The First Day Read online

  At the end of the meeting people lingered, reluctant to leave; Orr was hugged and touched and left in no doubt that the pain he was feeling was shared. The boys stood beside him, receiving the same attention, though many of the men weren’t sure how to engage them and some ruffled their hair with a sympathetic pat, which Philip quickly tired of. The youngest did not cry, had not cried since Orr’s return. He stood implacable like a soldier returned from war, soaking up sympathy, no longer able to be surprised or saddened.

  The days that followed were full of activity. The inevitable involvement of a coroner meant that Sarah’s body was not released for burial until the Tuesday, and so the funeral was scheduled for Thursday, over a week after she died. Those days lay before Orr like a minefield; Anna had never seen him so uncertain, so self-conscious. She had been, up to this point, drawn to his confidence, his seeming solidity, but she found this other, vulnerable Orr just as compelling. It unnerved her, this realisation; that this man could fall apart completely and she would still love him. It was like a power, or possibly a weakness, she never knew she had, a capacity for desire that seemed increasingly unconcerned of an object.

  They saw each other only once more before Sarah was buried. On the day before the funeral the boys were still staying with Orr’s parents, and Orr visited Anna. They went for a walk together along the towpath by the Lagan, where summer was in full, fecund display. It was early afternoon when they set out, the sun throwing short shadows around them, Anna slightly rounded in the middle, her clothes almost ready to be exchanged for the loose drapes—curtains, she called them in one of her later poems—that would hide and show her growing belly. They were comfortable in silence, and needed to be, and they walked without touching. Anna asked him how he prayed.

  Do you mean how can I pray at a time like this, or what way do I actually do it? Orr asked.

  Both.

  I do it by just talking. Sometimes I close my eyes, sometimes I don’t. That’s not a metaphor, he almost smiled.

  And how do you pray? she asked again.

  Orr was silent for a long time and then said, simply, We’re in this together.

  Anna was unsure if the we meant herself and Orr, or herself and Orr and God, or—and this possibility only came to her much later—just Orr and God.

  The funeral was small and private. The story had made the news, but Orr was left, along with his congregation and friends, to mourn in peace. The service was in the mission hall, and was presided over by an older pastor from another church in the country, who had known Orr since he was a boy. He spoke with deliberation and a marked, steady rhythm which lifted and fell as he praised the young woman whose body lay in the coffin before them, but whose soul was already in the arms of her saviour. He read from Isaiah 55: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

  Orr stood up to speak about his wife. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, he repeated. He spoke awkwardly, hesitating, stumbling from one word to the next. The calmness, the measured precision deserted him, and he spoke as though grasping, still looking for the words as he said them.

  The coffin was carried for about a quarter of a mile, up the Beersbridge Road to the junction with Bloomfield, where it was lifted into the hearse. Orr and Philip shouldered the front, with four men from the church behind. Philip was not as tall as his father, but insisted that he be allowed to be one of the bearers, and they placed two cushions on his shoulder to help keep the height uniform. At the graveside the visiting pastor read the words of the apostle: There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.

  They lowered the coffin into the ground and Orr threw mud on it. Two men from the council filled up the hole as the mourners left. Philip stood alone, face marked from earlier tears, watching them.

  After the funeral there was a small gathering at the mission hall, where food had been prepared by some of the older women. The atmosphere was subdued, constricted, the grief different in its contours than at other funerals they had all witnessed. Sarah was so young, there was no escaping the sense of a brokenness in the order of things which lingered among the mourners even after the consolation of the scriptures. It was coupled with the sense that Orr’s charisma, his simple ability to put others at ease, seemed to be working in reverse, and the gap between the Orr they had known and this new Orr—an Orr who did not even seem to know how to do grief properly—was too confusing. People drifted away quickly. His parents eventually left with the boys, and the handful of mourners who remained began packing away food and stacking chairs. Orr and the visiting pastor stood off to the side for a long time, Orr doing the listening, his face towards the floor. The older man eventually put his hand on Orr’s shoulder, and said goodbye.

  Orr visited Anna the following night, and she asked him about the funeral. He described it for her, his tone flat but containing a calmness too, a warmth that seemed to be spreading inside him, as though the old Orr was considering returning, testing the waters. She was overwhelmed by, at first, a blunt satisfaction, which turned almost instantly to shame at her own callousness. Sarah was in the ground less than a day, and Anna already found that she could not help but feel glad, or, if not glad exactly, relieved, that the unsettled question of ownership was suddenly in her favour.

  As he was leaving he put his hands on her belly, just as he had when she had announced she was pregnant. She put her hands on top of his, and looked at his face, but his eyes stayed where they were, directed at her belly, at the child within. He shook his head.

  What? she asked him. What is it?

  Without looking up he answered, If I do not love you I shall not love.

  He kissed her and Anna watched him leave, considering for the first time that the line was perhaps as much threat as promise.

  III

  Orr took a month off from his pastoral duties after the funeral. The boys returned home, and it was now Orr’s responsibility to ensure they were dressed, fed, taken to school. There was some relief for Orr in this, the distraction of routine, but the boys struggled to adjust. Their father had been present and affectionate in their daily lives from the beginning, but this was a new form of intimacy, and neither they nor Orr knew how to move into it. The middle child adapted most quickly. His needs, perhaps, their uncomplicated flatness—an eight-year-old with simple desires and the language to express them—left space that Orr could fill with relative ease, whereas the other two fought much harder to work out what they needed or wanted from him. The youngest had stopped crying, but a dull stoicism took root in its place, a loss that he was old enough to experience but insufficiently able to articulate, and it began to mark a pattern he would never shake. Philip, on the other hand, had been the confidant of his mother, and Orr was never certain how much she had told him before she died, how many words he had stored up inside, many (perhaps) against his father. He offered no hint of this to Orr, and Orr worried that to question the boy might feel like an intrusion on a grief to which he had no right. And so they walled themselves in, and lost each other. Orr, in fairness, had Anna. Philip had no one.

  The school holidays arrived in the first week of Orr’s month off, so he had little time to himself. The two older boys went to a sports scheme in a local leisure centre with other children from the area, and Orr and the youngest would spend the day together. At first Orr tried to read or study in the mornings while the child watched television, but when Orr sat down with him on one occasion and experienced the inanity of the shows for himself, he decided they should go out for walks instead. They visited loc
al parks, and occasionally Orr would drive somewhere further, the Waterworks in the north of the city or the Pickie Pool in Bangor where pedalos in the shape of swans could be rented for a few pounds. Twice a week Orr left him with his parents, and travelled across the city to Anna. The immediacy of the passion had diminished, but they were both, Anna felt, finding their way into a new connection, and she was not concerned. The question of what would happen when the child came lay between them unasked; conversation by conversation they circled it, coming ever closer. It was unusual for Orr, Anna was aware, to be so indirect.

  It is not hard to imagine the thoughts that surely hovered in Orr’s mind during this time. His life, which had only months before seemed so regimented and purposeful, now lay riotously, terrifyingly open. It was clear that he would have to tell the members of his congregation, though when and how, and how much, remained uncertain.

  The day before he was to return to the mission hall, to resume his duties and preaching, Orr asked the elders for an extra two weeks off. He promised them that he would not need any further time beyond this fortnight, but that he needed to take a trip, that there were conversations with God he needed to have before he would be ready to continue. The two weeks were granted, and his parents again agreed to take the boys. His father was not convinced. He had begun to poke at the edges of Orr’s moods to see what lay there besides grief. Orr knew how to bear a silence, had learned it, indeed, from his father. He told him he was going back to Elgin, to where he had first been saved.

  His father wondered aloud at the wisdom of this. God is not found in a place but in our hearts, he said.

  Yes, said Orr, but sometimes he hides.

  God never hides, his father said. The blindness must be yours.

  Orr nodded. Perhaps it is both.

  Orr’s father, Adam, was a complicated man. Raised by a dour Scottish Calvinist who moved to Belfast as a teenager and became a skilled carpenter in the shipyard, not long after the success and tragedy of the Titanic, he had grown up with a curtailed joy at the world, tasting everything bitter. The old man had never really adjusted to Belfast life, his teenage Scottish burr a permanent hindrance he deliberately refused to soften, and Adam inherited not only a hint of the accent, but something of his inability to be satisfied. Born unexpectedly in his father’s forty-first year, he grew up surrounded by a voice constantly seeking grounds for disapproval, and, more often than not, finding them. Adam was an excellent footballer, and for a while it looked like he might make it across the water, to one of the big English clubs. But a bad knee injury in his late teens put paid to that dream, and he ended up stuck in the postal service, delivering mail in south Belfast, never quite able to shake the disappointment of an unlived life. Like his father he was saved, but regarded Orr’s role as a pastor with some suspicion, a combination of pride in his calling and scepticism that such a calling was necessary. He went to a different mission hall, one without a pastor, where the congregation sat around a table with bread and wine at the centre, and anyone—any man—could, at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, stand and speak. When Orr had told him of his decision to become a pastor, giving up his job as a mechanic, Adam had reacted at first with anger. Orr was only twenty-eight himself, with a two-year-old son, and Adam could not hide his frustration, though what the frustration was about, exactly, he would have been hard put to say.

  Orr left for Elgin, despite his father, and spent his days moving between the mountains and the small seaside towns of Aberdeenshire. He called Anna only once, as he had said he would. He talked to her of the huge sky, of the summer light extending late into the day, turning the mountains incrementally from green to purple, shade by shade, and eventually to black, their forms seeming to grow heavier as darkness fell. He walked and walked, he told her, and laughed as he described finding God through his feet, a phrase that stuck with Anna and that she flirted with some years later, in a series of poems which took her as close as she ever came to an idea of spiritual transcendence in her writing. (It is no coincidence that the phrase itself is so material, so human; Anna flirted only with an earthbound God.)

  Anna remained patient. It is true that Orr had lost his wife, and the attendant grief—and, as Anna alone knew, guilt—demanded of him a certain wrestling, which Anna understood he must do alone. But she was pregnant with his child, over halfway by this stage, and her life was about to change irreparably. Her mother asked her, only once, about this. Anna told her simply that it would be alright. The child in my belly, she said, is a kind of peace. Orr will be Orr, she said. But I am not carrying Orr, I am carrying my child.

  Orr returned from Scotland with a renewed vigour. The hesitation had gone, and it seemed he had removed his guilt, whatever there was, shed it as a snake sheds its skin. He went to Anna as soon as he returned, straight from the ferry.

  We are having a child, he said to her, as though revealing some new information, and when she didn’t reply, he said, We should raise him together.

  Him? Anna asked.

  Yes, said Orr.

  Anna nodded. Okay, she said. Let’s raise him together.

  On the following Sunday, the first in September, Orr stood up in front of the congregation. The two younger boys were not there, but Philip sat at the front. It was a wet, miserable day, the sky dull and grey, the rain audible on the roof of the hall. It was his first time back in the pulpit since the events of the summer, and a hushed, nervous energy passed invisibly from row to row, each scrape of a chair, each cough magnified and obvious. He spoke clearly, his voice sure.

  I have been the pastor of this congregation for more than ten years. God has blessed me, and us, in many ways during this time, and together we have wrestled with his presence, and occasionally his absence.

  A pause. Orr steadying himself.

  I have stopped hearing his voice. Or, perhaps, I have stopped listening. Eight months ago I fell in love with a woman who was not my wife. She is called Anna. In a few months she will have a child. My child. I am no longer going to be your pastor. I have no right to speak to you of what God wants when I no longer know myself. I would like to tell you I am sorry for what I have done, but that would not be the truth.

  The rain on the roof seeming heavier, like stones falling.

  I told my wife three weeks before she died. If God has intended to punish me, he has succeeded. Though his cruelty seems to have lost its focus.

  Orr sat down. The silence gave way to murmurs and confusion. No one knew what to do, where to look. Orr was sitting on a chair behind the pulpit. He looked at his son, sitting ten feet away. Philip stared at his father for ten, fifteen seconds, then simply stood up and walked out. No one else moved; they watched him walk down the centre of the hall. A dog barked in a nearby street, aggressive and pained. Philip opened the door without turning around, stepped outside, and pulled it shut behind him. The sound of the door seemed to act as a trigger. One by one the congregation stood up, some shaking their heads, and moved in silent, solemn procession to the door, following the boy. Orr watched them leave, refusing to hang his head, defiance to the end. Two minutes passed, three, five, until there was only a handful of people left, spread throughout the room.

  An old man, Hugh Roddy, was still there; he had been a member of the congregation his whole life, had watched hundreds of people find Jesus, and community, in the same seats that now sat empty around them.

  Will you lead us in prayer before you go, pastor? he said simply.

  Orr stood up, and waited silently for a moment, enough time for any of those remaining to leave. None did. Our father who art in heaven, Orr began, moving his way unhurried through the Lord’s Prayer. Lead us not into temptation, he said, and paused, and then continued, his voice unbroken.

  The elders accepted Orr’s resignation, and arranged to meet with him during the week. Orr was, of course, being paid by the congregation, and there was some debate as to how this state of affairs should be handled, not only in terms of the future—which was hardly in questi
on, he would be paid nothing from this point on—but also the past.

  On the following evening, the day before the arranged meeting, Roddy knocked on Orr’s front door. Orr welcomed him without fuss. Over a cup of tea, Roddy explained that there were a number of elders who were out for blood, that he must be aware.

  What am I supposed to do? asked Orr.

  Contrition, said Roddy.

  Orr stared at his tea for a moment, and set it down on the table. But I am not contrite, he said. I have stood before God for almost a year, wrestling with a love I have no words for, nor defence against. You feel I should have been stronger.

  Roddy interrupted him. Not stronger. Just more honest.

  There are different kinds of truth, Orr said.

  Orr told Anna about his admission, his declaration. She said little, believing that this part of Orr’s world, or what had been Orr’s world, was intimately his, and should remain his. There was a dull fear buried somewhere inside her that the removal of Orr from his church would do something irrevocable to him, would destroy him in some subtle, contagious way, and that the very freedom that had opened up the possibility of their being together may yet be a disaster. But she kept it hidden, not only from Orr but from herself; even in her notebooks refusing it the words she would later use with the brutality of hindsight. She was pregnant, she figured; such a feeling could just as easily be the baby shifting, and she gave herself over to this wisdom, this cause.