Realms of Glory: (Lindchester Chronicles 3)

by Catherine Fox

  ‘Yeah!’ Leah loves how Lydia instantly gets things. Nobody else at QM plays games any more. It’s like there’s a rule against it.

  There’s literally no wind today. It’s very quiet. Now and then a nut patters down.

  ‘I so wish Wilkos would sell us fireworks,’ says Lydia. ‘Sparklers, even.’

  ‘I know. Still . . .’ Leah delves into her bag. ‘Ta dah! Wanna Tangfastic?’

  ‘What the—?’ Lydia sits up. ‘Did you pay for those?’

  ‘Course I paid for them,’ lies Leah.

  ‘I didn’t see you.’

  ‘We’re not exactly joined at the hip, Lydia.’ Suddenly she hates the sight of the sweets. ‘I could of bought them another time.’

  ‘Yeah, but you didn’t, though,’ says Lydia. She says it kindly, not meanly.

  ‘Whatever.’ Leah tosses the stupid packet away on the side that isn’t their garden. It lands somewhere in the undergrowth. ‘I only do it to master sleight-of-hand skills. Like, very occasionally.’

  ‘Yeah, I get that, but couldn’t you learn magic tricks, instead? There are these like UNBELIEVABLE magic tricks on YouTube? This guy at a wedding—’

  ‘FINE. I’ll learn magic,’ snaps Leah. God! Some people can be so judgementalist.

  ‘And he goes up to the guests—’

  Though to be fair, Lyds isn’t judgementalist. She’s cool. Plus she never tries to make Leah feel stupid by going Ha ha! at a mistake, or calling her a baby for not knowing stuff.

  ‘—and then next thing, there was literally a cross drawn on the girl’s hand? And everyone was NO! Seriously, it was so unbelievably awesome. We should try it.’

  Leah’s heart does a massive thump. She could casually mention him. Casually say his name. She flicks a beechnut shell off the roof.

  ‘Uh, so actually, a friend of mine’s – Freddie’s – boyfriend, he does magic?’ She clears her throat. ‘So he did some at Freddie’s surprise birthday party? That I went to. And it was awesome.’ Leah’s face is burning. But Lydia doesn’t say, Ha ha, you’ve gone all red!

  ‘Wait! Freddie from the cathedral choir? NO!’

  ‘Yeah. How . . . ?’

  ‘Who led the singing at our Leavers’ service? Omigod! Why didn’t you tell me you actually know him? I am so in love with him!’

  Me too. She could say that. ‘Yeah, well, he has a boyfriend.’

  ‘So? I still fancy him. Everyone fancies him. Mum says she even fancies him – and she’s a lesbian. Ha ha ha! What? What’s the big deal? It’s OK to be attracted to people, Leah.’

  ‘I know it’s OK,’ snaps Leah. ‘I’m not stupid.’ Her mum’s a lesbian? Wait. So that grumpy-face woman, Helene, who was so blah-blah-blah about everything that time Leah accidentally got Freddie into trouble, she must be like Lydia’s mum’s—? Wife?

  ‘I’m attracted to like loads of people,’ Lydia is saying. ‘It’s really random.’

  And then – for no reason at all! – Leah starts to cry. Stupid, stupid, stupid. But she can’t stop.

  ‘Leah, what’s wrong?’ Lydia puts an arm round her shoulders. ‘Did I upset you?’

  ‘No,’ chokes Leah. ‘It’s just. Everything’s. Rubbish.’ And she hiccups it all out. How she’s got to move back to Cardingforth after half-term, just when finally she’s happy in her life. Nobody listens to her. And Mum’s acting all betrayed: You’d rather live with your father, is that what you’re saying? And although it’s dumb, she just can’t make herself not be in love with you know who, and—

  A car pulls up on the drive. ‘Crap!’ Leah wipes her nose on her sleeve. She grabs Lydia’s arm. ‘You can’t tell anyone that last bit. Swear!’

  ‘I swear.’

  Jess’s tiny sweet Snow White voice goes, ‘Bye, Madge! Thanks, you’re the best!’ The car door slams.

  ‘Quick!’ They toss their schoolbags into the garden and jump down off the roof.

  ‘Are you OK, Leah?’ Lydia squeezes her arm as they hurry to the house.

  ‘Yeah.’ She wipes her nose on her sleeve again. ‘Thanks. Probably it’s just puberty. Yada-yada.’

  ‘Hair starts sprouting in new places!’ says Lydia brightly, like an infomercial. ‘It’s NORMAL! It’s nature’s way of preparing your body – TO TURN INTO A GIANT HAIRBALL!’

  ‘WITH BOSOMS!’

  Then they are literally crying with laughter.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ asks Jess.

  ‘Oh, you wouldn’t understand,’ gasps Leah. ‘Go and get changed, coz we’re going over to Lydia’s. She’s got to walk Dora.’

  ‘Yay!’ says Jess. ‘I love Dora! I so wish we had a dog. I’m going to ask Santa for a puppy for Christmas!’ She skips off.

  Leah and Lydia exchange glances.

  ‘It’s OK. She’s not having puppies,’ says Lydia quickly. ‘I’m totally, totally almost one hundred per cent certain.’

  Suddenly Leah thinks of something. Oh God. Don’t let us meet Chloe and Cosmo in the park. Because Jess is bound to say, ‘Yay! You’re Ambrose’s cousin! We met you at Freddie’s party!’ or something dumb. Then Chloe would recognize her this time for sure.

  But then Lydia makes her snort by saying, ‘In other news, a giant hairball with bosoms was sighted in QM Girls today! The public are warned not to approach it!’

  You will see that my rescue package for the Rogers family has gone awry. Leah was right. It’s not that simplistic. Martin and Becky finally had their awkward meeting in Nero’s last week, to talk about The Way Forward. They are still trapped in the binary world of break-ups, which decrees that relations must either be Amicable or Acrimonious. Of course, they both tried to be amicable, but before long, the conversation was like sticking your hand into a bag of scissors again.

  Poor Becky had to stop the car in a lay-by and cry on the drive back to her parents. How, how was she ever going to cope? Even with medication, even now Mum and Dad had sorted her finances out for her. That horrible house. It smelt of misery. She knew she’d be fighting Leah every single day. I’m not going back there. You can’t make me. I’ll run away. Poor Jess was bed-wetting again. Becky had failed as a mother. But she couldn’t live without them! Couldn’t bear to let them go.

  Poor Martin also had a little weep as he walked back to his office in St James’s church. He knew he’d failed as a husband – although he’d never quite worked out what he’d done wrong. Just been the wrong person? Well, he knew it was over. He’d had to explain to Jess that Mummy wouldn’t be moving back in. Leah already realized. Oh, why was it, a year after the decree absolute, that a part of him still wanted to love, cherish, protect? It was like being left with a sad little clock, wound up years before. He could hide it away in a drawer with the wedding album, but it would go on and on ticking, until it finally wound down and stopped. Without the girls in the house, all he would be able to hear was that tick-tick-tick. How could he bear to be on his own all over again?

  The red and gold river of Christmas merchandise is joined by an orange and black tributary. It’s cobwebs and pumpkins as far as the eye can see. The fancy dress shop in Lindford is already doing a brisk trade. Homeowners are bullied into buying tubs of ‘candy’ for ‘trick’n’treaters’. Gene suggests loading a blunderbuss with gobstoppers and discharging it at any chancers on the deanery doorstep. The dean vetoes this, but agrees to sidestep the whole issue by going out on Hallowe’en. To a Michelin Star restaurant.

  Lift up your eyes. The church’s new year, Advent, is in sight. Candles have been ordered. Our year in Lindchester is nearly done. Already the first fireworks are going off at dusk. A police helicopter hangs over the Abernathy estate most nights, shaking the sky.

  Posters for Haydn’s Creation have been up for some time now. This performance will be the last choral huzzah before half-term. Lindfordshire is out of sync with other regions, just to maximize childcare problems. School and choral half-term will, however, coincide with ‘Employability Week’ at Linden University. This is what it is called. It is not cal
led ‘Blended Learning Week’ any more. Anyone referring to it as ‘Blended Learning Week’ will be birched behind the smoking shack by the pro vice chancellor.

  Fer feck’s sake. Jane knows that if she waits long enough, the wheel of pedagogical fashion will crank round again, and they’ll be back to calling it plain old Half-Term. It’s Tuesday, it’s warm, so she’s taking her Sainsbury’s meal deal into the arboretum. She passes a fence groaning with foliage, and catches the rank hanky-­boiling smell of ivy blossom, which is apparently the insect equivalent of crack cocaine. The air seethes with flies.

  She enters the park, once again passing that blazon of a dead chivalric age, the EU flag. God, she was here right before the referendum, wasn’t she? Had herself a big old prophetic migraine. The sun is glinting off the lake again. She sits on the same bench. Ah! There goes that old kingfisher. God, it’s like nothing has happened. Here she is, trying the same what-if thought experiment. What if Trump gets elected? What if these are the good old days, bad as they are? What if we still don’t know we’re born? She opens her sandwich. This is like in some ghastly political Groundhog Year – hah! If only we could have another try – hundreds more tries – at this nightmare which is 2016 until, chastened, we’ve finally learnt our lesson.

  She sighs and eats her lunch. In the distance she can hear bagpipes. It’s that piper outside M & S. ‘Amazing Grace.’ Huh. A hymn she hasn’t cared for ever since she read about John Newton devoutly holding services on the deck of his slaver, after his conversion. ‘Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.’ Not even the tiniest twang of cognitive dissonance for you there, John?

  But Jane is nothing if not ruthlessly honest. As she stares across the lake, she hears one god almighty twang. Because what about Dr Jane bleeding-heart Rossiter? Donating online to charity from the deck of her luxury cruise ship, with ninety-nine per cent of the world’s population beneath her feet out of sight.

  Fire, fire, fire down below. Yeah. That’s what the piper should be playing.

  It’s Saturday night. Freddie calls round at Ambrose’s coz fine, he’s gonna go to the rehearsal, even if Roger’s there, singing away, sharp as a fingernail down the proverbial blackboard.

  ‘Like I keep saying to Timothy, I’d rather piss on an electric fence.’

  ‘You’ve clearly never pissed on an electric fence, then,’ says Brose. ‘There’s two hundred and twenty volts running through those babies.’

  ‘I so have! No word of a lie. I’d be maybe five, six? My stepbrothers dared me? Said it tickled? Yow! And my dad, he was zero sympathy. If they told you to jump over a cliff, would you?’

  Pause.

  ‘Freddie, just to flag this up with you – you do know your upbringing wasn’t entirely normal?’

  ‘Ha ha ha! True dat.’

  They set off. Half a giant red moon slides up from behind the palace.

  And you do know your dad is a real piece of work, don’t you? Ambrose doesn’t add. He’s been trying to stay aloof from Mr May senior’s machinations, ever since that confidential chat at the funeral. But he can tell he’s being reeled in all the same.

  Chapter 42

  here are strange goings-on up on the Close. If you walk past the Song School, you will hear it. Barking, yodelling, Tarzan yells. Don’t worry. It’s just Mr May rehearsing the girls’ choir. Their first evensong is the week after half-term, and Timothy, the Director of Music, wants to inject a little more fearlessness into their singing. They are perfectly in tune, but still making rather a timid sound unto the Lord. Freddie’s task is to convey to them, by whatever means he chooses, that a bold mistake is preferable to accurate inaudibility.

  How soon girls have their style cramped by fear of making a mistake. Their brothers hurl themselves at life, padded before and aft by the body armour of simply being male. The girls’ choir is wading upstream against the tide of opinion that boys sing better. Let us wish them well, this little band of pioneers. It will take years to make up the lost ground.

  Shall we peep in? The girls – there are fourteen of them – are not behind the tall desks decoding the Lindchester pointing. They are all in the middle of the room with Mr May, dancing. That doesn’t sound like Stanford in G to me. No, I’m afraid it’s ‘Agadoo’. With the actions. Fourteen girls shake that pineapple tree. In a fat man voice! Werewolf voice! Cow falling over a cliff voice! STOP!

  Thank goodness.

  ‘And now . . . Train’s a-coming, ladies! Woo-woo!’

  The girls jump up and down and squee. They’ve been working on this for weeks.

  ‘Ssh! Ready?’

  And they’re off. One group start chuffing. One group are the wheels. My, that’s a powerful steam whistle there! Now the singing starts. ‘“This train is bound for glory, this train.”’ Then they segue into another gospel train song. ‘“People get ready.”’ Then back to the glory train, which chuffs off, forte, mezzo piano, piano, ­pianissimo, into the distance, with one last Woo-woo!

  Timothy, who has come in to take the boring bit of the practice, applauds. Freddie tells the choir they are awesome. He tells them girls rock.

  He walks to Brose’s house. Stanford in G floats out to him across the Close. ‘“My soul doth magnify the Lord.”’ What he wanted to say back there was, listen, don’t be hating on yourselves. Don’t let anyone shame you, and stop you singing and dancing and loving, you hear me? But that’s maybe a bit creepy for a guy to say to young girls?

  His hands are up his sleeves, like he’s cold, but he’s not cold. He can feel the old scars under his fingertips. That time he went too deep, and it wouldn’t stop bleeding? Sitting in A & E, and the staff were all, self-harmer, drama queen, make him wait. They didn’t get how it was a safety valve, a lame attempt to equalize the pressure, and make the outside match the inside. The dark inside of him where nothing was pretty at all.

  Gah, why is he even going there again? Coz now? Life’s good, no? He smiles. That sweet guy of his. They’re heading down south so Freddie can meet his folks this half-term – hnn, could be that’s what’s freaking him out a little. Yeah, plus his dad, with the endless texts. Can you call me, son. It’s important. Probably he should get onto that? Only his dad properly does his head in.

  This Sunday the clocks go back. Where has the year gone? All Friday it stays grey, as though the sun hasn’t ever quite risen. Sumacs and cherries blaze. There is gold above and gold underfoot as Jane mooches round the arboretum at lunchtime, thinking doomy thoughts. This is autumn weather straight from Planet Childhood, when your dad made a bonfire and it was nearly Guy Fawkes night.

  Like childhood, only nowhere near cold enough. Jane can see daisies and dandelions in bloom among the fallen leaves. We are drowsing like frogs in lukewarm water, she thinks. Slowly, ­relentlessly, we will come to the boil. Even if we realize in time what’s happening, there is nowhere left to jump, no handy Goldilocks Planet next door. So let’s go ahead and expand Heathrow. Why not? It’s good for the economy.

  Although it is not half-term here in the diocese of Lindchester, pilgrims come from other realms where schools are shut. Tea lights flicker and prayer requests heap up at the shrine of William of Lindchester. The cathedral shop does a brisk trade.

  I am aware we have not popped in here for some time. Perhaps we have been assuming that we know what merchandise a cathedral shop stocks, and are not in particular need of communion wafers or Holy Land olive wood holding crosses. More fool us. We have deprived ourselves of a range of exciting new treats: Cathedral Honey, made by the dean’s own bees; boxes of locally baked cathedral Billy cakes; bottles of Lindchester Cathedral craft ale.

  Happily, there is still time for amendment of life. Let us go in and buy all of the above, as well as an old-fashioned Advent ­calendar. Perhaps one with Bible verses instead of chocolate behind the little doors, for our greater edification in the approaching Season of Preparation and Hope.

  The bell still tinkles as ever it did as we enter the shop. Small chi
ldren still cluster round the pocket money section. The ­volunteers may look exactly the same to you as they attempt to bubble-wrap your purchase at the till. You probably still grind your teeth as they grope for the Sellotape roll that is too far away – like someone attempting a Grade 3 cross-hands piano piece – fail, and then begin the wrapping process all over again, this time with little tabs of Sellotape laboriously lined up along the counter edge in preparation.

  Nothing has changed, you say? How wrong you are, reader. This cheery amateurism masks the shift towards professionalization that has overtaken the volunteer corps in Lindchester Cathedral during the last two years. One by one the various groups have all been given role (not job) descriptions, expected (not obliged) to sign an agreement (not a contract), and invited (not ordered) to participate, where appropriate, in Disclosure and Barring checks. Or get their marching orders.

  Yes, the rot has set in here in Lindchester. It is the same everywhere, this political correctness gone mad. Dean and Chapter have swept aside generations of trust and devoted service. Gone are the happy, innocent days when the cathedral existed for the volunteers, not the other way round; and anyone at all could take unchaperoned minors into a quiet vestry without the finger of suspicion being pointed at them.

  October is nearly at an end. It is Saturday night. Trains to Lindford are packed with zombies and nurses. Everywhere you look there are ashen faces dripping blood. The living dead spill out onto the streets, trailing bandages. It looks like the end of the world. Vampires and devils prowl. Perhaps hell has opened and the earth given up its dead?

  The crowds that gather on the Close for the long-awaited performance of Haydn’s Creation are not in costume – unless by some collective intuition they have all decided to come dressed up as life members of the National Trust. There was some concern voiced that the timing of the concert would prove unfortunate, since they would be competing with Hallowe’en festivities. This fear was soon dismissed. A Venn diagram showing the set of people who enjoy Cathedral Community Choir performances of Haydn, and the set of those who enjoy drinking blue kamikaze shots out of skull glasses while dressed as Donald Trump, would produce but the tiniest of intersections.