A Father Before Christmas

by Neil Boyd

  ‘This might be his last opportunity, then.’

  ‘It’s Bud Norton,’ burst out Archie.

  ‘Where does he live?’

  ‘’E don’t live nowhere. Or, rather, ’e lives everywhere, but not somewhere.’

  ‘No fixed abode?’

  ‘That’s what I just said, didn’t I? You’d as easy find a wisp of smoke from yesterday’s fire.’

  I was thinking we would have to catch Bud Norton in the act, after all, when Archie asked if Bud had taken more than money.

  ‘Yes, the silver stocks containing the holy oils.’

  ‘Wicked,’ said Archie. ‘You’ll ’ave to get on ’im before ’e breaks open yer tabernacle. Anythin’ else?’ I told him the rest. Archie frowned and said, ‘Wanner know where to get ’em?’

  I could hardly believe my luck. ‘You mean you know where Bud Norton keeps his stolen goods?’

  ‘’E don’t keep ’em. ’E passes ’em on to a bloke name of Pedlow in Larkin Street.’ Larkin Street was off the King’s Road in Chelsea. ‘Pedlow buys up everythin’ from Bud for a bleedin’ song. Real bent, ’e is, and as genuine as a sea breeze off a winkle stall.’

  ‘I’ll keep mum, Archie,’ I said, touching the side of my nose, ‘you can trust Fr Boyd. Oh, yes.’

  Next morning after breakfast, while Mrs Pring was keeping watch, I took a bus to the King’s Road. Larkin Street had a narrow entrance and was deep in shadow. The only shop in the street was PEDLOW AND SON, FURNITURE DEALERS, EST. 1881.

  In the very front row of the window display were our two candlesticks. A notice on them said, PRICELESS SILVERWARE, £35 THE PAIR. I couldn’t see the carpets.

  Now I’d arrived at the shop, my nerve failed me. There was no sign of an assistant. What if he turned out to be a typical example of the criminal classes and brutally assaulted me?

  I plucked up courage, prayed to the Holy Ghost and went in. An old-fashioned bell fixed on top of the door tinkled and I was assailed by the odour of old furniture, mildew and cold stale air.

  A white-faced man, about five feet two inches tall, shuffled in from a back room in carpet slippers. He hadn’t a hair on his head. A pair of rimless spectacles gave the appearance of a short-sighted egg. He wore, in striking contrast to his face, a black corduroy jacket set off by a drooping black cravat.

  Seeing my clerical collar, he broke into a smile. ‘James Pedlow, at your service, sir.’

  ‘I’ve come for the candlesticks in the window.’

  ‘You have admirable taste I can see, sir, and an eagle’s eye for a bargain, if I might say so.’ He had a habit of accenting unexpected words. ‘Where else in London,’ he continued, ‘could you pick up a pair of antique silver candlesticks like that for only £35?’

  ‘I haven’t come to buy them, only to claim them,’ I said.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Mr Pedlow, taking one sharp shuffle backwards.

  I told him I had come to claim them because they were stolen from our church. His demeanour instantly altered. ‘What’s your little game, then, eh?’

  ‘Game?’

  ‘What are you, a cop?’

  ‘Do I look like one?’

  He lifted his spectacles on to his forehead and ran his eye up all six feet and more of me. ‘As a matter of fact, you do. Are you in plain clothes or something?’

  Fingering my clerical collar, I replied that I was in my normal uniform.

  ‘You must be a con man, then,’ he said.

  What twisted minds these crooks have, I thought. ‘I happen to be a Roman Catholic priest, Mr Pedlow. No,’ I added, to forestall a further question, ‘this is not a front.’

  When he demanded to see identification I realized that I hadn’t any except for my name inscribed on my miraculous medal. I didn’t think that would do.

  ‘Have you a visiting card?’

  ‘I have only just been appointed to St Jude’s and I’ve not had one printed yet.’

  ‘A driving licence perhaps?’

  ‘I ride a bicycle.’

  ‘A cheque book?’

  ‘I haven’t got a bank account.’

  This must have been the crushing proof that I was a Catholic priest. He cracked. Like Humpty Dumpty, he was never the same again. ‘Well, sir,’ he said, bracing himself, ‘that’s as may be. But that gives you no entitlement to claim my candlesticks as your own. I purchased them in good faith on the open market.’

  I felt my star was in the ascendant. ‘You did no such thing,’ I affirmed, ‘you received them from Bud Norton.’

  He cowered in my shadow like a naughty schoolboy. ‘That’s the first time in twenty years Bud’s grassed on me.’

  ‘He didn’t,’ I said. ‘I got a tip-off.’ Those Hollywood gangster movies were proving useful.

  ‘An enemy has done this,’ he said, sounding quite biblical to my ears.

  ‘It doesn’t matter who did it, it’s done,’ I cried, ‘and I demand my candlesticks back, otherwise I’ll prosecute you for theft.’

  ‘Theft!’ exclaimed Mr Pedlow, riled by the word. ‘Theft! I have never stolen anything in my life.’

  ‘To receive or retain what you know belongs to another is as much theft as if you had taken it yourself. Whoever steals through another is himself a thief.’ Moral theology had its uses, too.

  Mr Pedlow appeared to think I was quoting from a law book. ‘How can you prove they belong to you?’ he asked more respectfully.

  Time for my trump card. ‘Here,’ I said, pulling out a picture from my inside pocket, ‘is a photo of those candlesticks in the place Bud Norton stole them from: the Sacred Heart Altar.’

  He didn’t even bother to look. ‘They’re yours,’ he said miserably.

  My triumph could not have been more complete if I had pulled a gun on him. ‘Do you want me to call the cops?’ I thundered, revelling in my role of bully-boy.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked timorously. ‘Didn’t you hear me say they’re yours?’

  ‘The carpets. I want them back, too.’

  ‘Which ones, sir?’

  ‘Chinese and Persian.’

  ‘Come with me, sir,’ he said with a gesture of defeat.

  I followed him into the back room and searched a tall pile of carpets till I found the two belonging to St Jude’s. ‘Finally,’ I said greedily, ‘where are the candles?’

  ‘I don’t stock candles.’

  That jogged my memory. ‘Forget the candles.’ I could afford to be generous. ‘Where are the stocks with the holy oils?’

  He knew exactly what I meant. He crossed to a cupboard and drew out the casket with the three silver phials. As if despairing of mankind, I asked, ‘What possible use could anyone have found for these?’

  ‘They would have made such nice snuff boxes,’ he whimpered.

  I struggled with the stolen goods up to the King’s Road where I stopped a taxi. As luck would have it, out of the hundreds of cabbies in London, it had to be the one who had taken me and my bike home in less happy circumstances. He took one look at my haul of furniture and said, ‘Don’t tell me. St Jude’s.’

  When Fr Duddleswell saw his precious possessions, he raised his eyes to heaven, saying, ‘Magnificat anima mea Dominum.’ Then in a more earthly tone: ‘So you tracked him down, Father Neil?’

  ‘It’s useful having one or two contacts in the underworld, Father.’ I proceeded to tell him the whole story, adding a spice of drama here and there, but leaving out the thief’s name. ‘That,’ I said, ‘is a professional secret.’

  ‘You cannot even tell me his initials?’ I shook my head.

  He didn’t press the point. He grasped my hand with, ‘A palm branch for you, lad, well done.’

  Once he knew the thief was an R.C. he felt a special responsibility towards him. Besides, to take him to court would only bring Holy Mother Church into disrepute.

  ‘Shall I take the carpets and candlesticks into the church, Father?’ I asked. It seemed clear to me that if the thief were to see them ther
e, he would know we were on to him and leave us in peace.

  Fr Duddleswell didn’t agree. On past evidence, the thief was quite capable of stealing them and offering them again to the Chelsea fence. He had devised his own method of stopping the thief’s tricks. ‘I am wearied out enough by this whole thing,’ he said. ‘Come with me, Father Neil, and I will show you something that escaped me notice before.’

  In the church, Mrs Pring was keeping solitary vigil. He put her on guard outside so that the burglar would not be tempted to enter and went up ahead of me into the organ loft.

  ‘Well, Father Neil, we never thought to keep a look-out up here, did we?’

  The loft overhangs the back of the church. ‘But this is no use,’ I said, peering over the wooden balustrade. ‘We’ve no view of the boxes from here.’ This was why we had discounted the place as a watchtower in the first place.

  Fr Duddleswell drew my attention to the back of the loft. ‘Look down there.’ In the floorboards was a crack half an inch thick. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘we can see without being seen.’

  I made the point that by the time we clattered down the spiral stairs the thief would be further away than the Houses of Parliament.

  ‘Ah, to be sure. But since he is a Catholic, Father Neil, we are not aiming to nab him. Only reform him. And,’ he said mysteriously, ‘we will accomplish that without laying a finger on his person, without so much as letting him set eyes on us.’

  He outlined his plan. In our parish, lived Paul J. Bentley, a radio actor in the B.B.C.’s drama company. The idea was to get him to put a message on tape. When the thief appeared, we would play this message very loudly from our hiding place in the loft.

  Within twenty-four hours, the recording was in our hands. In Fr Duddleswell’s study it sounded stupendous. A B.B.C. engineer had added a sinister echo effect.

  Fr Duddleswell was to have the tape recorder all warmed up, and when Bud Norton came in, I was to give a signal. He only needed to release the pause button and Bud would get the message.

  Next morning at eleven, after we had been watching for an hour, an elderly, balding gentleman in a black overcoat appeared. He sank to his knees in silent prayer for fully five minutes. I had seen enough of life lately not to be taken in by pious attitudes. When he rose, looked around him furtively to see no one was looking and crossed to the Poor Box, I gave Fr Duddleswell the agreed signal. The recorder gave out a full blast:

  ‘THIEVES WHO ARE UNREPENTANT WILL PERISH … PERISH … PERISH …’

  The natural echo of the building intensified the ghostly echo on the tape. It chilled me to the marrow. Fr Duddleswell pressed the pause button down and we kept quite still, scarcely daring to breathe.

  Below there was no sound. Puzzled by the silence, I peeped through the crack in the floorboards to find that the thief had returned to his place and was once more lost in contemplation. His conversion must have been as sudden as St Paul’s. I beckoned Fr Duddleswell to me. He tiptoed across and put his eye to the crack.

  ‘Holy Jesus,’ he whispered, putting a shaky finger to his lips. ‘’Tis Lord Mitchin himself. Deaf as a trumpet. He cannot be wearing his hearing-aid today.’

  ‘Lucky for us,’ I whispered back.

  ‘Deo bloody gratias,’ he said, signing himself.

  When after a quarter of an hour, Lord Mitchin left, Fr Duddleswell wound the tape back. I asked him if we should go on with it.

  ‘How else, Father Neil, are we to recover one of Christ’s lost sheep, tell me that, now?’

  I went back to my post and Fr Duddleswell bent down, his finger poised to release the button. There was a clatter of feet. This time, when I looked through the chink in the floor, there was this shabby, shifty looking character, thin as a tile. Bud Norton for sure. An army greatcoat reached to his ankles. Beneath it was a pair of shoes without toecaps and with string for laces. On his hands he wore a pair of khaki mittens.

  Bud made no pretence of praying. He simply stood there, his face raised and his body arched like a squirrel’s listening. I saw his grimy bald head, his grizzled face, his red-rimmed watery eyes. My heart, in a mad gallop, went out to him. It was the mittens that did it.

  Until this moment, Bud Norton had been a shadow among shadows, a thief, a nuisance, a name stirred half jokingly into conversations. Now here he was, a common, shameless, pitiable vagrant who walked the streets in toe-less shoes by day and slept where he could at nights. ‘As bright in the ’ead as a star by day,’ as Archie in his mercy put it, and as much soft flesh and warm blood as Fr Duddleswell or I.

  Bud went over to the Poor Box. A rusty screwdriver was in his hand. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Fr Duddleswell getting tense as he waited for my signal. It was cowardly of me but I gave it.

  The ugly sound from the tape-recorder reverberated round the church. Bud stood there paralysed.

  ‘Once more?’ Fr Duddleswell mouthed in my direction.

  I nodded and the next message must have gone right to the heart of poor, old Bud Norton.

  ‘THOU SHALT NOT STEAL … STEAL … STEAL …’

  I saw Bud start and shiver, and I heard him say in a hoarse whisper, ‘Godalmighty!’ Then something which, together with his mittens, broke me up. He genuflected. The next moment, he was gone.

  In the organ loft, we both stayed motionless for a while. I closed my eyes, only opening them when I felt Fr Duddleswell’s hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Get up, lad,’ he said gently. ‘I feel as black-hearted as yourself. ’Tis a dangerous game, playing God, to be sure, even to put a stop to a man’s thieving.’ He stood up. ‘I only barked so I would not have to bite. But I swear by all the Bibles ever printed with an imprimatur I will never do such a cruel thing again.’

  Fr Duddleswell was at last able to have the locks on the boxes fixed permanently. Together we combed the district looking for Bud for three days till late in the evening. We called in at the local Doss House and the Salvation Army Hostel. One old dosser, reeking of methylated spirits, claimed to have seen Bud three days before but not since. ‘Imagine,’ said Fr Duddleswell, ‘no one has so much as heard a taste of him.’

  It was cold and wintering early. The Lord had started to shake his salt-cellar over the nights and mornings. I was wobbly on my feet as if I was heading for a bout of ’flu and Fr Duddleswell confessed to feeling as wretched as a Christmas without snow.

  We were forced to conclude that Bud had moved away. In a last desperate effort at atonement I persuaded Fr Duddleswell to come with me to Archie Lee’s. Archie was on his own, eating lunch. He pointed to his poached eggs on toast. ‘Adam and Eve on a raft,’ he said, laughing.

  When I put Archie in the picture, he asked what day it was. I said it was Saturday. No, he wanted to know the day of the month. November 30th.

  ‘And what’s the hour?’ asked Archie.

  In exasperation, I said, ‘12.45.’

  ‘Then,’ said Archie glumly, ‘I can’t ’elp yer, ’cept to tell you ’e could be an ’undred miles away by now.’ The only predictable thing about Bud Norton was that he only stayed one month in any district. On the last day of the month, before midday, he was off. ‘By tonight,’ said Archie, ‘’e could be in Land’s End or John O’Groats.’

  That was that. Fr Duddleswell shook Archie’s hand papering the palm with a pound note and we walked slowly home to St Jude’s.

  Before we went into the presbytery, Fr Duddleswell suggested we pray for Bud in front of the Blessed Sacrament. Neither of us could have guessed when the whole miserable business began how overjoyed we would be to find that for the last time the boxes had been rifled.

  IX The Heart of a Curate

  ‘If it isn’t Neil Boyd.’

  I had been walking in the High Street absorbed in myself and the shooting pains in my abdomen. The greeting brought me to my senses.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, trying to fathom who the stranger was. Then: ‘Johnny Downes!’

  ‘I could scarcely believe my eyes,’ said Johnny, squee
zing my hand. ‘I looked at this long, lean cleric with his head in the clouds and I thought, “I haven’t seen that chap in five years.” Neil, you haven’t changed a bit.’

  ‘Neither have you, Johnny,’ I said, stretching truth in the interests of charity.

  Johnny Downes had entered the Junior Seminary with me. His sandy hair had thinned considerably since last I saw him, his face was red and blotchy from contact with the elements, he had the beginnings of a paunch. Now I was focussed on him I could see that under his raincoat he was wearing some sort of uniform.

  ‘I’m a Copper,’ he explained. ‘It’s ironic we should meet up like this just as I’m being transferred to the West End.’

  We went into a ‘Lyons’ for a cup of tea.

  ‘God,’ Johnny was speculating, ‘if I hadn’t left the Major Sem at the end of my first year, I would have been a priest by now. As it is, I frighten the life out of people in other ways.’

  ‘Are you married, Johnny?’

  He saw me wince. ‘Got a pain, old man?’

  ‘Just a stitch or something like.’

  He flashed his wedding ring at me. ‘Yeah, I’m married.’

  ‘Great, what’s she like?’

  He reacted with something between a whistle and a laugh. ‘Indescribable.’

  ‘All right, just tell me what she looks like.’

  As I recalled, it was Johnny’s nature to lay it on thick. ‘Molly? Peaches and cream, fair hair, eyes of heavenly blue—two of them. In fact, all the essentials and one or two luxuries.’

  ‘Kids?’ I said, laughing at his enthusiasm.

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Terrific.’ I speculated on my own account: I might have had a family by now.

  ‘And another on the way.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ I exploded, and I pronounced the word with the emphasis on the last syllable as we always used to do in one another’s company.

  ‘We’ve been warned it may be twins this time.’

  ‘Johnny,’ I said, ‘I’m going to ask my parish priest to have a special collection for the Downes family next Sunday.’

  He bit into his cake. ‘Your turn, Neil,’ he said. ‘What about yourself?’

  ‘Me? Well, er.’ It was difficult. ‘Well, I was ordained at the end of six years.’