Cross and Poppy: A Village Tale

By GMW Wemyss

Trollopean clerics, comic peers with hidden depths, the villagers of a thousand cosy English novels ... but in a very modern world: our own.

The Woolfonts – Woolfont Parva and Woolfont Magna, Woolfont Abbas and Woolfont Crucis – are, on the surface, the sleepiest and most chocolate-box villages in the West Country, indeed, in all England.

On the surface.

The duke of Taunton, whose title testifies to James II’s roving eye, is the leading figure, running things from behind his mask of comic, peppery eccentricity (and effecting his ends largely through his superbly competent, respectable, and much-respected butler, Viney, who serves as his fellow churchwarden). Sir Thomas and Lady Douty do their bit, grumblingly. The jovial, genial Simon Kellow, down the pub, keeps the real ale flowing (and keeps wicket for the village XI when wanted, under the duke’s OE captaincy), quietly reminiscing upon his youthful travels to the North and the Midlands for Northern Soul all-nighters. The villagers are a contented lot, and with cause. It’s a peaceful district. The Free School is the best in the country, under Headmaster Trulock and such staff as young Mr Sher Mirza, the English master and a noted expert on English classical, church, and choral music ... who won’t actually perform it, being devoutly Muslim. The celebrated ‘Hipster Chef’, Cheshire-born Teddy Gates, another young incomer, has transformed the old Woolford House Hotel into a Michelin galaxy, loyally supported by his lover, early-retired and painfully outed Man City striker Edmond Huskisson. The Hon. Gwen Evans – scrumptious though she is – has her mind only on the horses at her Woolbury Stud. And everyone’s young mate, Brian ‘The Breener’ Maguire, the Irish-born former England cricketer, can (sometimes) be torn away from Teddy’s nosh to coach the village XI, and still more the School’s, in the nets.

In Salisbury, the Bishop, with some exasperation, has given way to the duke’s rights of presentation to the Woolfont benefices, and the parishes contentedly await the arrival of their new, Anglo-Catholic priest, the young widower Noel Paddick, from far-off Wolverhampton. He’ll be just in time for the village fête and, after, the Village Concert, before the solemnities of Remembrance Sunday and the Advent season thereafter.

No one expects death, bigotry, persecution, fire, storms, and attempted murder to enter into a quiet village tale.

And no one expects an unlikely love triangle, or that a bittersweet attachment – bringing both pain and grace to the new Rector and the English master alike – shall play out, before the sympathetic villagers, between the Summer fête and the crosses and poppies of Remembrance Sunday.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bapton Books
• Release date: Nov 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311891761

GMW Wemyss

Parliamentary historian, chronicler of Titanic’s sinking and Churchill’s ascent, annotator of Kipling and of Kenneth Grahame: GMW Wemyss lives and writes, wisely pseudonymously, in Wilts. Having, by invoking the protective colouration of tweeds, cricket (he was a dry bob at school), and country matters, somehow evaded immersion in Mercury whilst up at University, he survived to become the West Country’s beloved essayist; author or co-author of histories of the Narvik Debate, the fall of Chamberlain and the rise of Churchill, of 1937 – that year of portent – and of the UK and US enquiries into the sinking of Titanic; and co-editor and co-annotator of Kipling’s Mowgli stories and Kenneth Grahame.

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CROSS

AND

POPPY

A Village Tale

GMW Wemyss

Bapton Books

Copyright 2013

by Bapton Literary Trust No 1

for GMW Wemyss

All rights reserved

Published by Bapton Books at Smashwords for GMW Wemyss

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Book design by Bapton Books

A note to the reader: it is the aspiration of this imprint, small though Bapton Books be, to have as few errors and literals – 'typographical errors', misprints – as occur in any average Oxford University Press publication (which, alas, in these thin and piping times, gives us a margin of perhaps five or ten). Any obliging corrections shall be gratefully received.

Dedication

For Anne-Elisabeth, on the Continent; and for Liz and Morgan, and for Bubba and Matty, in America – with thanks as unstinting as their long support.

Table of Contents:

Grace

Mercy

Pilgrimage

Epiphanies

Communion

Reconciliation

Words of Institution

A Commination

Sursum Corda

Oblation and Satisfaction

Afterword

About the Author

Grace

'Archdeacon? His Grace is here.'

The Archdeacon sighed: his secretary was, he knew, far too discreet to take official notice of sighs. 'Thank you. Send him –'

His visitor had never been one to wait upon an invitation. He came in like a tidy cyclone, a trim man of fifty and a bit, short but with a barrel chest which gave him a parade-ground basso which could flatten a forest: a figure compact of conventionally floppy hair that remained as butter-yellow as ever (if the least bit scant at the crown), martial moustaches, bristling brows that seemed to precede him into any room he entered (which was any room he damned well chose, the Archdeacon well knew), and blue agate eyes that missed nothing and dared anything.

'On your way, madam,' said he to the archidiaconal secretary as he blew past her. His Grace's views on the ordination – 'purported ordination, damn it all! Square circles, that!' – were all too well known, not least to the longsuffering the Rev'd Jane Leaver, secretary to the Archdeacon. 'Hullo, Flops.' This was to the Archdeacon's address. 'What heresies and apostasies are you lot hatching against basic, orthodox Christianity generally, the Creeds particularly, and the use of the C of E specially, today?'

The Archdeacon – a man studiedly lean and languid, who ought by rights to have been an Edenic or Curzonian ornament of the FCO – reminded himself that, if diplomacy were a merit, patience was positively a Christian virtue, particularly in a clergyman. He swiftly recalled, and rejected, the succession of bye-names his visitor had acquired over the years: 'Caddie' (and on occasion, if in whispers, 'Cad') for his initials – and his scratch golf; afterward, also at school (to which they had gone together from the same prepper), 'Tempers', from the courtesy title that had come to His Grace when they were Fifth Formers; and, always: from his Christian name; from the 'Malet' in his quadruple-barrelled surname; and from the same character in him that had formerly dowered him as 'Tempers': always, always the final names that had persisted into University and ever after: 'Hammers' and 'Charles Martel'. His Grace's cousin Dickie (a Naval officer, naturally), the one who resembled a young Jonathan Trott, had won the Amateur at the Old Course in a howling gale; his remoter cousin Gerry Ay, the Younger of Lynchat, the one who resembled an aging Rory McIlroy, had carried his bat (and won his Blue) in a famous victory over the Tabs, at Fenner's, and gone on to play for an MCC XI who'd given the England side and all comers no little pause; his cousin Lady Mary, formidable, tweedy, learned, and mannish, the one who resembled a more acidulated Clarissa Dickson Wright, had declined to become Mistress of Girton on the grounds that she wished nothing to do with Fenland Poly and shouldn't live in Cambridge on a bet … and His Grace – who resolutely refused to do anything save what he chose, and chose to do nothing save angle, shoot, hunt, garden, breed Clumbers, meddle, and write annoyingly popular histories – was generally conceded to be a better golfer, a better cricketer, a better scholar, and a far worse headache than the rest of his family taken together.

'Charles.' The Archdeacon had settled upon simply addressing his fellow OE by his Christian name.

'Oh, don't give me that balls of a tone of forbearance, Nigel. The Wesleys and then the Tractarians had only to recall the C of E to itself from periods of national apostasy; thanks to you lot and the Yanks and all, the Anglican Communion as a whole is in a global state of international heresy. And do you lift a finger to stop it? You do not: you go on, beneficed with Bray, as it were, as creature and toady to Spacely-Trellis.'

'Bishop Stephen –'

'Oh, Christ, not this rubbish again. The man's not a religious, he's a secular cleric – in all senses, I may add – and this inane Call-Me-Tony-Call-Me-Dave balls –'

'Given what you're in the habit of calling him, Charles, I think you've markedly little ground to whinge about it. I've heard Spacely-Trellis, and that mitred ass, and the bish, and – in direct address, mind – you son of a bish … I've yet to hear you refer to His Lordship as His Lordship, or by his name or proper title.'

'Called the silly bugger just that, only the other day. We had a … discussion.'

'Yes. So one gathered. You've won, by the way.'

His Grace simply stared at him. 'Well of course I won, Nigel. Hardly worthy of remark, that.' He stood. 'That's settled, then: you put the arrangements in hand for the necessary observance of the rubrics, and I'll get my man down here by the next train.'

'He's – you really cannot, Charles, go about referring to a parish priest in the Church by law Established as your man, you simply can't.'

'My dear Flops, of course I can. It's my living.'

And in his accustomed manner, the duke of Taunton trotted out and away to make, the Archdeacon had no doubt, more mischief somewhere. It was always as if a wild beast had departed the Close, really…. One simply thanked God that little damage had been done and no one had been devoured. The Archdeacon had always credited the rumour that had it that HRH the duke of Edinburgh had once observed of Charles Taunton, 'Man has a refreshing lack of diplomacy': and when you were almost too blunt for Phil the Greek….

Your Grace,

… I implore you to bear in mind that Fr Paddick is a severely practical priest. If he has reclaimed the brothers Wesley for Anglo-Catholicism, as the link between the Caroline divines and the Tractarians, it is in no small part because he is, in the best sense, a Methodist, drawn naturally to Methodism as Methodism was in its beginnings: a Loyola-like spiritual exercise in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. Some priests are born. Others are made. Our Lord makes priests of what material he chooses. Left to himself, without a call that overrode perhaps other and more natural bents more congenial to him, Noel Paddick should have been what he remains beneath the priest: a lad of parts, skilful to the work of hand, interested in how things work, and why they don't, and how to repair them. Beneath his scholarship and under the discipline he chose with his eyes open, he is now called to do just that on a ghostly scale, repairing and mending all that he may. From this, the unwary conclude that he is Nice But Dim. (Differently to your case, this is not a pose designed to ambush the unsuspecting.) Do not be unwary, or deceived.

He is methodical. He is disciplined. He exercises his body – I am tempted to say, 'religiously' – not for its own sake or an earthly end, but as a warrior trains for battle. He exercises his mind in like manner. And he engages in spiritual exercise after the manner commended in the Epistles, to fight the good fight and to run his race.

All that is in him which has never wanted training and exercise, is his heart, which is naturally developed to the highest pitch.

If you are seeking – particularly now, when his loss is yet raw – a scholar, look elsewhere. If you seek a mystic at any time, find another candidate. If, as you have said, you wish to present a pastor and priest to these livings, a man of parts who can get stuck in, you've made the right choice. As a man who can remember even now, with a wince, your batting my bowling all 'round Lord's in your debut in the Eton-Harrow match, I am – my dear Charles – all too well aware of what a parish in which you are the natural leader of the laity must be in want of. As a man now dying, whose greatest achievement the nurture of Fr Paddick is, I am well aware of what he wants and what the Church wants in and of him. If I may speak for a moment simply as an old acquaintance and in distinctly secular terms: do not bugger this up, Charles.

I make quite certain you've already made his path less smooth in the process of bullying him into prospective acceptance of this presentation, and, I don't doubt, angering Bishop Chubb into the bargain. I feel a special responsibility towards Noel, as I have done since he was a small child, his health if not his mortal life regularly despaired of. Nevertheless, if he accepts your presentation, it has my blessing. Even Pharaoh was in the end an instrument of grace, in the days of Moses; but that does not mean his is a role one ought to seek. Look to yourself, Charles, with that in mind; and be prepared for your new rector, if that be in the end Fr Paddick, to force you to confront your soul.

Yours faithfully – in all senses –

Matthew AF Pryor SSC

Wolverhampton St Peter

The Vale of the River Wolfbourne slept in the West Country sun, beneath the offhandedly kindly protection of the Anglican deity and the more determined invigilation of the duke of Taunton.

John Aubrey had declared the river to be the 'Wold Bourne', in the same way that Nadder has for its folk-etymology the adder, equally winding; but riper scholarship knows better. The River Nadder is the Ancient British 'flowing water', and its serpentine windings did not give it its name; and its tributary the Wolfbourne, like the River Wolf of Devon to the West, Pliny's Voliba that flows into the River Otter, was named by the Dumnonii before ever the Roman eagles saw a British sky, and has nothing to do with wold, wolf, or wool.

The coombe of the little Dapple Brook, where it hastes to its confluence with the Wolfbourne, and the downs beyond, make together a secret, quiet place, in the midst of which the Woolfont villages hide themselves, the world forgetting and by all the world – save the duke – commonly forgot. Brigaded by Beechbourne, a market town by prescription and by function – for certain very moderate values of 'market' – and by Chickmarsh, a market town by charter of King John and, in its centuries of slumber since, a market town only in name, the Woolfonts live at peace amidst fields and pasture, wood and down, tenuously connected by lazy, straggling, sunken lanes that have no taste for hurrying. (The shape of the land, the likelihood of spate and flood, had made the little lanes lazy, even as that shape and that likelihood had dictated that there should be three small parishes of much riches in a little room.) Woolfont Parva and Woolfont Magna, Woolfont Abbas – 'Ducis' in some old maps made between the Reformation and Victoria's accession – and Woolfont Crucis, the eldest of the four, where St Aldhelm had once founded a church and the friars of the Fourteenth Century had erected a preaching cross, the base of which even now quietly crumbles in the shadow of the village war memorial: these were and are and ever shall be the four-chambered heart of the Vale.

The Spring Rill ran from Springhead above Magna down the Fore Street – a stream in every front garden and every house or cottage with a bridge to its name – to the pond in Woolfont Crucis, even as its mirrored image ran from its eponymous Beechbourne, on the other side of the down, to Parva and thence into the Dapple less than a mile from its confluence with the Wolfbourne. All along the way, it trilled and chortled: past the sub-post office and shops where old Mrs Jukes presided (saved from the vagaries of the new Royal Mail computer system by the duke's having the clever, technically-minded son of one of his under-gardeners cast her accounts); past the Blue Boar, where Mr Kellow pulled perfect real-ale pints for all and sourced his real cider from the ducal orchards; past the village school (C of E voluntarily aided) over which Miss Coombs and Miss Woolley presided with dignity, affectionate firmness, and no damned nonsense (or His Grace should know the reason why, damn it all); past Mullins the Family Butcher and Penny the greengrocer, Whatley the Fish and Bungay the fruiterer; past churchyard and church, rectory (the incontinent sale of which the duke's father had scuppered) and cricket pitch, pond and green….

The Woolfonts – and it had been wool had made them for all that it had not in fact named them, in centuries past – were as chocolate-box a set of villages as might be found in England. The ninth duke had followed, and improved upon, his father's determination that they should be model villages as well. And when he had fallen at the Somme, the estate and the villages had – fortunately, as might be seen in retrospect – become frozen in time. Successive trustees had preserved all in situ, in status quo ante bellum: for the dukedom had, remarkably for a dukedom, become dormant – some argued, abeyant – for several generations, by a curious quirk. The earldom of Fitzwarren had been the title first granted to James' bastard son, when the future James 7th and 2d had been but duke of York in exiled pretence; and the elevation to a dukedom had, in its patent, granted that ducal coronet to the first duke and to 'his heirs of entail, male or female, descended from the body of the first earl of Fitzwarren': which was the only way in which a dukedom in any British peerage could have managed to become thus tangled and disputed. It had done, and been, and remained, until, what time the present duke was at Eton (and quietly wondering where the next term's school fees were to come from), the inevitable generational deaths, often without surviving issue, otherwise d.s.p., of elderly connexions, had left his father unexpectedly with sole claim to (and eventual lumbering with) the dignity – and, unusually, more than enough property and dosh to support it (although scattered properties granted by James in Haringey, Newham, and Croydon even now didn't quite match up to the Grosvenors' holdings, any more than did the swathes of Hants, Wilts, Berks, Somerset, and Dorset that had come with them – although bits of Thurrock were paying off handsomely), after generations in which swingeing death duties had fallen upon the other and richer members of the family.

The Woolfonts, and indeed much of Beechbourne and Chickmarsh, having been preserved as in amber, and His Grace the current duke being a man who commonly observed that 'fogeyism is wasted on the old', their chocolate-box quality was now a cherished (and attractive) character; and although His Grace was not a man in much want of money, he was willing to allow a few incomers with an eye to secluded, 'posh' (a word he despised) properties – for the right price. An Irish-born England cricketer whose knees were no longer fit for purpose, and an early-retired footballer from Oop North, had come to live in the Woolfonts, and a Cheshire-born restaurateur had founded an extremely recherché pub-cum-restaurant-cum-hôtel-gastronomique in the old Woolford Hotel, Woolfont Abbas; but the duke was determined that the place should not actually become Cheshire, overrun with ghastly slebs and WAGs. To this, the public generally and the few resident celebrities to a man assented heartily: Brian 'The Breener' Maguire had never cared for celebrity as such; Teddy Gates well knew the value to a Michelin star of avoiding popularity and ease of access; and Edmond Huskisson had ample reason for burying himself in remote village life.

The Woolfonts, wanting only a new Church of England incumbent to return to their somnolent normality that was now elsewhere so abnormally rare, dozed in the dappled sunshine.

'A refreshing lack of diplomacy….' The Bishop should have agreed with Prince Philip – bar the adjective. It had been two days now since His Lordship, the Rt Rev'd Stephen Chubb, had had the displeasure of dealing with the duke.

The point of contention had been the vacancy recently arising in the very rural, not to say rustic, not to say back-of-beyond, team benefice that chanced to serve the duke's lands and holdings, the advowson of which parishes the duke's family had retained for yonks (and had refused quite pointedly to donate to the diocese when asked, in the trendier-than-thou turmoil of the Seventies, with much acute comment on the ordinary's competence to choose proper churchmen). The duke, owning the right of presentation to the livings affected, had regarded it as wholly his decision as to what manner of man the new clergyman ought to be, and his supine fellow parishioners had allowed him to make the running entirely in sounding out candidates, the ducal choice amongst whom he had then presented, as something of a formality and a fait accompli, to the Bishop.

'Your Grace I think presumes too far,' had said Bishop Chubb, very much upon his ecclesiastical dignity. He wore it well: a stooping, thin, scholarly-looking man who went to some lengths to belie his name. 'Although it is true that the parishes in question are those to which your family have long exercised a right of presentation, they are part of a team benefice now, and I and the team rector –'

'Haven't a sodding thing to do with it,' had said the duke, with genial ferocity. 'I own those advowsons. They constitute a benefice to which I have the right to present a rector. And as far as the fabric goes, I'm the lay rector. This team of yours has in fact no standing, and it was only from a wish not to make things difficult for Your Lordship and your predecessor that I've not complained before, after Father died: I try always to be irenic.' With dawning horror, the Bishop had realised that the duke actually believed that. 'Bad form, looking out quarrels; and old Giles Wyndham was an acceptable enough incumbent, God rest his ineffective but well-meaning soul. Team vicar – what utter balls that was….

'The fact remains, my rights are clear. As are yours: if you – not that damned woman swanning about pretending to be a validly ordained priest, your so-called team rector – if you have a legitimate reason to oppose my choice, say so. Otherwise, I shall have my man of business instruct counsel.'

'Were I able to forget my cloth for a moment –'

'Oh, do,' had said the duke, as one offering an indult to a schoolboy.

'– You, Your Grace, are a total cock.'

'Oh, my dear little man, if we're to speak frankly…. You're an idiot. You're a toady and a tuft-hunter. You're a thoroughly secularised, Grauniad-ista, Islington-and-Notting-Hill, woolly-minded, muesli-munching, socks-and-sandals ass. I've heard you in the Lords, after all: albeit, thanks to the idiocies of successive governments of your own kidney, from the Gallery rather than my rightful bench. You're a liturgical vandal all of whose taste is in his mouth. You're a shit. You're a Lib-Demish twunt. You're a credulous, half-educated, modishly-Lefty barrow-boy. You –'

'I am, however, the ordinary of this diocese!'

'Very ordinary. Dead common, in fact. That and five quid might get you a cuppa and a small cake at a tea-shop – if any were fool enough to let you in the door. Let's hope they'd have sense enough to count the spoons, after. You, you grubby little man, are the very model of a modern churchman, and what an indictment that is.

'And you're stuffed.

'The Ecclesiastical Commissioners of the time having managed to sell off most of the C of E's property portfolio at the bottom of the market – I assume Gordon Brown took notes: it'd explain the sale of the gold reserves – you haven't tuppence, or, nowadays, two pee, to rub together. Your party in the Church has spent fifty years cocking everything up, and has only lost more parishioners by your frenzied attempts at secular relevance: choosing to be guided by the unholy Zeitgeist rather than by the Holy Ghost isn't working out terribly well for you lot, is it. Always the same thing: "we can be popular; and always the same tactic: give us this one thing and we'll never ask again. Like Little Adolf's succession of final territorial demands in Europe in the Thirties, really. Give us an alternative service-book, it shan't change the status of the BCP; let parishes that want women pretending to be priests have them, other parishes needn't"…. And you even yet bleed parishioners.

'Well, I have a legal right to present a rector, damn it all, to these parishes, and you've very limited rights to say me nay: and you certainly cannot afford a legal scrap. You can't afford to keep up these Grade I and Grade II* churches: I can, as lay rector – so long as I am not wantonly abused, and kept on side, hmm? I want Paddick, I intend to have him, and you cannot afford to fight me on him. As for this team benefice of yours … you've improperly deprived these parishes of Alternative Episcopal Oversight by Ebbsfleet, who cannot be happy with you just now, on the very issue of conscience that is the whole sodding purpose of it. And you did it by a shabby trickery in violation of secular as well as canon law. You made a very poor choice, taking advantage of my late father's senility to treat these livings as if you owned them, not he. I don't think Her Majesty's judges should think very highly of that, were I to be forced to resort to litigation – which I can afford and the diocese cannot – to defend my rights to my incorporeal hereditaments.'

The Right Reverend Stephen Chubb MA (Lond.) was a progressive, go-ahead Reddish-Yallerish Lib-Lab sort in his personal politics – although theologically much more traditionalist than the duke gave him credit for being, and an old Chaplain RN to boot. He was not, actually, a toady, a tuft-hunter, or a fool. He certainly wasn't fool enough not to realise that, whatever right and right-thinking he had on his side, he was not likely to come off the victor in a fight against His Grace, the Most Noble Charles Arthur Donald Ivor Waldemar Fitzjames-Holles-Clare-Malet KG GCB KCVO MiD, duke of Taunton, marquess of Templecombe, earl Fitzwarren, earl of Dilton, viscount Malet, baron Daubeny, baron Chard, baron Beechbourne, baron Marden and Widham, VRSM DL JP FRHistS, Major (Ret'd) the Intelligence Corps, Privy Counsellor, Fellow of All Souls, and MA (Oxon).

He had spoken coldly. 'I shall give my decision within two days. I think it best that I communicate it to Your Grace through the Archdeacon.'

'Right, I'll wait for your white flag, then,' had the duke snorted, as he'd marched out at his usual pelting clip.

The Reverend Noel Paddick was as near to home as he might be on this earth, which, he well knew, was no permanent home to any Christian soul. The Collegiate Church of St Peter, Wolverhampton, had been his refuge and his school.

He'd been a late addition to his family, the third child and only son, the babbee; and though – as the old wives in Bilston said, often – 'you'd not think it, to look at the lad now', a sickly one in his infancy, in and out of hospital at New Cross ('bronical', had his Nan said, shaking her head at his chest troubles). He'd been shy as well, withdrawn, as children who are often ill will be; music had been his first refuge, and his voice – when he had breath, in the intervals of illness, and after – had been an acknowledged marvel: even to Stephen and Mary Paddick, his parents, who were proudly and respectably working-class people with little time for culture, popular or otherwise. Even his sisters, Joan and Carola, had grudgingly admitted as much, although neither this, nor, thankfully, his early frailty, had granted him immunity from sibling teasing: for which he was, in retrospect, thankful.

The bullying, at school – a succession of sink state schools, as the LEA, hoping that charts and theory could supply wholly other deficiencies, had fiddled haplessly with bounds and catchments – had not been, then or in retrospect, anything save a heavy cross to bear, and he could be grateful for it only for its having been a form of refiner's fire. He was always a gentle soul, Noel, as gentle as were his mild, conker-brown eyes that did nothing to disabuse others of the notion that he was rather bovine – and thick with it, a diligent but hopeless pupil. If a bull, it had been thought – and even that much was rarely thought: ox, yes, mooncalf, certainly, stirk not infrequently, but rarely 'bull' – he was, pupils and teachers were assured, Ferdinand all through. He had had no friends; he was treated as a doormat.

Then Carola had become ill, and it had come his turn to wait and fret and worry – and to cry, a bit – at New Cross. To keep his spirits up, he'd sung quietly to himself; and to his mum and his sisters, once in a way, to try to keep up theirs.

One day, he had been overheard: by, for a change, someone who didn't snarl or sneer or shut him up. A tall man, with silvery hair above a face that was much younger than that, all in black, cassocked and collared: Noel had first assumed the man was an RC priest.

He'd been right about the 'C'; not about the 'R'.

The man – the priest – had smiled at him, and Noel had ducked his head.

'You've an excellent voice, young man.'

Noel had looked up, then. You could just tell, couldn't you, from speaking voices, when someone knew what they were on about? With singing and all, any road up. This man, Noel had reflected, was surely a singer himself. Old-fashioned accent, like on the Beeb, proper English; but the voice itself was like those old albums of Mum's that made her and Dad look funny at each other, Barry White or summat.

'Th- thanks. Sir.'

'I don't recognise the song, but I am certain the saints are enjoying it for all that.'

Noel had stared.

'Do you think that Our Lord doesn't hear us? Or all the saints, from Our Lady to the newest to have gone into the light?'

'But…. But. Aren't they … dead?'

'And why ought that to matter? Have you never had a friend move away? Yet –'

'I've never had a friend … move away.' Noel had bitten his tongue, realising he'd interrupted a priest … and had nearly blurted something out that was shame-making.

'Homebodies, are they? Not a bad thing, in this rushing world. But surely you've had a relation move away. And yet you and they write, all the same, and ring up, and they wish to know how you do, and you, how they do.'

'Well, I suppose. But … death's permanent.'

'Is it? The body dies, certainly: but what makes you, you? Do you know, science tells us that every cell in our bodies is replaced, on average, every seven years. How old are you now?'

'Almost twelve. Sir.'

'Then, if it's the body by which we live or die, you have died once already, and shall do again within three years. But here you are, and just the same, I'd wager, the same you, as you were five and six years prior.'

'I nearly did. Die. I mean, I was here a deal when I was small.'

The man had smiled. 'I think I could put a name to you, then: I thought I recognised the look of you. You're Noel Paddick, aren't you.'

'Wh- – I mean, yes. Sir.'

'You'll not remember, young Noel, but we have met before, when you were very ill, and I – was visiting the ill.'

'But. We're, um. We're C of E, I reckon, if we're anything. I mean, we're Church, not Chapel, and we're not Roman.'

'Nor am I. My name is Pryor – Father Matthew Pryor: no relation to any young Sussex wicketkeepers – of the Collegiate Church of St Peter. And if, as I suspect, you are the brother of Carola Paddick, you may take me to her, if you wish, as she – being, as you said, C of E if anything – is on my list of patients to visit today: the last of them, in fact. I'm very glad to see you up and about and looking very healthy, indeed.'

'Thank you. Um. She's just down here, if you'd like me to take you.'

'Thank you, I'm greatly obliged. It's good of you to be here for her; I make sure you'd rather be kicking a ball about with your friends, say, or something of the sort – although not, of course, doing your revisions for school.' Fr Pryor had smiled. It was a nice smile, Noel had thought. It had given him courage.

'I don't really have any friends.'

'Haven't you? You've one who died for you. And Our Lady, and all the Company of Heaven – Peter, Leonard, Chad, Wulfrun: the lot – are all your friends, if you but knew it. No: I know. But you shall have friends here on this earth, good friends: better than you know, and better, in God's Grace, than you might have had before. After all, the lads you know now did not come and see you when you were in hospital; they aren't, you say, clever enough to realise now that you'd be a friend to be proud of…. Well, Noel Paddick, that tells me that you can do better – and shall; and perhaps it was a special mercy of Our Lord's that you didn't make friends with that sort of person, when you were young. Do you think?'

Noel had frowned, thinking hard.

'And, young Noel Paddick,' had said Fr Pryor, 'you've made a friend today.'

Noel had looked at him, and grinned. Bostin, he thought.

After Fr Pryor had stopped in to see Carola – who was nothing at all like Noel, and had rather suppliants than friends, and could reject most overtures, yet who had responded as swiftly and eagerly to Fr Pryor's kindness as had Noel – the priest had taken their Mum, Mary, aside, and spoken softly to her for quite a quarter-hour, at least. She'd nodded, at the end, looking flustered and tremulous with hope, and had nodded Noel out the door to walk to the car park with Fr Pryor.

'Is Carola going … is she going to die? B- because you and Mum were talking, and –'

'Peace, Noel. Peace. So far as I or the doctors know, there is no reason she should not be alive in the body for many years yet. And I shall see to it that her soul shall never die, under the Omnipotence. Your mother and I were, in fact, speaking of you – and no, you're not at death's door, either. And, no, of course I did not reveal to her anything you spoke of to me in confidence.

'We spoke, in fact, of your singing. I know a place with new songs and better…. Well, we shall see, young Master Noel Paddick, my friend. But – your father shall be bringing you, tomorrow, after school, to St Peter's. You and I and he shall speak further, then.'

And he had placed his hand gently on Noel's head, and Noel had felt a pattern being traced on his forehead by Fr Pryor's thumb, and then Fr Pryor had folded himself into his clapped-out old Morris and driven away.

The old Morris was gone at last, now: had been for years; and Fr Pryor's face was now suited, in his middle fifties, to his still strong and full halo of white hair; but his voice was the same as he hailed Noel, quietly, in the nave bejewelled by spilling light.

'Father! Laus Deo: I am so happy to see you once more. And – for your sake and mine: not for hers in her joy – I remain so very saddened, with you, that Pauline has gone, before you, into the light.'

Of the unborn child lost with her, Fr Pryor wisely did not speak. Fr Paddick was not yet ready for that, he knew.

'Thank you, Father. I … it's odd. I can't but rejoice that she has made her Easter, and yet….'

'Come with me into the Close, Father,' said Fr Pryor, wisely. They genuflected and processed out, donning their birettas as they reached the out of doors. 'Of course you miss her terribly, Father. Of course it hurts. That is nothing to do with your joy for her, that she is now with Our Lord, and has been translated from the Church Militant and the heat and dust of battle, to the Church Triumphant and at rest. And it is not only that your body, yet alive in the body, misses her body and its life. You mustn't be over-scrupulous, Father Noel Paddick – my friend.'

'I don't know that I am, Father. I don't know that I am not, either. It seems…. Not only my emotions, but my wits, are out of joint. I can't write; I can hardly think….'

'You can, in time, and shall. But of course you must first heal. I have not ceased to pray for you, and for Pauline's soul, since the event. And I think you are called, as part of your healing, to the Woolfonts.'

'I wish I were as certain, Father.'

'Then let me be certain for