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This, Biddle knew, could only lead to territory to be averted in any way possible. ‘My word, these rock cakes are fantastic!’ he exclaimed, thrusting one into his mouth and unintentionally completing his distraction by uttering a loud scream. Slocombe and Milne stared at him in astonishment. ‘Um …’ Biddle began, apologetically removing a bloody rock cake from his mouth, ‘I think I’ve broken a tooth.’
The argument might have been curtailed earlier had any of the participants been in possession of the truth about what Jesus was doing at that very moment.
Since the end of the family service at St Barnabas, Jesus had been in no position to move any chairs at all, having hurried away to catch a bus to nearby Cogspool where he was working at a local homeless shelter that had recently started offering free Sunday lunches to those in need. He had quickly cleaned the toilets before the doors were opened, only to discover that today there was a problem.
‘Oh Jesus,’ complained Roy Hackett, who ran the shelter and had no idea how precisely his expletive was targeted. ‘I told them we needed more bacon, they’ve gone and forgotten the sodding bacon, and now there’s no bacon.’ The bacon situation now as clear as it could possibly be, Jesus softly enquired what had been on the menu. ‘Eggs and bacon. We always do eggs and bacon.’ Roy’s approach to cuisine was functional rather than artistic. ‘I would suggest bacon constitutes a good fifty-sodding-per-cent of that particular dish,’ he added, in case his volunteer hadn’t quite picked up on the full ramifications of the bacon deficiency.
‘So … you have eggs?’ Jesus responded, calmly.
‘That would be the other fifty per cent, yes,’ Roy impatiently replied.
‘Fine,’ nodded Jesus. ‘I’ve just the recipe.’
‘What, eggs and eggs?’ Roy sarcastically countered.
‘In the form of an omelette,’ Jesus agreed.
‘Oh, right.’ Roy poked his head out of the kitchen door and squinted; the shelter was filling up fast and there seemed to be rather a lot of new faces today. ‘Though we’ll run out of eggs I expect.’
‘Don’t worry,’ the new volunteer smiled back, ‘I’m good at making food go round a lot of people.’
Biddle had indeed broken a tooth, a diversion which caused Bishop Slocombe considerable merriment and Biddle considerable pain. In the long run, however, Biddle had achieved the near impossible feat of bringing the argument about serving to an end before it got violent, so he began to feel that in his own minor way he had managed to martyr himself.
Had God broken his tooth to prevent violence? Was this actually an act of divine intervention, he an unwitting pawn in a cruel trade-off for a greater good in the midst of a larger game? Was that what being a priest was all about?
As the Bishop administered more wine (the best he had to offer by way of an anaesthetic), Biddle explained that he had been in his new parish for so short a time that he hadn’t yet managed to register with a dentist.
‘Oh, you mustn’t worry about that,’ Slocombe exclaimed, refilling Biddle’s glass, ‘you must go to my dentist. He’s in Cogspool – he does every priest in the area.’
Biddle was not convinced that this was the best qualification for a dentist.
Chapter 4
As Biddle cycled unsteadily up the darkening road towards his house some hours later than he had intended to return, he saw a small, hunched figure sitting on his doorstep. He sighed – if it was the drunk man needing the toilet again why couldn’t he use the bus stop like everyone else? But as Biddle got closer he saw that it wasn’t a man at all – or at least, barely.
‘It’s … Gerard, isn’t it?’ he asked, wishing he’d brought some chewing gum to cover up the Chianti still lingering on his breath. A pale face looked up at him through misted glasses.
‘Oh – er – Mr … Reverend Mr,’ the boy began, uncertainly.
‘I’m sorry, have you been waiting long?’ Biddle asked, hoping that his visitor had only come to leave some kind of message. He didn’t want to be uncharitable, but lunch with Bishop Slocombe had been more punishing than usual and right now what he needed more than anything else was a long soak in the bath with a good book. Not the Good Book, which wasn’t really designed for bath-time reading. He would have another stab at Weaving the Spell of Civilisation, an Indian novel which was not necessarily a good book either, but which had been recommended to him by a friend as brilliant and life-changing. It had proved to be neither; in fact, he had only ploughed on with it because he felt that it was the sort of multicultural writing he ought to be aware of as a vicar. After all, there might actually be people in his parish, even in his church, who had read it as well.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, remembering that there was a boy on his doorstep. ‘Did you – er …?’
‘It’s – I wanted to – there was something, to talk with you … about …’ Gerard Feehan said, earnestly and a little incomprehensibly.
Biddle sighed inwardly. A vicar’s work was never done.
‘Well,’ he said brightly, ‘you’d better come in, hadn’t you?’ He gave Gerard a broad, reassuring smile, then winced at the pain that suddenly shot from his tooth.
It wasn’t at all helpful that it hurt so much to smile. As a vicar, he saw it as one of his duties to smile a lot, especially when parishioners visited him and smiling was essential to put them at their ease.
On the other hand, he gathered from the worried look on Gerard’s face that it was going to take a lot more than smiling to put this visitor at ease. He needed something comforting, homely and even a little authoritative; it was on occasions such as these that the Victorian hostess trolley which he had found at a remarkably low price several years back really came into its own.
A while later, Biddle sat opposite Gerard Feehan in the vicarage living room with freshly poured tea and an atmosphere of comforting, homely authoritativeness. ‘I don’t know,’ Gerard Feehan was saying, his face contorted in thought. ‘My mother?’
Biddle restrained himself from saying ‘tsk’.
‘Gerard,’ he began, trying to maintain his kindliest voice whilst adding a subtle note of teacherly sternness. ‘What makes you think that your mother has anything to do with it?’
‘Well …’ Feehan shifted awkwardly in his armchair, almost knocking off the teacup on the saucer perched next to him. Biddle instinctively leapt forward to catch the cup; seeing the vicar lurching towards him, Feehan nervously bolted halfway out of his seat, this time actually knocking his cup of tea off the arm of the chair. Biddle narrowly reached it in time to avert disaster; the cup successfully caught, Feehan rather unnecessarily grabbed at it, almost succeeding in upsetting it for a third time. ‘Sorry, I’m sorry,’ he nervously apologised.
Biddle wondered if it might be an idea to start giving his parishioners tea in plain old mugs – possibly the ones that he got free from Leading in Love, a Christian organisation of whose actual aims he was unsure, unless they were to keep vicars supplied with mugs bearing their logo. He was growing aware that a whole generation had been brought up unequipped to deal with cups and saucers, or for that matter Victorian hostess trolleys; the trust won by his vicarly tea-serving utensils might not really be worth the risk to his carpet.
‘Erm … listen, not to worry, it’s only a carpet after all!’ he laughed, wincing at the resultant stab of pain in his tooth.
‘Are you alright?’ Feehan nervously enquired, anxiously holding the cup and saucer in place with a shaking hand.
‘It’s … nothing, just a tooth problem,’ Biddle explained.
‘You should see a dentist about it,’ Gerard suggested helpfully.
‘Yes. Thank you,’ Biddle replied. ‘You were telling me about your mother,’ he reminded Feehan.
‘Oh – well, I …’ The young man drew in a long breath and looked down at his knees. ‘I get on – my mother – with her, very well, you see.’ He coughed; he was not enjoying this conversation. He wasn’t sure if he really should have brought up the issue in the first place, and having done so he was wishing very much that he hadn’t. Conversations were not his strong point at the best of times, and this one was proving particularly difficult, especially since his words had started coming out in the wrong order.
‘Why do you think that has anything to do with the way you feel?’ Biddle asked, after a pause.
‘I thought …’ Feehan continued to look at his knees, and the hand resting on the saucer almost imperceptibly started to tilt. Biddle held back from leaping forward to steady it again. ‘I heard that – that what made people – it was – that it was – the relationship with your mother – to do with that, that made you …’
‘Nobody knows, Gerard,’ Biddle interrupted, unable to bear the boy’s misery, or his bizarre sentence structure, any longer. ‘Everybody has theories, nobody knows. Scientists don’t, psychologists don’t, vicars don’t.’ He looked at Feehan’s thin, unsmiling face and decided to play up the gentle kindness in his voice, eliminating the sternness altogether for the moment. ‘The point I was trying to make, Gerard, is that if you didn’t choose to be gay’ – Feehan shrunk away at the word ‘gay’, reminding Biddle how long it had taken the boy to explain exactly what he was worried about – ‘and let’s for the moment assume that your mother can’t be blamed, either,’ – a slight look of relief at this – ‘then what, or who, is it that made you how you are?’ Biddle looked expectantly at the serious young boy opposite him who refused to meet his eyes. The serious young boy stared blankly into the distance.
Biddle tried to suppress his growing exasperation. He would have preferred Gerard to work it out for himself, but the boy clearly didn’t need to be patronised at this time. ‘It must have been God, mustn’t it!’ he beamed, recoiling again at the sudden shooting pain in his jaw. He made a mental note to phone that dentist first thing in the morning.
‘Oh. Oh yeah.’ Feehan frowned slightly, as if trying to come to terms with this new concept.
‘And do you believe that God would create you in a particular way if it wasn’t what he wanted?’ pressed Biddle. He watched Feehan’s intense features grapple with this.
‘Do you mean …’ Feehan finally began, then stopped. He took off his glasses and fiddled with them, a look of thoughtful concentration on his face. ‘I suppose not,’ he finally concluded. A slight but significant chink had appeared in his stony expression.
‘There you are, then.’ He wondered how old Gerard was; the boy had a youthful face and a thin, wiry body, both of which matched his air of immaturity, but their opening conversation had established that he was no longer at school – Biddle thought the boy might actually be in his early twenties. Clearly there was some growing up to be done. Ideally away from his mother.
Feehan had been staring at his knees again – undoubtedly running over various objections to the common sense that had been introduced to him. He was probably about to bring the Bible into it, Biddle conjectured as he refilled his teacup.
‘Doesn’t the Bible say …’ began Feehan.
‘What the Bible says and how people interpret it are two very different things,’ Biddle said. He put the teapot back down on his Victorian hostess trolley. ‘We can talk about what the Bible says as much as you want, Gerard, but you need to work out what it says to you, not what other people have told you it says.’
‘But ’ Feehan was clearly still struggling with the intensity of the thoughts running through his mind. ‘What would it mean if my mother did …’
His mother again. Perhaps some sort of accident ought to be arranged.
He quickly repented of the thought.
‘Gerard,’ he said. ‘You are who you are. That is something that you need to accept. It’s a good thing.’ An unwilling smile slowly began to spread across Feehan’s face. Encouraged, Biddle added, ‘Wasn’t one of the main things Jesus said “do not be afraid”?’
Something clicked into place in Gerard’s mind, a minor epiphany which lit up his eyes with his newfound understanding of a great truth. ‘Mr – Reverend, I mean, Biddle?’
‘You can call me Andy,’ smiled Andy, gratified to see the effects his wisdom was having on the boy at last.
‘This morning – the omelette it – you made was – it was about human sexuality, wasn’t it?’
Biddle continued to smile, half closing his eyes in thought. Finally, he opened them again and looked at Feehan’s bright, excited face.
‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘That’s right.’
It was completely dark by the time Gerard walked out of the vicarage, still feeling a little uncertain but comforted by the reassuring glow of having had a thing that had been worrying him a lot explained in a way that had made enough sense at the time for him to feel less worried about it now. As reassuring glows go it wasn’t exactly rock solid, but that was about as reassuring as it ever got for Gerard Feehan.
In the moonless night he almost bumped into the stranger walking in the opposite direction up the path to the vicarage and he leapt backwards in terror, stumbling into a bush. The stranger caught hold of his arm before he fell and Gerard regained the closest he ever really came to an upright position, panting slightly and waiting for his thumping pulse to return to a normal speed. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ the stranger chuckled, and carried on up the path. Gerard scurried away back to his home.
Biddle heard the faint knock at his door and sighed. A minute later and the bath would have been running and he probably wouldn’t have even heard the knocking. For all that the person knocking knew, he was already in the bath. So what real difference would it make to the person knocking if he ignored it?
He glanced at his watch. It was probably that drunk man wanting to use his toilet again. Unless it was Gerard, back with more concerns. Either way, it was late and it had been a long, trying day. Whoever was knocking, they could surely wait until tomorrow. Except for the drunk man, who could use his own toilet.
There was another knock, quiet but insistent, and Biddle had another brief struggle with his conscience. His conscience didn’t put up much of a fight; he really needed that warm bath.
Chapter 5
‘He made – a bloody – omelette,’ Ted Sloper stated, emphatically.
‘He did make an omelette. That’s quite right,’ agreed Harley Farmer.
‘I admit that it was a little bit odd,’ Noreen Ponty deliberated, ‘but you know, his advice about stopping it from sticking to the frying pan really works. My omelettes always stick to the frying pan, but I tried doing it Reverend Biddle’s way the other day and it didn’t stick at all.’
‘I don’t care if he makes the best bloody gourmet omelettes in the world,’ Ted answered, ‘I maintain that it was not a good sermon.’
‘What I meant by a good sermon,’ Noreen clarified, ‘was that I thought he delivered it in a very clear way.’
‘But he delivered clear instructions on making a bloody omelette!’ Ted almost shouted.
‘You are right,’ Harley Farmer agreed again. ‘That’s just what he did.’
‘Look,’ sighed Ted, ‘if we’re all here, can we get started, before I lose the will to live?’ They were not all there; the members of the choir of St Barnabas tended to gradually drift in throughout the course of their rehearsals, with some of the braver members also drifting out part of the way through. However, the members of the choir who were there mumbled their assent and slowly started to arrange themselves in the stalls. Ted watched despairingly. ‘Oh, I forgot,’ he bitterly mumbled to himself, ‘I’ve lost the will to live already. I lost it about twenty years ago.’
‘What happened twenty years ago?’ asked Gordon Spare, the choir’s only tenor, in the placid, sympathetic tone with which he always spoke (and indeed sang). ‘Nothing happened twenty years ago,’ Ted snarled, ‘it’s not a precise measurement. I don’t count the days and mark the bloody anniversary of when I lost the will to live.’ Gordon nodded placidly and sympathetically. ‘Come to think of it, I’m not sure I ever had a will to live,’ Ted continued. ‘If I did, I can’t remember what it felt like. Get out the Cantique de Jean Racine.’
Ted was well aware that the Cantique was beyond the capabilities of the St Barnabas church choir, but since there wasn’t a single piece of choral music that wasn’t beyond the capabilities of the St Barnabas church choir, he masochistically gave them repertoire that he was especially fond of, enabling the choir to ruin it for him.
‘Why don’t we start by singing through it?’ Ted suggested, several reasons instantly flitting through his mind. His face clouded over as the inevitable torture approached.
A voice quietly piped up in the altos. (Voices in the altos rarely piped up with any significant volume.) ‘Ted?’
‘What?’
‘Are we doing the French or the English translation?’
‘It’s French. It’s a bloody French piece. The clue’s in the title – the Cantique de Jean Racine. Are those English words? Have you ever met an English person called Jean Racine?’
‘It’s just—’ the alto bravely continued, ‘there are English words as well as French words in the music. There’s a choice.’
‘No,’ Ted impatiently growled, ‘there is not a choice because the music … is bloody … French.’
‘Okay,’ said the alto, ‘I wanted to check.’
‘Yes, thank you for checking,’ Ted retorted, his voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘Thanks for wasting everyone’s time. Let’s just start, shall we? Anne?’
Anne Hudson, installed in her usual position at the church organ, reluctantly looked up from her romantic novel, having reached a particularly engrossing and lurid section in which a stable boy called Jake had spilled a vodka and lime down his employer’s dress. ‘Yes?’
‘We’re ready. Can we start, please?’
‘What piece are we doing first?’ she unwisely enquired. It was completely impossible to see the choir stalls from the organ, the manuals having been situated in absolutely the worst place possible as far as sight lines were concerned; a small mirror had once allowed the organist to see the conductor’s left ear, but this had been stolen by a group of inebriated students during an unofficial and spontaneous late-night concert a couple of years earlier. Anne was, therefore, unable to see the precise cause of the minor explosion she could hear behind the pillar obscuring the conductor. In the silence that followed, she was tempted to go back to her romantic novel – Jake had been flirting with Lady Cardigan-Ainsley for several chapters now, and that the consequences of the (possibly deliberate) drink-spilling incident would be sensuous and erotic seemed inevitable.
Ted’s voice floated from behind the pillar, somewhat indistinctly due to the fact that he was crunching his teeth together. ‘We’re doing the Cantique de Jean Racine,’ it growled. ‘In French, in case you were wondering.’
The choir waited expectantly whilst Ted’s blood continued its inevitable progress towards boiling point. Finally, the organ began, and Ted started to beat time. It was three or four bars before he stopped. ‘Anne?’ he called. The organ continued to play. ‘Anne!’ he yelled, veins standing out in his neck. After a few more seconds, the sound died away. ‘What the hell are you playing?’ Ted demanded. ‘Because I’ve got the music in front of me, and what you’re doing bears no bloody resemblance at all to what Fauré wrote!’ There was no response. ‘Perhaps you think that Fauré’s version doesn’t quite work? Perhaps your own musical wisdom has given you some insights into the interpretation of these notes that I don’t have. Maybe you’re playing it in bloody English. What is it, Anne? Why don’t I recognise anything you’re doing?’
‘I haven’t had a chance to look at this one,’ Anne’s unrepentant voice answered from the direction of the organ.
‘Oh, I see!’ Ted said, ‘we do one anthem each week and you haven’t had a chance to look at the one we’re doing this week, right? That makes absolute sense.’ The choir waited, too familiar with this ritual to be embarrassed by it, and relieved that every second taken up by this argument was a second they wouldn’t be singing. ‘Then we shall have to manage with you making an utter cock-up of it, won’t we?’
Some choirs would have been shocked by Ted’s use of the word ‘cock’, but the choir of St Barnabas had grown accustomed to Ted’s standard rehearsal vernacular. The older members of the choir who might have found his colourful phraseology harder to cope with were all slightly deaf and assumed that they had misheard what he had said, though none of them had.
Ted wearily motioned in the direction of the organ for the introduction to begin again. After the silence, which was Anne Hudson guessing whether she was expected to play again, the organ came in with precisely the same accuracy as before – admittedly a fairly free interpretation of what Fauré had intended – and this time got a little further before Ted interrupted it.
‘Basses!’ he screamed. ‘Where the fuck were you?’
‘We didn’t know we were meant to come in,’ Harley Farmer explained, slowly.
‘We’re using this thing called music,’ Ted shouted, ‘that tells you what notes you’re meant to sing and when you’re meant to come in.’
‘But we couldn’t tell when that was,’ Harley calmly replied, ‘because we couldn’t tell what notes Anne was playing.’
‘Right, here’s some advice,’ Ted barked, ‘don’t listen to her, okay? Don’t listen to anything that woman plays because it’s always fucking wrong. I’ll bring you in. Watch me. Try to block the organ completely out of your mind. That’s what I’m doing.’ He took a couple of angry breaths then carried on. ‘I mean, think about my dilemma, I have to block out the organ and the bloody choir.’ He exhaled deeply, bringing his frustration vaguely back under control. ‘Let’s try again.’
The choir fumbled its way through the piece; it got progressively slower throughout and seemed to Ted to go on forever. When the final chord died away, he closed his eyes and didn’t speak for one and a half seconds.
Then he gave his considered appraisal. ‘That was without exception the most God-awful fucking noise I’ve ever heard in my entire life.’ The choir nodded in mute acceptance of this judgement. Ted generally told them this about everything they sang, although the exact expletives varied from week to week. ‘If I die tonight, I shall thank God with all my heart that he spared me from hearing that again,’ he continued. ‘Yes, Noreen?’ Noreen Ponty was holding her hand aloft, expectantly waiting to ask a question.
‘I wondered, Ted,’ she said, ‘how we’re pronouncing the word – er …’ She glanced at her music. ‘Er … “paisible”.’
