Half Broken Things (8 page)

‘How are you doing, Gordon? I'm Jeff. Jeff Stevenson.'

‘Yes, yes, hello. You're expected. Gordon Brookes.' Gordon lifted the hat and replaced it. He always wore a hat of one sort or another; he thought of his hats as his little trademark. Oh, the vicar and his hats, he imagined people saying, affectionately casting their eyes upwards. He found it useful that a hat created an illusion of approachability and friendliness, and at the same time kept people away. Most people were wary of eccentricity, he had found. They seldom stopped him in the village to chat, for instance, unwilling to risk being thought, by association, as barmy as the man in the barmy hat. But clearly Jeff Stevenson was not most people. For one thing, he had a most persistent handshake.

‘Great hat! How do you do?' Michael said, thinking that Gordon Brookes's lower lip looked too red and wet.

Gordon said, ‘I didn't realise you knew my name. We haven't met before, have we?'

Michael swallowed. Although Gordon Brookes's tone of interrogation was mild, he was still asking a question. Michael had never before been asked how he knew a vicar's name. Vicars in general seemed to assume that everybody knew who they were. Thinking fast, he worked out that he could afford to be honest about the source of that small piece of information, and that it would be easier than coming up with a lie on the spot.

‘Actually, I looked you up.'

‘Oh?'

‘In Crockford's. I looked you up in Crockford's; I like to do my homework, seems only right since I'm imposing on your time and goodwill,' Michael said in his carefully unplaceable accent, and tried to rest in the fact that this was quite true. Of the books that Michael owned, many were volumes that he had acquired only because he had failed to sell them on the stall. Among them were
Crockford's Directory of the Clergy 1997,
and Simon Jenkins'
England's Thousand Best Churches
. It was the combination of these two that had inspired his curate impersonation technique for robbing churches in the first place, but Gordon Brookes would not, of course, be told that. Crockford's supplied him with his characters: the names, dates, backgrounds and present positions of the earnest churchmen, invariably curates, whom he impersonated. It supplied him with the same details of the incumbents of the churches he selected for his forays, for the rare occasions on which he might meet up with the vicar rather than a ‘parish worker'. The Jenkins book gave him details of church treasures, both fixed and architectural (which were of course irrelevant to the purpose, though Michael had at times been grateful to be able to make an admiring reference to, say, the Norman reredos or the double hammerbeam roof), but also—and more to the point for Michael—Jenkins described the treasures small, easily liftable and saleable: the minor effigies and busts, silver, pictures, chairs, lecterns, embroideries. Over and above these Michael often found a pleasing range of more humble but attractive objects waiting to be opportunistically pilfered, and the beauty of it was he wasn't taking things that belonged to
people
. He was not depriving anyone of anything personal, and if he did cause upset, then at least church people had one another to turn to for comfort. And if God himself were offended, he hadn't so far got round to showing it. In the meantime, Michael had done well out of candlesticks, church candles, tooled leather Bibles, altar cloths, small and ancient rugs, even sheet music, all of which were the kind of thing that any number of Bath people would pay money for in order to reinforce their belief that they were complex and creative souls whose originality and flair were revealed in the arrangement of their homes. He now noticed that Gordon Brookes was looking at him with some curiosity.

‘Sorry, where did you say you got my name?'

Michael swallowed again, and felt a tiny twitch of his face, the kind that might look to anyone watching like a deliberately tight blink of the eyes. The question, never before asked, was now being asked again. Perhaps it was the loss of the wife that was making this one so cagey, though he seemed to Michael more exasperated than bereaved.

‘Crockford's. Fount of all knowledge! I say, it is all right for me to see the figures, isn't it? I've looked at them behind the glass, of course, but it'll be just tremendously exciting to get really close to them.' He beamed again and tried to look eager. Steady, Michael, he told himself.

In the church Gordon Brookes pulled on a pair of cotton gloves from a drawer at the base of the display cabinet, unlocked the glass door and lifted out one of the two figures. ‘Here's our St John. Vestry's the best place, there's a proper table there,' he said, making his way to a door at the far end of the church. He could not carry both figures at once, but he seemed prepared to make two trips rather than hand one to Michael to bring. Michael, obedient to some etiquette that suggested it would be unseemly to do so, did not offer to help, but waited patiently by the open case. Gordon came back, took the second figure in his arms, saying only, ‘St Catharine, slightly heavier,' and Michael followed respectfully.

The vestry smelled of paraffin and chrysanthemums. Two walls were lined with cupboards, and chairs were stacked in one corner. The only other door must lead outside, back towards the vicarage, Michael thought. From a large cardboard box on the floor with ‘Waste paper for Afghanistan' written on its side in black marker, Gordon Brookes drew a couple of magazines. He spread them over the centre of the table. Without smiling he placed the figures on top of them. Gordon Brookes then tipped his head on one side and gazed at them sentimentally, and it seemed sensible to Michael to do the same. The St Catharine sat on her magazine, partly obliterating the cover photograph of a middle-aged man standing on a rock on the edge of a lake looking through binoculars. The white, sweet-faced Saint Catharine, her eyes cast graciously downwards, was apparently reading the headline ‘Whale watching in Manitoba'. Michael smiled, and Gordon Brookes smiled too.

‘Lovely, aren't they?' he said, quite kindly. Michael got his notebook and magnifying glass out of his backpack and put on a pair of spectacles. But he did not sit down, feeling that the most delicate of transactions was being conducted and that even one off-balance move, one over-zealous gesture on his part, would cause the whole fragile bargain to collapse. Gordon Brookes took a step back. Michael smiled at the figures again and then looked at Gordon.

‘Carry on,' Gordon said, pulling off the gloves and handing them to Michael. ‘I'm no expert so I'll leave you to get on with it. I'm assuming you know how to handle them.'

Michael almost burst into song. ‘Right! That's terribly good of you. I do appreciate it. It's a marvellous opportunity.' He sat down at the table and squinted purposefully at the figures, wrinkling his nose. Gordon Brookes did not leave. Michael looked at him with the gentlest smile of dismissal he could manage.

‘I'll be fine, now. Thanks so much,' he said.

‘Right. Well, I'll let you get on, while I just potter.' So that was what he meant by leaving him to get on with it. Get on with it, but I'll be right here behind you. In the same room. I am not going to leave. Michael's face twitched behind his glasses. How was he going to manage the amount of bluffing that would now be required? He could drop out of the whole thing, just look at the figures and go. But how could he even think of leaving without them, after this much effort? His heart had been thumping in his throat since he arrived. He coughed. He dared not touch the figures in front of Gordon Brookes. He could not trust his hands not to shake.

‘Don't let me, er . . . I'm quite happy here on my own, if you've got things to do.'

‘I gather it's a study of yours. Have you published?'

‘Oh no! Oh, you know, the usual problem. Time! Takes so much time, getting anything knocked into proper shape for a publisher. That's life. But I chip away, live in hope. You know.' He turned and looked at the alabaster figures in what he hoped was an informed sort of way.

Gordon turned and started to busy himself with a precarious stack of books and sheets of paper. ‘Choir. They will leave things higgledy-piggledy,' he murmured. Michael, pretending to consult his notebook, was getting desperate. He had to get Gordon Brookes to leave.

‘Honestly, don't let me stop you getting on,' he said. ‘I'm quite happy on my own for . . . well, I should think twenty minutes should do it. But naturally I'd prefer you to come back to put them back in their case.'

‘You were ordained when, Jeff?' Gordon asked mildly.

‘Oh, only in 1996,' Michael replied. ‘Latecomer.' He would volunteer nothing more lest it provoke more conversation. He needed the man to go.

‘Yes. Yes, because you see, if you don't mind, Jeff, it's odd you're not aware. Trivial thing, of course, but if nobody's pointed it out to you . . . we never say Crockford
's,
do you see. It's Crockford, not Crockford's. You just don't say Crockford
'zzzz,
except when you're saying the whole name, as in
“Crockford's Directory of the Clergy”.
Hope you don't mind my mentioning it.'

Michael fixed a look of polite amusement on his face and turned.

‘Oh? Well! Well, my goodness. I, er . . .'

‘It's odd you've not picked that up so far.'

It was too late for Michael to pretend he was hard of hearing, had to lip-read and sometimes made mistakes. His mouth was dry. Gordon Brookes was about to say that he knew perfectly well that Michael was a fraud. But Michael knew, just as perfectly, that he needed the alabaster figures to get himself afloat again; he needed them so badly that he felt a rush of fury at the thought that Gordon Brookes might stop him. Just as he was thinking that the only course open to him now was physical assault, he wondered. Dare he try it again? He had done it once before with a punter who'd come back to the stall complaining that Michael had sold him some dud Cornish ware the week before.
'1930s you said and when I get it home I turn it upside down an' it says fucking dishwasherproof on the bottom.'
The punter had not been in the right frame of mind to be convinced that dishwashers had been around for a lot longer than people realised. Michael had had to think fast. It had worked then, and it had to work now.

He pretended to turn his attention back to the figures, but stirred, then coughed, started rigidly in his chair and sucked up a noisy breath. He swung back in his chair and pulled in another breath with a sound like air being blown into a balloon. He struggled to say, ‘Asthma. Be all right . . . in a minute.' And then he took another, even more shallow, pained and laborious breath to show that he would not be all right at all.

‘Oh good heavens—have you got something to take for it? An inhaler or something? Don't you carry an inhaler?'

Michael shook his head and lurched in his chair, sucking and heaving. ‘Glass of water. Pills. Need water. Glass of water.' He now brought fear into his eyes, which swivelled wildly round the room in search of the sink and tap, which he had already established were not there.

‘Oh! Oh right, I see,
right
. Hang on. I'll just have to . . . er, look, will you be all right for a minute? I'll get one from the vicarage. I'll be back in a second, can you, are you sure you, er . . .'

Michael nodded. ‘Please! Please, water.'

When the vestry outside door had closed behind Gordon, Michael waited for a moment, got up, wrapped each figure quickly in the magazine on which it stood and placed them both in his backpack. Then he dashed back into the church, crossed it swiftly, let himself out and raced down through the churchyard, keeping off the path, which he knew could be seen from the vicarage. By the time the van started on the third attempt Michael was half-dead with terror, but with the pulse of fear came also a quickening surge of relief because he was, after all, alive.

My mood changed. Something happened to remove any last trace of uncertainty. Two people turned up on bicycles—imagine, in February! They were Dutch, and I believe they did say that they had hired the bicycles for the day as it was fine and they wanted to see something of the countryside outside Bath. They had all that strange clothing that people wear on bicycles. I've never had the slightest idea where such clothing is even to be bought or what it is called, let alone what particular purpose it might serve, and it took me a moment to get over their appearance at the door, like giant tadpoles in some sort of brightly coloured race. And they had maps, of course, and showed me the special cycle route they were doing on which certain ‘points of interest' had been marked, including Walden Manor. They had left the marked route and come all the way down the drive, even though there is a sign saying ‘Private' at the top, next to the road. This is Walden Manor, yes? they asked me. I couldn't very well dispute it. So I said yes, and then I stood at the door waiting for them to go.