Crusaders (12 page)

Gore did not quite believe the heresy. But a high gleam stayed in her eye as entrées were served. ‘Do you remember a guy called Martin Pallister?’

‘I do. Lecturer. From Newcastle? I remember his dad too.’

‘His dad? Well, Martin came to see me and I’m doing a bit work for him. On the side, really. Off the books.’

‘What can you do for a college lecturer?’

‘Oh no, he’s come on a fair bit. Wants to be an MP. I’ve been advising him. We ran into each other a few years back – that course I did out in Surrey?’

Gore had vague recall of his sister spending a long weekend at some country hotel being instructed in assertiveness, not an attribute he remembered as wanting in her or indeed Martin Pallister.

‘Don’t worry, it’s not sexual. Just a job. No, my sex life is a bore, dahling.’

‘No one left on the Tory benches takes your fancy?’

‘Please. They’re a lot of wimps. Snuck into the Commons under Maggie’s skirts. They look a poor lot now she’s gone, I can tell you.’ She had taken on a dreamy aspect, her osso buco neglected. ‘Seb wasn’t like that. Not gay, or weird. Not on the take, not
really
. Just a smart, handsome guy. The wrong horse, but. Wife and kiddie and that. Don’t know where my head went to there.’ Gore was silent, feeling much the novice. Susannah shook her head as though to dislodge clinging irritants. ‘No. No, I was silly. It won’t happen again.’

‘At least you got out unscathed.’

She pouted at him, as if the comment were woundingly
heedless
.

‘Well, you did. All in all? Didn’t you?’

A quite unthinkable thought occurred to Gore, and he quashed it before it gestated, chewing at length on his lean, flavourless beef fillet. To his relief Susannah recovered her stride. ‘What I need is a new job. Or new contacts. Your lot are coming up.’

‘We only got beat six months ago.’

‘Well, defeats can be blessings in disguise. Isn’t that what Churchill’s wife told him when he lost to what’s-his-face?’

‘Atlee.’

‘Aye, him. No, Smith’s hopeless, just a Scots lawyer. He’s not Kinnock, but. He could maybe beat Major.
You
could maybe beat Major.’

‘You’re too kind.’

‘I’m serious. The ERM thing is a fucking
disaster
. I suppose you enjoyed it.’

Gore shrugged. Yes, he had felt a certain sickly thrill in the Tory calamity, worsening with each hourly news bulletin, the
bumbling
schoolboy Chancellor fighting his feckless rearguard,
buying
sterling in billions while foreign speculators bet against him with lethal ease.

Their plates were being whisked away, Susannah lighting up moodily. ‘Housing market’s gone rotten too. Just when I had my eye on Islington.’

‘It’s all about houses, isn’t it?’

‘You bet it is, pet. Ask your Church about it. You know how much they’ve pissed away on property? Eight hundred
million
. They might have to sell the Metro Centre.’

The Church’s interest in a Gateshead shopping mall was not of interest to Gore. He tried to let Susannah see as much. ‘Don’t sneer, bonny lad, that’s your pension there. I was reading, actually, about the Metro, they’ve got a
chaplain
, of all things? Presumably he goes around telling people not to spend all their money. Made us think, but. Have you picked out your pitch yet? That could be one for you … You didn’t want coffee, did you?’

‘No, I have class at two. Ethics.’

‘Oh, ethics indeed? Is that where Basildon is?’

She glanced at her slip of a Tag Heuer watch, and made what John considered a rather over-defined show of flipping her credit card at the small white dish on which the bill was lolling.

The custom of the evening was for a loose affiliation of more sociable ordinands to follow Compline by a visit to one in the rank of pubs on King Street. Arriving solo after the terse weekly phone call to his father, Gore pushed through the door of the Nell Gwyn to find the session in swing, and saw to his dismay that Simon Barlow had inserted himself into the heart of the sodality.

‘Right then, Gore’s here, let’s have some proper crack about the vote.’

Charlie Gummer set down his tall frothy lager. ‘Ears! Ears!
La-la
-la-la-la! Not women! No, I bar the subject!’

Gore turned for the bar, there procuring a warm pint of sour sudsy bitter and a bag of peanuts, but on his return he found the issue unabated.

‘The whole thing,’ Gummer was gesticulating, ‘is just a ghastly American import. Like
Dynasty
. All this time, there’s poor Rome patiently reaching out to us. Now we’re just going to blow that all to hell.’

Gore set down his pint. ‘Who cares about Rome? We’re Anglicans. We ought to have the right enemies. I pay no more heed to the Pope than I do to Mystic Meg.’

‘
Ooh
. Nice one.’ Barlow banged the table. ‘Them’s fighting words.’

‘Well, I tell you now,’ Gummer declared airily, ‘I’d as soon go off and start up a whole new church than have to share the one we’ve got with a load of dippy
birds
. Is that what you want for our Communion, John? Women bishops, ordaining priests? It’s
ridiculous
. Where’s our authority then?’

Barlow clattered the table again: Gore knew it for a shameless ploy. ‘
Right
. And Christ told Peter, “On this rock I build My Church.” And after Peter was Linus, after Linus Clement, after Clement … Who was it, Gavin?’

‘Anacletus,’ murmured Gavin Knott.

‘
Anacletus
. Doesn’t that stir your blood, Gore? Doesn’t it
move
you? Our heritage, our descendance? From them who walked with Christ?’

Gore chose to ignore the monkey. ‘You’re very quiet, Gavin.’

Knott’s eyes flicked upward from his glass of red-ink Syrah. ‘Well, if you’re asking for my view of the question, I should say – I do believe there’s a reason why God chose to – incarnate himself, as a male. To reveal himself in that form. And take only men for his disciples. I do, yes.’ He nodded.

‘What reason is that then?’ Gore was truly curious.

‘Oh, I don’t say I
know
what it is.’ And Knott chuckled, the rarest of sights. ‘But it does seem He was content it be so.’

A hundred easy ripostes occurred, but Gore bit his lip. He saw no point in arguing with a wilful mystic, or playing the male
feminist
in this homosocial conclave.

On returning heavy-footed to his set of rooms he should have gone directly to his bed, he knew, and yet instead, enervated, he fell onto the chaise longue and there stared glazedly and gloomily at a hollow of plaster in the wall. At some point, though, he must have faded into sleep, for the next he knew he was peering with bleary eyes at the back of a hunched and bristly figure perched on the end of his bed. Lit only by the bedside-table lamp, its
shoulders
seemed to shake with contained mirth. The grace of a few more befuddled moments were needful for Gore to take this strange sight as reality rather than dream-state.

‘Simon …? What are you doing?’

Barlow swivelled to face him. ‘Your door was wide open, pal. Thought I’d better check on you. Someone might have done you an injury.’

Gore hoisted himself upright, dry-mouthed, not madly
grateful
.

‘Reason I
come
, see, is cos I thought you might fancy a
nightcap
?’

Now Gore saw the bottle of Bulgarian red on the bedside table, next to a pair of his utility glass tumblers, both of them generously charged.

‘Here.’ Barlow thrust a tumbler at him. ‘Have a sip. It’s not too foul for what it cost.’ He took a swig of his own, then smacked his lips with a livid tongue. ‘God almighty. Gav and old Charlie, eh? Fattypuff and Thinnifer. I mean, yeah, the whole women thing is barmy. But I can’t stomach the way that Charlie puts it. See, you reckon I rub along okay with that lot, don’t you?’

‘No, not necessarily.’ Gore sniffed uneasily at the wine.

‘Well, it’s true, I’m all for the High Church mob if it helps stick it to all you liberal scum. And I like this Pope, I’ll say that. He’s the boss, what he says goes. But that’s it. No, he puts me right off my supper, that Charlie.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, don’t come the innocent, John. You know how it is round here. All these mincers. Closet cases, making rules to suit their own
perversions
. Or is that all okay by you then, is it?’

‘Not just me,’ Gore groaned. ‘The bishops. We have a position, it’s been settled. You know what Lockhart says. “God intends a partner for each one of us.” Who knows, Simon, He may even have a partner for you.’

‘Oh, funny, yeah. Not
clergy
, but. If they want to be clergy, the gayers, they’re supposed to mend their ways. Get straightened out. I tell you what
I
think’s funny. Letting them decide what God wants for them. What’s the bet they decide he wants what
they
want? Eh? Lovely. So no harm in a little bit of buggery then.’

‘Do you have to use that word?’

‘People shouldn’t hide it, John, or try and talk around it.
God
sees it. Augustine calls it dead right. “Let your sin have you for its judge, not its patron.”’ Barlow took a sluicing swallow of wine. ‘
Any
how. That’s not my
point
. My
point
with these High Churchers, what really winds me up is all this threatening to pick up their ball and flounce off to Rome. That’s not how you win an argument, right? You stay the course, fight the good fight. My lot, we’re not going anywhere, I’ll tell you that.’ And he grinned. ‘You wish we would, don’t you John?’

‘You can do what you like.’

‘Oh, very liberal, I’m sure.’

Barlow stood with a little difficulty and slouched across the rug toward Gore’s fitted bookshelves, where he trailed fingers over a mounted print of Christ Pantokrator and the old brass miner’s lamp that served as bookend to Gore’s small paperback library. He peered closer. ‘“
Existentialist Biblicism
”. Bloody hell. Very
thin
, these books of yours. I mean, why do you bother? With all these continental phonies?’

‘I don’t see the harm in reading.’

‘Well, you say that, I’m not so sure. I think it waters down the faith.’

‘What, you don’t read?’

‘I read scripture, John. Just scripture. And I find it sufficient unto the day. It’s got all you need, scripture, if you look right. Amazing, it is. Have you never noticed that? I mean, what
do
you get out of scripture, John? If it’s not the Word of God?’

Gore took a mouthful of jammy vinegar and gestured,
grimacing
, to his bookshelves. ‘Barth tells us the text itself is not the revelation – it only becomes the Word if and when we hear God speak through it.’

‘Oh, you
hear
God, do you? Personal, is it, then? Between you and Him?’

‘No, I mean that I read the Bible as the word of men, of fellow believers. A historical text. And I find some clues there – themes, traces of things.’

‘
Themes?
Like in a novel?’

‘Great themes. Covenant, jubilee. Concern for the poor. The conquest of evil.’

‘How about creation? Redemption? Judgement?
Those
themes, John.’

‘Well, true, I’m not so keen as you on God the lawmaker. The judge in black cap at the end of days –’

‘Don’t talk crap, John. You’re judging me now. You hate me just cos I’ve got the neck to say I might know right from wrong.’

‘I don’t hate you. I hate fundamentalism. I can’t just believe one thing to the exclusion of everything else. I know I can’t, because I know myself. I have oppositions inside me. Divisions. Cleavages.’ And Gore smiled wanly, for a certain mad notion had begun to whittle within him, a scheme to drive out his
unwelcome
guest. ‘God and Satan are in me, Simon. Male and female. Hetero, homo –’

Barlow only grimaced. ‘Oh, piss off with that. What are you
doing
here, John? You’ve not come to learn, have you? Learn your trade, a proper working preacher? I mean, it drives me mad, it does, it’s like you come into my church without wiping your feet. Moping about, talking rubbish. It’s not good enough. These are dangerous times,
everything
we’re about is under attack. And what’s our defence? Eh? We’re the next generation of ministers.
How many after us? Who’s going to keep the gospel alive? Keep England in the faith?’

‘“Old toad, old toad, help me down Cemetery Road …”’

‘Shut up, idiot, it’s your living too. I’m telling you, if we don’t fight then this Church is dead. We’ve got to be out there,
evangelising
the nation. Or else we’re irrelevant, we’re just some little
sect
, trying to get on the telly so people give a toss. And that’ll be your fault, Gore, you and your lot. I’m not afraid, see, I’m ready to preach the gospel like fire. You, you’ve got this …
literary
appreciation
of it. Very nice, for you. But you don’t see the power,
wonder-
working
power in the words. ‘“Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.” Let a man be reborn of water and the Spirit.’

Barlow was on his feet and bobbing and weaving, banging away to some inner drum, fit and measured for his pulpit. Despair crawled over Gore, that this awful man wouldn’t leave him to his slumber – worse, that he might have a point. Still it would have pained him too much to grant such.

‘It’s not
your
Church, Simon – you didn’t make it, you don’t own it. You think your lot could ever get it back to what it was? Where? In a tent? Not in a million years. You’d drive away twice as many as you ever got in, I’d bet any money.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah. Because you’re a bigot. It’s all just poison comes out of you. Anyone can see it a mile off. It’d be too much fun just to ignore you. You’d make me want to kiss a man on the mouth just to get you to fuck off.’

Barlow lunged at him. For a sick instant Gore thought they would fight. Instead – infinitely worse, before he could flinch – his head had been seized between Barlow’s hands, a talon-like grip. The bristly head darted down and his mouth covered Gore’s, wet and sour to the taste, his grainy cheeks rubbing and grazing. Appalled, writhing to free himself, Gore then felt teeth incising into his lower lip, and punched out at Barlow’s chest, driving him off.