Gordon sucked on his bottom lip, feeling misunderstood and a little peeved. Women were better at these things, that was all. It had been Wendy who made sure that Simon’s many lurchings in and out of physical and psychological health, education, employment and relationships remained, to Gordon, vague; with Wendy gone Gordon now felt in danger of having too much expected of him. This raised in him a mixture of fear and indignation because, having forgiven himself within a year of Simon’s birth for a detached paternal style which some might have called inadequacy, he no longer worried that inadequacy was what it was. Since Simon had been born he had devoted himself almost entirely to parish matters that, he had persuaded both Wendy and himself, were more deserving of his attention. He had wanted, he said, to set Simon an example of life and work that would be worth following.
So the lychgate, Gordon now considered, might be a problem whose time had come. The lychgate could be his next project. And for as long as it would demand his energy (Gordon was known by his parishioners to be terribly focused) he could not be expected to lavish the kind of attention that Wendy had had time for on the grandchild with an absent father. In fact, he thought, with Wendy gone, he needed a project. Gordon liked to be committed. Over the years, ‘commitment’ was what he had come to call the habitual and sustained expenditure of his energy on a range of projects of his own devising. ‘Commitment’ was the personal quality of which he was proudest in himself. He no longer noticed much about the church or his parishioners except the things he disliked, one of which was a lack of commitment. He was just thinking he might bring it into the sermon on Sunday and also get in something about the needles and condoms (obliquely, of course) when he saw a man, presumably Jeff Stevenson, standing under the lychgate, his head raised in apparent admiration of the timbering of the roof. What was the attraction? It was not nearly as interesting as the church- you could say it detracted from it- and it was only nineteenth century, Gordon thought, simultaneously deploring Jeff Stevenson’s taste and framing the first arguments he would have to meet and demolish on his way to reinstating the lychgate in the parish’s affections. Not wishing Jeff Stevenson to see him waiting at the window, Gordon turned, selected his deerstalker from several hats hanging in the hall, pulled on his jacket and set off from the front door of the vicarage to meet him.
‘Hello there! Gordon, how are you?’ Michael demanded, meeting him on the churchyard path and advancing with a handshake. Gordon submitted his hand, Michael seized it and grabbed Gordon’s wrist with his left hand. As he beamed at him and yanked his arm up and down, Michael was trying to see beyond the smeared glasses, which reminded him of the chip shop window at the top of his road on Snow Hill. He searched through the lenses for eye contact and fixed him with a look of concern. The hat was perching so ridiculously on Gordon Brookes’s head that he had to concentrate on not staring at it.
‘How are you doing, Gordon? I’m Jeff. Jeff Stevenson.’
‘Yes, yes, hello. You’re expected. Gordon Brookes.’ Gordon lifted the hat and replaced it. He always wore a hat of one sort or another; he thought of his hats as his little trademark. Oh, the vicar and his hats, he imagined people saying, affectionately casting their eyes upwards. He found it useful that a hat created an illusion of approachability and friendliness, and at the same time kept people away. Most people were wary of eccentricity, he had found. They seldom stopped him in the village to chat, for instance, unwilling to risk being thought, by association, as barmy as the man in the barmy hat. But clearly Jeff Stevenson was not most people. For one thing, he had a most persistent handshake.
‘Great hat! How do you do?’ Michael said, thinking that Gordon Brookes’s lower lip looked too red and wet.
Gordon said, ‘I didn’t realise you knew my name. We haven’t met before, have we?’
Michael swallowed. Although Gordon Brookes’s tone of interrogation was mild, he was still asking a question. Michael had never before been asked how he knew a vicar’s name. Vicars in general seemed to assume that everybody knew who they were. Thinking fast, he worked out that he could afford to be honest about the source of that small piece of information, and that it would be easier than coming up with a lie on the spot.
‘Actually, I looked you up.’
‘Oh?’
‘In Crockford’s. I looked you up in Crockford’s; I like to do my homework, seems only right since I’m imposing on your time and goodwill,’ Michael said in his carefully unplaceable accent, and tried to rest in the fact that this was quite true. Of the books that Michael owned, many were volumes that he had acquired only because he had failed to sell them on the stall. Among them were Crockford’s Directory of the Clergy 1997, and Simon Jenkins’ England’s Thousand Best Churches. It was the combination of these two that had inspired his curate impersonation technique for robbing churches in the first place, but Gordon Brookes would not, of course, be told that. Crockford’s supplied him with his characters: the names, dates, backgrounds and present positions of the earnest churchmen, invariably curates, whom he impersonated. It supplied him with the same details of the incumbents of the churches he selected for his forays, for the rare occasions on which he might meet up with the vicar rather than a ‘parish worker’. The Jenkins book gave him details of church treasures, both fixed and architectural (which were of course irrelevant to the purpose, though Michael had at times been grateful to be able to make an admiring reference to, say, the Norman reredos or the double hammerbeam roof), but also- and more to the point for Michael- Jenkins described the treasures small, easily liftable and saleable: the minor effigies and busts, silver, pictures, chairs, lecterns, embroideries. Over and above these Michael often found a pleasing range of more humble but attractive objects waiting to be opportunistically pilfered, and the beauty of it was he wasn’t taking things that belonged to people. He was not depriving anyone of anything personal, and if he did cause upset, then at least church people had one another to turn to for comfort. And if God himself were offended, he hadn’t so far got round to showing it. In the meantime, Michael had done well out of candlesticks, church candles, tooled leather Bibles, altar cloths, small and ancient rugs, even sheet music, all of which were the kind of thing that any number of Bath people would pay money for in order to reinforce their belief that they were complex and creative souls whose originality and flair were revealed in the arrangement of their homes. He now noticed that Gordon Brookes was looking at him with some curiosity.
‘Sorry, where did you say you got my name?’
Michael swallowed again, and felt a tiny twitch of his face, the kind that might look to anyone watching like a deliberately tight blink of the eyes. The question, never before asked, was now being asked again. Perhaps it was the loss of the wife that was making this one so cagey, though he seemed to Michael more exasperated than bereaved.
‘Crockford’s. Fount of all knowledge! I say, it is all right for me to see the figures, isn’t it? I’ve looked at them behind the glass, of course, but it’ll be just tremendously exciting to get really close to them.’ He beamed again and tried to look eager. Steady, Michael, he told himself.
In the church Gordon Brookes pulled on a pair of cotton gloves from a drawer at the base of the display cabinet, unlocked the glass door and lifted out one of the two figures. ‘Here’s our St John. Vestry’s the best place, there’s a proper table there,’ he said, making his way to a door at the far end of the church. He could not carry both figures at once, but he seemed prepared to make two trips rather than hand one to Michael to bring. Michael, obedient to some etiquette that suggested it would be unseemly to do so, did not offer to help, but waited patiently by the open case. Gordon came back, took the second figure in his arms, saying only, ‘St Catharine, slightly heavier,’ and Michael followed respectfully.