Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death

by James Runcie

  He looked up at the darkened stained glass. He had learned more about love in the past few weeks than he had known in years. He had seen some of its characteristics: how it could be passionate, jealous, tolerant, forgiving and long-lasting. He had seen it disappear, and he had seen it turn into hatred. It was the most unpredictable and chameleon of emotions, sometimes sudden and unstable, able to flare up and die down; at other times loyal and constant, the pilot flame of a life.

  Sidney touched his hands together in prayer. Then he gave himself up into silence. ‘How we love determines how we live,’ he thought.

  A Question of Trust

  It was the afternoon of Thursday 31 December 1953, and a light snow that refused to settle drifted across the towns and fields of Hertfordshire. Sidney was tired, but contented, after the exertions of Christmas and was on the train to London. He had seen the festival season through with a careful balance of geniality and theology and he was looking forward to a few days off with his family and friends.

  As the train sped towards the capital, Sidney looked out of the window on to the backs of small, suburban houses and new garden cities; a post-war landscape full of industry, promise and concrete. It was a world away from the village in which he lived. He was almost the countryman now, a provincial outsider who had become a stranger in the city of his birth.

  He started to think about the question of belonging and identity: how much a person was defined by geography, and how much by upbringing, education, profession, faith and choice of friends.

  ‘How much can a person change in a life?’ he wondered.

  It was an idea at the heart of Christianity, and yet many people retained their essential nature throughout their lives. He certainly didn’t expect too radical a departure in the behaviour of the friends he was due to meet that evening.

  As the train pulled in to Kings Cross, Sidney was determined to remain cheerful in the year ahead. He believed that the secret of happiness was to concentrate on things outside oneself. Introspection and self-awareness were the enemies of contentment, and if he could preach a sermon about the benefits of selflessness, and believe in it without sounding too pious, then he would endeavour to do so that very Sunday.

  He put on his trilby, gathered his third umbrella of the year – he had left the previous two on earlier journeys – and alighted in search of a bus that would take him to the party in St John’s Wood.

  His New Year’s Eve dinner was to be hosted by his old friend Nigel Thompson. Educated at Eton and Magdalene College, Cambridge, Nigel had been tipped as a future Prime Minister while still at university and had become Chairman of the Young Conservatives straight after the war. Having been elected as the Member of Parliament for St Marylebone in the 1951 General Election, he began his rise to power as PPS to Sir Anthony Eden (a man his father had known from the King’s Rifle Corps), and now worked as Joint Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Sidney was therefore looking forward to a few meaty conversations about Britain’s role on the international stage with one of the most promising MPs in the country.

  His wife, Juliette, had been the Zuleika Dobson of their generation, possessing a porcelain complexion, Titianesque hair and a willowy beauty that her dream-like manner could only enhance. Sidney had worried at their wedding whether she had the stamina necessary to be the wife of an MP but cast such masculine thoughts aside as the first intimations of jealousy.

  Their home was a nineteenth-century terraced house to the north of Regent’s Park. It had previously been the type of establishment in which rich Victorian men had kept their decorative mistresses. Sidney considered this rather appropriate as Juliette Thompson certainly had a whiff of the Pre-Raphaelite about her. Her beauty was both doomed and untouchable: unless, of course, you were Nigel Thompson MP.

  Sidney got off the bus at the stop for Lord’s Cricket Ground and made his way towards Cavendish Avenue. He was not an admirer of London in winter, with its wet streets, fetid air and gathering smog, but he recognised that this was where his family and friends earned their living and that if he wanted to enjoy the congeniality of their homes and the warmth of their fireplaces then he had to put up with any inconvenience in getting to them.

  At least, Sidney remembered, his sister Jennifer would be at the dinner. His younger sibling had a naturally good-natured manner, with a rounder face than the rest of the family, eager brown eyes and a bob cut that framed her face and gave the impression, Sidney thought, of a circle of friendliness. She was always glad to see her brother; and he felt his heart lift every time she came into the room.

  Traditionally, Jennifer was considered the most responsible member of the family but on this particular evening she was to bring a rather shady new boyfriend to the dinner: Johnny Johnson.

  She had briefed her brother about him during the family telephone call on Christmas Day, and she had high hopes that Sidney would approve of him: not least because he and his father ran a jazz club. He was ‘a breath of fresh air’, and he did, apparently, ‘a million and one amazing things’. Sidney only hoped that his sister was not going to become besotted too soon. The family trait of thinking the best of people had resulted in the past in her having rather too fanciful expectations about the ability of men to make lasting commitments, and this had, inevitably, led to disappointment.

  They were to be joined by Jennifer’s best friend and flatmate, Amanda Kendall, who had just begun her career as a junior curator at London’s National Gallery.

  When Sidney had first met Amanda, soon after her twenty-first birthday, he had been rather smitten. She was the tall and vivacious daughter of a wealthy diplomat who had once been a colleague of his grandfather. Unlike Juliette Thompson, she was not what a fashion magazine would refer to as an ‘English rose’, being dark and commanding and full of opinion. But she had presence, and even though her own mother had described her nose as ‘disappointingly Roman’, dinner parties throughout London were grateful for her conversational sparkle. It was universally considered that, although she might cause trouble with her outspoken views, Amanda could liven up any party and would be a good catch for any man who was prepared to take her on. Sidney had nurtured a faint hope that one day he might be that man, but as soon as he had decided to become a clergyman, that aspiration had bitten the dust. It would have been ludicrous for a well-connected debutante, in pursuit of the most eligible bachelor in town, to marry a vicar.

  Now, after several years of careful research, Amanda appeared to have got her man. On one of her recent trips to assess the potential death duty on a series of paintings in a Wiltshire stately home, she had met the allegedly charming, undoubtedly wealthy, extraordinarily good-looking and unfortunately ill-educated Guy Hopkins. This was the man to whom she was to be engaged, perhaps even, it had been suggested, that very night.

  Sidney’s official companion at dinner was the renowned socialite Daphne Young, a terrifyingly thin woman who was famed both for her sharp intelligence and for the number of marriage proposals she had turned down. Consequently, he rather dreaded the disappointment that even someone so well mannered would be unable to conceal on discovering that her dining companion that evening was going to be a clergyman.

  At least the other two guests at the dinner were relatively jovial: Mark Dowland, a publisher who was delightfully indiscreet about his authors, and his small and spiky wife Mary, a zoologist with piercing blue eyes and the sharpest of tongues. The softest thing about her, her husband had once remarked, was her teeth.

  Sidney had never been that keen on New Year’s Eve. It was, perhaps, the thought of yet another year passing, a reminder of all the time that he had frittered away in the previous twelve months and the secular conviviality so soon after Christmas. He sometimes wondered what it might be like to take to his bed until it was over, and remembered a fellow priest who, when he felt the horrors approaching, would hole up in the grimmest boarding house in the most depressing town he could find, in order to plumb the slough of despond. T
he idea was, that after hitting rock bottom, he would emerge into a world in which anything would seem better than his most recent experience. The town his friend had chosen to confront every demon known to man, Sidney remembered, was Ipswich. It seemed an odd choice.

  Cocktails were served in the drawing room on the first floor where Mark Dowland began to recite from the work of John Betjeman, a promising new poet:

  ‘Phone for the fish-knives Norman

  As Cook is a little unnerved . . .’

  The other guests began to laugh at the performance but Sidney could not join in. He was already disconcerted by the fearful realisation that the party might end in charades; an activity which he always dreaded since his failure, the last time he had been at the Thompsons, to mime the five syllables of the Dickens novel Martin Chuzzlewit.

  He drank a first glass of Sauvignon Blanc to stiffen his sinews before facing the prospect of Amanda’s potential engagement and the introduction to his sister’s new inamorato.

  Johnny Johnson proved to be a dark, good-looking man, and he was dressed in an extremely well-cut, thin black suit that Sidney rather admired. He began with a question. ‘All right?’

  ‘I think I am,’ Sidney replied.

  ‘Jennifer’s told me a lot about you.’

  ‘Nothing too damaging, I hope.’

  ‘Not at all, Sidney. Although I did find it quite a turn up for the book when she told me her brother was a vicar. I thought you’d be a teacher or a doctor.’

  ‘I think that was what was expected of me.’

  ‘I don’t go to church very much, Sidney, if I’m honest. It makes me feel like I’ve done something wrong.’

  ‘That may be the intention.’

  ‘You need to liven those services up a bit,’ Johnny continued. ‘Literally. You could have Sunday evenings as jazz nights. After you’ve done all the serious stuff.’

  Sidney brightened. He had always wanted to attract more people to his church services and stem the departure of teenagers from protracted ceremonies that still felt Victorian. Sometimes he thought that the church had hardly advanced since the days of Trollope. ‘That’s not a bad idea,’ he replied.

  ‘I could help if you like; put you in touch with some people to get you started?’

  ‘That would be splendid.’

  Mary Dowland moved over to join them. ‘You’re not seriously thinking of having jazz in church, are you?’

  ‘Why not?’ Sidney replied.

  ‘Well, you can never tell if the notes are being played in the right order.’

  ‘That’s the wonder of jazz, Mary,’ Johnny explained. ‘There’s no right way and there’s no order.’

  ‘Don’t people get very lost?’

  ‘You can’t get lost if you’ve got rhythm, Mary.’

  Sidney was amused by Johnny Johnson’s copious use of other people’s Christian names. He admired his directness.

  Edna, the Thompsons’ maid, arrived with a further tray of drinks, offering refills, which Johnny refused.

  ‘You’re not having a cocktail?’ Sidney asked.

  ‘I don’t drink alcohol, Sidney.’

  ‘How restrained,’ Mrs Dowland noted.

  ‘I like to keep my wits about me, Mary.’

  ‘Shall we go through?’ Juliette Thompson asked, as she stood up and smoothed her hair. She was dressed in a sleeveless gown that flared out from her thin waist and Sidney noticed Guy Hopkins giving her the once over. He wished Amanda’s prospective partner could have been less obvious.

  The dining room was decorated in the Georgian style, with walls painted in smoking-room red, an ornate plastered ceiling and an egg and dart cornice. A narrow sideboard held two Chinese vases and a canteen of silver cutlery.

  ‘I presume there are placements?’ Daphne Young asked, turning to her host. Her halter-necked and backless dress only drew attention to her almost skeletal frame. ‘I do expect to be seated to your right.’

  ‘Then your expectations have been fulfilled,’ Nigel Thompson replied.

  Sidney dreaded the humiliation of this moment. At many a dinner party he was placed next to the ‘difficult relation’: the cousin with a slight lack, the daughter recovering from a broken engagement, the son who had lost everything in a casino and who had come home to sort himself out. He knew, for a start, that he was unlikely to be seated anywhere near Amanda Kendall but was surprised and delighted to find himself next to his hostess. He looked at the placements.

  Nigel Thompson MP

  Miss Daphne Young The Hon. Amanda Kendall

  Mr Guy Hopkins Mr Mark Dowland

  Mrs Mary Dowland Miss Jennifer Chambers

  Canon Sidney Chambers Mr Jonathan Johnson

  Mrs Juliette Thompson

  ‘This all looks very congenial,’ he said to his host.

  Nigel Thompson was anxious that everyone should appreciate his reasoning. ‘Guy,’ he called out, ignoring Sidney’s gratitude. ‘I haven’t put you next to Amanda because I am sure you have been seeing quite enough of each other recently. And besides, I rather want her to myself.’

  ‘You can have her on loan,’ Guy called out. ‘Like one of her paintings. I shall need her back at midnight.’

  ‘I am no Cinderella,’ Amanda replied.

  ‘And I am no Ugly Sister,’ Mary Dowland chipped in. ‘Canon Chambers, I believe I am seated next to you?’

  Sidney passed her the plan.

  ‘I see Jennifer and Johnny have been seated next to each other,’ Mary observed. ‘Shouldn’t we swap?’

  ‘But that would mean putting a brother and a sister side by side,’ Juliette explained.

  ‘Of course,’ Mary Dowland stood behind her chair. ‘Not that I have anything against sitting beside you, Canon Chambers . . .’

  Jennifer cut in. ‘Don’t go on about it, otherwise he will think that you do. He’s very sensitive about these matters, my brother. He’s always complaining about how disappointed people look when they discover that they are sitting next to a clergyman.’

  ‘But this is not just any old clergyman,’ Juliette Thompson explained. ‘Sidney is one of the most charming men I know. That’s why he’s sitting next to me.’

  ‘Now, now,’ Nigel announced. ‘You’ll embarrass the man. I presume we can rely on you to say grace, Sidney.’

  ‘Blimey, Jenny,’ said Johnny Johnson under his breath. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve said that.’

  ‘You only have to say “Amen”, darling.’

  Sidney began: ‘Benedic, Domine, nobis et donis tuis, quae de tua largitate sumus sumpturi, et concede ut illis salubriter nutriti, tibi debitum obsequium praestare valeamus, per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.’

  ‘Amen,’ the group affirmed.

  Johnny pulled in his chair. ‘And I wasn’t expecting Latin, Sidney.’

  The meal consisted of French onion soup and then the braces of pheasant that Guy Hopkins had brought as a gift from his Boxing Day shoot. This was accompanied by roast parsnips, carrots, cabbage and game chips; followed by a lemon meringue pie. Nigel Thompson had provided several amicable bottles of Beaujolais. He also promised champagne for the chimes at midnight.

  The conversation drifted aimlessly as the guests discussed the best kind of house party, the merits of a London home over a place in the country, and the right kind of carpet for a dining-room floor. The Thompsons were, apparently, ‘between carpets’ and so the dining-room floor, for the moment, consisted only of the wooden floorboards.

  Sidney was a little disappointed. He had been expecting an advanced level of political and cultural debate. The increasing international escalation over atomic weapons had created the possibility that, for the first time, mankind held the means of its own extermination. Tensions between Eisenhower and Khrushchev were on the rise; and questions remained concerning German rearmament, the rescue of the Atlantic alliance and the building of a new framework for the collective defence of Western Europe. Yet here they all were talking about carpets.

  Sidn
ey was surprised that people took the conversation so seriously but was happy not to have to respond to gambits which presumed that Christmas must be his ‘busiest time of year’. Instead, Mary Dowland was keen to tell him about the prospective arrival of a panda at London Zoo, while Daphne Young informed Sidney that her current paying guest was a clergyman in search of a new challenge who needed a little advice.

  ‘I’m not sure anything I say could be of much benefit.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Daphne replied. ‘Nigel tells me that you are one of the brightest clergymen in the Church of England.’

  ‘I think that is only because he is a friend of mine.’

  ‘He’s a good friend to have. And I imagine Grantchester’s a fine living. Perhaps you need a curate?’

  ‘I have considered it.’

  ‘Then come and meet Leonard. He’s frighteningly intelligent. He’s learning Russian at the moment. God knows why. I fear he thinks me rather flippant.’

  ‘I very much doubt that.’

  ‘It’s true, I’m afraid.’

  Guy Hopkins put his arm around the back of her chair. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t brought someone along, Daphne. Don’t you have a man in tow?’

  Mary Dowland giggled. ‘You normally have several, don’t you? I’m sure you must be in the address book of every eligible bachelor in London.’

  Her husband filled his glass with more red wine. ‘I wonder what happens when they get married. Do you suppose their wives cross you off?’

  ‘It has been known,’ Daphne Young acknowledged, aware that she was being teased. ‘I suppose that these days I am considered rather dangerous. It can sometimes take a man rather a long time to recover.’

  ‘A lifetime, I should imagine,’ said Sidney, generously.

  ‘You are too kind, Canon Chambers.’

  Just before midnight, after the maid and the cook had been allowed to leave for the New Year celebrations at Piccadilly Circus, and as the port began to circle round the table, Guy said that he had a surprise. He stood up and placed a jewellery box in front of Amanda. ‘I think you may be able to guess what this is.’