Facing the Tank (18 page)

Evan was sitting on the sofa. It was an unpleasantly soft one so his knees were not far from his chin. He was pretending to read Sukie Lark Rosen’s
Towards a New Mythology
although there was scarcely any light on his side of the room. Mrs Merluza was sitting in her armchair to his right. Despite the fact that he was apparently absorbed in a book, she had persisted in wittering on about high society in the Barcelona of her youth. He had observed this to be a nervous tic in her, brought on by silence. There was a pile of little presents, all carefully wrapped. Occasionally she would mutter something to herself, reach out to pick one up, finger it curiously then set it back. Madeleine stood glowering in a cloud of smoke. She had changed into a dark red dress. She only joined the others in order to stub out a cigarette and pick up a fresh one.

‘Can’t I open this tiny one?’ asked her mother, fingering another packet.

‘No,’ Madeleine snapped, swinging back towards the garden window. ‘It’s probably just another packet of fudge.’

‘You used to like fudge,’ came the rejoinder after a pause.

‘Well only in moderation,’ growled Madeleine, ‘and not today.’ Evan turned a page. ‘Besides, they’re my presents, not yours.’

‘It’s very kind of you to sit with us, Professor,’ said Mrs Merluza, seeing that Madeleine had turned her back. ‘I do hope you understand.’

‘No. No. It’s quite all right. A pleasure,’ Evan enthused and flicked back a page to trace the beginning of the sentence amidst which he had suddenly found himself.

There was a brief silence punctuated by the occasional clatter and buzz of the policemen’s walkie-talkie in the street below and by Madeleine’s violent throwing up of the garden window for air. Then the doorbell rang. No one left the room but Madeleine turned to lean against the open window and her mother smoothed out her skirt.

‘I wonder who it’ll be now,’ she said.

The front door was opened and closed, there were footsteps on the stairs and one of the policemen put his head round the sitting room door.

‘A Mr Hart to see you, Mrs Merluza. All right if he comes up?’

‘Has he brought fudge?’ asked Madeleine.

‘Yes, of course, Officer,’ said her mother. ‘Send him up. And thank you.’

The policeman disappeared and after a while a man Evan thought vaguely familiar took his place. He had hairy hands and was dressed like a schoolmaster.

‘Clive, what a lovely surprise,’ said Mrs Merluza, rising to take his hand.

‘Hello,’ the man said and glanced amiably around.

‘You know my daughter Madeleine, of course.’

‘Actually I don’t think we’ve met since she was a young girl in my Shakespeare class.’

‘No. We haven’t.’

‘How do you do?’

‘I won’t answer that.’

‘Oh,’ said Clive and laughed. ‘Sorry.’

‘And this is Professor Kirby, who is staying with us to do some research for a book on Heaven.’

‘Hello. Clive Hart.’

‘How d’you do.’

‘Heaven. How fascinating.’ Evan made deprecating noises and flapped the hand with the book in it. ‘I won’t keep you,’ said Clive. ‘Because I’m sure you’re about to eat but Lydia rang to ask me to drop in on my way home and bring you this.’ He held out a large carrier bag. ‘Sorry it’s not wrapped up properly.’ He glanced at the pile of presents. ‘Gosh. It’s a bit like Christmas, isn’t it?’ he said without thinking.

‘An amaryllis,’ said Mrs Merluza, lifting the plant from its bag. ‘How lovely and how kind of you,’ she continued as its grossly phallic stem bounced against her cheek. ‘And it’s going to be a white one. They’re our favourites. Look,
cariño
.’

‘Lovely,’ murmured Madeleine. ‘Thank you.’

‘Not at all. Just a little nothing, really, but, well, we heard about the fuss in the papers and felt so sorry for you both. People are so insensitive.’ He had perched briefly on the arm of a chair and now rose to go. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Must get back for supper. Bye Madeleine – lovely to see you again. Bye, Professor. Nice meeting you.’

‘Oh must you? I’ll see you out,’ chimed in Mrs M. and followed him out on to the stairs.

‘Why’s he so familiar?’ asked Evan, pushing the door to. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen his face.’

‘Redundant Sixties playwright-turned-househusband and teacher,’ she explained. She had come forward to grab another cigarette, having tossed the last one into the garden. ‘I hate amaryllis,’ she added.

‘They are rather big,’ he agreed.

‘I suspect it may have had an accident by tomorrow.’ She looked up and gave him a tired smile. ‘You should escape now before she comes up again. There aren’t likely to be any more people tonight.’

‘Right. I think I may. Are you sure …?’

‘Yes. I’ll be fine. I think I’ll go to bed in a sec to have some peace. Have you got something for supper?’

‘Fish fingers and butterscotch Angel’s Delight.’

‘Lucky you.’ She waited until he was at the door then added, ‘Thanks, Evan.’

He glanced back but she was touching her cigarette end on the amaryllis bud and failed to see him. Mrs Merluza was doing something in the kitchen so he hurried into the granny flat and shut the door undetected. He added a pint of milk to the Angel’s Delight mix and whipped it up with an egg whisk, working himself into a kind of silent fury as he did so. He set it to thicken in the miniature fridge then arranged the fish fingers in rows in the grill pan. Leaving them to cook, he tugged the curtain across, having realized that he was brightly visible to any journalists who had not yet given up and headed to the Tracer’s Arms in search of Old Stoat and local gossip. Then he strode through to the bedroom, causing the sliding doors to rattle as he went. He sat at the table, snatched off the rubber band from his journal and scrawled.

‘Why a Cardinal? Cardinals are for weird dames in Webster. I doubt whether even Sukie Lark Rosen would lay a Cardinal. I have to admit, though, that it shows a certain flair. It also confirms my suspicions about her being the wickedest girl in class. Could I keep up? The only time I tried to get kinky for Miriam’s sake, I got sick on pineapple chunks and sprained a wrist.’

After the morning’s brush with the journalists, he had spent the day feeling like the Invisible Man. It had felt as though his involvement in the talk of the town should show, and it didn’t. Not until he came home, that was. To sidestep the besiegers at the front door, he had approached the house from the back, through the passage from Scholar Walk. Finding that the garden gate had been locked, he had started to climb the wall only to be pulled back by a policeman. At Evan’s polite insistence, Mrs Merluza’s good word had been sent for and he was released, but not before the pressmen had photographed him as a suspect for Scarlet Woman’s Beau No. 2.

After what seemed to be a heavily censored tour with the
Lord
, work at Tatham’s library had gone well, although Perkin Philby, the fluting, owlish man in charge there, had not been terribly welcoming. He put an old typewriter at Evan’s disposal on the bizarre condition that he only use it when it was obvious that no one was ‘really trying to read’. Evan suspected that he disliked Americans, so disliked him back.

Compared to the Cathedral’s collection, Tatham’s library had no views, being housed in a converted stable block and laundry with only a few high windows, and those obscured by rasping shrubs. The most precious manuscripts, which Evan was consulting in the afternoon, were housed in high-security, atmospherically controlled stacks with no windows whatever. Glad of an escape route from thoughts of Madeleine, he had ploughed on with far more perseverance than he had mustered on his first day in Petra Dixon’s company, and kept rigidly to relevant material. Every half hour, however, nature had called him out to smoke a Winston as usual. Under bald sunshine the nearby quadrangle had proved far wider than it had felt by moonlight. A few youths and, here and there, a girl had hauled battle-worn sofas and armchairs on to the cobbles and basked as they read. Back in the library he could hear the occasional complaining of castors as this furniture was tugged around to follow the sun. A blind boy was listening to a tiny one’s recitation of some unfamiliar language, giving languid prompts when his flow dried up. There seemed to be an unusual lack of schooltime rush. No handbells rang and no one seemed to be in a hurry for classes. He assumed that this was some scholastic oasis and that the main business of teaching went on elsewhere. He was startled to see Madeleine glaring at him from the front page of
The Sun
as one small boy sat unfurling it as a break from Homer. He bought one of the last copies in a newsagents on his way to the Tracer’s Arms for lunch and saw it much bandied about by his drinking companions. As he waited to place his orders the barman even stuck up the offending front page on the mirror between the bottles.

‘I love you when you’re angry,’ he jeered at it, blowing a kiss, and everyone had laughed.

After eating his burnt fish fingers and while waiting for the Angel’s Delight to set a little more, Evan had returned to his desk. He had covered four pages of his diary yet if he were to write to even a distant colleague in his present state, he could still be sure of revealing too much. Despite his denial he had spied on her that morning. He had hidden in the kitchenette so as to be sure of having breakfast with her and not her mother. He had seen her rush downstairs to snatch the newspaper. Her dressing gown had flown out as she turned to run up again. Her thighs were voluptuous rather than athletic, he knew this now. He also knew their shade of pink and the unexpected delight of her tiny feet. It had taken two years for him to persuade Miriam to let him kiss her feet with any seriousness. She had claimed that she was ticklish but when she finally deigned to let him suck at them on a deserted beach one day he had found that she had hard heels and nasty horny bits on the undersides of her toes where her preposterous shoes had squashed and rubbed them. Evan could tell that Madeleine’s feet would be soft; not only could one see at a glance that she gave them nothing to do, but she was plainly more an earth child than a stiletto wearer. Forced into high heels, she would be sure to teeter and say ‘bugger’ a lot. Yes indeed, she was fine when she was angry. He might even say that anger was her element, had he not been struck this morning by her silence. After Mrs Merluza had left, he had crept up to sit on the stairs and listen while Madeleine had her bath. She was a big girl who bumped into things and cast a shadow, but her bathing had been terrifyingly silent. She had not hummed or sighed, talked to herself or made any of the relaxed, splashy noises of most people’s bathtimes. At least she was a heavy smoker; that made her human. Evan met the stare of his reflection in the dark garden windows and wondered whether she had made a lot of noise in bed with the Cardinal. He smiled at his imaginings then, disgusted with himself, reached for Sukie Lark Rosen and sobriety.

It was Wednesday morning and the alarm clock was turning circles on the floor like some poisoned fly. Groaning, Gavin Tree shoved aside the bedding which had twisted itself around him, pulled on his dressing gown and slippers and shuffled to the barn-like episcopal bathroom. He had always groaned on waking. The sound bore no relation to his state of mind but was as purely physiological as a baby’s first cry. As he shaved, brushed his thick white hair, gargled with Listerine, replaced his plate and shuffled to his dressing room, the groans gradually modulated to hums and progressed, via snatches of half-remembered melody, to a full-blown pom-pomming rendition of something (usually by Handel or Stanford) as he walked down to his mother’s apartment to wake her.

Mrs Chattock had been awake on most mornings, long before his knock on her sitting room door (the waft of scented bathroom steam betrayed her) but on retiring, one always asked the other when she wished to rise and made a promise to wake her. This was part of the family closeness they had confected since her retirement into her son’s pious household from the knocks of an uncaring world.

Gavin liked the effect that his mother and her interior designer friend had created in what used to be a guest flat. The Palace was a minor architectural delight, but less than a joy to inhabit. Successive generations of bishops had worn away any quirks that might serve to make such a building human and left only tide marks of pomp, and memorial encrustations. There were three principle rooms which spanned one side of the building on the ground floor. Neither Gavin, nor his mother, nor his secretary were musically able so the piano which should have been the feature of the music room was draped in a silk shawl and shunted into one corner as a support for photographs and a vase of ever-changing flowers. The dining room was far too large to make dining
à deux
anything but sinister, so all but rare official meals were taken in the backstairs fug of the kitchen. The third main room was the library. The original episcopal collection had long been at the convent for rebinding and the making of copies when the Dissolution arrived. The nuns had locked the books in the cellars for protection but these treasures were then purloined, in a masterly sleight of hand that no one had since dared undo, by Thomas Tatham when he turned the convent into his famous school. The present Palace library contained therefore little beyond an
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, a vast dictionary of Catholic thought (‘for mugging up on the Enemy’, Mrs Chattock said), bound copies of all editions of
The Church Times, The Barrowcester Chronicle
and minutes of meetings of the General Synod and Lambeth Council. These were fleshed out by a generous and supremely unapproachable collection of ecclesiastical memoirs and biographies (few in one volume) donated by Bishop Herbert Thrush in 1939. The furniture here was slightly more comfortable than that of the music room, there was oak panelling and the blacks and navy blues of the spines were most soothing, so the room made a good setting for the obligatory Christmas punch and pies party. The sprinkling of rugs and the anti-draught sausages by the doors also suited the bodily needs of Mrs Chattock’s meditation group. The plasterwork on the ceilings of these great ground-floor spaces was exquisite, especially in early morning when, with the connecting doors thrown open, a whole side of the house was bathed in cool light. However these salons were impossible to heat well and, to fit them for the reception of large numbers, they had acquired a hardwearing industrial carpet and an array of strong, charmless furniture.

While his mother styled herself a homely snug in her flat, whence she descended only for meals, her groups and to walk in the garden, Gavin retreated from the assessing stare of the portraits downstairs into frequent spells in his study. This small, low-ceilinged room was placed off a halfway landing over the front door and so enjoyed a fine view along the plane tree avenue of the drive, and across to Tatham’s chapel tower. Gavin had there the desk he had bought off his Oxford landlady and the ragged Turkey carpet which had lain beneath it in every lodging since. Apart from a forbidding copy of
Thring’s Uppingham Sermons
that had mysteriously strayed thither from the library and which he had never had the courage to return, he was surrounded by his own books. Bound editions of
The New Statesman
and
New Society
shared a bookcase with his pride and joy; complete first edition sets of Simenon and Dorothy Sayers. On a shelf out of reach in a less important corner, lay the twelve free copies of
Less by More
sent him by his publishers and which he had always lacked the nonchalant poise to give away to friends.

Gavin looked into his study now after ‘waking’ his mother. He drew the curtains. The Dean had been here for an urgent council last night concerning the ever-swelling publicity for the miracle and how he and the Chapter could best turn this into profits for the cathedral appeal. The Dean chain-smoked on a pipe and the air was rancid with its stale fumes. Gavin threw open both windows and, pom-pomming Britten’s
Jubilate
– a new departure, this, inspired by yet another morning of brilliant sunshine – he continued his descent to the kitchen.

Normally a peaceful haven at that time of day, the kitchen had already been invaded by Mrs Jackson. Dispense though he might with the handful of gardeners, maids and cleaners engaged by his higher-living predecessors, it seemed that Gavin had to accept Mrs Jackson the housekeeper and Mr Jakewith the gardener as built-in. Even Bishops with wives were not trusted by the powers that were, it seemed, to keep house, garden and table in good order. Having no female companionship but that of a twice-widowed mother, Gavin was in no position to do anything but waive his principles, it seemed. Mrs Jackson and Mr Jakewith were siblings, cast in the same dourly industrious mould. Like her drear cuisine, Mrs Jackson, who now had one arm up to the elbow in a chicken, was especially lacking in the leaven of joy. Of all his flock, she was possibly the one to whom addressing one’s bishop as plain Mr Tree came easiest.

‘Good morning, Mrs Jackson. What a pleasant surprise.’

‘Morning, Mr Tree. Your breakfast’s in the dining room.’

‘Really?’

‘No room for you both to have it in here. I’ve got to get ready for that black priest as is coming to lunch.’

‘Goodness! Is that today? I believe you’re right. Well, thank you, Mrs Jackson.’ He turned to go.

‘Our Judith’s helping out with a spot of cleaning, so don’t mind her.’

‘How nice,’ Gavin said. ‘No. I won’t.’

He had indeed forgotten that Nigel Okereke, Bishop of Bantawa, an African diocese adopted by Gavin on Barrowcester’s behalf, was coming to lunch. Leaving Mrs Jackson to brutalize the chicken, he walked back to the hall and crossed to the dining room. The pom-pomming had regressed to the less confident, fragmentary stage. Judith Jackson, an anaemic teenager as shy as her mother was sullen, scampered, duster in hand, through the doors to the library as he entered. A rack of toast and a coffee pot enfurled in an insulating towel waited at one end of the table, along with two meagre glasses of orange juice and the mail. Already sustained by tea and biscuits, Mrs Chattock would not come down for another fifteen minutes, thus to uphold the charade that her son had woken her. Gavin took a seat and, sipping some juice, picked crestfallen through his letters. He took out the envelopes addressed by hand and opened the unfamiliar one first.

‘St Dunstan’s Holt

Amberwoods

Clough

Nr. Barrowcester,’ he read,

Dear Bishop

I have no hesitation in supplying my name and address since I am quite unabashed of the strength of my feelings. Your accession to the diocese of Barrowcester, indeed your original entry to the church of Christ, our General and Blessed Sacrifice, and of Elizabeth, our Queen was a blight on our land. You are a curse to the spiritual welfare of many helpless parishioners.

My wife and I have no doubt that you are an emissary of our lionlike enemy the Devil. We are not deceived by the holy robes you wear, knowing you to have obtained them through your evil powers and the deceits of which your chief is father. Your presence in our midst is a lie and a desecration and we abhor the manner in which you seek to infect clean minds with your abominable false doctrines. The Devil has many names with which to lead us astray and communism is one of them.

When you appear on
Faith Forum
later this week we shall foregather with ten other True Christians – thus echoing the number of the blessed disciples of Our Lord Jesus Christ (may his name burn your devilish eyes!!) and we shall conduct a rite of exorcism to rid the diocese of your presence. We pray daily for divine intervention in this matter and know we are not the only ones.

May the pains of Hell be multiplied on your swift return to from whence you came.

I remain in Christ,

Kenneth Kirk (Church Warden)

p.s. We know the so-called miracle was a hellish invention to assist the re-entry of moneychangers into the Temple. The sweet-seeming canary is a well-known posture of Him Whose Name Is Legion.

Gavin pushed the letter over to his mother’s plate. Messages of its kind came daily and it amused her to read them. She would perch her reading glasses on her nose, the better to glance up and watch his reactions and, cigarette in hand, she would recite them. Her mimicry of suitable voices was extremely funny. Gavin tried not to be intimidated by his hate mail – it was compensated for by a few letters of support – but it was only human to suspect that his mother’s mockery was a temptation to fate. On second thoughts, he took the letter back and thrust it into his jacket pocket.

He heard a familiar smoker’s cough and footsteps coming from the hall and poured a cup of coffee for his mother as she came in.

‘Morning,’ he called out over the tail-end of her bout of coughing. She waved a handkerchief in reply, calmed her raging lungs then came to take her seat before him.

‘Very grand this morning, aren’t we?’

‘Mrs Jakewith needs the kitchen to herself so she can do something to a chicken for Nigel Okereke’s lunch.’

‘Does she, indeed?’ She sipped at her coffee and made a face as it scalded her tongue. ‘Any letters?’

‘Nothing much.’ He waited for her to refuse toast then took a piece himself and buttered it. She looked appalling this morning; decades older than her sixty-whatever. She had tried to mask her hangdog pallor with rash dabs of blusher. It looked as though her ancient surface had begun to rust. ‘Bad night?’ he ventured.

‘Christ,’ she swore softly and spooned another sugar into her cup.

‘Tell me,’ he told her. She reached for a piece of toast after all, but only so as to have something to tear up on her plate.

‘I …’

‘What?’

She looked across at him suddenly. He had never seen such fear in her eyes.

‘I know you’ll think me a stupid old bat,’ she went on cautiously, her own accent surfacing, ‘but … Petal, do you believe in werewolves?’

‘Werewolves? Just misinterpretation of rabies symptoms, weren’t they? Hydrophobia; fear of water, walking on all fours, bellowing like a dog.’

‘Not werewolves, then, but a kind of possession?’

‘That’s more serious.’ She was beginning to shake. ‘Don’t have another stroke,’ he prayed. ‘Don’t let her break down on me. Not now.’

‘Possession by some kind of beast. Worse than possession; more a sort of opening out – as if there was this ravening beast inside you and it only needed the right words to make it come to the surface and make you sort of lose control.’ Her hands shook with sudden violence. One knocked her coffee cup over in its saucer, sending a shock of black across the white linen. Her other hand swept and scrabbled on her plate, scattering torn chunks of toast. Gavin jumped up, helpless, uncertain whether to run to her or run for help. With a visible effort she tugged her hands to her breast, against each other. They quivered still, but their violence was contained. She looked up at him and he knew she saw his fear. ‘Gavin.’ She had not called him by his name in years; he was always ‘Petal’ to her, or ‘Poppet’ or the pleasantly Elizabethan ‘Chuck’. ‘Gavin, I had a dream,’ she said. The hands broke loose again and fluttered under her astonished gaze. For a moment it looked as though she might applaud.

Gavin raced round the ridiculous expanse of the table, feet sliding on the polished wooden floor. He seized her hands and crouched before her. She smiled down at him and her hands, calm now having passed their wildness into him, rose and pressed gently against his cheeks. He smelt gin on her early morning breath. The door behind her opened and Mrs Jakewith’s absurd daughter stepped in and paused with a barely audible ‘Oh’.

‘Poor Gavin,’ his mother whispered. ‘You’re so bloody
pure!
’