Breaking Faith

by Jo Bannister

  Chapter Five

  In the timbered hall events had taken an unexpected turn. Thunderous music was still playing but no one was dancing now. Two hundred party-goers, oblivious of the treat awaiting them in the kitchen, were gathered round the open doors and windows along the front of the house.

  Brodie and Chandos joined them; and because Chandos was the sort of man for whom crowds part they were soon standing at the front.

  A demonstration was taking place in the road outside, illuminated by the spill of light from the house. It wasn’t a large demonstration. What was remarkable about it was that none of those demonstrating was under fifty and some of them were wearing lisle stockings.

  They were also carrying placards. They were hand-made. Some of the placards said Demon Rockers go to Hell. Some of them said Sinners Come Home. One of them said Philbert’s Healing Oils: Because Granny Knew Best – until the demonstrator realised he had his bit of cardboard back to front and turned it round, at which point it said Get Thou Behind Me, Satan. A woman in stout brogues was orchestrating a chant of ‘Souls Yes, Satan No!’ with a tambourine.

  When Eric Chandos emerged out of the grinning crowd the chanting first lost its beat then petered out in a confusion of defiance and uncertainty. The demonstrators watched the bearded man as if they saw something genuinely demonic in him.

  Chandos said mildly, ‘Is there a problem?’

  The little gathering didn’t have to nominate a spokesman: his garb did that. Chandos thought the white insert in his black collar made him a Catholic priest, but the narrow man with the bald pate and zealot eyes belonged to a much smaller and even less liberal establishment. ‘I am the Reverend Gilbert Spender,’ he announced with gravitas, ‘and these are members of my flock at the New Brethren Chapel in Cheyne Treacey.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you. My name is Eric Chandos and these are my friends. What can we do for you?’

  Reverend Spender hadn’t expected courtesy. It’s easier to hurl insults at someone who’s hurling them back, and for a moment the welcome wrong-footed him. But a man didn’t get to be a chaplain of the New Brethren, even in Cheyne Treacey where the competition was limited, by lacking words on the big occasion. He drew a deep breath, swelling like a balloon.

  ‘You can begin by ceasing that infernal racket!’ He meant the music once more pounding from the sound system. ‘Then you can send these harlots home with instructions on how to dress decently in future. And then, if you have any hope of salvation, you can get down on your knees and repent the outrages you commit daily against our poor bleeding saviour!’

  ‘Hm,’ said Chandos thoughtfully. He pivotted slowly on his heel and looked at the faces behind him, expectant and not at all offended. ‘Well, Mr Spender. Thank you for coming. But I don’t think I’ll be doing any of those things any time soon.’ He turned back to the house.

  ‘You might well flee the Lord’s name!’ thundered Reverend Spender. ‘You should be afraid to face Him. Don’t think I don’t know who you are, what you do. Imps of the Devil you are, all of you. Taking clear young voices that should be raised in praise and twisting them to idolatry! Taking fresh young hearts that should be filled with joy and turning them to evil.

  ‘You don’t like that?’ He warmed to his theme as Chandos looked back. ‘I know evil when I see it and I call it by its name. I know it’s not the modern way. I know we’re supposed to be tolerant and inclusive. To say that any man’s creed is as good as my creed, and if it involves sacrificing goats and dancing naked round a bonfire, who’s to say that his way is less precious to the Lord than mine?’

  He drew himself up to his full if modest height. ‘I told you who, Mr Chandos. I am the Reverend Gilbert Spender of the New Brethren of Cheyne Treacey. I do the Lord’s work. I am not among the first of his ministers, but if I thought that naked heathens garotting goats could be anything but an insult to the Lord my God I’d leave my vocation today and go sweep the road instead. That’s who I am, and what I do, and why I do it.’

  His eyes narrowed dramatically. ‘I’m not sure why you follow your path. How much you understand of how the Devil uses you. Are you sworn to him, as I am to God? Or do you think it’s just a bit of nonsense that does no one any harm and makes you rich? A bit of a laugh.

  ‘Look around you, Mr Chandos. These are the sons of Adam, the daughters of Eve. They had a birthright – life everlasting. The Lord Jesus Christ died to guarantee it. And you take it from them. You steal their immortal souls, and give them in return music that beats like a fever in their blood to make them forget. And you do it for a laugh?’

  Watching him sideways, Brodie saw the moment at which Chandos had heard enough. It passed through his eyes like a bird crossing the sun, no sooner glimpsed than gone, and all the evidence of its passing was a slight lifting of the corners of his mouth in a tiny, hungry smile. But before he had been willing to let this foolishness go unpunished and afterwards he was not. ‘You don’t like our music, Mr Spender?’

  ‘Like it? It is an abomination. A fart from the bowels of hell. No decent man would foul his ears with it. No respectable woman could hear it without blushing.’

  Chandos nodded slowly. A backward glance gathered his guests as co-conspirators. ‘So which notes it is that offend you? A? G-sharp? Maybe it’s E-flat. It’s a sneaky little sod, that E-flat, I always had my doubts about it. Is that the one the Devil uses and God abhors?’

  He waited for an answer, just not quite long enough for Spender to formulate one. Then he shrugged, as if the minister had let him down. ‘The dictionary defines music as the result of modulating sound-waves in an organised and harmonious fashion. Now, I can see how we might argue over whether a particular musical form is harmonious or not, but moral? How can a modulated sound-wave either have or lack morality? It’s like accusing a chair of being wicked. It isn’t wicked, it isn’t good, it’s just a chair. It’s good for sitting on. It’s bad if you throw it through somebody’s window, but it’s still just a chair.

  ‘If you don’t like demon rock, don’t buy it. Buy Songs of Praise: the Album instead. Buy The Dominican Choir Nuns Sing-along. Buy Cliff Richard, for all I care: it’s a free country and there’s enough music out there for every possible taste, even yours. But if that’s the price for getting into heaven, I think I’ll be happier in hell.’

  ‘You admit it! He admits it!’ The chaplain was dancing with a terrible triumph. ‘He’s going to hell and he’s taking all you people with him. But he won’t burn, oh no. There’s a right cosy welcome waiting for him. The number of innocents he’s corrupted, Lucifer himself will shake his hand. Dear God, he advertises what he’s up to on every disc he sells! Souls For Satan – that’s not the name of his band, it’s his job description!’

  Chandos rather liked that. The smile broadened within the well-shaped confines of his beard. ‘Maybe it’s not the music that’s a problem so much as the lyrics. Is that what’s getting you all of a tizzy – the words of the songs?’

  ‘Songs?’ Reverend Spender’s voice soared till it cracked. ‘In better days than these a man who wrote such filth would have had his hand cut off. He’d have been burnt at the stake.’

  ‘Have you ever read the Song of Solomon?’ asked Chandos.

  ‘Of course I have.’

  ‘All that about the garden? About the winds blowing in the garden, making the spices thereof flow out? About the man coming into his garden to eat his pleasant fruits, and his fruits being sweet to her taste.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Spender in a low voice.

  ‘You don’t really think it’s about gardening, do you?’

  To his credit, Spender didn’t hesitate. ‘I think it’s about love.’

  ‘I think it’s about sex.’

  The little minister turned his nose up. Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. Proverbs 26, verse 7.’

  ‘He that hateth dissembleth with his lips, and layeth up deceit within him,’ countered Chandos. Also Proverbs.’
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br />   ‘Curse God and die,’ snapped Spender. Job, chapter 2, verse 9.’

  ‘A stone is heavy and the sand weighty. But a fool’s wrath is heavier than them both.’

  Brodie had no idea if Chandos was quoting accurately or making it up as he went along, but Spender knew. ‘You damned popinjay,’ he yelled, abandoning the last vestiges of dignity, ‘will you bandy words with a minister of God? This has become a house of iniquity in the midst of the righteous. Get from hence, and take your abominations with you. We don’t want your kind here. We have families to protect.’

  The closer the chaplain came to losing control, the more Chandos was enjoying himself. A throb of power came from him as if from a generator. His eyes sparkled with the joy of conflict.

  In truth, making a fool of a pompous little cleric was not something an intelligent man should have been proud of. Brodie felt a quiver of unease that so demeaning someone, even someone who was asking for it, should give him such pleasure. But another more primitive instinct rejoiced at his deftness.

  ‘Well, I don’t see us doing that either,’ said Chandos cheerfully. ‘This is our house and we’re going to be here a long time; and what we do here is none of your business. Will it involve Satanic orgies? – certainly. Is there any danger of your wives and children getting involved? – if they play their cards right. Are we a threat to the church’s ideals of pious decency? – I do hope so.’

  Spender had his mouth open to retort, but Chandos was on a roll now and wouldn’t let him in. ‘You think your opinions are worth more than another man’s because you’re quoting from a book written thousands of years ago. If your doctors treated you according to best practice in Bible times you’d sue them – if you lived long enough. If scientists had learned nothing for two thousand years there’d be no power, no communications, no travel. Education would be what your dad remembered his dad telling him. Most children would die in infancy, most women in childbirth. Most men would die before middle age from minor illnesses and trivial injuries.

  ‘The people who wrote your book lived in squalor and peril, and looked to a power beyond themselves to make a world they couldn’t control a little less scary. But times have moved on. What made sense to them really shouldn’t still make sense to you.’ Chandos’s beard jutted like a black finger driving home his point. His voice rang with authority. ‘They were a primitive and frightened people who understood nothing of the world they lived in, and their God was a bloody tyrant. And that’s the thing you worship? You know the biggest difference between you and Jared Fry, Mr Spender? He rides his demons. You kneel to yours.’

  The argument might have gone on, though not to a resolution. Neither man was about to compromise. There was no middle ground. For Chandos, ridiculing the little minister was like pelting an Aunt Sally with a wet sponge: facile but still fun. And, while Spender’s beliefs were too deeply ingrained to be shaken, sheer outrage rendered him incapable of response. By now he could hardly put words together without gibbering.

  A cheer went up from the crowd at The Diligence. They thought it was entertainment. They sounded like a little corner of the Colosseum at the first sight of blood.

  If the demonstrators needed any more convincing that demon rockers were the seed of Satan, that served. They were going home before the Devil himself appeared in a puff of smoke. They set off down the road at something between a stalk and a trot, leaving Spender no option but to follow his routed flock. The party-goers helped him on his way with a round of applause.

  Afterwards they drifted back into the house. Someone changed the music, someone else opened some more bottles. A voice called from the kitchen, ‘What’s all this cola for?’ The drama was forgotten, and nothing in Chandos’s manner suggested he’d done anything to be ashamed of.

  He ushered Brodie back inside, closing the door behind them. A sideways glance at his face told her nothing. She took the glass he offered and they picked up the conversation pretty much where they’d left it, Brodie trying not to let the tumult in her breast show in her face. Half of her was appalled at what he’d done – shredding a pompous but essentially harmless little man in front of those who respected him for no better reason than that he could. But the other half felt quite differently about it, and that startled and alarmed her.

  Chapter Six

  The events at The Diligence preyed on Brodie’s mind all the following week. Every time she saw Daniel she apologised again. He accepted her apology, because it was undoubtedly due, and afterwards considered the matter closed. That Brodie couldn’t do the same made him wonder if there was something else she felt guilty about.

  Twice he created opportunities for her to talk about it if she wanted. She side-stepped them with a kind of desperate adroitness that was not reassuring. He thought she was avoiding the issue not because she thought it too trivial to discuss but because it loomed too large. When he thought of some of the things they’d managed to talk through, the fact that she couldn’t talk about this troubled him.

  Then she began avoiding him. When he suggested lunch she claimed to be busy; when he called at her office she said she was rushing out. Finally on the Sunday evening he went to her flat in Chiffney Road, uninvited and timing his arrival just before Paddy’s bedtime. He didn’t see how she could avoid speaking to him then.

  Paddy was delighted to see him, Brodie less so. He saw her looking for an excuse to send him away. Ignoring her, he offered to tell Paddy a bedtime story, and by the time the little girl was asleep – head full of an unusual mythology in which dragons were the good guys and their trusty sidekicks were all mathematicians – Brodie knew they had to talk and had put the kettle on. They took the coffee into the living room. Brodie curled up on one sofa and Daniel, kicking his shoes off, on the other.

  ‘So what’s going on?’ he asked patiently.

  At least she didn’t insult him by lying. ‘Oh Daniel,’ she sighed, ‘I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.’

  ‘This isn’t still about the party?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and no. Not what I did to you. I am sorry about that, but you know that.’

  Daniel nodded. ‘What do I not know?’

  He thought she was changing the subject, but actually she wasn’t. ‘After John left me, I didn’t think I’d ever trust a man again. He was my husband, we’d been married for five years, we had a little girl. I thought I knew him – but I didn’t know he’d fallen for a librarian. I thought, if even John, who I knew best of anyone in the world, who had Mr Reliability tattooed on his forehead, could let me down like that I could never count on anyone ever again.’

  ‘Then you met Jack,’ Daniel prompted gently.

  Brodie smiled. After everything that had passed between them – perhaps because of everything – he could still touch her heart in ways no one else could. ‘I was going to say, Then I met you. Daniel, I don’t think you’re aware of the effect you’ve had on my life. I had a pretty jaundiced view of the world. If we hadn’t met I’d have been a sour, disappointed old woman by the time I was forty.

  ‘Finding you changed that. Provided options. It’s impossible to be around you for any length of time without starting to feel a little optimistic. I was locked in my own bitterness and you freed me. Opened me out; unfolded me. I’m not sure how you did it, I’m not sure it’s something you set out to do, but it happened. You showed me how to be happy again.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said softly. But he knew she hadn’t finished.

  ‘It was the trust I had in you – the confidence, the strength I drew from our friendship – that gave me the courage to risk being hurt again. If I hadn’t known you first I wouldn’t have dared get involved with Jack. And that’s given me a lot of pleasure, as you know. Neither of us has used the word but I was coming to think of it as love. I was beginning to think in terms of commitment, of a future.’

  The brow wrinkled above Daniel’s glasses. His voice was low. ‘Brodie – are you trying to tell me Jack’s let you down? Been unfaith
ful?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head, the cloud of dark hair storm-tossed about her shoulders. There was a thin despair in her voice as if a crack was opening in her heart. ‘Jack’s a good man. He’d never knowingly hurt me.’

  ‘Then … ?’ He didn’t understand.

  ‘I thought we were happy,’ said Brodie softly. ‘I thought I was happy. I thought we could be happy together maybe for the rest of our lives. Somehow it never occurred to me I might meet someone else.’

  Whatever Daniel was expecting, it wasn’t that. He only realised his mouth was hanging open when his lips went dry. He moistened them and hunted for something to say. ‘Have you told Jack?’

  ‘No!’ exclaimed Brodie. ‘Daniel, I don’t want him to know. I don’t think what I’m feeling now is real. I don’t think it’s going anywhere. I don’t want to throw away what I had a month ago for something that might blaze like a firework and spend itself as quickly.’

  Daniel was a mathematician: he could put two and two together. ‘You’re talking about Eric Chandos.’

  Brodie nodded, face shielded by her hair. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did anything happen? Anything you owe it to Jack to tell him about?’

  She shrugged. ‘Sparks flew. I really enjoyed being with him. Of course, you know that.’ She looked at him, one lip caught between her teeth, but he said nothing. ‘I want to see him again. But I’m not going to. I don’t see any future in it. Fireworks are great for half an hour’s entertainment, but what you really want on a cold winter’s night is a big log fire.’

  ‘Brodie …’

  She met his gaze bravely. ‘You’re wondering if I slept with him. No, I didn’t. Not on the night of the party and not since. I’ve thought about him – almost, I’ve thought of nothing else. I know better. Both my head and my heart know that what I have with Jack is worth more than a fling with Eric Chandos.’ The problem was – and she knew it was dishonest to say that much and not finish – her loins weren’t subscribing to the majority view.