The church showed no trace of the confusion Alexander had found when he strayed into it those weeks previously. The pews were up, the choir-stalls were up, the pulpit was up – not only up, but with the appearance of haying been up for an indefinite time. The renovators’ orders had been to produce something as indistinguishable as could be from the interior to be seen in the photograph given them as their guide, and they had accordingly attacked the pine boards with chisels, drills, hammers, adzes, had stained them, rubbed ash and tea-dregs into them, stained them again; relays of men in cleated boots had run up and down the pulpit stairs. Above, missing or damaged panes of the Victorian stained glass had been replaced by window glass (of indifferent quality) overlaid with semi-transparent emulsions. Great care had been taken, on the whole rather successfully, to duplicate the tints and shades of the surviving parts, but if those craftsmen of old could have seen the reconstructions of the non-surviving parts, all supposedly conceived in a spirit of scrupulous adherence to the pictorial and devotional values of their period, they might have been very much surprised. The organ, on the other hand, having been left more or less undamaged except by rot and rust, closely approximated to its former self, in appearance at least, though erratic wiring behind the pistons had produced some sudden loud noises when soft ones had been expected and vice versa, together with unintended moments of complete silence, in the opening voluntary. Still, it led the choir safely enough into the first hymn.
‘He who would valiant be
‘Gainst all disaster,
Let him in constancy
Follow the Master.’
The choir, trained by Russian masters, stiffened with Russian singers, performed well, keeping the voices balanced, giving full value to every note, holding the tempo at the end of each verse. Scattered among the congregation some old voices began to join in, most of them with the air, one at least with the bass part, powerfully and accurately rendered. Bit by bit others picked up the melody. To Joseph Wright, standing near the back with Kitty at his side, it seemed something he had always known, a part of his childhood, even though he could never have heard it in public after the age of three. The tune he understood, felt thoroughly at home with; the words were a different matter, set out in full as they were on the replicated sheet before him.
‘Who so [sic] beset him round
With dismal stories?
But they themselves confound…
Why was it thought interesting that the kind of man who would be brave however disastrous the situation became would also be proof against mere discouragement and dismal stories? And why was the question of the identity of the dismal-story-tellers raised only to be instantly dropped? And the line about the people cursing (confounding) themselves was… but the main drift was clear. Brave men were being encouraged to make a pilgrimage, to travel to some spot where a saint was said to have been executed or a miracle performed, the pilgrimage being under the direction of a priest or parson known as the Master. Such pilgrims were evidently subjected to verbal abuse and disheartening accounts of conditions on the journey. Well…
‘Then fancies flee away!
I’ll fear not what men say,
I’ll labour night and day
To be a pilgrim.’
Of course! The pilgrimage was frowned on by the authorities, perhaps actually forbidden, but the doughty Christian would make good his right to go on it just the same, undeterred by the fear that reports of this might reach their ears. So the poem was not so much about a literal pilgrim as about the duty of following one’s convictions, which, Wright supposed, made it a religious poem even though it nowhere referred to God. Admirable as its theme certainly was, if it was at all typical of what his parents’ generation had sung in church some of the early Russian measures had at any rate not been reasonless.
What had others in the congregation made of the hymn? They had clearly enjoyed the singing as such, producing, along with the choir in unison, a quite impressive body of sound in the last verse. Their expressions as they settled back in their seats were comfortable, pleased, expectant of further sober enjoyment. He could see no hint of triumph at a freedom restored or a gesture of defiance, however small, however permissible, offered the oppressor. Jim Hough, Frank Simpson and their families, the rest of them and their families, looked to Wright very much as their forbears might have looked when at evensong, in one sense peculiarly so, for the dark suits the men wore, the bowler hats and gloves they carried, the women’s long dresses and wide-brimmed hats, had been carefully copied from another photograph, one taken almost a century before, in 1937, of a crowd of people leaving this church after a service. The clothes had been mass-produced by local labour from cheap sub-materials and in some cases were already starting to come apart.
‘I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Amen.
There was a prolonged rumbling and rustling as, one after the other, members of the congregation caught on to the idea of kneeling. Glover spoke alone from the chancel.
‘The Lord be with you.’
‘And with thy spirit,’ responded those of his hearers who could read.
‘Lord, have mercy upon us.’
‘Christ, have mercy upon us.’
‘Lord, have mercy upon us.
To Kitty Wright, what then followed was relatively familiar, a piece of old church ritual in which people gave particulars of what they expected God to do for them every day. What had been said earlier interested her more: the list that began with the Holy Ghost. That was the third Christian god, about whom even less seemed to be known than about God the Father; a sinister figure, even scaring if taken seriously, but she remembered reading somewhere that a great point of religions had been their scaring parts. The holy Catholic Church puzzled her for no reason she could have named, so she went on to the communion of saints. Communion of course had been another old church ritual, with which saints had no doubt had something to do. The final three items were plain enough in a sense, though the inclusion of the resurrection of the body was another mystery, given that it could actually be seen to be impossible in a way that the forgiveness of sins, for instance, could not. But the whole catalogue was very odd – remote and fanciful. It made sense to believe in keeping oneself to oneself, in divorce for unhappy couples, in a hot-water-bottle on cold nights; to do so might be of use in each case; that could be argued about. But what difference could it make to think the Holy Ghost advisable, to be in favour of the life everlasting? How had they come to recommend things like that? And yet men and women had died for the right to say they thought well of them. Incomprehensible; though it should be said that these days no one died for anything.
A girl who Kitty rather thought was Glover’s granddaughter went and led him to the foot of the pulpit stairs and put his hand on the rail. Slowly but without a false step he completed the ascent and faced the congregation. The nave was full of flowers: yellow, bronze and orange chrysanthemums, white and pink dahlias, gladioluses of all those colours. Glover could not see them as such; he saw vague variegated patches, but he had been told of their presence often enough. What he had not been told (because there was nobody to tell him) was that by the standards of another time the blooms were puny and undergrown, not diseased, just uncared-for. If he had known this he would still have been glad they were there. The church was almost completely silent, but he was necessarily unaware of that too. He tried to pitch his voice at the level established as satisfactory at the run-through the previous evening; one could not be expected to carry that sort of thing in the mind after fifty years.