Murder at the Monastery, page 21
part #3 of A Canon Clement Mystery Series
‘Don’t stand so close, Neil . . .’
‘Sorry,’ said Neil. ‘Where do you want me to be?’
‘Not in my light.’
‘Here OK?’
‘I just need you not to get in the way of what I’m doing.’
‘In art and in life,’ said Neil.
‘What does that mean?’
Neil sang, sotto voce, ‘“Don’t stand so-o close to me . . .”’
‘Neil, I’m trying to concentrate. Just turn the page when I nod.’
Daniel started again and this time, as the lambs were gambolling away, when he nodded Neil leant over and flicked the page at exactly the right moment for a flawless shift. The lambs gambolled without stumbling to a satisfactory end.
‘That’s a very jolly number,’ said Neil. ‘I see what you mean about dancing.’
‘It’s also very difficult. I’m going to make a mistake in the pedal part at the end – only a little one, you won’t notice it – and it’s after the last page turn, so I won’t need you here. I want you to watch the community and tell me what happens.’
Second Vespers for the Feast of St Willibrord, Apostle to Frisia, went without a hitch. Aelred, vested splendidly in his abbatial mitre, was assisted by two novices who held open the two sides of his cope so he could swing the thurible and wreathe the altar in scented smoke during the singing of the Magnificat.
At the end of the service, after the abbot pronounced a blessing, he returned to sit on his stool, his two servers on either side, and Daniel struck up with the organ voluntary. There was a little ripple of approving nods from those in the community who got the reference to St Willibrord in his choice of the fugue, a silent version of the polite laughs from those who get the jokes in Shakespeare. Then, after two faultless page-turns from Neil, he arrived at the last entry of the pedal part, when everything comes together for the big finish. And then in the fourth bar from the end he changed a pedal triplet so it went up a major second, rather than down a major sixth – a change so tiny and inoffensive to the ear no one would notice it.
One person noticed it.
‘Aelred,’ said Neil, ‘looked up just before the end.’
‘Ah,’ said Daniel, ‘I thought so.’
‘But that wasn’t the interesting thing,’ said Neil.
‘What was the interesting thing?’
‘What everyone else was looking at.’
‘Which was?’ Daniel asked.
‘The two lads on either side of Aelred having a spat.’
The lights were on in the courtyard when Audrey appeared from the kitchen entrance. Nathan was waiting dutifully with a tin bath and a hose.
‘Stand down, Nathan. Bernard is bathing the dog.’
‘His lordship? Give a dog a bath?’ He laughed.
‘I know, but that’s what he intends to do.’
‘Jean Shorely more like.’
‘No. Well, she’s to bring him towels and Honoria’s got some baby shampoo, but now he intends to bathe the dog himself in his own bathroom.’
Nathan started to coil the hose, then said, ‘You want to be careful about that, Mrs Clement.’
‘Careful?’
‘It’s like that with dogs. If they don’t get the attention they want from someone, they’ll look for it from someone else.’
‘Cosmo is smothered with attention,’ said Audrey.
‘Often happens with dogs when bitches whelp. It’s all about the mum, see, and the puppies.’
‘But they’ve hardly been out of my sight.’
‘I know, but what about Cosmo? The rector’s not here, the rectory’s out of bounds, he’s in a strange place. And what with you helping out at Miss March’s shop . . .’
‘Consulting, dear, not helping out.’
‘He’s attaching to his lordship. And his lordship may be attaching to him.’
‘Bernard and Cosmo? Like John Noakes and Shep?’ said Audrey.
‘Dogs and humans attach. Always have. It’s in the blood,’ said Nathan.
‘Well, that’s not what I’d planned at all.’
12
After Vespers, Daniel switched off the organ and put away the music in accordance with the meticulous shelving system Aelred had invented when he was the community’s organist. He and Neil then made their way to the hall to await the supper bell. They passed the sacristy, empty by now, save Paulinus and the two novices, now derobed, one in a cassock and a blue scapular, the other in a plain cassock – Brother Placid, he remembered, who had seemed rather abrasive at their session on the New Testament, and Darren the postulant with the sinister semi-shaded glasses.
‘You serve the abbot,’ said Paulinus, ‘not your own liturgical prejudices. And it is the Holy Mass, not a forum for your squabble.’
Brother Placid blinked and said, ‘I must say, Father, that I wouldn’t dream of disrupting the liturgy—’
‘But you did,’ said Darren. ‘You placed the mitre on the abbot’s head for the censing of the altar during the Magnificat. By what authority?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘By what authority? You should know these things!’
‘Don’t speak to me like that,’ said Brother Placid.
‘Don’t mess things up, then,’ Darren shot back. ‘Do your job. It would help if you knew what it was.’
‘Darren, I have been doing this since long before you were born,’ said Placid. ‘Yours is not the only way—’
‘It’s in Fortescue!’
‘Fortescue is not one of the historic formularies of the Church of England.’
‘So just do what you like?’ said Darren. ‘Give him a top hat? A fez?’
‘Do you think Our Lord minds particularly if I get the hat rules wrong?’ said Placid.
‘Yes, I think he does. Why not give your best when you could give your best?’
‘Darren,’ said Father Paulinus, ‘compose yourself.’
‘Father, not only did he mitre the abbot for the censing, which is wrong, he also ignored me when I said so, and at the end for the blessing he put it on the wrong way round.’
‘That was unfortunate,’ said Paulinus.
‘Try exercising oversight of the Church when your lappets are flapping in front of your face,’ said Darren.
The bell for supper went.
‘We will continue this conversation after supper,’ said Paulinus. ‘You will come to my office—’ He saw Daniel and Neil standing in the doorway. ‘That was the supper bell, Father,’ he said.
Daniel nodded and motioned to Neil to follow him down the corridor towards the hall.
‘What was that all about?’ said Neil. ‘Hat wars?’
‘It’s complicated. I’ll tell you later.’
After Miss March shut up the shop for the day, she popped over the road to the post office. She had started taking the Braunstonbury Evening Telegraph. It was a good source of intelligence for business because it alerted her to forthcoming events in the town’s social calendar, for which ladies might be persuaded to buy a new frock.
The Beagle Ball was held on the first Saturday in January at the Assembly Rooms, perhaps the most splendid gathering of the year, and as Christmas approached, with its mood of largesse, she was thinking about what her ladies might like to wear. Everyone under forty wanted to look like Princess Di, who had created a sensation on a trip to New York earlier in the year wearing smart Catherine Walker suits by day and a gorgeous Victor Edelstein white beaded gown with a bolero by night, but Miss March’s ladies were of riper years and no more likely to wear something like that to the Beagle Ball or the Braunstonbury Chamber of Commerce Dinner Dance than a leopard-skin bikini. Jacques Vert, she thought, Windsmoor, were the key to unlocking their purses, and Audrey Clement, who had an almost supernatural feel for these things, agreed in general, but added highly focused specifics. ‘Frank Usher,’ she said, ‘long dress with a bit of Lurex in a geometric style with a three-quarter-length-sleeve jacket. So you can fold it over the arm with the label showing.’
Miss March had also grown to like the personal columns in the Evening Telegraph, especially the rhyming obituaries, which were sometimes surprisingly bold. ‘You thought the driver waved you past,’ went one; ‘you weren’t to know you’d breathed your last.’ It made her laugh all night.
She also liked the paper as a source of intelligence for Braunstonbury’s shadow life, which expressed itself through vandalism and shoplifting, summarised by a reporter at the magistrates’ court. The more nefarious infractions – assaults inflicted, contraband seized, frauds perpetrated – were written up more vividly, under pictures of the sort that appeared in the rogues’ gallery on Crimewatch. These she read with particular interest.
The bell dinged as she pushed the post office door open to find Norah Braines at the counter in conversation with Dot Staveley. As soon as they saw her they were silent.
‘Good evening, Mrs Braines, Mrs Staveley,’ said Miss March.
‘Miss March,’ said Mrs Braines in coldish acknowledgement. ‘The post office is shut so it’s shop only.’
‘Just the paper, please, and a packet of Mintoes, if you have one.’ Dad’s Army was on at eight, her father’s favourite, and she liked to watch the repeats and suck a Mintoe – also one of his favourites – in his memory. She kept an old Mintoes tin in the cupboard, from the Sixties, she thought, 11d. for a quarter-pound, into which she decanted the packet. She found it comforting.
‘You’re making the news today, Miss March,’ said Dot Staveley rather boldly as Mrs Braines handed over the folded copy of the paper.
‘In the paper?’
‘No, dear, parish pump. Personnel change at Elite Fashions, we hear.’
‘You mean that Mrs Dollinger has left my employment?’
‘I do. Anne’s a friend of ours,’ said Dot.
‘I’m sure she is. But I don’t see what business this is of yours, Mrs Staveley, or anyone else?’
‘Only a lot of us spend money in your shop and . . . you know, ill feeling?’
‘The old order changeth, yielding place to the new,’ said Miss March. ‘At Elite Fashions as well as the Communist Bloc. I’m sure you understand.’
‘And we hear there’s already a replacement,’ Dot went on.
‘Mrs Clement has kindly offered to assist me as floor manager.’
‘How clever of you to snap her up. Such a head for business,’ said Dot.
‘And such a sure sense of fashion. So important to have someone who has an instinct for what customers like. Not just now’ – Miss March looked at Dot with an appraising eye – ‘but what they will want to wear when others have blazed a trail.’
Mrs Braines intervened. ‘That’s 67p, Miss March. You know, I could get my lad Christian to deliver your paper, if you prefer?’
‘No, thank you, Mrs Braines, I like to call in. Catch up on the news that isn’t fit to print. Mrs Staveley’ – she nodded at her – ‘my regards to Councillor Staveley.’
The door dinged as she left.
‘You really don’t like her, do you, Dot?’ said Mrs Braines.
‘She was horrible to Anne. Made her cry.’
‘It’s not hard,’ said Norah.
‘I know, but . . . Miss March just seems to think she’s better than the rest of us. Goodbye, Anne; hello, the rector’s mother.’
‘Retail consultant.’
‘I’m free!’ Dot trilled like Mr Humphries in Are You Being Served? ‘And the rector’s mother has always got something up her sleeve. A plan. Some ulterior motive.’
‘Everyone’s got a plan, Dot.’
Supper in the refectory was silent, or rather without conversation, for as in the ancient custom of the Benedictine tradition, one of the monks, appointed as lector for that week, sat at a stool in front of a lectern.
The abbot said a particularly mean grace – ‘Forgive us, Lord, for feasting while others starve’ – and the lector began with a portion from the Rule of our Holy Father Benedict.
‘Chapter twenty-five. “A brother guilty of a serious fault is to be excluded from both the table and the oratory. No other brother should associate or converse with him at all. He will work alone at the tasks assigned to him, living continually in sorrow and penance, pondering that fearful judgement of the Apostle: Such a man is handed over for the destruction of his flesh that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord. Let him take his food alone in an amount and at a time the abbot considers appropriate for him. He should not be blessed by anyone passing by, nor should the food that is given him be blessed.”’
The abbot rapped the table and the monk put away the Rule and produced the book they were reading through for pleasure rather than instruction. They all sat – Neil looked at Daniel and said, ‘Bon appetit’ – and the novices, wearing white scapulars to serve dinner, appeared from the kitchen pushing trolleys from table to table.
The lector announced his text. ‘Imperial Twilight: The Story of Karl and Zita of Hungary by Bertita Harding. Chapter twenty-three: “Farther down the river bronzed colliers plied their oars and turned sullen eyes from the passing enemy craft, while fishermen drew back their nets before the rampant White Ensign of Britain . . .”’
Dinner was not a considerable meal – there was a sort of hash, followed by bread and jam – and no wine was served, as it had been with lunch to mark the feast. Weak beer instead was poured from jugs that smelled faintly of the detergent used in the dishwashers. It was the cellarer’s job to provide for the brethren’s alcoholic needs, which in Daniel’s day, when that duty fell to him, meant going once a week to the cash and carry at Owthorne to stock up on Watney’s Party Seven, Emva Cream sherry and a gin so coarse William Hogarth could have cleaned his brushes in it. It was revealing, however, to know who was drinking what, because individual orders, as well as community orders, were placed with him. What do you buy a monk for Christmas or his birthday? Gin, probably, and because mixers were not a monastery staple, gin and ice was the signature drink, usually sipped after Compline when the house was in Greater Silence and the monks in their quarters. Some, the irredeemably social, failed to uphold that item of the Rule and drank quietly together; others drank alone. Drink, indiscipline, jealousy, sex – worldly vices not left at the gate but admitted to what Aelred once called ‘laboratory conditions’.
Neil, meanwhile, was enduring another of the trials that come with monastic life. He was sitting opposite one of the older monks whose management of the intake of food and drink was so incomplete that half of what was intended for his inside ended up on his outside, on the scapular, which looked like Mount Everest’s death zone.
Dinner was mercifully short, business-like. After the bread and jam had gone silently round, and the monks had offered more to guests with enough of a suggestion of perfunctoriness for them to understand that acceptance was not expected, Aelred rapped the table again.
The lector concluded, marked his place, closed the book and they all stood.
‘We give Thee thanks for all Thy benefits, O Almighty God, who livest and reignest world without end,’ said Aelred.
‘Amen.’
‘May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.’
‘Amen.’
Everyone crossed themselves, except Neil, who wasn’t sure what to do.
They turned to face the abbot, who led out the diners at the top table, followed by the older monks who could walk, and the rest of the community, and then the novices, who assisted the monks who could not walk, including the one who sat opposite Neil. When they helped him up a small cascade from the smorgasbord of his scapular tumbled onto the floor, and words came to Neil’s mind that he had not thought of for years, about being unworthy of the crumbs under the table.
He followed Daniel out into the hall. The abbot was waiting for them. ‘Daniel,’ he said, ‘introduce me to your friend?’
‘Father Aelred, Neil Vanloo. Neil Vanloo, Father Aelred.’
‘I hope dinner was not too much of an ordeal. Father Sylvanus is not always the prettiest of dining companions.’
‘No problem,’ said Neil. ‘Thanks for your hospitality.’
‘You are a parishioner of Daniel’s?’
‘Not exactly. A sheep of his flock,’ said Neil.
‘I see. Would you like to join me for a sherry? It’s marginally less undrinkable than the beer.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Father,’ said Daniel, ‘but we’re seeing Paulinus.’
‘Well then, you must see Paulinus. How long are you with us, Mr Vanloo?’
‘Another couple of days, I think.’
‘Then sherry tomorrow?’
‘Thank you.’
The abbot glided away.
‘Are we seeing Paulinus?’ Neil asked Daniel.
‘I hope so. I didn’t want to get into a conversation with the abbot about why you’re here.’
‘I can understand that.’
‘I don’t think you do,’ said Daniel.
‘You don’t want to discuss our personal stuff in front of a monk?’
‘It’s not that I’m concerned about, it’s him discovering you’re a policeman. Let’s find Paulinus.’
Daniel led Neil along the corridor to the cloister. It was empty, save a couple of monks having cigarettes outside the offices on the east side. In one office, Daniel could see Paulinus at his desk, using a sort of typewriter. That’s not a typewriter, thought Daniel. That’s a Panasonic KX-W900.
Paulinus looked up. He seemed puzzled at first to see Daniel looking in through his window. He got up and opened the glazed door to the cloister. ‘Mr Vanloo? Father?’
‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ said Daniel, ‘but is that a Panasonic KX-W900?’
‘Ah, you are an aficionado? Come in, come in.’
They stood around Paulinus’s desk. ‘I wouldn’t say aficionado, but I’ve read about them. I’ve never actually seen one.’
‘It’s a typewriter,’ said Neil.
‘It is not a typewriter,’ said Paulinus. ‘It is a word processor.’
‘Strictly speaking, it is something between a word processor and a typewriter,’ said Daniel. ‘It does what a typewriter does but with the functions of a word processor. You see, you type, and the text appears on that little screen – you can edit it and even save it to a floppy disk – but then press a button and it prints it like a typewriter. How did you get one?’
