by Patrick Gale
‘Really?’ He tried not to sound surprised. There had been a television documentary, after all; she might have read the picture book spin-off.
‘Yes. I read it a few times in the library, but it was too long to read comfortably in one go, and besides I wanted a copy of my own, so I stole it.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘I keep it by my bed.’
She examined him with the blank stare of a psychopath, or was it the guileless gaze of a rustic innocent? Not altogether rustic, evidently; she had read and clearly enjoyed the full version of Visions of Hell, much of which was meaty stuff.
‘Sit down.’ He waved a cigarette at the spare chair on the other side of the table.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You should be having breakfast.’
‘Go on,’ he said.
She sat.
‘I’m after something big,’ she said. ‘The police couldn’t help and the Cathedral lot’s too feeble. You could tell me, I know you could.’
‘What?’
‘What’s the strongest invocation for finding a missing person?’
He played for time.
‘Sorry.’ He laughed. ‘I don’t quite … er. Invocation to whom, exactly?’
She fixed him with her small eyes.
‘You know,’ she said, and smiled. Her teeth were clean and even, but looked unnaturally wide – like a horse’s. He knew.
‘You mean, the Devil?’ he asked.
‘Well, in your words, Professor, “he wears many faces”. My manual suggested I aim high and try for Belial.’
‘Which manual are you using?’
‘Bugwash and Stavey, seventh edition.’
‘Reputable enough,’ he said, seeing a way, albeit a rash one, of losing this rather frightening woman’s attentions. ‘But I think you could do better.’
‘Tell me.’
He saw her tough hands tighten their grip on her mug.
‘How badly do you need this … This person?’ He was putting it on, now, fobbing her off. She had probably fallen for some local swain beyond her reach; an estate agent, perhaps, or simply a plasterer bound round with wife and clinging children.
‘More than life,’ she said. She said it almost airily. Was he doing the right thing? His interest was purely academic. He didn’t believe, but there were plenty of unpleasant stories of those who did.
‘I’ve a better book,’ he said. ‘I’ll lend it to you to copy the relevant sections.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’ He rose. ‘Finish your coffee, first,’ she said. ‘It can wait.’
But he knew it couldn’t. She might only be after a local swain, but he sensed that if he didn’t find her the book now, she would gladly turn his room upside down in order to steal it.
‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I’d finished.’
It was a valuable book, rarer than she could know, which was why he was carrying it with him rather than leaving it behind at the Booths’s. An early eighteenth-century demonic lexicon. He had found it cunningly sewn into the middle of the books of Isaiah in a later family Bible, and he had cut it out and had it rebound. The Bible had cost a small fortune, but the lexicon was worth more and the bookseller had given the Bible no more than a cursory glance front and back and knew nothing of the nasty little secret it held. Little more than thirty pages, but something Satanists would kill to possess. He had quoted it in Visions of Hell but a passing fear, doubtless irrational, had led him to lie about the source. Why then was he lending it to his landlady’s cleaning woman?
‘Because she needs it more than I do,’ he thought as he slid the little book from the lining of his suitcase, ‘and maybe because she can lose it for me.’
She said nothing when he passed it to her but opened it at once and began to read, scowling at the crabbed print and blotchy vellum.
‘I’ll be here for at least a week,’ he told the top of her head. ‘Drop it back when you’ve finished. I’ll … er … I’ll be off to the library now, then.’ And he left her to read and set out along the gleaming pavements, a cigarette defiantly in hand and a queasy uncertainty as to the wisdom of facing the day with an empty stomach, olive oil or no.
The well-dressed crowd was coming back from the Cathedral but in a state of overexcitement out of all proportion to what they had just been through. From what he could remember from the compulsory church-going of his Boston childhood, freshly emerged congregations rewarded their virtue and patience with a spirited round of greetings and, possibly, gossip. But that was on a Sunday, after a sermon and in most cases a week of unsociable labour; these people had emerged from what Evan took to be a sermon-free Holy Communion, a service to which he assumed they were inured. As he walked through to the Close, it became almost embarrassing to meet the directionless sparkle of so many happy faces. Their elation rested uneasily on these types of prosperous conformity as it had on the mundane forms of the worshippers he used to watch leaving the Chapel of Charismatics in his street in Nowhere, Vermont. He kept his eyes firmly on the Cathedral and cut an easy swathe through the beaming, mostly skirted, pedestrians. Then, nearing the foot of the south transept he had to ask the way to the library. He accosted a round, amiable creature in powder blue.
‘Carry on from here,’ she directed, ‘then turn right through that passage – we call it the Glurry – and on the other side you’ll see a lovely round building. That’s the Chapter House and the library is on the first floor.’
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘But I think I should warn you that there’s no visiting until ten-thirty.’
‘Can’t you see he’s doing research?’ clucked her companion, who wore navy and a less approachable aspect.
‘Actually yes, I am,’ confessed Evan.
‘Silly me,’ laughed the first woman, pointing with a gloved hand to his briefcase.
‘Tell me,’ he asked, feeling sorry for her as her navy companion clicked her tongue and stared, impatient, at the passers-by. ‘Why all the excitement? What have I missed? My landlady said something about a saint.’
‘Oh a miracle!’ gushed the first woman. ‘You missed a real miracle. And we saw it all, didn’t we, Marge?’
‘Popish tripe,’ snarled Marge. ‘So nice talking to you,’ she said to Evan and steered her companion away.
Evan watched them pass, bickering, round the corner of the transept then followed the path through the Glurry to find a chapter house every bit as fine as its equivalent in Salisbury and Wells. A short, neat, grey-haired woman was waiting for him at the door. He recognized her at once as the one with the fox terrier on the train from London.
‘Professor Kirby?’
‘Yes?’
‘How do you do. Petra Dixon.’ She shook his hand and her reading spectacles bounced on their chain against her small, no-nonsense bosom.
‘I should have introduced myself on the train,’ he said.
‘But you didn’t know me from Adam and I certainly had no idea who you were, so I would have found it rather odd,’ she replied simply. ‘I ran into Mrs Merluza in the Close just now and she told me you’d be on your way so I thought I’d wait outside in case you got lost,’ she went on, unlocking the door on to a short spiral staircase. As he followed her, Evan noticed that her hair was not cut short as he had at first supposed, but grown long then brushed back tightly off her head and swept up in an unexpectedly baroque chignon with a black velvet bow.
‘I trust you didn’t miss the miracle,’ he ventured.
‘I jolly well did,’ she said, pausing to open a second door into the high, vaulted chamber above. ‘My temper gets filthy if I don’t have seven hours’ sleep and I never turn in until I’ve heard the shipping forecast.’
‘Oh,’ he said, nonplussed. ‘I see.’
‘My brother-in-law’s a lighthouse keeper,’ she explained, reading his expression. ‘It helps me feel in touch. Had you not seen photographs?’ she continued.
‘No,’ said Evan who was involuntarily gazing up a
t the ceiling. ‘It’s incredible.
‘Mmh’, said Miss Dixon, sitting sidesaddle at her desk to change into her comfortable shoes before opening the mail she had brought up with her from downstairs. ‘Thirteenth-century. The shelves are much later of course. Downstairs is much the same only without the view and with stone thrones in place of books.’
The central single pillar seemed far too delicate to support such a massive structure. A maze of tracery radiated from it. The effect was like a magnification of the underside of a beech leaf. Though the Chapter House seemed round on the outside, within it was octagonal. The staircase and door took up one of the eight sides, high oak bookcases laden with riches took up four and the remaining three held leaded windows with views across the Close and on to the nearby windows of the Cathedral’s quire and south transept. The higher glass was clear though pleasantly uneven with age. The lower five inches of each window had been stained with a stylized design of running water with, here and there, a darting fish.
‘What exactly were you hoping to read?’ Miss Dixon’s tone brought him back to earth.
‘Pardon me,’ he laughed, ‘but I’m sure you’re used to people gaping.’ She said nothing so he dug in his briefcase and brought out an index card. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘Barrow 341 to start with then Memling’s Gravitas and Barrow 22 – that’s On the Nature of Briddes.’
‘Very à propos,’ Petra Dixon commented as she left her desk to find Barrow 341, a twelfth-century compilation of miracles, fables and saintly legends.
‘How so?’ asked Evan. ‘May I sit here?
‘Yes do. It seems you’d be interested in this morning’s little phenomenon.’
‘Tell me more.’
‘Well, because we need to carry out drastic building works in the east end, the patron saint is having to be moved.’ She pulled over a set of rolling steps, flipped down the brake shoe with her foot and began to climb them.
‘Saint Boniface of Barrow?’
‘Yes. You’ve done your homework, only it’s pronounced ‘Brew’.
‘Sorry. He’s the tall one with the sparkler, yes?’
‘That’s right. Anyway there was a service this morning for the opening of his tomb and a flock of doves shot from inside.’
‘My word.’
‘At least, I say doves but I wasn’t there and my informant owned to having been between long-range and reading specs at the time. But they were certainly white.’ Miss Dixon grunted slightly as she tugged a large, vellum-bound volume from the shelf.
‘Here. Let me,’ said Evan, bounding forward, and he took it from her so that she had both hands free to climb with. ‘Fascinating,’ he went on. ‘You don’t think it was a put-up job?’
‘We’re not in Ireland, Professor.’
‘No. Of course not. But I was thinking of Augustan Rome and those funerals they still have in Japan sometimes, where they let out a flight of birds to represent the departed soul.’
‘Possibly. It’s not very us but then the Bishop is still very new here. I was thinking more of Claudia of Knightcote.’ She wheeled the steps back to their place and returned to her desk.
‘You’ve got me there.’
‘Marvellous story. Hang on.’ She twisted to a small shelf beside her. ‘Keller and Baynton vol. three,’ she said, thawing as she pulled out the book. ‘My favourite.’ And she read him the story of how Claudia of Knightcote’s corpse was replaced in the turning of a handmaid’s back, into a bedful of fluttering doves. She then shamed his ignorance further, but with charm, by pointing out a reference in his own early work, The Visionary Tradition, St Marty of Rabastens who drove pillaging soldiers off his tomb in the guise of three enraged cob swans. Evan didn’t remember that bit and thought he must have plagiarized it.
Miss Dixon proved herself the soul of discreet helpfuless and her library was indeed breathtaking. Evan was already familiar with its contents, having pored over the catalogue often enough in the British Library and back in Harvard, but there was nothing to compare with the happy sensation of feeling the precious manuscripts on a desk before him. He frittered away much of the morning devouring Barrow 341 for no better reason than the perfection of its illumination. When the huge bells in the spires behind her sounded the lunch hour, Miss Dixon apologized that she had to turn him out for forty minutes while she went home to walk her terrier. Out in the Close again, she directed him to the Tracer’s Arms in Tower Place. He enjoyed an excellent lunch of the local herb-flecked sausages and an incautious pint of Old Stoat, the local bitter, before he was led further astray by the siren lure of the Cathedral where he wandered happily for half an hour or more. It had one of those cunning rooves which seem so much higher on the inside than they appear to be from without, but for him the chief attraction was the scattering of fine memorials, whose epitaphs it had long been his bad habit to study. Already there were hordes of tourists searching for small white birds and bothering the Scottish Masons for photographs. The west end tympanum bore a crude representation of the Last Judgement watched over by various saints including a towering Saint Boniface of Barrow, carrying a lantern whose spiky beams represented the ball of fire that had converted him. Tourists were lining up to take photographs of each other in front of him. The rising souls of the blessed on whom he cast his approving, if sightless, gaze seemed to be paddling through water. Ambrosia perhaps, or badly carved clouds.
Evan’s afternoon was spent in genuine work, translating the relevant chunks of Memling’s Gravitas and taking notes for the photograph collectors. As she shut the doors again at five o’clock, Miss Dixon warned him that Tuesdays always saw the place overrun with school parties and a lecture on bookbinding. On her advice, he telephoned Dr Cresswell – the Lord of Tatham’s – and arranged to spend Tuesday there instead.
11
‘No. Don’t jump on there. No! You’ll leave pawprints. Beast! Go on. Pssh. Get down!’ Emma shouted.
The cat, an immensely fat ginger tom, regarded her with his habitual expression which could convey either hauteur or cretinism, depending on Emma’s mood. A damp cloth in hand, to wipe away the pawprints he had indeed left on the kitchen table, she scooped him gently up and carried him out to the stairs. He sat where she left him, sending a gooseberry glare through the banisters as she returned to tidying the kitchen. As well as the house, she had inherited its two cats, Rousillou (said to be Occitan for ‘small red thing’) and his mother, Blanquette. Blanquette was a smoke-tinted Abyssinian of whom so few traces were imprinted on her son that she was assumed to have married down. Both cats were extremely loquacious, mewing as often from a wish to be sociable as from hunger or irritation. Emma tried not to talk to them too much. It was an easy habit into which to slip, however, so her self-discipline in this quarter tended to stretch only as far as not talking to her cats in front of other people.
Since her telephone conversation with Fergus Gibson yesterday, her house had received a major spring cleaning. Emma’s original intention had been merely to run around with a Hoover, to do a little dusting and conceivably, to clean the wash basins. In the event, she had started to enjoy herself so much that she had been quite carried away and had hauled rugs out to the washing line for beating, had turned mattresses, washed windows and even lifted pot plants off the window sills so as to wipe away the brown rings left underneath. She had retrieved stale copies of Sunday papers (she saved money on weekdays by reading papers in the staff common room), The Times Literary Supplement, History Today, and The Church Times from points of accumulation around the house and had tied them up in neat bundles in the woodshed. Her father had taken out a life subscription to The Church Times and the paper continued to arrive regardless of his decease. Emma had intended to write them a cancellation letter long ago, but had become a quiet fan of the quirky journal and continued to read it, cherishing the hope that the subscription department would now never notice their oversight.
She had taken everything out of the larder, washed the shelves and even wiped the dust of
f storage jars and the stickiness off jam pots before she set them neatly back. She had sorted through the bathroom cupboard and thrown out old pills and several tubes of her late father’s pile ointment which she had been keeping on the rather depressing offchance that they might come in useful some day. In a final blast of enthusiasm last night, she had taken all her late father’s suits, shirts, shoes and ties and piled them into bin liners, along with some clothes she had not donned since the Indian cotton summer of 1977. She had telephoned the Spastics Shop before setting out for this morning’s school, and a whinnying sort of woman had just come round to take it all away in her Morris Oxford. The house now had a clean, expectant feel to it.
Emma sat with her post-lunch coffee in the sitting room and waited. Blanquette emerged from under the sofa, jumped with a mew to her lap, sniffed the coffee and, rejecting it, lay down. Mr Gibson had said ‘after lunch’ but that could be now, which was 1.30, or in two hours’ time. She hoped he would not expect her to harbour any strong tastes of her own. She judged houses on the air they conveyed and was not wont to think in terms of wallpaper or painting effects. On her way home to her rendezvous with the whinnying Spastics envoy, she had bought a copy of House and Garden and found it deeply disturbing. Certainly she possessed the initiative to march into town, pore over colour cards and do the place up herself over a score of weekends and long afternoons, but the transformation – exorcism almost – which she had in mind was so momentous that she had a horror of making a mistake. Renovating a late father’s house was not so different from building a chapel in which to house his corpse; a task best left to other, impersonal hands.
The garden gate clanged. Emma jumped up and stood peering from the gloom at the back of the room. She barely glimpsed six feet worth of brown tweed striding past the window towards the porch. The knocker was struck. Her coffee was too hot to drink. She hurried into the downstairs lavatory to tip it into the sink, checked her face in the newly polished hall mirror and let him in.