In the Days of Rain Page 3

  If I was going to finish my father’s story, I’d have to write about the girl I’d been in the Brethren too, because we’d both lived in that thicket, and we’d both got caught up in its cruel aftermath. I’d have to think about the days I spent listening out for the sound of Satan’s hooves on the paving stones of Brighton, for instance, or making deals with the Lord, or hoarding tins of corned beef and condensed milk in preparation for the Tribulation. I didn’t want to think about that Brethren girl in her red cardigan with brass buttons, wearing her headscarf and clutching her Bible. I’d drawn a line between me and her. My mother was right. Perhaps it was all best left well alone.

  4

  Four years after my father died I won a place at a month-long silent writers’ retreat in a fifteenth-century castle just south of Edinburgh. I was supposed to be writing a novel set in nineteenth-century London, but after a week sitting at a desk staring down over the castle grounds I was deleting everything I wrote, and that wasn’t much. Every paragraph felt hollowed out; every sentence threw me off.

  When I walked the castle grounds at dusk, down through the bracken and the fallen and rotting trees to the peat-red river, up to the edge of the mown lawns and the flowerbeds and back round again, I heard my father reciting parts of Revelation or Ezekiel, or Yeats’s ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, or talking about that thicket of his. His voice echoed through the east and west wings of the castle, through the woods, in the wind. These were just aural grief hallucinations, I told myself, just flickers in my neural pathways. They were nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to worry about.

  In the final week of the retreat I joined the other four writers at dusk to swim in the river that curled wide and red-brown over rocks and pebbles through the castle woods. After we’d climbed from the freezing water and pulled our towels and robes around us, we followed the path up the steep riverbank into the darkening wood. I fixed my eyes on the poet’s feet ahead of me, now level with my head, as they pressed into the leaves and bracken. When his foot slipped and he stumbled slightly, I saw, or thought I saw, a plume of smoke rising slowly from a hole in the ground that he’d disturbed.

  I felt the scratchings and rustlings in my hair. The first stings began. The poet behind me, dressed in a red robe, had also been engulfed. We ran through the wood back to the castle, tripping over undergrowth in the darkness, shaking our hair and pulling off our clothes, until we were sure we’d outrun them.

  We’d had a lucky escape, we told ourselves over dinner. Was it, someone asked, lemon juice or ice you were supposed to put on wasp stings? Someone passed me a tumbler of whisky. I took myself to bed early. The whisky must have addled my head, I thought, because I seemed to be hearing voices that weren’t there.

  At three in the morning I woke, my pulse drumming wildly in my ears, fireworks exploding behind my eyelids. When I stumbled to a mirror to prise open a single eye, my face and neck were so swollen, taut and shiny that I stumbled backwards in shock. I was struggling to breathe.

  Two days later it was all over: the early-morning drive through the dark to the emergency surgery in the director’s car, the steroids, the dosage of antihistamines large enough to floor an elephant, the semi-coma I slipped into for twenty-four hours. The doctor had counted up the hard lumps on my scalp and neck. Twenty-five stings. Enough to kill someone with an allergy, almost enough to kill someone who’d been stung before in an empty garden when a smoky swarm had risen like a ghost from a hole in the ground.

  Not enough to kill, I thought, but enough to make a point.

  A few years earlier, I’d discovered that the man dressed in a turquoise and pink Hawaiian shirt sitting opposite me at a Cambridge dinner party was a world expert on shamanism. I’d plagued him with questions, and if I’d failed to observe the to-and-fro turn-taking of dinner-party etiquette, I was not the only one. None of us wanted to talk about anything else.

  For fifteen summers he’d lived with a shamanic tribe on the Russian steppes, he told us. He’d studied shamans as they talked their dead down.

  ‘Talking down,’ I said. ‘What does that mean?’ Death for me had been all about going up there, the transcendent sucking up into the air, into the arms of Jesus. I thought again of the impossibility of that body-weight of my father’s going up there, going up anywhere. Even in the blood-red plastic cremation jar his ashes had been a ton weight.

  The shaman expert told us that the bereaved Sora used the shaman as an intermediary to persuade the dead person to go down into the next world.

  ‘Like laying a ghost?’ I asked.

  ‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘Though it works both ways for them. The dead and the living both have to convince the other to let them go. It takes a long time.’

  Until the relatives had talked down the dead person, he told us, their spirit would be hanging around the village doing bad things, provoking, making people sick, causing the crops to fail. They had to be talked down and into the ground.

  In that moment I saw my huge father up on a cliff ledge somewhere, slightly drunk, swaying close to the edge, holding forth, and my siblings and me talking him down. Or trying to. Hadn’t we done that? I asked myself. Isn’t that what we’d done out there at the Mill with the Bergman and the cricket?

  But I hadn’t even started. My father was still roaming. Still talking. There were swarms of wasps, acts of provocation. It would get worse. Someone was going to have to talk him down.

  5

  Six years after my father died, my daughter Kezia, nineteen and home from university for the summer, went looking for an electric fan that I told her had been dismantled and would be in a cupboard somewhere. It was impossible to think, she’d complained the day before, up in my study with the summer sun beating at the closed shutters.

  She texted me at the desk where I was working a mile away in the cool of the British Library.

  ‘I found Grandpa’s boxes,’ she wrote. ‘Can I open them?’

  It took me a while to reply.

  ‘It’s a mess in there,’ I texted back. ‘But maybe you could sort the papers into some kind of order, if you’ve got time.’

  When I came back to the house several hours later Kez was sitting in the top-floor study, shutters closed, among neat piles of papers. Knife-thin shafts of light, pouring in through the gaps in the shutters, lit up the dust. Orlando, my elderly marmalade-striped cat, tiptoed over and between the piles of papers, trying to get himself into the path of her intense attention. The fan parts lay discarded, unassembled, on the floor.

  She’d gone to the pound shop round the corner and bought Post-it notes and plastic filing sleeves and filing boxes.

  ‘I started in 1953,’ she said, flushed. ‘There’s letters from South Africa and Grandpa’s prison diary in that file. There’s this letter he wrote to Granny when he tells her he wants a divorce and he says he wants to discuss which of you stays with her and which one goes with him. There’s all these lists of Brethren rules and pamphlets. Mad stuff. Weird. I didn’t know half of this. You’ve never told me.’

  ‘You can’t just tell it in bits,’ I said, though I knew I could have tried. Why hadn’t I told my children about the Brethren? Because I didn’t know how to begin to answer the questions I knew they’d ask, questions that I’d avoided for years. How do cults work? How had our family got caught up in such an extreme Protestant sect in the first place? Why would anyone have wanted to join the Brethren? How did the men get such power over the women? Why didn’t anyone rebel?

  And then the girl in the red cardigan and headscarf is in the room with me again. The girl I’d once been. She’s furious. She’s sitting in Meeting listening to the men preach, and she’s trying to figure out what ‘heavenly citizenship’ is, or what it means for a house to be ‘hallowed’, or whether the Holy Spirit is male or female and how transparent it is. And she wants to know why the women aren’t allowed to speak. But she knows she can’t ask questions about that because she’s a girl and she’s not allowed to speak either. A
nd she’s wondering why none of the women are standing up and shouting and stamping their feet like she wants to do, telling the men to stop talking all that nonsense.

  My father might have died before he’d been able to face his questions, but I still had time. This was going to be my story as well as his. I might be afraid of those bullying men and their lawyers, but I’d face them down. Let them come and find me.

  Kez agreed to be my research assistant for a few weeks that summer. She’d make an archive in a series of box files, label everything. While I began to piece a history together, Kez found a website.

  ‘They’ve renamed themselves the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church,’ she said, passing me her laptop.

  ‘You must have found the wrong Brethren,’ I told her. ‘Exclusive Brethren never go anywhere near the internet. Mobile phones and computers are all banned. Bruce Hales – that’s their current leader – once described the internet as “pipelines of filth”. They’d never have their own website.’

  But Kez was right. This was the same Exclusive Brethren that three generations of my family and I had all been born into: same leaders, same values, same rules. There were, according to Wikipedia, 46,000 of them, living in fellowship across nineteen different countries, 16,000 in the UK. The leader, Bruce Hales, was the nephew of the man who’d been in charge when I was growing up. They’d turned it into a family dynasty and rebranded – expensively. They must have renamed themselves to throw off the bad publicity they’d been attracting for decades, I told Kez. But why would they have spent that much money? They’d never cared about public opinion before.

  The website had photographs and videos of Brethren Rapid Response Teams – young people dressed in high-visibility jackets – setting up travelling kitchens to feed people who’d lost their homes in bushfires in Australia or in flooding in the UK, handing out brownies to baffled fire crews or bottles of water to commuters at King’s Cross station during a heatwave. There were photographs of choirs of Brethren girls in long skirts and headscarves singing hymns to old people in care homes. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

  Family is at the heart of everything we believe and everything we do, one caption read, printed over a close-up photograph of a small girl running her hand through ears of corn. I felt a sudden flare of fury. How dare they? I thought of the suicides; the thousands of families that the Brethren had tortured and broken up over the decades; the scores of ex-Brethren I knew who would never see their parents or their siblings again. Did the members of the PR company have any idea about the group they’d agreed to promote?

  But when Kez and I looked at news archives, we found that the Brethren were still getting bad press. In 2009 an Australian investigative journalist had published a best-selling book about Brethren tax-avoidance schemes. He’d exposed their aggressive political lobbying in Australia; he’d interviewed hundreds of ex-Brethren about suicides, excommunications, severed families, and post-traumatic stress.1 The then Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd had described them as ‘an extremist cult that breaks up families and is bad for Australia’.2

  British investigative journalists had been on their backs too. Newspaper articles about Brethren faith schools and tax-avoidance schemes had dented their reputation. In 2012 Britain’s charity watchdog had denied charitable status to the Brethren for one of their trusts in Devon. They risked losing millions of pounds in tax breaks as a result. So they’d appealed against the decision, and started up that PR and lobbying campaign to get their charitable status reinstated. But, British journalists wrote, these were no little guys being picked on by the Charity Commission. These people preached hate.

  ‘We have to get a hatred, an utter hatred of the world,’ Hales had told a large Brethren audience in 2006. ‘Unless you’ve come to a hatred of the world you’re likely to be sucked in by it, and seduced by it.’3

  British Brethren lobbyists had been more than usually aggressive in their campaign to get their charitable status reinstated. Two Times journalists had got hold of minutes from a meeting in which Hales had urged Brethren lobbyists to apply ‘extreme pressure’ to William Shawcross, the head of the Charity Commission; ‘Go for the jugular,’ he told them, ‘go for the underbelly.’ It made me shiver.

  ‘That’s in hand,’ one lobbyist had replied.4

  For Hales and his followers, Shawcross was a non-Brethren ‘worldy’, an agent of Satan’s system and thus fair game.

  When I read that the Charity Commission had renewed the Brethren’s charitable status in 2014 I began to wonder what they’d done to Shawcross’s jugular. Then I began to wonder what they might do to mine. I could see Kez was thinking the same thing.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘This is scary.’

  Over the next few weeks Kez labelled the box files ‘Before’, ‘During’ and ‘After’.

  ‘You can change it later,’ she said. ‘It’s just a way of dividing up the time for now.’

  I nodded. The girl in the red cardigan was in the room again.

  ‘You might prefer “Aftermath”,’ Kez said, ‘rather than “After”. It gives more of a sense of consequence … You know – that what happens to you and your father after is a result of the screws gradually tightening in the “Before” and “During” parts.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. I was remembering the feel of the headscarf knot pressing at the back of my neck and the weight of my uncut hair hanging down my back in braided ropes. ‘Yes. That’s good.’

  I made a note to watch Wild Strawberries with Kez. She’s never seen any Bergman.

  A month after we started, I dreamt Kez and I were lowering ourselves down into a dark network of caves on a long rope. She was ahead of me. She had the torch. She made me think of those old stories where an innocent girl has to slay a dragon to break a curse.

  Her young handwriting layered over my father’s when she put his letters in order. ‘This one’s interesting,’ she’d write on a label on the plastic sleeve. ‘He was preaching out in the black townships during apartheid.’ On the letter that my father had written to my mother about divorce, Kez wrote: ‘This one might be hard to read.’

  ‘Break bread?’ Kez says. ‘What’s that?’ She’s secular. I’ve raised her that way.

  ‘Transubstantiation,’ I tell her. ‘Jesus died on the cross and left instructions that people were to remember his death, his sacrifice, by eating bread and drinking wine. The bread was supposed to be his body and the wine his blood. We called it breaking bread.’

  ‘I’ll look it up,’ she said.

  I’m already back there, kneading the tiny piece of warm bread in my fingers in the early hours of the morning. It’s winter. It’s the first Meeting of the day and it’s still dark outside. I’m in my headscarf and my Best Dress and I’m holding my Bible in one hand and my doll in the other.

  ‘We called it breaking bread,’ I’d told Kez. Who, I wondered, was this we I kept slipping back into?

  BEFORE

  1

  I was born fourth-generation Brethren. Hanging up there on all the branches of the family tree are generations of Brethren on both my mother’s and father’s sides, and before that several generations of French Huguenots, Calvinist émigrés who fled waves of Catholic persecution. If you’ve been born into a group like the Brethren, and everyone you know – parents, friends, work colleagues, siblings, grandparents, great-grandparents, cousins – is living by Brethren rules, you assume it’s completely normal. It’s the people outside your assembly who seem strange.

  That long Brethren inheritance was a badge of honour in our household. It was held in place by the stories we were told and the objects and keepsakes in our home. An enormous oil painting of my eminent great-great-grandfather, Grandpa Mallalieu, my grandmother’s grandfather, hung over the fireplace in our sitting room. It would have reminded the Brethren guests who came for tea between Meetings of our distinguished bloodline. Arthur Lee Mallalieu had ‘taken the ministry’ across Australia, set up tent meetings and tin
tabernacles and helped to establish the first Brethren assemblies in Adelaide, Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney. When my mother toasted crumpets on the fire for us on cold winter days I’d look up and he’d be looking straight back down at me.

  It was not an especially stern portrait. Grandpa Mallalieu was tall and handsome. In the painting he seemed to have just looked up from reading his Bible; his head rested thoughtfully on his hand. But you could never escape Grandpa Mallalieu’s eyes. Growing up I tried standing in every corner of our sitting room to find a spot where I might avoid them. There wasn’t one.

  There was always someone watching: God from above and Grandpa Mallalieu from the sitting-room wall.

  ‘Grandpa Mallalieu’

  The portrait had been painted over another painting, my mother said, but she could not remember what it was. As a small child I imagined there was a ship under Grandpa Mallalieu, battling high waves, riding the wind.

  In the kitchen my mother had hung a large framed print of Vermeer’s The Milkmaid. She loved the cobalt blue of the young woman’s apron, she said. It was her favourite colour.

  The milkmaid stood at a window, pouring milk at a table piled high with freshly baked bread. She didn’t watch me like Grandpa Mallalieu did. Her eyes were down; she was rapt in her own daydreams, just as my mother often was. I watched the milkmaid from the kitchen table when my father was giving thanks before dinner, when my siblings and I were supposed to be praying with our eyes closed. Her milk poured from the mouth of her jug into that terracotta bowl below, without end. With her head covered like that and her table full of freshly made bread, I always assumed she was a Brethren sister, just like my mother and aunts, busy preparing the bread for the Lord’s Day Meeting. While the men were discussing ministries or disciplinary decisions in the adjoining room as they did in our house, she was snatching a private moment, secret and off in her dreams.