The two bodies lay there together.
It was nine forty-five when Shirley woke up. For a little while she lay almost still, side by side with Elroy, staring up at the ceiling, then moved very slightly to feel his warmth, stretching luxuriously, silently. One of his arms was on top of the blanket; she slid hers against it. Smooth warm skin. White on black. But she didn’t want to wake him. She got up quietly, pulled on a wrap.
The events of the day before were dream-like. She needed time on her own to think.
They were going to St John’s at eleven o’clock. That meant leaving around ten thirty. Plenty of time. Shirley felt happy. She wandered downstairs and poured herself some milk, a large beaker, and sat down to drink it. She could see herself in a mirror on the wall. Pink and cream. Flushed with contentment. Her pupils very large and black.
She wriggled in her chair. Two in one night.
She hadn’t heard Elroy come downstairs, barefoot, so she jumped slightly as he touched her shoulder, caressed her neck and the base of her skull underneath the curls which he liked so much.
‘Hi Beautiful,’ he said. ‘Hi Curly-head.’ Because of his one white grandmother, her curls weren’t such a lot looser than his, but he liked their blondness against her pale skin.
She felt caught out with her secret thoughts. ‘Elroy, love. I was going to bring you coffee –’
‘And I was going to bring you breakfast in bed.’
‘You’ve never brought me breakfast in bed!’
‘Well a lot of things round here never happen before.’
A few more than you know about, she thought, but she kissed him lovingly, enjoyed his soft lips.
And in the middle of the kiss, as their mouths opened, as she felt the damp heat, she suddenly remembered her father was dying.
A stone. A cold stone. A heavy little stone.
‘Sit on my lap,’ he said to her, and she got up, docile, and the pain melted, at least for the moment, she sat on his lap, lowered her head and kissed his chest, naked under his open robe, firm and black and beautiful. ‘You made me come,’ she whispered. ‘I loved the way you made me come.’
‘Can’t say I didn’t try before,’ he said, but he was smiling, blowing in her hair, nibbling a curl between his teeth. ‘Time for another go this morning? Maybe not – we have to get to church –’
‘There’s plenty of time,’ she said, smiling. ‘I’m going back upstairs. I’ll be waiting for you. And all I need is a cup of tea.’
‘Shirley, love. I been thinking. The Temple give me a hard time about marrying, and you give me a hard time by not agreeing. But you know, I don’t feel sinful with you. Because our souls join. Our souls join already. It says in the Bible, “My soul hunger for you; my body long for you.”
She smiled at him. ‘Too much Bible, Elroy.’
Sometimes she felt he kept the Bible for her, because they’d met in church, on her first visit to the Temple, and perhaps he thought she was better than she was … Idealized her. Which was nice, but tiring.
Certainly he thought she was better than she was, Shirley reflected, thinking of last night. And she almost ran upstairs to the bedroom, springing like a girl from step to step, feeling the joy of her breasts pulling, their weight bouncing slightly as she moved.
Perhaps it’s because I nearly died …
Maybe I’ve become a different person.
She’d thought that nothing would ever change. Especially the family. The White family. Dad was so proud of their name: the Whites. It was the Whites this, and the Whites that – ‘The Whites don’t have debts … The Whites never beg … The Whites don’t lie … The Whites have their pride … The White family sticks together …’ (But we didn’t, did we? I lost my daughter.)
And later Dad was always pushing me away because he couldn’t stand Kojo or Elroy. That force of hatred like a wall. You could never break it down, you could never climb over –
Then suddenly Dad is at death’s door and all the family are back together and Darren comes flying in from New York and Thomas Lovell appears from nowhere –
And here I lie, a scarlet woman, with sperm from two different men inside me.
But the stone came back, falling through her body. Hardest to bear was simple pity. Dad looked so small, so weak, so – human. Would they let her mother be with him, in the hospital? Or – would he come home? Her heart began to hammer. Would she have to help Mum look after him?
I ought, she thought. He looked after us. He came home every night. He paid the bills … He did his duty, by his lights.
Rubbish, she told herself, don’t be so soft. Look at the harm that man has done. Mum is his slave, but I don’t have to be. Look at his sons. What good are they?
She remembered Darren at Kojo’s funeral. He’d had a few drinks and talked too much. ‘Isn’t it frightful, I have no black friends. I wish I had. You’re very lucky.’
But most white people had no black friends.
Elroy, Elroy. Why can’t Dad see? He should be glad his daughter’s got a man like Elroy. Doesn’t smoke, hardly drinks, has a job, is faithful – Shirley thought he was faithful. Though sometimes there were things – a telephone number with a female name written beside it in his jacket pocket. A woman who rang, then rang off, suddenly. Certain jokes his two sisters made, though Shirley suspected them of wanting to hurt her. A passing look of concern in her direction from Winston when Elroy disappeared with a friend.
But Elroy was so serious about the Temple. Wasn’t he? He couldn’t be leading a double life, could he?
Was each of them idealizing the other? It had to be harder to know a person when it wasn’t easy to know their family.
Hard to know Elroy’s friends, as well. She felt they saw her as Elroy’s white woman. They were nice to her, but there was some kind of distance that was only partly bridged by her sex.
But she did know Elroy was a caring man. His job was caring for other people. Patient Care Officers fixed things for patients that they were too ill to do themselves. He put up with their tantrums and complaints. How many men could do that job? She made jokes about it. ‘Patient Care … that’s what you give me, patient care.’ And he did; he was almost too nice to her. Kojo was different, very confident, a joker. She and Kojo talked all the time. Whereas Elroy was often strong and silent.
It comes from how Elroy was at home. He had to look after his mother and sisters and little brother when his father vanished. He’s had to be the responsible one. Only twenty-nine, but seems older than his years –
Lovely Elroy. He’s still my toy-boy. I love the smell of him, the feel of him – I’ve always liked the maleness of men. Talking to my women friends I sometimes wonder – They talk about men as if they hate them, their breath, their wind, their penises. But hating people gives them no choice – what can they do, except be hateful?
Waiting for Elroy. Wet for him. Wanting him as I never have. Touching myself and thinking of Thomas, touching myself and thinking of Elroy …
He brought up the tray, but seeing her lying there, he put it down, came over and kissed her.
‘Is this the land of milk and honey? What you doing to me, girl, you look so sexy –’
‘I feel so sexy. Ooh, and you’re hard.’
She had lain like that on purpose to arouse him, posed so the duvet pushed up her breasts, and she pulled him down, she held him fast, she held his warm springy head in her hands, she burrowed down and sucked his dark penis, enjoying its blackness against her pale fingers, she kissed and licked it till it bucked in her hand like a living thing, like a force of life, she weighed his heavy balls in her fingers, she told him she loved him, she worshipped him, and as she pulled him inside her she was almost coming, already coming from deep deep inside, and his slow firm thrusting made her come up, up, coming to him, coming to meet him, coming like honey from a dense dark comb, coming gold and white and wet and moaning as doves come thrumming from their warm dark dove-cote, trembling, flurrying, flying into sunlight.
And then the two bodies lay together, slowly breathing in the warmth of the morning. The brown and the cream, the black and the rose, each curl of dark hair, each shining iris, each curve of the lid, each moving eyelash, intertwined in their living beauty.
They arrived at St John’s at the last moment, took their hymn sheets from the matron on the door who recognized them and smiled automatically, a sweet smile but tired and thin. Very few black people used this church. Kojo had liked it partly because, as he said, it was so much quieter than black churches; ‘I’ve had too much of the shouting and jerking.’ They had attended quite regularly over the years, and lots of people knew Kojo by name, though she realized how imperfect the friendships were when so many of them greeted Elroy as Kojo. He put his arm lightly around her shoulders, accidentally winning a radiant smile from a middle-aged woman with a large red face and a knotted rope of long grey hair who sat on the end of the pew they chose.
Walking up the aisle, she had felt without pleasure heads turning, as they did everywhere except the poorer parts of London where mixed relationships were common, the parts of London where black people lived. In Hillesden, so many of the families were mixed. But in other places, people still noticed. One of the cruder responses had been yelled at them from a passing car only last week: ‘Oi darling, why do you like doing it with black men?’ There were three young white men straining at the windows, crewcut, thickset, leering and making disgusting gestures. Just too late, she thought of a response. ‘Because black men aren’t mannerless yobs,’ she said. Whereas here in St John’s – where all was acceptance, where communion was taken for ‘Our brothers and sisters in Islam and in the Jewish faith’, where the vicar always asked at the end of the service if there were any newcomers or foreign visitors, so all the congregation could applaud them – people were more likely to romanticize them.
On some occasions the glances were from women, envying her both men for their good looks. She knew that women who had never had a black man believed they might be better, sexier. As did white men. And it made them afraid.
Fear and envy of the black penis. That was at the bottom of it all. (Indeed Kojo joked that all white men were gay, they didn’t really envy it, they wanted it.)
Maybe in heaven there would be no colour –
But on earth, since Kojo, love had been black. She was drawn to Elroy because of Kojo, although she always had to deny that to him, for he didn’t want to be in Kojo’s shadow, Kojo who was older, cleverer, richer – She reached out gently, touched Elroy’s arm, and mouthed ‘I love you. I do, you know,’ and he whispered back, ‘Skeen, it’s blatant’ which made her laugh aloud into a sudden silence, for the procession was just coming in.
The priest and his retinue of deacons and cantors and other Latin names she could never remember, but some of them women, long-haired white women, floated down the aisle in a cloud of white surplices.
Then the priest asked everyone to greet their neighbours, and a wave of shaking hands, of embraces, kisses, of smiles and touches and chatter and laughter swept through the church like a flock of bright birds, light-feathered birds sweeping in from the south, and everyone was lifted, they hovered in the light, everyone was part of the flock, flying, and it only died down reluctantly, slowly, when the priest raised his hands and called them to prayer, as if they didn’t want to cease and be still, to sink back into their single wooden spaces, as if once people moved, once they moved together, the tide of good feeling would rise to the rafters and float the great church straight down Piccadilly and over Charing Cross to the golden Thames, as if the life in people was unstoppable –
But no: they were middle-class, they were docile. Shirley and Elroy settled down with the rest.
The hymns began. They were always long, and the choir were the only people who knew them, their thin clear voices sprinting ahead with the congregation trailing after. The tunes were modern, to be honest rather tuneless, and each hymn seemed to have at least a dozen verses. The church felt cold; she moved closer to Elroy. She was wishing they had gone to Elroy’s church, somewhere where they could move and dance … But St John’s had its points, she reminded herself.
It tried hard to be democratic; so everyone did something, one a prayer, one a reading. Though it did make the service a little long. The Order of Service was a printed sheet, and the questions and responses went dutifully on. Liturgy, thought Shirley, this is liturgy. The word was unpromising, like something legal, and yet the repetitions were comforting … She knew it wasn’t right to sit and criticize.
I suppose this was written to hold us all together. Which is why we come here; to be together. We could pray, after all, on our own at home. But heaven could never be lots of separate houses.
Shirley had always liked the priest. The Reverend Stewart had a sense of humour. He was passionate and honest, he was big and handsome with thick silver hair, and Kojo had liked him. He was kind to her when Kojo died.
Today, though, her mind wandered during the sermon. He was talking about the City of God. She was stroking Elroy’s hand, tracing the veins, the tree of blood underneath the skin.
Suddenly she felt from the tension in Elroy that he was listening in a different way. The Reverend Stewart was leaning forward, raising his voice, thundering: ‘… recent bloody acts … disgraceful blot upon our city … These poor young people, pointlessly murdered … White and black is just a matter of skin … Remember the speech that Shakespeare gave to Shylock, the Jew, addressing Christians. “If you prick me, do I not bleed?”’
Shirley grimaced at Elroy, helpless. There had been a lot of killings in the last six months. The guilt she felt was always wretched and total: My people are killing your people.
Now she longed for this church service to be over, so the two of them could leave with their arms around each other, so she could be close to him, show him she cared.
She tried to concentrate on the sermon again. ‘My image today is the Heavenly City. The image of a sacred place on a hill. This longing runs through so much religious writing. Sometimes it seems to be a paradise lost, a place to which we shall one day return. Sometimes it’s the Garden of Eden … and the English love their gardens, don’t they? I often feel it’s our most attractive trait … The way towards the city is a pilgrimage, for Christians. We see it as a light in the future, stopping us from getting lost, drawing us onwards. Perhaps we are only meant to find that city after we die, but I don’t believe so, do you? I think that Christians should be building it here. I think we can build the good place in our lives. I think we can build the city for others. I hope we are trying to build heaven on earth …’ His voice was clear, carrying, triumphant, lifting his people, lifting them up – ‘But when I read about this senseless violence. When I read about white killing black, I know how many miles we still have to go … I ask you to join with me in prayers today for all black people living in Britain.’
What a shame, Shirley thought, nearly all of us are white.
The church was very quiet after he stopped speaking. Now there was a time for silent prayer.
Shirley didn’t kneel because her knees were unforgiving, she always sat with her head in her hands, and as she sat there staring at the cage of her fingers, the dark pink bars of her crossed fingers, Elroy reached out and took her right hand, peeled it away from the face it was protecting, pressed it to his lips, then held it tight, saying to her as clearly as he could, I love you, Shirley, it doesn’t matter. Nothing can stop us being together. She looked across and smiled at him, then covered her face with the remaining hand.
The words came into her head, unchosen, slipped into her head like a patch of bright silk – Bring us all to the golden city.
At the end of the service, there were always announcements, and as person after person came up to the front and (with varying skill at the microphone) told the congregation about a workshop on ‘God and autogenic training’, or a seminar on Creation Chanting, or a Circle for Christian Cookery, Shirley’s attention began to wander. The Reverend Stewart had bouts of coughing that Shirley suspected were not accidental.
It was after one o’clock when they finally spilled out of the church into the bright Sunday sunlight. The Reverend Stewart stood at the door, smiling at people and shaking hands. He greeted them particularly warmly. He seemed about to talk to Elroy, but a middle-aged woman with two straight plaits and a semi-transparent cheesecloth dress came bustling up and began to pour out a torrent of impassioned speech, before which he visibly flinched for a second, then returned to vertical, smiling staunchly, trying to keep his flock on the road, trying to keep their eyes on essentials.
It was dazzling after the dark of the church. The sky was the heavenly new blue of spring. It soared above the black vale of Piccadilly, to the bottom of which the sun could not reach, though people’s heads and shoulders were up in the sunlight. The bright glass and metal of the passing cars pushing on down the deep straight gully made her think, suddenly, of knives.
‘It’s good that he talked about the killings,’ she said.
‘Maybe. Yes. I don’t want to dwell on it.’
So Shirley walked along, worrying her worries, and Elroy withdrew into himself. And the congregation, the three hundred or so souls who had stood so close and embraced each other and prayed together for the City of God, trickled away into the crowds of Piccadilly, leaked away through the veins of the city, the real city, grey and dirty, thinning out, becoming lonely, threes and twos and single people, losing touch for another week, fading away into dryness, numbness, the never-ending chatter of electronic noise, the dust and heat of the underground. Because the embraces, the handshakes, the greetings, were never quite long enough to stick, never quite deep enough to bind them together. For the British were shy, and solitary, and did not want to embarrass each other –
The two of them wandered on down Piccadilly. They had five hours before the service at Elroy’s church in the afternoon. Outside the great arches of the Royal Academy where crossed red flags saluted the day, little cliques of greyhound-legged women in hats and cheery-looking men in dark suits and ties hallooed above the traffic in fluting voices.
Elroy said, ‘I went to an art gallery one time. I was curious, right. The Tate, I think it is, the one by the river –’
‘That’s nice. I don’t think I’ve ever been there. Did you like it?’
‘Nice pictures. And you don’t have to pay. But – I never see any of the brethren all day. Except a few in uniform, working as attendants, and one or two women in the canteen.’
‘Oh,’ said Shirley. She wished she hadn’t asked.
‘And the British Library,’ Elroy mused. ‘One time I do some research on nineteenth-century hospitals. Beautiful place. Very quiet, very peaceful. But most of them sitting there studying is white.’
‘I’m sorry, Elroy. But I’ve never been there – I don’t suppose they’d let me in.’
‘When we raise kids, it will be different for them. God does not despise His captive people. He rebuild the cities of Judah, Shirley, and the children of His servants will inherit it all.’
‘Are you still so sure that we shall have kids?’ Shirley stared at a bus, ploughing forward through the traffic towards them.
‘Of course we raise kids. Long as we have faith. What if I make you pregnant last night?’
Briefly, Shirley’s heart lifted with hope. Then they were plunged into the shadow of the bus, and the sound of the engine drowned their voices.
When it passed, Elroy was talking about his brother. ‘I got to have another talk to Winston. Time that boy is settling down. Mum’s only got one grandchild from us four kids.’
‘He’s busy studying,’ said Shirley. ‘Not a good time to have a baby. When I was studying –’ Then she pulled up. She had never told Elroy about her daughter.
‘Winston’s twenty, and he don’t have a girlfriend.’
‘Doesn’t,’ said Shirley automatically.
‘No good for a man not to have no woman.’
‘Well maybe that’s not what he’s looking for.’ Yesterday’s film had made Shirley even more certain of the thing that she had half-guessed at before – Why were the family so blind about it? His mother always talked about Winston getting married.
‘A man’s never too busy to be interested in women. The girls at that college aren’t real women.’
‘Oh come on, Elroy –’ He could be impossible.
‘A good woman settle Winston down. Maybe you can fix him up with someone. Do you know any good Christian women round his age?’
‘He could meet them at the church, any time. If he wanted to, that is –’
‘He don’t even come to church regular. I don’t know what it is with him.’ Elroy had begun to sound fretful. ‘Sometimes I think I’m a stranger to my brother.’
‘But you two are so close,’ she protested. They hugged and joked and fought a lot, a play-fighting Elroy always won, being nine years older and twenty pounds heavier. Elroy’s kind of closeness was not about words.
‘Skeen, Shirley, he’s my little brother. I always look after him, since he is a baby. I’d kill anyone who hurt my brother. But he need a good woman to care for him.’
They had passed the Ritz, which was still asleep, and came to the air and light of Green Park, the leaves unfolding on the trees to their left, two children suddenly cutting across them in the middle of some chasing game, a deck-chair attendant rubbing his nose. He spat on the pavement. It lay in the sun. One of the boys was panicking, screaming –
Further down was the Sunday Art Market. Paintings hung in packed rows on the railings. The crowds thickened up, became a forest, and Shirley and Elroy’s talk fragmented.
‘What would you think –’ Shirley began, as Elroy stared up at a painting of deer, hung slightly too high for them to see clearly, dun dappled bodies leaping, free (could she and Elroy ever live in the country?) ‘What if, you know, Winston didn’t like women?’
But Elroy couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand her. ‘We see him in church this afternoon. Now you start thinking of a woman for him.’
It wasn’t her business, in any case. But what was it, she wondered, about black people and homosexuality? It was as if they thought only white men did it. Even Kojo, who was liberal about most things, had been very uneasy around gay men. She remembered Elroy’s grimace of distaste as they walked down Regent Street one day and a flamboyantly handsome black man erupted out of Liberty’s, laughing, his arm round the shoulders of a fat older white man with streaked blond hair and tiny dark glasses that made him look slightly piggish, admittedly. Elroy had winced with distaste as they passed, then said, when they were still within earshot, ‘Cha, look at that battyman! How much do you think Piggy’s paying him?’
Did everyone have to despise someone?
‘He’s too young to be married,’ she said, making peace. ‘Let him get his degree. Then you’ll all be proud.’
‘First one in the family to go to university,’ said Elroy. ‘My mother going to be dancing with joy.’
They could hardly move in the press of people milling forward to see the paintings. Here she and Elroy were happily invisible. Some black-hooded Arab women pushed and exclaimed, three African girls in reds and oranges swooped and skittered like graceful flamingos, an American couple in small cotton sun-hats twanged and complained and stuck close to each other …
‘There must be thousands of people here,’ she said over her shoulder to Elroy.
‘Lots of people like paintings,’ he replied, ‘long as they not shut away in museums.’
‘If only all this lot would come to church. Imagine Piccadilly jammed solid like this, with people coming to the morning service.’ She was joking, really, but Elroy lit up.
‘One day they will. His Kingdom come. The revival’s coming, Shirley. Must be. The Lord’s not slow in keeping His promise …’
‘I hope you’re right.’ She looked away.
‘You people have little faith.’ He said it with sudden bitterness.
‘What’s the matter, Elroy? You know I believe.’
‘You people don’t need to, though, not like we do … is just a luxury for you.’
‘It isn’t true. Jesus saved my life.’
There was a long silence; she could see he was sorry. When he spoke again, he had changed the subject. ‘I just get vex when I think about Winston.’
She knew what he’d said was partly true. It was black people who read the Bible on the tube, black people, mostly, who drove the cars with ‘Jesus Saves’ stickers on the windows.
They need the Kingdom more, she thought, because they don’t have enough on this earth.
She turned to Elroy without thinking about it, looked at the sun on his handsome face, severe and sculpted, not an ounce of soft flesh, and rested her head against his shoulder. ‘You’re a king to me, Elroy.’
‘And you’re my baby.’
And when they got home they made love again, with a blind concentration and hurry, then, as if death were stalking them, and time was short, but after they were finished they fell asleep, and woke an hour later in a panic race to fling their clothes on and drive to the Temple.
Two churches in one day. Can’t do better than that. Perhaps I’ll be forgiven for two men in one night –
They always met Elroy’s family at the Temple. They glanced quickly into the nave of the church, packed with people, as it was every Sunday, but no one was looking round for them, and Elroy’s mother always did, glasses glinting, a deep frown in her forehead under tight grey-black coils of plaits, not relaxing until all her offspring were there.
‘Must be upstairs, then,’ Elroy said. On the stairs she felt his hand patting her buttocks.
The gallery was like the circle of a theatre. The warmth hit you first, a surprising warmth when the Temple itself was high and stone-built. It was the warmth of hundreds of bodies, the majority black, but a true mixture, brown, pink, olive, yellow, old and young, Chinese, Japanese, even a few Indian faces. The whites who were there did not look rich, wearing anoraks or faded coats, the women with gleaming un-made-up faces, a striking contrast to the chic and gloss of the young black women in the congregation. More women than men. Always more women. Perhaps they came to pray for the men. Or to pray for deliverance from the men?
Electric organ played softly in the background, sweet, faintly mournful, modern. And the sadness rose in Shirley again, she saw her father’s small face on the pillow … Shaking herself free, she looked round for Elroy’s family. Beside two empty spaces she suddenly saw Sophie, waving her arms, beaming, mouthing, her arms and legs always remarkably thin besides her bulky, comfortable body, Elroy’s mother who had come over in the fifties to be a nurse, but ended up a cleaner. Almost from the start she had welcomed Shirley.
‘Elroy! Come on! We waitin’ for you.’
Winston wasn’t there; that’s what Shirley noticed first. The sisters were there, Viola and Delorice, Delorice clamped to her exquisitely dressed baby, a little girl in layers of ribboned peach frills, and Viola who managed the boutique in Kilburn, in a tight, waisted black suit and high lacquered hair glued flat to her head in sharp strands and kiss-curls. Delorice, the youngest, was rather shy, jobless since she had a screaming row with Viola because she brought the baby to work with her. Sophie had told the whole story to Elroy, gasping with laughter – ‘Your sistas killin’ me, Elroy! Viola get so miserable sometime, she done shout at Delorice dat she no havin’ no stinky doo-doo in she shop …’ Now the two sisters were devoted again but Viola wouldn’t have her back in the shop. And Viola, as Shirley knew only too well, was in the process of divorcing a white man, a college lecturer. He had seemed adoring until they were married, ‘the perfect man’, as Viola said, but soon became unfaithful, then abusive, and finally horribly violent. ‘He just a little dog,’ Viola had told Shirley, rubbing her face in all the details, making her suffer because she was white too.
She still wasn’t used to Viola and Delorice, their edge of resentment, their sass, their chill, the suspicion in their eyes when they looked at her, so different from the warmth of her African friends.
But Africans were different, as Kojo had explained in the long-ago days when Shirley knew nothing. Africa was very big and very old, and in some ways white people had barely touched it. Things were very different for Caribbeans. Was it surprising if they hadn’t forgotten?
‘Shirley, darlin’,’ said Sophie, hugging her briskly with one thin black arm. ‘We miss you las week, dear. Come sit by me. Go way, Elroy, you too big to be kissin’ your mummy that way,’ laughing, showing two gold teeth, one of which Elroy had recently paid for.
On the stage below, spot-lit, smiling, looking round the church with a contented air, were the usual group, the Reverend Lack in his ‘casual smart’ blue foam-backed blazer and knife-creased flannels, and on the chairs behind him, two other white men of around the same age, in safari suits worn over careful shirt and tie, plus Leah, a handsome middle-aged black woman, whose role in the service was mostly smiling, and praying, arms upraised, with statuesque dignity. On her right were the singers and musicians with their mikes, the sax glinting like a golden treble clef.
And then the Reverend Lack welcomed them, and the music came up, and the singing rose, and the half-dozen television monitors dotted around the church flickered into life, deep indigo, and upon them the words of the gospel songs began to lift them and move them together, as people started swaying, as people started clapping and smiling at each other, as a young mixed-race woman to one side started dancing, rhythmically, sensually, without the self-absorption of sex, her head held high, her face shining, smiling, her hands held up in celebration, and then at least half the congregation were dancing, and Shirley began to move as well, her hips loosening, slowly, and her stiff white shoulders, and Sophie’s hand was tucked through her arm, she was at least five inches smaller than Shirley but when Sophie danced she bobbed up to her nose, singing in a pure, slightly cracked soprano, smiling and looking round in approval at what was happening elsewhere in the church, perhaps also to receive the approval of others, for church, Elroy said, was where she was happiest, where she felt accepted in this country at last. (But the Church of England hadn’t made her welcome, the church she had hoped would be her home. A hurt from fifty years ago, never forgotten.)
This singing, this dancing always touched Shirley deeply, the feeling that they were all together in a perfectly simple, bodily way, all of them equal in God and the music, jackets and coats coming off as they moved – Let them praise His name with dancing, for the Lord takes delight in His people.
Hard to believe, in that ringing temple, that black and white people feared each other.
They sang the refrains again and again, but they weren’t like the choruses they sang at St John’s, a rigid tag after every verse. Here they sang words again because they were moved to, they sang them again to go with the feeling, Let His grace … fall … here, Let His grace … fall … here, and as they sang, she could feel grace falling, she felt grace fall upon her heart, upon her hands, which she lifted to the sky, upon her hopes, upon all their futures. Death would pass; it would pass away, and hatred, and prejudice, all pass away, for those who hated must surely get tired, lay down their heavy burden and rest, For today … is the day … of the Latter Rain …
Viola’s hands were lifted as she danced, such elegant hands with glossy red nails and the rings her departing husband had given her, leaning towards the platform below, and she flashed a sudden smile across at Shirley, as if she saw what they were doing was absurd but wasn’t it also something fine?
Shirley didn’t like the Reverend Lack, for all his thick hair and easy smile. He was British, born in Kenya, as he often reminded them, probably the son of missionaries, but his inflections were American, and his style of preaching seemed learned, not natural. He won their attention with rhetorical tricks, with sudden dramatic raisings of his voice, with appeals to the congregation for assent and approval – ‘Amen, brothers?’ (though most of them were sisters) ‘Amen, brothers?’ until they gave him back an ‘Amen’, appeals that sometimes seemed unconfident but sometimes almost bullying, especially as he primed them for the offertory song, telling them God would bless the givers tenfold, practically promising their money back. It didn’t seem right to pressure them so much, when so many of the congregation were poor, but the bag came round, a capacious bag, and Shirley slipped in a note, and tried not to think how much Elroy was giving.
Then the Reverend Lack continued. He had been given a word. ‘Brothers, I have been given a word …’ He was often given words, and would shout his words at the congregation, suddenly, emphatically, yelling them into the microphone, disconnected words he used like bullets, ‘Order’ was one, ‘Order, ORDER,’ and ‘Revival’ was another, ‘Revival, REVIVAL,’ and he was saying Britain was ripe for revival, that revivals were beginning everywhere, that together they could carry the word across the land, but the words fell like shotgun pellets on her ears, she was still very tired from the night before, and her mind strayed away to Thomas and Elroy, Order, ORDER, revival, REVIVAL …
Then a police siren howling in the street outside brought her up with a start, completely awake, cold sweat on her forehead and her palms.
It was death she thought of then, and disorder. Sudden, brutal. The thief in the night. What if her father had died last night? (Was it right between them? Had they made it right? His last words were ‘You’re a good girl, Shirley.’ Dad, she thought. I wish I had said – ‘It’s all right, Dad. It’s all right, now. I know you tried. The rest doesn’t matter.’ When it gets to the end, the rest doesn’t matter. She hadn’t said it; she said it now, her lips moving slightly, talking to him, sending a message to her earthly father, because time seemed short, everything felt fragile.) What if that screaming police car had killed her? – Where were the police cars rushing off to?
Sophie was sitting, deaf to the sermon, writing requests for prayers on the green cards supplied for the purpose. She always completed at least a dozen cards, which sometimes seemed faintly comic to Shirley, as Sophie sat through the sermon oblivious, frowning with concentration as she wrote, putting on and then removing her glasses. It was as if she was determined to get value from the church, and the value, to her, was the prayers and the singing and the feeling that here at least she was at home. She had left her old home so long ago, and Britain hadn’t given her what it had promised, but she kept on writing in her spidery hand; here she was at home again, here she was happy. Every Sunday she was welcomed, respected.
Now Elroy was whispering to his mother. ‘Why Winston not here again?’
‘I jus callin’ Winston name to the Lord. He not come home again las night. I tink he got himself a girlfriend at las, now we have to pray she a good gyal, Elroy …’
‘That boy deserve some licks for not letting you know.’
‘You watch your mouth in church, Elroy King.’
The sermon continued, now louder, now softer, its peaks as deafening as Shirley’s memories of Alfred shouting when she was little. The Reverend Lack leaned forward and thundered, ‘For we have to be ready to fight, brothers and sisters. We shall have to fight for the souls of the people. Great times are coming, wonderful times, times of renewal, times of revival … We shall see again the glory days of the Welsh Revival of the 1920s. All of us will have to stand up and be counted. Then it will not be enough to drink, to come and drink of the waters of life. Every one of us will have to go forth. There will be a new Battle of Britain, brothers and sisters. A Battle of Britain. And we are His Army. This is the word I am given today. Amen? Amen … I give you a new Battle of Britain …’
He was flying at last, no longer awkward, alight with the fire of divine anger, eyes blazing, waving his hand, pointing his finger in a way she didn’t like, reminding her of something from history – was it a picture of God the Father, pointing? An old-fashioned picture from her childhood Bible? On all the six monitors his image flashed, flaming down on them, arm raised, shouting, and everyone stared at him, transfixed, more than a thousand people listening, gripped – suddenly she realized why she didn’t like it. It was from the past, but long before her childhood, something from history, unspeakable, and she felt ashamed for even thinking it, but his arm on the monitors rose and fell, his voice roared on, hypnotic, dramatic – He wasn’t a priest, he was the German Fuhrer, and they were the crowd at one of his rallies, she had seen a film of it only last week. Then she shook herself out of the illusion, blinked, and he was just a man again, the Reverend Lack in his foam-backed jacket, trying too hard to lift his audience.
She looked sideways at Elroy, but Elroy was listening with puzzled respect, nodding his head.
Did people really want battles, and wars? Shirley had had enough of them. Who would we be fighting? Atheists? Muslims? Men believed in battle, women did not (but a glimpse of Viola leaning forward in her seat, eyes gleaming, fists clenched, nodding and smiling, told Shirley she was wrong. Viola couldn’t wait.)
The Reverend Lack was drawing to a close. Now there would be prayers, with the organ playing softly, everyone standing, hands raised to God, and the church officials would come among them and pray with those whom the spirit moved.
Shirley still found the behaviour of the congregation during the closing prayers astonishing. Some laughed hysterically, raising their eyes, clutching themselves, others were weeping, some sitting on the floor, some half-supported in the arms of officials, some shaking uncontrollably and moaning, but down at the front they were falling, crumpling, toppling as if they had been struck by lightning at the instant the hands of the ministers touched them.
Now the Reverend Lack asked the whole second row of the congregation to come on stage and receive a blessing. They came, and he touched them, one by one, and they fell like playing cards, falling in order, and lay there pole-axed while prayers and music continued around them.
(On one of Shirley’s first visits to the Temple, a Malaysian official, ugly and kind with big brown eyes and the Pentecostal badge upon her shoulder, had come and offered to pray with her, and looking in her eyes Shirley saw similar suffering, felt a kindness that came from pain, and she fell, she yielded, she sank down before her, ‘Thank Jesus, thank Jesus, for He is good,’ fell, in truth, partly as a gift to the woman, but once she was down on the ground she felt puzzled – it was hard and uncomfortable; she couldn’t get up.)
And yet it was a wonder, in its way, this scene of transformation, of ecstasy, it was what St John’s could never quite manage, with everyone in fluid, passionate motion as the spirit rippled round the building like wind, blowing some over, raising some up, shivering the outstretched arms like corn, the organ still stirring softly underneath them.
Then Shirley’s eyes fell on the back of the stage where the two church worthies had sat throughout, the middle-aged white men in their spruce light suits, beaming approvingly on Reverend Lack. Their smiles, their posture seemed suddenly wrong, as if they had set themselves apart. She looked again at the praying priest, and his prayer, to her, became false, grotesque, maybe because he was being filmed in close-up and the image flashed all over the church, repeated six times on the TV monitors which hung above them, powerful as crucifixes, surely too big, too loud, too many – she focused again on the two watching white men, leaning back in their chairs, relaxed, smiling, though the stage at their feet was covered with the fallen, a battlefield covered with helpless bodies, nearly all of them black, lying dead still –
So many dead bodies. Why were those two smiling? How could they sit there, comfortable?
It was only a moment, then the image faded, the Temple around her returned to itself, she knew, she believed it was a good place, if they had a fault it was only being greedy, and even their greed, she supposed, was for God – Sophie was happy, they made people happy –
Why should it seem any different today?
But what she had seen was a vision of hell, and she shivered convulsively, and turned to Elroy. ‘Time to go.’
‘You in a hurry?’
‘I don’t feel well.’
Then he was all concern, whispering something to his mother and shepherding her through the crowd and down the stairs.
In the air he held her and stared into her face. She felt as though he might read her secret, so intent were his pupils, cold and small in daylight.
‘You’re shaking, woman. Is it the spirit?’
‘I think I’m just tired,’ Shirley said. ‘I think I should go home to bed. Going to church twice – it is tiring.’
(Having two men, being full of them.
Seeing such visions of life and death. The bodies lying there, the others watching.)