by Alan Beechey
On the stage, Garth pulled Kylie and Danni off the platform. They followed the Victory Vanguard boys, who had fled to safety through the open side door. Joseph ran after them, clutching the baby Jesus doll in a misguided act of heroism. Behind the sanctuary, Dougie Dock directed them out of the church and into the night air.
The platform began to smoke in several places.
Paul Piltdown, deep in agonized prayer in the pulpit, had been slow to react to the commotion. He stood up, blinking, and wasted several seconds trying to appeal for a calm exodus, but he was too late and too quiet. He hurried out of the pulpit, leaving behind the plastic pitch pipe that he had gingerly picked up and wedged under the lectern last Sunday.
At the same time, Billy Coppersmith opened his eyes and instantly stopped playing his deafening trill. He tried to get to Tina, who was standing still, staring in horror at the small pool of flames near her feet. But he forgot that he was tethered by the guitar. The cable tautened, dragging him off balance, and he fell. The cheap amplifier crashed onto the platform, sparked, and died.
The organ stopped.
Like Billy, Oona Foison had been oblivious to the shouts and screams of the fleeing mob while she was still playing. Then she smelled smoke. She struggled to slide off the organ bench, her panty hose ripping on the wood. The smoldering amplifier lay across the console steps, and she edged around it. Her wig snagged on the curtain rail.
Billy quickly untangled himself and threw his beloved Stratocaster aside. The fire was almost burned out, although the smoke streaming from the carpet’s crumbling backing was finding its insidious way into his lungs. He walked over and put an arm around Tina.
“It’s okay, Chrissie,” he said gently.
“All right, Billy?” asked Piltdown, standing at the edge of the platform with a few nervous congregants who felt the likelihood of being roasted was considerably lower than the likelihood of being trampled to death. Hovering behind the minister, they seemed relieved that the fire was out as quickly as it started. Behind them, the melee in the aisles continued, as slower pensioners and handicapped people were pushed aside by more able-bodied Plumleyites, still fearing an inferno at their backs. Joan Quarterboy stood silently in a pew near the front, her eyes fixed on Tina.
Oliver managed to get through and joined Piltdown. Trapped in her seat, Effie was calling the emergency services on her mobile telephone. Mallard had let himself be carried to the vestibule, trying to remember the rules of crowd control.
“Everything’s under control, Reverend,” said Billy, leading a trembling Tina forward. He was wrong.
When the cries of “Fire!” broke out, Sam Quarterboy had almost been thrust out of the narthex by the fleeing sea of people. Fearing for Tina’s safety, he had run around to the building’s side door, arriving just as Dock was ushering the children out of the building. He pushed past them and opened the door to the sanctuary.
The scorching air below the platform now sensed the escape route. It rushed instantly for the cold night, swirling and egging the nursling flames on. A jagged streak of newborn fire blazed spitefully through the platform. It split, part of its middle tier dropping away in an eruption of sparks. Bright tongues of flame roared up angrily through the hole, spitting heat and screaming abuse at the watchers.
A wigless Foison managed to reach the side door, just ahead of the fire that was catching at his high heels. New bubbles of flame burst through the carpet with every second.
Billy, partly blinded by smoke, knew he only had a short time before the entire platform collapsed. He grasped Tina’s hand and stepped across an unburned pathway of fuming carpet. But as he jumped onto the lowest tier, the floor gave way beneath his feet. He disappeared. The fire gave a great screech of victory and blew furiously toward Oliver and Paul, who had stepped forward to intercept the teenagers. They were forced back, coughing.
Tina squealed and leaped away from the edge of the hole. Bushes of fire bloomed on two sides, and thick smoke surrounded her.
“Oh dear God, no!” moaned Quarterboy. He ran toward his daughter, but the flames slapped him back disdainfully. Joan screamed.
“Get Billy!” shouted Piltdown to anyone.
He tore down the “Jesus is Lord” banner from the front of the pulpit, took a large breath, and sprinted straight into a new rampart of flame that had blazed up in front of him. Staggering across the remains of the platform, he managed to reach Tina. He flung the banner over her head and hurtled back the same way, carrying the girl like a swaddled baby.
At the same time, Oliver ducked under the railing and jumped down into the smoke-filled baptismal pool, where Billy had fallen, momentarily protected from the fire outside by its tiled walls. The long, unexpected drop had shattered Billy’s thigh, but Oliver got him upright, and the braver worshippers lifted them both out before flames crept around the front of the pool.
They carried the boy to the back of the deserted church. Sam Quarterboy followed, now carrying Tina, leading his trembling wife. Piltdown came behind, wondering when his body’s own natural painkillers would go to work on his burned hands.
It was three minutes since the fire had first broken out. The last section of the old wooden platform staggered and fell, and the triumphant flames took their thirst to the pulpit.
Chapter Nine
Good Tidings We Bring
Thursday, December 25 (Christmas Day)
“An act of God,” said Oliver skeptically. Nobody else was in the bathroom, or he wouldn’t have dared utter the phrase. He tried to add more hot water to his bath, but his toes weren’t dexterous enough to work the taps. The action provoked another coughing fit.
A simple accident. That was a preferable explanation. Although to an insurance company, acts of God and accidents often boiled down to the same thing. (Was a church more or less likely to be insured against an act of God? he wondered.) One thing was certain: The fire was no deus ex machina, with the timely arrival of a deity or two to solve everybody’s problems. The Plumley United Diaconalists had greeted Christmas morning with half their historic church burned to a cinder and the other half about to fall down. And if Piltdown’s heroism had helped his sagging reputation, he’d paid for it in minor burns. No, there were still plenty of problems in Plumley.
Of course, there was that odd blackened lump of molten plastic lying amid the charred remains of the pulpit. Or so Oliver imagined…
Really, not a bad bathroom, he thought, looking around. There was a lot to be said for the thoughtful touches only Effie could have provided, such as the thick towels and the supply of soothing bubble bath. It was the first time he had woken on Effie’s territory. He had visited her tiny apartment in Richmond, but up to now, she had always treated it as a distant extension to her office, a place to go to sleep alone or pick up a change of clothes when her work pushed him to the side. Last night, after the ambulances and fire engines had departed, she had led him to her car, brought him home and put him to bed, still coughing. It was past three o’clock before his lungs let him fall asleep.
He had crawled from the bed at nine and telephoned his parents to say he would not be joining them for Christmas lunch.
“Why not?” asked Effie sleepily. He covered the mouthpiece to muffle their conversation.
“There’s only one train on Christmas morning, and I’ve already missed it,” he whispered.
“I can drive you there.”
“It’s eighty miles from London. Besides, you have your own plans for the day.”
“No I don’t.”
“Oh.” Oliver had informed Effie weeks ago that his presence at the senior Swithins’ country house was an established Christmas tradition. He had assumed that Effie would spend the day with her own parents.
“In that case, come to dinner with the Swithin clan,” he said warmly. “Always room for one more.”
What he could see of her face red
dened. “Oh no, no, I’m sorry,” she stammered. “When I offered you the lift, I wasn’t trying to invite myself. I didn’t think. Look, forget about it.”
He took his hand away. “Mother—” he began.
“Tell Effie we’re dying to meet her,” his mother cut in excitedly. “Your Aunt Phoebe and Uncle Tim have told us so much about her. They’ll be here, too. Apparently, Tim’s been home from work for a week, and he’s getting on Phoebe’s nerves, so I invited them to give them somebody else to talk to. Join the party, the pair of you. We can all play Murder in the Dark. So much more fun with professionals. Stay the night. You can have your old room.”
“Where will Effie sleep?”
There was silence.
“Mother?”
“Sorry, Oliver, just checking in the hall mirror to see if I was green. Good God, boy, I was at Woodstock, you know! Now, I have to go, your father’s perilously close to complete consciousness.”
Oliver found himself staring at a humming telephone.
“Welcome to the family,” he announced. Effie covered her head with a pillow to hide her embarrassment.
It took half an hour for Oliver to convince Effie that he was convinced she had not manipulated him into introducing her to his parents, and for her to convince him that she was convinced he had not bulldozed her into the same prospect. Then they each attempted to convince the other that meeting parents was not a big deal for their relationship, while making it equally clear that they secretly knew it was and they had no problem with it. After that, Oliver was faced with the choice of exploring why Effie was not planning to visit her parents—although he knew that her father had never forgiven his only child for not being male—or taking the bath she suggested. Exhausted from diplomacy, he opted for the bath.
The warm water soothed the muscles he had strained lifting Billy Coppersmith from the baptismal pool. Billy, too, had demonstrated that he had the right stuff during the fire. Just as well, Oliver had remarked casually to Mallard, as they watched the ambulance ease its way through the crowds that had come out on Christmas night to watch a burning church, since the fourteen-year-old was about to become a father.
***
“I trust that this is the one thing you and Effie haven’t told me,” Mallard had replied.
Oliver nodded. “Billy is responsible for Tina’s pregnancy, not Tapster. The result of an evening of experimentation behind the church a couple of months ago.”
Mallard stared at him.
“So why on earth did she say Tapster was the father of her child?” he asked, when his nephew had finished one of his frequent bouts of coughing.
“She thought he was,” Oliver gasped.
“Because he, too, had seduced her?”
“No. Nigel never touched her.”
“Then what was the silly girl talking about?”
Oliver paused while his lungs pulled in more air. Mallard’s warrant card had left them inside the invisible boundary that the Plumley police were trying to maintain, keeping the spectators away from the blazing building. Several television crews had now arrived to capture the conflagration—it would make a pleasant change from the standard interviews with last-minute shoppers and live coverage of midnight in Bethlehem. Fire hoses snaked across the cleared street, and three fire engines were blasting cascades of water over the roofline. Sparks and burning papers, ascending in the heat, flew up into the night sky like tiny angels.
Piltdown had been taken to the casualty ward, and Patience had accompanied Billy in the ambulance, but the remaining deacons had gathered in a forlorn flock, watching their church crumble. Sam and Joan Quarterboy held an unharmed Tina between them. Oliver pointed to the family group.
“The Quarterboys had the best intentions in the world,” he said sadly.
“Well, you know what they say about the pathway to Hell,” Mallard responded, glancing ironically at the dying flames.
“Sam and Joan wanted to preserve Tina’s innocence in a world that, unfortunately, preys on innocence. When she asked them where babies come from, she was told they were a gift from God to the parents. And as the actress playing the Virgin Mary, this seemed to make perfect sense of the Christmas Story. She hadn’t learned the facts of life from her school friends, who regarded her old-fashioned piety as a bit of a joke. So when the school doctor told her she was going to have a baby, she never connected it with one time she let Billy Coppersmith do that odd thing in the dark that he was so keen to try. Tina didn’t know what sex was for. And she didn’t know sex was wrong. She’s just what her parents wanted—the last innocent thirteen-year-old in England.”
“Why did she name Tapster as the spiritual father?”
“She had a God-Almighty crush on him. Nigel made a big impact on the young people who were swept into his circle, and Tina was no exception. But her parents forbade her to go to the meetings, which made her puppyish longing for him even worse. By now she had broken up with Billy, because the sex had been messy and painful. She prayed that God would give her a way back to Tapster. And lo and behold, God plants a baby in her belly, a condition that she’s been told is an answer to prayer. In her mythology, Tapster had to be its father, appointed by God.”
“So when Tina went to see Tapster that evening, his astonishment and denial were totally genuine?”
“Exactly. And when she ran to Paul, she truthfully answered the only question he posed: Who is the father of your baby? Effie put it the same way. I’m afraid I was the vulgarian who asked her a different, blunter question: Who did you have sex with? And after I’d explained what that meant, the lot fell on Billy Coppersmith. I should have guessed. Billy said he ‘broke up’ with Tina—Chrissie, as he calls her—and later he talked about not ‘seeing her.’ Those words don’t apply to a mere friendship.”
“Do you think Tapster really told Tina to get an abortion?”
“I think he may have mentioned it. No matter how sincerely you believe abortion is wrong, it must be heartbreaking to stare a frightened, skinny, pregnant thirteen-year-old in the face and tell her that she has no godly option but to carry the child to term.”
“Then Tapster was also telling the truth when Paul Piltdown confronted him shortly afterwards?”
“Absolutely. Although I believe something had happened in the meantime. Even though Tapster knew he was guiltless, he also knew that his wife might not give him the benefit of the doubt, because of his dubious past. He thought it would be politic to keep Tina’s visit from Heather, until he found out more, such as whether the girl’s pregnancy was real or imagined, or even if she had been put up to the accusation by people who wanted to undermine his bid to become a deacon. Billy Coppersmith was the only witness, and he was sworn to secrecy. In return, Billy proffered a secret of his own, and I have little doubt that it was the loss of his virginity with Tina. Billy, of course, had no idea that Tina was pregnant, and Tapster didn’t tell him. But now Tapster guessed who was the real father of Tina’s baby.”
“But he didn’t tell Paul?”
“No. Naturally, he denied his own responsibility for the pregnancy, but he kept Billy’s secret. Even from Heather. And she, in turn, chose not to confront him after her conversation with Paul. She opted to test his holiness instead.”
“Why didn’t Tapster say something after Tina ran away?” asked Mallard, waiting while Oliver coughed again.
“Because he didn’t hear about Tina’s disappearance until Saturday evening, when Heather got home from the rehearsal. Perhaps Tapster was planning to talk to Sam or Billy or Patience after church on Sunday morning. He didn’t get the chance.”
Mallard scratched his moustache sadly. “So all in all, Nigel Tapster comes out of this quite a decent fellow. And he’d still be alive if Paul Piltdown had kept his mouth shut.”
“Paul has yet to find out that he accused Tapster wrongfully. When he does, I don’t imagine he’l
l want to stay on as minister of this particular church. Not that there is a church anymore.”
“No church?” said a voice.
Oliver had not noticed that Sam Quarterboy had joined them. The deacon reached for Oliver’s sooty hand and shook it firmly. “I’ve just heard that you played a part in finding our Tina and bringing her home, Mr. Swithin. There are no words to tell you how grateful my wife and I are.”
Oliver looked across to the group Sam had left. Patience Coppersmith had returned from the hospital and was holding hands with Joan Quarterboy, watching the light die within the building’s core. Tina hovered in front of them. Behind them, a crowd of people stood and stared.
“But don’t think there’s no church,” Sam continued. “The church is not the building. It’s the people. We’ll rise again.”
***
“Hot enough for you?”
Effie’s voice startled him. Was that really how it ended the previous evening, or had the warm water lulled him into a half-dreaming state? He did remember the little group of church members staring at the smoking remains, neither crying nor smiling, and singing a carol together before fading away into the night. Good people.
Effie walked up to the edge of the bath and studied him critically while she tied back her unruly hair with a ribbon. She was wearing a dressing gown, but being submerged, he was wearing nothing, and he felt oddly self-conscious. He fluttered his hands under the water, hoping to encourage more bubbles.
“What’s all this about a family secret?” she demanded.
“I couldn’t possibly tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a secret?” he suggested lamely.
She thought about this answer, head on one side. Then she untied the dressing gown and let it fall from her shoulders.
