‘Now, young man, I don’t want to rush you, but we’re dog tired. I understand you have something urgent to tell me.’
‘Have you seen Bishop’s Green since you got back?’
‘No. We came straight to the deanery.’
‘You haven’t been out since?’
‘Only to the cathedral for a brief visit.’
‘In a nutshell, the green was taken over a few days ago by an encampment of New Age travellers who have proved exceptionally disruptive. While the chapter have gone through the legal motions, it is clear that these people will leave only if forced. And since there are small children involved, this could produce very bad publicity for the cathedral.’
‘What kind of people are these?’ asked the dean, his lips set in a straight line and his eyes narrowed.
‘There are four trailers, each housing a woman and two or three children; it seems that the commune is polygamous; each family shares the same man—known as Tengri—who is, as it were, husband and father to all.’
The dean’s eyes began to flash. Tilly emitted a shocked squeak.
‘The reason I came to tell you about it tonight was to warn you that you will almost certainly be woken at dawn by drumming.’
‘Drumming?’ bellowed the dean, giving the word an emphasis and inflexion reminiscent of Lady Bracknell and the handbag.
‘It’s a feature of his religion—or at least what he alleges to be his religion, which revolves a lot around drumming and conversations with spirits and’—fuck it, he thought, let’s get the bastard well wound up—‘magic and drug taking.’
Veins began to bulge on the dean’s forehead. ‘And these degenerates are given shelter in a place of worship?’
‘Not voluntarily, I assure you, Dean. In view of their immoral behaviour and their antisocial practices, although feeling that to an extent a hand should be held out even to the most despised of God’s creatures, the bishop and canons appealed to them to leave.’
‘No hand should be held out to degenerates, unless they repent. And certainly not to people who practise wicked superstition and sully the temples that are their bodies with vile substances.’
The dean brooded for a moment. ‘Do these people have a name for their degenerate cult?’
‘I suppose generically they’re pagans.’
‘Pagans?’ The dean’s voice was loud enough to reach Bishop’s Green.
‘More specifically, shamans. Tengri calls himself a shaman.’
‘Shaman! Shaman! Satan is everywhere!’ screamed the dean, leaping up and running from the room.
‘Jesus save us,’ said Tilly as she ran after him; Amiss brought up the rear.
Chapter 12
For once Amiss had the pleasure of ringing the baroness at a time which suited him and not her. When he reached her at midnight she was deep in what she self-pityingly mourned as her baby sleep.
‘She who lives by the telephone dies by the telephone,’ said Amiss unfeelingly. ‘If you think I’m going to give you any sympathy when I think of the number of times you’ve woken me at some frightful hour, you can forget it. Now do you want to hear about the dean exorcizing the devil or do you not?’
The baroness’s grumbles ceased abruptly. ‘Do I just!’ She smacked her lips.
‘We start with the unfortunate events in the lady chapel.’ He took the baroness through the high points of the ceremony, which elicited predictable snorts of derision and condemnation. ‘Christ, what a load of bollocks all this sort of stuff is. Why they can’t just shut up about sex and enjoy it is beyond me. “Pray for those of us in the closet,” my arse!’
‘I certainly find it hard to imagine a closet which could contain you for long. However, can we drag ourselves away from you for a moment? I’m trying to tell you about the denouement.’
The story of the dean and the portrait was a great success. ‘Magnificent. I wish I’d been there.’
‘Have you no sympathy for poor Alice?’
‘Certainly not. It might do her a lot of good. She’s got to put all this rubbish behind her and get down to useful-do-goodery on behalf of the deserving. I hope this deters her from ministering to self-indulgent weirdos.’
‘Which leads me to the shamans.’ His account of his visit to the dean caused her to pay him one of her rare compliments.
‘I hand it to you, Robert. Perfect timing. By morning he might have been calm.’ She chortled. ‘Ooh, good. I hope the next bit lives up to expectations. So we have him thundering through his front door pursued by wife and agent provocateur.’
‘Not only—as we were to find out—was his strength as the strength of ten, but his speed was as the speed of light. I hadn’t realized that righteous indignation adds wings to the feet, but so it proved to be. By the time we reached the green, Tilly and I—many years his junior—were in some distress, but the run appeared to have taken nothing out of the dean. Even his breathing was unaffected: he gazed at what by that time of night was the silent and apparently innocent quartet of trailers and emitted a thunderous bellow which put the fear of God into me—I can’t imagine what it sounded like to the slumbering, doped-up shamans.
‘“Come out, you children of Satan!” he shouted. And when they didn’t instantly appear, he started racing around the trailers crashing his great fists against the sides and screaming about the fires of hell that awakened infidels. This presumably penetrated the adult brains—for, I suppose, when you live in encampments, your worst fear would be an arson attack.
‘From three of the trailers emerged the heads of wary women and from the fourth the great shaman himself scrambled out looking slightly alarmed; a woman and child were silhouetted in the doorway behind him.
‘As Tengri ascertained that all that was in front of him was a large clergyman, a thin blonde and me, he reverted to type and began to sneer. Within two minutes the dean had pulled him down the steps, had got him in an armlock and was delivering maledictions of the Old Testament variety. There was quite a lot about the Lord raining brimstone and fire from the heaven down on Sodom and Gomorrah, various references to whetting glittering swords and rendering vengeance to his enemies and some rather incoherent stuff to do with false gods and smiting trangressors. It was pretty unnerving, I can tell you, especially to the women at whom he shouted that if they didn’t obey instructions he’d break Tengri’s arm. “Up and out,” he shouted. “If you’re not gone in ten minutes I’ll have the water hose turned on you and the insides of your abominable homes.” He waved with his free arm. “And take all your filth with you.”
‘One of the women looked nervously at the wretched Tengri, who incautiously began his response with the word “don’t,” and for his folly had his arm twisted so far up his back that he screamed like someone on a griddle and said, “Go, go.” “Where to?” asked one woman. “Far away from this city,” said the dean, “for if I catch sight of any of you again, believe me, this time the wrath of the Lord will be brought upon you and there will be no mercy. Do I make myself clear?” To which Tengri screamed, “Yes.”’
‘By now, we had been joined by David, Jeremy and Cecil—the others, I learned later, were gazing through their windows afraid to emerge—but no one tried to intervene, for the dean appeared possessed. One would as easily have demurred at his treatment of Tengri as have had a quiet word with the Lord when he was in the middle of laying waste an altar of idols or sending down a plague of frogs. So we watched open-mouthed and silently.
‘Not until all the detritus had been removed from the green, the engines had been revved up and the headlights were on, did the dean take Tengri over to the door of his trailer and release him. “Begone, you Satanists and fornicators,” was his parting sally. “And never darken the gates of the City of Westonbury again.”’
‘Compelling stuff. Was that it?’
‘That was it. They drove away without a backward glance, the dean and Tilly went off to bed and I came back here and did my best to rid David of his guilt at allowing—and even being pleased about—t
he expulsion of the people who’d been making his life a complete misery.’
‘It would be your guess that they won’t be back?’
‘Since they don’t even know who this mad exorcist was, I can’t see them taking the risk of running into him anywhere in Westonbury. No, I think they’ve definitely gone off to persecute some new community.’
‘Good for the dean. He did exactly what I told you to do the morning they arrived, with a few embellishments of his own. As an exorcist, he certainly beats the bell, book and candle merchants any day.’
‘He was the right man for the job, Jack. None of the rest of us has such balls.’
‘We might have to revise our opinion of him, you know,’ she said ruminatively. ‘The fellow’s only been back ten minutes and he’s already put paid to lesbian drivel, fag-hag art and New Age vandalism. Perhaps he should be Archbishop of Canterbury. See to it, will you?’
***
‘I hate him,’ said Cecil Davage some days later. ‘Hate, hate, hate. He’s a perfect example of everything that is nastiest in English life—that hideous puritan streak that took the religious art we had spent centuries perfecting and destroyed it. Look at this.’
He led Amiss to a tiny cell-like chantry, bare except for a stone altar. Davage unlocked the gate, switched on the light and pointed to a square foot of rose and silver paint in a corner just above the altar. ‘This whole wall contained a mural of the Nativity, said by the chronicler of St Dumbert to have been the most beautiful ever seen throughout the length and breadth of England—and that at a time when our religious art was possibly the greatest in Europe.’
He gave a muffled sob. ‘There’s evidence to suggest that this survived the first wave of vandals under Henry VIII and Elizabeth at a time when they were destroying every statue in the cathedral as well as the paintings, and stealing every object of value we possessed except those now in the treasury which the then dean managed to hide. But when Cromwell’s barbarians came, they mopped up what the others had missed. That’s when our wonderful medieval stained glass went—except for the rose window, which by some fluke they couldn’t get at in the time available. They threw some stones at it, but didn’t make much impact.
‘But they found time to take axes to this little miracle here—our own tiny Sistine Chapel. And so in the name of God they destroyed in Westonbury—as elsewhere—the wonderful fruits of the greatest flowering of English art, designed to worship God and honour his mother and his saints. Here, they didn’t rest until they had taken from us every last little bit of beauty and vision and joy except for this remnant of previous glory. I hate, hate, hate that century of desecration. And I hate all those responsible for and sympathetic to that desecration. Dean Cooper is one of them; he’s a Roundhead and I wish he were dead.’
‘Surely you forgive him much for throwing out the shamans.’
‘No, I don’t. It doesn’t make up for wantonly destroying the Marian picture. He’s a desecrating throwback.’
‘Oh, come now, Cecil. You can’t seriously claim that pulling down the canopies and smashing that frankly not-very-good painting is on a par with Cromwell.’
‘It’s the same mentality, don’t you see? He didn’t like that painting, but he could have asked us to move it, or to give it away. And you know he said he’d have Reggie Roper’s memorial pulverized if it wasn’t that the cathedral needs the bequest. He says he’s praying for a bolt of lightning.’
‘But is it reasonable to expect him cheerfully to put up with having a gay extravaganza in his garden? I’m not surprised he’s complaining.’
‘I know the memorial’s not in the best of taste, but it is very well sculpted. And it kept Reggie happy thinking about it. Why can’t it be treated as an enjoyable folly. That’s another thing about puritans; they have no sense of humour. Nowadays they hate even what they helped to construct themselves—the great and wonderful language of the King James Bible: the dean’s language is banal.’
His voice rose to a near squeak. ‘No, no. I see how it will be. Everything beautiful will go and we will have ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly puerile minds and all will be brought down to the level of idiots and philistines.’
He stamped his right foot six or seven times. ‘What great art is about is raising the philistines and the brutish to an understanding of beauty. That was what God wanted. It was Cromwell who was the Satan. Like Cooper.’
‘Did Westonbury suffer more than most other cathedrals?’
‘No. Everywhere suffered, every little church in the country with its own little piece of beauty. All that survived was maybe five per cent—an altar cloth here and a statue there. Do you know that when they had finished with us our religious artists forgot how to paint and it was generations before any concept of religious art re-emerged.
‘Now do you wonder that I’m drawn to Rome? At least pre-Vatican II Rome. Bloody church has been going to pot aesthetically since then. Old Catholicism might have been corrupt, decadent, autocratic and greedy for power and money, but it was greedy for beauty too. Corrupt people were the sponsors for the greatest art to come out of Italy and corrupt people treasured that art and kept it in being.’
His little face took on a malign expression. ‘Every year I take some friends and we go and dance on Richard Cromwell’s grave. We can’t dance on his father’s since he was dug up and his head stuck on a spike. But people like that believe in the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children, so we reckon Richard can pay for the sins of Oliver—as well as his own. We curse him to hell—and I don’t mean a namby-pamby Church of England hell either, with its consciousness of difference or absence of God or any of that other insipid muck. I mean good old-fashioned lakes-of-fire-for-eternity hell of the kind the dean is so fond of.’
***
Amiss lay on his bed and told the story to the baroness. ‘It’s given me a whole new perspective on little Davage.’
‘Indeed. Who would have thought the little man had so much passion in him? And of course he’s absolutely right. Tell him to invite me to the next Cromwell-stomping session and I’ll wear hobnailed boots.’
She brooded for a moment. ‘He’s not afraid for his treasures, is he? Even if the dean is mildly crazed, he’s hardly going to set about the cathedral like a Roundhead. I should have thought he would get a pretty stiff rebuke from the Church Commissioners and English Heritage if he started firing rocks at the rose window.’
‘There’s something to be said for progress after all, Jack. Modern vandals are constrained by bureaucracy from physically expressing their feelings of outrage.’
‘Pah! It’s a pretty poor century that has us trouncing Dean Cooper with a set of regulations. My ancestor, old Alfred Troutbeck, would have known what to do with him. Knock his block off and stick it on one of the spires with that grinny, sappy woman of his along with him.’
‘I shall recommend that course of action to David. I’m sure he’ll take swift and decisive action.’
‘Tell him if he doesn’t I’ll knock his block off too.’
***
‘I’ve had the most awful meeting with the dean and his wife.’ The bishop was slumped in the chair behind his desk. ‘They came, as she put it, for a social call and to chat about their plans, and then began to talk about all kinds of terrible things.’
‘Like what?’
‘She simpered at me and asked if I would be “people friendly” and stop calling myself either Doctor or Bishop Elworthy and instead call myself Bishop…’ he gagged.
‘Bishop David?’
‘No. Worse. Bishop Dave. Or just Dave.’
Amiss’s attempt to keep his face straight failed. He looked across the desk at the embodiment of scholarship that was his employer and began to laugh.
The bishop looked distressed.
‘I’m sorry, David. I’m truly sorry. But I’ve never in my life seen anyone less like a Dave. You mustn’t think of giving in to that: you’d be a laughing stock.’
‘But she told
me that titles frightened off ordinary people and that the cathedral must become the meeting place for all God’s children. Anyway that’s but a small thing; there’s much worse. He was talking of closing down the choir school—apparently it’s elitist—and getting rid of all traditional music in the cathedral. Henceforward, it’s all to be’—he looked at his notes—‘as she put it, “sing-alongs for Jesus,” rave music and whatever else is “relevant.” Incense, of course, will go, the King James Bible will go, the Book of Common Prayer will go. In will come the Contemporary English Version and other dreadful American muck.’
‘He can’t do that without the agreement of the chapter surely.’
‘He said he was certain they would listen to reason and she said she knew that Jesus would make them see the light. Apparently they’re asking that Rev. Bev creature to address the next meeting of the chapter to show them how’—he scrutinized his notes again—‘to make Jesus accessible. The dean rambled on a bit about how the Rev. Bev’s faith could move mountains.’
‘What did you say to all this?’
The bishop smiled. ‘I had, I think, a moment of divine inspiration. Anyway they left pretty quickly afterwards. I remembered that piece of advice Cromwell gave the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland which he would have done well to follow himself: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”’
***
‘Will you come back and see me later this evening?’
‘Sure, Jeremy, I’d be glad to. When?’
‘About tennish.’
‘Anything in particular?’
‘The dean…’ Flubert’s mouth set itself in a hard line. ‘The dean wishes to talk to me about the future.’
‘Any hint of what he has in mind?’
‘I can’t imagine I’ll like it, whatever it is. But I don’t have to pay that much attention to it. I don’t mind making a few concessions here and there, but when the chips are down, he can’t enforce any changes without the support of three members of the chapter. And even if he gets Alice on his side…’
Murder in a Cathedral Page 12
