The muffled note of a small dinner-gong echoed through the house. ‘Come and eat,’ said Mr Drogo, putting a fatherly hand on Martin’s shoulder.
The meal was good, though a little strange and spicy. So was the wine. The daughter – no, the granddaughter – whose name was Celicia, moved about serving it as silently as a cat on the thick, red carpet. The rest of the time, from the side, she watched Martin as he talked. Or rather, listened.
Mr Drogo talked. In between eating with the most exquisite manners, he talked about Muncaster; he talked about St Austin’s, right back to the time of the Augustinian canons. He talked with the authority of a historian. Martin was fascinated, the way he showed one thing growing out of another. He made it sound as if he’d lived right through it. Martin stopped trembling eventually. But if he listened to the grandfather, he secretly watched the girl. The girl watched him, too, a slight smile playing about the corners of her mouth.
‘About that phone call.’ Martin’s voice, almost a shout, broke through the smooth flow of Mr Drogo’s talk. ‘Was I meant to come and tell you?’
‘Yes, you were meant to come and tell me.’ Mr Drogo pulled a grape from a bunch that lay on a dish near him and popped it into his mouth with evident enjoyment.
‘But . . . why?’
‘I am going to die – on March 26th.’ He helped himself, unhurriedly, to another grape.
‘Oh, I see. The doctor’s told you. I’m so sorry.’ Then reality broke in like a blizzard. ‘But . . . but he can’t have told you the exact date!’
‘I chose the date.’ Mr Drogo extracted a grape pip from the back of his excellent teeth, with the delicacy of a cat. He looked as healthy as any man Martin had ever seen.
‘But what—’
‘Do you know how old I am?’ asked Mr Drogo. He might have been asking the right time. ‘I am one hundred and ninety-two years old, on March 26th. I thought that made it rather neat.’
Martin stared wildly at the girl, as if assessing how much help she would be against this madman.
‘And I am eighty-four next birthday,’ said the girl. She smiled, showing all her perfect white teeth. Martin noticed that the canines were slightly, very slightly, longer than usual. But not more than many people’s were . . .
Martin leapt to his feet, knocking over his chair behind him with a thud. ‘I came here in good faith,’ he cried. ‘I didn’t come here to be made a fool of!’
‘We are not making a fool of you. Have you got your birth certificate, my dear?’
The girl disappeared into the hall, returning moments later with the certificate in her hand. She passed it across to Martin. Even now, in his rage and fear, her perfume was soothing . . . Hands trembling again, he unfolded the paper roughly, tearing it along one fold. It was old and frail and yellow.
Celicia Margaret Drogo. Born July 8th, 1887, To William Canzo Drogo and Margaret Drogo, formerly Betyl.
‘Do you want to see her parents’ marriage certificate?’ asked Mr Drogo gently. ‘I want your mind to be absolutely satisfied.’
‘I’d like my coat,’ shouted Martin, only half hoping he would be given it.
‘As you wish,’ said Mr Drogo. ‘But,’ he added, ‘it would be easier for you if you went with my granddaughter now. She could make everything perfectly clear to you. She helped Canon Maitland to see things clearly. We gave Canon Maitland a very contented life for many years. He was almost one of us.’
‘Get lost!’ shouted Martin, most regrettably. ‘All I want from you is my coat!’
They did not try to stop him. Celicia came with him, but only to help him on with his coat. Her fingers were still gentle, pleading, on the nape of his neck. Then he was outside and running for the car. He drove out of the drive like a lunatic, narrowly avoiding a collision with a Rover that hooted at him angrily until it turned a corner. He made himself pull up, then, and sit still till he had calmed down. Then he drove home shakily and painfully slowly. Sheila was just standing on the doorstep, pulling on her gloves before going to the pictures; she had a distaste for being in the rectory on her own at night and went to watch whatever film was on, however stupid.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ She took him inside gently. After three whiskies, he plucked up the courage to tell her everything. It said a lot for her love for him that she believed him unquestioningly.
‘I tried to ring you on Tuesday,’ said the Bishop. ‘Tried all day.’
‘Tuesday’s my day off,’ said Martin. ‘I was in London.’
‘That explains it,’ said the Bishop, who always had the last word, however pointless. He shuffled the papers on his desk, as if they were a squad of idle recruits. He had begun life as a major in the war, passed on to be an accountant, and only in later life been drawn to the church. Some spiteful clergy said he remained a major first, an accountant second and a bishop only third. His jutting nose and bristling moustache certainly sat oddly under his mitre on high days and holy days. Every church in his diocese had its accounts scrutinized by his eagle eye, and paid the uttermost farthing. He was brave, honest, loving and as unstoppable as one of his own old tanks when he’d made up his mind.
‘I’ve taken up your complaint with Mr Drogo,’ he announced. ‘He apologized handsomely, I must say. Said his granddaughter was a great one for practical jokes, and rather a one for the men. More than I’d care to admit about my granddaughter. Said he was a fool to go along with her, but he didn’t know how far she was going. Damned decent apology, I call that. He’s writing to you. Wants you to take your missus over for a meal – make things up.’
Martin gaped. He had not complained about Mr Drogo; he had sent the Bishop a long and detailed report marked Personal and Confidential. That Mr Drogo now knew all about it filled him with a nameless dread.
‘It wasn’t a practical joke,’ he said. ‘I’ve been doing some investigating. That’s why I went to London – Somerset House: births, deaths and marriages. I spent the whole day checking. There has not been a single Drogo birth since 1887 – that was Celicia. But from the electoral rolls, there are at the present time thirty-two Drogos living in Muncaster.’
‘Rubbish!’ said the Bishop. ‘Stuff and nonsense. Of course they were born – I know a lot of them well. Michael Drogo is solicitor to the diocesan board, Giles Drogo was chairman of Rotary last year. Why, in a quiet way, the Drogos are Muncaster. Don’t know what we’d do without them. Without their generosity, St Austin’s would have had to be demolished years ago. Your lectureship at the college is funded by Drogo money—’
‘How long have you been in Muncaster?’ shouted Martin. ‘Ever baptized any Drogo babies?’
‘I’ve been here five long years, my lad. And no, I’ve never baptized a Drogo baby – it’s not my line of business. And what’s more I won’t have young clergymen who are no more than jacked-up curates havin’ the vapours on my hearthrug. Go away, Martin, before I start revising my good opinion of you. You’ll not prosper in Muncaster long if you get the Drogos’ backs up. Though why anybody in their senses should want to . . . Stop waving those bits of paper in my face!’ Colour was showing in the Bishop’s cheeks – what the cathedral clergy referred to as the red warning flags.
‘There’s something funny going on at St Austin’s . . . something against the will of God . . .’
‘That,’ said the Bishop, ‘is my province to decide. If you don’t agree with me, you can always resign. Well?’
Martin swallowed, and was silent, as the enormity of it hit him. If he resigned the living, Sheila and he had nowhere to go. They’d even sold off their own poor sticks of furniture, because they looked so pathetic in the opulence of the rectory. They could just about exist on Sheila’s teaching salary, but if the Bishop passed the word he was an awkward hysterical character . . .
The Bishop pounced on his hesitation; he was never one to miss an opening. He came round the desk and put an arm on Martin’s shoulder, in a way horribly reminiscent of Mr Drogo. ‘This is racial prejudice, Martin, don
’t you see? There is foreign blood in the Drogos – touch of the tarbrush there, perhaps. Lot of people think they’re Jews, but they’re not. Good old Church of England – among our keenest supporters. They have their own funny ways in private, but they do a lot of damn good work in public. They don’t do any harm – I happen to know their chemical workers are the highest-paid in the city. Live and let live, Martin, live and let live. Go home and think it over – I don’t want to lose you now you’re doing so well. Why, I’ve just had an invitation for you to give a talk on your city-centre work to the Social Science department of the university . . .’ He picked up a thick, expensive-looking envelope from his desk, with the university crest on the back flap. ‘Bless you, my boy.’ He shook Martin’s hand warmly on the way out.
Martin opened the envelope in the car, his hands shaking with something which might have been anticipation. There was the invitation to give the James Drogo Memorial Lecture.
On the twenty-eight of next month. Friday, 28th March. At 10.30 a.m.
‘They want me out of the church on that morning,’ gabbled Martin. ‘Don’t you see? They want me out of the way so they can . . .’
‘Can what?’ said Sheila, with a brave attempt at briskness. But her hand shook as she passed Martin another whisky.
‘I don’t know,’ said Martin. ‘That’s the awful thing. It’s only two weeks off and I don’t know.’
‘Well, they can hardly bury him in the churchyard. It’s been closed how long? A hundred years?’
‘More than that.’
‘And it’s so jam-packed it’s practically standing-room only. And people would notice . . .’
‘What people?’ said Martin, despondently. ‘Anyway, they wouldn’t have to use the churchyard – St Austin’s has got a crypt. All those names on plaques on the church walls – near this spot lie the Mortal Remains of etc. They’re down under the floor in coffins on shelves, in a place probably as big as the church itself.’
‘Ugh,’ said Sheila. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Most people don’t, or they wouldn’t go near some churches. It’s a kind of clerical conspiracy of silence. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over. Tastes have changed. Mind you, some crypts are just coke-holes, even headquarters for Telephone Samaritans or tramps’ shelters, like St Martin-in-the-Fields. But a lot . . .’
Sheila glanced round the opulent kitchen and shuddered. ‘Where was old Canon Maitland buried?’
‘It’ll be in the church diary – in the church. Let’s go and look.’
Sheila glanced out of the kitchen window. Dusk was just starting to gather around the graceful spire of St Austin Friars.
‘We can be there and back in ten minutes,’ said Martin. ‘It’s better than wondering. Better than not knowing.’
The church door was locked, but Martin had his key. He banged his hand down across the massed banks of switches in the vestry and the whole church sprang out into light. Martin hoped the lights at this hour would not attract the eye of Mr Phillips. Old Phillips who knew the ropes, old Phillips who would see to it. Old Phillips who spent a quite extraordinary amount in the betting-shop for a poorly paid church verger.
They opened the church diary, holding their breath. The entry for the burial of William Henry Drogo, in Martin’s own handwriting, mocked them.
‘That was the awful thing,’ whispered Martin. ‘When he told me he was going to die, he smiled. As if he was looking forward it, like his summer holidays.’
Sheila firmly turned over the page in the book, because his own handwriting seemed to have paralysed Martin, like a snake hypnotizes a rabbit. The previous entry, in old Phillips’ hand, recorded the funeral of Canon Maitland, conducted by a Revd Leonard Canzo, fellow of a minor Cambridge college. The body had been interred in . . .
. . . the crypt of St Austin Friars, by special faculty, authorized by the Bishop. Because of his long and faithful service to the church of seventy years . . .
‘Where’s the door down to the crypt?’ whispered Sheila.
‘I don’t know. There are two I’ve never been down. One’s the boiler-house for the central heating – I left all that to old Phillips.’ They looked round nervously, expecting to see old Phillips coming up the aisle at any moment, in his dull overcoat and checked muffler, which he seemed to wear, winter and summer, as a uniform. But he was nowhere in sight. And yet all that stood between the brilliantly illuminated church and the verger’s house was a flat stretch of demolition-site . . .
‘Probably in the betting-shop,’ said Sheila, and giggled, then stopped herself abruptly.
They swiftly found the pair of doors; the door-surrounds were Gothic and crumbling, but the doors were Victorian, oak and very solid. And the hasps and padlocks on them were even newer and even more solid.
‘Have you got keys?’
‘Not for these locks.’
‘Old Phillips has got them,’ said Sheila grimly. She thought. ‘Look, most boiler-rooms have another door to the outside, for the coke-deliveries in the old days – I mean, they didn’t want coke all over the aisle floors and people crunching up to communion. That might be open – it’s worth a try.’
Every fibre of his body said no. But some kind of frenetic excitement had seized Sheila. She flew off down the aisle. He didn’t dare wait to switch the lights off; besides, they would need them, shining out through the church windows, if they were not to break a leg in the wilderness of tilted table-tombs, leaning urns and tangled brambles in the graveyard outside. He wished he’d thought to bring a torch . . . but he caught sight of Sheila’s slim figure, in her white mac, flitting through the tomb-scape ahead. Halfway round, he found her waiting for him, outside a low Gothic door.
‘It’s shut,’ she said. ‘Locked.’
He felt suddenly flat, and yet glad. ‘It’ll only be the coke-hole,’ he said. In the semi-dark, they could hear the coke-droppings of centuries crunching beneath their feet. Relief made him gabby. ‘It’s funny about this churchyard; disused urban churchyards are usually a menace: vandals writing on the tombs with aerosols, or throwing the gravestones over – even black magic cranks. But here, there isn’t a trace of vandalism—’
A hand on his arm stopped him both talking and walking. She pointed ahead. There was a faint crunching of footsteps on the coky path. ‘Somebody’s coming.’ They hid in a flurry behind a miniature Greek temple, black as coal.
It was old Phillips, shabby overcoat and checked muffler. He kept glancing up at the lighted windows of the church as he walked; a little uneasy, a little cautious. He passed, and went as far as the locked door. Without benefit of torch or light, he fitted a key neatly first time into the keyhole.
‘That’s not the first time he’s done that in the dark,’ whispered Sheila.
‘Shhh!’
Old Phillips swung the door open; the hinges did not creak.
‘Well-oiled,’ muttered Sheila.
‘Shhh! What’s he doing?’
But it was all too obvious what old Phillips was doing. He was returning, leaving the little door not only unlocked but ajar. He passed again, and faded into the dusk.
‘What’s he done that for?’ whispered Sheila. ‘That’s mad – unlocking a door at dusk. Shall we look inside?’
Just then, the church windows above their heads went dark. Old Phillips was busy putting off the church lights. Another light went off, and another. It was enough to panic them. They fled across the graveyard, and didn’t stop running till they reached the rectory.
‘Quick!’ said Martin. ‘Let’s get all the lights on – on the far side of the house. Not these. Phillips can see these from the church.’ Suddenly it was desperately important that Phillips should not know they’d been anywhere near the church.
They went and sat in the sitting room, which, fortunately, was on the side away from the church. The central heating was on, but low, and the room was too cold. Martin banged on all three bars of the electric fire and the telly. They sat shi
vering till the room began to warm up. ‘Get something to do,’ whispered Martin, savagely. ‘Get your knitting out. Take your coat off. Get your slippers on . . .’ He was just taking off his own coat and hiding it behind the settee, when there came a ring on the doorbell. ‘Relax!’ screeched Martin, and made himself walk slowly to answer it.
Old Phillips’ face was set in that look of joyful censoriousness beloved of caretakers the world over. He held up Martin’s bunch of keys.
‘Your keys, I believe, Mr Williams. I found the church unlocked and all the lights on. Vestry open, and the church diary.’ He held that up in turn, still open at the page that recorded Canon Maitland’s funeral. ‘I thought at first it was vandals.’
‘Sorry,’ said Martin, and his voice didn’t shake. ‘I’ve been meaning to go back and lock up, but I got lost in the football on telly. Won’t you come in for a moment? The match is just over.’
Phillips came in; his eyes did not miss the slippers and the knitting, the telly and the warmth of the room. They roamed over everything, making it dirty as if they were a pair of grey slugs. When he was satisfied, barely satisfied, he turned to them.
‘You want to be careful, Mr Williams. A lot more careful. And you, Mrs Williams. Canon Maitland would never have made a mistake like that. Very happy and well-settled here, Canon Maitland was.’
They all knew he wasn’t talking about the church keys.
They were careful. They hardly went near the church at all; Martin found he could no longer face his solo Wednesday service. If God was listening above, who was listening down below, beneath the black stone slabs of the nave floor? Martin found his thoughts going downward far more than they ever ascended upward. What was down there? Why did they need their door opened at dusk? What was Mr Drogo looking forward to, more than his holidays? Anyway, old Phillips was now round the place practically every hour of the day and night, as the 28th of March approached. None of the crypt doors was ever found unlocked again.
Break of Dark Page 13
