‘Much appreciated, Frederick. I thought I’d given you the evening off.’
‘Oh, but darling,’ says Susanna, ‘he’s just offered to help me!’
Paul is outmanoeuvred. ‘Fine. Could you change into something smarter, please.’
Freddie spreads his hands, all innocence. His pink T-shirt says What Wouldn’t Jesus Do?
Father Dominic is late, but he’s on his way. On the passenger’s seat is a lovely bunch of blue hyacinths for Susanna. Remembering his Lenten discipline, Dominic has got over himself. Paul is, after all, his father in God, and however tedious the evening proves to be, crucifixion was doubtless more tedious still.
Aha! You see what I am about? You think I’m steering Dominic in the direction of Freddie May? Well, let me tell you that Dominic has more sense than to allow some pretty boy to wander into his life, wipe his feet on his heart, and wander out again. I’m almost certain about that. We’ll follow him in to the palace and see what happens, shall we?
The big drawing room was full when Dominic arrived. He smiled, shook hands, and air-kissed his way round the throng. ‘Meet my wife.’ ‘Hi!’ ‘Have you met my husband?’ ‘Hi!’ It was all sugar and spice and all things nice. Lord, how he needed a drink. But no. Forty days and forty nights. Mingle, mingle. Lovely, lovely. He headed to the drinks table, resolute.
Oh. My. God! ‘Um. Hello!’
The vision smiled at him. ‘Hey. What can I get you?’
‘Something soft?’ Argh. The conversation was being dubbed into innuendo. ‘Ha ha! Yes, well, this looks like elderflower.’
‘Seriously? Du-u-ude, I can totally get something hard for you?’ Sly flash of tongue stud.
‘What, supermarket Shiraz?’ (You little tramp!) ‘I think not.’
Mercifully, Susanna appeared and asked Freddie to help carry things through to the dining room.
Dominic watched him go. My. Oh. My.
Then he recollected himself and (tempted and yet undefiled), picked up a glass of sparkling elderflower. When he turned the bishop was at his elbow.
‘I’m very much appreciating your recommended Lent book, father.’
There. See? We will leave them now to their chicken and broccoli bake. But the bishop is not pleased. I fear his earlier sartorial intervention misfired. Freddie is no longer in trackies and flip-flops. His black trousers are smart, if a little snug. But he’s wearing a tight black ultra-low V-neck T-shirt and sporting more cleavage than any clergy wife present.
Has he overstepped the mark? Not quite. But he is deliberately standing right on the mark, defying the bishop. And the bishop is deliberately ignoring him.
For now.
Chapter 12
The cardinals are in conclave. Tempting though it is, we mustn’t loiter with the crowds in the piazza, nor yearn with them for a glimpse of white smoke. Our business lies with the diocese of Lindchester. We are on the brink of Passiontide. On Sunday our focus will shift from the Wilderness to Jerusalem. But today is Tuesday. At 9.17 a.m. a little local train (this train is made up of two carriages) rattles out of Cardingforth towards Lindford. Let’s follow it.
The Linden flows beside the track among rush and willow. To our left the cooling towers serenely manufacture clouds. Look away. A solitary crow lollops over a field greened with winter wheat, and here and there along the hedges we can make out a sly haze of hawthorn leaf, a frosting of blackthorn blossom. The train clatters on, knackerty-tack, knackerty-tack. Allotments, houses, a square-towered church in a huddle of yews. We will shortly be arriving into Carding-le-Willow. If you are leaving the train, please ensure you have all your luggage and personal belongings with you. Carding-le-Willow, our next station stop.
Personal belongings? As opposed to what? Impersonal belongings? Arriving into? Station stop? What, to distinguish it from the other places where we stop for no apparent reason, which are not stations?
That is correct: Dr Jane Rossiter is on this train. Her car is being serviced, and she is on her way to work. Today she’s wearing a black beret because she still hasn’t been to the hairdresser. It looks rather good on her. When Danny was growing up, public hat-wearing was among her most heinous maternal crimes. Nowadays she could sport a ten-gallon diamanté-studded Stetson with impunity. Nobody cares. Was Jane remembered on Mothering Sunday? She was. Danny and Mickey Skyped her and performed the haka. Thanks, boys.
Before long Jane is looking down on back gardens. White conservatories, blue-edged trampolines. A Union Jack. Two swans on a canal. The sports stadium over the rooftops. Lindford, our next station stop. Jane takes care when alighting, and walks to the campus.
There it is: the Fergus Abernathy building, with all the glamour of a multi-storey car park. Doors closing. Sixth floor. Ding! At least her office (sweet FA 609) has a nice view. In that it’s physically impossible to see the Fergus Abernathy building from its own windows. Jane dumps her bag, sits at her desk and turns on her computer, resolving to delete unread any email with an acronym in its title.
There’s a little tap at the door. It’s Dr Elspeth Quilter. That is her name. She is not called Dr Elspeth Quisling.
‘Hi, Jane. Hope you’ve recovered. Sorry you had another migraine so soon after the last one.’
Jane bares her fangs in a smile. ‘I’m much better now, thanks.’
‘As you weren’t at the departmental meeting, can I trouble you for your—’
Jane’s mobile rings. She checks who’s calling. ‘Sorry, Elspeth, do you mind? It’s my agent. New book contract.’
Elspeth retreats and closes the door.
‘I dined at the palace last week,’ says Jane’s agent (who is called Dominic and is not in fact Jane’s agent at all; and while we’re at it, nor does Jane have a new book contract). ‘You knew, and yet you didn’t warn me!’
Jane laughs. She has a filthy laugh. People turn and stare when Jane Rossiter laughs.
‘Well?’ prompts Dominic. ‘Yonder trollop, who is he, where and what his dwelling?’
Jane tells him all about Freddie. She fingers her chin as she talks. One of those annoying bristles, too short to tweeze out.
‘So he’s another Henderson rescue dog,’ says Dominic. ‘Well, that’s very commendable, I suppose.’
‘Yeah, right,’ says Jane. ‘Or very strategic. Vis-à-vis “the gay issue”. Paul can’t be written off as a frothing homophobe if he takes queers in and employs them, can he?’
‘Ooh, cynical!’
‘Meanwhile, Freddie’s on the lookout for a silver fox with a convertible, to take care of him for ever. He told me.’
‘My car has a sunroof. Does that count?’
Jane laughs again. Filthily. ‘Your car’s a Honda! Buy an Audi. But you are very, very foxy, my darling. And getting quite silvery too.’
‘Meow.’
I don’t want you to get the wrong impression here. Dominic did not ring to gossip. He was checking up on his good friend Jane. Well, all right then; maybe he was a tiny bit curious about that incarnation of sluttiness made manifest in the episcopal drawing room. However, his main object was to see how Jane was doing. He’s reassured. She’s laughing again. Goody-good.
Dominic swigs his last mouthful of coffee. Holy Week services all planned. Daphne stroked back into contentment about the Easter lilies. Fair Trade mini eggs sourced for the children’s Easter egg hunt. Kindling for the Easter fire. Mustn’t forget kindling. The lead thieves’ ladder is still in his garden, but he’s calmed down, and is no longer vowing to chop it up for firewood.
Right. Off to Lindford General Hospital. It’s outside official visiting hours, but a dog collar opens many doors. One of his churchwardens has just had a chap’s plumbing op. Dominic is very much hoping not to be told the details. Or shown any tubing, catheters, stitches, cannulas, dressings, mesh, needles, wounds, seepage, or anything latex. There can be a parent–child dynamic to bedside visits. Forty-nine stitches, father, look! Look, father, it’s still oozing! Look, Dad, watch me, Dad! Even after a qu
arter of a century in Holy Orders poor Dominic remains squeamish. Dead bodies: not a problem. Suppurating ulcers: good Lord, deliver us. He gets into his trusty Honda and sets off.
Audi, Schmaudi.
Wednesday. White smoke! A new pope, and we Anglicans are still waiting to enthrone the next archbishop of Canterbury. The mills of Anglicanism grind slower than those of Rome.
Thursday, late afternoon. Dean Marion looks at her watch. Just time for a quick cup of tea before evensong. She’s been in a senior staff meeting. As usual, she feels like Switzerland. (Hmm. Come to think of it, I will not pursue that metaphor any further. I foresee a risk of characterizing the bishop as a Nazi.) As usual, Marion feels like an embodiment of Anglicanism: a via media between the warring forces of change and conservatism.
The bishop has a Growth Strategy. (Lindchester: A Missionary Diocese!) Everything must be strategically lined up behind mission: all the systems, the finances, the processes, every parish, every appointment. And the cathedral must become a missionary cathedral. I will now permit you a fastidious shudder, followed by a short interlude of hand-wringing. Ready? Off you go:
Ew! Oh, my dear, how crass! How vulgarly McDonaldizingly Evangelical! As if the mission of the Church can be reduced to evangelism, and success to numbers, and the priesthood to doing, not being! Anyway, we tried a Decade of Evangelism and it didn’t work.
And . . . stop.
The bishop has powerful allies in his corner. The Church Commissioners have sunk a not inconsiderable sum into promoting this shift towards missional thinking. But cathedrals are bastions of conservatism. Hence Marion’s dilemma. She has been won over by the bishop’s proposals (while remaining temperamentally allergic to them); but she knows many of her flock – to say nothing of colleagues and staff – will fight them tooth and nail. She must bring folk to look at tables and figures, at incontrovertible evidence demonstrating that growth is possible, that the relentless decline in numbers can be reversed. She must commend strategies that have already been proven effective elsewhere in the Anglican Communion. And folk will dig their heels in.
Meanwhile, the safeguarding issue at the Choristers’ School rumbles on. And Linda, Marion’s high-maintenance PA (inherited from the previous dean), is off with stress again. Stress (with a whiff of litigation) is Linda’s default mode when asked to change her working methods. Does Marion have the heart for another employment tribunal? John the Bastard was vanquished before Christmas, and since then – coincidentally? – someone has been sending Marion little turd offerings in padded envelopes. The police are involved. There is talk of CCTV for the deanery porch.
Oh, and the south side of the cathedral is falling down. They’ve just finished propping up the north side, and the laws of stonemasonry – nay, of physics itself! – dictate that the pressure now exerted by the restored side must push the crumbly side over, unless 4.6 million pounds’ worth of work is undertaken, let’s say, now-ish.
Marion has not given anything up for Lent. She doesn’t need to.
She lets herself in. A pile of post waits for her in the deanery hallway on the round mahogany table. Gene appears. He sees her poor weary face. ‘Would like me to cook Coquilles St Jacques for you, in the nude with a red rose clamped between my teeth?’
‘You know what, Gene? Just a cup of Earl Grey. That would be lovely. But thank you for the offer.’
‘It’s because you’re worth it,’ he says.
Saturday. Tomorrow is Passion Sunday. It is also St Patrick’s Day. This will be celebrated in Lindford the age-old way, by Englishmen who cannot confidently tell you the date of St George’s Day getting bladdered on Guinness. The origins of this custom are lost in the mists of the late 1990s.
Susanna is out. The bishop is off duty. He’s watching the rugby in the family sitting room on the palace’s first floor, all alone. It’s half time. Wales are winning, but he’s not despondent. So far it’s been pretty close. We just need to run the ball a bit more, get a couple of tries. It’s only half time, and it could still go either way.
But then, just to complicate things, Freddie appears, bearing four bottles of Peroni.
‘Hey. What’s the score?’
‘Nine three to Wales.’
‘Sh-i-i-t.’ Freddie came in and leant over the sofa. ‘You doing OK? Want some company?’
There was a short pause. ‘Yes, why not?’
‘Cool.’ Freddie sat. ‘Wanna beer?’
Again, why not? ‘Well, thanks.’ Paul took one. ‘Bottle opener?’
‘Ah, crap.’
‘No!’ Paul stuck out a hand. ‘You’ll crack your teeth, darling. Go and get an opener.’
Freddie blinked. Scrambled to his feet. ‘Yep. Sure. An opener. I’m on it.’
‘Second drawer down,’ Paul called after him.
Gah! Freddie stood in the kitchen. His heart thumped. He stared at the kitchen drawers, began opening and shutting them at random. His mind was all, What the—? He—? Say what? Darling? Darling?! Aw, c’mon, what’s with you? Some guy who you know totally judges your whole lifestyle . . . And what? What kind of weird fucked-up shit is this? You need him to, like, validate you? Love you?
Meanwhile, upstairs on the sofa, the bishop was also processing the data. Oh dear. Was this a problem? Normally a term he reserved for close family, distressed children, and babies who cried when he was baptizing them. Home/work boundaries. Blurred. Perhaps he’d better—
No, he was refining on it too much.
But Paul’s multi-processer insisted on crunching the emotional numbers. His feelings for Freddie: seventy per cent affection, fifteen per cent concern and ten per cent exasperation. That didn’t add up, did it? His feelings for Freddie May didn’t add up. What was the other five per cent? He really didn’t want it to be . . . revulsion? Homophobia? But it probably was. And now he’d have to sit through the whole second half with Freddie beside him on the sofa.
Reader, we must leave them now. Paul is still discombobulated by his slip. (Yes, but suppose it were a twenty-two-year-old blonde woman lolling on his sofa beside him, rattling tongue stud on bottle neck, clogging the air with pheromones, flashing an acre of knicker elastic whenever she leant forward? Would that not make him equally uncomfortable? Of course it would!)
(Then again, Paul would know never to allow that situation to arise.)
The second half kicks off.
It’s going to be a rout.
Chapter 13
Monday smiles, mild and sunny, over the diocese of Lindchester. Everywhere you look, your eye is gladdened by the jocund company of daffodils. Bend down and sniff. Isn’t that the quintessential smell of childhood Easters? All Peter and Jane and new Clark’s sandals, and cards made from sugar paper and Gloy gum!
At Easter time the lilies fair
And lovely flowers bloom everywhere.
At Easter time, at Easter time!
How glad the world at Easter time!
You half-remember that song from Infants?
But enough of this cosiness. Cast off your (retro crocheted) comfort blanket and venture with me into the hurly-burly of a modern primary school. Shall I take you into St John’s C of E in Renfold to watch Dominic take an assembly? No, he sets a very bad example, I’m afraid. The head is forever having to stand up at the end and say, ‘Now, boys and girls, I know we just saw Father Dominic sticking pencils in his ears/playing a recorder with his nose, but I don’t want to see any of you trying it.’ We’d better make for Cardingforth instead, where Father Wendy is doing an assembly at the village primary.
‘Gooood mooorning, Mis-ter Crow-ther. Gooood mooorning, teach-uz. Gooood mooorning, Revrun-Dwendy.’ (Oh. Looks like nothing has changed after all.)
Wendy smiles at the children sitting cross-legged on the hall floor in their red sweatshirts. The teachers are in a row at the back, on chairs, keeping a beady eye out for mobile phones and farters. Wendy has something to show them. Does anyone know what it is? That’s right, it’s a daffodil bulb. And what’
s this? A daffodil. You’d never guess, would you children, looking at this bulb . . .
Death, new life, et cetera. You can imagine the kind of thing Wendy says. Wendy is never going to set the Linden on fire. Mr Crowther will not have to say, ‘Boys and girls, I know we just saw Reverend Wendy eating a daffodil . . .’ All the same, there’s something so, well, just plain good, so kind, in the way Wendy says these rather trite things. It bypasses the cerebral cortex to land, thud! on target, right in your yearning heart. The way the smell of daffodils dumps you straight into your childhood garden.
On the back row Mrs Fry is in difficulty. Her mum died last month. But Wendy’s little talk is over now, and she’s inviting the whole school to Cardingforth parish church on Sunday, because there will be an extra special guest coming! Does anyone know who will be coming? Yes?
‘Jeeesus is coming on a donkey coz it’s Palm Sunday.’
The voice drips such sarcasm that this can only possibly be a child of the vicarage speaking. Yes, it’s little Leah Rogers, elder daughter of the bishop’s chaplain. She eyeballs Wendy, a look of withering scorn on her face. Dominic would probably reply, ‘Ha! that’s exactly where you’re wrong, young lady! Bananaman is coming on his Banana-scooter because it’s National Banana Day. What? It isn’t? Curses!’ But Wendy recognizes Leah. She understands where this hatred is coming from.
‘Yes, well done,’ she says. ‘It’s Palm Sunday. And everyone is welcome.’
Mr Crowther activates the data projector, Mrs Fry goes to the electronic keyboard, and the school scrambles to its feet. They sing ‘1 2 3 it’s good to be me’. The 288 young voices of Cardingforth Primary stoutly declare: ‘I’m a special person and there’s only one of me, and no one else is prouder of the person that is me.’ Or rather, 287 young voices declare it. Leah Rogers has her arms folded, her eyes narrowed and her mouth clamped firmly shut. She’s making a wish that on Palm Sunday the stupid donkey will do A GREAT BIG GIANT POO right in the middle of CHURCH.
Meanwhile, special person Freddie May (there’s only one of him!) was in the bishop’s office, helping PA Penelope stuff envelopes. This time it was a lovely, lovely letter and a leaflet from Susanna, inviting clergy spice to a quiet day with aromatherapy at the Diocesan Retreat House.
Acts and Omissions Page 8
