Free Golden Hill by Francis Spufford Page A

blue and gold of his coat, must be Governor Clinton, and his lady in lilac silk, and two African footmen with wigs powdered to the colour of icing-sugar to get the maximum contrast of black and white. A row behind, a skinny, sinewy, querulous man with eyebrows like caterpillars and a pointed nose was tapping his teeth, rubbing his lip, scratching his concave cheek, with a yellowed finger; next to him, at his most glazed and impervious, was Septimus Oakeshott, and Achilles the slave alongside. Septimus raised an eyebrow when he saw Smith looking. And then behind them , with a whole lavishly-dressed household around him, stood a middle-aged man in plain black who justified the accidental classicism imposed by the line of the pew-top, for he had a massive and statuesque Roman head, finely modelled at ear and nose, like a slightly depraved but very intelligent emperor; and this man was turning, and nodding, and working the room as the Governor was not, directing smiles, and ironic compressions of the brow, and communicative glances, to many faces in the ranked congregation behind him, stirringas if with a spoon the coupled merchants and merchants’ wives, officers and officers’ wives, lawyers and lawyers’ wives. The men bowed, the women dipped and dimpled. His eye travelled over Smith too, and bestowed on him a look of lively curiosity, charm and danger. Seeing where he was looking, the people in the pews behind all looked too. Smith inclined his head.
    A band of fiddle, bass-viol, trumpet and hoboy tuned up in the west gallery, a choir of blue-coated orphan boys trooped in, followed by Trinity’s rector in surplice and cassock, and a wig whose weight was all in bunched clusters on each side, like ear muffs. On the sanctuary step he turned, and declared in the loud voice required by the prayerbook, ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us … Wherefore I pray and beseech you, as many as are here present, to accompany me, with a pure heart and a humble voice, to the throne of the heavenly grace, saying after me—’
    The congregation dropped to its knees, and consequently out of sight of itself. Smith was all of a sudden alone, with nothing in view but the rectangular top of his separate box, and above it the church roof and vacant pulpit: a most effective architectural similitude of the individual soul’s necessarily separate and lonely address to the mercy seat. From all the separate souls, in all their separate boxes, lidless before the Lord, arose the grumbling, lisping, rumbling, droning, hoarse, melodious, piping, muttering, murmuring, whispering, bellowing voice of the congregation together, making its way through the utterly familiar words of the prayerbook’s General Confession, at once soothing and demanding, ignorable and liable from moment to moment to sink a hook into the soul where least expected. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, and there is no health in us … Whenever an individual lost their place in the flow of the words, lost their attention or paid too much attention, they heard the flow continue over their heads, a roof of sound beneath the roof of wood, made from the voices of the many separate souls combined, but apart from each, and asking no questions when the faltering voice was raised again to rejoin it. What, if anything, Mr Smith confessed, this history must not tell; and what answer he received, if any, it cannot. The operations of grace are beyond the recording powers of the novelist. Mrs Fielding cannot describe them; nor Mr Fielding, nor Mrs Lennox, nor Mr Richardson, nor Mr Smollett, nor even Mr Sterne, who can stretch his story further than most. Not much redemption is to be looked for, in a novel, when we lean so materially upon the visible and the audible, when the four walls of our domain are: what is seen, what is said, what is done, and what became of it. Certainly, all the heads reappeared again looking