Acts and Omissions (5 page)

Chapter 8

Shrove Tuesday. Already the shock of the pope's resignation has receded. Across the diocese of Lindchester, clergy (or their spouses) are buying in eggs and flour and lemons for the parish pancake party. By now – unless they are very low church – they will have rounded up last year's palm crosses ready to burn for Ash Wednesday. Getting the proper consistency for liturgical ashing is not as easy as you might think. Dominic has been known to cheat and grind up charcoal in his pestle and mortar. This year he's going to follow a colleague's advice and microwave the palms first.

The colleague is Father Wendy. Yes, I know, but that's what they call her. She's given up trying to stop them. Mother Wendy would be worse – flying round in a nightie tending the Lost Boys! I think the Revd Wendy Styles will cheer you up, because like most parish priests, she's just faithfully getting on with it. Her patch is four small villages where Renfold straggles out into almost-countryside. These villages include Cardingforth, so technically Wendy is Jane's vicar. Wendy is how Jane might have ended up, had she pursued her theological training, got ordained, and been given a niceness implant.

Come, let us stretch those eagle wings and shake Lindchester out of our feathers. It's good to cleanse our palate with the sorbet of normality, after the rich fare of the Close. Follow the river out over mournful industrial estates and retail parks until we reach fields ashed with snow, a shriven landscape. Willows burn bronze and copper in the sunshine. We'll keep the Linden below us, ignoring the Cardingforth cooling towers as they plume out their cumulonimbus warnings. There, look: beyond the tin-roofed tyre place and the allotments, can you see a little square-towered church in a huddle of yews? That's All Saints, Carding-le-Willow.

Here comes Father Wendy, in floral wellies and a pink puffy gilet, her cheeks red, robes bag over her shoulder. She pauses to wait for Lulu, her chocolate Labrador, who is now a waddling arthritic. They pass under the lichgate, dedicated to the boys of the village who never came back from the war. Thomas, Walter, John, John, William. Seventeen of them. All the boys of Carding-le-Willow. ‘Come along, old girl,' says Wendy. ‘Good girl.' We'll follow them through the churchyard and go inside and wait for the midday Holy Communion to start. Lulu's claws click on the tiles. Breathe in the scent of lilies and old stone. Keep your coat on.

Wendy, as she stands behind the altar and looks out, knows she's in the right place. This is what she was made for. Behind her the low winter sunshine slants through the window. As the service progresses it angles slowly round her flock like a patient searchlight, illuminating each bowed head as it passes. All they need to do is sit there and they will be touched. That's all we have to do, thinks Wendy. Turn up, put ourselves in its path. Sometimes faith is that simple. What she can't know, of course, is that from where we are sitting, she is transfigured too. Her grey hair and oatmeal cassock alb are edged with glory; light streams from her upraised hands. Let all mortal flesh keep silence.

Afterwards Wendy boosts Lulu into the back seat then gets into her car. She's off to Cardingforth now – to Sunningdale Drive, funnily enough, though not to see Jane. She's calling on a pastoral case, at the request of the archdeacon. It is, as they say, complicated. A priest in the diocese has fallen in love – plunged disastrously through the floorboards of life and into love – with someone else's wife. The wife of the bishop's chaplain. Poor Martin, yes. It was a mutual falling. Becky Rogers moved out before Christmas, taking their two little girls. She rents a house on Sunningdale Drive, because she cannot, cannot be with Martin any more! The priest is still in his rectory; he has not moved in with them, may never do so. He too is married and has three teenage children. The situation is not good. Good may yet come out of it, but right now it's hell. Becky, when she opens the door, looks as though one of Emily Dickinson's imperial thunderbolts has scalped her naked soul.

We will not intrude. I will just tell you that all Wendy does today is listen. Lulu listens as well, and every time Becky cries – in fact, in the split second before she does – Lulu senses it, raises her old head and cries too, because she cannot bear the pain.

I'm afraid that won't have cheered you up as much as I'd hoped. We'd better head to Lindchester for a bit of light relief. We will fast-forward to evening, and gatecrash yet another party in the deanery.

Yay! The choristers were in the kitchen experimenting to see if pancakes will stick to the ceiling. Simmer down, simmer down! Sixteen prepubescent boys, all hyper, all with well-trained vocal cords, some painfully virtuosic in the whistle register. The approach to total meltdown was being accelerated by that catalyst of naughtiness, Freddie May. Marion had already been forced to confiscate the Jif lemons.

Gene glided suavely round the adults, like the serpent before he was condemned to go on his belly, taking the edge off things with a last-chance-before-Lent Pouilly-Fumé. Present in the kitchen were: Giles the precentor and his German wife Ulrika; Timothy, the director of music; Iona, the sub-organist with the dragon tattoo; the inevitable group of liggers (three lay vicars, four choral scholars); and Miss Blatherwick's successor, June, who right now could cheerfully have strangled Freddie for winding her charges up to fever pitch right before bed. Not present was the cathedral organist, Laurence, on the grounds that kitchens typically only have four corners, and there was no guaranteeing one would be available for him to hide in if he came tonight. He was practising alone in the dark cave of the cathedral instead.

‘Mr May! Sir! Mr May!' piped the choristers (we like a spot of 1950s formality here in the Close). ‘Mr May, will you do your thing for us?'

‘Do my thing? You want me to do my thing?'

‘
No!
' shouted Timothy, Giles and Ulrika together. (Ulrika is a singing coach.)

‘Dudes, the grown-ups say no.'

‘Oh, ple-e-ease, Mr May!'

So Mr May took a deep breath – the adults clapped hands to ears – and gradually a noise emerged from his mouth. Oh, horrible! What on earth? A human didgeridoo, a concrete mixer full of lost souls!

Let me explain. In his schooldays, Freddie – beguiling the hours spent in corridors after being ejected from lessons – somehow taught himself to split his voice in the manner of a Tibetan Buddhist monk. Don't ask me how – vocal resonators? Harmonics? Ulrika could probably explain. Anyway, this transgressive noise thrills the choristers to their core and they are always begging for another demonstration.

‘Stop it, Freddie!' ordered Ulrika. ‘Boys,
don't
try to copy him! THOMAS GREATRIX!'

Thomas froze. Head chorister. Ought to know better. Tomorrow at evensong he was due to sing that soaring treble line in Allegri's
Miserere
. Silence. No boy moved a muscle as the juggernaut of Mrs Littlechild's wrath swept past them, stirring their hair.

‘FREDERICK MAY' (beautifully, from the diaphragm), ‘I'll deal with you later!'

A grown-up! Being shouted at! The choristers quivered in terror and glee.

‘So yeah, don't ever do that?' agreed Freddie. ‘It like totally trashes your voice?' He shone his radiant ‘if I only had a brain' smile in Ulrika's direction. If she'd been standing any closer, I believe she might have cracked him round the head with her fearsome assortment of dress rings.

‘Well! Who'd like the last pancake?' said the dean, as the lay clerks smirked into their Pouilly-Fumé.

Allegri's
Miserere
! Music so beautiful that once upon a time the pope kept it to himself, fencing its secret about with threats of excommunication. For over a century it was performed only in the Sistine Chapel, on the Wednesday and Friday of Holy Week. Then one year the fourteen-year-old Mozart heard it, wrote it down from memory and debased its spiritual currency for ever. Ah, if only we could hear it again for the very first time! Even now, domesticated though it is by overuse, it makes the hair on the back of the neck stir when you hear it echo round a medieval cathedral.

Later, as he walks back to the palace, Freddie hums that treble line. It's a ghost of his performance eleven years ago, when he stood where Thomas Greatrix will stand tomorrow, way up in the triforium looking down the nave of Lindchester Cathedral. Totally nailing those high Cs.
Et a peccato meo munda me
. Cleanse me, cleanse me from my sin. He will never sing like that again. He knows he will never outdo his eleven-year-old self.

You may be wondering why he believes this. Ulrika, driven to distraction, took Freddie by the shoulders tonight and tried to shake some sense into him: ‘Idiot! Why do you waste this incredible talent?' But he just gave her another vacuous stoner smile. Nobody has any idea that when Freddie was fifteen, someone very important whispered in his ear – like a wicked fairy godmother leaning over a cradle at a christening – that while his adult voice was pleasant, it was nothing special. Warned him, kindly, that he would probably never equal, let alone surpass, his early achievements. Freddie internalized that prophecy and then blanked out the incident because it hurt too much. This why he believes that there's no real point either hoping or trying.

Smoke alarms go off in vicarages across the diocese. Dominic shrieks as he nearly takes his eyebrows off. In the cathedral vestry the vergers are doing it properly. They are old hands at this, with their big stainless steel bowl and blowtorch. It is, perhaps, Gavin's favourite moment of the church year, if you don't count the Easter fire. (How lovely that there should be a niche for the high-functioning pyromaniac in our cathedrals.)

So Lent begins. No flowers or alleluias till Easter. By some piece of bungling mismanagement, Valentine's Day falls on the second day of the fasting season. Who's going to eat all those heart-shaped chocolates and drink the pink cava now? – the giving up of booze and confectionery being, of course, the traditional way of keeping Lent these days; a kick-starting of those stalled New Year's resolutions in the spiritual spa. Evangelicals, for whom Lenten discipline still smacks faintly of popery, prefer to
take something up
for Lent. More Bible and prayer, usually, or a worthy Christian paperback of some kind.

Ironically, this is what Dominic will be doing. He will be reading the bishop's Lent book! He wanted the book to be crass so he could despise it with a clear conscience, but no such luck. It's actually rather good, despite being written by an Evangelical and recommended by Paul Henderson. Dammit. Unlike his happy-clappy brethren (who seem to natter with the Lord all day long), Dominic seldom thinks he's heard God address him directly in actual words. He could count those occasions on the fingers of one hand. All the same, last Sunday – as he leafed snippily through
The Desires of the Heart
– he very nearly heard a voice say: Get over yourself, queen.

The words come back to him during the imposition of ashes. ‘Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return,' he says to each person as he marks them with the cross. ‘Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.' On his own forehead he can still feel the cold smears of ash. Remember you are dust. Get over yourself. Remember.

Jane has neither given nor taken up anything for Lent. Yeah, like the knowledge we are dust is ever far from her thoughts! On Thursday morning Danny Skypes. Danny's father wanders past in the background. ‘Hey, babe. Happy Valentine's Day.' He blows her a kiss and ambles out of the screen. Jane drives to Poundstretcher University. It could have been different. She could have dropped everything nineteen years ago. Gone to New Zealand.

Oh well.

She parks and gets out. Another grey day. Someone has lost a balloon. Jane watches as the red foil heart sails off over Lindford. Smaller, smaller. Gone.

Chapter 9

Monday. Jane wakes. 8.20 a.m. and Sunningdale Drive is spookily quiet. No cars. No oafs surging past in a fug of Lynx and hormones. No screams or ‘omigod!'s. Unless the Rapture has occurred and Jane's been left behind, it's half term. At Linden University, half term is called Blended Learning Week. Because it is a week for blended learning, that's why. Not because Poundstretcher has totally given up on expecting seven days of reading from their students. It's a week without teaching, at any rate. There's a peer appraisal day on Thursday, but unfortunately, Jane has a migraine then.

She should get up. Her ‘To Do' list hasn't changed since she finally forced herself to shovel handfuls of paperwork into a big envelope for her accountant, so she could cross off ‘Tax'. Which means the rest of the list has started to accuse her. Bloody car needs servicing. Dentist check-up long overdue.

Interesting: the thought of visiting the dentist appears to be the only thing capable of generating an urge to tackle Danny's room. It's been untouched since he left, and is acquiring a Miss Havisham aspect – had Miss Havisham been a stinky great crap-eating rugby slob. Half the crockery in the house is probably lurking in there somewhere, under rancid duvet covers, pizza boxes and busted lever-arch files spewing semi-literate A-level work. There's still a note from last July stuck to his door: TIDY YOUR ROOM, PIG! Underneath, in tiny, tiny letters, the reply:
You do it, bitch!

Ah, dammit, now she's crying again. Jane gets up and stomps to the shower. Danny's so like his father. What was she nineteen years ago? Apart from an idiot, obviously. Just an incubator for a blunderbuss-load of mongrel genes, that's what. Scots, Irish, Spanish, Maori, Samoan? God knows what's there in the Mickey mix, but he discharged it with a will, ba-boom, and now there's Danny, apparently undiluted by Rossiter DNA.

The hot water widdles down onto her head. Why is her shower so crap? Why is her life so crap? And how come her boy has turned out to be one giant lump of contentment? A seal basking on a rock. He simply lets the waves of maternal stroppiness wash over him, then says, ‘Yeah, so anyway, Mum, can I have five quid for the train?' Big grin? Please?

She gets out and dries herself, towels her hair, blots her tears. The mirror is not her friend. God, look at yourself. Make an appointment, Badger-Woman! Alternatively, she could hack it all off with a Stanley knife. Maybe she'll look like Anne Hathaway in
Les Mis
. Only grey.
Les Gris
. She gets dressed and goes downstairs to make coffee.

It's quiet in Lindchester too. The Close is not clogged with the black four-by-fours of yummy mummies dropping off Jack and Daisy. There is no choral evensong this week, it's evensaid. The Mass setting yesterday (Byrd, for Four Voices) was sung exquisitely by an ad hoc quartet, including Freddie May; now why can't he always be like that?

A taxi pulls up outside the precentor's house. The front door opens. Out come Giles and Ulrika; Ulrika, glorious in ankle-length fake fur and Valkyric jewellery. Both of them put a little suitcase in the taxi boot. The suitcases are so very little they
must
comply with the hand luggage restrictions, surely, unless Giles has cocked it up. If he has, oh Lord! His life won't be worth living. He pats himself down. Online check-in, tickets printed on the back of a recycled music list. Passport. Wallet. Phone. He returns to the house for a last scan round.

‘Oh, for God's sake, Giles, come on!'

They are off to Germany on a recce for this summer's choir tour. They will also visit the in-laws, but that is not why Ulrika is accompanying him. She's there to keep Giles on the straight and narrow, because once, many years ago when he was but a callow young man on a similar recce, Giles very nearly disgraced himself. There was a hotel. A massage. I would love to tell you more, but I'm not supposed to know about this. Anyhow, by sheer incompetence, he remained faithful to Ulli. (Giles is pretty useless at being wicked. There was also that time when he went out to buy cannabis and came back with the most expensive Oxo cube in London.) Ulli is entirely safe, but twenty-five years on she still does not trust him in hotels on his own. When he confessed his almost-infidelity, she chased him through the parish with her Swabian spätzle-maker, a fearsome piece of culinary hardware like a large potato ricer.

I should not have told you any of that.

‘Bye, boys!' calls Giles. There's no answer. Their sons are fifteen and seventeen. Of course they aren't awake at 8.30 a.m. (Ulrika's instructions are stuck to the fridge:
Do your homework. Don't live off junk. Put the brown bin out. No parties. DON'T smoke weed on the palace roof with Freddie May
.) Tickets-passport-wallet-phone. Giles pulls the front door to. He goes and folds himself into the back of the taxi. Ulrika, all fur and Fracas. Five days. He smiles.

Mr Happy, the canon chancellor, is in residence this week. This means that he leads Morning and Evening Prayer, and is custodian of the residency mobile phone, which the vergers ring when there's a crank in the cathedral demanding to see a priest. To be ‘canon in residence' these days means, essentially, to be on the duty rota. Victorian canons had to interrupt their butterfly hunting in Italy to come back and be in residence for a few months each year, while in the glory days of sinecures, the canon chancellor of Lindchester was probably simultaneously dean of Ely and bishop of Ravenna, and could scarcely be expected to locate Lindchester on a map, let alone reside here. Today, even when not in residence, the canons residentiary reside permanently on the Close in their gorgeous National Trust-style properties, but without the private income or the staff to make that any kind of fun. Especially in the winter.

Mr Happy emerges from the cathedral. Morning Prayer has finished and he's heading back to his house, via the builders' skip outside the school, to see if there's any firewood in it. He meets the canon treasurer coming the other way, carrying a pallet.

‘Bastard!' says the chancellor.

‘Excuse
me
, father,' replies the treasurer. ‘But you had the cathedral Christmas tree.'

‘Yes, but it hasn't fucking dried out yet, father, has it? Fucking thing won't burn properly.'

The treasurer perceives that this is not about firewood, it's about lack of sleep, and recalcitrant volunteers sending snotty emails saying they are ‘saddened and disappointed', about how the hell that book was ever going to get written, and whether coming to Lindchester from Oxford last summer was a ghastly mistake.

‘You're right,' says the treasurer. ‘That's fucking terrible. Have my pallet.' He carries it to the chancellor's house for him. ‘Look, Mark, I'm around this week – want me to cover your residency for a couple of days, so you and Miriam and the babe can get away? Have a think, let me know.'

Sudden tears threaten. ‘Thanks.'

The treasurer props the pallet against the gate and dusts his hands. ‘I'd offer to lend you my chainsaw, but I'm scared you'll run amok. Not that you could run far, come to think of it: it's electric.'

‘I can always borrow an extension lead,' says the chancellor.

The Revd Canon Philip Voysey-Scott walks to his house, singing a hymn in a warbling nasal tenor. ‘When the woes of life o'ertake me, hopes deceive and fears annoy.' (His Giles Littlechild impersonation.) He's remembering when the sprogs were tiny. They have four. Admittedly, he and Pippa (yes, they really are Philip and Philippa, I'm afraid) had a string of nannies and au pairs, but all the same, it could all get pretty torrid. Each individual day seeming never-ending, but the months – and then the years – zooming past. Can't quite believe he's been here for four years now. Four years! Not the new boy any more. He lets fly his trademark laugh, the single bark guffaw: Hah! Pigeons scatter.

Given the state of the cathedral's budget and the number of listed buildings round the Close he's responsible for – to say nothing of the crumbling gothic sandcastle that is Lindchester Cathedral – a lot of people think Philip has no right to be this cheerful. His predecessor was a right Eeyore. But Philip was a 1980s red-braces yuppie – so maybe cathedral finances are a bit of a breeze after the trading floor? Or maybe his faith sustains him: he knows that here we have no abiding city. Whatever the reason, the microclimate of the Close has been sunnier since he arrived. He's frictionless. Other people's angst and hostility gain no purchase on his soul. May the Church be granted more like Philip Voysey-Scott. He lets himself into the chapter office. A warble trails after him: ‘Lo! it glows with peace and joy.'

Half term goes by. The days are stealthily lengthening. Daffodils are up and poised to bloom in clusters on the cathedral lawns. At night half a moon sails above the spire. The cathedral clock chimes midnight, and up on the palace roof Lukas and Felix Littlechild smoke weed with Freddie May.

Like the bishop, we will pretend we know nothing about this, and instead fly off across the city towards Renfold, and call in on Father Dominic. It's rather late, but he's still up, I think. The lights are on in the vicarage. And there's Dominic on his drive. Oh dear. A patrol car. Dominic is waving his arms and shouting at two police officers.

Right. Let's do a tactful lap of the parish until they've got this sorted out. Along Church Street, quickly, towards Prince Albert Park, which we last saw clad in the wonder of freshly fallen snow. Below us now lies the lake with sleeping swans, white on black. Grey moonlit paths wind through formal gardens. A little bandstand. Vast poplars sigh. Children's play area. A car park, where cars jiggle and we will not linger. Let's wheel round, following the long curve of Renfold High Street, with its boring little crescent of shops, and then back to St John's Church.

The patrol car pulls away. Dominic goes back into the vicarage, straight to the kitchen and pours himself a whisky. It's Lent, but fuck it. His hand shakes with rage. If he were a medieval bishop, he would anathematize them all. He would curse their going out and their coming in, their downsitting and their uprising. Their eyes, their noses, their teeth, the legs they ran away on. He would smite their geese and their swine and all their cattle.

What can it be that has reduced our poor friend to this state? That's right: lead thieves. Tonight he interrupted them in their evil trade (curse them cock and balls!). He managed to get a photo of the truck they fled in, which PC Plod has failed to act upon, because the number plate is illegible. Hence the shouting and arm-waving earlier. The lead was only replaced a month ago. The arseholes just wait, then they come back for the new lot! The insurance premiums are now – ha ha – through the roof. But the little shits left their ladder this time. Dominic is going to chop it up to smithereens and burn it on his Easter fire.

He takes a deep breath, and pours another slosh of whisky. He looks at his watch. He'd sound off to Jane, only he knows that if he rings at this hour, she'll only freak out, think something's happened to Danny.

At the precise moment he is thinking this, Jane's mobile rings. She lurches awake. Snatches the phone. Sees it's Mickey. Oh, God. Something's happened!

‘Yes?'

‘Jane, it's me, Mickey, eh. Listen. I'm really sorry. It's Danny.'