The vestry smelled of paraffin and chrysanthemums. Two walls were lined with cupboards, and chairs were stacked in one corner. The only other door must lead outside, back towards the vicarage, Michael thought. From a large cardboard box on the floor with ‘Waste paper for Afghanistan’ written on its side in black marker, Gordon Brookes drew a couple of magazines. He spread them over the centre of the table. Without smiling he placed the figures on top of them. Gordon Brookes then tipped his head on one side and gazed at them sentimentally, and it seemed sensible to Michael to do the same. The St Catharine sat on her magazine, partly obliterating the cover photograph of a middle-aged man standing on a rock on the edge of a lake looking through binoculars. The white, sweet-faced Saint Catharine, her eyes cast graciously downwards, was apparently reading the headline ‘Whale watching in Manitoba’. Michael smiled, and Gordon Brookes smiled too.
‘Lovely, aren’t they?’ he said, quite kindly. Michael got his notebook and magnifying glass out of his backpack and put on a pair of spectacles. But he did not sit down, feeling that the most delicate of transactions was being conducted and that even one off-balance move, one over-zealous gesture on his part, would cause the whole fragile bargain to collapse. Gordon Brookes took a step back. Michael smiled at the figures again and then looked at Gordon.
‘Carry on,’ Gordon said, pulling off the gloves and handing them to Michael. ‘I’m no expert so I’ll leave you to get on with it. I’m assuming you know how to handle them.’
Michael almost burst into song. ‘Right! That’s terribly good of you. I do appreciate it. It’s a marvellous opportunity.’ He sat down at the table and squinted purposefully at the figures, wrinkling his nose. Gordon Brookes did not leave. Michael looked at him with the gentlest smile of dismissal he could manage.
‘I’ll be fine, now. Thanks so much,’ he said.
‘Right. Well, I’ll let you get on, while I just potter.’ So that was what he meant by leaving him to get on with it. Get on with it, but I’ll be right here behind you. In the same room. I am not going to leave. Michael’s face twitched behind his glasses. How was he going to manage the amount of bluffing that would now be required? He could drop out of the whole thing, just look at the figures and go. But how could he even think of leaving without them, after this much effort? His heart had been thumping in his throat since he arrived. He coughed. He dared not touch the figures in front of Gordon Brookes. He could not trust his hands not to shake.
‘Don’t let me, er… I’m quite happy here on my own, if you’ve got things to do.’
‘I gather it’s a study of yours. Have you published?’
‘Oh no! Oh, you know, the usual problem. Time! Takes so much time, getting anything knocked into proper shape for a publisher. That’s life. But I chip away, live in hope. You know.’ He turned and looked at the alabaster figures in what he hoped was an informed sort of way.
Gordon turned and started to busy himself with a precarious stack of books and sheets of paper. ‘Choir. They will leave things higgledy-piggledy,’ he murmured. Michael, pretending to consult his notebook, was getting desperate. He had to get Gordon Brookes to leave.
‘Honestly, don’t let me stop you getting on,’ he said. ‘I’m quite happy on my own for… well, I should think twenty minutes should do it. But naturally I’d prefer you to come back to put them back in their case.’
‘You were ordained when, Jeff?’ Gordon asked mildly.
‘Oh, only in 1996,’ Michael replied. ‘Latecomer.’ He would volunteer nothing more lest it provoke more conversation. He needed the man to go.
‘Yes. Yes, because you see, if you don’t mind, Jeff, it’s odd you’re not aware. Trivial thing, of course, but if nobody’s pointed it out to you… we never say Crockford’s, do you see. It’s Crockford, not Crockford’s. You just don’t say Crockford’zzzz, except when you’re saying the whole name, as in “Crockford’s Directory of the Clergy”. Hope you don’t mind my mentioning it.’
Michael fixed a look of polite amusement on his face and turned.
‘Oh? Well! Well, my goodness. I, er…’
‘It’s odd you’ve not picked that up so far.’
It was too late for Michael to pretend he was hard of hearing, had to lip-read and sometimes made mistakes. His mouth was dry. Gordon Brookes was about to say that he knew perfectly well that Michael was a fraud. But Michael knew, just as perfectly, that he needed the alabaster figures to get himself afloat again; he needed them so badly that he felt a rush of fury at the thought that Gordon Brookes might stop him. Just as he was thinking that the only course open to him now was physical assault, he wondered. Dare he try it again? He had done it once before with a punter who’d come back to the stall complaining that Michael had sold him some dud Cornish ware the week before. ’1930s you said and when I get it home I turn it upside down an’ it says fucking dishwasherproof on the bottom.’ The punter had not been in the right frame of mind to be convinced that dishwashers had been around for a lot longer than people realised. Michael had had to think fast. It had worked then, and it had to work now.
He pretended to turn his attention back to the figures, but stirred, then coughed, started rigidly in his chair and sucked up a noisy breath. He swung back in his chair and pulled in another breath with a sound like air being blown into a balloon. He struggled to say, ‘Asthma. Be all right… in a minute.’ And then he took another, even more shallow, pained and laborious breath to show that he would not be all right at all.
‘Oh good heavens- have you got something to take for it? An inhaler or something? Don’t you carry an inhaler?’
Michael shook his head and lurched in his chair, sucking and heaving. ‘Glass of water. Pills. Need water. Glass of water.’ He now brought fear into his eyes, which swivelled wildly round the room in search of the sink and tap, which he had already established were not there.
‘Oh! Oh right, I see, right. Hang on. I’ll just have to… er, look, will you be all right for a minute? I’ll get one from the vicarage. I’ll be back in a second, can you, are you sure you, er…’
Michael nodded. ‘Please! Please, water.’
When the vestry outside door had closed behind Gordon, Michael waited for a moment, got up, wrapped each figure quickly in the magazine on which it stood and placed them both in his backpack. Then he dashed back into the church, crossed it swiftly, let himself out and raced down through the churchyard, keeping off the path, which he knew could be seen from the vicarage. By the time the van started on the third attempt Michael was half-dead with terror, but with the pulse of fear came also a quickening surge of relief because he was, after all, alive.
My mood changed. Something happened to remove any last trace of uncertainty. Two people turned up on bicycles- imagine, in February! They were Dutch, and I believe they did say that they had hired the bicycles for the day as it was fine and they wanted to see something of the countryside outside Bath. They had all that strange clothing that people wear on bicycles. I’ve never had the slightest idea where such clothing is even to be bought or what it is called, let alone what particular purpose it might serve, and it took me a moment to get over their appearance at the door, like giant tadpoles in some sort of brightly coloured race. And they had maps, of course, and showed me the special cycle route they were doing on which certain ‘points of interest’ had been marked, including Walden Manor. They had left the marked route and come all the way down the drive, even though there is a sign saying ‘Private’ at the top, next to the road. This is Walden Manor, yes? they asked me. I couldn’t very well dispute it. So I said yes, and then I stood at the door waiting for them to go.