‘Yes, what’s the fuselage?’ the Major wanted to know.
‘It doesn’t do to press these analogies too far,’ said the Rector rather coldly. ‘And in any case, by the time I reached that point, my audience had always somehow managed to disappear. Anyway, Woppie didn’t mind being called Woppie in the least; he just laughed. Fine little chap - and the best three-quarter the school had had for generations. He could still teach Jarrett a trick or two, I’ll bet.’
‘Woppie’s going to show the Rector round the Vatican,’ said the Major. ‘And he’s even arranged for him to have an audience of the Pope.’
‘No, he hasn’t,’ the Rector said.
‘But, my dear chap, you distinctly told me -’
‘ “Have an audience of the Pope” implies that the Pope’s going to do all the talking and I’m going to do all the listening. Well, that’s not going to be so at all.’
‘No,’ said the Major meditatively. ‘Come to think of it, I dare say it isn’t.’
‘I’m not going to kiss His Holiness’s ring, either,’ said the Rector, ‘(a) because it’s idolatrous, and (b) because it’s unhygienic - you never can tell who kissed it last - might have had yellow fever or something. But Woppie says the Pope won’t mind, so considering all the circumstances, I shall go.’
(In practice, as the Major wrote gleefully to Fen several weeks later, the interview had developed unexpectedly well, both men of God spending most of their time bemoaning not so much the Laodiceanism of their laymen as the follies of their clergy. ‘Not a bad chap at all,’ was the Rector’s verdict on his return, ‘if only you could hammer some sense about Christian doctrine into his noddle.’)
Now he said, ‘And your book, Fen: will you be going on with it when you get back to Oxford?’
‘No, I shan’t,’ said Fen, and explained about his publishers’ voluntary liquidation. ‘Now that there’s not likely to be any money, nothing would induce me to go on with it.’
‘But wouldn’t some other publisher take it?’
‘I dare say. But it’s not really my line, you know. I was only doing it to fill in time.’
‘All those books that you’ve been reading,’ said the Major. That must have been fun, anyway.’
‘Up to a point, Lord Copper.’
‘What will you do, then?’
‘I shall write my own novel.”
‘Oh, good.’
‘It will be called A Manx Ca’
‘A what?’
‘A Manx Ca. And once I get back to Oxford,’ said Fen, ‘I shall really be able to get down to it - in, as you might say, detail.’
1 I include this fragment of dialogue only at Fen’s personal insistence. — E.C.
For Ann
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © Edmund Crispin, 1977
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The Glimpses of the Moon Page 34
