Dry Bones Read online

  ‘I’m fine. Why?’

  ‘You look unwell.’

  I reassured her, but faltered slightly when she stared at my lips, as foreigners sometimes did, and also interpreters trained in lip-reading, and of course women who wanted to sleep with me. She stared at my lips. I stared at hers, and imagined them quashed on my chin, my chest, reminding me of another life, and a little light fornication to add to Becket’s publicly renounced vices of venery and hawking, dicing, pride, ostentation, and other confessable but otherwise deadly sins.

  As a young man Becket had made errors, like I had, but we’d both been reformed by a touch from the finger of God. I hadn’t slept with anyone for nearly three months, and even then it had only been Helena, and at the time I’d loved her.

  Exiled in France, Thomas à Becket had taken to wearing a vest and breeches woven from goat’s hair, and was scourged three times daily by his loyal attendant Robert of Merton. I was cold, my bare forearms up in gooseflesh, and out beside my plate I had Becket’s toe squeezed tight in my fist, tighter, clenching my teeth when the sharp edges of the bone cut redly across the jagged arrow of my life-line.

  ‘You’re sure you’re alright?’

  The minister from the American church was now back in his original place, sitting on my left. He must have forgiven me, because in a neighbourly way he asked for the keys to All Saints. He smiled and held out his hand.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  We’d agreed to leave the keys at the American church, where Joseph Moholy, the new owner, could send someone to pick them up.

  ‘Let’s not make this difficult,’ the American sighed. He lowered his voice, which I construed as threatening behaviour. I therefore stared back at him without blinking.

  ‘Don’t ruin your last day,’ he whispered harshly. ‘You’re in enough trouble as it is.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’

  ‘Everyone knows why they sent you. Now don’t be obstructive.’

  Becket was generally recognised as the patron saint of problem priests. He’d been martyred for protecting clergy who preferred sex to marriage, robbed their own churches, or devised a personal theology to ease the pain at funerals. He insisted that ordained servants of the Lord, including wayward deacons, be treated as exceptional cases, descended as they were in a direct line of succession from the Apostles. They were themselves, but they were also of one body with the evangelists, and all the holy saints.

  Meaning, quite clearly, that my mistakes were never just my own. None of it was entirely my fault. ‘You know nothing about me.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to the Chaplain,’ the American hissed, ‘and it seems you have little remaining credit with the Almighty. Now, give me the keys.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘No.’

  Exasperated, he looked away, pretending to survey the party along the rest of the table. I knew what he was doing. He was taking the measure of my imperious nature, and mentally recommending a course in humility. He turned back and tried again.

  ‘In a few hours’ time you’ll be home. Just go quietly.’

  Thomas à Becket returned to England from exile on 1 December 1170, with a bodyguard of five knights in full armour. Twenty-nine days later he was dead.

  ‘I’m not going,’ I said, hands balled in fists on the table, still the only person at lunch not to have eaten, and not to have moved from my original seat at the head of the table. I felt strong and unassailable, and looking forward to a squabble, which wasn’t out of character. Enthusiasm for an argument was a general fault of the twelfth century.

  The American fetched the Chaplain. I now had one of them on either side, the American hunched sharply forward, his fingers interlocked on the tablecloth in the first stage of Here’s a Church.

  The Chaplain was laughing again. Out loud and unrestrained.

  ‘Frankly, I don’t give a hoot. He can do what he wants. I’m out of here.’

  ‘Look,’ the American said, ‘you don’t understand. Your church was for sale. Joseph Moholy bought it. I have an arrangement with Moholy to deliver the keys.’

  ‘And I have an arrangement to get on a plane,’ the Chaplain said. ‘It’s called a ticket.’

  ‘What about your deacon?’

  ‘Jay was foisted on me. I did what I could. Now I consider myself unfoisted. I simply don’t care. I resign. Look.’

  He drew his finger gleefully across his throat. ‘Read my neck. No collar.’

  And with that, he went back to Stella who was looking very neat and pretty and reminding me of the story of Abelard, one of Becket’s professors during his studies in Paris. Abelard had a child with his beautiful student Eloise. It was a glorious expression of love, a love-child. Unfortunately, Eloise also had an incorruptible uncle. He took Abelard to one side, and righteously removed his testicles.

  I wished the Chaplain better luck, naturally, though clearly the paths of our lives were diverging.

  The American stayed beside me, and for the first time I sensed he was pleading. ‘I’ll have to phone him,’ he said. ‘If you don’t give me the keys, I’ll have no choice. I’ll have to phone and tell him.’

  ‘You do that.’

  ‘He’ll send someone round. Is that what you want?’

  In Geneva, everyone knew the stories about Joseph Moholy. Even me, and I’d been in the city less than a month. Moholy had once bought, from an Iraqi antiquities dealer, eleven pages of The Book of Vestiges of Times Past. They were supposedly by the master-calligrapher Ibn Al Bawwab. When revealed as fakes, the Iraqi had his fingers amputated under the wheels of an early-morning tram. The exact details of how this came about depended on the version of the story.

  My own instinct, when I’d met Joseph Moholy for the first time, had been not to like him. It was a reaction I often had to anyone richer and more successful than me, and still living. At the time, we knew him only as a Swiss-Hungarian entrepreneur and trader in antiquities, who’d visited the church among the first of the prospective buyers. He was elegant, even dapper, and light on his feet for a silver-haired man in his fifties. From a purely professional point of view, I’d thought him sad, and a little lonely, and in need of saving. He seemed to be missing something, but actively, as if the absence could be remedied by the acquisition of one single object, though it wasn’t clear what that object actually was.

  All Saints was a protected building, and the conditions of sale insisted that Church Commissioners approve its intended use. They’d already turned down a fast-food franchise, a chain of dance and work-out studios, and an heiress who needed more square metres to rehearse her militant theatre. Moholy had proposed an exhibition space for art objects from, around the world, which the Church Commissioners found acceptable.

  We did wonder how a man with a single, ordinary-looking gallery of antiquities in the Rue de la Croix d’Or could afford to buy a church in central Geneva. Or why he’d even want it. But, apart from that, he seemed normal, a polite non-believer, which in the Church of England didn’t count against him.

  ‘Moholy won’t be happy,’ the minister said, ‘especially when he finds himself locked out of his own church.’

  This wasn’t the American minister’s problem, and he resented feeling involved. In the States, Christianity was buoyant with new converts and born-agains, and one out of three US citizens had personally spoken with Jesus. The prospect of a closing church simply didn’t arise. ‘Stop being so stubborn. Give me the keys.’

  ‘There’s good that needs to be done.’

  ‘You’re a junior deacon. You were brought in to lend a hand with the heavy lifting.’

  ‘I know what you’re trying to say,’ I said, using my knuckles to push away my unused plate. I stood up, and prepared to leave. ‘You were expecting someone less unswerving.’

  An empty church like All Saints offered a limited range of amusements. Turning Becket’s toe in my fingers, I looked for dropped collection coins in the open spaces left by the pews. I started t
o hum, tunelessly. It happened sometimes. I just couldn’t find the right note on which to start. I considered putting Becket back in the safe, but was diverted by the disc of purple silk he’d originally been wrapped in. There was a pattern woven by hand into the circle of material. Holding it up to one of the windows, the design struck me as curious. Four straight lines were woven as a square, each corner touching the circumference of the circular piece of silk. It was a square inside a circle, a square peg in a round hole. Inside the square, there was an irregular pattern of small blocked-in rectangles, hand-sewn in uneven rows.

  I dropped the toe-bone into my pocket and folded the cloth into a semi-circle, then into slices, and took it to the safe. All Saints dated from 1845, and had been financed by Geneva’s bankers. Out of habit, they’d had a safe embedded in one of the walls, neatly concealed behind a memorial tablet. This plaque of white marble remembered an aristocratic second son and member of the Alpine Club who’d died in a fall from the Eiger, and the handle was a genuine Victorian ice-axe. I swung it open, and found a place inside for the folded cloth, between dusty bottles of Sanctifex and an optimistic back-up box of one thousand hosts. I checked again, but we’d definitely run out of candles, which was a shame.

  Towards the end of his life, Becket became very fond of excommunication. He’d light a candle, say the name of a rival, and then dash the candle to the ground.

  Another day, perhaps.

  I checked the church door, making sure it was locked, and then dragged the bin-bags of jumble further down the aisle. At the top of one was a pair of driving-gloves, and a blue plastic sports-bag. Underneath, it was mostly clothes, dresses and sweaters and a large grey suit. I was still cold in my flimsy short-sleeved shirt, so I rummaged through and laid out all the sweaters. There were four in all, including a striped tank-top, a Guernsey, and a red stretch turtleneck. I unbuttoned my shirt as I made my choice; not of the warmest, but the harshest.

  The winner, by some margin, was a round-necked sweater in electric-blue imitation mohair. It scratched at my naked skin everywhere it touched, which was pretty much everywhere, and not that surprising since it was meant for a teenage girl. It was simple homespun, short in the sleeve and body, tight at the neck and under the arms, and all across the back. And the front. I flinched and wriggled. The bodily irritation was unbearable, exquisite.

  In parishes back in England, this was the clergy’s last week in white before the long summer drone of Sundays after Pentecost (green), stretching right through from now until October. But this wasn’t a parish in England. It was Geneva, where I’d consulted Becket in the crisis of my life, and Thomas à Becket advised tight and bright-blue mohair.

  I ended up on the floor in the corner furthest from the door, clutching Becket’s toe, my shoulders itching and hunched and itching, listening for the quarter-hours from the chiming clock in the tower. Each additional bell made it harder to imagine rushing for the airport, and easier to keep a close hold on the toe-bone, waiting for nothing much but the next fifteen minutes.

  This wasn’t despair, or even depression. I convinced myself it was contrition, hoping to be excused all the bad things I’d ever done, as recently as lunch-time. It wasn’t cracking up. It was the first step in a personal reformation which started with penance for the liberty I’d enjoyed in my former life.

  Although possibly, from another point of view, I could see that curling up in the corner of an empty church, wearing a teenager’s electric-blue sweater, relying on a lucky bone, I could see that this might look like despair, like depression and cracking up.

  Thomas à Becket had a mother, who was very special and nothing like the other mothers. She had visionary dreams of her son’s resplendence, and his future as a distinguished man. She encouraged him to make the most of himself, to renounce the pleasures of skating on the shin-bones of animals across the Smithfield ice in favour of floggings and book-work at school. At his daily lessons by six, often without breakfast, Thomas studied until dusk, his over-education gradually making him useless for the common work of the world.

  The Church was uncommon work, and now as then it was due a revival. All it needed was individual men and women of heroic quality. Someone had to stand up. To get it started, perhaps just the one special person, and all my life I’d been looking for a life’s work. I was physically strong, and could live on gruel. I was unmarried and childless. If I sacrificed what little I had, even if it was my own self, I’d somehow get what I wanted, the proof I was priestly material, dean of chapter, bishop.

  From now on, I’d therefore faithfully put others before self, and reinvigorate the good works of St Thomas. All Saints had a long history of helping the distressed, and in Geneva there were Filipinas trapped in prostitution, and homeless drug-addicts from the Balkans. Stranded in camps outside the city were penniless refugees from Kabul, or Baghdad, who’d somehow arrived in Geneva and were hoping to reach London by Christmas. In fact there were any number of victims of the American West, here like everywhere in need of help.

  Another quarter-hour. If I hurried, and was lucky with a taxi, I could still make it to the airport.

  But there again, of his eight years as Archbishop, Becket had spent six in exile, far from the chafing restraint of convention and petty deanery synods. The time to return to England would come, of course it would, but by then the ordinary people would have understood my long absence, some prostrating themselves before me, others tearing off their clothes and strewing them in my path, kindly ensuring that my feet need never touch the vulgar dirt of the road.

  There was a thud at the door, echoing through the church. I hugged the horrible, scratchy sweater close round my prickled skin. Another thud. My heart lurched, and as my clenched hand reached to still it Becket was hard against my breast. Waiting for hatchets, the grunt of men making effort and the splinter of wood, I grew the Archbishop from the bone of his big toe, in sandals, feet splayed as he stopped, stood, listened for the flow and rush of approaching chain-mail. In the afternoon light dusting through the coloured windows, Becket was upright and without fear, shining with self-belief. I had in mind a tall, white-haired, beak-faced man; the person I intended to become. Noble, stubborn, waiting unmoved for death.

  I stood up and strode fearlessly down the hard tiled aisle of the church, as the door thudded once again. From the closed inside, on the safe side, I forcefully asked who it was, and there was something unlike me about my voice, the empty church playing new acoustic tricks. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘I’ve been sent by Joseph Moholy.’

  Not in armour, nor wielding a broadsword, nor with several armed companions. It wasn’t even a man. It was a woman’s voice.

  ‘You don’t scare me.’

  ‘Open the door. I think I can help you.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You’re frightened, aren’t you?’

  Becket was never frightened. I stored his toe-bone safely in my pocket, took out the keys, and unlocked the door. It was definitely a woman.

  ‘Hi,’ she said breezily, ‘my name’s Rifka.’

  She held out her hand, and I looked at it.

  ‘And you must be the deacon, James Mason. Great sweater.’ She gave up on the handshake. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Rifka what?’

  She was already past me, a crop-haired blonde woman about half a head shorter than I was. She was wearing a corduroy coat, and carrying a canvas bag across her shoulder. Her face was round, or wide, and she had a nose in two goes like a boxer, something I’d always found immensely attractive. I locked her in, but she didn’t seem bothered as she contemplated the empty spaces of the church, the skewed altar and the crumbling walls in cream and powdery white, like relief maps of territory in the clouds.

  She was in her late thirties, and her full name was Rifka ‘Who-works for-Joseph-Moholy’, and she was in good shape without being thin. She went over to the altar, turned, and using her arms she sprang herself up to sit on its edge. She looked around some m
ore, her overbite tight over very fine teeth, making it seem she was always about to smile, or find something amusing.

  ‘I won’t mess about,’ she said, and I couldn’t immediately place her accent. It was Australian German, or Austrian New Zealand. ‘Moholy had a call from the American church. He sent me down to investigate. Now. I have carrots, and I have sticks. Your call.’

  Whenever she swung her legs, the heels of her boots collided with the front of the altar. ‘Are you alright? You don’t look too great.’

  ‘I haven’t eaten.’

  ‘You should eat.’

  Her grey eyes were scuffed round the pupil with brown, and I was secretly gratified by her concern with my health. As a reformed man, in 1164, Becket had contracted mystery pains in his face and stomach. He was advised by doctors with twenty years’ experience to indulge, for therapeutic reasons, in sexual congress. For his own well-being. Presumably with the beautiful and willing Avice of Stafford, a discarded mistress of the king.

  Becket held up his hands in horror, pushing the world away. (Avice backed against a trembling arras, hands crossed shoulder to shoulder, flashing bright glances from beneath teasing and darkened eyelashes.) Thomas à Becket turned on his heel and fled the room. He went outside, and climbed some way up a steep hill, to a place where flat rocks stood either side of an icy stream. He looked down on the monastery at Pontigny, his home in exile, and then further off to the distant mountains. He hitched up his robes, took his weight on his elbows, and lowered himself up to the waist in the freezing water of the stream, where he held himself, teeth clenched, until his arms and legs shuddered with the effort and the cold.

  ‘What’s the stick?’

  ‘Let’s start with the carrot. Is it money you want?’

  It felt like a temptation, money for nothing. I stubbornly crossed my arms, which made me itch from elbow to elbow, and also across my shoulders and neck. Rifka looked at her watch.

  ‘Your Chaplain is already at the airport. He’s about to take off. He couldn’t tell us why you’re still here, and nor could the pastor from the American church. Luckily for you, Moholy knows more than the both of them put together.’