Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

  He said, “Why has nobody come? Are they on their way or has the car broken down?”

  “No, dear, it’s just that they’re all so busy with Christmas so near and—”

  “But dammit. Poo, that’s why I thought they’d be sure to meet me at least at Christmas time. Did they get my telegram about the exam results and everything?”

  “Yes, dear, you did do well, didn’t you? But you see, with Mr. Greenbloom and his friend here—”

  “Greenbloom?”

  “He’s been here a week, came up in some big car with Mr. Boscawen-Jones. I can’t stop now, dear. They’ll all be in for lunch any minute, and you know what your mother is when she’s hungry.”

  “Can’t you get me Geoffrey or Mick?” he begged.

  “There’s only yer father in and he’s busy at his desk for Mr. Greenbloom.”

  “Father’s no good. I want to know what’s happening. He’ll only muddle me. Where is everybody?”

  “You’d better get a bus, pet,” she repeated. “All the cars are out. Mr. Geoffrey’s gone off to Llantrysant with Mr. Llewellyn, Mr. Greenbloom’s with your mother—Llanerchymedd, Mr. Michael’s gone over to see the Bishop at Bangor.”

  “Good God, what’s it all about, Poo?”

  “It’s Mr. Greenbloom’s ideas. I really don’t know how we’re going to get any Christmas at all. You’d best get the bus, dear. I’ll keep back a hot lunch for you, but I can’t talk any longer now.”

  When he got home the drive was full of cars. Greenbloom’s old 4½-litre Bentley limousine took up most of the space; beside it was Michael’s drunken-looking Singer sagging on its springs, the family Ford and Geoffrey’s van covered with advertisements. “The Farmer’s Friend, Agent for Egg Poult Laying Mixture, Beefeater Cattle Cake and Baconmaker Bran.”

  Drawn up in the space before the garage at the near end of the drive were two other vehicles: a green open lorry and a charabanc labelled PRIVATE. The lorry carried a small cement-mixer, a crane, several lengths of chain and many pickaxes and shovels. At the far end was a padlocked wooden box painted red and labelled HIGH EXPLOSIVES, KEEP OUT.

  The charabanc was locked, but by touring its windows John was able to see that the place of the seats had been taken by draughtsman’s boards on which were spread maps and blueprints, rulers, theodolites, dividers, compasses and books of reference.

  Carrying his bag, he ran up the steps to the terrace and in at the front door. There was no one in the dining-room, but the noise of a dozen or more people in high conclave on the other side of the drawing-room door was plainly audible.

  No one saw him at first. There were two or three young men in dungarees, patched jackets and Wellington boots with their backs to the door, talking to Geoffrey about local geography, a beautiful girl with egg-yolk hair and blue eyes wearing slacks and an alpine jersey talking to Michael, and at the far end, ranged round the fire on the sofa and armchairs, the remainder of the family: George and Mary, Melanie, Father looking bewildered, Mother sitting on the nursing chair with her legs wide apart and Greenbloom himself with his friend Boscawen-Jones.

  These two occupied the centre of the room, standing right in front of the blazing fire with glasses of whiskey in their hands, and a little table in front of them on which stood decanter and syphons.

  Boscawen-Jones, whom everyone called Jane, was hardly recognizable; in the five years which had passed since John had last seen him he had grown immensely stout and wore his greying black hair in a full bang across the right-hand temple. He wore spectacles of the type in which the thick tortoise-shell bridge runs directly into the lens’ frames so that he seemed at first glance to have a permanent meditative frown. His short round neck was enclosed in a narrow dog-collar surmounting a pleated stock with black mother-of-pearl buttons set in the centre.

  Beside him Greenbloom looked as lean as a mediaeval heretic. He was most conventionally dressed in a businessman’s blue pinstripe with a finely spotted tie, black shoes and socks. His hair, however, was exactly down to his ears; a short bob swept back unparted from the forehead and lightly oiled, the white strands from the temples gleaming in the lamplight like an uncurled Georgian wig.

  He was not talking but swilling the whiskey round in his glass and listening to his friend who was speaking to no one in particular with the pleasurably abstracted gaze of someone who is talking on a full glass.

  Mother was the first to see John or to think that she saw him, being so short-sighted that she had often to await confirmation of her vision though never of her visions. When she said, “It’s John,” everyone stopped talking and he ran forward to touch her always cold lips and to brush the evening stubble of Father’s cheek.

  Mick and Geoff closed in on him with heavy facetiousness, so that he wondered which of them was being more successful in their pursuit of Greenbloom’s girl, who was introduced as Averil Browne-Browne and something to do with the film studios at Elstree. Greenbloom only said, “Fill him a glass, Mick,” and then, without looking at him, “We drink to your successes, John, recent and to come.”

  “We knew he had it in him,” Michael said and Father got in with, “What sort of a crossing did you have? I fancy the ship must have left Kingstown on the ebb which, with an easterly piling up the water on the Irish coast, could have given her a nasty roll.”

  He was cut short by Boscawen-Jones who said, “If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, it is a thousand pities no one thought of asking your son to consult the most direct sources whilst he was over there. Though I have transcripts of most of the early literature, there are still certain of the Celtic missions whose only records are to be found in the Trinity library and, perhaps, certain of the archives of the Irish monastic foundations. The more information we have, the more likely we are to get full diocesan faculties for the remainder of the island, from Bangor. Eilianus now, as I explained to his Lordship in my correspondence, did present peculiar problems. His bona fides, that is to say, his process held before either Boniface or Urban, though retrospective, are not in question provided we can prove he was identical with the Carmelite St. Kilian known to have sailed from Blackrock in the tenth century or the Augustinian St. Liam of Glendalough who landed somewhere on the local coastline in eleven sixty or thereabouts.”

  Greenbloom said, “The answer, my dear Jane, lies in the ground. If the past is to serve the present and make glorious the future there comes a moment where the pen must be discarded and the pickaxe wielded. Tomorrow we will open up the crypt.” He drained his glass and turned to Mother. “I am sure you are all with me in this. We shall celebrate such a Christmas here in this Parish of St. Eilian as the Church in Wales has not seen in a dozen centuries, Mrs. Blaydon?”

  “If you’re sure, Horab, that there will be no sacrilege. If we give the Vicar the slightest chance he will down Teddy without a moment’s hesitation.”

  “Sacrilege, with the Bishop’s consent, madam? With Jane here in possession of all the facts? The opportunity of bringing to light the true faith native to these islands and unsullied by the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation, by Puseyism, Welsh Methodism, Victorian Revivalism, or by Bog Catholicism? Think of the significance of it, the unearthing of the shining relics of a saint untarnished by the disasters of later dogma, the fact that it should be your own church which is first on our list and that thanks to my own resources and Jane’s research it can and shall be done at the very season of the Nativity.”

  “It’s just that I don’t like the thought of blowing things up,” she began. “I’m sure that it could be done gently if everyone is willing to help. Surely with six of you—” She hesitated and went on. “The Vicar has made things difficult enough as it is.”

  “The Vicar,” said Greenbloom with great emphasis, “built in order to destroy. Generations of your Joneses, Thomases and Williams have been burying the unsoilable bones of the Irish Christian missionaries beneath tumuli of Penmaenmawr slate and Aberdovey granite. Tomorrow we will undo their work in a matter of moments.
We shall send their hideous monuments hurtling into the sky and uncover the true nexus of Christianity not in Canterbury, York, Tara or the Hebrides, but here in Anglesey, the Insula Opaca of the druids, the nurse and mother not only of Wales nor of England but of Christendom itself.”

  At this, one of the dungareed young men, Bernard Macwilliams, called out excitedly, “To the Church in Wales!” And another, “To Horab’s conversion!” And everyone drank.

  Greenbloom said, “I will now ask my party to return to the Panton Arms for dinner. Bernard, you had better take them in the charabanc. The less that lorry is driven at night the better. Averil, Jane and myself will follow later in the Bentley.”

  At supper Boscawen-Jones expatiated on his researches into Anglicanism and the suspect theology of an Elizabethan named Matthew Parker whom, he said, he had once admired as having done more for the Church of England than Leo XIII had ever accomplished for that of Rome. He never had time to explain exactly why or when he had changed his mind about this, because of Greenbloom’s frequent interruptions which culminated in a diatribe of such eloquent erudition that everyone at the table was left feeling quelled and inadequate.

  Greenbloom attributed his conversion entirely to having paid for the rood screen in St. Eilian’s Church on his last visit to the family. He sketched in the alarming progress of his faith from that date onwards, proclaimed his certainty that it was no accident he should have found his Damascan illumination in Wales and thus, by some celestial paradox, have fulfilled the presentiments of his mother that though it was not given her to have been delivered of the Messiah, at least she had found consolation in having given to the world a prophet destined for honour “in another country.”

  From this he ranged and raged through the Articles, calling them “Thirty-nine steps downwards into the seventh circle of the Inferno,” the Black Rubric, the Carolean divines, Broad Churchmanship, Bishops Hooker and Bourne, the Oxford Movement, several ex-Anglican cardinals, and a number of Archbishops of Canterbury, most of whom, according to himself, would be unfitted to act as vice presidents of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

  Everyone was left wondering what he had been converted to in the positive sense; and when John, made bold by whiskey, asked him what exactly was left, he rounded on him and subjected him to a fusillade about the early Irish saints sailing across to the Welsh coast in minute boats armed with the Book of Kells and the fire and water of patristic Christianity.

  “Do you imagine,” he demanded, “that Jane and I have come here in order to preside like Eliot and that man Betjeman over the sea-green corruption of a great Church, mooning round cathedrals to mourn the glory that is past or parish churches in order to count the number of ladies’ bicycles in the porch? Do you not realize that we are going to give our lives to this work? That when, at midday tomorrow, we blast away the slate and granite beneath which the crypt of Eilianus lies foundering like the ark of the covenant, we shall be uncovering the pristine spring of the Faith it was given to my people to pour into the world?”

  Either nobody could answer him or nobody at this stage cared to do so. Whenever he detected an undertone of uncertainty or lack of conviction in his hearers he appealed at once to the fact that they themselves had been the instruments of his conversion from Judaism to Christianity. Whenever Boscawen-Jones attempted to correct his flow of historical facts he silenced him immediately by referring to him in a deprecatory way as “Father” and decrying too great a dependence on scholarship at a time when only work and enthusiasm were necessary.

  The meal drew to a close with everyone looking bewildered and fatigued. John had a sudden vision of his mother and father having housel’d a raven in their nest of ducks. He saw that their misgivings were scarcely defined even to themselves and that though someone, with their worried connivance, had evidently succeeded in getting the Bishop’s consent to Greenbloom’s immediate plans, they were still a little confused by the suddenness of his descent upon the Parish and the exact nature of his beliefs.

  Matters were made no better when he started to explain to Father that Boscawen-Jones, though he did not insist on the title, was really a Bishop in his own right. For Father was very touchy on the question of the validity of his own orders, having gone to great trouble to make sure that the ordaining Bishop was himself truly consecrated. Greenbloom explained that Boscawen-Jones had been ordained by a non-practising Bishop of the Old Catholic Church in Brussels eighteen months earlier and had on the spot been appointed to this Bishop’s own see, somewhere between Charleroi and the Luxemburg frontier.

  “We were taking no risks,” Greenbloom declared with a slow look round the table. “We wished to be sure that Father’s orders were valid. With the Anglican adherence to the Edwardian Rite one cannot be sure that one is not simply having the hands of a retired grocer laid upon one’s head. Whereas the New Romans, by which I mean the men of the Vatican, have tied themselves into such dogmatic knots since the Council of Trent, that one might end up by being ordained a hedge priest, a professional celibate or a witch doctor.”

  Throughout all this, the girl Averil said nothing because she was so attractive that she had no need to, or that was John’s presumption. Greenbloom treated her much’ as he had treated Rachel, his former mistress, as a background figure more or less permanently in place whom he seldom addressed directly. Once or twice he spoke to her without even looking at her, saying, “Did you get that, Averil?” or “Note that point if you please,” and she for her part said, “I did, Mr. Greenbloom,” or “I have.”

  When the party had broken up, Greenbloom and Boscawen-Jones retiring to Benllwch with her, and the remainder of the family to bed either in the cottage or over at Bryn Glas with George and Mary, Michael, Geoffrey and John discussed her for half an hour.

  Michael was knowledgeable: “An obvious continuity type he’s picked up at the studios.”

  Geoffrey envious: “Always seems to get good-lookers even when it’s through church work.”

  John asked, “How do you mean, church work?”

  “She’s in this Ecclesiastical Film Unit he’s running at Elstree. Didn’t you see the cameras and stuff in the back of the Bentley? He’s got about two thousand pounds’ worth of equipment with them.”

  “Good lord! And those other fellows, Macwilliam and Co.—”

  “He’s a camera man and the others are technicians. That’s how he got round all the bishops. He’s pouring money into the thing.”

  “You mean they’re going to film it all?”

  “Yes.” Geoffrey yawned. “Old Horab’s going to blow up various churches and then exhibit the pictures all over England and France to raise funds for their restoration. We’re going to have a damned noisy Christmas.”

  But Michael, who still felt himself to be responsible for having introduced Greenbloom into the family and who was still employed in some legal capacity in one of his firms, corrected this, saying, “It’s a documentary. There’s no question of blowing up the church. He’s simply going to uncover the crypt and the leper hole in the apse.”

  “I ask you,” said Geoffrey. “What on earth would a leper have been doing here in eleven hundred A.D. or whenever it was? The total population now is only about five hundred and I’ve never met a single person in the whole island who ever even heard of an Anglesey leper unless you count old Christmas Piebron’s syphilis.”

  John said, “I wish David was here, he’d have enjoyed it enormously, but he’d be furious if there was any chance of those Jacobean angels being damaged.”

  Geoffrey replied, “He’d be a damned sight more interested in seeing that Averil Browne-Browne came out of it intact.”

  And on this they went to bed.

  Greenbloom left on December the twenty-third very suddenly in response to a telegram from Paris. Boscawen-Jones and the girl left with him while Macwilliam disappeared without trace, leaving only a message about “runs through” at the studio. He also left his two companions, who seemed to have very little m
oney with them and no particular home addresses.

  They were billetted temporarily at Bryn Glas with George and Mary and one of them, Jon Penington, proved unexpectedly useful in helping to get the tarpaulins into position over the hole in the roof of the church. The other one was not moved into the Caernarvonshire and Bangor Infirmary until after Christmas because of the hospital’s seasonal shortage of staff. Dr. Jones said that since his fracture was a simple one and that most of the granite chippings had been easily removable under local anaesthetic, he had had a fortunate escape, adding privately to John, “Provided he doesn’t get tetanus or worse, isn’t it, with it being churchyard dirt that constitutes most of the foreign bodies.”

  The family’s biggest problem lay with the Vicarage. As a first measure of protest the Vicar, the Reverend Hugh Pritchard, known locally as “Plank” ever since his wife had told Nell Roberts that in bed he was always as stiff as one, refused to hold any further services in English until he had obtained redress from the Bishop.

  He was far too stiff a little man to approach the house himself, his anger being of the cold Calvinist sort which is nursed passively as an ice bag by a man with a severe headache. Instead, as on other occasions, he made use of his private bravo, old Scraffe the sexton, debt-collector, gravedigger and unofficial guide to the Church of St. Eilian.

  Whenever a flower-arranger forgot the flowers for the altar, when an infrequent wedding or baptismal fee was considered to have been too low, or unwelcome parishioners aspired to the Parish Council, old Scraffe would be despatched from his cottage on the mountain just above the dark tree-shrouded Vicarage to make known the feelings of the Reverend Plank. He was a man of disturbing aspect even to his compatriots; to the small English colony and to tourists with the pre-Reformation church on their lists, the first sight of him was enough to make them feel strangers in a very foreign country, later to hurry back, their change uncounted, talking about druids and witchcraft.

  Old Scraffe’s yellow face was covered with purple moles. He kept his eyes on the ground always because he was bent, creeping along doubled up in the attitude of one accustomed to “digging, isn’t it, in a very little place.” He pretended to speak only a little English when it suited him; when it did not, as for instance during a tour of the murals supposed to be showing through ten coats of damp whitewash in the chancel, he could be voluble: swearing to himself that “anyone but a bloody Sais could see the Seven Diggers of Ditches against the Sumerians, the Diawl Mawr with the bird ara vol and the banner of St. Eilian inscribed with the name of the eighth sin.”