Acts and Omissions (9 page)

Chapter 16

Dominic hears about it from Jane. He's at the crem, having just taken the funeral of an old lady who died of a stroke. The last mourners have gone when his phone vibrates. ‘Ding dong, the witch is dead!' says the text. Oh my God, oh my God! He checks the BBC website. It's true! Maggie's gone. He looks round for someone to clutch, to exclaim with. But he's alone now outside the chapel. At his feet red carnations spell out MUM. Wreaths. The casket tribute of lilies and roses. A white cross made of dahlias.

Already the next set of mourners is in the chapel behind him.
Sheep may safely graze
has started up. He feels . . . He presses a hand to his heart as if to check. Another old lady dead of a stroke. Has everything else dropped away now – the miners' strike, poll tax, Section 28? He's surrounded by death. The scent of lilies is in his nostrils. We are all going to die, he thinks. There's nothing we can do, nothing. Dominic has sat by countless deathbeds, held the hands of the dying; but priest though he is, he's still clutched now and then by Donne's ‘sin of fear'.

I'm going to die. No, really, I'm going to die. He thinks of the hymn they've just sung: ‘Death will come one day to me; Jesu, cast me not from thee.' Cast me not away, cast us not away.
Miserere nobis
. He's astonished to find tears welling. Now this he would not have predicted. Solidarity at the last with the Iron Lady. He shakes his head and walks to the car park. The row of poplars, planted to screen the uncomfortable truth from Renfold, sways in the wind.

‘Who's Mrs Thatcher?' asks little Leah Rogers at teatime.

Marion is in London at the Deans' Conference when she finds out. She thanks the Lord that she is dean of Lindchester, not of St Paul's.

Meanwhile, back at home, her husband Gene smiles when he hears the news. He puts a magnum of 1990 Lanson in the fridge – 1990 being a year he remembers fondly in the career of that staunch friend of apartheid. He'll invite a few carefully selected people round tonight. Not the Hendersons. True, the bishop speaks up in the Lords against welfare reform. He may not be a toadying Tory sycophant, but Gene's still not prepared to deviate from the law that you don't waste vintage champagne on Evangelicals.

Giles the precentor, cut off from civilization while typing up the music list, does not hear until Gene phones to invite him round for a glass of something this evening. Giles immediately sets about crafting suitably eirenic prayers for evensong, prayers that will cater to both the grieving and the gleeful in Lindchester. Make me a channel of your peace, he thinks. Perhaps we'll be able to reclaim the prayer of St Francis now.

I ought probably to mention – lest the tendentious reactions of my characters are giving a wrong impression – that the diocese of Lindchester is made up largely of safe Tory seats. The truth is nuanced, but you will forgive me if, for simplicity's sake, I paint the political landscape with bold expressionist swathes of blue, and tell you that the region is populated by people who can discern the iniquity of benefit fraud more clearly than that of tax avoidance. People, in short, who think Maggie did a jolly good job. They get behind community projects, tirelessly volunteering for charitable causes and as Friends of This and That. If their good deeds have a strong local bias, who are we to judge? Which of us is not (secretly) more exercised by the threat of a high-speed train route ploughing through our back garden than by the plight of the shadowy poor we have never met? Radicalism, when it does surface within diocesan borders, has a right-wing flavour, as anyone who has ever proposed building a mosque round here would be able to tell you.

Linden University, it goes without saying, is a bit of an exception. Ravaged though the natural hairy leftie habitat is by the depredations of Management and the evil machinations of the vice chancellor, a pocket remains in the Fergus Abernathy building.

It was 11 a.m. on Tuesday. Jane locked her office door behind her and headed down the corridor to the disabled loo. Sorry, the accessible toilet. As she entered, the air freshener emitted a squirt of citrus toxin. Agent Orange, probably. It didn't quite mask the smell of fag smoke. Hey, Spider! Back from study leave. Well, hoorah for that. He was always too idle to go down six floors to smoke in the leper colony. Simeon E. Dacre, poet and creative-writing lecturer in the English department, was the closest Jane had to a kindred spirit in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. (That is its name: it is not called the Faculty of Farts and Inhumanity.) Jane had her wee, deployed the liquid soap ejaculator and washed her hands. She then stooped to check her reflection in the low-placed accessible mirror. Oh, well. At least she still had her teeth. Bonjour, Fantine! How's that dream working out for you?

The tall, spindly shape of Spider was silhouetted against the big window at the tea point. He flinched at the sight of her. ‘Jane? Oh, fuck, Jane. Was I meant to know about this?'

Jane toyed with the idea of stringing him along, but this was a piece of behaviour too vile even for her. ‘No, God no, don't worry. Just a grim warning to us all: never let a drunk cut your hair.'

‘Thank fuck for that. Thought it was chemo.' He looked her over to make sure, eyes magnified behind the blue lenses of his glasses. He thrust out his long skinny arms. ‘Hug.'

She was clamped into the weird hollow chest, then pushed away again. ‘Let's get out of here and go and get coffee,' she said. ‘And celebrate.'

‘You bet.' They set off for the lifts. ‘State funeral, Jane. State fucking funeral!'

‘Well, of course – like Clement Attlee,' she said. ‘It's only fair. Oh, wait, he didn't get a state funeral.'

‘Attlee! What did that bastard ever do for the country?'

‘Yeah, apart from create a culture of dependency!'

‘Present government are still tidying up after him. Bastard.'

We will leave them to their embittered socialist grousing as they head for the vegan restaurant. Perhaps you are wondering what I am up to, introducing a new character a quarter of the way through my novel. Aren't there rules against that type of thing? I hope you will permit me to hint that I am the writer, and I can do whatever I bloody like. My purpose here is to wean you off solipsism: just because you, reader, have not seen him before does not mean Simeon E. Dacre has not existed all along.

This, I trust, will prepare you for the following surprise: there is another bishop about to make an appearance in this tale. He is the suffragan bishop of Barcup. Even now he is winging his way towards us, in mid-air, somewhere over the Atlantic. He has been in the partner diocese in South America on sabbatical for the past three months. You will be saddened to learn that the Rt Revd Bob Hooty is a thorn in Paul Henderson's flesh. Paul has prayed the Lord rather more than three times that He would remove it from him. Still, the Lord's grace is very nearly sufficient for Paul.

The issue is this: the bishop of Barcup is a 1970s style Christianity-and-politics-from-the-bottom-up-type liberal. The two bishops are unfailingly courteous to one another. But there is not much collegiality. Bob's been in the diocese four years longer than Paul, doing the donkey work of licensings and confirmations, and he still has two years to go before retirement. At this point Paul will be able to appoint someone he is better able to work with. I'm afraid Bobby Barcup will come home to discover that Paul and his stooges have advanced the (decidedly top-down) Diocesan Growth Strategy significantly in his absence. But we will leave the poor man in ignorance of this for a little longer, happily flexing his toes in his flight socks and sandals to stave off DVT, and reading Francis Spufford's
Unapologetic
. It is such a good book that he keeps reading excerpts out loud to his wife Janet, who is sitting beside him reading something else. Discreetly on her Kindle (to see what the fuss is all about). If he doesn't stop interrupting her with bloody Spufford she's going to read him a toe-curler of an extract in retaliation.

In his suffragan's absence, the bishop of Lindchester has been doing more of the donkey work himself. It is Friday evening and he has just got back from confirming a dozen young teens and adults in one of the farthest flung corners of the diocese, on his day off. Bad bishop. Susanna has forgiven him, and is ready in the kitchen with a plate of sandwiches for him and Freddie, who was driving.

‘How did it go?' asked Susanna, once they were seated and eating.

‘Fine,' replied the bishop, in the off-hand manner of a child describing a day at school.

‘Did your sermon go down well?'

‘Hope so.'

‘Did he preach well, Freddie?'

Freddie paused just a heartbeat too long before saying, ‘Awesome?'

The bishop laughed. ‘Now tell me what you really think.'

‘Aaaw, c'mon. Man. You can't ask me that?' He crammed the sandwich into his mouth to avoid answering.

Susanna – who bowed to no one in her ability to feel bad about things for which she was in no way responsible – began to panic. ‘I'm sure it was fine, darling. Freddie's teasing you.'

‘No, he's not. He doesn't want to hurt my feelings.' He removed the plate of sandwiches from Freddie's reach. ‘Come on, I'm genuinely interested in what you think.'

Freddie slumped over forwards and thumped his forehead on the table. ‘No-o-o-oo. Oh, OK, fine, then.' He sat up. ‘So yeah. Here's the thing. When you're preaching you're like, doing this jigsaw? Only it's like I've got this killer hangover, yeah, and you're all, look how it fits together? See? This is God's amazing plan, it all fits together, and it makes sense and therefore God loves you? Only I'm like, dude, yeah, totally, I so agree with you, only I've still got a headache and I'm gonna be sick?' There was a pause. ‘Know what I'm saying?'

Paul stared at him.

‘So you're saying Paul's sermons don't quite hit the spot for you, emotionally, as it were?' translated Susanna, to fill the terrible yawning chasm that had opened in her kitchen.

This chasm, dear reader, was caused by a momentary fit of abstraction on the part of the bishop. He had just benefited from his first glimpse of Freddie's tramp stamp when he slumped forwards, and had not in fact heard a word Freddie was saying.

‘Sorry. Run that past me again,' he said.

Freddie coloured. ‘Hey. It's cool. Forget it.'

Oh, bishop! That was your moment to own up and make light of it! Paul could see he'd just squashed Freddie and made him feel like a complete idiot. Another couple of seconds passed and the opportunity was well and truly butter-fingered and dropped. Say something! But nothing came to mind. The bishop castigated himself. And then, I'm sorry to say, began to find it amusing. He frowned in an effort to repress this.

And in that frown poor Freddie read disapproval. He checked his phone: 10.20. What the fuck. It was Friday. He got to his feet. ‘Catch you later, guys.'

Susanna tilted her head in pastoral anguish as he left. Oh dear! The front door opened, and closed.

‘Is he all right?' she asked. ‘Should we . . . ?'

‘Freddie's an adult,' said Paul.

Outside in the dark palace garden a fox wailed, lonely, cold, like the lost soul of a family pet.

Chapter 17

Spring? Surely we dare breathe the word ‘spring' in the diocese of Lindchester? The first chiffchaffs have been heard along the banks of the Linden, cross-stitching the air with song; the water meadows are filling with Shakespeare's flowers, daisies pied and violets blue, ladies' smock all silver white.

Bob Hooty, back from his sabbatical, has missed the worst of the English winter, lucky man. He is in his kitchen now, looking out at his garden. His magnolia is nearly out. A blowsy yellow haze dusts the pussy willow buds, where a bee potters. Barcup is a village near the site of the ancient Saxon shrine of Sexfrot, or some equally implausible saint. But the bishop doesn't live there. He lives in the town of Martonbury, in the south of the diocese. This is the lot of suffragan bishops. The lines fall to them in suburban places. Not for them the oak-panelled be-moated idiocies inflicted upon diocesan bishops – in which their poor sofas and Billy bookcases look like doll's house tat – but posh detached houses, probably with an extra downstairs loo and a side door, so visitors and PA don't have to walk through the house to reach the bishop's office.

I like Bob. He's a good man. Look at him standing in his kitchen on Monday morning, with his All Saints' Martonbury 150th Anniversary mug of Fair Trade coffee, shaking his head at Radio 4. Ten million pounds for the funeral. He thinks about the poverty he's just seen. He sighs over austerity measures and the
Belgrano
. He ponders Spufford and sin, the HPtFtU. And yet outside his kitchen window a blackbird is singing in the magnolia, and the bee still potters in dusty golden bliss. All's not right with the world, but it's not all wrong, either. Hope remains. He's not an empty-tomber, but Easter is what makes the difference.

Bob is wearing a grey suit and a purple clerical shirt (under his jumper), because he's going to get in his car and drive to Lindchester for the senior staff meeting and give a brief presentation about his sabbatical. He goes through his little stack of A5 cards one last time. (Bishop Paul uses an iPad.) Bob's shirt is one of the four he bought when he was consecrated nearly twelve years ago: a little faded at the edges, but still going strong. He's not quite in sandals and socks, but his brown shoes have a distinct sandally air about them. You can glimpse sock through the little cut-out bits. He has a beard, nicely trimmed, not wild and mage-like. His varifocals are not stylish. Having been bullied by his children into trendy frames in the 1980s, Bob has stuck loyally with them ever since.

His wife Janet appears in her dressing gown and offers him a cooked breakfast. He declines. She starts cutting the rind off the bacon with a pair of recycled episiotomy scissors, because she's a midwife. (Don't worry, they've been sterilized.) She makes enough for him too, because he'll change his mind the minute he smells the bacon cooking.

‘I bet Voldemort's taken over the entire diocese in your absence,' she says.

Voldemort, you will be relieved to learn, is not Janet's name for Bishop Paul. No, Voldemort is the archdeacon of Lindchester.

The ARCHDEACON! (Sulphur fumes and menacing discords on cathedral organ!) The word alone raises certain expectations in a work of this kind. It is customary for writers to have fun with their archdeacons; to give them a short fuse and a string of expensive hunters, or a secret boyfriend and black leather gloves. We unleash archdeacons as the bishop's enforcers, to strut across the page striking terror into the hearts of feeble-minded clergy. That said, a novelist has a duty to avoid clichés. You perceive the tension here? I ought to subvert the stereotype and present you with a mild-mannered godly archdeacon, free from foibles and eccentricities. And yet the stereotype exists for a reason: however lovely you are, you don't get to be an archdeacon unless you have at least a hint of Rottweiler in your psychological make-up. Archdeacons are not paid to be popular. They are paid to get things sorted.

And that, dear reader, is all the permission I need.

But you will have to wait a little longer to meet Voldemort. There are, in fact, two archdeaconries in the diocese of Lindchester. One is currently vacant, which gives Bishop Paul the opportunity to appoint yet another stooge. Sorry, to enhance collegiality in the senior staff team. Thus the evil Hendersonian master plan gathers momentum, to go into all the world and make disciples of all people.

And how is Bishop Paul? You will remember we left him in a not entirely happy frame of mind. He seems to be locked into a pattern of bungling his dealings with Freddie. What Freddie craves is his attention. Paul knows this, but Paul is deeply resistant to being manipulated. In fact, the best way of ensuring that Paul Henderson won't do what you want is to tiptoe round him hinting and angling. So he refuses point-blank to reward Freddie's attention-seeking behaviour. Unfortunately, the more he withdraws in steely disapproval, the more Freddie ups his game. At what point will Paul's strategy of taking no notice become negligence? For example, after walking out on Friday night, Freddie did not return till Monday lunchtime. Paul did not enquire where he'd been, but his PA (who always finds these things out) put him in the picture: Freddie hitched to London, scene of his earlier adventures. This is not a welcome development. Paul sees that he urgently needs to find some appropriate way of paying attention on his own terms, not on Freddie's. He wonders briefly whether to raise this with his trusty archdeacon. He's seen the two of them together and observed that Matt achieves some secret alchemical mix of banter and boundaries when dealing with Freddie. A light touch and a firm hand –
this
is what always eludes Paul. But no, the archdeacon is a busy man. Not worth troubling him with this. We will allow Paul a few more days to ponder this, then pop into his office on Thursday afternoon and see how he gets on.

Paul was due to reappear at any moment from a finance subcommittee over in the diocesan offices. Freddie was sitting at Martin the chaplain's desk, watching YouTube clips on Martin's computer while he waited for orders. This was allowed. Penelope was in the room, and Freddie was legitimately logged on under his own user name. He couldn't get up to any mischief because he did not know Martin's password. Thought Penelope. Freddie jiggled in his chair, rattled his tongue stud along his teeth, sorted his boys out.

‘You're such a fidget!' said Penelope. ‘And do you want a tissue? You're driving me mad sniffing like that.'

‘Huh?' He pulled an earphone out. ‘What'sh that, Mish Moneypenny?'

Penelope lobbed a box of tissues across. ‘Stop sniffing!'

‘Sorry.' He grabbed a bunch and tossed the box back. ‘It's the blow.'

‘You'll rot your septum, you silly boy!'

Fish in a barrel. Literally? Penelope had no bull-ometer. He grinned at her and returned his attention to the screen. I'm sorry to tell you that YouTube was not the only tab open. Freddie was in the episcopal diary again and seriously considering booking Paul and Martin in together for a Swedish massage and pedicure at the local health spa.

Nah. Probably don't do that? But Martin, my man— Chaplain1? Time to rethink your password, maybe?

Footsteps crunched across the gravel. Freddie logged off quickly. The office door opened and Paul and Chaplain1 came in. Freddie gave them a sunny smile. ‘Hey.'

‘I'd like my desk back,' said Martin.

‘Please,' prompted Freddie.

‘Please.'

Freddie scooted the chair backwards across the office. ‘All yours, dude.'

‘And my chair. Please.'

Freddie sighed and trundled the chair back over to the desk with his feet. He stood up close to the recoiling Martin and whispered, ‘Just keeping it warm for you.'

Paul observed all this with an expression that said he'd like to knock their heads together. ‘Freddie, do you have a moment?'

‘Sure.'

‘Could you cast your eye over this and give me your perspective on it?' He had a print-off in his hand. ‘Published last week by the Faith and Order Commission.'

Freddie was reaching out when he glimpsed the title:
Men and Women in Marriage
. ‘No. No way. Man, you can't ask me to read that. Get
him
to read it, I'm not reading it.'

‘I've already read it, actually,' said Martin, without unclamping his teeth.

‘I'm specifically asking
you
to read it, Freddie,' said Paul, ‘because I'd value your reactions.'

‘Yeah? Well, this is my reaction. Not reading it.'

The distress flares were screaming up into the sky. But he hadn't stormed out. Paul risked edging the conversation on a little further. ‘Are you . . . able to express why you don't want to read it?'

‘Nope.' Freddie took hold of the back of Martin's chair and spun it round.

Paul waited, willing Martin to keep his mouth shut.

‘So yeah, no, it's like all the grown-ups discussing me in the head's office, and I'm sent outside the room?' muttered Freddie. ‘Totally does my head in.'

‘Forgive me, but if you refuse to engage with the process, what can you hope to achieve?' asked Martin.

‘I can achieve not having to listen to a load of hate from assholes like you.'

‘Excuse me? It's not—'

‘Thanks, Martin,' said the bishop. ‘Freddie, I've upset you. I didn't mean to do that, and I'm sorry. But I'm genuinely interested in what you think and feel.'

‘Yeah, well. But what's the point? Not like you're gonna change, are you?' Freddie gave the chair another twirl. ‘So. Anything else you want me to do?'

Paul turned to Penelope.

‘Gavin's got flu, so the vergers are short-staffed,' said Penelope. ‘They're behind on the mowing.'

‘I'm all over it,' said Freddie.

‘You're still banned from using the sit-on mower,' Penelope called after him.

‘La la la!'

The door banged. ‘Honestly, he's hopeless,' said Penelope.

Excellent. That went well, thought Paul.

Actually, Freddie had read the report. He had plenty of thoughts and feelings about it. Like, why did it sometimes say ‘
we
'? Who is this
we
who
knows
this stuff about marriage? The Faith and Order Commission? People in general? Not Freddie, that was for sure, sitting outside the head's office permanently in the wrong. Plus, why's it all about
difference
? Why does nobody think marriage is about sameness? Yeah, coz why did Adam go, ‘Here at last is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh'? Unless Eve was someone
like
him? Adam was all, yay, at last, another one of me! But no way was Freddie saying any of this with Fuckwit1 in the room.

He collected the big petrol mower from Dave the head verger, who sent him to mow the palace lawn. ‘Keep it nice and straight,' said Dave. ‘Clippings in the brown bin. Straight lines, not round and round.'

‘Straight lines. I hear you.'

Father Dominic has not read
Men and Women in Marriage
. He probably should, but hasn't quite mustered the strength. He knows there's nothing new in it that he wants to hear. What does he want to hear? Oh, he's an old softie. He wants it to be like that YouTube clip of the New Zealand parliament, when they announce the passing of the same-sex marriage bill, and the room erupts spontaneously into a Maori love song. He would like to hear the archbishop of Canterbury cry, ‘Unlock the doors!' and General Synod breaking into song, and the song flooding the entire C of E. But that's not going to happen any time soon, is it?

Freddie mows the palace lawn all afternoon in the sunshine. As he mows he sings. It's the same Maori love song, because he was watching that YouTube clip on Martin's computer earlier, too, and now he has an earworm.
Pōkarekare ana
. He knows the words from Sing Up! concerts years ago, when he was a chorister.

        The waves are breaking, against the shores of Waiapu,

        My heart is aching, for your return, my love.

Because in the end, that's what it's about, no? Love? I mean, seriously, fuck everything else. Because what else is there? In the end, what else is there but love? Love love love love love?

The following morning the bishop opens his bedroom curtains and stares down at the palace garden. Freddie has not kept it nice and straight. The entire lawn is one giant heart.