The caretaker nodded. He was big and broad and dressed like a lumberjack. He had a ridiculous fur hat with ear-flaps tied up under his chin. Dryden would have laughed, but then he was big and broad and dressed like a lumberjack.
Dryden was always disappointed at his inability to intimidate. At six foot three, in the cavernous black overcoat, he felt he might just occasionally demand some respect. But the lumberjack didn’t look very impressed.
‘I just wondered,’ said Dryden, weakly. Any news about the car they got out of the river?’
‘Car?’
There was a long silence in which the sound of cogs could be heard turning. Was that a thought crossing his mind?
‘Fuck off,’ said the caretaker and whistled. An Alsatian dog bounded into the light trailing a line of dribble any rabies victim would have been proud of. Dryden’s guts dissolved and the surge of panic was so strong he couldn’t move his legs. With what looked like exaggerated calm he flipped open a laminated wallet containing a press card, which failed to impress the dog. Then again it was a decade old, and someone else’s.
‘Philip Dryden. The Crow’
‘Fuck off,’ said the caretaker. It didn’t count as repetition because it was at least an octave lower and a lot louder.
Dryden fucked off. The last thing he saw was a half-finished sign propped up against the marina’s prospective site office. ‘Feltwell Anchor Marina opens: April 1’. Work on the bridge would not take as long, but the river would be blocked for several months at least. But for the kids, and the ice, the Lark victim would have stayed undiscovered into the spring.
‘Local knowledge,’ said Dryden to nobody, fishing in the pockets and producing a packet of mushrooms which he munched as they swept on through the gloom.
The village of Little Ouse lay at the end of a three-mile drove – a long, dispiriting ride across the peatlands on a track constructed of slabs of concrete laid inexpertly heel-to-toe. It had been a soft drove until the war, when the concrete had been laid by the Ministry of Production to speed the supply of vegetables to London. The corrugated surface played a soundtrack back to drivers – a kind of dismal rumbling background beat.
Two rows of brick tied cottages formed what was once the heart of the village. They stood in the lee of the high river bank. A tortured cast-iron bridge crossed the Lark. A home-made wooden sign hung from its railing in the gloom of a winter’s dusk: At Your Own Risk’. The church of St John, rebuilt by the Victorians, was demure and neat in contrast to the monumental vicarage, a neo-Gothic classic in damp red brick, which stood beside it in the same stand of tall pines. Much of the odious decoration was hidden beneath a facade of ivy. Like most poor Victorian buildings it was dominated by a minor feature, the front porch – a stone portico supported by carved caryatids of two clerics with bishops’ crooks.
They pulled up and Humph killed the engine. He was asleep before the sound died.
The light was gone from the day and the dusk was violet except for the white ice on the trees. The vicarage loomed over them, some of the windows lighted. Two men came out and made their way to a woodstore beside the church, returning laden with logs for a fire. Beneath the portico they stopped to chat to a figure lost in the gloom. Then they were gone, but the figure lingered. The wind whispered through the pines. A full minute passed before the Reverend John Tavanter stepped out into what was left of the day.
He wore a heavy black overcoat but nothing on his head, which was globe-like and radiated intelligence. Dryden guessed he was in his mid sixties, a rounded, almost sensual figure with the dreamy childish features of a poet. A teetotal Dylan Thomas. He exuded a comfortable confidence, although his hands fluttered in a minor betrayal of something less assured.
He saw Dryden, spread his hands in a blessing, and looked to the sky. ‘Snow soon,’ he said, in a pulpit voice.
Dryden slammed the cab door and enjoyed the triple echo. They walked towards the church. They’d met before over the previous two years in a depressing round of parishioners’ deaths, farm accidents, and petty vandalism in the parish – and finally at his own mother’s funeral. St John’s at Little Ouse was the least vibrant of Tavanter’s six churches, the solitary Sunday service drawing a congregation of twenty, limping in from outlying farms.
Some, most perhaps, knew the story of the desolation of St John’s. In small communities sexual scandal has a half-life as long and corrosive as radium. Tavanter had come to St John’s, his first parish, from Oxford in the spring of 1965. The obstacles in his modernizing path were formidable – the nagging poverty of his congregation and their almost pagan need for a style of religion he could not condone, let alone deliver. He had arrived with ideas of social mobility then popular in his theological college. He found a congregation which wanted a medieval preacher to take up residence in the manse with a suitable wife. They suspected his motives and eventually, worse still, his morals. For years they despised him while he fought to love them without hatred.
He blamed himself for hiding the truth. So, on Advent Sunday 1975, a bright day full of unforgettable yellow sunlight which managed to flatten a landscape already steamrollered by nature, he announced from the pulpit that he was gay. It was a life-defining moment and one he replayed with pride on the video tape that was his memory. In a single practised sentence he gained the authority he deserved, and lost a congregation. At the end of the sermon the hymn had been Bunyan’s ‘To Be a Pilgrim’. He had sung it alone.
They drove him out: not in the hail of earth and invective that would have been his punishment a century before, but by indifference and malice. He preached to an empty church for six months. On saints’ days they would gather within sight of St John’s across the peat fields to pray. He watched them, his vestments blowing uselessly in the wind, while they raised their voices in hymn. He left within a year after a pauper’s funeral which he had briefly prayed might be his own.
It was God or chance that arranged the next episode in John Tavanter’s life. By then he did not care if it was someone else’s God. He joined a team ministry in Stepney, in London’s East End, where he helped the poor who asked no questions. In 1983 he used his savings to buy a plot of land on the canal bank beside St Barnabas’s Church so that a youth club could be added to the Victorian church hall. It cost him £26,000: the land was of little value to anyone else.
Within a month the diocese had decided to close St Barnabas and merge two congregations at a new church half a mile away. Developers wanted the land for executive housing – the gentrification of the inner city was then beginning to gather pace. The only obstacle was Tavanter’s half acre. He sold for £750,000.
When it came it was a delicious moment. The solicitors handed over the cheque in their wood-panelled offices in Bow High Street. Cold rain ran in rivulets down the fake mullioned window panes.
£750,000.
The figure hung in the air despite the weight of its astonishing implications. He returned to Cambridge and founded a centre for the care of terminally ill patients with AIDS. He called it, in one of many acts of retribution, the St John’s Centre. In return for transferring ownership of the hospice and its financing foundation to the local diocese he was appointed team vicar for a group of six Fen parishes, based at the vicarage of St John’s. He used the rambling building as a centre for the carers of AIDS patients, in need of somewhere to escape the pressures of the deathbed.
It was a victory and John Tavanter spent most of the rest of his life trying not to glory in it. Those parishioners who remembered him treated him like a ghost.
Dryden and Tavanter liked each other in that kind of instant superficial way which can be the first step in a long friendship. Tavanter saw in the reporter a fellow outsider, someone who watched life as a spectator, a game devised for ordinary, normal people. Dryden recognized in Tavanter the wry attitude of someone estranged from society, and not entirely unhappy with the arrangement. When his mother died he chose Little Ouse for the burial. Tavanter had been matter-of-fact, helpful and humane.