Realms of Glory: (Lindchester Chronicles 3)

by Catherine Fox

  Miss Blatherwick lies awake. Just can’t get comfy. Indigestion. Her hand strays to her stomach. She applies her customary self-control and doesn’t go looking for lumps. If you look for lumps at 3 a.m., you will certainly find them. She is a sensible woman. If she’s no better by Monday, she will make a doctor’s appointment.

  Downstairs her phone rings where it is charging. A phone call at 3 a.m.! Her heart thumps. Bad news. Or a wrong number. Probably a wrong number. But she gets out of bed anyway, puts on her dressing gown and goes to check.

  Voicemail. Unknown number. She listens.

  ‘Miss B? It’s Freddie.’ She hears wailing in the background. ‘Oh God, Miss B, really sorry to do this to you? Probably it’s all fine, yeah? Only we’re making an emergency landing? So just to say, love you? Please tell my people, if – Oh God. OK. Gotta give this phone back now. So yeah, I’ll see you, OK? Love, love, love, love, love.’

  Chapter 2

  t is the Eleventh Day of Christmas. Eleven pipers piping. Listen. Do you hear them? Actually, there is just the one lone piper in the diocese of Lindchester. He busks to shoppers in Lindford in front of Marks & Spencer, drones a-droning, skirls a-skirling. ‘Amazing grace, how sweet the sound.’ At intervals his cheeks pop out spherically like a bullfrog’s. He nods every time a passer-by chucks a coin, but the piping never stops. Rain drips from the vast lit-up snowflakes suspended over the street. In coffee shops people drink festive lattes laced with gingerbread. Christmas music plays on a loop. The baristas are sick of it, sick of Christmas, wouldn’t care if they never heard another Christmas song again, ever. Outside the piper pipes his different tune in the gloom.

  Not long now till Epiphany, when we can dismantle it all, get rid of the tree, wonder what to do with all the cards, sling that nub of pudding nobody’s going to eat, start the New Year properly.

  The Venerable Bea Whitchurch has a knitted nativity set. Walk past number 34 Tennyson Gardens, Martonbury, look down the drive, and you will glimpse the figures kneeling in homage on her sitting–room windowsill. Bea knitted the entire scene ­herself – years before knitted nativities became a thing – for she is a great knitter. Knitting in meetings, on trains, in front of the telly. She carries her big patchwork bag everywhere, some project or other always on the go.

  Perhaps a knitting archdeacon ought to strike dread into the heart? She might not be a cheerful little teapot (short and stout) after all. What if, Madame Defarge-like, she is secretly encoding into that nice snuggly snood the names of clergy lined up for the chop in the new bishop’s reign of terror? Measuring out the yarn of incumbency, and snipping it short! O clergy of the Martonbury archdeaconry, beware! Don’t get on the wrong side of Bea Whitchurch.

  No. It’s no good. Even as I wrote that, I could hear Bea hooting with laughter. Bea doesn’t really have a wrong side. Obviously, she’s capable of being firm when required, and now and then of getting pretty cross. But it’s becoming clear to me that once again I have failed to present you with an archidiaconal monster. We will be seeing more of Bea later. For now, we will leave her to finish that snood. She is making it for someone who said, ‘I love your snood!’ Perhaps this is the thing to beware of with our new archdeacon – admiring her handiwork. If you admire it, she is sure to make you one.

  Miss Blatherwick is not a great knitter. Miss Blatherwick is a great reader. So, naturally, she has a novel with her now as she sits in the doctor’s waiting room. It is Adam Bede, which unaccountably she has never before read. But she is not reading it. Instead, she is staring at the wall and thinking about Freddie’s message. Probably it’s all fine, yeah? And of course, it had been. The plane had landed safely. An engine fault, but no disaster. Dear boy. Dearest boy. He was castigating himself now for scaring her. But Miss Blatherwick would rather a false alarm at 3 a.m. every night till kingdom come than imagine him gone. Just . . . gone. Winking out over the Atlantic, with no warning, no proper goodbye.

  Well, well. This, too, will probably be fine. And if not, well. She is eighty, is she not? She opens Adam Bede to the place she has marked with her bookmark. (Miss Blatherwick does not dog-ear her pages.) It strikes her with sudden clarity that one day she will have read her last book. And if she had enough warning, she might even be aware that she has read her last book. She will close the volume, lay it down, and that will be that. A lifetime of reading concluded. And if this appointment today – probably nothing, probably a false alarm – proved to be the beginning of her end, well, she would have the luxury of choosing her last book. And pondering her last words, too. A blessing not to be underestimated. She would have far more leisure than Freddie, gabbling into a borrowed phone on a plane full of wailing people. Even so, she rather doubted she would come up with anything better than he had: love.

  We enter the Season of Epiphany. O Epiphany, how your currency has been devalued! The market has been flooded with cheap mini-epiphanies, until the word means little more than ‘Omigod! I suddenly saw something in this whole new light?’ Miss Blatherwick, had she been sixty years younger, might have described that insight about reading her last book as an epiphany. Who, outside the church, thinks ‘6 January’ when Epiphany is mentioned?

  Who thinks of star-led chieftains travelling on imagined camels (a cold coming they have of it) seeking the right thing in the wrong place? ‘Where is he that is born King of the Jews?’ Who pictures the other mothers coming to their doorways in Bethlehem to watch the commotion? Wealthy foreigners – what can they want here? The strangers depart into their own country another way. What was all that about? The mothers rock their swaddled innocents as night falls in Ramah.

  The primates of the Anglican Communion worldwide are travelling now. Lo, from the north they come, from east and west and south! They will gather in Canterbury – for a birth or a death? Will this be the point when one last fatal tap is dealt, and the fragile bowl of the Anglican Communion falls apart along the hairline crack of human sexuality? The right tap, dealt at the wrong time? Light a candle, let your prayers gather there too. ‘Dawn on our darkness, and lend us thine aid.’

  But our tale is not concerned with primates. Canterbury lies far beyond the borders of Lindchester. We have local fish to fry. So come, rise up (as you are able) and fly with me again. Let us see how the rest of our old friends are faring. It is Saturday. This being the New Year, rather a lot of them are engaged in some form of exercise. Jane has been for a lumber round Lindford arboretum. Freddie heads out, as ever, on his mental long route to Cardingforth and back.

  This does not surprise us. But who is that, in £200 running shoes with MetaClutch exoskeleton heel and X-GEL comfort, and top-of-the-range compression gear? He fairly bristles with GPS connectivity, motivational music, heart-rate sensor, and all-round general fitness tracking. That’s right. It’s our pal Neil Ferguson. We salute him in his New Year efforts to ward off chunkiness. (‘Am I looking chunky? Do I look chunky to you? Oh my God – you think I look chunky!’) He is taking a little breather now, and sipping his isotonic rooibos, having covered a full kilometre, nearly. Je-sus Christ! He checks his gadgets to see if he’s dying. In his head he’s still that nippy little kid, lethal in the box, demon king of playground fitba. How has this happened to him?

  Father Dominic is not running. Not because he doesn’t need to lose weight – I’ll see your chunky, and raise you mountain ranges of wobbling fattipuffs! – but because he can’t run. Well, he can, but it frightens people. They start jogging alongside with a defibrillator, just in case. No, Dominic is in his basement cranking away on his cross-trainer where nobody can see him, hoping – like the psalmist’s clouds – to drop fatness. Year one of the three-year dieting cycle has commenced.

  Dean Marion is not running, either. She is out on her new bike, toiling along a disused railway track a safe distance from Lindchester. Lord, they say you never forget how to cycle! But the first minutes in the saddle after a thirty-year lay-off can be a bit dicey. It is a very nice bike, a Christmas present from her devoted h
usband. He bought it on condition that he could cycle along behind her, the better to admire her arse. (‘If you admire my arse in padded cycling shorts,’ pants the dean, ‘then you are even sadder than I feared.’)

  And there goes Father Wendy with Pedro, along the banks of the Linden. Pedro is wearing a new tartan jacket. A Christmas present. I can’t make out which tartan from this distance. Hunting Postlethwaite, perhaps. We will just wave as we pass, because I must hurry you to the Close, where something terrifying is happening: Freddie May (back from his run) is odd-jobbing for the vergers’ team by chopping up this year’s cathedral Christmas tree with a chainsaw.

  Argh! I can’t look! But wait – Freddie is wearing gauntlets and proper ear and eye protection. He’s using his power tool responsibly! Is that a metaphor for his life, I wonder? Perhaps Freddie has steadied down and grown up, in the last year. If so, then we may attribute this to the ennobling and refining force of his fin’amor. What acts of chivalry, what ordeals of discipline would Freddie not dare in his quest to win the love of his unattainable mentor? Did he not – at the merest hint of amusement on Dr Jacks’s face – shave off the hipster beard he had grown?

  Freddie finishes his sawing. Now he’s got to take a load of logs over to the wanker’s bishop’s. Man, he hates the guy. But this is like his New Year’s resolution? To not hold grudges. It came to him after the whole emergency-landing situation, the need to not waste his entire life hanging onto the bad stuff. It was kind of dumb, anyway, coz Penelope? She was cool with taking early retirement; so why was Freddie all, I will never forgive the guy for sacking her?

  ‘What was he grinning at?’ asked the bishop’s wife.

  ‘I suspect,’ said the bishop (grinning himself), ‘it was the double entendre.’

  ‘—tendre.’ Sonya was one of those very affirming people who likes to join in the end of sentences. ‘What double entendre?’

  ‘Um, that would be “wood”.’

  ‘Wood?’

  ‘“I’ve got some wood for you; where do you want it?”’

  ‘—want it. Oh!’ Sonya clapped her hand to her mouth. ‘Round the back, please! I said that, didn’t I?’

  The bishop gave a helpless snort. ‘Afraid you did, love.’

  ‘No-ooo! Ha ha ha! I couldn’t work out what was so funny! Cheeky thing! Well, I suppose he’s finally spoken to us. I’ve been praying for that for months.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said the bishop. ‘Maybe you should stop praying now.’

  ‘I can’t. You know me.’

  The bishop gave her a mock stern look. ‘Whose job is it to save people?’

  ‘—ple. I know, I know! Saviour complex! Anyway. Zumba! I’ll just grab my things, and.’ To compensate for finishing the sentences of others, Sonya often left her own incomplete.

  ‘Have fun!’ The bishop listened to her crashing around in the cloakroom. There was an Ow! and a clatter. (Falling squash racquets?)

  ‘It’s huge fun, but I’m rubbish at it!’ called Sonya. ‘I can’t find my. Oh, here they are. Bye!’

  There. Our first proper glimpse of the Penningtons. I rather like them. Bishop Steve did not proceed to spend the next half-hour agonizing over Freddie May. In fact, apart from the nuisance of getting the locks changed on the office, Mr May has barely impinged on the bishop’s notice at all. Instead, Steve went back to drafting the advert for the suffragan bishop of Barcup job.

  And over in Lindford, Matt still hasn’t got round to mentioning the subject to Janey.

  Chapter 3

  iss Blatherwick lies awake in the night again. Tonight she finds herself pondering the idea of glory. There are choristers singing in the playgrounds of yesteryear:

  Glory, glory, hallelujah!

  Teacher hit me with a ruler.

  Ruler broke in half and we all had a laugh,

  And we won’t go to school no more!

  Yes, that would have been a glorious moment, the rod of the school oppressor snapped. But when had that ever happened? No, there was nothing for it but to endure. To yearn for justice, but to endure.

  How the mind wanders. Glory. After decades of sermons, Miss Blatherwick is something of a biblical scholar. Two words for glory: shekinah and kabod. Kabod, if memory serves, means weight. The weight of glory. ‘For our light affliction, which is but for a moment’ – Miss Blatherwick knows her proof texts – ‘worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.’

  Our light affliction. Well, the test results will indicate how light. In emotional ounces and pounds, as it were. And give her a sense of how long the ‘moment’ might be. Months? Years? Perhaps one ought to view all suffering and challenge – indeed, the whole of one’s life – as weight training? She smiles in the dark. Not the absurd body sculpting her dear boy goes in for, but strength training, to prepare for the burden of glory, which might otherwise be impossible to bear. Like glorious vestments worked with gold and jewels, so heavy that they made the wearer wade like a dreamer trying to run . . .

  She has drifted asleep now. Rain taps at her window. The cathedral clock chimes the night away in quarters. It will pass. It will all pass.

  Oh, let it pass! Let this January be over! Dark mornings, dark afternoons. True, the days are drawing out, but in these darkest of weeks the dawn comes a little later each morning. Sunshine lights up the tender red shoots on rose bushes across the diocese. A wren trills the same short phrase over, over. How green the grass is when the sun is so low. The sky of Lindfordshire is marbled with clouds like faded endpapers. On the cathedral flagpole the flag lifts, half unfurling on the slow breeze, then drops again.

  It’s Monday. Neil is driving to the station. He hears it on the radio. No! NO! He’s got to sit on the fecking train to London, trying not to cry all the way to Euston, knowing he’s dead, the ‘starman’, the thin white duke. Oh Jesus, can we not turn this horrible year off and on again?

  ‘Omigod, Bowie! Bowie, Jane!’

  ‘I know, sweetums, I know,’ says Jane. She’s stepped out of a seminar to take the call. ‘I actually shed a tear when I heard. It was my Diana moment. Finally! I must be human after all.’

  ‘I’m going to throw a party,’ says Dominic. ‘This Friday. We can all get pissed and bawl Bowie songs.’

  ‘Count me in.’

  ‘Who even is David Bowie?’ asks Leah Rogers.

  Oh boo hoo. Someone’s died, some old singer from a billion years ago who looks like a weirdo. It’s not like he was your best friend, Father. It’s not like you actually knew him. You can’t love someone you haven’t even ever met. You’re like the girls at school, all literally crying their eyes out about One Direction breaking up. Like who even cares?

  Leah slams the car door. At least Mum’s back tomorrow. Everyone expects their mum to be embarrassing.

  Tuesday. The primates still seethe in the unbearable crucible of prayer. We wait, fingers in ears, for the explosion. For the mass walkout by conservative archbishops. If the vessel holds, what will we find at the end of the process? The famous stone that turneth all to gold? Some panacea, some alkahest to dissolve all difference, all hatred and misunderstanding?

  ‘Shame about Bowie,’ said Bea to her fellow archdeacon as they crossed the Close to the palace. ‘Part of our youth.’

  ‘Yup,’ said Matt. ‘Took me by surprise. How much it rocked me.’

  They passed the cathedral’s west front in silence. They made a comic pair, the two archdeacons of Lindchester diocese. Man Mountain and little teapot. There was always much hilarity – measured in Imperial units of lay-clerk smirks – when the two were in formal procession together.

  ‘I had the haircut,’ said Bea.

  ‘Me too. Wide trousers. The works.’

  ‘Ooh! Lightning make-up?’

  Matt could not deny it. Probably still had the photographic evidence, if he dug around. He rang the palace doorbell.

  The door opened. It was Sonya.

  ‘Oh, hi, guys! Come on in. The others are already.’


  Bea smiled at the bishop’s wife. ‘Happy New Year!’

  ‘—Year!’ agreed Sonya. ‘Hang your things up in the.’

  The archdeacons obeyed, not catching one another’s eye.

  I’ll bloody murder you, Bea Whitchurch, thought Matt.

  I should explain Matt’s last thought, lest the reader fears this tale is about to take a sudden dark twist. Bea Whitchurch has a naughty eye for the foibles of others. It did not take long for Bea to spot the linguistic quirk of the bishop’s wife and point it out to her fellow archdeacon. Matt cannot now un-hear it. Nor can he banish from his mind Bea’s suggestion that if they were cunning, they might be able to lure Sonya into saying a rude word: ‘I’ve been visiting the hospice.’

  The two archdeacons, having hung up their. In the. Went through to the large meeting room (—ting room) (Stop it, Bea!), where the rest of the senior staff were waiting. In accordance with our custom of not intruding into private meetings to take minutes, we will now leave them to it – pausing only to weave in a tiny narrative loose end. Just before the door closes, we will catch sight of Bea handing over that nice snuggly snood to Marion. If anyone needed a nice snuggly snood right now, it’s the dean. The dean will be moved almost to tears. She will put the snood on immediately (conscious of all the folk who needed cherishing with snoods even more than she does).

  Our good friend Marion is struggling this January, I fear. She is weighing up whether to put her weight behind the bishop’s ideas for a restructure, or if she needs to defend the cathedral’s historic independence. At this point, the bishop has merely floated his idea with her. No point taking it to the rest of the senior staff team if she rejects the suggestion out of hand.

  A brief word here about the senior staff team. Its main role is to bypass Bishop’s Council. The composition of these varies from diocese to diocese. Here in Lindchester it is made up of the bishop, the suffragan bishop (situation vacant), the dean, the two (plus two pending) archdeacons, the bishop’s EA (as there is no longer a bishop’s chaplain) and the diocesan secretary. I commend this body to your prayers. The business they transact behind that closed door will impinge upon our tale. We tiptoe back out now, past the red dining room, observing (like good Anglicans) that we preferred the old colour scheme.