Come the summer, I signed a declaration that I wasn’t in debt, and presented myself for ordination as a deacon. Of the family, only Tom attended the ceremony. ‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘Nice one, mate.’
Helena was also there, supporting me, loving me, and the certainty and scope of her love made my own feelings seem small and skittish. To be worthy of her, I had to amount to more than a straight biography of the narrow life I’d lived. This dim perception, that I could be more than myself, was the starting point for any belief I possessed, in God, in love, in Helena. There was something more. There had to be.
The Diocesan Director of Ordinands suggested I try for a curacy in one of England’s many Urban Priority Areas, where young deacons with energy were always in high demand. I organised nine months on a mission station in Zambia, and stayed almost twice that long.
To the African natives, I meant no harm. The villagers believed on their mothers’ lives in a man-eating creature from the bush, the fearsome Sasabonsam. I offered them an Anglican spirituality not entirely decided about crusts on or crusts off. Without the brisker appeal of mass stadium marriages, or group suicides to a Messiah hidden behind a meteor, my personal mission attracted little attention, and I never knowingly baptised a single Christian.
For weeks at a time I didn’t write to Helena, or phone her. Maybe, I don’t know, not being nice to her was my way of saying I loved her. To everyone else, I wrote and phoned and was nice. To Mum, I sent funny character sketches, and cartoons of vicars boiling in pots. She told me I was wasting my life. To Dad, I sent herbal remedies, and carvings of eccentric Olukun, the Benin spirit of the sea, with mudfish legs and a lizard in each hand. For Tom, I compiled graphs of how little money the local farmers and craftsmen earned in a year, and made bar-charts of the disparity between costs of African labour and margins of Western profit.
Gratifyingly to everyone, except perhaps the Zambians, in its own way Zambia was awful, though my memories had since softened significantly, brown boys running and a glowing reference from the Archbishop of Lusaka, who liked to win at backgammon.
Back in England, Helena was now working for an organisation which monitored the connection between government aid packages and arms deals. I went to meet her parents, Mr and Mrs Byczynski in Eastbourne, who were disappointed in me but didn’t know how to object. It was as confusing as if Helena had brought home a poet, and awkward for educated people to be openly ashamed. However, a fully ordained vicar earned a stipend of fifteen thousand a year, and no one could raise a family on that.
I remained a deacon, and attached myself to a provincial cathedral. They found me titbits around the Close. Whenever I was asked to provide emergency cover for some exhausted rector, I’d preach bitter sermons on selfishness, yes I mean you, because beneath outward differences which blind us, but which to God are barely noticeable, God discerns the same pride, the same vanity, the same petty and complacent preoccupation with the self. We were all as bad as each other.
The Cathedral Press published my Commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, of which I was overly proud, and which counted for nothing. I taught a course at the University. I blessed some newly-weds who’d broken a mirror. I exorcised a brewery which repeatedly failed its health and safety inspection. And in the remotest English countryside, I investigated the theft of altarware from unattended country churches. There was never any great mystery. The churches were unattended.
I was avoiding so many things at once, I didn’t know where to turn. I wrote an application to the MCC, but they replied to the Bishop, who smartly reminded me of the priority of our Urban Priority Areas.
‘I know just the place,’ he said. ‘I know exactly where your presence will best be felt.’
The Diocese sent me to shadow Dad in his new inner-city parish for a day and a half in the middle of a working week. I was appalled. Dad was seeing every day what most of us only see at intervals. Death and disappointment. Indifference. Despair.
He’d aged terribly. As proof that he’d made no youthful pact with the devil, Dad had every male-pattern loss, hair gone or greyed, a stoop, and a hard little paunch over his plain black belt. He’d stopped wearing his collar, and distrusted his safety-razor. He also had four different churches in four different wards, too much for a healthy man, twenty years younger. And he wasn’t a healthy man.
He was seriously ill. Cancerous cells had been discovered in his blood, and when out walking he often had to stand very still, resting. He’d concentrate on something inside, trying to speed it up, or slow it down. He’d close his eyes, locating each of his vital inner organs, checking them over, willing them back into shape. And when he opened his eyes again, the whites would shine like glazed porcelain, glittering and brittle, sick.
His GP suggested Dad apply to a private hospital for an urgent operation on his bladder. On a Church stipend. Failing that, he ought to insist on some help in the parish.
I did think about it. I did. I squared my shoulders, trying to settle on myself the necessary qualities to cope with social reality. Some basic level-headedness, for example. Reliability would have come in useful, as would a quietly confident twinkle. Perhaps, if I had it in me, a certain understated authority.
I said no. Definitely not. It simply wasn’t me.
They sent me anyway, and in Dad’s horrific parish I was more than ever an impostor, a priest-impersonator. My own short life seemed such a meagre thing to hold up as an example. Do what I do. Be like me. How could that help? Was that all I had to offer?
I over-adapted, and launched myself zealously at all the parish’s problems. I raised money, supervised initiatives, then raised more money, which I spent on microwave-ovens and reclining chairs and other material comforts for Dad’s loyal congregation of ageing ladies. Unfashionably, I was an evangelist to the old, who were more in need, I thought, because they had less time to make up their minds. In their oversized dark glasses, for the shingles, the old ladies accepted my meals on wheels inscrutable and all-knowing, like ancient rock-and-rollers.
I paid for their hair-appointments, and their notelets with matching envelopes, and vet’s fees for their cats.
On Sundays the men of the congregation, in RAF-coloured coats, sat separately and so self-possessed they seemed Chinese. I followed them back to the pub, and had satellite installed in the C of E retirement home, for the cricket. I was a roaring success, and good-humoured, endlessly patient, I wondered if this was finally me, or just my belated version of Dad.
None of my local achievements seemed to please him. He only brightened on the weekends of Helena’s visits, when he’d force himself upstairs to make us up a double bed. He’d joke with Helena that he was bang up to date, and he knew how it was. These days young women did everything, even feminists, and not before marriage but instead of it.
‘I know,’ Helena said, the two of them always laughing, ‘it’s all quite dreadful.’
When she left on Sunday nights, she’d tell him not to stand up, and reach over the back of his chair to kiss him on the baldness of his head. And by Tuesday, Dad’s health would have dipped again, and I’d intensify my efforts, seeking out novel ways to involve myself in the community. I helped the Lions club with their triathlon. I accompanied the scout-cubs to defend their ladders while window-cleaning the Estates. I swam 1500 metres for Shelter, even though I couldn’t swim.
A jocular local police sergeant, bored with catching vandals who spray-painted their own names in bus-shelters, found it amusing to ask Jay Mason Minor, the stand-in vicar, if he’d like to take part in an identity parade. I accepted. It was a service I could provide to the community, and there was money involved.
Every month or so, I therefore changed out of my vestments into caps, coats, hats, jackets, whatever was this year’s in-thing with the nation’s house-breakers. The local force was then royally entertained whenever the confused victim of a break-in would stammeringly pick out the vicar.
‘There,’ the fat sergeant would say,
rocking back on his copper’s flat heels, convinced that this false identification proved something very important about life’s big questions. He never said exactly what that was. And before long, the parish being such a hideous old English place, there was always another parade. The natives were beyond saving, and the line-ups were for robberies from the guide-dog box, a vandalised allotment, and the gradual theft from local churches of all furnishings of any potential value.
Instead of the urgent operation he needed, Dad had the same operation six months later on the NHS. Tubed up in bed after three days of oxygen and post-operative hallucinations, Dad reached out for the hand of his second son, an insubstantial presence at the bedside. His recovery took longer than predicted, but as soon as he could sit up unassisted, the nurses helped him, still in his pyjamas, to a taxi.
Back at the vicarage, Dad used to sit in his dressing-gown with his chin on his chest, hands clenched on his paunch, staring at his son in vestments. He looked like death. Physically he was a ruin, his face more bone than blood, his inexact hands rattling the spoon in his mug of hot water whenever he went to drink.
I tried to cheer him up.
‘Tell me honestly,’ I said, spreading out my arms, showing myself off before midweek Communion. ‘Do I look like a vicar?’
‘You’re dressed like one.’
‘If I ever start looking like a vicar, shoot me.’
‘Really?’
‘Well, just tell me.’
‘Son?’
‘Dad?’
‘You don’t look like a vicar.’
Neither of us smiled. ‘What’s the problem, Dad?’
‘They say that the person who’s been stealing from the churches disguises himself as a vicar.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard that.’
‘How can you afford Sky for the old codgers?’
‘Dad, you’re not well.’
I replaced his glucose drip, and knew that he needed a nurse, at more than forty pounds a morning. During the night of the 7th Sunday after Trinity, a communion cup was stolen from the church closest to the vicarage. Dad had been at the bedroom window, taking some air. He claimed to have seen the thief leaving the building.
‘Did you get a good look at him?’
‘Not really. He was dressed like a vicar.’
The police treated the old man gently. He was frail and ordained, and couldn’t be expected to talk much sense. Within a week, I was called to the station. Either side of me, facing the floor-to-ceiling mirror, the usual suspects, but this time in black clerical shirts and tight white dog-collars. Numbers One and Six looked ill at ease but harmless, like curates fresh from college. Five, a nail-biter with a tattooed head, kept running a finger inside the band of his collar, and was anxious to be elsewhere. Two and Four, on either side of me, even dressed as vicars looked villainous and bad to the bone.
I was desperate. I knew that Dad was behind the mirror making his choice, and I wanted to be picked out as the only suspect who could plausibly pass for a vicar. In the endless questioning and interrogation of who I was, I wanted to know if this, after all, was the answer.
The sergeant was beside himself. He thought this was fantastic. He stroked his fried-breakfast belly and chuckled with delight as he walked slowly from One through Six. He wiped away a tear, then laid a hand on my shoulder.
‘Not today, son,’ he said. ‘Apparently you’re nothing like him.’
‘None of you,’ Dad grumbled, shaking his head as I pushed his wheelchair back to the car. ‘Not one of you looked plausibly like a vicar.’
‘Thanks,’ I eventually said, as I sorted out the ramps. ‘Thanks, Dad. I owe you one. I think.’
At the end, he liked to sit sideways in the driver’s seat of his car, the door swung open, his feet trembling on the pale tarmac of the vicarage driveway. He wanted to go somewhere, to do something, but he didn’t know where or what. He used to hunch forward with his shoulders high and his hands crushed in prayer between his thighs, shivering and shaking, an old man dwindling in flesh and blood.
He needed another operation, this time on a kidney, but by then his spirit had gone, no longer earth-bound by the love of living.
It was my turn at the family funeral. Tom’s contribution, fresh in from a diamond merger in Johannesburg, was to wonder whether it really had to be in a church.
‘For God’s sake, Tom, he was a vicar. All his life that’s what he was.’
‘Yes, but he’s dead now, and isn’t it more important what we feel?’
‘We’re having it in church.’
Helena was kinder. And even Mum came, back from Spain in her bright summer clothes.
‘A cremation would have been quicker,’ Tom hissed. ‘And cheaper.’
‘Tom, for God’s sake.’
‘You’re such a fraud, Jamie. You don’t believe a word of it. And he knew that, too. It was you who probably killed him.’
The Suffragan Bishop was there, and a single archdeacon. I stood beside Dad’s lacquered coffin, not in the pulpit but on the step, and even then, and only a deacon, I understood that it wasn’t a whodunnit. I wasn’t there to investigate, or take revenge, nor to work out why.
I knew that, and I ignored that. I acted the rogue cop, incensed but logical, on a personal quest to find out who and why and where to lay the blame.
‘The bad carpets,’ I said, pausing for effect. ‘The bullock doses of tannin. The lack of recognition. The pathetic waste of a heroic stance gone unnoticed. The minimal salary, and the complacency of the conformist and sickly bishops.’
In my bitter and considered opinion, Mason Senior had died for the Church of England as surely as Thomas à Becket, the top of his skull sliced clean off with a broadsword, with such force that on its follow-through the sword itself had shattered on the flagstones of the cathedral floor. Hugh of Hornsea had then planted his foot on Becket’s neck, poked the point of his sword into the open wound, and scattered about the blood and brains.
I left a long silence, in which there was much coughing and shoe-shuffling. I could have gone on, but tears frightened me, and I was about to cry, and I wasn’t ready for the rogue cop’s subsequent voyage of self-discovery. I fell back on the comfort of the Burial Service. The confidence, the bluff.
We should not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning those who are asleep.
Within days, a letter arrived from the Bishop. He suggested in writing that I take a break, some time to reflect. He knew of an interesting short-term opportunity abroad, in Geneva. It was still a few months off, but he encouraged me in the strongest terms to apply.
The longer I thought about it, the more the idea appealed to me. Geneva would be an escape during which to reflect, and make a fresh start, where my familiar self would be hidden from anyone who knew me, especially if they wore summer clothes and thought I deserved better, or had violet eyes and were determined to love me. It was maybe my last chance to see who it was possible to become, before it was too late, before I was left with nothing but Jay Mason Minor, not through accumulation, but default.
The night of the funeral Helena encouraged me to prove, as she’d always argued, that I was a believer in life. And not in condoms. That was four months ago, almost to the day.
The bones. In the flat I still had the bones. All things considered, Helena accepted the news philosophically, unshockable after the earlobe. It took us the rest of the meal to agree on what to do with them, and we were now walking off our experimental pudding between the Hôtel du Paix and the Cimetière des Rois. Helena had the locket round her neck, underneath her clothes, just as I’d always intended.
‘It’s heavy,’ she said, ‘and it bounces. But I think I’ll get used to it.’
The cemetery was a joint idea. My own first impulse, now that we were back together again, had been to leave the city, the country and every problem of my own making behind. After all, it was a mess. I had uncertain status in an apartment I didn’t own, which I was sharing with skeletons. Richard B
urton was in the closet. Someone else was in the kitchen, and I didn’t even know who it was.
I genuinely couldn’t remember who it was I’d dug up the night before last. As Richard Burton, it was impossible to over-exaggerate my drunkenness. Calvin’s grave had definitely been empty, I remembered that clearly, but the rest of the information was gone. I just couldn’t remember.
‘We could go to the police,’ Helena suggested, before I reminded her that I was the one who’d done the digging. And also that we’d agreed, I thought, about this being a rare but genuine instance of a crime without victims. It was nothing but old bones.
‘Richard Burton’s old bones,’ Helena said. ‘Burton’s not a problem. We say sorry and put him back. Honest mistake. All we have to do is find out the identity of the other one, and then do the same. It’ll be a new experience for you. Actually resolving a problem, seeing it through to the end, instead of running away.’
‘You think we have to?’
‘Then we can move on. You’ll see. In the long run it makes life easier. And it’ll do you some good.’
Helena didn’t believe that in one afternoon I could have learnt to open graves, remove the bones and then replace the stone. Or at least I could, and obviously had. But it was unbelievable that I could have done it without leaving any incriminating evidence.
So off to the cemetery it was.
It had stopped raining, though the weather had yet to make up its mind, the sun still smothered behind a flat puzzle of cloud, in which from edge to edge the challenge was the gradual shadings between white and grey. It might still rain again, and I hoped it would. As long as the showers kept coming, Moholy had no choice but to wait for Calvin.
A helicopter chopped by, tracking foreign dignitaries between luxury hotels, and we walked for some distance along the United Nations perimeter-fence, erected to keep the powerful safe from the people. The city had begun to itch and fidget as the young and discontented steadily arrived. Even though the main protest rallies weren’t scheduled until the weekend, it was worth coming early. Later in the week, stricter controls were expected at the borders, and every available room in the city would be taken.
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