefore, simultaneous with two or three cold triumphant shouts from the direction of the choir (from whence the figure), each one screwed a pitch higher, then followed by a trill of volant notes which snapped off in shivers and spontaneous barks of ecstasy. Which flipped his sunglasses to his nose, turned to one of the altar boys, and, closing his eyes, quickly jerked his head as a sign he would speak; as quickly, an altar boy, small as a rock pigeon, stood below him. He touched the boy’s pale neck (noticing his raspberry-coloured lips).
“Bumpass, what’s that vile thing doing in the aisle?”
“Please, sir?”
“He’s squiffy. It’s written all over him.” Which stamped his foot, hidden beneath the alb, while the hymn with drumbeating insistence grew louder and wilder with strange, almost prelapsarian vigour.
“The man down there, sir, you mean?”
“The nigger, Bumpass,” the priest said. “Yes.”
“He’s singing, I think, sir.”
“He wishes,” replied the priest, pushing the boy aside. Which recalled that he and his mother had once seen this very choir several Christmases ago in Trafalgar Square, where, together with the Society of Pan-African Wives, they had sung a selection of carols in their tribal masks and costumes: bright robes, bone combs, sashes, stripes, and paper flowers. (“Are they elves or lollies?” Lady Therefore had asked, dragging Which away.) His memory was composed chiefly of the highly ornamented males, natural and quite lovely, the aesthetic capacity of the females, he felt, having been advanced—unlike the male—in perfect accord with the Darwinian theory, through exercise or habit in the same manner, he had read somewhere, as our own taste is gradually improved. Walking away with his mother, he remembered, he had flatly denounced the peahen.
“It is not insisted upon,” Which said, blinking dim reproaches at Cyril, “but you may kiss the bride.”
“This is permittable and not being prohibited me?”
“Though not insisted upon.”
And he who doted on Sensations, Pulsations, and Exquisite Moments had to stand passively by and watch both of them, with highly censurable vim, fumble together like cheap dummies in a long, vulgar kiss that smacked out a loud report. A shriek of endorsement from the choir pierced to the very roof: “Waaaaaiiiieeeee!”
It had been explained as the original intention, during the collation of watercress sandwiches and tea that morning—as the young men were snapping on their cassocks—that through its cruciform arrangement the choir would try to reflect, as well as somehow ritualize in platonic copy, the order and pattern of what theology saw as The Greater Symbolic Design and, notwithstanding its reputation, humbly try to duplicate it. The Recessional, however, seemed to recapitulate a Zulu puberty rite.
The choir, during “How Mature Is Jesus, Very,” began to come apart—just as Cyril and Anita left the altar, hand in hand. The marginal positions gave way first when, in happy agitation over a few too-long-held polyphonic bursts, several choristers mambo’d over to the pews (vacant, vacant), and, snapping their fingers as if on the giddy crest of some tumultuous crisis, they swooned in fits of piglike hysteria. It was now a map of passion, totally lost to the concept of boundary; and vocal deformations, heated with wheezes and amazed whistles, were followed by physical. Rev. Therefore thought immediately of St. Tatwyn, patron saint of the costive in devotion. The hymn, more chased away than come to an end, left the choir hanging out in fealty a series of tongues frothed in pink. One boy found himself gasping for breath in the cobwebs of the loft, where, in the fervor of unabridged passion, he had tried to run into the steeple and ring the bell. Ring the bell!
“Epilepsy, so brief of horror,” Which exclaimed, alone on the altar, as the bridal party left the church, “wherefore is it thou canst not die?” He was an omniverous reader.
The howls ceased.
The church hung in dead stillness.
The lights had been extinguished some time before Which, more grey than eminent, slipped from the shadows of the vestry, where he had quietly kept station as an escape, a sanctuary, from the constantly renewed consignments of the living, in this case—unbeknownst to him—his mother, who, waiting at the main door, looked like a little poisonous toadstool that had sprouted through a crack there in the moist darkness, exuding spurts of bitter venom that fell drip, drip, drip from its network of close wrinkles and shadowy bracts—a liquor Which had gladly drunk to shrink, drugged, into perpetual dullness, even death. It seemed either that or a soaring dive in a plummet from the turrets of Tower Bridge. He thought of St. Phocas, the mar
ket gardener who dug his own grave, and patron saint of those who suffer from uterine nostalgia.
“Punctuality,” the mushroom announced, “is a sign of breeding.”
As he heard the voice, Which jumped in fright and caught at his throat. He staggered backwards, his face the colour of milk glass, and slumped into a dark pew.
“I had hoped—”
“Vainly,” she replied.
“And yet I fancied—”
“That the squall and catspaw of those perfectly foul Abyssinians sent me running?” She harumphed. “Pray build no hopes there, dear. You are speaking to a woman still as yet undefeated in the game of quinze, with which acumen, I might remind you, has something to do.”
“My hopes, if you must know, Mother, are dashed quite.” Which, dispossessed of Cyril, sacrificed to expediency, and stooped over, even as a young man, with an obstinate distaste for the ways of fortune, reached over and took his mother’s hand. He was miserable. He thought of St. Swope of Croquet Island, patron saint of the twentieth century, who was decollated in his twenty-fifth year for claiming he had invented the symbol for nought.
“Luddites, Costermongerers, Evangelicals,” she said, eyeing him through her veil as she thought of the tumultuous kick-up the choir had caused. “Each one, notice, an antonym for Good Taste, to say nothing of the cement of moral imperatives.”
“Then, so primitive.” He seemed diffident. “Or did you think not?”
“Ugly races are always primitive. It’s their form of sour grapes. The lower classes,” Lady Therefore whispered, confidentially pushing his head into her shoulder, thin as a wishbone and suffocatingly perfumed, “have been the raspberry seed in our wisdom tooth for a long, long time.”
“I am the victim of rather hoping that were not the case.”
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