Idol Bones

by D M Greenwood

  The author of the Swallow Guide to the Cathedral Cities of England was set to enjoy himself.

  ‘Of the saint himself nothing is known about his life or sanctity save only that he was slaughtered in battle with the Danes when leading a detachment of local people against them in 870. The town lies, or rather squats, for the land is marshy, in a bend of the river Bow which surrounds it on three sides. Excavations undertaken in 1922 by the then president of Bow Antiquarian Society, Sir Lionel Dunch, revealed traces of a Roman settlement with a castra and the footings of a well-built gate north of the now demolished temperance hall. Fragments of paving unearthed at that time suggest that the main Roman road to the port of Tepidunum at the mouth of the Bow must have passed near to the present site of the cathedral close. Funds ran out before the excavation could be completed and the works were filled in and not resumed. Such finds as there were are displayed in the St Aelfric Museum. The mediaeval town …’

  The Reverend Theodora Braithwaite’s attention wandered. She peered out of the carriage window at the flat, rain-swept fenland and wondered what the immediate future held in store for her. She was thirty years old, a woman in deacon’s orders in the Church of England. She had set herself as part of the discipline of following a vocation properly not to mind where she was sent nor to become too attached to any settled pattern of life. So far that attitude had resulted in a couple of years in a first curacy in east Africa followed by six months in her present curacy at St Sylvester’s Betterhouse on the Thames in south-west London. There she had risen this morning in time to serve for her vicar, Geoffrey Brighouse, at his seven a.m. Eucharist in the huge Victorian Gothic church of St Sylvester. When they had finished, Geoffrey had driven her across London at a speed comparable to that which he had previously obtained from his naval helicopter.They’d shot across Southwark Bridge and hurtled down unfamiliar one-way systems of the City not yet aroused to its moneymaking day. Theodora, always exhilarated by Geoffrey’s driving, had inquired whether he knew anything about Bow St Aelfric.

  ‘Not a thing,’ he’d replied cheerfully. ‘Don’t you? All those clerical ancestors of yours. Surely one of you must have bumped up against it at some time.’

  Geoffrey’s own family were navy. He sometimes envied Theodora who could claim descent from eight generations of Anglican clergy.

  ‘Bow’s one we missed out on,’ she had said bracing herself against the seat as they swung to a halt in the forecourt of Liverpool Street station. Geoffrey had seized her bag and loped across the concourse towards the East Anglian train. Theodora followed him, bending her tall head into the evil-smelling draught which sought to repel them.

  ‘There,’ said Geoffrey, as he thrust the Independent into her hand. ‘Should see you through as far as Grantham.’

  Theodora, who would have preferred coffee, thanked him warmly and waved him away with genuine regret. She tucked it into her holdall beside her copy of this quarter’s edition of Church History Review, settled herself in the corner seat of her empty carriage and took stock. She thought back with something like shame to the interview with the archdeacon which had brought her here. Archdeacons, Theodora reflected, are powerful people in the Anglican hierarchy. She had known a variety of them all her life. They had a say in future appointments and present comfort. Their praise or censure counted. They had the ear of bishops and were accordingly much disliked. They got used to clergy evading or resenting them. They expected flattery and the worst of them liked it. They reckoned they knew what to expect in clergy attitudes so that when they met one who didn’t mind too much what happened to them, and who did not, therefore, either flatter or resent, they were slow to adjust. Well, Theodora told herself, they are, after all, only human.

  The archdeacon had had her into his office the day after one of his infrequent visits to the parish.

  ‘I don’t feel you’re being stretched,’ he’d said jovially.

  It struck Theodora that he felt she was enjoying life too much.

  ‘Do you?’ he’d inquired. But, in the manner of archdeacons, he had not stayed for an answer. He had a full diary. He could not really afford the time to listen to the views of young deacons, certainly not female ones.

  He always reminded Theodora of a Victorian Shakespearian actor, a bit gone to seed and rather larger than life. Over his clerical black he wore a grey woolly cardigan to disguise his real power.

  ‘I enjoy working with Geoffrey very much,’Theodora returned cautiously.

  ‘Of course you do,’ said the archdeacon heartily. ‘Super chap. Super. But we really feel you need to be stretched.’

  This time the overtones of rack and thumbscrew were unmistakable.

  ‘In a way, Theo,’ the archdeacon went on, feigning intimacy (Theodora had met him only once before, and would not have dreamed of calling him ‘Jim’). ‘In a way,’ he went on, ‘all this parish stuff is pretty familiar ground to you. Your old dad and so on.’

  Theodora regarded him stonily. She was damned if she was going to hear her excellent father’s parochial skills patronised by this actor.

  ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘we feel you need to branch out. A bit of experience in specialist ministries wouldn’t come amiss. Widen your scope and so on. The point is,’ he concluded rapidly, coming to the crux of the matter, ‘the bishop’s been asked to supply someone to do a couple of months on adult lay training, pastoral assistants, readers, that sort of thing. The laity are very important, you know.’

  Theodora, who did not doubt it, and had no objection at all to extending her knowledge in that area, nevertheless felt it only fair to point out that she had no experience.

  ‘Precisely,’ the archdeacon grinned like a shark. ‘Just my point.’

  ‘When?’ inquired Theodora.

  ‘Start Monday.’

  ‘Lent starts on Wednesday,’ she pointed out just in case the archdeacon might have overlooked this. It would certainly be inconvenient for poor Geoffrey to work the parish suddenly deprived of his curate.

  But the archdeacon had his own priorities and the convenience of a newish, youngish vicar who looked as though he were going to be too efficient by half, was not one of them. ‘Theo,’ the archdeacon pushed his elbow across the desk and threw his bulk after it. He lowered his voice a couple of octaves. ‘Theo,’ he repeated, ‘no one is indispensable. That’s a bit of pastoral advice I can give you out of thirty years’ experience.’

  His Voice, which had been the making of him, gave unassailable authority to this banality.

  ‘On your bike, pastures new, eh?’ he said cheerfully, rising to his feet and, therefore, drawing Theodora after him.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where am I going?’

  ‘Oh, didn’t I say? Bow. Bow St Aelfric. I expect you know it, with all your clerical connexions,’ he added maliciously. ‘Actually,’ he went on, his real interests shining through for a moment, ‘it’s architecturally odd. It’s got two towers, one over the crossing and one over the west end. The monks of the original foundation built the crossing one, the townspeople built the other because they couldn’t stand the monks. So they put up a partition wall and each group worshipped separately for about two hundred years. Back to back. Paradigm of the Christian life,’ he concluded, truth gaining hold of him. ‘I think they’ve just put in their new dean. Vincent Stream. Not perhaps an ideal choice,’ he could not refrain from adding, ‘but certainly an interesting one.’ He returned to his former tack. ‘Lots of challenges. God bless.’

  So here she was on a bitter Monday morning in the week of Ash Wednesday, bound for St Aelfric, to which, though she had failed to convince the archdeacon of it, she looked forward. The archdeacon was right, it would enlarge her scope, there might be all sorts of exciting things in store.

  She resumed her study of the Swallow Guide and gazed from time to time out of the window at the fleeing landscape. They must be nearing journey’s end.The countryside ceased to be a flat, dyke-measured fenland a
nd gave way to a patchwork of market gardens. Chicken wire flapped loose and dangerous in the prevailing east wind. Cabbages, monstrous growths like small trees, ran to seed in allotments beside the bypass. Bungalows thickened, the hangars housing light industry began to close in. Theodora gazed over the last remaining hedges. The carriages swung round a bend and in the distance the double towers of Bow St Aelfric Cathedral rose above the office blocks.

  A moment later Theodora’s eye lighted upon a cluster of caravans and Nissen huts. From one of these parked close to the railway line a woman emerged and began to hang out clothes. The train slowed for a moment and Theodora had the uncanny experience, sometimes afforded by train journeys, of staring straight into the eyes of someone who could not possibly be looking back at her. She glimpsed a face, haggard by too much experience, the mouth wide and generous, copious brown hair swept back from the brow and streaked with rain. There was a scar on the forehead, she noticed, running into the hair line. A moment later the train hooted in triumph and stormed into Bow St Aelfric station. The grandest house in the cathedral close was the Deanery. The plain eighteenth-century stone façade stared at the cathedral across the perfectly kept green sward, with a certain worldly insolence. It at least did not have to pretend that it was anything other than what it was, a gentleman’s residence.

  In his study on the first floor, the newly installed dean raised his gaze from the day-book on the desk and allowed his eye to stay on the glass of the window. It was the original bottle glass and therefore opaque. It was, moreover, he noticed with irritation, streaked with dust. Nothing in this place worked. The whole house needed redecorating. The cellars had flooded a week ago with the March rains. The smell from the inundation seemed to linger still. Cracks in the drawing-room walls suggested there might be problems with subsidence. He would have to take steps. Taking steps was what he was good at, what he had been put into Bow St Aelfric to do.

  Vincent Stream had fixed his priorities early in life. As a schoolboy he had gazed in at the lighted windows of Father Cuthbert’s tall house in Bodium Crescent in Birkenhead. On winter evenings, which was how he remembered it, a single immense table lamp had illuminated the study. Sombre book backs glowed, heavy curtains framed the windows. Leather armchairs and oil paintings could be glimpsed from beyond the railings which set the house apart from the street. Vincent had loitered on the rain-swept pavement and decided that that was how he would like to live. He wanted nothing to do with his father’s brick semi up the Liverpool bypass. He had fallen in love with a set of artifacts. He but partly understood what was attracting him.

  ‘Do you believe in God?’ he’d asked his pinafored mother one evening on his return home. His father, who was reading The Amateur Gardener, put it down and looked at his son. ‘Don’t be cheeky to your mother,’ he said without rancour, mild, excellent man that he was.

  His mother had placed the liver and bacon on the oilclothed table and bidden him wash his hands. It had all been very ordinary.

  Father Cuthbert’s lighted window had guided Vincent as truly as more refined visions had guided the early saints. It worked upon his emotions. It irradiated his life. He would be a priest and live like a gentleman. He’d have a house that other people would stare into with envy. He’d have a study. It would be lined with books and have soft lights and oils over the fireplace. He longed, he thirsted to live differently from his parents. He plotted his path.

  Undistinguished in intellect, he was, nevertheless, prepared to put in more hours than his classmates at what his mother called book work. In adolescence, while his contemporaries were experimenting with the delights of cars and girls, he was upstairs in his bedroom doing his prep. He hung on by the skin of his teeth to the Latin set at his grammar school. When his voice broke, he found himself blessed with a serviceable baritone and on the strength of it joined St Augustine’s church choir. Thus placed, he could study the habits and mannerisms of the clergy whom he learned to call high church. He imitated their southern vowels and listened attentively to their careful, doctrinal sermons. The real presence, the seven sacraments, the importance of the eastward position became important to him because they were invested with emotion by those whom he sought to emulate. God, when he came to him, came in the form of a rather taller and mistier Father Cuthbert. Father Cuthbert did not possess a beard, but perhaps God did, Vincent thought.

  Father Cuthbert, an aesthete, a politician, well born, well heeled from his grandfather’s cotton mills, had two curates and a social standing in Birkenhead. He did not especially like Vincent. He’d had better looking, better bred and more intelligent lads through his hands, but he knew his duty when presented with tenacity of the kind discernable in Stream. When Vincent sought his advice about a vocation and a university place, Father Cuthbert, an Oxford man, had declared that they took anyone for theology at Cambridge. His parents, hesitant but overawed by the presence of the priest, revised their feelings that their boy would do very nicely with a course in geography at Reading, and gave way. And so it had proved.

  Three years at Selwyn had brought him nearer to the study and its soft lights, the books and the envied window, the lives he wanted to follow and join. He wasted not a minute of his time at Cambridge, made his friends and doggedly won his respectable degree.

  Theological college had been followed by a single curacy in Halifax, appalling enough to convince him that he had no talent for pastoral work in a parish. He did not care for the poor. They and their houses smelt. He did not like their children; their directness, his inability to impress them frightened him. He liked well-dressed, prosperous adults with southern vowels. That was what he’d joined the church for, to mix with nice people. It was not that he doubted that Christianity was for all people. He did think that. That is what the church had taught him. But he felt there should be order in it. The flowing of one category into another, priest into layman, high into low, was a difficulty for him. He liked clear boundaries, order and predictability, above all, a secure unarguable social place for himself. Over the years he had studied the trappings of priesthood, loved them and adopted them. He had made himself an expert on the accoutrements of clerical gentility.

  After the disastrous first curacy, he’d looked around for something, anything, which would guarantee him a position he did not have to make himself, where he could depend on other people’s expectations to see him through. He’d been fortunate. He thanked Providence. A Cambridge friend who had been appointed to a chaplaincy at a provincial university got jaundice at the last minute. Before disappearing into hospital he mentioned Vincent to the bishop. Vincent made sure he never had to look back. He’d worked hard and systematically. He had a modest talent for organisation. He knew about dates, could read a balance sheet, genuinely liked male Christian students who took him at his face value. He made a moderate success. A first chaplaincy was followed in due course by a second at a more illustrious university. He’d been industrious and published in the not too intellectually demanding pages of Theology. Incapable of original thought, he had hit upon the idea of editing collections of other people’s work, men more gifted than himself. His abilities for taking pains, checking footnotes, keeping the dilatory up to publication dates, found their proper métier. In time, with no research or original work to his credit, he had gained the reputation within the church of being a competent scholar. And, as the standards of the Church of England went at that time, so did he feel himself to be. ‘Dedicated’ was an epithet often attached to his name. To what, few bothered to inquire. In his sermons he learned to mix sound Catholic doctrine with reference to the modernly fashionable. If the two bits didn’t always cohere, few were capable of noticing.

  Twenty years after that first chaplaincy, the deanery of Bow St Aelfric had been his reward. In the course of his careful efforts, he’d made himself useful to a handful of bishops who felt they ought to have a publication to their name. He’d entertained one or two Christian MPs and the odd permanent secretary. When St Aelfric came up,
the tall crown appointment secretary had looked at the short crown appointment secretary and nodded. It had been done. The phone calls had been made, the soundings taken. The committee met, but it was mere form. All had already been decided. Six months later Vincent Stream had heard the fanfare and processed to his dean’s stall. A lesser man, as he sank into the velvet cushions, might have thought he had achieved all that could be expected and more. But Dean Stream had looked across at the bishop’s throne and knew there was one more step along the road to go.

  Hence his feverish activity over the last few weeks. The moment he put down the phone call confirming his appointment, Stream had written to the suffragan bishop, Henry Clement, who was also vice-dean and a residentiary canon of Bow Cathedral. The long tenure of the last dean, urged to his retirement in his eighties and dead soon after, would mean there was a lot to do. ‘No one was more admiring of Dean Mantle’s work for the cathedral over the last half century,’ Stream had written in his own small neat handwriting, but he was eager to get to grips with the tasks which lay ahead. Would chapter allow him to come down a month before his installation to make a start on the in-tray?

  The suffragan bishop showed the letter to the diocesan bishop. The relations between a cathedral chapter and the bishop of the diocese are delicate, In theory the dean and chapter are entirely independent of the bishop but in fact long-established bishops usually have their cathedral’s chapters well in hand. They have, after all, appointed at least some of their members.

  A thruster, thought the diocesan bishop, Ronald Holdall, when he read the letter. But he didn’t dislike the idea. He was looking forward to doing a bit less in his final couple of years. He’d accepted an invitation to the States and was busy soliciting another from India. It would be convenient to have someone capable in the cathedral and politic for him to withdraw for a month or two while the new man found his feet with the chapter. ‘Tell him he can come, and square Riddable and Gold,’ he’d said naming the two other residentiary canons, the first of whom was precentor, the second archdeacon. The suffragan had, therefore, written a cordial note to Stream assuring him he’d be most welcome to come down prior to his installation. The courtesies exchanged, the goal posts agreed, Vincent Stream had come. He had spent a day looking through the files. It had been every bit as appalling as he had hoped. Nothing had been done for at least twenty years. Finance, fabric, furniture, personnel and liturgy were all a neglected shambles. Here if anywhere a name could be made. It was God’s gift.