and real religious. They go round asking her things like that she’s going to walk out on us.’
‘That’s what I’m telling you. And that’s not all. Rube says they wanted to know how many gays there are in Wilma, what proportion of the town and if they’re black or white and living together as married folk. In Wilma! That gets out it won’t just be Maybelle leaves. I’ll be going too.’
‘Oh Wally,’ said Auntie Joan and sat down heavily on the bed. ‘What are we going to do?’
Wally gave the matter some thought. ‘I guess we’d better go up the lake after all. There’s no one they can ask anything of up there. And you tell that Eva she’s got to stop them before it gets out what they’re doing. How many mixed couples of gays in Wilma? Jesus, that beats everything.’
It didn’t. That afternoon Auntie Joan had invited the Revd and Mrs Cooper over with their daughters to meet her nieces. The occasion was not a success. The Reverend enquired what they learnt about God at their school in England. Auntie Joan tried to intervene but it was no good. Samantha had summed the Revd Cooper up only too accurately.
‘God?’ she asked in a bewildered tone of voice. ‘Who is God?’
It was the turn of the Revd Cooper to look utterly bewildered. It was obvious that no one had ever put such a question to him before.
‘God? Well, I’d have to say…I’d have to say…’ he faltered.
Mrs Cooper took up the problem. ‘God is love,’ she said sanctimoniously.
The quads looked at her with new interest. This was going to be fun.
‘Do you make God?’ Emmeline asked.
‘Make God? Did you say ‘make God’?’ asked Mrs Cooper.
Auntie Joan smiled bleakly. She didn’t know what was coming but she had an idea it wasn’t going to make things easier. In fact it made things extremely unpleasant.
‘You make love and if God is love you must make him,’ said Emmeline with a seraphic smile. ‘People wouldn’t exist if you didn’t make love. That’s how babies are made.’
Mrs Cooper gazed at her in horror. She couldn’t find any answer to that one.
The Revd Cooper could. ‘Child,’ he said loudly and injudiciously. ‘You know not of what you speak. Those are the words of Satan. They are evil words.’
‘They aren’t. They’re simple logic and logic isn’t evil. You said God is love and I said–’
‘We all heard what you said,’ Eva said, drowning out the Revd Cooper. ‘And we don’t want to hear any more from you. Do you understand that, Emmy?’
‘Yes, Mummy,’ said Emmeline. ‘But I still don’t understand what God is.’
There was a long silence broken by Auntie Joan who wanted to know if anyone would like some more iced tea. The Revd Cooper silently prayed for guidance. The phrase ‘out of the mouths of babes and sucklings’ didn’t apply. These four horrible girls weren’t babes or sucklings. All the same he had his mission to pursue.
‘It says in the Bible that God created the heaven and the earth. Genesis 1:1. We are all the children of God–’ he began. Josephine interrupted. ‘It must have made a terrible noise, the Big Bang,’ she said, giving the word ‘bang’ a distinctly peculiar but unmistakably lubricious emphasis.
Eva had had enough. ‘Go to your room at once!’ she shouted as wrathfully as the Revd Cooper felt.
‘I’m only trying to find out what God is,’ said Josephine meekly.
Mrs Cooper struggled with conflicting feelings and decided that Southern hospitality should prevail. ‘Oh, it’s quite all right,’ she cooed. ‘I guess we all need to learn the truth.’
