Read by Louisa Gummer
It was the height of summer when the curate Gordon E. E. Garside unlocked the chancel safe of St Mark’s, Gloucestershire, and wrapped the communion silver in an anorak. He placed it in his backpack alongside a spare pair of underpants and a toothbrush. During the cycle from Berkshire to the Oxfordshire village of Adderbury, he stopped three times at local pubs to enjoy an ale, bought with small change from the parish collection box.
By the time he rang the bell of her house, his shirt and trousers were soaked. She spotted his red face through the keyhole with the sort of excitement that is close to fear.
“Gordon!” She wanted to put her arms around him, but found she could not.
“Hello! I would have rung ahead, but no idea where my phone has got to.”
“How did you know I’d be in?”
“A happy accident.”
He stepped inside and put down his bag. “If I could trouble you for some water, that would be grand.”
“Of course.”
“Also, like Joshua, I must unleash the flow of the Jordan,” he said, “if you’ll point me to your bathroom.”
Some minutes later he emerged, more cheerfully than before.
“How’s the curacy?”
“If I’m honest, I reckon I’m screwed,” he said, leaning against the kitchen counter to wipe his forehead with a tea-towel. “Not really cut out for the church. Gordon is such an unpriestly name. My original flaw, if you will.”
“Really? I thought it was a runaway success. The curacy, not the name.”
He had pelted straight from state school into Oxford, where the half-hearted religion of his school days had been oddly catalysed by the pressures of PPE into an apostolic exuberance. This was a sea-change which she found equal parts admirable and alien, her own religiosity never anything more than a forfeit of the pleasures she knew the church condemned. It had certainly never approached the irrepressible love that enabled Gordon to bring the standing committee of the Oxford Union, as well as half the homeless population of Broad Street, along to his small, out-of-town church, as if it was a tremendous party. After Oxford, there were two years in the city, working for Goldman Sachs and making a small killing out of buy-to-let properties on the side, breezing into ordination, before landing at St Mark’s. It had been the beginning of what the Church Times had termed the ‘Gloucestershire Revival.’ He was the sort of person, she felt, who would either end up as Prime Minister or dead in a ditch, but nowhere in between.
She had never known exactly what it was she hoped for from him: whether she wanted to be loved or simply influenced. This too was unsettling.
“So it’s going down the pan?”
“Oh,” he said obliquely, “It might be time to try my hand at something else.” He raised his hand to his mouth and suppressed a small burp, rubbing his stomach. “Alas. Indigestion.”
“There’ll be no indigestion in the new creation, I suppose.”
“That’s certainly what I teach on Sundays. Or perhaps there will still be indigestion, but the resulting upset will be rather enjoyable. ?Angels to clean it up, and so on. The book of revelation is quiet on that.”
“I’m sorry to hear about St Mark’s. Still, if it’s any consolation, word hasn’t got out.”
He smiled. “Yes. The worst characteristic of the English church is, fortunately, counterpointed with its best: as judgemental as people are of my personal failings, they’re far too polite to voice them, to me or to anyone else.”
She waited for him to explain further, which he did not. Instead, he excused himself, wandered into the living room and passed out on the sofa. Some while later, the sound of snores prompted her to discover him with an unconscious hand down his trousers, which despite appearing to be more protective than gratifying contributed to her feeling that the whole business was best concealed by a quilt. This achieved, she retired to the kitchen, unaware of the stolen silver in the hall.
He returned to full sentience around seven-o-clock, when they had a tea of cheese and crackers and crumble. For an hour, she was reminded of the qualities that had originally recommended him to the priesthood. Like Christ, Gordon had the gift of bestowing a certain dignity on whomever he was speaking to; her modest achievements in the field of service delivery co-ordination and content management appeared temporarily magnificent. Unlike Christ, however, he disappeared to the bathroom after the meal and blocked her toilet.
After tea, he unpacked the contents of his backpack in the guest-room. He felt sheepish on noticing that the sixteenth-century silverware, having survived the dissolution of the monasteries, had not fared well by his cycling.
In the last light, she showed him quickly round the village. He was particularly impressed by the Norman church. They stayed to chat in the graveyard while it became dark, and he dug around in his pocket for tobacco.
“Usually I would pipe-smoke, but I lost the pipe the other week.”
“Standards have slipped in the Church of England.”
“Indeed.”
“What’s prompted your change of heart?”
“Well. Firstly, I received a sample of wafers in the post on Friday, of two sorts; one for laypeople and one for ordinands. One wafer holier than the other perhaps. And with it, a form from our supplier enquiring how many wafers I would be requiring this quarter. And it brought to mind the peculiar sort of bureaucracy this job has become. I’m always filling in forms for the powers that be, demonstrating the efficiency of my outreach: the church, like Goldman Sachs or Starbucks, must always be expanding. Which, having worked for Sachs, I happen to be excellent at, but I don’t like myself for it. Secondly, I’m sick of all the bloody politics.”
“You knew what the Church of England was like before you went in. There’s been a five-hundred-year warning.”
Acknowledging this, he continued, “Well. Jesus died for the drunk, the desperate, the disabled. I imagine he looks down on us filing away the baptism forms and wonders if it was bloody worth it.” He licked the paper and sealed his cigarette.
“I don’t know if agnostics are allowed to say this,” she replied, “but isn’t that blasphemy?”
“There can be no blasphemy in an age that habitually disbelieves in the possibility of a god.” He exhaled and the smoke rose in a cloud around him, giving a slightly mystic air. “Anyhow, if he came back today - if he comes back today - he’s not going to bother with self-congratulatory rich fucks like me. Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, and all that. The fact is, I don’t suppose he’d be hanging out in the church.”
“What would he be doing?”
He shrugged as if the thought had only just now occurred to him. “Refugee stuff, I suppose. Calming the storm in the Mediterranean.”
It struck her that while Gordon had always taken the view that all the world’s a stage, he had now wandered into the foyer and, having bought an overpriced theatre lager, was unsure whether or not to bother with the second act.
He continued, “They say that religion is the opiate of the masses, but I must say, I’m increasingly finding that to be untrue. In fact, it’s more like an ill-judged amount of MDMA: makes one quite paranoid.”
“I wish I could say religion had ever inspired me to feel anything at all. I’ve tried.” She shrugged.
He met her eye in a moment of uncomfortable communion. “You and every other believer, at one point or another. If a thing is true, it remains true despite the wanderings of human feeling. So surely the task is not one of feeling, but of rationally discerning truth from falsity.” He exhaled and thought for a moment. “I’m a complete arse, as you know. I hope you can take some comfort from that.”
She looked at him, baffled.
He smiled. “If Jesus died for me, is it not possibly true of you too?”
She thought about this. “I don’t think you’re so bad.”
“Well, I’ve had quite a cock-up. Buying-to-let has turned out to be a poor investment, now that interest rates are rising, and I didn’t pull out in time. I’m in rather a lot of debt. So much, in fact, that my city friends have all but disowned me. Better to make a quiet break for it now, I figure. As the saying goes, desperate times, desperate measures.”
She was alarmed. “What are your desperate measures?”
“Well, no need to make a thing of it, but I think I’m on my way to France.”
“On a bicycle?”
“Yes. My uncle has a house in the South, absolute middle of nowhere. I could quite happily stay there for a while, wait for this whole thing to blow over. Let the bills pile up in Berkshire. It’ll be fine.”
When they had finished their cigarettes, they walked back along the lane to the house.
She could not sleep. It was too hot, for one thing, and the unfamiliar nicotine caused her heart to race. A small metallic crucifix, picked up on a school trip to the Sacré-Cœur, glinted distractingly in the muted light of a streetlamp. She watched the Christ-figure glued there, unable to move, and was reminded of childhood nightmares in which she could wake but not stir. She felt the same now.
What it was that had brought this figure back to her each night since childhood, arriving unrecognisably at the door, she could not say, but she knew that he no more lived in her than she in him. She had been waiting for something - she didn’t know what exactly - that had never quite arrived.
She passed the guest room on her way down to the kitchen for a drink, and in a moment of courage imagined herself opening its door. What she would do after that, she couldn’t be sure. Confess something to him? Slide into the bed?
The door remained closed.
All the birds of Oxfordshire sang on Sunday morning; when she woke, she found him at the dining room table surrounded by the detritus of an enthusiastic breakfast, bathed in the white light like an unhygienic angel. The resolutions of the previous night had dissolved.
Aware of his impending commitments at the evening service, he was brisk to the point of rudeness. She was surprised to find herself disappointed.
“You must pass on my thanks to your landlord for letting me stay here.”
“I will.”
“Thanks for passing on my thanks.”
She smiled, shyly. “Thanks for thanking me for passing on your thanks.”
“I’m pretty sure this is what St Paul meant when he told the Roman church to outdo one another in honour.” As he patted her on the arm, by way of goodbye, she was left with the usual resentment: as always, it was all very well for Gordon.
He hopped on his bike and, with a grim salute, turned his eyes to the road and the questions ahead. “See you on a dark night!” he called back, cheerfully.
He cycled off towards Berkshire, to return the silver.
(c) Frances Salter, 2018
Frances Salter is a writer and performer based in Oxford, UK. She makes left-field tunes under the band name Good Canary, which has been featured by BBC Radio 6. She is also working on a comic novel, As Though A Stranger. You can find her on Twitter as @goodcanarymusic.
Louisa Gummer is a highly experienced actor and voiceover. Work includes several roles in new Audible comedy series Slaving Away, and the audio guide for the Rotterdam Maritime Museum. Audiobooks include A Jane Austen Daydream. She can be heard saying ‘Pig Museum’ on the Stuttgart City Open Top Bus Tour.
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