Mercy Seat (22 page)

Yes, I said. Of course.

Honestly, I'm sorry – I'd love to talk. But I've an afternoon service in one the old folks' homes in town today. Next week, maybe? She stepped lightly across the gravel toward her small blue car, pausing after opening its
door to grin over her shoulder and wave. I watched her drive off and listened for the engine fading into silence before starting on the walk home.

Soon enough, I know, she'll be offered the chance to move on to some livelier mission in a town or city, with a youth group and a bustling congregation of liberal, like-minded souls. And when I think of that I wonder if I'll begin my travels again then, too. But I doubt it. I belong here as much as I've ever belonged anywhere. This is where the world makes sense to me. Here I am.

My mother had no religious convictions as far as I know, but of course I lost her before reaching the age when we might have quarrelled about such things. Once though, in the hospice, very near the end, half-waking from a morphine dream, she told me she'd seen the devil, with absolute clarity, and he was a small, distant figure, walking away from her. It wasn't at all frightening, she wanted me to understand. He was walking away.

Some of the more optimistic among the Reverend Bethell's tiny flock believe in a personal God, and a personal Jesus. I prefer the thought of a personal Satan, not stinking of brimstone, more the cold scent of some stony beach, or winter fields before snow, or forestry tracks on some hillside in the rain. Where have you been? God asks him in the Book of Job. From going to and fro in the earth, he answers, and from walking up and down in it. My mother was right, I think: he always has his back to us, though we'd recognise him if he turned.

Most Sundays, in the dead hours between morning and evening services, I make my way after lunch from the cool, damp cottage that for all its smallness is much too big for me and follow the farm tracks, between fields of staring
sheep, to the cliffs above the sea. I stand on the bright grass that lies like a prayer rug – wind-clipped, smooth as baize – at the very lip of the long drop down to the waves. You can watch the white backs of the gulls below, wheeling to the limed twigs of their nests, or rising and riding out on the thermals. You can see, sometimes, the black, unmoving heads of seals, solitary, or in twos and threes, pinned there among the swells and troughs. And I think of Christine, treading water over a colder, more lonely and bottomless depth, years in that hospital bed. And the night I swam out, following and losing her, turning to see the world I'd left: the orange glow of the hidden town, and somewhere within it the brief miracles of my sleeping wife and child; the fossilled cliffs crouched in their own, almost animal dark; and everything lit by the lamps of a thousand long-dead stars.