Facing the Tank (13 page)

Far too full of his landlady’s coffee and thoughts of her daughter to think of sleeping yet, Evan took the spare latch key Mrs Merluza had insisted he borrow, and set out for a moonlit walk. He had hoped to see the outside of the Cathedral under floodlights but had forgotten that the Close was locked at ten-thirty. Instead he sought to get as near as he could by turning left out of the front door then swinging right towards the Cathedral along Dimity Street. He was catching his first glimpses of the west end when he was distracted first by voices and then by a sighting of what had to be Barrowcester’s token black. After the racial assortment of Notting Hill and, to a more specialized extent, the British Library, he had been disappointed and faintly disturbed by Barrowcester’s marked lack of anyone who was not Anglo-Saxon, let alone Third World. There were tourists, of course, but foreign residents seemed to be limited to the families who ran the city’s Italian, Chinese and Indian restaurants. Even Le Tarte Tartin was owned, according to his food guide, by one Priscilla Fox and while pretty, its waitresses were far from French.

Light was pouring through an open front door. Someone was evidently leaving a dinner party. A couple emerged on to the doorstep. Evan could not see the faces but from their voices they were roughly his age. The woman hugged a willowy young man, whose face caught the light, while her partner patted him on the back. The youth then clambered into an open-topped car and called out,

‘Gloire?’

in the loudest voice Evan had heard since his arrival. While the woman was giggling and telling the youth that he’d wake the neighbours, Evan lingered in the shadows to see who this Gloire was.

‘Coming,’ called a bright American voice, and he thought he had the answer.

‘She’s re-doing her hair,’ said the man.

‘Oh darling, she’s so
nice!
’ enthused the woman to the youth.

The nubile, unexpectedly black subject of this muttered praise then sailed from the house, swooped with a low murmur on the woman, lingeringly hugged the man, then climbed over the door on the passenger side of the car. There was a roar of high-performance engine, a shout of

‘See you Saturday!’

and a waving departure. The couple seemed to sag when left alone. As they returned inside. Evan hurried forward. Their house was extremely large – nearly thrice the width of Chez Merluza – and what little he could make out seemed to be Queen Anne. The front door had a prosperous look to it. Standing still to admire the fanlight, he distinctly heard the woman say,

‘I can’t bear it. I just
cannot
bear it.’

Intrigued by these bare bones of crisis, he lingered to admire the view of the floodlit Cathedral. Then headed back the way he had come, past the top of Tracer Lane, then down Scholar Street to examine Tatham’s by moonlight. He had heard about the school from his agent Jeremy over black buttered skate at Manzi’s. It had turned out that Jeremy went there and not to Eton as so many people supposed.

‘It should have been abolished long ago,’ he declared, trying the Pouilly Fuissé and accepting it after a moue of discerning resignation. ‘It’s only survived by taking in a bunch of embryo bluestockings and a few thick little rich girls and by letting TV crews inside. The academic record is high but so’s the nervous breakdown rate. It used … Oh. Thanks.’ He paused while their fish arrived. ‘It used to be a suspiciously wealthy convent before the Great Divorcer kicked out the sisters and gave it, library, buildings, lock, stock and mead barrel to an upstart pet cleric of his called Tatham. The idea was to churn out a regular supply of Protestant, king-adoring bishops-to-be. Good-looking turbot. How’s your skate?’

Madeleine who, Evan gathered, had been Tatham’s first female scholar, had told him that the main gates to the old part of the school stayed unlocked until midnight so as to let supervising
gods
out to their families. She said that the place was run like a dictatorial university; with strict regulations but an unusual degree of self-rule and solitary study periods for the pupils. The archway where Evan now arrived would not have looked out of place in Oxford or Cambridge. The porter’s lodge was lit but showed no other signs of life, so Evan slipped through the shadows into the chapel quadrangle.

There was a huge moon, now obscured by the gate tower, and the sky was riddled with stars, which made a crenellated silhouette of the four sides. A few windows were still lit, including those to one end of the chapel where someone was quietly practising the organ. There was the occasional shout or rush of stout shoes on old floorboard, but he saw no one. He knew that if he walked along the chapel wall he would find a way through to the cloisters spoken of by Petra Dixon that morning. He walked gingerly across the cobbles and, as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, saw a black, arch-shaped hole. This led to a passage which duly spilled into a quadrangular colonnade surrounding a tiny chantry. Never frightened by the dark so long as he was alone in it, he began to wander round, piecing out his impression of damp, intricate stonework with remembered photographs and engravings.

Then he got a Bad Feeling. Evan’s Washington Aunt Ciboulette used to get Bad Feelings. She said she would walk into a stranger’s house sometimes and suddenly feel as if a live catfish had been slipped down the back of her dress.

‘And I’d get my Bad Feeling,’ she’d say, ‘And I’d just
know!
’

Ciboulette had never said what she knew exactly, but his mother had later explained that it must have been something unfitted to tender ears, involving bigamy, lovers in too much riding gear or hatchets buried in the chicken run. Unlike his aunt, Evan hadn’t got religion, but he was sensitive to religious atmospheres and suddenly the cloisters did not feel altogether Christian. Besides, it would soon be midnight and he had no wish to spend his night locked in with a crowd of egg-head children when he could be getting his beauty sleep for breakfast with Madeleine.

He was starting rather more quickly out of the cloisters than he had wandered in, therefore, when he saw something move. Because of the obtuse angle of the moon and the few lights from quadrangle buildings, his side of the cloisters was in total darkness. As he turned, something had jumped from within an arch on to the ground about six feet away. He just saw whatever it was slide out of silhouette and he could hear shallow breathing. He had felt countless cigarette butts underfoot so, his shock past, he guessed that this was some boy out for a quick Winston before bedtime.

‘It’s OK. I’m an addict too, friend,’ he said but whoever it was belted like a shocked hare back through the arch and around the other side of the chantry.

Judging from the patter on the stone, he was in bare feet.

Walking briskly out through the passage by the chapel, Evan half slipped on something, only saving himself from a fall by a scrabbling grasp on the uneven wall to his left. Spine unpleasantly jarred, he rubbed his grazed palms on his jacket and cursed. He scraped whatever it was off his shoe and on to the side of the chapel step, supposing the worst. Then he sniffed an unexpected smell of riverbank and stagnant pool.

Returned to the reassuring, electrified gas lamps of Scholar Street, Evan found himself quite seriously jumpy so decided to raid Mrs Merluza’s kitchen for cooking brandy to calm his nerves for bed.

Dressed in a new pastel cotton from Daniella’s, because it was the first day of summer, Mercy Merluza left the kitchen and walked through the hall to the stairs. She frowned at the letter box because her
Daily Telegraph
was inexplicably late, then went upstairs and tapped on her daughter’s door.

‘
Cariño
?’

‘Mmh?’

‘I’m just off to have coffee with Mrs Chattock now at the Palace. The Professor doesn’t seem to have got up yet. Dawn doesn’t come today and I don’t want to be late so I wondered …’

Madeleine half opened her door, pushing back her unbrushed hair and yawning.

‘… if I’d make breakfast for him,’ she finished.

‘Would you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Bless you.’ Disliking to see Madeleine undressed, Mercy turned to go. Remorse tweaked her into pausing on the top of the stairs. ‘You are all right,
cariño
, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, Mum. I’m fine.’

Madeleine shut the door.

‘Good,’ sighed her mother and walked down to the front door.

Just as Mercy had suspected, Madeleine had come home because she was in a certain sort of fix. She had started to tell Mercy about an affair she had just finished, then broke down and admitted that she was pregnant and could not decide what to do. Having been through no less than three abortions, Mercy found herself completely unshocked and capable of being extremely sympathetic. She said she knew of a good clinic who would be able to deal with it, as the Stepfords’ poor girl had been sent there last year after a problematical French exchange. Madeleine had refused to give her mother the man’s name or to explain why he was being so unhelpful. The atmosphere was just starting to feel tense when Professor Kirby had joined them for supper and they were obliged to drop the topic. Mercy hoped that her daughter would not do anything hot-headed such as confide in her lodger. These things left fewest traces when kept under wraps.

As she turned from shutting the front door, she saw that Miss Dyce-Hamilton, who used to be at Tatham’s with Madeleine, was approaching on her bicycle. When she was close enough, Mercy gave a little wave she reserved for timid or unmarried women.

‘Hello,’ she said.

Rather than stop to chat as she normally did, however, Miss Dyce-Hamilton fairly shouted,

‘Lovely morning, isn’t it? Really lovely!’ and shot on.

The look which accompanied this greeting had been so frantic that Mercy glanced at her reflection in the post office window. Her dress was a perfectly innocuous dusky blue, the flowers extremely small, the sleeves long and the hem below the knee. Her hair was fine as ever, her lipstick straight, her shoes tinted the most unpredatory of charcoal greys. Perhaps Miss Dyce-Hamilton had been late for school; they did say she was apt to be scatter-brained.

Mercy continued on her way, enjoying the brilliant blue of the sky and the shrill chatter of the birds in the gardens that backed on to Scholar Walk. A diminished crocodile of eight choristers emerged from the garden gate of the choir school. They raised their caps in unison and the leader said,

‘Good morning, Miss.’

Mercy beamed in reply and would have felt better had she not seen Marge Delaney-Siedentrop spring, to the best of a stout woman’s ability, through the front door of number thirty-two without so much as a smile. Of all people, Marge had nothing to feel guilty for, and she could not be avoiding Mercy for they had spoken at length in the queue at Hart’s yesterday. It was Marge’s time of life, Mercy decided; that and her envy of Mercy’s friendship with Deirdre Chattock.

Mercy liked to think that this friendship sprang from the fact that both she and Deirdre were wild briar roses ill at ease in Barrowcester’s confining borders. When she had arrived, a widow with a foreign surname, a growing girl and the musk of Bayswater on her person, the town had dismayed her. For the first few weeks she was preoccupied with putting her new house in order and with settling Madeleine into Tatham’s. Then she grew nervous. She was very much alone, since Madeleine was a scholar and scholars had to board. This was nothing new. She had been almost as alone in London, and prepared to live in Barrowcester in the state of semi-anonymity she had learned to enjoy in the capital. This however proved extremely hard to do in her new surroundings for she was now surrounded by people who knew not only each other, but each other’s friends and relations. Barrowers had links. Mercy heard their links jingle into place as they accosted one another in shops or introduced themselves to near strangers climbing out of cars or sweeping front paths.

‘Sorry. You probably don’t know me but I’m Simon Curlicue and our sisters do begging-box duty together on Tuesdays.’

‘Excuse me, but aren’t you Mrs Typewriter Hatpin? Yes? What fun! Our littlest are in the same form at Tatham’s. Will’s enjoying it
so
much.’

Mercy heard them rejoice in their links and felt aware, for the first time in her existence, that she was rootless and, save for Madeleine, denuded of family; a bald log in a buzzing April orchard. She could feel her neighbours, who had barely introduced themselves, sizing her up, looking for links and finding none. Whereas in Bayswater she had been quite content to sit at her sewing machine, watching Australian soap operas in her dressing gown all day while Madeleine was out at school, here she felt guilty for doing so. No one in Barrowcester seemed to watch television unless there was a ‘classic’ adaptation of Austen, Mrs Gaskell or E.F. Benson. Then they would pull their sets from under wraps and throw ‘telly teas’, marvelling at the improved standard of television drama since they last watched any and lamenting that their tastes were so old-fashioned as to prevent them from watching more often.

Mercy started to cast her eyes about, to size up her neighbours in return, and she began to notice patterns in their lives. A clutch of them was regularly to be seen walking to the Close at 7.45 in the morning and a far larger group did so, more obviously, on Sunday mornings at 7.45, 10.15 and 11.20. Most intriguing off all, however, were the people that vanished off the face of the hill between 4.45 and 6.00 every day of the week.

Mercy determined to break in on the latter’s secret: they displayed an appealing homogeneity lacking in the Sunday group. One Thursday, therefore, she pulled on an uncharacteristic two-piece she had just bought in Daniella’s and loitered outside the Close at ten to five. Within five minutes the pavement was dotted with groups of two and four and she could follow the crowd unobserved. They wandered, link-swopping, to the Cathedral, with her in their midst. The first thing she learned was that they used a special entrance. She had been to no services since her arrival in Barrowcester, what little religion ran in her veins being a condensed Roman Catholicism, but she had felt obliged to go with Madeleine on a guided tour of the Cathedral on their first weekend and had returned once on her own. On each occasion she had entered by the huge open door at the west end, where she had been accosted by a woman who lived a few houses away and who was standing in a dark green gown by a giant Perspex moneybox. The woman bade Mercy a hearty welcome without a flicker of recognition then discreetly breathed that the Cathedral needed a fair donation from every visitor if it was to remain standing. As she followed the five o’clock crowd on this Thursday evening, they had led her through a sort of tunnel by the south transept.

‘I didn’t know we could get in this way,’ she admitted to a benign, stork-like man on her right.

‘Oh?’ he said. ‘It’s the Glurry. It’s really the tradesmen’s entrance for the choir and Chapter but it’s also handy for those of us in the know as it saves a long walk up a cold nave. They can only afford to heat the quire. After you,’ he added and held open a tiny door for her.

‘Thank you,’ she said with feeling as they walked through a sort of cubby hole into the south transept and on to the quire. As they walked and as Mercy realized that he was quite content to lead a novice to her initiation, she felt a warm sense of arrival seeping through her being to meet the cold that was rising from the floor.

The form of service had been unfamiliar, but there was far less standing and kneeling than in the rather Filipino Carmelite church she had occasionally attended in Kensington. The singing was delightful, the bearing of the clergy was unanimously distinguished and, most importantly, Mercy had enjoyed being surrounded by Barrowers who no longer stared at her or who, if they did, had a kind of tenderness in their curiosity. The hour flew by and as they were going, blessed, on their way and as Mercy was trying to decide whether to be grown up and eat her supper at the table or to damn the consequences and eat it before the television as she normally did, someone laid a hand on her arm. It was an attractive woman with subtle green eyes.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You don’t know me but I think my husband Clive teaches your daughter Madeleine English. I’m Lydia Hart.’

‘Mercy Merluza. How d’you do.’

‘Clive and I are having a little drinks party tomorrow and wondered if you’d like to come and meet some of your new neighbours. I’m afraid it’s terribly short notice.’

‘Oh. How kind.’

‘Around seven? Mrs Porter and her husband are coming and as they live just two along from you, Jane said they’d drop by to pick you up and show you the way.’

Links jingled in Mercy’s grateful ears.

‘How kind of her,’ she said.

‘Lovely. We’ll see you tomorrow then,’ said Lydia with a broadish smile.

Of course she and Lydia had never been close since, but Mercy would always be grateful for the forging of that first link. At the drinks party she had made several friends and met the owner of The Treasure Trove who had fallen on hard times and was so keen to make a private sale. From one link grew three, from three grew nine and so the process had continued until it slowed down dramatically to an average gain (balanced by a seasonal pruning) of one link every three months. Along the way, Mercy had felt compelled to fashion herself a new past; amnesia about one’s origins was so very suspect and however much Barrowcester prided itself on freedom of outlook, she felt no doubts as to the way her neighbours would look on an ex-cabaret artiste and jewel thief. She began to drop hints about a family and property shattered soon after her marriage by a terrorist attack, adding that her ‘little Madeleine’ had been spared the details and lived in blissful semi-ignorance of the family tragedy.

As for church-going, Mercy could now be found in the Cathedral every Sunday morning and every evening too except for Monday of course, when the choir had their night off and Mercy might be found, dispossessed and shopping.

Deirdre Chattock had arrived in the wake of her son, the Bishop, barely eight months ago. Gavin Tree was unmarried, which was a point in his favour in the eyes of Barrowcester, as opposed to his high political colouring, refusal to entertain on an episcopal scale and request that he be addressed as plain mister, which were not. His mother had been married twice, Gavin being an only child, happy fruit of union number one. Granted, she was untainted by divorce, but there was something about a multiple widow which ill accorded with a society where marriage was a duty performed once in a lifetime and where widowhood was mutely regarded as the will of God and therefore beyond the further attentions of man. Before her first marriage, Deirdre had strutted a handful of hours upon various northern stages. More recently she had led a campaign against alcoholism, of an awkwardly revelatory nature. When it suited her son’s political credibility, which it did most of the time, she could resuscitate an unmistakable Derbyshire accent. Not a woman likely to find a downy nest in the Barrowcester bosom, she was neither a woman to let Barrowcester snobbery ruffle her plumage. She suffered a mild stroke under anaesthetic for a recent operation and found that it had, as she put it delightedly, ‘plugged her into the switchboard of the Spirits’. While she continued to follow her son in orthodox Christian practice, she had instigated a weekly ‘at home’ meditation group. In the absence of any large-scale entertainment on her son’s part, this had proved very popular as a means of regular admission to the Palace.

Mercy had enraged many, however, by bounding into a palace intimacy long before any stroke had opened doors. Deirdre Chattock had come into Boniface Crafts in her very first week and bought herself a cardigan knitted by a local craftswoman. As she looked around Mercy’s shop she had hummed a song to herself. As sometimes happens, the song had penetrated Mercy’s unconscious ear and, after selling Deirdre Chattock the cardigan, she had pottered into her store room to put on the kettle for elevenses and had started to sing the song herself.

‘Falling in love again,’ she sang. ‘Never wanted to …’

‘Pardon me.’

‘Yes?’

It was Mrs Chattock, who had not left the shop but was hovering by the counter. Heads turned: Mrs Chattock was a new arrival and therefore subject to scorching local interest.

‘That song. I’ve had it on my brain all morning but can’t remember beyond the fourth line,’ she said, then sang, ‘Da da da
Dee
dle-dah,
Dee
dle da da
dah. Dee
dle da da
dah
. Tumtee
tum tum
. I know it does that twice but then I get stuck and I’ve been going berserk doing the same bit over and over.’

Glad to be of assistance and seeing a chance of forging a twenty-four-carat link, Mercy had continued in her fruity tenor, beating time with her much-jewelled left hand in a slow waltz rhythm.