Gentleman's Relish

by Patrick Gale

  On the minibus home everyone was chattering and excited, as though they had been abseiling or done a bungee jump at an age when no one would have expected it of them. Eileen pretended to join in but she was thoughtful, disturbed at the emotional roiling their messy little demonstration had set off in her.

  By the time they were being dropped outside the church again, her old mute passivity had fallen on her however and she was easily persuaded back to Gwen and Bernie’s for a restorative cup of tea.

  It was an unremarkable house, over-furnished with unremarkable things; a house in a gravy advertisement. She donated a box of fondant fancies she had bought in Marks and was saving for later. Gwen sliced up a Battenberg and passed it round. The pieces were far bigger than Eileen would have allowed herself. She normally made a Battenberg feed eight, not three. She broke her slice into more manageable blocks of sponge and icing.

  ‘Hey,’ Gwen said. ‘Show Eileen the tape.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Bernie asked.

  ‘Oh, she’s one of us, now,’ Gwen said, dabbing a pink crumb from the corner of her lips. ‘Aren’t you, Eileen?’ She had not finished her mouthful properly. Eileen saw mashed cake on her tongue. ‘After this afternoon’s display,’ Gwen chuckled. ‘Eh, Eileen, who’d have thought you had it in you!’

  So Eileen sat on in a vast Parker Knoll recliner like an imprisoning dentist’s chair – Bernie had yanked up the footrest because they knew she had vein trouble – and watched a video with them.

  It was a home-made affair, crudely shot by their son who worked in the Middle East as an engineer with an oil company. Because of the crowds, the passing cars, the glimpses of women, children, people on mobile phones, it took her a while to decipher what she was supposed to be focusing on. Then she saw the diminutive figures beyond the bustling foreground, figures in a clearing of bloodstained sand. It was, she understood as Gwen began her fascinated commentary, footage of punishments and executions, shot by the son with a hidden camera. It was not all shot on the same occasion or even in the same place. He was an ever-ready collector, like a trainspotter; a connoisseur of extreme justice.

  She glanced away from the screen long enough to take in again the photograph on the mantelpiece her eyes had skated over earlier in a restless search for something beautiful. There he was. A mixture of Gwen and Bernie. Big-boned. Cheerful. Smirking in his mortarboard. Her eyes were drawn back to the screen.

  There were floggings for adultery and lechery and removal of hands for theft. There were stonings and, astonishingly, beheadings. The shootings were shockingly banal by comparison, because they were so familiar from films yet quieter and less dramatic than anything faked. (Gwen and Bernie afforded these their slightest respect and talked across them, ordinary talk about food plans, neighbours, fish-food pellets.) Then there was a scene so specific yet so odd that she could not quite believe what she was seeing and, reading her mind, Bernie rewound the tape to show her again.

  Two men were pushed to their knees then tied to a stake. Then everyone backed away to allow a bulldozer to cause a sizeable wall to topple onto them, hiding them from view in dust and rubble. There was a cheer from the crowd on the video and an answering murmur of assent from Bernie.

  ‘Homosexuals,’ Gwen said. ‘They used to stone them apparently until someone decided that was spiritually unclean for the executioners.’

  ‘Splashes,’ Bernie explained.

  ‘So they topple a wall,’ Gwen said. ‘Go on, Bernie. Show her again.’

  Somehow Eileen found the lever to lower the footrest and made it out of the chair and onto her feet. Somehow she found excuses and even thanks to stammer before finding her way out without actually seeming to flee.

  Back at her house she locked the front door behind her, ran to the bathroom and brought up everything, OAP lunch, fondant fancies, Battenberg. She rid herself of everything of the afternoon but the stains in her memory, the fear in the driver’s eyes, the admiration of ingenuity in Gwen’s voice. She heard the woman’s placid suburban tone, that would have been no different if she had been explaining a cunning technique for building a rockery or installing a water feature.

  The spasms were so violent she had to wrap her arms about the lavatory bowl, and left her so weak that she rested her cheek against its cold porcelain for minutes afterwards, still hearing Gwen and seeing atrocities.

  ‘We missed you,’ Reverend Girouard said as he shook her hand after the next Sunday’s service. His grasp was so coolly reassuring she found herself imagining how it might feel to hold his hand across her face. ‘Daniel – Mr Clancy – thought you might have forsaken us for St Mungo’s.’

  Mr Clancy passed them, dunking a custard cream in his coffee. ‘The dark side,’ he murmured flirtatiously.

  ‘I tried it out,’ she admitted. ‘Because they asked and it seemed rude not to. But it wasn’t for me. They do the Peace, you know and it’s all a bit much.’

  ‘Well, welcome back,’ he said and Eileen saw how it was possible to feel at once judged and forgiven by a smile.

  HUSHÈD CASKET

  They found it quite by chance. There was nothing on the map or in the guidebooks. Sons of hysterical women addicted to spontaneity, they were both methodical men, keen and meticulous planners. They had spent half the morning at Beverley Minster and had calculated on squeezing in the churches at Patrington and Hedon before they stopped for a late, wintry picnic. An unscheduled diversion was no more in character than trusting in fate to provide a palatable provincial lunch.

  Hugo nearly didn’t stop. He was a fast but inhibited driver and hated ever having to swerve onto a verge or lay-by to execute a three-point turn.

  ‘Stop!’ Chris told him, flapping a hand against Hugo’s forearm. ‘Please. Something really interesting…’ And he made Hugo pull over and park so they could walk back, armed as ever with camera and sketch pad. ‘Through here!’ he called, hurrying ahead.

  They had entered what passed for a valley in Yorkshire’s seaward south-east. There was a press of overgrown trees beside the lane. What might once have been a lych gate had been smothered in ivy and neglect and all but lost beneath bird-sown elder and holly.

  ‘There’s nothing there,’ Hugo insisted, glancing between the map and photocopies he had taken of the relevant pages of England’s 1000 Best Churches. ‘Probably just a barn or…’

  But Chris pressed on, ducking under the holly. He had glimpsed a buttress as they flew past and was anticipating a little Gothic Revival jewel or at least one of those architectural riddles that made church-crawling such an addictive pleasure. The guidebooks had missed things before. Only two days into their honeymoon they had found a magnificent Saxon font, which alone was worth three stars, in an unlisted church they had only visited to track down the key-holder for one that was in all the books. Besides, he was the pretty one in the partnership, used to a fairly generous wilfulness allowance.

  There was little left of the original building – a foreshortened nave, badly patched up with some decidedly agricultural breeze-block masonry. The old chancel and apse had been left to collapse, cut off by a new east wall and a crude, inappropriate window. What might once have been an avenue of clipped yew from lych gate to porch now formed a forbidding canopy, chilling the sunless air beneath it. But it was still a church where the map marked nothing, so Chris waited in the porch in triumph for Hugo to catch up.

  ‘Well spotted,’ Hugo said, picking a yew berry off Chris’s shoulder, and Chris felt a flush of pathetic pride. The significance of his having at last found a lover whose preferred bedtime treats were lives of the likes of Ninian Comper or monographs on East Anglian corbels and whose top ten was not of dance tracks but bell towers passed him by in his happiness at having finally found the right match. It was his mother, waving them off on this eccentrically unsensuous honeymoon, who slyly observed that he had married his father. And she should know. Hugo wasn’t conventionally sexy or notably rich so perhaps his main attraction for Chris were these small, heart
-bumping instances – when he correctly dated a clerestory or found them some five-star Norman in a deeply unpromising suburb – of fatherly approval.

  The porch displayed none of the usual vital signs of even remote parish business: no flower rota, no service list, no contact number for longsuffering key-holders, not even a notice about closing the door behind one so as to stop birds becoming trapped. There was no noticeboard, even, just plaster-work mapped with bright patches of green. Another curiosity was that the door was fastened from the outside, with two stout bolts so rusted and unused that Hugo had to take off a boot and wallop them with its heel to persuade them to shift.

  By rights the hinges should have let out an echoing whine and skeins of cobweb sprung down from around the lintel. Such touches of Gothic might have offered camp comfort. Instead the door opened soundlessly onto a space where one felt not even a spider would have lived for long. There were no pews, or pulpit, no altar even. There was only a tomb, grey with dust, a large cardboard box and a font. There were none of the usual accretions a church gathered about itself with age – no memorials to virtuous wives or to sons lost in cruelly distant colonies, no antiquated cast-iron radiators, no mildewed hymnbooks, no stoutly tapestried kneelers and no electricity. Were it not for the font, it would hardly have seemed like a church at all. The interior had been scraped and replastered in the late 1800s, to judge from the tell-tale use of treacly wood stain on the undistinguished roof timbers. The windows – nonrepresentational stained glass, a fiery red margin around that peculiarly gloomy Victorian green – must have been replaced at around the same date, possibly following whichever fire or disaster had wrecked the original east end and left the place so stripped and truncated.

  ‘Hardly feels like a church at all,’ Chris said then wished he hadn’t because the words gave the place permission to feel sinister. Hugo only let out a preoccupied huh for answer. He was already busy photographing. That was what they did usually: he photographed the whole while Chris executed quick watercolours or sketches of telling details, gargoyles, carvings and so on, the two elements to be combined eventually in an album.

  By their usual standards the building was not even second rate, but the tomb and font were arresting. The tomb was ancient. Whatever inscription it had borne had long since worn away but it was of a type with one they had seen in St Martin’s, Lowthorpe, where the sculptor had demonstrated considerable bravura in portraying the corpse as so many mounds and dips beneath a shroud. The Lowthorpe monument was of a married couple, however, its shrouded bier a grim parody of a wedding bed. This showed just one body, a man’s, uncomforted by pomp at its head or pets at its feet. It had been defaced, an angry cavity chipped away where the genitals had perhaps been too generously suggested for later sensibilities.

  Chris sketched rapidly, his mind half on the need to press on if they were to do justice to Patrington before dusk. He used charcoal, as it was apt for conveying the sweeps and shadows of carved cloth. Hurrying on to choose the best angle from which to sketch the font in pencil, he felt again the sense of dread that had pricked him when he dared to imagine the place was not quite a church. The font was carved from a basalt so black and so smoothed with age it might have been lead. It could have been pre-Christian, of course, and simply adopted for baptismal rites; he had seen such things before. It had figures on it, crudely carved, which appeared to be engaged in a dance or procession around its base, led by a taller figure dancing backwards with arms outstretched.

  He jumped at the sound of the door thumping closed and glanced round to find he was alone. Hugo would be circling the outside, hunting for clues to the age the interior’s shoddy restoration had masked. One of the crucial differences in their approaches to church-crawling was that whereas Chris required something attractive or at least amusing to hold his attention, Hugo could become entranced by a dull piece of lead detailing or some sidelined and anonymous lump of wood he was convinced might once have been a Golgotha.

  Chris had glanced at his watch, shut his pad and been all set to follow him when his eye was drawn to the cardboard box. Had the church, or whatever the building now was, been even half as cluttered as they usually were, his gaze would have slid straight over it. The lack of clutter, however, the absence of the usual flower-arranging junk, stall of unloved books or garishly inappropriate Sunday school art projects, lent it a peculiar resonance. As did its placing. For, quite accidentally of course, it had been left on the floor at just the point where one would have expected to find an altar.

  Hearing Hugo’s whistling, he snapped charcoal and pencils back into his cunningly adapted spectacles case and made for the door…then stopped with the chilled handle under his fingers. There was no one here to laugh at him so he darted back to indulge his instincts and tidy the box off to one side where it wouldn’t be the first thing visitors saw on entering. The place was depressing enough without litter.

  The cardboard was damp, almost soaked through. He’d picked it up firmly and his grasp was enough to make it give way. Something fell onto his shoes. He tossed aside the cardboard, revolted, and looked down. It was a battered nylon sports bag of the sort carried by youths selling poor quality tea towels and nail brushes door-to-door. Or by burglars.

  He crouched down to unzip it, half-expecting a cache of silver candlesticks and picture frames. The light in the building was so dim and the bag so dark that at first he thought it must be empty, then his questing hand found wood.

  It was a tea caddy. George II, he’d have said, of an elegant sarcophagus design with little ball feet. Damp had left the wood blue with mildew, which made him sneeze. It was hard to judge its condition on the spot but he felt at once the unquestioning urge to acquire that often possessed him in junk shops and auction houses. He could tell at once how good it would look lovingly restored to its former lustre, with the other bibelots on the half-moon table behind his study sofa. He wanted it. He had to have it. Leaving it behind to moulder still further would be an act of cruelty and that was that.

  Hugo coughed impatiently. Chris zipped the caddy back in the repellent bag, virtuously scrumpled up the mass of sodden card along with it for safe disposal in a proper place and hurried out to him.

  Hugo was predictably horrified. ‘You can’t just take it!’

  ‘Someone else did. It was obviously stashed here by some kid who nicked it and then didn’t know what to do with it,’ he suggested. ‘Got shot of the iPods and jewellery then panicked and dumped it. It’s nothing to do with the church. If it is a church still. I mean, it’s an abandoned building, for Christ’s sake. Look at it!’

  As a sop to both their consciences, he wrote a quick note on a pad from the car and pinned it to the door. Found here: antique wooden tea caddy. By an instinct born of long years of bad dating, he made one of the zeroes in his mobile number look deliberately like a six. The note was fluttering in the wind as he left it; he had every hope it would not last the night.

  The base Hugo had rented from the Landmark Trust for their honeymoon grandly described itself as a castle. It was actually just the surviving gatehouse and banqueting chamber of a medieval bishop’s country residence, still fantastically atmospheric for all that it was only a fragment. Both main rooms were magnificently vaulted. There was a tremendous spiral staircase to a roof terrace with unnervingly low crenellations around its edge. Even the bathroom had an oriel window.

  While Hugo fricasséed chicken and sang along to a Barbara Cook CD, Chris found dusters and beeswax furniture cream in the housekeeping cupboard and set to work on the caddy. It was every bit as good as his instincts had told him. The condition was perfect. It was made of mahogany or rosewood – or something more exotic as it was oddly weighty – and there was a lozenge of ivory inlaid about the keyhole. His determination to keep it grew as he made the wood shine once more. By the time Hugo was calling him to the supper table he had made up his mind that if anyone did ring up about it, he would pretend they had a wrong number, even if Hugo was in the room.
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  Hugo could be shamingly honest. It was one of the things Chris cherished about him, along with his not smoking. When obliged now to put the correct money for postcards into a church’s honesty box instead of the usual deceptively clattering collection of coppers, he would soothe his irritation by telling himself, I married a Man of Principle. He thought of it like that, with capitals, like the title of an Edwardian novel.

  But perhaps the principles were weakening. As Chris set the caddy down without comment on the candlelit dining table, Hugo murmured, ‘Oh. That is nice, isn’t it? I expect you were right. Someone stole it then lost interest when they couldn’t get it open. Either that or they didn’t like to try selling it without a key. Odd, though, that they didn’t try to force the lock. Hope this is okay. I forgot tarragon vinegar so it might be a bit rich with all this cream.’

  It hadn’t even occurred to Chris that the caddy was locked until Hugo mentioned it. Now it irritated him throughout supper. Beneath their roving conversation, his mind kept returning to the subject like a tongue to a chipped tooth.

  There was no television or radio to lull them into somnolence and the small fire had little effect on the warmth of so vast a room, so they retired far earlier than usual. Chris read an M.R. James ghost story and Hugo, who had no patience with fiction, read James’s essay on the Lady Chapel sculptures at Ely. Then they made clumsily perfunctory love, possibly because they were both so wide awake, which sort of petered out. Rather than slip into blissful oblivion, they lay there fidgeting for a while then Hugo apologetically turned his bedside lamp back on and returned to his abbeys while Chris, thus released, slipped back downstairs on the muttered pretext of thirst.

  He ransacked the chest of drawers where games and jigsaws and the accumulated detritus of many holidays were stashed. It was even colder downstairs now that the fire had gone out and his dressing gown was only of silk. He was shivering and on the verge of giving up when he found what he needed: a couple of grimy paperclips adrift in a leaking Monopoly box.