‘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 Flanagan 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 flaneur 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 betes noires in government or public, had dared to utter such cliches, 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.’