much supervision. A few elderly scholars occasionally drift in. The opening hours are on the board outside.”
Rolf was suspicious. “Why there?”
“Because I like to visit it occasionally and the attendant is used to seeing me. Because it provides a number of accessible hiding places. Mainly because it’s convenient for me. Nothing else about this enterprise is.”
Luke said: “Where exactly will you leave the message?”
“On the ground floor, the right-hand wall, under the head of the Diadoumenos. The catalogue number is C38 and you’ll find that on the bust. If you can’t remember the name, you can remember the number, presumably. If you can’t, then write it down.”
Julian said: “It’s Luke’s age, that makes it easy. Will we have to lift the statue?”
“It’s not a statue, merely a head, and you needn’t touch it. There’s a very narrow gap between the base and the shelf. I’ll leave my answer on a card. It won’t be incriminating, a simple yes or no. You could telephone me for it, but no doubt you believe that might be unwise.”
Rolf said: “We try never to telephone. Even though we haven’t got started yet, we take normal precautions. Everyone knows that the lines are tapped.”
Julian asked: “And if your answer is yes, and the Warden agrees to see you, when will you let us know what he says, what he promises to do?”
Rolf broke in: “Better leave it for at least two weeks. Report on Wednesday, fourteen days after the Quietus. I’ll meet you on foot anywhere in Oxford, an open space might be best.”
Theo said: “Open spaces can be watched through binoculars. Two people, obviously meeting, in the middle of a park, meadow or university park draw attention to themselves. A public building is safe. I’ll meet Julian in the Pitt Rivers Museum.”
Rolf said: “You appear to like museums.”
“They have the advantage of being places where people can legitimately loiter.”
Rolf said: “Then I’ll meet you at twelve o’clock in the Pitt Rivers.”
“Not you; Julian. You used Julian to make the first approach to me. It was Julian who brought me here today. I’ll be in the Pitt Rivers at midday on the Wednesday two weeks after the Quietus and I shall expect her to come alone.”
It was just before eleven when Theo left them in the church. He stood for a moment in the porch, glanced at his watch and looked out over the unkept graveyard. He wished that he hadn’t come, hadn’t got involved in this futile and embarrassing enterprise. He was more affected by Miriam’s story than he cared to admit. He wished he had never heard it. But what was he expected to do, what could anyone do? It was too late now. He didn’t believe that the group was in any danger. Some of their concern had seemed close to paranoia. And he had hoped for a temporary reprieve from responsibility, that there would be no Quietus for months. Wednesday was a bad day for him. It would mean rearranging his diary at short notice. He hadn’t seen Xan for three years. If they were to meet again, it was humiliating and disagreeable to see himself in the role of supplicant. He was as irritated with himself as with the group. He might despise them as a gang of amateur malcontents, but they had outwitted him, had sent the one member whom they knew he would find it difficult to refuse. Why he should have found it difficult was a question he was not at present willing to explore. He would go to the Quietus as he had promised and leave them a message in the Cast Museum. He hoped that the message could justifiably be the single word NO.
The christening party was coming up the path, the old man, now wearing a stole, shepherding them with small cries of encouragement. There were two middle-aged women and two older men, the men soberly dressed in blue suits, the women wearing flowered hats, incongruous above their winter coats. Each of the women was carrying a white bundle wrapped in a shawl beneath which fell the lace- trimmed pleated folds of christening robes. Theo made to pass them, eyes tactfully averted, but the two women almost barred his way and, smiling the meaningless smile of the half-demented, thrust forward the bundles, inviting his admiration. The two kittens, ears flattened beneath the ribboned bonnets, looked both ridiculous and endearing. Their eyes were wide-open, uncomprehending opal pools, and they seemed worried at their confinement. He wondered if they had been drugged, then decided that they had probably been handled, caressed and carried like babies since birth and were accustomed to it. He wondered, too, about the priest. Whether validly ordained or an impostor—and there were plenty about—he was hardly engaged in an orthodox rite. The Church of England, no longer with a common doctrine or a common liturgy, was so fragmented that there was no knowing what some sects might not have come to believe, but he doubted whether the christening of animals was encouraged. The new Archbishop, who described herself as a Christian Rationalist, would, he suspected, have prohibited infant baptism on the grounds of superstition, had infant baptism still been possible. But she could hardly control what was happening in every redundant church. The kittens presumably would not welcome a douche of cold water over their heads, but no one else was likely to object. The charade was a fitting conclusion to a morning of folly. He set off walking vigorously towards sanity and that empty inviolate house he called home.
On the morning of the Quietus, Theo awoke to a weight of vague unease, not heavy enough to be called anxiety, but a mild unfocused depression, like the last tatters of an unremembered but disagreeable dream. And then, even before he put out his hand to the light switch, he knew what the day held. It had been his habit all his life to devise small pleasures as palliatives to unpleasant duties. Normally he would now begin planning his route with care: a good pub for an early lunch, an interesting church to visit, a detour to take in an attractive village. But there could be no compensation on this journey whose end and purpose was death. He had better get there as quickly as possible, see what he had promised to see, return home, tell Julian there was nothing that he or the group could do, and attempt to put the whole unsought and unwelcome experience out of his mind. That meant rejecting the more interesting route, via Bedford, Cambridge and Stowmarket, in favour of the M40 to the M25, then northeast to the Suffolk coast by the A 12. It would be a faster if less direct and certainly duller route, but, then, he wasn’t expecting to enjoy the drive.
But he made good progress. The A 12 was in much better condition than he had expected, considering that the east-coast ports were now almost derelict. He made excellent time, arriving at Blythburgh, on the estuary, just before two. The tide was receding but beyond the reeds and mud flats the water stretched like a silken scarf and a fitful early-afternoon sun struck gold in the windows of Blythburgh Church.
It had been more than twenty-seven years since he was last here. Then he and Helena had taken a weekend break at the Swan in Southwold when Natalie was only six months old. They had only been able to afford a secondhand Ford in those days. Natalie’s carry-cot had been firmly strapped to the back seat and the boot filled with the paraphernalia of babyhood: large packets of disposable nappies, sterilizing equipment for the bottles, tins of baby food. When they reached Blythburgh, Natalie had begun to cry and Helena had said that she was hungry and should be fed now without waiting to get to the hotel. Why couldn’t they stop at the White Hart at Blythburgh? The innkeeper would be sure to have facilities for heating milk. They could both have a pub lunch and she could feed Natalie. But the car park, he saw, was crowded and he disliked the trouble and disruption which the child and Helena’s demands would cause. His insistence on pressing on for the few extra miles to Southwold had been ill-received. Helena, attempting ineffectually to pacify the child, had scarcely glanced at the gleaming water, at the great church, moored like a majestic ship among the reed beds. The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill-humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife’s feelings and deprive his daughter than to inconvenience a pub bar full of strangers. He wished there could be one memory of his dead child which wasn’t tainted with guilt and regret.
He decided almost on impulse to lunch at the pub. Today his was the only car parked there. And inside the low-raftered room the black hearth of blazing logs which he remembered had been replaced with a two-bar electric fire. He was the only customer. The publican, very old, served him with a local beer. It was excellent, but the only food on offer was pre-cooked pies which the man heated in the microwave oven. It was an inadequate preparation for the ordeal ahead.
