The Western Wind Read online

  Newman, at Annie’s wedding: his face lean, clever and quick. Janet Grant was wrong, he wasn’t unhappy, he was serene, and inside that serenity, I believe, elated.

  He stood as he often did, left leg rooted, right leg kicked out at rest. He looked at me; he was the slightly shorter of us two, but something about him towered and made me feel half-grown.

  ‘You should give it up, John, this love affair with the bridge.’

  ‘Hardly a love affair.’

  ‘In any case, give it up. If two wives died on you, maybe you’d think twice about marrying a third.’

  ‘Or maybe you’d hope for the third to outlive you.’

  He’d drunk nothing all night as far as I could tell, except one cup of beer, which he was still cradling. Amid a barnful of people dancing his body was quiet and still, the toe of that kicked-out right leg resting on the ground, where usually it would’ve percussed a tap-tap-t-tap, tap-tap-t-tap. A wreath of rosemary was tied around the oak strut against which he leant, and it was just above his head; its smell would plunge intensely between us from time to time. He seemed to have no great investment in the music and dancing close by.

  ‘I know you’ve given enough money,’ I said, ‘but – ’

  ‘You’re right, I’ve given enough.’

  ‘Who else can Oakham look to, then?’

  ‘For yet one more bridge? It can look to its priest, and its priest can reassure it that another bridge would be unnecessary, and that other things are more essential for its well-being.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘That’s so.’

  ‘For instance, its bridge to the Lord,’ he said, glancing at me before looking elsewhere, but not at anything; not cross or waspish, but not warm, either. ‘A bridge they can navigate alone now and then, without you standing taking tolls, as it were. There are times when your best intervention is to get out of their way. When they need to, let them make up their own prayers, let them know – feel, in their hearts – that he’s their God as well as yours. That bridge, from their hearts straight to him, is worth any number of bridges you might orchestrate across the river.’

  ‘Make their own prayers?’ I said. ‘Have you heard the kind of prayers they make?’

  Newman looked into his cup of beer, and swilled it, and said nothing.

  ‘Peter Green had a jammed lock – what prayer did he give? He invoked Christ’s breaking down of the gates of hell. Do you think it worked?’

  ‘Do you have a prayer that would have worked?’ he asked.

  I turned my shoulder from him. He was mild with me, never raising his voice except above the music, or even showing signs of being vexed. I watched his right foot to see if it tapped or if it made ready to join the other and walk away. It was still as a clam.

  He was watching the wedding dances without attention – Annie going from arm to arm in the blue silk dress she’d borrowed from Cecily Townshend, and taken up at the hem. She’d a chaplet of Star of Bethlehems around her head that kept falling loose, and which she repinned as she danced. Cecily Townshend herself was leaning against a table, picking at a boar’s head; if Newman was less indifferent to her than he was to anyone else, he didn’t show it.

  ‘What is it, then?’ I asked. ‘What is it they do in Rome, or Florence, or wherever, that’s made you so certain about a man or woman’s way to God? What – is there some holy water you drank there that gave you all the answers? In which case, bring me some.’

  It came out unmistakably bitter; another time I’d have raised a brow to show there was a tease in there, and another time he’d have raised his in return and crossed himself and muttered, Fornax ardens caritatis: burning furnace of charity, forgive me for stravaging around Europe and drinking water without you, Reve, rex et centrum omnium cordium: king and centre of our hearts. All of it said with some sarcasm. I might once, when we were younger, have nudged him with my elbow. Not now; the wedding wine had doused my burning furnace of charity. And neither was he in frivolous spirits.

  ‘Listen to you,’ he said. ‘Bring me some. If you think there’s some holy water that gives you all the answers, wouldn’t it be worth going to find it, not waiting for it to come to you? You could know something of the world, but you’d rather stay here trying to shake money out of the trees for a bridge. I don’t know why you’re so beset by it.’

  ‘What do you think I want a bridge for, if not to cross it?’

  ‘For other people to cross it, and pay you.’

  ‘To bring wealth to Oakham,’ I said, ‘to guard us against winters that leave us starving. I’ve repaid you well for the money you’ve put in – a plenary pardon, Newman, which is more than anybody else in Oakham’s been granted.’

  ‘For which I thank you.’

  ‘I want to rebuild that bridge,’ I said. ‘I want it, Tom. To stroll each morning on that opposite bank.’

  Meaning: Do you remember that friendly morning, when we watched the others on the opposite bank? Do you recall?

  ‘It’s your business what you do,’ he said. ‘I’m not willing to give more money. And business is just what it is – a man of business builds a bridge and waits for people to pay tolls to cross it; a man of the spirit seeks across the bridge himself, pays with his faith and opens his heart. Well, I’m not a man of business, Reve, I’m a man of the spirit, and I’ve sought, and prayed, and find myself finally in a state of grace.’

  That’s what he said. Unlike you (those first words not actually spoken), I’m not a man of business, Reve, I’m a man of the spirit. Those were the words he said.

  ‘Ah,’ said the dean when I appeared at his – Newman’s – door.

  He let me in. We sat by the hearth where a fire was getting up. It was darkish by now, and the last thunder was a distant, soft rumble. He’d lit the room amply and the floor was strewn with the violets and rushes we’d laid the day before, in the hope Newman’s body might appear and could be laid out at his hearth. No such fortune – and the place was traitorously cheerful and warm in his absence.

  ‘I just thought I’d let you know what I know,’ I said.

  ‘And what do you know?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘in a single day, about a third of the parish has confessed.’

  I expected him to be glad; it was his idea to lure them to confession, and he had. A man is glad when others do his will, so my experience had shown me. But he showed no sign of gladness, so I went on. ‘After a day of confession, nothing’s surfaced – Herry Carter’s stricken with grief and has cut his face. Drew Norys lobbed a stone at a bird, the miserable fool. Maurice Fry came for a sleep. Gil Otley found his boy’s teeth. Sarah Spenser is willing to confess to anything in her torment, including murdering Newman with an axe.’

  The dean spluttered a laugh.

  ‘Which we know she couldn’t have done,’ I said.

  I sipped the beer he’d poured me and waited for his response. He yawned. A tear of tiredness glistened in the outer corner of one eye. All the light in the room had found it and made it bright as a jewel.

  ‘I wanted to say how I appreciate you being here, in Oakham,’ I said.

  He turned his face and that bejewelled tear blinked at me.

  ‘Your friendship. Your support of us in our grief. Sarah, for one, said you were kind to her.’ I turned the cup in my hands. ‘I can be lonely here at times, with nobody to talk to. About the works of the Lord, I mean. About problems.’ I smiled. ‘And then a brother comes along.’

  He nodded slowly. After a while of nodding, and then a while of sitting so still that the tear – which had trickled slightly – rested as a single pearl on his cheekbone, he inhaled and said, ‘Yes, it can be lonely being a priest. So much to decide – some of it trivial, some not, but still. All yours to deal with.’

  The truth of his words had a weight, and the sympathy in them a warmth, and I was rendered heavy in my chair as I murmured, ‘Yes, indeed, yes.’

  ‘When I was a priest,’ he said, ‘I had an odd thing happen in
my parish. Our church wall supported the wall of a house, meaning that the church and the house shared a wall. I suppose it’s not that uncommon a thing – ’

  ‘Like at Bourne,’ I said.

  ‘Precisely like that. Well, a hole appeared in that wall, just about big enough to squeeze a hand through. The man living in the house, John Brews, decided he liked this hole because he could watch the consecration of the host without getting out of his underwear. He was an odd parsnip of a thing, he looked like he’d just been pulled up from the ground.’

  The dean reached over with the jug to pour me more beer, which I took.

  ‘I couldn’t give Mass and sermons, with the noise that came from Brews’s house,’ he said. ‘He had eight children and a wife who liked to sing more than people liked to hear her, so I had the hole fixed. A while later it was miraculously back. I told Brews that since he’d made it, he ought to fix it, and he refused. I’d be at the chancel and there’d be his little parsnip-face at the hole, all knotty and pale. I had the hole fixed again, and he sued me and had me arrested for trespass.’ At which the dean turned to me and said with a little huff, ‘Trespass!’

  ‘That’s a sad affair.’

  I leaned forward to scratch an ankle. Floor rushes always gave me cause to scratch; if they laid me out on rushes for my own death, would some flickering, leftover force of life in my limbs still feel the itch, though my hands were dead clay and unable to scratch? It seemed to me that would be purgatory indeed.

  ‘I’ve heard of the same,’ I told the dean, to show fraternity, and because I had, ‘of priests being sued by their own parish, and it’s always a sad affair.’

  ‘Oh, it happens,’ the dean sighed, and seemed so minute in his chair that a surge of feeling occurred in me, at least some of it affection. The tear rolled down his cheek finally, and he wiped it from his jaw. ‘It happens alright. And what do we do about it? Right and wrong aren’t like man and woman, they’re not so easy to tell apart.’

  ‘I’d say they’re just like man and woman, you can usually tell them apart, but not always.’

  ‘Fine, then,’ he said, lifting his cup as if in salutation. ‘And in that case, was John Brews right or wrong? It was his wall as much as the church’s. Besides, he saw Mass a lot more when the hole was there. Well?’

  ‘It’s hard to say.’

  He turned in his chair to look at me. ‘Yes, it’s hard to say, but you still have to say it.’

  I raised a brow at him. ‘Do I have to say it?’

  His stare was nothing other than cold, though I tried for a moment to see it as something else.

  ‘All I mean is, I’d be interested to know what you did,’ I said.

  ‘And I’d be more interested to know what you’d do, Reve. Would you concede John Brews had a right to his wall and his hole, and let it be? Or would you concede that the church had a right to its wall without a hole, and block it up?’

  ‘A compromise perhaps,’ I said.

  ‘A compromise!’ His left leg lifted and fell as if on a string. I’d delighted him somehow. ‘Yes, Reve, a compromise!’

  ‘Leave the hole, and ask his wife not to sing.’

  ‘And his children not to speak or cry or babble or squabble. And Brews not to snore and fart, and his wife to bite her tongue in the pleasures of – ’

  Intercourse. I wanted to speak it, because you should never leave unsaid the awkward-to-say word, else it repeats itself in the silence a hundred times over and swells like a fruit between you, hanging, dangling, ripening by the moment. Begging to be picked. But I delayed too long, and by the time I went to say it, the fruit had fallen and landed, overripe, at our feet. We both looked there, towards our feet.

  ‘Shall I tell you what I did in the end?’ the dean said, becoming upright in his chair. ‘I convinced the chancellor to drop the charge against me, and we fixed the hole, and told Brews it would be the last time. Or, if there was a next time, it would be him being arrested.’

  At some point between the plump, glistening tear of tiredness and the now-upright rod of his back the dean’s mood had turned. His lips thinned and his fingers curled with defiance.

  ‘You see, Reve, in the end I had to show guidance and example. Where there’s no right or wrong in a situation, you have to supply the answer yourself. This is the meaning of strength and leadership. You have to say: This is what I’m going to do, for want of better ideas. You have to say: There’s some unexpected trouble, and I’m going to take charge of it.’

  ‘You aren’t talking about the hole in the wall any more,’ I said, because his glare didn’t leave any doubt that the anecdote was turning its pointed end towards me.

  He tapped a rigid finger against his cup. ‘I never was.’

  ‘No.’

  We gazed, I at the floor, he at me. My cheek hot and hollowed where his scrutiny bore at it. In that scrutiny, the failure of our friendship. The failure of myself to inspire him.

  ‘Is there something you want me to do?’ I asked.

  ‘Where there’s no clear answer or wrongdoing, but nevertheless a problem, you have to lead by example.’

  ‘As I try.’

  ‘And not let your parish fall to mishap and – degeneracy.’

  I could think only of the little skirt that Jesus had been dressed in. Had it troubled him that much? Surely not the grunting, pounding cow in the barn. ‘Is it about our walk?’ I asked.

  Nothing.

  ‘Is it about that skirt that Jesus was wearing at New Cross? You know that’s a prank. I always think that a village that can still find the spirit for pranks is in good health, don’t you?’

  I was tired of his silences, and angry, and distressed at sitting in Newman’s house, in Newman’s chair, when Newman was dead.

  ‘What, then?’ I said. ‘Is it about the cows in the barn? Did you expect me to part the two beasts with my hands, mid-thrust, mid-shunt? Did you want me to catch the barn boy mid-flail before he landed in a ditch of shit? Push my palm against Jane Smith’s mouth mid-vomit? Do you want me to clean up the seedy weather?’

  ‘I saw Cecily Townshend walk around the back of your house this evening with a large bundle in her arms,’ he said, ‘and I thought it was odd for a woman of her standing to be running errands. Is there anything you want to tell me about that perplexing sight?’

  I’d been at my ankle again, but stopped. My hand fell loose and I sat back.

  ‘What does this have to do with our conversation?’

  ‘So there’s nothing you want to tell me?’

  ‘She was bringing a goose,’ I said. There was no point lying, and anyway I guessed his question was a formality, and that he’d already been to the back of my house to check for himself. ‘Just a goose.’

  ‘A goose? Why would you need a goose, when we’re about to fast for Lent?’

  I rested my hands flat on my splayed knees.

  ‘It was just an act of kindness on Cecily Townshend’s part.’

  ‘Will you share that kindness with your parish?’

  ‘It’s hardly big enough to share.’

  ‘So while the rest of Oakham does their best with bread and barley and stew and one piece of fish in forty days, if they’re lucky, you’ll get halfway into Lent before your meat runs out.’

  ‘If I share it, it’ll be a mouthful each – ’

  ‘What you mean is that you can’t share it, because then you’d have to explain that Cecily Townshend gave it to you and that would be – awkward, I assume. Particularly if you tried to explain why.’

  ‘I told you, she gave it in kindness; it’s not uncommon to want to thank your priest.’

  ‘Will you be able to eat it all before you fast for Lent?’

  ‘Lent’s only two days away.’

  ‘Then share it with your parish, a mouthful each. Or is it that you want it all for yourself?’

  The dean stood, went to the fire and showed the palms of his hands to the heat; his fingers were a bloodless white. ‘Do you know how mu
ch you need your people to pull together, now that Newman’s dead? Do you know how close your churchyard is to becoming another vegetable patch for a monk? How can you ask your parish to pull together if you, yourself, are pulling away? One rule for you and another for them. Can they trust you?’

  I took a short gulp of beer and let it sit in my mouth for a moment without swallowing. When I did swallow, it was audible and the dean wheeled round to face me.

  ‘You’re their guardian, Reve, you’re the single greatest force that stands in the way of the Bruton monks taking this village. You might as well be standing up at the boundary with a pitchfork. Maybe one day you will be.’

  Woe betide us then, I thought. I wouldn’t have the first instinct of what to do with a pitchfork. Wave it, jab it, charge hell-bent and full-pelt with it, like a spear? At a monk?

  ‘It might have been my eyes,’ the dean said, ‘but I don’t believe I saw your end of that boat rise, by the way. If anything, it sank slightly.’

  I don’t know what my look conveyed to him, because I tried not to show panic, but panic isn’t easy to disguise. I was ordained, I wanted to tell him; I gave over my flesh to the spirit, a pound of my own blood for a weightless whisper, a hope. If the boat didn’t rise, isn’t that a fault of the test, not of the man? Do you really mean to say that, when offered me, the Lord refused? Or only that I’m a fake?

  I said, uselessly, ‘I’ll send the goose back to the Townshends.’ Though useless, the urge behind it took formidable shape – to be rid of that goose, which seemed now to mock, deride, belittle me.

  ‘How incriminating that would be for Cecily Townshend. Wouldn’t her husband wonder why she was giving the priest little Shrovetide gifts? Perhaps he’d wonder if she had something to hide.’ The dean went back to his chair and perched on its edge. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, no. You won’t take that goose back – you’ll eat every sinew of it, and there’ll be no trace of it left by Shrove Tuesday. Think of it as eating your weakness and affection for compromise, and at the end, when the weakness is gone, you’re left only with resolve.’