The Book Against God

by James Wood

  I sat there in admiration of my father’s mind, his absolute clarity. But I had to say something. I had to disagree.

  “Is life love, or is it really power?” I asked. “And is God love, or is God merely power? Perhaps creation is just the tremendous exercise of power, the power to create. That’s surely why Aristotle said that it would be very odd for citizens to love Zeus. Respect, fear, hate, perhaps, but not love him. Who loves power?”

  “But, Tommy, Zeus is not our God. Power is not our God; love is our God. We have an intercessor whose name is Christ the Lord. And God so loved—loved—the world that He sent His only son to die on the Cross. Jesus suffered on the Cross, and suffers with us, and so God suffers with us every day, every minute. Our suffering is our love, our brotherhood.”

  “Do you remember,” I said gently, because I was moved, “the old story Mum told about Terry’s father and the doctor? He kept on going back to the doctor for a certain kind of pill. And then Mum went round once to his house and saw all these boxes of pills, unopened, and she asked him why he was hoarding drugs. And he said that the pills were not doing him any good at all so he had stopped using them. But he kept on going back to get more only because he ‘felt sorry’ for the doctor! He didn’t want to hurt the doctor’s feelings. Well, I think sometimes we make ourselves feel better if we also feel sorry for God a bit. You know, like the doctor, if God suffers as well as us, then perhaps things aren’t as bad as they seem.”

  “Oh, Tom—is Jane right, are you seeking? For so many years your mother and I assumed you were indifferent, or bored, or just consumed by philosophy. You never mention Christian matters to us, you see, you have never really discussed them with us.” He sounded reproachful.

  “I was never indifferent, never bored! Look, I think Jane is right, I am seeking God,” I said cautiously.

  “Seeking God? Oh, that is wonderful to hear. It’s far more important than your Ph.D., you know,” said Father with a smile.

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Though your Ph.D. is quite important!”

  And suddenly the moment had passed, our utterly unexpected, forever glorious intimacy and tenderness had arrived and moved away like a trade wind, stirring its little storm, and Father was returning to his buoyant, humorous, public self.

  “We’ve steamed up the windows like a couple of desperate teenagers,” he said.

  And we went inside.

  23

  AND SO I SEALED my father’s lips with a final lie. The biggest lie. “Seeking God,” eh? But it worked. Nothing further was said about the whisky bottle (my mother had removed it). Both parents seemed to abandon, or set aside, the habitual anxiety with which they had treated me for so many years. For I was on the path to Christ. I was a “seeker,” and since I was a seeker the Ph.D. would suddenly be easy to complete. No mention was made of my rising late, or my afternoon trips to The Stag’s Head. I was returned to innocence. As I walked into rooms, my parents’ kindly, handsome faces opened themselves into smiles. Father told Mother, obviously, about my “new direction.” By lying I discovered a great truth: I discovered what mattered most deeply to my parents, and what had worried them most deeply about me. It had nothing to do with the Ph.D.!

  The next few days were spent in a characteristic Bunting limbo. Everything had changed, the house was full of the perfume of amnesty; yet it was understood by all that the subject could not be discussed again. It had had its moment, its accidental appointment, and was now returned to its place of reticence, a tiny English principality where no language existed. In some ways, this suited me; I wasn’t keen to return to my lie; it was best left alone. But to be suddenly “innocent” and not to be able to speak of it, was painful, too. I longed to find again that charged solemnity with which Father had spoken to me in the car, a solemnity sweetened by his naiveté—I will never forget the way he quickly, earnestly said, “So you give me your word of honour that you are not an alcoholic?”

  Instead, we all lived in what seemed to me a wordless time. Gestures spoke louder than words. From those days I remember my father coming to waken me one morning. He hadn’t done this since I was a teenager. Alluding to his old story, he stood by the door and said, “Sorry, O’Brien.” And I remember that one or other of my parents slipped a twenty-pound note into my pocket, while my jacket was hanging on the hook in the hall. I’m sure of it.

  I was alone a great deal, as I had been in my childhood, and took notice again of the world around me while I was on my walks. Winter was ending. The silver ferns of morning frost on my bedroom window had become a gentler spring of dewdrops. Now that the ground was softer, Terry started serious work on my father’s garden shed, and soon had the main structure up. (It was not for books but garden tools.) One day, Mr. Deddum’s dog trusted the now tepid grass behind the pub enough to roll in it and juggle the air. The brass handle of the vicarage door lost its polish of cold. All around, the countryside was voyaging into its green abroad. On my walks I saw the sheep, now joined by collapsing lambs, on fields bordered and divided by loose, gap-crowded drystone walls, private versions of Hadrian’s Wall, an hour to the north, built by the Roman emperor to keep out the Scots.

  Speaking of Mr. Deddum, it was at this time that a curious incident occurred at The Stag’s Head. I have known Mr. Deddum since I was a teenager, and have always liked him. Whenever I was up in Sundershall on previous visits I had looked in at the pub, and Mr. Deddum, in honour of the rarity of these appearances, had always said the same thing as I entered: “Eee, if I’d known you were coming, I’d’ve baked a cake,” in a slightly sarcastic way. Anyway, Mr. Deddum had a young man, Simon, working for him; the boy could only have been seventeen or eighteen. He seemed a little slowwitted, with a permanently worried face like a gargoyle’s and a mouth which he never closed and through which he breathed noisily. A clumsy, kind boy, who got to know the brand of cigarettes and the whisky I liked, and gave me a second shot of Scotch without charge on quite a few occasions. On one of these afternoons, in March, as Simon was handing me my drink, Mr. Deddum came out from the back, said hello to me and watched Simon as he performed his duties. Then he said suddenly and rather sharply to him, “Close your bloody mouth.” As if he were Mr. Deddum’s Labrador, Simon closed his mouth promptly, but his face seemed to collapse as it contracted, and he blushed savagely.

  I felt sorry for him, felt ashamed, and was angry with Mr. Deddum for making such a spectacle of the boy. I made an anxious laugh or cough, and said, “Oh, he’s doing all right, you know.” Mr. Deddum looked at me quite cheerfully and said: “What d’you know about it? There’s nowt wrong with your gob.” I couldn’t argue with this, and Mr. Deddum, seeing me silent, continued: “I’ve already told our Simon that if he wants to go to Newcastle and do this line of work—ya kna, pub work—that open gob of his is going to be a winder for some hardcase to put his fist into, and that’s an end of it. It looks bloody stupid. Extra, don’t think I didn’t see him giving you a pickle more of that Scotch without charging you. The lad’s on parole here, so don’t feel sorry for him.”

  Simon’s humiliation affected me more than it deserved to. I found myself in a fury over Mr. Deddum’s brisk cruelty, and I decided not to go again to The Stag’s Head. The occurrence, which would seem trivial to most people, settled in me like a germ, and disrupted my sleep, and my now fitful work on the BAG.

  24

  THE REASON I eventually returned to London, in late April, was that, despite my parents’ warmth, I was getting nothing done in Sundershall, and it seemed fairer to keep my nothingness to myself than to inflict it on my parents. Karl said that I could stay with him until Jane and I mended things, and Max extended the same offer (of course I would not have been able to stay with Max anyway, contaminated as he was by Jane’s information). So I went back to the city, and my parents waved me off. We were at the Durham bus station. The cathedral watched over us. My dainty parents stood very close to each other, like toy soldiers eagerly arranged by a slapdash little boy. Fa
ther quipped, “Don’t do anything I would do,” as he rather formally shook my hand.

  I hardly noticed them, because I was in a “state” about taking the bus, and yet was embarrassed to admit as much to my parents. I very much dislike buses, but the train was much more expensive, and I was saving the money Zealy had loaned me. On long bus journeys I get afraid that the bus driver will fall asleep at the wheel. I can’t relax while this fear grips me, and I feel compelled to try to keep the driver awake. So on the trip to London I employed my usual tricks. I sat right behind the driver. I could see his speedometer. Then I spent the journey making various noises. I crushed my newspaper, and noisily turned the large pages. (It was Max’s day to have his Times column, I noticed.) I coughed a great deal, and shifted in my seat, and tapped the floor with my feet. Above all, I kept my eye on the back of the driver’s seat, and as soon as that head began to droop, I was ready to bring out my orchestra of effects.

  Exhausted at Victoria Coach Station, I phoned Uncle Karl, and went to his house. Uncle Karl said he was not surprised that Jane and I were having problems. “You were looking too much at one another,” he said, oddly. “I can always tell when relationships are on the rocks, it is all quite simple—they are always watching each other and saying ‘Yes darling. No darling.’ But look, this is just a cooling-off period. All will be well with the two of you. Anyway, you’re welcome, Tommy. As long as you like. The last person to stay in your old bed at the top was a very early girlfriend of Lucian Freud’s.”

  It was at Uncle Karl’s, two and half weeks later, that Mother phoned to tell me the news. She was very calm. But I became hot and began to shake. The telephone receiver felt like a weapon which I wanted to bring down on my own head. Father had gone to the church, had not returned, and Mother had found him lying on the stone floor, face downwards. He had broken open the collar of his shirt. Dr. Braun said that he had had a heart attack. I could tell that my mother had already wandered into the bureaucratic wilderness of funeral arrangements and telephone calls and the undertaker’s bills. By treading this arid ground she avoided drowning. It was no time for watery grief. But her voice was dull and weak. While she told me about the date for the funeral, Karl came up the stairs and stood inquiringly for a second. He smiled and so I smiled back and waved him on. He wrote a note and handed it to me: “Running out for the evening, back twelveish.” The heavy front door was opened, a taxi could be heard drilling outside, and then there was silence. I told Mother that Karl was out for the evening, but that of course he and I would immediately drive overnight to Sundershall.

  Karl came back at midnight, flushed and smelling of society. I told him the news, and felt oddly embarrassed as I did so, perhaps because I thought he would be full of sympathy for me. But his own grief was too strong for that. He crumpled, he bent over as if I had hit him, with the top of his head pushed towards me, almost in my nostrils, so that I could smell on him the royal aroma of good wine and cigar tobacco, which seemed to be souring as he shrank before me. “Oh, why did he do that, why that?” wailed poor Karl. I couldn’t bear to see him so afflicted, I couldn’t bear to see his rusty eyes full of tears, and so I wept with him, and rather than embrace we stood in his drawing room, holding hands like children.

  Karl said he wasn’t in a fit state to drive. I took the big Mercedes north, up the desolate AI, and he slept beside me. It was foggy; the strong headlights cut a world for us. We swiftly passed long articulated lorries, sighing and creaking their governed way north. They were covered with little lights like a starlet’s mirror and as we passed them the car briefly glowed inside with rough glamour. Then suddenly they were gone, and we were silent again. Hatfield, Grantham, Doncaster. At York the dawn arrived very quickly, like something unimportant. At Durham, the cathedral seemed to be rising with the rest of the world, receiving light and attention as the morning grew. We were in Sundershall by breakfast.

  It was painful to see my mother trying to assume a former politesse—grave smiles and “I’m sure you’d both like some breakfast.” She seemed remote, like Karl, involved with her grief. She spoke to me immediately about the funeral, about the exact instructions he had left for hymns and prayers and music. I suddenly remembered that, in our conversation in the car, Father had spoken of a particular poem that he wanted read at his funeral.

  “It was about a red flower, or about the flower of faith, or something like that. Does that mean anything to either of you?”

  Mother looked at me as if I were lying. And also being a nuisance, an obstacle in the way of the proper rites.

  “Mum, I’m not making this up! Dad mentioned this poem, and said he wanted it read at his funeral. I remember the phrase he used: ‘faith is the red flower.’ Then he recited the only bit he could remember—‘If thou can get thither, there will be a flower of peace,’ something like that. God, I’ve forgotten it … Oh yes! ‘The rose that will not wither.’ I remember that. Does that sound familiar? We must try to find this poem.”

  But Mother looked at me almost coldly, and said:

  “He never mentioned that poem to me in more than forty years of marriage, and there’s nothing about it in his instructions.”

  “But he said it to me, to me.”

  Karl pulled at my sleeve. “Come on, Tom, let’s have breakfast, and then go to the funeral home.” I took the hint, how could I not, and decided to drop the question of Peter’s poem.

  As we ate breakfast, Mother swept the kitchen floor around our table, something I had never seen her do. She seemed obsessed with getting us to go as soon as possible. “He’s over there,” she said several times. So we ate quickly and went to Pickering’s Rest Home. Karl said I should go in first, and I walked into the room where the coffin lay on a trestle.

  There he was. His nose looked prowlike, his brow forceful and almost glowing in the soft light. I realized how very rarely I had seen him asleep; he was a spirit of wakefulness. He was wearing a blue shirt I had never seen, and his tie was not properly adjusted. But for the life of me I could not possibly adjust it. I was terrified: he seemed so utterly alive. Surely he was only dozing. I was afraid that at any moment he would open his eyes and look at me and say “Tommy, have you seen my cigarettes?” or “Everything all right?” or “Sorry, O’Brien.” My eyes went up and down the length of him, searching for a sign. I was sure, for a horrid second, that I saw his chest give a twitch.

  Suddenly my eyes were drawn to his right hand, which lay beside him, partly obscured by his body. I leant over the coffin to get a better look. His hand was wrapped around a small silver cross which I knew well. He had carried it everywhere with him, in his left trouser pocket. But there was something else, the top of which could just be seen. It looked like a piece of glossy paper. I willed myself to touch the hand. I had to see what this paper was. Closing my eyes, I felt the stiff hand. I could not move the fingers, and my body was shivering with the vileness of the sensation. But I tugged instead on the paper, and it gave way, and slipped out of the dead fist. The paper was stiff too, as if it had also died. Of course it was stiff: because it was a photograph. A photograph of my mother. Which she must have folded into his hand, and which she must have thought obscured by the closed fist. I looked at my father, and then at the photograph of my mother. And then I stuffed the photograph back into the tight fist, pushing against both the unwilling cold flesh of Father’s hand and the hard silver cross, doubtless bruising and creasing the paper as I did so.

  It was hard to think of Father’s body simply stopped like a clock. Where had he gone? I firmly believe that “only burdock will grow upon my grave” and that the dead go nowhere at all; certainly not to hell; surely not to heaven. But the dead are fortunate; they have at least got beyond the ordinary celebrity of being alive. They are elsewhere, not here. Father believed that he would see his Maker in heaven, and his parents, and I suppose eventually his wife and his wayward son. But I won’t be there, Dad, I won’t be there, because I don’t believe. I will be elsewhere, like you. A
nd our elsewheres will be different in death, as they were in life.