The Chorister at the Abbey

by Lis Howell

  ‘Shit. She’s changing buses. Quick, look in Little’s window so she doesn’t see us.’ Poppy fixed her frown on a fascinating box of satsumas.

  ‘Which bus will that be?’ Tom asked.

  ‘It’s the bus to Fellside, I think.’

  ‘She must be going to Fellside Fellowship.’

  ‘On a Saturday morning? Don’t be a plonker: even I know that they don’t do anything on Saturday mornings and I never go to church.’

  Tom thought back to his days in the choir at Uplands Parish Church. ‘Maybe it’s a coffee morning?’

  ‘Chloe at a coffee morning? She may be going nuts but she’s not that nuts. Dream on, Tom.’

  Nettled, Tom had to think of a new idea. ‘OK, so if we walk in the other direction we can pick up the Fellside bus at its previous stop. And if you get a paper, something big like er . . . The Daily Telegraph, and we sit at the back reading it, she won’t notice us. And if she does, well, we just say “Hi!” We don’t owe her an explanation.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. Good thinking, Tom.’

  Poppy had gone into Little’s to buy the paper, and they walked quickly down to the previous bus stop. The Fellside bus, half full of early shoppers coming back from Workhaven, pulled in and they got seats at the back on the lurching bit which no one liked, perched over the engine. Poppy unfolded the Telegraph.

  Chloe boarded the bus and didn’t see them. Poppy had thought she looked as if she was in a dream anyway, and for a moment she wondered whether Chloe had taken her experiments with drugs a bit further. But that wouldn’t square with the self-consciously dowdy clothes.

  ‘C’mon,’ she’d said when Chloe got off the bus at the Co-op in Fellside. They had hurried to catch up with her, but it was a busy stopping point and they were at the back of the bus. The strategy which had helped them follow her unseen now let them down. By the time they were off the bus, Chloe had disappeared.

  ‘Where’s she gone?’ Poppy had looked down the road to the low brick building that was St Luke’s, now Fellside Fellowship. Chloe was nowhere in sight, so she certainly wasn’t going there. But there was no sign of her up the road either.

  ‘She’s gone,’ Tom had said. They stood there, waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. ‘We’d better give up.’

  ‘All right. I’m getting cold anyway.’ They’d gone into the Co-op to buy some fizzy drinks, but they never reached the checkout because of some mad woman ranting on about a missing scarf, and taking up all the attention of the girl on the till.

  ‘Might as well go home,’ Tom had said.

  So they had taken the bus back to Poppy’s house between Uplands and Norbridge, and watched DVDs. Occasionally Poppy frowned and crossed her eyes, but in an unspoken pact they didn’t mention her former friend again. The rest of the weekend had been OK. Well, great really.

  Now it was over. The bus to Newcastle rocked into the bus station. ‘Time to go,’ Poppy said resolutely.

  Tom felt an awful lurch in his stomach. ‘Can I come and see you?’

  ‘Yeah. All right.’ She looked at him intently and he wondered what she was going to say.

  ‘Keep an eye on Chloe for me?’ she said surprisingly. ‘There’s something really weird going on.’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ yelped Tom. ‘Weird!’

  ‘Yes.’ Poppy was on the bus now. ‘I know you did. You’re right. See you.’

  ‘See you.’ Then in a moment of madness he added: ‘Love ya!’

  ‘Love you too,’ Poppy said, chewing a bit of hair and crossing her eyes. Then she disappeared to make way for a noisy family seeing off their tearful grandma.

  Love you, love you, love you, Tom sang all the way home.

  At the same time, Suzy Spencer was getting out of the train at Carlisle station. She travelled to Tarnfield in a cab and let herself in at The Briars. She took her overnight bag upstairs and then came running down, face flushed.

  ‘Robert, we have to talk.’

  ‘Too true. Let me get you a drink. I want you to sit down, Suzy, and listen to me. No, this can’t be a discussion. I’ve got things that have to be said and you need to listen.’

  He had rehearsed this moment but he still found it hard to speak. Since his confident conversation with Edwin the day before, he had thought constantly about what he was going to say to Suzy. He needed to apologize for being so pompous about marriage when he had made a mess of it himself. He needed to explain that he didn’t think she needed a stepfather for Jake but that he would be privileged to take on that role. And most importantly he had to make her see that she would never be another Mary and that he would never be that sort of husband again. Every marriage was different. And if one day, perhaps, she would marry him, then it would be for his good and not necessarily for hers. He would never again presume to tell her what she needed.

  He blushed and stumbled through his confession. ‘So, you see I wasn’t a good husband. I did my best but I was tempted more than once.’

  ‘So you were unfaithful! You hypocrite! Mr Perfect with his trousers down.’

  ‘If you put it like that. I loved Mary, but it was tough. And though I wasn’t faithful, she never knew.’

  ‘Well, that’s one for the village to enjoy!’

  ‘If you want to put an ad in Lo-cost’s window then I’ll have to grin and bear it.’

  ‘You should, literally! But seriously, how much damage did you cause?’

  ‘I think that Sandy – that is, Alex Gibson – was the only woman I really hurt. I’m deeply sorry about that. I know you must think I’m a self-righteous old fart and you’re right. But I needed to escape from Mary sometimes, and I will never need to escape from you. You’ve saved me from all that mess.’

  ‘You mean I’ve rescued you?’

  ‘Absolutely! Saved me from myself! Thank you!’

  And to his astonishment Suzy leapt off the sofa, did a pole-dance round the door jamb and kissed him with a warmth and passion he hadn’t felt for months.

  ‘I love you, Robert Clark. It’s so much better now!’

  ‘What, now you’ve found out I was unfaithful? After all I said?’

  ‘Of course! What do you think it’s been like for me living in the shadow of your unimpeachable behaviour? And thinking that you only loved me because I was the local flake in need of care and protection?’

  ‘But Suzy, I was a bad husband.’

  ‘Yes, you were.’ She paused. ‘But maybe you’ll get another chance . . .’

  * * *

  Pat Johnstone looked at the velvet scarf and sneezed. ‘Horrible thing,’ she said, and pushed it away.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Christine Prout said, sipping her coffee and looking as if the scarf on the coffee table in Pat’s lounge was a snake about to strike. ‘It’s all right in itself. It’s just the implications. You say they found this in the car with David?’

  ‘Yes, the police brought it over. I said it was mine straight away but of course it’s not! I wanted to get my hands on it. Ugh. It’s already brought me out in a rash.’ Pat scratched her skinny arm under her lambswool sweater.

  ‘So you think it must belong to, er, David’s other woman?’

  ‘Well, who else could it belong to? That was my theory anyway. I thought he was up to something in Fellside. I followed him once, you know, last year. He parked the car on the edge of the council estate and walked in there. I couldn’t go any further or he’d have seen me. But I’m pretty sure it was some woman he was meeting. So now I thought I’d go into the Co-op and ask if I could leave the scarf there for someone to pick it up. I wanted to leave my name and address so the owner could let me know she’d got it back.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘The stupid girl on the till said these scarves were ten a penny. McCrea’s in Norbridge had job lots of them. Everybody’s got one.’

  ‘I think you’re right. I think my sister’s got one like this.’

  ‘Exactly! So I brought it home. I must say right
up until Saturday night I felt pretty good about having it. But now, I don’t think it’s going to help me at all.’

  ‘Do you really want to find out who David might be . . . seeing?’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ Pat paused. ‘I’m not sure any more. You see, it’s not the fact that he’s got another woman which bothers me.’ She stood up and walked to the big plate glass windows looking over the hills. The house was almost too warm, but she shivered. And she suddenly changed the subject. ‘You can see the old convent from your sister’s bungalow, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes, you can. It’s the only good view of the grounds.’

  Pat paused. ‘I can trust you, Chris, can’t I? We’ve been friends for years, haven’t we? And you know what David’s like?’

  ‘Oh, Pat . . .’

  ‘You know what I mean, Chris. The reason I’m asking you is that I want you to ask your sister if she’s seen anyone in the grounds of the convent. Digging.’

  ‘Digging? Why on earth would you want to know about that?’ Chris wrinkled her brow. When Pat had asked her to come over on Monday morning for a heart-to-heart she had imagined all sorts of things, but not this.

  Pat scowled and walked up and down in front of the window. ‘You know I said I followed David last year? Well, I followed him on Friday as well. When he left Norbridge, I followed him to Fellside and I saw him park the car by the convent. He strolled through the hole in the wall. He walked through the garden and then he fell.’

  ‘Fell? Where?’

  ‘Into a bloody big hole in the ground, that’s where. From what I could see it looked like someone had dug a great big grave. I just turned round and ran back to my car. I thought David would start yelling and people would come running, so I drove away like the clappers. But then I went round the block and came back; the car was still there so I guessed that David was knocked out.’

  ‘And you didn’t do anything to help? I mean, like go and find him or get an ambulance?’

  ‘You must be joking. If David had seen me he’d have known I’d followed him and my life wouldn’t be worth living! No, the convent’s right on the main road. Someone would have come for him sooner or later.’

  Chris Prout swallowed. She would never describe her relationship with Reg as particularly warm, but she couldn’t imagine leaving him in a hole in the ground!

  ‘Anyway,’ Pat was saying, unfazed, ‘someone must have got David out of the pit and into the car.’

  ‘But what makes you think it was a properly dug pit?’ Chris was confused. Something slipped into her mind that Reg had said worriedly a few days earlier. ‘Couldn’t it have been subsidence? Or collapsed drains?’

  ‘Nah! I had my driving specs on and I could see the edges. Clean as a whistle. Believe me, it was dug really deep, and then covered over. Like an animal trap.’

  ‘Well, maybe someone was doing the garden. Or putting in a new septic tank!’ Chris reasoned. ‘And then maybe poor David was concussed and climbed out himself – and then drove when he was only half conscious which is why he hit the tree?’ Chris was trying to be helpful, but Pat looked at her with contempt.

  ‘No one’s officially working up there. And no one could climb out of that hole unaided. No, I think the person who got David out of that trap was the same person who dug it.’

  ‘But that means someone deliberately tried to injure him!’

  ‘Oh, clever girl! Go to the top of the class and give the pencils out!’

  ‘But Pat, shouldn’t you go to the police? And anyway, why do you want to know?’

  ‘Because the person who dug the pit must be on to something too! There’s something big going on and that convent is right in the middle of it, literally. And your sister’s place is too. David wouldn’t usually go to such trouble over a jerry-built bungalow. If there’s any money to be made, I want to know about it. The bastard has tucked it all away and I haven’t a penny. But things are changing here!’ Pat gave a cackle. ‘The only reason I need to find out about his tart is to make sure she hasn’t got her nose in the trough. It’s his money I’m after. Not his willy! I’ve had enough of that!’

  31

  And yet they think that their houses shall continue for ever, and that their dwelling-places shall endure from one generation to another, and call the lands after their own names. Psalm 49:11

  Paul Whinfell met the postman coming down Fellside High Street.

  ‘How do, Vicar?’

  ‘Very well, thanks. Got anything for me?’ He wanted to get to the post before Jenny did. If she found out how much he’d been spending on replica birth and marriage certificates she would go mad. He felt some guilt about it but underneath he knew it was justified. His religious faith must have come from somewhere. His parents were agnostics of the most annoying ‘you-don’t-have-to-go-to-church-to-be-Christian’ types; he was sure there was something in his God-given genes that made him different.

  ‘Here’s another of these for you, Rev.’ The postman handed him a large envelope with the TNT logo on the front and the initials of the Office of National Statistics on the back. Paul’s hand trembled with excitement as he took it, trying not to grab.

  He hurried home and into his office. Jenny was doing the washing and would assume he was hard at work on his talks for Sunday. In the past he had asked her advice about his sermons, but at the moment he pretended he was working alone so she wouldn’t guess how much time he spent at the computer. Genealogy had become to feel like some secret vice, like porn or violence. But he couldn’t help it.

  The door was shut. Then, everything ready, he opened the big white envelope.

  He had seen the details on the web but it was wonderful to hold the facsimile in his hand. There it was. The birth certificate of Henry Quaile Whinfell. Author of the only definitive biography on Cecil Quaile Woods. Paul had first been given the book on Cecil Quaile Woods by an elderly parishioner who was intrigued that his new vicar shared a name with a long-dead local biographer.

  ‘I reckon this copy must be the only one left,’ the old man had said. ‘It was written in the twenties and belonged to my grandmother. Funny that the author’s got the same name as you. There aren’t any Whinfells left up here now but they used to be a well-known local family.’

  So Paul had started his search to try and find a link between his family in Bristol and this nineteenth-century Cumbrian branch the old man referred to. And he’d got back to what must be the very same Henry Whinfell. But why had Henry Whinfell written a biography of Cecil Quaile Woods? Paul thought he was on to the answer.

  Just as he’d seen on the screen, no father was named on Henry Quaile Whinfell’s birth certificate. Whinfell was Henry’s mother’s name – Harriet Whinfell, housemaid. The date was 1880 and the place of registration was Workhaven.

  It was the Quaile which gave it away. That and Harriet’s address. She had put it down as The Vicarage, Fellside. Paul looked through his great-grandfather’s book again. A Memoir of The Reverend Cecil Quaile Woods, Vicar of St Luke’s, Fellside, by Henry Whinfell. Quaile Woods had been a saintly priest in the High Church tradition, celibate, dedicated to his flock of wretched miners who had called him Father Cecil and who had depended on him to get them through the dark days of accidents, illness and deprivation. He had been a padre to the miners, and also priest in charge of the convent, which did so much work with the underclass of the whole county. But in 1882 he had left Fellside for the parish of Uplands as curate. A downwards move. And he had withdrawn from pastoral work, dedicating himself to writing church music.

  Why? Could it have been shame? Was that because he had sired a son? A son who forty years later wrote his father’s biography as a secret acknowledgement? Did the boy’s birth explain why Father Cecil had given up being a parish priest and had retreated from Fellside to Uplands as curate – only taking over the full parish role on the death of his rector ten years later? It seemed that he had needed to retract, to withdraw and come to terms with something. And could that something be
his own illegitimate son?

  Quaile Woods. Jenny’s new inspiration. And now it seemed he might be Paul’s own great-grandfather on the wrong side of the blanket. Someone local surely had to be the father of Harriet’s baby. And why else was that mysterious name Quaile on the birth certificate? Quaile was a common enough Manx surname, but there were no other Quailes in Cumbria in 1881, according to the census results on ancestry.co.uk. So was this name an acknowledgement of sorts without going public on the illegitimate child? Paul had read that such ploys weren’t uncommon. Lots of working-class Victorians had two surnames. This use of Quaile had to refer to the vicar of Fellside, and maybe the inclusion of the name meant that he had taken some responsibility for his child? Henry’s later writing indicated a superior education to any the Whinfells could provide. Although there was no Harriet Whinfell in the census of 1891, Henry was there as a ten-year-old boy, the grandson of a retired dockworker called Matthew Whinfell and his wife. There was only one Henry Whinfell in the whole of England.

  And then thirty-one years later, in 1922, someone called Henry Whinfell had written the biography of Cecil Quaile Woods which Paul now had in his hands. It had been published in Bristol. Was it possible that Henry Quaile Woods had moved south? And settled in Bristol, siring a whole line of Whinfells of which he, Paul was the next to last, culminating in Joseph – Paul and Jenny’s baby son?

  Starting from the other end, Paul had retrieved his own father’s birth certificate three months earlier. His father’s death had set him off on the trail. Paul’s father had been called straight Paul Whinfell too. But his father, Paul’s grandfather, had been listed on the birth certificate as Leslie Quaile Whinfell. And that had spurred Paul on. He had guessed that Leslie had been between twenty-five and thirty when his son was born and it hadn’t taken too much delving to find and then obtain a copy of Leslie Quaile Woods’ birth certificate. And to his delight he found that Leslie’s father had been called Henry Quaile Whinfell. He could find no other Whinfell sons. The marriage certificate that he had applied for and received just a few weeks earlier showed that Henry had married late in life, in Bristol. Henry’s age was on his marriage lines. It just remained to get Henry Quaile Whinfell’s birth certificate, which Paul was now looking at. And there it was. Not conclusive proof by any means. That would be very hard to get. But surely anyone with any common sense could assume that Cecil Quaile Woods was the father of the illegitimate child born to his servant in his vicarage and called by his name.