A Death in the Parish, page 21
At that moment Bernard, who could bear it no longer, rose and said, ‘Thank you, Mrs Porteous, and now the rector will finish with a prayer.’
Daniel, for the second time that day, positioned himself near the exit to catch people as they left. Bernard already had, taking Hugh and Michelle with him, and Daniel knew he would have to call at Champton House later with a dole of harvest balm rather than bread. Michelle seemed to have made an excellent first impression, not flinching at the well-intentioned but clumsy welcome of those whom she would one day live among, and if there were any questions on their part that she would not be able to fulfil the role of chatelaine of Champton, in the judgement of the village she could not have seemed more poised and more gracious.
He went to thank the ladies in the kitchen, did the compulsory stint helping to wash up, WI pinny over his cassock, and then made his way to the gatehouse along the brook and through the main gates. A thread of wood smoke rose from the chimney and two pairs of boots had been left in front of the woodpile neatly stacked at the door.
Daniel knocked. Nothing happened. He knocked again. Again, nothing, so he did what he would not normally do and let himself in. He nearly tripped in the corridor that led to the drawing room, which made enough noise to alert anyone there of his presence.
Alex and Nathan were lying on the sofa, Nathan with his head against Alex’s chest, their legs resting on the ottoman. Nathan got up in a hurry and blushed.
‘Don’t you knock?’ asked Alex.
‘I did.’
‘And when there’s no answer you take that as a “come in”?’
‘I would not normally, Alex, but I need to talk to you. Both.’
‘Rector,’ said Nathan, ‘I was going to come to see you …’
‘I know, Nathan, and you’re not in trouble, but there is something you need to know.’
Nathan sat down again. Alex did not even stir but indicated the armchair as an invitation to Daniel to sit too.
‘Thank you. Nathan, we know it was you who called in the discovery of the body.’
Nathan made to answer, but Alex held up a hand.
‘Who is “we”? And how do you know?’
‘The police.’
‘You mean Neil?’
‘Neil is the police.’
‘I know, but he is becoming rather a feature in our quaint little world. Hard to tell whether he is off duty or on sometimes,’ said Alex in a knowing tone.
‘Which is why I am here rather than the police. And we know—’
‘We … Are you turning into Father Brown?’
‘We know because the 999 call was recorded and it is your voice, Nathan, unmistakably.’
‘So I am in trouble.’
‘No, you’re not in trouble, and you did the right thing, but you will need to answer some questions.’
Daniel knew that any encounter with the police was to be avoided, because for Nathan and his grandfather there was always the option of flight into the network of gypsy families that they came from. That had happened last year after his relationship with Alex was discovered. Daniel had always known he would be back, or he had when he realised their liaison was not a taboo knee trembler behind the woodshed, but a true love affair. He also knew that Alex would not thank him for driving Nathan away. ‘No one is interested in what happened last year, Nathan. We just need to know about what happened to Joshua Biddle. You would only need to talk to DS Vanloo …’
‘And then what?’ said Alex. ‘How can you promise us that it won’t go further? It’s a murder inquiry and we know better than most how that works.’
‘Because the inquiry is focused on how Josh died, not on Nathan or Edgy and the past. And it is better that we manage it ourselves rather than set the machinery of the criminal justice system in motion.’
Alex thought about it. ‘OK. What happens next?’
‘Nathan, why don’t you call round at the rectory after Evensong? Say seven? I’ll arrange for Neil to meet us there.’
Alex saw Daniel to the door. ‘Did you know?’
‘I suspected.’
‘Why?’
‘Two places laid for a dinner for one? And the logs. Only Nathan stacked them that way.’
‘Very Father Brown.’
‘And, if I may say so, love sometimes conquers fear. It is one of the few things that can.’
‘Love?’ Bernard almost snarled. ‘Love? It’s not fucking Romeo and fucking Juliet.’
They were in his study, the loveliest room in Champton House, where Bernard liked to retreat when he felt the world was against him. Daniel had let himself in and found him there, sitting in his armchair by the fire, which Mrs Shorely had lit. On his lap sat Jove, carpeting his tweed with his white fur, but Bernard preferred the cat to any dog, for its dark nature and indifference to suffering. He looked to Daniel for a moment like Blofeld stroking his white cat in the Bond films, only without the diamond collar. Bernard had barely looked up, had greeted Daniel with testy impatience, and had not even offered him a drink, though he was on his second brandy.
‘Well, that’s not a particularly helpful comparison, if I may say so …’
‘No, it’s the house of Montague and the house of fucking Hiawatha.’ He paused and calmed a little. ‘I mean no offence to Michelle, Daniel, but it is not about our personal feelings, it is about … the requirements of the role.’
‘I understand that you have to think of such things. But she would not be the first outsider to marry into this family. There are precedents.’
‘You mean my third wife? Italian nobility. My grandmother? She was a railroad heiress from Baltimore, Daniel. With a million dollars, not a fucking peace pipe.’
‘But my point is, she learnt how to do it. Indeed, she was a great success.’
‘Yes, but she grew up with wealth, position – it wasn’t such a big jump. And while she was learning how to be presented at court, Michelle’s grandmother was shooting fucking bows and arrows at trains.’
Daniel let the anger subside. Then he said, ‘What do you want for Hugh?’
Bernard took a slurp of brandy. ‘I want someone suitable, from a suitable family, suitable background, who will help him keep this show on the road. It is complicated, it requires experience and judgement. Do you understand?’
‘Who would bring that?’
‘Some dim earl’s daughter from a shire county or Scottish shooting estate, or a … I’d settle for a fucking nancy-boy gypsy had not primogeniture fucked it up.’ He took another long slurp of brandy.
Daniel could see the brooding mood begin to settle on him. It came more frequently upon him now. It used to be towards the end of a marriage, or on those occasions when the house and park were open to the public under the terms of the arrangement he had made with the tax man. He was at his bleakest when he felt his inheritance of title, estate and history was most precarious, most threatened by the failure of the present to provide for the future. A gay son in love with a gypsy gamekeeper, a daughter working for her living and now – hardest blow of all – an heir who did not want his inheritance and who had brought back to Champton a bride-to-be who was not cut from the right cloth.
‘What do you think of her personally?’ Daniel asked.
‘Personally? I think she’s absolutely fine. More than fine – charming and beautiful. But that’s irrelevant.’
‘Not irrelevant to Hugh. And Hugh’s happiness.’
Bernard sighed. ‘For fuck’s sake, Daniel. Have you ever been in love?’
Daniel did not know what to say. He blushed.
‘Thought not, though even parsons must have their passions. Is it dogs with you? Doing pretty services? But love is … a palm court orchestra, a rose in bloom, it’s your favourite pudding. It’s not running this estate. It’s not being a de Floures. Why am I having to tell you about this? You should know. I’ve always thought it absurd that a bachelor parson should pontificate about marital matters, let alone dynastic matters. What qualifies you to do that?’
Daniel blinked. ‘Detachment.’
‘The detachment of the non-combatant?’
‘If you like. But also, I am outside your world, Bernard, and perhaps I can see what you cannot see. The world is changing. Think how different life is on the estate now compared with when you were a boy. Or when your grandfather brought his American bride back from Baltimore. Perhaps Hugh and Michelle will have the necessary elements to adapt to change.’
Bernard snorted. ‘Do not be beguiled by the promise of change. First lesson they teach you when you are born into something like this.’
‘But change will happen. Look at the world, Bernard. Look at what is happening in Hungary, East Germany, Romania. The Communist world, impregnable? Not so impregnable now. The old order passeth.’
‘Perhaps the old order returneth and the commissars will face their own firing squads. Hasten the day!’
‘I don’t know, but it will not be the old order again. The Wettins restored to the throne of Saxony? Trianon reversed?’
Bernard made a noise between a growl and a sigh and went to pour himself another brandy. Jove, displaced from his lap, gave an irritable little miaow and stalked away.
He had barely got out of the Land Rover when his mother’s bedroom window flew open.
‘Daniel!’ she shouted. ‘Get in here!’ and she slammed the window down again.
Daniel wondered what the cause could be of not only the urgency, but the location. His mother’s bedroom was out of bounds, her sanctuary, her boudoir, that part of the rectory into which neither he nor any other authority could stray without a very clear and very infrequently issued invitation. He could not remember the last time he had been inside it; he could recall only the doctor getting past the door when his mother had shingles after she bit off more than she could chew for the League of Charity Centenary Party. So he rushed inside and, while hardly taking the stairs at a bound – ‘A good priest never runs!’ his tutor at theological college had told him – he was puffing when he arrived at the door. Cosmo was lying in front of it, his snout almost on the paintwork. Daniel tapped on it gently.
‘Come in, quick!’ was the reply. He held Cosmo back with his foot and went in. His mother was kneeling beside a mound of cushions and pillows and towels, which she had heaped inside what she called ‘the whelping box’ but which he had improvised from the cardboard boxes he had taken from Upper Badsaddle Manor. In it, Hilda, the size of a small seal, lay on her side.
‘Puppies!’ his mother exclaimed. ‘They’re coming!’
‘Oh, good Lord,’ said Daniel, ‘should I telephone the vet?’
‘Nonsense! Easiest thing in the world, Daniel. Leave nature to her work!’
‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘Make me a cup of tea.’
‘May I just see Hilda?’ He knelt next to his mother and stroked Hilda’s flank. ‘Beautiful girl,’ he said, ‘beautiful girl!’ She stirred slightly, and he supposed she was preoccupied with the business of parturition, although she looked like she was resting. Then there was a jostle from inside her. ‘Mum!’ he said. ‘They’re moving!’
‘Of course they’re moving, they’re ready to pop out. Now get me that cup of tea!’
Daniel, flustered like a grandparent outside a delivery suite, forgot to fill the kettle before he put it on the hob, confirming the old adage, but in a new way, that a watched kettle never boils. He picked things up and put them down in a random ritual of orderliness before he pulled himself together. He carried a tray upstairs set with two mugs of strong tea (he thought a mug rather than a cup and saucer more suitable to the hard work of midwifery) and a plate of nourishing digestives, which he took from the biscuit tin that had provided for him since childhood, and indeed for others before he arrived – and for that reason, and because of the promise of new life imminently to come, tears began to blur his vision and he had to compose himself again.
The bedroom was hot and charged somehow: hot because Audrey had ignited the ugly portable Calor gas heater which she had wheeled in from the dampest of the guest bedrooms, normally reserved for Daniel’s brother, Theo; charged because the great drama of birth was unfolding. Audrey, who had given birth to Daniel – a feat which she thought, very privately, her greatest work – was almost unable to contain her excitement. Her eyes were shining, her colour was up, and there was a sort of repressed whinny, if there can be such a thing, with every contraction.
‘Look, Daniel,’ she said, and pointed to Hilda’s rear end, where something that looked to Daniel like a fleshy hot cross bun appeared to be about to pop out.
‘What is it?’ he asked anxiously.
‘It’s a vulva, Daniel. What were you expecting, the archangel Gabriel?’
‘Is it normally like that? Shouldn’t we fetch someone?’
‘No, it’s meant to be like that. And before long we will have, I think, three puppies.’
‘What shall we do with them?’
‘Keep them, of course.’
‘How can we possibly keep them?’
‘Oh, Daniel, if you have two, what’s another three?’
‘The expense, Mum?’
‘I will take care of that.’
‘How?’
‘Oh, do stop fussing, Da— oh, look!’
Hilda tried to heave herself onto her paws and then lifted her tail. A tiny head appeared, with a squashed snout and closed eyes, covered in a sort of juice, which Hilda curled round to lick off. And then what was left of the tiny creature emerged, covered in wet, dark fur; it plopped onto the towel, and Hilda licked it and it gave a sort of squeak, like a toy. She licked and licked, and nuzzled it towards her belly, and it latched on to one of her teats, which were the size, Daniel noticed, of raisins.
‘Oh, my goodness!’ he said.
Audrey sat up and said, like the grocer’s daughter from Grantham, ‘We are a grandmother.’
Forty minutes later another was about to arrive, but the bell for Evensong rang and Daniel had to go. ‘Send for me, Mum, if you need me,’ he said.
‘Send my lady’s maid? A groom? A gamekeeper? Just hurry back!’
The office hymn at Evensong was ‘Creator of the Stars of Night’, good for Harvest as well as for Advent, when it was usually sung, and especially apt that day:
‘When earth was near its evening hour,
Thou didst, in love’s redeeming power,
Like bridegroom from his chamber, come
Forth from a virgin-mother’s womb.’
Hardly a virgin mother; the father of Hilda’s puppies was thought to be Siegfried, a black-and-tan dachshund, who belonged to one of Theo’s friends. He was less than a year old when Theo came to look after the dogs so Daniel could take his mother to the funeral of a cousin in Scotland. He invited his friend to stay at the rectory and to bring his little puppy too, and in a quiet and unobserved moment the little dog must have mated with Hilda. Daniel was so distracted by the outcome of their congress he could barely concentrate and nearly beseeched God to endue his ministers with righteousness twice.
By the time he got home, Hilda was about to give birth to a third. He marvelled at her composure and the easy arrival of each pup, so unlike human childbirth – noisy, agonising and dangerous. He had been summoned to perinatal intensive care sometimes to baptise a very premature baby only a little larger than the two puppies now greedily sucking at Hilda’s teats. They fluttered between living and dying, so vulnerable, so tiny, and once, when he was asked to scatter the ashes of a premature baby, he had quietly added some he had made himself by burning the little charcoal briquettes for a thurible, so that there would be enough for the parents to grieve. He wondered if childbirth was a design flaw, not a curse inflicted on the daughters of Eve after she ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but something to do with bipedalism? The cost of our striving upwards? Chris Biddle came into his mind, or rather the conversation he would not want to have with him about the truth of Bible stories, for Chris would insist on them being true in a way that Daniel did not, could not – and anyway, he thought we owed the Bible more than the literal truth that those who thought themselves its defenders allowed.
The doorbell rang. Audrey jumped up from the floor and threw the window up again. ‘Who is it?’
A voice floated up from the drive. ‘It’s Alex. And Nathan!’
‘I’m up to my elbows in placenta!’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You will have to come back another time!’
Daniel stuck his head out of the window. ‘Hold on, I’ll be down in a moment … Mum, this is important, I have to deal with it.’
She said, ‘Did he say Nathan? Nathan Liversedge?’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘Well! The wanderer returns! You had better see what’s the matter. I’ve been managing perfectly well on my own so far. And I don’t think there will be any problems. We’d know by now if there were.’
Daniel was nearly at the foot of the stairs when she shouted, ‘Daniel!’
He turned and rushed back to her bedroom.
She was wiping her hands on a towel. ‘Ask Nathan if he can fix those loose slates, rehang the gates and paint the windows?’
‘Mum, it’s not really the time.’
‘Cash!’
‘We don’t have the money – and he’s helping the police with their inquiries, not doing bob-a-job.’
He left his mother to her ministrations and went downstairs to let in Nathan and Alex. Cosmo, he noticed, remained en garde outside the bedroom door instead of coming to bark at the people.
Daniel showed them into the study. Nathan looked around uncomfortably, then said, ‘Your windows need doing.’
‘That’s just what my mother was saying.’
‘Mrs Clement all right?’
