by James Wood
“Does this probation start right now?” I asked, inwardly joyful that Jane might be giving me a second chance.
“Yes, right now. Admit to me that the speech was monstrous.”
“The speech was monstrous.” I was lighthearted.
“Don’t just parrot me,” said Jane, smiling. “Be actively honest. I don’t want to just pull truths out of you like someone forcing open a handbag and rummaging around for a penny.”
“Okay, here is something,” I said.
“Yes? Oh dear.”
“When I heard from my mother that Dad had died—remember, I was at Uncle Karl’s—I immediately had the shameful thought that now you might take pity on me and let me come back. I can honestly say that you were the first thought I had on hearing of Dad’s death.”
Jane looked away, and bit her lip.
“Oh Tommy.”
She stood, and I eagerly stood with her. We embraced. She was gentle, and held me gently—starved of her, I couldn’t help letting my hands move down her thin back. But she pulled off.
“Let’s go downstairs, shall we?” she said.
Thanks to Jane’s offer, I was ecstatically happy throughout the rest of the funeral lunch.
It was quiet once everyone had gone. I was desperate to leave and to begin the new era of marital “probation” in London, assuming I could find somewhere to live. Mother and I said little to each other, though we had one sharp exchange about the BAG, in which she confessed her dismay that I had not been working on the Ph.D., and urged me to finish the thesis “to honour Daddy’s memory.” In Peter’s presence, she and I had been his suitors, always petitioning for his vital, difficult attention. Without him, we were both husbandless. And both kingless, too—each room of the large house seemed to be dominated by an empty throne. Terry continued to work on my father’s shed; now I understood what he had meant at the funeral. “I don’t have the heart to tell him to pull it down,” said Mother. “Let him keep his tools in it.” When he was not working on it, Terry would sit in the shed, hunched on a little wooden stool he had brought with him.
My mother abandoned the kingless palace; she spent as much time as possible visiting villagers to thank them for flowers and food, or planting and weeding in the awakened garden. I often watched her from the sitting room window. She and Terry spoke quite a lot. He seemed to need to keep her informed about each tiny development of the shed. One afternoon, while she was in the garden, I went into my father’s study. It was frozen in squalor; not a thing had been touched. But already, without its daily renewal, the air was losing its scent of tobacco. I sat at the desk, fingered some books. Then more systematically I went through the drawers, and found an intriguing little notebook, half-full with jottings. One of the pages read as follows:
Polanie—the Poles; literally, “people of the plains”
shul—proper Yiddish word for synagogue (lit. “school” in Old German)
“bone-orchard” Terry Upsher’s phrase for graveyard
Ranke: “I am an historian before I am a Christian.”
Ranke on Michelet: “he wrote in a style in which the truth could not be told.”
St. Bede’s dying prayer to God: “O leave us not as orphans!”
Aristotle: Why is it that he who confers benefits loves more than he who receives them?
Celia Johnson = Mrs. Peter Fleming = Ian Fleming /James Bond (Mr. Norrington)
Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus.
I read this page again and again. The last entry was nonsensical to me, but the others, types of which appeared on every page, clearly formed a particular kind of commonplace book. There was a whole section marked “Karl,” with entries such as this:
“The Slovakian officials offered their Jews to us like someone throwing away sour beer” (Eichmann)
Inventor of the word anti-Semitism: Wilhelm Marr
Inventor of the word genocide: Raphael Lemkin
So this was a book of promptings, in which Peter stored away little pieces of found knowledge, where he prepared privately for his public successes. For a moment or two, I thought: the cheat! Look how he cribbed! But I reflected that surely I had always known him to be a performer, even if the mechanics of the performance had been invisible to me.
On my last morning at home, as I was making for the bathroom, I heard my mother behind the door. The water was running, and it was only because I was so close to the door that I heard, amidst the other water, the sound of crying. When I was little I used to hear her doing her “reciting” in the bathroom. Those freezing, wintry mornings, years ago, when I used to take a few extra minutes in bed while Mother was in the bathroom … Father, seemingly irrepressible, rose first, and was always up and about by the time I began to stir in my sheets; I never saw him unclothed, as if he were a commanding officer who could not be seen out of uniform by the rank and file. Once he or Mother had woken me—she ghostly in her long white nightgown, with fretted panels in it that looked acoustical in function, as if designed to let the body speak—I turned over for a few more minutes, in the delicious knowledge that she would now occupy the bathroom. In winter months, I eventually stretched out a hand, parting the air for my clothes. Then I pulled them in, like an animal feathering its nest, and dressed under the blankets in the trapped warmth. So by the time I even approached the bathroom door I was fully dressed—perhaps that is where I developed my disdain for bathing? But it was a good thing I was dressed, because often Mother was still in the bathroom. I could hear her talking to herself. For seven years she taught religious knowledge at a junior school in Durham, and at weekends or in the evenings she sometimes gave speeches to town or village societies, or opened garden fetes and speech days, and for all these different forms of presentation her method of preparation was the same: she learned things by heart, reading out aloud a textbook or the speech she had written, in a low gentle voice as she sat in the bath or at her dressing table, calmly, as if speaking to a loyal pet: “Leaving Corinth, Paul continued on his travels to Ephesus and Antioch, where he addressed the congregations there, which were large in number.” But now she was crying, not reciting.
25
IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE FUNERAL I found this place on the Finchley Road. It’s cheap, but Philip Zealy’s firm has been admirably businesslike and professional in its pursuit of my monthly payments, and it is all I can afford. UCL do not want me back, so I have been living off my weekly dole cheque. I had to get some work. For the month of June I was employed by the local council. One of my tasks was to lock the park gates at the foot of Primrose Hill “at dusk.” Roger paid me to stuff envelopes for his early music choir. Then I got a job as an underground porter-packer for Harrods, during the July sales, in busy catacombs underneath the Brompton Road. The sooty tunnels lead from the shop under the street to an enormous loading area, where green, liveried vans are parked under old-fashioned wooden signs, on which are written different destinations: Kensington, Hammersmith, Chiswick, Hampstead. The work was tedious and subterranean, and there was a peculiar torment in being so close to so many luxurious unaffordable items. The manager of my section liked me and asked me to stay on after the sales. But I had had enough of working underground as a kind of miner for Mayfair sheiks, and told him that I had to take some time off because my father had just died. He didn’t seem to believe me.
It is late October now, five months since the funeral, and Max and I are still wary with one another. Of course, his extraordinary recent behaviour at Roger’s music evening did not help. Last week he told me that he is getting married to Fiona Raymond, which will surely take everyone by surprise; perhaps marriage will make him sweeter. He has not asked me to be his best man; I am waiting, without much optimism.
And so life continues, and my rhythms are not so different from those I had as a student, or those I had when I was married to Jane. I wake, I lie on my bed (and try not to think of Jane or my father), and then I rise in my little bedsit and brew my coffee (and try not to think of Jane or my f
ather). Recently, I have had great difficulty getting up. Now that summer is properly over, it is getting cold in this room. When I do rise, I put on the paisley dressing gown, have a cigarette. I look at my books, I write this Book, and sometimes continue with the Ph.D. The familiar optimism, the familiar fatigue. On really bad days, if I have the cash, I have lunch at the Olympus, because Theo’s gloominess cheers me. He never has any good words to say about the country he has lived in for seventeen years. Today, his peculiar turn of speech reminded me horridly of last Christmas and all my troubles. Theo looked phlegmatically through the Olympus’s smeared window at the street and said, “I think England is one big sperm bank, that’s what we are.”
God Almighty first planted a garden: and now England is in a mess.
Last night, Jane invited me to supper at her flat—our old flat. This was very exciting; our last, awful meeting, three weeks ago, was at Roger’s, when we argued so. None of our meetings since the funeral has taken place in her flat. So I was as excited as I had been before Roger’s music night, and I made sure that I bathed thoroughly and used the sunscreen. This might be it, I thought, this might be the moment of truth.
At the flat, I kept looking for signals. She cooked, we ate, felt warm and tender, and then Jane put on a record.
“This is Richter. A live performance of Beethoven 109. This is the slow bit, a beautiful theme, with variations.”
I listened, heard first the noise of steady background hiss, and then, cleanly abolishing it in a way that made me think of opening my eyes for the first time on a brilliant morning, the piano’s chords sounded. It was a beautiful tune, oh yes, simple and hymnlike, broken into sets of two repetitions. There was something about that first chord which made everything following it less exciting. That first chord was pristine, and pushed its successors out into an ordinary exile. Nostalgic for that first annunciation, I asked if she could stop the record, and start again. She did. Again, the first chord broke through the background noise and announced itself. This time I listened properly to what followed. The melody was, above all, very stable, neither joyful nor melancholy; instead, it seemed to be the essence of knowledge itself, the gold of truth, constant behind our stormy extremes as the sun is behind clouds. Yet there was another sound, not musical. Something like a man sniffing. It was the pianist breathing!—heavy, almost impatient, as if he were wrestling with the music to secure its great medial serenity. The pianist was breathing quite hard through his nose as he wrestled with this sweet sound. It was the sound of hard work, but it was also the sound of existence itself—a man’s ordinary breath, the give and take of the organism, our colourless wind of survival, the zephyr of it all.
The evidence of human effort, of pain, was intensely moving, and I hung my head as I listened. How strange, this combination of Richter’s strong, masculine, working butcher-breath, just audible to the microphone, and the delicate impalpable music.
“Thomas, my darling, you have tears in your eyes?”
“It’s the pianist breathing,” I said simply. “That’s what you wanted me to hear.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I can hear Richter breathing, the struggle of it …” I wanted to be as truthful as possible with Jane.
“I didn’t hear that,” said Jane. Sadly, she looked at me, and said: “All I wanted you to hear was the simplicity of the tune. It’s so soothing. Does it mean anything? I played that piece at the concert.”
“Which concert?”
“The one at which you first met me.”
“Well, put it on again, and this time I promise not to hear Richter breathing.” So we sat together, as the music repeated. But the moment was lost, somehow, and once I had finished my drink, Jane shook her ponytail with a familiar, irritable flick, and I knew that I was being dismissed.
This morning, thinking over the events of last night, I sat in my room and once again heard in my head the sound of the pianist struggling, the zephyr of it all. I thought about Max, and something he had said to me at Roger’s, when we argued, which at the time I had interpreted as merely hostile. “If the Book Against God is your own little secret, your own private crime, then think of your dad’s death as the removal of the last witness, the one who could have seriously testified against you.” But what if I still needed the witness? And I recalled Father’s funeral, and the mild wind that blew as the coffin was docked, a wind as invisible as the future, and my mother holding my hand. And suddenly I realized why the experience of having my hand held by my mother seemed familiar. Because I think perhaps that my father held my hand all the time that I stood next to him at Granny’s funeral. Is that right? Could that be? Why, then, did I only remember Father being cross with me and striding towards me in his black cassock? But the more I think about it, the more I convince myself that Father took me back to the graveside and held my hand at Granny’s funeral. I am sure he held my hand. All my adult years I only held his hand to shake it, to say hello or goodbye. I would like to put my hand out now, and touch his.
Oh, Father, there were days so exciting when I was a little boy that each morning was a delicious surprise, a joy adults can only mimic when they are fortunate enough to make a long journey by night and rise in an undiscovered place in the morning and see it in the first light. When anyone asks me, I say that my childhood was happy, and for once, for once, I am not lying. Wasn’t it an orchard, my childhood? But why, then, the worm? Why the worm? Tell me.
For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.
—HEBREWS 12:6
Also by James Wood
The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief
Copyright © 2003 by James Wood
All rights reserved
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
www.fsgbooks.com
Designed by Barbara Grzeslo
eISBN 9781429932127
First eBook Edition : May 2011
First edition, 2003
A chapter of this book previously appeared in The London Review of books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wood, James, 1965–
The book against God /James Wood.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Truthfulness and falsehood—Fiction. 2. Children of clergy—Fiction. 3. Graduate students—Fiction. 4. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 5. Authorship—Fiction. 6. Young men—Fiction. 7. Atheists—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6123.0527 B66 2003
823’.92-dc21
2002042600
