‘Oh.’ Milne tried to pull himself away from his angry, confused thoughts. He needed to move on and there was no point in reinforcing the common perception of himself as a miserable bastard. ‘Yes, same as usual – getting by, in the same old lonely way,’ he said with a miserable smile.
Bishop Slocombe shook his head at Milne’s response. Miserable bastard, he thought. He looked over to Biddle, who was an equal prayer concern, though the problem was the opposite – when did he ever stop smiling? And was he really as ignorant as he sounded? Surely not, but all the same – it was worrying to have a priest who was so happy all the time. Perhaps if there was some way to combine Milne and Biddle genetically, that would produce the ultimate Anglican priest. Slocombe wondered if there might be government funding for such an experiment.
He turned his mind back to the more immediate problem of refilling his glass with sherry.
Biddle had a feeling that Alex’s answer hadn’t been an entirely positive statement, but it didn’t feel like the right place to follow it up, what with Bishop Slocombe glowing impatiently and trying to chivvy them through to the dining room.
‘We’ve finished the sherry,’ he was saying, as he quickly gulped down the glass he had just poured himself, ‘I’ll uncork some wine, shall I? Red?’ Since the cork was already half out of the bottle nobody felt the need to answer.
As they went through to the dining room they were greeted by Mary, Bishop Slocombe’s cook, who was unloading dishes from a hostess trolley and glowering at the assembled company. Mary was an elderly Welsh woman who had been employed by the church since the age of Constantine. She rarely said a word, her cooking was at best variable, and she surveyed everybody she met with a continual scowl. However, her long life had been devoted wholly to the church, and there was little doubt that she had a place reserved in heaven, in which she would probably spend the rest of eternity scowling at the angels and archangels.
‘Thank you, Mary!’ Biddle smiled, in an attempt to coax the tiniest hint of happiness from the cook. Instead, he received an even fiercer glare. He often had similar experiences with babies and dogs, which bothered him because he was sure he possessed an unthreatening, friendly face.
‘Alright, Mary, I’ll do the rest,’ Slocombe told her, and with a look of disgust the old lady slowly left the room. Biddle’s attention was suddenly caught by the hostess trolley she was wheeling out with her. It was the kind of item that genuinely excited him.
‘I like your hostess trolley,’ he commented.
‘I’ll just go and turn the music up in the other room,’ Slocombe said.
‘Do you remember my hostess trolley?’ Biddle asked Milne. Milne shook his head. ‘I picked it up for a remarkably good price some years back. I’m sure I must have shown it to you.’
Milne shook his head. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘It’s Victorian. Bit of a bargain.’
They heard the operatic strains from the living room rise in volume. Bishop Slocombe was a lover of music, or at least that which fitted into his somewhat narrow preferences, and he saw one of his ministries as sharing the music he loved with those around him. Including his next-door neighbours.
He returned flourishing a newspaper. ‘I was saying to Alex,’ Biddle told him, ‘I picked up a very nice Victorian hostess trolley myself some years ago for a remarkably good price.’
‘Oh, hold on, yes, I do remember,’ Milne suddenly recalled, ‘I left a bottle of port on it once. You don’t still have it, do you?’
‘Lovely picture of your favourite person in the Guardian,’ Slocombe said to Milne, throwing the newspaper down in front of Milne. It was folded to a large photograph of the Pope stepping from an aeroplane.
‘Doesn’t he look splendid?’ Milne observed.
‘Once upon a time you’d have been burned for being a Catholic,’ Slocombe gloated.
‘Once upon a time you would have been burned for being a Protestant,’ Milne calmly replied.
Biddle felt he had rather excluded himself from the conversation thanks to his Victorian hostess trolley, bargain though it might have been. ‘I suppose,’ he said, edging his way back into the discussion, ‘we get the best of both worlds, don’t we? Being Anglican, I mean. We take the best parts of the Catholic liturgy, the best music from the Anglican tradition …’
‘Some of us use the best music from the Anglican tradition,’ Bishop Slocombe interrupted, staring pointedly at Milne. Milne frostily returned Slocombe’s stare, mentally preparing to defend the modern mass settings he favoured, musically simplistic though they were, for their congregational advantages.
‘If you do want to elevate music to a point at which the congregation cease to be involved in it …’
‘If I wanted to involve my congregation in the music, then I’d rather sing evangelical worship songs than your modern Roman crap,’ Bishop Slocombe barked. Milne recoiled as if he had been slapped; Biddle winced. ‘As Anglicans, we have the finest choral tradition in the history of music behind us, and don’t you forget it.’
‘Um … of course, technically, that wouldn’t be the Anglican tradition so much as the Lutheran tradition,’ Biddle argued, trying to divert the conversation in a direction that would take it well away from the topic of evangelical worship songs.
‘What? The Lutherans never had a Dyson. They never had a Stanford! And don’t you dare invoke the name of Bach, it’s all overrated anyway. Now have some wine and shut up.’ He poured a large glass of wine for each of them. ‘Better not have too much of this myself,’ he added, ‘I’ve given it up for Lent.’
Like the mass, there was no sense of time in Bishop Slocombe’s dinners, which were more of a liquid nature than solid. Mary’s beef casserole, which turned out to be uncharacteristically tasty, was clearly only a side-dish to Slocombe’s regular and overzealous measures of Chianti. Yet how ironic it was, thought Biddle, that he had ended up eating a beef casserole almost exactly the same as the one that he had been microwaving earlier on. Of course, the homemade version was considerably more real than the two-for-the-price-of-one microwavable dish he’d initially expected, something he thought might form the basis for a sermon. Perhaps another cookery sermon involving a microwave meal and a genuine casserole.
‘I was wondering,’ the Bishop slurred, turning again to the newspaper on the table as Mary glowered into the room to collect their dirty plates, ‘if I was getting off a plane, would I want to be the Pope?’ He paused, dramatically. ‘Or would I want to be Cher?’
‘I really ought to be going soon,’ mused Biddle, who was distracted a second time by the hostess trolley that Mary had pushed into the room with her, not least because it was loaded with cakes this time.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Milne told Bishop Slocombe. ‘It would have to be Cher.’
‘I wouldn’t be happy kissing the tarmac whenever I got off a plane,’ Slocombe declared. ‘You don’t catch Cher kissing tarmac.’
‘Do you think they clean the tarmac for him before he gets off the plane?’ Milne wondered. ‘In the name of hygiene, I mean.’
Biddle turned the newspaper towards him and studied the photograph. ‘He looks quite happy there,’ he observed. ‘But I bet he’s wondering if they’ve cleaned the tarmac for him.’
‘He’s probably also wondering whether he’d prefer to be Cher,’ Slocombe added.
‘Cher sins a lot, of course,’ Milne said thoughtfully.
‘But she can get away with that. Being Cher,’ Biddle pointed out.
‘Indeed!’ Slocombe agreed, enthusiastically. ‘I’d absolve her, any day.’
‘I bet you would.’
‘I