Being both enthusiastic and humble, the bishop was a good teacher. There were moments when Amiss thought he almost cared about St Augustine of Hippo and when one evening, over the shepherd’s pie, they got into a dispute about the ontological proof of the existence of God (that than which no greater thing can be thought exists not only in the mind but in reality)—a concept which Amiss had always regarded as a prime piece of theological claptrap—the bishop was so lucid and eloquent that over the next few days Amiss wondered a few times if St Anselm might not have had a point.
Amiss always allowed himself a prelunch stroll around the close and the cathedral. Initially this was to take the opportunity to get to know another part of the building well. He had always tended to be an impatient visitor to great and beautiful places and things—one of those who gets around a building of great architectural interest in twenty minutes while the Louvre or the Uffizi takes no more than an hour and a half. But as the gentle pace of Westonbury had its effect, he found there were great pleasures to be had from applying himself to quiet contemplation of the sunlit rose window or the intricate carvings on the choir stalls.
This period of soothing the spirit was frequently necessary in order to calm Amiss’s soul after he had attended to Plutarch’s perpetrations and desecrations, for she had taken to demonstrating her fondness for the cathedral by bringing it gifts of dead wildlife. It was only because she liked to take a well-earned nap beside the remains of the rat, water vole or blue tit that had the misfortune to cross her path, that Amiss was able to locate the corpse most mornings before anyone else did. It was once again the bishop who saved her from being ignominiously exiled when Amiss found her lying on the altar asleep beside a well-chewed pigeon.
He spent a great deal of time alone, for the bishop was required to attend, reluctantly, numerous working lunches and welcoming dinners, but Amiss enjoyed the opportunity to read, think and amble by the river—sometimes with Plutarch—and occasionally he went to the cathedral for evensong. Perhaps his greatest and most unexpected pleasure—for he had never particularly liked organ music—was sometimes after dinner, when the bishop was at his lectern, to go over to the cathedral to listen to Jeremy Flubert practising and go back to his little house in the close for a glass of wine.
***
A week or so after he settled in Amiss had caught up with Flubert after evensong just as he was unlocking his front door. ‘You’re the precentor and organist, aren’t you?’
‘And you’re the mysterious assistant. Come in and have a drink.’
Flubert had waved Amiss to a brown leather winged armchair which proved to be wonderfully comfortable and crossed the room to switch on his CD player; Chopin came on quietly. ‘You don’t mind the music, I hope. I fear I’ve become like one of today’s wretched children—hardly able to function without music in the background. I’m almost on the point of succumbing to one of those dreadful Walkman things, though I’m sure it’s the worst kind of self-indulgence.’
‘Seems pretty harmless as self-indulgence goes.’
‘What a comforting thing to say. You’re probably right; there is somewhere buried within me too much of the Calvinist spirit. I am an escaped prisoner from the Plymouth Brethren. Every day I thank God for my luck and for giving me the chance to create what I have created here. Sherry?’
What was it about the British Establishment and sherry, wondered Amiss fleetingly. ‘Thank you.’
Flubert filled two small glasses, passed one to Amiss and sat down opposite. ‘So tell me why you have moved into the palace. My colleagues are agog.’
‘Dr Elworthy needs someone to organize him a bit and help him with his academic research. I’m an historian by training and an administrator by profession—at present between jobs—so it’s an excellent temporary job for me.’
‘I’d be inclined to guess you’re adding a little bit of espionage to your activities.’
Amiss adopted his bewildered look. ‘Come again?’
‘Oh, now, come on. Our bishop is an innocent, there is no dean to hold his hand and we are a rum lot in the chapter. I should think he needs help to understand what is going on.’
‘And what is going on?’
‘You’ve come to the wrong person. There is nothing I care about except music.’ He smiled. ‘And a few creature comforts.’
Amiss looked around the room. Three of the walls were lined with books. Directly in front of him was a long row of volumes of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, to his left were biographies and memoirs of musicians and to the right was music criticism, while the bottom shelf around all three walls was packed with what looked like sheet music.
The fourth wall was covered from ceiling to halfway down with tightly packed portraits. Amiss recognized two Bachs, Beethoven, Mozart, Liszt and Vaughan Williams. Below them was a long refectory table with the sound system and rows of CDs, tapes and records.
In the centre of the room was a Bechstein; beside it were three music stands with sheet music, towards which Flubert nodded. ‘An informal chamber-music group. It’s not really my forte: I’m essentially a soloist. But it’s fun sometimes in the long winter evenings.’
‘Who do you play with?’
‘A friend from the town and two masters from the choir school. I’m an obsessive, I’m afraid. I mix almost exclusively with musicians.’
‘So you don’t socialize with the other canons residentiary?’
‘No. We are not a chummy bunch. However, let us not indulge in gossip. Tell me about yourself.’
Amiss set himself to win Flubert’s trust by the time-honoured English method of humorous self-deprecation. By the time he had given an amusing though heavily censored version of how and why he had quit the civil service and a few of the dead-end jobs that followed, he could feel his host warming to him.
Flubert reached for the decanter. ‘More sherry?’
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘So you are, as it were, still resting?’
‘Yes, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. I’m enjoying myself here, for instance. I’ve never encountered such serenity before, you see, not even in Oxford.’
‘Hm. It’s not as serene as all that. At times it can be pretty poisonous here. A small compound dominated by a gay mafia is not a healthy place, as you might imagine. Under dear Dean Roper, blood was spilled about issues of such staggering consequence as the colour of the new curtains in the vestry. No, we really should have families here—though I admit I would hardly be grateful for the noise. But children might give us some sense of perspective.’
‘You aren’t inclined to invest in a family yourself?’
Flubert laughed. ‘What a discreet way of asking if I too am homosexual. I will say merely that my inclinations are neither here nor there. As a recent bishop put it, my sexuality is a grey area: I am a celibate with no need to parade his sexuality.’
‘Unlike some of your colleagues?’ ventured Amiss.
‘I infer you have been exposed to the vulgarity of Cecil Davage.’ He sighed. ‘He was an especial trial to me in earlier days, until Dean Roper persuaded us all to sink our differences. Funny old fellow—dreadful misogynist—but quite wise in many ways. Pointed out that since we agreed on so much—liturgy, music and so on—we should as much as possible leave each other alone and turn a blind eye to each other’s failings and excesses. It’s worked for most purposes.’
Amiss raised an eyebrow. ‘Excesses?’
‘The fag-hag chapel, for instance. That would darken every day for me, but I choose never to go near it and to block it from my mind.’
‘How did it get through?’
‘A trade-off. In exchange for my dropping my opposition, Cecil agreed to the appointment of another assistant choir-master, and anyway he gives me total support on our programme of music. At least no one can fault us for vulgarity in that area.’
‘Is there any pressure for change?’
‘Nothing to speak of. There are occasional squeaks from loc
al burghers that we should be more popular and less cerebral—a bit more of “Oh, for the Wings of a Dove” and a bit less of Byrd and Tallis—but with the help of Cecil, who is the cleverest politician among us, I see them off.’
‘Aren’t you worried about what Dean Cooper might have in mind?’
‘Not really. He’s got to get three members of the chapter on his side before he can do anything. He might do something with that nice earnest woman, Alice Wolpurtstone. But he’ll never get a majority with a clever clogs like Cecil against him. And from what I’ve seen, he’s dim. I expect he’ll be bought off with a demotic service every Monday or something similar.’
He lay back in his chair and stretched luxuriously. ‘I’m indifferent, really. A bit like the bishop. We’re two of a kind. He sits in his study wanting to be left alone with Pelagius: I sit in mine poring over a recently discovered variation to a fifteenth-century vesper.’
‘What should I know about your colleagues if I’m to smooth the bishop’s path?’
‘Don’t cross Cecil. Get him on your side. You can ignore Trustrum: he’s about as effective as the dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s tea party and goes sleepily along with whatever Cecil tells him to do. By instinct he’s a clerical equivalent of a particularly bureaucratic railway clerk—the “can’t-do-this-if-it-isn’t-in-the-rule-book” brigade. Which doesn’t bother me. It keeps the liturgy intact.
‘Then there’s Dominic Fedden-Jones. He’s quite a little plotter too. Just remember he’s an absolute Narcissus—little interest in anything except his own appearance and smarming up to the well-born. Sort of chap you used to find fluttering around Princess Margaret and these days worshipping at the feet of Diana. Loves hobnobbing with Italian cardinals. Ideally would like to be RC and chaplain to the Duke of Norfolk. You know the type.’
‘Why hasn’t he gone over to Rome?’
‘Two reasons. He was Dean Roper’s blue-eyed boy and wouldn’t have upset him by jumping ship. And then there was the usual problem. His Holiness is too much of a homophobe even for a wannabe papist. In his snobbish soul Dominic wants to float around the Vatican kitted out as a Supernumerary Privy Chamberlain of Sword and Cape or something similar, emerging only to dine with princes and contessas; but he knows that his carnal appetites would interfere. Better to stay with the dear old tolerant C of E than be unfrocked by Il Papa.’
The telephone rang. ‘Jeremy Flubert. Ah, Dominic…Yes…Yes…Yes. Certainly, ten a.m. will be fine…Thanks…Oh, before you go, have you met the bishop’s assistant yet?…Robert Amiss…Look out for him. You might have mutual friends…Well, I know his last job was in the House of Lords…Yes…Yes, I get the impression he’s a bit lonely. It might be kind to look him up…Right. Goodnight.’
He replaced the receiver and smiled at Amiss. ‘Expect an urgent invitation to lunch—and don’t spare the name-dropping.’
Chapter 8
As a host, Dominic Fedden-Jones had the pleasantly condescending air of a minor royal graciously entertaining in his grace-and-favour residence a stranger of unknown stock. However, a casual reference from Amiss to his friend the Duke of Stormerod won his interest immediately. Over sherry they found they had two or three peers in common. And over lunch—smoked fish and ‘a jolly little wine from a friend’s vineyard’—Fedden-Jones chattered happily of earls and baronets and country houses and society balls and charity functions.
As Amiss drew him out it became clear that his host was next thing to an absentee canon. Preoccupied as he was with his excursions with well-placed friends and acquaintances, he had little or no interest left over for Westonbury. Questions about holidays and foreign travel drew trilling reminiscences of a fortnight here in a Tuscany farmhouse with Contessa Somebody and fun and frolics there in a Bordeaux chateau with the Duc of Something. Amiss was rather dazed by the torrent of foreign titles, but drew the strong impression that at home Fedden-Jones’s happy hunting ground was among the Roman as well as the Anglo-Catholic fraternity: happy titters accompanied some story about the conduct of the Papal Nuncio at the birthday party of some titled Monsignor.
Lest a sceptic might have thought he was making it up, Fedden-Jones had taken care to fill his little house with signed photographs of himself in clerical evening dress—sometimes in a striking opera cloak—beside a variety of bejewelled women of a certain age. The sheer volume demonstrated to Amiss that the fellow must be an exceptionally attractive social asset—a kind of cultivated court jester with excellent table manners whom one could take anywhere. After all what could be more respectable for a contessa or a principessa than a clerical walker who could be relied upon to show them the respect they felt their pedigrees deserved?
‘You might like to see this.’ Fedden-Jones plucked a large silver-framed photograph from an occasional table. Hiding his antipathy to the lady, Amiss assumed a treacly expression at the sight of his host bowing obsequiously to Princess Diana. ‘Charming girl. Charming. We had such a giggle at the opera.’
Opera cropped up a great deal in stories of the highborn and famous, but not simply as a backdrop. Interspersed among the social bragging were lines like, ‘Domingo was in striking form that night,’ or, ‘Best Tosca for a generation.’ Amiss had a hunch that what had started as a method of extending his network of glitterati had developed into a genuine enthusiasm.
While his music collection was not on Flubert’s scale, Fedden-Jones had a very respectable collection of grand opera; his books included a couple of shelves of what Amiss judged to be books for middle-brow opera buffs. As the stories continued, Amiss recognized Fedden-Jones’s social gifts: he would be the ideal companion for those who attend opera to be seen rather than to listen. Fedden-Jones would leave you equipped with the correct opinions on the production and the quality of the singers, amused by funny anecdotes about great opera disasters or crazy modern productions, and able to opine after the debut of a new talent that not since Callas—Patti even—had Aida been sung with such passion and brio.
A reminiscence about a weekend at a Venetian palazzo was interrupted by the telephone. ‘Yes, he’s here. Who shall I say is calling?’
He handed the phone to Amiss with an expression of some distaste. ‘A person of indeterminate sex states he or she is “Troutbeck.”’
‘Who’s that poncy bloke? The double-barrelled canon himself?’
Thankful that long experience of the baroness had caused him to clamp the receiver tightly to his ear, Amiss answered, ‘Good afternoon, Jack. Is there something I can do for you?’
‘I said who’s that poncy bloke?’
‘Canon Fedden-Jones is kindly entertaining me to lunch.’
‘Why didn’t your phone answer? I had to track David down via his secretary to find out where you were.’
‘I switched it off.’
She chortled. ‘As you’ve now discovered, that doesn’t do you any good. Only causes David trouble. Look, I’ve had a thought. That female canon is the one you should be working on. New and insecure, probably, and aching for a lusty male. Get to it.’
When in a position to retaliate with abuse, Amiss endured the baroness’s presumption with reasonable equanimity. When—like now—hamstrung by social convention, he could do little but respond coldly—though he knew it was pointless, since she wouldn’t even notice. ‘Very well, Jack. I shall see what I can do. Goodbye.’
It was obvious from his host’s face that his rude caller had somewhat lowered his stock. ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Amiss. ‘I fear Lady Troutbeck can be a little abrupt. She’s a busy woman.’
Fedden-Jones wriggled with excitement. ‘Lady Troutbeck. Of course. How could I have been so dense. I’ve seen her on television. Should have recognized her voice.’ A faraway look came into his eye. ‘Do you think she and you would be free to come to the opera tonight?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I’ve been charged with finding a stand-in couple. The Thrupcott-Wintles have had to cancel at the last minute. And though I’ve left a few messages, no on
e’s come back to me yet.’
Amiss tried to keep the panic out of his voice. ‘It’s very kind of you, but I can’t imagine she’d be able to get up to London at such short notice. She’s mistress of a Cambridge college, you see.’
‘You must ask her.’
‘Hardly worth it.’
‘My dear boy, tickets for a box at Covent Garden are like diamond-studded gold bricks. Not to be had unless you’re a Greek shipping magnate. I’m sure Lady Troutbeck would recognize that.’
‘Oh, I’m sure she’d be thrilled to be invited. As, of course, I am.’
Fedden-Jones smiled. ‘I wish it were possible for you to come on your own. Unfortunately I’ve been charged with producing a couple, so I fear a couple it must be.’
You old hypocrite, thought Amiss. I am welcome only if accompanied by my titled friend. ‘Well, I could try her.’
‘Ring her up now. I insist. You know she’s there.’
Amiss tried and failed to think of a way of getting out of what he feared had the potential to be an exceptionally embarrassing evening. With a sinking heart he fished out his phone and called her direct line.
‘Troutbeck.’
‘Robert.’
‘Looking for further instructions?’
‘No.’ Gabbling to avert any more loud indiscretions—for Fedden-Jones had moved closer—he continued, ‘Canon Fedden-Jones has kindly asked if we’d care to accompany him to the opera tonight. Two of his friends have had to drop out. I’ve told him it would be impossibly short notice for you.’
‘What’s the opera? I don’t want any modern crap.’
Amiss turned to Fedden-Jones in embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry. What opera is it?’
‘La Bohème.’
The passing on of this intelligence earned a bellow of delight. ‘Bugger me, Myles has done everything bar breaking and entering to try and get tickets for that.’ There was a pause while she consulted her diary. ‘It’s a cinch. I can take the architect back to town with me and we can finish our meeting in the car, straight to Myles to change into gladrags, and back to Cambridge tomorrow early in time for the college council.’
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