I AWAKE at dawn to find someone sharing my bed. A bat. He lies still on the sheet. Could he be one of the bats for whom at great expense the parish has provided social housing in the south-aisle roof? I enquire. He says nothing.
I try a more eloquent question. Does he realise that the day will come when a man will cast silver and gold idols to the moles and bats?
He says, “What on earth will I do with them?” So I place him tenderly in a cup, and carry him through the drenched grass to an ancient shed and leave him to his bat thoughts. Then the white cat and I return to the kitchen to dry our toes.
On Thursday, a young Turk drives me to St Edmundsbury Cathedral. We discuss the virtues of the local towns. He and his wife do not care for Colchester, but it is good for mascara. They love Bury. They picnic in the Abbey garden. She is only part-Turkish and has blue eyes, he tells me enthusiastically. He failed his first driving test in Bury, but it wasn’t Bury’s fault.
I am early for the Chapter meeting because of his speedy progress, and walk through the morning streets expecting canons to the right of me and canons to the left of me. But they are all in the Cathedral drinking coffee.
Bury smells of bread, like Chartres. The sun polishes Edmund’s flinty name on the new tower. Dean Neil hands out our Rule, and thank goodness; for anything might happen in a College of Canons without a Rule. It contains the Edmund prayer:
Christ Jesus, with the life and martyrdom of St Edmund, King of East Anglia, you inspired generations of pilgrims in the way of love and hope. Enfold your Church in the mystery of your life, that we, in our own pilgrimage, may be apostles of your wounded and risen glory. . .
After the eucharist, the Dean and I stare over the wall into the fragments of the vast Abbey. “Where do you think he is?” The bones and dust of a 29-year-old. That target for the arrows. In the cosmos. Pensioners nod on municipal benches, children shout in the dorter enough to wake the dead. Home on the bus.
“No more return fares,” says the driver.
“Never?”
“Never.”
In Norfolk, my friend Ian Collins gets Sister Wendy to open his art exhibition in the airy Salthouse church. She arrives in a taxi, is of course inimitable, but is soon rather anxious about the time. Ian thinks that it may be time for her Rule, but it is actually time for Sister Wendy’s Wimbledon, she knowing that there is time for everything under the sun.
I, too, watch the great drama. It is played out to perfection and at length, and is hugely civilised. Nadal looks like a descendant of Matthew Arnold’s dark Iberian who, on the Cornish beach, “undid his corded bales”.
But the big question is, “Shall I dig up the potatoes, or leave them another week?” Their bloom has gone; the stalks (hulms) writhe in faded strings. But any day now the fork will go in, and the smooth spuds will surface. It is a moment to live for. I will let them lie in the light.
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