Murder at the Monastery, page 6
part #3 of A Canon Clement Mystery Series
‘That’s what I was thinking. But there is something. Last night Neil told him about him and me.’
‘Why? Where?’
‘After the Evensong in memoriam thing. Neil said he needed a word in private – isn’t it awful when someone says that? – so they went to the rectory, all wreathed in soot and water damage, and he . . . confessed.’
‘I suppose Daniel already knew. Mystically.’
‘No, Neil said he had no idea. Actually he was flabbergasted. So he told him all about it, how we got together, the assignations, declared his undying love for me and all that. And Daniel was so affected he embraced him. A hug! From Daniel! Gave him his blessing, literally. And Neil came running home like a little boy who’d just seen Father Christmas.’
Alex took a cigarette from the pack on his bedside table. ‘Thought so.’
‘Thought so what?’
‘Come on, Hon.’
‘Now you’re being mystical.’
5
Daniel had a vague unfocused fear that one day he would go back to Ravenspurn and discover that its attraction had gone, like a magnet that had lost its powers. It had never happened; even when he felt most distant from the cloister, he only had to smell boiled celery, carbolic, the unlaundered smorgasbord of an old monk’s scapular, to fall back into its routine. It was more a regime than a routine, he thought, a rule of prayer and work and leisure and sleep, timetabled by the horarium and mapped by the boundary wall, the cloister, the church, the Calvary, the vegetable garden. The constraints gave a paradoxical liberty, freedom from the necessities of earning a living, providing for a family, going to the golf club – stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.
There were those at Ravenspurn who already knew about the deprivation of liberty. They came and went, appearing in the refectory, or working in the fields and gardens and workshops, people who did not come to church and had no obvious connection to its life. They were former prisoners, disowned by their past, with nowhere to go on release. Once a guest on retreat had recognised a temporary resident, a man who had committed a notorious crime, and whose release had been luridly reported by a newspaper. The two were put on garden duty together, but the guest had refused to work alongside him and went to see the then abbot. He complained that he did not want to ‘live and sleep and pray next to someone evil’, to which the abbot replied that neither did the other man so they might as well get used to it. ‘Sinners all, sinners all,’ said Father Aelred in the sing-song way that meant there was no more to be said.
Daniel was in the crypt chapel, beneath the church, where he sought to follow Our Lord’s injunction to find an inner room and pray there.
He had spent all his years of ministry soliciting invitations into other people’s inner rooms, to see what troubled them, what strengthened them, but mostly what they were most anxious to keep behind a locked door. You get a knack for this, and Daniel had acquired a reputation as a confessor with an almost supernatural ability to see into the contents of a troubled soul. In reality, it was simpler than that. People tend to mess up their lives in the same ways – sex, money, violence, addiction – and the effects create patterns of behaviour, which become recognisable. Occasionally a visitor sitting on the Sofa of Tears in his study revealed something unpredictable. Sometimes he would pretend to tidy things up at the back of the church to be near to the person who sat alone there for too long, and a surprise would come from them.
Physician, heal thyself. So much easier to open the door to another’s inner room than to open your own. He sometimes thought confessors became confessors to silence the knocking and rustling from their own inner rooms. Our determination not to hear may for a while keep them where we want them, but most people sooner or later surrender and open the door. What do we find?
We fear we will discover a horror, like the Monster of Glamis, a terrible creature we lock away in a secret chamber, but keep alive because we think we have to. There was a story that a new Lady of Glamis heard about the legend of a monstrous figure confined somewhere in the castle – the true heir it was said – but no matter how thoroughly she looked she could never find the hidden room. So when her husband was away she got the servants to draw all the curtains in every room. Then she got on her horse and rode round the castle. One window was uncurtained. She never found the room it belonged to.
Daniel liked this story. The uncurtained window was a nice illustration of how a disrupted external pattern can reveal a hidden inner truth – when people were not telling him what they needed to tell him the eyes usually betrayed what the tongue did not. But what he liked most about it was what the story did not tell.
In the legend the room was undiscovered, the monster undisturbed. In his ministry people sometimes did find the room and open the door, and what they found was not a monster but themselves.
Daniel had opened the door of his inner room and found on the other side his own self looking back at him, in itself enough to wrench the heart, but what caused him to lose his composure was what he was wearing – not the sober vestments of a cleric, but the motley of a clown.
Ridiculous.
He let out a breath that was almost a sob.
‘Are you all right?’
Daniel pretended to cough. He turned and saw a man standing behind him. It was the man with the white hair and beard from the stand-off at Matins. He was dressed in the sort of clothes worn by people who have no idea about clothes – or who have not had to think about what they wear for so long that they wear anything.
‘I didn’t want to disturb you, but . . .’
‘I’m fine, thank you,’ Daniel said, ‘just a bit . . . verklempt.’
‘The charism of tears. One of the rarest of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.’
‘Not that, no. Not one of my gifts at all.’
‘My name’s Colin.’
‘Daniel.’
‘We got off on the wrong foot this morning. May I?’ Colin sat down before Daniel could reply. ‘The Bishop of Durham has the charism of tears. He cries when he preaches. Have you ever seen it? It’s rather affecting.’
‘No. In fact, I find it unnerving.’
‘Not one for the gifts of the Spirit?’ Colin enquired.
‘Not the showier ones, no.’
‘Oh, yes, the showier ones. That’s part of it, I think. Margery Kempe – you know who I mean?’
‘Yes,’ said Daniel with a note of impatience.
‘She cried buckets,’ said Colin, not noticing, ‘but tears were a sort of mark of authenticity; they gave her authority. If you were a fourteenth-century woman in Norfolk, no one really took any notice of you. Not an issue for the Bishop of Durham, of course.’
‘Perhaps. I’m not so sure now. About people noticing the Bishop of Durham . . .’
‘They said it was his doubts about the Resurrection that caused the lightning to strike York Minster . . .’
‘Well, yes, the sillier kinds of newspaper would notice that,’ said Daniel.
Colin seemed quite rehearsed on this subject. ‘All the same, I thought it extraordinary that one of the most senior bishops of the Church should describe the Resurrection as a “conjuring trick with bones”.’
‘He didn’t say that,’ Daniel interjected. ‘He said exactly the opposite, that the Resurrection was not a conjuring trick with bones. And he wasn’t then the bishop.’
‘All the same, all the same . . .’ muttered Colin.
Daniel decided to change the subject. ‘Are you interested in Margery Kempe?’
‘Not especially. She crops up.’
‘In what?’
‘My research.’
Colin the scholar, Colin the long-stay guest with the inexhaustible curiosity. He looked, Daniel thought, like Bernard’s antisocial cat Jove with his fur up in a hostile frizz.
‘You’re an academic?’ Daniel asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Church history?’
‘Systematics,’ Colin said.
‘Oh, at King’s?’
Colin smiled. ‘I’m an independent academic. Published, I might add. My field is the relationship between spiritual authority and political authority.’
‘An enormous topic.’
‘Yes, but a fascinating one. I’ve been working on Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii. Are you aware of her?’
‘Barely,’ said Daniel, aware that he was about to learn more.
‘Brought up by Presbyterian missionaries – rather a mix, actually. After she lost her kingdom in 1893, she became Church of England, or the Hawaiian version of it. Some say she later became a Mormon. Have you noticed how often deposed monarchs become terribly religious?’
Daniel thought about it for a moment. ‘Yes, I have. Lose a kingdom in this world, set your sights on the kingdom of the next?’
‘Yes. It’s why the pope granted himself infallibility, I think. Because he lost the Papal States and had to make up for it somehow.’
‘That’s a rather colourful way of putting it.’
Colin took that as a compliment and gave a little nod. ‘And your field?’
‘I don’t really have one,’ said Daniel. ‘It was New Testament, but I’m a parish priest now.’
‘Actually, I knew that. New Testament textual criticism. You’re giving a talk to the novitiate this afternoon. It sounds fascinating.’
‘I find it fascinating.’
‘I wonder if I might come?’ Colin asked.
‘I’m sure that would be fine. Perhaps ask the novice master, Father Paulinus?’
‘I notice you wear the novice’s habit, Father.’
‘I was a novice here, years ago,’ Daniel explained.
‘So what brings you back?’
‘Oh, you know, a twitch upon the thread.’
‘Isn’t that from Father Brown?’ Colin asked.
‘It is.’
‘My favourite priest-detective. Obvious, when you think about it.’
‘What is?’ Daniel asked.
‘A priest as a sleuth. It comes with the job, don’t you think?’
‘So they say.’
‘Well, you would know, Father,’ Colin went on. ‘I mean, you get everywhere. You see the best of people and the worst of people. You constantly have to work out why things happen. Or don’t happen. Everyone confesses things. But perhaps that is only in the Roman Catholic priesthood?’
‘Not that different, at least in the senses you just listed.’
‘But you, I think, do not have the same relationship to people – with marriage, children, vicarage life. The Roman discipline removes all those distractions. You are alone in the world. And that perhaps sharpens your focus, or I imagine it . . . are you all right?’
The gift of tears.
‘So sweet of you,’ said Audrey, her words rather lost to the yapping of Hilda, the mewling of the puppies and the hissing of Jove, who had retreated to a higher shelf in Bernard’s bookcase.
She and Mrs Shorely were standing in the doorway to the study. Mrs Shorely was holding the whelping box, now puppy nursery, in which the three were squirming while in transit. Hilda, anxious, was circling the study, a security sweep, Cosmo behind her.
‘I’m not fucking Crufts,’ Bernard muttered.
‘So sweet, only I simply have to get to the post office and Honoria’s gone out and Mrs Shorely has to do the bedrooms. I shall be no time at all!’
‘What am I supposed to do with the fucking cat?’
‘Keep it well away, if I were you. Nature red in tooth and claw!’
Audrey gave a little wave and as she went to leave Jove shot past her, a streak of white, as Mrs Shorely closed the door on Cosmo’s sudden barrage of yapping. ‘The old Adam,’ she thought, but had no time to worry about the eternal enmity of dogs and cats, for she had to get to the post office to be absolutely sure to catch the next post. She was not sure how it worked with the collection and delivery of post at the big house, and she did not particularly want Mrs Shorely to see on the hall table the address on the front of the envelope – The Abbey of Sts Philip and James, Ravenspurn, Yorkshire.
‘There goes your mama . . .’ said Alex, looking out of the window at Audrey’s briskly walking figure passing through the park gates and into Main Street.
‘Which way?’ said Theo, checking his boxers from reflex lest more of him was on show than he could bear to countenance if his mother were to suddenly appear.
‘Post office, I think,’ said Alex. ‘She’s holding a letter. I hope she’s not still offering clairvoyancy by correspondence.’
‘That’s too good, isn’t it?’ said Honoria. ‘But I don’t understand why she thought it a good idea.’
‘Money,’ said Theo, once he’d ascertained all was safely gathered in. ‘Or lack of it. They’re very hard up.’
‘Are they?’ said Alex, sounding surprised.
‘Yes. I know it’s a struggle for you to understand, Alex, but most people don’t have inherited wealth to spend and estates to replenish it.’
‘I so adore it when you go all lefty. And in your Communards pants. I just thought . . . wasn’t your father a manufacturer of some sort?’
‘Shoes. Boots and shoes. Family firm. Went up the swanny. Nothing left now. Mum has a small pension and Daniel gets a pittance for a stipend.’
‘I thought our parsons lived rather well.’
‘In the old days. When there was such a thing as a good living. Not now. They all get paid the same and it’s barely enough to run a lawnmower, let alone a Queen Anne rectory.’
‘But what an irony,’ said Honoria, ‘that while no one comes to church and the parson starves, Audrey should be raking it in providing supernatural services through the post.’
‘Not any more. I think there was rather a showdown,’ said Theo.
‘With who?’ Honoria asked.
‘Daniel. Mum said she’d never seen him so angry.’
‘Daniel angry? I can’t imagine what that looks like.’
‘It’s not exactly volcanic, but you can tell because he blinks.’
Nathan said, ‘So that’s why he’s gone.’
Theo looked surprised. ‘Oh . . . yes, I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe.’
‘A fall-out with Audrey?’ said Honoria, mugging a sceptical look.
‘What else could it be?’
Daniel normally found that prayer came to him quite naturally. As a parish priest he had managed to preserve enough of the monastic discipline he had acquired at Ravenspurn to feel he only had to turn on a tap and it would flow. Occasionally the flow was unsteady, the tap reluctant to budge, or giving forth a dribble rather than a spurt, but it had always produced something.
Now there was nothing. He had dutifully sung the psalms and canticles at Matins, he had knelt in silence and alone in front of the sacrament, he had repeated and repeated the Jesus Prayer, he had slowed his breathing, he had made intercession for those people he was obliged to pray for, but there was nothing. It was not even the right kind of nothing, the nothing that answers a dishonest prayer. His prayer was heartfelt, heartbroken, and he wanted more than anything the strange returns that surprised and challenged him. Nothing. It was as if he were deaf, mute, sightless.
After half an hour of this he decided to go into town to seek its distractions. He went to his room in the guest house and changed out of his cassock. He paused for a moment, then decided not to put on a dog collar but a normal shirt, because he did not want to stand out, he did not want to represent anything. He remembered how differently he had felt when he was first ordained and would wear his dog collar to put the bins out, so excited to be seen in this new role. What he could not see now was what others saw plainly: that he was no less clerical in mufti, for he had become so habituated to the role that he would still look like a vicar if he put on a tutu and a sporran.
Ravenspurn itself spread along the valley south of the monastery, a little town that could never really grow much, for it was hemmed in by moors and the river and the railway and the canal. It had crept a little over the lower slopes, a few streets of Victorian terraces when the wool mills arrived, a ribbon of council houses beyond them when the Second World War receded, but it had hardly changed at all, he thought, from when he had first seen it twenty-five years ago.
At the bottom of the hill the town began, tentatively at first, with the garage – more a sort of shanty than the neon-bright ensemble that sat on the outskirts of Braunstonbury. Its little fleet of second-hand Escorts and Granadas looked unfashionably boxy even to Daniel, who normally would not be able to tell a Datsun Cherry from a Hispano-Suiza. There was a bus stop, an Indian restaurant – that was new – and then a little parade of hairdresser’s, off-licence, post office and a shop that seemed to be selling window frames. ‘DOUBLE GLAZING’ shrieked the sign on the van parked outside – a home improvement his mother secretly longed for as they shivered in the draughty rectory, but he did not mind a draught to preserve the elegance of its windows, even if they were rotting, and his mother would sooner sit naked than admit that it would take more than an extra jumper to check the creeping cold.
The Co-op had upgraded itself to a ‘superstore’, which promised, Daniel thought, temptations beyond the expectations of its thrifty clientele. The architecture was peculiar, like a warehouse pretending to be a Tudor market square, and he went in past corralled shopping trolleys that looked like they were tethered to each other with reins. Inside there were exotics – yoghurt, courgettes, orange juice – alongside potatoes and mince and marrowfat peas; so much choice he felt for a moment like one of the Romanian monks seeing the menu at a Golden Egg for the first time. Against his better nature, which was trying to enforce the disciplines of retreat, he bought The Times and took it to the café he used to visit when he was a novice on his day off, the Kozy Korner.
He loved it then because it was a reminder of the world outside the monastery, where people who were not obliged to tune their lives to abbey bells went for a mug of tea and two slices and talked about Don Revie rather than Polycarp of Smyrna. It wasn’t busy, but he found a little table at the back, left his paper there and went to order a tea.
