by Patrick Gale
‘It’s OK. I’m an addict too, friend,’ he said but whoever it was belted like a shocked hare back through the arch and around the other side of the chantry.
Judging from the patter on the stone, he was in bare feet.
Walking briskly out through the passage by the chapel, Evan half slipped on something, only saving himself from a fall by a scrabbling grasp on the uneven wall to his left. Spine unpleasantly jarred, he rubbed his grazed palms on his jacket and cursed. He scraped whatever it was off his shoe and on to the side of the chapel step, supposing the worst. Then he sniffed an unexpected smell of riverbank and stagnant pool.
Returned to the reassuring, electrified gas lamps of Scholar Street, Evan found himself quite seriously jumpy so decided to raid Mrs Merluza’s kitchen for cooking brandy to calm his nerves for bed.
18
Dressed in a new pastel cotton from Daniella’s, because it was the first day of summer, Mercy Merluza left the kitchen and walked through the hall to the stairs. She frowned at the letter box because her Daily Telegraph was inexplicably late, then went upstairs and tapped on her daughter’s door.
‘Cariño?’
‘Mmh?’
‘I’m just off to have coffee with Mrs Chattock now at the Palace. The Professor doesn’t seem to have got up yet. Dawn doesn’t come today and I don’t want to be late so I wondered …’
Madeleine half opened her door, pushing back her unbrushed hair and yawning.
‘… if I’d make breakfast for him,’ she finished.
‘Would you?’
‘Of course.’
‘Bless you.’ Disliking to see Madeleine undressed, Mercy turned to go. Remorse tweaked her into pausing on the top of the stairs. ‘You are all right, cariño, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, Mum. I’m fine.’
Madeleine shut the door.
‘Good,’ sighed her mother and walked down to the front door.
Just as Mercy had suspected, Madeleine had come home because she was in a certain sort of fix. She had started to tell Mercy about an affair she had just finished, then broke down and admitted that she was pregnant and could not decide what to do. Having been through no less than three abortions, Mercy found herself completely unshocked and capable of being extremely sympathetic. She said she knew of a good clinic who would be able to deal with it, as the Stepfords’ poor girl had been sent there last year after a problematical French exchange. Madeleine had refused to give her mother the man’s name or to explain why he was being so unhelpful. The atmosphere was just starting to feel tense when Professor Kirby had joined them for supper and they were obliged to drop the topic. Mercy hoped that her daughter would not do anything hot-headed such as confide in her lodger. These things left fewest traces when kept under wraps.
As she turned from shutting the front door, she saw that Miss Dyce-Hamilton, who used to be at Tatham’s with Madeleine, was approaching on her bicycle. When she was close enough, Mercy gave a little wave she reserved for timid or unmarried women.
‘Hello,’ she said.
Rather than stop to chat as she normally did, however, Miss Dyce-Hamilton fairly shouted,
‘Lovely morning, isn’t it? Really lovely!’ and shot on.
The look which accompanied this greeting had been so frantic that Mercy glanced at her reflection in the post office window. Her dress was a perfectly innocuous dusky blue, the flowers extremely small, the sleeves long and the hem below the knee. Her hair was fine as ever, her lipstick straight, her shoes tinted the most unpredatory of charcoal greys. Perhaps Miss Dyce-Hamilton had been late for school; they did say she was apt to be scatter-brained.
Mercy continued on her way, enjoying the brilliant blue of the sky and the shrill chatter of the birds in the gardens that backed on to Scholar Walk. A diminished crocodile of eight choristers emerged from the garden gate of the choir school. They raised their caps in unison and the leader said,
‘Good morning, Miss.’
Mercy beamed in reply and would have felt better had she not seen Marge Delaney-Siedentrop spring, to the best of a stout woman’s ability, through the front door of number thirty-two without so much as a smile. Of all people, Marge had nothing to feel guilty for, and she could not be avoiding Mercy for they had spoken at length in the queue at Hart’s yesterday. It was Marge’s time of life, Mercy decided; that and her envy of Mercy’s friendship with Deirdre Chattock.
Mercy liked to think that this friendship sprang from the fact that both she and Deirdre were wild briar roses ill at ease in Barrowcester’s confining borders. When she had arrived, a widow with a foreign surname, a growing girl and the musk of Bayswater on her person, the town had dismayed her. For the first few weeks she was preoccupied with putting her new house in order and with settling Madeleine into Tatham’s. Then she grew nervous. She was very much alone, since Madeleine was a scholar and scholars had to board. This was nothing new. She had been almost as alone in London, and prepared to live in Barrowcester in the state of semi-anonymity she had learned to enjoy in the capital. This however proved extremely hard to do in her new surroundings for she was now surrounded by people who knew not only each other, but each other’s friends and relations. Barrowers had links. Mercy heard their links jingle into place as they accosted one another in shops or introduced themselves to near strangers climbing out of cars or sweeping front paths.
‘Sorry. You probably don’t know me but I’m Simon Curlicue and our sisters do begging-box duty together on Tuesdays.’
‘Excuse me, but aren’t you Mrs Typewriter Hatpin? Yes? What fun! Our littlest are in the same form at Tatham’s. Will’s enjoying it so much.’
Mercy heard them rejoice in their links and felt aware, for the first time in her existence, that she was rootless and, save for Madeleine, denuded of family; a bald log in a buzzing April orchard. She could feel her neighbours, who had barely introduced themselves, sizing her up, looking for links and finding none. Whereas in Bayswater she had been quite content to sit at her sewing machine, watching Australian soap operas in her dressing gown all day while Madeleine was out at school, here she felt guilty for doing so. No one in Barrowcester seemed to watch television unless there was a ‘classic’ adaptation of Austen, Mrs Gaskell or E.F. Benson. Then they would pull their sets from under wraps and throw ‘telly teas’, marvelling at the improved standard of television drama since they last watched any and lamenting that their tastes were so old-fashioned as to prevent them from watching more often.
Mercy started to cast her eyes about, to size up her neighbours in return, and she began to notice patterns in their lives. A clutch of them was regularly to be seen walking to the Close at 7.45 in the morning and a far larger group did so, more obviously, on Sunday mornings at 7.45, 10.15 and 11.20. Most intriguing off all, however, were the people that vanished off the face of the hill between 4.45 and 6.00 every day of the week.
Mercy determined to break in on the latter’s secret: they displayed an appealing homogeneity lacking in the Sunday group. One Thursday, therefore, she pulled on an uncharacteristic two-piece she had just bought in Daniella’s and loitered outside the Close at ten to five. Within five minutes the pavement was dotted with groups of two and four and she could follow the crowd unobserved. They wandered, link-swopping, to the Cathedral, with her in their midst. The first thing she learned was that they used a special entrance. She had been to no services since her arrival in Barrowcester, what little religion ran in her veins being a condensed Roman Catholicism, but she had felt obliged to go with Madeleine on a guided tour of the Cathedral on their first weekend and had returned once on her own. On each occasion she had entered by the huge open door at the west end, where she had been accosted by a woman who lived a few houses away and who was standing in a dark green gown by a giant Perspex moneybox. The woman bade Mercy a hearty welcome without a flicker of recognition then discreetly breathed that the Cathedral needed a fair donation from every visitor if it was to remain standing. As she followed the five o’cloc
k crowd on this Thursday evening, they had led her through a sort of tunnel by the south transept.
‘I didn’t know we could get in this way,’ she admitted to a benign, stork-like man on her right.
‘Oh?’ he said. ‘It’s the Glurry. It’s really the tradesmen’s entrance for the choir and Chapter but it’s also handy for those of us in the know as it saves a long walk up a cold nave. They can only afford to heat the quire. After you,’ he added and held open a tiny door for her.
‘Thank you,’ she said with feeling as they walked through a sort of cubby hole into the south transept and on to the quire. As they walked and as Mercy realized that he was quite content to lead a novice to her initiation, she felt a warm sense of arrival seeping through her being to meet the cold that was rising from the floor.
The form of service had been unfamiliar, but there was far less standing and kneeling than in the rather Filipino Carmelite church she had occasionally attended in Kensington. The singing was delightful, the bearing of the clergy was unanimously distinguished and, most importantly, Mercy had enjoyed being surrounded by Barrowers who no longer stared at her or who, if they did, had a kind of tenderness in their curiosity. The hour flew by and as they were going, blessed, on their way and as Mercy was trying to decide whether to be grown up and eat her supper at the table or to damn the consequences and eat it before the television as she normally did, someone laid a hand on her arm. It was an attractive woman with subtle green eyes.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You don’t know me but I think my husband Clive teaches your daughter Madeleine English. I’m Lydia Hart.’
‘Mercy Merluza. How d’you do.’
‘Clive and I are having a little drinks party tomorrow and wondered if you’d like to come and meet some of your new neighbours. I’m afraid it’s terribly short notice.’
‘Oh. How kind.’
‘Around seven? Mrs Porter and her husband are coming and as they live just two along from you, Jane said they’d drop by to pick you up and show you the way.’
Links jingled in Mercy’s grateful ears.
‘How kind of her,’ she said.
‘Lovely. We’ll see you tomorrow then,’ said Lydia with a broadish smile.
Of course she and Lydia had never been close since, but Mercy would always be grateful for the forging of that first link. At the drinks party she had made several friends and met the owner of The Treasure Trove who had fallen on hard times and was so keen to make a private sale. From one link grew three, from three grew nine and so the process had continued until it slowed down dramatically to an average gain (balanced by a seasonal pruning) of one link every three months. Along the way, Mercy had felt compelled to fashion herself a new past; amnesia about one’s origins was so very suspect and however much Barrowcester prided itself on freedom of outlook, she felt no doubts as to the way her neighbours would look on an ex-cabaret artiste and jewel thief. She began to drop hints about a family and property shattered soon after her marriage by a terrorist attack, adding that her ‘little Madeleine’ had been spared the details and lived in blissful semi-ignorance of the family tragedy.
As for church-going, Mercy could now be found in the Cathedral every Sunday morning and every evening too except for Monday of course, when the choir had their night off and Mercy might be found, dispossessed and shopping.
Deirdre Chattock had arrived in the wake of her son, the Bishop, barely eight months ago. Gavin Tree was unmarried, which was a point in his favour in the eyes of Barrowcester, as opposed to his high political colouring, refusal to entertain on an episcopal scale and request that he be addressed as plain mister, which were not. His mother had been married twice, Gavin being an only child, happy fruit of union number one. Granted, she was untainted by divorce, but there was something about a multiple widow which ill accorded with a society where marriage was a duty performed once in a lifetime and where widowhood was mutely regarded as the will of God and therefore beyond the further attentions of man. Before her first marriage, Deirdre had strutted a handful of hours upon various northern stages. More recently she had led a campaign against alcoholism, of an awkwardly revelatory nature. When it suited her son’s political credibility, which it did most of the time, she could resuscitate an unmistakable Derbyshire accent. Not a woman likely to find a downy nest in the Barrowcester bosom, she was neither a woman to let Barrowcester snobbery ruffle her plumage. She suffered a mild stroke under anaesthetic for a recent operation and found that it had, as she put it delightedly, ‘plugged her into the switchboard of the Spirits’. While she continued to follow her son in orthodox Christian practice, she had instigated a weekly ‘at home’ meditation group. In the absence of any large-scale entertainment on her son’s part, this had proved very popular as a means of regular admission to the Palace.
Mercy had enraged many, however, by bounding into a palace intimacy long before any stroke had opened doors. Deirdre Chattock had come into Boniface Crafts in her very first week and bought herself a cardigan knitted by a local craftswoman. As she looked around Mercy’s shop she had hummed a song to herself. As sometimes happens, the song had penetrated Mercy’s unconscious ear and, after selling Deirdre Chattock the cardigan, she had pottered into her store room to put on the kettle for elevenses and had started to sing the song herself.
‘Falling in love again,’ she sang. ‘Never wanted to …’
‘Pardon me.’
‘Yes?’
It was Mrs Chattock, who had not left the shop but was hovering by the counter. Heads turned: Mrs Chattock was a new arrival and therefore subject to scorching local interest.
‘That song. I’ve had it on my brain all morning but can’t remember beyond the fourth line,’ she said, then sang, ‘Da da da Deedle-dah, Deedle da da dah. Deedle da da dah. Tumtee tum tum. I know it does that twice but then I get stuck and I’ve been going berserk doing the same bit over and over.’
Glad to be of assistance and seeing a chance of forging a twenty-four-carat link, Mercy had continued in her fruity tenor, beating time with her much-jewelled left hand in a slow waltz rhythm.
‘Men cluster to me like moths around a flame.’
‘Ah-ha!’ laughed Deirdre, and joined in. ‘And if their wings burn I know I’m not to blame!’
While Miss McCreery and the other observers in the shop scurried off to tell their friends (and Marge Delaney-Siedentrop) that they had seen the Bishop’s mother purchase the cardigan that no one else could afford and then impersonate Gracie Fields impersonating Marlene Dietrich, Deirdre Chattock showed her gratitude by inviting Mercy to dinner the following evening.
Dinner had been a great success – they had listened to a stack of old records – and after a prompt reciprocation, gave way to less formal, more intimate lunches and then to downright confidential elevenses and cups of tea. Before Mr Tree had been in office a month, Mrs Merluza was the only woman in Barrowcester on ‘popping-in’ terms with his mother. Now every Barrowcesterian slight, every ungracious innuendo could be written off by Mercy as mere envy. Whatever sly disapprovals were stretched across her path, she had a friend to help her face them. Needless to say, she was the first after Gavin Tree at Deirdre’s sickbed last year (he had found her a room to herself on the NHS) and had heard long before him of her momentous ‘plugging in’. The meditation classes that attracted so many were little more than a smokescreen; Mercy was the only Barrower to have been a party to Mrs Chattock’s secret dalliance with powers beyond her control.
Her skin prickling slightly, for despite the sunshine the day was not as warm as she had at first supposed, Mercy turned off Scholar Street into the drive of the Palace. She saw Deirdre at a first-floor window and raised a hand in greeting. Deirdre waved back and slipped from view only to reappear at the front door as Mercy drew near.
‘Mercy, Petal, I didn’t think you’d come! How are you coping?’ She spoke as though Mercy had just tossed away crutches and were inadvisedly walking too far too soon.
‘I’m fine
thanks. How are …?’
‘You’re so brave! I said as much to our Gavin over breakfast and he thinks so too.’ Mercy was baffled at this sudden solicitous outburst which was quite out of character, but then Deirdre was always slightly larger than life. ‘And I’m so touched that you’ve come despite everything,’ her friend continued. They kissed. Although her last husband, the late Mr Chattock had proved a martyr to tobacco, Deirdre remained a compulsive smoker of Players Navy Cut and had a gravelly voice to prove it. ‘Come in, Flower,’ she said, waving her friend through the porch.
She shut the door and they walked side by side across the huge parqueted hall watched by the portraits of some ten past bishops, and started the slow climb up the stairs to Deirdre’s apartment on the first floor. Deirdre had regular visits from a town masseuse to tend her stiff joints, but she was still a painfully stately mover. A typewriter clattered from behind a door on their way.
‘Our poor Gavin slaving away,’ coughed Deirdre. ‘He has to prepare all his arguments for Faith Forum on Friday and write a piece on the vision for the Church Times, and answer any number of cranky letters.’
‘Does he get many?’ asked Mercy.
‘Oh my dear, they arrive by the score. I’d toss them in the Aga if I was him but he insists that every opinion is important and that every voice deserves a hearing and a reply. You thought it all a fake, I gather.’
‘Well I wouldn’t say that, exactly.’
‘No? I heard all about your views from Marge Delaney-Siedentrop who didn’t see a thing and is heaping coals on the anti-Roman fire.’ Deirdre poked discreet fun by pronouncing Siedentrop with a silent P. ‘I can quite see your point of view,’ she went on, ‘but I can assure you it was the Real Thing.’