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Authors: Iain Crichton Smith
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excitement, as if there was a coach outside waiting. And she also remembered the compulsory church services she had had to attend when she was in school and which she had hated, as she had hated many of the pupils; their childish scurries in the dorm after lights out, the shared food parcels at midnight, the running into wardrobes and under beds when authority came to investigate. They had all been so infantile, their world was so uninteresting in comparison with that of for instance Jane Eyre. She remembered the stupid conspiracies with hot-water bottles and baths. And she suddenly felt overwhelmingly insecure as if someone were trying to disassemble her carefully structured world. Evil perhaps rose simply from that; fear, grief, absence, insecurity.
And now there was this new development which she couldn’t help construing as a threat, Tom’s going to church. What had happened to his, for want of a better word, integrity? How could one despise the empty robes and theatre of religion, how could one feel the utmost contempt for that bravado without substance, and then in such a short time and so inexplicably become a willing spectator of it, perhaps even an actor in it. It was true: she felt a new coldness about her, as if her formal world were in danger of destruction, a sentence which would soon lack a verb. In the chill of the autumn morning she left the kitchen and went to the bathroom and stood staring at the doll which was lying on the cistern facing her as she looked in. The eyes, blue and cloudless, gazed at her from below the long eyelashes. The face, round and chubby and red as an apple, showed an almost vulgar healthiness and absence of thought. The dress, short and frilled and golden, hardly reached the chubby knees.
Where had the doll come from? She couldn’t remember. Had she got it as a marriage present? Surely not. Had she bought it in the town one day when she had nothing better to do? She couldn’t remember at all. But there it stood on top of the cistern, mindless and clear-eyed confronting her head-achy untidy self, as if it were a symbol of a primitive time before religion had been even thought of, with its red lips, red ribbons and startlingly blue eyes which seemed to suggest a pagan heaven without mercy or fear. She picked it up in her hand, weighing it delicately, and then began to stroke the golden hair very gently and tenderly as if she were stroking the head of a child, over and over, a stiff staring child golden in the autumnal light.
7
M EANWHILE T OM SAT beside his mother in the church after a moment of hesitation at the door, as if even then he could turn back and not commit himself. He saw a number of people whom he knew and who nodded at him in slight surprise, glancing at his mother who smiled in an almost queenly manner. As he waited for the service to begin, looking around him at the bright hats of the women, the tall blue cross on the pulpit cloth, the varnished pulpit with the microphone, the narrow windows with their stained-glass panes, he thought of what he was doing. His mother sat beside him, staring straight ahead of her, her hands in her lap, passive in the silence, and he sensed that in some way she was repossessing him, that by doing what he had done he had taken an irrevocable step. For what he was doing, and his motive for doing it, was unusual. Not believing in religion, he had placed humanity above ideology as if by doing so he was setting himself beside her in the world, as if he was showing that he was not ashamed of her.
This extraordinary achievement—the clearsightedness with which he had seen the issues at stake—warmed him with a righteous glow. How many people would have understood what he had understood, that beyond ideology, that even beyond disbelief, there lies the human being, solitary and vulnerable: that more important than intellectual consistency is the helpless demand of the human soul and body: that from these stale forms peers out shyly and
And now there was this new development which she couldn’t help construing as a threat, Tom’s going to church. What had happened to his, for want of a better word, integrity? How could one despise the empty robes and theatre of religion, how could one feel the utmost contempt for that bravado without substance, and then in such a short time and so inexplicably become a willing spectator of it, perhaps even an actor in it. It was true: she felt a new coldness about her, as if her formal world were in danger of destruction, a sentence which would soon lack a verb. In the chill of the autumn morning she left the kitchen and went to the bathroom and stood staring at the doll which was lying on the cistern facing her as she looked in. The eyes, blue and cloudless, gazed at her from below the long eyelashes. The face, round and chubby and red as an apple, showed an almost vulgar healthiness and absence of thought. The dress, short and frilled and golden, hardly reached the chubby knees.
Where had the doll come from? She couldn’t remember. Had she got it as a marriage present? Surely not. Had she bought it in the town one day when she had nothing better to do? She couldn’t remember at all. But there it stood on top of the cistern, mindless and clear-eyed confronting her head-achy untidy self, as if it were a symbol of a primitive time before religion had been even thought of, with its red lips, red ribbons and startlingly blue eyes which seemed to suggest a pagan heaven without mercy or fear. She picked it up in her hand, weighing it delicately, and then began to stroke the golden hair very gently and tenderly as if she were stroking the head of a child, over and over, a stiff staring child golden in the autumnal light.
7
M EANWHILE T OM SAT beside his mother in the church after a moment of hesitation at the door, as if even then he could turn back and not commit himself. He saw a number of people whom he knew and who nodded at him in slight surprise, glancing at his mother who smiled in an almost queenly manner. As he waited for the service to begin, looking around him at the bright hats of the women, the tall blue cross on the pulpit cloth, the varnished pulpit with the microphone, the narrow windows with their stained-glass panes, he thought of what he was doing. His mother sat beside him, staring straight ahead of her, her hands in her lap, passive in the silence, and he sensed that in some way she was repossessing him, that by doing what he had done he had taken an irrevocable step. For what he was doing, and his motive for doing it, was unusual. Not believing in religion, he had placed humanity above ideology as if by doing so he was setting himself beside her in the world, as if he was showing that he was not ashamed of her.
This extraordinary achievement—the clearsightedness with which he had seen the issues at stake—warmed him with a righteous glow. How many people would have understood what he had understood, that beyond ideology, that even beyond disbelief, there lies the human being, solitary and vulnerable: that more important than intellectual consistency is the helpless demand of the human soul and body: that from these stale forms peers out shyly and
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