As a token bit of mysticism, the mason had fixed an Eye of God way up on the steeple, above the clock — an oval shape carved into a block of stone that I’d noticed on the old country churches Farther dragged us round at weekends. Yet at Saint Jude’s, it seemed more like a sharp-eyed overseer of the factory floor, looking out for the workshy and the seditious.
Inside, a bigger than life-sized crucified Christ was carefully suspended in front of a vast window so that when the sun shone his shadow fell among the congregation and touched them all. The pulpit was high up like a watchtower. Even the air felt as though it had been specially commissioned to be church-like; to be soup-thick with sound when Miss Bunce touched the organ keys, and when the nave was empty to be thin enough to let the slightest whisper flutter round the stonework.
‘So,’ said Father Wilfred, indicating for us to sit on the front pew. ‘Let’s start at the beginning. McCullough, tell me something about the Penitential Rite.’
Father Wilfred put his hands behind his back and began a slow pacing alongside the altar rail, looking up into the vault like a teacher awaiting the answer to an impenetrable maths question.
Actually, I often thought he had missed his calling on that score and in the photograph Mummer had cut out of the paper the time he’d protested about a new horror film they were showing at The Curzon, he indeed looked every inch the Edwardian schoolmaster — thin and pale behind the round-rimmed glasses, the hair raked into a severe parting.
Henry looked down at his sweaty hands and shifted uncomfortably as though something unpleasant was passing through his gut. Father Wilfred suddenly stopped and turned to face him.
‘Problem?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Henry.
‘I don’t know, Father.’
‘Eh?’
‘You’ll address me as Father.’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘Well?’
‘I still don’t know, Father.’
‘You don’t know if there’s a problem or you don’t know what the Penitential Rite is?’
‘Eh?’ said Henry.
‘Well at least tell me when it comes in the Introductory Rites, McCullough.’
‘I don’t know, Father.’
‘You wish to be a servant of God and you can’t even tell me the order of the Mass?’
Father Wilfred’s raised voice echoed briefly around the church. Henry looked at his fingers again.
‘You do want to become an altar boy don’t you, McCullough?’ Father Wilfred said, more quietly this time.
‘Yes, Father.’
He looked at him and then resumed his pacing.
‘The Penitential Rite comes at the start of the Mass, McCullough, once the priest has come to the altar. It enables us to confess our sins before God and to cleanse our souls ready for the reception of His holy word.’
‘Now, Smith,’ he said, stopping to buff the golden eagle lectern where Mr Belderboss struggled with the Old Testament names when it was his turn to read, ‘what comes after the Penitential Rite?’
‘The Kyrie, Father.’
‘And then?’
‘The Gloria, Father.’
‘And then?’
‘The Liturgy, Father.’
Suspecting I was being facetious, his eyes narrowed for a second, but he turned and walked back the way he had come.
‘Right, McCullough,’ he said. ‘Let’s see if you’ve been listening. Tell me the order of the Introductory Rites.’
And so it went on until Henry could recite the structure of the Mass down to where people stood, sat or knelt.
While they spoke, I stared at the altar, wondering when we would be allowed up there, if it would feel holier beyond the invisible screen that only the privileged directors of the Mass were allowed to penetrate. If the air was different. Sweeter. If I might be allowed to open the tabernacle in the reredos, and look upon the very resting place of God. Whether there was some evidence of Him inside that golden box.
Having passed one test, I was sent away to complete another. I was to go into the office next to the vestry and bring back a pyx, a censer and a chaplet of the Divine Mercy. Father Wilfred handed me a key and then looked at me sternly.
‘You are to go to the vestry office and nowhere else,’ he said. ‘Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘You are to touch nothing other than the things I have asked for.’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘Good. On you go.’
The office was cramped and smelled of old books and snuffed wicks. There was a desk and several book shelves and locked cupboards. In the corner was a sink with a grimy mirror above it. A candle in a red jar guttered in the draft coming through the window frame. But the things which interested me the most, as they would any boy of thirteen, I suppose, were the two crossed swords fastened to the wall — long and slender and curving gently towards their tips — the kind Hanny’s Napoleonic soldiers wore. I longed more than anything to hold one of them. To feel my chest tighten like it always did when we sang O God of Earth and Altar.
I searched for the things Father Wilfred had asked me to fetch and found them easily, setting them down on the desk where a few books had been left open.
One had a painting of Jesus standing on the edge of a mountain in the desert being tempted by Satan, who flitted about him like a giant red bat. I didn’t like that one at all. It was the Devil of my nightmares, all cloven hooves and horns, with a snake for a tail.
I turned the page and found Simeon Stylites standing on his tower. He was a popular figure in Father Wilfred’s sermons. Along with The Rich Fool and The Prodigal Son, he was an example to us all of how we could change, how we could rid ourselves of temporal desire.
Surviving only on the Eucharist, he had lived on top of a stone pillar in the desert so that he could meditate on the Word untouched by the world of sin below him. His devotion was absolute. He had stripped his life to the quick for God. And his reward was that he needed to look no further than heaven for all the things that the sinners beneath him pursued through selfish, lustful means and suffered for in the chase. Food, love, fulfilment, peace. They were all his.
In the painting he had his face turned to the sky and his arms outstretched as though he was letting something go or waiting for something to fall.
Next to it was a photograph album full of pictures of a place that I recognised. It was The Loney. Shots of the beach, our pillbox, the dunes, the marshes. Dozens of them. These were the photographs he had taken that last morning of the pilgrimage.
He had left a magnifying glass on top of a photograph of the mudflats at low tide, the sea far out, the way over to Coldbarrow clear and Coldbarrow itself a grey mound in the distance. I picked it up and moved it back and forth but couldn’t find that there was anything much to see apart from the black sludge and the sea and the low sky. What he had been looking for, I couldn’t tell.
‘Smith,’ Father Wilfred was at the door, with Henry behind him.
‘Yes, Father?’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing, Father,’ I said and stood up.
‘I trust that you’ve found what I asked you to find?’
‘Yes, Father,’ I said and showed him the stuff on the table.
He looked at me and came over and picked up each object, turning them in his hands as though he’d never seen them before. After a moment or two he realised that we were waiting for him to dismiss us and he turned sharply.
‘On Sunday morning,’ he said. ‘I shall expect to see you both standing outside the vestry door at nine o’clock on the dot.’