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By Root 514 0

We are not worthy, he thought, so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table . . . The familiar words of the Book of Common Prayer came back to him unbidden, from the liturgy of the Scottish Episcopal Church, in which he had been raised and to which, when he felt the need, he always went home; these phrases lodged in the mind, to surface at unexpected moments, such as this, and brought with them their particular form of consolation. Such language, such resonant, echoing phrases – man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live . . . Dearly beloved we are gathered together here in the sight of God – this was the linguistic heritage bequeathed to the English-speaking peoples in the liturgy and in the Authorised Version by Cranmer and by Jamie Sext, James VI, a monarch with whom Angus had always felt a great affinity. And what had we done with it, with this language and all its dignity? Exchanged it for the banalities of the disc jockey, for the cheap coin of a debased English, for all the vulgarities and obscenities that had polluted broadcasting. And nobody taught children how to speak clearly any more; nobody taught them to articulate, with the result that there were so many now who spoke from unopened mouths, their words all joined together in some indecipherable slur. You have taken away our language; you have betrayed us. Yes. Yes.

Our situation, he thought, is serious. Our nightmares are waking ones: global warming; the loss of control over our lives; a degenerate, irretrievably superficial popular culture; the arrival, with bands playing, of Orwell’s Big Brother. He stared at his table in despair. Did he want to live through all this? Did he want to see the world he knew turned so utterly upside down?

He closed his eyes. Even then, he could feel the presence of the sun as it cast its light upon his table. It was there, a yellow glow, a patch of warmth. He lowered his head and brought his hands together on his lap; hands on which the smell of paint and turps seemed always to linger, the hands of one who made something, an artist. Suddenly, and with complete humility, he began to pray. At first, he felt self-conscious as he performed the forgotten act, last done how many years ago? But, after a moment, that went away, and he felt the onset of a proper humility, a glow. Because I am nothing, he thought, just an ordinary man, a tiny speck of consciousness on a half burned-out star, precisely because of that I lower my head and pray. And it seemed to him at that moment that it did not matter if there was nobody listening; the very act of prayer was an acknowledgement of his humanity, a reminder of true scale.

‘O Lord,’ he whispered, ‘who judges all men and to whom alone the secrets of the heart are known; forgive me my human failings, my manifold acts of wickedness. Open my heart to love. Turn thy healing gaze to me. Forgive me for that which I have not done which I ought to have done.’

It was a hotch-potch of half-remembered phrases, taken out of context and patched together, but as he spoke them, uttered each one, he felt their transformative power. He saw a man beside a shore. He saw children at the feet of the man. What he saw was love and compassion; he was sure of that, utterly sure.

Angus opened his eyes and saw the sunlight upon the table. He moved his hands so that they lay in the square of warmth. He looked. The hairs on his hands were picked out by the light; there was a small fleck of white paint on one knuckle. He closed his eyes and concluded his prayer. ‘And I ask one final thing,’ he muttered. ‘I ask that you restore to me my dog.’

He rose to his feet and looked about him. How foolish, he thought, to imagine that words uttered by him could change the world in the slightest way; what a massive, sentimental delusion!

But then the telephone rang. Angus gave a start, and then crossed the room to answer. For a second or two, he imagined that his prayer had brought results and that the call would bring news of Cyril. But that, he knew, was not how the world worked. The world was one of chance,