Bethany crossed her arms over her chest and kept staring at Arthur but did not speak.
“And I’m sorry I went through your things. And you’re right—I do like the Grail and its . . . its lore. But if we have this in common, this fascination with the Grail, then yes, maybe we can talk about that; maybe we can share that . . . that passion. It’s the kind of thing that friends do, isn’t it?”
“God, you’re an ass, Arthur,” said Bethany, her arms still crossed. Arthur felt the rock in his gut harden. He hadn’t expected to feel this way. Of course she would stay mad, but why was her anger making him feel so sick? He had tried to apologize. Shouldn’t that be enough?
“It’s one of the things I like about you,” said Bethany, dropping her arms and returning to the work of packing up her carrier bag. “So, as long as we can agree that I was right and you were wrong, I suppose we can be Grail buddies.”
“What if we agree,” said Arthur, “that we were both wrong but that I was more wrong than you?”
“Seriously?”
“That I was much more wrong than you?” said Arthur hopefully.
“OK, fine,” said Bethany.
Arthur hadn’t realized that his entire body had been tense until he felt his muscles relax. The wretched tightness in his belly began to dissolve. “So we can be friends?”
“I’m willing to give it a shot,” said Bethany. “But let’s both be honest, OK?”
“Fair enough,” said Arthur, smiling. “We can start on Monday.”
“Monday! What the hell!”
“Oh, it’s nothing to do with you—it’s me and the dean and the chapter. They’ve given me an ultimatum.”
“An ultimatum?”
“I didn’t tell you yesterday because we . . . I got distracted researching Henry Albert Naylor. It’s about the cathedral guide. Either I hand in the completed text next week or they ask for the advance back and assign someone else to the job.”
“And I’m guessing you don’t have the advance.”
“Not unless I sell you Gladwyn’s notebooks at a tidy profit,” said Arthur. “So, I shall be sitting right here all weekend working on the bloody guide and trying to make it sound good even though there is still so much I don’t know. In fact, I think I shall take the next two days off work and write from now until Monday morning and hope I can come up with something the chapter will approve. So I shan’t have much time for friendship or Grail stories or chasing after missing manuscripts.”
“I’ll help you.”
“How could you possibly help me?” said Arthur. “You’ve been at Barchester for, what, three weeks? I’ve been studying the history of the cathedral for years.”
“I’m not going to write it, you idiot,” said Bethany, striding across to the ancient table where Arthur worked and picking up a sheaf of papers. “But I don’t think they’ll want you to hand in this. You, my nineteenth-century friend, have lovely handwriting, but I imagine your printer will want digital files. I’ll be your typist.”
“My typist?”
“Yes, Arthur. There is this wonderful new invention called a typewriter. And someday they might even add electricity to it and put a screen on it and—”
“OK, OK, I accept. That’s very kind of you really. Sadly, I don’t have much of anything to type at the moment.”
“I thought you had been working on this thing for years.”
“True, but I’ve mostly just done research and taken notes. I don’t actually have any finished text. And I spent so long wanting to start out with the story of St. Ewolda that now I don’t know where to start.”
“Start with the nave,” said Bethany.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Start with the nave. It’s the oldest part of the church.”
“How do you know that?”
“From Bishop Gladwyn’s guide—the one I’m forced to use because you are taking so long to write yours. He started with the nave. Start with the nave and when you have a few pages done bring them to me and I’ll type them.”
“I suppose it’s as good a place as any,” said Arthur.
“By the way,” said Bethany, “how will you get out of work at the university?”
“The classic,” said Arthur. “I’ll call in sick. I just hope my chairman doesn’t make one of his infrequent visits to Evensong.”
“Why don’t you just skip Evensong?” said Bethany.
“I don’t think I could,” said Arthur, “especially with the work I have to do over the next four days. It will . . . it will center me.”
“You don’t believe in God, but you can’t make it through a day without going to church. You’re an odd duck, Arthur Prescott.”
—
By Friday night, Arthur had come to the conclusion that he did not work well under pressure. His table had become an increasingly cluttered morass of notes, discarded efforts, and false starts. He had most of the information he needed, but wrestling that information into a guidebook, reducing the history of a thousand-year-old building into ten thousand words, required an entirely different skill set from researching and note-taking. Arthur’s first attempt at the nave section had weighed in at over four thousand words. When he tried to rewrite it more succinctly he kept remembering things he had left out and ended up with five thousand. He knew because before he had given up and gone to bed on Thursday night, he had counted every one.
With nothing to type, Bethany had taken Friday off to meet up with an old college friend who was visiting Salisbury. Arthur envied her. He had not been to Salisbury in years and on such a clear day the view from the tower toward Old Sarum would be magnificent. Arthur’s view was of piles of papers, heaps of notebooks, and a blank page. He had worked all day except for brief breaks for Evensong and Compline. Now, as the cathedral clock struck ten, he was starting to make a list of the books he would have to sell to raise the ￡500 he would soon owe the cathedral, when Bethany bounded up the stairs into the library.
“God, Arthur, turn some lights on. It’s not the twelfth century.” The small lamp on his table was the only light in the library. Bethany flicked a switch by the doorway and bright light filled the room. Arthur was blinded for an instant, but he could still hear Bethany’s voice.
“Making progress? I brought you the guidebook from Salisbury. It was beautiful. Have you seen the new baptismal font? I mean new for an eight-hundred-year-old building. It sits right in the middle of the nave aisle and the surface of the water is like a mirror—you can see the vaulted ceiling reflected in it. But then it drains at the corners, cascades right down and through the floor, so the water is always moving, too. It’s super modern but it really works in the medieval context, I think. Oh, and I went to Evensong—they have it earlier there. They sang a contemporary setting; I think the composer was Armenian. I brought you the service leaflet. The choir was good, but I think I like Byrd and Tallis and all those old English guys better than the modern Europeans, don’t you?”
Arthur fell into the breathlessness of Bethany’s voice and for a moment forgot about the task that lay before him. When she stopped for air he gazed at her across the room.