Murder in a Cathedral Page 9

  ‘I was staying with Toby and Cathy Wolpurtstone one weekend when Cathy happened to mention that she wasn’t at all happy with Alice’s state of health. Apparently she’d been in one of those awful inner-city parishes as a team vicar, living in squalid quarters with drug addicts turning up before breakfast. Cathy was anxious that Alice be transferred to somewhere more salubrious. That’s when I got the idea. Two birds and all that.’

  ‘Had you met her?’

  ‘She came down for a brief visit that weekend to conduct the christening of a neighbour’s child and she seemed just right. Not like one of those awful women priests in Crimplene suits speaking in estuary English. She was nicely turned out and she officiated well—had the vain pomp and glory of the world renounced in great style. Nice voice too.’

  You mean right accent, thought Amiss. ‘You weren’t worried about how she might react to the ethos here?’

  ‘Oh, you mean in case she turned out to be homophobic. No, I had no worries there. Cathy had mentioned with some distaste that Alice had spent far too much time helping out at an Aids hospice.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘No. That was another plus. It leads to trouble. Priests’ husbands don’t know how to behave. Anyway, I went back and did the deal with Cecil, so that was two to one. Jeremy didn’t care and went along with it after some musical bribe or other. Then Trustrum woke up and for once tried to fight it on the grounds that there was no precedent for female canons, but he gave up when he realized everyone was against him. Reggie was horrified at first, but I managed to calm him down and convince him he’d hardly notice her. Anyway he was beyond caring much about anything but his memorial plans.’

  ‘It was all surprisingly painless, then.’

  ‘Except for Alice, who didn’t like the idea at all.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Fedden-Jones sighed. ‘She’s an idealist.’

  ‘Ah, yes. I can see how that must have been a bit of a blow. Thought life here would be too easy, I suppose. So how did you crack that problem?’

  ‘Toby Wolpurstone made a point of running into the bishop—Elworthy’s predecessor, that is—in the Lords and told him he was worried she might crack up. Toby’s been helpful before now on the fund-raising side of things, so Hubert was minded to help and use his influence. He called her in and told her she was to take this offer. She was upset, but he told her he gathered she was being moved from her inner city in any case and indirectly threatened her with what Toby had told him she dreaded most: a prosperous suburb with few contemporary problems.

  ‘He told Toby she was pretty obdurate, but he finally sold it to her by telling her she would simultaneously strike a blow for women, awaken the chapter to the need for greater social responsibility, and indicated she might be able to provide spiritual comfort to the New Age travellers who—as I’m sure you’ve noticed—infest Westonbury. That clinched it.’

  ‘And is she happy?’

  ‘I don’t really know. I don’t see her round the close much and she’s never opened her mouth at chapter meetings. But I’m afraid I don’t think so. She looks a bit depressed. Of course it didn’t help that up to now she’s only been allowed to celebrate mass in a side chapel. Reggie just wouldn’t tolerate a woman officiating at high altar, and since he died, Trustrum and Cecil have kept her there.’

  He looked a little guilty. ‘I’ve probably not done what I should for her. She might be a bit lonely. Obviously I had her round for sherry, but frankly she turned out not to be my type. She talked very seriously about witness and ministry and that sort of thing and I didn’t know where to look. No appetite for gossip.’

  ‘But her presence has helped on the PR front, presumably?’

  Fedden-Jones shook his head. ‘Not yet, I fear. You see it turns out that she’s an enthusiastic member of the C of E Gay and Lesbian Association.’

  ‘She’s a lesbian?’ Amiss began to laugh but checked himself at Fedden-Jones’s evident distress.

  ‘It’s not very helpful, as you can imagine. I can’t bear to think how the dean will react if he finds out. There was a very embarrassing moment at the lunch after the enthronement when some innocent asked him what he thought about ordaining gays and he rather excitedly began to quote Leviticus.’

  ‘Sorry, Dominic. I’m not up to speed on the Old Testament.’

  ‘It’s about how men lying with men is an abomination.’

  ‘It would seem that one knows where one is with the dean.’

  ‘I’m trying not to think about him. Now, would you like me to ask Alice over for a drink?’

  ***

  After spending an hour in her company, Amiss was little wiser about Alice Wolpurtstone, though he could detect her unease at Fedden-Jones’s questions about mutual friends and cousins of cousins. She was polite but unforthcoming; it was not clear whether she was contemptuous, embarrassed or simply very shy. Amiss made a little headway when he asked her about her previous job and she spoke haltingly about the sense of purpose she had found in working in an inner city. However Fedden-Jones clearly found this conversation both boring and unpleasant, so it was abruptly curtailed. Alice made her excuses as early as was decently possible and departed, leaving Fedden-Jones shaking his head and complaining that she had taken after neither of her delightful parents.

  ***

  There was no sighting of Alice the following day, and she didn’t answer her telephone, so instead Amiss found a spurious reason to ring Canon Sebastian Trustrum and received an invitation to call. ‘Come at three-forty-five for an hour. That’s my time for seeing people.’

  Trustrum’s home was a shrine to order, a house in which no object was ever misplaced, let alone mislaid. It was short on possessions, other than a few shelves of books and some photographs of Trustrum with various ecclesiastical notables. But in its own way it was a little gem, for in its furniture and appurtenances it was frozen somewhere round the 1890s.

  Trustrum, it emerged, was extremely proud of his establishment’s imperviousness to change. ‘I’m pleased to say,’ he explained, ‘that for the last few generations this house has been inhabited by people who understand about tradition. None of this mad modern passion for changing things. I never know why people want to do that.’

  Much of the fixtures and furniture proved that one of the great advantages of not changing anything was that fashion had a tendency to come round and embrace the old again. Trustrum’s Victorian bathroom, which would have been a laughing stock in the 1950s and ’60s, was full of artefacts now much sought after. All over smart London the well-to-do were rooting out modern plastic bathroom suites and installing porcelain lavatories and old iron baths with claw feet. And these days too, many people were coming to regard fitted cupboards as rather naff. Admittedly, Trustrum’s refusal to instal central heating kept him in a minority, but his Georgian fireplace and blazing fire would have gained many admirers.

  ‘Would you care for a cup of tea? I always have tea here at four o’clock. Except in summer, that is, when I have it fifteen minutes later.’ Trustrum, it rapidly became clear, was a man whose passion for routine would have been understandable in someone who had clocked up fifty years in a particularly strict jail.

  It wasn’t just his timetable that was rigid; so too was its content. Coffee could be taken only in the morning, tea only in the afternoon, beef was reserved for Sundays, chicken for Mondays, fish for Fridays and so on. The dishes were specific too. The fish was always plaice, the lamb always cutlets, the chicken always grilled.

  Trustrum was a man determined to ensure that in his life there were as few surprises as possible, so it was no wonder that he was in a state of advanced neurosis about the changes in the chapter. Before the first cup of tea had been finished, Amiss’s sympathetic manner had had its effect, and a well-timed question about whether the dean was likely to be an innovator got his host going. ‘Why was he appointed? Why should they do such a thing? We were getting on fine. We did no one harm and we kept custom and practice inta
ct. That’s what a cathedral is for, isn’t it? What is it, if it isn’t about passing tradition on unaltered to the next generation?’

  Amiss muttered sympathetically and was rewarded with a second cup of tea. ‘We’re not here to get involved in silly new fads or to keep making changes that years later are recognized as having been all wrong,’ continued his increasingly impassioned host.

  ‘Look at those horrid tower blocks that they put the poor in. They said all those nice little artisans’ cottages were passé, but now they say they were all wrong and they’re tearing down the high-rise monstrosities and building nice little houses on the old model with a little bit of garden instead of those awful open spaces.

  ‘And look at all those so-called reforms in education in the 1960s when they got rid of the old grammar schools and brought in those dreadful comprehensives. And they stopped teaching tables and spelling. And what have we got now as a result? A nation of illiterates, that’s what. I could have told them what would happen. And now they’re going back to basics in teaching and trying to recapture the spirit of the old grammars.’

  He paused for breath. Amiss nodded in agreement.

  ‘What did they do to the monarchy? Tried to make it relevant. I could have told them. Just as Walter Bagehot said more than a century ago, the monarchy has to have its mystery. But they started making television programmes about it and telling people what went on behind the scenes. And what do we have now? An institution that’s almost been destroyed by the consequent intrusion. As the Duke of Cumberland said, “All change is bad.” Wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘I’d make an exception for dentistry.’

  ‘I grant you that.’

  ‘And plumbing.’

  ‘Yes, yes. And I will even admit to enjoying the wireless. But in most areas of life we should stick with what we’ve got. For heaven’s sake, look at how so-called progress has destroyed travel. Once it was a pleasure, but now…’ He cast his eyes heavenwards. ‘We’ve replaced ocean liners by nasty aeroplanes, so almost the whole population of the world rushes around it all the time, wasting petrol, ruining the environment, and ensuring that nobody ever enjoys actually travelling and everywhere one goes is overcrowded.’

  Not that Trustrum was exactly an expert on this, it turned out, for he rarely travelled. Although he stoutly maintained he was not afraid of flying, he had never done it and did not propose to start now.

  The tirade reminded Amiss of the baroness in a particularly reactionary mood; he found it quite familiar and soothing. Besides, Trustrum was not as withdrawn from the world as Amiss had expected. He seemed to keep in touch with current affairs and trends like a prosecuting barrister. He spoke learnedly about large areas of life—from agriculture to politics—where change had spelt disaster. On the question of the European Union he became almost incoherent with distress.

  However, if Trustrum was a keen observer of the world, he was not a student of character. Amiss gleaned little more about the other canons residentiary than he already knew. Trustrum spoke approvingly in general terms of his colleagues for their championing of old values, though there were disparaging remarks about Davage for becoming a television performer and about those who had a hand in commissioning the Marian picture. All his colleagues—even the late Dean Roper—were anathematized for having appointed a female canon.

  Brooding on the radicalism and foolishness of this move led Trustrum into an assault on the whole notion of coeducation, women’s liberation, feminism, and all the evils it had brought to both men and women. He dwelt on young males, deprived of work, denied responsibility as providers and unmanned by aggressive women and again showed himself impressively up to date on the latest controversies—his information gleaned, he explained, from the papers he’d been reading since puberty, the Telegraph, the Spectator, and the Church Times, and of course from Radio Four, which he still called the Home Service.

  ‘And all that modernizing of religion has had the same effect. They’ve taken away most of the mystery and the magic. The Catholics destroyed themselves by replacing Latin with the vernacular. And what are we doing but replacing the glories of our King James Bible with nasty new rubbish?’

  ‘You mean like the Good News Bible?’

  ‘No, no. Much, much worse. You have no idea.’

  He jumped up and fetched two books from his shelf, out of each of which stuck dozens of slips of paper. He opened one at the first slip. ‘Right. Now this from the King James version of Genesis. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.” Poetry. Sheer poetry.’

  He picked up the other volume. ‘Now let us see how the Contemporary English Version improves on this. Ah, yes. “The Lord God took a handful of soil and made a man. God breathed life into the man, and the man started breathing. The Lord made a garden in a place called Eden, which was in the east, and he put the man there.” Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!’ Opening the offending Bible randomly at another marker, he snorted, ‘Here’s a moving passage: “You lazy people can learn by watching an anthill.” Obviously a vast improvement on: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.”’

  He put the books back on the shelf. ‘I can read only a few extracts at a time: I get so angry.’

  ‘I don’t blame you. It’s like comparing a great claret with Diet Coke.’

  Trustrum looked at the grandfather clock near the door.

  ‘I’ve enjoyed talking to you, Mr Amiss, but you must forgive me if I bring our meeting to an end: from four-fifty to five-twenty-five I read my newspaper, and then I go to evensong.’

  He ushered his guest to the door.

  ‘Thank you for the tea and the interesting conversation, Canon Trustrum. As a newcomer to your congregation, I, at least, am very pleased you’ve kept the services traditional.’

  ‘But for how much longer can we hold out against the barbarians, Mr Amiss? For how much longer?’

  Chapter 10

  Harassed by another early call from the baroness, Amiss determined the following morning to hunt down his quarry. He sat in a window seat overlooking the close, listened to the radio and watched for Alice Wolpurtstone. Just after ten o’clock her front door opened, and she set off at a brisk pace towards the river. Amiss hared out of the palace and followed her down the towpath and then left into Canon’s Leap.

  As he watched her swinging athletically along in front of him, he realized that she was much more attractive than he had thought, for at their brief meeting her shyness had been off-putting. And although there was nothing provocative about her clothes, they had none of the depressing churchiness of so much female clerical garb. Her black trouser suit and white polo-neck jumper were well cut and suited her slim figure: presumably Mummy Wolpurtstone had had a hand in kitting her out.

  Amiss followed her into Parson’s Ride and towards the centre of the city. As ever, when he went into Westonbury, Amiss yearned to take to the town planners the bulldozers they had taken to the old town. Here and there were traces of happy architectural evolution; in side streets, little bits of Tudor were interspersed with some Gothic Victoriana and some charming Edwardian artisans’ cottages. But in the centre the planners’ philistinism had turned Westonbury into a 1990s shopping precinct dominated by chain stores and indistinguishable from a hundred other English towns.

  He caught up with her as she turned down a lane: ‘Good morning, Canon Wolpurtstone. I wonder if I might persuade you to join me in a cup of coffee?’

  The strong graceful woman instantly gave way to the peerer-under-eyelids and presser-of-arms-to-torso-to-protect-against-wanton-assault he remembered from their first encounter. ‘Oh, gosh, how very kind of you. But I really can’t. I’ve got to make a visit.’

  ‘Please do. You’d be doing me a favour. I get very lonely in the close and today I could really do with some company—just for a few m
inutes.’

  She melted immediately, stood upright and let her arms and hands relax by her sides. ‘Oh, of course. I’m so sorry. How selfish of me. I’d love to. But please call me Alice. I hate titles.’

  ‘Oh, good. An ally. All these grand formalities get me down. I’ve never understood why people get such joy from being called by silly names.’

  He looked up and down the street. ‘Now where shall we go? If you don’t mind, I’d like to avoid one of those highstreet coffee shops. Do you know of anywhere down here?’

  ‘Not for coffee. But if you’re happy with tea…?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She led the way into an establishment outside which dangled a sign full of obscure mystical symbols surrounding images of waxing and waning moons. On the walls were posters of goddesses, elves, witches, druids and various other pagan icons along with images of earth, sea and sky and signs of the zodiac, while on the tables covering most of the floor were jars of herbs, bottles of oils, books and tapes, heaps of crystal jewellery, flints, stones and other odds and ends all jumbled up together. In the corner was a rack of long shapeless psychedelic robes. The strong smell of incense made him feel rather nostalgic.

  As they sat down at an empty scrubbed pine table in the corner, a bare-footed skinny girl with purple hair and lipstick, huge dangling crystal earrings, silver symbols attached to several orifices and a green T-shirt and leggings covered with orange dragons arrived to take their order. It emerged that all that was on offer at that time of the morning were herbal infusions, so, miserably, Amiss followed Alice’s example and ordered camomile tea, which proved to be quite as foul as he had expected.

  ‘This certainly makes a change from the cathedral. Except for the incense, of course.’

  Encouragingly, she managed a little smile, so Amiss continued to babble unthreateningly about the claustrophobia of living in such a small community. ‘I find it very odd. Very odd indeed.’

  For the first time she looked at him with some interest. ‘How do you mean?’