by James Runcie
‘You have broken the rules.’ Hildegard looked at him with mock seriousness as she unwrapped her present. ‘And you remembered.’
Sidney had got it right. It was, indeed, her favourite perfume. Shalimar.
‘There are some things in life which are too important to forget,’ he replied, as truthfully as he could.
Later that night, after he had confessed to all his adventures, and while he was going through the correspondence that he had missed while being away, his wife called down to say that she wanted to ask him a question and it was important that he come upstairs without delay.
Sidney climbed the stairs with trepidation. The light on the upstairs landing had been turned off and the bedroom was lit by candles. Hildegard had also brought up the two-bar fire from the living-room.
As he walked through the door Sidney could only just discern the figure of his wife, unclothed on top of the bed and surrounded by apples.
‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘Am I naked or nude? Be very careful how you answer.’
Death by Water
Sidney was uneasy. He knew that it was one of his principal duties as a priest to keep cheerful at all times and he liked to think that he was content with his lot in life, but the copy of The Times that he was reading one late April morning in 1963 carried a biblical quotation at the top of the Personal Columns that gave him pause.
‘Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you.’
Sidney smashed the top of his boiled egg. What on earth was wrong with being liked? he mused. Did such a verse from the scriptures suggest that being popular was an attempt to curry favour and the deliberate result of flattery and hypocrisy? Why should one suffer for being loved?
Hildegard recognised the familiar signs of anxiety, tidied away her own breakfast and went off to practise the piano, leaving her husband alone with a vexatious newspaper and an overcooked egg.
This was one of those darker moments when Sidney wondered if his life since the war had been a mistake and that he should, perhaps, never have become a priest at all. It would certainly have been easier for his family, and now, indeed, his wife. He could have been a teacher or an academic, or trained himself up for something to do with the law. His mother and father, liberal North London agnostics both, had hinted at other possibilities while being generous in their acknowledgement of Sidney’s gathering clerical momentum, but there was no family history of holiness, and their son suspected that he would have filled their hearts with more pride had his willingness to work for the greater good been diverted into medicine or politics. Now, however, as he turned the pages of The Times, and looked idly into ‘Situations Vacant’, it was clear that he was ill-suited for any position other than that of a priest in the Church of England. He was too old to be a ‘brand executive’ at Lyons Maid ice cream and only just young enough to apply for a job as an agronomist promoting the use of boron in crop nutrition. He read that he could more than double his salary by becoming an electrical engineer in Nigeria (at £1,800–£2,200 per annum), or work perhaps in Canberra, in the Commonwealth of Australia, in ‘three-dimensional site planning’ (if he could ever find out what either of these posts involved). As he turned the pages of the newspaper he thought fancifully what it might be like to up sticks and live with Hildegard in Germany, and The Times helpfully advised him that Deutsche Edelstahlwerke AG needed a Managing Director for their works in Krefeld (wherever that was), but Sidney knew he had as much chance of acquiring that job as he had of becoming the local blacksmith.
Such idling over the idea of an alternative career had become more persistent after he had been persuaded to take a small part in a low-budget film directed by an old army friend, Nigel Binns. The forthcoming presentation, The Nine Tailors, was an ecclesiastical thriller based on the novel by Dorothy L. Sayers. It was set in the fictional village of Fenchurch St Paul and combined crime with campanology as the villain of the piece, a jewel thief, suffered divine retribution in a case of death by bell-ringing.
Grantchester was, in being both rural and relatively close to London, a convenient location for the film and Sidney had been persuaded to play a fictional clergyman, the Reverend Theodore Venables. This was the character who rescues Lord Peter Wimsey from his broken-down Daimler at the beginning of the story, puts him up at the rectory and then asks the great detective to take part in a nine-hour bell-ringing session to see in the new year.
The part of the vicar was, Nigel Binns told him, the ‘engine of the entire drama’, but when Sidney checked the script against the novel he found his character described in more satirical terms, as ‘a man who seldom allowed anybody else to finish a sentence’.
He was surely too young for the part. Venables had thin grey hair and a long nose; his hearing was not as good as it had been and he was always misplacing things (the only thing both actor and character had in common). He was a comic figure and despite the affection Dorothy L. Sayers undoubtedly had for the Church of England, Sidney worried that he would be playing the part of a buffoon.
Nigel Binns reassured him that he had no intention of poking fun and viewed his potential casting as a masterstroke. To have the character of Theodore Venables played by a living, breathing clergyman would give the role depth and authenticity. The film was going to be made like a documentary, he told his old army colleague. What Nigel wanted was the essential truth of things. Neither acting nor costume was required. All Sidney had to do was to learn his lines.
He offered a fee of £50 and Sidney initially thought that he would give the honorarium to charity until Hildegard reminded him that they did actually need the money. She also managed to persuade the director to throw in driving lessons since Theodore Venables had to give Wimsey a lift at the start of the film and her husband still could not drive a car convincingly. It was high time he learned, she said, and this would be the perfect opportunity to get going.
Nigel Binns agreed to the lessons on one extra condition; that Sidney’s Labrador could also be cast in the film. His presence by the water in a final tragic drowning scene would add extra sympathy to the tearjerker he had in mind.
This was slightly worrying because Dickens was not on top form and had recently begun to show signs of arthritis. There were walks on which he could not find his ball or appeared disinterested in any form of play. However, the film was an opportunity and, taking a longer-term view, there was always the thought that his beloved dog would be preserved on celluloid after he had made his final journey to that great kennel in the sky, and so all was agreed.
Sidney had a month to learn how to drive well enough to be filmed motoring up and down a private lane in a Morris Oxford ‘Bullnose’. He took instruction from Fergus Maclean, a lugubrious undertaker with a penchant for quoting Thomas Hardy, and then, on one memorable occasion, from Amanda who thought it would be a ‘lark’ to see how her friend coped with the double declutching required.
‘I really don’t know how you have got away without driving for so long, Sidney. I thought you learned all that stuff in the army,’ she teased.
‘I never got round to taking my test.’
‘You had your mind on other things, no doubt,’ Amanda replied before screaming ‘Concentrate’ as they approached an oncoming tractor on the wrong side of the road.
Sidney’s driving was, it had to be said, erratic. He stalled at junctions, proved reluctant to turn right, and was often unsure of the width of the car the film crew had lent him, veering away from the verges into the middle of the road before swerving back into his lane to brush the branches of the hedgerows.
‘I used to think driving revealed the character of a man,’ Amanda observed, ‘but now I am not so sure. You have an alarming ability to alternate between confidence and absent-mindedness. You must pay more attention.’
‘I am trying my best.’
‘Still, I suppose it will be good for the part. You’ll look like a typical vicar.’
‘There is no correlation between vicars and bad driving. T
hat is most unfair.’
‘RED LIGHT,’ Amanda shouted as they made their way back into Cambridge. ‘STOP.’
Sidney hit the brakes and stalled.
His friend looked straight ahead. ‘I rest my case,’ she said.
The weather was far from promising on the day the crew arrived and Sidney knew that he should get Dickens’s morning walk out of the way before the rain came on. Nigel Binns had told him that they were filming at this time of year because they wanted a look of ‘March winds and April showers’ but Sidney did not feel it necessary to experience these things before production began. He therefore set off across the meadows with his beloved Labrador before the weather turned for the worse. Daffodils, crocuses and even a few fritillaries were popping up amidst fresh grass, and he noticed that these signs of spring gave the people of Grantchester renewed confidence. As they looked up to greet each other rather than down to their uncertain footsteps on frosty pavements, smiling a little more often, bicycling with renewed speed, their hearts, perhaps, more hopeful now the weather was warmer. The first cricketing schoolboys had even set up an impromptu game, and Sidney remembered that he had tickets for the forthcoming visit of the West Indies and would be able to see Gary Sobers bat at last.
Both dog and owner settled on a gentle amble across the grass, a look at the river, and a quiet return home so that Sidney could concentrate on his Easter sermon. His mood began to lift as he thought of his dog’s exemplary companionship and how much his canine friend had taught him over the last ten years.
As the morning progressed the film crew began to take over the village. Sidney had been told that it was a low-budget affair, but the presence of camera crew, designers, costumiers, wig-makers, make-up artists, drivers and no fewer than three assistant directors made the film look far from cheap. Every spare room in the village had been commandeered, with the stars staying in a range of Cambridge hotels and the crew over-nighting in Grantchester. Mrs Maguire had even been persuaded to take in one of the dressers. The village school became the production office, and most of the High Street was made impassably narrow by the presence of camera and sound vans, three different lighting trucks, as well as caravans for design, costume, make-up and special effects: not to mention an enormous catering vehicle that was dispensing bacon rolls and cups of tea to the crew.
Nigel Binns had an authority on set that he had never enjoyed in the army. He wore a range of eccentric hats, and had a preference for pin-striped suits, colourful socks, brogues, braces and tiepins, and he carried a silver-topped cane. He also sported an oddly styled beard which tufted outwards from the chin.
Nigel had originally said ‘you won’t notice we’re there’, but as Sidney watched the growing encampment of people he realised that this perhaps was only the first of the many evasive exaggerations that film people go in for. The unit was staying for three weeks.
Sidney was first introduced to the three main actors with whom he was to play the majority of his scenes. Roger de la Tour, a former matinée idol with luxuriant hair and a romantic history that was as chequered as his trousers, had been cast as Lord Peter Wimsey, while Melvyn Robertson was his manservant Bunter, a pale, bald man with a beard and a prominent mouth-shaped wrinkle across his brow which made him look as if his head had been put on upside down.
Sidney was more than intrigued by the actress who was to play his wife. This was Veronica Manners, an ageing red-haired woman in a cerise shot-silk dressing gown who knew how to make herself look considerably younger than she was. Only her smoker’s mouth gave her age away. Veronica began by complaining that her glory days were behind her and that she would soon have to age-up rather than down and go for parts normally taken by character actors if she wanted the work. There were so few decent roles for women between the ages of Juliet and her Nurse, she added, and most of them involved crying. At least she wouldn’t have to do so in this film but, as far as she was concerned, a small part as the vicar’s wife was the thin end of the wedge. Sidney asked her why she had accepted the role.
‘The money, darling; and Robert wanted a bit of company.’
‘Robert?’
‘My husband. Surely you know him? He was the Hamlet of his generation and the toast of the Old Vic; but you’re probably too young to have seen it.’
‘I don’t get to the theatre as often as I should.’
‘Busy working, I suppose. You’re lucky.’
‘Yes, I suppose I am.’
‘Robert’s confidence has taken a knock recently and he’s not getting the work he should. Nigel’s cast him as a favour, I think. He’s got a tiny part as the sluice-keeper. It’s only a couple of scenes but it involves drowning, so at least he’s got something to do.’
‘Do you often act together?’
‘We were in rep at Bristol Old Vic for centuries: Chekhov one week, Rattigan the next, and a panto at Christmas. You know the kind of thing. I prefer being apart because it’s so exhausting to work together. Robert doesn’t. He likes our companionship and says we need each other but that’s not always easy in the business, as I’m sure you know. Other actors are uncomfortable around married couples. They don’t feel they can say anything and that you’re in a little exclusive club of your own.’
‘Have you been married long?’
‘Nearly thirty years. That gives my age away but I’m past caring. The days of wine and roses will soon be over. Is your wife in the biz?’
‘No. She’s a musician.’
‘I don’t think we’ve worked together before, have we?’ Veronica continued. ‘You weren’t in The Seagull at the Theatre Royal in Bath a few years ago? You have a hint of Trigorin about you.’
‘Alas not.’
‘So what have you been in recently?’
Sidney could not think how to reply. ‘Church, mostly.’
The penny dropped. ‘You’re not a bloody parson in real life, are you?’
Sidney admitted that this was, indeed, the case.
Veronica was appalled. ‘I thought there was something iffy about you. There are moments, no, I mean weeks on end in point of fact, when Nigel really does prenez la biscuite. He keeps going on about all this documentary realism and the need to be “authentic”, whatever that means, but any drama has to be a story. It’s all made up. It involves acting. That’s why we’re called actors. Real life is boring. That’s why no one puts it on the stage. People need entertainment. They want a bit of a show. The last thing we require is bloody amateurs who think they can get by in the biz by being “authentic”. There aren’t enough parts for us actors as it is without pulling in the parsons to make up the numbers. I don’t know how Nigel’s swung it with Equity.’
Sidney began to plan his escape. ‘I’m sorry if I offend you.’
Veronica shook her red curls emphatically. ‘It’s not your fault, darling.’
‘Perhaps I should step down?’ Sidney looked hopeful.
‘Please don’t. It’s almost amusing. But I would ask, if we have any of these little tête-à-têtes in the future, that we stick to the subject of acting. It’s the only thing I know about and it will confuse me if you want to talk about religion instead. Please don’t think you can get round me on the sly and ask what I think about Christianity. Since I am hardly the shiniest decoration on the Christmas tree I would also be grateful if you didn’t ask me about my sins.’
‘I can’t imagine there are many of those.’
‘They are legion, darling. If we started on them we’d be here for weeks.’
‘I thought you were here for weeks,’ Sidney replied rather glumly.
The rest of the cast were sitting around reading the papers and playing cards, as if they were waiting for the departure of a delayed train. Sidney was lost. Everyone appeared to know what they were doing except him. After his second cup of tea, the third assistant director told him that it was time for make-up.
Sidney did not think that he would need much, particularly as he was due to play an extended version of himse
lf, and he was not anticipating anything too exciting when he entered the relevant truck.
He was wrong.
The make-up artist was a small blonde woman in a sleeveless white dress, and even with a beehive hairdo she was scarcely five feet tall. She had piercing sapphire eyes, long dark eyelashes, high cheekbones and delicate earlobes, which contained two perfect pearls.
‘Just pop your bum on my magic chair and we’ll see what we can do with you, darling,’ she began.
Daisy Playfair spoke in a husky voice that sounded like a sore throat, and with her tongue forward in the mouth, as if she was about to offer an all-too-alluring kiss. Her lipstick was glossily pink, her skin was tanned and her cleavage was pleasingly visible. Sidney tried not to stare and composed himself by looking down to the floor and concentrating on her white slingbacks; only to discover that Daisy also possessed the most erotic feet he had ever seen.
‘You’re more handsome than I expected, Vicar. We’ll have a challenge making you look old.’
‘What do you mean?’ Sidney squeaked.
‘You’re supposed to be in your sixties,’ Daisy said firmly.
‘I thought I could be myself.’
‘Not with Veronica Manners as your wife. She’s twenty years older than you if she’s a day. One of our best-known character actresses.’
‘I understood she was a leading lady?’
‘No such luck,’ Daisy answered as she busied herself before fluffing up Sidney’s hair, touching his cheek and deciding what make-up to use. ‘She never got that far. Now it’s too late. You can look ten years younger on stage but once you’re on film there’s only so much a girl like me can do. She’s a difficult woman.’
‘I’ve noticed.’
Daisy put both her hands on her client’s shoulders. ‘You can’t look younger than her or she’ll go mad, my darling.’ She winked and put a finger to her lips.
‘So I’m to be an old duffer?’ Sidney asked.
