The Lying Tongue (22 page)

I read through the diary quickly, almost eating the words as I went along, scanning the pages for any mention of Crace. As I did so, my heart raced, my breathing shortened, and I felt anger and panic begin to rise inside me.

Shaw had promised me an insight into why Chris had committed suicide, suggesting that Crace had had something to do with it. Apart from the entry about how Crace had come across the inspiration for
The Debating Society,
the diary gave me little extra information about the novelist. I threw down the diary, got up from my bed, opened the window and stared into the darkness outside. A murmur of voices came from below, locals enjoying a drink and warming themselves by the fire. Someone coughed, a loud rasping that reminded me of Shaw. I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been to trust that weasel of a man. And I’d paid him a thousand pounds. At the sound of a woman’s high-pitched laughter from the bar, I brought my fist down hard on the wooden windowsill. The pain, exploding from my hand and running up my arm, came as a relief.

I couldn’t afford to abandon the project now. I had to make it work. I did not have a choice. In order to find out more about Crace, I knew I would have to gain access to the school. Yet I could hardly breeze in and start asking questions about Crace. Telling them about my proposed biography was completely out of the question, as there was a risk that word would leak out, either to Crace’s publisher or even back to the writer himself. I thought about various options—presenting myself as a son of an old boy, pretending to be a tourist who wanted to look around—but realized that none of them would work.

What about the truth or something near to it? How would that work? What if I said I was an art history student who had taken an undergraduate course at London University—a fact that could be checked if necessary—and that I was embarking on an MA or PhD thesis exploring one particular art historical aspect of medieval churches? Crace had told me that Winterborne Abbey contained an interesting collection of relics, sculpture and statutory, objects that I was sure would have been documented in some way and the records held, I presumed, in the school archives. At least that would give me an excuse to get inside and hopefully strike up a conversation with the librarian. And if somebody checked with my old college and came up with the fact that I had not enrolled in an MA or PhD course, what would I say then? That I was doing this as research so as to strengthen my application for next year? It sounded just about plausible to me and certainly worth taking the risk.

At least this way I wouldn’t have to dissemble that much. I needn’t have to act. I could just be myself.

The next day, a Saturday, after an early breakfast, I decided to walk to the abbey to do a spot of research. Dark clouds cast shadows over the dense woods that enveloped the valley. As the wind roared through the trees, I stood outside and, in the back of my notebook, did a quick sketch of the building, which looked like an enormous Oxford chapel, complete with elaborate flying buttresses. What was unusual about it was the fact that the abbey did not have a nave, only a covered entrance where the central part of the church would have stood.

I turned the cold metal ring on the thick wooden door and pushed. Inside, the air was chilly and damp, as musty as the inside of a tomb. Weak sunlight filtered through the huge stained-glass windows, casting blood-colored shadows onto the tiled floor. I listened for the sound of other people, but I couldn’t hear anything except for the wind high in the trees outside. Inside, the stillness was oppressive, unnerving.

To my right there was a table selling illustrated guides to the abbey for two pounds, above which a notice read, “This stall is run on a trust basis. Please place money in honesty wall box. Please do not abuse this trust.” As far as I was concerned, my honesty was above question—in fact, I rather prided myself on my trustworthiness—and I promptly dropped two pound coins through the slot in the wall. As I did so, I remembered something I had read in Aretino’s
Letters:
how the king of France had given the writer a heavy gold chain decorated with tongues enameled in vermilion on which was written the message LINGUA EIVS LOQUETUR MENDACIUM—his tongue speaketh a lie.

On the wall facing me, above which sat the huge organ, hung several old prints in ancient frames, one of which had an inscription describing the origins of the abbey. It was said that the church was built by King Athelstan in atonement for the death of his younger brother, for which he was responsible. Apparently Athelstan had accused him of a crime, falsely, it later turned out, and set him to sea in a boat with no sails or paddles and only one page for company. After his brother drowned and Athelstan learned the errors of his ways, he built the abbey, together with another monastery, and underwent seven years’ penance in a bid to try and make his peace with God.

I noted all this down before walking underneath the curtained archway to the treasury that lay below the organ loft. According to my little guidebook, this is where I would find the relics of the church, all displayed beneath a glass panel. I switched on a timed light to illuminate the abbey’s collection of precious objects, an ivory triptych of a nativity scene; cigar-shaped parts of a pectoral cross dating from the fifteenth century; a pewter chalice and paten from an abbot’s grave; and on the very bottom shelf of the display,
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,
the only surviving book of John Tregonwell, who had left his library to the abbey. As I bent down to have a closer look at the book, its spine half-eaten away by age, the volume surrounded by clusters of silica crystals, I heard a footstep behind me.

“Not what you’d call a great collection, I’m afraid, but still quite fascinating, I think.”

I turned around, startled, to see a woman in late middle-age wearing a tartan jacket, a gray skirt and black sensible shoes, carrying a pair of yellow rubber gloves and a large pair of scissors.

“Sorry if I made you jump,” she said. “I was in the back of the vestry doing a spot of tidying.”

She eyed me up and down and smiled.

“It’s always pleasing to see young people show an interest in the past,” she said, her gray-blue eyes twinkling behind her tortoiseshell-frame glasses. “I mean, so many of them haven’t got a clue about what went on in their grandfather’s day, never mind in the Middle Ages. Really quite a disgrace.”

As she gestured around the abbey with the scissors, she looked down at the sharp point of the implement and laughed gently to herself.

“Sorry, so sorry, you must think me extremely odd, not to mention very rude,” she said, stretching out her free hand. “I’m June Peters, the headmaster’s wife. About to go into battle with the altar flowers over there.”

“Hello,” I said, shaking hands. “Yes, it is rather a fascinating group of objects. All extremely unique and actually quite moving.”

“Do you think so?”

“Yes.”

“Down on holiday? Beautiful countryside around here. Walking?”

“Well, sort of a working holiday,” I said. “I’m an art history student, working on a thesis.”

“Really? That’s wonderful. How interesting. Some of these things go way back, as you most probably know. Anyway, I’ll let you get on.”

She waved her scissors in the air as a parting gesture and breezed down the aisle toward the altar. As I walked around the abbey, noting down its art and sculpture, including the rather fine reredos, an elaborate family tomb fashioned out of white marble and a wonderful nine-foot-tall oak hanging tabernacle, I came up with a plan to try and enlist the woman’s help.

“Excuse me. So sorry to bother you,” I said, walking up to her as she was beginning to trim the dead foliage away from a display overlooking the stone sedilia.