The bleep of a mobile interrupted the orderly calm of the cathedral chapter meeting.
The Dean paused. “If that’s important, do take it outside and answer it.”
The Reverend Jane Fitzroy flushed scarlet. She had arrived in Lafferton a week earlier and this was her first full chapter meeting.
“No, it can wait. I do apologise.”
She pressed the off button and the Dean moved the agenda smoothly forwards.
It was over an hour later before she could check the caller display. The last number was her mother’s, but when she rang back the answerphone was on.
“Mum, sorry, I was in a chapter meeting. Hope you’re OK. Call me when you get this.”
She spent the next couple of hours at Imogen House, to which she was now Chaplain, as well as being the Cathedral Liaison Officer at Bevham General hospital. The work would take her out into the community but bring her back to her base at the cathedral, where she would take a full share in the worship and ministry.
At the moment, the most important part of her job was to get to know people, and let them size her up in turn, to listen and learn. It was an absorbing afternoon, at the end of which she sat with a man a few weeks off his hundredth birthday and determined, as he said, “to go for the telegram.” He was like a bird, a fledgling of skin and bone, tiny in the bed, his skin the colour of a tallow candle, but his eyes bright.
“I’ll get there, young Reverend,” Wilfred Armer said, squeezing Jane’s hand. “I’ll be blowing out all those candles, you’ll see.”
Jane doubted if he would live through the next twenty-four hours. He wanted her to stay with him, to listen as he wheezed out story after story about his boyhood, of fishing in Lafferton’s canal and swimming in the river.
As she left the building, she switched on her mobile again. It beeped a message. “Jane?” Magda Fitzroy’s voice sounded distant and strange. “Are you there? Jane?”
She pressed “call.” There was no reply and this time the answerphone did not come on. She sat under a tree, wondering what to do. There was only one of her mother’s Hampstead neighbours whose number Jane knew and he was in America for three months. The house on the other side belonged to a foreign businessman who seemed never to be there. The police? The hospitals? She hesitated because it seemed too dramatic to involve them when she was not even sure if anything was wrong.
The clinic. That number was on her phone. Other numbers might be somewhere among her things which were still in boxes in the garden cottage of the Precentor’s house.
A boy bounced past her on a bicycle doing wheelies over the cobbles. Jane smiled at him. He did not respond but when he had gone by, turned and stared over his shoulder. She was used to it. Here she was, a girl, wearing jeans, and a dog collar. People were still surprised.
“Heathside Clinic.”
“It’s Jane Fitzroy Is my mother there by any chance?”
Magda Fitzroy still saw a few patients at her former workplace, though she had officially retired the year before and was now working with a fellow child psychiatrist on an academic textbook. She missed the clinic, Jane knew, missed the people and her own role there.
“Sorry to keep you. No one’s seen Dr Fitzroy today, but she wasn’t expected. She hasn’t any appointments here at all this week.”
Jane tried her mother’s number several times during the course of the next hour. Nothing. Still no reply and still no answer machine.
Then she went across to the deanery. Geoffrey Peach was out and she left a message. By the time she was away from Lafferton heading towards the motorway it was early afternoon.
The London traffic was dense and she sat on Haverstock Hill for twenty minutes without moving. From time to time, she dialled her mother’s number. There was never a reply and she turned the corner into Heath Place wishing she had called the police after all.
As she drew up outside the Georgian cottage she saw that the front door was ajar.
For a second Jane thought the hall seemed as usual; then she realised that the lamp usually on the walnut table was lying broken on the floor. The table itself had gone.
“Mother?”
Magda spent much of her time in the study overlooking the garden. It was a room Jane loved, with its purple walls and squashy, plum-covered sofa, her mother’s papers and books flowing from desk to chairs to floor. The room had a particular smell, partly because the windows were almost always open, even in winter, so that the garden scents drifted in, and also because her mother sometimes smoked small cigars, whose smoke had melded into the fabric of the room over the years.
The study had been taken apart. The walls had been stripped of their pictures, the shelves of every piece of old china, and both the desk and a small table had had the drawers pulled out and overturned. There was an unmistakable smell of urine.
It was only as Jane stood looking round in shock, trying to take everything in, that she heard a slight sound from the kitchen.
Magda was lying on the floor beside the stove. One leg was buckled beneath her and there was dried blood on her head, matted into her hair and crusted down the side of her face. She was grey, her mouth pinched in.
Jane knelt and took her hand. It was cold and her mother’s pulse was weak, but she was conscious.
“Jane …?”
“How long have you been here? Who did this to you? Oh God, you rang me and I didn’t realise.”
“I, I think … this morning? Someone rang the doorbell and … just … I couldn’t manage to get up again to the phone … I … thought you might …”
“Darling, I’m going to call the ambulance and the police. I’ll get a blanket but I won’t move you, they’d better do that … hold on a moment.”
Every room that she glanced into as she ran upstairs had been ransacked and overturned. She felt sick.
“This will keep you warm. They’ll be here soon.”
“I am not going to hospital—”
But Jane was already calling the emergency services.
“I’ll die if I go to hospital.”
“Much more likely to die if you don’t.”
Jane sat on the floor and took her mother’s hand. She was a tall, strong woman, with grey hair usually coiled up into an idiosyncratic bun. Now, it was down and anyhow; her features, so full of character, so well defined, with the beaky nose and high cheekbones and forehead, seemed to have sunk in, so that she looked closer to eighty than the sixty-eight she was. In a few hours, old age and vulnerability had come upon her, changing her terribly.
“Are you in pain?”
“It’s … hard to tell … I feel numb …”
“What kind of man was it? How did it happen for goodness’ sake?”
“Two … youths … I heard a car … It’s difficult to remember.”
“Don’t worry. I’m just angry with myself that I didn’t come sooner.”
It was only then that the old look crossed her mother’s face, the one which Jane had come to know so well over the past few years. Magda’s eyes fell, briefly, on her collar and there it was, even now, after everything that had happened—the look of scorn and of disbelief.
Magda Fitzroy was an atheist of the old school. Atheist, socialist, psychiatrist, rationalist, formed in the classic Hampstead mould. Where her daughter’s Christianity, let alone her desire to be ordained a priest, had come from was to her both a mystery and a matter for ridicule. And then the look was gone. Her mother lay, hurt and afraid, in shock and Jane felt for her; she let the paramedics in and told them the little she knew.
One of them examined the cuts on Magda’s head. “I’m Larry,” he said, “and this is Al. What’s your name, my love?”
“I am Dr Magda Fitzroy and I am not your love.”
“Aw, pity about that, Magda.”
He glanced up at Jane. “She always like this?”
“Oh yes. Ignore her at your peril.”
“You all right?”
Jane had sat down suddenly, hit by the realisation that her mother had been robbed and attacked in her home one quiet weekday morning while the world went about its business, and that she might well have been dead. She began to cry.