Realms of Glory: (Lindchester Chronicles 3)

by Catherine Fox

  Martin brings his girls to the concert. Jess is pestering to go on the next ‘Be a Chorister for a Day’, because she wants to audition for the girls’ choir. Martin says, ‘I’ll look into it and discuss it with your mother.’ He waits for Leah to shout, ‘How come SHE gets to do it?’ But Leah says nothing. Both girls are off to Cephalonia for a half-term holiday with Granny and Granddad, to make up for their rubbish summer. And then they will move back in with their mother. Leah says nothing about this, either. What’s going on in her head? Is she reconciled? Martin can’t tell, but he’s anxious.

  And ‘Mrs Matt Tyler’ is here! This is Jane’s first experience of sitting on the front row with the chain gang, ogling the soloists’ tonsils. During the interval, a select group will be invited for drinks at the deanery. They will take their eye off the time, end up speedily necking their half-finished wine, then clatter back in just as the conductor is about to raise his baton. Jane will sit through the second half cosily pished in a candlelit medieval cathedral, watching the wax form rococo stalactites and listening to gorgeous music – this Mrs Bishop caper isn’t all bad.

  Father Dominic is here with his mum, who likes a bit of Haydn. Dominic has been told his heart is fine, but he needs to go easy on caffeine and alcohol to reduce the risk of another bout of tachycardia. Dull, dull, dull! Still, it beats lying on the cathedral floor thinking you’re about to meet your Maker.

  The lot of lying on the cathedral floor waiting for an ambulance fell instead to the tenor soloist, James Lovatt. Twenty minutes before the concert was due to begin, he bent down to tie his laces, and his back went into spasm. Ruptured disc. Somehow he got to the floor. Whispers, flurried action. He lay behind the screened-off area in the north transept, among the instrument cases. Dimly, through his agony he heard the overture happening. Paramedics. Talking to him. Pain relief. Oh, thank God. This must be an out-of-body experience, he thought. Where was he? His part was carrying on without him, over on the other side. Uriel. ‘And God saw the light was good . . .’ He was floating now. ‘The first of days appears . . . Chaos ends . . .’ Is that me singing? But he was on a stretcher out in the night. No, that can’t be me.

  It was Freddie, of course. Rising to the occasion. He knew the score inside out and back to front. True, he’d been a dick about rehearsals, but it’s not about deserving. As the canon chancellor (sitting on the front row with a Bible commentary hidden under his programme) could have told the precentor’s wife – grace is unmerited, or it is not grace.

  And Freddie just stepped out, and rode it. Spread his wings like Uriel. Like the condors riding those thermals? ‘The heavens are telling the glory of God.’ He could see the world spread out beneath his feet.

  The cathedral is locked now. In the basket by the shrine the prayers wait to be carried to the altar in tomorrow’s Eucharist.

  Please help my son, suffering from cancer.

  We pray for all those in Aleppo.

  Please be with all refugees.

  Tomorrow is the fourth Sunday before Advent. Advent 2016. We will sing our Advent hymns, read those familiar lessons. We will pass once again from darkness into light. Advent is out there, waiting for us. Out there on the other side, after multitudes, multitudes of voters have passed through the Valley of Decision. We will know the answer by then: Trump/Clinton. Either/Or.

  I will stand at my watch-post, and station myself on the rampart;

  I will keep watch to see what he will say to me.

  Pray. Pour out baskets full of prayers. Pray that we will be spared. Fire close at hand. Earthquakes. Wars, rumours of war. We can sing Haydn’s Creation, but there’s no going back to Eden. One by one the species wink out like little lights. Dead as dodos. Gone. Would that even today we knew the things that made for peace.

  People get ready. Vote, pray, weep, march, campaign. Abandon your luggage. Scramble aboard before the gap’s too wide and the train has gone.

  This train is the 20.16, bound for Glory. Calling at Death and Judgement.

  NOVEMBER

  Chapter 43

  ord has got out. Freddie’s performance is being touted as the singing equivalent of a record-breaking standing high jump. To pull off a feat like that without any real preparation! Why, he didn’t even have enough time to race home and change into his soloist’s tails, let alone work on his phrasing!

  There was the usual choral foundation party afterwards, back in the precentor’s house. The precentor issued his customary admonition about it being Sunday tomorrow, please go easy on the salty snacks, gentlemen, they are so dehydrating. He burst into ‘See the conquering hero comes!’ as Freddie entered with Ambrose. Everyone cheered.

  Freddie waved his arms, tried to explain it was no big deal. Yeah, no, no, guys, guys listen, he’d known shedloads of oratorios, like for ever? Since he was a chorister?

  But the gentlemen of the choir only laughed.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Nigel, patting him, ‘it was nothing. Like delivering babies – all in a day’s work for a jobbing lay clerk.’

  ‘Nothing to see here, folks,’ muttered the sub-organist. She was lurking by the drinks table. ‘Nope. Nothing at all freaky about Freddie May and his idiot savant musical memory.’

  ‘Come, come, Iona!’ said the precentor. ‘We must enjoy him while we still can. He’ll be off and away, applying for vocal courses before we know it.’

  ‘Except he’s got approximately two failed GCSEs to rub together.’

  ‘I seriously doubt that will hold him back.’ Giles looked across at Freddie. See the godlike youth advance, he thought. Dash it all. Never say Peter Pan has gone and decided to grow up! He wiped a sentimental tear from his eye, and poured himself another glass.

  It was a champagne moment for Lindchester choral foundation, all right. (That is to say, a supermarket two-for-one Prosecco moment, times being what they are.) Even Laurence, the organist (over in his preferred corner), was looking remarkably cheerful, considering the page-turning fiasco in Part III. Yes, the concert had been triumph snatched from the jaws of mishap. Lindchester would not need to brace itself for the gleeful commiseration from other cathedrals.

  Of course, thoughts were spared for poor James Lovatt, but these quickly deteriorated into competitive slipped-disc horror stories, I’m afraid. How are we to condole with others, if not by helpfully remarking ‘that happened to me once, actually’?

  By one in the morning, everyone had left. The salty snacks had taken their toll. The precentor reeled to his study to cast his eye over the dots for tomorrow’s choral Eucharist, at which he was presiding. There had been no alternative with half-term falling when it did: All Saints was transferred to Sunday, and the Chamber Choir would be singing the traditional All Soul’s Duruflé Requiem this year. Mere anarchy is loosed!

  Uli stood in the kitchen among the champagne flutes and canape wreckage. She folded her arms and scowled. All those singing lessons Freddie had busked through. She could still hear herself saying it: He’s got to learn! Das Leben ist kein Ponyhof ! But she’d been the one treating life like a bloody pony farm. Schooling him like a naughty horse, reining him in, making him walk in boring little circles, when all the time he was desperate to gallop. Huh! Or prance about like a sodding Lipizzaner stallion.

  Ach, Gott! She was a bad woman. She’d half-known she was being unreasonable at the time. But grr, she could sympathize with poor Salieri in Amadeus. What had he said? How dare God choose for his instrument a lustful, smutty, infantile boy? Something like that. She’s wasted her opportunity. She should have used the time to polish his German pronunciation, and turn him loose on Winterreise. Or start tackling Wagner, even!

  As Uli stood castigating herself in the quiet kitchen, something oozed out from a tiny gap under the dresser. Her hands flew to her mouth. Nein! Before she could move, the creature snatched a fallen grape, stowed it away in his furry hamster chops, then squeezed back the way he had come.

  Here the reader may discern the author at work, contriving happy en
dings again. See? Boris I is not dead after all! This is a world where small rodents may escape the claws of fate. They may establish the Republic of Free Hamsters in the floor and roof spaces of medieval canonical houses, roaming freely about the Close, knowing no boundaries. Hamsters are one thing, humans another entirely, however. That said, hamsters are tricky enough, come to think of it, as anyone who has owned one of these world-renowned escapologists will testify. So we may yet see the cathedral cat trotting round the Close with a limp mouthful of Boris.

  Might it still all be all right in the end, though? For Freddie and Ambrose, for Leah and her family? For Miss Blatherwick? I am prepared to settle for all right-ish. I am flying by the seat of my narrative pants in this tale, having renounced the authorial luxury of going back and changing things. All I can do is keep flying, jettisoning stuff as I scan for somewhere plausible to land. Deus ex machina plot solutions are frowned upon, but I secretly hanker after them. I long to be reassured that some jerry-built plywood platform is even now being knocked up in the wings, ready to trundle on stage in the final scene and winch down the gods to sort the mess out. There comes a point, as we hurtle downhill with failed brakes, when we no longer object to being saved.

  And so it is half-term in Lindchester. Martin has driven his girls to Birmingham International and waved them off for the week. They will be back on Saturday. He will take them to the firework display in the arboretum in the evening, then on Sunday— But he will not think about Sunday.

  Over in Cardingforth Father Wendy has nipped back into Becky’s house with a fresh bunch of flowers and another welcome home cake.

  Father Dominic hires a Luton box van (shriek!) with a tail lift, and enlists the help of a couple of his strapping Iranian congregation members. He tries in vain to pay them. No, no – it is honour to them to help him. Together they drive to Mum’s bungalow and load up with furniture and personal effects (Dominic has a list – though quite what ‘the whatchamacallits from your Aunty Barbara’ are is anyone’s guess). Yes, Mother is officially moving in.

  Freddie and Ambrose are also away this week. We may not follow them down to the wilds of Somerset, where Ambrose’s family have farmed their acres since time out of mind; but we can at least hide in the back seat of Ambrose’s car as they set off after evensong on Sunday afternoon, and eavesdrop on their conversation. You may judge for yourselves whether they are hastening together to perfect felicity.

  ‘So, they gonna love me, your folks?’

  Ambrose was silent.

  ‘Gah! Freaking me out here, babe!’

  ‘There could be a problem with that,’ said Ambrose. ‘They may decide to adopt you and keep you for ever.’

  ‘Ah, you.’ Freddie nudged him. ‘Wish we could’ve taken Cosmo.’

  ‘Plenty of dogs to borrow where we’re going.’

  ‘Wish we had a dog.’

  ‘Labradoodle,’ said Ambrose.

  ‘Golden retriever.’

  Pause.

  ‘“‘Let’s call the whole thang off!’”’ sang Freddie.

  ‘Plenty of dogs, plenty of long walks.’ Ambrose glanced at Freddie. ‘Plenty of stiles . . .’

  ‘Mmm, stiles!’ sighed Freddie. Then he shook himself. ‘Moving on. I’m super-excited for this week? I mean, I’m kinda nervous, obviously? And maybe a bit sad? Coz I wish I had a normal regular family for you to meet too? Ah, crap. Meant to ring my dad. Never mind.’

  Good, thought Ambrose. That’s one problem deferred.

  ‘So how come you don’t have the Zummerzet accent?’ asked Freddie.

  ‘I do. When I g’woam.’

  ‘Ha ha ha! Be you gonna talk dirty to me in Wurzel, my lover?’

  ‘Well, there won’t be much else to do in the cottage. No mobile signal. No wifi. You need to brace yourself for five days without social media, babe.’ And five days for me without obsessively checking the polls, the predictive websites, the early voting tallies in Florida, thought Ambrose. Probably do me good. Not forgetting five days without your dad pressurizing me. ‘Think of it as a digital detox.’

  ‘But man – five whole days? No Facebook, no Instagram, no porn?’

  ‘Meh. I’m not much for porn.’

  ‘Right.’ Freddie started pulling at the frayed edge of his ripped jeans. ‘So, uh, why’s that?’

  ‘It’s all so cliché,’ mourned Ambrose.

  ‘Ha ha ha!’

  ‘The characterization’s so stereotyped, the plotlines are implausible, the narrative arc’s way too predictable.’

  ‘Narrative arc!’ By now Freddie was weeping. ‘Nobody watches porn for the narrative arc!’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No!’ He wiped his eyes. ‘They just wanna see hot guys getting it on, yeah?’

  Ambrose glanced at him. ‘Isn’t that what mirrors are for?’

  ‘You’re dirty!’

  ‘That’s how you like me.’ Ah, c’mon, Freddie, he thought. You think I haven’t heard the gossip? You think I’m going to stumble on those clips, and stop loving you?

  Maybe not a conversation to start while driving, though. All Souls’ Day dawns. In the quiet gardens of Lindfordshire bees still buzz. A feather drifts down. The sun still toils away at the last apples. There are magpies in ones and twos. Sorrow. Joy.

  Two sorrows? Or one joy? It all depends on how you look at it.

  *

  Jane looks at it as a historian. She stands on the station platform in Martonbury on Friday morning. It’s happening. History. Unfurling in front of her very eyes. Idiots on Fleet Street playing Agadoo with the democracy tree. ‘Enemies of the People’? What kind of an irresponsible headline is that? Don’t you get how high the stakes are? This is the constitution! Parliament makes the laws, not the government. And then the ‘out of touch’ INDEPENDENT LEGAL FUCKING EXPERTS interpret it! These are the fucking goalposts of civilization! You can’t just move them, and put them back, la la la, when you’ve won your little make-it-up-as-you-go-along game of Brexit. Why not just pack the cellars of Westminster with gunpowder and toss in a lighter instead?

  A jet passes high overhead neatly slicing the blue. ‘Sinnerman’ is pounding away on a loop in her brain. Oh Jesus! The whole world is going to split in half, she thinks. There’s a fault line running through it. Through the UK, through America, through us all, through every human heart.

  Next Wednesday we will be looking back on it, she thinks. Looking back and asking how the fuck America let this happen. Historians like me will construct narratives. But right now, it could still go another way. Couldn’t it? Latino voters, African Americans, women, millennials – they could all turn out in their thousands. Feather upon feather in the scales, vote on vote. It could still be OK.

  If she could pray, she would. Lord, Lord, Lord, don’t you see me down here praying? Let there be another way. So I don’t have to look back and list the things that didn’t happen in time.

  Things like, Maria Schicklgruber did not slip on the stair and tragically miscarry. The people who might have spoken out stayed silent. The people who could have fled stayed. The briefcase with the bomb in got moved. The cattle trucks rumbled through Poland and officers were kind to their wives, their children, their dogs. Like decent people.

  ‘Hide me. Hide me. Hide me. All on that day.’

  Please to remember the fifth of November.

  Gunpowder, treason and plot.

  I see no reason why gunpowder treason

  Should ever be forgot.

  But for all our fireworks, have we forgotten the lessons of history? What can we do? If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do? This is Saturday the fifth of November, 2016. Dusk, and the street lights just going on. Bonfire smoke. Explosions shaking the night.

  Jess is already zipped up in her pink anorak ready for the firework display. Yay! Toffee apples! Sparklers! Yay!

  Martin goes up to Leah’s room, where she’s finishing her homework, to say, ‘Time to go, darling.’

  Empty room. Curtain
blowing. A note on the desk.

  Chapter 44

  ’m running away because my life is totally ruined. You and Mum say you want what’s best for me and Jess, but you never listen to us. I am taking matters into my own hands. Goodbye. Leah.

  Martin ran to the window. ‘Leah! Leah?’

  A firework ripped a path up into the sky and exploded, white. Lawn. Trees. Like an old photo. That bloody child! She’d climbed onto the extension roof and jumped. His mind raced. Hiding in the garden? The garage? Wasteland next door?

  ‘Leah! Come along, please. It’s time to go. Are you out there?’

  Silence. Then distant crackling.

  He hurtled downstairs. Jess stared up, round-eyed.

  ‘Look, I’m afraid Leah’s hiding.’ Let her be hiding, let her be safe! ‘She’s cross about moving back to Cardingforth. I’m afraid we can’t set off for the fireworks till— Oh, poppet, don’t cry! Jessie!’ He leant down and hugged her. ‘She’s probably just in the garden. Listen, I’m going to get my torch and go and find her, OK? Why don’t you watch a DVD?’

  ‘Has she run away, Daddy?’

  ‘What? Did she tell you she was going to?’

  Jess flinched and shook her head.

  ‘Sorry. I’m not cross with you. You can tell me, darling.’ Jess fiddled with her zip. ‘This is important, sweetie. Do you have any idea where she might have gone?’

  ‘Um.’ Jess hesitated. ‘She might of gone to London?’

  ‘London!’ Dear Jesus! ‘OK. What makes you say that?’

  ‘She might of gone to seek her fortune? Like Dick Whittington?’

  ‘Oh, sweetie!’ Martin hugged her tight. ‘That’s a clever thought. But did she actually mention anything to you about running away, or where she might hide?’

  Jess shook her head. ‘Leah won’t ever ever ever tell me secrets. But she tells Lydia, coz Lydia is reliable?’