Published 'Masque' 1994


Ruthven sits in a church graveyard one sunny spring sunday morning. It has been a hard winter, so it's sheer delight to almost feel that there are no more winters left in the pack. Yet there is a joker: something he scrutinises in the palm of his hand: a family photo that he once found in a library book, with no clue as to who they were or even when they lived. It seems reasonably modern, albeit in one drained colour.

The father sits - so difficult to gauge how tall, but Ruthven plumps for six foot: a full rounded face with a beard that is cut short to the face, leaving a gap under the lower lip. The vicar just walked past on his way to morning service. He certainly gave Ruthven a querulous look. Perhaps he thinks Ruthven is composing a long poem in his head about a country graveyard. The mother also sits, cross-legged, a half smile peering from obliquity. She has obviously just spent much trouble getting them all to pose properly. A sunday school group is sitting outside a community hall not far away, around a table in the sunshine, no doubt pondering the ways of Christ. But too much laughter comes across to Ruthven, for that to be too true. Three ladies clasping files also just passed, keeping up a desultory conversation in some attempt to give themselves grounds for ignoring Ruthven. The two children of the photo family stand behind the mother and father. The boy, around fifteen, has the beginnings of a moustache which he has not yet attempted to scrape off. He is surly, but straining to form the correct countenance for the occasion. The girl, elevenish, I guess, is similar to a victorian doll, whilst her smile conceals something. Perhaps that is what Ruthven strives to discover each time studies the photo. More people are arriving in dribs and drabs for the church service; Ruthven expects they're wondering who he is. This is not the first time he has sat here.

The sunday school type of group is quieter now. The meek shall inherit the earth, is the teacher now saying? As the voice seems further away than her body, he can't recall what's she's saying. He wonders how many of those children in the sunday school will die prematurely of cancer. The church arrivals just gathered apace: shining spring faces have been painted on their white oval canvases to fit the occasion. He returns to the photo and wonders what made them choose those particular faces from their dressing-room cupboards, to pose for a permanent record of their existence.

One gravestone which he can discern records the death of a man in 1928. He wonders what it's like to be under the ground since then and what face he donned for the funeral. A white pale frozen mask is what Ruthven shall will choose, one to prevent others from seeing into the depth of his soul.

Do photos change over the years? As the decades pass since its enflashment, is there a creeping movement of their essential features? A nose slightly out of joint, eyes narrowing, eyebrows beginning to meet, mouths thinning, beards inching further out, youthful moustache crawling like a caterpillar across the cheek, hair moving of its own accord like cilia, chest moving with indrawn breath and moving again when outdrawn - steaming the surface of the photo, making it more impressionistic, yellowing the whiteness, browning the darkness, both aging the artefact and those it embodies? Queries pour out like the church bells that begin to peal endlessly, as the morning service draws to its own beginning. Ruthven hears the preamble of the organ from within the church, distanced by century old walls. Latecomers just arrived, including a family – yes, one resembling an older version of that in the photo. He notes the two grown-up children never had a family of their own. Ruthven gazes, as if expecting them to acknowledge him - but they chat together and, unlike the other churchgoers, genuinely fail to see him. The course of their life has not been altered or revised by the sight of Ruthven. That is untrue of most of the other churchgoers - and at least one of them will die from an accident tonight, not directly caused by Ruthven's volition, yet by a proximation to the new realities derived from his simple presence here, on this churchyard bench.

The sunday school group have disappeared inside the community hall, no doubt tending to a sudden sickness in one of the children. They are fearful of the blood and phlegm being coughed up by the previously happy girl who just drew the best picture possible of her Saviour. The ambulance has already been called, but she will die in terrible pain before sunday lunch is served. Behind Ruthven, a hymn has burst out. He must go now for his own sunday lunch, reddish rare beef, flaky slab of yorkshire and oodles of thick gravy, then rhubarb crumble. He leaves the photo on one of the gravestones. If the wind fails to freshen, someone will later wonder what it is doing there and use it, perhaps, for a place-marker in a library book. A book about jolly japes by Blyton. Or a course in family planning.