Jane Gardam - Last Friends

‘Stay there,’ Dulcie ordered him, making for a chancel prayer desk up near the organ. ‘I can’t pray with anyone watching.’

‘The Muslims can,’ he said, trying to bring the blood back to his knobbed hands. ‘This is a refrigerator, not a church.’

‘ Muslims ,’ she said, ‘can crowd together on mats and swing about and keep their circulation going and you don’t see what the women do but I don’t think they pray with men, in a huddle. Anyway, I need what I know,’ and she vanished, eastwards.

‘Five minutes,’ he shouted after her as her high heels tapped out of sight. ‘Utter madness,’ he said to the stained glass windows. ‘Hopeless woman. Hopeless village.’ His voice echoed hopelessly around the rood-screen and its sad saints. Rows of regimental flags hung drooping down the side-aisle like shredding dish cloths, still as sleeping bats. ‘They’re all off their heads here,’ he called out. There was the sound of a heavy key being turned in the lock of the south door, just behind him. The one by which they had entered.

He sprang towards it, flung himself first through the wire, then the baize door, the south door they had just pushed heavily through. He tugged and shouted.

But the door was now firmly and determinedly locked from the outside. Chloe, on her bike, had been thinking that it was evening again.

* * *

Up in the chancel there was no sign of Dulcie but at length he saw the top of her head and her praying hands. She was like a — what was it called? A little Dutch thing. Little painting on wood. ‘Praying hands,’ he thought. ‘They have them on Christmas cards. Dürer. The Germans were perfectly all right then.’ Her head was bowed (‘She still has thick, curly hair’). ‘Five minutes,’ he called, like a tout, or an invigilator.

* * *

Soon he began to hum a tune from his seat in front of the choir-stall and after a minute she opened angry eyes.

‘We are locked in,’ he said.

‘Nonsense,’ she said.

‘I heard the key thrust in and turned. It was Chloe.’

Dulcie went pattering back down the central aisle, tried the oak door first with one hand, then the other, then both hands together. She regarded the broad and ancient lock. ‘You heard her? Chloe?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you shout?’

‘I think I did. Now, leave all this to me, Dulcie, I banged and rattled and yelled. I will do it again.’

‘Yes. She is getting deaf.’

They stood in icy shadow and he called again, ‘Hullo?’

‘It’s no good shouting, Fiscal-Smith. Nobody in the village is up yet except Chloe.’ But he roared out, ‘ Hullo there?’ ‘There may be someone walking a dog?’

‘Nobody walks a dog as early as this in winter. We are all old here.’

‘I’m tired of this “old”,’ said Fiscal-Smith. ‘We don’t have it in the north. Won’t Susan be coming by on the horse? And where’s that boy?’

‘Sleeping. And Susan won’t be out for at least two hours. She may notice we are missing, but I don’t think so.’

‘I suppose ,’ he said, ‘you don’t carry such a thing as a mobile telephone?’

‘Good heavens, no. Do you?’

‘Never.’

‘We could try shouting louder.’

And so they did for a time — treble and bass — but there was no response.

‘Of course, there are the bells,’ said Dulcie. She was shaking now with cold. ‘It might warm us up.’

Fiscal-Smith released the tufted, woolly bell-ropes from their loops in the tower and handed one to her, icy to the touch. She closed her eyes and dragged at it with childish fists. It did not stir.

‘I’ll have a go,’ he said, and after a time, sulkily, on the edge of outrage, the damp and matted bell-pull began to move stiffly up and down: but Fiscal-Smith looked exhausted.

‘Go on, go on,’ cried Dulcie. ‘You got it up I think,’ and thought, I believe I said something rather risqué just then, and giggled.

‘This is quite serious, Dulcie. Don’t laugh. Go over there and pull the blue one.’

And so they toiled, and after what seemed to be hours they both heard the sad boom of a bell.

‘I think it was only the church clock striking seven,’ she said.

‘We must go on trying.’

But she couldn’t and made for the chancel again and possible candles on the altar for heat. He followed, but the candles looked like greasy ice and all the little night-lights people light for memorials to the dead were brownish and dry and there were no matches. Dulcie’s lips were turning blue now. ‘This,’ she said, not crossly, ‘will be the death of me. We have no warm clothing and between us we are nearly two hundred years old. My mother stayed in bed all the time after eighty. There was nothing wrong with her but everyone cherished her.’

Through a door they found a vestry and a wall full of modern pine cupboards, ‘Bequeathed,’ said a plaque, ‘by Elizabeth Feathers’. ‘I wish she’d bequeathed an electric fire,’ said Dulcie.

Inside, the cupboards were crammed full of choirboys’ black woollen cassocks, and Fiscal-Smith and Dulcie somehow scrambled into one each. Dulcie said they were damp. But then, over in the priests’ vestry nearby, there was treasure. Albs, cottas, chasubles and a great golden embroidered cope beneath a linen cover.

‘Wrap it round you,’ ordered Fiscal-Smith.

‘It’s reserved for Easter only,’ said Dulcie. ‘It’s for the Bishop and it’s too big. It could go round us both.’

So they both stood inside it, their faces looking out from it side-by-side. ‘My neck is still very cold,’ said Dulcie. ‘Look, there is the ceremonial mitre and the St. Ague stoll. This church! This church you know was once High. And very well-endowed.’

‘I can’t remember what High is. I’m a Roman Catholic,’ said Fiscal-Smith, ‘but I’m in favour if High turns up the heat. Remember Hong Kong. No copes there. Too hot. This is very curious head-gear, Dulcie. We are becoming ridiculous.’

‘I wish this was a monastery,’ she said. ‘There’d be a supply of hoods.’

‘That was because of the tonsures.’

‘I’m not surprised. I had terrible tonsils as a girl. Before penicillin and I wasn’t a monk. Wonderful penicillin.’

‘I’m lost,’ said Fiscal-Smith.

‘It was God’s reward for us winning the war, penicillin.’ (‘She’s bats.’) ‘Willy used to say that every nation that has ever achieved a great empire blazes up for a moment in its dying fire. Penicillin. I wouldn’t have missed our Finest Hour, would you, Fiscal-Smith?’

‘I bloody would,’ he said. Then after a silence, ‘Look here, Dulcie. Where do they keep the Communion wine?’

* * *

It was later that there came a loud knocking on the vestry door into the churchyard. ‘Are you in there? An answer please. Are you there? Who are you?’

‘Yes, we are locked into the church. Accidentally. Dulcie is not well. It is very cold. This is Sir Frederick Fiscal-Smith speaking.’

‘Have you tried to open the door?’

‘Of course we’ve tried the bloody door.’

‘I mean this door. The vestry door. It is beside you. There is an inside bolt.’

Fiscal-Smith leaned from his princely garment, considered the unobtrusive little modern door, slid open a silken brass bolt and revealed the misty morning. There, in running shorts among the graves, stood the family man.

Out through the doorway, laced across with trails of young ivy, a door which, like Christ’s in Holman-Hunt’s Light of the World in St. Paul’s Cathedral, only opened from within, stepped a pair of ancient Siamese twins in cloth of gold, one of them wearing a papal headdress and both of them blue to the gills.