I was so fortunate. My good luck took my breath away as I sat there, adding up my little columns of figures, glowing with happiness.
After an hour I called the number on the Discarnate leaflet and got an authoritative male voice. ‘Brother Simon here,’ it said. ‘How may we help you?’
‘I’d like to interview your reverend father for
Life and Times
magazine,’ I said, inventing freely. ‘Would six o’clock be convenient?’
‘Five would be better,’ said Brother Simon. ‘We keep God’s hours here. I will consult the table of appointments … yes, the father could see you at five. You know where we are?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Good. Come to the front door and tell the porter that Brother Simon has given you an admit. Your name?’
‘Chapman,’ I said. ‘See you soon, Brother Simon.’
Jon had put my new identity card through my letterbox. It was a nice job. I wondered if Kepler had managed to demolish his virus. I assumed that he had, because no headlines screamed ‘Air Traffic Control Lost!’ in the news kiosk I could see from my window. If I was going to get to the castle before five I would have to leave now. I wasn’t going to wake Daniel up to see me off. I changed into clothes suitable for a newspaper person, grabbed my notebook and a pen, and called a taxi. Poor Timbo had received enough shocks in his young life. I wasn’t going to take him to that graveyard of slaughtered vehicles again if I could help it.
This time no one was to be allowed to upset me. My black suit was formal, my white shirt professional, my wide collar a miracle of the lacemaker’s art. I had put on several silver rings which Daniel had given me, amethyst, moonstone, opal. I had sprayed myself with Yardley April Violets. I was, as far as feminine defences were concerned, unassailable.
The little wicket door opened and another of those skinny robed figures poked its nose out. This time I announced, ‘I have an admit from Brother Simon,’ before anyone could start retching. The bony hand and thin wrist, ringed with black rubber bands, gestured and I stepped boldly inside. And stopped.
Oh, my. It was a castle inside as well. I was standing in an entrance hall with a very high ceiling, but beyond me opened out a real great hall. It had a proper Y-shaped staircase mounting to the upper floors. A gallery ran around the whole circumference. There were two massive fireplaces, suitable for tree trunks or Yule logs, and the hall was hung with the heads of the stags which I presumed had once been roasted on those hearths. I suppose that one might as well do something decorative with the rest of the beast. If one can call cutting off something’s head and sticking it on a wall decorative. I, personally, didn’t.
Hundreds of glass eyes stared out at me. They looked blank, as well they might. Someone in the Depression had ordered the whole of the interior, including what looked like linenfold panelling, to be painted a colour called ‘light stone’. Unique in making the painted surface look dirtier than it had before the painter began, it was a kind of contaminated cream in colour. And flaking. The floor consisted of stone flags innocent of any carpet or mat, swept painfully clean. It was freezing. I sniffed. No scent of cooking. But then, one would not have expected that.
The little acolyte had vanished, leaving me stranded in the middle of this waste of floor. I had no idea where I might find Reverend Father Hungerford. Thinking that this might be a ploy to disconcert visitors, I drew up a kitchen chair, the only portable-looking furniture in all this huge space, sat down, and began to write a description of the hall. That ought to produce some action. Nothing upsets a bully more than someone who hasn’t noticed that they are being bullied.
I started to hear sounds and they were very pleasant. Plainchant. A Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy. I hummed along. Plainchant follows rules and isn’t hard to busk. I was just beginning to enjoy myself, anticipating the rise and fall of the chant, when I heard footsteps and stood up to greet whoever was coming.
Imagine my surprise when I found myself looking into that Savonarola face which had so disconcerted me one morning at my bakery. But my surprise was as nothing to that of my interlocutor, who was staggered. For a moment he was utterly at a loss. His violet-dark eyes widened, his soft kiss-me-quick mouth gaped, he gave a gasp and he was so attractive that my knees went momentarily weak.
‘Corinna Chapman,’ I said, holding out my hand. No use attempting to pass myself off as anyone else, though I could still credibly be a reporter for
Life and Times
. ‘I am pleased to meet you, Reverend Father.’
‘Miss Chapman,’ he said, regaining his voice. It was a sweet voice. ‘I thought you were a baker.’
‘I am that as well,’ I said, giving him my card. ‘Shall we talk?’
‘Come in here,’ he said, opening one of the small doors under the gallery. ‘You might find it too cold out here in the great hall.’
He had recovered. Rats. I might find the hall too cold. He, by inference, wouldn’t. Indeed he appeared to be clad solely in one of the order’s thin black garments, judging by the way it hung on him. I dragged my mind away from contemplating this. He resembled a Greek statue far too closely for comfort. I wondered how old he was. The little lines around his eyes indicated he must have been at least forty. Starvation had not damaged him too much yet. But it would.
His office was a small wood-panelled room which had escaped the general awfulising that had damaged the great hall. It also lacked dead stuffed animals, which was a plus. On the wall was a small icon of a ravaged looking saint, probably Simon Stylities, because he was holding a pillar. And next to him an incongruous Madonna, a modern painting of the Mother of God as a strong, rosy-faced country girl with the child on her ample knee. There was also a fine gold encrusted gothic cross next to one made of black wood tied together with tarred string, like the cross given to Joan of Arc by an English soldier who was required to watch her burn at the stake.
I sat down on a (padded) visitor’s chair while my host assumed his (unpadded) bench. The office had the usual office stuff, including a new computer. There were neatly stacked leaflets with that headline on them. FAT? HATE IT? SO DOES GOD.
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘How do you know God hates people to be fat?’
‘There we stray into doctrine,’ he told me.
‘Let us stray,’ I suggested.
‘Very well.’ He set the tips of his fingers together and began to expound. Whenever I see that gesture I settle back and wait for Nanny to tell me a big, fat lie. I tried not to be distracted by the man’s sheer physical beauty, a haunted face which might have been painted by El Greco, Lestat from the last frames of
Queen of the Damned
. ‘The desert fathers believed that only in simplicity and austerity could true virtue and enlightenment be found. This is shared by most of the leading faiths, which all employ fasting; Ramadan of Islam and Yom Kippur of the Jews. Buddhist saints subsist on sunlight and die in mudra, preserved forever by their own austerity. Food and drink are distractions from the contemplation of the infinite, and what person can call themselves virtuous who is dripping with gross heaviness, wallowing in the fleshpots?’
‘And so …’ I prompted.
‘Here we eat little, just enough to support life. The food is sustaining but not palatable. We work hard at uncongenial tasks, to learn humility. We learn the value of silence.’
‘I see. And your seminars?’
‘Those who cannot partake of the life of the community can come in, though it disturbs our peace. They can be partly initiated into our mysteries. For this they pay a lot of money, which purges them of some of their excess goods, and they can continue with our practices out in the world. Though not as well,’ he added. ‘The world has too many distractions.’
‘The rubber bands?’
‘Are to remind them of fasting and purity. They are graded, from white for a neophyte to black for a brother or sister.’
‘So you have women in your order?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said, smiling a little. ‘Women need to purge themselves of grossness even more than men. Vanity, vanity. Some little vanities, like cosmetics. Some large vanities, like sexual love.’
‘Sexual love is a vanity?’ I asked, making a note.
‘The only love is the love of God,’ he told me. ‘Human love is fallible, it wanes, it ceases, it stops, it is denied,’ he added. That about summed it up for earthly love, I thought. And remembered the naked man asleep in my bed, cat curled into the small of his back. I must have smiled because Father Hungerford’s expression became markedly more austere. ‘You may think that it will last,’ he said coldly, ‘but only God knows eternity.’
‘True. Perhaps you would show me around?’ I asked. ‘If my presence is not too upsetting for your community?’
‘There will be time before collation,’ he said, consulting a Phillip Patek watch — vanity, eh? I stood up and shut my notebook.
He led me up the main stairs to the series of small rooms all around the gallery. Each one had a camp bed, a single blanket, a small table and a cardboard box, which probably contained what few personal belongings members of the community were allowed to keep. They seemed to consist of a toothbrush and a razor. No books. Not even a tin of sweets or a handkerchief or a flower.
‘We are still at work,’ said Father Hungerford, leading me down back stairs to a large room in which perhaps forty people in brown robes were sitting on the floor and stitching tapestries. A thin woman in a black robe was supervising, handing out new threads and occasionally fixing mistakes. I was obscurely pleased that the front of her robe was stuck with threaded needles and she was at that moment asking, ‘Who has the good scissors?’ Some things about needlework never change. The tapestries were not exclusively religious, though several people were working on pastel Raphael Madonnas. I caught sight of that unicorn and Pegasus one which Therese Webb had been working on. So this was why her prices had gone down. She had said something about slave labour.
There was no buzz of conversation in the room as there would have been amongst any usual group of people all doing the same thing. Just the plainchant, which was coming from another room. No one looked up as we came in except the needlework sister, who gave a brief smile and abandoned her search for the good scissors.
‘Why tapestry?’ I asked her.
‘It isn’t too hard to learn for those who have never so much as sewn on their own buttons,’ she said briskly. ‘It requires concentration. It is a good discipline. And we can sell the tapestries to support the community. These acolytes are only here for the two-week retreat. By Friday they will be back in the world, much thinner and more at peace with themselves.’
My father, as far as I could tell, was not in this room. I caught the eye of a portly gentleman who was stitching easily at a sunset over a country cottage of unusual frightfulness. He winked. This cheered me. That one would be back on the port and cigars as soon as he shucked his brown robe.
‘And here,’ said Father Hungerford, leading me on, ‘are the singers.’
Another room, this time smaller and therefore warmer. Twenty people were singing from an overhead PowerPoint projection. It was an authentic medieval music manuscript, with those square notes which I suspect might be called neumes. They were doing a pretty good job, which argued that they had been singing together for a while. ‘Credo in unum, in unum Deum,’ they sang. ‘I believe in the one God.’ One God, perhaps, but an awful lot of sects, of which this was not the least peculiar. In his own way, Hungerford had stolen the ideas of someone like Fox, who established the Quakers — silence, work, plainness — and embroidered them with decorative St Anthony features like that famine bread and complete rejection of human love. At least he wasn’t asking anyone to sit on a pillar, I suppose …
No father amongst the singers. We went on, down and down, and came to a cavernous kitchen in which it would have been proper to prepare a massive banquet for a hundred or so like-minded friends. There were huge slow combustion ovens, cold as charity. There were several cooking hearths, with pot hangers and treadmills for little dogs to turn the spit — how Mrs Pemberthy’s Traddles would have adorned one of these! There were huge unpolished tables running down the middle of the cavern which had once groaned under haunches of venison, saddles of beef, mounds of potatoes, hundred of pies, game and larks’ tongues and pork — and mounds of butter and cheese and breads and bowls of bitter salad and marzipan castles and iced cakes and fruit jellies oozing with cream.
The three electric light bulbs swayed over a meagre repast. Huge pots held what I thought was a vegetable stew, mainly turnips and potato, with a few carrots, parsnips, and maybe an onion to eke out the broth. Famine bread lay already cut into chunks on wooden trays. No spices, no salt and pepper, no butter, no cheese, no meat, no herbs. I must ask about those herbs, I reminded myself. Several of the brown-robed were cutting up yet more turnips. One of them was my father.
He looked straight at me and did not react. He didn’t recognise me. I didn’t know what to say. I stayed silent. Silently, I began to fume. I had chased him from pillar to post, whatever that meant, exposed myself to shock and fear, and finally found him and he didn’t even know me!
Father Hungerford was introducing a black-clad monk. ‘Brother Amos,’ he said. ‘Our brother was once a famous chef.’
I almost put out my hand and then didn’t. In view of Father Hungerford’s statements about sexual love, touching was probably forbidden.
Brother Amos had been fat. He now sagged. His eyes were red. His hands shook. He nodded. ‘Have a taste,’ he offered, and gave me a spoon. One of the huge pots was placed on a trivet on the table. I tasted. Turnip stew. Not unpleasant. Brother Amos brought out a bottle of vitamin concentrate and measured an amount into the pot.
‘Sustaining,’ he told me. Then he opened a small box and put a heaping teaspoon of something which smelt foul beyond belief into the innocent stew. ‘But not palatable.’
‘Black broth,’ I said, enlightened. The Prof had told me all about how the Spartans mortified their flesh with appalling soup in order to prove that they were the hardiest soldiers. He thought it was a silly idea, mind, and added that they had in the end been beaten by the Thebans, who ate their soup without contaminants. ‘That’s asafoetida, isn’t it?’