by A. N. Wilson
‘Trivia is my métier – hadn’t you noticed?’
‘That’s not what I meant – oh, I meant, here was I going on about my feelings about Worledge and Hans Busch and …’
‘I know what you meant.’
‘Is it because of us?’
A sly glance peeped over the top of his specs.
The scene at the dining table last night was not going away. It replayed itself constantly inside his head – Julia’s face contorted with hurt anger; his teenaged daughter in tears; his son staring at him with hatred before leaving the room and slamming the door.
‘And all this time,’ Julia had said, ‘all this time!’
She’d waved the evidence over the untasted lasagne – some statements from MasterCard, and a bundle of envelopes containing letters which he had always known it was madness to have kept.
The MasterCard statements showed that he regularly patronized a massage parlour in Bermondsey. It was not a fact of which he was either especially proud or especially ashamed. He felt about it as he felt about his journalism. He knew that it could be seen as sad, sordid, possibly disgraceful. He wished, with heartfelt strength, that his wife had never become aware of this degrading habit of his. But – there it was. He was fairly sure that divorce would not have been mentioned merely because of his going to a massage parlour every few weeks.
It was the bundle of letters from Mary Much which provided evidence of something much more damning. Lionel and his wife had been married for twenty years. It now emerged that for well over ten of them, he had been the lover of Mary Much.
‘She’s been in this house – she’s patronized me, she’s praised my taste in interior design, my clothes – my God, I’d like to kill her.’
It was the quietness with which Julia said this which alarmed him.
None of this conversation could possibly be repeated back to Rachel. He knew that if she knew about the massage parlours, she would be far more shocked than Julia had been. Julia was a trouper – she probably thought of massage parlours as catering for the ridiculous side of the male psyche, and she was right really. Rachel would be far less tolerant and much more easily hurt. She had often spoken to him of her horror of prostitution and of the men who exploited women in this way. He had always heartily agreed, denouncing them as pathetic wankers. As for telling her the truth – that throughout their affair he had also been sleeping (albeit occasionally) with Mary Much – this was impossible.
‘Yes,’ he said quietly.
He would never know why he told Rachel this lie, but some of the reason for it was connected with his desire to protect her from the truth. Even as he told the lie, his brain spoke of the appalling risk that she might come round to the house in Clapham, or by some other means – with her humourless desire for truthtelling – confront Julia, apologize to her … In that precise moment, however, he was desperate that Rachel should not know about the massage parlours, nor about the Mary Much affair. So, he said that Julia was wanting a divorce because she had found out about his affair with Rachel.
She leaned forward, and he could see in her dark eyes all the things which at that moment he most dreaded – love, undying commitment, and support.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I know it’s hell for you now. And it’s hell for Julia. But it’s going to be such a relief, sweetheart – not lying any more.’
He made a little grunting noise and found that it was not just that tears were in his eyes: he was convulsed with crying.
‘Oh, Lionel. You can call me darling now. Call me darling as much as you like,’ said Rachel Pearl.
‘Fuck-a-duck,’ said Peg Montgomery. She had lured Sinclo to Bin Ends to discuss diary stories. He had kept from her Mary Much’s promise that he would soon be in charge of editing ‘Dr Arbuthnot’ himself. ‘Bit early for that sort of thing, isn’t it?’ She indicated Rachel Pearl and L. P. Watson, who were openly embracing. He remembered as a boy when it became clear, from the laughter of the grown-ups, that his mother and father, not Father Christmas, had been filling his stocking year after year. He had felt enormously humiliated by the laughter, and grief-stricken for the shattering of his faith in something which had been wholesome, innocent, pure. Allied to these feelings was the cynical knowledge that with a part of his brain, he had always known the truth.
THIRTY-SIX
‘If he’s better – and he’s so much better, Mum – what does it matter what he gets up to …?’
‘I don’t like it,’ said Lily. ‘I preferred it when he was being a bad boy …’
‘Even Trevor notices the difference: though he still thinks he’s pinching his Marlboro Lites. Which he isn’t.’
‘Where does he get those expensive clothes from? I ask him, and he smiles in that strange way. And he doesn’t speak in the way he used to. That voice. Sometimes he sounds like Father Vivyan, sometimes it’s like he’s acting – “Dashed good show” – who taught him to say that?’
‘He’s got a beautiful voice.’
‘Yes, Mercy, he’s got several beautiful voices – but what I’m telling you is they aren’t Peter’s voices.’
‘He told me it’s a really posh restaurant where he’s working. He’s always picked up different ways of speaking, since he was a little kid.’
‘It don’t feel right. Like now, he’s all religious, and—’
‘You surely approve of that?’
‘It’s not right, not all of a sudden. I told him when he came to live with me now, I go to mass each Sunday and I want you to come with me. And it was all silence, or “Oh Gram, do I have to”, “Oh Gram, I’m tired, don’t make me …” And now what is it – every blessed moment he’s not down that restaurant, he’s been down the church. And those nights I worry myself sick wondering where he’s got to – he’s sleeping at Father Vivyan’s house.’
‘You should have told me, Mum. Those nights he was missing.’
‘You’ve got enough on your plate.’
‘I’m feeling optimistic,’ said Mercy. ‘It could be so much worse. It has been so much worse.’
‘Finish your coffee.’
‘I haven’t had a chance to read the Legion yet.’
‘Bring it in your bag and read it after.’
So it was that Mercy Topling and Lily d’Abo missed an item buried in the paper about the mystery death of a psychiatric social worker, Kevin Currey, 38. From the crowds at rush hour, at the Angel Islington, he had suddenly been pitched in front of a train and died instantly. There had been a number of cases recently of young boys pushing passengers off the platform of underground stations into the path of incoming trains. This death seemed comparable, but no one had seen anything suspicious; no one saw Kevin Currey being pushed. Since his death, it had emerged that Currey had links with various paedophile rings. The schools in south London where he worked claimed that they had received no complaints, but the police had taken his computer and downloaded a large quantity of illegal material.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Tall, bald, cherubic in appearance, Brigadier Courtenay emerged from Crickleden Junction wearing a charcoal-grey double-breasted suit, and highly polished black brogues. He also wore a white mackintosh and sheltered beneath a golfing umbrella.
He had done his homework, as he always did. He would be able to find his way to the shrine without consulting a street map, or otherwise drawing attention to himself, though in that district of London he could hardly fail to stand out, dressed as he was and looking as he did. Nearly everyone he passed in the High Road was black. Since he was in plenty of time, he could take in the drizzly atmosphere, and look in at the windows of shops, most of which were closed. Super Afro Cosmetics looked at first glance as if a scalp-hunter had been hard at work, to judge from the many skeins of hair of various colours and consistency hanging from the walls like tassels. ‘100% Human and Artificial Hair’ said a notice in the window. He noted an Internet cafe next door; always useful to know where these were. He had lately become an active e-mailer, enjoying
this terse and above all silent method of communication. Next to the Internet café was The Gold Shop – Western Union Money Transfer. Cheques cashed. Pawnbrokers. Next to this was a large neon-lit shop front called Silvertime Amusement Centre. Beyond its open door, the Brigadier glimpsed a darkened room twinkling with dozens of fruit machines and one-armed bandits. Next to this was a butcher selling ‘Halal Meat – Fair Prices’ and next to this was a driving school called The Redeemer’s Tuition Centre.
The Brigadier was aware of an atmosphere unknown in England since his boyhood, of Sunday morning being observed. Into the Baptist church near the station, rotund women in large white hats and gloves had been filing in their dozens. The Redeemer Chapel next to the driving school seemed no less popular, and as he wandered along, liking all that he saw, he noted the popularity of the Seventh-Day Adventist conventicle and the Comunidale de Londres Church of Prophecy.
He had read up the previous evening about his own destination.
In the Middle Ages, Crickleden had been a village on the Pilgrim’s Road to Canterbury. The Shrine of Our Lady of Crickleden had been a place of pilgrimage in its own right. Henry VI, after his arrest in the north in 1464, had been allowed by his Yorkist captors to come to the shrine and pray, before, with his legs tied under his horse and a straw hat rammed on his head, he had been ridden through the streets of London with the mob hooting and jeering at him. (The monk who accompanied the king often heard him murmur Owre Ladie of Cryckleden, pray for me.) Henry VIII in his pious youth had walked to the shrine barefoot, and it was a favourite place for Thomas More.
After the Reformation it fell into disrepair, and it was probably largely fancy on the part of the late-Victorian incumbent of old Crickleden parish church that the few boulders and heaps of rubble found on the site of a proposed new church was the ruin of the medieval shrine. This clergyman was the Reverend Cuthbert Guiseley, DD, a disciple of Canon Liddon, and a keen ritualist. The scheme to build a large brick mission church to cater for the new sprawl of south London suburb became in his mind the ‘revival’ of the old pilgrim site. To the barn-like basilica, described in Pevsner as ‘a substantial stock brick building in Northern French Gothic’, had been added, in the north aisle, a ‘shrine chapel’ in 1906 by the Arts and Crafts architect and metal-worker Oswald Fish. The screens were described by Professor Pevsner as ‘Fish at his exuberant best’, though he disliked the altar added by Sir Ninian Comper in 1931.
The Reverend Cuthbert, having established this centre of ritualism for the inhabitants of East Crickleden – the Brigadier imagined the original occupants of these two-storey modest villas as clerks who read H. G. Wells and most of whom had no time for outmoded pieties – left for the mission fields of Africa. He was consecrated Bishop of Accra in 1910, and was translated to Chamberlainstown in 1917. It was during his life as a colonial bishop that Guiseley formed the Community of the Holy Redeemer, a small religious order whose rule was based on the Austin Friars of the Middle Ages, but adapted to the methods of early twentieth-century Anglicanism. A firm Christian socialist, Guiseley had very much disliked the colonial atmosphere of Lugardia, which was why he had built his first church out there as close as possible to the copper mines of Kanni-Karkara. (The Holy Redeemer was a church which bore a strong resemblance architecturally to St Mary’s, Crickleden.) Not long after that, Guiseley returned to England. He had inherited a large house from his father, Kelvedone Hall in Lincolnshire, and this became the mother-house of his order. At first there were four clergymen. By the time of the Second World War, the order had grown very considerably, with some thirty monks in England, and forty or so in Africa, divided between Lugardia (modern Zinariya) and Ghana. There were now about twenty monks left at Kelvedone and a handful in Cambridge, but the African order was flourishing, with over a hundred monks in Zinariya.
There had been a number of CHR monks who, within the confines of mid-twentieth-century Anglicanism, had made their mark. The order had produced several bishops and scholars. Kelvedone was a place where many, and not merely the professionally ‘high church’, went for retreats, ‘quiet days’, spiritual refreshment of various kinds. There could be no doubt, however, that in the public mind, the most famous of the Kelvedone fathers – as they were often known – was Vivyan Chell, CHR.
The Brigadier was not a regular churchgoer but he counted himself pro rather than anti, and had, over the years, attended innumerable services, at school chapel, church parade and parish churches. He had never attended a church exactly like St Mary’s, which, he had been informed, was typical of a certain type of London Anglo-Catholicism.
There were about sixty worshippers, and when a bell rang at the back, they rose to sing a hymn which was familiar to the Brigadier since boyhood:
Soldiers of Christ arise!
And put jour armour on;
Strong in the strength the Lord supplies
Through His Eternal Son …
A procession made its way up the aisle of the church. First, a black youth carrying a gilded cross. Then another black boy, much more striking in appearance, came, swinging incense from a burner on the end of a chain. This boy was tall and angular with high cheekbones against which little sideburns had been carefully trimmed. His aquiline nose and jutting jaw made the Brigadier think that he could have appropriately been chosen by one of the great Venetian masters to model King Solomon or one of the Magi. The most striking features of this boy were his eyes. They glided to left and right as he made his stately way up the church, taking in those he knew, those he didn’t. The Brigadier felt himself being noticed. The boy was not quite as tall as the Brigadier himself, but he was fully six feet. At his side, holding a silver vessel containing unburnt incense, walked a little boy who could not have been older than seven. This child, dressed like his tall companion in black cassock and lacy cotta, nuzzled against the elder boy’s legs, and stared entranced as the burning incense was swung to and fro, filling the air with billows of sweet smoke.
It was going to be the Communion service. The Brigadier did not possess quite enough faith to receive Communion. Besides, he felt, given his purpose in visiting the church, that it would hardly be good form to go up and take the bread and wine from the priest who brought up the rear of the procession.
From strength to strength go on,
Wrestle and fight, and pray;
Tread all the powers of darkness down,
And win the well-fought day.
Father Vivyan Chell now came into the Brigadier’s line of vision. If he recognized the stranger in church, he did not betray this. He held his hands together, and his eyes were raised aloft, staring towards the crucified figure on the rood beam at the east end of the church.
The form of service was unfamiliar to the Brigadier: one of these modern Communion services, but it was conducted with great seemliness. He noted how devout the congregation was, and what a varied collection of individuals they were – several families looking like Albanian gypsies, respectable West Indians in suits and hats, and a number of Africans in their national costumes. There was great stillness as the passages from the Bible were read aloud. Then came the sermon. In the context of the elaborate ceremonial, the bowings and scrapings as the Brigadier saw them, the informality of Father Chell’s mode of addressing the people came as something of a surprise.
The children from the Sunday school sat on the floor at the front, and instead of standing in the pulpit or at the reading desk, the monk walked up and down. The Brigadier was reminded by his manner, though not by his words, of an old-fashioned staff officer briefing a platoon before exercises.
‘The Kingdom of Christ! Christ our King! So, Jesus Christ is our King. Does that mean he is a rich man?’
He pointed to a girl who had her hand up.
‘Olukemi?’
‘No,’ said this girl clearly. ‘He was a working man, a carpenter.’
‘That’s right – a poor, hard-working man, a carpenter. And what did his mother say when she knew she was goi
ng to have this baby king? Our Lady’s song? You remember we had that last week. What did Our Lady say about the powerful people, the rich and the mighty?’
The same girl put up her hand.
‘Another person – yes, Olukemi you know!’ He grinned but asked, ‘Who else knows?’
There was general silence, shuffling of feet, looking at the floor.
‘Help them, Olukemi.’
‘She said God would put down the mighty from their thrones of power and send the rich people away empty.’
‘That’s right, right, right! And who was God going to exalt in place of the rich?’
‘The humble and meek.’
‘Yes! Yes!’ said the monk excitedly. ‘The rich and the mighty and the powerful have been cast out of God’s Kingdom. It is a kingdom for the poor. And what does that mean in today’s world? Who are the mighty people today?’
‘The Prime Minister.’
‘Good, Olukemi, the Prime Minister – but anyone else?’
Several hands had shot up and children began to shout out the names of those who might have been famous in the world of pop music or football. The Brigadier admired the way in which Father Chell bluffed his way with ‘Exactly! Splendid! Any grown-ups in the congregation got some ideas about mighty men in this world whom God will overthrow?’
One man called out, ‘What about these fat cats, the bosses of big industry with pay of nearly a million pound a year – there’s gotta be something wrong there, that’s way out of order.’
‘While there are still people in this world starving,’ added Father Chell, ‘that’s right. And shall I tell you, there’s another category of person whom Almighty God would like to bring down a peg or two, and that’s the big newspaper barons, the men who make themselves rich by peddling lies in the newspapers – oh yes! They’re all as guilty as one another, whether it’s The Daily Telegraph or The Daily Legion. They deserve to be taken from their seats. Yes? Tuli?’