Pictures of Perfection

‘Mine’s non-existent,’ she replied, closing the file. ‘I’ve probably got the wrong end of the stick. Nevertheless, it could be worth a look. Meanwhile I’ll drop the rest of this stuff off at the vicarage and I might just carry on to the Hall and have a talk with Girlie about Beryl. Edwin, if you see anyone going into the Gallery, you might pop across. Caddy’s supposedly in charge, but once she gets stuck into something in her studio, you could blow up the till and she would hardly notice.’

She set off up the street with the wind dancing attendance.

Digweed, watching her go, said, ‘Interesting how well Kee managed to suppress her fascination with parish history while old Charley Cage was up at the vicarage.’

Dora said, ‘A vicar needs a wife. It’s not natural else.’

‘Indeed? Perhaps you should drop a line to the Pope. I think I’ll just pop over and check that Caddy’s OK.’

He patted his silvery hair as he spoke, though unlike Kee’s silken mane, it was too coarsely vigorous to be much disturbed by the wind.

Dora Creed said, ‘The hoary head is a crown of glory if it is found in the way of righteousness.’

‘True beyond need of exegesis,’ said Digweed.

He crossed the street and entered the Gallery. Converted from the old village smithy, it was a spacious, well-lit room, the upper walls of which were crowded with paintings and the lower shelved with tourist fodder. Behind the unattended till a door opened on to a narrow, gloomy passage. Digweed went through it and called, ‘Caddy?’

‘Here,’ a voice floated down a steep staircase.

Digweed ran lightly up the stairs and along a creaking landing into the studio. This consisted of two rooms knocked together and opened into the attic whose sloping roof was broken by a pair of huge skylights. These spilled brightness on to a triptych of canvases occupying almost an entire wall. On them was painted a Crucifixion, conventionally structured with the cross raised high in the central panel and a long panorama of landscape and buildings falling away behind in the other two.

Here conventionality ended. Though much was only sketched in, the background was clearly not first-century Palestine but twentieth-century Enscombe. And the as yet faceless figure on the cross was a naked woman.

At one end of the chaotically cluttered room, Caddy Scudamore, as dark as her sister was fair, and as luscious as she was lean, stood in front of a cheval-glass with her paint-stained smock rolled up, critically examining her heavy breasts.

‘Hello, Edwin,’ she said. ‘Nipples are hard.’

‘Indeed,’ said Digweed, his gaze drifting from reflection to representation. ‘And perhaps one should ask oneself whether in the circumstances they would be. Caddy, I think the time has come for you and I to have congress.’

And he carefully closed the door behind him.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_908e4956-9ea1-572f-898c-cddc436ee1c8)

‘… he gave us an excellent Sermon – a little too eager sometimes in his delivery, but that is to me a better extreme than the want of animation, especially when it comes from the heart.’

‘The church of St Hilda and St Margaret in Enscombe, dominating the village from the high ground to the north where the valley of the Een begins to climb up to the moors which give it birth, has two immediately striking, unusual features. One is the double patriotic dedication and the other is the famous leaning tower which, though no challenge to Pisa, is certainly more inclined to Rome than a good Protestant church ought to be.’

(Pause for laughter.)

The Reverend Laurence Lillingstone paused for laughter.

His audience, which was himself in the pier-glass set in his study wall, laughed appreciatively. So too, he hoped, would the ladies of the Byreford and District Luncheon Club. ‘Not too heavy,’ Mrs Finch-Hatton had said. ‘Save your fine detail for the Historical Association.’

He had nodded his understanding, concealing his chagrin that the Mid-Yorkshire Historical Association had just rejected his offer of a talk based on his researches into the Enscombe archives. ‘Sorry,’ the secretary had said, ‘but we’ve got old Squire Selwyn doing his ballad history. Don’t want to overdose on Enscombe, do we?’

Dear God! What sort of world was it where serious scholarship could be pushed out by a music-hall turn?

The handsome face in the glass was glowering uncharitably but as he met its gaze, the indignant scowl dissolved in a flush of shame.

What right had he to mock old Selwyn’s verses when God who knows everything knew it wasn’t serious scholarship that drove him to his own historical researches, it was serious sex!

He’d thought he’d put all that behind him when, after a highly charged episode during his curacy, he had taken a solemn vow of celibacy.

This was of course purely a private matter as the Church of England imposes no such restraint upon its ministers. But when he was offered the living of Enscombe, he felt duty-bound to apprise the Bishop of his condition … ‘in case such a rural community might expect eventually to have a vicar’s wife to run the MU, help with the WI, that sort of thing’.

The Bishop, of the Church’s worldly rather than otherworldly wing, replied, ‘You’re not trying to tell me you’re gay, Larry?’

‘Certainly not!’

‘I’m relieved. Not that I’ve anything against gayness. Some of my best friends ought to be gay.’

‘But you don’t think Enscombe is ready for such an imaginative appointment?’ smiled Lillingstone. ‘Not even after putting up with the Voice of the People for so many years?’

‘Charley Cage, your predecessor, was my predecessor’s predecessor’s revenge on the Guillemards. Shortly after his elevation to the episcopate back in the ’thirties, he gave way to pressure from the then Squire to move the then incumbent, Stanley Harding, on. Later, as he grew into the job, he much regretted this weakness, so when, just before his own retirement in the ’fifties, the living became vacant again, he looked around for someone whose views were likely to cause the Guillemards maximum pain, and lit upon young Charley.’

‘What was Stanley Harding’s crime?’

‘Oh, social awareness, Christian charity, the usual things. But worst of all he had the temerity to marry the Squire’s daughter!’

‘Good Lord! And the Bishop got his own back with Cage.’

‘This is only my own theory, you understand,’ laughed the older man. ‘In fact, it rather backfired. The old Squire died and his son, the present Squire, got on rather well with Charley. At least they never fell out in public. But to get back to your non-gayness, I’m relieved because old Charley was in every sense a confirmed bachelor, and I feel that after forty years, the blushful maidens of Enscombe deserve at least a level playing field.’

‘I haven’t made my vow lightly,’ said Lillingstone, slightly piqued.

‘Of course you haven’t, but the strongest oaths are straw to the fire i’ the blood, eh?’

‘Saint Augustine?’ guessed Lillingstone.

‘St Bill, I think. No, you’ll do nicely for Enscombe, Larry. But be warned, it’s a place that can do odd things to a man.’

‘Such as?’ inquired Lillingstone.

The Bishop sipped his Screwdriver and said, ‘Old Charley used to claim, when the port had been round a few times, that after the Fall God decided to have a second shot, learning from the failure of the first. This time He created a man who was hard of head, blunt of speech, knew which side his bread was buttered on, and above all took no notice of women. Then God sent him forth to multiply in Yorkshire. But after a while he got to worrying he’d left something out – imagination, invention, fancy, call it what you will. So he grabbed a nice handful of this, intending to scatter it thinly over the county. Only it was a batch He’d just made and it was still damp, so instead of scattering, it all landed in a single lump, and that was where they built Enscombe!’

Lillingstone laughed appreciatively and said, ‘I wish I’d known Cage.’

‘He was worth knowing. He died in the pulpit, you know. No one noticed for ten minutes. His dramatic pauses had been getting longer and longer. He was extremely outspoken both on his feet and in print. For recreation, or as he put it, to keep himself out of temptation (though he never specified the nature of the temptation), he was writing a history of the parish. You’re a historian yourself, aren’t you? If you feel the flesh tugging too strongly, you could do worse than follow Charley’s example. All the archival stuff’s at the vicarage. It’ll need sorting out before our masters sell the place from under you.’

‘Sounds interesting,’ said Lillingstone. ‘But if Cage’s work was well advanced …’

‘Oh yes. He showed me various drafts. Fascinating, but much of it utterly unpublishable! No, you take my advice, Larry. There’s nothing like the dust of the past for clogging an overactive internal combustion engine!’

The young vicar had taken this as a joke till a few days after his induction when his desire to meet those of his flock who hadn’t been at the church (i.e. the majority) took him through the door of the Eendale Gallery.

He had been instantly aware that there were paintings here of a quality far above that of the usual insipid watercolours of local views which filled much of the wall space. One in particular caught his eye, a small acrylic of his own church, stark against a sulphurously wuthering sky, with the angle of the tower so exaggerated that it looked as if the building had been caught in the very act of being blown apart.

The Gallery had been empty when he entered and so rapt was he in studying the picture that he did not hear the inner door open.