The Sleep of the Just

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.