Unseen Things Above (26 page)

And what of the archdeacon in all this spousely malarkey? Everyone knows about his situation now. Not like the disciplinary process is a secret, is it? Cheers for that, Veronica. So, is he going to make a stand and invite Janey along? Or would that be a bit of a distraction from the main focus, which is to welcome Steve and Sonya to the diocese? In the end, he rings Janey. Tells her how matters stand. He hears the filthy laugh that always makes his heart turn flic-flacs. ‘An evening with the diocesan stuffed shirts of Lindchester? That's very sweet of you, Mr Archdeacon, but I think I'll pass.'

It is Wednesday evening. The diocesan communications officer cracks his knuckles. He goes over the schedule for the umpteenth time. Welcome dinner tomorrow night. Bishop designate to attend Morning Prayer in cathedral on Friday, followed by press conference (seen a copy of Steve's speech, all OK, ditto Bishop Bob's, to be read by Bishop Harry), meeting with civics, visit to Lindford Food Bank, chance to meet key business/religious leaders. Local radio interview. He scans on down the list. Yup, yup, yup. Lunch over in Martonbury with Bishop Bob. Chance to look round palace. Press release ready to go live on Friday morning, just after Downing Street announcement. He needs to make a couple more phone calls, but basically everything seems to be in order. Quick check on Twitter to see if anyone had got a whiff. Seems unlikely, but—

You probably saw @roderick_fallon's tweet yourself: ‘New bishop of #Lindchester is @BishopAylesbury Steve Pennington.' With a link to Fallon's feature in Thursday's
Herald
, exposing the CNC's decision not to appoint the openly gay Principal of Barchester Theological College.

OCTOBER

Chapter 23

A
voice sings in the darkness.

When the house doth sigh and weep,

And the world is drown'd in sleep,

Yet mine eyes the watch do keep,

Sweet Spirit, comfort me!

Almost midnight in Lindchester Cathedral. There has been much sighing and weeping tonight. Marion kneels in her stall and listens. Outside the wind rushes.
Comfort me!
The last echo fades. She hears someone whisper, ‘Jesus.' Footsteps come towards her down the quire.

‘Freddie?'

‘Omigod! Mrs Dean! I'm so sorry, didn't know you were there.'

‘How did you get in?'

Pause. ‘Oh, right, yeah, I kinda . . . yeah? Just wanted to be here and like, y'know? Sing? The acoustic? And because, God?'

A pale gleam from the floodlights seeps in through leaded glass and casts patterns up on the vaults. Like moonlight rippled on water. And the quire is the seabed of this sleep-drowned world. Above in the crow's nest Marion hears the muffled chimes of the clock strike midnight, like a ship's bell – like Herrick's passing bell – and the wind washes in restless waves. Freddie seems to sway there on the current, a ghost fish.

‘Have you borrowed Philip's keys?'

‘Ah, right, about that. I'll totally put them back? Hhnn. Probably I should've asked first?'

‘Oh, Freddie.'

‘Sorry, Mrs Dean.'

She sighs.

He steps closer. ‘Mrs Dean? Are you OK?'

‘Not really, if I'm honest. I've got rather a lot on my mind.'

‘The new bishop thing? Yeah, saw that on Twitter just now. Can I . . . do anything?'

Yes, you can stop adding to my problems, you feckless dummy. ‘Not really, thanks. Unless . . . Would you sing that anthem again? It's beautiful.'

‘Hey. You bet. Cool. So we always sang it back in the day? When I was a chorister? Back then I was, yeah, yeah, Hurford again. Kind of, it was just part of the repertoire? But now, when everything's fucked— gah, sorry, Mrs Dean! When things are like . . . complicated? Still sometimes I . . . coz, yeah, I mean the words? And then it's like, y'know? If that makes sense?'

Marion shakes her head and almost smiles. ‘Well. In a way, Freddie.'

‘Awesome.' He walks back to the far end of the quire. And then his voice, that bright dark-edged voice, shucks off its earthbound stumbling and soars:

In the hour of my distress,

When temptations me oppress,

And when I my sins confess,

Sweet Spirit, comfort me!

When I lie within my bed,

Sick in heart and sick in head,

And with doubts discomforted,

Sweet Spirit, comfort me!

Marion – sick in heart and head at what has happened, and at what must come – lets the tears fall quietly, knowing they are hidden by the dark.

That was last Wednesday night. Since then, as you may well imagine, there has been much soul-searching and not a little recrimination over the leak. Some very stiff emails were sent. But so far nobody has confessed. Fallon, of course, refuses to name his source.

Marion – as chair of the Lindchester CNC – has been testing the truth of Kipling's ‘If' poem to its limits. She has kept her head while all around were losing theirs and blaming her. The truth she has spoken has been twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, and she has endured that. She will not, as a result, attain the ultimate dignity of becoming A Man; but in due course I hope she will be a bishop. Frustratingly, she is powerless to correct the impression Fallon's piece created, because to do so would involve revealing the confidential discussions of the CNC. While intolerant views – no,
homophobic
views – were aired, that was not the full story. But on the whole, Marion, Bishop Harry and the diocesan communications officer, along with Bishop elect Steve, have handled the flak deftly. Completely off the record and for your ears only, the communications officer did console himself by composing a spoof press release that Gene himself could scarcely have improved upon. (‘“I'm not a bigot. Some of my best friends are shirt-lifters,” says Lindchester dean.')

It will blow over. Marion knows it will. But right now she's still smarting. At night she cannot prevent the merry-go-round of suspicion setting off on another mad twirl. Who was it? Which member of the CNC had spoken to Fallon? One by one she calls the local members to the stand and cross-examines them. Nobody cracks. She'd swear to their innocence. They are good folk! Fallon, the key witness in the case, thwarts her by claiming his right to silence. It's clear he's seen at least one crucial email. How much more does he know? Maybe it was a member of the national CNC? But why, why? Surely it served nobody's interests, advanced nobody's cause. Because the whole process of senior appointments has been held up for ridicule. Yes, the system's not perfect, but it's an improvement on what went before!

Ah, leave off your fretting, Marion, she chides herself. Hush that fairground in your soul. The cathedral clock chimes. Two a.m. The wind sighs and the deanery windows rattle. Hush, my soul.

But no! The jangly music starts up, and off we go again. Could it have been Guilden himself? Every instinct rejects that idea.
Of course
he will be feeling crushed and disappointed – as everyone does, when they are shortlisted but don't get the job! There's no way he'd want to be dissected in the press, or have the world's nose metaphorically pressed to his windows! Besides, he will have known from the feedback what happened, that Steve simply performed better. Can she acquit herself? Did they just use the Diocesan Growth Strategy as an escape route from bitter division? No! Yet she cannot deny the secret relief. Oh, leave it. Leave this pointless picking over the bones.
Comfort me . . .
Outside the clock chimes three.
Sweet Spirit, comfort me.

Yes, it will blow over, just as other catastrophes have done. In the meantime, things remain pretty grim. My readers will no doubt remember that Roderick Fallon has a spot of previous with Lindchester. Almost a year ago he experienced the chagrin of watching the most stupendous episcopal catch of the decade twist off his hook and vanish into the weeds. It is not the purpose of this tale to suggest that journalists are driven by vengeful malice, any more than we seek to imply that canons curse and precentors like their tipple. However, I hope I may persuade you that Roderick Fallon, when he opened this particular can of CNC worms, was energized by more than a simple journalistic desire to expose institutional homophobia and see truth prevail.

At a local level Fallon shot himself in the foot. His piece belittled the Lindchester CNC members. This is like belittling a family member. While we reserve the right to abuse our mad aunts and surly teens in whatever terms we choose, we don't take kindly to a stranger wading in. Thus colleagues, sniffy about having yet another Evangelical thrust upon them, had to execute a swift about-turn. Perhaps Fallon was on the side of life? I leave that to my reader to determine. But moral rectitude is seldom palatable when dished up with a large side order of obnoxiousness.

The top secret dinner was therefore much more convivial than it might otherwise have been. I am pleased about that, for Steve is lovely too, and Sonya is not a nightmare. There is no tick beside Steve's name on the Senior Appointments list in the ‘WI' column. (‘Wife Impossible'.) So the meal was lovely, lovely, lovely. Perhaps a
little
too much wine was drunk? That is not for me to say. At any rate, not a whiff of Poppinsical disapproval was detected on the face of the bishop designate. He laughed very hard at the canon treasurer's impersonations. Yes, provided Steve is biddable in matters liturgical, the cathedral canons have high hopes that this might be workable.

And he will be biddable! Unlike Mary Poppins, he
gets
cathedrals and the choral tradition and knows his place. During the meal it emerged – gloriously! – that Steve had actually been a chorister at another cathedral in his youth, back when he was still called ‘Stephen' (or Pennington Major), and before he tragically went off on some summer camp and fell into the clutches of the evanjellybabies. Such a man was to be pitied, not reviled; much as one might pity someone who, through no fault of his own, had lost an arm in a baler. These were the sentiments laboriously expressed by the precentor in the taxi home. ‘
Du hast gesoffen
, darling,' observed his wife.

Meanwhile, back in their little vestry, the vergers have been congratulating themselves once again on issuing Fallon with a ticket last year when he parked in the Close. He was not specifically targeted. I can vouch for the fact that, in a completely even-handed way, the vergers of Lindchester Cathedral will ticket
any
illegally parked convertible, be it Audi, Merc, Porsche or BMW. Another time it will be personal, though. I am sorry to say that Gavin has even been speculating about how much damage a carelessly driven cherry-picker might do to an S5 Cabriolet if it happened to be left on yellow lines.

October has arrived, bringing with it storms and rain and hail. But today it is calm. Freddie May is out running. You may already have inferred that he did not flounce off to London, get off his tits and paint ceilings. Instead, he remained in Lindchester, where he amended his life according to his mentor's word. His online presence is now impeccably professional. After a night of heart-searching, it came to him that there
might
be a helpful distinction to be made between getting picked on for being gay, and getting picked on for being a dickhead. So the following morning, without even being prompted, he sent grovelling emails to the director of music and the canon precentor, in which he lamented his hissy fit, his indiscreet use of social media, and begged to be given another chance. Happily, the director of music and the precentor were inclined to mercy. What role the new tail suit had in this, I cannot say: but it hangs on the back of Freddie's bedroom door like a mentorly presence, where it sternly monitors his every move.

Totty (to whom Freddie's heart is open and from whom no secrets are hid) very much admired the suit. She stood over Freddie (as Miss Blatherwick had done when he was a chorister) till he'd produced a proper handwritten thank you note like a well brought up boy. ‘Yeah, no, he'll go mental, he said I could only thank him once?' Freddie protested in vain. ‘Rubbish! He'll be expecting a thank you note,' said Totty. And Totty was right, for the letter prompted a reply, beautifully handwritten in fountain pen:
You're welcome, sweetheart. A x

OMFG! Freddie had no words to express his feelings on reading this, just a shaken Scrabble bag of letters. Nor can I easily articulate them. I would need to gauge star height and take ocean depth soundings in order to calculate just how much in love poor Freddie now is.

And so he goes out running. The world is fuzzy-edged today; it is all padded and wadded with mists and old man's beard, with thistledown and willowherb seeds. High wisps of mare's tail clouds and vapour trails drift in the blue. Come with me now, and we will fly from Lindchester out along Freddie's long punishing route towards Cardingforth. Look, a golf course down there, pearlized in dew, the greens frosted like sage leaves, like sea glass. Velvety brown fields have a watercolour wash of winter wheat. It rained in the night, and now the roads are blinding. Sheep graze in faded water meadows. How green it all is, the trees still in leaf – in October! Oh, uncanny. Where are the frozen puddles of childhood, the red noses on the way to school? Look at the Linden! It lies a ribbon of mirror as Freddie pounds along the bank.

We climb, then swoop, then climb again – ah, how our DNA knows the art of flying: we come from the birds! – and below we watch Freddie pass under a graffiti-tagged bridge, and then for a straight mile the railway unspools beside the river, sunlight wincing along the tracks as we fly. Pylons play like giants across the landscape, cat's cradle, French skipping. They stride massive, yet invisible to the human eye trained only to be offended by wind turbines. Magpies in pairs swirl between ash trees. Joy, joy! And there's a jay on a fence, dandy flash of chequered turquoise, like underpants glimpsed over waistband.

That is Carding-le-Willow below us now. See the houses backing on to the railway line? Little conservatories and plastic gutters tick softly in the sun's warmth. Brambles tangle up an embankment where old sofas have been toppled over the back fence, out of sight, out of mind.

Freddie runs on. Distant spires rise from clumps of trees, the parishes of rural Lindfordshire, the old prebendal lands, all Gaydens great and small, and the wise and wonderful Itchington Episcopi. Cardingforth is a mile off now, with its Cotman idyll of a humpbacked bridge: the halfway point. Steam ascends to heaven from the cooling towers, so quiet, so benign, so unlike the mushroom clouds that menaced the edges of our childhood.