Theodora had refused Geoffrey’s offer to accompany her home. He’d wanted to look in on the youth club down in the old drill hall next to the primary school. There was no point in hanging about. The sudden plunge into darkness had made further discussion impossible as far as the members of Lance Springer’s meeting were concerned. The atmosphere was heavy with suspicion, as dense as the smell from the sewage works which swept down the river when the wind was in the west. But there was nothing, as far as she could see, that she could do about it.
‘How about supper, ten-fifteen?’ Geoffrey had flung over his shoulder before he’d sprinted off. It was eight-forty. She had time to walk back to the vicarage.
She set off through the parish, down the long high street. At this end the tall Edwardian houses had basements and steep steps up to front doors, where panels of a dozen names beside as many bells suggested full occupation of the premises. The skips parked permanently in the front gardens overflowed with interesting materials and functioned, Theodora knew, as a sort of informal swap-shop: a nice bit of hardboard would go out and a couple of discarded chairs would go in. It struck her as an admirable system.
Further down the street, the solid detached houses gave way to earlier, more decayed Victorian terraces of shops. Many of these were still open. They were family businesses, and closed only when their owners went to bed. Entering them was like entering someone’s front room. The smell of un-English food drifted out from back kitchens. Dark-skinned Asian children played games on the shop floor, clamouring in unknown tongues. The chippy was Chinese. Only the Prince of Orange was in indigenous hands, run with even-handed brutality by an ex-SAS man and his lady.
Theodora loved it deeply. It had been part of her apprenticeship in learning how to live in this unfamiliar society to find out who counted, who could do what, what the networks were. ‘Map your culture,’ her pastoral studies tutor at theological college had advised. And she had. She had observed, reflected, prayed and chosen her priorities.
The youth club was mainly boys, so she left that to Geoffrey. The old people’s coven was mainly women, so she took it on. They tossed each other for the hospital and Geoffrey won, so she took the prison. It introduced her to the female network which was different from the male. It was the wives and mothers who suffered when the men had no work or went to prison – though sometimes their incarceration was a relief. Once they knew and trusted her, the wives, sisters and daughters asked the small favours of the postman from her. There was no quantifiable reward in this. These people were not Christian worshippers. They would not come to church, seek instruction or enter the Christian life. But she knew that both she and Geoffrey were increasingly acceptable in a large number of households. They were seen as part of what English society had to offer: like compulsory schooling and free health care, they were taken for part of the deal. Indeed, since they lived and dressed differently from other people, because they were clearly in their daily habits religious, they were more easily understood and accepted by the immigrant population than other public bodies like the social services, whose ministrations were seen as intrusive.
Where, Theodora wondered, as she tramped past the video shops and the pornography parlours, where in this mixed brew had the Kostas boy’s death come from? She circled the patch and learned it street by street, shop by shop, family by family, assimilating it as best she could. The houses were easy. But the tower blocks which loomed behind them were intractable. Traffic swirled about them, cutting them off from casual pedestrian access. Getting to one was like planning a campaign. Their ugliness seemed to kill ordinary human affections. It was in one of these, Theodora knew, that the Kostas family lived. The tower blocks were what had replaced the terraces which bombs of the Second World War had destroyed. The area had flourished between the wars and until the fifties. Then the indigenous population had grown richer. In the sixties and seventies the sons and daughters had moved out to Sidcup, leaving behind the old, the feckless, or the miserably unfortunate. Then the immigrant population had flowed in and created a new life.
It wasn’t peaceful. Energy, on some nights and in some areas, could become explosive. Theodora was surprised to find how like Africa it was; how climate played a part in the eruption of violence. Hot nights brought it on; rain stopped play. Violence started with noise, ear splitting as a pub door swung open; then there would be the sound of breaking glass, women screaming, an explosion of motorbikes or car engines racing, then the pounding of feet. Someone would start running, others joined in; it was impossible to tell whether it was a race or a hunt. Were they running from something or towards it? Sometimes, it seemed to Theodora, they were running to find something, wanting anything to fill and occupy their terrifying, unfocused energy. She saw how men loved it, loved the exhilaration of forming the gang and running together, the bonding coming in the running. At first when these affrays were just starting, often there wasn’t even hatred present. But in the end, of course, hatred always came. They would create it, manufacture it, hurling their insults like weapons up and down streets until the running and shouting turned into real fighting. There was nothing to be done about such surges. They would often stop and peter out as quickly as they had formed. But it was from this set of ingredients that the Kostas boy’s death had come. Seen thus it wasn’t so extraordinary, wasn’t even so appalling. Paul Kostas and his brother had by all accounts contributed their share.
Was it her business, Theodora wondered as she turned from the high street into the narrow road which led first to the church of St Sylvester and then ended in steps down to the river? She recalled Geoffrey’s sister, Barbara Brighouse, making a flying visit to the parish soon after she was instituted as deacon. ‘Surely this is a terribly inefficient way of catering for social needs,’ Miss Brighouse had said, surveying with her competent eye the building works at the church. ‘What is really needed is enough money in the social services budget, plus enough jobs to give people some self-respect. Most of these problems,’ she waved her hand towards the parish, ‘ninety per cent of these problems would disappear overnight.’
‘What about the other ten per cent?’ Theodora had asked out of curiosity.
‘Oh well, I suppose you have to allow a margin for sheer human perversity: wickedness, if you like.’
Theodora was amused. ‘Only ten per cent wickedness, ninety per cent misfortune which can be solved by money?’
Barbara Brighouse was a straightforward old-fashioned liberal. She liked efficiency, a good committee, and sensible use of resources. She found little of that in the Anglican Church as far as she could see. She simply could not understand Geoffrey, her favourite brother, joining such a ramshackle body when they had been so close, shared all the important values as children. Three years older than Geoffrey, she had thought she’d taught him better. She turned to Theodora for explanation, for reassurance almost. ‘Surely there is no more ineffective way of stopping crime and violence than this. You scarcely touch the surface. Tiny bandages on massive wounds.’
Barbara was so intelligent that Theodora wondered for a moment if she were being ironical. ‘But we don’t,’ she answered. ‘We aren’t here to imitate the social services. It’s not that sort of result the Church is looking for. If we start quantifying we’re lost. Christianity, any good religion for that matter, offers an alternative reality. Not a patching up of this one. We’re here to show people what God is like, where He can be found, what a life lived from and towards Him should, can be. It’s another dimension, not a matter of league tables.’
Miss Brighouse had snorted. Really, the woman’s a prig, she thought privately. ‘Well, it hasn’t made much inroads into the world’s needs as far as I can see. Frankly I think Geoffrey is wasting his not inconsiderable talents.’ She had paused. ‘And you too, my dear.’
‘I couldn’t be happier,’ Theodora had answered.
And it was true, she thought as she rounded the corner and came up against the silhouette of the church outlined against the Lond
on sky which was never entirely dark. ‘I couldn’t be happier.’ Then she thought of Mrs Stephanopoulos whom she knew, and Mrs Kostas whom she did not. Someone, somewhere, was thrusting their way through the city, and that someone had killed a boy. Someone, somewhere, was holding captive a girl. And her mind returned again to that odd connection: the Kostases’ firm’s card on the silver salver at the foot of the statue of the Virgin in the Stephanopouloses’ house in Hampstead.
On an impulse, Theodora turned not towards the vicarage and her flat, but towards the ugly brick Victorian house lurking behind the chestnut trees, the Foundation of St Sylvester.
Gilbert Racy turned his beautiful, ascetic profile towards Theodora, whom he disliked. It was not a personal dislike. He disliked most women, but it in no way impaired, he liked to think, his priestly correctness or his effectiveness. He knew their value, and if they could be used to contribute to the quality of the work of the Foundation, he’d use them. St Sylvester’s offered a genuine ministry of retreat and healing to those who were sick in mind. Clergy worn down by the intractable requirements of parish life, laymen driven mad by their own and the world’s wickedness were catered for. Both Racy’s group work and his individual counselling were well organized and, given his many worldly contacts, well resourced. Papers in the journals were not ashamed to quote his findings. He was subterraneanly influential.
Theodora grasped his small single malt with pleasure. She was not sure that she altogether trusted Gilbert. She detected, she thought, a vision which she shared: that people can’t be healed but can be put in the way of healing themselves. She thought he knew, too, the difference between healing and cure. He had a perspective which she valued. Nevertheless, he liked power, being able to turn people this way and that, knowing what others did not know. So now she prepared to address herself to him with caution.
‘It was in this very room,’ Gilbert started out before she could frame her own beginning, ‘that Newcome finished Cities of Men, City of God in 1879.’
‘Really,’ murmured Theodora, who had other matters on her mind and, in any case, knew this already. She’d started to investigate the archive. At some point in the future she intended to publish on the life of Thomas Henry Newcome. She thought of Jessica Stephanopoulos. ‘I wonder if you could—’ she began.
‘Of course,’ Racy was pressing on in that precise diction, the stress on the first word in a phrase or sentence, which enabled him to be picked out across many a crowded room, ‘he knew our problems.’
‘Our?’
‘The problems of our cities. Listen.’
He reached for the leather volume on his table, took out the floppy
leather bookmark which had “The Holy Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham” etched on it in peeling gilt letters, and began to read. ‘“Is any so purblind that he cannot comprehend that the lives lived by the spiritually poor in our great cities draw each one of us, howsoever endowed with worldly riches, towards a common mire? Is it so hidden from our intelligence that if our souls be not properly arrayed, it matters not whether we go in silk and broadcloth or in the veriest tatters?”’
‘You see,’ Gilbert leaned forward with intellectual passion, ‘Newcome can imagine spiritual poverty as afflicting the materially rich quite as much as the poor. Nor does he credit the poor with virtues denied to the rich. He’s impartial. In his argument, both rich and poor are impoverished. That’s really rather rare in Victorian thought. The temptation to make the rich the baddies and the poor the innocent, or to make the poor vicious, and riches the reward of virtue, is almost always succumbed to. But he’s discerning enough to see that it is the spiritual poverty of both rich and poor which causes the material poverty of the poor.’
Theodora had enjoyed the Latinate cadences of Newcome’s prose; of his theology she was less sure. ‘So what was his remedy?’
Gilbert chewed his whisky. ‘He was ahead of his time there too. Whilst his contemporaries were prattling about moral effort and the will,’ Gilbert articulated his contempt for such notions, ‘he wanted practices, techniques, artefacts, architecture, a physical setting, to create a tangible Christian culture, to remind us of religious truths and constantly prompt us towards a less destructive, self-destructive life.’
‘Hence his church-building activities. Angelic voices. Reminders.’
‘Open to rich and poor alike, costing nothing, or only the price of the artefact. Cheaper than television and the advertising which pollute our visual environment and seek to mould our habits and dictate our values,’ Racy said, complacently folding his hands over his flat cassocked stomach.
He owned, Theodora realised, very little. He lived as simply as possible. The whisky would undoubtedly have been a present. Whatever reservations she had about Racy, he at least lived the life he preached. Did all St Sylvester’s priests do so?
‘If we’re thinking of visual reminders of the angelic, what do you know about icons?’
‘A mistake to think of them as art.They are the products of a community, a believing community, not the lone inspiration of unrooted individual egos. It is noticeable that our own society seems unable to produce adequate or moving works of religious art. Perhaps Pugin was right: you remember. “It is the devotion, majesty and repose of Christian art for which we are contending.” Both he and Ruskin knew that religious art can’t come out of an unbelieving society.’
On any other night, Theodora would have been happy to follow him down his path. Tonight, however, weighed down by the miserable meeting with Springer and Troutbeck, never able to forget Stella Stephanopoulos’s haggard face, she wanted precision, focus and, in the end, enlightenment.
‘What do you know of the Greek community?’
‘The Kostases?’ Racy’s tone was neutral. How much did he know, how much had he heard, Theodora wondered.
‘Cypriot Greeks are close knit. They have a sense of history second only to the Irish. And of course Greek Orthodoxy is tenacious as an interpretation of the Christian faith. It grips and holds the imagination. Hence its ability to produce its icons.’
‘There was an icon on Jessica’s dressing table.’
‘The Stephanopoulos girl? Is there any news of her?’
Theodora was startled. The press had been silent; Geoffrey was as discreet as any priest who heard confession.‘How on earth do you know?’ she asked.
Gilbert looked complacent. ‘I have an acquaintance with one of your St Veep’s governors. Ronnie Holdall, he used to be bishop of Bow St Aelfric. Retired a bit before his time when his dean got his throat cut. You may remember.’
Theodora did not care to be reminded. She wrenched the conversation once again back to what she was seeking.‘If you used icons in meditation, as a religious practice, would you need to be taught how to do so?’
‘Oh yes, absolutely.’ Gilbert had no hesitation, he spoke with the authority of a priest who knew what religious practices demanded. ‘Like all religious techniques. If you try to invent the wheel without a teacher you’ll come off the rails. That’s the point of the church, of course, to keep the techniques pure, the tradition intact. Obviously, I wouldn’t deny that such traditions can become corrupted. There’s a fourteenth-century manuscript, the Solovki manuscript, which has a commentary on Marian icons which depicts the Virgin’s power as a sort of rain goddess. It was her prerogative to send down lightning, frost and earthquakes on the impious unless the prayers of the faithful changed her anger to mercy.’
‘Less angelic, more demonic,’ Theodora said.
‘Weather is a great chastener,’ said Gilbert with satisfaction.‘Personally I always like those icons where Mary is shown clasping a ladder and holding a mountain in her hand.’ He glanced inquiringly at Theodora.
‘Symbols of the links between heaven and earth?’Theodora suggested.
Gilbert nodded. Theodora perceived she had passed some sort of test. Her thoughts went back to Jessica’s bedroom.‘Gilbert, would a community, would anyone feel so strongly about an icon,
its power and significance that they might kill or kidnap to get hold of one?’
‘What had you in mind?’ Gilbert suddenly turned his pale eye upon her.
‘Oh, nothing. Just that I wondered if there was a connection between Jessica’s icon and her kidnapping.’
‘Why should there be? She wasn’t carrying one around with her, was she?’
‘Not so far as I know. It’s just that a friend of hers, Clarissa Bennet, made a remark about Jessica being keen on religious art.’
‘They’re not straight, you know, the Stephanopoulos family.’
‘I think I gathered that from what Mrs Stephanopoulos told me. What do you know about them?’ Theodora was never surprised at who Racy knew. His network was catholic.
‘The grandfather collaborated with the Nazis to get out of prison camp. It wasn’t clear what he gave in order to get his favour, but it made him much hated by some of his own countrymen.’
Theodora was glad to have her own inferences from Mrs Stephanopoulos’s words confirmed. ‘Would that provide a motive for the kidnap of his granddaughter?’
‘It might. It just might.’
‘I think,’ said Theodora as she rose to go, ‘I ought to find out more about icons.’
‘Try Father Kallistos at the Church of the Resurrection. It’s just opposite your school,’ was Gilbert’s parting shot.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Day School
‘Almighty God,’ said Dame Alicia curtly, ‘give us strength to succeed in our work today; help us to keep our minds on our final achievements. Make us work hard,’ she added as an afterthought, lest the Almighty might fail to take her meaning.
Doris King analysed the stylistic infelicities. To the side of the first mistress, Barbara Brighouse, agnostic as she was, rocked to and fro in her staff chair in a paroxysm of embarrassment, groaning to herself under her breath. Down amongst the pupils ranks, the Hapgood profiles elevated into well-bred disbelief like a couple of horses rearing their heads over hedges. They kept a book, a collection of Dame Alicia’s failures of tone: it was known in their circle as the FT Index.
Holy Terrors Page 9
