‘In Memory of Our Son Mark,’ read a newer one. ‘Who Died at the Age of Twenty-One.’ The implied tragedy drew her like a tabloid headline. Who was this Mark, cut down in his prime? Agnes leaned closer to examine the inscription. He had left loving memories, apparently; all his ends tied, his bills paid, his laundry clean and folded. What had he known to make him so prepared, leaving the neat equation of himself to be applied later to the incomprehensible fact of his absence? She could see them using it, those who had known him, figuring out the arithmetic of his imaginary life. Mark would be twenty-three by now, for instance; by now, Mark would perhaps be getting his first job; now Mark would say this and do that.
It couldn’t have been easy for him, remembering his future as well as his past. She herself would have botched the job, with the muddled, sprawling sum of her parts. If, for example, a piece of masonry from the church’s crumbling roof were now to fall upon her, her disappearance would leave an uncertain taste in the mouth. They would find dirty underwear, rent demands, unfinished arguments. People would come to the door asking for that ten pounds they had lent her, that apology she never gave, that explanation for herself she had promised. Things would come up. Her parents would grow terse and resentful. She would boil beneath their surface, spoiling things. Before long, her death would begin to lend life a guilty ease. There would be more room in the car. They could watch what they liked on television. Eventually they would murder the memory of her, scratching the uncomfortable itch of her lingering absence. Mark was unscratchable, it seemed; a bunch of burning nerve ends projecting himself like an amputated leg. He was good at it. She was half in love with him already.
Agnes ambled around the hard, mud-rutted path to the door of the church. It looked shut. She had used to go in sometimes when she was a child, loving its sanctuary, the dark womb and whale-belly. She loved its mouldy smell and dank air. It was the smell of history. It told her there had been other times; that these times, too, would pass. Now she was unsure about things. She wondered if it had a door policy, or opening hours, like a pub. She leaned on the weatherbeaten wooden slab, and found that it opened easily.
Inside, the church was cold and empty, and seemed somehow frozen in an attitude of suspended action; as if, a moment before, the wooden pews had been jiggling in the aisles, the candlesticks hopping on the altar, the stained-glass saints quaffing communion wine. There was about it an aspect of unsupervision which should have provoked anarchy.
Agnes’s feet echoed on the stone slabs of the floor as she approached the altar. It was covered with a cloth like something in a morgue. Before, when she was younger, she had come here to pray; or to complain, rather, presenting a list of woes and requests to the management as if there were some kind of democratic machinery in place to deal with them. Compensation! She had wanted compensation for daily disappointments and injustices. She had believed justice would be done! Agnes almost laughed aloud at the very thought of it. She would never have guessed that growing older was merely the process through which certainties became doubts. The grey areas grew larger, more amorphous. It showed around the eyes and over the hips: a gradual yielding to disappointment, a comfortable acceptance of pain. One acquired a glazed look. Indeed, had she not begun to see in herself the re-routed wires of fear, the concealed pipes and drains of desolation? She had hovered over bottles of shampoo in supermarkets, not knowing which one to buy, something fluttering in her eye like a tic, like an absence of want, like a malfunction of greed; wondered why she didn’t know, why she couldn’t choose, what else there could be if this wasn’t important!
At moments like these something seemed to open up vastly beneath her and she would lurch, gasping, towards its vacancy. Once, ages ago, Merlin had said that he thought she was lucky to have been born into a ready-made set of religious beliefs. This had, he claimed, imbued her from childhood with an instinctive relation to the Other, which others spent lifetimes trying to achieve. At the time she had sneered at his Otherisms; she knew the grandees of her creed by name, had its hierarchies graven upon her heart. That particularly nasty strain of belief that was mysticism, to which she assumed he was referring when he spoke of the wasted lifetimes of the agnostic world, had nothing whatsoever to do with her own high-pedigree catechism; and appeared to her to consist mainly of the desire to explain phenomena such as spectral activity, telepathy and alien spacecraft.
Now, however, she too was beginning to detect something querulous within herself; doubtful yearnings which could not, it seemed, be answered by her story-book religion with its sacraments and sacrifices. The sun came out behind the stained-glass windows, illuminating their peopled mosaic with colour as if through chromatic aberration. She needed something bigger, less constricting, something more applicable to the modern world, of which, after all, she was a part. She gazed at the bright pieces of glass. Their colours were luminous, gorgeous lozenges with dark rheumatic joints. She found herself becoming so hypnotised by them that she could no longer see the figures which arose out of their union. They floated blurrily in and out of her field of vision, quaint and heraldic: the glass ghosts of a divine fiction, a land neither dead nor living; a whole world of human hope caught worshipping the sun.
The visitors’ book had been there ever since she could remember. She flicked through it, reading the comments. ‘V. Good’, someone had written, as though marking an essay. Others picked up adjectives and passed them on like an unimaginative virus: ‘lovely and peaceful’; ‘peaceful and beautiful’; ‘beautiful and quiet’; ‘quiet and lovely’. She turned back to the comments which predated this verbal epidemic. Most of them were from children, gleefully seizing the rare opportunity to give their small opinions. ‘A good place to sit and think’, wrote Tim, aged five. Agnes wondered what a five-year-old had to think about. She went to the beginning of the book, where the writing, dated from 1975, had begun to fade. Her eye lighted on one childish script. ‘It’s good to quietly hide’, it read. She looked along the line for the name of this splitter of infinitives, this timorous asylum-seeker, this petrified wisp who saw so little in the world to reassure her. Agnes Day, aged six and a half.
As she walked home, Agnes passed a tree which had been struck by lightning. Its demise was not recent. In fact, Agnes had never known it to be any other way. She and Tom had used to play there, climbing up into its truncated top where there had formed a high, hollowed dish lined with soft moss. It had stumpy arms which the climber could easily grasp, scorched smooth with few scratchy twigs. They had delighted in its useful deformity and would spend hours there while the wheat-fields planed flatly around them to the horizon, muddybrown and stark in winter, waving golden in summer.
Agnes jumped over the small ditch beside the road and began to climb the tree. It was much easier than she remembered. In less than a minute she was at the top of the crippled trunk. She heaved herself over the side and sat down in the bowl of its distended open neck. Almost immediately she was suffused with warmth. It had always been mysteriously warm in that tree, she remembered. This was probably owing to the shelter it provided against the biting East Anglian winds, but Agnes and Tom had entertained the theory that the fire which smote it still coursed, ghost-like, around its blackened remains.
She drew up her knees and hugged them against her chest, rocking back and forth. In such historic locations, one could allow the years to roll back unabated. She thought of all the time she had seen pass and felt sad; not for its irretrievability, for she was haunted by its taste and tincture still; but for herself, helpless as she had so often been before the things which befell her, bewildered and credulous and afraid. And for the fact that all along she had been there, always there, trailing along in the wake of her aspirations, driving through her days with eyes fixed in a rear-view mirror on the road behind; always there, popping up in every memory like coincidence, the reluctant and culpable star of her own recollections.