Without the Song

Normally, she wouldn't think of fogging the air around non-smoking parishioners, especially so soon after a service. Tonight was different. Tonight, Merrily needed not only this cigarette but what it was saying about her.

The cigarette said, This woman is human. This woman is weak. Also, given the alleged findings on secondary smoking, this woman is selfish and inconsiderate. This is a serial sinner.

Only it wasn't getting through. Brenda Prosser's eyes were glowing almost golden now. Twice she'd tried to sit down at the kitchen table and been pushed back to her feet by the electricity inside her. She had to hold on to the back of the chair to stop her hands trembling, and then the joy would make her mouth go slack and she'd shake her head, smiling helplessly.

'Gone.' Maybe the fourth time she'd said that – Brenda relishing the hard finality in the word: gone, gone, gone.

'Just like it never was there, vicar,' Big Jim Prosser said. His light grey suit was soaked and blackened across the shoulders. He stood with his back to the old Aga in the vicarage kitchen, and the Aga rumbled sourly.

And Merrily smoked and wondered how she should be responding. But the inner screen was blank. Just like Ann-Marie's scan.

'This is a miracle, sure t'be,' Jim said.

Oh Christ. Any word but that.

'And, see, like I kept saying to Jim, hardly the first one, is it?' Rain was still bubbled on Brenda's forehead like the remains of a born-again baptism. 'Not the first since you brought back the Evensong.'

'Without the song.' Merrily sat down, then abruptly stood up again and went to fill the kettle for tea. A dense curtain of rain swished across the dark window over the sink, as though it had been hosed.

They could have waited for her in the church porch, Brenda and Jim. But when the congregation was filing out, umbrellas going up, there they'd been, standing among the wet tombs and the headstones, both of them bareheaded, as though they were unaware of the sometimes-sleety rain. Like they were in some parallel dimension where it wasn't cold and it wasn't raining at all.

The truth was, Jim had said, as they followed Merrily to the vicarage, that they didn't want to talk to anyone else, didn't want to answer all the obvious questions about Ann-Marie. They thought it was only right that the vicar should be the first to know.

This was the first time that either Jim or Brenda had been to the Sunday evening service. They'd been among those older parishioners who were huffily avoiding it because they'd heard it was all changed, had become a bit unconventional, a bit not for the likes of us.

'I pray we'll be forgiven for ever doubting what you were trying to do, Merrily,' Brenda said now.

So much for the experiment in Mystery.

Evensong.

As in most parishes, the Sunday evening service had been killed a while ago, by falling congregations.

And then Merrily had suddenly brought it back. Sunday evening in the church. Everyone welcome. Just that. Nothing about a service.

The truth was that, after what had happened with Jenny Box, she'd been feeling guilty. Deliverance work had been separating her too often from her own parish, from the day-to-day cure of souls. She'd been too busy to notice the anomalous buds in the local flower bed until they were bursting into black blossom.

When she'd put this to the Bishop, he'd waved it away. Congregations were in free fall; it was a phase. Or it wasn't a phase, but something truly sinister – the beginning of the end for organized Christianity. What about children? the Bishop asked; the new Archbishop of Canterbury was particularly worried about the absence of children in churches. Merrily had raised this issue with Jane, who seemed to have been a child like yesterday, and Jane had wrinkled her nose.

'Who needs kids in church, anyway? Look at it this way – kids are not supposed to drink in pubs until they're eighteen, so pubs are slightly mysterious ... therefore cool. So like, obviously, the best way to invest in the future would be to ban the little sods from the church altogether. That way, they wouldn't turn out like me.'

'So the monthly Family Service, with kids doing readings, the quiz ...'

'Totally crap idea, I always said that. It just makes the Church look needy and pathetic. You have to cultivate the mystery. If you don't bring back the mystery, you're stuffed, Mum.'

It was worrying: increasingly these days the kid was making a disturbing kind of sense.

OK, then. When she brought back the service, she didn't call it Evensong because there was no song. No hymns, no psalms. And no sermon, definitely no preaching. It was an experiment with Mystery.

She didn't even call it a service. She didn't wear the kit – no cassock, not even a dog collar after the first time – and she sat on a car cushion on the chancel steps. The heating, for what it was worth, would be on full, and pews were pulled out and angled into a semi-circle haloed by a wooden standard lamp that she'd liberated from the vestry. It was a quiet time, a low-key prelude to the working week. The first time, only four people had turned up, which partly dictated the form. Five weeks later, it was a congregation of around twenty, and growing, although congregation was hardly the word.

It would begin with tea and coffee and chat, turning into a discussion of people's problems. Sometimes solutions were arrived at before the villagers went home. Small difficulties sorted: babysitters found, gardeners for old people. Sometimes it would quietly feed notions into the village, and issues would be resolved during the following week.

The church as forum, the church as catalyst. The polish-scented air as balm. How it should...