“Come this way, please.”
We wandered after him. He might have started to make a fuss. He was determined to do his duty, echoing the General’s sentiments, as he stopped in front of his window.
“Great General Gordon, sirs. His head was taken off by the Mahdi and sent down here. This is his window. Very fine glass made in England by Pimplingtons, the extraordinary manufacturers. You are English — yes?” We weren’t paying attention. He looked at us doubtfully, two laggards who might be American and upon whom he would thus be wasting his eccentric knowledge of Sudanese and British industrial history. But he chattered on comfortably when I nodded.
“Novak wouldn’t have stopped you, Henry,” I said quietly. “Don’t be stupid. You’re twice the size. After twenty years with us they’d do anything to get you back.”
“.… ‘done my duty for my country.’ This notice was put here by Bishop Gwynne …”
“You don’t want to go back, that’s all. What have you been doing for Moscow all these years anyway? — Snooping round Farnborough on press day?”
“…. the Cathedral was consecrated by the Rev. Dr. Temple on St. Mark’s Day, April 25, 1938, who later became your Archbishop of Canterbury …”
“I believed in it all,” Henry said. “That may surprise you. That’s why I don’t want to go back.”
“The Moscow trials, Stalin, Hungary?”
“I believed in the belief, not the facts. I’ve never been to Russia.”
“… and the foundation stone was laid by Bishop Gwynne on November 20, 1936 and can be seen on the outer wall of the east end of Lady Chapel …”
“That was rather careless of you, wasn’t it?”
“No one believes in the loaves and fishes. He was a fraudulent caterer and quack doctor. But that doesn’t seem to have mattered.”
“… the architect was Adrian Gilbert Scott …”
“The English Martyrs, the Thirty Years’ War, the Huguenots — Christ! — the facts. I’m not talking about them. They never interested me. I was interested — I had to be, I was on the outside — in the selfishness of the creed. It had no message for anyone but me. It was mine. And the more the others said it was a fraud and a lie, the better I liked it. The more Hungarys there were, the more I said, ‘Screw you with your liberal notions — what have you been doing all these years? Reading Encounter by courtesy of the CIA?’ Though they don’t know it yet. Moscow seemed a better pitch than weeping tears on the box and paying super tax. I wasn’t interested in being a professional left winger writing for the Telegraph colour mag.”
“… and the general contractors for the Cathedral were Messrs. Hettena Brothers, of Shrubra, Cairo …”
“If I had to argue that’s how I did it. But it was never an argument for me. It was a suffragi who broke a decanter in Shepheard’s Hotel.”
“What happened?’
It was the story of a genuine cradle socialist, of an old Nubian waiter wounded by his father in Shepheard’s thirty years before — a cut-glass decanter more valuable than the man’s annual wages; the story of a child who smells justice down the servant’s stairs and learns to hate his father over the stench of boiled cabbage. Though of course the child wouldn’t know — and I wondered if Henry did — that it was the other way round: it was the denial by his father which had driven him underground in anger, into the warrens of duplicity and subterfuge, and bruised love, where he had remained all his life. Children are the most undetectable double agents; Henry had become a professional child. Belief lay behind the tins of raisins and the candied peel. He had found Marx in the larder, the road to Moscow through the cellar door.
Hungary, five million peasants — the greatest repression — can mean nothing to such people whose political faith is formed in childhood, a creed inextricably related to the pain and happiness of a seven-year-old. A man, once set to the task, will seek to restore imagined innocence ruthlessly and without question. Henry would justify every sort of betrayal and repression because his own identity had been formed by just the same things. He would accept every sort of collective pain because he would be denying that identity, his childhood and an old Nubian, if he didn’t.
“Gentlemen! This way please.”
The old fellow shouted for our attention. He had tired of his descriptions and had led us now quickly up towards the Lady Chapel.
“King Farouk’s Gates, the ‘Gates of Heaven’,” he said peremptorily, pointing to a sort of boudoir grille that divided the Lady Chapel from the Cathedral proper.
“I thought that was a brothel in Port Said,” Henry said. And then the men was looking for his tip in a business-like way. And afterwards he produced some half-crowns and one-franc pieces, asking Henry for Egyptian change.
“No,” Henry said shortly. “No, you’ve had your money. That money is no use to me.”
I gave the man some change instead and he disappeared without another word.
“So you’re going to Moscow then?”
“They expect everything these days. Expect it,” Henry said, looking after the swinging galibeah rounding a pillar. “They crawl, they force themselves on you, then they insist, then they want paying twice over. Then they just fuck off.”
“That sounds like the Reform Club, not the Central Committee.”
“I know. I thought last week it was a village in Galway I wanted. Now it’s just a castle with a moat. The other view — the East: you know, the desperation, the shoddiness, the eternal damp of six months’ snow, fashions five years late and lashings of raw alcohol on rough counters — all the things you saw as necessary, which you looked on with nostalgia, when you thought the Wall and the barbed wire was your prison — all that seems now just like a bad copy of the professionals, a cheaper show, a swindle bigger than the swindle of the West. But I used to think of what happened over there as a genuinely amateur performance.”
We had walked down to the end of the Cathedral, next to the mission boxes by the door, the lepers and all the penny charity of darkest Africa.
“The cold must have had something to do with it. In my mind. It was so cold there, so much snow; there was some marvellous quality there which we didn’t have in Africa. Wordsworth’s daffodils for someone in Capetown who’d never seen more than a flame tree or a thorn bush or a prickly pear. I fancied myself, I suppose. In Astrakhan.”
“It’s just as cold in North America surely?” I said. But I didn’t press it.
Henry confessing; supplication in a place cracked with the sun, rotten with heat, summoning a frozen creed. It was an odd sensation, hearing this memoir of belief from someone you thought only really cared that the champagne was cold enough; like seeing a man circled by birds, the true words homing at last, falling suddenly from nowhere, completely engulfing the isolated figure, so that one couldn’t tell whether he was being savaged or saved. And could do nothing anyway. One doesn’t “lose” faith: that would be a charity. It simply grows cold in you and stays there, a dead limb that you can never throw away, never replace. There was no use my offering anything.
“What will you do then?” I asked. “A farm in Kenya or something? Algeria? — they’re taking on every sort there these days, I hear.”
“Do you expect to have to tell them — that you’ve met me?”
“I won’t tell them anything. Except that they sent me out here on just as much of a goose chase as you.”
“And Marcus. Was he sent out here to fetch us both back?” Henry smiled briefly. “Who will they send to fetch him away, fetch him away, fetch him away? Who will they send to fetch him away …” He sang the little rhyme joyfully, not a trace of the cynic. But he slowed on the last line, a little bitterly, as if he really wasn’t expecting it: “… on a cold and frosty morning.’