Caroline Minuscule (9 page)

T
hey were up early the next morning. Dougal had a weakness for cooked breakfasts, especially those cooked by somebody else. Amanda preferred to have a bath and put on her makeup, so Dougal went down alone and ordered for both of them. Having eaten his own egg, bacon and tomato, he moved on to Amanda's sausage and scrambled egg.

The dining room was empty, except for the waitress, who was listlessly sorting out the cutlery on the sideboard, and the elderly clergyman, who was making a very slow breakfast indeed – as if, Dougal thought, his metabolism was only firing on one cylinder. Seen in daylight, everything about the man – his suit, his hair, his complexion – suggested he was gradually decomposing. ‘Dust to dust,' Dougal said to the last forkful of Amanda's scrambled egg and nodded politely to Mrs Livabed as she appeared in the doorway with a clutch of menus in her hand. She picked up the Church Dormant's napkin and asked Dougal if he needed more coffee.

When Amanda came in, the room's atmosphere seemed to change subtly. The waitress straightened her spine, Mrs Livabed absently smoothed a crease from her skirt and Dougal could have sworn that the clergyman chose to drop his napkin again so he could turn to bend down, thereby getting the chance of a better look.

Amanda said ‘Good morning' to nobody in particular (and Dougal thought that in an English hotel it was possibly ruder to say it to one person in particular than not to say it at all; it was one of those impossible dilemmas) and sat down. He poured her some coffee. Their table was by the window and they stared out into the High Street, passing the time talking about the weather – it had stopped raining during the night, but on the other hand the sky was not the sort you associate with a fine day. Already a good number of doleful shoppers were abroad, scurrying mournfully like people late for a funeral.

When Dougal and Amanda themselves reached the outside world, half an hour later, it was easier to understand the predominant aura of depression which had clung to the pedestrians. True, it was no longer raining, but the chief feature of the weather was now a vicious east wind which pried its way into one's clothing by the smallest crannies and treated exposed surfaces of skin with the callous indifference of fine-grained sandpaper. Amanda refused to change her elegant but light leather coat; Dougal, however, abruptly dropped his sartorial standards and dug out his elderly duffel coat from the boot of the Mini.

In the High Street they bought cigarettes and a film for Amanda's camera and then walked briskly along Minster Street, which ran south from the chemist's shop, to the west door of the cathedral. As they reached it, the clock which a nineteenth-century dean had caused to perch incongruously over the west window chimed the quarter: nine-fifteen. They had agreed at the hotel that it was obviously too early to call on Mrs Munns and the cathedral seemed the natural place to go. Dougal had an unspoken hope that the church would provide a clue of some sort.

The west door was twelve feet high and had two flaps, made of oak and covered with wrought iron foliage, interlaced with someone's initials, endlessly repeated. One of the flaps had a postern door cut into it. When Dougal opened it, he found that its weight had been augmented by a thoughtful dean and chapter: the powerful spring which held it closed nearly snapped shut on Amanda, like an ecclesiastical mousetrap.

Inside the church, Dougal's first impression was of cold and gloom; his second was of an avenue of stone tree trunks wide enough for several lines of traffic abreast. In fact the nave was filled with rows of orange plastic chairs, of the sort which bend alarmingly when you sit down in one.

‘Must be expecting a big congregation,' said Dougal in a whisper – childhood conditioning made talking at the usual level difficult.

Amanda pointed to a notice beside the door which explained the chairs: the population of Rosington was expected to attend in force a concert in aid of the World Organization Against Racism and Fascism; the programme was to be composed entirely of works by the celebrated Russian dissident Anton Petrovitch Spudovsky, and included, Dougal noted, the anticoncerto Nausea in F-sharp Minor, which had caused such a furore at its premiere in the Albert Hall last month.

A verger appeared in the north aisle, a portly person in a very large, black cassock which reached so close to the ground that it created the illusion that he was levitating rather than walking towards them. For he was certainly coming in their direction: there was no mistaking the sense of purpose on that fleshy face. Dougal saw that he wore a chain round his neck with a medallion bearing the arms of the cathedral; it swung gently as he moved, like a small, smokeless censer.

‘No photography,' announced the verger, his voice a delicate blend of Fen vowels and clerical consonants, ‘without permission and the payment of two pounds towards the maintenance of the cathedral.' His eyes strayed meaningfully towards Amanda's camera, which hung from her right shoulder.

‘Ah. Yes,' said Dougal. ‘Photographs. We hadn't actually taken any yet. But I suppose we might. Two pounds did you say?'

The verger inclined his head. Dougal wondered if the prompt acceptance of his authority had mollified him, for he volunteered the information that the permit was valid for a whole day, and you could come and go, during that day, as much as you liked.

Dougal pulled out his wallet and the verger, from some hidden pocket, produced a biro and a pad of numbered receipts. By the time the transaction had been completed, Dougal's hands were far too cold for him to want to hold a camera in them.

‘The fabric,' remarked the verger, ‘requires an enormous sum daily, merely for its maintenance. The shop—' he bowed slightly, in the direction of the north transept ‘—opens at half-past nine. Visitors are asked to remember that they are in a House of Prayer.'

The verger noiselessly retired. Dougal and Amanda looked at one another.

‘I don't
want
to take any photographs here,' she hissed. ‘Why did you give him the money?'

Dougal didn't know the answer, so he said it was all in a good cause and perhaps one day they would make enough money from the tourists here to be able to afford to install central heating; he also wondered aloud how one became a verger, for it was not the sort of career they advertised in job centres and employment agencies, and presumably one had to be trained up to it from an early age, like a steel welder or a butler.

Amanda, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth out of habit rather than genuine disapproval, wandered in to the south aisle and looked at a marble bishop reclining uncomfortably on a slab. Dougal joined her, and they set off on a leisurely stroll round the cathedral.

The church oppressed him, which was curious since he usually enjoyed churches, older ones especially. He realized that the thought of meeting Mrs Munns (assuming she hadn't gone away for the weekend and had the time and inclination to see them) was part of the reason: it was difficult to concentrate on his surroundings while various conversational ploys were revolving round his mind. Beneath the present lay unknown layers of the future; Dougal admitted to himself that there was nothing very unusual in this – but then, since he had found Gumper, he had the feeling that even the present was rushing away from his control, so God alone knew what the future was going to do. And the way information had begun to fall together last night had been disturbing in itself, as if everyone and everything were pieces in a game which an anonymous mastermind was manoeuvring towards an equally unknown end.

They walked past more bishops along the south aisle to the south transept.

The interlaced Norman arcade on the south wall was very fine, Dougal told himself, quoting Vernon-Jones on the subject. But it was no use. He couldn't make himself like this building. It felt alive to him, in a slow, bleak fashion – like a gigantic stone amoeba gradually changing its shape over the centuries.

Amanda took a photograph of the arcade. (‘Might as well get some use from this bloody permit.') She took Dougal's hand and discovered it was cold. Immediately she hustled him over to a blackened stove at the bottom of the south choir aisle. It was shaped like an old-fashioned birdcage and surmounted with a mitre designed for a dwarf with a strong neck.

Her action, rather than the stove, warmed him. Dougal winked at a seventeenth-century dean nearby, whose effigy was made insignificant by the rest of the articles which cluttered his monument (three sorrowing hounds, two headless wives, a series of diminishing children, his heraldic achievement, a skull and an ornate prie-dieu).

When Dougal was slightly warmer, they strolled through the ambulatory round the east end of the cathedral. The tombs here were older; it must have been a case of first-come-first-served, Dougal thought. In St Tumwulf's chapel, nothing was left of the medieval magnificence of the shrine. The site of the saint's grave was marked with a black slab. Vernon-Jones had quoted a local legend which claimed that the last of the monks had preempted the commissioners of Henry VIII and removed the holy skeleton, bricking it up, together with some of the shrine's portable wealth, in a corner of the abbey until the True Faith returned. Unfortunately, so it was said, by the time Mary ascended the throne, those in the secret were either dead or abroad.

At the east end itself was the Lady Chapel, flanked by two chantries. Dougal and Amanda hurried past, because the Church Dormant was seated near the altar rails staring at the roof – a plain, wooden construction of the last century. It was difficult to tell whether the vacuity of his gaze was due to the intense inward concentration, which Dougal gathered was essential for communing with God, or to senility. But the last thing he wanted was that the gaze should slide down from the ceiling and entrap them into conversation.

They maintained a brisk pace until they reached the north transept, where a side chapel had been converted into an enclave of ecclesiastical commerce. The verger looked at them hard as they went in, and Amanda whispered that the authorities should buy him one of those electronic devices they have at airports; the man was obviously yearning to screen all visitors and relieve them of their submachine guns and high explosives.

Amanda bought a postcard of the kneeling dean, while Dougal looked rather despairingly at the array of tea towels, ashtrays and bookmarks which commanded grossly inflated prices owing to their status as souvenirs. He caught Amanda's arm as they left the shop and suggested that they go to see Mrs Munns right away.

She agreed at once – not so much because she was tired of the cathedral, but because walking up the nave was a large man with his shoulders thrust forwards: Michael Aloysius Lee.

Dougal and Amanda retreated through a small door in the northwest corner of the transept. There was no reason why they shouldn't meet Lee, of course – arguably he wouldn't even recognize them as fellow guests, though Dougal had noticed that people tended to remember Amanda. It was rather that his presence in the cathedral made the outside world seem far more attractive. He was surprised that Amanda shared his feelings.

They crossed the green which lay between the church and the backs of the shops which ran parallel to it, and passed through the Boneyard Gate into the High Street. Saturday shoppers were out in their hundreds by now, despite the weather. The narrow pavements were jammed with shopping baskets, pushchairs and prams, controlled with a ruthless efficiency which would have made mincemeat of the tourists in Oxford Street.

‘We go right, don't we?' Amanda had to raise her voice to be heard over the squawling of a passing infant; its pushchair glided over Dougal's foot.

Dougal nodded and led the way up the pavement. They went in single file – it would have been madness to walk two abreast without special training.

After a hundred arduous yards, they came to the Sacristan's Gate, an elegant fifteenth-century entrance which would not have disgraced a college at Oxford or Cambridge. Beyond it, facing the marketplace, was a row of stone-faced cottages, a terrace which had been constructed within the shell of a long monastic building. Each cottage was divided from its neighbour by a substantial buttress which projected out into the pavement. The windows were small and mullioned and Dougal said that the overall effect reminded him of Disneyland, while Amanda replied that he'd never been there, had he?

‘Which is the witch's front door?' enquired Dougal. Now that they were doing something other than killing time, he felt more cheerful.

‘The one with the green curtains. Mrs Livabed was right – it is number eight.'

The buttresses created little oases: the shoppers surged past only inches away, but in their stone shelter there was relative peace. The front door of number eight reinforced the impression of an island of ordered tranquillity: it was painted a soothing olive green and the letter flap and knocker had that soft sheen which brass only acquires after years of regular polishing.

Dougal rang the bell. As they waited, a poodle relieved himself against the buttress on the left, before scurrying importantly away. On the other side of the road was a little marketplace, filled with cars rather than stalls. Dougal heard the unearthly wail of an untuned violin from that direction, and eventually tracked the sound down to a small tramp with wispy grey hair, looking as perky as a sparrow in a larger bird's cast-off feathers, scraping with the aplomb of a maestro. He had a soft spot for buskers, and promised himself that he would contribute something after they had seen Mrs Munns.
If
they saw Mrs Munns. He rang the bell again.

Just as they were about to go, the letter flap was drawn up from within – an uncanny sight, as if a pump handle was rising and falling of its own volition. A voice at a level between their knees and waists said firmly, ‘Go away.' As an afterthought, it added, ‘Please,' with a slight question mark trailing after the word.