“Oh, God, I was rambling again, wasn’t I?”
“Not at all,” said Arthur, pushing back his chair. “In fact, I should like to hear all about your day.”
“But you have work to do. And you must have pages and pages for me to type by now.”
Arthur sat in silence. He was suddenly back in school, sitting at his desk with an incomplete assignment, his teacher about to discover that instead of writing an essay on the Peloponnesian War, he had spent the previous afternoon reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. He had forgotten that day, but Bethany’s youth and her expectant smile brought it all back.
“Arthur? Are you OK? What have you got for me?”
“Nothing,” said Arthur timidly.
“Nothing? It’s been two days.”
“I don’t think I was cut out to write guidebooks. I can’t seem to boil things down to their essence. I want to include everything I know and I know far too much.”
“Read me something,” said Bethany.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Just read me something. Read me a section of your guidebook. Read me whatever’s on the first page you pick up.”
“All right, all right, if you insist.”
“I do.”
“Here’s a bit about the altar screen.”
“What’s that?”
“The altar screen. It’s the screen behind the altar. Well, not behind, more above, I suppose. It had all these carvings of saints in little niches. It’s not a screen exactly, although I suppose it does screen the ambulatory from the chancel, but it’s not like a rood screen—you know, not screening the service from the congregation.”
“You do such a good job of explaining. I can see why they picked you to write the guidebook.”
“Oh, stop it.”
“Read.” Bethany pulled a chair up next to Arthur, plopped down, and kicked off her shoes.
Arthur began: “The great altar screen of this cathedral church was erected in the course of the fifteenth century, primarily under the aegis of Bishop Maywood. It contained sculptures of over one hundred and twenty saints and martyrs, including such English saints as Alban, Paulinus, and Hilda. In the year 1538, at the hands of King Henry VIII’s commissioners, it was grievously mutilated and despoiled of the figures that had adorned it. In succeeding ages, it was subjected to various tasteless alterations until its original beauty was almost entirely effaced.”
“God, Arthur—who would read this?”
“Someone interested in the cathedral?”
“Someone with insomnia, maybe.”
“I adapted the wording from a memorial in the nave.”
“I thought you were a fan of P. G. Wodehouse. Couldn’t you put a little . . . I don’t know, a little humor in the thing?”
“You think I should write the cathedral guide in the style of P. G. Wodehouse.”
“Perfect idea, Arthur. Couldn’t have put it any better myself. Think of it as a writing exercise.”
“A writing—”
“Only don’t write it, just tell me.”
“Very well,” said Arthur, leaning back in his chair. How would Wodehouse describe the altar screen? he thought. How would Gussie Fink-Nottle describe it? He closed his eyes and gave it a go.
“Sometime longer ago than I care to think, a certain bishop what’s-his-name took into his head the idea that the wall behind the altar should be chockablock with his betters and by Jove the next thing you knew the place was filled to the ceiling with blokes who had gotten themselves so deep into the mulligatawny with the whole religion thing that they ended up losing their heads or being roasted alive or other various bally good ways of shuffling off the old mortal coil. The next thing you know the whole country was Reformation mad, and old King Henry, when not working his way through wives like Galahad Threepwood through dry martinis, had taken something of a dislike to saintly types, and so in 1538, his cronies depopulated the screen—leaving the dean, if not actually disgruntled, far from being gruntled.”
Arthur had expected some reaction from Bethany and was surprised at the silence that met this recitation. He turned and saw that her face was unusually red, her eyes seemed to be watering, and she was having some sort of small spasm, as if she were gasping for breath and trying to stay quiet all at once.
“Are you quite well?” asked Arthur, but he did not question her health for long, for she fell back in her chair and put an end to her silence with an explosion of laughter. Bethany had a sense of humor after all.
When she quieted a few moments later, she managed to say, between shallow breaths, “Ever so much better, Arthur.”
“Can you imagine the look on the dean’s face if I handed that in?” said Arthur.
“Oh, the dean would love it. It’s the precentor’s face I’d like to see. The old codfish would blow smoke out of his gills.”
“How do you know the precentor?”
“Gwyn threw a little dinner party for me to meet the chapter last week. You don’t get invited to everything, you know, Arthur.”
“I always thought he looked more like a salmon.”
“No, definitely a codfish.”
“Anyhow, I can’t write it like this.”
“OK, so don’t be Wodehouse, but loosen up a bit. I mean you did all that—made me laugh so hard I nearly peed myself—without putting pen to paper. You were just talking to me. So talk to me if you need to. Tell me a story. You’re good at telling stories, Arthur. Tell me the story of the nave.”
And so he did. He told her the story of the nave and then the story of the west front and then the story of the cloister. Each time she asked questions and suggested which bits were uninteresting enough to be cut from the next version and then Arthur told her the story again and again, and eventually they hit on a version that seemed worth preserving. Then Arthur would tell her that version one more time and Bethany would record his voice on her computer. After each recording, Bethany sent Arthur back to his notes to prepare for the next section while she typed up what he had just dictated.
“OK,” said Arthur, after he had finished another story, “read that bit back to me.”
“Are you sure?” said Bethany.