by Martin Howe
Tony smiled self-consciously to himself and looked guiltily over at Peter, who stared icily back at him.
“Pathetic, really pathetic.”
“I was lucky and it saved my life and my marriage. It was like coming home for Emily. She intuitively took to the role of vicar’s wife. As she used to say she drank the life in with her mother’s milk, and she became increasingly like her, in fact, as the years went by. It was particularly the case when we moved here to Dumpton Gap in the early fifties. It had everything I could have asked for. It’s a beautiful part of the world, with a docile set of parishioners and not too many challenges for a lazy vicar. Perfect. She took to the yearly round of fete’s, tea parties, committees, visits, that is the lot of the vicar’s wife and our relationship got back on an even keel again for a while. I was busy, we were both pulling the same way. It was as close to perfect as one can hope for, I think.”
“I’m so glad for you. It warms my heart to hear that things worked out. I have to admit I was getting concerned earlier and I’m sure there’s a simple explanation for the name change. From what you’ve told me it can’t have had anything to do with covering your tracks and making you that much harder to find. That would be underhand and not something a man of the cloth would do?”
Tony was at a loss for words. He looked around uneasily as if searching for something, then when he couldn’t find whatever he was looking for stammered out an answer.
“It was, sort of like that. I mean not exactly deliberate. It just sounded more the part. Dyet is my mother’s maiden name. So it’s not stretching it that far …”
“Noooo.”
“… went better with Coxon than Cox. Rolls off the tongue, don’t you think?”
“If you say so.”
“… in fact it’s increasingly common these days to have a double-barrelled name, calling yourself after both your mother and your father. I should know I’ve christened enough of them in this very church.”
“Oh, so that’s alright then.”
“My friend’s still call me Tony.”
“Well, Tony, may I call you Tony, Anthony? You won’t have many of those left, I suspect, when this comes out. They won’t be too impressed and they may not be as understanding as me and Grandad here.”
With a gloating sneer he laughed out loud, to Tony the sound was chilling.
“I’ve been alone so long now I hardly know what the truth is any more. So many stories, so many tales told to myself and others. Where does it all leave me?”
Tony wasn’t sure if they could see he was crying or not. His eyes were drenched and heavy, but tears were not flowing, his skin hot and damp. The heat issuing from his body, trapped by his heavy clothing, was a palpable ordeal. It was stifling. He shifted uneasily, loosened his dog-collar and pumped his shirt like a bellows drawing cool air over his chest. There was momentary relief, nothing more, a fleeting distraction from his pain. All he could hope for was that his final question would yield an answer that would help him, maybe even excuse him. He paused and clutched his aching head. He silently prayed – with a fervour unfamiliar to him during the myriad services over an eternity of Wednesdays and Sundays that he had appealed to his congregation to have faith – that this was the case, that he would be delivered a last-minute reprieve. Pardoned. His torment was physical – his soul, brittle at the best of times, appeared incompatible with his body, a transplant rejected. Quaking, he turned to face his accusers. They had not moved.
“Albert, why were you going to tell the authorities about our tunnel? Why were you going to rat on us?”
Tony paused, expecting a reaction but there was none.
“That’s why we did it. That’s why we gave you a beating. We had to keep you quiet. How could you? We were all in the same boat after all, all members of the Party, for God’s sake. Why? We could have come to some arrangement. We could have cut you in, if that was what you wanted. That wouldn’t have been a problem. Why, just tell me why?”
His voice was high-pitched, close to hysterical. He wanted to shake the crippled man sitting in front of him, force him to shoulder some of the blame for what happened. He wanted him to admit that it had been his foolishness, his arrogance that had brought them to this pass.
“Why?” he asked despairingly.
Peter looked on open-mouthed, incredulous. Albert stirred in his wheelchair, his expression, which had flickered from worried concern to blank detachment while Tony had been talking, now broke into a distorted grimace, uneven yellowing teeth bared between cracked bloodless lips, his lined brow relaxed and almost clear, his watery eyes focused intently on Tony’s face. Surprised and embarrassed, Tony glanced away only to be drawn back by Albert’s startling laugh. Mute and helpless until now the sound he made was one of such crazed amusement and volume that Tony winced. He smiled feebly, eager to understand the joke, then quickly became serious. He looked at Peter, but he was also laughing. The Saxon walls and high ceilings of the nave echoed with these human sounds, amplifying their pitch until they rang in the vicar’s ears like the tolling of an executioner’s bell. Everything he had ever achieved in this holy building of his was, as of now, worse than nothing – the joyous sermons he crafted each week, at christenings, weddings, Christmastime, the prayers he had offered up, the hymns he had sung, the uplifting words at Easter, at funerals – they were all one big lie. He looked on in horror listening.
Peter’s voice was calm and still when the answer to Tony’s question finally came.
“The tunnel, your tunnel? That was nothing at all to do with it. Grandad knew nothing about that.”
His grandfather, alert and attentive, nodded his head in agreement.
“You mentioning it now is the first time we’ve heard about any tunnel. No, what happened was Grandad stumbled upon your friend Eric in bed with a young Italian man, what was his name, Paulo. Nothing more, nothing less than that. Grandad swears he was never going to breathe a word to anyone about it. He says he told Eric that at the time and I believe him.”
Chapter 11
BOO TO A GOOSE
David glanced behind him, feeling nervous for the first time since he’d entered the house, but nothing had materially altered. The orange glow of a resplendent sunset hung over the garden, the kitchen doors were open, as he had left them, and the sound of the television buzzed above his head. A large stripped pine table was strewn with the remnants of a meal and the sink was full of dirty pans. David walked over and stared at the dishes.
“Bloody typical,” he thought, “they’ll be leaving all this for the au-pair to wash up, no doubt.”
He drained a half-full glass of red wine that was sitting on the draining board and nodded with satisfaction. Then he froze, a look of panic crossing his face, as he remembered where he was.
“Fingerprints, fucking fingerprints.”
Calmly he wiped the glass clean with his handkerchief, replaced it carefully and then turned and surveyed the kitchen.
“Just the door handle,” he muttered, “that’s all.”
He took care as he approached the back door to check that no one was passing along the railway embankment. All was clear and he quickly rubbed the handle to a bright shine.
“Dead give-away or what?”
He smiled. It was warm in the kitchen, he noticed a battered green Aga in the corner that was radiating heat into the room. Its presence was reassuring for David, so much was conforming to his preconceptions about the Beckinsale’s lifestyle that it boosted his confidence. He felt to be on familiar territory. Taking a deep breath he slipped his suit jacket over the back of a Shaker-style wooden chair, took off his tie and watch and placed them in one of the pockets. He then rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. Handkerchief in hand he carefully inspected the kitchen knives in a polished wooden block that was standing on one of the black granite work surfaces, doubling up as a book-end for a long line of cookery
books, before picking one – an eight-inch cook’s knife – that felt comfortable and balanced to hold. David’s thumb scraped satisfyingly across the edge of the stainless steel blade, he sighed and headed through the arch into the corridor.
St Botolph’s church was in darkness when Tony returned. The sky was clear and intensely grey, the graveyard hollows brimmed with mist and the black bulk of the nave loomed ahead of him, its presence familiar, yet now vaguely mocking. He walked slowly but resolutely along the path towards the porch. He was aware of the gravel crunching under his feet and when he stopped to stare at the smattering of stars that were visible overhead he noticed his heavy breathing and the pneumatic beating of his heart. Such feverish exertion was starkly at odds with the scouring cold at his core, a chill too vital to ever again be dispelled by a warm hearth or an intimate embrace. He shivered. His immediate fate lay in the hands of his verger of many years, Raymond Sturgis, a man as old as the century and as worn out. Had he returned and locked up the church after organ practice? He often didn’t bother, being either too trusting of people or too absent-minded, which one, Tony had never been able to ascertain. Over the years the parish had been fortunate that there had been no thefts or vandalism so Tony had never had the heart to challenge the verger about his lack of rigour. This evening he hoped to be grateful for his own acts of benevolence; he had mislaid his church key and had not had time to look for it after Albert Chalmers and his grandson left. They had promised to return, after thinking through their next steps, and had reiterated that he was not to think this was the end of the affair. Tony had not thought that for one minute and had gone to see his solicitor.
A dog fox coughed in the limes close to Emily’s grave. An eerie, plangent sound that made him peer over his shoulder into the gloom. Through the gathering mist he could just make out the glow of the streetlight that feebly illuminated the old covered gate on Church Lane. There were shadows everywhere, manifestations seemingly tangible, the next instant elusive. Beguiled by ephemera, he stumbled.
The air was heavy with wood smoke and the powdery aroma evoked a memory submerged until now beneath a turbid wash of remembering – the cold silvery-white ashes of a freezing morning, the ashes his Grandmother would sweep from the frigid hearth onto a crumpled newspaper as he stood beside her shivering in his dressing gown, the ashes she would take out to spread on her frozen vegetable beds, her footprints darkly tracked in the frosty grass – it was such a long time ago and he had been happy. Those days alone with his Grandmother stood out like islands in a murky race of misplaced commitments and unhappy connections. Though he had long since given up harking back to find anything meaningful or significant in his past. What he had not bargained for, which was a surprise for someone like him who had been a gambler all his life and knew the score, was that when his view of the past achieved some clarity, as it had today, it should be of a landscape he didn’t recognize. Travelling across this terrain as he was now destined to do was uncomfortable, the scenery ugly, the climate foul. There was to be no respite from this expedition that he understood, his route was fixed, his destination immutable. He could take his time though, there were no stewards along this course hurrying him forward. He had a moment to reflect on the time he had wasted waiting for a stroke of fortune that would redirect him, galvanizing his efforts to search for a higher place. He had believed for a while that it was his ordination into the church but that, he now knew, had been an opportunistic detour, not the action of someone with a clear direction. All he had been doing as a vicar was peddling a line, to those who would listen, about gambling everything – your life, fortune and immortal soul – on faith in an unknowable outcome. If challenged, he would have insisted that the Holy Spirit was his only mentor. But honesty had never been his strong suit and he was fooling himself, even after decades as a priest. The bet he had personally made had finally come in. The odds had been struck that afternoon and the scenery had changed revealing his true journey’s end – it had been the most shocking outcome imaginable. The best he could hope for was that the map of the region he had now would be simple to follow on foot.
He steadied himself before moving on.
He reached for the iron handle. It was icy to the touch. He turned it clockwise and heard the clunk of metal on the far side of the heavy wooden door, as he had many times before, felt the heavy iron bar lift and disengage. He pushed. It moved, swinging open. The ancient air rushed over him. Good old Raymond, he thought, you could rely on him. We are all chancers. His fate was sealed.
The stairwell smelled of potpourri – a sickly sweet fragrance that reminded David of his parent’s house, an association that left him unmoved. His father and mother were peripheral to him now. Throughout the recent drama in his life – the revelations about his grandfather and his redundancy – he had never thought to approach them for help, never would have dreamt of it, despite his wife’s constant urging, never asked them what they knew or what they thought. He had resolved only one thing in his mind – an inexorable line of logic – and that was that they must have known everything about his Grandfather. If they knew then why didn’t they tell him? It was a betrayal that was impossible to forgive and he never would, but it was not a surprise. Dad obviously hated his father, he didn’t have a single good word to say about him and he never visited him from one year to the next. The whole affair was dead and buried as far as he was concerned, so dead and buried is how it would stay. His son’s ignorance of the family’s sordid past was no bad thing. It would do nobody any good to reopen that particular can of worms. There was nothing to be discussed.
Silently David moved across the multi-coloured tiles of the basement passage to the foot of the stairs. The television was louder now. Deliberately, he climbed one step at a time up the steep staircase past a wall crowded with a series of framed theatre posters. A large potted Swiss cheese plant sat in the corner of the small landing and as he turned he glanced out into the garden through the high window. He could clearly see the tall pine tree and guessed where in the mass of vegetation that obscured the bottom of its trunk he had sat observing and plotting. It seemed an age away.
The front door of the house was ahead of him, more or less at eye level, it was old, ill-fitting and daylight streamed through a large gap at the bottom. A shadow appeared, then a pair of black shoes, causing a momentary panic, before a local newspaper crashed noisily through the letterbox and thudded onto the mat. The feet disappeared. Nothing stirred in the living room. David, his heart thumping, climbed the last few stairs into the hall. The door to the living room was open and tinted images danced and flickered across its highly varnished surface. Peering through the crack between the door and the jamb David saw his quarry slumped in a large off-yellow armchair, a glass of red wine teetering precariously in one hand. He was bare-footed and wearing black jeans and a dark blue “Boston Red Sox” T-shirt. Most important of all, he appeared to be asleep.
It was pitch dark in the church. A black intensity he had known once before in a tunnel in a distant time and remote place. It wasn’t simply the loss of vision, the blinding, but the emptiness that made these moments unique, binding them together across the years. Humanity had been banished and Tony was alone. The old church door thudded shut behind him. He stood for a moment. Silence, a solid presence, weighed him down. St Botolph, the patron saint of wayfarers – they had only just celebrated his feast day – had deserted him but he ceased to care. His journey was almost over. He sank to his knees. Reaching out with his hands.
“It’s here somewhere,” he whispered.
The small brass handle felt surprisingly warm to the touch, he reached for the key hanging down the back of the cabinet, felt the thick dust, repellent to his searching fingertips, and the courseness of the string. The key slid easily into the lock, but refused to turn – back and forth – it required careful positioning before it would yield. Inside was the greasy bulk of a candle and, sitting on the shelf below, a full box of matche
s. His life proceeded in finite stages until the flowering of a flickering intimate light – molten wax hissing onto the stone flags – shut out the rest of the world more completely than the darkness had done, obliterating time.
He felt the smooth knife handle in his right hand and looked down at the dull sharp-pointed blade. Hiding the weapon behind his back he stepped out into the room. Larry Beckinsale didn’t stir. A high corniced ceiling, wide sash-windows, off-white walls and varnished floorboards filled the space with a vacant airiness that David found pleasing. He admired the ornate grey marble fireplace, the tasteful abstract prints – or maybe they were originals, he wasn’t sure – that dotted the walls, the fine Persian rug, the towering shelves of books, the bank of black hi-fi equipment. Suddenly edgily aware he turned. Larry Beckinsale’s eyes were open.
He made his way cautiously towards the belfry, holding the candle ahead of him. The flame quivered, then almost died in the maelstrom of chill drafts whipping around the nave, before flaring back into fiery life when he shielded the guttering wick with his hand. Crazed shadows dipped around the stone pillars, skimmed across the wooden arches of the high vaulted ceiling, flitted past Tony and tripped out along the backs of pews before diffusing in the gloom. Eyes, red, blue and green blinked at him as he glided past the stained glass windows and their wrenching parables of saints and sinners. He had always enjoyed conducting the candlelit services, the coming together, the sense of wellbeing, the community feeling of the procession. This passage however was different, for the first time in his church Tony felt abandoned. He was frightened, sensing again the knot in his stomach, the muscular tightening of his frame, the gut terror, familiar from his street-fighting days. This was a mockery of parades past, present and future. This was hell on earth.
