Facing the Tank (5 page)

Mr Gavin Tree, socialist thinker, author of
More by Less
and Bishop of the diocese of Barrowcester, let himself into the Cathedral through a small door in the south transept soon after six-thirty on Monday morning. He was not officiating this morning so wore a plain suit over his purple shirt front but even had he been, his principles would have forced him to leave his mitre, crook and title at home. Even now that the full flush of spring was here, the floors of the building exuded ancient chill. Mr Tree had taken the popular, but inadmissible, precaution of sneaking on a pair of pyjama bottoms beneath his trousers. He walked slowly, hands in the pockets of his anorak, towards the Patron’s chapel where the morning’s ceremony was to take place. He had come an hour early; he needed to think.

He did not come here often unless forced to by an official invitation from the Dean. The chapel at the Bishop’s Palace was more intimate. Being only eighteenth century it posed less of a threat. There had been revolutions in the eighteenth century. Unlike the Cathedral, the Bishop’s private chapel didn’t keep interrupting with boasts of how long it had stood there. Usually, when a crisis struck, Gavin would slip quietly in there for a while. The Classical lines were unadorned; there were no memorials and no flowers.

The Bishop had nothing against flowers in a garden, but he had always thought it tyrannical to make a practice of cutting them. What appalled him in Barrowcester was their inextricable association with the diocesan women. Here, where every venerable tomb, every altar and, outside the coffer-draining annual fortnight when the heating
had
to be turned on, every dustbin-shaped Victorian radiator was garnished with the blooms in season, he could feel them watching him.

‘I may be tucked up in bed,’ whispered Miss McCreery’s narcissi, ‘but I’m here in spirit.’

‘Never fear,’ sighed an alarming spray of things with salmon-pink tongues a little further on, ‘Mrs Delaney-Siedentrop is here.’

There had been flowers everywhere when disaster had struck on Saturday. He had been here (officially invited) to confirm the latest batch of boys and girls from the town’s grammar school and high school. He had sat on his lesser, portable throne (the lurid gargantua full of lights being mercifully stuck in an impractical corner of the quire) and a nave-long column of boys and girls had come to kneel in pairs before him. Their uniforms were picturesque affairs in pea green and sky blue. Mrs Delaney-Siedentrop, in her role as Captain of the flower arrangers, had achieved the coup of using only those blooms that would match the uniforms. It was a pretty sight. (The Captain being there in person there had been no need for her flowers to keep an eye on the Bishop.)

Each child held before them a card with their Christian name printed so that as they knelt in pairs Gavin could lay his hands on their well-brushed heads and announce,

‘I confirm thee …’ glance at the card and continue, ‘Jemima in the knowledge and love et cetera.’ All went well until he was dealing with the fifteenth pair when suddenly his words seemed so much gibberish to him. It was all he could do to keep them coming out in the right order. He took a mouthful of cool water from the glass held by a server at his elbow and continued. His panic abated, the words fell back into place, the recital of unfair Christian names continued, but the business had lost all importance.

Gavin had suffered attacks of doubt before and gladly so; they were part of a healthy spiritual life. With the death of questioning came too much certainty and an excess of certainty was a moral blindfold. This was different. It seemed less an attack than an unexpected retreat. Meandering through his incantations, patting youthful scalps, he felt the last collapse of mystery and was left, Father Christmas in an overcrowded Norman grotto.

He had always been a man of iron principle. He had threatened to resign his Oxford fellowship when he took exception to his warden’s support of a certain African charity. During his recent post at York he had sprung into limelight for criticizing the government both from the pulpit and from a small piece in
The Guardian
. It was chiefly because of the latter that he was so keenly watched over by the more powerful diocesan matrons. By the time he was laying hands on the last pair of heads and preparing to rise and bless the newly confirmed, his mind was made up to flex his principle anew.

After a hymn to relax everyone and a jolly bit of Gibbons from the choir to put them in the mood for an anodyne chat about growing up, he scaled the pulpit. He had prepared a sermon about duty, an uncomfortable topic at the best of times. He condensed this into a brief introductory paragraph then set aside his notes and improvised for the first time in his professional life. The peroration to which he treated an increasingly attentive audience was on doubt. In an unprecedented display of iron principle he went so far as to
share
his doubts with those he was appointed to lead. He cast aspersions on the Virgin Birth; less on whether or not it had happened than on whether this question were remotely important in a world of unemployment, famine, incurable plagues and impending war. There were surprised faces certainly but no one walked out since Barrowcester had long prided itself on its aggressive stance towards the Beast of Rome. What did cause a flurry of walk-outs, including a whole clutch from the Sisters of Bethesda and a shepherded crocodile from Saint Cecilia’s High, was his merciless swipe at the angelic host. The cosy cult of these peripheral characters, he declared, as typified by the tasteless Christmas card motifs that even made their way into television commercials as Yuletide market aids, represented a sickness in our spiritual standards and a wilful cold-shouldering of less palatable, more urgent truths. Those who were not already wriggling in their seats did so like singed maggots when he went on to remind them that Barrowcester had the least unemployment, lowest crime rate, fewest council flats and tiniest immigrant population of any English city.

As he warmed to his theme, doubt gave place to rage at the serried ranks of Christian Barrowers before him, at their unthinking coupling of Bible study with share application, of paying for farmyard holidays for inner-city children and taking themselves off to converted farmhouses in Tuscany. He raged and they listened.

One of the golden rules of preaching was that one typed the sermon out in advance, partly to give one’s ideas shape and to balance their expression but principally to prevent one’s getting carried away. In the cold light of the following dawn, indeed in the cold light in the eyes of his fellow clergy as he stepped from the pulpit, Gavin could see that he had been carried far far away. A kind of madness had come over him more suited, some would say, to newer religions than Barrowcester’s. He refrained from foaming at the mouth, which was perhaps a blessing, but he did see a vision.

As he wound up his attack, he saw a small, furred creature staring up at him from behind one of Mrs Delaney-Siedentrop’s grosser arrangements. So absorbed was he in its wild yet child-like frame, so startled at the speed with which it darted from sight with a flash of red hair, that he regained his full concentration only in time to hear himself declaim, in a most unepiscopal tone, something about the softness of a cherubic bum. Having had what sounded so very like the last word, he threw out a deeply felt blessing with an extra line in it to show them who was still a step ahead, then retreated to his painfully visible throne for the final hymn.

There had still been a cheery queue at the west door waiting to shake his hand after the service, but certain key faces had been missing and he had walked home with a heavy heart. The next day, predictably perhaps given the number of quondam shorthand typists that had been present, he was quoted word perfect in
The Sunday Times. The Times
carried a similarly scandalized piece on Monday as did
The Daily Mail. The Guardian
put the same quotations to opposite ends. Rather than write the replies and explanations demanded by each paper, he had agreed to air his views on a television debate later in the week.

Gavin took a short cut across the quire to the Patron’s chapel. Saint Boniface of Barrow (pron.
Brew
) was reputedly a Viking who, while leading a raid on the original Saxon abbey of
Barro
, on the hill where Barrowcester now stood, had been enveloped in a dazzling light. From the middle of said light he launched, on divine prompting say some, not surprisingly say others, into the Lord’s Prayer. This rousing combination of fireworks and linguistic virtuosity (for notwithstanding the date he had, of course, prayed in English) converted his hordes to Christianity on the spot. When the light dissolved, their leader had lost his sight. Legend further had it that he became Abbot. Depending on how far the pillaging had gone before the intervention of the light, he would either have done this straight away or nearer his well-behaved dotage, when he died a saintly death amid angelic clamour having swallowed a quantity of water when rescuing a child from the Bross. Under the Normans the abbey had become a moderately fine cathedral and under their descendants Barrowcester had grown into a sizeable market town and thence to a city, gaining the curious pronunciation of its name along the way. In the late 1960s an unpleasant French historian had been allowed the freedom of the Cathedral’s superb library for an entire summer, only to emerge declaring that the ‘cester’ bit was the result of a typographical error in the early seventeenth century. He left in a hurry and was not greatly missed. Tradition also had it that the original Viking settlement was responsible for a smattering of curious local surnames and for a local Scandinavian colouring known as ‘Barrowcester blond’.

No one was certain when he had been canonized, but the reformed Viking butcher had been the city’s patron since at least the eleventh century, for the rood screen and the tympanum bore carvings of his good deeds. He was traditionally portayed as a giant of a man with a ball of fire in one hand. An illumination in a fifteenth-century chronicle of Barrowcester embellished the image with an equally fiery shock of blond hair. His final resting place was a stark box of rough-hewn local stone in one of the few sections of the Saxon abbey untouched by the Normans. Whatever their master builder’s plans, it was plain that his workmen had a profound reverence for the tomb’s totemic force.

Boniface had worked no miracles since his death apart from an incident in 1908 when a small boy fell into a city cesspit and was saved from an unsavoury death by a pair of hands that hoisted him back to safety. Said boy swore they were the hands of a blond giant and went on to become Dean. Medallions of the saint had since become popular around the necks of local potholers and sanitation engineers.

Like several of England’s greater churches, the Cathedral was built on unstable ground; a massy challenge in faith to Nature. Barrowcester’s hill was riddled with caves, streams and uncharted passages that tended to make their presence known in a dramatic fashion. A cottage would move a foot in the night, a herbaceous border would fold in on itself. Occasionally whole houses had collapsed. An attempt in the late nineteenth century to drive a railway through the hillside had ended in tragedy with many workers buried alive and several children maimed by a briefly liquefied school. Seismologists had produced what they swore were accurate maps of the hill’s interior. These were enough to put any fool off digging a mine but, as far as householders, Dean or Chapter were concerned, had arrived a little late in the day. Severe accidents were rare enough to be outweighed by the attractions of the place, but close enough in public memory for Barrowers to see themselves as invested with a certain brave, frontier spirit.

Nine centuries on, alas, Nature had begun to tamper where Normandy had held off and the Saxon section was at risk. The first warning came as long ago as 1908 when a new altar was installed in the Patron’s chapel and the floor was found to be so out of true that a portion of the new stone had slid forward and smashed against Saint Boniface’s tomb. With the more recent appearance of alarming cracks in the outside wall of the chapel and the tumbling, during eight o’clock Communion, of the Patron’s crucifix and one of the larger flower arrangements on his tomb, it was decided to declare an emergency and launch an appeal. An expatriate Californian billionaire kindly put up two thirds of the money needed, without even coming to see the damage, and so forced Mrs Delaney-Siedentrop to soften, if not exactly to recant her views on his people.

Work was to begin today, supervised by the family of masons who had arrived from Glasgow between the wars and since secured a monopoly on all work at the Cathedral and Tatham’s. Although only the retired patriarch retained his Glaswegian accent, his several sons were still known as ‘the Scottish Masons’ and it was cause for pride if one could ever secure their time to labour on anything so mundane as a house. Before they could move in, the Patron had to be shifted. A charming service of apology and explanation had been concocted by the Dean and this morning, with the aid of a winch and the attendance of such local archaeologists, well-wishers and press as could not be put off by an ungodly hour, the tomb was to be opened. The sainted contents were eventually to be removed to a cavity before the high altar. The cavity in question was actually something to do with a redundant heating system but, by the tender attentions of the Scottish Masons, had been transformed into a clean and passable tomb. Because the sight of such important bones being slid on to an unpoetic plastic sheet might upset the congregation, no more than the sarcophagus lid was to be moved during the little service. The rest would happen once the crowds had departed and once the area was afforded the discretion of a curtain and no-entry sign.