by A. N. Wilson
‘You’re wrong about my being expelled from Zinariya – though I’m sure I’d never get a visa to return. Not since I became friends with Gabriel.’
‘Galwanga the Loon!’
‘I was invited back to England by the bishop. St Mary’s Crickleden has long associations with CHR. Our founder, Bishop Guiseley, was vicar there before he went off to Kelvedone with four friends to start the community. St Mary’s was a big Victorian parish – what they used to call a slum parish – and the bishop thought I might be able to get back some of that energy we seem to have lost in the church. It’s a problem area …’
‘Largely thanks to your black friends.’
‘Lennie, that’s not worthy of you.’
‘I know what Crickleden’s like – for God’s sake, it’s only three miles south of here. Those sink estates down there – they’re muggers’ universities, schools of rape. I suppose you think they’re making a violent protest against all the injustices in English society?’
‘In part – yes, that is what I think.’
‘Jesus!’
Lennox kicked out his short legs, at the end of which were pale blue mohair socks and very small, highly polished Italian loafers.
‘As you say,’ said the monk, ‘Jesus! When I left this country, the best part of forty years ago, England still seemed to have a soul. It had pulled together after the war and committed itself to a welfare system …’
‘Jesus, it was the welfare system which drained this fucking country of its soul – can’t you see that? The dependency culture destroyed any sense of having to do something for yourself. Do you think those violent, criminal bastards in your parish would have time to be muggers if they had ever been made to work?’
‘Made? By whom? When I came home after forty years away, I found an England I hardly recognized. It seems to have no values at all. An African friend came to stay with me in the vicarage when I’d been there a few months. I tried to explain to him what an “old folks’ home” was. This Zinariyan friend knew that in a few very sad cases there might be old people in any society who had outlived every member of the family and needed residential care. But he simply could not grasp the notion that British families wait until their parents or grandparents are in greatest frailty and need and then discard them, put them with a lot of other old people to be cared for by someone else. In this man’s village in Zinariya—’
‘And why was he here if it’s so marvellous in his village? To sponge off the British welfare state …?’
‘He was here because his wife had been raped, then killed by government troops. His house was burnt down. His permission to work as a lecturer in Mararraba was revoked.’
‘Lovely African community spirit.’
‘He stayed here a few months only. Now he lectures at the university in Lagos. I envy him. I have become an African. You seem to have lost your African-ness, Lennie. You can’t really think much of England? It’s entirely Americanized – hamburger joints in Crickleden High Road, KFC, rowdy violent films, expensive drugs and cheap music the normal entertainment. This isn’t the England Clem Attlee and Nye Bevan set out to build.’
‘In Clem Attlee’s socialist paradise you’d be lucky to get a margarine sandwich. You’re a snob, Father! KFC or Burger King give poor people cheap food they enjoy. You want them to be at a church social playing ping-pong; they’d rather go to a disco, see a movie – what’s wrong with that?’
‘England’s lost its way – lost its values, lost its identity.’
‘Too many immigrants – but again, you’d favour that.’
‘I don’t know – maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t. I want Britain to be the decent, humane place it was in my boyhood. When I was a child we were fighting a world war against racialists, we were welcoming refugees – now everyone is so mean-spirited, so unwelcoming. The church is inward-looking, squabbling about gay bishops when it should be preaching the Gospel. But what about you, Lennie? You still believe in the Gospel – I know you do.’
Lennox looked sheepishly at his Gucci loafers.
‘I believe,’ he murmured.
‘Then, for God’s sake, stop supporting Bindiga!’
The monk knew that this was the end of the interview. He stood, an enormous beanpole of black cloth.
‘I’ll show you out, Father.’
They made a strange pair, descending in the glass lift through twenty storeys.
‘And all this is yours, Lennie?’ The monk shook his head at the greed of it. Lennox tried not to notice the reproof; took the enquiry at its face value; replied in a tone, almost, of detachment, speaking either to himself or to some imagined guest, rather than to a man who had expressed such blanket disapproval of him and all his works.
‘These floors are let out. They are the offices of ZA – what was Lugardair …’
‘And do you own Zinariyan Airways, Lennie?’
‘They’re owned by the state. You know that. With some private investment obviously. This is WAMO.’ He nodded at another wall of plate glass, more yards of fitted blue carpet tiles, stenographers staring patiently at VDUs.
‘I spit on your Mining Organization, your mines, your greed …’
‘Then these floors’ – as the lift whooshed downwards, but not fast enough now for Lennox in his embarrassment – ‘are devoted to some of my magazine titles. Gloss has its own premises in Mayfair, but here we’ve got The Seedsman, some motorcycle mags, a Formula One racing magazine which is doing rather well …’
‘And where do you produce the iniquitous newspapers?’
‘We’re passing Floor Six – that’s the boardroom for the two Legions – now on Floor Five that’s the legal department and the reference library – Floor Three – if you like we could look round the offices of one of the Legions?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘That’s The Sunday Legion!’
He pointed to the large open-plan office, taking in at a glance the wisdom of Kurtmeyer and Spottiswood’s advice: if the same editorial team could be used to produce both titles … Each head, glimpsed through the plate glass squinting at its computer screen, was costing him thirty, forty grand a year.
‘And then we have the Daily …’
An identical office – same toneless grey laminated desks, each with its grey computer, same carpet tiles, same strip lighting. There was more activity here, however, and a larger staff. The priest could make out employees bustling, even running about.
‘And then we have Classified Ads and the whole advertising department: the whole lifeblood of a newspaper. These guys’ – he indicated through the windows the workers in the advertising department – ‘actually make all the money which these fuckers’ – he jabbed with his finger in the direction of the editorial offices – ‘spend.’
The monk closed his mouth like a rat trap and actually closed his eyes when the lift came to a halt. They emerged on to the large marbly landing known as the Atrium. A London plane was planted there and stretched its branches upwards to about half the height of the building. A tall cascade splashed on to a goldfish pond.
‘This is where we part, Father.’
‘So it would appear. You haven’t heard the last of me, Lennie.’
Suddenly, this tall Englishman with bony grey socks sticking out beneath his black skirt was not simply ridiculous, but extremely annoying to Lennox, and he burst out, ‘Just who the fuck do you think you are?’
‘Goodbye, Lennie,’ said Father Chell.
Lennox watched the silver head disappearing down the silver escalator, disturbed by his own loss of control.
‘Don’t let that man in this building again!’ he shouted at the commissionaire.
The man was assuring him that he wouldn’t when beside him the receptionist leaned forward from her desk. ‘Mr Mark – an important telephone call from your wife …’
‘I’ll take it upstairs!’
He could not stop shouting.
‘She says it’s urgent, Mr Mark. There’s
been a—’
‘Upstairs – didn’t you hear me?’
ELEVEN
While Martina Mark in Knightsbridge was telephoning her husband with her version of that afternoon’s events, and while Lennox Mark in Bermondsey was yelling in response at the plate glass of his penthouse and while the lights of London became visible out in the darkness beyond, two women in Crickleden were entering the gates of a large comprehensive school for an interview with a psychiatric social worker.
Lily d’Abo was a neatly dressed woman in her early sixties. She wore a crimson coat, trimmed at the collar with soft cotton velvet. It looked, and was, a coat which had been well cared for for over thirty years. She wore a small black felt hat which, covered with a multitude of tiny drops of moisture, glistened in the evening drizzle, as did the short curly white hair which protruded from its rim. From the hem of her coat could be seen two stick-like legs descending into shoes which proclaimed that like their owner, they were sensible. Other metaphors were suggested by the brown lace-ups which, like the coat, dated from her early nursing days in London: they were feet planted firmly on the ground, they were her own and she stood on them; whichever was the best, she was going to put it forward.
Her daughter, Mercy Topling, was four inches taller and at first sight excited an altogether different set of assumptions. If Lily d’Abo’s appearance suggested immediately a person who could restore order and common sense to a troubled scene, Mercy looked in the merriest sense as if trouble of a frivolous sort could easily ensue at her arrival. Someone had once told her that she had the figure of a woman on a saucy seaside postcard. She was not sure that such postcards even existed any more in these serious times, but she had taken the observation as the compliment intended. She dressed to please – though in the periods of gloom when her husband Trevor was beyond pleasing, it was hard to be specific as for whom exactly the pleasure was intended. The truth probably was: everyone. This evening, a short skirt of black leather revealed massive, shapely calves swooping to the slenderest of ankles, a gold ankle bracelet and patent leather shoes. Her generous bottom had many admirers, both at the office – she worked for the planning department of the local council in a clerical capacity – and in the streets of Streatham when she did the shopping. The bright cerise woolly jumper emphasized large breasts. The rain caught their mounds, so that she seemed to carry before her two great fluffy globes adorned with dewy sequins beneath the open PVC mac which only partially served to keep out the weather.
Compared with the two women who had come to meet him, in a bleak interview room on the first floor of the school, Kevin Currey – the psychiatric social worker on Peter d’Abo’s case – had made markedly little effort with his appearance. He was the same age as Mercy, thirty-eight, but already (balding head, bad teeth) he was going to seed. While the two women, like the great majority of civilized humanity throughout history, had taken trouble, every day of their adult lives, to clean and to adorn themselves in readiness for what that day would bring, Kevin Currey belonged to that large number now alive on the planet who had never seemingly possessed this instinct.
With his lack of dress sense went an absence of any sense of occasion, formality, or order – either in individual lives or in society. Though his work exposed him daily to those whose lives were malfunctioning, he felt no calling to restore individual lives, let alone society itself, to order or workability. He had never, in fact, thought through the implications of his work at all. He took each case as it came: seemed, when he met the parents, to be gormless, if kindly by the lights he had presumably acquired at a college. When one interview was over – on to the next. When one problem had been investigated – chewed upon, aired or acknowledged – on to the next.
Kevin Currey did his share of listening while teachers or parents wept. He did his share of attending juvenile courts, sitting in on police interviews as a ‘responsible adult’ when his young clients were in trouble, and he was reasonably conscientious at visiting homes, or – where the case had been moved from a domestic situation – remand homes, detention centres or prisons. He had never once thought through the state of things to the possibility of a solution, either for individual dilemmas or for more generalized social ills.
In his job, he arrived in a mess, to find more mess, and he left it a mess. His function was to stir up the mess a little and if possible give short-term consolations, offer friendship. Hence, perhaps, the appropriateness of his clothes – the trainers, the white though not markedly clean socks, the Levi’s against which his expanded belly protruded a flabby protest, the sweatshirt emblazoned with the name of an American university which he had never visited.
‘So – Mercy, Lily! Great, great to see you!’
With sweeping arm movements – suggestive of an all-inclusive attitude to the world, perhaps disappointment that it was just the three of them and that the two women had not brought a party of friends to discuss Peter’s case – he indicated two plastic stacking chairs with the munificent air of one proffering luxury.
Mercy, who had been loyal to Trevor since her wedding day, was by nature a coquette. When she looked at a man the thought of sex was never absent – what he’d be like naked, what sort of lover he’d be. Not only did Kevin Currey score low. Something wasn’t there. This disconcerted her from the beginning, but it did not stop an automatic habit of flirting, of flashing her very round, and very slightly squinting eyes.
‘Thank you!’ She injected into two words the exaggerated impression that Kevin or the stacking chair made her feel a real woman, and her smile, gap-toothed and brought on by a mixture of nerves and natural good-heartedness, seemed like a come-on.
Her mother’s exaggerated ‘Tanks’ and her complaint about ‘Dee rain it nairver stop, I’m telling you’ seemed to be offered as a correction to Mercy’s nonsense. Lily spoke normally with the rhythmic lilt of her native Nassau, but in real life her accent was simply that, a lilt like the gentle movement of a fishing boat bobbing on a light breeze through Exuma Sound, not like a white person parodying a West Indian bus conductress on some television sitcom. Mercy had noticed over the years that in situations of seriousness, especially those which threatened the family, her mother exaggerated her West Indian voice. It was the equivalent of an old cat arching her back and standing her fur on end, this underlining the difference between themselves and Kevin.
Mercy was born in Crickleden and she spoke with the voice of an intelligent south Londoner who had left school at sixteen and worked in minor clerical jobs for twenty-two years. She often imitated her mother’s voice and those of older Caribbean friends, just as she enjoyed imitating the African voices of colleagues or friends from church. In the face of teachers, doctors or officialdom, Lily d’Abo’s ‘dats’ and ‘disses’ were a retreat behind the Bahamian stockade.
‘So!’ Kevin with both hands patted the file, perhaps for good luck, and opened it. He drew out some papers, at the top of which was written the name PETER D’ABO.
‘First things first. How’s it been at your end?’
Lily looked at Mercy. It was an example of her maddening capacity to combine quite opposite qualities – bossiness and diffidence; tolerance and bigotry: hardness and kindness. She meant, by a pause, to convey a politesse. Peter was Mercy’s son. Mercy should be allowed to speak first.
‘No – you go first, Mum.’
‘Well,’ said Lily in her sing-sing, ‘he’s been helpful round the flat. He’s a clean boy. He helps me wid arl de cleanin’ and tidyin’ – he polished the bath till it shone, I’m tellin’ you. And he’s bin better gettin’ up in the marnins now, and I give him a proper breakfast mind you, an amlet, a plate of fruit – mango, pineapple, none of your tinned.’
Mercy, who loved, revered and loathed her mother, felt all this was torture. She knew that if Lily were not volunteering to shoulder the burden of Peter at this very difficult time, it would be impossible to cope. To leave Peter at home with her husband Trevor was not a possibility – nor could the
ir sons, Bradley and Lucius, be expected to cope with it.
‘None of dem carnflakes!’ Lily’s aggressiveness on the subject might have been appropriate if Kevin had been a member of the Kellogg family, but, for all his faults, the social worker could not be held responsible for the Western world’s deplorable breakfasting habits.
‘No one can say he go to school without sometin inside his belly.’
Kevin consulted his file with pursed lips.
Mercy knew what this meant. Peter – of course he was – was still playing truant. Mercy understood her mother’s elaborate games with life. The boring recitation of the boy’s nutritious breakfasts was not an exercise in faux-naiveté for its own sake. She put it forward like a counter in a game. Peter was their boy. She did not want her lips to be the first to speak of his continued truancy. So she made herself seem slightly idiotic, in order to get something out of the social worker.
‘The trouble is,’ said Kevin Currey on cue, ‘no one can say he’s going to school at all. He leaves you in the mornings, but he’s not turning up for register.’
‘What you sayin’, den?’
‘Mum!’ – for this last bit of demotic was carrying self-parody too far.
‘I’m saying that sometimes he goes to school, but much, much more often he doesn’t.’
‘He will be sixteen in August.’
‘I agree he’s nearly old enough to leave school …’
‘And he’s a big boy,’ said Mercy proudly.
‘But you see, it isn’t just truancy, is it? There have been these incidents in the school.’
‘I do think it’s hard,’ said Mercy, ‘just because Peter’s going through a difficult phase, that, when something goes wrong, everyone blames him. Mrs Rajagopalachari admitted that the fire in the laboratory was a complete accident.’
‘She did,’ said Kevin. ‘Even though she was locked in, after the fire started. If it hadn’t been for Mr Gallagher hearing her screams through the window … But we went over all that some weeks ago now. Water under the bridge.’
