The Sleep of the Just
He kept the church alive for thirty years. He never believed it.
For nearly forty years Arthur Sutton's hand has entered the town's dead in the parish register in the same upright copperplate, without a waver and without a word of belief behind it. He is churchwarden of St Botolph's — the great wool church that rides above the Lincolnshire fen like a ship run aground — and he keeps it the way he keeps everything: competently, dutifully, the roof fund's shortfall known to the penny, the forms of a faith maintained like the listed building it is.
Then a calm new order settles over the world, and it comes to England dressed in heritage — borrowing the bells, the liturgy, the decency, asking a nation only to sign what it has always signed.
And at a graveside, in his own steady voice, Arthur hears himself read that the dead will rise — and cannot say whether he believes one word of it.
