Communion

Here's the next installment of The Communion of the Saint:

Chapter 5

     

       The Morris Minor chugged down the hill and wheezed to a rattling halt in front of Mrs. Fern’s house.

      Before Father Tom could get out, I slid into the passenger seat.

      “What is it?”

      “I want to go somewhere that has nothing to do with this place.”

      He gave me a long look, then put the car in gear and drove off. I shut my eyes and leaned back in the narrow seat, willing myself not to feel. For five minutes I counted seconds. Father Tom had the good sense not to talk. When I opened my eyes, we were on the outskirts of town, in territory I hadn’t seen before. Low clouds scudded across the sky the sky; a sweater would have been nice.

      I glanced across at my driver.

      “Better?” he asked. He seemed to see through my curtness.

      I nodded, unsure how far to trust him.

      “Food?”

      “And drink,” I said. Something to dull the edge of exposure. Whenever I turned around, something seemed to be waiting for me.

      The sun lay low toward the hills, half obscured by cloud, when the Minor slid onto the gravel in front of a country inn. The sign over the door had nothing to do with holiness or saints, gods or ghosts.

      Once we found a table, conversation became inevitable.

      “What kind of help do you need?” Tom asked. Somehow, by dint of his instant help in my escape, he was no longer “Father.” I’d made him a human being instead of a cleric. I was having second and third thoughts about sharing everything with him, but not just anyone would have dropped everything for a drive in the country.

      “I don’t know,” I lied. I must have sounded miserable. Tom reach across the table and took my hand. I let him, for a moment, then snatched it away.

      “People will talk.”

      “They always do. What’s the matter?”

      I wasn’t going to get off as easily I wanted. For me, it was enough that I was away, but Tom had questions, and I owed him at least an answer.

      “I don’t want the Communion to think—”

      “Think what?”

      I caught myself. I had to tell him something, but the truth was out of the question. Voices and visions wouldn’t get far with this priest.

      His eyes glowed in the shadow the dim lighting threw across his face. I wouldn’t have thought brown could shine out of that secrecy, until I saw it.

      What did he want, that drew him from whatever he had been doing when I called in a panic? Why did he drop it and come out to help me?

      “Why are you here?” I asked.

      “You rang me up—remember?” His face creased in a smile, a good one.

      “Phones ring all the time.”

      “Not with calls from the new director of research for the Communion of Saint Alban. You’ve become a ‘figure.’” His voice put the quote marks around the word, even as it was tinged with a gentle, sad sarcasm. “You may not know it consciously, but part of you understands. I don’t know why you’re not scared. I would be.”

      “So it’s political?”

      “It involves what people hope and dream about.”

      “For you, too?”

      “Especially for me,” Tom admitted. “I have a dean, a bishop and a chapter waiting for news about you. The ladies in the gift shop want to know all about you. So do the gardener and the sexton.” He picked up the single page menu and didn’t seem to notice my start at the mention of the man in the cathedral. “So do I.”

      “I’m not sure that I want everyone to know all about me.”

      “Being ‘difficult’ are you?” He grinned again, and I burst into laughter. I couldn’t help myself; his imitation of Leslie Phelps was perfect. He had taken me completely unawares. The drinkers and the other diners in the pub stared at us.

      “So much for anonymity,” Tom said. This time I held myself in, not letting the big laugh I inherited from my mother get the best of me. Too late, really. The damage, if damage it was, had already been done.

      “Not ‘difficult.’” I said. I could feel the blood of embarrassment surge from somewhere down in my chest and fill my face. There are some advantages to a dark skin. “Shy.”

      We ordered. I stayed away from the Guinness and settled for a lager that was almost as rich. Only a half-pint. Supper was a plate of roast beef, a slab of cheesecake with blueberries, and a heavy, crusty bread. My hunger surprised me, until I realized that the only nourishment I’d had since breakfast was a cup of tea at my interview. I didn’t remember eating anything at my meeting at the hotel.

      When all the food was gone, Tom gave me a look of pastoral expectancy.

      “Do you want to tell me about it?”

      “What?” I was full of food and beer. My mental processes felt sluggish.

      “You said you needed help.”

      I could have sat in front of him and debated with myself all night long. There comes a time when you decide whether or not to trust a man. You may suspect that he’s not all you need him to be, but you chance it anyway.

      I dug in the pocket of my jeans. Each time I changed clothes, I made sure that the brooch was with me without having to think about it. It was more than a talisman; it was an appendage.

      I put the brooch on the table and leaned back against the high-backed bench.

      Tom’s eyes widened.

      “Where did you—?” He stopped. “Is that why Leslie Phelps spent half an hour complaining about a certain female American tourist barging around her museum?”

      I shook my head, then reconsidered. “Maybe, but I didn’t get it from the museum. I went there to check it out.”

      He picked up the relic. “This is very old. Where did it come from?”

      “I found it.”

      He looked up from his examination, his forehead creased. Then, so help me, he raised one eyebrow. I tried to do it myself; it must be genetic or something.

      “I found it!” I repeated, a little louder than I intended. Peripherally, I saw heads turn in our direction. “I did.”

      Bless his heart, Tom believed me.

      “Where?”

      I told him. I left out the part about the voice. I didn’t think he was ready for that, yet. I know I wasn’t ready to talk about it.

      “Why?”

      “Why what?”

      “Why did you pick that spot? Why did you pick any spot at all? Do you often get down on the ground to see what’s lying in the grass?”

      I shook my head.

      “Then why?”

       “I don’t know. I wish I did.” I considered panic. Maybe enough panic would absolve me of whatever responsibility had become mine. I could run away, find a menial job, disappear into the big world, and no one would ever need to know. “I just don’t want it blathered all over the place. It’s private.”

      Tom took a deep breath and looked directly into my eyes. “Is this a matter for the confessional?”

      I stared at the brooch. It lay between us on the scarred wooden table.

      “No.”

      “Then what kind of help do you want?”

      I realized the impossibility of explaining it all to him. How many choices were there?

      Choice one was that I was deep in psychosis and tailored what I saw and heard to fit my delusions. But everything felt very real, very solid. The oak planks that made up the table, the hard wood under my seat, even the fullness in my stomach felt real and normal and ordinary.

      The brooch still lay between us on the table.

      “Maybe this is enough, I guess, conversation and company.” I felt suddenly shy. “You must think I’m a crazy.”

      “Not at all. Something upset you, but everyone goes through that. You’re an intelligent woman,” he said, “with, from the evidence of your work, a rare sensibility.”

      I tried not to blush. His approval meant a lot to me, perhaps too much. “You’ve read—?”

      “Enough to get a sense of your thinking. I rather like your rational approach to history and matters of belief.” He touched the napkin to his mouth. “You must be under substantial pressure to deliver. Working under Lady Phelps might be considered stressful, for some. Why did you call me?”

      I’d thought I was off the hook, but he was too good to let go as easily as I had hoped. “I had an experience,” I said, “and I was alone. I thought I saw something that couldn’t be real. I’m afraid I panicked.”

      There was choice two—that I was merely overtired, overstressed, and in a strange place, with too many things going on in my life, from Daddy’s death to starting a new job to being physically and emotionally exhausted. I said as much, and Tom visibly relaxed.

      “I’m sorry about your father. That’s a hard time for anyone, then you add to it the change of living situation and circumstance—I think I’d be seeing things, too, and it would be a damn sight more than an old piece of jewelry.” He looked at his watch. “If we’re through, I must be getting back home. The bishop plans a late-night session. He’s so busy that it’s the only time he has to give me my work assignments for the next week or so.”

      “Thank you for seeing me. It was an imposition to call so late.”

      He smiled. “It does me some good to get away from the place. Sometimes the old church seems awfully brooding.”

      Choice three was that I could pretend that nothing was happening. I picked up the brooch and slipped it into my pocket, out of sight.

      “Nice piece of work, that,” Tom said. He dropped a few bills on the table. “You’ll want to take care not to lose it.”

      “Don’t worry. Somehow, I don’t think that will be easy to do.”

      We drove back to town in companionable quiet. One measure of any relationship is its ability to sustain silence.

      “Listen,” Tom interrupted the quiet. “I have a service to do. Why don’t you come along, take in Vespers?”

      “I don’t—” I began.

      Go. The voice was insistent.

      Tom pushed the cuff of his jacket back, looked at his watch, and pressed his foot on the accelerator. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”

      Worship as fun seemed a novel idea. I let myself be carried along with his enthusiasm.

      We hurried along to the church. The shadows of evening were full and deep now. Drizzle misted the windshield. The streetlights glowed like will-o’-the-wisp, haloes that hung in air thick with moisture, and a chill that belied the time of year.

      Tom drove up the a side door. We hurried inside, brushing through cobwebs of fog stirred by the wind. Tom ushered me to a pew in the choir, then disappeared through an ancient door.

      Evensong—vespers—would not use the giant nave of the church. The handful of worshippers would be lost in that great room. The choir area lay between the nave and the Lady Chapel to the east.

      I surveyed my surroundings. I had been here before, to observe. Now I was a participant, or about to be.

      The church was drafty. High up, wind swirled through a pair of broken windows in the clerestory.

      The pew was hard. Before me was a prie-dieu, and on it a prayer book. The kneeler was uncushioned. My knees crackled as I mimicked the attitude of those around me. It felt invasive to stare at them, though I sensed a handful of eyes on me, speculative and questioning.

      The old church was different at night. Before, light had spilled the length of the nave. Now, the illumination came from within, and it was weak and flickering, candles trembling in the drafty dark that made the prayer book hard to read.

      “‘Seek him that made the Pleiades and Orion...’” Tom’s voice, but not the voice I had heard while we chatted, boomed through the cathedral. I had missed his entrance. “‘... the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: the Lord is his Name.’”

      In the pause that followed, the deep peace, like the hunger of the old, filled the old church.

      “‘Grace to you, and peace...’” Tom continued. I glanced down at the prayer book. No response was required of me, yet, but it was coming. I made it through the confession, unhurt by the cadence of the old language of Paul, the crazed prophet of Jesus. I had heard them too many times to feel their pull any more.

      The darkness grew to surround us. An acolyte, gowned in white, guarded the flame of her taper against the twisting breeze that fell from above. While she spread her fire to the candles in the choir, Tom sang, in a cracked tenor, the Phos hilaron, the hymn to light. The candles’ dancing flames pushed the surrounding dark back outside. I began to fancy I could feel their warmth against my cold cheek.

      A sparrow, lost in the gathering storm, flew in through the window above. Its tiny wings flapped against the silence left by the end of Tom’s chanting. No one else looked up, I saw. Apparently, it was a normal occurrence. Tom went on with the service, while I watched the frightened bird fly ever larger circles, seeking its way out.

      I listened with half an ear while Tom read.

      “‘The Lord called me from the womb; from the body of my mother he named me.’”

      I didn’t hear the rest. I could only fix on the panicky flight of the sparrow overhead. She careened through the towering space, a shadow among gathering shadows. Still, no one else paid attention. She flapped her weakening wings against a pane of colored glass, its hue indistinguishable in the growing dark. Their beating drew me from my knees to my feet.

      “Oh, help her,” I said.

      Tom’s hand touched my shoulder. I couldn’t answer; I could only point to the darkness above, but I felt myself quiet under his touch.

      People were looking at me, now. I had done the unpardonable, created a ruckus in an Anglican ceremony. For the sake of a bird. My cheeks burned. I sank to my knees.

      A pang of concern for the fate of the bird thrust through me. The service had gone on without my awareness. I looked up toward the ceiling of the nave, all shadow now. I thought I caught a glimpse of movement, impossibly high.

      “‘Lord, now let thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation. . . .’”

      I don’t know how I knew, but the sparrow escaped. I heard Tom’s voice signal the end of the canticle, “‘Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit,’” and the small congregation respond, “‘as it was in the beginning ....’”

      There were more words, and I got through them, somehow, still thinking about the sparrow. She must be out in the rain, or, better, have found her nest. Tom gave a benediction. The people filed out, each of them giving me a glance. I tried not to feel the scraps of disdain, pity, concern, and scorn that fell from their eyes as they passed me. I still knelt on the prie-dieu.

      Tom knelt at my side. His body gave off warmth against the evening chill of the old church. He did not speak, but bowed his head for a moment. He was praying, for me, I guessed, someone he barely knew. When he finished, he straightened and held out a hand to help me up. I don’t usually accept chivalric gestures; they’re demeaning. But I felt washed out and weak.

      “I have a meeting in a few minutes. Can I walk you home?”

      I nodded. I didn’t trust my voice.

      “I’ll be right back.” Tom disappeared toward the sacristy.

      I pulled my coat close around me. Tom came back after a moment, without his white surplice, a jacket thrown over his cassock.

      Without further words, we left the choir and went out into the now-dark cathedral close. The Norman buttresses flew around us for the few moments it took to clear the building itself, then we were on the grass, more in the open. I took a deep breath of cold, damp air and kept walking. The further we went from the church, the easier it was to keep moving. We passed through the old gate. Tom guided me with a hand on my elbow, all very chaste and proper, across the street to Mrs. Fern’s house.

      As we climbed the steps, the curtains twitched.

      “You’ll be okay?” he asked on the front step.

      “I’m fine.” We both knew that I lied, but the British are nothing if not polite.

      “I’ll check on you.” He shuffled his feet preparing for departure. “Tomorrow.”

      “There’s no need—”

      “Tomorrow.” He turned away and strode back towards the abbey. I watched him disappear into its shadows before going inside.