They Came From SW19 (17 page)

‘We are come to the Temple,’ said Mrs Quigley, as Quigley reversed into a parked car.

The street was packed with members of the First Spiritualist Church. It was Day Release at the loony bin. Over by the door of the church I could see Meriel Viney, wearing a kind of white sack and a pair of what looked like tennis shoes. On her head was a hat that looked as if someone had dropped a large meringue on her head. She was chatting away to Roger Beeding and to Roger de Mornay. There were, I found myself thinking, a hell of a lot of people called Roger in the First Spiritualist Church. What was it about the name that made them want to funk on down and start praising the Lord? We had no Peters, no Colins, only one David and, though there had been a Kevin a few years back, we were now understaffed in that area too. But you just could not keep the Rogers away!

It’s for old people, our church. Old people called Roger.

Right outside the church, directly in front of Roger Beeding, was a large Rolls-Royce. Sitting in the back seat was a woman in a long, cream dress and a hat the size of a toddler’s swimming-pool. She was smoking a small cigar and sported a face that was a lot less elegant than the hat.

Quigley is down on smokers. Cigarettes are the work of the Devil. But smoking was obviously kosher as far as this old bat went. He rushed up to her as she got out of the Roller, took her right hand and thrust it into his beard. ‘Oh!’ I heard him say. ‘Oh!’

Mrs Quigley looked pretty pleased as well. She had the air of one who might head for the pavement and start writhing at any minute. ‘Mrs Danby,’ she croaked, ‘I’m so pleased! Mrs Danby!’

So this was Mrs Danby. It was strange. I couldn’t remember ever having clapped eyes on her before. But she was looking at me as if we were long-lost friends. She was smiling so hard the gauze on her hat wobbled. And, as I met her eyes, I did have a memory of something, although I couldn’t have said what. It was to do with a smell and some music and a steel thing swinging out and back, out and back, like the pendulum in the story by Edgar Allan Poe.

‘This’, Mrs Danby was saying, ‘is one of the greatest days of my life!’

She simpered at me. I was beginning to feel like a ritual sacrifice. I mean, had the First Spiritualists moved on? Was I going to have it off with this woman and a couple of goats? Give me the goats any time, I thought, as I was shuffled towards her.

‘Has Norman come through?’ I heard her say.

‘We have been in
constant
touch with him,’ said Quigley, as if he was reassuring the chairman about the Exports Division.

The old bat beamed. ‘How is he?’

‘He is doing fine, Mrs Danby,’ said Marjorie.

Who was this woman? And why would she not take her eyes off me?

‘What’s he doing over there?’

Everyone looked at Mrs Quigley.

‘Oh, he’s been . . . jetting around,’ she said at last.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Danby, shaking her head winsomely, ‘he was always a busy soul, was Norman. Has he made new contacts?’

‘He feels very, very fully occupied,’ said Mrs Quigley, ‘but we are getting some very serious indications that he has been . . . having a personal rethink.’

Mrs Danby nodded gravely. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh yes. When we fall, how we do fall!’

I couldn’t work out what she meant by this. In fact, I couldn’t work her out at all. She was wearing high-heeled shoes – which is very unusual for a First Spiritualist – and she was smirking at people as if she was at a cocktail party rather than morning service.

Behind her I could see into what is rather optimistically known as the vestry – which is nothing more than a curtained-off area of the floor, rather like what you might see in a hospital casualty ward. Pike was standing by a wooden rack of pamphlets, including
What Has Old Mother Walsh to Say to Us?
and a large, colourful one for the kiddies entitled
Daddy isn’t Dead, He’s Just Gone Out for a Bit.

Mrs Danby started up the steps, and we followed her. When she got to the large graph that shows the state of the church-roof appeal, she stopped and looked down at the waiting crowds as if she was a victorious politician looking down on her compliant voters. To avoid catching her eye, I looked at the graph. As far as I could tell, the roof seemed to be consuming money faster than we could give it.

She grabbed my hand and turned her wrinkled face to mine. ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ she said.

I didn’t reply. I wanted to ask her if she was, by any chance, called Veronica, but I didn’t dare.

She tossed her head and looked around at the congregation. ‘I have not been to Service these few years,’ she said. ‘I have been in the Outer Darkness!’

Perhaps she had been abroad, to Africa or something. That would explain why I didn’t recognize her. She was hard to miss, even among such a hand-picked collection of fruitcakes as the First Spiritualist Church.

‘I was close to your father during his great crisis,’ she said, ‘and it was I who led him astray. Into other fields, other woods, other pastures that seemed sweet but were full, as it turned out, of stinking weeds!’

They had been on country rambles together, was that it?

‘And now’, she went on, ‘I am hearing Norman again. I am hearing him loud and clear. You are helping me, Simon. And when you are one with us, when you have plunged your head in the cold, clear waters of baptism, then my great sin will be forgiven. I stole the father and gave Him back the son!’

I didn’t like the sound of any of this – especially the bit about plunging the old head in the cold, clear waters of baptism. But there was nothing I could say. I still had this uncomfortable feeling that I did know her. That she belonged to some time, when I was a little kid, that had somehow been barred from my memory.

Down below, Roger Beeding was beginning the traditional question-and-answer routine that always comes before you go into the morning service.

BEEDING
: Shall we go in and worship?

CONGREGATION:
Let us.

BEEDING:
How shall we go in and worship?

CONGREGATION:
On our feet.

BEEDING:
How shall we worship when we are within?

CONGREGATION:
On our knees.

BEEDING:
How shall we go before the Living God, if He appears before us?

CONGREGATION:
On our bellies . . .

I used to have a friend, the only other boy of my age in the congregation, before he went to Nottingham. He and I had a version of the Introit that went:

BEEDING:
How shall we stand in the church?

CONGREGATION:
On our heads.

BEEDING:
What may we hold when we are within?

CONGREGATION:
Our penises.

BEEDING:
How may we hold them?

CONGREGATION:
Well and tightly . . .

I thought of him now – he was called Mike Jarvis and he was a great skateboarder – as the congregation swept up the steps, past me and Mrs Danby, and Pike triumphantly pushed back the curtain to reveal the inner sanctum of the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist.

It was a sight as familiar to me as my own front room. A large, empty room with high, narrow windows through which the bright day filtered slowly on to various shades of brown. Brown linoleum on the floor, brown chairs, arranged in neat rows, and, on the walls, pictures and photographs and testimonials from dead spiritualists, all of them, it seemed to me, written in faded brown ink and confined to faded brown frames.

At the back of the raised platform at one end of the hall was a wooden cross, about six feet high. That, too, was brown. As we trooped in for the service, the sun caught it and, for a moment, I had a vision of what it must have really looked like, all those years ago, when they nailed poor old JC up before the people, one bright day in Palestine.

At the far end of the hall, Quigley was showing Mrs Danby to what looked like a comfortable chair. There aren’t many of those in the First Church. And, up on the platform, Roger Beeding was calling the faithful.

‘How are we now?’ he called.

‘We are in the church!’ called back the congregation.

‘How are our voices?’ he called.

And they replied, ‘They are rich and fruitful!’

Mr Toombs raised both his arms. He looked like Dracula about to make a maiden flight. ‘Let us,’ he said, ‘praise the Lord!’

We had started. There was no going back. And all I could think, as the service began, was
the whole truth of my heart! I am supposed to tell the whole truth of my heart!

In the autumn of 1924, the young Rose Fox was visited by the spirit of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He told her that, in a previous life,
she
had actually been the composer of
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
, and, while she was in a trance, he dictated his new work to her – a Concerto in G for harp, oboe and string orchestra. The piece was performed in Wimbledon Town Hall in 1926, and the consensus was that, in 130-odd years, Wolfgang had not really developed musically. Some people were so bold as to suggest that he had now lost his grip and was writing pretty fair garbage.

It didn’t stop at Mozart. It turned out that Rose Fox had been an awful lot of people in previous lives – mostly male, and all of them, apart from a rather dull-sounding galley slave in 34 bc, rather famous or important. These people have always Done Things in previous lives, perhaps to make up for their rather undistinguished efforts while being alive and in their own bodies.

Anyway, one of the people Rose Fox had been was John Wesley. And, from what I hear, her Wesley was a lot nearer the mark than her Mozart. He dictated to her many of the hymns that are still in use by the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist – many of whose tunes are exactly the same – bar one or two notes – as the ones the
real
John Wesley cobbled together in the eighteenth century. Rose’s Uncle Eustace, who lived upstairs in her parents’ home when she was a girl, was, incidentally, a staunch Methodist.

The better Wesley went down, the more she did him. Mozart didn’t write much after the concerto for harp, oboe and string orchestra, apart from an unfinished Requiem Mass, which no one could be persuaded to perform. But Wesley went on to write hymns, give advice and generally add shape, colour and texture to the ritual life of the First Spiritualist Church.

He was pretty gnomic by all accounts. He didn’t say, ‘Right, men – come in by twos, line up facing east and bang your foreheads on the floor!’ He would come out with lines like, ‘Let your words to God be as the noise of Esau!’ Which meant that, for a couple of weeks, an amazing amount of shouting went on. So much so that Wesley came back with, ‘And yet, softness be a virtue.’ He did sound a bit Mummerset from time to time.

One of the first bits of advice he gave the First Church was, ‘Bend the knee, but not unwisely.’ With the result that, to this day, the guys spend a lot of the service in a kind of crouching position.

He also said, ‘Wave thine extremities and be joyful.’ Which led to all sorts of strange behaviour. People finally settled on a kind of threshing movement of both arms, which, when combined with the crouch, made the congregation look like a group of canoeists on a particularly tough stretch of water.

But the most important thing Wesley told Rose Fox was, ‘Let there be constant movement in thy church.’ He stuck to that. In fact, he kept on repeating it. And he made it clear that he wasn’t talking about regular reallocation of senior positions in the church. So, by the late 198os, the services resembled the kitchen of a fast-food restaurant during a busy lunch hour. People would get up, go to the opposite end of the room, jig about, go back to their seat (or, better still, someone else’s), get up again and jog round the perimeter of the hall.

As Rose got older, Wesley’s orders got stranger and stranger. Most people agreed that things had gone a bit far when he told the church, in 1982, to ‘Face north-west whenever possible.’ Did this mean when in the middle of the service? Or did it mean just what it said? Were we going to be looking at guys backing into the path of oncoming lorries in order to preserve the decencies? How about the old
sexual intercourse
? Were spiritualists going to be forced to do it in strange, and possibly overexciting, positions?

I’d love to be forced to do it in strange positions. It’s my dream.

Most people ignored this commandment, although I have heard it said that Pike was to be seen with a compass on a number of occasions, trying to align himself correctly. It turned out the reason we all had to face north-west was because it was the direction ‘from which Rose had come forth’! She was born in Liverpool. A year or so later she told everyone that they must make an annual pilgrimage to that city, where she had a cousin in the catering trade who was prepared to give them all cheap rates, but by that time Rose was losing her grip on the faithful.

We started with Healing. People are always being Healed down at the church. It is certainly easier to get the medical treatment dished out by Roger Beeding’s wife than it is to get to see your local GP. She does patients in job lots, which is a system I could recommend to the Mayberry Clinic, Wimbledon.

‘Stand before if you wish Healing,’ said Beeding, and his wife – a short, dumpy woman called Clara – walked out in front of the congregation, her eyes tightly shut.

In a high, squeaky voice, she said, ‘Come to me in Jesus’ name!’

The usual bunch of hypochondriacs shuffled forward. Clara Beeding opened her eyes and looked quite relieved to see Jasper Lewens, Tracy Johnson and the guy with the wart. She had dealt with a case of peritonitis in 1985, and apparently it didn’t work out too well.

‘It’s my neck,’ Jasper Lewens was saying in a rather whingeing tone. ‘It won’t leave me alone!’

Before Lewens could moan on any longer, Clara Beeding put out her hand and touched the side of his head. ‘Your pain,’ she said, with fantastic confidence, ‘is going!’

Jasper started to rub his neck furiously.