Death in the opening chapter

THIRTEEN

The church was packed.

It always was. Correction. It always was for this annual service preceding the Fludd Lit Fest. On the average Sunday, at Holy Communion, Matins or Evensong, attendance was sparse. Sir Branwell and Lady Fludd sat sadly in the family pew at one or other of these services, but otherwise the faithful were considerably less attentive and dutiful than even a few years earlier. The church was always full at Easter and Christmas, but apart from this, and the annual Festival service, it echoed in effective emptiness. The vicar, the choir and the organist turned up, and one or two hardy regulars, but that was all. The rest stayed away pursuing secular rites and rituals.

This was the way of the Church of England. Time was when it had been the Tory party at prayer, but now even the traditional Conservative Party was little more than a memory of blue rosettes, feudalism and soapbox oratory. Muslims, foreign sects, and even the Methodists and Roman Catholics, seemed to be gaining ground, or at least standing steady, but the lukewarm moderate established church was no longer part of the required procedure.

Tonight, however, the ancient building was full of Mallborne and its visitors. The ghost of the late Reverend hung heavily over the service and all the suspects were there. Sir Branwell and Lady Fludd had kept a couple of places for the Bognors, who dutifully squeezed into the box pew alongside them. Just behind them, though decently below the salt, were the butler, Harry Brandon, and his wife Peggoty. The widow Dorcas Fludd was snivelling appropriately in off-black weeds. Brigadier Blenkinsop and his wife Esther sung lustily in tweed and responded noisily in all the right places. Vicenza Book kept shtum, waiting presumably until she could command attention from centre stage, and Martin Allgood sat near the back of the building behind a pillar and observed beadily. Gunther Battenburg was not there; presumably preparing dinner in the Fludd kitchens.

All was as one would hope and expect, and as orderly as Sir Branwell would have wished.

The service itself was robust and conventional: middle of the road as only rural C of E could be on a high and holy day, and the whole affair made Bognor comfortable. He was surrounded by the sights and sounds of his growing-up and he drew strength from their permanence.

The Saxon church was full of English spring flowers of a kind he associated with cottage gardens, rather than municipal beds. The sweet peas smelt, the wild garlic and valerian were classified as weeds elsewhere, but here they were encouraged to rampage over the pulpit, lectern and font. All was amateur, in a friendly way, unless you scratched the smiling surface and revealed the steely professionalism beneath. Iron fist in velvet glove. The congregation was led by the choir in ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, ‘Fight the Good Fight’ and the 23rd psalm. The readings were from the King James Bible, the Authorized Version, the only decent committee job known to man.

The bishop was the senior cleric present by a mile. A couple of lay readers from the neighbourhood were officiating, standing in for the Reverend Sebastian, and hating each other in a decidedly unchristian way, if the Bognors’ sixth sense was to be trusted. It was difficult to upstage one another during a church stage, but it seemed to the Bognors that these two did their best, though even this rivalry was strangely reassuring, for it reminded Bognor of the chaplains at school – technically equals, but for ever, it seemed to him and his friends, competing for supremacy. Or at least the appearance of supremacy.

Finally, the bishop’s turn came. He, more than anyone, cut a figure that was at once friendly and familiar, but also contrived to be scary. On the one hand, he was benign, short and fat, on the other, his cope, mitre and crook made him seem forbidding and frightening. His smile was beatific, but his frown was full of the wrath of God. He was, after all, God’s representative in Lymington and the surrounding diocese. When he smiled, the lilies of the field smiled back, but when he looked cross, the ground trembled. Yea, verily, he was Bishop Ebenezer and it would be sensible to keep the right side of him.

From the pulpit, he began by presenting his right side as if to the manor born by quoting a Biblical text in the traditional manner. ‘My text tonight is taken from the Gospel according to Saint John, beginning at the first verse of the first chapter: “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the Word was God.”’ And then he paused and looked down and around at the congregation, seemingly undecided about whether to telegraph the smile of God or the frown of God, but, instead, merely repeating the words in an incantatory manner: ‘“In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the Word was God.”’

Once more, he looked round the congregation, seemingly uncertain whether to smile or frown, whether to play God the merciful or the God of wrath. In the end, he seemed to hold both in check and play God the neutral: a sort of ‘don’t know’ in one of Miles Kington’s plenary sessions.

‘Of course, we all know that the word “word” is a translation of the Greek “logos” and is open to any one of a number of different interpretations. I won’t, however, insult your intelligence by going down that route. Apart from anything else, I feel it would be something of a cop-out. The authors of that majestic book wrote “word” and I feel we owe it to them to believe that they meant what they wrote, and that therefore they believed in the supremacy of the word. For them the word is the word of God and the word of God reigns supreme.’

He was a long way off insulting their collective intelligence, let alone copping out. The Brigadier had certainly never come across ‘logos’. Nor Vicenza Book. Martin Allgood, well, yes, up to a point and in a manner of speaking. The Bognors, certainly. Branwell Fludd, perhaps surprisingly, yes. His wife, no.

In a curious way, it was an episcopal sorting of goats from sheep, men from boys, cognoscenti from buffoons.

‘How appropriate, therefore, that we should be meeting at the beginning of this tenth literary festival in the House of God; a God who, according to the Holy Gospel, not only believed in the word, but believed in the word above all else. All this week, we celebrate the word in its various shapes and patterns and glories. Tonight, however, we celebrate God’s word in God’s house.

‘And what, I ask myself, as we all must, at this beginning of a week of celebration of God’s unique gift, what exactly was God’s message? To what use did he put that wonderful word which he gave us, and which St John tells us about so memorably and so beautifully? What exactly did God mean? What exactly did God say? His is, by any standard, the greatest book in the world, and yet what precisely is its message? What exactly does it say? What is the message which echoes so vibrantly throughout its pages?’

Bishop Ebb was beginning to lose the attention of even those listeners who had been paying some attention, and not just listening to the more or less acceptable noise that he made. He spoke in a passably well-modulated middle-church way, some way short of the wonderfully nasal C of E fashion adopted by Alan Bennett for his seminally parodic sermon (‘My Brother Esau is an hairy man but I…’) in Beyond the Fringe, but also divorced from what generally passed for received speech in the early years of the twentieth century. The bishop spoke prose from the pulpit in an appropriate manner. It would have passed muster on the BBC’s ‘Thought for the Day’, alongside the breezy Balliolity of the Reverend Lionel Blue, the people’s Rabbi. As a matter of fact, Bishop Ebb had appeared on ‘Thought for the Day’ and was considered by the powers that be at the corporation to be rather better than such performers as Chartres, the Bishop of London (too Old Testament prophet) and Harris, the former Bishop of Oxford (too serpentine, sibilant and reminiscent of Caiaphas, the High Priest). Ebenezer Lariat fell well short of being trendy, but he was nearer the common man who listened to the radio than any of his counterparts.

Today’s bishop moved on to Flanagan Fludd. He had obviously googled Flanagan Fludd and was forced, therefore, to rely heavily on the Wikipedia entry which had been composed by Sir Branwell and Lady Fludd with a little help from the Bognors some years ago. It had been ‘improved’, as is the way with Wikipedia entries, that is to say it now contained even more ‘information’ whose factual basis was questionable. This meant that the bishop’s stuff on the eponymous festival centrepiece was thin and slightly doubtful.

This, in turn, meant that the Fludds and the Bognors switched off for the stuff about the Mallborne Pageants of the l890s, for the collaboration with Louis Napoleon Parker and the famous rhyming version of King Lear. He vaguely heard that Flanagan might perhaps not have been a man of God in the strictly conventional sense, but that he was assuredly a man of His Word, and therefore blessed in some indefinable but definite fashion, and that he was generally speaking a Good Thing, in the Sellar and Yeatman sense. Actually, it was the festival and the present generation of Fludds that were his most significant and lasting bequest, and none the worse for that.

The bishop padded out his sentences on Flanagan Fludd with references to Tennyson (whom Fludd had once met) and the optimism of Locksley Hall (‘Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change’), despite no evidence that Fludd had ever read the epic verses, nor indeed anything much, except for his own outpourings, which were, if truth be told, more reminiscent of William McGonegall than of the poet Tennyson, but let it pass; Flanagan was one of the great impresarios, a flaneur and, above all, a man of His Word.

Here, the bishop paused and looked around the church with that curious mixture of threat and mateyness, before coming out with words which made the inhabitants of the family pew suddenly sit bolt upright.

‘Above all,’ he intoned, ‘Flanagan was a Fludd.’

He beamed again. Beatific yet baleful. It was not a smile in the usual sense, but more the sort of rictus grimace with which one brought really bad tidings. It was a more in sorrow than in anger sort of movement. He was telling his listeners that this was going to hurt him more than them. He was also signalling that this was not true, but necessary public relations. Bognor had spent years of his upbringing listening to teachers such as this. They said one thing, while meaning something quite different. What they said was nice, what they meant was nasty. Life was full of people like that. Even Bishops. Even Bishops who, on the whole, one rather liked.

‘Fludds,’ said Bishop Ebb, ‘may come, and Fludds may go. Unlike our Lord, none go on for ever.’

He smiled again, for what he had just said represented the nearest a bishop in a pulpit came to a joke.

‘Most Fludds, like the rest of us, have but a short time to live. Many manage their allotted three score years and ten. Some manage more and some less, but it matters not a lot, for the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and he has an unpleasant habit of giving life on the one hand, while removing it on the other. It is no coincidence that the two most significant dates on the Christian calendar come at Christmas and at Easter. These represent, first, the giving of life and, second, the taking away of that same gift. Life is a gift of God, but so too is death.

‘No one here will be unaware of the fact that our Lord has stretched out his hand and taken away a Fludd from amongst us. “Come in, Sebastian,” he said, only yesterday in this very place. “Come in, Sebastian. For your time is up.”

The bishop looked round the silent killing ground, obviously satisfied at the way in which his words seemed to have grabbed the attention of all those present, and he repeated, softly and slowly:

‘Come in, Sebastian… Your time is up!’