Duncan walked across the room to hug him but lost his nerve. ‘Would you like some more coffee?’ he asked, veering towards the kettle.
‘I’ve been told to cut down on caffeine. But thanks.’
‘So don’t you ever … touch anyone when you’re in the woods,’ Duncan asked hesitantly.
‘Never,’ Henry replied with a sad smile. ‘I’m what’s politely called a Peeping Tom. It sounds so quaint. Like a character in a children’s storybook: Old Peeping Tom ambled down the lane. I can think of more appropriate names for it.’
‘Please tell me if it’s none of my business,’ Duncan said, never more conscious of the barrier that Henry’s priesthood posed to intimacy, ‘but have you ever had a lover?’
‘You mean before I made impotence my saving grace: psychic castration?’ He glanced at Brandy, placidly licking his scrotum. ‘I suppose it depends on your definition. I’ve never made love with the same man twice.’ Duncan struggled not to betray his shock. ‘But there was one unforgettable night in my early twenties with a German language student in Brighton. His skin was so pale – almost translucent – apart from his penis, which was significantly darker, like a steeple that had been added later. We only met once but he’s been the stuff of my romantic – no, what the hell, erotic – fantasies for nearly thirty years. I’m sorry. Does that disgust you?’
‘Of course not.’
‘I was wrong. The problem isn’t that God made me gay and a priest, but that He made me gay and a priest and an Anglican. He could at least have made me an RC. Then loneliness would have been my natural state.’
‘Perhaps you should leave God out of the equation for a change?’
‘Perhaps I should. But of all my desires the deepest, the most overpowering, is to serve a God I’m no longer sure I believe in – or at least that I believe in the way I’m supposed to. Isn’t that perverse?’
‘No, what’s perverse is to shoulder all this guilt.’
‘Trust me, this is nothing. Catholics have guilt; Calvinists have guilt; Anglicans just have lassitude.’
‘Not from where I’m standing.’
‘No doubt you consider me the worst kind of hypocrite?’
‘I’m not in the job of judging. But you did endorse our Clean up the Woods campaign after the attack on Dragon.’
‘I pray “Lead me not into temptation”. Perhaps I should change it to “Give me strength to resist the temptation I can’t avoid”?’
‘Aren’t you worried about being recognised or even bumping into one of your parishioners?’
‘It’s already happened. Although men come here from halfway down the coast (especially now it’s listed on websites), it’s mainly the same old faces, particularly at this time of year. Have you never wondered why Chris is so hostile when I visit your mother?’
‘I assumed it was generic. He sees being gay and a vicar as incompatible.’
‘No, he sees being voyeuristic and a vicar as incompatible. And he’s right. Did I go to his rescue when those lads were laying into him?’
‘You rang for the ambulance,’ Duncan said, the words sticking to his tongue.
‘How do you know that?’
‘The police traced the call.’
‘Of course! Maybe I should have run back here and pretended I’d heard his cries for help? But even I’m not that much of a coward. So,’ he said, digesting the information, ‘the cat’s out of the bag, eh Brandy?’ He smiled at the dog, who wagged his tail. ‘They’ll summon me to give evidence in court.’
‘There may not be a trial. One of the youths has already confessed. Craig, Derek Weedon’s son.’
‘I’ll have to inform the bishop: hand in my resignation.’
‘Why?’
‘How can I stand in the person of Christ … how can I celebrate the Eucharist when people know the sort of man I am?’
‘What people? The culprits are under eighteen so the case can’t be reported.’
‘There’ll be rumours, gossip.’
‘In other words, business as usual. And if anyone does ask, you can say you were taking Brandy for a late-night walk.’ The dog sprang to his feet. ‘No, sorry, boy, false alarm,’ he said, stroking his muzzle. ‘And as for the “person of Christ” thing, I’m no theologian but Christ was a man, wasn’t He? I’ve never understood all the dualism stuff: so much ink – and blood – spilt on arcane conjecture. I prefer to think of Him as a good man with a touch of the divine. But even if I were a regular churchgoer, I’d want a vicar with experience of human frailty.’
‘Feet of clay?’
‘Doesn’t the Bible say that’s what we’re all made of?’
Having declined Henry’s invitation to lunch, Duncan heard from him again in the late afternoon with news that he had given a witness statement to the police in which, taking Duncan’s advice, he claimed to have been out walking Brandy when he chanced on the attack. He refuted Craig’s allegation that Chris had made advances to him while he was urinating, insisting that, on the contrary, Craig had flaunted himself in the thicket, holding out his penis ‘like a canapé’. To his immense relief he was not called to testify in court since all three defendants, faced with the incontrovertible evidence on film, pleaded guilty: Craig and Alan to assault occasioning actual bodily harm; Rosalie to aiding and abetting an assault.
Despite all the stories of legal logjams – many of them in the Mercury – the hearing, which had been expedited on account of the defendants’ youth, was held the following Thursday. The court was closed, with only parents and, by special dispensation, step-parents present, which, given that Craig, Alan and Rosalie were all the children of divorce and only Rosalie’s mother had yet to remarry, ensured that the public benches were more than usually full. With Duncan not permitted to attend – let alone report – proceedings, he was dependent on Linda for the facts, which she gave him by phone later in the day during a break from consoling Derek.
The prosecutor had opened the case with an account of the attack, after which the magistrates watched the footage on DVD and studied photographs of Chris’s injuries. The prosecutor read out witness statements from Sue, whose attempt to exculpate her friends by detailing how much they had smoked and drunk merely added to the general picture of delinquency, and Henry, whose description of Craig exposing himself ruled out any plea of ‘homosexual panic’. She concluded with a victim impact statement from Chris that dwelt more on his emotional than his physical trauma. The defence solicitors offered mitigation, focusing in each instance on their clients’ broken homes and lost childhoods (which made painful listening on the public benches). The magistrates retired for barely ten minutes before the chairman announced their verdict. In respect of Rosalie, they ordered a pre-sentence report and instructed her to return to court in two weeks’ time. In respect of Craig and Alan, they decreed that the savagery of the attack, compounded by its filming, left them no choice but to impose the maximum sentence: two years in a young offender institution.
The sentence was harsher than Duncan had expected. He asked Linda to convey his sympathies to both Craig and Derek, but her curt ‘We’ll see’ showed that, like her husband, she blamed him for forcing Craig’s hand.
‘I don’t always agree with Derek but in this case he’s right. You would have felt differently if it had been Jamie.’
‘Of course. But I hope I’d have acted the same.’
‘What a comfort it must be to you, Duncan!’ Linda said. ‘Free of all the doubt and confusion that plague us ordinary mortals.’
Duncan mulled over her gibe as he went down to the boardroom to check that everything was in place for the morning. He had asked his mother and sister to Mercury House to ratify the sale of the company to Newscom. Barring a miracle, it would be the last board meeting ever held there and he felt deeply moved as he gazed up at the array of ancestors, not least his great-grandfather, whose judicious choice of portraitist (a Sotheby’s expert had valued the Sargent painting at £280,000) had been a factor in Newscom’
s decision to buy the company outright, taking on both its assets and liabilities. While paying a token £10,000 each for his, Adele’s and Alison’s shares, and transferring both the editorial and production operations to its Basingstoke headquarters, they had undertaken to preserve the title, retain the majority of the staff, provide a generous redundancy package for the rest and, crucially, protect the pension fund.
At ten o’clock the next day Alison, who had driven down from London, brought Adele to Mercury House, where Duncan greeted them together with Dudley Williams, the long-serving accountant whom Adele valued as much for his deference as for his expertise. Dudley outlined the terms of the Newscom offer, adding that in his view it was by far the best available. Duncan was both relieved and touched when Alison not only endorsed it but proposed ‘a vote of thanks to my brother for all his hard work’. Adele was less magnanimous. With a pronounced sniff, she implied that the sale was the final proof of his mismanagement. Pointing to his father’s portrait, she declared that her one consolation was that he had been spared this humiliation, before grimly signing the papers. Then with a sweeping glance around the room as if she were playing herself in The Mercury Story, she inclined her head towards Dudley and tottered out. Her children soon followed, returning to Ridgemount where Duncan took the opportunity to underline the change in her circumstances. Although the deal with Newscom protected her share of his father’s pension, the loss of the annual dividend would require her to cut her expenditure drastically.
‘Why not pack me off to Castlemaine and have done with it?’ she asked.
‘There are other options, Mother. I had hoped … we had hoped,’ Duncan said, determined to involve Alison, ‘that you’d be able to stay here for the rest of your life.’
‘Forgive me if I’ve upset your plans.’
‘Even if you could pay for the upkeep, this house is far too big for you. Either you’ll have to move somewhere smaller or else we must split it up into flats.’
‘I agree,’ Adele said cheerfully.
‘You do?’ Duncan asked, turning to Alison, who shrugged.
‘We should make a flat for you.’
‘What?’
‘It’s the perfect solution. You’ll have to leave Mercury House and you can’t afford to rent anywhere else. This way I’ll be able to keep an eye on you, make sure you don’t brood on what went wrong. And you’ll be able to take over some of Chris’s jobs – that’s if he ever deigns to come back.’
‘You mean I’ll be an unpaid carer?’
‘You’re the one who told me to economise.’
‘It’s very kind of you, Mother,’ Duncan said, breathing deeply, ‘but I have other plans. I hadn’t intended to mention it yet but now’s as good a time as any. I’m going to marry Ellen.’
‘What? Since when?’
‘That’s marvellous news, Duncan,’ Alison said, springing up to kiss him. ‘I’m so pleased for you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You haven’t met her mother,’ Adele said to Alison.
‘I’m not her greatest fan either,’ Duncan said. ‘But it’s not her I’ll be marrying.’
‘Of course not, darling. I’m thrilled for you. I’ll cross all my fingers that this time it’ll work out. But it needn’t stop you living here. There’s plenty of room for Ellen.’
‘She has her own house in West Francombe. I’ll move in there, at least for the time being.’
‘Have you set a date?’ Alison asked.
‘Not yet, but we’re looking at March. At our age there’s no point in hanging around.’
‘“Marry in Lent, live to repent.”’
‘Mother!’ Alison said.
‘I’m not the one who wrote it! Anyway, I don’t suppose they’ll be having a church wedding.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong. I’ve asked Henry if we can use St Edward’s.’
‘But you made such a fuss last time,’ Adele said.
‘Because we were under so much pressure, from Jack and Brenda as well as you. Ellen and I are agreed. We’re not worried about making our vows before God but we do want to make them in public, before the wider community. And these days a church congregation may be our best bet.’
‘Will you be using the 1662?’
‘I doubt there’ll be much “obeying” but for the rest, yes. I still squirm at the memory of Stewart and Laura Canning’s promise to take on each other’s “brokenness”. What’s more, we thought we might use one of grandfather’s anthems, maybe the Magnificat?’
‘Oh darling, that would be splendid,’ Adele said, her face glowing. ‘I’d be so proud.’
‘I’ll say one thing for you, Duncan Neville,’ Alison whispered in his ear. ‘You certainly know how to get the old girl eating out of your hand.’
Doubtful of his mother’s discretion, Duncan alerted Ellen to the need to break the news to their children as soon as possible. All three in their different ways were victims of the woodland attack. Rosalie’s friends, ignorant of Sue’s attempt to intervene, accused her of betraying her companions to save her own skin. Shunned by her schoolmates, she was now content to spend her evenings at home studying for her GCSEs, with the result that a mere two weeks after the hearing her form teacher had revised her prospective grades from Cs to Bs. Neil, meanwhile, had been targeted not only by Craig’s and Alan’s friends but even by some of their enemies who set aside past differences to join in condemnation of the ‘snitch’.
Jamie was hit hard by Craig’s imprisonment. However regrettable the circumstances, Duncan rejoiced at his release from his stepbrother’s tutelage. Linda had been convinced that the rupture would occur when Craig went to university, but that might have been too late. Who could say what trouble they would have been caught up in before then? Craig’s sentence offered Jamie the chance of a fresh start. Besides, with Craig out of the picture, Duncan dared to hope that Jamie would be more agreeable to Neil. So it was with new confidence that, on the Sunday afternoon he had appointed with Ellen for their disclosures, he took Jamie on to Salter cliffs, stopping beside the ruins of the Martello tower where, with waves lashing the rocks and herring gulls wheeling in the sky, in the very spot that he had previously chosen for his proposal to Ellen, he announced his engagement.
‘You mean you’re going to live with Neil Nugent?’ Jamie asked, with such desperation that Duncan regretted not having stayed at sea level.
‘The same way that you live with Derek. I hope we’ll become friends,’ Duncan said, drawing him away from the edge, ‘but I’ll only ever have one son and that’s you.’
‘What will he call you?’
‘Duncan, I suppose. Probably “hey you”,’ he said, failing to raise a smile. ‘Remember he calls his grandmother Barbara.’
‘He’s an arse wipe.’
‘May we dispense with the insults? I’m asking you to make an effort. You’ve been gratuitously cruel to him and I’m not just referring to that text. Suppose it had been the other way round and you were the one who’d moved to a new town.’
‘When you and Mum split up, you said you’d always put me first. Now’s your chance to prove it.’
‘I do put you first but that doesn’t mean I have to order my life around your prejudices,’ Duncan replied uneasily.
‘In other words you’re a liar and a hypocrite. Can we go now? Why did you bring me out here? Couldn’t you have been normal for once and told me in a room?’
After driving Jamie home, Duncan returned to his flat where he texted Ellen that he had told Jamie, who took it ‘much as expected’. She rang him an hour later in a voice so strained as to be barely recognisable.
‘It’s done,’ she said.
‘And?’ Duncan asked, praying that the strain was due to emotion rather than effort.
‘Sue was amazingly positive. She said she was happy for me. For me: can you imagine? Just a few weeks ago she treated happiness like a playground where adults were only allowed in if accompanied by a child.’
‘And
Neil?’ Duncan asked hesitantly.
‘Well, you can’t have everything – or anything when it comes to Neil. He says he hates you and he hates Jamie even more. He wants us to leave Francombe and, when I refused, he accused me of putting my pleasure above his future … actually, the phrase he used was a good deal more graphic.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘I told him that running away from your problems was never the solution. So he asked why we’d left Radlett and called me a liar and a hypocrite.’
‘What?’
‘A liar and a hypocrite.’
‘That’s exactly the phrase Jamie used about me.’
‘Then at least they have something in common,’ Ellen said, with what was either a stifled sob or a muffled laugh. ‘I told him that we’d be a proper family again and life would be better for all of us. I truly believe that, Duncan.’
‘So do I.’
‘But is he right? Am I kidding myself? Pursuing my own happiness at the expense of his?’
‘Neil has to find his own happiness. At least now you – we – can set him an example.’
‘He spat out more of my mother’s vitriol.’
‘Oh no!’
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Doesn’t she realise the harm it can do to an impressionable boy?’
‘I’ll just have to try twice as hard to make up for it.’
‘No matter what you say about bridges and bygones, my mind’s made up; I won’t have that woman at the wedding. Being with you has finally given me the strength to cut her out of my life.’
Widows & Orphans Page 28
