You Owe Me Five Farthings

by Jane Anstey

  “The abbey was a Tudor manor house after the Dissolution,” Jeremy told his son, as they came in sight of the house. “The family who owned it made various additions in later centuries when they prospered, but then it fell on hard times.”

  He had read something about it a few years ago. The expansion had been followed by a long period of impoverishment and dilapidation in the twentieth century as the house changed hands several times. It had been a school for a while, and more recently a hotel chain had acquired it, only to fail to get planning permission for the changes they wanted to make. The Benedictines had bought it in time to save the building from falling into ruin, and the roof was sound, but it still wore an air of shabby grandeur, Jeremy thought, that sat quite well with its return to the religious life.

  “Wow,” said Mike to his father, as he unfolded his long limbs out of the passenger seat. “This is quite a place.”

  Jeremy smiled. “It is, isn’t it? I came here once years ago when it was a prep school to hand out prizes, or something—I can’t remember. I think the monks have made some recent changes, but probably mainly inside. I don’t suppose it smells of stale urine and cabbage now, for one thing.”

  Mike laughed, and they went up the stone steps to the porch with its Georgian pillars, and plied the black-painted Victorian iron knocker on the ancient oak of the front door.

  “You can really feel the history, can’t you?” he said, his hand on the knocker.

  “I know what you mean,” his father agreed. “Lots of different periods all jammed together. Fascinating.”

  The door swung open and they both looked down in surprise, for the monk standing before them on the threshold was tiny––stooped with age and osteoporosis so that he peered up at them from beneath his cowl, his head on one side. His seamed face was wreathed in smiles, however, as he greeted them.

  “Reverend Swanson?” he beamed. “And this must be Mike. Father Abbot told me to expect you.”

  He stood back to usher them inside, then pushed the heavy door closed behind them with a surprisingly muscular arm. “This way to the library,” he told them, leading them along the passageway briskly. “Brother Librarian is waiting for you, I believe.”

  The passage led to another oak door, which opened on to the ancient cloisters.

  Jeremy looked around him with interest as he followed the monk across the square of grass in the centre of the quadrangle. “I’d no idea this had survived,” he said. “Though it must have been here when I gave away the prizes when it was a prep school. I can’t remember going out of the building on that occasion, so perhaps I never saw it.”

  “We did some renovations when the community arrived,” the old monk told them. “But yes, the cloisters have always been here.”

  “So many old abbeys had their cloisters removed by the Tudor Protestant families that took them over after the Dissolution,” Jeremy told Mike. “Smacked too much of Popery, I suppose,” he added, sotto voce.

  “Our Tudors were a recusant family,” said their guide, whose hearing was clearly excellent in spite of his age. “They remained Catholics and their sympathies were with the old order, so they kept the abbey as it was, so far as they could. I think they were expecting the monks to return quite quickly and felt they were just caretaking the buildings for them––but of course it never happened.” He shook his head sadly. The permanence of the Dissolution was clearly a matter of regret to him. “Then the Stuart occupants––the same family––were Royalists, though they kept it to themselves during the Commonwealth, of course, for fear of reprisals. And the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century family were antiquarians and conservatives. They built the Georgian wings and the porch to flank the old building and constructed a Gothic library, but they left the core intact.”

  Mike shook his head, slightly bewildered by this gallop through English history, but his father was unfazed.

  “It sounds as though you’re the monastery’s historian, Brother,” he said, as they approached a large building, Victorian Gothic in style and decorated with stone tracery, that abutted the cloister on the far side of the quadrangle. The little man’s knowledge was pretty comprehensive, he thought, if he had only lived at Whitehill for a few years.

  The monk nodded. “I am indeed. I was caretaker here when it was a school,” he explained. “And I took my vows only after the hotel acquired the estate. I couldn’t see a job for me here then and I was ready to retire, anyway, so I joined the local Benedictine community. We were at a modern house in Newbury, then, while we looked for something larger. But when I heard this had come on the market, I told Father Abbot I thought it would be just the thing for us––and it is.”

  Jeremy smiled. “You came late to the religious life, then?”

  The monk gave him a serene smile. “Better late than never, Reverend Swanson,” he said, with a touch of reproach, as though suspecting Jeremy of laughing at his vocation. Then he smiled in farewell and turned back towards the cloisters, obviously keen to return to his duties in the main house.

  The library door swung open as Mike turned the heavy handle, and they stepped inside. The soaring Victorian Gothic architecture was as impressive within as it had been outside, with a high raftered ceiling, pointed windows and several bays of oak lined with bookshelves. A tall, lean, swarthy individual, possessed of an ascetic face and dark, hooded eyes, was waiting for them at a desk to one side. As they came up to him, he looked up and turned on them both a gaze of penetrating enquiry.

  “You have the book?” he asked eagerly. There was a trace of foreign accent in his voice. East European, Jeremy speculated. Or German?

  Mike put his hand into the carrier bag and drew the precious volume out carefully. “Here it is, sir,” he said. He was uncomfortable with the idea of addressing this formidable old man with the familiar title of “Brother” that his father had used for the doorkeeper monk. There was something intimidating about him, although Mike would have found it hard to explain what it was. He’s a bit creepy, was the way he put it to himself. He shrank suddenly from handing over the precious volume, even though the librarian was the appropriate person to take charge of it, and found himself wishing he had not decided to bring it back after all. Now the time had come, he found it hard to let it go.

  “We’d love to know more about The Book,” he said, after a moment, still holding it in his hands. “If you don’t mind, that is, sir.”

  The librarian held out his hand imperiously, and Mike found himself handing the book over to him, though reluctantly. It seemed unlikely that his hesitant request for information would meet with anything but a refusal.

  The monk leafed through it carefully, as though checking that it was indeed the volume he expected. Then he gave a sigh, and put it down on the desk.

  “It is the diary of one of the fourteenth-century brothers,” he told Mike. “Written in the English of the time, rather than Latin, which is unusual, as perhaps you realise?”

  Mike began to shake his head, but Jeremy forestalled him. “I did think that was strange,” he commented. “Latin was still the language of the church then, wasn’t it? And for quite some time afterwards, come to that.”

  “As it should still be,” stated the librarian, with grave authority. “But Brother Piers was influenced by the Lollards, who believed even the Scriptures should be translated into English. Thus he wrote his diary in English, rather than in Latin.”

  The monk’s own English was impeccable, but again Jeremy caught the hint not only of an accent but also of the formal, slightly stilted, English constructions of someone whose first language was something else.

  “Do you have the original?” he asked, curiously.

  Was it his imagination, or did a shadow of some emotion––fear or uncertainty––cross the librarian’s face? Then the monk shook his head.

  “I regret, no. The original is lost.”

  To his surprise, but with a certainty born of dealing with parishioners of all kinds and mentalities, Jeremy knew
at once that this was untrue. But why on earth should the librarian lie? What could he possibly have to hide? And what, if anything, he wondered, did Jan Petrowski know about it?

  “All we have is this copy that you have returned to us,” the librarian assured him, as though he had picked up Jeremy’s thought. “It was made by one of the Victorian owners of the house, more than a century ago.”

  “I thought that must be what had happened,” he heard Mike say eagerly. “I can see why you were glad we found it. It would be dreadful to lose something so important, when you only have the copy and not the original.”

  The librarian bowed slightly and seemed to regard Mike with more approval. “That is true. We will certainly look after it more carefully in future.”

  “Under lock and key, I hope,” came the abbot’s cut-glass tones from behind them. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to greet you when you first arrived, Remy. But Brother Anselm told me that he had brought you here, so I came to join the party. Is it indeed the lost book, Brother Andrew?”

  The librarian nodded, showing it to the abbot rather reluctantly, it seemed to Jeremy. “I will put it in the display case over there,” he said, waiting with some impatience for his superior to hand the book back.

  “Good,” said Jan. “I will have a closer look at it another time. And now, Remy, would you like to join me for coffee in my study?” He smiled at Mike. “We haven’t had a chance for introductions, but you must be Mike. I’m very pleased to meet you. And you must come back and see the book any time you want. That can be your reward for bringing it back to us!”

  With some amusement, Jeremy watched his son fall under the spell of the undoubted Petrowski charm. He wondered suddenly what the abbot’s pre-religious life had been and how young he had been when he entered the cloister. He must be in his late fifties and at the peak of his powers, expanding the little empire he headed and revelling in its spacious surroundings. He had presumably embraced the monastic life early enough to make a successful career out of it.

  No harm in that, Jeremy told himself. But such men, successful in a spiritual setting, like charismatic tele-evangelists and bishops, too often struggled to remain humble. Was pride a problem to Jan Petrowski?

  He looked back as they followed Jan out of the library. The librarian was standing, stock still, beside his desk, with an expression of sour disapproval on his face.

  ~ * ~

  After the little party had gone, Mike chatting happily to the abbot about Northchurch College, his impending GCSE exams, and his plans for the future, Brother Andrew closed the library door and went back to his desk. He looked at the book again, checking carefully that it had sustained no damage as a result of its unauthorised absence from home. Then he unlocked the display case, opened the book carefully at an appropriate page, and laid it down in its space. He smoothed the label that lay beside it. “Brother Piers’ Reflections,” it said laconically. “Copy of fourteenth century manuscript.”

  He went back to his desk and sat down again, staring into space. What philistines these English were, in their lack of historical appreciation––even Jan, in his borrowed Englishness, which he wore, it seemed to Andrew, like his Benedictine habit, hiding beneath it his chequered past with all its intrigue and dark secrets. No one here appreciated sufficiently and was worthy to look after this library and its heritage, excepting himself, an exile.

  His thoughts wandered back to his youth in Poland, teaching history at the university until the Communists (God rot them) turned him out for dissidence. He had had to live without books and scholarship for many years, even after he found refuge in England, where at least one could read what one liked and say what one liked about political matters without fear of arrest. He had never returned to academia. Polish history was what he knew, and there was not much demand for specialists in that in English universities. He could have changed direction, made himself master of some other historical niche that had a following, but there was no guarantee of employment, even then, in a capitalist country, and in any case his heart would not have been in it. Polish nationalism still held him in thrall, and the hope of escaping the Communist yoke as they had escaped the Nazi one before it. He had found other ways to use his time fruitfully, in the service of both his native country and his adopted one, and until recently had had no regrets about it.

  He wondered whether Jan felt the same.

  Nine

  Rose and Robert spent the rest of the week after Christmas pottering around at home together––Robert sorting his new toys and putting them in the cupboards vacated by the cast-offs, Rose catching up with a variety of domestic tasks that had been neglected while Robert was unwell. They visited the Winchester shops together to buy items that Robert needed for the new term at school and chatted happily about whatever came to mind. Robert seemed to be making up for all those silent and near-silent weeks before Christmas: he chattered busily and freely to his mother, and Rose found herself becoming more relaxed and cheerful herself as a result. She eventually phoned Jeremy and arranged for the twins to come over for the afternoon one Saturday but remained non-committal about a return visit for Robert when Jeremy suggested it. For the moment, she still judged it best to stay out of reach of the Swansons who, good-hearted though they were, saw too much of what she was thinking and feeling and made too much of what they saw.

  Her relationship with Clive seemed to have reverted to its pre-Christmas stand-off, with communication kept to the bare minimum of everyday conversation, while the spare bedroom became once more her sanctuary and private space. She wondered, indeed, how she had managed to share a room (and a bed) with Clive for so long and why she had continued to do so when Sarah left home and there was a perfectly good untenanted bedroom next to Robert’s. Sarah lived not far away in a flat of her own and had taken all her possessions with her, so there was no reason to keep a room for her use. Some instinct to preserve the conventions, perhaps, or an unconscious reluctance to acknowledge that she and Clive lived different lives and inhabited separate mental spaces. Sleeping separately, Rose had always felt in the past, when friends had taken to doing it in their forties, was the first slippery step towards divorce––and events had often proved her right in this. Now that the crisis in her marriage had precipitated the change, however, she was enjoying the sense of independence it gave her. Whatever happened in the future, she wanted to keep a bedroom for herself.

  Already the room was beginning to show signs of different occupancy. It was untidier, for a start, than Clive would allow any room in which he slept to be. The clothes she had worn during the day, which had always had to be put away in the wardrobe overnight even if she wanted to use any of them again the next, reposed across the armchair in one corner of the room, while her toiletries lived a rather jumbled life on a little painted tray on top of the chest of drawers.

  She spent an hour or two in the week after Christmas moving most of her clothes into the spare-room wardrobe. There was a lovely dressing table in the main bedroom, but she had never spent much time sitting at it, for effort spent beautifying herself for Clive had always seemed wasted. She didn’t need a dressing table, she decided, finding space for her hairbrush on the painted tray. Clive made no comment on the rearrangements she had made—she wasn’t sure he had even noticed—but there was a brooding quality to his conversation that week which made her wonder whether he was as unconscious of them as he appeared.

  “I’m going away this weekend,” he told her on Friday over breakfast, his eyes daring (forbidding?) her to question where or why. “I’ll be away Saturday night but back Sunday evening. We’re going to the Eveshams’ New Year party, aren’t we? I’ll be back for that.”

  Rose nodded. She found that she didn’t really care that he hadn’t told her where he was going, and she certainly wasn’t going to ask. She wasn’t even very interested in whether he was taking Olivia—or anyone else—with him. Clive had made no further attempt to make love to her and had continued to sleep alone in the main bedr
oom without complaint. Which just shows, thought Rose, that this fresh start we’re supposed to be having is a non-runner. If we were really making progress, I’m sure I’d want to know who he was going away with, and I’d be quarrelling with him over it, too, I shouldn’t wonder. But instead I just don’t care. Just as she hadn’t cared about Maddie, she remembered.

  Simon’s continued absence hovered, bat-like, in the corners of her mind. Where was he, and what was he doing? When she had seen him at the ringing practice she had been sure he still cared for her, even though he made little public show of it. But he hadn’t followed it up in any way. Perhaps (to be fair) he was just respecting what she had said about their relationship, rather than divining what she actually felt. After years of feeling unattractive and unlovable, she didn’t feel surprised that neither her husband nor Simon seemed to be making much effort with her, but it hurt just the same. You told Simon to go away, she reminded herself drearily. You can’t blame him now if he’s done what you asked.

  ~ * ~

  Clive was as bewildered as Rose by the atmosphere at home. Indeed, his announcement about his weekend plans was at least in part a gambit to test how much she really did care about reanimating their marriage, for her behaviour towards him during the Christmas holiday had puzzled him very much. She had apparently responded to his physical advances on Christmas night with great passion, and yet the following morning had retreated once more into the cool aloofness that had so frustrated him in the preceding days, an aloofness that had somehow made it seem dangerous to raise the subject, although he had been sore put to it to refrain. But if she had really rediscovered her love for him and had found that she could now express it physically with such intensity, he was sure she would also react with pique, even anger, if she suspected he might be continuing to cheat on her. It was a risky ploy, but Clive had never shrunk from taking risks if it would achieve what he wanted, and he found himself desiring a physical relationship with his wife with quite extraordinary fervour. Rose aloof and unresponsive presented a challenge to him that Rose submissive and dutiful had never done, besides which a repeat of the joys of his Christmas Eve experience with her had become a high priority. He was determined to find a way to reanimate this relationship that he had so nearly thrown away.