Ian McEwan - In Between the Sheets

“I didn’t know you were a Christian, George,” I said.

“Oh, well, you know…” George sank into his chair. There was a pause, as if all four of us were gathering our strength for another round of fragmentary dissent.

Mary was now in the second sag chair, facing George. Terence lay like a low wall between them, and I sat cross-legged about a yard from Terence’s feet. It was George who spoke first, across Terence to Mary.

“I’ve never been interested in churchgoing much but…” He trailed off, a little drunkenly, I thought. “But I always wanted the boys to have as much of it as possible while they’re young. They can reject it later, I guess. But at least for now they have a coherent set of values that are as good as any other, and they have this whole set of stories, really good stories, exotic stories, believable stories.”

No one spoke so George went on. “They like the idea of God. And heaven and hell, and angels and the Devil. They talk about that stuff a whole lot and I’m never sure quite what it means to them. I guess it’s a bit like Santa Claus, they believe it and they don’t believe it. They like the business of praying, even if they do ask for the craziest things. Praying for them is a kind of extension of their… their inner lives. They pray about what they want and what they’re afraid of. They go to church every week. It’s about the only thing Jean and I agree on.”

George addressed all this to Mary, who nodded as he spoke and stared back at him solemnly. Terence had closed his eyes. Now that he had finished, George looked at each of us in turn, waiting to be challenged. We stirred. Terence lifted himself onto his elbow. No one spoke.

“I don’t see it’s going to hurt them, a bit of the old religion,” George reiterated.

Mary spoke into the ground. “Well, I don’t know. There’s a lot of things you could object to in Christianity. And since you don’t really believe in it yourself we should talk about that.”

“OK,” said George. “Let’s hear it.”

Mary spoke with deliberation at first. “Well, for a start, the Bible is a book written by men, addressed to men and features a very male God who even looks like a man because he made man in his own image. That sounds pretty suspicious to me, a real male fantasy…”

“Wait a minute,” said George.

“Next,” Mary went on, “women come off pretty badly in Christianity. Through Original Sin they are held responsible for everything in the world since the Garden of Eden. Women are weak, unclean, condemned to bear children in pain as punishment for the failures of Eve, they are the temptresses who turn the minds of men away from God, as if women were more responsible for men’s sexual feelings than the men themselves! Like Simone de Beauvoir says, women are always the ‘other’, the real business is between a man in the sky and the men on the ground. In fact women only exist at all as a kind of divine afterthought, put together out of a spare rib to keep men company and iron their shirts, and the biggest favor they can do Christianity is not to get dirtied up with sex, stay chaste, and if they can manage to have a baby at the same time, then they’re measuring up to the Christian Church’s ideal of womanhood—the Virgin Mary.” Now Mary was angry. She glared at George.

“Wait a minute,” he was saying, “you can’t impose all that Women’s Lib stuff onto the societies of thousands of years ago. Christianity expressed itself through available…”

At roughly the same time Terence said, “Another objection to Christianity is that it leads to passive acceptance of social inequalities because the real rewards are in…”

And Mary cut in across George in protest. “Christianity has provided an ideology for sexism now, and capitalism…”

“Are you a Communist?” George demanded angrily, although I was not sure who he was talking to. Terence was pressing on loudly with his own speech. I heard him mention the Crusades and the Inquisition.

“This has nothing to do with Christianity.” George was almost shouting. His face was flushed.

“More evil perpetrated in the name of Christ than… this has nothing to do with… to the persecution of women herbalists as witches… Bullshit. It’s irrelevant… corruption, graft, propping up tyrants, accumulating wealth at the altars… fertility goddess… bullshit… phallic worship… look at Galileo… This has nothing to…” I heard little else because now I was shouting my own piece about Christianity. It was impossible to stay quiet. George was jabbing his finger furiously in Terence’s direction. Mary was leaning forwards trying to catch George by the sleeve and tell him something. The whiskey bottle lay on its side empty, someone had upset the ice. For the first time in my life I found myself with urgent views on Christianity, on violence, on America, on everything, and I demanded priority before my thoughts slipped away.

“… and starting to think objectively about this… their pulpits to put down the workers and their strikes so… objective? You mean male. All reality now is male real… always a violent God… the great capitalist in the sky… protective ideology of the dominant class denies the conflict between men and women… bullshit, total bullshit…”

Suddenly I heard another voice ringing in my ears. It was my own. I was talking into a brief, exhausted silence.

“… driving across the States I saw this sign in Illinois along Interstate 70 which said, ‘God, Guts, Guns made America great. Let’s keep all three.’”

“Hah!” Mary and Terence exclaimed in triumph. George was on his feet, empty glass in hand.

“That’s right,” he cried. “That’s right. You can put it down but it’s right. This country has a violent past, a lot of brave men died making…”

“Men!” echoed Mary.

“All right, and a lot of brave women too. America was made with the gun. You can’t get away from that.” George strode across the room to the bar in the corner and drew out something black from behind the bottles. “I keep a gun here,” he said, holding the thing up for us to see.

“What for?” Mary asked.

“When you have kids you begin to have a very different attitude towards life and death. I never kept a gun before the kids were around. Now I think I’d shoot at anyone who threatened their existence.”

“Is it a real gun?” I said. George came back towards us with the gun in one hand and a fresh bottle of Scotch in the other. “Dead right it’s a real gun!” It was very small and did not extend beyond George’s open palm.

“Let me see that,” said Terence.

“It’s loaded,” George warned as he handed it across. The gun appeared to have a soothing effect on us all. We no longer shouted, we spoke quietly in its presence. While Terence examined the gun George filled our glasses. As he sat down he reminded me of my promise to play the flute. There followed a bleary silence of a minute or two, broken only by George to tell us that after this drink we should eat dinner. Mary was far away in thought. She rotated her glass slowly between her finger and thumb. I lay back on my elbows and began to piece together the conversation we had just had. I was trying to remember how we had arrived at this sudden silence.

Then Terence snapped the safety catch and leveled the gun at George’s head.

“Raise your hands, Christian,” he said dully.

George did not move. He said, “You oughtn’t to fool around with a gun.” Terence tightened his grip. Of course he was fooling around, and yet I could see from where I was that his finger was curled about the trigger, and he was beginning to pull on it.

“Terence!” Mary whispered, and touched his back gently with her foot. Keeping his eyes on Terence, George sipped at his drink. Terence brought his other hand up to steady the gun, which was aimed at the center of George’s face.