Acts and Omissions

by Catherine Fox

  APRIL

  Chapter 15

  The cherries are not wearing white for Eastertide. Father Wendy reflects on this as she and Lulu plod along beside the Linden. It’s Easter Monday, a bank holiday, but she’s on her own. Her husband Doug is off on the NUT conference, which was scheduled for Easter weekend. It’s the first of April already, and the hawthorn leaves are barely out in the hedges. There’s dog’s mercury in the undergrowth, though. And the first feathers of cow parsley are coming up. Dandelions, coltsfoot, a clump of primroses. And ‘the stars of lesser celandine’. Wendy knows her wild flowers pretty well, mostly from Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies books, which she used to read to Laura at bedtime. To this day she cannot see a daisy without hearing Barker’s little rhyme jingling about ‘closing my petals tight, you know, sleeping till the daytime’.

  This morning it’s all right, surprisingly. You can never tell in advance. You can never spot the wonky paving slab that will cast you headlong again. Wendy, who can’t sing for toffee, hums an Easter hymn as she plods: ‘My flesh in hope shall rest, and for a season slumber. Till trump from east to west shall wake the dead in number.’ Sleep tight, my darling girl. Close your petals. See you on that morning. As ever, she prays for Lucy too, the harassed mother who thirteen years ago turned to yell at her squabbling children in the back seat and ploughed into Laura on the zebra crossing.

  Here’s their bench. On the opposite bank the young man in black running skins passes. Wendy has seen him several times before. Maybe he’s training for a marathon? She calls down blessings on his blond head as he dwindles towards the distant bridge. Behind her, a lark begins to climb. Up, up, above the cooling towers, bubbling down his beads of bright music on the righteous and the unrighteous.

  I need to reassure you about Jane, I think. The ease with which plumbers can be summoned by bored housewives has been exaggerated, but never fear, she has not perished from hypothermia. She is snug and warm in the palace. That’s right: Susanna, hearing of Jane’s boiler problems, immediately offered the use of one of the many episcopal guest rooms until she gets it fixed. As we have just seen, Freddie is off on one of his insane long runs. We will find Jane sitting by herself in Susanna’s lovely kitchen, ranting at Susanna’s floral Cath Kidston Roberts radio. If you are a Conservative voter, or easily offended, look away now:

  Shut up, shut up, shut up, you vile Tory twats. I was at college with wankers like you. You know nothing, nothing about poverty. The taste of it in your mouth, the feel of it on your skin, in your hair. Culture of dependency, my arse. Struggling to make ends meet does not mean forgoing the skiing trip so you can pay your kids’ school fees. No, tosser, you could not live on that much a week. You could probably lose that much down the back of your fucking antique French sofa and not notice! Fuck you and your fucking bedroom tax. God, let this be your poll tax, the thing that brings you down, you Boden arseholes. If only this were an April Fool. Ho ho ho, had me going for a minute there: but thank God, we actually all voted for Gordon and none of this ever happened.

  My apologies. We will tiptoe away now. Ironically, Jane has managed to turn the air blue. Tsk. Not really in keeping with Susanna’s ivory and pastel colour scheme.

  Who else is around on the Close this week? Rather a lot of people, as it happens. Gene, true to his promise, has whisked the dean away to Prague, but Mr Happy the canon chancellor is still here. Mr Happy Junior, who was baptized on Easter morning at the vigil, has just got the hang of sleeping for four entire hours at a stretch – ssh, ssh, don’t say that out loud, you’ll break the spell! – and neither Mark nor his wife Miriam dare jeopardize this by disrupting his routine. Perhaps, just perhaps, they are through the worst? Perhaps the chancellor will no longer want to kill the nice old ladies who say, ‘Enjoy him while he’s little!’ (Could you enjoy him for me? For half an hour, maybe? While I sleep?) Nor will he want to kill any parent of a contented little baby who offers smug advice. Best of all, he won’t want to kill Mr Happy Junior. He won’t catch himself thinking at 3 a.m., I’ll just smother him now, and we’ll deal with it in the morning.

  Because Daddy would never do that really. Would he? Would he? Woody-woody-woody? No, he wouldn’t, he would not do that, because Daddy loves his little boy. Yes, he does. Oh yes, he does. Mr Happy Junior braces his little arms and legs and goes rigid with bliss. He gives Daddy a great gurgling grin and latches optimistically onto Daddy’s nose. Milk? Milk?

  On the opposite side of the Close the Littlechild family are all home, too. As we know, Giles and Ulli had a short half-term break in Germany on a choir tour recce, so they are staying put this week. They are taking it in turns to sit on Lukas and Felix, and force them to revise for their GCSEs and A-levels, impressing upon them that this activity is best undertaken with books and notes sitting at a desk, rather than in bed with YouTube, or up on the palace roof with Freddie May.

  Philip Voysey-Scott, the canon treasurer, has gone away. He and Pippa have popped across to their house in Norfolk for a few days. Timothy, the director of music, is flat out on his parents’ sofa recovering from Holy Week and Easter. I’m sorry to say that Laurence, the cathedral organist, has snuck off to be unfaithful to his lawful wedded wife, and fumble some younger floozie in Liverpool with more pipes and manuals.

  A word is in order here about organists. Better still, a joke. Question: what’s the difference between an organist and a terrorist? Answer: you can negotiate with a terrorist. This is unfair. It ought to be viewed as a spectrum, rather than a simple disorder, and Laurence is very high-functioning. He is another tall, gangly man. If you lined him up with Giles and Timothy I’d defy you not to laugh. Laurence is tall, but Iona (the sub-organist with the dragon tattoo) is tiny. Oh, the battles over organ bench height up in the loft! On Easter morning Laurence was a happy bunny. During Lent we have restrained use of the organ. (Smirk.) But along with flowers and alleluias, unrestrained use of the organ greets our Lord’s resurrection. In the case of Lindchester Cathedral – hold on to your biretta, father! – it was a stonking great Niagara Falls of a Vierne voluntary, the kind that makes you long for a cigarette afterwards, even if you don’t smoke. Not everyone is a fan of Vierne, mind you. Laurence, when he emerged from his loft, was greeted by a wild-eyed lady who accused him of being the organist. Laurence admitted it. ‘Well, fuck off. That was horrible.’ Laurence, being English, merely ducked his head shyly as if receiving a compliment and said, ‘Oh, thank you very much!’

  It would have played out differently had the wild-eyed lady accosted Iona. Iona is further out along the organist spectrum. She plays beautifully, but you should see the hand gestures she aims at the director of music in her little CCTV screen. You should hear what she says to him and the precentor and the preacher. Iona would give Dr Rossiter a run for her money in the swearie department. All you are aware of, down there in your seat, is her sensitive improvisations, her mastery of Messiaen. She is twenty-seven, has crimson hair with bold black stripes, a dragon tattoo on her left biceps, and more piercings than Freddie May. Not your typical organist, you say? Don’t worry, we solve this taxonomic puzzle by classifying her thus: family – Anglican; genus – a Character; species – organist.

  Easter week drags by, a bit cold, a bit flat. Next Sunday will be Low Sunday; not the best moment for a first visit to your local church, should you be contemplating such a thing. The vicar will probably be away, and a retired priest will trundle out of hibernation. It is the day of the year when you are most likely to encounter a sermon that begins: ‘When I was a young man on military service . . .’ Rookie curates, local ordained or non-stipendiary ministers will be at the helm, and sometimes they will be celebrating Weird Intonation Sunday. The Lord BE with YOU. Lift up YOUR hearts.

  But let’s zoom in on Friday evening and check up on Jane and Freddie. When Susanna hinted to Jane that she might ‘cherish’ Freddie, Susanna probably didn’t picture them sitting one at each end of the pistachio linen sofa drinking too much Malbec and rewatching se
ries four of True Blood. But that’s what they are doing. I’m a bit worried about that oatmeal carpet.

  ‘Are you allowed up on the couch, by the way?’ asked Jane, between episodes.

  ‘Paul lets me,’ said Freddie. ‘If I’m a good boy.’

  ‘Provided you don’t jump up and lick his face, you mean?’

  ‘Or hump his leg? This OK?’ (He was giving Jane a foot massage.)

  ‘Divine.’

  ‘So yeah, what’s happening with your hair, babe?’

  ‘Babe? Don’t oppress me with your patriarchal nomenclature, faggot.’

  ‘Oh, sorry. What’s happening with your hair, skank ho’?’

  ‘That’s better. Well, it’s a work in progress. Long term, I’m aiming for the Cruella De Vil look.’

  ‘Seriously? Wasn’t she like, really skinny?’

  ‘Watch it, you.’ Jane shoved him in the chest with her foot. ‘You can pour me some more wine.’ He rolled round and reached for the bottle. (Careful, careful!) His black vest rode up. ‘Hey! Tramp stamp! Is that new? C’m’ere, let’s see.’ She hauled him to her by his jeans waistband. It was a stylized serpent, coiled, head down, forked tongue disappearing. ‘My, that’s subtle. Paul seen it yet?’

  ‘Nah.’ He laughed, sat back up and refilled her glass, not meeting her eye.

  ‘Cheers.’ She checked out his upper arms. Ladders of scars. Freddie, Freddie, Freddie. And Maori bracelet tattoos. Like the ones Danny was threatening to get. ‘Doesn’t it hurt like hell?’

  ‘God, yeah.’

  ‘Then why do it?’

  ‘Coz.’ The smile. ‘Hey, listen, Janey, can I cut your hair? Like really short?’

  ‘Do you know how to cut hair?’

  ‘Yeah, no yeah. Aw, c’mon, how hard can it be? Suze cuts Paul’s. We’ll use her clippers? G’wan. You’ll totally look like Judi Dench?’

  ‘No! No way.’ She reached for the remote. ‘Shut up. Episode three.’

  ‘I wanna do real bad thangs with you!’

  ‘I’m not letting you.’

  ‘You so are.’

  The Hendersons arrive home the following afternoon. Paul admires Jane’s new haircut.

  ‘Yes, I’ve decided to become a lesbian,’ says Jane, stroking her stubble. It feels like a bus seat. ‘Freddie recruited me. It’s a lifestyle choice. Golly, I hope I don’t tear apart the fabric of society and undermine the institution of marriage.’

  But Paul just looks at her, patiently, until she feels bad.

  Ah, damn it. ‘Sorry.’ And now she’s got to own up to Susanna about the carpet as well.

  Chapter 16

  Dominic hears about it from Jane. He’s at the crem, having just taken the funeral of an old lady who died of a stroke. The last mourners have gone when his phone vibrates. ‘Ding dong, the witch is dead!’ says the text. Oh my God, oh my God! He checks the BBC website. It’s true! Maggie’s gone. He looks round for someone to clutch, to exclaim with. But he’s alone now outside the chapel. At his feet red carnations spell out MUM. Wreaths. The casket tribute of lilies and roses. A white cross made of dahlias.

  Already the next set of mourners is in the chapel behind him. Sheep may safely graze has started up. He feels . . . He presses a hand to his heart as if to check. Another old lady dead of a stroke. Has everything else dropped away now – the miners’ strike, poll tax, Section 28? He’s surrounded by death. The scent of lilies is in his nostrils. We are all going to die, he thinks. There’s nothing we can do, nothing. Dominic has sat by countless deathbeds, held the hands of the dying; but priest though he is, he’s still clutched now and then by Donne’s ‘sin of fear’.

  I’m going to die. No, really, I’m going to die. He thinks of the hymn they’ve just sung: ‘Death will come one day to me; Jesu, cast me not from thee.’ Cast me not away, cast us not away. Miserere nobis. He’s astonished to find tears welling. Now this he would not have predicted. Solidarity at the last with the Iron Lady. He shakes his head and walks to the car park. The row of poplars, planted to screen the uncomfortable truth from Renfold, sways in the wind.

  ‘Who’s Mrs Thatcher?’ asks little Leah Rogers at teatime.

  Marion is in London at the Deans’ Conference when she finds out. She thanks the Lord that she is dean of Lindchester, not of St Paul’s.

  Meanwhile, back at home, her husband Gene smiles when he hears the news. He puts a magnum of 1990 Lanson in the fridge – 1990 being a year he remembers fondly in the career of that staunch friend of apartheid. He’ll invite a few carefully selected people round tonight. Not the Hendersons. True, the bishop speaks up in the Lords against welfare reform. He may not be a toadying Tory sycophant, but Gene’s still not prepared to deviate from the law that you don’t waste vintage champagne on Evangelicals.

  Giles the precentor, cut off from civilization while typing up the music list, does not hear until Gene phones to invite him round for a glass of something this evening. Giles immediately sets about crafting suitably eirenic prayers for evensong, prayers that will cater to both the grieving and the gleeful in Lindchester. Make me a channel of your peace, he thinks. Perhaps we’ll be able to reclaim the prayer of St Francis now.

  I ought probably to mention – lest the tendentious reactions of my characters are giving a wrong impression – that the diocese of Lindchester is made up largely of safe Tory seats. The truth is nuanced, but you will forgive me if, for simplicity’s sake, I paint the political landscape with bold expressionist swathes of blue, and tell you that the region is populated by people who can discern the iniquity of benefit fraud more clearly than that of tax avoidance. People, in short, who think Maggie did a jolly good job. They get behind community projects, tirelessly volunteering for charitable causes and as Friends of This and That. If their good deeds have a strong local bias, who are we to judge? Which of us is not (secretly) more exercised by the threat of a high-speed train route ploughing through our back garden than by the plight of the shadowy poor we have never met? Radicalism, when it does surface within diocesan borders, has a right-wing flavour, as anyone who has ever proposed building a mosque round here would be able to tell you.

  Linden University, it goes without saying, is a bit of an exception. Ravaged though the natural hairy leftie habitat is by the depredations of Management and the evil machinations of the vice chancellor, a pocket remains in the Fergus Abernathy building.

  It was 11 a.m. on Tuesday. Jane locked her office door behind her and headed down the corridor to the disabled loo. Sorry, the accessible toilet. As she entered, the air freshener emitted a squirt of citrus toxin. Agent Orange, probably. It didn’t quite mask the smell of fag smoke. Hey, Spider! Back from study leave. Well, hoorah for that. He was always too idle to go down six floors to smoke in the leper colony. Simeon E. Dacre, poet and creative-writing lecturer in the English department, was the closest Jane had to a kindred spirit in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. (That is its name: it is not called the Faculty of Farts and Inhumanity.) Jane had her wee, deployed the liquid soap ejaculator and washed her hands. She then stooped to check her reflection in the low-placed accessible mirror. Oh, well. At least she still had her teeth. Bonjour, Fantine! How’s that dream working out for you?

  The tall, spindly shape of Spider was silhouetted against the big window at the tea point. He flinched at the sight of her. ‘Jane? Oh, fuck, Jane. Was I meant to know about this?’

  Jane toyed with the idea of stringing him along, but this was a piece of behaviour too vile even for her. ‘No, God no, don’t worry. Just a grim warning to us all: never let a drunk cut your hair.’

  ‘Thank fuck for that. Thought it was chemo.’ He looked her over to make sure, eyes magnified behind the blue lenses of his glasses. He thrust out his long skinny arms. ‘Hug.’

  She was clamped into the weird hollow chest, then pushed away again. ‘Let’s get out of here and go and get coffee,’ she said. ‘And celebrate.’

  ‘You bet.’ They set off for the lifts. ‘State funeral, Jane. State fucking
funeral!’

  ‘Well, of course – like Clement Attlee,’ she said. ‘It’s only fair. Oh, wait, he didn’t get a state funeral.’

  ‘Attlee! What did that bastard ever do for the country?’

  ‘Yeah, apart from create a culture of dependency!’

  ‘Present government are still tidying up after him. Bastard.’

  We will leave them to their embittered socialist grousing as they head for the vegan restaurant. Perhaps you are wondering what I am up to, introducing a new character a quarter of the way through my novel. Aren’t there rules against that type of thing? I hope you will permit me to hint that I am the writer, and I can do whatever I bloody like. My purpose here is to wean you off solipsism: just because you, reader, have not seen him before does not mean Simeon E. Dacre has not existed all along.

  This, I trust, will prepare you for the following surprise: there is another bishop about to make an appearance in this tale. He is the suffragan bishop of Barcup. Even now he is winging his way towards us, in mid-air, somewhere over the Atlantic. He has been in the partner diocese in South America on sabbatical for the past three months. You will be saddened to learn that the Rt Revd Bob Hooty is a thorn in Paul Henderson’s flesh. Paul has prayed the Lord rather more than three times that He would remove it from him. Still, the Lord’s grace is very nearly sufficient for Paul.

  The issue is this: the bishop of Barcup is a 1970s style Christianity-and-politics-from-the-bottom-up-type liberal. The two bishops are unfailingly courteous to one another. But there is not much collegiality. Bob’s been in the diocese four years longer than Paul, doing the donkey work of licensings and confirmations, and he still has two years to go before retirement. At this point Paul will be able to appoint someone he is better able to work with. I’m afraid Bobby Barcup will come home to discover that Paul and his stooges have advanced the (decidedly top-down) Diocesan Growth Strategy significantly in his absence. But we will leave the poor man in ignorance of this for a little longer, happily flexing his toes in his flight socks and sandals to stave off DVT, and reading Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic. It is such a good book that he keeps reading excerpts out loud to his wife Janet, who is sitting beside him reading something else. Discreetly on her Kindle (to see what the fuss is all about). If he doesn’t stop interrupting her with bloody Spufford she’s going to read him a toe-curler of an extract in retaliation.