‘And you?’ She turned to me for the first time. There was quite a queue at the bar now and Tolly d’Amico was at the back of it. ‘What are you doing?’
‘You mean, at the office – it’s too boring to –’
‘No I mean, outside. What’s your life, who are you seeing?’
She enquired calmly, almost as though it were her professional duty to put such questions. Yet the questions touched me greatly, touched me more perhaps because she didn’t love me and never would and realised that I knew this but that it didn’t stop me hankering. What she did make me realise was how lonely and shut up in myself I had become. It was in scenes that should have been brimming with warmth and intimacy – squashed on a sofa at a party, three-quarters drunk – that the desolation visited me most sharply. Sitting at my desk or trudging down a street in pouring rain, I was better protected against the brusque onrush of despair.
This discovery had led me to seek out places where my own melancholy would be somehow muffled, outgloomed, by a kind of atmospheric inoculation. Taking a short cut home from Stamford Bridge, I found myself following part of the crowd through the gates of the Brompton Cemetery. As our glum cortège (the team had lost to Derby County) padded through the sodden leaves, I paused by the monument to Sir Augustus Harris, manager of the Drury Lane Theatre, with the sorrowing figure of a woman carrying a wreath looking like she had just flunked her audition. Then a tomb with a colossal white lion on it which was John Jackson, champion pugilist of all England, friend and sparring partner of Byron. Gentleman Jackson. He could lift half a ton, write his own name with a six-stone weight attached to his little finger. The most perfectly proportioned man who ever lived. Statue erected by public subscription.
So I had wandered, on that afternoon and others, through these avenues peopled by dead merchants and their unfailingly worthy and charitable consorts, by monuments to acrobats and music-hall stars and singers – Richard Tauber and his melting tenor voice finished up there. Then a weird ambition seized me to visit the other ‘hygienic cemeteries’ which had been built around the city’s skirts to scoop up the swelling population of Victorian London – Abney Park with its Egyptian gates, Nunhead and Norwood, the great rolling expanse of Kensal Green, the precipitous dark avenues of Highgate with their sudden steepling panoramas that took my breath away, and, dimmest and saddest of all, the obscure tumultuous deathscape of Tower Hamlets cemetery. There was slum crowding even in the afterlife. As I passed through the little lodge in Southern Grove – nothing less grovelike, less southern – I came upon a spectacular scene of frozen mourning, tombstones jostling against one another at every height and angle, extended from the earth not so much by the prospect of some Stanley Spencer-style resurrection as by the pressure of the noxious gases building up below. Here I was happy.
Then the fever really took hold of me and I had to see other cemeteries too. Bunhill Fields, of course, with Bunyan and Defoe and all the other great Dissenters, and the Tottenham Garden of Peace, then the Jewish burial grounds, Kingsbury Road, where all the Reform Jews were buried because the Orthodox wouldn’t lie alongside them, and the Spanish and Portuguese Jews down the Mile End Road, and the jewellers and bookies up at West Ham. And I kept a little notebook for epitaphs and oddities like the one to George Cruikshank in Kensal Green about how he had struggled for the cause of temperance for forty years, or the one to the champion rower Robert Coombes with his boat and his Doggett’s Coat and Badge thrown over the keel and the legend ‘Fare thee well my trim-built wherry, oars, coat and badge, farewell’.
Some, not all of this I described to Helen and Tolly d’Amico.
‘They must be very picturesque, those places. You want to know where they bury us lot? As far away as possible. We had to go out to Ilford to find a plot for our Auntie Elsa. Not like in Italy, wonderful cemeteries they have there, beautiful family chapels with your own key, so you can be private, have a picnic of a Sunday. Now tell me something, Gus, you did say your name was Gus, we like to have pictures of the deceased on the tombstone, a photograph, or something to jog your memory. You don’t do that, do you? Now why is that?’
‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s odd. We do for famous people, sculptures not photographs, but it’s the same principle. But for ordinary people we don’t, perhaps we –’
It had been in my mind to say something feeble about how perhaps we were less keen to be reminded of our nearest and dearest when I became aware of Helen’s frosty expression.
‘I think they’re horrible places, cemeteries,’ she said.
‘Well, I suppose that’s the point of them really, to give you a shiver of mortality. They’re meant to be horrible.’
‘And you crawling around them all day, that’s just creepy. You’re sort of exploiting other people’s grief – no, not exploiting it, wallowing in it.’
‘I suppose so but –’
‘Anyway, they’re a disgusting waste of money. Think of what you could do with the land. In the train you go past acres and acres of those places with their fake greenery and their grotty little chapels when it could be green fields or hospitals or housing, I don’t mind which.’
Tolly said soothingly: ‘But Helen my love, if the family wants to grieve –’
‘It’s all sentimental rubbish, so undertakers can screw gullible people when they’re defenceless. I’d like to see every one of them dug up.’
‘You can’t stop people believing in the hereafter, my love.’
‘Yes you can. Or if you can’t, you should bloody well try. I’m going to the loo.’
Helen got up. She seemed to be shivering, or perhaps she was simply shrugging on her coat as she clambered over my legs, but there was no mistaking her rage.
‘I like women like that, not afraid to give you the benefit of their opinion,’ Tolly said. ‘But perhaps you hadn’t seen her like that before, on her high horse with a force ten gale behind her.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘You wouldn’t probably.’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘Dunno.’
He smiled, not unfriendly but a patronising touch about it, as though he had a perfectly clear idea of why I failed to provoke Helen’s passion but was too nice-mannered to say so.
‘Anyway, it was me who set her going then,’ I said.
‘That’s true. She doesn’t care to hear the D-word. It’s something you don’t talk about in polite society, like sex and money. Still, what else is there? Tell me something, what exactly do you think I do for a living?’
‘You said, or she said.’
‘Trader yes, but trader in what?’
‘How should I know?’
‘Have a guess.’
‘Mm, something to do with . . . no, I really don’t know.’
‘You were thinking, is it cars, or is it scrap metal, but you didn’t like to say, did you?’
‘Oh all right then, I give up.’
‘Property.’
‘Is that any more respectable?’
‘No, it isn’t, not after the activities of P. Rachman Esquire. He’s a bad boy, that one.’
‘Is that the business you’re in, winkling and all that?’
‘Certainly not, wouldn’t touch it, much too dangerous, you never know when some old lady’s going to have a son-in-law with violent habits. No, I’m in the mathematical end of the business, reversions, well it’s more of an art than a science really, no malice in it at all, but what there is is lots of death about it, because half the time you’re making an educated guess about how long some fellow’s going to live and your guess needs to beat the actuary who’s just going by what his slide-rule tells him. Ah, here we are.’
Helen came back, patting my shoulder as she clambered over me. Sat down, undid her coat, then took Tolly’s hand which was resting limply on his knee and placed it on her thigh, just below the hem of her tight skirt which had ridden half-way up or more. Shoulder pat for me, high thigh for Tolly. Perhaps that was what each of us
deserved.
‘So I expect you go to church every Sunday, probably sing in the choir,’ she persisted.
‘I’m tone-deaf,’ I said weakly.
‘Ah so you do go to church.’
‘Didn’t say I did.’
‘Didn’t say you didn’t.’
‘Oh Helen, give over, stop persecuting the poor boy.’
‘He can speak for himself, can’t you Gus?’
She used my name purely as an offensive weapon. Like many other people.
‘Short for Augustus is it then?’ said Tolly trying a diversionary tack.
‘No, Aldous.’
‘Aldous, that’s elegant. Family name is it?’
‘No, it’s after Aldous Huxley the writer’ – only Tolly’s forceps would have extracted such an admission.
‘My namesake was into geography. Thought the world was flat like a dinner-plate. Some people say I take after him.’
‘Ptolemy didn’t think the earth was flat, he thought the earth was the centre of the universe, just like you think you are.’
‘Ooh, back into the knife-box, Miss Einstein.’
‘So why do you go?’ she said. ‘You can’t really believe all that stuff. I mean, it’s not even a question of science having exploded it. Most of it was quite unbelievable in the first place.’
‘I haven’t even admitted I go to church, let alone whether I believe in it, or what I believe in, if anything.’
‘Surely one must follow from the other, doesn’t it?’
Her lips were parted in a frozen kind of expression, not a smile exactly, more like the expression on a not very good statue, an angel designed to express ecstasy but the effect not coming off, so that the face seems uncertain, neutered of emotion. This, I was beginning to see, was the way she looked when she was angry and unwilling to show it.
‘No, it doesn’t follow,’ I said.
‘Why not? It’s a total contradiction. If you go to a special place once a week and stand up and chant “I believe in such and such” and you don’t believe in such and such, that’s pure hypocrisy, I’m sorry, but there isn’t any other word for it.’
‘Why do you mind so much?’
‘All right, unlike you I don’t refuse to answer a simple question. Because my father brought me up to be an honest atheist, that’s why.’
‘Atheist or agnostic?’ Tolly put in a surprise question. He was losing his temper too, and the meteorite crevice on his forehead seemed to be convulsing as though about to give birth to a tiny alien.
‘Atheist.’
‘How can you be so sure? You can’t prove a negative.’
‘If there are good reasons for not believing all the hypotheses so far advanced, man with a long white beard and that, then there are good reasons to call yourself an atheist, because there’s no plausible hypothesis left to remain in doubt about. Of course, evidence could come along to prove anything that we can’t now conceive of, like that pigs can fly, after all. But you wouldn’t say you were an agnostic about flying pigs, would you?’
‘So you have to either believe or not believe?’
‘You either go to church or don’t go to church, because you can’t get up and say I sort of half-believe in Almighty God, and I’m in two minds about the Holy Ghost.’
‘You seem to think I spend the whole time asking myself all these great questions.’
‘You mean you avoid even thinking about them. That’s worse still because that means you must know what the answers are and you just don’t dare face up to them.’
‘So you know all the answers.’
‘So do you.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes you fucking well do’ – her voice louder and sharper now – ‘you know perfectly well that God isn’t even a question worth asking any more, the whole thing is –’
‘Oy, turn it down a bit there, some people are trying to have a quiet conversation.’
With startling speed, Helen jumped up and twisted round, kneeling on the seat so that she was looking over into the next booth and, rather more quietly than she had spoken about God or the Holy Ghost, said:
‘Well, you’d better go and have your conversation somewhere else then.’
‘You’re drunk, young lady.’
‘You’re ugly.’
‘Look, I’m going to have to speak to the landlord.’
‘See if I care.’
‘Don’t care was made to care.’
The other half of this conversation turned out to be a sturdy elderly midget in horn-rims who moved with some agility towards the bar.
‘Time to go, folks,’ Tolly said.
I knew how sad, not even sad, sad has dignity, how pathetic my outings every Sunday would look to an unsympathetic observer. For I did not seek out beautiful churches where the singing might be superb and even the sermon might be bearable for an intelligent modern person. That would be a cop-out. My preferred haunts were scruffy brick barns of the 1860s, their great eastern rumps hoisted to the traffic and their grotty, garbage-blown porches crouching amid the laurels in some desolate crescent where three-quarters of the residents were still in bed sleeping it off and the rest were out washing their cars. As for the clergymen – the Rev. Alan Dickholm BSc, priest-in-charge of St Aidan’s (they were trying to close it down and wouldn’t make him a rector), was typical: former research officer at Farnborough, whistling speech-defect no doubt contracted from excessive exposure to wind tunnels, his mind a pretty fair wind tunnel itself, sermons drawing on TV news stories, usually the items towards the end of the bulletin, the ones about pets and floods. Yet he stuck to King Edward’s prayer book and King James’s bible, both of which he read from very slowly and with a merciful absence of expression. So for me sitting in the pitchpine pew behind the pillars, listening to his slow whistling voice and the roar of the traffic behind him, a degree of serenity was achieved but not a serenity which could easily be explained to Helen.
After a year or two the bishop shut St Aidan’s – an average congregation of fourteen was scarcely up to quota – and my custom had to be taken elsewhere. All Saints, Scuttle Alley, was an instant wash-out. Father Prout-Mahony, with his sweet squashy face and his belchy breath, had a bunch of virtues which might shortly waft him aloft if he didn’t lay off the Jamesons, but clarity of diction was not among them. He gabbled through his Mass so quickly that even regulars found difficulty in keeping up with the responses. The next one I tried, Terry Briscoe, Your Parish Priest, as it said on the board outside St John’s, Fakenham Gardens, wasn’t too keen on ‘taking’ the service in a taking, authoritarian way and would sit in some remote corner of his church, accompanying the hymns on his electric guitar (perhaps he needed to be over there to be close to the power point), while selected children went up to the lectern to read prayers of their own composition. The assorted idiosyncrasies of these incumbents managed to provoke all my principal vices – snobbery, impatience, pedantry – without offering much in the way of balm until I happened upon the Rev. James Moonman.
His church, St Columba’s, has gone now, its fabric so much deconsecrated hardcore beneath the dual carriageway, but when it was standing, St Col’s was a dear little Victorian gothic box, with a miniature green spire, modelled on the Sainte-Chapelle according to the flyblown but exhaustive leaflet by the poor-box, and chocolate-and-blue tiles and a series of glowing windows all round the church telling the story of how the faith came to lona: the mountains a sumptuous purple, the fields bright green and the saints stepping out of silver boats from an azure sea. Mr Moonman, very old, smelly and unkempt with a fringe of bristles along his jaw, read in a precise, old-fashioned voice with a peculiar snorting sign-off effect at the end of each passage, a sort of ‘Haugh!’, strangely pleasant. It was quiet in St Columba’s. Mr Moonman’s congregation made the average turn-out at St Aidan’s feel like a football crowd. My fellow worshippers, mostly elderly women, sat well spaced out and made little or no noise, even when the prayer book instructed them to respond. W
hen Mr Moonman went ‘Give peace in our time, O Lord, haugh,’ there came back only the most delicate of rustles, barely classifiable as human speech. Mr Moonman also made no effort to heat his church, so that even on a mild spring day there was a midwinter chill in the pews. And it is with a shiver – a pleasurable shiver – that I remember that sensation of utter coldness and peace experienced those Sunday mornings in St Columba’s – the coldness deepening and entrenching the peace.
Belief didn’t come into it at all, would have spoiled the effect. Impossible to explain that to Helen. How could you sit there, I could hear her saying, if you didn’t honestly believe? Impossible to convey that the words ‘honestly believe’ represented a state of mind that was beyond me, in fact not one that greatly appealed even if I had been capable of it. In some moods, to believe in anything – certainly not just the truths of religion – seemed to me a most peculiar ambition, which made me think of an argument that Scrannel had once elaborated.
We have been taught, he said, for several millennia that belief is something that comes naturally to us, that to have beliefs is part of a proper person’s normal equipment. This conviction about the necessity of having convictions is so taken for granted that we do not stop to wonder whether it is odd, whether there may even be something a little touching, or touched, about it. Even the word itself betrays a certain poignancy: belief is originally, after all, only ‘be lief’, be dear, be lovable. So this word which is now employed to describe our grandest intellectual projects, about the origin, nature and destiny of the universe, is the same as that which we once used to describe our humblest, most intimate, most personal passions. We needed it then, not to state, quite coldly and impersonally, that such and such is the case, but rather to state that so-and-so is a darling, and we want to hug her, or of course him, and bind her to us for ever – which I cannot resist pointing out is what most scholars agree is the root word of religion, religo, I bind fast or moor. So religious belief simply means huggy hug. It is an old ambition, perhaps our oldest and a lovely one some think, to clasp the universe, to return to those comfortable moorings in the womb from which we were so rudely untied, but it isn’t exactly what we think we are doing when we embark on our grand explanations of how the world came into being. How cool and objective we mean to sound, how hot our hearts.
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