Phil Rickman - The Remains of an Altar

‘I’d heard. But I don’t know much more than that.’

‘Reason he was calling… I’m one of the three coordinators of the choirs. I told you about the three choirs, who did the three churches simultaneously?’

‘You did.’

‘OK, well, there’s a pool of about sixty of us, right? Three coordinators who can each pull twelve compatible choristers together at short notice. Twelve out of twenty’s usually a safe bet. Tim called me about half an hour ago. They’re trying to arrange Redmarley and Little Malvern Priory to join in with Wychehill again. Another simultaneous chant.’

‘When?’

‘Tonight. Like we did before, only longer. It has to last, somehow, from nine tonight until three a.m. Luckily, it’s Saturday tomorrow.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s what I’m ringing for, Lol. I wondered if you knew.’

‘He won’t tell you?’

‘He never tells you. He rambles. He gets incoherent. You stop asking because you think maybe he doesn’t know the answer anyway, but it don’t matter, you know you’re gonner get something out of it. Bit of a coincidence, though, ennit?’

‘I don’t know. Honestly. You going to be able to organize it in time?’

‘Won’t be too much of a problem,’ Dan said. ‘After last time, nobody’s going to want to miss it. Even the ones who went home scared.’

A priest could go through his entire career without facing this kind of situation. That was the irony of it.

‘Not a lot frightens me. I can deal with most physical pain, emotional pain, stress. I can achieve separation from the weakness of the body. But there are leaps I can’t make. Aspects I can’t face.’

‘You’re worried by the non-physical?’

Syd leaned back and took a deep pull on his cigarette.

‘Samuel Dennis Spicer,’ he said. ‘Church of England.’

‘Because you can’t resist it, overpower it… slot it? Is that what you mean?’

‘Samuel Dennis Spicer. Church of England.’

Merrily smiled.

‘You talked about any of this to Winnie Sparke?’

‘Winnie?’ He’d been about to bring the cigarette back to his mouth. He brought his arm down. ‘Why would I?’

‘They’re saying in Wychehill that you’re seeing a lot of her.’

‘Told you.’ He leaned his head back over the chorister’s stall. ‘Didn’t I?’

‘You told me about the Ladies of Wychehill.’

‘I assisted Winnie Sparke with her researches into the origins of the church. Parish records. And a few other things. Anything else…’ He squeezed out the cigarette between finger and thumb. ‘Anything else, my wife really wouldn’t like.’

‘Your-?’

‘In essence, stories of our separation are overstated. Having three parishes can be an advantage, Merrily. You go missing for a while, they all think you’re in one of the others. Fiona took the kids down to Reading to get away from a difficult situation. We have a house, and her family’s down there, so it seemed expedient. I go down every week, or we meet somewhere. Yesterday it was in Berkshire. Hungerford.’

‘That works?’

‘Separation – she’s used to that. Least I’m less likely to get killed as a clergyman. Seemed easier to let people think we’d split, otherwise there’d be three restless parishes wondering how long before the new guy.’

‘But why didn’t you? Why didn’t you just leave? Go for a new-’

‘Because I was sent here. Never yet failed to complete a mission. One way or another.’

Like God was his field commander. But obviously Merrily understood.

‘And the difficult situation… that would be drugs?’

‘Partly. Emily’s been a problem. Shrinks say she has an addictive personality. As a kid she overate. You tried to cut down the Mars Bars to three a day… tantrums. Cold turkey on Mars Bars, you believe that? With adolescence, it stopped, all the weight dropped away, and we were so relieved that it was quite a while before we realized what’d replaced it. The shoplifting conviction was a clue. Then robbing the offertory box.’

‘She was in rehab?’

‘Joyce told you all this, I assume. Joyce, the parish talking-newsletter.’

‘And then the Royal Oak changed hands,’ Merrily said. ‘And suddenly it was all on your doorstep. Like a sweetshop.’

‘Yeah. There’s a group of us, county-wide – parents of kids with drug problems. We attend briefing sessions with the police, regional seminars. We learn what to look out for.’

‘Like Roman Wicklow? Did you know about him?’

‘Suspected.’

‘But you didn’t tell the police.’

‘One man with a rucksack?’ Spicer snorted. ‘Take Wicklow out of the picture and there’s another one in place by next week, in a different beauty spot. Better the devil you know.’

‘If they’d arrested him, he could’ve fingered others…’

‘His sort don’t finger people.’

‘What about Raji Khan?’ Merrily said.

‘Raji Khan -’ he looked almost amused ‘- is a very clever boy. Somebody like me says a word against him, it’s like the Crusades are back – I must be starting a holy war. Anyway, not your problem. Your problem’s more ethereal. It’s my problem too but… we’ve been into that.’

‘What are you asking me to do?’

‘Your requiem should be broadened. I was thinking a wider brief. For a start, you might give this place some attention.’

‘What are you trying to lose?’

‘Longworth, for a start. I don’t know what his problem was, but I reckon St Dunstan’s only compounded it. You look at the records, you find that what existed on this site could have been no more than a single monk’s cell. A Celtic hermit’s primitive stone hut. So he builds a pseudocathedral. Look-’

Spicer sprang up, walked into the nave, pointing out empty stone ledges, blank areas of wall.

‘When I first came, there were terrible pictures on these walls, of saints and angels… figurines in niches.’

Merrily looked around. Light oak furniture, a marbled font. He was right: there was little of the period clutter that even churches less than a century old accumulated.

‘They’re in storage. None of them great works of art. No treasure. Phoney High-Church iconography, reeking of… hierarchy. Grotesque, to me. Forbidding – like that hideous angel on Longworth’s tomb. When we had one small statue nicked, I talked the parish council – well, Preston Devereaux – into safeguarding the rest. He didn’t need much encouraging. His family always found Upper Wychehill an intrusion. His grandfather’s on record as having attempted to stop Longworth building.’

‘You’ve virtually… stripped the place?’

‘Best we could, bit by bit, over a period. They’re all newcomers here, nobody missed anything. But I didn’t get rid of it. It’s as if it’s built into the stone.’

‘What is?’

‘Longworth’s grandiose concept. Longworth himself. He brought something here that’s caused an imbalance. This church is disproportionate to its surroundings and to the community. It’s a big stone ego-trip, and it’s like the houses are hiding away from it… below the road, over the road, squeezing into the rocks. It explains a lot about Wychehill. I found a journal kept by one of my predecessors, thirty, forty years ago. Even then, the population was unstable, people buying and selling, coming and going.’

Syd Spicer’s voice was crisp and carried across the body of the church with hardly an echo. Whatever you thought about Joseph Longworth, he’d known who to consult about acoustics.

‘I know a bit about geology,’ Spicer said. ‘Rock-climbing used to be my specialist skill. I was an instructor some of the time, so I know about rock. There’s a small fault through Wychehill, did you know that? I mean, the whole of the Malverns, that was volcanic, but a long time ago. The shifts in this area – there’s been more recent action here. I say recent – eighteenth, nineteenth centuries.’