The Water Clock(57)

He would rise early, at 5.30, in the Victorian manse. He would shuffle, barefoot, to the shutters in the parlour and throwing them back to the new dawn he would close his eyes and pray for sympathy from the sky. Rain, clouds, grey skies, and sleet were his friends. These would save him from a sunny graveside and provide, instead, a fitting backdrop to a lonely burial. Buffeted and soaked, he felt at least that he had the sympathy of the elements.

But this morning, in that last summer of 1976, he had prayed hard and long because he could feel even at that early hour the warmth beyond the bay windows of the manse. He opened his eyes to see a clear sky, purple in the west, shading to a cobalt blue in the east. Venus, the morning star, was rising over St John’s. It was a perfect day: a day indifferent to the ceremony he was about to perform. He felt his heart crush a little more.

The body of Martha Jane Elliott, spinster, was delivered at 10 a.m. by a Co-operative Society hearse paid for by the parish. Her body had lain for three days in the mortuary at the Princess of Wales Hospital. During this time she had been visited by no one. Tavanter had known her for all the years of his ministry and saw in her the petty insecurity which seemed a blight on this tiny community. She’d lived her life in a world still coming to terms with the arrival of the motorcar and the independence and affluence of youth, ill at ease with both technical progress and social change. Her cottage so closely resembled the kind of house drawn by a child that Tavanter always expected to see a pencil-thin line of smoke snaking up from the chimney stack. Built on the peats of the southern fenland, it had been undermined by the shrinkage that had followed the systematic draining during the nineteenth century. As a result it stood crazily at variance to the horizon: a worthless hovel which creaked in the wind.

She died on a brass bedstead in a bedroom so damp he could push his fingers into the plaster. In that last bitter winter rats had nibbled at the rugs downstairs. She lasted until the summer when, on a day weighted down by the vast sky above the fen, she clutched her family Bible to her chest and asked her confessor finally what she had asked him constantly throughout her long, final illness. ‘Has no one come?’

No one came. The landlords of the cottage prepared to repossess: the bailiffs, mindful at least of the villagers’ acute sense of sacrilege, made discreet requests of the vicar on behalf of debtors afraid they were about to be cheated by death. Martha directed him to a wooden chest beneath the bed which on inspection yielded some costume jewellery, a badly corroded silver picture frame, and a brass candlestick. Wrapped in tissue paper there were four china cups, perfectly intact, but nearly worthless.

He’d been with her when she died. A moment marked by the chattering of her rotten teeth.

The bailiffs came in through the back door as her body left through the front. The villagers watched in silence as her chipboard coffin slid with a thin veneer of pine and decorum into the back of the Co-op hearse. Then they melted back into the fields.

Today they would stay in the fields, not because they had little respect for the dead, but because they had no respect for him.

He stood now alone at the edge of her grave. His white cassock soaked up the great blast of sunlight that had fallen on St John’s – mocking the burial. They would not come. They had rejected him for many reasons: but largely because he had brought no wife. He had come as a herald of the modern world but they had expected God’s representative of the past. He wanted to understand them; they wanted him to preach to them from the stunted pulpit in the damp chapel. He wanted to sympathize with them and their lives; they expected that he would remain aloof as his predecessors had done. They wanted the vicarage to be a symbol in brick of the set order; he wanted it to be home to a social revolution. They wanted their children to work there, cleaning and gardening and answering the door. He wanted it to be a modern world.

And he wanted it to be an honest one. There had been other men after Tommy. His life was fractured by the pretence he was forced to maintain. Public opinion in the wider world had changed. He felt it was best for his parish to tell them, from the pulpit one Sunday, that his sexuality was not conventional. A fatal error.

And this was their revenge. His cassock flapped in the sunshine and wind like the flag of surrender it was. The pall-bearers, hired from the Co-op along with the hearse, had seen the coffin lowered into a wet Fen grave – they were always wet whatever the summer – and had then retreated beyond the churchyard wall to smoke and chat. He was alone to say the rite. Standing there he knew it would be his last. A week earlier the letter had come by registered post. A new position in London, lost in the teeming millions. By the time the last clods of earth had been placed over the grave he’d packed his first case.