The Black Seraphim (12 page)

James had been thinking about this. He said, “Who does elect the Canons?”

“The Canons Residentiary? They’re appointed by the Queen.”

“No doubt. But don’t tell me she has a little notebook and opens it and says, ‘We must give Canon Buggins a turn at Melchester.’”

Mrs Brookes laughed and said, “I don’t entirely understand it myself, but I believe it’s the Dean who puts up the names to some committee in London and they advise the Queen.”

“The Dean does it? Not the Bishop?”

“Certainly not the Bishop. He never interferes in Cathedral matters. Anyway, he’s in Australia.”

“But it’s not something that’s done quickly.”

“When Canon Carstairs died, it was six months before we got Canon Humphrey.”

“I see,” said James thoughtfully. “Not like the Army.”

“Not a bit like the Army. We’ve been talking so much you’ve let your coffee get cold. I’ll get you another cup.”

“It’s the sort of England I used to dream about when we were in India,” said Amanda. “Green fields and bosomy trees and little villages hidden among them with the church spire peeping out like a giraffe in a pampas clump.”

From where they were sitting, on the top of Helmet Down, a fair slice of southern England was spread below them. Not dramatic, thought James, but old and tidy and secure.

“It looks peaceful,” he said. “But I expect that underneath the surface all the basic passions are running hot. Progressives against conservatives, men against women, the old against the young.”

“Talking about running hot,” said Amanda, “I thought you were going to blow up on that last uphill stretch. You can’t be fit. It must be all that desk work. Didn’t you get any exercise at all?”

“There wasn’t time for much. I used to play a little squash.”

“Fine. There’s an Army court we’ve got the use of. We could have a game.”

“I haven’t got any clothes. Or a racquet.”

“Don’t be feeble. Peter can lend you the clothes. You’re about the same size.”

“You’ll be too good for me.”

“Then you’ll get a lot of exercise, won’t you?”

“I suppose so,” said James. He was changing his mind about Amanda. He had thought she was thin. Now he realised that thin wasn’t the right word. Thinness implied weakness. There was nothing weak about her. She had led him up that last steep bit like a chamois. There was strength in the shoulders too.

What was the expression people used about boxers? That they’d strip well. He was certain she would strip well.

“Why is it,” said Amanda, “that doctors look at you as though you were a prime piece of beef hanging up in a butcher’s shop?”

“Sorry. Professional interest in the human frame,” said James. “Actually, I was admiring that jersey you’re wearing.”

It was a pale blue sweatshirt embroidered in front with the words NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY.

“I stole it from my brother. He’s the real athlete of the family. Low hurdles. An international prospect—”

“Is that how he got to Northwestern?”

“Certainly. We could never have afforded it otherwise. He got what’s called an athletics grant. English universities don’t approve of that sort of thing. I can’t see why. They give people scholarships because they’re brainy and hope they’ll bring credit on the university by writing learned theses and things. Why shouldn’t you bring just as much credit by jumping farther or running faster than anyone else in the world?”

“The Ancient Greeks would have approved of that. Was your father an athlete too?”

“The thing he was really good at was fencing.”

“He would have been a difficult man to beat,” agreed James. He visualised the Dean as a young man, tall, with strong arms and wrists, ruthlessly dedicated to finding and exploiting the weak spots in an opponent’s technique. He said, “You promised to tell me the real story of what happened to your father in his last mission in Africa.”

There was a pause, measured in minutes more than in seconds, before Amanda said, “Did I?”

This was followed by another long pause.

“It’s not a very nice story. You’re not easily shocked, are you?”

“Not easily,” said James, but as he said it, he was conscious of a feeling of disquiet.

“Then don’t interrupt me. And don’t look at me. Our mission was on the plateau between the Ilubabor and the Keta Mountains, near the boundary line between Abyssinia and the Southern Sudan. The nearest town was Jimma, about eighty miles away, and from there to Addis Ababa was another hundred miles by quite a good road. Our supplies used to come up from there. When we first arrived, I thought it was the nicest place we’d been in. It was February and everything was green. Mimosa and pine trees and giant sycamores and all sorts of fruit trees – oranges and peaches and tamarinds and figs. The people of the plateau were friendly and a lot more sympathetic than some of the ones we’d lived among before, in Central Africa and India. After all, they’d been Christians longer than we had. It was a primitive sort of Christianity, but it gave Father a basis to work on. There was a nice convert called Jobo who helped with the services, and three or four servants. One of them was quite a good cook. I was sixteen at the time and had a pony which I rode when we visited the villages. It all seemed too good to be true. I think our first hint of trouble was when Jobo told us about our predecessors. We’d known, in a general way, that there’d been two missionaries there before us and that one of them had died and the second had left rather quickly. What we didn’t know was that the first one had committed suicide. Not in any dramatic sort of way. He just wandered off into the hills in mid-June – that’s the hottest of the hot weather – without any water or food or even a hat on his head and after a time he lay down and died. The natives found what the foxes had left of him. They’re not like English foxes. They’re grey and nearly twice as big. More like wolves, really. We used to hear them barking at night. The second man stood it for about six months and then came back to Addis and advised them to abandon the mission. He had been told about men who came across the border from the Sudan and terrorised the villagers. Gangas, the villagers called them. At the first hint of them they’d abandon the village and hide out in the hills until they’d gone. Father took all this with a pinch of salt. We’d been in dangerous places before and the dangers had mostly proved to be exaggerated. It would have been better if he had listened.”

When Amanda stopped talking, the sounds of the English countryside reasserted themselves. There were grasshoppers in the dry grass. A flock of starlings passed overhead like a dark cloud, formed, re-formed and swept away.

“I was in the kitchen, trying to find out what had happened to all the servants, when the Gangas arrived. There were five of them, almost naked. They were carrying machetes and iron-wood clubs. Jobo was arguing with them, telling them to go away, I suppose. They cut him to pieces. The first blow nearly took his head off. Then they started cutting off his arms and legs. They were like boys playing a game. Then Father came out. He must have heard the noise. He just stood looking down at what was left of Jobo. The man nearest to him took a swipe at him with his club and broke his leg. They’d have killed him, of course, but at that moment they caught sight of me in the window. They all swung round and came crowding into the kitchen. The only thing I could do was back into the corner and crouch down. I think my legs had given way under me. That was when they saw something more interesting than a sixteen-year-old girl. There were a dozen lumps of raw meat on the dresser. They grabbed them and started stuffing them into their mouths. The blood was running down their chins and dripping onto their naked bodies. They fought each other for the odd piece. I suppose they must have been starving. Father, who had dragged himself to the doorway, stood watching them. As long as I live, I shall never forget the look on his face. A few moments later the five men were all rolling on the floor in agony, jerking and twisting. They died quite soon. The meat was bait, for the foxes. There was cyanide in each lump. I don’t remember much after that. The servants who had run away came back. They buried the Gangas. They could have driven Father into Jimma, where there was a hospital, but he wouldn’t let them. He showed them how to set and splint his leg. It wasn’t a sensible thing to do and it made a lot of trouble later. Something went wrong with the leg bone. It had to be broken and reset. He was nearly a year in and out of hospital when we got back to England. I think he welcomed the pain. It was a penance for what he’d done. He could have stopped them, you see. He knew enough of their language to shout out, ‘Poison!’ But he didn’t. He let them die. If he’d had to do it to save the Church, it would have been justified. It wasn’t justified to save me. I told you
not
to look at me.”

James said, “Sorry.” He knew that she was crying, although she was making no noise about it. He watched two boys on bicycles racing each other on the road at the foot of the down.

Their shouts came distantly up to him. When Amanda spoke again, she seemed to be back on balance.

She said, “Now you know what a dangerous man he is.”

“Not an easy member for a cathedral community to accommodate,” agreed James.

“Oh, he got on well enough with most of them. Tom Lister was a great standby. Is it true you were talking to him on the night he died?”

“Quite true.”

“What a perfect way to go. Like a candle being blown out when it’s time for bed. I wonder if he knew it was going to happen.”

“I think he must have done.”

“What did you talk about?”

“He said that scientists were so dangerous that they ought to be locked up in their own laboratories.”

“James,” said Amanda, “you do like me, don’t you?” Before he could say anything, she went on, “Because if you do, you mustn’t talk to me as though I was ten years old.”

“I’m sorry. It was quite a long discussion.” He tried to collect his thoughts. “What Tom seemed to feel was that scientists were all right when they were doing their proper job, which was, I suppose, inventing useful things like anaesthetics and antibiotics, but when they went too far and meddled with things they weren’t meant to meddle with, they were stepping out of their proper ground and that was when they hurt people more than they helped them. I didn’t agree. I said that a scientist must always go the whole way and damn the consequences.”

“Then you were wrong and Tom was right.”

“You really think that?”

“Certainly. Do you believe in God?”

Faced with this sudden and practically unanswerable question, James took refuge in silence.

“Before you say something stupid, let me tell you what I
don’t
mean. I’m not asking if you believe that there’s an old man with a white beard waiting to say hello when you go aloft, or that if you live respectably down here on the ground floor, you earn yourself a stay in a golden penthouse afterward.”

“I’m with Omar on that,” agreed James. “’For this is truth, though all the rest be lies. The rose that once is blown forever dies.’”

“Right. But what I
do
mean is that all this—” Amanda lay back on her elbows and looked down at the patchwork of fields below them “—all this can’t just be blind chance. Someone must have thought it out. The world and all the weird and wonderful creatures in it. The dolphins, who knew all about radar before we imagined we’d invented it, and the swallows that come every year, without maps or compasses, from a particular house in North Africa to a particular house in Melchester, and the ants who organise themselves like an army, and hummingbirds, and the creatures who live so deep down in the sea that no one has ever set eyes on them, to say nothing of the balance of elements that allows the world to exist at all. Don’t tell me it’s all a fluke.”

“Darwin—” said James.

“Oh, Darwin. All he explained was why some giraffes have longer necks than others. He doesn’t get near the real point that some intelligence, so much more intelligent than we are that we can’t even begin to understand it,
must
have thought it all out. Ever since people have started to think, they’ve realised that an intelligence like that
must
exist. Mostly they’ve been prepared to be thankful and enjoy their luck. It’s only scientists who probe and peer. It’s so—so impertinent. And dangerous, because they never know when to stop. And what happens at the end of the day? They produce a baby out of a test tube and think they’ve done something terribly clever.”

James had listened in silence to the altars of his faith being trampled on. What he would have said was never put to the test, since a lady, who had approached Helmet Down from the rear, arrived at this moment with an English setter which fell on Amanda and started to lick her face.

“Good walk?” said Peter.

“Smashing.”

“You look stiff.”

“I am stiff.”

“I’m telling you, don’t let that girl get you onto a squash court. She’ll run you off your feet.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“What did you find to talk about?”

“Everything under the sun,” said James. “What about a drink? I could just hobble as far as the Black Lion.”

“Not tonight. Thursdays and Fridays are no-booze and early-bed nights. We’ve got a needle match on Saturday against Salisbury. They always put out a good side.”

“In that case,” said James, “since I didn’t get much lunch and no tea at all, I think I’ll stand myself a proper evening meal for once.”

He was not sorry to be alone. He didn’t want to talk about Amanda. He wanted to think about her. The elaborate four-course dinner at the Black Lion, with decorous intervals between the courses, gave him plenty of time to do this.

For a start, how old was she? If she had been sixteen or seventeen at the time of the Ganga episode and had come back to England soon after that, and her father had been in and out of hospital for a year and had been at Melchester for the best part of two years, that made her about twenty. She looked older than that, but, living the sort of life she did, she’d have grown up quickly. That last episode must have been traumatic. Clearly, it was not for general publication, since all that he had heard before had been vague rumours. From remarks dropped during the school walk he gathered that there were at least three versions current among the boys, the most widely believed being that the Dean had a wooden leg in place of one cut off and eaten by cannibals.