by Patrick Gale
He had always been a man of iron principle. He had threatened to resign his Oxford fellowship when he took exception to his warden’s support of a certain African charity. During his recent post at York he had sprung into limelight for criticizing the government both from the pulpit and from a small piece in The Guardian. It was chiefly because of the latter that he was so keenly watched over by the more powerful diocesan matrons. By the time he was laying hands on the last pair of heads and preparing to rise and bless the newly confirmed, his mind was made up to flex his principle anew.
After a hymn to relax everyone and a jolly bit of Gibbons from the choir to put them in the mood for an anodyne chat about growing up, he scaled the pulpit. He had prepared a sermon about duty, an uncomfortable topic at the best of times. He condensed this into a brief introductory paragraph then set aside his notes and improvised for the first time in his professional life. The peroration to which he treated an increasingly attentive audience was on doubt. In an unprecedented display of iron principle he went so far as to share his doubts with those he was appointed to lead. He cast aspersions on the Virgin Birth; less on whether or not it had happened than on whether this question were remotely important in a world of unemployment, famine, incurable plagues and impending war. There were surprised faces certainly but no one walked out since Barrowcester had long prided itself on its aggressive stance towards the Beast of Rome. What did cause a flurry of walk-outs, including a whole clutch from the Sisters of Bethesda and a shepherded crocodile from Saint Cecilia’s High, was his merciless swipe at the angelic host. The cosy cult of these peripheral characters, he declared, as typified by the tasteless Christmas card motifs that even made their way into television commercials as Yuletide market aids, represented a sickness in our spiritual standards and a wilful cold-shouldering of less palatable, more urgent truths. Those who were not already wriggling in their seats did so like singed maggots when he went on to remind them that Barrowcester had the least unemployment, lowest crime rate, fewest council flats and tiniest immigrant population of any English city.
As he warmed to his theme, doubt gave place to rage at the serried ranks of Christian Barrowers before him, at their unthinking coupling of Bible study with share application, of paying for farmyard holidays for inner-city children and taking themselves off to converted farmhouses in Tuscany. He raged and they listened.
One of the golden rules of preaching was that one typed the sermon out in advance, partly to give one’s ideas shape and to balance their expression but principally to prevent one’s getting carried away. In the cold light of the following dawn, indeed in the cold light in the eyes of his fellow clergy as he stepped from the pulpit, Gavin could see that he had been carried far far away. A kind of madness had come over him more suited, some would say, to newer religions than Barrowcester’s. He refrained from foaming at the mouth, which was perhaps a blessing, but he did see a vision.
As he wound up his attack, he saw a small, furred creature staring up at him from behind one of Mrs Delaney-Siedentrop’s grosser arrangements. So absorbed was he in its wild yet child-like frame, so startled at the speed with which it darted from sight with a flash of red hair, that he regained his full concentration only in time to hear himself declaim, in a most unepiscopal tone, something about the softness of a cherubic bum. Having had what sounded so very like the last word, he threw out a deeply felt blessing with an extra line in it to show them who was still a step ahead, then retreated to his painfully visible throne for the final hymn.
There had still been a cheery queue at the west door waiting to shake his hand after the service, but certain key faces had been missing and he had walked home with a heavy heart. The next day, predictably perhaps given the number of quondam shorthand typists that had been present, he was quoted word perfect in The Sunday Times. The Times carried a similarly scandalized piece on Monday as did The Daily Mail. The Guardian put the same quotations to opposite ends. Rather than write the replies and explanations demanded by each paper, he had agreed to air his views on a television debate later in the week.
Gavin took a short cut across the quire to the Patron’s chapel. Saint Boniface of Barrow (pron. Brew) was reputedly a Viking who, while leading a raid on the original Saxon abbey of Barro, on the hill where Barrowcester now stood, had been enveloped in a dazzling light. From the middle of said light he launched, on divine prompting say some, not surprisingly say others, into the Lord’s Prayer. This rousing combination of fireworks and linguistic virtuosity (for notwithstanding the date he had, of course, prayed in English) converted his hordes to Christianity on the spot. When the light dissolved, their leader had lost his sight. Legend further had it that he became Abbot. Depending on how far the pillaging had gone before the intervention of the light, he would either have done this straight away or nearer his well-behaved dotage, when he died a saintly death amid angelic clamour having swallowed a quantity of water when rescuing a child from the Bross. Under the Normans the abbey had become a moderately fine cathedral and under their descendants Barrowcester had grown into a sizeable market town and thence to a city, gaining the curious pronunciation of its name along the way. In the late 1960s an unpleasant French historian had been allowed the freedom of the Cathedral’s superb library for an entire summer, only to emerge declaring that the ‘cester’ bit was the result of a typographical error in the early seventeenth century. He left in a hurry and was not greatly missed. Tradition also had it that the original Viking settlement was responsible for a smattering of curious local surnames and for a local Scandinavian colouring known as ‘Barrowcester blond’.
No one was certain when he had been canonized, but the reformed Viking butcher had been the city’s patron since at least the eleventh century, for the rood screen and the tympanum bore carvings of his good deeds. He was traditionally portayed as a giant of a man with a ball of fire in one hand. An illumination in a fifteenth-century chronicle of Barrowcester embellished the image with an equally fiery shock of blond hair. His final resting place was a stark box of rough-hewn local stone in one of the few sections of the Saxon abbey untouched by the Normans. Whatever their master builder’s plans, it was plain that his workmen had a profound reverence for the tomb’s totemic force.
Boniface had worked no miracles since his death apart from an incident in 1908 when a small boy fell into a city cesspit and was saved from an unsavoury death by a pair of hands that hoisted him back to safety. Said boy swore they were the hands of a blond giant and went on to become Dean. Medallions of the saint had since become popular around the necks of local potholers and sanitation engineers.
Like several of England’s greater churches, the Cathedral was built on unstable ground; a massy challenge in faith to Nature. Barrowcester’s hill was riddled with caves, streams and uncharted passages that tended to make their presence known in a dramatic fashion. A cottage would move a foot in the night, a herbaceous border would fold in on itself. Occasionally whole houses had collapsed. An attempt in the late nineteenth century to drive a railway through the hillside had ended in tragedy with many workers buried alive and several children maimed by a briefly liquefied school. Seismologists had produced what they swore were accurate maps of the hill’s interior. These were enough to put any fool off digging a mine but, as far as householders, Dean or Chapter were concerned, had arrived a little late in the day. Severe accidents were rare enough to be outweighed by the attractions of the place, but close enough in public memory for Barrowers to see themselves as invested with a certain brave, frontier spirit.
Nine centuries on, alas, Nature had begun to tamper where Normandy had held off and the Saxon section was at risk. The first warning came as long ago as 1908 when a new altar was installed in the Patron’s chapel and the floor was found to be so out of true that a portion of the new stone had slid forward and smashed against Saint Boniface’s tomb. With the more recent appearance of alarming cracks in the outside wall of the chapel and the tumbling, during eight o’clock Communion, o
f the Patron’s crucifix and one of the larger flower arrangements on his tomb, it was decided to declare an emergency and launch an appeal. An expatriate Californian billionaire kindly put up two thirds of the money needed, without even coming to see the damage, and so forced Mrs Delaney-Siedentrop to soften, if not exactly to recant her views on his people.
Work was to begin today, supervised by the family of masons who had arrived from Glasgow between the wars and since secured a monopoly on all work at the Cathedral and Tatham’s. Although only the retired patriarch retained his Glaswegian accent, his several sons were still known as ‘the Scottish Masons’ and it was cause for pride if one could ever secure their time to labour on anything so mundane as a house. Before they could move in, the Patron had to be shifted. A charming service of apology and explanation had been concocted by the Dean and this morning, with the aid of a winch and the attendance of such local archaeologists, well-wishers and press as could not be put off by an ungodly hour, the tomb was to be opened. The sainted contents were eventually to be removed to a cavity before the high altar. The cavity in question was actually something to do with a redundant heating system but, by the tender attentions of the Scottish Masons, had been transformed into a clean and passable tomb. Because the sight of such important bones being slid on to an unpoetic plastic sheet might upset the congregation, no more than the sarcophagus lid was to be moved during the little service. The rest would happen once the crowds had departed and once the area was afforded the discretion of a curtain and no-entry sign.
With the saint safely stowed, the massive task was to begin of dismantling the east end, stone by historied stone, so that the cavity beneath it could be dealt with. William Walker, a fearless diver, had spent months and at last his health, swimming through mud to shore up the sinking mass of Winchester Cathedral earlier in the century, so it was assumed that the brave workers of Glasgow would not be averse to clambering in Barrowcester’s primeval potholes to erect similar supports. The whole secure, the east end would be rebuilt. It had occurred to Gavin to suggest that the rain-smoothed gargoyles and carvings be replaced with stone caricatures of modern figures so as to continue the medieval tradition. It was a suggestion which he thought could now wait a little.
He entered the Patron’s chapel. The winch that was arranged over the tomb, its chains cunningly attached to the corners and sides of the sarcophagus lid, was entwined with Mrs Delaney-Siedentrop, or at least her watchful flowers. He walked over, not knowing their names, and took a sniff to show he was not afraid. They were white and smelled of honey and dust. He touched the pulley chain and made it and its scented burden swing with a sound like distant mice.
Temptation overcame him. It would be another half hour before the first verger came to open up shop. He pulled hard on the chain, grinding flowers as he did so. The pulley and gears ground into action and the lid shifted. He pulled more, harder and faster until it was five inches clear of the tomb. He was getting hot. Leaving the lid to swing, he unfastened his anorak, draped it over a nearby chair and returned to pulling the chain. The sound echoed but he had gone too far to stop. He could plead religious fervour or divine prompting. He could say he had had a dream – vergers loved to talk about dreams. As he pulled he realized that more than anything he needed to see for himself that Saint Boniface or at least a body’s remains lay within. On top of Saturday’s sermon, a vanished patron would be too disastrous. There was no smell. He had expected a smell or at the very least a cloud of ancient dust. Of course; in order to secure the chain, the workmen had already prised the lid clear. There was to be no mystery, no unveiling.
Panting, still curious despite his realization that he was not the first to do so, Gavin crouched to peer inside. While no miraculous preservation of the corpse had occurred, as might have been the case nearer the dread lair of the Beast of Rome, the patronal skeleton was remarkably well kept and had not crumbled to dust. The skull was rolled to one side as in sleep and the hands were unusually draped across the pelvis. No. The hands were grasped in prayer over the ribs so the other hands … Gavin Tree frowned. As well as his sainted compliment of skeletal arms and legs, Saint Boniface of Barrow had the remains of a great pair of wings. What had seemed to be hands were in fact the tips of two delicate webs of tiny wing bones which were draped protectively across the saintly shoulders, chest and midriff. Before bursting into wild and rapid action, the Bishop calmly observed that legend was in this case truth in that the body measured at least six and a half feet.
Reaching deep into the sacophagus, he laid hands on first one wing then the other. Age had been only superficially kind to the bones; as he pulled at the join where the top wing bone entered the back of the massive rib cage, he felt it turn to a sort of crumbled biscuit in his grip. He dislocated both wings then lifted them gingerly through the cavity. He wanted to run because time was short and he still had to lower the lid, yet he was terrified of tripping and landing in a mass of someone else’s broken wing cartilage. Also the skeletal wings were too long to carry from his waist, so he had to keep his fists at shoulder height. Thinking quickly, he lurched like a crippled dragonfly to the entrance of the crypt. He took both wings in one hand, turned the doorknob and leaned on the door with his back. As he scrabbled with his free hand for the light switch, Gavin heard something scamper in the dark and splash into the water. Rats. Rats? No time to think. He hurried, bones flailing, to the point where the city’s subterranean stream swirled in a black U in and out of one mossy wall. It was difficult to throw the bones any distance but the swift current helped him.
There was a distant sound of an animal gnawing as he closed the door. He didn’t look back but hurried to the Patron’s chapel where he lowered the lid as fast as he could. Only then, when he was at liberty to fall to his knees and beg forgiveness, did the full enormity of his crime begin to dawn upon him. Quite apart from his proud motives, his act had been one of scientific as well as religious desecration. Wise men would kill to have had even a glimpse of the remains that the rats were now chewing so eagerly.
Perhaps that was a good reason for having destroyed them; a less shamefully selfish one than not wishing to have an overhasty sermon rendered ridiculous by untimely evidence of the miraculous. Gavin chewed on a thumb knuckle and thought hard about humility.
There was a rattling of fat keys in the south transept door before someone found it was already unlocked, then footsteps across the quire. Sam the verger came in, paused to recognize the Bishop and appreciate the importance of what he was at, then came tutting forward and picked up the crushed flowers from around the tomb. Through the cracks in between his raised fingers, Gavin saw him do this and cursed himself for forgetting to gather them before he kneeled. He lowered his head and, sliding back on to a chair, smiled at Sam.
‘Morning, my lord,’ said Sam, obstinate as his colleagues on the little matter of calling a Bishop plain ‘mister’.
‘Hello, Sam. A fine day for it.’
‘Suppose so,’ said Sam, ‘though I reckon it’s a dangerous thing to do. If a church is going to fall, I say it will. There’ll be a war soon, anyway, and all the money will have been wasted.’ Before the shepherd of his soul could answer he held out the crumpled petals. ‘Least we’re not a sinking ship,’ he chuckled, ‘we’ve got ourselves a colony of rats still.’
‘Really?’ asked his lord, relieved.
‘They chew flowers, tear surplices; I reckon they’d eat those wafers if they could open the safe.’
He laughed out loud as only vergers seem able to do in a Cathedral and went to throw away the rat-mauled flowers. Gavin sighed, rose and went for a little walk to count his remaining blessings.
7
Strapped into the passenger seat, Clive Hart picked the yellow sleep from behind his glasses. His wife toured the Close in search of a parking space. It was a little after seven o’clock. His wolfed coffee and slab of home-made bread were being ungraciously received by a stomach that was barely awake. Last night he had been all
in favour of coming to the service of disinterment. It had been his idea and he had had to ply Lydia with arguments of ‘rare opportunity’ and ‘kick yourself for missing it’. Tables had turned this morning. It was she, the habitual early riser, who had plied him with breakfast and a running shower and he who did the self-kicking.
‘Won’t that warden nab us here?’ he asked as she gave up the search and parked on a yellow line.
‘No. I slipped her a cheapo Stilton in the shop when her family came to stay at Easter and she knows our car.’
She was so damned arrogant and she always got away with it. He couldn’t bribe a child. People stole his bike lights with heartless regularity.
They shivered because the sun had not yet rounded the east end to dry the dew on the grass or chase the chill off the pavements. They walked around the lawn and entered through the south transept. The Glurry was the only door open at this time of day but habitués used it all day long so as to avoid the embarrassment of having to greet an acquaintance on begging box duty in the main entrance at the west end.
Lydia had slipped her arm through his soon after leaving the car. The action was common between them; a thoughtless gesture of affection and territory, a twenty-one-year habit. Today she also did it for comfort. Quite apart from the faintly revolting nature of what they were about to witness, the Cathedral’s interior made her feel unimportant, little-wifey and slightly guilty.
Her faith was not especially strong. She loved singing hymns and listening to the choir. Some – by no means all – passages of the Bible and the liturgy made her feel safe and whole. Clive only came here if persuaded and he had very little faith, if any. He shared her love of the music however, never ceased to be inspired by the building and had a wry respect for its importance as a social hub. When he retired from Tatham’s she would like him to train to be one of the guides; it would give him something to do when they weren’t at the house she intended they buy on the Tarn. She already had the Lady chapel to dust each week and was on a reserve list for the begging boxes.