I looked at Mum as she moved towards the door. She seemed pleased to have got this off her chest. Whatever it was.
‘In Angmering . . .’ I said, cautiously.
She suddenly got angry.
‘With Veronica, for Christ’s sake!’
I still didn’t get it.
She went to the window and looked down at our drab patch of suburban garden. She sighed. ‘I’ll never forget that night in Lisbon!’ Then she turned to me: ‘Always be faithful and true, Simon. Always be honest and faithful and sincere in your dealings with others where are your trainers?’
‘On the floor.’
‘Keep them out of sight!’
Then she puckered her lips and allowed her breast to heave one or two times. This is usually a sure sign that she is about to quote from the collected works of Old Mother Walsh, and this, indeed, is what she did: ‘ “Shoes are remarkable, warm, bright and neat. The best place to keep them is on your feet.” ’
And with these words she thumped off down the stairs, leaving me to collect my thoughts for the hard task of Testifying.
I rolled out of bed and, feeling I was doomed to the state of hei-hei, or eternal sloth and uselessness, I wondered whether I could find a pair of unstiff socks.
The choir outside seemed to have stopped, but downstairs I could hear the Quigleys. Marjorie, who has a carrying voice, was saying, ‘Isn’t Testifying the best thing? Mrs Danby says it’s the best thing!’ She sounded rather girlish as she said this. Then I heard Quigley’s low bass, but couldn’t make out what he was saying.
I took one last, depressed look at myself in the mirror above the electric fire and clattered down the stairs. As I reached the landing I heard Mrs Quigley say, ‘We’re having the patio done. Then we’re getting a completely new roof.’
They were getting a good deal out of staying at our house. Some people have to rent places. And, while we were at it, how the hell were they managing to afford these improvements? My dad always used to say that we could not afford lunch, although, I have to say, this did not stop him eating it.
They were all in the clothes traditionally worn when people are going to testify. My mum was wearing a sort of large red sack and a conical hat that made her look like a gnome in a pantomime. Mrs Quigley was wearing a loose white robe with a hat and a veil rather like a bee-keeper’s. She looked like a worker at a nuclear power station. Women at Testifying must be ‘loose and bright’, as Old Mother Walsh once said. The men are their usual uninspiring selves.
Mrs Quigley held out her arms as I came into the hall. ‘Oh my darling, darling boy!’ she said.
I had been getting a lot of this. I had so far managed to avoid being kissed by the old bat, but I had the strong feeling that, by the end of the day, she and I were going to be getting physical.
I stayed where I was. She decided against physical contact. Instead, she looked up to the ceiling from where she got quite a lot of her inspiration. Quigley was smirking next to her. The whole truth of my heart! How was he going to take the news of the hijacking of earthling bodies by extraterrestrial beings? I was going to have to be extremely subtle about this.
‘Jesus,’ said Mrs Quigley in sharp tones, ‘can you see this boy?’
‘Thee him,’ said Emily. ‘He’th blethed!’
My face didn’t crack.
‘Today,’ said Quigley, ‘is a very great day in your life. You’re going to stand up in front of a hundred or so of your closest friends and tell them your deepest, most private thoughts.’
This seemed to me to be a pretty fair definition of hell, but I tried to look like a man who enjoyed such occasions.
‘You’re going to tell them,’ said Quigley, ‘what you think about . . . about . . . everything!’ And then, with a kind of war whoop, he picked me up under the armpits and carried me out to the choir waiting outside. He was incredibly strong.
As we thundered along the road, he whispered in my ear, ‘And after you’ve Testified, Simon, you’ll be Confirmed in Faith. In ten days. Think of it! Cor blimey, mate, you’re not just Simon, old lad. You’re Simon pure!’
Bergman had a barmitzvah and I went. Everyone there was Jewish apart from me. There was a lot of chanting, and afterwards we went to a posh hotel and I got a free hat. Bergman, at the end of it, was officially a man. As far as I am concerned, Bergman has been officially a man since the end of the Upper Removes. He is one hairy guy. But it was nice to see all these old geezers with huge noses treating him as if he was a man. In the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist you are Confirmed in Faith, which means you are officially a berk. There are no free hats.
Quigley held me up with one free hand and opened the door of his car with the other. He threw me across the front seat, and the choir applauded – whether this was for my benefit or to register approval for Quigley’s strong right arm was not clear.
He wanted me Confirmed in Faith did he?
Being Confirmed in Faith is the full masonic job. I’ve never been able to find out what goes on at the ceremony, but, from what I’ve heard, there is more to it than rolling up your trouserleg. I know that the male members of the congregation ‘play loudly on the organ and show their bodies’. I know a fair amount of water gets chucked around, and at some point I think you are expected to wear your underpants on your head. But in between all these things something happens which is only spoken of in hushed whispers. Maybe they paint your balls green.
All this stuff dates back years, to Old Mother Walsh and her Sisters. When they baptized people they stayed baptized. You know? There was none of this dip-the-finger-in-the-water-and-let’s-talk-about-the-Test-Match bollocks. They used to run down into the Nerd, or whatever river it is that runs through Ealing, and throw themselves in, yelling about the love of Jesus. Water was cheap and unpolluted in those days.
He was really moving fast, was Quiggers. He couldn’t wait to get me sewn up, could he? Why the big hurry? I wondered, as Mum, Emily and Mrs Quigley got into the back of his brand new car and he thrust it out into the traffic.
One of the areas where Quigley really needs a lot of help from the Lord Jesus is in the driving department. But I have never heard him confess his unworthiness in this field of human endeavour. He snarls at motorcyclists, accelerates hard at the back of buses and views the red traffic light as a challenge rather than a warning.
As we careered down towards South Wimbledon, I remembered other trips I’d taken to church. Mostly I thought about going with my dad. I thought about running along beside him as we came up to the main road opposite the church, about his taking my hand and singing, ‘Hold my hand – I’m a stranger in Paradise!’
And, as I thought about that, another image came into my mind. A heavy, silver casket was swinging backwards and forwards and there was that smell in the air – a smell of old leaves and perfume and musty, clinging sweetness. There was music, too, and those long shafts of light that fell from a high window, somewhere over to my right. For the first time, I could feel my father very close to me, his face very dark and serious. He was talking to someone. Someone I couldn’t see. I wanted to see who it was, but I couldn’t. He was mumbling. The words he was using weren’t English. They were some old, runic language I couldn’t understand. But there was something even stranger than that about him. He was on his knees. Why? Why was he kneeling? And to whom?
‘We are come to the Temple,’ said Mrs Quigley, as Quigley reversed into a parked car.
The street was packed with members of the First Spiritualist Church. It was Day Release at the loony bin. Over by the door of the church I could see Meriel Viney, wearing a kind of white sack and a pair of what looked like tennis shoes. On her head was a hat that looked as if someone had dropped a large meringue on her head. She was chatting away to Roger Beeding and to Roger de Mornay. There were, I found myself thinking, a hell of a lot of people called Roger in the First Spiritualist Church. What was it about the name that made them want to funk on down and start praising the Lord? We had
no Peters, no Colins, only one David and, though there had been a Kevin a few years back, we were now understaffed in that area too. But you just could not keep the Rogers away!
It’s for old people, our church. Old people called Roger.
Right outside the church, directly in front of Roger Beeding, was a large Rolls-Royce. Sitting in the back seat was a woman in a long, cream dress and a hat the size of a toddler’s swimming-pool. She was smoking a small cigar and sported a face that was a lot less elegant than the hat.
Quigley is down on smokers. Cigarettes are the work of the Devil. But smoking was obviously kosher as far as this old bat went. He rushed up to her as she got out of the Roller, took her right hand and thrust it into his beard. ‘Oh!’ I heard him say. ‘Oh!’
Mrs Quigley looked pretty pleased as well. She had the air of one who might head for the pavement and start writhing at any minute. ‘Mrs Danby,’ she croaked, ‘I’m so pleased! Mrs Danby!’
So this was Mrs Danby. It was strange. I couldn’t remember ever having clapped eyes on her before. But she was looking at me as if we were long-lost friends. She was smiling so hard the gauze on her hat wobbled. And, as I met her eyes, I did have a memory of something, although I couldn’t have said what. It was to do with a smell and some music and a steel thing swinging out and back, out and back, like the pendulum in the story by Edgar Allan Poe.
‘This’, Mrs Danby was saying, ‘is one of the greatest days of my life!’
She simpered at me. I was beginning to feel like a ritual sacrifice. I mean, had the First Spiritualists moved on? Was I going to have it off with this woman and a couple of goats? Give me the goats any time, I thought, as I was shuffled towards her.
‘Has Norman come through?’ I heard her say.
‘We have been in constant touch with him,’ said Quigley, as if he was reassuring the chairman about the Exports Division.
The old bat beamed. ‘How is he?’
‘He is doing fine, Mrs Danby,’ said Marjorie.
Who was this woman? And why would she not take her eyes off me?
‘What’s he doing over there?’
Everyone looked at Mrs Quigley.
‘Oh, he’s been . . . jetting around,’ she said at last.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Danby, shaking her head winsomely, ‘he was always a busy soul, was Norman. Has he made new contacts?’
‘He feels very, very fully occupied,’ said Mrs Quigley, ‘but we are getting some very serious indications that he has been . . . having a personal rethink.’
Mrs Danby nodded gravely. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh yes. When we fall, how we do fall!’
I couldn’t work out what she meant by this. In fact, I couldn’t work her out at all. She was wearing high-heeled shoes – which is very unusual for a First Spiritualist – and she was smirking at people as if she was at a cocktail party rather than morning service.
Behind her I could see into what is rather optimistically known as the vestry – which is nothing more than a curtained-off area of the floor, rather like what you might see in a hospital casualty ward. Pike was standing by a wooden rack of pamphlets, including What Has Old Mother Walsh to Say to Us? and a large, colourful one for the kiddies entitled Daddy isn’t Dead, He’s Just Gone Out for a Bit.
Mrs Danby started up the steps, and we followed her. When she got to the large graph that shows the state of the church-roof appeal, she stopped and looked down at the waiting crowds as if she was a victorious politician looking down on her compliant voters. To avoid catching her eye, I looked at the graph. As far as I could tell, the roof seemed to be consuming money faster than we could give it.
She grabbed my hand and turned her wrinkled face to mine. ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ she said.
I didn’t reply. I wanted to ask her if she was, by any chance, called Veronica, but I didn’t dare.
She tossed her head and looked around at the congregation. ‘I have not been to Service these few years,’ she said. ‘I have been in the Outer Darkness!’
Perhaps she had been abroad, to Africa or something. That would explain why I didn’t recognize her. She was hard to miss, even among such a hand-picked collection of fruitcakes as the First Spiritualist Church.
‘I was close to your father during his great crisis,’ she said, ‘and it was I who led him astray. Into other fields, other woods, other pastures that seemed sweet but were full, as it turned out, of stinking weeds!’
They had been on country rambles together, was that it?
‘And now’, she went on, ‘I am hearing Norman again. I am hearing him loud and clear. You are helping me, Simon. And when you are one with us, when you have plunged your head in the cold, clear waters of baptism, then my great sin will be forgiven. I stole the father and gave Him back the son!’
I didn’t like the sound of any of this – especially the bit about plunging the old head in the cold, clear waters of baptism. But there was nothing I could say. I still had this uncomfortable feeling that I did know her. That she belonged to some time, when I was a little kid, that had somehow been barred from my memory.
Down below, Roger Beeding was beginning the traditional question-and-answer routine that always comes before you go into the morning service.
BEEDING: Shall we go in and worship?
CONGREGATION: Let us.
BEEDING: How shall we go in and worship?
CONGREGATION: On our feet.
BEEDING: How shall we worship when we are within?
CONGREGATION: On our knees.
BEEDING: How shall we go before the Living God, if He appears before us?
CONGREGATION: On our bellies . . .
I used to have a friend, the only other boy of my age in the congregation, before he went to Nottingham. He and I had a version of the Introit that went:
BEEDING: How shall we stand in the church?
CONGREGATION: On our heads.
BEEDING: What may we hold when we are within?
CONGREGATION: Our penises.
BEEDING: How may we hold them?
CONGREGATION: Well and tightly . . .
I thought of him now – he was called Mike Jarvis and he was a great skateboarder – as the congregation swept up the steps, past me and Mrs Danby, and Pike triumphantly pushed back the curtain to reveal the inner sanctum of the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist.
It was a sight as familiar to me as my own front room. A large, empty room with high, narrow windows through which the bright day filtered slowly on to various shades of brown. Brown linoleum on the floor, brown chairs, arranged in neat rows, and, on the walls, pictures and photographs and testimonials from dead spiritualists, all of them, it seemed to me, written in faded brown ink and confined to faded brown frames.
At the back of the raised platform at one end of the hall was a wooden cross, about six feet high. That, too, was brown. As we trooped in for the service, the sun caught it and, for a moment, I had a vision of what it must have really looked like, all those years ago, when they nailed poor old JC up before the people, one bright day in Palestine.
At the far end of the hall, Quigley was showing Mrs Danby to what looked like a comfortable chair. There aren’t many of those in the First Church. And, up on the platform, Roger Beeding was calling the faithful.
‘How are we now?’ he called.
‘We are in the church!’ called back the congregation.
‘How are our voices?’ he called.
And they replied, ‘They are rich and fruitful!’
Mr Toombs raised both his arms. He looked like Dracula about to make a maiden flight. ‘Let us,’ he said, ‘praise the Lord!’
We had started. There was no going back. And all I could think, as the service began, was the whole truth of my heart! I am supposed to tell the whole truth of my heart!
16
In the autumn of 1924, the young Rose Fox was visited by the spirit of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He told her that, in a previous life, she had actually been the compose
r of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and, while she was in a trance, he dictated his new work to her – a Concerto in G for harp, oboe and string orchestra. The piece was performed in Wimbledon Town Hall in 1926, and the consensus was that, in 130-odd years, Wolfgang had not really developed musically. Some people were so bold as to suggest that he had now lost his grip and was writing pretty fair garbage.
It didn’t stop at Mozart. It turned out that Rose Fox had been an awful lot of people in previous lives – mostly male, and all of them, apart from a rather dull-sounding galley slave in 34 bc, rather famous or important. These people have always Done Things in previous lives, perhaps to make up for their rather undistinguished efforts while being alive and in their own bodies.
Anyway, one of the people Rose Fox had been was John Wesley. And, from what I hear, her Wesley was a lot nearer the mark than her Mozart. He dictated to her many of the hymns that are still in use by the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist – many of whose tunes are exactly the same – bar one or two notes – as the ones the real John Wesley cobbled together in the eighteenth century. Rose’s Uncle Eustace, who lived upstairs in her parents’ home when she was a girl, was, incidentally, a staunch Methodist.
The better Wesley went down, the more she did him. Mozart didn’t write much after the concerto for harp, oboe and string orchestra, apart from an unfinished Requiem Mass, which no one could be persuaded to perform. But Wesley went on to write hymns, give advice and generally add shape, colour and texture to the ritual life of the First Spiritualist Church.
He was pretty gnomic by all accounts. He didn’t say, ‘Right, men – come in by twos, line up facing east and bang your foreheads on the floor!’ He would come out with lines like, ‘Let your words to God be as the noise of Esau!’ Which meant that, for a couple of weeks, an amazing amount of shouting went on. So much so that Wesley came back with, ‘And yet, softness be a virtue.’ He did sound a bit Mummerset from time to time.
One of the first bits of advice he gave the First Church was, ‘Bend the knee, but not unwisely.’ With the result that, to this day, the guys spend a lot of the service in a kind of crouching position.
They Came From SW19 Page 13
