by A. N. Wilson
The concealment had been done with some skill. Joan Fenton, sixty-seven, a housewife, had been the first to complain of the smell, but her husband, Pat, a solicitor’s clerk in Greenwich until retirement two years previously, had assured her that all the huts smelt damp – it had after all been raining for the better part of twelve months. It was the scuffling of the rats which persuaded him that he was wrong. Once they began to suspect what had been placed beneath the floorboards of their hut, Joan had warned him not to go on. Pat, Pat, she had urged, ring the police – don’t look, Pat, it might be … Joan had known how her sentence would end, so she had not ended it. But Pat, stubborn as ever, wouldn’t take advice, not from her, chance’d be a fine thing, and had gone on, wrenching and prising and swearing at splinters in his thumbs until the plump, insolent gnawing rats had been revealed, scampering over what remained of Sol Farr’s face. Whoever had done that, Joan always said afterwards, had Pat’s stroke to answer for as well as the old railwayman’s murder. But they never did find out who had done it. And that, anyway, belonged to the sunlit period of Indian summer after this story is over. We find ourselves in the allotments when they were Crickleden’s wetlands; when paths were liquid mud, and when the planks laid down in parts to facilitate walking were themselves slimy and hazardous, when canes, plants, bushes and leaves were splattered with a sooty black ooze.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Rachel Pearl had called at the vicarage, at Mrs d’Abo’s, at Mercy Topling’s house, but none of them knew the whereabouts of Peter d’Abo. Odder, given the painfulness of the circumstances, none would admit that they did not know. Mrs d’Abo was withdrawn, crushed, hesitant.
‘I say arl I garter say,’ she had repeated several times.
The same misconception was apparent in the daughter’s much more aggressive response to Rachel’s enquiries.
‘Don’t you think you people have done enough?’
‘I’m sorry. Which people?’
‘So you should be sorry …’
‘Look, Mrs Topling – Mercy …’
‘I’m not helping you – is that clear? I’m not telling you anything.’
The scene, at the Toplings’ maisonette in Streatham, was one of unrelieved desolation. Trevor, the husband, was slumped in a chair, on one arm of which a metal ashtray overflowed volcanic quantities of stubs and grey dust. His brown crinkly socks stretched useless before him. He looked as if he had no intention of getting up from that posture. He stared, wordless, into the middle distance as his wife spoke out, spoke up.
‘This whole thing has just got so out of hand. Talk about a stitch-up!’
‘I’m not stitching anyone up.’
‘You know who he was working for? All the time, he’d told my mum he was working in a posh restaurant and he was working for your boss.’
‘I don’t have a boss.’
‘Oh yes you do.’
‘Look, if you think I’m a journalist …’
‘Like that other one – ever so smooth, handsome, posh. He’s good-looking, I’ll give him that. Now he’s staying at the vicarage, saying he wants to “help out” – when we all know he works for Dr Arbuthnot’s Diary. I mean, just how stupid do you think we are? Okay, pretty bloody stupid if you judge us all by my mother.’
‘I’m not a journalist. I used to work for The Daily Legion. I don’t any more.’
‘That’s just what he says.’
‘Who says?’
‘That public schoolboy, the one I said – he’s good-looking. Lovely hair.’
‘There’s been a terrible misunderstanding.’
‘Too right there has.’
‘I’m not the person who … Look, if you’d just listen for a minute, I want to help Vivyan. I know I can clear his name, but we must get hold of your son …’
‘You know what they started saying now?’
‘Who?’
‘Peter – before he left. Lucius. Brad.’
She pointed at her husband.
‘I know that man – he’s not a child-molester. That’s what I mean by it all spiralling out of control. First we find that Peter’s working for Lennox Mark. Then the accusations start flying around – first it’s Father Vivyan. Then it’s Trevor. They actually accused Trevor …’
‘Your other two sons, they said that Trevor …? I’m sorry, I don’t follow this …’
‘Peter put them up to saying it, I’m sure of that. I’m not saying Peter’s blameless, but what I am saying is that he is vulnerable. This whole thing’s made him worse – stands to reason it would, someone like him. Someone in his condition. But where’s a social worker when you need one? We had one – Kevin Currey – he was on Peter’s case, though if you ask me he made it worse not better. Then – nothing for weeks. Then we heard, it was terrible, he’d met with an accident. I still think they should have put another social worker on Peter’s case. As for what that paper has done to my mother …’
TWENTY-EIGHT
The cemetery wall divided growing plots from burial plots. In many places, though, its jerry-piled stock brick had collapsed, so that amid the brambles it was hard to know where the allotment ended and the huge municipal graveyard began. Since the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, south Londoners had been mulching the acreage. The sodden paths where unswept leaves were squelched into mud led to a variety of graves – headstones, marble crosses, angels with outspread wings – but the attempts to suggest individuality in death had as the years went by produced an impression of sameness. Here and there, gestures towards grandeur had been essayed. A terracotta bas-relief, a miniature obelisk, even a pyramid could be found among the undergrowth. And down one edge, beyond the nondescript slabs, was a row of mausolea resembling a parade of little houses, made of marble, or granite. The family name would be carved over the jamb of these bizarre edifices: SOSKICE – WHEELER – AMLOTT. None of the nobility lay here. The vaults represented the sense, here of a prosperous grocer, there, ‘SPINELLI’, of a restaurateur, there of a doctor, here of a factory-owner, that, if they had to lie in death with the anonymous rows of their clients and employees, whose very names were now illegible on skewed stone, they might, these richer ones, continue, even in death, to mark themselves out, to cut a dash. Inside, as you could see if you peered through the grilles in the doors, the dead, in their coffins, were stacked on shelves up the wall in an arrangement reminiscent of the old couchettes in transcontinental trains. These vaults were themselves in various stages of decay and in many of them the locks on the doors were broken. Some of them had been boarded up by the local authority, but to those with a mind to penetrate, there was not much difficulty in wrenching a board, cutting some wire or forcing a bolt. Some of the cave artists who had adorned the bandstand in the adjacent park had been here spray-painting their allegations about the auto-eroticism of characters – Del, Leroy, Jake – themselves already as anonymous as the forgotten dead who lay in multitudes around.
Since the police raids on the camper-vans in the drive of the priest’s house, a number of the young men had found these vaults a suitable temporary abode. The police had found many rifles, machine-guns, pistols, but not all, and luckily O’Sullivan, their contact in South Norwood, still held on to the bulk of the explosives. Without Father Vivyan, their possession of this arsenal was, besides, if not quite pointless, then without any immediate reason or justification. For most of the young men, the fun consisted in the accumulation of the weaponry, the secrecy of it, the combat training, rather than in any specific goal. Tuli, the young lunatic, had tried to persuade them that they should take revenge for the priest’s arrest – perhaps by the assassination of some well-known local figure, or by blowing up a police station. But this was crazy talk. The priest had been arrested – then the police let him go. No one knew where he was, though one of the young monks said Father Vivyan was ill and had been taken to the infirmary in his monastery. The Kosovans, together with their rag and tag of newly accumulated friends – a Bulgarian called Grigor wh
o had smuggled himself into England buried in a vanload of tomatoes, a mysterious figure called Enver – had dispersed. There was always somewhere else to run to.
The vicarage, quite apart from the presence of police smiles like the man Manners, who was now working for military intelligence, was no longer a good place to be. The two young monks who were running the parish had put locks on the front door, and bolts on the back. The Gentlemen of the Road were directed to a hostel which the monks had set up in the parish hall, run by the volunteers who slept in the vicarage. There were some immigrant families being accommodated in the drive, but no illegals, no seekers.
It was Thimjo, in effect their platoon commander, who had seen the necessity, before they all dispersed, of finding somewhere local to store the remaining armaments, and, vitally important this, of finding an individual who was prepared to act as the arsenal’s custodian. The ideal person would be one who was not afraid of solitude, not afraid of sleeping rough. One of the tramps would probably have fitted the bill admirably. Then came the newspaper articles. And suddenly the boy wanted out. Tuli needed to take cover. To go underground. Tuli wanted to hide, Thimjo wanted a guardian of the armoury. The huts in the allotments were an obvious place to hide both boy and guns, at least until the weather improved. After several days of watching, it had been decided the allotments were safe. They had commandeered three huts. One of these had been emptied of rakes, forks and spades and filled to near bursting point with weapons. Another had made a good enough place for general stores – stolen tins of food, a camping stove, rudimentary cooking implements. There was even a toilet in a small brick enclosure, but after one of the Albanians pulled the chain too roughly, this broke and the pan soon became blocked and stinking. In the largest of the huts, a number of them stretched out in sleeping bags and slept – until the old man came and found them. After they’d concealed him beneath the floorboards, they completed the risky job of moving the guns back to the mausolea.
TWENTY-NINE
She had told her over and again, but there was no chance of Rachel persuading Mercy. The last few months had obliterated Mercy’s trusting nature, destroyed her capacity for optimism. The boy’s madness – no point, any more, in beating about the bush, this was what it was – had infected all of them. Mercy herself, whose gift for happiness through thirty-eight years had derived from her certain, laughing knowledge of her own sanity and good sense, had, even she, begun to be tainted by it. The boys had, after a childhood of football, videos, fun, lost sight of their own boyishness and learnt to be conspirators, to play at criminality, to swear. Their accusations against their own dad had poisoned the atmosphere.
Lily, silly Lily as Mercy had so often meanly (though in the secrecy of her own thoughts) dubbed her mother, had performed the ultimate madness of talking to the press, and thereby she’d made it impossible for Mercy to talk to her. Mercy wasn’t being vindictive. She hoped, believed, that one day she’d be able to talk to Lily again, but just for the moment – no. It was not a question of forgiving her mother, it was that Lily had projected them all into a narrative which was not real. You couldn’t go into that story, even to contradict it, without taking off into lunacy.
So, outgoing, smiling, laughing Mercy had become cautious, half-paranoid and angry. She did not really believe that Rachel Pearl was not after her for a story. There was, anyway, more going on here. Mercy half disbelieved Rachel’s story that she was a reformed journalist who merely wanted to clear Vivyan’s name and, if possible, help Peter. The half of Mercy which believed this story resented it. She sensed that Rachel was in love with Vivyan, or obsessed by him in the way that so many of his devotees were. Rachel obviously, therefore, resented the stuff in the Legion about his having made advances to Mercy. What wouldn’t Rachel do – this Mercy thought – for what she had seen and had?
Mercy’s caginess with Rachel concealed, therefore, a multitude of thoughts. Rachel had worked on the Legion – she knew that Peg Montgomery cow, the nice boy who was living in the vicarage: for all Mercy knew, she’d been one of the girls who’d had her bottom pinched in the lift by L.P. She resented this woman with her pert, knowing, educated manners, presuming to be the one who ‘saved’ the priest – saved the boy.
‘He doesn’t have,’ Rachel was pressing in her enquiry, ‘some special friend, a girlfriend maybe, where he’s staying?’
‘I’ve told you. I don’t know where Peter is …’
‘He must be feeling … my point is, he must know that the stories in the Legion were untrue. All he has to do now is say so …’
That ‘all’ was annoying. Mercy looked at Rachel, took in not merely her neatly cut hair, her pallor, her seriousness, but also her need to sort and tidy and boss. Mercy wanted to scream: ‘It’s my boy you are talking about – my son! And possibly his father – and you’re talking about the situation as if you could just bustle in and sort it.’
‘Of course,’ Rachel said, ‘if I hear anything, I’ll let you know.’
Mercy made her voice deliberately vague; she said, in a sort of sigh, ‘You won’t find him,’ but she couldn’t keep from this assertion a certain edge, a hint of aggro.
Rachel picked up on this.
‘Oh, I’ll find him,’ she said, with gritted determination.
THIRTY
Who you fucking kidding. You told Mr Fat. That’s how it …
Now wait a minute before you start …
Told Mr Fat it was Father.
Yeah, I was … I was frightened.
You’ll be fucking frightened before I done with you.
… before you start attacking him, wait. Quiet. Calm …
… Blessed Mary ever Virgin, Blessed Michael the Archangel … through my fault, through my fault, through my own most grievous … oh and I served Holy Mass, I confessed it all …
You tell him a loader shit, man – you were both getting off on it, you know that – confession – loader shit.
It was Mr Currey who …
No uphill gardener get near my ass I’m telling you, mate. You hear me – no bum-bandit – if you say, if you so much as say – see this knife? Remember the Paki – slice, slice? Remember that revolting bit of shit, that poof in the multi-storey? Took his balls off for him, dun I? He’s lucky – no listen …
We shouldn’t, you shouldn’t have told Mr Mark it was Father Vivyan when it was Mr Currey –
Listen, fuckface, will you? I’m telling you he’s lucky I never cut his cock off ‘n’ all for him, know what I mean.
A custom, if I may say so, sir, more honoured in the breach than in the observance.
If you say so, Jeeves. I say, Jeeves …
If you would like one of my snifters, sir …
… through Jesus Christ our Lord, by whom and in whom and with whom …
In the darkness of the WHEELER family mausoleum, Peter d’Abo sat cross-legged in a black plastic bin bag, the best way to keep dry. The blanket round his shoulders was damp. He lifted aloft the bottle of vodka, half-empty. ‘Looking up to Heaven to you His Almighty Father …’
Often, when swigging, he became a priest at the altar, drinking from the consecrated chalice. At such times, his head filled with an image, as vivid as a film, of Father Vivyan, his closely shaven cheeks, his high colour, draining the sacred cup and then wiping it with a white cloth.
He thought, on such occasions, of the mass when the priest had blessed him. Had he been crying out? Shouting? Or had the priest simply known of his need for such a blessing? He remembered the heat which passed from the priest’s hands into his head as he placed his hands on him, and the sensation of calm, hypnotic calm, which followed.
She’d been there that night, the woman from the Legion. All the trouble started – Rachel she was called – when she came from the Legion and started to live in Father’s house. Jew. All the newspapers, all the TV stations, all the media in the world was controlled by the Jews: The Daily Legion, Radio Five Live, Hollywood – they wanted to get inside your head. He’d
seen her looking at him, that Jew – seen her looking. She wanted more than what they all wanted. Didn’t just want him to fuck her stupid, fuck her ass, fuck her face – that was obvious, any stupid fucking cunt could see that – she wanted more. Wanted inside him, inside his head. Wanted to seize the controls, work the dials, hack in. And that was where she was going to be disappointed, that little yid. He’d heard Mary Much and Martina talking about her, knew her game. Whore, they’d called her. He’d give her whore. Knew her type. Fucking spy. Spying on Father Vivyan. Everything went wrong once she came. The police raids on the camper-vans. The arrest of Father Vivyan. The dispersal of the guns. Shooters. Nice shooters. Good word, shooter. Give a shooter to Lucius and Brad, get them to shoot fuckface Trevor. Take it to school. Take it into a classroom. WHAM! Fuck, man …
Grant by the mystery of this water and wine …
He wiped his mouth on a sleeve and screwed up the bottle again.
… that we may come to share in the divinity of … Tuli!
Yes, Father?
Tuli! Can you hear me?
Yes, Father. Speak.
You see that big shooter?
