The Laying on of Hands - Alan Bennett [15]
A woman sitting near to the front and quite close to Carl said almost conversationally: ‘And you made this journey quite often, did you?’
‘What journey?’
‘Round Clive’s body.’
‘Sure. Why?’
‘It’s just that, while I may be making a fool of myself here,’ and she looked round for support, ‘I didn’t know he was … that way.’
Several women who were within earshot nodded agreement.
‘To me he was—’ and she knew she was on dangerous ground, ‘to me, he wasn’t that way at all.’
Carl frowned. ‘Do you mean gay?’
The woman (she was a buyer for Marks and Spencer’s) smiled kindly and nodded.
‘Well let me tell you,’ said Carl, ‘he was “that way”.’
Though these exchanges are intimate and conversational they filter back through the congregation where they are greeted with varying degrees of astonishment, some of it audible.
‘She didn’t know?’
‘Who’s she kidding?’
‘Clive,’ the woman went on, ‘never gave me to suppose that his sexual preferences were other than normal.’
‘It is normal,’ shouted Carl.
‘I apologise. I mean conventional.’
‘It’s conventional, too.’
‘Straight then,’ said the buyer with a gesture of defeat. ‘Let’s say straight.’
‘Say what you fucking like,’ said Carl, ‘only he wasn’t. He was gay.’
Smiling and unconvinced she shook her head but said no more.
During this exchange Geoffrey had been thinking about Carl’s hair or lack of it, the gleam of his skull through the blond stubble making him look not unlike a piglet. Once upon a time hair as short as this would have been a badge of a malignant disposition, a warning to keep clear, with long hair indicating a corresponding lenity. With its hint of social intransigence it had become a badge of sexual deviance, which it still seemed to be, though nowadays it was also a useful mask for incipient baldness, cutting the hair short a way of pre-empting the process.
‘Fucking’ had put a stop to these musings though Carl had said it so casually that for all they were in church no one seemed shocked (Treacher fortunately hadn’t heard it) and Father Jolliffe decided to let it pass.
In his fencing match with the buyer from M&S Carl had undoubtedly come out on top but it had plainly disconcerted him and though he resumed his journey round Clive’s body, when he got to his well-groomed armpits he decided to call it a day. ‘When someone dies so young,’ he summed up, ‘the pity of it and the waste of it touch us all. But when he or she dies of Aids’—someone in the congregation gave a faint cry—’there should be anger as well as pity, and a resolve to fight this insidious disease and the prejudice it arouses and not to rest until we have a cure.’ Carl sat down to be embraced by two of his friends, his stubbly head rubbed by a third.
HEARING AIDS MENTIONED for the first time and what had hitherto been vague fears and suspicions now given explicit corroboration many in the congregation found it hard to hide their concern, this death which had hitherto been an occasion for sorrow now a cause for alarm.
One woman sobbed openly, comforted by her (slightly pensive) husband.
A man knelt down and prayed, his companion stroking his back gently as he did so.
‘I didn’t think you needed to die of it any more,’ a round the world yachtswoman whispered to her husband. ‘I thought there were drugs.’
Others just sat there stunned, their own fate now prefigured, this memorial service a rehearsal for their own.
One of these, of course, was Father Jolliffe who is professional enough, though, to think this sobering down might be given prayerful expression, all this worry and concern channelled into an invocation not only for Clive but for all the victims of this frightful disease and not merely here but in Africa, Asia and America and so on. The landscape of the petition taking shape in his mind he stood up and faced the congregation. ‘Shall we pray.’
As he himself knelt he saw the student-type in the anorak, impervious to the atmosphere obviously, still with his hand up and waving it even more vigorously now. But