The Blasphemer: A Novel (26 page)

‘Much of this collection is from that trip,’ Daniel continued. ‘And I think members of the public would pay good money to see it, if they knew about it. We could make it an interactive experience, with computer graphics and holograms. Get school parties coming in. We could call it “The Darwin Experience”, or, and this is what I really wanted to try out on you …’ He held his arms above his head and spread them wide, miming a sign, ‘ “On the Side of the Apes: a Journey through Darwinian Evolution by Natural Selection”.’

‘But what Disraeli said was: “The question is this: is man an ape or an angel? I, my Lord, I am on the side of the angels.” ’

‘I know.’

‘So why misquote him? I don’t understand.’

‘It’s a play on …’ Daniel caught Wetherby suppressing a grin. ‘Look, it doesn’t matter. The point is, it could be the first thing visitors see through the door. You could have it here …’ He pointed to a space above the doorway. ‘A painting of Disraeli standing up in the Sheldonian with the quote underneath it. Look, I’ve done some sketches.’ Daniel laid out a sketchbook showing different sections and vistas. ‘Obviously I’d get these all mocked up as a virtual reality tour, so you can see what it will look like as you walk from room to room. I know there’s this bequest to the college and I just thought … Of course, I’d need to do a presentation to the Senate. The museum would draw in different departments. History. Theology. Biology. Political science. Philosophy. The
Courtauld could loan us some quattrocento paintings of angels. This was one of the reasons I wanted to run it past you first. I know about your interest in angelology … We could present it as a joint idea, you coming from the one direction, me the other. I see it as an antidote to all the misinformation that is being pumped into schools by the Creationists. Did you know, there is a Creation Museum in Ohio that has a model of Stone Age children playing with a pet dinosaur?’

‘What is wrong with that?’

‘What’s wrong with that! Dinosaurs went extinct almost … Oh I see. You were joking.’

Wetherby’s fingers were tapping his chin. ‘A better quote to have above the door might be “Monkeys make men. Men make angels.” ’

‘That’s good. Who said it?’

‘Darwin. Notebook B.’

Daniel looked embarrassed.

Wetherby took pleasure in this. ‘You see this as an exercise in atheistic propaganda?’

‘Not at all. I see it as a way of stimulating debate, getting students thinking about the subject. We could inaugurate it with a reconstruction of the Disraeli debate, only do it here at the Union. You could propose the motion, I could oppose it. Or the other way round, depending on what the motion was.’

‘But I would win, and that would never do. Fashion dictates that the atheist must always win.’

Daniel gave a short, dry laugh. ‘So how would you win then? What would be your clincher?’

‘I would win because there is no poetry in your idea of man as a lumbering robot servicing the interests of his genes. People like poetry. Consider the profession of faith: “All that is, seen and unseen.” Is that not poetic?’Wetherby was enjoying himself, savouring the polite tension and the academic one-upmanship. ‘God cannot be found by looking through a microscope, or a telescope. That would be like unravelling a human brain in order to find thoughts and feelings.’ He picked up a small, yellowing bone and
held it at arm’s length to see it better, feeling its weight as if contemplating using it as a club.

Daniel said, ‘That’s from a quagga. Very rare.’

Wetherby laid the bone down gently on a case containing beetles, cockroaches and locusts stuck down with pins. He let out a long sigh. ‘You know, I almost envy you your Enlightenment certainties. Life is so much messier when you have to accommodate the numinous and the mystical. Messier, but more human. Our intellect craves certainty, our nature craves mystery. Are you familiar with Sir John Tavener?’

Daniel nodded.

Wetherby was sure he was bluffing. ‘Sir John refers to “the angel of inspiration” and talks of having “auditory visions” in which music is dictated to him. Blake spoke of something similar …You look shocked.’

‘You’ve reminded me of something.’ Daniel sounded distant.

Wetherby raised his eyebrows but Daniel, looking as if he had seen a wraith, did not take the prompt. ‘Well?’ Wetherby said.

‘There was a Canadian neurosurgeon in the fifties who performed surgery on the brains of epileptic patients. He found that when he stimulated certain areas of the temporal lobe with electronics, his patients began to hear voices and see ghost-like apparitions. This prompted Aldous Huxley to ask if there was a part of the brain from which the probing electrode could elicit “Blake’s Cherubim”. It was staring me in the face. I can’t think why I didn’t …’

Wetherby removed his glasses, breathed on them, rubbed them and put them back on. ‘Even if you were blessed with a divine intervention you would not accept it,’ he said. ‘Such is the arrogance of the scientist. You would explain it away. Murder in order to dissect.’

‘The dissection of an angel, now that I would like to see.’

‘Milton believed their vital organs were evenly dispersed throughout their bodies, so that they were all heart, all head, all eye, all ear.’

‘As a Catholic, you believe in them presumably?’

‘Angels? You do not have to be a Roman Catholic. Angels profess no single confession.’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘All three of the monotheistic religions, the Abrahamic ones at least, share the same angels. Belief in the same angels, I mean.’

Daniel made an apologetic face. ‘Didn’t know that.’

‘Islam, Christianity and Judaism. The archangel Gabriel being the … your generation would call him “the Daddy”.’

‘Wetherby!’ Daniel was laughing. ‘We’re the
same
generation!’

‘We are?’ It struck Wetherby that Daniel was wrestling with something, something that he wanted to get out in the open. It was to do with his falseness of tone, his pretence at nonchalance. He studied him narrowly, watching him chew on his lip. ‘What, may I ask, has aroused your curiosity in angels?’

Daniel hesitated, backing up against a cabinet containing glass models of jellyfish, sea anemones and gastropods. ‘What would you do if you heard that someone had seen one?’

‘That would depend.’

‘On whether there were witnesses?’

‘Yes, and how reliable the witnesses were. I might inform the appropriate authority at Westminster Cathedral. It could be something the Vatican would need to investigate. But there are thousands of claims made each year, and almost all prove to be false or fraudulent. The Vatican has a whole department dedicated to unmasking fake miracles and sightings of angels.’

‘Seriously? That’s hilarious! So only Vatican-approved fake miracles and angels are allowed? I suppose they don’t want to flood the market. Devalue the currency.’

Daniel led the way to the far end of the display cabinets. ‘Come and look at this.’ He pointed to a taxidermic duck-billed platypus. ‘The bill of a duck, the tail of a beaver, the paws of an otter. Preposterous in evolutionary terms. Like it’s thrown together from leftovers. When this little fellow was first brought over from Tasmania at the end of the eighteenth century, European naturalists assumed it was an elaborate fraud …’

‘When in fact it was proof that God has a sense of humour.’

‘Or proof that evolution works through random mutation – the natural world trying on different things to see what fits.’

Wetherby exhaled noisily. ‘Perhaps you are right. Perhaps that is why God makes angels, immaterial beings whose identity resides in the world of thought. The unseen world. The abstract world. They are creatures that can’t be explained away by scientists.’

‘Thought you said men make angels.’

‘No. I said that Darwin said men make angels.’

‘So you
do
believe in them?’

‘They have been described as the most beautiful conceit in mortal wit, and I would go along with that.’

‘And the museum?’

‘The idea has merit. Let me try it out on the provost.’

Wetherby turned to go, turned back again and gently placed his hand across Daniel’s forehead. ‘You have an injury here, I think.’

Daniel shrank back slightly but did not remove the hand.

‘It hurts because you think too much. You should try to think with this.’ Wetherby pressed the hand over Daniel’s chest. ‘Ponder with your heart.’

Northern France. First Monday of September, 1918

THE WEDDING CEREMONY IS TO BE A SIMPLE ONE, OF NECESSITY
. Neither the bride’s family, nor the groom’s, will be attending. The priest has explained that Adilah will need to provide him with her late husband’s death certificate. The only other documentation required will be their birth certificates. Having written to the Registry of Births at Somerset House in London asking for a copy of his, and having received a letter in reply asking for proof of identification and a fee of twopence, Andrew has sent his army pay book by return, along with the fee in loose change. As soon as the certificate arrives they will marry. Their child will not be born a bastard.

The light is dying as Andrew returns home from work. When he goes to lie on the bed, aching pleasantly from his labours, Adilah joins him, bunching up her skirt so that she can sit astride him. She leans over to cut a lock off his hair. As he stares up into her eyes, his face tickled by threads of her hair, he traces the length of her spine with his thumb. His hand moves under her skirt and feels the loose silk material gathered at her knees. Her skin is almost as silky: fine-textured and delectably soft to the touch, like flour – like dipping fingers into a bag of cool flour.

Adilah leans forward to kiss him and the wetness of her kiss carries down to his groin. A thin, clear trapeze of saliva stretches
between them as she backs away so that she can remove her clothes. Supporting herself on her good arm, she crawls back across the bed towards him, her slightly swollen belly and compact hips looking hugely foreshortened, as if she is a giantess looming towards him. Her small breasts are two downward-pointing conicals, the pigmentation of the areolae pink. Cupping the back of his head in her hand she draws his mouth to her left nipple, shivers, and swivels her shoulder forward to press the other nipple to him. They make love and, afterwards, wrap themselves in towels.

Later, as Adilah heats three pans of water on the stove, Andrew drags the tin bath in from the pantry and places it in front of the fire. Next he pours two glasses of Armagnac and stares at the fire through its amber lens, shivering intermittently before helping Adilah plait her hair into a single fat rope. As she steps into the bath she flips the hair over her shoulder so that it covers her left breast. She no longer covers the pucker of her stump with her hair. Being naked in front of Andrew does not make her feel shy or awkward any more. The fatty deposits beneath her skin, the lines at the corners of her eyes, the freckles on her shoulders, Andrew, she knows, adores them all. She cups the slight swell of her belly and rakes her fingernails upwards, leaving tiny white trails on her skin. No kicks yet but she calculates it must be four months since she last bled. As she lowers herself into the bath, Andrew feels the reflex of desire. He lathers a bar of soap, pauses to pick a hair from it and rubs it over her back. When it is his turn to get in, Adilah puts on a dressing gown and tops up the bath with water from the pan. When he has washed, he asks her to pass him the towel. She holds it at arm’s length while he stands up and, as he reaches for it, she drops it. Laughing, and leaving wet footprints on the stone floor, he chases after her. She runs behind the table and feints left as he tries to anticipate which way she will run next. They are laughing so loudly they do not at first hear the knocking at the door.

‘Open up.’

An English voice.

Andrew feels a trickle of ice in his veins.

Adilah tosses the towel across to him. As he wraps it around
himself he reaches for a comb and parts his fringe to one side.

‘Open up.’

Andrew nods to Adilah to open the door. Instinctively he stands to attention; something about the tone of the man’s voice. Four military policemen, identifiable by their red-topped caps and armbands, are crowding the doorway. They are holding pistols in their hands. The tallest of them, an assistant provost marshal, looks at Adilah in her dressing gown then at Andrew. ‘Private Andrew Kennedy?’ he asks with a Scottish brogue.

Andrew swallows. ‘That’s right.’

‘You’d better get some clothes on, laddie. You don’t want to face the firing squad with a bare arse, now do you?’

‘Andrew?’ Adilah looks frightened.

‘It’ll be all right,’ Andrew says with rapid blinks. Turning to the APM he adds: ‘My clothes are in the bedroom.’

‘Well, you’d better go and fetch them, then. On the double. And get that horrible thing shaved off.’

A redcap follows Andrew into the bathroom where he slips on a singlet and a pair of shorts, before cutting off his beard with scissors. He has a shave after this and finds the sudden smoothness of his cheeks strangely disgusting, as if he were unpeeled, his skin exposed and raw. The redcap escorts him into his old room and watches uninterestedly as he pulls out from under the bed a blanket tied with string. It springs open as he tugs the string apart, revealing a uniform covered in dry mud and dark stains. It smells of mildew. As he puts it on, its scratchiness against his newly bathed skin makes him shudder. Though he has filled out slightly since he last wore it, it is still a size too big for him. He picks up the lock of Adilah’s hair that is lying on the bedside table and slips it in his pocket. When he returns to the kitchen, Adilah is crying.

‘Can I have a moment with her?’

‘Fraid not, laddie.’

London. Present day. Six weeks after the crash

BRUCE CAME IN JIGGLING CHANGE IN HIS POCKET AND SMELLING OF
disinfectant. He had a stethoscope wrapped up in his waist pocket. He could not meet his patient’s eye.

‘Shouldn’t you be wearing a white coat with pens sticking out of your breast pocket?’ Daniel asked.