This Is All (52 page)

‘Sorry,’ Will said. ‘Forgot.’

I had that feeling again of being a lot older.

I said, ‘You didn’t order any wine.’ And couldn’t help thinking, Lordy, I sound just like his mother.
Yuk!

– the day of her birthday – to look round Norwich, before driving home late that night. But when they set off they were held up by a road block. There had been an explosion, the police had cordoned off the area, and inside the cordon a badly injured man was lying in the road. No one was tending him because the police feared he was a suicide bomber who might still have explosives strapped to him, which had not gone off. But the man was moaning in agony. Ms M. couldn’t bear to do nothing. She broke through the cordon and ran to the man, but as she bent over him a small explosive went off, which killed him and injured Ms M.

She was in hospital for weeks. For a time it was feared that the explosion might have blinded her. Her eyes were bandaged for days. Eventually the doctors decided it was safe to uncover them. They did this in a darkened room. To everyone’s relief, her eyes were all right. The light was gradually increased as her eyes got accustomed, and at last the blinds were drawn from the window and she could look out at the grounds of the hospital. What she saw was a field of roughly cut grass, a pond in the middle, a big old chestnut tree beside the pond, and a high mellow brick wall hiding the main road beyond the field. Above that the sky. Nothing else.

What happened to her at that moment was another revelation, another godspell, another ‘epiphany’, like the ones in St James’s. The same day she described it in a letter to the friend who had been with her on her pilgrimage. Later, the friend gave her a copy of the letter. This is part of it:

As I lay here looking so hard and so long, I began to see everything was perfectly itself. The grass was perfectly grass, and the pond perfectly a pond, and the water in it perfectly water, and the tree so perfectly a tree. And the light! Oh, the light! It was so perfectly itself too, perfectly
light,
and yet also perfectly everything else. Because without the light I couldn’t have seen anything. It illuminated everything. Made everything visible. Made everything
there.

‘But he didn’t ask.’

‘Excuses, excuses. Deliberately, I should think. To get his own back.’
Yuk!
again.

‘You put the boot into the wrong person.’

Trying to be light: ‘How easily you’re roused.’ And failing.

‘By you or by him?’

If at first you don’t succeed. ‘He doesn’t fancy you the way I do.’

‘And he doesn’t fancy
you
the way
I
do.’

I couldn’t help Little C blurting out, ‘But what about when you’re at college?’

‘What?’

‘And you see someone you fancy. It’s bound to happen.’

‘Is it? Not to me.’

‘Certain sure?’

‘Nothing’s ever
that
certain.’

‘There you are, then.’

‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘Yes,’ I said, sharper than I meant, ‘but I don’t trust tree girls. Who are very good at climbing all over tree boys, I expect.’

‘Virginia creepers.’

‘Is that what they’re called?’

‘So I was told.’

Acid really had entered the soul by now. ‘The virgin bit won’t apply for long, then. Even if it does to start with. Or did I hear wrong? Was that vagina creepers perhaps?’

‘Meow!’

‘And it won’t be just the girls. What about boys who climb all over girls? What’s the male of the species called?’

‘Woodpeckers.’

‘Very droll.’

We disconnected, annoyed with each other. I looked around. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. Glanced at Will to see what he was doing. Looking straight at me. The eyes that always undid me.

And I thought: Yes, the light made everything visible that is
there.
But it also
made
everything. Without the light nothing would exist. The grass, the pond, the water, the tree are all light, only light. Their perfection is made by the light
. …

As I watched, the sunlight played on the ripples of the water and flickered on the leaves of the tree as they moved in the breeze. And the light broke up into thousands of individual flecks. But I knew they all came from the same source. They were all, each fleck, perfect sunlight, and were also all the same thing, the Sun. They came from the Sun and go back to the Sun and are the Sun now while they are flecks of light on the water
.

The light reveals the water so we can see it, and the ripples of water reveal the flecks of sunlight so that we can see in them perfect individual particles of the Sun. They don’t blind us if we look at them, though we would be blinded if we looked at them all together in the perfect Sun
.

And I knew that this is how it is with us and how it is with God. We are perfectly what we are, as the flecks of sunlight are perfectly flecks of Sun. And we are individual particles of God who we come from and are already all the time, now, here, every day. The flecks of light don’t go looking for the Sun. They
are
the Sun. In themselves and all together. And we don’t need to go looking for God. We
are
God, in ourselves and all together
.

I expected Ms M. to tell me that this experience strengthened her Christian faith. But it didn’t. Just the opposite. It caused her to give it up. That’s how she put it. She didn’t say she lost her faith, but that she
gave it up
.

I asked her why. She told me that in the following weeks, as she recovered from her injuries, she reviewed her belief. And for the first time she ‘saw through it’. It was as if the recovery of her sight had opened her eyes to her faith – what her faith really was – for the first time.

And what did she see? I asked.

The main thing was this. She could accept the story of Christ
as a story
. She could see it was full of truths about

‘Pax?’ he said, making an effort. His oboe voice.

‘Pax.’ I smiled love at him.

We changed the subject: The music we were practising together. His band (he was fed up with it, had outgrown it, had had enough of that kind of thing, and had decided to give it up). Some gossip about a mutual friend.

The food arrived. Neither of us could face ordering wine.

I shouldn’t have had the lobster, not because of our conversation but because it’s so messy to eat and I wasn’t dressed for mess. The waiter made a drama of kitting me out in a special lobster apron that made me look like an overgrown three-year-old, which drew glances and chuckles from the now full restaurant. This reignited Will’s scratchiness. He refused his apron with a vexed shake of his head.

‘Please yourself,
sir
,’ said the waiter, and sashayed off.

I set to and while I was winkling the meat out of the claws with the poker, Mr Malcolm appeared at our table, dangling a bottle of wine by the neck.

‘Forgive the intrusion,’ he said to Will. ‘Celebrating?’

Will, summoning the kind of dutiful politeness you keep specially for the boring friends of your parents, said, ‘End of school. Exam results. Last night before college.’

‘Congratulations.’ Mr Malcolm raised the bottle to view. ‘A nice chablis.’ He looked me over. ‘Go well with your lobster.’ And to Will: ‘May I? To mark the occasion.’

Will nodded. Mr Malcolm looked at me.

‘I’d like that very much,’ I said, over-compensating for Will’s lack of enthusiasm. ‘Thanks.’

Mr Malcolm poured.

‘My best to your father,’ he said to Will. ‘And my wife sends greetings to your mother.’ To me and to Will, ‘All success with whatever you do in the future.’

He put the bottle down on the table.

‘You’re very kind,’ I said, performing again, but meaning it too.

people and about life and about God – whatever ‘God’ meant. But she also saw that she had never really believed the stories were literally true. O yes, she said, she accepted that there had been a man called Jesus and that he had been crucified. But she couldn’t accept that he was literally the son of God or that he was literally born of a virgin. Nor could she believe that he literally rose from the dead and was literally taken up into heaven a few weeks later (escalated to the penthouse, as Old Vic put it).

These, she said, were stories; they were
metaphors
. And that was okay. She had no problem with metaphors. In fact, language, she said, and our ways of thinking about anything are actually metaphors. We are, she said, only the stories – only the metaphors – we tell about ourselves. But as she understood it, Christianity required its followers to believe that the stories about God and Christ actually happened and were literally true. And you had to swear you believed this every time you said the Creed during the Mass. And she was no longer prepared to do this. So she gave up her Christian faith.

There were other less important reasons as well. For instance, the male-dominated paternalism of Christianity. She had tried hard to think of this as just a part of the way life has been since ancient times, and that it was changing now. Male domination was on the way out. Not fast enough, but on the way. And in some of the Christian churches there was less of it than there used to be. In her own denomination, for example, the Anglican Church, there were women priests now. But Ms M. had come to the conclusion that the idea of male supremacy was so deeply ingrained in Christianity that it could never actually be got rid of. In Christianity, God was a ‘He’ and Christ was male, and the Virgin Mary was a compliant, eyes down, supplicant mother ready to do the will of her husband-father-God, and would never be an equal.

This couldn’t be changed because it was the way the story

‘My pleasure,’ he said. ‘Really.’ He nodded to Will. ‘Enjoy your meal.’ And returned to his overdressed wife.

Will closed down. I once watched one of those awful Second World War movies about a submarine. They were being attacked and went into what they called ‘silent running’, which as far as I could make out meant proceeding underwater without making any noise that could be detected by enemy ships on the surface. I used to think Will was silent running when he was in this mood. I knew him so well I could guess what he was thinking about Mr Malcolm and the wine and the restaurant and our dinner. The whole thing was going from bad to worse. But I couldn’t raise enough energy to tackle him about it.

I poked and picked at my lobster. Fish and chips beside our kissing tree would have been better. Will could have been as scratchy as he liked and it wouldn’t have mattered. I could have tickled him out of it. And could have dunked him in the river if necessary to cool him off. At least that would have been fun. This was agony.

I drank some of the wine. Will didn’t touch it. Out of pique. But it was wasted on me as I had no idea whether it was ‘a nice chablis’ or plonk. The irony of which – wasted wine as a gift from a man in waste disposal – gave me a rueful mental smile.

Why, I wondered once again as I struggled through the meal, why can’t people just
enjoy
things? Why do they allow stupid feelings to poison what should be happy times? And why am I as bad as everyone else? Though I did think Will could have made more of an effort, could have put himself out a bit more. I knew he hated pretending. But sometimes pretending is necessary, it seemed to me. Sometimes, as Dad put it, ‘behaving
as if
helps oil the wheels of life’. I could have done with Will using some of that oil. He wasn’t the only one who was suffering. I was too. I was about to lose him, I was convinced of it. This might not only be our last meal

about God had to be told in Christianity. The metaphor couldn’t be changed just by changing the pronoun for God from He to She. (And even if you did that, you only shifted the domination from the male to the female, and that wasn’t right, wasn’t
true
, either.)

There was something else as well. The Christian faith had become a rigid structure. The churches – each one of them, whatever their denomination – had turned Christianity into a system, an institution. It had a hierarchy of archbishops and bishops and various ranks of priests who ran their church as a business organisation, which owned vast amounts of land and property and traded in stocks and shares and owned newspapers and even banks and was ruled by politics and money.

Some people like this. They are comfortable and reassured by an organisation that tells them what to think and how to behave. And it provides them with a social life – a group of like-minded people to belong to – as well as spiritual and social security. The thing most people fear the most, Ms M. said, is loneliness. They cannot bear to be on their own, not just physically but spiritually. They prefer to belong to a herd, a tribe, a gang, a group. They prefer to believe anything, no matter how odd, than nothing.

‘During my weeks of convalescence,’ Ms M. said, ‘I began to think of the Christian faith in the past tense. As something finished. Or, if not finished, on its last legs. I decided I wanted to go on from there, and to think out for myself what God
is
, what I really do believe about God, what it means to have a
soul
, and what it means to be
myself
. I wanted to work this out and work out how to express the truths I found in a way that is true for now, and how to give these truths power in my own life.

‘All I knew to begin with,’ she went on, ‘was that God was to be found in what I’d come to call the Silence, and that the truth was that I myself, and everything in the world, everything in the entire universe, was a part of God. God was

before we were separated for a while, it might also be the last meal we’d ever have as – I hesitated to think the word –
lovers
.

I poked hard at the half-empty carcass of my lobster. But I was digging hard at myself really. Poking at myself. It was all my fault, wasn’t it? This meal. Will in such a mood. Things not being
right
. I should have managed everything better. My fault. All my stupid fault. I wasn’t good enough for him. And now he was going away and he would find someone who was good enough for him, someone who could be all he wanted and could match him and win his love and keep him. And so I berated myself with another of the fatal flaws of womankind, blaming ourselves for whatever goes wrong, and not the man we love.