Sidney Chambers and The Persistence of Love

by James Runcie

  ‘Toads. Yes, I know what herpetology is.’

  ‘And now,’ the inspector concluded, ‘so do we. It’s how the dog died, isn’t it? All he had to do was play with a toad, lick it or catch it in his mouth, and that’s it. Cardiac arrest. More common at night, apparently, when everyone else is asleep. Easier to get rid of the body.’

  ‘The dog died by accident,’ said Linda. ‘I didn’t know he was going to try and eat a toad.’

  ‘And you didn’t tell the others because reporting him missing would give you an alibi.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything to the others because I didn’t want to upset them. It was a horrible death. I thought if we just assumed he had run away it would be kinder.’

  ‘You wanted to be kind?’ Geordie asked.

  ‘I hope so, Inspector.’

  Sidney turned to Tony Clarke. ‘Did you know about this?’

  ‘No, I did not. But I don’t like asking too many questions. Then you don’t have to worry about the answers.’

  ‘So you’ve never asked your wife about her feelings for Lenny Goddard?’

  ‘I don’t need to.’

  Linda spoke out. ‘This is none of your business,’ she said. ‘A woman can love someone else without it getting in the way of her marriage. You don’t always have to bring everything out into the open, Mr Chambers. I’m sure you must have friendships with women yourself.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And your wife doesn’t mind?’

  ‘She doesn’t say anything.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Tony Clarke. ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘As long as no one wants anything more . . .’ Geordie added.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Linda, ‘love can be beyond the physical. People don’t understand that but it’s true. You go past the body to find something deeper. Truer.’

  ‘And you had that with Lenny?’ Sidney asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to attempt to describe it.’

  ‘But you did want your relationship to be exclusive?’

  ‘It already was.’

  ‘He was married.’

  ‘We understood each other. We had a past together. We were more than married.’

  Sidney pressed on. ‘I don’t think you were, Mrs Clarke. I think you were having a relationship and Lenny stopped it. That’s why he didn’t join you downriver. He wanted to be on his own.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  Geordie was losing patience. ‘Perhaps he wanted to be shot of the lot of you.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘We think you poisoned him. If you couldn’t have him, no one else could – not least his wife.’

  Tony Clarke had had enough. ‘Linda is not the type of woman to poison her friends. She loved them.’

  ‘We’re not saying she didn’t,’ Sidney continued. ‘Lenny Goddard guessed what had been happening – that you had been poisoning him slowly, over several weeks – and tried to find the antidote because he still loved you enough to protect you, Mrs Clarke. Perhaps he felt guilty? Then Stella drowned herself in grief. Unless, of course, you poisoned her too? We’re still waiting for the post-mortem. I’m not sure about the dog. That may not have been an accident either.’

  ‘This is a lot of supposition,’ said Linda.

  ‘But once we find the bufotenine, everything will follow.’

  Tony turned to his wife. ‘Is this true?’ Linda Clarke remained silent, but he continued to focus on her alone. ‘I don’t know why you needed to do all that. Everything was fine. We could have just carried on. Didn’t I love you enough?’

  ‘Perhaps I’ve always wanted too much,’ she said at last. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I wanted everything.’

  ‘I thought you loved me.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘But not enough.’

  ‘Differently,’ said Linda. ‘Lenny said he was going to go away. He said it was too stifling. He couldn’t cope. He was going to leave and go as far away as he could and he was just going to be with Stella. They were planning to start again. He said he couldn’t bear to live with me being so close. We loved each other too much. He couldn’t breathe, he said. And I told him I couldn’t live without him.’

  ‘But that’s what you’ve done,’ said Sidney. ‘You’ve made that come true.’

  ‘You should have told me,’ said Tony. ‘Why did you keep this from me? I could have helped you. I could have understood.’

  Linda looked out over the night water and spoke to no one but herself. ‘Now Lenny’s gone I can love him without any fear of losing him. A dead man can’t reject you. I can love as I have always wanted. No one can stop me and he can’t ignore me or leave me. Stella can’t provoke me. She’s gone. There’s no widow to claim his memory. I can have Lenny to myself. And that love won’t end. And I won’t ever doubt it. Even in prison. Even in death.’

  Sidney and Geordie drove back into Ely together. ‘You’d think we’d get better at this, wouldn’t you?’ the inspector began. ‘But it could have been any of them. Do you think Tranton knew all along?’

  ‘He told me about the poison. It was up to us to prove it.’

  ‘I’m not sure we have yet.’

  ‘Do you know if we will?’

  ‘I hope so. By the way, I wonder if, in time, Linda Clarke would have poisoned her husband as well?’

  ‘I do think that’s possible, Geordie.’

  ‘So at least we’ve stopped one thing. I don’t suppose you fancy a quick pint before last orders? Hildegard won’t mind, will she?’

  ‘She’s had ten years of this already. She’ll probably be asleep by now.’

  ‘By the time I get back to Cambridge, Cathy will definitely be out for the count. She’s been so tired recently. So why break the habit of a lifetime? We could even fit in a game of backgammon . . .’

  ‘I can’t believe we’re still doing all this,’ Sidney replied.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, man, what else would you be doing?’

  The next night Sidney and Anna read a Tintin story and were amused to find their namesake, an Inspector Chambers, in The Seven Crystal Balls. The inspector shot the intruder who put Professor Tarragon into a coma and called police headquarters when Professor Calculus was kidnapped. He was a dark, angry man with a toothbrush moustache who appeared in only two or three frames, dressed in a traditional trench coat and looking nothing like Sidney or his father. Still, it could have been worse. The only clergyman they had spotted in the series so far was the Reverend Peacock in Cigars of the Pharaoh, a bemused and elderly hanger-on who turned out to be a member of an international gang of drug traffickers.

  It was light behind the curtains and the room had a dusky air. Sidney prayed with his daughter, tucked her in and kissed her goodnight. Then he left the door slightly ajar so that she would not be afraid if she woke up later, when darkness was at the full.

  ‘Does a story always have to be true?’ she asked, just as he was leaving. Anna was always good at delaying tactics to prolong bedtime.

  ‘I think it has to be truthful even if it didn’t really happen,’ said Sidney from the doorway. ‘You have to care about the story you are telling and then make people believe it.’

  ‘But can you sometimes make it become true if you work hard enough? Is that why people pray? To force their stories to come true?’

  ‘Or to make them better.’

  ‘Even if they’re not true?’

  ‘They can be true in spirit if not in fact.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘That might take a long time to explain; a whole life . . .’

  ‘Can you come and read me something else – a story with a happy ending? Then I don’t mind if it’s true or not.’

  She finished her wild-flower collection just before the end of term, filling her scrapbook with the blues of periwinkle and lady’s-smock, the yellows of celandine and marsh marigolds, the pinks of cuckoo pint and rosebay willowherb, each with little descriptions. ‘Gorse is too spiky,’ she wrote,
together with ‘My mum’s favourite’ next to the sweet violet, and even a little picture of a skull and crossbones by a foxglove: ‘Warning: poison’.

  Linda Clarke was arrested and charged. Yes, poison, she said. She had wanted Lenny for herself, but he had refused to leave his wife. Love had turned to hate, then to vengeance and on to despair, murder, fantasy and illusion. Her husband had known and loved her through it all, but she had been too determined to accept what he had to offer, pursuing an idealised vision of a past with someone else; what she thought had been, and always would be, a better love, even if it was one that was entirely without a future.

  All that devotion or passion or shame or humiliation or obsession – whatever it was – made Sidney think about the waste of misdirected adoration and the persistence of desire; and how important it was, perhaps, to recognise the quieter, humbler, lasting love of a marriage like his own, one that took its place beside his and Hildegard’s side so often that it came and survived almost without them noticing, waiting patiently for acknowledgement.

  The bluebells were long gone now, replaced by the wild flowers of June and July: figwort and field roses, giant hogweed, musk-mallow and montbretia, tansy, vervain and sweetbriar; the height of summer, the fullness of light.

  Authenticity

  Sidney had been reading a book about the presentation of the self in everyday life; how we behave differently depending on who we are talking to and how sometimes we can be several people at the same time, all contained in the one body, just as so many different people could all be housed in the same Christian Church. How could so many constituent parts be reduced to a single definition of faith and identity; and what was the authentic self? How can we ever find out who we truly are?

  It was one of those mornings when he couldn’t quite work out what he wanted to say in his next sermon and, at the same time, he was troubled by the nagging feeling that he had forgotten something. He knew that he was having lunch with his old friend Amanda, that his former housekeeper, Mrs Maguire, needed a visit and that he still had to find a priest for a vacant parish in the north of the diocese, but none of these things were particularly troubling. Then, as he was shaving and a shaft of sunlight hit the edge of the tin mirror, Sidney remembered. It was his wedding anniversary.

  Ten years. That was why Hildegard had kept saying the word ‘tin’ recently; and Anna had kept pointing out tin toys – frogs, elephants, fish, cars and carousels – laughing when they were reading their Tintin stories as if they contained some great secret. His wife and daughter had dropped so many hints it was a wonder he had forgotten.

  Even though he rather disapproved of spurious commercialism, he decided to research the significance of tin as a symbol of marital wellbeing. He discovered that its flexibility was supposed to represent the tractability of a good relationship; the give and take that makes a marriage strong. Perhaps he could preach about that?

  Tin. What on earth was he going to buy? A tray? A bangle? He couldn’t give Hildegard earrings again. He remembered Amanda talking to him recently about Goya’s series of fantasy and invention painted on tin (perhaps she was even in on the joke): bullfighting scenes, strolling players, a marionette seller, a yard filled with lunatics. She had just returned from a short holiday in Madrid and was excited about one of his other paintings, but Sidney hadn’t been concentrating because he was still thinking about the Goddard murders and Linda Clarke’s obsessive love. Wasn’t there also a paint called ‘tin yellow’? Perhaps he could get an artist to undertake Hildegard’s portrait? If he did so, he reminded himself, he wouldn’t forget a former friend’s bid to do the same, telling his wife that he wanted the painting done ‘before you lose your looks’.

  He couldn’t imagine Hildegard ever desiring such a thing. It was bad enough attempting to take her photograph, an activity that was now forbidden in bright sunlight lest it illuminate the telltale signs of her middle age. Some kind of tin picture frame would not be the answer either. Her present would have to be jewellery, carefully chosen, something that didn’t look too cheap or tinny but represented the authentic heart of their marriage.

  It was at moments like this, wondering what on earth he could get that might please her, that Sidney began to question how well he knew his wife. Hildegard certainly still liked to retain an air of mystery and keep part of her personality private. This, she insisted, was a deliberate attempt to retain Sidney’s interest because he was, apparently, ‘so easily distracted’.

  As he finished shaving, scraped the last of the lather and splashed his face in all-too-bracing cold water, he thought about the ideal marriage and what it might mean. Did Sidney and Hildegard really need to know everything about each other to be complete as a couple?

  He wondered if a lack of self-knowledge was sometimes not a bad thing; that if we acted instinctively and almost without awareness it could perhaps be a better way of thinking than being self-conscious all the time. And were there some things that were best kept hidden, even from our own selves? Was it dangerous to have an all-consuming marriage in which both members were overly dependent upon the other? What if we gave away so much of ourselves to our partner that we were no longer defined individually but by our married state? Did Hildegard now own a part of him that he would never get back; and did he own a part of her?

  He could hear her voice. It is not a question of ownership.

  Now, in thinking about such things and in remembering that he had forgotten to buy his wife anything at all, not even a card, he was filled with fear, particularly as he could hear Hildegard’s footsteps on the stairs and knew she would wonder why he was shaving so late in the morning and what was keeping him in the bathroom.

  ‘How much longer are you going to be?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m just coming, my darling.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Shaving.’

  ‘It can’t take that much time. Are you all right?’

  Sidney opened the door. ‘I do love you,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve forgotten, haven’t you?’

  ‘Our wedding anniversary? Of course not.’

  ‘Have you booked a restaurant for tonight?’

  ‘I’ll get us a table at the Old Fire Station.’

  ‘Won’t they be full?’

  ‘Not if I ask them nicely.’

  ‘You’re very sure of yourself for a man who has forgotten all about it.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten.’

  ‘For a man who has only just remembered, then. It’s just as well you’re getting a new secretary. Next year she can remind you.’

  ‘I won’t need reminding, my darling. I promise.’

  ‘I did put it in your diary; just as it tells me that you are supposed to be meeting her at the Deanery before your lunch with Amanda.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Five minutes ago. I thought you’d gone.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘She’s called Miss Morgan. I hope you like her. Perhaps she can babysit?’

  ‘I very much doubt it.’

  ‘Then I’d better find someone who can. You still want to go out?’

  ‘There’s nothing I’d like more.’

  ‘You haven’t forgotten anything else?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And Geordie won’t telephone with another crisis?’

  ‘When has that ever happened?’

  ‘You do know that you’re impossible, Sidney?’

  ‘I do. And I hope it’s why you love me.’

  ‘You’d better get on. You’re late already.’

  Hildegard turned to go back downstairs but Sidney just managed to stop her. ‘What about a little anniversary kiss?’ he asked.

  His wife closed her eyes and opened out her arms. Their lips touched softly.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘You’re still impossible.’

  A few weeks beforehand Sidney had complained, quite gently, to the dean about the amount of paperwork that he had to dea
l with, and they had come to the decision that the new diocesan secretary would be able to help out on a part-time basis. He was therefore due to meet the most likely candidate for coffee and biscuits in order to see how the arrangement might work in practice.

  Vanessa Morgan was a petite and precise woman, who might have passed for a French assistante at a local school, with fine features and long dark hair that had been tied up in an Audrey Hepburn bun. Sidney imagined that she must be used to rejecting flirtatious advances from unsuitable men, and that such attentions probably irritated her a great deal, but, having attempted to disguise his initial intrigue and met his future secretary’s challenging stare with what he hoped was a graceful politeness, he told himself that he really must try and stop judging people, particularly women, by their appearance alone.

  Miss Morgan had been recommended by an accountancy firm where she had worked for the last five years, only leaving because, it was rumoured, she had plans to enter the Church as a deaconess. Part of the attraction of her new employment, therefore, was to get a feel for the Church of England at first hand and understand the ways in which it worked. At the same time she could bring some of her financial training to bear on the Diocesan Board of Finance, as the firm she had come from was well known for its attempts to cure ‘the British disease’ of industrial malaise by streamlining management and implementing efficiencies.

  If she was to be truly effective, she told Sidney, she would have to know his every movement: where he was, who he was talking to and how long he planned to spend at each meeting. A proper schedule was essential, with routine consultations, daily catch-ups, and access to Hildegard’s diary. She would need the telephone numbers both of his family and of all the people he met regularly, and she would also like to know his attitude to key theological issues so that she could help prepare his response to any general enquiry. Meetings would run to set lengths. Coffee, lunch and tea would be at the same time each day and she would be available in the evening for emergencies. Nothing would be left to chance.

  Since chance was Sidney’s main modus operandi, this seemed an ambition too far, but he reluctantly agreed to try out a suggested new regime in which he was assured that he would be able to ‘worry less and get more done’.