They lost.
As an adult, a modern civilised man, Gallio almost believes that reason will prevail. Sometimes, though, the instinctive equations reassert themselves, and no rational argument will deny them. We should pray for victory in the battle. Sex is the opposite of death.
Claudia sits at the end of her bed wrapped in a hotel bath towel. A smaller towel is around her hair like a turban.
‘You haven’t moved.’
His eyes settle on her damp neck like fingers, then move across her reddened ears and along her jawline to her chin. This is so inconvenient for him, if he wants to be good.
‘I need to wash my hands.’
‘Again?’
Cassius Gallio goes to the bathroom and washes his hands. He comes back out, and in the last half-hour between them they have used three of the four guest-room towels provided, thus hastening the end of the world. Gallio can’t bring himself to care, not after the last few days. He lies on his side, watches Claudia inspect her toenails.
‘One more day,’ she says, ‘then we move on.’
She bumps herself up the bed and sits back against the headboard, picks up her book and puts on her reading glasses. Reads for a bit, looks across at him over the frames. ‘I was thinking. If you ever come to Rome there are places I could show you.’
‘I know Rome pretty well.’
‘Take your mind off the disciples.’ Claudia has given up on packing. If Gallio isn’t leaving today, neither is she. ‘The city changes. Changes all the time.’
‘But also stays the same.’
Gallio could fuck her now. Reach for her, exploit his instinct that life wins out over death. He’ll have to deceive her a little, pretend he likes her more than he does, that he’s always liked her, suggest that sex between them is therefore somehow inevitable, and it is right and good. His feelings for her have a past and a future, that’s the message to convey, even though he’s not sure what those feelings are.
He wonders if he ever loved his wife, or Valeria. If he did he loved them and he lost them, but he was young, and the earlier love is lost the less serious it is, like chickenpox. He moved on and he was lucky because losing love later, as a grown-up, can scar the victim for life. People can actually die.
He’d be a fool to fall in love now. Wanting Claudia is probably connected with Valeria, and with his younger self. He wishes he didn’t think so much.
Still, Gallio could fuck her now. He swings off the bed and waits until he’s sure his feet are making solid contact with the floor. Then he stands up. He locks his hands behind his neck and pushes his head back against them.
‘To work!’ he says. He flings out his arms. The disciples of Jesus have no monopoly on virtue.
They’re in Caistor the next day, and still they haven’t packed. Cassius Gallio has a pain in his left shoulder from the single bed, and at some point in his sleep he pulled out the stitches above his eye. He checks in the bathroom mirror, tugs out the one remaining stitch, and disinfects the seeping wound with aftershave. He is not entirely indifferent to the future.
Claudia spends time on the phone to Valeria, excusing the delay, proposing fresh explanations for Baruch’s excessive behaviour. Stress disorder, exhausted in the line of duty. Also, they need another day or so because two Jewish corpses on the same night in Caistor, one of them a disciple of Jesus, is not routine police work. There are loose ends.
‘Yes, yes,’ Claudia promises, ‘as soon as we can. We can’t leave any sooner than that.’
Valeria phones back. What the hell are they playing at, really?
We’re not playing, Claudia thinks, we’re being sensitive to each other’s needs at a difficult time. Not what Valeria will want to hear. ‘We’re questioning Bartholomew. He lacks physical strength for the return journey.’
She could go on, and does. Bartholomew is frail from his coma, and without careful handling could suffer a relapse — a lie Claudia tells beautifully, because most of the time they can’t even find him. Bartholomew is out, he’s about, doing the work that disciples do.
Meanwhile, his protectors discover that in the slowness of Caistor a Speculator can avoid the headache of Jesus and global terrorism and Valeria’s complex casework. The displaced Romans enjoy bright English afternoons, savouring this time between horrors when children can walk home safely from the grammar school. In the market square a parish councillor raffles tickets for Caistor in Bloom. Under striped tarpaulins, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, the market has tables of vegetables, meat, pet food, and Cassius Gallio honestly can’t see that the world is going to end, not soon, not here in provincial England. Simon the disciple of Jesus may as well not have been sawn in half here. Life continues as if he never existed.
At the church on Sunday Bartholomew speaks from the pulpit, unaffected by Simon’s death. He is confident that what will be will be, which seems to include his return to health and a renewed commitment to Jesus. Cassius Gallio slides into a pew near the back, and feels a twinge of metaphysical envy: to feel a sense of destiny would be a true consolation. He thinks about his frailties and his failures and corrects himself — but only if that destiny were favourable.
He listens to Bartholomew advising the older churchgoers not to be scared of dying. Then Bartholomew reassures the middle-aged who are frightened of the death of the old, and, in smaller numbers, he consoles the young frightened by the fear of the middle-aged. Bartholomew the preacher promises to honour the strongest and most urgent human wish: that we should never die. In exchange, the parishioners of Caistor bake cakes and sort jumble at the town hall on a Thursday. Simon is dead, yet their belief in Jesus and eternal life remains alive.
Caistor already has a stipendiary vicar, a bearded graduate of Sunday schools, who repeats stories he knows from Simon. Bartholomew stands aside with clasped hands and hears about the miracles of Jesus, the sayings of Jesus, the death and resurrection and ascension of Jesus. James, Jude, Thomas, Philip, James, now Simon himself. All eyewitnesses, all dead, but the stories live on. The parishioners of Caistor sing ‘Thine is the Glory’.
In the high-ceilinged Church of St Peter and St Paul the hymn resonates with longing fulfilled, and in a moment of weakness Cassius Gallio wants everything they believe to be true. Jesus promises justice and love and eternal life. That would be a lovely and perfect solution to injustice and hate and death, thank you, but from experience he has his doubts.
After the preaching and the singing, Bartholomew attends to the misfortunate of Caistor. Gallio watches and learns, loyal to his vocation as a Speculator, as does Claudia. They tell Valeria this is what they’re doing, and this is what they do. Bartholomew picks up where Simon left off. He performs his small repertoire of country doctor tricks, easing the ailments of the rural poor. Cassius Gallio hands him bandages and presses him for a medical opinion on Jesus.
‘Up on the cross the point of a spear went into his side. That’s right, isn’t it? If Jesus bled from the wound then at that stage of the execution his heart must still have been beating, correct?’
Bartholomew is dressing an ulcer on the leg of an immigrant farm labourer. ‘Could have been. I’d need more information to confirm a diagnosis.’
‘So clinically he was still alive?’
Bartholomew shines a penlight into the milky eyes of an ancient woman who as a child was blessed by a retired naval chaplain who’d opened a gate for Queen Victoria. Everyone tells him a story.