Death in the Opening Chapter Read online

  His absence would be felt, however, and his sudden death would cast a pall over tonight’s proceedings and much of what was scheduled for the week ahead.

  ‘Your friend the Bish had better be good,’ said Monica.

  THIRTEEN

  The church was packed.

  It always was. Correction. It always was for this annual service preceding the Fludd Lit Fest. On the average Sunday, at Holy Communion, Matins or Evensong, attendance was sparse. Sir Branwell and Lady Fludd sat sadly in the family pew at one or other of these services, but otherwise the faithful were considerably less attentive and dutiful than even a few years earlier. The church was always full at Easter and Christmas, but apart from this, and the annual Festival service, it echoed in effective emptiness. The vicar, the choir and the organist turned up, and one or two hardy regulars, but that was all. The rest stayed away pursuing secular rites and rituals.

  This was the way of the Church of England. Time was when it had been the Tory party at prayer, but now even the traditional Conservative Party was little more than a memory of blue rosettes, feudalism and soapbox oratory. Muslims, foreign sects, and even the Methodists and Roman Catholics, seemed to be gaining ground, or at least standing steady, but the lukewarm moderate established church was no longer part of the required procedure.

  Tonight, however, the ancient building was full of Mallborne and its visitors. The ghost of the late Reverend hung heavily over the service and all the suspects were there. Sir Branwell and Lady Fludd had kept a couple of places for the Bognors, who dutifully squeezed into the box pew alongside them. Just behind them, though decently below the salt, were the butler, Harry Brandon, and his wife Peggoty. The widow Dorcas Fludd was snivelling appropriately in off-black weeds. Brigadier Blenkinsop and his wife Esther sung lustily in tweed and responded noisily in all the right places. Vicenza Book kept shtum, waiting presumably until she could command attention from centre stage, and Martin Allgood sat near the back of the building behind a pillar and observed beadily. Gunther Battenburg was not there; presumably preparing dinner in the Fludd kitchens.

  All was as one would hope and expect, and as orderly as Sir Branwell would have wished.

  The service itself was robust and conventional: middle of the road as only rural C of E could be on a high and holy day, and the whole affair made Bognor comfortable. He was surrounded by the sights and sounds of his growing-up and he drew strength from their permanence.

  The Saxon church was full of English spring flowers of a kind he associated with cottage gardens, rather than municipal beds. The sweet peas smelt, the wild garlic and valerian were classified as weeds elsewhere, but here they were encouraged to rampage over the pulpit, lectern and font. All was amateur, in a friendly way, unless you scratched the smiling surface and revealed the steely professionalism beneath. Iron fist in velvet glove. The congregation was led by the choir in ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, ‘Fight the Good Fight’ and the 23rd psalm. The readings were from the King James Bible, the Authorized Version, the only decent committee job known to man.

  The bishop was the senior cleric present by a mile. A couple of lay readers from the neighbourhood were officiating, standing in for the Reverend Sebastian, and hating each other in a decidedly unchristian way, if the Bognors’ sixth sense was to be trusted. It was difficult to upstage one another during a church stage, but it seemed to the Bognors that these two did their best, though even this rivalry was strangely reassuring, for it reminded Bognor of the chaplains at school – technically equals, but for ever, it seemed to him and his friends, competing for supremacy. Or at least the appearance of supremacy.

  Finally, the bishop’s turn came. He, more than anyone, cut a figure that was at once friendly and familiar, but also contrived to be scary. On the one hand, he was benign, short and fat, on the other, his cope, mitre and crook made him seem forbidding and frightening. His smile was beatific, but his frown was full of the wrath of God. He was, after all, God’s representative in Lymington and the surrounding diocese. When he smiled, the lilies of the field smiled back, but when he looked cross, the ground trembled. Yea, verily, he was Bishop Ebenezer and it would be sensible to keep the right side of him.

  From the pulpit, he began by presenting his right side as if to the manor born by quoting a Biblical text in the traditional manner. ‘My text tonight is taken from the Gospel according to Saint John, beginning at the first verse of the first chapter: “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the Word was God.”’ And then he paused and looked down and around at the congregation, seemingly undecided about whether to telegraph the smile of God or the frown of God, but, instead, merely repeating the words in an incantatory manner: ‘“In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the Word was God.”’

  Once more, he looked round the congregation, seemingly uncertain whether to smile or frown, whether to play God the merciful or the God of wrath. In the end, he seemed to hold both in check and play God the neutral: a sort of ‘don’t know’ in one of Miles Kington’s plenary sessions.

  ‘Of course, we all know that the word “word” is a translation of the Greek “logos” and is open to any one of a number of different interpretations. I won’t, however, insult your intelligence by going down that route. Apart from anything else, I feel it would be something of a cop-out. The authors of that majestic book wrote “word” and I feel we owe it to them to believe that they meant what they wrote, and that therefore they believed in the supremacy of the word. For them the word is the word of God and the word of God reigns supreme.’

  He was a long way off insulting their collective intelligence, let alone copping out. The Brigadier had certainly never come across ‘logos’. Nor Vicenza Book. Martin Allgood, well, yes, up to a point and in a manner of speaking. The Bognors, certainly. Branwell Fludd, perhaps surprisingly, yes. His wife, no.

  In a curious way, it was an episcopal sorting of goats from sheep, men from boys, cognoscenti from buffoons.

  ‘How appropriate, therefore, that we should be meeting at the beginning of this tenth literary festival in the House of God; a God who, according to the Holy Gospel, not only believed in the word, but believed in the word above all else. All this week, we celebrate the word in its various shapes and patterns and glories. Tonight, however, we celebrate God’s word in God’s house.

  ‘And what, I ask myself, as we all must, at this beginning of a week of celebration of God’s unique gift, what exactly was God’s message? To what use did he put that wonderful word which he gave us, and which St John tells us about so memorably and so beautifully? What exactly did God mean? What exactly did God say? His is, by any standard, the greatest book in the world, and yet what precisely is its message? What exactly does it say? What is the message which echoes so vibrantly throughout its pages?’

  Bishop Ebb was beginning to lose the attention of even those listeners who had been paying some attention, and not just listening to the more or less acceptable noise that he made. He spoke in a passably well-modulated middle-church way, some way short of the wonderfully nasal C of E fashion adopted by Alan Bennett for his seminally parodic sermon (‘My Brother Esau is an hairy man but I . . .’) in Beyond the Fringe, but also divorced from what generally passed for received speech in the early years of the twentieth century. The bishop spoke prose from the pulpit in an appropriate manner. It would have passed muster on the BBC’s ‘Thought for the Day’, alongside the breezy Balliolity of the Reverend Lionel Blue, the people’s Rabbi. As a matter of fact, Bishop Ebb had appeared on ‘Thought for the Day’ and was considered by the powers that be at the corporation to be rather better than such performers as Chartres, the Bishop of London (too Old Testament prophet) and Harris, the former Bishop of Oxford (too serpentine, sibilant and reminiscent of Caiaphas, the High Priest). Ebenezer Lariat fell well short of being trendy, but he was nearer the common man who listened to the radio than any of his counterparts.

  Today’s bishop moved on to Flanaga
n Fludd. He had obviously googled Flanagan Fludd and was forced, therefore, to rely heavily on the Wikipedia entry which had been composed by Sir Branwell and Lady Fludd with a little help from the Bognors some years ago. It had been ‘improved’, as is the way with Wikipedia entries, that is to say it now contained even more ‘information’ whose factual basis was questionable. This meant that the bishop’s stuff on the eponymous festival centrepiece was thin and slightly doubtful.

  This, in turn, meant that the Fludds and the Bognors switched off for the stuff about the Mallborne Pageants of the l890s, for the collaboration with Louis Napoleon Parker and the famous rhyming version of King Lear. He vaguely heard that Flanagan might perhaps not have been a man of God in the strictly conventional sense, but that he was assuredly a man of His Word, and therefore blessed in some indefinable but definite fashion, and that he was generally speaking a Good Thing, in the Sellar and Yeatman sense. Actually, it was the festival and the present generation of Fludds that were his most significant and lasting bequest, and none the worse for that.

  The bishop padded out his sentences on Flanagan Fludd with references to Tennyson (whom Fludd had once met) and the optimism of Locksley Hall (‘Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change’), despite no evidence that Fludd had ever read the epic verses, nor indeed anything much, except for his own outpourings, which were, if truth be told, more reminiscent of William McGonegall than of the poet Tennyson, but let it pass; Flanagan was one of the great impresarios, a flâneur and, above all, a man of His Word.

  Here, the bishop paused and looked around the church with that curious mixture of threat and mateyness, before coming out with words which made the inhabitants of the family pew suddenly sit bolt upright.

  ‘Above all,’ he intoned, ‘Flanagan was a Fludd.’

  He beamed again. Beatific yet baleful. It was not a smile in the usual sense, but more the sort of rictus grimace with which one brought really bad tidings. It was a more in sorrow than in anger sort of movement. He was telling his listeners that this was going to hurt him more than them. He was also signalling that this was not true, but necessary public relations. Bognor had spent years of his upbringing listening to teachers such as this. They said one thing, while meaning something quite different. What they said was nice, what they meant was nasty. Life was full of people like that. Even Bishops. Even Bishops who, on the whole, one rather liked.

  ‘Fludds,’ said Bishop Ebb, ‘may come, and Fludds may go. Unlike our Lord, none go on for ever.’

  He smiled again, for what he had just said represented the nearest a bishop in a pulpit came to a joke.

  ‘Most Fludds, like the rest of us, have but a short time to live. Many manage their allotted three score years and ten. Some manage more and some less, but it matters not a lot, for the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and he has an unpleasant habit of giving life on the one hand, while removing it on the other. It is no coincidence that the two most significant dates on the Christian calendar come at Christmas and at Easter. These represent, first, the giving of life and, second, the taking away of that same gift. Life is a gift of God, but so too is death.

  ‘No one here will be unaware of the fact that our Lord has stretched out his hand and taken away a Fludd from amongst us. “Come in, Sebastian,” he said, only yesterday in this very place. “Come in, Sebastian. For your time is up.”

  The bishop looked round the silent killing ground, obviously satisfied at the way in which his words seemed to have grabbed the attention of all those present, and he repeated, softly and slowly:

  ‘Come in, Sebastian . . . Your time is up!’

  FOURTEEN

  Bognor had never previously thought of the Lord His God as a fairground attendant, nor as the man in charge of pleasure boats on an artificial lake. He was, however, open to new thoughts, and this one pleased him. He rolled it around his mind as if it were a toy that he had just unwrapped. He tasted it, as if it were an interesting wine to savour, or the first in a packet of Tim Tams or Cherry Ripes; an opportunity to decide once and for all whether Marmite was better than Vegemite. He considered Sebastian a Vegemite sort of priest – bland, all-things-to-all-men, not spikey and sharp like Marmite. He liked people to be Marmites. Difficult presences. The Reverend Sebastian had been a Vegemite in life, bearing the imprint of the last person to whom he had spoken. A true Marmite would have resisted and been a constantly awkward customer. It was only in death that Sebastian had become a Marmite.

  ‘Life,’ said the bishop, ‘goes on. Like the show. And my friend – our friend – Sebastian, would have wished it that way.’

  Only a bishop, thought Simon. Having a pulpit enabled you to look down on other people, wearing ornate frocks and a purple vest gave you a spurious authority, a mitre raised your height and a crook was a staff to lean on, as well as a club with which to beat. If he, or any of his bêtes noires in government or public, had dared to utter such clichés, they would have been laughed at and scorned. A bishop, however, could get away with such banality.

  ‘There are two lives here,’ he said from the pulpit, with all the authority of his vestments and his position. ‘The life temporal, fleeting and, perhaps even as the political theorist Thomas Hobbes would have us believe, “nasty, brutish, solitary and short”. And the life everlasting, which is a thing of beauty beyond our comprehension, for eternity is a concept we cannot comprehend.

  ‘Our friend, my friend, Sebastian, has departed the first of these lives. He has done so unexpectedly and, to our conventional way of thinking, before his time. The reason for, and the manner of his departure, have to be ascertained, for that is the law of this land in which we live. We are singularly fortunate in that we have in our midst one whose whole life has been concerned with such sudden unexpected comings and goings. I have known him for what passes on this Earth for quite a long time, even if, in the eyes of the Almighty, it is no more than a blinking of an eye. I am confident that our friend, my friend, Simon, will solve the matter of Sebastian’s sudden departure correctly, according to the laws of this our land, and that he will do so decorously, respectfully and without fuss.’

  Once again, he paused in a manner which Simon was beginning to find suspiciously theatrical. Ebenezer was too like a stage bishop – an episcopal Robertson Hare, an ecclesiastical Derek Nimmo. Too much to be quite true. If he had not known that he was real, Bognor would have had his suspicions. He was like a man playing at being a bishop, a layman assuming a disguise.

  ‘I,’ said the Rt Rev. Ebenezer, ‘have no more standing in this world than any of you. We are all equal in the sight of the law, and it is in the sight of the law that justice will be done and will be seen to be done. I trust implicitly in my friend Sir Simon Bognor, and I trust that you too will echo that trust and bring that which passes for guilty to be brought to that which passes for justice. I yield to no man in my respect for the true course of such temporal affairs, and yet I feel obliged to enter an eternal caveat.’

  He looked around and smiled, though this time it was more of a snarl than a smile.

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘and it is an important, an all important “but”, there is another country, another judge, another justice. And in the world where this is so, I have a certain locus. I repeat: I have no more status than any of you when it comes to the law of the land, which I respect. However, in the law of God, the eternal, the everlasting, the law to end all laws, I do have a certain standing, for I stand before you as a man of God, as His representative on this Earth, which is of his making. His motive in doing so passeth all understanding and his ways are not the ways of mere mortals. And by the same token his justice is not the same as mortal justice, nor his giving, nor his taking away.’

  No pause here, even though the technical construction of his sermon might have demanded it. The bishop was beginning to believe in his own rhetoric; his material was getting the better of him.

  ‘In other words, Sir Simon will do his duty and we must assist him in
whatever way we can. But there is a higher judge, a higher justice, a higher truth. The one does not invalidate the other, nor does it mean that we must stand in the way of man’s law and our own puny attempts to serve it. It does mean, however, that we can not pretend to an understanding of Almighty God, his infinite mercy and his absolute love. God has the final word, for as the evangelist has it, He is not only with the word, he is the word itself, the first word as well as the last.

  ‘I cannot pretend,’ and here he lowered his voice like the old ham he was, ‘to know the workings of the divine mind. None of us can, but rest assured. His is the Might and His the Right.’

  The Bognors exchanged glances and raised all four eyebrows.

  Bognor himself was unsure about this division between the temporal and the divine. It seemed to him that the law of the land was running a rather dismal second to the Law of God, which put him into a subsidiary position behind the Lord and his vicar on Earth, viz Ebenezer Lariat. The bishop would say that though, and he had the advantage of the pulpit and an awe-inspiring frock. Bognor reckoned that he too would cut an authoritative figure in episcopal gear, especially when speaking from on high, with a strict ban on heckling or vocal dissent of any kind. Whoever heard of a bishop being disagreed with publicly – especially in church.

  On the other hand, his was a strong hand and he had the endorsement of God’s representative. True, this support only extended as far as this life and not the one hereafter, in which, in any case, he was not sure he believed. Who needed authority to deal with heaven, hell and purgatory when he and a majority of ordinary people, including those gathered in St Teath’s did not even believe? No point in one’s writ running in a fictitious place which didn’t exist. Better the nitty gritty, the here and now, than an illusory life to come. In any case, the bishop would say that, wouldn’t he? No, on balance, he was quite pleased.