The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (9 page)

‘Farrar?’

‘Yes, Vicar?’

‘I wonder if – if I might have a glass of water? My throat seems a little tight. Constricted, somehow.’

‘Why, certainly, Vicar.’

‘Thank you.’

A moment later, having taken a few modest sips, he was ready to continue – or as ready as he’d ever be.

‘Well, you know, I – I took up my post here in 1919 – in January, was it? Or February – oh well, I don’t suppose it really matters.’

‘No, it really doesn’t,’ said the Chief-Inspector drily. ‘Just go on.’

‘Anyway, it was in one or other of the early months of 1919, so not too long after the end of the War, and my predecessor in the parish had been a young man, relatively
young, but nevertheless much liked, I might almost say much loved, by his parishioners. All the more so because he’d been killed in action – during one of the last Big Pushes. I ought to explain, too, that he’d been so keen to do his bit for King and Country he’d actually concealed the fact that he was a clergyman and enlisted as a common soldier. Then he was posted to the front, where he died quite the hero’s death. He was mentioned in dispatches, you know, and there was vague talk of a posthumous George Cross.

‘In any event, when I arrived here to take up my living in 1919, I found that his presence, if I may put it that way, was still very, very powerful. Not that there was any resentment against me, I hasten to add – well, not to start with – it was just that the locals hadn’t forgotten the shining example of his courage. I fear I must have struck them as something of a letdown by comparison.

‘That would certainly explain why, when Cynthia and I moved in, the parish was at first a trifle standoffish, a trifle “sniffy”. There was, in particular, a Mrs de Cazalis. She’s our local
grande dame
and she’d evidently been very “in” with my predecessor. Harker, the village’s odd-job man, had a nickname for her – Vicar’s Pet. You know, like the kind of schoolchild who gets ragged for being Teacher’s Pet?

‘Well, it soon became clear that she expected things to go on just as they had before. My predecessor had been a bachelor, you see, and whilst you might expect that to have
counted as a point against him, it had in reality turned out to be the reverse. All the local ladies – now, Inspector, I wouldn’t like to suggest that they were
all
busybodies – but all the local ladies who
participated
, don’t you know, who organised our Charity Sales and Mystery Tours and Charabanc Outings for the Old Folk, well, they were absolutely in seventh heaven that there was no interfering vicar’s wife to run these things, which is traditionally the case.

‘Hence it was, at least in the first few months, a rather lonely life for us. It’s a lonely part of the country, anyway, and we had problems making new friends, as we tend to do. So, without thinking of the possible consequences, Cynthia eventually elected to busy herself with all the usual chores of a vicar’s wife and, I’m afraid, only succeeded in putting a few noses out of joint. There was even, at last, a sort of showdown – is that what it’s called? – a showdown in the Vicarage.

‘I can still see them all sitting in our little front room, rattling their teacups in their laps, and after some pointed comments on the very
exceptional
calibre of my predecessor, on his heroism, all of that, Mrs de Cazalis turned to me and enquired, bold as brass, “And what did
you
do in the Great War, Vicar?” The italics, needless to say, were hers.’

There was a pregnant pause, and it was the Chief-Inspector, the only one of the Vicar’s listeners not to know his story’s dénouement, who nudged him into continuing.

‘You understand, Inspector,’ said the Vicar, ‘I really didn’t mean to tell a lie. I didn’t. It was almost as though – well, as though I wasn’t
stealing
the truth – which is what I always think a lie is, you know, a stolen truth – but, as it were, embezzling it.’

This original concept clearly intrigued the policeman.

‘Embezzling the truth? I confess I …’

‘As though I’d temporarily stolen somebody else’s truth to get myself out of a hole, but fully intended to replace it once the crisis was over.

‘Alas,’ he sighed, ‘like so many embezzlers before me, I was to discover that there never does arrive that convenient moment when you’re able to return what you’ve stolen. Before you could say Jack Robinson, I’d gone on stealing other truths that didn’t belong to me, until I found myself – oh dear God forgive me! – I found myself living a permanent lie.’

The poor man now really was on the verge of tears, and his wife would have attempted to offer him comfort, except that she must have realised that at such a point any display of affectionate solidarity on her part would have done for him.

‘Mr Wattis,’ said Trubshawe, ‘I know how difficult this is for you, but I have to ask. What
was
this “truth” which you – you embezzled? That you too had been a war hero, p’raps?’

The Vicar was aghast at such a calumny.

‘No, no, no, no, no! The very idea, Inspector! I would never,
never
have presumed … By lying as I did, it wasn’t at all my intention to puff myself up. I simply hoped to take those prying old – I mean, the ladies of the Church Committee, down a peg or two.

‘I recall a schoolmaster friend of ours – I’m thinking of Grenfell, dear,’ he said to his wife, ‘who once admitted to me that he, the very gentlest of souls, would be a regular martinet with his charges at the start of every new term, actually going so far as caning them for the most piffling of offences, even as it went against the grain, because he believed that, if he gave them so excessive a demonstration of his authority straight off, he’d never have to use his cane again. Well, that in a sense was what I was also trying to do. I allowed myself to tell one little untruth right at the beginning – merely to impose
my
authority, so to speak – and I trusted I’d never have to tell another.’

‘Yes – yes,’ replied Trubshawe, ‘I can see how that might have worked. But I have to put it to you again – what was the lie?’

‘The lie?’ said the Vicar sadly. ‘The lie was that, throughout the War, I’d been an Army padre in Flanders. Nothing grand, you understand, no heroics, no mention in dispatches. I just left my parishioners with the impression – not much more than an impression, I assure you – that I’d, well …’

‘I get you. You claimed you’d seen action in Europe.
Instead of which …?’

The Vicar almost literally hung his head.

‘Instead of which, I’d been a company clerk in Aldershot. I hadn’t yet been ordained and, in addition, I was declared unfit for active service. My feet, you know.’

‘Your feet?’ said the Chief-Inspector.

‘They’re flat, I’m afraid. I was born with flat feet.’

‘Aha. I see. Well, Vicar,’ said Trubshawe benignly, ‘I have to say it strikes me as a pretty forgivable fib. Not much there for anybody to make a song-and-dance about, surely?’

‘No,’ said the Vicar, ‘perhaps not. If that had been all there was to it.’

‘There was more to it, then?’

‘Well, I fear it all rather got out of control. You’re familiar, I’m certain, with the old rhyme “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive”? Once I’d told the original lie, there I was, caught in my own web. Even though I played down any notion that I might have been a hero, I daresay I sinned by omission when I let the inference stand.

‘The consequence was that these ladies of the parish took it for granted that I was being disarmingly modest about my experience and started pestering me about everything I’d seen and done at the front. Oh, don’t misunderstand me, I feel sure their curiosity in this regard was utterly irreproachable, except – except in the case of Mrs de Cazalis herself, whom I confess I did come to suspect – it was most
un-Christian of me, I know – but I did come to suspect her of harbouring, alas, all too well-founded doubts about the probity of my character and even of hoping to trip me up. Then it all came to a head with the matter of the organ.’

‘The organ?’

‘The church organ. When I arrived in the parish, it was in dire need of repair, as many church organs were in the aftermath of the War, and as always there was simply no money to pay for it. So, following innumerable committee meetings, with all the internecine bickerings which would appear to be part and parcel of these meetings, and whose endless ramifications and recriminations I’ll spare you, we decided to hold a Grand Charity Fête.

‘It had Tombola, Morris Dancing around the Maypole, a Punch-and-Judy show for the tots, a Pin-the-Nail-on-the-Donkey’s-Tail stall for the older children and an entertainment which we, the members of the Church Committee, got up ourselves. We invited some jolly Pierrots and Harlequins over from the Postbridge concert-party, the Fol-de-Rols. The girls of St Cecilia’s performed a series of tasteful Tableaux Vivants. Mr Hawkins from the Post Office charmed us all with his famous bird-call impressions. And his eldest son Georgie – well, Georgie, as I recall, did some sort of an act with gaily coloured hoops. I never did know quite what was supposed to happen to those hoops, as we had next to no time for rehearsals, but Georgie surely didn’t mean for them all to bound off the stage in every direction
at once. Anyway, it got the biggest laugh of the day, which I suppose was the main thing.’

‘Mr Wattis,’ the Chief-Inspector nipped in quickly, ‘sorry, but where exactly is this business of the Fête going? And what has it to do with Raymond Gentry?’

There was a snort from the Colonel.

‘Really, Trubshawe!’ he cried. ‘Why must you badger the poor fellow so! You asked him for his story and that’s just what he’s giving you. It’s a deuced uncomfortable spot you’ve put him on, you know, but he’s doing his level best. Go on, Clem, and take your own time. Whatever courage you did or did not show in the War, you’re certainly making up for it now. You’re an example to us all.’

‘Very kind of you to put it that way, Roger,’ said the Vicar, visibly touched by his friend’s unsolicited words of support. In fact, with the relief of having got over the worst, there had now come a new confidence in his voice.

‘The thing is, Inspector,’ he went on, ‘I was expected, as Vicar, to contribute some little thing of my own to the show. And, as I couldn’t sing, or juggle, or do bird-call impressions, or anything of the kind, it was finally proposed – by the perfidious Mrs de Cazalis, surprise surprise – that I deliver a public talk about my wartime experiences.’

‘H’m. Quite a can of worms you’d opened up.’

‘I simply couldn’t say no, particularly as it was to benefit the church, and the other ladies of the committee excitedly
backed her up, and I felt well and truly trapped. Cynthia will confirm how I agonised long and hard over how I might extricate myself. I tell you, Inspector – all of you – it got to the point where I even contemplated resigning from my living as the only decent thing to do, but – well, that would undoubtedly also have meant quitting the Church, which would have been a frightful cross to bear for the rest of my life. As well as something I could ill-afford.

‘Anyway, the upshot was, I agreed to give the talk.

‘There was absolutely no question, as I already said, of inventing stories of my own so-called courage, but I realised I would have to offer a detailed summary of conditions at the front. So I read every single book on the war I could lay my hands on, until I became quite an expert on the subject – history manuals, personal memoirs, whatever there was, I read it and made copious notes. And, you understand, I couldn’t even borrow these books from the circulating library, as I suspected it would soon dawn on the snooping Mrs de Cazalis what I was up to. So I had to buy them, putting a real strain on our purse-strings, given that Cynthia and I are as poor as a pair of church-mice.

‘But even if what I had to say wouldn’t be, couldn’t be,
my
truth, I wanted it to be, at some level,
the
truth. You do understand? That was very important to me.’

‘What happened?’

The Vicar seemed briefly in danger of once more losing his composure, but he swiftly rallied.

‘It was a fiasco!’

‘Really? But why? If, as you say, you’d done your homework?’

‘The fact is, I’m simply no good at lying. I was convincing, more or less, when I gave my audience a general outline of the situation in Flanders. But when I started to talk in the first person – about
my
visiting the trenches,
my
consoling the walking wounded,
my
holding a service in a half-ruined village chapel with the distant rumble of Big Bertha shaking the rafters – well, Inspector, I quite went to pieces. I stumbled over my words, I was hazy on details, I got my dates all mixed up, I lost the place in the notes I’d made, I hemmed and hawed and then hemmed all over again. I was clueless, clueless!’

‘I’m truly sorry, Reverend. You didn’t deserve that for one minor lapse.’

‘Oh, it all happened a very long time ago. Yet, you know, I still wake up in a sweat at the memory of it. No, no, no, why should I pretend any longer? Not in a sweat. I wake up screaming. Do you hear? I, the sweet old Vicar, dear old Clem Wattis who wouldn’t harm a fly –
I wake up screaming in the middle of the night!
Oh, my poor Cynthia, what I’ve forced you to put up with!’

His wife’s eyes looked into his with infinite love and compassion.

‘Where was I?’ he finally asked himself. ‘Oh yes. Well, I could already hear a smattering of titters from the audience
and I could see, in the very front row, Mrs de Cazalis savouring every minute of her triumph.

‘And then I came in my notes to the word “Ypres”.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Chief-Inspector. ‘What word?’

‘Ypres. The Belgian town, you know. I had blithely jotted down the name without thinking I’d actually have to pronounce it when I gave my talk, and I got so tangled in my pronunciation it emerged from my mouth like a – forgive the vulgarity, but I’m afraid there
is
no other word – like a belch.

‘I’d also misspelled it, which didn’t help. It’s an old failing of mine, spelling. I can’t spell for toffee. Matter of fact,’ he added with an unexpected dash of self-deprecating humour, ‘I can’t even spell “toffee”.’