Such Men Are Dangerous (25 page)

The only question not to ask yourself is, what can
I
do about it? Not, I mean, if you ask it in a purely negative way, in that commonly held spirit of helplessness and defeat.

The age-old query, of course. The one, perhaps, that more effectively blocks the path of Good, and stands there signalling the roadway clear for Evil, than any other prevarication on earth. What can
I
do?

Yes, the world is full of apathy. Whether or not it was an angel who said this doesn’t alter the truth of it.

The world is also full of kindness. Equally true. All of us in here this morning are probably quite kind. We do good turns for our neighbours. We chat pleasantly to shop assistants. We send off small amounts to charity; we tut-tut at brutality; we’re well-intentioned, friendly,
nice
.

But how far does this niceness reach? What sort of effect do we really have on the world, each of us? Who changes matters more: one terrorist, say, or fifty of our kind? And if the answer isn’t us, why isn’t it?

Our apathy, would you say? Our reluctance to make any kind of
real
personal sacrifice?

To what do we ascribe it, then, this indifference, this basic lack of interest? To laziness? To a dearth of imagination or of courage? To complacency and callousness? To that conviction of helplessness we mentioned just a moment ago? It doesn’t matter. What it all boils down to is pretty much the same thing. And that thing
isn’t
love—which, whether an angel spoke of it or not, is positive and outward-looking and dynamic and contagious, strides out in strength and beats down devils. Do you believe that? Yes, of course you do. But do you intend to do anything about it?

Do you intend to translate that belief into practical terms, into action and sound, into spectacle and fury? (Yes,
fury
! Fury that this world has been allowed to go so wrong. Fury that we have taken something basically so beautiful, so full of limitless potential, and turned it into something so warped, so ugly and so…
hellish
.) Do you intend to shoulder your responsibility?

And if you don’t, if you intend just to leave it to someone else (after all, who’ll notice?), how
dare
you call yourself a Christian? Christianity has no room for spongers and stowaways and people who opt out.

Right, then.

What must we do about it? Is it enough merely to sit here in Scunthorpe and spout platitudes at one another? No, obviously it’s not. But how in God’s name can we make ourselves heard? How in God’s name can we influence the thinking of others in the way we believe it ought to be influenced? How can we make those others see just how desperately we
care
? We can’t, we simply can’t, not unless in the first place we come into contact with them; with as many of them as possible. And how do we accomplish that? There’s only one way I can think of—other, of course, than through the media. Only one way! We rise up and march.

We rise up…and we march
!

Quite literally, I mean.

We march to London: from Scunthorpe to London, collecting people as we go, collecting signatures, carrying banners, singing battle hymns, chanting slogans, stopping at every town and village for recruitment, a journey such as Christ sent his apostles out on, a journey which Christ
is
sending his apostles out on, over days, over weeks—the period is irrelevant—leaving our jobs, begging our food, throwing ourselves on people’s hospitality, expecting their kindness, expecting all that’s best in them, showing that one thing is important to us above all others, making our opinions known…known and accepted and
acted in accordance with
. This is the one solution. Take it or leave it—I hope to heaven that you’ll take it; or are you indeed one of those parasitic types we’ve just been speaking of, sheltering among vast numbers? Naturally there are going to be those who, for completely valid reasons, won’t be able to come: young children, the infirm, people who look after young children or the infirm, people whose absence from their place of work would genuinely put at risk the safety of the community; in the last resort it’s a matter for your own conscience. But as for the rest, those of us who have no genuine excuse to hold us back and who are neither wicked nor simply weak (and I can see that by the time we get to Downing Street there are going to be
millions
of us, many, many millions), as for us, we meet here, outside St Matthew’s, at nine o’clock on Tuesday morning. Bring sensible footwear, plenty of changes of socks et cetera, adequate protection against the weather, plasters for blisters, soap, towels, toothbrushes, toilet paper, TCP, as many provisions as you can comfortably carry in a knapsack, as much money as you can afford (but not to worry if you can’t bring either money or any of those other things) and a lot of positive thinking and love and prayer and reliance. Tuesday morning. We shall hope to move off at a quarter-past-nine. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Having spoken these last words and crossed himself Simon descended the pulpit stairs. He wiped his forehead and walked back to his position before the altar and between two servers in a silence that still wasn’t eased by any whispering or coughing or shifting of limbs. Eventually, though, the coughing did break out, along with those other customary signs of relaxation, and then the congregation started to straggle to its feet, that part of it which had been seated. At first the Creed sounded ragged and automatic but gradually gained in cohesion as well as in volume. The atmosphere returned more to normal, allowing for the size of the congregation and its largely foreign content. During the Peace, however, a partial exodus occurred. When Simon again returned to his place he laughed and said to those remaining, “It’s at times like this you find out who your friends are!” and then, with the doors now closed upon the empty vestibule and the heavy curtain pulled across, he continued with what little was left of the service.

35

In May they returned to Eastbourne. Ginny hadn’t been well and Simon thought that sea air and a change of scenery might help. It was an impromptu decision, made at breakfast, because the Friday was warm and the sunshine was expected to last. But they went only for the weekend, going down in the evening, since of course he had to be back at his job on Monday—and on Mondays, too, Ginny had a regular checkup at the hospital.

They chose Eastbourne mainly because they knew the hotel was comfortable and because Miss Bryanston had promised a small discount in the event of their return.

They also chose it out of sentiment.

“But I hope we’re not being foolish,” said Ginny, on the train. “Granny went back to Venice after fifty years and claims it was the greatest mistake of her life.”

“Yet that’s completely different.”

“I know it is.”

“I think you’re round the twist.”

“Simeon, don’t say that. I’m half scared it could be true!”

She spoke humorously yet with a certain underlying seriousness. He knew what she was thinking of: her morbid fears that she was either going to lose the baby or else give birth to one whose brain was damaged—“I’ve had to take so many drugs!” (“But, Ginny,” he would say, “it must be the same for nearly all expectant mothers, even if their pregnancy is easy. Most of them must think they’re heading for the loonybin!” In this context he didn’t ever speak of expectant fathers, feeling it would hardly help to mention they were sometimes subject to the same fears. “You’re such a tower of strength!” she kept on telling him.) But now he didn’t comment on her last remark. There was nothing new he could advance.

“Well, Venice is still a place I’d very much like to see,” he said. “
Despite
Granny. We’ll have an assignation there one of these days if ever we get tired of coming back to Eastbourne.”

“Oh, did I tell you? I promised we’d stay in Surrey for a week of your fortnight off.”

“That won’t be any hardship.” Ginny’s grandmother lived with two of her sisters in a cottage fronting the village green, where, the previous September, as a last-minute replacement on account of illness, Simon had scored seventy-six runs for the local cricket club. While waiting to go in he’d lounged with Ginny on the dry grass beside the old ladies’ deckchairs, and all the hackneyed, idealized ingredients—like the click of the knitting needles, the chock of the cricket ball, the players in their white flannels, even the church spire rising obligingly above the trees—all those Miniver-type props redolent of the spirit and tradition that had once made Britain great:
those
plus the thought, never a long way from his mind, of all the pleasures which that night could be relied upon to bring, suddenly made him say, “I think I’ve never been so happy! Surely this is how the world was meant to be!” Certainly the relationship which he and Ginny enjoyed with that trio of spry octogenarians contrasted hugely with the one which they did not enjoy with Ginny’s parents. Although Ginny and her mother had managed to make up and were again on friendly and affectionate terms—their closeness expressed mainly in phone calls and during occasional, clandestine meetings—Ginny’s father was far less conciliatory. Simon had met him only once. Despite Mrs Plummer’s efforts the meeting had not been a success.

As the train reached the coast and they caught their first smell of the sea they felt again all the excitement of childhood. Ginny cried out, “Oh, darling, let’s go back there!”

“Where? To London?”

“No, you lunk. To the spot where you first held my hand and kissed me.” She stopped. “But I’d forgotten: I suppose I’m not in a condition to go clambering over Beachy Head. Besides…” There was a slyness in her look. “Perhaps it would be a mistake. Like going back to Venice.”

“A magic now beyond recapture?”

“Well, what do
you
think?”

“I think you’re growing tired of me.” He put the back of his hand up to his forehead; adopted an air of tragedy that, many years later, would have made him the perfect soulmate for Mrs Lorrimer. “Love for sale!” he announced, looking around the compartment for a potential purchaser.

“Stop it!” she rebuked him softly, with a smile. “Making an exhibition of yourself.”

He hung his head. “
Simon the Show-Off Strikes Again
! I’m sorry. I do keep trying to reform.”

“Oh,
that
? The unending Madison quest for self-improvement! But can a leopard change its spots?”

“Or can a lover give up sex?”

“You see! You can’t stop! And I’m not sure at the moment I think it’s anything so very much to brag about. I may feel different in another month.”

He was immediately contrite, honestly contrite, as if her scolding had been wholly in earnest, instead of only partly so.

The next day was his birthday. Ginny had brought his present with her: the book of Arthurian legend he’d become so engrossed by in a Hampstead bookshop that he’d at once gone to order it from the public library, for he had always found fascinating the idea that Arthur would come riding back from Avalon in Britain’s hour of need. (“Mind you, I’d have thought that thirty years ago things were getting pretty desperate! Or do you suppose Mr Churchill could have been one of his reincarnations?”) As a child, his three greatest heroes had been Galahad and Jason and Robin Hood. During the afternoon, while Ginny rested in a deckchair in the garden of
Sea View
, Simon lay in trunks beside her and read thirty pages of his book; then he dozed and Sir Galahad cantered through a Sherwood Forest where sunlight slanted between the trees and where in a dappled glade he found the Holy Grail being guarded by a dragon. The dragon belched out smoke and fire and Simon’s dominant image upon wakening was of the undimmed chalice gleaming through the black, vermilion shroud. Sir Galahad had shrunk from the flames as Simon himself would have shrunk from them.

Later they had dinner at the type of restaurant befitting a birthday celebration. Ginny said, “I do hope your cousin wasn’t at all put out—your cousin seventeen times removed—but then of course it’s not as though she were actually the cook, is it?”

Simon accorded this his full consideration.

“I imagine Mr Butcher will be
quite
put out and it isn’t as though he were actually the cook, either.”

“My God! Are you
wanting
to bring back my indigestion?”

The state of their finances was certainly no topic for a gourmet meal. They hadn’t found a house to match the one in Lee Green and about a month before had finally decided to postpone the whole project and to take a furnished flat in Muswell Hill, where they had been lucky enough to discover a landlady sympathetic to babies. So for the time being Simon continued unambitiously in menswear—unambitiously, though not without some pleasure. Already there were customers who returned to him regularly because he gave, as one ex-colonel put it, “the sort of service, young feller, that these days one very seldom comes across!” (Simon laughed at this but still he treasured it.)

“It’s been such a nice day,” said Ginny, as they lingered over coffee and liqueur. “Although I’m sorry for your sake that it couldn’t have been a little more exciting.”

“It’s been perfect.”

“No, not for you, not as exciting as your first married-life birthday ought to have been. Not as exciting as mine was. But in other years your timing may be better.”

“You’re very
young
,” he told her. “All this emphasis on excitement! Of course, it may not have been a day to compete with that other, that idyllic one, whose magic now lies way beyond recall. I realize that.”

“Not way beyond recall. Earlier you said recapture. I can remember very well for instance you ate nearly all the picnic and I thought oh dear he’s not as much in love as I am.”

“At that point you didn’t know I was in love at all.”

“I hoped.”

“I know we talked about the moon landing.”

“And I said you ought to be a vicar.”

“You
didn’t
? Why on earth should you have said anything so extraordinary?”

“I can’t remember. But it was less than a year ago. I think you must have blocked it out.”