No sooner was Knott sat, though, than they had more company – Charlie Gummer, round in the middle, thin on top, bearing a furled broadsheet and a supermarket carrier bag. ‘Hello Gloria, Judy,’ he sang.
When first greeted in this fashion Gore had felt some hackles rise, before realising it was simply an irredeemable trait in Gummer, and part of the tolerant atmosphere of Grey, fostered from on high by Lockhart.
‘Look, quail’s eggs. Sainbury’s had them discounted.’
Gore tried to look impressed. Gavin too was being asked to coo, but he was not comfortable. And yet Gummer was allegedly his pal, another of a High Church disposition, hence their Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee alliance.
Gummer settled himself on the banquette between them with a modicum of squirming. ‘So, you and Essex Man at each other’s throats again, John,’ he tutted. ‘You know, I don’t agree with Simon, not on much. Sometimes I think he’s a bit touched? Few pages stuck together, upstairs.’
Gore nodded.
‘Though I will say, he’s got nice eyes.’ Gummer was beating his Telegraph against his leg. Now he thrust the paper at Gore. ‘More grief for the Windsors, you see? Charlie’s been at it too.’
Gore glanced at the front page, given over to some new revelations about the marital strife of the Prince of Wales and his wife. ‘Does it really bother you?’ he murmured, returning the paper.
‘“Bother” me? Our future king? Excuse me, Judy, in case you didn’t notice, the monarch is the head of our Church.’
‘But this is the front page? When we were just chucked out of the ERM?’
‘Oh that’s just … money. And bloody Europe.’
‘A recession, Charles, and all because a few rich men with more money than the government start –’
Gummer clapped hands over ears in the manner of the prudently deaf monkey. ‘La-la-la-la-la! Boring!’
Fine, thought Gore, live in your own little cloister.
‘Judy, this is a constitutional matter. Does he plan on being a divorced king? Marrying his divorced mistress? Or does he just think he’ll keep her on as his bit? No, we have to deplore this. The public demands it of us. To be properly reverent about things. It’s like the opening of parliament. That’s where we’re at our best, Judy. In purple.’
‘In pantomime, you mean,’ Gore murmured.
‘John,’ said Knott, nearly smiling, ‘I seem to recall you saying that vicars ought to be a bit like actors.’
Gummer was rubbing his hands toward a trestle table piled with shrink-wrapped sandwiches. ‘Right, then, I’ve got my victuals but what’ll you girls have?’
‘Not for me, thanks, Charles, I’ve a lunch date.’ Gore was glad to rise and stride out into the air, free of the airless sun-bleached room, mired in matters that Barlow’s beloved Man in the Street would surely think queer if not redundant.
*
The designated restaurant on King Street was a brasserie, wrought-iron tables and chairs set for alfresco diners under a stiff white canvas awning. Gore the anchorite felt he had come to the outside world in some style. Within its shaded depths, a crisp young man danced across the laminate floor toward him.
‘I’m here to meet Ms Susannah Gore?’
‘Twelve-thirty? She’s not here but I’ll take you to table.’
Today was a surprise summons. Either Susannah was feeling unusually guilty for time not spent or, more likely, desirous of displaying her fast-moving prosperity, her irresistible rise within the firm of Hook Millard. His sole fear was that she might have a problem she wanted to share: if so, they were liable to sit marooned in unhappiness. Their teenage jousting had fallen into disuse, but nothing more meaningful had filled its place, so markedly different were their adult worlds. For four or more years she had been in an on–off relationship with a Tory MP, one Sebastian Sellars, a suave sort of a pig – relations that John firmly if fruitlessly deplored. Now he was given to believe the affair was in a dormant phase. But she surely had to know he had no advice to give? There was, then, a more discomfiting thought. If he were her best hope for sympathy, did she have any real friends?
And here she was, slipping between tables, rather chic in a black polo-neck, a heathery-grey wool miniskirt, sheer tights and knee-length black leather boots. He rose, they embraced lightly.
‘I like your outfit.’
‘Of course you like it. It’s sort of dull, isn’t it?’
She set down a dinky paging device and lit a menthol cigarette. Gore inspected the menu, mentally reckoning the price of each entrée as a percentage of his current account balance. Susannah leaned across the table, hand over face in stage whisper. ‘Divvint worry, kidder. You can have the steak.’ She sat back, pleased with herself, and by her brother’s giggle. ‘I’ll just claim it back. Or will I? Yeah, I will. I’ll put you down as a consultant. Say you were advising me. On what Jesus would have done.’
‘Don’t let me get you in trouble.’
‘Oh, trust me, you’re small fry to what some of those buggers spend. You should have seen our summer party. Smoked salmon and champagne all night for two hundred. But – it pays for itself. So you have your steak.’
‘What do you mean, “pays for itself”?’
‘Well, there’s plenty of our clients happy to sponsor a nice little drinky. They like meeting MPs. It cuts both ways – MPs like meeting millionaires. Who knows what it could mean down the road? Maybe a few thousand jobs in their backyard.’
‘It sounds like – what do you call it? Insider trading?’
‘Never. It’s just like-minded people having a nice little drinky.’
‘So you like it, then? Lobbying?’
‘Well, I was fucked off with PR. Having to worry about the size of bloody billboards all the time. No, it’s good, lobbying. We just took a job for the Nigerian government, would you believe? French Water Board before that. I got threatened with Scottish and Newcastle Breweries, but I telt them, “Listen, I don’t drink turps.”’
‘What can you do for the Nigerian government?’
‘Just present a case. For something they’d like done. They’ve maybe got a project and they’re not certain how we do things, how our market works. Same as if it’s a foreign manufacturer, he’s maybe worried if he sets up here then he won’t get to run off his waste into the River Tees. Little does he know, eh? So, anyhow, then we might have a word with one of our MPs.’
‘Your MPs?’
‘We’ve got a few members we pay. Consultants. We’re only starting a conversation they’d want to be having anyway … What’s that look for?’
‘Nobody elected any of you lot, Su.’
‘Pet, what is an MP for? God, if people knew, all what doesn’t get done in their names, by whatever monkey they sent up, I tell you, they wouldn’t set much store on the whole …’ – she sighed – ‘I don’t know, box-ticking part of things. Anyhow, there’s no politics in what we do. Not party politics like you think. We’re not … contaminated by any of that. The people I work with, they’re just clever people. They might have Tory backgrounds or Labour backgrounds, none of it counts on the job.’
‘Who do you know has a Labour background?’
‘Oh, we’ve taken on Labour people since the election. A lad used to be in the press office, a girl from one of the think-tanks. They’re good, too.’
Gore did not quite believe the heresy. But a high gleam stayed in her eye as entrées were served. ‘Do you remember a guy called Martin Pallister?’
‘I do. Lecturer. From Newcastle? I remember his dad too.’
‘His dad? Well, Martin came to see me and I’m doing a bit work for him. On the side, really. Off the books.’
‘What can you do for a college lecturer?’
‘Oh no, he’s come on a fair bit. Wants to be an MP. I’ve been advising him. We ran into each other a few years back – that course I did out in Surrey?’
Gore had vague recall of his sister spending a long weekend at some country hotel being instructed
in assertiveness, not an attribute he remembered as wanting in her or indeed Martin Pallister.
‘Don’t worry, it’s not sexual. Just a job. No, my sex life is a bore, dahling.’
‘No one left on the Tory benches takes your fancy?’
‘Please. They’re a lot of wimps. Snuck into the Commons under Maggie’s skirts. They look a poor lot now she’s gone, I can tell you.’ She had taken on a dreamy aspect, her osso buco neglected. ‘Seb wasn’t like that. Not gay, or weird. Not on the take, not really. Just a smart, handsome guy. The wrong horse, but. Wife and kiddie and that. Don’t know where my head went to there.’ Gore was silent, feeling much the novice. Susannah shook her head as though to dislodge clinging irritants. ‘No. No, I was silly. It won’t happen again.’
‘At least you got out unscathed.’
She pouted at him, as if the comment were woundingly heedless.
‘Well, you did. All in all? Didn’t you?’
A quite unthinkable thought occurred to Gore, and he quashed it before it gestated, chewing at length on his lean, flavourless beef fillet. To his relief Susannah recovered her stride. ‘What I need is a new job. Or new contacts. Your lot are coming up.’
‘We only got beat six months ago.’
‘Well, defeats can be blessings in disguise. Isn’t that what Churchill’s wife told him when he lost to what’s-his-face?’
‘Atlee.’
‘Aye, him. No, Smith’s hopeless, just a Scots lawyer. He’s not Kinnock, but. He could maybe beat Major. You could maybe beat Major.’
‘You’re too kind.’
‘I’m serious. The ERM thing is a fucking disaster. I suppose you enjoyed it.’
Gore shrugged. Yes, he had felt a certain sickly thrill in the Tory calamity, worsening with each hourly news bulletin, the bumbling schoolboy Chancellor fighting his feckless rearguard, buying sterling in billions while foreign speculators bet against him with lethal ease.
Their plates were being whisked away, Susannah lighting up moodily. ‘Housing market’s gone rotten too. Just when I had my eye on Islington.’
‘It’s all about houses, isn’t it?’
‘You bet it is, pet. Ask your Church about it. You know how much they’ve pissed away on property? Eight hundred million. They might have to sell the Metro Centre.’
The Church’s interest in a Gateshead shopping mall was not of interest to Gore. He tried to let Susannah see as much. ‘Don’t sneer, bonny lad, that’s your pension there. I was reading, actually, about the Metro, they’ve got a chaplain, of all things? Presumably he goes around telling people not to spend all their money. Made us think, but. Have you picked out your pitch yet? That could be one for you … You didn’t want coffee, did you?’
‘No, I have class at two. Ethics.’
‘Oh, ethics indeed? Is that where Basildon is?’
She glanced at her slip of a Tag Heuer watch, and made what John considered a rather over-defined show of flipping her credit card at the small white dish on which the bill was lolling.
*
The custom of the evening was for a loose affiliation of more sociable ordinands to follow Compline by a visit to one in the rank of pubs on King Street. Arriving solo after the terse weekly phone call to his father, Gore pushed through the door of the Nell Gwyn to find the session in swing, and saw to his dismay that Simon Barlow had inserted himself into the heart of the sodality.
‘Right then, Gore’s here, let’s have some proper crack about the vote.’
Charlie Gummer set down his tall frothy lager. ‘Ears! Ears! La-la-la-la-la! Not women! No, I bar the subject!’
Gore turned for the bar, there procuring a warm pint of sour sudsy bitter and a bag of peanuts, but on his return he found the issue unabated.
‘The whole thing,’ Gummer was gesticulating, ‘is just a ghastly American import. Like Dynasty. All this time, there’s poor Rome patiently reaching out to us. Now we’re just going to blow that all to hell.’
Gore set down his pint. ‘Who cares about Rome? We’re Anglicans. We ought to have the right enemies. I pay no more heed to the Pope than I do to Mystic Meg.’
‘Ooh. Nice one.’ Barlow banged the table. ‘Them’s fighting words.’
‘Well, I tell you now,’ Gummer declared airily, ‘I’d as soon go off and start up a whole new church than have to share the one we’ve got with a load of dippy birds. Is that what you want for our Communion, John? Women bishops, ordaining priests? It’s ridiculous. Where’s our authority then?’
Barlow clattered the table again: Gore knew it for a shameless ploy. ‘Right. And Christ told Peter, “On this rock I build My Church.” And after Peter was Linus, after Linus Clement, after Clement … Who was it, Gavin?’
‘Anacletus,’ murmured Gavin Knott.
‘Anacletus. Doesn’t that stir your blood, Gore? Doesn’t it move you? Our heritage, our descendance? From them who walked with Christ?’
Gore chose to ignore the monkey. ‘You’re very quiet, Gavin.’
Knott’s eyes flicked upward from his glass of red-ink Syrah. ‘Well, if you’re asking for my view of the question, I should say – I do believe there’s a reason why God chose to – incarnate himself, as a male. To reveal himself in that form. And take only men for his disciples. I do, yes.’ He nodded.
‘What reason is that then?’ Gore was truly curious.
‘Oh, I don’t say I know what it is.’ And Knott chuckled, the rarest of sights. ‘But it does seem He was content it be so.’
A hundred easy ripostes occurred, but Gore bit his lip. He saw no point in arguing with a wilful mystic, or playing the male feminist in this homosocial conclave.
*
On returning heavy-footed to his set of rooms he should have gone directly to his bed, he knew, and yet instead, enervated, he fell onto the chaise longue and there stared glazedly and gloomily at a hollow of plaster in the wall. At some point, though, he must have faded into sleep, for the next he knew he was peering with bleary eyes at the back of a hunched and bristly figure perched on the end of his bed. Lit only by the bedside-table lamp, its shoulders seemed to shake with contained mirth. The grace of a few more befuddled moments were needful for Gore to take this strange sight as reality rather than dream-state.
‘Simon …? What are you doing?’
Barlow swivelled to face him. ‘Your door was wide open, pal. Thought I’d better check on you. Someone might have done you an injury.’
Gore hoisted himself upright, dry-mouthed, not madly grateful.
‘Reason I come, see, is cos I thought you might fancy a nightcap?’
Now Gore saw the bottle of Bulgarian red on the bedside table, next to a pair of his utility glass tumblers, both of them generously charged.
‘Here.’ Barlow thrust a tumbler at him. ‘Have a sip. It’s not too foul for what it cost.’ He took a swig of his own, then smacked his lips with a livid tongue. ‘God almighty. Gav and old Charlie, eh? Fattypuff and Thinnifer. I mean, yeah, the whole women thing is barmy. But I can’t stomach the way that Charlie puts it. See, you reckon I rub along okay with that lot, don’t you?’
‘No, not necessarily.’ Gore sniffed uneasily at the wine.
‘Well, it’s true, I’m all for the High Church mob if it helps stick it to all you liberal scum. And I like this Pope, I’ll say that. He’s the boss, what he says goes. But that’s it. No, he puts me right off my supper, that Charlie.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, don’t come the innocent, John. You know how it is round here. All these mincers. Closet cases, making rules to suit their own perversions. Or is that all okay by you then, is it?’
‘Not just me,’ Gore groaned. ‘The bishops. We have a position, it’s been settled. You know what Lockhart says. “God intends a partner for each one of us.” Who knows, Simon, He may even have a partner for you.’
‘Oh, funny, yeah. Not clergy, but. If they want to be clergy, the gayers, they’re supposed to mend their ways. Get straightened out. I tell you what I th
ink’s funny. Letting them decide what God wants for them. What’s the bet they decide he wants what they want? Eh? Lovely. So no harm in a little bit of buggery then.’
‘Do you have to use that word?’
‘People shouldn’t hide it, John, or try and talk around it. God sees it. Augustine calls it dead right. “Let your sin have you for its judge, not its patron.”’ Barlow took a sluicing swallow of wine. ‘Anyhow. That’s not my point. My point with these High Churchers, what really winds me up is all this threatening to pick up their ball and flounce off to Rome. That’s not how you win an argument, right? You stay the course, fight the good fight. My lot, we’re not going anywhere, I’ll tell you that.’ And he grinned. ‘You wish we would, don’t you John?’
‘You can do what you like.’
‘Oh, very liberal, I’m sure.’
Barlow stood with a little difficulty and slouched across the rug toward Gore’s fitted bookshelves, where he trailed fingers over a mounted print of Christ Pantokrator and the old brass miner’s lamp that served as bookend to Gore’s small paperback library. He peered closer. ‘“Existentialist Biblicism”. Bloody hell. Very thin, these books of yours. I mean, why do you bother? With all these continental phonies?’
‘I don’t see the harm in reading.’
‘Well, you say that, I’m not so sure. I think it waters down the faith.’
‘What, you don’t read?’
‘I read scripture, John. Just scripture. And I find it sufficient unto the day. It’s got all you need, scripture, if you look right. Amazing, it is. Have you never noticed that? I mean, what do you get out of scripture, John? If it’s not the Word of God?’
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