Unholy Dying

by Robert Barnard

  “No, I’m not,” said Cosmo, who would have preferred to kick him in the face.

  “Because she’s not coming back here and pushing me out of my bedroom. You don’t want her back, Mum, do you?”

  “No, Lennie darling. There’s no question of that. Julie’s in some kind of trouble—”

  “Well, that’s no surprise. But it’s not our business. Have you told him that?”

  “Yes, we have, Lennie.”

  “And you got the message?”

  “Yes,” said Cosmo obediently.

  “Well, that’s all right then.”

  And he banged the door shut and went up the stairs two at a time. Mr. and Mrs. Norris looked at each other, apparently pleased with themselves. They’d done what Lennie wanted. Cosmo was used to the extremes of human oddity and perverseness, and he was beginning to get the idea that Julie had been thrown out of this house so that her kid brother could have a room big enough for his train set. He, schooled in the tabloid gutter, could believe such an absurdity. It was another piece in what was proving to be a very interesting little jigsaw puzzle.

  • • •

  “Just fetching something I’d forgotten,” shouted Derek Jessel as he came through the front door and scaled the stairs.

  The fact that the something he’d forgotten was condoms he did not mention. When he had slipped a packet into his briefcase, he dashed down again, but paused at the sitting room door. Then he poked his red shock of hair through the door and said to his wife, “Heard something about your Father Pardoe today.”

  Janette Jessel sighed. She was eating soup and a roll, as she generally did at lunchtime, and she did not look up.

  “He’s no more mine than he is yours,” she said, “but go on, tell me, because you will anyway.”

  “A priest is always a woman’s rather than a man’s person. He’s all the women’s pet. Anyway, Ben Lucas has been going regularly to this quack in Pudsey, acupuncture or something, and he’s seen him twice, walking off his midday meal. Apparently that’s where he’s holed up: Burton Avenue.”

  “Well?”

  “Odd place for a spiritual retreat.”

  Janette Jessel turned away and looked out her back window in irritation.

  “It’s pretty generally known there’s some kind of inquiry going on. That doesn’t mean he’s guilty. I’m absolutely sure he’s not—and that’s based on knowing him a lot better than you do.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t quarrel with that. Still, it’s pretty funny spreading a lie like that, isn’t it? The Church and all that?”

  “That sort of thing happens when you’re trying to be kind. If you’d been caught cooking the books, you’d be quite happy if they spread the story that you’d been overworking and needed a rest, wouldn’t you?”

  “No chance of that,” said Derek, a false heartiness in his voice. “Straight as a die, you know me.” But he thought it was prudent to take himself off before she could reply.

  Left alone, Janette put the spoon down beside her half-finished soup and wiped the corners of her eyes. It was the hypocrisy and double-dealing of her husband that she . . . she nearly thought “hated” but substituted in her mind the word “despised.” There must be some sort of jealousy of Father Pardoe based on women making a lot of him, fussing over him—above all looking up to him and respecting him. That’s what must rankle: the respect. When she thought about Derek’s own personal conduct—his lying, his women, the dodginess of his business dealings—then the contrast with Father Pardoe made it even more stunningly clear that he must have been wrongfully accused.

  She had once been in the house when Derek had thought she was absent, and she had heard him talking on the phone to Conal Leary, his fellow adulterer and bullshit artist, a man absolutely after Derek’s own heart. She’d heard Derek talking about one of his women—she couldn’t now remember which, and it really didn’t matter. After a bit Leary must have mentioned her, because Derek, laughing, had said, “Janette? What can she do? Anyway, she’s got nothing to complain about. She’s got a good Catholic marriage.”

  The phrase had gone through her like a knife—still did when she thought about it.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Faithful

  Sunday Mass at St. Catherine’s was drawing to a close. Father Greenshaw, standing in for Father Pardoe as he had for the past four weeks, thought it had gone beautifully. He was a slim man in his late twenties, with dark curly hair and plump cheeks that gave him the look of a cherub. His religion was for him a thing of beauty—of sights and sounds that plucked aesthetic chords, aroused pale, earthly intimations of future heavenly experiences beyond human understanding. The church at Shipley—mid-Victorian Gothic at its least inspired—gave few such intimations of itself, but Father Greenshaw was conscious that the way he orchestrated and led the worship there was providing his flock with an experience superior to anything they had known under the leadership of Father Pardoe.

  For Father Greenshaw was ambitious not only for the greater glory of God, but for the advancement of himself. In fact, the two things inevitably went together in his mind: it followed that, for the Lord’s praise to be magnificently conducted, he himself must gain advancement to a position of influence. At his age a permanent position at a parish as important as St. Catherine’s was hardly to be thought of, and yet . . . and yet . . . the shortage of new priests was chronic and endemic. God’s ways were beyond scrutiny. And what a good thing it would be for the parish!

  He advanced a few steps to give the blessing, like a Victorian prima donna preparing to sing the final rondo.

  “Silly bloody pillock!”

  Conal Leary, on one of his occasional attendances at church, hissed the words to his wife. Mary Leary hushed him, and suppressed that part of her mind that agreed with him. The disloyal thought had occurred to her earlier in the Mass that Father Greenshaw reminded her of a camp hairdresser. She thought it must be Marco at Snip ’n’ Set, a few years back. He hadn’t lasted long. Not at all suitable for Shipley. She shut her eyes to obliterate the picture of Father Greenshaw and to concentrate on the words.

  Mass over, the congregation moved toward the main door, the Leary family toward the rear, having sat as usual near the front in a pew that Con’s father had considered his own private property.

  “Current laddo’s a bit of a ponce,” muttered Con Leary in his wife’s ear. She agreed, but gave the tiniest of nods. “Not a patch on Father Pardoe.”

  “No.”

  “Currently holed up in Burton Avenue, in Pudsey, so Derek Jessel tells me.”

  Mary Leary made no reply, not even a shadow passing over her face. But as they slowly advanced, greeting friends, she thought she heard the name Leary, and then definitely heard the words “involved with the Norris girl too,” whispered but distinct. This time an expression of pain did briefly come into her eyes, but she put it from her. Probably the sort of silly rumor that was accumulating around Julie Norris’s name. And even if it were true, rumors about her husband had reached her so frequently that she had developed a hard carapace to cope with them.

  Father Greenshaw was quick to leave the church by the back door and mingle with a selected few among the faithful in the churchyard. The young he had given up: he knew he did not go down well with hormone-happy teenagers, and he did not regret it. It was their parents and grandparents who mattered in the parish: they were the people with the clout. And it was the men, ultimately, who mattered most, and he tried hard with them, though he had to admit in his innermost heart that he found things easier with the women, particularly the older ones.

  “He tries hard, poor lamb,” said Janette Jessel to Mary Leary, standing in the nearly warm sunlight. It wasn’t necessary to specify who she was talking about. They looked in his direction: he was talking to Conal Leary.

  “He tries a bit too hard,” said Mary Leary. “During Mass I suddenly thought of Marco at Snip ’n’ Set. He’ll get nowhere with Conal, I’m afraid.”

  “He doesn’t
take to him?”

  “Not a bit. Nor the children either.”

  Janette shook her head.

  “He should be in a small parish at his age. Learning what it’s all about. Shipley isn’t exactly the deep end, I know, but he’s out of his depth.”

  “But you can’t get the priests these days, can you? There’s so few have the vocation.”

  “No, it’s sad.” Janette took a deep breath and voiced her fears. “I sometimes think that Father Pardoe may be the last of the old-style priests we have.”

  Mary’s face twisted into a grimace.

  “Please God, that isn’t so. And please God, he comes back to us, and soon.”

  Mary’s eye was caught by activity in a far corner of the churchyard; her son, Mark, was talking to Lennie Norris. Janette’s eyes followed hers.

  “I didn’t see the Norrises at Mass. It’ll be the first time in months if they were there.”

  “It wouldn’t worry me if it was months before we saw them again. Personally, I blame them for . . .”

  She didn’t need to say what she was thinking. Janette took a tougher line.

  “I would blame them if I thought there was anything in it. But I’m sure there isn’t.”

  “Of course you’re right. It’s pure malice. I’m sure that’s the conclusion they’ll come to.”

  “Whoever they are.”

  Their eyes, leaving the boys, lighted on their husbands, now chatting together nearby. But on that subject they never talked, prevented either by their loyalty or their shame. Feeling awkward about their silence, they soon separated and made their way home.

  Father Greenshaw was talking to Miss Preece-Dembleby, one of the parish stalwarts. He was impressed by the double-barreled name, and skimmed over in his mind the fact that it was the sort of improbable double-barrel that Prince Charles seemed to have a penchant for. The word “ladylike” might have been coined for Miss Preece-Dembleby. She was by social class perhaps not a lady—the upper classes being thinly represented in Shipley—but she was very like one, and was generally treated as one.

  “A truly lovely service,” she was saying, in her clipped, beautifully enunciated tones, “and beautifully conducted. But of course that goes without saying, doesn’t it? Beautiful services don’t come about of their own accord, do they?”

  Father Greenshaw cast his eyes down to survey the soil. “They have to be led,” he said.

  “Of course they do. You make sure everything is fitting and reverent and grateful to the eye.”

  “Your appreciation is very valuable to me.”

  “And how is the youth club coming along?” Miss Preece-Dembleby suddenly asked. “One wouldn’t want Father Pardoe’s good work to decay while he is in retreat.”

  “Oh, quite nicely, quite nicely. . . . I must go and have a word with—”

  And he hurried away. He was very fond of Miss Preece-Dembleby, but she did have a habit of asking inconvenient questions out of the blue. Older and wiser parishioners could have told him that he had been deceived by her etiolated figure and prissy manner, and had failed to notice the spark of shrewdness in her eyes.

  Miss Preece-Dembleby, her mouth and eyes thoughtful, watched him dither as to which of his congregation he had to have a word with, then turned and left the churchyard to take the road home. Her way coincided for two streets with Janette Jessel’s, and she soon caught up to her.

  “He won’t do,” she announced as she came up beside her. As with Mary Leary, Janette knew at once who she was talking about.

  “No, he won’t,” she said.

  “He’s simply a lightweight, to put it at its kindest. No earthly good in a parish like this.”

  “I’m afraid he reminds Mary Leary of Marco at Snip ’n’ Set.”

  They both laughed.

  “I hope you have absolute faith in Father Pardoe being cleared of those wicked slurs?” Miss Preece-Dembleby demanded.

  “Absolute!” her companion averred. “Provided . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Provided they really try to get to the bottom of them. Provided they really want to find out the truth.”

  “Why would they not?”

  “Because after so many nasty cases, they might just be running scared at the thought of sexual misconduct.”

  “But Father Pardoe is a man of substance, a man one can trust,” Miss Preece-Dembleby said indignantly. “They would be going against the whole wisdom of the parish, our knowledge of him over a decade and more, if they simply assumed the worst. But I do understand your feeling that the affair is being mishandled.”

  “Why is it taking so long?” Janette demanded. “And why do we know of no one in the parish who has been questioned?”

  “Why indeed?” Miss Preece-Dembleby agreed, nodding vigorously. “And who is looking into the matter, and why all the secrecy? It’s pulling the parish apart, you know.”

  “It’s so . . . unusual,” said Janette. “I’ve never been in a parish where anything like this has happened. Who should one go to?”

  Miss Preece-Dembleby thought.

  “We have so little scope in our church for the involvement of the laity. I have a shrewd suspicion that if we tried to make our opinions felt through Father Greenshaw, they would get no further, whatever he might say.”

  “Yes. It’s awful to mistrust a priest, but—”

  “But,” agreed Miss Preece-Dembleby, “that being so, I suppose the only course is to approach the Bishop.”

  They both thought about this unusual step.

  “A petition might be too radical,” said Janette. “It would smack of rebellion.”

  “Yes, we couldn’t have that. The Bishop would be very angry.” Miss Preece-Dembleby thought. “Perhaps a letter. With a note at the bottom saying it had been read to so-and-so and so-and-so, and they agreed with its contents.”

  “That’s a really good idea,” said Janette. “Sort of like a petition but not actually one. You would write it, wouldn’t you? I would be hopeless.”

  “I could have a try.”

  “And we’d need to get some men on the list as well as women. It would look bad otherwise.”

  Miss Preece-Dembleby screwed up her mouth in distaste.

  “Oh, dear—men,” she said.

  • • •

  It was much later in the day, after three drafts and three phone calls to Janette had resulted in a letter she regarded as tolerable, that Miss Preece-Dembleby let her thoughts stray to earlier in the day and to two persons of the male sex. As she had emerged from church she had seen the Norris boy arriving at the churchyard, down the street that led from his home. Later she had seen, in the farther reaches of the churchyard, him and Mark Leary deep in conversation, and she had been puzzled by the sight. Thinking it over, sipping a glass of sherry, she decided there were two things that were somehow not quite right about it: their disparate ages and their disparate tastes.

  • • •

  Cosmo Horrocks had never gone in for “at home” pieces, and if he had been any sort of celebrity he would never have invited a journalist to bear witness to him in his domestic role. Too risky by half. You never knew what children would say. Most of the time they just blurted out the truth. However hard you’d borne down on them, however well you’d kept them under your thumb, somehow they wriggled out from under if there was the stimulus of visitors.

  Sunday lunchtime at their Rodley home was one of the few times that the Horrockses functioned as a family. It usually began with Cosmo in unusually good humor. Sometimes he let it end like that too. Predictability was not the name of his game. Still, he engineered a storm often enough for his elder daughter to have given up working to keep the peace. The tension in his wife’s mouth and eyes, the sometimes white-knuckled grip she had on plates and tureens, showed that she never took his mood for granted. And if today he was unusually sunny of disposition, she knew that must be because he was on to a good story. She had met him first when she was part of such a story, and had marrie
d him in the afterglow of his good mood. Sometimes she wondered how she had stood it for twenty-one years. Early on she had been grateful to him, believed he had “rescued” her. But to rescue someone, you have to bring him or her to something better.

  “Very good,” said Cosmo, pushing away his plate of roast beef with all the traditional trimmings. “As good as Mother made. Except that my mother was a lousy cook, made the worst cup of tea in London, and could even spoil a mug of Nescafé if she put her mind to it. No, I wouldn’t compare you to my mother.” He turned to Samantha and Adelaide. “You’ll be judged against your mother’s standards when you grow up and have families of your own.”

  Adelaide nodded with the solemnity of a twelve-year-old, but Samantha, in a neutral tone that did not conceal the scorn in her voice, said, “Women aren’t judged by their cookery anymore. They’ve got more things in their lives than that.”

  Samantha was of an age when she would, in her words, take no more crap from her father, not even to please her mother, not even for the sake of domestic peace. What can he do to me? she asked herself. You can’t spank a seventeen-year-old girl and get away with it. She’d be down to the police station like a shot—having kneed him in the groin first.

  “Oh, swipe me!” sneered Cosmo. “I’ve been put down by Rodley’s Germaine Greer. If women aren’t judged by how they do household duties then more’s the pity, I say. They should have clung to the things that they can do and not gone hankering after the things they’re hopeless at and always will be.” He turned to his wife, his good humor apparently reasserting itself. “She’s been listening to that daft teacher of hers, whatever her name is.”

  “We can hardly tell her not to take any notice of her teacher,” said Cora, her face a mask, her hands gripping the plates she was taking out to the dishwasher.

  “Can’t we?” Cosmo shouted at her back. “With the sort of mentally subnormal types who go into teaching these days, it’s the best thing we could do. Most of them are only doing the job because nobody else would employ them.”

  “Miss Daltrey is a very good teacher,” said Samantha sulkily. “You wouldn’t know because you never go to parents’ evenings. She’s the best in the school—everybody says so.”