Facing the Tank (6 page)

With the saint safely stowed, the massive task was to begin of dismantling the east end, stone by historied stone, so that the cavity beneath it could be dealt with. William Walker, a fearless diver, had spent months and at last his health, swimming through mud to shore up the sinking mass of Winchester Cathedral earlier in the century, so it was assumed that the brave workers of Glasgow would not be averse to clambering in Barrowcester’s primeval potholes to erect similar supports. The whole secure, the east end would be rebuilt. It had occurred to Gavin to suggest that the rain-smoothed gargoyles and carvings be replaced with stone caricatures of modern figures so as to continue the medieval tradition. It was a suggestion which he thought could now wait a little.

He entered the Patron’s chapel. The winch that was arranged over the tomb, its chains cunningly attached to the corners and sides of the sarcophagus lid, was entwined with Mrs Delaney-Siedentrop, or at least her watchful flowers. He walked over, not knowing their names, and took a sniff to show he was not afraid. They were white and smelled of honey and dust. He touched the pulley chain and made it and its scented burden swing with a sound like distant mice.

Temptation overcame him. It would be another half hour before the first verger came to open up shop. He pulled hard on the chain, grinding flowers as he did so. The pulley and gears ground into action and the lid shifted. He pulled more, harder and faster until it was five inches clear of the tomb. He was getting hot. Leaving the lid to swing, he unfastened his anorak, draped it over a nearby chair and returned to pulling the chain. The sound echoed but he had gone too far to stop. He could plead religious fervour or divine prompting. He could say he had had a dream – vergers loved to talk about dreams. As he pulled he realized that more than anything he needed to see for himself that Saint Boniface or at least a body’s remains lay within. On top of Saturday’s sermon, a vanished patron would be too disastrous. There was no smell. He had expected a smell or at the very least a cloud of ancient dust. Of course; in order to secure the chain, the workmen had already prised the lid clear. There was to be no mystery, no unveiling.

Panting, still curious despite his realization that he was not the first to do so, Gavin crouched to peer inside. While no miraculous preservation of the corpse had occurred, as might have been the case nearer the dread lair of the Beast of Rome, the patronal skeleton was remarkably well kept and had not crumbled to dust. The skull was rolled to one side as in sleep and the hands were unusually draped across the pelvis. No. The hands were grasped in prayer over the ribs so the other hands … Gavin Tree frowned. As well as his sainted compliment of skeletal arms and legs, Saint Boniface of Barrow had the remains of a great pair of wings. What had seemed to be hands were in fact the tips of two delicate webs of tiny wing bones which were draped protectively across the saintly shoulders, chest and midriff. Before bursting into wild and rapid action, the Bishop calmly observed that legend was in this case truth in that the body measured at least six and a half feet.

Reaching deep into the sacophagus, he laid hands on first one wing then the other. Age had been only superficially kind to the bones; as he pulled at the join where the top wing bone entered the back of the massive rib cage, he felt it turn to a sort of crumbled biscuit in his grip. He dislocated both wings then lifted them gingerly through the cavity. He wanted to run because time was short and he still had to lower the lid, yet he was terrified of tripping and landing in a mass of someone else’s broken wing cartilage. Also the skeletal wings were too long to carry from his waist, so he had to keep his fists at shoulder height. Thinking quickly, he lurched like a crippled dragonfly to the entrance of the crypt. He took both wings in one hand, turned the doorknob and leaned on the door with his back. As he scrabbled with his free hand for the light switch, Gavin heard something scamper in the dark and splash into the water. Rats. Rats? No time to think. He hurried, bones flailing, to the point where the city’s subterranean stream swirled in a black U in and out of one mossy wall. It was difficult to throw the bones any distance but the swift current helped him.

There was a distant sound of an animal gnawing as he closed the door. He didn’t look back but hurried to the Patron’s chapel where he lowered the lid as fast as he could. Only then, when he was at liberty to fall to his knees and beg forgiveness, did the full enormity of his crime begin to dawn upon him. Quite apart from his proud motives, his act had been one of scientific as well as religious desecration. Wise men would kill to have had even a glimpse of the remains that the rats were now chewing so eagerly.

Perhaps that was a good reason for having destroyed them; a less shamefully selfish one than not wishing to have an overhasty sermon rendered ridiculous by untimely evidence of the miraculous. Gavin chewed on a thumb knuckle and thought hard about humility.

There was a rattling of fat keys in the south transept door before someone found it was already unlocked, then footsteps across the quire. Sam the verger came in, paused to recognize the Bishop and appreciate the importance of what he was at, then came tutting forward and picked up the crushed flowers from around the tomb. Through the cracks in between his raised fingers, Gavin saw him do this and cursed himself for forgetting to gather them before he kneeled. He lowered his head and, sliding back on to a chair, smiled at Sam.

‘Morning, my lord,’ said Sam, obstinate as his colleagues on the little matter of calling a Bishop plain ‘mister’.

‘Hello, Sam. A fine day for it.’

‘Suppose so,’ said Sam, ‘though I reckon it’s a dangerous thing to do. If a church is going to fall, I say it will. There’ll be a war soon, anyway, and all the money will have been wasted.’ Before the shepherd of his soul could answer he held out the crumpled petals. ‘Least we’re not a sinking ship,’ he chuckled, ‘we’ve got ourselves a colony of rats still.’

‘Really?’ asked his lord, relieved.

‘They chew flowers, tear surplices; I reckon they’d eat those wafers if they could open the safe.’

He laughed out loud as only vergers seem able to do in a Cathedral and went to throw away the rat-mauled flowers. Gavin sighed, rose and went for a little walk to count his remaining blessings.

Strapped into the passenger seat, Clive Hart picked the yellow sleep from behind his glasses. His wife toured the Close in search of a parking space. It was a little after seven o’clock. His wolfed coffee and slab of home-made bread were being ungraciously received by a stomach that was barely awake. Last night he had been all in favour of coming to the service of disinterment. It had been his idea and he had had to ply Lydia with arguments of ‘rare opportunity’ and ‘kick yourself for missing it’. Tables had turned this morning. It was she, the habitual early riser, who had plied him with breakfast and a running shower and he who did the self-kicking.

‘Won’t that warden nab us here?’ he asked as she gave up the search and parked on a yellow line.

‘No. I slipped her a cheapo Stilton in the shop when her family came to stay at Easter and she knows our car.’

She was so damned arrogant and she always got away with it. He couldn’t bribe a child. People stole his bike lights with heartless regularity.

They shivered because the sun had not yet rounded the east end to dry the dew on the grass or chase the chill off the pavements. They walked around the lawn and entered through the south transept. The Glurry was the only door open at this time of day but
habitués
used it all day long so as to avoid the embarrassment of having to greet an acquaintance on begging box duty in the main entrance at the west end.

Lydia had slipped her arm through his soon after leaving the car. The action was common between them; a thoughtless gesture of affection and territory, a twenty-one-year habit. Today she also did it for comfort. Quite apart from the faintly revolting nature of what they were about to witness, the Cathedral’s interior made her feel unimportant, little-wifey and slightly guilty.

Her faith was not especially strong. She loved singing hymns and listening to the choir. Some – by no means all – passages of the Bible and the liturgy made her feel safe and whole. Clive only came here if persuaded and he had very little faith, if any. He shared her love of the music however, never ceased to be inspired by the building and had a wry respect for its importance as a social hub. When he retired from Tatham’s she would like him to train to be one of the guides; it would give him something to do when they weren’t at the house she intended they buy on the Tarn. She already had the Lady chapel to dust each week and was on a reserve list for the begging boxes.

Lydia led the way up the steps towards the east end, where she had seen a friend. Clive lingered by a noticeboard to see what the choir would be singing at Evensong for the rest of the week. Sometimes it was possible to slip over during a gap in his afternoon’s teaching. He didn’t always bother to tell Lydia about these trips. In fact it was so long since he had done so that he feared it might look suspicious if he suddenly started telling her again. She seemed to regard church-going as a showy, diplomatic, distinctly
female
affair; certainly not for men of pre-retirement age to ‘get into’. When she suggested he accompany her, she expected him to sigh as if he had something more manly and important on his mind, so he did. He followed her more slowly, watching her talk to the unfamiliar friend. She was wearing her new spring coat, a light creamy cashmere which hid her bum but showed off her legs. It looked expensive, but that was usually the desired effect. She made so much more money from her books and shop than he ever could from teaching that she tended to buy him clothes rather than he her.

Like the Bishop, Lydia was a 1970s success story. When they had met, Clive was the ambitious one and she the adoring mouse. He had had his first play accepted by the BBC and had had a second commissioned by the Royal Court. He was a fashionable go-getter with a fashionably seedy address and fashionably black Chelsea boots. She had just finished at secretarial college and was in her first year at cookery school. They got married because simply everybody was living in sin so it seemed more daring to run to a register office then toast their joint future in a Portobello Road pub. Then she had produced a son and everything had changed.

He would say ‘went wrong’ but it had not been like that. When even the Royal Court regulars were staying away in droves from his third play and when, in the same month, the cookery book she had written on the sly was becoming a bestseller, he had coped remarkably well. By and large he had not had to cope, in fact, because she had
managed
him so cleverly. They became the perfect late-Sixties couple; she writing witty guides on how to live cheerfully well on
Nothing At All
(second bestseller) and he, one of those faces which everyone recognized but nobody could quite place. As she made more money and gained more confidence, she found in him the perfect Seventies husband; a complaisant drone, hairy and supportive. She persuaded him to grow a beard and take a teaching post in an ancient public school. They were getting tired of living in a gentrified slum and suddenly it was oh so chic to discover the countryside again.

‘Welcome to the Earthly Paradise,’ their new neighbours had said.

Nothing had gone wrong. When chauvinist friends of either sex sneered that he had opted out and been emasculated by a distaff cash flow, he retorted that they were the ones who had opted out by not daring to bare their innate passivity. Lydia and he had found their levels. He
liked
being underneath. She turned and smiled as he approached. The beard had gone recently; she had said he would look younger without it, and he did. He took her hand discreetly and they found seats in the sixth row.

The Patron’s chapel filled fast. People soon forgot that they were light-headed from lack of sleep or breakfast and before long there was much twisting in seats and nodding to friends. It felt more like a fire practice than the preliminary to a service; the occasion was altogether strange. Sam had been joined by another verger, Mrs Moore, who was helping him to lay out extra chairs outside the chapel door to accommodate the overflow. Lydia finished the difficult bit where one had to kneel and compose one’s thoughts and sat up in her chair to see who had come.

Mrs Chattock, Gavin Tree’s mother (twice widowed, poor woman) drifted to the front where her son would be waiting for her. She had grown increasingly otherworldly since her minor stroke last autumn and was purportedly cultivating a mystic circle. A spectral smile, doubtless learnt in her days as Coward’s Elvira in northern rep, conveyed her serene greetings to all as she advanced, but forbade any from being so fleshly as to do more than bow in return. Fergus Gibson had taken a seat in a darkish corner as usual. His partner in the city’s only interior design business had died suddenly some months ago and Lydia knew he was having a terrible time with his old mother. The latter had got religion on the death of her husband and rushed off to darkest Africa to become a missionary. Illness had forced her home and into her son’s care. It was said that she was quite seriously unhinged. Poor Fergus. Lydia tried to catch his eye but he was looking sad and preoccupied, which was scarcely surprising. Mrs Delaney-Siedentrop had said something awfully tactless to him last week. Lydia made a mental note to buy something special for when he came to supper with darling Emma Dyce-Hamilton. Funny little Emma was just the right age for him. The Delaney-Siedentrop had secured a front seat as usual through the agency of her ex-stockbroker husband St John who was a sidesman and wore his medals rather too often. She was wearing one of her habitual navy blue suits and had just beckoned Mercy Merluza over to join her on a spare seat. Mrs Merluza was a once-luscious Spaniard who would not have looked out of place in an Italian toga epic of the Fifties. One of Barrowcester’s few exotica, she ran a craft shop, a disappointingly tame occupation given her striking appearance, Lydia and Clive had asked her for drinks occasionally when she first arrived but had found her hopelessly narrow-minded and dull. Clive finished composing his thoughts and sat back in the chair to Lydia’s right. She smiled encouragingly at him then looked across to bow to peculiar Dr Morton who had just found a seat.

Early morning sunlight was pointing out the cobwebs on the eastern windows that were so soon to be dismantled and cleaned. The poplars outside waved, clattering, and caused the light to dance on faces and over stone. Behind the congregation, in the quire, the organ brought whatever it had been playing to an end. There was a pause and then the choristers burst into plainsong somewhere nearby. The combination of the white flower arrangements, the brilliant sunshine and their high voices that scalded the still air and wobbled slightly because they were processing, made Lydia want to cry, so she laid her right hand on the back of Clive’s left and squeezed. He caught her eye and smiled. Sweet Clive! Accessible Clive! She wished their son Tobit were here so that she could be the filling in a love sandwich.

Gavin Tree had spoken of love last time she heard him preach. A wise and principled man. Apparently his sermon at Saturday’s confirmation service was an outrage to some. She had been working at the time but the reported gist of it struck her as extremely sensible. She was as guilty as the next person of overindulging in prettiness and sentiment – angels, flowers and choristers – but at least she was aware of doing so and felt the shame of it. Someone had given her Gavin’s book for Christmas two years ago. She had still to read it.

The choristers drew near. Sam marched in with his staff, leading the Dean and, behind him, Canon Wedlake who had such a noble profile, and behind him the choristers. The Dean and Canon Wedlake took up stations to either side of the Patron’s tomb and the choristers passed them in two lines to form a semi-circle that met behind the altar. Sam’s arrival in the chapel doorway started a wave of rising congregation so that by the time the choristers were filing round the apse, everyone was on their feet.

‘Dearly beloved,’ began the Dean, ‘welcome.’

The service that followed was remembered by all present as having been pertinent and tasteful but it was so eclipsed by the raising of the sarcophagus lid that the remembrance was hazy at best. After a hymn, a brief address by the Dean reminding the few strangers present of St Boniface’s history and a briefer summary by Canon Wedlake of the enormity of the task lying in store for the cathedral masons, there were some prayers and then everyone stood again for the start of the disinterment. The choristers sang a suitably medieval psalm setting and the Dean laid hands on the winch chain and began to pull.

There was an unrestrained craning of necks as the lid rose the first five inches. Several service sheets fluttered irreverently to the flagstones from fingers parted with excitement. Dr Morton stood on his hassock and his peculiar beady-eyed face, which had always reminded Lydia of an ostrich’s, rose above the crowd, hungry for view. Clive froze in the middle of unwrapping a throat pastille, apparently aware that he was rustling too loudly, and Lydia felt a sudden extraordinary temptation to climb on to her chair. There was then a slight threat of anti-climax. Everyone realized that from where they were placed it was impossible to see
inside
the tomb and that the prospect of one’s Dean hauling a slab of pre-Norman stone into the air on a winch teetered on the dull side of inspiring. Then two things happened extremely fast. Five small birds like canaries, only white, flew at great speed from under the lid and disappeared into the quire. More obviously the Bishop groaned and fell in a dead faint. Gavin Tree was a tall man and his fall put two chairs and the Dean’s wife off their balance and gathered a rush of helpful hands and counsel. As Sam, the Dean and a man Lydia did not know helped to carry him out, pursued by a still otherworldly Mrs Chattock and an undisciplined gaggle of choristers, it became clear both that the service was considered thoroughly finished and that not everyone had seen the apparition of the white birds. Clive had not for a start, but he had notoriously slow reactions so he took it on trust from Lydia, who had seen. Mrs Delaney-Siedentrop certainly had not, and was making increasingly unsubtle references to popery and cheap stagecraft. The scene was like a re-enactment of the one at Babel. Those who had seen pointed for the benefit of their less fortunate neighbours and made gliding motions with their hands. Those who had not, scoffed and indicated the weight of the lid while muttering about oxygen. Gradually the crowd dispersed, having waited for the news that the poor Bishop was well on the way to recovery, and the Scottish Masons began to move in. There was a small scuffle amongst the local radio crew when it transpired that their smuggled video camera had jammed at the crucial moment.

Over the days that followed there was a marked increase in the ranks of Those Who Had Seen – the party that was tasting the sweet tang of autobeatification. Soon the less fortunate party came to number only three; Clive, who none the less counted himself as a believer, Mrs Delaney-Siedentrop, who most certainly did not, and Fergus Gibson, who had suddenly had a bad feeling about his mother and had left the service during the Dean’s brief address.