1
The damp seeping up from the flagstones, the lofty virtuosity of the organist, and the quiescent congregation filled Susannah with a deep nostalgia. As she sat in the front pew of Roxborough, waiting for her family’s arrival, she found herself transported back to Wells. She had been three at the time of her father’s installation and had measured her childhood as much by the Church calendar as by the school year. Even now, when she confined her visits to high days and holidays like courtesy calls on an elderly aunt, the liturgy was in her blood. Surveying the great cathedral, a monument to almost a thousand years of devotion, she was acutely aware of the void in her own life. For all the attractions of a bulging diary, she longed for the simple faith she had known as a girl.
In a painful irony, it was her father who was most responsible for its loss. As a child, she had been embarrassed by his eminence, envying the daughters of a minor canon. As an adolescent, she had been still more embarrassed when he published Spirit of the Age, giving her an early taste of the distinction between celebrity and notoriety, the maintenance of which was now her daily bread. She had been twelve when the book came out but, even so, she could see that for a bishop to deny the existence of God while remaining in the Church was the height of hypocrisy. Mark had weathered the storm with admirable ease but Clement, like her, had been hit hard. She still recalled his elation when, after brooding for months over their father’s stance, he had reached some sort of epiphany at an art exhibition in Bath.
‘This is it! Can’t you see?’ he asked, as she stared in consternation at rooms which displayed nothing but empty frames. ‘Pa is just like the artist. He’s showing us the purpose of the frame… the beauty of the frame… the mystery of the frame, even when there’s nothing inside.’
Although at the time she had scorned the pretensions of her two-year-older brother, on looking back she applauded his ingenuity. It was typical, however, that he should have extolled work which the average spectator would have viewed as perverse. The same wilfulness was in evidence nearly thirty years on, when he was so convinced of his own integrity that he refused to accept that his opponents might be equally sincere. The chants of ‘Cleanse the cathedral!’ and ‘No more sick art!’ filtering in from the close proved otherwise. If he had only been prepared to add a loincloth, the demonstrators would have been appeased.
‘Doesn’t an artist have a duty not to cause pain?’ she had asked him.
‘On the contrary,’ he replied, ‘his one duty is to speak the truth.’
A murmur in the rows behind alerted her to her family’s approach. Instead of slipping in by a side-aisle as discretion demanded, Clement had claimed the mother-of-the-bride privilege of a last-minute entrance down the nave. She stood up to greet him and was struck by how handsome he looked in his charcoal grey herringbone suit. Even his hair, which so often seemed an affectation, matched the medieval setting. His flushed face caused her a surge of panic, until she remembered the welcoming party on the green. She flashed him a supportive smile which faded when, as usual, he presented her with his cheek rather than his lips. She responded with a colder kiss than she would have wished. Then, too late to repair the damage, she wondered whether, far from keeping aloof, he was trying to protect her from even the most notional risk.
She turned with relief to Carla, enveloping her in a hug which was made all the warmer by her compliments for her dress.
‘I haven’t seen it before. Is it new?’
‘Of course. I had to mark the momentous occasion.’ She regretted that Clement was too engrossed in the Order of Service to hear.
‘You’re so lucky you can wear such strong colours. Permanent pastels, that’s me!’
‘Don’t be silly. Powder blue looks great on you.’ She cast an appraising glance over Carla, whose ash-blonde pageboy hair and well-scrubbed complexion were as bright and wholesome as ever. She wondered how much her affection for Carla, which could not have been greater for a blood sister, depended on her being no threat. Even during her all too brief marriage, Carla had never tried to come between Mark and his family. Which, in turn, might have sprung from her recognition that, no matter how close she was to him, she could never hope to equal his rapport with Clement, that mystical bond which no one, not even a wife, could break. It was as if, by choosing an artist from the scores of women who pursued him, Mark had sought to reassure Clement that he would not be left out. She banished the thought abruptly, conscious that any slur on Mark’s motives was the nearest thing to a taboo that their impeccably liberal family would allow.
She turned swiftly to her father, whose joyful ‘Hello Nanna’, a remnant of her nursery struggles with her name, made her feel at once warm and foolish. As she kissed his tissue-thin cheeks, she was struck by how much frailer he looked away from home. Eighty-two was no longer old. They were living in an age when medical advances had taken Abraham’s late-flowering paternity out of the realm of myth and into that of reality, even if, she acknowledged with a pang, there had yet to be any such grace accorded to Sarah. He should enjoy several more years of active life, provided that he was well looked after. On cue she turned to her mother. Age had done little to diminish her; on the contrary, while a mere five years younger than her husband, she had the vigour of a woman of fifty. One of her pet jokes, a reference to the minuscule frame that set her apart from the rest of the family, was that at her height she needed only half the normal amount of energy to survive.
‘You look good enough to drink, darling,’ she said, giving her a kiss redolent of lunch.
‘You mean “eat”, Ma,’ she replied, fearful that her mother’s hard-won grasp of English was slipping with age.
‘No, darling, isn’t that dress wine-coloured?’
‘Of course.’ She gave her mother a hug, while wishing that she would restrict herself to a simple epithet, be it ‘happy’, ‘cross,’ ‘well’ or ‘tired’, that would spare her the debilitating attempt to sift through the layers of meaning. ‘You’re looking pretty fantastic yourself. I don’t know many seventy-seven year olds who could carry off yellow-and-purple crêpe-de-Chine.’
‘You don’t think it’s too much, do you? I wouldn’t want all the old hens clucking.’
‘Of course not, Ma, you’re an inspiration to us all.’ Many a true word… she thought ruefully. She had long wished that her mother had spent less time inspiring the world at large and more looking after her children, or at least that the disciples who had flocked to her side had acknowledged the primacy of a daughter. Even the joys of living in a palace had been compromised by her determination to share it with striking miners and battered wives. She turned back to Clement, unwilling to risk a return to Wells.
‘No Mike?’ she asked, too quickly to register her mother’s warning.
‘He’s on his way. He’s supposed to be bringing Rafik… my model. But there’s been no word. That reminds me; I must switch the mobile to Vibrate.’
‘Clement, you perve!’ Karen said, leaning forward from the pew behind. ‘You’re in church!’
‘Thank you, Karen,’ Susannah said in mild reproof, pecking her on the cheek and wondering whether her sense of responsibility towards her non-stepdaughter would ever end.
She had been twenty-one when she first met Chris. At a stroke, she found the perfect focus for her belated adolescent rebellion. Chris was the ultimate challenge to her parents’ values. Unlike her brothers who had asserted themselves by their choice of subject (Clement at the Slade) and setting (Mark at Sussex), she escaped from their cloistered world by refusing to study at all. At eighteen she moved to London, intent on experiencing everything that youth and the capital had to offer, spurning the fig leaf of her mother’s ‘university of life’ by insisting that her sole aim was to have fun. She found a job as an assistant PR in a record company and, in 1989, when one of their groups, The Snow Leopards, got their big break as support for Shakespeare’s Sister, she got hers by joining them on tour. It was then that she came to the attention of Chris who, ha
ving started out as a roadie for various bands, had set up on his own as a manager.
She was easy prey for his wide-boy charm. Far from offending her by its crudity, his ‘When I take you home tonight, will there be a boyfriend in your bed?’ disarmed her by its frankness. It set the seal on all that followed. She revelled in his feral energy: his flagrant delight in making money, a far cry from her father’s sheepishness about his family wealth; his undisguised scorn of ‘oiks’, a relief after her mother’s academic egalitarianism. Whatever his faults, he was not lacking in self-awareness. ‘I know I’m vulgar,’ he declared, sprawling on his red leather sofa, ‘but I like it.’
She moved in with him after a particularly passionate evening. Her mother warned that she was far too young to make such a commitment, not least because she would be taking on his two small children. It was precisely because she was so young that she saw them as a blessing, picturing herself as Julie Andrews fresh from the convent, bringing sweetness and light to a motherless household. The reality proved to be very different. Five-year-old Karen and four-year-old Bill had been so traumatised by their mother’s death that they were more likely to pull the petals off roses and whiskers off kittens than to sing about ‘a few of my favourite things’. With a determination that surprised even herself, she set about rebuilding their lives. She stuck it out for seven years, until Chris’s drinking spiralled so far out of control that she feared for her safety. She agonised over leaving the children, but Chris, to his credit, allowed her to see them whenever she wished, as long as she never set foot in the house. On his arrest eighteen months later, she took the children to live first with her and then with her parents.
‘They’re a tribute to you, darling,’ her mother had said. ‘When I think what they were like when you first brought them here. Swinging on the tapestries. Throwing stones at the swans. It just goes to show; all that children need is the right kind of love.’
‘Thanks, Ma,’ Susannah replied, forbearing to add that she might have a very different take on the noble savage if, instead of field trips to Africa, she had spent some time in the East End.
For all her efforts, neither child turned out quite as she would have wished. Bill was the first pupil from Linden Hall ever to join the army; but, while commiserating with his teachers, she was secretly relieved that he had found a legitimate channel for impulses which might otherwise have been as dangerous as his father’s. Karen meanwhile flitted from man to man and fad to fad, a self-destructive pattern which Susannah blamed on her discovering the truth about Chris. Whatever his faults, he was a devoted father, and Karen had been devastated by the news of his arrest and conviction for an arson attack in upstate New York.
‘He didn’t do it! He couldn’t have! I know him!’ she had cried.
‘We hired a top-notch attorney.’
‘It’s all corrupt. Everyone’s corrupt.’
‘That’s what your dad was banking on,’ Susannah replied. ‘It was his whole philosophy of life.’
It was one which had left him increasingly vulnerable. He narrowly escaped charges after dangling the double-dealing manager of a Manchester nightclub from a fourth-floor window. He was pilloried in the press after Jack-in-the-Box, a decorative but uninspired boy band, complained that supporting Alice’s Kitchen on tour meant providing sexual services for a string of middle-aged promoters. By dispensing bribes and trading favours, he was able to stay one step ahead of the law at home, but the Snow Leopards’ success in the States proved to be his undoing. Against all advice, he refused to buy off the Mafia, who ousted him after the group went platinum. His public vows of revenge meant that, when the Albany concert hall burnt down on the eve of their first performance, no one believed his professions of innocence. Susannah herself didn’t want to believe them. For all her grievances against him, it was intolerable to think of an innocent man being locked up for twenty-five years.
The memory chastened her and she turned round to give Karen a broad smile, happy to see that, with her hair tied back, the green tips might be mistaken for a ribbon.
‘You’ve not said hello to Frank,’ Karen said.
‘Oh I’m sorry. I didn’t know… we’ve not been introduced.’ She gazed at the bloodless, scrawny young man who would have been perfect casting for a Dickensian clerk. ‘Hi, I’m Susannah.’
‘Ank…’ he mumbled, holding out a limp, moist hand. As Susannah shook it with a shudder, she wondered how Karen could bear his touch.
She was jolted out of her reverie by the Dean’s news that the Bishop, suffering from an upset stomach, was unable to perform the dedication. Clement, with his taste for the dramatic, muttered something about Pontius Pilate. She stroked his arm protectively while pondering the ghastly prospect that the service might be postponed, requiring them to return another day. The Dean proposed that her father take the Bishop’s place. His eager acceptance held the lie to his happy retirement, and he hurried to the vestry to robe.
‘I do hope he’ll be all right,’ her mother said, ‘he’s been looking so tired lately. He doesn’t need any extra strain.’
‘You saw his face,’ she replied. ‘He couldn’t wait to get going. It’ll give him a new lease of life.’ Clement seemed set to agree when he was distracted by the sight of Mike. She suppressed a twinge of envy at their easy intimacy, which felt like a reproach to her own solitary state.
The sight of choir and clergy processing down the nave lifted her spirits. Timelessness was the closest the Church came to eternity and she took heart from the age-old ritual. Her father brought up the rear in his gilded cope. For once she was glad that she had no more than a nominal faith or she might have been offended by the speed with which he had assumed its trappings. The organ thundered to a halt, and the Dean moved forward to welcome the congregation, seemingly oblivious to the chants which showed no signs of dwindling now that the service had begun.
The opening hymn was The Lord Is My Shepherd, and she relished its familiar cadences. Her last visit to church had been at Beckley the previous Christmas, when so many of the carols had been in medieval French that she had asked, only half-frivolously, if they were subject to an EU directive. She smiled at the recollection before sitting for the address, feeling a rush of compassion for Clement as he squirmed beneath the Dean’s plaudits. During the second hymn, the Dean escorted her father behind the altar, from where their disembodied voices rang out like airport announcements. After offering a prayer of dedication, her father drew back the curtain so discreetly that she longed for the resounding crack of a champagne bottle. She stared at the window, keen to inspect the cause of the controversy, but the sun was so bright that the glass looked molten and the design was obscured.
Subsequent events occurred too fast for her to be sure of the sequence. She heard – or, rather, saw – a smash when a stone shot through the glass.
‘Is there a doctor… anyone… a doctor?’ The Dean’s voice, shocked from its neutrality, filled her with fear for her father. She ran out of the pew, stumbling as her heel caught on a time-worn memorial, and entered the chapel to find him lying covered in splinters like a felled shop-window dummy. Her instant assumption, more reflex than thought, that he must be dead was belied by a faint moan. She stood transfixed as a quartet of doctors hurried to his aid, while a dentist, doing nothing to confound the profession’s reputation for perversity, offered himself in reserve.
‘The ambulance is on its way,’ an official shouted, just as the doctors agreed that it was safe to lift the patient on to a chair. A palpable sense of relief spread through the onlookers, pierced by a loud scream from Karen, whom she calmed with a shake and a hug.
A pack of ghouls descended on the chapel, hovering behind the rail as though distance ensured discretion. A photographer with fewer scruples snapped furiously at her father, who sat like a deposed monarch, a glass splinter the sole relic of his crown. An indignant choirman saw off the photographer but failed to spot the choirboy who was taking pictures on his mobile phone. She was abo
ut to object when she was called on to console Carla, whose attempt to rescue the fragments had been thwarted by an overzealous policeman.
The ambulance crew arrived, exuding a welcome air of professionalism. She was relieved by her father’s reluctance to lie on the stretcher although, with her own legs threatening to give way, she would have happily taken his place. The Dean led the procession through the cloisters like a party of monks spiriting away an ancient abbot at the Reformation. They reached the close where, to her dismay, they found themselves face to face with a handful of pickets. It beggared belief that any of this ragged bunch, who lowered their voices in deference to the stretcher while keeping their placards defiantly raised, could have thrown the stone. She longed to confront them with the innocent victim of their violence but suspected that, given their loathing of his views, they would regard it as divine providence. Meanwhile, their primary target eluded them, making straight for his car. She followed suit and, stopping only to collect Carla, Karen and Frank, set off for the hospital.
The radio came on along with the engine, bringing a stream of stories about a Hindu riot in Kashmir, a suicide bomb in Baghdad and a victory for the Religious Right in their advocacy of ‘intelligent design’ in Ohio. It felt as if the attack on the window were part of a wider struggle, although she was unable to determine quite what it was or on which side she stood. Then a lorry pulled out ahead, forcing her to focus on the road.
At the hospital she sat with her mother and Clement while her father was examined. The wait dragged interminably and she was desperate for a cigarette, but the fear of being found wanting kept her rooted to her seat. She attempted conversation, only to find that, having skirted the broken glass in the cathedral, she was treading on more here.
‘Don’t worry, Ma, he’ll be fine. The wound’s superficial.’
‘Nothing’s superficial at eighty-two, darling. Not even shock.’
Silence descended again, although now her apprehension was tinged with guilt, which she sought to deflect on to Clement for his blatant disregard of other peoples’ feelings. She longed to make him see that, rightly or wrongly, not everyone thought the same way as he did. He professed to be a liberal but he was just as doctrinaire as any of his critics. Not content with having made religion a seaside sideshow with his cut-out Christ, he had made it a locker-room peepshow with his nude one.
The Enemy of the Good Page 12