Sidney Chambers and The Persistence of Love

by James Runcie

  ‘I’m not implying anything, Inspector Keating. I am asking questions in order to prevent a miscarriage of justice.’

  ‘Mrs Mitchell’s the one who is most likely to suffer . . .’

  ‘That will be for this court to decide.’

  When the time came for the jury to consider its verdict it was clear that, despite the ripped nightie, and the alleged attempt to stifle Helena’s sobs with a pillow, their judgement would be that there was ‘insufficient evidence’ for a prosecution. It was not enough for her to have said ‘no’; Frank Downing had to understand that she was saying ‘no’. Helena had not made her feelings sufficiently clear. In conclusion, the judge said that there had been ‘mixed messages’ and that, although the situation had been ‘unfortunate’, there was nothing he could do apart from draw attention to the ‘lessons learned’. There was no point in ruining a man’s entire career for the sake of a single night of passion.

  Downing was ‘impassive’ as he left court in his best suit and navy tie, only telling the press that he wanted ‘to leave this nightmare behind me’ and that he bore Helena ‘no ill will’ for her ‘false accusation’.

  Helena said that the fierceness of the interrogation at the trial and the not guilty verdict had been like a second assault. She resigned from her job, particularly after her newspaper’s coverage of the trial and their lukewarm response to having her back. Some of her colleagues even spoke to her as if rape was some kind of initiation ritual that she had failed. She was branded as a troublemaker, a woman who had broken ranks. Downing was ‘just being Frank’. Was it really that serious? Couldn’t she just have toughed it out and got on with her job? It wasn’t that bad.

  That night Sidney tried to understand the limitations of the criminal justice system and how inadequate he had been in helping Helena. He couldn’t think of a single thing he had done that had improved the situation.

  He smashed a glass of water.

  Hildegard asked him what was wrong.

  ‘You know the Puritans used to punish women who had been raped for fornication,’ he said. ‘They thought it was their fault. Not much has changed.’

  On Midsummer Day, just after seven o’clock in the morning, Mercy Mitchell, conceived the previous October, was born in the Middlesex Hospital in central London. She weighed six pounds, ten ounces.

  ‘One wouldn’t want to call this a happy ending,’ said Malcolm, ‘but at least it’s a new beginning.’

  ‘Seven hours of labour,’ said Helena. ‘I suppose it could have been worse.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Sidney asked. ‘I’m sorry to be banal. I have to know.’

  ‘Of course I thought about what happened. It all came back. Not that it’s ever gone away. But Mercy gives me something different to care about; something other than myself. I’ve shut out everything else.’

  ‘Have your parents come?’

  ‘Not yet. And we haven’t told them the truth. But we’ll bring Mercy up as our own. People can think what they like.’

  ‘She is our own,’ said Malcolm.

  ‘But that doesn’t mean I’ll always be silent about what happened,’ said Helena. ‘I’ll speak when the time is right. And so, I hope, will Mercy.’

  ‘I like the name.’

  ‘Her middle name is Victoria. We think they go well together, don’t we, Malcolm?’

  ‘She will be our victory.’

  ‘And will you go back to work?’

  ‘I will,’ said Helena, ‘although not for that paper. I want to tell stories differently. When Mercy is a young woman I hope she’ll go out to work in a very different world to the one I grew up in. Frank Downing may have started with his right to silence. I want us to have the right to noise.’

  ‘Then I hope that I will live to see the day.’

  ‘And I hope,’ said Malcolm, ‘that one day you will celebrate Mercy’s wedding.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t think she’ll do something as conventional as that?’ Sidney replied.

  ‘Would you like to hold her?’ Helena asked.

  ‘I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.’

  Despite a reprimand, Geordie was reinstated in his job almost as quickly as he had left it. There were, he said, still some advantages to old-fashioned policing and now, having seen Helena himself, the only thing he regretted was that he had not hit Frank Downing harder.

  ‘Still unrepentant then?’ Sidney asked.

  ‘I’d trust that girl with my life. She’s a fighter.’

  ‘Woman, Geordie. We’re supposed to say “woman”.’

  ‘She’ll always be a “girl” to me.’

  ‘Then she’ll keep on saying that, despite your sympathy and support, as a man you have still got a lot to learn.’

  ‘I don’t mind about that. I just want to get that bastard. His card’s marked, I can tell you.’

  ‘Helena will keep up the fight, as must we all.’ Sidney gestured towards the bar. ‘I presume I’m getting the pints in?’

  ‘If you don’t mind. I have lost three months’ pay.’

  ‘And Cathy?’

  ‘On the mend, I hope. She’s ditched that drug you asked your father about and the surgeon thinks he’s got it all out. And her GP’s paying more attention now he realises that if he doesn’t come up to scratch Cathy will go off and see some expensive quack.’

  ‘Is that where she got the Laetrile?’

  ‘Her sister married an American who knew someone in London who organised it all for her. Cathy’s too embarrassed or anxious to tell me everything, but I wouldn’t mind sorting the bugger out.’

  ‘One thing at a time, Geordie. You’re hardly back at work.’

  ‘Couldn’t have come soon enough. I’d go mad sitting at home all the time.’

  Although it had been a dull day for late June, it was still warm enough to stay out in the pub garden and enjoy what little of the light was left.

  ‘You know, I didn’t demand to be reinstated,’ Geordie continued. ‘They just did it. But then I’ve never asked for anything in my life; not this, not that, not Cathy, not her cancer, not our friendship, nothing. I suppose I should learn to pray. That’s asking.’

  ‘And receiving.’

  ‘But I’m frightened that if God gives you one thing, he’ll take away something else. He gives me Cathy. He takes her away.’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that, Geordie. She’ll pull through.’

  ‘I hope so. It’s a hell of a treatment.’

  ‘And sometimes when things are taken away, other things are given back.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Helena’s child. I don’t want another argument, but at least something good has come out of all this.’

  ‘I don’t agree at all, Sidney. I think nothing happening at all would have been a hell of a lot better than what actually took place. You say no incident, no child. But I say no child, no incident. You always see the silver lining, not the bloody great cloud.’

  ‘That’s what makes us a team, though, Geordie. You see the cloud, I see the lining.’

  ‘And none of us get the sunshine.’

  Sidney picked up his pint. ‘You know that, whatever happens, with Cathy or anything else, I will always be your friend.’

  ‘You’d bloody better be. You know I’d be lost without you.’

  The two men resumed their drinking. For a short while they sat in a companionable silence that neither had any desire to interrupt. Geordie unpacked a box of backgammon.

  There was a flicker in the sky, a trick of the light, perhaps, and the sun made a final appearance that day, low on the horizon, sending a brief beam across their garden table, the silver lining in the cloud.

  Sidney looked up and smiled at the warmth on their faces.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Geordie. ‘Don’t even think about speaking.’

  Ex Libris

  Every time Sidney returned to Corpus Christi, Cambridge, the college where he had been both student and chaplain, he felt i
nadequate, intimidated by history, architecture, scholarship and tradition. He worried that he could never live up to the university’s intellectual expectations, that he had only ever had temporary membership of such an august institution, and that his presence never counted for very much at all.

  This was odd, because he did not have the same feelings when he entered a cathedral, even though the sense of human transience amidst so much ancient stone might have provoked a similar response. Perhaps ecclesiastical buildings were welcoming because they were open to all of the faithful, whereas a university could close its doors to anyone it chose. Simply through its admissions process it was more likely to reject than accept you, and even if you did manage to make it through the front door, you were still greeted as a temporary member, bounded either by length of degree or security of tenure.

  The fact was that, no matter how often he was welcomed, Sidney never felt that he belonged, and there was something added to his uneasiness each time he made his way past the Porters’ Lodge and looked out over the finely mown grass of New Court. He tried to pin it down. Was it the issue that the university was a self-governing organisation that considered itself outside the laws of the land? Was it the elite confidence that only the cleverest and the fittest were worthy of admission and that those less fortunate, privileged or intelligent could simply be locked out? Or was it, he wondered, the inhabitants themselves? Could it perhaps be the combination of intellectual superiority and social unease that so many of the university Fellows displayed, particularly in the presence of a clergyman whom, they made plain, could never be given academic respect: for how could anyone with rational intelligence believe in God?

  Sidney wondered if he could do anything to improve his chances of intellectual acceptance. Perhaps he was being a touch paranoid; yet he couldn’t help but dwell on the matter. Was the apparent disapproval of the dons due to the fact that Sidney had a sense of humour and that his delight in the absurd demonstrated an alarming partiality to the trivial? Did his meddling in detection and the cares of the world leave him on the nursery slopes of the icy heights of academe? Or was the disdain of his colleagues the result of jealousy; a situation in which the Fellows who had deliberately incarcerated themselves within the privileges of the past envied Sidney’s freedom of movement in the world outside, his easy friendships and genial curiosity?

  After a moment of what he now had to dismiss as ungrateful nervousness, Sidney pulled himself together and made his way around Front Court to the Parker Library, one of the most valuable collections of medieval manuscripts in the world.

  Matthew Parker had been a pupil at Corpus Christi in the early sixteenth century. He was chaplain to Anne Boleyn, King Henry VIII’s second wife, and Archbishop of Canterbury to her daughter, Elizabeth I. A book-collecting scholar, he edited the Bishop’s Bible of 1568, and established the Thirty-nine Articles as the official definition of the beliefs and obligations of the Church in England: a Church separate from Rome which, Parker argued, Pope Gregory the Great had always intended when he first sent Christian missionaries to Britain.

  On his death Parker had left over five hundred manuscripts and several thousand printed books to his old college; a series of priceless documents that showed the unbroken continuity of the English Church from earliest times, including the Chronica Maiora of Matthew Paris, Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert, Alfred’s Laws, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the finest copy of Chaucer in England.

  The most prized possession in the collection was the gospel book that St Augustine brought from Pope Gregory in Rome to the county of Kent in 597 AD in order to found English Christianity. This was the first book ever known to have been in England, the forerunner to all the Christian art that followed and the oldest object that had been in continuous use since the sixth century. Many thought it to be the most precious artefact in English culture.

  It was also the religious text upon which Archbishops of Canterbury took their solemn oaths of office and now, following Michael Ramsey’s retirement, it was due to be pressed into service at the enthronement of his successor, Donald Coggan.

  Before this could be done, the library had to undergo its annual audit, for it was a condition of Matthew Parker’s original bequest, made in an age when literary kleptomania was rife, to confirm the collection was still complete.

  The auditors were allowed to inflict a penalty of four pennies for every leaf of a manuscript found wanting and two shillings for every absent sheet. For every printed book or manuscript missing, and not restored within six months of admonition, they could levy whatever sum they thought proper. More crucially, if six manuscripts in folio, eight in quarto and twelve of lesser size had been removed due to negligence, and were not restored within six months, then the whole collection, together with the college silver given by Parker, would be forfeit to Gonville and Caius within a month, and should that college be found similarly wanting, then they were to pass to Trinity Hall.

  Although not a single item had been lost since Parker’s time, it was therefore in the interests of both Gonville and Caius and Trinity Hall to find manuscripts missing and become beneficiaries. The Masters of both these colleges were almost amused by their potential to ruin another at the annual feast, attended by Fellows, friends, benefactors and representatives from all three colleges, which was given in celebration of the bequest.

  The evening that required the pleasure of Sidney’s company took place in early September and began with a display of the most valuable manuscripts in the library followed by drinks in Old Court and dinner in the Great Hall.

  Sidney’s host was the librarian, Dr Ralph Mumford, an expert in Anglo-Saxon and the development of the English language from the Corpus glossary of 800 AD to the Norman Conquest. A tall, enthusiastic man dressed in clothes that he looked as if he was trying to escape, Ralph acted with surprising clumsiness for an archivist entrusted with the care of fragile objects. Some of his colleagues treated him as a bit of a joke, but he was more of a scholar than he let on; patiently allowing people who worked in the glitzy world of painting and sculpture to patronise him; only bristling when they pronounced his Christian name incorrectly. ‘It’s Rafe, as in strafe,’ he would say, ‘not Ralph as in Alf.’

  After looking at a series of images from medieval bestiaries depicting horses, donkeys, eagles and dragons, Sidney was told how many of the inks used in the illustrations contained poisons (canary-yellow orpiment, for example, included arsenic; vermilion: mercury) and Ralph ventured that perhaps, had he lived in medieval times, he would have been called to solve crimes even then?

  After replying that this was no joking matter, he was shown a 1572 edition of The Bishops’ Bible that Parker had edited and an English Romanesque manuscript that illustrated one of the earliest examples of musical notes on a stave: a hymn for the Feast of St Augustine.

  ‘Something to tell Hildegard when you get home.’

  ‘I’m sure she’d like to have come, but she knows the college doesn’t encourage women.’

  ‘Nonsense. Bring her next year.’

  ‘She’d like that,’ said Sidney, thinking that this was at least one thing he could offer her that Rolfe von Arnim couldn’t.

  The Gospel Book of St Augustine was given a prominent position in a display case at the far end of the library. It was not a large manuscript, some ten and a half by eight and a half inches, bound in plain oak boards, slightly bevelled on their inner edges, with a spine of creamy alum-tawed goatskin. The condition of the manuscript was remarkable, the Latin text written in the same uncial script used by St Jerome, separated out into clauses that were each designed to be read aloud in one breath: ‘per cola et commata’. Sidney remembered that Winston Churchill had set out his speeches in a similar way, with rhetorical performance in mind.

  The manuscript lay open at the illustrated page at the start of Luke’s gospel, showing the Evangelist beneath his attribute as an ox. The colours were soft yet persistent, like those found on old Roman frescoes – indigo, vermili
on, hematite and orange red lead – and the painted architectural design that framed the scene looked both back to Pompeii and forward to the Bayeux Tapestry.

  ‘After the dinner,’ Ralph Mumford promised, ‘when everyone’s gone, I’ll bring you back here and we can take it out of its case. Then you can handle it yourself. To think that you will have history in your hands, Sidney: our sacred Christian heritage. You know that in the Middle Ages they thought it had miraculous powers? There’s a 1414 reference to a peasant in Thanet who lied when swearing an oath on it and who was then struck blind as a result.’

  ‘I’ll be careful how I handle it, Ralph.’

  ‘I should hope so. It is almost a talismanic object, Sidney, more valuable than the relic of any saint.’

  ‘Not that many of those are relics. Shall I wear gloves?’

  ‘No. We prefer clean, dry hands, but you need to be careful. We’d rather not have to mend a tear. But let me start gathering up the troops for the drinks. I’ll leave Julian to lock up.’

  ‘The chaplain? Is he entitled?’

  ‘He can do it in his capacity as Fellow. He’s perfectly competent; unless you’d like to take charge of security yourself?’

  ‘I think I’d rather have a drink.’

  ‘Good man.’

  They made their way to the most ancient part of the college and the oldest surviving enclosed court in Cambridge; a series of fourteenth-century buildings that still contained the sills and jambs used to hold oil-soaked linen before the arrival of glass. A long table with a fluttering white cloth was staffed by four waiters preparing jugs of Pimm’s, and glasses of red and white wine, together with orange juice and elderflower cordial. It was the last knockings of summer, with the students not yet back, and the small gathering of some sixty or seventy friends and benefactors had an air of secluded privilege.

  The only drama of the evening came when Sir Leslie Manning, the recently appointed cathedral agent of Canterbury, the man responsible for the safekeeping of The Gospel Book of St Augustine during the enthronement of the next archbishop, arrived late. The unfortunate chaplain had not seen him when he was locking up and had therefore managed to trap him in the library. Manning had then had to telephone the Porters’ Lodge to be released. As a result, he was not in the best of moods when he arrived in Old Court and only calmed down towards the end of his second glass of Pimm’s.