by A. N. Wilson
This bold readiness to cut corners, not to be precious, in the furtherance of a public good seemed to lie at the heart of Vivyan’s political stance. Rachel did not have any doubt that this so-called ‘scandal’ attaching to his name had to do with this. She found it completely impossible to believe that he had any sexual life at all. Surely it was all channelled into his work, his mission?
One of the congregation was now reading the lesson, a passage from the Christian Bible. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.
These words encapsulated why Rachel found Vivyan Chell such a fascinating man. She could not conceive of what it would be like to share his religious beliefs; and yet his preternatural sympathy for others, his evident willingness to give his whole life to others, to bear their burdens with them and, where possible, for them, these indubitably good qualities were inseparable from the religion. They could not be faked up, and she had begun to feel that somehow they were different from the ideals of personal integrity to which her own humanism aspired.
They were all standing up now and Vivyan was reading the Gospel.
‘And they arrived at the country of the Gadarenes, which is over against Galilee.
‘And when he went forth to land, there met him out of the city a certain man, which had devils a long time, and ware no clothes, neither abode in any house, but in the tombs.
‘When he saw Jesus, he cried out, and fell down before him, and with a loud voice said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the Most high? I beseech thee, torment me not …’
From where she sat in the church, Rachel only had a sideways view of what was going on. She could see Vivyan at the lectern, but she could not see everyone else in the shrine chapel, and at first she thought some strange echo was occurring. The echo said, ‘Torment me not, torment me not, me, me’ in Vivyan’s own voice.
But it was being interrupted by another quite different voice, which cried out, ‘Priest! Priest! I’m full of sin! Priest, make me clean, man!’
This voice, which sounded not unlike Louis Armstrong, was interrupted by a frightened little boy saying, ‘Leave me alone, Trevor, leave me … Don’t make me!’
‘Priest, cleanse, man, cleanse!’
In spite of this heckling, Vivyan continued to read the Gospel story in his drawly, but authoritative voice. He had come to the moment in the story when the demons inside the lunatic begged Jesus to expel them from the man and send them into a herd of pigs which then cascade down the hill into the lake. The story ended with fear. The whole multitude of the country of the Gadarenes round about besought him to depart from them, for they were taken with great fear.
Rachel was still unable to see where the hecklers were.
Vivyan at the altar was holding aloft a little silver dish with a wafer on it. He was saying, ‘Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, through your goodness we have this bread to offer …’
‘Fuck you, priest! Fuck, fuck!’
‘… which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become for us …’
‘Don’t make me, Trevor.’
‘Fuck you!’
‘… the Bread of Life.’
She could now see that the altar-server, Peter d’Abo, instead of helping the priest to prepare the bread and wine for the mass, was standing in front of the altar and performing a grotesque parody of his actions, pretending to lift up an imaginary paten and an invisible chalice. The voices were all coming from the boy.
In the middle of his praying and preparations, Vivyan suddenly stopped.
He came round the altar to where the boy was prancing about and said, ‘Tuli!’
The boy laughed. It was a high-pitched laughter rising to an eerie screech which filled the church, almost making one suppose that a bat or some variety of bird was flapping its way into the high rafters, and round the crucified figure on the rood screen.
Vivyan placed his hands on the boy, who was beginning to shake with convulsions.
‘Tuli, dear child.’
‘Don’t touch me.’
‘Tuli.’
‘Priest, forgive.’
‘Tuli. Peter. Do not be frightened. May Almighty God bless you.’
The scream which followed these words was even louder than the first.
‘May God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, bless you. May Our Lady pray for you and strengthen you. May your holy Guardian Angel protect you. And once again, my dear child, may Almighty God bless you, the Father, Son, the Holy Spirit.’
The banshee-shriek had echoed and faded. The whole building became extraordinarily still and quiet. The rain continued to whir and patter on the church roof. Outside could be heard an ambulance siren, perhaps a police car wailing. Buses and cars continued to change gear at the corner of the old clock at the top of the High Road. So, it could not be said that there was absolute silence. But a palpable stillness had descended, a beautiful calm which had embraced them all. Rachel found herself thinking that the calm and stillness around Vivyan had the cold purity and limpidity of a mountain rock pool.
The altar-boy had crumpled to the floor.
Vivyan continued with the mass. He left the boy where he was on the carpet in front of the altar as he consecrated and distributed the holy bread and wine. When the rite was over, and fifty or so people had trooped up to receive Communion, Vivyan briskly brought things to a conclusion. Only when the last prayer had been said did he turn to the congregation and say, ‘Could two of you give me a hand?’
Two people, a man and a woman, stepped forward to lift the inert boy on to a pew. He seemed to have passed into a trance.
‘If we could get an ambulance,’ said Vivyan, ‘just to be on the safe side. I think he is going to be all right.’
At his side, there now appeared two young men whom no one remembered seeing in the church before.
‘Mr Vivyan Chell?’
‘I’m Father Chell, yes. You’re not paramedics? We have a sick boy here.’
‘Can we have a word with you, sir?’
‘Of course. What about?’
‘You might prefer it to be a word in private, sir. We are police officers.’
‘Here is as good a place as any for a word.’ Vivyan made a sweeping gesture round the church. ‘We can sit here, or you can come back to the house if you’d prefer.’
‘We should prefer it, sir,’ said one of the young men, ‘if you accompanied us to the station.’
‘Is someone in trouble?’ asked Vivyan. ‘One of my people?’
‘It rather looks as if you might be in trouble, sir. We are not arresting you as yet, but a number of very serious allegations have been made and we would like you to come with us to the station.’
‘Allegations? What sort of allegations?’
Vivyan was not demonstrating anger, but he was every inch the officer interrogating semi-incompetent corporals.
‘Allegations of an intimate nature, sir. We really must insist.’
‘You want me to come dressed like this?’
His hands swept over his purplish altar-robes.
‘Of course you can change, sir, but then, if you don’t mind, we should like you to accompany us. We have a car waiting.’
SEVENTEEN
The scene outside the church was one of confusion. It was raining extremely heavily. A crowd had assembled on the tarmac forecourt where a police car was parked. The word had spread fast, that Father Vivyan had been arrested. This was not technically true: he was merely being asked to accompany two officers to the police station to ‘help with their enquiries’, as the jargon had it. Such distinctions easily became lost in the minds of a small but angry crowd; outside in the road, a large white van containing more police officers was in wait, in case things got out of control.
‘What you arrestin’ him for?’ ‘He a good man – he done nothin’ rang’ were among the objections which Rachel could hear people making as they all squeezed through the church door to the tarmac. It was very bright there a
nd it took her a while to recognize that arc lights had been fitted up by a television camera crew, who were filming the incident.
Everything happened so fast. Rachel was not close enough to the priest to be able to say any of the things which, with hindsight, she wanted to say: perhaps they were things he knew, and which did not need saying – such as that she wanted to be near him, that no one was obliged to go to a police station without the police producing a warrant … like What the hell’s going on here?
The police were now coming into the drive from their parked van, and asking people to keep calm, but the atmosphere was the opposite of peaceful. The quite extraordinary calm which had descended upon the church during the mass when the priest had blessed the head of the lunatic boy had been replaced by a collective frenzy. It looked as if one man, whose name Rachel did not know, one of the refugees from the camper-vans, was scuffling with a policeman – perhaps being arrested. It was not easy either to see or to interpret what was going on, since the whole of the tarmac drive was crowded. Vivyan and the two policemen with him were lost in the mêlée. Some of the women had started to cry, and one or two of them were screaming at the police.
‘You’ve no right to take him!’
‘He done nothing rang!’
‘Move along, please, madam.’
‘Who you tellin’ to move along?’
‘Rachel,’
‘Sinclo – what are you doing here?’
It was both reassuring to see Sinclo in that distraught scene, and instantly upsetting.
She said, ‘Oh Christ, what’s happened?’
‘You need to get out of here – I’ve got a car round the corner,’ he said, taking her arm.
‘Please let go.’
They were both extremely wet, even though she had only been out of doors for a matter of seconds. She could feel the rainwater soaking her hair, splashing her cheeks, seeping into her clothes. She realized that among the huddle of confused figures, some shouting at the police, some swarming around the police car, which was now on the move, there were photographers. Flash bulbs popped in the driving rain. Through the crowd, she caught a split-second glimpse of Vivyan Chell in the back of the police car. He had slumped, and although his eyes were open, it was as if all the life had gone out of him, and he had been shot or suffered some bodily blow. He held up a book – it was the battered black volume called Day Hours which he usually carried everywhere with him – against his face.
‘Oh my God, you’ve set this all up,’ she said suddenly to Sinclo.
‘I … I … er …’
‘This is a set-up of some kind,’ she said. She did not know what kind of dirty trick had been played, but it was inconceivable that TV cameras and a lot of journalists should have turned up without something underhand having been plotted. Every hour of the day in London the police turned up on someone’s doorstep to take them in for questioning, and the newspapers didn’t send reporters and cameras to snoop on the fact. ‘I really think you should … er …’ Sinclo’s hesitancy, which was part of his charm when he was plucking up courage to suggest lunch, had sometimes warmed her heart. Now it seemed craven, even sinister.
‘Just what is going on?’ she asked.
‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
On the contrary,’ she said furiously, ‘you did not have to guess. You were here for the kill. You were here to watch when they took him.’
‘I didn’t know …’
‘Oh, come on …’
‘I didn’t … er …’
‘What? You just happened to be coming down to Crickleden in your car and you thought you’d look up Father Vivyan … Sinclo, he’s your uncle for Christ’s sake …’
‘He’s a rather remote cousin, actually.’
‘I don’t care what relation he is – he’s your family, and you can do this …’ She gestured wildly to the cameras, the lights, the snappers who were running after the red tail-lights of the departing car as it squelched out of the drive, spattering the puddles at the onlookers, and turned right into the evening traffic of Crickleden High Road.
‘You don’t really think that, surely?’
‘Well – how did you know?’
‘I didn’t. I was coming down – well, about something … something else.’
‘Don’t tell me you were coming to see me.’
‘Rachel, you know what they are saying?’
‘Who?’
‘The hacks there.’ He gestured with the side of his head to the reporters, an anorak-clad gang who were moving among the crowds asking for what they would call quotes.
‘He’s a good man – he’d never hurt a kiddy,’ one woman was shouting.
‘So you’d trust him to be alone in a room with one of your boys, would you?’ this disgusting person was asking the woman.
‘Sinclo – what is this?’
‘You know, surely?’ He smiled.
‘Know what?’
‘There’ve been – er – complaints about Vivyan.’
‘What sort of complaints?’
‘A boy … er …’
Oh, but that’s ridiculous!’ she shouted at him.
‘I know … er … I mean, I …’
‘You drive all the way down here to join that pack of ghouls … All right, Sinclo, I don’t know if he’s your cousin or your uncle, but you’ve known Vivyan all your life …’
‘Er … much of the time … Africa … not very long, actually …’
‘And you know what a good man he is … I don’t think until I came down here I had completely understood what it might be to live a good life.’
‘Oh … no … splendid.’
‘What do you mean, splendid?’
‘I mean, he does splendid work – did … Mad Monk … wonderful.’
‘Sinclo, you are a hypocrite.’
‘Absolutely … I mean, no, no, Rachel, it’s not what you think … I knew nothing of this …’
‘You deny you were snooping and spying on him?’
‘No, I don’t deny that,’ he said, suddenly and surprisingly able to finish a coherent sentence.
‘Clear away now, please!’ some young policeman was shouting.
‘You admit—’
‘Rachel, come away with me.’
The rain poured down his intense, miserable face. She was not sure whether or not some of the drops of water were tears. It was only afterwards that the curiosity began to eat into her – what did he mean by admitting that he had been spying on Vivyan Chell? When he said the words, she understood them to mean that he was snooping for the newspaper … Then again, later, as she mulled over the whole confused ten minutes they spent talking to one another in the rain, she understood his Rachel, come away with me to be another embarrassing declaration of love; but had he perhaps just been suggesting that they leave the arc lights and the hysterical parish women and the angry little crowd, and find shelter from the rain in some pub in the High Road? She had not given him time for explanations.
‘Go away, Sinclo,’ she said, and went back to the vicarage.
Here was a scene of comparable confusion, with photographers going into all the rooms, and snapping the rows of sleeping bags, the many unmade beds, the furniture rescued from skips, the plastic bin bags full of clothes.
Two of the burlier parish workers, one male, one female, were doing their best to get rid of the photographers.
One said, ‘If you do not go freely, we shall have to call the police.’
‘You go ahead,’ said one of the snappers as he pointed the camera at these justly furious people and took their pictures.
Watching the photographers go about their work, Rachel asked herself how she could ever have taken money to work for a newspaper. They barged and shoved and kicked.
‘Would you please leave,’ asked Heather, one of the parish workers.
A mustachioed little snapper in an anorak ignored her words completely and shouted to one of his underlings, ‘What about the kitchen? We have
n’t done in there.’
The large kitchen, by contrast with some of the scruffier rooms in the house, was always kept in apple-pie order. The floors and surfaces were clean. The high tea which was always served after the evening mass was in the process of being prepared, and various huge saucepans of boiling vegetables were on the vast caterer’s stove. There was a pleasing smell of cottage pie.
‘Try upending the rubbish bin,’ shouted the photographer to his assistant, who shoved past the cooks to a dustbin full of potato peelings, cabbage stalks and empty tin cans. He proceeded to do just that – to upturn the rubbish all over the floor. This gesture elicited the inevitable – Rachel considered, the appropriate – response: Lance, one of the kitchen assistants, a nice young black boy from one of the neighbouring estates, tried to restrain the hooligan who was upsetting the dustbin; another young man, one of the asylum seekers, grabbed the camera from the snapper’s hand and hurled it to the ground. He then took a wooden meat-mallet from a hook on the wall and began to smash the camera.
Someone had already called the police – or perhaps the police had never gone away – for several officers now came into the kitchen. They began manhandling Lance, and taking a statement from the photographer about the wilful damage to his property.
