Silver Birches Page 6

  It was Peter’s turn to blush. I got the distinct impression that he was facing a brand new concept. Could being a good friend turn out to be the most useful tool in his collection? I hoped he wouldn’t hang it up on his workshop wall in the gap between the hammer and the crowbar.

  “That’s the first thing. The second thing is your comment about not having changed at all. Well, I don’t know about him, but if he hasn’t, then neither have you, Mike. Not one little, tiny scrap as far as I can see.”

  “Now, just a minute — ”

  The dispassionate monotone was relentless.

  “Earlier on, you said that you were sorry if the things you were going to say spoiled our party.” He waited for no more than a beat, then continued, his voice even more ominously calm than before. “Yes. Well. That’s exactly the type of deliberately manipulative comment I can remember you indulging in twenty years ago. You trotted out lines like that whenever you found it necessary to trivialize other people and their activities. And you did it so that you could get what you wanted.

  “Let’s humble everyone else off the stage and into the wings and get them sitting in the stalls so that there’s no shred of doubt about who is the rightful center of attention. That’s roughly the way it works, isn’t it?

  “You know perfectly well that there never was the slightest question of us meeting here simply to have a ‘party.’ Nor is there an ounce of reality in the scenario you implied by using that term. I mean, of course, in case I haven’t made myself clear, the one in which the rest of us are a bunch of squealing, paper-hat wearing lightweights, whilst you alone are gloriously revealed as a person who genuinely feels things. You, only you, are ready and willing to grapple with the deep, dark issues that are tearing your heart to pieces, and, in the process, favor us all by doing the whole performance in Cinemascope. You spent a lot of time feeling sorry for yourself when I first knew you, and you’re doing exactly the same thing twenty years later. And that’s how you’re going to deal with the things I’m saying now, isn’t it? In fact, I can see from your face that you’re leafing through your little sheaf of options even as I speak. Shall I get angry with him — storm around a bit, or would bursting into tears be more useful? Stick with the sympathy vote? No, I’ve already used that one up. Perhaps just a quiet, dignified exit with chin bravely held high, followed by a long, enjoyable sulk. That used to be another of your favorite party pieces, I seem to remember. You could come down to breakfast tomorrow morning looking heroic but pale and deeply hurt. Still enjoy your croissants and marmalade, of course.”

  Our fire had become a bed of glowing embers by now, but the storm obviously had no intention of dying down just because we might have decided that bedtime was getting close. The rain had got going with a vengeance since Angela and I had come back in. It was driving and rattling against the single-thickness glass of the kitchen windows with the insistence of an urgent warning, its weight and rhythm altering as the wind rose and fell, attacked and retreated.

  I think we were all rather dumbstruck by the calm, full-frontal attack that we had just witnessed. As for the victim of the assault, I had to admit that it looked as if Andrew had been right in guessing that he would be sorting through all the possible options. I watched fear, anger, scorn, and an attempt at haughty contempt chase each other experimentally across Mike’s keen, weak features. Finally he settled for a derisive tone, its mildness, to my ears anyway, wholly spurious.

  “If I’d realized that this weekend was designed to be a forum for personal abuse I’m not sure that I would have — ”

  “You’re doing it again.”

  Andrew still spoke quietly, but there was a stony, white-hot intensity of anger in his voice that was quite disturbing.

  “You’re doing it again. You seemed to think personal abuse was fine when you were dishing it out to Peter just now. You claimed your right to tell the truth according to our agreement. Well, now I’m claiming mine.”

  Mike spread his arms wide, enlisting our support.

  “I hardly think you can equate what I — ”

  “You stole attention from people who needed it badly and might not have wasted it as you did.” His voice resonated with passion now. “You robbed us! You robbed people less capable of putting themselves forward. You robbed them of time that should have been divided up amongst the other people who were there. We were there, you know, whether you noticed us or not. You moaned then. You moan now. You tried to control God and the clergy and everyone else with your — your juvenile designer moods all those years ago, and, unbelievably, you’re still trying to do the same thing two decades later — this very evening. Do you honestly think you’re going to sulk or in some other way pressure God into being or doing what you want without any serious effort on your part? No wonder you lurched so quickly from tears to laughter just now. As far as you’re concerned, one’s just as meaningless as the other.

  “Oh, and The Railway Children. Yes. Very moving! I wonder how long it took you to put that little speech together. Did you work it out during the drive down, or is it a set piece that you come out with whenever you get worried that no one’s taking any notice of you?”

  “Andrew...”

  Angela frowned as she laid a restraining hand on Andrew’s shoulder. She obviously felt that the situation was getting seriously out of hand. So did I, but I was reluctant to come out from inside, and anyway, there was a part of me that couldn’t help being fascinated.

  “It’s all right, Angela,” responded Andrew, “I’ve only got one more thing to say, and then I’m going to bed. It’s this. I said earlier that I wanted to complain about what was happening this evening. Specifically, as I’ve already said, my complaint is that there’s very little hope of us really getting anywhere this weekend. From what I’ve seen so far all the old patterns and problems that I remember from when we first knew each other haven’t altered in the slightest. I worried about coming precisely because I thought people like Mike might still be playing his same old games. I hoped he wouldn’t be. Well, he is, and that tells me we’re wasting our time.”

  Abruptly he stood, smoothing his short brown hair with both hands, looking, in that moment, completely drained. His eyes were small intense points.

  “So, I shall be leaving in the morning. Goodnight, Angela — everybody. Goodnight, Mike. I’m sorry if I’ve spoiled your party.”

  He crossed the room and opened the door leading through to the lower hallway and stairs. Angela swiveled the top half of her body to speak over the back of the sofa that he had just vacated.

  “Andrew.”

  He stopped. “Yes.”

  “Sorry — just one thing. About telling the truth.”

  Deep sigh.

  “Yes?”

  “You came down here hoping to find that Mike had changed. That’s what you said. You were hoping he might have stopped playing his games because then we could really get somewhere. You said that as well. Have I understood you?”

  Andrew waited, one hand and forearm resting wearily on the door frame to support his weight. He neither nodded nor spoke.

  “But you didn’t tell the truth either, did you, Andrew?” Angela’s voice was certainly not loud, but it was very firm. “You lied about hoping Mike had changed. I’m quite sure you were very much hoping he’d be exactly the same. Parts of that speech of yours were almost as well rehearsed as Mike’s. You came here to say all that. You’ve been waiting for years to watch his face as he listens to that stuff spilling out of your mouth, haven’t you? And now you’ve done it. Does it feel good?”

  By not a single word or gesture did Andrew respond to what Angela had said. He stared steadily and blankly at her for what must have been several seconds, then turned and left the room, closing the door with meticulous care behind him as he went.

  As for Mike — well, have you ever seen anyone immediately after they’ve been flayed alive? That was the feeling I had about the poor bloke. By now he was just a crumpled heap in his chair. I
t was as if those razor-sharp words of Andrew’s had sliced away the outer skin of his self-respect. He was raw and defenseless, like a remnant, a piece of emotional meat. Where did we go from here?

  “That was so cruel,” whispered Jenny after a little while, her eyes bright and brimming with tears, “so cruel and nasty.”

  Peter sighed deeply. “I’m quite surprised,” he said. “I knew Andrew was in some ways a very angry person, but...” He leaned across to pat Mike on the shoulder. “Mike, I’m so sorry you had to hear all that. It really wasn’t fair.”

  “I... er, I do think it was more about Andrew than about you,” contributed Graham nervously.

  We all nodded and made noises of agreement, I think for Graham’s sake as well as for Mike’s.

  “Amazing,” said Angela, one hand pressed against her chest, “what can get stored up over the years.”

  More mechanical nodding as before, except that on hearing Angela’s words, Jenny, tissue in hand, turned and looked directly at me, and there was something about the expression on her plain, good-natured face that I did not understand in the slightest.

  Going to bed on that Friday night was a frightening experience for a number of reasons. High on this list of reasons, despite what I had said to Angela in the course of our tour, was the unexpected shock of finding myself abandoned in a centuries-old paneled room containing a priest hole, a four-poster bed, and a very small electric lamp. The prospect of being stared at by Angela’s customers suddenly seemed far preferable to an encounter with the range of spooky beings that my imagination began to conjure up as I lay in my large bed waiting for sleep to come. I spent some minutes peering into the dark corners of the room, wondering if I dared get out of bed to close the door of the priest hole.

  Those fears passed relatively quickly. What could a ghost actually do?

  But I had brought too many things to bed with me for sleep to arrive swiftly. The sour taste of Andrew’s attack on Mike lingered in my mouth. It seemed hardly credible that such a heavy cache of bitterness had been hoarded and sustained over so many years. Surely only a temporary loss of sanity could allow anyone to believe that such a viciously concentrated attack was justified after a gap of two decades. The evening had never really recovered after Andrew’s exit.

  Then there was the whole business of this reunion. All those years ago at St. Mark’s there had been a sense of optimism about the future. It was part of being a Christian. If you got married, for instance, you might have problems from time to time, but because God was so closely involved in your life it was bound to be all right in the end. The same applied to all other areas of life. Job, family, faith, health, and anything else you cared to name. Jesus was the divine long-stop, the final defense against disaster, the one who would ensure that we all lived happily ever after. It may have been naïve and was certainly the result of poor teaching, but it was what we had believed.

  Now look at us. Angela, a Christian, deserted by her husband, another Christian. Andrew, filled with bile and the need for revenge. I dreaded to think what Mike had got himself involved in over the years. And then there was Peter, still turning up simplistic comments and advice like great clods of earth that nothing fine or delicate had a hope of growing in. Myself, alone, facing a future without shape or meaning. Graham and Jenny — well, they looked very mild and quite nervous but not too bad. Surely, though, we had been hoping that something a little more interesting and dynamic than “not too bad” would have developed as the years went by? All delusion?

  I had learned over the years that for genuine followers of Jesus, doubt had little or nothing to do with lack of faith, but on this particular night, crushed by negative thoughts, I entered a very dark place indeed. Trapped between a past that had gone beyond recall and a future presenting nothing more than a featureless vacuum, I stared with terrified eyes at the part of my life that was called “now,” and I wondered where God had gone.

  Until the moment when I finally slept, I knew that I would never sleep.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Saturday Morning

  What’s it like being a traveling Christian speaker, David?”

  I shrugged. “Well, first of all, Jenny, I don’t think I am one any more, and secondly, it depends which bit of that magnificent title you’re talking about. Traveling, being a Christian, and speaking haven’t always fitted together all that well. I don’t know — it’s all so varied. I mean, sitting in hotel bedrooms watching T. J. Hooker dubbed into German is a vastly overrated pastime, but some of the actual contact with people has been wonderful.” I braced myself to deliver the obligatory and quite truthful additional comment: “I’ve been very lucky — very blessed.”

  It was the next morning. After his extraordinary outburst of the night before, Andrew had packed and gone before anyone else was up. The storm seemed to have gone with him. Last night’s raging winds and beating rain had given way to a completely different stage in Mother Nature’s wash cycle. The sun was brilliant but purely ornamental in a sky as blue as a hedge sparrow’s egg, the air chilled and snappy as wafer-thin ice. The world was clean and ready to be dried.

  Morning and breakfast and a change in weather seemed to have cleaned some of last night’s darkness out of me as well. I had vivid memories of loving mornings like these and an unexpected, embryonic hope that it might happen again. Jenny was the only one I had been able to persuade into a morning walk. Coated, booted, and scarved until we looked like two Michelin men, we were planning, with the help of instructions supplied by our hostess, to follow the ridge that ran northward for several miles from a starting point at the top of the hill overlooking Angela’s house. The idea was for Jenny and me to join up with the other four to have lunch at a “fantastic” pub called the Old Ox, which, we were assured, was to be found nestling in a fold of the hills on the eastern edge of a village called Upper Stark.

  “Beware seductive signs to Lower Stark,” Angela had warned us darkly. “They deliberately make their pretty little ornamental signposts much more attractive than their dull little village. And anyway, the Ox makes their rotten old pub look like McDonald’s. Besides, we wouldn’t all be there waiting to make your day complete, so get it right.”

  Angela, tough as ever.

  It had felt strange embarking on this expedition with Jenny. We said all sorts of bright and cheery things to each other as we stepped out energetically up the hill, but there was no escaping the fact that long country walks with women I hardly knew were completely outside any recent experience of mine. My vague discomfort was significantly alleviated by the knowledge that our little capsule of physical closeness involved walking. Like all the best sports and more than a few social activities, walking is essentially a sideways game. Eyes and bodies forward perhaps, but all other important things tentatively sideways — that can work very well. I hoped it would this time.

  Up on the ridge the view had been as spectacular as we had both hoped.

  “Why is it,” I asked Jenny when we stopped to gather breath at last at the top of the hill, “that views across valleys and hills seem to offer the possibility of solving the most crucial and least identifiable problems in life?”

  Exertion and cold had brought color to my companion’s cheeks and a sparkle of exhilaration to her brown eyes. Gazing out across the valley, hands pushed deep in her pockets, straight hair gathered in by a red woolly hat, she looked much younger and not at all plain. She chuckled.

  “Is that some kind of test question?”

  “Sorry, it did come out a bit pat, didn’t it? No, of course it isn’t. It’s just something I always ask myself when I get to places like this.”

  She glanced up at my face.

  “People who ask questions like that usually can’t wait to get the other person’s boring reply out of the way so that they can answer it themselves. Tell me you haven’t got a clever answer all worked out to stun me with when I’ve finished mumbling something embarrassingly banal.”

  It was my turn to
laugh.

  “Certainly not! I haven’t the faintest idea what the answer is. Questions are roads. Answers have a habit of blocking them. I think I prefer the questions really.”

  “I see.” She studied my face for an instant longer then turned toward the valley once more.

  A panorama of soft velvet shadows and crystalline light stretched away from us for miles before merging with purple hills and sky of a paler blue in the far distance.

  “Well,” she continued slowly, “my answer to the question you always ask, and do please forgive me if it turns out to be a tedious old block, is that we love views because they teach us a little bit about how God sees things. In particular, that there’s much more space to work in than we might have thought when we were — well, when we were down there being part of the view. Does that sound too silly for words?”

  “Oh, no,” I said. By unspoken mutual consent, we set off along the grassy track that, according to what we had been told, ran the length of this early section of the ridge. “It doesn’t sound silly at all.” I considered for a moment. “In fact, it might even be rather helpful. Did you realize, by the way, your accent’s become more and more pronounced the higher we’ve climbed?”

  “Oh, rubbish! Are you trying to suggest lack of oxygen turns people Welsh? That’s an interesting variation on the usual insults. Mind you, if you’re right and it has, it’s a good job we’ve reached the top this early. Otherwise I’d have ended up speaking fluent Welsh before long, and you wouldn’t have had the first idea what I was talking about, would you?”

  It was a few amiable, wordless minutes after this that Jenny had asked her question about being a Christian speaker.