Death in Holy Orders

by P. D. James

  The theme of the homily was Christian discipleship in the modern world and it was an attack on nearly everything for which St. Anselm’s had stood for over a hundred years, and on everything Father Sebastian valued. The message was unambiguous. The Church could not survive to serve the needs of a violent, troubled and increasingly unbelieving century unless it returned to the fundamentals of the faith. Modern discipleship was not a matter of indulgence in archaic if beautiful language, in which words more often obscured than affirmed the reality of faith. There was a temptation to overvalue intelligence and intellectual achievement so that theology became a philosophical exercise in justifying scepticism. Equally seductive was an overemphasis on ceremony, vestments and disputed points of procedure, an obsession with competitive musical excellence which too often transformed a church service into a public performance. The Church was not a social organization within which the comfortable middle class could satisfy its craving for beauty, order, nostalgia and the illusion of spirituality. Only by a return to the truth of the gospel could the Church hope to meet the needs of the modern world.

  At the end of the homily the Archdeacon returned to his stall and the ordinands and priests knelt while Father Sebastian spoke the final blessing. After the small procession had left the church, Henry returned to extinguish the candles and switch off the altar light. Then he came down to the south door to say a courteous good-night to Dalgliesh and to lock the door behind him. Except for those two words, neither spoke.

  As he heard the rasp of the iron, Dalgliesh felt that he was being permanently shut out from something which he had never fully understood or accepted and which was now being finally bolted against him. Sheltered by the cloister from the full force of the gale, he made his way along the few yards from the church door to Jerome and bed.

  BOOK TWO

  DEATH OF AN ARCHDEACON

  The Archdeacon didn’t loiter after Compline. He and Father Sebastian disrobed in silence in the sacristy and he said a curt goodnight before stepping out into the windswept cloister.

  The courtyard was a vortex of sound and fury. An early rain had ceased but the strong southeaster, rising in strength, gusted and whirled about the horse-chestnut, set a hissing among the high leaves and bent the great boughs so that they rose and fell with the majestic slowness of a funeral dance. Frailer branches and twigs snapped off and fell like the sticks of spent fireworks on the cobbles. The south cloister was still clear but the fallen leaves, rolling and twisting across the courtyard, were already piling in a damp mush against the sacristy door and the wall of the north cloister.

  At the entrance to the college, the Archdeacon scraped free the few leafy skeletons plastered against the sole and the toe of his black shoes and moved through the cloakroom into the hall. Despite the violence of the storm, the house was strangely silent. He wondered whether the four priests were still in the church or sacristy, perhaps holding an indignant meeting about his homily. The ordinands, he assumed, had gone to their rooms. There was something unusual, almost ominous, in the calm and faintly pungent air.

  It wasn’t yet ten-thirty. He felt restless and disinclined for so early a night, but the outside exercise he had suddenly craved seemed impracticable and even dangerous in the darkness and the force of the wind. It was, he knew, customary at St. Anselm’s to keep silent after Compline and, although he had little sympathy with the convention, he wasn’t anxious to be seen flouting it. There was, he knew, a television set in the ordinands’ sitting-room, but the Saturday programmes were never much good and he was reluctant to disturb the calm. But he could probably find a book there, and there could be no objection to his watching the late ITV news.

  But when he opened the door he saw that the room was occupied. The youngish man, who had been introduced to him at lunch as Clive Stannard, was watching a film and, turning at his entrance,

  seemed to resent the intrusion. The Archdeacon hovered for a moment, then said a brief good-night, let himself out through the door beside the cellar steps and battled his way across the courtyard to Augustine.

  By ten-forty he was in his pyjamas and dressing-gown and ready for bed. He had read a chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel and said his usual prayers, but tonight both had been no more than a routine exercise in conventional piety. He knew the words of scripture by heart and had silently mouthed them, as if by slowness and careful attention to each word he could extract from them some meaning previously withheld. Taking off his dressing-gown he made sure that the window was secure against the storm and climbed into bed.

  Memory is best held at bay by action. Now, lying rigidly between taut sheets, hearing the howling of the wind, he knew that sleep wouldn’t come easily. The crowded and traumatic day had left his mind over-stimulated. Perhaps he should have battled against the wind and taken his walk. He thought about the homily, but with satisfaction rather than regret. He had prepared it with care and delivered it quietly but with passion and authority. These things had to be said and he had said them, and if the homily had further antagonized Sebastian Morell, if distress and dislike had hardened into enmity, well that couldn’t be helped. It wasn’t, he told himself, that he courted unpopularity; it was important to him to stand well with people he respected. He was ambitious and he knew that a bishop’s mitre wasn’t won by antagonizing a significant section of the Church, even if its influence was less powerful than once it had seemed. But Sebastian Morell was no longer as influential as he imagined. In this battle he could be sure that he was on the winning side. But there were, he reminded himself, battles of principles which had to be fought if the Church of England was to survive to serve the new millennium. Closing St. Anselm’s might be only a minor skirmish in that war, but it was one which would give him satisfaction to win.

  So what was it then that he found so unsettling about St. Anselm’s? Why should he feel that here on this windswept desolate coast the spiritual life had to be lived at a greater intensity than elsewhere, that he and his whole past were under judgement? It wasn’t as if St. Anselm’s had a long history of devotion and worship. Certainly the church was medieval; one could, he supposed, hear in that silent air the echo of centuries of plainsong, although it had never been apparent to him. For him a church was functional, a building for worship, not a place of worship. St. Anselm’s was only the creation of a Victorian spinster with too much money, too little sense and a taste for lace-trimmed albs, birettas and bachelor priests. Probably the woman had been half-mad. It was ridiculous that her pernicious influence should still govern a twenty-first-cenrury college.

  He shifted his legs vigorously in an attempt to loosen the constricting sheet. He wished suddenly that Muriel were with him, that he could turn to her stolid comfortable body and accepting arms for the temporary oblivion of sex. But even as in thought he reached for her, there came between them, as so often in the marital bed, the memory of that other body, arms delicate as a child’s, the pointed breasts, the open exploring mouth moving over his body.

  “You like this ? And this ? And this ?”

  Their love had been a mistake from the beginning, ill-advised and so predictably disastrous that he wondered now how he had been so self-deceived. The affair had been the stuff of cheap romantic fiction. It had even begun in the setting of much cheap romantic fiction, a cruise-ship in the Mediterranean. A clerical acquaintance, who was booked as a guest lecturer on a voyage to archaeological and historical sites in Italy and Asia, had fallen ill at the last minute and had suggested him as a substitute. He suspected that the organizers wouldn’t have taken him if a better-qualified candidate had been available, but he had been surprisingly successful. Luckily on his cruise there had been no knowledgeable academics among the passengers. By conscientious preliminary preparation and by taking with him the best-written guides he had managed to keep ahead of the other passengers.

  Barbara had been on board taking an educational cruise with her mother and stepfather. She was the youngest passenger and he wasn’t the only male to b
e enchanted with her. To him she had looked more like a child than a nineteen-year-old, and a child born out of her own time. The coal-black hair cut in a bob with a low fringe over immense blue eyes, the heart-shaped face and small full lips, the boyish figure emphasized by the very short cotton shifts she chose to wear, gave her a look of the 1920s. The older passengers, who had lived through the 30s and had a folk memory of that earlier frenetic decade, sighed nostalgically and murmured that she reminded them of the young Claudette Colbert. For him the image was false. She had no film-star sophistication, only a childish innocence and gaiety and a vulnerability that enabled him to interpret sexual desire as the need to cherish and protect. He couldn’t believe his luck when she singled him out for the distinction of her favour and thereafter attached herself to him with proprietorial dedication. Within three months they were married. He was thirty-nine, she was just twenty.

  Educated at a succession of schools dedicated to the religion of multiculturalism and liberal orthodoxy, she knew nothing about the Church but was avid for information and instruction. Only later did he realize that the relationship between teacher and taught was for her deeply erotic. She liked to be mastered, and not only physically. But none of her enthusiasms lasted, including her enthusiasm for marriage. The Church where he was then vicar had sold off the large Victorian vicarage and built in its grounds a modern two-storey house of no architectural merit, but economical to run. It was not the house she had expected.

  Extravagant, wilful, capricious, he early realized she was the antithesis of a suitable wife for an ambitious Church of England clergyman. Even the sex became overlaid with anxiety. She was at her most demanding when he was overtired or on the rare occasions when they had overnight visitors and he would become uncomfortably aware of the thinness of the bedroom walls as she murmured endearments which could so easily rise to shouted taunts and demands. At breakfast the next morning she would appear in her dressing-gown, openly flirtatious, lifting her arms so that the thin silk fell away, sleepy-eyed and triumphant.

  Why had she married him? For security? To get away from the mother and stepfather she hated ? To be cosseted, cared for, indulged ? To feel safe ? To be loved ? He grew to dread her unpredictable moods, her outbreaks of screaming fury. He tried to shield them from the knowledge of the parish but soon the whispers came back to him. He remembered with burning embarrassment and resentment the visit of one of his churchwardens who happened to be a doctor.

  “Your wife isn’t my patient, of course, vicar, and I don’t want to interfere, but she isn’t well. I think you should try to get professional help.” But when he suggested that she might see a psychiatrist or even a general practitioner, he was greeted with sobbing accusations that he was trying to get rid of her, to have her put away.

  Outside the wind, which for a few minutes had dropped in intensity, rose again to a howling crescendo. Usually he enjoyed listening to its fury from the safety of his bed; now this small and functional room seemed less a sanctuary than a prison. Since Barbara’s death he had prayed for forgiveness for marrying her, for failing her in love and understanding; he had never asked for forgiveness for wishing her dead. Now, lying in this narrow bed, he began painfully to confront the past. It was not an act of will that drew back the bolts of that dark dungeon to which he had consigned his marriage. The visions that rose to pass through his mind were not of his choosing. Something that traumatic encounter with Yarwood, this place, St. Anselm’s worked together to ensure that he had no alternative.

  Caught between a dream and a nightmare, he imagined himself in an interrogation room, modern, functional, characterless. And then he realized that it was the living-room of his old vicarage. He was seated on the sofa between Dalgliesh and Yarwood. They hadn’t handcuffed him, not yet, but he knew that he had already been judged and found guilty, that they had all the evidence they needed. It rolled before his eyes in a grainy, secretly-filmed indictment. From time to time Dalgliesh would say ‘stop there’, and Yarwood would put out a hand. The image would be fixed while they viewed it in an accusing silence. All the petty transgressions and un kindnesses as well as the major failure in love, passed before his eyes. And now at last they were viewing the final reel, the heart of darkness.

  He was no longer squashed down on the sofa imprisoned between his two accusers. He had moved into the frame to re-enact every movement, every word, to experience every emotion as if for the first time. It had been the late afternoon of a sunless day in mid-October, a thin rain, fine as a mist, had been falling continuously for the last two days from a gunmetal sky. He had returned from two hours of visiting long-term sick and housebound parishioners. As always he had tried conscientiously to meet their individual and predictable needs; blind Mrs. Oliver who liked him to read a passage of scripture and pray with her; old Sam Possinger who on every visit re-fought the Battle of Alamein; Mrs. Poley, caged in her zimmer-frame, avid for the latest parish gossip; Carl Lomas, who had never set foot in St. Botolph’s but liked discussing theology and the defects of the Church of England. Mrs. Poley, with his help, had edged her way painfully into the kitchen and made tea, taking from the tin the gingerbread cake she had baked for him. He had unwisely praised it four years ago on his first visit and was now condemned to eat it weekly, finding it impossible to admit that he disliked gingerbread. But the tea, hot and strong, had been welcome and would save him the trouble of making it at home.

  He parked his Vauxhall Cavalier in the road and walked to his front door down the concrete path which dissected the spongy saturated lawn on which decaying rose petals were dissolving into the unmown grass. The house was totally silent and he entered, as always, with apprehension. Barbara had been sullen and fidgety at breakfast, and the restlessness and the fact that she hadn’t bothered to dress were always a bad sign. At their lunch of soup from a carton followed by a salad, still in her dressing-gown, she had pushed her plate away saying that she was too tired to eat; she would go to bed for the afternoon and try to sleep.

  She had said petulantly, “You’d better go to your boring old parishioners. They’re all you care about anyway. Don’t disturb me when you get back. I don’t want to hear about them. I don’t want to hear about anything.”

  He had not replied, but had watched with a surge of anger and helplessness as slowly she mounted the stairs, the silk belt of her dressing-gown trailing, her head drooping as if in an agony of despair.

  Now, returning home and burdened with apprehension, he closed the front door behind him. Was she still in bed or had she waited for him to leave, then dressed and gone out on one of her destructive and humiliating insurgencies into the parish? He had to know. He mounted the stairs quietly; if she were asleep he had no wish to wake her.

  The door to the bedroom was shut and he turned the doorknob gently. The room was in semi-darkness, the curtains partly-drawn across the one long window which gave a view of the rectangle of grass, rough as a field, the triangular beds which were the garden, and beyond to the rows of neat identical houses. He moved towards the bed and, as his eyes adjusted to the half-light, saw her clearly. She was lying on her right side, her hand curled against her cheek. The left arm was flung out over the bedclothes. Bending down he could hear her breathing, low and laboured, could smell the wine on her breath and a stronger, sweet, disagreeable stink which he identified as vomit. Qn the bedside table was a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. Beside it, lying on its side and with the screw-cap rolled a little apart, was a large empty bottle which he recognized. It had contained tablets of soluble aspirin.

  He told himself that she was asleep, that she was drunk, that she needed to be left undisturbed. Almost instinctively he picked up the wine bottle and was about to judge how much she had drunk when something as strong as a warning voice made him put it down again. He saw that there was a handkerchief protruding from beneath the pillow. Taking it he wiped the bottle clean, then dropped the handkerchief on the bed. It seemed to him that his actions were as without volition as they wer
e without sense. Then he left her, closing the door behind him, and went downstairs. He told himself again: she’s asleep, she’s drunk, she won’t want to be disturbed. After half an hour he went to his study, calmly got the papers together for the six o’clock meeting of the Parochial Church Council and left the house.

  He had no mental picture, no memory of the PCC meeting, but he could remember driving home with Melvyn Hopkins, one of the churchwardens. He had promised Melvyn to let him have a sight of the latest report of the Church’s committee on social responsibility and had suggested that Melvyn accompany him to the Vicarage. And now the sequence of images was clear again. Himself apologizing for the fact that Barbara wasn’t there and telling Melvyn that she had been unwell, going up again to the bedroom and again gently opening the door, seeing in the half-light the still figure, the wine bottle, the bottle of pills on its side. He went over to the bed. This time there was no low raucous breathing. Putting out his hand to her cheek he found that it was cold and knew that what he was touching was death. And then there came a memory, words heard or read from some forgotten source, but now terrifying in their implication. It was always wise to have someone with you when you found the body.

  He couldn’t relive the events of the church funeral service or the cremation; he had no memory of either. In their place was a jumble of faces sympathetic, concerned, frankly anxious zooming at him out of darkness, distorted and grotesque. And now there was that one dreaded face. He was sitting on the sofa again, but this time with Sergeant Yarwood and a young uniformed boy who looked no older than one of his boy choristers and who sat silent throughout the interrogation.

  “And when you returned to the house, from visiting your parishioners, shortly after five, you say, what exactly did you do, sir?”