Our Game

Yet destiny had decreed that I become a keeper of the faith, for when I inherited Honeybrook from blessed Uncle Bob and decided to appoint it my Cold Warrior's rest, I acquired also the title of squire, and with it the advowson to the benefice of the Church of St. James the Less, an early-Gothic cathedral in miniature, perched at the eastern boundary of my land, complete with antechapel, wagon roof, miniature hexagonal bell tower, and a superb pair of giant ravens—but because of its remoteness and the decline in religious interest, fallen into disuse.

Fresh from London, and flushed with dutiful enthusiasm for my new bucolic life, I had determined, with the full consent of the diocesan authority, to revive my church as a working place of worship, not realising, any more than did the bishop, that by doing this I would be imperilling the already diminished congregation of the parish church a mile away. At my own expense I repaired the roof and saved the timbers in the splendid little porch. With the personal encouragement of the bishop's wife, I had the altar cloth repaired, organised a cleaning rota of willing spirits and, when all was ready, obtained the services of a pallid curate from Wells, who, for informal reward, gave bread and wine to a mixed bag of farmers, weekenders, and us retired types, all doing our best to look pious for him.

But after a month of this, both the diocese and I were forced to recognise that my efforts were misplaced. First, my willing spirits ceased to be so willing, ostensibly on account of Emma. They did not take kindly, they said, to arriving in their Land-Rovers with their mops and pails, only to find her perched in the organ loft, playing Peter Maxwell-Davies to a congregation of one. They implied ungraciously that if the cradle-snatching Londoner and his fancy girl wanted to use the church as their private concert hall, they could do their cleaning for themselves. Next, an unprepossessing man in a blazer and a pair of Larry's buckskin boots presented himself, claiming to speak for some unheard-of ecclesiastical body and requiring information of me: the numbers of our congregation, for instance, the sums and destination of our offertories, and the names of our visiting preachers. In another life I would have suspected his credentials, for he also asked me whether I was a Freemason, but by the time he left I had decided that my days as the saviour of St. James the Less were over. The bishop gladly agreed.

But I did not desert my charge. There is a natural butler in me somewhere, and in no time I discovered the soothing satisfactions of mopping down flagstones, dusting pews, and buffing brass candlesticks in the stillness of my seven-hundred-year-old private church. But by then I had other reasons to persist: in addition to spiritual solace, St. James was providing me with the best safe house I could ever hope to find.

I am not speaking of the lady chapel, with its worm-eaten panelling so adrift you could stuff a complete archive behind it and it wouldn't show; or of the capacious vaults where the crumbling tombstones of the abbot-farmers offer any number of natural dead-letter boxes. I am speaking of the tower itself: of a secret, windowless hexagonal priesthole reached by way of a cope cupboard in the vestry, and thence by a tiny curling staircase to a second door, and, as I truly believe, not entered for centuries by a living soul until I happened on it by accident after puzzling over the discrepancy between the tower's external and internal measurements.

I say windowless, but whatever genius designed my secret chamber—whether for refuge or for venery had had the further ingenuity to provide one slender horizontal arrow slit high in the wall at each point where the main joists support the wooden canopy that skirts the outside of the tower. So that by standing my full height and moving from one arrow slit to another, I commanded a perfect all-round view of the enemy's approach.

As to light, I had made the test a dozen times. Having rigged up a crude electric lighting system, I had undertaken elaborate tours of the church, now at a distance, now close to. It was only when I pressed myself against the wall of the tower and craned my head upward that I detected the palest glow, reflected on the inside of the wood canopy.

I have described my priesthole in detail because of its importance to my inner life. Nobody who has not lived in secrecy can appreciate its addictive powers. Nobody who has renounced the secret world, or been renounced by it, recovers from his deprivation. His longing for the inner life is at times unendurable, whether of the religious or clandestine kind. At any hour he will dream of the secret hush reclaiming him in its embrace.