Our whole Order had been constructed on a base more dangerous and shifting than the sands of Luskentyre themselves; everybody had been lying to everybody else! Far from being a single eruption of poison in our placid and serene environment, Allan's lies and machinations suddenly started to look like an unremarkable and even predictable continuance of a vein of evil and mendacity that had been intertwined with the roots of our Faith from the very start, and indeed which predated it. Was there no foundation of my life on which I could still rely?
I tried to comfort myself with the thought that the Community and the Order had some intrinsic merit independent of their genesis. In a sense, all I had discovered - about my Grandfather, at any rate - made no difference. The proof of our Faith's worth lay in the hearts and minds of all of us who believed, and in the commitment and dedication we displayed. Why should good not come out of evil? Was it not a sign of the ineffable bounteousness of God that They wrought the gold that was our Faith from the base and toxic ore that had been my Grandfather's violence and thievery and my grandmother's and my great-aunt's deceptions and manipulations?
It might be argued that the subsequent deceits of my grandmother and great-aunt had been the balancing wrong that had redeemed my Grandfather's original sins, that sometimes two wrongs do make a right, and that of all the things Aasni and Zhobelia might have done - reporting the find of money and Grandfather's army pay-book to the appropriate authorities being the most obvious and strictly correct - their actual course of action, intrinsically dishonest though it was and including Zhobelia's exploitation of her own Gift and my Grandfather's need for guidance, had produced entirely the best and most fruitful outcome, and a harvest of enlightenment and happiness very few avowedly good and well-intentioned acts ever yielded.
But ancestry matters in the minds of men and women, and symbols are important. To discover that Salvador had been no more than a common thief on the run after an act of violence, and realise that had he been able to find his washed-up loot he would probably have disappeared from Aasni and Zhobelia's lives, could not fail to alter the whole way people thought of my Grandfather, and by implication the Faith he had engendered. We would all feel deceived, and our beliefs cheapened.
It could be argued that the worse Grandfather had been before his conversion, the more blessed he became in comparison afterwards; God may take little credit for turning a man already good into a slightly better one, but to perform the miracle of forging a virtuous man from a bad one signified serious divine accomplishment and deserved real appreciation. But would such considerations make up for the inevitable feeling of betrayal people were bound to experience?
How many followers would we lose if this truth came out, as I had vowed to myself it must? How many more converts could we hope to gain once my Grandfather's history became common knowledge? Ought I now to renounce my earlier oath and, like my grandmother and great-aunt, conceal the ugly truth to favour the general good? What, then, would my word be worth? What self-respect could I claim for myself if a commitment, so freshly made, so vehemently sworn, could be so quickly abandoned when its consequences proved even more wide-ranging and more grave than I had anticipated?
Well, my self-respect was far from being the most important point at issue, I supposed; what mattered was the good of the Order and the Community and the spiritual well-being of the great majority of blameless people therein. I was confident that should I go back on my vow and keep my Grandfather's dreadful secret to myself, I could rest easy with such contained knowledge, and its cosseting would not contaminate or poison me.
But would it be right to incorporate what would in effect be another lie into what was already a whole tangled web of them, when the truth might sweep them all away and let us start again, righteous, uncontaminated, and without the baleful, jeopardising threat of that deceit hanging over us? And was I right - and had I the right - to assume that our Faith was so fragile it required shielding from such unpleasant facts? In the long term, might it not be better to embrace the truth regardless, and suffer whatever falling away in belief and support such a course entailed, secure in the knowledge that what - and who - remained would be true and strong and fundamentally trustworthy, and proofed - tempered -against further harm?
And should I announce, I have the Gift, only me; I am the one and the line that comes from my great-aunt, not my Grandfather? Ought I to take it upon myself to alter the whole emphasis of our Faith and point out another false belief we had previously held so dear, another area of shifting sand we had before thought immovable bedrock?
And by God, even my Gift was not unquestioned, in my own mind; here I was suffused with self-righteous anger at my Grandfather for having lied to us when there was still a question hanging over the validity of my own renown, if people only knew. The problem of action at a distance, with which I had been struggling for over a decade, took on a new, shiftier significance in the present climate of poisonous suspicion, and suddenly the hope I had clung to that I might have a gift greater than people knew of, rather than lesser, looked distinctly dubious.
'Cheer up, Isis; might never happen,' Topee's friend Mark said, winking at me across the glass-crowded table.
I gave him a tolerant smile. 'I'm afraid it already has,' I told him, and drank my beer.
I fell out of the system of buying rounds, unable and unwilling to keep up.
I went to the dance with the lads, and continued slowly drinking beer out of plastic pint containers, but my heart was not really in the proceedings. I found the music boring and the men who came up to our group to ask me to dance no more attractive than the sounds. I could not bring myself to join in the dancing even when Topee asked. Instead I found myself watching everybody else dance, reflecting what a strange and comical activity it could appear. How odd that we should get such pleasure just from moving rhythmically.
I supposed you could link the urge to dance to the sexual drive, and certainly there was both a correspondence between the regularity of the movements the two activities tended to involve and an obvious element of something between courtship and foreplay in the coming together of two people on the dance floor, but I had watched young children and very old people take part in dances at the Community and had myself danced there when I had been convinced there was no aspect of sexuality involved, and had seen the obvious delight experienced by young and old alike and felt a kind of transcendent joy in myself that I was even more sure shared nothing with carnality except the feeling that what one was experiencing was good and pleasant.
The elation I had felt while dancing, in fact, seemed to have more in common with religious ecstasy, as I understood it, than with sexual bliss; one could feel almost mystically taken out of oneself, transported to another plane of existence where things became clearer and simpler and more connected at once and one's whole being seemed suffused with peace and understanding.
Certainly this effect was difficult - and took a long time - to achieve while dancing (I thought of whirling dervishes, and African tribespeople, spinning through the night), and could only ever be a weak reflection of the intense rapture experienced by the believer… but one had to say that it would be better than nothing, if nothing was the only other choice. Perhaps there lay the explanation for the attraction so many young people obviously felt for dancing, in our increasingly Godless and materialist society.