Lady Myre took to the idea but wanted an audience. On the Shaw Savill Line she’d played to a packed theatre every night, she said. And in No Sex, Please, We’re British the queue for returns in Huddersfield had stretched halfway down Queen’s Street. ‘Bums on seats,’ she said, ‘that’s what’s needed.’ There was a reason why the theatres were full and the churches empty: people were having a better time at the theatre. As for the Bible, she’d been incarcerated by herself in enough hotel rooms with iffy TVs to know it wasn’t an easy read. How could you get excited about a book called Leviticus? All that wrath of God and plagues.
She called her sermon ‘The Second Coming’. I asked if that was a good idea in the light of the current sex charges. She said I was a naughty mousey. She printed out a flyer and we delivered it to all the houses:
THE SECOND COMING
11 a.m.
Come to Church this Saturday and hear Lady Myre’s
Views on this Perennial Problem.
Lady Myre is not Representative of Any Known Religion.
Free Gifts, Singing, Dancing.
None of the defendants showed up. I wondered if they feared a stitch-up. The policemen sat in the back row and looked more formal than usual. Wayne was there and his wife. Hank began with church business: the times of forthcoming Bible studies, the rota for polishing the pews. Lady Myre was late and the pre-school-age children restive. Her entrance was calculated. She wore a sort of tunica alba and a headpiece that seemed like a cross between a mitre and a bicycle helmet. She looked like Edna Everidge impersonating a bishop. She distributed tambourines and maracas and offered what she called ‘a warm warm welcome’, then took off with the song ‘Lord, I’m Coming Home’:
Coming home, coming home, never more to roam;
Open wide thine arms of love, Lord, I’m coming home.
As ever, she brought more than herself to the situation. The mood grew lively, though uncontrolled, and Damian who was three became overzealous with his tambourine. He couldn’t be dissuaded from banging and rattling it inappropriately, then cried at an effort to take it from him.
Her sermon was disappointing: anecdotal and discursive. She went on about meeting Sir Roland on Riis Beach. I noted that the story changed with retelling and the frenzied Pekinese stealing the bathing hat had become a Yorkshire terrier. ‘I believe in destiny,’ Lady Myre said. ‘Che sera sera, whatever will be will be.’ She started singing again in her operatic soprano. The bewildered congregation joined in, ‘The future’s not ours to see. Che sera sera.’
I pondered the confusion of opposed ideas: God, or no God, chance or predetermination, chaos or linear narrative. Not for the first time I felt relief at the one certainty of death. Lady Myre talked of her search for her half-brother. Once again I doubted the existence of a Garth or a Sir Roland. She said perhaps she was a second coming. Why else would she have holed up in such a peculiar place? She always travelled with Explore where everything was done for one. All she’d ever wanted was to spread a little happiness. She jiggled from side to side with the palms of her hands facing us:
Even when the darkest clouds are in the sky
You mustn’t sigh and you mustn’t cry,
Spread a little happiness as you go by.
There were guffaws from the congregation, murmurs and shuffling. Lady Myre was undeterred. There’d been, she said, in her country England a very wonderful lady prime minister, the first ever, who was inspired by Saint Francis of Assisi:
Where there is hatred let me sow love,
Where there is darkness, light,
Where there is sadness, joy.
That, Lady Myre said, was how she felt too. Then she led the singing for another of her gospel songs, if that’s what they were:
We’re little black sheep who’ve gone astray,
Baa-aa-aa!
Gentlemen wankers out on the spree,
Damned from here to Eternity.
God ha’ mercy on such as we,
Bah! Yah! Bah!
Then it got out of hand. There was worse than murmuring from the visitors, and Damian couldn’t be constrained on his pew. He marched up and down, banged and rattled his tambourine and shouted ‘Baa! Yah! Bah!’ I heard the word ‘Blasphemy’. The two policemen moved to help Lady Myre from the platform. Did we know, she shouted, that those lines were composed by the famous English poet Rudyard Kipling? ‘That’s enough,’ Ed the Scottish policeman said and took her arm.
‘Wait,’ she said. She scooped a handful of beads from a white bag and threw them into the congregation, such as it was. There was a shriek from one of the social workers, who thought they were a sort of explosive. The beads rolled down the aisle and along the pews. Nola and the children scrambled for them. Lady Myre was hurried from the church. ‘Hands off, young man,’ she said. ‘I’m Lady Myre.’
The islanders went home. I congratulated her on a spirited performance.
‘Was I moving?’ she asked.
‘Intriguing,’ I said. ‘But it’s gentlemen rankers, not wankers.’
She looked nonplussed and said she knew a fair number of wankers but what were the others? I told her I believed they were officers who’d been promoted from the ordinary ranks of foot soldiers. She said Roley’s friend Sir Anthony Polworth had taught her the words and he had a soft ‘r’.
Over lunch of pickfish and sweet potatoes Rosie’s good cheer seemed forced. Hank ate in silence. I feared they were offended. I talked of general things: ham radio links, the dried-banana business, but they remained wary and reserved, as if any exchange of niceties might be a trap.
And then it happened. Early one September morning after a night of bugs, the usual ghostly visiting from Lady M. and concern over when a ship might call, over the intercom came a man’s voice with a German accent. ‘My name is Kurt. I am a lone yachtsman. I am from
