‘But I don’t play poker.’
‘Exactly. Case rests.’ She laughed.
He lunged at her, but she was too quick, and stood, smoothing her skirt as she did so.
‘The only real evidence is the hymns on the board.’
‘Which may be a complete red herring,’ he said. ‘Had any more thoughts?’
‘No. Afraid not.’ She glanced at her watch. It was 6.15 p.m. ‘And talking of church, which we sort of were, don’t you think we’d better cut along if we’re going to catch the festival service and your friend the bishop? I wonder, incidentally, if Sebastian had worked out what he was going to say. We haven’t found any notes. He might have been going to confess. You know. Say something revelatory and incriminating, and then take poison, or plunge a dagger into himself in front of a full congregation. Now that would have been dramatic.’
Bognor stood and adjusted his tie. The garish stripes of Apocrypha College. He guessed Sir Branwell would be wearing the same. It had become a ritual.
‘Poor taste,’ he said. ‘Vulgar gesture. Far-fetched suggestion.’
‘If you can’t make jokes about sudden death,’ said Monica, ‘I don’t know what you can make jokes about.’
‘I suppose not,’ he said.
The bells of St Teath had started to ring, drowning out the sad cooing of the Fludds’ doves. The congregation was heading towards the pews, as it did every year on the Sunday before the literary festival began. For the first time ever, the sermon would not be delivered by the Reverend Sebastian Fludd, nor would he take the service or say grace at the supper in The Fludd, aka the Two by Two, shortly afterwards.
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 conventionaclass="underline" 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 neutraclass="underline" 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.