It said, ‘A View from a Pew’. It sounded familiar. He began to read.
‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘It does not belong to me.’ Absently he tucked it into his own papers.
Theodora met the suffragan as he descended the stairs. She was faced with the usual dilemma of such occasions. She stood back to give him passage because he was a bishop and she was a curate in deacon’s orders. The bishop in his turn stood back because he was a gentleman whose manners predated any revision by feminism. She let him have his way and gained the waiting room. She surveyed the décor, pitied the plants and, eschewing the chairs, made for the notice board on the far wall. It held two curling postcards from well-attended resorts in Spain and Greece and an advertisement for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land for the Easter before last. Pinned above these was a minatory notice about smoking and a copy of the cathedral’s services for the current week, the week of Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Theodora was pleased to see there was a daily eight o’clock Eucharist and Compline on Wednesdays and Fridays. The canon in residence for the month was someone called Canon Trevor Riddable.
She was due to meet Archdeacon Archibald Gold at two-thirty. It was twenty past two and they’d said, downstairs, he was not yet back from lunch. She settled herself to wait.
After the dean’s phone call, Canon Millhaven had terminated her session with Theodora and pointed her in the direction of the cathedral guest flat.
The flat had proved to be two rooms with a tiny kitchen and shower at the top of the house next to the cathedral office. The living room looked as though no one had touched it since the last, clerical, owner had vacated it round about 1870. In the kitchen, however, the fridge had provided milk, the cupboard bread, marmite and coffee. She’d made what she considered an excellent lunch. Things immediately looked brighter. She had consulted her timetable. Canon Millhaven had provided a very full programme of work for the next fortnight, remarking that she had better start by seeing everything they were doing. They were doing a great deal. Theodora had packed an ordnance survey map of the surrounding country and a street plan of the town just in case the archdeacon got technical.
Theodora looked again round the desolate waiting room which served both the general office and Archdeacon Gold’s. It was going to be like this for some days, she reflected, waiting for people, making arrangements, feeling disorientated, not knowing which engagements were going to be important or, for that matter, which new acquaintance. Fits and starts. Betwixt and betweens. Half landings and outdated notices. She recognised in herself a deep love of routine; a dependable rhythm of work and prayer was her ideal. Was it a fault, she wondered. In theory she held one should depend on nothing, expect nothing, be continually open to the prompting of the Spirit. In reality she would prefer to be able to predict, to know where she stood.
She cast her eye round the room in search of occupation and lit upon the Bow Examiner lodged beside the dying plant. Theodora was addicted to the provincial press. It seemed to her that they had a more wholesome set of interests than the nationals and treated their material more imaginatively. She had spent many a happy moment with accounts of the Royal Norfolk show or the Frostbites’ under-fifteens dinghy trials in the columns of the Eastern Daily Press.
She turned to the middle pages and read the article under the heading of ‘A View from a Pew’. Was this what Canon Millhaven had meant this morning when she had tapped a newspaper on her desk and said the church had no right to be loved? Theodora glanced at it again. It was signed ‘A. Pathfinder’ which was presumably a nom de plume. The writing was passionate. It was composed, she judged, by someone who was knowledgeable, who cared deeply about the Anglican Church and who felt that the least it could do was to get its rituals right. Well, given the immense privileges of the cathedral clergy, so they should, Theodora ruminated. She wondered though at a local newspaper printing anything so critical. What lay behind it? Was it part of a policy, part of a longrunning feud?
She was recalled from her speculations by the sound of voices from the hall below.
‘Your questions are impertinent. I have no intention of answering them.’ The voice was high, the accent clipped, the tone irritable. The voice which answered was lower. Theodora couldn’t make out the words. The first voice resumed. ‘Moreover, you’re a nuisance, Fresh. You’re not a scholar and you have no qualifications which give you any right to go around pontificating about the fabric of the cathedral. In particular, I shall not permit you to meddle with the alterations which I intend to make to the west door.’
This time Theodora could distinguish the reply.
‘You see,’ the other man was explaining patiently, ‘the very site here is an ancient and sacred one. It’s much older than Christianity. A building as old as the cathedral isn’t an artifact, a plaything for any old committee of amateurs. It’s more like a piece of the natural world, a forest or landscape. A serious house on serious earth.’ The voice had a slight local accent and the words though spoken more slowly than his interlocutor’s were passionately urged.
‘The ordering of the cathedral is the responsibility of the dean and chapter and of no one else.’
The lower voice tried to interrupt but was overridden by the higher one. ‘I am not going to argue with you further.You’re an autodidact, too ignorant to know what that word means. I shall proceed as I think best.’
The voice had become more audible as its owner’s footsteps ascended the stairs. Theodora thought it politic to become very interested in the advertisement for last year’s trip to the Holy Land. She was not unfamiliar with the manners of senior clergy but, even so, she was surprised at the tone of the conversation. The owner of the voice, square of head and square of figure, attired in deep clerical black with a narrow clerical collar, marched past her, without a glance, into the general office.
She leaned over the banisters to see if she could see the other party to the unequal conversation. There was no one in the hall below but the door to the close was open and the figure of a man could be seen receding through it.
Theodora was cheered by this episode. She felt that she was beginning to build up local knowledge. What further would she be offered? The cathedral clock struck the half hour. The archdeacon arrived on cue. The downstairs door slammed. There was a lot of noisy stamping. Then a bulky figure in leather jacket, rain pouring from every part of it, stamped up the stairs. He wore what might have been a flying helmet and carried a pair of gauntlets in one hand and a canvas holdall in the other. He began unzipping odd bits of attire and from beneath the layers emerged a tweed-suited figure rather smaller than might have been supposed from his outer cladding. Theodora judged him to be in his middle forties. Nature had grouped the archdeacon’s features in the middle of his face and then allowed them to slide down to rest on a powerful looking moustache which, as it were, ruled them off. His thin reddish hair was sleeked thriftily from a low parting over the dome of his head. This he turned in Theodora’s direction.
‘Shan’t be a mo,’ he said and disappeared through the door marked ‘Gentlemen’.
The archdeacon’s office, when she entered it, looked like a store room into which detritus from other offices and parts of the cathedral had been piled. There were bits of a dismantled pulpit propped against one wall. Perched on a cupboard behind the desk a couple of marble cherubs’ heads in the Italian taste smiled happily down either side of the archdeacon’s own head. Chairs, plastic, canvas and bentwood, were piled in every corner and what looked like parts of an outboard motor rendered the floor as dangerous as a minefield. The archdeacon bounded nimbly over them and gained his desk in safety. He flung himself down in his revolving chair which promptly tipped backwards with his weight. He hooked his legs on to his desk as though to secure himself in place. Theodora found herself addressed by an almost recumbent figure.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t got terribly much time. I’m up to my eyes.’
Theodora murmured about how very understandable this was. She th
ought how often she had sat on chairs in front of other people’s desks. Were desks necessary? Her eye lit on the perfect miniature of a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost 1925 mounted on a wooden base which took up a good part of the archdeacon’s desk. She brought her attention back to the archdeacon. His cuffs, she noticed, were secured by very large, gold links. His watch was likewise on a chunky gold bracelet. He was not wearing a clerical collar.
‘Just one or two points.’ The archdeacon stopped to marshal his thoughts. ‘Erica’s fixed you with digs et cetera?’
Theodora nodded. She could see she wasn’t expected to talk.
‘Right. Right. Got a TT?’ He cast round the muddle of papers on his desk and whilst retaining his recumbent position extracted a sheet.‘We’re delighted you could come and help us out. Of course. Growth area.’ He appeared to have got a grip on the business in hand. ‘Children’s work in the parish. The junior church. The young unchurched.’
‘Adult lay education,’ Theodora said cautiously.
‘That too.’ The archdeacon’s eye glazed as he sought for his cliché. ‘Words like “outreach” and “mission” are integral to the chapter’s vision for the church in this diocese,’ he said rapidly. ‘We’re looking,’ he leaned forward as far as he could without actually compromising his horizontal hold, ‘for a far more aggressive interchange between parish and diocese. We’re looking for renewal on every front.’
There was an almighty crash. The office seemed to rock slightly. Somewhere outside a woman shrieked. There was a sound of running feet. The archdeacon hesitated, then disengaged his feet from his desk and hauled himself upright. Once on his feet he gained courage and impetus. ‘Something’s up,’ he said acutely. ‘Half a mo.’
They moved swiftly down the stairs. Outside the rain had started again. It was slanting evilly across the close in teaming rods. It was difficult to see. The quiet which Theodora had noticed on her first entry to the close before lunch had given way to a pandemonium of noise. Doors slammed. There was a deep sound of drumming which might have been running feet or running water. Through it all came the high stomach churning wail of a child frightened or in pain. The archdeacon sprinted towards the middle of the green sward at a pace which suggested he jogged regularly. Theodora followed with long strides.
Where the notice board had stood half an hour before was a crater about three feet wide and six feet long. From one end water mixed with mud and shingle was gushing with some force. The board swayed to and fro in the current. At the far end of the hole a girl of about eleven was kneeling and peering into the crater. Beside her, clinging to her coat, was a younger child, a boy. It was his cry which was filling the air. There was a smell of ancient earth and wet stone.
‘What happened?’ panted the archdeacon to the girl.
Theodora bent over the crater. Her eyes met those of another small boy sitting on the floor, his hair plastered to his round head, mud caking his anorak.
‘I’m all right, I think. It was rather a surprise,’ he said courteously in answer to Theodora’s inquiry. Theodora extended a hand. He lodged his foot on the side of the hole, braced his weight against it and allowed himself to be hoisted up.
Behind Theodora a small interested crowd was gathering. Mrs Perfect, a plastic mackintosh over her head, was taking charge of the two other children. A man in dungarees straddled the hole and engaged the archdeacon in conversation about the probable source of the water-flow. Tourists who found present events more fascinating than ancient architecture were beginning to gather. One young man slid to the front. He was hailed by Mrs Perfect as ‘Nick’ and told to ring the fire brigade. The young man slid off again. At that moment a small figure thrust its way with competent elbows through the crowd.
‘Rebecca’, declared Mrs Riddable, flinging her arm round her eldest child who did not move away. ‘Benjamin’, she exclaimed to her youngest. He obligingly clung in Victorian set-piece fashion to her skirts. Her attempts to envelope Timothy were less physically successful. She lacked a third arm and he for his part, was extremely muddy and seemed to feel this disqualified him from too close a contact. He was, in any case, reluctant to divorce himself completely from the fissure behind him.
‘I’m all right,’ he said firmly. Then he turned to Theodora. ‘Hadn’t we better get the other one out?’
‘What?’ said the archdeacon.
‘Where?’ said his mother.
‘Who?’ said Theodora.
Timothy gestured back into the hole. The crowd took a step forward. At that moment the rain ceased. A sudden brilliant shaft of cold March sun slanted directly into the pit. At the bottom, rising from the mud and shingle, as though struggling to free itself from a grave in which it had been interred, could be seen the form of a body cut off at the waist.
There was a moment’s silence. Then with a nimble movement, one of the bystanders slipped into the hole and began to scrape away at the shape. Gradually a hunched figure could be made out.
‘There,’ said Oliver Fresh, brushing the last of the mud from the shallow eye sockets of the idol. ‘I told you so, didn’t I?’ He looked up in triumph at the archdeacon. The Roman god Janus stared up at them out of the pit in which he had lain for sixteen hundred years.
‘So what happened?’ Stella Parish asked Oliver Fresh as she chopped onions on the kitchen table in the hut in the Hollow.
Fresh removed his head from beneath the cold tap. It was a large, well shaped head covered with black curling hair and a full, neatly trimmed beard from which grey eyes and red lips emerged sparkling with life. The head was crafted, wrought, not unlike an artifact which might have been dug up or have decorated a pre-Norman building. One of the many people who did not care for Fresh had once compared him to a tadpole for his head was large in comparison to his neat slim body. Stella, who had started off by finding him slightly repulsive had come, over the three years of her own stay at the Hollow, to love him. He was physically dexterous. She had watched his long tapering hands and seen how at home they were with materials of all kinds, how he formed them, caressed them, worked them.
His workshop, which led off the living part of the hut they shared, was clean and neat with tools of different crafts hung on different parts of the wall. She had learned to recognise the implements of metal work, wood work, stone work, gem cutting and leather working. Down the middle of the room ran a long table fitted with clamps and a lathe. The whole place smelt of wood, oil and leather. At the far end was a single bunk in which Fresh slept. Over it was a shelf of books: Corbishley on butterflies, Mattingley on Roman coins. It could have been a clever adolescent’s collection. It could have been the remains of a scholar’s.
Stella pushed the onions into a pan and conveyed it to the calor gas.
‘So what happened?’ she repeated as Fresh applied a kitchen towel to the hair of his head and beard.
‘The water main, which runs north south through the close, broke near the centre of the green. They’ve been repairing the main up Colgate and they’ve been altering the pressure all week. The piping’s old, circa 1890, and it finally split.’
‘But the wireless said finds of great archaeological interest.’
‘Did they?’ Fresh smiled. He was full of energy. He was practically dancing as he hung up the towel. ‘I told them. I told the old dean. I told the new dean. I told the archdeacon. In fact, I told anyone who’d listen and a lot who wouldn’t that the Via Tepiduna went east west through the close. If you look at Dunch’s plans of the 1922 dig, it’s clear that if they’d let him dig up the close – which, of course, they wouldn’t – he’d have hit the south gate of the Roman city.
Stella was only moderately interested in this. She enjoyed the way Fresh told things more than what he actually said. She swung the cauldron of chicken mash from the stove into his hands. Then she took a small bag of pellets and steered him to the door. The lurcher bitch, who had been stretched out beside the black boiler stove, rose, stretched gracefully and followed them out. The hut formed o
ne of three arranged in an opensided square. In front was a spruce-looking vegetable garden. The hens were lodged behind. The rain had ceased and a yellow gash in the sky on the other side of the railway line indicated the sun had set.
‘So what did you tell them?’ she pursued.
‘I told them,’ Fresh resumed, ‘that where there’s a gate there’s life. That stands to reason.’ Just occasionally the local accent with its glottal stop in place of the final ‘t’ could be heard in Fresh’s speech. It’s worth digging at a gate. Trade goes on. Stuff passes. Things’ll have come off the back of carts just as they come off the backs of lorries nowadays.’
Fresh distributed the mash evenly along the wooden feeders which he’d made with timber recovered from the river. He was rewarded with a dozen Moran hens falling to with appreciation. The lurcher, who had been left outside the wire run, drooled.
‘So why wouldn’t they let you dig?’ Stella broadcast the pellets over the ground.
Some of the Morans found themselves in a dilemma.
‘Partly, it’s that they’re frightened of what they might find. There’s a great pile of bones and rams’ skulls scattered all round. That’s more than they can take, death. They don’t want to be reminded. Also,’ Fresh dumped the last of the mash and swung the pail round in his hand, ‘they don’t like me because I’m not pukka. I haven’t a university chair in archaeology. You know what the new dean called me? An autodidact.’ He flung back his head and laughed in huge pleasure. ‘Autos, self, didasko, I teach. He thought it an insult that I’m self-taught. When you think of the archaeologists who’ve taught themselves. Schliemann, Evans, Ventris. Why, it’s a compliment.’
‘What was the new dean doing?’
‘Trying to get rid of me. He’s got silly plans for the west door involving glass, engraved, I shouldn’t wonder, with a design of angels. I was trying to dissuade him.’
Idol Bones Page 4