She opened her canvas bag and pulled out a sheet of paper in a plastic wallet. ‘This is the inventory of the fixtures and fittings of the church, as agreed before purchase. You may remember that Moholy reserved the organ, which I see is still here, tick, the wooden canopy on the pulpit, tick, and also Thomas à Becket’s toe-bone. In which case,’ Rifka said brightly, looking up from the page, ‘the toe-bone must still be here. Somewhere.’
I stood without moving, trusting in silence, in my own private exile. Archbishop of Canterbury by the age of forty-four, I’d been expecting my next ten years of steady advancement to begin more smoothly. Rifka hopped off the altar and went to search the safe, which I’d left unlocked. She turned back, eyebrows raised.
‘Own up,’ she said. ‘You’ve taken it, haven’t you?’
‘No.’ But I couldn’t lie. I could resist, and defy, and argue, but I found no special talent for deceit. ‘Yes.’
I took Becket from my pocket, and held him up between my fingers.
‘Oh damn,’ Rifka said, her face closing in. ‘You really oughtn’t to have touched that.’ She chewed on the side of her mouth, keeping her distance. ‘Moholy guessed you probably had. Though he also presumed you were an educated man, and thought you’d probably survive.’
She rummaged through her bag for some water, then reached into the top pocket of her shirt for a small glass bottle. She pressed down and round on the child-proof cap, shook out some white pills, tipped them into her mouth, and washed them down. As she put everything back again, she said, ‘Relics do have a certain addictive power, don’t they?’
‘Do they?’
‘They connect us to the whole stretch of eternity. Now. Can I have Thomas à Becket. I’m asking nicely.’
‘It belongs to the church.’
‘And the church belongs to Joseph Moholy. Look, there’s nothing sinister about it. Relics have always changed ownership. It’s what used to be called translation, the translation of relics.’
‘I think they often used to be stolen,’ I said, frowning. ‘Didn’t they?’
‘Or purchased,’ Rifka countered. ‘To save them from neglect. Your own Protestant Church considers Becket’s toe-bone an object without value. That’s right, isn’t it? It therefore seems unlikely they’d oppose the removal of a holy relic in which no one actually believes.’
‘I have a duty to history.’
‘In a blue mohair jumper? I can see your belly-button.’
She was misjudging me. My appearance was unimportant, as irrelevant as the money she’d offered earlier. I had no intention of giving up Becket.
Rifka sighed, and for inspiration, instead of heaven, she looked closely at her fingernails. ‘Moholy warned me you might be like this, but take care, because I’ve only one more carrot. We’re prepared to be reasonable. You’ve been living in the church apartment, which, as you’re aware, Moholy has also bought. He says there’s no rush, you can go on staying there. Not a problem. However, he did ask me to find out if you’d any ambition.’
She looked into my eyes, first the left, then the right.
‘Well, James, are you ambitious?’
A Becket cult, glamorous with sapphires and rubies, had flourished at Canterbury for 300 years. A million pilgrims travelled to touch the spot where Becket had fallen, to pray not for his soul, but for his intercession, and to buy tiny lead ampoules of his infinitely diluted blood which healed the deaf and the dumb, cured dropsy and the King’s Evil, brought cows and horses back to life, and exorcised demons in possession of hopeless souls.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘In my own small way, I suppose I am.’
Rifka threw up her arms. ‘At last, something we can agree on. Moholy might be able to help. He’s on the track of something special, and thinks you may be interested.’
‘Me?’
‘You’re a vicar.’
‘I’m a deacon. I don’t see how he can help me.’
‘Remember, James, last of the carrots. Moholy proposes the two of you should meet. You can go to his villa, have a look around. And personally, I recommend you use your head and bite this carrot. Avoid the stick. That’s my personal recommendation.’
She was now behind the altar, leaning forward on her elbows, and all her movements had been easy and athletic, suggesting great reserves of strength, or speed. She moved about the church with an owner’s sense of assurance.
‘Opt for the carrot, not the stick. Really. Moholy can be very strange, unpredictable, but he thinks he may have work for you. And now I’ve seen you, I think he may be right.’
With Becket a sharp reminder in my soft clerical palm, I considered it for at least a second. ‘The church needs Becket. This is where he belongs.’
‘You think Becket’s the only one?’
Rifka was growing irritable now, impatient. She searched inside her bag, didn’t find what she was looking for, so held it open and looked again. She slid a plastic box on to the altar, and then a white disc tightly wrapped in clingfilm. ‘There’s more to relics than Becket, you know. Becket’s just the start. Just the margins.’
‘But Moholy wants Thomas à Becket.’
She laughed, letting a brief explosion of air escape through her nose. ‘It’s not Becket, that I know for sure. Whatever’s keeping him awake at night is more important than Becket. Someone far more important.’
Only Thomas à Becket, alone in the world, knew that there was no one more important than Thomas à Becket. Could that be right? This was no time for humility, or self-doubt. Swallowing hard, I could see that inside the plastic box on the altar there was a solid-looking section of bone, like an uneven marble, and the flat disc in clingfilm was also bone. Becket needed to assert his own pre-eminence, to find thirteen poor folk daily between matins and dawn, to feed them and clothe them and wash their wretched feet.
‘Trust Moholy,’ Rifka said. ‘Humour him. That or the stick.’
If I clutched the bone hard enough, until it impressed my flesh, I could convince myself there was nothing to fear. Thomas à Becket had publicly humbled the king himself, Henry II, an all-powerful descendant of Fulk the Black and William the Conqueror. At the West Gate of the Cathedral Close, Henry had felt compelled to remove his boots. In the rain and sleet he’d undressed to his underwear, a hair-shirt from neck to knees, in feeble imitation of Thomas. Reaching the shrine, Henry had creaked to his knees, then prostrated himself, his face flat to the jewelled floor, the inner skin of his royal cheek mashed fleshily between his teeth. As further penance, he went on to claim a vigorous whipping from the bishops, the abbot, and all eighty of the privileged Canterbury monks.
Yes, Mr Joseph Moholy, you be very careful.
I had an idea of what a saint ought to do, so I tried to do it. With Becket in my hand, I stumbled outside to help people, the door in its old arch like an ear opening to the city-noise of Geneva. The sun was lower now, but the vicious Bise was still blowing, freezing my head and slicing through the open weave of the sweater.
The banks and shops had closed, but the exchange booths were still changing money. People passed by in cars, or hanging to the straps of trams. In every direction I saw prosperity, everyone well and warmly dressed for business, in banking and pharmaceuticals, luxury goods or peace. I was in religion, and in my black clerical trousers and boil-washed blue sweater I was zealously cold. I was shivering and goose-fleshed and pure and virtuous and very fervently cold. And though I ran one way, and then the other, slapping my arms for warmth, I failed to catch any poor beggars in immediate need of feeding or humble and tender foot-washing.
I stumbled in front of a car, and there was some panicked horn and screech. Pedestrians accelerated and veered away. The poor and needy were elsewhere, which I knew didn’t make it any better, but for me, here and now in Geneva, what was the good I’d been called upon to do?
There was a girl, some distance up the street beyond the central Post Office, but coming my way. She looked different from the others, in lace-up boots and r
ipped jeans. I didn’t want to frighten her, so I waited until her white sweatshirt was close enough to read. Up near the neckline, in bold black letters, it said Intellectual Property.
And below her breasts, the letters jagged by the material pleating into her belt, Is Theft.
I lurched towards her, my tight sweater riding high above my belly-button, but she saw me coming and held both hands straight out, palms flat towards me. And continued to stay well clear by turning a semi-circle to pass me by, keeping me in view at all times, showing no sign whatsoever of welcoming salvation.
Which was when it occurred to me, at last, that this wasn’t a time or a place in which a man like Becket could prosper. I felt a weariness, a sudden relaxation in the tension of my will. I’d never be able to sustain it. I couldn’t possibly keep myself lowered in the freezing river, because good intentions weren’t enough. I was lonely for Helena, and Stella, and even Rifka. I wanted to embrace them all, and most warmly. A vow of chastity was too hard, especially when these days by their own free-will most people were already excommunicated. It made my only remaining pleasure of dashing the candles seem a little redundant. Everyone was already excommunicated from the spiritual, by choice, and I saw no joy in my future as a blissful martyr. I wasn’t strong enough to die for the Church of England, not like Thomas à Becket, not like my dad.
People who suffered believed in God. For a long time, I’d been jealous of that sincere, serious place, only I didn’t want to suffer. I was therefore hardly the type of person to sustain this Becket-like imitation of Christ. It just wasn’t me.
I scurried back inside the church, and startled Rifka, who was making a close inspection of the silk cloth which had once wrapped Becket. I slapped his toe-bone on the altar, and stumbled backwards and away from it.
And felt alone, and abruptly abandoned, and for the first time genuinely cold, so cold it made me weak. Should have worn another sweater, and at least one coat. And a scarf and a hat. Should have flown back to England, while I had the chance. I blew into my hands, and slapped at my shoulders, trying to rub some comfort into the itch of my feeble arms.
I’d got my life all wrong. Unlike Becket, who knew exactly what was required. He’d left home at twenty-two, and sensibly gone to learn the basics of financial management from Osbert Eightpenny, in the City. After three assiduous years, he’d been head-hunted into the retinue of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was a very prudent start. Impeccable. He grew up in London, of course. That had to help. And his father Gilbert Becket was a prosperous merchant, a former sheriff, with contacts and connections already in place. Thomas also had the motivational edge of his mother dying young, and, like all boys’ mothers, Becket’s mother was very special.
I shared none of these advantages. My mother wasn’t dead, we didn’t come from London. I was not destined to be a conspicuous and gifted servant of the Lord our God. I threw the church keys on to the altar beside the toe-bone.
‘Actually,’ Rifka said. ‘Moholy’s less bothered about the keys. He said you could hold on to them. For a while, anyway.’
Under the influence of Becket, this would have been a triumph. But instead, I now saw the church for what it was, old and cold and empty.
‘Come on, chicken,’ Rifka said. She had an arm round my shoulder, and I was grateful for the human warmth. ‘I know it’s bad. I know it is. You’ll be feeling cold, and weak, and a little lost. It happens to us all. That’s why I brought you this.’
She held out the plastic box with a transparent lid she’d shown me earlier. Inside, on a bed of cotton wool, was the uneven marble of greyish bone.
‘That should help you through the worst of it,’ she said. ‘It’s a bone from Sir Humphry Davy. With Joseph Moholy’s compliments.’
Davy’s Foot
‘If matter cannot be destroy’d
The living mind can never die
If e’en creative when alloy’d
How sure its immortality.’
Humphry Davy, Untitled Poem
SIR HUMPHRY DAVY WAS KNIGHTED in 1813, at the age of thirty-five, one year from now. Sir Jay Mason, Knight of the British Empire. Imagine that.
From humble and distant beginnings, in Penzance at the furthest edge of England, Davy achieved public eminence in the Age of Personality (the first one) as President of the Royal Society, and the first knight of science since Newton. He was a self-made man and friend to Coleridge and Wordsworth, an aspiring poet who discovered the mind-altering qualities of nitrous oxide, later known as laughing gas. Davy’s mentor Thomas Beddoes, in his Medicinal Uses of Factitious Airs, had classified the gas an instant killer. Davy inhaled it. It made him laugh.
His reputation enhanced, he repeated the experiment with carbon monoxide, and barely survived.
Davy specialised in substances the nature of which is not yet perfectly known. He made significant discoveries, many of them invaluable, like his isolation of the elements potassium and chlorine. His papers on matter and electricity provided the foundation for modern physics, and with his lab assistant Michael Faraday he was among the first freethinkers fully to appreciate the excitement of electricity as the mood of the future.
Davy was a split personality, a romantic scientist. He was also a social climber of some skill and, towards the end of his life, a professional curmudgeon and bully.
On Saturday morning, recovering in bed, I tried to make sense of what had happened to me the day before. I found myself alone in Geneva, in Joseph Moholy’s flat, the day after the closure of the church and the date on my ticket home. I also had older problems of my own making that I was choosing to ignore, but which one day, surely one day, I’d be happy to face. As soon as I became better than or at least different from the person who’d caused the problems.
Fortunately, on this particular morning, I felt exceptionally clear-headed, reflecting that abroad and far from home it was acceptable to be anxious, and to compensate by acting out roles. Some early mistakes were inevitable, and, looking back now, I was glad to be rid of the influence of Becket. He was so self-willed, so ostentatious and stubborn. It was feasible to become a saintly man, at least I hoped so, but not in a single day.
Better to keep an open mind, and in a spirit of sceptical enquiry to question everything. There was usually a perfectly rational explanation, even for behaviour as changeable as mine.
I therefore dressed warmly and sensibly (coat, scarf, cap), and arrived at Geneva’s oldest cemetery with the last of the morning’s rose-coloured clouds, gilled pink and fresh from the lake. It was nine o’clock, and the gates were already open at the Cimetière des Rois, a square plot of land between a multi-storey retirement home and the fire-station. Set back from the road behind a waist-high wall, it had no church attached, but was put to use by the various Protestant cults squeezed for space in the centre of the city, including (until very recently) All Saints.
On the right of the cemetery gate, on the way in, there was an open-sided pavilion sheltering drawer over drawer of named and dated ashes, like an oversized chemical cabinet. Behind and above this loomed the stacked windows with closed orange curtains on the less coveted side of the retirement home. At the back and along its left-hand edge, the cemetery of kings was closed off by high walls, ivy veining the stonework.
It would soon be a bright morning. The low sun was full in my face, and as I closed the cemetery gate it felt like the most splendid of times to be alive. The possibility of making original and unexpected discoveries was like being born anew, every day of the week.
Even at nine o’clock, even on a Saturday, there was a funeral. A clustered family in black made a silent semi-circle, backs turned to a one-man mechanical digger, in yellow, parked just behind them. I didn’t let this gloomy scene affect my mood. As long ago as the boy Davy, as far back as the French Revolution, natural philosophers had already rejected Priestley’s concept of the resurrection of the body. Some part of us might live on, but it wasn’t the body, and in this cemetery like every other all
that remained was the body; not even that, the bones.
Sir Humphry Davy’s final resting place was clearly marked on the indexed map at the cemetery entrance, and I could reach it while maintaining a respectable distance from the mourners. The way I saw it, I was an unremarkable if dark little man, with fine and curious eyes, about five foot seven but often stooped and seeming shorter. They wouldn’t look at me twice. Though perhaps they might have done, on another day, if they’d known that I held in my fist a bone, a mere fragment, but allegedly from the skeleton of Sir Humphry Davy.
On my discreet and roundabout route towards Davy, I noticed that about a third of the graves in the Cimetière des Rois were amateur shrines, with wilting flowers and letters of devotion trapped beneath glass jars containing candles. It was a high proportion, but for 300 years Geneva had been a favourite place for the famous to avoid taxes and criticism, to wallow and die.
I stopped briefly at John Calvin. His was not a grave overflown by trumpet-blowing angels. The headstone was about the size of a shoebox, rounded at the top and marked J.C. No epitaph, no dates. There were no flowers, or snuffed candles in old sauerkraut jars, no smudged letters of homage in transparent plastic envelopes. Calvin hadn’t wanted to be buried here at all, or even have a headstone, horrified as he was by the idea of his gravesite as a shrine. It was only several years after his death that the city surrendered to public pressure, and provided this token memorial.
It was sometimes suggested that Calvin’s body wasn’t actually here. His more literal disciples, at Calvin’s apparent request, had secretly buried the body elsewhere. This was just a stone, a sentimental scrap for the weaker brethren, although personally I found this story hard to believe. Everyone wants to be remembered, whatever they might say.
At Davy’s graveside, I clasped my hands respectfully below my belt, his fragment of bone secure inside two layers of flesh and fingers. I rocked forward on my toes. Even with the fading lettering, and the ageing stonework liver-spotted with lichen, I was delighted by the solid, immodest memorial to the English scientist Sir Humphry Davy. He had a very large rectangular stone, with breadth as well as width, whereas the nearby Calvin had barely a shoebox.
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