‘All shall be well,
And all shall be well,
And all manner of thing
Shall be well.’
He realised that he had forgotten his notes. He must have left them on the counter in the cafe. He drew another deep breath and looked down at the audience. Sitting beside the bulk of the Earl was a row of four serious men in dark suits. All in their fifties, all wearing sober ties, wide-collared shirts, shined black loafers. They looked up at the stage with cool, calculating eyes. The representative of the Evangelical Free Church of America took notes in a black leather notebook. The head of the American Family Association stared up into the dim heights of the church’s roof. David recognised the charismatic leader of the Back to the Bible organisation. A heavy thatch of white moustache perched above his lips, a silver fish was pinned to his lapel. Next to the Earl sat the CEO of Mission Media Productions. He leaned back in his seat, chuckling at something the Earl had said, dabbing at the corner of his eye with a hairy wrist.
The Earl was looking up at David expectantly from the front row, his large hands knitted together in his lap. The doors at the back of the church slammed shut. David waited for the music to stop. There were three, perhaps four hundred people staring at him. He attempted to unleash his famous grin, but felt his skin tightening as he smiled. He found himself thinking of the smell of Lee’s hair in his dream, the way the strands had come glittering out in his hands. Pull yourself together, he said to himself, then suddenly worried that he had spoken the words out loud. He smiled again, and the smile came more easily this time. He twinkled his eyes. The music faded. A beat of silence.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. A particular welcome to our friends visiting from across the Atlantic,’ he began, his voice remarkably steady. ‘I started the Course because I kept hearing the same thing from the young people I spoke to. And it was very different from the message that I was hearing from the press, the message I got from my own church. This wasn’t a Godless generation. These young people weren’t drugged up and lacking in morals and beyond saving. They just didn’t feel that the church, or rather the experience of church that they had through school or through their parents, spoke to them at all. So I decided to do something about it.’
It began to rain outside. Shadows passed across the stained-glass windows. He took a sip of water. It was going well.
‘We have three hundred churches in the UK running the Course, a further sixty in Australia and New Zealand. And — and this is our great success this year — we have just signed up the two hundredth church in the United States. So over five hundred churches have decided that change is necessary, that we must find a new way of doing things, that our faith will die if we don’t breathe life into it.’ He was sweating a little.
‘That life comes from the energy, the optimism of the young people in our church.’
David heard, very faintly, the sound of Lee playing the piano. Panic hit him like the smack of a wave. He looked around the hall wildly, then back to the empty lectern. He could feel his heart beating hard in his chest.
‘I feel so blessed to have had the opportunity to work with our young people, with the Course leaders. .’ David paused, looked out into the audience. The Earl was tugging at his ear lobe. He tried to remember if they had discussed a secret signal of some sort.
‘We have enough old men in the church. It’s time to give youth a chance. I think sometimes we forget how young Jesus himself was. These young people. .’
David remembered how Lee’s fingers used to look when she played. He recalled placing his hands over hers, feeling the delicate bones moving, nursing the notes from the piano. Her head nodding as she swayed with the music. He remembered that, just before she had died, she had cut her hair. Then he saw her skin peeling from her scalp in his nightmare.
‘. . It’s amazing to see the devotion in the eyes of these young people, before they have been ruined by the world. .’ David’s breaths came fast and shallow. His heart seemed to be skipping beats, dancing across his chest in jags and stutters.
‘. . While they still have hope. .’ Suddenly, terribly distinctly, he pictured the moment when the hairless skull in his nightmare turned towards him. Hollow sockets where Lee’s eyes should have been, pinkish flesh clinging to bone in the corners.
‘It’s. . Working with these young people is so. .’
His mind was blank. He could see his irregular pulse in the corners of his eyes. He looked down at the Earl, whose face had turned very red. He saw one of the Americans glance at his watch. He leaned forward onto the lectern, which began to wobble. His water glass fell to the floor, spilling its contents onto the wooden stage and then rolling off to land at the Earl’s feet.
‘Thank you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. . thanks very much,’ he said, lifting his hand and waving half-heartedly to the audience. He walked from the stage. A few people clapped. Silence followed by the scraping of chairs, muttered conversation. Sally was waiting for him. He hugged her distractedly, looking over her shoulder for the Earl.
‘What the fuck was that, David?’
The big man’s face was purple. He loosened his tie with one hand and pushed Sally aside with the other.
‘You knew what you had to do. I thought you were up to this. I told you. I told you we only had one shot. Fuck!’
David and Sally sat in the rectory later that day. Sally had made them both a cup of tea. They were side by side on the sofa. Sally picked at an embroidery on her lap, pausing every so often to lift her tea to her lips. David stared out into the rain that fell through yellow light.
‘I expect you had too much coffee. It can do that, you know,’ Sally said.
‘Yes, I expect that was it.’
He sat as the light began to fade. Sally went through to the kitchen to make dinner. David knitted his fingers together and started to pray. But where in the past the words of his prayers had come easily, now there was just silence. He once again felt as if the walls of his throat were closing in. He couldn’t find any way to speak to God, to the God who had been beside him for so long, whom he had addressed as a favoured employee might speak to his managing director. He fell down onto his knees, then forward onto his elbows. He lay on the thick carpet and sobbed, words stumbling over each other in his foggy mind: Our father who art, Our father, Our father who art in, Our father. .
*
Mouse sat on the bus as it snaked along the narrow Oxfordshire lanes, his rucksack clutched on his lap. It was raining and the rain was pulled along the windows of the bus, tracing wandering paths like rivers seen from the air. Mouse followed one with his finger. He had travelled up that morning. Sitting on the swaying train as it made its way haltingly out of London, he had fingered the earrings in his pocket, pricking his thumbs with the sharp ends, committing to memory the rough surfaces of the stones.
He was still living in the hall at Senate House. When he visited the boat, it seemed as if it didn’t belong to him any more. He found that he could think much more clearly high in the library tower. He had stood at the window that morning and looked out onto the world and planned. There were a few things he needed to do before he left London. He wrote a letter to Lazlo Elek. It was brief and unsentimental. He had been listening to Lee’s father’s music recently, blasting the famous cello concerto through the empty corridors of the fourteenth floor. The music somehow fitted the place. He wrote to D.I. Farley. He considered writing to Marcus.