The White Family

by Maggie Gee

  She tried to concentrate on the sermon again. ‘My image today is the Heavenly City. The image of a sacred place on a hill. This longing runs through so much religious writing. Sometimes it seems to be a paradise lost, a place to which we shall one day return. Sometimes it’s the Garden of Eden … and the English love their gardens, don’t they? I often feel it’s our most attractive trait … The way towards the city is a pilgrimage, for Christians. We see it as a light in the future, stopping us from getting lost, drawing us onwards. Perhaps we are only meant to find that city after we die, but I don’t believe so, do you? I think that Christians should be building it here. I think we can build the good place in our lives. I think we can build the city for others. I hope we are trying to build heaven on earth …’ His voice was clear, carrying, triumphant, lifting his people, lifting them up – ‘But when I read about this senseless violence. When I read about white killing black, I know how many miles we still have to go … I ask you to join with me in prayers today for all black people living in Britain.’

  What a shame, Shirley thought, nearly all of us are white.

  The church was very quiet after he stopped speaking. Now there was a time for silent prayer.

  Shirley didn’t kneel because her knees were unforgiving, she always sat with her head in her hands, and as she sat there staring at the cage of her fingers, the dark pink bars of her crossed fingers, Elroy reached out and took her right hand, peeled it away from the face it was protecting, pressed it to his lips, then held it tight, saying to her as clearly as he could, I love you, Shirley, it doesn’t matter. Nothing can stop us being together. She looked across and smiled at him, then covered her face with the remaining hand.

  The words came into her head, unchosen, slipped into her head like a patch of bright silk – Bring us all to the golden city.

  At the end of the service, there were always announcements, and as person after person came up to the front and (with varying skill at the microphone) told the congregation about a workshop on ‘God and autogenic training’, or a seminar on Creation Chanting, or a Circle for Christian Cookery, Shirley’s attention began to wander. The Reverend Stewart had bouts of coughing that Shirley suspected were not accidental.

  It was after one o’clock when they finally spilled out of the church into the bright Sunday sunlight. The Reverend Stewart stood at the door, smiling at people and shaking hands. He greeted them particularly warmly. He seemed about to talk to Elroy, but a middle-aged woman with two straight plaits and a semi-transparent cheesecloth dress came bustling up and began to pour out a torrent of impassioned speech, before which he visibly flinched for a second, then returned to vertical, smiling staunchly, trying to keep his flock on the road, trying to keep their eyes on essentials.

  It was dazzling after the dark of the church. The sky was the heavenly new blue of spring. It soared above the black vale of Piccadilly, to the bottom of which the sun could not reach, though people’s heads and shoulders were up in the sunlight. The bright glass and metal of the passing cars pushing on down the deep straight gully made her think, suddenly, of knives.

  ‘It’s good that he talked about the killings,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe. Yes. I don’t want to dwell on it.’

  So Shirley walked along, worrying her worries, and Elroy withdrew into himself. And the congregation, the three hundred or so souls who had stood so close and embraced each other and prayed together for the City of God, trickled away into the crowds of Piccadilly, leaked away through the veins of the city, the real city, grey and dirty, thinning out, becoming lonely, threes and twos and single people, losing touch for another week, fading away into dryness, numbness, the never-ending chatter of electronic noise, the dust and heat of the underground. Because the embraces, the handshakes, the greetings, were never quite long enough to stick, never quite deep enough to bind them together. For the British were shy, and solitary, and did not want to embarrass each other –

  The two of them wandered on down Piccadilly. They had five hours before the service at Elroy’s church in the afternoon. Outside the great arches of the Royal Academy where crossed red flags saluted the day, little cliques of greyhound-legged women in hats and cheery-looking men in dark suits and ties hallooed above the traffic in fluting voices.

  Elroy said, ‘I went to an art gallery one time. I was curious, right. The Tate, I think it is, the one by the river –’

  ‘That’s nice. I don’t think I’ve ever been there. Did you like it?’

  ‘Nice pictures. And you don’t have to pay. But – I never see any of the brethren all day. Except a few in uniform, working as attendants, and one or two women in the canteen.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Shirley. She wished she hadn’t asked.

  ‘And the British Library,’ Elroy mused. ‘One time I do some research on nineteenth-century hospitals. Beautiful place. Very quiet, very peaceful. But most of them sitting there studying is white.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Elroy. But I’ve never been there – I don’t suppose they’d let me in.’

  ‘When we raise kids, it will be different for them. God does not despise His captive people. He rebuild the cities of Judah, Shirley, and the children of His servants will inherit it all.’

  ‘Are you still so sure that we shall have kids?’ Shirley stared at a bus, ploughing forward through the traffic towards them.

  ‘Of course we raise kids. Long as we have faith. What if I make you pregnant last night?’

  Briefly, Shirley’s heart lifted with hope. Then they were plunged into the shadow of the bus, and the sound of the engine drowned their voices.

  When it passed, Elroy was talking about his brother. ‘I got to have another talk to Winston. Time that boy is settling down. Mum’s only got one grandchild from us four kids.’

  ‘He’s busy studying,’ said Shirley. ‘Not a good time to have a baby. When I was studying –’ Then she pulled up. She had never told Elroy about her daughter.

  ‘Winston’s twenty, and he don’t have a girlfriend.’

  ‘Doesn’t,’ said Shirley automatically.

  ‘No good for a man not to have no woman.’

  ‘Well maybe that’s not what he’s looking for.’ Yesterday’s film had made Shirley even more certain of the thing that she had half-guessed at before – Why were the family so blind about it? His mother always talked about Winston getting married.

  ‘A man’s never too busy to be interested in women. The girls at that college aren’t real women.’

  ‘Oh come on, Elroy –’ He could be impossible.

  ‘A good woman settle Winston down. Maybe you can fix him up with someone. Do you know any good Christian women round his age?’

  ‘He could meet them at the church, any time. If he wanted to, that is –’

  ‘He don’t even come to church regular. I don’t know what it is with him.’ Elroy had begun to sound fretful. ‘Sometimes I think I’m a stranger to my brother.’

  ‘But you two are so close,’ she protested. They hugged and joked and fought a lot, a play-fighting Elroy always won, being nine years older and twenty pounds heavier. Elroy’s kind of closeness was not about words.

  ‘Skeen, Shirley, he’s my little brother. I always look after him, since he is a baby. I’d kill anyone who hurt my brother. But he need a good woman to care for him.’

  They had passed the Ritz, which was still asleep, and came to the air and light of Green Park, the leaves unfolding on the trees to their left, two children suddenly cutting across them in the middle of some chasing game, a deck-chair attendant rubbing his nose. He spat on the pavement. It lay in the sun. One of the boys was panicking, screaming –

  Further down was the Sunday Art Market. Paintings hung in packed rows on the railings. The crowds thickened up, became a forest, and Shirley and Elroy’s talk fragmented.

  ‘What would you think –’ Shirley began, as Elroy stared up at a painting of deer, hung slightly too high for them to see clearly, dun dappled bodies leaping, free (could s
he and Elroy ever live in the country?) ‘What if, you know, Winston didn’t like women?’

  But Elroy couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand her. ‘We see him in church this afternoon. Now you start thinking of a woman for him.’

  It wasn’t her business, in any case. But what was it, she wondered, about black people and homosexuality? It was as if they thought only white men did it. Even Kojo, who was liberal about most things, had been very uneasy around gay men. She remembered Elroy’s grimace of distaste as they walked down Regent Street one day and a flamboyantly handsome black man erupted out of Liberty’s, laughing, his arm round the shoulders of a fat older white man with streaked blond hair and tiny dark glasses that made him look slightly piggish, admittedly. Elroy had winced with distaste as they passed, then said, when they were still within earshot, ‘Cha, look at that battyman! How much do you think Piggy’s paying him?’

  Did everyone have to despise someone?

  ‘He’s too young to be married,’ she said, making peace. ‘Let him get his degree. Then you’ll all be proud.’

  ‘First one in the family to go to university,’ said Elroy. ‘My mother going to be dancing with joy.’

  They could hardly move in the press of people milling forward to see the paintings. Here she and Elroy were happily invisible. Some black-hooded Arab women pushed and exclaimed, three African girls in reds and oranges swooped and skittered like graceful flamingos, an American couple in small cotton sun-hats twanged and complained and stuck close to each other …

  ‘There must be thousands of people here,’ she said over her shoulder to Elroy.

  ‘Lots of people like paintings,’ he replied, ‘long as they not shut away in museums.’

  ‘If only all this lot would come to church. Imagine Piccadilly jammed solid like this, with people coming to the morning service.’ She was joking, really, but Elroy lit up.

  ‘One day they will. His Kingdom come. The revival’s coming, Shirley. Must be. The Lord’s not slow in keeping His promise …’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’ She looked away.

  ‘You people have little faith.’ He said it with sudden bitterness.

  ‘What’s the matter, Elroy? You know I believe.’

  ‘You people don’t need to, though, not like we do … is just a luxury for you.’

  ‘It isn’t true. Jesus saved my life.’

  There was a long silence; she could see he was sorry. When he spoke again, he had changed the subject. ‘I just get vex when I think about Winston.’

  She knew what he’d said was partly true. It was black people who read the Bible on the tube, black people, mostly, who drove the cars with ‘Jesus Saves’ stickers on the windows.

  They need the Kingdom more, she thought, because they don’t have enough on this earth.

  She turned to Elroy without thinking about it, looked at the sun on his handsome face, severe and sculpted, not an ounce of soft flesh, and rested her head against his shoulder. ‘You’re a king to me, Elroy.’

  ‘And you’re my baby.’

  And when they got home they made love again, with a blind concentration and hurry, then, as if death were stalking them, and time was short, but after they were finished they fell asleep, and woke an hour later in a panic race to fling their clothes on and drive to the Temple.

  Two churches in one day. Can’t do better than that. Perhaps I’ll be forgiven for two men in one night –

  They always met Elroy’s family at the Temple. They glanced quickly into the nave of the church, packed with people, as it was every Sunday, but no one was looking round for them, and Elroy’s mother always did, glasses glinting, a deep frown in her forehead under tight grey-black coils of plaits, not relaxing until all her offspring were there.

  ‘Must be upstairs, then,’ Elroy said. On the stairs she felt his hand patting her buttocks.

  The gallery was like the circle of a theatre. The warmth hit you first, a surprising warmth when the Temple itself was high and stone-built. It was the warmth of hundreds of bodies, the majority black, but a true mixture, brown, pink, olive, yellow, old and young, Chinese, Japanese, even a few Indian faces. The whites who were there did not look rich, wearing anoraks or faded coats, the women with gleaming un-made-up faces, a striking contrast to the chic and gloss of the young black women in the congregation. More women than men. Always more women. Perhaps they came to pray for the men. Or to pray for deliverance from the men?

  Electric organ played softly in the background, sweet, faintly mournful, modern. And the sadness rose in Shirley again, she saw her father’s small face on the pillow … Shaking herself free, she looked round for Elroy’s family. Beside two empty spaces she suddenly saw Sophie, waving her arms, beaming, mouthing, her arms and legs always remarkably thin besides her bulky, comfortable body, Elroy’s mother who had come over in the fifties to be a nurse, but ended up a cleaner. Almost from the start she had welcomed Shirley.

  ‘Elroy! Come on! We waitin’ for you.’

  Winston wasn’t there; that’s what Shirley noticed first. The sisters were there, Viola and Delorice, Delorice clamped to her exquisitely dressed baby, a little girl in layers of ribboned peach frills, and Viola who managed the boutique in Kilburn, in a tight, waisted black suit and high lacquered hair glued flat to her head in sharp strands and kiss-curls. Delorice, the youngest, was rather shy, jobless since she had a screaming row with Viola because she brought the baby to work with her. Sophie had told the whole story to Elroy, gasping with laughter – ‘Your sistas killin’ me, Elroy! Viola get so miserable sometime, she done shout at Delorice dat she no havin’ no stinky doo-doo in she shop …’ Now the two sisters were devoted again but Viola wouldn’t have her back in the shop. And Viola, as Shirley knew only too well, was in the process of divorcing a white man, a college lecturer. He had seemed adoring until they were married, ‘the perfect man’, as Viola said, but soon became unfaithful, then abusive, and finally horribly violent. ‘He just a little dog,’ Viola had told Shirley, rubbing her face in all the details, making her suffer because she was white too.

  She still wasn’t used to Viola and Delorice, their edge of resentment, their sass, their chill, the suspicion in their eyes when they looked at her, so different from the warmth of her African friends.

  But Africans were different, as Kojo had explained in the long-ago days when Shirley knew nothing. Africa was very big and very old, and in some ways white people had barely touched it. Things were very different for Caribbeans. Was it surprising if they hadn’t forgotten?

  ‘Shirley, darlin’,’ said Sophie, hugging her briskly with one thin black arm. ‘We miss you las week, dear. Come sit by me. Go way, Elroy, you too big to be kissin’ your mummy that way,’ laughing, showing two gold teeth, one of which Elroy had recently paid for.

  On the stage below, spot-lit, smiling, looking round the church with a contented air, were the usual group, the Reverend Lack in his ‘casual smart’ blue foam-backed blazer and knife-creased flannels, and on the chairs behind him, two other white men of around the same age, in safari suits worn over careful shirt and tie, plus Leah, a handsome middle-aged black woman, whose role in the service was mostly smiling, and praying, arms upraised, with statuesque dignity. On her right were the singers and musicians with their mikes, the sax glinting like a golden treble clef.

  And then the Reverend Lack welcomed them, and the music came up, and the singing rose, and the half-dozen television monitors dotted around the church flickered into life, deep indigo, and upon them the words of the gospel songs began to lift them and move them together, as people started swaying, as people started clapping and smiling at each other, as a young mixed-race woman to one side started dancing, rhythmically, sensually, without the self-absorption of sex, her head held high, her face shining, smiling, her hands held up in celebration, and then at least half the congregation were dancing, and Shirley began to move as well, her hips loosening, slowly, and her stiff white shoulders, and Sophie’s hand was tucked through he
r arm, she was at least five inches smaller than Shirley but when Sophie danced she bobbed up to her nose, singing in a pure, slightly cracked soprano, smiling and looking round in approval at what was happening elsewhere in the church, perhaps also to receive the approval of others, for church, Elroy said, was where she was happiest, where she felt accepted in this country at last. (But the Church of England hadn’t made her welcome, the church she had hoped would be her home. A hurt from fifty years ago, never forgotten.)

  This singing, this dancing always touched Shirley deeply, the feeling that they were all together in a perfectly simple, bodily way, all of them equal in God and the music, jackets and coats coming off as they moved – Let them praise His name with dancing, for the Lord takes delight in His people.

  Hard to believe, in that ringing temple, that black and white people feared each other.

  They sang the refrains again and again, but they weren’t like the choruses they sang at St John’s, a rigid tag after every verse. Here they sang words again because they were moved to, they sang them again to go with the feeling, Let His grace … fall … here, Let His grace … fall … here, and as they sang, she could feel grace falling, she felt grace fall upon her heart, upon her hands, which she lifted to the sky, upon her hopes, upon all their futures. Death would pass; it would pass away, and hatred, and prejudice, all pass away, for those who hated must surely get tired, lay down their heavy burden and rest, For today … is the day … of the Latter Rain …

  Viola’s hands were lifted as she danced, such elegant hands with glossy red nails and the rings her departing husband had given her, leaning towards the platform below, and she flashed a sudden smile across at Shirley, as if she saw what they were doing was absurd but wasn’t it also something fine?

  Shirley didn’t like the Reverend Lack, for all his thick hair and easy smile. He was British, born in Kenya, as he often reminded them, probably the son of missionaries, but his inflections were American, and his style of preaching seemed learned, not natural. He won their attention with rhetorical tricks, with sudden dramatic raisings of his voice, with appeals to the congregation for assent and approval – ‘Amen, brothers?’ (though most of them were sisters) ‘Amen, brothers?’ until they gave him back an ‘Amen’, appeals that sometimes seemed unconfident but sometimes almost bullying, especially as he primed them for the offertory song, telling them God would bless the givers tenfold, practically promising their money back. It didn’t seem right to pressure them so much, when so many of the congregation were poor, but the bag came round, a capacious bag, and Shirley slipped in a note, and tried not to think how much Elroy was giving.