Facing the Tank (20 page)

Evan shut the door of the granny flat, leaning against it a moment to celebrate the first solitude since breakfast with a round of no-hands yawning. Then he slung his briefcase beside the bread bin and yawned again, rubbing his aching scalp. Stooping over the sink, he drank straight from the tap to dilute the taste of Mrs Merluza’s sherry. The moment he got in she had lured him upstairs on the pretext that her ‘old hands’ were having trouble breaking the seal on a new screw-top bottle, only to introduce him to the bishop’s mother and force him to stay for a glass. Mrs Chattock was a racy old thing who shook rather and sported an accent even stranger than Mrs Merluza’s. It had been amusing enough to chat, but now that the two of them had left for their lecture (with slides) his exhaustion had crept up on him, pounced and hung heavy on his shoulders.

He had worked in the Cathedral library all day, spurred on by the near completion of the book and, although Petra Dixon had closed up shop for an hour as usual to go and walk her terrier, he had been deprived of a lunch break by the necessity of crossing over to Tatham’s to talk about illustrations with the officious Perkin Philby. By the time Philby had released him, the Tracer’s Arms had shut and the town’s food shops had fallen under the dismal pall of something called, with unelucidating frankness, early closing.

As his bath ran, he put some beer in the fridge then drew all the curtains and undressed. Since leaving Miriam, he had begun to dislike his body and had taken to dressing and undressing chastely, like a convent child, with the aid of a silk dressing gown. There was no one to laugh any more, but it felt more comfortable that way. The bath water was too hot but he was too tired to stand around waiting for enough cold water to run in. He felt his face grow scarlet and, ignoring fifteen years of Miriam’s habit-weary warning, fell asleep. When he woke, the water was stone cold and the soap had added considerably to his natural wrinkles. He had not drowned because the bath was too short. Though not especially uncomfortable, he knew from the slight blueness in his legs that it might be wiser to get out so, swearing quietly, he tugged out the plug and staggered, dripping to the bedroom where he had left his towel that morning. (Mrs Merluza did not like to tidy too often during a lodger’s stay; she felt it to be an intrusion on their privacy.) He glanced at his alarm clock, saw that he had been asleep for an hour and decided not to dress again for dinner. He turned his pyjamas the right way round and put them on, followed by the dressing gown and a pair of clean socks. He had no slippers and there was something of a draught on the kitchenette floor.

He tore open a fresh packet of sliced bread (dyed brown as a sop to Miriam and conscience) and arranged a fistful of slices across the grill pan. While these were grilling, he poured himself a wonderfully cold beer and decided on ravioli. Determined not to go to bed without at least finishing the first chapter of
Towards a New Mythology
, he decided that he might as well read while he ate. He turned the toast, opened the ravioli tin and fetched the neglected book. He had just speared the first pasta envelope when there was a knock on the granny flat door and Madeleine called,

‘Evan? Can I come in?’

‘Of course.’ He jumped up, licking spicy tomato sauce off his thumb and she came in. She too was in a dressing gown. Her hair seemed to have been brushed the wrong way. According to her mother, she had not left her room all day.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Oh. You’re eating. I’ll go.’

‘No. Not at all. Join me, why don’t you?’

‘You’re just saying that.’ She was hovering by the door.

‘No I’m not. It’s too big a tin for one.’ That was a lie. ‘Here. You sit down and I’ll heat it up.’

‘Please don’t. I prefer it cold. Unless you’d rather …’ She pulled up the second chair to the tiny table.

‘Oh good. So do I.’

‘It’s got more flavour that way. Your toast’s burning.’

He rescued the toast, tipped half the ravioli into a bowl for her and found her a fork.

‘Beer?’ he said.

‘What kind?’

‘Heineken.’

‘No thanks. Actually, yes I will.’ He raked the other can out of the fridge. ‘Thank you,’ she said as he set it before her. ‘Don’t bother with a glass.’

He sat opposite her and ate a couple of ravioli.

‘You’re being very slow reading that book,’ she said.

‘It’s abysmally dull,’ he explained. ‘How was your day?’

‘Confined. I felt sick at first so I spent the morning in bed, then I was stupid and rang Edmund. He told me to bugger off out of his life. Well, more or less. So that put me in such a foul mood that I spent most of the afternoon in bed too. I came down and sat in the kitchen a bit for a change of scene, but Mum got on my nerves wanting to call a doctor, and then a goody-goody girl I was at school with turned up with a chestnut and chocolate gâteau so I escaped back to my room. I’ve read a very unsuitable novel to pass the time up there.’

‘Oh? Which?’

‘Weather in the Streets.’

‘Can’t say I know it.’

‘Wonderful doomed mid-wars love affair between married man and neglected, would-be authoress. She has an abortion and he falls in love with his wife.’

‘Ah. Bad idea.’

They laughed.

‘Do you mind my barging in like this?’ she asked suddenly. ‘I’m sure you do. I know you do, in fact, because you’re dying to get on with that bloody book. It’s just that, apart from the phone call to Edmund, I’ve barely said an intelligent word all day and I was starting to argue with the bedside light.’ A hot point of red in each of her cheeks lent her a fevered look. Perhaps she had been at her mother’s paint-stripper brandy.

‘Not at all,’ said Evan, scraping absently at the inside of the tin then pushing it aside. ‘What do you want to talk about?’

‘Well. What would … Can I have a cigarette?’

‘Sure. Help yourself.’

‘Thanks.’ She lit up and inhaled briefly before answering. ‘What would you do if you were my father?’

‘How d’you mean?’ he stalled.

‘Would you throw me out, make him marry me or fork out for a discreet clinic to tidy things away?’

‘Of course not. I mean, neither. I guess I’d let you make your own mind up. If I was your father I assume that all I’d want would be your happiness. But of course, I can’t really talk because I’ve never been one.’

‘What?’

‘A father.’

‘Choice or destiny?’

‘Miriam and I couldn’t make one.’ Light-headed from cold bath and colder beer he added, ‘To tell the truth, I think Miriam wanted one as much as I did, at least to start with, but I think there were, er, problems. And they weren’t in her department.’

‘Oh. I see. But that’s only a hunch?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mmm.’ She swigged at her beer as Evan proffered the empty ravioli tin as an ashtray.

‘When do you think you’ll go back to London?’ he asked her.

‘Dunno. Not just yet. How about you?’

‘The work’s almost finished.’ He sighed. ‘So a couple of days should see me out.’

‘The libraries are impressive, aren’t they?’

‘Out of this world.’

‘I think it spoils it, growing up with all that around you. I haven’t been around the Cathedral once since I was seventeen and I did a project on illumination. I’d probably be far more astonished now.’ Evan offered her a half banana.

‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘Oh all right. Actually, couldn’t we have one each?’

‘Of course.’

‘Got any white sugar to dunk it in? They taste better with sugar.’ They dunked their bananas in the sugar basin. She offered to fetch the charity gâteau but he persuaded her to halve a second banana instead.

‘Barrowcester continues to disprove my early doubts concerning its lack of an alternative culture,’ he said with a chuckle.

‘How so?’

‘I met a magnificent black Bishop being shown round the Cathedral library this morning.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, but his grandeur was a touch diminished after he’d left and the redoutable Petra Dixon explained that he was not resident but was Bishop Okereke of Bantawa.’

‘The pet African diocese,’ she said. ‘It’s so touching. Mum and her friends raise all this money to send there without knowing that he’s a perfectly wonderful communist.’

Soon after this their conversation died. Evan was trying so hard to find the right moment to ask if they might meet for a drink when they were both back in London that he became tongue-tied. Madeleine began to play with a cigarette stub and a puddle of beer on the tabletop.

‘I must go back to bed,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m slipping into what your Petra Dixon would call a brown study.’

‘Oh must you?’ said Evan, thinking suddenly of her mother.

‘Yes I must. Thanks for the ravioli. It’s much better cold.’ She pecked him on the forehead and gave him one of her defeated smiles. ‘G’night,’ she said and left.

As he had been leaving the Chapter House this evening, Evan had met Bishop Okereke again, who was leaving Evensong. The Bishop broke graciously away from a circle of well-wishers to shake Evan’s hand.

‘I really must apologize, Professor Kirby,’ he had said in his James Mason English, ‘for not having said hello properly before. You see, I’d read your excellent books but I failed to recognize you from your flyleaf photograph.’

Had he gone so severely to seed?

Lydia was shutting down the Cathedral for the night. She was in there to do her ‘holy dusting’ and should have had Sam the verger at her elbow waiting to do the locking up himself, but his son was leaving for Northern Ireland soon and it was the last night of his leave. Sam had left her with the keys, therefore, quite unofficially, and sloped off early. This was a frequent enough occurrence. Lydia’s place on the dusting rota meant a great deal to her but inevitably she was so busy that she ended up making her contribution minutes before closing time. Sam had long since been bribed to show her the ropes. She would drive over to his dreadful little house on Friary Hill afterwards to post the keys through his letter box. She was able to dust later than usual tonight because it was the occasion of one of Canon de Lisle’s candlelit poetry readings in the Lady chapel. The latter was Lydia’s particular dusting patch and she had hoped to rush off a quick dust there before anyone arrived, then slip away unnoticed home, but Bernard de Lisle himself had drifted in early, forcing her to stuff her duster out of sight and pretend that she had come expressly for the poetry he selected so beautifully. Sam was delighted to knock off early, so he slipped Lydia the keys, handed out candles then vanished into the gloom, leaving her to sit in the spectral cold for forty minutes listening to various over-emotional types reciting Donne, Blake and Milton.

Sam had already locked the doors to the vestry, treasury and choir room; all Lydia had to do was check for still-lit lights and lock the Glurry door on her way out. A labour-saving device had been installed close to the main fusebox last year. This was a plan of the Cathedral’s circuitry with little bulbs that lit up to show at a glance if anything were still switched on and where. For some reason, the lights in the crypt seemed to be on. Irritated at this further delay, she turned on enough lights to find her way without tripping. She climbed the steps up to the quire then descended on the other side and made her way to the north transept. The most thunderous notes of the organ were made here. Great sixty-four-foot black wooden boxes reached up and coiled back on themselves into the darkness. They were linked to the main body of the instrument, the prettier part, by snakes of electric cable sunk beneath the flagstones. When someone pulled out the
contra bombard
stop, this whole corner of the building throbbed to a sound like an infernal motorbike. The lowest note of all was scarcely recognizable as a note at all; it was more a vibration one felt on the backs of the legs and across one’s chest. Sam claimed it made the loose panes of glass rattle. The door to the crypt was set into the wall at the base of these giant pipes. A strip of light showed underneath it.

Lydia was not easily frightened. Clive implied that she lacked imagination to be able to cope with her nocturnal dusting, for he had only to walk past the Close wall and see the Cathedral floodlit to feel a shudder. All the vergers had at least one part of their work that frightened them. Trevor Sly and Mrs Moore shared a horror, bred by old films, of being alone here and hearing the organ play. Sam had an elaborate fantasy in which he would find himself locked in at night and realize that there was a tight, white face watching him from every window. Lydia’s one fear was less imaginative, less explicable. She had never liked spaces of enclosed water. From girlhood on, reservoirs, swimming pools and water tanks, however small, had filled her with dread. It had become a secret joke between her and Clive that she panicked at any hint of a problem in a lavatory cistern and would have to leave the room rather than watch him open one up. Barrowcester’s subterranean stream terrified her. This rivulet which, strangely in a city of titles, had found no name, bubbled up somewhere under the Close. The builders of the Cathedral had interrupted its flow through the caves and tunnels to the Bross and, for reasons that died with them, diverted it briefly in and out of the crypt. They had contained it in stone, like a sewer, for an inordinate length of its way. Some said it was diverted like this for sanitation while others, scoffing at the idea of pious men building a latrine under their high altar, said that the stream was the site of ancient veneration for a river goddess – one of those rites left half-explained by the departing Romans and half-absorbed into the new religion by their Christian successors. Lydia found neither theory comforting and continued to avoid the crypt as zealously as she steered clear of the public baths in Hanover Street and the reservoir on Friary Hill where Clive liked to walk for the view.

She took a deep breath and approached the crypt door, planning to open it just enough to dart a hand in to click off the light before locking in the underground river and beating a quick retreat. The light would not go off, however. She flicked the switch up and down twice to make sure, then was forced to open the door further to take a look. There was no sign of damage. Presumably something had come loose inside the mechanism. Although she knew she ought to unscrew the light bulb to save the Cathedral money, Lydia decided to leave things as they were, lock the door as usual and tell Sam when she dropped off the keys. She was turning to go when she saw feathers.

They were white ones. Two were sticking to the toe of her shoe with what she saw with disgust was blood. There were several more scattered on the steps where she had been standing. Frowning, her anger at the thought of having to clear something up before heading for home taking brief precedence over her fear of the stream that was swirling in the dark far corner, she walked down. On the last steps she stopped. A small white bird lay below her. Its head had been bitten off then spat out. Its white plumage lay in bloodied disarray. It was the size of a canary but white as a dove.

Lydia raced back to the north transept. There was a broom kept there in the flower arrangers’ cupboard. She snatched this, hurried back to the crypt and, her breathing heavy with nerves, swept the feathers off the steps and consigned them, along with the tiny carcass, to the inky waters of the unnamed stream. The bird’s remains sank and its feathers, floating, were carried swiftly into the maw of stone in the wall.

Lydia forced herself to stare at her watery enemy. She had not been this close since Sam showed her and Clive around in their first week in Barrowcester. Seen close to like this it was less frightening than when she saw it from the corner of her eye while hovering at the top of the steps. Astonished at her own daring, and dizzy at the thought that she had just saved a saint’s miraculous reputation with a few quick strokes of an old broom, she crouched and forced herself to stare into the hole where the waters vanished.

Like a sewer, this tunnel had a narrow ledge at one side just above the lapping of the water. It was easy to imagine monks hiding in there. Perhaps – Lydia shuddered at the thought – one could follow the ledge into a sort of flood-circled underground chapel, deeper even than the crypt. She could only see three or four feet into the hole so she shifted slightly so as to let more light past her shoulders. There was a low growl, as from a cornered cat, and something slid with a flash of brown skin and bright claw into the water.

Lydia had never covered the quarter mile between the Glurry door and her parked car so quickly. On Friary Hill Sam the verger saw her coming and opened his front door to her when she dropped off the keys but she said nothing of what she had seen. She would not even tell Clive, who for some reason was in a filthy temper but, curled beside him in their bed that night, she lay awake and thought of mutant rats and chewed canaries.