Picking a route that wound through the sprouts of marram grass, he climbed up the slope, feeling the wonderful collapse of it under his feet. The burn it put into his thighs. The coldness of the sand when he broke the surface. He was seventy-three years old, but he felt like a child again.
When he reached the top, he was quite worn out with the effort and stood catching his breath and taking in the panorama. He recalled the instruction given to him years before by his tutor at Saint Edmund’s College — a keen amateur naturalist, like him.
‘Look first,’ he had told him. ‘And then see. Be patient and you will notice the workings of nature that most people miss.’
It was a piece of advice that he had taken as it was meant — as a metaphor for focusing on the interdependencies of God’s world, yes, but also one that he could apply practically in his role as a priest.
He had learnt to watch his parishioners closely, to monitor their progression through the sacraments so that he was better able to correct any deviation from the road that would lead them to heaven. It was his duty. It was the fulfilment of his calling. Their road was his road also. If they found peace at last, then so would he.
He watched and waited and began to see the way the grass moved in the wind, the way the wind came with all the subtleties of a voice. He started to see how the colours of the sea changed as light followed shadow across its vast surface. Turquoise, cobalt, slate, steel. It was quite beautiful. As was the natural geometry of the horizon as it bisected the sea and the sky and invited the eye to be drawn along its length — from the distant industry spiking out of the Fylde peninsula to the south, across to Coldbarrow with its empty heath and its empty house — across to the Furness shipyards faint and grey.
There were the genteel seaside towns full of white houses further away up the coast, and beyond them the Cumbrian mountains rose in severe crags that bared their teeth in the lowering sun.
It was the gulls that made him look back to the beach. He hadn’t noticed their noise before. In fact he hadn’t been aware of them at all. He had startled them away, perhaps, as he blundered up the sand dune and now that he had been standing there for a few minutes and they knew he was no threat they had returned to feed on the stuff that had rolled in with the seaweed and driftwood and marked the stretch of the tide. It was going out now. Little by little. With each break and foam and hiss it lost its grip on the land and slipped further back. It had been a high tide, he noticed. It had come as far as the old pillbox and left a skirt of wetness around its base.
They were stupid creatures, seagulls. There was something vile about them. As there was with brattish children. The way they screeched and fought over the same scraps, even though the place was an embarrassment of riches.
They were like the people who lived in that esurient underworld, from which he had separated Saint Jude’s and its congregation successfully enough for it to seem a place of vivid contrast. The people of that Other world were not the same. They walked in darkness. They were to be pitied. And shunned if they would not change.
He carried no guilt about such defensiveness. In Romans, Paul talked about associating with the lowly, but it seemed like idealistic nonsense now. Paul’s world had gone for good and had been replaced by a vacuum. The sinful no longer worried that they would be punished by God, because God to them did not exist. And how could they be punished by an absence? Wrath and fury, when they came, were no longer attributed to any kind of divine retribution but to natural freakishness and bad luck — and so it was up to him to interpret and judge the world as it truly was. Not to play God — never to do that — but to make it clear for his parishioners that God was still present and in authority by drawing divisions between their world and the Other.
In their world, cause and effect continued. If they sinned, they confessed and were absolved. If they performed good deeds they would be rewarded in heaven. In the Other world there was nothing but inconsequence. Oh, there were people jailed and so on — he had, in his younger days visited them alclass="underline" rapists and murderers and incorrigible thieves — but for most it was only a temporary withdrawal of their liberty. They cared little, if at all, about their eternal freedom or incarceration. A manila file of forms in an office somewhere to be pulled out at the next offence was the only legacy of their sins. No heed did they pay to the entry that had been added to the greater book of reckoning.
It had been Paul’s decree that neighbour should love neighbour and this he stuck to — but only within the world he had created at Saint Jude’s. The people of the Other world would care little if he loved them or not, if he rejoiced with them or wept with them or pitied them. Paul had warned of the dangers of judging others — that only God was fit for the task — but those in the Other world needed to be shown up for what they were. And he felt qualified to judge them; they had made it easy for him to do so. Despite what Paul said, his sins — such as they were — were not like theirs. Their sins came from a greater depth entirely.
He had never left a child to die in its own filth as a mother had done in one of the high rise estates not long ago. He had never poured petrol through a pensioner’s letterbox and tossed in a match for fun. He had never come stumbling out of a vice club at four in the morning. He had never stolen anything, destroyed anything. Nor had any of his flock. He had never lusted after anything or anyone, as people in that Other world seemed to encourage and applaud.
He knew what such people would think of his relationship with Miss Bunce. She couldn’t be his housekeeper without being his lover also. It was impossible that he would have no carnal desire for her, she being so much younger than he and at his beck and call. He loved her, yes, but not in the way that the Other people understood it, for whom love could not be separated from intercourse.
Galatians, Ephesians, Peter and John. He could have picked a weapon from a vast arsenal to defend himself and show them that it was possible, an act of devotion in fact, to express God’s love in the loving of a brother or sister in Christ.
She was the most pious girl he knew. She was a beacon of light in the presbytery. She was untainted by the world that lay outside, and the proof that he had made a difference.
Indeed, all his parishioners deserved to feel like Miss Bunce. Different, loved, guided and judged. It was their reward for being held to ransom by a world that demanded the right to engage in moral brinkmanship whenever it pleased.
People talked about a permissive society, but, as he knew it, permission was something one asked for. No, this was what it was — an assault. They were being beaten into submission by morals that were the reverse of their own. He had lived a long time and had seen the world regressing. With each year that went by it seemed that people were no better than children in their petulant demands.
And children themselves were changing. Youth still had the natural rebelliousness that had been there since the time of Moses, but it seemed to have had something added to it, or forced into it — a fearlessness. No, more a detachment. He had seen it in the youngsters he had caught one evening smashing gravestones with bricks they had knocked out of the churchyard wall, a kind of emptiness in their eyes. They had looked at him as though he wasn’t quite real, or what he was saying wasn’t quite real. They had been no more than eight years old.
These weren’t just the jittery fears of an aging priest, it was a genuine feeling that all goodness and simple humility — for who on earth was humble nowadays? — had been excised from the hearts of men. He alone, it seemed, had noticed the apparent descent from depravity to depravity that had taken that Other world to a place that was unique and irreversible. There was no darkness now that couldn’t be explored or expressed.