Wilberforce (47 page)

—Down there, right at both forks. Three miles, you'll find the market square. Cathedral's on the right, can't miss it. Go round to the Chapter House and ask for Miss Flynt.

—Sir—

—Your call's booked for half past ten. It is quarter to now. Chop-chop.

—What call, sir?

The Bishop breezed away back to the house:

—When you return, I'll expect your decision. Please tell him that I've made mine. In the affirmative.

 

34

They looked at him disdainfully in the Chapter House, and no wonder. Sweat was pouring off him as he stood before them in running kit. Mention of the Bishop and Miss Flynt gained him admittance but did not elicit welcome. He was made to wait in a stony corridor, cooling off too quickly, while someone located Miss Flynt. She burst from a dark-paneled door carrying a pile of paperwork.

She was not an old woman. She was not old at all. She filled her smart little frock with a most appealing figure. Her hem hung modestly low, her décolletage remained concealed, but her lips were full and red as if stung by bees. He longed to put them in his mouth and suck the hurt away.

—Wilberforce? she inquired.

He extended a hand, which she ignored.

—This way.

Without having looked at him long enough to appraise him, she slipped back through the door. He hurried after her, wondering whether she was wearing any scent, and if so, what.

—What's your position here, Miss Flynt? Morgan asked.

She located a piece of paper on one of the desks in the room, rang for the operator, and announced her readiness for the call she had booked. After some moments, she replaced the handset. Clearing a space at the desk, she indicated that he should sit in the chair beside the telephone receiver.

He couldn't stop looking at her. Her accent revealed a decent background. Her position indicated an education. Everything else about her appearance and manner testified to a perfect ripeness. How he would enjoy loosening her hair from its pins, relieving her of her cardigan, and investigating her stockings and the skin just above them. It was one of his favorite parts of the female anatomy, that span of inches above the stockings and below the rest. If he could only be allowed to run his fingers and his lips across it, regularly and at leisure, he felt sure something profound inside him would be soothed.

—Miss Flynt, he tried again, I wonder if you might be able to assist me once this is all done.

He waved at the telephone as if gestures could erase it. She looked at him with a trace of mirth. He decided it was encouraging.

—I'm new to the area, he said, and I know I look a fright, but I was wondering if later this afternoon, when I'm dressed, you might do me the kindness of showing me round the cathedral.

The mirth grew around her lips, those plump, vivid—

—Have you an especial interest in cathedrals?

—Oh, yes, Morgan said. They enthrall me.

The apparatus on the desk interrupted with an offensive blare. She put the receiver to her ear:

—Deanery … yes, I'll hold.

—If not this afternoon, perhaps tomorrow, Morgan persisted. When's your day off?

The door opened, revealing a middle-aged man in a cassock. Miss Flynt raised a hand as she spoke into the phone:

—Yes. Hold, please.

The cassock-wearing man spoke urgently:

—Mrs. Flynt, chapter meeting.

—Coming, she snapped.

Morgan gaped at her:

—Mrs.? But, the Bishop said …

She pressed her lips in exasperation.

—My father is really very stubborn about my marriage.

She put the receiver in his hand and pushed him into the chair.

—Morgan?

His name from the receiver, crackly connection, but the voice, unmistakable.

—Good morning, Father, Morgan said.

 

35

—I've had a call from Burton-Lee. Is it true what he says?

Could he pretend the connection had failed? They had left him alone in the room. If he simply put down the telephone, everyone would assume trouble with the wires.

—Probably not.

—I think you had better explain yourself.

—I'm not sure I can, sir.

—None of that. This is extremely serious.

—They've disposed me again?

—Just you drop that jaded tone and answer my question.

Morgan's hand felt weak as he held the receiver. He could put it down, but now no one would believe the connection was to blame.

—Did you abuse Alex Pearl as I was told?

—We … He was …

—
Morgan!

Shock, appall.

—And that girl, did you insult her?

—No!

He tried to steady his voice:

—I never insulted her. I love her.
Nous avons fait l'amour complet.
There's nothing the matter with love!

Silence on the line. (Was the call over?) Then a sigh, or something like it.

—She's not yet fifteen, I'm told.

—Isn't she?

—Do you not even know?

—Why should I?

—For God's sake, boy!

Coarse language on outings was one thing, but Morgan had never heard his father blaspheme. And
boy
? As if Morgan were not his son.

—Does the age of consent mean nothing to you?

—She consented. She said so plenty of times.

His father's voice low, lethal:

—God help me, it's lucky for both of us that I am not in the same room with you.

It wasn't happening. It was all just passing before him, like the blood pouring out of Spaulding's head, like Grieves taking his shoulder and wrenching it into place, like the sounds he had heard behind his father's door that night after the funeral.

—Are you disowning me?

—How dare you put on injured innocence, and to me?

Morgan waited for a petulant reply, but none came to him. His father's voice softened, but he could hear the effort it took.

—I will never disown you, boyo, but I can't lie. I am immeasurably let down.

Morgan forced his voice to find volume.

—I'm sorry, sir.

—Yes, well, I don't think you're anything like sorry. You don't like my being angry with you, but for you to feel remorse, you'd have to grasp just what it is you've done. And plainly you haven't.

Anger was clouding his father's judgment, but this wasn't the time to point it out.

—Shall I join the navy?

Another silence.

—If I didn't know you better, I'd accuse you of flippancy.

—Sir, I'm not—

—As it is, I'll take that suggestion as a sign of your preposterous immaturity.

Like branches across his face, Kitty Deadlock on his palms.

—To be perfectly honest, I don't know what to do with you, but I can't have you home just now.

Too ashamed of him, too ashamed for others to see.

—I'm too angry. If Bishop Sebastian can keep you another day, I'll make arrangements for you to go to … someone.

Orphaned, fully this time. He tried to speak, but a rock filled his throat.

—Please tell the Bishop I'll leave word tomorrow at the latest.

—Oh!

Morgan's voice leapt like a child's.

—The Bishop said to tell you he'd taken his decision. In the affirmative.

—I beg your pardon?

Morgan repeated himself.

—Well, his father said, I'm at a loss for words. All I can say is you had better get down on your knees and give thanks properly.

—Father, you know I don't believe—

—Boyo, I'm ringing off now, so I'll just say this: if you want to live, sometimes you have to die, in a manner of speaking.

Silence on the line, and it went dead.

 

36

Back at the Rectory, he hung on the lion bell, panting. Mrs. Hallows admitted him instantly, as if she'd been standing on the other side of the door.

—His Grace is waiting.

She turned and clacked down the corridor. His side was stabbing from the second run. When he'd left Mrs. Flynt's office, some weaselly number had informed him that the Bishop was expecting him in less than half an hour. He'd had to take the run at speed, which, following the unspeakable telephone call, had left him limping towards the cloakroom and clutching the basin. Being sick always hurt, and this would be no exception. Bending over the toilet, he felt it all come up—three eggs, four pieces of toast, three cups of tea. His stomach writhed even when empty, a muscle in spasm, a joke that wouldn't quit. Mrs. Hallows found him on his knees.

—What's all this?

He wiped his eyes and got to his feet. She stood in the hallway, holding the door. He pulled the chain on the toilet and rinsed his face with cold water.

—Enough filly-folly! she exclaimed. The Bishop is in the summerhouse.

—But …

He could scarcely form words. Surely the Bishop did not wish to see him …

—As you are, she said. His Grace's instructions. Don't stand there gawping, young man.

She led the way through the conservatory, where they'd eaten the night before, and onto the patio. The sun blazed, and he longed to plunge into the canal at the foot of the garden. Mrs. Hallows clomped down a trail of flagstones to a gazebo set before two willow trees. The Bishop looked up and marked his place in a book.

—Sir, Morgan began, I'm a sight. If I might just—

The Bishop pointed to a seat, thanked the woman, and filled two glasses from a pitcher. The lemonade was sweet enough to settle Morgan's stomach and sour enough to restore his head. The Bishop nodded again at the seat he wished Morgan to take. It gave way as he sat, swinging backwards.

The Bishop asked no questions, yet his gaze constituted a sort of embrace, as if speaking were unnecessary between them. He didn't ask whether the call had come off. He didn't ask what Morgan's father had said. He looked at Morgan as if he knew all that but awaited something else. He waited not in supplication or pity, but with the intensity of a watchman, bow in hand, arrow notched, waiting on the walls of a city against attackers in the night. The Bishop looked at him with authority, as if the power of his gaze could transport Morgan back to the room with the voice coming through the telephone—
immeasurably let down, preposterous immaturity
. His father had truly said those things. And Morgan had done the things he had done. He felt a flash of relief that his mother was not alive to know.

The Bishop continued to gaze at him, infinite will, unflinching presence (
desperate case
,
you aren't sorry at all
). The seat swayed again beneath him. What, given liberty, would this man do to him?

—Sir …

Morgan's voice scratched.

—What's going to be done with me?

—Done with you? the Bishop repeated. It seems to me events are already doing quite a lot with you.

Morgan searched the man's face.

—Something is knocking at the gates, the Bishop said.

A surge of alarm—had he spoken out loud about the city and the gates?

—It's battering, isn't it? Nearly splitting the timbers.

Morgan found himself nodding, gripped by the Bishop's muscular and uncompromising … compassion.

—The question, I think, isn't what's to be done with you, but what you will do.

A cloak of lead slipped from his shoulders as another, searing skin snapped tight around him.

—What
can
I do?

—It seems to me you have two options, the Bishop said. You can continue to fortify the gates and hope that what's knocking will grow discouraged and depart.

—It won't, though, will it?

The Bishop blinked as if something pained him.

—Otherwise, Morgan said, I can open the gates.

—Yes.

—But that's suicide.

—It rather depends on what's knocking.

—You said battering, not knocking. Enemies batter. Who opens the gates to an enemy?

The Bishop took a sip from his glass as if they were in a summerhouse on a June day sharing lemonade after a morning's exertions.

Morgan scanned his memory of the
Iliad
, of classic sieges Mr. Grieves had narrated. Who but a traitor would open the gates to the enemy? He ought to have paid closer attention. When it mattered, he was vague about the things he was supposed to have learnt.

—
Batter my heart
, the Bishop said, reaching for the jug to refill Morgan's glass.
For you as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.

He knew that! They'd done it with the Eagle, the day something essential happened. But what?

—That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me.

—Oh, don't make me sick again! Droit cried kicking the swing into motion.

They'd read it the day after Kilby—after Polly—

—
Bend your force to break, blow, burn
—

Isn't that what had happened in the unspeakable interval this morning? Wasn't he being burnt even now?

—You're not going in for this claptrap, are you? Droit said severely. The whole thing's so ludicrously transparent.

Was it?

—Out you're sent on a stiff run, Droit continued. Then they spring that unforgivably maudlin scene on you. Next, sprint back until you're puffed beyond endurance. Finally, without even allowing you an uninterrupted moment to retch up your guts, they haul you outside so this number can moon at you and quote clerical poems. Wake up, Dicky!

Morgan's arms raced with goose pimples. The Bishop sat forward:

—What?

—Sir?

—What happened just now? Don't lie, I haven't the reserves.

Fire at the all-but-direct accusation that he lied habitually and without qualm.

—It's only …

How could he phrase it? He had been told off professionally by a figment of his imagination, a figment that had called him by a most disagreeable name.