Theo

by Paul Torday

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From the bestselling author of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, a haunting novella that introduces one of the most memorable characters from Torday's forthcoming novel Light Shining in the Forest. John Elliott is the recently appointed vicar of St Joseph's - a dilapidated church with a congregation of sixteen and a leaky roof. Having entered the Church more by default than through any great calling, he struggles to inject some life into his ailing parish. His wife Christine longs for them to escape the endless rounds of coffee mornings and cake sales. Then Theo, a child at her school, starts to exhibit strange marks on his hands and feet that vanish almost as soon as they have appeared. What has produced these marks - is it physical violence or something stranger? And why has the previous vicar of St Joseph's ended up in a psychiatric hospital?

Release date: December 20, 2012

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Print pages: 114

Sample

Chapter 1

Plop!

The vicar of the church of St Joseph of Arimathea feels a drop of water strike his head, right where the hair has begun to thin, exposing the beginnings of a bald spot. He’s halfway through his Sunday morning sermon, for which he has chosen as his text Galatians VI. The drop of water makes him pause, look around the church for a second and lose his thread.

The front three rows are occupied. He knows the names of each member of the congregation as well as he knows his own. The same faces appear at every coffee morning, wine and cheese evening, and every other event that he and his wife Christine organise in the constant struggle to keep this church alive. There is deaf Mr Bell and his wife. Alan and Myra Johnson. Mike Graham, the churchwarden. Old Miss McFarlane. They are all over sixty. If they have children or grandchildren, they never bring them. There are rarely any new faces. There are almost never children in the church, except at Christmas or for weddings or christenings, hauled in by their parents who turn up once and never reappear again.

At the back of the church sits George, next to the door, his face in shadow. He never sits at the front. And he always slips away before the service has ended, leaving a pound coin on the collection plate. He’s shy. It’s understandable.

The vicar gathers his wits and returns to his sermon. His pause has been so momentary that nobody has noticed. Sometimes he wonders how they would react if he simply got up and left in the middle of the service. Is Martha Taylor, sitting there in the front row clutching her hymn book, listening to a word he says? Or has ever said? It would be interesting to know.

Plop! Another drop strikes his head. He looks up. He can’t help it. He peers up at the whitewashed vaulted ceiling above him and sees, spinning down towards him from an infinite distance, another drop of water, which smacks him lightly on the bridge of his nose. He raises his hand to his face to wipe away the moisture and continues his sermon.

His voice drones in the silent church, rises and falls as he tries to breathe some life into the words. What would the sixteen middle-aged or elderly men and women sitting in front of him think, if he were to suggest, ‘Well, this is a terrible waste of time. Why don’t we all go to the pub?’

But, of course, he would never say that, he would never even think of saying that, the words just popped into his mind. Maybe a demon put them there. He doesn’t think so. He doesn’t believe in demons. He doesn’t believe in angels either.

Plop-plop-plop.

It is an un-looked-for baptism. The cold water trickles down his neck, moistening his collar. It runs down his forehead and then down his cheeks, so that it looks as if he is weeping. The drips increase in their frequency until they become a thin stream, as if someone up there has turned on a tap.

‘We seem to have a leak in the roof,’ the vicar says. Faces look up at him. They show no curiosity, no alarm. They show no emotion at all. They don’t quite know what the vicar is talking about. A door bangs at the back of the church and then George comes down the aisle, his face averted, with a bucket that he’s found in the vestry where the cleaning lady left it. He marches quickly up to the lectern and helps the vicar move it out of the way, then places the bucket underneath the leak in the roof. A moment later, he’s disappeared once more into the shadows at the back of the church.

The vicar brings the sermon to an abrupt end and nods to the organist, who strikes the chords of the next hymn: ‘How Cheering is the Christian’s Hope’. A little later, he invites the congregation to take Communion. Everyone comes to the altar except, of course, George. The service draws to its conclusion. When the vicar walks back up the aisle, George has gone.

The vicar walks to the church door, inspecting the meagre contents of the collection plate as he passes it. He stands at the door of his church, still wearing his surplice, and shakes the hand of each member of his congregation as they shuffle homewards.

‘Thank you for a nice service, vicar.’

‘Lovely to see you. Will you be at the coffee morning next Saturday? Christine is so looking forward to seeing you.’

‘Oh yes. Wouldn’t miss it.’

The departing churchgoers speed up as they leave the shelter of the church porch. Rain is falling steadily from a dull grey sky. Soon the last of them has disappeared through the gate that opens onto the lane below.

Mike Graham, a churchwarden, stays behind. He helps the vicar to lock everything away in the vestry and tidy up. Then they look at the bucket on the floor of the chancel. The drips are slowing down, but their point of origin is clearly visible in the large, circular damp patch on the ceiling.

‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking, John?’ asks Mike.

‘We’d better go and look.’

They go outside. The rain has turned to a fine drizzle that wets their faces as they walk along the gravel path that leads around the church to the exterior walls of the chancel.

The church of St Joseph of Arimathea is not that old, though an ancient church once stood where the present building is situated. This building is constructed in the Gothic style, put up during the period of the Oxford movement in the mid-nineteenth century and funded by local mine-owners. It must have been a handsome edifice when it was first used not quite two hundred years ago. The limestone it was built with was once honey-coloured, but is now darkened by acidic streaks so that it looks as if the church is made of soot. It stands on top of a hill, surrounded by a churchyard, with views across the valley.

From here on a clear day you can see down the Tyne Valley to the market town of Hexham. You can see the square tower of the abbey. The abbey was built over 1,300 years ago, part of the diocese of Lindisfarne, one of the very earliest places of Christian worship in Britain. Cuthbert, one of the first British saints, was a bishop here. In Hexham Abbey there is a sense of a magical connection back to the earliest times in the history of Christianity. There is no such sense of connection in St Joseph’s.

And looking north from the hill on which St Joseph’s stands, you can see the ridge along which runs Hadrian’s Wall. Built in the second century, a few of its mile castles and forts still survive and there are sections of the wall itself standing here and there along its eighty-mile course that have somehow escaped being plundered for their dressed stones. There’s hardly a building of any age in this part of the world that does not have stone from the Roman Wall in it. Even the foundations of St Joseph’s are Roman stone. Directly below the church are the wet slate roofs and smoking chimneys of the small town it serves.

The churchwarden and the vicar back off a little from the path, standing in the grass and weeds that encroach upon the gravestones in order to peer up at the roof of the church.

‘Oh God,’ says Mike.

‘Bastards,’ says the vicar.

Somebody’s been on the roof and has ripped off a long section of lead flashing that lined a gully. The whole area is badly damaged. Slates are broken or have been thrown onto the ground below. There’s hardly a roof there at all. They walk forward again and inspect the gravel.

‘They had a ladder here,’ says Mike, pointing to two indentations in the path.

‘Vandals,’ says John Elliott, his heart bursting with rage. The veins on his neck swell, and his face reddens. If one of the perpetrators had been in front of them right now, his life might have been in danger.

Mike gets out a mobile phone, takes pictures. ‘That’s going to cost us,’ he says. ‘I’ll call the police.’

‘Thousands of pounds,’ agrees John. ‘And for what? A few hundred pounds’-worth of lead?’

‘They say it goes to China.’

Mike calls the police while the vicar walks up and down the path.

‘They can’t spare anyone at present,’ says Mike, after a brief conversation on his mobile. ‘They’re busy. They’ve got my number.’

‘Bastards,’ says the vicar again. It isn’t clear whether he means the vandals who took the lead or the police, who obviously have better things to do than come to the scene of this particular crime.

‘It must have happened last night,’ says Mike.

‘I’ll contact the insurers. We’d better get some plastic sheeting up there until it can be fixed.’

‘I’ve got a friend who’s a builder,’ says Mike. ‘I’ll call him. He’s probably in the pub right now.’

The vicar remembers his random thought earlier on about taking everyone to the pub. He has a mental picture of the inside of a pub late on a Sunday morning: cheerful people jostling to get to the bar, laughter and fellowship and conversation as everyone gets a pint or two inside them before going home for the Sunday roast.

He wishes he was with them.

Chapter 2

Christine is cooking Sunday lunch when he returns home. Home is a small, detached house on the hillside below the church, built on the site of a much larger Victorian vicarage that once stood there. The original vicarage has been pulled down and the grounds have been developed as a housing estate. The vicar and his wife live in one of the new houses. It is built so badly that when the wind comes from the southwest, it feels as if it is blowing straight through the house. None of the windows fit properly. The pointing is already crumbling, even though the house is only a few years old, and damp patches appear on the bedroom walls when it rains.

‘How did it go?’ asks Christine.

‘Same as usual. Less than twenty in church. What’s for lunch?’

‘Chicken.’

The vicar has to go out again in the early afternoon, to pursue one of his many and varied duties that never cease, even on a Sunday afternoon. Chicken is a lot cheaper than sirloin or a leg of lamb. The vicar can’t remember the last time they ate a joint of roast beef.

‘Someone’s stolen the lead flashing from the church roof,’ he tells Christine, coming into the kitchen as she is basting the chicken.

‘Oh no!’

‘It will cost thousands to repair.’

‘How could anybody do such a thing?’

‘I don’t know.’

John Elliott goes to the fridge, takes out a can of beer and pops it open. He pours it into a glass and sits at the kitchen table. Indeed he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything any more. He doesn’t know why he goes on with a job that he no longer enjoys, struggling to preserve a church that most people in the town have turned away from. If you stopped someone in the streets and asked for directions to St Joseph’s, chances are they wouldn’t be quite sure how to get there. Chances are that one or two people you stopped might never even have heard of the church.

John Elliott doesn’t look particularly ecclesiastical when he takes his dog collar off. He’s just under six foot, square-shouldered and solidly built, with dark hair cut short and a ruddy face: the complexion of someone who has always spent a great deal of his life out of doors.

He was born in the Scottish Borders, in the town of Hawick. His father was a minister in the Church of Scotland. He grew up in a family where God and rugby were the two important things in life. His father was a respected man in the community and had once been a promising rugby player himself. His father’s religion and his occupation in the church meant the house was always full: members of the congregation calling in for cups of coffee, to discuss their personal woes or else the prospects for ‘The Greens’ – as the local rugby club was known – that season. His father’s love of sport meant that John Elliott d. . .