Читать книгу Absolute Truths - Susan Howatch - Страница 25

There were two police cars parked outside the church and a young constable was on guard in the porch, but the adjacent vicarage was not yet besieged by either the police or the hound from the Starbridge Evening News. Parking my car in the forecourt of the bleak Victorian house I rang the front doorbell and waited, eyeing with dismay the state of the woodwork, which needed a coat of paint, and the windows, which were caked in grime. Eventually I was admitted by the daily housekeeper, a dour woman who conceded with unprecedented animation that the news had given her ‘ever such a turn’. Also present in the hall was the elderly parishioner who had found Desmond lying in a pool of blood when she had entered the church to perform her weekly chore of dusting the pews. Various other members of the small, ageing congregation were twittering in the front reception room as I looked in.

I was unsure how quickly the police would be able to pick up a search-warrant, but knowing Malcolm would delay them as long as possible I thought I had at least an hour in which to prove or disprove the worst. Willing myself to betray no trace of impatience, I singled out the one male in the group and asked him to escort home the woman who had found the body; luckily the woman lived across the street so I was not obliged to waste time giving them a lift in my car. Then I dismissed the remainder of the gathering by assuring them that there was no need for anyone to linger at the vicarage for news; the churchwardens would be issued with regular bulletins which would be posted in the church porch. As the front door closed after the last parishioner I got rid of the housekeeper by requesting some tea and finally invaded Desmond’s study, a large dim dusty hole where the temperature hovered uncertainly above freezing.

I need hardly say that by this time I was exceedingly worried. Of course there might still be an innocent explanation for the attack: a parishioner might have had a brainstorm or a passing tramp might have succumbed to psychosis, but Desmond’s past did mean the attack was capable of a seamy explanation. After the attack upon him in the public lavatory in London he had been arrested for soliciting. The charge had later been dropped but the Bishop of London’s archdeacon, taking charge at the vicarage as Desmond languished overnight in hospital, had to his horror discovered a cache of pornographic magazines in the study. Homosexual behaviour combined with a taste for pornography could well have led to imprisonment. Desmond had been lucky to escape and had no doubt been spurred on by gratitude when he had made the best of his rehabilitation, but if he were now in the midst of a second breakdown, the possibility that his old weaknesses had resurfaced was strong.

I knew I had to search his study. I had no wish to impede the police in the execution of their duty but what drove me on was the dread that the police might uncover material which was irrelevant to their enquiry but of immense interest to the press. I thought it unlikely that Desmond would have managed to acquire the kind of hard-core pornography which would render him liable to prosecution on a pornography charge alone, but even a soft-core collection could prove disastrous if Sergeant Locke chose to make a caustic comment to the hound from the Starbridge Evening News. The hound’s scoop would tip off Fleet Street and then all hell would break loose.

I glanced around the study. At once I noticed that the desk was in chaos, a sinister sign indicating a disorganised mind unable to cope with the daily routine, but the upper layers of paper contained nothing more sensational than unpaid bills and copies of the Church Gazette. I looked at the desk-diary. The page for the day contained – to my relief – only two morning appointments, but it did occur to me that an afternoon appointment might still have existed even though Desmond had chosen not to write it down. Opening the drawers of the desk I found that although they were crammed with an extraordinary variety of rubbish ranging from candle-stubs to undamed socks, no pornography lay waiting to be revealed. The cupboards below the bookshelves were similarly innocent, and the books themselves were unimpeachable, displaying a respectable, orthodox, old-fashioned taste in both English literature and theology. The fact that the volumes were so neatly arranged on their shelves, however, suggested that they had not been read for some time.

I concluded that although I had discovered evidence of a priest fraying at the seams, there was nothing to suggest that he had actually fallen apart. Sitting down in the chair behind me desk I reached for the telephone and dialled the South Canonry.

‘It would take a week to go through the study properly,’ I said to Lyle after I had given her a rapid resume of events, ‘but at least there’s nothing frightful lying around.’

‘Well, of course there isn’t, not after that archdeacon in London went looking for an address-book and instantly uncovered horrors! Wake up, darling! This time there’ll be a hidey-hole designed to outwit any archdeacon – try the bedroom.’

‘I couldn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Only private detectives invade bedrooms.’

‘And the police! Darling, do you really want Desmond to hit the headlines in the News of the World?’

There was a pause while I wrestled with my middle-class upbringing, my public-school mores and my Christian duty as a bishop to look after a wayward member of my flock. ‘If you only knew,’ I muttered at last, ‘how much I wish I was back in Cambridge –’

‘Charles, this is not the time to wallow in a pointless nostalgia. Think of the Church – think of the diocese –’

‘If only I’d never taken him on! Of course I knew it was a risk but the Abbot-General absolutely swore Desmond was fully recovered as the result of that long retreat with the Fordite monks –’

‘Darling, stop fluttering around in a purple panic and search that bedroom. Or do I have to come over and do it myself?’

‘I must say I think this is a singularly distasteful conversation for a bishop to have with his wife!’

‘Don’t waste any more time thinking, Charles – ACT!’

‘Very well.’ I replaced the receiver, marched out of the room and almost collided with the housekeeper who had been approaching with my tea. Thanking her profusely I returned to the study, but as soon as the tray had been deposited on the desk and the housekeeper had once more retreated to the kitchen, I made another swift exit into the hall.

As I padded silently upstairs I was aware of the size of the house, built for a large Victorian family with several servants, and it occurred to me that this size was enhanced by the interior dilapidation which underlined the high ceilings, the wide staircase and the long corridors. I suspected the housekeeper neither dusted nor swept, probably because Desmond had never noticed whether she did so or not. Upstairs the cold intensified. Stooping over the floor in one corner of the landing I flicked open my lighter and saw the mice-droppings beside the hole I had noticed in the wainscoting. The notorious lines of a well-known hymn flared in my mind: ‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate; God made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate.’ I thought of my comfortable home and felt not only guilty but angry and ashamed.

I told myself that something should be done for the parish, but I knew the problems it presented were intractable. The diocesan board of finance had already classed the church as a white elephant which required too much money too often. The congregation had dwindled to a remnant. It was hardly surprising that the vicarage was now a mere sordid niche for a man whom no other bishop would employ, but how I hated that long decline from Victorian power to mid-twentieth-century enfeeblement! It made me despair of the future of the Church.

But then I remembered St Athanasius, battling on contra mun-dum, never giving up, never sinking back into despair, and it occurred to me that I should stop bewailing the present in disgust and pray for the future with hope. So I said in my head to God: ‘Breathe new life into this parish – resurrect it from the dead!’ – an outrageous demand indeed and I hardly hoped for it to be met, but no attempt to align oneself with God can ever be futile, and perhaps the result of my prayer would be that in future I would take more interest in this dying parish, a move which would produce beneficial results for the congregation.

To finish off my prayer I added my current mantra: ‘All things work together for good to them that love God,’ and feeling fractionally calmer – or was I in fact more depressed than ever? – I resumed my journey to Desmond’s bedroom.