by A. N. Wilson
He sipped his cider and ginger beer mix from a handsome silver tankard. When the cutlets arrived, the two men had been silent for a short while which to Sinclo had felt like about two hours.
‘The thing is,’ said the Brigadier quietly – ‘do help yourself to those potatoes. Rather good.’ He stammered very slightly as he added, ‘Parmentier.’
‘Has something cropped up about the Mad Monk, sir?’
‘The thing is,’ said the Brigadier, ‘and this is very much …’ His knife and fork, between each mouthful, were laid neatly together across the plate rather than being splayed. It was an affectation which Sinclo had never come across before. The Brigadier’s hands were free, and with them he gestured the absolute need for secrecy – first by flickering his right hand in the air, and then by placing an index finger against his lips.
‘Of course …’
‘Only, I know that Lennox Mark has a vendetta against Vivyan Chell, and that he is preparing an assault.’
Sinclo was astounded that the Brigadier should be privy to such information.
‘Because you seem to be working for The Daily Legion, I assumed you might know this.’
‘There is something afoot,’ said Sinclo.
He felt an absurd need at this juncture to keep his end up, not to admit his complete ignorance. He hoped that his vagueness would suggest discretion, an inside knowledge of matters too hush-hush to be talked about openly.
‘You see, I’m almost bowler-hatted now, but my job at the MOD, as you probably know, is a continuation of the work I did in Ireland.’
‘Anti-terrorism?’
‘There are a number of fairly peculiar characters, shall we say?’ He laid his knife and fork neatly together again while he chewed the crisp fat of the lamb cutlet with his fingers. The peculiarity of these characters – presumably bombers and murderers – perhaps gave him some amusement. ‘There are African resistance fighters. There are various terrorist organizations in the Balkans. There’s at least one old veteran of the Republican movement from my old haunts …’
‘You mean IRA?’
‘It’s not the IRA as such.’
‘Real IRA?’
‘The thing is … and I must urge upon you, Sinclo, that this isn’t to be repeated to anyone …’
‘Of course not, sir.’
‘A number of these characters – no one can actually point a finger at Father Vivyan, and say that he is behind their cells, but about a dozen of them have, at one time or another, enjoyed his hospitality down at Crickleden.’
The two men ate for a while in silence. Sinclo was astonished.
‘You see, what we are considering is the possibility that, under the cover of a sort of freelance refugee camp run by the church, Chell is organizing a liaison between a number of these quite disparate terrorist groups. We can’t be certain of anything yet. We’ve nothing to link Galwanga – who is a very dangerous man, by the way …’
‘Really? I thought people called him the Zinariyan Gandhi.’
‘Quite,’ said the Brigadier. ‘We’ve nothing to link Professor Galwanga with the IRA and we’ve nothing to link the IRA with these Albanian terrorists. But Chell was a first-class officer in a guerrilla war in Lugardia as it was then. First class. MC.’
‘I know.’
‘If anyone could knock some discipline into that ragtag and bobtail, it would be him. And if anyone could teach them to help each other – with expertise, with men, with the actual explosives … You see, some of those breakaway Irish cells in south London are sitting on huge arsenals …’
‘Excuse me, sir, but what would they use it for?’
‘Sinclo!’ The older man smiled at the naivety of the question. ‘What do any of these people want? They want power. They can’t enjoy power of the kind you and I might enjoy by going into Parliament or rising to a high rank in the forces. So they cause mayhem.’
‘You surely don’t think the Mad Monk …’
‘He’s a disappointed man, he’s an angry man. We don’t know anything at present. But what I – what the MOD is very anxious should not happen is that some half-baked version of all this gets into the paper. Lennox Mark uses very primitive surveillance devices, as I’m sure you know. Bugs all your offices. Bugs his enemies. He’s been bugging this youth who is a rather pathetic hanger-on of Chell’s – a black boy. We’ve got most of the tapes. He’s a little nutcase, this child. Psychopath. Ought to be in the bin. We are really close to having a breakthrough in this case. If I am left in peace for four or five more weeks, I think I can break at least three significant terrorist cells in London. But if The Daily Legion comes barging in with its hobnailed boots … do you see what I am saying, Sinclo?’
EIGHT
Piet had promised the two women that he would meet them at Burlington House, but so far they had not shown. The crowd was quite large. Piet himself waited outside in Piccadilly, but most people had squeezed into the quadrangle to see the large Perspex throne which had been erected in the middle of the space, replacing the statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds. The words SPONSORED BY GLOSS were printed in large letters and stuck like billboards around the plinth.
Piet both did, and did not, want the women to be there. He had said too much. He, or some of the beings inside him, had blurted out stuff to Lennox Mark which he now regretted. He’d hoped that nothing would come of it. Then Martina had called him in. She’d been standing, like it was really formal, like it was an interview. Like, she did and didn’t remember how he’d first come into that house. Like, how she really had something on him and now she was calling in the chips.
Shit, man, you didn’t need and go tell them ‘bout Father Vivyan. And besides, it weren’t Father Vivyan that made you give him head, it was that uphill gardener Currey and he got all he deserved … You’re a dickhead. Who’s you callin’ a dickhead, prickhead nigga yerself. What’s the harm, they aren’t gonna harm Father Vivyan …
And the altar-boy had decided to go to confession and tell Father Vivyan everything. He’d told him the lot – about the burglary, about Martina and her mother capturing him and making him into their house-boy; about Kevin Currey and what he made him do – that didn’t make him gay, did it, Father? More and more of this shit, he’d confessed – like how he went cottaging, but not ‘cause he was an arse-merchant, wanted to punish them, filthy creeping bastards. That was all right, wasn’t it, Father? He’d like to have killed that old bastard ‘Dr Arbuthnot’, same as he’d killed Kevin Currey. But he wasn’t finished with them yet.
Father Vivyan had listened to his outpourings in silence.
‘You won’t tell anyone, Father?’
‘Oh, Peter, oh, Tuli.’
‘You won’t, Father Vivyan – will you? You won’t tell?’
‘Dear boy.’ Another long silence.
Peter had made this confession sitting on the floor beside Father Vivyan’s deckchair in the darkness of the priest’s room one night.
‘You need have no fear,’ the priest said. ‘If you make your confession to a priest, he may not reveal what you have told him. Even if you told him you were going to commit a murder, the priest could not do anything which showed to another person that he knew your secret. That’s why when a priest hears a confession such as yours, Peter, my dear, a great burden has been placed on him … You see, some of these things ought not to be secret. You should have told someone about Mr Currey …’
‘I’m not a gay, Father, I’m not a poof.’
‘Of course not. But even if you were, God would love you no less.’
‘Who you calling a bloody poof, Farver?’
‘I’m not calling you names, Tuli. And soon I will give you a blessing, and absolution, and God will have put away all your sins. But before I do that, I want you to make some things clear to other people. You should make it plain to the school that Mr Currey was abusing you. And you should tell Mr Mark that you lied to him about me. You see, now you’ve told me about it in your confession, my lips are sealed. I
can never breathe a word about this to anyone. If the newspaper prints the lies you told to Mr Mark as if they were true … Do you see what I’m saying, Tuli?’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘If they print those lies – if they say that I was the one who abused you – I can deny it; but I can’t enlist your help. I can’t say that you have already confessed to me what truly happened. My hands are tied. That is why, if I had known what you wanted to confess, I should have asked you to confess to a different priest. But what’s done is done. Now I want to ask you another question. This bugging device, those tapes … where are they?’
‘Mum’s confiscated them. Threw them in the bin.’
‘You are sure she threw them away?’
‘Said I had no business with them.’
‘You see, Tuli, it is almost certain that there is more than one speaker and more than one recorder.’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘You understand what I’m saying, Tuli?’
But he had not really been listening. It was all too confusing. He knew, like, he’d opened up a can of worms, but he could not do anything about it now. Jeeves and the camp altar-boy and the more sensible among them were drowned out by their disturbing companions, the hurt little boy and the one to whom he’d gone for help, the Murderous Moron.
Martina and Mary Much were waving at him now. They were getting out of a taxi and waving. They were on the other side of Piccadilly, and he suddenly had the impulse to run, weaving through the traffic which honked and hooted their horns, to stop them getting any closer.
‘Should we not be inside the gateway arch, at least?’ asked Martina.
‘Surely,’ said Mary Much, ‘and after all the help, Piet, that you gave Hans, don’t you wish you were – on display, as it were?’
Piet, half Jeeves, half a shy public schoolboy, smiled and said, ‘I think the artist should have first go.’
‘After all the help you gave him. He said those engineers you found for him understood everything – much better than the in-house electricians. Where did you say they were from?’
‘Kosovo,’ said Jeeves.
‘Look,’ said Martina. And from their vantage point on the far side of Piccadilly, they could see the throne. Hans Busch had emerged from a side door and to the cheers of the crowd had lowered his leather trousers and thong and sat down.
NINE
‘You’re not suggesting that the Mad Monk is … some kind of terrorist boss?’ asked Sinclo Manners.
There was a pause while, very slowly, Brigadier Courtenay emptied the contents of one teaspoon into his coffee. He did so with the precision of one conducting a chemical experiment. It would have been possible to suppose that by adding one granule too much to his cup disaster would ensue.
‘Look, Sinclo, I know that you aren’t happy at the’ – he jutted out his lower lip, regretful at having to use a dirty word – ‘newspaper. But if you are prepared to stay for a little longer, we … that is … I … could put work your way. I think you know what I’m saying?’
Sinclo, who had very little idea what the Brigadier was driving at, nodded vigorously.
‘Oh, absolutely,’ he said.
‘You’d probably rather be abroad somewhere – doing a bit of travel writing, sending back pieces on serious subjects to serious – um – periodicals. Foreign correspondent sort of thing.’
Presumably, Sinclo had often voiced this ambition when drinking with friends, with flatmates and colleagues. As the Brigadier came out with it, however, it seemed positively eerie; as if They, the Intelligence boffins, the MIS, had been bugging his mind.
‘This job – if you’re happy to take it on – could be regarded as an apprenticeship,’ said the Brigadier. ‘Let’s be quite clear what I am not asking you to do. I am not asking you to snoop or spy on Father Chell. As such.’
It seemed to Sinclo that this, exactly, was what Brigadier Courtenay was asking.
‘But if, having been down to the place – sniffed it out, as it were – you think that you spot danger signals …’
‘Let you know – is that what you want, sir?’
‘I don’t want any further communications with you,’ said the Brigadier. He stared firmly into the middle distance, not looking at Sinclo at all. He had stretched out his right palm and held it at an angle to the table, making sawing gestures as he did so.
‘No notes, no e-mails, no letters, no telephone messages. We’ll meet here for lunch once a month, just as we are doing now. The first Wednesday of every month, here, 12.50. If there is any reason why you can’t make it, there is no need to write and cancel. Just turn up the following month. If for any reason you need to get in touch with me sooner than the regular meeting …’
‘You mean if I find the Mad Monk with bomb-making equipment in the vestry?’
‘This is serious, Sinclo.’
‘I know, sir.’
‘I want you to send me one of these typed postcards. Post it to this club special delivery. Then come to the bar and I shall meet you there at six p.m. on the day after you posted it.’
The cards, all identical, were printed with the letterhead of a tailor in the Prince’s Arcade. They read, ‘Your esteemed order is ready for a fitting.’
‘As for money …’
Sinclo made the self-deprecating noises which shy men of his class made when embarrassed.
‘When you leave after each luncheon, the hall porter will hand you a package. Fair?’
‘I don’t know … it’s very …’
‘You mean, you don’t know if you want to do it, or you don’t know how much we are paying you, or … what?’
‘I mean, thanks very much, sir. Everything you have said is clear.’
‘Good,’ said the Brigadier. But then, almost at once, he added, ‘Good grief, what’s that?’
A rumble as of thunder could be felt: beneath their feet, in their ears, almost in the air. The rumbling coincided with the deafening boom of a vast explosion.
TEN
‘Piet is right, we can see better from here – you get a vista,’ said Martina.
But Mary Much was dissatisfied. ‘We have to be nearer, darlings.’
The crowd, from where they stood in the courtyard itself, could have been watching a wreath-laying at the Cenotaph. There was near silence as they contemplated Hans on his Perspex seat. From where the critics and photographers stood, there would have been visible through the Perspex the equine anus and hairy arse of the artist. He was still. Mr Blimby’s middle-brow comparison with Rodin’s Thinker was actually inescapable. Perhaps the allusion was wittily intentional.
‘We need binoculars if we are going to stand here,’ said Mary. ‘Oh, look, look. Do let’s get nearer!’
Unmistakably, the features of the artist had begun to contort. His pallor momentarily reddened, obscuring the pustules on his bald head. Then he went ashen pale and the process of defecation began.
‘I can see it from here,’ said Mary Much. ‘Oh, a real long Cumberland …’
But her word ‘sausage’ was not heard.
There were some survivors. Amazingly, one of the critics who had been standing quite close recovered sufficiently to file a piece for the following Sunday to the serious newspaper which employed him. From his hospital bed, he wrote that when the brown snake torpedoed the pan it had been a Pearl Harbor Moment. English art would never be the same. The story which had begun with the Wilton Diptych and ended with Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst had now exploded. Chaos ruled. This had been Hans Busch’s eternal, tragic legacy. There were, indeed, those who contemplated the possibility that this had been the ultimate form of self-expression, the final clash between the Personal Heresy and the Classical Tradition: Suicide as Art. But the Suicide as Art theory, so popular with some critics, did not wash with the bomb disposal team. It was a timed device, almost certainly home-made in someone’s garage. Although every window in Burlington House and a number of shop windows in Piccadilly were smashed, it was not in fact
a very large bomb. Hans Busch had been torn limb from limb. His head was hurled in the air like a football, and rolled out into Piccadilly. Legs, blood, fingers spattered in a generalized gore as the crowd screamed, ran, fell. On the other side of the street, Piet, Martina and Mary stood rooted to the spot, seeing at first only a cloud of smoke, and a chaos of pain.
ELEVEN
Rachel Pearl was sitting on the rag-rug which lay at the foot of an old man’s orthopaedic chair. She was helping the old man to put on a pair of very frayed tartan slippers. He was wincing with pain as she endeavoured, very gently and delicately, to fit the extraordinary red and purple swollen toes, hard with calluses, into the slippers. The small sitting room of his council flat smelt of urine. From where she knelt, she could see more such ugly blocks, brutalist structures erected during the late 1960s. They were constructed of an absorbent concrete so that, in the extremely wet weather which persisted, they looked soaked.
None of these circumstances was in itself especially cheering. Rachel Pearl, however, felt more intensely close to a sense of joy than she had ever done. It was a happiness all the more pure because it was hedged round with grief. She was, acutely and painfully, in mourning for her friend. She was dazed and hurt by the end of her love affair. She was haunted moreover by a dark foreboding about the future. For a few weeks, however, she had glimpsed a vision of how it might be possible to lead a good life, and this accounted for this inner peace, this calm which was, if not happiness, so like happiness. The old man, whose name was Gordon, was talking about his war years. He was not demented, but getting on in that direction; his tales were an unstoppable film-show in his head of military recollection. Sometimes, the stills from this mental home-movie were historically significant. He saw Wavell in a staff car being driven past as he and his mates marched down a dust-track in Abyssinia. More often the visions were generalized.