Читать книгу A Pure Clear Light - Madeleine John St. - Страница 6

When Simon had first known Flora – a decade and a half ago: how time flew! – she had still been a professing Roman Catholic, but he had soon talked her out of it.

‘I can’t believe no one has told you all this before,’ he said, having itemised the horrid ingredients in that scarlet brew – moral blackmail, misogyny, cannibalism and the rest. ‘At Cambridge, or wherever.’

‘Oh, but they have,’ Flora assured him.

‘But?’

‘I didn’t really care,’ said Flora, ‘what the others said.’

‘Ah,’ said Simon. He was home and dry. They got married, when the time eventually came, in an Anglican church, causing sorrow and consternation to Flora’s parents, who knew in their bones that this was not a proper marriage ceremony, and joy and satisfaction to Simon’s, whose bones told them that no other – truly – was; although of course by ‘proper’ they meant something rather different from what Flora’s parents meant; but since the bride’s mother is expected to cry, anyway, everyone looked as happy on the occasion as they ought.

When they had been married for several years, and Flora began to get a brooding look now and then, and to ask rhetorical questions about spiritual growth, Simon took a stern line. ‘For Heaven’s sake,’ he said.

‘Exactly,’ said Flora.

‘Look,’ said Simon, ‘we’re not going to have to go through this again, are we? It’s hocus pocus. You agreed. And there are the kids to consider.’ They had two girls and a boy.

‘Yes,’ said Flora. ‘I’m considering them.’

‘They can be Anglican if they like,’ said Simon expansively. ‘You too, for that matter. Further than that I’m not prepared to go. Honestly, Flora. I mean it, the Pope and Days of Obligation and plastic Virgin Marys with light bulbs inside them and all the rest of it – no way. Not in my house. Please. It’s just too effing naff.’

Flora looked down at the floor to hide her smile, but despite herself, she began to laugh. Yes, Days of Obligation, the Pope – it was naff, alright. But then – what could you expect? Simon was laughing too, relieved and glad. But then Flora stopped laughing. ‘That’s not the whole story,’ she said. ‘After all.’ Simon didn’t want to go into the rest of the story, the part that wasn’t naff, because that was something even worse.

‘Be an Anglican,’ he reiterated. It was the lesser of two evils. In fact it was hardly evil at all; it was probably completely harmless. ‘No naffery there.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that,’ said Flora.

She let the whole thing ride for another year, but when the mood once more came upon her – or was it the Holy Ghost speaking to her? Probably – she looked again at the noticeboard in the porch of an Anglican church not too far from where they lived in Hammersmith, and judging it rightly to be High (another, nearer, was Low) she found herself noting the times of the masses. Hmmm, she thought. She had no present intention of attending; she was just sussing it out. In any case, she was too busy to brood very often, because she had gone into business with a woman friend importing and selling third-world textiles; and the children continued to be highly labour-intensive: Janey was thirteen, Nell was nine, and little Thomas had just turned five.