Читать книгу I Take You: Part 3 of 3 - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 6

To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself

Sunday morning. Needing a quietening. A necessary removal from all of them, to recalibrate. What is happening to Connie as uncertainty and indecision stain her life? A drawing to … what? Mystery. A veering towards it like an ocean liner subtly altering course for a new destination in the great ocean of life. Yet the destination’s unknown.

Before Cliff’s accident Connie had attended church. He certainly didn’t, ever, still doesn’t; one of those pitbull atheists, a sneerer à la Dawkins. Yet increasingly she’s finding there’s something … all-calming … about her Sunday morning experiences at the family-crammed church of St Peter’s in its high, shouting ochre on Notting’s hill. It’s an astonishing leak through a veneer of aspirant coolness and moneyed cynicism; a gentle drip, drip, through her restless, caged, unsettled life. Connie feels righted by these assignations, balmed, lit.

‘I like that you go to church,’ Mel said to her once, even though he doesn’t go himself. As if it softens her. As if it separates her from those who are the jeering, the sneering, the unsettled – and the ones with a chip of ice.

So. Sunday mornings, quite bravely alone. Connie’s brief coracle of solace. Brought down into stillness by a spiritual enveloping from a service mostly sung. The hour or so freshening, shining, rejuvenating. At times she says no, it’s ridiculous, she’s with that gentle atheist, Alain de Botton on this one; tipping her hat to the graces within organized religion but not sucked in by them. Yet Connie knows that she’ll never be aligned with the Cliffs and the Dawkins of the world, thumping that believers are deluded, stupid; she has too much respect for the mysterious in life. Which includes Mel. Can’t turn her back on wonder, craves it, in a sense. Found it, long ago, in the wild places of her travelling youth, the places where the silence hums – Greenland’s ice deserts, Cornwall’s high moors, under a full butter moon – yes, yes. She wants those places again. Somewhere in her life. Her rescue is tied up in them, she just knows it.

Connie feels silted up, often now, with the great weight of acquiring and cramming and rushing and worrying and just getting by; grubbied. Needs the simplicity of a spiritual way, its light touch, a tuning fork back into calm. The ocean liner on its unknown path is veering her towards those most shining qualities of religious practice: pilgrimage, contemplation, quiet. With Mel, she hopes. Somehow.

What she does know: that religion’s a miracle of survival. That places of potent spirituality do not belong entirely to earth. The tugging, the faint whisper of a tugging … and Connie has to find her way back to them. Urgently, it feels now.

Alone, or with someone else.