Idol Bones

by D M Greenwood

  ‘Look, Beddows, you’re supposed to be offering it, not trying to hit them with it.They’ve got a choice, you know. They don’t have to eat the stuff.’ He took the plate from the grinning Beddows and demonstrated. There was a round of applause.

  The kitchen in the basement was large, warm, clean, and stacked with food and drink. All had been beautifully organised by the head verger. The dean had indicated his wishes for this, his first venture into hospitality in his new dignity, and Tristram Knight had seen to it. Nick was much impressed by Tristram. He had style, Nick felt. He watched him and felt more drawn to him the more notice Tristram took of him. He discerned Tristram to be a fixer. He liked his attention to detail, his ability to foresee contingencies, his ease and lack of fuss. In a small way he was imitating him as he ran through the moves again with Beddows and his three happy helpers. A fact which did not escape Tristram as he removed the final corks from the claret.

  On the kitchen table was spread the late edition of the Examiner. The evening headline ran ‘New Gods for Old’ and the first sentence, Nick saw, read, ‘The Dean and Chapter of St Aelfric Cathedral are worried about the Janus discovered in the cathedral close yesterday’.

  ‘The Examiner’s running the Janus story for all its worth,’ Nick remarked.

  Tristram leaned companionably over his shoulder and grinned. ‘Not the dean’s day,’ he said. ‘And we haven’t finished yet.’

  Upstairs in the entrance hall visitors were beginning to arrive. It was all suavely organised. Ladies left their coats in the dean’s study on the left, the gentlemen pushed on to the cloakroom beyond the staircase. Then they were channelled upstairs to the drawing room on the first floor.

  Clerical society is not unlike an archaeological dig. The modern top layer only partly hides much older attitudes and manners. The Church of England is not a Guardian-reading democracy of rational equals. It is a hierarchy, and a male hierarchy at that, where the criteria for advancement are decorously unpublished. Promotion, with its overtones of talent and industry, may operate in the secular world; in the clerical, however, it is called preferment and it moves in a mysterious way. ‘How on earth did he become … ?’ can often only be answered in terms of whom he knows. ‘What on earth does he do?’ can sometimes not be answered at all.

  In such a society wives of clergy have no independent worth and must, therefore, take their rank from their husbands. Accordingly, in the Deanery hall, three people hurried to help the diocesan bishop’s lady off with her serviceable Windsmoor. Those who failed to gain a part in this performance were granted a second chance on the arrival of the suffragan’s a few moments later. The two women looked at each other with practised loathing. The suffragan’s wife’s family had lived in the county for five generations. Her cousinage went in all directions, but mostly up. She never needed to strain. The diocesan’s wife had been a nurse before she met the bishop when he had been a curate in Hounslow. Height, a full figure and a large jaw entitled her, she felt, to a leading role, even had Ronald not made the bench. If there were those who did not concur and felt she overestimated her powers, they held their tongues. There was no subject on which she was not willing to give a lead, or, as she put it, set the tone. She was especially inclined to put people right if they were not performing quite as she would wish. God would not mind, Ronald would not notice, but Grace would say a word.

  She shook the dean’s hand with the air of setting aside rank in favour of Christian brotherhood. ‘Well, Vincent, is this a house warming or are you celebrating your find?’

  ‘Find?’ The dean stood square and stocky in the middle of the mat in front of his drawing-room hearth, his clerical evening dress immaculate, his little shoes gleaming. He was not a tall man. On a good day he made five foot two. His strong grey hair sprang across his head like Cumberland turf. He gave her a ration of his small smile. ‘No find of mine, Grace, I do assure you.’ He was noticeably more at ease with his superiors than with his equals or subordinates. Hierarchy breeds such manners.

  ‘Have chapter decided what to do with him?’ the bishop asked as he joined his wife. He had taken the precaution of getting a glass in his hand before embarking on the rigours of conversation. He did not need to listen. It was enough for any gathering that he graced it. He allowed his mind to stray to the American holiday for which he was departing early on the morrow.

  The dean was saved from having to frame an answer by the arrival of the mayor. ‘A sort of secular re-run of the installation,’ said the mayor jovially as he pumped the dean’s hand up and down. ‘Let’s hope we’re all using the same service sheet, this time.’ He laughed affably at the dean who did not respond to his pleasantry.

  The room was beginning to fill up. Beside the other fireplace, directly opposite the dean and the diocesan bishop, a rival court had gathered round the suffragan and the archdeacon. Various responses to the topic of the moment were being explored.

  ‘The point is, can we make some money out of it?’ Archdeacon Gold was saying, swaying to and fro on his jogger’s heels. Though perfectly presentably turned out he managed to give the impression he had just come on from Brands Hatch. ‘It could be a multi-million pound attraction, if we handled it right.’

  Mrs Riddable shivered in a way which suggested she was demonstrating what shivering was to very young children meeting the concept for the first time. ‘It gives me the creeps,’ she squeaked in her well-known italic delivery. ‘All that pagan power, all that concealed evil just lying there under the surface waiting, just waiting to jump out at us when we weren’t expecting it.’

  Mrs Riddable’s excesses were too well known in her own society to cause comment any more but even the hardened were brought to silence by this. Only the suffragan’s wife remained unmoved. She sipped her wine composedly. ‘I thought he looked rather a handsome fellow. What do you think, Henry?’ she turned to her husband.

  ‘He’s beautifully modelled,’ Bishop Clement conceded. ‘A very high level of craftsmanship. Not, I would have thought, provincial work. Perhaps continental, even Italian.’

  Mrs Riddable seemed to think that explained a great deal. ‘I do wonder, though,’ the suffragan went on, ‘whether it isn’t rather a pity that he was found so near the cathedral, on consecrated ground. I fear the general public might get the wrong impression.’

  ‘What impression?’ said Canon Riddable abruptly, joining the conversation for the first time. ‘It’s a bit of tin. St Paul tells us what to think about pagan idols. Romans 8.17.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve read Romans,’ said Bishop Clement mildly,’ ‘but people get attached to things. He may attract the wrong sort of notice.’

  ‘Provided they pay to notice him.’ The archdeacon showed his own attachments. ‘Then it could be a multimillion pound …’ He felt an almost physical release as he said this. When he’d been a bank clerk before his conversion, he’d never dreamed he might be able to say things like this and mean them. But the Church had given him that opportunity. He was a humble man at heart. He was grateful.

  Canon Riddable swung round on the archdeacon whom he overtopped by more than a head. He seemed to threaten him almost physically.

  ‘Historically that idol has no part in our Christian tradition. If we meddle with it, we’re damned.’

  ‘We shouldn’t be railroaded by tradition,’ the archdeacon protested incoherently, taking a step back.

  In the doorway of the drawing room Theodora paused. Her height gave her some advantage in gatherings of this kind. She surveyed the scene and saw an eighteenth-century double cube room panelled in white painted wood with rather too little furniture and rather too many people.

  Over on the far side of the room she caught the suffragan’s eye. She was surprised when he detached himself from his group and made his way across to her.

  ‘Miss Braithwaite? I think we met on the stairs yesterday.’

  Theodora smiled her remembrance and gratitude.

  ‘I believe Canon Millhaven may be delayed. I wo
ndered if I might have a word with you a little later on. I have a small commission which you might be able to help us with. I knew your father, of course,’ he smiled as though this explained all. ‘Now, will you allow me to introduce the dean to you.’

  Theodora admired the way he had put this.

  ‘Braithwaite?’ said the dean.

  Theodora was aware of the double take, the adoption of an attitude and the almost simultaneous revision of it.

  ‘Braithwaite? Are you by any chance related to Nicholas Braithwaite?’

  Theodora nodded. ‘He was my father.’

  ‘And Canon Hugh?’ the dean pursued, anxious not to make a mistake about anything.

  ‘My great uncle,’ she conceded.

  ‘I’m delighted to make your acquaintance,’ said the dean warmly. Whatever he felt about women, and women in deacon’s orders, had to be balanced against the known saintliness of the father and the scholarly distinction of the great uncle.

  Theodora murmured polite sentiments about being delighted to be in Bow, opportunities to learn, a part of the country unknown to her.Then, as others lined up to claim their host’s attention, she was free once more to wander.

  Her clerically practised eye took in the groups. The high churchmen of the Catholic wing were nearest to her, their hands confidently cradling full glasses. The low churchmen, the evangelical tendency, had gravitated to the other end of the room. They mostly solaced themselves with fruit juice.The distinction between these two groups had a sartorial dimension: the clerical collars of the evangelicals were broad, those on the Catholic wing narrow. The higher the collar, her uncle Hugh would have remarked, the lower the churchmanship. In between these two groups were the broad churchmen and the laity. The two knots of the latter Theodora mentally labelled town and gown. Securing a glass from a passing Kingsman she began her perambulations down the room.

  ‘It’s certainly beginning to change,’ a vigorous-looking young priest was saying. ‘We haven’t quite reached the stage of Benediction yet, but at the Eucharist I was at last week there were altar boys running around like rabbits.’

  ‘I understand the new dean is sworn to restore proper Catholic worship to the cathedral.’

  ‘What do chapter think of that?’ a third member of the group inquired with interest.

  ‘In general, they’re against anything which lengthens the services.’

  ‘How do they plan to stymie him?’

  ‘By a masterful campaign of inactivity. Canon Riddable is a world champion in the art.’

  Theodora moved down the room. The broad churchmen were keeping to personalities and politics. Old scores were being paid off, new ones totted up. Archdeacon Gold’s tastes in dress, cars and churchmanship did not command the approval of all his colleagues. He had been in the post for three years but he was not a Bow man born and bred. He’d come from some suburban diocese in the south of England. He was fair game, it was reckoned.

  ‘He’s scarcely presentable, the archdeacon, would you say?’ A silverhaired gentle old man with a concave, ascetic face inquired of a squarer and younger version.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Thick?’ suggested the concave one tentatively.

  ‘A bit out of his class, certainly,’ the other conceded.

  ‘Doesn’t know which way’s up, would you say, Noel,’ he drew in the third member. ‘All those real estate deals.’ He chewed the Americanism with delight.

  ‘A very different class of shark to the ones he’s been used to,’ agreed his companion.

  ‘Essentially a man of the Sixties,’ the silvery haired one went on, clearly eager to finish the job once he’d started it.

  ‘You mean?’

  ‘Good will, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘A deep personal commitment.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘But viring a lumpy budget.’

  ‘I see what you mean.’

  ‘Keeping an eye on the small print.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Putting the right sweeteners round the Borough planning office for the Hollow development.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Won’t last long with the new dean, would you say?’ He slammed the trap shut.

  It was all very familiar stuff to Theodora. She skirted the first group of laity which she had labelled town. It consisted of the mayor and a posse of expensively suited local politicians supported by their womenfolk, all of whom looked as though they might originally have worked for their livings and could again if the need arose. There was a smell of aftershave and many, by the look of their tans, seemed to have recently returned from skiing holidays. The talk was of prices, shares and fat stock.

  Beyond them a second group of laity had congregated. These were the ones Theodora had thought of as gown. They were less well turned out than their neighbours but had the air of not caring, of minds on higher things. Their wives wore no make up and were clad in interesting combinations of colours and fabrics. They were dominated by a small broad-shouldered old man whose copious white hair might have been cut at home rather than in a barber’s. His small eyes popped beneath bristling white brows. He was smoking triangular Egyptian cigarettes and his high cultivated voice was easily discernible above the babble of others.

  ‘My father, God bless him, always said there was more to come out of the close. There were rams’ skulls, you know, all over the shop. Rams,’ he paused and sucked his lips appreciatively, ‘were the sacrificial animals of the Janus. Amongst others,’ he added.

  For a moment it looked as though someone else might get their hands on the conversation, so he pressed uninterruptibly on.‘Though, of course, for the ancients, there was a right and a wrong way to go through a gate, especially to war.’ His manner was midway between an old-fashioned WEA lecturer and a military man going over his last campaign. He lacked, Theodora thought, only the epidiascope and pointer.

  ‘What is it Livy says?’ he went on. ‘“Infelice via”, by an ill-omened path.’ The old man’s lips split open to reveal appalling teeth. ‘Serve the clergy right to have had their old rival lodged in their cellars for fifteen hundred years.’

  ‘It’s an eerie thought,’ said one of the women in attendance. ‘Do you suppose it’s had an influence? Been at work, as it were?’

  ‘Well, it’s had a dramatic enough resurrection, rising out of the abyss on a flood,’ said her companion with relish.

  ‘It’ll cause a great deal of trouble,’ the old man went on. ‘Mark my words. Problem one, who owns it? Problem two, what to do with it?’

  Theodora edged her way through the crowd. If ‘father’ was the original archaeologist, would this make the little white-haired gnome his son, Sir somebody Dunch, she wondered. She moved within listening distance of the suffragan’s group. Conversation had grown desultory, as of people who had been too long in each other’s company.

  ‘Trevor used to play the guitar quite a lot,’ Mrs Riddable was saying to the suffragan’s wife.

  ‘I somehow thought he might have done,’ returned the latter in a neutral tone.

  ‘Can we make some money out of it?’ the archdeacon was asking a newcomer to the group.

  ‘Archdeacons only think about money,’ murmured a youngish-looking cleric. No one took the least notice of his remark which suggested to Theodora that he might be the succentor. Reckoning she’d had her money’s worth conversationally, she turned away.

  ‘A celebration of shared values, Miss Braithwaite.’

  Theodora looked at the tray-carrying figure who had addressed her. She had a flash of memory. ‘Did I see you verging at the eight o’clock this morning?’ she inquired.

  ‘Quite so. I have the honour to be the dean’s verger as well as his head waiter for this evening. My name, by the way, is Tristram Knight.’

  ‘How do you do,’ murmured Theodora. She was a bit overwhelmed by the man’s presence, his theatricality, his air of addressing an audience wider than herself. He was as tal
l as she, pale and thin to the point of emaciation. His head was set on his neck in such a way as to appear to slope back from his chin. The black jacket, Theodora judged, was not hired. The shirt, if she were not mistaken, was linen. There was a sort of muted foppishness about him. His voice was educated. He might not be what he appeared to be.

  ‘I thought I would take this opportunity of introducing myself because my young colleague, Nick Squires,’Tristram jerked his head in the direction of the far end of the room, ‘is looking after your lodgings. Please don’t hesitate to let him or me know if there’s anything you want done. Nick’s a willing lad.’

  Theodora felt it was better not to take up the theme he offered. Instead she tried, ‘Does the dean entertain a lot?’

  ‘The last dean was known for his thrift. The size of his sherry glasses was remarked amongst the chapter to be the smallest compatible with hospitality. On the other hand he was eighty when he retired last year. So he had the excuse of age. It is said that in his youth he had laid down a modest cellar and when that ran out in his seventy-fifth year he saw no point in reordering.’

  ‘You’ve had a long interregnum?’ Theodora inquired.

  ‘Six months officially. But the new dean has been at work here for the past month before his installation.

  ‘Have you been here long?’ Theodora thought it safe to inquire.

  ‘Long enough, I’m beginning to feel.’ And with that he manoeuvred his tray over the heads of two passing clergy and disappeared.

  The dialogue confirmed Theodora’s sense of unease. She was aware of an edginess in the gathering, an undertow of disquiet amongst the guests. Was it the advent of a new dean amongst entrenched clergy? Was it the time of the ecclesiastical year, with Lent starting tomorrow? Or was it the Janus? Of course a new dean would be a difficulty for the chapter. Two of them, the archdeacon and the precentor were of a different churchmanship from the dean. He, like the suffragan, was from the Catholic, they from the evangelical wing. There would be tensions in how worship was ordered, how the furnishing and fabric of the building were treated, how, if one were honest the Christian gospel was interpreted and recommended to the world. Moreover, how things were done in the cathedral would influence and set an example to the rest of the diocese. But all that was par for the course. Every diocese all the time. She sensed something more difficult to define, some tension more cryptic than mere differences in churchmanship. Theodora was surprised to find how many people were stirred by the finding of the Janus.