by James Runcie
‘A certain lady?’
‘It is meant to be confidential.’
‘You have my confidence.’
‘Isabel Livingstone.’
‘I know her, Geordie.’
‘I am aware that you do.’ The inspector placed the dice back in the cup and threw again: five and a six. He smiled at the resumption of his fortune.
‘I saw her only the other week,’ Sidney remembered. ‘She was with my doctor, Michael Robinson. They are planning to marry. Nice couple, and well suited, I would have thought.’ He took a sip of his disappointing tonic water and tried to remember the conversation. ‘They told me that they had decided to wait for the ceremony until after her mother had died.’
‘Don’t you think that is unusual? Most daughters would want their mother at the wedding.’
‘They were planning on Easter . . .’
The inspector rattled his dice. ‘Well, they can have it now if they like . . .’
‘We don’t normally conduct marriages in Lent. But I seem to remember that Mrs Livingstone was opposed to the whole idea of matrimony. Her husband had left when Isabel was an infant. After that she had taken a violent dislike of all men.’
‘He must have been quite a man to have wrought such havoc.’
‘Such a pity, to let resentment fester.’
‘Well, it won’t be festering any more.’
‘And so she has died? I am surprised I have not been informed.’
Inspector Keating was matter-of-fact. ‘And so am I. But there may be a reason for that . . .’
Sidney could see that too many of his opponent’s pieces were in advantageous positions. He was already anticipating a gammon. ‘You hesitate, Inspector . . .’
‘I’m sorry . . .’
‘You hesitate in a manner that alarms me.’
George Keating threw his dice and began bearing off but his heart was no longer in the game. He spoke without looking at his friend. ‘The problem is . . . Sidney . . . that I am not sure that Mrs Livingstone’s death was entirely natural . . .’
‘I was afraid you were going to say that. You mean?’
‘That the lovers might have helped things along? I am afraid I do . . .’
‘But it is the winter, and Mrs Livingstone had been in very poor health for a long time,’ Sidney observed. ‘I would have thought she had a pretty pressing appointment with her Maker.’
‘Well, I’m afraid that’s not what the coroner seems to think. A friend of Mrs Livingstone came to see him. He asked us to take a look and it’s now become a little more complicated.’ The inspector threw a one and a six and began to bear off his checkers. ‘You remember the Dorothea Waddingham case?’
‘The nursing home murderer? You’re not suggesting?’
‘In the Waddingham case they found three grains of morphine in the first body they examined and then a fatal dose in the second. Sometimes, doctors and nurses get carried away and death comes on a bit too easily.’
Sidney threw again even though he knew it was futile. ‘Was Mrs Livingstone wealthy?’
‘Moderately . . . but I would have thought the doctor had a good enough income. It can’t have been for the money.’
‘And why are you telling me this?’ Sidney asked.
The inspector leaned back and put an arm over the back of the chair next to him. ‘When people come to you to be married, you tend to put the couple through their paces beforehand, don’t you?’
‘I give them pastoral advice.’
‘You tell them what marriage is all about; warn them that it’s not all lovey-dovey and that as soon as you have children it’s a different kettle of fish altogether . . . .’
Knowing that Inspector Keating had three children under the age of seven, Sidney recognised that he had to be careful of his reply: ‘Well, I . . .’
‘There’s the money worries, and the job worries and you start to grow old. Then you realise that you’ve married someone with whom you have nothing in common. You have nothing left to say to each other. That’s the kind of thing you tell them, isn’t it?’
‘I wouldn’t put it exactly like that . . .’
‘But that’s the gist?’
‘I do like to make it a bit more optimistic, Geordie. How friendship sometimes matters more than passion. The importance of kindness . . .’
‘Yes, yes, but you know what I’m getting at.’
Sidney could tell that the inspector was impatient for another drink. ‘I think I can guess what you want me to do.’
Keating stood up. ‘I’ll pay even though it’s your round . . .’
‘There’s no need for that . . .’
‘You’re not drinking anyway. All I am asking is that you do a bit of digging. Give them a few tough questions when they come and see you. Ask the girl about her mother. Watch the doctor’s face. I wouldn’t want you marrying a couple of murderers . . .’
‘I don’t think that’s likely . . . they’re a very friendly couple . . .’
Inspector Keating ordered his third pint of the evening. ‘Well, if they’re as nice as you say then we won’t have anything to worry about, will we? Another game?’
The winter of 1954 was relentless. Sidney awoke to fierce frosts on his window sills, the days never lightened and rime hung on the trees all day. When Sidney rose the next morning he felt that he had forgotten something. Then the dread returned. ‘Ah yes,’ he thought, ‘Keating. Another distraction. Another death.’
He put on his dressing gown and looked out of the window. In another life, he thought, he might have been a naturalist. He had been reading how it had always been something of a tradition in the church. Gilbert White, the vicar of Selborne, for example, had noticed how, in winter, the rooks in the lane fell from the trees with their wings frozen together. He examined the different techniques with which the squirrel, the field mouse and the nuthatch ate the hazel nuts he had laid out for them, and discovered that the owls in his neighbourhood hooted in the key of B flat. Perhaps, this winter, Sidney thought, he could even emulate Reverend White. So much of life was about noticing things, he thought. It was about observation. He would try to be a man upon whom nothing was lost.
It was too dangerous to bicycle to the Livingstone home, he decided. Even walking required caution. He put on his Wellington boots, draped his clerical cloak across his shoulders, and set off through the snow. Hector Kirby, the butcher and churchwarden, with a ready catchphrase and a depressed wife, was clearing a path to his shop; Veronica Hodge, an elderly spiritualist who had once told Sidney that she had been ‘mercifully spared the attentions of men’, was making her tentative way to the shops, and Gary Bell, the village mechanic, who had somehow managed to avoid National Service, was jump-starting a tractor.
Sidney passed the frozen meadow, where his parents had met before the war, skating at sixpence an evening, and stopped to watch a group of boys in a snowball fight.
As he walked into town he realised that he had never known Cambridge so still. The buildings looked like illustrations to a nineteenth-century fairy tale. The snow had muffled the once audible cries of the world. It was like grace, he decided, or the love of God, coming down silently and unexpectedly in the night.
A slip and a very near fall awoke him from his musing. Perhaps he should daydream less, Sidney thought, as he walked towards a small terraced house in Chedworth Street. Not everything in life could be considered material for a sermon, he told himself, and snow might cover sin just as it could conceal suffering.
He rang the doorbell. As he waited, he remembered Isabel Livingstone as a small, shapely woman with eager brown eyes. Her short hair had begun to grey, perhaps under the pressure of caring for her mother for so long, and she dressed in practical clothes: a white blouse, a green cardigan, a tartan skirt. It was a uniform that never appeared to change and it was hard to tell what age she might be: forty perhaps? Her late-flowering love gave Sidney a quiet hope of his own. After all, if Isabel Livingstone at forty could entrance a d
octor might not he have a similar opportunity one day? He remembered the unexpected thrill he had felt when Amanda Kendall had kissed him goodbye at the station and the calm he had felt when he had sat with Hildegard Staunton. How comfortable their silences had been. He really should write to her again, he thought.
Dr Robinson opened the door. He expressed surprise at Sidney’s visit. ‘I thought we were due to see you at the end of the week?’
‘I was passing and thought that I would call in,’ Sidney replied, ‘since it seems that we now have more than a wedding to discuss.’
‘Indeed. Isabel is in the kitchen. I was just leaving . . .’
‘I came to offer my condolences; and also to say that the church is, of course, at your disposal should you wish to hold the funeral there.’
‘Isabel’s mother was not what you might call a churchgoer, Canon Chambers. I am afraid she put herself down for a cremation with the Co-op.’
Isabel Livingstone emerged from the kitchen. She appeared flustered. Sidney apologised for his intrusion.
‘I’m so sorry we hadn’t got round to telling you, Canon Chambers,’ Isabel apologised. ‘But there has been such a lot to do. I thought that some day we would be planning a wedding but I suppose I always knew that we would have a funeral service to sort out first.’
‘I am doubly sorry,’ said Sidney, ‘both for your loss and for the unfortunate proximity of events.’
‘We did expect it though, didn’t we, darling?’ The doctor put his arm around Isabel’s shoulder and she smiled up at him.
Sidney thought that they looked good together. ‘I know you move between birth and sickness as much as I do, Dr Robinson . . .’
Isabel broke free. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’
‘It makes you appreciate the unexpected pleasures of daily life,’ the doctor continued. ‘Every time I wake up I try to be thankful that I have spent the night safely, and I try to look at everything as if I am seeing it for the first time; not that I want to philosophise. Come in, sit down . . .’
‘I’m sure you’ve calls to make. Don’t let me keep you . . .’
‘They can wait. Isabel needs me, I find. And, of course, I need Isabel.’
Sidney tried to make conversation as they moved through to a small sitting room with a two-bar fire. ‘It is surprising how often happiness and sadness bump up against each other. It is why I am so opposed to confetti.’
‘Confetti?’
‘It’s upsetting for those who have to attend a funeral when a wedding has taken place earlier in the day. It reminds the principal mourners of what they have lost.’
‘I don’t think my mother would have minded about that,’ Isabel Livingstone interrupted, coming in with the tea tray. ‘She was violently opposed to marriage, as you know. Whenever she heard church bells she covered her ears. Weddings just set her off, didn’t they, Michael?’
‘It’s why we didn’t discuss our plans with her, Canon Chambers.’
‘Sometimes I think Mother kept on living just to spite us,’ his fiancée continued. Sidney noticed that she was wearing an emerald ring. ‘I had stupidly promised her that I would not marry if she was still alive and so I think she decided to try and outlive me. “Even if I do die first,” she said to me, “I’ll still be watching.” ’
‘Perhaps you did not need to keep your promise?’ Sidney replied.
‘Are you, a clergyman, suggesting that I should have broken it?’ Isabel asked as she poured from a pot of tea. ‘Sugar?’
‘No thank you. If it was forced from you, or if it was a bad promise, why, yes of course.’
‘Well, in the end, it was not such a long time to wait. We’ve only known each other properly for seven months,’ the doctor continued. ‘But you know all this, Canon Chambers. Obviously we are not going to make any public announcement of our engagement until after the cremation.’
‘Even though Miss Livingstone is wearing a ring . . .’
‘Only in the house. I take it off when I go outdoors. It seems silly because everyone must have guessed by now but when you are supposed to be in mourning it doesn’t look right.’
‘Supposed?’
‘I’m sorry, Canon Chambers; my mother was not a kind woman, either at the end of her days, or even before. I can be grateful for the fact that she gave me life and that she looked after me, but recently, apart from Michael, my life has been misery. It’s hard to nurse someone who is so resentful that you are young and she is old.’
Sidney decided to take a risk. ‘I know that sometimes, when those close to you die, it can almost be a relief.’
‘It was. But you are not allowed to say this.’
‘You can say anything to a priest.’
‘Or a doctor . . .’ Michael observed.
‘Not quite anything,’ Isabel Livingstone replied.
There was silence.
‘Talking of the cremation,’ Dr Robinson resumed, ‘we were planning to have it next week but now there seems to be some kind of delay. I don’t suppose you know anything about that?’
‘I did hear,’ Sidney replied. ‘I think it is a delicate matter.’
‘I don’t see what is so delicate about it. What have you heard?’
‘Oh Michael . . .’ Isabel began, but her fiancé cut her off.
‘Mrs Livingstone died a perfectly natural death. It was heart failure. I completed the death certificate myself.’
Sidney thought that Dr Robinson was rather too keen to justify himself. ‘And you, Miss Livingstone, were you present at the time of death?’
‘Of course. I nursed my mother to the end. I gave her sips of water. I mopped her brow. I made sure that she did not become dehydrated as Michael had told me. I did everything my fiancé said.’
‘You applied for a cremation immediately?’ Sidney asked.
‘We were being efficient,’ the doctor continued. ‘I don’t think there is anything unusual in that. It is what Isabel’s mother asked for.’
‘She had a fear of being buried alive,’ Isabel explained. ‘She hated worms. She used to say, “Don’t let the worms have me.” She could be very morbid.’
Dr Robinson was becoming suspicious. ‘Why are you asking us this?’
‘It seems the coroner is not quite ready to release your mother’s body, Miss Livingstone. He may ask for a post-mortem.’
‘And why on earth would he do that, Canon Chambers?’ Isabel asked in a tone that sounded altogether too innocent.
‘I think your fiancé can explain the medical reasons for that request,’ Sidney replied.
Dr Michael Robinson rose from his chair and looked out of the window. ‘That meddling bastard,’ he muttered.
The next day Leonard Graham arrived from London to begin his duties as Sidney’s curate. He was looking forward to working both in a parish and in a university town that would allow him to continue his studies into the work of the great Russian writers, most notably Dostoevsky.
Unfortunately, Inspector Keating had sent Sidney off to see the coroner and Leonard’s first Grantchester encounter was therefore with the housekeeper. A small, fiercely opinionated woman, five foot three and thirteen stone, Sylvia Maguire told Leonard Graham that he had no need to worry as Canon Chambers was not a practical man and it would be clearer if she explained the way in which the parish, and most notably the vicarage, was run, herself.
She showed Leonard to his room and offered to make him a cup of tea while he began to unpack his suitcase and his boxes of books. After six or seven minutes she called up and told him that everything was ready. Leonard came downstairs, looked at his tea and sponge cake, and prepared for his induction. He already sensed that, rather than talking about the ecclesiastical status of the priesthood or the nature of the holy fool in Russian fiction with Canon Sidney Chambers, he would, instead, be treated to Mrs Maguire’s life story. This assumption proved correct.
Mrs Maguire set off on her account of how she was born on 21 January 1901, the day that Queen Victoria had die
d, and yet, despite this historic date, Sidney never remembered her birthday because he was too busy thinking about criminals. She told him how she had lost three of her brothers in the First World War and how her husband Ronnie had disappeared ‘for no good reason’ in the second. She explained at length that her sister Gladys, a spiritualist, had been unable to contact Ronnie so he couldn’t be dead and she was still waiting for his return; and she reassured Leonard Graham that her husband’s departure meant that she was able to ‘do’ for other people but, even so, and saying that, she regarded both indoor toilets and the bathroom off the ground-floor kitchen of the vicarage as ‘unhygienic’. She would be able to offer catering for both the clerics but it would not include too much fish as she was worried about the bones and had never quite recovered from the embarrassment of a choking incident suffered on her honeymoon at Skegness.
Simple meals would be provided, she stated – shepherd’s pie, welsh rarebit, toad in the hole, bubble and squeak, steak and kidney pudding – and it was a lot easier now she was coming to the end of her ration book. But washing and ironing would be extra, especially if Leonard wanted his dog collars starched, and she would also be very grateful if he tidied up before she hoovered and emptied his own ashtrays.
Leonard Graham tried to reassure Mrs Maguire when he thought she had finished, ‘I am sure that everything will work out beautifully, Mrs Maguire.’
He was then alarmed by her retort. ‘Are you indeed? Have you been a curate before?’
‘I have not.’
‘Then everything will be a surprise to you.’
Leonard was desperate for Sidney’s return. ‘I am sure I will be able to manage,’ he answered. ‘My role here will be more spiritual than material.’
‘Everyone has to eat, Mr Graham.’
‘Indeed they do. I think the playwright Bertolt Brecht even suggested that food must come before morals . . .’
Mrs Maguire did not appear to be listening. ‘I don’t understand why Canon Chambers cannot write his sermons, take his services and visit the sick like any other clergyman,’ she complained. ‘He has to go poking his nose into other people’s business and it’s just going to lead to trouble. Before Christmas we had one hell of a time, I don’t mind telling you.’
