Chapter VI
MULTIPLE DEPRIVATIONS
12 April 1988
With care John plucked one from the cluster of three-inch figurines set on the glass table, and raised it to his eye-level. He had guessed correctly: Anubis, the jackal-headed god, sculpted and cast in dark pewter, bearing his scales. He replaced it among its fellows, the crocodile king, the cat clutching a staff, the female hiding a scorpion in her coiled hair. Queer choices for the master of a Cambridge seminary. On the wood-panelled wall behind the master’s desk hung a Buddhist prayer shawl of shimmering white silk, pressed flat behind glass. Such were the traces of a man and his tastes, but as yet John awaited the actual presence of Reverend Gordon Lockhart, and the clock was tripping past eleven. John had straightened his tie, buttoned up his corduroy jacket and returned to his chair when at last Lockhart entered in haste. He wore his white hair swept back from his temples, with a neatly trimmed white moustache and goatee beard. His eyes were mild behind large-framed spectacles.
‘Mr Gore. I do apologise. Let us brook no more delay.’ Lockhart opened a manilla file and spread papers before him. ‘Let’s see. You were seen by Canon Botsford. You’ve done your conference in Leeds.’ He glanced up. ‘You’re finishing a degree in politics? And you want the two-year divinity course at the university, after which – you’d come to us for the certificate in ministry?’
John nodded. ‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘And you’re from Durham? You didn’t fancy keeping near your roots?’
‘No, I liked the course here best. Roots are for trees, I think.’
Lockhart smiled, not quite approvingly.
‘But you’re renouncing politics? Your devotion until now?’
‘Not as such. I still belong to the Labour Party. I just – lost a bit of the taste for politics, at university.’
‘How unfortunate. Any special reason?’
‘I think … it was a lot to do with the miners’ strike. My grandparents were miners – Durham, you know. So I was ashamed of the Party, really, for giving nothing to that fight. To people they were meant to fight for.’ Gore adjusted himself in his seat. ‘There was that, then there was just all the nonsense of student politics. Pushy people calling each other names. It was like being back in the school playground – only pompous as well as childish.’
Lockhart seemed mildly amused. ‘Oh dear. So what did you do to fill your time instead? At college?’
John shrugged. ‘Christian Union, two nights a week. I played a bit of football. Acted in a few student plays.’
‘Ah, drama. What sort of parts did you land?’
‘Small things, mostly. I was Angelo in Measure for Measure.’
‘Oh, now there’s a useful character. A study in our dual nature. “Heaven in my mouth”,’ the master recited jauntily, ‘“as if I did but only chew his name. And in my heart the strong and swelling evil of my conception.”’
Lockhart appeared to revel in a certain showmanship of his own. Again John shifted in his chair. This was proving a livelier exchange than he had expected.
‘Well, our production was a “feminist” version, apparently, so the director said. I never knew what he meant. But he asked me to make the character cold and violent and generally loathsome. So I did my best.’
‘That sounds rather fun. In a vicarious sort of fashion. You enjoyed acting?’
John nodded. ‘I don’t know that I had any great skill. But I found that I understood the words and could say them aloud so they sounded vaguely interesting.’
‘That’, Lockhart nodded slowly, ‘is a definite boon.’
John omitted to share with the master what he had found to be the chief blessing of amateur dramatics, namely that it had inducted him into female company. The Isabella to his Antonio had been a third-year chemist called Amanda, a lively girl with limpid green eyes, a bushel of kinky copper hair, and a cat-like body that John held closely but warily as he flung her hither and thither round the rehearsal room. After one such vigorous evening she led him through cold streets and up to her attic bedroom, fitted and straddled him like good collegiate sport, and relieved him of his virginity. In short, he had found acting an altogether worthwhile pursuit; and Lockhart, for as much as he knew, seemed to approve. He was smiling, at least.
‘Still, you’ve decided not to pursue the actor’s life. You’d already given up on elected office. Through all this you stayed steadfast in the Church?’
The crux, thought John, clearing his throat. ‘Yes. The Church has always been where I’ve found all my interests. All my passions. That’s never gone away. It was affirmed for me, really, when the Church report on inner-city poverty came out. At the end of 1985?’
‘Faith in the City,’ Lockhart nodded.
‘Yes. That made me proud, that piece of work.’ He smiled despite himself. ‘My father agreed with the Tories that it was all Marxist claptrap. I mean, that’s what he read in The Times, I think.’
In Lockhart’s own slight smile John saw complicity. ‘Your father disputed the Commission’s findings?’
‘I don’t think he’d dispute that a lot of people have got madly richer and just as many are miserably poorer. “Multiple deprivation” was the phrase, I think. But I don’t waste time arguing the hows and whys of all that with my father. Or my sister, or any of the two million happy shareholders in British Telecom.’
‘You have a sister? What does she do with herself?’
‘She works for a public relations firm at Westminster. They’re very close to the Conservatives.’
‘How funny. So she’s the real political animal of the family. And you, meanwhile, seek ordination to ministry.’
John nodded, a little perplexed by Lockhart’s antithesis.
‘Well, I hope no one’s lied to you about the way we do things. You’ve read the syllabus? There are, of course, the core areas. Doctrine, Old and New Testaments, the Fathers, Church history. Ethics we’re rather big on, with reference to philosophy and theology. All of that appeals?’
John nodded. ‘It’s really theology that’s my main interest.’
Lockhart closed his eyes meditatively, nodding as if to distant music. ‘Theology is fundamental to Grey.’ The eyes reopened. ‘Who do you read that you fancy?’
Strange terms, thought John. ‘John of the Cross. Tillich, I suppose. Bonhoeffer.’
Lockhart’s eyebrows flicked heavenward. ‘“Religionless Christianity”.’
‘I don’t think Bonhoeffer meant Christianity without God,’ John hastened to add.
‘Oh no,’ Lockhart murmured. ‘No, I expect he had in mind the dead weight of the Church. Or some of its votaries.’
‘I should say the school of negative theology is the one I feel nearest to. The idea of God I feel I can best approach through a sense of His absence.’
‘Oh well, of course, yes,’ said Lockhart. ‘There’s that idea too.’
John was picking up something whimsical, unacceptably ironic, about this man, reflecting ill on the solemnity he had tried to summon for the occasion. He was unhappily put in mind of his chance meeting in the street only weeks ago – Amanda, out with her crowd, stopping and smiling brightly. But when he told her his news, his plans, she had bit her lip, her smile turning piteous. ‘Oh John,’ she had said.
‘In any case,’ Lockhart resumed, ‘we get all sorts here. But the course itself is a set menu. Lectures are compulsory. You may feel your life has been full of such stuff.’
‘It’s true, I’ve been a long time about my education.’
‘Quite. But here we believe in a proper balance between theory and practice. The true objective is to train you for your pastoral duties in the world. You are not hermits. You’re free to pursue your hobbies, whatever they are – it doesn’t have to be bell-ringing. There are certain domestic duties that fall by rota. How are you in the kitchen?’
‘I’m told I make a decent pot of stew.’
‘Oh well then, you’re in.’ Lockhart w
as turning over John’s handwritten statement. ‘No, I think I can understand your various interests, your background. What faith has meant to you. Specifically, though – I see you are someone who believes they “felt the call”.’
John flinched. ‘Isn’t that how everyone feels – who comes?’
‘No. No, it isn’t.’ Lockhart stared at him very levelly, then back to the statement. ‘You refer to a particularly charged experience.’
‘Yes, I had a – it was a couple of years ago – it gave me a very strong feeling. Not really … explicable, I thought. Not rational.’
‘Go on.’
‘I was in France, a village in the Auvergne region. I’d arranged some leave from my studies, I was – I wasn’t in a very good frame of mind.’
‘Why was that?’
John held his tongue for some moments, knowing nonetheless that this disclosure would have to be complete.
‘My mother had died, very suddenly. I mean – she hadn’t been well, it was a condition, malignant hypertension. But rest had seemed the only remedy. And, I hadn’t seen her for a while but I thought that she was … coping.’
‘But she wasn’t?’
John nodded. ‘My father called – I was in my college digs, in a bad way that day, just gloomy over some’ – he sighed – ‘oh, some totally insignificant personal woes. But my father reached me and he – I mean, I knew right away from the sound of him that it was bad, then he said Mum had had an awful stroke, and I, I said, “She won’t die, will she?” And he said, “She’s gone.”’
The line of Lockhart’s mouth twitched. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It was a very low time.’ John paused. ‘But – my father told us we had lives to get on with, that’s what he and Mum had always wanted. That’s what Susannah did, my sister. I chose to get involved in this voluntary project in France. A restoration of some historical buildings.’
Lockhart raised a polite eyebrow.
‘I just wanted to get away, try to make myself useful. I was in a team working on the sacristy of a Gothic chapel, and rebuilding a wall round an old medieval fortress. They were both stuck up on the same hill.’
‘And was it useful to you, this work? Did it serve its purpose?’
‘It did. My French got better – if only from people shouting at me for shoddy work. I learned to answer back. Learned how to cut stone. That was good – hard, hard on the hands, all the blisters and bloody knuckles. But rewarding. In itself.’
‘And this was where you had your – experience.’
John nodded. ‘It was after we downed tools one evening. We were all straggling back down from the hill, over the hay-fields to this old barn where they put us up. I was … exhausted, really a crushing fatigue, all the aches and grazes you get working stone. But I was – happy, I think. And I stopped walking and looked around me. It was that strange blue-rose light you see after sunset. There was a breeze. And I saw my friends’ shadows lengthening over the ground, and the grass seemed to glow like jade. Very curious. And I shivered, but then – it was like a warmth crept all over me. And I felt such a sadness, right in the heart of things. But an amazing sweetness too – like they were of a piece, made of each other, the sadness and the sweetness. And I just realised that there was nothing wrong in the world. Nothing wrong but me – us, any of us. Nothing wrong but we don’t see the rightness of it. The rightness of creation.’
In reliving his account, John had begun to feel a little lightheaded anew. Lockhart had bridged his fingers, his brow creased. ‘It didn’t occur to you that you were perhaps just suffering exhaustion. Or, I don’t know, that you’d ingested something?’
John winced – this was not the consideration he had wished for. At the same time, he knew, the shaky, groggy vertigo he had felt in that field had been not so far removed from the aftermath of his one hallucinogenic experience in college, a week or so after Amanda ended their affair, when in the depths of dolour he had let a coursemate talk him into swallowing a hundred dried and bulbous psilocybin mushrooms. Yet he was ready to insist on a vital distinction.
‘No, the feeling had come from nowhere, and it was incredibly strong – in fact it became – frighteningly so. Like a thrumming in my head and behind my eyes, violent colours. I was scared, to be honest. I had to keep telling myself my name. Eventually some sort of calm came back to me. Some clarity. The colours faded, the noise too. Then it was as if my chest was full of fibres, all being knotted together, against my will, too tight to bear. But the feeling was exquisite, more powerful than any I’d known.’ He shrugged. ‘Then it was over. My friends were shouting for me. I could feel the earth under my feet. A greenfly on my wrist. And all was well.’
He had felt laughter, too, as he recalled – surging up his chest cavity like cool water through a brass pipe, racing to break forth. It had emerged as a wracking sob, and his workmates had seen the need to support him in the slow trudge back to the barn. But this, again, was not a detail John thought to disclose.
‘What I mean is, I knew very clearly that I had had an experience.’
‘You felt a presence.’
‘It was … I suppose I’d say it was a worshipful moment? I’d been feeling a lot of things oppressing me. Then they just lifted.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Just mainly my own self-absorption, I suppose.’ Lockhart shook his head, gently, quizzically. John was disconcerted to find more words come forth. ‘I’m sure I’d been feeling quite bereft, as you do. But after I had this … this moment … it just reminded me, I suppose, that life is short, really. And I had best get on and try to do things.’
‘Do you think that’s what your mother would have wanted?’
‘Actually it’s more my father’s sort of – credo. I don’t really know what she would have wanted. We didn’t have that discussion. I didn’t really pay her that courtesy. Before it happened.’ John found his throat and speech suddenly clotted.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘No, thank you, I’m okay.’
Lockhart bridged his fingers. ‘Have you considered that perhaps what you really want to do is to, well, make good a loss?’
‘No, not at all, I can’t see how that would …’
Lockhart winced and waved a hand. ‘No, forgive me, I am a psychoanalyst manqué. I ought really to stick to what I know.’
John coughed. ‘Sorry, I will perhaps take a small drink if I may.’
Lockhart nodded, rose and went to his drinks table, unstopping the decanter. ‘I don’t mean to harass you. The fact is, I was myself reluctantly called. And that is the more common way, I find. The early Fathers, you know, a good number of them were nominated. Pre-ordained? In spite of what path they may have wished to follow.’ He handed John a small port and resumed his seat. ‘No, the common element isn’t really a calling. It’s a sort of a wound we carry, I’d say. An intimate wound.’
John was silent, uneasy. Having felt his own inner ballast overturned, he had no notion of how now to take Lockhart’s confession. The master glanced down at the papers before him, as if abashed, then looked longer, and was silent awhile.
‘You were born the same year I was ordained. I daresay half your generation were baptised in an Anglican church. The next lot, it wouldn’t surprise me if that number were halved again. You’ll be aware, I’m sure, of the present catastrophe in church attendance. When they offer the figures now, I have to look away. Like a car crash.’
After some moments, John shrugged. ‘I don’t know, what are you asking me?’
‘Just consider this. You’re twenty-two. As a candidate for ministry you propose to devote your whole working life to Christ. The duties are taxing. The pay is not generous. I’m asking are you serious?’
‘I do understand – the price of the ticket, Reverend.’
Lockhart raised his chin and smiled. ‘Of course you do. Very good, John, very good. Well, I really look forward to welcoming you among us.’
The master steered him out
of the door, and then John stood alone once more in the wan sunlight of the college quadrangle, its lawns, beds and paths segmented around a slow-trickling stone fountain. He was unable to entirely shake the sense that he had been weighed in the balance, found a little wanting. But if Lockhart were laying some kind of wager on his level of commitment, then – and in this John was determined – the master had yet no notion of the zeal with which he would be repaid.
Chapter VII
WISE COUNSEL
Wednesday, 25 September 1996
‘Now be ready to bite your tongue here, marra,’ said Jack Ridley.
In reply Gore merely rapped the hardbacked notebook in his lap. He was not entirely certain if Ridley’s remark was by way of scold or friendly warning, just as he was not entirely certain of its maker. But they were on the road again, driving north of Hoxheath through Arthur’s Hill for the mile or so to St Mark’s Church in Fenham. It was the dog-end of the working day, the only time, Gore understood, when his Parochial Council could be quorate, given the diverse commitments of its members.
Ridley steered his Fiesta through a sprawl of handsome semidetached housing, the pavements congested with teenage schoolchildren in impeccable black sweaters and blazers. St Mark’s Church was set back through gates, in tidily landscaped grounds. They walked up the pathway to the vestry, a modern glass-fronted extension bolted onto the chapel. Inside, the door to a meeting room was propped open. Therein the table was already populated, teacups laid out. The Reverend Bob Spikings moved quickly down the length of the room to take Gore’s hand.
‘Hullo there, John. So, you, uh, found us, then?’
Spikings seemed to Gore like some dreamy corporate IT boffin, apologetic and mildly harassed. He was bespectacled and tidily bearded, probably in his late forties, a peeling Filofax and a mobile phone set by his teacup. Gore paid only a half-measure of attention as he was escorted round the table for the naming ritual. Here was a retired lady hairdresser, there a technical manager with Findus Foods; a manager at the electric company sat with a former bus driver. A journalist had a pen and pad before him. Spikings’s petite dark wife Rose had taken the chair by her husband. Gore assumed his seat beside Ridley at the far end of the long table, nodding in the direction of Monica Bruce, and struck a contemplative pose.
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