Crossing the Lines

by Melvyn Bragg

  What about the blood? Joe wanted to ask. That waterfall of blood coming from the wound the Roman soldier had made in his side with the sword, the blood coming out from the holes made by the nails. Didn’t that hurt?

  But he suppressed these thoughts and tried to see it from the vicar’s point of view. ‘The sun is obscured although it was the middle of the day. Jerusalem just seen in the distance, see? - he was crucified “Without a City Wall” as the hymn says, “where our dear Lord was crucified” …’

  ‘Who died to save us all,’ Joe whispered, to finish it off. ‘Who’s that woman at the bottom?’ Joe’s question was unpremeditated and too loud. The woman was dressed in gold, she was kneeling, her arms around the feet of Christ, her lips very near the nail on the left foot, Joe observed. He liked her long, loose golden hair.

  ‘We think she is Mary Magdalene,’ said the vicar, not quite prepared. He collected the prints together and walked out.

  ‘I shouldn’t have spoken,’ Joe said, miserably. ‘He said be silent.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’ Alfred smiled.

  ‘So I’ll see you on Sunday, then? Four o’clock.’

  ‘Spiffing.’

  Alfred hurried after his father. Impatient though he was, Joe let him get a start, not wanting to seem to be cadging proximity to the vicar, cautious, even afraid of the commanding man of God. He counted to a hundred, then he sped out of the vestry, slung himself over the wall, down the twists and turns of Church Street, King Street, New Street. Edward’s house.

  Edna was there. So was Edward’s mother, glowing in an obscurely exciting way that Joe could not fathom. She was a young woman and though she had mothered Edward and a younger sister she could still look even girlish, as she had that morning in the vicar’s car. The woman at the foot of the cross, nearly kissing the nail! Edward’s mother to a T. The same flowing hair! He would tell the vicar when he got the chance, just slip it in, show he took notice.

  They made a place for him around the table and gave him his stack of matches. Edward’s mother looked on from a fine armchair next to the fire. Alan and Edward flanked Edna but by stretching out his legs under the table, Joe managed to make contact with one of her feet. Should he tell Edward’s mother she looked like the woman at the foot of the cross? He wanted to please her, both for herself and for this place, this haven, this kitchen.

  In the pub, the kitchen would be filling up. Sometimes he would be drawn into the talk, even initiate it; it could be good. But it was not a real kitchen in a real house like this. Not a place for just the family and their friends. Not a kitchen barred to all but those belonging or those invited. This was a kitchen you all ate in together and at the same time. Just you. You did not have to go to your bedroom for peace and quiet or feel driven there by adult indifference. This was a kitchen a family lived in as they should.

  They tried to let Edna win. She was not very clever at pontoon. She could have been utterly and disruptively hopeless and the three boys would not have given a hoot. Each was in a state of agitation about this well-developed girl, orphaned and just arrived from out of the country to live in Edward’s house. Edward’s father had been cousin to her father and in his typical Christian fashion - Edward’s father, much older than his mother, was a scrupulous church warden - he had volunteered to take her in. The older woman watched eagerly, even greedily, as the three boys posed and played for the handsome, rather plump young girl’s favours. The sadness about her won their sympathy, touched their sense of gallantry, increased their desire.

  ‘I can see what your feet are doing, Joe Richardson,’ said Edward’s mother, lashing a blush onto his face, provoking a lie in his denial, and, ‘Edward! I saw you give her that king!’ Alan, the most careful, the solid to Joe’s liquid, the polite to Edward’s familiar, eluded her criticism, playing more stealthily, and winning her, Joe could see it from the glances.

  Frustrated at merely commenting, Edward’s mother said, ‘Why don’t you have a kissing contest?’

  They stopped playing. It was as if she had become one of them.

  ‘We did. When I was your age. Mind you,’ her tone darkened, ‘that wasn’t long before they married me off.’

  The pontoon school waited for more.

  ‘There would be two or three lads. You would find a wood. I lived near woods just like you, Edna. I loved those woods. Deer came there in winter, big stags with antlers. The lads would be given five or ten minutes each or just until the lass,’ she smiled proudly, and jutted her right thumb in the direction of her breasts, ‘got sick of it. Best kisser got to go with me.’

  That was fair, Joe thought. He had studied kissing at the Palace. As a younger boy, kissing on the screen had made him squirm, shut his eyes, groan, bend his head, feel horribly self-conscious, and it always held up the picture. Recently he had begun to take notice: there was a progression - pecking, first embrace, a decent one, a smacker, then all the way to torrid.

  ‘I wouldn’t like that.’ Edna spoke firmly. ‘I don’t want them all just kissing over me.’

  ‘Suit yourself.' The older woman was put out: her manner was more girlish than that of Edna: even a pout.

  Nobody followed up. The game was suspended. The charge which had been introduced by the kissing contest was replaced by general embarrassment.

  ‘We had great times when I was a girl,’ the tone was defiant, ‘I should never have been made to leave,’ Her expression became sullen. ‘I was far too young to be brought to Wigton to marry anybody,’ Edward’s father had been represented as a good catch: money had changed hands but in the way of kindness, help for her parents with a large family, a good man, could even be spoken of as a gentleman. ‘You could walk anywhere you wanted in the country without anybody spying on you! Everybody spies in Wigton.’

  ‘I saw you in the vicar’s car this morning,’ said Joe.

  ‘What of it?’

  Edward looked frightened. Joe’s tongue thickened. All the pleasant, stirring urges and incipient fantasies about Edna were blown out like a candle at those three hard words.

  ‘He takes me back into the country to see my brothers and sisters. That’s what vicars does.’

  ‘The vicar showed us some pictures of the Crucifixion after choir practice and in the one he liked best there was a woman who looked like you.’

  ‘Did she? On a picture?’

  ‘Kissing His feet. Nearly kissing His feet.’

  ‘He said he liked that one best?’

  ‘He did, missus, honest.’

  Her smile lit up the room.

  ‘Come on, Edna. Let’s get these lazy men something for their stomachs.’

  They went into the tiny back kitchen - a luxury in its way - where meals could be prepared discreetly. Left alone, the three friends looked at each other with relief.

  Edward took over.

  ‘Let’s divide her matches up between us,’ he said. He handed the cards to Alan. ‘Do a new shuffle.’

  But the game soon petered out after the jam sandwiches. Joe saw Alan home, hoping to be invited in to the flat above their shop, but Alan just said, ‘So long,’ and went up the stairs alone. Just as well, Alan’s mother seemed to hate him and would have found any excuse not to let him in.

  It felt too early to go home. He decided to use the time. There was still some warmth in the air and Joe let himself drift around the honeycombed middle of the town, looking in the alleyways and the gaps which led to the old yards, seeking out passages slit narrowly between buildings. The lighting was poor, the darkness thick. ‘Bible-black,’ he said to himself. That was what he wanted. The English teacher had read out parts of a new play, saying it reminded him of Wigton. ‘Bible-black.’

  The two words seemed to guide him along Proctor’s Row, which faced the churchyard. He went into the churchyard, its headstones made paving stones by the vicar, only three or four grandiose tombs remaining upright, the rest underfoot or down to grass. Even so, even though it was now supposed to be more like a park, even though Joe wa
s long trousered and intimately acquainted with the geography of the place, there was apprehension, a prickling more demanding than the boil whose itch he had forced himself to ignore all day as an act of self-denial. But it was this apprehension turning to fear that he sought out.

  He went behind the east window in the niche he had first found as a boy when they played hide and seek on choir practice nights. It was as well he knew the lie of it. There was no moon. He was bible-black.

  It was, in its juvenile but purposeful way, a calling up of his demons. The dislocation of what might be his mind, or soul - that which made him know he was the boy he was - had tormented him for more than a year now. It was difficult to remember a time without it, without being scared to be alone or panicked totally by a scooping out of self which could not be resisted and left him helpless with terror until he was joined up to himself again. In desperation - no one to tell, nothing to refer to - he had begun to seek for ways to face it down. To let music drown him in its sensations. To engulf himself in reading so hard and fast that his head seemed to sweat with the cram of words: to look into mirrors and windows and let himself divide and wait, knowing he must not move until there was a reunion. Forcing it.

  Now he stood, pressed shoulders against the east wall of the church, facing the black mass of the slaughterhouse. He was already flaring with anticipated fear at the mere sound of his breath. That it drew in. That it panted out. How did it keep on going on? What if he forgot how to suck it in? The sound of it was so dominating. No churchyard noises to distract: no owl hooting, no sudden flurry of wind. Just the breath. Panted out. Heaved in this time to make sure, a filling of his lungs. Why did that begin to unnerve him so much? An every day, every hour, every minute sound: living, dying, living, dying.

  The fear gathered itself in the darkness, in the black holly tree, rising at him from the stricken headstones, from the tombs. He wanted it to come, the darkness to mix into his mind so that he could take it in, take it on and still not be split from himself. It was like being under water too long, swimming for a record underwater span, but you could reach for the surface in water. Here the dark just pushed in and his breath trembled, he saw the trembling of the horse’s nostrils after Lizzie had broken it in, the skin on him grew clammy and oh! he wished he had not started this. He wished he had not dared this, pinned below the east window which inside, in ruby and yellow and blue glass, showed and said, ‘Suffer little children to come unto me and forbid them not.’ Our Father,’ he said, but not out loud, ‘which art in Heaven.’ He shut his eyes. There was Christ on the cross and the woman nearly kissing the nails. Just stay. As it rolled through him, just stay, as it rolled through him.

  Eventually, weak-kneed, he walked away, not exulting in a victory but knowing that he had endured it and that not very long ago he would have fled before putting himself in such danger.

  He was too shaky to face the pub but he needed a refuge. He made for the house in which he had been brought up with his mother during the war, his mother’s Aunt Grace and Uncle Leonard’s house, a big but familiar house, once given over to lodging rooms but lately reduced to one tenant, the schoolmaster Mr. Kneale, installed permanently it seemed in quaint space and comfort on the top floor. And Colin. Nothing would shake off Colin. Aunt Grace’s failing health had prompted the running down of the business: Mr. Kneale was no trouble, a respected schoolmaster and by now a close friend of Leonard.

  Joe deliberately took the darker route back, where he was unlikely to meet anyone, and he forced himself to stroll despite a drilling urgency, that he had to get at the boil. He had denied it long enough: a whole day surely proof enough that he could subdue the flesh.

  He went straight to the bathroom, locked the door, flung off his jacket, tie, unbuttoned shirt and fingered it tenderly. Perhaps not quite perfectly ripe. Not that soft truly cushioned ripeness that gave at the base which told you that the core of it was ready to be squeezed out. But ripe enough. He could not resist: he had to evacuate that boil, that livid eruption gathering in its poison just below the collar line. He unpicked the scab with some skill: at one stage there had been nineteen boils. Down to three. There were still eight pock marks on his legs.

  He pressed gently, from the base, wiping away the ooze with the flannel. The relief made him sigh contentedly, steadily working it out. By twisting his neck he could see it in the mirror. He surrounded the base and felt that central core, it slid under his fingertips as if trying to escape them: the fingertips cornered it, pressed, it slid away, pursued, encircled, held steady, then Joe applied sudden violent pressure. It began to rise, forcing out more yellow pus and the boy felt a thrill of pain as he struggled to break the core from its moorings deep in his neck: and succeeded. It hurt but he was jubilant! He wiped with the flannel and dabbed until nothing was left but the puckered tip, the wrinkled collapsed walls of skin no longer alive, no longer shiny and stretched by the poison. Two to go: still maturing.

  ‘You took long enough. Your tea’s nearly cold.’

  Grace’s complaint was a comfort. Joe blinked into the company of people he had known all his life. Leonard and Mr. Kneale were involved in a game of chess, which both professed to have played much better in their youth and, now re-stimulated by the teacher’s purchase of a fine set at a knockdown price, was more an excuse for a conversation than a battle of wits. Grace was reading the local paper and she went back to it as soon as she saw Joe take up a biscuit.

  Leonard parked his knight in a spot that signalled an interlude.

  ‘So what’s new, Joe? What’s the little town up to tonight?’

  Joe swallowed the tea without pleasure: it was cold but he had to swallow it.

  ‘The vicar showed us pictures of Jesus Christ on the cross.’

  ‘Did he now?’ Mr. Kneale chimed in, encouraging, wanting more. Joe remembered that expectation. As always he tried to respond to it, all but seeking out his absent mother whose glance would have told him to be respectful to Mr. Kneale, who had been so good to them while his father was away in the war, take notice of the helpful schoolteacher, such personal attention is a privilege.

  ‘Different painters,’ No names had registered. ‘Long ago. With the two thieves, some of them, and Mary, Joseph,’ faltering, ‘disciples … God was in one of them - and there was one of a woman kneeling, hugging his feet.’

  ‘That would be Mary Magdalene,’ said Mr. Kneale.

  Grace lifted her eyes in warning.

  ‘It must have hurt.’ Joe sensed that the subject was acceptable. He felt free. ‘The vicar said he was beyond pain but it must have hurt before he got beyond it.’

  ‘They do say being the Son of God he didn’t feel pain like you and me.’ Leonard wore his atheism discreetly. It was a religious town dominated by a dozen demanding denominations and his reputation as a solicitor’s chief clerk and rent collector rested on being above suspicion.

  ‘That Son of God business …’ Mr. Kneale paused. Joe after all was still a boy: a boy on the way to being a youth, but more boy still: rather a late developer, Mr. Kneale thought, and all the better for it. He himself had been the same.

  ‘There’s many suffered worse,’ Leonard pitched this in the tone of one musing, a statement that could be ignored, one presented in such a way as to deny direct confrontation.

  ‘I’m inclined to agree with you,’ said the schoolteacher.

  ‘But he did it to save us all,’ said Joe, taking the last sandwich.

  ‘That’s true,’ Mr. Kneale was judicious. ‘But that doesn’t mean your Uncle Leonard’s altogether wrong. I’ve gone right into the war business for this book and I would even go so far as to say that there’s Wigton men - and by extension men from all over - who have indeed suffered, who did suffer worse.’

  ‘Worse than being nailed to a cross?’

  Mr. Kneale pursed his lips - he had gone too far. But truth would out - and he nodded. Wigton Men at War begun to celebrate the heroism, the epic courage of ordinary men, the sacrifice and joy
of righteous battle, was taking him into darker areas than he had anticipated.

  ‘And he rose again, you see.’ Leonard pulled out a cigarette as he completed that sentence. Had he gone too far? He wanted some smoke between Grace and himself.

  ‘He didn’t know he would rise again!’ Joe was heated. ‘“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” he said. What about that?’

  ‘Don’t get him excited.’ Grace would not be obscured. ‘It’s near his bedtime.’ This was more than a hint: it was a ruling.

  Mr. Kneale picked up the moment.

  ‘I think this bishop will do the job nicely,’ he said.

  Joe lingered, wanting the argument to go on, happy in the companionship of these men. He sat beside Grace, reading the paper over her shoulder.

  ‘Don’t listen to your Uncle Leonard,’ she whispered, ‘he’s been like this all week, since Mr. Churchill resigned.’

  Grace had come to admire Leonard for being able to feel so deeply about someone he did not know. The more dependent on him she grew, the more she let her appreciation show. Leonard’s involvement with the evils of socialism, the foolish doings of people half way across the world, trades unions on strike, America taking over, but above all with Mr. Churchill, had finally impressed her. She saw it as his hobby - some men kept pigeons, others had allotments; Leonard had a touch of the gentleman about him and so he had Public Affairs. And there was pride in having Winston Churchill in the family.

  ‘End of an era,’ said Leonard, scarcely acknowledging her. ‘Downhill all the way from now on. Mark my words. How about that?’ He moved a castle.

  ‘Everybody has to retire at some time.’ Mr. Kneale spoke without lifting his gaze from the board. Leonard’s move had surprised him.

  ‘Hell-o! Now then! What’s this, stranger?’

  Colin’s entry disturbed them all. Grace could see her nephew rather the worse for drink: she hated the coarseness it brought out, and feared drink would weaken him still further, as it had her brother, his father. Mr. Kneale regretted that an unusually interesting game would now be interrupted. Leonard detested him.