by A. N. Wilson
‘It’s page fifteen, as if your lordship didn’t know,’ said Mrs Thorn.
He murmured, ‘Please.’ The tone was so bitter – and it was years since Mrs Thorn had called him ‘your lordship’. (They had reached the quite pleasant truce of him calling her Mrs Thorn and of her calling him nothing, or occasionally ‘sir’.)
While his eye took in the words on the garish page, Mrs Thorn was talking.
There was a large picture of Lily d’Abo, evidently very distressed, staring out at the top of the page. Inset into this was a photograph of her daughter, wearing a very revealing T-shirt and a short leather skirt with the caption ‘Have Mercy, Father, for I have sinned.’
On the other side of the spread there was a huge picture of Vivyan. He looked haggard and rather seedy, with a worn-out donkey jacket over his cassock. Inset into this page was a picture of his bishop, wearing a mitre.
‘WE DIDN’T WANT ANY OF THIS TO GET OUT. Bishop admits cover-up to top Legion writer Peg Montgomery.’
‘I mean,’ Mrs Thorn was saying. ‘I’m sorry, my lord. But … with kiddies … even if they be piccaninnies, and their nigger mothers ‘n’ all. I’m sorry, my lord, but so long as that man … your brother …’
I went to the bishop for spiritual comfort. From the minute I stepped in the door I was greeted with hostility. I tried to share my hurt with him, the hurt which Reverend Chell did to me, my daughter, my grandson.
BRAVE GRAN LIL SHARES HER HURT WITH THE LEGION IN AN EXCLUSIVE PEG MONTGOMERY INTERVIEW.
‘You seriously believe all this?’ asked Monty. He was appalled by the newspaper item, but far more appalled by her credulity.
‘There’s no smoke without fire,’ she said. ‘Either he goes, or we go.’
‘We?’
‘John feels the same.’
Mr Thorn, keeper, groundsman, odd-job man, was pivotal to the running of life outside at Throxton, as Mrs Thorn was to the life of the house, in so far as it had a life.
‘Judie’ – Judith Cross, a woman who came up from the village to do charring three days a week, and who helped out at table if there were guests – ‘she feels the same as me. More so, she’s got little ‘uns of her own at home to look after. Well, I’ve got grandchildren.’ She said it with such anger that anyone hearing her might suppose that Lord Longmore had just suggested roasting them for his dinner.
‘I know you have, Mrs Thorn. I know. But surely, you must see that … serious as these charges are against my brother, he denies them. Isn’t the fairest thing to do to wait and see whether there is the smallest truth …’
‘Like I say, there’s no smoke …’
‘I’m sorry.’ He said it quietly, but Monty was actually very angry with her. Afterwards, he felt that his anger was caused by the fact that this red, stupid face, with all its hatred – its almost open hatred – was not only for Vivyan’s sin, but, Monty felt, for him, too, and perhaps for his whole class. This had a most profoundly disconcerting effect on him. He asked himself for the first time, What would happen if the story was true?
‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you feel like that, then you have no alternative but to stay at home until my brother …’ This was a sentence which could have started better. He had hoped that Vivyan was here indefinitely. He did not want to say ‘until my brother is arrested and put on trial’, but that was the outcome which suddenly and horrifically he envisaged. Sadistically, Mrs Thorn let the words die on his lips.
He began again. ‘To stay at home until further notice,’ he said.
‘We’re not handing in our notice this week,’ she said. ‘John ‘n’ me thought as how it was only fair to let you consider it. But with Jude having kiddies – quite apart from our feelings, it wouldn’t be right for us to go on coming here while he’s here.’
‘I’m sorry you feel like that. But, very well,’ was all that Monty said. While she was performing the office of housekeeper, Monty would never have risen and opened the door for her, which was what he did now – as if she were a visitor in the house.
‘I, too, of course,’ he said hotly, as he led her through the dark shadows behind the main staircase, and out into the stone-flagged hall, past the huge, highly polished refectory table and the brooding Dobson of Colonel Chell and his sons before the battle of Naseby, ‘I too will be considering your position. Quite honestly, Mrs Thorn, I don’t take very kindly to your insulting insinuations!’
The glass in the huge inner front door rattled as he slammed it behind her, and he watched her stout legs and trainers beneath the brown coat squelch across the sodden gravel.
In the incomparable harmonies of the Anglican chant, the choir of Westminster Abbey was singing the daily psalms.
‘My God, my God, look upon me; why hast thou forsaken me: and art so far from my health, and from the words of my complaint?’
All over London, the clergy of the Church of England were reading the words silently, or muttering them quietly at the back of their churches. And in St Paul’s Cathedral, only a mile or so east of the Abbey, another full choir took up the melancholy Hebraic poem, lamenting the silence and absence of God.
‘O my God, I cry in the day-time, but thou hearest not: and in the night-season also I take no rest …’
Sweating, and aching with hunger, for it was twenty minutes since he had eaten a beefburger in the car, Lennox Mark sat at the back of St Paul’s, luxuriating in the words and the sound.
All over London, the voice of prayer was lifted up. Domes, towers, steeples and pinnacles soared through the wet, cloudy air in token of the human faith in some beyond. From minarets in Mile End Road and Regent’s Park, the muezzins called the faithful to prayer; from brick bellcotes clattered the Angelus; from temples, Hindu, Bahai and Buddhist, the collective human mind strove towards the Absolute and the Infinite. Great Nature, both amorphous and complex, enfolded this multiplicity of consciousness, of which they were a mysterious part, this million-minded awareness of Being itself, this human race. Pigeons, starlings, jays and magpies took wing through the rainy sky. Seagulls settled on rooftops, telephone wires, drainpipes. The drains and gutters themselves, alive with bacterial forms, amoebic vitalities invisible to the naked eye, gushed on to the indifferent paving-stones and tarmac. Trees, grass, mud, heavy with moisture, simply were. Urban foxes cowered by dustbins; cats, feral and domestic, dogs, rats, voles, mice breathed and moved and fed without the need to project their mentalities into the indifferent surroundings, or to look for personality in the vast impersonal processes of the natural world.
‘But be not thou far from me, O Lord: thou art my succour, haste thee to help me …’
Lennox Mark’s certainty, as he heard the choir sing these words, that there was a God, benignly anxious to promote his own personal wellbeing, was based upon not experience but his own processes of mind. It stood, as far as he was concerned, to reason. And now, God had blessed him, and given him what he and Martina had yearned for. That very afternoon, Lennox Mark had been to the College of Arms, a short walk from St Paul’s, to discuss the finer points. He had wanted to be Lord Mark of Kanni-Karkara, but Garter had said that though, in the days of Empire, some of the new peerages had been associated with colonial territory, it was no longer deemed appropriate. Lord Mark of Knightsbridge sounded a little too much like a department store. LenMar House was, broadly speaking, in Bermondsey, but there was already a peer of Bermondsey and, it would seem, of Southwark. Garter, with what degree of seriousness it was hard to tell, had suggested looking to the river for inspiration. The stretch of Thames by Cherry Garden Pier was known as Lower Pool. Lord Mark of Lower Pool was the ‘working title’. He was a little anxious about what Martina would have to say about this.
But the great thing was that he had made it! He was no longer Lennie the fat boy who could not make friends; Len from an obscure African country and an ersatz public school; sausage roll Len who prematurely ejaculated, and could not get religion out of his system.
‘His Lordship will see you
now.’
Henceforward, secretaries would say this to everyone who walked into his office – editors, politicians …
Waiters would murmur, ‘Your Lordship’s usual table …’
It was all in the bag. The Prime Minister had announced it in the Birthday Honours List. Lennie would take his seat in the Lords in only a few weeks, during the Bindiga State Visit. The General had graciously consented to come for lunch at the House of Lords with Lennie’s sponsors, with Martina and her mother, and witness the arcane performance as, robed in the fur of a threatened species, and swearing allegiance to the Big White Chieftainess, he was led, with much bowing and mumbo-jumbo, to his place among the tribal elders.
There was a rightness about this, a fittingness, a justice which corresponded to his religious view of the world. Yet, ever-gnawing in his mind was the opposite thought … The choir sang it: ‘For he hath not despised, nor abhorred, the low estate of the poor; he hath not hid his face from him, and when he called upon him …’
What if he really had been running away from the true God all his life? What if the voice of Father Vivyan was the voice of God? Why all this stuff about the poor? Couldn’t God stop talking about the poor for just ten bloody minutes?
‘The poor shall eat and be satisfied …’ sang the choir.
Lennox felt within him one of those surges of rage which made him hurl food at servants. He stood up roughly, and with a great scraping of the chair against which he had been leaning, and without further ceremony he walked noisily from the Cathedral. It was a long walk, and he reckoned he was about ten minutes away from the next fix of junk food. Since the car would not be expecting him for another twenty minutes, he might have even longer to wait outside in the rain. But he could not wait in this place any longer. That frantic restlessness had come upon him, that sense of panic.
As he left the Cathedral, a university-educated voice was saying through the loudspeaker, ‘Here begins the fourth chapter of the book of the prophet Amos: Hear this word, you cows of Bashan, who are on Mount Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy …’
The traffic outside mercifully drowned out the noise of it. Ludgate Hill, for all its churches, looked down at an essentially secular world of Londoners who were as indifferent to the poor as was the wind and the rain. Cafés, shops, cars and buses: the sight of them restored in him the sense of the normal, where the poor lurked ignored in doorways and sleeping bags.
The cries to God of the godless city rose up unheard in the rain-soaked sky. Yet in some couple of thousand or so of the many millions of consciousnesses in London, God did speak, and was heard. This was not the quiet sense, enjoyed momentarily by Lennox and now evaporated, that his life had a shape or purpose or pattern. In these cases, an actual voice was heard. In the Mile End Road, in a mosque, an imam heard his God distinctly telling him to massacre Jews and unbelievers. In the convent behind Marble Arch, the nun kneeling before the altar in a posture of perpetual adoration heard Jesus speak to her of the peace which passes understanding. In Number Ten Downing Street, the Prime Minister, anxious about the crisis facing the Commonwealth, was assured personally by God that General Bindiga’s visit to London would be a great success, a sign of the PM’s personal leadership. God used to address the Prime Minister by his first name, but recently, perhaps as a mark of respect, he had started to call him ‘PM’. And clamouring for attention, through the cacophony of voices inside Peter d’ Abo’s head, God spoke of the need to collect guns, knives, weapons for the coming struggle.
Ed Hartley, thirty-nine years old, married with two children, had only one blemish in his unstained career. Five years earlier, as the sports reporter for a TV company, he had travelled to Holland to report a football match. While there, in a group of other male journalists, he had gone into the red light district of Amsterdam for a night on the tiles. Having drunk too much, he and the lads had ended up in a nightclub with some lap-dancers, who had sold him a number of drugs, including some tabs of acid and a small amount of cocaine. Two of the tabs and some of the cocaine were still there, in a tiny envelope in the top pocket of his shirt, when he awoke the next morning in his hotel.
It had been a foolish episode but not, as he supposed, anything significant. He knew that when he went home at midday, he would take the Gatwick Express to Victoria, and then travel by the suburban line to Dulwich where his wife and two sons (both at Dulwich College) would be awaiting him.
He had no interest in drugs, and since his early twenties (when he had enjoyed clubbing) he had hardly ever taken any illegal substance. It was a misplaced frugality which had made him unwilling to do the sensible thing and flush the contents of that envelope down his lavatory in the hotel. The same habit of mind which made him pack in his sponge-bag free samples of shampoo from the hotel bathroom made hint believe that it was a waste to throw away these substances, even though he felt no particular urge to take them himself. So, they remained in his shirt pocket. It was one chance in a thousand, but the customs stopped and searched him at Gatwick Airport. He knew that Carol, his wife, would be furious with him. That went without saying. She was a chartered accountant who worked for a large firm in the City and was hoping to branch out into the sphere of personal financial advice. The boys went to the best school for miles in radius, and since their earliest years Carol had dinned into their heads that only fools took drugs. Now their father, an overgrown schoolboy aged nearly forty, whose ‘career’ was watching stupid boys’ games, had been found with the sort of drugs you associated with juvenile delinquents.
Ed’s chief worry, from the first, was not the drugs, but the girls. He did not mind how many lies he told Carol about the drugs. What he did not want her catching on to was that, whenever he got the opportunity, he was unfaithful to her – not in a way which he considered serious, but as a matter of habit. If in the course of work he found himself away from home for the night, staying in a hotel, he would regularly try and pick up a girl, or, failing that, go to some sleazy dive. He did not often go so far as to pay for a prostitute, though this had not been unknown, especially if he was away from home for more than a week, as had happened during the Olympics. He knew that this habit of his, if Carol found out about it, would end his marriage, and he loved Carol and the children. So he fabricated some ridiculous story about being approached by a man in the bar of his hotel and offered the drugs. Carol had insisted that he attend a drug rehab course, and she secretly began to wonder what normal man allowed himself to be picked up in bars in Amsterdam by other chaps. She had looked out ever since for secret signals of Ed’s (non-existent) homosexuality.
The drugs incident at Gatwick had the most damaging effect on Ed’s career. He was charged with illegal possession by the police and given a two-year suspended prison sentence. It cured him, for ever, of the idea that recreational drugs would add to life’s pleasures, and it even brought a temporary halt to his routine, and habitual, philandering. But the worst thing was that he was obliged to give up his job as a TV reporter. ITN were ruthless about this, and applications for similar jobs, even with BBC local TV, were turned down flat. He eventually got a very junior job on the sports desk at the Evening Standard and gradually worked his way back. He was good at his job, passionately interested in football, cricket, athletics – most sports, in fact, except racing. He was a reliable and quick worker. He was clubbable and well-liked among the other sports journalists. When Blimby took over as editor of the new Legion, he asked around to discover who would be a suitably dynamic new man to run the sports desk. Several friends had recommended Ed.
That was now some months ago, and it really looked as if his life had recovered from the terrible mistake at Gatwick Airport two years before. Then, completely out of the blue, when he was in the middle of sketching out the pages for the following day’s Legion and comparing photographs of a fast bowler with those of a tennis champion, the telephone rang. Scotland Yard.
Ed had frozen and begun whispering, frantically, into the telephone. It
was an open secret, his idiocy over the drug-smuggling, but he had not overtly mentioned it to Blimby when he got the job, and he did not want it referred to. Like everyone who had ever fallen foul of the law, in however minor a way, he reacted with feelings of guilt when confronted by the police.
They asked him if he could come down to see them. They did not specify over the telephone what it was which they wished to discuss. Ever since his night in Amsterdam, Ed had been possessed with the irrational fear that something would happen in the lap-dancing club – some explosion, some murder, someone would strangle one of the girls – and the international police would, by some process of magic, be able to interview everyone who had ever patronized the place. He imagined a uniformed officer turning up on the doorstep of his house in Dulwich and spreading out black and white stills of Dutch prostitutes on the kitchen table. He imagined the boys – Gavin and Hugh – coming into the room, and Carol’s unforgiving eyes falling on fishnet tights and bare tits.
Although he took particular pride in the layout of the sports pages – having supervised each and every page personally since taking his job – Ed had left the offices of the Legion in a hurry, and gone down to Scotland Yard, taking the Jubilee Line to Westminster.
The questions they asked him were incomprehensible. At the time of his arrest, he had given the police samples of blood and urine. They had evidently stored his DNA records. The police were interested in the fact that Mr Ed Hartley had recently been appointed chief sports editor of the Legion, whose proprietor was Mr – they begged his pardon – Lord Mark.
A while ago, back in February, Lady Mark – Mrs Mark as she then still was – suffered an intrusion at her house in Redgauntlet Road. The police were not at liberty to disclose how, but one of the intruders (there were three of them, at least) had left traces from which DNA samples could be taken. This DNA data, when fed into the computer, matched the DNA of Ed Hartley. The police were not accusing Mr Hartley of being the intruder. He did not match the descriptions of any of the men who had been to the house that night. What was not in doubt, however – they had the scientific evidence to prove it – was that one of the intruders was someone close to Hartley. Could his sons provide alibis for the night in question?