practised smoothness.
He must already have spoken those same words countless thousands of times in his lifetime. He was a young man, in his early thirties: he had served as a chaplain during the war. Christopher wondered what he thought of while he prayed, of Christ stretched out on the wooden frame of his consecrated life, nailed to him, hand to hand, foot to foot? Of the solemnity of these, his daily actions? Of his priestly role, ordained to bind and loose, to curse and bless? Or did he think of his dinner, of turnip and meat pie and roasted potatoes swimming in thick gravy?
To an astute observer, it would have been obvious at a glance that
Christopher Wylam was an Englishman who had spent little time in
England. He seemed ill-at-ease in his winter clothes, and his skin
still retained much of the colouring that can only be
obtained in warmer climates. His fair hair had been bleached by the sun and was swept back from a high, mournful forehead. There were wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, finely etched lines radiating towards the temples like filaments spun from a spider’s web. The eyes themselves were dark and heavy-lidded, yet touched by a depth and clarity that caught others unawares. One sensed perhaps it was only a trick of the candlelight that his eyes were closed to what was happening in the church and opened on to other, more alien vistas.
He looked round the small church. Not many had ventured out this evening. Men and women and restive children filled the front pews, some genuinely pious, others there from force of habit or a sense of duty. He himself came for William’s sake and perhaps as a penance for his betrayal of Elizabeth.
The priest had broken the Host and taken the Body of Christ.
He lifted the chalice and drank the consecrated wine, the blood of God, the blood of Christ, the blood of the world, red with redemption.
Christopher imagined how the wine must taste, imagined it transformed into blood, and he felt a sour bile rising in his throat.
Father Middleton had preached of Christ’s coming and prayed that the peace of Christmas might remain throughout the coming year; but Christopher had no welcome for the pale god-child of Christmas. There was no celebration in his heart tonight, only a dull anger that REGAINED against God and His season of specious joy There was silence as the priest raised a fragment of the Host and held it high before the congregation.
“Ecce Agnus Dci, behold the Lamb of God,” he said, ‘ecce qui tollit peccata mundi, behold him who takes away the sins of the world.”
One by one, the congregation rose and made for the altar, weighed down with sins, all but the children. Christopher stood up and followed William to join the line of waiting sinners. An old man knelt and opened his mouth, tongue partly extended to receive God’s body.
Corpus Domini nostn .. .
So many sins, thought Christopher, as he watched the silver paten flash in the candlelight. The Host touched the old man’s tongue. Mortal sins, venial sins, the seven deadly sins. Sins of commission and omission, the sins of pride and lust and gluttony, sins of the flesh, sins of the mind, sins of the spirit. Sins of the eye, sins of the hearing, sins of the heart.
Jesu Christi .. .
He knelt and opened his mouth. He felt the wafer touch his lips, dry, tasteless, forlorn. . custodial ammam tuam in vitam aeternam. Amen.
When Elizabeth had died, something in him had followed her.
He and William had visited her grave earlier that day, a little, snow-covered mound among so many behind the church. She belonged to the earth now. He remembered the funeral the frost, the ground hard like iron, the spades futile, out of season, the black horses, their breath hanging naked and abandoned in the thin winter air.
He remembered her as she had been in those last two months:
pale and feverish by turns, remote, her face turned to the wall, intensely conscious of death’s approach. There was nothing sculpted or romantic about her passage from the world, nothing fine or ethereal: just a young woman racked with pain, just blood and sputum, and in the end decay. After her death, men had come and burned her clothes and the furniture in her bedroom and scraped the walls as though they harboured some deadly miasmatic force. She had been thirty-one.
For two months, he had sat by her bedside holding her hand;
and for two months he had been conscious that they had become strangers to one another. She had died in his arms, but a nurse would have done as well. More than a war lay between them: in their world, love was as hard to come by as forgiveness. They had met in Delhi eleven years earlier, at the first dance of the winter season. She had come out with the “Fishing Fleet’ the annual contingent of eligible young ladies in search of husbands and had stayed behind as Mrs. Wylam. He had not loved her Fishing Fleet girls did not expect love but he had learnt to care for her.
He sat down in his pew again. At the altar, the priest purified the chalice and began to recite the Antiphon: “Ecce Virgo conapiet et panel filium. Behold a Virgin shall conceive and bear a son.”
In another month, Christopher would be forty, but he felt older.
His generation what there was left of it was already old: young
old men to rule a decaying Empire and heal the breaches left by war. He shuddered. There would be another war in Europe. A year ago, the thought would have left him cold. But now he had a son to fear for.
Unlike so many who had fought in the trenches in France and Belgium, Christopher’s mind and body were intact. But his own war, that dark, secret and dirty war whose details he was not even permitted to speak of, had changed him. He had returned with his body whole and his spirit in tatters: cold, cold and lonely, and the dusts of India choking him, filling his throat and chest and nostrils with dry and bitter odours.
Elizabeth’s death so soon after his return had made of that change a permanent and frozen thing, hard, calcified in the blood, ineradicable. It consisted in part of the obvious things that came through war and death: bitterness, a loss of joy, a certain coldness of the affections, grief written large, a deep sense of futility. But there were other feelings too, feelings that surprised him: a profound sense of human worth under all the tawdriness, compassion both for the men he had killed and for himself in his former ruthlessness, patience to accept what he had come to believe was inevitable. At times he dreamed of tall white mountains and cool, wave less lakes. And he spent a lot of time with William.
The priest read the last Gospel, final prayers were said, vespers were sung, and the service came to its appointed end. Christopher took William’s hand and led him out of the glittering church into the darkness. It was the Sunday before Christmas, but he found it hard to believe that God would ever return to earth.
They did not notice the car waiting in the shadows further down the street.
“Christopher.”
He turned to see a figure approaching from the side door of the church.
Father Middleton, still in his cassock, was making towards them.
“Good evening, Father. What can I do for you?”
“I’d like to talk with you, Christopher, if I may. Could I walk with you a little? Would you mind?”
The priest was shivering slightly from the cold. His thin cassock was more a spiritual than a physical garment. But he was a strong man who made a point of defying the elements when he could.
Christopher liked him: he made no show of piety and had helped after Elizabeth’s death by steering well clear of all talk of the blessed souls in paradise.
“Perhaps we could talk in the church,” suggested Christopher.
“It’s cold for you out here.”
Father Middleton shook his head firmly.
“Nonsense, Christopher. I won’t die. You’ve both got some way to go. And I only want a few words anyway: just along Hencotes past the Sele, then I’ll leave you and get back to my little fire.”
Christopher nodded and they set off. He felt his son’s small hand in his, warm and fragile, the frosted snow giving beneath his feet, the fog gathering force beyond the limits of the flickering gas lamps The presence of the priest made him self-conscious. Somewhere behind them, a car door opened and closed in the darkness.
“I’ve been thinking,” said the priest, ‘that it may be time to put up a permanent memorial to our war dead. I thought perhaps a small chapel in their honour, dedicated to the Virgin. Nothing ostentatious. Just a quiet place
