I set off back down the hallway, hoping to find a kind student who might direct me to their watering hole, where I was supposed to meet Richard Seth. If it was dark enough in the pub (so nobody would notice that I was pregnant), I had decided I would treat myself to a half pint of Guinness. After all, my grandmother had sworn by the stuff for pregnant ladies. I just hoped that I wouldn’t be “had up” by the local authorities, for corrupting the young.
Fifteen
The sacrament of baptism for a child is an occasion involving the whole family and should include both relatives and friends. Make sure you know what it means before you commit to it.
-From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: All’s well
Date: Thursday, February 14
Dear Polly,
Everyone says to say Hi, and your Aunt Susan sends a special Valentine’s Day greeting. She says you’ll understand the joke, because you guys don’t do Valentine’s Day, which makes no sense to me, but what the hey. George says he’s giving her a bunch of flowers anyways.
I don’t like the sound of these guys trying to steal your bags, so take it easy and watch your back. Don’t forget that every city in the world has a crime rate, even though it may look old-fashioned and quaint. Don’t go down any old English alleys by yourself.
It’s snowing a lot here now, and we’ve been busy with people driving like maniacs on Hwy 11 and spinning out. Susan said not to bother you with this, but I knew you’d be pissed off if you didn’t hear about it until later. Our young friend Eddie got himself into a load of trouble on Tuesday night, and some people are saying it’s partly your fault, although I know that’s not true. Seems he was driving George’s pickup truck (the one you drive) and was going real slow on a back road when some guy comes up behind him and Eddie didn’t have room to move over and let him pass, so the guy overtakes him and loses control and spins out into the ditch. Eddie stops to help him and the guy takes a swing at him. Road rage, I guess. Anyway, happens me and Becker were called to the scene and Becker searches the kid and finds a couple of joints on him. So we take both of the guys in, and the road rage guy gets off and Eddie gets charged. There wasn’t anything I could do, and you know how my partner gets when I disagree with him. Anyway, the stupid kid did have dope on him, although he swears he wasn’t driving stoned. So his court date comes up next month and you’ll be back by then, but I thought you should know. Don’t sweat it—he’ll probably just get a fine and probation. He did make damn sure that we knew he didn’t get the stuff from you, though, although some people think he did. I know better.
In other news, you might be interested to know that Brent and Rico are trying to get the local United Church to marry them, of all the fool things. No way it’ll happen, but they’re getting interviewed by that Calvin Grigsby from the paper, and it should be interesting watching the shamozzle over that one. I’ll save you the clipping.
Your aunt and George are fine. I’m going over there tomorrow night for dinner and a game of cribbage. If you write back soon, I’ll take your latest along. I’m at work right now so I got to make this short. I’m using Becker’s computer because mine’s on the fritz. He hates it when I use his stuff. We’re heading out on snowmobile patrol in half an hour. The sledders are out in full force, even though there’s no snow base on the trails and the lakes are still open. They’re dropping into the drink faster than we can pull them out.
Take good care, and best regards.
Earlie Morrison.
PS. Your Rosie caught her first mouse yesterday and boy is she ever proud of herself.
Getting a letter from home, even if you’ve only just left the place, is utterly heart-warming. Even if it contains bad news. I was so mad at Eddie that if I’d had him with me, I’d have smacked him. Talk about a dope. I knew damn well that Becker was the “some people” who thought I was Eddie’s source of pot, and I couldn’t help noticing that he hadn’t bothered to reply to my message, short though it had been. I saved Earlie’s message and decided to reply to it later in the day, after my seminar was over, so I’d have some interesting material. My large cop-friend surprised me—he was a good letter-writer, and I wanted to respond in kind.
I was already establishing a routine, even though it was only my second morning in Canterbury. I guess I’m a creature of habit, although I like people to think I’m spontaneous. I was sitting in the Internet café near the Cathedral again, with my Starbucks coffee, after having stuffed myself with Cedric Frayne’s morning fry-up. There was a seminar scheduled up at the university at ten, all about “Touring Tips for the Puppetry Troupe”, which I’d decided to miss, as I had toured for more than a decade and didn’t want to hear any more about it. Also, I’d picked up a flyer at the local convenience store, advertising the “Right to Life” march and speeches planned for that morning in the old downtown area, and I thought it might be interesting to watch. Not that I was expecting to see my new friend Alma getting her head stomped by the police, of course, but crowd dynamics interest me, and I wanted to see Alma’s agitprop baby-on-a-stick. I took my coffee with me and headed out into the day.
It was a glorious morning, quite mild, with the sun burning off a light mist and reflecting off the cobblestoned streets like a scene from a Merchant Ivory film. There weren’t many people up and about yet, although the Internet café was buzzing, having opened at the crack of dawn. I’d dabbled in the shallows of the net for a while and read The Times, and it was nine-thirty already. I was wearing my old, zip-up curling sweater, a retro-piece I’d found at a second-hand store in Sikwan, and the extra layer of wool was actually making me perspire. It felt like April in Kuskawa, or May, even. Who’d have thought that Canterbury in mid-winter could be like this? Who needed Bermuda? (Actually, it was only about fifty degrees Fahrenheit, according to Mr. Frayne’s thermometer, but for one of Canadian blood, in winter, that was tropical.)
The main street, which changed its name every block or so, was almost too perfect to be real. The Welcome brochure for the conference had a blurb about the “narrow streets and period architecture”, but nothing can prepare you for the extraordinary feeling of being surrounded by things built hundreds of years ago. Nothing comes close.
When used in modern building construction, the fake-o “Tudor”architectural style has always struck me as silly. I’d never realized, though, how far removed the fake versions are from the real thing. When I saw my first genuine Tudor buildings in Canterbury, I realized that the fake ones were like low budget cartoons. It was like comparing a plaster statue of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in somebody’s front yard with a living, majestic, shaggy and snorting creature seen on location in Lapland.
Canterbury is called the “cradle of Christianity”, and the Cathedral is considered the Mother Church of the world’s Anglicans. The Welcome brochure informed me that the first cathedral was built in AD 597, when St. Augustine arrived from Rome to baptize King Ethelbert of Kent and “so pave the way for the conversion of all England to Christianity”. Canterbury was obviously a kind of roadhouse theatre for invading people, Romans, Saxons, the whole gang, all using the place as a kind of stopover on the way to London, which was called Londinium, way back when. The neat part about England is that people have been bickering over the turf for almost two thousand years, and they all tended to leave their mark on the place. Not only their physical marks—buildings, battle sites, dropped change and tossed away booze bottles, but their psychic marks as well. That’s what thrilled me the most. I’m not a new-age crystal rubber, you understand, but you’d have to be made of stone not to feel the ghosts of people gone before. It was in the very fabric of the place. Nothing remains of the original cathedral, except a few bits and pieces incorporated into the ruins of a nearby monastery, which I decided I would have to visit later. The construction of the present cathedral was started in 1067. The place is most famous for being the site of th
e murder of Thomas Becket, which led to its being the destination of Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales. I wanted to visit the shrine in the Cathedral, as well, and planned to do that after I’d watched the loony Right-to-Lifers do their stuff.
The old part of the city was still surrounded by the ruins of walls, built in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries on Roman foundations, presumably to keep out the undesirables. At the end of the main street, there was an archway over the road, the last surviving city gatehouse, called the West Gate. I walked down the street towards the West Gate, imagining that my feet were stepping on ground that twelfth century tourists must have trod.
On the left, a bit before the gate, was an incredibly old facade that my brochure told me was the Eastbridge Hospital. It took me a while to figure out that it wasn’t a medical hospital, but rather a charitable foundation built in the thirteenth century to house poor pilgrims on their way to the shrine. According to the blurb, it was still used as a rooming house for Canterbury’s poor and elderly, and the chapel, refectory and crypt were open to visitors from ten a.m. until four. It was stone-fronted, crooked and utterly compelling.
A bit further down the street, there was a little bridge over a small river, a branch of the Stour, the brochure said, and leaning out over the water were a bunch of lopsided, half-timbered buildings, labelled the Weavers’ Houses, a flophouse for a group of French refugee textile workers in the sixteenth century. I was just loving this. The street ahead was practically deserted, the sun was casting time-traveller shadows on the cobblestones, and I felt sort of dreamlike, as if, with a waft of wind, I might suddenly be transported back in time, to be plunked on a bridge in 1170-something, just another pregnant wench on her way to an appointment with an apothecary.
It was in that bemused mood that I knew suddenly that I was being watched. You know the sensation, as if there are a couple of eyeballs like deerflies tickling a spot somewhere between your shoulder blades. I spun round to look back down the street, remembering as I did Earlie’s email advice to watch my back. There was a brief flicker of movement down the street on the other side, in the doorway of the Eastbridge Hospital. It was probably one of the residents out for a morning stroll. There were several people on the streets now, going about their business, and none of them paid me the least bit of notice. Perhaps my reverie had conjured up a ghost from the past, some medieval footpad getting ready to steal my purse and push me into the Stour. I turned back to face the gate, and heard the distant murmur of a crowd. I looked at my watch—coming up to ten a.m. This must be the march.
It was odd that they’d picked an early hour on a Thursday in February to attract attention to their cause, I thought. Still, perhaps the local authorities (who, after all, were known to shut down Punch and Judy shows on the basis that they were corrupting the local youth) had been dicey about giving these folks a permit. I knew without a doubt that you’d have to have a permit to march anywhere, especially in a place that relied on the tourist trade as much as Canterbury did.
I looked back behind me again, and there were twice as many people on the street now, as if some movie director had said “Okay, bring on the extras.” They were just people out doing their daily things, dropping into shops and presumably going to work, many of them carrying Starbucks coffee cups, as I was. Some of these people were visitors, I could tell. A tourist, even in February, has a certain look—the camera around the neck, the running shoes (in England they’re called trainers—so Brent had told me), the windbreakers (anoraks) and the guidebooks in hand.
The march advanced through the West Gate and onto St. Peter’s Street. Someone at the head of the line was playing a trumpet—“Onward Christian Soldiers”—and everybody was marching in step. I wondered whether they would have been allowed in by the security guys in the twelfth century. Probably not. Many of them were carrying signboards, the stuff you see clinic picketers carrying, with the usual graphic photo (retouched, I think) of a bloody fetus, ostensibly post-abortion. I believe you can download this thing off the net. It’s not a pretty sight. Some people were chanting “Let them live! Let them live!” and others were accosting bystanders and thrusting pamphlets into their hands. I stood and watched, fascinated by the fervour I saw in their eyes.
I accepted the pamphlet someone handed me, stuffed it into my bag and watched the passing parade. It was mostly men, I noted, middle aged men with receding hairlines, men so angry their faces were red. And older women, the kind of women you’d expect to see manning the booths at church bazaars, prim-faced and wild-eyed, with thin lips. When they chanted their slogans, their eyes slipped sideways, as if they were making sure their colleagues were being as loud and as dedicated to the cause as they were.
Alma was at the tail end of it, being ostracized by most of the people in front of her, who kept looking back at her with frowns on their faces, hurrying the people in front of them in a Keystone Cops kind of way, trying to widen the distance between themselves and the unwelcome caboose. Alma’s baby-on-a-stick was a lovely bit of soft sculpture. The artist had used nylon stockings, I think, stuffed with quilt batting and sewn to craft a big, pudgy and smiling infant. Its diaper was made of stark white material with an oversized safety pin on each side. The bum of the thing was enormous, and the words “Wanted Baby” were painted on it in big, black, easy-to-read print. I saw Alma handing out pamphlets, too, with the free hand not carrying her puppet, and a woman from the pro-life side trying to stop her. There seemed to be an ongoing tug-of-war between them, which would have been comical if it hadn’t been disturbingly vicious. The pro-life woman looked positively murderous. I tried to catch Alma’s eye, but she was way too busy. I admired what she was doing, but it looked like a lost cause. She handed me a pamphlet as she went by, but the tug-of-war lady was pulling on the stick with the baby at the time, and I don’t think she even saw me, just shoved the paper at me and turned to snarl at her opponent. It reminded me of elementary school basketball. The lady dogging Alma was just like the brutal girl from our rival, Sikwan Public School, who was always assigned to cover me in games because we were the same height. She used to come at me like a bulldozer in just the same way, slapping at the ball with big, meaty hands. I always figured she was the reason I got cut from the Grade Eight basketball team. This nostalgic image was reinforced by the fact that Alma looked so much like me and wore a look that was a mixture of fierce determination and a strong desire to be elsewhere. I knew how that felt—I’d loathed basketball.
People were emerging from shops and doorways to watch the marchers pass, most with vaguely interested or amused expressions on their faces, some looking outright disgusted.
“It ortn’t to be allowed,” one lady said, tossing the pamphlet she’d been handed into the gutter. “Spreadin’ their filth.”
A man with a megaphone in the centre of the marchers informed the onlookers that there were going to be speeches at the gateway to the Cathedral, and a special service inside, afterwards. It surprised me to hear that they’d be allowed to have a service. The staid Anglican tradition, you’d think, would be above that sort of thing, but maybe they had a special permit for that, too. I deked down a side street, having seen enough, and made my way through a maze of narrow, smaller lanes, hoping to get my Cathedral visit in before the mob took over the place.
Once I was inside, it quickly became apparent that no group on earth, short of a really large army, could possibly “take over” Christ Church Cathedral. I’d never been inside a really colossal place of worship before, and I have to admit it was quite overwhelming. You didn’t need to imagine you were a twelfth century pilgrim to feel dwarfed by it all. It soared, it came at you from all sides in unspeakable splendour, it was mind-blowing. I wandered around (after having popped a couple of pound coins in the collection bin—you can’t get to heaven for free, you know) with my head swivelling round and round like the quintessential bumpkin in the city, except that this city was indoors, and instead of skyscrapers, it was buttresses and st
ained glass, impossibly high ceilings, carvings, paintings and uplifting antiquity that had me rubbernecking, standing there with my mouth open.
Somewhere a mile or so away at the altar end of the building, a choir was singing. I could hear the voices of choirboys in a complicated, polyphonic tumbling of sound like a woven tapestry. I headed in that direction and found myself part of a small group being allowed into what I guess was an inner sanctum, a kind of church within a church, with its own small altar. A sign said Matins, 10:30 a.m., and seeing as it was that time on the dot, I realized I’d stumbled on a service.
This was obviously not the service the pro-lifers had advertised. As far as I knew, they were still marching and speechifying somewhere near the entrance gate. No, this was a solemn Anglican thing, and I was breaking all the rules, I figured, by pretending to be one and sneaking in. Nobody stopped me, though, and a stern-faced man in a black suit handed me a prayer book as I came in, directed me to sit in a row of ancient pews, like penalty boxes in an arena, two rows facing each other, and he didn’t ask to see any kind of Anglican identity card, so I was okay. The choir filled most of the penalty boxes on the opposite side. They were all robed-up in white, with stiff collars and red frills, and there were little boys among them, singing like angels. I had walked like magic into the heart of something so utterly English, I was practically catatonic with delight. After glancing through the various leaflets included with the prayer book, I realized that the prayers were more or less the same ones I’d been brought up with, and this was just a service of psalms and scripture readings—no communion. I felt a lessening of interior tension.
Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle Page 88
