‘And you do too, strictly speaking?’

‘Yes, I do. But the way I live my Christianity, I have gatherings elsewhere as well. I don’t just go to care homes and hospitals. I visit the young where they are, in youth clubs and snack bars, on street corners. I visit schools, kindergartens and I see it as my life’s mission to serve the Lord. Otherwise you have the disconcerting sensation in this country that God has fixed opening hours, from eleven to one on Sundays, and you can’t meet Him without an appointment. Churches are shut on the other days, like outposts in a Godless territory. If anyone wished to pay a visit, they would find the church door closed. This is the inheritance of Puritanism within the Protestant church. It’s what we have lost on our way from the mother church.’

‘By which you mean the Catholic church?’

‘Yes. I mean the difference no one can fail to notice, not least we priests, when you visit a Catholic church at lunch time, somewhere in France, shall we say, enter through the open door, see all the lit candles, the portraits of saints, everyone at prayer, priests chanting their cryptic liturgies, in Latin, a tradition which is, so to speak, synonymous with Christianity itself. Ur-Christianity!’

‘I assume you explain this to your colleagues?’

He stood with his hands folded, in front of his lower abdomen. ‘Yes, we’re a group of relatively young priests who see 297ourselves as fundamentalists, to a greater degree than those who have ruled the church for the last fifty years. In that sense we’re going back to the original text, to Jesus, Jacob and Paul. We’re trying to practise what we perceive as genuine Christianity, which the church has played its part in corrupting – both the Catholic and the Protestant churches. But then we have to espouse unpopular standpoints.’

‘Yes, we’re reading more and more about you – or some of you – in the papers.’

He shrugged. ‘There are degrees within our ranks as well. Some have a greater predilection for self-publicising than others. Some of us prefer to work out of the public eye. Perform good deeds. Live … a clean life.’ A twitch flitted across his face, like the shadow of a bird flying past.

‘And it’s because of this you—?’

‘But often it’s like sowing on untilled ground!’ he interrupted. ‘It’s as though the whole population in the course of the twentieth century has lost contact with this part of themselves, as though rationalism and science and all the demands of logic and intellect have taken control of the human mind, that is until now, coming up to the new millennium, when we can glimpse a new longing for the inexplicable, a form of…’ He stopped and pointed a long, pale index finger at me. ‘You, for example, Veum. If I ask you a direct question: what is your attitude to Christianity? Have you got any childhood faith to build on?’

I slowly shook my head. ‘I grew up in an irreligious home. It wasn’t something we ever talked about. My mother may have hummed a hymn while she was dusting or washing up the lunch dishes, but generally speaking there wasn’t much singing in her. She was left on her own prematurely. We went with the others to church and back on Christmas Eve or if anyone was going to 298get married. I was even confirmed. But my father would probably have preferred to make a sacrifice to Thor and Odin than light a candle for the Virgin Mary. He had a rather special relationship with Norse mythology.’