APRIL

Chapter 1

In homage to our esteemed forerunner, we commence this ecclesiastical tale with the question: Who will be the new bishop?

Back in the year of 185— when this same puzzle absorbed the good folk of Barchester, appointing a new bishop appears to have been a pretty straightforward affair. To be sure, there was some Oxbridge High Table-style manoeuvring behind the scenes. There were raised and dashed hopes, with the press confidently (and, for the most part, wrongly) naming names; and then the prime minister made his choice. Dr Proudie, we read, was bishop elect ‘a month after the demise of the late bishop’. A month! I fear, by contrast, we will still be asking, ‘Who will be the new bishop?’ for a long time to come, while the Crown Nominations Commission ruminates.

Ruminates? Dare I apply so bovine a metaphor to this august body? Do I wish my reader to picture jaws rolling, rolling, strands of saliva swinging, heads turning ponderously this way and that as the process of discernment toils on? And how – if we pursue this alimentary metaphor to its logical conclusion – are we to characterize its outcome?

No, we had better eschew rumination.

And anyway, they are not an august body. They are just a bunch of ordinary Anglicans operating as best they can in this awkward limbo that C of E senior appointments currently occupies (somewhere between 185— and the real world). These days it takes a very long time to appoint a new bishop. It feels especially protracted for those caught up in the process and zipped by oaths into the body bag of confidentiality.

So who will be the new bishop of Lindchester? I have no idea. If you’re keen to know early, your best bet is to keep an eye on Twitter. It is possible that someone will award themselves a smiley sticker on the wallchart of self-aggrandizement by being the first to blab what others have appropriately kept under wraps.

We rejoin our Lindcastrian friends the day before Low Sunday, that is, the first Sunday after Easter. In parishes across the diocese this collect may be said:

Risen Christ,

for whom no door is locked, no entrance barred:

open the doors of our hearts . . .

It may be said; but it is not, of course, compulsory. Gone is the golden age of Book of Common Prayer uniformity, the days of ‘Here’s a digestive biscuit, take it or leave it.’ Gone, too, are the late unlamented days of the Alternative Service Book. (‘Here’s a choice: digestive, Lincoln, rich tea or garibaldi.’) We now inhabit the age of the biscuit assortment. (‘Here, have a rummage.’) Heck, we are pretty much in the age of the liturgical bake-off. Provided some of the right ingredients are used, frankly you can go ahead and make your own. Anything, provided there are biscuits to feed the hungry people of the UK!

Like the risen Christ himself, this narrative will find locked doors no obstacle. The hearts and homes of our characters stand ajar to us. We may slip in and snoop around. Let us set out now to walk the joyful road of sacrifice and peace in their company as far as Advent, the Church’s New Year. New Year at the end of November? Yes, there it is again, that strange tension between the two realms we inhabit: the Church and the world, with ever and anon the tug of homesickness for the home we have never seen.

Come, reader, and dust off the wings of your imagination. Fly with me once again to the green and pleasant Diocese of Lindchester. Ah, Lindfordshire, from you we have been absent in the spring! Even now, as the month draws to its close, proud-pied April is still dressed in all his trim. Look down as we glide upon polite Anglican wings, and see how every road edge is blessed with silver and gold. Daisies and dandelions – no mower blade can keep them down. See where eddies of cherry blossom, pink, white, swirl in suburban gutters.

Hover with me above parks and gardens. The horse chestnut candles are in bloom, and the may blossom authorizes the casting of clouts. Sheep and cattle graze in old striped fields. Listen! A cuckoo dimples the air, and for a heartbeat, everything stands still. The waters have receded, but signs of flooding are everywhere across the landscape. Even now, the distant cathedral seems perched like the ark on Ararat, as rainbows come and go behind the cooling towers of Cardingforth.

We will head to the cathedral. I’m pleased to inform you that the spire has not crashed through the nave roof in our absence. The historic glass of the Lady Chapel has not slipped from its crumbled tracery and smashed to smithereens. Restoration work is under way on the cathedral’s south side, where a vast colony of masonry bees has been ruthlessly exterminated. Dean and Chapter (how can they call themselves Christian?) were in receipt of letters from single-issue bee fanatics. A reply drafted by the canon chancellor, referring them to Our Lord’s brusque treatment of swine, was never sent.

It is Saturday afternoon. Gavin, deputy verger and closet pyromaniac, is mowing the palace lawn before the rain starts. All downhill now till Advent, he thinks. The triumph of the Easter brazier still glows in his mind. New paschal candle lit first go. Cut-off two-litre Coke bottle, that was the secret. Stopped it blowing out. Up and down goes Gavin. Keeping things under control lawn-wise during the interregnum.

Ah, but the garden misses the touch of Susanna, the former bishop’s wife. Bleeding heart plants nod in untended borders. Roses shoot unpruned. The laburnum walk is unforbidden, poised to rain its deadly Zeus-like showers on nobody at all. Everything waits for the new bishop, whoever he may be.

As you may have seen in the press, there was a brief outbreak of squawking in the ecclesiastical henhouse back in February, when it was (wrongly) rumoured that the Church Commissioners had decided to sell the palace and stick the next bishop of Lindchester in a poky little seven-bedroomed house in suburban Renfold. Indignant petitions were worded. SAVE LINDCHESTER PALACE! The bishops of Lindchester had always lived there, since . . .

It emerged that the bishops of Lindchester had, in fact, only lived in this particular house since 1863, when a vigorous and godly Evangelical bishop sold off the other two palaces. The Rt Revd William Emrys Brownlow used the money to clear the city’s slums, provide clean water and good housing for the impoverished leatherworkers, build a hospital, schools and a theological college. Prior to that, no bishop of Lindchester had ever lived in the Close in such proximity to his clergy and people. It would have been tactless to do so, since they could not have afforded to ape his gracious lifestyle. No, far kinder to retreat to Bishop’s Ingregham and eat quails in aspic with a clear conscience.

Shall we pause to lament the passing of those glorious historic palaces from the Church? Ingregham Palace is particularly lovely, with its mellow sandstone walls, its acres of Capability Brown landscaping, the deer park, the lake. What was Bishop Brownlow thinking of, selling off the family silver like that? These treasures are not ours to dispose of – we are but custodians! Selling off property is only a short-term solution, a crass attempt to throw money at the problem.

As is so often the case when the problem is ‘lack of funds’, the throwing of money at it turns out to be the solution. A great many runty little leatherworkers’ children failed to die of cholera. Many were educated. Scores of earnest young Evangelicals were trained and sent to work in places of great danger and deprivation across the Empire.

Ah, but the palace is very lovely. It’s a shame the Church no longer owns it.

We will leave the garden in Gavin’s care and swoop gracefully to earth outside the deanery instead. Come with me, on tiptoe, to the old scullery, where the Very Revd Marion Randall (just back from a post-Easter break in Lisbon) is standing amid open suitcases. She is discussing the identity of the next bishop with her husband. Or rather, not discussing it.

‘There’s nothing to tell. And even if there was, I wouldn’t tell you. We take oaths, you know.’

‘Oaths! How Shakespearean. Ods bodkins! By my lady’s nether beard!’ he declaimed. ‘Like that?’

‘Funnily enough, Gene, nothing like that.’

‘How dull. But can’t you drop a tiny hint? In passing. I can infer. I’m an excellent inferrer.’

‘Yes. And you’re also an inveterate gossip. Which is why I’m not going to tell you anything.’

‘Aha! So you admit you do know something!’

The dean continued to sort and toss dirty laundry into heaps. ‘Of course I know something. Look, we’re only at the consultation stage. People have been invited to submit suggestions, that’s all. We’ll get a long list from the Washhouse, which we’ll sift, then decide who we want to mandate.’

‘Ooh! Who’s on the long list?’

‘You’re not actually listening.’ She bent and began thrusting a lights load into the machine. ‘Nobody yet.’

‘But who’s likely to be on it?’

‘Anyone whose name has come up.’

‘Literally anyone? What if some bonkers old trout suggests her parish priest because he does a lovely Mass?’

‘Then I suppose he’ll be on the list. Hence the sifting process. No.’ The dean held up her hand. ‘That’s it. Shut up.’

‘At least promise me it won’t be another swivel-eyed Evangelical pederast with a muffin-making wife.’

Silence.

‘Not funny?’ he enquired.

‘No.’

‘But quite clever?’

‘No.’

‘Oh.’ Another silence. ‘Well, let me go and choose us a homecoming wine. I am confident I can get that right, at any rate.’

My readers will see from this that Gene’s character has undergone no reformation in the last few months. He remains the same disgraceful reprobate. His mission is unchanged, too: to cherish, divert and pamper his beloved wife, and make the task of modern deaning more fun than it might otherwise prove, were he not on hand (at all times and in all places) with the right wine and the wrong remark.

Marion sets the machine running, then gazes round her. The overhead airer, the Belfast sink, tiled floor. This was where staff of former deans presumably toiled with their washboards and goffering irons. She thinks about the old servants’ bells still there high up on the deanery kitchen wall in a glass case – BED RM 3, DRAWING RM, TRADES. ENT – though they no longer work. Fell prey to health and safety regs when the deanery was rewired ten years ago. There is a button in Marion and Gene’s en-suite bathroom (formerly DRESSING RM 1). She imagines her predecessors summoning a valet to bring up a hip bath and pink gin. Gene, no doubt, would recreate this scenario with enthusiasm, were she to mention it.

Dear Gene. She smiles. But the brief holiday is already retreating from her mind. The thought bailiffs shoulder their way in to repossess the unpaid-for happiness. The spire. The stuff coming out about the school chaplain from the 1970s. The new bishop of Lindchester – would it be uncomplicated; someone she could work with and not be forever thinking, You are younger than me, less gifted, less experienced . . . ? How wearing it is, all the nuisance of being one of those tipped to be the first woman bishop. To know you’re being talked about. Folk speculating: would she be suffragan somewhere, or was she holding out to be the first diocesan? She shakes her head. Come on, you’re still on holiday till Monday.

She casts her mind back to Lisbon. That basilica. Was it only this morning they were there? Muted palette of browns and terracottas. Easter lilies, a CD of plainsong alleluias playing. High above in the dome, blue sky glimpsed through glass. Peace, beauty. And then to emerge into the big bright spring world! Dazzled by full sunlight, buffeted by the wind, the whirl of life, the vast dome of the sky above. If the inside was the only thing you knew, how could you guess at all this? And yet it made perfect sense. Of course, of course! Would it be like this – resurrection?

She goes through to the kitchen and puts the kettle on.

Gene emerges through the cellar door. With a fey flourish, he presents the wine. ‘Nineteen-ninety-six Chateau Latour.’

‘Lovely.’

He sees from her face that his magic words have conveyed nothing. ‘Bless you, my darling, I know you love that vinho verde.’ He gives a dainty shudder. ‘But some of it was so young, drinking it was practically a safeguarding issue.’

And now it is Low Sunday. Where shall I take you today, dear reader? I know that you are eager for news of our various friends. How is Father Dominic faring in his new parish, for example? And what of our lovely Bishop Bob, shouldering the weight of the whole diocese during the interregnum? To say nothing of our stout hero, the archdeacon, last seen haring off to New Zealand in pursuit of his lady!

You must be patient. I am going to introduce you to a new character, one I fear you may not find it in your heart to love, but Veronica plays an important part in our tale. There are times when we must stoically eat our plate of school liver (horrid tubes visible) before we are allowed out to play.

Come with me now to a church in Lindford. Not the parish church (where Father Dominic now serves), but one nearby with a Gothic revival building of the type that looks as though it might soon be cut loose by the evil archdeacon, Matt the Knife, and turned into a supermarket. Or more likely a nightclub called Holy Joe’s. It is in the clubbing district, such as it is, of Lindford. Beside the church is that narrow alley where, last year – you may remember the incident – two men picked on the wrong faggot. A CCTV camera now keeps watch. Every Friday and Saturday night the church pitches its gazebo in the little yard behind the railings, and from here the street pastors operate, dispensing love, hot chocolate and flip-flops to the lost souls of Lindford.

We will pop in now and see what’s going on in St James’ Church this Low Sunday morning. The first thing you will spot is the lack of pews. The Victorian Society took a tonking here, all right. There are cheerful banners. Someone plays thoughtful music on an electric piano. Can this be another Evangelical stronghold? By no means! This is an inclusive church, my friends, where God is mother and father of all, in the commonwealth not the kingdom of heaven. It is Bishop Bob’s kind of a place. Change from the bottom up, not the top down. They do good work here in their rainbowy way.

Veronica wears a simple cassock alb and Peruvian stole in bright colours. Lent is now over, so she has laid aside her equal marriage campaigning rainbow dog collar. She is not the incumbent, she’s a university chaplain. Here comes Geoff the vicar now. It’s a baptism, so he’s wearing a stole with Noah’s ark animals on. I believe somebody made it from upholstery fabric. It would cover a nursery chair very nicely. The baptism will move seamlessly into the Annual Parochial Church Meeting (getting in before the end of April) and be followed by a shared lunch.

I don’t suppose you want to stay for a church AGM, do you? No. Let us ‘risk the hostile stare’, and tiptoe back out as the congregation stands to sing ‘Will you come and follow me if I but call your name?’ (tune: Kelvingrove).

A glimpse of Veronica is all I vouchsafe you this week, dear reader. Instead, I will whisk you back to the Close and into the study of the Revd Giles Littlechild, the canon precentor. The Littlechilds have just returned from holiday in Heidelberg, visiting in-laws and older son (Gap Yah). Giles has read somewhere that you should do one thing each day that scares you. Opening his work emails surely qualifies!

He scrolls through, delicately, like a bomb disposal expert. Excellent. Nothing too dire. But then a new email pings in.

Oh, God. A last-minute application for the post of tenor lay clerk. They can’t not interview him, can they? And then they’ll have to appoint him, because he’ll be the best.

Lord have mercy! Frankly, Giles would rather have a tone-deaf moose on the back row of dec than Freddie May.

Chapter 2

Why hadn’t they worded the advertisement more carefully? The successful candidate will not be hell on wheels. Lindchester Cathedral’s music department had been complacent. It had placed its trust in Mr May’s legendary powers of self-sabotage. To be sure, the application bore signs of having been submitted in panic, but it had arrived with two whole hours to spare. What was wrong with Exeter? Or Truro? thought Giles. Or Christchurch New Zealand? Why couldn’t you apply for those when they came up, you little horror?

Oh, well. Giles supposed it was inevitable that Freddie would be drawn back to the place where he was known and loved, and where that little hiatus in his CV (‘gap year’ indeed!) required no mumbled explanation. And who could say, perhaps the stint as choral scholar in Barchester had steadied him? Of course it had. No awful rumours had reached Lindchester. If one discounted getting banned from Tesco Extra for skateboarding down the travelator. And the midnight Buff Run incident. But streaking round the Close was a historic tradition for choral scholars! Pure bad luck to collide with the precentor’s wife.

Giles skimmed the references. Look at that: Freddie had been gainfully employed as a cocktail waiter for the last six months. ‘Cheerful.’ (Stoned.) ‘Reliable.’ (Consistently stoned.) His boss at the Cuba Club had ‘absolutely no hesitation in recommending Frederick for the position he was applying for’. Neither had the director of music at Barchester Cathedral. Take him! Someone, anyone! I’ll pay you! screamed the subtext. Or was Giles just imagining that?

‘Darling, some lovely news!’ he called.

Ulrika appeared in the doorway with the bottle of Mosel she was opening (decent stuff, not the crep they exported to the ignorant Brits). ‘What?’

‘Our beloved Frederick has applied for the lay clerk post after all!’

I will not enlarge your vocabulary of German profanities by recording her reply.

How on earth had Freddie mastered his terror of forms sufficiently to fill in the application? The answer is not far to seek. It is Monday morning. Miss Blatherwick is hanging up the birdfeeder she has just refilled. The finches rely on her this time of year, with young to feed and no ripe seeds in the hedges and fields yet. Ironic that spring should be the season of starvation. She ought to have done this yesterday really, but it was getting dark by the time she returned from her little mission to Barchester. Couldn’t really trust herself in poor light. Balance not what it was.

Amadeus the cathedral cat, sleek on his diet of donated Sheba and goldfinches, watches from the top of the wall. Miss Blatherwick gets carefully down from her stool. She gives Amadeus the look that quelled generations of naughty choristers. He flicks his tail and gazes back, all innocence. She can’t stand guard for ever.

This being Monday, the canons have gathered for their weekly meeting, which for historic reasons is referred to as ‘Canons’ Breakfast’. Dean Marion is away on a conference in Derby with her fellow deans. Derby lies beyond the borders of the diocese, so an indistinct idea must suffice that they are conferring on matters germane to the office and work of a dean in God’s Church. In her absence, the meeting is taking place at the precentor’s house, and the precentor is chairing, because he is the first canon. Let’s slip in behind the latecomer (Mr Happy, the canon chancellor) and eavesdrop on the mice at play.

‘To be honest, it’s a right chuffing mare.’

I am sorry to disappoint the reader, but this was not our friend the archdeacon speaking.

‘We’re up to our axles in the whole interregnum malarkey, and now the volunteers are going tits up on us,’ continued Philip, the canon treasurer. He had his feet up on the precentor’s dining-room table. His chair was tilted at a rakish angle, as was the precentor’s son’s pork pie hat, which was perched on his head.

The precentor handed him a mug of coffee. ‘Thou look’st like antichrist in that lewd hat.’

‘You’re conflating antichrist and archdeacon, there,’ said the chancellor. His voice quavered.

‘Well, to be fair, I am the chuffing arch-antichrist of Lindchester, so you can do one, you nob.’ Satisfied that Mr Happy was now helpless with mirth, the treasurer removed the hat from his head and his feet from the table.

The precentor’s phone buzzed. ‘Ha! Text from Mrs Dean. She hopes our meeting goes well, and they’re off on a coach trip to Chatsworth House,’ he said. ‘Oh, that’s nice. The deans of the Church of England are off on a jolly, while the lowly canons keep the show on the road.’

‘Just think,’ said the chancellor. ‘If the coach driver misjudges a bend and they all go over a precipice, the archbishops’ appointments secretary is going to have a very busy year.’

His colleagues both stared at him.

‘You have a ghoulish imagination, Father,’ said Giles. ‘I like you!’

‘Well, gentlemen, we have a lot to get through,’ chided Philip in Marion’s voice. ‘Let’s make a start, shall we?’

And so the business commenced. Visitor donations, coach parking facilities, volunteers’ job descriptions, major art exhibition planned, big service to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the first women priests in Lindchester diocese, rewiring of properties in Vicars’ Yard, fresh wave of allegations involving the Choristers’ School in the 1970s, and (on a happier note) the successful fundraising effort to cover Amadeus the cathedral cat’s vet bill!

‘So, my suggestion is this,’ said Philip, ‘that we produce a document outlining the grave danger to Amadeus from falling masonry if the restoration work on the spire is not undertaken immediately. We’ll have the 7.8 million in two weeks.’

‘Get the cathedral architect on to it at once,’ said Giles.

‘Don’t forget FAC,’ said the chancellor.

‘FAC!’ shouted the precentor. ‘Great facking FAC, man!’

The Fabric Advisory Committee’s acronym was among chapter’s favoured expletives. We will tiptoe away as the treasurer launches into his cathedral architect impersonation and the chancellor weeps with helpless laughter again. I won’t apologize for their behaviour. It is gallows humour. If clergy could not assemble now and then to ridicule their congregations, colleagues and senior staff and generally make light of their lot, I doubt they would survive.

I am now going to introduce another new character. I know, I know. You are impatient to hear about the archdeacon and Jane. But I think you will like Pedro. He’s out for a walk with our lovely friend Father Wendy. Let’s leap forward now to Wednesday morning, and join them on the banks of the Linden.

‘Well, Pedro, isn’t this a lovely morning?’

Pedro makes no reply.

‘Look! Red campion – not to be confused with ragged robin, which is this one here. And that’s stitchwort. Isn’t the may blossom glorious?’ Wendy stops and takes in a lungful. ‘We could cast a clout, if we felt like it, boy.’ She unzips her puffy gilet as a token.

Pedro is wearing a jacket. He is also wearing a muzzle. Wendy still isn’t sure how he’ll behave round other dogs. It’s been less than a week. He’s in a harness, because she was warned about his Houdini-like escapes from collars to chase small furry things. He’s still fast, even on three legs.

‘Listen! Willow warbler.’

Pedro walks on. So different from Lulu. But she will get used to this lurching silky gait. This quivering shyness. And Pedro will get used to her plodding, her non-stop nature documentary and tuneless singing.

Glad that I live am I,

That the sky is blue.

Glad for the country lanes

And the fall of dew.

And she is glad! ‘Twenty years, Pedro. Can you believe it? At Petertide I’ll have been a priest twenty years! Oh, and by the way, this Saturday I’m off to London to the big celebration in St Paul’s, so it’ll be Doug taking you for your walk, all right? You like Doug, don’t you? Yes, you like Doug.’ She bends down and massages the greyhound’s neck and ears.

Pedro does not know yet that he is safe; that from now on he will be loved lavishly and unconditionally.

Who else is glad to be alive this spring morning? Why, Dr Jane Rossiter! Here she is, waiting for the lift in the ground floor of the Fergus Abernathy building. She might get into the lift, begin her ride up to the sixth floor, only for the cable to shear off. The lift will then plunge down the shaft in a few endless seconds of screaming terror, followed by a blaze of mangled pain, then death. So yes, because the alternative would be worse, Dr Rossiter is glad to be alive.

Happily, she arrives safely at her office door and rummages in her satchel for her keys. Jane was forced to come in by train today because the car’s out of commission. Why are keys so hard to find? She puts down the bunch of papers and bulging files (Poundstretcher, a paperless university! my bottom) and has a proper hunt. Why do handbags have so many effing compartments? She hunts in her pockets. She hunts in her bag again. She hunts in the files. In her bag. Files. Bag pockets files. Now what? Punch door. Set fire to building.

Because the fecking keys are at home.

Which means she’ll have to go back down to security and sign out the spare set. And now, joy! Another hot flush. She rips off her jacket with a snarl and blots her face with it. Then she gathers up her stuff and stomps back to the lift, scanning round for someone to blame.

Doors closing! says the voice primly. Jane shuts her eyes and leans her head back against the lift wall. She can feel the cold film of sweat on her face, but she’s taken a vow never to fan herself. Kill people, possibly; but never fan herself. So this is the end of project fertility, is it? Hoorah. Do I get my pre-adolescent body back? Do I get to be lean and lithe again? Will I be able to shin up trees and run naked without my arms folded? No? So what do I get? A beard, you say? Yeah, thanks for that, Nature.

The lift stops at Floor 3 and some undergraduates get in with their phones and tattoos and water bottles and hangovers and deadlines. Jane doesn’t kill them. She’s decided to kill the archdeacon instead. For not sorting her car out for her. He offered to sort her car out, but she informed him that she’d been looking after a car all by herself for over thirty years, thank you very much, so he can stop bloody patronizing her.

Oh, Jane! Why are you being beastly to the poor archdeacon? Is he not devoted to you? Was he not, only last night, steadily insisting that yes, he does want to come with you to New Zealand at the end of the summer term, to tie the knot? You can go ahead, crack on with the paperwork, book the tickets, everything’s peachy.

But is everything peachy, though? This is what Jane is wondering as she crosses the foyer to get the spare keys. She’s not a stupid woman. She worked out many years ago how to decode what men actually mean when they say something: they actually mean what they say. That’s the secret. Women are from Venus, men are from Ronseal. So why is she fretting that he’s got cold feet? Was there ever a sweeter, more uncomplicated bloke in the world? Maybe hormones are doing her head in. She should probably go home and wash down a handful of black cohosh with some Jack Daniels and get a grip. Sort it, go to New Zealand, return as civil partners and move in together at last. Stop having to creep about being discreet the whole fecking time.

Oh, God. Just to make the morning perfect, here comes the bouncing bomb in her dungarees and dog collar. Jane is a sitting duck by the Security window, while Mike searches ponderously for the spare keys to FA 609. She whips out her phone and pretends to check her emails.

But Veronica gets her phone out too! Maybe she hates me back? She can hear Veronica approaching the revolving doors, talking away. Either it’s a genuine call, or she’s making good use of her drama workshop skills. In comes Veronica.

‘Well, anon for now!’

Jane directs her sneer at an imaginary email. This is the crucial moment. She can feel Veronica’s gaze like a loopy searchlight sweeping the foyer for pastoral possibilities. But it passes her by. When Jane next sneaks a glance, Veronica is heading towards the student cafeteria.

The cafeteria has been redesigned, and is currently waiting for a new name. Suggestions have been sought, but as far as Jane knows, people aren’t getting behind her own idea: the ‘Give us lecturers a fucking pay rise instead of tarting up the cafeteria’ Café.

As Jane is signing for the spare key, it crosses her mind that she’s locked out of her house as well. Who can she blame now?

The archdeacon. Why hadn’t he accepted that spare set of house keys when she offered them, eh? Sanctimonious nob. All this was his fault.

We will don our Anglican seven-league boots and stride over the intervening days until we arrive at Saturday evening. Where normal mortals are opening their second bottle of wine, clergy who have sermons to finish for the morrow are being more abstemious.

Father Dominic, for example, is being very abstemious indeed. He normally favours something of an extempore style of preaching, but he finds himself required to prepare notes so that the gist of his sermon at tomorrow’s Eucharist can be translated in advance into Farsi. He is looking now at the passage about the Road to Emmaus, and forbidding himself to open that nice bottle of Chablis until he’s finished his preparation.

Let me explain. Quite without any growth strategy or effort on his part, the congregation at Lindford Parish Church has grown. Three months ago some asylum-seekers were housed in the Abernathy estate, which is in Dominic’s patch. Four of them arrived at church and asked to be baptized. Cynics might suppose that this was a ruse to strengthen their claim to asylum. And maybe he was being taken for a ride; but Father Dominic had more sympathy with homeless refugees than with middle-class parents strategically attending church in order to wangle little Oscar into the nice C of E primary school.

And the group of four has grown to nearly twenty! He’s scrambling each week to prepare Enquirers’ sessions. If it carries on like this, he’ll end up running an Alpha course! He reaches out instinctively for his non-existent wine glass.

Focus. Dominic rereads tomorrow’s Gospel. He’s always loved this story. He thinks of the Caravaggio painting, that moment of stunned recognition as Christ blesses the bread. This is what it’s like, he thinks. The truth bursting in. And then the thought, I knew it! Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked to us along the way? It was him all along.

He starts making notes, but then his phone rings. He checks. Jane. Goody-good! This will be the dates for the civil union! And about time, too!

‘How’s tricks, you old tart?’

‘Not so good, Dom.’

‘Oh, no! What’s wrong, darling?’ There was a silence. ‘Janey?’

‘I think Matt’s gone off the idea.’

‘No! Really? Have you tried asking him?’

‘Yes. He says he hasn’t.’

‘Well then.’

‘Well then, it’s probably all in my head. I lost my keys earlier. Do you know where they were? In the fridge. I’m at an interesting age. Do you find me interesting?’

‘Darling, endlessly. Do you need wine and a shoulder to cry on? Is it urgent, or can I quickly finish my sermon?’

‘I’ll help. What’s it on?’

He tells her.

‘The disciples didn’t recognize him because he had no beard,’ she says. ‘Check out the Caravaggio. There will be no beards in heaven. So unless you shave yours off, you’re stuffed.’

‘I could score a cheap point about facial hair here,’ says Dominic. ‘But I’m too mature. Listen, give me an hour, and I’ll be round with a bottle of Chablis. All right? Byesy-bye, darling.’

He hangs up. Oh, Lord. Please let this be OK. Dominic sighs, and gets back to his sermon notes so that poor old Ahmad has something to go on tomorrow.

At another desk in another part of the diocese another clergyman is sighing. It is the archdeacon. He’s a bastard. He should tell her. More than happy to zip off down under for the old civil union. But what about when they get home? He can’t see a way round it. If the Church requires gay clergy in civil partnerships to be celibate, the same applies to him.