‘I told you,’ says Tom.
‘What did you tell me? When?’
‘Ages ago. When Dad was giving all our stuff away. I said we’d have to go to church in the end.’
I had forgotten that. So Tom was right, in a way he could never have predicted.
‘This is nothing to do with your father,’ I say. ‘And no one has to go anywhere.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ says Molly.
‘What church?’ says David.
Good question.
‘The one round the corner.’ There must be one round the corner. They’re like betting shops, churches, aren’t they? There’s always one round the corner, and you never notice them if you don’t use them.
‘What corner?’
‘We could go with Pauline,’ says Molly. ‘I know which church she goes to.’ Pauline is a schoolfriend of Molly’s. She’s Afro-Caribbean. Oh, God.
‘That wasn’t… I was thinking of a different sort of church.’
‘Pauline says it’s fun, hers.’
‘I’m not looking for a fun church.’
‘What are you looking for?’ David asks, relishing my discomfort.
‘Just… I want to sit at the back and not join in. I expect Pauline’s is a… well, a joining-in sort of church, isn’t it?’
‘What do you want to go for if you don’t join in? What’s the point of that?’
‘I just want to listen.’
‘I’m sure we can listen at Pauline’s church.’
It’s the lack of conviction I want, of course. I was hoping for a mild, doubtful liberal, possibly a youngish woman, who would give a sermon about, say, asylum seekers and economic migrants, or maybe the National Lottery and greed, and then apologize for bringing up the subject of God. And somehow in the process I would be forgiven my imperfections, permitted not to like Hope and Barmy Brian, made to understand that just because I wasn’t good, it didn’t mean I was bad. That sort of thing. And maybe that’s exactly what Pauline’s church is like—how would I know? I am, however, presuming that it isn’t. I am presuming that at Pauline’s church there is no doubt, simply joyful and committed worship, and I am presuming that because it is easier to stereotype racially than it is to find out the truth. So there we have it. I get up in the morning determined to do something approximating to the right thing, and within two hours find something else to feel guilty about.
‘They go to a different sort of church, don’t they, Mum?’ says Tom.
‘Who are “they”?’ I ask sharply. If I’m going down, I’m going to take them with me.
‘Pauline’s family,’ says Tom, puzzled.
‘Oh. I thought you were being… Never mind.’
Because, of course, it wasn’t him that was being anything. It was me. As usual.
Eventually I manage to convince Molly that we are Church of England, although this line of argument is not without its horrifying moments either, and the two of us cruise the neighbourhood in the car, looking for the right church putting on the right show at the right time. We strike it lucky almost immediately: Molly spots a few ancient parishioners hobbling into St Stephen’s, a couple of streets away, and we park the car right outside. (If you are the kind of person whose choice of entertainment is governed by ease of parking, then I thoroughly recommend Anglican Sunday services. You can arrive at five to ten for a ten o’clock service, and you’re away by two minutes past eleven. Anyone who’s had to wait for an hour in the Wembley car park after a Spice Girls concert may find this attractive.)
It has everything I want. The vicar is indeed a kindly middle-aged lady who seems vaguely ashamed of her beliefs; the sparsity of the congregation, and its apparent lack of interest in anything or anyone, allows us to sit towards the back and pretend that we’re nothing to do with anything or anybody. Molly is of course the youngest person in the pews on this side of the church, but I am probably the second youngest, by ten or fifteen years, although with a couple of them it’s hard to telclass="underline" time has not, it is fair to say, been kind to some of these people. God knows what is cause and what is effect here.
We sing a hymn, ‘Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken’—an easy one, easy-peasy, clearly remembered from school assemblies and assorted weddings, and both Molly and I join in with both energy and expertise, even if we do say so ourselves; and then there is a reading, and then there are notices. They’re having a bring-and-buy sale. The reason there is no choir this week is that it has been invited to join forces with another choir to do something else somewhere else… I start to drift off. I have never been to an ordinary church service before. I have been to weddings, funerals, christenings, carol services and even harvest festivals, but I have never been to a bog-standard, nobody-there Sunday service.
It all feels a long way from God—no nearer than the bring-and-buy sale would be, and much further away than I imagine Molly’s friend Pauline is at this precise moment. It feels sad, exhausted, defeated; this may have been God’s house once, you want to tell the handful of people here, but He’s clearly moved, shut up shop, gone to a place where there’s more of a demand for that sort of thing. And then you look around and wonder whether the sadness isn’t part of the point: those who are able to drag themselves here once a week are clearly not social church-goers, because there is nothing social happening here. This isn’t a place to see and be seen, unless opera glasses are placed on the backs of the pews. You’d have to walk twenty yards to shake somebody’s hand. No, these people are the hardcore, the last WASPs in Holloway, the beaten and the lonely and the bereaved, and if there is a place for them in the Kingdom of Heaven, they deserve it. I just hope that it’s warmer there than here, and there is more hope, and youth, and there is no need for bring-and-buy sales, and the choir of angels isn’t singing elsewhere that day, but you rather fear it might be; C of E heaven is in all probability a quarter-full of unhappy old ladies selling misshapen rock cakes and scratched Mantovani records. Every day of the week, for all eternity. And what about the nice lady reading the notices to us? Is she ever dispirited by her hobbling, careworn flock? I thought that I could detect a touch of weariness, maybe even despair, during the appeal for flower-arrangers, but maybe this is because flower-arranging is not her thing.
Sermons, however, clearly are her thing—electrifyingly, embarrassingly, hilariously so. She takes a deep breath, fixes us with a stare, and then shouts ‘1–2–3–4 GET WITH THE WICKED!’, and we shrink back into our pews, afraid and confused—all of us apart from Molly, who recognizes the reference. ‘1–2–3–4 Get With the Wicked’ is her favourite song in the charts at the moment—she bought it last Saturday afternoon with her pocket money, in Holloway Road, and she spent the afternoon dancing to it. The rest of the congregation, however, the varicose women and emphysemic men who constitute the nice lady’s flock… I would wager that none of them have, as yet, bought the CD, so they do not know why the nice lady is shouting these things at them, and those who are physically capable of doing so stare hard at their shoes.
The nice lady pauses and smiles. ‘Is that what Jesus wanted, for us to “get with the wicked”?’ she asks. ‘I think it is.’ She points at us, suddenly and theatrically, as if she had a microphone in the other hand. ‘Think about it.’ Her invitation is welcome, because it means that we can continue to look at our shoes for a while longer as we struggle to tease out all the theological implications of the lyric. Who on earth does she think she is talking to? I can only presume she is literally looking at a different audience, that she has entered a parallel universe full of young, trendy Christians who wouldn’t miss her sermons for the world and whoop with joy at each reference she makes to their culture. I want to run up to the pulpit and shake her.
‘Think about it,’ she says again. ‘Mary Magdalene. Judas Iscariot. Zaccheus the tax collector. The woman at the well. One, two, three, four! That was Jesus getting with the wicked!’ Suddenly, though, she switches her line of thought, and, with a grinding change of gears that would make even the most hopeless learner driver wince, she wonders whether God wants us to get with the good as much as He wants us to get with the wicked. She suspects not. She suspects that He wants us merely to be ourselves, and that if we spend all our time being falsely pious, then He won’t be able to get to know us, which is what He wants to do.