Clerical Errors

by D M Greenwood

  ‘A skill,’ said Theodora when Julia complimented her, ‘perfected through five years at an English girls’ boarding school.’

  Julia, invited to stay for lunch, accepted gladly and they spent a cheerful meal eating a delicious vegetable stew. They were not inquisitive Julia noticed but she felt their genuine kindness and offered a little of her own background, the Australian bit, in payment. What she told them was received with interest, she felt, and to her relief, without demand for more.

  Finally, as she and Theodora were about to depart, Ian made a suggestion. ‘How about a trip up river by the evening light?’ he asked. ‘It’s a good way of learning your way round Medewich. You see all the old parts and none of the modern development. Do allow me to have that pleasure,’ he added, suddenly formal.

  Julia blushed a little and said she’d love to.

  ‘Would seven thirty be a possibility?’

  Julia said it would, and he arranged to pick her up, at the town quay below the west front of the Cathedral.

  The two women strolled back through the town together. Although slightly in awe of Theodora, Julia was sufficiently curious to summon up courage to question her. Here, after all, was an opportunity to begin her research into the world of the Anglican Church.

  ‘Theodora, are you a priest?’ Julia judged that she should be direct.

  ‘No. I’m in deacon’s orders. One below, as it were.’

  ‘Will you become a priest in time?’

  ‘Not unless they change the rules about women.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t they?’

  ‘The reasons are complicated. Some historical, some social, some, it is even suggested, are theological.’

  ‘So,’ said Julia valiantly, ‘what can’t you do that a priest can?’

  ‘I can marry, baptise and bury but I can’t consecrate the elements, the bread and wine, at the Eucharist, nor can I give absolution from sin.’

  Julia ruminated. ‘Could you ever be the vicar of a parish then?’

  ‘Only with difficulty,’ said Theodora grimly.

  Theodora’s tone had become rather clipped so Julia desisted and they went on through the market. Theodora seemed to feel she’d been curt and after a moment she offered, ‘Had you any particular reason for settling on Medewich for what I gather is your first post?’

  Julia hesitated. She had no intention of lying and indeed no identifiable reason for concealing anything. On the other hand, Theodora, as far as she could tell, was of the employing classes. The fear of being drawn in or in some way tied down was strong in Julia.

  ‘My father has, used to have, some relations, second cousins in the area so it seemed a good idea. I’m not sure I’ll be staying long in any case.’ Julia realised she’d got herself into a muddle. ‘I mean, of course, it, the Church, will be valuable experience, office training …’ She was reduced to mumbling. ‘But if I’m any good I expect I’ll move on in due course, after a decent interval.’

  ‘Oh quite.’ Theodora was amused rather than censorious. ‘A diocesan office may well have things to offer you, though I doubt if they will pertain to sophisticated office practice. We have yet, for example, to computerise. Not a word processor to our names.’

  Julia was sorry about this since her typing skills were meagre.

  ‘However,’ said Theodora, looking at her watch and turning decisively right towards the steps up to the Cathedral and Canons’ Court, ‘I’ve no doubt you’ll learn something. Nothing is ever lost.’

  Julia wasn’t sure whether this was meant to daunt or encourage her. But on the whole she felt she’d made a good start in her Anglican investigations. Happy in her new acquaintances, she strolled back through the now less busy market and stopped at a second–hand book stall on its outskirts. Her eye was taken by a handsome history of Medewich Cathedral in a splendid blue leather binding. She had just turned the frontispiece and was gazing at the steel engraving of the west front about 1890, when her ear caught a familiar voice.

  ‘I thought you said you’d have them ready.’

  The accent was local and the tone, sharp and nervous, was familiar. Julia looked up and saw the plump form of the Cathedral cleaner, Mrs Thrigg. She was leaning forward and talking to a man of not quite English appearance whose stall it appeared to be. The trestles were piled high with cheap brass, wickerwork and pot–pourris. Julia was about to greet the woman when she pulled herself up short. Perhaps one would not want to be reminded of what would have been a distressing occasion. Her eye returned to the book and she bent her head over its pages. Mrs Thrigg’s high–pitched harangue was more audible than her victim’s response.

  ‘I did say. I did tell you, didn’t I. I said, they’ve got to be here before six on Saturday. We pay enough for them. I told my ladies. I said, we pay enough for them in all conscience.’

  Julia moved away, letting the history of Medewich go back to its place. Slowly she began to climb up the hill to her lodgings.

  Julia trailed her hand in the cool water. It was a measure of Ian Caretaker’s presence that, in spite of the beauty of the evening and the river setting, she found no difficulty in keeping at bay memories of Michael and the Cambridge backs. Ian’s competent form could be made out in the evening light as he moved the long old–fashioned oars of the heavy craft dexterously through the water. He looked, she thought, like one of those drawings from Boy’s Own Paper of about 1900. His hair was as long and neat as it would have been then and not short as the boys in Australia had been wearing it when she’d left. He wore a white shirt with long sleeves loosely rolled up and flapping, rather baggy flannels, not jeans, and scuffed canvas rope–soled shoes. A thin leather belt with the end tucked in, not slotted through a keeper, held his trousers.

  The boat was the tender to the wherry Amy Roy, built in heavy oak tarred innumerable times outside and worn to a pleasant silver colour inside. The boat sat low in the water and appeared at home in it. The whole made a harmonious picture not quite of this century.

  The Mede bound the Cathedral on three sides, south, east and north, and the market and the town with its quay lay below the Cathedral’s west front. The hills on which the asylum, barracks and prison were placed reared up to the north of the Cathedral. There was an elegant modern foot–bridge linking the Cathedral’s site with the east side of the river and a traffic bridge, originally Norman, which led from just beyond the market place to the commercial docks on the south bank. The confines of the river had made modern development near the Cathedral impossible. The buildings which surrounded it, St Manicus house and the choir school to the north and the Deanery, Archdeaconry and Canons’ Court to the south, with the Bishop’s Palace facing the east end, made a harmonious range of buildings. Originally mediaeval, they had been modernised in 1750 and 1820.

  Julia and Ian proceeded slowly past the south side of the Cathedral. The river, which continued to be a working river with coasters from Narborough as far as the town quay, began here to narrow and became purely domestic and pleasure seeking. The back gardens of the Deanery, Archdeaconry and Canons’ Court sloped with perfect lawns down to the river. The three houses which made up Canons’ Court shared a single garden unmarred by flower beds. The façades of these buildings fronting the Cathedral were stone–faced. Their backs, however, showed earlier picturesque layers of seventeenth–century brick, sixteenth–century ragstone and bits of dressed stone pillaged indecently from monastic buildings after the Reformation. The nineteenth century had seen drain pipes added and the early twentieth, lavatories and bathrooms built out on stilts at first–floor level. It was all highly agreeable. Julia felt that she was seeing it at the right pace, about three miles per hour, and at the right hour, near sunset, and, she realised after an informed architectural lecture from Ian, in the right company. Her thoughts turned again to the events of the day.

  ‘If you live in such beautiful surroundings,’ she remarked to Ian when he paused in his efforts, ‘surely it must be easier to be good. I mean generous and truthful. D
o you think?’

  ‘In theory, yes. But in fact turning your collar round and convincing ACCM that God has called you seems to have an effect on the moral character so deleterious that even architectural beauty can’t heal it.’

  ‘You don’t seem too keen on Christianity,’ said Julia with a sudden directness. ‘You choose to work for it but haven’t a good word to say for it.’

  ‘You’re mistaken,’ Ian replied, without roughness. ‘I have no reservations at all about Christianity. It’s all there is to keep the devil at bay. It’s complete and true.’ He spoke with passion. ‘But about Anglicanism, how can one not be ambivalent? I love it dearly and you must know how close that can come to hate. Its tolerance can so easily become self–indulgence and complacency. Its kindness can turn into patronage and its easy relations with the political and social stage so quickly degenerate into worldliness and powerseeking.’

  ‘Is that why you’re not a priest?’ asked Julia.

  ‘No. I haven’t attained that purity of life which would entitle me to the priesthood. It’s an honour. It’s also a vocation and I don’t have that either.’

  Julia paused. ‘Why do you hate Canon Wheeler?’

  Ian stopped rowing for a moment. ‘Perhaps because he enjoys that honour and possesses that vocation I’ve just been talking about.’

  ‘And what about Dhani?’ asked Julia exploring remorselessly.

  ‘What about him?’ replied Caretaker.

  ‘What is he, religiously, I mean?’

  ‘Religiously he’s a Buddhist.’

  ‘What do they believe?’

  ‘Buddhism isn’t, I think, a matter of beliefs so much as the adoption of certain techniques for living.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, what one is aiming at, in Dhani’s sort of Buddhism, is not to aim at anything. Do you see?’

  ‘No,’ said Julia with finality.

  ‘Well, what he cultivates is a sort of relaxed alertness. A form of detached self–knowledge. A balance.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For the thing in itself.’

  Julia felt herself quite out of her depth. They had drifted under the modern footbridge. She allowed her eye to travel upwards to the Cathedral’s east window which by now had begun to reflect the setting sun.

  ‘What does he make of the murder?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ian. ‘But I think it wouldn’t be important to him.’

  ‘How can a grotesque horror like chopping off a man’s – a young priest’s – head and leaving it in a place people come to worship in, not move him?’ said Julia with an emotion which grew as she framed the words and allowed all the revulsion which she had suppressed and left unacknowledged since the previous day to be given full rein. She was near to tears.

  Caretaker stopped rowing and shipped the oars. He leant forward and said earnestly, ‘You’re quite right to feel as you do. That’s the Christian part. But you will also have to learn to cope with that feeling, that’s the Buddhist part. Try putting the horror into your breath and sighing it, blowing it, hissing it out.’

  He spoke with such conviction that Julia restrained her urge to laugh and merely smiled at him. She felt his kindness and was grateful even for something she could make nothing of.

  They had drifted to the north of the Cathedral and could clearly see the first of the three Victorian buildings of prison, barracks and asylum which crowned the hill to the north.

  ‘Shall we,’ said Ian, ‘walk up and see the view before we start back?’

  They walked companionably up the mixture of heath land and scrub which bounded the lower slopes of the hill. It was further than they had thought, fooled by the deceptiveness of buildings seen at odd angles from below. By the time they reached the outer periphery of the asylum’s range of buildings, darkness was encroaching. The main building stretched a long way, and was magnified in height by the lack of light. Its Gothic features, which in daylight looked rather parsimonious, by night took on a solidity and presence which were daunting. There was a low wall surmounted by iron railings. Not too far from where they were an iron gate leading into the grounds stood open. Beside the main building there was a collection of more modern buildings about four hundred yards from the main block, which seemed to be derelict.

  ‘Is the asylum still used?’ asked Julia.

  ‘In conformity with the Ministerial circulars, a policy of easing inmates who are not too dangerous or incapacitated back into the community has been initiated. I think the plan is to close it within three years. Certainly it hasn’t many inmates and the out–buildings haven’t been used since I came back to Medewich.’

  Julia allowed herself to feel the atmosphere of the place. Her mind went too easily to the hopeless and distraught who had until recently occupied the rooms behind the blank dark windows. Slowly she turned towards the south, away from the pile of the asylum and looked towards the town and its lights. They radiated a remote but comforting normality on the marsh below them. The full moon was beginning to thicken behind the spire of the Cathedral. It struck ten. The lights on the motorway which connected Medewich with the rest of the civilised world were a dull glow to their right.

  Julia thought about Ian’s advice to breathe out the horror of the obscene head. She had just started to draw breath into her lungs slowly, when she heard or rather felt a thudding noise; at first she wasn’t sure whether it was in her head. She turned to Ian, who had been standing looking towards the river with a relaxed air a moment before. She was surprised to find him already tense and listening alertly.

  ‘What is it?’ She found herself whispering.

  ‘The local peasants,’ said Ian, ‘with a cassette player.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like it,’ Julia answered.

  The sound was louder now, an insistent, taut throbbing. Julia found herself connecting the sound with a physical sensation at the base of her skull, like the beginning of a headache. The rhythm was by no means simple and, as it grew to a crescendo, her breath came in pants and she began to shake. For the second time in twenty four hours she felt as though a sound were possessing her. She turned to Ian, her distress mounting.

  ‘Ought we to go and investigate?’

  ‘Probably I ought to and you ought not,’ he said. ‘But I’ve no intention of leaving you alone. Come on, let’s go back to the boat.’

  They started to move down the hill when suddenly there was another sound. This time it was high–pitched and either animal or human. A prolonged scream. It was swiftly followed by another. I can’t bear this, Julia thought.

  Ian seized her hand in his and began to run back towards the sound, plunging up the hill through the open gate towards the nearest of the two asylum out–buildings. They were within ten yards of the door when the drumming ceased. Ian, clearly determined to use the surge of adrenalin summoned by his charge up the hill to give him courage to face whatever was on the other side of the door, seemed to Julia’s blurred perception of the scene to be shouting as he launched himself at the door. It did not give way to him immediately but he kicked with unnecessary violence and it fell open. There was a rush of warm air and a faint acrid smell of smoke. It was very dark. Ian paused. Julia’s eyes, by now accustomed to the dark, spotted something long and white lying on the floor towards the far end of the room. They moved cautiously towards it and Ian bent to pick it up. It was thick, slightly greasy and tubular. After a moment he realised it was nothing more than a candle, with the wick still smouldering. From far away and below came the sound of a powerful motorbike engine being revved into life.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Office Practices

  ‘Hello, Mary. Morning, Archdeacon. Good morning, Dean. Good morning, Canon.’ From her small cubby–hole on the opposite side of Canon Wheeler’s office to Miss Coldharbour’s room Julia listened to Theodora’s litany with interest. It was the third day she had heard it. Wednesday. The intonation never varied and was nicely calculated. To Mary, the reception
ist, brisk; to the Archdeacon, comradely; to the Dean, friendly; to Canon Wheeler, deferential. They all worked with their doors open in the early part of the morning. Whether this was because of the weather, which was warm, or because they were all as curious as cats or, perhaps, because they were actors manqué, Julia had not yet decided.

  The layout of the original house had not been much altered and there was a pleasing absence of fluorescent lights and plastic furniture. A back staircase, originally for servants, ran from ground–floor level to attics and was entered from a door to which Ian, Theodora and the clergy had keys. It was handy since it opened directly on to the parking slots for office staff, much prized and intrigued over. The lower orders were denied the privilege of the back door and entered through the front. However, on one’s first appearance in the office in the morning it was etiquette for all, even key holders, to enter through the front door and use the front staircase. On their way up to their office in the attic, therefore, Ian and Theodora had to pass the open doors of the offices of the Dean and the Archdeacon on the ground floor, and that of Canon Wheeler on the first. Ian got in earlier than any of the clerics and so avoided the business of greetings. Theodora got in exactly at nine every day and punctiliously greeted whoever of the clergy were in at that hour.

  In the course of her first couple of days, Julia found the social nuances of the office a constant source of surprise. Unfamiliar as she was with the niceties of English social life, she wondered why she should be surprised. What, after all, had she expected in the Church of England in a provincial town a hundred miles from London and the Midland conurbations? But the formality and hierarchical nature of the relationships still struck her. To each other, what Julia had heard Canon Wheeler describe as ‘the senior clergy’ were comradely in a slightly country cricket club way. They employed Christian names rather than titles but their turns of phrase for communication with each other, whether written or spoken, were formal in all cases and on occasions orotund.