I was about to go back down when I noticed the stack of colour in the corner. Father Wilfred’s robes. The purple that he wore at Lent, the red for Pentecost, the workaday green, and the white he had latterly put on for Christmas. The police hadn’t noticed them. I suppose they looked like the kind of junk that ended up in belfries, which were only really loud attics when all said and done. But the robes hadn’t been dumped. They had been neatly folded, the creases smoothed away. His crucifix was lying on the top along with his Bible and his white collar. And his diary.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Everyone was starting to go inside the house. Farther came down the path to where Father Bernard and I were sitting.
‘Will you come, Father?’ he said. ‘Andrew’s going to read for us.’
‘Aye, of course, Mr Smith,’ Father Bernard replied.
‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ said Farther and shook Father Bernard’s hand again before he went back to the house.
A train rushed past, leaving a skirl of litter and dust, and then the rails returned to their bright humming. In the scrubland beyond, the swifts were darting over the tufts of grass and the hard baked soil with its beetroot-coloured weeds. We watched them turning on their hairpins deftly as bats.
‘You will get rid of that book, won’t you, Tonto?’ said Father Bernard.
‘Yes, Father.’
‘Then we’ll be all square, won’t we?’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘We’d better go,’ he said and waved back to Farther who was beckoning us to hurry.
***
I knew that Father Bernard was right and that I ought to get rid of the diary for Mr Belderboss’s sake, but I didn’t, and I never have.
I’ve read it so many times that it has become inked onto my brain like a well-known fairy tale, especially the day that everything changed for him.
It began like any other at Moorings. There was the usual carnival of weather. The gathering for prayers in the sitting room. The various shades of gloom moving about the house like extra guests. But after supper an unexpected burst of evening sunshine had drawn him out of the house and he had been taken by a sudden urge to go down to the sea.
For a number of reasons, he noted, he had never been there before. He had always been rather put off by the local stories about the vagaries of the tides and in any case to reach the sea meant traversing the marshland by a road that seemed to be barely there, inundated as it was by overspill from the rain-swollen pools. And when he got to the shoreline, what would he find? Surely there would be little of interest. Only sludge and what the sea had left behind. He feared it would be a waste of time, which led him to consider the other main reason why he had never gone. Time was his gift to his parishioners when they stayed at Moorings and it wouldn’t be fair of him to take it back. It was important that he was on call, so to speak.
But, the compulsion to go to the sea wouldn’t leave him. It felt as strong as any demand he had ever had from God. There was no option, then, but to put on his coat, take his notebook and go and answer Him. It was, he supposed, the mere fact that he had never been there before that made the call so powerful. For wasn’t it the responsibility of Christians to seek, to move forward, to be missionaries? Not to take God with them to new lands like a trading commodity, but to make Him manifest there. To raise Him out of the land. God was already everywhere. People needed only to notice Him.
He was sure that God would walk with him on the sand, give him His guidance and explain the lessons he needed to take back to Saint Jude’s. He would tell him what he needed to put into the spiritual alms boxes of those who hadn’t been able to come on the pilgrimage and had missed out on the special attention God had conferred upon those who had made the effort. Surely for the good of the parish, his fellow pilgrims wouldn’t begrudge him an hour alone. They would understand the importance.
He thought of himself as a shepherd in one of those pre-Raphaelite paintings, drowsing under the dapple of an ancient tree, his thoughts taken away by the flowers and the dancing insects to higher things or nothing. His sheep down the hillside out of his immediate protection but safe enough to roam the pastures for a time unattended. Yes, they would understand.
But if it was God’s will that he should go to the sea, what was that apprehension that still dogged him as he started off across the marsh road? It was the feeling that he had disturbed something. The growing unease that the marshes were somehow aware of his presence. It was, he wrote, a dark and watchful place that seemed to have become adept at keeping grim secrets; secrets that were half heard in the whispered shibboleths that passed from one bank of dry reeds to the other.
It reminded him of an illustration of the Styx in the book of Greek history and legend he had had as a boy — his only book, fatter than the family Bible on the mantelpiece. And what stories he had found between the pasteboard covers. Perseus, Theseus, Icarus. What about Xerxes the Persian king, who had tried to bridge the Hellespont in order to crush the Greeks? Or Narcissus kneeling by his woodland pool? Or Charon, the pilot of Hades? He would have felt at home here, old Charon. Drifting through the marshes in his coracle.
He inspected his feelings again — that was, after all, why he had come — and found that he was not actually afraid, nor was it really apprehension. It was more a nervous excitement. Whatever lay in wait here, watching him, was nothing so malevolent. It was evidence of God. He scribbled down a quote from Psalms that came to mind.
Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
let the sea roar, and all that fills it.
There was nothing here that should make him wary, only glad. This corner of England was theirs, something they alone had discovered and had been blessed in the finding. In the springtime God was in the wheatfields and the pasturelands; He was in the rain and in the sunlight that followed and glossed every dripping leaf and branch. He was in the cry of the lambs and in the little cups of life the swifts built in the eaves of old barns. And down here on the beach, even though it was bleak and deserted, God was still at work. Here was the wild God who made nature heave and bellow. The violent shadow that followed Jesus through his tender ministry and could test men in an instant with water and wind. But if the weather should turn, there was nothing to be afraid of. There would be a goodness in His purging. A better world made from the wreck of the old.
Once he realised this, the marshes seemed to let down their guard. He noted the birds that he would not normally have seen up at Moorings, and never in London. Coots. Shelducks. An egret, brilliantly white dipping for the water snails he had seen clinging to the bullrushes.
Further out over the marsh, he saw a cuckoo being mobbed by a squabble of little brown birds. Reed buntings, most likely. He had read that cuckoos liked to use their nests most of all for their arch deception, secluded as they were and woven so beautifully into soft chalices that kept the eggs from the worst of the weather.
As it turned out, the road was not nearly so flooded as it had looked from the house. The water had only washed across the surface and it was clear and still, like a thin mirror reflecting the icy horseheads of cumulus above him, their edges crisp against the blue. If he stood still long enough, he observed, one had the sensation of looking down into the sky, with infinity under one’s feet. A strange sense of vertigo that he disturbed after a moment by breaking the puddle with his toe and moving on.
The shadow cast by the dunes was lengthening and he found himself walking in shade well before the tarmac give way to sand.
There must be something about sand that invites a person to put themselves directly into contact with it. To walk on it in boots or shoes seems a waste almost. He saw fit to make a note of the fact that he had taken off his shoes and turned up the bottoms of his trousers anyway.