‘What if they find out the truth?’
‘We don’t know the truth.’
‘He betrayed us, the ungrateful shit-bag.’
‘You keep talking about him as if he is a person. He is not. When he realizes and when others realize he’ll return, because if he is not part of the coming deluge there’s no point to him. At the right time a twitch on the thread will do it.’
Gil had wondered if Cale’s disappearance would damage the cause. What was the point of an absent saviour? God had revealed his hand when it was needed but then withdrawn it with a clear demand that the Redeemers themselves must act. Otherwise what was the point of them? However much destruction must be delivered to the world, including their own, God did not need them to achieve this. By sending Cale to intervene so miraculously he had made this obvious. By withdrawing Cale, God had shown them that he had not deserted the Redeemers and that if they followed his will by destroying all apostates and unbelievers he would not forget them when the time came to destroy themselves. Their annihilation would surely be a door to the next world. It was in mulling over his mistake that Gil, still a profound believer in the end of mankind, began to see that, whatever Bosco might think, Cale had now outlived his usefulness. A permanently absent Cale would do no harm at all. Quite the contrary. A live one, on the other hand, could and probably would become a serious threat. Something must be done.
To bring his great speech to a climax Bosco warned against a dangerous new kind of woman he knew was emerging, not the naughty beauties of the Materazzi with the stretched-forth necks and mincing walk and big hair that the Lord would smite with scabs at a point of his own choosing, nor the wantons of Spanish Leeds who made a tinkling with their feet because soon instead of a girdle about their womb there would be a rent. But there was a new threat from women who wanted to be the spiritual equals of men, to show off their strictness and persecute anyone insufficiently pious and even burn other women as a warning by showing that they too could be as generously harsh in the ways of orthodoxy and righteousness. The congregation nodded but did not understand that his wrath was aimed at his predecessor and his fear that there might be more like her. Perhaps many more. Perhaps they were everywhere. There were rumours out there, though, digging in like slugs for the winter, emerging in gossip and drunken talks among friends late in the night, but nothing at all like the truth that a woman, no better or worse than her male predecessors, had ruled the Redeemers for twenty years.
‘Consider the last four things as you go back to your diocese,’ finished Bosco. ‘And prepare for the extremity to come.’
After he had left the celebration that followed Bosco’s inaugural speech Gil went back to his enormous apartments, where his new secretary, Monsignor Chadwick, who had not been invited, was desperately hoping that Gil would be in the mood to let fall some news of who had been there and what had happened and how the new Holy Father was. There was only disappointment to be had.
‘Find me the Two Trevors,’ said an ill-tempered Gil. Hope on Chadwick’s face was replaced by instant dismay.
‘Ah,’ said Chadwick followed by a long pause. ‘Would you know by any chance where they might be at all?’
‘No,’ replied Gil. ‘Now get on with it.’ As Chadwick shut the door as mournfully as a door can be shut Gil knew perfectly well how very unreasonable he was being. The Two Trevors were not a pair it was at all easy, or even possible, to find no matter who you were.
‘More light?’ asked Cale.
‘I can see well enough,’ said the seamstress from the vegetable market. ‘The question is: what’m I lookin’ at?’
‘Old lady who spidered a fly,’ sang Vague Henri.
‘What’s he saying?’
‘He’s singing a song – he’s well off his track. Don’t worry about it. I want you to stitch his face. He won’t feel anything – or much anyway.’
‘You’re crazy. I just stitch clothes. You’re crazy. I don’t know anything about stuff like that.’
‘But I do. I’ve stitched people a hundred times.’
‘Then you do it. I’ll get into trouble.’
‘You won’t get into trouble. I’m a very important person.’
‘You don’t look like anyone important.’
‘How would you know? You just stitch clothes for a living.’
‘You want me to do somethin’ like this an’ you insult me? I’m goin’.’ She made for the door.
‘Fifty dollars!’ She stopped and looked at him. ‘He’s my friend. Help him.’
‘Let me see it – the money.’
Because of Kitty the Hare’s generosity, a wallet with three hundred dollars had been delivered the day after their meeting; he was able to count it out on the table there and then. The girl thought for a moment. ‘A hun’red dollars.’
‘He’s not that much of a friend.’
They settled on sixty-five.
As she went back to examining the mess of Vague Henri’s face he started singing about goats. ‘He won’t feel a thing while you work and I’ll take you through it. I know what needs to be done but it’ll take a fine touch if his face is to be saved. Think of it like you were sewing a collar to a jacket. Just make the neatest job you can.’ He remembered to flatter her. ‘Without you he’ll look like a horse’s arse. I saw how good you were. You have talent – anyone with brains can see that. Forget it’s someone’s face and think of him as a suit or something.’ Softened up by the compliments and understandably tempted by such a large amount of money she began looking at Vague Henri as a professional problem.
‘He’ll need a fillit.’
‘What’s a fillit?’
‘I thought you knew all about stitching.’
‘If that was true I wouldn’t be needing you. What’s a fillit?’
‘There’s a finger-sized hole in his face. I can’t just stitch over a hole even in cloth let alone skin. I’ll need to fill it with something.’
‘What?’
‘How would I know? In a suit or something we’d use felt.’
‘We can’t do that. I’ve seen what happens to wounds with even a bit of cloth left in them.’
‘If we’re reparing an old suit we use a bit of material from somewhere you can’t see. That way it’s the same an’ don’t pull away when it gets wet.’
‘Are you saying we should cut a bit off him from somewhere else and stuff it in the hole in his face?’
She had just been thinking aloud but now she caught fright.
‘No, I wasn’t saying that, I was just thinking that’s all. Like with like is what we say. I was just thinking.’
‘Why not? It makes sense.’
‘You could make things worse.’
‘You can always make things worse.’
‘If he’s your friend – praps you could cut a finger piece from yourself.’
‘Don’t,’ said Cale gently, ‘be bloody stupid.’
‘Greater love hath no man than he lay down his life for his friend.’
‘What idiot told you that?’
She was greatly put out by this disrespect but by now she had her heart set on the money and, also, the challenge. She was no shirker when it came to getting on in the world.
And so the ingenious operation born of luck, wit, skill and ignorance began and proved a wonderful success. Cale, reassuring the seamstress that he knew what he was doing when it came to knives, cut an exquisite round sliver of flesh from Vague Henri’s buttocks where he felt he would miss it least and the seamstress duly filled the deep hole in his face. With a skill that made Cale’s heart warm to witness she carefully cut and stitched, Tailor of Gloucester perfect, Vague Henri’s sorely battered face. Throughout, Vague Henri accompanied her with more songs concerning spiders, old ladies, cats and goats. When she had finished they stood back to admire what she had done and it was worth admiration. Red-raw as it was, anyone could see the
skill with which a ragged hole had been transformed into something that simply looked right. Cale knew that it might become infected or the sliver of flesh he had taken might die and then God knows what. But for now it looked right.
And indeed it was. For two days it looked worryingly angry for all the neatness and then on the third morning it began to pinkify and grow calm and was obviously on the mend. Vague Henri had only one complaint: ‘Why is my arse so sore?’
As for their great co-operation and the good fortune in happening upon this ingenious process it was rarely thought of by either Cale or the seamstress and was utterly lost to mankind.
30
It was the night of the banquet and IdrisPukke and his half-brother, Vipond, were in particularly good form. The former had teased the women concerning their beauty and bantered with the men about their failure to live up to the women, and Vipond, a more restrained humorist when he felt like it, created storms of laughter with a dryly amusing story about the vanity of the Bishop of Colchester and a misadventure involving an Aylesbury duck that concluded with the observation that ‘Whatever discoveries have been made in the land of self-delusion, many undiscovered regions remain to be explored.’
Not to be outdone, IdrisPukke smoothly passed into one of his aphoristic moods and was giving those around him the benefit of his many years’ experience of mankind’s idiocy, absurdity and wickedness, including, it must be said, his own.
‘Never argue with anyone about anything. No, not even Vipond, though he’s possibly the wisest man who ever lived.’ Vipond, just across the table and enjoying his half-brother’s performance and the double flattery involved in the mockery, laughed along with the others and the banging of approval of half a dozen now tipsy Materazzi.
‘When it comes to self-delusion my brother is completely right. You could talk to Vipond for a thousand years and barely touch on the number of absurd things he believes.’
Then Vipond’s face fell and for a brief moment IdrisPukke wondered if he had gone too far. But it was something he had seen not heard that alarmed the Chancellor. IdrisPukke followed the apprehensive look to the top of the room. Though the chatter and laughter of the rest of the vast room carried on, the table around the half-brothers went very quiet.
At the top of the stairway leading down into the hall stood Cale, dressed neck to foot in a black suit not unlike an unusually elegant cassock then very much the style among the rich young men of Spanish Leeds and which he’d had specially made by his seamstress and paid for again with Kitty the Hare’s money.
He looked like a nail and didn’t care who knew it. But, unsurprisingly, the greatest shock among the few dozen there who knew him by sight was that felt by Arbell Materazzi, sitting next to her husband and eight months pregnant. If a woman can be white as a ghost and blooming at the same time then so she was, the blue veins of her eyelids like the thready filaments in Sophia marble.
IdrisPukke, heart sliding out of humour, watched as Cale walked slowly down the aisle like the wicked witch in a fairy tale, his eyes in their black circles to match his clothes fixed on the beautiful pregnant girl in front of him. He should have realized thought IdrisPukke, he really should. The chair next to him, meant for Cale’s non-arrival, was eased back by a servant as Cale, full of himself at the satisfying catastrophe his presence was causing, came up, gave a gentle nod to Vipond and then fixed his murderous scowl on Arbell Swan-Neck. There was no word sufficiently strong to describe the look on Conn’s face but no one had much difficulty imagining what was going on inside his soul. The question of whether or not he knew often crossed IdrisPukke’s mind afterwards. It was hard to believe that if he did know the evening would end well. Bose Ikard must have hoped for trouble given what he must have known about Conn and Thomas Cale. But he had stumbled on something much worse than a glorified squabble between precocious boys.
There are many words for the different kinds of silence that exist between people who hate. IdrisPukke considered that if he was ever in prison again with a year or two weighing on his hands he might be able to arrive at a suitable list. But whatever kind of silence it was, it was ended by a guest of Vipond’s, Señor Eddie Gray, an ambassador of sorts for the Norwegians trying to get a handle like many others on what, if anything, the Materazzi would do next and how it might affect them. Provocative and supercilious by nature, Gray looked Cale up and down ostentatiously.
‘You’re the right colour for an Angel of Death, Mr Cale. But a little short.’
There was the unheard sound of souls drawing breath. There was hardly a pause from Cale as he took his eyes for the first time from Arbell and looked at Gray.
‘It’s as you say. But if I was to cut off your head and put it under my feet I’d become taller.’
The cordon of silence of those who realized something was up had now extended either side of the Materazzi, including and not by accident Bose Ikard. Alerted by the contempt in Gray’s tone and the odd appearance of the young man in black they had caught both Gray’s dismissal and the devastating reply and burst into laughter.
Filled with a noxious mixture of hatred, adoration, love and considerable smugness at the sharpness of his own wit, Cale allowed the chair to be eased under him and turned his gaze at once ludicrous and terrifying to the hapless Swan-Neck. No bullock in a perfumier’s maddened by wasps could have let loose such an ungovernable mix as the clouds of desires, resentments, betrayals and disappointed lusts that mingled and fumed within that stupendous hall. It was no wonder that the baby in its mother’s womb began to kick and squirm like a piglet in a sack. It was a monument to Arbell Materazzi’s good breeding that she didn’t drop her firstborn on the spot.
There was, however, a sign of poor breeding and it, quite deliberately, came from Cale: as the servants began double-spooning meat and beans and petit pois onto his plate, Cale thanked each one of them knowing full well, because IdrisPukke had told him repeatedly, that it was not done at all to acknowledge the appearance of food upon the plate but to carry on talking to the left or right as if the larks’ tongues or peacock cutlets had appeared magically by their own suicidal will. ‘Thank you. Thank you,’ he said, with each expression of utterly false gratitude intended as a blow to the heart of the beauty sitting opposite him and a kick to the shins of her glaring husband.
We are all cynics now, I suppose, and even a mewling infant knows that to save a life is to make an eternal enemy. But even though Conn had dismissed certain suspicions exiled to the very back of his mind and even though he must dislike the man who’d saved him from a hideous death at Silbury Hill – yet he could in the oubliettes of his unlikeable soul still remember the horrors of the purple death crushing him and which he still relived in terrible dreams: he could not, however hard he tried, shake off a clinging gratitude.
The trouble with Cale was that he had opened his opera of revenge brilliantly but now was lost for a song. Señor Eddie Gray’s mockery had been like throwing buns to a bear. He knew how to deal with aggression, verbal or physical. Arbell simply looked down at her soup bowl as if she hoped the contents would part like the Reed Sea and swallow her whole. Conn just glared at him. For all her misery she looked utterly and heartbreakingly beautiful. Her lips usually somewhat pale brown were a deep red and the white teeth just showing beneath them made him lyrical in his hatred and he thought of roses with snow between the scarlet petals. He had spent so much time thinking about her over the last hideous months that now she stood only a few feet away, it seemed incomprehensible for all the hatred that she would not laugh with delight, as she used to when he closed the door of her rooms behind him, and squeeze him tightly in her arms and smother his face with kisses as if she could never get enough of the touch and taste of him. How was it possible that she had tired of him? How was it possible that she could prefer the creature sitting next to her, have let him … ? But that thought was too near madness and he was already too close. It had not even for a moment – you must
excuse his utter ignorance in these things – occurred to him that he might be the father of the leaping bastard folded in its mother’s womb. Nor had it occurred to him that in the eyes of any objective person the obviousness of Arbell Materazzi preferring a tall and beautiful youth of her own kind and breeding, the great hope for the future of all the Materazzi, over a dark-haired, shortish, harsh-souled murderer with a grudge against the world was a matter anyone would have even thought of questioning. It was true that she owed her life to him, and in an extraordinary way the life of her younger brother, but gratitude is an awkward emotion at the best of times, even or especially towards those you once adored. It is particularly difficult for beautiful princesses because they are, in a manner of speaking, born to be given things and even a normal capacity for gratitude would weigh more heavily on them than human nature is generally able to bear.
‘Are you well?’ said Cale at last. At no time in all the history of the world has such a question been asked as if it were a threat.
She briefly looked up, her natural boldness getting the better of her confusion.
‘Very well.’
‘I am glad to hear it. For myself times have been hard since we last met.’
‘We’ve all suffered.’
‘Speaking personally I’ve caused more suffering than I’ve endured.’
‘Isn’t that always your way?’
‘You have a short memory – and worse since you were so many times in my debt.’
‘Mind your manners,’ said Conn, who would have stood and thrown his chair back with a dramatic flourish were it not for the fact that Vipond had gripped his thigh and squeezed with a strength surprising in a man of his age and profession.