The Fabric of Sin

There were crossroads in her life.

‘Do you want to drive, then?’ Merrily said.

PART TWO

This is wild frontier country with

an aura of barbarians roaming over

the adjacent border …

Simon Jenkins, on Garway England’s Thousand Best Churches

14 As Above …

What Jane knew about the Templars came, of course, out of paganism.

Those difficult months when she’d been a teenage goddess-worshipper, slipping out into the vicarage garden at night to make her devotions to the Lady Moon. Partly a rebellion thing — OK, understandable in an intelligent, imaginative kid who’d been dragged away to the unknown village where her mother had become a low-paid, low- level employee of the boring, set-in-its-ways, male-dominated, hierarchical Church of England.

Jane’s paganism: partly about giving Christianity a good kicking.

Merrily watched her driving, back straight, hands textbook on the wheel, eyes unblinking. Remembering the all-time-low, a couple of years ago, with the heat of the old Aga at her back, a white-faced Jane rigid in the kitchen doorway, and their relationship trampled into the flagstones.

Nobody gives a shit for your Church. Your congregations are like laughable. In twenty years you’ll be preaching to each other. You don’t matter any more, you haven’t mattered for years. I’m embarrassed to tell anybody what you do.

The rage had evaporated, tensions long since eased, but Jane’s pagan instincts remained — tamer now, certainly, but still feeding something inside her that was hungry for experience; up in her attic apartment she was still reading books about old gods.

‘Like, for centuries it’s been accepted that the Templars were the guardians of arcane secrets — including the Holy Grail. I mean, who better? They were spiritual warriors. They put their lives on the line to protect sacred truths. They were like … the SAS with soul?’

‘Who says the SAS have no soul?’

‘Unlike the Templars, however, they’re not known for their monastic celibacy,’ Jane said.

They’d driven in from the east, less of a back door to Garway and better roads for Jane, who was hoping to take her driving test before Christmas. The sun was low and intense, a searchlight spraying the yellowing leaves on the turning trees. When you weren’t driving, you got a more spectacular overview … or underview, maybe; all you could see of Garway Hill itself was the top of the radio mast on its summit.

Changing down for a sudden incline, Jane let the clutch slip.

‘Sorry …’

‘It’s OK. Take your time.’

Jane, red-faced, pulled the car out of its shudder, the Volvo wheezing and protesting like an old dog being dragged out for a walk by a child who didn’t understand.

‘So if The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail concept is that the Grail is actually the suppressed feminine principle as, like, enshrined by Mary Magdalene, who was Jesus Christ’s other half … and don’t look at me like that, Mum.’

‘You don’t know how I’m looking at you, your eyes are firmly on the road.’

‘I can feel the self-righteous hostility.’

‘It’s not self-righteous and it’s not hostility. It’s just that all that’s been discredited. Even the authors are now saying they were just testing a theory.’

‘It doesn’t change the fact that Mary Magdalene, whether or not she was Mrs Christ, represents the goddess figure which male-dominated Christianity suppressed.’

Jane’s debating skills had become formidable, but how many times had they been here?

‘Look … I accept that there may be a hidden feminine principle. What I don’t accept is Jesus and Mary Magdalene being an item, starting a bloodline. For which, when you look into it, there’s no real evidence at all.’

‘Aw, Mum, why do you have to deny the poor guy a sex life?’

‘There you go. The guy. If he was just a guy, just another prophet who didn’t rise again, didn’t ascend into heaven … if you want to deny his divinity…’

‘I don’t want to deny anybody’s divinity, I’m into divinity big time. But I don’t see why women shouldn’t have a share of it, whether it’s Mary Magdalene or the Virgin Mary.’

‘We won’t argue now,’ Merrily said. ‘Take this bit slowly.’

Maybe she ought to be driving instead. The lanes were proving unpredictable, and there were more of them than she’d figured. More to Garway, too, than you imagined; flushed by the low sun, it seemed like a remote and separate realm. Like Cornwall was to England. Maybe the Duchy had recognized that aspect.

Jane glanced at a signpost which seemed to have been twisted round, so that Garway was pointing into a field.

‘So Garway and Garway Hill are like separated, right?’

‘Looks like it. I thought the church and a few cottages nearby were the centre of the community, but apparently not. You get these separate clusters … kind of disorienting.’

After half a mile or so, the landscape broadened out and they were into a random scatter of modern housing and an open stretch of common with a children’s play area. Across the lane from the common was a pub of whitewashed stone with a swinging sign: a full moon in a deepening twilight sky.

THE GARWAY MOON.

‘Cool sign,’ Jane said. ‘Artistic. Kind of pagan.’

‘Why does the moon always have to be pagan?’

‘You tell me. Does the Bible have much to say about it?’ Jane relaxed into the driver’s seat. ‘This is very much my kind of place, Mum. It’s like frontier country. On the edge.’

‘It is frontier country. Those hills are Wales.’

‘I actually meant frontier in the deeper sense. The Knights Templar move in, monks with horses and swords, and they stamp their presence on the whole area. Infuse it with mystery. I mean like, why out here? Unless … maybe it was considered a really good, obscure place to conceal secrets, practise arcane … practices.’

‘Or they were just given the land. Maybe no better reason than that.’

‘There’s always a better reason,’ Jane said.

‘For you, flower, there always has to be.’

‘Don’t call me “flower”. And don’t tell me you’re not curious, too.’

‘I can be curious without having to subscribe to the whole fashionable Gnosticism thing.’

Jane slowed, as the road sloped past a modern-ish primary school on one side and a run-down village hall on the other.

‘I don’t see what’s so wrong with Gnosticism. It’s just saying that faith is not enough. The Gnostics wanted to know. They wanted direct experience of the reality of … something out there. God.