Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

I turn away to the other photographs, to the other stages of your life played out in the work of light on paper. You in your long black priest’s cassock under the African sun. Your church, its five high-domed thatched roofs like a patch of giant termite mounds rising from the flat earth, a crude wooden cross topping their disorder. You aged seventy-two, your eyes obscured by the round medical sunglasses, standing beside E. Ranga, an African evangelist who stares solemnly into the camera, taut in his European suit, shirt and tie. A black-and-white postcard of a ship, the Hertzog , white spray about its prow and two lines of signatures signed above and below it, one in the sea, one in the sky.

One photograph in particular catches my eye. It is a wedding photo, taken outside the entrance to your church at Maronda Mashanu. You stand in the background, wearing a black hat folded at the sides and your long white, pleated vestments. Yours is the only white face, and the rest of the wedding party stand in front of you, just the bride sitting down, the groom, bridesmaid and best man flanking her. They wear suits and dresses that appear a brilliant white. The old camera cannot cope with the midday heat reflected, and all of you shine out against the grey of the church and the veld, an angelic haze surrounding you as if your bodies are on the point of diffusion, burning brightly in the brief dilation of the lens. In the corner of the photograph, hard to see on first looking, a ribbed dog slouches past, its shrunken belly pulled taut against its spine, its thirsty tongue hanging loose from its jaw.

There are other photographs not of you, and I find myself scanning the ones of the women, in their high lace collars and neat buttoned dresses, the line from Steere’s book—‘ a persistent rumour of a love affair ’—still repeating in my head. I do not really know what I am looking for, a face to attach to this suggestion perhaps. But I find none. There is a photograph of your mother, Charlotte, your sisters Edith and Emily, but no woman whose name has any reason to arouse my suspicion. And it is the same with the letters. You wrote to everyone: family, friends, societies, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Manchester Guardian , even 10 Downing Street, but there are none to anyone who could be guessed at as a lover. There is over fifty years of your correspondence here. I have to assume that the rumour was just that. A rumour.

♦

The windows of the library have passed through grey to a deep blue to black, and it is time for me to go. I place the fragments of you back in their envelopes, tie the boxes with string and hand them in to the librarian. As I walk out through the marble-floored hallway I pass under the huge stone head of Cecil Rhodes, set in a backlit alcove above the entrance. The light casts a long shadow from his angular jaw across the wall and the irony of your letters being kept here, in the library of the man whose actions you spent a lifetime working against, does not escape me. I carry on out into the street where autumn leaves are falling through the shafts of street lights and a line from a Yeats poem comes to mind: ‘ the yellow leaves fell like faint meteorsin the gloom ’. Pulling my coat about my neck I walk on down the road, my breath fogging before me, wondering, as your photographs and letters make their journey back into the darkness of the stacks, if it is always this way: the light and the dark, the stone and the paper, the money men swallowing the spirit men in boxes.

On my way out of Oxford I pass my old college and I decide to go in and take a look. As I stand with my back to the street the library squats at the far end of the front quad, its lit windows casting long gold rectangles on the lawn in front of it. To the right of the library is the old bell tower and then the chapel, ornate in the corner. I walk towards the arches of its stained-glass windows, through a scattering of students leaning on their bicycles, talking.

At the chapel evensong is about to begin, so I walk inside. Epstein’s anguished Lazarus stands bound and huge in the ante-chapel, its Hopton Wood stone pale in the dim light. He looks over his shoulder up the aisle towards the altar (or appears to — his eyes are closed) and there is something pained about his face. As if he is regretful, a reluctant waker, unwillingly disturbed from the dead.

Walking under the pipework of the organ I feel the beauty of the building shed itself over me, its distilled atmosphere entering the body like clean air. A carved reredos covers the end wall behind the altar and I remember how I once came in here alone, when the place was empty, and spent an hour up close with the saints there, studying their faces, the details of their fingernails and skin creases, each one an individual. I never took part in the religious life of the college, but this reredos had always drawn me. It made me think of Jude the Obscure and the craftsmen who made it, the dust on their hands as they coaxed each of these saints from the stone, as if they had always been there, waiting for the tap of the chisel to break them into existence.

I take a seat at the back, on the right, but first I check for a wood carving under a misericord that my grandmother once showed me. Lifting the folding seat, I find that sure enough, it is there. Two people caught having sex with impressive contortion, conker-coloured, hidden under the dark wood of the seat.

The choir file in, extravagant in their surplices, the ruffs holding their heads as if on platters. Boys as young as ten or eleven alongside the older students of the college. I catch glimpses of trainers and jeans under the heavy red cloth of their cassocks. They peel off into facing rows, and stand there serious, their faces lit by the candles that burn on tall holders before them. The students bear marks of their lives before and after this service — highlighted hair, the odd earring, travelling bands on a wrist — but the younger boys are more timeless, their neat haircuts parted like wet feathers across their heads. The whole thing seems a little ridiculous. But then the organ rouses itself and they sing, their mouths opening simultaneously, as if operating on one mechanism, and a sound disproportionate to its origin unfurls up into the rafters of the chapel.

I don’t think I will ever have a relationship with a god in the way you did. Perhaps the modern imagination will not allow such a thing, or perhaps I know of too much harm done in the name of gods. As I sat there, however, with that singing uncoiling into the air, something happened: a tuning in of the mind, a spiritual awareness, a consequence of sound and place — call it what you will, but there, in that evensong, I felt a connection with a presence larger and greater than the present and the self. Perhaps it was the clarity of the notes clearing my consciousness, but I was aware of it, whatever it was, out there, beyond the thick stone walls, past Epstein’s pale Lazarus, outside the hushed cloisters. History, the collective soul, I still have no name for it, and I didn’t then either. I just knew I wanted to be part of it, always pitched at a higher note, and I knew that would be impossible, and that is why I wanted it.

Shutting my eyes I rest my head back against the wood of the pew and let the music envelop me while I try to think about what I have learned of you today. But it is hard, you still come in fragments. I do know though, that you were not, as I had once thought, a child of your time, but rather a child outside time. Today, reading your ideas, your hopes, your aspirations, I realised that your talent was one of disasso-ciation: an ability to stand aside from the ideas and codes of the day and see them in the long view of humanity. Despite the prejudices of those about you, you maintained the capability to see anyone as everyman and it is this, above all, that has impressed me, and once again I feel I want to know more about who you were, about how you lived and why. Because now I have disturbed the dust of your life, I know it will not settle until I do.