Silver Birches Page 7

  “What sort of lucky?” she persisted, after listening to my elaborately evasive reply.

  I pulled one hand from its warm pocket to rub the back of my neck. A sure sign of embarrassment in my case, as Jessica would have unhesitatingly pointed out.

  “Oh, well, you know, I get wonderful letters from people who’ve got something out of what I’ve said at some meeting. Stories about how their lives have been changed or they’ve come back to faith or come to faith for the first time. Marvelous stuff — truly marvelous. And I’m all too aware that a lot of Christians would give anything to feel they were doing something so up-front for God. It’s been a real privilege, and... well, that’s it really. It’s been a huge privilege.”

  “And what’s the downside?”

  I studied the grass-covered bumps in the path beneath my feet for a second or two. The downside. What was the downside? You quite often hear Christians talk about the importance of honesty. Very, very important. We should always tell the truth. The devil will be shamed if we stick to the truth. I had said that sort of thing myself many, many times. Unfortunately a commitment to telling the truth is never quite so simple as, say, deciding to always give the correct change or vowing to pay for train journeys even when you know you could get away with not buying a ticket. Some truth — quite a lot of truth — is slippery and elusive like a wet bar of soap. Just as you think you’ve got a grip on it and you’re looking forward to feeling clean, it slides away.

  I replaced my hand in my pocket.

  “Being me, I suppose.”

  “I don’t think I know what you mean.”

  “I mean that however marvelous the gospel is— and, despite coming over as such a miserable sod for other reasons this weekend, I can’t get rid of the part of me that still thinks it’s marvelous — I never ever was going to match the message.” I raised a hand again to forestall a reaction that probably wasn’t going to happen anyway. “Yes, I know that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I know we pay lip service to the idea that we’re nothing but useless servants, and I believe that — in theory. I believe it and I support it as a principle. I just — don’t like it. I’ve even repented of not liking it, but it never quite goes away. I rationalize it all, of course. I’m good at that. I rationalize everything.”

  “You do?”

  “Well, last year, for instance, not all that long before... before Jessica’s illness happened, a young couple turned up at our house one morning, just to... to see if I really existed in a funny sort of way, I think. Over a cup of tea they asked me how I coped with being a ‘famous Christian.’ They wanted to know if it was hard to avoid the sin of pride when I heard how people’s lives had been changed or affected by things I’d said somewhere. So I said, ‘Right, here’s a question for you. When your postman brings you a nice fat check or a letter from an old friend, how do you feel?’

  “ ‘Good, of course,’ said the female half of the couple. ‘Thinking of ways to spend money’s always fun, and we really enjoy getting news from people we love.’

  “ ‘But,’ I said, ‘you don’t chase down the road after your postman so you can throw your arms round him and thank him for the money and the letter?’

  “ ‘Not as a rule!’ she said.

  “ ‘And why not?’

  “ ‘Well, because his job is just to deliver them.’

  “ ‘But you are a little bit grateful to him — for doing his job, I mean?’

  “ ‘Of course, yes.’

  “ ‘Well, that’s all I ask,’ I told her humbly, ‘just a little gratitude for being a postman who does his best to deliver the right messages from God to the right people. That’s all I do, you see.’ ”

  Jenny chuckled into her scarf.

  “Goodness, I should think they were very impressed with that, weren’t they?”

  “Oh, yes, they were... so was I, actually.”

  “And God? Do you think he was impressed?”

  I sighed.

  “Actually, that little chunk of clever-clever dialogue came back a bit later in the year to interrogate me.”

  “And what did it say?”

  “Oh, it said things like, erm — ‘I see, so you really are content to be a postman, are you? Genuinely ready to settle for the humble role of one who’s vastly inferior to his message, eh? Come on — you’re not fooling anyone. It’s your talent and hard work that gets the job done. Be honest — that’s more like the way you see it, isn’t it?’ Things like that.”

  “And your reply was what?”

  “I never got a chance to reply. This... er, this other voice spoke to me.”

  “What did the other voice say?”

  I stopped and looked directly at her.

  “Why am I telling you all this, Jenny? All right — it said, ‘What did the little boy give Jesus when he needed to feed five thousand people?’

  “ ‘His lunch?’ I said.

  “The voice said, ‘And do you think it would have been sensible of him to make sure he had several lorry-loads of bread and fish with him the next time they met, so that he wouldn’t have to bother with a miracle?’

  “I said, ‘Well — no.’

  “And the voice said, ‘David, all you ever had to offer was the loaves and fishes of yourself. It was almost nothing when you started, and it doesn’t work without a miracle, but it’s still all I want. Be who you are, love me, and do what I tell you — that’s all.’ ”

  We must have walked another hundred yards before Jenny spoke again.

  “And that voice — was that God speaking?”

  “Yes. Don’t know. Hope so. It’s a bit difficult to care just for the time being.”

  By now the path had slanted down into a little wooded area, sodden with last night’s rain, where the branches of wind-blasted trees showered us with drops on the couple of occasions when we brushed against them. The wind was less cold on this little shelf in the hillside, but for some reason the last part of my conversation with Jenny had filled me with a sense of chilly desolation. In that state of mind I was pretty well incapable of seeing anything good. The areas of gray rock that broke through the thin, struggling turf on the rising ground to our left looked to me like bones breaking through skin. The trees and bushes seemed bowed and crushed and weary with the endless beating they must endure from every extreme of weather.

  What was it one of those clever blokes had said? “To name a thing is to kill it.” Telling Jenny about that little inner dialogue of mine had temporarily robbed me of the capacity to believe in it as anything more than the product of my own imagination. I had made it sound too neat. It had become a professional disease with me. Blast! I felt suddenly hot and embarrassed at the appalling presumption of my claim that God might have spoken to me in such a specific way. I wanted to retract it and return safely to the land of the sane unbeliever or the harmlessly nominal church-attender.

  “What’s that you’re humming, David?”

  “What! What? Oh, right! For goodness sake, I didn’t even realize I was doing it. It was — oh, it’s too embarrassing to tell you.”

  “Oh, excellent! Tell me, then.”

  By a considerable effort of the will I managed to prevent my hand from straying to the back of my neck.

  “Well, if you must know, it was that Queen song — ‘I Want to Break Free.’ That’s what I was humming. And as soon as we come to a convenient precipice I shall lose no time in throwing myself off.”

  “Facing up to the fact that you’re a Queen fan can’t be that depressing, can it — surely?”

  “No.” I smiled at the thought of resolving the issue of poor musical taste in such a drastic fashion. “I like Queen. It’s just that I kid myself I’m in control most of the time, and I didn’t even know I was singing. I must have been mulling over the perpetual problem that God and I share. How is this sadly inadequate vehicle — me, I mean— going to be kept serviced and repaired enough to finally make it through the gates of heaven in the end?”

  Jenny look
ed at me wide-eyed. “Oh, David, I’m ashamed of you! I can’t believe you don’t remember what we used to be taught on Thursday evenings.” She adopted vaguely ecclesiastical tones. “We are all, as it were, vehicles, and the Bible is, as it were, a repair manual given to us by, as it were, the chief mechanic.”

  “Mmm. Don’t you sometimes feel there’s just not enough vomit in the world?”

  The rocks retreated. The trees and bushes perked up a bit.

  “Are you going to tell me — any of us — about Jessica?”

  Jenny spoke as though she was asking me the price of beans.

  At this point the path ascended once more, taking us up onto a rocky promontory from which we could see, way down among the tall trees of the valley, a huddle of houses surrounding a dumpy little church with an incongruously proud spire. At this distance, and lit by the runny-egg-yolk sun that was dripping light so generously over the frozen countryside, it looked impossibly picturesque. How, I asked myself, could such apparent perfection incorporate blocked drains and gossip and animosity and isolation and prejudice and death and all the other things that ultimately make human communities grubby at the edges, however hard we may try to get it right?

  “Is that the village we’re not allowed to be seduced by, do you think?” inquired Jenny.

  Her previous question still floated between us like one of those lighter-than-air balloons. A blue one. She had let go of the string. If I didn’t take it, it would float away into the sky and disappear.

  “No, it’s a couple of miles yet. Look, I’ll do a deal with you.”

  “A deal?”

  “Yes, a deal. I’ll try to tell you about Jessica if you tell me something I’ve been wanting to know ever since last night. What do you say?”

  Her mouth dropped open. She stared at me with real panic in her eyes.

  “Last night? Something to do with me, do you mean? Something I said?”

  “No, it was more something you didn’t say — sorry, that sounds like one of those awful novels. It was after all that nasty business with Andrew and Mike. Andrew had gone out after Angela said her piece — which, by the way, was perfect, was it not? — and then one or two people made other comments, and Angela said something about how amazing it is that things can last or — no, not last — how they can get stored up for years. And right after that, immediately after she said those words, you turned and looked straight at me. Very directly and specifically. Remember?”

  After a moment of paralysis the expression of panic on Jenny’s face was replaced with sudden, shocked recollection and then with something much more akin to dull despair. She clicked her tongue against her teeth and groaned.

  “Yes, I’m afraid I do remember. Oh dear! What a fool I am. You drive a very hard bargain.” Jenny’s voice was small, little-girlish, and ever so sad. “Shall we start walking again? I can’t possibly answer that question while you’re looking at me.”

  “You don’t have to answer it at all if you don’t want to,” I said miserably. “I’m ever so sorry. Please forgive me. I was just trying to get out of having to talk about Jessica. It’s none of my business why you looked at me.”

  “Nor is what happened with Jessica any of mine. I — I will tell you. Just give me a minute.”

  As we somewhat uncomfortably continued our trudge along the path I raged inwardly at myself for being stupid. Why did I always find it necessary to complicate things so much? When Jenny asked that question just now I should simply have told her that I wasn’t yet ready to talk about Jessica, and that would have been that. She would have quite understood — or at the very least, she would have pretended to understand, and we could have continued our walk along the top of the world in peace. As it was, because of my ridiculous talk of a “deal,” we were both doomed to open up on subjects that we would probably much rather keep to ourselves.

  What was Jenny winding herself up to tell me? A grimace reached my face as I pondered this question. Please, let it not be another great wound of resentment that was about to open up after all these years, this time bleeding all over me instead of Mike. Good heavens, it wasn’t even as if I remembered Jenny that well.

  When I concentrated hard, what were my actual memories of her?

  Casting my mind back to the days when we all met regularly on at least those two evenings in every week, I made a conscious effort to pin down bits and pieces from a jumble of impressions and recollections. Some were very clear and specific. I could almost hear the rattle of plastic coffee cups and saucers on the Formica-topped serving hatch; the loud echoing scrape of chair legs along the wooden floor of the church annex as pairs of volunteers dragged chairs up from the cupboard at the back and arranged them into a rough semicircle; the slap, flutter and click of Bibles, notebooks, and pens being taken from bags once we’d sat down, and occasional peals of laughter combined with the chattering exchange of recent news as songbooks were given out and we waited for Malcolm, the curate who led our group, to formally begin the meeting.

  A spiritual, fairly solemn lady called Ethel, dressed in what always seemed to me depressingly sensible dark green and brown clothes, was usually on hand to assist the curate in a variety of practical ways. Ethel was tirelessly kind, but deflatingly somber about the Christian faith. She dealt with the (to me) totally unfathomable female problems experienced by the girls in the group, and accompanied our singing with strong, well-behaved chords on the upright piano. Ethel and the curate always made a great big thing about never spending time in a room together without anyone else being present, a precaution that invariably provoked a sort of tickling amusement in the less respectful among us. The prospect of our young, skinny, earnest leader and the solemn, pear-shaped, middle-aged Ethel finding themselves succumbing to lurid and inappropriate urges of the flesh in the confines of the church office seemed about as remote as the equally absurd idea put about by some idiot or other that we were all going to die one day.

  Other, more complex memories were to do with feelings and had to be teased out of the abstract in order for their real nature to be identified. I realized with a little start, for instance, that the rich, fruit-laden mixture of apprehension and excitement I had felt as we gathered each week to worship a God who might do or say anything right here in that very room, was inextricably bound up with my deep and thrilling passion for Jessica, who, until I started to go out with her, always seemed to be sitting just in front of me, usually between Angela and Laura Pavey, the girl Angela had mentioned in her letter. I had always had a vague feeling in my teenage soul that I would like to tear Angela to pieces with my bare teeth, or something along those predatory lines, although I prayed against such powerful surges of lust with all the fervor of a God-fearing sixteen-year-old. In any case, I knew that if it came to something as distant and unlikely and ungodly as what one might call “the crunch,” I would be scared stiff of her. Jessica, on the other hand, violet-eyed, devout, clever, and irresistibly cuddly, I simply adored. I had decided, even at that early stage in our acquaintance, that I wanted to marry her and take up residence way back inside her beautiful eyes for the rest of my life. Later, amazingly, that was exactly what I had managed to do, except that her sudden illness meant it had turned out to be for the rest of her life. Just at the moment there seemed to be an awful lot of mine left.

  So, where did Jenny fit in among all these images of the past? It was really not surprising that people like Mike were easy to remember. How could one not remember him, given his tendency to swing from loud, hectoring defense of God to equally wild and blistering attack? Probably, I thought with a smile, God had found it a lot easier to live with Mike’s attacks than with his defense. With friends or followers like Mike...

  Yes, there were quite a number of folk whose faces and voices came back to me with surprising vividness as I made the effort to bring them to life in my mind. Unfortunately, Jenny was not one of them. I could call her to mind only as a virtually faceless presence, like someone visible but blurred in the shadowy bi
t at the side of an old photograph. Or like a person put in to swell the chorus of a production in which, quite naturally at the age of sixteen, I unquestionably believed myself to be the star. Those I cared about and those whose lives unavoidably impinged on mine were the only other ones with named parts. The rest were incorporeal and wispy. I remembered Jenny being shy and saying very little. Beyond that there was only my faint impression that she had been a keen volunteer for all sorts of practical tasks that demanded regular attention, but...

  “In those days I was so in love with you that it used to hurt my tummy sometimes. Well, anyway, I had a terrible crush on you.” She set her lips and shook her head angrily. “No! What am I talking about? I was in love with you. I loved you. I dreamed about you and thought about you and dressed for you and foolishly imagined all sorts of things every time your eyes happened to turn in my direction. Why does it always have to be called a crush when people who are plain or ugly or young or simple fall for the good-looking, heavily in demand stars that they’re obviously never going to get in a million years? It’s not fair, is it?”

  “I don’t think — ”

  “Oh, no! Please!” Snatching her chin a few degrees even farther away from me and screwing her face up in anguished frustration, Jenny reached out blindly and rapped my elbow sharply three or four times with the knuckles of her gloved fist. “Please don’t say something corny and over-the-top not true about the way I look or— or anything like that. I couldn’t stand it! I’m not asking for sympathy or reassurance. I don’t need either of those, thank you very much — not about this, anyway. I’m just answering your question. That’s our deal, isn’t it? And before you ask or don’t ask, I’m not in love with you any more.”

  She hesitated. This time I didn’t need telling that I should keep my mouth shut.

  “David, I’ll be honest — you’re going to think me so foolish — I wasn’t completely sure that all those feelings had gone before I came down here. I’ve not had a relationship that’s meant a great deal or got anywhere very much since the time when we knew each other... well, since the time when I knew you. Apart from my relationship with Jesus, that is. That’s by far the most important one as far as I’m concerned, although I’d still love to get married one day. No, I suppose I just wondered if the warm feeling about you that I’ve been cuddling inside me all these years was only a memory or... or something else. And, of course...” She smiled shyly. “Of course that’s all it’s been. Nothing but a memory. I don’t want to be any more stupid than I have to be. When Angela said what she said last night I saw clearly how true that was. It’s a sweet, silly little memory. And I feel fine about it. Perhaps just a tiny bit bereaved, but — ” She clapped her hand to her mouth. “Oh, I am sorry. Do forgive me, that was so insensitive.”