“I couldn’t call Eloise,” Paul says. “And Mom … oh, God…” He trails off.
Henrique hadn’t needed to call anyone; he had a thousand pounds in the breast pocket of his blazer and had been able to arrange for his own release. Paul, though, had only had the five quid that Ollie had given him outside Horwood Hall, which he’d already used on the taxi that brought him to the Thirsty Lion—where, incidentally, he’d left his tab unpaid once he was arrested.
Paul asks her, “And did you know about Dad? Had you known?”
Alice turns the car off again. She knew he was going to ask, she was just hoping that they’d already be somewhere along the highway when he did so she could feign concentration on driving and avoid the sort of authenticity the conversation demanded. Had she known? It’s an excellent question to which she’s certain her brother deserves an answer. Yes. She had. Not explicitly—Alice learned last night that Donna had only told Eloise—but that didn’t matter; theirs was a family that communicated most effectively via the implicit, anyway. If anything, she was surprised at her brother’s willful ignorance.
“I think … I think I figured it out,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
Paul chews on a fingernail and spits it out the window.
“I’ve been so terrible to Mom,” he says.
“We both have.”
“Does she know about Henrique and that girl?”
Alice shakes her head.
“I’m not sure.”
“She can’t know,” Paul says. “At least not yet. We have to—I want to protect her from that.” He adds, “I just want her to enjoy the wedding.”
“Okay.”
Paul slumps down in the seat.
“I was going to call her instead of you. To pick me up, I mean.”
“I think it’s good you didn’t.”
“When she does find out, she’s going to be devastated.”
“I hope not,” Alice says. “But yes, probably.”
Paul leans forward and presses his forehead against the dashboard.
“Oh, God.”
Alice reaches forward and grabs his shoulder.
“Hey, look at me,” she says. “Look at me. What you did?” She nods toward the police station. “What you did for Mom?”
Paul looks at her. His eyes are all veins.
“You did a good thing.”
Paul
The Wedding
Sherborne Abbey traces its roots back to A.D. 705, when Saint Aldhelm arrived in Dorset with his educated and cosmopolitan brand of Christianity. Still, people who concern themselves with the vague and foggy past of the church say there’s every reason to believe that some other pile of bricks stood in the abbey’s place before his arrival; some testament to a Celtic and barbarian form of worship.
If they’re right, if some earlier church did exist, then Aldhelm got rid of it. In the same way sixth-century Christians conveniently turned the Parthenon, that improbably gorgeous tribute to Pallas Athena, into a temple for the Virgin Mary, Aldhelm insinuated himself into religion’s epic tradition of reappropriation. Appalled by the barbarism he saw among Dorset’s shallow hills and hollows, he wrote off the backward breed of Christianity being practiced: sacraments wantonly breaking stoic rules of orthodoxy; toothless locals celebrating Easter in July. And so he, at the behest of his superior, one King Ine of Wessex, took it upon himself to build a cathedral.
None of that original building exists anymore. In fact, the Saxon architecture around the abbey’s western door was actually taken from a building that postdates Aldhelm’s reign as bishop of Sherborne. That doesn’t mean the structure isn’t old—two of the chapels were built in the thirteenth century, and the choir was finished sometime in the 1400s. Still, none of it can be traced to when Aldhelm first rode into town. Since then, thanks to a series of political maneuverings and redistrictings; to royal christenings and marriages and—in the case of Henry VIII—divorce; to the sort of backroom decisions and betrayals that turn England’s idyllic countryside into a chessboard, the abbey has changed. Now, like much of England, it’s as much a mausoleum as it is anything else, a crypt that holds a country’s disintegrating foundations as a relentless and horrific future barrels in.
And apparently, Paul thinks, it’s a future without air-conditioning. He glances back down at the wedding program, on the back of which is printed this brief sketch of the abbey’s past—a history that he’s read and reread no fewer than ten times. He fans himself with the thick card stock, but it only makes him hotter. He checks his watch. He’s trying to ignore his hangover; he’s trying to be a good sport, but what the fuck: the wedding was supposed to start fifteen minutes ago.
He wipes sweat from his forehead and the back of his neck. Five minutes earlier, a small commotion broke out in the back of the church, and when he turned around he saw an elderly woman being led outside, her fascinator lying impotent and forgotten on the stone floor. Fainted from the heat, he heard someone say from where he was sitting, in the pew at the front of the church. And Christ—he believes it. He can’t remember the last time he was so hot. On the drive over to the church he heard a BBC report on record temperatures sweltering all over the country. Really, it’s this goddamned morning suit. No man should be required to wear a waistcoat and a morning coat with tails down to his ass on a day when you could fry an egg on the sidewalk. He dries his palms on his trousers, which are pin-striped and cut from thick, scratchy wool. Like pajama pants, he thinks. Ones I’d never be caught dead in.
Turning around, he looks toward the church’s entrance, past rows upon rows of similarly miserable men and women. He scans the pews, searching for Henrique, and gives up when he can’t find him. Probably fucking the twenty-year-old from last night in the rectory. Paul lifts an eyebrow; he shouldn’t be crude, at least not here. He’s not religious, but his natural inclination for guilt takes over whenever he’s in church.
A drop of sweat works its way down his spine and settles near the top of his ass. He turns back around.
The string quartet in the north aisle of the nave cues up Chopin’s Nocturne in E-Flat Major for the fifth time, and Paul closes his eyes, lets himself, and his hangover, get lost in the pockets of the wide melody. He sinks down and rests his neck on the back of the pew; when he opens his eyes again, he’s staring at the ceiling. There’s an instant when he’s sure he’s going to be sick—the abbey’s fan vaulting is that dizzyingly intricate, that spectacular. Lines spread out and converge again like hands folding, and in the spaces that those lines create Paul sees tiled mosaics, blocks of deep blue and crimson and green and gold.