The Lost Book of the Grail

by Charlie Lovett

  Arthur had been ready for this argument when Bethany had come into the room. He had been filled with righteous fury. The possibility that he might be wrong never even entered his mind. Now Bethany stood in front of him, choking back sobs as she shoved her books and papers back into the canvas bag, and the lump in his gut turned from anger to guilt. He had, in fact, treated her pretty badly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly.

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it, Arthur. Let’s just agree to live at opposite ends of the room, shall we.”

  “No,” said Arthur. “I don’t agree. And the fact is, I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I do.”

  “You do what?” said Bethany, wiping her eyes on her sleeve and looking at him in exasperation.

  “I do like you,” he said.

  They stood staring at each other in silence, Bethany’s half-filled bag still sitting on the table and Arthur trying to compose what he wanted to say next.

  “I liked you from the moment I saw you,” he said. “I like that you can put me in my place and win arguments with me. I like how hard you work and how much you care and I like the way that wisp of hair always falls down in front of your face.” It was there now, and Bethany quickly swept it away. “And I really wanted to be friends; I was trying, I was. And that’s why it hurt so much when I thought you were . . . were deceiving me.”

  Bethany crossed her arms over her chest and kept staring at Arthur but did not speak.

  “And I’m sorry I went through your things. And you’re right—I do like the Grail and its . . . its lore. But if we have this in common, this fascination with the Grail, then yes, maybe we can talk about that; maybe we can share that . . . that passion. It’s the kind of thing that friends do, isn’t it?”

  “God, you’re an ass, Arthur,” said Bethany, her arms still crossed. Arthur felt the rock in his gut harden. He hadn’t expected to feel this way. Of course she would stay mad, but why was her anger making him feel so sick? He had tried to apologize. Shouldn’t that be enough?

  “It’s one of the things I like about you,” said Bethany, dropping her arms and returning to the work of packing up her carrier bag. “So, as long as we can agree that I was right and you were wrong, I suppose we can be Grail buddies.”

  “What if we agree,” said Arthur, “that we were both wrong but that I was more wrong than you?”

  “Seriously?”

  “That I was much more wrong than you?” said Arthur hopefully.

  “OK, fine,” said Bethany.

  Arthur hadn’t realized that his entire body had been tense until he felt his muscles relax. The wretched tightness in his belly began to dissolve. “So we can be friends?”

  “I’m willing to give it a shot,” said Bethany. “But let’s both be honest, OK?”

  “Fair enough,” said Arthur, smiling. “We can start on Monday.”

  “Monday! What the hell!”

  “Oh, it’s nothing to do with you—it’s me and the dean and the chapter. They’ve given me an ultimatum.”

  “An ultimatum?”

  “I didn’t tell you yesterday because we . . . I got distracted researching Henry Albert Naylor. It’s about the cathedral guide. Either I hand in the completed text next week or they ask for the advance back and assign someone else to the job.”

  “And I’m guessing you don’t have the advance.”

  “Not unless I sell you Gladwyn’s notebooks at a tidy profit,” said Arthur. “So, I shall be sitting right here all weekend working on the bloody guide and trying to make it sound good even though there is still so much I don’t know. In fact, I think I shall take the next two days off work and write from now until Monday morning and hope I can come up with something the chapter will approve. So I shan’t have much time for friendship or Grail stories or chasing after missing manuscripts.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  “How could you possibly help me?” said Arthur. “You’ve been at Barchester for, what, three weeks? I’ve been studying the history of the cathedral for years.”

  “I’m not going to write it, you idiot,” said Bethany, striding across to the ancient table where Arthur worked and picking up a sheaf of papers. “But I don’t think they’ll want you to hand in this. You, my nineteenth-century friend, have lovely handwriting, but I imagine your printer will want digital files. I’ll be your typist.”

  “My typist?”

  “Yes, Arthur. There is this wonderful new invention called a typewriter. And someday they might even add electricity to it and put a screen on it and—”

  “OK, OK, I accept. That’s very kind of you really. Sadly, I don’t have much of anything to type at the moment.”

  “I thought you had been working on this thing for years.”

  “True, but I’ve mostly just done research and taken notes. I don’t actually have any finished text. And I spent so long wanting to start out with the story of St. Ewolda that now I don’t know where to start.”

  “Start with the nave,” said Bethany.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Start with the nave. It’s the oldest part of the church.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “From Bishop Gladwyn’s guide—the one I’m forced to use because you are taking so long to write yours. He started with the nave. Start with the nave and when you have a few pages done bring them to me and I’ll type them.”

  “I suppose it’s as good a place as any,” said Arthur.

  “By the way,” said Bethany, “how will you get out of work at the university?”

  “The classic,” said Arthur. “I’ll call in sick. I just hope my chairman doesn’t make one of his infrequent visits to Evensong.”

  “Why don’t you just skip Evensong?” said Bethany.

  “I don’t think I could,” said Arthur, “especially with the work I have to do over the next four days. It will . . . it will center me.”

  “You don’t believe in God, but you can’t make it through a day without going to church. You’re an odd duck, Arthur Prescott.”

  —

  By Friday night, Arthur had come to the conclusion that he did not work well under pressure. His table had become an increasingly cluttered morass of notes, discarded efforts, and false starts. He had most of the information he needed, but wrestling that information into a guidebook, reducing the history of a thousand-year-old building into ten thousand words, required an entirely different skill set from researching and note-taking. Arthur’s first attempt at the nave section had weighed in at over four thousand words. When he tried to rewrite it more succinctly he kept remembering things he had left out and ended up with five thousand. He knew because before he had given up and gone to bed on Thursday night, he had counted every one.

  With nothing to type, Bethany had taken Friday off to meet up with an old college friend who was visiting Salisbury. Arthur envied her. He had not been to Salisbury in years and on such a clear day the view from the tower toward Old Sarum would be magnificent. Arthur’s view was of piles of papers, heaps of notebooks, and a blank page. He had worked all day except for brief breaks for Evensong and Compline. Now, as the cathedral clock struck ten, he was starting to make a list of the books he would have to sell to raise the £500 he would soon owe the cathedral, when Bethany bounded up the stairs into the library.

  “God, Arthur, turn some lights on. It’s not the twelfth century.” The small lamp on his table was the only light in the library. Bethany flicked a switch by the doorway and bright light filled the room. Arthur was blinded for an instant, but he could still hear Bethany’s voice.

  “Making progress? I brought you the guidebook from Salisbury. It was beautiful. Have you seen the new baptismal font? I mean new for an eight-hundred-year-old building. It sits right in the middle of the nave aisle and the surface of the water is like a mirror—you can see the vaulted
ceiling reflected in it. But then it drains at the corners, cascades right down and through the floor, so the water is always moving, too. It’s super modern but it really works in the medieval context, I think. Oh, and I went to Evensong—they have it earlier there. They sang a contemporary setting; I think the composer was Armenian. I brought you the service leaflet. The choir was good, but I think I like Byrd and Tallis and all those old English guys better than the modern Europeans, don’t you?”

  Arthur fell into the breathlessness of Bethany’s voice and for a moment forgot about the task that lay before him. When she stopped for air he gazed at her across the room.

  “Oh, God, I was rambling again, wasn’t I?”

  “Not at all,” said Arthur, pushing back his chair. “In fact, I should like to hear all about your day.”

  “But you have work to do. And you must have pages and pages for me to type by now.”

  Arthur sat in silence. He was suddenly back in school, sitting at his desk with an incomplete assignment, his teacher about to discover that instead of writing an essay on the Peloponnesian War, he had spent the previous afternoon reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. He had forgotten that day, but Bethany’s youth and her expectant smile brought it all back.

  “Arthur? Are you OK? What have you got for me?”

  “Nothing,” said Arthur timidly.

  “Nothing? It’s been two days.”

  “I don’t think I was cut out to write guidebooks. I can’t seem to boil things down to their essence. I want to include everything I know and I know far too much.”

  “Read me something,” said Bethany.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Just read me something. Read me a section of your guidebook. Read me whatever’s on the first page you pick up.”

  “All right, all right, if you insist.”

  “I do.”

  “Here’s a bit about the altar screen.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The altar screen. It’s the screen behind the altar. Well, not behind, more above, I suppose. It had all these carvings of saints in little niches. It’s not a screen exactly, although I suppose it does screen the ambulatory from the chancel, but it’s not like a rood screen—you know, not screening the service from the congregation.”

  “You do such a good job of explaining. I can see why they picked you to write the guidebook.”

  “Oh, stop it.”

  “Read.” Bethany pulled a chair up next to Arthur, plopped down, and kicked off her shoes.

  Arthur began: “The great altar screen of this cathedral church was erected in the course of the fifteenth century, primarily under the aegis of Bishop Maywood. It contained sculptures of over one hundred and twenty saints and martyrs, including such English saints as Alban, Paulinus, and Hilda. In the year 1538, at the hands of King Henry VIII’s commissioners, it was grievously mutilated and despoiled of the figures that had adorned it. In succeeding ages, it was subjected to various tasteless alterations until its original beauty was almost entirely effaced.”

  “God, Arthur—who would read this?”

  “Someone interested in the cathedral?”

  “Someone with insomnia, maybe.”

  “I adapted the wording from a memorial in the nave.”

  “I thought you were a fan of P. G. Wodehouse. Couldn’t you put a little . . . I don’t know, a little humor in the thing?”

  “You think I should write the cathedral guide in the style of P. G. Wodehouse.”

  “Perfect idea, Arthur. Couldn’t have put it any better myself. Think of it as a writing exercise.”

  “A writing—”

  “Only don’t write it, just tell me.”

  “Very well,” said Arthur, leaning back in his chair. How would Wodehouse describe the altar screen? he thought. How would Gussie Fink-Nottle describe it? He closed his eyes and gave it a go.

  “Sometime longer ago than I care to think, a certain bishop what’s-his-name took into his head the idea that the wall behind the altar should be chockablock with his betters and by Jove the next thing you knew the place was filled to the ceiling with blokes who had gotten themselves so deep into the mulligatawny with the whole religion thing that they ended up losing their heads or being roasted alive or other various bally good ways of shuffling off the old mortal coil. The next thing you know the whole country was Reformation mad, and old King Henry, when not working his way through wives like Galahad Threepwood through dry martinis, had taken something of a dislike to saintly types, and so in 1538, his cronies depopulated the screen—leaving the dean, if not actually disgruntled, far from being gruntled.”

  Arthur had expected some reaction from Bethany and was surprised at the silence that met this recitation. He turned and saw that her face was unusually red, her eyes seemed to be watering, and she was having some sort of small spasm, as if she were gasping for breath and trying to stay quiet all at once.

  “Are you quite well?” asked Arthur, but he did not question her health for long, for she fell back in her chair and put an end to her silence with an explosion of laughter. Bethany had a sense of humor after all.

  When she quieted a few moments later, she managed to say, between shallow breaths, “Ever so much better, Arthur.”

  “Can you imagine the look on the dean’s face if I handed that in?” said Arthur.

  “Oh, the dean would love it. It’s the precentor’s face I’d like to see. The old codfish would blow smoke out of his gills.”

  “How do you know the precentor?”

  “Gwyn threw a little dinner party for me to meet the chapter last week. You don’t get invited to everything, you know, Arthur.”

  “I always thought he looked more like a salmon.”

  “No, definitely a codfish.”

  “Anyhow, I can’t write it like this.”

  “OK, so don’t be Wodehouse, but loosen up a bit. I mean you did all that—made me laugh so hard I nearly peed myself—without putting pen to paper. You were just talking to me. So talk to me if you need to. Tell me a story. You’re good at telling stories, Arthur. Tell me the story of the nave.”

  And so he did. He told her the story of the nave and then the story of the west front and then the story of the cloister. Each time she asked questions and suggested which bits were uninteresting enough to be cut from the next version and then Arthur told her the story again and again, and eventually they hit on a version that seemed worth preserving. Then Arthur would tell her that version one more time and Bethany would record his voice on her computer. After each recording, Bethany sent Arthur back to his notes to prepare for the next section while she typed up what he had just dictated.

  “OK,” said Arthur, after he had finished another story, “read that bit back to me.”

  “Are you sure?” said Bethany.

  “Even if it’s wasted time, I’d still like to hear it.” And so Bethany read.

  It begins with a field of sheep, tended carefully from the time they are lambs, shorn of their wool and slaughtered not just to provide meat for the village, but to make a great book. A hundred sheep hides are soaked in lime to soften the skin and loosen the hair, scraped clean, and dried on frames. Cut into rectangles, what was once a sheep is now parchment—soft and flexible, durable for centuries, and easily bound. But not yet. Now the scribe takes over. He has labored for years copying manuscripts in the light of the cloister, perhaps saving works that might otherwise have been lost to time. He “pounces” the parchment, rubbing it with a small stone to achieve the right texture for the adhering of the ink. Then he carefully rules faint lines in red ink to guide him in writing evenly. A young monk has brought swan feathers gathered at the nearby river, and the scribe cuts one of these to make his pen. He has mixed his own ink, using a combination of charcoal and gum arabic. It is an ancient recipe, one he understands bette
r than the iron gall ink used by the younger scribes. He dips the pen in the ink and begins his task—he is copying a Gospel of John. The quill scratching on the vellum and the birds in the yew tree are the only sounds that disturb the silence of the cloister. Days, weeks, and months pass and the scribe scratches away, as many hours a day as the sunlight allows. At other, wealthier monasteries he might pass the pages to an illuminator, who would decorate capital letters and add illustrations using colored ink and even gold. But Barchester can afford no such luxuries. And so the manuscript is at last delivered to the binder, who cleans any stray smudges from the parchment, sews the gatherings of pages onto bands of fabric, and then into wooden covers wrapped in parchment. The new Gospel of John is complete, and at the next day’s service a priest will read from the pristine pages, “In principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum.”

  “What do you think?” said Arthur.

  “I think it’s beautiful,” said Bethany, “but you can’t put it in the guidebook. The library isn’t even open to tourists.”

  “Maybe it should be,” said Arthur.

  Bethany stood up to stretch and glanced at the clock on her computer. “Arthur, it’s almost three A.M.,” she said. “You should get some sleep.”