Such Men Are Dangerous (12 page)

In 1979 he had a brief affair with one of the fifth-year girls at school. He didn’t make her pregnant; for one thing, he had long since been sterilized. But she boasted among her friends about her latest conquest; and then boasted to her mother. Ten minutes afterwards her father was on the telephone to the headmaster’s home. The following morning Josh was sent for after assembly. (He remembered, for some reason, that the hymn had been, ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways.’) There were raised voices in the study. Josh left the school at five minutes to ten.

Strangely enough, he had never even fancied the girl—well, not greatly. She was a cocky bit of baggage, far inferior, both in looks and personality, to anyone like his own Janice. And even before he took her to the woods the first time he had known he wouldn’t be able to rely on her discretion. He had hardly been unaware of the risk he was taking.

But at least, thank God, it never came to court.

Naturally he didn’t tell Dawn the true reason for his ‘resignation’—what mistake were we on by this time? But she discovered it, anyway. In the first place one of the local newspapers somehow got wind of the incident and in the second she received an anonymous phone call: a woman: “I just thought, Mrs Heath, that you ought to know…”

“Well, it was partly your own fault, in any case,” he screamed at her at last. (The three children were huddled in the kitchen of the thin-walled flat.) “I thought you used to
enjoy
sex. It isn’t me that’s changed!”

Dawn had a minor breakdown. (Up to now, he had never looked after her so attentively; she had never shown less interest in his looking after her at all. But as if to compensate, the children, despite their knowledge, responded to him warmly and with a mutely sympathetic affection that was truly, as he realized even at the time, the one thing he’d been allowed to salvage from the wreck.) Yet it was less due to his own ministrations that she finally recovered, or to the doctor’s, than to those of the vicar in Crosby. St Matthew’s wasn’t the nearest church to where the Heaths lived. None of them, indeed, would ever have had much reason to pass it: Frodingham Road was long and the far end of it frankly rather dreary. Added to which, St Matthew’s was in a side street and anyone who didn’t live nearby might have remained in ignorance of it for ever. Anyway, Dawn hadn’t set foot inside a church since she was married, and even then it was her parents who’d insisted upon
that
. (Though heaven knew why—they certainly hadn’t followed it through, regarding christenings for the children. Nor had Josh’s parents. Well,
they
in fact had terminated all ties, together with any hope of an inheritance.) But in recent weeks Dawn had turned into an aimless wanderer and Mr Apsbury had found her sitting with her head down, sobbing, all alone in the nave on a Wednesday afternoon when “but for the grace of God, my child, the place should really have been locked.” Mr Apsbury was silver-haired, rail-thin, close to retirement—and to death. He was gentle, encouraging, a good listener. Dawn explained why she had been sobbing, left almost nothing out; no other half-hour in her life had been so full of her own words. Throughout her recital Mr Apsbury saw much evidence of God at work. More to the point, he made Dawn see it, too. “We clearly found each other at the right time,” he told her. When, over two hours later, after several cups of tea in the old and rambling vicarage across the road, she eventually went home she walked back to the Precinct without noticing traffic or traffic lights or even the two boys on roller skates who were infuriating the few others on the pavement—and she was smiling, beaming. Josh seriously thought, to begin with, that she was drunk. She kissed him, she hugged him, she kissed and hugged the children. She praised the tea he had cooked, told him he was both a good cook and a good husband. She apologized for her long, long period of apathy, declared herself to be as great a sinner as anybody caught in adultery but swore that a miracle had now occurred and that the five of them were going to be the happiest, most united family in the world. Josh then wondered briefly, and almost as seriously, whether her mind had slipped across the border into madness. There at the supper table, over the baked fish and the mashed potato and before her three embarrassed children, she freely forgave him, forgave him everything, and humbly besought his own forgiveness and the forgiveness of them all.

That night she allowed, even encouraged, Josh to make love to her because she wanted to be generous in every way she could.

He didn’t much enjoy it.

In most other areas her generosity survived the time when inevitably her exhilaration left her and was replaced by something steadier.

Furthermore, within a fortnight the children had all been baptized and she and they were being prepared for confirmation. Since the reverend gentleman would soon be leaving Scunthorpe—a fact which desolated her when first she heard it—and the four of them were the only candidates, the course was an abbreviated one. Josh once told her that her renewed withdrawal from sex was a way of getting back at him for not sharing in her belief and for not being so accommodating as their children. He privately allowed, however, that if this were so, it was probably unconscious. She took her religion with almost frightening gravity. “Thou shalt not be recalcitrant!” he informed Janice on one occasion in her mother’s hearing after some minor misdemeanour. Dawn was exceedingly put out. She said that he’d been making a mockery of God and Moses
and
the Ten Commandments.

Naturally he told very little of this to Jimmy in the pub and what he did tell was in fact somewhat romanticized. Jimmy returned to the table with their second pints and said after a moment:

“I was thinking just now. It may seem daft but—all that—it’s a bit of a success story.”

Josh grinned self-deprecatingly.

“I suppose it could be on its way to becoming one. Yes! Why not?”

“What would you say, then, is the worst thing about being out of work? Apart from not having enough dough?”

Since, with alarming suddenness, a tremendous tiredness was now bearing down on him, complete with growing traces of nausea, he would have liked to say: “Not having enough hope either, not being able to break away, see even a signpost to an exit route.” In any case, it was all part and parcel of the same thing. He would have liked to say: “Once you’re in the system, mate, you’re scared shitless that they’ve got you there for life. And then what is there?”

But instead, despite the exhaustion, he laughed and did his best to enjoy this fairly rare kind of moment, by pursuing the theme of his success story.

“Not being able to afford the vitamins to keep you young!” he said.

There was supposedly something on the market now—well, if you were gullible—that could take ten or even twenty years off your appearance. Something indeed which he’d scarcely bothered to take note of. Superoxide Dismutase.

“Vitamins?” his companion answered, pat on cue. “I wouldn’t have thought that
you
were in need of any of those!”

17

On his way home—it wasn’t really on his way home, merely another delaying tactic—he went to have a look at Tiffany’s (‘The Brightest Nitespot in Town!’) or more particularly at the car park behind it. In the main this was just a stony, scruffy, potholed area, with patches of coarse grass, crushed coke cans, armchairs excreting their stuffing, a pink plastic bath jaggedly disfigured, a dead, limply-leaved candelabra of a tree branch. A notice on the back of the building read, “Mecca Ltd. Private Property. All persons using or entering do so at their own risk.” (Angels included?) Another said, “Parking Fee 10p inc. VAT.” Who might collect the parking fee, however, remained a mystery: was it the spectral figure of a once-splendid commissionaire, from the days when this was a plushly-carpeted cinema having its own orchestra? “Cars parked at owners’ own risk,” Josh was further informed; there was certainly no shortage of good literature. “No responsibility will be accepted by the company.”

Mecca Ltd appeared remarkably anxious to dissociate itself from whatever went on in its car park. Wise fellows clearly—these modern lords of the dance! Mecca. Birthplace of Mohammed, chief holy city of Islam, economy dependent upon pilgrims. Josh wandered restlessly across the holy ground, kicking aside an empty whisky bottle, watching it roll, savouring almost savagely its comic incongruity.

A car stopped on Parkinson Avenue. Simon got out.

“Good morning, vicar.” That last word was clearly parodied. “Tourists already converging on this hallowed spot? Let’s call it
Angel Pavement
. Or in the guidebooks will it soon acquire a different name? Something more like—let me see now—well, how about
Exploitation Corner
?”

“I think you had it right the first time.” Simon was looking at him, curiously. “Has something happened to you since yesterday?”

But Josh ignored this. “Come to look for sacred relics?”

“Not really. Just to glance around.”

“To work out the best location for the shrine? How about over there, by the armchairs? If they’re weary, people will be glad of those.”

“Josh, I’m not sure why you’re doing it but stop trying to bait me. I’ve come here to feel close to where a messenger of God is known lately to have stood. I’d like to spend a little time in prayer.”

“Say one for me while you’re about it.”

“Willingly.”

“I wasn’t being that serious.”

“In fact, I already do pray for you. For you and Dawn and the family. I mean, not only since last Wednesday.”

“Oh, that’s most terribly good of you, most terribly good. Not to mention most terribly, terribly patronizing. But I don’t like to think of anyone wasting his time on my account. Not even somebody who gets paid to do it.”

Simon bit his lip. “I’m sorry if I sounded patronizing. An irritating occupational hazard. I’ve got no call to be.”

“Cant. I bet you believe you’re better than I am. You’d never admit it but deep down—”

“I only believe I’m luckier than you are. More blest.”

“There but for the grace of God and all that rubbish?”

“It’s a grace available to everyone.”

“Sweet Jesus Christ! And you don’t call
that
patronizing?”

“Look,” said Simon. “Let’s go and have a drink.”

“‘Turning the Other Cheek…’ Oh, I can see it in inverted commas. Paragraph four-hundred-and-fifty-nine.
How to be the Perfect Clergyman
. But no thank you. I only drink with my friends.” He remembered Holden Caulfield, in
The Catcher in the Rye
, buying a trayful of his favourite food, then dumping it in a bin at the end of the cafeteria counter.

Simon gave no sign of finding the remark childish. Instead, he gave a wry smile.

“Please don’t think I’m referring to you, Josh, but I can’t help feeling it might have to come a lot earlier than paragraph four-hundred-and-fifty-nine. In case you should ever contemplate drawing up some sort of manual.”

Josh didn’t smile. Wryly or otherwise.

“In fact I’m glad to have this opportunity for a chat with you,” Simon said. “Apart from all else, I wanted to add a little rider to something I told you on the staircase. (Where I actually believed we might be all set to become friends!) I implied I didn’t want people thinking of me as a knight on a white charger. That’s not exactly true.”

“The perfect
introspective
clergyman.”

“I feel one can overdo the introspection bit but I can’t go round implying I don’t wish people to think well of me. Or that I don’t care much either way, so long as
I
know what I’m doing is right. One of my biggest faults, in fact, is that I do care.”

“You’re worried about the image of the Church? Oh, but that’s not a fault, vicar. You haven’t stained your precious little soul, I promise you. Look, here’s another gold star.”

Simon smiled again and persevered. “You see, I have too much ambition.”

“Oh. You want to be Pope?”

“Not immediately. But I do want to succeed; I mean, in a worldly sense. I sometimes think I’m more concerned with making a name for myself than with the actual quality of my work. So I’m not such a perfect anything that I can afford to feel superior to anybody. I only wish I were.”

“But you pray about it, of course?”

“Of course.”

“Scunthorpe, it seems to me, remains a tidy step away from Rome. Or even Canterbury.”

“‘Step’, however, is the right word. I’ve been here three years. In another three years I’ll probably be wondering what the next ‘step’ ought to be.”

“Oh, but don’t make out you aren’t already,
please
. It will demand a further little chat.”

“Wondering seriously, I mean. Apart from daydreams.”

“This sounds like True Confessions.”

Yes, perhaps it did. Simon didn’t normally indulge in breast-baring so why on earth should he be doing so now?

“Wouldn’t you like to come and have that drink?”

“No,” answered Josh. I can’t be won over
that
easily, he thought. I’m afraid your charming ways won’t work on
me
. Afterwards he almost wished he’d said it.

But drinks were certainly flowing in abundance today. He’d have to see if this were mentioned in his horoscope.

“Well, at any rate, how about our shaking hands to show there’s no ill feeling?”

Josh, however, merely turned on his heel and said, “I thought you came here to pray, not just to hand out bullshit or go boozing.” Then he walked off.

It was incredible to think that about an hour before, following his workout, he’d been feeling good. It was incredible to think that only the previous evening he’d said, “You’ve got yourselves the perfect champion,” and ‘perfect’ had neither been sarcastic nor had it seemed exaggerated.

Now he thought, viciously, “By their fruits shall ye know them,” meaning the effect that so-called righteous people had upon those chance unfortunates who happened to cross their path during their long bullshitting day. At the bottom of Parkinson Avenue he again remembered Holden Caulfield.

But Holden Caulfield had been a boy of sixteen, not a man of forty-six. The sudden recollection of this was startling and did nothing whatever to help.