Just recently, and it’s hardly even worth mentioning except perhaps as a reproof to myself, I find that whenever I enter a church, not only does my heart sink, but I’m invariably late. Today was no exception. As the sorrowful aroma of beeswax, stone and candles contrived to lower my spirits, so the shrill tones of the female vicar, welcoming the congregation, confirmed by bad timing.
As I crept in, a few heads near the back swivelled to smile sympathetically. I made to slide in amongst them, whispering apologetically, ‘Sorry, sorry…’ but my sister-in-law up near the front was having none of it. Her pointy features, flushed, irritated and rotated at a hundred and eighty degrees, were hard to miss.
‘Down here,’ she was mouthing theatrically, beckoning me on like an Italian traffic policeman. She even had the white gloves. White gloves!
Dutifully I gathered my hymn book and handbag, and hastened, head bowed, down the aisle. As I hurried along, I inadvertently looked up and caught the eye of my brother in his rather too tight hound’s-tooth-check suit, up by the altar, in his occasional capacity of church-warden. He rolled his eyes in mock horror and gave me a huge wink.
‘We were worried about you,’ Caro hissed as I squeezed in beside her. Everyone in the pew shoved up a bit. ‘You’re so late!’
‘Sorry,’ I muttered. ‘Traffic was horrific.’
‘On a Sunday?’
I shrugged helplessly as if to suggest I could hardly be held accountable for the vagaries of Oxford’s one-way system, and craned my neck past her to greet the rest of my family, such as it was. Beside Caro, my mother and stepmother had both leaned forward to smile: Felicity, my stepmother, elegant in a taupe chenille jacket and vanilla silk skirt, and my mother, startling in leopard-print leggings, a pair of tangerine trainers and matching headband. She blew me an extravagant kiss.
‘What’s she come as?’ I muttered to Caro as I sat back.
‘Don’t,’ she moaned, closing her eyes. ‘I swear she does it on purpose. I told her it was smart but casual, as in ‘no hats’, but she looks like she’s out on day release. As if the mini bus has just dropped her off!’
I suppressed a smile and turned my attention to the vicar, visiting for the occasion: not the village’s usual, but very enthusiastic, and, despite a telltale flush up her neck, really getting into her stride, encouraging us in carrying tones, to support these young people before us today, to applaud them in this, their momentous decision, to foster their faith.
I smiled. Jack, my nephew, one of the six or seven teenagers in the front pew, the sun from a stained-glass window shining through his ears, making them glow pink, his red hair dishevelled and hanging over the collar of an uncharacteristic tweed jacket, had the grace to turn and flash me a grin. When he’d cycled into college one day to see us and I’d casually enquired as to his motives, he’d replied in surprise, ‘Oh, you get terrific presents. Hugo Palmerton got a diving watch, and his godfather gave him a digital camera.’ As I’d raised faintly startled eyebrows he’d rushed on, ‘And obviously I believe, and all that stuff. And it’s a good idea if you want to get married.’ He nodded sagely. ‘Saves a lot of hassle.’
I had an idea he was confusing confirmation with baptism, but grasped the general sentiment. He was getting something under his juvenile belt, another notch on his list of ‘must dos’: get GCSEs, play in the cricket team, snog a girl at a party, was still a rite of passage to be doggedly manoeuvred. He was at a particular stage on his greasy pole, as I, I supposed, glancing around, was on mine. There was a time when I used to go to church for weddings, Saturday after Saturday, and then christenings, Sunday after Sunday. Now, with unerring regularity, it appeared to be first communions. Next, I imagined, with a jolt of surprise, it would be…yes. Well. After all, there’d been one of those already, hadn’t there? Dad’s. One box ticked. One box that had gone up the aisle, containing a supposedly hale and hearty man, a florid-faced, larger-than-life man, in this, our village church, whilst we’d all sat in this family pew, hankies clutched to mouths, shocked and silent: the remains of the Milligan family.
Family pew. An anachronism, of course, but one that Caro maintained rigorously, referring to it loudly, as Mum and Granny never had, as if we were the ancient descendants of some aristocratic lineage, instead of impoverished farmers who’d managed, by the skin of their teeth, to hang on to a certain amount of dubiously infertile land and a crumbling old farmhouse.