The Blasphemer: A Novel (52 page)

Who is the Bear talking about? Is he talking about me?

‘I know. Dan knew, too.’

Why are they talking about me as if I’m not here?

As Father Donne paced across the square towards the steps of Westminster Cathedral, his torch picked out dozens of small white patches on the pavement: discarded chewing gum that had become flattened under the feet of the faithful. He turned the torch off as he reached the steps and listened to the sound of London at night. The distant house alarm, the barking dog, the brushes of a motorized street cleaner scraping the kerb along Victoria Street.There was a full moon and the cathedral was floodlit. Neither was needed. Father Donne generated his own light. He had chalky skin and a silver fringe that emphasized the blackness of his cassock. As he searched through the numerous keys he carried on a bulky chain, he made a mental note to arrange for the square to be scrubbed of chewing gum. He concentrated on the matter in hand, the reason he had been called from his flat so late at night.

Only when he had found the key to the side door did he think to try the latch. It was unlocked. A check of his watch showed that it was ten to eleven; fifty minutes after the doors were normally locked to the public. Once inside, he stood between the two red granite columns in the entrance and looked down the dark nave to a
small pool of fragile light, a rack of votive candles flickering in the transept. A tall, bony man was sitting in the pew next to them, staring up at the organ. He was unshaven, wearing jeans and a fleece. As he got nearer, the priest saw the man had a domed forehead that glistened in the light and that by his side was a cardboard box containing framed photographs, files and ornaments. A Chinese girl was sitting the other side of him, partially obscured from view. She was pregnant. Father Donne cleared his throat loudly. The man looked startled, coming out of a trance.

‘I’m claiming sanctuary,’ the man said. He smelled of alcohol.

The priest tapped his watch. ‘It is a bit late, you know.’

The man stared up at the gallery again. ‘The crowning glory of Henry Willis and Sons.’

‘She is a nice organ.’

‘When they revoiced the stops and added a two-hundred-and-fifty-six-level capture system it made the registration changes so much easier … Father?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve been fired.’ The man tapped the box with lank fingers the colour of ivory. ‘Had to clear my desk after a quarter of a century teaching at the same university. Pension. Health plan.All gone.They even took away my computer as part of their …’ he pulled a mockserious face, ‘ “internal inquiry”.’

‘Have you been drinking?’

‘Of course. Will you hear my confession?’ The priest looked at his watch again.

‘I do not suppose the Lord sticks to Greenwich Mean Time.’

The priest smiled. ‘No, I don’t suppose He does.’

‘There is no need for the box. We can do it here.’

‘I’d rather do it in the confessional, if you don’t mind.’

The Chinese girl remained seated as the priest turned on his torch and led the way towards the confessional. He pulled the cord on a small strip light on his side of the box. In the adjoining compartment, the tall man sat in the semi-darkness gathering his thoughts.

‘So what is it?’ the priest prompted through the grille.

‘I’m a wicked man.’

‘Why’s that now?’

‘I’ve behaved abominably to a man who considered me a friend. I could easily have … Perhaps I thought, I don’t know,
accipere quam facere praestat injuriam
. I’ve tried to ruin his career and all because I’m …’ The sound of a hip flask being opened and liquid being swallowed. ‘I sent his wife flowers, you know. Well, common-law wife. I wanted her to … I don’t know what I wanted. Most of all, I’m jealous that he had a vision. He did not deserve it. He is an atheist, you see … I thought, why should he be blessed? Why him?’ The man took another swig before adding as an afterthought: ’I also got one of my students pregnant.’

There was silence in the next compartment.

‘Don’t worry, I didn’t let her have a termination.’

The priest remained silent.

‘Though she wanted one.’

Silence.

‘I’m going to live in sin with her, I think. Go abroad. A godless country such as China. I’ve had it with faith, you see, and the strange thing is, I feel happier. That was why I came here. To say goodbye. To you. To the Church.’

There was a pause before the priest spoke into the darkness. ‘A vision, you say?’

Philip looked through the peephole into a cell five paces by three. The white light angling in through the bars was illuminating a figure sitting cross-legged on the floor. His feet were bare, he was wearing what looked like a skullcap and he was rocking. There was a copy of the Koran on a rug in front of him. ‘Why is he wearing that orange uniform?’ Philip whispered.

‘Category A,’Turner said. ‘Solitary confinement.You want to go in?’

Philip nodded and stood back. A prison guard stepped forward with a set of keys and the mechanism in the lock turned with a
heavy clunk. He held open the door and moved to one side. The prisoner raised his head and smiled. ‘Welcome to Belmarsh.’

‘Thank you,’ Philip said. ‘I’m Daniel’s father.’

‘How is he?’

‘Still in a coma.’

‘Sorry to hear that. And Martha?’

‘Fine, fine. She was asking after you.Thank you for alerting us to Tom. We know you had nothing to do with it … How are they treating you?’

‘Like a suspect detained without charge or trial under the Antiterrorism, Crime and Security Act, since you ask.’

Philip studied the prisoner’s face.There was something about his bulging, wide-set eyes and guileless smile that was familiar … ‘If there is anything I can do to help, Hamdi, I promise I will. I know a good QC at Matrix Chambers. Specializes in human rights.’

‘Is that what you came to tell me?’

‘I wanted to know …’ Philip began. ‘I have to know.Where have I seen you before?’

‘You were there the night I was arrested.’

‘Before that.’

The prisoner stared at his visitor for a moment. ‘I’m afraid I don’t think we have ever met before.’

‘From here it looks like his eyes are open,’ Nancy said.

A blur of daylight was slanting in through the hospital window.

‘That’s just the muscles in his eyelids going,’ Bruce said. ‘Look …’ Fingers were being waved in front of Daniel’s face. ‘Nothing.’

‘There was a message from the provost. Said Dan could take off as long as he needs and whenever he feels ready to come back to work the zoology chair will be his. Don’t think they realize how bad he is. The papers don’t help. Did you see this?’ A crackle of a magazine being passed from one hand to another. ‘It’s about
Martha’s abduction. An account of the rescue. Pretty good. Accurate, I mean. Daniel would have been amused by the headline.’

Bruce read it out loud. ‘
LEAP OF FAITH.’
He tossed the magazine on the bed. ‘I heard about your friend Tom.’

‘What did you hear?’

‘He reckoned you and he had been, you know …’

‘Well, we hadn’t. Did you also hear that he told me his wife was dead when in fact she’d taken out a restraining order on him? That was before he was sectioned. Apparently he did three years in therapy after he was released. Volunteered to become a therapist himself. Ended up working as a part-time trauma counsellor. No one checked his references.’ Nancy’s shadow looked down, her hair flopping at the sides to blinker her eyes. ‘If I hadn’t led him on, Martha would have been …You know she went there on her own? She’d remembered his address.’

Bruce cupped her chin and raised her face. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself.’ A dry laugh. ‘On the other hand, Dan did warn you that this guy was a charlatan.’

Nancy echoed the laugh. ‘He talked about that?’

‘We talked about everything … Haven’t heard you laugh in ages.’

‘Haven’t had much to laugh about … Dan told you about what happened when the plane went down?’

Bruce nodded. ‘Everything.’

Nancy held out her wrist to show Bruce her watch. ‘I’ve had it fixed. It broke during the crash but I never got round to …’ She stared at it. ‘I overreacted. I misjudged him. I wanted to tell Dan that his dad was proud of him. He went with him in the ambulance, you know. Holding his hand.’ Nancy looked down again. ‘I was proud of him, too.’

There was a long silence before Bruce said: ‘How many weeks?’

Nancy hesitated, then she said: ‘Oooh.You’re good.’

‘It’s a doctor thing … Also you keep touching your tummy.’

‘Coming up to three months … Got an appointment for a scan.’

‘It’s Dan’s, right?’

‘Course.’

‘Did you know he was going to propose to you on your trip to the Galápagos Islands?’

Nancy took Daniel’s hand in hers and began stroking it. She leaned forward and kissed each knuckle in turn, so softly her lips barely touched his skin. From this position she first knelt on the floor then sat, with the side of her head resting on the bed. She placed Daniel’s hand on her hair and closed her eyes. ‘There’s something I have to tell you, Bear,’ she said. ‘And I don’t know how to … so I’m just … If things take a turn for the worse, and it may never come to this, but if they, you know, if they do, the hospital will need my permission to turn off his life-support machine. I’m not saying … They’re not saying … I mean, he could go on for years like this, but they … They want me to allow for that possibility.’

A few hundred yards from Kew Gardens, in the musty embrace of his study, Philip picked up the army chaplain’s diary and carried on reading. When he came to 23 September 1918, he held the diary closer to himself, then farther away, before finding his distance.

And on the third day he rose again … Had a long chat with the MO. He wonders whether the APM can be trusted. I pointed out that he has more to lose than we have. I told him my conscience was clear and that his should be also. In war men have to do what they think is right, regardless of the consequences. Does it even matter any more? Thank the Lord; with the Hun now in full retreat, this war appears to be drawing to a close. They have a body. The headcount tallies. The quartermaster is missin g some sandbags.

Philip stared dry-eyed at the page for a full minute before rising stiffly from his armchair. He walked slowly upstairs to his attic, pulled a small tea chest out from behind a water tank and carried it unsteadily back downstairs to his study. After sifting through the
papers it contained, he found the bundle of letters he was looking for: eight of them, the ones left on his father’s grave at Bayeux in the seventies. He had always assumed they had been left by one of his father’s comrades; partly because the handwriting had been the same on all of them; partly because, in the early eighties, the letters had stopped appearing, presumably when the comrade had died.

He took the top one out. The ink had run on the envelope. Rainwater must have diluted it; words fading into the past. The letter was thin, like a seam of sedimentary rock compacted by the pressure of the years. He removed a sheet of paper folded in two and his eye fell upon the words at the bottom: ‘Regards,Your Pa’. The handwriting was shaky but it matched the handwritten signature on the statement his grandfather had signed after his court martial.

Dear William,

I have a new bike. The old one fell appart. It has a pump and two stripes on its crossbar, a red one and a blue one. I have retired from looking after the graves here now. I spend my afternoons playing dominos with my friends, Jean and Henri. They know me as Jacques. They like to look at pictures of an actress called Brigitte Bardot.

The world is changing. The Americans have put a man on the moon. In England they have a ‘pop group’ called the Bay City Rollers who are even bigger than the Beatles. In the summer, I hear English voices when the tourists come. I sometimes wonder if I will meet your son again. He looked like a fine young boy. Yelow hair. Straight back. He was wearing a bowe tie. You would have been prowd of him. He told me what you done to get your VC. I am glad you was brave. I wish the angel had come to save you as well though. I still think of your mother every day. She was very beautifull.

Regards,Your Pa

Philip understood now.

It had been Andrew who had taken the photograph of him that day at the Bayeux War Cemetery.

He shook his head. Why had it never occurred to him that it was
odd that a gardener in France had spoken English to him? He was nodding now. Ten-year-old boys assume everyone is English.

Philip wondered what thoughts had haunted Andrew as he had stood over his son’s grave in Normandy and stared at the letters ‘VC’. He had never known what his son looked like, even from a photograph. Philip could have shown him one, but the old man had been too ashamed to introduce himself. He had simply taken the photograph of the widow and her two children – his own grandchildren – and walked away without saying a word.

Philip stared at the glass case containing his medal collection. ‘Bloody medals,’ he said. ‘Bloody, stupid medals.’

Breathing heavily, he picked up the case and dashed it against a shelf of books, the glass shattering into a hundred shards. He then tipped the box of documents over and swept his arm along his desk, knocking over his photographs and his lamp. He stared at the mess with confusion in his eyes, knelt down and crawled over the broken pieces on all fours, crunching them under hands mottled with liver spots, oblivious to the perforations that were being made in his papery skin.

He had seen a photograph frame lying face down underneath his desk. He reached for it with a bleeding hand and turned it over. It was the photograph of his grandfather and another muddy-faced soldier in a trench. There was a crack in the glass, running almost straight down the middle, dividing the two figures.

On the fringe of sleep, Daniel thinks he hears his father say: ‘Sometimes you have to believe before you can see.’ Aware of dry lips lightly touching his forehead, he half opens his eyes to see his father’s back shadowing through the doorway. He tries to call after him but can find no voice. The empty doorway holds his attention for a couple of minutes until he becomes aware of something new in the room, sensing its presence before it enters his peripheral vision, as if it is giving off a static charge. Lowering his gaze he can
see a flat object held between his finger and thumb. It has been placed in his frozen grip. He forces his eyes to focus. It is the photograph of his great-grandfather in the trench, the one he has seen on his father’s desk, the one as fragile as the glass plate on which it was recorded four generations ago. It is no longer in its frame. He realizes Philip must have placed it in his hand while he was asleep. As he studies it, he feels a tingling in his brow, as though he has antennae there that are twitching. The monkey chatter that has filled his head in recent weeks falls away. A string has been plucked and, on the threshold of audibility, a single harmonic note is being sustained. It is more a mood than a sound, a feeling of luminous certainty. Though he has glanced at the photograph a number of times before, he has never seen it. Not properly. Not in its entirety. He has paid no attention to the soldier who has his arm around Andrew Kennedy’s shoulder. With his protuberant, wide-set eyes and his broad smile, this unseen soldier seems familiar to Daniel. A name, the shape of a name, forms on the edge of his tongue and pushes against his teeth. He hasn’t been able to say it before, nor summon it to mind. Now it comes, a force of air down the palate, breathed as much as said. ‘Hamdi.’