When the World Was Steady (17 page)

‘Surely the company of the ungodly must put you at constant risk?’ Nikhil asked. He didn’t seem to be joking.

‘It’s not as though I’ve taken closed orders, honestly, just because I live through my faith and am happy to admit it.’

‘What does it mean, then, for you to do so?’

‘Goodness, you are serious. Be careful, or I’ll mistake you for
a potential after all!’

‘I’d like to know.’

‘Oh, Nikhil. I don’t much feel like talking about it.’ This was not the turn Angelica had hoped the conversation would take. She had even given herself licence to forget all that this evening. She had decided to sin a little, if it seemed appropriate. And then, of course, to repent. But this could hardly be admitted. ‘It’s not easy to talk about,’ she said. ‘It’s very personal, I think. Let’s just say that I had some bad experiences, and it was God who showed me a way out. I mean, I really believe that song you’re taught as children, “God is Love”, you don’t know it, I suppose? Well, I guess it just means that God’s love is there for me if I allow it to be, and it’s the only thing that makes life meaningful. The only thing I’ve found, anyway.’

‘And the church, your church?’

‘What about it? They’re the people who believe what I believe, and we celebrate together. In a way that’s truly alive. Our faith is very strong. Is that so strange?’

‘But the teachings?’

‘You’ll have to come and see, Nikhil. You’ll have to come to church and see. It’s the only way to explain. God is there, like an energy, this incredible force in the room. And He can work miracles. He does.’

‘And His judgements?’

‘I just don’t think my feelings can be put into words. Not properly. Anyway, you hear all this from the group, all the time. Surely it’s my turn to ask questions?’

Nikhil gestured acquiescence.

‘For example, why do you want to know?’

‘Isn’t it about who you are?’

‘Oh honestly, it’s part of who I am, but so is whether I eat oysters or whether my parents divorced when I was a child.’

‘I see.’

‘They did, in case you care. But I wanted to ask
you
questions. About India. About what it’s like?’

Nikhil was not as shy as she had thought, and proved eager to talk about his home. He conjured up smells and tastes and the little noises of people living their lives, but against this backdrop he set the outline of a life that sounded remarkably unexotic, that sounded, in some respects, quite akin to an adolescence in north London. Oh, of course, in many ways he made clear how different it was, and when he spoke about his sister, her upbringing sounded more constrained than Angelica’s. But she didn’t sound such a different person to Angelica; she sounded like someone Angelica could be friends with, with whom she could indulge the wild streak that had to be hidden at all costs from people like Virginia Simpson. When Nikhil told her about Rupica’s elopement, Angelica felt deeply satisfied.

‘That’s exactly,’ she said, ‘what I would’ve done.’

Nikhil recoiled in surprise, and a glob of salmon mousse fell from his fork to his trousers.

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Maybe then you can tell me why?’

‘Lust for adventure, I suppose. For the new, for what’s unknown and exciting.’

‘These alone are not reasons, not for this decision. It has something to do with her understanding of God, with the appeal of Christianity.’

‘Well, maybe,’ Angelica said, hoping the room’s pink light would mask her embarrassment. ‘Maybe it’s a whole lot of things at once. Maybe she found him exciting, and she found his beliefs exciting, because loving a person and loving God—or the gods_—it’s all bound up together, isn’t it? Like, it’s like, loving him gave her access to a new way of loving
everything
. So that then she had two ways, her own and his.’

‘Hmph,’ Nikhil said, to his mousse.

‘Well, it’s just a thought. It’s just how I would feel, I mean,
say, if I fell in love with a Hindu, say, with someone like you—’

He looked up and quickly down again. Angelica had overstepped, she felt. She’d embarrassed both of them. She stood up and started to clear, aware that Nikhil was looking her in the bosom because he couldn’t bring himself to look her in the face.

‘I’d love to meet her. She sounds terrific. Tell me again, where is she living?’

‘Scotland. The Isle of Skye. I have an address. I haven’t written.’

‘Skye’s gorgeous. And summer is
the
time to go. Right around now, it’s daylight till midnight. It’s spectacular. Have you thought of it?’

‘I have a lot of work. And she and I, we have not spoken since then.’

‘I’m sure you don’t have
that
much work. And there’s no time like the present for healing rifts. You know, in the Jewish faith they have a day set aside in the calendar for making amends. For patching up broken relationships. It’s a brilliant idea.’

‘Yom Kippur is in the autumn. And I am not Jewish.’ Nikhil was getting prickly.

‘I could go with you. I could be your guide. I
love
Skye. We used to go there on holiday when I was a child. I’d take you to all my favourite places. We always stayed in a wonderful old hunting lodge called the Tarbish Hotel, where I used to fish in the river with my father. And there are amazing mountains—the landscape is incredible! I could show you so much—we’d have such fun! I’m on holiday this coming week, in fact.’

Angelica had overstepped again, this time perhaps too far.

‘You will forgive me,’ Nikhil said, with a stiffness and solemnity whose origin was not clear, ‘If I protest that we hardly know each other.’

She ground the coffee in a rage. Rage at herself and her stupidity. Because now it was perfectly clear—it was the only thing
she
could
see clearly—that she would be visiting Virginia this evening after all.

By Saturday afternoon, Virginia was ready to get out of bed. The events of a few days before seemed to have receded to a fuzzy past that might have been weeks or even months ago. She knew she had been sleeping a lot, and she knew that there were reasons why she wanted only to keep on sleeping, but she wasn’t quite sure what they were, and her irritating tree-trunk of a mother wouldn’t say.

‘You’re just a little worn out, Ginny,’ Mrs Simpson kept repeating, as she tucked the sheets around Virginia’s chin and tried to keep her from rising. ‘You’ve been overwrought. And the doctor has left these for you to take.’ Whereupon she would pop a smooth, plasticky tablet on Virginia’s horrified tongue and ply her with water.

By late Saturday afternoon, it simply seemed imperative that Virginia get up. When her mother came in yet again and started fiddling with the sheets, Virginia slid up from her prone position—as slippery as a fish, she thought, as she did so—and swung her feet to the floor. Nothing Mrs Simpson could say could stop Virginia running a bath and laying out her clothes and announcing that when she was dressed she was going to see the vicar.

To that, Mrs Simpson merely threw up her hands and muttered something incomprehensible about where angels fear to tread, which Virginia hardly noticed because she was eagerly sliding her bony self—once again, she made note, with an ichthyoid ease—into bathwater which proved far too hot. By the time she was dressed, she felt much less like venturing out. Wooziness had overcome her while she buckled her sandals. But Mrs Simpson had only to ask whether she thought her outing absolutely wise and necessary for Virginia to become obdurate.

The church was silent and desolate. To the passer-by, on a weekday, it might almost have appeared a redundant church, with its overgrown shrubberies, its faded, graffiti-smeared sign and the abundance of pigeon droppings on its doorstep. It might almost have been described as forlorn, were it not that Virginia knew Sunday morning would bring life, fervour and spirit anew.

St Luke’s was a dilapidated country-style church with hideous hexagonal glass extensions—modern, shabby, with tatty brown curtains—one at each end of the original building. One addition, the one most visible from the street, was for the Sunday school, and offered up scabby beanbag chairs and primitive crayon renditions of Christ among his disciples to the observant pedestrian. The extension where the choir rehearsed, and where morning coffee was held after the service, might have given a more presentable view to the world, but it was screened from the road by the bulk of the church itself.

Treading the overgrown path to the grimed church doors required all of Virginia’s concentration. She watched her white sandals plant step after step, and she paused on the threshold to regain her composure. One wanted, after all, to be utterly oneself when entering the house of the Lord. She wasn’t sure whether the Reverend would be in the church or at home in his vicarage, a grim modern edifice of similar architecture to the extensions, but she thought to seek him first in the place of worship, thereby allowing herself the luxury of a prayer before an empty altar. Saturday was not a time when she generally made this pilgrimage, unless, of course, it was her turn with the flowers. But when, in the past, she had popped in for counsel or reflection, she had often found the Reverend Thompson busy in the vestry, sorting books, or making order after a wedding. Upon occasion she had found him simply praying, kneeling in a pew like a common parishioner, with his eyes upon the altar and his thoughts, Virginia always assumed, on the glory of the infinite.

A late shaft of sunlight filtered in one of the higher windows, casting shadows in the corners of the church. But otherwise, Virginia felt this was a calm and untroubled place. A weight and a confusion were lifted from her, and she slipped on to one of the hard benches as if into the arms of a lover. She rested her forehead on the back of the pew in front, and she opened her dialogue with her Maker.

‘What is it,’ she asked aloud, after a brief, silent prayer, ‘that You are testing me for? There are changes all around me, and maybe changes in me too, and it is Your will, I know. But I don’t see Your plan. Not, of course, that I
need
to, or that I would ever
presume
, but suddenly the direction doesn’t seem clear any more. Everything’s turned upside down. This hasn’t happened since I came to You, and I have to say I’m a little annoyed. Well, bewildered, I suppose, is a better way of putting it. I know only that these are signs—’

She interrupted her muttering because she thought she heard a sound. A soft thud—perhaps a pigeon against the glass, or noise from the road outside. But she
never
prayed aloud if anyone was near, and could not continue until she had established her solitude with certainty. She knew there was nobody with her in the nave, but she tiptoed up to check the chancel. It did not
feel
to her as though the Reverend was there: his was an open presence, despite his nervousness. And there was no sign of disruption near the altar. She was about to return to her pew—the same she took on Sundays, fourth from the front, on the right-hand side—when her ear caught a breathy whispering, like the movement of the wind. Only more rhythmic. More human.

It came, Virginia surmised, from the vestry, the door to which stood at the rear left of the chancel, slightly ajar. It didn’t occur to her not to pursue it, not once she heard it. She didn’t think of her own safety; the sanctity of the church was uppermost in her mind. She envisaged a gang of vandalizing youths; a hungry, homeless
tramp with his snout in the communion wine; even the image of a bloodied Reverend, attacked by thugs and abandoned, rose unprompted to her mind. The walls and contours of the church, which had only ever stood safe and reassuring, were now made strange by the concurrent haziness and peculiar focus of her movements.

Stealth was not Virginia’s forte, and usually she had little occasion to deploy it. But in this instance she moved without hesitation and without a sound to the crack in the vestry door. She could see nothing but the whitewashed wall of the corridor, but ascertained that the sighing—accompanied by creaking and vigorous slithering sounds—was indeed emanating from this point. The door didn’t creak when she slid it open; she was quiveringly attuned, and heard nothing. She inched along the little corridor and peered through the actual vestry door—not through its opening, where she might have been seen, but through the sliver of light between door and frame, between one hinge and the next.

First she saw the black-clad, slight shoulder of the Reverend; and his upright presence so reassured her that she almost disclosed herself. It was as if that slice of his left side put all the earth to rights again, and removed the surreal filter from her eyes. She hung back only because he was obviously not alone. Counselling, perhaps?

She saw an arm on his black back, the fingers splayed, and moving. Embracing a bereaved parishioner, then? The irregular, rapid breaths were thus explained. Satisfied, Virginia looked away, then heard a moan which drew her eye back to the light. She examined the hand again, and as she followed its caresses—they were caresses—recognized that it was a male hand. And that the movements, and the sounds, were those of a particular sort of comfort. And with one eye pressed up close to the chink of the doorway, Virginia Simpson saw, undeniably and definitely and irretrievably, her world turned upside down forever: she saw the
Reverend Thompson—whose passion had always been all for God, confined to the pulpit, just as it should be—making earthly and physical love to Philip Taylor. Or was it Stephen Mills? The one with the glasses, anyhow.

The silence with which she greeted this revelation was absolute. Despite the shrill whistling inside her head, Virginia didn’t allow a scream, or even a sharp intake of breath, to escape her. Because if this vision was a horror unimagined, how much more so would be any actual encounter, any exchange of words, any acknowledgement?

By the time she paused among the pigeon droppings on the steps outside, after scurrying undetected through the body of the church, she could almost attribute her sighting of Evil to the sedatives pressed upon her by her mother. It just didn’t seem real. Already, the moment was frozen into discrete frames: the contour of the chink before her eye; the arm; the fingers splayed across God’s sombre vestments; the turn; the flicker of a tongue. The sounds.