Such Men Are Dangerous (3 page)

Oh dear.

She remembered the time when Simon had been promised a bicycle: on condition he received a first-rate end-of-term report. The poor boy had talked incessantly about this beautiful machine, literally dreaming of the day when it would be taken out of the shop window, an almost unimaginable possession, already christened
Argo
. The report had been excellent—in all but one subject: Scripture.
Simon needs to try a little harder
.

“But I did try! I did try! He’s muddling me with someone else. He often gets confused, he’s famous for it!”

Yet when that bicycle left the window it was for some other child. Simon had cried himself to sleep for three nights in succession and Sally, listening helplessly outside his door, had argued and cajoled on his behalf. But Henry, who was usually no tyrant, was fanatical about Simon’s education. Dr Jekyll, she had sometimes mentioned to her son, had also been a Henry.

A year later, of course, the bicycle was still a welcome acquisition but it was no longer that passionately desired and dreamed-of trophy. “And next time,” said his father, “make sure you do so well in everything there’s just no possibility of
anybody
ever mixing you up with
anybody
! If you do that, we’ll have a holiday in France!”

Heigh-ho!

Mrs Madison sighed.

Happy days.

As she went in she became aware again, just a little, of the demoralizing arthritis which she suffered in one knee (but she was sure it wasn’t as bad as it had been before Simon had prayed over it) and also—more annoyingly—of the fact that the telephone was once more ringing. Ye gods, that made it the fifth time since Simon had gone out, or was it the sixth? She responded with defiance. “Sorry, zey theenk thees ees ze wrong nomber, very pardon.” She replaced the receiver, took it off again and laid it on the blotter with the happy sensation of being an alumna of St Trinian’s.

Much later, when she was in bed and practically asleep, trying not to think about the funeral she’d been present at that morning, she recalled the disconnected telephone; and after a great deal of effort forced herself to go downstairs to reconnect it. Oh, thank heaven she’d remembered! It was a foolish thing to be scared of incurring the displeasure of your own son—a son, moreover, who very seldom grew impatient with her and who had never addressed her with the least desire to hurt—but there it was: she would rather have provoked anyone’s annoyance than Simon’s; and that had nothing to do, so far as she could make out, with the fact that she loved him and didn’t want to cause him grief.

Sometimes she even wondered whether it had more to do with the possibility she really did find him…on the very rare occasion…just a little frightening.

But why?

Was it because he was so single-minded, so driven, so…? Well, no, he was never as demanding of others as he was of himself—not nearly so—but, still, his standards were obsessively high. This could be daunting. Uncomfortable. You wondered if you’d ever have a hope of meeting them. And you remembered that his father had also been—even if purely in one sphere—a person you could call fanatical.

3

Simon was good at table tennis but to his chagrin—as well as relief—was beaten in the third game of the finals.

The chagrin came because at heart he was a bad loser and would never have played less well than he could; the relief, because it would have been despicable to deprive a lad, already sufficiently deprived, of a victory bound to develop self-respect. “Christ, I beat the fucking vicar!” he heard Earl Davis bragging afterwards, in whispered awe.

Yet, whatever Simon’s form of self-reproach, almost nothing but the game itself had mattered whilst in progress and his absorption in it had been both merciful and marvellous. At seven-fifty, when he went into the empty, darkened church and spent several minutes kneeling by the altar, his gratitude for the tournament was the one uncomplicated thing he felt travelling between himself and God.

The youth centre not only abutted on the church, it was an extension of it. St Matthew’s itself dated from the twenties. Other additions included a new main entrance—made chiefly of glass—a vestibule and an office. Because the office was one of the easier parts of the building to warm, most of the church committees chose to meet in it. Simon left the altar rail shortly before eight.

Education and Mission had only five members on it, all of them women. They began light-heartedly: a few holiday reminiscences; hilarity at his and the youth leader’s rashness in allowing wet sponges to be thrown at them during a recent fête. More aggression had been unleashed than had been bargained for—“Some of it mine!” laughed Simon, who had slightly lost his temper. “And all for just tuppence a throw!”

“But talking of aggression, have you seen our Reginald’s latest in tonight’s edition?” Alison was about forty, shortish, dark-haired, lively. “My husband thinks the pair of you must be doubling the paper’s circulation.”

“Well, Reg certainly isn’t doing it with his syntax,” answered Simon. “So it must be with his sarcasm.”

“Let’s hope it isn’t with his prejudice!”

“What sweet new fascist principles is he flaunting for us now?”

Before Alison could reply, however, one of the others spoke. This was Paula, who was in charge of St Matthew’s Sunday school—
Pious Paula
, closely related to
Devotional Dawn
in every way excepting that of actual family tie and the fact that she was single and evidently ‘stuck’ on him: his mother’s terrible expression when teasing him with her own macabre vision of what the future might be offering, unless he took strong action to avert it.
Pious
was roughly his own age and rather dumpy. She wore a pancake makeup over a coarse complexion but she had a pleasant smile and she always smelled nicely of Bluebell. (She had told him recently, with a violent blush, that that was what it was—“Do you really like it?”)

“Oh, Simon, I just don’t know how he can be so rude to you! He should respect you. Not only because you’re a vicar and write much better letters than he does but also because you’re the vice-chairman of the Community Relations Council and really ought to know what you’re talking about. That’s what
I
say, anyhow.”

He took compassion on her flustered countenance. “Thank you, Paula. That’s what I say, too. But now I honestly feel we’d better do some work.”

Tonight there were four main topics they wanted to discuss: problems to do with house groups; the forthcoming visit to Nigeria of a missionary who was going to keep a link with St Matthew’s during his time out there; the possibility of some Franciscans coming to work in Scunthorpe; and what improvements could be made to the parish magazine. Throughout all this Simon did his best to concentrate and it turned out to be a satisfactory meeting, with some practical decisions reached.

When his concentration did lapse, furthermore, the direct cause was less Dawn Heath than a newspaper which the church secretary, who came in every Wednesday, happened to have left behind. This was folded in four but still revealed a couple of typically disquieting headlines: more provocative comment from Reagan at the expense of Russia and the death of yet another soldier in Belfast. There was also something about the government making further drastic cuts in services to the old and the mentally ill. Simon bit his lip.
Well, he said that we were heading for disaster. And told us how we’d have to mend our ways
.

Hmm.

It reminded Simon of nothing so much as the sort of ‘encouraging’ message delivered with such vibrant intensity at séances. Yet you’d think an angel could come up with something a
bit
more convincing. Surely?

And why on earth should he choose to deliver it in Scunthorpe?
Scunthorpe
of all places! The very name was a music hall joke; the easy butt of every second-rate comedian. Over the past three years Simon had become genuinely fond of the town and was often vociferously indignant at the rotten press it received. But the fact remained that, by and large, Scunthorpe was not a spot that the British media, or indeed the British population in general, treated with much seriousness.

Could anything good, they would say, come out of Scunthorpe?

These reflections occupied a few minutes. During the remainder of the meeting only one other thing distracted him: the memory of a burial service he had conducted that same morning. It was a death which had bothered him all week.

A man whom Simon hadn’t met had hanged himself in a local wood. He was twenty-three and had been out of work for five months. He left a widow of nineteen who was pregnant with their third baby—which even yet the doctors were struggling to save. The man’s father hadn’t attended the funeral either, “because, if you must know, I’m just too bloody well disgusted by that bloody boy!” Nor had the man’s mother, a recovering alcoholic. There had been eleven mourners at the service; these had included Mrs Madison and seven other members of the congregation who also hadn’t met Jerry Turner. The remaining three were a former workmate, a schoolfriend and a teenage Pakistani boy, the son of a neighbour. They stood around the graveside in warm sunshine under a cloudless sky, awkward, their dark clothes incongruous, and as they came away the schoolfriend said—there were tears on his pockmarked cheeks—“And he was always so sodding cheerful!” He had hung in the wood for nearly a week before he’d been discovered by two eight-year-olds playing at being savages.

Well, as a vicar, of course, you had to guard against becoming bitter. Either bitter or sentimental. Simon now chewed his lip again—a habit his mother kept trying to break him of—and suggested giving a party at the vicarage for this other unknown young man who would be stopping there for a weekend,
en route
, eventually, for Nigeria. “Better than having the kind of get-together here in the hall where you’re half afraid no one will turn up!”

The meeting ended. As he locked the office he saw Paula waiting for him by the main door.

“I was wondering if you’d heard on tonight’s news, Simon, about the vicar who’s just resigned from his parish near Stoke-on-Trent?” She was forever storing such snippets for him and—as usual when they were alone—spoke more breathlessly than at other times. “He’s caused a split in his congregation by setting up a rival church nearby!”

Simon shook his head. He guided her onto the pavement and locked the outer door.

“And can you guess why?” she hurried on. “Because his son went to Lourdes and was cured of his convulsions! Imagine something inspirational like that, Simon, creating so much controversy and so much bad feeling!”

“Strangely it often seems to.”

“And after seventeen years! Feels drawn to Rome! It’s wonderful about his son, of course, but I really can’t see—”

“Perhaps he thinks the Church of England pays too little attention to miracles? Perhaps, what’s more, he could be right. But excuse me, Paula, I’m on my way to an appointment.”

“Of course,” she said. “Please give my love to your mother,” she called across the broad expanse of pavement.

4

Josh Heath had gone to the pub. Dawn hastened to excuse this by declaring that it was for the first time in months; and then, although Simon wasn’t in the least offended, realized the excuse itself could need excusing.

This worried her for a bit—until she saw it didn’t matter. Tonight, nothing mattered. Her sons had been picked out by God for a glorious revelation and whatever Mr Mad—, whatever Simon, might have said earlier about queer tricks of the mind, now he would recognize the truth of it, simply by listening. Soon the whole of Scunthorpe would recognize the truth of it; the whole of Humberside; the whole of England.

She had the tea and biscuits waiting.

Both her boys sat on the sofa: William wearing jeans and jumper, Michael in pyjamas and dressing gown. William had acne. Michael wore a brace across his teeth. Each appeared small for his age. Simon, who’d have sworn he had never seen either of them before, thought they looked intelligent.

There was about them an air of quiet excitement. Naturally.

“Stand up,” whispered Dawn. “Stand up and shake hands with the vicar.”

The sofa was part of a three-piece suite whose chairs also looked towards the television—Simon asked if he might pull one round. Needlessly, but likably, William stood up again and helped him. They drank their tea and Dawn chattered about St Bernadette: recently they’d seen the film and Dawn offered this fact itself as though it might be significant, a form of preparation. She asked him vaguely about Fatima. Simon answered her questions as best he could but wondered whether he ought to be interviewing the boys individually and without their mother. Yet he didn’t want to seem like a policeman, and besides, if they were meaning to deceive him, they’d have got all the details worked out beforehand. He asked about school. They said they didn’t see themselves as being in any way unusual. They found religious education boring, apart from the occasional debate. (Yes, they’d both been confirmed; when Mr Apsbury was vicar.) In English they were thought to have strong imaginations. William was fairly interested in politics, Michael wasn’t. Simon didn’t know if he’d hoped to deduce anything of value from this line of questioning.

“What were you talking about as you came away from school?”

They listed a few things, none of them obviously relevant to heavenly visits.

Of the two or three minutes prior to their encounter they could remember nothing.

“All right. When you saw the angel what can you remember then?”

Simon had to prompt them further.

“Did you feel surprise? Astonishment? Fear?”

“No,” said William. “It seemed…it sounds silly…just natural.”

“How do you mean, natural?”

“Like meeting somebody you knew.”

“And liked,” added Michael.

“I see. Well, what happened then? How did he greet you?”

William shrugged.

“He said hi, asked how we were, didn’t want to shake hands or anything. Knew our names. Called us Mick and Bill, the way most people do.”

“Did he tell you his own name?”