Every Deadly Sin

by D M Greenwood

  Mrs Lemming creaked in her chair.

  ‘Secondly, I have to tell you we shall have the honour of being joined at lunch by the Suffragan Bishop of Wormald, Bishop Francis Peake and his party.’

  ‘What’s his party?’ asked Mrs Lemming who, with artistic dexterity, was dealing with a kipper.

  ‘I understand the Archdeacon, Mr Gosh, and the Reverend the Honourable Martha Broad, who is now, of course, in priests’ orders, will be with him.’

  ‘No woman can be in priests’ orders,’ said Mr Clutton Brock, pausing as he conveyed mushrooms to his mouth. His eyes swept toward Theodora and then away again.

  ‘Miss Braithwaite is in deacons’ orders,’ Canon Beagle stepped in.

  Mr Clutton Brock looked as though he would say more and then decided against it. He took out a large, none-too-clean handkerchief and hawked into it. Mrs Lemming edged her kipper out of his range. Theodora reminded herself that bodies didn’t matter, they were just impedimenta. Angus has said so twenty minutes ago.

  ‘What brings them here?’ Mrs Clutton Brock toyed with raspberries.

  ‘I think, since you are our guests, it is only fair to share with you the possibility that St Sylvan’s may not be able to continue as a pilgrimage centre. We do not make money. That is what the Bishop and his party are going to consider today.’

  ‘What do they want to do with the place?’

  ‘I think the diocesan authorities have it in mind to sell the site.’

  ‘What will they sell it for?’ Mrs Lemming was curious.

  ‘I have heard it mentioned that it may be developed as a heritage centre.’

  ‘Why don’t they call heritage centres museums?’

  ‘Lack of muses,’ said Guy cheerfully.

  ‘A saint’s as good as a muse,’ said Mrs Lemming who had, after all, been an Anglican all her life.

  ‘What’s the shortfall?’ Canon Beagle could read a balance sheet.

  ‘Half a million would be necessary.’

  ‘We could pass the hat round. It was solvent in Bellaire’s time.’

  ‘Not entirely, I believe. It was Canon Tussock who put it on a proper footing.’

  Guy raised his head from his task of spreading the maximum amount of marmalade on to a thick slice of wholemeal. ‘They need to read the will,’ he said and gave them all his wide-open smile.

  The Right Reverend Francis Peake was not too sure how the Church differed from the world or indeed whether it should do so. ‘We set the agenda,’ he was wont to tell diocesan training groups. ‘But that agenda needs to be relevant, politically and socially relevant,’ he said with emphasis, ‘to the world’s needs. We, the Church, have got to take a lead,’ he would conclude often to applause.

  He’d risen, he’d got his episcopal orders, partly by a judicious amount of boasting (high profiling, as he put it), partly by catching a doting old bishop’s eye. The Bishop had been looking for a son that week and Francis had looked real son material. A youthful fortyyear- old, he had retained, after some thought, the bodily movements of his undergraduate days. He could be found, on occasion, sitting cross-legged on the floor at the feet of men a little younger than himself. His fair hair crinkled like knitted wire over his large head, he wore his chin jutting forward to affirm his incisiveness. Nice teeth, nice figure, nice accent (which could go demotic if the occasion warranted it) recommended him. He talked of great events as though he had formed them and great men as though he knew them intimately. Few, after all, could check. It was amazing how far this could get you in the Church of England, ever ready to be impressed by the world. He’d a friend or two in the media, he’d told the old bishop. That had clinched it. The diocesan Bishop had followed his lifelong policy of picking men for office under him who were just slightly below par, who were not quite up to the job. He enjoyed their surprise and thereafter their gratitude and deference, both of which, as he got older, he found comforting. He had made Francis Peake his suffragan before his forty-first birthday.

  Francis’s greatest spiritual struggle thereafter had been whether or not to call himself ‘Frank’. In the end he’d decided against it. He liked to have his cake and eat it, which might have suggested he should use both according to need and context. But he was a man of integrity. He’d stand by Francis. It was as well to keep in with the religious side of things.

  Now, as he swung the wheel of his new Mondeo towards St Sylvan’s he felt he was to face the first trial of his new strength. The place would have to go, whatever the locals thought. The road stretched ahead curving over the hills. The dry-stone walls hemmed in the sheep. The sun was up, the world was good. He should make St Sylvan’s for ten-thirty. There would be time enough to say a pastoral word to the servants before the meeting.

  He reviewed the field. There wouldn’t be any problem from his fellow committee members. Angus whatshisname was wet. He’d no clout. He didn’t count. Not very senior in orders, he rather thought. Four or five years at most. He’d been a teacher or something dim before he’d been priested, he seemed to remember. As for Gosh, well, Gosh was just an evangelical barrow-boy. Full of enthusiasm and guitars and suchlike. Hopeless as Archdeacon. Let the diocesan treat him like an office boy. So busy being jovially all things to all men, he’d no time to watch his back. That was a mistake in Peake’s view. You’d got to be prepared to make enemies in this game. Standing up for the right and so on. Getting things done. Getting known for being what, after all, one actually was, pretty able, was what it was all about.

  Bishop Peake put his foot on the accelerator to show how very powerful he was. The traffic was light. He’d passed one cyclist. He glanced in the driving mirror to see his new purple stock. It looked good; it suited him. He turned his thoughts to the coming meeting. He only needed to make three quick points, he reckoned: relevance, of course, money and er, redeployment. The lunch and back to report to and dine with the diocesan Bishop this evening.

  Lunch with Martha Broad would be a bit of a pain. To say she really did come from a top family (Broads had had land at Rest since the Conquest), she was ghastly. Fat, for a start. Why did women let themselves go? And, frankly, women in orders! Of course in theory and in the modern world and all that but really there was no need for them. There wasn’t anything they did as well as men. And as for them dressing up in clerical collars, it was just risible. He hadn’t much time for them actually. He’d told his patron the diocesan Bishop. The diocesan, who entirely agreed with him, saw no reason, since he’d preferred Peake, not to punish him. ‘The modern world,’ said the old Bishop recalling something he thought he’d heard another bishop say in the House of Lords, ‘is providing us with new challenges. Who knows where the Spirit may require us to go? The great question of our time for us is, can the Church catch the world up? We’ve got to do that if we’re to lead it,’ he had concluded oracularly. Francis hastened to agree with him. Actually he thought the old man was talking rubbish, beginning to lose his grip. Time he let younger and more able men step into the driving seats.

  The car was new and clean, the upholstery well sprung; his driving gloves were smart. The document case and map on the seat beside him looked efficient and masterly. He felt he really did make a good bishop. The leadership role was so very important. Before the diocesan had picked him out at that fortunate dinner party, he’d sometimes feared he might not make it. Still, it had turned out all right on the night. Merit, of course, real quality, will out. But in the Church you could never tell. It was all rather chancy, not being able to apply for jobs, just having to wait around till you were invited and never really knowing what they were looking for. Must be terribly soul-destroying if you didn’t have talent, mouldering in some obscure little country living burying unimportant people and marrying peasants.

  He pressed the button which wound down the window and looked down over the chestnut forests. He was a town man, well, suburbs really, so the country was still a bit of an adventure to him. He hadn’t quite got over how c
lean the air was out here. There were times when he felt almost attacked by it. He slowed down for the turning to St Sylvan’s then braked. Slewed halfway across the narrow road was an ambulance. Or rather, it had once been an ambulance, now clearly it was something else. A multicoloured dragon’s head had been painted across its back doors. One of these was open and from it spread a collection of dogs and children. The vehicle filled the road. It was impossible to pass.

  Bishop Peake revved the engine of his new car. The dogs and children seemed not to hear him. He hesitated a moment and put on the handbrake and tooted on the horn in quite a friendly fashion. Still there was no sign of the vehicle moving. Peake felt a surge of irritation. Couldn’t they see what he wanted? What on earth were they all doing? He framed his reproach. ‘You do realise this is a public highway which it is an offence to obstruct.’ Then he got out of the car and slammed the door to make them pay attention to him. He smiled commandingly at one of the children, a boy of about twelve. The boy was wearing a football shirt in Huddersfield Town colours and a pair of greenish cords rather too large for him, held up by washing-line. He was carrying something in his hand, Bishop Peake noticed. He looked more closely. It was a rabbit which the boy was holding by its back legs. From its mouth came the steady drip of blood on to the hot grey tarmac. A Jack Russell pirouetted round him to get at the corpse. The boy swung it high in the air to torment the dog. Bishop Peake stepped back to avoid being splattered by blood.

  Irritation turned to anger. ‘What is all this? What precisely is going on here?’ Peake enquired.

  The boy turned a blank face towards him. He seemed to see him from very far away. ‘Blowy,’ he said and managed to make the word sound sibilant.

  In times of stress Francis Peake’s hearing was not always reliable. ‘What?’ he asked. genuinely at a loss.

  ‘Blowy,’ repeated the boy.

  ‘No it weren’t,’ said one of the girls with contempt. ‘We skid, didn’t we? Then the tyre go. That aren’t wind. No way it was not.’

  ‘Yah silly beggar. Blowy it was,’ retorted her brother with spirit. ‘Blowy the tyre.’

  Bishop Peake felt he was losing control of the situation. ‘Who’s in charge here?’ he demanded. He kept his smile in place but the tone was peremptory. Probably the boy was simple and if so he might be dangerous or anyway unpredictable. He looked at the dripping rabbit with loathing. The children gathered round him. There seemed to be a great many of them, surely more than the ambulance could hold. None of them looked clean. From the back row of the circle one of them pointed to the bishop’s shirt. ‘Nice shirt,’ he remarked as though to an equal in sartorial affairs. ‘Purple’s nice.’

  ‘Whose is this thing?’ Peake gestured towards the obstructing ambulance.

  ‘Blance is Gik’s,’ said the shirt expert.

  ‘He’s over the wall.’ The girl flung her arm back over her shoulder.

  Bishop Peake started towards the wall and then stopped. A tall male figure in a brown belted gabardine reared up from the other side. The man’s face was long and tanned. He had a lot of dark curly hair which was neatly tied in the nape of his neck in a short queue. Peake formed the impression he was wearing no shirt under his gaberdine. The man gazed at Peake out of wide-set alien eyes. He spoke no word. Peake’s temper snapped.

  ‘I’m very much afraid,’ he began dangerously, ‘you’ll have to move this thing at once. I have a very important appointment indeed, for which I am really rather late.’ He shot his cuff to show his Rolex and tapped it lest the man should be deficient in the concept of time.

  The man’s eyes went from Peake’s face to the watch. In a single movement he put his hand on the wall and vaulted over it landing upright immediately in front of and very close to Peake.

  ‘Nice watch,’ he said in an accent which was not easily assigned to any English county.

  Peake could not bear the invasion of his space by the taller man. He stepped back. It was an unfortunate thing to do. His attendant crowd of children, including the boy holding the rabbit, had grouped themselves behind him. There was an anguished yelp from the Jack Russell as the Bishop’s foot caught him. The dog abandoned the rabbit for the Bishop’s leg.

  No one seemed to feel it was the dog’s fault. Two more dogs, much larger than the Jack Russell, fell out of the back of the ambulance and came to support the home team. The children cheered impartially. The brown gaberdine looked on as Bishop and dog fought it out. The noise rose to a crescendo until the man finally seemed to feel enough was enough. He gave a low whistle and the terrier rolled its eyes in his direction without actually letting go of the mouthful of trouser and flesh to which he had committed himself. At the second whistle, however, he disengaged and stood, his little feet splayed, his flanks heaving, his throat vibrating with growls.

  Bishop Peake backed cautiously towards his brand-new car. With a final lurch he fell into the driving seat and banged the door shut. An inch of steel between himself and chaos revived the Bishop’s courage. His mind turned to cliché as the needle to the North Pole. ‘You have not heard the last of this matter, I can assure you. This is a very serious matter indeed. I have no intention of letting the matter drop. I know the Chief Constable very well indeed, as it happens.’

  But the man in the gaberdine had lost interest. The chorus of children bore down upon the car. The boy with the rabbit held it up and swung it back and forth in front of the windscreen while the blood dripped on the bonnet. The Bishop reached for reverse.

  CHAPTER SIX

  From the Old Things to the New

  ‘It’s not being married to a clergyman that I find so unpleasant,’ said Mrs Lemming. ‘It’s being married to Norman.’

  Theodora wiped the sweat from her brow and plunged her fork into the end of the trench. She watched a wire worm slip adroitly between its prongs. Had it a mind or only behaviour? She looked up at Mrs Lemming who had a mind, indeed a troubled one. Society, a time when one gives out, Theodora reflected, solitude a time when one takes in. She had hoped for a rather larger dose of solitude at Rest. But after breakfast Mrs Lemming had followed her to the enclosed garden and tracked her down amongst the onion sets. Theodora had resolved to spend some time in useful unskilled physical labour. Since Tom Bough seemed not to object even if he evinced no actual enthusiasm, she had started out amongst the vegetables.

  Mrs Lemming sat down on the bench beside the hose tap, embraced her knees and determinedly started to converse. Theodora had realised early in life that she attracted lame ducks as the magnet the steel. This was perfectly in order as far as she was concerned; if she could help, she would. It was just that at times she thirsted for a cessation of demands. She though of Geoffrey also about to embark on the perilous gamble of a lifetime’s companionship with someone whom, surely, he hardly knew. How courageous, how rash the married were.

  ‘You see he stops me speaking the truth. He simply makes it impossible.’ Mrs Lemming was pressing on.

  ‘How does he do that?’ Theodora was interested in spite of herself.

  ‘Well, now, of course, he has angina so that cuts out saying anything which could give him a sudden shock.’

  Theodora wondered what this middle-aged woman could possibly have to say to her old husband, which, after thirty years of marriage, could cause his heart to palpitate.

  ‘His ailments in old age chain me up as much now as his vocation did in his younger days. He uses both to stop me speaking.’

  ‘How?’ Theodora continued digging. She saw no reason, so far, to stop. Often people talked more freely if they felt themselves to be peripheral to your main attention. Mrs Lemming appeared not to resent the arrangement and pressed on with a fluency which made Theodora wonder if she had rehearsed.

  ‘He uses fear, my fear of his panic. I sense panic behind his eyes when he’s confronted with, oh, I don’t know, ideas he can’t understand, attitudes and values different from his own. He seems to feel that as a parish priest he ought
to be omniscient. And of course he’s not.’

  Theodora was familiar with the syndrome. ‘Priests are often seen as gods in their own parishes. We have great expectations of them. Too great, perhaps, for them to bear, too great for their own moral good.’

  Mrs Lemming was delighted. Somebody understood what she was saying and didn’t apparently, despise or judge her for saying it. She grew more confiding. With the detail born of suffering, she reviewed for Theodora’s benefit the evasions she had noted over the years which her husband had adopted and refined to fend off the real world, that swirling chaos of the diverse and the unpredictable which threatened Norman Lemming’s frail personality. She had watched him patronise and deflate, advise and rebuke as though from an immense moral height on matters far outside the sacramental. She had seen how he responded with elaborate and belittling courtesy to the laymen, and, even more, the women who did the work of the parish for him. She had listened to him preach Sunday after Sunday in the nineteenth-century pulpit in the nineteenth-century church stationed high above the congregation, so high that they had to tilt their heads back to see him. Thus elevated, already halfway to Heaven, he had preached sermons made up of quotations usually from the Bible. No one could criticise them. He rarely essayed comment above the most moralistic.

  ‘I just can’t understand,’ Mrs Lemming cantered on, ‘why they turned out to hear him. But, you know, he had a solid congregation for over twenty years. He wasn’t kind. He wasn’t concerned. Only frightened that anyone should find out he wasn’t. He was like a parcel which no one had ever bothered to unwrap. Everyone assumed it contained the goods. I sometimes wonder if the congregation too feared that if they found there was nothing inside, it would be they who would be the poorer. We’re all locked up in a self-deceiving game with Norman at its centre.’

  Theodora felt she had heard this many times before, too many times for comfort. She recalled, as she always did on such occasions, her own excellent father’s parochial practice just to remind herself that there were good parish priests, altar and office men, who performed competently and unobtrusively the duties of praying for Church and world. She turned her attention back to Mrs Lemming.