I entered the big state room as I always did, pretending to have difficulty managing both coffee and papers. This little deceit saved me having to look at the assembled men for a moment. There were a couple of “Ah, Natalie” greetings, of the bouncy-syllable variety to demonstrate faux welcome, and one “Hey, Nat” from someone who wanted to be my right-on friend.
You don’t need to know who these people are – nobody does – but there was Dean (never “the Dean”), in the middle and silhouetted in the light of one of the three long sash windows that face the cathedral. He was between the Canon Precentor, a better harpist than administrator, and Dean’s secretary, jolly and overweight. On my left, against the ridiculous columned fireplace and under a huge, dark painting of an early Victorian cleric whom no one could be bothered to remember, were the tall and beaky Canon Treasurer and Hugh, our Canon Pastor and the only one, including me, in an open-necked shirt without a jacket. The legal secretary was sorting papers further down the table.
All were men and they mostly wore the full-wrap acetate clerical collar, except the secretaries, the only laypeople present. Dean wore his crushed silk vestock and starched linen collar, somewhat presumptuously with a large pectoral cross, made of nails.
“Always those nearest who are last to arrive,” said Dean, grinning but not kindly.
“Actually, Hugh lives closer,” I said, wincing into the light from the window.
Hugo, Hugh for short, Huge to me, was my neighbour in Ave Maria Court, the small enclave of house-for-duty Georgian homes, and one door closer to Paternoster Square, like it mattered.
The Chapter House had survived the Blitz and had dowager-duchess status among the local postmodern architecture. It sat incongruously next to Temple Bar, Fleet Street’s ancient gate to the City of London, which had been rescued from ivy and nettles in the park of some stately home and dropped like a last-minute conversation piece into the redesign. It fitted in only in so far as it was a folly.
I sat at the table, facing the windows and beyond them the north walls of the cathedral, as the meeting lurched along bet-ween self-interest and exhibitionism. These meetings were easy enough to play. Just stay in touch, drifting a little off the tide of the conversations, offer my own agenda items and make about three considered interventions into those of others. Job done. I stared out through the long windows, as though considering the issues of budgeting for art shows in the north transept, or the policy on charging tourists who said they wanted to access the cathedral to pray, but really considering the uselessness of these two houses: the home I shared a few hundred yards away with a man who couldn’t manage his own email and this politburo of ecclesiastical bureaucracy.
The great walls of the cathedral rose terrifyingly outside, so large they looked closer than they were. It was right that they had put the old Temple Bar next to it – this was our Temple in the old scriptural sense, the Temple at Jerusalem, the old order, and no number of new committees could expunge its corruption.
I imagined it as a great steam liner in port, we in some sort of stevedores’ office on the jetty. I had heard somewhere that Christopher Wren had deliberately built the edifice from every bit of its entire base upwards, like a ship raised from the keel, to avoid the king suddenly ordering something smaller to save money. Then I imagined the great ship sway in some remote ocean, pitching slowly and irresistibly in the swell, then quite still in a glassy sea, perhaps the north Atlantic in April, a huge foundering metaphor for the Church of England.
As I watched from the Chapter House, my cathedral-liner began to settle at its east end, its bow out of sight from me, but the horizontal lines of its ancient architecture imperceptibly tipping in that direction and then occasionally taking a more definite lurch as a bulkhead in its vast crypt gave way. Its great west-end stern began to rise from the water and the tourists who had sought sanctuary there began to drop, screaming, into St Paul’s Graveyard. Finally, the great vessel started to swing to the perpendicular, the proud dome breaking free and crashing into the City offices of Cheapside. It stood there a moment, its lights extinguished, then shuddered and roared as it began its inexorable plunge into the depths of the ground, leaving a chaos of flotsam on the surface, smashed choir stalls, events leaflets, regimental flags and a Pre-Raphaelite painting, bobbing on the vacated surface of the City of London, as the screams died away.
Well, shall we leave it there.
“Well, shall we leave it there?”
Dean was wrapping up. Chairs were pushed back.
“Natalie, would you spare a moment,” he said down the table.
I nodded and smiled.
“Just give me five minutes and then come through.” And he glided out, the trunk of his body still, as if on castors.
We called the Dean of St Paul’s “Dean”. That may seem obvious, but the most senior cleric of a cathedral is usually only called that, without the definite article, to his or her face: “Yes, Dean, the regimental flags in the transept will be laundered ahead of the Lord Mayor’s choral evensong.” Elsewhere it would be “The Dean wants the bloody flags washed.”
But we called ours “Dean”, rather than “the Dean”, behind his back too. Like it was his name. Everyone knew intuitively that you couldn’t think of a name demographically more inappropriate for the spectacularly patrician Rt Rev’d Dr Algernon Crowhurst. Algy was Winchester and Oxford; Dean was a plumber’s mate.
If you’re going over to the dark side, you have to visit Dean. He is not lightened in any part of himself by popular culture. I
