The Chorister at the Abbey Read online

Why on earth had Morris Little been clutching a psalter?

  Robert Clark had no experience of a child-orientated family Christmas, twenty-first century style. He had known it would be different, fraught even, but he’d mentally fast-forwarded to the day, imagining Jake and Molly sitting round the tree opening presents with delight.

  He had to admit he hadn’t considered the intensity of last-minute arrangements, the literal weight of shopping, the crazy round of kids’ activities, which meant constantly chauffeuring children about, and the exhaustion of trying to get The Briars to look like a Christmas card for Suzy’s mother’s visit.

  And on top of it all there was the awful business of Morris Little. Robert had offered on behalf of the Chorus to go and see his wife Norma. The funeral was to be sometime after Christmas when the initial legal formalities were over. This left the Little family in a sort of limbo where receiving visitors was all they could do, in shocked silence punctuated by platitudes.

  ‘Does it have to be you?’ Suzy had said irritably when he said he was going to Uplands store again on Christmas Eve.

  ‘I offered to. Norma is very low . . .’

  ‘But what about coming to Norbridge? You said you’d drop me there and pick me up. I need to get Molly that game she wants for her stocking.’

  ‘Can’t you take your own car?’

  ‘But parking’s a nightmare. You said you’d wait for me. A job that should take me half an hour will take hours now.’

  ‘I’m sorry, love.’

  ‘Oh, forget it. I’ll manage.’

  Robert went from Uplands into Norbridge to buy Suzy a present. He had wondered about getting her a ring, but then thought a bracelet might be more appropriate.

  Earrings were out as Suzy always lost them. And she’d recently ruined her watch by wearing it in the bath, and declared that cheap watches were all she wanted.

  He took a while to choose the bangle, relishing the calm of the jeweller’s shop.

  When he came home, a little later than planned, he could hear Suzy yelling at Molly upstairs.

  ‘I had to leave you on your own for five minutes because I needed to go to Lo-cost Supermarket and Robert let me down by being late. And now look what you’ve done!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mummy.’

  ‘Sorry! How could you, you disgusting little beast. It will take me hours to clean this up. You should be ashamed of yourself. How inconsiderate can you get? It’s Christmas Eve and I’m run off my feet. And this isn’t our house, you know. You can’t just wreck it . . .’

  ‘But Mummy, it just came out . . .’

  ‘Don’t lie to me!’ Suzy was shouting now. ‘How could a whole tube of glue get all over the carpet like that? You sloshed it about and then you trod in it and you just didn’t care. Get into the bathroom and try to scrape it off your hands. And your jeans. I’m not letting you make any more decorations.’

  Molly was starting to scream. Robert went up the stairs two at a time and was shocked to see Suzy standing over her daughter who was cowering on her bed.

  ‘Suzy! It’s all right. Really. I don’t mind about the carpet. Don’t shout at her. You’re just upsetting her.’

  Suzy rounded on him. ‘I beg your pardon? What do you think you’re doing, telling me how to deal with my daughter? Molly, do as I say. Shut up, and go and clean up. Now.’ The little girl scuttled out of the bedroom.

  ‘Don’t ever do that, Robert. Don’t ever tell me how to bring up my children.’ Suzy walked away from him, down the stairs.

  Robert went and changed into his jeans and a sweatshirt. When he went down to the kitchen, Molly was sitting at the table with milk and a biscuit, showing Suzy something in a book. The crisis was over.

  Suzy came over to him and put her hand on his arm. ‘Listen, Rob, Molly and I have big rows every so often. It’s how we cope. All parents get angry at some point, you know.’

  ‘Of course I know,’ he said more sharply than usual. I’m not naive because I’m not a parent, he thought.

  ‘And it really was wrong of Molly to get glue all over Mary’s rug.’

  ‘It’s not Mary’s rug.’ Robert said. ‘Mary’s dead.’ It sounded brusquer than he meant it to. He had been trying to say that he understood how difficult it must be for her, here in Mary’s house at Christmas. But Suzy jumped away from him as if he had hit her.

  ‘Mummy!’ called Molly imperiously, and the chance to talk was gone.

  8

  I am become a monster unto many, but my sure trust is in thee. Psalm 71:6

  Christmas Day dawned dark and dreary. Alex Gibson got up and pulled the thin, cheap brown curtains aside to reveal the view from the picture window of her mother’s bungalow bedroom. She looked down at the rolling scene of beige-green fell. Fellside was not a cute village, and today in the grey dawn it looked especially dreary. A stunted leafless bush framed the panorama. The hillside dropped away to a disused slate quarry which was about as pretty as an inverted slag heap. In the other direction, the crazy turret of the deserted red-brick convent, once home to a dying group of Anglican nuns, punctured the skyline. Alex could see their deserted overgrown garden and the depressing, lurching stone cross.

  The window was cold, single-glazed; slimy rivulets of condensation ran down the pane to collect in fat drops on the chipped and warped window frame. The bungalow had been built in the 1970s and the minimum had been done to it since. Her mother’s empty recliner chair cluttered the room, still with the plaid blanket on top of it. To get to the heap of clothes she had dumped there, Alex had to manoeuvre her way between a big, old-fashioned oak veneer wardrobe and a hideous kidney-shaped dressing table with some tatty pink frilled pleats curtaining its spindly legs. Alex had loved her mother, but she’d had no illusions about her taste.

  And she missed her terribly this morning. Even last year, when things had been so wretched and Mum was declining, Alex had made a pretence of Christmas being special, trying to be patient.

  ‘What day is it?’

  ‘It’s Christmas Day, Mam.’

  ‘Christmas Day? But you didn’t tell me! What am I going to do for dinner?’

  ‘It’s all right, Mam. Christine and Reginald are coming. Your other daughter and her husband, you remember? I’ve done the veg already and we’ll put the turkey in soon.’

  ‘Oh, taking over, are you? You’ve always been bossy.’

  ‘Have some toast, Mam.’

  ‘I don’t mind if I do. Put jam on it. What day is it?’

  ‘It’s Christmas Day, Mam.’

  Tears came to Alex’s eyes, but she shook her head. It was all very well to try and pretend she’d been a dutiful daughter, but she’d only come back to Fellside when her own life had fallen apart and she had nowhere else to go. Her mother had already started to deteriorate; it was fitting that the disgraced daughter and demented mother moved in together.

  Her sister Christine and brother-in-law Reg had of course been delighted, though there had been an unspoken nervousness on their part that perhaps this would mean losing out on their share of the bungalow. But Alex had been scrupulous about that. In the fallout of her divorce she had been left with half the money for her marital home, and nothing to spend it on, so, of all the horrors Alex had had to face, poverty wasn’t one of them. Not that you would know, looking at the dilapidated bungalow with its leaky gutters, gas-scented kitchen, charcoal-edged carpets and drooping curtains. Her mother had been dead eight months. Since then, Alex had become even more inert.

  But how different things had been once! For a second a memory of Christmas before the fall came back to her, like the scene from a film. Buck’s fizz on Christmas morning, carol singing in their fashionable church with her own voice rising high in the descants, and then the kisses and hugs of all their friends in the church porch before drinks at a neighbour’s house where Alex wore her new designer jacket and the jewellery her husband had given her. All very South-West London. All very over.

  The dressing-table mirror was smeared but
it still reflected back to Alex her bulging waist in one of her mother’s bright blue nylon nighties. Not helped by another bottle of white wine the night before. And a whisky nightcap. Now, after the usual deep drugged sleep, and restless awakening from about five thirty, it was eight o’clock. Only four hours – well, three hours, seeing it was Christmas – before she could start the next bottle of wine.

  There was no point having a shower or washing her hair. She wasn’t going to see anyone who mattered. She had told Chris and Reg she was going to the Cliffords’ for Christmas lunch. She suspected they knew she was lying, but were relieved to leave her alone.

  She would go to church to fill in the hours before the corkscrew came out. She would attend Fellside Fellowship, with the trendy young vicar Rev Paul, his clever wife, and their wide-eyed, happy young congregation. She would sing choruses and torture herself – and them – with her dumpy, off-message presence. There was no point in actually trying to enjoy anything, and religion wasn’t there to make you feel good. It was there to make you feel bad, like everything else.

  Except the white wine. And of course there was the sort of dull relief that Morris Little was dead. A few weeks earlier Alex had made the mistake of visiting Uplands off-licence for two days running. ‘Putting the sauce away a bit, aren’t you, Miss Gibson?’ he had leered. What did he know? Had he guessed? Did she look like an alcoholic? Was that what she was? Usually it was only a bottle in the evening with supper, though of course lately it had perhaps been a bit more . . .

  For a minute she was tempted to get a bath, clean up and go down to sing lovely traditional carols at Uplands – maybe the Cliffords would invite her to lunch after all, on the spur of the moment. But she couldn’t stand the thought of Lynn Clifford’s kindness – the confiding remarks about the menopause or pension problems. I’m probably at least ten years younger than you think, Alex wanted to shout. I’ve taken to wearing my mother’s clothes because I’ve got so fat. I’m even wearing her old glasses because I cried so much I gave up on my contact lenses, and my face is grey because I can’t be bothered with make-up or moisturizer, and even smiling seems a waste of muscle power. I only use my mouth to stuff it with food or to gulp drink or to snarl at people. But what was the point? Alex looked and felt like an old bag. And that was what she was.

  So she would go and embarrass the scrubbed, cheery kids who came to the Fellside Fellowship. And to the backing of the hackneyed guitar she would try and pray for the soul of the departed Morris Little. But it would be hard.

  ‘Good to see you. God bless.’

  ‘Fab talk, Paul. Happy Christmas.’

  ‘Praise the Lord!’

  Rev Paul, as he liked to be called, was an Anglican priest and one of Neil Clifford’s team ministry. He stood with his right-hand man Mark Wilson outside their ugly red-brick church and said goodbye to their communicants. There had been sixty people at the Fellside Fellowship Christmas Morning All Age Worship, which was an all-time record, and most of them were under thirty – as the roar of a dozen high-tuned engines testified.

  The Fellside Fellowship was based in a drab chapel, built in the 1850s for the terraced village that had grown up around the Cumbrian slate industry. It had been called St Luke’s, but everyone knew it as Fellside Fellowship now.

  ‘Great service, Paul. Really cool.’

  Rev Paul had revived the place. He had seen that the prettier village churches, like St Mary’s in Uplands and All Saints over in Tarnfield, already had established congregations. So he had set about making the chapel at Fellside something different.

  Paul was a good operator and had been careful to work gradually towards something contemporary, without distressing the old guard. After a while there had been no objection from the parochial church council to his idea of a pop-based evensong for local teenagers, and the development of a ‘big band’ of teenage rock musicians on any instruments they could muster, plugged into massive amplifiers. Paul himself played the guitar.

  Slowly, more and more local kids came to Fellside. Paul retained a basic communion service every Sunday morning for a sprinkling of older people, but for Christmas Day it had been the beat service.

  ‘Nice one, Paul. I like a tune to get me going.’ It was one of the pensioners who made no secret of enjoying seeing the girls dancing in the aisles. ‘’Appy Christmas, lad.’

  ‘Happy Christmas to you too.’

  He and Mark stood talking to people leaving the church, and Paul glanced at his most dedicated parishioner. It was brilliant that help, in the shape of Mark, had come along. In the last year Mark had taken on much of the church administration. He was now secretary to the parochial church council, and an assistant at communion. The older people were happy to let him take over the work. And the young ones liked him because he was handsome in a blond, surfing sort of way, and they took for granted that he would do boring stuff like running meetings and taking minutes. Surprisingly, for one so cool-looking, Mark was an accountant, in his early thirties, but with a real common touch. A godsend, Paul thought sincerely.

  Not that they were joined-at-the-hip in liturgical matters. Tentatively, almost apologetically, Mark had developed a different sort of approach since first coming to the Fellowship a year earlier. Paul had expected him to become one of the evangelical types who predominated at Fellside, but Mark had started to change. He was becoming much more interested in High Church stuff – crossing himself and kneeling to pray. Which was fine. Two people couldn’t have identical views, and Paul already had his wife’s support. He and Jenny really did think as one.

  ‘Mark’s such an asset, isn’t he?’ Paul had said to her after Mark had been with them a few weeks.

  ‘Marvellous,’ Jenny had said, a touch curtly. ‘I must go and see to Joseph.’

  Joseph was a joy but he was hard work too, especially as Jenny had insisted on feeding him herself for ten months. Jenny was a brilliant mother, a fantastic sounding-board and a great helpmate, even if these days she was abrupt at times. Paul had to be patient and remember that she had, literally, born the brunt of the new baby. They had waited until their mid-thirties to have children, and Jenny had been such a capable, clever woman that it had never occurred to either of them that having a baby would be more than they could take in their stride. But for Jenny, former secondary school teacher, potential deputy head, now full-time mother and mere parish sidekick, it was tough.

  But there was no need to think about that today. After all, it was Christmas, and so far so good. Joseph, exhausted, had let them sleep till six thirty, his stocking had gone down well, the untidiness in the tiny vicarage was under control and the morning service had been a triumph. And now Jenny was coming out of church at last after tidying up behind the little kids who’d been drawing pictures at the back. Joseph was on her hip and she was laughing for once.

  She called to them both: ‘I’m running off to see that the turkey’s cooking. I hope you’re hungry, Mark.’

  Paul said, ‘It’ll be a bunfight. I could scran a gadgee off a scabby hoss!’

  Mark’s face beamed. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means I could eat a man on a scab-covered horse. Cumbrian dialect.’ Paul grinned.

  His grandfather’s family had come from Cumbria. Paul had been born in Bristol, but he’d been delighted to come back. Since his father’s death just a few month earlier Paul had become hooked on genealogy, sneaking off to the computer when he was supposedly writing his sermons. He had not been close to his dad, who’d been nonplussed by Paul’s vocation, but Paul was sure that somewhere in his genetic make-up there was an ancestor who, like him, had faith. His heritage meant a lot to him and he felt it showed God at work through the generations. He wanted to know what he was passing on to his son. He had told Mark all about it – and his parishioner and friend thought it all rather exciting. Not like his wife, who was a little bit dismissive.

  ‘Yum! Dinner sounds deee-licious. Can’t wait, Jenny,’ Mark said good-humouredly, with his warm
smile.

  Thank God, Paul thought, sincerely. He was suddenly filled with a sense of peace. He was brought down to earth by his last parishioner lumbering towards him. Alex Gibson had been left behind in the rush. He wondered for a minute why she was here at the Fellowship. It clearly wasn’t her thing. But he tried to be a good priest and he advanced towards her, extending his hand.

  ‘Happy Christmas, Alex. God bless.’

  ‘If you say so,’ she mumbled, shaking his hand with the enthusiasm of a wet dishcloth. She hardly paused in her heavy stride, and walked past him up the hill.

  Perhaps I should have been more supportive of Alex Gibson, Paul thought. Wasn’t it Alex who had found Morris Little’s body? The thought made Paul shiver involuntarily and he put the local murder out of his mind. But, watching Alex walk slowly up the hill, past the boarded-up convent and on towards her featureless bungalow, he thought that if he had said anything, she probably would have been her usual ungracious self anyway.

  He could hear Jenny and Mark laughing as they walked down to the cramped council house which served as his headquarters. Thank you for friendship, Lord, he thought.

  Merry Christmas.

  9

  Blessed are they that dwell in thy house: they will be alway praising thee. Psalm 84:4

  Three hundred miles away, Wanda Wisley peered over the top of her duvet. The view of the white room was broken only by the slight swaying of an orchid on its thin stem, bobbing almost unnoticeably to the waves of heat rising from the radiator cover. Her head ached in a dull, general sort of way, and she felt nauseous, but, lying there stretching her neck muscles, she willed the mild pain to go. The hum of traffic, always minimal in this Notting Hill cul-de-sac, was almost non-existent today, and the world seemed silent except for the occasional shout from the street below.

  ‘Freddie,’ she whispered, but he was still out of it. A snore rippled between his rubbery lips. He turned away from her into the pillow, flicking her with his swatch of grey-black hair, still tied back in an elastic band, even in bed.