Old Filth - Jane Gardam [56]
This terrible silence.
He sat in the south aisle and closed his eyes and when he opened them saw that winter sunshine had lit up a marble memorial to some great local family. It was immense, a giant wedding cake in black and pink and sepia. Like an old photograph. Like a sad cry.
Filth got up and peered closer. He touched some of the figures. They were babies. Dozens of babies. Well, cherubs, he supposed, carved among garlands of buds and flowers, nuts, leaves, insects, fat fruits. More marble babies caught at more garlands at the foot of the pyramid, all naked, and male of course. They were weeping. One piped its eye, whatever piping was. Their fat lips pouted with sorrow. They stood, however, on very sturdy legs with creases across the backs of their knees, and their bottoms shone. There was a notice saying that the memorial had three stars and was thought to have been designed by Gibbons.
Well, I don’t know about that, thought Filth. What would Gibbons be doing here? And he gave one of the bottoms a slap.
The air of the church came alive for a moment as the baize door opened and shut, and a curly boy came springing down the aisle. He wore a clerical collar and jeans. “Good afternoon,” he cried. “So sorry I’m rather late. You’re wanting me to hear your confession.”
“Confession?”
“Saturday afternoons. Confessions. St. Trebizond’s. Half a mo while I put my cassock on.”
He ran past the weeping pile and disappeared into a vestry, emerging at once struggling into a cassock. He hurried into something like a varnished sedan chair which stood beside the rood screen, and clicked shut its door. The silence resumed.
Filth at once turned and made to walk out of the church, clearing his throat with the judicial roar.
He looked back. The sedan chair watched him. There was a grille of little holes at waist level and he imagined the boy priest resting his head near it on the inside.
It would be rather discourteous just to leave the church.
Filth might go over and say, “Very low-church, I’m afraid. Not used to this particular practice though my wife was interested . . .”
He walked back to the sedan chair, leaned down and said, “Hullo? Vicar?”
A crackling noise. Like eating potato crisps.
“Vicar? I beg your pardon?”
No reply. All was hermetically sealed within except for the grille. Really quite dangerous.
He creaked down to his knees to a hassock and put his face to the grille. Nothing happened. The boy must have fallen asleep.
“Excuse me, Vicar. I’m afraid I don’t go in for this. I have nothing to confess.”
“A very rash statement,” snarled a horrendous voice—there must be some amplifier.
Filth jumped as if he’d put his ear to an electric fence.
“How long, my son, since your last confession?”
“I’ve—” (his son!) “—I’ve never made a confession in my life. I’ve heard plenty. I’m a Q.C.”
There was a snuffling sound.
“But you are in some trouble?”
Filth bowed his head.
“Begin. Go on. ‘Father I have sinned.’ Don’t be afraid.”
Filth’s ragged old logical mind was not used to commands.
“I’m afraid I don’t at the moment feel sinful at all. I am more sinned against than sinning. I am able to think only of my dear dead wife. She was in the Telegraph this morning. Her obituary.” Then he thought: I am not telling the truth. “And I am unable to understand the strange games my loss of her play with my behaviour.”
Why tell this baby? Can’t be much over thirty. Well, same age as Christ, I suppose. If Christ were inside this box . . . A great and astounding longing fell upon Filth, the longing of a poet, the deep perfect adoring longing of a lover of Christ. How did he come on to this? This medieval, well of course, very primitive, love of Christ you read about? Not my sort of thing at all.
“My son, were there any children of the marriage?”
“No. We didn’t seem to need any.”
“That’s never the full answer. I have to say that I saw