Mortal Spoils

by D M Greenwood

  The book’s contents were wide-ranging: ‘Azbarnahi Geography and Climate: Barrier or Bridge?’ by Etvan Groombridge; ‘Politics and Policy in Cold War Azbarnahi,’ Professor Ditch Molar, formerly of the British Council; a substantial article on mining’s contribution to the economy of lower Azbarnah; an introduction by the editor and a concluding essay by him, ‘The Enigma of Archimandrite Georgios XII’. That looked promising. Tom turned to page 277. There was a photograph of the Archimandrite in grainy black and white. The familiar features stared at at him. Tom recognised the corpse in the chair of Ecclesia Place.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Vicarage

  ‘Te Deum Patrem colimus, te laudibus prosequimur, qui corpus cibo reficis, caelesti mentem gratia,’ Geoffrey intoned rapidly over the dinner table for the benefit of his clerical guests.

  ‘I didn’t know you were a Magdalen man,’ Teape said as though discovering a rare volume on a forgotten shelf.

  ‘Three happy years doing, I’m afraid, rather little.’

  ‘Theology?’ Canon Clutch inquired, hanging out his napkin like a flag.

  ‘Physics with fencing,’ Geoffrey admitted.

  Oenone looked with pride upon her husband’s dexterity with his escargots and garlic butter. Theodora, observing the dynamics of Geoffrey’s table, thought how instantly men who did not know each other started in to form a club: I belong, you don’t. But she caught herself up for being silly; a shared education is necessary to maintain a culture, a nation even. Naturally they would check each other out.

  ‘Did you know Ralph Dunch, by any chance? He must have been about your time. He’s just got his archdeaconry at Rabbitswold.’ Clutch was indefatigable at mapping his territory.

  ‘Geoffrey was in the Navy for ten years after Oxford before he entered the Church,’ Oenone explained. ‘So perhaps he’s not as senior as he might otherwise be.’

  It was, Theodora thought, the opening move in the game which Oenone, she did not doubt, would play until she got Geoffrey on to the bench of bishops. In a world which looked unstable, with its traditional institutions frail or corrupt, Oenone had at least the strength of knowing what she wanted. The present party was an early skirmish in that campaign. No one knows how bishops are made. There are no advertisements, no interviews, no one to whom you can apply. The criteria for choice are never debated in public. It is clear from the results that competence, whether construed as spirituality, pastoral skill or management prowess, is not the first requirement. Had Oenone chosen well in getting Clutch to her table? Theodora observed his expensive tailoring and understood how much he might dislike Tom, a nylon shirt man if ever there was one.

  They were eating in what Theodora remembered as having been Geoffrey’s study in the days when she’d had the curate’s flat in the basement. It seemed another life. Under Oenone’s hand, and blessed with her money, the Victorian vicarage had changed or, perhaps, returned to its heyday splendour. Geoffrey’s bachelor establishment in which he had camped with neat naval simplicity now looked and felt like a gentleman’s residence. Carpets new enough to sink into had replaced the stained boards and slippery rugs with holes in them. Chrysanthemums stood in a pool of their own reflection on the sideboard. White painted walls set off a couple of heavily framed oils, one an architect’s fantasy of St Sylvester’s Church and the other an impression of Ecclesia Place in the apocalyptic manner of Piper. The degree of unreality in both seemed to Theodora to capture things nicely.

  Oenone had transformed the house. Had she also remodeled Geoffrey? Theodora wondered. Had he put on a bit of weight? Certainly he looked well. He’d shaved off his naval beard. His thick copper-coloured hair gleamed with health. Marriage, then, agreed with him, as it did with Oenone. She looked kempt, accoutred perfectly for the occasion. She was dressed (Theodora wanted to say ‘robed’) in some soft material which it would be hard to put a name to, in a colour midway between grey and brown. She was slightly older than Theodora’s own thirty-two years but looked timelessly the hostess.

  Theodora had been late; Oenone had led her into the drawing room with a shade of impatience. Between engagements Theodora had kept on trying to get hold of Tom. The loss of the cross weighed on her like a sickness. Where was it now? In some pawnbroker’s a couple of boroughs away? Or had the thief known what he wanted and, indeed, come for what he knew he would find? She had had to put such cares behind her as Oenone made the introductions.

  ‘Dr Racy, Gilbert, of course you know.’

  Gilbert’s eyes gleamed behind his rimless glasses. ‘Theo, once again.’

  ‘Canon Teape, Eric, archivist – sorry, canon archivist of Ecclesia Place.’

  Canon Teape was well below Theodora’s height. He pushed his grey face upwards in amiable greeting. Theodora could imagine him hunkered on a lily leaf in a pond.

  ‘I think we have met.’

  He blinked as though to take a better picture of her. ‘But of course. Miss Braithwaite. The church historian. Newcome’s biographer. Your excellent article in CHR for September 93 volume 37 number 4. A model of what such things should be.’

  Clearly, in Teape’s league she counted. And if she counted for Teape then she could see that Clutch was prepared to give her a trial.

  ‘Miss Braithwaite, how do you do?’ He stopped short and his Crockford-nurtured memory came into play. ‘Not, by any chance, a relation of Nicholas Braithwaite?’

  ‘My father.’

  ‘I’m delighted to meet you,’ said Canon Clutch with warmth. ‘And so very sorry to hear of your father’s untimely death.’ Eight generations of Anglican priests, seventeenth- and nineteenth-century bishops, an earl’s daughter for a grandmother, if he remembered rightly. Worth turning out for, just. And dinner promised well. Oenone, recognising her guests’ needs, had shunted them speedily into the dining room.

  ‘I very much enjoyed your letter in Thursday’s Times.’ Gilbert arched his long neck across the table like a swan seeking bits of bread from someone on the bank. They had swapped the escargots for pheasants which Geoffrey carved on the sideboard.

  ‘I felt it needed saying,’ Clutch assured him. ‘The Church has a duty to give a lead at a national level.’

  ‘I missed it.’ Oenone shuffled plates neatly round her guests. ‘What did you write about?’

  ‘The Government’s duty to house the homeless. It is quite scandalous. I look out of my window at Ecclesia Place every day and see a collection of poor people who need help.’

  Geoffrey ceased his carving and applied himself to handing vegetables. ‘We could do more ourselves. I mean, the Church could do more. The homeless are as much our responsibility as anyone else’s.’

  Clutch was prepared to be kind to a young tyro whose excellent food he was eating and whose connections he had not quite ascertained. He smiled forgivingly. ‘No, no, you’re quite wrong. That’s not the point, is it? It’s up to the Government. They have the responsibility and the financial clout to solve the problem. We, the Church, merely have the authority, the moral authority, to show politicians the proper priorities.’

  ‘Surely we forfeit any moral authority we might have if we fail to follow up those priorities ourselves.’ Geoffrey was very much the naval officer. He’d commanded his own ship. Men’s lives had depended on his judgement. It made a difference. ‘If we hadn’t lost so much money by appointing incompetent financial servants – what was it they gambled away, eight hundred million? – we, the Church, might have done a bit more for the homeless. In this parish, we’re trying to get a scheme going to help rehouse …’

  Canon Clutch wasn’t interested in the parish pump. ‘At a national, indeed international, level – and we have to think in those terms, don’t we – the macro economics make it absolutely essential to put a bomb under the Government. Some of us, those of us with clout, have a duty to show concern, compassion.’

  A nice mixture of sanctimoniousness claiming moral high ground and power politics, Theodora thought. S
he glanced at Gilbert. He looked like a tennis aficionado at Wimbledon in a good singles match.

  ‘We can’t urge action on others and not take it ourselves,’ Geoffrey began.

  Oenone had a long line of hostesses in her ancestry. She had no intention of letting her dinner table become a shambles because priests didn’t know how to behave.

  ‘Gilbert, do tell us about your work at the Foundation. It really is a remarkable institution, isn’t it? I hear you’ve done wonders for that poor woman, what’s her name?’ She turned to Theodora for help. ‘Anona. Anona Trice. Geoffrey was saying she’s becoming quite useful in the parish now that you’ve,’ she hesitated over the term, ‘stabilised her. And all without drugs too. Where does she come from?’

  Gilbert smiled his Jesuitical smile. ‘I’m afraid we never reveal the provenance of our clients. But yes, your kind words are, I think, justified for once. Mrs Trice is much better than when she first came to us.’

  ‘Mrs Trice? Is she married?’ Oenone attached significance to the state, Theodora realised. Was it because she had married late herself or because she hadn’t expected to marry?

  ‘Trice is her maiden name,’ said Gilbert. ‘The “Mrs” designates her marital status.’

  Oenone looked as if she were none the wiser.

  ‘Oh, come along, Gilbert, don’t make such a mystery of things. We all know who she’s married to.’ Teape’s tone was not quite comradely. He didn’t like Gilbert, Theodora inferred.

  ‘I think it’s better to respect the client’s wishes.’ Gilbert’s voice was high and slightly nasal, snake-like, in tone. It stopped Teape in his tracks. Theodora thought how quickly the senior clergy pull out the card of moral superiority. In this case, though, perhaps Gilbert had a point.

  ‘I suppose American money comes in very handy?’ Clutch was smiling at Gilbert.

  ‘I wouldn’t for a moment deny it.’

  ‘And American methods, therapy via games playing,’ Geoffrey invited.

  ‘The ludic element is very important and largely lost from our mainstream therapies.’

  ‘But dangerous?’ Geoffrey pressed him.

  ‘We think we know what we’re doing and without the research we couldn’t claim the money. As it is we’ve been able to double our provision for clients over the last three years. We can publish more and all of us do. We are, I think I may say,’ Gilbert leaned forward towards Clutch, ‘at the cutting edge of the Church’s contribution to the psychological sciences.’

  Theodora thought ‘cutting edge’ was a bit of Clutch diction, and if Gilbert’s ‘ludic element’ was just research fodder to push back the boundaries of knowledge, she only hoped he was right when he said he knew what he was doing with Anona.

  ‘I’d have thought that that was a bit of a dead end.’ Clutch’s vowels got plummier as he got more annoyed. ‘The Church has managed quite well for two thousand years without this bogus fiddle faddle.’

  ‘Unless the Church can heal the sick, especially the sick of mind, it is not fulfilling its apostolic role.’

  ‘It’s the National Health’s job to—’

  ‘But surely, Gilbert,’ Theodora was drawn in in spite of herself, ‘we can only heal ourselves. There is nothing anyone can do for us, instead of us. We have to carve our own path to safety.’

  ‘There is always grace.’ Geoffrey was willing to have a go if the argument was going to get theological.

  ‘But the whole point of grace is that we dare not predict it. We have to do the work first.’ Theodora found herself more disturbed than she meant to allow herself to be. She felt that Anona’s safety, Anona (whom she did not like), Anona’s sanity was perhaps in the hands of these mistaken, experimental, possibly manipulative people. ‘What the Church needs,’ she fixed Gilbert with an accusatory eye, ‘is to see how the traditional Catholic religious practices, prayer, silence, meditation on scripture, use of sacrament and liturgy, can meet the psychological needs of the sick. Then—’

  ‘How about Ecclesia Place, Canon Clutch?’ Oenone had had enough. She distrusted psychology; she did not understand religion. She didn’t really see how these two could fit together and wondered how anyone could take either seriously. She had more important political or at least social ends in view. She judged it was time to allow Clutch to dominate the table again. ‘You really must have a bird’s eye view of affairs there.’

  Clutch rose to the occasion. ‘It’s really enormously rewarding work, as you can imagine. Terribly interesting. The buzz. The hum. Of course we’re right at the centre, the very heart of Government.’

  ‘Who do you report to?’ Gilbert was disingenuous. No man was more knowledgeable about Church systems than Gilbert.

  ‘I am answerable to a committee of ninety-three members. Most of them are very busy bishops and immensely senior civil servants widely dispersed over this country and others. It meets twice a year for a couple of hours. Few comprehend the standing orders let alone the intricacies of the business. They trust me implicitly.’

  Theodora wondered who was more dangerous, the incompetent committee or the hubristic canon. Really, if the Church couldn’t get its own systems right, how could it tell others, the Government for example, how to run theirs? She thought again of Tom Logg and how he would have dived into this particular argument.

  ‘But then of course there is the Diet,’ Canon Clutch went on with distaste. His duties with regard to the democratic processes of Church government were clearly bitter in his mouth. Not a democrat, Theodora thought. She searched her memory to recall how the Diet worked. ‘Keep off committees,’ her father had said to her when she was deaconed, speaking from his wealth of parish experience. ‘The proper work of the Church in the world is done in parishes, cathedrals, the religious orders and church schools. Anywhere else is a waste of energy and money.’ It was almost the only piece of practical clerical advice he had offered her before his death. She wondered how her father would have got on with Geoffrey. Rather well, probably. And with Oenone? Well, he’d liked handsome, intelligent women, and he hadn’t judged them by quite the same criteria as he judged men.

  ‘Kenneth keeps everything in his own hands,’ Canon Teape croaked, raising his eyes from his plate to which he’d been giving full attention. Theodora couldn’t quite place his tone. Was it admiring or derisory?

  ‘I have one of the best teams in the country.’ Clutch patted him metaphorically on the head. So it was admiration, or at least Clutch took it to be such. ‘Of course, our responsibilities are enormous. Quite enormous.’ Canon Clutch shook his head at their mammoth extent. ‘Our advisory role is crucial. People, the Government, look to us to give a lead. Sometimes, when you have real power, you have to take very hard decisions, very hard ones indeed. Then you have to have faith that the end justifies the means.’

  Did this man realise what he was saying? Theodora wondered. How could he so complacently invoke that arch slogan of moral corruption down the ages which it was the duty of religion always and everywhere to combat?

  ‘Don’t you need a lot of expertise, I mean specialist knowledge which has nothing to do with religion to sustain that sort of level of political involvement?’ Geoffrey was such a dear, Theodora thought. She wouldn’t have had the courage to take on the appalling Clutch herself.

  ‘We have it, I promise you.’ Clutch was immensely reassuring. ‘There is no sphere of political or social life where the Church cannot call on the very best specialist advice.’

  ‘Pity we don’t follow it then.’ Gilbert was acid. ‘Or is that because expert advice very often contradicts itself?’

  ‘Or better still, stick to our lasts and teach people how to pray.’ Geoffrey wasn’t going to leave well alone in spite of the furrowing of his wife’s brow.

  ‘Made a bit of a pig’s ear of your publicity for the Azbarnah thing, didn’t you?’ Gilbert returned to the fray.

  Gilbert didn’t care, didn’t have to care what Canon Clutch thought of him. Gilb
ert wasn’t a parish priest seeking preferment. He didn’t have to take account of either diocese or Diet. It gave him freedom, it made him unpopular. He couldn’t have cared less. He was subwarden of the Society of St Sylvester, a religious, bound by his vows to its rule which, as Theodora well knew from her researches into the life of Newcome, was dedicated to the maintenance of the Catholic tradition within the Church of England. Really, Theodora thought, looking round the table and drinking Oenone’s Margaux with pleasure, we have the Church of England’s diverse elements gathered here. And how diverse they are, how different from each other in aims and methods: an honest parish priest, an ambitious politician, a scholar, a religious and a woman in deacon’s orders. Her spirits rose with the excellence of the wine and her sharpened perception of the ritualised and theatrical on which a dinner party depends. She was beginning to enjoy the fray. What a blessing it was that she had no wish to rise up the hierarchy.

  ‘Azbarnah is such an interesting country,’ Oenone was saying, scenting danger to Canon Clutch’s ego and therefore willing to protect her most important guest. ‘One of my uncles spent some time there in the sixties as military attaché in Vorasi, when Kursola was in power. I remember him saying how beautiful the country was and how brutal the ruling classes were.’

  ‘Archie Douglas hadn’t done his prep, had he?’ Gilbert was unwilling to be ridden off his promising new ground of dispute. ‘That old pirate the Archimandrite ran rings round him. What on earth did Papworth think he was doing? Who on earth advised him? It really doesn’t matter whether we’re in communion with Azbarnahi Orthodoxy or not. No single soul in either Church will be saved by such an alliance.’ Gilbert didn’t care what his hostess wanted. Protection of Kenneth Clutch’s self-importance wasn’t one of his priorities. ‘Anyway,’ he concluded in triumph, ‘Diet will have to ratify and they may have a rush of common sense and vote it down.’