The Laying on of Hands: Stories by Alan Bennett Read Free Book Online

Geoffrey hoped nobody was going to feel strongly enough about this discrepancy to offer up a rival version as, however fascinating this material was, he felt there was a limit to what the congregation would stand.
    ‘Do we really want to know this?’ a senior official in the Foreign Office muttered to his wife (though in truth he knew some of it already and unbeknownst to him, so did she).
    Actually Geoffrey was surprised at Carl’s forbearance in omitting the penis, an intimate survey of which he was obviously capable of providing did he so choose. Perhaps, Geoffrey thought, he was saving it up but if so it was to no purpose as it was while Carl was en route from the scrotum to the anus that suddenly it all got too much and a man was bold enough to shout out: ‘Shame.’
    Carl rounded on him fiercely. ‘No, there was no shame. No shame then and no shame now. If you didn’t understand that about Clive, you shouldn’t be here.’
    After which, though there were no more interruptions, the congregation felt slightly bullied and so took on a mildly mutinous air.
    A woman sitting near to the front and quite close to Carl said almost conversationally: ‘And you made this journey quite often, did you?’
    ‘What journey?’
    ‘Round Clive’s body.’
    ‘Sure. Why?’
    ‘It’s just that, while I may be making a fool of myself here,’ and she looked round for support, ‘I didn’t know he was … that way.’
    Several women who were within earshot nodded agreement.
    ‘To me he was—’ and she knew she was on dangerous ground, ‘to me, he wasn’t that way at all.’
    Carl frowned. ‘Do you mean gay?’
    The woman (she was a buyer for Marks and Spencer’s) smiled kindly and nodded.
    ‘Well let me tell you,’ said Carl, ‘he was “that way”.’
    Though these exchanges are intimate and conversational they filter back through the congregation where they are greeted with varying degrees of astonishment, some of it audible.
    ‘She didn’t know?’
    ‘Who’s she kidding?’
    ‘Clive,’ the woman went on, ‘never gave me to suppose that his sexual preferences were other than normal.’
    ‘It is normal,’ shouted Carl.
    ‘I apologise. I mean conventional.’
    ‘It’s conventional, too.’
    ‘Straight then,’ said the buyer with a gesture of defeat. ‘Let’s say straight.’
    ‘Say what you fucking like,’ said Carl, ‘only he wasn’t. He was gay.’
    Smiling and unconvinced she shook her head but said no more.
    During this exchange Geoffrey had been thinking about Carl’s hair or lack of it, the gleam of his skull through the blond stubble making him look not unlike a piglet. Once upon a time hair as short as this would have been a badge of a malignant disposition, a warning to keep clear, with long hair indicating a corresponding lenity. With its hint of social intransigence it had become a badge of sexual deviance, which it still seemed to be, though nowadays it was also a useful mask for incipient baldness, cutting the hair short a way of pre-empting the process.
    ‘Fucking’ had put a stop to these musings though Carl had said it so casually that for all they were in church no one seemed shocked (Treacher fortunately hadn’t heard it) and Father Jolliffe decided to let it pass.
    In his fencing match with the buyer from M&S Carl had undoubtedly come out on top but it had plainly disconcerted him and though he resumed his journey round Clive’s body, when he got to his well-groomed armpits he decided to call it a day. ‘When someone dies so young,’ he summed up, ‘the pity of it and the waste of it touch us all. But when he or she dies of Aids’—someone in the congregation gave a faint cry—’there should be anger as well as pity, and a resolve to fight this insidious disease and the prejudice it arouses and not to rest until we have a cure.’ Carl sat down to be embraced by two of his friends, his stubbly head rubbed by a third.

    HEARING AIDS MENTIONED for the first time and