A Little Bit on the Side (25 page)

Their separation, and all that it entailed, had been formalised with a divorce and settlement that had proceeded entirely without acrimony. They had met several times, mainly at Jack’s request, as he was determined to keep any costs to a minimum, viewing the performance and fees of all professional men with the jaundiced eye of one who had to work with them on a day-to-day basis. Twice Roger had been of the party, but it had, nevertheless, all advanced to a conclusion on a very civilised, if not chummy basis.

Jack and Kate, having decided what they thought was an appropriate valuation for the house and land, were told by Parsons the estate agent (once again with his finger on the pulse of the market) to increase the figure by ten percent. He was proved to be right, and they were delighted when they got their asking price. With that divided equally there had indeed been no falling out over the division of the spoils, as poor old George Pennington had put it.

Why Jack always thought of George as ‘poor old’ George he could never quite understand, as he himself was in precisely the same boat. Like being semidetached, it was a tendency that ran in the family perhaps, a failure to recognise in themselves what they saw all too clearly in others, and he’d frequently heard the same sort of thing from his grandmother when he saw her on his visits home, which he had made more frequently now that Kate had left him.

Much preferring his grandmother’s company to that of his parents, especially as she had always regarded the political activity of her family with a faint air of distaste, he had, whenever he went home, always made a point of taking her out to the edge of the heath for a lunch at the Spaniards, where she could satisfy her taste for a good draft guinness, an indulgence not readily available to her at other times

‘I mean it really wouldn’t do for me to be popping into the local by myself would it darling, and your father wouldn’t be seen dead near draught beer. Except for those occasions when he was out on the stump of course, and had to down one or two with potential voters. What was it you used to call them: his cloth cap days? Some of your political sarcasm I suppose. He really was upset though when it all fell through, and I did feel sorry for him.’

‘Did you honestly gran? I thought it saved us all from a slow death by political pontification.’

‘Yes, I can believe you did. And what about Kate, Jack? I was very fond of her. Have you heard anything of her lately, and are you seeing anyone else now in Barlow?’

‘Yes to the first gran. She seems to be well and happy, but I suppose I’d be unlikely to know if it were otherwise. No to the second, but Barlow’s a very comfortable barrel from which to rail at the world.’

The final part of his reply was, however, only a half-truth. He had in fact been ‘seeing someone’, as his gran liked to put it, but at that time found some difficulty in deciding for himself the precise nature of his association with Josie. Was it one with potential for the future, or just another semi-detached affair: even he wasn’t sure.

It was on such home visits that he noticed his grandmother’s habit of referring to any women who might possibly be taken as over seventy and marginally decrepit as ‘poor old dears.’ A strange affectation for a wrinkled and white-haired old lady who admitted to ninety, was almost certainly more, and walked with a stick.

Despite Jack’s undoubted love for his granny, he would have been honest enough to admit that as her favourite he was also mercenary enough to hope for some little acknowledgment in her will when the time came. He knew the bulk of the estate would almost certainly be split between his father and his siblings (seven in all, which even at Hampstead house prices wouldn’t leave much to go round) but he had for many years expressed much admiration for a matching pair of Frank Moss Bennett paintings he’d known and loved since he was a boy. His mother and sister, the only ones in the family to pretend to any understanding of painting, scoffed at his taste. Naive, sentimental stuff they called it, but he’d noticed that taste was slowly changing, the market was strengthening, and he was quite hopeful that there was an unspoken understanding between them which meant that they would in due course come his way.

Jack had, however, delayed any further return to Hampstead for a few months to allow passions to cool a little in the corridors and committee rooms of the Manning tribe. A little earlier in the year a General Election had seen Labour consigned to the political wilderness, and he simply could not summon up the resolution to submit himself to the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth that would await him at home.

His general alienation from the political classes had not been such, however, that he was willing to forgo the pleasures of election night: the half-concealed shock on the faces of the defeated, the ill-concealed smugness of the victors, and the platitudes ponderously trotted out by each when interviewed. Election after election they were the same, and election after election just as meaningless.

Jim and Celia had been his drinking companions through the results of a long election night, when at about three in the morning he had watched, with almost a proprietary interest, as David Butler brought him the results from Ashburton, where Labour came close to losing its deposit, and Vincent Anstruther Crispin Mar-tindale increased the Conservative majority substantially, and assured his electorate that he would serve them diligently and honestly to the best of his ability. A couple of days after the election Jack selected what he thought was an appropriate congratulation card and sent it anonymously to Martindale at the House of Commons. ‘With best wishes for the future,’ he wrote. We once had a common interest in the cruise of L’Esperance.’

The reasons for Jack’s attachment to Barlow were certainly not hard to find as its relative remoteness and insignificance in the world of the twentieth century had enabled it to escape the ravages of post-war redevelopment that had blighted so many market towns in the Home Counties. Certainly there had been changes, but not such as to diminish the seductive charm of its ancient streets and narrow lanes, the sense of former purpose and resolve evoked by the remaining walls and battlements of the castle, its two historic churches, or the discreet aura of gracious, civilized town living that hung about the grand houses of Priory Hill.

Compared with other more ancient settlements in the county the history of the town began comparatively recently, in that there was apparently no evidence for anything further back than its foundation by the Normans in the late eleventh century. There had been a flutter of excitement among local historians when a few Roman tiles and bricks were identified in the walls of St Botolph’s, but renewed efforts to carry things back a little further led nowhere.

In the immediate post-conquest years life in the Marches went a fair way towards satisfying all of the Hobbesian criteria in being nasty, brutish and short, and not even the castle could withstand the Welsh when they besieged and burnt it in 1191, leaving it and most of the town around it in ruins. But before the end of the century what was left of town and castle, together with much of the surrounding area, passed to Edmund Fitz-Alan, Earl of Arundel under whose directions both castle and town walls were re-built and massively reinforced. The Welsh, looking for easier pickings than Barlow now had to offer, turned their attention to the richer valleys to the south, and at that point Barlow castle and town effectively passed out of history.

A window of medieval glass fragments in St Botolph’s was said to support the local legend that in 1403 Henry IV, weary and oppressed by the heat of July, had stopped at the priory for rest and refreshment on his way south from the battle of Shrewsbury. But that was as close as battles got to Barlow, and the ensuing Wars of the Roses passed it by, leaving the burghers of Barlow free to develop, expand and enrich themselves from the profits of its market for which the town had received a charter from King Edward I in 1301, and from the wool trade, which reached its height in the late middle ages. Just about the time, as Jack invariably added when he told the tale to visiting friends, that money-grubbing Harri Tudur (he of the bastard line) usurped the throne at Bosworth.

From the prospering citizens of the town, quite as concerned then for the future of their souls as for the weight of their purses, money flowed not only to the church, but also to the priory outside the town. This institution, however, a holy and dedicated body of thirty -five monks and fifty lay brothers at its peak in the mid-thirteenth century, had been so reduced in size by the passing years and the depredations of the Black Death that by Tudor times it amounted to no more than fifteen monks and even fewer lay brothers.

And hand in hand with that decline in numbers had come a gradual but accelerating departure from the piety and sobriety that marked the intentions of its founders, into a concupiscent life of ‘such carnal and abominable abuses and manifest sin that it was an abomination.’ Such had been the enormity of Barlow’s clerical scandal that it had been whispered down the centuries, until finally full details were unearthed in the 1930s by a diligent researcher from the Barlow History Group who published his findings in the group’s local journal. There they had languished until in 1969 a parish councillor, browsing through the journal to while away the tedium of a council meeting, stumbled upon them, and immediately recognised the tourist value of such titillating gossip.

‘Carry on up the Priory’ proclaimed one local rag, while its competitor’s headline was ‘Barlow Scandals of 1493.’ Both also printed an abbreviated and journalistically enhanced version of the researcher’s findings. The headlines of the two nationals that picked up the story were less inhibited. ‘Priapic Prior in Passion Parlour’ screamed one. ‘Monks in C15 Sex Romp’ was the choice in the other, with a reference to its page three, where the story was more fully and vividly reported, together with the in-house cartoonist’s vision of the affair. Copies of these (the local, more restrained versions) plus a full report in the researcher’s original words were in due course hung in both churches. The little local museum and most of the pubs in the town chose to display both local and national versions in anticipation of the interest likely to be shown by visitors to the town.

The evidence for this fragmentary look behind the arras in a medieval priory was to be found in the ‘Comperta’ or ‘Things Discovered’ as a result of the ecclesiastical visitation made by Bishop Robert of Hereford into the reported abuses at the Priory below Barlow. The Comperta, as reported in the two papers, was as follows:

It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the obscure and ambivalent nature of the Bishop’s final judgment that occasioned more debate and comment in the visitors’ books than any of the more salacious aspects of the affair.

Little more than forty years later, with the priory reduced to nine monks, there was little obscure or ambivalent about the judgment of Henry VIII’s commissioners, Dr Layton and John ap Rice when they came calling. Whatever the truth of the matter, the old charges were resurrected by those in the town ill-disposed towards the priory. The commissioners found the monks to be ‘filthy dreamers, who defiled the flesh, despised ecclesiastical dominion, and spake evil of dignities in the very spirit of the evil one.’

The muniments, plate, jewellery, vestments and other goods and property of the house were seized. The lead was stripped from the roof and melted into profits on fires made from the timber of the stalls, screen-work and fabric, and the estates were sold into the hands of Henry’s supporters. In brief anything that could be rendered into cash was. The monks were probably relieved to escape with their lives and what they had on their backs. Only Rupert Coventry the prior, on being turned out of what had been his home for almost sixty years, was granted the generous sum of Six Pounds Eight Shilling and Fourpence per annum ‘because he is sick and decrepid.’

With the departure of the monks and the commissioners, the good citizens of the town moved in to mine the structure and finish the job, so that throughout the town many a fine piece of priory stonework or tracery could still be found in its walls, houses and gardens. And with that and the assistance of natural forces over the centuries the bare, ruined choirs declined gracefully into the mossy, ivy-covered, romantic haunts that attracted artists and poets in the nineteenth century and the casual tourists of the twentieth: in noticeably increased numbers following the ‘Sex Romp’ publicity.

But it wasn’t just visitors, salacious or earnest, that were increasingly showing an interest in the unassuming delights of the town in which Jack found so much to please him. Others were coming with more serious intent.