Murder in a Cathedral (21 page)

She returned bearing an immense Georgian silver punchbowl, and removed the covering film to reveal within a pile of fruit and fresh mint. ‘Courtesy of Mary Lou, who sends her love to you both. I’ll take this to the drawing room and add the lemonade.’

‘How very kind of you to have gone to so much trouble, Jack,’ said the bishop, as the hosts stood in the drawing room awaiting their first guests.

‘I thought it the least I could do for the nondrinkers. Oh and by the way, there isn’t that much of it, so FHB.’

‘FHB?’

‘Family Hold Back. We can make do with champagne.’

‘My goodness, this really is turning into a feast. It reminds me of high table at a rich college. I hope the dean won’t be shocked.’

‘We’ll just keep telling him it’s in his honour. That should draw his sting.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ said Pooley. ‘From what I’ve seen of him one might as well reason with a hornet. Champagne, anyone?’

The Coopers arrived at 7.30 on the dot, he glowering suspiciously, she all smiles and gush. ‘What a charming idea this is, Bishop Dave. Most thoughtful. Most thoughtful. Although of course our little celebration cannot but be marred by our sadness over the wicked act of that unfortunate. May God forgive him.’

As she delivered herself of this spectacular piece of crassness, the bell rang again, allowing Amiss to escape the temptation to strike her. At the front door were the canonical trio, all clad as orthodoxly as the dean and all clearly on their best behaviour. He led them through.

The baroness took command. ‘Hello, hello. Welcome. Delighted to meet you two,’ she said to Davage and Trustrum. She clapped Fedden-Jones on the back. ‘What a jolly night out we had last week.

‘Now, we have a little wine here for the drinkers and a simple fruit concoction of my own for the others.’

She smiled gaily. ‘Hands up the nondrinkers.’

The Coopers obliged. ‘Right. Ellis, sort out the others. Now, Dean and Mrs Dean, come over here and examine my lemonade fruit punch. If you don’t like the look of it, you can have water.’

The dean, who had appeared ill at ease since he first caught sight of Alice, made a big effort. ‘How delicious this looks. My goodness, strawberries. I haven’t had any of those since last year. Yes, please.’

‘That’s both of us, then,’ said Tilly with a bright smile.

The baroness ladled punch into two large tumblers as Amiss and Pooley poured champagne for the others from bottles swathed in white cloths to conceal their identity. Davage, Fedden-Jones and Trustrum, who had been looking depressed, seemed to cheer up when they tasted the contents of their glasses; so indeed did the Coopers.

‘Very delicious, I must say, Lady Troutbeck. Most refreshing.’

‘What is it called?’ asked Tilly. ‘You must tell me how to make it.’

‘We called it Granny’s Punch in my family, and I’m afraid I’m honour bound to keep the recipe secret.’ The baroness reached for their glasses. ‘Have some more, Dean. And Mrs Dean, of course.’

By the time they sat down to dinner the mood was perceptibly lighter. Invited to say grace, the dean restricted himself to: ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.’ Offered a switch to water, he and Tilly opted to finish up the punch on the grounds that it would be a shame to waste it. Conversation had begun rather stilted and artificial, as might be expected of people required to be civil in almost impossible circumstances, but the dean’s evident good humour caused his colleagues to relax. The blinis were delicious and allowed several minutes of appreciative oohing and aahing and reminiscences from Fedden-Jones of eating the dish in St Petersburg.

‘You carve, David,’ commanded the baroness, when Pooley came in bearing the splendid leg of lamb.

‘Oh, dear. I’m not sure that I’ll be able to do it.’

‘Nonsense. The host must carve. It’s tradition.’

Obediently, the bishop applied the knife uncertainly to the joint and began to cut slightly jagged slices, as Pooley and Amiss fussed around with plates and vegetable dishes. Suddenly there was a squeal, and the bishop stuck his finger in his mouth like a child.

‘You’ve cut yourself,’ said Alice, rushing to his side with her handkerchief.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ offered the baroness cheerily. ‘It’ll mingle with the blood of the lamb.’

It was a tribute to the dean’s equable mood that he chose to ignore this blasphemy. The baroness directed Pooley to take over carving, which he did with extreme competence.

Over the main course, Amiss, Davage and Fedden-Jones – the most practised social animals among the gathering – kept the focus on the Coopers, enquiring about their recent travels, their impressions of America and their assessment of the political scene there. There was a momentary upheaval when the dean began to denounce the Democrats as abortionists, but an astute question about the blurring of party boundaries got him back on benign track.

The dean, Amiss realized, was not at all stupid or ill-informed. Indeed there were moments when it was clear that had he not succumbed to the virus of fundamentalism, he might have been good company. Unfortunately – as became clear later on in the drawing room – the virulence of that virus was only temporarily in remission.

After dinner, it was the baroness who started the trouble. ‘How much you must miss Canon Flubert. It will be difficult to find anyone to replace him, won’t it?’

‘I see no practical difficulty,’ responded the dean. ‘We need less and less of that kind of music and there are always freelance organists available.’

‘You mean you’re not proposing to replace him with a musician?’

Tilly snorted. ‘Certainly not. Norm’s mission is to make the church relevant to the world of today and bring souls to God.’ She smiled patronizingly at her expectant audience. ‘So that is why our dear Battersea colleague, the Reverend Bev Johns, a great fisher of souls, will be the new canon.’

Fedden-Jones’s normal cautious mask slipped. He blurted out incautiously, ‘You’re joking, of course. Make that awful vulgar creature with the ponytail a canon? Why he actually told me at the bishop’s consecration that he likes to be known as the Rev. Bev.’

‘I have the utmost faith in the Reverend Mr Johns.’ The dean spoke stiffly, although his consonants were slightly slurred. ‘He will give our proceedings an energy which they lack.’

‘Over my dead body,’ said Fedden-Jones. ‘We’re not having him, are we, colleagues?’

Davage and Trustrum failed to meet his eye. ‘Cecil! Sebastian!’

Trustrum continued to look at the floor, but Davage came in bravely. ‘I’m sorry, Dominic, but we mustn’t rule anyone out. Sometimes one has to compromise.’

There was a long and uneasy silence, broken by Tilly, who moved further up the sofa until her body was touching Ellis Pooley’s, giggled flirtatiously, put her hand on his thigh, gazed at him coquettishly and asked, ‘And why is a nice boy like you not married?’

Pink with embarrassment, Pooley muttered something feeble about never having met the right woman, eliciting a skittish rejoinder about how different things would have been had Tilly been free, which caused the dean to look thunderously in her direction.

‘We are a little gathering of confirmed bachelors and spinsters, aren’t we?’ tittered Davage, ill-advisedly holding out his glass to Amiss for a refill of port. ‘What is it about the air of Westonbury, I wonder?’

The dean scowled. ‘It is better to marry than to burn.’

It was hard not to feel that the conversation was deteriorating. Worse followed shortly when the effects of alcohol removed whatever control Davage normally kept on his malice. ‘How do you feel about being the only straight in a chapter of queers?’

‘What did you say?’

‘You know about us. But it must have been a shock to come back from Bible-thumping country to find lesbians affirming in the cathedral.’

The dean stood up slowly. ‘Have I heard you correctly? Are you telling me that those women worshipping idolatrously were also sexual abominations before God.’

‘ ’Fraid so,’ tittered Davage. ‘What you hit on there was a coming-out ceremony of the Wolpurtstone coven. And a pretty ghastly bunch they were too. I saw them coming out of the cathedral.’ He shook his head. ‘What an ugly crew.’ He waved his glass in Alice’s direction. ‘I can’t understand, I simply can’t understand, Alice, why you don’t leave those dreary, dumpy, frumpy dykes and hang out with lipstick lesbians.’

He leaned forward confidingly. ‘Why don’t you just find yourself a little church in London and make it a really chic centre for lesbians who know how to dress?’

The dean’s attention had now been completely distracted from the sight of his wife patting the cheek of the increasingly miserable Pooley; he stormed over to Alice.

‘Is this true? Were these women perverts?’

They were lesbians, yes,’ she said quietly.

‘And are you one of their abominable number and therefore hateful in the eyes of the Lord?’

She remained silent.

‘Answer me, woman. I insist on knowing if you are a degenerate.’

She looked him straight between the eyes. ‘I refuse to answer such a question.’

The baroness came in cheerfully. ‘Come now, Dean. I don’t think you’re right there. I was looking up the Old Testament only the other day to check on that fellow often quoted these days for his denunciation of homosexuals… What’s his name?’

‘Leviticus,’ said the bishop.

‘Well, I’ve scrutinized Leviticus thoroughly and he says absolutely nothing about lesbians. Now he’s chock-a-block with prohibitions of a sexual kind – blokes are forbidden to do it with mothers, aunts, step-granddaughters, men and animals among others. His list of no-noes is as thorough as anyone could reasonably expect, but lesbians do not appear. So what’s the problem?’

The dean ignored him. ‘Answer me, woman.’

The bishop stood up. ‘Dean, please. Canon Wolpurtstone is a guest in my house. She should be treated with courtesy.’

‘She is a member of my chapter. I must know the answer to this question. Are you or are you not that abomination – a woman who lies with women?’

She remained silent. The baroness jumped up. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Dean, don’t you realize the girl is as straight as the next man. She’s doing her Lillian Hellman before Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist Senate committee – refusing to distance herself from her friends. Don’t you realize she pretends to be a lezzie because she thinks they’re victims and therefore she feels she must support and identify with them. An honest girl like that would tell you if she was one. The fact that she doesn’t, means she isn’t. Have you got that?’

The dean’s bad temper magically disappeared. He patted Alice on the top of the head. ‘That’s a good wee girl,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to hear you’re not an abomination.’ He sat down again.

‘A little more punch, Dean?’

‘Why not?’

The port however was working its potency on Davage and unleashing further stores of mischief. He leaned forward. ‘Have you had a chance to peek at Reggie Roper’s memorial since you returned?’

The cloud chased the sun from the dean’s features. ‘Is it finished?’

‘It certainly is. And I can tell you it lives up to all expectations. Pop down to the bottom of your garden, lift up the tarpaulin and you’ll get a treat. It’s just as Reggie wanted it.’

The dean began to glower. ‘We should get rid of it.’

‘Come on, Dean. Reggie paid you handsomely for tolerating his little whim. Think of all the lolly you got to spend on the cathedral.’

The word lolly distracted Tilly Cooper from further pressing her attentions on Pooley. ‘Oh, yes. The lolly. And how wonderfully we will spend it on behalf of Jesus. Soon we will have the disco system, the strobe lighting, the pool for total immersion.’

She beamed at everyone, but the dean was unresponsive. ‘It may be that we have been tempted by Satan. I must go home to pray. Come, woman.’ He grabbed Tilly’s hand and hauled her protesting from the sofa, muttered a few words of gratitude for the hospitality and without looking at any of his canons dragged his wife from the room.

The bishop returned from seeing them out to find the room plunged in despair.

‘What is strobe lighting?’ asked Trustrum.

‘Flashing coloured lights as used in taverns where the young dance. You must have seen them on television,’ said Davage wearily. ‘Oh, sorry, I forgot. You don’t have one. What Mrs Cooper seems to want is to have the cathedral full of dancing coloured lights which whirl around the whole area, while a modern sound system produces the sound of thump-thump music at about a thousand decibels – all in the name of Jesus, you understand.’

‘She said something about a pool.’

‘I expect higher authority may be able to block that, but I doubt if they can do anything about the lighting and the music’

‘Can’t we stop it, Cecil?’

‘You can try, Dominic. I’m afraid I doubt if we’ll be able to prevail.’ Davage stood up, staggered and then recovered himself. ‘Excuse me, My Lord. Thank you and goodbye to you all.’

Fedden-Jones and Trustrum followed soon after.

‘What a strange evening,’ said Alice.

‘With that mixture it’s bound to be,’ said the baroness robustly. ‘You poor girl, what a ghastly lot of colleagues you’ve got.’

‘In your place,’ said the bishop, ‘I have to say I would feel like looking for another job.’

‘Another job! Oh, Bishop!’

‘David, please.’

‘David, I’m only here because your predecessor made me take the canonry. Please, please, will you find me somewhere else to go? Somewhere I can be useful.’

The bishop took her hand. ‘My poor girl. You should not be here against your will. Talk to me about it tomorrow.’

She gave him a stunning smile. Pooley stood up. ‘Let me walk you home.’

‘Why are you blaming me?’ The baroness stubbed out her cigar.

‘You are being a little unfair, Robert,’ said the bishop, visibly fighting the sleepiness brought on by champagne, claret and port. ‘Jack has been a wonderful hostess. It’s just a little unfortunate that Cecil Davage was so tactless, Dean Cooper so irascible, Fedden-Jones so distressed and—’