Mortal Spoils

by D M Greenwood

  They laboured towards their shared ends by visiting, by being flexible in the type of formal worship offered and assiduous in penetrating and nurturing the local networks. Prison visiting, hospital visiting, bereavement visiting, school visiting filled their days. Youth groups, wives’ groups, childrens’ groups were all organised and working. For her part, Theodora knew from her father what a well-run parish should look like. The small local good which lay to hand rather than the large universal good which was beyond reach was her goal. Quietly, unobtrusively, efficiently she performed her welcome duties. She made no fuss and no demands. She made lists and kept to them. She said her daily office as he did. If his marriage to Oenone had taken her by surprise, she reckoned she could cope with that.

  The grand march of the liturgy pressed onwards. They prayed for those in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness or any other adversity. Theodora let her mind wander to the events of the recent past. This was a parish with plenty of adversity. And then there was the question of that other trouble, the death of an unknown man perhaps violently, perhaps a fellow Christian, perhaps a priest. What had gone on at Ecclesia Place yesterday while the prelates had been playing politics? What was it that Tom had stumbled upon?

  Theodora glanced down at the small congregation. To her left she felt rather than saw the south door creaking open. She knew at once who had entered. A slight figure insinuated itself into the back pew in time for the prayer of consecration. Theodora kept her mind on the prayer and then at the end glanced up again. Anona Trice. Her thin androgynous face with its cap of red-gold hair glowed out of the uncertain light and, for a moment, Theodora felt a tremor of unease, fear almost, before she returned her attention to the liturgy. Perhaps Anona would disappear afterwards as unobtrusively as she had arrived. For no reason, Theodora felt in her pocket and was comforted by the cold touch of the heavy silver cross resting there. Perhaps Gilbert Racy could help her with it.

  In the vestry afterwards, Geoffrey, the fastest divester in the trade, paused at the door and turned back towards her.

  ‘Oh, by the way, Oenone’s having one or two people over from Ecclesia Place to meet parish types. Apparently she knows someone called Clutch. Big cheese at the Diet. Would you care to come and balance the table?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Er, tonight, actually.’ Geoffrey was embarrassed.

  Theodora knew enough about Oenone to infer someone must have dropped out. She thought of the decorating she would rather be doing. ‘Love to. Thanks. Time?’

  ‘Good ho! Round eight.’ Geoffrey departed at a working trot for his Lambretta. Theodora turned the key in the vestry door and made her way down the long aisle.

  The church, the work of a single dedicated intelligence in the 1870s, was remarkable for its neo-Gothic exuberance. Angels with Pre- Raphaelite wings and ethereal facial expressions yearned out of the architraves of the pillars like a species of sacred topiary. What would Tom make of this as a working environment? Theodora wondered. At least there had been no attempt here to deny the purpose of the building or edit out the uncomfortable truths of Christian teaching. At the crossing was suspended Christ suffering. Behind the high altar He appeared again in majesty. Wherever the eye went, the iconography reminded the observer of the function of the place, worship, and the proper relation between man and God. It was at once luxurious and austere. It suited Theodora down to the ground.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Braithwaite.’ The voice interrupted her reflection.

  Theodora jumped. From the shadow by the font at the west end, she recognised Anona Trice. A large head on a small body smiled up at her.

  ‘Would you be in your new lodgings now?’

  Anona didn’t have an Irish accent but just occasionally the syntax of her utterance suggested the Celtic.

  Theodora immediately felt threatened. She’d never wanted power but she did want privacy. She realised she had begun to think of her flat as her sanctuary, also her labour. The electrician was, with any luck, starting the rewiring this very hour. The last thing she wanted was that the Stowage should be seen, worse, visited, as though it was an extension of the Foundation of St Sylvester.

  ‘It isn’t quite habitable yet.’

  ‘But you’re living there, they tell me.’

  Who the blazes would ‘they’ be? Theodora wondered. She and Anona had begun to pace down the path from the south door of the church through the vestigial churchyard towards the narrow windows and tall brick chimneys of the Foundation. The path was not quite wide enough to accommodate both of them. Theodora found herself walking on the verge. Anona turned towards her.

  ‘It’s down by the river, is it not? In the Stowage? That’s a very picturesque part of the borough, don’t you think so? I’d love to take a peep. A view of the Thames, now that’s a romantic thing.’

  Theodora thought, over my dead body. Anona trotted sideways along the gravel. Theodora was tall, Anona was short. It was not the only discrepancy.

  ‘It’s not really ready for entertaining in yet,’ Theodora murmured.

  ‘Oh, but I’m not needing entertainment. I’m as quiet, as silent as our friends here.’ Anona gestured towards the graveyard’s only tabletop tomb, 1870s with a canopy of defaced mourning angels crouching over it.

  Anona Trice is not well, Theodora told herself. She was undergoing treatment at the Foundation. She’d been there on and off to Theodora’s certain knowledge for close on a year. Theodora suspected, however, that even when Anona was well, whatever that state might be, she would have found her trying. She was importunate, foisting her emotions on you and seeking, requiring, a similar exaggerated response. She had a kind of anxious thirst. For what? For intimacy? For knowledge? For drama? Theodora feared it might be the last and if there wasn’t one to hand, Anona would invent one. Anyway, Theodora found it exhausting, whether meeting it or resisting it. She set her face against it.

  ‘Now you won’t disappoint me, will you? You’ll let me see your little house? In my sorry state I don’t get much beyond a boat trip.’

  Theodora had no idea what she meant by this last and no wish to find out. She loathed whimsy and found it difficult to be civil in the face of it. St Sylvester’s Foundation was mercifully within reach. The front porch, in the style of a lych gate, reared up at the top of a flight of steps.

  ‘Is Dr Racy around this morning, do you happen to know?’

  ‘Ah, now there’s a fine man, don’t you think? Great healing gifts. A really spiritual being, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?’

  Hell’s teeth, thought Theodora, why can’t the woman be simple?

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ was all Theodora would allow herself.

  ‘Oh no, Miss Braithwaite, Theodora, I’m sure it’s you who are right.’

  The tone, the abasement, the falsity made Theodora squirm. The merely sad, the self-pitying even, she could cope with, listen to, prompt until they were able to listen to themselves, a first step on the way to self-knowledge and therefore healing. But those who were there before her and had self-knowledge enough to play games stumped her. Which was why she’d decided that, on the whole, she would make her contribution to the Foundation by writing the definitive biography of its founder Thomas Henry Newcome, who in 1861 had sunk his fortune into building this retreat house of the Society of St Sylvester for Anglican clergy and laity in the grounds of his friend Canon Langthorne’s Church of St Sylvester. She had already made a preliminary survey of the sources and published in the Church History Review. When things were particularly dire in the parish, this secret work of hers consoled and refreshed her.

  Theodora leaped up the front steps of the Foundation three at a time. She felt Anona drop away from her. In the entrance hall there was no one at the reception desk. She glanced at the sessions board. Dr Hertzog out, Rev’d Canon Butress in, Sr Hazel Millhaven in, Rev. Dr G. Racy in. Spot on. The house was warm, clean, newly decorated and carpeted. Gilbert’s work on the boundaries of religion and psychia
try had recently attracted funding, especially from America, in a way that those in other areas of the Church’s ministry envied. Gilbert might well arouse the mistrust of his more mundane clerical colleagues, but as a religious in the Society of St Sylvester there was little they could do about him. So he published his papers, saw his clients, organised the work of the Foundation and made sure that it catered for those distressed by their own or the world’s evil. Groups were held, retreats given, instruction in the spiritual life, counselling for the bereaved and betrayed. Theodora reckoned they met a need and if Gilbert seemed occasionally eccentrically autocratic or even downright devious, it was, after all, his life’s work.

  The house was quiet. The smell of fried bacon lingered in the air from breakfast, reminding Theodora that she hadn’t had any. At the end of the first-floor corridor she paused and listened. She could hear Gilbert’s high precise tones with the odd stress on the first word or syllable in a phrase which could identify him across many a committee room.

  ‘Of course, I understand you. The idea that there are propositions which you understand and I do not is preposterous.’

  Theodora recognised that Gilbert was on the phone. Priests were ruder over the phone than they would be face to face. She wasn’t sure whether the same held for the laity. She thought probably not. It was one of the safety valves which the clergy allowed themselves. The fact that they were expected by the world, expected themselves, to behave better than anyone else meant that they had to let off steam somehow. Freed from eye contact, they let rip.

  Gilbert was pressing on. ‘I would not myself trust the Archimandrite of Azbarnah to sell me a second-hand bicycle let alone a …’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Well, all I can say is caveat emptor.’

  Another pause.

  ‘I would point out that it was you who sought my opinion.’

  Theodora thought the moment had come to tap on the door.

  ‘Ah, Theodora.’ Gilbert replaced the handset and rose. He regretted all women so his manners were impeccably formal towards them. ‘How very nice to see you so early.’

  This was unfair since Theodora was punctual for every engagement and daily went to early Mass.

  ‘I was not aware this was one of your days.’

  ‘I come on Monday morning this term,’ said Theodora patiently. Gilbert knew quite well when she came. He knew when everyone came, doctors, patients, kitchen and cleaning staff as well as the occasional helpers like herself. He knew what they did and how well they did it. And he made sure in his subterranean way that those on the staff who weren’t any good didn’t stay long. With clients, on the other hand, the feeling among his colleagues was that the more intractable, the more hopeless the case, the more likely they were to be made welcome, all possible care taken over them. Theodora thought that this was right too.

  ‘The reason I looked in today is, I wondered if you could give me a spot of advice.’

  Gilbert liked that. He relaxed enough to lean back in his chair and fold his long thin hands on his concave stomach. His domed head with its shadow of silver hair inclined in Theodora’s direction. Theodora fumbled in her coat pocket and produced the silver cross from the missing body. She held it in the palm of her hand and extended it towards Gilbert. Gilbert liked guessing games which allowed him to show expertise. He took it and turned it over.

  ‘A pectoral.’

  ‘Is it?’ Theodora was disingenuous.

  ‘Byzantine design, of course. Silver not as pure as we have it in the West. The setting of the stone has been disturbed at some point and then mended.’

  ‘What’s the stone, do you know?’

  ‘Belzique. Semi-precious. Popular around the Baltic in the ancient world. Easy to cut because soft when it first comes out of the rock, hardens later. Used for seals therefore. Not much mined beyond the seventeenth century. But of course there was enough in circulation by then to be fairly common. I rather like that dull bluish grey, don’t you? Nicely understated.’

  Theodora watched him turn it over in his hand. Gilbert, she suspected, had no possessions beyond a lot of books and a spare cassock. He lived, as he preached, on the minimum. But she could see he valued the cross.

  ‘Yours, would it be?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Theodora answered.

  ‘Got a provenance?’

  Theodora had thought this one out in order to combine truth with as little information as possible. ‘It got left behind after the Ecclesia Place junketings yesterday.’

  ‘Ah.’ Gilbert didn’t sound as though he believed it. He tapped the strained ring at the top of the cross. ‘Came adrift?’

  ‘It does rather look like it, doesn’t it? Could it be one of ours?’

  ‘I wouldn’t pretend to be an expert on the pectoral crosses of the Anglican Church,’ Gilbert deprecated. ‘But it certainly doesn’t strike a chord with me at the moment. Anyway, whoever lost it will doubtless reclaim it. It must be worth five or six K at present prices. More to a collector.’

  Theodora refrained from showing surprise. If Gilbert had said hundreds, it would have been more in her line of thinking.

  ‘Are they much collected, would you know?’

  ‘One or two in this country, more in America. Ecclesiastical silver is a very rich man’s hobby. There’s the scarcity of legitimate gleanings and then the effort of supplying provenances for the illegitimate. But there is the frisson of possessing something which has had a supernatural use. A cross worn next to the heart for generation after generation must, it is felt, have some special power.’

  ‘Who would be a collector in this country?’

  ‘Why? Thinking of selling it?’ Gilbert was dry.

  ‘No. I told you it’s probably fallen off some bishop at yesterday’s gathering. But if it came from one of the Azbarnahi entourage, it might be an easy way to find out if there was a Byzantine silver expert somewhere in the city.’ It sounded lame even to Theodora.

  ‘There’s an exhibition of Azbarnahi art on at the Galaxy Gallery at the moment. You might learn something there. Though I’d have thought the Archimandrite himself would be the best source of information. If you can get hold of him.’

  ‘I rather gathered you didn’t trust the Archimandrite.’

  ‘Listening to private conversations is not an attractive trait.’

  ‘Gilbert, your door was open. You could be heard all down the corridor. Why don’t you trust him?’

  Gilbert chewed his teeth for a moment before answering. ‘The rumour is, he did a deal with the communists under Kursola which involved his supporting Kursola’s regime. In return he got the buildings and land and closure of the churches of the Roman Catholic minority in the country. The result was that the Catholic Church was left without a single centre of worship for half a million souls while the Azbarnah Orthodox Church mopped up the real estate.’

  Theodora remembered Henry the Eighth. It really was no good Gilbert manifesting righteous indignation about ecclesiastical property deals. If the Church dabbled in politics then it should expect to lose some as well as win some.

  ‘I’d better keep it safe then.’ Theodora rose and swept it up from the table.

  ‘Sure you wouldn’t like me to keep it here?’

  ‘I think it had better go back to Ecclesia Place or, failing that, the police.’

  ‘Wouldn’t trust them at all,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘Oh, and the Whip’s Office rang, Canon.’ The secretary was respectful and subduedly triumphant. She worked in the office of Ecclesia Place for the pleasure of being able to say things like that. ‘They wanted to know if you’d like a debate on Social Responsibility. Housing was what they had in mind. They’ve got a space in the list after Christmas.’

  Canon Clutch conjured up the bishop in the Lords whose job it would be to speak for the Church in the event of a debate. He focused on the evangelical fervour of Bishop Breezewell. The bishop had made enthusiasm a substitut
e for thought. It had carried him far in the Church. He was new on the bench and would need a lot of briefing to be even coherent, let alone commanding in his subject. It would mean a great deal of work for the Diet office.

  ‘I think not quite yet. Ring them back, would you, Myfannwy, and tell them the omens are not propitious.’ Canon Clutch was roguish.

  Mrs Gwynether drew a line through her list, with a flourish. She was a sloping woman. Her straight dark hair sloped straight down from her centre parting. Her shoulders sloped down from her neck, her bosom from her chest and her arms from her elbows. So when she rose, the impression was of someone overcoming gravity, of rising above the mundane into the upper air.

  ‘And there’s the Secretary of State’s reply to yours of the twentieth of August.’

  Canon Clutch took the thick creamy writing paper with the embossed portcullis at its head, positively his favourite paper, and scanned it. ‘Regret pressure of business … unable to meet you … you do not say in your note what you wished to discuss with me. Perhaps you could put it on paper and let me …’

  ‘Excellent.’ Canon Clutch ran his finger over the portcullis to make sure it was embossed and not printed. ‘Excellent,’ he repeated, reassured of its bona fides. ‘Put a memo in to Mr Logg. Tell him the Secretary of State has asked me to put together a paper for him on the housing problem. I shall want it by Friday.’

  ‘Mr Logg’s outside now. Would you like to see him? He’s been hovering for ages.’

  ‘I suppose I must.’ Canon Clutch smiled a kind, colluding smile. ‘We mustn’t discourage youth, must we?’

  As Tom replaced Mrs Gwynether, Canon Clutch allowed his smile to fade. The flesh of his large face came to rest on its bones as though the displacement had been accidental. He fixed his pale eyes on Tom. ‘What is it now, Logg?’