Mortal Spoils

by D M Greenwood

  Much the same pattern was followed by the rest of the hierarchy. The trick, Tom had noted with approval, (its simplicity and symmetry appealed to him) was to clock in ten minutes before your superior came in and to leave ten minutes after he (there were no women above the level of typist) had gone. Tom was the sole exception to this ritual. He was in at 8 a.m. and left twelve hours later.

  He seized his pocket electronic organiser and clicked the display to check his day’s work. It read: ‘AM: check porters, Can Clutch, Arch brief, conf rm. PM Archie, TV press Archi, food for all.’ It was going to be a full day, he observed with pleasure. Lots and lots to do. He reached for his mobile phone and made for the door. Much could be accomplished while walking the corridors of ecclesiastical power.

  Canon Clutch, midway between Tom and the porters, that is to say on the desirable first floor of Ecclesia Place, in his room overlooking the Thames, admitted with reluctance that he could not complete the crossword from the clue ‘Holy Book not quite long enough for eighth of May’. He pushed the paper from him and looked with distaste at the large desk diary with gold-edged leaves and morocco cover and sighed. It was going to be a busy day. He could see no way out of it. Even if it meant a lot of time spent with the great and the good (and the great and the good were Canon Clutch’s speciality, his raison d’être), still there would be longueurs when he would have to be about but not actually the centre of affairs. The trouble with archbishops was they took precedence; they expected everyone else to defer to them. Even someone as genuinely humble as Papworth of York would naturally rise to the top of everyone else’s agenda. Canon Clutch had worked with him over the years and found his tall, spare figure in the classical Anglican mould something of an affront to his own style. Canon Clutch himself, was tall enough to be a bishop, but his large head with its wealth of silvery hair worn rather long and his florid complexion looked more worldly than ecclesiastical. His dress was immaculate. It resembled a successful lawyer’s, that of a high court judge, he told himself, rather than a cleric. Indeed, when he had first come into post fifteen years ago, he’d discovered where the most eminent lawyers went for their tailoring and followed suit. This end of Victoria abutting on to Westminster was awash with lawyers. He felt, without precisely defining it to himself, that they had real power while he had only a second-rate kind. He did not dwell on this uncomfortable perception though sometimes it crept up on him like unforeseen indigestion.

  Kenneth Clutch was in some respects the human counterpart of the building. He was his own architect and he’d attended to every detail. He had learned early in life to convert fear into anger and communicate his anger in such a way that others were frightened of him. Just so had he imposed his created self upon the world. He was, no one could deny, immensely impressive. He could not be said to be a liar since he sincerely believed what he felt and therefore what he said. In his presence few doubted the truth of his view. He had early in his career espied and fixed his world, the world of official culture where gentlemen were recognisable by their dress and speech and deferred to by others of different dress and speech. This world had disappeared in the course of Clutch’s career. His was, surely, the last generation (he was sixty-two) which aspired to gentility by copying its accoutrements. In the Church of England, or anyway in its upper echelons, he was not alone, but he was, he prided himself, among the most successful. He had never run a parish, never organised so much as a church fete, had taken a theology degree forty years ago and neither read a book nor embarked on any course of training subsequently, but he was where he was, at the highest pinnacle of the management of the Church, by impressing the right people and doing the done thing. Perhaps only an institution which had interpreted its role as being one of ruling, because it was so closely connected with rulers, could have bred and nurtured Canon Clutch. Perhaps he was its reward.

  Within the safe doors of the Church, along the quiet, busy corridors of Ecclesia Place, it was possible, it was easy, to imagine that the traditional culture prevailed, was important, was the only importance. Of course, there was a price to pay. If you live in a bubble of illusion you must not step outside the bubble, and all that enters it must be processed and refined to fit the illusion. Canon Clutch had a number of strategies to see that all was kept as it traditionally had been. He commanded the language and categories for dismissing the too importunate, too ragged external world. ‘Tenth-rate, no clout, not the brightest of boys’ were terms with which he kept the bridge. Lately, snuffing a wind of change in the culture, he had begun to espouse the modern jargon, the bullish, clubby cliché drawn from the world of the military, finance and the media. He picked it up in his club, Brooks (not the Athenaeum, which he’d early recognised was for the dim, the tenth-rate). The Falklands war had given him the term ‘task force’, financiers taught him to talk about downsizing and back burners. Clergy with less time than himself to study the latest verbal fashion were impressed and somehow comforted. There was at least one of them, and one at the top too, who knew the modern world and could cope with it. Thus, cleverly, had Canon Clutch learnt to have his cake and eat it; he despised the modern world and it terrified him, but he knew its language and many of its leading figures. And that was what counted.

  He looked out on the khaki water of the river. The Place possessed a paved courtyard abutting the river and open to the public. The large, tough leaves of the plane trees swirled into the gutters and heavy autumn rain beat on the windows of his office. Outside he could just distinguish the figures of the two resident tramps huddled on the bench overlooking the embankment. God knew what they were doing there in this weather.

  Clutch wore a half-hunter. He took it out and consulted it. The Archbishop would be here at about three forty, the Archimandrite at four. Difficult for meals and hospitality, that timing. In the end he’d decided to serve afternoon tea at four. That blazing idiot Logg had been told to lay on the cucumber sandwiches and China and Indian. Show the little foreign man what the best people did in this seat of power. That would leave about two hours for talking and the official signing of the concordat at about seven. He planned to get the Archimandrite back to Brown’s as soon as maybe and then invite Papworth to dine with him at the club. He’d need to fill him in on one or two matters before posting him back on the train for York around tenish. Logg was dealing with the press release and he’d promised Archie Douglas he’d wheel on the Archimandrite and the Archbishop for the TV interview before they left. Meanwhile, however, there was the Place General Purposes Committee to deal with and its little domestic agenda. Indeed, if he mistook him not, there was the murmur of manly voices in the outer office already.

  ‘Come in, David, Tim, and Christopher too,’ he said heartily, beaming on the trio of dog collars converging on his door. ‘Has anyone got eight across?’

  Tom Logg, snatching a late, substantial lunch in the almost empty refectory, checked his organiser. Everything had been accomplished by two-fifteen. Pretty good, he congratulated himself, mopping up the remains of loin of pork with a supplementary bread roll. The posse of French nuns had dabbed their dainty lips, risen as one woman and glided noiselessly out. The American evangelists, dressed in dog collars and camping gear, had made an uproariously cheerful exit, calling out names, addresses and telephone numbers as they went. The four members of Canon Truegrave’s staff (Eastern European Affairs) who looked and acted like spies, heads close together, unEnglish clothes, had disappeared suddenly like pigeons, each flying its own way.

  At this hour the place was practically deserted. The staff had melted back into their own squalid quarters behind the kitchen. The lady on the tea urn came out every now and again to draw stewed refreshment from the communal pot for her colleagues. The new lad from the porters’ desk had finished off a plate of beans and chips almost the size of Tom’s own and scooted out when Sergeant Ashwood had put his head round the door and looked at him. Over the far side was the figure, so unobtrusive as to be almost invisible, of the librarian and
archivist, Canon Teape. Tom liked Teape. He was the only person who had spoken to him outside the call of duty during his first week in post. They had shared a table and a late lunch hour on his first Friday.

  ‘I’m Teape,’ Teape had said cautiously, eyeing Tom from behind his copy of the Antiquarian Bookseller, once he had made sure the other was indeed staying at the table.

  ‘Logg,’ said Tom. ‘Tom Logg. Canon Clutch’s assistant,’ he added, having learnt that clergy can’t identify laymen except in relation to their clerical masters. ‘I’m new.’

  ‘Which way do you start off with people?’ Teape had asked.

  ‘Sorry?’ Tom had paused in mid-swipe of steak and kidney pudding.

  ‘I mean, do you start by assuming that they’re all highly intelligent and totally honest and then let them prove you wrong? Or do you go the other way? Take it they’re idle and stupid until they give you evidence to the contrary?’

  This degree of self-analysis was not too familiar to Tom but he had cast it immediately into business studies terms and realised that as far as human relations skills were concerned, it was quite a useful analytical tool and worthy of his consideration.

  ‘I think I proceed on the first assumption,’ he answered truthfully.

  ‘You’ll have a lot to learn here,’ said Teape and retired behind his journal.

  Since that time a couple of months ago he had addressed no further word to Tom. Now he rose and left the refectory still clutching, Tom noticed, his periodical.

  Tom leaned back in his chair and stretched his very long arms above his head and back behind him. He considered what he could do next. It would be defeat indeed if he could not fill the next hour before the arrival of the Archbishop. Check the conference room. Drinking water and carafe. Of course. He sprang up happily and loped off down the room, up the back staircase and along the corridor. It was an inside corridor with no outside windows. The lights, set at parsimonious intervals of about twenty yards, produced a dim religious glow. One of the bulbs needed replacing. Tom tapped the requirements into his organiser. The corridor was quite deserted. There was an after-lunch stupor oozing from under the closed doors of offices and seminar rooms. Tom turned sharp right and the corridor opened out into a stairhead and gallery, round the wall of which were hung portraits of past archbishops. It was one of Tom’s favourite areas. Portraits ranged in style from the late seventeenth century, icons of the Erastian religious life, via the Victorian romantic to the modern functional imitations of photographs. A particularly good example of the Victorian crop was Archbishop Tuddenham, an obscure Archbishop of York in the early nineteenth century, depicted on a Regency Gothick throne with mitres for finials. It reminded Tom of a portrait he’d once seen of Edmund Kean playing Lear. Something in the wildness of the silver hair escaping from underneath the mitre, the concave face and dark, harrowed eyes, the clawlike hands grasping the arms of the throne imparted an immensely theatrical air to the whole composition.

  Tom stopped at the end of the corridor to admire this dramatic masterpiece. He let his eye wander over it and then come to rest on the chair beneath it. The chair was not empty. It was occupied by a thickset figure in a dark suit, his head sunk forward on to his chest. From beneath the heavy black beard spreading round the lower part of the face could be seen the silver pectoral cross of a bishop. One thick finger bore what could have been an episcopal ring.

  Tom approached the figure carefully, mindful of the old adage about letting sleeping bishops lie. When he was within a couple of feet of the chair, he cleared his throat. There was no response. Tom was nonplussed. He’d not read anything in his business studies course which gave him a formula for dealing with clerics asleep in security cleared zones. The Archbishop and the Archimandrite had both required the security to be stringent. Who was allowed where and when was all charted on the plan in Tom’s office and it didn’t include an unknown bishop slumbering in a chair outside the conference room a couple of hours before countdown.

  He stepped a little nearer. Something in the angle of the man’s head struck him. Very gently he put his hand on the shoulder and shook it. The figure, as though dislodged from a niche, slid calamitously forward onto the floor.

  It did not need any business studies manual to tell Tom that this priest was dead.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Stowage

  Theodora Braithwaite, a woman of about thirty in deacon’s orders in the Church of England, looked out of the window of her flat in Betterhouse on the south bank of the Thames on Monday evening. It was quite dark at ten o’clock. The only light came from the glow, which never leaves the London sky, reflected off the river. Two adolescent foxes were making their way down the alley, cuffing each other in comradely fashion. As they reached the end of the cul-desac, a dog barked. With no change of pace or hesitation, one fox squeezed under the fence and the other posted himself through the gaping hole of the vandalised letterbox of the defunct warehouse opposite. The alley which had seemed populated, now felt empty. A smell of wet plane leaves drifted in on the mild autumn air. It was very quiet. The warehouses on either side of the terrace in which the flat was situated screened out the roar of London’s traffic. Such peace, such pleasure, she thought. How can I be grateful enough for this sanctuary?

  She withdrew her head from the open window and surveyed her domain. There was no furniture, only packing cases of books dotted over the floor of the room which ran from front to back of the first floor of the house. At either end was an uncurtained window. Halfway down, a door stood open onto a lobby, in which could be glimpsed a stone sink and a ferocious Baby Belling. All was in a state of decay. Lincrusta wallpaper flapped loose from bulging plaster. A dangerous swathe of woven purple flex was pinned in loops towards a single electric fitment in the centre of the ceiling. The floor was bare boards of a greyish splintery kind.

  ‘Lovely,’ said Theodora aloud. She meant, just enough for her needs.

  It was her first night in her own place. This was the first time in her entire life that she had not had to consider the needs of anyone but herself. Is this to be really grown up, she wondered. Ever since she had left her father’s rectory, first for boarding school then for university, she’d shared accommodation. Theological college, a clergy house in Nairobi and latterly the basement of the vicarage of St Sylvester’s Church in Betterhouse had found her carefully, courteously putting others’ convenience before her own. Now she was free. Her vicar, Geoffrey Brighouse, had recently taken it into his head to marry and his wife was not for keeping curates in the basement, especially when the curate was a woman. Theodora had had to look for alternative lodgings.

  She’d been touched to find how many of the parishioners of this diverse parish had been eager to have her. She’d been offered rooms in the high street with the Robinsons who made frequent trips to the Caribbean and mistakenly thought she liked young children, of which they had many. Then there’d been a flat over the Chinese chippy’s, tentatively suggested because, though they wouldn’t normally have considered taking anyone outside their family, they were looking for someone quiet and they reckoned they didn’t come quieter than Theodora. Even the Archdeacon had intimated that since the diocese had a duty to house her, he would be happy to help so had she thought of moving into the spare room in the Foundation of St Sylvester? It was, after all, next door to the church and hence convenient for her duties. The Foundation, to the work of which Theodora contributed a day a week in addition to her parish tasks, was a retreat house and centre for Christian therapy. This meant, in effect, that it sheltered a shifting population of people whose needs were unassuageable. The director of the centre, the Reverend Doctor Gilbert Racy, had clearly been in two minds about the Archdeacon’s suggestion. On the one hand it would be quite nice to have an unpaid, dependable night nurse continually on tap. On the other, his was a bachelor and, indeed, celibate establishment which he hated to have disturbed. On the whole, regretfully, he declined to have Theodora. She tu
rned with relief to walking the parish to see where she would really like to live. She took her time. She knew by now that a house is a way of life, it carries moral as well as aesthetic values.

  Betterhouse in Pepys’ time had been a ferry across the Thames for travellers from the Channel ports making for Westminster. In the nineteenth century the railway had arrived and increased both the population and the river traffic. The Church of St Sylvester had been built to serve the neighbourhood. Wharves and warehouses followed, blocking off most of the river which remained accessible only by way of an occasional set of steps. When the river trade declined in the sixties of the twentieth century, these remained and rotted. The Victorian terraces, which had come with the railway, had filled with every race and culture. The tower blocks, the most recent addition to the landscape, guarded the outskirts of the borough as, in former times, wall and ramparts might have done.

  It was, of course, towards the river that Theodora in the end gravitated. She’d stumbled upon the Stowage eighteen months ago when she’d first come into the parish. It was guarded by a one-way system and its status as a cul-de-sac. It had been evening in spring when she had turned the corner, smelt the river, and heard the pluck and suck of the tide on the steps at the end of the alley. But the terrace of dilapidated houses was uninhabited. No people meant no pastoral duties. She’d stayed for a moment to take in the cats and rats and decaying tyres which littered the weedy cobbles, before turning back to more frequented ways.

  Now, needing lodgings, she had returned. She knew at once that this was her habitat. The end house must have been the ferryman’s. It was lower than the terrace and timber-framed with a tile roof. It was also decayed beyond redemption. The adjoining buildings, however, looked more hopeful. They were later, eighteenth-century, slate-roofed artisans’ dwellings, each distinguished by a different design of fanlight over the front door. A shallow brick pediment unified them into a row. She squeezed through the door of the end one and surveyed the interior. The cellars were supported on the masts of sailing ships. The windows were broken. The roof had buddleia growing from the guttering. Ferns decorated the soil pipe. The drains were not what the health and safety man would have wished. The following morning she spent twenty minutes with Gilbert Racy, a reliable fount of local and ecclesiastical gossip, and discovered that the owners were the St Sylvester’s Trust. Their affairs were dealt with by Ecclesia Place. She did some telephoning and finally sought out the Archdeacon. They concluded a deal. Theodora knew she was being cheated: rent plus a full repairing lease would bankrupt her. He was an old hand.