Chapter 6

We had dinner that night at the Cricketers’, a small public house nearly opposite a second-hand bookseller, where I saw a complete set of Thackeray for sale at a very reasonable price. I thought it would go well on my shelves below my father’s edition of the Waverly novels. Perhaps tomorrow I would come back and buy it. The thought gave me a warm feeling towards my father, a sense of something in common. I too would start at Volume I and continue to the end, and by the time that last volume was finished it would be time to begin again. Too many books by too many authors can be confusing, like too many shirts and suits. I like to change my clothes as little as possible. I suppose some people would say the same of my ideas, but the bank had taught me to be wary of whims. Whims so often end in bankruptcy.

When I wrote that we had dinner at the Cricketers’, it would have been more correct to say we ate a substantial snack. There were baskets of warm sausages on the bar, and we helped ourselves and washed the sausages down with draught Guinness. I was surprised by the number of glasses my aunt could put down and feared a little for her blood pressure.

After her second pint she said, “It was odd about that cross. In the leaves I mean. I’ve always been interested in religion – ever since I knew Curran.”

“What church do you attend?” I asked. “Didn’t you tell me you were a Roman Catholic?”

“I call myself that for convenience,” she said. “It belongs to my French and Italian periods. After I left Curran. I suppose he had influenced me, and then all the girls I knew were Catholic and I didn’t like to look superior. I expect you’d be surprised to hear that we ran a church once ourselves – me and Curran, here in Brighton.”

“‘Ran’? I don’t understand.”

“It was the performing dogs that gave us the idea. Two of them came to see Curran in hospital before the circus moved on. It was visiting day and there were a lot of women around to see their husbands. At first the dogs weren’t allowed into the ward. There was quite a fuss, but Curran got round matron, telling her they weren’t ordinary dogs, they were human dogs. Bathed in disinfectant they were, he told her, every dog, before they were allowed to give a performance. It wasn’t true, of course, but he was very convincing. They came up to the bed, wearing their pointed hats and pierrot collars, and each gave Curran a paw to shake and touched his face with its nose like an Eskimo. Then they were taken quickly away in case the doctor might appear. You should have heard those women. ‘The darlings, the sweet little doggies.’ It was lucky neither of them had raised a leg. ‘Just like humans.’ One woman said, ‘You can’t tell me that dogs haven’t got souls.’ Another one asked, ‘Are they gentleman doggies or lady doggies?’ as though she had been too refined to look. ‘One of each,’ Curran said, and just out of devilry he added, ‘They are married as a matter of fact.’ ‘Oh, isn’t that too sweet? Oh, the darlings. And have any little doggies come yet?’ ‘Not yet,’ Curran said. ‘You see, they have only been married a month. At the doggies’ church in Potters Bar.’ ‘Married in church?’ they squealed and I really thought he’d gone too far, but how they swallowed it down! They all gathered round Curran’s bed and left their husbands abandoned. Not that the husbands minded. Visiting day is always a horrible reminder of home to a man.”

My aunt took another sausage and ordered another Guinness. “They all wanted to know about the church in Potters Bar. ‘And to think,’ one said, ‘we have to leave our doggies at home when we go to Saint Ethelburga’s. My dog is as good a Christian as the vicar is with his raffles and his tea-fights.’ ‘Once a year,’ Curran said, ‘they have a collection of dog biscuits. To help the poor strays.’ When at last they left us alone and went back to their husbands I said, ‘You’ve started something,’ and ‘Why not?’ Curran said.”

My aunt put down her glass and asked the woman behind the bar, “Did you ever hear of the doggies’ church?”

“I seem to remember hearing something, but it was donkey’s years ago^[54], wasn’t it? Long before my time. Somewhere in Hove, wasn’t it?”

“No, dear. Not a hundred yards from where you are standing now. We used to come to the Cricketers’ after the service. The Rev. Curran and me.”

“Didn’t the police interfere or something?”

“They tried to make out that he had no right to the title of Rev. But we pointed out that it stood for Revered and not Reverend in our church, and we didn’t belong to the established. They couldn’t touch us, we were breakaways like Wesley^[55], and we had all the dog-owners of Brighton and Hove behind us – they even came over from as far as Hastings. The police tried to get us once under the Blasphemy Act, but nobody could find any blasphemy in our services. They were very very solemn. Curran wanted to start the churching of bitches after the puppies came, but I said that was going too far – even the Church of England had abandoned churching. Then there was the question of marrying divorced couples – I thought it would treble our income, but there it was Curran who stood firm. ‘We don’t recognize divorce,’ he said, and was quite right – it would have sullied the sentiment.”

“Did the police win in the end?” I asked.

“They always do. They had him up for speaking to girls on the front, and a lot was said in court that wasn’t apropos. I was young and angry and uncomprehending, and I wouldn’t help him any more. No wonder he abandoned me and went to look for Hannibal. No one can stand not being forgiven. That’s God’s privilege.”

We left the Cricketers’ and my aunt took a turning this way and a turning that until we came to a shuttered hall and a sign which read: TEXT FOR THE WEEK. “If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, Then how canst thou contend with horses? Jeremiah, 12,” I can’t say that I understood the meaning very well, unless it was a warning against Brighton races, but perhaps the ambiguity was the attraction. The sect, I noticed, was called The Children of Jeremiah.

“This was where we held our services,” Aunt Augusta said. “Sometimes you could hardly hear the words for the barking. ‘It’s their form of prayer,’ Curran would say, ‘let each pray after his own fashion,’ and sometimes they lay there quite peacefully licking their parts. ‘Cleansing themselves for the House of the Lord,’ Curran would say. It makes me a little sad to see strangers here now. And I never much cared for the prophet Jeremiah.”

“I know little about Jeremiah.”

“They sank him in the mud,” Aunt Augusta said. “I studied the Bible very carefully in those days, but there was little that was favourable to dogs in the Old Testament. Tobias took his dog with him on his journey with the angel, but it played no part in the story at all, not even when a fish tried to eat Tobias. A dog was an unclean beast, of course, in those times. He only came into his own with Christianity. It was the Christians who began to carve dogs in stone in the cathedrals, and even while they were still doubtful about women’s souls they were beginning to think that maybe a dog had one, though they couldn’t get the Pope to pronounce one way or the other, nor even the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was left to Curran.”

“A big responsibility,” I said. I couldn’t make out whether she was serious about Curran or not.

“It was Curran who set me reading theology,” Aunt Augusta said. “He wanted references to dogs. It wasn’t easy to find any – even in Saint Francis de Sales. I found lots about fleas and butterflies and stags and elephants and spiders and crocodiles in Saint Francis but a strange neglect of dogs. Once I had a terrible shock. I said to Curran, ‘It’s no good. We can’t go on. Look what I’ve just found in the Apocalypse. Jesus is saying who can enter the city of God. Just listen to this – “Without are dogs and sorcerers and whoremongers and murderers and idolaters, and whosoever loveth or maketh a lie.” You see the company dogs are supposed to keep?”

“‘It proves our point,’ Curran said. ‘Whoremongers and murderers and the rest – they all have souls, don’t they? They only have to repent, and it’s the same with dogs. The dogs who come to our church have repented. They don’t consort any more with whoremongers and sorcerers. They live with respectable people in Brunswick Square or Royal Crescent.’ Do you know that Curran was so little put off by the Apocalypse he actually preached a sermon on that very text, telling people that it was their responsibility to see that their dogs didn’t backslide? ‘Loose the lead and spoil the dog^[56]’, he said. ‘There are only too many murderers in Brighton and whoremongers at the Metropole all ready to pick up what you loose. And us for sorcerers —’ Luckily Hatty, who was with us by that time, had not yet become a fortune-teller. It would have spoilt the image.”

“He was a good preacher?”

“It was music to hear him,” she said with happy regret, and we began to walk back towards the front; we could hear the shingle turning over from a long way away. “He was not exclusive,” my aunt said. “For him dogs were like the House of Israel, but he was an apostle also to the Gentiles – and the Gentiles, to Curran, included sparrows and parrots and white mice – not cats, cats he always regarded as Pharisees. Of course no cat dared come into the church with all those dogs around, but there was one who used to sit in the window of a house opposite and sneer when the congregation came out. Curran excluded fish too – it would be too shocking to eat something with a soul, he said. Elephants he had a very great feeling for, which was generous of him considering Hannibal had trodden on his toe. Let’s sit down here, Henry. I always find Guinness a little tiring.”

We sat down in a shelter. The lights ran out to sea along the Palace Pier and the edge of the water was white with phosphorescence. The waves were continually pulled up along the beach and pulled back as though someone were making a bed and couldn’t get the sheet to lie properly. A bit of pop music came from the dance hall standing there like a blockade ship a hundred yards out. This trip was quite an adventure, I thought to myself, little knowing how small a one it would seem in retrospect.

“I found a lovely piece about elephants once in Saint Francis de Sales,” Aunt Augusta said, “and Curran used it in his last sermon after all that business with the girls had upset me. I really think what he wanted was to tell me it was me he loved, but I was a hard young woman in those days and I wouldn’t listen. I’ve always kept the piece though in my purse and, when I read it, it’s not the elephant that I see now, it’s Curran. He was a fine big fellow – not as big as Wordsworth but a good deal more sensitive.”

She fumbled in her bag and found her purse. “You read it to me, dear, I can’t see properly in this light.”

I held the rather yellowed creased paper at an angle to catch one of the lights of the front. It wasn’t easy to read, though my aunt’s handwriting was young and bold, because of the creases. “‘The elephant,’” I read, “‘is only a huge animal, but he is the most worthy of beasts that lives on the earth, and the most intelligent. I will give you an example of his excellence; he…’” The writing ran along a crease and I couldn’t read it, but my aunt chimed gently in. “‘He never changes his mate and he tenderly loves the one of his choice.’ Go on, dear.”

“‘With whom,’” I read, “‘nevertheless he mates but every third year, and then for five days only and so secretly that he has never been seen to do so.’”

“He was trying to explain,” my aunt said, “I am sure of it now, that if he had been a little slack in his attentions^[57], it was only because of the girls – he didn’t love me less.”

“‘But he is to be seen again on the sixth day, on which day, before doing anything else, he goes straight to some river wherein he bathes his whole body, for he has no desire to return to the herd until he has purified himself.’”

“Curran was always a clean man,” my aunt said. “Thank you, dear, you read it very well.”

“It doesn’t seem very applicable to dogs,” I said.

“He turned it so beautifully that no one noticed, and it was really directed at me. I remember he had a special dogs’ shampoo which had been blessed at the altar on sale outside the church door that Sunday.”

“What became of Curran?”

“I’ve no idea,” Aunt Augusta said. “He must have left his church, for he couldn’t have carried on without me. Hatty hadn’t the right touch for a deaconess. I dream of him sometimes – but he would be ninety years old now, and I find it hard to picture him as an old man. Well, Henry, I think it is time for us both to sleep.”

All the same, I found sleep difficult to attain, even in my comfortable bed at the Royal Albion. The lights of the Palace Pier sparkled on the ceiling, and round and round in my head went the figures of Wordsworth and Curran, the elephant and the dogs of Hove, the mystery of my birth, the ashes of my mother who was not my mother, and my father asleep in the bath. This was not the simple life which I had known at the bank, where I could judge a client’s character by his credits and debits. I had a sense of fear and exhilaration too, as the music pounded from the Pier and the phosphorescence rolled up the beach.