The One Per Cent
Syd Spicer looked like a priest feeling unwelcome in his own church and uncomfortable – or was she imagining this? – in his own cassock.
‘So he’s out, right?’
Spicer looked pale. Few people, in the current weather, looked pale. Regiment men, always getting dispatched to sun-kissed hell-holes, never did; only their wives. That was the standing joke in Hereford: foolproof way of recognizing an SAS man – suntanned bloke, pale wife.
‘He was released this morning, without charge,’ Merrily said. ‘But I gather they haven’t lost interest in him.’
‘Who could?’
But, for some reason, he looked relieved. Merrily sniffed the air.
‘He burns incense in here?’
‘Not when I’m here, he doesn’t. But, yeah, who else? Or Winnie.’ He sat down in one of the choir stalls, looking down the aisle with distaste. ‘It’s got to end.’
‘What has?’
‘I don’t like this church much – have I indicated that?’
‘A few times.’
‘Sometimes there’s a peculiar energy in here. You can feel it on your skin, abrasive, like on a cold morning when you’ve cut yourself shaving. And sometimes you can still smell the incense when Loste hasn’t been in for days.’
Merrily looked around. With the afternoon sunlight in free fall through the diamond-paned windows, it was like being inside a great stone lantern.
‘Something’s needed doing for a while, but I couldn’t do it,’ Spicer said.
‘Couldn’t do what?’
‘What you do. Maybe that’s another reason I called you last weekend. Maybe I couldn’t admit it to myself, but something needs sorting here.’
She sat down next to him. ‘You trying to make me feel worthwhile or something, Syd?
He was still gazing down the nave, his eyes like currants. She could feel him becoming quiet. The screensaver routine. She looked at him, saying nothing, trying to be as still as he was. But she couldn’t manage it.
‘It’s a technique,’ he said. ‘That’s all. Makes me look heavy. On nodding terms with minor seraphim. I’m just a fucked-up old soldier, Merrily, and coming into the Church was a mistake. I can’t hack it.’
‘What?’
Spicer pulled a box of matches out of his cassock, followed by a packet of cigarettes. He flipped it open, offered it to Merrily. She blinked.
‘We’re, erm, in church.’
‘Don’t go spiritually correct on me, Merrily. You think he cares? It’s smoking, not sex.’
‘You’re right, but I don’t think I will right now, all the same.’
‘Fair enough.’
He lit up, the striking match a sacrilegious gasp. He stretched out his legs in the direction of the central aisle, watching the smoke float up and dissipate at pulpit level.
‘At the core of the Special Air Service, there’s a harsh kind of mysticism. Kind you won’t find in any other area of the armed forces. Connected with survival. I used to think survival was ninety per cent training and preparation, nine per cent luck, and one per cent… one per cent something you could call on when you were at breaking point.’
‘I can imagine the closer you get to-’
Merrily shut up. She didn’t know. How could she possibly know?
‘I’m not gonna tell you when and where this happened to me,’ Syd said. ‘But there’s always one time when it all drops away – all your training and your discipline – and your insides turn to water. At first you’re just afraid of dying. Not death, dying. The way it’s gonna happen. The fear of… of fear itself, I suppose. Of giving in to fear. Of dying in it. Dying as someone who you can only despise. And when you’re suddenly confronted with that sorry person – with the sight and the smell of your own terror… that’s a big, gaping moment, Merrily.’
She nodded. She kept quiet. They didn’t know one another, not at all. All they had in common was the one per cent.
‘So I started to pray,’ Spicer said. ‘Prayed the way those poor buggers probably prayed when they jumped off the twin towers, out of the flames.’
Merrily nodded.
‘And something happened. Not a flash-of-lightning kind of thing… just a bloke behaving in a way he wouldn’t normally behave in the circumstances, and me finding a sudden unexpected strength. I won’t go further into it… except I thought, afterwards, I can respect this. A source of strength infinitely greater than your training’s ever gonna give you – and in the Regiment, training’s all, to a level of aptitude and precision that you believe makes you equal to anyone. Any one. But in that moment, the one per cent had become a hundred per cent. And I suppose it still is.’
‘Yes.’
‘What I’ll admit to being good at,’ Syd Spicer said, ‘is helping the dying. Having been there, very close, twice, I can find them strength. I know there’s gonna be help for them, and I can take the weight off just enough for them to feel it. The way you help your mates in a shit situation. So the dying… they’re the only people I tell exactly what happened at my times. Times and places, nothing concealed. It’s me passing on something precious, and they value it, and I think they take it with them.’
‘Syd,’ Merrily said, ‘how on earth can you say you can’t hack it?’
‘Because I could do that without being a priest.’
The phone was ringing when Lol got home. He caught the call just before the machine lifted it.
‘Lol, Dan.’
‘Sorry?’
‘From Much Cowarne?’
‘Sorry… out of breath.’
‘Me too, I expect, by the end of the night. Look, when you talked to Mr Levin, did you know something was about to happen?’
‘Like what?’
‘Just had a call from Tim. I’m glad to say they let him out – did you know?’
‘I’d heard. But I don’t know much more than that.’
‘Reason he was calling… I’m one of the three coordinators of the choirs. I told you about the three choirs, who did the three churches simultaneously?’
‘You did.’
‘OK, well, there’s a pool of about sixty of us, right? Three coordinators who can each pull twelve compatible choristers together at short notice. Twelve out of twenty’s usually a safe bet. Tim called me about half an hour ago. They’re trying to arrange Redmarley and Little Malvern Priory to join in with Wychehill again. Another simultaneous chant.’
‘When?’
‘Tonight. Like we did before, only longer. It has to last, somehow, from nine tonight until three a.m. Luckily, it’s Saturday tomorrow.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s what I’m ringing for, Lol. I wondered if you knew.’
‘He won’t tell you?’
‘He never tells you. He rambles. He gets incoherent. You stop asking because you think maybe he doesn’t know the answer anyway, but it don’t matter, you know you’re gonner get something out of it. Bit of a coincidence, though, ennit?’
‘I don’t know. Honestly. You going to be able to organize it in time?’
‘Won’t be too much of a problem,’ Dan said. ‘After last time, nobody’s going to want to miss it. Even the ones who went home scared.’
A priest could go through his entire career without facing this kind of situation. That was the irony of it.
‘Not a lot frightens me. I can deal with most physical pain, emotional pain, stress. I can achieve separation from the weakness of the body. But there are leaps I can’t make. Aspects I can’t face.’
‘You’re worried by the non-physical?’
Syd leaned back and took a deep pull on his cigarette.
‘Samuel Dennis Spicer,’ he said. ‘Church of England.’
‘Because you can’t resist it, overpower it… slot it? Is that what you mean?’
‘Samuel Dennis Spicer. Church of England.’
Merrily smiled.
‘You talked about any of this to Winnie Sparke?’
‘Winnie?’ He’d been about to bring the cigarette back to his mouth. He brought his arm down. ‘Why would I?’
‘They’re saying in Wychehill that you’re seeing a lot of her.’
‘Told you.’ He leaned his head back over the chorister’s stall. ‘Didn’t I?’
‘You told me about the Ladies of Wychehill.’
‘I assisted Winnie Sparke with her researches into the origins of the church. Parish records. And a few other things. Anything else…’ He squeezed out the cigarette between finger and thumb. ‘Anything else, my wife really wouldn’t like.’
‘Your-?’
‘In essence, stories of our separation are overstated. Having three parishes can be an advantage, Merrily. You go missing for a while, they all think you’re in one of the others. Fiona took the kids down to Reading to get away from a difficult situation. We have a house, and her family’s down there, so it seemed expedient. I go down every week, or we meet somewhere. Yesterday it was in Berkshire. Hungerford.’
‘That works?’
‘Separation – she’s used to that. Least I’m less likely to get killed as a clergyman. Seemed easier to let people think we’d split, otherwise there’d be three restless parishes wondering how long before the new guy.’
‘But why didn’t you? Why didn’t you just leave? Go for a new-’
‘Because I was sent here. Never yet failed to complete a mission. One way or another.’
Like God was his field commander. But obviously Merrily understood.
‘And the difficult situation… that would be drugs?’
‘Partly. Emily’s been a problem. Shrinks say she has an addictive personality. As a kid she overate. You tried to cut down the Mars Bars to three a day… tantrums. Cold turkey on Mars Bars, you believe that? With adolescence, it stopped, all the weight dropped away, and we were so relieved that it was quite a while before we realized what’d replaced it. The shoplifting conviction was a clue. Then robbing the offertory box.’
‘She was in rehab?’
‘Joyce told you all this, I assume. Joyce, the parish talking-newsletter.’
‘And then the Royal Oak changed hands,’ Merrily said. ‘And suddenly it was all on your doorstep. Like a sweetshop.’
‘Yeah. There’s a group of us, county-wide – parents of kids with drug problems. We attend briefing sessions with the police, regional seminars. We learn what to look out for.’
‘Like Roman Wicklow? Did you know about him?’
‘Suspected.’
‘But you didn’t tell the police.’
‘One man with a rucksack?’ Spicer snorted. ‘Take Wicklow out of the picture and there’s another one in place by next week, in a different beauty spot. Better the devil you know.’
‘If they’d arrested him, he could’ve fingered others…’
‘His sort don’t finger people.’
‘What about Raji Khan?’ Merrily said.
‘Raji Khan -’ he looked almost amused ‘- is a very clever boy. Somebody like me says a word against him, it’s like the Crusades are back – I must be starting a holy war. Anyway, not your problem. Your problem’s more ethereal. It’s my problem too but… we’ve been into that.’
‘What are you asking me to do?’
‘Your requiem should be broadened. I was thinking a wider brief. For a start, you might give this place some attention.’
‘What are you trying to lose?’
‘Longworth, for a start. I don’t know what his problem was, but I reckon St Dunstan’s only compounded it. You look at the records, you find that what existed on this site could have been no more than a single monk’s cell. A Celtic hermit’s primitive stone hut. So he builds a pseudocathedral. Look-’
Spicer sprang up, walked into the nave, pointing out empty stone ledges, blank areas of wall.
‘When I first came, there were terrible pictures on these walls, of saints and angels… figurines in niches.’
Merrily looked around. Light oak furniture, a marbled font. He was right: there was little of the period clutter that even churches less than a century old accumulated.
‘They’re in storage. None of them great works of art. No treasure. Phoney High-Church iconography, reeking of… hierarchy. Grotesque, to me. Forbidding – like that hideous angel on Longworth’s tomb. When we had one small statue nicked, I talked the parish council – well, Preston Devereaux – into safeguarding the rest. He didn’t need much encouraging. His family always found Upper Wychehill an intrusion. His grandfather’s on record as having attempted to stop Longworth building.’
‘You’ve virtually… stripped the place?’
‘Best we could, bit by bit, over a period. They’re all newcomers here, nobody missed anything. But I didn’t get rid of it. It’s as if it’s built into the stone.’
‘What is?’
‘Longworth’s grandiose concept. Longworth himself. He brought something here that’s caused an imbalance. This church is disproportionate to its surroundings and to the community. It’s a big stone ego-trip, and it’s like the houses are hiding away from it… below the road, over the road, squeezing into the rocks. It explains a lot about Wychehill. I found a journal kept by one of my predecessors, thirty, forty years ago. Even then, the population was unstable, people buying and selling, coming and going.’
Syd Spicer’s voice was crisp and carried across the body of the church with hardly an echo. Whatever you thought about Joseph Longworth, he’d known who to consult about acoustics.
‘I know a bit about geology,’ Spicer said. ‘Rock-climbing used to be my specialist skill. I was an instructor some of the time, so I know about rock. There’s a small fault through Wychehill, did you know that? I mean, the whole of the Malverns, that was volcanic, but a long time ago. The shifts in this area – there’s been more recent action here. I say recent – eighteenth, nineteenth centuries.’
‘A history of earth-movement and then quarrying?’ Merrily followed him down the central aisle. ‘No wonder Winnie Sparke says the hills are in pain.’
‘She’s not a stupid woman,’ Syd Spicer said. ‘She gives you all this fey stuff, but that’s her screen. If you think she’s more gullible than you are, you start to lose your inhibitions, tell her more than you intended to. C. Winchester Sparke – former professor of anthropology, back in the US. Did you know that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Specializing in ancient history, comparative religion, philosophy, anthropology. Smart woman. Don’t be fooled. We had a serious talk about this once. Her theory is that the whole of the Malvern range was one huge ritual site… because it was so volatile. People didn’t live here, they came here to experience transcendence… to have visions. That’s the pagans and the early Christians.’
‘The hermits in their cells and their caves. Like in Tibet.’
‘Presumably. That’s not the point of Christianity, though, is it? That’s smoke. Smoke and… incense.’
‘Wasn’t Longworth supposed to have had a vision?’
‘I have a theory about that.’ Spicer sat down on the edge of a pew. ‘Well, it’s not my theory, but it fits. You mess around on volatile rocks, on operations or just on exercises, and you become aware of occasional phenomena, linked particularly to fault lines and places where the Earth’s crust has been been disrupted. Lights, usually. Balls of light.’
‘You’ve seen it?’
‘Couple of times. It’s like ball lightning. Might have been ball lightning. Gets people excited about UFOs, but it’s natural, I think. The Ministry of Defence knows about it. I think that’s what Longworth saw.’
‘Preston Devereaux says the story is that Longworth saw the Angel of the Agony in a blaze of light. Which, presumably, is why there’s a representation of it on his tomb.’
‘I’d go for just the blaze of light.’
‘Is there any actual record of what Longworth believed he saw? Did he ever describe it?’
‘If he did, it wasn’t around this locality. Maybe he told Elgar. It’s all smoke, Merrily. And I’d like to get rid of it. Starting with the music.’
‘I’m sorry – which music?’
‘Loste’s music. His lush, extravagant choral works. It’s become clear to me that that’s part of the problem. It’s not the place for music like that. And certainly not the place for experiments.’
‘I know what you’re saying…’ And it was odd, Merrily thought, that a man inclined towards a blanket rejection of the numinous should be saying it. ‘I think you’re saying that, for sacred music to be effective, it needs a strong, working spiritual foundation – an abbey, a cathedral. Like the difference between a puddle and a well.’
‘And if you’re being literal about that, the Wychehill well disappeared with the quarrying.’ Spicer shrugged. ‘I might be wrong. If I am… But I thought about it all the way back from Berkshire and it was the only conclusion I could reach. Which means that as from next week Tim Loste and his choir can go and look for a new home.’
‘You mean you’re…?’
‘Evicting him. I’m within my rights, as priest in charge – I checked. What’s more, I think it’s for his own good. He’s being drawn into an unhealthy fantasy.’
‘When are you going to tell him?’
‘I’ve already told him, Merrily. I went in the back way from the rectory while you were talking to Winnie Sparke. I told him there were probably dozens of other churches and halls that would be overjoyed to have him and the choir. I said he might want to think about moving. That this place wasn’t good for his… health.’
‘That must’ve sounded like a threat.’
‘Not the way I put it, I assure you.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said… he said he didn’t know how he was going to tell Winnie.’
‘Syd…’ God almighty, no wonder Spicer had needed a cigarette. ‘She’ll go completely bloody berserk. This – whatever she’s trying to reach through Loste – this has become the central focus of her life.’
‘Merrily, if the central focus of her life is producing a bestselling book on the secret source of Elgar’s inspiration… well, she can do that anywhere, can’t she?’
‘I’m not sure she can. Not the way she sees it. And I’m not sure that’s the entire-’
‘She needs to get out of here, too, the quicker the better. Out of the area.’
‘What are you saying?’
Spicer stood up and stepped out of the pew.
‘And, of course, this had to be done before Sunday evening.’
‘Oh, I see. Jesus, Syd…’
‘You have a problem with that?’
‘You mean so that, on Sunday evening, we can solemnly invite God to wipe away every last taint of Longworth and Loste’s brand of Anglo-Catholicism?’
‘Think about it. It makes sense.’ He walked towards the main doors. ‘Maybe you should stay for a few minutes on your own, get the feel of the place?’
Merrily sat down in a pew, the confluence of at least three sunbeams.
Spicer probably didn’t want them to be seen leaving together. People might talk.
What a total bloody… It wasn’t quite a sectarian isssue, but it was close. She wondered if he’d served with the SAS in Northern Ireland and something had left a bad taste.
No, that was ridiculous. His decision to stop the choral singing could be justified purely on the basis of what they’d said about puddles and wells.
But there was already a bad taste in her own mouth.
And Spicer still hadn’t told her everything he knew, of course. Merrily was sure of that.