The Coke came. They sipped it but did not speak, and the very fact that their earlier chatter had stopped so abruptly told Anna that Andrew, though he had said nothing to state it, and had heard nothing from her, was quite aware that they had established a bond of a quite different kind. Yet if, as she now knew, they were destined to become lovers, it was in a way that she had never known before, not ever imagined. He had said nothing; he had done nothing; no pass had been made, no innuendo slipped into a casual conversation; only that humble acknowledgement that he could but serve as a substitute for someone better.
He was silent now, as if also aware that anything either might say would be beside the point. He seemed shy, certainly, but not awkward or uneasy. His manner was that of a bridegroom who, after a long engagement, had finally reached the day of his wedding. She, too, looked back on their friendship as upon the courtship of an arranged marriage, with Providence the matchmaker and love an unexpected surprise.
When they had finished their drinks, they went out into the warm streets again and walked towards the Temple Mount to watch its honey-coloured ramparts turn pink from the light of the setting sun. There they held hands, as did a number of other courting couples. Then, as the sun set, both declared that they were hungry. They went back into the Jewish quarter to eat pancakes and drink beer at a table in the open air. Again they hardly talked because there was nothing now to say. Only when they had eaten did Andrew ask: ‘Will your parents wonder where you are?’
‘I guess they will if I don’t go home.’
‘And will you go home?’
‘Do you want me to?’
‘No.’ He shook his head almost sadly.
‘Is there room at the inn?’
He smiled. ‘I think so.’
‘Good. Then I’ll call them from there.’
Sixteen
On the day that Andrew and Anna left for Israel, Henry awoke as usual at seven o’clock in the morning and went barefoot to his bathroom. There, as he rinsed his face after shaving, he saw a scarlet stain in the soapy water.
He was at once seized by panic. He spat into the basin: there was blood, too, in his saliva. He went pale, imagining that these were signs of internal bleeding; that his lungs or his liver or his kidneys had ruptured, and that in half an hour he would be dead.
A few moments later, after further spitting into the basin, he saw that the leak came from his nose, and could be stanched with a paper handkerchief. Still with the ambiguous taste of blood in his mouth, he shuffled through to the kitchen to make some coffee, feeling relieved to be still living and foolish that he had thought himself so close to death.
This was not the first such scare. Three months before, he had panicked because his weight had begun to go down. He had imagined some malignant growth devouring all the nourishment that would normally have gone to his body. He then remembered that he had given up alcohol for a spell, and that, since he was used to drinking several glasses of whisky every evening, he had reduced his consumption of calories by around a thousand each day.
Now, as he sat down to his breakfast of freshly squeezed orange juice, freshly ground coffee, wholemeal toast and thick-cut marmalade, with a copy of the Financial Times on the table in front of him, Henry tried to return to the solitary contentment he usually felt at this moment of the day. However, the fear he had felt, while it did not persist, left a residue of anxiety of an imprecise kind. It was not that he feared death, which he supposed was simply oblivion; he was, rather, annoyed in advance by the business of dying, just as he was exasperated when any of his machines broke down. He expected his body and his brain to function as efficiently as the engine of his BMW. He was tormented by petty malfunctions, like nosebleeds or toothache, far beyond the parameters of the pain itself.
He was equally fastidious about his clothes. When he had finished his breakfast he went to his dressing-room, where nine suits awaited him on heavy mahogany hangers. Before deciding which to wear, he thought of the day’s appointments. Having chosen an appropriate suit, with shirt and tie to match, he dressed in front of a full-length mirror, inspecting each garment as he put it on for signs of wear, ready to throw it aside for the husband of his Spanish cleaner.
Once, he had been as demanding about the furnishings of his flat. A mark left by a glass on the leather top of his club fender, or by a greasy hand on the arm of his sofa, would have led him to call in the cleaners and, if the stain could not be removed, have the upholstery renewed. If, now, he tolerated the odd sign of grime or wear, it was not because it did not pain him, or would cost too much to make good, but because he could not be bothered to telephone the shops which had provided the furniture, or the girl who had decorated his flat.
As a result, although he seemed to others to be a man in control of his own fate, Henry felt the victim of a creeping decrepitude brought about by the weakening of his will. Far from the heroic destiny he had once envisaged, he now foresaw nothing but a grumbling war of attrition against dirt, dilapidation and disease, ending in a final defeat by cancer, a heart attack, emphysema or a stroke.
Only the demands made upon him by his work distracted him from this pessimism. That morning, having dressed, he drove from Belgravia to Soho, left his car in a garage, and walked from the garage to his office. It occupied one floor of an old brick building, with an architectural practice above and a cutting-room below. At ten, he held a meeting of his editors and researchers to discuss a newsletter on barter in international trade.
This, Henry believed, would increase over the next decade. Many countries in Africa and Eastern Europe were virtually bankrupt, their currencies worthless, their credit exhausted. Even the Russians needed most of the hard currency earned from the export of oil to import food for their hungry population. Those Western businesses who wished to trade with the Soviets in the future might have to return to the kind of barter which had existed at the time of Ivan the Terrible, when English merchants had exchanged pitch and iron for Russian furs and timber.
With this newsletter on barter in mind, Henry had arranged to have lunch with Edward Meredith, a friend from his days on the Economist and now the Moscow correspondent for a London daily. They usually met when Meredith was in London, and on this occasion – eager to pick his brains – Henry had asked him to lunch in a restaurant in Charlotte Street.
On his way to meet him, Henry was crossing the east side of Soho Square when a woman came out of St Patrick’s Church whom he recognized but could not place. It was too late to avoid her, so he smiled and prepared to walk past, but she stopped and greeted him.
‘I thought you might not remember who I was,’ she said with a coy smile.
‘Of course I do,’ he said.
‘I was reminded of you because I met your brother the other day.’
‘Andrew?’
‘Yes. I had heard about him from the Simonites, but I never realized he was your brother.’
Henry now remembered that this was Veronica Dunn, the woman seduced by Father Lambert. ‘We’re very different,’ he said.
‘I rang him this morning but they said he was away.’
‘He went to Israel.’
She nodded – a grave expression on her face. ‘Did he go because of … Father Lambert?’
‘Yes.’
‘To find out what might have happened to him there?’
‘He knew already.’
‘He didn’t tell me.’
‘He was very agitated.’
‘Why? What was it?’
‘It appears that Professor Dagan has discovered the skeleton of Christ.’
‘Ah.’ She made a sound – half an exclamation, half a cry – and a look passed over her face of mixed pain and relief, as if Henry had just removed the point of an arrow from her flesh. She listened gravely as he explained to her about the Vilnius Codex and the discovery of the jar in the cistern.
‘And Father Lambert believed it was Jesus?’
‘So it would seem.’
‘Th
e poor man.’
‘It seems to explain why he killed himself.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded with the same grave look on her face, then frowned as some anxiety came into her mind. ‘And your brother?’ she asked. ‘How did he take it?’
‘He was shocked, I think, but also glad to know the truth.’
‘What truth?’
‘That Christ did not rise from the dead.’
‘Is that established?’
‘Why yes, surely, if Father Lambert accepted it.’
‘Can we be sure that he did?’
Henry frowned. ‘I should have thought so, from the very fact that he took his own life.’
She closed her eyes for a moment and Henry, afraid that she might be about to faint, led her across the street to a bench in the garden of Soho Square.
‘There might have been other reasons why he took his own life,’ she said as they sat down.
While sympathetic to her physical frailty, Henry was irritated by this refusal to face the facts. ‘You can’t deny, surely,’ he said, ‘that his suicide now seems certain to have been an act of despair?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I am sure … I have reasons of my own for believing that that afternoon he was in a state of great confusion … perhaps despair. He doubted, yes, he doubted, but … you are not a Catholic, are you?’
‘No.’
‘I thought not.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you cannot understand doubt unless you have known faith.’
‘They are both attitudes of mind.’
‘No.’
‘What are they, then?’
‘Faith, is to find God. Doubt is to lose him, or rather, to lose sight of him.’
‘And hadn’t Father Lambert lost sight of God, or at least God as he had previously conceived of him?’
‘We all lose sight of God from time to time. He withdraws.’
‘Why?’
‘Perhaps to teach us that he is a person, not an attitude of mind.’
Henry frowned, annoyed that this woman was trying to evade the ramifications of her lover’s suicide. ‘I dare say,’ he said, ‘that Father Lambert had had doubts before …’
‘Grave doubts.’
‘Any sane man would.’
‘Any man at all.’
‘All the same, the doubt he entertained that afternoon – knowing, as he did, that Dagan had found the body of Christ …’
‘He cannot have known it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he had not had time to study the findings.’
‘That’s true, but prima facie …’
‘Prima facie, it was enough to make him vulnerable to doubt, but that is precisely how we can know that he was not convinced, because he behaved irrationally, chaotically, absurdly …’
‘In killing himself?’
‘And in other ways.’
‘What other ways?’
‘I think you know.’
‘Andrew did mention that …’
‘I don’t blame him. He’s young.’
‘But that – what he did to you – was not the act of a man who still believed in the Resurrection.’
‘It was the act of a man wrestling with Satan.’
‘Satan?’ He gave a sniff of involuntary derision.
‘If you don’t believe in God, then I dare say you don’t believe in Satan.’
‘I didn’t know that anyone did these days.’
‘That only goes to show his cunning.’
‘Why?’
‘Because, prima facie …’ – she repeated Henry’s Latin tag with an ironic smile on her lips – ‘there is so much evil and suffering in the world that it should be easier to conceive of an evil creator than of a good one.’
‘Does one need to conceive of a creator at all after Darwin?’
‘He explains how one thing turned into something else, but he doesn’t explain how the first thing came out of nothing.’
‘And a God, I realize, provides an easy answer,’ said Henry scathingly, ‘particularly if he is all-powerful and totally mysterious.’
‘But he is not totally mysterious. He makes himself known.’
‘To whom?’
‘To anyone who prays and listens.’
Henry scowled. He disliked her archness and her complacency. ‘How lucky you are to have all the answers,’ he said.
‘But I don’t,’ she said.
‘Well, you seem better equipped than Father Lambert was to cope with the news of Dagan’s find.’
She looked suddenly perplexed. ‘He went through periods of great depression.’
‘About his vocation?’
‘No, no. He never doubted that.’
‘About what, then?’
‘About the state of the Church.’
‘It’s surely in better shape now than it has ever been.’
‘In most ways, yes. But even when the Popes were utterly corrupt, they maintained the claims of the Catholic Church to be the only institution founded by God.’
‘And don’t they now?’
‘A year or two ago – you may remember it – our present Pope held a meeting in Assisi of the heads of several different religions – not just bishops from other Christian denominations, but a Muslim, a Hindu, a Shintoist, even a Red Indian chief or medicine man.’
‘I remember. They were photographed together.’
‘Exactly. And that photograph seemed to proclaim that the Pope now accepted that the Catholic faith was just one among others. He may not have intended to say that, but that was its effect, and to Father Lambert this was very disheartening.’
‘It seems to me to be stating the obvious.’
‘Of course. But what is obvious to those who doubt is not obvious to those who believe.’
‘So faith can not only move mountains, it can see through them too.’
‘It is quite as valid a way of knowing what is true as deductions based upon archaeological data.’
‘So it can rise above awkward facts like a skeleton found just where Josephus said it was buried, with marks consistent with what the Evangelists say was done to Christ?’
She smiled. ‘I really think that it is faith of a different kind which makes you so sure that those bones are the bones of Jesus.’
‘Why?’
‘Because, after so many years, it is quite impossible to know something like that.’
‘They found the body of Tutankhamun after many more years than that.’
‘Certainly, but in that case there were inscriptions …’
‘And here there is the description of Josephus.’
‘Discovered when?’
‘A couple of years ago.’
‘Isn’t that in itself an unlikely coincidence – two finds which fit so neatly together, within such a short space of time?’
‘Are you suggesting that the find is a hoax?’
‘Yes.’
‘Will you bet on it?’
‘If you like.’
‘Whose judgement will you accept? An archaeologist’s? Or must it be the Pope’s?’
‘I’ll accept yours.’
‘My judgement?’
‘Yes. If you look into it.’
‘But I’m not an archaeologist.’
‘If it is a fraud, then it isn’t really an archaeological question.’
‘No. It would be personal, or political.’
‘There may be some link, if my hypothesis is true, between Vilnius and Jerusalem.’
‘Possibly.’
‘Some complicity between two people.’
‘Yes.’
She stood up. ‘I must go.’
‘And what is the wager?’ asked Henry, glancing at his watch, then also getting to his feet. ‘Ten pounds? A hundred pounds?’
‘It is worth more than that, surely.’
‘A thousand?’
‘I think bets of this kind are usually in a different currency.’
He was puzzled. ‘Dollars?’
‘Souls.’
‘Ah. You mean I’m playing for my soul?’
‘And I for mine.’
‘Very well.’
‘Ring me when you know.’ She held out her hand and he shook it – whether to say goodbye or seal their wager he did not know – before walking towards Oxford Street.
Henry was now late for lunch and found Edward Meredith waiting at his table. After his encounter with Veronica Dunn, he was particularly pleased to join his sceptical friend. He had changed a little since he had last seen him – his hairline an inch or so further back on the brow; his eyes a little more bloodshot and bleary; his face heavier around the jowls; but his personality was the same, and they at once reestablished the familiar manner of their early days in journalism. After conventional enquiries about the well-being of his wife and children, Henry plunged straight into the question of the Soviet economy.
‘It’s a fascinating time to be there,’ said Meredith, ‘because the country is doubly bankrupt – economically bankrupt and ideologically bankrupt. You are right about barter – they’re reduced to that, not just in their trade with hard-currency nations, but also with other socialist countries which don’t want their worthless roubles. Even in trade between the Soviet republics themselves, they may be reduced to barter. I wrote a piece about a paper-mill in Lithuania which suddenly stopped receiving pulp from Siberia. The director telephoned the saw-mill and was told that they would only continue to provide the pulp in exchange for sausage, cabbage, beer, potatoes and beans. It’s a most extraordinary situation. Anything could happen …’
They ordered their lunch – not sausage, cabbage, beer, potatoes and beans but feuilleté d’escargots, rack of lamb, fraises des bois, a half bottle of Chablis and a full bottle of Clos de la Roche.